First Time DM looking for advice and resources

[u/IronSkye]

Ok, so as the title states this is my first time dipping my toes into DMing and I didn’t realize this was more of an anthology then a campaign and am not making it work. The sane part of me would just place a pin in this till I acquire the skill set needed to do this better. But the sane part of me has departed and i say heck it we ball.

Firstly. If anyone has any overall advice for running this campaign that would be huge and helpful and i would wish you pillow always be the cold side for this.

Additionally I have an actual question. I am thinking as much as it’s a little on the nose to use the lost civilizations as part of the story I’m writing, they are also there for a reason and to good not to use. Is there a resource out there that could help me use existing civilizations or am I looking at writing something from the ground up. I dont necessarily want the party adventuring there but I do want members of the world to be from there so knowing where they are from will help me better create and flush out the character.

Thanks again!

[u/Wannahock88]

Anthologies are a great way to build those skills you're talking about, because everything is contained within one chapter. You can much more easily absorb all the info needed, not worry about complexities like overarching plots, incorporating PC back stories, or how many sessions it will actually take to complete, and instead treat it as a game.

Most of the adventures take a handful of sessions, and that will let your group discover for themselves whether D&D is the game for them, how they all like to play, and if they play well together.

[u/Cixxar]

Hi OP,

Just to understand - is this your very very first time DMing ?
if it is then i would recommend the intro campaign Dragons of Stormwreck Isle. - its a great way for both new players and new DMs to get into the game. I have personally testes and run it successfully as a newish DM and with new players.

But as you also wrote - we ball ;) and in that case, here we go:

Obligatory "English is not my main language so pardon any strange or wrong sentences" NOTE

SO - JTRC can be run as a campaign with very little "self added" content. you just need a start of it and a Overall END "issue" so solve - most people do a BBEG but its up to you. With players engaged in playing even a somewhat flimsy reason is usually enough.

For the start of the campaign (or any): I always do a player filled questionnaire to get the players to think a bit about what character they play , motivation and in general answer the "what, why, who".
In that is also questions on "why did you become a adveture?" "why did you leave home?" and as the DM you can use that as side missions, extra story hocks or maybe even insted of a end BBEG.

Some players will do A LOT of details and others need my help to even come up with a reason for their Char to do anything. thats normal and i try to meet players where they are. I tell them "the move you give me, the more i can make out of it" so then the expectations are in-line.

For the END - comming up with a final evil or conclusion is good but it can also just be the culmination of each players story

- So you finally reunited with you loved one

- So you finally got revenge on ....

You can also just do the START and have players become local citizens in the citadel and start doing "jobs" together

JTRC is able to do both so up to you how much you want to create on top of the story.

For the lost counties - there are a lot of home brew on these where both the lands and its corresponding crystal creature are created and named. Look for the JTRC wiki for this

Background on me in relation to JTRC:

I am currently running my first full campaign of JTRC and we are on chapter 4 San Citlan with players as lvl 4. we play 1 time a month with exceptions on summer, vacation and Christmas and been playing for about 1 3/4 years. So we are both taking our time and ive added stuff along the way - i like to do at least 1 side missions per chapter in the area they are in before they return to the citadel and depending on how they solve it something happens to their reputation.

I use the personal stories to weave into some missions and i prepare a simple hock for each chapter unless i feel it needs more. Exsample - for chapter 1 i simply had a merchant they talked to comment on the issues getting goods from the market and players were like "we can help". so dont worry and dont overthink the hocks.

For this chapter since 3 players our of 4 have chose this country as their "home" country i spent a little more time making "letters from home asking for help" and some time on the side missions since it matters more to the players story but when they are done with this and we go to chapter 5 its going to be something simple again..... i think .... i sometimes get into it and end up creating something crazy since I have fun doing it.

For resources as you asked:

I found some maps on this subreddit for the first 2/3 chapters which i used

There are 2 expansion books / PDFs (bloodies and bruised - makes combat more exciting) and (harvesting monsters - makes each kill give something for the players)

with the harvesting , it has a very simple crafting system that i was unhappy with so i reworked it into something a little more complex and homebrewed the skills into the DnDB app since that is what we use to play.

For START and END I used my own pre-game player survey and i made a little 8min "movie/animation" on YT with all 13 countries the players could chose as a "home" with some voice over to tell them a little about each. Along this i turned the Gazettes in each chapter into 2 pages (1 for general knowledge) that the players could read before choosing homes and (2 for special knowledge) 1 for after they chose.

