I’ve just spent a sunny afternoon prepping the final session of a short 13th Age Glorantha campaign, and it’s been great to get through a short season entirely home-written. I’ll have run 6 sessions by the time the finale is over, and we’ve taken 3 PCs from 1st level to the cusp of 4th level – we might come back to them at 4th level for a sequel, when we can rotate it back into the schedule.

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And it’s been great. I thought I’d review and share some of the prep techniques that worked for me. In fact, I’m going to look at adapting it and getting it up on the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium’s fan-made storefront. In advance of this, Patrons are going to get sent my unedited, raw prep notes – they can let me know if they think this is a good idea.

Run What You Know

I’ve never actually run an ongoing 13th Age game before, although I’m fairly sure I’ve run more 13th Age Glorantha at conventions than anyone else over the past few years. I’ve a real love for the crunchy narrative combat / freewheeling player agency interlude bit of 13th Age, and this was a great chance to see it fly with players that were involved with it. 

So, if it isn’t too obvious, pick a game you like and ideally one you know the rules to pretty well. This gave me a good feel for making combat balanced and exciting (pretty important in a game like this) and how to handle the narrative techniques like montages.

Have A Campaign Plan

By “Campaign Plan,” I literally mean just a bullet point for each session. I didn’t follow it exactly, but it helped make prep easier as I wasn’t starting from an empty page each time – I’ll be doing this again with every season going forwards.

In fact, this was what it looked like:

• S1 – Defeat cattle raiders, learn of encroaching chaos L1
• S2 – Investigate chaos, learn of lunar magics upsetting balance L1
• S3 – Secrets in the Cackling Caves – dungeoning L2
• S4 – Consult with corrupted Silver Wolf tribe
• S5 – Travel to Jonstown to find who could have learned of this – citycrawl beset by lunar spies L2
• S6 – Fight the lunar spies in the Compendium / somewhere else exciting L3

We ended up going to six sessions, partly because session 1 was a sort of combined session 1 / session zero with character generation folded into it – so the first session took a couple of sessions really. Jonstown, too, ended up a bit different, because I thought it’d be a good idea to have the city burned down and besieged by Lunars. Session 6 is also completely different – they’ve dealt with a Lunar ghost and now have to find how to finally lift the curse on the lands.

Then Prep A Session At A Time

After that sketch was done, I stuck to only going one session ahead at a time. Why? Well, this allowed me to reincorporate player ideas. 13th Age has montages, hazards, and other opportunities for players to add elements to the story, and this let me re-use them in following sessions. I’ve written before about how effective reincorporation is, and this let me respond to it without having to feel like I was improvising too much.

This led to an entire session changing – I’d thought of the Cackling Caves as being a Broo encampment, but this became a corrupted Brown Elf shrine when elves were introduced in a montage the session before. I did a fair bit of checking in with the players for what they wanted more of through Stars & Wishes, too – which meant I had plenty of material to work with each session. Adding parameters, like with anything creative, usually makes things easier rather than harder, and this is a campaign I’ve genuinely enjoyed prepping.

Use Random Generators

Speaking of the Brown Elf Shrine, I actually used a random dungeon generator (well, sort of) for it – and similarly for the Silver Wolf tribe. In fact, I used the same generators each time – the tools in Kevin Crawford’s excellent Worlds Without Number. There are many more available, and although I’d recommend these, use whatever you want to spike inspiration within the parameters set.

Make Up Monsters

While 13th Age Glorantha has a great bestiary in the game, it’s also been fun to lean into 13th Age’s recommended way to freeform monsters. Most of the time I’ve either reskinned existing monsters, but I’ve also used the standard stats in 13th Age core – flavour counts for more than statistics in a game like 13th Age, and so picking up a few of these has been great.

So, a run down of how I’ve prepped a full campaign for a (relatively) trad game. I’ve learned a lot from these processes, and a lot of them I’ll use again. Are there any go-to prep techniques that you use for campaign planning? Let me know in the comments.