How Do I Start A Campaign?

So, you have somehow found friends, bought dice, and been tasked with running a D&D campaign. How do you start running a campaign? Well, the first step is having some kind of campaign in mind. There's a number of questions you'll need to answer: what edition of D&D, what genre of play, etc, etc. I don't want to answer those questions; that's on you. What I want to talk about here is about building a world to run a campaign in. There are three meta-options for you to consider.

META-OPTION 1: THE NEW TOLKIEN, OR TOP-DOWN CREATION

So, you can create languages from the bottom up, plan the geography of an entire world, create a fantastic Sanderson-esque magic system. That's good, and that's fun – though, of course, most of the fun to be had there will be by you, the DM, not your players. Most of the stuff you make will never transfer to your players. That's fine, just be aware your impulse to Play Tolkien is as much a way of you spending your own time as it is preparing a game for others to play.

META-OPTION 2: SMALL BEGINNINGS, OR BOTTOM-UP CREATION

Or you can create a little town and a couple of places for players to explore – there's a ruined Elf Tower (...New Mexiccoooo...) in the hills, strange tunnels carved out of onyx underneath the town, and nomadic boarmen crossing the plains nearby. Which empire is this part of? Who knows. In the marketplace, there's a birdmess-spattered statue of some old hero; who is it? We'll work that out later. Where are the boarmen going? Follow them to find out! This is a fairly simple way to start a campaign – sketch out a few “safe” locations and a few “dangerous” locations, drop the characters in it one way or another, give the players some rumours about the local area, and let them at it. Make more up as you go.

META-OPTION 3: PLUNDER THE BOOKS, OR THE MASH-UP

Probably actually the most common form of campaign; use a book or books published by others. Change it where you want to. Maybe glue bits from different books together (not literally, really damages the resale value). An example: I'm about to start running a game set in Chult, in the Forgotten Realms, using Chris Perkins' Tomb of Annihilation as a basis for it. But there's a number of issues with that book; some of them have to do with the expectations of a campaign (which I've changed), but some have to do with it being an exploration campaign with nowhere near enough locales. So I've added the two official-ish supplements to that, The Tortle Package and The Lost Kenku; but I've also thrown in James Raggi's Tower of the Stargazer, Kiel Chenier's Blood in the Chocolate, Ken Hite's Qelong, and a bunch of unofficial ToA supplements from the DM's Guild. Some of that stuff will need adaptation, for sure, but that's fine. Even the ToA supplements will be hacked to fit my version of Chult and my campaign needs; I don't need linear adventures, for instance. I need lots of adventure locations and dynamic environments, because that empowers player choice.

But whichever of these you do, you're going to need to end up with a place for your players to start, for them to adventure in, became heroes/villains of, etc. So whether you want to create the world top-down, bottom-up, or via the mash-up, there is a similar objective in mind. Now, one solution – a version of Meta-Option 3 – is just run your players through a set of published adventures, one after another. You set the scene: “you've been hired to do this...”, and the players function within the game as you've delineated. This is good for pickup play, for quite casual groups, and for very irregularly-scheduled campaigns; people turn up knowing they'll have an adventure. You'll need to pick interesting adventures (hint: don't play Pathfinder Adventure Paths unless you're using Joseph Manola's condensations of them – see his Against The Wicked City blog for more), but this is a perfectly reasonable way to run the game that probably reduces your workload.

But what if you want to emphasize player decisions at the campaign level? What if you want them to be the chief agents of change in a world, the architects of the rising and falling of kingdoms, even? Then you need a world with real choices for the players, even at 1st Level. They need to be able to pick which adventures to go on, and then allowed to determine their own objectives within that adventure location. So if you want to run that sort of campaign, here's what I'd recommend you come up with (by whatever method):

A REASON: This is simple and only matters for the first ten minutes of your first session, really. But why are your characters in the setting? It can be as simple as: this is a place where adventurers come; the characters are adventurers. It might help to establish why the characters are together before starting the game proper, too, to avoid confusion or the negative play habit of one character essentially forming their own party and doing their own thing the whole time.

THE TOWN: Doesn't need to be a town. Could be a yurt village, a strange and rambling inn and wagonhouse, whatever. The essential point is: there is a point of light the adventurers rest in, hear rumours in, may feel inclined to defend. There may be adventure locations in or beneath The Town, and you might have fun encounter tables for them as they spend their downtime there, but the key thing is that this can function as a home base. They're not constantly attacked by dragons when they're there. There are shops or traders or whatever. There are one or two “questgivers”; the weird shaman always wants ingredients from out of the way caves and bogs, and the Peace Chief wants the boarmen scared away from their current path without a proper fight.

DUNGEONS, PLURAL: By dungeon I also mean: bandit camp, strange outlying village, ruined observatory. Places that adventures happen. It can be a simple location with one puzzle or a multi-level, 159-room True Dungeon. A mix of size and type is good. This places are dangerous – hence why only adventurers would dare going – but they shouldn't be unrelentingly hostile, and solely full of combat. Make sure there are potential allies out in the wilderness. At least one baffling, strange, and slightly disturbing location.

A MAP?: Optional, but sometimes helpful for visualization, even outside of a proper hex-or-pointcrawl. Even if it's just a flowchart or set of nodes. The Yurt Village is in the centre, or at one edge; then there's the Puzzle Swamp, the True Dungeon, the Boarmen Stomping Grounds, and the Ruined Obsevatory. As there's a Dark Conspiracy at the Yurt Village, that gives you at least five adventure locations waiting for your players.

RUMOURS: You can just have an NPC hire the PCs to do something, or otherwise incentivize their action. But you might benefit from giving the group two or three “rumours” to start with; this lets them choose what seems most valuable to them. Maybe they start with these three:

“The Peace Chief needs help with the Boarmen, and is willing to reward any who offer aid.”

“She who solves the cog puzzle in the Putrid Swamp is sure to receive great riches...”

“Some say there is no bottom to the Spiral Dungeon, until it meets the Fire Below. But the strange artifacts within are surely of some bygone race.”

With that, I'd say you're more than good to go.