Episode 88: Running Published Campaigns

The Good Friends of Jackson Elias are back, and we're digging into various techniques for preparing and running published campaigns, looking for pearls of wisdom. Sure, you don't dig for pearls, but common sense has never proved an obstacle to us before.

While it's nice to have someone else come up with cool ideas, do all the research and write out those bloody stat blocks for you, there is still a lot of work in taking this material and turning it into something you can play with your friends. We offer our tips for making the process as quick and painless as possible (although "painless" seems to go against the spirit of Call of Cthulhu).

We also experiment with hideous new singing techniques in this episode, creating sounds that will echo through your body cavities for days afterwards.

Great show with lots of good tips with a few additions newer keepers might try.

One is in addition of the paraphrase the flavor text with the bullet list is to maybe jot down the npcs with a basic description or photos/image but one thing to add is to put 1-2 word motivation for the character. So if the character is scared, angry or whatnot, this will give some general obvious/hidden notes to how they are in the scene. This should help some with how the player characters interact with them or how they are in the scene.

Other thing in a more sandbox game would be to take a note from Caleb at Role Playing Public Radio with the more sandbox campaigns is to keep track the bad choices that the player(s) made in earlier sessions, eventually the consequences will add up enough that there will be parts of the campaign that will write itself when things come back to haunt the player(s).