How to start your first RPG campaign
The Talehaven team7 min read
You have an idea for a campaign, two or three willing players, and a blank document that has been staring at you for an hour. Somewhere online, someone said you need a continent map, a full pantheon and three hundred years of history before anyone rolls a die.
You do not. A first session runs fine off a single page of notes, and most of the world only appears once the players start doing things in it.
Short answer
Before your first session, prepare five things: a one-sentence hook, one starting location, two or three NPCs, the opening scene, and a short conversation about what you are all here to play (a session zero). Everything else you leave alone on purpose - it fills in as you go.
What to prepare before session one
Write a one-sentence hook
The hook is the reason the player characters are together and moving at all. One sentence you can say out loud: "someone went missing in the mine and there is coin for finding them." If it takes a paragraph to explain, it is too complicated.
Build one starting location
A single place where the game opens, described enough to feel alive: a tavern, a camp, a city gate. Who runs it, what is missing, what is wrong. The rest of the map can stay blank for now.
Three NPCs, not thirty
Two, maybe three characters the players will definitely talk to in the first scene. Each needs one line - what they want. A patron, someone who knows too much, and someone who gets in the way will carry the whole night.
Plan the first scene, not the whole session
Know where and how you open and what the first problem is. What happens after that depends on the players, so planning it now is just guessing. Prepare the opening and one strong hook, and run the rest live.
Agree on a session zero
Before anyone rolls, settle the tone, the subjects you are steering around, and the fact that everyone is playing the same game. Fifteen minutes of talking saves an evening where half the table imagined something else. There is a separate guide on running one.
Deliberately skip the rest of the world
Do not write the kingdom’s history, the later arcs or the pantheon until the players reach for them. Prep you will not use in the first session is not a reserve - it is a reason never to start.
A first session in Alpendorf
Hook: a mountain mining settlement is paying to find out why nobody has come back up from the deepest shaft in a week.
Starting location: the one tavern in Alpendorf, where everyone who can still afford a beer ends up.
NPCs: the innkeeper who hears every rumour, the foreman who is a little too keen to close the subject, and the widow of one of the missing.
First scene: the players walk into the tavern in the middle of an argument about whether anyone should go down there at all.
That is it. The rest of the mountains, the neighbouring villages and whatever is in the shaft are not on paper yet - and that is fine.
Common challenges
- Building an entire world before session one instead of the single location where it actually starts.
- Scripting the plot scene by scene, as if the players will walk through it obediently.
- Skipping the session zero and discovering mid-evening that everyone pictured a different campaign.
- Waiting to start until the prep is "finished" - it never will be.
Start a campaign from a single page of notes
Create a campaign, drop the hook, the location and a few NPCs in one place, and run the first session. You can write the world once the players start exploring it.