Sometimes — not often, but sometimes — I’ll end up with an article whose Long, Rambling Introduction™ is actually relevant. Useful. Vital even. See, usually, the Long, Rambling Introduction™ starts its life as the story of how the article came to be. And sometimes, that story’s an important part of the article itself. It provides a necessary context, for example, for the advice in the article. Or else it sets up a brilliant analogy that I’ll carry through the whole article.

And, while it seems like writing an introduction that’s actually relevant to the thing it’s introducing is just good writing, it causes me a huge f$&%ing headache. Because I know a lot of people skip the Long, Rambling Introductions™. They’re not here to be entertained. And they’re very important people whose time is just too damned valuable to waste on my weird ramblings. Even if those ramblings often hide lessons that are just as useful as the ones in the actual article. More useful, sometimes. Because often, my lessons are just kind of crap. So, when I have an actual, relevant Long, Rambling Introduction™, I have to trick those people into reading it by adding another, different Long, Rambling Introduction™ to the article before the real, Long, Rambling Introduction™. That way, when they skip to the first header, they find themselves reading the original Long, Rambling Introduction™.

But that leads to another problem. Because now I’m forcing another Long, Rambling Introduction™. So I’m making the people who do read them sit through a bunch of pointless, ingenuine crap. And while I know most of my articles are already pointless crap, they’re at least genuine pointless crap. I don’t ever write anything I’m not feeling.

The real problem is the Long, Rambling Introduction is a sort of vestigial organ. It’s a holdover from when I was even worse at this writing thing than I am now. And when I had really poor writing discipline. But they became a part of what I will laughingly call my style. The people who like them really like them. To the point where if I even suggest I might be thinking about not doing Long, Rambling Introductions™ anymore, they scream, “hell no” and threaten to burn my cat down. Because this is the internet and threatening someone’s pets with fire is just how you express polite displeasure with a content creator’s choices.

Besides, I like writing them. They’re fun. I get to dick around and joke around and just sort of be myself before I get into the serious business of helping people pretend elf better.

And if I did suddenly get rid of them, a bunch of people would skip a bunch of actual, relevant introductions before they figured it out.

Point is, everyone’s used to the Long, Rambling Introductions™ now. You might love them or hate them, but you know how to deal with them. And I like them. So they’re here to stay. But that still leaves me with the problem of what to do when I accidentally churn out a real introduction. And I have no f$&%ing idea what to do about that.

Anyway, here’s an article about how to start running a campaign with a complex, long-term plot without actually having to plan a complex, long-term plot first.

How to Not Plan a Campaign

Not too long ago, I told you all about the not Session Zero I didn’t run for my upcoming campaign. And about how I started a campaign without it. And lots of people let me know they’d like to hear more about that. Not about my campaign, per se, but just about starting campaigns in general. And one of the people who wanted to hear more about starting campaigns was my partner in gaming crime — and in life — the Tiny GM. See, her schedule’s going to open up in a few months and she’s raring to start running a game of her own again. For the last few years, she’s been too busy to run anything. So she’s not really the Tiny GM. She’s just Tiny.

As a side note, the Tiny GM told me I had to add a line emphasizing her cuteness. So here it is. The Tiny GM is cute and I’d like to emphasize that. Not because I’m afraid she’ll pummel me with her tiny but fierce fists of fury and then make me sleep on the couch, but because it’s true.

Tiny’s doing things a little differently than I am, though. She’s not just pulling an adventure-of-the-week style campaign out of her a$& for a few months. She wants to run a serious game. With a serious story. And a serious long-term goal. I learned this only recently when Tiny and I took a road trip out of state together. We had a lot of hours to talk. And we spent most of those hours talking about gaming. Mainly because if I try to talk about anything else, I inevitably get myself in trouble. And then come the aforementioned tiny but fierce fists of fury.

