In the last month alone I’ve had three people tell me they were feeling overwhelmed trying to prep an entire campaign and ask me if I had any advice for how to push through that prep when all you really want to do is start playing!
Well, the good news is that at least nine times out of ten, you don’t need to push through that prep. You almost certainly can — and should! — start playing a lot sooner than you think.
I think the prevalence of this “I’ve gotta prep the whole campaign before the first session!” mindset is due, at least in part, to the prevalence of published campaigns, particularly for D&D 5th Edition. Obviously if you’re publishing a book, you need to write the whole book before you send it to the printer. Looking at these printed books, however, it can be easy for a new GM to think that this must be a model of what they should prep for their own campaigns: Literally hundreds of pages of notes detailing adventures that will take months or possibly even years to play through at the table.
And, yeah, that’s a pretty daunting prospect.
In So You Want to Be a Game Master, I actually recommend almost the exact opposite approach for first-time GMs: Start with a one-shot. Prep it, run it, and only then prep the next one. I think this is particularly important if you’re a new GM, because you’re going to be learning a lot in your first few sessions of play: What works and what doesn’t. What the players loved and what blew up in your face. What you need and what you don’t.
You’re going to want to be able to immediately apply those lessons to the next session and the next adventure so that you can keep growing and learning as a GM, and it’s a lot more difficult to do that if you’ve already prepped two dozen adventures before ever sitting down at the table. If you instead lean into an episodic campaign structure, you’ll be freeing yourself to learn and explore — and you’ll also able to embrace your excitement and start playing as soon as possible!
HOW MUCH DO I PREP?
But let’s say that you want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.
You want to run a larger, more interconnected campaign.
– Leslie Nielsen (probably)
You still don’t have to prep the whole thing ahead of time. This raises the question, of course: How much do you need to prep?
In my opinion, you’ll want to start by creating a broad, comprehensive overview or outline of the entire campaign. What this looks like, exactly, will depend on what the primary structure of your campaign is going to be, but it will generally be no more than one or two pages in length.
With your outline in hand, you’re then going to prep just enough material for the first session. But what does that mean? Once again, it depends on the campaign structure.
For example, if you’re planning a megadungeon campaign, then your campaign overview is going to be a list of all the different levels in the dungeon. This might include short, one- or two-sentence descriptions of each level, and you might even put together a side view showing how the various levels connect to each other. This initial list might expand and the connections might shift over time, but this gives you a place to start.
Arneson and Gygax, way back in the 1974 edition of D&D, recommended having three levels of your megadungeon prepped before running your first session, and that’s still pretty solid advice: Most groups, during their first session, will likely never leave the first level of the dungeon, but there’s a chance that they might find a staircase down to the second level and decide to check it out. So you want to be prepared for that. You might even have a situation where, through pure dumb luck, that group makes a direct beeline to another staircase and ends up down on the third level. No reason not to have your bases covered.
In addition to not wanting the players to go charging off the edges of your prepared content, prepping a little bit ahead like this also lets you backfill and foreshadow, knitting the dungeon together into a more coherent environment. (For example, once you’ve prepped the dragonborn cultists on the second level of the dungeon, you might seed the goblin treasure on the first level with Tiamat artifacts they’ve captured from the cultists.)
If the level connections of your megadungeon are heavily xandered, I recommend modifying this advice: Prep the entrance level of the dungeon and any level directly connected to the entrance level. (For example, if Level 1 connects to Levels 2, 4, and 1A, you should prep all four of those levels, because you have no way of knowing which way the players might decide to go.)
After the first session of the campaign, make a list of which levels the PCs have visited. You should now prep all the levels which are connected to those levels. The great thing is that you’ll often discover you’ve already prepped some or all of those levels, which means your prep load will generally decrease over time. (For example, they might gone down to Level 2, which connects to Levels 3 and 4. You’ve already prepped Level 4, so all you need to do now is fill in Level 3.)
Repeat this after every session, and your megadungeon will expand, filling out the details of your original campaign overview at a nice, sustainable pace.
You’ll find that these same basic principles — prepping roughly one scenario ahead of wherever the PCs currently are — can be applied to a lot of different campaign structures. For example, if you’re using a node-based campaign structure, then your campaign overview will be a revelation list of all the adventures plus the clues that link those adventures together. You can include any number of scenarios on this list and, once again, you’ll be free to expand and rearrange the scenarios as you flesh them out into fully playable notes.
