Spelljammer Academy, 12 Sessions (Feb-June 2023)
What it was: semi-open table run continuation of the Spelljammer Academy adventure. It initially was the hook for us to test new venues for our games club so it was episodic one-shots I banged together fairly haphazardly and just let it evolve as it went
What worked: Episodic nature worked well, set-up tolerated a changing cast week on week really well. People were able to pick up the 'D&D in Space' vibe pretty well. I got to improve my 'minimum viable prep' muscles. We found some kick-ass venues, people were understanding when the venues were sub-par;
What didn't: Trying to be authentic and use the Realmspace supplement. Slogging into the morass of old Oriental Adventures content. What rose-tinted glasses I may have had about AD&D Spelljammer or Oriental Adventures were ripped off and ground underfoot. Some time management issues but that is perpetual with the drop in games. Some venues worked better than others.
Lessons learned:
Fixing two dates a month and asking a bunch of people to get a minimum table of 3 is much better for my stress levels than trying to align peoples schedules
Reduce what you need to carry by challenging yourself to run games with only what is in one or two books
Episodic things like this or Adventurers League are ideal for open tables but you can get much of the campaign 'actions have meaning' feeling with even one or two players continuing session to session
Read the abilities of your monsters and how they interact with players on ships - area effects like dragons-breath, banshee wails, etc. are a lot more effective because people cannot spread out
To delve into the off-table logistics, this was a new one for me in that it each session was a new venue and a round up of a handful of folk to play. Happily, given the pool from RPGVienna that was doable - numbers varying session to session - and strongly assisted by this all kicking off as a means to scout potential locations for us to find a new regular home. I had my own motivations in that childcare obligations block my joining the regular Friday night slots so I was well motivated to prove up whether rounding up folk at times other than the usual could be done regularly. Happily for me, it is.
This was also a study in trimming down my 'go bag' to the minimum - driven by the need to haul it all along but also mindful that everything brought to a public venue with food and drink was liable to get ruined and so nothing sentimentally important should be there.
Of 12 sessions, we ran 6 Saturday afternoons, 3 Saturday evenings and 2 Sunday afternoons and 1 Sunday evening. I did a block of my scouting with Googlemaps, using the 'busy times' tool to spot how busy they ever got then checking when they were down off that high point. A bunch of places I might have liked were never quiet enough and one has to recognise that a table full of gamers is not as hard drinking or fast-turnaround as others a venue might have in.
A few of the venues tested were not revisited - one place would only allow Sunday night which doesn't work with typical late finishes, another place was an outdoor terrace and we nearly froze, another place was a touch to dim of a back room and a last place was just too busy - we had a guy come up and ask to roll dice and tell us about his own fighter. We found two keepers - one that is quiet in the afternoons, one that is quiet in the evenings - both cafe/bars. The evening one was a great find, maybe its their cash only policy but for whatever reason find a nice place not too far out to place D&D on a Saturday night felt like a lucky find.
Of the players, there were 14 people involved over the whole campaign, 1 who made every session, 2 who made half of them and the rest made one or two. After an initial temp of getting in a weekly game, the rush to round up a table each week got un-fun so I settled down to calling a pair of dates for the month at the start of the month and going from there. On average was able to pull a table of four together. I made it direct requests rather than open invite on the forum as I knew with our main venue out of action I would be mobbed.
Interestingly, with 14 players we had 16 characters, one switching out for a mid-point session and another deciding after their first session to mulligan their character. Hilariously, variations on Robert cropped up a lot and we had Bobby the human farm-boy, Bob the satyr warlock and ROB the autognome cleric all at table at one point. Ella, Lara and Alira were also on the roster though only Lara and Alira shared a table.
Mechanically the episodic nature of each session a voyage and the players operating within the structure of an organisation helped a lot with making the campaign feel coherent - different people at the table today? Different crew got rostered, it wasn't your call. A bench of NPCs was regularly drawn on to fill out crew slots on the ships so packing a ship and getting on mission for each session worked well.
Another thing that was a muscle-builder for me was quick, coherent one-shot creation for people who have spent a lot of time on Adventurers League tables so have expectations of crunchy combat way above my normal comfort zone. I took as a challenge to try and bring the entire Boos Astral Menagerie to the table at least once and that was a creativity sparker for me. I will go through how each of the episodes was built in another post, there is far too much meat there to rush it here.
All in all, there were a bunch of comfort-zone boundary busters in this for me - running public venues, first time DM'ing for some veteran player/DMs, cooking up authentically Spelljammer escapades on short notice, finding venues, cranking up the combat content, repeated ad-hoc scheduling. I don't think I've felt I made such a qualitative leap as a general DM in quite a while, I would solidly recommend the experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment