How Running the Big Game Went - Part 1
We ran a two-table Shadowdark one-shot for sixteen player characters!
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Introduction
This last weekend was the game. My 40th birthday weekend get-together, where I was fortunate enough to have a a group of 16 players!! plus myself and my good friend James who let me volunteer him to run the second table. The goal was to run two tables of randomly assigned players that would be spun up on the same premise, sent out to their respective tasks/dungeons, and then re-convene for a finale that would determine ultimately if the players reached their goal or not. AND we needed to fit all of this with a mixture of newly christened and veteran players within a four hour window.
Ambitious! But thanks to awesome players taking care of each other and helping us keep the game moving, it turned out great. In this piece we're going to walk through this game touching on prep, thoughts on execution, and look for insight for anyone looking to run something like this.
Prep
I've been meandering through preparations for this game for months. Like many of my game mastering friends - I tend to spend a lot of time on things that don't actually serve me at the game table, but I use the enjoyment and fact I want to turn these things into products to share with the world to keep myself from feeling like an idiot - sometimes that works.
For the purposes of this discussion though, I'll focus on categorizing things into groups of "useful while playing", "not useful", and "Made me feel prepared in any case."
My prep consisted of:
Two level 1 Shadowdark mini-adventures, one each group will explore
Dungeon map and key
Traps and Treasure tables
Random roaming group tables
1 table unique to the specific dungeon (curses/chemical reaction)
Stat blocks when needed
A final ritual/test/combat for all 16 players together
A region map
Player character portfolio with character generation instruction
Stackable Individual PC tokens
Premise
It all started with an imagined final scene - The Witch-Queen revived by the PCs takes the two relic treasures and combines them into a single powerful magic item and casts a spell upon the cursed Duke, making all the damage he's been taking crumple him and his dragon mount like a tin can.
This was the inspiration that sparked the double one-shot. But I also wanted to gear towards this out come without guaranteeing it. The players and their choices need to matter, so it needs to be possible this is not the outcome. My largest concern was that the ritual had a chance of failing and the Witch-Queen not becoming revived and the Duke winning - wiping out the PCs, but the deciding factor would be dice rolls and what players managed to gather from their separate dungeon adventures.
The Premise is the Witch-Queen of Mikros is in magical stasis after wounding by the Duke of Kairaga who also stole magic items from her and stashed them all over the region un-aware as to which items would revive her. The NPCs sending the PCs on their quest inform them that scouts have located the two that are needed - The Orb of Planar Focus and Skiptro, Bludgeon of the Maikari which each group must delve into a separate location and bring back and successfully use these items in a ritual to revive the Witch-Queen.
Character Generation
This immediately went off the rails. I had intended to do a show and tell walk through with everyone, but the veterans just jumped in but were also very generous in getting the newbies up to speed. I spent direct time with a couple of the newer players, but we had 16 player characters and were ready to roll within 40 minutes of getting started. Unfortunately, one of my major goals was to make this simple and easy and I am not sure yet that I accomplished this, but it did work out because my players were being awesome. It flustered me just a bit to have it not meet expectations immediately, but I got over myself and everything was fine.
I let everyone assign rolls however they wanted so players could choose the class they wanted to play. Once everyone had selected a class I used two standard decks of playing cards to randomly divvy up the groups into two player groups based on their chosen classes. Thieves got spades, Fighters got diamonds, Priests got hearts, Wizards got clubs - each player received a card of a unique value of the suit their class belonged to and a matching copy went into my piles. We had so many thieves and only 2 priests I think. I shuffled the piles separately and put half of each pile at each table to assign seating. Hilariously, the gods of chance chose to put 90% of the veterans at the table James was running and 90% of the noobies at my table. I was intending more of a mixture, but it did not seem to hinder that game at all.
Timing
I teased out my hiding spots for the target magical items in the mini-dungeons and also put major helpful items that would be great to have in the final battle that weren't necessary for the PCs to get or even look for before they could leave with the target item. My goal here was to make the parties go up/down at least one level and then to have a major challenge to get the target item. The other stuff around was just to entice them to stick around long enough that both tables could get their target items so one table wouldnt' be stuck waiting for the other for the finale. This actually worked out perfectly, as both tables were ready to go back to the throne room in Mikros within about 5 minutes of each other! Would it always work this way, I dunno but it did this time.
The Game At My Table
My group was headed to "The Buried Chapterhouse of the Assassin". An abandoned wizard's alchemical hideout that had been taken over by an assassin's guild that was paid by the Duke to hide away Skiptro, Bludgeon of the Maikari and keep it from falling into the hands of Mirkan representative (IE - the PCs).
They get the run down from the scouts, whom are badly hurt, but are convinced to secure the entrance for when the party has the item and wants to escape the way they came in. The party descended down a decrepit well in the middle of an abandoned village at the edge of a forest. The party oriented themselves by piling their 1x1 inch stackable character tokens at the entrance (1) and light torches. Thieves and fighters out front, priest and wizards in the back. The torches have a 1 hour timer per standard Shadowdark play.
With 8 people at the table, initiative is always loose. I am making sure each player is doing something each exploration round, and when combat happens, I planned to call for a roll to determine surprise (if any) based on context of closest member to the action, but outside of that everybody takes a turn and then the bad guys go and then we move on. Keep it moving.
Flowing water can be heard up ahead. An underground river moves rapidly from west to east and there is a grate in the hall north of the party that the thief out front discovers is trapped. After some investigation, the thief disables the trap easily and the party moves to the intersection. To the west (3) it is crowded with stalactites and stalagmites making it difficult to navigate, to the east (2), there is a vast cave that reaches up to stalactites covered in thick cobwebs, and just ahead to the north, a shut wooden door is built into the rock wall and muffled arguing voices can be heard on the other side of the door.
The party decides to head east and part of the thick webbing falls way to reveal a huge spider is apprehensively watching the party from its nesting in the ceiling. The spider does not attack, but moves to sit on the wall over a section of the eastern wall that the underground river flows to - the river flows through a large underground grate leading to the outside (though the players don't know that)
Having stepped into room 2 with a torch they can now see there is hallway extending north out of this room and after some lively debate the party goes in that direction and leaves the spider alone. One of the newer players wanted to befriend the spider and interact with literally everything there was. I noted this, as in a more relaxed explorative game it would have been really cool to explore, but the nature of the one-shot did not lend itself to this so the veteran player at the table was pushing to stay on the task. To be fair, the spider was formidable for even a group of level 1's, I wasn't sure how that would go if they had engaged with hostility. But what if they had somehow gained it as an ally?
The opportunity for it to go either way is the awesome thing.
The party crept forward and still avoided the muffled voices in (4) and instead opted to go into the rooms of (5) - the alchemical library and experimentation rooms. One of the wizards got brave and decided to try to use the tools to make something...
To Be Continued...
I'm loving walking through this story and we've blown past my original word-count target. So this will be stretched over two posts. Come back next week for the rest of the exploration of the Buried Chapterhouse of the Assassin and the Boss-fight finale!
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Thanks for reading! Till next time!
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