Storytelling

It seems like a month has gone by since last Saturday when I came home from work and ran the first part of my module for a couple of my players. Just Friday, I decided, "You know, this really doesn't feel like the modern fantasy idea I imagined." I've been really thinking something like Percy Jackson, with enough Buffy and Shadowhunters to keep it from being elementary. Granted, I still like The Heroes of Olympus series. But regardless, I had a perplexing job ahead of me. Although there was a little nervous chill in my gut, wondering if I could fix this, a mentor's advise of "it's all gonna work out" proved true. I removed , after reading it over for ten minutes, the superhero setting from the module by renaming the city, as well as most of the other names, something more realistic, and reworking the player characters to be less super without weakening them. Most importantly, I started to sort out a few of the scattered paragraphs to appropriate bul

I didn't expect the first week to be quite like this. My group of friends rotates the gamemaster role, and this Saturday is my turn, allowing me to test out the work I have done so far.  At the beginning, I thought it would be months just writing the first draft; however, after a couple late nights and several days of editing before bed, the first draft is more than one third finished. What I have done since last week on Thursday: 1. A few sentences which set-up the adventures 2. The first draft of the first one-page adventure 3. Abbreviated stats for the first adventure's creatures 4. Abbreviated stats for 4 pre-made player characters 5. A few concise suggestions throughout the document for playing in the setting as well as making the adventures themselves more interesting I plan on continuing to give updates every Thursday night, with few exceptions, complete with everything I've done so far. Feel free to give criticism or use ideas from this for your home g

I thought carefully about what my New Year's resolution would be, and my answer came just a week ago when I was the gamemaster for an Edge of the Empire session. They were all sitting there and looking at me, expectantly. I was hastily flipping through my notes, trying to figure out what I was going to say. The paragraphs in the adventure looked like thick black puddles on the white wastleland-like page, and my notes were skeletal outlines that had become filled out to the edge of the margin like a snake after too big a meal. I just made something up, and my players had some fun. But it seemed pretty unnecessary that I had to stress over some notes when I should've been enjoying time with my friends. Part of the solution is for me to get more experience as a gamemaster, and the other part, I have decided, is for me to write an adventure where a gamemaster, without more than 3 minutes of editing, can look down at the page, even when they're anxious, and immediately find the