Dudes,

So i've been GMing for a while now but i dont really consider myself to be that advanced of a GM. I tend to GM because the others want to play or have no confidence to lead the adventure. So most of what i know is self learned or read on the web.

My question centers around how you guys run adventures when using a scenario or adevnture book. Specifically, how much do you read from the book when running the adventure? Do you paraphrase content or read directly skipping over the GM only parts? It seems like adventure books are written as if to be read to the players but there are many GM only tid-bits in there to trip you up from just reading. Obviously the spoken text sections are read alowd but what about the other text content?

I have been paraphrasing and trying to memorize adventures from books and seem to get myself lost quite often and would love some tips for running the adventures straight form the books. I know this could lead to being a little dry if done improperly but thats why i'm asking for some tips =). In the paraphrasing method i seem to miss important details and descriptions which can lead to a lack of imersion for the PCs so this inquiry is geared to to finding a way to deliver the most robust content to the PCs while eliviating some of the stress of the adventure on me as a GM.

I appriciate your feedback!

Game on,

Gitzman

I never read anything out loud from the adventure books at all, and I always add a lot pf sub-plot, character progression and plain impovistaion to each scene to flesh the world out and have fun. But that is just my style. I usually read the adventure module/text thouroghly, and make a few notes for each scene or lokation. Usually, I jot down a few bulletpoints for each location and character, like so:

Nighttime cemetary

• Dark, misty, creepy. Main entrance: a shack, light in window.
• Clinging, sweet stink of decay, mildew. "Cool-check" for stress.
• Uncempt. Crumbling structures, owergrown with grass, creeper and toadstools. Slippery footing.
• Cracked and crooked toombstones - suitable for cover.
• Looming family crypts, maze-like layout. + 2 challenge observation.

NPCs and mobs

• 5 grave robbers - NE corner by opened grave. Vary, hostile.
• 1 grounds keeper - in shack by entrance. Dis-missive, non-combattant.
• 4 watchman - alerted on tic 5 of combat. Mistakes PC's for graverobbers.
• Lashworm - entrance to Brünner family crypt. Se "The Crypt" for details.

Nothing of this I read out. But I might improvize a verbal description when I glance at my bullet points as the players approach the cemertary. They're there to "investigate" the Brünner crypt, in which one of the coffins lies a rather valuable heirloom which was once buried with a deceased forefather of the today impowerished Brünners. Of course, the crypt is placed under magical protection, and shunned by local graverobbers, who are tilling this rich soil for bodies to sell to medicine students. The cemetary lies in a once-rich, no decrepit part of town.

OK, so I say somthing like this to my players, and try to get some feedback from them:

ME: OK, so you wait for nightfall before setting out for the cemetary, right?
P1: Yeah, we don't want to be seen. Shady business, this.
ME: You guys are shadily walking down the street, slitting from shadow to shadow like the shady bunch of dodgy guys you are.This part of town is pretty dark, looks like most of the houses here are emty. There are posts for street lamps, but none of the laps are lit. Do you use a light source?
P2: Yes! I have a storm lantern, it says so here on my sheet.
ME: Do you light it?
P1: Wait 'till we reach the cemetary.
P2: I light it when we get to the cemetary.
ME: OK, pass a group of pfour patrolling watchmen on the way there. They scowl at you, but dont say anything. Do you hail them.
P1: No, we just skuulk by. In the hadows.
ME: You skulk shadily by them. They eye you suspiciouslym, but seems to be set on another purpose. You reach the cemetary without further incident. It's... ah... a creepy mist hangs in the air, swirling about you as you walk. Like in a night scene in an old hammer horror movie, you know the kind. There's a small shack by the entrance to the cemetary, there's light in the shack's single window. Hwat do you do.
P2: I light my storm lantern!
P1: I make an observation check.
ME: GO ahead. Add two challenge dice, it's dark and misty.
P1: I made it.... two boons.
ME: You hear someone rustling about in the shack. The cemetary is dark and decrepit, the toombstones staning askance, several have fallen over. The crypts are crumbling, and wet grass and other plants seems to grow everywhere. In short, it's a pretty creepy place - so you all have to test for stress against willpower. Add two challenge dice.
P1: I made it.
P2: Oops - i did'nt.
ME: You can hear some muffled shounds from dwwp within the cemetary. Probably shuffling footsteps. Maybe bones grating on crumbling stone. You don't really want to go in there. Here's a stress token for you.
P1: Hey, I made my chack, do I hear the same stuff?
ME: No, you just hear someone digging. That's till pretty strange tho - graves are usually dug in the daytime.
P1: Unless you're a grave robber - like we are!
ME: Indeed. So what do you do now?

And so on. I could have provided an example for a character description too, but I found out that his post was long enough already.

Gitz,

I've been GMing since 81 (pretty much non-stop since I learned the D&D game..with breaks only to hone my DMing skills running games under other GM's).

