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
Trinity Toolbox

ADDITIONAL READING
Smart Prep: The Exposition Drip

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

Smart prep is generally about targeting the highest value prep while seeking to avoid prep that’s wasted (i.e., never used at the game table). Maximum bang for your buck, in other words. Which is not, of course, a radical insight. The devil is in the details here, so here are three general principles that can help you zero in on the high-value prep.

DON’T DUPLICATE IMPROVISATION

Compared to a “zero prep” scenario (where you literally prep nothing), smart prep is always going to add quality. Because smart prep, by definition, is adding elements that cannot be improvised at the table.

Technically, of course, everything in the game world can be hypothetically improvised during play. So what you want to focus on is the stuff that adds value by virtue of being prepped. This can vary a lot depending on the premise, the system, the GM, and the players involved, but what you want to look for is stuff that is:

• Time-consuming to create
• Requires special tools
• Benefits from considered thought
• Difficult for you to run off-the-cuff

Particularly valuable prep targets are the things that can never be improvised on the fly. Props and handouts are perhaps the most obvious example of this.

What you can improvise effectively also depends on your own strengths as a GM. It will change over time and it will vary based on the system you’re running. I talked about one facet of this in The Hierarchy of Reference, but it applies across the board. Maybe you struggle with having dynamic battles featuring clever tactics, so you spend a little effort prepping Tucker’s Kobolds. Maybe you find it easier to run Pathfinder monsters if you make a point of highlighting feats you’re unfamiliar with and jotting down a note about what they do. Personally, I know that I get too tight-lipped with NPCs revealing the deep secrets and conspiracies of the campaign (because I once ruined a campaign by getting too loose-lipped with those secrets and it’s a Pandora’s Box you can’t close – if the PCs don’t know something they can always learn it later; if they learn too much they can’t forget it), so personally I focus a certain amount of effort on prepping exactly what NPCs know and what clues they can supply.

It can also be useful to keep in mind that some stuff you find hard to improvise can be made easy to improvise if you prep the right tools. Procedural content generators are an obvious example of this, but it can also include stuff like “if you’re bad at coming up with names on the fly, prep a list of names”.

Beware, however, the temptation of believing that something has value simply because it requires prep. If you build something that has no (or little) value to you and your players, the fact that you couldn’t improvise it during play is irrelevant, and the amount of work you put into something doesn’t create value.

For many GMs, I find that stat blocks fall into this category. In many systems, creating stat blocks on the fly can be quite difficult (particularly if you don’t have a high level of expertise in using the system), and so customized stat blocks clearly fall into the category of things which can’t be improvised at the table. As a result, GMs will sink huge amounts of time into carefully building and tweaking every single stat block in their scenarios.

The question you have to ask yourself is how much value you and your players are really gleaning from these stat blocks. How much is giving the ogre in Area 5 a unique stat block compared to the ogre in Area 6 really improving play? Frequently, the answer is “not at all”; in fact, the players may not even notice the distinction. I’ll go so far as to argue that having an unnecessary panoply of different stat blocks can actually have a negative value compared to re-using familiar stat blocks, as the quality, pace, and tactical creativity of combat encounters can see significant improvement as the GM learns and masters what the “ogre stat block” is capable of doing.

Which is not, of course, to say that you should never customize a stat block. Well-designed stat blocks can create unique gameplay and tactical opportunities that are exactly the sort of thing that requires prep to realize at the table. They’re a good example of the sort of balancing act and constant self-diagnosis you have to engage in as a GM to make sure your prep is on point.

AVOID WASTE

Smart prep also means that you work to minimize the amount of material you work on that never makes it to the table. It doesn’t matter how potentially awesome something is; if your players never experience it, then its effective value is zero. The more wasted prep you have, the more it will drag down the average value of your prep overall. Or, to put it another way, every minute you spend working on stuff your players never see is a minute you could have spent working on stuff that they do.

Something I think is almost universally a waste of time is prepping a lot of specific contingencies based on hypothetical choices the PCs might make. (“If the PCs enter from the north, then the goblins will… If the PCs enter from the south, then the goblins will… If the goblins can see a spellcaster, then they will…”) Even if it’s not material which can be trivially improvised at the table (and it almost always is), you’re still basically guaranteed to end up prepping a bunch of contingencies that will never be used. You’ll gain a much higher quality-to-prep ratio from virtually anything else you choose to prep.

