I generally don’t use published material for my games; I have always enjoyed running my material. From time to time and depending on the game, I find that the published material can either be better than what I think I can create (in the case of Dungeon Crawl Classics) or I don’t have a good feel for how the situation of the game should work, and I want to see how the publisher did it, so I can learn (as in the case of Triangle Agency). Last week, I needed to prep a published adventure for the first time in a while, and I thought we could talk about it. 

What is Prep?

I feel like prep is often misunderstood. When people lament about it on the Internet, they evoke images of reams of paper or a cascade of words in a document. Some bash it, saying that the OneTrueWay is to abolish prep. All of that is garbage. 

Prep is what you need to do to feel comfortable running the game and the story. 

Prep can take on many forms based on what it takes for you to feel comfortable. Prep is dependent on the person and the game. It is everything you need it to be. 

Regarding the misconceptions above, most people do not take an active role in streamlining their prep or have learned their prep from someone else. If that sounds like you, check out Never Unprepared and make prep your own. End stump. 

Published Adventures

We all know what a published adventure is, and most of us have used them at some point in the hobby. Nothing wrong with them; there are many great published adventures in the world. 

What a published adventure does for you is present you a story in the way of the game’s Situation. It is made for a generic group of characters and, in many cases, makes assumptions about who those characters may be. It can be a time-saver because someone has written the story and prepared maps or other components for you. 

There are some disadvantages. The first is that it was created for a generic group of characters, so it lacks any specificity to the characters in your game. Also, it was created external to you, meaning that your brain did not build this story from an idea through the prep, so you have to get the material into your head to understand what is going on. 

Quick note. Published adventures can come in a physical format (Book) or electronic format (PDF, VTT, etc). Some of the techniques I am going to mention work the same with both of these, using similar tools. Unless specified, you can use the advice below for either format. 

Prepping Published Adventures

Prepping published adventures requires three activities to make the material playable. These can be worked on at the same time or can be done separately, but they all need to be completed. 

Integration into your Group and Campaign

If the material you are running needs to be part of your campaign, you are going to have to do some writing to integrate this material. This can take the form of two activities:

• Bookending the story – You will need to create an on-ramp and an off-ramp for the story so that your characters can enter the story, and when they complete it, they can move to the next story. 
• Customizing the material – Depending on the game and your characters, you may need to do some editing of the material to make it fit your group. For example, if your group does not have a Cleric, but the published material requires one for an encounter, you will need to make a few edits to make that encounter work for your group. 

For bookending, I use whatever platform the rest of my campaign info is stored in. For me, that is OneNote. I will write my on-ramp and off-ramp material in OneNote and refer to it during the game. For any edits, if the edits are small, I may put a post-it note in the text with the edit, or if the edit is more substantial, then I will take it into OneNote and rewrite the scene. 

Load The Story Into Your Head

The next activity is to get the published story into your head. You need to have a broad understanding of the story in your head so that as you are reacting to the characters’ actions, you have an idea of the consequences of their actions on the greater story. 

When you write your own material, you are synthesizing it in your head organically, and by the time you have finished your prep, that material is loaded. For a published adventure, you need to upload the material. 

For that, you need to read, read, read. Reading the material will make you familiar with it. You don’t have to commit it to memory, but the better you understand it, the better you will be able to determine what to do when players take actions within the story. 

I typically do a surface read, where I don’t worry about memorizing anything but rather get a feel for the story, what it’s about, its structure, any twists, etc. Closer to game day, I do some deeper readings, making sure I understand how each encounter works, if there are any special rules, etc.

Create A Reference Document

The third activity is that you need to prepare the document to be a table reference. Here is a major shortcoming for published adventures. Published adventures come traditionally from a print publishing background – they are books. As such, they were laid out the way books are laid out, columns, paragraphs of texts, pages, minimization of white space, etc. That is great for reading. We are conditioned to read material that is formatted in such a way. 

When we are at the table, though, we need a reference document. We need something that we can scan in order to find information quickly. If we are in the middle of adjudicating a combat, or moving the spotlight between characters, or the dozen other things we do in the game, and we need to find that specific rule about the trap door in room 12 on floor three — what page, paragraph, and column is that in? 

This kind of searching can create dead air at your table and impact the flow of play, the tension of scenes, etc. Worse, if you can’t find the info you need you run the risk of skipping it or making a mistake and needing to do some ret-con to fix things later. 

Reference documents are sparse, with bullet points, simple facts, and white space to make the text less dense. It is a formatting that is conducive to scanning glances and quick lookups. Rarely is material published in this format. 

When you prep your own material, you develop your style of writing out the adventure. My prep in OneNote is written as a reference document to be used in the game. It heavily uses bullet points, simple tables, and headers. It contains the information germane for the scene. 

Sadly, I do not know of any publishers who want to create both the text version of the game and a reference document for play (hey…if you know one who does, shout them out in the comments, and let’s give them the duly deserved praise). 

So you need to do something to the published text to make it a reference document. For this, I typically use highlighters and different colors for different things (green for text to read out to the players, yellow for rules, etc). In more extreme cases, and when my time was far more plentiful, I would make my own reference document in OneNote, but those heady days are long gone.

To be fair, you don’t need to do this activity, you can rely on your ability to scan full text and find things in a timely manner or just commit the whole story to memory. For me, I do not like to memorize things, and I do not like the time it takes me to read through a document to find specific info. 

Read Twice…Highlight Once

Published Adventures are a great way to run stories for your group. You are purchasing the imagination and work of a team of people. To make it useful for your game, you need to integrate it and customize it for your group, become familiar with the story, and make a reference document to aid in running the story. Make no mistake, it’s prep, and it can be just as much prep as someone who is writing their own games. 

How do you prep published adventures? What are your tricks for making the published text into a reference document?