For a beginning GM, the location-based method of adventure prep is the best way to go: Draw a map. Number the rooms. Key the rooms (i.e., describe what’s in each room).

(1) Start small with a Five Room Dungeon.

(2) After a couple of those, go a little larger. And, when you do, start thinking about Xandering Your Dungeon.

(3) Okay, that’s getting awesome. But this map-and-key thing is a little too static: Monsters are just sitting in their rooms and waiting for the PCs to wander by and hit them over the head. So mix it up by prepping an Adversary Roster that’s independent of the map key and then run the monsters in the complex actively (so that goblins from area 6 might run across the compound and reinforce the goblins at area 1). At this point, it may also be useful to broaden your encounter design to give yourself more flexibility in how you use encounter groups.

At this point you’ve probably run about a dozen adventures and you’re starting to get comfortable as a DM. Awesome. Now you can start exploring non-location-based methods of adventure prep. For some basic priming check out: Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and Don’t Prep Plots. Or, for another classic alternative, check out Hexcrawls.

And if you’re really ready to jump into the deep end: Game Structures.

HOW TO PREP

Throughout all of this, however, don’t over-prep. I think it’s really important to NOT use published adventures as an example of how to prep: Professional adventure writers are trying to communicate their vision to you. If you’re prepping notes for yourself, however, you can trust your creative instincts in the moment.

For example, it’s not necessary to elaborately work out and write down all of the different tactics that a group of orc fighters might use. You can just jot down “8 orcs” or “8 orcs, they’ll try to kick over the pot of boiling stew to burn the PCs” and then trust yourself to be creative in the moment.

Rule of thumb: Details are overrated (with the proviso that essential details and awesome details should always be jotted down).

Similarly, you don’t need to spend a lot of time customizing every stat block. You can take generic stat blocks out of the Bestiary and make them interesting through context and use and creative description. (The one-eyed orc chietain wearing the steel-plated skull of a wyrmling is pretty awesome. But there’s no reason you can’t just use the stat block for an orc warrior from pg. 222 of the Bestiary.)

Another rule of thumb: If you’re spending more time prepping it than your players spend playing it, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Read More at Gamemastery 101

On a lighter note (compared to yesterday’s post), here’s the ape-headed manifestion of a god I designed in HeroMachine 3.0:

“Fear me mortals!”

On Monday night, my mother passed away.

I mentioned earlier this month that she caught a very nasty flu at the end of December. After twenty years of fighting metastatic breast cancer, the complications from the flu finally pushed her body too far. After a brief period where I thought things were turning around again, everything collapsed very, very fast and very, very suddenly.

You can find the obituary I wrote for her here.

Between the flu and my mother’s illness and her death, I have simply dropped the ball on these updates. I have also, behind the scenes, been fumbling and delaying my interactions with the artists trying to finish up the last of the work for the book.

I’m sure many of you will say that this is “perfectly understandable” (because I’ve had several people already say that to me). But this is a project which is radically overdue and this is the first time that I feel like I, personally, have been screwing it up instead of just trying to stay on top of a bad situation. I’m also not really clear of this situation. The memorial service was yesterday, but next week will bring its own challenges as my brother and I work out way through her estate.

This is all combined with the fact that I really thought I would have a substantive update for contributors by December 1st or, at the latest, December 31st. And those dates (which I was treating in my own head as deadlines of a sort) have, obviously fallen by the wayside even before the added shittiness of the last month happened.

So here’s the deal: Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be taking an honest stock of where I’m at and where this project is at. At that point I’ll be making a serious decision about whether to start refunding money or not. (My hope, obviously, is that I can get things pulled back together.)

NOTE: If you’re one of my artists reading this, please continue working. You’ll be getting paid regardless of what happens with the project.

Also: Apparently the comments on the site collapsed again during my absence. They’ll be reopened within the next 10-15 minutes.

