Game Prep Thoughts and A Free STL

Good times can be alot of work, but the payoff is so good...

May 06, 2025

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Introduction

As we approach the shindig I’m hosting at the beginning of June this year 2025, these posts will tend towards what’s on my mind for preparing a big multi-table game. Regular readers will remember that my wife and I have convinced a collection of well-spirited friends to join us for a long weekend in a ridiculous abode and one night will be devoted to making everyone play a two-table two-gm game that I am doing everything I can think of to produce odds of fun for a wide swath of players from gnarled veterans of decades to brand new players that are trusting me to introduce them to a good time.

Disclaimer: You don’t need to be extra to host a game and have a good time, if you are reading this and want to run a game, you should 100% take the plunge and jump into the GM’s chair - your future players will appreciate you.

Today’s post is about review of the prep I’ve started so far and my thoughts as I let looking forward to this event keep my spirits high in this last month of waiting. Some of the awesome friends that are coming along on this adventure are also awesome subscribers here to The Glyph and Grok, so I won’t reveal any specifics about the adventure for the night until afterwards, but I do think this one will be worth giving the layout treatment and doing some deeper GM thought dives on later.

The Thing

My GM work recently has been as much about keeping my scope reasonable as much as anything else. I tend to get a lot of exciting ideas and then the 80/20 rule applies where about 20 percent of them a really worth taking all the way. Being only a month a way we need to have narrowed down to our focus already and those points for this game are:

Two level 1 Shadowdark mini-adventures to play simultaneously
A player aid/character sheet combo to keep character generation quick and dirty as possible
Dice sets and matching player tokens
Excellent cosplay style wizard gear
(Maybe) Other 3D printed accessories

The premise for the adventures will be item based. The PCs will need to go get two very important relic magic items and bring them back to a location to prevent calamity. I am not 100% sure how I will split people up yet, but my current idea is to use a deck of cards to randomly split the group into two parties. One will be playing at my table, and one will be playing at my buddy’s table across the same greatroom. I’m just having the four basic classes of the Shadowdark primary book so one suit per class - Spades: Thieves - Clubs: Priests - Hearts: Wizards - Diamonds: Fighters. So everyone will us their player aids to build their characters together with the experienced players supporting the new players - then each player is given a card based on their class - then we shuffle them up and put as even a distribution as we can amongst the two tables. Will is be perfect? Probably not - but I think it will be interesting enough and not have previous players stacking one game full of veterans over the other (not that I think they’d do this purposefully, they just like playing together)

I believe what I need still is a small regional map, and to figure out the particulars of the individual dungeon crawl site maps. I’ve already sketched out the themes, contents, challenges, and have a fleshed out idea for each dungeon - but I need to take my time making the maps to make sure the scope is kept to a mini-adventure (targeting 3 hours play time - likely will become 4) and yet have interesting and varied challenges to make it unique and memorable (a struggle for me in the past, but lots of reading seems to help.) I’m drawing on “Tome of Adventure Design”, “Worlds Without Nubmer” and “Knave 2E” for juice flowing.

Studious followers of the Glyph and Grok will recognize that the player aid I’m talking about is the “Into the Dark Character Folio linked below:

Into The Dark Character Folio

Alex Tzakis

Apr 7

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The version I will use at the tables has material that is copywritten and will only be used at this event for personal use - a 7 step process to generating a Shadowdark character with four two-page spread character sheets. I plan to tell the players that if they die, they can get back into the game as quickly as they can generate another character.

I do love sets of polyhedral dice and I love having enough dice for everybody to play with in case they didn’t bring or don’t own any. Having hosted a number of larger games (12+ sometimes) I know it gets wonky representing and identifying PCs when there’s a big ass group working through a dungeon together. So I designed the rather simple interlocking stacking octagons that I will paint to match the dice sets the players will have in front of them when they sit down to play.

The last bits I currently have are cosplay-level wizard gear and 3D-printable accessories - Though I am worried about scope creep with the 3D pintables. I’ve ordered a badass wizard’s hat and a hooded cloak so far. The cloak has arrived :P