What Can I Homebrew?

D&D is built on the imagination of players and DMs. Many of the classes, spells, and items famous in D&D have been created by players looking to add their own unique touch to their game, and have since become enshrined in D&D lore. How much homebrew you choose to allow or include in your campaign will be up to you, but there’s no reason to shy away from it entirely.

What Can Be Homebrewed?

Everything.
From enchanted items to entire realms and worlds. Here’s some examples off the top of my head:

Items: Animated spoon, phylactery doll, WTF wand.

Beasts: Tasmanian devil, buffalo, giant duck.

Monsters: Vampiric schoolmarm, blortkin, club-thumb hwhacker.

Races: Duck people, tree people, pixies.

Subraces: Fire dwarves, Moonshae Firbolg, Many-Arrows half-orc.

Classes: Shaper, soulweaver, wordsmith.

Subclasses: Elementalist wizard, Circle of swarms druid, Way of the festival monk.

Backgrounds: Farmer, eldritch upbringing, tundra dweller.

Feats: Master fencer, friend to animals, peasant combatant.

Spells: Intestinal manipulation, water transit, ambience.

No, I’m not giving you fully developed detail here of any of the above, in fact I just made almost all of them up just now. I don’t even know what they do yet, but we have a name, concepts that go with them, and a lot of directions we can take them in.

The point is, we can create pretty much anything to run in a D&D game, and that’s perfectly in keeping with the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons.

One of my favourite stories of homebrew involves Gary Gygax and his son, Luke. According to Luke, his father was running a single player adventure for his multiclass character, Melf. Melf cast a fireball in a room that was too small to contain it and the result was fire pouring back down the corridor that Melf was in, causing significant damage to himself. After this, he asked Gary about creating a new spell, which Gary encouraged him to do. After a bit of tweaking, Melf had created a new spell that would allow him to do ranged fire damage without the blowback, and the world got the spell Melf’s Minute Meteors.

Spirit and Function

I think of homebrew as having two aspects: Spirit and Function.

Spirit refers to the creative act of building and adding to existing worlds and realms; the individual efforts that contribute to the expansion of playable content, whether official or not. It is that desire and effort to make something new, and to see it grow and develop.

Function refers to the taking of an idea and making it work in game. Tweaking the concepts to keep the flavour and feel that comes with spirit and make it balanced and functional; making it useful and compatible while keeping it fun and unique.

These two elements work together in concert to give us interesting characters with fascinating backgrounds and colourful abilities while keeping the game challenging and fun.

Working Together

As a rule, players will have the most ideas for homebrew races and classes; borrowing from television, movies, comic books, video games, novels, mythology, and their own imagination, while DMs will probably have the most ideas for items and new creatures.

It falls to the DM to edit and balance a player’s homebrew ideas. That means it also falls to the DM to try to keep the spirit intact while working on the function. A lot of the homebrew that I’ve seen has a lot of spirit but generally not much function (or rather, very broken function).
At the same time, players need to remember that just because your idea might seem cool, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to severely unbalance the game. Work with your DM to try and find compromises, rather than insisting on your Superman/Elminster/Conan hybrid.

Don’t break the game, or the group that plays it, with arguments over homebrew. Take it slow. Do it right. Have fun.