Session prep report: after-action edition

See previous post!

The game was goodish. The PCs didn't interact much with each other, doing their own things, which is fine by me contra many others, but never sparkles.

Two questions about any bit of prep to assess it postfacto:

• Did I use it in some way?

• Was it/would it have been better than I could improvise?


1. Ideas from the daydreaming walk

• While cool, the view down the stairs at an angle wasn't used. It did inspire a little 3rd person intro snippet I did with a view of *somebody* (the doctor) getting arrested

• The octopus was referenced, in a big tank in Durret's study when etric went to visit. The image got appreciative comments & bond villain comparisons; without prepping it I'd never have done it, I'm awful at improvising set dressings like that

• Didn't use the little oil lamp. Eh.

Obviously these are all unimportant descriptive fluff. But does matter in a description based medium.


2. Notes on Notes


The player's account of last time

I didn't get any times or details horribly wrong, so re-reading these was definitely a good idea. I don't have a good enough memory to keep a game this complex straight in my head for two weeks


My notes

• I had Clio make a Perception save to notice preliminary effects of the Migratory Letter. She immediately became suspicious and reported it to a military doctor who took her in for treatment and got the early stages of the curse effect dispelled. Good work that player! And I only came up with the effects at all due to preparations, though improvised specifics: vague sense of hostility in the world, shifting heat haze patters like the letters 

• Due to this Clio never talked to Sunny the Radiant Light agent. I could probably have improvised even if she had, it wasn't a detailed note.

• I did indeed assume the message got to Etric and he went to visit durret, with maybe less umming and ahing than if I had thought of that on the fly to keep it moving

The other notes didn't come up but I wasn't super expecting them to. They're more long term consistency details.


Forthcoming Things In the World

• I mentioned the weather. I never would if I didn't generate it in advance (with the Hex flowers from THIS PACK) and it really does make a difference. Tell your players it's grizzly and damp, see how the behaviour changes. Immersion!

• We only got through the stuff for the 19th, as expected, but I've already prepped background events for the 20th & beyond so no harm was done reviewing them.

• I didn't use the Knights of Tasseten ad. I'd love to say it didn't come up but honestly I'm bad at seeding rumours. Hey, this is why we prep! Even if it doesn't work

• Kirrin found the landlord's demand letter. I really should have got the price calculation I did a few weeks ago when they were shot out pre-game! Also defined a landlord and letting agent. As it was I improvised a contractor called Mr. Sline (my default 'slimy lawyer' names for years have been Slyne, Greebe and Mowlder, of whom I'd already used Greebe for a local infobroker Kirrin sometimes helps out), who stayed offscreen and worked via mail. He works for... a senior Pillar merchant-aristocrat and absentee landlord. I need to prep both more. 

• The arrest of Dr Noselala has happened but the PCs don't know yet. Still good to have a sense of background

• None of the ships came up apart from a one-sentence mention of the impounded malaoan ship which they missed and a mention that the docks were busy. That's fine; if they'd headed to any docks, this stuff would have been very useful. I checked to see if Eik might run into the Ryshyan leg-breakers whilst doing some snooping after his rumours, but he didn't get any random encounters.

3: image meditations:

Hard to quantify how useful these were

• The cityscapes were definitely in my head as i described things, but did I pick them because they matched what was already there?

• None of the rest really consciously came up, but I did include some theological weirdness: eik, snooping, ran into the "not-priests", a group of Listeners (weird group of the downtrodden who seem to share a hive mind) treated like holy men in a city slum

• In the low point of this bit of prep, I ended up googling a new image for inspiration for said slum as I describwd it! Probably should have looked at one before 

4: self-care

Self-care was good, but my thoughts on Manala didn't come up at all (just as they didn't come up "above" in the original post! Oops... originally I picked out a couple of gods whose details I could sprinkle in if need be)

Looping back to "self-care was good" - I do really recommend just walking for 40 mins before a session. Getting in a good mental state is usually more important than any last-minute prep; I always find I forget that stuff, or it leaves me in a bad mood that drags the whole session down. Not that I never do it, but I usually regret it.


Things to improve next time:

As in praise of legwork sayeth, sometimes you need to do the boring work. In some senses doing it for an audience helped; but the flashier ideas, the images and wandering, probably detracted from what was already a harder-than-usual task. Going back over my really basic assumptions in the briefing felt pretty useless, so in that sense the actual blogging might have been a bit time-inefficient. Overall, though, I was pleased with the game's outcome, and I at least felt like I'd been as thorough as usual if not more despite being slightly debilitated.

Anyway, other posts will obviously be a bit slow in coming but I am getting on with them when hands allow!

Tarra for now,


Jago


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