The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has been completely retooled and reorganized with loads of new and updated advice for the spectrum of the DM experience. Chapter 5 of the new book is dedicated to tackling one of the most memorable and awe-inspiring elements of running Dungeons & Dragons: the campaign.

An entire series of adventures that tells a complete story? How does someone even begin to put that together? Like many seemingly overwhelming things, the answer is one step at a time. The advice and tools in chapter 5 are here to help you break down each of those steps so you're primed to make creating your campaign as fun and seamless as possible.

Today, we'll take a quick look at each of the helpful strategies and suggestions that'll get you campaigning in no time!

• A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Campaign
• Campaign Journaling
• Campaign Premise
• Campaign Start
• Planning Adventures
• Ending the Campaign

A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Campaign

Artist: Kent Davis

Chapter 5 of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide starts off with an easy-to-follow, four-step guide through each of the main aspects of building a campaign: Lay Out the Premise, Draw in the Players, Plan Adventures, Bring It To an End.

This guide mirrors a similar checklist from the book's previous chapter, focusing on individual adventures and their encounters. This is on purpose. If you think about an adventure as simply stringing a few encounters together, a campaign is then stringing two or more adventures together to tell a story.

There's more in-depth coverage of each of these steps, and we'll talk about that a bit later in this piece. However, this quick guide at the top of the chapter can be a great resource. You can check back when you're working on your campaign prep to guide you to whichever step you need to focus on next.

Campaign Journaling

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The player who takes notes is a figure of great reverence at the D&D table, and for good reason. A campaign can take months, even years, to complete, so having an ongoing log of important events can be important to maintaining the lore of an ongoing story. As important as notes are for a player, they're exponentially more important for a DM.

Chapter 5's section on journaling walks you through how to use a journal prior to the session, during the session, and afterward. You might use it to plan for the session or prepare foreshadowing, you might use it to take quick notes on unexpected roleplay moments, or you might use it to remember moments that connected with the players so you can stoke that momentum again the next time you play.

The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide suggests a variety of different ways to keep your journal. It also emphasizes that the best way to keep a journal is the method that works best for you, whether that's in a notebook, loose binder, or computer.

If you need more inspiration on what you should include in your journal, a template is provided with fields for the date of the session, the title of a specific adventure, important events from previous sessions that might impact this session, a summary of your current plans, and finally a space for notes to take during the session itself. You can print this sheet from the 2024 D&D Free Rules or use it as a prompt as you write down similar details in your own journal.

Campaign Premise

Artist: Calder Moore

Next, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide walks you through setting up the premise for your campaign and how to get players to buy into the story. This is similar to how a hook pulls characters into a given adventure. Since player investment is key to a successful campaign, let's look at some of the things chapter 5 recommends:

Campaign Characters

The first steps suggested in the campaign premise section involve working directly with your players during their character creation process. This helps you get an idea of what kinds of stories they're most interested in playing so that you can build out your campaign appropriately.

It also helps by allowing you to share the load when coming up with story ideas. Suggestions are offered on how to pull ideas both from directly talking to your players and by indirectly picking some of the more choice bits from their character creation to pepper into your adventures.

Next, it gives you some tips on how to help your players pursue character arcs. It breaks down different types of character motivations, goals, ambitions, quirks, and whims as potential storytelling elements. It also offers tips on how to use the NPCs created as a supporting cast for these characters, like their friends, family, and even foes, to generate stories.

If you need help keeping track of all these details for your players' characters, this section also provides another helpful tracking sheet that you can use for each character. Think of it as a DM's version of their character sheet.

Campaign Conflicts

Artist: Raluca Marinescu

This section provides ideas for longevity in a campaign by creating varied conflicts in the story. Suggestions include preparing three distinct major conflicts ahead of time and using the tiers of play (level 5, 11, and 17 ) for character milestones when stories can escalate.

Like some of the above items, an example of a tracking sheet is provided to keep notes on your campaign conflicts.

Flavors of Fantasy

People often think of different things when they picture fantasy storytelling. It's helpful to think of the kind of fantasy story your group wants to tell. The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide breaks down a short list of some of the most known types of fantasy stories, such as swashbuckling tales of pirates, war stories from epic battlefields, or the classic dungeon-delving heroic fantasy that D&D is most known for. It even has suggestions for how to “cross the streams” and draw in elements from other genres of story, such as sci-fi or post-apocalyptic.

Campaign Setting

Finally, when setting up your campaign's premise, you'll need to determine what the setting is. Twelve of the published settings in the D&D multiverse are described briefly as potential choices, or you can create your own. For DMs who want to create their own setting, there are five questions provided as prompts to get you thinking about the world you want your players to explore. It's worth noting, too, that nothing about the published settings is set in stone either, and these same questions could be used to modify those planes to your own story needs.

The Greyhawk campaign setting is provided in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide as an example of a published campaign setting you can use. This fleshed-out setting, along with the short adventures provided in chapter 4, can either be used in your campaign or serve as inspiration for you to refer back to when building your own.

Campaign Start

You've hooked your players, you've built your world, and you have some great ideas for how to get the characters involved in your adventures. Now, how do you start the darn thing? Well, this section helps you do just that.

Advice is offered for how to run a Session 0 at the start of your campaign to establish expectations, build or finalize characters, and bring the characters together. It also has tips on how to build up your starting location and recommendations for using the first adventure as a campaign kickoff.

Planning Adventures

Chapter 4 of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide focuses on creating adventures for your games, so this section of chapter 5 is more dedicated to how to make your adventures tie together into an ongoing campaign. It breaks down the difference between episodic adventures, which tell disconnected stories, and serialized adventures, which build together into a greater plot. For serialized stories, a table is provided for suggestions on how to build connections between stories.

Getting Players Invested

No matter how much you've built into a campaign, it's all for naught if the players aren't connecting to it. So, this section gives you a lot of help to inspire you to find those hooks that make players want to keep coming back. Having details that the players are drawn to, like a community, a likable villain, or even a home base they care a lot about, are suggested. The new rules for Bastions, detailed more in chapter 8, are mentioned here as well.

In order to make players feel more connected to the story, there's advice on how to play on pleasant senses when discussing locations that you want the players' characters to care about or like. There's even some detailed advice on how to ask your players questions that allow them to contribute to worldbuilding. This tavern isn't just serving their characters' favorite foods, it's serving theirs.

In order to stem an ongoing or challenging story from starting to feel grueling or tiresome, the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has prompts for ways to amp up the players' excitement or to allow them to blow off steam. Suggestions include occasionally acknowledging their characters' roles as heroic figures in the story by having NPCs remark on the incredible feats they've pulled off. In addition, having the occasional break episode or session where the characters can relax and have fun is a recommended way of fighting player fatigue.

Ending the Campaign

Artist: Sam Keiser

All good things must come to an end, and eventually, most D&D campaigns wind down. The last part of chapter 5's campaign advice helps you to bring your campaign to a satisfying conclusion. This has tips on how to plan for the ending of a campaign once your players have resolved the major conflict of the story.

It also has advice on how to end the campaign sooner than expected, whether that's due to it running out of steam or if you've been inspired by new ideas. This section provides a few ways to successfully handle the early dismount, such as arranging a grand finale to end on a satisfying note or getting input from players on what would make them feel best when wrapping things up.

Bringing It All Together

A lot of factors contribute to a successful campaign. Many of these things will be out of your control. Player energy, real-world vibes, and scheduling can all be part of the mosaic of collective tabletop roleplaying. But with the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, you have a toolbox of guided suggestions, inspirations, and tracking sheets to help you to get the best handle on everything you can control. You've got this, and the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has got you.

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.