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Lemmy
2016-09-15, 03:57 PM
Hello, everyone! How you all doing?

Awesome!

Today I am here to ask how you guys and gals go about writing homebrew campaigns. Do you write a timeline of events? Do you simply improvise game session after game session? What's your writing process for writing the overall story/narrative and how do you turn that into individual moments?

I like to begin by writing a series of events that will take place, unless disrupted by outer forces (i.e.: the PCs), then I give a few adventure hooks for the PCs to choose from and follow through that naturally lead into one or more of those events (although, players do occasionally decide to do something completely different and unexpected and I can only hope they will stumble into something plot-relevant again. :P).

I usually start with writing bullet points, then I develop them more as needed.

e.g.: Lord "X" is planning to do "Y". He attempts this plan around date "W", in location "Z". If nothing interrupts his plans, he succeeds, and as consequence, Baron "A" ends up in condition "B", but everyone blames it on Lady "C".

...Or something like that.

As of a few months ago, I started making detailed timelines of when notorious events have taken place... It helps me organize my mind. Future events aren't as precisely written because sooner or later, the PCs do something that delays, stops, changes or advances on them and then the dominoes start falling...

I find this entertaining because when a PC adds a bit of their backstory, I know what was happening when [piece of backstory] took place and can even tie it in with my storyline. In one of my games, this resulted in the long disappeared parents of one of the PCs visiting a notorious tavern at the day/night of its grand opening!

- - -

But forget my lovely self for a second (just a second!)... How do you do it, ladies and gentlemen? How do you write campaigns and/or game sessions?

Share your stories and advice!

Squibsallotl
2016-09-15, 06:37 PM
Well first off I start out with a premise for the campaign, usually both setting and overarching-plot-based. Examples (from campaigns I've run):

The pantheon is dead, but no one knows it yet. An entity from the Far Realm has invaded the Astral Sea, killed the gods there, and is now answering prayers on their behalf. But each prayer answered is slowly driving the faithful insane...

An order of paladins and invokers create a new god supposed to bring about Justice to the world. However it interprets Justice differently than they expected, and tries to kill all life so as to eliminate all injustice. They manage to defeat it and seal its power, however they can't prevent it from influencing the world entirely, and as millenia passes it slowly twists history to make it seem like the Order was a cult out to destroy the world, and only it can save the world. The "prophecy" comes to a head, and a group of adventurers set out to free Justice...

Both are quite religion-themed campaigns, so my homebrew setting is very much focused on the gods and their worshipers. From there I focus on worldbuilding, creating cities, towns, trade routes, and a good handful of NPCs for each location with a few lines of description/personality for each. I set some immediate plot hooks and side quests, plonk my players down in the sandbox, and see what happens. Based on their actions some unimportant NPCs could suddenly become central to the campaign, unexpected conflicts (and alliances) can arise, and the adventure becomes its own beast that I just have to nudge back onto the path of the overarching plot every once in a while.

Green Elf
2016-09-15, 07:10 PM
Hello, everyone! How you all doing?

Awesome!

Today I am here to ask how you guys and gals go about writing homebrew campaigns. Do you write a timeline of events? Do you simply improvise game session after game session? What's your writing process for writing the overall story/narrative and how do you turn that into individual moments?

I like to begin by writing a series of events that will take place, unless disrupted by outer forces (i.e.: the PCs), then I give a few adventure hooks for the PCs to choose from and follow through that naturally lead into one or more of those events (although, players do occasionally decide to do something completely different and unexpected and I can only hope they will stumble into something plot-relevant again. :P).

I usually start with writing bullet points, then I develop them more as needed.

e.g.: Lord "X" is planning to do "Y". He attempts this plan around date "W", in location "Z". If nothing interrupts his plans, he succeeds, and as consequence, Baron "A" ends up in condition "B", but everyone blames it on Lady "C".

...Or something like that.

As of a few months ago, I started making detailed timelines of when notorious events have taken place... It helps me organize my mind. Future events aren't as precisely written because sooner or later, the PCs do something that delays, stops, changes or advances on them and then the dominoes start falling...

I find this entertaining because when a PC adds a bit of their backstory, I know what was happening when [piece of backstory] took place and can even tie it in with my storyline. In one of my games, this resulted in the long disappeared parents of one of the PCs visiting a notorious tavern at the day/night of its grand opening!

- - -

But forget my lovely self for a second (just a second!)... How do you do it, ladies and gentlemen? How do you write campaigns and/or game sessions?

Share your stories and advice!

Your writing is pretty good. I've tried to write a fairly detailed story and opportunities for sidequests. Many () are added and if they go off the plot, well, try to make a circle back to the plot. REMEMBER, AS A GM YOU ARE IN POWER. I love using characters in the party to tie to my plot because it adds interest and enthusiasm. Good luck! Your doing great!

Lemmy
2016-09-15, 07:29 PM
Well first off I start out with a premise for the campaign, usually both setting and overarching-plot-based. To me, the most difficult part by far is turning the Big Picture into a bunch of (fun and interesting) small pictures. Sometimes I get lost and have to improvise some insanity for the players to deal with while I gather my thoughts together (this is a lot easier in PbP games, as individual scenes can take days or even weeks to play out, giving me plenty of time to put the pieces together :smallbiggrin:).


The pantheon is dead, but no one knows it yet. An entity from the Far Realm has invaded the Astral Sea, killed the gods there, and is now answering prayers on their behalf. But each prayer answered is slowly driving the faithful insane...This is honestly one of the coolest campaign themes I've seen in quite a while! :smalleek:

How do you deal with divine spell-casting PCs?

Lemmy
2016-09-15, 07:36 PM
Your writing is pretty good.Heh... Summarizing it to fit a single post in the forum makes it sound better than it actually is, but thank you for your kind words. :smallbiggrin:


I've tried to write a fairly detailed story and opportunities for sidequests. Many () are added and if they go off the plot, well, try to make a circle back to the plot. REMEMBER, AS A GM YOU ARE IN POWER. I love using characters in the party to tie to my plot because it adds interest and enthusiasm. Good luck! Your doing great! I can come up with dozens of plot hooks to show off the world, setting and overall state of everything around the party. Tying everything together in a single overarching story is the hard part... :smalleek:

Thanks for the encouragement. :smallsmile:

OracleofSilence
2016-09-15, 07:52 PM
As a word of advice, write story arcs, not stories. For example:

The Outside Rushes In: (Beast): A shadowy conglomerate pursues an unstable young woman, who is both more, and less than she seems. She flees unthinkingly until she recognizes one the the characters: a figure in her dreams. Her warped perceptions, and the confusion she creates in her pursuers (or saviors) brings the party into conflict, both with old allies, and their understanding of themselves.
Active characters: Rachel Dawson, The Chairman, The White Shirts, Chief Rose
Antagonist: ???
Motivation:A lost investment, a threatened ideology

The Wolves at the Door: (The Chairman): The city is threatened. Dark forces, fanged shadows, and savage ghosts howl at the gates, and slink through the alleys. The Chair is determined to defend the city, his city, and the unwitting pawns that fate has provided him could be the perfect bulwark against the external threats. Of course, in war, there are always martyrs, and preexisting tools, well, they are simply to valuable to throw away.
Active Characters: The Chairman, Derek Rose, the Party, the White Shirts, Mr. Brown
Antagonist: Mr. Brown
Motivation: expanding the House requires a larger Garden.

A Box, a Bag, and a Pinch of Salt: (City Father): The Enigmatic Mr. Brown can answer any question, for a price, but what first appears to be a normal courier job becomes more and more dangerous as relics are restored to their proper place, and the plans of the mighty begin to come undone. The City has a Soul now, and it is determined to order it’s components as the character of the times dictate.
Active Characters:
Antagonist: The Department

This is for nWoD, yes, but the point stands. These are probably connected stories. They can be run in any order, they all connect, and all of them have... 4 concrete NPC's. All these NPC's can be reused, and appear in other sample story arcs from this game. This flexibility allows me to accommodate things going off the rails. Maybe one of the characters gets kidnapped by an eldritch entity and comes back half sane. Maybe another is an unhinged rogue cop who doesn't really act consistently, at least when it comes to anyone other then his semi-platonic life partner. The point is, don't plan on concretes. Just think about the big picture, and make sure the moving parts are in the right place. Everything else will probably sort itself out.

prufock
2016-09-15, 07:59 PM
Elevator Pitch
I usually start with the quick and dirty concept in a few sentences that set the tone and overall theme of the campaign.

One-Page Overview
I write out a one-pager that covers the major events of the game, split up into acts (that may be one or more sessions). The number of acts depends on how long the game is intended to last.

Sessions
I plan each session with around 4-6 "scenes" to cover approximately 5 hours of game time. Then I worry about gaming stats. I plan each new session only after the previous one concludes so I can take into account anything the PCs change about the scenarios.

Side Notes
The PCs often have their own goals that I try to work into the plot. This can take the form of side quests, but often I try to make it part of the overall campaign. I don't usually do meaningless side quests, though I allow for the PCs to get distracted.

Squibsallotl
2016-09-15, 10:53 PM
This is honestly one of the coolest campaign themes I've seen in quite a while! :smalleek:

How do you deal with divine spell-casting PCs?

Thank you :) Sadly none of my PCs in that game opted for a divine class, but if they had, they would have started experiencing odd things the more spells they cast (or divine abilities they used). Whispering voices, strange urges, random Will saves Vs doing something completely against their nature, etc. It would have made the central conflict more personal.

As it played out, the Kingdom was divided in a civil war between two princes who both were claiming the throne. One of them was clearly insane, as he and his men were killing any divine magic users they could find. The other, the "good" one, hired the party to safeguard some clerics and escort them back to the capital for the first mission of the campaign.

Needless to say, that didn't work out as expected.

Vrock_Summoner
2016-09-16, 12:20 AM
Alright, this is super long and includes a lot of example information about my current campaign, so I'm putting it in spoilers in case people just want to see more simplified answers. :smallredface:

The first part of my campaign design process is creating a setting that is fleshed out to a degree that I have a variety of different game types and threat scales that I can work with. Preferably, it will be an intricate setting that I can use many times, but some setting concepts only really work for however many campaigns it takes for some group that's high enough power to come along and solve the problem. I never like running a campaign in a setting that has its big problem solved, unless the consequences of that solution can trickle down into another interesting big problem, in which case the setting is still so profoundly changed that a lot of setting work has to happen. Reviving a solved problem so I can reuse the setting feels like it cheapens the original players' efforts, at least to me. No value judgments for people who do it differently.

The second part of my campaign design process is actually getting to know my players. (Something seems out of order about this.) If I'm trying to hook in new people, this will usually take the form of running some one-shots to get a feel for them.

Taking my players into account is important for a number of reasons. I need to decide what level of power and scale they most enjoy, where they fall on the proactivity-reactivity scale, and how close they like to get to NPCs. This is quite possibly more important to my process than having a functional setting - I have the most fun I can when my players are having the most fun they can, as long as things don't go outside my comfort zone (for example, ethnic genocide and sexual violence are not allowed to be performed by even the most otherwise-evil PCs, and if anybody includes a backstory NPC with such elements I will go out of my way to portray said NPC as so vile that even other villains won't knowingly associate with them, realism be damned).

So I want to cater to their play preferences as much as possible, except wherein it breaches aforementioned comfort zone, and that colors the next step of campaign prep. Do they want me to set the stage and keep things reacting to them as they proactively lead the plot down a path of their own choosing? You've got it, my campaign prep will focus on fleshing out NPCs and important relationships between people and organizations so that they react as realistically and interestingly as possible to the actions of the PCs. Do they enjoy clear objectives and tough fights that leave them with unambiguous sense of accomplishment, while disliking nuanced social interactions, deception, and "easy paths"? I'll focus on developing well-structured session paths with mechanically complex and challenging fights that will keep the players' interest and tension high. Do they want extremely nuanced social affairs and politics, with an overarching goal that gives them time to pursue personal interests in the meantime? I'll focus on the "big problem" and its ongoing effects on life and the attitudes of NPCs, and the goals and customs of the other players on the PCs' social level.

The point is, I come in with a setting with interesting hooks for a variety of campaign themes, figure out my players' preferred theme and their play style, and expand on that part in either a vague or specific plan depending on the preferences of my players.

As an example, my current Mutants & Masterminds group doesn't really like pre-structured plots. They like the combination of feeling powerful and having responsibility that comes from being heroic supers of a much higher caliber than anyone they could call on for help. They're extremely proactive, and while they're not above throwing a plan in the wrench of a supervillain, they get a lot more joy out of dealing with the wrenches thrown into their own plans. That said, in order to give their plans meaning while still allowing them to be heroic, it's better for there to be ever-present potential threats on several fronts. Lastly, they also love exploring obscure lore in the setting and using their own power to warp said lore, sometimes in ways they can't predict the results of.

My setting, to quickly summarize, is science fantasy, with sci-fi flavored elements turned up to fantastic proportions. There's sort of a plane of nonexistence "overlapping" the universe, called the Plug, which has no time or space or anything, but the potential for everything that could be but isn't. It's also a "comic programming center" for lack of a better term. So some beings, the Creators, willed that programming to change, limiting the potential options but making them substantial, creating the Universe. They gave beings with intelligence, the only thing unifying all of them, the ability to manipulate the Universe, in order to give themselves power in this Universe. Completely by accident, life evolved on Earth, and since humans and most animals are intelligent, they could affect the Universe in non-chemically-predetermined ways (as opposed to bacteria and plants acting on autopilot). One of the Creators thinks humans are interesting, decides to increase their connection to the Plug, screws it up, and opens a tear in space time through which some of those other potential existences that were prevented by this Universe's laws can come in, targeting the Creators and Earth because that's where all the power that was preventing them from existing are at.

Immediately, I decide that the players are some of the strongest beings available in the setting, though they had control of how that manifested - one is a Creator, one is an amalgamation of billions of psychic ghosts, one was the absolute strongest of the Creators' self-designed servants who had gone rogue to get a power boost up to their level, and one was the only human who the Creator's experiment worked on before things went haywire so she's pretty much the ultimate psychic.

The NPC Creators are the only ones on the players' level who might be predisposed towards helping them, but they're all busy and are in many cases divided on how best to deal with the issue, making them allies the party has to earn on a case-by-case basis. Over the course of the game, the players took to a surprising tactic to increase the number of potential equals they could ally with (though gaining allies for battle wasn't the main point of it) - they started sparing and trying to redeem those "void beings" who were capable of intelligent interaction. They succeeded in several cases, although their new friends were rarely allies on the field of battle.

The void beings who attack are pretty much all on or above the players' level, making them threats to the continued existence of the planet the players are protecting (never mind just the life on it) and, if left unchecked, a much larger portion of the universe most of the characters admittedly care much less about.

There are precious few meaningful threats to them originating from Earth, though. One technologically focused supervillain has given them some regular but very minor difficulty and managed to cause a meaningfully large threat twice, one of which times one of the PCs hacked him out of his new super powerful mechanical army and gave the group some extra battle support for a while. Most of their peacetime is spent on a combination of making friends and allies where they can, their own projects (the human opened up a school, the rogue cosmic agent regularly creates and reinvents structures and gadgets based on her own ideas and things that bad guys have used, occasionally birthing more threats on the PCs' level if things go badly, etc.) and, surprisingly enough, just roleplaying out as normal of lives as they can manage with being so powerful and often alien to the people of Earth.

What all of this means for me is that I spend way more time making "monster of the week" type encounters than focusing on long-term villainous plots, while most of the fun for the players is coming from having the world and NPCs they care about reacting realistically to the things the players do and say. Much of my job is ongoing world building and roleplaying development - we've all come to the agreement that, while important things will continue to happen that change the situations the players face, an overarching plot connected by anything other than the characters' experiences and developing relationships would just get in the way of what we want from our sessions. There's also a lot of lore development going on, with the characters slowly discovering and, at times, altering the metaphysics of the world. The players, in their own ways, have 1) made fusion possible (as in combining multiple people into one, not the thing with atoms), and 2) created an entire new layer of reality (albeit a rather nonsensical one following the laws of cheese rather than physics). They've found out a lot about the underlying way the universe works through self-pursued experiments based solely on small clues and things that intrigued them, without any prompting on my part, meaning I have to be constantly working to keep up with everything they need.

This is, of course, very different than if I were with a group who wanted an awesome, well-structured epic following the key elements of story structure. Which is why, as I said at the beginning, it all depends so heavily on your players - you can't design campaigns in a vacuum.

Tl;dr version: My campaign design actually demands I know my players a bit before I start. The kind of campaign I run, and thus the things I spend time working on, depends strongly on what that individual group of players likes and wants to do. Since my current group likes focusing on developing complex emotional relationships, learning about the world, and working on huge setting-altering projects, most of what I do is providing interesting, thorough NPCs to interact with and shaking up the status quo regularly with diverse problems to keep relationships and plans from getting too static and stagnant, rather than making "plots" or even "session plans."

Knaight
2016-09-16, 12:24 AM
From a session to session perspective I basically improvise everything. At campaign start though I make a network of involved parties, note what needs to be noted about other aspects of the setting (e.g. geography), and set up initial conditions. Then I see where it goes from there. There are more nuances than that (if you google "Knaight GiTP Roster Response" you can probably find a detailed post or two), but that's the core of it.

Jay R
2016-09-16, 01:11 PM
To me, the most difficult part by far is turning the Big Picture into a bunch of (fun and interesting) small pictures.

Turn it around. Plan encounters first, then build an arc to include them all.

The encounters are what matter, much more than why we're going through them. Make sure that the encounters with Lobelia, orcs, Nazgul, orcs, Bill Ferny, elves, the Watcher in the Water, the cave troll, a Balrog, the spider and others are interesting enough, and it won't matter much if the ultimate goal is to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, destroy all the horcruxes, bring the Queen's diamonds back from Buckingham, learn who Rosebud is, or teach Scrooge the true meaning of Christmas.

Vrock_Summoner
2016-09-16, 02:16 PM
Turn it around. Plan encounters first, then build an arc to include them all.

The encounters are what matter, much more than why we're going through them. Make sure that the encounters with Lobelia, orcs, Nazgul, orcs, Bill Ferny, elves, the Watcher in the Water, the cave troll, a Balrog, the spider and others are interesting enough, and it won't matter much if the ultimate goal is to throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, destroy all the horcruxes, bring the Queen's diamonds back from Buckingham, learn who Rosebud is, or teach Scrooge the true meaning of Christmas.
I'd like to provide a counterpoint to this view - you can make the encounters as fun and interesting as you want, but if you can't get your players behind the reasons their characters are dealing with those challenges, they will feel hollow and forced no matter how well-designed they are. This is obviously a table-dependent concern - some players are coming to invest themselves in a character and that character's world, other people might consider all that stuff to be filler and won't really care why they're doing this or that as long as it's a fun challenge. The latter group would consider "dealing with a fun encounter" reason enough to get their characters involved, the former group might balk at the idea of fighting for stakes they have no interest in no matter how good the fight (or other type of encounter) is. Again, as mentioned in my earlier post, the most important part of campaign design is tailoring it to what your particular players find fun.

Slarg
2016-09-16, 02:40 PM
When I first started DMing, I tried to meticulously plan the entire adventure in the weeks between each session (We played on Saturdays).

Welp, that lasted all of about three sessions (The first two being generic fantasy settings, the last being trying to set the "plan" in motion") and my group took it so far off the rails (Think Old Man Henderson but no where near as epic) that I had to scrap three weeks worth of work. Now all of my planning can be summed up in cliff notes and everything else is improv.

My last session's notes were "Farmhouse, family of 12, 3 remain, Scarecrows, Hag, woods, horror" and next sessions is "Merchant, Cattle, bandits, no bandits, 2 Buelletes, run, run, RUN!"

Knowing my group, probably going to kill the Buelletes.....

Jay R
2016-09-16, 08:58 PM
I'd like to provide a counterpoint to this view - you can make the encounters as fun and interesting as you want, but if you can't get your players behind the reasons their characters are dealing with those challenges, they will feel hollow and forced no matter how well-designed they are. This is obviously a table-dependent concern - some players are coming to invest themselves in a character and that character's world, other people might consider all that stuff to be filler and won't really care why they're doing this or that as long as it's a fun challenge. The latter group would consider "dealing with a fun encounter" reason enough to get their characters involved, the former group might balk at the idea of fighting for stakes they have no interest in no matter how good the fight (or other type of encounter) is. Again, as mentioned in my earlier post, the most important part of campaign design is tailoring it to what your particular players find fun.

Agreed. But it can be easier to come up with a quest that fits the encounters than a complete set of encounters that fit the quest.

Look at my original post. Obviously, if your encounters include Nazgul, orcs, elves, the Watcher, a cave troll, a Balrog, more orcs, and a giant spider, you won't decide that the overall quest is to bring the Queen's diamonds back from Buckingham, learn who Rosebud is, or teach Scrooge the true meaning of Christmas.

I find it easier to start with what kind of encounters I want, and find an overall quest to justify it, than to start with a quest, and determine encounters to fit. YMMV, of course.

Tiktik Ironclaw
2016-09-17, 09:18 PM
I tend to start by thinking who I want the main antagonist to be; Lolthite drow? Slavers? Cultists? The evil wizard? Then I consider what the PCs will be doing for most of the adventure, because my homebrew setting is a kitchen sink of other fantasy settings with my own twists, so I can facilitate most anything. Are the PCs seafarers that end up in a pirate crew? What about caravan guards protecting desert merchants? Or, my personal favorite, the generic tomb-raiding explorers?

With these in place, I can set about looking at the map to see where the PCs will be operating, and plot out some adventures to occur alongside whatever else comes up at random thanks to the PCs. I also begin plotting out the antagonists' motivations, who they are and what makes them tick, so I can see why the PCs might oppose them. The PCs believe in freedom and value it dearly? The slavery ring sees people as no more than cattle to be kept alive and sold for a profit. The pirates might be making a profit at the expense of the drow, who take extreme measures to make an example. The cultists want to empower a dark entity and destroy the world, and the PCs come upon them in their travels. The evil wizard is taxing travelers to fund an army, and the humble caravan guards learn of the plan.

Further, I get an idea of side characters and how the villains would go about their plans. The drow send out proxy minions before dealing with the PCs personally. If their organization is big enough, the slavers might employ the same tactic. The cultists target the PCs more openly, but rely on stealth to catch the PCs off guard. The wizard could literally do almost anything. These in turn help plan adventures.

So, by the end, I have an outline of the plot and some highlights of the campaign, as well as a cast of important NPCs. I also tend to start the campaign on a simple unrelated adventure, so that I can introduce the main plot inadvertently, and have the PCs engage the enemy willingly, rather than mandating it from the start.

TheDerpyAlicorn
2016-09-17, 09:33 PM
Sometimes I'll have a broad idea ahead of time. Just a loose outline, but most of the time I don't bother at all. I instead treat the world as a character of sorts. I build it, define how it works, then populate it. After that, I drop the players in, they play the PCs, I play the world, and the campaign writes itself.

BWR
2016-09-17, 10:10 PM
Step 1: Find a setting I like.
This is easy.

Step 2: general idea of what I want the game to be about.
This is also pretty easy

Step 3: find a starting adventure
This is also pretty easy

Step 4: muddle about with semi-connected adventures until about half-way through the game when I figure out what the general plot is going to be, trying desperately to keep things interesting for the players while I figure out how to involve the PCs in what I had thought the game would be about
This is where things start to fall apart

Step 6: try to salvage things and move towards a proper end

Lemmy
2016-09-18, 12:56 PM
It's really cool to see how many different ways people come up with their ideas and turn them into a full campaign. I've been playing RPGs since I was 10, and I'm still amazed at how unique GMs and players can be, and how the game reflects that.

I love this hobby. :smallsmile:

Velaryon
2016-09-18, 06:59 PM
I've never made a world completely from scratch because I just don't have the time or motivation to do that. Instead, I tend to grab an existing campaign world, choose a part of it that I and my players aren't super familiar with, and flesh it out to our liking, using what I like from the canon and throwing out the rest. I find it easier to have an existing canvas on which I can scribble things out and make rewrites and changes than to start with a completely blank page.

Once the general setting has been chosen, I give the players a description of the area and the current state of the place. For example, my current campaign is 3.5 Forgotten Realms, set a few years after the date where the 3e FRCS picks up, but well before all that Spellplague nonsense that I'm completely ignoring anyway. I chose Tethyr as the place to play because it's full of political intrigue (which is something I really love in my roleplaying), and it doesn't have any of the famous characters or locations that Faerun is known for. I described the general setting to my players (nation recently united after decades of civil war and general lawlessness, civilization reasserting itself and adventurers needed to chase out the monsters, bandits, and other assorted baddies).

From there, I hand it over to the players. They have ideas about what characters they want to play, and I want to make sure that what they are looking for fits the world in which we're playing. The best way I've found to do that is to get the character creation process done while the world is still sparsely detailed, so that I can change what I need to change to have a lawyer-turned-warlock, a half-orc-druid-who's-really-more-of-a-monk-with-a-gorilla-companion, a centaur-who-wants-to-be-a-knight, and a nonevil-necromancer-searching-for-his-missing-girlfriend all make sense. And yes, those are the PCs I have in my game right now... or at least they were (the druid has actually awakened his gorilla companion and the player is now playing the gorilla instead).

Now that the players have supplied the starring roles for the campaign and detailed at least a little bit of background, I go back to detailing the setting around them, until I've got a few loose adventure hooks and enough other material that I can wing the rest of the session if they do something unexpected. From there, I try to stay one session ahead of the PCs. Eventually when the general path of the campaign becomes clear, I'll start to think long-term and come up with a final villain, major plotline, etc. and lightly steer the game toward that direction, though if the players take things in a different direction I will always go along with that.

Basically we end up with a crazy, chaotic ride in which nobody is quite sure who's in control, and everyone gets some unexpected surprises and lots of fun. I know I'm not great at designing unique combat encounters, I'm not the best roleplayer or a world-class storyteller, but I put the players in the driver's seat and just make little nudges to the steering wheel here and there when I have something cool I want to do.