Being a DM can include a mess of notepad entries, browser tabs, and books, and when the adventure module you’re running is poorly organized it can leave you with general confusion and interrupted game play as you hunt for a particular monster stat block that you accidentally closed the tab on ten minutes earlier.
Yes, I have done this.
Why I didn’t consider using Scrivener before, I don’t know. I’ve only been writing novels with it for more than a decade. I even used it to write an original one-shot. But it wasn’t until I started running The Wild Beyond The Witchlight that I clued in. And since the conversation about DMing tools comes up every so often, I thought I’d show you how I do it.
Mild spoilers for the first two chapters follow.
Welcome to the Witchlight Carnival, laid out in a Scrivener manuscript draft.
If you’re unfamiliar with Scrivener this might be confusing. If you loathe Scrivener, why are you even reading this? Go do something fun.
So what are we looking at? Down the left side (the binder) is the Carnival folder, containing all the stops within the Carnival that the characters might go to. Each one has its own document. In the middle is a corkboard with cards for each scene, which aren’t really relevant to this usage (the grey dots are covering copyrighted material from the adventure book).
Also down the side are documents for each NPC, containing notes on how to play them and important things they have to tell the PCs. You can also see the open PCs folder, containing things I need to know about them (in this case, the things they’re looking for and any events or prizes they may have won).
Here I’ve opened session zero, which I wrote myself. I took each character through on their own, giving them the same prompts.
If I need to, at any time during play I can just click over to this or to a PC’s document and then back to the scene they’re in (like Dragonfly Ride or Lost Property) without having to change windows.
In each scene document I copy (or rewrite) the flavour text, adding what I need to for my players. They also include basic stats for NPCs and monsters, or page numbers of where to look them up. Once they’ve completed a scene I mark it with the red dot so I know which they’ve done, but I can still go back to it easily if needed.
Here’s Chapter Two, Hither.
You can see how the Carnival folder is collapsed under the Hither folder, but still accessible. The random encounters I rolled up have their own document, as do the things the PCs are looking for. If the characters look at the map and say, “Let’s explore D5,” then it’s easily found, no hunting through the book necessary.
That’s not to say I don’t still have pages in the book flagged and sections highlighted (did you know there’s highlighter tape now? There’s highlighter tape now) but that’s for minutia I think the players are unlikely to need.
Now that we’ve finished Chapter Two, I’ll add another folder at the top for Chapter Three, Thither.
This method really works for me, and I can’t believe I didn’t consider it earlier, when I was running an even less well-organized module.
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