I’m sitting on a sofa in Portugal and it’s 0:57 in the morning. Cars are still driving past our place: too fast, too loud. I’m posting stuff on Reddit.
/u/its_called_life_dib asked on /r/AskGameMasters about organising prep for a campaign. I think the best answer is to figure out what you can organise and then run a campaign that requires no more than that. If you can only draw little maps of monster lairs and populate them, don’t plan for a campaign world full of court intrigue. Instead, create a village plagued by monsters from two dozen lairs and start from there.
This is how I try to run things these days.
I have a map. This is the first layer.
The map has locations. The locations have monster lairs or settlements. The settlements have two or three named NPCs with levels that could be important. This is the second layer.
Some of the monster lairs and settlements have temples to one of the gods or demons in my setting. Nearby settlements have NPCs that support those temples. This is a third layer.
The NPCs can belong to one of several secret societies. These are all in one form or another mutual aid societies or crime rings, depending on how you look at it. This is the fourth layer.
A lot of this can be randomly generated given the right tables, and so working on those tables would be my first priority.
When the game is running, these set pieces enable me to improvise without needing too much prep. I can read through the locations the players are likely to visit, the dangers they face as they travel there, and so on.
Sure, this prep doesn’t allow me to run a war game, or a deep political campaign, but it might turn into one, if the players keep talking to the political leaders, keep making friends with one secret society or temple against the others, and so on. This prep doesn’t allow me to run a game with an inherent dynamic where factions move and the map changes. I’d be unable to keep it all in mind as I prep for the next game. I’d have to write and rewrite the current setting state again and again. How tiresome it would be, how exhausting! Calendars, currencies, all of that has little effect on the game, so I drop it. Timelines of events, of armies marching, of developments developing – not me!
Instead, I only run campaigns made of simple elements interacting in interesting ways so that I don’t have to keep involved, distributed notes.
Given the above this leads to location-based note taking. I find a wiki works best for me.
I do keep track of changes the happen due to player interference. After all, making an impression upon the world is a source of joy. I very rarely make changes to a location further away.
When I want a thing that I am unable to keep track of in my campaign, like a war, I place camps of deserters, battlefields full of the dead, I rename bandits to marauders or refugees and play them accordingly, and to all of these encounters I assign one of the three sides of the war. Three sides is always best. Bards and innkeepers will mention nearby refugees and deserters and battlefields. This is how walking through the landscape gives you a feeling that the war is ongoing, even though you never actually see it – unless the players get really interested and decide to track down an army, in which case there’s your season finale. This scattering of traces I can organize using my location-based notes, and so this is how the war will look from the players’ perspective. It’s good enough, I think.
#RPG #Prep