I thought I’d try something new for this week’s post – a worked example of how my prep looks for a one-shot, from conception to delivery. After Deadlands and Weird Frontiers on the Unconventional GMs Channel, we talked (me, Gaz, and the players for those games) about doing some more wild/weird west games. It seemed as good an idea as any – and of course what could be more authentic than a bunch of British people playing at America’s great mythic tradition – and so I started looking at other RPGs.

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I’d heard good things about the Index Card RPG (ICRPG) and on a look through, found it had a weird west setting in it – Ghost Mountain, where a chunk of the landscape has been lifted off into a purgatory of devils and demons. The dead won’t stay dead, and every sundown you have to wager souls to keep the world from floating off into hell. Sounds good, right?

So, I went about prepping a system. My first step, as you’d imagine, was to set a date for the one-shot recording – I need this sort of deadline to keep my brain focussed and make sure I deliver. Then I properly read through both the ICRPG rules (as I’d not run it before) and the setting material (this was not onerous; it’s 22 pages of the book).

Then I tackled two things concurrently. I sketched out a plot, and I made some pregens. I like to start with pregens when I’m prepping a new system for two reasons – one, it helps me to get my head around the system – if it’s fiddly I might try out a combat to learn it, for instance, and I can get an idea of how powerful the PCs are to start with. And two, it’s one of the least enjoyable parts of game prep – so I want to get it out of the way first. Fortunately ICRPG is dead easy. Pregens will be shared with Patrons in part two!

For the plot I started with Morningstar Productions’ Plotlibs random tables – after six d100 rolls, I’d got the bones of a plot. This isn’t always my approach, but I wasn’t full of ideas, and it shook out pretty well. The results are below:

AN INDIAN TRADER
Wants the posse to

FIND THE STOLEN WAGON TRAIN

And thereby

MAINTAIN THE STATUS QUO

But when

AN EARTHQUAKE

And

THE HUNGRY THUNDER-GOD IYA

Stand in their way, how can they possibly succeed?

And they don’t even know that

THE TOWN IS BUILT ON A SECRET INDIAN BURIAL GROUND

So far, so good. I’ll change the indians-as-occult-dangers bits, obviously, and Ghost Mountain’s setting provides enough weirdness without needing the problematic stuff. Let’s have a death cult seeking to hasten the world’s drop into hell instead, laired in caves inside the mountain, and make them equal opportunities evil cultists with every ethnicity tempted by their nihilistic dreams. The earthquake can fit with this if it’s how they capture the wagon trains, and adds a dual goal of escaping the caves as well as stopping whatever worldplan the cult has.

Next I think about structure. A quick sketch of a flowchart gives me this:

That looks pretty linear, but in the middle I’ve a location-based dungeon that should afford plenty of options, and there’s probably a few different ways the plot can shake out after that.

Next step? Leave it for a bit to percolate. I think I’ve got the backbone of a solid one-shot there, but I need some time to refine it – and often leaving it a while does this best. I did this, so stay tuned for Part Two, where I’ll share the finished prep notes when I wrote it up to pull everything together.