Dark Fantasy X first session

For anyone wondering why the Dark Fantasy X blog became a Heroes of Might and Magic blog the last few weeks or so, fear not! I'm actually going to swing back in a fairly big way to Dark Fantasy X, because I've scheduled my first session for it. My oldest son, his wife, and my son-in-law have had a lot of interest in D&D and have been wanting to play it. My daughter has played with my son-in-law and some work friends. She doesn't really love it, but she likes it well enough and is willing to do it because of everyone else doing it, if nothing else.

So, I've scheduled the first session for two weeks from yesterday, which is the first reasonable availability that we had. My daughter just couldn't believe that we wouldn't need 4-5 hours, especially with a starting session and chargen, so although I told her that this was different, I ended up bowing to the pressure (somewhat) of her expectations, and we'll have some pre-work done in advance. This actually works out well for me in some ways, otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to it. This coming weekend, when everyone will be together for some other things, I'll do a mini-session of sorts—if you remember, there's a nice prologue piece that I'd planned—and we can generate their real characters, with the "real" campaign start to be effective on the day that I planned, i.e. the 28th. While this isn't exactly how I meant to do it, I think it'll start off well, and doing it this way should work smoothly. And if it calms my daughter down, then that's probably worth it too—she's convinced that the 5e way of doing things that she's used to is the only way that it can be. She probably won't believe otherwise until she actually sees it.

What do I need to do to be prepared, then? I've done the work, but it may not be well enough organized to be handy. So, I have a few tasks:

• Print out the inside inserts for my custom GM screen, and insert them in the screens.
• Print out a bunch of character sheets for the players to use.
• Remake my disposable prologue characters
• Transfer my notes on what I'm doing from my blog posts to my notebook, so I have it handy at the table.

While that isn't a big deal to do any of that, it's not totally insignificant, and most of it needs to be done this week. Wednesday evening's too booked to be useful, Thursday is pretty booked, although maybe I could do some stuff late in the evening, and Friday is booked too. Saturday is pretty booked, plus that's potentially the day I'd squeeze in this "session 0", if not Sunday evening. That means I need to hit it pretty hard today and tomorrow.

But, the good news is that starting next week, I should have some actual play to talk about.