Is there anything in particular you wanted help with? The community here is always full of tips (that usually contradict each other) but it's hard to know where to start without knowing what you're struggling with
Im just kinda struggling with actually making the story
Then don't start one yet. Get some premade adventures, run those. Get more general experience. Understand how those premade adventures are run. While you are running and prepping these, now start crafting the story. Maybe even have it as a "continuation" of your premade ones.
Not that it is required by any means, but the guidance in there is really well laid out compared to the 2014 version, and there is a lot of Lore and Info to help inspire you.
As Character77006 suggested, maybe you could try running a few official D&D One-Shots, like Borderlands Quest: Goblin Trouble, or the intro adventure Lost Mines of Phandelver. These would help you get a feel of how most adventures flow and are laid out, so that you have a better grasp of what you are trying to create.
Don't be afraid to 'borrow' ideas from your favorite media. I once wrote a whole adventure, loosely based around the movie The Goonies, and it was a lot of fun.
You never know when inspiration will hit. I make notes in my notes app if I am out of the house and see something that gives me inspiration for a good idea for things like an antagonist, a great story hook, or even the adventure itself.
Remember that creating an adventure should not be like writing a book with a fixed story path. The DM and the players together create the story off of the backbone of the adventure. Players should feel like they have control of their characters, and have freedom to express their character (again this is covered in the DMG).
Breathe, dragons; sing of the First World, forged out of chaos and painted with beauty. Sing of Bahamut, the Platinum, molding the shape of the mountains and rivers; Sing too of Chromatic Tiamat, painting all over the infinite canvas. Partnered, they woke in the darkness; partnered, they labored in acts of creation.
There's a youtuber named Mystic Arts who is in the middle of a series of videos on how to build a campaign and funnily enough just yesterday he dropped one on how you don't actually need a plot to start a campaign. He suggests a few tips on how to start by having some traditional missions for when the adventurers first arrive in town and then a suggestion on the type of ways to tie those together once you've got the plot worked out.
As others have said above also consider just running a published adventure. If you can't come up with a story just don't, lots of other people have done that for you. I've been DMing for five years and never run my own campaign, I add stuff on, give player focused side quests, and I can continue after a published adventure finishes but creating a story from scratch just isn't something I can do well so I just don't. As Laird suggested Lost Mines is a fantastic story that will give you an adventure from levels 1-5 that also gives you a nice example of how to structure a story that you can then take and you can then use that as a template for your own story as a second or third campaign
Im just kinda struggling with actually making the story
If you're new to DMing, one secret is that you don't make the story: you make the world, and your players make the story. Well -- OK -- that's not entirely true. (See below for more...)
Agreed! Fantastic advice! And, in particular, the second video, Your First Adventure | Running the Game, where he says: "You are going to run D&D, tonight, for free, with an adventure that....I made."
Here's some more advice because I have ADHD and couldn't stop myself...
Have you played D&D before? Are you going to DM for a group of existing D&D players? Or are you introducing your friends to D&D for the first time? The advice I'd offer would really depend on some of those details.
If you're a new DM, especially if you have players who are brand new to D&D themselves, start there. See how it goes. If you had fun, and the players had fun, you're doing great! You can keep going like that, one session at a time. At any point, if your group gets bored, you can reset, start over, make brand new characters, and start the "real campaign" with what you learned in the first one.
If your group consists of experienced D&D players, you can still start there. (No reason to commit to a long campaign before you know whether you like DMing!) But if you want to continue, then I'd definitely recommend grabbing a pre-written adventure that the players haven't done yet. Do not get one of the really long ones: that's too big of a commitment, and some of them are complicated to run. Just find something that starts at level 1 and takes the party to somewhere between level 3 to level 5. Some good options on D&D Beyond include:
Any of those adventures will give you content for several sessions. There's a pre-written story and background and maps and everything. Some of them have specific advice for the DM to help you run the encounters. That adventure will take you and your players a few weeks to a few months to finish, depending on how often you play. At that point, you'll have some experience DMing, and if you're hooked, you can come back for more advice!
Like I said up top, your players create the story. Unless you decided to be a DM because you are really motivated to create a campaign with a specific flavor or a specific "big bad" or something, then you don't actually need to make the story. Definitely not up-front and not before the first session. It's fine just to start at level 1 with some small, simple encounters and then figure it out the larger campaign as you go.
