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I'm putting together a campaign ready for when we're allowed to go out again, and I'm quite a long way into it. I'm writing it in such a way that the players aren't railroaded, and I'm bvasically trying to come up with plots for the various places on the map which interlink in some way, so as the players play more of my quests, they will find more things which link together.

I'm wondering, how far ahead do people normally plan when they are making their own world to explore? do you tend to write entire mission and plots, or just the locations and then make up the next one in time for next session?

I avoid writing "plots", players will not follow a plot, because the game is about letting them and their characters be in control of what they do.

Instead, I focus on the making situations to put them in and things that they can deal with "somehow". How exactly is up to them, I just provide most of the tools the needed.
Makes it easier to be flexible when players "think outside the box".

For example, my starter adventure begins with the players being ambushed. There is a tavern as the base and several goblin camps with ways to find them (including tracks or asking the nps's in the tavern).
The goblin camps have something useful (like better weapons) and clues for finding the main camp, which is a challenge and a puzzle. I put a troll there, which the players cannot beat in a straight fight at their level.
I then have things they can do to gain allies (like free the centaur prisoners) and bring fire to bear on the troll (like a big campfire in the camp).

Be sure to have a layer of extra places though, like a town if they decide to press on past the tavern.

In addition, I also have a bunch of "side quests" to fill time if we get through things too quickly or players get off track.
These are ideally stand alone "mini-adventures" that can be dropped in front of players when need be. I usually plan the contents for a few CR levels so that they stay useful.
For example: five room dungeons (like a bandit camp or a goblin cave) or an npc needing help that requires something done somewhere (locations, remember).
A few one scene encounters are useful for this as well.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
For a bigger campaign or if I have long to plan, I increase the scale.

That goblin adventure leads into an orc invasion. That's what the goblins are stealing supplies for.
I have an orc army and raiding parties. What do they do if the players ignore them?
A few towns and villages, with defence encounters.
Orc camps to raid. Camps of the kingdom they're in to visit.

I only write a plot in so much as "These people have a plan they want to execute on.

All of my prep work is done in a such a way that it makes doing things on the fly fast and easy. NPCs and enemies are put onto note cards that I can pull out quickly to get some stats to handle an encounter.

I will record some random names for NPCs and a buildings and when the players go looking for 1 or the other I check them off the list and record who or what they are now. Like... here are 10 good names for inns/workshops. and 20 NPC names male/female. Players want to find a blacksmith? Well this town has one called the Black Buckler and it's run by Raorhan. Here is my note card for a Peddler. Now I have stats for him.

I do draw out maps. Name major cities. Come up with the general idea of what each nation is about. Name rulers etc etc... Thats more setting information then campaign plots though.

So the last campaign I ran involved a nation using a high level secretive sect to research into using golem making to enhance people to make super soldiers. Basically grafting golem bits to people. The downside of it was that the more golem they get on them the more it drove people crazy.

Anyway, the first session was the players investigating some people going missing from a small outlier town on the edge of a kingdom that had its resources tied up in a cold war/border skirmish.

They find goblins stealing people, bugbears gaurding the hollow, and a hobgoblin (really a doppleganger sorcerer) who is dissecting the stolen people to study their musculature and such and then his work shop was full of clay in various stages of building the various parts of a person up layer by layer. bone, sinew, muscle, etc etc...

For that adventure I made a goblin card, a bugbear card, a doppleganger card, I drew out the goblins lair for my own reference or rooms, I knew where the town was, what forest was by it and the surrounding landscape. I made a list of 8 people who had gone missing recently and their familys/other villagers who might know something. How the players get pointed towards the goblins was up to what questions they asked and what they wanted to look into. The players filled in the rest of the blanks. That adventure with NPC chats and other stuff lasted for 2 sessions. By then the players had decided to take a boat to another place. Check off a name for a ship and a name for a captain and make some cards for potential sea encounters and they are off to the next city.

coo, it sounds like I'm going in the right direction - I am writing the "plots" of what is happening in the world for the players to have to react to. I've not made any plans which involve the players doing something specific, but I will have plots & missions to drop on them if they go to specific places.

I need to start making some flashcards, and I like the idea of generic NPC names and building names to drop in as and when the players are looking for them, I'll loot that idea!

Don't worry so much about players going to specific places.

Consider this. If you go buy a DnD adventure they will give you a map of a whole town. They will make layouts of all the buildings. They will tell you what loot is in that building. They will tell you what NPCs are where and what those NPCs can tell the player.

