Get one of the starter sets, they will cover the basic rules, provide some premade characters for your players, and comes with an adventure pre-written for you! Great low-cost way to get into the hobby, and you can tweak things in the campaign without having to write a whole story on your own :)
If you're wanting to write your own though I'd suggest think about how you want your characters/players to feel in your world.
Do you want them to feel like it's majestic and beautiful? Maybe something is threatening to turn it into a wasteland.
Do you want it to feel seedy with unseen or understated dangers lurking around every corner? Maybe a shadowy organisation whose members can take the appearance of prominent figures are moving themselves into position around the sovereign.
Do you want them to feel like the righteous few who are fighting the good fight against an evil status quo? Maybe they can overthrow real world horrors like slavery, racism or homophobia by gathering a band of ragtag allies and rising up.
Once I got who I wanted my players to feel when playing I found quest ideas easier to lock down. Then flipping through monster manuals to find cool stuff to work in was easy.
I agree that it's much easier to get one of the starter sets at first. You can feel free to write your own adventures after you've run a module or two so you have a better idea of what adventures are like.
Another note I'd like to add: being the dungeon master is a pretty tough job. I played D&D as a dungeon master long before I played a character, so it's totally possible to start off that way, but I personally recommend playing at least a little in someone else's campaign before running your own, since it's less work thrown in your face as a new player.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Panda-wat (I hate my username) is somehow convinced that he is objectively right about everything D&D related even though he obviously is not. Considering that, he'd probably make a great D&D youtuber.
"If I die, I can live with that." ~Luke Hart, the DM lair
I've started writing an original campaign but I'm basing it off of one that I saw on YouTube
I'm not 100% set on a story yet but so far, I've set out the overall quest and I've started in a forest with 5 places to go each with around 3 things to investigate that can help with the quest or just be a bunch of goblins or other monsters. if you have any other ideas, please post them on this thread.
It's easy to over prepare as a starting DM. While it may be tempting to put all your ideas to paper you might find keeping a group of players together and interested for an extended time harder then you think.
My advice is to start small. At low levels your players should be doing simple stuff like rooting out the local kobold mine or goblin den. No need to come up with a huge world or anything. With enough imagination you can get a ton of mileage out of a seaside town with a haunted island offshore, occasional pirate attacks, and a pending invasion by inland demon worshipping gnolls.
I'd even recommend you run a couple of quick 1-5 level games before tackling something bigger. You and your players might need a little taste of things before tackling a long term campaign.
I've started writing an original campaign but I'm basing it off of one that I saw on YouTube
I'm not 100% set on a story yet but so far, I've set out the overall quest and I've started in a forest with 5 places to go each with around 3 things to investigate that can help with the quest or just be a bunch of goblins or other monsters. if you have any other ideas, please post them on this thread.
Thank you!
If you're making your own campaign, a couple of things:
It's a collaborative game. As a new GM, it's very easy to get in the mindset of "this is the story, and the players are going to do X and then Y and it'll be awesome!" And then the players do Q. And you are tempted to try to force the players back into the awesome plot you've thought up, and then everything starts to suck.
Relatedly, don't write too far ahead, or bigger than you need. World-building is tempting, but you can end up putting in a lot of work on stuff that's never used.
I suggest keeping things small, and giving the players a clearly defined setup. ("You're here to help the village fight off bandit attacks", for instance.) While they do that look for things that interest them, and start thinking about how you might develop them. Once they've dealt with the initial setup, you have two options, and which one you do depends a lot on you and the players:
Ask the players "what's next?" Whatever it is, that's where they're going next, and there's something going on there.
Have some structure where the players get defined missions
Some player groups are just more self-directed than others. Defined missions are also easier for you, and you can use the game premise to establish that. (A classic is doing jobs for a more powerful figure, such as a wizard or local lord.) Even if you're mostly giving them missions, they're likely to want to do their own thing eventually, so you need to be ready for it.
I want to give a variation on one of jl8e's good points:
I say that if you are feeling enthusiastic about worldbuilding, do as much as you want to do. But don't feel that you need to build more than the party will do in the next session. Sly Flourish suggests the "two horizon" approach to worldbuilding, which means that you build out everything your party will do in the next session in good enough detail (first horizon) and then picture where the party will be at the end of the session and build out enough rough ideas to lay the groundwork for the following session (second horizon) even if it isn't in great detail.
