Go to Campaign Status Documents

Generally speaking, my campaign status document is not the place for full NPC write-ups to live. Whether you’re using something like the Universal NPC Roleplaying template or even the briefest of write-ups, these NPCs will consume your campaign status document and choke the life out of it.

So NPC write-ups go somewhere else: Maybe that’s in a specific set of scenario notes or faction notes. Maybe you just have one big folder where all the free-roaming NPCs or notable NPCs from defunct scenarios get filed in alphabetical order.

But what I will keep in my campaign status document, when it’s appropriate for the campaign, is a list — or, in some cases, multiple lists — of the major NPCs in the campaign.

This is not, of course, a list of every single NPC they’ve ever met. That would just be a bunch of noise drowning out the signal. What you’re looking for is a quick reference of all the important, recurring characters. You’re looking for characters who:

• Show up in more than one scenario (or outside of scenarios entirely), because otherwise they would just be attached to that single scenario.
• Show up in more than one location, because otherwise they would just be in the notes for that location.
• Have some personal connection to the PCs or are otherwise important to them.

(Of course, some NPCs who start out as part of a single scenario or single location will end up clicking with the players or otherwise find their role in the campaign expanding beyond the original plan of action.)

You might title this section of your campaign status document the Cast of Characters.

To understand the function of this cast list, the key thing is Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs: Whenever a scenario or circumstance demands a new NPC, check to see if there’s an existing NPC who could fill the role. Each reappearance of an NPC will deepen that character and also inherently develop the PCs’ relationship with the character. This creates a lovely feedback loop, because the NPC being richer means that whatever purpose you’re turning the NPC to (exposition, scenario hook, dilemma, dramatic bang, etc.) will also become richer and more meaningful to the players.

For example, if the PCs go looking for information, instead of having some random dude tell them about it, consider having it be someone the PCs know.

The cast list, therefore, can ultimately be thought of as a menu: Whether you’re prepping a scenario or improvising in the middle of one, the campaign’s cast of characters makes it easy for you to quickly find the character you need to fit the hole you’re looking to fill.

You can also flip this around, looking through your cast of characters, identifying old favorites who haven’t put in an appearance lately, and figuring out how you can bring them back onstage. This can often be a great way to find inspiration for scenario hooks or entirely new scenarios.

TAVERN TIME

In some campaigns your Cast of Characters, or sections of your Cast of Characters, may become more specialized in their function. One example of this is the Tavern Time scenario structure, in which you develop a cast of recurring characters who give continuity and life to your PCs’ favorite tavern (or other home base).

You can see a detailed example of the Tavern Time system in action in A Night in Trollskull Manor. The full scenario notes are kept separate from the campaign status document, but I do find it useful to include the random table of tavern patrons, like this one for the Ghostly Minstrel tavern in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign:

Each of these characters then appear in their own write-ups, either as part of the write-up for the Ghostly Minstrel, as part of other scenario notes, or in my larger Ptolus NPC file. I personally just know where to find these write-ups, but you could easily include a direct reference in your list.

SYSTEMIC CONNECTIONS

In Technoir, during character creation, each player selects three Connections from the setting guide. These are, of course, relevant not only for roleplaying, but also because they’re tied into specific procedures of play. As the GM, I find it quite useful to have a quick reference for which PCs have a direct relationship with which Connections in the campaign, so during the first session I’ll make a point of jotting these down, and then I’ll transfer them to my campaign status document for long-term reference (along with any other notes about debts owed and the like).

Trail of Cthulhu similarly features Sources of Stability: NPCs created by the players during character creation who are the most important people in their characters’ lives. These characters are vital, serving as touchstones of humanity that allow PCs to recover the Sanity and Stability lost during their harrowing adventures. Although, as a result, the Sources of Stability are rarely made an active part of the action, I make sure to include them in my campaign status document so that they can be referred to and incorporated “offscreen” at appropriate moments. (I’ll also maintain a correspondence tracker featuring these characters.)

Another example along these same lines are the Friends & Rivals players create for their PC in Blades in the Dark. These lack the more formal procedural and systemic incorporation found in Technoir and Trail of Cthulhu, but also serve as a good reminder that this is something you can easily incorporate into the character creation of any RPG, not just those that include it in the rulebook.

However you go about it, finding a way to seed a supporting cast list at the very beginning of the campaign is just good praxis.

