Hello friends first time DM here who foolhardily decided to jump into world building rather than running a cookie cutter adventure.
I’m hoping some battle tested dungeon masters could throw me a couple pointers on how you introduce players to your worlds to help flesh out my pages of notes 😅
“hey, I want to run a game about {theme, conflict} in {setting} using {rules system}. You want in?”
When you have enough interested players, do a “session 0”. Talk about what kind of game you’re aiming for (serious? Comedy? Deadly? Power fantasy?). Set lines and veils. You’re going to have a bad time if you’re aiming for tactical combat in a grim world, but two of your players want Loony Toons.
I highly recommend players make character concepts together. You should probably play “you all meet in a tavern” once or twice because that’s kind of a whole Thing, but that brings in a bunch of problems.
Read how Fate does it: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . Maybe just read the whole section on starting a game there. A common property of good DMs is reading other sources and stealing from them.
Absolutely do not get super committed to any particular story beat. Do not expect the players to get captured, or for them to agree to a sea voyage. If you want the game to be about something like that, start there. Tell the players. You can absolutely pitch a game based on “you were all overcome by an orc raising party. You’ll start as prisoners planning an escape”. Do not play out them losing the fight.
Your players are probably not going to pay a lot of attention to your setting. This is doubly true if you unilaterally made it up. If you give players input into the setting details (see again how fate does it), they’ll be more invested and remember more. (Though some players hate having narrative agency, so watch out for that)
This is the way
Interpretative dance.
Seriously though, think cinematically. Find a framing device for the adventure (a legend) and a mcguffin (the item that drives the story forward.) The first few times you try it, you may cringe but it’s a skill that gets better over time. Have fun with it.
I started DMing in my own custom world to begin with. Its kind of freeing because you can just make EVERYTHING up and not have to worry about existing lore or cannon. I few things I would suggest is do a session 0 where you talk about your campaign and place the characters into the world. You can finalize building characters in the day and talk about the world that you are all jumping into.
Before your sessions 0 communicate out what you inspiration might be including specific references to media if applicable. For my first campaign it was “generic forgetten realms / dnd lore with more planar holes”. Some other campaign pitches I have done are “cowboys and aliens”, “U.S revolutionary war as seen by Hamilton in Dnd”, “The Seige” and “Young world with big monsters”. I am currently playing in a dnd campaign that was pitch as “animals as characters in a is redwall meets, Princess Mononoke meeting breathe of the wild campaign”.
So keep it simple, give specific references to inspiration or theme if appliciable.
For the first session have a single hook and a single winnable combat ready. That is all you really need.
Well I’m currently running a Beam Saber campaign, so I told them “This game is about giant robots with giant laser swords” and I showed them this picture:
And that was really it. Didn’t need to do any more pitching. Everyone pretty much got the concept. So I recommend having a very strong idea of what your game is about. What system are you running?
This is the way. Keep it simple and clear
With good intentions to immediatly get derailed.
First rule of DMing, your players will fuck up your carefully planned out story.
No plan survives contact with the
enemiesplayers.
This actually touches on a really important point. Make sure you and your players are on the same page about the kind of game you’re looking you run. Are they buying into an epic, cohesive campaign over a year or more? Or are they looking for a monster of the week build a story purely on the fly? It’s way easier if you establish this early on… then it’s up to them to bite on the plot hooks you throw them which they almost certainly will. They might throw you a curve ball and send you down different roads than you were planning, but you’ll still get to your destination.
In my experience it’s just when there’s a disconnect there that it becomes a problem.
For my longest running campaign I told my players that the world will zoom in with details when you interact with it. So I started with a 5 or so big hooks and they looked at a few of them. Others they ignored. I did ask them what few ideas they were interested in doing and built it from that.
One of their ideas was to have one others players father to get arrested. That ended up being a huge plot point that I never considered until they mentioned it. Player driven campaigns are the way to go
They’re just different. Sometimes you want to play Lord of the Rings, with a reasonably clean beginning, middle, and end. There’ll be side quests and diversions, but a pretty clean narrative, as if running a published campaign. Other times you want something more open ended where they can chase down random rabbit holes and see where they go. I genuinely like both, or mixing the two, but everyone needs to be on the same page what the goal as players is or someone is gonna get upset.
I mean, even cohesive epics will usually have player driven deviation, and that’s cool, not implying it’s a pure one or the other… but there’s nothing wrong with a DM wanting to run a “tighter” campaign as long as players are buying into it and are still forging the path there (they’re going their own way to Mordor, but they’re still going there, in other words).
I really do like both. Sometimes I want Minecraft where I make my own story, other times I want to play out a choose your own adventure… we’re going to get to the same destination, but how we get there and what the ending will be is a big question mark.
I definitely agree that as a DM, whether epic or open ended, the paths you haven’t thought of that your players throw you is easily the most interesting part on that side of the screen.
For sure. There is fun in both open ended and tight story structure. Player driven is way to get player input to both and make sure player choices matter. I agree with being on the same page
“foolhardy”, not “fool hearted” smh
Anyway - different DMs have different styles. If your group is into extensive backstories, your startup session can incorporate that. Do the characters know each other because they’re all citizens of the starting town? or did they each respond to a town bulletin-board recruitment flyer and the recruiting event is their first meeting?
The classic Basic D&D module “Keep on the Borderlands” has characters arriving at the titular Keep because they’re the best and brightest of their home villages, sent to do a tour of duty in service to the Kingdom.
