D&D

DM: “…Are you sure?”

Player, with unearned confidence: “Yup!”

Dm:

So I’m not sure what to call this

But I figured I’d at least try to impart my knowledge of (hank hill voice) weapons and weapon accessories.

“You wouldn’t know”: If you ask to roll, say, history, and your DM responds with this, it usually means, “This is a vital plot point that you aren’t supposed to find out until later, so I won’t tell you regardless of what you roll”

“I mean, you could”: The DM is strongly suggesting you don’t do the thing you were just about to do. But it is your choice… if you reeeeeally want to.

“Oh, fuck”/“Oh, shit”/et cetera: “I DID NOT EXPECT YOU TO MAKE THAT DECISION AND I DID NOT PREPARE AN OUTCOME”

“Oh, fuck”/“Oh, shit”/et cetera: “I JUST REALIZED I DID NOT BALANCE THIS COMBAT CORRECTLY”

“Hang on…”: “Where the FUCK did I put this in my notes?”

“Oh boy”/“Oh god”/“Oh no”/et cetera: I either just rolled REALLY well or REALLY badly. You’ll find out soon enough.

“It seems like…”/“As far as you can tell…”: What I’m about to say your character notices, is nowhere CLOSE to what’s actually going on.

“Make a [skill] check”/“Make a [skill] saving throw”: I’m having you make this roll, but I’m not going to tell you what it means until later, when you’re going to regret it.

Do you open up a word doc at type out your story hook and make little bullet points from there? 

Do you wing it completely? 

What’s your notes system like? 

I can’t help myself. I love all the work that goes into prepping for a campaign, and I keep all of my crazy notes and papers, so today I’m gonna try and share with you my process for the latest DnD session I prepped for/ran! 

Rough Notes

I always start by hand writing a full page or two of just random thoughts/story bits. I’m gonna give examples from the latest session I ran (BACKSTORY - this setting has frequent time travel moments and so every location I make also needs a past version and present version)

Writing Stonevale began with me rambling on about any vague ideas I had for the scene setting. I also find it’s useful to get the secrets and mysteries all clear and laid out straight away, and work backwards from them to slot in clues for players. “Stonevale Past” begins with me deciding that the ancestors of an important NPC live here - maybe the players never get far enough to discover that, but having the secrets and info at the heart of my process helps me keep things focussed, and it’s easy/fun to build walls around the secrets this way :)

I also generally get a feel for any creatures/NPCs that populate the area, and give them vague roles. And I try to note down key details/props/locations/events that will help the players navigate and investigate.

Session Summary

Now’s the time to check what happened last session just to make sure you know how the party characters will likely be feeling/acting at the start of the session, and to remind yourself of any items they picked up, or active statuses going on. Also a good moment to check what the party planned to do next, what their expectations could be and so on.

It’s hard to make myself fill this in at the end of every session, but the session summary page in this kit really helps me note down what’s most important.

Maps

Making a map is always an exciting prospect for me! I thought this time I wanted to give a more illustrative style of map, as I’ve been super inspired by the very cool maps made by @anywhichwayatlas ! I got onto pinterest and collected some ideas of the type of map style I was going for:

Above are the images I used to inspire me, and below is the finished Stonevale map! It’s come out a bit rough/childlike but was definitely a fun way to explore more ways of making maps!

Later on, I realised I’d got too into making this and forgotten about some sort of depiction of the INSIDE of the manor… Since I didn’t have any time to make more maps by this point, I went to where I always go when I need a DnD map in a pinch - @2minutetabletop ! I picked up Castle Keep, which is free (like so many of his maps are!) and faffed with some colours and levels in photoshop until I was happy. Printed them out on A3 card and they were good to go! I can’t recommend this resource enough, it’s saved my GM butt a lot when I run out of time to make a map of my own!

Adding in Detail

So next I need to flesh out those vague ideas to make sure I’ve covered what’s likely to be important for the party. I love using the town builder here as it gives me a bit of mental breathing room and asks the questions for me. I find having questions ready means the answers come a lot easier than if I was trying to pluck this out of my head, if that makes sense? 

It was at this point I realised I’d likely need a family tree, even just so I could keep track of the time travel/ancestral stuff. I roughed one out, then made a slightly bigger, still very rough, version that I thought might be a handy clue for players. If they make it inside the castle, they’ll notice a framed family tree on the wall, and this will be it!

NPCS

Our story involved one of the players having worked at Stonevale before the adventure, so I made a staff list for that player’s reference. This way they had some basic information on their old co-workers and the residents of the manor. I also filled in an NPC list from the people & society kit to make sure I had enough NPCs to generate about the property.

Then I used the map to mark some likely locations of the important NPCs. I made sure to spread them out so that no matter how the party approached the grounds, they’d likely hit a plot hook somehow.

Quest Hooks

Time to shove as many clues as possible in here! My experience has been that players need a lot more help picking up clues and reaching conclusions than you expect (myself included!) so I make a point of writing a bunch of quest hooks to inspire both the players and myself during play. I use the quest hooks page from the session kit to note down basically little story bites and clues that I can drop in as and when I need to. It’s a useful sheet to glance at real quick during the game!

