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How to Start a New Campaign with Just a City, a Map, and Three Tables

A lot of DMs don’t get stuck because they lack ideas, they get stuck because they think they need all the ideas before session one. Whole continents, ancient histories, nine pantheons, a dozen factions… and meanwhile your group is asking, “So uh… when are we starting?” This post is for the DM who wants to start a new campaign with just a city, a map, and three tables, and feels like that couldn’t possibly be “enough.”

On one side you’ve got the worldbuilding trap when you say “I’ve been working on this setting for six months and still haven’t run session one.” On the other, the pure improv trap that goes “I’ll just make everything up as we go and hope it somehow turns into a coherent campaign.”

We’re going to walk a middle path:

  • A practical campaign-launch framework, not a theory essay.
  • Built for 5e-ish fantasy first, but easy to port to other systems.
  • Designed so you can get from “I’d like to start a new campaign” to “Session one is booked and I’m ready” in a couple of evenings, without writing a setting bible.

This post answers the question “how do I even start a new campaign?” And we do it with just three pillars: a home city, one playable map, and three well-chosen random tables.

Why “Just a City, a Map, and Three Tables” Is Enough to Start

Before we dive into steps and tools, let’s reframe what “ready to start a campaign” actually means. For our purposes, a minimum viable campaign start is:

  • A home city the PCs care about
  • One playable map they can actually walk around (or under, or just outside)
  • Three random tables that keep throwing out fresh hooks and problems

That’s it. Not a continent map. Not 40 pages of history. Not a fully detailed pantheon. Just “Here’s where you live. Here’s where trouble is. Here are a few dials I can turn every time we sit down.”

Why not a full setting book?

Big boxed sets and 300-page setting hardcovers can be fantastic reading material. They’re also often terrible “I have two nights to prep a new campaign” tools because:

  • They spread detail over hundreds of pages.
  • The specific bits you need for session one are buried under lore, sidebars, and optional sub-systems.
  • You feel pressure to “do it justice,” which often means… more delay.

On the flip side, pure improv campaigns can be exhilarating. That is, until they fizzle. With no stable home base, no recurring locations, and no consistent pressures, it’s hard for the world to feel like it’s changing in response to the players.

Campaigns don’t grow from owning more map. They grow from revisiting the same places and watching them change over time. Session one only needs this city, this map, and a handful of dials you can turn between games. You can always add more later.

To make that easier, there are some great “city hub” tools that slot into this approach without demanding you read a novel first, like:

We’ll come back to specific tools later, but the big idea is simple: you don’t need the world, you just need a place that can feed the world to the players one problem at a time.

The Three Pillars of a “Just Enough” Campaign Start

We’re going to talk about three core pillars needed to start a new campaign. Everything you prep will hang off one of these.

Pillar 1: The Home City

This is the anchor point of your campaign: the place that appears in almost every session, even if only briefly. It should be somewhere that:

  • Has people, power, and problems
  • Can plausibly feed the group jobs for months
  • Can be sketched in broad strokes now and deepened over time

In practice, that often means:

  • A rough frontier town on the edge of something dangerous.
  • A border city where empires, cultures, or planes overlap.
  • A busy port where rumours, cargo, and monsters all wash ashore.

You don’t need every district detailed, just need a few repeatable touchstones: the tavern, the employer, the temple, the market, the alley where bodies show up. As the campaign goes on, players will naturally “zoom in” on the parts they care about, and you can expand those pieces when you actually need them.

Pillar 2: The Playable Map

Next, you need one concrete, gameable location they’ll actually move through at the table. That might be:

  • A dangerous district in the city (the docks, the under-market, the cursed ward).
  • A dungeon or network of tunnels directly beneath it.
  • A patch of wilderness or ruins within a day or two of travel.

The key here is playability, not scale. The map should have rooms or areas the party can explore and offer a mix of encounters, clues, and decisions. It also must be small enough that you can actually use it in the first 1 to 3 sessions.

You can absolutely steal this from a one-page dungeon, a short zine, or a map pack you like. What matters is that you have at least one place where “leave the tavern and go do something dangerous” is always an option.

