This is the first time I'm trying to dm, and the only two times I've played as a player, my DMs quit on me. I decided to go completely homebrew, aside from the general NPCs, and it's working for the most part. But I fear I don't have enough content ready for my party. I'm trying to create more NPCs and personalities for them, but I feel stuck. Any tips for this?

Quote from carterblack0523 >>

This is the first time I'm trying to dm, and the only two times I've played as a player, my DMs quit on me. I decided to go completely homebrew, aside from the general NPCs, and it's working for the most part. But I fear I don't have enough content ready for my party. I'm trying to create more NPCs and personalities for them, but I feel stuck. Any tips for this?

 Honestly as a fairly new DM myself, about a year in to running my first campaign, I’d recommend against going 100% homebrew. It is so much work to develop everything you need, and there is so many resources to draw on, for your first time at least, rely on the published source books and just modify them to your tastes. I went in planning this whole homebrew world I wanted to make, and still plan on getting to down the road, but I am so glad I got the advice for my first time DMing to use available stuff and just adapt it. My campaign is set in Faerun, so I can rely on most of the available sources and lore to build my campaign on and not have it feel lacking or rushed. It also lets me use published adventures and just modify them to fit my story, because the mechanics and plotting of most of the adventures are easily adapted to different stories.
For instance my party is currently getting involved in an adventure that is based on the framework of Kwaliah’s Lost Laboratory. Their quest doesn’t have anything to do with Kwalish, it’s a totally different person and macguffin and location they are after, but I can use the framework for plotting and direction with out having to invent everything from scratch. 

Talk with your players about what they intend the characters and party to do in future sessions. That'll help you focus on the things that matter (stories, personalities, etc. that they are going to meet) and then you can refine from there.

It's a LOT of fun to run with ideas and make content that pleases you as the DM - I do this all the time - but if you are feeling stuck it's a good time to chat with the players and get a sense of what they are hoping for. That'll inspire you!

No matter how much you prepare, you won't have enough content. Your players will go off in a direction you don't anticipate, and you'll need to improvise.

For actual advice. Start small. There's a town, some woods on one side, mountains on the other. Kobolds live in the woods, bandits in the mountains. Put it on the players to explain why their characters are in the town. The town has maybe 50-100 people in it. Most of them are just townsperson No.1 and 2. Do some names and personalities for maybe a half dozen of them. Better yet, take them from your PC's backgrounds. Have some vague ideas about the larger region -- there's a city called X a few days travel away. The town is in the kingdom of Y. There's a BBEG out there planning to cause trouble. They are somehow tied to those kobolds and/or bandits. That's enough to start. Then just take it from there.

And don't force things. If the story sems like its ready to end, end it, and start the next campaign. If you do it in the same world, you'll now have a corner of it already fleshed out.

A lot of people will recommend against homebrew for your first campaign and that's solid advice, but I think it's such a common thing for new DMs because making their own world and story is the thing that primarily drove them to DM in the first place. So running a module is just not an appealing alternative.

If that's how you feel OP, I'd still recommend you check out existing content just to steal bits and pieces from it. There are lots of good NPCs out there on the internets. Grab some and tweak them however you want.

I also recommend getting comfortable with improv. I will usually only write one or two things down for an NPC and let the rest emerge as we play. Improv is a skill that only improves through practice.

for quick NPC there is no substitute The Rogues Gallery.  Also remember  you have 50 years of history  to draw on  look at some of the adventures from BECMI, and 1e D&D at decent prices

Quote from Xeresia >>

for quick NPC there is no substitute The Rogues Gallery.  Also remember  you have 50 years of history  to draw on  look at some of the adventures from BECMI, and 1e D&D at decent prices

 
I had completely forgotten about that and so immediately remembered how much I loved that when it came out.

that and citybook 1 were immensely helpful back when.

My first campaign was a Homebrew Campaign, and I found that I almost always overestimated the amount of content my parties could go through in a single session. So I wouldn't worry as much about the amount of content. As others said, the more problematic part was when they do something you don't expect (this will happen sooner or later).

In that case, I would recommend doing one of two things:

1. Make a minor adjustment to the story that leads to the same place. For example, maybe your plan was for them to go meet some dwarves in the mountains, but they decided to stay above ground. In that case, you can have the party meet a dwarven scouting or trading party, and they will give them a reason to go meet the dwarves.

2. Go with what your party did and use it to explore your story in a different way. This is one of the advantages of Homebrew—you are not beholden to a module that you must follow. For example, your plan was for them to go fight some bandits, but they decided to become merchants. Sure, they can do that, but after some time, the bandits will come and extort them, and they are back on track.

But always remember, the most important thing is having fun—both for you and your players.

Apparently, this is a topic that comes up again and again in my immediate environment of dms.

The short answer is: don't do it. The effort while you are still learning the basics of running a game can be very overwhelming and in the worst case you waste energy on world building that you should be putting into preparing a session.

