First: I’m frequently asked what my session notes look like. People want an example of what my prep looks like.

Second: Last week at Green Dragon Fest, I was asked if I would be sharing the scenario I ran on the Alexandrian. I said I’d like to do that, but wasn’t certain if it would happen, because it would involve a lot of work.

“A lot of work? For an adventure you’ve already prepped? Why?”

These two things are related to each other.

WHAT MY PREP LOOKS LIKE

What my prep looks like actually varies quite a bit. At one end of things, the scenario notes for the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies are what I used when actually running the campaign. Patrons of the Alexandrian can also grab my actual running files for the Dragon Heist Remix. These are expansive, detailed campaign notes with elaborate continuity, deep themes, and extensive, integrated player handouts.

But my adventure notes are generally written for an audience of one (me), and it’s not at all unusual for them to be essentially incomprehensible to anyone else. I was reminded of this while working on The Vladaam Affair, a campaign arc which I prepped in a significant amount of detail, but nevertheless discovered — when I started sharing it here — required extensive editing and additional writing to make useful to anyone else.

But more than just being tailored to my own idiosyncracies, it’s not at all unusual for me to be running adventures from notes that are essentially chicken scratch. The principle of Smart Prep boils down to not prepping stuff that you can improvise at the table, and I’ve been doing this long enough that there’s a lot of stuff that I can improvise at the table.

For example, here are the original scenario notes from Bloodwight Heist, the scenario I ran at Green Dragon Fest 2026.

BLOODWIGHT HEIST

Job: Steal a Namir-Radi G7 genesplicer from the Nanopore Genlabs facility located in Zoyechka, Katerineta. 30,000cr.

NANOPORE GENLABS (Zoyechka, Katerineta)

• Laboratory A – Genetic Census (Katerineta)
• Laboratory B – Aphrodite Crops
• Laboratory C – PT Soil Seeds
• Laboratory D – Yellow Goo Prep

Admin – File Servers

Offices – Cubicles and Offices on north/south side

Lower Level – The Blood

LEADS

• Splicer going to Genma (Nirvana).
• Admin: Missing Shipment @ Tranquility Station
• Lower Lab: Source in Dark System (Ukweli-17)

AT THE TABLE

This scenario was originally prepped for my Mothership open table. These notes, plus the monster stat blocks (which I pulled from a different adventure), were everything that I had prepped, although the “Job” entry was actually player-facing and I dropped it into a template to create a small card that I added to the Jobs Board that hangs in my game room:

In terms of play, I got four sessions of open table out of it:

• Group 1 took the job, had the heist blow up in their faces when the monsters showed up, and fled. This led to local authorities placing Nanopore Genlabs under quarantine. A new job was then posted, offering payment for retrieving data from the file servers and tissue samples from the basement lab.
• Group 2 attempted the new job, infiltrating a drone into the facility after an elaborate heist. They caught a fleeting glimpse of the monsters as their drone was destroyed, and they decided to high-tail it out of there. The contract remained open.
• Group 3, including a member of Group 1, took the job. It took them two sessions to complete and they were forced to abandon the tissue samples, but they were able to retrieve the data.

For Group 2 I had kept some brief notes of what Group 1 had done (e.g., breaking stuff and blowing up rooms), then added an adversary roster for the monsters and another one for the security team enforcing the quarantine.

For Group 3, I beefed up the federal security forces.

For Green Dragon Fest I added a few additional layers to the overall experience, but the heist portion of the adventure was essentially unchanged except that I prepped fancier versions of the blueprints to use as player handouts. (At the table, the adventure followed a similar course, with each additional group getting a version of the job and site modified by the previous team’s efforts.)

AFTER ACTION REPORT

If I were to make this adventure publishable — or, perhaps more importantly, to put it in a form where someone else could meaningfully run the same adventure I did — I would obviously need to download a lot more of my brain onto the page. For example, what are PT Soil Seeds? (Hint: PT stands for Pre-Terraforming and PT stations can be found in orbit around or on the surface of multiple planets in the Tempest Cluster.)

So what’s my point? Am I saying that you should prep your own adventures like this?

Not exactly. After all, I’ve already linked you to adventure notes where I prepped a lot more than this, and that was not, generally speaking, wasted effort.

But I’m also not NOT saying that. It’s definitely useful to be able to run a scenario from notes like this ­– or, at least, whatever your version of minimal looks like. Even if, like me, you’d generally prefer to have more notes when you’re running, occasionally running a scenario from minimal notes is a good way to test your limits and can also help you figure out what is and isn’t essential prep for you. (Which can improve the quality and usefulness of your more detailed prep notes.)