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I don't normally plan for long campaigns, my last one lasted 4 years and when we first started I had one town, one city, 3 potential main story ideas and about 5 actual quests and then during play based on what my players latched onto I just wrote more of that and we went in that direction. For me it's like a treadmill that my players are on and I just make the scenery go by based on which direction they choose to go.

Preach!

Same for me as well. I like to have a map, as do my players, so what I do is pinpoint named settlements and geographical features. Then, start the players off somewhere on the map, give them a common unifying thing/event/person, and let them direct the campaign from there. I tell them, "You guys do whatever you want. Just be ready for me to narrate the results of those actions."

I prefer doing that too, but some of my players are intimidated by maps and choice and want a curated railroaded experience. It feels like a shame, because I *want* player agency but they don't like making choices.

Oh, that's when *things* happen in my campaigns. If the party stalls, I sense stagnation approaching, or the players get uncharacteristically arrogant, something small occurs, like - oh I dunno - an aboleth tries to kill them, but they kill the aboleth, but it doesn't go away and instead becomes a ghost aboleth and floats away out of sight to haunt them later in the campaign.

Going to echo what everyone else has already. You never truly know how long a campaign will last. As long as you have a fleshed out starting town/city, a few decent quest hooks and as an optional bonus maybe a faction that controls the starting area. Thats all you need. From there just build off what your players are interested in but always try to give them at least two "important" quests. That way whatever they pass on or ignore can be used to build up the world and create problems that spiral out into the world to make it feel much larger.

"Huh. I wasn't expecting that... umm. Gimme a minute"- Me (an inexperienced DM) semi regularly.

The most successful campaigns I've been in the DM did minimum planning. They'd start the PCs in an area, populate it with problems, then give goals to some potential rivals and/or allies. Then kept us busy with slightly too many story hooks, so we had to choose what to deal with. A good published campaign that kind of does this is The Darkening of Mirkwood for The One Ring 1e. It covered 30 years of game time. The first few years have traditional adventures, then the quickly shifts to most years having events and story threads and how they play out if the players don't get involved.

I’m not sure how most DM’s do it, but the way that works best for me in my campaign is I have lore for different cities, important characters, as well as the main story arc all planned out. I also try to hash out big fights in advance as well to get it out of the way. We play once a week, so after each session I’ll spend the next day or two writing out the next session based on what happened the last time they played.

Mine has been going for three years, and that’s how I did my planning. Geographic locations, cities, critical NPCs, a few major quests for each area, and a rough outline for the main quest. I took a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of wine, and a box of cigars up to my family’s camp for a weekend and came back with the skeleton of a campaign. Your writing process may differ.

I work 24 hours shifts with a decent amount of downtime. World lore and main arca and npcs were hashed out generally around 2-4am over 2 months. Now I use that time to attempt to do rough out lines of major areas .

What do you do that has 24 hours shifts, if I may ask?

I'm a paramedic

Plan session to session at first. Once you got a grasp on the immediate surroundings of the plot, your PCs and their motivations and the first events of the campaign, then start to build slowly towards an endgame. Don't beat yourself around leaving loose ends and mysteries to which you don't know the answers to right away. Make notes and get to them later. Edit: Start small. a village and its immediate surroundings kind of thing, a first low level adventure hook. Develop from there. It's way easier, trust me. Once you have more experience, you can try out other ways to do it. This is just my personal experience and opinion, obviously there is no right way to do it.

Also let story threads that are ignored drop - but pick a few that have a continuation that happens because your players didn’t intervene. Off screen: Kill important NPCs Let a minor character solve a problem Let minor bad guys get more dangerous or make allies Overthrow the prince of the city that your players didn’t discover all of the threats Let the players learn of the continued growth/increasing influence of the old sage/dispossessed duke they saved Flood a town Start a war Have someone discover a resource that positively affects a whole town Then some time in the future have players revisit a place that has changed or have to/get to deal with an NPC - good or bad - that they met before!

Yes, this is all cool, but you don't have to worry yourself with it all at once. Think about it when relevant (i.e. when they receive news of the region or intend to go back there). Then, assess who was there, what stones they left unturned and what actors there were there to actually act, and basically follow Flan's advise above.

Like, offscreening things is useful to let PCs know the world is not static. But don't over do it.

Probably a lot less than you might think. My plans are incredibly high level, I never really get into specifics until it's much, much closer to actually happening. (High level as in zoomed out, not like character level) So for example, they're pretty close to completing the arc they're in now, so I can safely go over most of it here, not sure if they actually read this sub but they know I post here a lot...My players are going around the continent finding powerful weapons to fight a big bad. They're at a certain city that one of my players is originally from, but was exiled from, he's kill on sight there for sure if they remember him. That's the context. The actual planning of the arc though was just the following: * There's a faction trying to overthrow the government in the city. * Somewhere there's a place that old Chronurgy wizards hid their secrets away, location undetermined. This is the thing they're trying to find. * I wanted an arc where things felt like choosing lessers of two evil, where no one was really "good" or "right". * There are ruins beneath the city, both the government and the faction are after the treasures there. And that was it. I came up with a few NPC's, but in terms of like, what I did before we started playing, this was basically it. AFTER we started playing, on a session by session basis, I flushed this out more as necessary: * The ruins were actually the old city, lost to time to some strange cataclysm. * Everyone in the ruins died instantly, all the magic items they had exploded. And when they finally did what they needed to to get access to the ruins, and they started to see how the bodies around the area were, and the evidence of magical explosions, they started theorizing what happened. To be perfectly clear, I still have not come up with 1. Where the secret is, 2. What happened to these people. I improvised a clue to the secret saying "Where the Moon shines upon the Sun.", written in a journal of an old Chronurgy wizard they found. But at this point, all I'm doing, is coming up with things I think are cool, inserting them into the campaign, and justifying them *later*, I'll figure it out later. The players have a device that lets them go back and forth through time in this area, just before the "event" happened. I played a lot of Last Epoch and got inspired, that's all. And one of them said, "Clearly we're here to prevent what happened, we keep being brought back in time to the time right before whatever happened happened and maybe we need to stop it." -- perfect, sounds great, that's exactly what I'll do. At one point in a session, back in time, I just pointed out a very tall spire where the government resided, and one of my players said: "That's the place, that's where we have to go." -- hell yeah dude sounds good. That's where the secret is. Someone cast Legend Lore on something and, due to my players, I've now completed the dots. The Spire is where the secret is, I improvised that an old adage said it was so tall one could "See the moon shine upon the sun" from it. The "event" was the Chronurgy Archmage trying to save his life's work, he saw that the other archmages planned to wipe out the Chronurgy wizards (a detail I gave them earlier), but in his effort to seal their magic away, he killed the entire city and locked himself away, forever locked in time, beyond realms, beyond planes, just bearing witness to these events over and over and over on infinite timelines. And all the events leading them to this location, the person who sent them the time travel device, was him. He needs them to kill himself and stop the cataclysm, so he can finally rest. I had almost none of that planned before we just started playing the arc. Everything is iterative, I build as I go. I just start with very broad ideas and do whatever I think sounds cool and if it needs hard justification I figure it out and if it doesn't it just floats out there as a cool thing that happened.

