jack

PLOT DEVELOPMENTS

Both groups learned some significant facts about the background of the world. The way the labyrinth sometimes connects different places in time, and the kobold legion they encountered had taken advantage of this to flee a post-apocalyptic future into the past, in the hopes of setting up an endlessly looping permanent kobold civilisation without the "and then the world expires and all is blackness until the beginning comes round again" bit.

And which gods think approve of this and which don't.

And both had some more extended contact with the kobolds (in reluctant negotiations or capture-and-interrogate ways). And both found some of the macguffins they'd been looking for.

PACING

The last couple of sessions have been pretty fun and satisfying (a few previously-mentioned frustrations aside), but I feel like, not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. The one with the "investigating how the fungus creatures got in to massacre the mines" I think was still the best, I think because it had a lot of intermediate goals, but the more recent sessions have all been reasonably good, even if not perfect.

This is my first longer campaign, really. I wrote myself into a corner a bit. I originally hoped the players would just find hooks and challenges in the labyrinth, and explore off their own bat, finding new areas and getting money and levelling up being the rewards. But it didn't work out like that.

I naturally built up the things that were going well and sidelined the things that weren't clicking, so that made the game go a lot better. But that meant a lot more NPCs, plot, etc than I originally intended. Which is good, because it went well. And has mostly settled down to needing "not much prep". But partly it means that I'm crafting more of a story and less of a sandbox, which the original design is less suited to.

And partly, it means we've got lots of different story hooks or goals and not enough clear player-bought-into goals. If I did this again, I'd try to find a way to make clear progress towards goals (either with explicit missions with subgoals like "follow the clues" or "search areas to find", or with explicit goals for exploration like "level up when you find X thousand gold pieces").

Nothing specifically spectacular happened, but this session was really satisfying!

The players brought the rescued miners the rest of the way back to the main mines, on the way discovering a small Myconid outpost near the mines, and discovering the myconids had made a big attack on the mines, sadly wreaking quite a massacre. Further patient investigation discovered a contingent of guards had let the Myconids in, and absconded with some of the most valuable resources mined.

What worked out

I tried several things to make the session feel more satisfying, and I think they all worked:

* I looked at the overall arc of the campaign, which so far had mostly been "rescue trapped miners" and a few other hooks which we hadn't had time to explore, and worked out what would be natural next things to happen, and then made sure they happened *now*, not waiting on the players to "get there", even if I needed to jump a little to get there
* I worked out what the players were most likely to encounter and let my imagination run free fleshing it out, updating my overall notes accordingly. Some of that showed up in ways I expected and ways I didn't, so the prep is showing worthwhile even when it doesn't come up as expected
* I made an effort, in advance and during the session, to flesh out the NPCs the players meet. Even a little bit made the world feel a lot more alive, and began to snowball as I got used to the NPCs and more fell into place, even if I'd just got the players to make up a name and single personality trait to start with.
* Some "joining-the-dots", or just having stuff that the players would see during the session, but making sure it's uncovered successively by specific player action; even if it's only "ask the obvious questions in any order", it adds a lot more feeling that the players/characters are driving what happens, and it's easy to adjust (e.g. if I know what they're likely to discover, I can on the fly judge what actions might uncover what easily or only after some challenge they encounter)

In the end, I spent some time introspecting about *how* to plan this, which I'm pretty pleased with, and the actual prep ended up not taking long, mostly plugging a few ideas I had for what was likely to come up into the existing worldbuilding I already had, and some brainstorming. So hopefully I can keep doing that without a big investment of time.

It does mean, I can't yet quite do what I'd originally hoped of running a zero-prep session on the spot whenever I'd like. But if I work in some mini-plots into the worldbuilding/scenario/locations, I probably could start to do that just by picking up one of the ones I'd prepared. After a few sessions I should start to have a surplus of stuff like that anyway.

Also

We had enough time to revisit some things which had come up before, and discovering more about them made everyone feel like things had happened, and me feel like they were worthwhile including.

There wasn't that much combat, and that felt about right as we'd spent a fair bit of time on combat before and people are now reasonably familiar with what their characters can do, so being low on hit points was tense even when they didn't encounter significant opposition. It took a while to get to that point, when people don't initially have a good instinct for how much healing is available.

That also sped things up, but I don't think it needs to stay like that, the pendulum can also swing back. I think the important thing is to include the things that made the session feel like it made progress, but the "in between" bits that get to them can either be investigation, or combat, or navigation, or other character activity.

In future

Think this plan worked and I want to follow a similar model in future. In particular, I hope to recapture the "each session feels worthwhile individually" I'd originally intended. Despite connecting quite tightly to the previous session (starting in the middle of the labyrinth with trapped miners to escort home) and following session (following up on the events of this session), this session felt reasonably like it was satisfying by itself, with events established and resolved.

I also should continue to trust my gut on what the players are feeling reasonably on top of (basic combat, navigation checks), and keep them present but only touching on them briefly can be enough, and on what the players haven't enough chance for (agency, finding things out, progressing plot) and trying to make sure it has a chance to happen.

Ideally every session will be fun in different ways, but none will be the "mustn't miss" session.

I am also starting up a second group on alternate Mondays, so I will try to follow the same model and see how it goes. I'm excited to see how they interact in the same world.

I'm hoping that if I keep this up, I can get away from my completionism and come up with cool new ideas and do prep with only a small investment of time each week, and make more time for other things. We'll see how that goes :)