Unconscious GM Burnout

 I was burned out on RPGs and I didn’t even know it. 

Me, on Sunday nights

I was busy. I did not have time to prep. I struggled to improvise. I didn’t have ridiculous unrealistic expectations of my gaming life. When games were cancelled due to lack of players, I was not overly upset about it. 

I didn’t know it but I was burned out. It seemed like I was having a good time, even to me. I was off my game though. 

As I returned to running the Grim North to fill gaps in player availability my interest in playing and running games was rejuvenated. I was still busy but I was able to tiny prep my way around it. Ideas started to come thick and fast. I’ve been ticking over with the Grim Underworld in a slow but progressive way. One room at a time isn’t a lot of progress but it adds up. 

I’ve started to have unrealistic thoughts about Marvel Superheroes; or learning to play Champions or even Rolemaster. My MSH box has sat unopened for a long time, and I last played it before I went to University in 1996… Champions and Rolemaster I remember from the Games Store. I loved the covers but the games seemed dense and inaccessible, and beyond my meagre finances. Do I owe it to my younger self to try these games now that I could? I’m not sure 12 year old me envisaged their middle age spent buried in 600 page rulebooks or drowning in hit tables or highly involved character generation processes. 

It seems I needed a change. The signs were there but self evaluation is hard. I’m running another Grim North session on Sunday: The PCs are caught up in the ambiguity between smuggling  Black Market Thyme and Black Market Time. It’s very entertaining. And there’s lots of spelling things out. 

Behold! Actual GM Prep

In order to show my working out I am planning to discuss two older examples of my GM prep. Both are for game sessions that I felt especially well prepared for and resulted in, for me at least, some memorable games. 

The first is part of the campaign in which I returned to running Dragon Warriors for the first time since childhood. Originally conceived as a one shot, it finally resolved 5 years later. In this period of the campaign the PCs were sailing to the Holy Land from Ferromaine and had stopped off for supplies in Molasaria. 

I didn’t really expect much to happen here but threw out a little hook about the local headman’s wife and daughter being missing. To my surprise (although perhaps I should’ve known better) the PCs decided to pause their voyage and head into the ominous Molasarian woods to seek them out. 

These notes are pretty basic and I backed them up with some text on my iPad. Essentially I estimated that Molasaria was roughly equivalent to Bulgaria, at least in terms of folklore so I incorporated as much Bulgarian folklore as I could. I make no claims as to authenticity and some of what I used was general Slavic folklore from surrounding regions. All woods in my Legend based games tend to have a least a bit of the Mythago Wood feel to them. Woodlands have memory, and because in Legend they are magical places, that memory can be drawn to a sort of life or you can become engrossed in it. In this case, probably the wolves and some ancient horse-nomads (the ancestors of the modern Molasarians.) The other, more faerie inspired creatures have a different relationship with the Wood and its collective memory. Being incredibly long lived, they can exist in its past and present simultaneously. 

The Hala was a lovely piece of Bulgarian folklore that I immediately fixated on. Essentially a bad weather demon that can manifest in numerous forms, the Hala presaged the coming snows of winter. The local NPCs laid it on thick how dangerous the Hala was and that it came only at night. The PCs treated it with a healthy respect, probably due in part to some recent character deaths, but also due to the strong implication that the Hala played for keeps. 

Other things that caused my great amusement were the knight whose armour turned out to contain only worms and maggots; and the old woman who changed identity with the fall of night and the breaking of dawn. 

This took two three hour sessions to resolve and included the PCs dealing with grey skinned dyavol in a shadowy mockery of the village; and slaying the local priest in a church, continuing their modus operandi of killing people in houses of worship. 

Foul Devices of Sorcery

Your Rod, Staff or Wand has charges that power its magic but what are they?

Bit of Wayne Reynolds for the crowd

Souls. They’re souls.

If your wand of fireballs or whatever has thirty charges, then thirty folks went under the wavy bladed* knife to feed it. 

