Credits

Author: Phil Vecchione

enginepublishing.com

Publisher: Martin Ralya Never Unprepared: The Complete

Game Master’s Guide to Session
Prep is copyright © 2012 by Phil
Editor: Martin Ralya Vecchione, all rights reserved,
and is published by Engine
Publishing, LLC with permission.
Art Director: John Arcadian
All artwork is copyright ©
2012 by Engine Publishing,
Graphic Designer: Darren Hardy LLC, all rights reserved.
Layout: Darren Hardy
Engine Publishing, the Engine
Publishing Logo, and the truncated
Cover Artist: Matt Morrow gear device are trademarks of
Cover Designer: Darren Hardy Engine Publishing, LLC.

Gnome Stew, The Game Mastering

Interior Artists: Matt Morrow, Christopher Reach Blog, and the Gnome Stew logo
Diagrams: Phil Vecchione are trademarks of Martin Ralya.

Mention of ©, ®, or TM products
Indexers: Martin Ralya, Phil Vecchione and services is not intended as a
Proofreaders: Robert M. Everson, Daniel Milne challenge to those rights or marks,
or to their holders. All such products
and services are the property
Capitalist Tool: Kurt Schneider of their respective owners.

The Engine Publishing logo was

In memory of Eric Wujcik designed by Darren Hardy.

Published by Engine Publishing,

With special thanks to my Keurig and LLC in July 2012. Second
my “fatman” chair, who supported me printing August 2018.
throughout my writing. –P.V.

Dedication
To my wife Florence, for putting me onto this path, and
supporting all my gaming and other endeavors over the years.

To my children, Dante and Rose:

Embrace your creativity in all you do.

To my gaming group, who were the lab rats for all my

tinkering and experimentation as this process evolved. –P.V.

2
 Contents
Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
How to Use This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Understanding Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1: Prep is Not a Four Letter Word . . . . . . . 10
2: The Phases of Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3: Brainstorming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4: Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5: Conceptualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6: Documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
7: Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Prep Toolbox. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
8: Tools for Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
9: Mastering Your Creative Cycle. . . . . . . 75
Evolving Your Style. . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
10: Your Personal Prep Templates . . . . . . . 86
11: The Prep-Lite Approach . . . . . . . . . . 99
12: Prep in the Real World. . . . . . . . . . 106
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
References and Inspiration. . . . . . . . . 119
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Contributor Bios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

3
 Foreword
I don’t know how I missed hearing about this book when it first
came out. Sometimes, that’s the way life goes. You think you know
everything you need to know, or that you have all the tools you
need, and then someone who knows you really well says, “Hey, I’m
sure you’ve already read this book (or tried this food or become
friends with this person), but if you haven’t, I bet you’d like it.”
And suddenly this new awesome thing is in your life, and you can’t
believe you didn’t know about it already.
Never Unprepared is that kind of book.
Those of you who have played in games that I’ve run might find
it hard to imagine me preparing for my games. I’m a complete
“pantser” when it comes to running games. (The term, if you’re not
familiar with it, comes from the book writing community, where
a “plotter” is someone who, well, plots their book and a pantser is
someone who writes their book by the seat of their pants, never
knowing where they’re going ahead of time.) Basically, it means I
pull things out of my butt, steal all my players’ best ideas (and then
turn it against them), and never, ever have a plan.
In other words, I ALWAYS come unprepared. To books. To life.
And definitely to GMing.
Or so I thought.
Reading this book made me realize that I actually am much more
prepared when I show up to run a game than I think I am. How
is that possible? Because I inherently utilize a lot of the techniques
that Phil recommends. I just didn’t realize it until now.
If only I’d had this book to guide me back when I started GMing
so many years ago. Instead, it took me years and years of Gming—
and years of failing—before I figured out some of the techniques
he recommends. I just did so by trial and error, until it became
an ingrained part of my “no-prep” GMing style. It’s like muscle
memory—you do it enough, and you don’t even realize you’re
doing it. The way you can drive from home to work and not really
remember doing so.

4
 Foreword

But thankfully, you can save yourself from years of trial and error
by reading this book. (Don’t be like me, kids! Save yourselves!).
Phil’s done the trial and error for you already—so now you can just
sink into his wisdom and reap the benefits.
A lot of teaching, I think, is striking the right tone (and I say this
as someone who’s sat on both sides of the proverbial teacher’s desk).
This entire book carries the tone of someone who is filled with
knowledge, has your back, and only wants the best for you—and
for your players. So when Phil says, “Okay, it’s just you and me right
now, and I’m not really there. No GM really likes to talk about
their weaknesses, but we all have them. We’re going to talk about
your weaknesses now, and it’s okay because I’m not going to tell,” I
believe him. I put my trust in him. That means I can let my guard
down, admit my flaws, and then work on finding solutions.
So put your trust in this book. Inhale it. Make notes. Try out the
techniques. Use the tools Phil provides you. Be so prepared that
you don’t even realize how prepared you are.
In other words, “Hey, I’m sure you’ve already read this book, but if
you haven’t, I bet you’d like it.”
Shanna Germain
Co-owner, Monte Cook Games
July 2018, Seattle, WA

5
 Introduction
I’ve never read an RPG or supplement that has told me how to prep for my sessions.
Most of them talk about encounter building and campaign planning, but none of
them lay out what information needs to be in my session notes, how long my notes
should be, or even the best way to record them. I don’t know if that’s an unrealistic
expectation to place on game designers, but since the dawn of the hobby we GMs
have been left to wander in the desert trying to figure out how to prep our sessions.
The RPG blogging community has done some work to help advance this aspect of
GMing, but the number of articles on how one should prepare their session notes
is drowned out by a deluge of articles on how to speed up combat, the best class
combinations to take, and the reasons to love/hate every version of Dungeons &
Dragons TM. If you’re lucky, you may stumble on the occasional article with some
nuggets of information which, through trial and error, can be cobbled together into
some kind of system to prepare for your game.
The end result is that many GMs hate to prepare their session notes. I have yet to
encounter a GM who is excited to prepare their notes—at best, they have made some
kind of uneasy truce when it comes to getting their prep work done. Not me: I am
a GM who likes to do my prep. Not because I like to give up time for other forms
of leisure to write encounters, but rather because I have come to appreciate that the
time I spend on my prep will make the games that I run so much better. I have also
created a personal system whereby I am not a slave to my prep; instead, my prep is a
minor to-do accomplished in the course of my day.
My goals in writing this book are to share my own experiences with, and techniques
for, session prep; and to make prep much less painful—and perhaps even pleasant—
for GMs. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first gaming book ever written
exclusively about game prep.
What I share in Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session
Prep is not a specific method for how to prepare for a game. That kind of approach is
novel but inflexible and will become stale as our hobby continues to evolve. Rather
this book looks at prep in a more holistic way, identifying its role and your specific
needs, but will require you to determine how to meet those needs. Don’t worry,
though: There are plenty of tips and suggestions on how to do exactly that in this
book.
When you have completed the book, uncovered those needs, and worked to solve
them, the end result will be your prep system—and you will know how to grow and
adapt that system as you run different games and embark on different campaigns.
Phil Vecchione
Buffalo, NY
March 2012

6
 How to Use this Book
Never Unprepared is designed to be read, internalized, and adapted for your own use
as a GM. Whether you’ve run a few games, never run one, or have run hundreds or
thousands of sessions, you’ll find things in this book that you can put to use right
away to improve, streamline, and better understand your prep process.

Why a Book about Game Prep?

I’m hardwired at the genetic level to prepare for things: Through my maternal
bloodline I am half-Scottish, and come from the Johnston clan. Our clan motto
is Nunquam non paratus, “Never Unprepared.” And while this trait does not carry
through to all of my relatives, it is strongly expressed in me. I am rarely without a
pocketknife, and I always have just what I need in my work bag. I hate to be caught
unprepared and am at my most comfortable when I have done my research before
any significant event.
I have been a gamer since 1982 and have been a GM for nearly all of those years.
I cut my teeth on the Moldvay D&D Basic Set and crafted my first dungeons on
graph paper from the stationery store. Over the years I have run numerous cam-
paigns under a variety of systems, and I’ve written out my session notes in many

Artist: Christopher Reach

7
How to Use this Book

different ways. I have written and run thousands of sessions, and have been un-
derprepared, over-prepared, and sometimes just prepared enough. In the course of
running those games, I’ve developed a good feel for what common elements appear
in the prep for any game.
When I am not in my basement gaming (yes, I game in my basement), writing gam-
ing books (I was one of the authors and designers, as well as the project manager,
of Engine Publishing’s two first books, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game
Masters and Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game), or writing
articles for the GMing blog Gnome Stew (gnomestew.com), which I’ve done since
2008, I am a project manager by profession. As a project manager I have experience
in time estimates, scheduling, and planning. I have an understanding of how to take
something complicated, break it up in to manageable parts, and then tackle them
over time in order to achieve a goal.
The culmination of all of this has been a journey, undertaken over the past 10 years,
to understand session prep and how to hack it for best effect. It is through trial and
error that I have assembled the concepts and elements presented in this book, with
the hope that the things that I have learned can benefit other GMs.

The Breakdown
Here’s what you’ll find in each section of Never Unprepared. Each section builds
upon the others.

Understanding Prep
To really dive into how to build your own system for prep, we have to understand
the nature of prep. First we’ll look at the role of prep and its phases, and then we’ll
break down those phases and look at each step and its importance. In this section
you will come to understand your own prep cycle and to identify the phases where
you’re strongest, and those where you need to develop your skills.

Prep Toolbox
In the next section we’ll look at some of the components that go into creating your
notes. We’ll look at various tools to create prep notes; we’ll also talk about creative
cycles and energies, and how to do the right things at the right time. Then we will
address creating a personal prep template that complements your style.

Evolving Your Style

In the final section, we’ll talk about how to evolve and adapt your style as you gain
experience. We will also address how to re-evaluate your tools when you switch
games and as technology changes.

8
 Understanding Prep

Artist: Christopher Reach

9
 Chapter 1: Prep is
Not a Four-Letter Word
When you say “session prep” to most GMs, they imagine a pile of handwritten notes
spread across a table; a kudzu of loose-leaf and ink attempting to consume any free
space it can find. They have blood-chilling visions of sitting at a desk like a monk
penning a copy of the Bible, writing endlessly in silence. They have flashbacks of
high school and college term papers, pulling all-nighters to get them finished in
time, and the fatigue and the low-level self-loathing that comes from making your-
self stay up all night for nothing more than homework.
Session preparation is the act of preparing oneself as the GM for an upcoming ses-
sion where you will run a game for your players. Session preparation (which I will
call prep from now on) is related to campaign preparation, which is the act of orga-
nizing information for a campaign, or series of sessions. This book addresses session
prep, but some of the concepts presented are applicable to campaign prep as well.
Prep has become a much-maligned part of the GMing process, with many GMs
confessing that they enjoy running games but not doing the prep for them. This in
turn leads some to follow the path of the improvisational GM, who doesn’t prep
anything but instead lets the game organically flow from her mind. While that’s a
fine skill to have, for most of us some kind of notes are necessary, be it a map, a few
note cards with some plot points, or 15 pages of story material.
There are also types of stories that are best not run off the cuff. An intricate mystery
with numerous red herrings, a complex political thriller, and a game centered on an
ancient conspiracy are all types of plots where having notes about what is going on
is beneficial to the GM and the players. Running those sorts of games without notes
carries a high risk of not correctly conveying the small details and facts that are the
key to making those kinds of plots work.
As for not liking prep, it is my belief that the reason that many GMs do not enjoy it
is because they are doing it wrong. That may sound bold, and I will defend that point
later on in the chapter, but I think that prep has been given a bad reputation over the
years. In the way that many parts of our hobby are passed down from experienced
GM to new GM, I think that we older GMs have perpetuated the belief that at best
prep is some kind of necessary evil and not an enjoyable, creative process.

The Goal of Prep

Every GM, experienced or new, has been in this situation: on the spot, facing your
players, when something unexpected has happened in the game and you are search-
ing for what to do next. It could be that the players have attacked the king, or the
party has decided to explore the hex to the west and not the one to the north, or
the mage attempted to bluff the villain into revealing his master plan and succeed-
10 ed. In those situations, we freeze up for a moment as our minds scramble to
 Prep is Not a Four-Letter Word

determine how to resolve the event. In that moment of thought, as time seems to be
crawling and the attention of your players is running out like sand in an hourglass,
wouldn’t it be great to look over at your backup GM and have him whisper the an-
swer to you, allowing play to resume?
In essence that is what our prep is: It’s our backup GM. The outcome of good game
prep is the organization of the information we need to keep our game running and
our players immersed in the game.
GMing is in many ways like radio, where silence is death. When I was in college I
was a DJ at the college station, rocking out metal at 10:00 in the morning. The first
lesson they teach you is that having dead air is the worst thing that you can do. If
someone is listening to your station and the song ends, and another song does not
start right away, people reach for the dial and move to the next station. You’re taught
to do anything to avoid that silence, from timing your songs so that one flows into
the next, to jumping on the mic and jabbering away until you can get the next song
going.
GMing is no different: Silence is death. When a session is in full swing and you are
narrating the scene, judging the players’ actions, and playing the roles of the NPCs,
your players are hopefully following you. When this is running at its best, there are
moments when the walls of the gaming space melt away, when you see your players
as their characters and they see your narrative as the world around them. In those
moments you have reached true immersion, the zone of RPGs. When you reach
that zone, you want to stay there as long as possible; those are the moments that we
all—players and GMs alike—remember for years to come.
The last thing you want to do in one of those moments is to fall silent because you’re
unprepared. When that happens, immersion is broken and the gaming table slowly
devolves into building dice towers, book flipping, and sidebar conversations. The
longer the silence goes on the more disruptive those behaviors become, and the
harder it will be to return to that immersive state when play resumes.
Prep is what prevents those moments of silence. The more prepared you are, the less
often those moments of silence will occur in your game and the better your chances
are of reaching that immersive state and remaining in the zone. In other words:

The goal of prep is to give the GM a level of comfort through

the understanding that all the information they need to run
the game as smoothly as possible is readily at hand.
Prep is not just about written notes; it is a mindset for being prepared to run your
game. Are there written notes involved? For most of us, myself included, there are—
but there are other GMs who require only an index card, or even just the thoughts
in their head, to run a session. Regardless of how many notes you have, you still
need to be prepared; to have done your prep. Many factors go into your prep,
11
 Artist: Matt Morrow
including your experience as a GM, the game you are playing, your ability to memo-
rize information, etc. What the final product of your prep looks like will be deter-
mined by you, and will change as you grow as a GM and play different games.

What Makes Good Prep

Prep must have four basic attributes in order for it to be useful. First, it must be ac-
cessible. You must be able to get to your prep when you need it. Second, it must be
organized. You need to be able to find a specific item at the moment you need it.
Third, it must be effective. The information that you locate must be helpful to you
when you find it. Fourth, it must be reliable. You need to know with confidence that
when you need the information it will be there and not have vanished.
What I just described are the high-level requirements for any database system from
a recipe app on your smart phone to the most complex banking servers. Our prep is
a database. It contains information that needs to be organized, stored, and retrieved.
When one of the above attributes fail, then our prep may fail us at a crucial moment
during the game.
When someone designs a database, they identify requirements in advance: what
platform it will run on, what data it will contain, how data will be indexed, etc. In
the case of prep, it has been my experience that we don’t put the same structured
thought into our notes, and thus we may overlook a critical requirement that our
prep needs to fulfill to be the most useful to us. It’s not really our fault, though, be-
cause prep isn’t something we as GMs talk much about.
12
 Prep is Not a Four-Letter Word

The First Rule of Prep Is:

We Do Not Talk about Prep
As gamers we often talk a lot about our hobby. We can spend hours discussing the
best class and feat combos, share tips on how to make the best horror adventures, or
argue until the sun comes up about rolling the dice in front of or behind the screen.
What we don’t spend a lot of time talking about is how to prep for our games. We
all have our own way to do it, but we often don’t share tips on how we actually do it.
It is a solemn ritual that every GM seems to have to discover on her own.
We should talk more about prep, and should share our ideas, tips, and tricks. Many
GMs who stop running games—or worse, stop GMing all together—often cite not
having enough time to prep their game as the reason they quit. In a hobby that needs
every GM it can find, prep should not be a reason to turn in your GM’s screen.
My own style of prep was conceived largely without input from other GMs. Some
of the tools I use were suggested by friends, but the contents of my notes, and the
system I use to plan the time to write them each week, were discovered by trial and
error—a lot of errors. Over the years I evolved a style of prep that I became comfort-
able with, but I never really understood why it worked. I just stuck to it because it
did.
When I became a father, something wonderful happened: Being a dad is insanely
awesome. Something terrible happened as well: My free time vanished. Suddenly
my tried-and-true approach to prep was falling victim to a massive time crunch.
With no real resources to draw upon, I started to work at my prep and find ways to
make it fit into my new, much tighter, schedule. Along the way I learned some valu-
able lessons.

You’re Doing It Wrong

The pain that people feel when they prep their game is due to the fact that their sys-
tem of preparation isn’t aligned with their needs. I’ve run a lot of games in my tenure
as a GM, and I’ve talked to hundreds of other GMs, both successful and struggling.
When I hear complaints about prep, they often fall into one of four categories.

Writing Too Much

This is the most common reason that GMs dislike prep: They are simply writing
too many notes. They often do this because when they first learned to play, they
took copious notes to make sure they were well-prepared for their sessions. Over the
years they have grown as GMs and their skill at handling the game on the fly has
improved, but they are still writing volumes of notes.

13
Chapter 1

A common question that I’m asked when I am on GMing panels at conventions is

“How long should my notes be for a session?” My answer for this is always the same:
As long as you need them to be to comfortably run your game. Less experienced
GMs often need more (and more detailed) notes because it makes them feel com-
fortable GMing. More experienced GMs often require fewer notes because they fill
in the gaps with their improvisational skills. What GMs often fail to do is to review
their skills and attempt to trim down their notes as they grow in experience.

Poor Tools, or Tools You Are Not Excited About

Another common issue with the way people prep is that they are either not using the
proper tools to do their prep, or not using tools that they actually enjoy using. There’s
no denying that prep is a form of work, and like any kind of work the proper tools
are required to get the job done. Your tools need to be matched to the way you work.
When you use tools that match your style of prep, and find tools that are interest-
ing or even fun to use, it makes the act of creating your notes more exciting and can
remove the frustration that many GMs feel when doing prep.

Not Understanding Your Creative Cycle and Schedule

The final issue that I have seen GMs encounter is one that is often overlooked by
most people: understanding their creative cycle. Our ability to be creative ebbs and
flows throughout the day—some people are more creative in the morning, while
others are more creative in the evening (and so forth). Trying to perform a creative
activity when you are at a creative low point can be a very painful process—and one
where the fruit of your labor pales when compared to what you could have done
when you were at your creative peak.
In addition to understanding your creative cycle, you need to understand your per-
sonal schedule. Many people fail to leave themselves enough time in their busy
schedules to get their prep done, so they either feel stressed from rushing or they
fail to finish their prep and wind up canceling game sessions. By being aware of
your personal schedule and the commitments that are part of your life, you can then
properly plan to get your prep done in a relaxed manner.

It’s Time to Make Peace

Prep is not a terrible thing. If it’s part of the foundation of having a great game and
the experiences that come from running a great game, then prep is a valuable ally. In
order to make peace with prep, we need to better understand our creative processes,
our needs as GMs, and the things going on in our lives. When we make the time
for prep, give ourselves the most comfortable tools, and know what we need to ac-
complish, prep becomes a natural and painless process and our games will benefit
from being more prepared.

14
 Chapter 2:
The Phases of Prep
A common misconception is that prep is the thing you do when you write your notes
or draw the maps for your upcoming game. Prep begins before that, and it goes
through a series of phases that can eventually yield a stack of notes and maps. Dif-
ferent people place emphasis on different phases, and people have varying skill levels
in each phase. Mastery of each of the phases of prep will make you very good at this
critical aspect of GMing.
When we talk about the prep process we are talking about starting with nothing
and progressing to a set of notes, maps, and other useful tools that we need for an
upcoming game. This is not only the written material we require for the game, but
also the mental preparation that allows us to run the material in a session. How we
get from nothing to notes is a process that can be broken down into a number of
discrete phases. At each phase we move closer to being prepared to run the game.

How This Came About

I did not set out to define the phases of prep; I came across them naturally as I began
to take an interest in productivity and life hacking (the latter being the practice of
using tricks, shortcuts, and various other methods to increase efficiency in different

Artist: Christopher Reach

15
Chapter 2

areas of one’s life—see lifehacker.com for more). I began to read a lot of articles about
the creative process and how people in various creative endeavors, from artists and
designers to those in advertising, actually worked. At the time, I was a software de-
veloper; this too is a creative endeavor, even if the medium you work in is somewhat
more structured.
I began to take things that I read and apply them to my gaming, specifically the
creative process of coming up with an adventure (or story or plot, if you prefer). The
more I did this the more I began to see that the overall process of prep was much
more than just writing my notes. I began to notice the early phases, the intangible
stage of the creative process where ideas are born. As this introspection continued I
started to see the boundaries between one process and the next. I explored the mean-
ing of each one, and looked for how each phase contributed to the whole process.
The outcome of this process of observation was a more full understanding of a par-
ticular creative process for prep. Based on talking to friends and fellow GMs, I
believe that this is a natural process that many of us follow, in most cases without
really understanding it.

The Phases
Prep has five phases. Collectively, these take the roughest of ideas and hone it into a
scene or story. Your brain naturally goes through these phases, and it’s possible that
you might not always be aware that they are occurring. The phases of prep are:

1. Brainstorming 4. Documentation
2. Selection 5. Review
3. Conceptualization

Brainstorming
This phase is when ideas are spawned. At this stage they are rough, unrefined
thoughts about the story or a given scene, or sometimes even just a line of dialog
within a scene. Ideas are just that: small and incomplete. They lack the refinement of
a fully formed thought. They don’t always make sense; they can be silly, serious, or
even inappropriate. Their power comes from their nearly limitless potential. Because
of their imperfection and incomplete nature, they don’t have to conform to any rules.
They are what they are: possibility in its rawest form.
Brainstorming can happen nearly anywhere and under a wide variety of conditions.
It can happen spontaneously while driving to work, talking to a friend, or even
sitting in a meeting. Some people rely on ideas appearing randomly, calling them
flashes of insight or strokes of genius. Others learn to refine this exercise and are able
to enter a highly creative state in which they generate lots of ideas about a given topic
(or many topics). The best example of this is in the field of advertising, which
16
 The Phases of Prep

combines a highly creative process with crushing deadlines and competition; if you
don’t churn out a lot of ideas, and quickly, you lose.
When we brainstorm we generate a host of unrefined ideas, each of which has a
chance of being something that we may use in an upcoming game. Not every idea
can be used as soon as it springs to mind, though, and that’s where the process of
selection comes in.

Selection
This is the phase where we select the ideas that we want to use in our upcoming
game. Every idea generated during brainstorming has the potential to be a good
idea. In this phase, we apply a dose of reality to that pool of ideas and narrow the
field to one idea—or a handful of ideas—that we will then refine.
In this way you become like the gem cutter who examines several rough stones, ana-
lyzes them, looks for characteristics that make for a favorable stone, and selects the
best candidates to cut. Some stones will be so obviously high-quality that you know
they should be cut immediately, others you’ll hold onto to cut another day, and some
you’ll discard because they will never yield a worthy gem.
How you sort your ideas and select the best ones will have a lot to do with under-
standing the kind of game you are running and the players who are participating
in the game. You will need to understand what fits within the campaign world and
what breaks the fourth wall. You need to be aware of what kinds of stories interest
your players and what stories will disengage or even upset them. You will also need
to understand your own abilities as a GM and determine if a given idea is something
that you think you can pull off in a game.
At the end of the sorting, your idea isn’t really any more fully formed than it was
when it was conceived during brainstorming, but now it has passed through a few
logical filters and been found worthy of additional thought and consideration. You
then need to build out this idea into something more usable in a process called con-
ceptualization, the next phase of prep.

Conceptualization
In the conceptualization phase we now take each idea and expand upon it; we apply
logic, give it a description, and fit it into the overall game. Where the brainstorming
phase was about limitless possibly, conceptualization is about making your idea work
within the reality of your game.
For an idea to be useable within a game, you need to make sure that it fits into the
logic of the story. What characters or groups are involved in this idea and what are
they doing? Do those things make sense based on what you already know about your
game? How will you mechanically express some of the actions or elements of the
world? Do those fit within the rules of the game?
17
Chapter 2

The answers to these questions are what frame the idea and and allow you to inte-
grate it into your story and your game. At times this process is as straightforward as
putting a few orcs in a cavern, but at other times it is the challenging task of deter-
mining why an NPC ally may wish to betray the PCs. In some cases the great idea
that you conceived isn’t strong enough to hold up under closer scrutiny and must be
discarded.
Once you have fully conceptualized an idea and know it’s strong enough to use in
the game, the next step is to capture and organize a number of details about that idea
during the documentation phase.

