I Built A New Dungeons and Dragons Campaign

My teen players finished up their introductory campaign. They wanted something with more exploration and discovery for the next campaign, which gave me the opportunity to try something out, the old school hex-crawl.

Here’s how I did it:

I used this as my outline. It helps breakdown building the initial part of your campaign and world into do able steps. It takes 5 weeks to complete. Since my world is sandbox style, I don’t have to have everything thought out ahead, the world reacts to my players. Once I got over myself, I found this to be a great resource. Did I follow it entirely? Nope. But it did help a lot. I highly recommend giving it a try.

One area I didn’t follow the above book, The Gygax 75 Challenge, was in building the big dungeon. I have a very small group currently (2 players!) so the giant multi-level dungeon isn’t going to work well. Instead, I have an old copy of this gem, Central Casting Dungeons. This book is basically a random table generator for dungeons. It’s awesome, highly recommend the Central Casting books!

My players still want to run D&D 5e, sighs in DM, so I made my random tables using bits from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. This book has lots of random encounter tables and tables of names, so I don’t have to come up with every random NPC name on my own. I had to heavily balance and edit the encounter tables, because of the small number of players. I will adjust as I see what my players’ characters can handle.

And yes, coffee fuels a lot of what I do! Good thing I roast my own!

This is really all there is to what I used to make this new campaign, outside of my imagination, and borrowing ideas from books and movies. It does not and should not take a ton of time, energy, and effort to make a campaign and world. I have left out a lot of specifics, because we only just started this campaign, and I don’t want there to be spoilers.

If you’re interested in my specific campaign world, let me know! I will post more on my specific campaign and world as we progress. For now, here are the handouts I gave my players for session zero:

campaignintropdfDownload

Thanks for being here, beautiful souls! See you soon!