Behind the Madness

Steve here. As we jump into a new year, a new game, and a new challenge, I find myself trying to work out what the best sort of content I can offer this blog. Under Emma’s suggestion, this one’s going to discuss that most terrifying of RPG subjects: preparing sessions. I have on many accounts prattled on about my love for Dungeons and Dragons, and my struggles with Call of Cthulhu and then Monster of the Week, so let’s delve into the paperwork side of things and what’s going on behind the screen.

Firstly, for the uninitiated or those that are fortunate enough to always be players, let’s just cover the basics. As the Keeper of Arcane Lore/Keeper of Mysteries/Dungeon Master/Game Master, my job is to prepare the world in which the player(s) will find themselves. I am the people they meet; I am the monsters they face; and I am the annoyingly simple riddle on the side of the bookcase that’s slowly falling on top of the character that just won’t move on!

If you have not had the pleasure of running a game, it simply comes down to how confident you are to improvise versus how well you know your plot.

When we did The Last Station, it was a game written around a pre-existing campaign. This meant I had to read the entire of the Murder on the Orient Express campaign, then write my own version of it which led to countless amounts of scrawled notes to myself to remember the dream segment or how the monster needs to be different. It came down to a few pages of A4 detailing the story I wanted to tell and the expected places and challenges a character might face if they were the protagonist of the story. A bit like writing a short story or novella really.

Looking back further to The Dawlish games or to the Monster of the Week games, these were completely home brewed. I did the same sort of thing with the Dawlish games because it was easier to write what the little horror story would be. Monster, however, doesn’t really allow for much prep of story…

This is all great if you’re planning to write a book, but there’s a catch when it comes to RPGs. The character always comes and mucks it up!!! Some GMs spend a lifetime perfecting a sea of political intrigue or a high stakes thrill ride and then the player(s) find out there’s an NPC called *insert name closely resembling a childish phrase or even something that makes no sense to you but the player(s) are going to find hilarious* because there’s no end to the amount of that! And on the other side of the coin, there is a lot of great things that the player can drop on you that you also were not expecting. A self-sacrifice in the middle of a long campaign, an answer to a question that you hadn’t thought of, loads of stuff.

Now we’ve got the general prep out the way, lets get to the actual games.

I’ll start with our most recent first: Monster of the Week. The game itself relies heavily on it being taken seriously in one aspect. It’s a community storytelling device. You cannot prep a story written by several writers all by yourself because you are not all the writers and there’s still a level of cops and robbers as the players unravel the story. All you can do is prep the key monsters, minions, locations, and bystanders and then pray that your player is okay with “yes and…”. There are some great options here for arcs and mysteries where you simply make a monster that sets the characters down a certain genre or feel, and the players compliment it by acting accordingly and also offering like-minded suggestions.

There is a photo on our social media of me surrounded by paper from our first Monster of the Week game. This is mainly due to each page being the stat block or notes of the issues that rise if the players don’t stop things, as well as having the side character and the quick reference guides for both Keeper and Hunter. The game doesn’t do prep well. It just does paperwork to keep you afloat in the middle of the improv.

Secondly, Call of Cthulhu. This, for me, is very similar to Dungeons and Dragons in prep. I write the story and then I flesh it out into scenes or rooms that the players are going to go into and what sort of key things need to be noted in each. There’s a chance the player might spot the hidden trap door? Make a note that in this room the player needs to make a Spot Hidden check.

If you ever see my notes for a session of Call of Cthulhu, you’ll see a lot of bullet points and some blocks of text when I want to get certain images across. Other than that, you have to react in the moment. I cannot prepare for everything, but I can prepare the obvious. The times you really want to make sure you described your room so the player knows it’s full of noxious gas? Write a description and read it out. You want to add it on the fly? Don’t need to write it down before hand, but you can add bullet points to the room suggesting ideas you thought you might want to add.

Always be prepared to improv. The character sheet is fairly open to it as well. They’re trying to talk their way out of it and you didn’t prep for it? A brief scan and Fast Talk or Persuade comes in handy.

This has been quite garbled and I’m not sure how interesting it will be, but if it gets one person to even remotely consider running a game with less apprehension of running, it’ll be enough. At the end of the day, I picture the game as a book I’m reading and try to prep what I’d like to read in the next chapter. It’s not my fault that the protagonist is being written by someone else!