An RPG isn't a rollercoaster ride, it's a fun house. You can't prepare it by choosing a route and setting up loops and drops and stuff, all you can do is put curvy mirrors in the places where they look weird and cool, paint up some colourful clowns for the guests to interact with and if it's a combat focused game fill up a few buckets with gunge for the clowns to throw at people.
Last year I went to a big sci-fi/fantasy con in my country. I had been planning to go for years because there is a big emphasis in talks with authors and there were many relating to ttrpg topics. There was one about sandbox campaigns! I was excited!
But sadly, I left many of the talks very disappointed. The one that hurt me the most was, precisely, the one about sandboxes. In it, a national expert in the ttrpg industry explained how there are two (2) kinds of sandbox campaigns, either open world or "social". Maybe three if you also count urban campaigns as sandboxes.
"Ok," I thought "I completely disagree, but let's see where this goes".
Then, the speaker proceeded to explain her prep process. In a social campaign she firts creates the factions. She likes Legend of the Five Rings a lot, so she usually uses the five usual clans of the settings.
"Alright. That's reasonable".
Then, she proceeds to populate their factions with about seven to ten NPCs per faction.
I left at that very instant absolutely astounded.
In my personal opinion, sandbox campaigns don't need to be an exercise of immense prep from the GM. They can be and if it works for some people I am glad for them and I hope they have fun with that prep. But I don't think that's a really reasonable way to manage this kind of campaign for the majority of GMs and even less so for the majority of tables. (And giving a talk about it without properly disclaiming it can set up an impossible standard that might discourage many novice GMs that would consider sandbox campaigns as too labor intensive).
I believe sandbox campaigns should play with the interest of the players. As a GM one should set up an interesting backdrop to explore and interact with, with a varying degree of prep according to one's own interests. And then the players are the ones that will guide the prep needed for the next session by stating their intentions. I have seen several people here clamouring for the many benefits of asking one's players "So what's your plan for the next session, then?". And I think those benefits double when playing a sandbox campaign!
It allows for a true feeling of discovery, not only for the players, but for the GM as well! The GM doesn't need to know everything from the beginning, they can discover it in a fractal way, following the interests of the table (which includes the GM themselves, let's not forget that).
Let me give you an example.
I am currently starting a sandbox campaign based on Skerples' Magical Industrial Revolution. I am mashing it into my DIE campaign, but that's not important. This setting revolves around technology and the grave danger it poses when left unatended to the whims of idealistic inventors and shrewd investors looking to make a fortune. I did as much prep as I wanted:
Being a urban setting, I made small sheets for different neighborhoods and points of interest of the city. I also got the help of my players to do this with a small session of i'm sorry did you say street magic by Caro Asercion.
I set up small scenes to present to the players the different pre-apocalyptic inventions that will destroy the city if left unchecked. (And I added a ninth invention for DIE reasons even though that breaks the number 8 theme in the module)
And that's that! We are already three sessions in and we had an impromptu heist into the university, spent a day selling turnips in the market and met a guy who knows he is inside a narrative (DIE stuff). Next time we are going to attend to a flying machines engineering duel because that's what one of the players asked!
Admittedly, a lot of the prep in this campaign is already done by Skerples, shared with me through the module. But I could have gone with a vibe, a list of cool places to visit, a list of things loosely going on on the setting and a list of names to invoke when a new NPC appears. And you could probably do without any of those things!
What you need to set up a sandbox campaign is not a huge load of prep. Is just enough to present an engaging premise and to answer confidently enough to whatever shenanigans your players throw themselves into.
I have yet to write a single faction sheet. Or a NPC background. I possibly will. But that will be whenever I consider it fun enough.
“Whenever you are building something, you need to ask yourself two questions.
Am I having fun building this?
If yes, you can keep going. You need to make sure you cover material you need for your next adventure session, but if you’re having a good time then it’s okay to indulge yourself. If the answer is “no” or “maybe”, however, you need to ask yourself a second question.
Am I going to need this for the next play session?
