Tag / prep

by guyeatsfood

Stuck in a Prep Rut? Make some Pregens!

I have a long gaming to do list. Between conventions, Unconventional GMs, and new purchases, I’ve got a lot of games I want to get to the table. But I’m stuck. UK Games Expo was over a month ago, and my excitedly-purchased new games have been sat unplayed on my shelves. I have Bundles of Holding burning holes in my hard drive. But I can’t seem to get them ready. Sound familiar? “I’d love to run Dark Conspiracy at a con…” – well, why haven’t you?

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

I’m in a rut – I just can’t seem to get started. But thinking about it, I know how to solve this, so in the true spirit of self-help, I’m telling myself what to do in this post. And what you should do if, like me, you’ve got games you really want to run, but can’t… just do the first step. That first step?

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by guyeatsfood

Actual Prep: The Lazy Loremaster – The One Ring

Here’s a new project – I’m fascinated by prep, in all its forms – one-shot, long-form, session notes, handwritten scribbles. My own and others. A quick check online leads me to believe lots of you are, too. So, I’m going to showcase this on the blog. I can’t promise every session I’ll share my prep notes, but I’ll try and do it where I can – and I’ll offer a variable amount of commentary. 

These are also going to be 50% patreon exclusive – half of them will never be released to the public – so spread the word, and let me know if you’d like to share your own prep and talk to me about it. This one, however, links to an active Kickstarter – so, unlike most of my posts, it’s going public on both platforms at once – a reminder that usually Patrons get access 7 days earlier.

This is a little different. This is the 2nd (or 3rd, if you count our little Session Zero-to-One as Session 1 – I like to get a bit of play in at the end of a S0 to wet the whistle) session of an ongoing One Ring game that I had to set up because I was having so much fun playing TOR in another campaign. They’re going to be working for Saruman eventually, but some of the players are new to the system and so they are bumbling around Bree for now.

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by guyeatsfood

Whimsymaxxing : Running Under Hollow Hills One-Shots

It’s fairly unusual that a game blows me away with entirely different gameplay to what I’ve seen before, but Under Hollow Hills has done that. It’s also really great for one-shot gaming! So here’s my guide to the game, and how to get a great one-shot out of it.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks! Patrons also get three ready-to-run Occasions uploaded with this post – a Patreon exclusive!

Under Hollow What?

Under Hollow Hills is a Powered By The Apocalypse (PBTA) game by Megeuy and Vincent Baker. Its core gameplay system is standard PBTA, but it twists some other aspects of the system in other ways – you’ve got Plays, not Moves, and instead of choosing Attributes in character generation, you assign bonuses directly to the Plays. 

In it you play a fairy circus, travelling through Fairyland and the Mortal World, putting on shows at various Occasions. These could be a change of seasons, a funeral, a wedding – or sometimes your circus just shows up, and an audience wanders in. The core gameplay loop is that you arrive at a location, explore and find out what is up with the people there, and then put on your show – where you’re probably trying to resolve some of the problems you heard about in the first part.

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by guyeatsfood

“Why does X not want to kiss you?” – Better Bonds for One-Shots

One of the things I’m always mindful of when prepping one-shots is encouraging player roleplay. I don’t mean PCs talking to my NPCs (you can directly influence this as GM), I mean PCs talking to other PCs. There’s several techniques to promote this, but I’m going to talk today about bonds.

What are bonds? They’re questions, or loaded phrases, that link 2 (or more) PCs together at the start of the session. In a one-shot, after everyone has picked their character, they answer the question or tag the bond which whichever of their fellow PCs they want. They give players a chance to customise who their pregen is, ground them in their past and the setting, and set them up to interact with their fellow players. They’re entirely transferable – while lots of PBTA games come with them ready-baked into the playbooks, you can use them in D&D, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu (which is what really got me thinking about them).

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Hacking #Borg Games

It’s hard to deny the impact that Mörk Borg and its cousins have had on the game space. With a punk aesthetic and layout just this side of legible, the quick-and-dirty system and open license has encouraged lots of related games. And the system is solid – a really good basis for relatively rules-light action-oriented OSRy gaming. We’ve got a few of them up on Unconventional GMs – check out Ronin and Pirate Borg, and there’s more to come. You’ll notice these hacks aren’t used for these games – these are how I’ve developed it since then.

However, based on my own preferences for gaming, I like to hack the system a bit when I run these games – largely to give the PCs a few more options, and to reduce the chances of meaningless character death. So, here are the ways I hack #Borg games, when I’m prepping for one-shots:

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

The Original Lonely Fun – How We Read TTRPGs

I’ve just finished reading Every Day I Read, a collection of essays by Korean author Hwang Bo-Reum where she breaks down the joy and approaches she has to reading fiction and non-fiction. Most of my reading tends to be TTRPG books, and it occurs to me that I think we have a really different approach to reading game texts than other non-fiction. 

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, and the chance to request articles or content, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

The Form Factor – alternatives to the 4 hour Session

Regular readers of this blog will know that one of the things I always say is that sessions, and campaigns, should be shorter. On bluesky a few weeks ago, I went further – somebody asked what the biggest issue stopping TTRPGs becoming more popular was (as you’d expect, many answers ironically identified D&D5e as the problem) – and I said the session paradigm. I think shorter one-shots would help – to be able to demo a game in an hour and a half, like a movie. Also, the endless epic campaign (that, realistically, never finishes). 

Campaigns should be 4-12 sessions – if you like it, take a rest and come back for another season – but that’s another blog post. Here’s some really good forms of play that you can actually do, and give slightly different gaming experiences. 

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

The Dilithium Dilemma – a Star Trek Adventures One-Shot

After talking about three-stage prep before, I thought I’d better give you the finished example. This one-shot for Star Trek Adventures (2nd Edition) is soon to be released on Unconventional GMs, and I rattled it off as a one-shot ready to run. 

UPDATE! The Dilithium Dilemma is now out on Unconventional GMs – here to watch in a tight 1hr 40min actual play!

It’s set in the Original Series era, as that’s where my co-host’s tastes lie (and, to be honest – it gives a bit more pulpy action than any of the other eras), and it played through in about an hour and a quarter. Scheduling meant we only had two players, though – a normal group and  normal pacing means this should run in a normal 3-4 hour slot no problem.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Three Step Prep – my new method

I’m always looking for ways to approach my game prep that results in great gaming experiences that are fun for my players – and, importantly, easy for me at the table. I’ve used a few methods, and I’ve got a few go-to structures that I often use for one-shots. But alongside this, I’ve started doing my prep in three stages, and it’s producing great results – so I thought I’d share it here.

Basically, I do my prep in three stages – each of them, ideally, a few days apart. Now, I know there’s conflicting advice on this – Lowell Francis has blogged on Age of Ravens about doing his prep an hour before the session – but I’m trying to invest a little bit more time than that. This is often prep to feature on Unconventional GMs, so it needs to be tight enough to run for the first time confidently, and clear enough that I can speak without filler words on camera. Looking back at some earlier videos, I really didn’t have enough prep – you can tell by counting the “ummm”s!

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Culture Clash

We’ve all got our own tastes and foibles when it comes to TTRPGs. But more than that, we’ve got established play cultures in our groups that we not only evolved to suit our own tastes, but that we assume everyone else enjoys. Recently I’ve encountered two quite different play cultures to mine, and I wanted to examine them here, and why I found them tricky.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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