Having seen the inception of this challenge, I am going to take the same format as
Weird Writers 'How I Prep' masterpost for my own.
To start, I am a 'never let them see you bleed' DM - never admit you did not have something ready, maintain the facade of a fully realised world and never dump your players out if at all possible. I never call a session early because of lack of prep - the players go off the map, things might get a bit wooly but we keep going as long as people want to. As a happy coincidence I like the lonely fun of game prep quite a lot, so all to the good. As a third point, I get to use lots of my prep as material for this blog so I get dual use out of many things.
At the table I find
the blorb/anti-blorb idea of a heirarchy useful for maintaining consistency when busy/tired/worn down. When the show must go on, having some pre-decided stuff you can lean on when the players bolt for the horizon helps. As Jenx pointed out "constant improv wears thin" - blorb/anti-blorb for me is "some rules to avoid defaulting to the thing you always come up with when you improv."
I like to prep sufficient to have what I call 'clockwork universe' - a sense of what big cogs are in motion, ticking along in the background - so whatever the players do, I have some idea of what they might run into where.
The First Steps
Typically new games/campaigns are driven by 'who do I want to play with'. There are so many campaign ideas on the shelf, I will do a session zero with them, then pull down and execute the best fit. I use
Colvilles campaign pitch document over email to see who is even interested then run the pre-campaign sequence of
- What is the game we want to play? Spanning from things people do not want to have in through to atmosphere, activities in focus, ruleset.
- How are we going to play together? Includes the nuts-and-bolts logistics but also some ground rules for communication, especially if people do not know one-another already.
Typically this is over email, chats or various side conversations with folk - some of this can be done by other players on my behalf sometimes where those players are old hands and familiar with my style of play.
Of old I used to cook up a whole new world per campaign but in the last few years have come to the realisation that the effort/reward for that was not paying off. The past nine campaigns I ran have included campaign + sequel in Forgotten Realms/Realmspace, a Plane-of-the-week game (continuity-less), a campaign + sequel built around two crystal spheres and a remix of Light of Xaryxis and then by *far and away* the most hours (78%) have been spent on the four campaigns set in menagerie world - my home campaign (Ducal House), my online open table (Southern Reaches), my in-person open tables (Bay of Princes) and my current hexcrawl campaign (Reluctant King).
So for me, this is where a lot of the 'prep' work goes in - worldbuilding, from which factions, hazards (derived from terrain and architecture), encounters (derived from terrain, history and factions) and settlements all cascade. For menagerie world I am underpinning much of it with an Azgaars Fantasy Map Generator map where I strongly adjusted the factions, religions, etc for the first campaign but now for all the surrounding places for subsequent campaigns and later parts of the first campaign, I stare at the map and figure out the implications from whatever terrain, culture, religion and realms are present. See
the Hexcrawl25 posts for lots of this.
Choice of ruleset is typically driven by player pool to tap + energy available to learn/teach/pitch a system that is not 5e. This last is usually low so hey-ho, typically 5e - except my home campaign, which is 3.5e.
For the open table games, there is a code of conduct and a tweaked set of the Adventurers League rules so for those sessions lots of the parameters are already set, I play with whoever sits down on that basis.
Campaign Prep vs Session Prep
I hold campaign prep as 'everything that feeds more than one session' - so for the couple of campaigns I have rolling now:
- hexcrawl campaign mode - all the populating of hexes and figuring out what factions are up to
- hexcrawl one-shot mode - nil these are open-tables - past a single session, these only persist as fluff news items
- Ducal House home campaign - macro things that become part of the 'reference' stack - NPC family trees, major locations to be used multiple times, regional maps, faction plans, etc.
Practically this breaks down into two buckets -
worldbuilding and continuity.
Macro-worldbuilding activities for the campaign then inform things like encounter tables or give you a sense of what should be where if the PCs hare off the for the horizons. I talk through
executing this for my Spelljammer campaign here.
Since most of my campaigns at present are running in different parts of the same continent I am recycling all my prep for deep time - the same crisis, ancient foes, deep-time factions, etc. are turning up in multiple campaigns which is useful. I am keeping them from interfering with each other through geographic spread which has worked so far.
The other bucket -
campaign continuity (or "consequences") feeds session prep both through keeping time records and tracking who should have turned up where and triggered what and by figuring out which plans ought to have come to fruition and changed a location.
This is mostly relevant for my Ducal House campaign; I have my thick stack of session sheets that get referenced repeatedly, in particular the timelines where NPCs arrival times at places get tracked. These
consequences that tie back to actions players took or failed to take are one of the key contributors to making the place feel real and alive.
For the open table games I just pick a module and prep it with the single-page session notes below.
Procedures and Rules
My key procedure for prep is my
single page session prep - I do this without fail before a session
1. Post session implications/consequences of characters declared actions
2. Check the start time, see how much time passed in-world - for continuous campaigns not one-shots
3. Copy forward any untriggered encounters or events from previous sessions or player intentions from last session
4. Check the timeline and spot and new things due to happen
5. Detail any hooks not yet fleshed out - typically things of the timeline or player intentions
These are complemented by:
6. Session notes on a 30-min chunk timeline
7. Getting player intentions and actions at the end of the session
A
walked through example of me doing this (numbering offset but same steps) is here.
For module preparation I use a variant of this; run through the module, figure out the on-ramp, how things could play out, rail-road vs sandboxy-ness of it and then work up a single page sheet for that. Typical things are noting key NPC and location names to have them visible and not be flipping around as I work through the module.
Level of procedures used at table varys hugely - for Ducal House it will be scene-appropriate mechanics like the Aces High rules for aerial combat. For the hex-crawls I have an overloaded encounter dice and some downtime tools.
For both I generate random encounter tables - more formally for the hex-crawl since they are persistently within the same region, Ducal House I just do a half dozen or so interesting things since they have multiple high-speed travel options and bounce around a lot.
Specific Prep
Specific things I find I prep recently are all the hex-locations for the hex crawl; those tend to be relatively light weight and backed up with random encounter tables and some campaign level 'what does a dwarf mine look like' understanding of potential dungeons.
For Ducal House, since there are some specific questlines being pursued, I put work into locations where major conflicts are likely to happen - most of this is done by rummaging through my library looking for a giants stronghold or a demon temple which I can recycle - mostly because those will have figured out a bunch of traps and monsters already and I do not want to put a huge amount of effort into creating a high-level location that the PCs might find a way to bypass.
The main thing I aim for are recyclable tools which I generate using time-management procedures -
the Egan doctrine, a kind of 'hair-trigger pomodoro' - which is seize any free 20 mins to just push something along. I find the single page session prep set up combines well with this because if I only punch out one or two of the steps in a free 20 mins, good, 20 mins of work I do not have to do later.
The other major block of 'procedure' I follow is
the setting up and running of open tables - mostly all runs as a loop within our local games society regular friday forum posts.
Otherwise I do not have any set procedures I follow religiously - for a given session or two I might test run one or another tool-set someone blogs or I will test an adventure generator from some book or another. A good chunk of this is to keep things interesting for me, I do not find the idea of locking into an overly strict process and then cranking the handle on that forever appealing. There is way too much good stuff on the blogs to not road test it in my games.
