Falling into a Prep Rabbit-hole
THE QUIET FUN OF THE HOBBY
Before I get into writing about the prep rabbit-hole I’ve been tumbling down giddily for the past few weeks/months first a bit of background: I’m currently running The Enemy Within campaign for WFRP 4E on a bi-weekly basis for one of my regular groups (session write-ups are available here). We’ve just started the third book Power Behind the Throne and—thanks to some excellent tips and suggestions from the Ill Met by Morrslieb and Awesome Lies blogs—I knew that the book took place in Middenheim during a festival and that it involved tracking a lot of NPCs and who is at what events during which time of day, and so on.
Essentially there is some chaos-tomfoolery afoot ,seeking to destablise the city and the PCs need to find out who is behind and then rally support from influential NPCs to help resolve it.
Quiet Fun
Now I’ve always been a bit of a prepper; don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly capable of running a one-shot or even a campaign with minimal prep and I love Return of the Lazy DM by Mike Shea, so I know you don’t need loads of prep to have a great game. However, I quite enjoy the prepping, if I’ve got time then I’m quite happy firing up my copy of Obsidian Notes and working away on my session plans, NPC notes, etc.
I believe one of my regular gaming amigos Johannes Paavola put it best when we were testing out some stuff recently for the WFRP game, that we both enjoy the “quiet fun” parts of roleplaying where you’re just working away at the creative coal-face making something out of nothing. It’s certainly true that the game is most definitely the main point of all this, but I agree that there is a certain satisfaction to having your notes all done and ordered.
Tracking Events
The festival in Power Behind the Throne takes place over a week, and there are multiple events taking place at different times of the day, all with different NPCs attending them. After some debating I decided that I would make each individual event a note, each would need the following information:
Name of event
Date it takes place
Day it takes place
Time it takes place
Location
Attendees
I decided to set these up as YAML front-matter in each of these notes, also adding in a timeslot variable to help ensure the data was sorted correctly, at this point I also decided to streamline the times to morning, afternoon and evening.
This left me with YAML that looked like this:
---
title: Archery Tournament
fictional_date: 2512-05-01
day: Wellentag
timeslot: 2
time: Afternoon
location: Square of Martials
attendees:
- Maximillian von Genscher
- Siegfried Prunkvoll
- Allavandrel Fanmaris
---
In the actual note itself I decided to put in the name, date, location and time along with the following dataview query:
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID
map(sort(attendees), (a) => "<span style='white-space: nowrap;'>[[" + a + "]]</span>") as "Attendees"
FROM "ZZ Events"
WHERE file.name = this.file.name
```
This took me a while to work out but essentially it produces a list of the attendees for the noted event, automatically transforming the names of the attendees into note links that can be clicked on, resulting in the following:
I then decided that—since a number of events occur multiple times—that I didn’t want to write out the description/rules multiple times, so I made a single separate note with the description of each event and linked it:
![[Archery Info]]
This resulted in a final event note looking something like this:
There are probably better ways of doing this, but I’d definitely place myself firmly in the “enthusiastic amateur” category when it comes to Obsidian Notes and didn’t want to go too crazy (I realise the irony of stating that in this post) with custom plug-ins and the like.
With this done I made a few notes with dataview queries that displayed the following:
Here’s what one of these notes looks like:
I then turned my attention to NPC notes, I’d already decided that I wanted to create NPC notes specifically for the purposes of this festival since keeping them seperate would make things a bit easier, besides I could always copy them into normal NPC notes if they became important after the events of Power Behind the Throne.
Initially I went for a simple NPC note that looked like this:
Using a fairly simple dataview query to create the list of events attending by the NPC:
```dataview
TABLE WITHOUT ID file.link as "Event", day+" "+time AS "WHEN", location
FROM "ZZ Events"
WHERE contains(attendees, this.file.name)
SORT timeslot ASC
SORT fictional_date ASC
```
However—as I was reading the book more throughly—I decided that I wanted to include how the NPCs felt about each other, so I decided to use YAML frontmatter to represent this, effectively each NPC notes having something similar to the following:
name: "[[Albrecht Helseher]]<br>(High Wizard)"
relationships:
- name: "[[Josef Sparsam]]<br>(Graf’s Chancellor)"
type: "Suspect him of being behind the Scroll Tax.<br><br>Helsher regards him as clever but detahced.<br><br>Janna is still seething about his unwelcome advance."
- name: "[[Dieter Schmiedehammer]]<br>(Graf’s Champion)"
type: "No dealings with him (Janna is aware of his engagement to Kirsten Jung)."
I was then able to include a dataview query on each NPC note to display their relationships:
```dataview
table without ID relationships.name as "NPC", relationships.type as "Relationship Type"
where file.name = this.file.name
flatten relationships
```
Resulting in an NPC note that looks like this:
So—after numerous weeks and months—of typing away, I now have pretty much everything I need to track the NPCs and various events, I’ve also created VTT tokens and backgrounds with event lists to help the PCs keep track of what is going on and where. Hopefully I’m in a good place to start running it, since our next session sees the start of the festival.
Do you need all of this sort of prep to run the game? Almost definitely not, but I had the time, found it interesting and it makes me feel more comfortable going into the session, so I’m pretty happy that I fell down the “quiet fun” rabbit-hole all in all.
Very cool John!