(See Don’t Prep Plots – Tools, Not Contingencies for a more in-depth discussion of this.)

The mistake some GMs make, however, is trying to eliminate waste at the table by forcing their players to experience the content they’ve prepared. (Railroading, in other words.) That’s the wrong way to do it. Where you need to work at eliminating waste is when you prep, which you can do by controlling what you prep.

Ironically, the fear of railroading can lead some GMs astray by convincing them that they aren’t “allowed” to prioritize their prep: “I don’t want to assume that the PCs will go somewhere specific, so I need to prep everywhere that they could even potentially think about going!”

But, as I said in the Railroading Manifesto:

It’s often quite trivial for an experienced GM to safely assume that a specific event or outcome is going to happen. For example, if a typical group of heroic PCs are riding along a road and they see a young boy being chased by goblins it’s probably a pretty safe bet that they’ll take action to rescue the boy. The more likely a particular outcome is, the more secure you are in simply assuming that it will happen. That doesn’t mean your scenario is railroaded, it just means you’re engaging in smart prep.

A large part of avoiding waste is, in fact, about learning how to identify the likelihood of a particular outcome by:

• Discerning what the PCs are likely to affect vs. what they won’t affect
• Predicting the choices your players will make

The caution, of course, is that this is only valuable insofar as your predictions are accurate. Otherwise you can end up committing all-out to a course of prep that will all end up on the waste heap.

The reality, though, is that this is a skill which you can learn and improve. Particularly if you focus on doing so. There are also techniques you can use to increase your hit rate, perhaps the most valuable of which is a simple question:

What are you planning to do next session?

It’s a simple question, but the answer obviously gives you certainty. It lets you focus your prep with extreme accuracy because you can make very specific predictions about what your players are going to do and those predictions will also be incredibly likely to happen.

Even this isn’t infallible, though. The worst example I’ve had of wasted prep in the last decade or so was when the PCs said they were interested in going to explore a dungeon at the end of one session, but half of the party wasn’t firmly committed and at the beginning of the next session they managed to convince the others that it wasn’t a good use of their time and resources. Unfortunately, in the interim I had written a really nifty 70 page dungeon that I then had to toss out. (That dungeon is the Lost Laboratories of Arn.)

And this is where we end up looping back to Tools, Not Contingencies. Because the other way to avoid waste is to prep a toolbox. As I wrote in Don’t Prep Plots:

You can think of this as non-specific contingency planning. You aren’t giving yourself a hammer and then planning out exactly which nails you’re going to hit and how hard to hit them: You’re giving yourself a hammer and saying, “Well, if the players give me anything that looks even remotely like a nail, I know what I can hit it with.”

“The players have ruined my adventure!”

If you ever catch yourself thinking that with anything other than glee, it usually means that your players have done something that you didn’t expect and now you’re at a loss for what to do next. It’s also usually a pretty good indicator that something has gone awry with your prep.

In practical terms, it should be very easy for your players to do something that you hadn’t anticipated. But it should be very difficult for them to do something that you have absolutely nothing prepared for. Most of the time you should be able to just keep doing what you were doing before: Selecting the tools built into the scenario and actively playing them. They did something unexpected and now the guy you thought was going to be their patron is, in fact, their arch-enemy. But you still had the guy prepped, right?

In some cases, the PCs will end up tumbling into a section of the scenario that was prepped for a completely different type of interaction. (Common variations include “I didn’t think I’d need a stat block for that character” in relatively complex systems where stat blocks are time-consuming or “this will involve several dozen pieces moving in directions I didn’t anticipate.”) If this happens, call for a 5 or 10 minute break so that you can juggle the pieces into place smoothly.

In extremely rare cases, the PCs will manage to perform a complete scenario exit. When that happens, you can usually bring the current session to a close and spend the time necessary to prep the new scenario. Whatever action they took to exit the scenario is usually the answer to the question, “What do you want to do next session?” but it never hurts to double check. You can also ad lib along the new path for a certain distance until the new frame is both clear and the PCs have clearly committed to it. (If you imagine that the campaign is currently in Houston and the PCs decide to go to Dallas, you can probably get a fair distance down the freeway or all the way to the city limits of Dallas as you wind things down for the night. Partly because it will help focus your prep, but also because the players will sometimes abruptly reverse course and head back to Houston.)

With all that being said, remember that some waste is unavoidable. That’s okay. Your goal is simply to minimize it.

