Go to Part 1

Conceptually, I think of most campaigns as being collections of scenarios. The ways in which those scenarios are organized can radically differ, but at least nine times out of ten everything still breaks down into very distinct scenarios. Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire is a node-based campaign, with each interconnected node being a separate scenario. In my OD&D hexcrawl each hex is basically a separate scenario. Even in my Castle Blackmoor megadungeon campaign, the castle dungeons and the tunnels surrounding those dungeons are studded with sub-levels that are designed and managed as separate scenarios.

None of these are necessarily distinctions that will be recognized by my players at the table, but they nonetheless exist in how I organize, prep, and think about the material. As a GM, I think you have to be able to compartmentalize the campaign world into these sorts of manageable chunks; in its totality, the campaign world would overwhelm you.

(For example, in my series on Hexcrawls I talk about how hexes are an abstraction for my convenience as a GM, but that they’re a player-unknown structure that’s inherently invisible to the players. This is true in other campaign structures, too: In Dragon Heist, for example, the players can obviously distinguish the difference between the Eyecatcher and the Zhentarim interrogation house, but they probably won’t see the Outpost / Response Team / Lair structure I’ve used to organize my notes.)

Once the game begins and the campaign world is set into motion, however, this can become a lot trickier. You separated the headquarters of the Black Lotus gang from Benny Hu’s mansion from the third eye dealers in Kowloon so that you could manage each of them conveniently, but if all of those separate scenarios are active simultaneously, how do you keep track of them? Each individual ball was easy to get a grip on, but now you’ve taken a dozen balls, tossed them into the air, and you’re trying to keep them all up at the same time.

How do you keep it all straight in your head?

The tool I use is a campaign status document.

Rather than keeping notes attached to a dozen different scenarios, I rope all the active elements of the campaign into this single document. In some ways you can think of this as a change log or diff file: The original scenario notes, by and large, remain untouched. Instead, the campaign status document records how those scenarios have changed. When the PCs re-engage with those scenarios, I can use my original scenario notes in combination with the campaign status document to run the updated version.

But the campaign status document is more than that. It’s a compilation of ALL the active components of the campaign (not just those arising from scenarios which have been ejected from the status quo). It’s the default repository for the evolving canon of the campaign. It’s arguably the single most important document I have at the table during play. It is always kept close to hand, and is ultimately the guide I use to keep the campaign on track.

It’s also kind of my secret weapon as a GM. How do I manage to run these huge, sprawling, complicated campaigns without getting lost? I have a road map. I use the campaign status document as a cheat sheet, offloading the mental load to my downtime so that at the actual table I can stay focused on execution and active play, rather than the logistics of continuity.

The campaign status document, however, is not a one-size-fits-all tool. Every single campaign is unique, and I’ve found that to be reflected in each campaign’s status document. It often takes me three or four sessions with a new campaign before I can really start grokking what the status document for that campaign is going to look like.

With that being said, there are three elements which form the core of my campaign status sheets: The timeline of bangs, the list of background events, and the scenario updates.

TIMELINE OF BANGS

“Bang” is a term of art from the Art of Pacing. Bangs are the explosive moments that you use to start a new scene. Stripping the jargon out of it, the timeline of bangs is basically a list of events that are going to happen to the PCs in the future; the places where the active campaign world is going to actively seek them out instead of waiting to react to them.

For example, here’s the timeline from one of the campaign status documents from my first Eternal Lies campaign:

• Wini receives a letter stating that Monte Jr. is getting sicker.
• Trigger Floating Scene 5: Bomb on Board.
• Waterlogged tome washes up next time they’re on a beach. (Particularly creepy if it’s a lake. Or the pond behind Allaghmore House.)
• Ulysses finds the mango he was given in Bangkok buried in one of his bags. Rotten and forgotten.

For Eternal Lies, my timeline of bangs was usually not tied to specific dates, but rather triggered by certain actions or as the result of reaching particular milestones. This worked well for Eternal Lies because often a globe-hopping character’s ability to receive a letter, for example, was tied more to them arriving at a place where the letter could reach them rather than some specific date.

In my Ptolus campaign, on the other hand, the timeline was tied to specific dates (and often times). Here’s an example from the Session 41 campaign status document:

• 09/22/790: Dominic scheduled to denounce Rehobath. (Backdrop 2)
• 09/22/790 (Evening): Chaos cultists identify Tee as being “Laurea.” They attack the Ghostly Minstrel. (Laurea’s Doom)
• 09/23/790: Tor’s Training.
• 09/23/790: Jevicca’s Briefing on the Pactlords.
• 09/23/790: Receive invitation from House Abanar for a cruise on the Vanished Dream. (Interlude 2)
• 09/24/790: Ranthir’s headband of intellect delivered.

The entries in parentheses indicate where the bang is coming from: Backdrop 2 and Interlude 2 were two specific scenarios. “Laurea’s Doom” referred to a later page of the campaign status document where I had summarized the retaliatory attacks aimed at Tee and the rest of the group as a result of their previous actions.

You can see from these entries that the nature of these bangs can vary wildly: Some are simple appointments the PCs have made. Others are ambushes. But, as I wrote in The Art of Pacing: Prepping Bangs, every single one of them is a bang waiting to happen: When the clock reaches that moment, we’re going to frame a new scene, set an agenda, and bang our way into it.

One other thing to note about these timeline entries, is that they generally aren’t fully-formed bangs. They’re more like bullets waiting to be fired. When the moment arrives, the actual bang will be customized to the circumstances of the PCs. These bangs will often act as interruptions or obstacles to other intentions: The PCs are trying to accomplish one thing, when the active campaign world interjects something else.

When these timeline bangs emerge from a scenario in motion, they’re also scenario hooks. And that’s true even if they’re for scenarios that the PCs have already engaged with.

BACKGROUND EVENTS

Background events are a second timeline of future events running in parallel with the timeline of bangs. These are the events which DON’T directly affect the PCs, but which are nevertheless taking place and moving the campaign world forward.