And then the player might not go into any of those buildings and interact with any of those people which means all that work was done for nothing.

Maximize the usefulness of your time.

Instead, vaguely come up with the town. Create a few details that make this town stand out as unique. The structure or architecture. It's a fishing village. It's _____ whatever. It's got a big unique temple. Whatever gets the place to stick into the players mind as "Oh that town".

Then preroll some small random loots or just make your own. Put them on note cards again.

If the story requires that the players meet a certain NPC or you think a certain NPC would fit well at x, then the next time the players walk into a building they meet that NPC. Don't leave it up to the players to make decisions they have no agency over because they have no information. THEY won't know that entering ANY building was always going to be the same building. That the NPC you wanted them to bump into was always going to be on his way out the same door they were opening. To them it looks like good fortune. To you it was an efficient use of your prep time by only prepping things you were actually going to use.

If the players find some loot, grab the note card most appropriate or just give them some coins. Whatever. again, to the players this looks like you meticulously planned out the world because you immediately knew what was in that building. The reality is you are making it all up as you go with a few quick reference tools. The important thing isn't that you made a living breathing world. It's that you give the players the ILLUSION of a living breathing world.

The only reason to make an actual map of the entire town and plan out every building is if you are handing the players a physical map. Which is why I don't do that. I stick to theater of the mind because it lets me prepare things efficiently. Don't waste your time planning things that might not be used. Random loot cards can be used forever in any situation. Monster and NPC cards can be used forever in all kinds of situations. List of names are GOING to be used. Designing a side quest that requires the PCs to go down a specific ally at a certain time? feth that.

On a good day about 2 hours before the session starts. On most days right after the players say something.

Also worth noting: Nothing in the world stops you from presenting 4 different places to go, and then the plot event you planned happens at any of those places. I do this all the time. Makes the world feel way more fleshed out, but still the same amount of work XD

Monkeysloth and the_scotsman are pretty much spot on for me! I like to obviously have an end goal in mind and then all of the subplots and discoveries to get them there are fleshed out with multiple ways for them to achieve.

They need to find a crucial letter in a desk drawer? Well, it could be found when you want at any time in any spot they happen to be - not necessarily drive them to one particular room at all costs, since that is where the plot critical letter is stashed. If where it is found is plot crucial, then planting the seeds to get them there is what moves everything forward. All of this takes planning, but not every step of every detail needs to be done up front - let plot points be designed to happen as you see fit.

There is nothing worse than playing someone's well planned campaign only to discover you are going from one random encounter to another with nothing really advancing the plot - if there is even a plot to begin with... You have to advance your main plot at a fairly regular level or players get very bored.

Thanks all for your inputs on this, it's making me feel a lot more confident about finally having a go at this.

The plots and such I've got planned are all fairly easily dropped into the adventurers paths, and as you have all said, I've not planned for specific things to happen in specific rooms, I can have them happen to be exactly where the adventurers go!

I have some "side quest" things to promote exploring for adventurers, which will just be smallish encounters which have general locations on the map (in the mountains, on the salt plains, etc) so the adventurers can stumble across them "randomly"

I honestly do not plan.... all I do is set a plot hook and opening scene and see where things develop.

I always ask myself, "what would make this more interesting?" Then I ask, "Do I want to make this harder, easier, or is it about right?" Then, i apply the things that would make it more interesting as I go.

Example:
Opening Scene- You are walking across the campus, when you see a foot and a women's high heeled shoe sticking out from under the brush along the path.

Now it is up to the character's what they want to do? Investigate the situation? Call the police? Ignore it? Wait in ambush and see who comes by?

Now, no matter what they do, i think "What will make this more interesting?" If they go investigate, a witness will may come by and see them hovering over the body and calls the police, or they find that the body is missing its head, or the person is just a homeless bum sleeping it off BUT they start mumbling crazy talk about your father's exploits during the War.

You see how the story naturally builds from there until you get to a point where you resolve it.

This gives you full control on how hard to ramp and when to ease off. My sessions almost always end exactly on time and when they have played out.....


Full Confession Time:
I don't even bother Stat-ing up monsters and the like. They last precisely as long as they need to and do exactly what they need to do to drive the energy at the table. I roll dice and never truly look at the result. If it is interesting or adds to the game, it happens. Dice roll results limiting their actions is for players, not the story teller per se. To me it doesn't matter if it is a rules light or a crunchy game. I have used this method just fine with DND, Shadowrun, Homebrews, D6 Star Wars, Palladium Robotech, Legend of the 5 Rings, Dark Heresy, and so many more games.