The next thing I say may seem overly complicated. If it does, then feel free to disregard it entirely, but I have had a lot of luck designing campaign arcs using the 5x5 method. The way this works is that you think of five things going on in your campaign. It might be something as big as the main bad guy of your story doing something, or it might be as simple as the town guard wanting help cleaning out a goblin enclave nearby. But if you think of five things going on in your story, you can divide each of these into five segments. (example: 1- town guard approaches you about a missing caravan. 2- travel to the caravan route and see signs of an attack 3- search the area to find evidence of goblins and captured survivors 4) track down the goblins and fight the goblin boss 5) rescue the survivors, find out the goblins were serving a larger purpose, return to town, get the reward.) Once you have five story threads with five segments each, you can decide top trickle one or two or three onto the party to see what they bite on. Not every idea has to be a winner if you have five of them :) And if you REALLY want to get fancy with things, you can go back and make sure that at least one segment of each of the five stories references another one of the five stories so that they lead into each other.
At the end of the day, there is one ironclad truth about DMing and worldbuilding: You can come up with a thousand contingencies, but the party is going to surprise you with something you never thought of. And that's a good thing. If the party really throws you for a loop, you're allowed to say, "I didn't see that one coming. Let's take a ten-minute break while I figure out what this would mean in the world."
When I started, I thought it'll be a good idea to make my own campaign straight up! it worked a little bit, but didn't had much feel into it. Try getting the Lost Mine of Phandelver starter pack. It's usually the best option for new DMs and players. Then after you're done with that, purchase the advance rules including Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's handbook, and Monster Manual. Then you'll be ready to make your own campaigns, or stick with the published ones and buy them.
I also love d̶̡̼̥̻͙̣̼̿͂͐͘ę̴̢̨̛̼̙̤̻̞̠̗̳̝̦̹̹̦͍̉̏͛̽͠͠sţ̵̢̼̹̭̖͔͎̞̪͇͚̞̇̀̇̀̒͂̇̍͊̏ru̸̮̭̪̠͆̑̍́̈́̑̾̒̑̂̕ͅc̶̢̜͓̮̩͎͕̄́͑̃̈͋̈͌̑̽͠ͅͅţ̵̢̼̹̭̖͔͎̞̪͇͚̞̇̀̇̀̒͂̇̍͊̏io̵̪̭̞̗̝͙̝̬̥͕̒ͅn̸̨͖̳͓͍̜̬̗̪̜̪̗̺͆̏̆̊́̈́̿̎̅̈͠͝͝ in my campaigns! In other words, i'm an evil DM.
I usually like to start by figuring out 3 things your bbg the bbg's motive and the players motive to stop the bbg and then have the campaign be foiling the bbg plots until they are powerful enough to defeat him
I want to give a variation on one of jl8e's good points:
I say that if you are feeling enthusiastic about worldbuilding, do as much as you want to do. But don't feel that you need to build more than the party will do in the next session. Sly Flourish suggests the "two horizon" approach to worldbuilding, which means that you build out everything your party will do in the next session in good enough detail (first horizon) and then picture where the party will be at the end of the session and build out enough rough ideas to lay the groundwork for the following session (second horizon) even if it isn't in great detail.
The next thing I say may seem overly complicated. If it does, then feel free to disregard it entirely, but I have had a lot of luck designing campaign arcs using the 5x5 method. The way this works is that you think of five things going on in your campaign. It might be something as big as the main bad guy of your story doing something, or it might be as simple as the town guard wanting help cleaning out a goblin enclave nearby. But if you think of five things going on in your story, you can divide each of these into five segments. (example: 1- town guard approaches you about a missing caravan. 2- travel to the caravan route and see signs of an attack 3- search the area to find evidence of goblins and captured survivors 4) track down the goblins and fight the goblin boss 5) rescue the survivors, find out the goblins were serving a larger purpose, return to town, get the reward.) Once you have five story threads with five segments each, you can decide top trickle one or two or three onto the party to see what they bite on. Not every idea has to be a winner if you have five of them :) And if you REALLY want to get fancy with things, you can go back and make sure that at least one segment of each of the five stories references another one of the five stories so that they lead into each other.
At the end of the day, there is one ironclad truth about DMing and worldbuilding: You can come up with a thousand contingencies, but the party is going to surprise you with something you never thought of. And that's a good thing. If the party really throws you for a loop, you're allowed to say, "I didn't see that one coming. Let's take a ten-minute break while I figure out what this would mean in the world."
I would add to this...pay attention to character interactions also. They may say something you can use to develop the story.
One thing I did also was allow the players to design areas in my homebrewed world that they were from. I had final say but used their suggestions to a point. That is if you feel like tackling world building in the future.
