Campaign Resources
Wizards of the Coast has produced a number of great campaigns to use as a starting point for your games. In my experience they usually leave quite a bit up to the DM to fill in. This is intentional, they want to give you the change to be creative. The players get to make all kinds of decisions about their characters, why should the DM not have the same freedom? As a new Dungeon Master however, this can feel intimidating.
When I started running my first game I expected the pre-written adventure to include everything I needed. I thought it would run as a fully formed choose your own adventure story that I would be narrating the players through. While the first adventure I ran, The Lost Mines of Phandelver, was more (but not entirely) this way, the camapign we transitioned into was not that way at all.
We moved into Storm Kings Thunder which has large open-ended sections left for the DM to fill in. A lot of adventures are like this, but luckily there are a lot of great people online who have already had to fill in these same gaps. In this section I play to provide links to all of the resources I come across that would be useful when running an official adventure.
There will be a lot of Storm Kings Thunder here at first, since that’s what I’m currently running, but I’ll expand into others as well.
I’ll also add anything else I come across that I find useful, hopefully my preparation can be helpful to you as well.