Hi there.  I want to share a trick I use that really helps cut down your prep time while still delivering a high quality game to your players- deploying queues that systematically generate content in your world. 

You can stack up queues for anything you might need in order to run your game; towns, dungeons, adventure hooks, treasure, npcs, encounters, events, whatever you need. I even queue up large chunks of land (or ocean), about 50x50 square miles, give them a distinct theme such as "the Murky Marshes" or "Fey Forest", and when my players reach the extreme edge of the current 50x50 zone, you just flop down the next queued plot of land.  Doesn't matter if they go north south east or west you can just put it where you need to.  

That plot of land comes with placeholders for dungeons, towns, hooks, and other interest points that THEMSELVES run off queues.  Just place whatever is next in line down in your world when the players get there and it matters to them.  Done.  The only sort of prep time you need to be concerned with is just refreshing your queues with new content as needed.  

I highly recommend using random generators such as donjon to take a good chunk of the legwork out of it while you are at it.  Use the generator, expand and tweak what it spits out to better fit your world, then queue it up.  There are lots of these generators online and in the DMG too for that matter.  Use them.

One of the things I like best is how I'm not struggling to tell some story or whatever.  It's my players, and my best interpretation of how the content my queues are delivered would logically interact, that are doing the storytelling for me.  I have no idea what will happen.  But I will say I've ran several campaigns like this and it is always awesome.  

Well thanks for reading.  What's your campaign prep method?  

I kind of wish I had gone with this type of design but instead, my campaign prep was to build the whole world and then winnow in on what part of it they would be starting in. I did give the players the choice of more of a "build as we go" world but they all said they wanted something that I had designed and they would discover rather than something we kind of "built together".

But I think now that I would have had a much easier time doing it more like what you have going, and I probably will do that in the next campaign. If there is a next one... this one is still a ways from finishing (I'd guess a couple of real-world years).

Quote from BioWizard >>

I kind of wish I had gone with this type of design but instead, my campaign prep was to build the whole world and then winnow in on what part of it they would be starting in. I did give the players the choice of more of a "build as we go" world but they all said they wanted something that I had designed and they would discover rather than something we kind of "built together".

But I think now that I would have had a much easier time doing it more like what you have going, and I probably will do that in the next campaign. If there is a next one... this one is still a ways from finishing (I'd guess a couple of real-world years).

You know Bio Wizard, I’m quite against the DM needing to prepare an entire world complete with a detailed map with this an that established empire etc etc...

There are a few reasons why I feel that way. 

First of all it is a LOT of work for the DM.  Way too much work for me anyways.  In my experience an overworked DM is an unhappy one and the game will suffer accordingly.  

Secondly you are actually limiting your world in a way. By saying “here is a map of my world and everything it contains.”, you have now limited your world to only that content.  Your world is now set in stone, with little to no flexibility if you have new ideas for it. 

Lastly, I think a lot of players take it for granted that their characters know a lot about the wider world, and that there even is an established map of it available in the first place.  That might be true if the DM says so, but is definitely not in my games.  I run a “Dark Ages” kind of game where the average person, heck even lords and kings, know very little about the wider world beyond their walls.  They my have a vague idea, or heard of places (which you can allude to with what’s next in the queue), but beyond that they don’t know Anything!  A couple level 1 PCs, fledgling adventures, are not an exception obviously.  The fact this is a dangerous, monster infested fantasy world only compounds this tenfold.  What I’m trying to say here is you are not under any obligation to provide them with any information about what’s out there.  In fact it is supposed to be a mystery if you ask me.  Get out and explore 

My instinct is to world-build because I like it. I do the same thing when writing (I have started several, and completed one or two, fantasy novels, though nothing publishable). I always over-build the world, because I like making up maps and mythologies and the like.

But again, I agree with you... I should have done it more your way, and if there is a next time, next time, I will, 100%.

Personally this method is a bit too random for me. While I don't do detailed world building what I do is a halfway house, so for my most recent campaign I drew out a shape that was my continent, then I populated it with my starting nation by drawing some lines. I came up with an idea as to why that nation existed, prompted by an image I had of a great river tamed by engineering and magic to make it wholly navigable with a series of giant locks at points where waterfalls etc are. I then created a Dwarven nation at one end (the source) and a port city at the other (my nations capital). Then I randomly created the bordering nations and just named them all TBC. The main driver for me for this was the image of my players eventaully getting to the dwarven Port in the mountains, a large artificial lake suspended high up, giant huge locks lifting vessles from the river up to the lake, huge gates leading into the internal port that is housed in the mountain. The dwarven mines across the mountain range transporting all their goods to this one port via there underwater trade routes. 

