How I Prep
Introduction
Weird Writer from Roll To Doubt) suggested a blogging challenge where participants explain how they prep and what their priorities are when sitting down to get ready for their game. So here I am!
Before the Campaign Begins
Whenever I run games, my goal is to do as little between sessions as possible. To accomplish this, I normally do two things. The first is plan smaller, more contained games that center around a region or so. This tends to make me the happiest as a referee, and I understand and enjoy these smaller games more than longer, scopeless ones. The second is to write the entire play space before I start recruiting for the campaign.
I'm a hobbyist writer, so I'm always working on one project or another even when I wish I wasn't. Most of the time, this project is tabletop related, and typically, although not always, it's a hexcrawl, a little region for my broader setting called The Spokelands). Making these hexcrawls is a way to experiment with my prose and get my reps in while incorporating whatever I find interesting at the time into my setting.
It is very rare that I'll run a hexcrawl or a campaign if I don't have every hex keyed, every dungeon stocked, every thing in an almost complete state. Due to the nature of my setting, I don't have that many hexes to key for each region, and it's trivial to whip several up pretty quickly and tie them to one another via portals.
I like having the keys for each region complete before I run it for a few reasons. One, because the act of writing and keying is part of what helps me interrogate the fiction and arrive at a more detailed understanding of the whole thing (more on this later). If I were to write it piecemeal as we played, it would be this inconsistent mess of things that I liked over a 3-month span. Secondly, writing the regions before I have any idea of who my players might be helps me make challenges that are distinct and don't rely on the strengths and weaknesses of any particular party. I'm a lazy bastard, and if I let myself hand-tailor challenges to my table, I think it would compromise the merit of the challenges I'm trying to write. If I write a challenge that requires a wrench knowing all my guys have screwdrivers, it's not really a challenge, it's me as a referee knowingly including an obstacle. There's a time and place for this, but I like the headspace I have to put myself in when I write hexcrawls for an unknown group of adventurers.
While I do tend to write full sentences, these sentences typically aren't very elaborate or artful. Here are a few from a hex region I prepared for a WWN game but never ended up running:
Hex 1, Angel's Bay Colony
24 Religious fanatics make a home here, working the land and watching with a careful eye the clouds of black smoke that arise from Khromarium to the eastHex 2, Angel's Bay
An ancient blast crater here, big enough to fill with water form the ocean to the north. Scattered around it are shoddily constructed huts which house penitents in blue and white robes. The blue half depicts waves and the white half depicts rays of light.
These are ancillary hexes truthfully, the city of Khromarium is the big point of the region, but the general structure of the hexfills here are illustrative of how I like to write things.
As far as tools go, I use all sorts of things. I find it fun to flip back and forth between different methods of generating points of interest, hex features, people, places, and dungeons. Sometimes I'll build my own tools, and even if I do use a generator it's very rare that I take a result unedited and slap it into a hexcrawl. One method I keep returning to, or a theme that I find popping up in tools I make myself, are spark tables. Just little tables of fun words. The point is throwing them against one another in the context of a dungeon room, person, feature, or encounter and seeing what comes out of trying to incorporate both words. This works really well for me, since the comparison/contrast of the two words given some context feels like making a comparison or metaphor like you might do when writing a more traditional piece.
Once I've gotten a few of these hexcrawls finished and connected, I'll put out a call for players.
Before the Session
Before each session, I'll skim over the notes for whatever the party is tackling. I've pre-loaded most of the detailed prep, made any tools I'll foresee needing to use like random encounter tables, loot tables, and so on, so most of my prep before a given session is just reviewing those. Then we're into the game!
At least, that's the ideal I strive for. In reality, there are often times where the nature of the adventure requires that I buff up some of my hexfills or expand upon some terseness or another to run that given session. When I have to do this, I spend some time thinking about what would make the most sense given the rest of the region and the broader rules of the Spokelands setting, and then jot down a few notes.
Notes at this stage exist to jog my memory, harking back to periods where I was brainstorming or thinking about one region or another instead of the prose I write before the campaign. By this point, I ought to have a firm grasp on the kind of place that I'm running is and what it's people are like (since I've spent the pre-campaign time writing about them), so any notes are pointers to thoughts I've had rather than discrete pieces of information.
Something like "The gnolls have a cult here" reminds me of the gnolls and the context surrounding their cult. I don't need to extrapolate much at this stage, because I have a very solid understanding of the world and its relevant players.
Speaking very broadly, at the beginning of my process for prep, writing is a generative process, helping me think of new ideas to include in the game. During a game, writing is a notary process, helping me remember and highlight important ideas that develop during play.
But yeah, that's basically it in broad strokes. I like to frontload as much stuff as possible into the before-campaign period of time so I can work on the next thing while I'm running the current thing. It's worked so far and it also lets me run modules really easily since the process of reading and preparing a module is basically what I already do for my own stuff.