I am a new GM of Pathfinder 2e and my Group and I voted Kingmaker P2 to be our first Adventure Path to play through after we finish the Beginner Box (exquisite material!).
Now I have my Obsidian.md vault set up with tons of plugins for managing encounters, creatures and rules and pull the content out of the Kingmaker P2 Adventure Path while trying to keep it structural sound (each chapter on its own, with cross linking between Quests and Characters etc.)
How do you guys do it if you prep a campaign, adventure paths or even just your worldbuilding? What tools do you use and how detailed do you write your notes?
*On a side note: If this post isn’t in the correct place, so I apologise as this community is the only one I can see from my instance (coming from feddit.de) on your instance (pathfinder.social) also I am pretty new to lemmy all together. *
For AP’s I exclusively use FoundryVTT, and buy the official AP modules from Paizo. My current group doesn’t play in person, but I suspect if that were to change I would still want to incorporate Foundry into home games to some extent, even if that just meant showing the map on a TV and ignoring the character sheets & encounter tracker altogether. It’s just too nice having most of the prep done for me already.
I also play quite a bit of Ironsworn: Starforged, and rely quite heavily on Obsidian for that. I don’t use a lot of different plugins personally, but I did see an obsidian ttrpg guide posted the other day.
I too use FoundryVTT exclusively. I have been running converted 1E to 2E adventures so I haven’t been able to take advantage of any of the official modules yet.
Not to sidetrack, but I’ve been interested in getting into solo RPGs. Do you play Ironsworn solo or with a group? I’m considering that or Scarlet Heroes and would love to get your take! Had not thought about Obsidian for tracking (or really thought much at all what I’d use).
Obligatory sorry for the wall of text :)
I’ll preface this by saying I’m hardly an expert in the space, having dabbled with PbtA (Avatar Legends), FitD (BitD) and Mythic GME (all topics I think are related to Ironsworn in some way). I do play Ironsworn: Starforged solo, and have been very thoroughly impressed for the most part. There is definitely an adjustment period, which I think boils down to a few points for me:
- I tended to view ttrpg rules as more of an ironclad “this is how it works, do not deviate from RAW”, and that is something that I feel less crunchy games tend to challenge. There are multiple ways to handle a given situation, and which you will choose will largely come down to personal preference
- I found it difficult to read the book because it was so full of cool, inspiring ideas that it made me want to play ASAP. So anytime something said it was an optional rule, I would often skip it, only to kick myself later for realising it was the perfect solution for some situation I felt the rules were otherwise lacking for (e.g. scenes and non-combat encounters). I also didn’t fully read through a lot of the moves until I had half a dozen sessions under my belt, and things started to flow smoother for me after having done so.
- I find even now I often forget to use the oracles as much as I feel I should be. At first I viewed them as more of a “this is how I generate a planet, or a settlement”. I realise now the core oracles that are more generic are super useful, and I try to ask myself when playing “Do I really like this idea of what happens next, or is it boring to me?”. If it’s boring, the core oracles can usually inspire me to come up with something much cooler.
Overall though I love playing Starforged solo, and I feel that it has really improved the pathfinder game I’m running right now as well. I’d highly recommend any GM or player to mess around with systems like this that really push you into a different way of thinking, and for other forever GM’s out there it’s a great way to get to be a player. I also hope to try out the co-op rules at some point with my current group when someone can’t make it to a session (instead of cancelling)
Thanks so much for the insights! I’m the same when it comes to point one so that’s good to watch out for and same for the other two. I’m fortunate to get to play fairly regularly but I’m realizing I have a stack of books I will never get through with my group if I don’t do it on my own.
P.S. I love your avatar.
Those officals AP FoundryVTT modules are well crafted, its a real joy playing through Meance under Otari with it!
Also yeah I followed that guide and its great for setting up a vault!
I use Obsidian for prep and pen and paper for play. I absolutely adore Obsidian’s versatility and have a crapton of plugins that I all use.
When worldbuilding, I like to start with a loose concept of the world, pitching that to players, and then have them ask questions about the world. I’ll take those questions home and try to find satisfying answers for them until I have a barebones world, detailed enough that my players could feasibly pitch characters in it. From there, I have them all pitch 3 characters so that I find what needs to be more detailed and then I write that bit of the world.
It’s all play and write as needed from there.