MAINTAINING YOUR SUPPORTING CAST

You’ll introduce some characters to your campaign with the intention of making them recurring characters.

As I mentioned earlier, though, you’ll also want to keep your eyes open: During the course of play, some NPCs are just going to “click” with the players. (And with you.) It’s going to be fun roleplaying scenes with them. Maybe your players will talk about the NPC in later sessions or even mention them during conversations outside of the game. (If your players start deliberately seeking the NPC out, that’s a dead give-away.) These are all characters that you’re going to want to get onto your supporting cast list ASAP.

On the flip-side, it’s also a good idea to periodically review your supporting cast list and remove any NPCs who are no longer relevant to the campaign. (If you’re not certain, maybe you could drop them into a Probationary section of the list and then purge them if they still haven’t shown up after three or five sessions or whatever seems appropriate.)

In some cases, this removal will be quite definitive: Maybe the NPC died. Maybe the PCs slipped into another dimension and left the NPC behind.

In other cases, the pruning is much more subjective: Do you still care about this NPC? Do the players still care? Are there any loose threads still attached to the NPC (in which case you might want to tie those off and then remove them)? Are they — in position, role, theme, or otherwise — still relevant to what’s happening in the campaign?

There’s also need to be too afraid of making a mistake here: Pruning an NPC from the list doesn’t mean they’re gone forever (although it might). You never know when they might come back onstage, find the spotlight, and earn their place on the list once more!

Go to Campaign Status Documents

Another element that you can keep track of using your campaign status documents is literally just the miscellaneous continuity of the campaign.

Obviously, there are lots of ways that you can (and will) use to record the continuity of your campaign. A detailed campaign journal, for example. Or an updated set of scenario notes. Or a restocked dungeon. Or notes scribbled in the margins of an NPC’s briefing sheet.

But sometimes you just need a quick reference to help you keep the events of the campaign organized in your mind and consistent at the table, or there may be miscellaneous stuff you need to keep track of, but which you just don’t have any clear place in your notes to write down.

It turns out that the last page of your campaign status document is the perfect place for that.

EXAMPLE: NPC EXPEDITIONS

During my Ptolus campaign, the PCs were exploring a vast dungeon known as the Banewarrens. At the same time they were doing this, however, there were several other factions who were also sending NPC adventuring groups into the Banewarrens pursuing a wide variety of agendas.

So I needed to not only keep track of what the PCs were doing in the Banewarrens, I also needed to keep track of these various NPC expeditions and the changes they were making to the dungeon. (So if I determined that, for example, the Pactlords of the Quaan found the body of a fallen comrade and removed it from the dungeon, I would need to update the dungeon key to reflect that the body was no longer there.)

I quickly realized, however, that there were some significant problems with this approach: If I needed to figure out what, exactly, the Pactlords had been doing – for example, if the PCs captured a Pactlord agent and interrogated them – then I would end up sifting through the updated room keys like a detective trying to reconstruct events that I had worked out weeks or months earlier. (And some of these clues would have been obliterated from the record by subsequent changes to the key.)

I concluded that what I needed, in addition to the updated room keys, was a literal log of the NPC expeditions. For example:

NAVANNA – FIRST TRIP
10/06/790 – 5 AM

• Inspects door to purple wraiths, but does not open.
• Passes through Area 10.
• Heads down to the creature vaults. (Will remove the body of the pain devil and take it to the NOD4 apartment complex.)
• Goes to warding generator.
• Enters Outer Vaults. Passes through Area 12/13 and spots new construction in Area 10. Places a clairvoyant mark on the wall for Aliaster. (This doesn’t work, since you can’t scry into the BW, but she doesn’t know that yet.)
• Goes to the warding generator in Area 6.
• Gets caught in the trap in Area 5 and is badly wounded.
• Leaves the Banewarrens.

GOAL FOR NEXT VISIT: Break through into the weapons vault.

(The “Goal for Next Visit” was basically just a way of encoding the line of my thought for Future Justin. It remains important, of course, not to prep so far in advance that you end up throwing out a bunch of stuff that gets contradicted by play.)

This format also let me start pre-running these expeditions, which meant I could also seamlessly trigger this NPC expeditions in the middle of a session. Which, in turn, resulted in more dynamic play as the PCs could react to the expeditions in real time.

If the expeditions were modified during play, I could just note that in my campaign status document. Either way, these expedition “logs” were then archived in the campaign status document for future reference as needed.