As my players then created their characters I worked with them to determine background and then fill out some of those nations. Minotaur Barbarian from a crime family, russian accent wants to come from Siberia, great that is Nation A to the North of my home nation, half elf bard on the run after being caught having an affair with a kings wife, ok lets say it is a city state to the south, which is one of an alliance of city states much like Italy used to be, Satyr Sorceress, Satyr will be very rare so you are from the fey wild, but need a place where the veil between the planes is weak, so lets put a magical forest over here and say that is where you entered and so on filling out nations and cities as each player worked with me on backstory.

I get other ideas as I go, why don't the dwarfs trade in any other direction. The sea to there west is unnavigable because 1000 years ago the whole of that side of the continent was shattered leaving the sea to the immediate west of the mountains the Dwarfs live in islands and volcanoes and reefs and a perpetually storming ocean. 

I then stopped whole world building and created my starting town, that giant river that trade, there would be tributaries, the nation would have grown along these trade points, away from them is still wild lands, not all merchants can afford the river taxes and so still use overland routes. So I placed a town out away from the main rivers, said it was a stop over point for a small Dwarven Mine, I want it struggling, not a place of wealth, so the mine is becoming exhausted, the number of barges traveling through has dropped. People are looking to either leave, or find other ways of making money. I need a BBEG, the Mine isn't really struggling, the Dwarfs uncovered something bad, something a level 5-6 party could deal with, Initially I thought Mind flayers or an Aboleth, they are controlling the dwarfs in the mine and making them horde what they mine for some nefarious reason, I then focussed on an Aboleth. That means I can run an invasion of the body snatchers type start to my campaign. Then I just started building initial plot hooks, 3 adventures to start with ti bring the party together and then a host of other ideas to introduce them to more and more NPC's just one line ideas that I can flesh out or discard depending on what my players want to do. Session by Session I will get a sense of where the party is going and prep accordingly. For instance .

They will at some point want healing potions, the main potion maker, a druid, is out of ingredients, she can't go herself because one of the towns folk is about to give birth and she can sense it will be a hard one. If the party want they can go collect them for her. 
The Aboleth has an ally in town, a Wizard who wants knowledge, the Wizard himself is immune to the enslave ability but brings townsfolk to it to be enslaved, he wants to add to the sense of despair in the town so is working to cause mischief and mayhem. Hiring bandits to attack townsfolk and disrupt what little trade there is, starting a cult in town that may lead to a minor demon summoning (also throwing the players off track as to the real BBEG), 

Al of the above probably took me about 8 hours in total writing and typing time, alot of it I come up with in my head as I am out and about doing stuff. I note things down in my phone or make voice recordings of ideas to listen to later. In terms of game prep I map out just enough for my next session, I try to end every session with the players deciding what they are doing next time and I let the players do anything and go anywhere so most of my creation is done on the fly. 

I'm partly with BioWizard in that world building is a lot of fun for me.

But I don't build a whole world, either.

I work on the idea of concentric circles of detail, in order to cut down on work. If you envision the world like a movie set for the Characters, you absolutely need everything the "cameras" interact with ( in this case the Characters ) to be fully realized, and seem completely realistic. Everything else needs only to be developed insomuch as it influences the environment around the Characters. The further away, the less detail needs to be created before play.

So - the local village needs to be pretty well developed, the barony around the village needs to have some more high-level design, the kingdom around the barony less detailed than that, and surrounding kingdoms might be no more than a name and a handful of saying in the "common wisdom" as to what people from Elbonia are like. 

The trick is that you can't contradict yourself, so write it all down. And - of course - as the Characters move around the world you find yourself sketching in high detail "sets" around the Characters as you flesh out the settings around them. It's like the Characters are setting off ripples of world building as they stride across the world, but they should never be able to see the construction crew ;) 

An added facet I use though is "high detail" rumors. Sure - I might not be 100% sure where the Dungeon of Nostalgic Delving might be ( yet ), but I might create some specific rumors about it that make their way to the Characters - and if the Characters go off to search for it, I'm busily sketching in the details as they get closer.

This "build only as needed" approach works well for rumors and events as well. I might create some really high-level events/rumors for the area surrounding where the Party is, to make the world seem alive and dynamic ( and yes, write those down as well ), and I may create new regional rumors and events ( at the appropriate level of detail for Party proximity ) and if the Characters get closer to the areas those rumors originated, I can pencil in more detail - remember, you can retroactively go back and put in new details to past history, so long as what you write doesn't interfere with what is already known ( unless, the rumors turn out to be false - but don't overdo that ).

