For the last convention I went to, I prepped my games differently. Normally, I rattle out a google doc, paragraphed text into scenes to get my notes in order. Like a lot of prep, the act of writing is more important than the artefact – I don’t often look at my notes at the table. 

But for Seven Hills, where I adapted two games from Tales From The Forlorn Hope, I used powerpoint. This is, to be clear, not my usual method – but it worked, and it’s something I’ll go back to. 

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Patrons also have full access to two slide decks prepared using this method – The Impalers for TORG Eternity, and A Hard Road to Go for Neon City Overdrive, snips of which are used to illustrate this post.

Here’s a few of the method’s advantages, and why I’d do it again:

1 Slide = 1 Thing

Setting up your notes as a slide deck helps to organise ideas, both in writing them (put everything for each scene in the same place) and at the table (I printed out full page slides and shuffled them into a folder).

In terms of structure, I made a slide for NPC notes, a slide for NPC art (nabbed from Pinterest), a plot structure slide, and a slide for each scene. This made both playing from them, and writing them, really easy – everything was there in one place for what I needed. The NPC art I cut up into little laminated name cards – always good for convention play to throw down some NPC name/portrait reminders onto the table.

Constraints

You can’t get too much text onto a powerpoint slide. This worked to my advantage; I’m not one to over-prep, but I can add unnecessary verbiage a little when I’m writing in a google doc. Having one slide per scene also meant I paid about as much attention to later scenes as I did to earlier ones. I can definitely prep loads for the start and end of sessions, and leave the fat middle a little loose, and this helped me pay as much attention to middle and transitional scenes as earlier ones.

Rewriting

For this specific project, I was adapting a pre-written adventure to a new system. Prepping pre-written stuff is hard enough as it is for me to run as a one-shot, so this meant I could keep the details down to exactly what I needed for the adventure.

Re-organising text into another format is a classic revision technique, one that I’ve recommended to students in my day job, and it worked here as well. By channelling the text into a slide deck I internalised what I needed to run the adventure, while also statting up what I needed to.

Inspiration

Have you ever tried to write something in comic sans? It’s a remarkably effective way to get your brain out of  a funk and think properly about ideas. Similarly, cracking open powerpoint felt very different from typing into a word doc, and meant I could keep my prep fresh and get some new ideas down.

In short, a surprisingly effective way to prep. Have you used an unusual prep medium? Let me know in the comments.