Plodding On: Behind the Screen

I did not prepare for this session well at all. I spent a lot of my allocated D&D time this week just reading through my newly printed Planescape setting books, largely to the detriment of the game. The lesson here: “lore” isn’t a thing that your players can play! Don’t neglect encounters. If I did this session again, I would plan the church riot/encounter first, change details as needed, and then work backwards from there. It might be that Daniphe’s lie would be best altered. We’ll see.

I spent a second chunk of time looking for an acceptable calendar for Sigil as well, and figuring out what the date was in the game. As Gygax himself said, keeping good track of time is an important part of immersing your players in the world. Dead Gods says the PCs get to Yggdrasil in late summer, so I figure that’s like the third week of August in our world. I used this calendar that I found, which is full of charm and fun details.

Some useful things I did prepare were road encounters. What with it being the Athar’s month, the faction is out pamphleteering and evangelising. More on that next time.

In-game, I added some heavy embellishments to the story of Daniphe, which I fear is going to end up in some disappointed players when they don’t get to fight a mad wizard.

How is the best way to handle the super attractive vixen? 25 years on this is something worth giving some consideration. Some people like to explore the theme of love/romance in their D&D game, and some might even be willing to explore the idea that their character has been bewitched to find someone beautiful. But some people really won’t! The hobby’s history of attracting creepy rape fantasists is real, and we all have a responsibility to make sure everyone is comfortable at the table. Luckily for me, M’narr has 14 Wisdom and 12-Bar is still unsure about his gender, so I didn’t have to agonise over it. I knew Alex would trust me if Ragados borderline fell in love with Daniphe, so it was fine. It led to some fantastic roleplaying, and I loved his character’s insistence that Daniphe pay her fare for the cab.

On the whole this session went just okay. My lack of preparation this session made it harder for me to enjoy. Finishing downtime felt more like I was stalling than running a game proper.

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