Documentation
Documentation is the part of the prep process that most people associate with prep,
but as you can see it is really the fourth step in the overall process. In the documen-
tation phase, you write down your concept in a way that’s meaningful to you. What
medium you use and what you write down is determined by your needs as a GM.
You may prefer to handwrite your notes, or perhaps dictate them to a voice-to-text
editor. Some GMs like an elaborate binder with multiple sections, while others only
want a few sticky notes. In terms of what’s written down, some GMs write full de-
scriptions of locations and NPCs while others write a bulleted list of key identifiers.
Sometimes a GM will do her entire documentation in one sitting, while another
GM prefers to break his documentation into multiple sittings.
The documentation phase encompasses many parts of preparing for a gaming ses-
sion. The most common item created during this process is your session notes, the
details of the encounters and scenes that comprise the session. Documentation also
includes creating maps, generating monster and NPC stats, and creating any coun-
ters, tokens, or similar tools you might need. This phase encompasses the creation of
all of the physical or digital components that you may need in the session.
Many GMs consider the act of documenting their notes to be the end of the prep
process, but there’s one more phase that will keep you from missing key elements
that might cause problems during the session: the review phase.

Review
In the final phase of prep, your documentation gets refined and any errors or prob-
lems are identified and fixed. This often-overlooked phase can have a big impact
on the quality of the material you present during the game. This process identifies
things like plot holes, bad dialog, or an over- or underpowered encounter.
The review phase is the dress rehearsal for your prep. With all of the ideas
selected and fleshed out into concepts, and those concepts documented, you can
then review your session notes in their entirety and check for issues. Perhaps there’s
18
 The Phases of Prep

a missing clue without which you can’t get the players from one scene to the next, or
you overlooked the spell list for the evil wizard. This is the time to find those errors
and correct them.
Besides looking for errors, the review phase is the time to look at how prepared you
are to run the scenes that you’ve prepped for the upcoming session. Perhaps one
scene involves a bridge over a raging river. Do you know the falling and drowning
rules for this system off the top of your head? If not, this would be a good time to
look at them and perhaps put a bookmark in that section of your rulebook.

It’s More Natural than You Think

With the phases of prep broken out like this, you may think that the process sounds
unnatural, but it’s just the opposite. In many instances, this is exactly how our minds
work, and we often progress through this process naturally. When presented with
a problem, we usually generate a pool of possible solutions, select the strong candi-
dates, elaborate on a selected solution, test it out, and refine it based on our initial
test. So if this process is natural, why even talk about it? For two reasons: command
and consistency.
Being a good GM means not being a slave to your creative process; your imagination
isn’t a mental desert and you don’t need to wait for drops of inspiration to rain down
upon you. As GMs, we need to be able to prep for our sessions on demand, whether
for the game next week or the game you’re running an hour from now because a
good friend showed up unexpectedly. Your ability to come up with good ideas and
to be sufficiently prepared to run a game should be under your command, able to be
summoned at your will.
When you bring your creative process to bear, you want to be as consistent in the
process as possible. In the next few chapters, we’ll discuss each phase in more detail
and will address what happens when you complete a phase poorly or not at all. By
studying each of the phases and working to improve ourselves in all of them, we can
move towards a more even creative process that yields a stronger product—the sum
total of your prep—because each phase was executed properly.

It Can Happen Anywhere, Anytime

The beauty of breaking prep down into phases is that this process doesn’t need to
happen in a special or specific environment. While you might not be able to write
your session notes while driving to work, you can brainstorm, select ideas, and con-
ceptualize even while sitting in traffic. When you have command of the process
you can engage in it wherever and whenever you have time. Having mastered each
phase, you can move your ideas along the continuum until they are fully formed.

19
 Artist: Christopher Reach
I have done brainstorming while waiting in line to pay for groceries, gone through
the selection phase while standing in line at a fast food restaurant, and conceptual-
ized ideas while in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. I have documented my
session notes between meetings and mentally reviewed them in the shower. While
that may seem like overkill, when you have a spouse, a career, and children, the abil-
ity to prep a game during small slices of free time can be invaluable.

The Order of the Phases is Flexible

While the overall prep process progresses from the brainstorming phase to the re-
view phase, there will be times when you’ll need to move in the opposite direction.
The most common time for this need to arise is during during review when you
find something that just isn’t going to work in your upcoming session. You can then
slide back to documentation or even up to conceptualization to make the necessary
changes. Or you might find that you don’t have enough ideas for a complete story or
adventure, and solve this problem by sliding up the scale to brainstorming in order
to come up with an idea or two to fill the gap.
There’s nothing wrong with doing this; it’s a natural process. In fact it’s a strength
of this prep process that it enables you to go from concrete to abstract and back to
discrete when needed. We often do this as a reflex: It is summed up in the phrase
“back to the drawing board.” When we get stuck on something specific we need to
back up, expand our possibilities, chart a new course, and then proceed.
20
 Chapter 3:
Brainstorming
The greatest stories that have ever been told all started with an idea. We start with
nothing and then from the empty expanse of limitless possibility comes an idea,
then another, and if we’re lucky they keep coming until a swarm of possibilities sur-
round us. Some will be great ideas and some will not. Now isn’t the time to judge
them, though; rather, like children running through a summer field in the evening
chasing fireflies, we need to chase down those ideas and catch them in a jar.
Brainstorming is an exciting mental exercise, but one that doesn’t always come natu-
rally to everyone. For every person who can close their eyes and let the ideas pour
forth, there’s a person who just stares at the wall in frustration. On top of that, many
people feel that inspiration must come to them at its fickle whim and not when
desired.
The truth is that brainstorming is a skill, and like all skills it can be learned and
practiced. If you have trouble believing that, consider the world of advertising. Ad-
vertisers have to create multiple ideas for marketing a product on a tight schedule,
often under pressure. They are able to deliver because they’ve trained themselves to
be creative on command. When your ability to brainstorm is properly developed it
can be used on demand as well. The first step to mastering this skill is to recognize
that it is just a skill and that it can be practiced and improved.

Making Something from Nothing

In terms of session preparation, the goal of brainstorming is to come up with the
idea or ideas that will eventually become the session you’re going to run. Every game
session or adventure can be summed up as one or more ideas. One idea may be the
basis for a whole adventure: “The agents will sneak into the hidden lab and steal the
deadly virus.” Another idea might be a sub-plot for a specific character: “Jean Bap-
tiste will encounter a female musketeer while off-duty.” Or you might have an idea
for a single scene: “Tabris will sneak into the fortress and assassinate the Demon
Knight.”
When you are brainstorming for a new session, ideally you want to come up with
the big idea that frames the entire adventure—but don’t discount a single scene or
sub-plot. While I prefer to come up with the big idea, I have centered sessions on
a smaller scene and built the rest of the session around that idea. You may also be
able to combine a big idea and a few smaller ones into one session, with the big idea
forming the main goal of the session and the smaller ideas forming scenes within
that adventure.

21
Chapter 3

Making the Rain

Brainstorming requires only a few ingredients: a clear mind, a place to think, some
time, and something you can use to capture ideas. When people are learning to
brainstorm or are not very proficient at it, they often need to be somewhere quiet,
with some time set aside. The act of brainstorming can be boiled down to posing a
single question—“What should I do in the next session?”—and then listening to the
answers that follow.
When I brainstorm I start with exactly that question. If nothing comes from that
process, then I ask myself an additional question, such as:

• What kind of session do I • Is there anything my players

want to have? (As in a chase, wanted to do?
a rolling fight, a heist, etc.)
• Is there an NPC or monster
• What would the major NPC that I want to use?
be doing right now?
• Is there a goal that I need the
• Do I want to focus on a PCs to accomplish? (Acquire a
specific character? holy artifact, get the big break
in the case, steal a secret weapon.)
• Is there a type of event I
want to occur? (A big battle,
a flood, a zombie outbreak.)

Often one of these questions will set off the brainstorming session. When the ideas
start coming I try to think of as many as I can and not focus on any details. I like to
capture these ideas in a list, either on paper or electronically. As I am making my list
there may be ideas that I’m drawn to more than others, but I try to avoid any bias
and just collect all of them. There is no set number of ideas I aim to collect in a given
session, but I don’t stop until I have more than one. Having options is better than
having just one idea.
When I collect my ideas, I keep it simple—often just a sentence or two written
down in a bulleted list. For a long time, the Moleskine® notebook was my medium
of choice for note-taking; I have stacks of worn black notebooks filled with various
RPG ideas. Within those pages were the seeds of a number of memorable adven-
tures, but they were greatly outnumbered by the hundreds of ideas that were never
touched (we’ll talk more about that in the next chapter).
When I first started brainstorming explicitly as an activity, I did so in a quiet room
with a pad of paper and a pen. I needed that quiet room to keep me from distractions.
As time went on and as my skill level improved, I learned that I could brainstorm in

22
 Brainstorming

lots of places: between meetings at work, waiting at the doctor’s office, while grocery
shopping, etc. All I need now is a time when I don’t have to speak; from that baseline
I can clear my mind and begin the brainstorming process.

Spontaneous Bursts of Inspiration

Even after you hone your skill at brainstorming, there will still be times when flashes
of insight hit you like strokes of lightning. Those flashes are still of great value even
though they’re not part of the formal brainstorming process, as they often represent
your subconscious delivering to you an idea that was processing in the back of your
mind, waiting to take shape.
In those situations, it’s best if you have something on hand where you can write
down your new idea. Originally it was my little notebooks that were never far from
my reach, but as I’ve transitioned to digital tools that role is now occupied by Ever-
note® (evernote.com).

Brainstorming for a Purpose

In the previous examples of brainstorming I focused on having an open mind, ex-
ploring all sorts of ideas by allowing your mind the freedom to create spontaneously.
There are times, however, where you need specific ideas. For instance, you could be
writing a follow-up adventure to a previous session where the PCs were captured.
In this case, you don’t need every idea in the world—you need ideas about what the
PCs will encounter in prison and how they can escape.
In these cases you can rein in your brainstorming by setting some initial parameters.
The best way to do this is by changing the initial question that you ask yourself. By
making that question more limiting, you can focus your creative process on gener-
ating ideas within specific confines. You may still get a few “rogue” ideas, and you
should write them down; great ideas are sometimes born out of strange associations.
If your mind wanders and you find yourself in a place completely outside your origi-
nal confines, pose the initial question to yourself again, or ask a follow up question,
to focus your thoughts.
Another time where focused brainstorming is a valuable tool is when we have to
move backwards through the prep process. You could be in the conceptualization
phase when you realize that there are some areas of a scene or story that are incom-
plete, and you now need to generate some new ideas to fill in the gaps. Once ideas
have formed you can move back through the phases and incorporate them into your
developing scenario.

23
Chapter 3

When We Do Too Little

As in all phases of prep, when we don’t brainstorm enough our prep suffers. When
we don’t perform enough brainstorming we have a shortage of creative ideas for the
games we run. The first problem that creeps up is that when it’s time to prep for a
game, the well is dry and you’re out of ideas to develop. When this happens there are
two things a GM can do: try to get something written by brute force, a painful and
tedious process, or cancel the upcoming session. Canceling can be dangerous for the
long-term health of a campaign; too many cancelations and a campaign can collapse.
The other side effect of not doing enough brainstorming is an overall lack of origi-
nality in our sessions. When we don’t brainstorm enough, we retreat to ideas that are
established and safe for us. We draw upon ideas that we may have used in previous
campaigns or we dress up ideas from other GMs. We can become desperate and
blatantly take ideas from TV, movies, or books. While there are good ways to take
ideas from other media and use them creatively, desperation often leads GMs to take
ideas without obscuring their origin.

When We Do Too Much

It’s hard to make a case for brainstorming too much, but it can happen. We can get
overly excited about coming up with ideas and overexert ourselves in this phase. Re-
ally, the only downside to brainstorming too much is that you may not be spending
enough time working on other phases, which will cause problems in those areas. If
you’re going to brainstorm heavily, make sure you have the time and a way to capture
all those ideas. It’s terrible to put in the effort to come up with a mountain of ideas
only to forget them because you didn’t have a good way to capture them all.

Techniques for Improving

If you don’t feel like your brainstorming skills are strong, or are just looking for ways
to get better at it, there are ways to improve in this area. The ultimate goal is to be
able to start generating ideas on command and to be able to come up with a short
list of ideas during a few minutes of concentrated effort. Here’s how you can become
better at brainstorming.

Brainstorm on Command
Like getting to Carnegie Hall, the trick to being able to brainstorm on command is
to practice. Dedicate some time to sitting down and writing ideas each day or a few
times a week. Do some freeform brainstorming by asking open-ended questions,
and do some focused brainstorming exercises as well. The more often you do this,
the more practiced your mind will become at getting into that creative space quickly.

24
 Brainstorming

Brainstorm Anywhere
Once you are comfortable brainstorming on command, take it out for a spin. Get
comfortable with brainstorming in different places, such as standing in line at the
grocery store, or on the drive to work, or when your co-workers are late for the next
meeting. The goal here is to get out of needing to be in a quiet place or specific loca-
tion to brainstorm. The reason why you want to be able to do this is so that you can
utilize those little slices of time during the day to work on your prep. (We’ll talk
more about that later on.)
When brainstorming “out in the field,” you will need to make sure your focus re-
mains tight, as distractions from the things going on around you can easily derail the
process. When I find my focus slipping I repeat the opening question to myself over
and over until I get my focus back, or I read the list of ideas that I’ve come up with
so far. The other thing that you will need to address is how you’re going to capture
your ideas. If you’re sitting in a classroom waiting for class to start, getting your ideas
down is easy—but driving on the highway in the middle of the afternoon commute
is going to require a good memory or some digital tools.

Artist: Matt Morrow

25
Chapter 3

Brainstorm Faster
True Story:
Practice will make you faster at generat-
ing ideas, but there are two additional Storm Clouds on
ways to pick up the pace at which you
brainstorm. The first is to work hard
the Express Lane
not to critique or second-guess your During the summer of my junior
ideas (see the next chapter for more on year of college, I was a cashier at a
that). If you’re unconsciously combining grocery store by day and ran an Am-
brainstorming with the selection phase, ber Diceless Role-Playing campaign
then your overall speed will be slower for my friends twice a week in the
than if you were just brainstorming. evenings. My prep time for having a
Don’t pass judgment on ideas as they full evening’s session (with up to four
surface; get them captured and move separate storylines) written up and
on. Once you’ve captured them, you can ready to run was no more than three
come back and be more critical about days. To accomplish this task I began
them. brainstorming at work while ringing
up groceries. I would stand with this
The second way to speed up your brain-
semi-blank stare, my hands grasping
storming is to keep your mind fed with
for items to drag across the scanner
books, movies, songs, and other media.
while my mind churned out ideas.
In essence brainstorming is coming up
While the customer paid or wrote a
with associations between something
check (yes, I am that old), I would
you need, in this case the framing ques-
write my ideas down on the backs of
tion that kicks off the exercise, and the
a small pad of price correction forms.
potential solutions you conceive. Those
I would fill several pages with ideas
solutions come out of making associa-
during the course of a day and come
tions between things that are rattling
home each night with a sheaf of these
around in your brain. So when you read
small papers in my pocket. When
an article in a magazine, watch a movie,
the campaign finished at the end of
or listen to the lyrics of a song, those el-
the summer, I had hundreds of these
ements, themes, and ideas are digested
little papers. If it wasn’t for that men-
and, at some level, stored in your mem-
tal free time to brainstorm, there’s no
ory. The more of those elements that are
way I could have kept the up with the
floating around in your mind, the more
pace of that campaign.
quickly associations are going to be made
and the faster ideas will come together.
Years ago when I was trying to come up with an idea for a campaign, I got the no-
tion to use elements of Gone with the Wind as the foundation for the game. There’s no
way that I would have been able to do that had I not watched the movie—not one I
would normally have watched, but I was trying to impress my girlfriend (now wife)
at the time. Feed your mind and you’ll have more—and better, and different—ideas
to choose from in the next phase: selection, the subject of the following chapter.

26
 Brainstorming

Rate Your Skill Level

Now it’s your turn. For this book to be of the most use to you, you’re going to have
to do some introspection. How will you know what you want to improve until you
understand your current skill level? This simple two-question test will give you some
guidance. Take a moment and consider the following:

Frequency
On a scale of 1-5, how often do you brainstorm ideas as the first step
of your prep process for the sessions you are planning to run?

1 - Never (I never brainstorm; rather 4 - Regularly (Brainstorming is an

I hope for sparks of inspiration) established part of my prep process)
2 - Infrequently (I only brainstorm 5 - Always (I am constantly
if I’m totally out of ideas) brainstorming ideas, and I do
3 - Occasionally (I brainstorm it anywhere I have free time
between every few sessions) to think about my game)

Strength
On a scale of 1-5, when you brainstorm how would you
rate your skill level at coming up with ideas?

1 - Non-existent (When I’m 4 - Skilled (I can brainstorm in most

done brainstorming I still places and can come up with a
have a blank sheet of paper) list of ideas with little effort)
2 - Weak (I get a few ideas 5 - Master (When I need ideas, I can
after considerable work) come up with them anywhere and
3 - Competent (With some in a very short amount of time)
dedicated time and some quiet,
I can get some ideas down)

Adding those numbers together will give you a rating between 2 (unskilled) and 10
(mastery), with 6 being an average score. That’s a rough representation of your cur-
rent skill at brainstorming.
Now take a look at the difference between your Strength and Frequency scores. If
there’s a big difference between the two, focus your efforts on evening the scores out.
If there is little or no difference between the two, then focus on improving your Fre-
quency score first to get a bit more out of brainstorming, as an increase in Frequency
will have the side effect of increasing your Strength score.

27
 Chapter 4:
Selection
In a swirling sea of options and possibilities, the path to greatness can be obscured.
Your path to a great session lies in finding an idea that will grow into that great
session. Some ideas are truly inspired; some are good but will require effort to yield
their fruit; others are interesting to consider, but will never hold up to the rigors of
full development; and some are poison—bad ideas which tempt you with promises
that will never be kept, and which can drive enjoyment out of your next session.
How you sift through your many ideas and separate the wheat from the chaff depends
on your ability to understand the game you’re running, the strengths and weaknesses
of your GMing skills, and the players and characters that will be involved. From that
foundation you can assess which ideas are viable and focus on them.
In the brainstorming phase you generated all manner of ideas, without judgment or
bias. That freedom was necessary to allow your mind to reach beyond its comfort
zone to come up with truly inspired ideas. In this phase you need to regard those
ideas with a critical eye and embrace the notion that some ideas are better than oth-
ers.

A Discerning Mind’s Eye

The selection phase is where you take your unfiltered list of ideas and review it—
mindful of your game, your players, and yourself—with the goal of selecting an idea
that is strong enough to become a great gaming session. Whereas brainstorming is a
skill, selection is more of a discipline. It’s something that requires a level of detach-
ment, requiring you to check your ego at the door and to make selections that are
best for the group rather than for individuals—including yourself as the GM.
During the selection process, you will take a list of ideas and look for one or more
that will be a sound foundation that you can develop into a session. Ideas will be
evaluated against a set of criteria, and the good ones will be those that best fit the
criteria. Lesser ideas will be those that aren’t a good fit for one or more criteria,
whether they’re not quite right or they just plain stink.
Your criteria need to include areas that are important in your game. By understand-
ing each of those areas, you’ll be able to evaluate external ideas and look at them
critically from several different angles. The ideas that look the best from multiple
perspectives are the ones that have the best potential to be developed into great ses-
sions.
Four elements form the basis of the major criteria: players, GMing, the game, and
the campaign.

28
 Selection

Know Your Players

Within a given group of people, individual taste in movies varies greatly. Some peo-
ple love action movies, some enjoy science fiction, and others love political thrillers.
When it comes to roleplaying games, players are no different: Some players love a
long dungeon crawl while others want to play out trade negotiations. Understanding
what your players enjoy during play will help you determine whether or not a given
idea is going to work for your group.
While there are many sources of advice on understanding what kinds of players you
have and the various player archetypes, the definitive source is still Robin’s Laws of
Good Game Mastering. Absent this book, you can of course come up with your own
categories for your players. Virtually all roleplaying games encompass at least these
three activities:

• Roleplaying (Acting and speaking • Problem Solving (Coming up

in character, talking to NPCs) with the big heist, running the
long con, solving the mystery)
• Combat (Getting into fights,
defeating monsters, starship battles)

Artist: Christopher Reach

29
Chapter 4

Think about your players and what kinds of things they like to do in the game. Most
players enjoy all three elements above, but it’s not uncommon for someone to get the
most out of just one facet of the game.
Knowing what types of players you have will help you select ideas for your sessions.
You might have a great idea for a complex mystery, but if none of your players are
really into problem-solving then this is likely an idea that they won’t enjoy—at least
not in its current form.

Know Your GMing Style

All GMs have strengths and weaknesses. Some GMs love to act out every NPC,
some love to plan and play out huge combats, and others like to run political dra-
mas. We’re always most comfortable when we play to our strengths, and always less
comfortable when we leave our comfort zones. I’ll revisit this topic in a moment,
but for now take a moment to think about the kind of GM you are, and about your
strengths and weaknesses, by answering the questions below:

• Do you like to convey lots of • What are your favorite parts of a

details in-game, or do you session (combat, roleplaying with
skim over the little things? your players, creating challenges)?
• What are your favorite types of • Do you like to present
adventures to run (thrillers, dun- challenges for your players and
geon crawls, political dramas)? then sit back and watch as they
try to overcome them, or are you
• Do you enjoy acting out your
more collaborative in working with
NPCs’ actions or are you more
your players to create a story?
subdued in your delivery?
• Are you good at managing a lot of
• Do you prefer adventures that
details and moving parts or do
fit into one session or those
you prefer things to be more
that last for several sessions?
streamlined?
• Do you enjoy running a
slower-paced game, or do you
prefer a more frantic pace?

Based on your answers to these questions, you should have a good feel for your com-
fort zone as a GM. When you review your ideas during prep, consider that any idea
you develop, you’ll eventually have to run as the GM. You are likely to be naturally
attracted to ideas that fit within your comfort zone and repelled by those that fall
outside of it.
As one example, my personal preference is for complex stories with simple combats.
I have never enjoyed coming up with a full spell list for an NPC, and the order they
will cast spells, and on whom, and on what turn. When I select ideas I tend to shy
30
 Selection

away from those that will force me to design a complex combat, but I’m drawn to
ideas that lead to complex narrative scenes.

Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

We all have comfort zones, but we shouldn’t let ourselves become content with stay-
ing inside them. As a GM you should, from time to time, push your boundaries and
expand your comfort zone by running the types of games (and sessions, and stories)
that you aren’t comfortable running. That being said, there are times when doing so
isn’t ideal. In the first few sessions of a game, for example, you should play it safe
so that you lay a solid foundation for your campaign. Also, when you get close to a
climax in the story, it’s better to use plots that have a high comfort level for you so
that you can deliver strong sessions during this critical part of the campaign.
When you do step out of your comfort zone, be sure to account for some additional
time in your prep so that you can do a little extra work to support the areas where
you are weakest. For instance, in order for me to run a complex fantasy combat I
know I’m going to have to devote extra time to reading up on spells, and I might
even want to create a spellcasting cheat sheet. I’ll allow myself extra prep time to
accomplish this additional work.

Know Your Game

Games, like players and GMs, are better at some things than others. Not all ideas
can be elegantly played using any game system. I stress the word “elegantly” because
you can play most styles of games under any set of rules, but some systems will make
your job a lot easier depending on what you want to do with them. Consider the
game you’re running and the strengths and weakness of that system. For example,
does your game feature:

• A highly tactical combat • A robust skill system?

system or a lighter one?
• A fluid magic system for
• A social combat system (i.e., creating effects on the fly?
rules for verbal sparring and
• A system that enables players to
convincing other charac-
take narrative control of the story?
ters to do what you want)?
• Rules for mass combat?
• Rules for aerial combat?
• Rules for kingdom building?
• A fear/horror/sanity system?
• Good rules for creating a heist?

When you’re evaluating an idea, consider the question “How will the rules support
this idea?” You don’t have to discard an idea because your rules aren’t a good fit, but
you might want to discard it if there’s no solid basis for handling that idea in
your game of choice. 31
Chapter 4

For example, consider an idea for a complex treaty negotiation between two king-
doms. If you’re running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons® 2nd Edition it can be done,
but mostly outside of the rules. In Dungeons & Dragons® 3rd Edition, there are rules
for using Diplomacy in this situation, which may make that system a better fit. In
Burning Wheel®, however, there’s a Duel of Wits system for playing social combats
that’s a perfect fit for this premise. You can run the treaty negotiation in any of those
systems (or countless others), but it will likely work better in some than others.

Know Your Campaign

The campaign that you’re running is another area of consideration when selecting
ideas. Any campaign, from a packaged setting like Dragonlance® to a homebrewed
world, will place constraints on what does and doesn’t fit into the setting. That’s why
it’s important to look at whether or not your idea fits the game world, not just the
game mechanics.
Ideas which fall outside of the expectations of the game world can destroy player
buy-in, and can prevent your players from being able to immerse themselves in the
game because of the logical inconsistencies that they introduce. For instance, having
space aliens invade your Dragonlance® campaign in flying saucers is likely to cause a
disruption at your table.
While some genre blending can lead to great gaming moments (the classic AD&D®
module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a perfect example of this), it’s best to focus
your selection on ideas that conform to the logic of the campaign world. If you want
to push those boundaries, it’s a good idea to discuss this with your players in advance
in order to make sure that they’re interested in playing that kind of game. You don’t
have to reveal your whole idea, but you can tease them with something along these
lines: “What if your police detectives were to uncover clues that lead to them discov-
ering the existence of alien life forms?”

