Best step by step campaign design advice?

[Doug McCrae]

kittens being kept as household pets

The fools! Don't they realise those things are deadly?

 

[Ry]

The fools! Don't they realise those things are deadly?

I tried to warn them... but they don't listen. WHY DON'T THEY LISTEN?

 

[IanB]

What do you do when you're stuck on a new campaign? I'm building a theatre of nations and trying to create some evil secrets in the background (aboleth agents infiltrating society, demon princes trying to bring about the apocalypse, kittens being kept as household pets) but I find myself frequently stumped as I try to fill it in.

To sum up what I do: steal, steal, steal.

I have so much old gaming material at this point that it is pretty easy to just grab a book/magazine at random and steal ideas from it, if I run out.

 

[RangerWickett]

Take a look at successful campaigns, and draw inspiration from those. For instance, Sagiro's storyhour helped me out a ton, and more recently reading the Savage Tide gave me ideas for what I wanted to do and to avoid for War of the Burning Sky.

Big campaigns require a fair bit of pre-planning, and a hell of a lot of flexibility as things go off the rails.

 

[cerberus2112]

The Making of a Milieu, from Dragon #93

 

[howandwhy99]

Forget about every rule
Start small and grow outwards
Think like the characters in the game world
Devise plot after plot of NPC plot
Make a list of everything you love and add in what you want where
Be in the mood of the thing you are creating when you create it
Listen to and know your players, their likes and dislikes
Dream regularly, with a pen in hand

and carry dice wherever you go

 

[The_Gneech]

Anything written by Aaron Allston for Justice, Inc. and much he wrote for Champions. (Sadly, very hard to find now.)

Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering as well ... also kind of hard to find but partially rewritten into DMG II.

-TG

 

[Woas]

The '97 Ray Winniger ones?

Seconded.

Those articles are my DM Bible. I wrote all the Rules of Dungeoncraft in Sharpie on the inside cover of my DMG.

 

[barsoomcore]

Make stuff up.
Figure out what sucks.
Do less of the stuff that sucks.
Repeat.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

The Ray Winniger Dungeoncraft articles rocked (and still do rock). They are the best series of world-building articles I have read. I only wish he had kept doing them. That's not to say that Monte and Wolfgang's articles suck. I like them too, but Ray's articles tended to focus more on the world-building pre-game prep side of things, which is what I am most interested in.

Olaf the Stout