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GameMastery Guide / Running a Game / How to Run a Game / GM Considerations

Emergency Game Prep

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 48
Sometimes day-to-day life conquers even the most committed Game Master. You meant to get that dungeon ready, but then the boss/spouse/kids/friends/lottery office called, and now everyone’s gathering at the table. It’s time for emergency game preparation.

Sometimes you’ll need emergency game prep in the middle of a session, too. The party may get an urge to visit the Astral Plane. They may give the all-powerful scroll to the obviously disguised villain, just because he asked to look at it.

When this happens, don’t try to find the right section of the book to reread. Every minute counts! In these situations, it’s good to have an emergency game kit containing raw adventure fuel. That’s stuff like:

Stat Blocks: Any opposition appropriate for the PCs works, even if it doesn’t “belong” in that part of the campaign world. Coming up with reasons for monsters to hang out together and fight the PCs takes less time than flipping through the books to find the perfect monsters. That’s particularly true in an emergency situation where you’re likely going to “reskin” the monsters anyway. That armored knight? You can just describe him as a hill giant and your players will never know. Then you can make him into a dire wolf, or a swarm of killer bees, and still your players may never know. Sure, you’ll know that the damage dice should have been different, the skills were completely irrelevant, the Armor Class was wrong, and the special abilities were made up on the spot, but you’re the only one who sees the stat block. Everyone else is just rolling dice and having fun.

Ten Proper Names: Write down 10 names out of thin air—names that have a “mouth feel” appropriate to the setting. You’ve now got your answer when the PCs ask what the name of the bartender is, or the name of the river they just crossed, or the magic words that open the portal. Nothing makes you look like you’ve prepared more than a confident answer to the “What’s his name?” question.

A Basic Flow Chart: Take a blank piece of paper and draw roughly 10 bubbles on it, scattered around the paper. Then draw some lines between them, trying to make interesting clusters but not connecting everything to everything else. Now you’ve got a rudimentary dungeon map and a basic event flowchart—whatever you need in the next few hours. If you use the flow chart as a map, of course it won’t have proper dimensions and everything laid out in proper architectural fashion. But your concerns are more basic. You want to keep track of the rooms so that when the PCs retreat from the map room, they come back to the observatory, not the barracks they visited two encounters ago.

Remember, thrust matters more than direction. As you improvise your way through a session, it’s tempting to worry about whether you’re making decisions—especially plot and setting decisions—that will come back to haunt you later. Ignore those concerns; you’ll have plenty of time to tie up loose ends, patch over plot holes, and bring the players back to the main plotline later. You care that the PCs are doing something interesting. The pause while you figure out the perfect encounter diminishes everyone’s fun more than the out-of-place detail or the tangential plotline ever could.