Bottom-Up Tabletop Prep

I’ve been GMing for years in various systems, and I’ve been subject to burnout, I’ve lost campaigns as session after session gets canceled until the whole thing just collapses in on itself, I’ve given up on GMing for years at a time, and I’ve come back to it again, only to run against the same frustrations time and again. This time though, I’ve come out on top, at least for now, and it’s been because I’ve adopted a different philosophy towards my games.

Today I want to talk about the sorts of problems I run into while preparing and running my games, how the prevailing narrative about tabletop prep on the internet doesn’t land for me (and maybe not for you either), and introduce the philosophy that I’ve taken up to help me overcome these challenges that I’ve decided to dub “Bottom-Up Prep”.

Problems in Prep

Tabletop prep is a very personal process. It’s one about the discovery of the self, how your mind works, and what will help you be in the best situation for the next session that you’ll run for your table.

An average session of prep for me used to look like this:

• Sit down in front of my VTT and my notes
• Read over them to re-familiarize myself with where my players are at narratively
• Decide that the next step for prep was to determine what challenges I wanted to place in front of my players before their next goal
• Sit for an hour trying to think of ideas for what these challenges could be, but come up with nothing, write down nothing
• Get frustrated, just scribble down the next 3-6 ideas that popped into my head
• Pick one of these ideas mostly arbitrarily
• Spend the next hour trying to figure out how to get my players from where they are to the idea that I picked, again pulling a complete blank
• Realize that the session is supposed to start in an hour
• Either cancel the session, or feel bad and not, followed by two to four hours of honestly quite fun improv as a payoff for an insane amount of anxiety/dread around running a session with no prep

For me prep had always been like this, something that was frustrating to no end, not fun, but without it I felt incapable of providing a good experience to my players and would cancel session after session if my party got to an important part of the story but I couldn’t prep anything for it.

The Prep Narrative

In response to my experience preparing for games and never feeling ready and never even really getting my prep off the ground, I’ve consumed a lot of content for preparing. I’ve tried everything from various suggestions in GM Tips, the workflow presented in Never Unprepared, The Lazy Dungeon Master, in various videos by various long-time GMs, and they all tend to follow one general trend.

These prep methods all are built around top-down thinking about your narrative, limited to the context that your players will be focused on in the next session. More or less, this can be broken down into the following steps:

• Identify where the players are narratively and their direction
• Decide on what the party will find in that direction
• Prep specific characters with motivations, or locations with details
• Prep events and consequences that will happen regardless of PC involvement, and think through some consequences if the PCs do choose to get involved

Now which steps are included and what level of detail the prep goes into varies drastically by which prep method is being focused on, with some being sketchy sets of bullet points and others involving creating keyed maps of relevant locations and building character sheets for NPCs, but all of them have the common theme that they start from what you want your PCs to encounter next, and then work backwards from there to fill in the detail, with the primary difference between methods being which and how much of those details are left for improv at the table.

This advice is good, and it works for a lot of people. But for me, this common narrative just led me back to the cycle that I detailed in the last section, and reinforced that there must be something wrong with how I think, not something wrong with how my prep process was working for me. This is what led me away from GMing in the first place, the thought that it must simply not be for me because me and prep didn’t jive.

The next time I ran games, I only ran one-off prebuilt adventures strung together into a campaign with a little improv. While I was running this game though, I discovered something that would change how I see prep, and has led me to running many more games and having more fun with them than I have in a long time. Solo roleplaying games.

Solo Roleplaying

I discovered solo roleplaying as many people did during the global pandemic, and it started for me with the Mythic Gamemaster Emulator by Word Mill Games. I started out playing a game of WOiN using Mythic, and I was hooked.

You see, the way a solo roleplaying game in this style works is that you create characters and then put them into a scene, I made a trio of a human knight, an elf ranger, and a dwarven mage, and used a method to get inspiration for a first scene using Mythic. My party was tracking a group of bandits into the woods to save the daughter of a wealthy merchant from a nearby town. Cliche, I know, but I wanted to start off easy.

From there, you start to form a picture of the scene and the world in your head, the same way you’d imagine things filling in the gaps of what your GM tells you about the world. And when you want to know something specific, you ask a question. In a group game you’d ask the GM, but with Mythic you ask a Fate Question, which gives you a yes/no answer about the world.

Some questions are easy to figure out how you’d interpret them, like “is there a river nearby?” has a very clear meaning if you get a yes or a no. Other questions are a little harder, you have to understand your expectations of the game better. For example, if you ask “is the bandit wielding a sword?” then a “yes” answer is clear enough, but if you get a “no” then you may be tempted to just go through a list of other weapons until you get a “yes.” With Mythic though, the idea is that instead a “no” means you go with the next most expected thing. Maybe that means the bandit has a bow.