Anyway, Tiny was feeling really overwhelmed trying to come up with her campaign’s plot. She assumed that if she wanted to run a year-long campaign with an overarching plot, she’d have to plan out a year’s worth of overarching plot before she could start. And she’s not the only one to make that assumption.

In that article I linked above, I said the only thing you need to start a campaign was a bunch of filled-out character sheets and a first adventure. I said that was true even if you were planning a complex epic with an actual story and s$&%. I got a lot of feedback about that. And notice that I didn’t put feedback in sarcasm quotes. Because it was actually just feedback. Not feedback. Not f$&%ing feedback. Just feedback. Questions mostly. Questions like, “yeah, but how can I start running an epic like Lord of the Rings without knowing about Mount Doom and the One Ring and all that s$&%?” And that’s a fair question. Obviously, if you’re going to run Lord of the Rings, you need some kind of plan. One involving a lord, one or more rings, and how to destroy the one to depose the other. Something like that.

The thing is, though, that you don’t need much of a plan. Hell, you really only need a couple of sentences to start running that campaign.

There was this evil lord once who made a magic ring that’d let him take over the world. But he lost it and one of the player-character’s relatives accidentally found it. Having inherited the ring, the PC and his friends must evade the lord’s servants and find someone who can tell them what the f$&% to do with the ring now.

That’s it. That tells you everything you need to know to run your first adventure titled Oh S$&%, the Ringwraiths are Coming!

So how do you plan a months- or years-long campaign in a week? How do you start a campaign without knowing absolutely everything about it? Especially an intrigue or mystery campaign about unearthing and confronting ancient sealed evils in a can? Well, appropriately enough, it’s kind of like planning a road trip. Which is what I told the Tiny GM — whose cuteness I can’t emphasize enough — which is what I told the Tiny GM during our road trip.

This just goes to show that I come up with analogies the way characters in comedy movies come up with fake names.

On the Road to Adventure

It’s a lot easier to go on a road trip than it used to be. You just punch your destination into your GPS thingy or iPhone and do whatever the robot voice tells you to. And if you don’t, she starts yelling at you to make a U-turn and get your a$& back on track. Once upon a time, things were different. You’d get in the backseat of the car. Dad would start driving and you’d go wherever the hell he told you you were going. And sometimes mom would start yelling at him.

Well, maybe it’s not that different.

Point is when you plan a road trip, you don’t really plan the whole trip. You don’t plan every twist and turn. Every road you’re gonna take. Instead, you just have destinations in mind and you take whatever route you have to get there. You don’t really care about the route except insofar as it takes you through all the intended stops on your itinerary.

Except sometimes you do care about the route. You don’t care about the specific roads and turns, but you care about taking an efficient route. At least, if you’re concerned about getting somewhere on time. Or maybe you’re more concerned about following a route that’s easy to navigate. So you stick to big roads and major highways even if the route takes longer. Or maybe you want to relax and enjoy the trip itself. You want to see interesting sights. So, you take scenic routes and local roads instead. And that’s why GPS thingies let you set preferences like that. And why they can reroute you if you decide to get off at Exit 157 because you just have to see the World’s Biggest Ball of Reptiles in Outer Bumblef$&%, Florida.

And sometimes s$&% changes while you’re on the road. Sometimes highways are closed and traffic gets detoured. Or sometimes you take an alternate route to avoid some massive car accident or the traffic jam to end all traffic jams. Sometimes you get hungry. Or thirsty. Or you have to pee or poop or sleep. So you have to find a place to handle that s$&%. And sometimes you change your plans. Sometimes you spend an extra day visiting Uncle Alice and Aunt Bob and have to cut out that visit to the Museum of Earwax. Sometimes, the health inspector closes the Museum of Earwax and you’ve got to skip it. And sometimes your transmission just up and f$%&ing explodes and you have to get your car towed home and you have to decide whether to go home with it or rent a car and continue your journey.

And that’s why you don’t plan every twist and turn along the way before you start driving. You could, sure, but you probably won’t actually follow the plan perfectly.