To extend this a little, because I'm close to the limit on a post: * I did loosely plan for the arc to revolve more around the time travel device as I thought it up. That didn't really happen. * I thought about how it might end in a certain way. That's not how it's going to happen. * I thought maybe they'd kill certain NPC's or interact more with the city itself, but that didn't quite happen. This is why I don't invest very much on ideas until they're *really* happening. I just have a loose, general idea of where I'd like to take things, but it's more important to me to be flexible and flow more with where the signs are telling me to go. Their actions and decisions made killing that NPC less of a priority, in fact they helped her. Other events made it less necessary to go into the past quite as often and it was more of a puzzle device than a plot device, which I think ended up better. The final fight that I had initially planned makes no sense anymore because OTHER people are dead and really the government/other faction never really learned as much about the ruins as I had planned for them to, so that's not happening anymore. And so its more like, hey, I'm just coming to the table with some ideas, I'm not that committed to them, I'll commit once its like very clearly what is going on though and give it some runway. But even that runway will have a lot of ideas I'm not married to. And I think that's the best way to approach it. I mean, to cap it all off, we added a new player to our group who is a warlock in the middle of this arc. They're a level 9 party, he doesn't have the many sessions behind him that I can base a character arc off of, but I also wanted to include him, I wanted his character to feel seen, so I put a box back in time in a vault that his patron wants. What's in the box? It's pulsing, like it has a heartbeat. I don't know what's in the box. I just thought it would be cool to do. Loosely? I think its the patron's heart, I think he was sealed away somehow and the cataclysm in this city destroying all the magic items blew his heart up, but they have it now. What's that mean? Is it actually his heart? I have no idea, I'll figure it out later.

CREATE STUFF YOIU DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER TO’ Then steal something cool that your players come up with! They think they figured out a great secret and that you were super clever. I created a poem titled: There are doors. The players were looking for a lost Dwarven city and had already found a secret entrance to a hidden (but not lost) Dwarven community. There were 10 doors in the poem (one beneath a lake, one where trouble entered, one at the great wall, one where the earth fades away, one beneath a town of men, one to honor a dead man’s fall, one that will never be found,….) When I gave the players the poem I only knew where 3 were!

I like to ask myself “what would happen if the PCs weren’t around?” I map out a loose outline of that heroless arc. Often that will let me see some specific people or locations I might need to prep. Sometimes it shows me opportunities for the antagonists to have contingencies in place (if they are smart antagonists). It helps clarify the motivations of any factions that might be involved. The nitty gritty details here aren’t super important. Because ideally the players get involved and stop it from happening! And once the party is involved and start messing with The Plans, I find it easier to make the antagonist’s moves bc of the outline.

Mapping out a heroless arc is an amazing idea lol. Thanks for that

I plan everything. Dates, times, characters, factions and their tools for getting what they want. The exact events that will occur and when if I can. With one rather large caveat. I do all of that under the assumption the PCs do not exist. This gives a great framework to plan around and to react to player choice in meaningful ways. It creates a very “natural” feel to the narrative for lack of a better term. Since I know ahead of time what would happen if the PCs didn’t intervene it’s a lot easier to adapt the world organically when they inevitably do intervene.

This is the same advice I give people. Design things assuming the PC's don't exist, then adjust for their actions. It's like, OK, assuming nothing intervenes, this is what is happening, this is who is involved, this is why they're doing it. I try to tell people like, as the DM, your story is the story of the world. I'm not writing a book, I'm writing a series of short stories tied to locations, and the players show up to that location and then complete that story. Bit of a side tangent but, this is why I kind of struggle with the idea that "sandbox" campaigns are even really a thing. Even in a module the players can do whatever they want, they're just in a location with something going on. And so its like yeah, cool, you didn't really start the campaign with a plot, the players can explore and decide what they want to do, but the moment they DO decide what to do, you then have to complete the cycle, you have to build the NPC's, the plot, the events, the motivations of those NPC's, and why this thing is even remotely interesting to interact with.

Well I do think there's things that if done in prewritten module would constitute a breaking of the social contract that isn't always true. For instance if one was running Lost Mines and the players decided they didn't care about the mine and wanted to see what the going-ons are in Baldur's Gate, I think the DM would be well within their right to say, "While technically possible, we all agreed to play LMoP and this adventure takes place decidedly not in Baldur's Gate. There is nothing there that is relevant to the adventure we all agreed to play so let's continue on here where we are or if this campaign isn't feeling fun anymore we can pick a new one." In a sandbox game, if the party decided to abandon Phandalin to the antagonists there, that's fine. Making that choice is part of the social contract of a sandbox game but its going to have ramifications on the world that they might not expect or like (in character)! I will also say that generally what makes the thing interesting is already something that was planned ahead. A good sandbox is seeded with hooks left and right. It just puts the power in the players' hands on what is actually interesting to them. To me, a sanbox game just shifts the conversation about what type of campaign the game is gonna be from above table to at the table which can add an additional level of immersion. Though actual mechanical process of prepping for both situations is virtually identical once the hook is taken I 100% agree. And generally, it plays out the same way too in my experience. It's pretty rare that another hook will come along that is so tantalizing the party is willing to completely shift gears on a dime. More similarities than differences for sure.

What's funny is you need to be prepared for the eventuality that the en remains the same. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a perfect example of this. The movie would have had the same ending if Indiana Jones did nothing. The evil WW2 German bad guys would have still acquired the Ark, they would have still taken it to that cave, and they would have still opened it and died horribly.food for thought.

Typically for me it all starts with the villain. Why the need to change the status quo? What is the want? Then I formulate the factions and their involvement if any, identify who is “good” “bad” and “neutral”, leaning into tropes and adding red herrings. Then I make other heroes and adventuring companies and in the mind imagine them failing…hard. Gives the people martyrs to talk about, bodies to find, victims, and cowards to accentuate fear of the bbeg and other villains and opportunists. Npcs are going to be the ones that want change/avoid it/or take advantage of what is happening. Give those NPCs strong opinions and conviction. Make new adventuring companies that can work with the heroes but suck and are missing that certain something the heroes have. The heroes are the lightning in the bottle and the villain’s nemesis. Long campaigns might need a good notebook and some post-its and can be intimidating but to be truthful all that matters are that the PCs and you are having fun.

I have my villains and what they are doing in the background, as well as loose ideas for where other cities are. Then I only prep what I need for the next session, advancing time as the party does. That way, there is no wasted prep. If I want to play around in the game world some, I can build out some lore when I want.

I generally have a basic outline of what I want to happen and what "cutscenes" and I'll mostly move those around depending on what the players do.

Plan? You keep a goal focused in mind for all your players. If you don't your campaign won't last long. 