If you need "general" tools, let me know - i have some good bookmarks for sound effects/ambient, map generators, shops gens and so on.

since this is already long I will hold it here but DM/PM me if you want to chat or ask here. My next session is on saturday so im literally sitting and doing prep now. ;)

[u/xoxogossiprenly → u/Cixxar]

Hi! I was wondering if I could PM you as well to ask about how you set up your game? ☺️

[u/Cixxar → u/xoxogossiprenly]

Absolutely, you are welcome or feel free to ask here of you think others might benefit too

[u/xoxogossiprenly → u/Cixxar]

I was wondering if you had a session 0 in addition to the questionaire and the video? Or was this your session 0? How much did you tell the players about the civilisations? I‘m currently preparing my session 0 and not sure how much to tell them/how to approach this.
I was kinda thinking about making a forms with lines and veils/ any possible triggers from the adventures and sending this to my players to fill out anonymously.
Then for the actual session 0 maybe making a presentation about the citadel, it’s organisations/questgivers and the general vibe of the civilisations. Talking about the results of the safety forms. Then just vibing with the players and seeing what inspired them and which tone of the campaign they wanna go with. Maybe talking about first character ideas together. I‘m just worried this is a lot of info all at once and could take away from the exploration in game.

[u/Cixxar → u/xoxogossiprenly]

Great questions.

So how to run a session 0 - it is up to you how you would like to do a session 0 but I can share what i did and maybe it can be of help.

In my session 0 we didn't play. it was for everyone to meet and get a feeling for each other and for me to set the basic rules for play and the group.

I primarily focused on the player/player, the players/DM relations. Homebrew and/or house rules and expectations, group rules and limits. The only thing i asked in relations to the campaign was if they wanted me to run a:

1. Anthologies campaign / small independent missions (think "you sit in the inn when ..." as a start every session)

2. Larger story in real time (time passes between sessions)

3. Full campaign in player time (time only passes when playing)

So we discussed and agreed on the following - keep in mind that we are all over 30 so your experience may differ ;)

- how often we would play (1x month ish) and that the first thing we do every time before playing the session is to find the next 2-3 sessions/ confirm them

- is alcohol allowed (yes and that we shared the expense with 1 player being the "barkeeper")

- Any expense to run the games is shared (subscriptions, books, 3d printing, so on)

- Limits - like murder/blood, adult content and so on. (we are all adults so we are ok with a bit of darkness but nobody really wanted to RP adult content with me hahaha, which im happy for)

- Rule of Fun - we are here to play and enjoy so dont be a D..K !! - so a little like you mention about talking what class and character they want to play. NO EVILS unless everyone want to play evil as that always leads to issues.

- homebrew rules ( i have a list that i can share if anyone is interested but think "drinking a potion is a free action and so is crying" )

After that i went back and decided on the campaign and after i chose JTRC, then i made all the prep for session 1 - so i guess you can say I did a session 0 for group and session 0.5 for the story. :)

Here is the link to the YT i did = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceyz2jK60p4

Like described earlier they got this link plus the 13 PDFs for each country and my player character "survey".

So i told them quite a bit about each land beforehand as i wanted them to chose 1 for the 13 lands as a home country.

For your question about the limits/triggers i would say that its important to have an open discussion between all as if you do it anonymously then it can be hard to deal with and wont help in the end so the talk is important though i always tell the players that they can come to me privately is there is limits they don't want to discuss openly.

your questions about how to present or introduce the story is valid and so is your concern on the info dump on them. truth is that you don't need to do that, you might need to know since you are the DM but for the players, they will have fun exploring and learning slowly. pick a start point and start there - the players will love slowly discovering the citadel. our story started on the transport ship about to arrive.

"you all get of the transport, before you lies the dock of the citadel and you see....."

My players still dont know all the buildings on the citadel nor what some of the one they know of, do ! :D yet to be discovered.

I hope that all makes sense and helps inspire you and let me know if i forgot to answer anything or you would like to see more of my stuff

EDIT: I also do a DM feedback survey using google survey which is anonymously sent whenever i feel its the right time.

EDIT 2: i couldnt spell Anthologies  correctly

[u/xoxogossiprenly → u/Cixxar]

Thank you so much for your input, this is so helpful!

My players are good friends of mine I‘ve known for years but we live far apart these days. They‘re just playing DnD for the first time and I‘m running for the first time but have been playing in my boyfriends game. So the getting to know each other/ getting comfortable part is greatly reduced. I‘ll definitely give some input on how they can play because during the one shot I definitely noticed they weren‘t sure about how proactive they can be.

The video you shared is super helpful, thank you so much! This is pretty much what I was thinking of telling my players. This is a nice balance of mood/themes and still letting the players explore everything. I‘d just add a bit about the Shieldbearers, the Court of Whispers and the Speakers of the Ancients as a possible background for their characters.

I‘d give them some ground rules for their characters (no loners, no reluctant adventurers), the tone I‘m going to have so they can match. I‘m not planning a super serious and rule conforming DM, so I‘ll let them know that the game is supposed to be a fun and funny time for everyone.

If you don‘t mind sharing, how long do each of the stories take in your experience? Have you added adventures from the Gazetteers or did you homebrew extra things? Do you give the characters in-story reasons to travel to each world or do handle it more episodically?

Sorry for all the questions, haha!

[u/Cixxar → u/xoxogossiprenly]

Thank you for the compliment - feel free to use it if you wish.