Putting this all together, it presents the game with a world that appears hyper-detailed, alive, and dynamic - and can have the consistency of a purposely designed fictional world - but I only have to build the details and/or history that I need at any given time.

Am I the only one who freaks out about economies when world building?

Like right now I've got my PC's heading into a town like Waterdeep sized and I'm thinking over and over about how the economy there supports artists when there isn't a lot of trade going in or out of the town (it's not actually Waterdeep and it's got issues with trade routes).  And I'm like "okay.. who pays the guards?  How is there any upward mobility?"

I think I could be happy "region-building" like the OP describes. Start with a base region, the level 1-4 area, and some adventure locales and plot hooks and a town or three, and that is big enough to get going. While they are working that area, you build the next region, say a level 5-8 region with more adventure hooks, maybe a large city, etc. That is the next region they go to, and so on. It's a little rail-roady (if you make it that whether you go off the first map, to N, S, E, or W, doesn't matter, you come to this map next, yeah, that's basically a railroad), but it makes things more manageable and within the zone, since it was small enough to build out completely, you can have the players do whatever sandbox things they want.

So you're kind of saying here, you can play in this sandbox, and then when you leave it, you get into this sandbox next... which I think would have made my life a lot easier than how I actually did it, which was starting top down and doing the whole world and all its politics and lore.

Quote from Rorlins >>

Am I the only one who freaks out about economies when world building?

Like right now I've got my PC's heading into a town like Waterdeep sized and I'm thinking over and over about how the economy there supports artists when there isn't a lot of trade going in or out of the town (it's not actually Waterdeep and it's got issues with trade routes).  And I'm like "okay.. who pays the guards?  How is there any upward mobility?"

I used to ... then I realized the the Fantasy economy of 5e is not anywhere near plausible. I don't worry about the economy of fantasy kingdoms any more than I attempt to redesign dragons to be correctly aerodynamic.

That's not to say that medieval society structure and economics aren't interesting. There are some good - and quite surprising - sources on that if you Google around.

Quote from BioWizard >>

I think I could be happy "region-building" like the OP describes. Start with a base region, the level 1-4 area, and some adventure locales and plot hooks and a town or three, and that is big enough to get going. While they are working that area, you build the next region, say a level 5-8 region with more adventure hooks, maybe a large city, etc. That is the next region they go to, and so on. It's a little rail-roady (if you make it that whether you go off the first map, to N, S, E, or W, doesn't matter, you come to this map next, yeah, that's basically a railroad), but it makes things more manageable and within the zone, since it was small enough to build out completely, you can have the players do whatever sandbox things they want.

So you're kind of saying here, you can play in this sandbox, and then when you leave it, you get into this sandbox next... which I think would have made my life a lot easier than how I actually did it, which was starting top down and doing the whole world and all its politics and lore.

It is definitely a railroad, but the cool part is that the players have no idea they are actually being railroaded.  They don’t know that it doesn’t matter what direction they go.  

As long as they don’t know, no problem right? 

It is definitely a railroad, but the cool part is that the players have no idea they are actually being railroaded.  They don’t know that it doesn’t matter what direction they go.  

As long as they don’t know, no problem right? 

Welllll....

I think I would say yes, and no, to this.

The way you are describing it, wherein you have a fairly large and open sandbox for one region ("open region"), and you have only put which region they go to on rails -- I think this isn't really a bad way of "railroading," and I think that most reasonable people, not just DMs but players, would agree that it is a means of making our jobs as DMs actually doable. Otherwise, if you imagine a hexagonally shaped region that is "50 hexes across" (whatever scale you use), and if you further imagine that the players could go in any of the 6 directions, it would be unreasonable to expect a DM to build all 6 possible 50-hex regions that could be "next," when the players will only go to one next. No DM could do all that work, and a lot of it would be potentially wasted (imagine a case in which the players go N, then N, then NE, and are now 12th level, and have never gone to the 5 other level 5-8 zones you created "just in case" they went that way).

However, if you drill this down and do it with everything, it becomes a problem, IMO. There is a book about no-prep DMing that actually recommends this (and I don't agree with it). The "no prep" method very similar to what you have proposed but all the way down to the room level. Instead of room 1 being the west room, and room 2 being the east room, and room 3  being the north room... you just say "room 1 is the first room they enter" regardless of which it is. I think this is too much of a railroad. Now it becomes "Whichever way they enter town, the first thing they encounter is this shop," and "No matter what they say to the shop owner, he will automatically betray them." That is then too much of a railroad.

