How Mailanka Plans a Session

I noticed Christopher Rice suggesting “How you prep a session” as a blog topic for the 21st. I’ve been busy with two birthdays and Easter and three sessions (April has been a crazy month), so I don’t know if that topic is still the case, but I thought I’d post about it in any case.

I would argue, first of all, that my core method hasn’t changed much since I was in high school so much as bloomed out to solve various problems I often encounter. At its core, to me, session prep is about dreaming up with very cool “money shot” scenes, those climactic moments that players will inevitably remember, then I provide it with structure, and then I surround it with support elements that make improvisation easy and help it integrate with the rest of the ongoing campaign.

I’m running two campaigns at the moment, both Psi-Wars. I’ll use them as examples:

Undercity Noir: a heist in a neon-soaked megacity on an ancient, dying, alien world.
Wanderers of Dhim: Tragic heroes, and their robot, battle monsters and protect the innocent on a desolate desert world.

Always Be Creating

My first and most important rule is that I’m always planning a session. Whenever I’m reading a book, playing a game, watching anime, listening to a podcast, or bouncing to some tunes, there’s a part of my mind that’s stealing bits or drawing inspiration from a moment that I see. I tend to try to direct this (which often makes me seem like I have very eclectic taste).

The key takeaway here is that creation requires input for its output. It’s a bit hip to say “steal like an artist” but what you should really be doing is synthesizing everything you see. Did you like the character design of Violet Evergarden as a beautiful former child-soldier? Are you trancing to some psychedelic rock? Did you like that Hyperlight Breakers trailer that just dropped? You should be stealing elements from those and blending them into your work. But that means consuming a lot of content, but always with an eye towards “how can I use this?” This is ultimately pretty instinctive: if your head is swimming with, for example, One Punch Man, when you start writing your session, it’s gonna have a lot of One Punch Man in it!

I deliberately direct this process. When I’m preparing for a session, at least a weak before I’ll shift my consumption habits to focus my creativity on my end-goal. What I’m listening to, reading and watching should all be subtly pointing me towards my end-goal, so that when I’m finally writing, the first thoughts that come to mind tend to be helpful: if you played tons of Halo or Fortnight before you write up a dark D&D campaign, you might find the process of writing difficult, but if you spend a lot of time playing Diablo or Pillars of Eternity, watching LotR and reading some OSR material, it should flow quite nicely.

For example, I find a lot of inspiration for Undercity Noir in various heist films and underworld anime/games like Yakuza. The “soundtrack” to the game is outrun, bands like Carpenter Brut and Dance with the Dead (though some LukHash has snuck in). The alien structures of the city draw some inspiration from a few of Isaac Arthur’s podcasts on megastructures. Wanderers of Dhim is inspired by the art of Frank Frazetta, power metal like bands like Dream Troll and Beast in Black, and planetary romance works (like Barsoom) or various 1980s cartoons that primarily draw inspiration from those.

Money Shot!

In animation, I read once that you should be able to stop on any “key” still and take a picture of it, and it should look good. I’m not sure about that, but often what people will remember is the coolest moment of an animation sequence, and a session is no different. I try to have one awesome moment per session, a key moment that will have everyone excited and talking.

For example, in Undercity Noir, I had an exquisite chase scene in mind that showcased the local sewer rats. In Wanderers of Dhim, the moment they stumbled across a Matra ogre devouring a local Ranathim hunter while a cat-rider bravely tried to fight it off to rescue his friends remains was fairly important.

This isn’t an especially difficult step. If you’re doing the first step, this is happening anyway. When I take a walk with my tunes blasting, and I start thinking about the session, I can’t help but have scenes play out in my mind. But the danger is stopping at this point. It’s not enough to have a cool idea. You need to structure it, and that comes in the next step.

Remember English Class? Yeah.

Now that we have an idea of what basically to do, we need to provide it with some structure. This generally means an outline and thinking about the plot.

Broadly speaking, I see a session as a series of key scenes. Our “Money Shot” scene is just one scene. We find ourselves with a series of question. How do the players get there? What happens in the scene? What happens in the next scene?

We can usually answer that in very rough lines. For example, let’s say we want to do an Undercity Noir scene where the heroes fight a local gang to rescue some undercity urchin they’ve captured as ransom for something the heroes stole. We might expect this to culminate in a cool battle against an evil urban sorceress and her alien street samurai in the urban decay sprawling over some alien ruins with crackles of lightning emanating from from this dying alien generator that creates cool lighting from below plus an environmental hazard (as well as the urban environment itself starting to collapse around them through the intensity of the battle). Cool stuff, but…

What did they steal? How did the gangsters know to kidnap this kid and not some other kid? How do the heroes find out about the kidnapping? How do the heroes find the gangsters? How does the fight play out?

We can sketch these out as a rough outline, and I encourage you to do so even f you don’t know all the answers. The act of writing what you do know will lead to answering what you don’t know.

For example, ours might look something like this:

The Heroes get back from the Heist feeling good
A local contact busts in crying about the loss of her child, which sets everyone on high alert
Investigation to find the kid
Get a ransom letter pointing them in the right direction
Find the compound
Attack and try to rescue the kid

But each of these moments need more detail! There are several key components to a scene that you need to answer. The Transition Points: How do the characters get into the scene, and how do they get out? The Key Details: What happens in the scene? The Tension Points: Are the players just watching things transpire? No, probably not. But if so, what impact can they make, what interesting choices can they make? What moments in the story create the maximum stress on the players that need to be resolved somehow? And how can you handle different ways players might resolve it?

We need to answer these for each of these points. But let’s pull out one specifically: “Investigation.” Obviously, after the players get the notice that the kid has been taken, they’re going to want to find her, right? Or will they? What if they don’t care? Why should they care? Can we give them additional reasons to care? Perhaps the kid has some important information, or perhaps the contact has some leverage on them. If they do want to investigate, what will they do? Just roll investigation until they get enough successes? Of course not. There should be obvious hooks they can go look at (“Jimmy Scrambles said he saw something, but he’s getting drunk. Again. In the bad part of town. Again.”). When they go look for him, he’ll obviously be in trouble, so we can have a small fight, or at least a few rolls, to help him and then use his gratitude to get the information we want. But perhaps they can take a different approach: perhaps there’s a computer they can hack that has close association with the gangsters, or perhaps a spooky street-witch that can scry for the kid or look at fate for a price. Once we’ve let the players explore this, though, we need another Transition Point. We have to draw it to a close and move them on to the actual fight. We can have the gangsters deliver their ransom note, but then how will they get the ransom note to the players, and if the ransom note contains all the information they need to move on, what was the point of the investigation? Why do we want it? To show off more of the undercity? To expand the plot? If it’s not important, we might cut it, but if it is important, we might need to think our way through why it’s a useful part of the session. Perhaps they can get some special bonuses, or perhaps there is no ransom letter (and if so, what do they really want with the kid?).

Sleep On It

Chances are, as you write, you’ll reach the frustrating point where you begin to realize you’re asking questions you don’t have an answer to: you want the investigation scene, but it’s getting too open-ended and also pointless. Players might spend whole sessions looking for the kid only to get the ransom letter and have all the info they needed fed directly to them. Not a satisfying experience! How can we resolve this?

There’s no easy answer here. Which means there’s only hard answers! The next tip is getting at those hard answer! You need to put yourself in circumstances where you’re able to think your way through these sticky problems.

First, start early. I recommend sketching out the outline about a week ahead of time. You don’t need a ton of details. Mostly what we want get down on paper everything we do know, and then to write out the questions that we don’t know, questions like “How much investigation is enough?” “What is the point of the investigation?” “How do we make the investigation skills and good choices useful even if we intend to spoonfeed them the most important plot points?” Once you have those down a week ahead, you’ll have the time to think your way through these problems. This needn’t be labor intensive, just revisit these issues a little every day until the session. By starting early, you have plenty of time to think.

Second, start late, in the day. Do some work on your session, especially the most frustrating bits with the questions you can’t answer right at the end of the day. Then take a shower and go to bed. Most people will literally dream about it, whether or not they remember that, and what seemed and intractable problem the night before may have an obvious solution by morning.

Improvisation and the Fate of all Plans

So, you’ve come a long way with your plans, you’ve answered most of your questions, so the session is ready, right? Ha ha, no. Because the session is not going to run the way you planned it. The point of RPGs is to have player input, which means they will regularly short-circuit your best-laid plans. That’s their job. So how can you possibly plan for the unplannable.

First, let’s revisit how we’re planning above. I recommended an outline for a reason. The most important questions to answer are those transition points, a rough outline on “what they will do” and “what their choices might be.” But this should be a skeleton, just enough to get by. Writing more than that will start to lock you into a brittle set of plans that your players will disrupt.

