That is to say, not just a game where you were running a generic dungeon, or one where you were playing out adventures at random without any thought process behind it.
What was the first actual world you ran: was it homebrewed or published? if the former what were its themes and influences? if the latter, where was it located in the setting and what was the basic background to the campaign?
And in either case, what were your motivations for running that particular campaign?

In high-school I ran a MERP campaign set in the early Fourth Age.  After a few preliminary adventures, the characters were charged by King Elessar with recovering a lost palantir from the far north.

The campaign was drawn from a brief outline in the ICE campaign book, Rangers of the North.  (This outline later was expanded into a full-blown adventure series, Palantir Quest.  My campaign predated that book by many years.)

The campaign continued after the completion of that quest for a few adventures (the party was granted a fiefdom in the north, etc.).  It ended up being very D&D-ish in nature, but a lot of fun (for the most part).  And it lasted for over a year, I think, which was pretty incredible for my high-school group (as we tended to flit from game to game rather often).

I should mention that I had designed a few home-brewed AD&D worlds in middle and high-school before moving to MERP, and ran many AD&D adventures in those worlds.  But none of them ever added up to a coherent campaign.

First World: The first world I ran was the one I created for my OD&D campaign from about 1974-1979. It was totally homebrewed. It had to be. No supplements or published worlds existed when I started gaming.

Themes: Dude it was a game of OD&D not a bleeping storygame. ;-) The only theme was whatever the heck the players wanted their characters to do. One or two liked helping people and rescuing damsels. One guy really liked talking to NPCs. Most PCs mostly killed people and took their stuff. (For a sufficiently loose definition of people.)

Key Influences: D&D Little Brown Books, Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series, Celtic and Norse Mythology, and Tolkien's LotR - especially for orc/goblin behavior and society.

Motivation: DMing was fun. World creation was fun. And you can't be the player all the time. (At least I couldn't.) I'd much rather run a game than have someone else run a lame game.

I was on a Coast Guard ship just after high school. And not being bright I ended up on an Icebreaker so we were out for months at a time. So we played a lot, 3-5 hours 4-5 nights a week and had several rotating campaigns.

One I ran was a Spacemaster campaign with some Rolemaster weapons books to add some variety to the crit charts.

It was basically 3 characters trying to survive in a very cyberpunk sort of game and this was long before I knew what the hell cyberpunk was. late 1980's.

They lived in an isolated world in the Brown sector which was run down and was a mixture of factories and middle to lower class people. There were other sectors;  White was rich and best medical skills/hospitals ; Gold was for the ultra rich, Red was a communistic govt; Black was basically a sewer abandoned levels that connected many others; Blue was high technology; there may have been others.

It was never determined if it was underground bunker, a space ship, or dyson sphere or whatever. It was fun becuase things would break down for no reason. One character was a cop, but just didn't last and became a Private investigator. It was my first game I really had a world made up myself and not just set pieces. I ran very free form very seldom planning any plot and it was very sandbox before I was aware of the term.

Couldn't say what made me run it. They wante dt o do a space game. They were the only rules I had on the ship, and we just went for it.

The very first game I ran was an Amber campaign. I don't remember much about it other than I was way over-prepared and none of the player had read the books but it was still well received.

It was a promising start to my GMing career. Unfortunately my next few attempts at running campaigns, including a second attempt at running Amber a few years later, kind of sucked and it would be a while I ran anything else that was quite so successful.

As for themes, locations, influences.. well it was Amber, nuff said.

Not sure I've ever run what the OP describes as not a real game, but then I got into roleplaying fairly late in life.

It was AD&D 1e, shifting over to 2e once I got the books. I was in sixth grade.

It started with the PCs coming back to their town after hunting to find it burning. The dead were everywhere. There was a crude symbol of a black hand scrawled on the remains of the buildings, and in the center of town there was a stone carving of a black, gauntleted fist.

This led to a meandering campaign that stole pieces from every module or source I liked, including the return of dragons, an artifact called the Black Gauntlet, mystical powers for certain characters (rolled for) called "Talents", and of course the quest to unravel what the evil organization called "The Black Gauntlet" was up to. In the end it turned out that they were sweeping across the land, killing everyone they could to fuel a ritual that would "resurrect" their giant, Orcus-like undead demon god named "Charlok". The climactic battle killed all but the group's Paladin, who had to fight Charlok's avatar alone with his +5 Vorpal Holy Avenger. He wound up inside Charlok's mouth, and as he was about to be swallowed, he thrust his sword up into the roof of Charlok's mouth. He rolled a 20.

It was a hell of a lot of fun.

My first really coherent RPG campaign was The Enemy Within in 1992. I had been playing for almost a decade before then, much of it would probably meet your criteria. But that campaign was sort of my beginning as a GM.

Ran the Fighting Fantasy setting using this rules-and-two-modules package as a starting point:



I loved the Fighting Fantasy choose your own adventure books, and I'd never heard of Dungeons & Dragons (except perhaps the cartoon).

In terms of "plot" and structure that first campaign was heavily influenced by an unholy amalgam of Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past and Doom II, both video games that I was really into at the time. Hexen came a little while later and refined that hybrid flavor further.

I ran that campaign because it was way faster and easier than making a video game at that age.

