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.
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.
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
