The Grim Binder

My GM binder for the Grim North is a fairly recent  development. I have always previously worked from notes on my iPad but I was finding it a bit difficult to navigate in a hurry and wanted something that was: A) Easy to reference and B) A bit more permanent. 

There are some random tables that I use all the time and don’t change much in terms of contents so it made sense to start with them and see what needs develop from play. 

So I took an old A4 ring binder and printed some stuff out to stick in there. I’m using plastic sleeves to contain the print out and trying to keep them in some sort of logical order. Failing that, one that makes sense to me. 

The current contents are:

• General Encounters of the Grim North (and what are they up to?)
• So you need a Grim North Adventure in a Hurry?
• What do we Want?
• Where is Tonight’s Ill Advised Escapade Taking Place?
• What’s Complicating Tonight’s Grim North Session
• The Random District Table
• Cults of the Grim North 
• Thieves Crews
• Random Thieves Crew Activites
• Table of Random Contacts
• Random Patrician Names (and associated mental illnesses)
•  Critical and Fumble Tables (very much a work in progress)
• In the Possession of the formerly alive NPC…
• Guilds of the City
• Tavern Generator
• Random Grog Table (important due to Conan’s rule)
• Grim Omens
• Breachers from the Outer Dark/Farthest Black
• Weird Occurrence Table
• Random Portal Destinations 
• What’s on Sale at the Purveyor of Unusual Wares
• Who’s in at the House of Mercenaries, Sellspears and Blades for Hire?

Ideally I’ll add a page for each District of the city, complete with its specific random encounters, and likewise for regions outside of town and I have a big generator for random Gloom locations and events that I need to get around to printing too.

Housekeeping

But for like Grim North houses

Currently playing: WFRP 2e on Sundays. It’s ok. I had this scenario knocking around from my clearing the shelves project. Reading “The Devils” by Joe Abercrombie put me in a Warhammer state of mind so I decided to run it. I’ve not run 2e before and I’m not sure I like it. The game sessions have been fun enough but the early 2000s action economy is not to my taste. The PCs are involved in an attempt to cleanse their mortal souls in the eyes of Sigmar by recovering some holy items of behalf of his Church from the Border Princes. It’s suitably downbeat and gritty so far.

Additionally working on: Grim North open table for Thursdays or like any weeknight really. It’s not that open because I can’t be arsed to advertise for players everywhere but it’s scheduled for this week regardless. Probably tidy up a loose thread with some experienced heads and then start offering it to the world for next week. 

In the background: Been tinkering away with various Grim North bits. The Grim Underworld progresses. If any PCs found the entrance it’s probably playable in its current form. There are seven mapped areas of level 1 and most have at least a minimal key. It very much has the theme of mole men, undead and cultists at the moment  

I’ve added a few bits elsewhere to the world. Encounter tables for the Far North and the Plains of Sanguine Desolation. A few smaller dungeon locations. More details on the factions of the Grimwood. This sort of cumulative prep is building the setting as a whole but doesn’t generally help with what’s going to happen in the next session. It’s very much how my mind works in creative spaces though. 

Considering: Time and healing. One of the WFRP PCs took a fair bit of damage last session which he believes is going to take 6-8 weeks of game time to heal. I’m not sure how fun this is. One of the grumbles about Dragon Warriors from my players was they always seemed to be injured. Access to magical healing should be rare in WFRP and DW, which it is in my games but I wonder whether constantly dealing with injuries, while more realistic, this is the most enjoyable aspect of the game. I’m reminded of Chris in my Carcosa game saying it was easier to die and roll up a new character than barely survive and heal back up. Hmm.

Why I Prefer the DIY Approach

 I write my own adventures. Not for you to read and play, you understand, but for me to run at my table. When I say adventures I’m giving myself a lot a of undue credit. I have always preferred the term scenario in any case but I feel that it is more appropriate to what I do. Write some notes, draw or appropriate a map, roll on some random tables. We’re done. 