MAXIMIZE UTILITY

You may have already noticed how these principles of smart prep blend together: You avoid waste by prepping for improv. Keeping yourself open to improvisation means you don’t prepare material that’s likely to be wasted.

The same is true of our last principle.

Maximize the utility of what you prep by developing material that:

• Can be recycled
• Has flexible use
• Is multi-use

By maximizing the utility of what you prep, you avoid redundant prep. You can also generally reduce your overall prep while actually increasing the amount of quality play you get from your prep at the same time.

For example, imagine that you’re prepping a goon squad for Baron Destraad. If you spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how to position them in Room 16B and the tactics they’ll use in Room 16B, then you’re limiting the utility of that goon squad to Room 16B. (You could, of course, simply ignore that prep, but that means you’ve wasted that work.)

Here you can see the principle of not duplicating improvisation directly feeding into the principle of maximizing utility, but it’s more than that. Maximizing utility inverts that equation: It’s not enough to just avoid stuff that you could improvise; you also want to look at how your prep improves your improvisation. Building a goon squad that’s specialized to Room 16B gets you a different goon squad (and a less useful goon squad) than a goon squad that is prepared so that Baron Destraad can use it in any number of nefarious ways.

This idea of “using Baron Destraad’s goon squad in many different ways” can also be expanded to “using this goon squad to be many different goon squads”. This is what I mean by recycling material: Ten sessions after the PCs have dealt with Destraad’s goons, the PCs tee off on the Dragon Mafia and the Mafia decides to send them a message in the form of some thugs. Rather than generating all-new stats for the thugs, you can just grab the stats for the goons, maybe tweak them a little bit, and throw them back into play.

You can also design material specifically to make it more recyclable. You can also recycle material simultaneously instead of sequentially (within the context of a single encounter, for example). In my Ptolus campaign, I needed to design a squad of twelve knights who would act as allies of the PCs. Giving them all the exact same stat block proved a little too bland for recurring characters working in concert with the PCs, so I decided I wanted two different stat blocks (one for each half of the group). Rather than designing two completely different stat blocks, however, I used the same stat block and just swapped out the list of maneuvers (from the Book of Nine Swords) that each bloc of knights had.

A quick word of caution here, however: A quagmire that can be easily mistaken for recycling material is the “quantum ogre”, a common form of railroaded illusionism in which the GM forces the players to experience a particular encounter no matter what choice they make. If they go to the forest, they encounter the ogre. If they go to the mountains, they encounter the ogre. The ogre is what the GM prepped, and so the ogre is what they are going to fight!

The distinction between responsibly recycling material and quantum ogre illusionism can be difficult to precisely define, but it’s a really important distinction and one which radically transforms the form of gameplay at the table.

If you’re trying to figure out the difference for yourself, a lot of it just boils down to being aware of your own motivations: Are you trying to force a goon squad encounter on the PCs? Or are the actions of the PCs logically resulting in them running into a goon squad and you’re just looking for a way to quickly get a goon squad into play?

Another good, albeit not perfect, self-check: Would you be equally likely to recycle this goon squad even if the PCs had, in fact, encountered the first goon squad? If so, your recycling is probably not being motivated by a desire to enforce a preconceived outcome.

The process of recycling is really no different than using a goblin stat block from the Monster Manual. You’re simply turning your own body of pre-existing prep into a resource for continuing to build the game world, rather than relying on something designed and published by a third party.

Closely related to recycling material is reincorporating material: Instead of taking material you’ve already developed and using it in a different form, you take the material you’ve already developed and just literally use it again.

The term “reincorporating” comes from improv, where it refers to building on bits that have been previously established instead of creating all-new bits. By reincorporating material, you build depth into your game – depth of background, depth of relationships, depth of knowledge. You’re also saved the hassle of creating something entirely new from scratch.

This is something I discuss in more depth in Juggling Scenario Hooks in the Sandbox, but it’s a technique that can be used in any campaign. For example, in my Ptolus campaign there’s an abandoned castle which has been used as a cultist’s lair, a hideout for the PCs, a safehouse for someone the PCs were protecting, and as the headquarters for a group of religious freedom fighters.  And every single time this castle comes back into play, not only do the players become a little more emotionally attached to it, but I also get to reuse the amazingly detailed floorplans I have for it.

(To be fair, my players have been almost wholly responsible for the reincorporation of this particular castle.)

Need a tavern? Use one you’ve already created. Need a villain? What if it’s an old foe coming back instead of a new face? Need someone to hire the PCs? Make it a patron they’ve worked for before.