EXAMPLE: SESSION SUMMARIES

I don’t always keep detailed campaign journals. (In fact, I usually don’t.) But it can still be useful to tie a little figurative string around your fingers to remind yourself of what you’ve done before.

I’ve found this to be particularly true for open table campaigns, where a long-absent player will often ask me what their previous expeditions were or if they know another PC at the table (i.e., have they gone on an adventure together?).

(Yes, it would be nice if they kept their own notes for this type of stuff – and many players do – but the whole point of having an open table is to encourage more casual play in the first place.)

So what I’ll do is write short summaries of each session, limiting myself to no more than two or three quick sentences. For example, the session summaries for my Castle Blackmoor open table look like this:

Session 10: Drake, Tolliver, Gio, Tana, Havel. Journey through Tanglefuck. Fight a flying machine. Gio strips down to swim under the Pool.

Session 11: Drake, Eilidh, Gio, Tana, Tolliver. Return to Level 3. Recover +2 plate of giant strength. Baron Fant revealed as vampire. Eilidh turned by Fant. Eilidh’s sister Rue joins the rest of the group to search for her sister.

Session 12: Towby, Wazoo, Walton. Three W’s make plans for the church. Particularly making plans for the re-consecration of the Church.

Session 13: Anutar, Tana, Tolliver, Drake. Extensive mapping on Level 2. Enter the dark dwarf forge, kill most of them, and emerge with the elven mithril crown bound in taurum.

Session 14: Anutar, Drake, Hublin Mandrill, Tana, Tolliver. Drake met Hublin on caravan back from Great Kingdoms. Finish clearing out dark dwarf forge. Kill men working for the balrog Ascutiel.

Session 15: Hublin, Johnny, Lana, Ashton, Rue. Hobbit children are now vampires; rescue three out of six hobbits who had been sent after the kids. Ashton and Lana die.

Session 16: Tolliver, Sid, Johnny, Lunara. Followed Sid’s maps down to Level 4. Chased by bandits, werelions, and Baron Fant back upstairs. Attacked by hobbit child vampire; Tolliver turned it. Removed corpses from the cages.

Session 17: Gio, Tana, Zaxxon, Illenya, Sid. Find obsidian charm that grants sight of gasoline-slick alternate version of dungeon. Kill werelion.

But I’ll often find this useful for campaigns run with dedicated tables, too. For example, this list of previous scores from a Blades in the Dark campaign:

Score #1: Steal shipment of ekrosi from the Gaddoc Rail Station impound warehouses for the Fog Hounds.

Score #2: Lady Sharrah has them meet with Maw of the Void cultists in the Lost District to receive delivery of the Flayed Skin of Sevraxis in exchange for an Iruvian dusk candle.

Score #3: Raided the Midnight Gold for evidence against the proprietor, Drav. Killed him, released his ex-wife’s hussy-obssessed ghost.

Score #4: Broke Vestine Vale (Roland’s banker) out of Charterhall jail. Mission goes badly pear-shaped; failed to do side job for Gray Cloaks (stealing ethereal railgun). Attracted interest of Roethe.

Score #5: Delivery of ekrosi to Rubbo’s Boys at Kellis Tower goes awry when Grey Coats ambush the couriers. Managed to deliver drugs without Grey Coats identifying them, but with several deaths.

These particular campaigns took place years ago, and only the dimmest memories are stirred by these quick references. But at the time, they were just enough of a reminder to refresh our collective memories.

KNOWN FACTS

I love improvising new lore and setting details during a session. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and it’s a great way to flesh out a world.

Some of the stuff you improvise is just ephemera – it has its moment in the sun and then drifts away. Other stuff will have a clear place in your notes where it can/should be recorded. But sometimes it’s a detail just random enough that it has no place to live, but is still compelling enough to be preserved and reincorporated into the campaign.

For that stuff, there’s the “Known Facts” section of my campaign status document. This is literally just a bullet-pointed list of stuff

(This can also be a repository for stuff that probably could be added to my notes somewhere else, but it’s just convenient to store it here until I’ve accumulated enough material to make updating stuff worthwhile.)

For example, here are the Known Facts from that same Blades in the Dark campaign:

Rat ‘n Crown. Bar in Crow’s Foot where Nissan and Marlene intimidated drivers from 1^st score.

Kites, a hawker crew in Crow’s Foot. Cyrene spread rumors they were responsible for the 1^st score.

