I’ve been spending altogether too much time thinking about appendices. Most of my adventures have a few appendices, and some of these have been:

·        *  How to scale the adventure for higher- or lower-level PCs

·         * New rules items (such as new monsters or new magic items)

·         * A timeline of events

·         * All of the player handouts consolidated into one place

·         * A few pregenerated PCs

All or some of these are likely to appear in future adventures as well; in particular, I know that the next couple of adventures will include a “mini-setting” appendix that would be too large to fit into the text of the adventure, but would be very useful for GMs. In one upcoming adventure, the PCs travel to a lizardfolk village with a couple of goals in mind. The adventure details how the PCs can meet those goals, but doesn't detail each and every location in the village. There is an appendix for that! That way, if the PCs want to poke around the village further, the GM has the information to run with it.

As another example, a couple of upcoming adventures will be set—as a default—in a small city called Thaven. Thaven is generic enough that a GM can transplant the adventure to any other city in his or her own campaign, but if the GM prefers to use the default, the Thaven appendix will provide further detail of the city (eventually, I may pull together an entire Gazetteer of Thaven product, but would always include a summary appendix in urban adventures anyway).

With several types of appendices swirling around, I wanted to establish an order of appearance after the adventure text. After kicking this around with a few people, here is the grand answer:

It doesn’t really matter, so long as there is a table of contents.

Hardly a shocking revelation, but there it is. I suppose that so long as a GM clearly knows where to look to find things, the exact order doesn’t particularly matter. I will have some preferences (for example, “player-only” items such as pregenerated PCs and consolidated player handouts will always be the last couple of appendices), but the table of contents will become a regular feature starting with Kingdom of Toads. Or, technically, starting with The Emergency Character Collection, which had a table of contents as well.

So, as a preview, the table of contents for Kingdom of Toads will be Prologue, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 (which will be excerpted as a free product as well), Act 4, Act 5, Act 6, Scaling This Adventure, New Rules Items, and Consolidated Handouts.