Loot

Gotta make sure there’s some loot somewhere! There’s always at least one player who ransacks every location they visit :) I hadn’t set up Stonevale to be a particularly loot-filled place but knew the manor in the centre could do with holding some of the resident’s belongings that could be steal-able. Again, I realised this quite late in my planning, and so dashed off to the @rpgtoons Patreon to grab all the free item cards I could find! Then I picked out which ones could be appropriate for certain family members and residents, and stashed ‘em in the pile ready to hand out.

Ambience

This is one of the last things I come to, as it’s fairly easy to set up, but so important if you want your players to be focussed and engaged. Every time I use music or scents its palpable how much more invested in events players are. For ambient backgrounds, youtube is a gold mine. I like to have two playing simultaneously - one for music and one for background noise. For example:

Fantasy Adventure Music + Forest Sounds Peaceful Travelling Music + Winter Storm Horror Music + Swamp Sounds

Check out Sword Coast Soundscapes or Guild of Ambience for some very cool RPG ambient soundtracks too!

As for scents, I use these a little more sparingly, but @cantripcandles does some exceptionally convincing aromas that really work for setting the mood, and taking your prep that lil extra step. My favourite is Goldwheat Bakery - the only way to get a more accurate smell would be to visit a bakery!

Finishing Up

At this point I’m almost good to go. I take one last look over everything I’ve prepped to see if there are any gaping plot holes or parts I’ve missed. For this particular session, it occurred to me there could be an opportunity for eavesdropping on an important conversation, so I wrote out a one page script for what the players might overhear should they choose to snoop. 

Play!

I guess you wanna know how the session went down after all this prep? Did the players enjoy it, did they find what I’d laid out for them? 

OF COURSE NOT! They made their very best effort to skirt the entire property, clinging to the edges of the map and hiding any time an NPC interaction looked likely. Predictably, I didn’t anticipate that they would attempt to avoid everything, but the Quest Hooks page kept things flexible. That, and the fact that one player’s rat companion decided to jump down a hole and became “irretrievable until further notice”…. ahem.

Hope you find this useful, I’ve tried to link to as many resources as possible because there are just so many good ones out there right now! Thanks to all DnD creators! I think it’s really cool everyone’s helping each others’ games become even more fun to play! :)

Beautiful world maps by @anywhichwayatlas​ 

Location maps by @2minutetabletop​

Item cards from @rpgtoons​ Patreon

Background Music - Sword Coast Soundscapes

Background Music - Guild of Ambience

Ambient scented candles by @cantripcandles​

Session Kit (includes session summary page, campaign brief, encounter manager, quest hooks, world overview page)

World Building Packs (npc makers/lists, land builders, society/org creators, history packs, etc)

There are also some really good DMing resources in this post - definitely worth a read!

Fetch © Heather Frazier.

[The first of Flashback Summer posted with the original art from the Monsters of Twilight PDF. The inspiration was the Shadow Beasts from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. These were originally written for my run-through of the Council of Thieves Pathfinder AP, and I used them to make sure “Shadow Plague” encounters had more variety than just shadow mastiffs and shadows.]

Fetch The darkness moves. Within the black sphere you can barely make out the outline of an immense ape-like creature, its body covered in a carpet of lashing tendrils. Its head turns towards you, a flat plate like a shield, studded with a dozen irregularly placed glowing red eyes.

Hulking brutes native to the Plane of Shadow, the fetch is a simple-minded creature concerned with little more than the spreading of pain. A fetch stands about nine feet tall, although their knuckle-walking gait hides some of that height, and weighs an average of 350 pounds. The fetches are composed of the very essence of shadowstuff—the only truly solid part of a fetch is its iron-like skull. A fetch’s body is an oily liquid that drinks in light, held into vaguely humanoid shape by a thick membrane. This liquid surrounds the fetch with its characteristic aura of shadows, and allows them to fit through tight places with remarkable ease. As a being of pure shadow, a fetch does not need food or drink. They seem sustained, however, by the causing of pain, at which they prove most proficient.

Fetches live on the Plane of Shadow in strictly hierarchical organizations somewhat like the associations of apes on the Material Plane. These fetch bands patrol a territory, which they defend aggressively from intruders. The largest and strongest fetch controls the group. Fetches have no language of their own, and are indeed mute, but understand the Infernal tongue. This innate knowledge, combined with their dim intellect and lawful tendencies, make them excellent followers. The kytons of the Plane of Shadow often use fetches as slaves and menial labor. Any offering of a live victim for the fetch to torture grants a summoner a +2 bonus on all Charisma checks to control a called fetch.

The Shadowshield Although fetches carry little if any treasure, their iron-hard skulls can be useful in the right hands. With one day of work and a DC 20 Craft (armorsmithing) check, a fetch’s skull can be turned into a masterwork heavy steel shield. This shield takes very well to magical enhancements—a shadowshield can be enhanced with the slick or shadow armor special abilities, and only costs half as much as an ordinary suit of armor to bestow with these abilities. A shadowshield is worth 800 gp.

The first installment of my “Drained Magic” series. This one covers A through D with some simple variants of magic items. (Most notably the Deck of Many Things).

The artwork used for the cover is “Vampire Place” by Moonchild-ljilja