Pillar 3: The Three Tables

Finally, the “three tables” part of the formula. These are your ongoing engines that you’ll use between and during sessions to keep the city and its surroundings lively without prepping a dozen bespoke plots every week.

You want:

  1. Jobs & Problems: Why they leave the tavern. These can be bounties, rumours, odd jobs, monster sightings, missing people, cursed objects.
  2. Street Life & Trouble: What makes the city feel alive and messy. Good optons are street scenes, petty conflicts, minor crimes, odd local traditions, weird weather.
  3. Factions & Fallout: Who cares, and how the world reacts between sessions. Ideal factions include guilds, cults, noble houses, gangs, foreign powers. And it’s all about what they’re doing in response to the PCs’ actions.

Our post about Low-Prep Session Structure is about “what happens inside tonight’s session,” this article is about “what keeps the campaign going” with minimal overhead. The same four beat rhythm applies (Arrival, Complication, Escalation, Fallout) but now you have regular tools to feed your players content each week.

Step 1: Choose or Build Your Home City (15 to 20 Minutes, Once)

Your home city is the campaign’s anchor. You’re going to keep coming back here between delves, so it needs to be interesting enough to matter, but light enough that you’re not writing a gazetteer before session one.

What Makes a Good Starting City?

When you’re picking or sketching your starting hub, aim for:

  • A clear identity that you can explain in one line:
    • Frontier trade hub at the edge of monster-haunted woods
    • Pilgrimage city built around a holy relic
    • Rotten port ruled by smugglers and tax collectors
    • Necropolis stacked on top of older ruins
  • Multiple power centres with at least three groups that have leverage:
    • A church or temple
    • A civic authority (mayor, council, watch, magistrates)
    • A criminal element (gang, thieves’ guild, smugglers)
    • A mercantile or guild power (traders, craft guilds, mining interest)
  • Nearby sources of adventure that give want reasons to leave the walls:
    • Haunted district or plague ward
    • Undercity tunnels or forgotten catacombs
    • Cursed forest or monster-ridden hills
    • Enemy border, rival city-state, or warfront within a day or two
  • Easy player buy-in. You don’t need elaborate origin stories. Keep your pitch simple:
    • “You all live here; this is home.”
    • “You’re newcomers hired by the caravan guild to deal with a problem.”
    • “You just survived the last disaster here and now people keep asking you for help.”

If you can say what the city is, who runs it, and where the nearest trouble sits in 60 seconds, you’re in good shape.

At this point you want to create a short list of key districts or neighbourhoods that could see play in the first 3 to 5 sessions. Examples include the Docks, Noble Quarter, Marketplace, and Guard Hall. Later you’ll list factions and key NPCs for each one.

Step 2: Pick One Map That Represents the Frontier

Now that you know where the campaign lives, you need a play surface: one map that stands for “here’s where danger starts.” Instead of drawing the whole world, you pick a single area the PCs can actually explore in the first few sessions.

What Kind of Map Do You Need?

You’ve got a few good options, depending on how you want to start:

  • A city district map: the dock ward, market district, necropolis, undercity level, or cursed quarter. These are all great when you want the early game to stay mostly urban.
  • A dungeon or ruin just outside or under the city: A classic “first delve” location: old keep, tomb, shrine, mine, wizard tower, sewer complex. These are easy to justify use: someone’s missing, something woke up, something valuable is down there.
  • A local region or mini-hex map with 3 to 6 notable locations: Ideal for wilderness exploration in a valley, coast, swamp, or borderland with a handful of labelled sites. Perfect if you like hexcrawl or point-crawl style play.

When you’re choosing, check that you can read and understand it in 5 to 10 minutes. It must contain at least three distinct locations you can turn into early adventures (even if only one is fully detailed). It also needs room to expand with spots on the map where new factions can move in or deeper levels can be revealed.

If the map makes you think “I could run three different jobs off this,” it’s a good fit.

From here make some notes about the first area to explore, and circle two or three other interesting locations that could be useful for future sessions.

Step 3: Build Your Three Tables: Jobs, Streets, and Factions

This is where you turn ongoing prep into a couple of reusable levers instead of rewriting the campaign every week. Once these three tables exist, most “prep” becomes rolling a few dice and jotting a sentence or two.

