I like handouts.

I like them a lot.

If you’ve seen the Alexandrian remixes for Eternal Lies or Dragon Heist, then this won’t come as a surprise to you. Those campaigns are fairly representative of what my games look like: There will be dozens or even hundreds of handouts. Photographs, letters, lore books, artifacts — anything I can get into the players hands enhances the experience and becomes a tangible touchstone for what’s happening in the game.

In running a single adventure — like Left Hand of Mythos — keeping track of the props is pretty straightforward. Over the course of a campaign, though? Things can get more complicated.

It’s not at all unusual for my players to pull a sheet of paper out of their notes and say something like, “Hey, this letter from Lady Scarlet to Thornai that we got thirty-seven sessions ago — can we pull that from the evidence bag and dust it for fingerprints?”

Now, somewhere in my notes is likely the information I need to answer that question (i.e., who handed this letter before the PCs snagged it). But where, exactly, is it?

Well, almost certainly keyed to whatever location they found the letter in.

… and where is that?

Damned if I know. It was, after all, thirty-seven sessions ago.

What I’ve learned to do is put tracker IDs on my paper handouts. That way I know where to look up my notes about them later on.

I use alphanumeric codes for my scenario notes. For example, scenarios in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign include:

• BW03B Alchestrin’s Tomb
• BW06 Chapel of St. Thessina
• CC07 Porphyry House of Horrors
• NOD2 The Secret Meeting

And my current Night’s Black Agents campaign has scenarios like:

• CS03 Paymaster
• CS06 Dragovir Monastery
• PP01 Arkady Shevlenko
• SJ02 Serbian Mafia

These are just generally useful for keeping stuff organized, but are particularly useful for tracking props. In pencil, I lightly write the alphanumeric code somewhere on the prop. No matter how much later the prop surfaces, I can just reference the code and know exactly what notes I need to reference.

If you don’t want to use scenario codes, another option might be maintaining a master handouts index, listing every prop you’ve prepped and the adventure it comes from. The tip here isn’t the specific method of the tracking; the tip is that having some way of knowing the provenance of your props becomes important as you begin running rich, complicated, long-lasting campaigns.

When I’m running a campaign for a dedicated table, I try to make sure that the pacing is effective and engaging for the players, but I don’t worry too much about whether any specific scenario takes one, two, or a half dozen sessions to complete. (Among other things, it’s not at all unusual for there to be two or three different scenarios active in any given session.) I’ll still try to give each session a good conclusion, of course, but the campaign is not going to live or die depending on whether the PCs catch the ethereal troll serial killer in one session or three sessions: Wherever we happen to be in the action, we can wrap things up for the night and then pick up where we left off when the next session begins.

But sometimes you’re on a time limit.

A good example of this is a one-shot. If I’m running an adventure at a convention, for example, I can’t say, “To be continued!” There is no next week! I’ll likely never have a chance to play with these players again, let alone wrap up our story!

Fortunately, there are several techniques we can use when we need to hit a deadline.

ONE-SHOTS

Let’s start by taking a closer look at what it takes to run a true one-shot. How do we make sure everything wraps up in one session?

Prep an appropriate amount of adventure content.

The easiest way to blow your time limit is to prep too much adventure material. Ain’t nobody getting down to Level 5 of your dungeon in a four-hour session.

The appropriate amount of content will vary by system and circumstance, but my general rule of thumb for a four-hour session is generally five or six “meaty” pieces of content. Examples of this include a 5-Node Mystery or a 5+5 Dungeon.

Use a session timer.

I almost always keep a timer behind my GM screen that’s counting down to the end of the session. It’s very useful for maintaining pacing in any session, but it’s invaluable when you’re on a time limit.

I use a dedicated timer — rather than my phone or the like — because I want it to be visible at all times, so that I’m constantly aware of the temporal pacing of the adventure.

Running long? Start with aggressive framing.

Roughly two hours into a four-hour session, I generally want the PCs to either be in or heading towards the third meaty piece of content. If they’re still in the first or second node, it’s time to push down the accelerator with aggressive framing.

Aggressive framing means seizing suggested courses of action — don’t let players dither in their decision-making and don’t waste time on transitions. Instead, as soon as they say they want to do something, push hard and cut straight to them in media res doing it.

Then, on the back end of the scene, don’t be shy about sharp, definitive endings. Be quick to say, “This scene is done. What next?” in whatever forms works best.