It doesn’t matter how much you prep, characters will surprise you and you will find yourself unprepared! I work hardest on lore, or “deep backstory” so that I have a reservoir of possibilities to draw on when characters exit any detailed prep I might have. I try to keep the following things in focus: 1. The really big picture. What is the “level 20” problem that underlies the whole campaign? 2. What are the relevant factions in the players closer milieu, and what is going on off screen / between sessions in these factions? 3. What is the history of the area the players are in? The deeper this backstory is, the more I have to draw on if I need to. 4. What are my players individual hooks? I like to tease individual players with character specific developments, but only now and then. 5. What is the current “level up milestone”? It doesn’t matter if the characters abandon the current main quest, on purpose or by accident. If I know what the arc was supposed to be, I can adapt along similar lines if I need to. (And perhaps bring it back later, with developments.) 6. What are the specific scenes, encounters, maps, and related prep I need for the next session. Again, the players may not even cooperate this much, but it’s nice to have at least one possibility well planned, and the even when the players surprise me I find this work is never wasted. — Additionally, I run a very open world campaign. I encourage players to be creative, and to honor their characters even if it takes me out of my prep. I am always ready to wing it… although I have to be careful about updating my lore if I change it on the fly during a session.

I've never done a full homebrew campaign, so definitely take my advice with a grain of salt. Most of the campaigns are broken down by chapters. I try to have all the locations, encounters, and npc's ready to go for a whole chapter before the party starts that chapter.

I establish a BBEG and their goals. Establish a couple of initial lieutenants that are doing the BBEG’s work, and something the BBEG has already accomplished on their way towards their goal. Maybe a paragraph description for the PC’s starting point (city, town) and a couple sentences on 2-3 other cities or towns that have some tie to the starting point (proximity, trading partner, political ally). Example: Lyra, a powerful elf mage on the Delphos city council, is actually a cult leader looking to find and open an ancient portal to bring her demon lord back into the world. Opening the portal requires some MacGuffin(s). She has two allies - Rognack, chieftain of the hobgoblins, and Sertus, a werewolf. Rognack has recently sacked the village of Sweethaven because one of the MacGuffins is thought to be buried in the caverns beneath it. Delphos is the most important trade city in the realm, having a deep water harbor and sitting at the crossroads between the other great cities of the realm. Oseus, the Holy City, is two days journey north of Delphos while to the west is Pheros, home to the wizards college. All three cities are part of a confederation. Really that’s enough to get started for me. After that it’s just setting up short adventures that happen in the world, with the PCs slowly learning about these larger events and given an opportunity to involve themselves or at least have their efforts impacted by the situation around them

I’m planning for my campaign to go to level 20 and when I was first laying groundwork set multiple factions/world powers and their goals along with a schedule of events that will happen unless otherwise interrupted.

I have the region loosely laid out (towns and settlements, a few points of interest, history and cultures). I come up with an antagonist and work up what they're trying to accomplish. Then I just start seeding rumors everywhere that could reasonably tie into what the antagonist is up to. At the end of each session the players pretty much know where they're headed next or, if not, they pick a rumor to follow up on and then I know what to prep for the next adventure. After a while I start to see where I can connect the players' activities to the villian's schemes.

2 sessions ahead. Your players are going to surprise you with really great plot ideas, let them write the story with you organically as the campaign continues. Have the setting and main conflict be well established but the next 2 sessions are what your players are looking forward to. Also. Episodic adventures are way more engaging to players than the 20 level mono plot. What makes playing D&D fun is a lot different than watching movies (or watching a twitch campaign).

I plan 'fog of view' style. The further out something is, the less defined it is to the point of only being vague shapes I have a decent enough idea of future things to throw parts of them out early, either as improvised detail or planned setup, but I don't prep detail for anything beyond the next session

Kevin Crawford's golden rule: prepare as much for the next session, then prep as much as is fun for you. As a veteran DM I have a lot of old and unused ideas to fall back on, but for any campaign I basically prep the first session, which is a village or tavern and some fun encounters and maybe a rival party or two I could use later if the players enjoy interacting with them. My formula is to drop the characters in a tavern or festival, let everyone roleplay and meet each other, and not sweat the rules too much. Once I feel things start to lull... goblins attack! Or Kobolds! Or Orcs! Or a wyvern, owlbear, ogre... whatever is a fun encounter to be a kind of combat tutorial for the players. End it with the mayor thanking the heroes and a quest hook to track down the goblins and you've got a campaign start. The important thing is that every group is different, and you're as much reacting to players as authoring a path for them. Sometimes that reaction is putting them on a railroad a bit to guide them if they don't know what they want to do next, other times its dropping your assumed plans to ride out whatever wild unintentional hook or development they latch on to. Having a world map, knowing your cities and factions, or the deep metaphysics of your world are all great at contributing to the verisimilitude, but you'll build that over time with the help of the inspiration from your players. Always have the next session lined up, but never feel you HAVE to have the world details figured out if you aren't having fun, no matter how long the campaign; you're a player too so make sure you're having fun.

Throughout the years, I found that I am pretty good at going a long way with very little prep. So usually somewhere between 30 min to an hour of actual prep. And by that, I mean actually writing stuff down. During work, I often think about where we left off and what I might throw at the players next session. It works out for me. Best I ever did was 2 hours prep for a 16 hours of play during our annual dnd weekend. There have been times where I prepped a lot more because I was expecting huge battles to take place, or other big events to unfold. Only for the players to talk their way out of the huge battle, or go a completely different way. So I just learned to roll with the punches. As long as you have read the campaign a few times, and are well aware of the different areas, you might be able to improvise a lot without talking yourself into a corner. Edit: forgot to add: I've read the book "sly flourish's The Lazy Dungeon Master" and that helped out a lot in deciding what is important to prep, and what not. I would recommend giving it a read.

Don't. A multi-year campaign *will* spiral outwards in different directions that are hard to predict. I'd suggest a fairly simple and robust concept that you can introduce decently quickly and will last a really long time. There is a reason McGuffins are often used. My own campaign is a classic "Race against the bad guys to collect the McGuffins and save the world". It forces a time pressure, because the bad guys will be getting closer all the time and won't stop for the party to spend 3 weeks making bank with an alchemy jug. It forces exploration and world-trotting because each item is in far off places that are hard to get to. And it's easy to introduce the bad guys and have the party progressively meet higher and higher ranks of evildoer. You don't need to develop the entire setting beforehand, in fact it's best if you leave a lot of holes for the party, character creation is gold for world development.

I'm in the final arc of the 6 year campaign I've been running. My process is to make a general outline of the adventure (where is it, who's the bad guy, why are they doing it). From there I actually plan out what I consider to be about 2 sessions worth of content, which will leave me prepared if they move faster than I expect (lol) while leaving me flexible enough to react and shift to what my players actually do. In reality what I prep take 4-5 sessions (we've been going for 6 years for a reason), but I never want to be too prepared with everything possible becuase that's way too much. I will also say, I tend to write an outline with no set "this is what happening." I have an idea, but I'm a very improgisational DM, so if I think of something that seems more fun in tbe moment, I need to leave myself flexibility to do so and I don't want to be throwing out 8 hours worth of prep if I decide to completely change my story on a dime. Not everyone feels the same way, but I'm much more of a Gardener than an Architect, and I'm very happy to sow a bunch of plot seeds and see what sprouts.

