How I Prep (Xyntillan Campaign)

During each of the last five years, I have run forty or more RPG sessions, peaking at 119 last year, in 2024. I have just hit my 40th refereeing for this year, and was supposed to be running the 50th--and maybe ultimate--session of a "Castle Xyntillan" campaign today, but that has been postponed by real-world events for two of the players. To fill what had been reserved gaming time I've joined Weird Writer's prep description challenge, as announced on the rainbOSR Discord server.

Prep as Player

Campaign prep effectively started two years ago, even if I didn't know it at the time. I was scouring the Roll20 game offerings that were not Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, and by amazing luck, found an OSE Advanced Fantasy  "Castle Xyntillan" (CX, henceforth) open table that was just about to start. The GM was a Swede living down under, who ran for strangers an east-coast USA Friday night game from his own Saturday morning. As soon as the PCs stepped into the Castle, and the GM started impersonating the first Malévol family member, I knew I wanted to stick around for the campaign.

The other two players both lost characters that first night, and my initial PC died during the second session. My second character, and ultimate "main," Uctred the Chicken Priest (4 hp at 4th level), was there at the end. Over twenty players joined the table over the course of the campaign. Thirteen PCs perished, as did five retainers, and something like five dozen hirelings. I attended 39 of the 47 total sessions, including once playing from Seoul at 7 am, because I hated missing the weekly so much. I got deeply into the stories that our Company created and into uncovering the mysteries of the Castle. This was my initial prep for running CX. If possible, if I ever run another kilo- or mega-dungeon, I'd very much like to play through the adventure first. This gives one a familiarity with the material which, no matter how limited it is by a player's perspective, makes running such a complex entity easier.

Prep Prior to the Campaign

When that CX campaign concluded, and with my online DCC open table ("East Dredges") Whimdark campaign faltering (19 sessions before petering out), I sent out invites to sixteen persons to gauge interest in a focused kilo-dungeon campaign. A few players declined, a couple never answered, but ten expressed at least some interest. (Seven ultimately played.) I began a furious period of preparation as a GM. Because I am currently a high school teacher, one of my children is grown, and the other is old enough to be largely self-sufficient, I had a substantial amount of free time during the summer.

To prepare, I read the CX book, of course. Even being well-acquainted with more than half the dungeon, I had some misconceptions from the a player's point of view. I also read the online campaign reports by A Distant Chime, Streets and Spores, and especially Vague Countries, largely focusing on the advice about running. My GM had taken the "historical Europe, western Alps, 1525 CE" setting from Vague Countries, and I followed suit. With this in mind--I was once a historian, teaching mostly collegiate world history, but not a Europeanist--I did some very date-specific world-building research for events of 1525 that might be newsworthy enough to reach PC ears.

My GM had used a partial, human only OSE Advanced Fantasy class list, and I expanded it to include human "cognates" of some of the demi-human classes ("miner" for dwarf, e.g.), especially that I might have streamlined "multi-class" choices (the elf and half-orc cognates for F/M-U and F/T). This idea I took directly from the houserules of "Fish," who was already running his own Xyntillan Discord (that campaign seemed to have faltered in late 2024). I did not include the Gnome, Half-Elf, or underdark "races" in the choices, but offered to create an M-U/T if anyone desired such a thing. No one did. I have always been dissatisfied with some of the B/X ruleset, so I wrote my own house rules that created a few more variants for PC leveling, added some LotFP-ish combat options, improved to-hit chances, reduced saving throws to one number a la Swords & Wizardry, changed damage rolls to reflect class HD like in Dungeon World, stole the spell channeling idea from Greg Gillespie's ruleset, adapted the Tales of Argosa crossbow rules, wrote my own firearms rules, deployed the Carcass Crawler thief skills and slot encumbrance rules, and replaced initiative entirely with a Mothership-esque system. I also began re-writing magic-user research and death and dying rules, the latter to be a little more forgiving, though I was never satisfied with what I produced and sometimes forgot them during play. I rewrote from scratch the OSE equipment price list, using Grain into Gold as guidance, altering a few costs to make cost-benefit analyses produce no single best option. I adopted the silver standard and put all prices in sp (or denier).