Let's say that you ran LMoP, and the group finished that adventure and is now level 5. You might be worried what happens when you run out of "story," but by that time, you've run a lot of sessions for the group. You can ask for advice here, but really, things could go in a lot of directions. (All of the ideas below start with a level 5 party that just finished LMoP, but you'll see that your campaign could then go in a lot of different directions!)
Maybe you and your players just like hanging together, eating snacks, and playing / running the game. Feel free to grab the "next" published adventure, like the second half of Phandelver and Below. Or mix and match with different small adventures, like going from LMoP to The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. If you and they care about story, you can do some work with tying NPCs from one adventure into another. But some groups don't care about that.
(1) If your group just wants to jump into a bunch of combat encounters, find cool magical items, and level up, you can just skip to the next adventure. Maybe give each player a few minutes to describe how they spent the last few weeks since the party's success in the last adventure. Then, you can start off with something like: "So, some time has passed, the party has rested and trained up. Now, you all find yourself outside the next dungeon together, in search of lost treasures..." Nothing wrong with that. Skip to the parts that you and your group wants to focus on.
(2) What might happen is that something will grab you and/or your players' interest. Maybe they just really liked going through the Wave Echo Caves and fighting monsters? Great! Find a nice, long "dungeon crawl" adventure, maybe something like Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and run the party through that.
(3) Or perhaps they were most interested in Thundertree and Venomfang. Now that they're higher level, maybe they want to find and fight dragons. Great! You could just grab Dragon of Icespire Peak. Start mid-way through that adventure and then roll right into Stormlord's Wrath. (4) Another dragon-themed option would be to jump to chapter 5 of Tyranny of Dragons. (5) Or if you're interested in building out your own custom encounters, you can take a chapter of Dragon Delves and then build a story around that and the journey to get to the next dragon encounter.
(6) Or maybe your party was interested in something that's not directly covered in the published adventure, but it's something that the party wants to pursue. Maybe the party wants to set up a bastion at the Tresendar Manor and start clearing the surrounding wilderness of evil creatures. Maybe you're ready to start building your own encounters based on what interests you and the group. (7) Or grab another adventure or a series of one-shots from dmsguild and string them together. (8) Perhaps the games turns into a war campaign, with an army of orcs marching to Phandalin to seize the mine. You could grab the Strongholds & Followers and Kingdoms & Warfare supplements from MCDM.
If you want to homebrew a campaign after LMoP, just take notes on things that particularly seemed to interest the players. I once saw a post where a DM said that the party had convinced themselves that the "jade statuette of a frog" from LMoP was a magic item of some sort. Well, maybe it is...
(9) Perhaps the party finally unlocks the statue's secret, and it transports them to the Feywild! Now, they have to adventure through the Feywild, trying to figure out how to get back to their home world without getting ensnared in too many fey bargains.
(10) Or they accidentally release the [monsters]Green Slaad[/monsters} that was trapped inside the powerful jade frog artifact! Now the party finds themselves chasing the Green Slaad across the world, trying to defeat or capture the creature. Through a combination of shape shifting and Invisibility, it keeps getting away, giving you an easy motivation to move the party from one adventure to the next as they try to find the Green Slaad and undo the chaos that it leaves in its wake. And maybe that even leads them across the planes or through space as they try to destroy or recapture the creature. (And what is the slaad up to? Was it summoned by a powerful wizard, and it's trying to complete some mission that could trigger an apocalypse? Was it sent by some entity from the Outer Planes? Why? Or is it just trapped on this plane and spreading chaos because that's what slaadi do?)
See? You don't have to create the whole campaign story up-front. There were 10 very different campaigns that started with "run Lost Mines of Phandelver."
It's normal for the campaign story to develop over the course of the campaign. Part of the fun of being a DM is taking inspiration from your party and coming up with cool things that build on what they've done and what interests them. ("Yes, and...") Even if you eventually create a lot of additional lore and custom NPCs and some long-running plot, you don't have to do that at the beginning. And it would really be a bummer to do a bunch of work to prepare a whole dragon-themed campaign before you start, and then your players tell you that they're "bored of dragons" when they're only 10% of the way through!
Just start running the game. Start small. Build out your plans incrementally, just one or two sessions ahead of time. Be open to inspiration and improvisation, taking cues from the things that interest you and your players the most. As long as you're all having fun, there's no wrong way to do it. :-)
Hey I'm new to DMing and i'm writing a campaign and was wondering if anyone had any tips.
