An intake of breath. The calm before the storm. The blank canvas. In many worlds, it has many names, but in all, it is the same. The common thread of all stories is this: that at the instant when they begin, before the first word is spoken, when everything is merely a possibility of a maybe, every story is the same. Every story has a Beginning. Every story has the same Beginning.
And every story has an end. In the endless halls of the Archive, every tale is recorded. Each story, each telling, is unique, and each is captured. Countless paths meander countless ways, but all stories flow from one Beginning to a single, final End.
You know that somewhere in the hall is your story. It has Begun; it shall End. The path is recorded, but you dare not seek it out. Not yet.
So, you have decided to run a D&D campaign. Whether your regular group is starting something new, or you have committed to running your first game this year, we need to think about the necessary steps to prepare. Creating a campaign is no small feat, but it not nearly as hard as one might think. Especially once we identify and address the greatest foible of every dungeon master.
Ignore the Premise
If you are at all like me, you will have at least a few campaign ideas in your head. We think we know what we want to do. We are wrong. Ignore what you think you need — eventually we will come back to those ideas, but for now they are a stumbling block.
DMs love to work too hard. Our minds so often abound with ideas and places and people, wondrous and exciting, and we long for the chance to share them. In the midst of our excitement, we often forget several important points. First, this game is collaborative, and is most fun when we are able to work together with players, so we should leave space for them. Second, this game has rules, so we should work them into our schemes. Third, we live in a world filled with scheduling issues and other hazards that will cast our best laid plans into ruin.
My advice is this: keep your powder dry. You have a lifetime of DMing to unveil your greatest ideas. Do not spend hours planning out details until they are needed. In an emergency, when your preparation proves insufficient, you will discover that not only are you better at improvising than you think, but your players are less attentive than you believe, and more forgiving.
You may feel passionately about your campaign idea. That is good — the excitement will keep you going. However, beware lest your passions be for your idea, rather than the player collaboration, mechanics, and reality of the game. A D&D campaign is not a book. It will be derailed. It will fall apart. Hopefully, it will reassemble itself into something incredible that you cannot yet imagine. What it will not do is conform to your initial vision. A DM is not an author — the entire group is. If that makes you uncomfortable, consider turning your campaign pitch into a novel instead. It will spare you frustration, and leave you free to approach DMing without the weight of your desired story.
Focus on the Practical
But how do you create a campaign without first setting the premise? Start with what is real. No matter what game you come up with, you will need to address certain issues. Building it in from the start will make everything run smoother.
Schedules
The biggest issue to any game is scheduling. If your players cannot gather, you cannot play, and if you cannot play you cannot run a campaign. There is no harder rule than this. You must work with schedules, not against them.
Consider how many players you have, and how committed they are. You know your friends better than I, so need to judge this one yourself. If one of your players will always be late or cancel, acknowledge it, and decide how you will handle that. No problem is unsolvable, but the solution may be not to play with them — you need to give your requirements, and those of the other players, the same weight as those you are working around.
The number of players determines how many problems you will have. With more players, there will be more scheduling issues. However, you also have more flexibility to run a session with a player or two missing.
How frequently will your group meet? A fixed weekly time is the best way to get commitment — longer than that and the excitement from the previous week starts to wear off. However, this may be infeasible because people get busy. With longer periods between games, it is important to keep engagement up. Whether this involves boardgame nights for those available on off-nights, or exchanging memes in the group chat will depend on the constraints you are dealing with and what your players are like.
How long will your sessions be, and when? Late nights may be tough for parents, and work shifts might not align easily. I avoid running sessions under three hours, or over five — too short, and the deadline creates a frustrating time pressure. Too long, and I start to run out of energy.
You will need a place to play. Online has advantages and disadvantages. Dinning tables are great, but be aware of commute times eating into schedules if players have to travel far. If you are playing outside of your home, how much DMing kit will you need to bring? Also consider distractions — flatmates, ambient noise, and a host of other inconveniences can be addressed, but you must put in the effort to address them.