Here’s another thing about road trips. It’s less noticeable these days with the ubiquity of GPS thingies, but it was a big part of planning road trips back in the days of paper atlases. And that is navigational scale. When you start your trip or end your trip or when you’re nearing a destination, you usually find yourself winding along little, local roads. There’s lots of twists and turns and lots of interesting things to see. But once you get a little further on, you end up on major roads and big honking interstate highways where you can set the cruise control, point the car straight, and just zone out. Maybe even take a little nap if you’re in one of those flat, rectangular states where all the roads run in straight lines. I mean, you’ve got 300 miles of straight road before your destination and nobody — f$%&ing nobody — is out there. What’s the harm, right? Stop with the tiny by fierce fists. I’m awake.

The point is, if you zoom out and look at the whole trip, it just follows the big highways. It’s mostly just a gently curving line that connects all your destinations. It’s only when you zoom in that you see all the little twists and turns.

Funnily enough, though, it’s all very fractal too. Like, if you zoom in to the twists and turns around one particular location — say your hometown — you’ll notice that after you leave home, you usually take a bunch of little roads and make a lot of turns just to get out of your residential area. Then, you end up on your town’s main streets. And then you end up at the highway interchange. You make a turn or two again, follow a long, curvy ramp, and then merge onto the highway cursing the a$&holes who won’t let you in all the while.

And while you’re doing all that — while you’re getting from your driveway to the interstate highway — the rest of your route matters not a bit. It doesn’t matter what you’re going to be doing in Ohio, the land of chili on top of spaghetti for some inexplicable f$&%ing reason, while you’re getting out of Hometown, Wisconsin.

And all of that tells you exactly how to plan a long-running campaign.

Thanks for reading. I know this was shorter than most. And I’d like to remind you once again that Tiny is cute and… what? The analogy ain’t quite doing it for you? You get the point but you’d like to know how to translate that to practical campaign plotting?

Fine. F$&%ing fine. Whatever. I’ll draw you a f$&%ing map.

Every Complex Story Hides a Simple One

However complicated a story looks, it’s actually really simple if you zoom out far enough. That’s the key to planning your campaign like a road trip. Hell, it’s also a vital GMing skill. As a GM, you should be able to summarize any story in a single sentence. Any story at all. You should also be able to summarize it in two sentences. Or four. Or three paragraphs. Or five hundred words. Basically, you should know how to reduce any story down to a description of any length at all. It’s a vital f$&%ing skill. You need it to plan adventures, scenes, and campaigns, but you also need it just to recap your sessions for your players. And you need it to tell others about your games without boring the motherloving f$&% out of them.

Plots are like road trips. They mostly move between a small number of key destinations. Call them plot points or twists or reversals or whatever you want. Call the spaces between them acts or scenes or phases or chapters. It doesn’t matter what they are. And it doesn’t matter how many there are. Which I know is going to shock the s$&% out of some of you.

Lots of gamers make a lot of noise about different plot structures and about which ones work best. It’s old fashioned now, kind of passe, but newer GMs still lose their s$&% when they discover the standard literary and screenwriting three-act structure. Like it’s some big f$&%ing revelation to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And lots of gamer snobs who know a thing or two about video game design can’t get enough of the four-part kishotenketsu structure that Japan stole from Korea who stole it from China. Of course, those gamer snobs spend so much time wanking on about “stories with no conflict” that they’re missing the important parts of that four-part narrative structure. And it’s been a big thing in video games for a long time. It was around long before Hochi Hayashida made a big deal about it in Super Mario World 3DS or whatever the f$&% it was called. But that’s another story. And another article. Meanwhile, other gamers just can’t get enough of the various five-element thing structures popularized by various internet gamers. Five-room dungeon, five-part mystery, the five-by-five matrix of interwoven plots, all that s$&%.

Point is that the number of phases or chapters or turning or points or whatever? It means f$&% all. Neither does the presence or absence of traditional central conflict. What matters is you can break any story down into any number of parts and separate them by any number of turning points.