Is there anything in particular you wanted help with? The community here is always full of tips (that usually contradict each other) but it's hard to know where to start without knowing what you're struggling with
Im just kinda struggling with actually making the story
Then don't start one yet. Get some premade adventures, run those. Get more general experience. Understand how those premade adventures are run. While you are running and prepping these, now start crafting the story. Maybe even have it as a "continuation" of your premade ones.
Greetings Saggy Shark,
Welcome to the joys of DMing :)
Have you read the 2024 DMG?
Not that it is required by any means, but the guidance in there is really well laid out compared to the 2014 version, and there is a lot of Lore and Info to help inspire you.
As Character77006 suggested, maybe you could try running a few official D&D One-Shots, like Borderlands Quest: Goblin Trouble, or the intro adventure Lost Mines of Phandelver.
These would help you get a feel of how most adventures flow and are laid out, so that you have a better grasp of what you are trying to create.
Don't be afraid to 'borrow' ideas from your favorite media. I once wrote a whole adventure, loosely based around the movie The Goonies, and it was a lot of fun.
You never know when inspiration will hit. I make notes in my notes app if I am out of the house and see something that gives me inspiration for a good idea for things like an antagonist, a great story hook, or even the adventure itself.
Remember that creating an adventure should not be like writing a book with a fixed story path. The DM and the players together create the story off of the backbone of the adventure. Players should feel like they have control of their characters, and have freedom to express their character (again this is covered in the DMG).
Cheers!
Breathe, dragons; sing of the First World, forged out of chaos and painted with beauty.
Sing of Bahamut, the Platinum, molding the shape of the mountains and rivers;
Sing too of Chromatic Tiamat, painting all over the infinite canvas.
Partnered, they woke in the darkness; partnered, they labored in acts of creation.
There's a youtuber named Mystic Arts who is in the middle of a series of videos on how to build a campaign and funnily enough just yesterday he dropped one on how you don't actually need a plot to start a campaign. He suggests a few tips on how to start by having some traditional missions for when the adventurers first arrive in town and then a suggestion on the type of ways to tie those together once you've got the plot worked out.
As others have said above also consider just running a published adventure. If you can't come up with a story just don't, lots of other people have done that for you. I've been DMing for five years and never run my own campaign, I add stuff on, give player focused side quests, and I can continue after a published adventure finishes but creating a story from scratch just isn't something I can do well so I just don't. As Laird suggested Lost Mines is a fantastic story that will give you an adventure from levels 1-5 that also gives you a nice example of how to structure a story that you can then take and you can then use that as a template for your own story as a second or third campaign
I would suggest everything said above.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie;
And with strange aeons even death may die"
-H.P. Lovecraft
This is old but still applies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
If you're new to DMing, one secret is that you don't make the story: you make the world, and your players make the story. Well -- OK -- that's not entirely true. (See below for more...)
Agreed! Fantastic advice! And, in particular, the second video, Your First Adventure | Running the Game, where he says: "You are going to run D&D, tonight, for free, with an adventure that....I made."
Here's some more advice because I have ADHD and couldn't stop myself...
Have you played D&D before? Are you going to DM for a group of existing D&D players? Or are you introducing your friends to D&D for the first time? The advice I'd offer would really depend on some of those details.
If you're a new DM, especially if you have players who are brand new to D&D themselves, start there. See how it goes. If you had fun, and the players had fun, you're doing great! You can keep going like that, one session at a time. At any point, if your group gets bored, you can reset, start over, make brand new characters, and start the "real campaign" with what you learned in the first one.
If your group consists of experienced D&D players, you can still start there. (No reason to commit to a long campaign before you know whether you like DMing!) But if you want to continue, then I'd definitely recommend grabbing a pre-written adventure that the players haven't done yet. Do not get one of the really long ones: that's too big of a commitment, and some of them are complicated to run. Just find something that starts at level 1 and takes the party to somewhere between level 3 to level 5. Some good options on D&D Beyond include:
Any of those adventures will give you content for several sessions. There's a pre-written story and background and maps and everything. Some of them have specific advice for the DM to help you run the encounters. That adventure will take you and your players a few weeks to a few months to finish, depending on how often you play. At that point, you'll have some experience DMing, and if you're hooked, you can come back for more advice!
Like I said up top, your players create the story. Unless you decided to be a DM because you are really motivated to create a campaign with a specific flavor or a specific "big bad" or something, then you don't actually need to make the story. Definitely not up-front and not before the first session. It's fine just to start at level 1 with some small, simple encounters and then figure it out the larger campaign as you go.
