New Dm How Do I Write A Campaign

Hello, I'm a new Dm and have no idea how to write and interesting campaign that wont be repetitive and that wont take 30 minutes to complete if anyone has tips please let me know. Also are random tables are good for writing campaigns or more of improv.

If you're a first-timer, there's a lot to be said for starting with a premade scenario, just to reduce the amount of things you're dealing with right off the bat.

That said, if you are going to run from scratch, I would suggest not thinking of it as "writing a campaign". You should first work at a smaller scale.

Don't make a world. Make a town. Just sketch out some general ideas.

Then sit down with your players. Have them make characters, and also have them make connections between their characters and to the rough sketch of a town you have for them. Have them figure out why these people might leave their homes to go adventuring.

Now, you have what you need to start. Something may have occurred to you from the players' connection. Or it might not. Either way, create a situation. Something that will get the characters to act. Could be as simple as "there are bandits attacking travelers on the south road". Build that idea out into a simple adventure.

But don't make it self-contained. Put in some elements that'll lead the players to investigate further. If it's bandits, maybe they have written orders to deliver their loot to a specific location at a specific time. Maybe their leader is a low-level priest of a dark god nobody's heard of. You don't need all the answers yet, just the questions. Make up more of the world as you need it. (It may end up incoherent, but nobody but you's going to notice. Just keep notes.)

And then your players will likely want to poke further. How free-form you are is your call. Since you're new, you should probably explicitly agree with your players that the way things will work is "I give you the adventure hook, and you follow up on it". It's not the only way to run a game, but it's relatively easy to manage for a new DM. As you and they get more comfortable, you can loosen things up if you want.

This way, you don't give yourself a lot of work up front, and can adapt to how the game's playing out.

My biggest advice to you is not to over-prepare. Don't write a campaign beginning to end with every twist and choice and everything set in stone. Don't write the ending because you don't know the ending, because the players' choices write your story. 

What you should focus on is writing hooks. Put challenges, quests, and plots in front of your players with some bait to get them interested, and then prepare content as you go once it seems like the players start to go for one particular hook. 

As you go, you'll get more confident in writing your adventures and you'll be able to string together more complex stories, but starting out, focus on good hooks that make your players want to do things in your world. 

Start with a premade adventure. Making your own stuff is a big leap, and is so much easier if you have a grasp on the rules and a general idea of what an adventure can be kind of like. I'd recommend starting with Lost Mine of Phandelver, but there are plenty of other various premade adventures that can work well. Get together your group, run through that, and see how you like it. Once you feel like you're starting to get the flow of things, then you can start writing your own stuff, and you'll be better at it then than if you had jumped in immediately.