Good Monday, Gamer!
Spring break is over! The kids are back in school, and I have the place to myself again during the days!! We got some nice game time in over the week, mostly Burncycle, Scythe, and Warframe on the Xbox…but I do miss Anthem! We’ll road trip this week to see my folks and I think I’m gonna spring Atma on them - see how it goes!
I've been doing lots of GM prep for my con-worthy One-shot for Twilight: 2000 Heavy is the Crown and my May the 4th SW One-shot: 12 Parsecs. I've been planning out what to run Sunday morning at my FLGS, more like what to run for OSE. I'm going to mash up Ultra Violet Grasslands and The Baalgor Wastelands. I love what the UVG does for caravan point crawls, the vast landscape, and people, but I'm not feeling the setting. I just might be too old and cranky, but I also don't enjoy okra or avocados. Arden Vul and Dolmenwood are great options, too…but when I think about the structure of the UVG setup, I get jazzed about playing it.
Deeper In The Game does a nice bit on Tableplop VTT for my non-Foundry needs. I’m shopping for something to run Household in. Foundry doesn’t have a system for it. Tableplop looks like it’s kind of striving for that sweet, helpful, but not intrusive VTT spot, though it cares a bit more about 5E than I’d like it to. I’mma give it a go.
What is a New GM? Thomas asks in this week’s Indie RPG Newsletter, the answer from the book So You Want to Be a GM isn’t what you might expect! I'm reminded of the often lack of resources for intermediate GMs, much like resources for intermediate programmers and guitarists. It may be those resources are game-system specific. One game's 'Say Yes' is another's Bad GM Fiat. Maybe there's a deeper level of the general advice, I suspect all the facilitation wisdom gets covered in the GM 101 materials. For popular games and in digital gardens are 'best practices' threads. These are often re-constructed over the circle of time, and that's good IMO. Ideally, the best stuff sticks and new ideas get introduced. In the military I learned every soldier's role was three-fold. Perform your current job. Learn the role ahead for you and teach your job to the soldier coming up behind you. I don't know yet what's ahead. But I bet I got intermediate-level stuff I can teach for the games I'm into for folks moving up with me. Do you have any thoughts on what intermediate topics you’d like to read?
Catch ya next week!
ICYMI - the 1000+ subscriber celebration sale is on all month!
On the same thread as "intermediate gaming", I see a lot of articles and videos about starting and ending campaigns, but I don't recall any about "middles". Arguably, that's where we spend most of our time.