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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 2198565" data-attributes="member: 172">You can absolutely have too much going on. It's not hard to get there.Occasionally, it behooves the DM to introspect a little and ask "does this element go too deep". If something doesn't fit well or is too hard to work in, and makes it way too complicated to work in, it might be worth considering taking it out.Of course this varies according to your group. Players who are thinkers/problem solvers relish in deep mysteries more than players that likes to sit down with some cheetos and kill monsters.I used to keep a card file program (CorelCentral, if anyone cares) that could hyperlink secrets, and let me map them to NPCs and campaign sessions. Before the campaign session, I would pick out four events/elements/secrets that I wanted to highlight. It was pretty effective; I might consider doing that again. (The program was just buggy and didn't like to shut down correctly.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" /> )You can use real, physical index cards. Ray Winniger recommended something to that effect in his excellent Dungeoncraft series in the pre-3e Dragon. What he recommended is that whenever you make an element to your campaign (NPC, organization, religion, nation, whatever), make up a secret associated with that element and jot it down on a card, and put those cards together. Then, at the beginning of your planning for every session, pull out one of your secret cards and highlight it or exploit it. (This is what, in fact, inspired the above computer card file system I was using.)</blockquote>

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