Welcome to December of 2025 Barking Alien fans! Oh yes, I see you out there; the half dozen or so of you freezing your butts off in the nose-bleed seats of an otherwise empty stadium waiting for the big game to start. I don't say this enough because there is no way I ever could but thank you so much for coming and for giving my madness a moment of your time. It is very deeply appreciated.
Alright, enough mushy stuff, let's get down to business. Just like last year, I will be devoting December to the answering of viewer provided questions. As of now I have...hmmm...very few. Definitely nowhere near 31. Is it too late to shop around for a new theme?
No! It's to EARLY to do that. I am certain my friends and fellow TRPG bloggers will come to Gondor's aid once I light the beacons! Now...where did I put that blowtorch? No matter! I will get to that in a moment. Right now, the First Question (Cheering, Trumpet Sounds):
From that British Guy Who's Super Fly - Tim Knight!
Have you started serious prep work on whatever games you're planning for next year? How long do you take to prep a campaign or single session? What does this involve for you?
I have indeed already started to prep for what I hope will be my big game of next year. I might even call the prep 'serious' depending on how one defines that word. I am in what I tend to refer to as the 'Pre-Production' stage. This is where I do research on various game systems I think might work for the genre/setting I am looking to run, read up on a wide range of topics related to the genre/setting, make A LOT of notes, brainstorm ideas for themes, adventures, locations, characters, etc., and do some preliminary concept art. In some cases I might sketch out a map.
Once I have finalized what game I am actually going to run, both the rules and the setting, I start doing some more detailed write-ups of NPCs, locales, and the like. A more detailed map is usually completed before I'll say anything else is done so I have an idea of where to put everyone and everything in the given world.
I can take a long time to plan a campaign - the more time I have the better to be honest. It can take a while to look up historical details or literary references, perfect the artwork, get an idea about how the NPCs think and act, and create and fine all the details. My preference would be a few months but I've done it in as little as three weeks.
What it involves is a lot of reading, writing, sketching both by hand and on the computer, watching TV, Streaming, Film, Animation, and even YouTube videoes of genre related material, going over the rules a dozen times or so to understand the base mechanics and key elements, and other creating a 'cheat sheet' document or two with the finer points of both the mechanics and the major narrative points. Basically quick reference material so I am rarely slowing down the game to look anything up for more than a few seconds.
Once the campaign starts, I spend almost no time on prepping for the single session by comparison. Finding or creating illustrations of all the NPCs, Creatures, smaller maps and that sort of thing take up the most time and yeah, that can be as much as a few days but usually its pretty quick.
My campaign development is very 'front loaded' you might say, so that once the game begins there is very little week to week upkeep I have to worry about. As my buddy William Corpening once said, "If you did the first part (the prep) right, the campaign runs itself".
Well, that's the gist of it. One down and hopefully a lot more to go...?
Oh yeah before I depart, check out this wild thing! It's a Map of the TTRPG Blogosphere!
Created by an awesome dude with too much time on his hands (kidding!) named Elmcat, James of Grognardia explains what it is far better than I can. It just think it's cool that someone went and did this and that ol' Barking Alien is on it, roughly in the same sector of space as some of my personal favorite creators.
Anyway, Later Days,
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Barking Alien
