#dm prep

My players are actually communicating on things they wanna see in the game and characters they’d wanna see- AAAAAAHHHHHHH

I’m finding interesting plot hooks and unique ways to create unlikely alliances with deep background plots running- AWOOGA

Half of the stuff I'll say will probably not make sense as my hands cease to feel corporeal and my brain feel like it's soaking in sugar. So watch or read them with warning.

That's one of them. I think that means I should say goodnight, but I need to prep for my game.

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:

Format Key

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):

Reference Links

This is to link to articles I have on world anvil with more detailed information

Settings

NPC’s

Organizations/Factions

Misc.

Plot Setup/Brainstorming

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.

Objective

Themes

Relevant History

Hooks

Encounters

Small Outline of Main Questline

Reputation Points

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:

Introduction

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!

The NPC(s)

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:

Appearance

Personality (including voice/accent)

What They Know

Willing to Share

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.

Whats For Sale

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.

General Information

I like to split this up into three categories:

Schedules

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.

Points of Interest

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!

Encounters

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.

Missions (if applicable)

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. 

I got roped in to do a thing.

@tamisrandom asked me to help DM a group she had, comprising of herself, @tauntingcrow, @bladeverbena and @wehavekookies. All Tieflings, all wanting D&D Shenanigans and more gay ships than the San Francisco Harbour. Old daddy tieflings would not want to be walking around the forests. 

Waterdeep Dragon Heist would be a fun, lighthearted adventure that could be tweaked to focus on character growth in a confined environment. It would also cater to the generally informal play style I suspected the players enjoyed. So I agreed, and began to prep. 

How to Prep for the game if you’re a perfectionist but also lazy DM.

1)    Prepare the platform for play. Purchase content where available. Oh shit, no I can’t. Roll20 module only loads 25% of the plot based on season, and I want to run the Alexandrain Remix. Damn. Time to purchase the Complete WDH Bundle on DM Guild by Valeur RPG instead! It has nearly every map but Trollskull Alley/Manor. That’s alright, Reddit to the Rescue. Damn, now I must add dynamic lighting boundaries. Okay, that’s fine. I’m getting good with Roll20 shortcuts, this shouldn’t take too long. Note: it did take long.

2)      Upload info for the players into Journal. This took too long. Thank you Wikipedia and Google. I made a Witchypedia on Roll20 to summarise some key points of Volo’s Enchiridion, since the characters would know these thing prior to the campaign (All of them are Waterdhavians). I uploaded some key NPCs from the campaign too, with free to access basic info about them. Also, I got to find me sexy Renaer Neverember artwork, mmm. He was always my fave NPC in this.  

3)    Select classes. Cool, classes chosen. Wait, you’re a what now? Okay rogue. No, you’re a bard now? A rogue/bard. You have a mask, fine. Mysterious. I guess that would be important to your class-- You also want a bromeo/dudeliette romance? Okay, that’s awesome, here’s a hot guy in the story—Aww, you like him. If you respect your dude one more time, so help me god.

4)    Integrate backstory for characters. Let’s have the players (all daddies anyway) already be Waterdhavians. Now to give them links to key elements in the plot that will unfold... All the secrets, all woven in, all buttons for emotional pain down the road when I destroy your characters’ lives through the course of the plot. Each character has an arc and a backstory to develop. Everyone has a bond that can make or break them… – thank you for involving me in this process. One is grateful. So now I have a bunch of early 40s old guys with Back Story™ who somehow… are level 2. Okay, life happens. Over 40s maybe don’t really get into the adventuring gig so don’t level up.

5)    Integrate characters into setting. Damn, now they need residences, jobs, contacts. I’m lazy, let’s have them think stuff up. Okay they are into it, cool. OKAY they are TOO into this. ACK! That’s a lot of NPCs! Distract! Get them to design houses for their guys instead! Now they all have residences – with maps for in-game visits and bonking. It’s oddly character-building to create one’s residence. Hold up, is there only one character here with a legitimate source of income? And one janitor.