In my earliest campaign status documents, I didn’t separate these two timelines from each other: Stuff that would be directly experienced by the PCs and background headlines in the local newspapers would be freely mixed together in a single timeline of dates. This worked up to a certain point, but I eventually realized that:

• The two lists are actually used in distinct ways and at distinct times during play, so having them directly juxtaposed didn’t provide any meaningful utility.
• The timeline of bangs is, in many ways, a list of “things I don’t want to forget to have happen.” The background events, on the other hand, are factoids that the PCs usually have to seek out. Mixing them together on the same list sometimes resulted in the essential bangs getting lost amidst the reactive background events, thus degrading the utility of the list.

So although they’re superficially similar (insofar as both are a list of ongoing events that are likely to happen as the campaign world moves forward through time), they actually serve distinct purposes and work better when split apart.

For my Blades in the Dark campaign, I referred to this section of the sheet as “Word on the Street.” In the Ptolus campaign, it was “Newssheets” (i.e., what you might read about in the local papers) and would also include what was being publicly reported about the PCs. Here’s a sample from the Session 41 campaign status:

• 09/22/790: Sir Tor and his companions have rescued three of the most recently kidnapped children and freed more than a dozen slaves. Rehobath is proud of what the Church’s knights are accomplishing for the common citizens of Ptolus. “Let none doubt that the Gods will be true to those who keep faith with the True Church of Ptolus!”
• 09/23/790: What a Whopper! Stranded Jellyfish as Big as a House!
• 09/23/790: A priest was killed on the Columned Row in Oldtown. His head was ripped open, like the woman who was killed the night before on Flamemoth Way. (Thought Stalker)
• 09/24/790: It turns out that children have been disappearing from the Warrens for weeks, but no one has been reporting on it.
• 09/24/790: Three more people were killed in the middle of the night on the Columned Row. Their heads were ripped open. The murders are now referred to as the work of the “Columned Row Killer.” (Thought Stalker)

DEDICATED PAGES: Once again, the parenthetical reference to the “Thought Stalker” points to a dedicated page found later in the campaign status document that details the entire Thought Stalker situation (including its stat block). Dedicated pages serve as a singular reference point for ongoing threads in the campaign and make it easier to revise these sequences if the PCs intervene and cause them to take a different direction (which they absolutely will), allowing you to see all of the sequence’s events at once instead of digging through the larger timelines where they’ve been interwoven with other sequences.

Previous events can also remain archived on these dedicated pages, allowing you to reference them for context if you need to without clogging up the primary reference timelines.

BACKDROP FILES: As the complexity of the evolving world grew in my Ptolus campaign, I eventually expanded on the concept of the dedicated pages with separate Backdrop files: For example, Backdrop 2: Novarch in Exile is a very lengthy, sequential breakdown of the evolving religious conflict in the city. Backdrop 4: Cult Activities, on the other hand, lays out ten separate sequences of cult activity taking place in the city and then weaves them together to form a comprehensive timeline of cult activities.

These separate Backdrop files also allow me to offload some of this prep work so that the campaign status document can remain slimmer and more easily referenced during play. As time passes, I can periodically seed the campaign status document with material from the Backdrop files. For example, my current version of the Ptolus campaign status document reads:

NEWSSHEETS (Backdrops updated thru 10/27)

Which is a reminder to myself that, when we get close to the 27^th of Nocturdei in the campaign, I should go through my Backdrop files, pull out another 5-10 days of material from those timelines, and add it to the campaign status document.

DESIGNING BACKGROUND EVENTS: You want to make sure to include stuff evolving out of what the PCs have done AND foreshadow elements that you know are coming in future scenarios. You also want to spice the background events with entries that AREN’T directly related to the PCs’ activities or the scenarios of the campaign.

That can be purely random local color like the giant jellyfish. But it can also be whole “storylines” of unrelated events happening in the background of your campaign world, adding depth and verisimilitude to the world the PCs are living in.

(And you never know when those purely background elements may suddenly stop being background elements: The Novarch in Exile stuff in Ptolus, for example, was originally meant to just be a juicy story of local intrigue and conflict. But then two of the PCs independently pursued courses of action that thrust the whole group right into the middle of the religious schism and completely changed the course of the campaign. Great stuff.)

DIGGING IN: I also use a system of top-line summaries as bullet points combined with sub-bullets for additional details that the PCs can find out if they decide to dig deeper into a particular topic. (For example, the top-line might mention that a woman was found murdered in the Guildsman District. But the PCs will only discover that her body was covered in rat bites if they follow up on the story they read in the newssheets.) This is a hierarchy of reference, just like those described in the Art of the Key.

I use this technique sparingly. (It’s often just as easy to improvise the details on those occasions when the PCs decide to dig into a background event, and overthinking them isn’t smart prep.) But in specific circumstances, I sometimes find it useful, particularly if it’s additional information that has already been established as canon elsewhere in my notes.

SCENARIO UPDATES

The final core function of the campaign status document is the actual change logs for each individual scenario.

What you generally want to avoid doing is rewriting the entire scenario. There may be times when that is, in fact, necessary, but the entire goal of the campaign status document is basically to avoid doing that as often as possible. What you want is a set of tightly organized lists of updates/differences that you can combine with your original scenario notes on-the-fly.

I’m going to use location-based scenarios for my examples here, but these same basic principles can be used for any scenario type.

ADVERSARY ROSTERS: If you’re designing your scenarios with adversary rosters (which you should be doing anyway), they’ll help to streamline this process. During actual play you’ll have printed off a copy of the original adversary roster, and you’re likely annotating that adversary roster as you go. (The PCs killed these bad guys, etc.) When the session is over, simply copy-paste the adversary roster into your campaign status document and update it to reflect your annotations.