I'd echo a lot of the sentiments here. I prefer the essentials kit over the starter set, but either is good for you to start off with. Either way you'll get a flavour for each location and setting which you can then adapt out to your own world creation. D&D's adventure settings (imo) are the weak link mainly because most people I think develop their own settings. They will give you a hint at important figures, locations, available quests however.
Also, make sure you've read the DMG and PHB through at least once. You shouldn't try to memorise it, but simply have read through them. This seems obvious but I recently spoke to a player who wanted to DM and although they'd played for years, they've never actually read through the PHB. This baffled me.
For your own campaign you aren't writing the story. This is a hard concept to understand, but that's not your role as a DM. You're more like a game level designer. You build the world that the players will inhabit. You build the sandbox. This is why understanding the people, places, quests and puzzles in a location are the most important thing. Take for example Skyrim, your job as DM is similar to the designer of the town of Riften. They had to work out who lived there, what facilities existed (thieves guild, fisheries, temple etc). When building a world for a game of D&D you're doing exactly that job in world creation. Once you have this location nailed down you can then start to populate it with people (who works at the temple for example). Once you have that, you will have an idea of what those people's motivations are and as such quests spring from that knowledge. In fact, just from this and without a BBEG you can run a year's worth of campaign. Now some people say you need a BBEG, and it certainly is useful, but not entirely necessary.
The story that gets written is written during play. It's your group (you included) that create the story. The story won't and shouldn't go the way you expect it to. If you want to write a plotline and story, then be a writer instead.
Thinking again about the worldbuilding, start with a small self-contained area first. Design the heck out of it, know where every shop in your town is. Know the big important players. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of the Blades in the Dark TTRPG. The second half of that book is a masterclass in how to design a single, but busy city including factions, important locations, and important figures. You can get a taste for how well this is developed by reading Blades in the Dark players kit. Planning a single settlement in a similar way to the city in BitD is a great way of crafting your first world for a campaign.
Once you have that settlement designed, from there you can expand out as you develop. Work out what is nearby (mountains, caves, mines, rivers, forests etc) and that will help shape the settings of the quests available to the players.
I highly recommend avoiding a massive expansive world first time out. Often what happens is that you can end up crafting shallow locations that are somewhat limited because the workload of having to craft the entire world is overwhelming. So starting small with a single settlement is a great way of getting your feet wet.
If your new to DND and want to learn to DM, I would suggest seeing if you have a local game store that has open DND. Nothing better than seeing it first hand.
A starter set is easily be best option if you are completely green to the game and world. Personally, I enjoy building my own worlds too, but this can be done by simply expanding on the existing encounter(s) in the starter pack.
OP is long gone, but since this is bumped anyway...
New DMs often wanting to jump right into a homebrew campaign is not a coincidence or something born of misunderstanding how the game works. The concept of developing your own world to tell stories in is a huge draw to many people, and is the reason many of us got into DMing in the first place. Telling newbies to set that motivation aside and do all the other parts of DMing is often something they do not want to hear (or do). If they came here to worldbuild and you tell them to do everything else but worldbuild, they'll likely just go do something else that scratches that itch.
I usually suggest a compromise where they take an existing adventure module and incorporate it into their world, changing it as much as they like. Let them lean on some of the structure provided but also let them make it their own.
I've never played before, and I don't know how to write the campaign or what should be in it, it would be great if you guys could help!
Get one of the starter sets, they will cover the basic rules, provide some premade characters for your players, and comes with an adventure pre-written for you! Great low-cost way to get into the hobby, and you can tweak things in the campaign without having to write a whole story on your own :)
Agreed. Starter set campaigns are great for new players and new DMs. And they are fun.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
If you're wanting to write your own though I'd suggest think about how you want your characters/players to feel in your world.
Do you want them to feel like it's majestic and beautiful? Maybe something is threatening to turn it into a wasteland.
Do you want it to feel seedy with unseen or understated dangers lurking around every corner? Maybe a shadowy organisation whose members can take the appearance of prominent figures are moving themselves into position around the sovereign.
Do you want them to feel like the righteous few who are fighting the good fight against an evil status quo? Maybe they can overthrow real world horrors like slavery, racism or homophobia by gathering a band of ragtag allies and rising up.
Once I got who I wanted my players to feel when playing I found quest ideas easier to lock down. Then flipping through monster manuals to find cool stuff to work in was easy.
I agree that it's much easier to get one of the starter sets at first. You can feel free to write your own adventures after you've run a module or two so you have a better idea of what adventures are like.
Another note I'd like to add: being the dungeon master is a pretty tough job. I played D&D as a dungeon master long before I played a character, so it's totally possible to start off that way, but I personally recommend playing at least a little in someone else's campaign before running your own, since it's less work thrown in your face as a new player.