So, broadly speaking, sandbox regions within which players have total freedom and the region is built, and where they go determines what happens, not some arbitrary sequence pre-determined by the DM, yes... with the understanding that regionally, you have to go in a chronological order to keep a reasonable workload. Doing this on the grid-square by grid-square level in the dungeon though...would not be for me.

Thus the scale matters here, I think.

Quote from BioWizard >>

It is definitely a railroad, but the cool part is that the players have no idea they are actually being railroaded.  They don’t know that it doesn’t matter what direction they go.  

As long as they don’t know, no problem right? 

Welllll....

I think I would say yes, and no, to this.

The way you are describing it, wherein you have a fairly large and open sandbox for one region ("open region"), and you have only put which region they go to on rails -- I think this isn't really a bad way of "railroading," and I think that most reasonable people, not just DMs but players, would agree that it is a means of making our jobs as DMs actually doable. Otherwise, if you imagine a hexagonally shaped region that is "50 hexes across" (whatever scale you use), and if you further imagine that the players could go in any of the 6 directions, it would be unreasonable to expect a DM to build all 6 possible 50-hex regions that could be "next," when the players will only go to one next. No DM could do all that work, and a lot of it would be potentially wasted (imagine a case in which the players go N, then N, then NE, and are now 12th level, and have never gone to the 5 other level 5-8 zones you created "just in case" they went that way).

However, if you drill this down and do it with everything, it becomes a problem, IMO. There is a book about no-prep DMing that actually recommends this (and I don't agree with it). The "no prep" method very similar to what you have proposed but all the way down to the room level. Instead of room 1 being the west room, and room 2 being the east room, and room 3  being the north room... you just say "room 1 is the first room they enter" regardless of which it is. I think this is too much of a railroad. Now it becomes "Whichever way they enter town, the first thing they encounter is this shop," and "No matter what they say to the shop owner, he will automatically betray them." That is then too much of a railroad.

So, broadly speaking, sandbox regions within which players have total freedom and the region is built, and where they go determines what happens, not some arbitrary sequence pre-determined by the DM, yes... with the understanding that regionally, you have to go in a chronological order to keep a reasonable workload. Doing this on the grid-square by grid-square level in the dungeon though...would not be for me.

Thus the scale matters here, I think.

Sheesh I didn't even think of doing this on a room level in a dungeon.  That is just borderline lazy at that point.  It would be incompatible with the games I run anyways because I make each dungeon that is next in the queue in Dungeon Painter Studio and definitely actually make the place thoroughly. 

Anyways wanted to give you a visual for if you are thinking about running your next game this way BioWizard.  Here is the next "Sandbox" that the players will arrive at, I call it the Molten Meadows, a spot where the Plane of Fire is intruding on the world.  This Box of sand will take my players from lvl 13 where they are now to about 16 or so. While they do that I'll get the next one ready.

You can see the placeholders for towns, dungeons, and other adventure objects and events (the check boxes).  When the players get there the queue will spit out the next one in line.  One thing I like to do is set each "sandbox" up with some preset modifiers, to make the experience more consistent and believable.  For instance, this sandbox has modifiers that the populations for each town are desperate and diminished, with many people either dead or gone, and the scenery around them is charred.  Dungeons have a modifier that some monsters are replaced by fire-themed ones, and may have heat related hazards added.  

If you are running an online game you can upload the sandbox image to the background layer, if you are running in person you can print on 11x17 paper and laminate the map. 

One question I have is how you deal with direction... that is to say, if the players leave this map going north, or south, and come upon the next section regardless... do you have some method for making your maps interchangeable on all sides so you can easily slide them in? Seems like that would take some work, so I was wondering if you have a system that makes it easier.

Not that I can use this method for a couple of years....

Quote from BioWizard >>

One question I have is how you deal with direction... that is to say, if the players leave this map going north, or south, and come upon the next section regardless... do you have some method for making your maps interchangeable on all sides so you can easily slide them in? Seems like that would take some work, so I was wondering if you have a system that makes it easier.

Not that I can use this method for a couple of years....

I don’t have a set in stone system for that, other than some narrative about how the terrain might be changing during the travel time, transitioning from map to map, which is assumed to be a day or two through unremarkable wilderness.

 For this one it would be something like “you smell smoke in the air, and notice ash falling lightly from the sky”. 

Otherwise just picture an excel spreadsheet cells, with each cell representing a sandbox.  Whenever they reveal a new cell, the queued plot goes there, with a new one ready by next game.