Those who have been reading along with my Actual Play of Dragonlance: Shadows of the Dragon Queen, and who are familiar with the adventure itself, may have noticed that I’m past the halfway point of the adventure. Which means that I, as the GM, need to start thinking about what comes next. This has, in turn, had me looking over some of the game books that are in my collection and coming to some serious thoughts on what things a tabletop RPG needs to help with onboarding – based on what I think would help my players consider some of the more niche games in my collection.

: A Gameplay Cycle

This is related to, but different from, what would be called in a video game an example of the “Gameplay Loop.” This is, basically, laying out to the players – and the GM – what the hell you’re doing over the course of a campaign. Specifically, what the cycle of an adventure would be. For example, in Shadowrun, you go to meet with your Mr. Johnson, he gives you the job. In the course of that meet the players ask questions to learn more about who he actually is, and ultimately who he works for and who they’re running against, so they have an understanding of Mr. Johnson’s agenda – if they’re going to get screwed, and if they’re actually doing something really shitty.

This can even be applied to a larger campaign cycle: How do characters advance? What are some goals player characters might have over the course of a campaign? What resources do player characters accumulate, and what do they do with them? What does the endgame of the campaign look like (outside of “Life gets in the way, and the campaign ends in a whimper”)? All of these are things that help the players and the GM know what they’re getting into. This also provides some ideas for sourcebooks – for example, the Shadowrun Companion sourcebook gets into some alternative campaign frameworks (like working for a news agency or DocWagon) – this is perfect material for those books as well.

This can include the “example of play” sort of “Actual Play” transcript, to help flesh out the moment-to-moment gameplay of the game to players.

If your advice for GM prep is “roll on this slew of random tables at the back of the book to put together your adventure – then you really need to have a good Gameplay Cycle example, so the GM knows where to slot the results of those tables into your game.\

: Really Good GM & Player Advice Chapters

Related to – the more your game differs from D&D, in terms of the assumptions of how a session should play out, what characters do, and how they approach challenges, the more important it is to have material in the book that delves into approaching the assumptions that the players would come to the game with from other RPGs and, clearly and politely, explaining how things are different in this game, and how that relates to the duties of the GM and the Player.

: A Sample Adventure

This may seem excessively “Trad”, as an RPG concept – but for gamemasters coming from more traditional RPGs (especially Dungeons & Dragons), it provides an additional purpose. It lets the gamemaster know what kind of prep they need to do, and just as importantly, what kind they don’t need to do. You don’t explore a dungeon in Dungeon World the same way you might explore one in 13th Age, which is different from Shadowdark. An investigation in Call of Cthulhu works differently, mechanically, from one in Trails of Cthulhu. Exploring the wasteland in Gamma World is going to be radically different from the way it works mechanically in Apocalypse World.

This all helps the GM with the answer to the question “How do I prepare?” Also, if your GM is taking an adventure from a different RPG in the same genre and trying to convert it to your game, it would work better if you re-think a lot of idioms instead of just dropping it straight in; this is a good way to get the GM in that mindset.

The adventure “The Jacket” from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Boxed Set is a really good example of this, because of how it provides a beat map for the game, showing the various ways that the game’s plot can play out. Seth Skorskowsky has a very good review of the adventure that I recommend GMs watch. Older Shadowrun adventures like Dreamchipper and Mercurial are good at this as well.

: A Sample Campaign

This is taking , and the second part of , and combining them together. It is saying, “Here is a place to start your campaign. Here’s a place to finish. And here are a bunch of things to do on the way there.” It helps tell GMs a way you can structure things on a larger scale, beyond a whole bunch of vignettes and stand-alone stories, and depending on your game, can provide advice to gamemasters on how to incorporate the narrative hooks that your players set up into this larger campaign. Having a sample adventure is absolutely helpful. Having a campaign to follow up helps even more.

This doesn’t even have to be something as heavily scripted as Shadows of the Dragon Queen. It can be a plot point campaign, like what has been published alongside campaign settings for Savage Worlds. It can be a campaign setting with a plot timeline attached to it – showing what the agendas of the various factions in the smaller setting are, and how things can play out if the players don’t get involved, and the kinds of ways they can react when players throw a spanner in the works.

The key is showing the GM “Here’s the ways a larger story can play out, so they have an idea of how to structure that larger narrative.

: A NPC/Antagonist/Challenge Book

Finally, your player characters are going to run into non-player characters. They are going to end up confronting some of those NPCs. Maybe they’re fighting them. Maybe they’re getting into social debates with them, or cooking duels, or seducing them, or having a musical jam session with them – whatever type of contest or confrontation the rules focus on. This means that as the GM, you need to have an idea of what stats you need to manage those contests – and this book is all about providing you with examples for those.

If challenges that aren’t people are a significant part of the game, or one that’s just as important as dealing with NPCs, then you need to provide examples for those as well. These can be traps in the dungeon, or environmental threats when traversing the wilderness, or the difficulties involved with building your settlement. If you can’t fit those into your core rulebook or dedicated GM book, then you need to include that in your NPC/Antagonist book.

Finally, the thing that makes a lot of this easier…

: An Open Content License

One of the things that gets thrown around a lot is that “Adventures don’t sell”, “Campaign books don’t sell”, “Monster books don’t sell” – because they’re all targeted to GMs. Except people do like buying them, reading them, and hopefully playing them. Having some kind of open content license helps you offload some of that to other people. The rest from there comes from putting together a fan culture that encourages the creation of more of the materials that you want, but can’t financially justify the effort into making yourself. , however, is all on you.

We’ll be discussing the next game I’ll be running at the next session, and once we’ve got that figured out, I’ll post more on that here, and what form the campaign will be.

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