Pick the kind of session and how long you've actually got. The list is ordered by what survives contact with the table, so if you run out of time, the things you skipped are the things that were least likely to come up anyway.
Most prep checklists are grouped by category. NPCs here, locations there, encounters at the bottom. That is a tidy way to organise a list and a bad way to spend a limited hour, because it tells you nothing about what to cut when you run out of time.
This one is ordered by how reliably each item gets used. A strong opening scene is used in every session you will ever run, because you control the start. Written-out dialogue is used almost never, because the conversation goes somewhere else in the first thirty seconds. Both are "prep"; only one is worth doing when you have fifteen minutes.
Your own numbers will differ from these, and they matter more than the general shape. The prep tracker works out which categories you waste, which is the version of this list that is actually about your table.
Prep is the easy half. The hard half is remembering what happened last time. Scrivorn records your session and writes the recap, keeps the campaign wiki current, and gives your players somewhere to read between games.
See how it works