I see the advantage of buying and running prepared materials. Especially when I observe people who play a lot of different systems or game with a high frequency. There’s only so much cognitive space available for RPGs in one’s life. Using prepare material takes frees up some of that space for learning new rule systems or maintaining three weekly campaigns or whatever we’re trying to achieve. Or perhaps most of that space is already  taken up with work, social activities, family, stress factors etc. 

It doesn’t really occur to me to do this however. I do every so often strive to include more of other people’s materials in my games. Added diversity of ideas and making other people do the work for you so you can get on with the business of playing seem like wins to me. I don’t really enjoy reading rpg materials though. Scenario and setting creation is part of my hobby too. I like that element of the game in the same way that I don’t collect games for their own sake as some of my friends do. There are loads of ways to do RPGs as a hobby and none of them are objectively wrong.

Following someone else’s scenario seems limiting to me. When do engage in it I tend to use the framework of the writing as an adventure seed and go my own way with it. I suspect this is what most people do also but when I look back at times I’ve run published material it rarely looks even remotely like it does on the page.

Presentation matters too. Two column wall of text style just isn’t for me. I realise that some adventures are written with the intention of being reading material rather than to be run but I am not that demographic. If we get something like Wilderlands of High Fantasy with its brief hex descriptions; or something in the Necrotic Gnome house, style with its bullet points and  bold text for primary information, then we’re off to a good start.

Ultimately, it’s the sitting down with graph paper, pens and pencils and dice; these days it’s often my iPad, or notes I sketch during play. I might moan about GM prep but it’s an essential creative outlet for me. That’s why I’m DIY.

More GM Prep but different

This is the second post of my rather scruffy GM prep. It’s in note form and represents a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel designed to kick off a Crawljammer style campaign. Crawjammer being an awesome Spelljammer style zine for DCC. It should really be fleshed out into its own setting, with a boxed set and everything. Instead you can get it here.

The pitch for Crashed Black Ziggurat from Outer Space is  a space-going Chaos temple collides with a Crawljammer craft filled with space vikings and the whole thing crashes into your pseudo-medieval world. It’s leaking raw chaos into the environment and the smart money is it’s going to blow up, destroying everything. Your band of level-0 nobodies investigate the crash site in the hope of escaping their impending doom. 

I realise of course that this is a step pyramid, not a ziggurat but the latter makes for a snappier title…

The point of this of course is to have the player’s 0-level peasants get come face to face with space vikings, chaos spawn, a weird alien squid, negotiate with an imprisoned demon and either escape through a magic portal or fly off into the aether in a stolen Crawljammer Drakkar. Lots of them will die along the way but that’s part of the fun.

I ran this over two sessions of about three hours and it resulted in the serving characters taking a portal to an arboreal world just as the Chaos Singularity exploded and engulfed their world in pure Chaos. 

Behold! Actual GM Prep

In order to show my working out I am planning to discuss two older examples of my GM prep. Both are for game sessions that I felt especially well prepared for and resulted in, for me at least, some memorable games. 

The first is part of the campaign in which I returned to running Dragon Warriors for the first time since childhood. Originally conceived as a one shot, it finally resolved 5 years later. In this period of the campaign the PCs were sailing to the Holy Land from Ferromaine and had stopped off for supplies in Molasaria. 

I didn’t really expect much to happen here but threw out a little hook about the local headman’s wife and daughter being missing. To my surprise (although perhaps I should’ve known better) the PCs decided to pause their voyage and head into the ominous Molasarian woods to seek them out. 

These notes are pretty basic and I backed them up with some text on my iPad. Essentially I estimated that Molasaria was roughly equivalent to Bulgaria, at least in terms of folklore so I incorporated as much Bulgarian folklore as I could. I make no claims as to authenticity and some of what I used was general Slavic folklore from surrounding regions. All woods in my Legend based games tend to have a least a bit of the Mythago Wood feel to them. Woodlands have memory, and because in Legend they are magical places, that memory can be drawn to a sort of life or you can become engrossed in it. In this case, probably the wolves and some ancient horse-nomads (the ancestors of the modern Molasarians.) The other, more faerie inspired creatures have a different relationship with the Wood and its collective memory. Being incredibly long lived, they can exist in its past and present simultaneously. 