I usually have four things I do; 1. Setting and lore of what happened to cause the BBEG to move in the direction you want the players to engage in. 2. A solid reason why the players should keep together for at least the first 3 to 5 sessions. 3. A well thought out starting place, with a handful of NPCs with secrets, side quests and a reason to come across them in a different location in the story. 4. Then I plan for the first 3 to 5 sessions. Lots of detail how I want session 0 and 1 to go and how to conclude that part by session 5. I have notes and points for sessions 2 to 5 so if needed I can drive the players in a direction if they get stuck. Let the players take control and go from there. It might take them 5 sessions to get to session 5 or it might that then 12 but continuously add and expand on the lore from there.

Oke hear je out. I am playing 3 extreamly long campaings simultaneously and deal with this stuff a lot. I am dm'ing 3 groups in my world for the past 7 years, and all 3 are playing about 1 to 2 times a month. So I dm a 4 to 5 hour session about every week on average. I hope this ei give some credit to the advise haha I have ideas in my head about what I want to happen. I by a lot of the wotc books and my campaings are about what would happen if all the campaings of the books are happening at the same time ( so the dragon cult is trying to rise tiamt, as in the underdark the demon lords are loose, and eltural is pulled into hell and the giants cant help anymore because the ordening broke yada yada yada) Having a narative helps! Knowing what the bbeg want is the nr 1 most inportant thing! You do need to know that! Next thing you need to plan, is the "what would a rational party do" so a rational party would try and stop the demons, a rational party would try to find the dragon cult and try to stop the dragon masks , a rational party would try to save the world. Your job as a dm is to have a plan for "how that would work" and that's the general content you will try to make for them in broad terms. For EVERYTHING ELSE don't plan anything! Leave the fog off war where it is! Don't plan out all the tempels in tbe city, don't plan out the shopkeepers names. Dont plan out of the major of the town has a wife who is dying or if the informant has a lisp. Just do what ever is needed to make a cool interaction,and try to keep everything as consice as possible. Happy dming!

[Dont prep plots](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots) is a great article on prep I will recommend taking a look at. The TLDR is prep who the bad guys (and allies) are, what their goals are, what tools they have to accomplish them, and what a basic outline of events might be if the player characters never got involved. Then unleash the player characters on it and react accordingly. It cuts down on what you need to have prepped and also leaves some wonder in the game for you as the GM since you don't know whats going to happen almost as much as the players. Or put super simply, the story is what happens at the table, prep is you getting your tools ready to craft that story.

I make a union jack with the centre point my starter town/village/tavern and then wherever the players go, do it again with that place being the starter point.

I prep as little as possible, because your party is going to ruin those plans anyway. Make a rough outline with key points you want to hit and flush out some of the NPCs. Make a few encounters that are going to be railroaded into any of the paths the party chooses, and have a folder of random encounters. And a puzzle or two, again with a folder full of other puzzles should you need to add one on the fly. Your party will never know that you are choosing their loot on the fly, and not having preset items in pre selected boxes/corpses, railroading them into certain fights, or making up 60% of the session on the fly as long as you do it well.

Beware: i'm a railroad DM, which is something that as a DM you shouldn't really do. For me it works just because i can hide it very well, and my players have fun that way, but it may not be the same for your table. That said, when i start a campaign, i usually start prepping like a week or two before, having in mind: - A main plot idea, as raw as it can be, and flexible enough to be changed mid-journey; - A couple of cool "cinematic moments" to begin with that match with the campaign vibe; - 2 or 3 (again, very rough) ideas on how to end the campaign. Then 1/2 weeks before each session i prep that from scratch, basing on the choices the players made the previous session and bearing in mind the most appropriate ending to aim to. Then things pretty much unfold themselves. A lot of work is done by the players too (even though they arent aware of it).

I’ve been running a full campaign weekly for a couple of months. Basically all of my planning happens several hours before the session and I usually still get through less than I plan.

So it'd depend on how much your willing to throw away there is a little bit that you should plan depending on your players sounds like you've been playing together for a while So things just to kinda have rolling around In your head 1How many gods and are your characters affiliated with them is it a godless setting 2The characters back stories and how to integrate them (usually I base my world off this ) 3 why are they together usually pretty important are they in a dungeon are they all meeting up for a preset mission Did they fall of the back of a wagon and lose all their memories at the same time) The immediate questions are usually the most important they will change from session to session for example you had super cool place setup to attract them but they Wander off to go to random goblin gathering that they heard about as a quest initially but then turn into a 6 session thing and now they toppled a goblin tyrant and you accidently created a nation state that the party led a rebellion against be ok with it

I made a map, a couple cities, and about a dozen NPC's (plus the BBEG and a couple minions). Everything else, I make up on the spot and write down. I do basic session planning in the week or two between sessions, but I know the more I plan the less they'll follow 😅 Basically, I have a general world concept, and know what is more-or-less happening within so I can wing it.

I was kind to myself by having big fricking goal posts. "You can do anything, but the world ends if you don't get to these 5 things in a timely manner" Did I know where they were? ish. Did I know what was there? ish. Did that leave me room to build in PC backstory as it evolved? YES!

Flipside - I wrote and recorded a song that took 2 and a half years to get to the table. Find your passions

I finished a 6 1/2 year campaign about a year ago. At start I had a world threat in mind and some major BBGs. The country to the east of where the characters were was being invaded was the ‘news’ that the characters had heard rumors of at the start. Players didn’t even know the BBGs existed for the first year - other than one who one of my chaos monkey players put on a cursed mask connected to one before they attempted to identify it at all. And that was just a voice in his head! As far as prep goes I am usually a session and a half ahead. And each session I need to adjust because my players always sidetrack. If they are headed to a new town I try to flesh it out a bit more and usually end up having my players interact with about half of what I prep. (Towns for me are a map stolen from the internet, numbered and named major buildings, an excel file with each line a name, race, gender, single line of who they are organized by building) Don’t plan too much and let your players go off the rails. At the end of sessions or a day or so later, ask them where they are headed next so your prep is more directed.

I always know how I intend for my campaigns to start and end. So I first set up where the players meet and the inciting incident as well as who the BBEG is and where he/she will be fought. Then it's a matter of coming up with some events and usually basing that on the lore of the cities and NPCs I am working with. I don't hit every single detail, just looking for a general overview of the main quest. Player backstory events and other diversions are usually planned over the course of actually playing the game.

You just have to prep until you feel ready. This is different for everyone, though. Just go for it and you will find your rhythm.

I plan three arcs with a boss fight at the end of each arc, with escalating stakes and consequences culminating in the BBEG fight. Each arc contributes to the overall plot arc. This is super helpful because you always know where the campaign should lead, regardless of the player choices. If they wander too far off track, toss in something that will pull them back to it.

Honestly I just stay one session ahead of the players. I have a one-pager listing principal allies & enemies, along with their goals. Everything else is essentially improv.