Tip: There’s a converse of this at the one-hour mark, where — if they’ve already reached the third chunk of the scenario — I’ll relax the pace and maybe bring in a proactive element or reincorporate an NPC or other feature from earlier in the scenario. But, in my experience, this is rarely a problem.

The final hour.

If we hit the point where there’s only one hour left in the session and we’re still running behind, that’s where I pull the emergency lever. (You want to do this here because there’s still time to do it gracefully. If you wait until they’re only fifteen minutes left, it’s too late to adjust.)

Start by looking at where the PCs are and where they’re headed next. (Or, alternatively, where they could be headed next.) Following that line, what’s the vector that gets them to the conclusion of the scenario?

Aggressively prune everything else away. For example, do they head off to investigate a node that isn’t going to yield a lead pointing them to the end? Resolve it rapidly with one or two skill checks and then move on.

Basically, at this point, everything that isn’t essential should be treated as a dead end (even if it technically isn’t and you’d normally play it out in full). Check out Dead Ends in RPGs for more details on how to handle this.

Note: This is one of the reasons why it’s so useful to prep scenarios rather than plots. Actively playing a scenario means there are LOTS of potentially satisfying conclusions that can emerge from play, making it far more likely that the PCs will be near a potential conclusion when the time comes.

If, at the one-hour mark, the PCs are so far from a conclusion that it’s clear they’re never going to make it there no matter how aggressively you pace and prune, then you need to start taking more dire actions. (This includes all sorts of retcons and other stuff that I would never do in a full campaign.)

Option #1: Edit the vectors.

For example, whatever the next node that PCs go to is now miraculously stocked with clues that all point to the concluding node! Yay! Alternatively, a proactive node — similarly festooned with Clues Pointing Straight to the Finale — shows up.

In a dungeon? They search a room and find a secret staircase leading down to Level 5! Or the next hallway they go do down suddenly leads to the Fane of Nyarlathotep. Or the intervening rooms are still there, but it turns out all the monsters in those rooms were actually called away to another part of the dungeon. Maybe they’re responding to reports that the PCs were attacking the West Gate? Wow. It’s ironic that in trying to find the PCs they actually left the route to the Fane unprotected!

Option #2: Move the conclusion.

Instead of opening a path for the PCs to reach the ending, you can instead move the ending to wherever the PCs currently are. This often takes the form of either:

• The Big Bad finds the PCs and attacks them. (For example, if the scenario is hunting a werewolf, the werewolf pops up and attacks the PCs.)
• Someone tells the PCs where to go. (The werewolf attacks the chalet and an NPC calls the PCs to beg them for help before it’s too late!)
• It turns out the Big Bad is at whatever location the PC go to next. (Maybe the scenario was designed for the PCs to confront the Evil CEO in his office atop the Moebius Tower, but I guess it turns out the Evil CEO is conducting a surprise inspection at the warehouse where all the illegal drugs are being kept!)

When looking at your options here, it’s generally more effective to have the ending triggered by something that the PCs do. (In other words, if they choose to go to the warehouse and then the Evil CEO is there, then it feels like they found the Evil CEO! Good work! If the Evil CEO just walks through the door where they’re having lunch, it can very easily feel like nothing they did actually mattered.)

There are exceptions to this, but they tend to still be based in the PCs’ agency. (If you really need the bad guy to just teleport to their location and trigger the final fight, it helps a lot if they shout stuff like, “You’ve interfered with me for the last time!” and “You meddling fools! You thought you could blow up my chalet and kill my pet werewolf and there wouldn’t be any consequences?!”)

Keep in mind that you can also mix-and-match your options here. A good combo is triggering a proactive count that you can lard with a bunch of leads pointing to a location (or multiple locations!) where you can plausibly relocate the bad guy.

Tip: You may have noticed that having a proactive node designed into your scenario is incredibly useful for problem solving here. It’s always a good idea to include one. If you forgot to include one, Raymond Chandler’s “a guy with a gun kicks down the door” is always a good fallback.

LIMITED SESSIONS

Now let’s expand our horizons a bit and look at how we can handle a campaign with a limited number of sessions — either because we launched the campaign that way or because real life has imposed itself in some way. It turns out that a lot of the same techniques apply, just twisted slightly to account for the larger scale.

First, though, it can be useful to see if there’s an alternative solution to cutting the campaign short. For example, if you have a player who’s moving away, you might be able to arrange a satisfying send-off for that player and their character while the rest of the group keeps playing. (Check out Saying Goodbyte to a Player for a deeper dive into how to handle this.)

