I’m in the throes of running The Enemy Within for Warhammer Fantasy 4e, and we’ve reached the part (if you’re familiar with the campaign) where the characters are about to find out what’s happening in Bögenhafen. As a GM the next part of the campaign is where it really opens up and keeping it all straight is honestly a bit of a task, especially considering how little prep time I generally have.

I’ve previously had similar problems with other large pre-written campaigns, where uploading all the information about the next ‘pod’ of the story into my brain is a larger undertaking.

This led me to thinking how nice it’d be if there campaigns came with audiobook chapter preps. A succinct overview of the chapter, of what’s most important, who the main NPCs are and which leads binds it all together. It’s so much easier for me now that I have a son to pop in some AirPods and listen to something like that for a bit while I do the dishes, than it is to sit down and study the campaign book in detail.

Some campaigns do a better job than others of pulling out this information, and honestly I’m not too impressed with how The Enemy Within does this, whereas the new Masks of Nyarlathotep puts a lot of emphasis on the the overview and prep portion of running a beast like that.

Anyway, I guess we’ll see whether I have to pull the oldest trick in the book for unprepared GMs later today: “Roll for initiative”.