For example, it’s easy to break the story of the entire Harry Potter series down into seven parts. One per book.

1. After discovering he’s a wizard, Harry Potter must learn how to use his magic to stop the Dark Lord from stealing the MacGuffin that will bring him back to life.
2. Returning to school, Harry Potter must learn how to use his magic even better to stop the Dark Lord’s snake from killing all the students in the school extremely slowly.
3. Returning to school again, Harry Potter must protect himself from a psychopathic murderer by uncovering the truth about who betrayed his parents to their deaths.
4. Returning to school yet again, Harry Potter is forced to compete in a dangerous wizard tournament as part of a plot to restore the Dark Lord to power.
5. And so on…

You can also break the whole series down into three parts:

1. Harry Potter discovers he’s a wizard and must master his magic at wizard school to continually thwart the Dark Lord’s attempts to return himself to power.
2. After the Dark Lord returns to power and the authorities of the wizarding world turn against him, Harry Potter must forge alliances with other powerful wizarding figures and master his abilities and emotions.
3. After the Dark Lord secures his power over the wizarding world and destroys most of Harry Potter’s allies, Harry and his remaining friends are forced to work outside the wizarding world to unravel the Dark Lord’s power and defeat him once and for all.

We can even break it down into a kinkosushitatoo four-part thingy:

1. Harry Potter is introduced to the wizarding world and must become proficient in magic while thwarting the Dark Lord.
2. Harry Potter deepens his understanding of magic and the politics of the wizarding world, begins to master his emotions, and builds important alliances.
3. The Dark Lord returns to life and regains power, destroying Harry’s alliances and turning the wizarding world upside down.
4. Harry Potter understands his and the Dark Lord’s nature and the connection between them and uses that knowledge to ultimately destroy the Dark Lord.

And, of course, you can name that story in just one sentence:

1. Apprentice wizard Harry Potter must master magic and fulfill his destiny by thwarting and then destroying the Dark Lord, thereby saving the wizarding world.

Now, that’s a fun little literary parlor trick, right? It’s like the Kevin Bacon game for liberal arts degree holders to play while they’re making my latte at Starbucks. But what good is it? Well, honestly, unless you rode a particularly short bus to school — or you’ve got a degree in liberal arts — you’ve probably already figured out what this has to do with that whole road trip thing. The three points or four points or seven points? They’re the destinations on your road trip itinerary. While the plot takes a lot of little twists and turns along the way, what’s important is that it hits all those destinations.

And that’s how you plan a campaign.

Casting Summary in Reverse

Does anyone even remember the days of reversible spells? Anyway…

I said that GMs absolutely f$&%ing have to have the skill of reducing an entire plot — and that’s what we’re talking about here; plots, not stories — I said GMs have to be able to reduce an entire plot down to an arbitrary number of sentences. That’s a vital skill. Well, it’s also vital to be able to do it backward. To take an individual phase or plot point or twist or whatever and expand it into more phases or plot points or twists or whatever. You have to be able to zoom in and zoom out. Those summaries are just the destinations. And the major highways that get you close to each. But you also have to take interchanges and turns and surface streets and stuff. And you have to be able to add side trips. Or take a detour. Or skip a destination. Or skip all of your destinations and go somewhere else. Or go home.

Why? Because it keeps you from having to plan every twist and turn before you start driving. And because it means your trip is flexible. You can adapt to whatever happens. You can handle detours. You can handle getting lost. You can add stops, remove stops, and even change the whole trip. And it won’t cost you a f$&%-ton of up-front work. And it won’t take you months to plan a trip. You can just start driving.

How do you actually do it? Well, usually, you start with just one idea. One sentence. Tiny, for example, who remains as cute as ever, started with this vague idea that she wanted the players in her zombie apocalypse game to discover the zombie plague was deliberately released by a rogue government scientist and eventually have the players cure it. She just wasn’t sure how to plan a campaign around that.