I’m only using OneNote atm for all my ttrpg stuff. Feel like I’m missing something by not using Obsidian, is it that much better?
I used OneNote a long time but since I moved over to Foss I no longer can’t use it. It’s a great tool for sure but it lacks the extendibility but it can do canvad and free form texts which is nice. Obsidian is like having a bunch of notes, but you can link and reference between them, have them interact with each other. And, since it’s all flat markdown files, its easy the make them versionable and syncable.
There are some videos out the on how to use Obsidian for Tabletop RPG, or follow the guide link below. It’s super powerful.
Thanks for recommending Obsidian, I’ve been looking for something simple to keep my notes in, and this looks like it’s perfect
Awesome, I’ll give it a try. Thanks for replying with your experience
I’m currently planning to run Abomination Vaults after my group finishes the beginner box. I wanted to keep using my homebrew setting from when I used to run 5e, so I’ve started a document in Notion with conversion notes. Basically any time as I’m reading through AV I notice something that doesn’t jive with my setting, I make a quick note about what I’m changing.
The main change I need to make is the stuff with cosmic entities. My setting is a bit like Eberron, where there’s no real proof of the existence of Gods or religions. Nhimbaloth is probably going to change from being an “Outer God” to being a Lovecraftian Great Old One. Not sure what to do yet with the devils that come up in the second book.
So first off, I run all my games with foundry. So that keeps it easy and I can put long-form stuff in its journals after first drafting in my text editor (sublime text).
Side note: I even use foundry for in person games, I just control it all from my end for folks using pen and paper and it acts as a substitute for physical maps and minis.
For my notes, I use workflowy. This is mostly short form stuff, so as I read through an AP, I’ll jot down anything I need to remember in each section in workflowy. Notes on NPCs and how to portray them go in there too.
As we play, anything I improvise goes in there so I can remain consistent, and major story beats also go in there to track what players have done and where they’re at. Finally, I’ll have some hooks in there for the next few sessions – whenever I think of cool things to throw at my players, I’ll write them in there. Tie-ins with backstories, that sort of thing.
Right now I’m mainly doing adventure paths and I kinda riff off those. If I did a grand homebrew world, I’d probably use something like scrivener or obsidian before throwing things in foundry journals. But for how I run my games right now, workflowy is a great lil organized notepad.
I use a combination of Goodnotes on my iPad to handwrite ideas, and then I get them into one or more “org” mode files in emacs for outlining, tagging, exporting, etc. (like obsidian but open source and more powerful but with a steeper learning curve)
I try to go as detailed as necessary. Which is more of an art than a science. Too detailed and you can’t remember it or it’s clunky to run. Too little, and you’re stuck doing too much improv (yes that can be a thing when you mess up your skeleton of ideas).
Damn you are the first emacs user in the wild I’ve encountered. And yeah I agree that there needs to be some amount of detail to do good and consistent improv.
I even run my law practice TODOs and project management off of org. It’s fantastic. :D
The Plugins make it really versatile; didn’t thought of it as a project management tool tbh.
Pretty cool. Keep lawyering on :D
As you mentioned, I’ve used One Note in the past, but having moved away from Windows systems, I can’t justify messing with the web-based version. I’ve used Evernote in the past, as well, but I’m also looking for a solution. I’ve seen Obsidian come up recently, for other topics, and so I’ve got it installed but haven’t actually played with it any.
I can say that Google Drive/Docs is a really clunky way to do it, but works in a pinch. I don’t think I’d ever try doing that again unless they added features and/or plugins that really improved the experience.
Additionally, I mostly run PFS scenarios, and the way that I prep those is with highlighters. I print out a copy of the scenario, yellow highlighting is for mechanics/DCs, pink highlighting is for story, setting, and worldbuilding (because a lot of it gets left out of the canned blurbs that they hand you to read to the players), and orange is used for optional/conditional things. In the margins I make extra notes like if a check is secret, or if I need to reference some stats from a different page, also reminders for exploration activities and hero points. On the stat blocks, I highlight the main mechanics, but also write in what actions the NPC will perform on their first turn (if it’s complex), or other notes about how an encounter is supposed to work.
I know that an AP is going to be an entirely different beast than running a PFS scenario, but hopefully you can get some ideas that are helpful out of that. I’m also looking to get back into running APs soon, and I’m considering solely using Foundry VTT for it.
