One of the things I talk a lot about with Dungeons and Dragons is homebrewing your own world and your own game. I personally love doing this because it gives me so much freedom to create a world that I want and to put a story that I want into it and to be able to adjust it for the players choices on the fly. However, that’s not going to be for everyone, some people, especially when starting out, want something that they can lean on to tell a story or to help guide them through how the game should work.

Fortunately, Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition has a lot of different options for games like this. They have come out with Princes of the Apocalypse, Curse of Strahd, and so many more that you can run for your game, but the question is, how do you run them to the best of your ability? Now, I’m not going to be the best person to talk about this, because I do like homebrewed games better and running those, but I do have a few things that I think could be useful.

Firstly, read through the whole campaign before you play. This might seem like it’s a lot of up front work, and it is, and maybe that’s what you’re trying to avoid, but you need to know how the story is going to go. That is going to allow you as the DM to plan out your sessions and not stumble over text and dialogue that might be written in there for you. It also means that you know what elements to really focus on. There would be a lot of desire to just run straight through it, but maybe one thing is just a throw away line and if you put too much emphasis on that, you could derail your own game.

Reading through the story is also going to let you know if there’s anything that you need to cut from the game. Maybe you’re group is not at all combat focused and the campaign book has a lot of different combats in it that are very common. You’d be able to drop them out pretty quickly or make them more of a set piece for the players that is just more descriptive than it is tactical and dice focused. Or you could lean more into the combat, make the random encounters less random.

Prep sessions. Now, you should always do at least some of that, and I still do some with homebrewed stuff so I know where I want to go with it. But I actually think that you might need more prep for running a written module because you need to know that beats that you are planning for the session. But know where things are, know what NPC’s your players might meet. Know where they might go so that you aren’t spending a lot of time flipping through the book when you could be playing.

Don’t be afraid to adlib/go off script. Not really something you can plan for, but just know that it’ll happen at some point in time. Your players will lose focus and go off script of what dialogue the game might provide for you. You need to be able to go off script, have conversations with NPC’s who might not exist but that your players create for you, or maybe they’ll go down a rabbit trail with another NPC or rabbit trail a quest into something bigger than it would have been. If you know the material from the module, you’ll have the tools to make something that still falls in line with what has been done before.

Now, the biggest thing is really that first item, if you know your material well, you don’t need to prep as much and you’ll be more prepared to go off script, so read through that module a few times. Beyond that, have fun with it. If you’re a new DM, put in the work of knowing the material and the game will go well. And when you mess something up or it takes a bit to find something, or you get a piece of lore wrong, that’s okay, even with a module, it’s still your game, so have a good time with it.

Have you run modules, what do you do to prepare? Do you have any tips for running a premade adventure?

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