Other questions you might not have a clear expectation of, or you have too many expectations. If you’ve encountered some creatures on the road, you might ask “what is the creature like?” and then Discover Meaning, a mechanic where you roll two words off a d100 table of descriptors, where the theme of the table is relevant to the question you’re asking, from “descriptions,” to “character combat actions,” or “spell effects.” If you want the creature to be a standard creature from your bestiary, then you take the results and try to interpret them such that it tells you which monster to run. Or if you’re OK with making something up on the fly, you can simply interpret the results in a way that makes sense to you, and deal with working out the game stats later (and Mythic has mechanics for that too).

On the surface, this style of play seems like it might produce something eclectic and not particularly internally-consistent, because every question you ask is simply answered by dice. However, in practice it produces game worlds with a significant amount of internal consistency and interest, as long as you are careful what questions you ask.

By crafting questions designed to fit into what you already know about the world, you can take great control over the direction of your game, defining the space of possibilities as you go. Each question gives you some answer that then becomes a part of the world and guides how you think of the next question, and may have far-reaching impacts on the implied setting beyond the edges of what you have defined so far.

For example, if your character is sneaking up to a building following up on some lead on a criminal gang and you roll well on a perception and notice someone tailing you, you might assume that this would be someone from the gang that you’re trying to sneak up on, and so you pose that as a question. If the response ends up being “no,” you now have to consider who it might be that’s tailing you. It’s entirely possible that based on context this simple discovery implies that you exist in a corrupt surveillance police state where the cops protect certain gangs from interference because they funnel some of their profits to them to keep the cops in their pockets.

This type of thinking, where one answer to a seemingly small question can have ripples that reshape the entire setting that you are playing in, is prevalent in solo RPGs, and gave me inspiration for a new style of prep as a GM.

Bottom-Up Prep

The fundamental idea that underpins Bottom-Up Prep can be stated as follows:

I could just leave it at that, since the implications of it pretty much cover everything about the philosophy of prep that it stands for, but I want to make some of that explicit, and talk about how it plays out in games.

When I sit down to prep now, the very first step is the same, I try and determine the next thing my players will do. For bottom-up prep though, I only concern myself with the very next thing the players will do. Not their next goal, but their next specific action.

Once I know the next action, say they’re traveling to a far away city, then I think about the possibility space of what might happen. Maybe they make it to the city with nothing interesting happening. Maybe they are waylaid on the road by bandits demanding a toll. Maybe they spot a dragon off in the distance. At this point, any of these might happen. This is also not limited to only what I can think of, it could truly be anything that makes sense for the setting and world I’ve built up so far. This is the sea of possibilities.

Next, I choose one of the possibilities to happen. I might think through a set of possibilities and choose one I find the most interesting, or something I do increasingly often, I might use a random roll table appropriate to the situation to decide for me. Once I have a decision, this is a definition, I have defined an aspect of the world, and this changes reality. Next, I must think about the consequences of that decision in the context of the world I have so far built.

If nothing interesting happens on the way to the city, then perhaps this implies that the road the party is on is well-traveled and safe, maintained as a trade route by the surrounding nations. It means the party will likely encounter other travelers for all or part of their journey, likely will travel quickly, and will have access to taverns at regular intervals. If I know that this is not true, that the area is drowned in chaos and danger, then this implies something else, perhaps that the party is being protected by an unseen benefactor, or unknowingly following in the wake of a great beast that clears out anything dangerous before they get there. Maybe they will meet it at the city gates when they arrive.

If the party is waylaid on the road by bandits demanding a toll, then this means that the location is likely a good one for bandits to set up, traveled reasonably well, enough to support them, but not so well as to have attracted the attention of the army to protect trade interests. Bandits rarely are able to support themselves by farm or trade, otherwise they would not be bandits, so there are likely nearby villages which provide them with food, while the tolls they charge travelers give them the coin for enjoyment and maintaining their weapons. Perhaps there is nearby difficult terrain that give the bandits a defensible location, like a craggy cliff or a dense forest.

If the party spot a dragon in the distance and this is the first they’ve heard of it, then the dragon is likely to either be a newcomer, or to have recently awoken from a long slumber, taking its first opportunity to plunder the landscape. Likely there are nearby locations that provide food, worship, or treasures to the dragon, like shepherd villages, an important seabound shipping line, or a town under its watch. The dragon also needs somewhere to roost, and they often choose mountains, so like as not there is a mountain nearby.

These are the waves that the definitions make, and reality is transformed.

Each of these definitions constrains which possibilities the rest of the world can fall into, but they also often open up new questions that offer points for you to make new definitions. If there are bandits, does the kingdom know that the road is dangerous? Are there other bandits nearby competing for funds? What is the relationship between the people who have taken up banditry and their neighbors? Are they friends and brothers alienated by their inability to do more than scrape by? Or foreign mercenaries cut loose from the army when a treaty was signed and a war ended?

These questions are interesting, and answering them may be fun. If you were playing a solo game, then perhaps answering them would be a good use of your time, after all, worldbuilding is play. But this article is about prepping for group games, and while prep is play, we have limited time for prep, and a session at the end of the week. So instead of answering every interesting question during prep, you should focus on the definitions that you think your players will see. This allows you to pave the world in front of your players as they play, one session at a time.

Expanding the World In Play

Inevitably, your players will get out-of-bounds. They will go somewhere you didn’t plan for, try and see behind the curtain, and confound your best-laid plans. This is OK! It fits quite well in with Bottom-Up style play in fact.

During play, keep a decision log. When your players get beyond the edge of what you have defined in your prep, note down new facts about the world that you’ve defined in play in response to your players. Maybe it’s new locations, information you hadn’t specifically planned for but that your party acquires, or details of improvised locations that you think are important.

When the session is over, go back over your decision log, and compare it to your existing notes. Try to think through the waves that these new definitions make in the possibilities of the world. There’s a chance that these decisions introduce a contradiction, or something that seems like one, with your existing definitions.

First, I recommend that for every contradiction you attempt to think about how it might be resolved without changing any of your definitions. This will usually involve new and unexpected things that were not already a part of your plans, but it may also simply be a twist of something already present. Record the way you decide to resolve the contradiction as a new definition.

If, try as you might, you simply cannot resolve the contradiction, and one of the definitions is from a long time ago or was never directly observed by the players, prefer the definition you’ve made in your decision log.

Now that you have a further new set of definitions, think through their waves as well. This gives you a stronger understanding of the world that you can use when you sit down next to do prep for the next session.

Planning Beyond the Fog of War

Prepping in the way I’ve described allows you the freedom to focus on the details and moment-to-moment experience of your players, but even though I’m often paralyzed by attempting to prepare goals-first, everyone gets inspiration sometimes. You come up with some grand idea of a distant event or person to involve in your game. This doesn’t have to be in opposition to Bottom-Up Prep though.

There are two general ways that I plan things beyond the boundaries of what my players have experienced, and they depend mostly on “how far” they are from the players’ experience.

For things that are relatively nearby, things that may be relevant in the next few sessions, often the collection of definitions around the adventure being played all imply pretty strongly that a specific outcome will happen. Maybe a bunch of seedy things are happening around the players, they’ve witnessed thefts, been tailed a few times, and been denied entry to a shop for a few minutes before someone left in a hurry out a side door. There seems to be a strong implication that there’s a thieves guild, maybe with a protection racket going on. And while each of these events separately don’t necessarily constrain the sea of possibilities very much, taken together they and other situations might imply something as strongly as any definition. In these situations I don’t attempt to do anything particularly special, instead I allow my bias towards something I find interesting

For things further away, I may simply make one or several definitions that explicitly state what I want to be the case. In general I try to keep these definitions sketchy, like “there exists a city of paladins in a pockmarked plain dotted with scrubs and wildfires as minor demons sweep the countryside.” I haven’t decided anything specific about where in the world this is, who specifically runs the place, whether or not the order of paladins is corrupt at its core, or anything else that might come up in play, instead only defining the minimum amount that I need if I want to integrate it into an adventure in the future.

When I have made definitions such as these, I try to keep them in mind when I prep, and sometimes at the table when my players go past my prep. If there is somewhere that is convenient to fit them in, then I make a definition that places the relevant prep in alignment with the adventure, and think through the waves as normal.

In other cases, I may make the definitions more specific, which looks more like top-down prep. For me this is rare, and I won’t speak on it too much, but it can be integrated into a world of bottom-up prep fairly easily by ensuring that these specific definitions are always top-of-mind, with these islands of defined reality in the sea of possibilities shaping the currents and waves around them.

Conclusion

I hope this has been useful to you as an overview of how I have started preparing adventures. Look out in the future for more articles on the subject, I’ve started a new tag for it, and will be publishing examples of using bottom-up-prep, as well as some of the tools I use for it as well as specific processes for certain parts of prep, like defining NPCs, building dungeons and other locations, etc.