A comment I made just before this had me wondering how folks map out their campaigns (not adventures/modules, but the series of them) — if you do. I know many folks do not.

I start with an outline, going five levels deep, and then switch over to a hybrid of flow chart and organization chart. And the main reason I do that is so that I can improv should they go off script and I haven’t written out the full thing.

a typical adventure is about five pages in outline form, but the decision tree can be enormous. A Campaign, just sticking to the core adventures and not adding in errands and side quests, is usually around 100 pages.

my next major campaign is currently at about 165 pages, and I could likely run the entire thing by improv as a result of doing all the development work for everything concurrently. I expect that once I finish writing it all up, it will be around a thousand pages.

that isn’t usual, lol. I usually do about 20 pages a level, lol.

I get that I am a bit wild, but it is a function of how I work in general.

how about you?

I start simple with the overriding idea/story arch, and then work down from there in more and more detail in a separate document. If a separate detail/hook or something strikes me as super nice, I flesh it out in an "episode" that has a separate document

Curently working on a campaign that started from detail, though, as I wanted to have a sort of intro for really new players to Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Unfortunately, the more I read of that campaign, the more I wanted to do something different so I now have a six page document with bullet points/abstracts for about 15 episodes with more to come along the way.

I veered away from the bought campaign as I wanted something humanocentric with fewer monsters that were evil and had to be destroyed simple because they were evil and there, more about enemies (and allies) across species because of their actions and politics as opposed to their being. It's now based on the Sword Coast in a fairly empty stretch allowing me to set up as I want, while still avoiding having to do world maps (I find mapping tedious)

I've renumbered them about four times as new ideas makes it into an episode, or I want to ensure the party is an specific level before a certain episode to ensure they have a fighting chance. Each episode is approx 10-15 pages incl appendices, but the length does seem to be increasing as levels progress.

I made the decision back in 3.5e days to run everything in my own version of Faerun so I wouldn’t have to work as hard at keeping up the timelines and other world events and could place my PCs into the world as NPCS and play out their stories that way ( they were mostly tier 3- epic already so this was a way to both keep playing them and retire them). After running the various extended modules in the sword coast I got tired of that so when I was asked by my present group to DM for a while I went looking for stuff I could stitch together and put in a different part of Faerun. I wanted something that would start at L1 and could proceed into tier 4 over time and I didn’t want to create it from whole cloth. So I looked over the modules and found that both the Phlandelver series (LMoP, DoISP, SLW, SDW, DC) and the Saltmarsh adventures could be stitched together if a good location could be found. Looking around Faerun I realized that now being about 10 years after the end of the spellplague Luiren could still be returning from its drowning and, as it has very little real lore, would make a good place to situate the new campaign. There is enough general lore to stitch my campaign into the world and enough lore in the modules to flesh things out. To add to the confusion I’ve tossed in elements of acquisitions Inc. as my NPCs run an world spanning trading and adventuring organization that the PCs can be a franchise of for the region. So far it’s worked pretty well as we Phandalin and Saltmarsh have been squeezed together  and the PCs have just finished Lost mine and about half of DoISP and I’m feeding in some of the early Saltmarsh adventures as well.

Jegblivervirkeligtraet, that is pretty cool. I tried to do an "episode" structure more than a few times, but it never quite worked out for me -- I think that I may get locked into the "session equals episode" idea really tight, and I hate cliffhangers, lol.

I did a whole campaign once that combined Against the cult of the reptile god, saltmarsh and slavery series into a long and drawn-out thing -- It was one of my first times running a ship based sequence or three, and I did a lot of what you describe. Good luck! There is enough plot stuff there to go a full course.

Wi1dBi11, although I have never used a published setting for my games, i know exactly what you are talking about, lol.  I have been running Wyrlde since the early 80's, but it has gone through so many changes and differences and everything that it operates a lot like "we just gonna plop this down here", lol.  This "final" version of it I am working on is the same way -- I built into it places where I could do that in the future. And when it comes to designing adventures and campaigns, it really does take a huge burden off to already have a lot of stuff already available.

I may have to look closer at the Phandelver series -- the free one was ok to read, but we have only ever done it as playtesting sandbox, and my peeps are way too jaded after dealing with me and my devious traps, lol.  I have 21 adventures for the new campaign outlined, but I still need more sidequests.

I...don't. I have skeletal endgame ideas and I sketch out some plot hooks and baddie activities/motivations, but for the rest I kinda wing it. 

The only things I put formal effort into are level benchmarking for story arcs (e.g., "Vlad the Impaler dethroning arc should be levels 5-8, and I ought to hint the existence of The MacGuffin around level 3") and worldbuilding stuff. But even my worldbuilding is more scratch notes than deep lore. I write out stuff about religions, I have a couple NPCs and important locales with bullet points, and I might spend a long time finding images or writing up descriptions to help me set the atmosphere and mood for the campaign. Nothing gets detailed treatment, though. 