Red Mark Bounty is 6 Coin.

Big Lock vs. Fishing Lock.

Iruvian Dusk Candle. Suppresses the ghost field.

Blood Wine.

Triplicate of the final letter in your name is the “hip” thing kids are doing.

Lady Sharrah. Mansion in Six Towers. A fief-witch of the Dimmer Sisters. Multiple spirits in her body.

Lost District: Echoes. The Big One. Faceless market.

Physickers: Wear bandoliers filled with unguents, etc. Different orders marked by different colors.

• Fungal treatments. Including mushroom cocoons.
• Nightshade ears. A fungal replacement for damaged ears.

Charterhall Jail: 3 tiers (padded cuffs, overnight cells, and the literal shithole in the basement with leaking sewage). Under the domed roof is the armory and interrogation rooms. Cupola on top of the dome.

You can see here that, for example, I don’t actually know what “blood wine” is yet. I’ve just mentioned it, and it felt like something that might be drunk in a future scene (or perhaps casks of it stolen for the black market).

In some cases, a Known Fact (or collection of facts) will accumulate enough details and/or additional lore to forge some dedicated place in my notes. For example, perhaps I end up with enough novel foods and drinks that adding a Duskvol Menu to my setting notes will be worthwhile.

In other cases, I’ve had the Known Facts section of my campaign status document grow large enough that it became unwieldy to use. In those cases, I have found that separating it into separate categories can be helpful. For example, here’s a selection of the Known Facts from my Castle Blackmoor campaign:

GREAT KINGDOM

• King Robert rules from palatial estates on the Inner Sea of the Royal Demesne.
• 750 miles from Blackmoor along the coast to the river of the Royal Demesne.

DWARVES

• Northern Dwarves.
  • Hold of Iron Hand. Vast lowland kingdom carved out by the dwarven king Iron Hand.
• Southern Dwarves. Technically found in the Mountains west of Blackmoor. Tonisborg is apparently home to many of them. Speak with Massachusetts accents.
• Clan Crowns. Clan crowns can’t be replaced, even if lost/destroyed.
• Elder Metal. Electrum adulterated with copper. Various small artifacts passed down form the Elder Dwarves; their purpose now lost.

ELVES

• Elves. Wake up amnesiac, with no memory of how they entered this world.
• Elven Crown. Allows access to Elven spaceship through Elf Stump (and similar sites). Bound in taurum by dark dwarves prevents that function and inflicts amnesia on elves. [Possibly use Metamorphosis Alpha?]

VAMPIRES

• The vampires of the First Coven drank of Baldr’s blood, hoping to gain his eternal youth and vigor. The goddess Hel twisted the gift.
• Vampires can be killed with: Stakes of mistletoe through the heart (Baldr’s weakness), rays of sunlight, fire (like the pyre of the Ringhorn), or by being submerged in the waters of the ocean.

EQUIPMENT

• Dragon’s Milk. Flash-burn oil. 2d6 (take highest) damage; 2d6 (take lowest) duration. Costs 10gp. (Havel has alchemical instructions from the Great Kingdom.)
• Graysilk. Material woven by dark dwarves. Very difficult to see in normal light (2 in 6).
• Giant Weapons: Cost x10 normal weapons. Deal 2d6 damage. (Usable with giant strength effect.)
• Silvered Weapons. Light +25gp, One-Handed or Ammo +75gp, Two-Handed +150gp.
• Wine skins. Have 12 drinks in them.
• Gorget. Same price as helmet. +1 to AC vs. vampires.
• Lodestone: 10 gp.

OTHER

• Language of the Ancients. “Ocun” means forbidden or in error or rejected.
• Deera. Hugh’s sister is missing somewhere in the dungeon.
• Pixie Scars. Glow blue. Barbarians who use captive pixies for scarification.
• Troll Ash: Can be sold for 1d6 gp per dead troll. Used for rejuvenating face cream; possibly snorted as a mood-altering substance (makes you act like a troll?).

The equipment listed here is a good example of where this material comes from in actual play. Almost all of these items, or details, were the result of players asking specific questions or seeking specific equipment. (With the exception of graysilk, which was something I improvised when describing a random encounter with dark dwarves.)