Will you need this specific content for your next gaming night? Don’t ask yourself if it could be potentially useful, or if it’s something you’ll need in the future. Ask yourself if this piece of work is going to be necessary for what you expect of the very next session of play. If you can’t answer yes with confidence, put it down.
It is painfully easy for a GM to exhaust their powers on minutiae or peripheral details that aren’t fun to make and don’t get any useful play time. All of us are limited mortal creatures with finite amounts of time, energy, and focus. We can’t afford to spend it on trifles when there is more important and more satisfying work to be done. Instead, focus on what you need and enjoy making.”
-Worlds Without Number, Jeremy Crawford
BEHIND THE SCREEN: GM Prep for Deliverance, OH (Mystery 1)
Thank you so much to everyone who left a review of our show in February! I’m so excited to be able to share my GM notes and a little bit about how I prep for our sessions with all of you, which are contained in quite a long post beow, and I’m more than happy to answer any questions that come up, so send them my way and I’ll get to them as soon as I can!
Fair warning: this post contains spoilers for... the entire first eight episodes of Deliverance, OH, quite literally, so if you haven’t finished listening to the first arc, it’d serve you best to listen to episodes 00-08 before reading my notes. I don’t think there will be any other spoilers for future episodes, but if there are I’ll be sure to mark them with plenty of space for you to stop or skip reading them.
Thanks again for your support, and enjoy this little walk through my brain on Monster of the Week!
-Christine
ORGANIZATION
I do the majority of my GM prep for this game in one big google doc I call “Session Outlines” which I store in a folder that has all of my worldbuilding notes, monster ideas, intro scripts, alternate playbooks, etc. I like having everything in one place so I can cross-reference with old arc while I work and on the fly, and this is as close to organized as I get.
The “Session Outlines” document’s got a handy table of contents with links that I can follow to quickly get where I need -- the breakdown is based on the Mystery prep system that Monster of the Week gives, so each arc has it’s concept, hook, monster, minions, bystanders, locations, and countdown. I’m going to go through each of those, but this is what the outline/table of contents looks like on the first page of my doc:
As you can see, I give each arc a catchy, stupid name that no one else ever sees, just to entertain myself.
Also in this doc, right at the end, I have the countdowns for various long-term arcs so that I can reference them when those intersect with things happening in smaller mysteries:
I’ll get a little deeper into countdowns further on in the post for anyone who hasn’t run Monster of the Week before, because they’re my absolute favorite part of prepping for this game.
PRE-MYSTERY PREP
Now, the first mystery in Deliverance was the first time I’d ever run Monster of the Week, so there are some aspects of prep that I’ve altered a little as I’ve learned more, but let’s just go through each page of my original notes from that arc.
The first page of my notes is always where I put the high-level thematic stuff that I want going on. The Concept for the arc -- in this case, a complicated question of morality, responsibility, and control that comes up when you find out that the monster that’s killing people is just a kid that doesn’t really know any better. I knew that with this arc I wanted to immediately set up the season with the question of: can we say that a monster is intrinsically evil, and if they are not, how does that effect our moral responsibility in re: trying to stop/hunt them?
Some of that came from my own agenda coming into the game, and some of that came from our episode 0, with Andrew flagging an interest in this strict anti-monster sect with rigid morals and absolute obedience, and also with Roman flagging an interesting in the nature and morality of monstrosity by choosing the Monstrous playbook. I figured a question like this would instantly give them both a strong agenda, and build an interesting tension between two of the four main characters if I could get them to butt heads about it.
The hook is pretty straightforward: what direct action or effect of the monster’s presence are they going to notice first, what’s our “opening shot” so to speak. I’ve been reading the essay collection Dead Girls by Alice Bolin lately and feeling guilty about having killed Delaney off before she was ever even on screen, but at the time I chose what felt like a trope-y establishing shot for the season so that it would become very quickly apparent where I was attempting to turn certain other tropes on their head. Anyway, someday we’ll be returning to Deliverance again and all I can say is that we may or may not have seen the last of Delaney Chapman... but that’s all stuff for later.