Adversary rosters also make it easy to handle situations like, “The bad guys have reorganized their defenses, or, “They’ve brought in reinforcements.” Modifying the roster is quick and easy.

UPDATED ROOM KEYS: As events evolve in a scenario, it’s likely that physical changes will be wrought in the complex. Some of these changes will be inflicted by the PCs themselves; others may be done by the NPCs. Once again your approach should be to keep your notes tight and confined to the changes that need to be made to the original key entries. Another example from my Ptolus campaign status sheet:

• Area 7: Emptied.
• Area 12: Alarm spell on throne. Door is arcane locked.
• Area 14: Emptied.
• Area 15: Emptied.
• Area 18: Huge pools of blood, streaked back all the way to the inner chamber (where it looks like the bodies were dragged down the wall to Level 3).
• Area 20: Frozen ash (left from immolated body).
• Area 23: 3 dead (partially eaten) Commissar’s Men. (These bodies remain unlooted.)

Often these changes are the result of things that happened during actual play. You don’t need to go into exhaustive detail; just provide a reminder to jog your memory.

TIMELINE OF CONTINUED EVENTS: If the disrupted scenario is in a highly agitated state, but you’re not sure exactly when the PCs will re-engage with that scenario, you may want to develop a timeline of how events develop within that scenario. I discuss this process at length in Don’t Prep Plots: Prepping Scenario Timelines.

The short version is basically indicating that at such-and-such a time the adversary roster and/or room key will be updated in this way. A simple example is when the bad guys have summoned reinforcements, but they won’t arrive for a little while and it’s possible the PCs will come back for a second assault before they get there. So you create an adversary roster without the reinforcements, and then use the timeline to indicate when they should be added to the adversary roster. If the PCs don’t come back, then the next time you’re updating your campaign status document, you can add the reinforcements and remove the timeline entry.

As you’re doing these timelines, an important skill to cultivate is identifying how far in advance you need to anticipate trajectories. Basically, this boils down to judgment call: How long is it before the PCs are likely to interact with this scenario again? Prepping a timeline for the next three weeks is a waste of time if the PCs are likely to be coming back within 48-72 hours. If the PCs are coming back to the scenario at the beginning of the next session, then you probably don’t need a timeline of future updates at all.

On the other hand, you don’t want to necessarily undershoot: Prepping only the next 6 hours of events and then being left to scramble when the PCs don’t come back for three days (but still arrive in the middle of next session) isn’t ideal, either.

CONTINUITY OF PAST EVENTS: In some cases I will leave prior entries in the timeline after I’ve executed the necessary change and only mark them with strikethrough text. Such entries can be useful as continuity notes, helping you to accurately describe how the scenario has altered over time without necessarily doing a fully updated room key for every small difference. For example, if the NPCs have dragged the temporal generator from Area 8 to Area 19, you don’t necessarily need to add an entry describing the drag tracks to every room in between; you just need to know the dragging occurred.

DON’T FEAR THE ENDING: As you begin embracing this “world in motion” concept and begin keeping multiple scenarios active simultaneously through your campaign status document, you may actually find yourself overcompensating in the opposite direction so that nothing is ever actually allowed to finish.

If the PCs have authoritatively completed a scenario (killing all the cultists in the Temple of the Ebon Hand, for example), scratch out that scenario and remove it from your campaign status document. You might still come back to that cult or that location and reincorporate those elements later, but let the moment of conclusion land first and give those elements some breathing room while giving other aspects of the campaign room to grow.

In other cases, you may discover that aspects of the campaign that weren’t definitively concluded are instead simply no longer in focus: The PCs didn’t wipe out all the goblins in Hex A9, but they don’t seem interested in going back there, either. It may make sense to “archive” that material: Advance that scenario to a new status quo, create an updated copy of your original scenario notes reflecting that status quo, and file it with the other scenarios that aren’t being actively engaged.

Your campaign status document will be most useful if you keep it short, focused, and easily referenced.

ADDING MORE TOOLS

Beyond these three core elements, my campaign status documents frequently feature other toolkits that facilitate running the campaign (and particularly running the active, evolving aspects of the campaign). As I mentioned above, every campaign status document is a special snowflake that’s customized for the needs of that specific campaign, and you’ll find that tools which were absolutely essential for one campaign are worthless for another (and vice versa).

In the future, I am likely to add addendums to this series discussing some of the tools I’ve developed for specific campaigns over the years.

MAINTAINING YOUR STATUS DOCUMENT

I used to just maintain a single file on my computer called “Campaign Status” and I would simply overwrite the information in that file between sessions as it got updated. What I quickly realized, however, is that I would sometimes make mistakes about what information I no longer needed to reference, and would regret having deleted the older information. So now I do a couple of things.

First, when it’s time to update the campaign status document I save it as a new copy of the file (“Campaign Status – Session 12”) and drop the previous version into an archival directory.

Second, I file the printed copy of the old campaign status document into a cheap accordion folder. (The Ptolus folder with 100+ campaign status documents is bulging.) I keep this nearby while actually running the game: I rarely need to reference the older documents, but if I do then I have them right there.

Over time you’ll get more skilled with figuring out what should and should not be removed from the campaign status document. But you just never know when the players are going to suddenly want to engage with minutia from 30 sessions ago.

All of this emphasizes the fact that the campaign status document is, above all, a living document. One which reflects not only where your campaign is, but where it’s been and where it’s going.

CAMPAIGN STATUS MODULES
Dungeon Status
Restocking Checklists
Event Fallout
Correspondence
Trackers
Continuity Notes
Supporting Cast

ADDITIONAL READING
Smart Prep: The Exposition Drip

Back in 2015, I shared Game Structure: Party Planning. This is an incredibly flexible scenario structure that GMs can use to design and run large, dynamic social events without being overwhelmed by their complexity.

In getting ready to run one of these social events — whether it’s a bounty hunter trade conference, a political fundraiser, the Ilvermorny debutante ball, or a pleasure cruise to the center of a Hollow Earth on a flying ship — a GM can certainly pour a lot of prep into them. And the scenario structure is a powerful one which will reward that prep.

But I also included a quick ‘n dirty version of the structure that GMs can use with about 5 minutes of prep when they don’t have a lot of time to pour into it: If a big social soirée crops up in the middle of a session, you can call for a quick break and rapidly get your social event set up.

That’s the situation I found myself in while running Dragon Heist last weekend, and I thought it might be illuminating to walk through how it played out at the table.

(This post will contain copious spoilers for Dragon Heist.  I will do my best to make it comprehensible to those not familiar with the campaign, but check out the Alexandrian Remix if you’re feeling lost. Part 1 of the Remix alone should give you enough context to fully grok the proceedings.)

PROLOGUE TO THE OMEN COMING ON

Before we dive in, let’s take a moment to briefly establish the given circumstances of the situation.

The PCs — Kittisoth, Pashar, Kora, Edana, and Theren — had aggressively pursued their investigations into the nimblewrights which were being sold throughout Waterdeep. As such, they had (a) identified Captain Zord, the leader of a small fleet of carnival vessels based out of Luskan, as the person selling them and (b) discovered that Zord, or the Luskans he was working for, had implanted clairvoyant crystals into the nimblewrights and were using them to spy on various noble families and organizations throughout the city. They’d also made contact with a young dragon, Zellifarn, who had also been spying on Captain Zord, and could tell them that the crystal ball the clairvoyant crystals were bound to was located in a submersible underneath Zord’s flagship.

The group had also recently become invested as agents of the Harpers, and therefore felt honor bound to shut down Zord’s operation. As such, they began planning a heist to seize the crystal ball from Zord.

Largely by chance, the night they chose for their operation was Ches 25th. As noted here, this is also the night of the Shipwrights’ Ball, an event that was once a guild celebration, but which has now turned into one of the biggest social events of the Fleetswake festival season.

This is important because, elsewhere in the campaign, Kittisoth had been relentlessly flirting with Renaer Neverember (the young noble that the PCs had saved several weeks earlier). And I had decided that Renaer was going to ask Kittisoth to attend the Shipwrights’ Ball with him.

This was a great complication for the planning of their heist, so I fully embraced it.

All of which leads us up to the current situation:

• Theren and Edana, using a stockpile of invisibility and waterbreathing potions that the group had used all their resources to acquire, would infiltrate Captain Zord’s ship and steal the crystal ball.
• Pashar and Kora would provide what support they could from the shore (and be ready to step in if the shit hit the fan).
• Kittisoth would simultaneously go on a date with Renaer to the Shipwrights’ Ball.

Only problem? At least in part because I was running the campaign in big, marathon sessions, all of this had developed over the course of a single session. I didn’t have the Shipwrights’ Ball fully prepped, and I knew that — particularly with it playing out simultaneously with the Eyecatcher heist — I needed a strong structure for everything to play out to best effect.

So that’s when I called a 10 minute break, grabbed a sheet of paper, and quickly sketched out the Shipwrights’ Ball.

SET UP

The quick ‘n dirty version of party planning looks like this:

• Make a list of 3-5 places people can congregate
• Make a list of 10 characters
• Make a list of 5 events
• Make a list of 5 topics of conversation

And I basically ran straight down this list.

LOCATIONS: The Shipwrights’ Ball takes place at Shipwrights’ House. I took a few minutes to dig through the existing lore for the Shipwrights’ House hoping there would be some material to pilfer, but there wasn’t much. The House had been briefly described, a century earlier, in the City of Splendors boxed set as:

D19 Guild Hall: Shipwright’s House
2-story Class B building
HQ: Order of Master Shipwrights

As a Class B building, it’s a “larger, more successful and elaborate building,” and most likely freestanding. Briefly looking into the Order of Master Shipwrights, I discovered that in the 14th century they had been rivals with the Master Mariners’ Guild. I decided that, at some point in the last century, the Master Mariners’ Guild had been wiped out, and the Order of Master Shipwrights had grown rich indeed with a near-monopoly of shipbuilding in Waterdeep.

I stuck some Post-It flags to mark the appropriate pages in case I needed to reference this scant reference material and moved on.

On my single prep sheet, I quickly sketched out a “map” that basically looked like this:

Except, of course, sketched in pencil and with my sloppy handwriting scrawled across it.

I knew that the Bigass Staircase went down to Dock Street near Asteril’s Way (based on the 2nd Edition and 3rd Edition maps), which it turned out was surprisingly near to where I had placed the Eyecatcher (Zord’s flagship) in the previous session.

The Ballroom and Dinner Wing kind of speak for themselves. (The latter were a “wing” because I knew there would be lots of small, private dining areas and bars jutting off from the main dining hall, just in case that would be useful.) Galleon Hall was so called because it had about a half-dozen full-sized ships inside it as installation pieces. (You know that scene in Moana with all the ships in the cave? That was my visual touchstone. Except in a giant room of marble-encrusted wealth instead of a cave.) Private Rooms off to one side of the ballroom because it would give me smaller spaces for conversations to move into as necessary. And the Garden Terraces were 4-5 huge terraces jutting off the back of the building with winding paths leading through them; bioluminiscent plants would give the terraces a “Pandora from Avatar” kind of feel, and the whole complex would be hemmed in from the rest of the city by a “wall” of huge, dark, old-growth pine trees.

I didn’t write any of that down: Too time-consuming. A quick sketch-map for reference and the rough images that had been conjured up in my head were all that I needed. I had the 3-5 locations.

CHARACTERS: As I mentioned in Party Planning, “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs…” And that was definitely true here. Basically I just flipped through Dragon Heist and wrote down this list:

• Rubino Caswell – Guildmaster
• Renaer
• Laeral (207)
• Vajra (216)
• Jalester Silvermane (20)
• Obaya Uday (20)
• Cassalanters
• Mirt (211)
• Remalia Haventree (215)

The numbers in parentheses were page references to their write-ups. Several of these characters had already appeared in the campaign (Renaer, Jalester, Mirt) and several others I had already planned on introducing in the near future (Vajra, the Cassalanters). The only new character was the guildmaster.

