They say everyone's first game is terrible

I've decided to lay bare the still smoking corpse of my first long-running campaign, which ended a few months ago. Anyone who is interested can watch as I peel back charred skin and sinew to reveal the lovingly crafted, yet misshapen organs and bones beneath. My goal is to put to rest my own conscience--I need to move on before I can run my next game.

How I became a GM

    Almost exactly three years ago, I accidentally volunteered to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons. I'll call my players by their characters' names: Einion, and Frostbite were my neighbors, and Marill was their friend. Our exact conversation is lost to time, but the crucial moment came as they lamented a game that died after session 1, when I let slip that I'd run some games before. In the ensuing excitement, we all agreed to start a new game. I told them I'd need a month to prepare, and we agreed that this game was going to survive no matter what.

What I did to plan a campaign

    Back at home, images of Tad Williams' fabulous Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn played through my mind as I placed an order for a wet-erase board, the 5e D&D Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. It was clear to me at the time, that my first step was to make a broad-sweeping topographical map of the area (duh). So I did.

Based on my now-immutable map, it was possible to make a few conclusions:

1. I accidentally made the Rocky Mountains. To fix this, I would have to turn the map upside-down and give the range a new name: the Roc Wall. Perfect.
   
2. There was a pass through the east mountain range, through which bad stuff would come. There was magic in the wind that passed through this gap.
   
3. The main area of the map was split off from the north by a massive river canyon, which was not based on the Colorado River.
   
4. Wet weather was blocked by the Roc Wall as it came from the north, leaving the north side of the mountains wet, and the south side arid.
5. The giant mesas which dot the area were wind-carved by the east wind coming from the desert past the Roc Wall. People lived on top of these mesas, in micro-climates.
   
6. The lowlands to the west were forested with cacti.
7. This was the wild west, except more fantasy.
   

    With the important work done, I needed a story idea. My partner helped by spitting out random themes until two stuck in my mind. These were "Regicide" and "Birds are the good guys". I immediately sat down and wrote this trope-rich mess:

(Note: though I tried to transcribe without judgement, I was cringing too hard to keep myself from making minor edits.)

"In a time long before the race of men had spread to the far corners of the world, far to the east there was a dynasty of titans, advanced and widespread. For eons the titans had labored to shape their lands--mountains were transformed into great halls where their leaders bickered; field, meadow, and marsh were molded into farmland that stretched farther than even the eyes of a Roc could see; seas were drained into deep wells for their industry, and the very bowels of the earth were scooped out and processed. Finally, the seemingly endless bounty of the land dwindled. Titanic leaders fought each other to keep their people fed, and the natural philosophers raced to invent new ways to extend their resources. Buildings became lighter than the materials they were made from, and food was warped and enhanced through alchemy to feed more titans. At last, as scarcity blossomed, one people invaded their neighbors, citing ancient treatises long broken and forgiven. The civilization fractured into warfare and isolationism.

It was in this early phase in the Titans War that our guardians fled westward across the endless desert, stopping for refuge in the cliffs of long abandoned, titanic factories. They say signs of destruction were seen by the Rocs for a full generation of their kind, and that three generations had come and passed before our lords finally found their current home in the mountains that fill our horizon to the north and east.

Now the Rocs guard their home fiercely, as they have for the past 20 generations since their pilgrimage. It is said by a few in hushed whisper that the Lords of the Wall still fear the war in the east, though I believe the titans were eradicated by their own hands. I have faith nothing can reach us here. After all, what could travel the infinite sands but a Roc?"

-Zenif the Elder

And just like that, my story concept was born! With little concern for how the PCs would fit, I had a full basis for the campaign conflict:

    The playable races live under the protection of the Rocs, who reside in the mountains. The monarch of the Rocs was just assassinated, meaning problems would drift from the East and spill over into the unprotected lowlands. It would become clear that the Titans War had finally reached the area, and then... [one, two, skip a few, one hundred] ...the PCs would save the day!

Session Zero by text-message

Genius like this is hard to come by, so I excitedly shared details with Einion, Frostbite, and Marill in our new facebook group. In between my notes on the ecology of the region, and the inspiration for its name (Nohobah), my players informed me they already had characters ready from their previous, failed campaign. Frowning, I accepted their character sheets, and told them I'd find ways for their characters to fit.

