Hi all! I am a first-time DM trying to build my own campaign. I already have a concept, but I'm not sure where to go or what to do from there. My concept is below. I would really appreciate some advice from some more-experienced DMs on here. Thank you!
Campaign Premise: The players are a group of unlikely heroes, accused of murdering Princess Jhessail Marivaldi of {KINGDOM NAME}. Upon exiting a dungeon, they are detained and arrested by the royal guards. After having their memories wiped, the players are executed by way of "bottomless pit." Unbeknownst to them, the pit actually leads to The Hell Reach and they are headed straight for the bottommost circle, Treachery. The players reach the bottom relatively unscathed, finding a society of "executed" people. During the campaign, the players must work their way back to the surface from the lowest circle of Hell to defeat the High Table, who have thrown the princess into the pit themselves and accused the players of doing so.
Setting: {KINGDOM NAME}, The Hell Reach (all nine circles)
The logical starting point to build this is to map out (generally) each layer of hell. Obviously the goal of each level is to escape. And being hell, it's probably designed to be a lot harder to get out than to get in. Work out the theme of each level, and how its different to the last. Temperature, light, colour, gravity? In hell, the skies the limit.
Start getting into detail with your society. Who are your NPC's. Why were they executed? Who's in charge. And do they find the princess. Does she join the party as an NPC? Or maybe as a PC? Or does she stay in the relative safety of the society until they PC's find a safe passage out.
Write down your plot beats, and your purpose. Then work on connecting those dots.
I can tell you from personal experience that running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign is a lot harder than it seems on the surface. I actually learned a lot about story structure encounter building and world lore by running a module (my first module was storm kings thunder). Think about it this way, by running a module you do significantly cut down your initial prep. Things like, drawing maps, what monsters are there, what NPCs are there to interact with, what are their motivations. Even things as simple as what is the PCs next goal are easier to determine.
But don't think there is no room for your own creativity. You can create your own side quests, inject your own NPCs, or even rewrite whole sections if you think something either does not makes sense, or that your players wont like it.
As a first time DM you really want to develop your skills one at a time, rather trying to develop everything at once. It really is A LOT, and can be daunting. If you want something short in order build up your chops, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragon of Ice Spire Peak, or Waterdeep Dragon Heist are all meant to be introductory adventures. Literally built to take your players from level 1 to level 5, which I think should be do able in 10 or fewer sessions. That will also give you some more time to write your own material for your own setting.
That being said, some people just want to be thrown in the deep end. My personal recommendation is to check out World Anvil if that is what you want. World Anvil is a fantastic site to help all kinds of creatives build a world and populate it with characters, nations, gods, factions, important people, cities, and everything else you might not have thought of. It has prompts to get you started on things and later, when you start playing, you can make lore and things you have written available to your players without revealing everything. It is a nice tool.
+1 for World Anvil. Though you can sink a LOT of time into writing articles no one is going to read, so be careful with it. However it is useful for helping you think about things like how the organizations in your world connect to each other.
One potential issue here, since you didn't say how you are going to handle it:
The players are a group of unlikely heroes, accused of murdering Princess Jhessail Marivaldi of {KINGDOM NAME}. Upon exiting a dungeon, they are detained and arrested by the royal guards. After having their memories wiped, the players are executed by way of "bottomless pit."
Are you going to just give this to them to weave into their backstories? Or are you going to try and RP this out?
If it's just backstory, and they start the campaign "waking up" in the Hell Reach heading down, you're probably fine, as long as you tell them this is the backstory ahead of time.
If you're planning to RP it out with them exiting the dungeon, I suspect you may have trouble. Players are notoriously unwilling to surrender, so you may not be able to have them "just get arrested" -- they may fight, hide, try to escape, etc. They won't like RPing having their memories wiped (especially if a bunch of them made cool backstories and were planning to RP about them). And they will NOT like RPing about having their characters executed.
Not as bad as RPing it but if you just have them bring normal characters to the session and then say, "You were exiting this dungeon, captured, detained, etc. and now you are in the afterlife in the bottomless pit...." you will be better off than trying to RP it but still not great -- players again will have come to the table expecting ONE thing, and get ANOTHER. Not a good way to start off the campaign. I know surprises and "subverting expectations" are all the rage these days in narrative-building (movies, novels, etc.), but doing this is not a good idea as a DM starting off a new campaign.
You're much better off if you present the premise of the campaign to them (not the latter parts, but the starting part -- "you were betrayed, captured, tried, found guilty, and thrown into a bottomless pit for execution and we will start there") and having them agree that it is a cool campaign, should happen first (google "D&D session 0" -- make sure you have one). Having had them agree to the basic premise of the campaign, do not change it. I mean -- it can evolve over time. But don't change it on session 1. Give them what you have offered and they have agreed they want to play.
For example, when I started, we actually had a session -1 (I call it), before session 0, in which I presented to the players a couple of campaign ideas. The one I liked most, but thought they would not, was to do a campaign based on the Roman Empire. I warned them it would be a little more rigid in terms of things like what races are allowed, and social class would have to be RPed, citizenship in the Empire is a big deal, and whatnot. This might be restrictive. But they wanted to do it anyway because it sounded cool and they wanted to RP about the restrictions. Now, if I had then, in session one, had them transported to the nine hells for an extrra-palanar campaign that had nothing to do with the Roman Empire, they'd have been unhappy about that, and with good reason.