6)    Connect characters to each other. Somehow, I can’t remember how, they wound up all being connected through one woman – Madame Chaudron. This woman of unusual magical gifts is the owner of the brothel called the Polished Horn who also runs an information network comprising of mainly non-human gigolos, prostitutes and courtesans. Otho the janitor works there, Antiphony who works for her as a cats-paw has quarters here, Savos identifies odd items for her and visits once a year on his birthday, while Than provides perfectly safe 100% organic recreational restoratives for her masked parties. Through her, all 4 diverse characters are gathered, leading us to…

7)    Examine the campaign hook. I don’t want to start with 4 Randos Meet in A Bar. Let’s have Chaudron hear that her friend Volo needs help, and gathers the warlock with the cunning eyes, the rogue with the nimble hands, the janitor with his odd penchant for setting things ablaze, and the doctor who can keep them alive, while also turning into a bear.

So, my concern that S might not take to the game and that D wouldn’t be able to maintain enthusiasm without as much understanding was obviously unwarranted. Naturally this justified a couple of days of intense spending to get things looking a little nicer. Partly because pretty things help build immersion and partly because I made my own D&D group using my genes and I’m going to use them to justify buying things I want.

First thing first. I ordered some minis for their characters. They’re not perfect representations (Doran two-hands and doesn’t have a shield) but I’m not quite ready to justify custom minis for a 6 and 3 year old. These are from Dark Sword Miniatures and I’m sure I’ll get dinged by customs but they are very nice.

Except of course they won’t look that nice when they arrive so I had to invest in paints, paint brushes a wash and a gloss. I haven’t painted anything in over a decade and even then the majority of my Necron 40K army was spray black and dry-brushed copper. Not exactly detail work.

Luckily the paint set I bought came with Minsc and Boo! Look at this handsome Ranger. This could have gone so much worse considering how long its been since I used a paint brush on anything smaller than a shed.

btw my campaign takes place in a modern setting. and the players are all dads who moonlight as magical girls.

So there are a couple of things happening in Berez/Winery/Yester Hill that I need to write down.

Baba Lysaga is the reduced form of Mother Night. She was stripped of her godhood by Ravenovia and has been keeping her magic/beauty through the sacrifice of young girls.

These young girls come from Krezk to complete The Trial of Night. They must do a favor (Geas) for Baba Lysaga. In return, she leaves the town of Krezk untouched for a year. If they fail, she kills them and bathes in their blood/absorbs their soul.

She no longer needs the bodies and is all too happy to let the Abbot make use of them. She believes he may be the Morning Lord, similarly reduced. She does not know he is an angel created by the Morning Lord, who is trapped in the Amber Temple.

She chose Strahd as an infant to be her champion before being demoted by Ravenovia (and Ravenovia's eventual ascent to godhood). As such, she strives to make Strahd's life better. She is doing that by attacking the Keepers of the Feather. The druids who worship her (Mother Night) are killing ravens and wereravens indiscriminately.

Her newest disciple, Rose Durst, seeks to lead the hags of Barovia. Baba Lysaga has outfitted her with an army of druids and Volenta's mask (adventurers killed Volenta before the campaign), which is a powerful magic item. Rose is leading the assault against the Wizards of Wine Winery. The party hasn't seen her in six months.

Rose desperately wishes for more magical power. The mask grants her that. She wants more. She is also the one wielding the vampire's staff.

The druids are creating Wintersplinter as part of this assault. Have Rose flee to be a part of that.

Liya Krezkova is on (or soon to be on) her Trial of Night. Baba Lysaga will ask her to do something related to the WoW/Yester Hill events or to foil the party. Vasilka might go with her (to try to stop her?).

The party should encounter a dead raven en route to the winery. Maybe even more than one. But there should be another random encounter between Krezk and the winery.