So once you have the skeleton of the game, you need to flesh it out with improvisational details. Running a game is not like reading off a script you wrote, it’s more like jamming an improvised story with several different players, where you simply happen to be the most well-prepared member of the storytelling troupe. I know some hardened simulationists and gamists might dispute that description, but what I’m discussing here is what physically occurs at the table in the process of running a game, not how it’s modeled. You will outline a situation, players will come up with one of nearly infinite possible responses, and you need to be able to have an immediate response and the point of planning is to make that easier. Improvising is hard! So do the hard work now, while you have time!

Consider the investigation point that focuses on “Jimmy Scrambles.” The obvious “happy flow” of events is that the players find him drunk in a bar, fight some guy, ask Jimmy some questions, get their answers, and then leave. But what happens if the players don’t help him in the fight? What if they just spy on him? What if they seduce the guy who tries to pick a fight? What if they kill Jimmy because they’re a bunch of murder hobos? You can predict what they’re likely to do, but not what they will do, not for sure. And you’ll need to do a lot more than just explain those few lines. You’ll need to describe things, and you’ll need characters who feel real to react in real-time.

So I find it helps to have a set of notes that exist primarily to help you improvise based on what people do. This includes detailed characters and detailed scenery and random details as necessary.

A Little Character goes a Long Way

A detailed character doesn’t have to be a fully statted and written up NPC. Of course, the big bad might have a full stat sheet, but someone like Jimmy Scrambles doesn’t need one. What will really matter are roughly how competent they are, how to describe them, how they behave, and what their context might be.

Competence can be a number and a focus. In GURPS, I’d call it either a BAD modifier or a skill level. Jimmy Scrambles is probably “Skill 12 Streetwise.” The street witch is probably more competent, perhaps “Skill 15 Occult.” You don’t really need more than this. You can generally assume they have much lower, or no, skill at things that aren’t central to them. If you try to hack the street witch’s datapad, chances are she’s not skill 15 at stopping you, and Jimmy Scrambles is probably not Skill 12 at removing a curse placed on you. For 90% of cases, the “Contact” rules of GURPS is more than enough for competence. Consider the GURPS book Keeping in Contact for more ideas!

For physical description, a few descriptors are enough. It doesn’t hurt to go hunting over your favorite image sites to find cool pictures as sources of inspiration, but unless you’re running a VTT game, chances are players won’t see the art, so you need to use your words. Try to create a “descriptive signature.” The ideal sort of situation is based on the one descriptor players will instantly recognize the character. Perhaps Jimmy Scrambles has a shock of red hair and cheeks dusted with freckles. A single descriptor is enough; you can do more, but try to pick one descriptor as the main descriptor. When it comes to other descriptors, remember that people have five senses! Motion and action is also very important, so where possible try to include the idea of motion and action in your descriptors. Finally, try to write them as phrases; Homer had his “wine-dark sea.” Don’t just write “Jimmy Scrambles has freckles.” The phrase “a shock of red hair and cheeks dusted with freckles” can be dragged and dropped into any description as is, and if used over and over again (repetition is important for getting a concept across to the players) will help to build that descriptive signature. Of course, you don’t always have to use them as phrases. The point is to know the character well enough to sprinkle something into a description (“Jimmy’s freckled cheeks blush at the sight of your character in that outfit”) but the phrase-approach gives you a punchier description to drag and drop.

So we might have for Jimmy:

A shock of red hair and cheeks dusted with freckles
His ready grin and desperate eyes
Trembling, nervous fingers
Breath that reeks of beer.

For our street-witch, we might have

Her icy, disappointed gaze
The sway of her skirt-wrapped hips
Long, raven-feather hair
The clink of her bracelets
A whispering, alto murmur
The scent of desert jasmine from her sun-kissed skin.

GURPS has great personality traits in the form of disadvantages, so you can attach one to an NPC to give them a go-to personality. If you want more detail, GURPS Power-Ups 6: Quirks is a gold mine. Now, realize the more disadvantages and quirks you give a character, the more you have to remember. One disadvantage and one quirk is already plenty. You might think of a lot more and that’s okay, but realize the point is to be able to emulate the character in a flavorful way and know how they’d react if PCs throw you a curveball. More than that is just filligree.

So Jimmy might have

Unluckiness
Alcoholism
Loves to talk about (fast!) cars
Nose bleeds very easily

And the Street Witch might have

Jealousy
Pet Peeve: popular misconceptions about the occult
Self-conscious and prone to anger around attractive men
Toys with bracelets when lost in thought.

