Dark Fantasy X preparation

I feel pretty good about my prep last night, even though it wasn't everything I hoped to do. I went to print a bunch of stuff off, and got everything except the character sheets. In trying to start the character sheets, I immediately got an out of black ink message from my old Canon Pixma. I think my son-in-law, if he doesn't forget, will print them for me and bring them over. I asked for ten; which gives me enough to have one for each of the four players, one for each of the four pseudo-PCs; the "Scooby Gang" lookalikes who all get killed off right away, if you recall, and two more just in case someone messes up their sheet somehow, or we want to have a few backups in case someone bites it in the game.

Because I didn't get the character sheets printed off, I didn't make the characters for the Scooby gang. That's a shame, because that will take a little bit of time to make four characters, although it will be good practice for me before I do it with the players. I know, I know—they're my rules, I shouldn't need practice. But just because I wrote them—years ago with some slight tweaks months ago—doesn't mean that I'm super familiar with the process, honestly. Going through it with Frederick von Johannes, Daphne FitzBlake, Gavin Shagford (and his large dog) and Zelda du Velmois will make sure that my memory and understanding of the nuances of chargen are fresh and sharp when I have to do it with the players.

I was also going to copy a bunch of stuff from my blog posts into the journal that I decided to use as a GM journal for the game. I didn't do that either. My journal had a sticker from the store on it that was a big pain to remove; it took the better part of 45 minutes or even an hour while I was watching a youtube video in the background. Then I went up to bed thinking I'd make some notes. When I looked at the first blog post that I needed to summarize, I found a few outdated elements in it; the MASTER OF THE PACK NPC villain that they face for the "prologue" was from an older version of the rules, and had the old funky spells that I no longer use. I'm tempted, however, to just use him as is. I have descriptions of all of the stuff that the spells do, so I can run him without needing to convert them to the new revision of the rules.

Master of the Pack

Although I said that last night was just about the only free night I could use to do this, that's not completely true. It is that it's the only free night, but the things that I have tonight, for instance, or Thursday, will only take an hour or two. Wednesday is a bit more complicated, as is possibly Friday and Saturday all day—I genuinely won't have much time to do anything those days. So I have time here and there to work on things, but the time is a bit more constrained because I either have work or personal entries on my schedule that will take precedence.

But, as long as I can get the prologue stuff transferred into my journal this week, which I should have plenty of time to do, as well as make the pseudo-PC characters, I should be good to go. Actually, I technically don't need them until next weekend, but I think I want to be prepared for this weekend, just so we can see how things go. I'm thinking that I'd like to run the pseudo-PC "adventure" this weekend, and then tell the players that "OK, now we can make your real PCs. When we start next weekend, they'll be standing at this same spot early in the morning, ready to investigate what happened here. The most important thing in terms of backstory that you can come up with is—why are you involved in this investigation? What stake do you have in it? The Watch is undermanned and unlikely to solve this case on their own, so there's an opportunity here for you. Keep in mind that your characters aren't anybody yet. They're not important. They're not well-known. They're nobodies. But by the end of this prologue adventure, they'll be somebodies—they will have been able to get the attention of a few important people, and will be able to run on the fringes of their social circles, opening up more opportunities for adventure, if you do well and don't get killed yourselves." Then we'll make characters together, and hopefully that will whet their appetite for the coming "real" start to the game. Quick and easy, I've satisfied my daughter's anxiety about the time needed for preparation, and hopefully drummed up a little hype while I'm at it.

Daphne FitzBlake

Frederick von Johannes

Zelda du Velmois

Gavin Shagford

"The Dog"