D&D General Flying by the seat of your pants

[Christopher Bixby]

So tonight was my sixth session with my players. We are doing a campaign that I've been working on for some time now and I've been doing a decent job I think of staying ahead of them with my written material for the campaign. As of last night though I had to fly by the seat of my pants so to speak and drew off of some of the research areas that I've been using for this campaign.
To give a bit of background into my world for this campaign it is set in the old norse mythos. For those of you who don't know what that means it means it is set in the time of the ancient norse gods and centered around the Mask of Loki... (insert Jim Carey's The Mask for inspiration) which has been stolen from a wizard who the players only know him as D. Well I have a few plot hooks that are going to make themselves known to the players at the right time. Right know the players have left off doing some unusual tasks that they were not prepared for nor had the knowledge of some of the old Norse myths.
This is a set of myths that I always liked to dive into myself. So with all that being said I had to fly by the seat of my pants when they got to the end of my written material (hence the title of this thread) and had to come up and run through a multitude of scenarios in my head before settling on the one that I thought would be a good one to use. For those of you who know the Utgarda-Loki myth where loki and thor travel to jotinheim/land of the giants from the mythos you will recall that thor challenges utgarda-Loki and his giants to a number of contests in order to kill a few giants. My players didn't know or remember that particular story of thor & loki, so they had know idea of what to expect however when I presented them with a set of challenges to get the iron flask than they started to figure out sort of what I was up to, but i never let on that i was out of written material at this point.
I am now looking into getting more material written up for the next session and cannot wait to see where the players and i can go with norse mythology in 5e. If there are any ideas that any of you have that might help me in this campaign I would be very appreciative and will take all feed back into consideration.

 

[Morrus]

Paragraphs man! I can't read that text wall!

 

[aco175]

I find that players forgive a lot if it means winging it or not playing.

That being said, you have time between play to plan some more adventure to go with what you presented and guide things back to what you have in mind. You can completely go with the players decisions and that is fine if you stay just in front of them. You can also guide things back to your more fleshed out ideas and plans for the campaign. Some people will argue either way and I kind of thing both are ok, but if pressed I would push them back to the more structured game I have planned.

It is also nice to have a fight in your pocket. If the PCs have been poking around giants and such, you can throw one with a map or something to get the PCs back on the right path. You can also introduce something upcoming as well with an encounter with orcs and have the PCs wonder what is going on.

I played in a campaign where the DM totally winged it and it was ok, but not great. He would roll for a random encounter and then just pick something out of the MM he thought was fun. Not really cohesive when a dinosaur pops up in the woods or a demon just shows up. It worked and was better than not playing, but it showed.