Always remember that as a DM, it's your job to make your players happy -- to see that they have a good time. (You need to be happy, too... but if they are not, the campaign will die a horrible and unpleasant death.) Make sure whatever you are planning is so they can have fun adventures. The best way to do that is get player buy-in.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
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Hi all! I am a first-time DM trying to build my own campaign. I already have a concept, but I'm not sure where to go or what to do from there. My concept is below. I would really appreciate some advice from some more-experienced DMs on here. Thank you!
Campaign Premise: The players are a group of unlikely heroes, accused of murdering Princess Jhessail Marivaldi of {KINGDOM NAME}. Upon exiting a dungeon, they are detained and arrested by the royal guards. After having their memories wiped, the players are executed by way of "bottomless pit." Unbeknownst to them, the pit actually leads to The Hell Reach and they are headed straight for the bottommost circle, Treachery. The players reach the bottom relatively unscathed, finding a society of "executed" people. During the campaign, the players must work their way back to the surface from the lowest circle of Hell to defeat the High Table, who have thrown the princess into the pit themselves and accused the players of doing so.
Setting: {KINGDOM NAME}, The Hell Reach (all nine circles)
The logical starting point to build this is to map out (generally) each layer of hell. Obviously the goal of each level is to escape. And being hell, it's probably designed to be a lot harder to get out than to get in. Work out the theme of each level, and how its different to the last. Temperature, light, colour, gravity? In hell, the skies the limit.
Start getting into detail with your society. Who are your NPC's. Why were they executed? Who's in charge. And do they find the princess. Does she join the party as an NPC? Or maybe as a PC? Or does she stay in the relative safety of the society until they PC's find a safe passage out.
Write down your plot beats, and your purpose. Then work on connecting those dots.
I can tell you from personal experience that running a homebrew campaign as your first campaign is a lot harder than it seems on the surface. I actually learned a lot about story structure encounter building and world lore by running a module (my first module was storm kings thunder). Think about it this way, by running a module you do significantly cut down your initial prep. Things like, drawing maps, what monsters are there, what NPCs are there to interact with, what are their motivations. Even things as simple as what is the PCs next goal are easier to determine.
But don't think there is no room for your own creativity. You can create your own side quests, inject your own NPCs, or even rewrite whole sections if you think something either does not makes sense, or that your players wont like it.
As a first time DM you really want to develop your skills one at a time, rather trying to develop everything at once. It really is A LOT, and can be daunting. If you want something short in order build up your chops, Lost Mines of Phandelver, Dragon of Ice Spire Peak, or Waterdeep Dragon Heist are all meant to be introductory adventures. Literally built to take your players from level 1 to level 5, which I think should be do able in 10 or fewer sessions. That will also give you some more time to write your own material for your own setting.
That being said, some people just want to be thrown in the deep end. My personal recommendation is to check out World Anvil if that is what you want. World Anvil is a fantastic site to help all kinds of creatives build a world and populate it with characters, nations, gods, factions, important people, cities, and everything else you might not have thought of. It has prompts to get you started on things and later, when you start playing, you can make lore and things you have written available to your players without revealing everything. It is a nice tool.
+1 for World Anvil. Though you can sink a LOT of time into writing articles no one is going to read, so be careful with it. However it is useful for helping you think about things like how the organizations in your world connect to each other.
One potential issue here, since you didn't say how you are going to handle it:
Are you going to just give this to them to weave into their backstories? Or are you going to try and RP this out?
If it's just backstory, and they start the campaign "waking up" in the Hell Reach heading down, you're probably fine, as long as you tell them this is the backstory ahead of time.
If you're planning to RP it out with them exiting the dungeon, I suspect you may have trouble. Players are notoriously unwilling to surrender, so you may not be able to have them "just get arrested" -- they may fight, hide, try to escape, etc. They won't like RPing having their memories wiped (especially if a bunch of them made cool backstories and were planning to RP about them). And they will NOT like RPing about having their characters executed.
Not as bad as RPing it but if you just have them bring normal characters to the session and then say, "You were exiting this dungeon, captured, detained, etc. and now you are in the afterlife in the bottomless pit...." you will be better off than trying to RP it but still not great -- players again will have come to the table expecting ONE thing, and get ANOTHER. Not a good way to start off the campaign. I know surprises and "subverting expectations" are all the rage these days in narrative-building (movies, novels, etc.), but doing this is not a good idea as a DM starting off a new campaign.
You're much better off if you present the premise of the campaign to them (not the latter parts, but the starting part -- "you were betrayed, captured, tried, found guilty, and thrown into a bottomless pit for execution and we will start there") and having them agree that it is a cool campaign, should happen first (google "D&D session 0" -- make sure you have one). Having had them agree to the basic premise of the campaign, do not change it. I mean -- it can evolve over time. But don't change it on session 1. Give them what you have offered and they have agreed they want to play.
For example, when I started, we actually had a session -1 (I call it), before session 0, in which I presented to the players a couple of campaign ideas. The one I liked most, but thought they would not, was to do a campaign based on the Roman Empire. I warned them it would be a little more rigid in terms of things like what races are allowed, and social class would have to be RPed, citizenship in the Empire is a big deal, and whatnot. This might be restrictive. But they wanted to do it anyway because it sounded cool and they wanted to RP about the restrictions. Now, if I had then, in session one, had them transported to the nine hells for an extrra-palanar campaign that had nothing to do with the Roman Empire, they'd have been unhappy about that, and with good reason.
Always remember that as a DM, it's your job to make your players happy -- to see that they have a good time. (You need to be happy, too... but if they are not, the campaign will die a horrible and unpleasant death.) Make sure whatever you are planning is so they can have fun adventures. The best way to do that is get player buy-in.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.