So, here’s a semi-interesting thing. When I posted about one of the gilted fiends being used in a Redditor’s D&D game, my rambling thoughts led me to post an excerpt from The Fifth Sepulcher, a D20 adventure that I wrote for Fantasy Flight Games back in 2001. In order to pull that excerpt, I did a quick search on my computer to pull up my original draft of the adventure. But I also ended up inadvertently stumbling across something that I had completely forgotten about: The soundtrack I assembled when I originally playtested The Fifth Sepulcher.

A little over a decade ago I started prepping specific tracks cued to specific sequences in the adventures I was prepping. I would also take the playlists, burn copies of the adventure’s “soundtrack”, and give them to the players as gifts. (Often including CD cases, cover art, and the whole nine yards.) My players generally seemed to enjoy the result. A couple of tips from that experience if you should choose to duplicate it:

Tip #1 – A Big Pitfall: “Wow, this 2 minute track sounds perfect for the fight with the cultists!” Then the fight takes 40 minutes to resolve and everyone is really, really sick of that 2 minute track.

Tip #2: If you’re going to do this, it helps to have a music player with a remote control and a large display that you can see from across the room. (You don’t want the player right next to you, because some players will struggle to hear you over the music if you’re both coming from the same direction.)

Tip #3: Try to avoid well-known and easily recognizable music that your players are familiar with. They’ll associate it with the source instead of the adventure, and that can often lead to additional distractions. (Unless, of course, you specifically want to create and benefit from those associations.)

Over time, I’ve moved away from this kind of specificity and instead prep generic playlists for my iPod. At the moment, for example, I’ve got four primary playlists that I use for D&D:

• D&D Generic Background
• D&D Generic City
• D&D Generic Combat
• D&D Epic Combat

Whenever I add a new CD or soundtrack to my collection, I go through it track by track and add songs to the appropriate playlists. At the moment, for example, there are 4.8 hours worth of music in my D&D Generic Combat playlist.

What I’ve found is that this light theming is pretty much wholly equivalent in terms of effectiveness compared to the track-by-track prep I was doing before. Plus, it’s prep-once-and-reuse-forever instead of requiring a heavy prep load for every session.

Of course, even within this structure you can also move beyond the purely generic. For example, I’ve prepped a separate playlist for the two major Bad Guy Organizations in my regular campaign: So when the party is fighting Group A it sounds different than when they’re fighting Group B (and also sounds different from the Generic Combat playlist). It’s a subtle distinction, but over time I think it’s effective in building up musical associations.

But I digress. Without further ado, here’s the “official soundtrack” for The Fifth Sepulcher:

THE FIFTH SEPULCHER – SOUNDTRACK

The First Sepulcher

1. Lynmoor (Vampire Princess Miyu, Track 8, In the Ancient Capital)
2. King Alexir IV (Vampire Princess Miyu, Track 13, Larva’s Theme)
3. The First Sepulcher (Ultima Online, Stones)
4. Chathar’s Fists (Escaflowne, Disc 2, Track 10)
5. The Wight’s Howl (Quest for the Seals, Track 16, Enter the Creature)
6. Shadows of the Dead (Metal Gear Solid, Track 8, Warhead Storage)
7. The Crypts of Kings (Kenshin: OST 2, Track 13, Departure)

The Second Sepulcher

8. Down Into the Depths (Vampire Princess Miyu, Track 1, Opening Theme)
9. The Hall of Horrors (Dungeons & Dragons, Track 8, Thieves’ Fight)
10. Haradik’s Legions (Dungeons & Dragons, Track 4, On the Run)
11. Haradik’s Giants (Vampire Princess Miyu, Track 6, Shinma Makes Its Appearance)

The Third Sepulcher

12. The Seven Daughters of Lynmoor (Dungeons & Dragons, Track 2, Council of the Mages)
13. The Crypt of Fiends (Dungeons & Dragons, Track 7, The Maze)
14. The Virgin’s Death (Noir, Track 16, Sorrow)
15. Ghost Howl (Diablo II, Cave)

