Great to have you James!

I wish I had some old pics really badly, but I'll do my best to describe stuff. In my experience, nothing, NOTHING, gets people fired up like a nice big map. Gathering around a table, pointing at stuff, scheming together, a good map works wonders haha A handout I was pretty proud of was an elaborate infernal contract a BBEG had made with a devil. The "puzzle" was figuring out ways to take advantage and trick the guy into breaking it on accident, losing his power. I'd wanted to make a scroll haha but the printout was pretty neat too, the players liked it a lot

That is an AWESOME setup for a game haha! I'd say "you've been sent to and are now stuck in dinoland) is a solid pitch for a game, I don't think you'd need to not tell them about the time travel bit, or you could remove it if you don't vibe with it? If it's baked in from the start and they make characters/goals with that in mind, I don't think it's a huge issue. Setup wise, that's perfect: if you can identify the factions and NPCs (and their goals), and the locations, then you should be good to go. Once PCs have goals, you look for overlap and its off to the races

Great to have you! That’s an awesome array of games haha, I think the system that changed how I ran the most is Blades in the Dark. It was my first non d20 fantasy game, and I was amazed how much the mechanics of the game influenced the tone and my own actions, both as player and GM. Excited to hear about your experience as a GM!

Great question! And thank you for the kind words! We do talk about it in the next book haha but i can give you the highlights. The brutal truth is, I’ve never been able to get my players to read much about a setting, maybe a page at most, so giving them an in-depth knowledge of the world is tough. What I’ve had great success with is having a collaborative setting building “session -1” where we adapt a setting. There’s a video in the classroom tab about this, but we mostly tackle homebrew settings, I think we’ll need to make one about adapting existing ones because in my opinion it’s way easier and let’s you use published modules. Essentially, you choose the most important stuff about the setting (major locations, maps, factions, NPCs, how death works, etc) and make a little one page sheet. You go through different categories and make facts about the world, and as the players go through the process, two things happen: they know the world way better than anything a GM makes on their own, since they were part of the process, AND they immediately get much more invested in it. This setting won’t be exactly the same as the published one, and sometimes you have to tweak player ideas to get them to work, but usually it’s close enough that you can use almost all of its published materials. The pieces remain the same (in a forgotten realms game, there’s probably still drow cities underground and angels in heaven) but you and the players tend to lay those pieces out in a way that provides a new direction for the campaign (maybe the drow are trying to steal from the angels or something similarly sinister) There’s a lot to it, but that’s the basic idea!