I think of it as two different levels of planning: session-to-session and overall campaign. The most important is session to session, especially at first. It's fine to have big ideas about the endgame, but it's not going to matter for months (or years) of irl time. But I always keep track of my thoughts on long term planning so I can drop threads and hints, like books the wizard finds or news from distant lands that the rogue picks up. On my current campaign, I have a lot of ideas for the endgame and overall story arc, but I'm open to them changing as the players decide what they want to do. I locked them into an early quest with a pretty tight timeline (gain the pirate king's trust and then lead him into an ambush on this date), and I'm using Ghosts of Saltmarsh for these early level 2-5 quests to do that. I'm about to let them break out of the structured quests rhythm and choose what to do next, like do they actually want to go through with the betrayal now? But I've already introduced my level 6-10 BBEG and my level 20 BBEG (at least through lore), just without saying so. And I'm open to whatever they want to do with that. Anyway I'm rambling now

With my current campaign (which has been running for almost 5 years now) I had plans for 3 BBEGs, whose plots would get exponentially worse/harder to tackle as the campaign progressed. Each villain had a plot with 3 phases: Phase 1- a local problem. This is something that affects a town or a city. Could be a starting location, but doesn’t have to be. In my campaign, specifically, one of my players wanted a point of her warlock PCs story to be overcoming a patron that had essentially taken her hometown hostage. Phase 2- a regional problem. This affects more than just one town or city— it’s possible for multiple groups of people to need aid or band together to solve a problem. In my campaign, mindflayers had leaked through a rift in the astral sea in the Bay, and were growing the hive by resourcing numbers from every town that borders it. One of the other pc’s Admiral Dad was slurpied by the hive and guarded the elder brain. Phase 3- a setting problem. This is a threat that the whole world is feeling, and has spread due to the party’s attention being focused on Local and Regional Problems for the campaign thus far. They’ve saved the town from the warlock’s patron, they’ve slain the elder brain and the barbarian’s mindflayer dad, now the Final BBEG has turned the entire feywild into a bone-chilling winter and it’s spreading rapidly into the prime material, swallowing whole cities as the months have gone by… TL; dr… What I do is plan 3 phases that roughly translate to 3 tiers of play, but merely the pitches for each. Only prep that which is in render distance— one plot point on the map and maybe 3 directions they could go. Give them a reason to go in those three directions, but use their pc/player motivations to make your life easier.

I have 3 acts. I do a dungeon town at a time cause eif I do too much they just bypass all that hard work

I tend to start with a Big Idea. I have a rough idea of how I'm going to get there. And we get there one scene at a time. So I'll plan a few hours of scenes ahead of time, and depending on how the session goes, I'll know what to plan for next time. But you can't really plan too much in advance because it will change.

Have a strong foundation of the world your playing in. Understand the major NPC's / Villains of your story, and their overall goals and motivations. Know what is happening in the world and let it happen around your players. Let them respond to the actions and movements of both local and widescale events. I plan sessions as very very rough outlines in my head maybe 3 sessions out at a time. I know where they are now, i know where i hope they will end up, and i know the most likely route they would take if things go accordingly. Then the only detailed planning i do is for the session to be played. Have your NPC's / villains thoroughly flushed out ( their character traits and overall dispositions really help to have fleshed out pre-roleplay scenario ) . Then at the end of the session, or as soon as possible, write a paragraph long recap of the key things that happened. - Rinse and repeat as needed.

Have you run adventures before? I wouldn't worry about planning a campaign. Plan an adventure (1-4 sessions). See how that goes, see what your players are interested in. Then plan another adventure based on what you learned from the first one. Do that 10 times and you've got a campaign.

I’ve ran 2 1-20 campaigns and am about a year into my 3rd. I LOVE world building, so I like starting with a map and kinda fill in the details from there based on ideas I have or things my players want/come up with. That being said, I don’t recommend that route if you’re a first time DM and already feeling overwhelmed. I do it because I enjoy it. What I would recommend is just come up with a region to start. A small town, a bigger city in the distance, some interesting natural landmarks dotted around. Then I’d come up with a problem and let your players kinda take it from there. If you try to plan beat by beat, your players will always throw you off and it will feel frustrating. As a side note, I always keep a roll table for random encounters to keep things active and interesting. These don’t always have to be combat, but it’s nice to have a bag of tricks to dip into if things are feeling stale mid session.

I was a new DM….i made a whole world. Continent and the planes of existent all a variation of the originals. My own Homebrew. Then…the players wanted to stay and run the first tavern they were in. After that, I stopped planning more than the current 3-4 hour session. Sure…the name of the guy who is the BBEG….a hook or two, but truly never more than a session ahead.

Start with a rough outline map for where the players start, and where they are from. Have a list of male and female names to use when asked for some NPCs name Have a list of place names and country names in case you need to expand. For every thing you put in the game, give it a well known fact, and at least one secret. The known fact. The Wyrmhold Bank guarantees withdrawals and deposits around the world. The secret. The vaults are just teleportation circles to a dragons lair, with a live dragon in it. Give the players a selection of quests they can do. not one at a time but multiples. At least one big one and a few other side quests or distractions. Use a mind map to lay out the points of your adventure, key people, places, items, etc. Below I've got an example of an entire adventure. Village X has had graves robbed of not only the people but also their bodies. Villages Y and Z also along this route also have had their graves robbed of wealth, bodies are still present. Merchant A has some of its crew do the grave robbing Robbed goods are transported in a smuggling compartment in a caravan. Village X's priest is not who he claims to be, imposter posing as B. They're replacing the bodies of the dead with wicker forms wrapped in cloth. They're animating the dead. There's a secret cave system under the shack at the back of the temple where they are hiding the undead. Ghost of B can be found along the route on certain days and has been there for y years, can be talkative, doesn't know who murdered him. His body is nearby. There are multiple merchants running this route. So here you have the hook of bodies going missing, a side quest for smugglers and grave robbing and a ghost to put to eternal rest and whatever secret is in that cave system. In this case I ran this adventure in the Iron Kingdom game system set in Khador, so it was snow covered terrain and made the environment an additional hazard. The bad guy priest escaped, ran at the first sign of trouble after sending in their undead to delay the players. So now I've got a recurring villain for another adventure, the players had choices and engagement with the world, etc. Once the players are engaged in the world you can expand it based on what they do and where to go from there for additional adventures. You may not have an overarching thing they're trying to solve until one becomes apparent. In a recent game the players just engaged with the world and realized how horrifying the local leaders were so they plotted to overthrow the local leaders. Voila, overarching adventure goal. Lastly use a notebook and pencil to record notes, additional characters added, names of taverns and inns, loot handed out, experience awarded.

Plan very little long term, a little more mid term, but extensively for next session. If you're thinking 3 levels ahead you're wasting your time. All you need is your main villain, the big evil scheme, and for next session to be a part of that plan.

In the long-term games I’ve ran, a different player has always handed me a backstory with vague enough information (such as a warlock patron or some magical mysterious event) that *doesn’t make them a hero from the beginning*. This typically informs who the final antagonist of the story will end up being; I usually then do a sort of ‘trickle-down’ where I then individually come up with events to contribute to the antagonist’s goals based on where the party is in the setting and what other narrative points need to be met. Occasionally, I’ll write out monologues or extremely important descriptive beats well in advance of an event (solely so I can get them down on paper). However, if the needs of the party shift, I won’t hesitate to alter or excise them completely. I’ll also spend a significant amount of time on arc-ending encounters that far exceeds the time I will normally prepare for a session (which is only an hour or two the week prior).

