TLDR; I'm a new DM to long-form campaigns and seeking advice, tips, resources waaaaay later than I should be seeking them. I've bitten off more than I could chew and already had the first session, but I think I can keep it going.
Long-winded under the cut:
So, I have been wanting to DM my own D&D campaign for quite some time now, and I have perviously DM'd two one-shots. I've been playing in a party for several years now, roughly every other week, and somehow I convinced myself to just commit. We picked a day I would start. I gave the premise for the world and the sorts of characters in it, and hosted a session zero where the players created their characters.
I started creating a map and a city history and lore and then spent a bunch of time creating stops and maps for a public transit system and realized there's so much I still don't know but felt like I could handle it. I figured out the creature they would battle in session one that would be the inciting incident for all of them to come together as a team. It happened, they nearly one hit KO'd the monster that the internet guide said would be balanced for their level to fight. I last minute improvised some minions who joined the battle in the second round and 2 out of 3 were one hit KO'd. I kept rolling 1's and the battle was over so much more quickly than I expected, was way less epic, and we still had 3 hours left of time to fill where I wasn't expecting so many hours to be.
I had the players each pick an uncommon item which I was planning on doing anyway and used that time to scrape together more idea for what to do next, and I pulled a character in that I maybe shouldn't have pulled in so soon, but it's sort of fun and sort of working, and now I have to roll with it. I made up another character completely on the fly to go with said character, and an adventure that I wasn't quite expecting unraveled.
The player characters are now on a journey to find a missing love interest that didn't exist before of a character that is supposed to be Sort Of A Big Deal a bit later on who has been kidnapped by a different NPC and I've written myself into what will most likely become the different NPC being caught and revealing the truth about the Sort Of A Big Deal character earlier than I wanted it to be revealed.
Ultimately I think it will all work out, I have time to figure out options and dig more into the world and NPCs and settings and the players said that they had fun and I also had fun but WOW being the DM is a lot of work and I genuinely have SO MUCH work ahead of me for this campaign that I didn't even think about until I was in it because I've never DM'd more than a one-shot.
I would lowkey appreciate resources, tips, etc and maybe anything that I can use to build this up after already having session one. The good news is I am a fairly skilled writer and a fairly skilled improviser and both of those things will work in my favor, but yeah, I'm seeking community help here in terms of building worlds and NPCs specifically for D&D rather than for writing a story on my own while also having enough of a direction to guide players in 😅
