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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gilladian" data-source="post: 5509860" data-attributes="member: 2093">I have a single campaign world that I have been running for the past 20 years, in one form or another. Let me explain how I run things, and maybe it will help...1. decide where in the world to set a new campaign. For this example, I chose Tallowsland, a region of loosely-allied villages and towns in a temperate region of heavy forest, light hills and ample rivers  and streams. I spent a couple afternoons laying out a map, giving the major towns names and populations, and deciding how the alliance worked.2. I already had a history for the region that covered up to the last 20 years,  so I simply updated the history to account for the alliance, mentioned how a war in a not-too-far away kingdom had affected this region, and I was ready. If I had NOTHING written, I'd have spent a couple more hours roughing out a vague historical outline at least a hundred or two hundred years back, but no further...3. I picked a town as my focal point for the start of the campaign. I decided on the "feel" I wanted for the campaign - my original thought had been "kingdom building", but in the end my players didn't seem that ambitious, so I decided to focus more on "explore,  loot, grow powerful" for this particular campaign. NOTE: my campaigns NEVER have an overarching plot. I don't like them. Sometimes there's a THEME (ie one campaign focused on evil religions with political  power).  I drew maps of the town and a couple of the major features in town. I outlined the Lord Mayor, Sherrif and other leader roles. 3. I began selecting modules to "fit" the world and my scenario. In this case, I've got a subscription to Dungeon-A-Day, and am using it as the "main" adventure site. I'm also cannibalizing all the set locations from Paizo's Kingmaker adventure path, scattering them to the east in an open area of the world. This is the most work as it entails tweaking the history of my world, the background of the modules, and giving rationales for all of it. This took me about six weeks. Not that I'm finished, but I have a lot of rough ideas in my head or notated.4. Run things. Work the PC backgrounds into the world; they write,  I tweak, they tweak back,  and we have PLOT hangers! One PC is from far off to the south; she's a six foot + tall warrior. So I gave her a land to be from, and she told me about it,  a bit. New meat for another campaign site lateer! We made up a pair of lesser storm gods, too. Another wizard PC is an elf with a real better-than-thou complex. He's secretive, too, so later we'll decide what he's hiding in his past.This week we ran the third session of the game. They left the dungeon and are now in need of a remove curse. To start showing them the rest of the region, I had them carry a package for the big temple out to a small outpost to the east. They got attacked by (randomly rolled) orcs on the way, and ended up tracking them back to their lair and trying to raid it. Every bit of that from the package to the lair was random, but it was all "part of the scene" developed from the dungeon background and the necessity of fitting other bits and pieces into the storyline. As time goes by, things will grow from this basis. I rarely write from scratch anymore; it IS too time-consuming. But steal, modify, outline and invent! It will all hang together amazingly if you just take good notes...</blockquote>

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