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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6817658">Try to wrap your head around all the different kinds of ways to structure and design adventures, finding the one that fits you and your groups style the best. I agree with the poster who suggested considering situations rather than stories. Given that your group seems to be a bit prone to going off track, you might also look into sandbox adventures (those can be heavier on the prep end though). A lot of people will give you plenty of good advice on prepping adventures. But I am going to focus on something that has tripped me up every time when I don't pay attention to it (and therefore made prepping and running things on the fly harder): note taking and organization of materials. One piece of advice that really helped me was to create a master Table of all NPCs, then update that table after every session. You will very quickly amass a large number of NPCs in your game (some important, some less important, but even the latter often come up again). Getting the details about them right are key. It is important to know where an NPC was first encountered, what that NPC did with the PCs, what its attitude towards the PCs is, whether the NPC is still alive (this actually gets hard to remember once your NPC list is over thirty entries), where the NPC lives, what the NPC does, etc). This sounds like a lot of detail, but all my entries are a single paragraph (for more detailed stats and background information I have seperate sheets for important NPCs). This is a huge time saver both in game and during prep. If there is ever any question about someone the players bumped into back in the village who gave them that talisman, then you can look it up real quick. Similarly don't forget to keep good records of places, especially settlements. I always make entries with maps for my settlements, that include details on the population, inns, shops, organizations, etc. A lot of this may come up on the fly in an adventure (whether you are inventing an inn or the city itself) but it is very important to get the name of that inn down as well as the name of the proprietor because if the PCs go back to the city and want to visit the inn in six months, you'll need to remember those details. You can also add in new details as time passes. Most importantly, get a 3 ring binder, structure it according to your preparation and running style (this takes a bit of time to figure out). I have a tab for: CALENDAR, EVENTS, ADVENTURES, NPCS, PCS, SECTS, OBJECTS OF POWER, and this is followed by 8 Tabs for each of the Major regions in my campaign (essentially a LOCATIONS section). For my calendar, I have a literal months calendar with one sheet for each month in the campaign world. It includes information on the beliefs surrounding that month (since people get bonuses for certain things each moon phase) but I mainly use it for tracking time and helping figure out when things will happen (if the players send a messenger to a neighboring town asking for help, I can put a note on the day that help would arrive). Events are just a bullet point list of things likely to come up each session based on last session (i.e. Bone Breaker is really mad at the party and sends out parties of soldiers with dogs to track them down, The Qinwen Jade Palace Cult is trying to reach the Face of Vaagu before they do, etc). I don't typically prepare structured adventures, so my Adventures tab is rarely used (mainly my adventures are situational and sandboxy). But I do use it when things in the EVENTS folder are more robust and require a little more page space. So if there is an event that is likely to turn into a mystery or monster hunt, I'll write that out a bit longer and put it in the Adventures folder. However I try to keep my location material in the LOCATIONS section because it can be a huge pain if you have to sift through an adventure folder on the fly for a specific place on the map. So the ADVENTURE folder is more about developments, investigations, elaborate schemes by NPCs, etc. My NPCS folder has my NPC master table plus individual entries for each major NPC. This gets a lot of use during play. My Locations section has my encounter tables and entries for each place on the map, divided by region and each region is organized alphabetically. Once you get a system like this establish it really saves time before, during and after play.</blockquote>

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