Then we might have a Social Context. They exist within a broader social world, and this might motivate their particular actions. These don’t have to be much, just think a little bit about how they relate to their community around them. These can also act as hooks if you want to expand on the characters.

Jimmy might have

Owes a debt to a local bruiser/bar bouncer
Is a bit of a celebrity among local youths whom he’s convinced that he’s a bit of a street-hero
Regularly has affairs with middle-aged married women (his popularity with them is frankly baffling).

The Street Witch might have

Her occult bookstore is failing and she’s going dangerously into debt
She has a stalker on the police force
She speaks several languages and helps local ethnic minorities read legal documents and such.

Finally, you gotta name your characters! Yes, I know you hate it. Use Behind the Name or Fantasy Name Generator, or name lists, but you gotta do it! If you’re really stuck on good names, look for Alliteration (“Peter Parker” and “J. Jonah Jameson”) and think about syllable numbers. More than 4 syllables is too much for most names, especially the name people will use; two is better. For a full name, 4-5 is best. Longer names suggest someone of great importance or arrogance (You wouldn’t name a princess “Ann Cook”) while shorter names suggest someone cute or childish (There’s dissonance in naming the cute kid Jonathon K. Bartholomew the 3rd and insisting everyone use the full name)

Jimmy’s already got a name, but we might name our street witch Olivia van Darken. Is that silly? Nobody actually cares. Don’t worry too much about names. Just make sure you have them. You can also change them later if you have to!

While you’re at it, try to come up with some more names! And some more descriptors! And some more personality traits and connections. Why? For which NPCs? Whatever ones you randomly need to come up with. Who is in the bar with Jimmy? Who is shopping in Olivia’s store when the PCs arrive? If you can turn on the spot and conjure an NPC out of thin air on demand, that’s a very powerful skill. If you’re having trouble with this, look for Itemized Lists on various RPG sites, like these. There’s a cottage industry of people trying to help you with your game. Let them help you.

Some descriptors might be:

Frizzy black hair with golden highlights
A pinky ring
Painted-on eyebrows
Perpetually smudged glasses
A grating, high-pitched donkey laugh
a smog of eye-watering perfume
A sprinkling of salt-and-pepper stubble
A looming, shadowy presence
Clicking acrylic nails with a rainbow gloss
A food-stained shirt
vibrating energy spent by bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet
A jewel dangles from a silken choker

Personality quirks might be

Obviously delusional opinions about the government
Never makes eye contact
STARES
Overly flirtatious
Speaks entirely in surprisingly expressive grunts
Constantly selling stocks/crypto/essential oils
Apologetically chauvanistic
Boorish braggart

Names might be

Female
- Abigail Baird
- Candy Christianson
- Greta Scott
- Elsa Lovelace
- Tiffany Bennet
- Libby Larson
Male
- Brett Walker
- Clayton Cross
- Josh Gray
- Robert Cox
- Wyatt Webster Wilson (“But you can call me Web”)

With these in your notes, you can whip up a character quite quickly. Incidentally, once you get really experienced, name is what matters most. I find I can come up with descriptors and personalities on the fly, but coming up with a good name is hard. So make sure you do the hard work in advance!

Setting the Scene

It’s not enough to have good characters, they need to live in a place. The same rules for characters apply to scenes, but I find you want even more descriptors to drag and drop, and they’ll be more vague. What you’re trying to do is create an environment and a mood. If there are characters associated with a setting (the waitress at the bar, for example), now is the time to sketch them up.

I mostly just focus on a name for the place and some descriptors.

So Jimmy might go to the Last Sober Sailor.

The bar maid is a blond bombshell named Samantha “Sam” Sanders. She’s tall, athletic, and not interested, thank you. She practices kickboxing, and to newcomer’s surprise, doubles as the bouncer. She has nothing but eye-rolling disdain for Jimmy Scrambles.

There’s an old military veteran named Victor “Vickie” Vaughn with a long beard, a biker’s handkerchief and vest and who loves to mutter about conspiracy theories. He always bums beers, and nurses what he has for hours. He has no place else to be; he’s a violent drunk, but he’s about as dangerous as a puppy.

Sights: Faded red and blues of the seat stools; the amber of the beer; The flickering flash of the TV, a wall of golden and green liquor bottles.
Sounds: Loud, raucous laughter; the clink of glasses; the buzzing, staticky cheers of an ancient CRT TV tuned to sports.
Smells/Tastes: The salty brine of the sea outside; the sour scent of dried beer; the scent of the sweat of too many people pressed close together.
Feels: Sticky floors; the rough leather of stool-seats that have seen too many butts.

