Going Even Lower Prep for a Second Game

Jon Hodgson doing his thing

I’m looking at running another game on Tuesday. The Grim North continues on Sunday nights and the Tiny Prep method is keeping things ticking over nicely there. However as soon as something starts working it’s time to fuck it up, so now that I’ve established I have enough time to run one weekly game I shall try and run two. 

At Dragonmeet this previous year and probably every other year proceeding, those of us that meet up there have expressed our desire to meet up online like we used to in the G+ days and ply a game or two. This week we’re actually going to get our act in gear and do it. 

In order to manage this with the minimum impact on our time, we’re going to play Beyond the Wall in the manner the book intends. So using playbooks to generate characters and a shared village setting; and then using a scenario pack for the evenings adventure. It’s a good way to get things going with zero prep beforehand. I’ve used Beyond the Wall a couple of times in this manner and Through Sunken Lands as well. Through Sunken Lands being the Moorcock/Howard/ sword and sorcery genre take opposed to Beyond the Wall’s Prydain/Earthsea/Dark Rising presuppositions. They’re both good games that do exactly what they set out to achieve and it’s nice to have something like that in your back pocket for such as occasion. 

Beyond the Wall had campaign tools in Further Afield and while I have not employed them at the table, they look sound. If we decide to extend Beyond the Wall past a couple of sessions I’d be interested to see how they work out.  

What I Do When a Player Misses a Session

Play with who turns up.

What? Yeah, seriously, just play with whoever turns up and find a way to make it work. 

In most gaming groups there will be times when you all just can’t make it on the same Wednesday or whatever. This is just a fact of modern life. Something will come up for someone at some point which means they just can’t play. 

I saw a thread on Reddit recently where there was must handwringing on this subject but it’s all a bit nonsense. If one player can’t make it or two players or something please don’t cancel your game. Just play.

Having time for play is a rare thing, allowing that time to be subverted to something else because of scheduling is a shame. Sometimes it can’t be helped but the game should continue regardless. That way great campaigns are built and I think that is what we’re after. If you consistently run your game week in, week out with the players that are available then the game will inevitably grow. If that game is cancelled frequently then it will probably end up in the great campaign graveyard; Hiatus. 

It helps if you have baked into the setting reasons to be flexible about attendance but it’s not necessary. The famous OG West Marches campaign always started and finished in town to allow for its rotating cast of players to always have the same start point. My Grim North campaign exists mostly within one huge city to allow for people wandering off mid adventure to go shopping on their own and rejoin the others later (like next week.) 

Or alternatively Time in the Grim North is mutable. So this past weekend I had two players available out of five. One of whom has just returned from a two week holiday is out of in game continuity. Currently the PCs are involved in exploring an abandoned mansion and dealing with various squatters. I gave them the option of continuing this without the others or taking an alternate branch of the timestream to do something else for the evening, try and resolve it in one session and then pick up the mansion exploration when more people were available. This is a very meta thing to put to the players but it was game time and I wanted to play. They took the alternate timeline option and the two of them became embroiled in a heist to steal the last owlbear egg in the Grim North. 

The campaign continues and that’s the main thing

Setting Appropriate Random Tables

These are worth their weight in the precious metal of your choice. In order for an entry on a random table to have significant value it must be something that the GM couldn’t just make up on the spot. So if entry 23 on your Open Country encounter table is “2d6 Peasants,” it’s not working hard enough. 

The way the Black Hack handles this is interesting, and I expect it’s not the only example of this. It gives each monster entry two small (d6) tables of what they’re doing and what with. See Banished Elves above. This way we’re not just getting “2d6 Banished Elves, fight ‘em” as a result. You could argue that the old school reaction roll helps add variety to general tables and I would agree and wholeheartedly encourage you to use them. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, sometimes you need something general but random in order to introduce an element of chaos (with a small c) into your highly structured plan for this evening’s fun. If high structure fun is your and your group’s bag. I always roll on my “What’s Complicating Tonight’s Grim North Session?” table for this very reason. And despite my preference for more detailed and setting relevant results in general, this is just a big list of potential antagonists. This works for me in that it often throws in an unforeseen or incongruent yet possible wrinkle into a session or scenario. The advantage here being that it can be easy to get drawn into George RR Martin thinking when quickly crafting hooks and scenarios.  By this I mean too thematic. When travelling George’s Seven Kingdoms you will often encounter the Fisher Folk who are ruled by the Fish King and sit upon the Cod-bone Throne or whatever. This sort of theming is useful in differentiating between lots of what would be otherwise broadly similar places. Indeed the Districts of Nox Aeterna are themed in this way for that exact reason.  However, if we’re stealing a minority religious item from a cult and there are other thieves, other cults and the Watch involved then that’s fine but it’s all a bit obvious. If we roll on our random complication table and the mysterious Lamprey Men are now in the mix then we’ve got to get creative and that’s where the adventure is. 

If we look at a more specific example from my setting, each District of the city has a short random encounter table. They’re usually just a d6 but the encounters on them are relevant to that location in some way that I don’t have to just make up on the spot. So generally if I roll that table I get something specific to the region of the city the PCs are travelling through without having to really reference any deeper notes on the area; and it’s automatically congruent with that District and it’s inhabitants. In this instance when I create entries for these tables they include the activity taking place. So for instance if we consider this entry for Rivershore, a gentrified former fishing locale now popular with hipsters: 

1. Earnest youths seeking monthly charitable donations for blind, mute, plague ridden orphans

So yes, they’re beggars but more in the vein of the modern tabard wearing charity muggers that accost you in London claiming to want just a minute of your time (and of course a monthly direct debit from which their commission is generated.) It’s not creative genius but it’s definitely better than “2d4 beggars,” and that is sufficient for these purposes. 

In this week’s Grim North…

No one at home but us creepy, murderous weirdos

As the players continue to explore the formerly abandoned Von Eirik mansion and evict the squatters they encountered…

A cultist from the Cult of the Supreme and Baleful Eye and his new acolytes performing a ritual in the master bedroom. They paused to burn the lead cultist and his armband of preserved human flesh in the abandoned out buildings.

A very clean but lost party goer in the laundry room who hd through a mix of laundry steam and powerful hallucinogenics got lost in a small space. He renounced his life of drugs and gave his remaining stash to the PCs. He warned them of a huge caterpillar “that sucks you dry, man”

In the kitchen were a number of chrysalises and a very old jar of pickles. Once they realised what the chrysalises were, they destroyed them. 

Raskog the mystical urchin found a Ventari spell that will allow him to summon a suit of demonic armour.

A musician attempting to bring back his entirely desiccated friends by playing a symphony originating with the death magicians of accursed Xidia, on a slightly out of tune piano. 

They recovered a tiny amount of silver, some candlesticks, a blowgun, some drugs, a cult style dagger, an ancient jar of pickles and some sheet music with runic titles. 

Good job the twelve year old heiress of the place is paying them to clear it out.