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“Is this really useful? Is this really fun? And does it bring enough joy to the game to be worth the effort?”
Prepare what benefits your game.
Prepare what benefits your game, and omit what does not.
Review the characters Create a strong start Outline potential scenes Define secrets and clues Develop fantastic locations Outline important NPCs Choose relevant monsters Select magic item rewards
How a game starts is likely the most important piece of preparation we can do. Setting the stage for the session determines a great deal about how the rest of the game will go. When you define where a game session starts, you figure out what’s going on, what the initial focus of the session is, and how you can get close to the action. When in doubt, start with a fight.
a short list of potential scenes that might unfold.
few words per scene, and to expect one or two scenes per hour of play.
Secrets and clues are single short sentences that describe a clue, a piece of the story, or a piece of the world that the characters can discover during the game.
keep these secrets and clues abstract from their place of discovery
ten such secrets or clues.
it’s worth spending time writing out a handful of fantastic locations that the characters might discover and explore during the game.
Describe each location with a short evocative title such as “The Sunspire.” Then write down three fantastic aspects for it, along the lines of: “Blazing beam of light shining to the heavens,” “Moat of molten rock,” or “Huge elven glyphs carved into ancient stone.”
focusing on a name and a connection to the adventure, then wrapping the NPC in a character archetype from popular fiction.
What monsters are the characters most likely to face? What monsters make sense for a specific location and situation?
Players love magic items, and it’s worthwhile to spend time preparing items they’ll find interesting.
“Nothing’s more important to a campaign than the stories of the player characters.”
Players want their characters to do stuff, and GMs need to remember this as we prepare our games.
Secrets and clues can be tied to the backgrounds and desires of the characters as well.
However you choose to do it, write down the names, backgrounds, motivations, and desires of the characters. Then review them before you begin to prepare the rest of your game.
Write down the names, backgrounds, and motivations of all the characters. Review these character notes to prime your mind before the rest of your preparation. Use this character review to help you tie the characters to the rest of your game. Test yourself to see if you can remember the names of the characters.
“Getting over that first hump, going from just a bunch of people sitting around a table to playing D&D, is, for me, the hardest thing to do.”
To understand where your game starts, you need only to write down a single sentence that clarifies how your session will begin.
specificity is better than generality. “The baron talks to the characters about saving his idiot son” isn’t all that evocative. So instead, go with something like: “During the autumn festival of the running of the pigs, the baron’s foppish messenger, Louis Van Dorf, approaches the characters commanding them to an audience with Baron Winthrone—just before being run over by the dire boar Bloodtusk.”
What’s happening? What’s the point? Where’s the action?
Local townsfolk are celebrating the annual running of the pigs. It’s the day of a wedding between two members of rival hostile families. The local lending house has just been robbed. A rough mercenary army unexpectedly rolls into town. A clearly unnatural storm of swirling violet clouds tears across the local landscape.
Everyone is preparing for the annual “feeding of the roc.” It’s Boxing Day, and the lords of the area are all serving drinks to the local farmers. The city magistrate has just outlawed alcohol. The king is dead. It’s been raining for a solid month, and the bad weather has no end in sight.
The start of your game session should be the kick that sends the characters off to do something. You should have a clear point and purpose for the start of your session. Most often, this is the main seed or hook that sends the characters off on the next stage of their adventures.
There’s a term for a style of writing stories called “in medias res”—Latin for “into the middle of things.”
The opening scenes of your game sessions can do the same thing. Instead of starting with heavy narrative and description, plodding along as the characters wander about looking for something to do, you can start as close to the action as possible.
A thief tries to steal the coin purse of one of the party members. An eclipse begins to darken the sun, and a dozen normally well-adjusted villagers draw knives and begin to attack one another. Something explodes.
No matter what your favorite fantasy RPG, its key components are invariably exploration, social interaction, and combat.
Starting an adventure session with combat has many advantages. It gets the players rolling dice right away. It brings everyone’s attention to the table. It forces all of us as GMs to break past our desire to spew twenty minutes of deep narrative. And best of all, a battle almost always comes with its own
built-in story hooks.
This technique can be easily overused, of course. It’s an easy trick that won’t work every single time.
It’s only really important that something happens at the start of your session.
write down the start of a session in a single sentence or short paragraph, building a rich opener to your game.
During the ceremony marking the marriage of the prince to the daughter of an ambitious baron, a wyvern wearing a glyph-marked collar sweeps down from the mountains and attacks the father of the bride. During the annual festival of flowers, the floor of the old Dudley barn-turned-dancehall collapses—revealing ancient vaults filled with angry skeletons wearing armor from the age of Three Suns. During the running of the pigs, a huge dire boar suddenly appears, roaring through the village and shredding local folk with steel-coated tusks. A band of blood-faced wererats launches an attack on the
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begin to slaughter all those around them.
The need for a strong start for the session still stands. Even when you’re in the middle of a story, you can spend some time figuring out how to get the next session started strong.
What’s happening? What event will frame the start of this section of the adventure? What’s the point? What seed or hook will lead the characters further into the adventure? Where’s the action? Start as close to the action as you can. When in doubt, start with combat.
“The true goal of your session notes is to make you comfortable enough to run your session.”
The outline itself doesn’t need to be much more than a few words per line, with one or two lines per hour of game play.
“Be prepared to throw what you have away if something better happens at the table.”
Write down a short list of scenes that might occur in your game. Remember that the goal of writing down scenes is primarily to help you feel prepared. Scenes can occur in or out of sequence. Write only as much as you need to remind yourself of what might happen. Don’t fall in love with your scenes. Be prepared to throw them away.
Secrets and clues are the anchors of our games. They’re a simple way to build out an adventure, create meaning and story for the players, and connect people, places, and things. Secrets and clues are the connective tissue of an adventure—and, more often than not, a whole campaign.
A secret or clue is a single sentence that encapsulates a piece of your game world, its history, or the current story. It’s a piece of information the characters can discover as they explore the world and interact with its inhabitants.
They contain information that matters to the characters. They might be pieces of history that give the characters and the players a better view of why things are happening. They might be leads and hints that allow the characters to discover special locations or powerful items. They might be information about NPCs that the characters didn’t already know. Here’s an example: Aluvena the Keeper, archivist for the Whitesparrow family, is a secret cultist of Dusk.
You don’t worry about how the characters will uncover a secret or clue.
you’ll improvise the discovery of a secret or clue while you run your game.
Write Down Ten Secrets Per Session
