I have been DMing for about 8 years now, but I have always ran more sandbox or non-linear style campaigns, with a few linear one-shots scattered in there. I am about to start running Frog God’s 5e conversion of Tegel Manor for my group, but I am a little nervous about the differences in running an old school crawl. Do people have any tips? My biggest concerns are:
- How will any improvisations I make snowball? I like sandboxes because I can respond on the fly, but that seems harder in a crawl when the spatial/temporal relationships of things is so rigidly defined.
- How much should I bother reading ahead? When I ran more prewritten modules, I would spend a long while researching the quests, dungeons, and the world, but that seems like a waste of time when I have no clue where the players might go when there are a million room options.
- How do I keep track of everything? Rooms they have been to, how long since they have been there, named enemies they have killed, etc?
As GM, you have the power to run it as you see fit, this includes modifying the adventure to have less rooms, more rooms, rooms in different order, etc. I think mostly if you’re worried about staying “true” to the adventure as written, well, don’t. What’s important is that the group is having fun.
On point 3 I’d say every GM should have some method of keeping notes, whether the campaign is small or large. Find a system that works for you.