I was reading back through the Mothership Warden’s Manual and something jumped out to me: The amount of writing in the example prep adventure (pg 18-19) is very close to what I end up with when making my own material for play.
This question is less about what you prep as about how much detail you write down while doing so. How verbose your dungeon keys or NPC descriptions, etc. I think because published modules tend to be quite detailed (taking work off the GM), they end up being a bad example for GMs who are just making something personal for their home group. And I find that when I’m making an adventure, much of the detail can exist in my head and the written prep serve as more of mnemonic device.
As an example sometimes I’ll write as little as:
Aquarium Gallery w/ red moss & fear inducing liquid
But the same room could also be:
Red Aquarium Gallery, expansive & unlit:
Curved sunken chamber, everything covered in caustic red moss, except for a full glass wall on the Northwest, red liquid inside like a blood aquarium
A few inches of red liquid soak the mossy floor. Seeps from a tiny crack in the glass. Smells like iron but not actually blood.
Floor in hall to the East is gouged and shredded and waterlogged
Drinking the liquid induces a state of fear and panic. Mark stressed
Over the years I’ve ended up settling closer to the first example, and try to stick to a single A4 spread of prep per-session.
For prep, I favor the terse. A relationship graph with a few words between the related. A simple map / key with minimal room descriptions. Maybe a random table on the page as well.
However, if I’m reading for leisure, those lengthier descriptions can be pleasant. But those lengthy descriptions are worthless at the table. Unless you bring a highlighter.
Yeah, the notes I need to run my stuff don’t include much, just enough to spark my memory.
I’m working on finding an approach that relies on terse statements to spark GMs’ imaginations so I can avoid the boxed text plague. I’m so looking forward to getting feedback on that approach to module design when I can send a full collection of playtest materials out.
This is a very good insight, and is something that has bubbling in the back of my mind lately about ways that personal prep should differ from published adventure modules. One big one to my mind is when I am prepping for my game, I include hooks in the adventure for future adventures which is something you don’t see as much within the self-contained world of a published adventure since it makes less assumptions about the outside world.
The things I try to include in my own prep will involve everything that I don’t want to have to figure out on the spot/that I would be bad at improvising at the table. So that includes: NPC names and motives, treasure descriptions, physical qualities of a space, random encounter tables. Things I tend to gloss over that I would want more explicitly spelled out in an adventure would be how interactable things in the environment interact, consequences for the way things go wrong, lighting, and what happens if the adventurers ignore the threat.
The hooks for future adventures is something I look for during play. When a different location, especially if it’s a ruin of some sort, gets mentioned, I note that as a possible place to create something cool for play if I haven’t already. There are times the words of NPCs drop outta my mouth in response to PCs, speaking of places and things I’ve not planned. Those are gifts, I reckon, as I now have an additional place the PCs may want to visit.
As for names, I’m solidly convinced now that the authors of name lists and supplements are saints. Having a list of names available to scan and choose one in the instant is a godsend. No more referring to the pedlar as “The Pedlar” for a while until I can decide on a decent name, I can check the list and decide her name is Adelaide on the fly. Makes things feel much smoother to me, anyway.