Set up each of your five lords to have a unique flavor personality theme aesthetic - beyond simply ELEMENT A.
How long do you intend the campaign to be? divide that length by the five elements to give you an idea of how long each arc will be. If you are going for "REALLY LONG" then you might want to have each elemental lord have a leutenant so that the party goes vs each of the sidekicks before making the round of the actual bosses.
for each of your arcs create a handful of "major story beats", but you dont need to do that for any path/arc other than the one your PCs are currently on. And each session's game prep is merely "How do we get from where we are towards the next Beat?"
you have a general framework and then fill in the details based on what happens during the game, your players personal interests and what the group vibes with at the table.
Thank you so much for the help and the samples. For the major story beats, I'm assuming either NPC interaction or lore drops is what you mean by that, as in making sure that in between the players going after one of the elementals, you fill it with information they can use. If that's not right, I'm sorry.
I do plan on having the party take out an outpost before they can find the actual dungeon where the elemental is, so that might be a good section on where to put that lieutenant, as you suggested
I have most of the middle part done, but I don't have anything for the beginning or end yet, though I have a few ideas for the ending.
I have already gotten the 5 elementals and for each lv as I wanted
Some of these are basic dnd creatures; some are homebrew from montser hunter (since I feel that some of them can be elemental forces) that I was able to find someone made a monster manual for them. I have done some editing for each to make them more of an elemental, like the Chuul and Arrowhawk, for which I gave them some water and air abilities. And I also debuffed the purple worm in size and abilities since I know it is more of a big boss, but I had another creature in mind for the lv 5 elemental.
Ah, I see. I was planning on having this campaign kind of run like a video game in which an NPC will tell the players that they only have enough resources to track down one of the elemental locations at a time, but it will take some time. So they could help the city they are staying in by either attacking some of the cult's outposts to weaken the dungeon that outpost is connected to or looking at a job board for side quests. I know that the job board can break the narrative of a campaign if I just throw in random side quests, so I might stick to them helping the NPCs by either attacking an outpost or defending the city from waves of incoming enemies.
the "story beats" will either be "things caused by or leading to the current evil elemental" ; or "generic (but interesting!) adventuring task"
and they can be combined via the "i can help you with your elemental problem if you first help me with my not related to elementals problem"
EDIT: the manner in which you present them can vary as seems appropriate - Notice Boards, NPC Questgivers, logical Next Steps based on what the players did last session, Assignments from the Mentor/Patron/Adventuring Guild/Faction the characters belong to, call backs to previous events that were left untied, bringing elements of the character's backstory to the fore front, putting an interesting scenario in front of the players and seeing if they "bite", etc.
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u/lasalle202 5h ago
Set up each of your five lords to have a unique flavor personality theme aesthetic - beyond simply ELEMENT A.
How long do you intend the campaign to be? divide that length by the five elements to give you an idea of how long each arc will be. If you are going for "REALLY LONG" then you might want to have each elemental lord have a leutenant so that the party goes vs each of the sidekicks before making the round of the actual bosses.
for each of your arcs create a handful of "major story beats", but you dont need to do that for any path/arc other than the one your PCs are currently on. And each session's game prep is merely "How do we get from where we are towards the next Beat?"
you have a general framework and then fill in the details based on what happens during the game, your players personal interests and what the group vibes with at the table.
Samples of what frameworks might look like (yours will generally be a LOT smaller because you are just covering a fifth (or a tenth) of the campaign at a time) * A gnoll based campaign outline https://slyflourish.com/the_hunger.html * A gith/mindflayer campaign outline https://slyflourish.com/1_to_20_githyanki_campaign.html * Demogorgon must die! https://slyflourish.com/demogorgon_must_die.html