I also always put Chase’s start of mystery move on the first page of each mystery’s notes for a few reasons -- mostly so I don’t forget to ask him to roll it, but also because his result will, in part, develop the tone that mystery’s going to have. If he rolls a 10, this is going to be a mystery where the Kindred is working closely to solve the same problem, but if he rolls a 9 or below, the group is going to be more splintered, he’ll have fewer resources on hand, and on a 6 or below, they’re going to be actively obstructing him in some way. In play, I bold the result he rolls on this page so that I don’t forget, weeks and weeks later when we’re recording the third session in the mystery, what it was that he rolled, and so I can look back later and remember the progression of his relationship with the sect.
Anyway, after all of that’s set in place, I move on to firming up the details of the monster -- powers, attacks, weaknesses, all of that good stuff. Most important is the MONSTER TYPE, which is one of my favorite things about Monster of the Week.
For anyone who hasn’t taken a look at the Keeper preparation sheets for Monster of the Week ( HERE! ) I’ll put in a screenshot of what I’m talking about so that it makes sense.
The first thing I do in creating each monster is pick its type/motivation. Some of them are really obvious, but sometimes having the opportunity to pick an unexpected or non-traditional motivation for a traditional monsters is even better. I’ll elaborate more on that some day when I do one of these posts for a later mystery, because Clara is pretty straightforward in terms of monster type. Here are her full stats:
Now-- I’ll admit, at the end of the day Clara maybe wasn’t the monster in this arc. I went back and forth a lot on how to frame this arc in terms of monsters and minions, because the crew was never actually meant to fight or kill this kid. But, again, I was so interested in setting them up immediately against someone that made them question their internal concept of “monster” that I went with it. She was for me, ultimately, the central focus of the arc: the cause of the conflict, the motivation for the other involved characters, etc., even if she didn’t end up being the climactic conflict of the whole arc.
Clara didn’t appear on screen nearly as much as I expected her to: I’m not sure I ever got as far as her physical description as written here. I picked her type as BEAST because, in her uncontrollable werewolf form, that was what she would do -- so if they hurt her, and she transformed in response to that injury, that was what she’d do.
I also write this neat custom move for werewolf bites, but then none of the PCs got bitten by anyone. Still, I stand by the possibility of time-pressure and tension inherent in that 7-9 option.
As for weaknesses, my understanding of the werewolf healing process changed a little bit in play as I started to describe it happening to Evelyn, so between sessions I crossed out the original idea. I honestly have no idea, in retrospect, where I was going with the second bullet point, but thus is the fun of digital ephemera, it still lives in this google doc even though I have clearly ignored it for the rest of forever.
That link about mercury, for the record, goes to an instructables page I found for “how to kill a werewolf” -- Andrew still gets mad at me that “quick silver” not being literal is the reason he has to clarify whether anything I say is a metaphor or literal, but I thought it was way more interesting than Chase’s already having the perfect weapon (his silver knife) on hand.
Minions are up next:
As you can see, most of the heavy lifting here was in picking their Bystander Types since all three of them were werewolves with basically the same ability. I even copy and pasted from Clara to the point where I forgot to change the pronouns in Henry’s “supernatural powers” section. You can also see the little copy-and-paste checkboxes I use to represent harm on Henry’s stats -- there was so much happening at the end of that battle that I never fully caught up with filling those checkboxes in, and I think I also had them in my paper notes (which we’ll talk about later in this post).
The big motivation here was to differentiate Evelyn and Henry as two sides of the coin: both doing “bad” things to protect their sister, but going about them in different ways, with Evelyn -- who has an investment in this town, a life here she needs to protect in addition to protecting her sister -- being subtle, less destructive, really focused on protecting more than on doing whatever it takes, where Henry -- who has just moved back, and has no attachment to Deliverance itself except his family -- was going to do anything it took to get people off Clara’s scent, killing anyone who got suspicious.
