This is the page for my TTRPG documents!
I've been playing TTRPGs regularly since 2018, but I haven't actually run all that many games. Even in the few games I've run, it's easy to see the amount of improvment I'm able to achieve if I keep rigorous notes and go back after each session/campaign to reassess what worked and what didn't. I'll use this page to post documents from different campaigns I've run, summaries of different runs of those campaigns, and overall DM notes and advice I've accumulated from those runs. Hopefully that will help me be a better DM along with anyone else who looks here. I don't remember a lot of the old games very well, so the documents and summaries are less complete with those, but I'll try my best to remember those.
The Box
System: Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition
Summary: The party would start out in a combat with a bulette. Then they would be transported by an angel who had named the party as their chosen representatives, in an attempt to avert a war between dragons and some other as-yet-unidentified humanoid alliance. After learning of this, they would then be left at a massive floating cube of stone with lots of arcane and obtuse puzzles. Near the base they find a young red dragon imprisoned there, which they then free.
Runs: 1
Notes from run 1 (sometime in 2018, 2 sessions): I made a lot of stupid mistakes in this game. I was really eager to run my first campaign and I didn't prepare nearly as much as I should have. I also pretty much strong-armed my sister (who isn't really interested in TTRPGs) into convincing 2 of her friends to play with her in this game. This led to a lot of contention with my sister during the game, which eventually led to us full-out arguing at the table (we're fine now).
More generally than that though, I never really took into account what they were going to be actually expreiencing in the game. I made a lot of obtuse puzzles that would waste their time, and I showed them a bunch of cool creatures which might've made them go "Wow!" for about 2 seconds, but I didn't really think about what they would be thinking the rest of the time. I was so focussed on filling the session time with busy work, that I never really thought about whether the players would enjoy the story beign told.
Moving forward, I resolved to focus more on making an engaging story, including at least one full-depth character to interact with, and focussing on PC experiences/narration rather than always giving them a Rubiks cube.
Prep Documents: I kept no documents from this campaign. Partially because I didn't see any value in them, and partly because I didn't really keep all that many notes(or any really) in the first place.
The Icefields
System: Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition
Summary: In the wake of a failed invasion by Yuan-Ti in alliance with eldritch abominations from the astral plane, a military base in the middle of nowhere sends our heros out to find a legendary weapon from the war which had been lost in one of the final confrontations: the Stormglaive. This journey into the middle of the barren, snowy mountains(no there aren't any icefields, I just named it that because it sounded good to me at the time), could have impacts much wider than the party realizes.
Runs: 2
Notes from run 1 (June-August 2020, 3 sessions): This is first campaign I ever ran that I would consider to be successful. I owe no small part of that to the skill and cooperation of the players, who, this time around, were 3 friends I had picked up from other campaigns who each had plenty of experience DMing and playing. Apart from that though, one of the biggest takeaways I got from running this campaign was the effectiveness of music. I took from the soundtracks of Firewatch and Hyper Light Drifter to set the mood, and they did wonders. Not only did they help with setting the mood and keeping tension up, but they also helped to keep people focussed when I was preparing the next part of the adventure. Pretty much all of my campaigns from this point featured soundtracks that I had spent a lot of time picking out, usually from a video games I really liked the feeling of.
The only other thing of note was that I tried something that I had, up until that point, felt was very difficult to do in a ttrpg: make an ally betray the party without it feeling contrived. I think this worked out well here because I did it as less of a puzzle and more as a character interaction. The players were more than aware that the party member was suspicious, but that gave them the freedom to act accordingly with their characters to make a entertaining set of narrative moments. Generally, I try to make any puzzle/betrayal follow in this one's footsteps.
Notes from run 2 (January 2021, 3 sessions): I did this run right after the previous run of this campaign with the same people as from the run of The Box(seen above). I partially did this to see if my success was repeatable, and also maybe to look for a little redemption with the players that I had so badly failed a couple years ago. Sadly, I don't really think I could call this a success or a failure. I was much more organized this time around and much more focussed on allowing the players to actually interact with things and change the direction of the story. The music I had prepared also helped to keep people engaged. Unfortunately, the players still weren't really experienced with ttrpgs and thus had a kind of outsized notion of what could actually be accomplished in a single session. They were thinking about things like setting up love triangles and trekking across the nation in the space of 2-3 sessions.
I think those kinds of problems sort of come with the territory of having new players, but I definitely could have done a better job of making their charatcers more aligned with each other in terms of their goals, prior to the start of the campagin. Midway through, one of the players attempted to just leave the party and go to another country because "that's what they thought their character would do". In reality, it was probably becaause I didn't really examine their character motivations before the campaign, which pretty much included: being a thief. Otherwise I would have realizes that the character wouldn't be that fun to play in a group setting, except maybe by an experienced player.
Prep Documents: Google drive link, I also used some 5e monster stat blocks, but this happened so long ago that I don't remember exactly which ones.