For your first session, you’ll obviously start by prepping the initial adventure. When you’re done, look at all the clues in that adventure which point to other adventures, then prep those additional adventures. (Because it’s fully possible that the PCs might discover one of those clues during the first session and choose to immediately follow it, possibly never realizing that it leads to a “separate” scenario in your notes.)
For example, consider the classic introductory node-based structure:
Here the initiating adventure has clues pointing to scenarios A, B, and C, so those are the four adventure you’d ideally want to have ready to go when the campaign begins.
After the first session, as with the megadungeon example, simply look at which scenarios the PCs have broken the seal on (either because they’ve already followed a clue into the scenario or because they’ve told you they’re planning to do so at the beginning of the next session), identify the clues in those scenarios, and make sure you prep all the scenarios those clues point to.
Once again, you’ll find that you’ve often already prepped these scenarios: For example, if the PCs head to scenario A, they’ll have access to clues pointing to scenarios B, C, and D. But you’ll have already prepped scenarios B and C, so all you need to prep is Scenario D. If they wrap-up scenario A in the next session and head to scenario C, you’ll discover that all your prep is already done.
These same basic principles can be applied to mixed campaign structures or even larger adventures. For example, imagine a node-based campaign in which several of the linked adventures are large dungeons. If the PCs have access to clues pointing to one of these dungeons, you don’t necessarily need to prep the whole thing: You could just prep the first couple levels and wait to fill in the rest of the dungeon until the PCs show up and actually start exploring it.
PREP-INTENSIVE CAMPAIGN STRUCTURES
Both of our examples have featured campaigns with a single point of entry — the first level of the dungeon; the initial scenario. But what if we wanted multiple potential points of entry? For example, what if the megadungeon has multiple entrances leading to multiple levels? What if we want to start the campaign with a job board or by giving each PC a set of rumors that they can choose to follow up on?
At this point, you have a few options.
First, you can modify things to collapse the campaign back down to a single point of entry. For example, the dungeon might have multiple entrances, but only one of those might be known or accessible to the PCs at the start of the campaign.
Second, you can give the players access to all of their options (e.g., telling them about all of the entrances or giving them all of their rumors) during Session 0 and have them make a decision about which one they’re going to choose when the campaign begins. You won’t want to completely forget about the other options, but this will still let you focus your initial prep.
Third, you can look at each point of entry separately and prep each of them using the principles described above. For example, if the megadungeon has entrances to Level and Level 4, then you’ll need to prep both of those levels and all of the levels either of them are connected to. This will obviously be a lot more prep, but that’s okay as on as (a) you feel the benefits justify the costs and (b) you have the time and are willing to do that much prep.
As you can see, the same general principle applies: What scenarios could the PCs choose to engage in the next session? Prep those and, ideally, one step more.
This means, though, that some campaign structures are inherently prep-intensive. Hexcrawls, for example, are extremely prep-intensive, since the PCs could hypothetically head in any direction from their starting point and can easily travel multiple hexes in a single session. With no idea where, exactly, they could end up at in their wanderings, a typical hexcrawl requires you to key dozens of hexes before play begins, many of which could and probably will contain full location-based adventures.
If you can put in the effort, however, prep-intensive campaigns can be very rewarding. Partly because they give the players a lot of freedom in exploring the world or situation, but mostly because, as the campaign continues, all that prep will already be done! That will free you up to focus on other stuff during your inter-session prep. (Or, alternatively, just lean back and take it easy.)
REDUCING PREP
If you’re looking to cut down the amount of prep you need to do, there are a few techniques you can use.
First, if you’re comfortable with improvisation, then you get away with reducing your safety net. Broadly speaking, you can usually get away with just prepping the scenario for the next session. Most of the time, the PCs won’t skip ahead to the next dungeon level or jet off for the next scenario. If you’re comfortable just improvising when this does happen, then you don’t need to account for those possibilities in your prep.
Zero-prep games like Technoir and various procedural content generators can, of course, help you with improvising various types of content.
Something else to consider is downtime spacing between scenarios. This may be as simple as travel time: If the current scenario is in Geneva and the PCs find clues pointing to a different scenario in Dallas, then they’re much less likely to pop out in the middle of the Geneva scenario to check out what’s happening in Dallas than they would be if the other scenario was also located in Geneva. This can be generalized into anything that imposes a cost (in time, resources, etc.) for bailing on a scenario early or swapping between scenarios.
The other alternative is a downtime activity that consumes actual time at the table: If the players unexpectredly jag towards a scenario you don’t have prepped yet, you simply trigger the transitional content and use it to fill the rest of the session.
