Content Order

As you may not know I'm a fan of sandpit one off adventures. I love a good campaign, but with time constraints I also love the one off adventures, and that is what, at present, I am focusing on. I am writing up my first one with a view to publishing, as well as having two or three others bubbling away and one that was too attractive for me not to start making notes.

Some of this blatant procrastination has been driven by information order. I like everything planned out, that isn't to say that the characters can't ad lib, that is part of the overall appeal. However I like to have some pointers, a few clues for me as the GM that if they go off piste I can keep it flowing as much as possible so the entire adventure feels more crafted for the players. I don't want them saying, oh we'll go have a look at X only for me to think, I don't have a map, how should it look, how does it work in the adventure, should there be clues to discover.. etc. I like my notes to hand. Now as mentioned previously I make a lot of use of hand written notes, and those cool little coloured sticky strips to help me jump around my notes!

That sort of brings me to my latest conundrum. When running an adventure I'm often skipping back and forth in my notes to grab little snippets, even though I made a custom GM shield and glued my notes onto it. However when looking to publish something I need to make sure that everything is laid out as a GM would expect and need.

Well as you probably guessed I don't have an answer for this yet. At present I am experimenting with:

CH1 - Introduction and Background

CH2 - Character Creation

CH3 - Super Powers

CH4 - NPC Character Sheets

CH5 - GM Notes (this includes a plot overview, general hints that the players can find or discover the main scenes and a map index.

CH6 - Locations - The different locations, with brief descriptions.

CH7 - The Adventure Opening

CH8 - Pre generated character sheets

CH9 - The Maps

So that is sort of the running order I'm playing with. Any feedback is always good. If your a GM would this order of the information cause you any issues?

I will get it play tested to see how it all runs, however in the meantime, I need to go back and start cleaning up the chapters.