My first campaign that wasn't a series of published or homebrewed dungeons was a 1E AD&D game set in the Wilderlands, using Campaign Map 6 from the City State of the World Emperor. I had the CSWE for several years, but had never used it. I had overlooked the wilderness setting book when I first bought it, but eventually I was flipping through it and really enjoyed what I read. The eerie forests, weird ruins, and rough towns and cities with a riotous mix of evil and good inhabitants. It fired my imagination more than the typical TSR setting material, and at that time I didn't have any experience of my own at world-building (though I had created a dozen or more dungeons).

Previously, I had started all my adventurers with a group of PCs in an inn learning about about the background to the dungeon they were going to explore. But for this campaign, I had the players make PCs, then I came up with background hooks to get them into the game world. The elf magic-user was a spider elf from the Dankbark forest. A cleric of Mitra was on a pilgrimage. The gnome fighter came down from the SomethingOrOther Hills, etc.. They converged on one of the emperor's frontier towns, Tel Qa, where I presented them with a bunch of sandbox rumours, some from the setting book and some I made up. A lair of kobolds living in caves along the riverbank. A rampaging monster in the farmlands. An abandoned wizards' tower.

The players loved it. They happily took the backgrounds I wrote up and roleplayed their introduction to the setting. We played for a year or so in that campaign, and it opened by eyes to the possibility of sandbox play. One thing I took away from that campaign is my players would rather I came up with PC backgrounds (as long as they're cool) than bother to come up with backgrounds themselves.

My first campaign came up running THE FANTASY TRIP.  It started all chaotic like but the players ended up impressing a king (Of Alaria I remember that) and becoming 'the King's Musketeers.'  It ran that way for 2 and a half years.

Quote from: RPGPundit;793062That is to say, not just a game where you were running a generic dungeon, or one where you were playing out adventures at random without any thought process behind it.
What was the first actual world you ran: was it homebrewed or published? if the former what were its themes and influences? if the latter, where was it located in the setting and what was the basic background to the campaign?
And in either case, what were your motivations for running that particular campaign?

Greyhawk, with a lot of the published stuff and my filling in the gaps with my own. Did you know you could erase stuff on the map? From dungeon crawls to empire building.

Quote from: RPGPundit;793062What was the first actual world you ran: was it homebrewed or published?
if the former what were its themes and influences? if the latter, where was it located in the setting and what was the basic background to the campaign?
And in either case, what were your motivations for running that particular campaign?

I ran ADnD for some years, but like you say, it wasn't really a campaign, I ran the temple of elemental evil and all the scenario series up to killing Lolth.
But it was just back to back running published scenarios.

The first real campaign I ran was with rolemaster using the Shadow World setting.
I ran it in Jaiman in a  country called Tanara. I initially used the Tanara setting book, which was very old actually.
It sort of spiralled off into a proper campaign from there. I developed a hell of a lot of stuff based on that little setting book.
so in answer to the question, it started off in a published setting, but got heavily modded from there.

The background started as a main bad guy called "The implementor" a sort of undead knight thing possessed by an evil sword and the party had to get 3 other swords which in tangent were very powerful and would allow them to defeat "The implementor".

After that, I worked from the supplied background and expanded that as well.
I knew there was a "Dragonlord"  further up north (and various other dragon lords' over the world) and set up a sort of real life game of chess where they would compete with each other by invading various lands for points with their armies.

The party ended up getting quite high level and it all got quite political where a war had developed, they set up defenses, armies, colleges etc over the years.

I used the "War law" mass battles as well to do major battles against neighbouring countries and the Dragon Lord's armies.

Motivation wise, I just kind of went with the flow. I didn't decide the direction, I just listened to what my players enjoyed and developed the campaign world accordingly.

All in all, good fun.

Hmmmm... I could answer this two ways.

My first campaign was somewhat random, somewhat railroaded. I ran my local friends in my teenage years through Basic D&D then 1st edition Advanced. Village of Hommlett, I1: The Lost City, Isle of Dread, The Giant series, the Drow series were some of what I ran. Not a campaign in the sense there was an ongoing theme, just kill things and grab loot and level up. This was back in the early 80's. Why that game? We discussed the options (Gamma World was also on the table) and we all choose D&D to play through. It was the game of that time. We were new to the hobby, very raw and clumsy, leaned heavily on published material but learned a lot in the process.

My first campaign with a real story and flow to it came in college. I ran a Robot Warriors (Hero system) game set on Earth in the near future. Half the world was an Islamic Caliphate, the other half were the free Western nations, plus there were colonies on some other moons and asteroids in the solar system. War broke out and in the first few weeks everything blew up and broke down. Then a long period where the PCs and their mecha tried to hold off the remnants of the opposing army. Meanwhile alien starships were spotted coming and going through the solar system so the PCs had their hands full fighting the Muslims and alien mecha. We had a good time with it. Why Robot Warriors? My college friends and I were into Japanese anime at the time and we liked the Hero system. I found a copy in a hobby shop, bought it, we all read it and like the idea. Maybe not the best game ever but it's what we had.

The Enemy Within for Warhammer First Edition. My god that was epic. At that point I recall the final adventure hadnt been published (and wouldnt be till Hogshead took over years later iirc), so I had to make my own. And that made it all the more special.