A friend emailed me today and asked for advice on running a new RPG campaign. My response turned into a long email and since I'm really lacking in the blogposts I thought I would repost it here.
Read the section of the rulebook on running the game. Those sections usually have some pretty good stuff. Some other books that have good general GM advice are the 3.5 D&D Dungeon Masters Guide and any of the newer White Wolf rulebooks. Just the sections on how to run a game. The parts that pertain to the storyteller and D&D system specifically aren't all the useful, of course, unless you are running one of those games.
Other thing I try and do is to be prepared. Read through the adventure and make sure you've got the general plot down and think about how the players will go through the adventure. If the adventure wants the PCs to go from point A to point B then think about how to get the players to do that. Sometimes you have to change some things so the adventure moves in the direction it's supposed to.
For example, in my last Delta Green game, the players get attacked by some Mi-Go and cultists. The adventure assumed that when faced with monsters and cultist that the players would run off into the jungle which would lead them to discovering the Migo's lair. I knew that would not happen. The players would stand there and shoot the cultists till they were all dead or the cultists killed them. My plan was to have anyone who failed their SAN check run off into the jungle and discover the entrance to the liar. If no one had gone insane I was going to have one of the Migo fly off in that direction.
Some adventures have really complex plots, in that case I make a"cheat sheet" in a notebook that outlines how I want the plot to flow. That when I am running the game I can glance at it and see what I had planned to happen next.
Another thing to do is to prepare for any combats that are going to occur. In a fantasy game a lot of times the players will be fighting a monster with special powers or a wizard that has loads of spells. I try and read up on the rules for the powers and spells of anything the players are going to encounter in the next session. I don't memorize the rules but I try and know enough about the monsters abilities so I can decide if I want it to use them or not.
This website has some good advice http://www.treasuretables.org/ as does this one http://www.treasuretables.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page.
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