Strange D&D Homebrew: Knowing When, Where and How to Make Your RPG Campaign Weird Without Losing Your Players

DMs have some crazy ideas. And deep down, there’s nothing most of us want to do more than unleash those ideas on our unsuspecting players. The party is rolling along a totally normal campaign in a non-descript fantasy world, and suddenly, you’ve dropped a giant, soul-eating, boon-granting, Lovecraftian spaghetti monster into the center of it with a cult that’s depopulating the world to wake it up. Or, through your Wizard’s misfiring experimentations, you’ve bonded him to a Venom-like symbiote bodysuit. Or, SURPRISE, your wizard now has the body of a larval mage, composed of 10,000s of undead bugs! (If we’re being honest, a lot of this does seem to happen to the wizards.)

These strange homebrew ideas can be the coolest and most memorable part of the campaign, but they’re also risky. Will your player throw a fit after their corporeal form is replaced with a pile of insects? The quit risk is high. The trick is knowing when, where and how to get weird and bring out the strange homebrew, and often that comes from your narrative and how the players have been engaging with it. What makes sense in the story? If you can get the players to go along with that, you can have fun with all sorts of crazy homebrew ideas.

And that’s exactly what Thorin, Tony and Dave have done (repeatedly, often to each other). Here’s how they use narrative-driven homebrew to make their games unique, memorable, and more fun for everyone.

2:00 A listener question: How do you decide where, what and when to homebrew?

3:00 Narrative-driven homebrew: When the players and the story call for something … Strange

5:00 The origins of Ghatanothoa in Woodstock Wanderers: How the big, weird god monster grew organically from solving mysteries DM Thorin’s setting created

11:00 Baiting players into choosing the big character changes, from the Ring of Winters in Storm King’s Thunder to the Amber Temple Dark Gifts in Curse of Strahd

14:00 Homebrewing systems: Wrestling and combat rules we’ve played with

17:00 Balance and power-creep: Why we’re hesitant to homebrew classes

22:00 The set-up and seduction that led to the moment DM Tony’s wizard Cassidus became a pile of undead bugs, and how the “modification” was designed for him and Erasmus’s Storm Giant Wish

36:00 Campaign flavor, resistances and setting the right bar for immunity

40:00 Tougher Vampires: An example of on-the-fly homebrew to fit the narrative

44:00 The D&D Venom Symbiote: Another example of narrative-driven homebrew on the fly

50:00 Why create a new class out of whole cloth instead of changing the flavor of an existing one?

57:00 Steal smart: A lot of the best homebrew repurposes pieces from existing material

61:00 What if other players want to get into these homebrew goodies, too?

69:00 Final thoughts