Similar equipment sections have, in the past, eventually been transferred to the equipment list that players use while creating their characters. (And it’s likely that this one would have been similarly transferred, if COVID-19 hadn’t killed this particular open table.) You could similarly imagine me either improvising enough vocabulary from the Language of the Ancients, or perhaps sitting down one day and deliberately fleshing that material out, that it would make sense to create a dedicated document for it.

Next: Supporting Cast

Go to Campaign Status Documents

If we’re talking about information that can be encoded in the campaign status document, then with trackers we’re getting pretty primal with it.

Literally any aspect of the campaign that you need to keep track of over the course of several sessions?

Put it on the campaign status document.

For example, I have a tendency to default to warm, sunny days in my description of the campaign world. To counteract that, I’ll use a random weather generator, pregenerate the results for several days, and then put them on my campaign status document:

WEATHER

10/20/790: Cloudy, high 43°F, low 31°F, light wind

10/21/790: Windy, high 50°F, low 40°F, moderate wind

10/22/790: Overcast, high 48°F, low 34°F, light wind

10/23/790: Fog, high 58°F, low 41°F, moderate wind

10/24/790: Clear, high 42°F, low 31°F, light wind

10/25/790: Windy, high 41°F, low 24°F, moderate wind

At the beginning of each session, I’ll take the current day’s weather, write it on a Post-it note, and put it on my GM screen to remind me.

For the In the Shadow of the Spire campaign, I used a simple reputation system. That actually goes on the first page of my campaign status document, since it may be referenced during almost any social interaction:

REPUTATION

FAME: 8

INFAMY: 0.5

FAME:  Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Killing of the Columned Row Killer. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God. Paid repatriation costs for slaves from Porphyry House raid. Arrest ordered by Carrina.

Even more common than these permanent installations, for me, are bespoke trackers that get created as the result of the PCs’ actions.

For example, the PCs took one of their bags of holding and dedicated it corpses they want to talk to, either until they get speak with dead prepped or, after casting the spell the first time, until the one week time limit runs out and they can cast it again. (They call it their dead-icated bag.) Rather than scrambling through campaign journals and other notes trying to figure out the last time that they talked to, for example, Arveth, I simply added a tracker to my campaign status document indicating the last time they talked to one of their corpses:

SPEAK WITH DEAD ROSTER

Arveth: 10/19/790

Medusa: 10/18/790

Wulvera: 10/26/790

These bespoke trackers can also be more complicated. The same PCs looted twenty living paintings — paintings that are magically animated — while looting a dungeon. They ended up approaching the Winsome Gallery in the Nobles District to see if they would buy the paintings. I decided that the Winsome would buy some of them, but didn’t have enough cash on hand to buy all of them. Instead, they would put them on display and seek out buyers on the PCs behalf.

The PCs agreed to this.

Many sessions later, the PCs ended up looting Lithuin vases from a different adventure and the PCs once again decided to approach the Winsome Gallery. The result is this section of my campaign status document:

LIVING PAINTINGS / LITHUIN VASES

20 paintings total / 5 bought by Winsome Gallery

25% chance per day of selling 1d3 paintings

675gp per painting – 5400 gp on hand + 1000 gp from bidding war

Updated: 10/20/790

Winsome Owns: #13, #16, #17, #19, #20

On Display at Winsome: #19 – A figure pierced through by a great hook of iron, depending from the ceiling on a chain. Swaying gently back and forth.

Remaining Paintings: #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #14, #18

10/2/790: sold #6,

10/3/790: Vladaams purchase #5

10/10/790: sold #3, #15 – House Dallimothan, bidding war with House Cath on #3 following Interlude 2

10/11/790: sold #1

10/14/790: sold #4, #12 – House Sadar

10/18/790: sold #2

WINSOME GALLERY

• Wylsaen Faechild, owner and expert (male elf, Expert 1)
• Nerr, a friendly art dealer (original arrangement for living portraits)

CHECKING IN

• Wylsaen has noticed that the eyes of painting #20 (depicting Alchestin) opened “about a week” after they purchased the painting. They had to take it off display because the eyes would follow those in the room unnervingly.
• Paintings proved quite notable after House Vladaam purchased one on the 5^th: House Dallimothan, who purchased two of the paintings, was curious about their provenance and left a standing inquiry that the gallery is now passing along.

VASES OF LITHUIN (NOD5A, Area 7)

• Wylsaen unfamiliar with them, but Nerr identifies them correctly.
• Couldn’t dream of splitting the collection, but also can’t afford it for the gallery. Willing to pay 25,000 gp immediately and outright. Otherwise, they’ll try to find a buyer at the 40,000 asking price. (5% chance per day of a buyer presenting themselves)

Let’s break this down a bit.