So Olivia might work at the Magpie’s Library.

Sights: Endless rows of brown and gold book spines; the whorling wooden patterns of the unpainted bookshelves. The yellow brilliance of bare, incandescent bulbs; The flickering neon “Magpie” over the bar that houses the cash register (and Olivia).
Sounds: The whisper of pages; hushed conversation; the click of heels between the shelves; the creak of floor boards; the tinkle of the door bell.
Smells/Tastes: The musty scent of old books; the musk of leather-bound covers; the lingering scent of Olivia’s perfume. Freshly brewed coffee (black, of course).
Feels: A chill draft whenever the door opens. The rough, leather covers and the crackle of the pages.

Know the Rules

You may have particular game-mechanics that might come up in scenes or situations. Now is the time to look them up and write them out, so you can reference them in game. The bar might have dim lights (-1 to vision) and you might expect there to be a bar brawl (what are the damage stats for a bottle or a bar stool? What skill do you roll? How does Kiss the Wall work?). The library might have interesting books that help with research (on what topics?) and it might have a cursed book in there (what would the rules for the curse be?).

The Big Picture

Unless it’s a very short oneshot, your game will likely last a few sessions, or maybe even years. While planning specific scenes will help you with a single situation, but the sort of improvisational planning above is a well you can keep returning to. If the players like Olivia van Darken, she can keep returning. If the players keep flirting with “Sam” we can flesh out her backstory and integrate her into the game. We can make Jimmy’s string of married mistresses and the trouble this causes a running gag. Magpie Books can become the site of a haunting, and so on.

Likewise, previous games can inform our current one. Eventually, you’ll have so much improvisational material built that you can coast for a couple of games. Be careful with coasting, though. If you don’t keep working on new material, you’ll eventually run out of material and your game will peter out. But at the same time, don’t over do it with planning. As I noted in a previous post, players tend to explore what you create, and they tend to explore all of it. If you whip up 100 NPCs, don’t be surprised if they want to get to know, and collect, all 100. Your game may collapse under its own weight! Focusing on what’s most important isn’t just about saving work for you, it’s also about keeping the game from getting too cluttered.

Cram Time!

So, the session is tomorrow! Now it the time to cram. You can do last minute preparation, answer the last few questions (you might not answer all of them, but that’s okay, if you have the improvisational material, you’ll be fine). But the most important part is going over everything and trying to integrate it into your mind, like cramming for a test. You want to be able to embody these characters and the settings. Where exactly is the bar within the Last Sober Sailor? What sort of joke might Jimmy crack when he first sees the players? Perhaps practice Olivia’s disappointed scowl for when the players ask her a “dumb” question. You need to emulate this world, so load all of this data into your memory banks, whether by working on the last few bits, or practicing understanding your characters. Be sure to listen to your chosen soundtracks, if you have any!

Then sleep on it.

Then do some very last minute cramming right before the session.

Can’t Talk, Session’s Starting!

So now your players are at your table, you’ve got your notes, you’ve done your prep, and it’s go time. We’re beyond the context of of this post, but a few last comments. Try to organize your notes. It’s fine if there’s details you need to look up, but you should have your general outline of events and transition poins on hand, and your improvisation sheet (especially with random names and descriptors) should be front and center. When players transition to a new scene, get the notes you have on that scene. The point is to try to remind yourself to be descriptive, and you’re trying to help yourself to seamlessly improvise.

One last, last point: you’re going to freeze up, players will find holes in your plot, you’ll find you keep using the same name over and over, or you forgot a major plot point. That’s fine. Good players understand how difficult GMing is. Ideally, your prep is like a rolling snowball. Your players are going to learn their characters and your game at the same time you do. Your characters will grow and change and your mastery of the material will improve over time. And the point of RPGs is collaboration, so let players suggest things (“Does Olivia have a brother?” “Is Sam the bruiser that Jimmy owes money too?”) and incorporate them. If you run into a problem, it’s fine to stop and think for a minute, or just wave it away and revisit it later, or ask your players for help or input. Only in case of total disaster should you stop the game. In general, even an unprepared GM will run a surprisingly good game, especially if they’re skilled at improvisation. Ultimately, all prep is for is to help you organize thoughts and to front-load the labor intensive things, such as working out the names of NPCs or the nuanced rules of a complex situation.