I'd picked up City State of the Invincible Overlord and Judges Guild core Wilderlands package; that's what I used to start.  Right from the start, though, I wasn't satisfied with the dungeon fantasy flavor of Random Stuff Randomly Strewn, or with the Wilderlands/JRRT standard of oases of high civilization in the middle of howling wildernesses, with orc hordes in bowshot of every town's walls.  The pen went flying fast.  (I still use the Wilderland maps for my world, but out of decades of inertia; I'd create my own if I was starting from scratch.)

My first five players were my younger brother Mike, and four friends who'd been high school classmates: Rick & Jackie, and Laurey and Marilyn, the latter two with whom I'd first been a player just a couple months before in an Empire of the Petal Throne game.  Mike played Korak, a barbarian firmly in the Conan mode and with a Conanesque future; Rick played Valthor, something of a more Norse-style barbarian; Jackie played Alexandra the priestess; Laurey played Seka the courtesan-mage; and Marilyn played Linden the stick jock.  Classic Howard/Leiber style early RPG play, really, that was 70s gaming for you.

The crew shook out pretty fast.  Mike, Rick and Laurey were in my campaigns for several years, but Jackie was my first encounter with the Gamer's Girlfriend stereotype; she played pretty much because the rest of us were, and she dropped the hobby like a hot potato when she and Rick split up soon after that.  Marilyn was the root cause for my abandonment of random gen and my journey to variant homebrew; she hated playing anything but wizards, went along grudgingly with the STR 18 DEX 16 fighter-type she rolled up, and ditched her for greener pastures soon enough.

I wish I remembered what the first adventure was.  I ran a couple of the JG published scenarios early on (Dark Tower, Thieves of Badabaskor), as well as a homebrew dungeon or two, and the CSO remained the home base of the party for a couple of years.

Early on, though, I got geopolitical, but that's a tale for another time ...

First real campaign was BX, starting with Keep on the Borderlands, then flowing into Isle of Dread, both pretty freeform and open for modules. From there things grew as BX was mostly a blank canvas to bring to life. And even the modules left alot of room to liven up.

That was about my third go-round with BX and Keep/Isle so by then I'd built up some notes and ideas as the two previous groups had been pretty good about striking off in unexpected directions.

After the Isle the group set out north to deal with various troubles that popped up. Mostly it was dealing with problems with gnomes. Then later alot of NPC political dealings and scouting around Wereskalot and quite a bit of pounding on goblins.

Mostly playing off whatever the group was investigating rather than a overall "plan" for the group. Stuff went on in the background. but unless the group interacted with it. It was just there for my own personal bemusement and possible fallback plans. That way if the PCs delved they might note the chain of events. Or not. Usually not.

One of the players, a Fighter named Markus, eventually settled down and built a castle in the cleared out former goblin realm. The others Edicus (his younger brother), Haas, and Sonia retired there as well in various stations and the campaign came to a close as the players were starting to make moves to other states.

I would have been 12 years old, I think my first real campaign was a Fighting Fantasy sandbox campaign across Allansia. I remember very little about it - bounty hunters with baseball helmets and laser-beam pen-guns. Falling through a thatched roof into the skull-furnitured attic of Vanatar the Necromancer.

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?
And in either case, what were your motivations for running that particular campaign?

I played D&D for a while (modules, unconnected adventures) before I ran a "real" campaign.  The first one was a 1e AD&D campaign in a homebrew world.  It didn't have a theme, it was a generic D&D fantasy knock-off.  Influences were Greyhawk, Tolkien, Moorcock.  Motivation?  I dunno -- have fun, I suppose.  I do remember intentionally setting out to run that game as a "real" campaign, tracking campaign time, wealth expenditure, training, and all that.

Quote from: S'mon;793117I would have been 12 years old, I think my first real campaign was a Fighting Fantasy sandbox campaign across Allansia.

*high fives*

B/X with B2 as a starting off point. From there the campaign moved south in the Known World and I created some of my own adventures in the Wereskalot area and around other areas of Luln.  No strongholds got built by the players in that campaign largely because the Temple of Death lived up to it's name.

For total freeform though Gamma World was my first real campaign as it were. Lots of wandering around and blasting things. Really. Thats about all they did. Incorperated BX's overland exploration system and the strongholds to flesh things out. The two meshed rather nicely too.

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?

My first campaign was Ravenloft. I ran two different campaigns at the same time with one lasting for a few months but the other one lasting for several years. The second campaign was located in Mordent and began as a haunted house adventure in the House of Lament (which I think was from the Dark Lords supplement). I mapped out the whole house and added quite a few twists to it. Because it was a Ravenloft adventure and the characters were all pulled in from Forgotten Realms, the overarching goal was to escape. They spent most of the campaign following rumors of portals and eventually did find one that took some of them home.

