Prepare one session
Prep is a safety net for the hour you did not expect, not a script. If you can answer three questions, you can start.
The three questions
- Where are they when we begin? A room with an exit, a road with a choice, or a town gate. Name it. Give it one sensory detail so you are not inventing the smell of the place while five people watch you.
- What is already wrong? The problem should be visible without a monologue. A body, a closed bridge, a patron who will not pay, a door that was locked from the inside.
- What do you know that they do not? One secret: who actually locked the door, what the rumor gets wrong, which NPC is afraid. You will use it when they investigate. You might not use it at all, and that is still a successful session.
Stop there if time is short. A front, a clock and a secret outperform a twelve-page outline that the party never reaches.
People, not paragraphs
Write two people who can be talked to. Each needs a name, what they want tonight, and how they feel about strangers. Want is more useful than a biography. “Needs the wagon moved before dawn” gives you every line of dialogue. “Born in a coastal village” does not.
The NPC generator builds a look, a personality, a desire, a mannerism and a secret. Press Save NPC. The person is filed in the NPC library and can be opened later as a full sheet. Pressing Generate again will not delete the one you saved.
What to save, and where
- Taverns, rumors, hooks, weather and rooms use Save note. Each result becomes its own note on the home screen. If a generator shows several results, Save all to one note files them together.
- Names you like can be copied or saved the same way, then pasted onto the NPC or the quest.
- Quests belong in the quest manager once the party has agreed to do something. Before that, a rumor note is enough. A quest with objectives is a promise; do not create it until the table has bitten.
- World entries are for places you expect to revisit: the town, the faction, the road. A single room does not need one.
Search with Ctrl+K before you retype a name. It looks through notes, NPCs, monsters, quests, party characters and world entries at once.
The open-this pile
At the start of the session, have four things within one click: the note for tonight, the two NPCs, the party’s character sheets, and a blank initiative tracker if trouble is likely. Maps and PDF books can stay closed. Opening everything is how a screen becomes slower than paper.
Leave a margin. If the players ignore the wagon and follow a stablehand into the trees, use the secret and the second NPC. Do not pause the table for ten minutes to design a forest. A path, a reason they went, and something that can be found is a scene.
Afterward, write five lines: what they did, who they met, what you still owe them next time. That note is the whole of next session’s prep if you are tired. The first-night guide is the shorter version of this page. The combat guide is what you open only if the scene becomes a fight.