I half-wrote and discarded two massive background roll lists (social class, wealth, and starting equipment), and finally settled on a third version that split out social class/beginning wealth, and had 19 entries for most classes' beginning gear. Most of the cool ideas were taken from Gus L.'s starting equipment, Nobboc's "Get Your Gear" from the first Knock! anthology (p. 25), some online lists that I had curated earlier into my own for short-shots and may be lost to time and entropy, and Macchiato Monsters stuff, but I added some historically-specific weapons and armor and instruments for bards. I had only one bard who rolled a kora. PC social class was to be determined by a standard 2d6 table with modifiers linked to chosen character class (e.g., paladins had very low odds to come from the peasantry). I also wrote two hundred entries (dividing into starting and replacement) for a rumor table, as the module only came with thirty-six, not near enough. I sequestered all the false rumors into a separate small table for a liar source, or rewrote them to have a kernel of truth. Many of the new rumors were oblique clues to dungeon challenges that had no foreshadowing or tells written into the module, and were plausibly something that might be repeated outside of Xyntillan. I selected (from European historical records) a few hundred common names from the early modern period, a majority French, Italian, German, and English, but also Turkish, Arabic, Slavic, Latin, Scandinavian, and non-Slavic Balkan, and arranged them in alphabetical order for military hireling names. I selected several dozen names that all started with 'J' to be the names of porters. (When the party started hiring two per expedition, I always gave the pair similar monikers, like Jonah and Jonas.)

The longest portion of campaign preparation was getting the VTT (Roll20) materials ready. Although I could've used the very plain but perfectly serviceable maps that come with the adventure (VTT-ready, even), I prefer to let some of the image do my room description for me in most cases, so I created almost all of the maps I would need in Inkarnate. Taking weeks, this was pretty painstaking and divided between creating the image and the quicker application of features (lighting, walls, doors, a few other interactive objects) to the uploaded electronic map. (Someone else uploaded a Dungeondraft map of the whole Castle about 40 sessions in. Much of their map is better than mine, but some parts are not.) For the more generic wilderness maps I uploaded mostly "battle maps" from an artist whose Patreon I had joined, to give the region a singular appearance. I didn't finish the outdoor map before I started the campaign, so I began with Glasgow Spider's colorized map, replacing it in the first two months. I also sketched a vertical profile of the south and west faces of the Castle, because the illustration in the module does not match the structure, and I didn't want to have to explain that. When a player rolled an acrobat for his first character, I found and uploaded Castle Librarian's rooftop map of CX. I melded together some images, informational text and downtime procedures, and an old map to represent Tours and the starting (and ending) page for each session.

It looks better and spookier, with VTT lighting, I swear

Using Roll Advantage's Token Stamp 2, I made and uploaded tokens for most of the Castle's monsters, many of them taken from 16th-century (or thereabouts) woodcuts, plus some curated by A Groats-Worth of Grotesques, and created color tokens for all sixty (well, fifty-nine, there is a set of twins) of the Malévols, the family that rules CX. Scouring lots of black-and-white online fantasy art, I manufactured about one hundred tokens from black and white images for players to pick for their PCs. I made Roll20 OSE "monster sheets" for some of the Malévol family, all of the standard random encounter monsters, and some of the locational monsters (but not all, because this is a very tedious process, even considering how little time each takes). Someone had created AI'd images of the Malévol portraits, so I lazily laid those into the GM layer of the map in the places where the paintings hung, even though many were truly awful. I searched out and added at least forty medieval or early modern painting and fresco images to place in the dungeon's empty rooms, to provide clues about nearby chambers and add a little more flavor. I made a few (pretty crummy) medieval mash-ups to represent frescoes described in the module. For the three libraries I wrote a total of five tables of book titles (about half real historical works) that the players could roll on if they consumed time searching. I used a number of historical songs, poems, and epics (including Chanson de Roland), essays (including Martin Luther's), proclamations ("The Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants), and guidebooks, to flesh out certain documents found in the Castle, foreshadow certain situations, or to further immerse the campaign in the history.

I generated spreadsheets to track party encumbrance, hireling stats, random encounters, and the evolving relationship between the party and the Malévols. I pre-rolled the first twenty-five random encounters, so I would have them ready to "place on the table" quickly. I got 3d6DTL's Feats of Exploration spreadsheet, and used a few of the rewards (lore use, rumor confirmations, and room searches) to expand XP beyond just treasure recovery (I did not use monster kills for XP). I was given the between-session generator spreadsheet by King Kodok, although I ended up rolling almost everything by hand, with the exception of individual hirelings's qualities. I created a carousing table that was basically two hundred entries long (some with subtables), mostly borrowed from elsewhere, but some of my own, and some rewritten to fit the Xyntillan milieu.

I intended on creating ambient playlists in Spotify that would be specific to Xyntillan, but mostly I just recycled my already-created standard D&D background playlists (ones with titles like, "Suspense," "Dread," and "Unholy Combat"). I did create a folk-songs-about-lost-love playlist and a bombastic and corny Halloween playlist to start the campaign, which led with Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I added a few others' playlists to the folder, too, like the soundtrack to Under the Skin and ones named "H.R. Giger/Biopunk/Organic" and "Diablo Atmospheric."

Session-Day Before Prep

Since the play was tied to a real-world calendar and setting, I started each session with a pertinent Catholic Saint's feast or death day. Here I used real-world stories and myths which I had to look up. Mostly I just picked Saints whose lives and especially martyrdoms jibed thematically with Xyntillan. If a Saint celebrated on adventure day was mauled by dogs, you better believe that was who was being celebrated in Tours as the PCs left base. I learned quite a bit about the awesome and gruesome petty gods of Catholicism (I grew up in a very anodyne Protestant denomination). About every other session, the opening would also describe 2-3 appropriate European (or very occasionally American or Indian Ocean) historical events, sometimes loosely tied to goings-on at the Castle. 

I arranged all my necessary windows (about fifteen of them, including a pdf of the module) on my computer screen. I placed a paper time tracker and random monster pre-rolled hp by HD tracker and the Castle Xyntillan volume on my desk, with a box of d6s especially to roll "off screen" (so I didn't have to do the extra typing steps of turning rolls in the VTT to whispers). OSE Advanced sat on a nearby shelf, mainly for spell reference. I took running notes in a Google document. 

Session-Day After-Session Prep

Usually, right after the session ended, I would compile a "stats recap." This included fictitious participants, both PC and NPC, a list of kills and party casualties, a tally of resources used and treasure collected, an XP-tracking, broken down by type, and list of rumors heard. In my East Dredges campaign I had assigned this duty to rotating players, but that strategy required a lot of reminder emails and some gaps in information, so I just did it myself during this go round. I would also update the sheets: fresh rumors would fill learned-rumor slots in the spreadsheet; mercenary availability would be adjusted; the character-Malévol relationship tracker would be advanced. Then I would roll all the variable situations that Gabor Lux had set up in the base town, which were based on x-in-6 odds: Would one rumormonger lie to this expedition? Would a potion or two be available at the apothecary? Would the tavern be haunted by a ghost? What curios would show up at the antique shop? Would a passer-by be looking for a legendary treasure? Then I would update my at-the-Castle events sheet, nearly always determined by die roll: Would bodies be outside when the party next arrived? Would the bandits be waiting in ambush? How many ravens would be roosting? When the party substantially changed the ground situation or showed particular interest, new x-in-6 events were added and then rolled every week: Would one of the flying CX denizens be aloft during the party approach? Would the shambling mound they freed and fled be wandering a courtyard? Would a family ambush be set up to repel the party at entrance A, B, or C? Any downtime activities that hadn't been resolved were usually sorted out during this period.

Partway through the campaign, I would add a downtime summary page, arranged by PC. Because I am rarely good at improvising dialog, I added a sheet of quips for the more talkative Malévols, with Charles' selections being taken from Marx's writings, Maltricia's from Buffy's Darla, and the Beast's from, well, Beauty and the Beast. This required a bit of research. Initially, I added comments on recent party doings in the Castle to the rumors spreadsheet, but this only rarely produced timely feedback. The characters' actions were then added to short tables that would produce comments by the loquacious undead nobility who roamed CX's floors. As the party got more powerful, a separate magic item tracker was added. When one of the hirelings returned as a vampire, thanks to a morale failure and Table of Terror roll, a little time was needed to plot his ongoing depredations, which the players finally sought to end once they interfered with their carousing XP. For a while I rolled for restocking, and wrote random table replacements for Malévols killed by the party, like a mad hatter and a keeper of the frog, but neither was particularly fruitful, and I abandoned those efforts. A PC energy-drained by a wight was added to the random encounter table, too.

Mid-Week Prep

Usually I would finish the after-prep within an hour of completing the session, with one exception: the recap. That usually took at least four hours during the weekdays between sessions, the prose averaging a bit over 2000 words per session. Since it was an open table, I wanted to be sure everyone had access to all of the campaign events. The GM's recaps when I had been a player were quite important to me when I missed sessions.  

Other Preparations and the Future

The Xyntillan campaign is the most elaborate adaptation I have ever done, and also the most systematic preparation scheme. I will probably mimic some of the procedures I developed here in my future online campaigns, as the routine felt really good for organizing large amounts of information, and having it ready during play. My face-to-face games are a little more loosely prepared, although I spend many hours on miniature painting.

So ... anyone inviting to an Ave Nox, Arden Vul, or Blades of Gixa campaign?

VTT Landing / Downtime Page