Thuul-Botha Cinth (a PC,) He of the Eldritch Eyes, liberated soul-burned Black Magician Kallisran of his staff and also his life. The staff held strange powers,  each fuelled by the soul of an innocent that had been imprisoned within the witch wood of the stave. Their faces appeared upon its length as though burned onto it from the inside.

*No self respecting cultist would be caught dead with a straight bladed sacrificial implement. 

More Tiny Prep

As I tinker away with my game stuff I find myself disappointed with the transience of my prep. I often just make a few notes or maps and this allows me a framework for a session which is largely improvised from that base. I enjoy running games that way and find more focussed prep to feel a bit like homework and therefore I don’t tend to do it. 

Tiny prep appropriate tools

However I do frequently feel underprepared for a session as a result of this. Also, I sometimes lack the required mental energy to play this way and in the moment wish I had more to fall back on than half a page of barely comprehensible scribbling. 

Trying to concentrate more on the Tiny Prep method has resulted in two things. One is a greater volume of material. My previous method of staring out of the window, waiting for inspiration to strike is inefficient. Writing down a sentence, even if it’s just the name of one setting appropriate detail, is progress and often leads to inspiration. These small things add up to something greater. Given I feel I’m short of time for thinking about games at the moment, the efficiency of Tiny Prep is essential.

The other is more coherent notes. In this I’m making more of an effort to produce stuff that is reusable. The effort that goes into a campaign can often be specific to that game on that Sunday or whenever and that’s fine and good. However there are some things I’ve prepped and run that I could use again but the notes no longer make sense or they’re buried in a thousand different notebooks, Frequently I doodle and scribble of my notes while GMing which renders them messy and awful by the end of the session. Or the PCs do something unexpected and I draw maps and plan as I go in session but these artefacts are on loose sheets of paper that subsequently disappear. Again, this is inefficient. Settings that I could use long term, i.e. for the rest of my life, should benefit from this development. All that prep could serve a greater purpose. Maps and locations could be reused. If I wheel the Grim North out for another convention type game for instance (I ran Warriors of the Grim North for Burrito Con online and felt like I was tightly prepped for the game but when I’ve reviewed my notes to run it again, it was like “Oh my God, how did I ever pull this off?”) or if I end up running it for my boy and his gang when they’re a bit older.

So as I prep at the moment, I’m making a conscious effort to be a bit neater, rough maps in pencils and then ink them. Scan more stuff so it’s backed up digitally, and inversely copy tables I draught on my phone at lunchtime into appropriate notebooks when they’re complete. 

On Being Too Attached to Old Games

Last year or maybe longer ago than that I had an idea to try and play all my unplayed games. The Clearing the Shelves project. It didn’t go that well. I played Warlock! and Through Sunken Lands and that’s (it although I have played TSL with two different groups.)

Reflections on why it failed, lead me to the following conclusions:

I like the Dragon Warriors world of Legend. If I’m not playing a game in Legend, I miss it. 

I like running the Grim North. When I’m not, I miss it. 

Short form games are fine but I prefer to have them run long. It’s the accepted wisdom, or in some circles set in stone fact, that average campaign lasts ten sessions. This is not my experience when running. My average one shot lasts three sessions. Ten would be a mini campaign.

So I should  just commit to playing them for ever and stop getting lured into to trying to find time to run Traveller or Runequest or The One Ring or Empire of the Petal Throne of whatever. At least until I retire; and my kid leaves home; or we enter another pandemic. Or the final version of Jewelspider appears. 

The Grim Megadungeon

 

The Grim Megadungeon doesn’t exist. This map, for instance, is Mapper’s Challenge II by Dyson Logos. He missed a trick, to my mind, by not calling it Mapper’s Delight but maybe he’s not that into the Sugarhill Gang. I’m not sure how I feel about Megadungeon as nomenclature or even a play style. I’ve run a megadungeon. The Anomalous Subsurface Environment, which is good (although unfinished) and read some others. Not all of them are good. 

When it’s done well, the megadungeon encapsulates the fantasy adventure game milleu. Everything that can happen in a game can happen in a dungeon. That term is not a great one though. 

