Good Monday, adventurers 🗡️
Today was/is your last day to get in on the X-Mas in July sales at Drivethru. I didn't grab much. Neverwinter(4e) for a digital copy for online play, I already have a hard copy. I'm considering a run of DeGenesis, so I picked up the Atlas. Orphaned Star for Embers of the Imperium. The Indie RPG Newsletter and The Questing Beast have their picks up ICYMI.
Playing Classic Traveller has me looking at the Cepheus Engine to use for my Debt Punk setting, especially after reading The Four Legs of Traveller. It seems like a great match...but for the OGL! 😬
My kid's starting week two of drumline camp, so we’ve had to change up our gaming schedule. He's a sophomore in high school this year. I was in the band, but I don't remember 2-3 weeks of band camp putting in seven-hour days! I gave him outs; he chose to stay with it. So that means he likes it, right?!
My Saturday morning Twilight: 2000 game is approaching 50 sessions. I thought this weekend going to result in some solid PC injuries. The players pulled off a pretty nice assault on a group that has taken some of their people. I can't take credit for the fictional arcs that made our current in-game situation. I didn't plan any of it. The sandbox tools that came with T2K generated events. Sometimes it's the weather, rabid dogs, or street musicians. Sometimes it's a barn on fire, hostile roadblocks, or a heavy convoy passing through. Sometimes recon checks succeed, and the players choose how to engage with the event or not. Sometimes recon rolls come up short, and they are caught in the middle of the thing. I connect those events to the fictional history we've created so far, failing that it's a new faction, agenda, or thing. Between sessions, I reactively figure out the 'why', but most of the time, a player has speculated on the why (or who), and I 'embellish' on that!
I feel like some games, I can show up, unprepped, and run with whatever open threads the players are interested in, seeing where it unravels. For sure the Foundry VTT does a lot of the tedious bookkeeping and NPC generating. I'm pro-GM-prep games, especially sandbox games and tools. Somewhere after the first ten sessions, you have a lot of content to work with and can throttle your GM prep work.
Speaking of GM Prep. I've been trying out two new to me tools lately; to keep from getting set in my cranky old ways! One is the Context, Cool Shit & Consequences, a structure for DM’s notes. I've started using this in my Cy_Borg game with my son. Easy to slot it in and use, it creates, for me, space for contemplation of things rather than gut reactions in play. The other tool, more of a brainstorming, connected-the-dots tool, is the Circle Method from Runehammer.
It's a visual tool, but in short, you drop in all your thoughts, ideas around a circle and form connections. I used it to map out a starting situation for my Neverwinter campaign. The magic for me is putting it down on paper, seeing a visual representation of the stuff, and connecting the different elements. A good first draft to iterate on.
Catch ya in a week!