As the party progressed, I would simply place a check mark next to each name as Kittisoth had an interaction with them. (It’s not that she wouldn’t be able to continue having additional interactions with them, but this helped me keep an eye on which characters I hadn’t used yet so that I could make sure that everyone got brought “onstage” at some point during the evening.)

EVENTS: At this point in the campaign, I knew that the Cassalanters needed to make contact with the PCs and invite them to a meeting at their villa. I decided this was as good a time as any for that to happen, and I quickly included that in a list that largely consisted of the Ball’s social agenda:

• Grand Promenade
• Rubino’s Speech
• Cassalanter’s Approach
• Zero-G Dancing (Vajra & Laeral)
• Dinner

I’d indicated Vajra & Laeral in parentheses because I had an image of those characters being introduced to Kittisoth while she was dancing with Renaer. (The zero-g dancing is exactly what it sounded like: A cool magical effect where everyone could literally dance their partners off their feet.) As it turned out, this is it NOT how Kittisoth ended up meeting Vajra the Blackstaff and Laeral the Open Lord of Waterdeep.

Now, honest to god, while I was planning all of this, I completely forgot that Captain Zord’s carnival was scheduled to perform a parade from their ships to the Shipwrights’ Ball! It was only after returning to the table and beginning to review my notes for the heist portion of the evening that I realized that the two events were going to feature this dramatic and unexpected crossover event.

This is one of those incredible moments of serendipity that can only really happen when you have a truly robust scenario prepared and you’re actively playing it hard for all its worth. You keep setting things in motion, and the billiard balls inevitably start colliding in amazing patterns that you never anticipated and had no way of planning.

In any case, I reached back over to my list and added “Sea Maidens Faire Parade” as the first entry.

TOPICS OF CONVERSATION: “If the social event is growing organically out of game play, then you’ve probably already got the NPCs and the topics of conversation…” This was also basically true. I quickly jotted down:

• Embezzlement [meaning Lord Dagult’s embezzlement of 500,000 dragons]
• Explosion [meaning the fireball that the PCs were investigating]
• Black Viper robberies [this had not yet come up in the campaign, but was part of my prep]

This wasn’t quite enough, though. You really want to have a range of topics that you can cycle through to keep a party alive. Also, it would be more interesting to have more topics that the PCs weren’t already aware of. AND it would be good to have some topics that weren’t directly related to the plot of the campaign. So I added two more kind of out of left field:

• Misra Tesper eloped to Daggerford (with a half-orc) [this whole thing, including Misra Tesper, was made up out of whole cloth; I pulled her last name from a list of Waterdeep noble families and I pulled her first name from the list of fantasy names that I keep on hand as a GM tool]
• Black Gold in Moonshae (extrusion of the Feydark) [meaning that a new Black Gold rush had begun in the Moonshae Isles; I’d previously pulled this really obscure reference to MOON1-3: Black Gold, a 4th Edition Living Forgotten Realms scenario, as an explanation for why a house was abandoned in Part 2: Gralhund Villa, and here I was simply flipping through the binder containing my prep notes for inspiration, saw the reference and decided to foreshadow the later development if it ever came up… which it probably wouldn’t, but it doesn’t really matter]

And that was it. I now had everything I needed to run the Shipwrights’ Ball on a single sheet of paper. As I mentioned, the whole thing took me less than 10 minutes. In fact, I’ve spent far more time explaining the whole process here than I did actually jotting down my lists at the time.

Next: Run-Time

Go to Part 1

We’ve looked at the common mistakes that are made when using plotted/railroaded approaches. Now let’s look at the flip-side of the coin and look at the low-value prep pitfalls people can fall into when attempting to be open and flexible in their design.

Here’s a common one: You’ve prepped a bunch of elements for your sandbox campaign and now you believe that you need to keep all of those elements active and moving around.

For example, when I ran my OD&D sandbox I prepped a hexcrawl with 256 keyed hexes. Imagine running that hexcrawl and, between every session, trying to touch every single one of those hexes and saying, “Okay, here’s what’s happening in this hex right now. Here’s how the situation in this hex has evolved since the last session.”

Not only does this sound exhausting, but basically all of that prep is wasted. The players haven’t seen the previous situation in the vast majority of those hexes, and they likely won’t see the new situation you’re creating, either. So the players aren’t actually seeing any of this activity. You’re creating a ton of content of which your players have no awareness; no experience.

I’ve spoken to a large number of GMs who are intimidated at the idea of running a sandbox campaign specifically because this kind of prep work – this monumental task of keeping an entire fictional world “in motion” – is incredibly daunting to them. The reality, of course, is that this isn’t necessary. This low-value prep can be avoided through status quo design.

The truth is that status quo is generally the way the real world works: Imagine going to a diner. If you go there today, what do you see? You see some waitresses. They take your order. They deliver the food. If you went tomorrow instead of today, what would be different? Probably not a lot. Probably nothing. If you went next month would it be different? Probably not. Maybe the waitresses would be different; or the owner might have tweaked the menu a bit. But if you’d never been to that diner before, these changes would not really affect your experience.

Now, let’s say that you went to the diner today and fired a rocket launcher through the window. Then you go back tomorrow. Would the diner be different?

Yes.

And that’s basically the secret of status quo prep: You prep a chunk of the game world in a given state and then you don’t bother touching it again until the players’ actions interact with that state. But as soon as the players do agitate or change that status quo, that chunk of the game world becomes active.

It’s kind of an inverted quantum state: Until you observe a subatomic particle it’s impossible to know its current state. With status quo prep, on the other hand, you know precisely what the state of something is until you look at it.

