NODES & THE CAMPAIGN STATUS DOCUMENT
Campaign status documents are something I discuss in more detail in Part 4 of Smart Prep. The short version is that the campaign status document collects all of your notes on the current, evolving situation of the game. There are a number of cool ways you can use the campaign status document, but the most pertinent one for our discussion here is the scenario updates: Rather than attaching notes like “they killed all the kobolds in Area 3” or “Benny is angry with them” to a bunch of different scenarios, so that they’re scattered hither and yon, you collect all of these notes in the campaign status document for easy reference and upkeep.
The key insight here is that properly organized node-based scenarios make it REALLY easy to assemble and maintain your campaign status document. In the status document for In the Shadow of the Spire, for example, I can just place “NOD6” at the top of a section (remember those alphanumeric codes?) and drop stuff relevant to that scenario into that section. When the PCs go to NOD6, I can just flip to that page in the status document and have it available for easy reference.
We’ve also talked about meta-scenarios. Something I’ll do is pull upcoming or pertinent details from a campaign’s meta-scenarios and drop them into my campaign status document. When the players in my Eternal Lies campaign would go to a new city, for example, I would look at the Act II floating scenes (which operate as a very loose meta-scenario), grab a handful that I thought were likely to be appropriate, and drop a list of them onto the first page of my campaign status document. It gave me a kind of mini-menu that I could quickly consult without trying to process or remember the entirety of the meta-scenario in the middle of a session.
In some cases I’ll also drop “active” revelation lists into the campaign status document to keep track of them, but for these I’ll usually just mark up the master copy in the scenario itself. (That’s what it’s there for after all.)
NODES AREN’T EVERYTHING
With all of this being said, node-based scenario design is not the be-all and end-all of scenario design. Beyond obvious stuff like dungeon crawls and hexcrawls, I’ve already discussed lots of other scenario structures here at the Alexandrian. There are also a lot of tools that will be useful to you as a GM in node-based scenarios which aren’t nodes themselves.
Let’s take another look at my Bangkok prep notes for Eternal Lies and break them down. There’s five nodes in there, but there’s also a bunch of other stuff. What’s it all doing in there?
First, you’ve got the revelation lists and the trigger list for proactive nodes. These are obviously part of node-based scenario design, but they’re also basically the table of contents for the scenario. They show the whole scenario structure and can act as a quick reference for your nodes/tools. So I’ll usually have this in the first couple pages of my prep notes.
And then we come to the tools. One thing to note is that these are usually designed to be picked up in combination with one of the nodes. 95% of the time, this will be stuff that might be used in multiple nodes (like an NPC who could show up in multiple locations).
The other thing to note is that there’s nothing magical about these particular tools. I don’t use them for every scenario I prep and there are a lot of other tools you could potentially include depending on the nature of the scenario and game.
CITY MOOD BEATS: This is a cool tool from the published Eternal Lies campaign. These small beats (e.g., “birdsong drifts out of an open apartment window”) are designed to be dropped into any scene to provide local color/theme.
NPC NAMES: A list of locally appropriate names to be used when improvising NPCs (which could obviously happen almost anywhere in the scenario).
(These two tools usurp the usual place of honor for the revelation lists and are the first page of my prep notes for the city nodes in Eternal Lies. When the PCs went to a city, I would generally grab this sheet out of the binder and place it on the table off to one side for easy use.)
REFERENCE: I use a reference sheet to encode broad background data for the scenario that doesn’t belong to a particular node. In this case, it’s a timeline for the Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities. (This timeline could come up while questioning Daniel Lowman at his townhouse, questioning Savitree at Ko Kruk Island, or while looking at research notes found at the Estate. So it’s really clear how this has cross-node applicability.)
RESEARCH: In Trail of Cthulhu it’s not unusual for the PCs to head to the local library or newspaper morgue and do general research on leads they’ve found. This is material that doesn’t really belong to any of the nodes, so it gets split out.
NPCs: At the back of my prep notes I present major NPCs, including the Universal Roleplaying Template and other key information. Some of these NPCs are treated as nodes (and will be found indexed on the revelation list) while others can be used in multiple nodes, but for practical reasons I’ll usually include any NPC that takes up a lot of space to declutter the individual nodes. I also just generally find that giving each major NPC a full, dedicated sheet is useful. When roleplaying them, I can just grab and focus on the pertinent sheet. If it’s a combat situation, I can also grab the sheets for everyone participating for easier reference.
STAT SHEET FOR BANGKOK: But when a system’s stat blocks are short enough (as in Trail of Cthulhu), I will also drop all the stat blocks for a scenario onto a single sheet to make running combat SUPER EASY (at least when it comes to referencing stats). Some scenarios might require multiple stat sheets, which I will generally organize according to action group or node.
As I say, these tools are not the be-all or end-all of node-enhancing elements you can include in your scenario and campaign design. But they should give you a pretty good sense of the types of tools I’ll develop and use.
Sorry if this is off topic, but the City Mood Beats really struck me. It’s a cool idea to have these little moments to paint a location…but how do manage it at the table? Putting this in front of my players would inevitably lead them to fixate. (surely something about that window is important, or he wouldn’t have mentioned it!)
Do you hand wave past it with other narration? Tie nodes to these moments retroactively? Train your players that not every bit of narration requires a deep investigation?
My tip with the City Mood beats is to NOT treat them as boxed text. So, for example:
A toothless street-corner vendor hands you a mango. “No charge,” he says in awful but nevertheless comprehensible English. He repeats it again when you look unsure:“No charge.”
I wouldn’t just read that out. If the PCs went shopping, I’d drop it in as an interaction in the middle of the scene. If they’re staking out an apartment, drop it in as a bit of flavor during abstract time.
Generally, no, I wouldn’t retroactively hook things to the conspiracy just because the PCs get interested in them. And, yes, I find if you generally fill the world with colorful descriptions, the players generally stop assuming every bit of local color is a deep mystery waiting to be found.
OTOH, I’ve certainly had games where the equivalent of “guy who gave them a mango” somehow ends up being their best friend because they’ve chosen to engage. So I wouldn’t necessarily just write it off by saying, “Guys this isn’t actually important.” (Although that can be an option.)
Im not familiar with your use of the term “master copy”?
@1,2 The Trophy RPG incorporates what you call City Beats into its adventure („Incursion“) structure as one of the basic elements.
They call them Moments, “short descriptive scene fragments that reinforce the theme. For example, if you’re using the theme of Sleep, a moment might be ‘thousands of dragonflies in torpor, attached to trees and tents’ BBC, or for Water, you might write ‘pools fill in your footprints as you lift your boots from the thick, gray mud.’”
Can I interpret nodes as “scenes”? Im mixing and matching your wisdom with that of the return of the lazy dm to help me cut off the “useless prep”