When I ran Dead Light and Edge of Darkness for my group, it was the first time in a long time that I've run a story I didn't write myself. In running Dead Light, I ran into a problem I wasn't familiar with: I didn't have total mastery over the setting and plot elements. By that I mean, when the players wanted to go to Location X, I had to flip back through the scenario to find it. When they wanted to talk to NPC Y, I needed to spend half a minute reading up on that person again, their motivation, their secrets, and what player actions would trigger them to do something or reveal something.
Granted, part of good GMing is being as familiar as possible with the scenario as written, but even so, it's not possible for me to hold that volume of specifics in my head while also doing all the other things a GM does at the table - remember rules, deliver information in an entertaining way, think two or three steps ahead of the players.
Plus, there are environmental factors. I always print out the adventure, because I find it hard to make a suitably frightening mood in the glare of laptop and cell phone screens. We play in a dim room (the better to support the spooky atmospherics!), the table is a bit crowded, and frankly any time I spend squinting down at a printout of the Scenario is time where the tension is bleeding away.
What I need is an OUTLINE version of the Scenario. Organized, quick to read, and - for real - in a larger font than the narrative, prose version of the piece.
Here's what such a thing looks like for the "Zone Rouge" campaign's version of Edge of Darkness. I created it for myself - and, in fact, the act of doing so was also really useful to me in terms of gaining mastery of the material. A quick guide to what I did here:
- I already know the overall plot and theme, so I don't need to reiterate that in the "table companion" version.
- Each top-level heading is a major location.
- Lower-level headings are:
- Sub-locations (a hospital room; the grounds of a farmhouse; a basement)
- Summary of "Plot Information" that can be obtained from people and objects
- Summary of encounters
- As needed, bullet points provide:
- Descriptive words
- Brief dialogue cues
- NPC stats and strategy
This way, I can quickly find the location or person we're dealing with in the story, and in a couple of quick seconds I can have everything I need to run that scene. I know what vital information has to get across, what the other characters' motivations are, etc. I also use special icons to remind myself when to give out handouts, play certain music tracks, etc.
As I use this format more in the future I'll probably make it even more streamlined. But this worked pretty well for me at the last session, so I'll just make refinements here and there.
I also have the table-format layout that I use for tracking events at each interval of the ritual. This format would also be useful with things like chases! Hopefully more on that in a future after-action writeup!
So - what do you use? What makes it easier for you to run a smooth game?
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Want more of what I do? I have a number of best-selling Adventures and GM guides for the 7th Sea system available via DriveThruRPG! They are reasonably popular and shockingly inexpensive, so check them out! And now, it's been announced that 7th Sea will live under the same Chaosium roof as Call of Cthulhu - so there's some nice synergy for you!
I'll soon be working on writing my first-ever CoC scenario for publication, giving it the same "behind-the-scenes development" treatment you've seen so far - so watch this space for future posts on that topic!
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