Panda-wat (I hate my username) is somehow convinced that he is objectively right about everything D&D related even though he obviously is not. Considering that, he'd probably make a great D&D youtuber.
"If I die, I can live with that." ~Luke Hart, the DM lair
Thanks for the tips, guys
I've started writing an original campaign but I'm basing it off of one that I saw on YouTube
I'm not 100% set on a story yet but so far, I've set out the overall quest and I've started in a forest with 5 places to go each with around 3 things to investigate that can help with the quest or just be a bunch of goblins or other monsters. if you have any other ideas, please post them on this thread.
Thank you!
It's easy to over prepare as a starting DM. While it may be tempting to put all your ideas to paper you might find keeping a group of players together and interested for an extended time harder then you think.
My advice is to start small. At low levels your players should be doing simple stuff like rooting out the local kobold mine or goblin den. No need to come up with a huge world or anything. With enough imagination you can get a ton of mileage out of a seaside town with a haunted island offshore, occasional pirate attacks, and a pending invasion by inland demon worshipping gnolls.
I'd even recommend you run a couple of quick 1-5 level games before tackling something bigger. You and your players might need a little taste of things before tackling a long term campaign.
Current Characters I am playing: Dr Konstantin van Wulf | Taegen Willowrun | Mad Magnar
Check out my homebrew: Items | Monsters | Spells | Subclasses | Feats
If you're making your own campaign, a couple of things:
I suggest keeping things small, and giving the players a clearly defined setup. ("You're here to help the village fight off bandit attacks", for instance.) While they do that look for things that interest them, and start thinking about how you might develop them. Once they've dealt with the initial setup, you have two options, and which one you do depends a lot on you and the players:
Some player groups are just more self-directed than others. Defined missions are also easier for you, and you can use the game premise to establish that. (A classic is doing jobs for a more powerful figure, such as a wizard or local lord.) Even if you're mostly giving them missions, they're likely to want to do their own thing eventually, so you need to be ready for it.
I want to give a variation on one of jl8e's good points:
I say that if you are feeling enthusiastic about worldbuilding, do as much as you want to do. But don't feel that you need to build more than the party will do in the next session. Sly Flourish suggests the "two horizon" approach to worldbuilding, which means that you build out everything your party will do in the next session in good enough detail (first horizon) and then picture where the party will be at the end of the session and build out enough rough ideas to lay the groundwork for the following session (second horizon) even if it isn't in great detail.
The next thing I say may seem overly complicated. If it does, then feel free to disregard it entirely, but I have had a lot of luck designing campaign arcs using the 5x5 method. The way this works is that you think of five things going on in your campaign. It might be something as big as the main bad guy of your story doing something, or it might be as simple as the town guard wanting help cleaning out a goblin enclave nearby. But if you think of five things going on in your story, you can divide each of these into five segments. (example: 1- town guard approaches you about a missing caravan. 2- travel to the caravan route and see signs of an attack 3- search the area to find evidence of goblins and captured survivors 4) track down the goblins and fight the goblin boss 5) rescue the survivors, find out the goblins were serving a larger purpose, return to town, get the reward.) Once you have five story threads with five segments each, you can decide top trickle one or two or three onto the party to see what they bite on. Not every idea has to be a winner if you have five of them :) And if you REALLY want to get fancy with things, you can go back and make sure that at least one segment of each of the five stories references another one of the five stories so that they lead into each other.
At the end of the day, there is one ironclad truth about DMing and worldbuilding: You can come up with a thousand contingencies, but the party is going to surprise you with something you never thought of. And that's a good thing. If the party really throws you for a loop, you're allowed to say, "I didn't see that one coming. Let's take a ten-minute break while I figure out what this would mean in the world."
"Not all those who wander are lost"
When I started, I thought it'll be a good idea to make my own campaign straight up! it worked a little bit, but didn't had much feel into it. Try getting the Lost Mine of Phandelver starter pack. It's usually the best option for new DMs and players. Then after you're done with that, purchase the advance rules including Dungeon Master's Guide, Player's handbook, and Monster Manual. Then you'll be ready to make your own campaigns, or stick with the published ones and buy them.
