The Essential Guide to a GM’s Notebook *Updated 11/10 - Chapter 12*

[MarkCsigs]

This is one of those great posts that is so thorough, and so complete that there's almost nothing to add! All I can say is I've found my prepared lists of NPCs to be invaluable. And mostly they're just NPC ideas with names, not fully fleshed out character sheets. That's not necessary unless the NPC is going to end up being an opponent, or just important in the lives of the PCs.

The magic item/gem and treasure indexing system is also something I've found as necessary. I don't know how many times (going back to 1e) I told someone that the potion of delusion was actually a "potion of flying" ... only to have him use the potion four game sessions later, after which I've completely forgotten that it was false. The same goes for badly appraised gems and treasures. Or heaven forbid they actually put off identifying it for a while ... I don't know how many times I had to ask "umm ... do you remember what room you found that in?" as I'm scrambling through old adventure notes. That's when I developed my system, which involves an index card for the players (with an item number, description and how the item was found) that corresponds to a database in my notes with the real information.

The only one I haven't been using enough is the place system, which I'm now vowing to prepare more fully.

Thanks,

--Mark C'sigs

 

[Nightcloak]

Thanks for the great feedback!

I'm glad people find this useful, that'll encourage me to get more posted...

I have to say that saying the names out loud is a must. Also, attempt to rhyme them with anything that a 5 year old might find hilarious. Unfortunately, some PCs out there enjoy tearing apart NPC names (even though said individuals need me to make thier character names for them.)

Yea. I've learned the hard way also. I once set up an adventure (1E) to send the PCs to deal with some dark dwarves in the forbidden "Therra-Ghul Mountains" I thought the name rocked. Ominous, cool, a little Conan like. The PCs took one look at the map and promtly claimed: "Look! We get to go to George Thorogood Mountain" "Oh! I hear that place is bad. Bad to the bone baby!"

They paid, oh did they pay...

 

[LilMissKittyn]

How many prepared names would you probably need?

 

[ChaosEvoker]

As many as you can stand to right I would. Who knows when the PCs will attempt to interrogate every member of the town.......or metropolis....

 

[BSF]

How many NPCs will you go through in a session if you have to wing the entire thing? I would say at least a dozen for a start. Then do a dozen for each gender, and each race. That is a short list of names that you can refer to quickly. When you are bored, grow your lists larger and use them whenever you need them.

 

[Mordmorgan the Mad]

How many prepared names would you probably need?

As has been said, lots. Best thing to do isn't so much try to think of names, but write down any names that you hear/see (in movies, books, TV shows, real life, whatever).

 

[Nightcloak]

How many prepared names would you probably need?

I'd recomend a full page of male and female human names (unless your running an all elf or underdark campaign or something unnusual) plus a half a page for each common race the characters may bump into. Then a final page of odd names.

But seriously, as many as you want. The more often you play, the more you'll want on hand. But if you don't have the time, then just a few can be a real life saver.

But the more you have, the more of a confort zone you'll have, and the less often you may need to update the list. But this is your notebook so build it to suit your style of gaming and to fit your needs. You can have lots of pages and highlight cultural differences if you want, or only one 1/2 page of names if thats all you think you will ever need.

Make it your own

 

[Nightcloak]

GM Notebook Essentials #4: Maps



Maps are the great joy of being GM. Come on, how may of you reading this open up a new adventure and immediately flip to look at the map? I bet it’s most of you. I know I do. Maps are just plain cool. Be they maps of a dungeon, a tower, a castle, a ship, a city, or an entire continent, it doesn’t matter: They’re cool. Ravenloft was a great 1E adventure. It was the first real integration of dungeon crawl, plot, and horror into a D&D adventure. But what blew me away was the 3D map of the castle. That map just rocked.

Maps are cool. They are also essential to running a game. They also happen to be the most time consuming and a biggest pain in the dice bag to design on your own.

When drawing a map, it can quickly go nowhere, become pointless, or worse, you get “writers block” unless you spend lots of prep time to know everything you want out of the map and the adventure. Designing a cool map to include everything needed plus extra cool stuff you want is beyond this thread, but suffice to say the prep work is time intensive.

Then you need to draw the map. And then you need to finish that map. Finally, you’re a GM, which means you are a creative assertive type who knows what the “vision” is of your map/adventure/campaign. If you’re like me, you’re not always happy with how things look. Thus starts the fun process of redoing the map. “I’ll only tweak it a bit!” Wash, Rinse, Repeat…

Time that would be better spent on adventure design and world creation; you don’t have to be Tolkien and create the elven language just to write your version of Lord of the Rings!

The last five paragraphs are nothing more than me dramatizing a point made very subtly in the other three posts. The notebook is a time saver, but save your self even more time by getting the work pre-done for you when possible. Someone has spent the time making lists of medieval names, or generators of inns, or has created spreadsheets for you to use. A lot of people with the skill, time, and access to great equipment have also made some great maps. Remember, that’s why we love to flip to the map first when we buy an adventure. Someone got paid to make that map and odds are it’s really cool!

That map is just waiting for you to use it. Just because your characters are not going to adventure in “Undermountain” anytime soon doesn’t stop you from copying parts of that bad boy, mark a few changes, and then send your characters into your new adventure “Sea Caves of the Kuo-Toa”. They’ll never know they are really walking through downtown Skull Port on the 3RD level of Undermountain…

If you have been playing a while, you probably have tons for books on the shelf just ready to be cannibalized for the cause. If you are new to the game, there is plenty of used bookstores out their with old discount adventures waiting to be mined and the internet will become your best friend. If you’re a real gamer geek, then you’ve already abused all three options.

There are TONS of websites with maps. Maps of medieval Europe, castles, catacombs, tombs, ships, towers, and on and on. If it interests you, then it interested someone else even more, and they most likely put it onto the web. But it gets better, there is plenty of gamer sites out their with maps also. Just check out the link to the Wizards site for some great old adventures free for downloading. Tons of maps are just waiting for you to turn them into modern masterpieces.

This advice goes beyond the notebook. This advice is going to be a real time saver across the board in adventure design, campaign creation, and dungeon delving. Get copies of maps, whether it’s downloads or copies of things lying around on the shelf, but get those maps. Copies are good so you can change them without ruining the original. You can always make another copy later if you muck up the current one or expend it on an adventure.

Take all those maps and place them in a folder. Next time you need a map or two for an adventure, just open the folder and go shopping. Don’t be afraid to alter the map, that’s why they are copied. Heck, change the entrance. Fill in corridors that go off the page or add rooms. Change anything. Flip it upside down if you want. It’s yours.

You can still make your own maps, they are great fun to do, or you may need to if you are missing something in particular, but odds are you can find most of what you want if you look around.

Now how does this all relate to the Essential GMs Notebook? You are going to want to keep some maps at the ready in your notebook. What kind of maps will you need? Here’s a short list of great maps to have “just in case”:

Inns
Taverns
Temples
Warehouses
Ships
Towers
Castles
Catacombs
Tombs
Small Dungeons
Small hamlets
Random buildings

Take a minute to think about the kind of games you run and were the PCs are like to go. You may realize that wilderness travel is a big part of your games so you may want a few wilderness sites or bandit camps available. Or you may realize your players get into a lot of trouble in towns, and decide to add a few extra merchant shops or government buildings *cough* jails *cough*

Once you have your list, these are the maps you will want to place in your notebook. That way the next time your players surprise you by starting a fight in an inn, or you decide to drop an assassin on the players while they sleep, or some old flavor text suddenly gets a vote to be explored, you're ready to roll.

While you’re at it, take a minute to grab a piece of graph paper and scribble random squares, circles, and lines connecting them. This advice has been written in the Wizards core rulebook II and it has worked real well for me. Don’t get fancy, just some flowchart type diagrams. They don’t have to go anywhere or serve anything right now. These little diagrams make great little maps in a pinch. I’ve used them for maps of sewer systems, trails through swamps, a forest game trail, and even a pocket dimension once! They serve in a pinch for something minor you don’t need to blow a “good” map on. The players “see” your flavor text, you see the diagram.

Not only will having a variety of maps ready to go be a lifesaver, but also prepping all those maps ahead of time will inspire many adventures to come.

Now, the next time the players decide to start a fight in some small shop or go explore some cave. Don’t pull out your hair. Just pull out your trusty notebook, look them in the eye, and say, “Of course you do…”



Great Links:

Classic Adventures
Map of the Week
Free Small Adventures
Phineas' Dungeon Maps o' the Week

 

[Rapida]

These links are alot of help, I especially enjoyed the names and the tavern generator.

 

[Nightcloak]

GM Notebook Essentials #5: NPC Stats (Part 1)



We have discussed NPC names. Now it’s time to look at the rest of the NPC: The stats. One of the most time intensive parts of developing an adventure is stating out the monsters and Non-Player Characters the party is going to encounter. With the d20 rule system, you need to apply many factors to rounding out a monster/character: feats, bonuses, skills, different weapons, magic, and so forth.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the d20 system and all the options it gives me. In fact, I own a lot of third-party OGL books do to the extra rules and options they give me. But it doesn’t change the fact that stating out encounters is time consuming, not to mention a little intimidating for the new GM. More importantly, for our discussion, what do you do when the players decide to start interacting with NPCs that were “flavor text” one minute ago? Stopping the game to stat out a bunch of NPCs is not an option. You would lose the players to drinking, a game boy, or a game on TV long before you finished the details. You need stats now before you lose the action.

