You Don't Have to Grow Your Own Tomatoes
The myth of the wholly original GM is holding you back. Great GMs curate, adapt, and combine. The creativity is in the selection, not the raw materials.
Somewhere along the way, you absorbed an expectation that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It goes something like this: a real GM creates their own world, writes their own adventures, designs their own encounters, and invents their own items. Anything less is cheating, and anything borrowed is a crutch.
This expectation haunts your preparation. You open a published module and feel a twinge of guilt, like you should be doing more. You find a perfect encounter on Reddit, adapt it for your table, and feel like you got away with something. Or you run a session built almost entirely from other people’s ideas and wonder, quietly, whether you’re creative enough to be doing this at all.
That expectation is wrong. Not just unrealistic, but wrong about where the skill of running a game actually lies.
The Home Cook
Nobody expects a home cook to grow their own tomatoes, mill their own flour, raise their own chickens, or invent their every recipe from scratch. The expectation is way simpler: know what tastes good, find reliable recipes, and combine them into a meal your guests will enjoy.
A dinner party isn’t a failure if you use a cookbook to make the food (and it’s also not a guaranteed success just because you’re a master chef).
The skill comes from knowing which recipe to choose, how to adapt it for your attending guests, what wine pairs well, and how to time the courses so nothing goes cold. So what if the bolognese recipe came from your neighbor and the tomatoes came from the grocery store? Nobody cares.
Nobody expects you to invent every encounter, design every map, write every NPC, or create every magic item from nothing. The expectation for running a good game is the same as serving a good meal: know what your players like, find good recipes, and combine them into a session your players will enjoy.
The creativity is in the selection and the combination, in knowing what to take and what to leave behind, in recognizing that this encounter will land with your group while that one will fall flat, and in sensing that your players will love this NPC’s voice but need different motivation. These are real skills.
A Campaign Is a Meal
Think about the last session you ran or played in. How many of its pieces were wholly original?
Maybe you used an encounter structure you found on Reddit, scaled to your party’s level, or a shop layout someone shared in a Discord server, restocked with items that fit your setting, or an NPC whose voice you borrowed from a podcast, whose backstory you wrote yourself, or a dungeon map from a module you bought years ago, repopulated with different monsters because the originals didn’t fit your story.
Your players experienced none of the originals. They didn’t play the Reddit poster’s encounter or browse the Discord user’s shop or meet the podcast’s character. They played your encounter, browsed your shop, and met your NPC, and the source material was transformed by your choices, your table’s history, and the specific context of your campaign.
The meal was original even if the recipes weren’t, and that isn’t a contradiction. That’s how creative work has always functioned.
How Recipes Get Good
A recipe with four thousand reviews and a 4.8-star rating didn’t earn that reputation by decree. No authority declared it excellent. Thousands of home cooks made it, discovered which steps were essential and which could be skipped, found substitutions that worked and ones that didn’t, and adapted it for different kitchens, skill levels, and ingredients on hand. The version that survives has been stress-tested in ways no single cook could manage alone. A type of quality that only collective refinement can produce.
TTRPG content works the same way: someone creates an encounter, a magic item, or a shop layout, and others use it at their tables, discover what lands and what falls flat, notice edge cases the original creator never considered, and adapt and improve and fork their own versions until the best material surfaces through collective use rather than critics declaring it worthy.
This isn’t a competition. Nobody wins by having the best encounter. A shop template that inspires three adaptations, each shaped for a different setting, has created more value than it could have done alone, and the commons grows richer when good ideas build on each other.
D&D itself was born this way, a delicious stew made from wargames combined with Tolkien combined with pulp fantasy combined with whatever else Gygax and Arneson found inspiring, and the hobby has been a remix ever since.
The Permission
If you’ve felt guilty about using other people’s content, this section is for you.
When you find a perfect encounter online, adapt it thoughtfully for your table, and run it well, you aren’t cutting corners or cheating. You’re exercising a skill that matters: recognizing good material and knowing how to use it.
The guilt comes from misunderstanding what creativity means here. You aren’t a novelist alone in a room, responsible for every word and creating a magnum opus from scratch. You’re a curator, a DJ, a chef. Your job is to know your audience, find the right pieces, and combine them into something that works. The raw materials matter infinitely less than what you do with them.
So you don’t need to invent the encounter. You need to know if it will work at your table. That’s the skill. That’s creativity.
The Contribution
But that’s not the end of the cycle. Borrowing is only half the equation, and sharing your refined work back completes it.
When you adapt an encounter and discover a fix for something that didn’t quite work, that fix has value beyond your table. The shop layout you modified to better fit a particular setting, the monster you rebalanced after it nearly killed the party, the NPC whose motivation you clarified because the original was too vague: another GM facing those same problems is desperately looking for your solutions. So consider giving it to them! Comment back on the original post, share your updated work, let others build off of what you created.
It’s not an obligation, but it is how the hobby has always functioned. Every resource you’ve ever used exists because someone chose to share it, and the chain extends all the way backward to photocopied zines and all the way forward to tables that haven’t gathered for their first session yet. Contribution keeps the ecosystem alive, and you have every right to add your recipes just as much as every other GM.
You don’t need to create everything from nothing. That has never been the expectation, even if it feels that way sometimes. Our hobby is built on remix and iteration, on borrowing and improving, on standing on the shoulders of GMs who came before.
The best GMs are curators, not isolated creators. They know their tables, they know what works, and they know where to find it. They know what tastes good. The tomatoes may have come from somewhere else, but the meal is 100% theirs.
So find recipes that work, adapt them to your table, and serve with confidence. You made this, and your players will love it.
If you’re looking for recipes to start from, we keep a pantry.