You’re making a homemade epic TTRPG campaign. That’s awesome! Before you sit down for your players to talk about the game, this is a good time to start planning for Session 1. Let’s talk about how to do this.

Yes, I call this preparing for session 1 but it’s really preparing me for session 0.

Goal Setting

Ok, what do you want to get out of your first session? For me, I want to set the tone and get my players excited to interact with this world. That means I’ve got to know what kind of tone I want. Did I figure it out when brainstorming my theme? How much of my setting should I give them? After all, I may not have a lot to go off of when I did my kingdom building. My goals aren’t so important, but I encourage you to think about what your goals of the first session are. Here’s what I want to accomplish in my first session.

• Introduce the player characters
• Have an action sequence (probably a combat session)
• Give them some immersion in the world

The Intro Scene

I try to think of my TTRPG sessions as a series of scenes. I find it helps to narrate them and I like to think of it in three parts

• Introduce the scene
• Accomplish one main thing
• Exit the scene

When I say the “scene” it doesn’t have to be a different physical place. Scene changes can just mean a shift in what’s happening. When you’re watching a TV show and there’s a whole conversation happening but a new character walks on set, you’re shifting scenes. The same can happen in your tabletop game.

One of the awkward parts of starting a new campaign is getting the group together. I’m going to bypass that entire part and start with them in media res. We will jump immediately to the action (my goal #2). If we need to, we can always do a *record scratch* “Hey, how did we get here?” scene a little later.

This scene composition is straightforward. I am going to describe a peaceful scene that they’re experiencing, and in a quick single sentence bring it to the point of conflict where they have to act. The scene ends narrating the remaining foes either slain or running away. To add a little drama, I’ll probably shift the focus of the scene exit to some NPC that was impacted by the combat encounter even if they didn’t participate.

Organizing your notes

There are a ton of tools out there for organizing campaign notes. The one I use is called Obsidian. It’s free for personal use and I love the way it makes cross referencing easy, which is helpful if you have a complicated web of connections.

Whatever tool you use, I highly recommend spending a little time and setting up templates. Templates are my not-so secret weapon of writing campaign notes. Just like in my theme post, writing session notes can be very intimidating when I sit down and see a blank page. Instead I have a template that I want to use. This does a few things

• Jumpstart the creative process
• Helps me remember things I often forget
• Helps remove creative block

Here’s one that I use for creating locations. I just throw this file into Obsidian Vault under a folder called Templates. Then I turn on the template feature in the vault settings and point it to that folder.

--
aliases: []
title: Evocative Name
tags: [location]
---

## General Description
- Size
- Lighting
    -     What type of source is it coming from (torches/sunlight/magic/braziers/etc), and how many sources are there?
    -     How bright (darkness, dim light, comfortable, painfully bright)?
    -     Is the light steady or flickering?
- Senses
    - Sight
        - Use the aspects below
    - Sound
        -     What sounds are there, if any?
        -     Is there a single noise or is it, rather, a cacophony coming from multiple sources?
        -     How loud are the sounds?
        -     Is there an obvious source?
        -     If not, then what direction are the sounds coming from?
    - Feel
        - The ground has a spring to it, making your steps more careful as you move forward.
        - You feel a gust of wind pushing from deeper within the cavern.
        - As you run your hand over the castle wall, you feel the fine sand between your fingers indicating it has not been disturbed for a very long time.
    - Smell / Taste
        - Acrid chemicals burning your nostrils
        - Sweet flowers and fresh air
        - Stale beer and urine
- Events
    - Are there any living creatures or NPCs?
    - The easiest way to include an event is by having the NPC/creature interacting with the environment in some manner. It could be people playing cards in the corner or a goblin king looking over his treasure horde.
    - If not, are there any inanimate objects doing anything?
    - This could be natural features (waterfalls cascading), or handmade object (clock chiming, gears mechanically shifting around)
- Mood
    - You can’t help but feel a sense of urgency in the air.
    - Upon entering the new room, a wave of relaxation and calmness rushes over you.
    - As you notice the decomposing remains in the corner, a cold shiver runs up your spine.

