Prep

It’s 6:40 on a Tuesday. The session is at 7:30. You meant to prep on Sunday, and then Sunday happened to you the way Sundays do, and now you’re standing in the kitchen with a laptop balanced on the microwave, opening a notes doc you last touched eight days ago. Somewhere in there is what the party promised the widow. Somewhere in there is the name of the guy with the ledger. You have fifty minutes, dinner is one of them, and you’re searching “how to prep a D&D session fast” with the specific calm of someone who has already accepted the evening will be improvised. ...

You spent the week building the next arc. The faction politics, the dungeon, the villain’s plan. Meanwhile, the best hook for that arc has been sitting in a shared doc since session zero. You read it once. You don’t remember what it said. Every player handed you a backstory. A dead mentor. A sister who vanished. A debt, a betrayal, a home they can’t go back to. Then the campaign started, the dice came out, and those pages went quiet. ...