Secrets of low-prep homebrew [+]

For battle maps specifically, assuming you are playing face-to-face, map books are great. I have a collection of Loke Battlemap books and they can be used to spin up an interesting and sufficiently representative map in a few seconds. All their books are designed to work together so you can mix and match. These days they sell digital versions, too.

Knowing your system well enough to either quickly select enemies or stat them in the fly is also really helpful. Savage Worlds is my primary system and I can both create enemies spontaneously if needed as well as it having multiple bestiaries to draw from. Breaking the assumption of ‘fair encounters’ is also important as that shifts the task of deciding ‘is this fight winnable’ from the GM to the players, and arguably that is the better place for it! Your duty switches to ensuring you give them enough description in-game so they have a chance of making that assessment. And they should start engaging in IC research of potential foes, too.

If you can, encouraging your players to have goals for their characters is also great. These should hopefully cause them to initiate activity and then you can focus on deciding what obstacles that entails or how the world responds. In terms of world response, having factions defined is helpful here so you know who the main NPC groups are and what they care about. This allows you to have intersecting threads going on (I’m deliberately avoiding the word ‘plot’) which the PCs will encounter, trip over, get pulled into or bump up against. Document any changes in faction status or disposition quickly either in play or briefly after each session. Do a quick random selection of threads to progress as 5-10 minute prep before the next session.

hawkeyefan said:

Steal.

Need a frontier town filled with NPCs? Take Deadwood and plop it into your campaign. Make Sheriff Bullock a grim dwarf and Al Swearingen a foul-mouthed orc. Reskin everything just a bit, and you can have a vibrant location filled with NPCs that you already understand.

Seriously, just lift things liberally and entirely from the other media that you enjoy. It’ll save you tons of time.

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This is a great way to do a moderate amount of prep when you have the mental energy and inspiration that then leads to many sessions of 0 prep or at most hastily jotted notes of possibilities for the day. I tend to steal/borrow liberally from books I've read, like when I sat down and built out the city my players have been at for 3.5 sessions now. Once that's done, I haven't had to do any pre-session work and shouldn't until they leave this location (at least 5 sessions or longer).

dbm said:

If you can, encouraging your players to have goals for their characters is also great. These should hopefully cause them to initiate activity and then you can focus on deciding what obstacles that entails or how the world responds.

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Yuuuup. Put the players to work. I'd pull back from letting them put things directly in the story, but let their ideas become "yours."

zakael19 said:

I tend to steal/borrow liberally from books I've read,

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Steal from video games, too. Those tend to include more visual details. But the stealing should be happening when the improv breaks down.

An essential tool for me is a "random" name list. I hate telling PCs they just met Joe Blacksmith.

Look for the posts on this blog related to prep: Faction Turns, Sandbox Settlements, and Calendar Chronicles. They're all about setting up different systems and structures that undergird low-prep play. The author also posted about running his Dolmenwood game here and his GMing needs and yours seem aligned. The Dolmenwood Faction posts can show you how to implement the Faction Turn theory posts.

The internet is great for random maps, just do a random image search. This is good for cities:


I like this one for names:

EpicureanDM said:

Look for the posts on this blog related to prep: Faction Turns, Sandbox Settlements, and Calendar Chronicles. They're all about setting up different systems and structures that undergird low-prep play. The author also posted about running his Dolmenwood game here and his GMing needs and yours seem aligned. The Dolmenwood Faction posts can show you how to implement the Faction Turn theory posts.

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I think it is worth differentiating between actual "low prep" and moving prep around. Mostly, this is frontloading it: developing the setting and the factions and the NPCs and the locations so that during play, most of the responses are improvisational. But that isn't necessarily "low prep" if you do a ton of work ahead of time to be able to effectively improv.

Reynard said:

I think it is worth differentiating between actual "low prep" and moving prep around. Mostly, this is frontloading it: developing the setting and the factions and the NPCs and the locations so that during play, most of the responses are improvisational. But that isn't necessarily "low prep" if you do a ton of work ahead of time to be able to effectively improv.

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I didn't suggest that OP needs to create 15 Dolmenwood-like factions and ten Sandbox Settlements, so not a "ton of work ahead of time." With due respect to the OP, I don't think they're suited to low-prep play based on what they said initially. But I'm sympathetic to the idea of wanting to reduce weekly prep. So frontloading it makes sense. Create good frameworks that just need to be tweaked from session to session.

If they respond to what I wrote, I can refine the recommendation if necessary.

Find books of random tables that you like, I'll try to link the ones that I enjoy a bit later on. There are tons of published and free resources. I don't even necessarily use the thing I roll on the table, I tend to scan the whole area and see what sparks inspiration- but rolling gets me to that area, and it gives me numbers to work with even if I don't use them.

I tend to have players make the rolls! That helps involve them.

Off the top of my head the region tables in Level Up Trials & Treasures is a big one.

Reuse, Reskin, Reboot, Recycle!

All NPCs in the same archetype have the same stats, because I loath making stat blocks and most games come with a variety of them. Bandit #1 and Bandit #347 are exactly the same stat wise.

The same goes for named NPCs as well. The King of Crownlandia and the Empress of Manystatesland have the exact same stats, whatever the "NPC noble" stat block is. They are differentiated by their personalities and actions which usually consist of a sentence or three in my notes.

As for everything else, like indicated above, steal stuff. Steal plotlines, scenes, plot twists, character personalities, and other such things with abandon. There are only 12 stories, so that's all every author and screen writer has been doing since ancient times, you may as well too.

Reynard said:

I think it is worth differentiating between actual "low prep" and moving prep around. Mostly, this is frontloading it: developing the setting and the factions and the NPCs and the locations so that during play, most of the responses are improvisational. But that isn't necessarily "low prep" if you do a ton of work ahead of time to be able to effectively improv.

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Yeah, unfortunately I don't have much advice because I'm bad at being low-prep. I get too anxious if I don't have enough prepared.

However front-loading your prep does really help making pre-game prep lighter.

aco175 said:

I have a Word doc that I placed all the monsters in over the years as I need them. It helps to cut/paste into another Word Doc to make the adventure. I think you can find sites that have statblocks already formatted and you can just cut/paste them as pictures or something if you just need to have the monsters handy.

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For instance, because I always over-prep I often have creatures I never used, and now I have a stable full of custom monsters ready to be drawn from like this. I put mine in a slideshow because I like to DM from a tablet.

GMMichael said:

An essential tool for me is a "random" name list. I hate telling PCs they just met Joe Blacksmith.

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One piece of prep-work that has probably paid the most dividends to me was spending an hour or so with a spreadsheet and a couple of name generating websites.

I've got a list of about 100 names that I actually like because I picked them all. I went a step further and broke my list down into "archetype" too. I don't remember who but one of the dungeon tubers suggested this. "Sneaky" names or "Tough" names or "Wise" names.

I don't know if I'd call it "Low-Prep" but it was certainly high-value prep that can help reduce future prep.