The classic AD&D module series “Scourge of the Slavelords” opens with characters breaking free of captivity in a slaver camp. Maybe they knew each other before being kidnapped, maybe not, it’s not really important to how the campaign plays out either way.
I dunno but the first thing I do as a player is cast a spell so everyone is naked. That dungeon air really soothes.
throw some water on the rocks. turn it into a sauna.
Reading your comment from a sauna rn. Life is good.
Imagine the bard convincing the cleric to use create water inside the magma chamber of hell, turning it into a sauna and then trying to seduce the BBEG, only for the paladin to horn in and get laid.
Funtimes.
Well, I do other stuff; like I’m riding my bike in the park, and this policewoman says “Oi! You can’t ride your bike on the grass!” and I go “Oh no?” And her uniform falls off, and she goes “Ahh!” and she’s trying to cover up, but I’ve seen everything anyway. And I get on my bike and I ride off. On the grass.
Patrick Stewart
In a tavern is a classic for a reason; it’s simple, it usually makes sense, and we can just get to playing quickly.
I also like using something like boarding a ship all players are on for their own reasons. Shipwreck is a great way to throw players into a very alien or remote region very quickly with very little setup.
My favorite was a Sigil-based setting that had all players walking through their own versions in their own worlds of a magic door leading to a Sigil office hiring adventurers, pretty shamelessly stolen from Howl’s Moving Castle as inspiration.
Which is the final thing. Steal, steal, steal. Anything you’ve seen that you thought was cool, steal it. I actually did so hoping people would get references at first, but honestly, I’ve stolen from stuff as vanilla as Skyrim quests and rarely if ever do people put it together while playing anyway.
What’s your entry point ? What is your world ? Give us a little more to think about it
It depends on the campaign.
For star Wars ffg I made a scrolling text like the movies with some online tool.
For adventure time I sang a song with all the characters’ names in it akin to the original adventure time intro.
For Eldritch Automata I made giant robots out of the souls of every player’s mother.
One of these things is not like the others…
I liked how the DM started things off on one campaign I played in
We agreed that we’d be an already established party so we could pretty much jump right into things and not have to do a whole “I’m putting together a team” thing the first session.
We had our characters mostly ready beforehand and gave the DM a brief overview of them. It was loosely set in the forgotten realms, so we were already pretty familiar with the setting, but if it was a home brewed setting all we probably would have really needed was a brief primer of the major factions and locations. Most of us weren’t tied to any major factions, or our ties were pretty loose.
For our session zero, he basically had us figure out how we knew the characters to the left and right of us while he pulled each of us off one by one to run through a quick little backstory roleplay to give us a couple personal plot hooks we could latch onto
For example, I was playing a fighter with a soldier background, I remember the guy next to me was playing a barbarian, so we decided that sometime in the past his tribe had tried to invade my city, hijinks ensued, and we had ended up stranded somewhere together and bonded, missed out on most of that war, and became friends.
And when the DM pulled me back, we ran a quick scenario from another conflict I’d been involved in against cultists of some kind where I’d been captured during the final battle, the enemy had attempted to turn me into some sort of living statue servant, but the spell was interrupted, leaving me with a stone fist. I was rescued, managed to be present when the big bad was defeated, and was counted as sort of a minor hero of that war.
Unfortunately that stone fist kind of ruined my plans of retiring quietly to be a farmer or something (hard to do farm tasks one-handed) so I turned to being an adventurer to make ends meet. Recruited my old barbarian buddy who brought another of his friends on-board etc.
And once we all had our backgrounds and how we know each other sorted out, we hopped into things.
I ended up being kind of a central part of what brought us into town at the start of the campaign- my old commanding officer was getting a promotion and had sent me an invite to the ceremony. Of course it didn’t go off without a hitch and the ceremony was interrupted by an assassination attempt, and evidence pointed to it being tied to the cult we thought was defeated in that previous conflict, but there were some other things dropped that tied into some of the other players’ backstories as well, and off we went.
I think that did a very good job of making us feel like we were part of the world and not just some murder hobos dropped into it to run rampant. We all had history with each other and in the setting, and it wasn’t just words on paper that no one else was really going to read, it gave us a chance to actually act out a bit of that backstory and sort of collaboratively figured out our place in the world before the campaign started.
It’s helpful to collaborate the setting and world-building with the players. Not only does this allow them to create characters who are native to the setting, it also gives them agency and stakes in the story.
This will this save you time and effort, and make you a better DM.
“We join our heroes (on the road/in a tavern/in a dungeon) well on their way to (city name/getting drunk/formulating a plan for escape)” or whatever, plus a little background flavor text.
Maybe a couple sentences before if you need to set the tone for the world. Post apocalyptic high magic seafaring island nation or whatever, and now (hook for main quest).
It’s really not a big deal, just give them a taste and fill the the rest as you go. They’re all going to go somewhere you didn’t prep in fifteen minutes anyway.
In a tavern. Alcohol helps with breaking the ice.
“It was a dark and stormy night when all through the abbey not a creature was stirring, not even a wight. The axes were hung in the armory with care, in hopes that some hapless enemy soon would be there.”
Or something along those lines.
Actually, on the 14th of this month, I am starting a homebrew adventure for my Friday group.
How am I starting the adventure?
With a TPK of course.