This also works surprisingly well for campaigns, because as you learn the characters/players the world naturally evolves to fit them too. The hardest part is jotting down a few notes as you go so you remember your key NPCs and Locations for next time in the campaign.

I look at running RPG’s as an Author telling a story, with no control of the characters.

So I tend to block out plot points, like the skeleton of a story. I’ll then drape some details over it, plan out key characters and events, and leave much of the small details to improv... which I’m good at.

The plot points don’t *need* to be physically set at a point in the world. A dungeon encounter might instead happen in an old mansion. The weird enchantress might move from a stall in the market, to a hovel in the woods. I’ll let the characters wander until a suitable intro to the next adventure presents itself.

I’ve run a Resident Evil style adventure, where the location was meticulously mapped, because the adventure was discovering what happened and then dealing with it. The interesting part was that each player was from a different world-faction, and had different motives and desires from the adventure. In that case, I had a very fixed “world” to adventure in, with lots of prep.

Other times, I’ve run very open world campaigns where I had a few ideas for plots / encounters, and where ever the PC’s went they found one of those adventures waiting. The nice part about that is that you can always level up encounters on the fly. Barbarians raiding the villages are mostly orcs and goblins at low level, and start recruiting ogres and trolls and giants and wyverns as the PC’s level up. The thieves guild becomes ever more deadly, engaging in ever more organized crime until political assassinations are taking place.

This lets threats organically become all the more dangerous, while giving the PC’s a suitable challenge and reward feels for overcoming them... and providing a sense of urgency to the adventures too. Their actions are important because without them these problems are growing out of control.

Players can’t follow a script, because they don’t have it. So as the DM, you just need to drop hints and ideas for the players to explore. Just like characters in a story, your players choose to do things that make sense. Sometimes, it’s as basic as asking, “Do you want to go to the inn, or go to the town hall?” Both locations have quest givers... but your PC’s are in control of where they want to go.

If you can get your hands on it I recommend picking up the King in Yellow RPG. It's

1) a good game. Kind of technically 4 different games with a cohesive central plot threaded through them.

2) It has some of the best layouts for an adventure I have ever seen from a company. Really simple flow charts of "scenes" with bullet points for things that could happen, tips for giving the players seeds to nudge them in a direction, and tips for what to do when they do something different.

Seriously, I won't ever run a mystery without giving one of their adventures a read through ever again to help map my own plots. I sometimes give a read just to refresh myself and to prevent me from wasting my time doing things in dumb ways like I used to.

 Easy E wrote:



Full Confession Time:
I don't even bother Stat-ing up monsters and the like. They last precisely as long as they need to and do exactly what they need to do to drive the energy at the table. I roll dice and never truly look at the result. If it is interesting or adds to the game, it happens. Dice roll results limiting their actions is for players, not the story teller per se. To me it doesn't matter if it is a rules light or a crunchy game. I have used this method just fine with DND, Shadowrun, Homebrews, D6 Star Wars, Palladium Robotech, Legend of the 5 Rings, Dark Heresy, and so many more games.

This also works surprisingly well for campaigns, because as you learn the characters/players the world naturally evolves to fit them too. The hardest part is jotting down a few notes as you go so you remember your key NPCs and Locations for next time in the campaign.

I'm not quite this bad, but when I'm running a rules-heavy campaign I do absolutely customize the armor, hit points and damage of the creatures to make sure everybody gets to do their cool stuff and the fight ends in a reasonable time frame. If it seems like the baddies are going to get blown away or I didn't realize how some particular rule actually works (accidentally killed a characer with a basilisk once, didn't realize petrified meant dead whoopsdonttellanyone) I'll just change it and not tell anyone.

The only RPG I GM these days is 13th Age, which works best when it's about 90% cooperative improv. So I don't really plan anything ahead. I do have ideas about NPCs and scenes that I think would be interesting to include, but I've found that anything more than brief bullet-points jotted down on an index card just gets in the way of the improv. The vast majority of my notes are written during a session as an aide memoire for the next session.

It depends on the game and the players.

A traditional dungeon crawl doesn't require as much prep (especially if you're running it from a book) though it does pay to read ahead and think about how your players will try to subvert the set up. I've been on both sides of the DM screen plenty of times when the party decides to try talking it out, or taking a different route, or using some ability to bypass the next encounter.

