The Lordock (Story Guide)
“The Lordock is your Setting Sheet. I have a tendency to keep mine public to the players. They see what things I have noted, they can see my titled moments, they can refer to what has happened.”
My first thought when working with my Lordock is this is all history. It includes locations, the titles of the stories we have covered. Historical notes. The Lordock is a separate document than my Campaign Set. The campaign set is where I work on prep, and put my spoilers and notes for moving forward.
The Campaign Set will include everything the Lordock includes. These two artifacts take a little effort, but usually less than ten to fifteen minutes each week.
Organizing the Lordock (Locations)
Most of my Lordocks include the world map on a main tab. A light overview of the world. Beneath it we zoom in and highlight the continent we are on. One more zooms in on the larger area where we want to start our players. This three layer touch feels good, it is easy to reference, and it isn’t an overload at the beginning of things.
Each of the tabs beneath this are the regions of the continental area where we start our players. We will use headings to keep things organized within each of these tabs. Heading 2 for the larger area, heading 3 for a town or zone, and heading 4 for individual locations.
Location Vira should include any maps made of the location, pictures of individual rooms, any supporting characters who have been the area, and also the party’s history visiting the location or any information they have heard about it if they’ve not gone there yet. In your Campaign Set you can add more notes, like more supporting characters, special items they may find there, any storylines you might want to include later, and all the tracking you need to do for those storylines.
Location Vira: Maps, Rooms, Supporting Characters, History & Rumors.
Organizing the Lordock (Supporting Characters)
In the Campaign Set, we suggest keeping an entire tab dedicated to your Supporting Characters which includes any more details about them, including all the locations they have showed up. It is easy to lose info on supporting characters if their entries are spread out over multiple locations.
In the Lordock, we should leave their entries where they are in locations. It is a history of the party’s experience in the campaign. We should keep Supporting Character information light. A picture of them, a short bio including only information the party may know. Sometimes a transcript of the scenes those supporting characters have been a part of for the party.
Timeline and Dating
Every single entry in the Lordock past the background information needs to include the in game date, and the real world date. This simple record will provide incredible insight into the passage of the overall campaign. It will lock down things for references. It is worth doing, especially if as a Story Guide you have world events going.
3rd Party
There are many campaign trackers on the market. There are some really advanced tools out there. Use what you’re comfortable with using.
Accurate Lordock
Keeping an accurate lordock is paramount. Knowing what has been is the key to future moments. Recurring locations with growing storylines, or supporting characters out of place to do one thing or another is the essence of a consequential world.
Alabaster’s Memoir “My Lordock”
I hardly ever kept good notes over the first few years. I’d jostle down a few events here and there, but I didn’t tie it to a location or a specific supporting character in most cases. The day I started to do so by Location and Supporting Character was the day I went from being an amateur storyteller, to an actual story guide.
Knowing where we came from made figuring out where we were going so much easier.
