Whether you’re getting ready to run your very first campaign or you’re simply starting a new one, you face a question all GMs do – should I buy or build? Do I want to use an already published setting, such as Faerun from the Forgotten Realms, or do I want to build my own? Or do I take inspiration from a published setting and then homebrew my own version?

The decision you reach will be based on a few things, such as your own wellspring of creativity and the amount of effort you are willing and able to commit to the process. Having done all of these for one campaign or another, I found some pros and cons to each.

Published Setting

At first blush, the published setting seems the easiest. In some ways, it is. In other ways, not so much.

Chances are, the published setting already provides a great deal of background information. What is the history of the setting? What deities and religions influence the lives of the inhabitants (and thus my players’ PCs)? What are the major and minor locations and who are the movers and shakers among NPCs?

Having to make all this up yourself, especially when it flavors the campaign but may not dominate it, can be pretty time intensive and not worth your valuable time. In the published setting, that workload is avoided.

You may also find that there is a large library of published adventures based on that setting, again reducing your own creative workload. Of course, not all modules are equal in quality, but there are often plenty of solid choices. If you have already settled on a published setting, you may have an easier time getting a campaign online for your players.

But modern roleplaying games often focus on storytelling and, as a creative person willing to bear the burden of GMing, you may end up finding the published setting and corresponding adventure modules to be constraining, or at least poorly supporting the story you and your players wish to create. You may also find the choices made by the publisher to be misaligned with those of your table’s.

Certainly you can tweak things, but doing so can have wider impacts that you may not discover until late in the game. And, given enough tweaks, you begin entering the third option of hybrid settings, which I discuss below.

Homebrew

The full expression of your own creativity, there’s a lot to like about building a homebrew world. For many GMs, myself included, we’ve been brimming with ideas since childhood. Maybe you’ve imagined your own Middle Earth, Earthsea, Pern, or Alderan but never saw yourself as a novelist.

You decide who inhabits your world and where they sit in relationship to each other and to the very gods themselves. With adventures in mind, you build the history that explains why the Amber Obelisk stands amidst the ruins of ancient Domerra or how the war between the insectoid races of Havash VI and the methane-breathing Gevesti got started.

If you’re aiming for consistency in your world, however, the more you add, the greater the complexity and likelihood of having gaps or conflicts that cause your players to struggle a bit. Meaning you have to devote additional time and energy up front to identify and correct (or avoid) these issues. You also run into what is often a common complaint – my players aren’t interested in all the lore I created. They won’t read the 100-page history guide I wrote!

Of course, the decision to homebrew doesn’t require you to build all of that. I don’t want to misrepresent the broad range of depth a world-builder can choose to implement.

Hybrid

In some ways, the hybrid option gives you the best of both worlds. In this case, your world is modeled on some other property with which you are already familiar. Your players may be, too. You don’t, however, use all the existing lore – maybe just a few interesting bits and bobs. Anything that exists in the published world that you don’t like? Just toss it out. You’ll deal with any inconsistencies that arise.

You may have that purist’s voice in your head that tries to criticize you for not being creative enough in generating something completely novel. You can either use that voice to motivate you to full homebrew or you can ignore it and do what you want to do. It’s up to you.

My Own Experience

Having first started roleplaying in 1979 and GMing my own games shortly thereafter, I have tried all of the above at one time or another. In my younger years, I often went the hybrid route.

I was a big fan of the Thieves’ World anthology by Robert Lynn Asprin (and many others) and created my players’ starting point as the equivalent of Sanctuary – a crime-ridden city ruled by a prince recently arrived from the capital. That was about the extent of the borrowing, however, as the campaign went forward with fresh ideas invented by me and driven forward by my players.

Most recently, I was gifted Waterdeep: Dragon Heist by one of my players (who didn’t realize the actual nature of the module as a roleplay-heavy game). Now, I admit I am not a fan of Faerun. Having dabbled in the Blades in the Dark game, however, I thought the city of Doskvol would be an interesting alternative setting. I’ll save all the customizations I had to make to run W:DH for another post, but it was a great hybrid of the two published settings with a lot of my own ideas and my players loved it.

I have also done the pure homebrew – if anything can be considered pure when one has been raised on the works of so many great novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, and other creators.

A couple years ago, my players and I wrapped up a 1-20 D&D 5e campaign that took them over 100 sessions to go from level 1 to 20 set in a fully homebrewed world. I was able to establish the major races and their relationships to each other, the deities that were worshipped, and the political structures that guided their lives. I was also fortunate that my players gave me interesting backstories that I was able to weave into the larger campaign, which isn’t always something I am blessed with.

As to published settings, I mentioned Blades in the Dark earlier. It being so closely tied to the setting, and because I happen to like the setting, I am quite happy to adopt it soup to nuts. Only recently having started playing Pathfinder 2e, I am also starting with Golarion and running Abomination Vaults. I’m sure at some point I’ll switch to homebrew there, but with learning a new system (and a new platform with Foundry VTT), and balancing work/life, the published setting is meeting my needs.

Summary

So, as you approach a new campaign, your first or just one of many past campaigns, give thought to your setting. If you’ve got a great idea and enough time and energy to implement it, go for it! To me it is certainly the most rewarding. But the reality of our lives is that we’re often balancing families, friends, school, or career and our time and energy have their limits. Being able to play and still enjoy it is more important than meeting some nebulous Internet achievement score.

I think it was Hamlet who said, “The play’s the thing.”

Go out and play.