(“Why bother with all this?” you may ask. First, the cashflow of the PCs is a significant element of the campaign at this point, having a major impact on the solutions they can pursue to various problems. Second, it results in some interesting roleplaying and opportunities for the PCs to make social connections.)

At the top of the section is the mini-system I created for randomly determining when the paintings sell. It starts with a quick summary of the initial conditions (there were 20 total paintings, 5 of which were purchased directly by the Winsome). Then, each day, I roll d% and see if any paintings sell. If they have, I roll 1d3 to see how many sold. After that, the prices the PCs agreed to with the Winsome are recorded, following by how much money the Winsome has one hand from previous sales (and will turn over to the PCs). Finally, I list the campaign date when I last checked sales (to make sure I don’t skip a day or accidentally check multiple times per day).

Following that is a roster of the paintings available for sale. For a full description of each piece, I would need to refer back to the original adventure, but I do list the full description of #19 specifically because the Winsome has it on display (and I will mention and describe it to the PCs when they come back).

Then a breakdown of which paintings sold when, this includes — as you can see — notes about particularly significant buyers (who might be of interest to the PCs or vice versa).

Following that are some Key Info entries for Wylsaen, their contact at the Winsome Gallery, that I can use while roleplaying him next time.

Finally, since the PCs have declared their intention to bring the Lithuin Vases here, I’ve put together some preliminary notes for how that interaction will go (which also includes a reference to where I can find the original description of the vases so that I can find it easily).

It turns out the PCs have been distracted by a lot of other stuff lately, so the vases have just been sitting in a bag of holding (not the dead-icated bag, that would be be gross) and these notes have been patiently waiting for several sessions.

Next: Continuity Notes

Go to Campaign Status Documents

In any setting prior to the wide adoption of e-mail (and even moreso before readily affordable long-distance phone calls), correspondence with various NPCs is an incredibly natural form of bluebooking: When the PC writes to a correspondent during the session, you can encourage the player to write the actual letter (or telegram or trans-spectral synaptic encoding or whatever) before the next session. And then you can both reward the player, develop that thread of the campaign world, and encourage further correspondence by writing an actual response and giving it to them as a prop.

The great thing about correspondence — like any form of bluebooking — is that it allows the player to remain engaged with the game even when they’re not physically sitting at the table (or participating in the video call). It also affords them an opportunity to engage with their character in a different way, a more introspective and considered way, than they normally would. The benefits of this will often reflect back into how they play their character at the table, too, resulting in richer and deeper roleplaying.

Some games lend themselves particularly well to this dynamic. In Trail of Cthulhu, for example, the players are specifically required to create Sources of Stability during character creation — NPCs who are particularly important to their character and help them retain their grasp on sanity. Mechanically, the PCs must have meaningful interactions with their Sources of Stability in order to recover their Stability score between scenarios. For the globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign, which naturally took the PCs far away from their Sources of Stability, I allowed the PCs to count each meaningful act of correspondence to count as an interaction.

The result was a rich set of correspondence which kept the PCs connected to a wider world, while also giving the campaign a rich multi-dimensionality that extended beyond the immediate circumstances of the current adventure.

CORRESPONDENCE TRACKER

From the GM’s side of things, however, it can be non-trivial to keep on top of all this correspondence. Particularly if you get a group who is eager and willing to really lean into things, starting up multiple missive chains with a wide cast of characters.

Keeping track of stuff is, of course, exactly what the campaign status document is for. So even if you hadn’t noticed which series this post belongs to, it probably won’t comes as a surprise that I often include a correspondence tracker as a module in my campaign status document.

