I have been DMing for about 8 years now, but I have always ran more sandbox or non-linear style campaigns, with a few linear one-shots scattered in there. I am about to start running Frog God’s 5e conversion of Tegel Manor for my group, but I am a little nervous about the differences in running an old school crawl. Do people have any tips? My biggest concerns are:
- How will any improvisations I make snowball? I like sandboxes because I can respond on the fly, but that seems harder in a crawl when the spatial/temporal relationships of things is so rigidly defined.
- How much should I bother reading ahead? When I ran more prewritten modules, I would spend a long while researching the quests, dungeons, and the world, but that seems like a waste of time when I have no clue where the players might go when there are a million room options.
- How do I keep track of everything? Rooms they have been to, how long since they have been there, named enemies they have killed, etc?
Okay, yeah, I think that is gonna be the way to go. Maybe I could also process the map as an adobe pdf and add comments on each room about when they cleared it, what they found in it, etc. I also have some experience with photoshop, though I might have to pick up some illustrator skills to best do the fog of war edits.
Depending on how much work I am willing to put in, I actually have access to a massive plotter printer for posters/banners through my work, so I am kind of inclined to make a big poster that we can stick to the wall and I can add removable covers with poster tack to each room that they haven’t visited to show their progression in real time. My friend who is hosting the games actually asked about putting my homebrew worldmap up on the wall as a poster, so this might be a better, more artistic piece to put up instead (the map I shared is the old one, the 5e conversion map is actually quite nice looking, I just didn’t share it for non-pirating reasons).
I also have tried to make a game progress tracker using chat gpt, but I run up against the token limit pretty quickly, so a living google doc might be the way to go to keep track of things. Thanks for your suggestions!