I have never GMed/DMed before but feel like it could be fun and have been wanting to try for a while. When role-playing, I really enjoy coming up with creative solutions to problems if possible (unorthodox spell use can often be fun), but the idea of creating an entire world/campaign seems a bit too big to wrap my head around. I hope to use Johnn's course and materials to give me a framework of how to come up with neat big picture settings with fun plot hooks but while still letting PCs "play to find out what happens".
Welcome to the fray!
Personally, I feel that if you never GM an RPG, you've only ever played half the game - so congrats on being interested in playing the whole game.
I guess the best place to start is with your concern about creating a world/campaign... don't stress on this - it's really a bunch of fun and where much of the fun of being a GM can come from.
In the 1970's there were not much in the way of premade worlds, so every would-be GM started from scratch anyway - that's just how it was.
The process seemed to go like this:
* take a big sheet of blank paper
* draw a jaggedy outline of a "continent" on it
* draw in some cool islands around it
* add some rivers, mountains with foothills, forests, and deserts.
* smack down where the elves, halflings, dwarves, and humans were.
The rest is secret ruins full of monsters and treasure.
Game on!
So, that's not so tough right?
Then you learn ...
I shoulda used HEXPAPER for my map!
I need a starting town with a town map so characters have a place to spend money and buy stuff and find the next adventure...
Graph paper does not come in packs with enough sheets, ever.
Wait... who RUNS this place?
Oh, now its winter in the world - how does the map change?
On and on you build and refine as you need, getting more and more detailed as you AND your players explore the foggy outline you created.
Now, doesn't that sound like something in need of a game of its own?
You're in luck - Dawn of Worlds is exactly that - a game where you and your players build the world to roleplay in.
http://clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf
Give that a read and see if it gives you some inspiration on how to build your own world - even as a solo game if you create a "pantheon" of 6-8 fictitious deities with different domains and then roleplay as them shaping the world in their preferences...
And yes, the courses here are extremely useful how-tos for world building, in disguise.
Faster Combat is focused mainly on efficient combat scenes, but includes tips on how combats integrate to the wider setting and how to take advantage of that.
Adventure Building Workshop (ADV) covers the core of campaign building as *part* of defining the background setting for a huge adventure build ... focus on the home base, sandbox, and hexcrawl lessons from about lesson 23 on for the campaign tools which wrap around the adventure building in lessons 1-22 or so.
The Wizard of Adventure / Adventure Building Master Game Plan (ADVII) interweaves a LOT of world building how-to with campaign and adventure building ... on the fly. So, you don't start out building all of the campaign pieces, you start out with the seeds to build them from... as needed.
And, don't forget to mine the Roleplaying Tips archive at
https://www.roleplayingtips.com/archives/ for tons of advice on GMing, villains, NPCs, monsters, treasure, magic and all of the other bits and bobs for GMing.
So... welcome!