In Pursuit of Prep Serenity

16 Jun, 2025

A typical GM gearing up for game night.

Part of a blog bandwagon started by Weird Writer.

Preamble and Rant

Prep is a journey, not a destination. Every campaign teaches you something new to borrow, bend, or break.

During the last decade I ricocheted between two unhealthy extremes: zero-prep improv and galaxy-brain over-prep. Pure improv let me spin up a one-shot in minutes—but the well ran dry just as fast. Hyper-detailed VTT prep, on the other hand, turned me into a one-person video-game studio. Sessions slipped, anxiety spiked, and I quit the hobby for almost two years.

Perfection is the enemy of good.

These struggles are mine, yet I hear the similar frustrations every day online. Theory points the way, but only practice tells you what fits.

What follows is the prep style that helped me to finally let me run a game on short notice without scrambling or surrendering to chaos. The world ticks on with or without the players, and—two-and-a-half years in—I still can't wait for the next session. Is it perfect? No. Would I start differently today? Absolutely. Am I having fun? You bet.

Prep Goals

Before launching the campaign I set three guiding objectives:

A Consistent, Player-Independent World

I wanted a setting that exists regardless of who is at the table. Multiple parties can roam the same map and their actions leave lasting marks—without me rewriting reality to cater to a single group.

Low-Prep Sessions

Session prep should take minutes, not hours. I'd already burned out once on elaborate VTT builds; this time I wanted to show up excited, not exhausted.

Redirect Energy Into Creation

If the next session requires little work, I can pour surplus energy into optional legwork—fleshing out locations, and create new bespoke ones because it's fun, not because a deadline is looming.

Pre-Campaign Prep

My current game is set in Dolmenwood, a published sandbox with a rich, detailed region. Whether you adopt an existing setting or create your own, the first step is the same: establish good baseline familiarity.

Because Dolmenwood already supplies the content, my job was to absorb it. I skipped rules and player options and dove straight into the hexes, annotating as I went. At one point I even built an Obsidian vault, transcribing every entry into a linked wiki. That was... overkill. Typing soothed my brain, but I almost never referenced those files. The PDFs' built-in hyperlinks plus a good reader app covered 95% of what I needed.

That deep dive did have one major benefit: typing and annotating the text forced me to explore the setting on my own terms. Encountering factions or NPCs I'd never noticed ignited my curiosity, leading me to dive into sidebars on towns, history, and lore. Ultimately, the exercise built a rock-solid baseline understanding—one you can also achieve simply by reading attentively and jotting down notes or questions as they arise.

Crucially, I did not wait until the entire book was internalised to start play. I kicked things off with a half-finished note pile and filled the gaps between the first sessions. That feedback loop kept perfectionism at bay and turned prep into fuel rather than friction.

Session Prep

My ambition was near-zero session prep, so I could show up relaxed and focus on play. A broad grasp of Dolmenwood gave me confidence, but procedures turned that knowledge into action—especially since this was my first serious plunge into OSR-style, player-driven gaming. The three practices below finally freed me from session-prep anxiety.

Prepping Tools

Random encounters are my favorite especially coupled with the evocative prompts from Dolmenwood's Monster Book, yet rolling fresh tables mid-session stalls momentum. My first workaround was to pre-roll results onto index cards. Players drew a number and I flipped the card—quick, but still imperfect: I already knew the whole deck, so surprise dulled over time and the cards were fussy to manage.

Everything clicked after I read Nick LS Whelan's "Prep Tools, Not Adventures" and watched Josh at Rise Up Comus use Perchance generators in his Dolmenwood game. A fellow tinkerer (sicko), I spent some time building my own suite:

Sample output from the Crawl Generator

Sample output from the Crawl Generator—just enough detail to let me improvise everything else on the fly!

To keep results vivid, I later wrote "expanded bestiary" posts—each one a handful of encounters fleshed out with Monster-Book-style prompts, though, most are only found in the generator. The whole project took weeks, but the payoff was huge: wilderness exploration now runs on rails I can't see ahead of time, so I stay just as surprised as the players.

Prepping Generative Procedures

I also implemented faction turns—Mausritter-inspired procedural events that advance Dolmenwood's narrative outside of sessions. Once again I delved into the source material, paying close attention to small details and reading between the lines to extrapolate content for each faction. Because these turns recur on a schedule, each roll gradually reshapes the world and inevitably intersects with the PCs. The longer the campaign runs—and the more the players engage with the factions—the richer the pool of story hooks becomes. It's working beautifully and ensures I never run out of ideas.

Rarer, lesser-known events arise from a table of natural disasters, ready to throw a wrench into everyone's plans and cause havoc. I'm still waiting for a major catastrophe, but I'm eager to explore the consequences—and to see how the players exploit the chaos!

Calendars

Finally, I fully committed to a campaign-calendar system—recording every world-action event: faction turns, loose-thread resolutions, random-event rolls, and more. In-game time advances at three distinct speeds, depending on what the party is doing:

Adventure mode: Time crawls. Often several sessions cover a single in-game day.
Travel / settlement mode: Time marches. Up to a few days pass each session.
Downtime: Time accelerates. Usually a week per session, ensuring at least one faction turn.

Because every event has a date stamp, I always know exactly when something must be resolved—nothing gets forgotten, and my focus stays sharp. Resolution itself is fast—just a handful of rolls—and I don't have to do it every session; sometimes several real-world weeks go by before the calendar needs attention again.

All this means session prep now takes ten minutes or less: open the tools, skim calendar notes, jot a couple of "maybe" ideas—if at all, and I'm good to go.

Conclusion

In the end, I invest a great deal of time upfront—but all that work goes into reusable tools and procedures that give me confidence and efficiency. At this point, I barely think of it as prep; it's more like a solo world-building lab that generates new content organically. That frees me to focus on crafting locations, fleshing out settlements, and creating bespoke Dolmenwood dungeons—without the stress of pre-session anxiety.

AMONG CATS AND BOOKS