Your Material Doesn't Need to Look like Published Works

March 29, 2026

I don't know who needs to see this today, but I've been needing to see this for quite some time.

The stuff you write for your table doesn't need to follow the same principles, structures, formatting, or even quality that published materials reach for.

Because obviously, the stuff you make for your home game and your table is... yours. It's not anybody else's. Nobody else needs to read your stuff, they don't need to understand it, they don't need to be able to easily reference it. They're never going to use it! It's yours! Maybe there's a little devil on your shoulder saying, "But one day you could release it, and then you'd become loved by the community and make tons of money and have lots of sex!" Flick that little demon away. You're not going to sell your home game material. Even if you did put in the tremendous effort to do so, it would look nothing like the useful, usable version you came up with first for your table.

You don't need to make it look pretty and format it just like that beautiful Mothership module or as succinctly as an OSE anthology. It doesn't have to be poetry and prose. It can be, it should be, a few words and a scribbled map that make sense to you, that you understand, and that can resurrect that little ember of an idea that you had that you thought would be fun. It'll never see the light of day, so don't waste your time making it look pretty and fitting it to some perceived notion of what adventures should look like.

Every time I sit down to start My Megadungeon Campaign (tm), I crack open some of my other favorite megadungeons, look at how they work, look at how lovely and interesting the content is, and.... find a new hobby. It's discouraging to compare yourself with greatness! And greatness in published materials is wildly different from greatness at your table.

Even when you sit down to write out a bog standard adventure for your traditional campaign, do you think "I need 3-4 hooks, 5-6 meaningful NPCs, a few different adventure locations, stat blocks for all the monsters I've put in this place, a table of rumors..." I have, I've had that thought quite a few times. But in reality, I need... one hook. Maybe two if I'm feeling spicy, but I know my players and I know what they're going to do and I know what hooks and rumors will stick for them. So I do that. I know what kind of NPCs they're going to need to interact with, and more importantly, which ones they're going to want to interact with, so I outline a few, and the rest will be improvised. And even the ones I outline, I only need to know a few things about them. The context is in my head, and it's not going anywhere.

When you read a published module or adventure, they are dumping the context on you because it's in their head. When you write your own for your table, the context doesn't go anywhere. You don't need to write it all out. Just write out some keywords that help you understand what's already in your head and what few tidbits you need to pull it out in the moment.

So yeah. You don't need to polish anything. The best format and layout an adventure has ever taken is in the brain. Don't worry about error-prone transcriptions.