Finally, keep in mind that no one will be more committed to your campaign than you. When your players cancel last minute, or drop out of a campaign, or forget last session’s events, remember that their lives are busy, yet they still chose to join your game for however long they could. What for you is weeks of planning and creation is for them a few hours of socialising. It is never fun when they are less interested, but I find this perspective helpful to maintain.
Making It Work
Once you have established how long your games will be, how consistent your party is, and how frequently you will play you can start thinking about the structure of the campaign.
Lots of players with unpredictable schedules? Consider a West Marches game where each session is a stand alone adventure with a different party all set within the same evolving world.
The less frequently your group meets, the harder it is to maintain complex stories. With monthly sessions, consider running grander single-session threats. With weekly games, slow builds are much more feasible. Similarly, the longer a session, the more space for complexity and extra combats.
If you are playing online, work out your platform. Either way, you need a way to run battles — theater of the mind or battle-maps both work, but both require work. Minis are fun, but costly and not essential.
Players
Pay attention to your players. The more on board they are with the campaign, the more they will do to prioritise it. If you have not played with them before, talk to them. Find out what they like to play or read. Think about what you know of them, and draw that into the game.
The more new players in your group, the lower a level you will want to start at, and the simpler you will want to make everything, at least at first. More experienced players might be more excited to try high level builds and facing complex threats.
If some of your players are reticent, avoid heavy roleplay in early sessions. If you are uncertain, wait, and let the players interact with one another to get a sense of what they are comfortable with. This also lets them experiment with the game and bond as a group.
Bringing the Party Together
At this point, you should have a group of players, and a campaign schedule. Now we have enough constraints in place to consider the premise of the campaign. Your players may be fully on board, or may have committed only to a one-shot with the possibility of a follow up. In either case, our next step is the same: create the first session.
Session Zero
Session Zero is a pre-game session aimed at setting expectations and finalising character sheets. It is perfectly possible to play D&D without one — one-shot games testify to that — but it can be helpful for a handful of reasons.
First, practically, it is a space to create character sheets. Players new to TTRPGs, or your system of choice, may benefit from your support. Making characters together also encourages some amount of collaboration on backstories, which is extremely helpful — the more reasons the party already has to stick together, the easier it will be for them to do so without breaking verisimilitude.
It is also a chance for you to influence the PCs. Your player’s characters are among your greatest assets as a DM. They are a set of complex characters guaranteed to be critical the the story, each with unique interpersonal relationships. Better yet, you did not need to create them. During character creation, you have an opportunity to influence the flavour and tone of the campaign through these PCs. Highlight the options that will ground PCs in the world and fit the idea of the campaign. Be prepared to take inspiration from the players as well — in collaborative fiction you do not need to do all the work! Communicating with your players is helpful because they do not yet know how cool your campaign setting is, and you do not know what their dreams for their characters are. By working together, you both get more out of it.
Finally, it provides space to set boundaries on what content your players will enjoy. It is an unfortunate reality that sometimes topics will come up that, for whatever reason, some people do not enjoy. This can happen no matter how careful you are. Rather than creating an exhaustive list of off-limits content, which can be an awkward and difficult discussion in itself, it may be better to remind everyone that this is a game. Ultimately, you are all there to have fun. If someone grows uncomfortable, it is in all your interests to take a break, then rewind or skip forwards. Whatever you decide to do, ensure you and your players are on the same page about how this stuff is handled — otherwise, your friends might not have fun, and then they will not prioritise your game, and you will not get to play.
None of this is essential. If you are part of an experienced group who know one another well, there may be no issues jumping straight to session one. If in doubt, hold a short session zero combined with a casual boardgame night. Then, it is time for session one.
Session One
The first session has several purposes: it should be fun for the players — ideally, it will banish any doubts they had and convince them to commit to the campaign; it will teach the players how their characters work; and it will introduce you to how your players play their party. But now we are getting beyond the creation of a campaign and into the creation of a game session — and those are topics for future posts!