Here’s what that can look like, taking an actual example from the campaign status document of my first Eternal Lies campaign:

LETTERS AND TELEGRAMS

• 11/17/1934: Robert to Julian (Session 4); response sent to St. Paul (arrives 12/1/1934)
• 1/3/1935 : Robert to Julian (Session 9), mailed from Athens around 1/23/1935, response sent to Allaghmore House on 2/20/1935 (arrives 3/15/1935)
• 1/15/1935: Robert to Rose (Session 9), mailed from Prague around 1/25/1935, response sent to Allaghmore House on 2/22/1935 (arrives 3/15/1935)
• 1/21/1935: Alice to Margaret (Session 9), mailed from Cairo, telegram sent to Allaghmore House on 3/1/1935 – Margaret was given a list of people to investigate
• 1/21/1935: Alice to Cora (Session 9), mailed from Cairo, response sent to Allaghmore House on 2/24/1935 (arrives 3/16/1935) – asked for news from home
• 1/21/1935: Jason to Kitty/Rachel, multiple letters from Cairo (including gifts of turban, Bast statue, and a racist doll)
• 1/21/1935: Jason to Rachel telegram [NEED DRAFT]
• 2/1/1935: Jason to William Dalton (attorney) , telegram sent in response 2/28/1935 – people have been making inquiries about Frankly Aviation
• 2/1/1935: Jason to National Geographic, telegram sent in response 3/5/1935 – National Geographic very interested, would also be interested in McCandalass’ accounts

RESPONSE SCHEDULE

• 12/1/1934: Julian to Robert (waiting in St. Paul)
• 2/28/1935: Telegram from William Dalton to Jason
• 3/1/1935: Telegram from Margaret to Alice
• 3/5/1935: Telegram from National Geographic to Jason
• 3/15/1935: Julian to Robert
• 3/15/1935: Rose to Robert
• 3/16/1935: Cora to Alice
• 3/16/1935: Kitty to Jason [NEEDS DRAFT]

There are a few things to note here.

First, of course, there are dates for correspondence. The utility here seems pretty self-explanatory. I was also indicating what session the correspondence was sent during, but you’ll notice I ended up dropping this. I think this was primarily because, when one of our players got a new job and was leaving town, we ran marathon sessions for two straight weeks in order to wrap up the campaign, so the sessions were really blending together at that point. The intention, though, was that it was easier to find my original notes on the correspondence (when necessary) if I told my future self where those notes were located.

Second, I used the [NEEDS DRAFT] tag to indicate a piece of correspondence which had happened in the campaign, but for which the player had not yet provided me the actual text.

Third, I track the NPC responses in a separate Response Schedule. This indicates when NPC letters would arrive. (Or, more accurately, when they would be available. With the PCs globetrotting and going on weird expeditions into strange corners of the Earth, it often take some time for their mail to catch up with them.) Although I refer to it as a “response” schedule, this list also includes NPC-initiated correspondence, and it would also act as a To Do list for my own letter writing.

Which, it should be noted, is another advantage of correspondence-based play: It also gives you, as the GM, the opportunity to explore your NPCs in a different way, often adding depth to their presentation in countless ways.

Next: Trackers

Go to Campaign Status Documents

A GM’s role at the table can be almost entirely described as providing the world’s response to a PC’s actions. “You do X, therefore Y happens. Now what do you do?”

This is relatively easy to maintain and keep track of in the normal course of play as reactions happen in more or less immediate succession: You swing your sword at the orc and we immediately learn whether or not you hit them. You negotiate with the Admiral and their responses to your repartee is an immediate back-and-forth.

But in some cases, the reaction to the actions of the PCs will be delayed. Or the PCs will knock over a chain of dominos which continue to topple offscreen: They leave evidence of their break-in and the Herschfelds begin an investigation. They retrieve a powerful artifact and deliver it to one of the heirs of the throne. They write a letter to their contact in Paris and must wait for a transatlantic response.

The campaign status document, of course, is the perfect vehicle for tracking the fallout from an in-game event. This generally takes the form of either a single event or a timeline of events.

For example, when the PCs in my Ptolus campaign fought a demon, got coated in demonic filth, and then teleported directly back to their rooms at the Ghostly Minstrel, they ended up impregnating the rug in their room with some of that filth. I decided that this filth would fester for several days before generating a half dozen demonic maggots. It would have been easy to lose track of this cool idea, since it wouldn’t happen for several sessions. But I simply included it in the timeline of bangs and supported it with a small sub-section in the campaign status document (which included the bespoke stat block for the maggots). Once there, the event could simply sit and wait until it was triggered at the appropriate time.

(Due to COVID-19, it actually took more than two years of real-time for this to pay off.)

Other events will have more complicated or multi-step resolutions. These basically work like the timeline of continued events that you’ll use as part of your scenario updates, except that the events in question aren’t connected to a specific scenario. (Remember that the campaign status document acts as a good catch-all for all the stuff in a campaign that neither belongs clearly to a specific scenario, nor rises to a level of complexity where it would be appropriate to spin it off into its own scenario.)

