Hi all! 

I am a new DM and I have some ideas for a one shot and a whole campaign and was hoping for some story board ideas from you! I’ve been feeling creatively blocked lately and could use some inspiration (dice or otherwise)! 

One shot: I played a 4th level rogue assassin that died and was not brought back to life. She’s gone as far as a PC, but I’d love to bring her back as an NPC. I do know I want to bring her back as a villain. I’m thinking she was brought back to life by a necromancer and now she has these same kind of abilities mixed with her rogue. Her body was left at a church in Neverwinter with some clerics who said they would try to bring her back, but we’re not able to. 

Campaign: starts out like this: the king of the town we are based in is getting married, but his bride is actually a green dragon in disguise and has the king under a powerful spell (think Ursula in the Little Mermaid). The adventurers need to find a way to defeat her and release the king from her spell and save the kingdom (again....). I have some ideas on people they need to meet to perform some side quests type thing to level up and also gain some potential allies in the eventual fight against the dragon. They are level 7 now and defeating a dragon and leveling up these characters is going to be important before the final Boss fight. 

Thank you for all your help and ideas! 

don't make a "storyboard", instead, try just having a situation, a location/set of locations, NPCs with goals and resources, and a conflict. Then let the players do as they will. This will make for a more fun and better story than anything that one person could make up on their own.

Edit: this isn't the only way to do things, so you do you, but in my experience as a player, I've had more fun in this style of game. not a sandbox, just a traditional game that leans toward open.

 Don't think of DM'ing as like directing a movie.

It's more like riding a rodeo bull. 

Yeah I get all this, I was really looking for more creative hooks rather than whole story lines. Just little things to get my players excited and then letting them flush out the details on their own during game sessions. 

I'll share a side quest with you that I'm preparing for my campaign.

The Druid Zoo.  A group of powerful druids is attempting to create a sort of zoo, to help younger initiates study various animals. (Druids and Rangers can enter freely, anyone else is charged a hefty price.) Inside the walls of their establishment are gateways to various other environments, where animals may be studied in their natural habitat. (Gateways to lion territories, wolf pack dens, elephant watering holes, an underwater arctic sea air bubble, etc.) Their goal is to provide access to every beast imaginable without caging or interfering with those beasts.

However, the druids are not able to create a permanent gateway through time, so instead they have created an enormous pocket dimension and are building a habitat inside to house dinosaurs. The players can earn druid/ranger allies by letting themselves be sent back in time to help the zoo's expeditionary force gather prehistoric plant samples and capture or charm dinos to be brought back to the zoo...they can gather seeds and topsoil, protect druids observing how the ecosystem works, act as bait to lure the dinos to the druids, steal eggs, anything that will help build a working, living dinosaur habitat, ideally without killing anything. (This will also give any druid and rangers in the party access to beasts they have not seen before.)