The long answer: I built my own little continent a long time ago which is (theoretically) set in the forgotten realms and thus follows the world building rules of the source material but is freely moldable for me and my players.

The advantage of this is:

-You only have to create "the outside" (the map, locations, e.t.c.)
-No homebrew races because the same lives are there as everywhere else.
-You can better implement homebrew wishes of your players.
-If you have a long-term group, it is super exciting and fun to build the world together.

In the beginning it is almost uninteresting "where" your adventures take place if no specific city is mentioned in them and you can postpone the worldbuilding to another day and concentrate on dming.

But as always: do what you enjoy and let your creativity run free. it's your world and you can always delete things later :D

When running homebrew, there are some key things to do at the beginning....

1. Be ready to improvise because your players can and will go in a direction you don't expect. Take notes and keep them of your improv and flesh things out from there between games.

2. Be prepared to shut down metagaming to set your game apart from other "Established/Published" settings. For example in my campaign Dark Elves have both a LE scorpion themed (borrowing from certain films for ideas) and CE "spider queen" who are at war with each other parallel to the Blood War between Demons and devils.  That can lead to certain build twists as opposed to the FRCS classic Ranger Drizzit 

3. You only need a "base area" where you're campaign is going to start and build out from there  Session zero= how does the party "come together". My personal favorite is a trade convoy escort needing help through a dangerous area with a merchant hiring the.PCs as guards.  Of course the monsters are going to be patrolling the wagon road....

Once you flesh out the starting area and destination, it's up to the PCs where they want to go.

4. Homebrew advantage= your PCs can't read the module content ahead of time, so metagamie information is not out there to be manipulated. Looks like some lore and gather information skills will actually be CRITICAL to survival.

5. Session zero and first game intro - got to thread the backgrounds together and (gasp) maybe build part of the world around the characters.  The big element here is deities and churches. You only have to develop the friends and foes of the deity your Cleric or Paladin PC is playing... Leave the rest for later. You don't have to worry about Dwarven Deities unless someone is playing a Dwarf....

No Cleric? Just a Druid? Great - Don't Develop God's! Beyond the "Deities of Nature".

6. Break down your "big city" into districts and set up a basic map. Is suggest a "Travellers quarter" where you develop an inn and tavern/bar below for dining, as well as a merchant quarter for trading. PCs are likely to go there first.

7. Pawnbrokers who will buy what PCs might acquire from adventuring are lots of fun.  They also have this disproportionate tendency to have thieves guild connections and complications.....

I've been running a campaign since november of last year roughly.  Very little DM experience and all IRL experience with friends using source based material.  I would suggest the following.

1) Look at the game, if it's 'open world', as a world in fluctuation.  Only define specific close-by locations that you want the party to know of, and leave the rest of the map difficult to determine.  This gives you the ability to move things up until they are found or explored, which can reduce the content load on you dramatically.

2) Create the husk of the character you want, but leave the name and race off.  You can use an NPC generator (of which there are many) and take the core quirks of the players create there, and fit in your own Motives and plot to those players. 

• Example: Drusilia Ilphelkiir was rolled in a random NPC generator website.  It provides her history and personality and motive.  If i'm creating a half-elf i leave the first name alone and alter the last name to make it something the party can more directly remember or spell in their notes, i take the personality and leave it alone, use the history if i think it's plausible to the world i'm creating, and change the motive with whatever hook i want.

3) Know that not everything the party does has to be a major questline.  Sometimes the party just wants to go out and kill things.  So you can create a bounty board so that the party can locate things that a government of a local town can't afford to deal with and requests strong adventurers to do instead.

4) When piecing together major NPC's, the most important aspect of creating an NPC is to give them their own motives.  An alchemist with a potion that can cure lycanthropy with a potion and sends you out for two herbs and some random metallic substance?  the one thing that doesn't belong actually allows him to create his own army of constructs to seek out those that killed his master 12 years ago, and now the party has implicated itself in aiding him in some ways (or feels obligated because of their inability to see the disconnect between a metal and two herbs for a potion).

5) Finally, just have a list of first names readily available for side characters that the party might seek out, and write where you put them.  Not everyone will reveal their entire backstory or motives to the party in the first encounter, so you don't have to build the entire character on the spot.  I usually have 10-12 names on the side and 2-3 motives prebuilt on the side as well, and if the party gets particularly nosy on the persons past i have those quick call options.

Finally i'll suggest that i do what others have done, i've taken characters or ideas from other campaigns run in public spaces or in the books and repurpose them with new abilities or purposes.  By doing so, it keeps metagaming down, and makes things new and interesting for the group.

Hopefully my direct experience and what i've used is of some help to you, but know that as long as the game is pretty fair to the group they'll go with it even if you don't always have the immediate answers, most players are usually just happy to have a table spot