Creating my first campaign

Starting up my first ever dnd (5thEd) campaign as DM, my only experience with dnd is ~10 sessions with some other friends half a year ago.
I am planning to just make this an "introductory" campaign, since all the people i am playing the game with are also first-timers, but at some point i want to continue on a grander campaign with the same players and characters. I was thinking something on a small scale for starters, like saving a village from a Ogre chieftain or something kinda "local"

I like to make cool settings, and started making a world map for the last campaign I played a part in, and it might be fun for the two groups to meet at some point.

In short: I am looking for a good (but short) story, preferably without that much closure, like an introduction to the TRULY GREAT adventures to come.

(Also, general DM tips, tricks and online resources greatly appreciated)

Other urls found in this thread:

ring-donkey.hyperdev.space/
morraey.deviantart.com/art/Map-Brushes-449750567
starraven.deviantart.com/art/Sketchy-Cartography-Brushes-198264358
calthyechild.deviantart.com/art/I-Want-More-Mountains-brushes-138817735
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Why not just a run a module?

What are those?
premade campaigns?

Yes.

Ok, thanks
will look into it

Also see

Lots of resources for you to download, including some premade modules and a beginners guide.

not the user you're replying to but yea essentially, they come in both single adventure and full campaign variety, as a matter of fact I believe the Tyrany of Dragons series is designed for pretty much what you're looking to do.
unrelated yet best DM advice I could ever give: don't let yourself become a one system kind of guy, good read up on Vampire the Masquerade, GURPS, even pathfinder all have great info for DMs and wildly different approaches to mechanics and adventure/encounter/campaign/setting construction that can give you both a baseline for what the medium is capable of as well as a lot of info on how to make the experience as fun for your players as possible (but I'm just an overenthusiastic faggot so try not to mind me if that sounds like too much effort)

Nono, it sounds fun, though it feels like something i might delve into at a later point in time.
I fear that i might start mixing up game mechanics and stuff, since i am pretty new, as i said.

Continuing work on map, if anyone is interested

...Did you steal that map from my current Endless Legend save?

what? :D
no, i have made it from scratch in ps

I know you like making the map, but at least I have never had an experience where it improves the game.

If nothing else, that map looks pretty damn neat.

I'm gonna have to disagree with you, I feel like at the very least the GM should have a campaign/local map to refer to, and as a player being able to whip out a printed map and plan our routes and travel plans have been great opportunities for player agency and roleplaying.

See, this guy gets it
I want to create a grand world map for me, the GM to use, while planning routes and stuff.
Later on in the campaign, i may give the players an opportunity to buy a map or something like that, which will show a smaller region, or maybe a whole country, with varying degrees of detail and colouring, depending on how much money they spent on it.
That way i can trick the players into buying a cheap map, which might fuck them over later or something >:D

example of a section of a map, keep in mind i have yet to add some towns and smaller cities and stuff.

I'd definitely not get too deep in, but I think the level of detail you've got right now is about perfect. One thing you may want to look into, if only from your end, is trying to use a hexmap.

This allows you to break up an area into discrete regions and gives you a way to roughly track time and progress without having to break out a ruler and worry about drawing your map to scale. If you set your hexes to a benchmarkable size then it's easy to calculate rough traveling times.

A lot of dungeon crawler systems provide benchmarks for long distance travel that you can scale your hexes too. For example, a lot of OSR systems consider a party traveling at walking speed in relatively open terrain to cover about 3 miles an hour, which means a 6 mile hex is covered in two hours.

Here's an example of how big a 6-mile hex would be superimposed on New York - you can do the same crude estimate on whatever city is near you to get a feel for how big a hex is.

The nice thing about hex maps is that you don't need to be super-duper precise about where players are on the map - you can say they're somewhere in Hex 22. This meshes well since if you're using premodern navigation you rarely have precise GPS locations anyway.

This makes things a little more abstract, but greatly simplifies book-keeping. It also allows you to spread out encounters with appropriate and consistent pacing - you roll on encounter tables whenever the party enters a new hex, for example, rather than whenever you feel like it. Alternately, you can key particular hexes to be special encounters, or roll on different encounter tables (for example, Hex 25 might be full of old barrows haunted by wights, which leads to a slightly different set of encounters).

Finally, you don't have to reveal the hex grid to your players either; but even using it behind the scenes helps keep the campaign organized.

Nice map OP. I'm a big fan of having that resource in a game. Fantasy cartography was what got me excited about fantasy novels originally as a kid, which naturally lead to RPGs.

I'm working on a GM aide, a web based tool that will generate a world for you and randomly populate it with points of interest. Clicking on a hex tile will eventually reveal a random event - maybe a roadside social encounter, a trap, a monster ambush and so on. The aim is to make a tool for groups in which no one can make that hefty time commitment to planning a session/campaign. I'd hope for it to be something a GM with no prep time, but some half decent improv skills, could use to get the group back together.

One of the big things I want to do with it is really capture that Tolkien-esque fantasy map style. Hand drawn, compass rose in the corner, squiggly lines for waves, concentric coastal lines, and scratchy mountains poking up off the parchment. Perhaps overly ambitiously, I want to pair that with a procedural generated hexagonal grid. Those two elements I already have in place (albeit in it's most basic form atm), but it's going to take a lot to get the hand drawn styling in, so I might hold off on that until the thing is feature complete first.

ring-donkey.hyperdev.space/

Nice suggestion, i guess it would work just by overlaying a hex grid on my map anyways

Here's the map if you want it, as far as i have developed it, that is.
can provide .psd also, if you are interested

Love your idea, i think it will cater to a huge audience. If you are worried about the art and stuff, you can use the same things i used in my map, packages of brushes from some deviantart-users:
morraey.deviantart.com/art/Map-Brushes-449750567
or this one, which is the one i used the most for the forests and stuff:
starraven.deviantart.com/art/Sketchy-Cartography-Brushes-198264358
This one is only mountains, but i like it vm.
calthyechild.deviantart.com/art/I-Want-More-Mountains-brushes-138817735

I know that most of these are terrain, and you are probably looking for buildings and that kind of stuff, but i think it follows your aesthetics pretty well, albeit a bit simplified

Thanks for the links. Those pictures in my last post are based on a tutorial one of those users made I think. I dug out a graphics tablet for the first time in years and gave myself hand cramp while I followed those guides, just so I'd have a couple of test assets at a decent size and transparent (pic related, anyone feel free to use if it's of any use to you).

I've only done a castle and a town so far, I intend to go back and create my own mountains, forests, lakes etc. although I'm not sure what my strategy will be for placing them on the hex grid. I think it would look kind of boring if each, say, mountain fit perfectly inside a hexagon.

I work with a guy who is much more knowledgeable about this sort of graphics programming than me, and he gave me an idea for how to approach creating noisy coast lines (at least as far as a single edge goes). I want to create something that straddles the line between a regular grid, and the messiness of hand drawn, so it needs to be perturbed and jagged, while still being recognisably a hexagonal. Similar to how Civ 5 does it, but in 2D. Rather than the approach you mention where you take a more organic map and apply the grid as an afterthought. That might be a viable solution, and I may go back to that, but I figure regular patterns are easier to develop with, so I might as well build up from regular and apply irregularities.

Also when it comes time to populate the random encounters, I might try and enlist some help from elegan/tg/entlemen. I'm developing it all open-source, so if I can produce the graphical assets (as opposed to just ripping those brushes and assets you linked) and random snippets of text myself or with the aid of the community under an appropriate license, then it can be a properly free and open system that anyone can modify to suit their needs.

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