Your to-do list for starting a new campaign?

[tavis]

What are the essentials that you make sure you have prepared before you start a new campaign?

(It'd also be interesting to know how often folks start new campaigns. It sounds like some of us have really long, generation-spanning continuous games, which is awesome and a tribute to the years worth of possibilities in the LBBs! I've started three in the last five years, and am about to begin the castle-developing hex-crawl I've posted about in another thread.)

Here are the things I plan to have ready for that wilderness campaign before the players sit down:

For the players:
- A world map (in this case the folio Greyhawk maps) to help players orient themselves and fit their backgrounds into the world

- A player's area map that sketches out rough directions and features within the local area (one 30-mile Greyhawk hex)

- A local map (one of the superb castle maps suggested in that thread, haven't settled on one yet) that lays out the "home base" that the players know about in detail

- A list of house rules for the campaign (in my case dealing with alternate XP and magic item rules, designed to seek a happy medium between the new-school character creation rules the players wanted & the old-school play style I'm striving for)

For me behind the screen:
- A wandering monster table, and some pre-planned encounters for each entry in the table to get me started / provide a basis for winging it as necessary

- A list of NPCs with a line about what they do & a broad-brush idea of how I'll roleplay them (in this case mostly castle inhabitants), which I can flesh out if needed with the random NPC attribute tables in the AD&D DMG (perhaps eventually using a JG table instead, Bledsaw being IMO the only one who could out-random-table-entry Gygax)

- A list of male and female names, broken out into different broad cultural groupings (maybe just 'civilized' vs 'monstrous'), that I can draw from when I introduce an unexpected NPC

- Tactical maps and monster stats for encounters I expect the players to get into during the first session

- A sketch map and adventure notes / ideas for a few places and encounters I don't expect to get to right away, for foreshadowing of what's to come or preparedness if it comes sooner than I thought

- Miniatures for monsters I plan to use and likely wandering monsters, plus a range of PC/NPC-appropriate minis

- A teacher's 1"-grid easel pad for sketching mins-scale maps onto

- A pad of graph paper and a stack of pre-printed hex paper

Hmm, that's quite a list. Hope it's interesting to others (it was certainly a good planning exercise for me to write that all down) and I would love to see what you prepare, both to check if I've forgotten anything and to get insight into other DM's approaches.

[Finarvyn]

My summer OD&D campaign had significantly less prep time than yours did. Here's what I did to start off:
1. Googled some dungeon maps. Found one I liked.
2. Stocked the dungeon with monsters and goodies.
3. Put together my house rules for this particular campaign.
4. Put together character sheets specific to those house rules.

I figure that I have a lot of time to create the world while the players explore the first dungeon complex. My usual plan is to prepare a simple world map and a more complicated local map with a big city (usually named "Greyhawk"), a few towns, and the dungeon complex the players just explored. A few neat names (like the "howling hills" or "dark forest") and I'm usually ready to go.

Of course, I have the habit of creating little campaigns that last for 6-9 months, then we switch characters and situations and start all over.

In the "good old days" when I ran the same world for several years, my "to do" list looked a lot like yours. :-)

[ffilz]

My to-do list for my forthcoming OD&D mega-dungeon campaign:

- start mapping a dungeon. I have a pretty good start on level 1, I'd like to flesh it out a bit more and at least start level 2 & level 3 maps (at least near the stairs and shafts).

- start keying the dungeon, at least the area near the entrance, develop wandering monster encounter tables

- settle on my house rules, complete my OD&D rules set with house rules incorporated, prepare a house rules sheet to accompany the OD&D books + supplements for players that prefer that medium

- prepare a town and local area map

Frank

[driver]

My to-do list:

1. Find some IRL players.

[hackman]

I do not know about lists per se. I've found that a general idea of a town or settlement, maybe a map for that, coupled with some dungeon names is about it for me. I've already worked up a couple of dungeons and just use those no matter where a player goes. I've just found that all the rest is so unpredictable as to not be worth the time. Even the first session tends to lead me towards putting more in, but I begin to get ideas based on player actions etc. I wing it a lot obviously. I remember one game where I had one player and he only took along one NPC Cleric rather than two to preserve treasure and I'd on the spot had the clerics say they wanted to go to fund their orphenage. That told me a bit about his priorities and I had a town location on the spot then.

[hackman]

Sorry for the double post, yeah some sort of wilderness map and house rules of course on a sheet.