Question: For my very first session, do I need to have anything about the campaign (fronts and whatnot) thought out? Or do I run the first session and see what kind of information comes out THEN start putting together the campaign?
Question: For my very first session, do I need to have anything about the campaign (fronts and whatnot) thought out?
Question: For my very first session, do I need to have anything about the campaign (fronts and whatnot) thought out?
First session is generally best to start cold or with just a few general ideas, then build from that.
Don’t do fronts before the first session! Show up with a few rough ideas, maybe a map or two. You can flag some monsters you might want to use too.
Then sit down to play and see where things go. It may be someplace you don’t expect! Or it could be exactly what you imagine! Either way by the end of the first session you’ll have some fuel for fronts.
My personal method is to have the players do all the “prep” work for me by having them talk about who they are, what kind of theme they’re going for, and so on. Once they’ve established that, I take about ten minutes to think and flip through the monsters section, and come up with some sort of on-theme action to plop them into the middle of. It doesn’t matter if things feel a bit random and incongruous as long as it keeps moving and you give the players a chance to guide you in new directions. After the first session, you can look at what worked, what elements you feel could be further expanded into Dangers, and starting thinking about how a Front or two could tie everything that happened together.
This isn’t for everyone, though. I facilitate this whole process by having my own fantasy world pet project with many elements and happenings to pull from when I need to, and if you don’t feel very grounded in fantasy tropes, it can be much harder to give the players what they are looking for.
If you don’t think you could wing it like that, I’d advise sketching out (or finding) a dungeon map and coming up with a few (open-ended) dangers, like a dragon, or a goblin infestation, or what have you, while always remembering to follow the Leave Blanks guidelines. Once again, let the players do your work for you: “I’m sure you researched this dungeon before diving right into it, right? What monsters are in it? Are there magic treasures rumored to be contained within? Is it full of traps?” They get to have fun worldbuilding, and your job is easier. It’s a win-win.
But what would you do with tight-lipped players? It can be very hard to get them to provide information about the characters or world. Mine sometimes tell me it feels strange to have to come up with stuff the GM is “supposed” to do!
I honestly don’t know, my players jumped all over the chance to make stuff up. I didn’t even need a name list because they came up with all of them for me. You could create an end session XP-reward of “Did we add something new and exciting to the world?”