How do I cut to the action in Daggerheart prep?

For years I overprepped roads, inns and market stalls, and the first session of our Motherboard campaign still carried some of that habit. I had written each character’s starting spot in Mother’s Embrace as if it were its own scene, from the food stalls to the docks to downtown, and the introductions ran long before the green embers fell. Nothing I had written for those spots mattered as much as the moment the sky turned. Now I cut my prep to the first beat worth spending Fear on, and I open as close to it as I can.

What I no longer prep

I no longer prep travel montages, shop inventories, three towns before the hook, railroaded plots with boxed text, or full maps of places the party will skip. None of it survives contact with the table, and all of it delays the first real choice.

Start at the dilemma

My prep page starts with the job of the first scene, written on a sticky note. Under it I put the first environment or group of adversaries, a countdown if one matters, and the first NPC who can say no. That is the whole page. I prep a situation the players can push on, not a plot they have to follow. Going from a campaign frame to the first session is a bigger bridge, and it will get its own post.

One prep page from the campaign

The session after the party met the preppers at Arrowcroft Walkway, I did not prep the road to Thorpe at all. We opened at the top of the stairs down from the neon-lit town, because the preppers had already pointed the way and the walk had no decision in it.

The job on the sticky was to find where the Collector had taken the people of Thorpe before they were shipped away. The environment was the labyrinth under the town, an Exploration environment that wanted to split the party at junctions, eat their light and show them what the Collector had left behind. The adversaries were a group of security drones as Minions. The countdown was the transfer, which I did not show them until they pulled a log out of a disabled drone that read “Payload secure for GOPHER transfer”. The Fear note said to open on whatever the last session had closed on, straight from the campaign note. The way out was reaching the staging chamber and working out where the basket had gone before the countdown fired.

That was all the prep, and there was no inn. The countdown carried into the next session, and it came back as the blast door warning that the transfer sequence would start in five minutes.

What I would do tonight

Cross out the travel and the shopping. Write one dilemma, then prep the environment or adversaries that serve it. Open on the dilemma, the way I described in starting a one-shot in medias res. When the sticky is full, you are done.