How I Prepare For Major Arcs & Organize My DM Notes, As Well As Just General Narrative Advice!
So, I got a question quite a while back to try out this neat little trend of displaying and explaining away how I prepare for a session, as well as show how i organize and utilize my notes as a DM. I’m going to be using my upcoming, work-in-progress arc, “Nightingale”, as a visual reference throughout the post.
So, I know i’ve released my DM’s notes on worldanvil before, but I gotta admit that the platform I most like to use for notes and plot setup is always OneNote, which I have for free via my college. It’s versatile, organized, and easy to navigate on any platform (even my phone!). So if you can get your hands on it, I highly recommend it.
PART ONE – THE MAIN PAGE OF CENTRAL INFORMATION
What I like to do first, is create a central tab of navigation, the first thing that will pop up when I open my fresh set of notes! Things I like to include in that main tab would be any of the following:
This will come in handy later, but essentially I have a key to differentiating different types of text throughout my notes and it looks like this (note: your notes DON’T have to look like this, but I recommend having a specific format for all these types of text to help keep you organized):
This is to link to articles I have on world anvil with more detailed information
This is helpful to get you started on your overarching plot! Be as messy as you want and DON’T DELETE ANYTHING, even if you think it’s stupid. All brainstorming is good brainstorming.
Small Outline of Main Questline
I like, especially for big cities with lots of factions and NPC’s, to keep track of reputation and karma with a point system. Every good deed or bad deed, I like to record and assign a certain number of points to add or subtract from the total score of each faction, based off of just how good or bad that act was. This will help decide things in both the conclusion of that arc, as well as the conclusion of my campaign. This way, your actions really do have consequences.
PART TWO – BUILDING THE PLOT IN ACTS
So I believe it is pertinent to keep things simple when it comes to notes, especially when it comes to major arcs where your players have a lot of freedom and you need to do a lot of writing in order to allow that freedom. So i like to build in 4 acts, each of them being dedicated to its own special needs. You can add however many acts as you might need, but this is just a base line!
Act One: The Introduction
Act Two: Exploration/Information Gathering
Act Three: The Rising Action
Act Four: The Conclusion/The Climax
To add onto this, I usually put these acts as Major Groups in OneNote, and they look a little like this:
Act One; Introducing Your Players To The Setting
This, in my opinion, is the most important act of the four. I usually like to send my players into the setting with a BANG! Throw something at them that they don’t expect! An eerie exorcism, a public execution of an old friend, a plague that keeps the party away from public entrances, anything you can think of! The intro should be narrative heavy, not battle-heavy. That will just make your party snore. Give them a reason to fight, a reason to care about this story and its NPCs. Make sure that this first part is your best work, because it sets the story from here on out and will determine if your players are eager to return to the table. Do not forget to set the precedent of your arc’s main plot goal here. If you don’t do it now, it won’t make sense elsewhere. Make the PC’s care right away!
For example, some snippets of my introduction notes look a little bit like this (remember my format key from before? well here it is in use:)
Act Two; Exploration/Information Gathering
This is a big one, because this is where the majority of your work will go. This is the part where the players can roam around the setting, getting to know the NPC’s and the environment for themselves and make their own opinions on the current state of affairs wherever they are. I like to get super organized with this part, because it can get VERY hectic while going live. You want to write where you leave room for players to move, but also keep them focused on the task at hand. So whatever dialogue or side quests you introduce in exploration, keep it brief and drawing back to the central plot line at hand.
I will expand more on this in PART 3, because it deserves its own section.
Act Three; The Rising Action
Yes, just like your english teacher taught you in 6th grade, there has to be a Rising Action in your plot line! This is self explanatory, it might seem. But this is the hardest part about writing up a plot line for D&D, because you never know how your players are going to change the plot. So keep things loose and relative, allowing for wiggle room and improvisation. But still, have a decent chunk of the plot ready to go in this act, because this will be the majority of your plot and usually where the information gathering from act two will start to come in handy. Things need to start coming to a head towards the end of this act, or else you’ll be stuck with a very unsatisfactory conclusion. Another helpful tip during this act, is to write down EVERY, and I mean EVERY SINGLE LITTLE question your players might have. Figure out an answer to all of them, even if the answer is “you’ll find out later”.
