The Fastest Way to Prepare RPG Sessions

The Technique

Employing this technique is a simple three-step process:

1. Figure out the rough setting of your adventure.
2. Come up with a list of actors that play a role in it.
3. Connect these actors in a meaningful way.

1. Figure Out the Rough Setting of Your Adventure

This is the part that is likely going to take up most of the time of preparing your adventure. It is the initial spark of inspiration that drives your adventure. Usually, your brain will automatically collect ideas for plots and tropes relating to the genre of your game over time. Deciding for one of these things (or unlocking them in your memory in the first place) is going to be your job here. A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Starting Points: Starting to come up with ideas can be hard. However, settings have the tendency to evolve and organically grow out of thoughts (and, later, out of player decisions). Just start with a single, simple idea.
  Maybe there is a feud between siblings over a magical heirloom.
  Maybe there is a corporate salaryman hiding an illegal experiment.
  Maybe there is a mother denying that her house is haunted by her deceased husband.
  Or maybe there is Sith lord influencing the senate’s decisions to bend politics to their plans.
  A single connection of two elements is usually enough. You can always add more details, layers, and actors to the setting to make it more interesting, more complex, and have more levers for players to manipulate.
• Settings: You are not creating a storyline or plot here. This is very important. You are creating a setting: a relationship of different elements that dynamically react to players. This is a fundamental difference: If you are preparing a storyline, you basically eliminate the whole purpose of playing a role-playing game. The storyline is what automatically emerges when player characters interact with the setting. They will enter the setting, become familiar with all of the elements of the setting, learn how they relate to one another, and then make decisions based on their characters‘ personalities to influence this setting. So, instead of coming up with a clever story, come up with a clever backstory and relationships. Build secrets and interesting statūs quo that you want your players to unravel and upset, not storylines you want to force them through. Storytelling in RPGs is a communal effort.
• Secrets: Try not to make figuring out a single secret the baseline for your adventure. If players figure out this secret during the first 30 minutes (and it is not compelling enough to interact with), the session would be over. Instead, hide a lot of little secrets, or feed them clues to a big secret one bite at a time so that the will have a satisfying journey through the setting. It is, however, fine to have a single secret at the center of the setting. Just try to make these secrets interesting enough that players would want to reveal them or act on them after figuring them out. Make them evocative, and not just secrets you learn and forget about.
• Story starters: This technique works independent of quest givers. If your genre demands that kind of story starter (which is fine by the way; think of all police shows), you will have an easy time picking one of the nodes as a starting point. If it doesn’t, just confront players with one or multiple of the setting’s elements and let them choose their own initial path.

2. Come up With a List of Actors That Play a Role in It

This is the step where you come up with a number of nodes that form the basis of your setting. From your central idea of the first step, you should already be able to generate two or more basic nodes. A node on this setting map is a distinct actor in the adventure’s background story. Most prominently, I use:

• People
• Places
• Topics/Concepts

Note that people should by far be the most numerous. The more of your nodes are people, the more interesting and dynamic will the setting be, as places and topics tend to be static and not acting on their own accord. Those node types can nevertheless be useful to tie relevant setting pieces together or to incorporate elements you think would be cool or important for the whole picture.

Number of Nodes

In my experience, a web of 6 nodes yields enough content to satisfactorily fill a single session of 4-6 hours. Depending on whether combats or other systems that take up a lot of time make up an extended part of your game, this will be either on the lower or upper end of that time window.

If you want to construct a setting that takes up multiple sessions (which I think is a good idea for mystery scenarios), using 12-16 nodes usually resulted in 2-3 sessions for me. Of course, there are different pacing techniques you can apply to modify the actual duration of all of this.

Node Dimensions

Again, what a single node represents exactly and how big a part of your gaming world is represented by one web of nodes is up to the genre and game you are playing. A single web (and thus a single session/adventure) can represent a whole country, a small village, a small political intrigue, a personal vengeance story of just one family, or any other scale applicable to your game.