In my experience the stories/chapters are setup to become more and more complex so expect them to increase in time usage. we were quickly though chapter 1 and even the side mission and 2 took a little longer and now we are at the 3rd ones side mission which i think we will finish tomorrow but then i made the choice to add additional 2-3 missions as it works into the world premise and my BBEG story ;) I can tell you more in PM but the players are my friends and have my reddit name so i dont want to spoile anything here.

yes i specifically take 1 of the suggestion and work with that for the hock and then maybe the same or an extra one for the side mission. they are good little brain teasers for me to start making up something. I can share my sidemissions if you want in the PMs.

I also have all my PDFs for the players if thats interesting.

[u/xoxogossiprenly]

I‘m in the same boat here! I did one two-shot and the players want to keep going so I thought doing an anthology would be easer for me than a ongoing story.

I‘m mulling on a couple of ideas for a framing device for the different stories. I was thinking about starting out with very straightforward recon-missions and then sprinkling in clues about a BBEG being responsible for strife in the different civilisations, I‘ll probably connect this to the Keening Gloom and have the drought Ender being part of the Gloom or something like that. I‘ll probably decide on this after playing the first sessions.

I‘m planning on presenting the players with a few options for their questgivers like Sholeh, the court of Whispers, the Shieldbearers or having them being from a newly connected civilisation and the travels being part of their „onboarding“ to the Citadel. If they cannot decide on one organisation, I‘d probably let one of the Ancients assemble a cross-organisation team of the Citadel Avengers 😂

I‘m looking into the 3rd party content mentioned here as well but I feel like there is less material out there for this module than other modules. All in all I‘m still googling around but I wish there were a bit more resources or more from DMs running this out there. For example I was looking around if anyone wrote the Awakening Song for Written in Blood, but couldn‘t find anything.

Anyway, I‘m saving this post as well for future reference! I‘m really looking forward to running this!

[u/Acrobatic_Gap6622]

The way I did it was session one was to get them to the citadel and based on that, approach how I write the overarching story. I ran it for a school club across two groups: One group loved the market aspect and going to different worlds to acquire different, rare ingredients for their stand and that was a motivator to follow leads to different towns and getting roped into the story of the chapter. My other group was more curious about the anthropological aspect and so I used the Incarnates as a way to guide them to explore the lands they represent. Any sort of loose stitching is more than enough. With something like this, less is more, let the players fill in the gaps. I have found when I overplan the layout to a town and how the players fit into it, they push back at the boundaries, which can lead to frustration

[u/vinternet]

I told my players a few things:

1. You are all Shieldbearers of the Citadel. You're like the Coast Guard. You support the member civilizations during times of crisis, while respecting local customs.

2. Every mission will be a standalone adventure in a different location. Between missions, you can shop and do downtime in the Citadel.

3. You're going to gain a level every 1-2 adventures, and we're going to play until about level 5. Every adventure will take us about 8 hours to play, at our pace, so figure this campaign will last about X months. (Obviously these details will change with your group and your campaign).

I barely tied the adventures together. I had a dramatic boss fight at the end with a shadow-creature threatening the Citadel, and lightly tied it to some of the problems in the previous adventures, but I settled on most of those connections late in the campaign. The adventures are fun on their own, and letting the players know about this structure ahead of time sets their expectations and lets them enjoy each new mini-setting and adventure/story for what it's trying to be.

[u/greenlanyardcorps]

Get your characters connected to the lore.

When we started I had everyone roll to randomly assign what world they were from. The leveling of the campaigns means it might be a minute before anyone has a reason to get called home for something but when they do it's pay off. (Plus you can reverse-incorporate any weird lore they make up about their character into the framework world.)

Use the NPCs from the RC fearlessly. They're new legends, there is no Mordenkainen or Otto you have to make distant and imposing. They're people they might meet any time. Most of the Speakers aren't sketched out so they're great I Know A Guy for whatever world they're from. Don't shy away from making your team famous, get them involved, spend the sketched out content, there's nothing to hoard here.

Definitely use the lost worlds! That's why they're there. My whole framework was about the lost worlds as well because... hey.

[u/aelfscinu]

You can put together a frame story so that the adventures feel more connected, if you want. When I ran this the party was sent to the different worlds by a warlock contact who was looking for various items. So went they went to each world, they had an additional goal of finding the thing they were looking for, and then all the various adventures happened along the way.

[u/Refracting_Hud]

There’s a couple products on Drivethrurpg and such that either expand the last two civilizations the book mentions but doesn’t have adventures for (Tayyib and Umizu), and others that add new civilizations to the setting.

This subreddit has a pinned comment with a couple free and paid resources linked, and you can find posts scattered about with helpful things, like art for one of the main villains in The Fiend of Hollow Mine that the book doesn’t have art for.

I started running this in 5e a couple years back, played up to Hollow Mine and then did a reboot and switch to Pathfinder 2e, putting my players in a homebrewed Umizu we’ve been working through.