GM Holocron

Today, or yesterday rather, I've started my GM Holocron. I would like to thank GMChris and GMDave for this fabulous idea. They presented the GM Holocron on their d20radio Order 66 podcast. This idea will prove to be very very valuable in my future GM plans.

While they have a community GM Holocron, I've decided to do my own instead. I am having issues creating stuff on theirs. If one day I gain the right permissions to add pages, I'll contribute a lot of content.

Basically, a GM Holocron is a stockpile of resources designed to make the arduous task of planning and setup of a session easier. The GM Holocron is a document/folder/ file system that will contain lists of NPC's, equipment, adventures, images, ships, and encounters (called set pieces). I would normally have just used InDesign or Publisher,  but I have recently found Evernote which is perfect for what I want to do.




When it comes time to plan and set up the session, I just copy and paste items from the GM Holocron to a session document and viola, prep time takes minutes instead of hours.

For example, My players have heard that a local rival Arms Dealer is making a deal soon. In the upcoming session, the PC"s want to intercept the deal, and steal the guns for themselves. They first need to find someone who is in the know about when the deal is taking place. While investigating where the deal is going down, the PC's will get attacked by a Bounty Hunter that has been pursuing them.

From my Holocron, I'll pull out a twi-lek shop dealer that acts and sounds like the shop keeper (Gideon) from The Crow (as listed in the notes for this NPC in my Holocron). Then pull out the generic Fight Scene set piece. The set piece will contain bare bones of the encounter, such as the setting, map, threats, Triumph and Despair, and so on. I'll now add details to the set piece, based on what's going on in my campaign, such as add the details of the Bounty Hunter (name, dress, look, etc), her lackey's (names and looks), fit the map to the planet my PC's are on, and a few others.

It just took me, 10 minutes to plan the entire session. Later on in the campaign, say the PC's get ambushed by the Arms dealer they are hijacking goods from. I can use the same Ambush set piece with different details such as NPC's complications, etc.

The main issue, is that the Holocron itself takes an exorbitant amount of time to get it set up correctly. GMChriss said on the podcast that it could take hundreds of hours and is never completely finished. I am trying to devote about 30 minutes to an hour each day to creating and inputting data into my GM Holocron.

Hopefully before my first session of the new Edge of the Empire Campaign I'll have a decent size Holocron to pull from.