In running games, I always prefer if there's both Read Aloud and GM's text, even though I don't always read all the Read-Aloud text. I just got used to the ease of running convention scenarios: RPGA Call of Cthulhu's were my favorite, followed closely behind by the Classics (those were the ones with the-pregen characters which had "attitudes towards other PC's." The Living Greyhawk scenarios were easy to run because I'd set all my D*D home campaigns in Greyhawk, so I could come up with "stuff" on the spot. Older WFRP scenarios haven't been as easy to run as they formatting was not as evolved as other systems and they require a more comprehensive approach to knowing what's going on. That's thankfully changed over the past few years, but I still sit down and write up an outline seperate from the actual scenario if there's too little "volume editing." Otherwise, I've just found that players will follow your mood. If you're excited about it, they get excited.

People'd say "Jay, how do you get so into your games?"

1. Get INTO your game's background. Read the scenario and draw something from real life/the movies/someting you recently watched on TV. This will help you create atmosphere.

2. Make written notes in the margins of the scenario: a) which voice you'll use, b) crucial clues should be underlined, c) "describe more here", d) x-out text that's irrelevant such as room size descriptions and instead put in a MacGuffin: "THere's a big room with about 100 people..there's a guy in a blue cape and a guy in a red cape who seem to be signalling each other at the masquerade."

3. Stand up, lean-in. Reading the text from the scenario while quietly sitting behind a GM's screen does NOTHING to draw players in.

4. After you read yoru scenario, look at your PLAYER CHARACTER ABILITY INVENTORY and see if there's a way to make each character sine in each situation. If you've bo a COMBAT COMING UP, FIGURE OUT A WAY FOR THE aGITATOR TO PARTICIPATE OTHER THAN SITTING THER EBORED OUT OF HIS MIND FIRING A X-BOW (sorry, I left the caps lock on). If there's an investigation scene, find a way to get the troll slayer involved..the main way is throw in another troll slayer who know's something.

Anyways, to answer your question, I'd say how much I read from a scenario is directly proportional to how much I bothered to read of it and how many notes I made in the margins. if I made notes then I typically have it down. If not, then I'm stuck reading boxed text.

.

Hey there!

When preparing for running a pre-written adventure, I usually read through it, to get a hang of the story itself. Since Im a huge soundtrack-geek, I usually end up, deviding the adventure into scenes and thinking about a music-track, that would fit the mood of each scene. When Im done, I have a soundtrack-compilation of renamed tracks (like "01 - Entering the enchanted forest-Loop" or "09 - Barfight at the Red Herring Inn"), which helps me keep track of the general direction of the adventure. It also helps to mark out the key-events in the adventure - the scenes that NEED to happen to advance the story - to get a sense of where you want your PCs to go. If I look at the "Mistaken Identity"-Adventure of the "Enemy within"-Campaign, I would summarize it like this:

CAUTION! This may contain spoilers!!!

- PCs on their way to Altdorf

- Ambush on the road / Finding Kastor Lieberung and his inheritance

- Arriving in Altdorf / Cultist Encounter / Glimpse of Bounty Hunter

- Meeting the boatman

- Being followed by Cultists / Bounty Hunter kills Cultists

- To Weissbrück / Searching for the Bounty Hunter

- Burning Boat / Showdown

Every other scene (like the gambler in the coachhouse) is nice for flavor and offers opportunities for roleplaying, but rather unimportant for the progress of the story.

I usually write up some general NPCs with some notes on behaviour and quirks ("french accent, constantly drunk, lying bastard, scratches his scar when lying"), which help me improvise more or less random encounters.

I never read anything from the books, because it always feels like killing the players immersion.

I use similar approach like Olemak. It gives freedom for the players to approach each scene differently and find their way of dealing with it.

But I guess more experienced you become more dynamic approach you can take. If it is ok to your group and works better for you then you may have more pre-written approach to the story. While this may remove some player freedom it creates usually more detailed story elements.

I was GMing in late 80s and early 90s and now again and I've found the best way to write and manage an adventure on a laptop in powerpoint. Powerpoint is great for writing short notes of each location / character / scene and re-organizing them. Better than Word at least.

making notes like Olemak mentions is a great way of building up descriptions even for pre-written adventures. By converting the stock read out descriptions into a set of bullet points, when you come to describing things during game, you'll use the bullet points to create a description in your own words rather than the original writer of the scenario.

This has an added bonus of not only making you feel a bit more comfortable in your descriptions, but generally making the descriptions more memorable for the players (a thought out description by a GM tends to be better than a rote read description, IMO). It also makes it less obvious when the PCs have gone off track a bit and you are ad libbing, because both descriptions (the on track one and the off piste one) still have your mark on them.

I do this kind of bullet point descriptions EVEN if the adventure is of my own making; I never write out long passages for read out to the players, it just doesn't work for me.

The expection to that rule is occassionally it will be done as an intro, which i really just do for a bit of nostaglia as it reminds me of the old DnD adventure modules, which always had a big intro write up to introduce the players to the dungeon and how they got there and why they are there and what they have to do now they are there!

It only really works for me as an intro for new PCs or as a re-intro following a large amount of in game down time..