Thoughts on a return to home brew Pathfinder style

[Captain Marsh]

After a long run of GMing other folks' adventures - a couple of different Adventure Paths, a big chunk of Slumbering Tsar - I've finally found the time to put together a homebrew campaign.

I stumbled across a couple of ideas about story and a setting that I wanted to write up and my players were cool enough to go along. After three play sessions, it's gone really well. Here are some basic thoughts:

1. Yes, Pathfinder is rules heavy but the resources are all there in the books to make creating your own detailed world and adventures without a lot of stat-blocking and numbers crunching. You can do that stuff if you want, but I've spent essentially zero time on that kind of thing.

2. It's been really fun to try to mine the Bestiaries for under-appreciated low-level monsters, or to try to reinvent old stand-by monsters to make them fresh again. Some of the coolest critters are CR3 or lower.

3. I've pretty much shed all my old prejudices about running published adventures, so many of them are just so good. But there is something pretty great about having one of your own encounters, or NPCs, or plot twists really go over big.

4. It really is pretty awesome being able to allow the story to evolve more organically than in a published adventure. When someone at the table comes up with a cool idea or does something unexpected, I'm able to just roll with it, knowing I can adjust later encounters and NPCs with a lot more flexibility.

Finally - and this isn't homebrew specific but it's been part of the fun -- starting at low level again (after a lot of high level play in Slumbering Tsar) has given me a new appreciation of a lot of the 'new' classes and how they interact.

I'd been grumbling about there just being too much out there, but at least in the early going it all integrates pretty well. We have a kineticist, a fighter-magus, a rogue, a monk, an evoker, and a skald (all 2nd level) and it's one of the funnest parties I've ever run.

-Captain Marsh

[Skeld]

Good luck, Captain. I've run my own adventures before, but time is a premium these days, so published adventures it is (with my own twist, of course).

Glad to hear you're having fun!

-Skeld

[Dale McCoy Jr]

If you are interested in adding a non-core race to your setting, might I recommend checking out the Book of Heroic Races line. Whether you are looking for races from the Advanced Race Guide in significantly more detail or all new races, you will find what you are looking for here.

[/shameless plug]

And I hope you have fun homebrewing your setting.

[Harry Canyon]

Home brew can be a lot of fun. There's the flexibility you've noted and there's zero chance that any player has read any of the material. :-)

I always enjoyed the freedom of the personal campaign (when time permitted!). There's little if any need to nudge players back onto a 'specific' path. Just let them go where they will. Granted you can certainly do that with published adventures but if you divert too much, you're pretty much just running 'your own' adventure at that point. ;-)

I generally play really loose with plot in personal campaigns because I love it when the players come up with some explanation or interpretation that I didn't think of. Then I just steal that without their knowledge and they get to feel all clever and happy having 'figured it out'. :-D

BTW: Are you using Golarion? Or did you create you're own world?