Everything else in this guide — the pitch, the anchors, the
Read your last session's notes. (You wrote them. They're covered later in this page. Keep reading.)
Pick the 1-3 things most likely to come up. Prep those. Prep nothing else in detail. The anchors, the NPCs, the seeds — you built those already. This step is just pointing them at what happened last session.
If you are tempted to prep the whole world before each session, stop and re-read Prep Philosophy. The instinct is understandable. It will cost you.
Sixty seconds. Not more.
Say what happened and then stop. Better yet — invite the players to fill it in. Their version is the canonical one now. If they remember something differently than you do, their memory is the campaign. Let it be.
If nobody remembers anything, that is two cues at once: keep better notes going forward, and open this session sharper than usual. Players with no momentum need something to react to immediately. Do not ease into it.
Open with something already in motion. Not "you enter the tavern." The tavern door slams open and a stranger — bleeding, urgent, wrong somehow — demands the room's attention before anyone has decided what they wanted to drink.
The first five minutes of a session set the pace for the next three hours.
Follow the players. They will go somewhere you did not expect. That is not a problem — that is the prep you did (anchors, not rails) working exactly as intended.
Watch the clock. Know when to cut. A scene that has resolved emotionally is over, even if nobody has said anything. Move.
When you do not know what happens next, ask what the nearest NPC wants next. Ask it out loud if you need to. The answer is almost always a scene. This is the engine behind the NPC-as-motivation idea from Prep Philosophy, running live.
Lean on your locations. A scene that is flagging often just needs a change of room. A new location is a change of pressure as much as a change of scenery, which is the whole argument of Creating Locations.
Shorthand, not sentences. Trigger words. Who showed up, what they said, what the players decided, any name you invented on the spot.
The goal is to give future-you enough signal to rebuild the scene from the note. Not to write a novel. A note that takes three minutes to write is too long.
Names in particular. If you improvised a name and the players liked it, write it down before the session ends. You will not remember it tomorrow. You will be certain you will. You will not.
Agree on a default with the group before it happens. Preferably in Session Zero — the table agreements section covers exactly this. Most of the stress around absences comes from a group trying to negotiate policy while one person is already missing and the rest are waiting to play.
Three common options:
Whichever you pick: do not grind the session to a halt waiting for them. The game runs with whoever is at the table.
The deeper fix is structural. Never build a session whose critical scene hinges on one specific character being present. That warning comes from Prep Philosophy — the "no single points of failure" rule — and it matters most here, where theory becomes a cancelled session. Tie important hooks to the whole party. Not to one player.
Find a natural beat — not necessarily a cliffhanger. A closed door. A decision made. A letter arriving just as the party settles in. A moment of quiet where someone gets to say the thing they have been holding all night.
Cliffhangers work. Use them sparingly. A session ending on a cliffhanger every week starts to feel like the story is being held hostage. A quiet beat sometimes gives the players more to think about between sessions than a dramatic one. Both have their place. Neither is the default.
Tell the players when you are about to close — "one more scene" — so they can wind down with you instead of feeling cut off.
Write it now, while it is warm. Not tomorrow. Not this weekend. Now.
Five bullets beats five paragraphs written three days later. What to capture: who showed up, what they chose, what changed in the world, any NPC name you improvised, any promise a player character made that the world should remember.
This note is where the campaign's memory lives. Next session you will open it before you open anything else. If you skip it tonight, you will be guessing from memory next week — and the session after that will feel slightly looser, and the one after that slightly more so. The loop turns on this note.
If you do one thing from this entire page: do this.
The mindset behind all of this — why short prep beats long prep, why NPCs drive the action, why you should never need one specific player present — lives in Prep Philosophy. And the long view — the pitch and seeds that this loop slowly turns into a campaign — lives in Planning a Campaign. The loop is the mechanism. Those two pages are why it works.
© Soltherra RPG System