What Makes Your Homebrew Great?

[The Shaman]

Tell me what is compelling about your homebrew game setting or adventure. What are the key things that really make it stand out?

The adventurers.

Every setting and adventure is nothing but stats and wishful thinking - it's the players' characters that bring the setting to life. As GM I try to facilitate that with interesting NPCs, landscapes, and cultures.

Some GMs, in my experience, spend a lot of effort trying to be 'original', however they choose to define it. Personally I strive for interesting archetypes, particularly in terms of the challenges presented by the game-world to the players. A princess captured by bandits, a city attacked by pirates, an unearthly monster stalking a dark forest - none of these are original in the least, so I strive instead to bring the setting to life by populating it with intriguing and memorable characters, by creating a landscape that is rich and textured, by developing a thoughtful backstory, and by pacing the action so that the players develop their own sense of urgency or excitement, thereby bringing tension to the narrative that develops as the game progresses.

All of it counts for nothing without players who create characters from whole-cloth and invest the effort to explore the setting and adventures. It's how they interact with the setting that determines if it's compelling or not.

The question is open-ended, but I imagine most people would instinctively respond based on their fantasy homebrew experiences. There is of course much more than that. My fantasy homebrew is straight-up swords and sorcery in the tradition of Howard and Leiber. My fantastic history homebrew is mythic Africa in the age of exploration. My historical homebrew is modern military versus insurgents in 1950s Algeria. And my fantastic modern game is...purposefully left undefined for the moment...

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

i think the point he is making is that the "Details" aren't what makes his setting great. the fact that he knows it intimately and can imporivse the effects of player actions on the setting easily ...that's what makes it great..or at least that would be my answer if you had quoted my post

Exactly. The adventures I come up with might not be that much greater than a published one, but they're perfectly tailored for my PC's and I know the contents top-to-bottom.

Let me see if I can give an example that will show this... In my Saturday game, the PC's (who were 5th level at the time) just finished a plot thread that was basically a fairly standard "stop the evil wizard from releasing the evil bad guy" scenario. What made it memorable was that the evil wizard had been developed from the very first session (the very first NPC they met, in fact), the place where the evil bad guy was imprisoned was within the wizard's school that was built into all the PC's background (giving them immense buy-in as to the importance), and the evil wizard's big helper was another bad-guy NPC that the PC's had fought earlier in their careers. Everyone involved on the enemy side was an NPC that the PC's had been dealing with for months and months whilethe plot slowly unfurled.

The scenario was pretty good all by itself, I think, with good puzzles, mysteries, and battles, but the advantage of it being homebrewed was shown in the connections and in the stakes that the PC's had in making sure they fixed the situation. It wasn't a thing where "someone hires you to do this" or anything like that. The motivation was built in and built up from 5 levels before. Its very tough to do that level of foreshadowing using modules.

 

[TerraDave]

That we have fun playing in it!

Why? Terra Viejo --which is a 10 year old world developed by myself and another DM (and our players)--allows the DM to easily tap into human history and legend while still keeping the game as "D&Dish" as he wants.

Its real world basis also allows for a rich history and geography, but it still has a "wide open" feeling allowing the DM to run his campaign. And very distinctive campaings have been run in it.

And, thanks in part to the OGL, it has some pretty good crunch.

 

[Mokona]

The homebrew stories I've played in tied to the characters background and motivations better than canned adventures.

Homebrew settings have always had more internal consistency regarding an epic plotline than a Campaign Setting designed to fit many different adventures or adventurers.

 

[francisca]

I dunno if my homebrew was great by anyone's measure, but for 3+ years, people kept coming back, session after session, were involved in the "plot", and most importantly, had a good time.

The highest compliment I have ever gotten (concernign D&D) was during the latest session in our current game, when the "remember when" stories about my homebrew came out, and the 3 guys at the table who played in it said they missed it.

 

[Captain Needles]

What makes my homebrews work well is that by writing and documenting all of the points I eventually want to use, they stay fresh in my mind, and it's very easy to ad lib and improv on a moments notice. Improv is the key to any game I run, no matter if it's homebrew, weird wars or scarred lands.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Well, it is mine. Mostly, it is my view and not someone elses, I do not have to bend, adjust, remove, censor, edit the material. Does this make it great, no, my ego does that.

 

[Wombat]

What makes New Mavarga good?

Well, monsters are rare, and therefore terrifying, mysterious, and dangerous.
Magic is something that happens, but rarely in the eyes of most inhabitants.
The Akapans, giants who have built up a Mayan-style civilization!
"Winning" doesn't necessarily mean "killing everything around".
Sometimes the right answer can still get you in trouble and every action has consequences, be it phycisla or moral.
There are no GOOD guys or BAD guys, but there are many potential allies and foes.
Jungles, baby, jungles!

And what my players say they like about it most...

...everyone fits into a larger community. Adventurers are part of the society, rather than strictly abberations from it.

 

[Gez]

I like my homebrew better than other settings because I'm more free to experiment and toy with ideas.

It let me redefine D&D. Where else would psionicists become mad prophets in tune with the inhuman thoughts of the land itself? Where else would illithids be trying to extinguish the Sun because it burns their "homeland" in order to produce reality?
Where else would powerful arcane spellcasters (able of casting level 8+ spells) be part of a powerful secret organization fighting against esoteric extraplanar threats?
Where else could I plug in things from those new D&D books I've read and liked without contradicting canon, like having one plane in an evergoing conflict between hordes of undead and changelings enslaved by the silians, while hags, demodands, and kytons come down from the moons of that plane to collect corpses for their foul experiments?
Where else would there be fiends physically and metaphysically gnawing at the inside of the world, like worms in an apple, tearing a chunk of rocks to fall to oblivion with each soul they harvest; until the day where the earth will collapse on itself and reveals a new fiendish planet that grew inside it like a foul hatchling?

Yes, I love my homebrew because it let me do what I want to do, unrestrained by sourcebooks and other authors.

 

[Scotley]

I won't say that my homebrew is great or even superior for everyone, but I feel it is good and interesting for my players. I agree with a lot of the points made so far, but one thing that I think is particularly important is that I know my players and discuss gameing with them. The world I developed reflects their interests and desires. We would be hard pressed to find a published world that meets our needs as well. I can borrow good stuff from published worlds. Other things that I think makes my world interesting--the way the creation myth is tied to the current stuggles and nature of magic, the fact that all elves, without regard to color are bad guys, the fact that most races and classes (except for a few oriental variants) have a meaningful place in the world, that the history of the world impacts the present rather than being just a timeline--past wars and events have a real impact on the way races and nations interact, the difference in landsmen and seamen is an important distinction that often crosses boundries of race and nation, the NPC's of the world are not so powerful that the PC can't have a real influence on events, there are many different powergroups and conflicts that sometimes make it hard to seperate good from bad and right from wrong, the mix of civilized and uncivilized areas coupled with the various conflicts between powergroups allows for a huge variety of adventure hooks, the current game has a nautical focus which is a little different for our group, the history and detail of the world is such that I can run more than one game at a time there or run other games in the past or future, druids and clerics each have a unique role to play rather than druids just being a subclass, there is a richness of documentation that gives that players a real feel for the world yet I still have room to reveal new things or expand, I have years of time invested in thinking about the world.