Coming up With More Nodes

After putting in the nodes directly derived from the main setting idea and deciding on the number of nodes used, I apply several techniques to fill up all nodes needed:

• Draw from the setting: Think about the setting. Are there any necessary characters related to your core idea? Any logical characters? Any characters that make sense with the general vibe of the setting?
  If, for example, there is a parent character, is there another parent? A child or sibling?
  If, for example, there is a company, is there also a competitor? A stakeholder? An employee?
• Add complexity: What nodes can be added that makes the setting more complex or more interesting? Can you add additional complications to any of the existing relationships that spawn more characters?
  If, for example, there is a movie star character, do they have a stalker? A competitor? A journalist on the hunt for dirt?
  If, for example, there is a seneschal, is there also a rebel? An envious heir to the throne? A spy from another kingdom?
• Split characters: What multi-function NPC can be split into multiple NPCs? How can you share responsibilities between multiple characters?
  If, for example, there is a character misappropriating funds, can there be another that does their accounting? Someone taking care of logistics?
  If, for example, there is a necromancer forcing abducted souls to work in a mine for them, can there be another character that is their underling? Any henchmen or guards? Any cultists preparing rituals for them?
• Reuse NPCs: If possible, re-use NPCs that already appeared in your campaign. The more interest players showed towards them, the better. Re-using characters makes your whole campaign feel more connected and more like a shared cast of characters. It will also obscure which characters are important and which are not (as the distinction cannot be easily made between recurring and single-use characters).
  If, for example, you had a friendly messenger talking to the PCs in a previous adventure, can they be the one abducted by angry fairies?
  If, for example, characters saved the live of a social media influencer, could they be at the center of the conspiracy?
• Places: Sometimes it helps to just have a place be a node. Places are interesting to investigate, can serve as a hub for other nodes, and give players a change of pace in a scenario full of social interactions. Depending on the game you are playing, places can also change the gameplay altogether, if they are, for example, a small dungeon crawl.
  Maybe one of the actors has a secret hideout? Maybe someone’s house holds more secrets than the people living there know? Maybe there is an abandoned place that holds a secret related to the adventure?
• Add default relationships: Most characters will have people close to them, and most will also have relatives of some sort (however estranged). If you are at a loss for more nodes, fall back on those.
  Most characters will have parents, some will have siblings. Some will have kids, some will have lovers. Most will have close friends.
• Prepare for player inquiry: If players start to investigate your setting, they will start looking for nodes proactively. While it is impossible to prepare for all of these inquiries (see „Using the Technique“ further down), you can preempt them by already incorporating some likely investigation avenues into your initial node web.
  It is common for players to look for relatives, visit people’s homes, look up official records on people and places (with the police, newspapers etc.), talk to previous or current employers and partners or investigate neighbors.

With this step concluded, you should now have a base idea that you developed into a web of about six characters. The last step is to define their relationships.

3. Connect These Actors in a Meaningful Way

Now it is time to bring all of these elements together. By the end of this step, every node will be connected to at least three other nodes, with each connection describing their relationship. The relationship here will define the theme and feel of the adventure.
If a lot of these connections are „lost lover“, „unfaithful“ and „desperately in love“, then it is very clear the adventure will be very much focused on love and relationships.
If, on the other hand, many connections are „mistrust“, „plans to overthrow“ and „manipulates“, then you will likely be faced with an intrigue players will need to carefully navigate.

Please keep in mind that these relationships do not need to be the road that players are going to take through the adventure. It is merely the truth of the setting that serves to inform your decisions. The player path will naturally evolve out of it during play. If you have this type of secure fallback, all your ingame decisions will be based on the same truth, but can smoothly be adjusted to player needs in their particularities.

Coming up With More Connections

As with nodes, there are several techniques you can apply to quickly fill your set of connections:

• Draw from the setting: By now, the setting will likely automatically suggest certain connections between elements for the original idea to make sense. Are there more dimension that you can add to that? Connections that fit the original theme?
  If you have a rivalry between two pupils of a magic academy, who is their favorite teacher? Or maybe they have a crush on somebody?
• Add complications: If possible, try to add some obstacles to the setting. These can be obstacles to characters in your node map, or obstacles to player characters investigating the setting.
  Maybe the crime lord one character angered has found out about their family and is now coming for them.
  Maybe the queen presented as the root of the problem in the queendom is really just a puppet of her undead mother.
• Add secrets: Secrets are fun. They are incredibly entertaining to hint at and foreshadows, and they are even more rewarding when players figure them out and get behind them (and dismiss several other ideas so creative you could have never thought of all of them just by yourself!). If you have not filled in all connections, add some secrets between characters to spice up the whole setting.
  The person sending the bribing letters was just doing it because they were blackmailed by another person.
  The killer is really the archduke’s secret son.
  Only the priestess knows the whereabouts of the child that has fallen from the sky.
• Add default relationships: And then there are some fallback options that always work because they are almost guaranteed to occur in any web of people. You can add those to fill any gaps left.
  Love and friendship are very common relationships. Mistrust, loyalty, enmity, or revenge can also do a lot to make a setting more interesting.

Now you should have an intriguing web of about 6 different actors connected in a meaningful way around a core setting idea. This is your status quo, and it is already interesting. Now it is time to put some player characters into it and see what they will do with it.

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