Not everything should be rooted in the familiar, obviously, but reincorporating material is not only a great way to maximize the value of your prep; it can also maximize your players’ engagement with the game world.

CONCLUSION

I’m not going to pretend that this is the be-all or end-all of smart prep. What I’ve tried to provide here are some fairly broad principles that you can hopefully use in guiding your own prep.

Because, ultimately, these are very specific and very personal decisions: The stuff you value and the stuff your players value may not be the same thing other groups value. Maybe your group finds detailed floorplans are valuable and evocative visual aids. Another group might not. Heck, the same group might not find them as useful in a different game, or even just in a different session. Stuff that’s useful for one type of scenario might be useless for another.

With that being said, assuming there’s interest, I’m hoping to continue this series in the future, sharing with you a few of the more unusual tools and strategies I use in my own smart prep.

Go to Part 3: Status Quo Design

Many GMs – possibly most of them – are bad at prepping.

This is true even of GMs who run good games. You’ll frequently hear the mantra that if everyone’s enjoying your game, then you’re doing it right! There are a number of problems with this belief (starting with the fact that enjoyment is not a binary property), but bad prep habits are a really important counterexample: If you’re spending fifteen hours prepping to get the same results that you could be getting with only an hour of prep, think about what you could be doing with those fourteen hours you’ve saved. (And not just in the rest of your life; think about the things you could be doing with that time that would make the experience of you and your players even better.)

LOW-VALUE PREP

Which brings us to probably the most common prep problem: GMs who burn themselves out with low-value (or no-value) prep. They either spend inordinate amounts of time prepping material which is never experienced at the table and/or they prep material which doesn’t actually enhance what’s experienced at the table.

One of the leading causes of low-value prep seems to be published scenarios. Most RPGs don’t include any meaningful advice on scenario prep, and the RPGs that do include such advice are generally inadequate or misguided (often being written by designers who are, themselves, engaged in bad prep; the problem is, after all, endemic to the hobby). It makes sense, therefore, that lots of GMs instead turn to published scenarios as an example of what they should be doing.

Unfortunately, published scenarios are a terrible example of what a GM should be prepping. And I’m including all of my professionally published scenarios in this condemnation.

First, even in an ideal case, what I need to write in order to clearly communicate the ideas in my head to someone I’ve never met is VERY different from the notes I need to run a scenario for myself. Here’s an actual quote from a homebrew scenario someone sent me for critique:

“There are eighteen goblins living in this rocky cavern, which is largely similar to the other caverns in this area. If it’s morning, the men will be asleep and the women will be cooking breakfast. If it’s afternoon, the men will have left, leaving only the women behind. In the evening, however, all of the goblins will be here. You should also carefully consider whether the PCs’ actions elsewhere in the dungeon have alerted the goblins to danger, in which case the men will either leave 1-2 of their number to protect the women during the day; or all may remain at home if the danger is seen as particularly acute.”

Leaving aside the profligate verbiage, who is the “you” in this text? If this is how you’re prepping your scenarios for your personal use, who are you talking to? You don’t need to explain your intentions to yourself.

Second, most published scenarios are bad. This isn’t really a surprising revelation (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap), but they’re often systemically bad in a way which collectively lead GMs to believe that scenarios are “supposed” to be prepped in a way which will also result in their scenarios being systemically bad.

Railroading is perhaps the most common example of this. But in terms of bad prep, the even more damaging example is Choose Your Own Adventure design, encouraging GMs to waste their time prepping elaborate flow charts filled with an ever-increasing amount of material that they know will never be used because it’s literally designed to NOT be used in its entirety.

Third, these problems have become increasingly exacerbated by the fact that a sizable portion of the audience reads published scenarios as a form of storybook pulp fiction instead of surveying them as a tool for creating memorable experiences at the gaming table. More importantly, the RPG companies know this and are writing their scenarios to satisfy this audience.

Here’s James Jacobs, the Creative Director at Paizo responsible for their Adventure Paths, on the subject:

Paizo more or less exists as a game company today (and not merely as an online RPG store) because adventures sell. If they’re done right. And by “right,” I mean “fun to read.”

Because I suspect the majority of adventures published by game companies are never actually played by most of those who read the adventures. (…)

And adventures, which tell stories, ARE fun to read. (If they’re built to be read.)

