I've been wanting to write a campaign for some friends of mine. I'm not entirely new to being a DM, I've run people through a few of the premade stories (Out of the Abyss, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Descent into Avernus). But I've run into some trouble when trying to write for a home brew story. My question to you all is where did you start? Did you write the bbeg first and have an idea of where you wanted things to go later on, or did you start with more of a blank slate and see where the random encounters took you?
just my 2 cents and not much experience here as i'm only about 1/4 of the way into my first campaign...but i started with a general over-arching story (who's the badguy/what's the ultimate goal...and why) and then just kinda dove in...not finishing one until the following adventure is near-complete, as i've found i go back an awful lot to the prior adventure to change small details to fit into next one as it gets worked out (sometimes I change an NPC race, NPC background, name, location, etc). in the process, the over-arching story has changed a small bit but with big-picture details changing a lot as the encounters are definitely taking me places i didn't expect.
my campaign has 4 adventures being worked on and I move them up at basically the same time so there's no big hole.
'Near-complete'...just waiting on the following adventure for any flavor tweaks to this one.
Development...it stays in this stage until after playtesting.
Outline...a decent outline of what i want to happen in this adventure, including main NPCs, baddies, and rewards.
Concept...few sentences, location and theme...doesn't really even need to be in writing yet.
using my very inexperienced method, i wouldn't start really diving into an adventure until you also have an outline for the follow-up adventure and a concept for adventure #3.
if you're only playing them with one group, category 1 probably won't exist...but you'll inevitably find some tweaks you want to make during play and you'll end up saying "okay, i changed this event or outcome so that happened instead...keep that in mind for the next one."
I've been wanting to write a campaign for some friends of mine. I'm not entirely new to being a DM, I've run people through a few of the premade stories (Out of the Abyss, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Descent into Avernus). But I've run into some trouble when trying to write for a home brew story. My question to you all is where did you start? Did you write the bbeg first and have an idea of where you wanted things to go later on, or did you start with more of a blank slate and see where the random encounters took you?
just my 2 cents and not much experience here as i'm only about 1/4 of the way into my first campaign...but i started with a general over-arching story (who's the badguy/what's the ultimate goal...and why) and then just kinda dove in...not finishing one until the following adventure is near-complete, as i've found i go back an awful lot to the prior adventure to change small details to fit into next one as it gets worked out (sometimes I change an NPC race, NPC background, name, location, etc). in the process, the over-arching story has changed a small bit but with big-picture details changing a lot as the encounters are definitely taking me places i didn't expect.
my campaign has 4 adventures being worked on and I move them up at basically the same time so there's no big hole.
using my very inexperienced method, i wouldn't start really diving into an adventure until you also have an outline for the follow-up adventure and a concept for adventure #3.
if you're only playing them with one group, category 1 probably won't exist...but you'll inevitably find some tweaks you want to make during play and you'll end up saying "okay, i changed this event or outcome so that happened instead...keep that in mind for the next one."
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