AAR: In which AsenRG prepares his next session

[AsenRG]

I'm a bit behind...
Since then, I ran a session of Sigil and Shadow, which went great. Here's what I wrote in the Actual News thread.

Lots of roleplaying news on my side, and for a change, all of them sound positive!

1) I ran Sigil&Shadow for a second time on Saturday. We had a good group of 4 players (2 of them new, one of the old players couldn't make it due to studying).
That's one of the few times since my several-months-long pause where I felt like I'm doing a good job. Maybe the first time when I felt I'm doing everything right, maybe the 3rd time when I was happy with my own performance...
(Now, the players were happy every time. I'm much harder to please!)

They are doing a splendid job of performing their part of the deal with the New Rochelle's Fairy God(less)mother*, who promised to hide the Mad Hatter's teapot under so much glamour, he'd never be able to find it. And thus, he'd never be able to attempt killing Time.
She just needed a small favour - investigating and dealing with a serial killer specializing in killing fairies... eh, if he kills her, she couldn't really hide it, right? Fairy glamour dissipates after the death of the fairy!

*Yes, she's a fairy. One of the mythical ones, not the slang term - though she's pretty ready to experiment, too...
No doubt at least one of my players would be glad to hear that, BTW.

2) My most regular player (he has hardly missed a session since the first time we played - coincidentally, he's also among the few Bulgarians with more experience than me) promised to consider running Aquelarre. The setting is exactly up his alley, the presentation is detailed, like he likes, magic system seems to be made to match his preferences, he loves the sanity system...
I have my hopes! The man is running not one, but TWO PF2 campaigns. So once one of them concludes, who knows...

3) First Daughter liked the D&D movie. At the same evening we watched it, a friend announced in Discord that he's planning to introduce his 11yo daughter to RPGs, as soon as our favourite FLGS announces the next weekend-long mini-RPG-con...
As my daughter is roughly the same age, I suggested we should put them in the same group.
Then he said the owner has informed him that he won't announce it for a couple weeks more at least. So I suggested we could offer them a session elsewhere, earlier. If there isn't a GM at the ready, I can fill the role!
And then it turned out, he knows more kids the same age who are interested in roleplaying, too (they met them at the local fantasy con, so obviously the parents are our kind of people)!
OK, I can run for a bigger group as well, no problem. Or I might talk one of my regular players into running, maybe. Whatever works.

4) I'm gearing up for running a (one-on-one) game of The Petal Hack tomorrow or after tomorrow.


5) My players are voting for what we should play on the next session, and on which day. It's either Tuesday, Wednesday, or the week-end, but the latter would need additional negotiations (I'm working on the weekend, but should be able to free up one of the afternoons by taking a morning shift).
I gave them the options "modern thriller via Mythras/Destined, Sigil&Shadow (but with different characters if it's on the weekend - one of the players can't make it), or something OSRish".

Expanding on to that, I've been using Bing and Chat GPT to help me create a one-shot for The Petal Hack. Yes, they're really just helping - I tell them what to create, and then there's the editing...but I prefer editing to writing.
So now I've got 15 pages of a Tekumeli-based "setting snapshot" (i.e. the starting situation at the beginning of the session, ready for use at the table).

...Maybe I should give them the task to write me a system and edit it, too?

On the bright side, I might have taught Bing how to run a sandbox campaign. Hey, it asked me how I run, it's a very involved AI!
Fingers crossed that it's trainer would allow it to remember that, of course...

 

[AsenRG]

I'm running a Destined one-shot today - street level, I'm actually using it to run a thriller-style action where two ninja, a CIA agent, a Triad member and a Yakuza with cyberprosthetics have to plunge in the underworld of Tokyo to save a well-known head of state that I'm not going to name to avoid attention by search engines!
OTOH, I'm at work, and I haven't finished preparing the PC pregens!

Clearly, I need someone to make them for me...

I can't bribe the Pub to do it, so I'd have to bribe some of the players. Let's see how much XP I'd have to offer.

 

[AsenRG]

Destined went well, mostly. BTW, the PCs saved Zelenskyy - in a totally apolitical, sandbox way...they actually had an option to help the hired hitman instead (they had been hired by mysterious parties to off him during his nonexistent visit in Japan on 20-05-2023).


