What are your personal steps to making it?
For me, its..
1. Brainstorm a storyline that would likely keep players going.
2. Map out a generic idea of what your hoping the map will end up as.
3. Major encounters, and some alternative battles dependent on various things you can think up that the players may end up doing.
4. Try and get a good feel for where you party is going to potentially end up powerwise for these different events to create or use various mobs that are relevant to the story and not completely random (Heck yeah! Gelatinous cube in the middle of the forest... wait what?)
5. Music to go with the game, to further set the mood.
OMG! Too many ways all at once!
I've made whole universes and single villages as starting points. I've tried open-ended gaming and hardline linear stories. I've tried winding, convoluted plots and single-story arcs that go nowhere. Bottom line: its up to your players.
My players have ALREADY thrown me a curveball and we haven't even played the game yet (only made characters.) I lovingly crafted a player's guide for my latest homebrew and in it made several references to ruins scattered around the land. I then crafted a linear story (at their request) about gypsies and fairy tales and lots of forest encounters.
My players got their player's guides, read them, and immediately thought: wouldn't it be cool if we ONLY explored ruins, looking for ancient relics of the past, and totally IGNORED the gypsies and forests?
Really??!!!
Anyway, I'm retooling. I hope to have something palatable for my players before next weekend. Ask your players; they'll know what to do!
My idea is here. :)
A. Unless you are the type of person who models game worlds in your spare time for fun, you should stick to a very manageable set of encounters and a very simple set of NPC motivations.
B. If you are the type of person who models game worlds in your spare time, then you just plug the new campaign into your existing world.
Be careful, doing "A" successfully could very well end up with you becoming "B".
I do this...
1) Map out an area, maybe a few towns, dungeons, landmarks, etc.
2) Create the basic plot and 1st adventure
3) Play
4) Let the area/plot develop based on previous adventure
5) Expand world to accomodate more than where they play
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Step 1) Sit down with my players and discuss what they are looking for, because there's a very good chance I have an Adventure Path or series of modules that will suit their tastes and cut down my workload.
Assuming that isn't the case (and very rarely is that not the case) then I start hashing out the ideas Round Robin style.
Round 1) Say Yes: Each player names a thing that MUST be in the game (an evil queen, a long journey, steampunk), every player must name something.
Round 2) Say No: Something the players DON'T want to see in the setting (No pirates, no horror, no guns!)
Round 3) I synthesize an idea, put together a player's primer and start hunting through my copious dungeon magazines, sourcebooks and internet sources for adventures and adventure ideas.
Round 4) Character Generation.
Round 5) Play!
I do this even without player prompting as I have my own setting that's been in the works for several years now.
I usually get a base trigger for an idea. Sometimes it's "ooh I want to run a story around X monster/class/concept". Sometimes it's inspired by a movie or book: "I like what they did here, this could have been done different, but that would cause this to change, etc. etc. etc." Sometimes it's more simple even than that: the current PbP I'm running was initiated by me thinking up the phrase "(Be)'Ware The Red" and backtracking to "Okay what does that mean? What's The Red? Is it a person, place, creature, event, etc.? Why should someone beware it? What can be done about it?"
After that it's just expanding on it, picking a place in my world for it to occur (not hard, lots of "adventuring centers" in my setting), picking a place in the timeline (depending on where I put the plot, the game will be low magic, high magic, moderate magic with low tech, or outright steampunk/magitek), and hashing out the details of the plot.
1. Brainstorm a vague concept.
2. Figure out how it will begin (this is the hardest step, and I like to do it early, because if I get stuck on it after doing everything else I could potentially waste a lot of work).
3. Figure out who the main villain is.
4. Figure out who any major NPC allies are.
5. Imagine a vague path that the adventure will take to get to its conclusion, leaving plenty of room for things to change based on player choice.
6. Pitch it to the players. (An important step. It would suck to prepare a detailed zombie apocalypse only to learn after finishing that the players don't want to fight zombies, and all your work was for naught.)
7. Figure out who the minor "stepping stone" villains along that path to the main villain are, and what type of monsters, if any, are going to be commonly used against the PCs.
8. Write down the vague path from start to end, and the names of the villains along it.
9. Stat up the big final villain.
10. Stat up the stepping stone villains (usually 4 or 5 of them).
11. Stat up the NPC allies.
12. Go through bestiaries and find a few monsters' worth of encounters that are suitable thematically for every level the players will be at during the campaign (about 4 pre-prepared encounters planned per level, more being added later, especially at higher levels, once I see what direction the adventure is taking).
...And that's about all I do. Unless of course it's also set in a homebrewed world, in which case worldbuilding takes place between steps 5 and 6.
Want instant inspiration? Grab your old Advanced D&D DM's Guide. Go ahead, I'll wait.
