Starting your game

It's one of the more challenging things to do when none of your friends have any of the same days off, and even more difficult when you've got work to juggle, but a bit of preparation can go a long way.
Lots of employers will be happy to schedule off for a certain day, or a certain time frame, so long as you ask well in advance. Don't be afraid to plan for a weekday!

It's a good idea to choose where to play in advance, and a courtesy to make it a potluck kind of thing, with everyone bringing some food to share; pizzas, sodas, etc, whatever you and your friends like to eat.

As the DM/GM(Dungeon Master, Game Master), it's always wise to have a campaign ready. A good way to prepare is to build pen and paper maps of specific towns, let's say Greyville, Orangetown and Blue Harbour, in advance(along with some roads). So if the party decides that Orangetown is not their speed, and decide to set out for Blue Harbour, you can use a prepared road and add it to your world, between Orangetown and Blue Harbour. You'd construct the world as you play; You'll always have something to place down, be it a road, dungeon, tower, fortress, cave, canyon, cliff, whatever you'd need. A bit of tape, and your map will stay together and you can work in whatever you need.

Designing your world involves more than places, though. NPCs, villains, treasures and traps. Goals to reach, fame to earn, and of course, a dragon to slay or dungeon to delve.

We'll expound on each of these in turn, but for now, we'll focus on hard and fast rules to keep up with players who do things outside the box, and how to keep the game going beyond what material you've prepared.

Your tools will be:
Pencils, mechanical or otherwise
A sheet of paper for mapping on the fly
A notebook to write in details of new NPCs, places, organizations, myths, lore, rumors, and dungeons

Your players will want to get into the world and do things, and more often than not, they'll want to do things you couldn't begin to expect before everyone sat down to play. In this situation, improvising on the fly is your best bet. You've built the foundations of the world your players are in, but they only know what they've seen so far. You can build grand mountains, massive fortresses, ramshackle towns. You can create noble thieves, dastardly wizards, foppish nobility. You can make a sheriff a corrupt scoundrel, a lazy layabout, an incompetent bungler, or a veritable bloodhound of a detective.
Just take notes on all that you create, and when the session is over, you can put it all together with your existing materials, and collate it into a solid session. Best of all, you'll know more about your players, their aims and goals, and what you should focus on for the next session. You'll know what motivates them, and what they find boring. You can plan consequences for their actions, be they acclaim, vendettas, or even just whispers overheard in the tavern as they sit down to a meal.

Next time, I'll discuss starting points, motivations, and how to build a successful foundation for a campaign.