As I just said on Discord (I've got my own channel in an RPG-oriented server, yay!) I've got to run between 1d4+2 and 1d4+3 one-shots more. Then I'm starting to set up for a new campaign.
Sigil &Shadow, Cryptomancer and some OSR game (Spellcraft@Swordplay, The Petal Hack, DCC or Cities Without Numbers) are mandatory. And I should probably run another session of Zaibatsu as well.

Legends of the Wulin, Fight! 2e and Blade of the Iron Throne are part of the dieroll, though. I mean, the first two of them would only make sense if the players want to learn the rules. And BotIT would make sense if the players don't tire from heavy combat systems!

The likely candidates for a campaign: Sigil&Shadow, Mythras/Destined (either wuxia or thriller aesthetics), Riders of R'lyeh with their campaign, M-Space, Exalted Essence, Art of Wuxia with a Brendon campaign (either Strange land of Li Fan or Sons of Lady 87), Cryptomancer, and - if the other old GM decides against purchasing and running it for us - Aquelarre. But I'd much rather be a player in the last one.

The campaign should last at least a year, though. I'm also looking at an investment of ~$100 before starting it, since this time, I intend to buy the books in print (well, print+PDF, where applicable). After being a PDF-only guy for a while, I've decided that it's actually easier to read from books...but mostly it's because books are easier to pass around the table.

Also, some players obviously like to see books, and hype themselves after seeing the print book!

 

[AsenRG]

No session this week. A kiddie birthday party threw me for a loop. Ah well, such is life, I wasn't really in the mood anyway, so I might not have pushed too strongly!

OTOH, I can try finishing the Petal Hack one-shot that got interrupted (by needing to sleep, imagine that...) at least. And there are rumours I might get to play Art of Wuxia, but I'll believe it when it happens!

On the plus side, the wife was seriously impressed with Arbiter of Worlds!

 

[AsenRG]

So, guys, anyone willing to give me advice on running a game for pre-teens is welcome to do so...
(And yes, I'm going to run Mythras, why bother asking?)

 

[AsenRG]

Current status: making pre-gens. Hasaph, on the Mythras Discord, already pointed out to me what I've been forgetting: that witches are quite adequately represented by Folk Magic, and that transformation magic !

The current plan is to have 7 chracters for them to pick from: Warrior, Witch, Hunter, Assassin (?), Thief, Wizard (or maybe 2 wizards &/or 2 warriors), Shapechanging Bard.
...note to self, use variant chargen (the pyramid). I'm not planning to use the standard chargen any more, but this goes double for when I'm doing pre-gens. The Destined chargen was a serious challenge for my nerves.
Not because Destined doesn't support the pyramid option, mind you - it does. I just forgot to use it!

 

[AsenRG]

So, my (9-12 yo) newly-minted Mythras players dealt with a band of 29 goblins* and met Goblin Slayer, who decided to show them how to deal with the goblins.
Yes, that Goblin Slayer. And the goblins are kinda like those in the manga, minus the age-inappropriate stuff. They still shocked the players, though, just with the "human soup" (which prompted comments how "this game should have a VR" from the eldest player, and comments from her father* "if there was one, it would be 18+ and you wouldn't be allowed").
If they only knew the reference...

Next plans: Goblin Slayer would keep killing goblins. But the entity behind the goblins might have spotted the PCs...Amusingly, that's exactly what Bing said as well! (This AI is learning, it just offered to run Mythras for me...and actually suggested Thenla!)
After some more consulting with Bing: the PCs shall receive a work offer that they might decline, but they'd also get to talk with the prospective employer. A talkative fellow, actually an actor, employed by a wealthy merchant, who is himself under the patronage of a noble, who is (not publicly) a client of a powerful necromancer.
Depending on what they share, they'd get pointed towards suitable (for them) enemies of the necromancer.

*They used a total of 5 magic spells for that. But one of them was Entangle. Goblins attack in numbers? Well, not when they are entangled.
Also, Sleep fucks up any goblin Champion, and Blind opponent sticks it to any goblin shaman.
The best part of it: I actually didn't suggest any of those - at least one of them is actually thinking on her feet!
**He was present at the table, and has claimed that he'd want to learn to run games...but he "doesn't know how to improvise", so his first attempt was a disaster. The kind of "players getting off the railroad, Referee having no idea how to deal with it" disaster, AFAICT (based on his account).
So I told him, via a wall of text on Discord, the basic rule of "set situations, not storylines", and added that it's easier to show than to tell how to do that. I think he got the gist of it (and was seriously impressed with allowing the players to do anything they want).