MC Banhammer Posted:

Ideally in a campaign your rad ideas for the low levels should be encountering really really low-level minions of your main villain. Take your super epic high-level main baddie, and figure out what his little side projects are. Work the layers down and down until you get to the street-level grunts doing the really minor dirty work which SOMEone needs to do, but the higher-ups don’t want to bother with — like, I dunno, laundering their secret society robes. Have your players fight those guys and tailor the results of the encounter to grip them with whatever hook’s going to work to make them want to get deeper into the story.

That sounds really good, too. Seeing as this is my first time DMing, but that seems just a tad daunting to me. If I did manage to get all the main baddies and scenarios created, how could I guide my players along the storyline, though? If they throw me a curveball and manage to ransack the barracks that the evil wizard’s troops use to arm themselves for the final battle, what would I do? It’s that element of surprise that always throws me off; I’m not good at dealing with the unexpected, yet.