Alternatively, is there a way to increase the number of sessions you can play before the end? When I first ran Eternal Lies, one of the players needed to move to Atlanta to pursue her career as a stuntwoman, but we didn’t want her to miss out on the end of the campaign, so we ran ten sessions in fifteen days to wrap things up.

If options like those don’t work, then you’ll need to figure out how to wrap things up in the time that you do have. Start, of course, by figuring out how many sessions you have left. I recommend immediately assuming that at least one or two of those sessions won’t happen: Either something will come up and actually cause those sessions to get canceled — in which case you’ve preemptively solved the problem! — or they’ll provide some breathing room in case anything goes wrong. It’s much better to wrap things up early (and maybe run an epilogue session or something) than to run out of time!

Now, remember our guideline about five or six meaty chunks of content per four-hour session? Just multiply that by your sessions and you’ll know what your “adventure budget” is.

If you’ve been prepping your campaign as you go along, you just need to identify where your potential conclusions are and then vector appropriately through the amount of adventure content you have to work with.

If, on the other hand, you have an existing structure of some sort — a published adventure, a set of linked node-based scenarios, etc. — that exceeds your adventure budget, then you’ll need to figure out how to cut things down!

It turns out, this largely works the same way it does for individual adventures, you just have more flexibility and the luxury of prep time to think about how you want to handle it. For example, in an individual adventure your might say, “I don’t have time to run this full dungeon, so let’s remove Levels 3 through 5. The stairs on Level 2 go straight to Level 6 now.”

You can apply the same technique to, say, node-based campaigns: You can redesign the clues from Adventure 2 to point to Adventure 6 instead of Adventures 2 through 5.

Alternatively, if you have a Big Bad, you can have them turn up in almost any scenario.

Also look for places where adventures can be dramatically trimmed down instead of cut entirely: Maybe the Tomb of Raknar-Thalla was originally supposed to be a large dungeon with dozens of rooms and multiple levels. You can have the same clues pointing to the tomb, but instead design it as a 5+5 dungeon that can be wrapped up in a single session instead of several.

OPEN TABLES & UNFINISHED SCENARIOS

Another place where a GM can often run into a time limit is an open table: Here you want to wrap up a scenario by the end of the session because there’ll likely be a completely different set of players at the next session and you can’t leave things dangling or stuck on a cliffhanger.

As discussed in the Open Table Manifesto, one option is to sidestep the issue entirely by immediately scheduling a bespoke sequel session with the same players: Now you likely can leave things unresolved and wrap everything up next time!

If that’s not an option (for whatever reason), then you can, of course, always use the same techniques you’d use for any other one-shot and get things wrapped up by the end of the current session.

When it comes to an open table, though, it can be useful to ask yourself another question: Do you NEED to finish this scenario?

Sometimes you do: Investigating half a murder mystery and never getting the solution isn’t satisfying. If the PCs are in the middle of trying to escape a haunted ghost ship, then it’s probably important to know whether or not they get out!

But in other cases you clearly don’t: If the PCs are investigating a megadungeon, for example, they can easily have a satisfying experience, accomplish many things, and then leave without “finishing” the dungeon. (That’s because scenarios like this are holographic — any part of the adventure contains the full experience of the adventure.)

Other scenarios will exist in a gray area between these extremes. In my experience, there are two keys to figuring out whether you can leave a scenario unfinished or not.

First, can you still give the current players a meaningful conclusion? For example, maybe they’ve been tracking the illegal drug trade on LX-510. They weren’t able to track the drugs back to the black market chemlab they’re being sourced from, but with an hour left in the session they are on track to take down the gang responsible for the local trade. Framed right, that’s a solid conclusion.

Second, what are the consequences for leaving the scenario unfinished? For example, with the gang taken out of commission, how does the rest of the criminal network respond? What new scenario hooks might be generated from that? What leads do the current characters have that they could follow up in future sessions (and will that follow-up result in a full adventure experience for them)?

WE DIDN’T MAKE IT!

Whether it’s an individual adventure or a full campaign, sometimes — despite your best efforts — you just won’t be able to succeed in wrapping things up. The best thing to do, when it becomes clear you won’t be able to reach a satisfying conclusion, is to let the players know what’s happening and then work with them to find some sort of closure.

For an individual session, this likely means that about ten minutes before the end, you say something like, “I don’t think we’re going to get to the end of this scenario today.” You can then switch to highly abstract time and wrap things up in broad strokes: “Okay, so when you got to the warehouse, you find paperwork implicating Rebecca Li in Helen’s murder.” You can — and should! — still ask the players what their characters are doing. It’s just those declarations and their resolutions will be handled in much broader strokes. You can even call for dice rolls from the players, but each one is likely to resolve entire scenes, not individual actions.

