Page-to-Prep

When you purchase an adventure, you would think it would be over and readymade to run but that is not the case with even the best adventures. You still need to iron out some kinks to suit your setting and players. For example, Arcane Library’s The Demon in the Mirror is presented as players being coerced by the crown to go in there and rescue the princess. I eschewed that story and objective from my game, I was looking for a demonically possessed mirror and author Kelsey Dionne’s adventure fit that. What you could do with it is have Dionne’s adventure in your back pocket any time you need to suddenly introduce a cursed mirror.

Here are some tricks to reduce page counts to make running your games a smoother experience.

Toss the Story Out

You should read the story, as the history of the dungeon is what will instruct you of the motivations of the denizens and NPCs. That is not required for your notes to bring to the table. One of the common pieces of advice is to not prepare plot but scenarios. The players cannot interact with the past, unless you’re playing a timey-wimey game. You do not need to know the machinations of the obstacles, just their behaviour.

If the players find out in some way, you can make it up either on the spot or have it become an adventure, giving you breathing room to figure it out. One of the common pieces of advice for how to act for Directors is to react, improvise the answer and let your intuition guide you. This can include lore. For example, in my sample page of a West Marches Calendar, I named the two moons on the spot because someone asked. I took the typical ‘man in the moon’ that people say for our moon and said “Old Man”. I characterized it’s long time in the sky as if it were taking its time across the night’s sky. The other had a faster trajectory and instead of ‘the bunny’ as stated in Asian mythology, I went with goat because the depicted GIF was the first thing that popped into my head. I blame the gremlin that runs my mind.

Yeah, I bet you were so confused about how that GIF was even tangentally related to the topic.

Pop Culture Characters I Improvised Due to Left Turn into Rando-ville

From Left to Right: Usagi from Samurai Rabbit, Billy Butcher from The Boys and Shaggy from Scooby Doo

You don’t need to re-invent the wheel, don’t be above going with a common trope or a pop culture reference. When I see a Director wishing to encourage their players to interact with the lore, I frequently ask the question if the players are having fun. I ran a 3.5 Narrative-based Dungeons and Dragons game for two years. Players came and went but one in particular showed up for every session. If you put a gun to his head, he could not tell you the plot. And that’s fine, because it wasn’t the story that kept bringing him back. It was the wacky fun he had playing with his friends each week. You aren’t there to tell an amazing tale, you’re there to act as a hub for your friends to come hang out. If that isn’t what you want, I suggest you write a book.

Knowing the story is important for verisimilitude to keep your players suspension of disbelief healthy but is unneeded in your notes. Using Aberrant Reflections as an example, directsun uses 5 pages explaining how the dungeon works and its history while I cut that down to a paragraph and two lines as a refresher. In fact, that’s what made the module so readible. Each page is dedicated to a room in the dungeon, there’s no need to talk about the history and so each room had neat bullet points making running it easy.

Homebrewery Your Issues Away

I use the Homebrewery to write up Stat Blocks and organize my game. I take pictures of the stat blocks and post them in Libre Office to eventually be converted to PDF and printed. Yeah, I am an old school curmudgeon who prefers hanging out in real life and uses paper as Gary Gygax intended.

One of the big advantages of writing up your own Stat Blocks, aside from making your own monsters, is that you can control how things are written. It drives me nuts that a lot of Blocks have “must make a DC X Stat saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes full damage. On a successful save, a creature takes only half as much damage.” That’s why I write my ‘Save for Half’ portions of a Stat Block as “Pass a DC X Stat Save to halve Y damage.” That saves so much space. If you are worried about riders, that is abilities that have additional affects if you fail the save, then I use a little more text: “Pass a DC X Stat Save to halve Y damage and negate the Status.”

If you noticed, I used the word Save with a capital because I am shortening and codifying words. That helps shorten Stat Blocks, allowing you to cram in more cool on the page. Another example of codified terms is turning ‘the start of a turn’ and ‘the end of a turn’ into Turn Start and Turn End. That way you can shorten a lot of common phrases into two words. An effect that allows you to Save to negate at the end of your turn? Re-Save at Turn End.

With significantly shortened Stat Blocks, I can easily cram a lot of Stat Blocks onto each page. It also makes easily read charts, plus you can emulate other products with adding Sidebar colouration. I might do that for when the PCs come across a Spellbook and it has a Spell in it that the party hadn’t unlocked yet.

Turtles All the Way Down

One aspect of what makes a Hex Feature good is an equilibrium that is broken by the players’ prescence. One of my complaints about Ghostfire Gaming’s Twisted Taverns is that most of these tavern adventures are ‘safe havens’ and so there is no balance to disrupt. Another good part of a Hex Feature is that there must be a reason for your players to return, as that is what caused the initial stalemate between the two or more Factions. An example is that perhaps one Faction has always lived there and the other knows of a way to harvest power, there’s a dramatic struggle and your players can decide which Faction they decide to throw their weight behind.

Homebrewery Made Chart. The Bolded Names are Factions Unique to the Dungeon. Italics are named NPCs.

With only two Factions needing to be printed for this lone Dungeon, I have reduced the amount of pages to prep. I can punch in Bats, Devils, Draconians, Ghouls, Insects or Spiders if I need to for future adventures without having to re-print Stat Blocks.

I noticed that Factions would frequently eat a large amount of page space within the Adventure and sometimes I would only be able to fit only the Easy and/or Medium difficulty Encounters. With my games trying to cater to levels 3 to 10, that’s a lot of information that would be stuck on the dungeon’s printed pages. Instead, what I learned to do was expand a Faction’s chart to Easy, Medium, Hard and Deadly Encounters with a Treasure chart. That way I would be ready for an Encounter of any amount of difficulty, whether it is the Hard or Deadly as suggested in the ‘overworld’ or Easy or Medium within the dungeon. I give a sampling in my coverage of Iron Kingdom’s Farrow.

This then made me make Micro-Factions. Spiders, Ghouls, Ghosts and Skeletons are frequent opponents in many dungeon dives. Instead of writing these down for each dungeon, I opted to make Micro-Factions. A Micro-Faction is a Faction with a very narrow scope that is placed in my Random Encounters part of my binder. With the Factions organized alphabetically, I know to jump to the S if the party’s Random Encounter are Skeletons or Spiders, for example. I can squeeze down Stat Blocks with various difficulties down to one or two pages, meaning that I’m saving my adventure from being bloated with that. That’s right, organization being the most important part of running a Sandbox RPG strikes again.

When you make room for Random Encounters outside of a dungeon, it becomes much more manageable. Only unique Stat Blocks fill up the pages. An exception to avoiding printing a ‘generic’ Stat Block is if a boss summons goons. It is better to have the boss and their guards listed on the same page. You avoid flipping back and forth between pages.

A Wild Exception Has Appeared

I find the primary point of Prep is to lower the page count. Yes, it should also be used so that you’re familiar with the material. The exception is the One Page Dungeon Contest, with a starting amount is one page. Almost any work you do will increase the page count. They’re worth it though, as I find that the central idea is what takes the longest. After that, it is filling in all of the blanks.

I mention this exception because the best thing for my game was a bunch of ‘shallow’ adventure sites for Hex Features than any sort of megadungeon. Most of the One Page Dungeons will do that but don’t feel bad when you can’t shorten your adventure. Shortening helps when you come across any other published adventure.