Shadows Over Garenport Actual Play Summary #1: Prologue Part 1

Well, we had our first Shadows Over Garenport session this last weekend. In spite of the fact that we cancelled our "Cider Mill and Bonfire" plans due to the threat of inclement weather, we actually had decent weather after all; only a few hours of very light drizzle in the later evening. Maybe it was a good call, but maybe we should have just done our original plans after all. We moved them to this next weekend, but now the weather forecast has changed.

Then again, our weather forecasts are notoriously unreliable where I live. They change multiple times during the day, and are almost always more pessimistic than reality. Not that we don't get a lot of rain; my biggest complaint about where we live is the number of days that are gray and rainy or both—compared to the West where I've always desired to live, where even in the coldest winters, most days are clear and sunny—all of which is a long way of saying that I don't know for sure when we'll play again. It doesn't actually require a lot of notice. Two of the players live in my house, and the other two are over frequently and only live about 5-10 minutes away. The only constraint is that it's difficult to start before about 8 PM because of the little kids not being in bed yet. And, of course, during the week, that only gives us 2-3 hours tops before we have to go to bed so that we can have a decent morning at work.

Anyway... The session itself was both more and less successful than I hoped. More successful in the sense that everyone seemed to really enjoy it, more even than they expected. Less successful in that I felt rusty and awkward compared to where I normally would expect to be; I had to flip through my own rulebook a few times, I forgot a few details here and there, and I didn't really feel on point with my descriptions, pacing, and the other elements of running. Not to say that I was a disaster, just that I know I've run better; I was too rusty, and maybe a little too unfamiliar with the details of what I was doing, unfortunately. I have a tendency also to rush to the next thing, and not linger as long as I'd like on stuff, so again; I could have done better. As I get more into the groove, that'll improve, so I'm not overly concerned that that's a problem. I'm just rusty. And if the players had more fun than they expected even so, then there's nowhere to go but up from there.

I am a little concerned—although maybe that's too strong of a word—about the pivot from prologue to the "actual" game. I'm also a little bit concerned that they may be a group of players that needs more direction and hand-holding; they're all Millennials, and two of them have never really played before. A third has only played a little bit, with one other GM, and the last has GMed and knows the game fairly well, but is a bit of an introvert, and not likely to really take the lead with the game. I know that offering options and leaning more towards the sandbox model is the theoretically preferred model for a lot of people, but I don't know how well that will work with this group without leading them into it gently. Their experience with games is more the directed platformers with a very railroady story, like Red Dead Redemption or the Zelda games.

I also did something interesting; I redid my contacts/patrons slightly, and required everyone to pick one. A few of the patrons allowed you to pick a different race. My son picked that patron and made an orc character. The rest were all human; one was a middle-aged guy with a tragic backstory that led him into investigating the things that go bump in the night. I'll probably tinker with Hero Forge while I still have an active Pro account and make images of them. He picked Shule the criminal goblin as his contact, and then made his character an active criminal.

Shule

My son-in-law, who also runs a Curse of Strahd 5e game for my daughter and some of her work friends, told me afterwards that he's been in talks with some of his high school buddies about gaming a bit again, and he's now leaning towards a very rules-lite system like we used, after seeing it in action and how fast and easy and smoothly it goes. So, I took that as a compliment too.