The Fourth Sepulcher

16. The Hall of Armor (Vampire Princess Miyu, Track 11, Attack of the Armored Apariti)
17. The Death of Kings (Kenshin: OST 2, Track 4, Departure Acoustic)

The Fifth Sepulcher

18. Vanal’s Hall (Ultima Online, Vesper)
19. The Hall of Wraiths (Three Days to Kill, Track 14, Battle Royale)
20.  The Crypt of Vanal (Remastered UO, Swamp)
21. The Necromancer’s Stone (Kenshin: OST 3, Track 11, Warrior’s Suite)
22. The Heroes Triumphant (Noir, Track 4, Canta Per Me)

(I have to apologize for one of these tracks: Track 5 refers to the “Quest of the Seals” soundtrack. This is actually a soundtrack that was prepped for my first 3rd Edition campaign by one of my players.  Unfortunately, she didn’t label the source for any of the tracks. I appear to have since lost that CD myself, so even I can’t fully  re-create this track listing.)

SOUNDTRACK GUIDE

Introduction: Track 2
Area 1: Track 3
Area 2: Track 4
Area 3: Track 3
Area 4: Track 5 – Combat: Track 5 (then to Track 3)
Area 5: Track 6 (30 seconds to juicy shadow stuff)
Area 6: Track 7

Area 7: Track 8
Area 8: Track 7
Area 9: Track 3 – Combat: Track 9
Area 10: Track 3
Area 11: Track 10 (startle them); to Track 3; to Track 11 (when giants attack)

Area 12: Track 12
Area 13: Track 13 – After Combat: Track 14
Area 14: Track 8 – Shadow Mastiffs: Track 15; After Combat: Track 8

Area 15: Track 8
Area 16: Track 16
Area 17/18/19/20: Track 17

Area 21/22: Track 18 – Wraiths Attack: Track 19

Area 23/24/25/26/27: Track 20 – Devourers: Track 19
Vanal Final Combat: Track 21
After Vanal: Track 22

FURTHER READING
Music in Roleplaying Games
Sunless Citadel – Unofficial Soundtrack

This may only be interesting to me, but somebody pointed me in the direction of a story on Reddit featuring one of my gilted fiends.

The title? Holy crap! Did I just let them resurrect an ancient dead elven king?

I think this may have particularly resonated with me because it coincidentally resembles an encounter I wrote for The Fifth Sepulcher. (Which I’ve realized I penned for Fantasy Flight Games more than a decade ago now. Ouch. Right in the age.) That encounter originally read:

Two sets of golden double doors face each other in this red-carpeted chamber. Six golden thrones — in two rows of three — face each other, and six figures sit upon the thrones.

These are six of the Seven Daughters of Lynmoor. The seventh, of course, is Queen Elisabet — who was interred in area 13. Each of the Daughters is under the effect of a permanent gentle repose and magic circle against evil enchantments (cast at 20th level). These spells have kept their bodies perfectly preserved, and protected them from the effects of the Necromancer’s Stone.

Note that the Daughters were prepared in this manner against the prophecy that they would rise again to save Lynmoor in her darkest hour. If the PCs take the proper actions (casting raise dead, for example) this could be that hour. (The Daughters are 8th to 12th level sorcerers.) However, if the enchantments are disrupted without returning the Daughters to life (through the use of a dispel magic spell, for example), the Stone will immediately transform the Daughters into liches.

If I recall correctly, when Alan D. Kohler reviewed the module he was not a fan of the fact that there was no particular compulsion forcing the PCs to raise the daughters. He also felt there was no way for the PCs to be aware of the prophecy or the magic preserving the daughters. The former is really just a Knowledge (history) check, of course, and the latter would seem to be a natural consequence of the PCs showing any interest at all in six perfectly preserved corpses in a dungeon and performing the logical investigations.

But I digress.

Unfortunately, if JCY2K ever posted a follow-up to let people know what happened at his next session, I haven’t found it. Still, it’s nice to know that I’ve been a major force for resurrecting long-dead royalty for more than a decade.