That is why you have your GM Notebook. It will be stocked full of NPCs ready to go. This part will discuss the higher-level NPCs you may need. The next part will cover all those 1st level NPC types that are encountered everywhere, but don’t necessarily deserve the attention or need for development.

There are three rules to NPCs that will make your life easier.


Rule Number 1: There are two types of NPCs.

The first type is a reoccurring character that the players will meet at least more than once. They are either integral to the story or serve as a bridge for the players to interact with your game world. The evil bandit, his thugs, and his spy at the Old Mill Inn are part of the story. The innkeeper and his daughter don’t serve the plot (unless they are the spies!) but do interact with the players and thus serve the game by creating verisimilitude. They make the world believable to the characters. The reoccurring NPC is usually important enough to be stated out.

The second type of NPC is what movie producers call “an extra”. They are part of the background, and if the players interact with them it will most likely be for one time, a sort of cameo appearance only. For purposes of this article, we’ll call them “disposable” NPCs, or DNPCs for short. The DNPC is “on screen” for a brief moment and then gone.


Rule Number 2: Recycle Disposable Non Player Characters

I was watching Babylon 5 several years ago and noticed that the starship commander highlighted on that episode was the same actor that played Worf’s brothers on Star Trek. When I pointed out this fact to my wife, she reminded me that he also appeared on Hercules and some other shows. It’s amazing how these actors have found their way into a sort of fantasy/sci-fi “actor’s circuit” through the different shows and characters.

Your DNPCs need to do the same thing. In this case, you do not recycle the actors (the description), but the stats. They are called disposable for a reason. When they are done, they are gone. Stating them out is a complete waist of time if you only roll one dice and put the sheet away never to be used again. Like actors who appear in one episode of a show then on one episode of a different show, your stat blocks can appear during different sessions of your game as different characters.


Rule #3: Generators are Good

OK. You knew this. At the end of this article is a link to a great online generator. There are many others out there also. Book mark them. Let them do the work for you and save the hard work for the major NPCs of your world.


Putting it all together to build an NPC army!

First and foremost, use those generators. Go to the link or do a search for one you like, but go to a generator and start whipping up some “generic” NPCs. A lot of these generators will give you a name, but don’t worry about it (or better, add the name to your name list!). If the NPC needs a name then he isn’t disposable and needs to be filed separately as a reoccurring NPC.

Reoccurring NPCs should have their own folder so they are available when you need them. If you like doing stats, then this type of NPC should be your focus. They are the important NPCs and deserve the time.

Disposable NPCs, however, should be quick and clean. Use the generator to print out copies of different classes at different levels. Don’t bother with 1st level NPCs; we’ll address those later. Don’t forget the NPC classes (most NPCs should belong to an NPC class). You will want some variety of each type, but you don’t need to go crazy. Just a few for each class at different levels will work. Don’t be afraid to regenerate a character that doesn’t look right to you. With generators, change is only a click away. Print up all those NPCs and add them directly to your notebook.

If something really catches your eye, say the generator punched out something cool or above average, then just place it into your important NPC folder. You can never have enough of those.

Now if the PCs spot some shady NPCs in an ally and decide to roll initiative, you can just pull out several rogues of the appropriate level and jump to combat. When the players dispose (literally) of the DNPCs you can just put the stat blocks back into the notebook for next time. If they follow the rogue’s trail back to a warehouse and get the jump on more shady characters, you can just pull out the same rogue stat sheets. The characters will see several new rogues with new descriptions and only you will see the same stat sheets again. They will remember an exiting “alley crawl” were they took out two individual groups of “guild goons”. You’ll be the only one who knows they technically (at least on paper) fought the same rogues twice.

Just watch out for high level NPCs. Most generators will include magical equipment into the character. As always with magic, be careful. That magic item could very easily wind up on the players treasure list. Not to mention, they may be suspicious if the third fighter they killed that week has a +1 long sword. In other words, you may need to change out high level NPC stats more often to keep things "fresh".

Finally, don’t bother with 1st level DNPCs. In part 2 of "Essentials #5: NPCs" I’ll post what I call the “NPC Matrix” for 1st level characters. It willl give you everything you need for the most numerous members of your world on one single page.



Great Links:


NPC Generator