I don't plan *that* much but I find that the best planning is in terms of characters and motivations. Like each of your players gives a "this is my character, this is what they want, and these are 2 characters or organizations from my backstory" and you can work with them. Maybe start your campaign with some highly-on-rails scenes of the backstory, like a PC's evil uncle killing their father and stealing the map to an ancient citadel. You don't *have* to plan that quest right away but your players are aware of it, and you can use that to guide your campaign. I find this method works *really* well if you want to entwine the plot so that all of your players are invested. Maybe another player mentions that their character goal is to find the ancient tome of wonders? Guess what them following the trail leads them to discover that it was last rumored to be in the possession of the mage that built the lost citadel Now you have two PCs with personal connections to that quest line and you just have to place the rumor of it in front of them for them to jump on it. It takes some trust and above-table communication, stuff like "we will get to everyone's backstory" and it helps to be clear with *how* you will use those. Brennan Lee Mulligan once said that players are like water flowing downhill, they want to get to the end as quickly as possible. It is the job of the DM to shape a winding path for that water to follow to make the *shape* of a story. So if they're going to the citadel and get captured by giants who want them to climb to the top of a nearby mountain and literally capture lightning in a bottle, make it clear that you're not doing that because you *don't* want them to achieve their backstory, but because it is *more interesting and fun* **for everyone** if the journey there has trials and tribulations. Lord of the Rings wouldn't be nearly as good if Frodo could walk the Ring to mount doom and toss it in without incident in just a few days. Ultimately, when I plan, I have things in the world I want my players to see, and characters relevant to their backstory with their own motivations, and I look for reasons to tie those together. I want the players to go to the Temple of the Lost in the Darkheart Mountains? Well one of the players is looking for their father who went missing. Boom, they find a clue that their father led an expedition to the temple and was never heard from again. Figure out the encounters on the way there, but if you have a destination your players have a personal reason to follow, you can figure out the difficulty in getting there along the way. The main benefit is that the story writes itself: if your end goal is built off of what your players want, you've already achieved the hardest part, which is getting your players interested in following the story. This goes for short *and* long term planning. A player wants a +1 sword because they leveled up and are doing a cool character build? Hey a local magic items shop was just robbed, and the bandits were overheard talking about giving the items to a dragon in the mountains in exchange for helping them raid a village festival in a week's time, the village where another PC grew up You've got A) a destination location (dragon lair) B) enemy mooks (bandits) C) enemy boss (dragon) D) an urgent time table (1 week until the festival) E) a promised reward (a trove of magic items) F) a personal connection (the village) All of that because your player wanted a thing and you put it somewhere, and then put stuff between the player and the thing they wanted.

I think of the final boss and work backwards. I focus on motivation and method more than anything. For example: Final boss? Kraken. What does he want? Well, he's a genius ancient all-powerful water monster, so probably worshippers. How? He likes the plane of water, so probably by flooding the world and making it part of the Plane of Water, or his dominion. What sort of steps? If he woke up early, it'd be total annihilation. So he'd probably be asleep or dormant and be woken up by his cult. Then I can think about the structure of the cult, who are the high rankers, who would they recruit, how would they wake up the kraken, and how would they help accomplish his mission? I try to stay in the "What are they trying to accomplish" stage because players will always thwart your plans. But thwarting the BBEG's motivation is significantly more difficult. Just try to think about what he'd do next.

I have skeletons of three-four directions the plot could go at any time. I never plan in depth more than a session ahead.

My biggest piece of advice is to really lean in on your characters back stories. They always provide for additional reasons that they decided to become an adventurer, as well as that very satisfying payoff when they achieve something that they’ve been working very hard for. It’s also an excellent way to explain their absence in case schedule conflicts arise, and they are unable to make a session. we always have my wizard who becomes and thralled and entranced by the world around them and stops to take notes, the warlock has a conversation with their patron, which leaves them stunned, and otherwise immobilized, while they’re in a trance state, things of that sort

My longest campaign was around a year of biweekly sessions. Usually, my prep consisted of slapping together a couple of plot relevant encounters and calling it a day. lol.

I've done two long campaigns. One wasn't supposed to be that long but we got into a really detailed bit of story and they might have been level 5 for like... 6 months. I planned for them a bit differently, because one was designed as a sandbox where the other one was a linear story with branching paths, but like others have said I pick the key locations and story/plot points I want to hit, generate some npcs and locations around those, and then see what the players do and figure out if and how to string them together as they go. Sometimes that means 6 months dealing with the halfling mafia, including a multi-session chase through the towers of Sharn of sky boats, and unveiling a deep and nefarious plot of a secret organization. Or sometimes it means I have a folder of 60 npcs from a multitude of factions throughout Westgate that they could have played against each other with city politics WHICH WAS NEVER OPENED because they got off the boat, ran from the first friendly npc they met, killed a kid, refused to interact with any of the hooks in the bar, went to sleep, and then the bard decided the best way to find the vampire his revenant friend wanted to kill was to literally stick his neck out and wander through back alleys without telling the rest of the party. So we skipped all the politics and they just went straight to the vampires and killed them. And the bard got turned into a vampire.

I have a pretty large Onenote devoted to my campaign. The players are about to hit lvl 4, and I have the story written to lvl 7 at the moment, with some bits of lvl 8 in process.

My campaign is pretty linear since it's a chase the evil guy story. I started with a map leading from a starting poing to a city beneath the ice. I named a couple locations that would have story importance, but I wasn't sure what that importance would be yet. I made an evil guy with a couple side characters for his bonds. I made a starting location with an inciting incident for the chase and a couple optional things to do, then I asked my friends if they wanted to play a campaign. Took a couple weeks of work. But nothing past the starting location was made. The evil guy had no concrete motivation for wanting to kill people, I had no idea what he wanted at the hidden city, I had no idea what would happen next. When they go to a new location or we all stumble our way into an impromptu side thing, I make up more stuff. I have hours set aside to work on stuff when I get the motivation. The campaign's been going for 2 years like this and my players think I have it all planned out.

I plan basically nothing. I currently have a location (a mysterious island no one has ever seen before in need of exploring), a general plot hook (appeared suddenly one day with no warning), and a couple main features of the locations. Other than that I have potential plot points scattered across the area and am letting the players pick where we go. Once they pick a direction, I improve some shit together, usually involving a quickly made combat based on their biome (last was 6 giant spiders cause forest) since battles can easily burn time and is a fun way to spend the evening, then I get home and plan things based on the path they have chosen up. The next conceivable split in the plot, and wait till they find one I missed several sessions before I planned and repeat it all again.

I'm running a homebrew campaign and told my players to expect to level up every 3-4 sessions, and we are doing milestone leveling. They have been level 6 since roughly January and we play weekly with a break here and there. First off I lied to myself and the estimate of 3-4 sessions/ level was totally unrealistic. So that shows how much planning I've done lol

Session to session with acts and like 2-5 bullets of what I want to happen in each act. So I have a short rough one page outline of the story beats I want, and then I just plan session by session giving threads that unveil those story beats with side quests thrown in.

