The saga begins.

First session under our belt with our home-brewed setting and hacked Exalted™ rule-set! I have posted an Adventure Log over at Obsidian Portal, so I won’t bother with a session recap. However, I do want to share a few things I have learned:

• Audio cues are a fantastic way to have everybody pay attention. At certain points in the session a creepy, disembodied voice would recite a verse of a nursery rhyme. Each time this happened, I would play a section of a music box track I found on the interwebz. When those chimes started playing – everyone got quiet and listened. Perfection achieved.
• Eight blokes sitting round a table in a warm, brightly lit room is not a good medium for a ghost story. I may reserve any further stories of this kind for times when I know there won’t be as large a group.
• Don’t be afraid to go off script. I’m usually a fairly prep-lite kind of GM anyway, so this isn’t a big revelation. However, if you do prepare a script or outline of events, flexibility is your friend. I skipped at least one encounter and some other minor details: they didn’t end up being necessary and to include them, simply because I had written it, would have bogged the game down.
• It doesn’t matter how much you blog, write or speak (at great length, whether anyone asks you or not). Someone will still ask you a question that has been answered a hundred times before.
• It doesn’t matter how many times you re-read your material, or how many other people read your material, there will always be some mistake that slips through. (*cough* Academics).
• Lastly – when you realize that you are waaay over time and call the session, a player remarks, “I knew what the time was but I didn’t want to stop”. That’s when you know you’ve been doing something right!

A big thank you to the Monday Nighters for making the first session a success and (raising a coffee mug) here’s to many more to come. Kumpai!

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~ by occam99 on July 10, 2012.