Table 1: Jobs & Problems (Why We Leave the Tavern)

This table answers the question: “Why are we going out the door tonight?” Your goal is to be able to generate 2 to 4 actionable hooks each session in under five minutes.

Think in a few simple patterns:

  • Pay-for-service jobs: Clear “do X, get Y” work (clear the crypt, rescue a missing person, escort a caravan).
  • Community problems: Things the town cares about, even if there’s no formal contract (dood or medicine shortages, strange crimes, neighbour disputes that might turn violent).
  • Faction-driven quests: Hooks that clearly come from someone with an agenda (Spy on a rival, sabotage a shipment, smuggle someone in or out).

You don’t have to invent all of these from scratch. Steal shamelessly and tweak:

Draft a small “City Jobs” table in your notes with 6 to 10 entries lifted liberally from the products above and reskin to your city. You can always add new rows later; you just need enough to start.

Table 2: Street Life & Trouble (What the City Feels Like)

This table is for everything that happens between destinations. It’s how you keep walks across town, shopping trips, and downtime scenes feeling alive instead of “you get there, nothing happens.”

Your entries should mix:

  • Colour scenes: Street performers, parades, market haggling, minor festivals
  • Low-level threats: Pickpockets, con artists, drunken brawls, watch patrols
  • Weirdness: Strange omens, prophetic graffiti, stray magic, masked pilgrims

Again, use existing material as scaffolding:

Create a “Streets of [City Name]” table with 8 to 12 entries to start. Every time the party crosses town or kills some downtime, roll once and describe what they bump into.

Over time you can cross out spent entries and add new ones as the city changes.

Table 3: Factions & Fallout (Who Cares and What Changes)

This table is how you track consequences without writing a metaplot flowchart. It answers: “If the PCs do X, who reacts, and how does the city shift?”

Include a mix of:

  • Faction moves: Gangs expand into new streets, cults recruit publicly, guilds calls for strikes
  • Political changes: New taxes or tariffs, curfews and crackdowns, trials and executions
  • Personal fallout: NPCs reacting to the PCs’ last job, Reputation boosts and smears, favours bring called in

Here, your tables are really just prompts for you to interpret based on what the group has been doing. Some useful tools include:

Once this is complete you should have a “Factions & Fallout” table with 6 to 10 entries describing possible shifts. You can also make a few simple faction clocks that you tick forward based on results, with the tables above as inspiration for what a tick looks like.

This ties directly into the “stakes and consequences” conversation from The 5 Most Common GM Mistakes (and How to Fix Them Fast), only here you’re baking the consequences into the campaign structure instead of improvising them from scratch every week.

Step 4: Run Session Zero in the City

Now you’ve got a home city with a clear identity, one frontier map, and three tables (Jobs, Streets, Factions).

Session Zero is where you plug the players into that machinery and maybe even take it for a short test drive.

Ground the Party in the Hub

You want the PCs to feel like they belong in this city (or are at least entangled in it) from the start. At the table, ask each player three quick questions:

  1. One person they know in the city: A mentor, rival, patron, relative, drinking buddy, fence, or former employer.
  2. One place they frequent: A tavern, temple, guild hall, dock, street market, or shrine.
  3. One problem they’re worried about: Rising prices, a missing friend, rumours of something in the undercity, a new cult, a border skirmish.

Then immediately tie those answers into your prep:

  • Fold their named NPCs into your Jobs & Problems table as quest-givers, informants, or people in trouble.
  • Attach some of them to entries on your Factions & Fallout setup (“Oh, your uncle? He works for the river guild / medusas’ cult / watch captain.”).
  • Add their favourite haunts to your Streets of [City] table so they show up organically in play.

Use the Three Tables in Session Zero

Session Zero doesn’t have to be purely talk. You can end with a short “episode zero” adventure beat that shows the campaign engine working. Concretely, you might:

  • Roll a handful of jobs on your City Jobs table and present them like a mission board, patron pitch, or rumour spread around the tavern. Let the group discuss and pick one.
  • Roll on your Streets table once or twice as they move through the city to meet people, buy gear, or argue about which job to take. This immediately teaches them what the city feels like.
  • Roll or advance on Factions & Fallout based on their choices:
    • If they take a job, who’s upset they’re meddling?
    • If they refuse a job, who’s offended or who picks it up instead?

