Campaign Preparation

I'm finally starting a new (5E) campaign set in my world of Altrion after about 25 years.

Man, but there are more useful tools than there were back then :D Google Docs for background documents is a godsend, as is Wonderdraft, and I'm slowly trying to braindump all the stuff I know and/or can salvage from emails and scanned in paperwork into a hyperlinked form in WorldAnvil. And boy is there a lot of it!

And equally, boy do I wish I'd backed up my old Mac from a couple of decades ago, as there's a bunch of stuff I'd dearly love to have back :( Backups are a rant for another day, though (or go search my wargaming blog).

First steps, then:

• Write up a background for the players, so they get an idea of where their character are and what the world is like - done - as ever, this results in a bunch of creativity and adding notes to various locations as I go :D
• Bullet-point the arc for the campaign (with the inevitable acceptance that the players can and probably will go off-arc) - in my head
• Design a few background NPCs - working on it

One thing I did find myself doing, which I've commented on before: in D&D, the rules and the setting are distinct. Those bits of the books that cover how combat works, stats, dice, skills, etc are rules. Things like races and classes are definitely setting, not rules. Yes, there's kind of an over-arching D&D multiverse, and some of that informs the rules to a degree, but you can (and I'm going to) say 'no, this doesn't exist in the world I'm DMing'.