Are you a new DM struggling to figure out where to begin? My advice is to stay focused on content for your world and everything else will fall in place.
What do I mean by “content”? What I mean is anything of substance that the players can explore or interact with. A dungeon they can dive into, a town to meet NPCs at, or a preset encounter on the road or in the wilderness. These are examples of content that your world needs. Too many newer DMs get wrapped up in thinking they need to write some 500 page novel with a “BBEG” and this and that, but none of that actually matters. You see, if you write some long and tragic backstory or this or that person, that isn’t giving players something they can physically do. However a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure certainly will.
You can organize your content with a queue style system. Whenever players encounter a placeholder for a dungeon, town, continent, NPC, encounter, or anything else you feel is important all you do is spit out the next thing readied in the queue for that particular piece of content when it becomes relevant to the players. You are ensuring you have exactly what you need where you need it when you need it by refilling these queues with more content as your players exhaust your current one.
I highly recommend making use of random generators found online and in the DMG to help take a lot of the legwork out of this process. Take what it spits out, enhance it, modify it, and queue it up.
Now, you are building a story around your content, NOT the other way around. So much easier and smoother. Trust me, been doing this awhile…
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Are you a new DM struggling to figure out where to begin? My advice is to stay focused on content for your world and everything else will fall in place.
What do I mean by “content”? What I mean is anything of substance that the players can explore or interact with. A dungeon they can dive into, a town to meet NPCs at, or a preset encounter on the road or in the wilderness. These are examples of content that your world needs. Too many newer DMs get wrapped up in thinking they need to write some 500 page novel with a “BBEG” and this and that, but none of that actually matters. You see, if you write some long and tragic backstory or this or that person, that isn’t giving players something they can physically do. However a dungeon filled with monsters and treasure certainly will.
You can organize your content with a queue style system. Whenever players encounter a placeholder for a dungeon, town, continent, NPC, encounter, or anything else you feel is important all you do is spit out the next thing readied in the queue for that particular piece of content when it becomes relevant to the players. You are ensuring you have exactly what you need where you need it when you need it by refilling these queues with more content as your players exhaust your current one.
I highly recommend making use of random generators found online and in the DMG to help take a lot of the legwork out of this process. Take what it spits out, enhance it, modify it, and queue it up.
Now, you are building a story around your content, NOT the other way around. So much easier and smoother. Trust me, been doing this awhile…