You can see that I’ve face-cast Evelyn, here -- I do this for maybe 25-30% of the NPCs I make for this show, either ones I think are going to be particularly important or ones where an image of them just immediately comes to mind. In addition to Evelyn, I think I have actors in mind for Damaris, Van, Larkin, Blanche... Maybe that’s it? I also originally had one for Remedy (blonde Zoe Kravitz) but some incredible fanart has swayed me to having at least 3 different mental images of Remedy.
I should note that my actual writing process for these notes is not in the order they appear in the doc: at this point, I usually try to at least sketch out the countdown because I’m in the mindset of thinking about the monster and what they’re going to do -- and then I fill in the bystander and location details to suit the countdown, making any adjustments to the countdown that I need to to accommodate new ideas.
But, in my notes Bystanders and Locations are next, so:
First thing of note: somehow, Sheriff Commander-Jones’ wife, the medical examiner, never made an appearance. She is just chilling in the background of this show, waiting for someone to need to talk to a coroner at the morgue, happily married to a very overwhelmed Sheriff. There are a ton of details here that never came up, and one of the things I learned from this first mystery is that I’d over-prepped the hell out of it. My bystander notes these days are a lot simpler: name, pronouns, age, brief physical description, type/motivation, and a one-word trait usually is about it.
(Melissa was going to be so good, I’m still so sad I’ve not found another way to bring her into things. Maybe someday...)
You can also see here the common symptom where I leave something (Yasumoto’s trait) blank to come back to and then instantly forget about it and it just stays blank forever. Also, I don’t know why the hell I wrote “charming” in Jason’s description. He was never truly meant to be charming.
I keep the little Keeper list of bystander types/motivations in the doc below all of my pre-made Bystanders in case I need to come up with some on the fly, but more often or not I forget to write them into the notes. Evidence: Remedy is missing from this document after I made her up on the fly when Chase needed healing.
Locations are notoriously my least favorite part of prepping. I’m not good at coming up with interesting locations so I struggle through outlining the important places. I spent a lot more time on it with this arc than I do later on in the show, but my go-to is a few keywords describing the feeling/appearance of the place, and what information they might come across there.
After that, we get to my favorite part of designing a mystery: the Countdown.
For those who haven’t read or run Monster of the Week, the Countdown basically represents the steps of what the monster would do if the hunters didn’t interfere, and it gives a sense of direction as to how things will progress. It’s broken up into 6 steps, and the story can move from step to step when the heroes take too long or fail rolls, etc. Here’s my countdown for the first mystery:
This one was super concrete compared to some of the ones I’ve written. A recent countdown ended “And then the world ends” or something like that, so this one was a nice, concentrated countdown for a first foray into the game.
I italicize countdown lines in my notes as they happen in play: when people stall for too long early on, or when they fail and I get to make an off-screen hard move. I think the shadows line here was activated when they took the time to take Chase back to the farmhouse to get healed, which meant they wouldn’t be able to find the information I had for them in the morgue. The rest of the countdown was altered by their decision to go after Evelyn -- because Evelyn couldn’t go after Damaris, Henry did, and thus didn’t go after the police.
I hang out on the Countdown page while we play, until I need to reference something else: it gives me a broad overview of where things are going to go, so switching back and forth between that and the list of Keeper moves on the Keeper reference sheet helps me improvise my responses to failed rolls and decide what’s going to happen as the characters go to specific place. I like keeping this focused outline of what the monster is trying to accomplish in the front of my brain at all times, because it makes it easier to decide what conflicts might arise and what threats are out and about.
The last section I prepare before we start the first session for the mystery is a broad mystery information section, which isn’t necessarily in the outline of Keeper prep that Monster of the Week provides. For some mysteries I use this a lot, for others it’s just a line or to, but it’s my catch-all space for any information I can’t fit anywhere else but think I might need.
In this case, it was both notes about werewolf transformations and also a sort of CSI-esque explanation of what had actually happened with Delaney and Jason the night before:
Again, most of this information didn’t get used -- and I’ve sense balanced out my over-prepping problem, but I almost always have something I want to remember that doesn’t fit in any of the other prep, so that’s what this section is for.
