Most prep fails not because there is too little of it, but because it is aimed at the wrong target. Scenes collapse. Plots derail. The GM rewrites their notes at midnight after a session went sideways. The fix is not more prep. It is different prep.
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When you prep a plot, you are writing something the players will derail. When you prep a situation, you are writing something the players will run through — in whatever direction they choose.
The Planning a Campaign page introduced the phrase "places, people, and pressures." A situation is exactly those three things arranged to collide. That is the why behind the phrase. Prep the collision. Let the players choose the angle.
Your prepped tavern can be any tavern. Your prepped villain can be in any city. Nothing you built is wasted, because you can pick it up and put it down wherever the session needs it.
The Broken Compass from Planning a Campaign is a good example of this in action. The players headed somewhere else. The Broken Compass followed. The nervous ex-smuggler is still the nervous ex-smuggler. The prep traveled.
Every anchor you build is reusable, forever, in any session. Prep that travels is prep that compounds.
When you do not know what happens next, ask what the
An NPC with a clear desire generates action on their own. You do not have to make them do things — they will tell you what they are doing, because they want something. The story assembles itself from the friction between what the NPCs want and what the players want.
This is a load-bearing idea for the whole guide. An NPC without a motivation is scenery. An NPC with one is a scene.
Three locations. Three NPCs per location. Three things each NPC wants.
You will only use half of it. The half you use will feel alive because the other half exists in the background — shaping choices, informing details, making the world feel like it was there before the party arrived.
This is prep that compounds. Each thing you prep makes every other thing you prepped more useful. Plant more than you need, and whatever the players pull on will have roots.
Never prep a session where one specific character must be present for anything to happen.
Life happens. People get sick. Cars break down. Babies arrive on their own schedule. A session that cannot run without Player A is a session you will cancel.
Make hooks catch multiple characters. Tie plot pressure to the whole party, not to one person. The design choice matters while you are still planning — when it actually happens, that is a different problem. Handling absences at the table is covered in Session Flow.
The one thing worth over-preparing: the first five minutes. That is the
Open with something already in motion. A door slamming. A stranger arriving. A decision forced. Not "you enter the tavern." The players need something to react to, and they need it immediately.
A strong start buys momentum for the rest of the session. When the opening is sharp, everything after it feels sharper. The mechanics of what comes next — recap, pacing, closing the session — live in Session Flow.
The situations you prep will need NPCs to drive them and locations to contain them. Creating NPCs covers how to build the characters whose wants become your engine. Creating Locations covers how to build the anchors they inhabit.
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