In some games, for example, you might just tell the players to level up. Then, while they’re spending twenty or thirty minutes advancing their characters, you can be throwing together the notes you need for the next adventure.
Blades in the Dark, on the other hand, has a structured downtime period between every job in which time in the game world passes, various events are played out, and crew development happens. This kind of downtime content requires more of your attention as the GM, but you don’t actually need to get an adventure prepped at the table: You just need the downtime spacing to chew up enough the session that you can wrap things up and come back next week with the scenario prepped.
(For more tips on handling the endings of sessions, check out Cliffhangers & Conclusions.)
Looks like the start of section 2 got a bit of random copypasta.
I think it’s an Airplane reference.
… so it is. I reread it twice looking for it and didn’t see it.
Feel free to expunge these comments 🙂
I just want to tell you GMs good luck. We’re all counting on you.
Great article. Thank you for giving me so many ideas to think about.
I’ve been considering a different balance between imporvising and planning out a lot. In addition to planning out X, plan out a few “random” encounters.
Give each one a piece of plot relevance, such as introducing a NPC or a faction, or just sprinkle in a bit of info you want your players to have.
When they go off the rails, you’ll shove one of these at them, and even assuming this doesn’t last until the end of your session, it will give you a lot of time to think of what comes next while they’re discussing what to do.
Done right, they’ll never know that it was a random encounter either. (If you don’t make the mistake of telling them.)
While “random encounters” means battles in most people’s minds, they don’t have to be fights. Meeting an NPC can also be engaging, as can many other things.
In general, I like to build my games out of “nodes” so that I can move them around to match my players’ actions.
@Dave: The formatting got messed up on the quote, so that was definitely killing the joke. Thanks for giving me the heads up to fix it!
@Alexander: You’re anticipating what is likely to be my very next article! Keep an eye out for the Trinity Toolkits.
@Alexander atoz: There’s no need to think of or call that kind of loose-fitting content “random encounters”. If you want, you can call it an “event” or a “free-floating scene” or even a micro-adventure, and exercise your prerogative as GM to trigger it whenever you like. It could be because the PCs are charging off in a direction you haven’t prepared and you need to slow them down, or it could be because you think the pacing of the current session just calls for a fight or an action scene or a breather or talky scene. I always try to keep a list of at least half a dozen “Things That Might Happen” as part of my session prep. (Actually, I tend to caption that section “The Ungiven Future”, but that’s just me.)
Excellent advice
What I usually tell people is prep about two sessions ahead not one. That’s because pacing is often one of the hardest things for a new DM to estimate. If you are off on pacing and the party goes slower then you expect, that’s fine but you don’t want to be trapped unprepared if they move faster.
The perfect image for planning a campaign is the train chase from The Wrong Trousers.
https://youtu.be/jrmZIgVoQw4?si=2XriansYUNOqtgod&t=88
Dear Colin
Agreed. I was calling it “random encounters” party because I didn’t have another name that fit (and that people would reconize) and party because I found the idea of calling it that amusing.
Oh, and because that’s my preferred format for all random encounters. Have them advance the plot, at least a little.
I agree with most of this…and definitely with the comment about the train sequence from The Wrong Trousers…but I think per session prep can be simpler. You don’t need a two-page campaign overview to know what to prep. In fact, you may have to alter what you think is the campaign ending depending on what has already occurred and how deep your social contract with your players to do the published module is.
Granted, you prep the session with AN ending in mind (not THE ending, mind you) but you stay loose and maybe have multiple options for how the session may end. This way, even if none of those options happen, you’re flexible with what the PCs ACTUALLY do. The eventual “ending” can be amended/changed/whatever as things progress.
I generally like The Lazy DM’s session prep, even if I don’t ascribe to it directly myself. I use something close enough that it probably doesn’t matter. Know the likely places, the likely NPCs, the likely things for the PCs to learn (or not learn), and what they may or may not encounter.
You always prep towards the end you have in mind…but that’s a moving target based on what the PCs ACTUALLY do in any given session. So your advice on working session by session is an absolute must.
But I don’t think you need a two-page campaign outline to pull this off in a satisfying manner.
One final and kind of fourth wall breaking solution to your players going somewhere you didn’t prep is just to… tell them.
“Hey guys, listen, I didn’t prep the third floor yet. There’s a downstairs, but it’s currently closed for maintenance. The goblin work crews are putting in 18 hour days to get it cleared, but it won’t be ready until next session.” Part of being a good player is to accept that the GM is human and be responsible for your end of the player contract. Part of that includes accepting in-game conceits that break verisimilitude because it’s a game.