To be clear, I understand the meta-fictional appeal of reading an RPG scenario. There is a creative act of closure that takes place when reading a scenario and imagining how the situations it describes might play out that’s a fairly unique (and enjoyable) experience. And I understand the commercial need to appeal to as broad an audience as possible in order to make your products profitable, particularly in an industry like RPGs where your sales will be anemic even at the best of times.

The problem is that there are a number of things you can do as a writer to enhance the enjoyment of the reader that are actually inimical to the runner. And I’m increasingly seeing these elements in published adventures: Bloated descriptions. Material sequenced so that the reader is given a Shocking Reveal!™ instead of being sequenced for easy reference by the GM at the table. Narrative discourses and background information for which there is no clear vector for the players to ever learn of them.

Some writers do this because they are intentionally aiming for the reader market. Some writers don’t actually run adventures themselves and are writing for their own preferences as people who only read adventures. (This is shockingly common, and often encouraged by publishers who respond to the word “playtest” as if you had grown a second head.) And some writers are just following the examples they see in print from others, and which they have come to think of as the “correct” way to write up a scenario.

A lot of GMs follow a similar impulse to this final category of writers: They’re looking for an example to learn from in prepping to run their games, and the examples they’re using aren’t even primarily designed to run a game from in the first place.

LOW PREP

There has, in fact, been a backlash against low-value prep.

One particularly common form of this backlash are “low prep” or “zero prep” philosophies. You’ll find these in games specifically designed for such play, like Technoir or Lady Blackbird (along with a metric shit ton of storytelling games like Ten Candles, Hillfolk, Fiasco, and so forth), but also presented as a more general philosophy about how traditional RPG scenarios can be prepared.

These low prep strategies can be very effective, and have a great deal of utility in specific circumstances. (I’ve talked often in the past about the usefulness of having RPG experiences that can be picked up and played as casually as many board games can be, for example. Low prep systems are one way of achieving that.) But what it reveals for many long-time GMs is that their prep is bloated and ineffective and wasted. For some, their low-value prep is so bad that it actually has a negative value. Literally doing nothing results in better sessions than what they were doing before.

This leads some to believe that all prep is a bad idea. But this is an overreaction, trapping some GMs in a stunted ideology that can be just as limiting as the low-value prep they were practicing before.

Even in less virulent extremism, low prep philosophies can seductively convince GMs that they’ve solved a problem when, in fact, they’re only masking it: They discover that the prep they’ve been doing doesn’t work, so they do less of it and their games improve! All better, right? Problem solved!

Except they haven’t actually stopped doing the sort of prep that doesn’t work… they’ve just dramatically reduced the amount of it they’re doing. Eating less cyanide is good, but what you should really be doing is not eating cyanide.

You can find an example of this in the first section of Michael E. Shea’s The Lazy Dungeon Master. The book preaches a good message about GMs wasting a lot of time on prep that doesn’t add value to their games, but the alternative structure it teaches is to prep four things, each on a 3×5 card:

1. A beginning scene.
2. Three paths your game might take.

These paths can either be a Choose Your Own Adventure (where, after the initial scene, the PCs can choose one of the other three paths or, alternatively, none of them), in which case you’ll prep four things of which at least half of them will never be used. Or it can revert to a linear, pre-plotted sequence. But because the GM didn’t spend as much time prepping this linear, pre-plotted sequence, Shea’s argument is that it will be more likely that the GM will be willing to just throw it all out as wasted prep.

Shea recognizes that plot-based prep doesn’t work, but in the absence of any other paradigm, the only advice he can offer is to just do less of it.

SMART PREP

Which, ultimately, leads us to smart prep – the way to focus your prep on stuff with a high utility value while avoiding prep which is either unnecessary or likely to be wasted during play.

Whereas the goal of a low prep philosophy is to reduce the amount of time you spend prepping, that’s not the primary goal of smart prep (although it might be a side effect). When you’re practicing smart prep, the goal is to make sure that every moment you’re spending prepping is maximizing the positive effect that prep has on your game sessions. You might even end up spending more time prepping. For example, I spent dozens of hours prepping the Eternal Lies campaign, but the result included hundreds of props and visual elements that created a unique and memorable experience for everyone involved.

Smart prep is all about thinking long and hard about your prep methods to see if there are ways in which you could be achieving the same results (or better results) with less prep. (Or using the same amount of prep to achieve more.)

So let’s talk about what that looks like.

Go to Part 2: The Principles of Smart Prep