The Hala was a lovely piece of Bulgarian folklore that I immediately fixated on. Essentially a bad weather demon that can manifest in numerous forms, the Hala presaged the coming snows of winter. The local NPCs laid it on thick how dangerous the Hala was and that it came only at night. The PCs treated it with a healthy respect, probably due in part to some recent character deaths, but also due to the strong implication that the Hala played for keeps. 

Other things that caused my great amusement were the knight whose armour turned out to contain only worms and maggots; and the old woman who changed identity with the fall of night and the breaking of dawn. 

This took two three hour sessions to resolve and included the PCs dealing with grey skinned dyavol in a shadowy mockery of the village; and slaying the local priest in a church, continuing their modus operandi of killing people in houses of worship. 

Going Even Lower Prep for a Second Game

Jon Hodgson doing his thing

I’m looking at running another game on Tuesday. The Grim North continues on Sunday nights and the Tiny Prep method is keeping things ticking over nicely there. However as soon as something starts working it’s time to fuck it up, so now that I’ve established I have enough time to run one weekly game I shall try and run two. 

At Dragonmeet this previous year and probably every other year proceeding, those of us that meet up there have expressed our desire to meet up online like we used to in the G+ days and ply a game or two. This week we’re actually going to get our act in gear and do it. 

In order to manage this with the minimum impact on our time, we’re going to play Beyond the Wall in the manner the book intends. So using playbooks to generate characters and a shared village setting; and then using a scenario pack for the evenings adventure. It’s a good way to get things going with zero prep beforehand. I’ve used Beyond the Wall a couple of times in this manner and Through Sunken Lands as well. Through Sunken Lands being the Moorcock/Howard/ sword and sorcery genre take opposed to Beyond the Wall’s Prydain/Earthsea/Dark Rising presuppositions. They’re both good games that do exactly what they set out to achieve and it’s nice to have something like that in your back pocket for such as occasion. 

Beyond the Wall had campaign tools in Further Afield and while I have not employed them at the table, they look sound. If we decide to extend Beyond the Wall past a couple of sessions I’d be interested to see how they work out.  

Achievability and Tiny Prep

IRL I’m super busy so I’ve returned to running the Grim North. This is what’s achievable right now and it’s a lot of fun to run. 

Just an average day in the Grim North

Because I’m short on time I’ve tried to embrace the principals of Tiny Prep. Just doing something every day to contribute to the weekly game is enough to maintain or even spur on my creativity. Tiny Prep is the brainchild of Che Webster of Roleplay Rescue. He’s got a book out on it now, which admittedly I haven’t read but the idea resonates with me. His blog posts on the subject are collected Here

I am not a prep heavy GM. I don’t generally have a lot of material prepared in advance. I certainly don’t get involved in virtual table top bells and whistles. I play on line using video chat and theatre of the mind. Some prep is required however no matter how well developed the ability of the GM to improvise. The reverse is also true; even the most well prepared GM must improvise at some point in response to player action. In returning to the Grim North I realise how much I have prepared to improvise. There are tables for things, adventure seeds, a big d100 rumour table, omens, weather, small encounter tables for each district of the city, a loot the body table, all things I have created piecemeal over the years to support myself in session. In going the Tiny Prep route I can add one small thing each day that will be useful in session: an NPC name, some detail about and existing NPC, add a room to a smol dungeon, add an entry to a random table, etc. The accumulation of such tiny additions pays off in the long term and often spurs further creativity so more gets done. 

 So, as much learning and playing the systems I have purchased over the years seems like a worthy pursuit I’m focusing on what is achievable right now. After all this is supposed to be fun, not work.