The first step’s to take that idea and expand it into some number of acts or phases or turning points or whatever. Doesn’t matter the number. There’s good reasons to stick with three or four at this point, but five also works. And I’m almost definitely going to write an article about the three-point, four-point, and five-point structures and the subtle differences between them. Maybe. If people want it.

Dance for your article, kids. Dance.

Right now, though, it doesn’t matter how many destinations you put on your campaign’s itinerary. Tiny and I settled on a three-act structure: introduction, rising action, resolution. Here’s what we came up with:

1. The PCs come together to survive after the zombie apocalypse.
2. Their basic survival secured; the PCs discover clues that reveal a rogue government scientist deliberately started the plague.
3. With the information they’ve gleaned, the PCs work to develop a cure for the zombie plague.

Now, you can be as detailed as you want with each of those points. And if you’re running an investigation-type campaign, it’s worth adding a few extra details. Maybe expand each point into a paragraph. You don’t have to do that, though. It just lets you drop clues and foreshadow things and perform other acts of literary sleight of hand. For example, if you decided the rogue scientist is still alive and he’s actively “improving” on his original zombies and he’s working out of a local hospital or research lab or whatever, you can add details to the early game that tie into that. Like, maybe some super-zombies are running around. And they’re always in hospital gowns or wearing id bracelets or have research numbers tattooed on them or something.

You can also add details later on. Even as you play. Let’s say, for instance, that you decide during your third adventure that you want to include an encounter with an advanced super-zombie. That might lead you to decide that the rogue scientist is still alive. Or his assistant is. And he’s actively improving his zombies and he’ll probably become the major antagonist in the later phases of the campaign.

The point is, though, you don’t need any of that s$&% to write your first adventure. All you need — all Tiny needed — were those three sentences.

Unsummarizing and Unsummarizing

So far, all I’ve told you to do was summarize the major plot points in the campaign. Whoop-de-f$&%ing-doo. Anyone can tell you that. And if that was all I was peddling today you’d be total right to flip me off and go watch Dungeon Craft or Mike Colville or whatever. But I ain’t done yet. Remember when I said that road trips had this kind of fractal thing going on? That each segment of the trip is like a miniature trip all on its own? And that however close you zoom in, it just keeps working that way?

Let’s say it’s time for Tiny to plan the first part of her campaign. The survival part. So she takes the first point on her itinerary, treats it like a single-sentence summary of an entire story, and then gives it that same unsummarizing treatment. She turns it into three twists, turns, and phases. Or four. Or five. However many she wants.

Something like this:

1. The PCs come together to survive after the zombie apocalypse.
   1. A group of strangers agree to work together to survive in a post-zombie apocalypse world.
   2. The survivors establish a shelter and stock it with supplies to ensure their survival.
   3. The survivors discover something that makes them investigate the source of the zombie plague.

Now, she could do that for each point on her campaign itinerary right now if she wanted to. But she doesn’t have to. Because all she’s concerned about right now is getting from her hometown to the first highway. And the more work she does before she starts running the game, the more work she’ll have to throw out if something goes wrong or if she decides to change the route or the destinations later. And the more work she does now on her campaign plan, the less time she’ll have to just write the actual f$&%ing adventures she’ll be running for her players. And the more time they’ll have to wait to start playing.

But what she can do — what she’ll probably have to do — is apply this same trick again. That is, to take the first point of her unsummary and unsummarize that into even more destinations. It all depends on what kind of scale she’s looking for for her game.

Setting the Magnification

The unsummary trick is really f$&%ing powerful because it’s not just for planning campaign plots. You can use the same trick to plan the story arcs or adventure paths that make up your campaign. You can use it to plot individual adventures within those arcs. You can use it to plan scenes or sessions within those adventures. And you can even use it to plot out the major encounters and events in those scenes and sessions.

Allow me to demonstrate.

