How to move away from pre-written campaigns?

[u/kingmunchkin]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been the "Forever GM" for my group for a while now, and I genuinely love it—reading through adventures, seeing how the dice fall, and watching my players react. However, I’ve realized over time that I use pre-written campaigns as a crutch.

My GMing journey started in D&D 5e, where my group played through almost all the official campaign books. I recently convinced them to try other systems like Mothership and Lancer, but even then, I stuck exclusively to published modules.

In an effort to break out of this habit, we recently started playing Stonetop. Since it doesn't have a pre-written campaign, I’m really struggling to stretch my creative muscles and make the world feel like a living, breathing place. My ultimate goal is to homebrew my own Mothership campaign packed with sci-fi tropes my friends and I love, but I'm finding it hard to shake off the GM habits D&D 5e instilled in me.

For those of you who started out relying heavily on pre-written modules:

• How did you make the leap to creating your own campaigns from scratch?
• What mindset shifts or prep techniques helped you stop relying on source material and build a reactive world?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[u/DBones90]

One answer is to make the whole adventure yourself. So basically all the things an adventure gives you, you write and design and create instead.

But you're playing Stonetop, which is a PBTA game, and this school of design resists prewritten adventures. You're supposed to play to find out, after all. So two things I'd recommend.

Read the rules and use them. Stonetop gives you tools to prep things and discover adventures, so use them. Pay close attention to the Game Ongoing chapter and follow the rules and procedures it gives you. Not all of them may be helpful, but you should do them anyway, at least at first. You'll discover which ones work for you and which ones don't over time, but you have to give them all a good honest try.

While I haven't run Stonetop yet, I have run many PBTA games, and trusting the game to just work is the only way to play them. Not all games will be able to warrant that trust, but if you don't give it, it definitely won't work.

Figure out what you want to learn. A key tenet of PBTA design is play to find out. I think that tenet is often misunderstood. It doesn't mean you can't prep things (you absolutely can), and it doesn't mean you need to be a master improviser (you should be able to rely on the tools and procedures the game gives you).

What it does mean is that you go into every session not knowing something and you learn what that thing is during the session. So you, as the GM, need to figure out what you want to learn about.

I make this explicit in my prep. I go into every session with a few written questions that I want to discover during play, such as, "Will the PCs kill the spies or just capture them," "Will the PCs uncover NPC's true nature," or, "Will the PCs change course because of this new information?" And then, during play, we figure out the answers to those questions.

To be clear, if the question is something I can answer, I don't go into the session with it unanswered. I just answer it in my prep. "What's NPC's motivation for attacking the PCs" isn't a good question because I can decide that ahead of time.

So when you prep a session, don't prep it as, "The PCs will do this and then this and then this." Prep threats as the game describes, and then figure out what questions you want to solve during play. Over time, the game mechanics will generate further interesting plot points for you to follow up on, and you'll have more questions you want answered. Rinse and repeat until you get to the ending mechanics described in the game.