On the other hand games like Shadowrun, or the Star Wars RPG can be very open ended. The players really can just drive/fly to somewhere else and IMO it's much more important to be prepared.

In the latter case have some generic layouts that would be common to the setting (office, lab, cantina, etc) that you can just drop in and make sure you have memorable NPCs. Players will remember and engage with NPCs and really drive their own story if you do it right.

Hmm, in all honesty, I do quite a bit of prep, and my overarching plot is pretty linear, even in the Rogue Trader campaign I'm running right now, but my players don't seem to mind too much. They are going to find a legendary sub-sector sized society supposedly hidden somewhere inside the Halo Stars and have the star map which will allow them to find a special type of Navigator needed to find it (in all honesty the plot hasn't even properly begun yet, I've been setting the "scene" so to speak establishing their allies and enemies and cementing their characters and character motivations beforehand, this has been going on over a year, now they're finally on the plot itself)

Although, the last couple of sessions the PCs have gone their own way, having just visited an Ork they encountered earlier Warboss Dakkdreff who they allied with before and now the Rogue Trader is going back to his homeworld to meet with his wife who's the planetary governor.

But what I keep in mind it logic and cause and effect. They have made enemies of the Tyrantine Cabal who, of course, going to have agents of the Shadow Agents infiltrate his homeworld and set up a trap in case he goes there. I wasn't going to do that at first because their enemies have set traps for them a few times before, so it's getting a bit predictable. Still, due to the logic, it has to happen (although, their Inquisitor ally and they will likely predict it, so will make them roll to see if they do) and I will have to adapt.

One of the biggest things I try to keep in mind is what's going on in the world around them, not in insane detail, but enough.

I also agree with the incredible importance of going into detail into important NPCs. The PC's earlier mentioned allied Inquisitor named Azakir Halgriv; he's inspired some great RPing one of the best in the whole campaign is one of the PCs giving him relationship advice as he keeps frigging up in his relationship with the woman who's his interrogator/lover.

Also, depending on the game/setting. I try to utilise the PCs backstories (if they have backstories, of course) Into the game's story. Right now one of the PC's father has been revealed as a member of the Amaranthine Syndicate, and he's now one of the main villains as well (The brother of a former PC is perhaps the main villain too) It's really great when the PCs get their own "arcs".

But most of all, I follow my instincts as a 'storyteller' and prep session by session but it's great that usually I over prep so I always have a bit for the next session.

I tend to prep a starting location and one big adventure location (dungeon in traditional terms) and then prep whatever I need so that the players could travel 2 sessions in a straight line in any direction and not encounter anything I need to improv. This tends to mean that I always have at least a session to prep anything if they start moving beyond the detailed zone.

I think the key to prepping is being prepared to be flexible. Plan out the NPCs and encounters you'll need for the session, but be ready to make changes on the fly cause you never know exactly what the party will do.

Don't get to wrapped up in things happening a certain way. The core here is contextualizing things to fit the moment. The party is looking for some child lost in the wood? Prep a combat or two, maybe a few maps. Then be ready for things to go off the rails and recontextualize your prep materials to fit what the party actually does. Maybe they try to stealth past the baddies rather than fight them. Check your map and mark out some terrain they can use for cover and arrange the enemies in a formation that is searching. If they try to negotiate, consider quickly what the enemies might want in exchange for a quick passage.

Good DMing imo is all about being ready to meet the party's needs and provide it with direction so the adventure can continue forward. Approach things from a player first perspective. Too many DMs I think get caught up on the story they want to tell and forget that TTRPGs are collaborative exercises, not movie sets. There's still room to tell a grand story, but expectations of session-to-session events need to be framed to fit the medium which isn't a page on a book.

That is part of the reason I can never understand someone making a DM playlist that isn't just background noise. When a DM makes a list for a particular set of circumstances and encounters well... the players are going to mess that up. And then what do you do?

I have completely moved away from prepping "plot" at all in my games, but I also don't really feel the need to approach things too much from what my players want. I make a world with a bunch of stuff in it, they choose what they want to interact with and how they interact with it, and if absolutely nothing I am putting in front of them appeals, then we can end the campaign. I also do not really feel the need to incorporate backstory and all that into my games. The story is what we do at the table together, not interested in writing 5 different fanfics for five different OCs and trying to tie it all together. Just not my wheelhouse any more, been there done that, got the burnout.