Say Tiny wasn’t planning an actual campaign. Say, instead, she was planning a single adventure. And to make it really hard on her — despite how adorable she is — let’s say she’s planning a one-shot adventure for a convention with a really strict time limit. So she takes that first itinerary she came up with and turns each point into a single encounter.

• In encounter one, a group of zombie apocalypse survivors scrounges for food, resources, and supplies for their shelter in a wrecked superstore. They have to fight off a horde of zombies but they escape with the resources they need.
• In encounter two, they’ve returned to their shelter with their supplies but a bunch of super zombies attack. They’re all wearing hospital gowns with logos from the local university research hospital. And the attack is clearly coordinated. Whether the survivors secure their shelter or not, whether they fought or escaped, it’s clear they have to investigate these new zombies or else they’re doomed.
• In encounter three, the survivors infiltrate the research hospital. They encounter the mad scientist who created the plague and who’s still working to perfect his zombies. After they defeat him, possibly by releasing a bunch of super zombies to devour him, they find the scientist’s notes and free his imprisoned lab assistant. The assistant uses the scientist’s notes to create a retrovirus that will destroy all the zombies as it spreads through the world.

Of course, Tiny’s not running a single, three-encounter adventure. Even though she totally could. She’s running a long-term campaign. She needs to get months out of this s$&%. Which means she’s got to keep drilling down until she’s got enough points to fill however many adventures of whatever length she wants. And she can keep drilling down until she has individual scenes or major encounters.

That said, she only has to unsummarize s$%& as she needs it. Right now, she’s just looking to run the first adventure of her new campaign. How might she get there? Well, let’s see. Right now, here’s where she’s at:

1. The PCs come together to survive after the zombie apocalypse.
   1. A group of strangers agree to work together to survive in a post-zombie apocalypse world.
   2. The survivors establish a shelter and stock it with supplies to ensure their survival.
   3. The survivors discover something that makes them investigate the source of the zombie plague.
2. Their basic survival secured; the PCs discover clues that reveal a rogue government scientist deliberately started the plague.
3. With the information they’ve gleaned, the PCs work to develop a cure for the zombie plague.

She’s concerned with the first adventure, so she takes the first point under the first destination of her itinerary — the one about the strangers agreeing to work together — and she unsummarizes that one.

• The PCs come together to survive after the zombie apocalypse.
  • A group of strangers agree to work together to survive in a post-zombie apocalypse world.
    1. Several scavengers chance upon each other while looting an old gas station and have to team up to escape a hoard of zombies.
    2. Sticking together to survive the worsening zombie infestation, the survivors search an old strip mall and discover another survivor on the verge of turning who tells them about a shelter they could claim and secure.
    3. The survivors make their way through the town’s teeming streets to secure the shelter while zombies pursue them.

At this point, she might decide that each one of those points represents a single adventure in her campaign. At that scale, she’ll run 25 to 30 adventures throughout her campaign. If the adventures average one or two sessions, she’ll have a year-long campaign.

But now it’s time to plan the first adventure, right? The one where the scavengers meet at the old gas station and team up to escape the zombies. She can plan the adventure’s major encounters or scenes by unsummarizing further.

• Several scavengers chance upon each other while looting an old gas station and have to team up to escape a hoard of zombies.
  1. In the parking lot of an old gas station, survivors meet by chance while looking for supplies.
  2. Inside the attached convenience store, the survivors contend with a few stray zombies before they can ransack the place.
  3. Drawn by the noise of their search, zombies gather outside, and the survivors must sneak out of the store or fight their way out.