For a campaign, if you’re going into a final session where there’s no chance of bringing things to a conclusion, you need to accept that reality. Try to wrap up whatever the players were doing at the end of the last session in an hour or less, and then, similarly, transition to an interactive “summing up.” Some of the techniques discussed in Epilogues & Skipping Time may be useful here.

The other technique here is to look at each remaining adventure in your campaign structure — whether that’s levels of a megadungeon, nodes in your Night’s Black Agents Conspyramid, or semesters at your magical academy — and resolve each one with a single round robin of action checks around the table. (I have a technique for resolving side jobs in my Mothership open table that can be useful for this sort of thing. I’ll try to share it here in the near future. You might also think in terms of each adventure being a clock, skill challenge, or complex skill check.)

It’s not ideal. But it’s better than nothing, and sometimes that’s the best we can do.

You probably know this technique.

Problem: Combat is taking too long. The players have analysis paralysis or they’re not paying attention.

Solution: Add a timer, requiring each player to wrap up their turn before the timer runs out.

It seems simple, but I’ve seen a shocking number of GMs screw this up. It turns out there’s a fairly large amount of finesse required to pull this off to best effect, so let’s take a deep dive.

MAKING THE TIMER WORK

A lot of what follows boils down to my personal opinion, but it’s also based on a lot of practical experience – not only mine as a GM and a player, but also my discussions with other GMs and players who have used combat timers in their games. There are some pretty common pitfalls, and often those who have gone astray won’t even realize they’ve fallen into a pit. Conversely, there are several best practices that will maximize your results when using combat timers.

A combat timer should not be standard operating procedure.

The first mistake is thinking you should always be using a combat timer. In reality, it’s an emergency measure that you deploy when something has gone wrong and you need to fix it. If combat at your table is moving at a good clip and with satisfying pacing, then you don’t need a combat timer. In fact, you definitely shouldn’t be using one. Even under the best circumstances, the combat timer introduces additional complexity – it’s one more thing that you, as the GM, need to keep track of. If you don’t need it, then focus your attention somewhere else.

More than that, combat timers are usually a temporary measure. In more than three decades of GMing, I’ve only had to implement combat timers a handful of times. In every case, we were able to drop the timer a little later with the game significantly improved as a result. Once people get a feel from what a properly paced combat feels like, they don’t want to go back.

Make sure you’re not the problem.

On that note, before introducing a combat timer, make sure you’re not the problem. If combat is bogging down because you’re the slow one, then that’s only going to exacerbate the problem. At a minimum, in my opinion, if you’re introducing a combat timer for the players, then you should also abide by the combat timer. Also spend some time practicing multitasking and other techniques for speeding up the group resolutions for  your NPCs.

Use a generous timer.

“If I’ve got six players and each of them takes 5 minutes, then every round takes at least half an hour. If the average combat lasts five round, then every fight is burning up two and a half hours!”

That math checks out, but it can lead to a mistake: “I want my fights to take up no more than half an hour. There are typically twelve combatants in every fight, so if we assume the fight will last five rounds, then every turn needs to be no more than 30 seconds. But we’ll want a margin of error, so let’s set the timer for 15 seconds.”

At first glance, this makes sense. But in practice it’s WAY too aggressive. I recommend nothing shorter than 90 seconds, and even two or three minutes might be the right fit for your group.

What happens in practice is that people don’t wait out the timer: The slight time pressure keeps them focused and, usually, decisions are made in 30 seconds or less even though the timer is longer. Occasionally they’ll take more time because the situation radically changed just before their turn or they misunderstood something and now they need to look up a rule or reconsider their options, and that’s okay.

Missing the timer delays your turn. You don’t lose it.

Time’s up? You’re obviously frozen in a moment of indecision. I’m going to resolve the turn of the next character in the initiative order and then we’ll come back and see if you’ve figured out what you’re doing.

The goal of the combat timer is NOT to punish the player. It’s to create a sense of purpose and focus through time pressure.

It’s a hard cutoff.

Making sure the timer isn’t too punitive also removes the temptation to ignore it, which is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If things have gotten bad enough at your table that you need to implement combat timers as a corrective measure, then you have to stick to it!

Once you start letting the combat timer slide, the time pressure evaporates and it all falls apart. Now the combat timer is just meaningless busywork and you’re wasting everyone’s time with it. (This is also why it’s important to use a generous timer! So that you don’t have to make exceptions!)