From Multiple Angles

With some understanding of your players, your own style, and the game you’re play-
ing, you can now look at your ideas objectively. When I do this, I run my ideas
through a mental filter that looks something like this:

1. On the surface, do I think 3. Is this something that I want

the idea is interesting? (Most to run and, if so, is there
likely I do, since it’s from anything special I need to
my brainstorming list) take into consideration?
2. Is this something that my 4. Does this idea fit into my
players will want to play? campaign setting?
(As a personal rule, I put my 5. Do the mechanics of the game
players’ desires before my own) support this type of idea?
32
 Selection

There are only two deal breakers on the list: If my players wouldn’t play it, or if I
don’t want to run it, then the idea won’t work. If I don’t think the idea is that inter-
esting, there’s still time to punch it up in the next phase, and if the mechanics of the
game don’t support it I can always work around that.

When We Do Too Little

When you grab any old idea you’ve come up with and run with it, that’s doing
too little selection. Sometimes the only thing that drives the selection process is its
alignment to your comfort zone and that presents a few problems.

Letting Bad Ideas Slip In

When you don’t objectively look at how an idea will compare to the desires of your
players, your GMing style, and the game you’re running, you run the risk of putting
development time into a bad idea. The idea will have failed in one or more areas: it
may be boring or offensive to your players, leading to a bad session at the table; it may
be an idea which you can’t effectively pull off as a GM, causing stumbling during
your next session; or it could be an idea that isn’t well supported by the rules, leading
to breaks in the action or arguments over rules and rulings. If this happens too often
during a campaign, interest in the game will wane.

Running the Game Solely for Yourself

When you pick an idea based on a gut feeling or how cool you think it is, you run an-
other risk: running the game you want to run, not necessarily the game your group
wants to play. Whether by accident or, less likely, out of hubris, you stop accounting
for your players’ interests; the game is the game, and they can get on board or not.
If things reach this point, you’ve failed in one of your core GMing duties: helping to
create an enjoyable group experience.
When this happens, it’s often accompanied by a huge disconnect: The GM is hav-
ing the time of his life running a great story which he has fallen in love with, while
his players are having a boring or terrible time because parts of the game—or the
whole campaign—don’t appeal to them. This type of game can’t be sustained and
will eventually implode as players withdraw their support.

When We Do Too Much

Spending too much time on the selection process is often the result of one of two
issues: an inability to select an idea or the elimination of too many ideas. In both
cases the end result is that potentially good ideas are being left behind. When you’re
too selective you wind up rooting yourself firmly in your comfort zone, and while
that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll run a bad session, it does mean that you
aren’t growing as a GM. It also means that, over time, your stories will show a lack
of originality.
33
 Artist: Matt Morrow

The problem with not selecting ideas efficiently is that it delays the start of the rest of
your prep, causing you to have to rush through the other phases; this in turn creates
stress. It can also force you to cut corners as you speed through subsequent phases,
which can lead to other problems (as we’ll discuss later on). When a game feels
rushed, it’s often due to a lack of polish during prep or to the GM’s visible uneasi-
ness about not spending enough time preparing the adventure. Players notice these
things.

Techniques for Improvement

If your ability to select good ideas is rusty or underdeveloped, fear not: There are
ways to improve your skills. Here are a few specific areas that you can work on.

Keep ‘Em Separated

The most important thing to do is to first recognize this skill—selecting good
ideas—as a formal part of your prep. GMs often blend brainstorming and selection
together: They start coming up with a list of ideas, but then jump on the first idea
that looks good and run with it. This can lead to two problems.
The first is that because a full round of brainstorming wasn’t completed, the first
good idea might not be as good as one that would have arisen out of continued
brainstorming. The second is that jumping on an idea right away short circuits an
34
 Selection

important part of the process: looking at ideas objectively and from different levels.
Skipping that element can lead to the issues described in the section When We Do
Too Little, above.

Be Introspective
Your ability to recognize an idea that will work for your group and your game is
based on the personal filter you create for sifting through your ideas. The way to cre-
ate, or refine, that filter is to increase your knowledge of your players, your GMing
style, and the game you’re playing.
If you don’t know what types of gamers your players are, it’s worth figuring that
out. Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering does an excellent job of categorizing play-
ers into understandable archetypes, and I recommend picking up a copy. Once you
know the makeup of your group, it will be clear what kinds of adventures they’ll like
and dislike, making selecting ideas much easier.
To learn your GMing style, ask your players for feedback. Your players, especially if
your group has been playing for some time, know exactly what type of GM you are.
We never see ourselves the way others see us, so it’s likely that you don’t know what
you’re like as a GM. If you’re not thick-skinned or used to objective criticism, this
can be an uncomfortable process, and one that many people avoid. If you’re nervous
about asking directly, send out an anonymous survey and get your feedback that way.
Once you know your style you’ll know what ideas play to your strengths.
Take some time to look at the game you’re running and consider what it does well
and what it does poorly. If you’ve played a lot of different games, you’ll probably rec-
ognize what aspects of the rules are strong, weak, and non-existent. If you haven’t
had exposure to a lot of other games, then do some research: Read reviews of the
game and see what reviewers have said about it, or visit gaming forums like RPGnet
(rpg.net), or those hosted by gaming companies and fans, and ask for help.

Construct Your Filter

Once you know what makes an idea worth spending development time on, the next
thing to do is to prioritize them and decide what’s most important to you. For ex-
ample, is it more important that the idea will be fun for your players, or that the rules
support it well? Or is it more important that the idea fall within your comfort zone,
after which you can consider whether or not your players will like it? Those priorities
will refine your ability to make your selections.
If your issue is that you’re making the wrong selections, then go back and check your
priorities to see if putting them in a different order would result in better selections.
If the issue isn’t your priorities, then review what you know about your players, your
GMing style, and your game to see if you’re making assumptions based on bad data.

35
Chapter 4

Rate Your Skill Level

How are your selection skills? Take a moment to quantify your skill level using the
criteria below.

Frequency
On a scale of 1-5, how often do you formally select ideas from your
list of brainstormed ideas for the sessions you’re planning?

1 - Never (I just grab the first idea 4 - Regularly (I make sure I pick
that looks good and run with it) the best idea on the list before
2 - Infrequently (I only think about I start writing)
selection when I have more than 5 - Always (I evaluate all of my ideas
one good idea on the list) before I pick one for a game)
3 - Occasionally (I go over the list, flag
a few good ideas between sessions,
and stick with those until they
run out)

Strength
On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your ability
to be objective about selecting ideas?

1 - Non-existent (I run what I think 4 - Skilled (I know what kind of

is going to be cool, and don’t GM I am and I know what types
worry about what others think) of players I have, so I look for
2 - Weak (I run what I want as long as the best fit)
I don’t think my players will hate it.) 5 - Mastery (I know my players,
3 - Competent (I look for ideas that myself, and the game I am
are going to be fun to run and running and I make sure an
that I think my players will like) idea will work in all areas)

Adding those numbers up will give you a rating between 2 (unskilled) and 10 (mas-
tery), with an average being a 6. As before, look at the difference between your
ratings in each area and focus on raising the lower score. If both are equal, then
start by improving the Strength of this skill, so that when you do take time to select
ideas you’ll select better ones. As your ability to make good selections improves you
will reject more ideas, which will force you to review and select ideas more often.
Your initial list will take on a whole new life.

36
 Selection

True Story:
Some Ideas Get Better With Age
When I start a campaign, I do an initial round of brainstorming to come up
with ideas that seem appealing for the game I’m going to run. At this point I
don’t know much about the characters or the game world. My selection of the
idea that will form the basis for the first session gets made based on a gut feeling
rather than a more refined set of criteria.
I always keep that initial brainstorming list, adding to it in subsequent brain-
storming sessions; I never take anything off the list. Later on in the campaign,
when it’s time to select more ideas, I go back to my list and start from the top.
What I have found is that as I revisit the list, those same initial concepts be-
come more and more interesting as I know more about the characters and the
campaign. After a session where the PCs were betrayed by the local baron, that
half-formed idea about overthrowing the local ruler suddenly becomes more
appealing. Brainstorming is naked and raw, creating something from nothing.
Selection is all about context, and the longer your game runs the deeper your
context becomes—and the more likely it is that weaker ideas from your initial
list will take on a whole new life.

Artist: Christopher Reach

37
 Chapter 5:
Conceptualization
An idea is just a seed; it is compact and immature. For it to grow into something
that you can use, you’re going to need to plant it in the soil of your mind, let it take
root, and allow it to grow and to eventually flower. The act of expanding an idea into
something that can be played, be it a scene or a full session, is called conceptualiza-
tion.
This process began with a flood of ideas, and by applying some insight based on your
knowledge of your players, GMing style, game, and campaign, you plucked out an
idea to be used for your upcoming session. Now that idea must be expanded and
transformed into a logical session, adventure, or story through a series of questions
and answers.
When you conceptualize an idea you need to think it through like a story that you’re
going to play at the gaming table. Like any story, it will need to begin, progress along
a logical path, and come to some conclusion. That doesn’t mean it has to be linear,
or that story trumps player choice; rather, it’s a framework for conceptualization. If
your session were a story, what would it need to include? You’ll need locations and
key NPCs, scenes that flow well (and, if applicable, into each other), a dramatic pos-
sible conclusion, and more—with no plot holes or other inconsistencies.
In this phase you’ll be coming up with a lot of information. Depending on how good
your memory is, you may want to take some notes. The goal for this phase is not to
create detailed, structured session notes, but rather to become familiar with the full
scope of the session. If taking notes helps you to do that, there’s nothing wrong with
that.

It’s In the Details

If you’re like most people, you learned the process of conceptualization at an early
age—when you learned to write. At its core, this process can be summed up by five
classic questions: Who? What? Where? Why? How? (In gaming “When?” is gener-
ally a foregone conclusion: “When the adventure takes place,” usually in the next
session.) These questions taught you to create details based on an idea, which is the
perfect place to start.
Take the idea you selected in the previous phase of the prep process and ask yourself
the questions below. In order to provide clear examples, the questions in this section
are geared towards a traditional fantasy game (good guy PCs vs. bad evil villains),
but that’s not to imply that they only work for that genre or style of game.

38
 Conceptualization

Who—Who’s after the MacGuffin? Who’s trying to stop the PCs?

Who are the NPCs who will be involved?

What—What are the PCs looking for? What will happen to move
this session along? What will make this scene more exciting? What
will happen if the PCs fail? What will the villain do to retaliate if
they succeed?

Where—Where will the PCs be when the session begins? Where do

they need to be when it ends? Where will the session take place?
Where are the villains lurking?

Why—Why would the PCs want to help? Why does the villain need
to succeed? Why is there a powerful curse on the temple?

How—How will the PCs get to the dungeon? How will the villain
set his defenses? How is the trap triggered? How will the NPCs be
changed after this session?

By asking these questions you’re prompting your mind to come up with answers that
expand the original idea into a story. Through this process of questions and answers
you not only expand the story, but also become comfortable with it. When your
players go off in an unexpected direction, that level of comfort will aid you in keep-
ing the game exciting and bringing the session to a fun conclusion.
In addition to the basic questions above, there are some specific questions I like to
make sure that I can answer about an idea. These questions help me to formulate
the logical reasoning behind the story. When there’s a logic gap in a session, you
run the risk of a player noticing it and having it jar them out of their immersion and
enjoyment of the game. The more logical your story is the better it will flow. In some
cases the answers to these questions don’t need to be presented to your players—just
knowing them will help you run a better game.
Goal—What is the struggle within this story?

PC Motivation—Why are the PCs going to want to partake in this

story?

Opposition—Who or what is the person or force that is preventing

the PCs from completing the story?

Opposition Motivation—Why is the person or force opposed to the

PCs?

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Chapter 5

After understanding the logic of the story I then like to do my casting. This is where
I figure out what interesting locations and NPCs will be part of the story. Some of
this will have been worked out by answering the questions above, but not all of it.
PCs’ Allies—Who are the friends of the PCs? Why would they
help? What can they do?

Opposition’s Allies—Who are the friends of the opposition? Why

would they want to help? What can they do?

Other Interesting Characters—Who else will the PCs encounter

during the course of the session?

Locations—What are some interesting locations where this story

could take place? Where are those places located?

Seventh Grade Composition

Now with some understanding of what’s at stake, the motivations of the major par-
ties, and some interesting locations and NPCs, it’s time to lay out the session. There
are as many ways to plan an adventure as there are to write a story, but I like to
stick with the basics: The tried-and-true dramatic structure that I learned in seventh
grade.
Introduction—How does the story begin? In a tavern, on a routine
patrol? Based on player and PC motivation, we know that once the
PCs encounter the problem they will want to see it to conclusion.

Rising Action—What steps will the PCs take to confront the op-
position? Is there going to be combat? A tense negotiation? Some
social manipulation? Depending on the length of the story, I like
3-4 of these scenes.

Climax—Where will the PCs confront the opposition to determine

who will win and who will fail? What will the opposition do to
prepare for that confrontation?

Dénouement—What happens if the PCs succeed? What happens if

they don’t?

When I feel like I can outline the entire session, I know I’ve reached the end of this
phase of prep. I like to allocate a day or two of real time to think about it, because
it’s rare for me to be able to conceptualize the whole session in one sitting. I prefer to
answer a few questions while driving to work, answer a few more while waiting for
a meeting to start, and get the rest of my thinking done the next day while at home.
I make as much time for the conceptualization phase as I do for the documentation
phase (phase four, which we’ll cover in the next chapter).
40
 Conceptualization

Knowledge is Power
As in the selection phase, the better you understand your players, your campaign,
and your game, the better your answers to the questions covered in this phase will
be. An idea can grow into a session in many different ways, each with their own
unique path from introduction to dénouement. When you ask and answer the ques-
tions in this chapter, keep these things in mind:
What kind of players do I have? Knowing that your players prefer
combat to negotiation will lead to one type of session, while gam-
ing with a group that prefers elaborate social plots will lead to an-
other kind of session.

How does this idea fit into my campaign? A campaign is a collection

of stories. You want this story to fit the tone of your campaign, and
you want it to be something that would be believable within the
game world. For example, would a session about a plot to overthrow
the emperor work in a kingdom that has known peace for a thou-
sand years? Probably not—but it might work well if all wasn’t what
it seemed, and the kingdom were actually seething with discontent.

What mechanics will be used in this session? The story you create is
going to be expressed in part through the mechanics of the game.
You will want to make sure that your game provides the mechanics
needed (and that you know them well enough to use them with-
out stumbling), or be comfortable enough to create what you need
within the system. For example, a story about a tense shipboard
race through dangerous waters is going to require more work to pull
off with a system that lacks chase mechanics.

Conceptualizing Scenes
The techniques for conceptualizing sessions described in this chapter can, with a bit
of tweaking here and there, also be applied to conceptualizing individual scenes.
Sessions are made up of a series of scenes, whether those are planned or arise organi-
cally during play, and when you prep a scene you need to know the answers to most
of the basic questions:
What’s the purpose of this scene?

Who’s in this scene, and what are their motivations?

Where is this scene taking place?

When is this scene taking place?

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Chapter 5

Answer the questions that make sense for the scene, ignore the ones that don’t, and
you’ll be well prepared for every scene. You can even circle back to this phase during
the documentation phase, and use these tools to refine a specific scene that you’re
outlining.

When We Do Too Little

When conceptualization is shortchanged or eliminated it’s often the session itself
that suffers. On its own, an idea isn’t enough to be a story. An idea is a great start,
but without additional details it will lack the dramatic elements necessary to create
a positive and memorable experience at the gaming table. Your players will quickly
identify, often through painful experience, the corners that you cut during prep.
Here are the three most common problem areas when it comes to conceptualization.

Logic Gaps
Logic gaps are one of the most obvious signs that you didn’t do enough conceptu-
alization. If you forgot to consider the opposition’s motivations, your players won’t
understand why the opposition is involved in the adventure. If you overlooked the
connecting elements between scenes, causing the opening scene to be set on Earth
and the next scene to be set at Moon Base Delta, that’s going to be jarring for your
players.

Artist: Christopher Reach

42
 Conceptualization

Another common issue is creating an obstacle without considering the tools the PCs
have at their disposal, allowing them to circumvent it in a way that isn’t much fun
for anyone. For example, you might create a villain and his lair in a hurry, including a
few traps and several encounters to wear down the PCs, but you forget that the PCs
possess teleportation and remote viewing magic. The PCs use scrying to locate the
villain, teleport there, and sidestep the entire adventure. Whether you let them do it
or make up an excuse for why that approach doesn’t work, neither solution will feel
satisfying for most groups. (Contrast this with a scenario where the PCs didn’t have
those capabilities but spent time and effort acquiring them in order to accomplish
the same goal; that’s a clever solution to the problem, and everyone would have had
fun in the process.)
The most painful logic gap arises when you don’t ensure that the PCs have reasons
to undertake an adventure. Once your players start questioning why their characters
should care about the mission, crisis, or situation that’s on the docket, you’re left with
very few options—all of them bad. You can ask your players to just go along with
it, dump the material you prepped and improvise a new adventure on the spot, or
railroad the PCs into the adventure. All three options will sour your players’ enjoy-
ment of the game.

The Blahs
It’s all too easy to cover all of the important areas of conceptualization without doing
so in a creative or imaginative way. With time running out to prepare the session,
or because you’ve slipped back into your comfort zone, you take the easy way out
instead of coming up with creative and imaginative answers to the questions in this
chapter. The result is a logical, consistent story that’s also whitewashed, less exciting,
or—worst of all—boring.
For example, imagine a sci-fi game where the PCs are going to battle a band of space
pirates in the cargo hold of a ship. Which version of the cargo hold sounds like more
fun?
A. The cargo hold is full of boxes.

B. The cargo hold is full of boxes that are being picked up, moved,
and set down by automated drones. The drones ignore the combat-
ants, but as the boxes are moved they reveal, conceal, and provide
cover to both the PCs and the pirates. Clever PCs may be able to
hack into the drones, ride them, or otherwise put them to creative
uses.

Both are cargo holds, both are reasonable locations for a combat, but the first one is
going to be just another fight while the second will lead to a battle your players will
remember.

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Chapter 5

Slow to Document
When you take an idea and immediately start writing session notes around it—
in other words, go straight from brainstorming to documentation, skipping this
phase—it doesn’t usually go well. There are too many details missing, so you have to
stop and think about what to write for each part, pause to consider each detail, etc.
The end result is a slow, frustrating documentation phase during which you write,
then must pause to collect your thoughts and come up with new ideas before writing
some more, and so on.
This process is painful and time-consuming. It takes much less time to document
something you’ve fully thought out and are comfortable with than it does to hap-
hazardly document an underdeveloped idea. The longer it takes to document your
game the more you run the risk of not finishing in time, which leads to not having
all your notes for a session or to canceling the session altogether. To avoid canceling
the session you may push harder to keep writing, raising your frustration and stress
levels about the game.

When We Do Too Much

When we conceptualize too much we begin to over think the session or scene. There
are two major pitfalls related to over thinking your prep.

Too Much Detail

A problem has an infinite number of solutions, but your players will only ever pick
one. As a GM, you shouldn’t try to consider every possible solution, but rather to
cover the most likely one. When you try to account for every possibility, you’re using
up mental energy on things that most likely won’t come up in the game. It’s better
to expend energy on the most likely solution, plus perhaps the two next most likely
contingencies if you have time.
This can be tricky to figure out at first, but when you’re comfortable with your players
it becomes obvious what solutions they’ll try first in most situations. As you come to
understand that, you will know which solutions to focus on and which ones to avoid
thinking too much about.

Bloated Session Notes

The other downside to over thinking a scene or session is the need to document all
the additional details that are involved. When you do this, you create bloated, overly
long session notes, only a small fraction of which will get used during the game.
Those notes will contain useful elements as well as unnecessary detail, of course, but
you’ll have to sift through the chaff to get to the wheat during play—and that takes
up even more time.

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 Conceptualization

Techniques for Improvement

Conceptualization is like any other skill: It can be learned and improved. Here are
a few techniques that can help you enhance your ability to create great adventures.

Conceptualization Is Its Own Step

Much like brainstorming and selection are too often combined into one hybrid step,
it’s easy to do the same with conceptualization and documentation. To improve at
conceptualization you need to dedicate time to this step and make it separate from
documentation. Because most of conceptualization is a mental exercise and doesn’t
require writing, this process can be performed anywhere you like as long as you have
some time to think.
We’ll cover how to utilize downtime to prep for your game in more detail later on,
but like brainstorming you can conceptualize while driving, waiting for a dental ap-
pointment, or standing in line at the grocery store. When you have a few minutes to
think, just take the idea or scene and start to work it out in your head. Ask yourself
the questions and listen to the answers. The more mental prep you do by conceptu-
alizing the scene, the more prepared you’ll be when you sit down to document your
notes.

Go in Circles
Sometimes the answers to the questions in this chapter don’t come easy. One or two
will come quickly, but the others are slow to form. You can smooth things out by
making conceptualization an iterative process: Answer some of the questions, sum
up what you have determined, and then ask the next questions. For instance:
“The fight with the space pirates will take place on the ship.
Okay, on the ship, but where? Engine room? No, too secure.
Bridge? No, how would they have gotten there? Cargo hold?
Yes. Cargo hold is good.
Okay, so the fight takes place in the cargo hold. What’s happen-
ing in there while the fight is going on? Maybe the boxes are
moving around? How? Automated lifts are picking them up
and moving them. Why? The ship’s AI is optimizing the cargo
for unloading at the next stop.”
That exchange of internal dialog could have happened all at once, say while driving
to work, or you could have thought through the first paragraph while waiting in line
at the coffee shop and the second paragraph while out grocery shopping later in the
day. If you can retain what you came up with in your head, that’s excellent—but if
not, be sure to jot down a sentence or two so that you won’t forget any details.
45
 Artist: Matt Morrow

True Story: The Columbo Question

As an IT project manager, I spend a lot of time working with teams to design
systems and software. In most cases my job is just to ask questions and keep
everyone talking. Rarely am I the guy who has the answer to the problem; I’m
the guy that gets the person who does have the answer to make that solution
surface. When things get quiet at the table I often ask what I call a “Columbo
question.” In the TV show Columbo, which first aired in the 1960s, the titular
character would ask a series of innocuous questions to get suspects to drop their
guard before slipping in the real question, which was simple and asked in a self-
deprecating way. This question always prompted the killer to blurt out some-
thing they shouldn’t have said. A good Columbo question provokes an almost
involuntary response.
When I conceptualize, I often play the same role in my own head. I ask simple
questions and then answer them, filling in the surface details for the story or
scene. I will keep going in this fashion until all the details are covered, and then
I’ll drop a Columbo question. Most often, this is either “Why would the PCs
be interested in doing that?” or “What would make this scene more exciting?”
When I can answer that question, I know that I understand the story or scene.

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 Conceptualization

Rate Your Skill Level

How are your conceptualization skills? Using the same categories and rankings from
the previous chapters, rate how often you conceptualize and how skilled you are at
this activity.

Frequency
On a scale of 1-5, how often do you carry out conceptualization
separately from the act of writing up your session notes (documentation)?

1 - Never (I don’t do any upfront 4 - Regularly (I make some time to

thinking before I write) think about the overall game and all
2 - Infrequently (I think about the the scenes before writing)
overall story before I write, but leave 5 - Always (I’m thinking about my
out the details of the scenes until I upcoming game all the time)
start writing)
3 - Occasionally (I think about the
overall story and a few key scenes,
but the rest I work on when I’m
writing)

Strength
On a scale of 1-5, how much detail do you go into during conceptualization?

1 - Non-existent (I never think about 4 - Skilled (I ask the basic questions

details ahead of time, I wing it and look at motivations within the
when I write my notes or run the story and/or scenes)
game) 5 - Mastery (I analyze my ideas from
2 - Weak (I make sure that the overall multiple angles, looking for logical
story follows a loose narrative, but flaws, and don’t stop until I’m
that’s it) satisfied that the story and/or scenes
3 - Competent (I ask the basic who/ are sound)
what/where questions)

As before, add up the numbers to get a score ranging from 2 (unskilled) to 10 (mas-
tery), with the average being a 6. If you scored lower in Frequency, work on plan-
ning some time to make conceptualization a normal part of your prep process (and
on doing it during downtime, like when you’re driving). If your Strength score was
low, focus on coming up with a set of questions you should run through when you’re
working through this process. That way, when you conceptualize you’ll get the most
out of your efforts.

