I was lucky that we just had friends that loved making them. So we wouldn’t have books or such, and we just made our player cards on paper with knowledge of what can grow and when. Then the world’s would grow crazy if we wanted them to, or not. Hell we had one game we played specifically when we were drunk. We would close the bar down, pick up a 12 pack a piece and cigarettes. Then we would sit out on the porch from 2am and play till sunrise every weekend, sometimes both Friday and Saturday night. In that game we’d note our cards on our phones so we’d remember and the DM would have us send them to him at the beginning and end of the night so he could reference/ make sure they weren’t all fucked up before the next play session. It gave us crazy things to talk about at the bar; what we wish we did differently, what we would want do aim to do, where we might want to go, and that just all fed content to the DM and they would draw up ways to integrate possibilities for the next week or so. Even had a couple side characters so if someone else happened to be in town or wanted to join us we could auto scale the character by doing a quick percentage off of some of main characters current stats. 1 or 2 people spend 5 mins to bring the person up to speed with what their character story is and where/what is going on or maybe overall goals while another one of us just writes down their updated stats for them and sends it to them.

So we’d spend nothing on the game itself. We had a blast