Part of the reason I can get away with this is that both of my campaigns so far have been set in universes that I've noodled on for years. My previous campaign (which ran from 2020-2022) started as a series of one-shots and writing prompts back in 2017. And my current campaign began as a novel I started writing back in 2015. So I'm pretty familiar with the settings and subplots because they've been jumbling about in my brain for a while. The rest of the reason I don't prep more is that I'm a better DM when I improv, so I don't like to pigeonhole myself into lore when I know I'm probably going to come up with something better on the spot. 

Quote from theologyofbagels >>

I...don't. I have skeletal endgame ideas and I sketch out some plot hooks and baddie activities/motivations, but for the rest I kinda wing it. 

The only things I put formal effort into are level benchmarking for story arcs (e.g., "Vlad the Impaler dethroning arc should be levels 5-8, and I ought to hint the existence of The MacGuffin around level 3") and worldbuilding stuff. But even my worldbuilding is more scratch notes than deep lore. I write out stuff about religions, I have a couple NPCs and important locales with bullet points, and I might spend a long time finding images or writing up descriptions to help me set the atmosphere and mood for the campaign. Nothing gets detailed treatment, though. 

Part of the reason I can get away with this is that both of my campaigns so far have been set in universes that I've noodled on for years. My previous campaign (which ran from 2020-2022) started as a series of one-shots and writing prompts back in 2017. And my current campaign began as a novel I started writing back in 2015. So I'm pretty familiar with the settings and subplots because they've been jumbling about in my brain for a while. The rest of the reason I don't prep more is that I'm a better DM when I improv, so I don't like to pigeonhole myself into lore when I know I'm probably going to come up with something better on the spot. 

Been there!

I confess the only reason I am writing this new campaign out and up in detail is that I plan to make it available for others to use. And while I am in that same boat of knowing the whole thing (as the 380-page Wyrlde Book shows, lol), if I share this, not everyone else will be. The outlines are enough for me -- but I started using the trees because they allowed me to stay up on different plotlines and make sure that each character had one that could run parallel to the main one -- and with an average group size of 7 to 9, that is a lot to keep together in my head in a sequential manner.

I do need dungeon maps. I don't need room lists, but I do need the maps, lol. Houses and such, too. Other than that, it is very heavily on the fly. I talk about my 100-level dungeon, lol, and there are 25 rooms written for the first level. After that, there is a list of stuff that is present on a level, and a map.  I improvise everything else -- but I also have been doing it for decades so I know how.

Those skeletons are essential, though. Just don't give them swords and an evil cleric...

I tend to start with one funky concept (eg. "low magic zombie apocalypse", "the PCs have all died and have now been revived by a magical force that is also reviving monsters and other people, which is causing problems", "a magical item from the feywild has been taken to the material plane, where its wild magic is Causing Problems"). Now, let it be known that i am NOT a worldbuilder. The way i plan things comes from beats and triggered events, built around how different key npcs and smaller npcs are interacting with each other as time passes in-game.

I delineate how PCs can start out (for the zombie apocalypse campaign, the players all start out knowing each other, and lived in the same town, surviving by sticking together, and i'd have them construct their own relations before the game starts, a-la many PbtA systems.), and then i pick a main goal, and as i'm doing this, small ideas for beats pop into my mind (and a 'beat' is almost always a character. i build my campaigns around people. i hate geography ghfjdkgsh), and i drop them into the world as connected or disconnected to the main conflict as i want, leaving them as either threads to chase or needed points of information.

After deciding on a motivation that brings the party together (helped by the guided backstory building process that i promise is not limiting at all if it sounds so), and deciding on the main few methods of conflict resolution (join the enemies, kill the enemies, reform the enemies, lose to the enemies, something else entirely), these give me the essential lore that i need to drop around the world for the characters to learn. Now i go back to level one and design a small starting adventure to get the players used to the style of the campaign that i want to run, and get me used to the style of campaign the players want to play. This adventure will drop a few hints that get the players asking questions and investigating on their own, some especially motivated by their backstory which is necessarily tied to the story (oh yeah, also, anything the players put in their backstory beyond the options i propose is absolutely added and tied in to make fun personal side quests, or as i like to call them: team building exercises.), and then the Inciting Event occurs, which is a triggered event that takes place wherever the players are physically in the world, whenever it feels like the Time Is Right. This is what launches the main plot into motion, pulling on at least one string from everyone's backstory if they haven't already started having strings pulled. Then they make their way through the world, and i try my darndest to figure out which beats that i planned they're most likely to follow through on, and we hopefully have a fun and funky time.

My worldbuilding consists of making individual NPCs and figuring out how they tick, and then making connections between their actions no matter how unrelated they are to each other, and domino effect the rest until i have a nice webby plot surrounded by towns and cities and locations i don't feel the need to prepare entirely in-depth, because i have more fun building the vibe based around what's appropriate in the moment to keep the story going + asking my players to name/come up with the species or profession or whatever of one-off (or sometimes even very important) npcs and locations, just to make everything more personal and fun.