Design Diary: Prep and Run Part 1
Thoughts from running my own one-shot at Gencon 2024
Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A “weekly” blog-letter exploring topics in the tabletop gaming arena. We explore design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop.
Previously on…
In one of my previous posts I discussed the early thoughts behind the one-shot I was designing to run for my friends on Saturday night of Gencon 2024. I purposefully left out much of the detail because three of the people that’d be at that table are awesome enough to be subscribers to this newsletter. But now that the game occurred about two weeks ago, I want to run my thoughts and get keyed up to take this from spicy one-shot idea to complete module product. Those subscribed to the Glyph and Grok will get a view into how I do that. But first, let’s discuss how it went!
Design and Prep
I kept the introduction as written from my previous post. The quick and dirty is the players are folk from amongst the villages and towns along a coastline in a dark fantasy setting where a cult devoted to “The Lord Of Light” has collected all fighting-fit persons and is sacrificing them to exploring and finding the treasures of an ancient underground temple of Order and Artifice. The premise excited me and it seemed to be well received by the table.
As is described in a number of places, such as the Tome of Adventure Design, establishing an original use for a location and then a different current use for a location can make a place feel steeped in the background lore.
The temple could be conceptualized as a large oval sphere under the bluff cliffs, with a thick rectangle jutting out from the midsection. The original concept was to have the rooms move on regular intervals but after second thought, that seemed rather impossible to execute at the table. The Second thought became having the rooms be stationary but the passageways move or change on regular intervals…but again, the practical execution of erasing and re-drawing hallways was a non-starter. After drawing the entire map out in my notebook, and then on some newly-aquired double sided dry erase maps, I settled on having both the rooms and connective pathways stay stationary but only 2 of the 3 pathways would be available at any given time.
The pathways were color-coded and I hung some folded colored notecards to display to the players which pathways were currently. The time-pressure hazard was, if anyone was in a pathway that became inaccessible, they would die a horrible narrative death. On top of this, I made mechanism that determined the color of the doorway and if it was functional, be a valuable gem held in mechanical fingers above the doors. The gem was the iris of a mechanical eye that could be taken out, but then that hallway didn’t work anymore.
I was exploring new territory in a couple ways here. Knave 2E was the guts of the ruleset with a small handful of Shadowdark exploration rules (like torchlight timers - but this was mostly abandoned because I had another time-based problem for the players) and one tweak from myself where the players would declare movement speed before moving.
My design focus was developing an atmosphere where rolling the dice was dangerous, but the players would push their luck and know that they decided to roll those dice if things went awry.
Additional prep documents I created ahead of time:
Intro story writeup
Map room key
Encounter tables (including distance/activity/reaction tables)
Enemies List w/ Knave stat blocks
Treasure and spell book table
PC Creation documents from Knave 2E
Extra randomly generated PCs in case of unforeseen death or random friend added to game
Many copies of the game ruleset (1 page double sided) and Knave 2E character sheets
Starting The Game
The players showed up with pizza (always a good move) and we got started generating player characters. Creating PCs in the Knave system was slick and went fairly quickly.
Some of what comes from this play through is going to be because we had an average of 10 players at the table, but even with that relatively obscene player count, we were able to keep the game moving at a decent clip.
I started a timer for 10 minutes, set the green and red indicators on the GM screen, and the players were dropped into room A1 with their freedom, a narrative reason backup PCs would originate from this room, and view of a large bronze clockwork statue of a blindfolded woman very slowly moving a dagger towards the chest of an infant held in her arms.
The statue was a visual representation of the 2 hours I planned to give the adventurers in the underground temple. Once the dagger touched the babe in her arms, a loud chime would ding for a third time, and the Order of Light would magically teleport them out and steal all of the treasure they had acquired and sacrifice them to their lord.
In coming issues of The Glyph and Grok:
Account of the 3.5-hour play session
Challenges of running a curated dungeon at high player count
Producing the one-shot into a module
Thanks for Reading!
Please comment if there are specifics you’re interested in!
What I Am Up To
TTRPG Reading: Shadow Of The Demon Lord, Runequest
TTRPG Production: GC 2024 Oneshot Development
Other Learning: Otherworlds: Fantasy Art
Audiobook: The Blacktongue Thief (Again)
Useful Things For Your Games
Spotify Playlist Add - Role: Combat and Danger
Ah! That's a bluetooth speaker. It doesn't really do much in the din of the room bit I always like to have spotify playlists going somewhere in the background during game
Ahhh thank you! Was wondering if it was some GM gadget I needed to have! 😆😆😆😆