Thursday, August 24, 2017

Time and Iron Rations Wait for No Man

I've gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of using the current real-life weather and time of year for the in-game weather and time of year in my Malara campaign. That worked out well enough when we were playing multiple times a month, but now one of the players is halfway across the country and Skyping in, so we play a lot less frequently these days. This upcoming session, they're picking up in the middle of a dungeon, but it's been a few months of real time.

It's time for me to keep track of this stuff like a big boy DM. You win this time, Gary.

I tried to be thoughtful about what I included in my calendar tracker. Each page is a 91-day season (a decent average of actual season lengths and divisible by 7). Each day has space to take notes or add upcoming events, a random encounter number from 1-100 (my encounter tables are all d100, like this one, and I usually roll once per day for overland travel), and the major phases of the moon (new, half, full) indicated by little icons. I don't need to include weather because my encounter tables do that.

I created a few other trackers too:

Turns - Ten-minute turns broken up into hour segments. Cross them off as they happen. Enough for four 24-hour periods. Each turn also includes a 1-100 random encounter number.

Resources - Includes light sources (by LotFP rules), rations, ammunition, and extra tick boxes for other things to keep track of.

"Exploration" - Turns and resources combined. Not sure I'll ever use this because I think turns and resources get used up at very different rates, and it's in landscape format so it wouldn't play nice in a binder. I might use it for a one-shot game, though.

NPCs and Factions - Rosters for keeping track of recurring campaign personalities. Pretty self-explanatory.

Without further ado, the Ice and Ruin Time/Resource/People Trackers.

Print/Download Instructions:
Select "portrait" orientation for all but the Exploration page and "fit to page" for everything. Narrow margins may give you a bit more writing room for the calendar pages, but otherwise normal margins should be fine. Uncheck "show gridlines" under Formatting.

Note that the random numbers refresh every time you load the document. You can make a copy and edit the numbers to match whatever scheme you prefer.

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