I haven’t felt this involved in a RPG campaign in a while as I have in this new 13th Age one. Whenever I have a short pause in in what I’m doing at my desk, I reach out for the little pile of index cards called “The Horizon Consipracy” and add new cards to it.
It seems the visiting my old blog posts about using index cards has rekindled my desire to handle something tangible while running games. Spending the last year running published adventures using online tools like D&D Beyond and Discord has made me less invested in preparing my games. I’ve gotten used to just run things as written and look up stuff online during play.
Yet one of the take home message from my recently completed Godless Chronicle D&D campaign was how the most fun we had as a group was when we played through encounters I’d rolled on charts beforehand, adding a few details to them to make them fit into the adventure’s narrative.
It became clear to me: the time I invested in prepping small, modular scenes added value to our combined experience. Which is funny because I used to be a prepping-heavy GM until I went near full-improv. It seems I’ve gone full circle in my evolution as a GM.
So here I was this morning, playing with the campaign’s stack of index cards. It contained a title card:
The Horizon Conspiracy – Summary
Something bad’s about to go down in Horizon. Chances are, our heroes are going to get blamed for it. That’s how those things go, right?
I made it during our last session (link to previous article) and added a card for each character, bearing their name, class, One Unique Thing, icon relationships and backgrounds. For instance the card for my son’s necromancer reads as:
[Title] Sivik Mirir Xer, Tiefling Necromancer
OUT: I will seek redemption by destroying all of the world’s undead and (eventually) free all wandering souls.
Icons: Lich King 2 (negative); Priestess 1 (positive)
Backgrounds: Exorcist 4; Preacher 2; On a pilgrimage 2
I then realized I should note any “facts” we had agreed upon during our prep session, including shit players said I thought should totally become fact. I picked new cards and titled them “[PC’s Name]’ Truths I”. I took this idea from the mini-RPG I had created a few years ago to play with my son. Each Truth would be a one liner which would accumulate into our combined world-building. I placed each Truths card right after their associated characters in the stack. When I’ll run out of space on any given card, I’ll just create “Truths II” cards, place them after the filled-up card and so on.
For example, when I established the party had worked together before, I used one of my convention games tricks, and asked them what went well in their last mission and what didn’t. The twin clerics piped in about how it was their 1st mission where no allies died, which was a apparently a big win for them. The Wizard’s player then indicated she had been unable to recover the intel she had been sent to recover on that mission.
Based on these story bits, I wrote “No allies of ours died on our last mission, that’s a first” on the cleric twins’ truths cards. I then wrote “Failed to retrieve crucial intel during previous mission” on the wizard’s.
As I was revising the stack, I recalled how someone had asked what kind of twins the clerics were. One of their players joked they were twins from different fathers. Everyone groaned and laughed…
Of course, I added this to the twin’s Truths, it’s just too good a tidbit to ignore.
I then realized I wanted at least one story bit on every Truths card. I went ahead and decided to add “unknown” Truths to the empty cards: things yet to appear “on camera” in the campaign. For instance, Sallissie’s One Unique Thing “Uncanny guide that always finds her way, always” kinda feelt like my friend who plays her was challenging me to bite into this. So on her Truth card I wrote “Sallissie got VERY lost once, but doesn’t remember it, at all… (unknown)” I look forward to explore that in a flashback in the campaign’s early episodes.
As I finish these quick blogiddy notes, I have a nice stack into which I’ll start adding cards about the Horizon Conspiracy and I’ll let the stack grow, split, and evolve as we play.
In fact, as I was writing this, I added a card called “Icons in play” to the stack to get a single place where the total investment in icon relationship points could be refereed to. It ended up looking like:
The Horizon Conspiracy: Icons in Play
- High Druid 3
- Archmage 3
- Priestess 1 + 1 + 1
- Diabolist 2 + 1
- Lich King 2
- Prince of Shadows 2
- Dwarf King 1
- Crusader 1
That tells me that 4 icons are going to play major roles in the campaign’s plot, 2 will get middling roles and 2 minor ones. This means I’ll create Icon spoecific cards and start putting schemes and key NPCs on them.
I’ll keep all y’all posted.
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