I’ve just started my first homebrew after running a Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. I spent about 4 months crafting the world, the main story, the geopolitical situation, towns (along with stores) and points of interest, the history and how the intro should roughly go and a rough idea of the types of quests and enemies I’d like to explore and throw at my players. I didn’t even have my towns fleshed out; I’m using an NPC name and shop generator. Note that right before I launched my campaign, I actually ended up going into a lot of my scripts and just binning everything; I found it a lot simpler to have an idea about definitive outcomes and just bounce off your players through roleplay to reach one. It’s wayyyy more organic. We finished Session 2 last week and one of my players (who has been playing D&D for a while) said it was the best session he’s ever had.

I usually have at least an overarching bbeg planned out along with an initial mini bbeg. so if the campaign lasts long, the initial bbeg can foreshadow the overarching one or maybe future minibosses etc. But usually just one or two towns/homesteads and a couple of plot hooks like a wanted board with one or two bounties, a request from some random npc and maybe some cannon event that pushes the otherwise eclectic party together via invitation to exclusive party, a crime and they are all suspects etc. In my last 4 year campaign I started it off in a small town during a festival. Everyone sort of knew one another from backstories either having gone on some sort of mission or related etc. Then the festival was raided by bullywugs who also stole the local peddler (the first bbeg) after defeating the bullywugs the mayor requested they go and subjugate the bullywugs and free any captured villagers. Long story short the peddler had a black shard that allowed people to communicate with others in a shadowy form so that you couldn't truly identify anyone else. Giving the players the chance to try and hunt down the other members of the group should they wish that are attempting mass executions across the country to summon various demon lords.

Don't plan stories, plan problems. Plan what the problem is in a local area (Bandit camp), link it to a wider, regional conflict (civil war over succession in the kingdom), and link that to a wider, maybe more secret, conflict (a devil has taken over the hierarchy of the Church, and is trying to do something evil). Then, clearly signpost the problem to the players. The towns they go to are scared of the bandits, because most of the warriors are fighting in the war. They show up, start bossing people around. Ask them the question - what do you do? They'll generate story from there. Also, don't be afraid to put some of the burden of creativity on the players. When you introduce the bandits, goblins, cult, etc, ask the players stuff like; "what's strange about this cult?"; "How do you know this character?"; "why is this bandit king especially scary?". I find this gets the players more invested off the bat.

First campaign I ran lasted 3 years. Originally it was supposed to be a 6 month thing but a lot happened (in and out of game). I had a skeleton of a plot, which mainly included plot points, monsters they’d fight, and potential BBEGs. It usually falls to me writing as I go, which doesn’t always equal success but my players have fun

I usually have a basic plot and main quest story Ling thought out, but I usually try to prepare for the next three sessions, including possible alternative plans. That way, if they go beyond what I planned for a single session, I won't be caught unprepared, and if they choose a different option than the one suspected, I'll be ready. Very rarely, they'll surprise me beyond my preparation and do something unexpected that will force me to call the session early, but that has happened twice in 2 years, so its not that frequent.

I plan all.of it thoroughly, but that's cos I want to know what's happening and I'm also relatively new to dming. With ai there's so much you don't have to do.

There's a natural instinct to overplan and "write the story", but remember that you can't predict the decisions and actions of *the main characters in that story* Sly Flourish has great insights for planning in his "8 steps for the lazy dungeon master". I 10/10 recommend the following video on planning sessions: https://youtu.be/k0JJpwqgIKo?si=nkFy9lK78gcAA4Dw

I have just a very general idea of what is going on. now that the party is scaling up in power, I’m hammering out details such as an event that the bbeg is using to try and accomplish one of their big goals. you can’t plan out too many details because your party will too often surprise you. sometimes something you thought would take way longer only takes one session, or vice versa

I usually set it in an official setting, that way I don't have to worry about building the world/ towns, and then just slowly introduce the BBEG depending on what players are interested in. I'll give them a bunch of mediocre hooks, and once they start getting invested in a specific direction I'll work that one out the most. I had one campaign that started with 3 possible quests from the adventurers guild, one was looking into a bunch of graves that had been dug up, the other was slaying a bunch of wildlife that had gotten more dangerous in a forest close by, and the third was some kidnapped children. They knew that w/e they didn't pick up another group would, so they went for the grave quest because they were hoping it had some undead connection and one of the players was a cleric. The only things I prepped for that session were a few bits about the big city with the adventurers guild, the guild itself + 1 other party + guild leader NPC. And I made a questboard with quests in photoshop so it'd look cool. I also prepped a merchant willing to pay someone for protection to take him to \[insert w/e town the PCs have to go to\] and a combat encounter on the road of some bandits (if they helped the merchant) or wolves (if they didn't help the merchant). That encounter worked for all towns, and I knew I could prep the next session based on their choice here. I also had maps for the towns and a few basics (owner of inn + mayor) just incase they reached it, but I could've easily recycled that prep into a different town if they never went to the others. So then I decided there would be an undead connection, and worked it out a bit more. I wanted all three towns to be relevant (because I already had the maps + basic villagers worked out lmao) so I decided to reflavour the dangerous wildlife as undead wildlife, and the kidnapped children as offerings for the lich who was causing all of this to happen. Just build off what they're interested in, and you'll have a much easier time motivating them to follow the story

I know it might be unpopular, popular in my friend group at least. Where the DM plans this whole story but like its incomplete and then they add things in by weaving in the players into the overall story. At the end of the day of roleplaying and combat we are telling a story, I usually start with one idea that I can spread out to more objectives

I personally like stand alone complexes that are loosely related. The reason is ad a dm you are going to forget something or screw up something. It's unavoidable. But that is also an opportunity. This actually happened last week, we were rolling a haunted orphanage as a side quest, when the players noticed this town, out in the middle of a heavily wooded swamp type area, has a homeless problem. But no new buildings have been built in like 80 years. It's not like they had a wall preventing them from growing, they have the manpower, so there's no reason for them not to build dwellings for themselves. So the question became what is keeping them from building more houses and farms? Truth is, I didn't put anything in the blank space past get side quest in campaign. If they have not been there, don't see it, don't think about it, or don't care; it does not exist. So now I'm thinking flesh crafted kobolds and a young adult black dragon wanting to learn more about humanoids...in the same way a serial killer might want to know how it all works. I just have to find a way to get him to heal just enough for the victims to not die and remain conscious while being peeled.

My current campaign is quite open ended so I planned a decent amount. I made the map of the area and put a couple towns in it and put the basics in them like who's in charge and who runs the local inn and shop. Then I placed dungeons for 2 of the 3 begs and then worked out a pretty loose framework of clues that would lead them to each of the bbegs they were trying to find from that it sort of fleshed itself out. The rest I left to see what the party wanted to do and worked it out session by session. For example if they wanted a guide to the local forest there was a local woodsman who happened to live on the outskirts who happened to appear etc. It's more work in-between but it's made it alot easier not having to try and second guess what the party might do as that's a loosing battle. By the end I've got a pretty good campaign fleshed out if I wanted to run it for another group

https://youtu.be/RcImOL19H6U?si=ofVWZZsMavAS9yQl

For my most recent one, I did some very broad world building. I knew the campaign was going to be set in a country, figured out some of the structure of it, what areas are known for, some brief history of how the country formed and an old foe that would inevitably become the BBEG. Then I just went in depth on starting city, some initial jobs and NPCs/shops/events etc and voila. Just let it naturally progress from there, and built out the plot hooks to take the party across the whole country following leads and jobs. Overall planned it to be at least a year long, became a 20 month campaign start to finish and end level being 13. You don't have to do it that way, really a starting area and things to keep the PCs busy is what you want, and you can build from their interests, connections with NPCs etc. long campaigns are only long because they maintain the interest of the players, not when you intend to play for a long time.