THE ACTIVE QUO: It should be noted that status quo doesn’t mean “static.” It also doesn’t mean “boring.” The status quo of a pirate cove, for example, isn’t, “The pirates are all sitting around doing nothing.” The status quo of a pirate cove is a bunch of pirate ships constantly sailing out to pillage the high seas.

In fact, I’d argue that the best status quo design is usually more like a coiled spring: The lightest interaction from the PCs will cause an explosion of activity.

NON-LOCAL EFFECTS: And the actions that force a location (or organization or NPC) into “motion” doesn’t necessarily have to be direct. For example, what if the PCs unleash a horrible plague that kills goblins? They don’t actually need to visit the dungeon full of goblins on the other side of the map in order for those goblins to be affected by the plague and the status quo of that dungeon to be changed.

These non-local effects don’t require cataclysmic scenarios, either. A single NPC being knocked loose from another location can act as a free radical, banging around the campaign world and putting any number of other elements into motion. For example, when the Necromancer escapes from the PCs’ raid of Bleached Bone Gulley, maybe they end up slaying the goblin chief and enslaving the tribe.

RETURN TO THE STATUS QUO: With that being said, in the absence of continued PC interaction, elements of the campaign world will generally trend back towards a status quo again. (Note that I said a status quo; it’s usually not likely that things will go back to the same status quo. PCs tend to be more disruptive than that.)

For example, the PCs raid a terrorist compound, wreak a lot of havoc, and kill a couple of the cult’s leaders before being forced to retreat. Over the next week the cult calls in reinforcements from some of their other cells to guard against further incursions until they can finish packing up and moving their operations to a new location.

If the PCs don’t re-engage with the terrorists within a couple weeks of the original raid, then the new status quo features cyborg guards (the other cells were up to some wacky stuff), an abandoned terrorist compound, and a new operational center set up in the sub-basement of a parking garage.

DANGERS OF THE STATUS QUO: One danger of status quo design is that you can end up inadvertently stumbling into a sandbox setting where you’re not actively tracking the activity of anything in the game world and, as a result, there’s no activity for the PCs to observe, which translates into a lack of scenario hooks.

This is a problem I discuss at length in Juggling Scenario Hooks in the Sandbox, but basically the solution is just, “Make sure you have scenario hooks. And lots of them.” (Once the PCs are in motion, of course, this will usually take care of itself.)

Robust, default structures for delivering scenario hooks – like random encounters, rumor tables, or the default action of the hexcrawl structure itself – are one way of doing this. Another is to look around your setting and remember that status quo doesn’t mean nothing is happening: The pirate cove is raiding local shipping. The terrorists are blowing things up. The goblins are fighting werewolves in the forest. Some jackass is shooting rockets into local diners.

Those are all obvious sources for endless scenario hooks. And in status quo design, you can really think of a scenario hook as being a hook: A thing which jerks the PCs into motion towards an object. And once the PCs collide with that object, the ripples they create will spread fast and far.

At that point, the challenge won’t be putting the campaign into motion. It will be keeping on top of it.

Go to Part 4: Campaign Status Documents

Go to Part 1

Our time with Dragon Heist is drawing to a close. I have a few more Addendums I want to explore, and there are a number of Running the Campaign columns based on my actual play that I think are likely to provide useful insight and cool ideas. But the core of the Alexandrian Remix is complete.

When I wrote my original review of Dragon Heist in November last year, I did not anticipate that the campaign would become the central focus point of the Alexandrian for the next several months.

Even when I started writing the Alexandrian Remix of the campaign a few weeks later, I wasn’t expecting to still be writing about it in February. My rough plan was that it would run through December and wrap up. What happened?

One of the major shifts was the decision to do full adversary roster breakdowns for each heist in the campaign. This was basically essential for me actually running the campaign, and it turned out to be a great opportunity to introduce a wide swath of new GMs to these really powerful techniques. But it was also the seed which saw my original intention of more-or-less briefly saying, “Use this lair to run a heist!” grow into a much more expansive concept of breaking down the entire heist structure and showing how each lair could be fully adapted to that structure.

The Faction Outposts also outgrew their original scope. My plan had been to highlight how material from the chase sequence in Chapter 3 of the book could be repurposed, and my expectation had been that I could basically say, “Use the Autumn Version of this location.” In order to balance the number of outposts between each faction, however, I ended up adding several all-original locations to the campaign. The process of making the clue-progression of the campaign more robust also meant including significantly more material with each outpost.

For something that stuck much closer to the original spec, look at the Faction Response Teams: The Faction Outposts were supposed to look more like that, with one post for the outposts and one post for the response teams. (Although the response teams actually expanded, too, as I realized that response teams should be included for factions beyond the four villains.)

In the end, a feature that I had originally thought would be perhaps 10,000 words ended up being more than 55,000 words. Seeing this, some have suggested that my early comments that the Remix primarily represents what the campaign could have been and arguably should have been was in error. (That clearly adding all of this new material would have considerably expanded the size of the book.) I don’t think this is accurate; reshaping material (and explaining the design choices I was making) is often more costly in terms of word count.

I primarily mention this length, however, to explain why this final installment of the Remix is necessary.

You see, when the original intention was a fairly short series of a little over half a dozen posts, I decided that the best structural organization was design-oriented:

• Discuss general principles (how the factions are organized and the new, heist-oriented structure of the campaign)
• Introduce adversary rosters and a proto-heist (Gralhund Villa)
• The path from Gralhund Villa to the Eye Heists (Faction Outposts & Response Teams)
• The Eye Heists (the heist structure and the four villain lairs)
• Making the Three Clue Rule and node-based scenario design of the campaign more robust (revised revelation lists tying all of the material together)

Most of these, with the exception of the Eye Heists themselves, were visualized as being one post. In actual practice, only one of them – Gralhund Villa – actually achieved that goal, and the tail end of the series also saw feature creep (adding full remixes of both Finding Floon and the Nimblewright Investigation, plus reference timelines and faction reports).