Let's say that you ran LMoP, and the group finished that adventure and is now level 5. You might be worried what happens when you run out of "story," but by that time, you've run a lot of sessions for the group. You can ask for advice here, but really, things could go in a lot of directions. (All of the ideas below start with a level 5 party that just finished LMoP, but you'll see that your campaign could then go in a lot of different directions!)
Maybe you and your players just like hanging together, eating snacks, and playing / running the game. Feel free to grab the "next" published adventure, like the second half of Phandelver and Below. Or mix and match with different small adventures, like going from LMoP to The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. If you and they care about story, you can do some work with tying NPCs from one adventure into another. But some groups don't care about that.
(1) If your group just wants to jump into a bunch of combat encounters, find cool magical items, and level up, you can just skip to the next adventure. Maybe give each player a few minutes to describe how they spent the last few weeks since the party's success in the last adventure. Then, you can start off with something like: "So, some time has passed, the party has rested and trained up. Now, you all find yourself outside the next dungeon together, in search of lost treasures..." Nothing wrong with that. Skip to the parts that you and your group wants to focus on.
(2) What might happen is that something will grab you and/or your players' interest. Maybe they just really liked going through the Wave Echo Caves and fighting monsters? Great! Find a nice, long "dungeon crawl" adventure, maybe something like Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and run the party through that.
(3) Or perhaps they were most interested in Thundertree and Venomfang. Now that they're higher level, maybe they want to find and fight dragons. Great! You could just grab Dragon of Icespire Peak. Start mid-way through that adventure and then roll right into Stormlord's Wrath. (4) Another dragon-themed option would be to jump to chapter 5 of Tyranny of Dragons. (5) Or if you're interested in building out your own custom encounters, you can take a chapter of Dragon Delves and then build a story around that and the journey to get to the next dragon encounter.
(6) Or maybe your party was interested in something that's not directly covered in the published adventure, but it's something that the party wants to pursue. Maybe the party wants to set up a bastion at the Tresendar Manor and start clearing the surrounding wilderness of evil creatures. Maybe you're ready to start building your own encounters based on what interests you and the group. (7) Or grab another adventure or a series of one-shots from dmsguild and string them together. (8) Perhaps the games turns into a war campaign, with an army of orcs marching to Phandalin to seize the mine. You could grab the Strongholds & Followers and Kingdoms & Warfare supplements from MCDM.
If you want to homebrew a campaign after LMoP, just take notes on things that particularly seemed to interest the players. I once saw a post where a DM said that the party had convinced themselves that the "jade statuette of a frog" from LMoP was a magic item of some sort. Well, maybe it is...
(9) Perhaps the party finally unlocks the statue's secret, and it transports them to the Feywild! Now, they have to adventure through the Feywild, trying to figure out how to get back to their home world without getting ensnared in too many fey bargains.
(10) Or they accidentally release the [monsters]Green Slaad[/monsters} that was trapped inside the powerful jade frog artifact! Now the party finds themselves chasing the Green Slaad across the world, trying to defeat or capture the creature. Through a combination of shape shifting and Invisibility, it keeps getting away, giving you an easy motivation to move the party from one adventure to the next as they try to find the Green Slaad and undo the chaos that it leaves in its wake. And maybe that even leads them across the planes or through space as they try to destroy or recapture the creature. (And what is the slaad up to? Was it summoned by a powerful wizard, and it's trying to complete some mission that could trigger an apocalypse? Was it sent by some entity from the Outer Planes? Why? Or is it just trapped on this plane and spreading chaos because that's what slaadi do?)
See? You don't have to create the whole campaign story up-front. There were 10 very different campaigns that started with "run Lost Mines of Phandelver."
It's normal for the campaign story to develop over the course of the campaign. Part of the fun of being a DM is taking inspiration from your party and coming up with cool things that build on what they've done and what interests them. ("Yes, and...") Even if you eventually create a lot of additional lore and custom NPCs and some long-running plot, you don't have to do that at the beginning. And it would really be a bummer to do a bunch of work to prepare a whole dragon-themed campaign before you start, and then your players tell you that they're "bored of dragons" when they're only 10% of the way through!
Just start running the game. Start small. Build out your plans incrementally, just one or two sessions ahead of time. Be open to inspiration and improvisation, taking cues from the things that interest you and your players the most. As long as you're all having fun, there's no wrong way to do it. :-)