Greetings! I thought I’d grace you all with a real quick update regarding that upcoming for-the-lulz DnD project we announced not too long ago, Homebrew Heroes.

It’ll actually start coming out pretty soon. With that being the case, I wanted to give you guys a few more details and run a few things by you to get a bit of feedback. Without further ado, let the Town Hall commence! [Skip to the last subheading if you want to go straight to the feedback section]

The Official Title + Release Date?

We’re just going with Homebrew Heroes for the title. BUT that’s not the whole of the matter. Homebrew Heroes is ostensibly the name of the entire project. Each campaign, however, has its own name. The first campaign will henceforth be dubbed “Renegade Knights.” You’ll see why when you start reading it, I assure you. There are numerous meanings baked into that name.

As for the release date, we’re actually pretty close. Technically, we could start as early as tomorrow if we really wanted to. We’ve already written a lot. However, we’ve decided that we’re going to wait until we have everything from our first session written down. More on that later. We don’t have a hard release date for this project. However, because it isn’t being tied up by visual assets (we’ll just be adding those at a later time if this gets to that point), the writing is the ONLY thing keeping it stalled.

I’d say that if we keep the pace that we did for this initial session, we’ll be ready to start releasing chapters next weekend. Consider it an early Christmas present. If nothing else, though, we’ll definitely have it ready by Christmas Day. So Happy Holidays, in advance.

The Process Of Making Homebrew Heroes

This has actually been… enlightening, as an experience. So, for the sake of transparency, there are three of us running this project. We’ve each contributed characters, ideas for storylines, etc. We’re all busy people, so a session of Homebrew Heroes will go on for an hour, maybe two. One of us takes notes of all the significant events that take place, then later we compile those notes into a workable outline. We may trim some of the fat, tweak some things to make more sense, be less outlandish, whatever. After that, it’s off to the races.

For reference, the very first Homebrew Heroes session – the one we’re currently chronicling – was roughly 90 minutes. At the time of writing this, we’ve managed to pull 3000 words out of just the first 30 – maybe 45 – minutes of that. We had a lot of material to work with and a lot of ideas for how to shore up the holes with meaningful content. Does this mean we’re going to drop a 6k-word beast on you, all at once? No. That would be a nightmare.

Our plan is to divide the sessions into “episodes,” based on where it’d make the most sense to stop for breaks, then release these “episodes” throughout the week. Each saga will be a “season.” I’ll tell you, right now, that there’s a near 0% chance this campaign goes belly up before reaching the endgame, so you can expect to get used to this world and these characters for the proverbial long haul. Homebrew Heroes is far less about the brutal spontaneity of D&D, and more about the creativity of it. Doesn’t mean there won’t be consequences or good ol fashioned oofs, just tempering expectations.

Homebrew Heroes Bonus Content [FEEDBACK CORNER]

Here’s where we’ve had some fun ideas to throw around as additional content. We’d appreciate a bit of feedback on said ideas, which you can leave in the comments, DM me on Discord, whatever.

What Had Happened Was…: This is a little segment we were thinking of doing occasionally where we take a moment from the story that was radically different in written form and tell you how it really went down in the session. The decisions the characters made, the rolls that determined the outcomes, all of it. Usually, we tweak the written version to either avoid being overly silly at a bad moment or just to better suit the characters. There are already a handful of extremely good examples of this which come to mind that I’d personally love to share.

Checking In: This is a fun little idea we had for a game. We’re thinking that when an episode comes out, you can submit a guess for a specific moment where you believe a character rolled a Nat-1 or a Nat-20. Any moment you like, but only one moment. If your guess is correct, we’ll do something nice for ya. Nothing to really give you, at the moment, but maybe we shoot ya a shoutout or some such, next time.

Homebrews of Heroes: This doesn’t really require feedback in regards to “if” we do it, but “how.” We’ve already said that our plan with this series is to share homebrewed content. We’re not entirely sure how we’ll implement it though. Obviously, it’ll appear in the story, but you don’t exactly have a clear way of knowing every single homebrew that we use in a session, just from reading. We may include sections beneath the episodes, themselves, where you can see every single homebrew concept that appears in (or is at least introduced in) the session an episode is pulled from, linking you to them and whatnot. For our own, there are no links, but we may include those as rewards or something. If you’ve better ideas, we’d love to hear them!

Open Forum: This is the part where I ask if you have any ideas of your own for things you’d like to see or believe would be cool bonus content as companion pieces to the story itself. Our suggestion box is ever open.

The Wrap-Up

That’s that. If there’s anything you’d like to ask or submit, drop me a line. I generally respond pretty quick if I’m not asleep. If I don’t, feel free to keep reaching out until I do. I sometimes miss stuff in the shuffle. I’m looking forward to the official rollout of this project and there’ll be another update soon-ish one what Renegade Knights is actually going to be. Homebrew Heroes has been a fun one, so far. Here’s hoping you enjoy it. Thanks for reading!

Keep Up The Awesome,
Voyager