[EightBitz]

I've owned RW for a while, now. I bought it the day it was released. But I haven't really used it beyond some trivial data entry ... until now.

As I've indicated in my previous posts, I'm running Rise of the Runelords, and there's a lot of information there. I had to figure out where to start and how to make things work. Here's what I did.

Rise of the Runelords starts out in a town called Sandpoint. There's an appendix in the book that details the locations of Sandpoint. In the description of each location, it lists names of people associated with those locations.

Step 1: Quick create (CTRL-Q) a topic (Places, Community) called "Sandpoint".

Step 2: Quick create (CTRL-Q) a topic (People, Individual) for each name, making "Sandpoint" the containing topic. I didn't enter any data yet, just created each topic.

Step 3: Quick create a topic for each place (Places, then either 'Merchant' or 'Location'), making "Sandpoint" the containing topic. For each topic, I gave it a prefix that matched its number. For example, the Sanpoint Cathedral is location #1. There are 50 locations, so made each one a double digit so they would be sorted properly when I sorted by prefix. So I gave it a prefix of 01.

Then I learned from looking at Silveras's example (thank you) that it would make sense to prefix each location with SP as well, because there are going to be other cities with other locations. So the prefix for the Cathedral became "SP01".

Step 4: I went through the campaign synopsis, the background for the setting, and the first part of the first chapter to get any other people and locations I didn't already have, and created them in the same manner. Again, I'm not adding content yet, just quick-creating all the "People" and "Place" topics I'm going to need for Chapter 1, Part 1.

Step 5: After I have all these topics created, I go back and start entering content. Now, since all the topics are already created, whenever I enter and organize my content into snippets, and I save the topic, all the topics are there for the auto-link scan to pick up.

When you're doing this bit, you have two options. You can stop and properly organize the snippets of each topic as you go. Or you could do what I did. -Copy and paste the content from the PDF into a text editor.
-Remove the line breaks except to separate paragraphs (making sure you have a blank line between each paragraph, for readability).
-Paste the whole block of text into one snippet in the "Summary" or "Overview" section. Then go to each blank line and press CTRL-ENTER to separate each paragraph into its own snippet.

I did it this way for expediency, just to get everything in there, because I was crunched for time.

Now, as far as Chapter 1, Part 1 goes:
-I have all my "People" topics.
-I have all my "Place" topics.
-I have relevant content in each topic.
-That content is interlinked.

Now it's story time!

Step 6: Under "Events", I created a "Campaign Synopsis" topic (Storyline).

Step 7: I created another Storyline topic for "Chapter 1".

Step 8: I created yet another Storyline topic for "Part 1" and made "Chapter 1" its containing topic.

Step 9: I created a Scene for each event/encounter within "Part 1", and made "Part 1" each scene's containing topic.

Step 10: For each of the events I created above, I entered content from the relevant sections of the book.

Step 11: I went to the story board and created a plot group called "Rise of the Runelords" (or you can just rename the group that's already there).

Step 12: I added a plot in the RotRL group called "Chapter 1"

Step 13: For each of the scenes I created for chapter in step 9, I added a plot point on the storyboard in the "Chapter 1" plot.

Step 14: I drew arrows from one plot point to another to show the proper flow.

Step 15: I linked each plot point to its corresponding event.

When came to actual play:
I had one character who lived in Sandpoint, and other characters traveling to Sandpoint from other areas. I gave them time to arrive in the city, look around a bit, get settled in, get some local news, hear some local gossip and rumors, etc, etc.

Whenever a player interacted with a location or person, I went to the relevant topic, and revealed relevant snippets for what the players learned.

When everyone was settled, I went to scene 1 and played that out.
Gave them a quick breather, as the end of that scene called for.
Went to scene 2.
Then more quickly (as the end of scene 2 called for), went to scene 3.
After scene 3 was sorted out, I went to scene 4.

In this particular plot, this sort of a rapid-fire was called for. In other cases, you can let the players rest between scenes and further interact with people and places.

Anyway, that's how I did it. I hope this helps someone. :-) I'm sure other, more experienced users will have things to add, but with this being my first time seriously using RW, I just thought I'd pass along how I did it for other people who look at this thing and go, "Oh, @#$@#%, where do I START?!?! ... How do I even...?!?!?!"