Where do DMs usually start out?

[ARandomGod]

My first game was homebrew, and whenever I start a game, even if I'm going to move it into a set campaign-world or module set I always run a homebrew to start.

Now, I'm playing in Shackled City (the dungeon magazine one) that a friend is GMing... and that's the first time I've ever played in a "setting" that started with day one.

Edit: However (as different as that may seem) I've always had a "game world" that I work to maintain as consistent. Probably because I was reading sci-fi/fantasy books long before I got into RPG's.

 

[Venport]

I Started my First Camapain as DM in January with the Shackled city AP from Paizo, good stuff! This let me get the hange of Dming So i can eventualy write my own Campaine.

The funny thing is that most of my players have been playing sence early 2e and have never taken their players past 13th=14th level. SO i have been granted the pleasure of brining everyone to a higher level than they have ever been before... also i only started DnD in Jan of 04.

(for those of you who konw the Ap the party kill Valadure last night)

 

[Masquerade]

I've never run anything but homebrew. Premade settings don't appeal to my creative side. If I suddenly found myself without as much time on my hands, I might switch to a published setting, however, but as it stands, I'd rather build the world myself.

My first games were set in worlds of my design like Xerzus Vai and Seionus . . . good times.

 

[mcrow]

I started with published adventures that I modified to fit together for my first campaign. Worked a quite well for a frist try looking bakc @ it know.

 

[TerraDave]

As soon as I knew what a campaign world was, gaming was all about building that campaign world, actually playing was a secondary act of play testing! (my attitude has since gotten a little better, well, a little)

Yes, I started in the early 80's, but I knew about Greyhawk and the "Known World" and saw adds for this Judges Guild stuff, but homebrew was the only way to go.

 

[Wombat]

I started with OD&D, pre-Greyhawk supplement (though I did get that in about 2 months)

Since I only had those Three Little Books, by necessity I had to go homebrew -- there was no camaign information! For the first couple of months all I did was run dungeons with no connection at all to any world -- you were either In The Dungeon or Outside The Dungeon Getting Supplies. Terribly exciting...

After about three months of this, however, I decided that I really did need a world to go with the game. First up I created the city of Albo (or, as most people called it, "Alpo"). Then I created some of the lands around it (marking a couple of dungeons on the map). The world itself was pretty crude, but it worked for us.

Thinking back over the various games I have run, the only ones that I have run in their "official" setting have been RuneQuest, Star Trek, and Over the Edge, and even these I tweaked to make them my own. For the most part I think I run homebrews because that is where I started from.

 

[Laser T. Swift]

When I first started out in the late 80's I simply ran modules with no real connection. We just ran adventure to adventure and had a blast. After awhile this got stale and I wanted something more. I picked up the Greyhawk boxed set. After reading it for a couple of days it seemed kind of dry to me, but I loved the maps. I ditched the setting and wrote my own world using based on the maps. Had a great time with my buddies for years.

I think that counts as homebrew...

Laser

 

[The_Universe]

I'm sort of in between, but I voted homebrew. My first GMing experience was with the Star Wars D6 RPG, which obviously carries with it a large number of assumptions for how the world/galaxy is supposed to operate. That being said, the first time I ran a game that was supposed to last more than an hour of "barfighting" in a mos eisley cantina clone, I started out a campaign arc set in alternate Star Wars universe in which many of the characters appeared in different roles than they had in the movies, generally just switching characters around. So, Tarkin was the Baron Administrator of Cloud City and Lando was the Imperial Grand Moff, etc. But, even just switching around starting positions really made it its own thing, really seperate from "normal" Star Wars.

 

[Mercule]

I think the "Known World" map was officially my world map for, oh, a week. By the time words started coming out of my mouth that first session, it was quite clear that not only did the map differ politically and climatically, but also geographically, too.

FWIW, I started gaming over two decades ago and only made about a handful or two sessions before being thrust into the GM chair. Turns out I prefer being the GM, anyway.

 

[Turhan]

In 1991, at the age of 33 I was introduced to DnD by a friend who said the game would only take 30 minutes to learn, but would provide a lifetime of entertainment.

The game was his homebrew that he started in 1977 or 78. My first DM job was a little 'bridge' piece in his world that I intended to get my feet wet until we "found the hidden portal to the New World."

The new world was my own homebrew, and the year was 1997. Since then we've spent most of our game time in my world. They like high magic and lots of monsters; I like big landscapes and lots of travel. Worked out good.

The latest installment is what I built around the Sherwood Map in Dragon mag a few years back. I plopped it down on the frontier of my Old Empire and we've made up the rest around the map and played there for almost 4 years.