I think the biggest thing to note here is that a lot of this information is in flux: I’m always playing with what things will work, what things won’t, what will make for interesting decisions based on what the PCs are doing, and adjusting my information and planning from there. Less kill your darlings and more let go of cool ideas when better ones come up, but it’s all about being able to adapt on my feet when things aren’t going to plan. I try really hard not to imagine the full arc of the story and how I think it might go, because when I do they inevitably go in the opposite direction. My focus is more cementing the ideas and themes and questions I’m interested in so that I can find ways for those to come up no matter what the players decide to do.
Now, that’s all the prep that I do before the first session. But most of our mysteries for Deliverance take 3-4 recording sessions, so what do I do during and between?
DURING AND BETWEEN SESSIONS
During sessions, I tend to make notes on paper because it makes less noise while other people are talking than typing does (I am, as anyone will tell you, a notoriously loud typist), so write some brief notes from the session on a page for that session, and then another page of notes of whatever I’ve scrawled down immediately after we finish recording where I make note of where I want the next recording to begin -- what hooks there are for each character/group of characters, what needs to be addressed, what they’ve been in the middle of, etc.
I dug through the pile of papers I brought back with me when I moved back to the US this summer to find my scratch page notes for the first mystery (recorded August-October 2017), which are below -- a few handwritten, and one pre-game section that I decided to type because, if I remember correctly, I was making these notes during a lecture because I had procrastinated until the last minute. Major apologies for my oft-indecipherable handwriting; I’d translate, but most of the time I, too, have no idea what it says.
This one below was my post-session 1 notes, along with my general on-hand notes during the recording of the first mystery -- I’ve got harm checkboxes, Andrew’s description of the farmhouse for reference (which, admittedly, I have not looked at again until just now), and then some notes about where people are headed and what they’ve encountered and/or promised.
Looking back at those harm checkboxes, I think I nerfed Henry’s harm-count because I was pretty sure I was going to kill Chase if I didn’t. I was very much still getting the hang of how much harm monsters can do vs. how much harm hunters can do.
No, I don’t know what those numbers on the top are. I want to say that was Jason’s iPhone password?
This one above is pretty typical for what my pre-session notes look like in the middle of a mystery -- each character or character group and then a quick note about where they are/what they’re going to be doing. This looks the most like the notes I take these days, now that I’ve been playing the game for a lot longer. They’re fairly sparse! Basically enough to give me an opening introduction as we start recording and then ask “what do you do?” and go off of whatever their answer to that is.
Another important note: much of this NEVER HAPPENS. “storm begins, takes them back to the station” who????? The quickest lesson I learned with this game is to not hold on to anything too tight because better things come up so quickly that you can’t afford to hesitate before abandoning ship and jumping to them.
As you can see, sometimes these notes are a “here’s what happened” or “here’s a thing you need to remember” note, sometimes they’re a “this is an interesting place to start” note, and sometimes they’re a “how the fuck am I going to get them back on track” note. Usually, I’d say, it’s that last one, with this particular group of characters. QUESTIONS are huge, in these notes -- “Where are you going now that Zeke’s kicked you out of the farmhouse?” is, I would say, the ideal kind of note for me to start off a session with.
Anyway, all that to say: for me, the real work of Monster of the Week is asking the right questions. Having a monster is important and having some idea of setting and bystanders is important, but if I had ten minutes to prep a Monster of the Week mystery, I would have: monster, countdown, and a strong hook, and I could probably improvise it all from there.
The prep work has begun for a new campaign! Got some new dice and am hauling my handbook and notebook everywhere.
Coming soon on the Role To Confirm twitch channel, I will be GMing a Daggerheart campaign. I can't wait for y'all to see it. It will be my first time GMing a live stream.
Keep an eye out for more information about when and where to watch!
First I wanted to run the Wake of Willowby Hall and maybe set it in Dolmenwood. Well, as long as we’re playing in Dolmenwood, might as well start with the Winter’s Daughter. Then one of my friends, Aaron, a huge elf supporter, read up on some Dolmenwood history in the Players’ Book and had strong opinions about the Cold Prince.
I started thinking about starting with the group being outlaws…and…