Also, now I think about it. I've prepped way ahead like a year or a bit less having rolled up the 3 out of 5 of the Star systems they're going to travel through to get the Navigator they need ages through them. The star system builder in Rogue Trader is fun but can become one hell of a rabbit hole to go down. Also, I didn't plan on the campaign being this long before the main 'plot' began, but I'm glad it has as now the PCs have more motivation to go there than 'ooooh unknown place' but also to stop their enemy factions from getting there 1st (The Amaranthine Syndicate, The Pilgrims of Hayte, The Tyrantine Cabal and another one led by a Rogue Trader who was the brother of a PC in my last Dark Heresy campaign) Each enemy having an 'arc' to show what they are, who their leaders are, their motivations etc and to make the PCs hate/fear them (the PCs were making a terrible propaganda film about how horrible the Slaugth and the Amaranthine Syndicate are, which was a ton of fun to RP)

To establish the connection between where they're going with the Haarlock Legacy, and the Tyrant Star (which they've seen the aftermath of first hand) and the implication their enemies wishing to gain the ability to control the Tyant Star.

I often don't plan very far ahead at all. Over the years I've found this to be an exercise in futility. Players tend to trash your best laid plans. I recall a Boot Hill campaign I was running one time where a tribe of natives were on the warpath, being led by an army officer who was possessed by a spirit. Upon learning of the plot, the players left town and headed for California...

Every time I plan ahead it all tends to fall apart as it makes contact with my players. I tend to write based on action beats more then a planned story. I have a beginning and I have an ending I want the players to get too, but HOW they get there I generally leave up to them.

My last big campaign was suppose to maybe be a 6 month thing with 3 main parts. It ended up taking a year and a half as the shear number of side quests that came about due to my players running around doing stuff.

The best example of this is the first part of my campaign my PC's finished. They failed didn't investigate the clues I laid out and went back to town. On the way the Druid asked a Field Mouse if there was anything around there to investigate. This led them to finding an old dwarf ruin and..well...that led to a whole side quest on its own. But while this was happening the ritual the PC's were suppose to stop completed because they took a detour leading too all hell breaking loose.

It was a crazy campaign but it ended up getting to the ending I intended, just not the path I had planned.

I like to have an overarching theme that I choose for a campaign and from there I put in as many details as I can when I can. I usually plan a session a day or two in advance, nothing major, just little hooks and ideas that I narrate to the players and let them pick and choose. I usually give them quests and then throw in side quests and encounters to see how they deal with it. Giving them multiple options gives them a lot to go on but also provides me with some structure, making my job a bit easier.

The homebrew I'm currently running is essentially dark fantasy Saxon England but with an entire world just over the mountains that I can easily dip into to give myself more flavour as and when. A necromancer is their main quest giver but also set up to be their big bad further down the line. They've turned up at the first town and finding out what the local feeling is as well as dealing with some minor enemies as they level.

I do the same as many others: I don’t plan a huge arc, I plan it encounter by encounter, usually as part of an overarching story, but I move those parts into the way of the PCs, so that they can’t easily just sidestep major events. Though I have had PCs bypass parts of a set encounter, for example, by escaping an island rather than fully exploring it.

That being said, I have some overarching major campaign events/plots running, and what the PCs do may or may not interfere with or help those events occur, tied into PC backgrounds.

I’m trying to run it as a Dark Ages British Isles type campaign using the Moonshaes in the Forgotten Realms (5e), set some 400-500 years earlier than current FR time, but with the 5e rules, everyone has ended up a spellcaster of some stripe, or took feats to cast spells, etc. So it went from low/mid magic pseudo historical to pretty typical DnD, and I’m working in game to see how that plays out, and making adjustments as it goes.

@Olthannon, I’d be curious what system you’re using, and how you’ve designed the Saxon England setting.

Create an outline of the world, or at least the region the PCs will be in, and a few NPCs. Plan an adventure, maybe two, and a few sides. Add to this as play advances. After all what happens at the table creates the foundation for what comes next. It's a game, not a play, or movie, or novel. DM flexibility is paramount. If you can get a hold of a 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master Guide, it has a goodly amount of advice. Ah, it's available as a PDF. (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17004/Dungeon-Masters-Guide-1e) An interesting bit of history if nothing else.

 Gridge wrote:
I often don't plan very far ahead at all. Over the years I've found this to be an exercise in futility. Players tend to trash your best laid plans. I recall a Boot Hill campaign I was running one time where a tribe of natives were on the warpath, being led by an army officer who was possessed by a spirit. Upon learning of the plot, the players left town and headed for California...

Considering how lethal Boot Hill is, a wise move.

