If there’s one fundamental lesson I think you should take away from Don’t Prep Plots or Smart Prep, it’s to think of your prep as a collection of tools that you can use during the game rather than a story you’ve written. Or as a box full of toys that you can play with at the table (the same way the players are playing their characters) rather than a script to be read from. Or whatever other metaphor works for you.

Those previous articles already discuss this principle in both general and specific terms, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time today retreading that ground. I’m going to assume that you’ve already discovered the joy of actively playing scenarios, and what I want to talk about today are the toys you could be playing with, but may not realize that you already have in your toybox.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I’m talking about is by way of example.

NEWSSHEETS

For my Ptolus campaign, part of my campaign status document is a list of upcoming headlines/articles in the local newssheets. For example:

• Another high-profile robbery in the Nobles’ District. Attributed to Shilukar. Said to have broken into Dallaster Manor and assaulted the Dallaster’s daughter and heiress, Tillian.
• Ratmen openly prowling streets of the Warrens after dark. City Watch refuses to patrol the area, although they’ve increased patrols along Old Sea Road to keep the problem contained to the Warrens.

And so forth. The current version of the sheet has the next fifteen or so days of newssheets mapped out and I do the same thing in my Dragon Heist campaign for broadsheets in Waterdeep. Some of the news items tie into future scenarios, others reflect the ongoing activities of the PCs, and some are just random events unrelated to the PCs.

The primary reason I started prepping these is the obvious one: My players were routinely checking the local newssheets to see what was going on in the city and it was useful to give some thought to what they’d find when they did.

Although designed as a single-use tool (PC wants to look at headlines → give them the current headlines), once I had the tool in my campaign status document I began discovering that there were actually lots of different ways that I could use it. For example:

• When canvassing local taverns for gossip.
• Conversational topics for NPCs, both generally and when using the party planning game structure. (Particularly true when improvising a party in the middle of a game session, like the one described here.)
• Feeding content into conversations they’re eavesdropping on.
• Local color. (A scrap of newspaper blowing down the deserted street; a news boy shouting headlines on the corner. Graffiti about the current scandal sprayed on a wall.)

To find these hidden tools, I just had to stop thinking of the list as being specifically “this is what appears in the newssheet” and started thinking of it in the more general sense of “this is what’s going on in the city / what people are talking about / what’s in the public consciousness.” What looked as if it was very specific content actually had a much broader general utility.

One of the interesting consequences of identifying and using these “hidden” tools is that it will often highlight places where, as described in Smart Prep, you can completely eliminate unnecessary prep. For example, when I first started prepping news stories for a campaign I would often get very specific: What newspaper were they published in? What was the headline? Et cetera. When I started using these tools in different ways, I realized that these details were often superfluous waste. The thing that was actually useful was the core piece of information. Everything else could be improvised during actual play depending on how the information intersected with the PCs.

This is not to say that the contextualization isn’t important. (Exactly the opposite!) It’s not even to say that this sort of contextualization shouldn’t be prepped. For example, you can see here how I researched specific newspapers from the 1930s for my Eternal Lies campaign. Note how easily you can grab one of these newspapers and combine them with a news item like the examples above and instantly contextualize the information: You don’t need to prep a specific newspaper for every single article in order to get the same effect in actual play. Similarly, it’s quite probable that if the PCs are getting this information from a PC or a tavern, then it’s also something you’ve prepped.

You can also think of this as prepping a collection of more generic tools that can be combined together in order to flexibly respond to any number of possibilities, rather than prepping hyper-specialized tools that can only be used in one specific way. Looking for your “hidden tools” is one way of taking a specialized tool and making it more widely useful. (Note, though, how this greater utility often takes the form of less prep, not more!)

But it’s important not to mistake this for a reductio ad absurdum where the goal is to eliminate all specificity. If you look at that same Eternal Lies campaign, for example, you’ll find any number of instances where I prepped very specific newspaper articles, books, or the like.

PERMISSIVE CLUE-FINDING

The principle of permissive clue-finding, described as a corollary to the Three Clue Rule, is actually another example of using hidden tools.

Basically, when you design a mystery scenario, you prep a specific list of revelations that are necessary to solve the mystery and then you prep specific clues that point to each revelation so that the players/PCs can figure it out. The principle of permissive clue-finding is simply to provide meaningful clues in response to PC-initiated investigations even if they are not the clues that you prepped ahead of time.

The revelations on your revelation list are, effectively, your hidden tools: You know that solving the mystery lies in grokking those revelations, so when the PCs start pursuing an investigatory path you hadn’t anticipated, all you need to do is figure out how (or if) it can be related back to one of those revelations.

HEXES & RUMORS

Here’s a technique I used when running my OD&D hexcrawl.

I wanted to seed the campaign with rumors, so I decided that new characters would begin play with 1d4 rumors and existing characters could make a Charisma check in the downtime between sessions to pick up a rumor. I experimented with a traditional 1d20 and, later, a 1d30 rumor table, but because it was an open table with several dozen players and even more characters the rumor table would basically get burned up as soon as I stocked it. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time restocking the rumor table (particularly because many rumors were never pursued, which felt like semi-wasted prep), so rather than rolling on a rumor table I started just randomly selecting one of the hexes on my map, looking at what the hex contained, and then just improvising an appropriate rumor.

So, for example, I might randomly select Hex C2 and read:

C1 – WHITE DRAGON LAIR

Queen of the Claw – Elder White Dragon (AC 2, 12 HD)

• Suspicious of Dyre (hex A1)
• Daughter (Paicyro) ran away and knows a secret entrance (hex C8)
• Remembers a time of Ashardalon and opposed him when she was a wyrmling

Sired a pack of half-dragon dire wolves (AC 2, 4+2 HD).

Served by the Twelve White Claws, elite anubian warriors chosen for the honor in a gladiatorial combat once every 10 years.

TREASURE: 8000 silver, 30,000 gold, 98 gems, 10 jewelry

And come up with any number of rumors like:

• Traders coming through the Gap have seen a White Dragon circling a mountain peak northwest of the Cloud Spiral.
• In an ancient Thracian text kept by the Temple of Minerva, you discover references to a “Queen of the Claw” who opposed the dragon god Ashardalon. She is said to have been entombed with untold wealth in a crypt “in the peaks directly north of the Tower of Wind”.
• A caravan passing through the Gap was found slaughtered. Those who found their ruined bodies heard a reptilian howling in the hills to the north. They quickly buried the bodies and fled.

You can probably come up with another half dozen such rumors yourself, even without knowing the wider context and lore of this particular campaign world.

Note that the hexes are still fulfilling the primary function I had designed them for (being discovered during a hexcrawl). It’s just that they were now also being leveraged and put to new use. (With, you’ll note, no additional prep on my part whatsoever.)

CONCLUSION

The point here is to reprogram your brain so that when you prep X in order to do Y you don’t lock down on the idea that Y is the only thing you can do with X.

Along the way you may discover that, instead of trying to prep something in order to do Y, it makes more sense to cut out the middleman and go straight to prepping something that’s directly designed to be flexibly used in multiple ways. That’s great! Y will still be taken care of, but now you can also take care of a bunch of other stuff.

At a macro-level I say don’t prep plots, prep situations. At the micro-level, we might describe this as prepping content instead of writing outcomes.