D&D 5E create a campaign

[jdrakeh]

You might want to take a look at Sword, Cross, and Chainmail, which is an awesome Mad Libs-like campaign building toolkit.

 

[aco175]

@GamingPanki first, welcome to the site, you will find all sorts of help and feel free to stay and look around.

Next, a lot of what is said above is great advise. You can go to DMsGuild.com and find free and Pay What You Want (PWYW) adventures to get and put something together. I also ran for some boy scouts the Delian Tomb by Matt Colville mentioned above. I also found free maps that went with the dungeon by doing a Google search. It is an easy starter adventure. You can also buy Lost Mines of Phandelvar (LMoP) for less than $20.00 from a local gaming store, Target, or online. It provides starter rules and a town, and a module for a few levels and I know there are many other adventures on DMsGuild that happen around that town for more adventure.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You might want to take a look at Sword, Cross, and Chainmail, which is an awesome Mad Libs-like campaign building toolkit.

I had never heard of this before. How detailed does it get?

 

[GMMichael]

TL;DwatchMattColville: making a campaign setting is fun, and it's not as difficult as it might seem.

Also @OP, write an adventure first. See what happens. Depending on your players, you might not have to answer a single "campaign" related question. Better, your players might answer some of the campaign questions for you. So take notes.

 

[Clint_L]

I think the consistent advice is: keep it simple. Gary Gygax started with just a dungeon. Then he added a keep and nearby village to give the characters a place to rest and resupply. Then he added clues to new locations nearby, so that the campaign world slowly grew as the adventurers explored. Don't feel like you need a whole world before you can start.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm actually approaching this challenge myself, because in addition to running my long-running Ptolus games, which take a lot of mental time and energy and now move at a George R. R. Martin pace, I want to have a beer-and-pretzels choice always on the table, probably using Shadowdark.

For me, that means building a West Marches-style game where whoever shows up each week is fine, with the expectation that other player characters are sleeping off a hangover at the inn or puttering around in their wizard's tower or whatever.

I know I want it to be a standard OSR vibe game, although with the Shadowdark world assumptions (playable goblins, for instance), but I also want it to have a sword & sorcery past, so that I can bring run adventures like that when needed and test a custom sword & sorcery class, etc. So I know what happened 5,000 years ago to the sword & sorcery setting and how it got replaced with a world that now includes elves, dwarves and halflings. (This also has the benefit of having antediluvian human ruins and hidden civilizations around, along with having ancient and depraved humans, rather than drow or the other usual suspects, be the big villains of the setting.)

My plan now is, in a moment when I've got some free time, is to drop a fortified town into the middle of a hex map and then sketch in a wilderness province around it where there's only one real safe home base, but a number of dungeons and ruins, wilderness of various sorts, etc., to explore.

I was tempted to make this a nautical adventure, with lots of islands, but two of my players did a lot of that with me during the pandemic, and I think primarily focusing on a classic Borderlands area will work for me. If there are fun one-shot islands (one of the Shadowdark starter adventures takes place on a sinking island and one of the zines is a Viking-flavored nautical adventure), we can just hand wave the players over there, the way that Conan popped all around the map in his stories until post-Howard writers decided to figure out his timeline better.

Right now, I just know the names of a few gods (generated more or less on the fly for my recent Grizzled Adventurers games), which I've kept in a notebook, and the names of a few locations, like Echo Lake. The rest I will leave very loosey goosey and construct as I go.

Most of the actual work will be creating a home base, the immediate area around it, and a few interesting places for people to go look at on the map. Then I'll provide that to my prospective players (via Discord and our private Facebook group) and let them know when they want to check something out and we'll arrange Shadowdark games that way.

Then I go back to the more labor-intensive hand-crafting of the separate 5E content, which we'll do as it gets done.

 

[jdrakeh]

I had never heard of this before. How detailed does it get?

The first half of the booklet is a pretty detailed setting builder. It's ostensibly dark ages Europe (but can stand in for any vaguely fantasy Europe setting, so most D&D settings). Example top-down setting-building prompts that the booklet provides multiple choice answers to include:

This world is utter [bad word] because:
Everybody knows that:
The Church denies it but:

There are, further, prompts for detailing individual towns, dungeons, geographical features, secrets, troubles and even fantasy races).

The second part of the book is a basic fantasy RPG that can be used in whole as-is or as a tool to hack your existing fantasy RPG of choice (by lifting some of the rules options).

 

[Ancalagon]

I don't know if it's a good "first time DM" campaign, but yoon-suin was great at generating random social groups the PCs could be part of, and all of these had hooks for adventure...

I haven't tried it myself, but Lost Mines of Phlanders has been widely praised as a great intro campaign. Seeing a basic campaign setting can be good to lay a foundation of sorts.