Time to decision, not resolution.

On the other hand, generally speaking, the timer is for the player to declare their action. If the timer runs out while they’re resolving their action, that’s okay.

This is partly a matter of practicality (putting half-resolved actions on hold can create all kinds of weird mechanical issues), but it’s also because the primary thing I’m trying to tighten up with combat timers is the decision-making process. That’s almost always what’s kill the pacing.

If you’re also having problems with players taking too long to actually resolve their actions (e.g., the guy who shakes their dice for ninety years before finally rolling the damn things), you might want to address that by expanding what the timer covers. But I’ve found it’s usually more about helping the players refine their resolution techniques in other ways.

Note: The exception to this, for me, are systems where characters get multiple actions per turn. In the second edition of Pathfinder, for example, it’s not unusual for a turn to consist of decision-resolution-decision-resolution-decision-resolution. In those cases, you may want to have the combat timer apply to the character’s full turn. (Although, obviously, you’ll likely want to get a little more generous with the timer to account for this.) If the timer runs out, finish resolving the current action (if any), and then put the rest of the character’s turn on hold.

Two hourglass timers.

A few features you want your combat timers to have:

• The timer should be visible to the players. It puts pressure on them.
• As soon as a turn ends, the timer for the next turn should immediately begin.
• You don’t want to have futz with your phone or some complicated interface.
• In my opinion, you don’t want something that beeps. Paradoxically, you want the timer to apply constant pressure, but when things are flowing well you also want it to seamlessly fade into the background.

The solution I’ve found works best is to have two hourglass timers: When a turn ends, flip the unused timer over and place it on the table in front of the players. Simultaneously grab the previous timer and place it behind your screen. Then repeat, switching back and forth between the timers.

This way you don’t have to wait for the timer from the previous turn to run out before starting the new one (which is a distraction and can create delays). If the players are resolving their turns so fast that the timer from the previous turn still hasn’t run out when it’s time to cycle back to it: Congratulations, you’re winning. You can flip that timer out whenever it finally runs out, which might not be until the start of the next turn.

Help the players.

Make a habit of putting the next player on deck, particularly when they’re losing focus. This will give them extra time to think about what they want to do.

Keep an eye on the timer and give them a ten second warning (or “sand’s running out!”) when appropriate.

Again: The purpose of the timer is not for the players to suffer the consequences of a timer running out.

The goal of the entire table — including you as the GM! — is for the timers to never run out. You should all be working together to accomplish that. So help ‘em out.

What do you do with your character sheets between game sessions?

If you’re using an online service for your character sheets that everyone in the group can access, this will largely take care of itself. But if not, then this is one of those little technical flourishes that you probably never think about, but which can nevertheless have an impact on your game. (And particularly so with some RPGs.)

Broadly speaking, there are three competing interests when it comes to the disposition of your group’s character sheets.

First, and most importantly, the players need to have their sheets during the game. (Obviously.) So if they forget to bring them or, worse yet, lose them entirely, that can derail an entire session.

Second, between sessions, the GM may want to reference the PCs’ sheets while prepping adventures. (Is anyone proficient in a particular skill? What spells do they have prepared today? Who’s carrying the Eye of Miebalung? And so forth.)

Third, and this is where it gets tricky, the players may want to have access to their sheets between sessions. This will be particularly true if they need to advance their characters between sessions or if there’s any form of intersession play. (For example, some groups might run domain play or downtime actions on their Discord server.)

Laying out all of these competing interests like this, it’s easy to see the points of tension.  In fact, if we assume there’s just one copy of each sheet, it would seem impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs, although whether or not this will effect a particular group will depend on their personal tastes and predilections.

(For example, I mostly prep my scenarios while thinking about the “logic of the world,” so I rarely, if ever, design with the PCs’ characters sheets in mind. In other words, I set up problems and let the players worry about how their characters will solve them. Although there are exceptions, like how the GUMSHOE system spreads its Investigation Abilities between the PCs, and it can be useful to do some spot-checking to make sure everyone is getting access to the spotlight.)

MY SOLUTIONS

In my dedicated tables, my players usually keep their sheets, taking them home with them between sessions. (Many of my players are copious note-takers, and they’ll often have a fistful of handouts they’ve collected over the course of the campaign. So they’ll just keep all that stuff together, sometimes even reviewing it between sessions.)