Here are their characters as they were initially conceived:

• Marill: a chaotic good halfling barbarian with 20 DEX
• Bite: (short for Frostbite) a chaotic neutral tiefling and ice-draconic-blooded sorcerer
• Einion: a neutral good human cleric and blacksmith from the evil Black Fort clan, which worships the Morrigan (from Celtic myth)

Over the next day I stared at my map and placed these characters on it. Marill was a halfling, so there had to be a halfling city on top of a mesa in the Wind Wastes. I named it Landreic and decided it was high enough that the magic winds didn't harm it. Bite was a tiefling, which I hadn't thought about at all, and furthermore, she had ice dragon blood, which meant she had to be from the north. On the spot I decided Nohobah was being colonized by the Americans Imperials in the north, and that's where she comes from. (This was also how I determined that the only passage north is through the Underdark, since the massive river canyon blocks overland travel.) Finally, Einion was a blacksmithing cleric from a raiding clan. I decided the tribes in Nohobah all had a bit of Orc blood (and were called the Orkenfolk), and that he was from one of the more aggressive tribes, called the Bullsoul tribe.

By now I had found inspiration for my first session in a reddit thread about why You All Meet In A Tavern is bad. The session would open in the midst of a clusterfuck. It would be a big battle between two enemy Orkenfolk tribes, the townsfolk of a neighboring Imperial town, the more peaceful Cloudfolk, and the mysterious druids of the Thorndeep cactus forest. Also, my players would be there, once I rewrote a little history to make it work.

SO, here are the player characters, after I magnanimously rewrote them for my players prior to session 1:

• Marill: A young halfling woman from Landreic in the Wind Waste. She and her husband abandoned their home to seek her fortune, but they were kidnapped by a raiding party of the Bullsoul.
• Einion: A cleric and blacksmith from the same Orkenfolk tribe that kidnapped Marill and her husband. He abandoned his tribe and traveled to the Imperial mining settlement Leeville nearby a year ago. He followed an angry mob on its way to kill a Land Shark that has been decimating the town's livestock.
• Frostbite:  An imperial refugee smuggled south by her grandmother after her magical blood caused a panic. Her grandma died on the way, and she was rescued in the desert by mesa-dwelling Cloudfolk, who raised her. She was sent by the Cloudfolk to help its hunters kill a Land Shark named Lisgrifin that was destroying the bison population.

Never fear, I also made sure to also provide my players with a wall of text each, detailing their history, and what in-world details they should know.

Session 1: The Landshark Massacre

As the first session approached, I planned out the map of the clash, notable members of each faction, and a turn-by-turn script of the action. Needless to say, I made damn well sure that I used all of it by the end of our 5 hours. Now, you might be wondering how I managed to make a battle last 5 hours. You see, I rolled every single roll for each of nearly 50 combatants, while maintaining an initiative list.

Out of self-respect, I won't recap the events of the battle. Unsurprisingly, they happened exactly as planned, despite my players' insistance that they affect the outcome. It ended with the Landshark defeated by a DMPC Mary-Sue named Katrine, and many, many casualties. The player characters were left injured and caring for many dying people in the hot sun, as a horseman left to go find help.

By the end my players were glassy-eyed, and I was beat. Everyone went home and we didn't plan our next session for a few days.

Yes, I painstakingly copied this map during our session, hex-by-hex.

What went wrong

• I designed a fake history instead of a collection of toys, people, and places for my players.
  
• I was not interested in the players' tastes and opinions.
• I spent probably close to 10 hours preparing session 1. (How?)
  
• I railroaded the ever-living fuck out of my players for 5 hours of gruesome quasi-solo-play.

Conclusions

At the beginning of this post, I swore I would go easy on myself. Next time, I'll actually go easy on myself, and try to write something productive.

As far as actual conclusions go, I made some typical mistakes of newbie Game Masters, but I also had some interesting ideas. Now I think it would have been more interesting to set the game in a region already blasted by the Titans War, but I could also have made this setting work with smarter prep. That being said, I definitely should have adopted an existing setting so I could focus my prep on actually learning to run a game.

Going forward, I will be doing shorter recaps of my mistakes, and writing down valuable prep I should have done at the time.