Monsters: Brathkal
Weapons: Sword of Ni , Bow of Ni
Spells: Zone of Ni
I also love d̶̡̼̥̻͙̣̼̿͂͐͘ę̴̢̨̛̼̙̤̻̞̠̗̳̝̦̹̹̦͍̉̏͛̽͠͠sţ̵̢̼̹̭̖͔͎̞̪͇͚̞̇̀̇̀̒͂̇̍͊̏ru̸̮̭̪̠͆̑̍́̈́̑̾̒̑̂̕ͅc̶̢̜͓̮̩͎͕̄́͑̃̈͋̈͌̑̽͠ͅͅţ̵̢̼̹̭̖͔͎̞̪͇͚̞̇̀̇̀̒͂̇̍͊̏io̵̪̭̞̗̝͙̝̬̥͕̒ͅn̸̨͖̳͓͍̜̬̗̪̜̪̗̺͆̏̆̊́̈́̿̎̅̈͠͝͝ in my campaigns! In other words, i'm an evil DM.
Thanks for all the help and advice guys!
I usually like to start by figuring out 3 things your bbg the bbg's motive and the players motive to stop the bbg and then have the campaign be foiling the bbg plots until they are powerful enough to defeat him
I would add to this...pay attention to character interactions also. They may say something you can use to develop the story.
One thing I did also was allow the players to design areas in my homebrewed world that they were from. I had final say but used their suggestions to a point. That is if you feel like tackling world building in the future.
I'd echo a lot of the sentiments here. I prefer the essentials kit over the starter set, but either is good for you to start off with. Either way you'll get a flavour for each location and setting which you can then adapt out to your own world creation. D&D's adventure settings (imo) are the weak link mainly because most people I think develop their own settings. They will give you a hint at important figures, locations, available quests however.
Also, make sure you've read the DMG and PHB through at least once. You shouldn't try to memorise it, but simply have read through them. This seems obvious but I recently spoke to a player who wanted to DM and although they'd played for years, they've never actually read through the PHB. This baffled me.
For your own campaign you aren't writing the story. This is a hard concept to understand, but that's not your role as a DM. You're more like a game level designer. You build the world that the players will inhabit. You build the sandbox. This is why understanding the people, places, quests and puzzles in a location are the most important thing. Take for example Skyrim, your job as DM is similar to the designer of the town of Riften. They had to work out who lived there, what facilities existed (thieves guild, fisheries, temple etc). When building a world for a game of D&D you're doing exactly that job in world creation. Once you have this location nailed down you can then start to populate it with people (who works at the temple for example). Once you have that, you will have an idea of what those people's motivations are and as such quests spring from that knowledge. In fact, just from this and without a BBEG you can run a year's worth of campaign. Now some people say you need a BBEG, and it certainly is useful, but not entirely necessary.
The story that gets written is written during play. It's your group (you included) that create the story. The story won't and shouldn't go the way you expect it to. If you want to write a plotline and story, then be a writer instead.
Thinking again about the worldbuilding, start with a small self-contained area first. Design the heck out of it, know where every shop in your town is. Know the big important players. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy of the Blades in the Dark TTRPG. The second half of that book is a masterclass in how to design a single, but busy city including factions, important locations, and important figures. You can get a taste for how well this is developed by reading Blades in the Dark players kit. Planning a single settlement in a similar way to the city in BitD is a great way of crafting your first world for a campaign.
Once you have that settlement designed, from there you can expand out as you develop. Work out what is nearby (mountains, caves, mines, rivers, forests etc) and that will help shape the settings of the quests available to the players.
I highly recommend avoiding a massive expansive world first time out. Often what happens is that you can end up crafting shallow locations that are somewhat limited because the workload of having to craft the entire world is overwhelming. So starting small with a single settlement is a great way of getting your feet wet.
DM session planning template - My version of maps for 'Lost Mine of Phandelver' - Send your party to The Circus - Other DM Resources - Maps, Tokens, Quests - 'Better' Player Character Injury Tables?
Actor, Writer, Director & Teacher by day - GM/DM in my off hours.
If your new to DND and want to learn to DM, I would suggest seeing if you have a local game store that has open DND. Nothing better than seeing it first hand.
A starter set is easily be best option if you are completely green to the game and world. Personally, I enjoy building my own worlds too, but this can be done by simply expanding on the existing encounter(s) in the starter pack.
You could start with a campaign from one of the books
OP is long gone, but since this is bumped anyway...
New DMs often wanting to jump right into a homebrew campaign is not a coincidence or something born of misunderstanding how the game works. The concept of developing your own world to tell stories in is a huge draw to many people, and is the reason many of us got into DMing in the first place. Telling newbies to set that motivation aside and do all the other parts of DMing is often something they do not want to hear (or do). If they came here to worldbuild and you tell them to do everything else but worldbuild, they'll likely just go do something else that scratches that itch.
I usually suggest a compromise where they take an existing adventure module and incorporate it into their world, changing it as much as they like. Let them lean on some of the structure provided but also let them make it their own.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm