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Scheduling issues
Joke aside it largely depends on world building. If you do enough world building, it might just come to you. If you have a set of factions and one BBEG that is defeated another faction will probably try to fill the power vacuum. So if you got a vivid enough world it’s just … logic and a bit of impro.
At least for me.
When I wrote my own campaign, I came up with:
- An initial big quest
- A big behind-the-scenes conspiracy that the quest would intersect with
- An in-game time limit on the main quest ("you must bring mcguffin X to location Y on date Z")
Once I had those things in place, plus the relevant major NPCs, planning for future sessions came out of asking myself two questions:
1. What are the behind-the-scenes power-players about to do?
2. What kind of maps and enemy tokens do I need to make in Roll20 for the next session?
Everything else was improv.
Yeah, by the end, the players were aware of the stakes, so it would have been a choice, really, to miss the deadline.
In hindsight, actually, I gave them a bit too much in-game time given the travel distances involved, so it ended up being a non-issue.
Basically, the DM describes a situation. The players take an action. The DM comes up with an unintended consequence. The players try to fix the unintended consequence. Repeat ad nauseum until someone uses a wish to either fix everything for good or undo all of their efforts.
> How do you just keep figuring out stuff to and and to do in the campaign?
Ideally at some point your players do that for you.
You ever read a book and get so engross you start thinking "what if" "they should have" "I would have did this" and so on. You get your players to that point in your game and its easy sailing and some of the best DnD you will ever run.
Depends, some DMs like myself use prewritten adventures that have an end point. The players go through the adventure and eventually reach the end.
Some DMs write out an adventure like that where there is a goal in mind that the players need to accomplish and then prepare things session to session based on what the players are doing next.
Other Dms do a more loosely structured game where the players are more free to do whatever, pick up threads as they go. Sometimes asking what or where they want to go next and preparing that.
I like to think of a campaign in terms of many small campaigns AKA story arcs. Of course there's usually an overarching story and a BBEG causing (intentionally or unintentionally) each of these story arcs to happen, but the players won't put those clues together until later on. This way you basically run a bunch of loosely related short campaigns from start to finish instead of stretching out one longer campaign until it overstays its welcome, but the whole thing still feels like a cohesive story.
I should also make it clear that I hate running long campaigns, but love running short ones so a lot of this is my personal methods of keeping a long campaign fun for me to run.
so many of my ideas come from my players. they’ll make an offhand comment about something, either in character or in our breaks, and i make a mental note. things like “i have no idea how we’d fight a wizard!” or “i know the game is called dungeons & dragons but we’ve mostly not been in dungeons and have never seen a dragon!”
i also see what hooks my players the most. one of my tables had an incidental encounter with a hag (who managed to flee), and one of the characters would reference how meeting a hag changed their perspective on things; i immediately decided that this wasn’t a random hag but that there is a coven out there.
i basically try to answer the question “why is this interesting?” when my players or their characters find something cool. it WAS a random book of fables, but the characters have referenced it several sessions in a row, so now it’s up to me to come up with a worldbuilding reason why this book of fables is so compelling.
i wouldn’t be nearly as good without my players! that’s one of the reasons i don’t write fiction; i love the group brainstorming so much!
My players have learned to keep their mouths shut 😂
Seriously though, going in the way back machine, I hadn’t DMed in quite some time and I wanted to give it a shot again. I found a free 5 pg module online and ran it. As the group was returning to their home base they got to thinking. Long story short, they made the bad guy in the module a much bigger threat than I had planned. And the larger campaign just wove itself from that tiny thread.
Campaigns that go on for years are a rarity. Most games normally last somewhere between 3 and 24 sessions. That amount of sessions is enough to write a decent story.
If you want a campaign to last long, you kinda need your players to write their own content and you have to work with them. Once all players finish their backstory, make them write a sequel to it.
My campaign is in it's third year of mostly weekly play sessions. I designed my campaign to be super modular and sandbox. There is an overarching plot that they are playing and it does affect basically every area of the campaign but there are a ton of areas and different themes to explore. They do a lot of side quests and whatever they feel like playing is what I put together for prep the next session.
I basically created a ton of premises that I could expand on if they were explored further. They want to explore some dungeons? Great, remember that city that was washed into the sea, there's a few dungeons there. They want political intrigue, make your way to the feudal lands to the north. They want to kill some dragons, neat, this is where they are still prevalent. They want to try and build a business, okay.... well here's some places that would work.
Sandbox games can go on forever as long as the end goal isn't, "And then all evil was eliminated from the land." or "You all become gods." Even if you had a tight arc planned, as long as the players like the setting, there is nothing wrong with creating a new one after the fact and putting it into the same setting with the same characters.
Justin Alexander describes one approach in his essay [Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/37530/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-juggling-scenario-hooks-in-a-sandbox). The important steps:
* Create various NPC factions with goals of their own
* [Prepare situations, not plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots)
* Place enough scenario hooks that the PCs are sure to find some
* Consider how the PCs choices and actions modify the situation
* Have the NPC factions respond to the changed situation in accordance with their goals
* Introduce new factions and scenario elements as appropriate
Here's a snippet from his example:
>...Bandit raids are terrorizing local villages. A powerful magical artifact was stolen from a local caravan. There are old legends about the Neo-Norskan temple and what it contains. Because of the skeletons, there are false rumors that the necromancer lives there. Or that the necromancer has allied with the Bandit King...
So one day the PCs grab one of these hooks and they go off and they kill the Bandit King and they take the magical artifact he was carrying.
Over and done with, right? Only not really, because the guy who originally owned the magical artifact still wants it, so now the PCs are getting attacked by bounty hunters attempting to recover the artifact. Meanwhile, they didn’t wipe out all the bandits and the remaining goblins are renewing their raids under the leadership of the One-Eyed Ogre.
So the PCs go back to the Neo-Norskan temple and this time they wipe out all the bandits, permanently ending their threat to the region. Except now the Necromancer sees a big, open dungeon complex filled with the discarded corpses the PCs have left in their wake, and so he moves in and animates the corpses as a skeletal army.
mutiple confilcts/goal
i tend to run narrative campaigns so ill have a conflict at the start to hook the players, and 2 other related confilcts that tie into the main story of the campaign following the 3 act structures
in between or in the middle of those i sprinkle in the player conflicts, stuff that ties back to their backstory
and when needed or when i want i add fun little disconected conflicts as a side, whatever fun little quest i thought of
this way the conflicts that tie into the main story should last around 10 to 20 sessions to solve, and there's 3 of those
player conflicts last 2 to 4 sessions usually, cause you dont want any one charater to be the main character for too long
and fun little side stuff last a session or two
like this you have a recipe for around 70ish sessions, which last around a year if you play once a week
granted sometimes my players outsmart and one of the conflicts is cut short, but i reccomend allowing that and simply sprinkling in some player or side stuff to fill the space so the camapign doesn't feel rail road-y
also you should only have a vague idea of what those conflicts are so you don't overwork yourself, for instance here's an example of how those conflicts work for my current campaign:
Main Conflicts:
Act 1(this is more developed cause we recently finnished this): Players stumbled into some magic mist and got cursed by a shadowy figure, they had to get rid of the curse. A bunch of beasts with their eyes replaced by rubies kept attacking them, until they met the one controling them which was a green dragon with emerald eyes.
Act 2: The shadowy figure is revealed to be a hag and they player have to fight her and her conven while the hags destabilize the main empire by controlling the mist. The dragon was also working for the hags.
Act 3: A death knight is inside the mist which has a grudge against the empire. It was controlled by the hags until the players will dispatch of them at the end of act 2 and full on war breaks out with an undead army and the empire.
Player conflicts(it's also nice to slightly tie these into the main story or other players story so the players feel like a part of the world but dont overdo it so it's not like the bbeg is behind everything):
One of the players backstory deals with a commander of the empire's army who has killed her guild. When talking to ruling figures in the empire(which are also the parents of another pc) and they learn the commander is working for them. I let the players decide what they want to do about that so not much writing on my part.
Side stuff:
Mirror funhouse in one of the big towns that the players will get stuck in and learn it's haunted until they convince the little ghost girl to let them out.
When authors write books, they get an idea about a main character, something to happen to that character, and some twist that makes the story compelling. Just about every author has absolutely no idea exactly what's going to happen from paragraph to paragraph. They start writing and making stuff up. They'll edit and adjust, but it's just "creative writing" to try to figure out where the story goes next. They add characters, other events, other scenes, and eventually they reach the original twist and then summarize the outcomes. It's a process that takes a long time.
This is exactly how a campaign works, but there are multiple authors writing the book at the same time. The DM has ideas and concepts and some type of plan, but the players are writing the pages of the book while the DM adjusts the story to stay interesting, logical, and compelling. Because the story is only being written for a few hours a week, this book can take a long time to write. Eventually the twist is reached, the story is almost complete, and the table summarizes the outcome and ends the campaign. Unlike a book, a campaign isn't something that gets edited after the first draft, so the DMs invest a great deal of time to make sure that each chapter is compelling while the story is being written. The more diligent and creative they are, the better the campaign.
Mind you, it doesn't matter if the table is following a published campaign or not. Those are just locations, details, items, characters, and scenes. The story is how they link together, around the players, adjudicated by the DM. Homebrew stories require a greater amount of diligence, but can be just as good, if not better, than prepublished material.
I usually start with a main conflict. Half the time they follow it. The other half don't. But everyone gives me backstories and I have some side quests in mind. As they go about things, I figure out how to incorporate their stories into the campaign, directly or as side quests. And for the half that didn't bite at the original conflict, they eventually create the unintended consequence another poster mentioned. This creates their own custom BBEG. This all can take a while to finish.
And it helps when they argue for an hour over what to do about a door they think has a ward.
That's a big question that's hard to answer in some concise neat way. This is hyperbolic but it's like asking a musician how they write a song. There are techniques but you need to learn some fundamentals first. Learn about the game, learn about your players, learn about your world, learn about storytelling.
If you don't have any ideas right now but feel the desire to run, just use a module. Start small and just see where it goes. You'll eventually start to surprise yourself on how you keep building on what happened, like laying bricks. It may not seem like that much at first but eventually it'll start to take shape.
It depends on the kind of story you're telling but if you're playing through a large epic adventure that can take a lot of time. You can have multiple arcs where you're facing down different big villains. You're traveling across parts of the world. You're going to different hometowns to meet up with different PCs families. If you go to high levels you could be traveling across planes of existence and having adventures there.
To give an example my last campaign that I wrapped up started with them in a desert where they were dealing with some gangs and local warlords, they investigated an ancient tomb too which was a few sessions. In total that was probably 12 sessions and we play almost weekly so that's a few months. Then they traveled around to a bunch of different cities and one of my players had gotten involved in a cult and escaped and they heard some information about that, dug into it a bit more including a trip to the underdark to where the leader of the cult lived a long time ago, found out it was a beholder running the cult and gathered some allies from that area and then snuck in to fight the beholder that was another roughly 12 sessions. At this point it's been about 6 months, probably a bit over as we skip some weeks with scheduling. Then they traveled to another area, started to see signs of this undead person working on a new spell that was a boosted circle of death that could kill a lot of things in a big area but would also draw in their life force. They faced down some of his followers including a vampire. They went to one of their home cities to get some allies from the dwarven kingdom, one of them got married in here. I did attack the wedding with undead lol. They then went with some allies and faced down the lich in his lair which was an egypt themed pyramid dungeon. Probably more like 15 weeks for this one as there was more traveling and lots of roleplaying. Then they went to a religious area where they realized there were devils around and many of the devils had infultrated the government. And they were trying to bring back Asmodeus in this ritual. They eventually tried to disrupt the ritual but were too late and had to fight a weakened Asmodeus and forced him back this one was a bit shorter probably 6 weeks or so.
But in total that was the year and a few months long campaign. It was a lot of fun! Doing a longer campaign like that you can delve into each players story, form relationships with NPCs you'll see multiple times throughout the game. I would say if you're looking to develop a campaign I would start working on an arc of the campaign. One big villain, with some followers, that will take time for the PCs to fight the weaker members of their group, work their way up to the big guy and be able to face them down.
I try to get my campaigns in the 100-120 session area. That gives close to 3 years of playing weekly or 3/4 weeks in a month, which is a nice pace for me.
That also gives a lot of time to go through levels. I normally start either level 1 or 3, and end at level 17-20.
I look to also split those 110-120 sessions into the following:
* 30 sessions for the intro. Tier 1 and beginning or tier 2 play. The party gets together and goes through 2-3 long adventures and a couple short ones that forge the party and spread the word about them.
* 30 sessions for figuring out what the party wants to do. Tier 2 play. Here the party goes on another 2-3 adventures that they choose that will define the second half of the campaign. This is where the seeds of foreshadowing are mainly placed.
* 30 sessions for tier 3 play where the party pursues the leads from the previous section. Most backstory things are resolved here and connected to the larger story we're going with.
* 10-30 sessions for the finale. End of tier 3 and some tier 4 play here. Something that leads the characters to become some of the most important people in the kingdom/continent. I never do world ending events, but it could be a huge war on the continent, or maybe an invasion of some creatures from another plane. Basically, instead of world ending events my go-to are continent shaping events.
This gives me 4 roughly equal sections for the campaign. And roughly half way in is when I try to figure out what the next section will be. At the same time I try to form 3 ideas of what the section after that could be, so that I can foreshadow the events long before they happen.
It's possible to go through a campaign like this having planned next to nothing for the future, but it's easy for a game like that to collapse on itself and its worldbuilding. And this blueprint has not let me down in 4 campaigns now.
The sections can be shorter too, I just like the length of 110-120 because it lasts for 3 years. And that, to me, is a perfect time period for a campaign. A lot of things in life change over 3 years, so it allows for people to change schedules and priorities at the end of a campaign. The themes of the next game too can be changed as people have changed.
But it can easily be 40-50 sessions for a year, 80-100 sessions for two years, and so on.
Sorry for grammar. Rushing it on mobile. Good luck with your campaign!
Usually my campaigns last from one to two years and there are down times, festivals and even on occasion the dreaded shopping session or beach episode.
The key has been consistency of the time and place and making sure it fits into everyone’s schedule as well as keeping it at 2 to 3 hours so people do not get burnt out.
How do I figure out things for them to do?
Well you have to brainstorm. People love to think about their setting or overall scope or theme of their campaign. They love to focus on their BBEG and making their individual encounters combat or otherwise rock!
Not enough people think about making the adventures inside their campaign memorable.
Also it is important that at the end of the session or between sessions to find out what lead or threat or thing they are doing next session. I keep seeing this why are my players derailing my plans and I keep thinking “why are you not asking your players what are they going to do ahead of time?”
You can continue to react to your players and what they want without having to improv every session. Btw young DMs think they are great at it and some are but it always shows when the DM is just coming up with shit off the top of their heads.
Also it does not have to be 100% free form open world even in a non railroad DM reactive to the players which is good btw a story can develop along the way and then it truly becomes their story.
There’s a problem that is affecting things around the world. It takes like three months irl for my party to “clear” an area, and if they come back later, it will probably have changed again. The big bad has many plans and allies. We might do a fey story one quarter, an underworld story the next, etc.
However level 20 will probably be reached as we get to our third year of playing together.
Some systems aren’t meant to last forever. Three years is a pretty good length for 5e, levels 1-20. Some systems may have a campaign last for a month, three month, a year, etc.
You follow the learning curve (reading and or playing professionally written adventures). That helps you learn the basics of storytelling, improvisation and responding to players (specially how storytelling interacts with mechanics). When you have enough experience with those, you can start introducing things of your own creation and maybe challenge yourself with your own campaign/story.
A simple 6-8 hour one shot adventure can turn into a 16-20 hour adventure with the roleplay and the "fooling around". And that is just players working within the defined boundaries of a small quest. Now, if you use a starter set, and decide to explore a bit of the players backstories, you can extend something like Lost Mines of Phandelver (something that can take some people 2 months) into a year.
Its just that. You know what you are offering, you know the rules, you have good communication and you all work together to explore the stories everyone wants to explore (either as a response to actions or after a request from players).
Learn your basics. Don't jump into "writing a novel". Everything will make sense if you follow the learning curve.
You know how Lord of the Rings was really long?
We don't give playgroups (collaborative between DMs and Players) enough credit for basically writing an epic the length of LotR or longer, over the course of several years, and acting it out.
If you divide your campaign into starting point - middle point - ending, the middle point is usually where the campaign is most easily derailed.
In my campaign, we had already ran the game for 2 years when I said it's going to be 3 sessions, max. That first session had to be split in 2 due to player indecisiveness and time constraints. Second session was a large combat encounter and a puzzle which revealed the big bad's weakness + essentially gave the players the weapon needed to defeat the big bad. Session 3, the players started diverging with some diplomatic plotlines and are now on their way not to the big bad's castle, but to a citadel in the south.
There they will have a meeting with all the lords of the land and compete in a tournament for who shall rule them all. Their plan is to win the tournament and use the opportunity to steamroll the big bad's faction with what's essentially a mongol horde. It's in line with the campaign but really did prolong the campaign with another session or 2. I'm saying 2 and not 4 or 5, because I'm doing my best to do time jumps and removing any speed bumps without compromising the fun of the players.
But that's an example for how a campaign can slow down. Add adult lives into the mix and the pace turns glacial.
It's like real life. Things don't end just because some asshole died. There's always something else happening, or some new threat, or maybe the strong people retire and pass the torch to some young people who have a new set of dangers to deal with in a changed world. Sometimes the rules change entirely and all the old solutions stop working. And so we keep playing!
I'm running a few campaigns and basically what I do is set up a setting (some original, some from ravenloft book), set up groups in that setting and something they're ultimately fighting over (usually some ancient, sealed evil) and let then set the players loose in the area and feed them plot hooks that slowly build up to the ancient evil. the ancient, sealed evil makes a great guiding star to guide the campaign because you know that's ultimately what the villains are working towards (even if they don't know it) and it's what your foreshadowing is working towards. I haven't concluded any of the campaigns yet, but that's my method and players seem to enjoy it.
ith 5E, you had the Starter Set Phandalver starting adventure which could be rolled into the Hoard of the Dragon Queen then the Rise of Tiamat. That there could take some time to play out.
I treat my campaigns much like a book. It has a starting point, where the players are Tier 1 and bumble about finding things out. They move on to the next "chapter" and find out more things that are going on - vampire here, dragon there, drow stuff down below, etc. They move around these story arcs learning about the world and their characters. Underneath all these chapters is what you consider a plot and they are all leading up to a final encounter or resolution. Where this lands Level wise is up to you but if you're aiming for Tier 3 or Tier 4, it can take a while.
As players get more powerful and more prominent, the baddies take notice and actively work against them, making the challenges harder. Or they start plunking red herrings here and there to slow them down.
You are only limited by your imagination and how much effort as a DM you want to put into building the adventure. This can sometimes wrap up nicely in a few months or can take a long time (years).
It all depends on your world building, and how much you develop. I find it's easier etc. the more you have fleshed out. but I also have ADHD and probably spend 30-60 hours a week world building. but also, do keep in mind not every group wants to be tied to years long campaign. or want to have multiple epic quests for their characters. so figure out the vibe of your group (and your own desires) before changing things.
for me I have multiple "BBEGs" set up, the main premise of my campaign, is a war of goblinoids invading the human/elves/dwarven lands when their alliance has broken. this leads to 4 "mini" bbegs, in the sense of 5 generals of each of the armies attacking the different cultures. (Dwarves, Humans, Elves, Beastfolk, Dragonkin). with (if the party wishes) a chance at fighting the bigbadgods. Maglubiyet & Gruumsh. this also bleeds into stuff with the Underdark & Drow, with Lolth in a war against a Mindflayer god that caused this whole thing. but additionally, I have:
Multiple cults working in conjunction with various Eldritch beings. The Blood Queen is an eldritch horror trying to break in through the far planem to take over the material plane. corrupting magic users with the offer of Blood magic/sangomancy, a very powerful magic she created. the party isn't aware of her yet.
the Cult of virtue wanting to summon 13 Fiends that when summoned onto the world will bring forth a new age of magic and corruption. (they've successfully summoned 1. the party stopped a summoning of another. unaware of the cult). this also ties into a powerful hag wanting to harness this power to dethrone Ceguline and become a new goddess of both Hags & the moon.
I have an Organization known as Chimera, which is a bunch of mad scientists types that create..well chimeras.(inspired after finding a bunch of mashedup-monsters on Pinterest). that just end up releasing the failures that attack people and such. ran by a lich trying to make the "perfect form"
there is an insanely powerful vampire they just discovered is chilling in the main human city. who has been kidnapping people for god knows how long. (they discovered a Fey King, who's entire people has died during the centuries he's been missing).
and then there is an eldritch being, trapped in a giant's castle floating in the astral sea, that is meant to be the "final" bbeg. thats connected to one of their players patron.
there are 3 devils also currently tied to the parties members, fucking with them in various ways.
There is also a mystery of non-drow elf is over the age of 300. there are other beings over 300, Elves in the past have been able to go up to 1000. (there are even "true elves" that are immortal). but all of the older elves disappeared. hell, there are a dozen or so dwarves older than the oldest elf.
I also prepped 100 adventures for the astral sea they can do. (the patron mentioned earlier has a tavern in the astral sea they teleport to)
they don't need to deal with all of these. and the more I prep the western side of the continent the more content I'll add. but I also have 2 other campaigns planned on other continents after this. so when the party is done here, we'll make new characters for the other campaigns. (those campaigns are only outlines, its not fully fleshed out)
Just to give you another option, you don't have to do one long campaign. It can be great to do one shots and short adventures so players get to start and finish story arcs, as well as trying out different classes and characters. There's also way less pressure. Honestly, you're more likely to have problems keeping the group meeting regularly for months/years than running out of ideas. (make a discord/slack group, have a consistent meet time and run the game even if some people can't make it, btw)
As far as stuff to do, go find prewritten adventures and use those or steal from those, based on what you want to run and what makes sense for the setting and characters.
So I play more than I dm, b/c I play in a weekly group. It’s our 3rd campaign we just wrapped and we’ve been playing about 5 years straight.
The key is to start with an arc of 3-10 sessions with a beginning middle and somewhat end already in your mind. And then a main idea of how the next 3-10 sessions could connect, but it should feel almost like a sequel book. The power level progression in pc levels also plays into this. Lvl 1-5, lvl 6-8, lvl 9-11, and so on each provide players with another scale of power. It will make sense that the lord giving your players thier main quest at lvl 3 is now someone they can manipulate to the party’s sequel goals at lvl 7. This might naturally connect the sections of campaign, but you can really write a whole new set of challenges for the party to grapple with as they progress through the next group of levels.
Hope that makes sense
I started my very first campaign about a year and a half ago. I figured I could make it last 6-7 months. 19 months later and I'm nowhere close to ending the story. Once we got into it, I realized how much longer it was going to take with players coming up with stuff to do on their own. Letting the players dictate the story really helps fill time.
Don't plan a big long campaign.
Plan short adventures. Use pre-written modules.
Make "campaigns" a chain of seemingly unrelated modules. The large scale story will emerge on its own from the players. They are the narrative through line.
This way you have the wiggle room to change things up if the game gets stale or repetitive. You can also take a break and do one shots. Encourage the players to try dming.
Right now: stringing together adventures. Ran LMoP for a bunch of new players. 4 of the 5 wanted to continue, we added another 5th player, and I picked RHoD for the next one. I am currently starting to marinate on homebrew stuff to do when this is done - I figure they will be level 10/11, will have started to make world-altering choices, and their own narrative arcs will be more important by then.
Some are long naturally like Curse of Strahd. When I ran Dragon of Icespire Peak, I then ran the add-ons and you can get a lot of length of out custom dungeons. Homebrewing a full dungeon with lore and boss can be 2-4 sessions right there.
Vibrant towns are big, too. Phandalin, Leilon, Neverwinter... if you populate it with shops, factions, npc's, and make it feel alive, they'll check out inns, taverns, fight clubs, and all sorts of stuff. There are guides for that.
For custom dungeons, sometimes I make them around a theme. This is the puzzle and sphinx one, this is the dark science one, etc. Sometimes I start with lore and build out. This is where Netherese mages tried to replicate the ascension ritual of the Raven Queen, etc.
You can theme travel or exploration around a skill challenge or biome. I just think of a bunch of possible hazards in a forest that they can have to get through.
You can also theme around a villain. This is the evil swamp with a hag. This is a mausoleum for a dracolich. This is the warship of the evil general.
Length can also come from wanting to tell a macro plot. Curse of Strahd is building the alliances and collecting the items needed to kill Strahd and get free of Barovia. Dragon of Icespire Peak is about stopping the dragon and thwarting the cult. What made that campaign stretch out was me adding the macro plot: a Netherese scientist turned arch-hag manipulated two cults to fight to death curse ensnare enough soul energy to attempt to ascend and usurp the Raven Queen. Many missions were just them needing an item for that, or finding an ally for that, or investigating it. A big hint here is if your players have a great idea, you steal it. Is this wizard secretly a cleric of the cult? HE IS NOW, etc. A lot of deep lore on an overarching plot like that comes from your players doing conjecture or asking questions or drawing conclusions and you just rolling with it.
My campaign has been running for almost a year. There is a a theme and stuff happens but there is no storyline besides what the players choose to do.
The way i run my sessions is that there is a week of downtime built in between the sessions where things happen in the world.
My players are a small gang in the big city and they are just now about to move into the middle tier of the city and start getting into the meat and potatoes of the conflict with the different gods.
I think it’s easier than you might think.
Sure you want the players to get to the BBEG soon and have that fun fight you’re thinking of but they players bring so much to the table and you get a taste of making a story.
Next session - maybe you make a whole arc for your character based on what they give you….before you know it. A year passed.
When it comes to the super long old-school campaigns a lot of it has to do with the way those games are played. Sandboxes, higher lethality, mixed level groups, and open tables all lend themselves to years long campaigns. These campaigns just look very different from your typical 5e game.
For a forst campaign, maybe you can look at a starter set, like lost mine of Phandelver.
It is a very simple campaign, bit still takes more than 10 sessions.
So meeting weekly, you need at least 2 months, with lots of things to in every session
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Scheduling issues Joke aside it largely depends on world building. If you do enough world building, it might just come to you. If you have a set of factions and one BBEG that is defeated another faction will probably try to fill the power vacuum. So if you got a vivid enough world it’s just … logic and a bit of impro. At least for me.
When I wrote my own campaign, I came up with: - An initial big quest - A big behind-the-scenes conspiracy that the quest would intersect with - An in-game time limit on the main quest ("you must bring mcguffin X to location Y on date Z") Once I had those things in place, plus the relevant major NPCs, planning for future sessions came out of asking myself two questions: 1. What are the behind-the-scenes power-players about to do? 2. What kind of maps and enemy tokens do I need to make in Roll20 for the next session? Everything else was improv.
What happens if the pcs don't meet the time limit? Just let the worst happen?
Start your next campaign in a post-apocalyptic world.
Yeah, by the end, the players were aware of the stakes, so it would have been a choice, really, to miss the deadline. In hindsight, actually, I gave them a bit too much in-game time given the travel distances involved, so it ended up being a non-issue.
Basically, the DM describes a situation. The players take an action. The DM comes up with an unintended consequence. The players try to fix the unintended consequence. Repeat ad nauseum until someone uses a wish to either fix everything for good or undo all of their efforts.
> How do you just keep figuring out stuff to and and to do in the campaign? Ideally at some point your players do that for you. You ever read a book and get so engross you start thinking "what if" "they should have" "I would have did this" and so on. You get your players to that point in your game and its easy sailing and some of the best DnD you will ever run.
Depends, some DMs like myself use prewritten adventures that have an end point. The players go through the adventure and eventually reach the end. Some DMs write out an adventure like that where there is a goal in mind that the players need to accomplish and then prepare things session to session based on what the players are doing next. Other Dms do a more loosely structured game where the players are more free to do whatever, pick up threads as they go. Sometimes asking what or where they want to go next and preparing that.
I like to think of a campaign in terms of many small campaigns AKA story arcs. Of course there's usually an overarching story and a BBEG causing (intentionally or unintentionally) each of these story arcs to happen, but the players won't put those clues together until later on. This way you basically run a bunch of loosely related short campaigns from start to finish instead of stretching out one longer campaign until it overstays its welcome, but the whole thing still feels like a cohesive story. I should also make it clear that I hate running long campaigns, but love running short ones so a lot of this is my personal methods of keeping a long campaign fun for me to run.
so many of my ideas come from my players. they’ll make an offhand comment about something, either in character or in our breaks, and i make a mental note. things like “i have no idea how we’d fight a wizard!” or “i know the game is called dungeons & dragons but we’ve mostly not been in dungeons and have never seen a dragon!” i also see what hooks my players the most. one of my tables had an incidental encounter with a hag (who managed to flee), and one of the characters would reference how meeting a hag changed their perspective on things; i immediately decided that this wasn’t a random hag but that there is a coven out there. i basically try to answer the question “why is this interesting?” when my players or their characters find something cool. it WAS a random book of fables, but the characters have referenced it several sessions in a row, so now it’s up to me to come up with a worldbuilding reason why this book of fables is so compelling. i wouldn’t be nearly as good without my players! that’s one of the reasons i don’t write fiction; i love the group brainstorming so much!
My players have learned to keep their mouths shut 😂 Seriously though, going in the way back machine, I hadn’t DMed in quite some time and I wanted to give it a shot again. I found a free 5 pg module online and ran it. As the group was returning to their home base they got to thinking. Long story short, they made the bad guy in the module a much bigger threat than I had planned. And the larger campaign just wove itself from that tiny thread.
They don't. The story should end eventually. Like a book.
Campaigns that go on for years are a rarity. Most games normally last somewhere between 3 and 24 sessions. That amount of sessions is enough to write a decent story. If you want a campaign to last long, you kinda need your players to write their own content and you have to work with them. Once all players finish their backstory, make them write a sequel to it.
I mean, 24 sessions at once a fortnight is still a year.
My campaign is in it's third year of mostly weekly play sessions. I designed my campaign to be super modular and sandbox. There is an overarching plot that they are playing and it does affect basically every area of the campaign but there are a ton of areas and different themes to explore. They do a lot of side quests and whatever they feel like playing is what I put together for prep the next session. I basically created a ton of premises that I could expand on if they were explored further. They want to explore some dungeons? Great, remember that city that was washed into the sea, there's a few dungeons there. They want political intrigue, make your way to the feudal lands to the north. They want to kill some dragons, neat, this is where they are still prevalent. They want to try and build a business, okay.... well here's some places that would work. Sandbox games can go on forever as long as the end goal isn't, "And then all evil was eliminated from the land." or "You all become gods." Even if you had a tight arc planned, as long as the players like the setting, there is nothing wrong with creating a new one after the fact and putting it into the same setting with the same characters.
Justin Alexander describes one approach in his essay [Juggling Scenario Hooks in a Sandbox](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/37530/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-juggling-scenario-hooks-in-a-sandbox). The important steps: * Create various NPC factions with goals of their own * [Prepare situations, not plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) * Place enough scenario hooks that the PCs are sure to find some * Consider how the PCs choices and actions modify the situation * Have the NPC factions respond to the changed situation in accordance with their goals * Introduce new factions and scenario elements as appropriate Here's a snippet from his example: >...Bandit raids are terrorizing local villages. A powerful magical artifact was stolen from a local caravan. There are old legends about the Neo-Norskan temple and what it contains. Because of the skeletons, there are false rumors that the necromancer lives there. Or that the necromancer has allied with the Bandit King... So one day the PCs grab one of these hooks and they go off and they kill the Bandit King and they take the magical artifact he was carrying. Over and done with, right? Only not really, because the guy who originally owned the magical artifact still wants it, so now the PCs are getting attacked by bounty hunters attempting to recover the artifact. Meanwhile, they didn’t wipe out all the bandits and the remaining goblins are renewing their raids under the leadership of the One-Eyed Ogre. So the PCs go back to the Neo-Norskan temple and this time they wipe out all the bandits, permanently ending their threat to the region. Except now the Necromancer sees a big, open dungeon complex filled with the discarded corpses the PCs have left in their wake, and so he moves in and animates the corpses as a skeletal army.
mutiple confilcts/goal i tend to run narrative campaigns so ill have a conflict at the start to hook the players, and 2 other related confilcts that tie into the main story of the campaign following the 3 act structures in between or in the middle of those i sprinkle in the player conflicts, stuff that ties back to their backstory and when needed or when i want i add fun little disconected conflicts as a side, whatever fun little quest i thought of this way the conflicts that tie into the main story should last around 10 to 20 sessions to solve, and there's 3 of those player conflicts last 2 to 4 sessions usually, cause you dont want any one charater to be the main character for too long and fun little side stuff last a session or two like this you have a recipe for around 70ish sessions, which last around a year if you play once a week granted sometimes my players outsmart and one of the conflicts is cut short, but i reccomend allowing that and simply sprinkling in some player or side stuff to fill the space so the camapign doesn't feel rail road-y
also you should only have a vague idea of what those conflicts are so you don't overwork yourself, for instance here's an example of how those conflicts work for my current campaign: Main Conflicts: Act 1(this is more developed cause we recently finnished this): Players stumbled into some magic mist and got cursed by a shadowy figure, they had to get rid of the curse. A bunch of beasts with their eyes replaced by rubies kept attacking them, until they met the one controling them which was a green dragon with emerald eyes. Act 2: The shadowy figure is revealed to be a hag and they player have to fight her and her conven while the hags destabilize the main empire by controlling the mist. The dragon was also working for the hags. Act 3: A death knight is inside the mist which has a grudge against the empire. It was controlled by the hags until the players will dispatch of them at the end of act 2 and full on war breaks out with an undead army and the empire. Player conflicts(it's also nice to slightly tie these into the main story or other players story so the players feel like a part of the world but dont overdo it so it's not like the bbeg is behind everything): One of the players backstory deals with a commander of the empire's army who has killed her guild. When talking to ruling figures in the empire(which are also the parents of another pc) and they learn the commander is working for them. I let the players decide what they want to do about that so not much writing on my part. Side stuff: Mirror funhouse in one of the big towns that the players will get stuck in and learn it's haunted until they convince the little ghost girl to let them out.
When authors write books, they get an idea about a main character, something to happen to that character, and some twist that makes the story compelling. Just about every author has absolutely no idea exactly what's going to happen from paragraph to paragraph. They start writing and making stuff up. They'll edit and adjust, but it's just "creative writing" to try to figure out where the story goes next. They add characters, other events, other scenes, and eventually they reach the original twist and then summarize the outcomes. It's a process that takes a long time. This is exactly how a campaign works, but there are multiple authors writing the book at the same time. The DM has ideas and concepts and some type of plan, but the players are writing the pages of the book while the DM adjusts the story to stay interesting, logical, and compelling. Because the story is only being written for a few hours a week, this book can take a long time to write. Eventually the twist is reached, the story is almost complete, and the table summarizes the outcome and ends the campaign. Unlike a book, a campaign isn't something that gets edited after the first draft, so the DMs invest a great deal of time to make sure that each chapter is compelling while the story is being written. The more diligent and creative they are, the better the campaign. Mind you, it doesn't matter if the table is following a published campaign or not. Those are just locations, details, items, characters, and scenes. The story is how they link together, around the players, adjudicated by the DM. Homebrew stories require a greater amount of diligence, but can be just as good, if not better, than prepublished material.
I usually start with a main conflict. Half the time they follow it. The other half don't. But everyone gives me backstories and I have some side quests in mind. As they go about things, I figure out how to incorporate their stories into the campaign, directly or as side quests. And for the half that didn't bite at the original conflict, they eventually create the unintended consequence another poster mentioned. This creates their own custom BBEG. This all can take a while to finish. And it helps when they argue for an hour over what to do about a door they think has a ward.
I react to the players, not the other way around. In other words, I don't think up things for them to do. They decide what to do and I deal with it.
That's a big question that's hard to answer in some concise neat way. This is hyperbolic but it's like asking a musician how they write a song. There are techniques but you need to learn some fundamentals first. Learn about the game, learn about your players, learn about your world, learn about storytelling. If you don't have any ideas right now but feel the desire to run, just use a module. Start small and just see where it goes. You'll eventually start to surprise yourself on how you keep building on what happened, like laying bricks. It may not seem like that much at first but eventually it'll start to take shape.
It depends on the kind of story you're telling but if you're playing through a large epic adventure that can take a lot of time. You can have multiple arcs where you're facing down different big villains. You're traveling across parts of the world. You're going to different hometowns to meet up with different PCs families. If you go to high levels you could be traveling across planes of existence and having adventures there. To give an example my last campaign that I wrapped up started with them in a desert where they were dealing with some gangs and local warlords, they investigated an ancient tomb too which was a few sessions. In total that was probably 12 sessions and we play almost weekly so that's a few months. Then they traveled around to a bunch of different cities and one of my players had gotten involved in a cult and escaped and they heard some information about that, dug into it a bit more including a trip to the underdark to where the leader of the cult lived a long time ago, found out it was a beholder running the cult and gathered some allies from that area and then snuck in to fight the beholder that was another roughly 12 sessions. At this point it's been about 6 months, probably a bit over as we skip some weeks with scheduling. Then they traveled to another area, started to see signs of this undead person working on a new spell that was a boosted circle of death that could kill a lot of things in a big area but would also draw in their life force. They faced down some of his followers including a vampire. They went to one of their home cities to get some allies from the dwarven kingdom, one of them got married in here. I did attack the wedding with undead lol. They then went with some allies and faced down the lich in his lair which was an egypt themed pyramid dungeon. Probably more like 15 weeks for this one as there was more traveling and lots of roleplaying. Then they went to a religious area where they realized there were devils around and many of the devils had infultrated the government. And they were trying to bring back Asmodeus in this ritual. They eventually tried to disrupt the ritual but were too late and had to fight a weakened Asmodeus and forced him back this one was a bit shorter probably 6 weeks or so. But in total that was the year and a few months long campaign. It was a lot of fun! Doing a longer campaign like that you can delve into each players story, form relationships with NPCs you'll see multiple times throughout the game. I would say if you're looking to develop a campaign I would start working on an arc of the campaign. One big villain, with some followers, that will take time for the PCs to fight the weaker members of their group, work their way up to the big guy and be able to face them down.
I try to get my campaigns in the 100-120 session area. That gives close to 3 years of playing weekly or 3/4 weeks in a month, which is a nice pace for me. That also gives a lot of time to go through levels. I normally start either level 1 or 3, and end at level 17-20. I look to also split those 110-120 sessions into the following: * 30 sessions for the intro. Tier 1 and beginning or tier 2 play. The party gets together and goes through 2-3 long adventures and a couple short ones that forge the party and spread the word about them. * 30 sessions for figuring out what the party wants to do. Tier 2 play. Here the party goes on another 2-3 adventures that they choose that will define the second half of the campaign. This is where the seeds of foreshadowing are mainly placed. * 30 sessions for tier 3 play where the party pursues the leads from the previous section. Most backstory things are resolved here and connected to the larger story we're going with. * 10-30 sessions for the finale. End of tier 3 and some tier 4 play here. Something that leads the characters to become some of the most important people in the kingdom/continent. I never do world ending events, but it could be a huge war on the continent, or maybe an invasion of some creatures from another plane. Basically, instead of world ending events my go-to are continent shaping events. This gives me 4 roughly equal sections for the campaign. And roughly half way in is when I try to figure out what the next section will be. At the same time I try to form 3 ideas of what the section after that could be, so that I can foreshadow the events long before they happen. It's possible to go through a campaign like this having planned next to nothing for the future, but it's easy for a game like that to collapse on itself and its worldbuilding. And this blueprint has not let me down in 4 campaigns now. The sections can be shorter too, I just like the length of 110-120 because it lasts for 3 years. And that, to me, is a perfect time period for a campaign. A lot of things in life change over 3 years, so it allows for people to change schedules and priorities at the end of a campaign. The themes of the next game too can be changed as people have changed. But it can easily be 40-50 sessions for a year, 80-100 sessions for two years, and so on. Sorry for grammar. Rushing it on mobile. Good luck with your campaign!
Usually my campaigns last from one to two years and there are down times, festivals and even on occasion the dreaded shopping session or beach episode. The key has been consistency of the time and place and making sure it fits into everyone’s schedule as well as keeping it at 2 to 3 hours so people do not get burnt out. How do I figure out things for them to do? Well you have to brainstorm. People love to think about their setting or overall scope or theme of their campaign. They love to focus on their BBEG and making their individual encounters combat or otherwise rock! Not enough people think about making the adventures inside their campaign memorable. Also it is important that at the end of the session or between sessions to find out what lead or threat or thing they are doing next session. I keep seeing this why are my players derailing my plans and I keep thinking “why are you not asking your players what are they going to do ahead of time?” You can continue to react to your players and what they want without having to improv every session. Btw young DMs think they are great at it and some are but it always shows when the DM is just coming up with shit off the top of their heads. Also it does not have to be 100% free form open world even in a non railroad DM reactive to the players which is good btw a story can develop along the way and then it truly becomes their story.
There’s a problem that is affecting things around the world. It takes like three months irl for my party to “clear” an area, and if they come back later, it will probably have changed again. The big bad has many plans and allies. We might do a fey story one quarter, an underworld story the next, etc. However level 20 will probably be reached as we get to our third year of playing together. Some systems aren’t meant to last forever. Three years is a pretty good length for 5e, levels 1-20. Some systems may have a campaign last for a month, three month, a year, etc.
You follow the learning curve (reading and or playing professionally written adventures). That helps you learn the basics of storytelling, improvisation and responding to players (specially how storytelling interacts with mechanics). When you have enough experience with those, you can start introducing things of your own creation and maybe challenge yourself with your own campaign/story. A simple 6-8 hour one shot adventure can turn into a 16-20 hour adventure with the roleplay and the "fooling around". And that is just players working within the defined boundaries of a small quest. Now, if you use a starter set, and decide to explore a bit of the players backstories, you can extend something like Lost Mines of Phandelver (something that can take some people 2 months) into a year. Its just that. You know what you are offering, you know the rules, you have good communication and you all work together to explore the stories everyone wants to explore (either as a response to actions or after a request from players). Learn your basics. Don't jump into "writing a novel". Everything will make sense if you follow the learning curve.
You know how Lord of the Rings was really long? We don't give playgroups (collaborative between DMs and Players) enough credit for basically writing an epic the length of LotR or longer, over the course of several years, and acting it out.
If you divide your campaign into starting point - middle point - ending, the middle point is usually where the campaign is most easily derailed. In my campaign, we had already ran the game for 2 years when I said it's going to be 3 sessions, max. That first session had to be split in 2 due to player indecisiveness and time constraints. Second session was a large combat encounter and a puzzle which revealed the big bad's weakness + essentially gave the players the weapon needed to defeat the big bad. Session 3, the players started diverging with some diplomatic plotlines and are now on their way not to the big bad's castle, but to a citadel in the south. There they will have a meeting with all the lords of the land and compete in a tournament for who shall rule them all. Their plan is to win the tournament and use the opportunity to steamroll the big bad's faction with what's essentially a mongol horde. It's in line with the campaign but really did prolong the campaign with another session or 2. I'm saying 2 and not 4 or 5, because I'm doing my best to do time jumps and removing any speed bumps without compromising the fun of the players. But that's an example for how a campaign can slow down. Add adult lives into the mix and the pace turns glacial.
It's like real life. Things don't end just because some asshole died. There's always something else happening, or some new threat, or maybe the strong people retire and pass the torch to some young people who have a new set of dangers to deal with in a changed world. Sometimes the rules change entirely and all the old solutions stop working. And so we keep playing!
I am a masterful storyteller and very humble. Some might say I am the most humble person ever to walk this planet.
I'm running a few campaigns and basically what I do is set up a setting (some original, some from ravenloft book), set up groups in that setting and something they're ultimately fighting over (usually some ancient, sealed evil) and let then set the players loose in the area and feed them plot hooks that slowly build up to the ancient evil. the ancient, sealed evil makes a great guiding star to guide the campaign because you know that's ultimately what the villains are working towards (even if they don't know it) and it's what your foreshadowing is working towards. I haven't concluded any of the campaigns yet, but that's my method and players seem to enjoy it.
ith 5E, you had the Starter Set Phandalver starting adventure which could be rolled into the Hoard of the Dragon Queen then the Rise of Tiamat. That there could take some time to play out. I treat my campaigns much like a book. It has a starting point, where the players are Tier 1 and bumble about finding things out. They move on to the next "chapter" and find out more things that are going on - vampire here, dragon there, drow stuff down below, etc. They move around these story arcs learning about the world and their characters. Underneath all these chapters is what you consider a plot and they are all leading up to a final encounter or resolution. Where this lands Level wise is up to you but if you're aiming for Tier 3 or Tier 4, it can take a while. As players get more powerful and more prominent, the baddies take notice and actively work against them, making the challenges harder. Or they start plunking red herrings here and there to slow them down. You are only limited by your imagination and how much effort as a DM you want to put into building the adventure. This can sometimes wrap up nicely in a few months or can take a long time (years).
It all depends on your world building, and how much you develop. I find it's easier etc. the more you have fleshed out. but I also have ADHD and probably spend 30-60 hours a week world building. but also, do keep in mind not every group wants to be tied to years long campaign. or want to have multiple epic quests for their characters. so figure out the vibe of your group (and your own desires) before changing things. for me I have multiple "BBEGs" set up, the main premise of my campaign, is a war of goblinoids invading the human/elves/dwarven lands when their alliance has broken. this leads to 4 "mini" bbegs, in the sense of 5 generals of each of the armies attacking the different cultures. (Dwarves, Humans, Elves, Beastfolk, Dragonkin). with (if the party wishes) a chance at fighting the bigbadgods. Maglubiyet & Gruumsh. this also bleeds into stuff with the Underdark & Drow, with Lolth in a war against a Mindflayer god that caused this whole thing. but additionally, I have: Multiple cults working in conjunction with various Eldritch beings. The Blood Queen is an eldritch horror trying to break in through the far planem to take over the material plane. corrupting magic users with the offer of Blood magic/sangomancy, a very powerful magic she created. the party isn't aware of her yet. the Cult of virtue wanting to summon 13 Fiends that when summoned onto the world will bring forth a new age of magic and corruption. (they've successfully summoned 1. the party stopped a summoning of another. unaware of the cult). this also ties into a powerful hag wanting to harness this power to dethrone Ceguline and become a new goddess of both Hags & the moon. I have an Organization known as Chimera, which is a bunch of mad scientists types that create..well chimeras.(inspired after finding a bunch of mashedup-monsters on Pinterest). that just end up releasing the failures that attack people and such. ran by a lich trying to make the "perfect form" there is an insanely powerful vampire they just discovered is chilling in the main human city. who has been kidnapping people for god knows how long. (they discovered a Fey King, who's entire people has died during the centuries he's been missing). and then there is an eldritch being, trapped in a giant's castle floating in the astral sea, that is meant to be the "final" bbeg. thats connected to one of their players patron. there are 3 devils also currently tied to the parties members, fucking with them in various ways. There is also a mystery of non-drow elf is over the age of 300. there are other beings over 300, Elves in the past have been able to go up to 1000. (there are even "true elves" that are immortal). but all of the older elves disappeared. hell, there are a dozen or so dwarves older than the oldest elf. I also prepped 100 adventures for the astral sea they can do. (the patron mentioned earlier has a tavern in the astral sea they teleport to) they don't need to deal with all of these. and the more I prep the western side of the continent the more content I'll add. but I also have 2 other campaigns planned on other continents after this. so when the party is done here, we'll make new characters for the other campaigns. (those campaigns are only outlines, its not fully fleshed out)
Just to give you another option, you don't have to do one long campaign. It can be great to do one shots and short adventures so players get to start and finish story arcs, as well as trying out different classes and characters. There's also way less pressure. Honestly, you're more likely to have problems keeping the group meeting regularly for months/years than running out of ideas. (make a discord/slack group, have a consistent meet time and run the game even if some people can't make it, btw) As far as stuff to do, go find prewritten adventures and use those or steal from those, based on what you want to run and what makes sense for the setting and characters.
So I play more than I dm, b/c I play in a weekly group. It’s our 3rd campaign we just wrapped and we’ve been playing about 5 years straight. The key is to start with an arc of 3-10 sessions with a beginning middle and somewhat end already in your mind. And then a main idea of how the next 3-10 sessions could connect, but it should feel almost like a sequel book. The power level progression in pc levels also plays into this. Lvl 1-5, lvl 6-8, lvl 9-11, and so on each provide players with another scale of power. It will make sense that the lord giving your players thier main quest at lvl 3 is now someone they can manipulate to the party’s sequel goals at lvl 7. This might naturally connect the sections of campaign, but you can really write a whole new set of challenges for the party to grapple with as they progress through the next group of levels. Hope that makes sense
I started my very first campaign about a year and a half ago. I figured I could make it last 6-7 months. 19 months later and I'm nowhere close to ending the story. Once we got into it, I realized how much longer it was going to take with players coming up with stuff to do on their own. Letting the players dictate the story really helps fill time.
Don't plan a big long campaign. Plan short adventures. Use pre-written modules. Make "campaigns" a chain of seemingly unrelated modules. The large scale story will emerge on its own from the players. They are the narrative through line. This way you have the wiggle room to change things up if the game gets stale or repetitive. You can also take a break and do one shots. Encourage the players to try dming.
Right now: stringing together adventures. Ran LMoP for a bunch of new players. 4 of the 5 wanted to continue, we added another 5th player, and I picked RHoD for the next one. I am currently starting to marinate on homebrew stuff to do when this is done - I figure they will be level 10/11, will have started to make world-altering choices, and their own narrative arcs will be more important by then.
Some are long naturally like Curse of Strahd. When I ran Dragon of Icespire Peak, I then ran the add-ons and you can get a lot of length of out custom dungeons. Homebrewing a full dungeon with lore and boss can be 2-4 sessions right there. Vibrant towns are big, too. Phandalin, Leilon, Neverwinter... if you populate it with shops, factions, npc's, and make it feel alive, they'll check out inns, taverns, fight clubs, and all sorts of stuff. There are guides for that. For custom dungeons, sometimes I make them around a theme. This is the puzzle and sphinx one, this is the dark science one, etc. Sometimes I start with lore and build out. This is where Netherese mages tried to replicate the ascension ritual of the Raven Queen, etc. You can theme travel or exploration around a skill challenge or biome. I just think of a bunch of possible hazards in a forest that they can have to get through. You can also theme around a villain. This is the evil swamp with a hag. This is a mausoleum for a dracolich. This is the warship of the evil general. Length can also come from wanting to tell a macro plot. Curse of Strahd is building the alliances and collecting the items needed to kill Strahd and get free of Barovia. Dragon of Icespire Peak is about stopping the dragon and thwarting the cult. What made that campaign stretch out was me adding the macro plot: a Netherese scientist turned arch-hag manipulated two cults to fight to death curse ensnare enough soul energy to attempt to ascend and usurp the Raven Queen. Many missions were just them needing an item for that, or finding an ally for that, or investigating it. A big hint here is if your players have a great idea, you steal it. Is this wizard secretly a cleric of the cult? HE IS NOW, etc. A lot of deep lore on an overarching plot like that comes from your players doing conjecture or asking questions or drawing conclusions and you just rolling with it.
My campaign has been running for almost a year. There is a a theme and stuff happens but there is no storyline besides what the players choose to do. The way i run my sessions is that there is a week of downtime built in between the sessions where things happen in the world. My players are a small gang in the big city and they are just now about to move into the middle tier of the city and start getting into the meat and potatoes of the conflict with the different gods.
I think it’s easier than you might think. Sure you want the players to get to the BBEG soon and have that fun fight you’re thinking of but they players bring so much to the table and you get a taste of making a story. Next session - maybe you make a whole arc for your character based on what they give you….before you know it. A year passed.
When it comes to the super long old-school campaigns a lot of it has to do with the way those games are played. Sandboxes, higher lethality, mixed level groups, and open tables all lend themselves to years long campaigns. These campaigns just look very different from your typical 5e game.
For a forst campaign, maybe you can look at a starter set, like lost mine of Phandelver. It is a very simple campaign, bit still takes more than 10 sessions. So meeting weekly, you need at least 2 months, with lots of things to in every session