al e. said: If you wait to start until you are experienced, you will never start. Worst case scenario, you will mess stuff up, best case scenario, you will mess stuff up and learn from your mistakes... This person is correct. I know this is about to be closed, but I do have some quick advice. What I would do is just jump right into it. A lot of people learn best from experience. The phases that I go through with DMing are like this: Concept phase : I don't start any campaign without having an idea of what I want it to be first. I know that not everything will go the way I planned, but a mental blueprint is always smart. Maybe you want a campaign where it's set in the future and there's this alien race that's threatening Earth and people have to stop them. What is the enemy like? What's its purpose? How is it going to achieve it? What should the players run into along the way? Make sure you have the setting and background thought up. You don't want to go halfway through where everyone is using rifles and pistols, and then swap it to where firearms no longer exist and its swords. Consistency is key. Visualization phase : I like to take this one step at a time since it's very easy to hop all over the place and then fizz out. But start with the beginning of the campaign. For the sake of consistency, i'll start with the idea I had from the last bullet point...aliens are attacking earth. Now it wouldn't make sense for a bunch of level 1 adventurers to jump the final boss and call it a day (or maybe it does make sense, and the boss beats them, but they get teleported to safety and now having a driving goal to beat that boss), so maybe you introduce them slowly. Maybe a few thugs from the enemy world threaten a bar they're hanging out at. The thugs are beaten in a barroom brawl and with his dying breath, the last thug says that 'Lloyd Mandell will get them' and now they have to find his hideout. Make the story like a rolling stone. After finding his hideout, they find out that he has a bomb set up over the city to destroy it. Or maybe they find out he's just a thug like the ones in the bar and the real puppet master is some big shot in space. Think about it like this: If this was a story you wanted to read, what would it have in it. Make Maps : This one is a little difficult, but fortunately, it never hurts in the beginning to start simple. Throw up 4 rooms (big squares/ rectangles), put some doo dads in them like chairs, crates, barrels, whatever. Connect them with hallways. Put enemies in the rooms. Put traps in the hallways. Maybe make the last room the most important with a boss fight or some flavor talking. Make, what I call, a base map. This is where people don't feel like they're about to be attacked all the time. This could be a bar. It could be a hideout camp in deep space. It could be someone's house. Players need somewhere to go to recuperate and rebuild, and you need a place where you can tell a story without having to make it into a fight. Making maps, even if you scrap the idea, is always good since it gives you an idea of what you might want to do, and you can expand upon them or change them, or even push them further back. Maybe you want to lengthen your campaign, so instead of them finding Lloyd Mandell, you have a shady business man who knows where Lloyd is, but won't tell the adventurers until they help him by stealing a precious diamond. Bam, you just made another map/chapter without rushing to the end boss of the chapter you're on. Make sure you don't lengthen it too much or the story will feel like a grind. Use your own personal bias on this...when would YOU, as the player, feel comfortable moving forwards. My personal creed is to stay 2 'chapters' ahead of my players. A chapter, to me, is a gaming session. So for this one, the bar and the bar fight would be a good chapter to start with. You use the same map for both, it's simple, it's easy to imagine and do. Then you want to make the second map, so maybe the alleyway where you meet the shady business man, and the diamond store where they steal the diamond. The alley is super easy and you don't have to edit it much, so it shouldn't be a big deal. Use the formula that I listed above to make the diamond store (4 rooms, traps, enemies, blah blah blah). Information Phase : I like to list this after the other phases since Pathfinder/D&D/Whatever medium you use are normally REALLY good at helping fit YOUR game and not the other way around. Once you have an idea of what you want the story to be and the enemies, do a search in the bestiary. Look at loot that makes sense to the story (You're not going to put the ultimate weapon in the first dungeon). This will help solidify the conception and visualization. Launch the Campaign : You've got your idea. You've got your maps. You've got your safe zone. Now just to find people to populate it. Make a listing on Looking For Group with what you have planned, game times, and a brief synopsis of the story (without spoiling too much). Trust me. People will sign up. Tell your story : As long as you've done the previous stuff, it all falls together from here. Remember to stay two chapters ahead of your players (so make one chapter every week, basically), and continue to conceptualize and visualize. Your story is ever evolving, and it's up to you to make it a reality.