To take another example from my Ptolus campaign, the PCs recovered an artifact known as the Horn of the Atapi. It didn’t take much effort for them to conclude it might have something to do with the Atapi clans who were currently besieging Casalia (another city-state south of Ptolus in my campaign world), and so the PCs decided to give the Horn to the Commissar to see if it might be somehow relevant to the war effort. The consequences of this choice are actually still playing out in my campaign, which means that my current campaign status document includes a timeline of future events relating to the Horn and its disposition.

Preparing these timelines, for me, often takes the form of solo roleplaying: I’m putting myself in the shoes of the NPCs involved, thinking about how they would react, then looking at the NPCs who would be affected by that and then figuring out how they would react. (And so forth.) In fact, I will often go so far as to roll dice and actually resolve the offscreen action to see how things would turn out. (Usually at a fairly high-level of abstraction, but nonetheless.) That’s not necessary, of course, and there are plenty of times that I’m simply making creatively appropriate decisions as I lay things out.

MINI-SCENARIOS

Event fallout can also include “mini-scenarios” that become part of the campaign status document. Again, anything that becomes sufficiently complicated should simply be spun off into a full-fledged set of scenario notes, but I often find there’s a fuzzy middle-ground where you’ll want to prep some interactive stuff, but handling it as a full-fledged scenario would really just clutter stuff up and make it harder to use.

(If you’re looking for a rule of thumb, anything longer than a single page should almost certainly be spun off. I generally try to keep these to no more than half a page if possible.)

Once a mini-scenario is complete, of course, you can simply remove it from your campaign status document.

The zaug maggot encounter described above can actually be seen as an example of this: It wasn’t just a single event, technically, it was an interactive mini-scenario featuring the fight with the maggots. Once the fight was done, I deleted the section dedicated to maggots.

Proactive combat encounters like this, often featuring some sort of retaliatory strike from a faction the PCs have pissed off, are quite common, in my experience.

Another common example is when the PCs have declared their interest in doing something that would (a) benefit from a little prep, but (b) once again, doesn’t really support ginning up a full a scenario.

Returning to my Ptolus campaign for a third, the PCs wanted to track down a nightstick, a cool magical item from the Libris Mortis sourcebook that grants additional uses of turn/rebuke undead per day. I knew that there wasn’t one available in the local magic markets, but I let them make a Gather Information check to see if they could locate one in a private collection. The succeeded on the check and, looking through the Ptolus sourcebook, I decided that it would make sense for the Keepers of the Veil, an order of knighthood dedicated to exterminating the undead, to have a nightstick.

I gave the PCs this information, but, having other urgent concerns, they didn’t immediately follow up on it. Believing that they would, however, I added a “Finding a Nightstick” mini-scenario to my campaign status document:

FINDING A NIGHTSTICK

KEEPERS OF THE VEIL (Ptolus, pg. 120)

Meet with Phadian Gess.

• Kind-hearted woman with short black hair and a short but fit frame.
• Became co-leader of the order with Sir Beck five years ago.

Negotiations

• Initial Request: 30,000 gp
• Fallback: 15,000 gp and they assist with a night-ride mission

NIGHT-RIDE MISSION

They have indications of an outbreak from the Necropolis near Wavecrest Way. There’s repeated activity, so they’re going to patrol the streets.

MOTHER’S LEMURES (from Dark Reliquary)

• 5 advanced lemures
• 10 lemures
• A D’Straadi dancer is observing the fight (having come to collect the wayward children). (Ptolus, pg. 622)

Lemures can be tracked back to the Dark Reliquary if tracks are searched for on the Necropolis-side of the wall.

Nightstick: This black rod carved of darkly stained wood is inset with religious symbols of various deities. Anyone who possesses the rod and is able to turn or rebuke undead gains four more uses of the ability per day.
Moderate necromancy; CL 10^th; Craft Rod, Extra Turning, class ability to turn or rebuke undead; Price 7,500 gp. (Libris Mortis)

In practice, it turned out that getting the nightstick was a low enough priority for the PCs that it kept getting pushed back. This mini-scenario hung around in my campaign status document for awhile, until other circumstances resulted in me writing up some scenario notes for the Dark Reliquary. Once that scenario existed, it made sense to embed these notes in that scenario so that I could de-clutter my campaign status document.

Next: Correspondence