If folks want to chime in, I will happily take examples of ancient magitech relics as macguffins for the sessions. 😁 Kind of a Warehouse 13 vibe, returning to home base when they’re done, à la One Punch Man.

Session One: Our first full session opened not on the mainland as they said last time, and rather on a pirate tower at sea. Okay, fine. 🤷 Glad I didn’t prep. It ended up being a nice, tonal on-ramp before the frontier proper. The party navigated social encounters with a pirate crew and their captain, Captain Twelves (a simia with an immaculate poker face and an even better plume), ultimately booking passage toward the mainland rather than fighting their way out. Capt. Twelves required they build their own rowboat, as he’s vowed to never set foot on the mainland again. His price: Deliver a message to Queen Marzipan, a Firbolg of the northern mountains. (I’m thinking a ballerina in a music box) We closed the session on a quiet but heavy note: as the ship pulled away from land, the pirates began singing together, “something you don’t yet realize you will likely never hear again.” That moment did a lot of tonal work for later themes around silence, fear of expression, and why bards are hunted in this world. Key character hooks emerging: - ID-10T carries a key to the Spire and is beginning to feel pulled toward something he doesn’t yet understand. - Harry Bigtoes wields a warhammer forged from a fragment of the meteor known to his people as the Twin-Tailed Comet, a god that “came home” when it struck the world. - Metacomet is positioning himself as a seeker of knowledge, hopefully setting up future pressure around what knowledge costs, and who decides it matters. (That’s my big lift.) - Finnick quickly established himself as the group’s social lubricant and complication generator. It’s fun having him know someone everywhere. Player feedback was good. Worldbuilding landed. Next they’ll get to see the contrast between the Scar — rampant wilderness vs the wastes, — and the mountains beyond the forest. Next session opens with a dream for Harry, an escape from a sea monster, and landfall at Lost Lantern Cove at the last path on the road along the Scar at the beach. I’ve got reskinned scorpions on the one hand and reskinned clank skeletons on the other.

Hi, gang! Finally throwing in!… I went from an elaborate Mind Node and accompanying Evernote folder with gobs of files and notes, to a one-page in Google Docs. Now I have my stack of index cards that I really just look through before the game. Let’s see…. Here are some Star Wars Evernotes… and some pictures of the folder. 50 Dream Sequences / Hallucinations / Visions / repressed memories 90 Brainstorming: Star Wars Season Three Scratch Here’s the link to the GM prep one-sheet, which got laborious with a 12-game campaign: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DWiSHjIpw8aadGYtREpmpNNU-iuwl_UllylJl3e0IWE/edit?usp=drivesdk And now I have a new set of card templates in Canva that I print off just once per campaign. CATS, setting data, all that stuff lives in a deck and I review it before the game… sometimes. 😄 https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5dJ0LrJY/X3f-DM78uoz5tXs2YQ7jIQ/edit?utm_content=DAG5dJ0LrJY&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton I’ll include a picture of what I’ve got going in “The Ether Frontier” for now, with a deck from another game (“The Chrysalis Revolver”) closes alongside it for reference.

Ah! If we’re going to mine sourcebooks for other games, I think Ken Hite’s keeper section in Trail of Cthulhu is one of the best I’ve ever read. I’ve heard great things about the wardens’ handbook for Mothership. I’ll let you know… And if you want to slingshot your GMing, listen to Fear the Boot (been going for almost twenty years), find a group with a rotating GM, and get some folks together to play Laser Kittens.

@Martin Voncannon : Okay, I’m biting… The first book? All five of them? The blog?

What a lot of gems in here! Echoing what Jesse and Jonah said, and it took me a few months to even grasp the idea of a proactive debrief every session. I’m keen on Stars and Wishes, and for some reason the goal discussion eluded me for a while. I was too busy trying to force the concept down folks to ask, which makes me not much different than the DM who laments that “my” players aren’t invested in my world. Annnnd I 100% have found that some players (not to mention groups) may not be interested in any, all, or certain parts of the proactive roleplaying mode. I also love what Eric said about it not being an either/or. My latest expression at work as we integrate software with a bunch of features has been, “It’s a valve, not a switch,” which is to say we can add aspects of the PARP style to the degree that it entertains the table. Season to taste, if you will. Keep it up, gang. Oh, and Matthew, just in case no one’s said it before: It is perfectly okay to play in other people’s groups, and run for other people. You may need to find more players to appreciate you and help you appreciate the ones you already have. There’s a feed out here in this forum about how to find other players. Some of us live in gaming deserts, and even still, sometimes it’s worth a try. What Justin Alexander says about practice and running games also holds true here: Just go out and do it.

@Eric Person : That is a hot tip! My buddies at Fear the Boot play board games when someone’s missing.