As the length increased, the original intention became obfuscated. The material had also become more specific than originally intended, encouraging GMs to simply pick up the Alexandrian Remix and run it… except the material wasn’t actually organized for doing that. It was organized as a design discussion.

All of this created a lot of confusion and frustration, particularly as the series began attracting new readers who weren’t necessarily familiar with the Alexandrian or the discussions out of which the Remix had arisen.

RUN-TIME ORGANIZATION

As I’ve discussed these issues with people, there has been some confusion about what the distinction is between a design-oriented structure of the material and a run-time organization of the material.

Here’s what the final organization of the Remix series here at the Alexandrian looked like:

Part 1: The Villains
Part 1B: Other Factions
Part 1C: Player Character Factions
Part 2: Gralhund Villa
Part 3: Faction Outposts
Part 3B: More Faction Outposts
Part 3C: Response Teams
Part 3D: Other Response Teams
Part 4: The Eyes of the Stone
Part 4B: Bregan D’Aerthe – Sea Maidens Faire
Part 4C: Cassalanter Villa
Part 4D: Xanathar’s Lair
Part 4E: Zhentarim – Kolat Towers
Part 5: Clues and Timelines
Part 5B: Finding Floon
Part 5C: The Nimblewright Investigation
Part 5D: Backtracking Dalakhar & Kalain
Part 5E: Outpost and Lair Revelation List
Part 6: Golorr Artifacts
Part 6B: The Brandath Crypts
Part 6C: The Vault
Part 6D: Faction Reports (Gralhund/Jarlaxle)
Part 6E: Faction Reports (Cassalanter)
Part 6F: Faction Reports (Xanathar/Zhentarim)
Part 7: How the Remix Works

(To aid with navigation, this table of contents has also been added to the first post of the series now that it’s wrapping up.)

As noted, this was a design-oriented structure: I was grouping the material, and discussing the material, by the method of design. For example, the revision of the Floon investigation came almost last because it was part of the discussion about how to structure revelation lists in investigations throughout the campaign.

From a run-time perspective, of course, this makes no sense: The Floon investigation should come first because it’s the first thing that happens in the campaign, and it shouldn’t be grouped with the Nimblewright Investigation because they have virtually nothing to do with each other. So when I actually sat down to run the campaign, this was how I organized the material:

0.0 Campaign Overview
1.0 Finding Floon
2.0 Trollskull
3.0 Nimblewright Investigation
3.1 Gralhund Villa
4.1 Faction Response Teams
4.2 Faction Outposts
5.0 Heist Overview
5.1 Bregan D’Aerthe – Sea Maidens Faire
5.2 Cassalanter Estate
5.3 Xanathar’s Lair
5.4 Zhentarim – Kolat Towers
6.0 Brandath Crypts
6.1 The Vault

The difference is stark, and I suspect abundantly clear to anyone who has been reading the Alexandrian Remix.

(Patrons of the Alexandrian can find my own run-time files on Patreon as a patron-exclusive example of this.)

It should be noted that I largely don’t regret presenting the Alexandrian Remix in the way that I did: A design-oriented approach was valuable and allowed the presentation of material that would not have been possible in a run-time presentation. A run-time presentation, by its very nature, is stripped down and utilitarian, and I believe there was value in actually discussing and exploring the design choices I was making in a step-by-step fashion.

But if you’re actually looking to run the Alexandrian Remix (which I heartily recommend), you’d probably benefit from ripping it apart and putting it back together in a run-time organization. In many ways, this was always my intention: That GMs would take the Remix and then put in the work to finalize it into their own campaign.

HOW THE REMIX WORKS

To that end, allow me to wrap things up with a concise summary of the structure of the Dragon Heist campaign.

If you’re running Dragon Heist as it was published, the structure of the campaign looks like this:

This structure is lightly accented with contrapuntal Faction Missions unrelated to the core structure of the campaign, although the application of these missions is limited because the Nimblewright Investigation, Gralhund Villa, and subsequent chase sequence are likely compressed into a very limited span of time (probably 24-72 hours at most), which means that faction missions will largely occur between Finding Floon and the fireball explosion. (And, of course, the lairs are completely absent.)

If you’re using the Alexandrian Remix, on the other hand, then the macro-structure looks like this:

(click for larger version)

This macro-structure is accompanied by two strong contrapuntal elements: The Faction Missions and the Faction Response Teams. What is essentially the expansion of Act III of the campaign (the investigations culminating in the Eye Heists) also allows these contrapuntal elements to be more thoroughly interwoven with the core structure of the campaign. In other words, the PCs will be called upon to complete faction missions while continuing their ongoing investigation into Neverember’s Enigma, thus complicating the action and possibly requiring them to make some tough choices.

(It can also be argued that the event timeline of the Fleetswake & Waukeentide festivals also constitutes a third weak contrapuntal element.)

It should be noted that the distribution of clues throughout the Alexandrian Remix will belie the straight, parallel lines of investigation implied by the diagram above. For example, here’s what a tiny selection of possible investigatory paths looks like in detail:

But in terms of actually running the campaign, it’s the macro-structure you need to pay attention to: The PCs investigate a villainous faction. You point them at an outpost. The outpost will contain clues that point them to a lair. Performing a heist at the lair will get them the Eye in the lair. Repeat to obtain the other Eyes.

If the players are struggling, use one of the proactive elements of the campaign (their faction allies or the faction response teams) to dump a lead in their lap.

Beyond that, just follow the players’ lead and everything else will take care of itself.

A SIMPLE CHECKLIST

A number of GMs — particularly new GMs — have told me that the ideas of the Remix excite them, but they feel overwhelmed by its complexity. In practice, however, the Remix can all be boiled down into a very simple structure:

1. Are the PCs looking for a lead to one of the Eyes? If yes, pick a Faction Outpost and point them at it.

2. Did the PCs just piss off one of the Factions? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs.

3. Are the PCs floundering and don’t know what to do next? If yes, pick a Faction Response Team and have them target the PCs. (If you’re not sure how they might target the PCs, just have them show up and try to kill them.)