If the adorable Tiny wants to start with a short, single-session adventure, she can treat those points as major encounters or even as the only encounters in the adventure and she can start statting them up. Or, if she wants a longer two- or three-session adventure, she can treat them as scenes and expand each further into individual encounters. For example, she might expand the third point thus:

• Drawn by the noise of their search, zombies gather outside, and the survivors must sneak out of the store or fight their way out.
  1. The heroes ransack the convenience store, making Search rolls to see what they discover.
  2. The heroes see they’ve attracted zombies which are gathering in the parking lot. They can keep searching as the horde grows. They can also take steps to secure the location and delay the zombies entering. They can also pick off zombies if they have weapons to keep the horde from getting too big.
  3. When the heroes are ready to go, they have to either sneak out of the location and evade the horde or else fight their way through. The bigger the horde that’s gathered, the more challenging their escape.

In the end, just by unsummarizing a few times, Tiny’d have a two- or three-session adventure consisting of six to ten encounters to start off her campaign. And her whole plan would now look something like this.

1. The PCs come together to survive after the zombie apocalypse.
   1. A group of strangers agree to work together to survive in a post-zombie apocalypse world.
      1. Several scavengers chance upon each other while looting an old gas station and have to team up to escape a hoard of zombies.
         1. In the parking lot of an old gas station, survivors meet by chance while looking for supplies.
            1. Encounter 1
            2. Encounter 2
         2. Inside the attached convenience store, the survivors contend with a few stray zombies before they can ransack the place.
            1. Encounter 3
            2. Encounter 4
         3. Drawn by the noise of their search, zombies gather outside, and the survivors must sneak out of the store or fight their way out.
            1. The heroes ransack the convenience store, making Search rolls to see what they discover.
            2. The heroes see they’ve attracted zombies which are gathering in the parking lot. They can keep searching as the horde grows. They can also take steps to secure the location and delay the zombies entering. They can also pick off zombies if they have weapons to keep the horde from getting too big.
            3. When the heroes are ready to go, they have to either sneak out of the location and evade the horde or else fight their way through. The bigger the horde that’s gathered, the more challenging their escape.
      2. Sticking together to survive the worsening zombie infestation, the survivors search an old strip mall and discover another survivor on the verge of turning who tells them about a shelter they could claim and secure.
      3. The survivors make their way through the town’s teeming streets to secure the shelter while zombies pursue them.
   2. The survivors establish a shelter and stock it with supplies to ensure their survival.
   3. The survivors discover something that makes them investigate the source of the zombie plague
2. The PCs piece together clues that reveal a rogue government scientist deliberately started the plague.
3. With the information they’ve gleaned, the PCs work to develop a cure for the zombie plague.

Meanwhile, when it came time to write her second adventure — the one about the strip mall — she could unsummarize that one as many times as she needed. She could even decide the strip mall thing really needs to be an adventure path and unsummarize it to get a few adventures out of it. Or she could skip it entirely.

Say, for instance, that as the survivors escape the gas station, the players get to talking. And they all agree that the first thing they need to do is get themselves a secure place to live. They can worry about supplies once they’ve got a fallback position. So, Tiny, in her infinite wisdom and cuteness, drops a clue about a potential shelter and skips ahead to the “claim and secure a shelter” point on her campaign’s road trip. Then, if she wants to, she can double back and send the players hunting for supplies in the strip mall afterward to stock their new home.

Say further that she notices the players are really having a hell of a lot of fun building out their shelter and stocking it and moving the furniture around and doing all that boring Animal Crossing bulls$&% instead of playing a fun role-playing game. Tiny could lean into that by dropping the whole “find the source of the plague and cure it” thing from her itinerary. It’s just erasing a couple of sentences at this point. It’s not like she mapped and statted the entire campaign. She could even replace those two plot points with one about gathering survivors and a climactic one about a war with a rival settlement instead.

Or, she could just burn down the f$&%ing settlement and kill the PCs with super-zombies if they don’t get stop playing f$&%ing Zombie Sims and cure the plague like the protagonists they’re supposed to be. The point is she’s got options. And that’s the key to staying flexible while building a coherent, long-term plot. That and not doing any more work than you have to.

But the final and most important takeaway is this: The Tiny GM is cute. And if you ever forget that, she’ll beat you up.

Send help.