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 Chapter 6:
Documentation
Ideas become concepts and concepts become documents. Writing things down has
been important to most cultures since the dawn of civilization—cave drawings be-
came symbols, symbols were joined by syntax, and written language followed. At
the same time, humans have always used verbal communication as well, with its
phonemes and similar syntax. Why have two forms of communication unless both
were equally valuable?
Verbal communication is the medium of the now. It’s how we convey concepts to
those around us, and to those connected by technology such as the phone or a video
chat. It’s fast, but it can be messy; it’s fleeting, and it lacks reproducibility (think of
the children’s game “Telephone”). The written word is the opposite: It is an everlast-
ing medium. It’s slower to produce, but clearer; it’s fixed, and it’s reproducible.
What does that have to do with RPGs? Being a GM is a very hectic job. During the
course of a game you’re likely to be doing more than one thing at any given time, or
doing things in rapid succession. Things like:

• Narrating a story • Reading the mood of the table

• Making a rules judgment • Responding to player questions
• Interpreting the outcome of the dice • Making tactical decisions

That’s a lot to do moment to moment, and doing it requires a great deal of mental
processing power. Now imagine that you have to hold the whole plot for a complex
mystery, with all its red herrings, clues, and the identity of the true killer, in your
mind while doing all of the above. It’s very likely that something is going to get
missed, and the complex mystery will become a confusing mess.
This is where written game notes come in. Your written game notes are static; they’re
your anchors for the game. When you lose focus because of a player question or
other table event, they allow you to pick up where you left off. When your players
throw you a curveball by making an unexpected choice, it’s your notes that enable
you to review what you planned and let your brain make the necessary adjustments.
In a campaign that spans months or years, it’s the everlasting nature of the written
word that allows you to keep track of everything as the game progresses. That’s the
purpose of the documentation phase—the stage of prep where you write everything
down.
This chapter doesn’t focus on the specific content you record or the tools you use
to write or create your session notes; those topics are covered later on. Instead, this
chapter focuses on the process of documenting your ideas and how that process fits
into your prep.
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 Documentation

It’s Personal… Very Personal

Documentation is the phase where you record your ideas in a format that will allow
you to access them at a later time. Oftentimes that means written notes, but you’re
not restricted to that format. There are as many ways to document a session as there
are GMs in the world. Some GMs like index cards, others prefer to use a wiki, and
some use sticky notes—if it can be written on or in, chances are a GM somewhere
has tried to use it to record their notes.
Your documentation has a purpose that is often overlooked by many GMs, though.
The true goal of your session notes is to make you comfortable enough to run your
session. As long as your notes enable you to run your game with confidence, it doesn’t
matter what medium you use or how many or few words you write.
There is no magic number of words or pages to write for a session. If writing 20 pages
of detailed notes is what it takes to make you comfortable at the table, then that’s
what you need. If all you need are a few ideas on an index card to be ready to improv
your way through an evening, that’s just fine as well. The worst thing you can do is
need 20 pages of notes but only allow yourself the index card.
There are many things that can be documented in your session notes, including:
Scenes/Encounters—Discrete, usually connected, parts of the ses-
sion. Scenes are more common in story-focused games, while en-
counters are more common in sandbox, tactically-focused, or loca-
tion-based games. Both scenes and encounters include:

Description—To explain the environment to your players

Dialog—Specific things for NPCs to say

Objects—From a rolling boulder to a magical sword, scenes

often include important objects

Stat Blocks—The game statistics for various NPCs and/or monsters

that will come up during the session can be jotted down, or you can
reference the page number in another book where the full stats can
be found.

Maps/Drawings—Pictures of the sites that will be involved in the

session, from crude sketches to elaborate illustrations. Maps can
depict anything from a single bedroom to an entire orbital complex.

Rules—Specific game rules that may come into play during the ses-
sion. These can be rules that you don’t use that often or home-
brewed rules that apply to a specific situation.

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Chapter 6

Your comfort level with each of these areas will determine how detailed your notes
need to be. If you can recite the most esoteric rules in the book, then you won’t need
to document rules in your notes. If you’re weak at coming up with good dialog for
your NPCs, then you’ll want to have more notes dedicated to important dialog.
(We’ll talk more later about how to figure out your specific strengths and weak-
nesses and how to reflect them in your documentation.)
Documentation is writing, and as such requires something to write with and upon,
somewhere to write, and time dedicated to the writing process. Depending on the
tools you use and your ability to focus on writing despite distractions, this process
may have to occur in the quiet of your home office using your favorite pen and
leather-bound notebook, or you might be able to tap out notes on your tablet while
riding the train to work.
Because of the varied ways that this process can be undertaken, there is great room
for experimentation; it’s worth trying out different writing media and note taking
methods to find the combination that you’re most comfortable with. That combina-
tion will be different for every GM, but one thing is true for all of us: When you find
the right combination for you, the documentation process will become comfortable
and enjoyable.
Over the years I’ve experimented with about every medium I could find for taking
notes. Like many GMs of my age group (read: old), I started out using loose-leaf
and graph paper and writing with a pencil. Since then I’ve tried bound journals,
index cards, word processing programs, web pages, wikis, and note-taking software.
I’ve written my session notes while lying on the couch, at lunchtime at work, during
meetings, on airplanes, in hotels, outside, etc. Currently I use Microsoft® OneNote
and write mainly at home or during my lunch break at work, but I’m always evaluat-
ing new options.

The Conceptualization/Documentation Blob

The hardest part of documentation is separating it from conceptualization. The two
are distinct activities that often get lumped together. In the conceptualization phase,
an idea is expanded and fleshed out with additional details. In the documentation
phase that detailed idea is recorded in the form of written notes. But often a writer
will come up with an idea, and then sit with a blank piece of paper (or in front of a
blank screen) and work up the whole story.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this approach, but it’s not as efficient
and generally isn’t the best use of your time. When you merge documentation and
conceptualization into a single effort, there will be gaps during your writing time as
you conceptualize the next element before moving on. This process can be made to
work—think of essay tests at school, where you’re given a topic and expected to write
an essay on the spot. But how much easier is it to write that essay if you’ve had a day
to think about the topic beforehand and can show up with an outline?
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 Documentation

While conceptualization and documentation can be done at the same time, you’re
missing a great opportunity to improve your ideas by thinking about them solely
during the conceptualization phase. Documentation requires a place and time to
write, but conceptualization can be done anywhere you can clear your head to do
some thinking. Take advantage of the different requirements for these activities and
leverage the free time between games to conceptualize your ideas, and then see how
much faster the writing comes when it’s time to work on documentation.

The Conceptualization/
Documentation Cycle
No matter how well you separate the two activities there will always be some natural
overlap between documentation and conceptualization. But remember that you’re
not locked into traveling in order through your phases of prep; you’re free to move
backwards and forwards through the “prep continuum” as needed.
There will be times when you start documenting a conceptualized idea and realize
that you’re missing a detail that would make the scene complete. It could be that you
forgot to come up with a good motivation for an NPC, or that you forgot to fully
describe the location you want to use in the scene. When this happens, it’s natural to
disengage from documentation and slide back to conceptualization to work up the
details you’re missing, and then return to documentation.

Artist: Christopher Reach

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Chapter 6

At present, I run a game every three weeks. I use the week after my game to do my
campaign prep and brainstorming. I then take my idea and spend the second week
casually conceptualizing it. The week before the game is when I write my notes. Af-
ter a week of conceptualizing on and off, I sit down to write with an outline of scenes
and most of the scenes framed out. This makes documentation pretty painless, as all
the hard work has already been done.

When We Do Too Little

How much documentation is too little? It’s not about page count—it’s about comfort
levels. Too little documentation means that you haven’t written down enough details
about the session to be comfortable running it. There’s too much information in your
head, and it isn’t present in a way that is accessible and useful. For some GMs this
means every little thing gets written down, while for others it means just an outline
on a card, but when you do too little for either GM the effect is the same.
When you aren’t comfortable running the session, or are caught off guard, you begin
to stumble. You pause too often, shuffle papers, or crack open your books. Your play-
ers will sense this at once and then mentally disengage from the game. This is a killer
when you are GMing. Doing solid prep in each of the phases will help to avoid this.
Let’s go into more detail about these problems and how to avoid them.

Missing Notes
The productivity guru David Allen says that the mind is a terrible tool for remem-
bering things. “Psychic RAM,” as he calls it, will hold something for you, but won’t
always bring it back up when you need it—especially if you’re distracted. The act of
GMing is a constant distraction. If you have stored all the critical details of your
game in your mind, and are trying to retrieve them while handling the action at the
table, you’re going to struggle. When that happens, you start to miss things.
Depending on the game you play and the types of sessions you run, missed details
have different levels of impact. If you’re running a classic dungeon crawl and you
forget to mention the door to the right, your players may have only missed a few
encounters, some XP, and a bit of treasure. If you’re running a gothic mystery and
you forget to give the players an important clue, though, then it may be impossible
for the players to solve the mystery, or you may be required to pause the game and
retcon (short for “retroactive continuity,” changing something in the game after the
fact) finding the clue—a painful process.
If you find yourself struggling to manage the details of your session, and are having
frequent pauses where you are mentally scrambling to figure out what to do next,
then you need to document more details.

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 Documentation

Caught Unaware
As discussed in the conceptualization chapter, an adventure has a progression from
start to finish. In literature, the author is in complete control of how the characters
will progress through an arc. GMs don’t have that luxury. Your players have free will
to decide how to progress through the adventure. At the same time, no matter how
much freedom the players have, GMs often expect them to take a certain path and
do their conceptualization and documentation with that path in mind.
But no matter how well you know your players, there will be times when they do
the unexpected (which is one of the things that makes GMing so much fun). When
they do, as the GM you’re expected to adjust the adventure and keep going. If you
don’t have a written version of the adventure on hand, then you’re much more likely
to be at a loss about how to move forward.
If you’re storing the entire adventure in your head and are thrown a curve ball, you
run the risk of freezing up as you try to remember where the story was going so that
you can account for this unexpected change. Documentation gives you something
to refer to so that you can focus on the adjustments, not on remembering every last
detail.
If you find that you often react badly when caught unaware by your players’ decisions,
you may not be documenting enough details about the game to use as reference.

Rules Fumble
Nothing cools a game like flipping open a rulebook during a tense or dramatic scene.
Imagine an epic battle on thin, cracked ice between the PCs and the big villain.
Suddenly the ice under a PC gives out and she goes under! The player looks at you
anxiously, waiting to find out what happens next. Do they have to make a Swim
check? Do they take damage from the icy water? How long can the character hold
her breath?
If you’re unprepared, you knew that the battle was going to take place on the ice but
figured that the rulebook had all the relevant rules in it—you could just look them
up. But which section tells you how long someone can hold their breath? Is it covered
with environmental threats or in the section about the Stamina attribute? Where
are the rules for Swim checks, again? Does armor affect swimming, and is that rule
covered in the armor section or the chapter on skills?
If you’re prepared, you knew that the battle was going to take place on the frozen
lake and planned ahead for the mechanics that might come into play. You wrote
down a few notes about Swim checks, characters holding their breath, how armor
comes into play (including the modifiers for the armor the PCs are wearing), and
included page numbers from the rulebook just in case.

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Chapter 6

The prepared GM won’t miss a beat, and will be able to keep the action moving and
the players engaged. The unprepared GM will break out his rulebook and grind the
game to a halt.
If you find that you’re relying too heavily on rulebooks during the game, you may
not be including enough notes about relevant rules in your session documentation.

When We Do Too Much

Is there really such a thing as too much documentation? If documentation helps you
be prepared, can you be too prepared? The short answer is no, you really can’t be too
prepared—but there are a few downsides to over-documentation.

All You Do Is Write

Documentation takes time, and it also requires you to be sitting and working with
your writing medium of choice. So when you over-document, you use up a lot of
time that might be spent working on other aspects of your game, or not working
on your game at all. If you have a lot of free time, then you likely don’t feel the
crunch from this because you are just working on your notes. When you have more
time constraints due to work, relationships, and/or children, this time crunch can
be crushing.
In many cases GMs who feel like they can never get their notes written before a ses-
sion are writing too much. This then leads to a downward spiral:

• Stress from not getting notes done • GM’s desire to run the
game decreases
• Game not fully prepped
• Group play suffers
• GM not fully comfortable to
run incomplete session • Campaign canceled
• Not running sessions
with full confidence

The worst part of this spiral is that it’s not tied to any specific campaign or game, but
rather is a cloud that hangs over that GM that goes from game to game. Not over-
documenting will help you avoid this situation.

On the Cutting Room Floor

Another side effect of over-documenting is that some of your material won’t get
used. Your players will take the session down a particular path, and some of the
choices they will make will render some of your documentation moot. For instance,
consider a game in which you’ve written down names and personalities for everyone
in the town near the dungeon. When your players visit the town, they can interact
with absolutely anyone and you’ll know who they are, their goals and aspira-
54
Artist: Christopher Reach
tions, their secrets, etc. Then during the session, your players decide to skip the town
and just head right into the dungeon because they don’t need any supplies.
A good GM chalks up that extra documentation to experience and picks up the
pieces with hopes of incorporating it into the game at a later date. Perhaps the PCs
will visit the town after exploring the dungeon, or if they avoid the town altogether
then the material can be used for a town somewhere else.
A bad GM resents the players for not using the material he created, and railroads the
PCs into town so that the material can be used. This might be satisfying for the GM,
who can now justify his hard work, but can lead to frustration or resentment among
his players. If you don’t over-document, you’ll avoid the temptation to do this.

Techniques for Improvement

You can refine and improve your techniques for documentation. Here are a few tech-
niques to make your documentation more efficient and effective.

Split Up Thinking and Writing

To be more efficient with your documentation, avoid the conceptualization/docu-
mentation blob: performing both activities at the same time. Instead, make sure you
dedicate time to conceptualize your ideas, so that they mature and grow in detail.
Use the tips in the previous chapter to hone your conceptualization skills, so that by
the time you sit down to write you’re just putting the details from your mind down
on paper. This will greatly speed up your documentation process.
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Chapter 6

Write for Effect

We’ll talk a lot more about this in sub-
True Story:
sequent chapters, but make sure that Speling Mistkes and
you’re documenting only the things you
need to make you comfortable when Extra, Commas
running your session. Avoid flowery I’ve never been very good at spell-
writing and skip details that you’re ing, and grammar isn’t my strong
comfortable making up on your own. suit either. I’ve had editors joke about
The things you put in your notes should charging me by the number of com-
be the things that are going to help you mas they have to remove from my
once the game is running. The less you manuscripts, rather than by the page.
have to write for a given session the I am one of those math/science peo-
faster you are going to complete your ple who are better at coding a pro-
documentation. gramming language than finding a
participle in a sentence.
Be Proficient at
I used to waste a lot of time during the
Your Writing Medium writing of my session notes by trying
Documentation is a physical activity, to make them perfect. I would look
and it does require some level of physi- up words, rewrite sentences, and do
cal aptitude and skill. Make sure that all manner of editing. It then dawned
however you document your notes, on me that in all likelihood no one
you’re comfortable with the activity and would be seeing my notes but me, so
proficient at it. If you handwrite your why waste the time writing properly
notes, but you have terrible handwriting structured sentences or spelling every
and your hand cramps every two min- word correctly as long as I could read
utes, then documentation is going to be what I had written and use it in my
slow and painful. If you type 90 words session?
a minute, then typing your notes is go- So if you’re a perfectionist when it
ing to be a much better choice for you. comes to writing, let it go. I’m not
Handwriting and typing are both skills saying you should abandon the rules
that can be worked on and improved of grammar entirely, but don’t waste
with practice. precious time combing through your
This also applies to understanding any notes to check for proper sentence
software that you choose to use in your structure. Get your ideas down and
prep. If you want to make maps elec- get playing instead.
tronically but aren’t proficient with your
mapping software, you’re going to have
a hard time turning out a map for your game. If you’re using software to generate
NPCs but you aren’t that familiar with it, it’s going create documentation drag. Take
the time between games to learn your software, and until you get proficient with it
allocate extra time for your prep.
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 Documentation

Rate Your Skill Level

Let’s find out how proficient you are at the art of documentation—at taking the
concepts for your session and scenes and putting them down in writing.

Frequency
On a scale of 1-5, how often do you perform documentation as an
activity separate from fleshing out ideas (conceptualization) for your
sessions, leaving you enough time to focus on documentation?

1 - Never (I never write up the 4 - Regularly (I am good about getting

material I need before a session) my material written with some time
2 - Infrequently (I write up my to spare)
material but always finish very close 5 - Always (I’m never in a rush, my
to the time when I’m running the notes are always done a few days
game) before the session)
3 - Occasionally (I write up my
material and finish in time, but I
always feel under pressure or
stressed out afterwards)

Strength
On a scale of 1-5, how well do your notes serve you during sessions?

1 - Non-existent (What I have 4 - Skilled (My notes give me a very

documented is too little, and there high comfort level to run the
are gaps that need to be filled) session, and I rarely have to stop
2 - Weak (Some of my material is to look anything up)
useful, but I am on my own 5 - Mastery (With my notes in
quite a lot) hand, I’m ready for anything)
3 - Competent (All the major parts
of the session are covered, but I
typically have to stop once
or twice during the session
to look something up)

Add the numbers up to get a range from 2 (unskilled) to 10 (mastery), with the aver-
age being a 6. If your Frequency is low, work on dedicating time to documentation
and make sure that you have separated out conceptualization and documentation
into discrete activities. If your Strength rating is low, focus on looking at what’s go-
ing into your notes—and more importantly what you’re not putting into your notes.

57
 Chapter 7:
Review
Mistakes happen. Things are overlooked. Nobody’s perfect.
The creation of your session notes is an involved process that can have many compo-
nents, from writing scenes to crafting specific dialog, generating NPC stats, draw-
ing maps, or even making props. It’s a process that’s sometimes done in more than
one sitting, and for some even in different locations. There are a lot of places where
mistakes can crop up. Before you run your adventure, which grew from an idea that
was then conceptualized and documented, you should take some time to make sure
that you didn’t make any mistakes along the way before running it for your friends.
Mistakes range in size from miniscule errors that hardly warrant attention during a
session, to colossal monsters that can make you scramble like crazy to patch them up
mid-game. Small errors are things like misspellings, incorrect amounts of treasure,
and minor omissions. Medium-sized errors are those that won’t derail the game, but
do still require a quick fix—things like missing dialog for a scene, forgetting the stat
block for an encounter, or omitting a reference to a rule that you might need. Large
errors are the ones that can halt you in your tracks, the worst offenders being logic
gaps within the adventure. These often require you to stop the game and can require
you to rewind a scene or retcon the error.
Any time the flow of the game gets interrupted, your players’ attention will drift.
The time required to regroup and get everyone back into the flow of the game is
time lost from having fun. As a GM, part of your job is to keep the game flowing.
Since the bulk of the narration of the game stems from you and your documentation,
you need to be mentally comfortable about your session, and your notes need to be
complete. To achieve this level of preparation, both mentally and in your notes, you
need to review what you’ve done so far.

The Three Reviewers

During the review phase, you will look at the material for your session as a whole—
what’s in your mind as well as what’s written down. This phase considers those two
elements together and evaluates their completeness, as well as giving you a chance
to catch and fix errors and omissions. A common mistake is to think that reviewing
your work just means checking your spelling and grammar. While that will be a
minor component of this phase, the process involves much more than that.
When you review, you need to approach session prep from the perspective of three
reviewers, each with a different focus: the proofreader, the director, and the play-
tester. Imagine that these are all different people, each one of them reviewing your
work.

58
 Review

The Proofreader
The first role you should take on is that of the proofreader. This is the oldest reviewer
you know, because you were introduced to her back in grammar school. The job of
the proofreader is to look for the written errors in your documentation. The most ba-
sic are spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. While these aren’t that important
(as we discussed in the previous chapter), if you spot them, fix them.
The proofreader also looks for transcription errors and omissions—things like for-
getting to note an NPC’s hit points or what sort of treasure is in a particular dungeon
room—as well as for glaring mistakes like leaving out a stat block in a mechanics-
heavy game.
In your role as proofreader, read your session notes for accuracy and completeness.
A good set of notes, free of distracting and problematic errors, gives you a strong
foundation for running your game.
The proofreader’s skills include knowledge of basic grammar and spelling, attention
to detail, and familiarity with the game rules.

The Director
When going over your prep in this role, think of yourself as being part GM and part
movie director. The job of the director is to read through your notes and examine the
structure of the session to ensure that there are no logic gaps, that it flows well, and
that it makes sense—in essence, that there’s continuity. Check to see that scenes flow
into one another, if it’s that kind of session; examine the motivations of your NPCs
and consider whether they’re acting as they should in the story. Look at locations and
make sure the PCs and NPCs have interesting places to go, and consider whether
your language is as descriptive as it could be.
As the director, you’re looking at both written documentation and the concepts in
your head. Make sure you feel comfortable with the adventure, that you’re familiar
with all of its pieces, and that you have an overall feel for how it’s likely to play out.
Mentally rehearse climactic scenes, work on your NPC voices, and evaluate your
dialog to make sure it doesn’t sound silly.
If you find problems, make revisions and change elements of the adventure as need-
ed. Work to make your adventure the best adventure it can be. When you’ve done
your job as director, you’ll be mentally prepared to run your game because you know
the adventure is sound.
The director’s skills are imagination, creativity, and an understanding of literature
and storytelling.

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 Artist: Christopher Reach

The Playtester
The final reviewer is the playtester. If the director is your inner GM, then the play-
tester is your inner player. The job of the playtester is to move through the adventure
like a player, to look at the session from the other side of the screen. From that per-
spective, look at what the GM presents and see if it makes sense. As a player, does
the hook motivate you? What decisions might you make during the session? Try to
anticipate those decisions and make sure you’ve prepared the necessary material and
thought through contingencies.
The playtester, like the director, reviews both your documentation and the ideas in
your head. Look for blind spots and logic gaps that your players might exploit in
ways that may make the game less fun. Try to solve the problems that are presented
not as you yourself expect them to be solved, but as a clever player—look for loop-
holes, ways to bypass challenges, and devastating combinations of powers that crush
the opposition.
If you, as the playtester, find an obvious loophole in the design of the adventure, put
on your director hat and close the loophole while maintaining the flow of the adven-
ture. When the playtester has done a good job, the adventure is challenging to your
players and you’re prepared for many things that they might do during the game.
The playtester’s skills are the summation of your group’s knowledge and experience
as players, which will vary from group to group.
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 Review

A Dress Rehearsal for the Mind

I treat my review of my session and its associated notes as a dress rehearsal for the
game. Typically I reserve the day of the game for my review. I sit down with my
notes and put myself into the role of the proofreader, going over my notes to clean
them up and format them in a manner that’s easy to read. When I’m done cleaning
up my notes, I go through the content of the session as the director, imagining each
scene, working through how to describe the scenes, and speaking any NPC dialog.
When I feel that a scene is polished enough, I set the playtester loose to run through
the scene and imagine how my players will interact with the material, to anticipate
the decisions they will make, and to make sure that my documentation and my men-
tal prep cover those decisions.
In my role as the proofreader, I need to be able to work with my actual documenta-
tion, so that requires me to be at my desk or on my laptop. I usually proofread in the
morning before my game. My work as the director and the playtester can be done at
my desk or away from it, and I typically tackle those reviews during the day while
getting ready for the game.

When We Do Too Little

When you’re under a time crunch, the review phase is an easy target. It’s the last
step, and when time is of the essence most GMs value getting more material written
down over making sure what they have is of the highest quality. Also, many GMs
are overly confident that they captured the session in its entirety during documenta-
tion. When you shortchange the review phase you give up the chance to make sure
that your session notes are as good as they can be. And when you ignore one or more
of the three reviewers (proofreader, director, and playtester) three things can hap-
pen, as you’ll see below.

Where Did I Put That?

When you fail to proofread your notes you run the risk of missing information that
you will need during the session. A minor error might be forgetting to note what’s
in the armory’s gun locker; a more serious gaff would be forgetting the stat block for
the major villain who’s central to the climax of the session. In both cases, these omis-
sions can cause you to lose your focus and to stumble during the game. Depending
on how serious the omission is, you may be able to ad lib your way past it. If you
can’t then you may need to take a break to sort things out, interrupting the rhythm
of the game.
Lack of proofreading can give your game a disorganized look and feel. A GM who
hasn’t done enough proofreading flips through books to find that stat block or rolls
up random guns for the weapons locker on the fly. She stops and starts a lot during

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the game, stumbling over the things that are missing and trying to compensate for
their absence. Her games rarely get into a good groove and if they do, they don’t stay
there for long.

I Thought He Was in the West Room

When you don’t review your notes for consistency, you will often discover logic gaps
within the plot. Small errors, such as forgetting what room the body was found in,
can cause confusion for your players, which can result in player frustration or stall
the game’s progress. More significant plot holes can derail a session, forcing you to
halt the game and make larger corrections, possibly including a retcon. Other types
of logic errors often show up when transitioning between scenes: The PCs start in
the bar in one scene, and in the next they’re in the mayor’s office, with no explana-
tion of what happened in between. Story errors, logic gaps, and plot holes are hard
to smooth over in the middle of the game without being noticed.
Games with a lot of story errors in them have confusing plots that seem to jump
from scene to scene, without smooth transitions. Plots don’t hinge on appropriate
motivations, or the NPCs seem to act in arbitrary ways. GMs who don’t consider
consistency won’t necessarily seem disorganized, but their players will be confused
about what’s going on in the game, and at times they may blame the GM for rail-
roading them through the session. It’s hard to get into a groove in this kind of game
because of the confusion caused by its lack of consistency.

I Didn’t See That Coming

GMs who don’t mentally playtest their material are often blindsided by their players’
actions. They will present a situation that looks like a challenge, only to have their
players devise an unforeseen and problematic solution. Sometimes the GM rolls
with it, and a challenging scene becomes very easy and anticlimactic. At other times
the GM will protect his challenge and shoot down the players’ idea. Scrambling for
a plausible explanation for why the plan doesn’t work can be done well, but if done
poorly the GM uses his fiat to squash his players’ creative solution. Players notice
when their ideas get shot down, even if it’s done well.
A lack of playtesting leads to games that players find too easy or anticlimactic, and
can create the perception that the only way to solve a challenge is the GM’s way.
Players then feel, justifiably, that their contributions to the shared narrative are not
respected. These kinds of games leave players frustrated and unsatisfied.