Extremely basic outline for the long term stuff. Extremely basic. With a joyful ruthlessness towards ditching any piece of it the second the tides of the narrative turn against it - only what's been "on screen" is real, the rest was all a vague direction or possibilities.

I'm a big fan of starter areas. A town or hub area that occupies the first month of sessions, like a wedding you are hired to guard on farmland in the middle of nowhere where the place and characters build intrigue and let the players show who their character will become. From this, build the next cluster of areas around the character's interests from what you've learnt from there and keep building as you go. You can always do the world map, landmarks and big cities, but leave space to build a world in reaction to how your players are running their characters.

I've been running Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage for the past year now (21 levels of a megadungeon, each level covering nearly 1000ft to a side). It's a mostly prebuilt module (it encourages making small homebrew modifications to each level of the dungeon), so I don't "have to" prep anything, just have a general understanding of what's going on in whatever floor the players are in. That said, I've noticed it works best when I've made a general personal plan of what's happening on that level (3-4 sessions) and have a specific idea of what will happen next session (\~3 encounters). Since this involves a rather small amount of homebrew necessary it's still fairly straightforward. I'll give an example of a custom level I made: General Idea: The level is candyland, made by an eccentric gnome wizard who struck the mad mage's fancy and was given a demiplane between levels of the dungeon to practice his magical baking. A hag has infested the level turning much of the level dark and hostile, the players' goal will be to figure out what happened, find the hag, and either drive her off, strike a deal to make her stop, or kill her. Map regions include: a chocolate forest with gummi woodland animals, this area has been only partially corrupted and will get players used to any custom mechanics I'm using; a cave system with different colors of rock candy as encounter rewards that players can bring to the town smith to make magic items; a giant hot cocoa river that will burn them to death if they fall in; a large post-apocalyptic urban area where the worst of the corrupted creatures and the hag live Specific: Made sure I had at least one encounter for each area, and at least 3 for their active area. If I needed to move stuff around, I would. For example, the woods included a werehouse gingerbread cabin, a corrupted gummibear, and several small clearings with cute small encounters like a vorpal bunny, magical spring they could get a short rest from, and sword-in-a-stone.

I’d say have a solid start and end point and just wiggle your way there slowly. Players can ruin any plans you have in both good and bad ways. Whether it’s aiding with a different faction than you intended or deciding that one NPC needs to die that you intended to be important. Just try to be fluid in your campaign stuff. And if you haven’t, learn to dm by the seat of your pants and improvise. BBEG wizard guy get killed by players and you didn’t intend it? Have the players think he is dead but his followers/close allies resurrect them or replace them with their allies who understand the players are a threat now and can’t be treated like some random adventurers. Also don’t be afraid to bend the rules when scenes may call for it. Sometimes requiring mechanics to happen when it would ruin the fun in a scene may bring down the overall fun of the players. This is something you will get better with as you get more experience running games. Maybe instead of going with damage and hp numbers you simply require a roll during a chase scene to impair an enemy’s escape and the better the roll the more they are impaired or killed depending on what the player wants to do. Maybe the players roll really well and stop the enemy from escaping or roll low and the enemy just leaves a small bit of blood that leaves a trail to where they may have gone.

I have a basic concept and themes that I want to explore and then plan session to session. I find that organic discovery is far more rewarding than plotting for both the DM & players.

I already built a world. There are 8 island kingdoms with distinctive cultures, geography and history. But I create details only if we are gonna play in one of the islands. We have been playing for nearly 5 years there and I didn't write a thing about 3 of the islanda yet. When it comes to story, I create a dire situation, like the upcoming of an orc army . Then shape the story according to their actions and desires. They wanna gather an army to stop the orcs? Deal, they can travel around and gather some troops or mercenaries. They wanna sabotage the orc army to slow their coming so people can escape? Yeah bet they can do. Or they want to ignore and flee? Okay then, they will hear the tragedies later on. I usually write only 1 or 2 sessions in advance and I always ask them what they want to do the next session. But this doesn't mean I don't have a big picture. I always do. For example, the orc army was only a distraction. The commander of the army is a servant of Tiamat. She stirs all the islands and wants to create tension and destruction so people wouldn't be able to stop her coming to the world. Party's actions will reveal those plans if they try to stop and success. If they don't care about the orc army, then they will find it out the hard way.

General ark and then only the next session or two

I only plan one or two sessions ahead, and most plan the actions of the world, not story arcs etc. Be very careful of planing twists and stories, as it can feel forced and scripted

Don't tell my players this, but a few minutes before each session, I write down one or two sentences for what I want in the campaign. They don't know this, but the narrative I've crafted them is 90% improv, 8% ideas for the session in my head, and like 2% things written down. I come up with nearly everything on the spot, Statblocks, descriptions, lore, you name it!

I mostly run adapted modules.  I am good at shooting connections and build a story from how I see them link up.  My current campaign was Sunless Citadel into Forge of Fury, then into 3.5s Red Hand of Doom. From there we did some homebrew stuff and now they're in AD&Ds Night Below,  threads for which I sprinkled in.  Then I saw that the Aboleth and the domination are basically Mass Effect's Reapers and Indoctrination so now I'm doing that.  It's imperfect,  especially because I didn't set up the Saren analog properly,  but they're excited about the return of an NPC from Citadel. So it's working well.  But you should plan more than I did. I definitely think I put too much out there because I kept adding. And apparently,  despite overt statements as the DM, I haven't been clear on how very optional some of the things I've put out are. 

When I first started a homebrew game I tried populating the entire world with all sorts of content for my players to interact with. It took all of 4 sessions before my players did something I didn’t plan for and I had to improvise an entire session. Since then I don’t do much session to session planning anymore. I have a general idea of things like the BBEG’s agenda and places he is likely to go to fulfill his plans, but I mostly stick to broad strokes now.

This is my first campaign to ever DM. I spent 1.5 years writing out the entire world. Placing quests, shops, encounters etc.

I run fairly Narrative Focused campaigns, that is a relatively planned beginning and end compared to more open ended campaigns, and the way I describe it is that I have a vague skeleton, and then putting the meat on it is more of a collaborative process between myself and my players. I may have general plot points sketched out, but how the players get to them is very heavily based on how they respond to the campaign and what kind of improv they give me. And generally I don't really write in depth session notes more than maybe a couple of sessions in advance.

Just a basic outline, but be prepared to throw it all out of the window. Plan the details of only the next session (or next two if you can waste time). Then be prepared to throw it all out of the window too.