DM-ing Ramble: The Little Homebrew that could?

Hundreds of hours of prep. Over fifty hours of play. Over ninety maps. One-hundred-and-thirty NPCs stretched over several towns and cities. And all of this with the knowledge that this is but the first or second leg on a long journey should my players (who are now at 7th level) end up with an epic 20-level campaign.

It's been over a year that we've been running this game once every couple of weeks. And it has been quite a challenge for me who thought that this would only last maybe five or six sessions before the story fell apart. There was a risk of that at one time. I didn't have everyone completely roped into the tale and then we had one player depart, which shook me a bit more than it should have. I've been working on regaining my balance and fighting a bit of burnout, though not nearly as bad as what it was this time last year.

I've also enjoyed some of the process. There are a lot of things I'm still learning to do that I'm not good at. I can't improv very well, my descriptions are lacking and I struggle to set the scene if I don't have a visual cue like a map or something. But my players know me well enough to know that prompting me for more information will yield a bit more than the standard fare I would have otherwise given them. Sometimes in their questions, they'd make suggestions as to what they were looking at and then I, as many DMs do, steal mercilessly from those suggestions. It is the way, after all, no?

I love making maps - be it battle maps or geographical maps. I never took geography, I have no grasp of tectonics or what the weather would be like on either side of a mountain, but I can make maps that serves the purpose I had in mind for them. There my Inkarnate subscription helps a lot. For general interior and exterior maps, I am so, so happy with my Dungeondraft programme. I like the styles of Forgotten Adventures and Tom Cartos' assets, so I've subscribed to their Patreons for a time. I admit my budget for patreon isn't really big enough to follow everyone whose assets I enjoy, but those two seem to have the widest variety of things that I want to use.

One thing I think I'm doing okay at is being a 'Yes, and' DM. I'm kind of a stickler for the rules but so is the majority of my players who will look up things and self-govern. But if someone comes with an idea, I try my best to incorporate it into the story and make it part of the game to such a degree that it seems as if it was always there. 

I do realise that my I am very fortunate with the group of people that I'm playing with. The players' alignment tend to lean towards lawful so I don't have a chaotic bunch of murder hobos who burn through every town they encounter. I don't have to worry and feel like I'm feeding my world into a shredder. Being experienced DMs themselves, they know that the amount of effort I've put into this thing is immense and a little expensive and so they deal rather respectfully with my 'toys'. But that also means I can trust their wild ideas. Sometimes it means making a whole story arc in the Shadowfell. Sometimes it means creating a map of a bordello and hoping that I won't need to use it very often. 😆

So the question remains: will this campaign actually have enough material and coherence to make it to level 20? I have no idea, but I hope it'll come to a satisfying conclusion... eventually. That's the most anyone can ask for in a story, isn't it?