When We Do Too Much

It is possible to review your material too much. Too much review can raise doubts
in your head and cause you to second guess yourself. You see errors that don’t exist,
you obsess over a single point in the session, or you begin to doubt that the adventure
will be good. When those doubts creep in, you redouble your efforts to root out
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problems but never accomplish what you set out to do. Instead you create a mental
feedback loop that only raises more doubts and sows further confusion. Here are
some common pitfalls associated with over-analyzing your work.

Nitpicking
Should the goblins have daggers or short swords? Are there six people or 2d6 people
in the tavern? Should the store owner say, “The men were here last night” or “Those
men were here yesterday”? Nitpicking is when you obsess over minor details of the
game to the point of either wasting time or distracting your attention from more
important aspects of the review phase.
Subtle changes like the ones mentioned
above aren’t going to be noticed by your True Story: TMI
players. GMs often think that their One of the things I love before game
players pick up on every detail, but the night is a hot shower and a shave. This
truth is that players have a lot to think ritual makes me feel more profes-
about; they’re more concerned with the sional; it’s like getting ready for work.
big picture, or with details that are rel- The reason I bring this up is that the
evant to the life or death of their char- shower is my Fortress of Solitude: My
acters, than with whether or not the kids aren’t around and it’s nice and
goblins are carrying the “wrong” weap- quiet. I usually tackle my director and
ons. So don’t obsess about the small playtester reviews during the shower.
things—instead, put your energies to- I find that I do my best thinking in
ward the more substantive elements of the shower, with no distractions. I
the session. walk through my session, practice
some of the key dialog, and rehearse
Second Guessing some of the descriptions. I often get
Often when you look very hard for an out of the shower and head straight
error, you find one—whether it’s actu- for my session notes to make my final
ally there or not. In being critical you adjustments.
need to be cognizant of not being overly
critical. The plot of a session is like a
sweater with a loose thread in it: When you tug on the thread, you unravel the
sweater. The same is true with adventures. A small change in one place can have a
ripple effect throughout the plot, and suddenly that one little change leads to whole-
sale changes to the structure of the session.
The worst time to become overly critical is when you’re running out of time before
a session. Changes need to be made with care and precision, and that’s hard to do
the closer you get to game time. The other downside to second guessing yourself is
that it can lower your confidence about running the session. Having spent time and
energy questioning all or parts of your adventure, you then come to the table filled
with doubts. Those doubts become barriers during the game, which can prevent you
from fully engaging your players.
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Chapter 7

Techniques for Improvement

You can become a better and more effective reviewer. Shortcomings in this area
typically fall into two categories: time and technique. The assessment below will
help you decide whether or not you need improvement in one or both of these areas.
In terms of time, as with the other phases of prep it’s important to dedicate enough
time to the review phase if you want to be able to do it well. I find that the best time
to review your prep is in the hours before the game. Reviewing your material during
that time not only helps to improve the quality of your material, it loads the session
into your “psychic RAM” and makes everything fresh in your mind.
With regard to technique, remember the three reviewers—the proofreader, the di-
rector, and the playtester. Are you performing all three review activities when you
prep? Are you performing them evenly, or focusing more on one than another? If
you have the time, start your review process in one role, move on to the next role
when that review is completed, and then take a third pass in the final role. By mak-
ing each review a separate activity you can focus on a single task and work to master
each of them. As your skill improves, you’ll find that you can perform all three roles
without thinking about it as you review.

Artist: Matt Morrow

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 Review

Rate Your Skill Level

This will be your final skill review. Let’s figure out how proficient you are at the art
of reviewing your session prep.

Frequency
On a scale of 1-5, how often do you perform a review
of the material you’re going to use for your upcoming session?

1 - Never (I write it once and then I 4 - Regularly (I make sure that I go

just run the game) over my notes for most sessions;
2 - Infrequently (I might take a quick it’s rare I don’t review them before
look just before the game while a game)
people are settling in at the table) 5 - Always (I never run something
3 - Occasionally (If I have time that I haven’t reviewed first)
before the game, I’ll take a look;
otherwise I don’t bother)

Strength
On a scale of 1-5, how thorough is your review?

1 - Non-existent (I never find 4 - Skilled (I am very good at two

mistakes) of the three review types, and
2 - Weak (I catch obvious things okay with the third one)
like missing stats, but there 5 - Mastery (I’m very good
is plenty that I miss) with all three review types)
3 - Competent (I’m very good at
one of the three review types
and do okay at the other two)

Add your scores together to get a range of 2 (unskilled) to 10 (mastery), with the
average being a 6. If your Frequency is low, you need to set aside some time to review
your notes before the game begins. If your Strength score is low, rank your skill at
each type of review and sort them from best to worst. Work on developing the worst
one first, and then the second-worst one, so that your skills even out.

65
 Prep Toolbox

Artist: Christopher Reach

66
 Chapter 8:
Tools for Prep
Over the years I’ve tried every medium for writing my notes. I’ve gone through
phases where I favored one type of medium and/or tool over another, written my
notes on everything from laboratory books to leather-bound notebooks, and used a
range of computers and software. Along the way I learned what went into making
a good tool, and how to match the tools I used to the way that I like to prep for my
games. Because prep is more than just writing your notes (i.e. the documentation
phase), you can use different tools for the different phases of prep. You may want to
use one platform from brainstorming through review, or you may employ one tool
for capturing your brainstorming and another for documentation.
My take on prep tools comes from two sources: David Allen and my borderline ad-
diction to office supplies. In Getting Things Done, David Allen talks at length about
the criteria for selecting the right tools for building a productivity system. He doesn’t
endorse a specific system, but rather encourages the user to explore and develop their
own system based on several criteria. In writing this chapter, I’ve taken a similar
approach.
I’m also an office supply geek—there, I said it. I have loved office supplies since I was
a kid. My favorite thing about going back to school was going to the store to pick out
my school supplies. As a child, my parents would take me to their offices and let me
raid their supply rooms for binders, folders, paper, and pens. To this day, I’m the kind
of person who goes into an office supply store and looks at every item with an eye to
how I could use it for my current game, or for some future game. Needless to say,
I’ve tried organizing my prep in lots of different ways using all sorts of office supplies.

What Makes a Good Tool?

A good tool can be the difference between a cumbersome prep process and a smooth
and efficient one. When you have good tools, you’re able to execute your prep with
ease and without trepidation. I would venture to say that with a tool that matches
your style, the process of prep can even be enjoyable. Good tools have three impor-
tant qualities.

It Fits Your Work Style

The first thing to consider about every tool you use is this: Does it fit the way you like
to work? When it comes to writing implements, do you have good penmanship, or
are you a fast typist? That will help to determine if you should be using pen and pa-
per or a word processor. When you work on your prep do you have Internet access or
are you somewhere without a connection? This will determine whether you should
use a cloud-based service or local software. Is your prep done in one location, such as
a home office or game room, or are you preparing your games in many different
places? This will determine how portable your tools need to be. 67
Chapter 8

You need to take into account these kinds of questions as you select your tools. The
answers to the questions above will favor certain tools over others. When a tool
doesn’t seem to be working, don’t force it; that will only make your prep process
more difficult. You need to find a tool that works best with your prep style, even if
it wasn’t your first choice. Find the tool that best fits your style and you’ll always be
ready to prep.
I love nice pens and journals, but I don’t use them for documentation in my personal
prep system; I use Microsoft® OneNote. I have so-so penmanship and I’m a terrible
speller, but I’m a fast typist so I benefit from working with electronic tools. Initially,
OneNote wasn’t an ideal solution because I do most of my prep at home or during
my lunch break at work, and I use a PC at home and a Mac at work. Once I started
using Dropbox (dropbox.com) to hold my OneNote prep file, and Parallels to run
OneNote on my Mac, everything clicked and this became the best solution for me.

It’s Exciting to Use

This one sounds strange, but it’s true. The best tools are the tools that you find excit-
ing to use. If you don’t have some level of interest or excitement about the tools you
use, or worse yet you regard them with disdain, then using them will be tedious and
you’ll resist doing your prep. That resistance will slow your prep, and could lead to
not getting your prep done or even to canceled sessions. When you look at possible
tools, imagine how you’ll feel using them. Will that notebook lay flat on the table
and be easy to write in, or will it be a struggle to use? How user-friendly is your
software of choice?
I like using OneNote because it’s so flexible. If I can capture it, whether in text, im-
ages, drawings, tables, or screen caps, I can put it into OneNote. To me that’s excit-
ing because I love having the ability to take any kind of material for my game and
put it in one place for easy access during play.

It’s High-Quality
Consider how much time you’re going to spend working on prep during your
GMing career, both for your current campaign and your future games. It’s not a
trivial amount of time. Like a crafter in other trades, if you’re going to be spending
a significant amount of time working on something you should have the best tools
possible. Your tools should be well made, and you should be able to feel their quality
in your hand or in their performance. They should also be reliable. If your main tool
is your laptop, you don’t want it to crash at unexpected times, causing you to lose
your work. If you use a notebook, you shouldn’t have to worry about the pages falling
out, or about your writing pressing through them.
When I’m brainstorming, I like to write my ideas down by hand. I use Moleskine®
notebooks for this because I love the quality of the paper and the feel of the note-
book in my hand, and because they’re quite durable. I pair my notebooks with
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 Tools for Prep

a Cross® Morph pen with a fine black ballpoint tip. The Morph is a nice weight and
very comfortable in my hand, and I love writing with it. There’s something about
holding that pen, feeling the weight of it in my hand and watching it glide along the
pages of the notebook, that is tactile and pleasurable.
When it comes to creating maps, buy some drafting tools and a good mechanical
pencil and draw them on nice paper. And if you use electronic tools, always have a
backup plan. If your notes are in OneNote and your laptop dies, how will you run
your session? Always have a second way to access your notes; Dropbox is a perfect
tool for this, and it’s free. You should also be prepared to migrate to new hardware
or software periodically.

Paper versus Electronic

It’s worth saying a few words about the two major types of prep tools: paper and elec-
tronic. Both types have their strengths and weaknesses, and they both meet the cri-
teria outlined above. Which type you use comes down to your overall comfort level
with them, and on what fits best with your life. Here are a few factors to consider.

Paper Tools
Strengths: Weaknesses:
• Always available • Editing isn’t as easy as it is with
• Don’t require power an electronic tool; you have to
erase or cross things out
• Don’t require an
Internet connection • Can’t capture audio or video

• Fairly ubiquitous; if you lose • Can’t be backed up—if you lose

your favorite pen, another your notebook, your notes are gone
pen will do in a pinch • The quality of text and drawings
• Can’t crash is limited by your own penmanship
and artistic skill
• You can use them nearly anywhere
• Can run out of space
• Fairly inexpensive

Electronic Tools
Strengths: Weaknesses:
• Easy to read • Can run out of power
• Can capture all kinds of media • May need Internet access
• Easy delete, cut and paste, and edit • Software and hardware
• Hold more information than compatibility issues
you’re likely to need • More expensive than pen and paper

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Chapter 8

If you’re a student or knowledge worker with continuous access to a computer, pow-

er, and the Internet, then electronic tools are likely to be a very good fit for you. On
the other hand, if you’re not comfortable with technology, have a job where your
Internet and computer access is locked down, or work in a field where you don’t have
ready access to a computer, then paper-based tools may be a better fit for you.

Identify Your Needs

“When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail” is one of my favorite say-
ings. It reminds me that having only one tool is often not enough to solve every
problem. This holds true for the tools you use to create your prep. In order to know
what tools you need, you have to understand what you require for prep and who’s
going to see the output of your work.
The first step is to inventory everything that goes into your prep in each phase of the
prep cycle:
Brainstorming: This phase requires a tool that allows you to cap-
ture ideas in different locations and at various times. It is best if it’s
something portable that fits in a pocket and can be carried around
without being cumbersome.

Selection: This phase requires a way to sort ideas and to archive good
ideas that aren’t going to be used right away. A tool for this phase
needs to be easily edited and needs to offer a way to archive things.

Conceptualization: This phase requires a way to jot notes down to

expand upon the idea that was captured during the selection phase.
A tool for this phase should allow for the capture of short notes,
lists, and perhaps a sketch or two.

Documentation: This phase requires a tool that allows for the cap-
ture of the full details of the session. You will need to capture your
session notes as well as maps, stat blocks, and images. The tool for
this phase should be flexible, allowing it to be used in a number of
ways: to write notes, draw a map, etc.

Review: Since the review phase doesn’t involve generating ideas,

most of your work will be done using the tool you use for documen-
tation. If you use a separate review tool, it needs to enable you to
amend other documents.

One, Two, or Many?

It’s entirely possible to have one tool that supports every phase of prep. A single note-
book could be used for every phase, but it may not be the most efficient tool, since
70 the needs of each phase are slightly different.
 Tools for Prep

Using two tools gives you the option of having one tool for brainstorming and an-
other for documentation. In many cases the tool you use for brainstorming can carry
through to conceptualization, and the tool for documentation can also be used to
review. For example:
You capture your brainstorming in a pocket notebook, one idea to a line.
During the selection phase, you put a star next to the idea you want to
use. You jot notes down in the notebook as you conceptualize until you
come up with an outline. Then for documentation, you sit down and use
a word processor to type up your session notes. Later on you review that
file before your game.

At the far end of the continuum, you can also have a system where most of the
phases get their own tools:
You capture your brainstorming on index cards, one idea per card. During
the selection phase you sort the cards and select your idea, putting the
others into a card box for future consideration. You then use sticky notes
and a corkboard to conceptualize the session and come up with a flowchart
for the plot. You then write your finalized notes in your favorite notebook,
and later review that notebook.

Artist: Christopher Reach

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Chapter 8

Using a different tool for each phase will add complexity to your system, but if it
meets your needs (see below) then there’s nothing wrong with that approach. It’s im-
portant to balance your need to operate in every phase of prep against the complexity
of being able to use the system in an efficient manner.
I rely on two sets of tools. For brainstorming through conceptualization, I like using
a notebook and a pen because this offers me the most flexibility in terms of where I
can write, and it allows me to draw arrows, make small sketches, etc. My ideas don’t
need to be neat or readable in the long term. For documentation, I tend to be in
places where I have access to a computer, so I use OneNote. I like my session notes
to be neater than my handwriting, and easier to read. For maps, I’m not proficient at
any electronic mapping software, so I usually draw something in my notebook, take
a picture of that page, and add it to OneNote.

Comfort and Mastery

No matter what tools you use, you need to be comfortable using them and be profi-
cient in their use. When a tool is uncomfortable to use it becomes a distraction, and
the longer you work with it the more of a distraction it becomes. Over time, you’ll
start to avoid the tool, and may be filled with apprehension when you have to use it.
Then when you can’t take it anymore, typically in the middle of using the tool, you’ll
have to launch into a search for a new tool.
In terms of paper-based tools, you want something that’s comfortable to write with
and that writes smoothly, and you want paper (or index cards, etc.) that doesn’t rip
when you try to erase something, and that ink doesn’t bleed through. When it comes
to pens, fight the tendency to just pick up something hanging on a rack in an office
supply store. If you write frequently, investing in a good pen will make all the dif-
ference. In terms of electronic tools, comfort is a factor when it comes to how well a
laptop sits on your lap, the action in the keys of a keyboard, or the glare on a tablet.
The more proficient you are with your tools, the more efficient you’ll be at perform-
ing your prep. When you’re not comfortable with a tool, you wind up spending
a lot of time trying to figure things out or correcting mistakes you make. This is
even more relevant for electronic tools, which often require you to be proficient in
a number of areas: general computer use, system knowledge, and knowledge about
the specific application. It’s possible that between sessions you may need to devote
time to improving your skills with your tools, usually through some combination of
reading up on them and practice.
For electronic tools, you want to become skilled in the applications you’re going
to use for your prep. For your general text that may mean understanding a word
processor, which isn’t that difficult, but if you plan on using a cartography program

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 Tools for Prep

for making maps for your sessions, then you may need to invest considerable time
practicing with the software before you can make a map in a reasonable amount of
time. I cannot stress this point enough: If you’re relying heavily on electronic tools,
make sure you’re a proficient typist. When it comes to documentation, the difference
between someone who is a full 10-finger typist and someone who hunts and pecks is
huge. If you’re an especially bad typist, seek out software that can help you improve.
For paper-based tools there are two basic skills involved: penmanship and drawing.
If writing is going to be your main form of documentation, then you want to make
sure that your penmanship is excellent so that your notes are easy to read, and that
you have the writing stamina to write page after page of notes. If you draw your own
maps, you’re going to want to develop some basic drawing skills so that your maps
are legible.

Adding and Removing Tools

Everyone’s chosen prep tools are personal, as personal as the thoughts and stories
they create with them. Some people prepare their notes the same way they have since
they started the hobby, be that last year or 30 years ago. Others change up how they
prepare their games with every new campaign.
You may find that you want to try a new tool as part of your prep. I’m always look-
ing at different kinds of software and office supplies with an eye to incorporating
them into my prep toolbox. Adding a new tool can be a great way to take advantage
of some new feature that you don’t currently have in your toolbox. When you find
something that catches your eye, give it a test drive. Use the tool and try to re-create
some prep you did for a previous session. If this tool is non-electronic, see how com-
fortable it is to write with and decide if the paper size fits your current style of prep.
If the tool is electronic, then see if it’s comfortable to type with and whether it has
the software features you need.
There will also be times when you find that you no longer want to, or no longer can,
use some of the tools in your prep toolbox. When you think you’re ready to phase
out a tool, think about what tool you will need to replace it with to perform that part
of your prep. It may be a tool you already have, or you might need to find a new one.
Often, removing a tool means making a trade-off, and you need to be sure you’re
comfortable with what you are giving up and what you’re getting in its place.
For example, I tried for some time to use cartography software to make maps for my
games. I wasn’t very good at it, and I really didn’t have the time to dedicate to be-
coming more proficient. I eventually decided to stop using the software and go back
to hand drawing my maps. I lost the clean, professional look of a full-color printed
map, but I eliminated some frustration and saved time in the process—a fair trade.

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 True Story: Written in “Blood”
In the late 1990s I ran a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign, and I wanted the
tools I used for the game to convey the feel of goth horror as a way to help me
stay focused when I wrote. For my brainstorming, I kept it simple and used a
normal pen and steno pad. For my documentation, I went to the bookstore and
found a large, unlined journal; I paired it with a red gel pen. I needed something
more romantic and ancient-feeling than a keyboard and mouse, and what’s more
ancient than pen and paper? When I wrote my notes, I wrote them by hand in
“blood.” And funnily enough, it really did help me stay in the right mood when
I wrote, and even now when I look through that book and see the red text on the
page, it still looks pretty cool.

Selecting Your Tools

Choosing your prep tools based on the criteria discussed in this chapter will be a
personal process. This section is here to get you to think more about prep tools. If
you’re in the process of looking for new tools, use this section as a guide. If you have
tools that you like, this section can be used to confirm your selection and to make
sure that the tools you’ve already chosen are the best fit for you.
Consider the following questions:

• What phases of prep do you already • Which do you prefer, writing or

have tools for? typing?
• Does your tool for each phase meet • Do you need your personal notes
your needs, or are you using a tool to be well-formatted and clean-
that isn’t a good fit for that phase? looking?
• Are there any phases you don’t have • Do your tools need to be portable?
tools for or that you think you need
• Do you have concerns about losing
one for?
things?
• Do you have too many tools for your
• Do you like to have things backed
prep?
up?
• Are your tools comfortable to use?
• Do you have easy access to the
• Are your tools reliable and Internet and your data?
available when you need them?
• Do the devices you use have
• Where do you perform each phase long-lasting batteries?
of prep that requires tools?
• Are your tools fun to use?
• Do your tools work well in those
• Are there any tools that you need
locations?
more practice with?

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 Chapter 9: Mastering
Your Creative Cycle
There is never quite enough time to get done all the things you want to do, be it in a
day, a week, or even a lifetime. We are creatures of obligations and responsibilities,
and our lives are framed by a series of commitments that are made to ourselves and
to other people. It’s a condition that only increases in both volume and complexity as
we get older and more responsibilities are given to us in our careers and the families
we build.
In a sea of responsibilities, it’s hard to find the time to work on a game. After all,
many non-gamers will say, “It’s just a game...” If we listen to those people too closely
we might start to believe them. What we need to remember is that our games are
our hobby; they’re an outlet for the stresses in our lives, and a reward for the hard
work we do. Hobbies, in general, are necessary for people to have full lives, and need
to be treated not as a throwaway activity, but rather as a key element of what makes
us who we are.
It’s equally important to remember that gaming is a hobby, and that we do have all
those other obligations and responsibilities. So while we must carve out a place in
our lives for our hobby, we must also be realistic, give it a reasonable amount of time
in our daily lives, and not overindulge in it at the expense of our other obligations.

Getting Prep Done

To adapt and paraphrase David Allen: Prep has to get done. From the moment you
finish your session until your next session starts, the clock is ticking. All the phases
of prep—brainstorming, selection, conceptualization, documentation, and review—
have to happen before the next time you sit down behind the screen. It can be a lot
of work.
You know what happens when prep doesn’t get done: You arrive at the game unpre-
pared. Some GMs will run what they have ready, and just play a short game—after
all, some gaming is better than none. Others will run what they have and wing the
rest; this can be hit and miss for everyone involved. And some will balk and cancel
the game; do this too often, and you won’t have a game to cancel.
As a GM, then, you want to be able to get your prep done in a timely manner with-
out being stressed. Let’s break those two elements down a bit.
“In a timely manner” means you want to have enough time to get your prep done
between sessions, along with meeting all the other obligations and commitments
you have as a partner, parent, professional, and/or friend. You want to have enough
time so that if something unexpected comes up, and it always does, you can adapt
and still complete your prep.

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When you’re doing prep, you generally feel stress for one of two reasons: not having
enough time, which we’ve covered already, and doing your prep when you should be
doing something else (mowing the lawn, playing with your child, working, doing
homework, etc.). When you steal time from a competing task in order to do your
prep, you feel stress and guilt. When you prep, you want to know that you’re doing
it not at the expense of other things, but rather in the time you’ve set aside for this
activity.

Free Time (Hint: It’s Not Free)

How much free time do you have in a day? In a week? Most people can’t answer that
off the top of their heads. I can. I’m not bragging—what I mean to say is that I know
what all my responsibilities are in a given day, and throughout a week, and I know
what times of day are truly free time. On weekdays, I have about four hours of free
time, and only two of them are productive (more on that later).
In order to know how much time you have to work on your game, you really have to
know all of the other things that you have to do every day of the week. You need to
take an inventory of all your activities and obligations. Once you’ve done that, you’ll
see how much free time you really have.
The best way to create that inventory is to create a spreadsheet and make columns
for every day of the week, and rows for hours of the day from 12:00 a.m. at the top

Artist: Christopher Reach

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 Mastering Your Creative Cycle

Blank Free Time Inventory Map

Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
12:00 am
1:00 am
2:00 am
3:00 am
4:00 am
5:00 am
6:00 am
7:00 am
8:00 am
9:00 am
10:00 am
11:00 am
12:00 pm
1:00 pm
2:00 pm
3:00 pm
4:00 pm
5:00 pm
6:00 pm
7:00 pm
8:00 pm
9:00 pm
10:00 pm
11:00 pm

Download a blank free time inventory and creativity heat map online:
http://goo.gl/v5ugf

down to 11:00 p.m. at the bottom—this will be a map of your obligations. You can
also do this by hand on a piece of paper, if you prefer.
Now starting with Monday and working your way through Sunday, block out your
obligations by the hour. So if you work on Mondays from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
draw a big block in the Monday column. Do this for all the activities and events that
you have every day of the week. Consider all of the following:

• Sleep • Family obligations (breakfast

with Dad on Sundays, etc.)
• Work
• Time spent with
• Taking care of kids
significant other/spouse
• Gaming events
• School
• Religious/social activities
• Studying, study groups, etc.
• Meals
• Sports, gym, working out
• Commuting

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Now take a look at your map. My guess is that it’s pretty full. If you’re a professional,
married, or a parent, it’s likely to be very full. Here’s what mine looks like:

Completed Free Time Inventory Map

Time Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
12:00 am
1:00 am
2:00 am
Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep Sleep
3:00 am Sleep Sleep
4:00 am
5:00 am
6:00 am Get Ready Get Ready Get Ready Get Ready Get Ready
7:00 am For Work For Work For Work For Work For Work
8:00 am
9:00 am
10:00 am Church
11:00 am
Work Work Work Work Work
12:00 pm
1:00 pm
2:00 pm
3:00 pm
4:00 pm
5:00 pm Family Family Family Family Family
6:00 pm Time Time Time Time Time
7:00 pm
8:00 pm
9:00 pm
Gaming
10:00 pm
11:00 pm

By looking at the map, you can start to see where you have free time in your sched-
ule. These gaps are the times when you could be working on prep. Take a quick
inventory and see how much time you have in a day and in a week.
If you look at my map, you can see that on weekdays I have from 8:00 p.m. to 12:00
a.m. free, about 20 hours a week. That would be more than enough time for prepping
a weekly game, but gaming isn’t the only thing that competes for those 20 hours.

All That Other Stuff

You do plenty of things that aren’t set obligations and activities—things like mow-
ing the lawn, taking your cat to the vet, troubleshooting your computer, playing
video games, and going out with friends. In other words: the rest of your day-to-day
life. These are the other things that compete for a slice of your free time, and there
are always more of them than there is free time. Some of these you will know about
in advance and some will pop up out of the blue. All of them are going to demand
to be done, and the time to do them will be during those blocks of free time. This
means you need to manage your free time, otherwise you’ll find that it all gets used
up.