As far as motives go, I don't know what motivated me specifically. I guess I had been playing in a number of campaigns and picked up the Ravenloft boxed set and Feast of Goblyns module. I was instantly in love with the setting and once I read the Feast of Goblyns I knew I wanted to run something. At first I just ran a couple of one shots here or there, to get my feet wet. I don't recall the details of how the campaign started but most likely my group of gaming friends at the time needed someone to run something and I volunteered.

My first two campaigns, which both kind of happened at the same time were:

a) a D&D game that was a huge jumble of just about any influence I could lay my hands on: the Known World, FR, Dragonlance, Fighting Fantasy, etc., plus some stuff I made up myself.  It was a big mess, made no real sense, but it was full of stuff to do and (admittedly playing fast and loose with the XP rules) the PCs got to something like level 15.

and

b) A Robotech campaign that played out, ultimately, over almost 10 years.  It was for the most part surprisingly orthodox, and covered decades of game-time.  It ended up actually being a model for a lot of subsequent campaigns I did over the years with similarly long-term timelines.

I played for about 10 years before i stepped behind the screen. My first game was based on the Wheel of Time series. Jesus, that shows how long that series of books was going for. I think i ran that game in about '92

My first was with Marvel Superheroes RPG. I ran a game for my friend and his uncle. Two teenage Mutants just coming into their powers. It was a lot of fun. I was 13-14.

About 89-90 I co-ran a Macross game using Robotech. There were about 5 of us, me and another friend took turns running it. It was a shared collaboration between all of us.

Amber was like my third campaign, and the rest was history.

My first campaign. Oh man. I was 14 and super into medieval political structures.

I spend hours hand drawing out a map then coloring it with colored pencils, and labeling it ever so carefully. Then actual play. The city-state of Phoenixia was fighting the Folarian Empire.

Our hero of the tale a half-vampire dark knight came in and rescued Phoenixia, he was immediately made Lord-General and put in charge of the entire military where he led a bloody campaign against the Folarians. Penultimately with the help of his artifact which was able to unlimitedly raise a corpse into a skeleton under his control, he was able to amass a skeletal army which only grew as the battles went on. Ultimately he was able to march on the Folarian capital with impunity who surrendered unconditionally. He had the power of the skeleton army, the Phoenixian army and conquered the capital city of Folaria, he was shortly there after crowned King of both kingdoms.

Within the catacomb library of the Folarian capital city he discovered a clue to the secret location of one of the mythical dragon orbs. He immediately set out to obtain the orb. It was being guarded by all manner of creatures and traps. Eventually he obtained it and gained the power to completely control blue dragons which he summoned as guards.

Finally his ultimate quest was to reforge the Sword of Kas, and usher in a new era for the material plane. Over a long series of adventures he revealed that the soul that inhabited his body was actually Kas' itself, the soul captured and infused into the human woman who gave birth to him, all to hide him from Vecna. He managed to reforge the physical sword which resonated with its owner to great effect. The half-vampire king led his army across the material plane for an epic showdown against Vecna, Undead God of Secrets. But we stopped the campaign right before the final battle.

Oh yeah, and there were some player characters who helped out, mostly by killing stuff.

I was 21, and it was 1977, whatever form of D&D was current at the time, but before AD&D. I had played one session of D&D under another GM, which confirmed that I was meant to be a GM, not a player, so I started my own game, in the setting I eventually published as Book of Jalan. It went on for twenty years, until I was tired of it and couldn't run it any more. I had no theme. I never have themes. I don't plan things enough to have themes. I threw things at the players, they responded, and the campaign went on. There was very little dungeon, mostly overland adventure, with politics and maneuvering. I can count the number of dungeons I ran in those twenty years on one hand, though one was a mega-dungeon - an enormous tesseract I created. That was towards the end of the campaign. They met up with time/dimensional travelers from Earth, space people in power armor, gods, demons, and many, many dragons. It was what it was. I tried to get them to play something else, but they - up to seventeen people at a time - only wanted to play this campaign. I burned out on it. I can't even think that way any more. I look back on it with massive indifference.

-clash

Quote from: danskmacabre;793094The 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.

Very cool!

I used to own (actually, I still do, somewhere) the Jaiman and Tanara books (as well as a number of other Rolemaster Shadow World modules).  I never actually used the setting myself (however, I transplanted a few of the adventures to ICE's version of Middle-earth back in the day), though I always found Terry Amthor's stuff really interesting and inspiring.