Repeat until the campaign is done.

A GUIDED TOUR

With all of  that in mind, let me just briefly walk you through the design-oriented posts on the website from a run-oriented perspective:

FIRST: “Finding Floon” is the beginning of the campaign. The revised “Finding Floon” investigation is Part 5B. An enhanced opening scene for the campaign is presented in Addendum: First Impressions.

SECOND: The PCs are rewarded with Trollskull Manor and are recruited into one or more factions. Spend some time allowing them to fix up their new home/business and run perhaps 1-3 faction missions. This is discussed briefly in Part 1C .

THIRD: The explosion happens. The Nimblewright Investigation which follows is covered in Part 5C and Part 5D.

FOURTH: The investigation leads them to Gralhund Villa. This scenario is given an adversary roster and other tweaks in Part 2.

FIFTH: After Gralhund Villa the PCs will either have the Stone of Golorr and need to find the Eyes (leading to the Eye Heists), or one of the factions will have obtained the Stone of Golorr and the PCs will need to find that (as an “Eye” Heist) and find the Eyes.

This is the core investigation loop: Point them at Faction Outposts (Part 3 and Part 3B) which will lead them to the Faction Lairs (Part 4).

SIXTH: With the Stone reconstituted, the PCs will be able to go to the Brandath Crypts (Part 6B) and access the Vault (Part 6C).

PROACTIVE ELEMENTS: In addition to the faction missions from the Dragon Heist book, use the Faction Response Teams (Part 3C and Part 3D) to actively bring the Grand Game to the PCs.

REFERENCE:

• Part 1: The Villains and Part 1B: Other Factions provide a high-level overview of the major players in Dragon Heist.
• Part 5: Clues and Timelines has a reference timeline and revelations pertaining to the macro-mysteries of the campaign.
• Part 5E: Outpost and Lair Revelation List has revelation lists you can use to track the primary investigation paths in detail.
• Part 6: Golorr Artifacts provides an overview of how the Stone of Golorr operates and how it can be used / has been used.

LEVELING UP

This is alluded to in various places through the Remix, but I recommend leveling up:

• After Chapter 1 (when they rescue Floon).
• After the Gralhund raid.
• After each of the heists.

There are four available heists, although the PCs may only need to do two or three of them. So the PCs will either be somewhere between 5^th and 7^th level going into the Vault. (In the case of my campaign, the PCs did all four heists, but we were on a race to the end and I forgot to have them level up. So they were 6^th level heading into the Vault.)

This means that heists done later will be easier. This seems to either provide a satisfying experience (“we’re getting better at this!”) or allows players to kick a heist they find particularly daunting or difficult down the road until they’re more powerful.

Check out Addendum: The Dragon of Dragon Heist for a detailed look at how the Vault itself can be handled.

A FOND FAREWELL

And so we come to the end of the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist.

If the Remix has brought you to the Alexandrian for the first time, I hope you’ll stick around. Not only for more Dragon Heist material (as I mentioned above, there are several addendums and Running the Campaign columns that are likely to still appear over the next few weeks), but for all the other cool stuff we do here. If you haven’t checked out Gamemastery 101, it’s a great place to take a deep dive into a lot of the material that underlies the work I’ve been doing on Dragon Heist.

If you liked what I did with this remix, you can check out a very different one with the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies for the Trail of Cthulhu RPG. The Eternal Lies remix is much less about fixing the structrure of the campaign and much more about enhancing it – adding 300 + props, 150+ diorama elements, 450+ pages and 130,000+ words (including two completely new scenarios) to an already amazing campaign by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller.

As you get your Dragon Heist remix campaigns to the table, I hope you’ll also come back here and share your own stories, tips, and modifications. Not only because I love hearing stories like that, but because I’m a big believer in GMs sharing their lore. It benefits the community and it encourages you to think deeply about your own campaigns, which is the first step towards improving your craft as a Game Master.

Good gaming, my friends!

Addendum: First Impressions
Addendum: The Twin Parades
Addendum: Fancy Props
Addendum: Other Collaborators
Addendum: A Night in Trollskull Manor
Addendum: The Dragon of Dragon Heist
Addendum: Timelines & Starting the Campaign
Addendum: The Blinded Stone

Forgotten Realms: A Textual History of the Yawning Portal

Running the Campaign: A Party at Shipwrights’ House
Running the Campaign: The Manshoon Heists
Running the Campaign: Creating the Characters
Dragon Heist: The Final Session

PDF – Go to Part 1

This PDF contains “fancy” versions of the props from the Alexandrian Remix of Dragon Heist. Some of these may be useful for Dragon Heist campaigns that aren’t using the Alexandrian Remix, but probably not many of them. (Most of the props take the form of clues added in the process of making the campaign more robust and interconnected.)

These props are all designed to be simply printed out on letter-sized white paper. Many of them, however, could benefit from being printed out on alternative/more evocative paper stocks with their headings removed.

HANDWRITING REFERENCE

Each NPC has a distinct “handwriting” used in their props. Writers do not always identify themselves in their writing. This reference can be used by the GM as needed.

SUGGESTED PROPS

In addition to the props found in the PDF,there are additional props which I prepared for my own campaign but which I can’t duplicate here without stepping over the bounds of fair use. These additional props, primarily featuring cool visual references, are listed here. In creating these props for your own table, you may find the Fantasy Grounds package for Dragon Heist useful. (It gives you raw image files that you can either use directly or modify using Photoshop/GIMP with greater ease than trying to scan material from the printed book.) In other cases, the images are not specific to the campaign and you may be able to find suitable images through a Google Image search.

In some cases, the PDF includes a link to an online piece of art that I used that you may find similarly useful.