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There are stacks of books out there that talk about time management. This book is
not one of them. (If you want to read one, my personal recommendation—as you
can probably guess by now—is David Allen’s Getting Things Done.) The thing to take
away from this section is an understanding that in order for you to find time to prep
for your game, you need to have discipline and take control of all of the other things
that will compete for this time. If you can’t manage them, then they’ll consume your
free time and leave you none for prep.

Creative Highs and Lows

Alongside your map of obligations and commitments, you need to take into account
another factor: creative energy. Humans are creatures whose energy ebbs and flows
in a circadian rhythm; our bodies go through peaks and valleys during the course of
the day. There are points in the day when our energy is high and we’re at our full cre-
ative potential, and then there are times when our energy is low and we can hardly
complete even the most mindless tasks. Our creative energy is on a cycle, and many
people don’t pay attention to its ebbs and flows. By understanding your creative ener-
gies, you can then plan to do certain phases of your prep at different points within
the cycle.

Creating a Personal Heat Map

In order to understand your creative peaks and valleys you’ll need to map them out,
in much the same way you did with your obligations and activities. You need to get
an hour-by-hour account of those energies. The best way to do that is to create a
heat map—essentially, a visual representation of a data set (in this case, your creative
energies) wherein values are represented by colors.
This heat map will be a color indicator of your overall creative energy. You can use
the following colors and/or numbers to represent your creative energies (or use more
vibrant colors—I chose these because this book is in black and white):

• Black (0)—No creative energy. Use this for the times when you’re asleep.
• Dark Grey (1)—Low creative energy. This is for the times when you’re awake
but not overly creative or energetic.
• Light Grey (2)—Average creative energy. These are times you don’t feel
especially low or high; the middle ground.
• White (3)—High creative energy. These are times when your energy is up,
your mind is active with ideas, and you feel at your most creative.

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Creativity Heat Map

You can make your heat map by add- Time Rating Color
ing one or more columns to the obliga- 12:00 am 0
tion map you made earlier. Fill in each 1:00 am 0
row based on how you’re feeling at that 2:00 am 0
time, either from memory or by adding 3:00 am 0
to your map throughout the day, hour 4:00 am 0
by hour. Here’s what my personal heat 5:00 am 0
map looks like, and a graph of those 6:00 am 1
energy levels. 7:00 am 1
8:00 am 2
What you can see is that I am very 9:00 am 2
creative in the morning, I have a valley 10:00 am 2
around 3:00 p.m., I peak again in the 11:00 am 3
early evening, and then I have another 12:00 pm 3
valley around 11:00 p.m. 1:00 pm 2
2:00 pm 2
I have found that while my activities 3:00 pm 1
and obligations change over the course 4:00 pm 1
of a week, my creative energies remain 5:00 pm 2
about the same throughout the week. I 6:00 pm 2
recommend that you start by filling out 7:00 pm 2
one day completely, and then see how 8:00 pm 3
it applies over the course of the week. 9:00 pm 3
If you find day-to-day differences, then 10:00 pm 2
map other days as well. 11:00 pm 1

Creative Energy Graph

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Doing the Right Things at the Right Times

Now that you’ve created your heat map, you can see that there are times of the day
when you’re more creative and times when you’re less creative. It’s important to take
that into consideration when you start to look at how you’re going to get your prep
done. You don’t want to try to brainstorm when your creative energy has bottomed
out, and you don’t want to squander prime creative time doing non-creative things.
Here are some suggestions for matching your creativity level to the phases of prep:

High Creativity
Brainstorming—The best time to get ideas to flow forth is when
you’re at your most creative.

Conceptualization—It takes a lot of creativity to take an idea and

expand it into a solid concept.

Middle Creativity
Documentation—You can write dialog and describe scenes when
you’re in a creative period, but not at your peak, because most of the
heavy lifting should have happened in the conceptualization phase.

Review—When you’re playing the role of the director and the play-
tester, you need a measure of creativity.

Low Creativity
Selection—This phase doesn’t require you to be very creative; in fact,
you need to be more pragmatic than creative.

Documentation—When you’re doing the mechanical parts of your

prep (generating NPC stats, creating random tables, identifying
and noting rules), you don’t need to be very creative.

Review—There’s no need for creativity when you’re proofreading

your notes.

Scheduling Your Prep Time

So now that you have a complete picture of your obligations, free time, and creative
highs and lows, you can start to see the best times to prep and which phases of prep
will fit best based on your creative energies. Plotting this out will guarantee that you
set aside time for your prep, and that when you prep you’re in a good creative state.

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As you look over your free time there are two important questions you need to an-
swer, and they will both play a big role in figuring out when you want to prep. The
first question is “How often am I going to run this game?” This will tell you how
many days you have between sessions, and determine how much free time you have
to work with. If you run the game weekly, you have just one week to get all of your
prep done. If you don’t feel that you can get it all done in that time, consider running
your game every other week, once every three weeks, or once a month. Each week
you add gives you that much more free time you can use in scheduling out the times
when you want to prep.
The next question is “How much time do I need to complete each phase?” Take a
moment and think about the phases of prep and how long each of them takes you.
Documentation is likely the longest one, but you should consider the other phases as
well. Estimate the time involved based on games you’ve run in the past, and if you
remember feeling stressed, under the gun, or unable to get everything done in time,
then add some hours to your estimate. Once you have an idea of how much time you
need for each phase, see if your numbers match up with the blocks of free time you
have available. Do you have enough time to prep your game, as well as maintain your
other obligations? If not, something’s got to give—and again, session frequency is a
good place to look.
Finally, with both of those questions answered, add 20% to each of your estimates
and include that time in your schedule. In project management we call this “slack.”
Slack is extra time that can be used up if something should arise (see the next chap-
ter for more on that topic). By having a little slack time in your schedule, you can
have something come up unexpectedly, deal with it, and still have time for your prep.

Stealing More Time

By now you may be a bit disheartened at seeing how many things fill up your time
each day. You may be wondering how you’re going to fit your prep into the free time
you have. One way to get more time is to steal it from other parts of your day. As we
talked about in earlier chapters, some of the phases of prep can be done in different
places.
Here are some examples:

• While in the car • Waiting for the bus

• Waiting in line at the store • While working out
• Before a meeting/class • Taking a shower
• On a lunch break

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There’s a lot of underutilized time throughout the day while you’re doing things that
don’t need your full attention, or while you’re waiting for something to start or fin-
ish. Being able to capitalize on that time will help you get your prep done, and then
you’ll still have your free time to get other things done. In order to best capitalize on
these wasted blocks of time, you need to make sure your prep tools are handy and
your skills at the different elements of prep are well-honed. Then when you have an
unexpected wait in the doctor’s office, you can grab your notebook and knock off a
dozen ideas for your upcoming session.
Here are my favorite places to steal time for each phase:
Brainstorming—On my drive to work. I turn off the radio and just
talk myself though the process.

Selection—Also on my drive to work. I sometimes blend brainstorm-

ing and selection, so this activity often happens while I’m driving.

Conceptualization—Between meetings or before a late meeting. I

keep my notebook close at hand to capitalize on these little gaps.

Documentation—During my lunch break. I typically eat my lunch

quickly and then take the remainder of the time to work.

Review—In the shower. I love to do my mental walkthroughs of the

game in this “quiet zone.”

Building Your Total Prep Cycle

At this point, you have a lot of pieces in front of you. You have your map of activi-
ties and obligations, you have a creativity heat map, you know what other things are
competing for your free time, you have some ideas about where to steal some extra
time, and you have an understanding of which phases of prep are best done at which
points in your creative cycle. You now have all of the building blocks you need to
come up with your total prep cycle.
Start by reviewing your map for windows when you have free time and good creative
energy. Think of which blocks of time are reasonable for you to commit for your
prep. You might want to do a little each night, or you might choose to do it all in
one day.
Looking at the time you have blocked out, is it enough time to get your prep done in
a timely manner and without stress? If not, consider adjusting the frequency of your
sessions to gain more time. Don’t forget to add a little slack time.
Next, plan out each phase of your prep. When will you work on it? Where will you
be? When does it need to be done so that the next phase can happen?

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When all this is done, make the commitment to yourself to follow the plan you have
laid out—and relax, secure in the knowledge that you’ve thought this through, and
have given yourself enough time to get your prep done. Once you’re relaxed, you’ll
be amazed at how easy your prep will be, and at the quality of prep you will produce.
Also, having set aside time for prep and for your other commitments, you’ll find that
you can strike a good balance between your gaming and the rest of your life.
From time to time, evaluate how your current prep schedule is going. Are you finish-
ing very early? If so, you might be able to give up some prep time. Are you rushed
or unable to complete your prep? Then try to find more time in the week, or change
the frequency of your sessions.

True Story: How I Prep

I have free time from 8:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. on weeknights, and on Saturday
evenings. Saturday and Sunday during the day are the times when I tackle all
my other work and obligations, as well as additional time with my family. I
also have to get things done during the week, so I can’t use that entire 8:00-
12:00 block.
My heat map also indicates that I’m highly creative from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00
p.m. and then I drop into a deep valley. So for me to get anything creative
done—prep a game, write a blog article, work on a book—it has to happen in
those first two hours. The last two hours I can use for less creative endeavors.
For me the best tactic in the weeks that I do documentation is to work for an
hour (sometimes two) each night.
So if I ran my game weekly, I would need to be able to prep my game in about
four hours from brainstorming to review, with an additional hour set aside for
slack. For me, that’s not enough time. So I moved my games to every other
week, giving me eight hours with two hours of slack. I used the four hours in
the first week for brainstorming through conceptualization, and then the four
hours in the second week for documentation and review. It really worked for
me.
After I had kids and started other writing projects, I found that coming out
of a game and going right back to brainstorming the next day was a bit too
much, so I moved my game out to every three weeks. I took the first week off
and used that time to catch up on other obligations, and then went through
my two weeks of prep. I am fortunate in that other GMs in my group run
games on the weeks I’m not running mine, so we game weekly but each GM
has three weeks to get their game prepped.

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Artist: Christopher Reach

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 Chapter 10: Your
Personal Prep Templates
Up to now I’ve avoided talking about what actually goes into your session notes. I’ve
discussed the creative process, the tools required for prep, and understanding and
managing your creative process, all of which has built up to this moment. It’s time
to talk about what makes up your session notes.
Most GMs have developed some method of prep through trial and error using in-
stinct as a guide. When GMs tell me that their prep is tedious and takes too long, it’s
often because they’re putting too much material into it. The design of their approach
to prep was not a conscious process. They don’t have a feel for what needs to be in
their prep and what could be removed, because they haven’t designed their prep sys-
tem. Their uncertainty forces them to include more and more material in their prep,
until it becomes a chore to prepare.
This chapter takes a very deliberate and focused approach to determining what
should be included in your prep. The end product will be written templates for ses-
sions, scenes, and special cases that you can use to prep more effectively and ef-
ficiently, because they’re built around your specific strengths and weaknesses as a
GM.

The Purpose of Prep

A quick review: Your prep—that is, what’s in your head and what you have written
down—is everything you need to feel comfortable running your session. When your
prep fails you, whether that failure is related to what’s in your memory or on the page
or screen, your ability to run your session smoothly is compromised.

In Its Simplest Form

Your documentation is the notes which detail the adventure that you’re running for
your players. Your notes are most likely going to be in chronological order, with the
adventure starting at the beginning and concluding at the end.
Your adventure is likely to be broken up into smaller parts—scenes or encounters.
Each of these elements encapsulates a part of the story: a dialog with the king, a
battle with the rat men, or a chase through an asteroid field. Scenes also have a be-
ginning and an end. Your documentation should also be broken down into scenes
or encounters.
In addition to your scenes there will be supplemental material which supports your
adventure. Most often this takes the form of NPC stats and maps, but depending on
the game you run you might have some other material as well. This material is often
tied to one or more of the scenes, and thus exists outside of their chronological struc-
ture; that often means it’s at the end or on separate pages from your main notes.
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There are three levels to your documentation, and at each level there are multiple
elements you need to document and prep. The highest level is your session notes
taken as a whole. What elements need to be included when you start your session
notes? The next level down is the scene. What kinds of elements should you include
in your scenes? At the lowest level are the needs of individual scenes: a combat scene
will have different needs than a social scene. What elements are important to those
scenes?
In order to account for all three levels and all of the necessary elements, you need to
set yourself up to succeed.

Setting Up for Success

Your prep needs to be designed to set you up for success. Yes, designed. By thinking
about what should be included in your notes, you’ll be undertaking a design process;
your personal prep template is the outcome of that process. The design of your prep
template hinges on several factors:

• What are your strengths as a GM? • What kind of game are you
running?
• What are your weaknesses as a
GM? • What type of campaign are you
running?

By understanding and then answering the questions above, you can then determine
what elements should be included in your prep. Once you know that, you can build
a template around those needs. The template will be a tool for your documentation,
one that’s designed to set you up for success by highlighting the elements you need
to define at each level. By focusing on those elements you’ll create better adventures
and your documentation will be more helpful to you when you are running your
game.
The rest of this chapter will highlight things that should be included in your prep,
and show you how to assemble your personal prep template. Using that advice, you
will be able to design a prep template that fits you.

Your Strengths as a GM
Every GM is stronger at some aspects of running a game and weaker in other areas.
When you’re strong in a specific area, you don’t need to look at your notes that often
during the session. That strength means that you’re in command of that particular
GMing skill.
What are your strengths as a GM? During which parts of a scene or a session do
you feel most comfortable behind the screen? Do you deliver great dialog? Or maybe

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awesome room descriptions? Do you excel at clever NPC tactics during combat, or
know the duration of every spell in the game? Take a few moments to jot down the
areas where you feel most comfortable.
Personally, I’m most comfortable describing locations. I can generally see the area
in my mind and describe it to my players in an evocative way through words and
gestures. I’m also comfortable with NPC dialog. When a PC engages an NPC in
discussion, I’m good at playing off that character and going back and forth with the
player. I’m not a master in either area, and I always strive to improve at those skills,
but I am comfortable with both activities.
Your template should include the least documentation in the areas where you’re
strongest as a GM. If you include these elements in your template, they should be
minimal; just a few bullet points or words as reminders. After all, these are your
strengths—why waste time writing them down when you don’t need to reference
them when you run the session?
As an example, because I’m comfortable improvising descriptions, I don’t include a
section for descriptions in my template. Rather, I usually include just a small note
with some tags to remind me of what I want to describe. For instance, if I were to
document the description of a forest clearing it might look like this in my notes:
“Forest clearing: mist, moss on trees, dense canopy, light breeze.” That would be all
I’d need to describe this location to my players during the game.

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 Your Personal Prep Templates

Doing documentation related to your strengths (or worse, doing too much docu-
mentation in those areas) won’t help you prep, and will likely be a waste of time.

Your Weaknesses as a GM
Okay, it’s just you and me right now, and I’m not really there. No GM really likes
to talk about their weaknesses, but we all have them. We’re going to talk about your
weaknesses now, and it’s okay because I’m not going to tell.
There are things that, when they come up in a game, give you that sick feeling or that
shock of adrenaline—you know the feeling I mean. They’re the things that you avoid
doing as a GM—or if you have to do them, you know that what you’re doing is either
barely adequate or not working. When you’re weak at a GMing skill, that’s when you
stumble in your speech and your mind goes blank mid-game. By identifying those
areas, you can compensate for them—and improve your skills.
To figure out your weaknesses you’re going to need to do some introspection. You’re
going to need to be honest with yourself. Failing that, you’ll need a very honest
player—you know the one, the one who will tell you the truth no matter how much
you don’t want to hear it. Go and ask them.
Take a moment and think about your weaknesses. If you say that you don’t have any,
place one hand on a table and rap your knuckles with the spine of this book (or your
tablet or laptop), and try again.
For me, one of my big weaknesses is tactics during combat. When combat gets go-
ing, there are so many things that I am managing that I often underplay my NPCs. I
forget to use their special attacks, or I fail to give them a measure of intelligence. My
NPCs often stand in one spot and get beat on rather than retreating or regrouping.
Got a list of weaknesses yet? Okay, good. Now that you do, guess what? These are
the most important elements in your template. Your documentation should always
include these elements, when applicable, in every scene. Remember that your prep
is designed to make you more comfortable when running your session, and what’s
more comfort-inducing than knowing that all the things you’re weak at are covered?
If you’re weak at something, how can you prep it? Often, being weak in an area just
means that you need more time or work to get it right. Time is something you have
much better control of during documentation than in the middle of a session.
The way I counter my weakness in combat tactics through my documentation is to
work out ideas for my NPCs in advance. While no plan survives contact with the
enemy (or your players), as long as I give some thought to the purpose of my NPCs
and how they will act, I can adjust those plans on the fly.

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For example, the tactics for one NPC, Captain Vosin, might look like this:

• Relies on tricks to get his • He will fight only to a few

opponent to lower their defenses. wounds and then escape.
• When an opponent loses • He will use a trick to slow down
defense, then all-out attack. his opponent and then escape.

Now, in the heat of combat, I know how Vosin generally fights and when he’s going
to run. I can adapt those principles to the situation Vosin finds himself in once the
battle is joined.

Compensating for Weaknesses

Below is a list of common GMing weaknesses and some ways to compensate for
them. If one of your weaknesses is on the list, then add this to your template.
Descriptions—Include a section in your scene template where you
can write a description of the location or NPC. Don’t be shy about
reading it to your players.

NPC Dialog—Include key NPC dialog in your scene template. In-

clude some sample phrases that the NPC may utter as well, to get a
feel for how that character speaks.

Weather—If you don’t use weather enough, add a section to your

template so that you always write down the weather during each
scene. Writing it out for each scene will remind you to vary it from
time to time. If you do vary the weather, consider how it mechani-
cally affects the game.

Date and/or Time—If you don’t do a good job of tracking time dur-
ing play, then add the date and time of the scene to your template
so that you’ll remember to convey it to your players.

Tactics—Include some basic motivations and some special or signa-

ture moves for your NPCs in the combat section of your documen-
tation.

Special Power Rules—Be it spells or super powers, if the rules of

their use trip you up, write the key things you need to know (range,
area, duration, damage, special effect, etc.) into your template for a
quick lookup.

NPC Names—Use free online name generators to create a list of

random names. Keep the list in your notes, or if you GM with your
laptop bookmark the page in your browser.
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If your weaknesses don’t appear on this list, then think of what would be the most
helpful thing to have written down or to be able to reference during your game;
that’s what you want to put in your template.
For example, after some reflection, you determine your key weakness is that you
never give your NPCs any mannerisms. To compensate for that, you need to think
about what information would be most handy to have in your session prep. In this
case you would want any major or minor NPCs to be written up with a mannerism
you can convey during play. You would then add to your NPC template a section for
mannerism. Your template might look something like this:

• Name: • Stats:
• Physical Description: • Powers:
• Personality: • Equipment:
• Mannerism:

Now when you fill out an NPC you’ll be reminded to come up with a mannerism for
her, and when you’re running your session, you’ll be able to look up the mannerism
rather than being put on the spot to come up with one.

The Game You’re Running

The type of game you run is also going to influence what goes into your prep, and
specifically into your documentation. Different games have different requirements
for play, and thus different elements that need to be covered for you to be success-
ful in running the game. For example, if you’re running a Dungeons & Dragons® 4th
Edition game, there’s a specific format for how to document a skill challenge.
One of the best ways to find out what kinds of things you’ll need in your prep,
especially for a new game you are preparing to run, is to look at the introductory
adventure—even if you don’t plan on running it. Look at how the designers prepped
the adventure for you. These are often the only hints you will get from the designers
as to how you should prep your own notes. Look at any templates they used. Is there
one for NPC stat blocks? Do traps or obstacles have a format?
As you identify those elements that the designer has found to be important, look to
see how you can incorporate them into your template. My favorite element to take
from the game’s designer is the NPC stat block. Often I will take the stat block from
the game, add a few more descriptive elements to it, and then incorporate it into my
template.
If you find yourself referring to your rulebooks frequently while running your ses-
sion, then it’s likely that some mechanical elements of the game are missing from
your documentation. For me the missing elements are most often rules like combat
maneuvers or special conditions. They’re not used in every session, but when they
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do come into play I get tripped up by them. One way to combat that is to either put
the page for that rule from the rulebook into your notes, or if you’re on an electronic
platform, to cut and paste the specific rule right into your prep.
For example, when I ran an Iron Heroes campaign, that system included a mechanic
for “zones” that was designed to make the areas where combat takes place more
challenging and interesting. Zones included things like terrain, traps, and magical
effects, and they were written in a format that covered their difficulty and effects. I
added zones to my combat scene template in order to make sure I included them in
all my fight scenes. I also made a template for zones so that I was certain to write
them down in the proper format.

Type of Campaign
There are other elements that need to be included in your prep based on the type
of campaign you’re running. Even different styles of campaigns for the same RPG
will have different prep needs. For instance, a Dungeons & Dragons® campaign that’s
focused on courtly intrigue and one that’s all about dungeon crawling both use the
same game system, but detailed maps are going to be a lot more important in the
second one. They share a system, and they have similar mechanical elements that
need to be included in your prep, but the nature of the campaign dictates what ele-
ments are going to be important for running the system the way you want.
Sometimes, an element of your prep that’s vital to one game won’t be useful in any
others. In my prep for a complex, investigation-heavy Conspiracy X game, I always
included a page that contained a “clue web.” This was a freehand drawing of all my
clues with arrows linking one to another. The purpose of the clue web was to help
me understand the relationship between the different clues the PCs could find, and
what they were leading towards. For that style of game, this was a key element of my
prep, but I’ve never used it in another game.

Two Essentials for Your Template

Before we get to building your templates, I want to briefly discuss two elements that
are essential to that process. While everything I’ve talked about up to this point is
derived from your needs based on your GMing skills, the game mechanics, and the
campaign you’re running, these two elements should appear in your session and
scene templates no matter what:

1. Purpose
2. Closing

In my session template, I include a purpose and closing in the top section of my

notes. In my scene template, I also include a purpose at the top and the closing as
the last element.

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Purpose
It sounds simple, but I have found that GMs often overlook having a purpose when
they prep. Without it, scenes and sessions can wander or go off in strange directions.
When the purpose is understood, you can make on-the-fly adjustments because you
know where things should be going.
At the macro level of your session notes, your session should have a purpose. What
is it that the PCs are trying to accomplish in this adventure? Are they seeking an
ancient relic? Trying to prevent a list of spies from falling into the wrong hands? At-
tempting to forge a peace treaty between two warring solar systems?
You should be able to write up the purpose of the adventure or story in just a few
sentences. If you cannot, then you need to go back to the conceptualization step and
do a bit more prep. Having the purpose of your story written down at the top of your
notes will help you stay focused as you write and keep your notes from wandering.
Every scene should also have a purpose. There should be something that is happen-
ing to the PCs in that scene, or some goal for the scene. Perhaps the PCs are there
to get information from the bartender? Or to find clues to reveal the true killer? Or
even to steal a prototype starship from the hangar?

Artist: Matt Morrow

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You should be able to write a single sentence to sum up the purpose of the scene.
If you can’t describe the scene in one sentence, the purpose is either too long or too
convoluted. If your scene is too long you should break it into multiple scenes. If you
can’t define the purpose, it’s doubtful that your players will understand it when you
run the session, so go back and clarify it before you document it.

Closing
Every session and scene should have an end condition or two—the closing. The end
condition is what tells you that this scene or story is done, and that you can move on
to the next one. When a clear closing is not in place, then the story begins to drag
on. The closing is always tied to the purpose. If the purpose of the story is to steal
the onyx totem, then the closing for the story comes when the PCs escape to safety
with the onyx totem (or, possibly, without it).
At the adventure level, the closing lets you know what loose ends need to be wrapped
up for the adventure to come to a conclusion:

• The NPC gets captured

• The relic is stolen by the PCs
• The dragon is forced away
• The townspeople evacuate the city

At the scene level, the closing lets you know that the scene is done and it’s time to
move to the next scene. When this isn’t clear to the GM, a scene may achieve its
purpose but then linger on until the PCs are at a loss about what to do next. A scene
closing might look something like this:

• After McJinx gives them the codes they can ask

him questions about the emperor
• Once the characters have the disk in hand
• When McJinx is killed or knocked unconscious

Every scene has a natural ending, and it’s always related to the purpose. Often it oc-
curs just after the purpose has been achieved. In some ways the purpose becomes a
mini-climax, and there needs to be a mini-denouement (falling action) to bring the
scene to a close. In my first example closing, the purpose of the scene would be to get
McJinx to give the PCs the codes. That satisfies the purpose, but then they have a
chance to ask a few more questions. If they’ve asked all their questions, then I know
I can end that scene and transition to the next.

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Building Your Templates

So far we’ve covered all the possible elements that will go into a template, but we
haven’t talked about what the template will look like or how you go about building
one. In this section, I’ll address four topics:

• Session Template—Building the template for your session notes

• Scene Template—Creating a template for your scenes
• Specialty Template—Templates for specific purposes (NPC, combat, etc.)
• Paper vs. Digital—How to build your templates using your tool of choice

Session Template
The session template has the following general structure:

• Header • NPC Stats

• Scenes: 1 through X • Maps
• Supporting Material

The header contains the information that will define this specific adventure or story.
It serves two purposes. The first is that it will be the first thing you fill out when you
start your documentation, so the act of writing the header will help bring focus to
your adventure. Second, the header acts as a quick look-up for the major elements
of your session, and a good reference when your players have done something unex-
pected and you need to retool the adventure on the fly.
The elements that can go into the header are:

• Title • Major NPCs

• Campaign Start Date • Major Locations
• Purpose (always included) • Adventure Summary
• Closing (always included)

Based on your specific needs, what elements in the header will be the most helpful
for you when you first document your notes? Those are the elements you should focus
on.