If there’s time, finish with a short first beat using your chosen map:

  • They might just reach the entrance to the ruin, district, or wilderness site and deal with one scene or obstacle.
  • Or they might complete a tiny “prologue” job entirely inside the city like a meeting gone wrong, or a missing person found in the wrong district.

Either way, the session ends with:

  • PCs tied to people and places in the hub,
  • At least one faction opinion already forming, and
  • A clear next step: the first real delve or mission, which you can then prep.

Step 5: Turn “City + Map + Three Tables” into Your Weekly Prep Loop

You’ve done the up-front work once. Now the goal is to turn that into a lightweight, repeatable prep loop you can sustain for months.

The 15-Minute Between-Sessions Routine

Before each session, you’re not “prepping the world.” You’re just tuning this week’s dials. In about 15 minutes, you can:

  • Roll or select from your three tables:
    • 1 or 2 entries from your City Jobs table.
    • 1 or 2 entries from your Streets of [City] table you’d like to spotlight.
    • 1 or 2 entries or ticks from your Factions & Fallout setup that will move this week.
  • Decide the focus for this session:
    • Which job is front and centre as tonight’s main hook.
    • Which map or location is most likely to see play. It could be the original starter map, or a new site added in response to previous sessions.

The point is that campaign prep and session prep are now talking to each other: the city and tables generate this week’s focus, and your low-prep session tools handle how it plays out at the table.

Letting the Campaign Grow Organically

Once this engine is running, you don’t need a pre-written setting bible. The campaign grows where the players push it.

  • New maps appear when fiction demands them:
    • If a job points to “an abandoned watchtower on the ridge,” that’s when you pick or sketch a new map.
    • If a cult retreats into the sewers, that’s when you grab a Dyson Logos map or a one-page dungeon and tag it as their lair.
  • New factions emerge from play, not from a spreadsheet:
    • When your tables or players suggest a new power (smugglers, a second church, a mercenary company), you add them to your Factions & Fallout list and maybe give them a simple clock.
    • When a throwaway NPC becomes important, they graduate into a named agent of one of those factions.
  • The city stays the anchor:
    • No matter how far they roam, arcs keep bending back to this hub: to resupply, confront consequences, cash in favours, or see what has changed.

You’re never trying to “prep the world.” You’re prepping this city, this current map, and this week’s rolls. Everything else can wait until the players actually care about it.

Your “City + Map + Three Tables” Campaign-Start Checklist

Here’s the high-level version you can screenshot, print, or copy into your notebook as a campaign-start template.

  • Choose a home city and write:
    • One sentence on its identity
    • Three power centres
  • Choose one playable map:
    • A dungeon, district, or local region.
    • Circle 3 to 6 locations that can fuel your first few sessions (entrance, key challenges, climax, escape routes).
  • Build three campaign tables:
    • Jobs & Problems with at least 6 entries.
    • Street Life & Trouble with at least 6 entries.
    • Factions & Fallout with at least 6 entries, or a couple of simple clocks with example moves.
  • Run a session zero that:
    • Roots PCs in the city with each having at least one contact, one haunt, and one worry.
    • Offers 2 or 3 jobs drawn from your City Jobs table.
    • Uses your Streets table once or twice so the city feels alive from minute one.
  • Before each session:
  • Don’t write a gazetteer.
    • If you find yourself detailing distant kingdoms or writing pages of city history, you’ve left “just enough” territory.
    • Add detail only when it hits the table and matters to this city, this map, and these factions.

For more help avoiding the usual traps, you can always loop back to:

Grab a Free City-Friendly Loot Table for Your New Campaign

In a city campaign, players constantly search people, rooms, and shops. If every pocket holds generic coins, the city starts to feel flat. You want the little stuff like buttons, IOUs, weird trinkets to hint at bigger stories.

To help with that, you can plug in a free PDF version of 1d100 Pocket Loot as an “always-on” loot and oddities table for your city game. This free tool works in every district, tavern, and back alley. Roll once whenever the party picks a pocket, tosses a room, or shakes down an informant.

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