However, I do make a point of periodically making a copy of their sheets. (This usually just means taking pictures of them with my phone, although if the players are using a digital sheet – e.g., form-fillable PDFs – I’ll just have them e-mail me copies.) I generally don’t do this after every session (too much hassle), but instead aim for the moments where the sheets have been significantly updated. In D&D, for example, I try to remember to do this each time the characters level up. In my Night’s Black Agents campaign, on the other hand, I’ll do it after each major operation (which is, again, when character advancement is happening).

This works well because my copy is generally up to date enough to be an effective reference for adventure prep when I need it. If a player forgets their sheet for a session, it’s also “good enough” (or, at least, close enough) that I can print temp copies for them.

For my open tables, on the other hand, I’ve defaulted to keeping all of the character sheets. I’ve discovered that the more casual nature of the game and/or the long breaks between sessions for some players meant that it was much more likely for character sheets to vanish into the ether if they left the table. For open tables I’m also usually running RPGs with streamlined character creation systems, so players also don’t need as much time to advance their characters and are unlikely to be doing it between sessions.

OTHER SOLUTIONS

This is a good example of how the specific needs of your group may shift from one campaign and game to the next. So what you want to do is keep the general principles in mind, while thinking about how they can be fulfilled and the tensions between them resolved in each specific case.

For example, if the game is being hosted at the apartment of one of the players, it may make sense for that specific player – rather than the GM – to keep all of the primary character sheets. (If they never leave the gaming room, they can never be forgotten.)

As another example, the GUMSHOE roleplaying games all include worksheets that GMs can use to specifically track the Investigative Abilities of the group. By capturing the essential information the GM is most likely to need while prepping adventures between sessions, a tool like this may reduce the GM’s need to make duplicates of the PCs’ sheets.

Similarly, the digital tools I mentioned earlier can almost automatically resolve these issues by making access to the character sheets ubiquitous and the number of copies functionally infinite. But this can create tradeoffs for players who would prefer to play with paper-and-pencil (how often are they required to update their digital sheets? how can printing off up-to-date copies for each session be facilitated?) and potentially raise other questions. (For example, what will you do if an online service goes offline? Do you want to archive older versions of the sheets? If so, how often should you do it?)

There are undoubtedly solutions and creative approaches to this stuff that haven’t even been discovered yet. So keep experimenting!

Here’s an adventure I see from time to time: The PCs are in a city or a space station or the Keep on the Borderlands and Something Weird™ is happening.

• Random people are turning purple.
• Invisible goblins are causing chaos.
• A false hydra is eating people.
• A new bratva is shaking down local business owners, triggering a gang war.
• A druid’s curse or escaped nanotech is causing the local plant life to become mobile.

The idea is that the PCs, while doing their own stuff around the village or space station or keep, will see this background stuff happening and get sucked in.

Here’s the tip: These background adventures are MUCH easier to run if the PCs do, in fact, have their own stuff to do.

This might be as simple as a standard post-adventure shopping trip: You’ve got weird stuff keyed to the general store, the magic item shop, the fletcher’s, the town square (as they pass through it), the inn where they’re staying, etc. and you’re good to go.

But I really recommend running this type of adventure in parallel with a completely unrelated adventure: So while the PCs are investigating the Neverland Murders, they keep encountering random people who have turned purple as a background detail. This lets you pace the purple people in a subtler and, often, more effective way.

(This is why I refer to these as background adventures: They play out – or, at least, start out – in the background of whatever adventure has the group’s primary focus.)

Without that parallel adventure, a background adventure tends to fail in one of two ways.

First, if there are leads the PCs can follow, the adventure will resolve too quickly. With nothing else to do, the players will immediately focus all of their attention on the not-so-background adventure, speed run the path back to whatever’s causing it, and cut short the full timeline of weirdness you had prepped. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but if you want the background adventure to feel like a long-term development (as opposed to a flash-in-the-pan), then you need the players’ focus to be somewhere else.

Second, if there’s nothing else going on AND there are no leads for the PCs to follow (e.g., Annie the Flower Girl turned purple, but there’s no way to figure why that happened from either Annie or her flowers), then the PCs will be left adrift — just kind of awkwardly waiting until the GM arbitrarily triggers the next background event. (And then doing so again until they finally get to an encounter with leads they can pursue.)

As long as the players have something else to actively pursue, though, you can now deliberately eschew keying access leads to the first several events in your background adventure, thereby assuring that the events have a chance to build before the PCs meaningfully engage with them. (Probably. Players can be devilishly clever at finding ways to conjure forth leads from thin air that you never suspected were there. And good on them for doing it!)