Ok, so the answer to that is a bit layered. My setting is homebrew, and a lot of it is my creation. My adventures are usually original as well, but I occasionally adapt and modify published adventures, or elements from them into what we are doing.

Part of it is that I used to freelance for the rpg industry, and some of my stuff was published, which means editorial hands have adjusted some of it, but I still freely use a lot of that stuff. Part of it is I am 52 years old, have been playing D&D for 41 years and being a geek for longer, and a lot of stuff has accumulated in my brain from games, comics, movies, books, etc. that get drawn upon and used in games with fresh coats of paint, often without consciously realizing I am drawing on that stuff. Another aspect is that for a 2-3 year span during fourth edition, the game we ran was a "jam campaign" where the DM seat often rotated and each player added to the tapestry of the world so nothing was wholly original to one creator or another, but a lot of that stuff still informs my current campaign. Part of it is intentional too as I choose to use things as specific nods or homages (for example, the party in one of my current campaigns met and hired a mercenary, a female fighter named Morgan Ironwolf based on a character mentioned in passing in the Moldvay era Basic rulebook with an art piece of her by Jeff Dee (who was in turn inspired by/homaged Red Sonja)

Jeff Dee's Morgan Ironwolf



Other such little nods include using The Green Gryphon Tavern seen in a piece of art in the 1E DMG picture of Emrikol the Chaotic as a location in several of my campaigns over the years.


A lot of it becomes syncretic, as I keep cannibalizing old ideas and material and using it in new ways or adding new material to it.

For example, my longest published piece was a 3.5 "mini-campaign in a book" that was largely based on a campaign I ran for several years as a home game during the 2E era. A lot of it had to be changed to fit the new rules. A lot of it needed to be changed because as much fun as we had doing those parts, it was objectively "bad" and needed to be better if it was going to be in print. A lot of it changed because I was a different person in my mid 30s than I was in my early 20s. But in my current campaign, I decided I wanted to use the BBEG in the background (a lich named Acregor), so I decided that the events of that game were well in the past, but the lich survived, somehow had his kingdom become a domain of Dread in the mists of Ravenloft and set that as a background piece for one of the PCs in the campaign to be discovered as we play, but stole the name Acregor to use in game as a bread crumb. But in that original 2E adventure I had created a magic item to emulate the Black Cauldron from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. It survived into the 3.% adventure, and even into the current campaign, as last Sunday, I was doing a dream/flashback scene (after the characters drank from the river Styx) and I described a scene where the villain had recovered the Cauldron, I was doing it ad hoc, and after the game my wife said-did you realize that scene was straight out of the Black Cauldron movie-my answer was no, I hadn't seen that movie in 30 years, but it was still apparently ratting inside my head and influencing game stuff.

But some of it is conscious-that 2E campaign was something I lived and breathed for like5 years. I was doing all kinds of world building, going so far as to start writing a Silmarillion like history of that world (I was young -early 20s), single, broke, and in grad school, I had no social life so any free time was spent world building if I wasn't reading). Every setting I have made since then for campaigns has started with the conceit that there was a great cataclysm in the past and a new civilization has emerged or is emerging. That 2E world however, still stands as the basis for the pre-Cataclysmic world in some way shape or form, even though the post-Cataclysmic world that emerges is different. But if there are elements I like form previous campaigns, I shamelessly steal them and incorporate them into whatever my current campaign is.

However I do borrow liberally form established sources as well. My religions usually use D&D deities at the core, sometime altered, sometimes supplemented with original creations. My outer planes are based on the D&D planes. Orcus and Graz'zt and the City of Brass are all floating out there or causing trouble in my games. In one of my games, there is a fey arch-villain, so I am using the published adventure The Wild Beyond the Witchlight as source material in that game, but it will be filtered through the MRP lens before the players see it.

I also don't want to overwhelm players with minutiae, so I make sure there are familiar points for them to hang new information on (like the traditional D&D gods or planes). And most importantly, I treat my games as collaborative storytelling, so I give my players a lot of agency in the worldbuilding and game play. If they come up with people, places or things as part of their characters story, I find ways to incorporate them into the world and the game (maybe not the way they imagined it would be, but that's part of the fun). But I try very much to make it our world not my world and our game not my game as I can.

So while everything is all homebrew, I can't claim its all original or all my creation. There's a lot of borrowing, stealing collaborating, cannibalising etc. to go along with imagining and originating, but that all part of the messy process called creation. And all part of the fun of rpgs.


-M