Scene Template
The scene template will be used for every scene within your adventure. The scene
template captures the elements you need in order to play out the scene. While the
template itself is constant, the length of each scene’s write-up will vary depending
on the purpose of the scene.
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The elements that can go into the scene template are:

• Title • Opening • Reward/Treasure

• Purpose • Dialog • GM Notes
(always included) • Descriptions • Closing
• Location • Combat (tactics, (always included)
• Date notes, etc.)
• Weather • Special Rules

Think about the scenes in your game. What elements should you include to ensure
that you can properly run each scene? What elements should you add to the scene
template based on your GMing weaknesses? What game mechanics from your sys-
tem do you need to include? Finally, based on the kind of campaign you’re running,
what elements do you require?
Once you have a list of elements, try to arrange them in an order that makes sense to
you. I prefer chronological order whenever possible, so that the template opens the
scene, progresses through it, and then concludes the scene.
Pick an order that seems logical based on the way you run your scenes and how you
like to organize things. Ultimately you’re the one who will be reading these notes
during your game, so they should be in the order that’s most predictable for you.
That way, your eyes instinctively know right where to go when you’re in need of a
specific piece of information.
You can also create a scene template for different types of scenes. I often use two
scene templates: a generic scene template for non-combat scenes, and a combat scene
template that includes combat-specific elements.

Specialty Template
This is the catch-all template type for the other material you need to prep besides
your overall session and basic scenes. The two most common specialty templates are
those for NPC stats and combat scenes. In most games, it’s rare to have a session
where one or both of these aren’t required. Here are the elements of those two types
of specialty template.

NPC Stats
• Name • Mannerisms • History
• Physical Description • Stats • Combat Tactics
• Personality • Equipment

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Combat Scene
• PCs’ Objective • Starting Location • Purpose
• Opposition Objective • Special Terrain (always included)

• Location Description • Special Effects • Closing

(always included)
• Tactics • Victory Conditions
• Opposition • Failure Conditions

Think about the types of information you need during the game you’re running
(or are planning to run). Are any of them the kind of thing that could benefit from
being turned into a template? For each type of information that needs a template,
consider the elements that will make running that aspect of the game easier for you
and include them.

Paper vs. Digital

At this point you should have at least two, and probably more than two, templates
you can use for your sessions. So how do you actually construct them?
If you’re using a paper-based tool for documentation, there are a few possibilities. If
you prep in a journal, then you can write your templates down at the front or back of
the journal so that you can reference them while you write your notes. You can also
put your templates on index cards and carry them with your notes. If you’re using
loose paper, then you can put your template on a piece of paper and store it along
with your other loose pages in a folder or binder. Finally, you can create a template
by hand or using a word processor, print it out as a form and then fill it out as you
write your notes.
If you go the digital route, your options are going to vary depending on the platform
you use. If you’re using a word processor, then there is likely a feature for creating a
template (as opposed to a simple file) within the program, enabling you to create a
template file that you can use every time you start your session notes. If you’re using a
wiki, some platforms allow for the creation of template pages. Worst case, you create
a master file that has all of your templates in it, and then copy and paste the ones you
need into your file for the session.

Template Maintenance
After you build your templates, you need to take them out for a spin. The first test
will come during the documentation phase, when you can evaluate how easy it is to
enter text into the templates. Consider the following:

• Is the medium you’ve chosen conducive to using a template?

(Consider trying a different medium)

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• Did the template take too long to fill out?

(Consider simplifying some elements)
• Are there elements you don’t fill out every time? (Consider removing them)
• Are there elements you add every time? (Consider adding a new permanent
element)

The second test of your templates will come after you’ve run a session using them.
Consider the following questions after your session:

• Did your notes flow logically or did you have to jump around from section to
section? (Consider reorganizing sections)
• Was there any information that you needed that wasn’t in your notes?
(Consider adding elements)
• Was there information in your notes that you didn’t use?
(Consider removing elements)

It typically takes a few sessions of using a template to get it tuned to a specific game
and campaign. Make adjustments between sessions until you dial in the right mix of
information and complexity/simplicity.
Once you have your templates established, they can last you for an entire campaign.
Though if you find yourself bored with a template or if your campaign changes
direction, revisit the template, consider the questions above, and then make some
changes. Remember the template serves you; you don’t serve the template.

True Story: I Love Titles

I give every adventure or story that I create for my campaigns a title. I love to
give them colorful names like chapters in a novel or issues of a comic book:

• Love In A Bottle • The Vault of Souls

• The Boy with One Green Eye • Ho! Ho! Dough!
• Operation: Red Horizon

In many ways, for me, titles are like true names: They have power. Once I give a
story a title, it begins to take shape in my mind. Like a true name, I rarely share
the titles with my players before we play, because I’m afraid that the title will
give something away.
I also title my scenes. The scene titles are never quite as colorful, but they do
help me mentally frame each scene. When I’m running a session, the scene titles
become a shorthand reminder of what the scene is about, and they help me jog
my memory as I scan my notes during play.
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 Chapter 11:
The Prep-Lite Approach
My path to discovering my prep cycle and its tools started 10 years ago. I was a very
different person then than I am now. For starters, I was single, I was in an entry-level
job, and I had ample free time. There were very few demands placed upon me and I
had few serious commitments. In those days, how long it took to prep a game didn’t
matter. I would work on my game for several hours a night. I would do all sorts of
crazy research for my games—like the time I called a shipping company to find
out how many days it would take to ship a liquid chemical container car across the
country, just so I could figure how long it would take for it to get to Iowa. Time…
lots of free time.
Just 10 years later, my life is very different. I’m married, and I’m the father of two
autistic children. That right there involves a tremendous amount of time. My career
has advanced in the past decade, and I’m now firmly in middle management. My
free time is not what it used to be. In fact, back in Chapter 9, you got to see just how
little of it there actually is. Time has become a precious commodity. And a couple of
years ago I realized that prepping my games the way I had in years past wasn’t going
to work—things had to change.

Prep-Lite Philosophy
I came to the realization that the main factor holding me back from gaming more
often was my ability to prep for games. I had evenings when I could game, and play-
ers who would play, but I’ve never been an improv GM—the kind who can walk into
the game with no notes and just wing a full session. I’ve always needed notes and had
to do some prep, and up until fairly recently prep had always taken me a lot of time
to do well. Putting a quick game together was out of my reach.
I embarked on a quest to find ways to reduce my prep time without compromising
the things I needed to do to run a good game. The Prep-Lite philosophy was the
outcome of that process, based on the idea that I was likely overdoing my prep and
that I really could improv better than I was giving myself credit for. I began to look
at how I did my prep and how I ran my games, and I started to notice that there were
things that I could remove—and more importantly, that there were things which I’d
thought were critical as a GM that went largely unnoticed by my players.

More Introspection
Prep-Lite, like the rest of this book, is not a single formula for reducing your overall
prep, but rather a mindset. By understanding your own needs, you can apply the
Prep-Lite philosophy and find tricks to reduce your prep time.

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Hopefully, through the other chapters of this book, you have come to learn a lot
about yourself as a GM and your needs when you prep for a game. We’re going to
put that information to good use. Before you take your journey, let’s talk about the
guiding principles of Prep-Lite.

The Four Tenets

In my quest to reduce my prep, I discovered four things that represent the core of
Prep-Lite. When applied to your prep, these four tenets will allow you to find ways
of streamlining your prep without compromising the things you really need to com-
fortably deliver a good game. Some of these tenets have been discussed in other parts
of the book, as they have become core beliefs for me when it comes to prep. I could
have saved them for this chapter, but that would have been a disservice to you; it was
important to cover them as they became relevant. I hope you’ll forgive me if parts of
this sound familiar, and in return I promise I’ll tie it all together and show you how
you can use Prep-Lite to streamline your prep.

Rely On Your Strengths

As a GM, you know that there are things you do well. We explored what they were
in the previous chapter, and talked about not over-prepping your strengths. This
practice applies in the first level of Prep-Lite, as well.

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This isn’t to say you should eliminate the things you’re good at from your prep, just
that you should streamline them to the point where they involve the least amount of
writing possible. I do this with two tools that I love: lists and tags.
I am, in general, a person who loves lists. I find lists easy to navigate, and I find the
individual items on a list easy to mentally process. So for the aspects of GMing that
I’m strongest at, I rely heavily on lists. No flowery prose, no detailed descriptions;
just a bulleted list. I don’t use whole sentences either, just phrases that will jog my
mental prep.
For example, say that I’m working on filling in a scene template and I need to write
down the motives of several NPCs involved in a meeting. I could easily write several
paragraphs covering their motives—or I could quickly make a list that’s much more
useful to me:

• Tabris - Upset that the king or- • Rogarth - Annoyed with Tabris
dered the prisoner killed always ordering him around
• Kelven - Trying to keep the peace • The King - Standing by his decision

I also love tags—a single word or two used to encapsulate a concept. When tags
became popular in software, wikis, email, and other areas, I instantly took to the
concept. Tags work because your brain naturally fills in blanks as it processes things.
So when presented with several tags, your mind can fill in the gaps. When you use
tags for an aspect of GMing that you’re skilled at, your mind will take care of filling
in the details. Whenever possible, reduce information down to a handful of tags for
documentation to save time.
I especially like using tags with location descriptions. I picture the location in my
mind, establishing a good mental image. I then focus on the main elements of the
image, and write them out in a list of tags.
For example, say I need to describe the Eiffel Tower in my next session. I look at
a few pictures of it online and generate the following tags: tall, lattice, three levels,
bigger in person, lights at night. From that list, I can re-construct my mental image
of the Eiffel Tower and describe it to my players.
This works equally well for NPC descriptions and NPC personalities. The bottom
line is that you should write as little as possible in the areas where you’re strongest
as a GM. The less writing you do, the faster you prep. Trust your brain to handle
the heavy lifting when you’re at the table, and record only placeholders that will help
your mind fill in the rest.

Support Your Weaknesses

I’ve said it before in this book, but it’s worth saying again: Prep is there to sup-
port your weaknesses as a GM. This was true in the last chapter, and it’s true now.
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Following the Prep-Lite approach, you never cut in areas where you’re weak; you
always want the most information in your notes for those areas.
Don’t be afraid to have more detail in your notes around these aspects of GMing,
and don’t rely on your mind to do the heavy lifting for these areas. Instead, do the
opposite: Your best support material should be provided here, where you need it
most. Creating templates, which we covered in the previous chapter, enables you to
build a framework to compensate for your weaknesses. Those templates are the best
way to make sure your prep supports you where you need it.

They Can’t See Your Prep

For a long time, I operated under the premise that my players had some kind of
insight into what was written in my notes. I felt that if I in any way failed to include
something in my documentation, or used something that wasn’t original, that some-
how I was going to fail my players. I included every last thing for my sessions in my
notes, and did a tremendous amount of work trying to be original, especially in the
areas of NPCs and maps.
It wasn’t until I was a player, on the other side of the screen and paying attention to
what was going on, that it occurred to me: Players don’t experience the GM’s prep,
but rather what the GM conveys in the game. Players don’t check the GM’s work by
reviewing her notes. That small and simple revelation gave me tremendous freedom
to borrow from other sources, and from myself. In terms of streamlining your prep,
this tenet states that you can borrow (read: steal) ideas from other places, including
from yourself, to cut down your prep.
In the case of NPCs I quickly learned that I could take the same stat block and, by
changing out the weapon (a cutlass for a spear) and describing that NPC differently
to my players, create a new NPC. To my players, this NPC was a totally different
one, but for me this was just last session’s pirate with a new “skin.” I also realized
that I did not need to spend a ton of time drawing my own original maps. I could
find a map in another game, or via a web search, and just put it into my notes. My
description of the area, and any drawings I made on my battle mat, would make it
a unique place.
This realization also gave me the freedom to not be perfect in my notes. In the past
I would be concerned about grammar and spelling—two problem areas for me that,
without the aid of a modern word processor and an editor, you would be experienc-
ing right now. I would spend time trying to make sure that my documentation was
cleaned up and neat; easy enough to do electronically, but nerve wracking with pen
and paper.
After I realized that no one would be reading my notes, I gave myself the freedom
not to worry about perfection, and instead focused on getting my ideas down in a

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usable format. While I still do some level of proofreading as part of the review phase,
I don’t spend a lot of time doing it—and when I’m crunched for time, I can let it
slide.
In terms of streamlining your prep, be liberal about picking things up and using
them, but always take the time to re-skin them so that your players don’t figure out
where they came from. Nothing jars your game quite like the moment when your
players figure out that some element of it was lifted from another source. Do a little
extra work to re-skin them and make them feel original. Let your players think that
you handcrafted each little element, and feel the sense of mystique that engenders.

Abstract Mechanical Elements

The last tenet builds off of the previous one. If you believe that your players only
experience what you describe to them, then you’re not bound to the same mechani-
cal rigors that they are. This isn’t to say that you should cheat, but rather that you
can streamline things by simplifying some of the mechanics of your game. This will
speed up your prep, and you can compensate for the simplification through your
descriptions at the table. Your players will never know the difference, and the time
saved can be considerable. As with the previous tenet, both NPCs and maps can be
abstracted into much simpler forms.
Say that characters in your game have six main stats. Want to simplify that for
NPCs? Reduce those six stats down to just two: Important and Unimportant. Then
just use the stat that describes that NPC: For a warrior, her physical strength and
coordination are important; for a wizard, it might be his intellect. With just two
stats, you can use the same pair of numbers for both of those NPCs. I call this a
“wireframe,” and with a wireframe and a new skin you can create what will appear
to be an entirely new NPC without doing much work at all.
I first tried this when creating NPC stat blocks in a game of Corporation. I was able
to reduce their stats down to a manageable number, and then build five “levels” of
simplified stats to represent everything from a normal human to the most cybered-
up maniac. I later used this same technique in All for One, and it worked just as well.
(For additional details, including a full example for Corporation, check out my origi-
nal articles on this topic on Gnome Stew: goo.gl/WzVvi and goo.gl/7xZtM.)
When it comes to maps, my realization was that if I wasn’t going to lay a map out
for my players to see, then I didn’t really need a map in the classical sense. Rather
what I needed were the locations of importance, and a way to connect one to the
next—essentially nodes on a web of lines. The movement from one location to the
next would be handled through narration, and my players would never really know
(or likely care) that they weren’t moving through a detailed map. Their experience
was that they moved from one important area to the next.

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For example, a secret medical facility might include the following areas:

• Guard checkpoint (several guards) • Medical bay (where the

subjects are held in cages)
• Computer lab (where the
research data is located) • Loading bay (where subjects and
equipment enter and leave)
• Laboratory (where the
samples are kept) • Scientist’s office (where the
chief scientist is located)

I can quickly connect these areas in a simple location map, as seen below.

Secret Front Door

Medical
Facility
Guard
Checkpoint

Scientist Computer
Laboratory
Office Lab

Medical Bay Loading Bay

I didn’t need to create any storerooms or bathrooms, or figure how long the hallways
are. If my players ask about anything like that during the game, I can fill in those
details on the fly. (For additional details and examples, see my article on this topic
on Gnome Stew: goo.gl/AoQNo.)

Your Own Prep-Lite Path

As you think about what Prep-Lite means to you, consider your own prep, especially
your documentation. Follow the tenets above and think about how they would apply
to your notes. Are you writing too much in areas where you’re strongest as a GM?
Can you reduce those elements to phrases, lists, and tags?

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In the areas where you’re weak, does your template provide you the support you need
to make sure you’re doing the kind of prep you need? Do you need to modify your
template to better address your weaknesses?
What parts of your prep are the most time consuming? Can you borrow from other
sources to speed up your prep in those areas? If so, go find a few sources, stockpile
useful things, and then re-skin them and use them in your prep.
What game mechanics eat up your time during prep? Consider how those can be
simplified. Do you really need a full stat block for every NPC, or can you use a wire-
frame to boil those numbers down to the essentials?
For tasks like abstracting mechanical elements, you may put in more upfront work
to crunch the numbers, but you’ll save time in the long run because you can reuse
that material in multiple sessions. In this way abstracting mechanical elements is
like writing a macro or a script for a software application: It takes time to set up, but
when you need it, it’s quick to run.
Prep-Lite is as much a mindset as it is a technique. After you have made some initial
changes to your prep, always be on the lookout for more ways to streamline what
you’re doing. As your GMing skills improve you’ll find more things that you can
streamline. By taking advantage of your strengths, recycling good material, and
abstracting complex ideas into simple ones, your prep time will keep on getting
shorter.

True Story:
The Pirate Stat Block
In my Iron Heroes game, I had a pirate villain who was to be a strong opponent
for an encounter with my players’ 5th level PCs. The pirate was designed to be
a duelist of sorts, handy with a cutlass and a strong melee fighter. The PCs had
their encounter with him and, in time, were able to defeat him.
Later on I needed another duelist type, but a warlord who was on par with
the PCs. I figured that my pirate stat block would work just fine. I changed
out the cutlass to a long sword, came up with a new description, and used the
stats again.
Before that campaign was done, I used the pirate stat block five more times.
Each time, I changed out the weapon and description. Each time the NPC
got weaker and weaker relative to the PCs, but that fit the situations where I
used the stat block. It also saved me a ton of time, since I didn’t have to create
a whole new NPC every time.

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 Chapter 12:
Prep in the Real World
Things go wrong. In a perfect world, everything I covered in the previous 11 chap-
ters would work every time, just like I wrote them. Some days, that just might hap-
pen, but there are going to be times when something unexpected crops up and you’ll
have to change what you’re doing in order to get your game prepped on time. This
chapter looks at some real-world examples of things that can arise, how they impact
your prep, and how you can adapt your prep style to overcome these challenges.
It’s worth mentioning that I was a designer and author of two other GMing books
that can save you time in several of the situations below, both published by Engine
Publishing. The first, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, presents
complete start-to-finish adventure outlines, each of which includes enough scenes
for an evening of play. The second, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplay-
ing Game, gives you a thousand NPCs complete with motivations, quirks, and back-
grounds, all suitable for dropping into your game. Both books are system-neutral,
and I believe they complement Never Unprepared well. You can find out more about
them at enginepublishing.com.

Make the Ideal Your Norm

In a chaotic world, it’s tempting to accept constant interruptions in your prep as the
norm, forcing you to alter your prep in a way that may not be the most beneficial to
you, your game, and ultimately your players. Understand that exceptions occur, but
you should always strive to get back to your ideal prep system after the interruption.
Don’t become upset at an unexpected change to your plans. With all things in life
you need to be flexible. If the interruption cannot be avoided, then accept it, look at
how you can adapt your prep, and keep on moving.
If you find that the same interruptions are occurring session after session, then you
need to reevaluate how you’re doing your prep and make some adjustments. If you’re
always working late and it’s cutting into your time to prep, then you may need to re-
vise your time map, extending your work time, and find a new time to work on your
game. Evaluate the issue, come up with a solution, and make the correction; those
three steps will always serve you well.

Playing Is Better Than Not Playing

Except when it comes to logical exceptions—family emergencies, your health, work,
and all the other things you recognize are more important than gaming—it’s better
to be able to play something than to cancel your game. Canceling a game hurts its

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chances for longevity. Cancel a game too many times and it’s likely that you won’t
play that game again.
The strategies and solutions presented below look to salvage your session by stream-
lining the prep process in response to unexpected events. Some corners have to be
cut, and some prep phases will be compressed. The goal is to be able to arrive at the
table with something to play. It may not be the length you planned on, or it might
be missing the level of detail/quality you normally deliver, but you will be playing.
And now on to life’s little disasters…

That Thing on That Night

Lots of things can be That Thing on That Night: meeting your parents for dinner
out, a friend coming to town tomorrow, tickets to a great concert, etc. The key is that
it’s a planned event that will occur during a time when you’d normally be prepping
for your game. You know about it in advance, unlike Something Came Up (see be-
low), and you’re aware that it falls during a time you were planning to prep for your
next session.
In these cases, the best thing to do is to see how much prep time you’re losing and
look over your schedule to see where you can make it up. If you’re losing three hours

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one evening to see a movie with friends, you then look to see where you can pick up
three hours. You could:

• Extend one of your other • Make up the time by using some

blocks of prep time of that in-between time (between
meetings at work, during your
• Plan to prep at a time when you
lunch break, etc.)
don’t normally prep, using up
some of your other free time • Start your prep a few days early

The goal is to retain the same amount of time to prep your game by finding and us-
ing some other free time in your schedule—trading one for one. Because your event
is planned, you should have enough time to make adjustments to your schedule to
make the accommodations necessary. If you can’t find any additional time because
all your time is accounted for, or the event came up too quickly to plan around, then
treat this situation as Something Came Up.

Something Came Up
Events that fall into this category include a minor emergency at work, catching a 24-
hour flu, a last minute offer for dinner, and the like. To qualify as Something Came
Up, the event needs to be one you didn’t plan for which interrupts your prep time,
and there can’t be a way to get more free time—you just have less time to prep. If the
event is planned, or if you can convert free time to prep time 1:1, then it’s That Thing
on That Night (see above).
The first thing you need to do is to figure out how much time you are losing or have
lost; the second is to figure out where you are in the prep cycle. Depending on how
far you are into the prep cycle there are a few different ways to approach the problem.
Let’s look at Something Came Up events before documentation, during documenta-
tion, and after documentation.

Before Documentation
When something comes up before you’ve started writing your notes, that’s the worst
case scenario—you still have all of your notes to prep. At this point you need to start
writing as fast as possible, so that you have the most time for documentation.
The first thing you need to do is to move quickly from brainstorming to selection,
and then to conceptualization. Selection is the best phase to reduce. Grab an idea
from the brainstorming phase and start working it out in your mind. Limit your
conceptualization to the basics; just make sure the scene makes sense.
Once you get to documentation, it’s okay if you need to roll back to the conceptu-
alization phase for some additional ideas; at least you’re writing at this point. Once

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your notes are written, take any time you have left and tackle the review phase,
focusing most on the director and playtester roles.
In this situation, the problem is that you didn’t vet or fully detail your ideas, so you’ve
increased your risk of having a scene that isn’t as detailed or logically strong as what
you normally produce. Make up for that in the documentation phase by mixing
some conceptualization with your writing, and during your review by focusing on
the details of the scene.

During Documentation
If you’re in the middle of writing your notes when you get interrupted, the good news
is that you’ve already conceptualized your scenes and you have some of your notes
taken care of. Your focus should be on getting the rest of your material documented.
In this case, see how much material you have left to document and determine if you
really need it all for your session. GMs often prep more material than players will
get through in an evening, so you may be able to eliminate a scene or two that you
haven’t written yet, wrap up your notes, and move on to your review. This is ideal,
because the material that is prepped is of good quality and is a product of your nor-
mal prep process. The risk is that your game may run a bit short.
If you can’t eliminate any scenes, then focus your time on producing good documen-
tation and minimize the review phase. Good documentation will aid you as you run
the game, so don’t cheat yourself out of those notes. Speed up your review first by
dumping the proofreader, and then (if necessary) the playtester. If you have any time
to review, do it as the director and make sure your scenes are well structured. In this
case, the risk will be that you have some errors or problems in your remaining prep
that you didn’t catch during documentation.

After Documentation
If you’ve completed your documentation, then you’re down to just one phase, review.
In this case, you can save time by dropping the following review techniques/roles in
this order: proofreader, playtester, director (at which point you’re skipping this phase
entirely). The main risk is that for each role you drop, you won’t catch the mistakes
that role is designed to catch.
Without the proofreader you may have some typos and grammatical errors, which
is a minor problem; where it becomes a major one is when you’re missing things like
stats for an encounter. With the removal of the playtester, the risk is that your players
will short circuit a scene in an un-fun way by thinking of something that you missed.
When you cut out the director, you run the risk of having logical errors in your story
that you might have difficulties narrating around.

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Not Feeling It
Sometimes despite your best efforts, you’re just not feeling it. Maybe you’re low on
energy, the kids were up all night, or you pulled an all-nighter yesterday. In this case
you have adequate time and no interruptions, but your personal or creative energy
is drained. You know you need to be working on prep, but you don’t want to do it.
The best thing to do is to not force yourself to be creative. Trying to be creative when
your energy is low is what I call “writing through molasses,” and it’s a painful process
that always produces lower-quality work. Fortunately, there are a few approaches
you can take…

Tackle the Non-Creative Work

Instead of forcing yourself to be creative, work on some of the less creative aspects
of your prep, even if that means doing some things out of order. Here are a few
examples:

• Roll up the treasure for • Do basic research

your encounters
• Review relevant rules for the session
• Write up the stat blocks for
monsters and NPCs

The idea is to get whatever you can out of the way now so that later on, when you’re
feeling more creative, you can address the creative stuff: writing dialog, room de-
scriptions, etc.

Take the Night Off

Sometimes your creative batteries need recharging. Give yourself the night off and
rest or do something else to take your mind off of your prep. Depending on how
soon your next game is, you can treat this as That Thing on That Night or Something
Came Up (see above for both). Once refreshed, you’ll be able to return to your work
and engage with it fully.
There is one caveat, though: Taking a night off is good, but taking a string of nights
off because your batteries are drained will create a Something Came Up situation,
which can be stressful to overcome. If you find that you’re just not feeling it for a
number of nights, your problem may be your feelings towards the game, and not
a personal energy issue. You may have lost your engagement in the game, and are
slowly losing your resolve to run the campaign. While that issue is beyond the scope
of this book, it does happen, and when it starts it often looks like a run of Not Feel-
ing It.

