Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9639832" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]In case it's of interest, I'm attaching/uploading some photographs of old timeline and event notes that I made and (sometimes/partially) used when GMing a "living world"-type Rolemaster campaign in the 90s. I pulled out my box of old notes, ferreted through the manila folders, and took photos of a few representative examples.You will see that they are not especially sophisticated in the way they are organised or presented - all are handwritten, and some would have been written by me sitting in carrels in the university library between lectures. They are all 30 to 35 years old, so my memory now for the meaning of any details/references/allusions is pretty hazy. Some of them I generated using random event tables (I had tables from the original AD&D OA, and also various Rolemaster books, and may be other places too); others I planned out based on "logical" extrapolation from some combination of setting details and events that had occurred, or at least been narrated, in play.My experience with this sort of game was very similar to what [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has described - keeping track of all the moving parts, and integrating them into play, is a lot of work and to me it was not clear what the payoff was. I was doing this because RPG manuals that I'd read told me it was the "right" way to GM a campaign, but I became increasingly doubtful of the utility.I'll call out two of the pages for particular comment:The one written in red pen is an attempt to plan out the capacity of NPCs to perform a "scry and fry"-style raid on the PCs, based on GM decision-making (informed by setting details and implicit setting conventions) as to the details of those NPCs. My recollection is that it left something of a sour taste in the players' mouths.The one in purple pen is the most recent in time (probably 1995 or thereabouts, rather than 1991 or thereabouts for the blue pen ones). It may not be very legible, but if you can read it, you'll see that it is getting closer to a "fronts" style account of motivations and possible happenings that would flow from those. My own approach to prep and to GMing continued more in that direction as I continued to GM RM for another 13-odd years.[ATTACH=full]402696[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]402679[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]402700[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]402680[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification