Where do DMs usually start out?

[Man in the Funny Hat]

When I started playing (1976) we really didn't have much in the way of "settings" to actually take and use as a whole for a game world. The guys who ran the games I played in used bits and pieces of Greyhawk and Blackmoor of course, but also Judges Guild material (in particular the City State of the Invincible Overlord), Arduin Grimoire, Dragon Magazine articles, and of course their own imaginations. Particularly they only used their own maps for their game worlds.

When I started DMing in the early 80's I wasn't really any different. Even though by that time I could ostensibly have gone out and BOUGHT the boxed set for Greyhawk rather than just using the Supplement I booklet I drew my own maps, made up my own nations and histories, and stole ruthlessly from any and all published sources - and for me every campaign started by drawing a new map. I could have used Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Judges Guild's Wilderlands but it wasn't until some time after the Forgotten Realms came along (1987) that I actually set my campaign wholly and firmly in a published game world. Only then did I make modifications to someone ELSES game world to suit my own tastes rather than modify MY game world with someone elses. That was at least 5 years after I started DMing but as I recall I still didn't use it right away.

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

It would possibly be more helpful to also know WHEN these DM's started out (what was the first year they DM'ed), because observation has shown me that older DM's who started in the 70's and 80's usually started with Homebrew, and newer DM's (1990's and 2000's) started with published campaign settings.

Well, I played my first session and started reading D&D books in the mid 80s, didn't get to truly play until around 1999 and finally DMed in 2003. Homebrew all the way.

It's sad that, despite being involved with D&D for so long, I have so little experience actually taking part in the game.

 

[TwinBahamut]

It would possibly be more helpful to also know WHEN these DM's started out (what was the first year they DM'ed), because observation has shown me that older DM's who started in the 70's and 80's usually started with Homebrew, and newer DM's (1990's and 2000's) started with published campaign settings.

I really started with the release of third edition.

The first game I ran (as short as it was) was a homebrew setting. That setting is the direct ancestor of the setting I am running a campaign in now.

In fact, until Eberron came around I never had any interest in published settings (and they are still a very hard sell to me).

 

[Psion]

I started playing under Greyhawk.

My first attempts at campaign mapping and planning as a GM were extending the corners off the edge of the map featured in the Expert book... which is, approximately The Known World/Mystara.

It didn't take me long to scrap that map and move on to mapping my own world from scratch, though.

Year? It was probably 81 or 82 when I started DMing.

 

[Christoph the Magus]

The first campaign that I ever ran was back in 1993. I was 16 or 17, DMing for a group my age. The thought of a world never really occurred to me. It was simply "generic D&D world". I exclusively ran published modules, but I didn't stick to just one setting. I picked anything that caught my eye and strung them together on the loosest possible threads. We had a lot of fun, though I sure that the whole thing pretty much sucked.