I like underworld. That’s how Dragon Warriors does it, and before that (probably influenced by too) the Empire of the Petal Throne. 

Mega-Underworld isn’t a thing though. 

The Grim Underworld probably does exist. It’s down there. From the very first post of this blog, and before, I have maintained that the city is built on the ruins of a thousand civilisations. That sounds like a megadungeon to me. So the Grim Underworld is down there. Existing. It’s just not been transcribed to graph paper, the rooms stocked and keyed, prepped for play. However, I can feel it. Can you have an Old School setting that doesn’t contain a really fucking massive dungeon? 

So I was wrong. Every time I’ve tried to write the Grim Underworld, I’ve failed. It seems, well, a bit shit. However that’s more or less what I think about every published RPG product I read too. So it’s a bit rubbish. Most other things are too. I wouldn’t wipe my arse with The Curse of Strahd and people fucking love playing that. 

Ok, ok. The Grim Megadungeon does exist. Theoretically. I can feel it existing. I wish it would stop. 

Unplanned Grim North

With one of our players having to miss the session last night we decided that the campaign was at a point where potentially crucial decisions might need to be made. Not good if you’re absent. 

So we decided to play some Grim North to pass the time, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Not just because one of the PCs fell to her death. 

The advantage of running the GN at short notice is it’s a simple OSR game powered by random tables. It also allows for a certain amount of whimsy on my part that a more serious game of Dragin Warriors does not.

So we happened to pick up where we left off with Rufus Rose (a fighter) and Pansy (a thief) found themselves trapped on the wrong side of a sprung steel door, deep in the Undercity. They had originally headed down there to obtain the liver of a Ghost Snake for a wizard, which is a as good a reason as any. They fought some mole men, declined to investigate an underground ziggurat, Pansy fell to her death while trying to escape a cavern, Rufus teamed up with newcomer Tulip (also a thief) and they found a slew a Ghost Snake. They also recovered a fill-in-the-blanks death warrant, signed by the Autarch. 

I remain unhappy with the current process for generating Grim North characters. It needs something along the lines of WFRP’s careers alongside its basic class and level structure. These would help tie the characters to the setting, add a little bit of flavour and provide quick starting equipment. I’ll get round to it eventually but I’ve never really been one for making my own classes or mechanics or whatever. Hmm.

The fragility of 1st level Swords&Wizardry characters remains constant. Perhaps if Pansy/Tulip’s player chose a class that had more than 1d4 hit points it would help. 

However: 

Pandora Set (thief) killed in a tavern brawl after being hit over the head by a plank with a nail through it.

Calypso Seth (monk) killed in single combat with the champion of the Amphibious Gods despite having imbibed several “toad brews” and receiving associated mutations.

Pansy (thief) fell to her death while climbing down a chimney style passage in order to assist Rufus Rose in climbing up. 27 feet was her downfall. 

Meanwhile, Dragon Warriors

I started a new Dragon Warriors game, set as I describe it “North of Fenring.” This a squashed little bit of the map between Fenring Forest and the Pagan mountains with no canonical settlements or the like. An area of blank space ripe for some low stakes adventure with a group of typical DW player characters:

Botwulf, a knight. He might have suffered leprosy, amongst other ailments, he doesn’t have the best stats.

Gwenneth-May, an assassin. Trained by her father and he own curious nature. 

Drakke, a hunter. Bombastic and cocksure. 

They started off invited to a friend’s wedding in the tiny settlement of Crowborough but arrived to find a funeral might be more appropriate. 

Sir Caeron, the local lord had died of a mysterious illness and apparently his hand had subsequently been severed. Meanwhile the mercenaries he hired to serve as men at arms were lording it up over the local peasantry and generally being unpleasant. Their leader, Grigget, pressing a suit of marriage against Ava, Sir Caeron’s betrothed. 

Our heroes set about getting into fights with Grigget’s men, some of which they won; trying to find the missing priest (who may have married Sir Caeron and Ava in secret,) meeting Green Jenny in her lonely cabin; that sort of thing. 

Good times.