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Hard to Starboard
When you find a glaring plot hole or a rule you thought worked one way that in fact
works another way, or a player who’s critical to the session can’t make it that night,
that’s a Hard to Starboard situation. These are cases where you’ve been doing your
prep and you suddenly discover that some assumption you made about the session
isn’t true.
Maybe it’s something about how you designed the plot, like finding out that your
scenes can’t lead to a successful conclusion. Or perhaps you were centering the ses-
sion on a specific PC, but that PC’s player is the one who can’t attend the game. You
have some prep under your belt, but it won’t work at the table in its current form.
There are two ways to approach this problem: change course or excise it.

Change Course
When you encounter one of these failed assumptions you can simply write around
it. To change course, you need to assess the problem, alter part of the plot in a way
that will correct the problem, and then work the change into your prep. The goal is
to figure out what it is you need and then find a substitute that will fit the plot better
than the element you currently have.

Artist: Christopher Reach

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Sometimes the change will only affect the material that is to come, which makes the
change easy to implement. For example: The plot is a mystery and your series of clues
pointed to the butler, but after reflection you find a reason he couldn’t have done it.
You ponder the situation and decide that the gardener is a much better choice. None
of the clues are too specific, and they can fit the gardener just as well as they did the
butler. You then continue your prep, but now the conclusion focuses on the gardener.
When the change requires some tweaks in parts of the plot that have already been
prepared, you’ll have to review your material and look for any new inconsistencies
the change has created, and adjust them as well. It’s important to change as little
as possible, since a change in early material can spawn more changes until, like a
sweater with a pull in it, the whole thing unravels.
Here’s another example using the same problem with the mystery, the butler, and
the gardener. This time, you realize that one of the early clues was that someone had
to have the key to the study; that makes perfect sense for the butler, but not much
sense for the gardener. Now you need to come up with a reason why the gardener
would have the key, and then go back and make sure that the earlier scenes support
this idea.
Depending on where you are in your process these changes could result in a Some-
thing Came Up situation, and you may have to decide if you can get all your docu-
mentation done in time. In either case, a Hard to Starboard always introduces the
risk of a plot error, so if time permits you need to focus a little extra attention on the
director role during your review to root out any problems.

Excise It
There are times when a problem cannot be worked around, when the flaw is too great
to correct. The once-good idea is now a cancer within the plot, and there’s no other
choice but to remove it. While it sounds simple, excision has some of the same chal-
lenges as Change Course.
When you’re going to excise part of the plot, first consider what the absence of that
element will do to the overall story. Can the adventure be run without this part?
If it cannot, then you need to Change Course instead, and attempt to salvage the
troublesome bit. If it can, look at what parts of the plot preceding and following the
excised element are affected by its removal.
For example: You have a scene early on in your session notes where the PCs are going
to be attacked by the Red Hand ninja clan. You realize that if the PCs beat the Red
Hand, you won’t be able to use them for the climax. If the opening combat scene
didn’t really matter, you could just excise it and save the Red Hand for later on. If
you needed that early combat scene for another reason (e.g., to kill a bystander to
raise the tension), then you need to Change Course, swap out the Red Hand, and
then find another suitable group who could be involved in that combat to generate
the same effect.
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Your main risk when you excise something is that by dropping some part of the
game, you may not have enough material for a whole session. In my experience this
is typically not the case, since players can chew up extra time planning and the like.
You can also slow the tempo of the game to stretch things out a bit.

The Shiny
The Shiny is a variant of Hard to Starboard, but instead of finding a flaw you need
to fix, you suddenly have an idea that sounds better than your original plan. This can
come as a stroke of genius while writing, a great thought during the review phase,
or because you just read the coolest thing and you have to use it. Once you have this
idea, it begins to dominate your thoughts and you start thinking that perhaps you
need to make some changes…
In many cases The Shiny is a problem because of poor impulse control. If you feel
that you have to act on every great thought you have, you will forever be sidetracked.
Here’s what to do when you encounter The Shiny.

Capture
The first reason GMs often act on every great idea that comes along is because
they’re afraid to forget it. When inspiration strikes you need to capture that idea
for future use. This follows David Allen’s advice about having a ubiquitous capture
device, a way to capture ideas no matter where you are. We’ve talked about that in
this book, as well: You should always have a way to record your ideas handy, be it a
notebook, a smartphone, or another tool.
When you have a great idea, capture it in your brainstorming system and then try to
let the idea go, knowing that you can use it in a future game. Once your brain knows
that you’re not going to forget the idea, it’s more likely to let it go and allow you to
get back to work.

Evaluate
Once the idea is captured, leave it alone for a little while and then revisit it later on.
Think about the idea; is it really as good as you thought it was when it first came to
you? People often love ideas when they first think of them, and a cooling-off period
will reveal whether an idea has merit or if you just got caught up in the moment.
If you’re lucky, that’s the end of the dilemma. The idea is captured, and it’s good, but
it doesn’t need to trump whatever you’re currently working on. It may make good
fuel for a future session.

It Really Can’t Wait

If, after you’ve captured the idea and assessed it, it really is that good and you just
have to use it in your next session, you now have a Hard to Starboard situation.
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You’ll need to Change Course and/or Excise It to alter your plot accordingly, and
those changes have to be sorted out before game night.
The worst-case scenario is when your idea is incompatible with your current mate-
rial, and you now have to dump what you’ve written and start over. Depending on
how much time you have until your session, this situation is either That Thing on
That Night or Something Came Up, and you’re going to have to hustle to account
for all the risks involved in following your chosen course.

You Want to Game When?!

An old friend is in town unexpectedly, the GM for this week’s session can’t run the
game, or a key player can’t make it and the game won’t work without them—the
common ingredient here is that you’re not engaged in game prep at all, but you’re
called upon to put a session together quickly, often in a day or less. In order to meet
this goal, you’re going to need to compress all of the phases of prep into a very short
timetable. The ground rules for a pickup game aren’t the same as those for a full ses-
sion, though, so there are ways to cut corners.
When you put together a pickup session, keep these things in mind:
No character development—A single-session pickup game shouldn’t
focus on character development.

Artist: Christopher Reach

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Simple plot—Keep the plot uncomplicated; sophistication in a pick-

up game is not required. A nice linear plot with a single surprise is
all you need.

Skimp on originality—This kind of game doesn’t require you to cre-

ate your plot from scratch. Cut and paste anything that will help
you along.

Action-packed—Make sure that the session has plenty of action.

First, action is always fun for players. Second, action can hide a
thin plot. Third, action scenes often take up a lot of time, so you’ll
need to prep less material.

With regard to compressing the prep cycle, here’s how you should approach each of
the steps:
Brainstorming—Jot down five ideas for the game; no more. If you
can’t think of an idea, find a source for plot hooks or plots and pick
a few at random.

Selection—Go with your gut. Scan your short list and select the one
that jumps out at you. That’s the one that is going to be the easiest
to write, because subconsciously your mind made a connection to it.

Conceptualization—Go light on this step. Just get an outline down

for the session and some ideas for the key scene(s).

Documentation—Get writing. Utilize the Prep-Lite techniques

of tags, lists, and bullets to keep your writing simple. Grab maps
and stat blocks from other material to avoid those time consuming
steps; this is no time to be original.

Review—Ditch the proofreader role and then be quick about the di-
rector and the playtester.

The end result of this compressed prep process isn’t going to be an intricately plotted
adventure, but it can be a lot of fun to run. You will get to game and, like pizza and
sex, even when it’s bad a pickup game is still pretty good.

Disaster Strikes
Your hard drive crashes, you lose your notebook on the train ride home, your kid
colors on your session notes—these are all examples of prep disasters. You did ev-
erything you were supposed to do: You planned out your time and you completed
every phase of prep, but at some point in the process you lost your documentation.
It’s gone, and there is no way it’s coming back. Don’t panic, because you can salvage
plenty of your hard work.
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When disaster strikes, you need to take advantage of the prep that’s still in your
head. While you may not remember every detail, remember that when you docu-
ment you’re actually doing both physical prep and mental prep. The first thing you
should do is write down everything you remember about the session—the outline,
any parts of the map you can recall, lists of NPCs, etc. Try to capture as much as
possible. If you do your brainstorming and/or conceptualization in another notebook
or file, use that to help fill in any gaps you have in your memory.
Depending on how far into your notes you were, this can be a Something Came
Up situation in terms of how much you lost and how much you have to make up.
If disaster struck early on in the process, then this is likely a minor setback; if you
manage your time well you can catch up. In this case, make sure when you review
that you pay extra attention to any material you had to rewrite, particularly in the
area of potential plot errors.
If your notes were finished and you don’t have much time before the game, you may
find yourself in a You Want to Game When?! situation. Take the rough notes you
recovered and use the Prep-Lite approach to put your session together, but in a more
streamlined format. It won’t be ideal, but you will be able to pull off the upcoming
session and get back on track afterwards.
No matter what has happened, by understanding the phases of prep and doing a
little time management, you can almost always come back from a real-world setback
and get your game to the table on time.

True Story:
Just Add Hit Points
When my son was born, like most fathers I lost a lot of sleep, and it was taking
its toll on my prep. By the time I put him to bed after a full day of work, I was
so tired that I was lucky to get an hour of prep done before falling asleep at my
desk. I would do what I could but my material was often a bit too short for a
full session. In order to stretch out a session, I would look at two things: the
time, and how many hit points the creatures in the current battle had left. If
the game was ahead of schedule, I would just add some extra hit points to the
creatures, or throw in another wave of monsters, and keep the battle going.
Battles chew up a ton of time, and players are usually too busy trying to keep
their PCs alive to notice.
As a more long-term solution to my prep problem, I eventually moved from
running games every other week to every three weeks. That gave me more
time to prep, and required me to add fewer hit points to my monsters.

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 Chapter 13:
Conclusion
When I started this endeavor 10 years ago, I didn’t have a journey in mind.
I certainly never thought that it would lead to writing a book about prep.
Ten years ago, I was 29 and sitting on my then-girlfriend’s couch as she told
me that in the future I wouldn’t have as much time to work on my games,
nor be able to game as much as I did then. In my head, I was panicking.
Gaming had been a core part of who I was since I was 10 years old, when
my mom’s friend’s son—in whose house we were temporarily living at the
time—introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons®.
In the 20 years between making my first character and sitting on the couch
that night, gaming had played a major part in my life. It helped me cope
with some hard years growing up, it was how I made friends, and it was how
I dealt with the stresses of life. It made me read more, it made me better at
math, it made me highly creative, and years later I learned that it had made
me very capable of working with and leading groups of intelligent and pas-
sionate people.
Sitting there on the couch, I realized she was right. We would get married,
I would advance in my career, and we would have children. Yes, all of those
things were more important than gaming—but there was no reason to give
it up entirely. Rather, my gaming was going to have to change to make room
for these new things in my life. So without knowing it, the journey started
there. I had only one goal: Keep gaming.
A few years later, when I discovered life hacking and personal productivity,
it was a short mental hop to figure out how to apply them to gaming. If I
was going to keep gaming, I was going to have to ratchet up my personal
productivity so that I could maintain my new obligations at the same time.
While everything I learned helped me both professionally and personally,
I never missed a chance to translate those lessons and techniques to their
gaming counterparts.
So far it has worked. It’s been 10 years since that night on the couch, my
then-girlfriend is now my wife, and all the other things we talked about—
house, kids, career—came true. The other thing that’s true is that I’m still
gaming. I don’t run games as often as I might like, but my group has been
together for 15 years and we have never stopped gaming.
When I started writing this book, I had serious doubts that people would
be interested in a book about session prep. After all, as GMs we don’t talk

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about session prep. But then I thought that if, 10 years ago, someone had
handed me this book and said, “You won’t be able to game like you do now,
but this book will make sure that you can keep gaming” I would have been
a lot less panicked at that moment.
I hope that in some way this helps you in your prep. Perhaps you’re an expe-
rienced GM, and from it you got a few tips that will help you be a bit more
efficient. Or maybe you’re a new GM just getting started and are curious
about how to get your session prep done, and this book helps you create that
system. Or you’re an established gamer who just proposed to her partner, or
is looking over at his pregnant wife, and isn’t quite sure how to keep gam-
ing, and this book helps you see that you can manage a family, a career, and
gaming.
My personal journey is still underway. If anything, this book was a nice
rest stop, a way to reflect on the things that I learned over the years and to
see how it has all come together as a way to not only prep my games better,
but to allow me to maintain a game-life balance. I will continue to work to
master my GMing skills in the years to come. What will my life be like in
10 more years, with teenagers and a growing career? I have no idea. What
I do know is that by managing my time, using my creative energies wisely,
and honing my creative skills, I will be able to keep gaming.
And so can you.

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 Chapter 14:
References and Inspiration
The following books, articles, web pages, and blog posts were all useful to me as
I worked on improving my own session prep—and on this book. Some have been
referenced directly throughout the text, while others are reflected in the concepts
I’ve written about.
Life Hacking and Personal Productivity
David Allen Company (davidco.com) and Getting Things Done—It’s hard for
me to encompass in words the effect that GTD has had on my life. It’s my
productivity system and philosophy of choice, and many of David’s concepts
formed the underpinnings of what I’ve written about in this book.
Lifehacker (lifehacker.com)—A daily read for me for many years, this site
focuses on ways to simplify your life.
Time Management for Creative People, by Mark McGuinness (goo.gl/38nh)
One of my earliest references about why creative people need to be orga-
nized.
The War of Art, by Stephen Pressfield—Another great book about managing
the creative process.
DNAphil.com articles (dnaphil.com)—Before I started writing for Gnome Stew, I
ran my own personal blog, and my first articles about session prep were written
there:
Session Writing – Taking It One Step at a Time (goo.gl/IbKnv)

Session Writing – Tools of the Trade (goo.gl/FIVUr)

Session Writing – It’s All In the Notes (goo.gl/dhKAk)

GM-Fu Session Prep (goo.gl/xVuyP)—Many GenCons ago, I participated in sev-

eral panel discussions and one workshop about GMing. At the workshop, I pre-
sented tips for session prep along with Philippe-Antoine Menard (the Chatty
DM), and Vicki Potter from Tabletop Adventures. The workbook from this panel
is a free download.

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Gnome Stew (gnomestew.com)—I’ve been writing on Gnome Stew since 2008, and
after looking back at my list of articles it turns out I’ve been writing about session
prep in one way or another for some time. Gnome Stew is also where I first wrote
about Prep-Lite.
The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Creativity (goo.gl/U6X3b)

A Deeper Understanding of GM Notes (goo.gl/PUvDE)

Prep-Lite Manifesto - The Template (goo.gl/m2xJ)

Prep-Lite: Wireframes And Skins (goo.gl/WzVvi)

Prep-Lite Wireframe How To (goo.gl/7xZtM)

Prep-Lite: Maps (goo.gl/AoQNo)

Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters and Masks: 1,000
Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game—I was the project manager for, and
one of the designers and authors of, both of these books from Engine Publishing
(enginepublishing.com). They can both be prep timesavers, especially if you’re
crunched for time.

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 Index
Allen, David. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 67, 75, 79, 113, 119

Brainstorming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16, 21, 83, 108, 113

Blending with selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Creativity and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Flashes of insight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Goal of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 37
Notebooks for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 23
Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Questions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Rate your skill level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Requirements for. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Techniques. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24, 115
Too little. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70, 71, 72
Too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
True Story: Storm Clouds on the Express Lane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Campaign prep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Campaign settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 32
Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24, 26, 33, 37, 41, 48, 54, 87, 92, 98
Capturing ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18, 22, 24, 25, 67-71, 83, 113, 116
Capulus est responsum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Columbo question. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Combat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 43, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97
Comfort zone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 43
Conceptualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 19, 38, 83, 93, 108, 115
Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Combining with documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45, 57
Creativity and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Dramatic structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Locations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38, 44
Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Mechanics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
NPCs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 40
Outline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Overlap with documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Players. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

121
 Index

Rate your skill level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Sessions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Too little. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70, 71, 72
Too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
True Story: The Columbo Question. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Who, what, where, when, and why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Consistency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19, 62
Creative cycle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14, 75
Creativity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79, 81, 110
Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Free time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76, 81, 107
Heat map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Highs and lows. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Inventory map. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Phases of prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Not understanding yours. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Scheduling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Stress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
True Story: How I Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Cycle, creative—See Creative cycle

Definition of prep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Director role—See Review
DNAphil.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18, 44, 48, 83, 86, 108, 115
Conceptualization/documentation blob. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Creativity and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 56
Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 54
Player choices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Psychic RAM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Purpose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Rate your skill level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Templates—See Templates
Tags. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 82
Too little. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

122
 Index

Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68, 70, 71

Too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
True Story: Speling Mistkes and Extra, Commas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Unused material. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Dramatic structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Dropbox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68, 69

Electronic tools—See Tools

Engine Publishing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8, 106, 120
Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters . . . . . 8, 106, 120
Exercises
Brainstorming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Conceptualization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Evernote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Fatherhood. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13, 99, 116

Feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Filters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 32, 35
First rule of prep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Game systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 91

Getting Things Done. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67, 79, 119
GM-Fu Session Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
GMing style—See Style, GMing
Gnome Stew. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8, 103, 104, 119, 120
Goal of prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 11, 86, 101
GreenShirts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Ideas. . . . . . . . . . 16, 17, 19, 21, 28, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 44, 102, 108, 113
See also: Brainstorming, Conceptualization, Selection

Lifehacker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Life hacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15, 117, 119
Locations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 40, 59, 95-97, 101, 103
See also: Where to prep
Logic gaps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 42, 58-60, 62

Making peace with prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49, 69, 72, 73, 92, 95, 102, 103
Heat map—See Creative cycle
Inventory map—See Creative cycle

123
 Index

Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs

for Any Roleplaying Game. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8, 106, 120
Mechanics—See Rules
Media consumption. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Misconceptions about prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 15
Mistakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56, 58, 59, 61, 72, 109
Moleskine notebooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 68

Non-player characters—See NPCs

Not Scottish—See Crap
Notebooks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 23, 68, 70
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6, 15, 18, 48, 58, 70, 86, 102, 108
Length. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13, 44, 49, 52
See also: Documentation, Templates
NPCs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 39, 49, 59, 89, 91, 96, 101-103, 105
Allies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Opposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 40
See also: Stat blocks
Nunquam non paratus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

OneNote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50, 68

Paper-based tools—See Tools

PCs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 40, 43
Pens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69, 74

Phases of prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15, 16-19, 70, 81, 84

Creativity level and. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Order. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
See also: Brainstorming, Conceptualization,
Documentation, Review, Selection
Player characters—See PCs
Players. . . . . . . . . . . . . 29, 33, 35, 41, 42, 44, 53, 54, 60, 62, 63, 101-103
Playtester role—See Review
Prep-Lite approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99, 116
Abstraction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Four tenets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Tags. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
True Story: The Pirate Stat Block . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Your strengths. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Your weaknesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

124
 Index

Prep templates—See Templates

Proofreader role—See Review

Rating your skill level—See Exercises

Real world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106, 117
Complications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Disasters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Hard to Starboard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Nights off. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Not Feeling It. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Pickup sessions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114, 116
Shiny, The. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Something Came Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108, 110, 112, 114, 116
That Thing on That Night. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107, 108, 110, 114
True Story: Just Add Hit Points. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
You Want to Game When?!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114, 116
See also: Creative cycle, Time
Resources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
See also: Tools
Review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18, 58, 109
Director role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Dress rehearsal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Mistakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58, 59
Nitpicking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Playtester role. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Proofreader role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Rate your skill level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Second guessing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Three reviewers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Too little. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
True Story: TMI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29, 35
Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 35, 49, 53, 90, 103

Scenes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21, 40, 41, 49, 61, 87, 98, 108, 111, 112
Templates for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92, 95
Selection. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 28
Blending with brainstorming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Comfort zone. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

125
 Index

Criteria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Filters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Rate your skill level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Too little. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
True Story: Some Ideas Get Better With Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
What your players like. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Your campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Your game. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Your GMing style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Skill level, rating your—See Exercises
Spelling and grammar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56, 59
Stat blocks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49, 61, 91, 95, 96, 102, 103, 105
Strengths as a GM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30, 35, 87, 100
Style, GMing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30, 35

Tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88, 101

Templates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Building yours. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87, 95
Closing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92, 94
Essentials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Maintenance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Paper vs. digital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Prep-Lite approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Purpose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92, 93
Scene template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Session template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Specialty template . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
True Story: I Love Titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Your campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Your game system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Your strengths. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Your weaknesses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Time. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31, 40, 45, 55, 64, 72, 75, 81
Managing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Obligations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75, 99, 106
Taking too long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33, 44
See also: Creative cycle, Real world
Time Management for Creative People . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Titles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95, 98

126
 Index

Tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50, 67, 106

Changing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Comfort with. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Cross pens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Dropbox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68, 69
Good ones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Identifying your needs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Maps (heat and inventory)—See Creative cycle
Moleskine notebooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Multiple. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
OneNote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Paper vs. electronic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69, 73, 97
Poor ones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Selecting. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67, 74
Templates—See Templates
True Story: Written in “Blood”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
True Story sidebars
Columbo Question, The. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
How I Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
I Love Titles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Just Add Hit Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Pirate Stat Block, The. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Some Ideas Get Better With Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Speling Mistkes and Extra, Commas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Storm Clouds on the Express Lane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
TMI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Written in “Blood” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

War of Art, The. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Weaknesses as a GM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30, 35, 87, 89, 90, 101, 105
Where to prep. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19, 22, 25, 45, 61, 63, 67, 82
Who, what, where, why, and how?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Writing
Medium for. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50, 56, 67
Writing too much. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13, 54
See also: Documentation, Tools

127
 Contributor Bios
My thanks to Phil for writing Never Unprepared, and to everyone on
the Never Unprepared team for your outstanding work. This is En-
gine Publishing’s first single-author book, and I couldn’t have asked
for a better first. I encourage you to check out the other excellent
work these talented folks have done, because it rocks—and so do
they. –Martin Ralya

John Arcadian stumbled into the roleplaying game industry back in

2003 because of a hobby project. It went further than expected and
John is now an RPG industry blogger, CEO of a small-press gam-
ing company, and industry freelancer who is proud of his contribu-
tions to the gaming industry. John lives in an idyllic, rural area of
Ohio. Rumors that he only wears kilts are mostly unfounded, but
entirely true.

Robert M. Everson, aka “Spenser,” has been gaming for the better
part of 30 years, and half of that in the same group as Phil Vec-
chione. He has been a fan and supporter of Gnome Stew since its
birth. This is the second book he’s proofread for Engine Publishing,
having previously collaborated with them on Masks: 1,000 Memo-
rable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game. He is currently scratching
several writing itches, including a blog and a fiction project.

Darren Hardy is a web designer and gaming enthusiast living in

lovely Petoskey, Michigan. His gaming interests run the gamut
from puzzle, board, and word games to roleplaying and electronic
gaming. His other hobbies include biking, kayaking, hiking, cook-
ing, and reading. He’s constantly hunting for the elusive creative
flow that gets stuff done. If you find some, he’s willing to pay extra
for it.

Daniel Milne is a gamer who makes his home in Utah. Whether it’s
played on a table, through a console, or over the Internet he’ll be
there to give it a test run. To date, he has thwarted 12 alien inva-
sions, been orphaned 85 times, and saved the world from certain
destruction on 163 separate occasions. Despite this, he has never
rescued a princess.

128
 Contributor Bios

Matt Morrow has been creating illustrations professionally since

1996. He worked for a computer magazine as an in-house illustra-
tor until 1999, where he crafted hundreds of editorial illustrations.
Since then, Matt has been juggling being a stay at home dad with
three great kids and working on freelance projects in various areas
such as newspapers, children’s books, and RPGs, drawing subjects
from hedgehogs to zombies. You can find a portfolio of his work at
(mz9000.carbonmade.com).

Martin Ralya is a writer, publisher, blogger, and huge GMing geek.

A GM since 1989 (with a physique and pallor to match), he’s been
running and writing for Gnome Stew since 2008, and he founded
Engine Publishing in 2009. His first RPG industry freelance gig
was in 2004. He lives in Utah with his amazing wife, Alysia, and
their beautiful daughter, Lark, in a house with six entire sub-base-
ment levels dedicated to books and games.

Christopher Reach works as a freelance artist, producing illustra-

tions for both pen and paper and web-based games. He creates im-
ages utilizing digital media, drawing on his training in traditional
painting techniques. He has worked on packaging art, covers, web
banners, and various other projects. To contact Chris and view his
work visit (ChristopherReach.com).

Don’t let the tough-guy image fool you; Kurt Schneider really does
have a soft nerdy core. He’s been gaming since the first time disco
was cool, writes for the game mastering blog GnomeStew.com,
regularly contributes to a number of gaming forums and mailing
lists (where he is commonly known as “Telas”), and is a contribut-
ing author for Engine Publishing’s books Eureka and Masks.

Phil Vecchione has dedicated 30 years to sitting behind the screen

and tossing dice with friends. He is known for his system pro-
miscuity and looking for the “next great campaign.” To feed his
gaming addiction away from the table he is one of the writers for
Gnome Stew, and an author for Engine Publishing. In those mo-
ments when he is not gaming he is a husband, father, and project
manager.

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