...
Got it? Great. Flip to pg 173/Appendix B: Random Wilderness Terrain. Now...start rolling.
My current homebrew started just like this. I knew I wanted the city of Dunspar on the coast; didn't know what kind of coast so I threw a few dice on other charts for random weather and 3 of the 5 came up cold snap and snow, so I thought "ok...it's northeastern US coast" and looked at Massachusets and Maine. They're renowned for rocky, hilly coast, so I assumed rolling coastline with lots of strata. From there, I went to Appendix B.
I rolled randomly for a few hexes adjacent to the city. I came up w/forested hills, forest, marsh and scrub. Here's what that gave me:
The city and the land due north are rocky hills, sparsely dotted with woods; as one travels inland eastward however the forest becomes old, dense; moss covered and ancient. South east of the town the forest thins once more into two distinct regions; sparsely wooded moors and scrub land in the highlands and cliffs overlooking the Icwynd Sea while the lowlands near sea level flood constantly creating a vast salt marsh.
Frankly I use the random tables in the old DMG for tons of stuff. I've created non-sensical dungeons, random freak weather, planned out homebrew lands and used them to create notable NPC's.
The last PC I made for another friend's PF game I was stuck for a character concept, so I rolled out the DMG and looked at the Secondary Skills table and rolled; ended up with "Teamster/Freighter". So, my guy drives a wagon? Then I went to the NPC tables and randomly rolled his Alignment: L. Good. I rolled possessions: Scant, but his appearance was youthful and clean; traits: helpful/kindly; personality: extroverted/overbearing...I won't bore you w/the rest.
Finally I got to Collections and he got a prize piece of armor or sheild. So I looked him over and a pattern emerged: a kid, nice but maybe a little overprotective with his heart in the right place. Currently he's driving a wagon and not paid real well for it (scant possessions). He had high energy, ponderous intellect and a penchant toward athleticism. I thought... circus performer.
So that's how I ended up with Brinnix Belthane, shielded fighter. As a boy he was very into doing what's right but as a teen something drove him to join a band of traveling performers. He had previously been trained as a militia member and still bore the shield he was presented with to mark his station but it never saw much use stowed in the cab of the wagon he drove. Until one day the company was held up and Brinnix saved the life of the dwarven strong man.
Since then the dwarf Frohmm has taken the lad under his wing, showed him a few other tricks to do with a shield BESIDES defend himself with it. Young Belthane has scrimped and saved, done extra odd jobs in the towns they've crossed and pulled together enough to p/up his own gear and he's striking out on his own to seek his fortune.
So several replies have combined the idea of 'custom world' with 'custom campaign' and I feel each are different. I would feel very comfortable running a custom campaign in a pre-made/commercially available game world - just as comfortable as I would be in my own custom created world.
Game World Issues: I've gamed with a relatively stable group (with ad ons and fall offs here and there) for roughly 23 years. Approximately 5 years ago we came up with and created a 'collaborative world' outline on a wiki. There are large landmass maps, a general history, house rules, etc. on the wiki and any time one of us runs a campaign we add detail into the world (detailed setting, new NPCs, minor historical events, etc). Because we are able to work collaboratively and cooperatively, the world takes on a rich and living character that cannot be achieved through just a single creator. Additionally, allowing for different eras of play provides huge flexibility in the campaigns being run and allows characters to participate in major historical events (which is quite fun).
Campaign Creation:
1 - Consider a theme and setting. What is happening in the world at the time the characters are living and what role (if any) do they play? Further, where in the world are the characters based? Small town? Big city? Desert? Arctic? Temperate? Are they in a peaceful kingdom? Under a tyrant? On the outskirts of civilization?
2 - Once a theme and setting are built, I create or reference the starting settlement the characters are in and build out several NPCs.
3 - The next step is to figure out an adventure that 'naturally' gets the characters together and gets them doing something adventurous. This adventure is usually a stand-alone with several possible 'hooks' in it that gives me an indication of how the players are feeling in regards to their game world and setting. It also helps everyone see how the party works together and what its strengths and weaknesses are.
4 - I usually continue with 2-3 more adventures, following on the hooks that players bite into and evolving the storyline as it goes. As the characters start making their mark, the world around them reacts and a campaign simply 'organically' grows. By the time characters are level 3 I generally have a good idea of where they're going and what the big goal is going to be. That said, sometimes they derail and go somewhere else entirely ... and that's ok too.
I think the biggest thing I do is simply build the living world around the characters rather than give them a 'set' campaign. In doing so, I can give them a 'players guide' in relation to what their home is like and what's going on in the world around them (hence what they might encounter in the campaign), but they actually determine the exact path of the campaign.
Is it a bit more work? I don't think so. It just requires a bit of flexibility and a strong understanding of your game setting.