 Cruentus wrote:

@Olthannon, I’d be curious what system you’re using, and how you’ve designed the Saxon England setting.

Well it's fairly straightforward, just using basic 5e but I merrily change up the rules a bit to fit the setting. The current ruler has only held the throne for a couple of years, the kingdom's army is defeated and essentially non existent. The varied cities rulers rely on their own guards or mercenaries. Things like books are difficult to come across, magic is more occasional. In my setting the land was a lot different with magic being more abundant, hideous magic war destroyed a lot of the previous civilisations. Now new powers are starting to rise. History is mainly a dark and unknown time, several of the players are involved with organisations that conserve and uncover historic objects and books to relearn lost arts. Simply knowing a language isn't enough to know all the older inscriptions in various tombs. The characters started in the borderlands where a war between two factions occurred, lots of death and necromancy at work. Currently a strong horror theme, but over to the east over the mountains a land of varied city-states and plenty of scope for something new. It's not really low tech, considering the artistry of both the Briton tribes and Saxon migrants, the carvings, the metalworking, the books, the religions are what bring it to life.

A little bit OT but hope that helps

New DM, running for a bunch of new players here. I plan a specific adventure ahead of time, since im running them a pretty sandboxy campaign where they're working for an adventuring guild and handling problems that come up. I've wanted to see how well I can handle wrenches being thrown in to my plans, since I've heard that's the biggest challenge of any DM. However, when I ask my players what they want to do, they seem to get lost, unable to decide on a course to take, or investigate things further unless I prompt them to. So in that regard, having a well-enough built plan ready for sessions comes in handy. A quest they take might take a session or two or more, depending on what's involved with it, so that's how far I plan ahead. With a different group, I would probably have to change how I plan.

A bit of advice I was given was, "If you want to do a locked room mystery, let the players figure out how it was done, then nod and compliment them on their cleverness." Basically, while you will need to prep the basics on flash cards as previously suggested, some of the plot points can be free-form. As long as the groups' solution is not too ridiculous, let that be the correct answer. And now you've avoided having to create a detailed plot that the players won't follow any way.

Some useful links.

Behind the Name for real world names. You can also look names up by meaning so if you want an important NPC to have a significant name you can enter that word. (That being said, most names are positive, so a personal name that means "killer" or "traitor" does not exist in that database. I've looked.)

When making your lists of useful NPC names, you may want to add a cultural element to distinguish their origins. The players will then associate certain types of names with different parts of the game world. For example, in my solo minis campaign I made a medieval fantasy "not-Wales" to skirmish over, so I'm using Welsh and Anglo-Saxon names, with the occasional Norman French name for the lords. And there are Norse, and the party rescued a Norse woman. There was a possible Unusual Background that did not come up that basically describes a Middle Eastern horse archer; I'd have picked something from the Arabic names if I'd generated such a character. Similarly, the Wandering Merchant event could either be Norse or Arabic/Moorish.

Fantasy Name Generators A large variety, including descriptions of places and things. With these I find they are better as seeds for when you are stuck for ideas. Generate a few random things for inspiration, then work from there.

Easy Settlements is intended for a sci-fi RPG, but it is simple and generic enough for any game. Also it is pay what you want.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/141370/47-Key-Concepts-for-Inventing-a-Fantasy-Race-or-Culture?term=47+KEY+CONCEPTS
Also pay what you want, I found it worth the dollar they suggested.

 Red Harvest wrote:
Create an outline of the world, or at least the region the PCs will be in, and a few NPCs. Plan an adventure, maybe two, and a few sides. Add to this as play advances. After all what happens at the table creates the foundation for what comes next. It's a game, not a play, or movie, or novel. DM flexibility is paramount. If you can get a hold of a 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master Guide, it has a goodly amount of advice. Ah, it's available as a PDF. (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17004/Dungeon-Masters-Guide-1e) An interesting bit of history if nothing else.

 Gridge wrote:
I often don't plan very far ahead at all. Over the years I've found this to be an exercise in futility. Players tend to trash your best laid plans. I recall a Boot Hill campaign I was running one time where a tribe of natives were on the warpath, being led by an army officer who was possessed by a spirit. Upon learning of the plot, the players left town and headed for California...

Considering how lethal Boot Hill is, a wise move.

Very true. His actually had rode into town earlier and saw his companion's lifeless body draped over a horse, so I guess he can't be blamed. That still wasn't as bad as a player getting his character killed in the first 15 minutes. They buried him where he fell.