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I'm new as well. I've never actually gotten to play D&D, only DM, because none of my other friends knew how to play at first. Anyway, the couple times we played, I had probably 10-15 pages of notes, because I'm an idiot.

A good way to do it would be to watch people like Chris Perkins DM. Watch the games he DMed for PAX with Acquisitions Incorporated. I pretty much learned how to DM by watching him. Granted her knows his crap, because he DMs all the time, and helped make the game, but still. So long as you have a general idea of the plot, and maybe a list of NPC names to help you along, you should be set.

Hands down the best thing you can do for yourself is to familiarize yourself with commonly used monsters in your campaign. If you have several sessions where the PCs are getting attacked by Kobolds, and there are similar/the same monsters in some of the encounters, you shouldn't need to use the stat blocks for more than once or twice. That is easily one of the fastest ways to speed up a game.

Since you're in a homegrown world, that makes your game exponentially easier. You don't have to worry about any metagame info your players may know about the setting, because it's yours. You set the parameters and only you know what can and can't happen.

Here’s another tool that I have found to be helpful; it’s a matrix of all the political power blocks in my campaign. Having it graphically displayed like this allows me to more easily see how PC interloping will affect things.

 

The big advice I might give : Any prep material you actually do, try to make sure it is usable in the future. If you make a map of a cave... don't write 'bugbear lair here', just write Room 1. I roughly copied a travel brochure for Mammoth cave a while back and I think I've used that map in well over 100 adventures since then (Shhhh... don't tell the party).


I'm not saying this is the best way, but this is my organizational chart, so to speak. I started out with a piece of paper with 4 circles in each corner... that was my world map.

This is what it's evolved to:

I now have 3 notebooks that I keep for a home-brew campaign. Plenty of people get by with much less stuff, but my old gray mare (me brain, berk) ain't what it used to be.

Book 1: DM SHORTCUTS

This is just a bunch of stuff I put together to save time when I'm winging it. It isn't campaign-specific. It includes:

 - A brief list of common house rules
 - A handful of pre-generated treasures of each challenge rating
 - 1 Super-generic pre-generated first level human character of each class (including NPC classes).
 - A handful of higher-level generic pre-generated NPCs, organized by 1 of these choices : A - Fighter types, B - Arcane types, C - Priesty Types, D - Stealthy types
 - All the dead PCs and any NPCs I actually took the time to make along the way.
- A list for an 'adventurer's kit' that includes backpack, rope, torch, oil, mirror and other common supplies 25 gp will buy. The things can be bought individually, but it's good for quick NPC treasure and speeds up character-making by avoiding penny-ante haggling.

Book 2: MAPS:

I organize these from scale-to-scale.

World Map
Continent maps
Kingdom maps, organized by continent
Local area Maps, organized by kingdom or area
City Maps (mine are really simple... just enough to show the scale of the city, with each city block drawn out and numbered, so I can say... Area 1 is where the Temples are. Area 2 is where the Prison is located. Area 3 is the castle. Area 4 is the Market. Etc...not much detail needed beyond that, since most adventures you can buy already have detailed maps of Inns and Temples and Towers and such.

Book 3: CAMPAIGN.

This notebook is in 2 parts.

3-A includes all the basic notes of the setting, organized by continent.
- Names of the gods and cultural descriptions of the peoples of the land
- How the calendar works (mine is 10 day weeks, 40 day months, 10 month in the year; each season is split into 2.5 months or 100 days). This makes it easy to roll percentile for random stuff)
- A brief history of major historical and recent events (which I compiled from the backgrounds of the characters, which I organized by year).
 This was the best thing I ever did for planning campaigns. If they say their father is an important noble, I add his father to the family tree, so to speak.
- A list of "Prophecies", in case players throw some divinations about... generic stuff like "War, Famine, Flood, Wedding"

3-B includes copies of a historical timeline for all the major events in the lives of the PCs.. If the PC tells me there was a plague that killed his family... I mark this on my history. I use this information when players talk to the various NPCs... I can say something like... "You knew him from the orphanage. His family was also wiped out by The Red Plague that claimed the lives of your parents. He was like a brother to you." or "Here is the site of that battle that your clan leader was in 100 years ago that forced him to send your great grandfather into hiding. 100 years is a long time... the river has moved and the hill has been leveled. The only thing that still remains is the cemetary there, though many new graves have since been placed there.".

I use all these notes to help me wing it. My latest campaign was a war with orcs, fought Roman-style. My last sessions notes were as follows:
good guys = 1 legate from legions 1 - 5 plus auxilliary for legion 5.

4000 orcs, 10 mastodons from somewhere with over-sized siege tower, guarded by the big scorpion-riding leaders. Siege tower atop marble quarry.
orc plan - reinforcement of 300 hvy foot orcs to march south and block bridge
chance to raise dead. roman stories of underworld. players are more greek. need boat. .... marble quarries... 'the dwarves dug too deep'...
sappers try to make it into underground marble quarry in order to attack mastodon baggage train.

Adventure Notes: engineers have finally broke into the mine. players lead the charge to clear the mines of monsters and hopefully take out the baggage train of the orc army. while there, they discover a path to underworld, which will include a chance to bring back one of the old dead characters. Players will go to three islands, borne on ships of the fallen dead of all the dead npc allies met so far. look at character histories for dead ancestors as well. ravenloft creepy? isle 1 = players are tiny compared to the natural wildlife.. treat them as 2 categories smaller and let them fight medium or large dire animals until they make it to ..... hercules tasks???


The way the adventure actually played out: I winged everything, but used all the notes above to do it. They were called into the war tent. I winged how they role-played a discussion with the general about how to handle a near-miss with the catapult. Result = move the general and the content of the tents, but not the tent. If they actually hit the tent, they can fake his death and catch the orcs off-guard if they hope to capitalize on the supposed defeat of the good guy's general.

the 300 orc reinforcements? the players were each assigned 100 men, depending on their level... a variety of troops. they role-played meeting with the orc leadership and made a strategy of waiting til the orcs bolstered their defenses and pushing the orcs into a bend in the river where they could cut them off from the main army. I ran an individual combat for each player involving a minor orc leader with an accompaniment of orcs, giving each player a full combat to shine, rather than spreading it out. The combats were brief, the orcs were outmatched, the battle was won. One cool scene involved fighting under a bridge that the orcs were trying to burn... and a group of chariots racing downhill through orcs, the decision of when to stop required a professional soldier check.

The attack on the marble quarry involved a make-shift tactic of using the mirrors from their soldier's adventure kits to create a glare on the catapult engineers and also give the players a chance to make it to the hole the sappers dug, while wading through the big flooded ditch.

The players were cut off from the most of the armies when the barge-catapult came in. And I used an old mine map. The dwarven sappers left equipment typical to a miner and I described it in detail on the meticulous of how organized it was... (paving the way for an encounter with the meticulous Dwarven Engineer Commander later).

In the mine, there was an ogre barbarian, straight out of the 3.5e monster manual, behind a handful of normal orcs.

I played up the cunning of the ogre. He didn't fall into the trap of getting flanked, made him a tough opponent. But he was still pretty stupid. He decided to sunder a pillar in the mine... all went dark and the players found themselves in the underworld.... a misty green-gray foggy land much like where frodo and sam went.