## Aspects
- something to describe to players they might interact with
- functional, familiar, fantastic
- aspect

## Key Info
- scenes this was used in during the campaign
- notable things that have/will happen
- these you don't read to the player

Something I like about this template is that I’ve already filled in examples of how I want it to be. When I imagine the scene and I look at the list, it’s easier to correct something than to write from scratch. So I’ll look at the list and say, “No it doesn’t smell acrid, it smells like pine trees in the fall.”

Full disclosure: I often forget to describe smells, so I focus on getting them right in my notes.

My Intro Scene

Ok, so I’ve gotten my campaign files set up in my note editor and I’ve got a scene template. Now I need to go back to brainstorming. Since I want to jump into combat, there are all kinds of ways to do that. But I also realized that I wanted to put my players into a situation where they don’t have a lot of resources they can fall back on. So I decided to put them on the road.

If they’re on the road, where are they going? I was recently reminded on the Roll For Topic podcast about how much fun it is to have a festival in your game. This is also a great way to introduce my players to the setting and to set them up for their next part of the adventure. Here, I’m addressing another thing that came up in my campaign planning: My players always want at least 1-2 clear directions they can go. They don’t like the open ended “go anywhere, do anything” concept.

Ok, so I’m going to start throwing out some city names. If you have trouble, I often go to Fantasy Name Generator and click it a few times until I see something I like.

We’re on the road to _____ to go to the festival of ______ when we get ambushed by ______. We have the additional complication to the battle of ______.

There’s my first scene! All I need is some details.

The villain is the hero of their own story

Why do these thugs attack our party? At first I was going to make it a random attack, but then I started to think about what’s going to come next. At some point after or during the festival, the group is going to be hired to solve some minor mystery because my players have requested more mysteries. So I thought I could tie this combat into that mystery.

One of the things I wanted to do was show human ingenuity being a destabilizing force in this fantasy land. I am going to have a woman named Molly who used to be some middle level management at Yankee Candle or something like that back on Earth. She gets to Tempus and realizes she has a unique skill set and sets up shop. Over the course of the next 15 years she dominates the potions market by recognizing that they key to success is logistics and product consistency. She is even forcing the local apothecaries out of business because they cannot compete. I came up with this idea because I was trying to think about the theme of individual power vs collective right (now I’m doing it at two scales: national level and city level).

Make it fun: I’ll have the players go into one of her shops and I will lean heavily into it being just like going into Yankee Candle or similar. I will use the fact that every one of my players knows that experience. I’ll even have a young dwarf woman who works on commission try to repeatedly upsell them on additional things they don’t need. Borrowing from the player’s experience to make the game more immersive is a great trick.

So Molly will be in some ways a villain. Then I thought about how the locals she’s forcing out of business will respond and it all clicked. Her success is through setting up logistics to get consistent product to market. Those families will try to disrupt her business. This ambush on the road is because the thugs believe their caravan might be hauling goods for Molly.

Molly may be a bad person, but she hasn’t actually done anything wrong that the characters know about (yet). But I don’t want the people who have hired the thugs to be out for blood. Their goal is not to attack the player characters but to destroy their cargo. It is all a mistunderstanding!

At this point, I might actually have enough for my first session.

Scenes to play out

Now that I know what’s going on in the background, I’m going to build just enough of a scenario that I can play it. Here are the scenes I think I need

• Ambush on the road (note: destroy most of the caravan goods so they need money)
• Games at the Festival
• Maybe an arena battle if they show interest
• Getting hired by Molly

What about Session 0?

Wait, did I forget something? No. I find it’s actually a good idea to plan out my session 1 at this level before going in to session zero. I don’t want to do much more than what I have here because I’m going to use some input from my players to help shape this.

How? Well, I’m looking at what special abilities they took. How can I create a scenario where they get to use that right away? If my players have the ability to create water, then maybe I light one of the wagons on fire.

Having an idea of what they’re walking into, I can also answer questions better in the session 0. One of the things I’m going to tell them before we go in is that they’re on the road so they need to decide from their backstory how they ended up on this caravan. They could be hired help. They could have joined along the road and agreed to mutual protection. They could have hired the caravan leader.

But I’m not done yet…

It’s true, I’m not ready for Session 1 yet. This was my initial brainstorming. I’m going to work out some of the details, like names for the three families that have bonded together to try and stop Molly. I also want to make sure I’ve got some good NPC archetypes (more on that later) ready to go. But for now, I’ve got enough info to walk comfortably into Session 0.