Act Four; The Conclusion/The Climax
This is the end. The part of your story where everything starts to come together into a full circle! You need to be prepared to answer all those questions your players had during act three, in one form or another. There’s nothing worse than ending an arc finding that there were a million plot holes that didn’t get accounted for. So prepare, prepare, prepare for this final act. On top of that, prepare for several outcomes on top of that! Don’t be afraid to change the ending on the fly, just make sure you answer those questions somehow–be it out right, or implied in the narrative. My best advice is to not write out the ending until you’re at least half way through act three. Because your player’s choices should matter, and should have a major effect on the ending. If they don’t, then whats the point in running a narrative-heavy campaign? This is where my reputation points have come in handy in the past.
PART 3 – EXPANDING ON EXPLORATION
I wanted to give you guys a taste at how I organize my exploration section. And to be honest with you, it’s fairly to-the-point and straight forward. I’m using a city setting for my example, but I feel like this can apply to any settlement setting to be honest. But I usually like to start with a table of contents as the first page for me to land on when going to my Exploration section. It looks like this, and each link, links exactly to that page on the document so i don’t have to guess at where everything is.
I also have a page dedicated to general information about the city in my worldanvil, linked on the Reference Links page I mentioned before! But it’s always good to have a central source of information about your settlement when prepping.
Now, let’s take a look at what one of the shops looks like, as that’s most likely going to be the bulk of what you’re writing. We’re gonna start with my shop “Dagna’s General Goods Store”, which is simple enough. Here, you can see all the pages I have for this location:
These are specific to a certain encounter, but to put it in a more general sense, this is how I would organize any relevant location in a settlement:
I like to introduce my players to the outside and inside of every establishment in my settlements. So, narrative of the outside… and then a narrative of the inside. For example, this one looks like this:
Then, from there, I can dive into whatever introducing encounters I may have planned for that shop on the same page. This is just to give the players an impression. I continue for this page like this:
I like to put in brackets before voicing a new character, how their voice may sound. But that’s just me!
Always have a page for NPC’s relative to the establishment! I usually like to link to my worldanvil at the top, but sometimes characters are so small that I don’t make them a page. For those instances, I like to write just a little bit about them under the following format:
Personality (including voice/accent)
Not Willing to Share (requires skill checks, or otherwise)
I like to keep this brief as possible, because too much text will just overwhelm me when i’m actually DMing live. Don’t make them too complicated, unless they’re major NPC’s, otherwise you will suffer.
Self explanatory, especially for shops. If the establishment sells things, I like to take screenshots from the books and place them in this page. Or I make tables myself! Cause OneNote can do that lmao.
I like to split this up into three categories:
What time does the establishment open and close? When is the owner there? When does the owner go to bed? Is there anything the people living there do at certain times that are of relevance? This all becomes helpful when trying to nail down routines and time tracking.
Things the players can find! Maybe a secret heirloom, a private letter, or a family tree! Usually these require skill checks to find, but can also just be apart of the apparent environment!
Events that happen to the players. This can happen at certain times, or only when the players are currently present! It’s entirely up to you. But don’t equate encounters with battle, encounters are just events, battle or otherwise!
Mine looks kind of like this, though it needs some more fleshing out– which will come with time as my plot progresses.
This can split off into various sub pages, if need be, and may not even be applicable to this specific establishment! But sometimes, you can acquire missions from people and places. I like to write the mission pages in the Establishment or NPC pages that will give them out.
And well, that’s about it! Sorry for the huge post, but it gave me some time to kill, so there you go! LOL Have fun with that, guys.
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