Cook the Chaos | Keeping Track

Time

To keep track, and to breathe life into the world, you can all decide, say, that time and seasons in The Realm between sessions should pass in parallel...ish with real life. So if there’s one week between sessions, one week will have passed in The Realm. If it’s winter in real life, it’s winter in The Realm. However, within sessions time can still speed up or slow down depending on what happens, hand-waving travel altogether if you like. For example, you might want to explore The Ruins – it would usually take around two watches travelling there from The Keep, but if you’re all pumped about getting straight to the location, you might prefer to just skip the watch rolls and say you all got there safely by nightfall, as the party had extra taken time to carefully avoid encountering potential threats. For this to work, you might want to keep track of time and events.

 

The Keep

Each session is self-contained. Characters will venture into the wild and, if they survive, will return to The Keep each session. The Keep is your character(s)’ safe home base, as they can't be killed there & can’t kill others, their money and possessions being stashed safely. The Realm can be pretty treacherous, and so usually, rests are only capable in the safe haven of The Keep, so it’s all about making it back safely.

 

Therefore, if there’s no opportunity to roleplay a return to The Keep before the end of a session, every player should roll to return, so maybe the party needs to scarper out from wherever it is as fast as it can, and maybe it encounters some trouble on the way back! Roll 1d6. 4-6 means you return safely, 2-3 means you return missing one item (at the GM’s discretion), and 1 means you return sustaining 1d6 - 3 damage. If that ends up killing you, well...

 

Keeping Track

In each group of players, you might want to assign roles at the start of the session (or take them up if you’re playing solo):

  • The Mapper, who should sketch even just a basic map, flowchart, or general gist of where the party believes things might be in The Realm, general distances and the like (it’s usually only a day or two’s walk between all locations).
  • The Scribe, who should jot down and share what they think others would need to know about what went down in this session, like encounters, terrain, points of interest, dangers.
  • The Stasher, who should keep track centrally of any loot, items, or coin borrowed, lost, recovered, or returned, paying to The Keep 10% of anything gained in the session (coin or the agreed value of any loot unearthed).
  • The Timer, who should maintain a time clock, keeping it updated with the date the session was played, and how many days may have passed in-game during the session.

 

If there aren’t enough in the group to spread these roles equally, the group for this session should agree who can take more than one role. Ideally, this information should be kept in a central place, like a folder or online channels or documents, so that everyone who’s playing or who has missed a few games, can keep up with what the pool of players as a whole has been unearthing or getting up to in The Realm, helping everyone shape and motivate their goals for the next time they play.

 

So group up & grab a GM, or cook it solo, choose a location and objective from the rumours & jobs here, and make sure you lock the door to The Keep before heading out into the unknown, into the brutal treachery of The Realm!

 

what's next?

Ok, so from here you might want to...

...move onto running a session

...return to the cook the chaos intro

...or double check the rules of the chaos

Remember, though, that you can navigate anywhere on the site using the menus on each page, and if you ever get lost, roll 1d6 and we'll see what perils you encounter!