With all this talk of Old School and New School going on these days I’ve got to wondering. In fact it was a comment on Game Of States latest post that gave me a good kick. I don’t judge a game by how it plays instead I judge a GM by how he preps and runs that game.  Ideally I shouldn’t be able to tell what system is being used apart from the very basic game/combat mechanics. That’s how I like my games run.

greekadman on Flickr

If I were to ask you to prepare a gaming session for a bunch of random new players using your favoured system how would you go about it? There are a few examples that jump straight to mind.

• Sandbox it. Throw the players into the random town and make up everything as you go.
• Grab a book that you know inside out and have the players run through a few of the chapters.
• Take a film and stretch it out a little. This takes away having to create locations from scratch as you can beg/borrow/steal almost everything from scenes.
• Go for that Lvl 1-4 adventure you picked up years ago and never had the chance to run before.
• Throw them in to your current campaign setting and roll with whatever happens.

They are all valid methods but if I’m completely honest if you didn’t go for options one or five I’d be less likely to play in your game. It’s completely hypocritical of me as I regularly use two and three for my campaigns but I want the GM/DM/ST/whatever you want to call yourself to be able to think on thier feet and accept anything the players manage to achieve or mess up.

So if you did only have 10 minutes to create this n00bfest I mentioned how would you go about getting it ready and running it?

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Do you ever get that way where your so full of ideas you don’t know where to start?

A few RPG bloggers are getting together as part of a world building exercise and we are at the stage of dividing up the land and getting to work on our own wee corner.

I know exactly how I want my area to look and I know exactly how I want it populated. Now ask me where I’m going to start. I honestly haven’t a clue.

Someone mentioned that as we come from all over the world it would be a good idea to take ideas from our own history and locations. Living in Scotland though means I have such a huge amount of history and such different geography that I’m struggling to pick just one area and stick with it.

So far we have a Lord of the Isles style geography for my kingdom and I’ll be stealing much of my style from the Celts that populated the UK back in those times. I’ll be stealing the vikings in one way or another to add a little spice to the mix but other than that it’s looking very good for back story.

I’ll be keeping the sea-going population with access to towns and villages only by sea and having sea forts for protection. No main roads and highly specialised trading posts and skills spread out amongst the nation. I just need to work out how I’m going to arrange their navy and I’ll have most of the basics sorted. So where do I start with getting it down on ‘paper’? I’d usually right a short piece of fiction to get me started and to get a feel for the setting but with this it’s all about taking the history and working it into setting. Very little of it will be completely original. Maybe that’s my problem? No complete control over what I produce so I’m finding it hard to get started.

Either way I get the feeling it’s going to be a labour of love. Hell I’ve even started drawing maps for it and my regular readers will know how much I detest the work that needs to go into a fully functional and playable map these days.

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Every time I write new work for whichever campaign setting I happen to be working on at the time I get that thought in my head that basically works out as why am I doing this? I know why I’m doing it as it’s something I love to do and even if the only person that was to ever read the work was myself then I couldn’t care less.

Photo by Timothy K. Hamilton

But it does make me wonder. Just how many people out there actually trawl through the internet looking for a pre-made setting for their games? Does anyone actually do that? I can only comment for myself because as you obviously realise I will write my own setting even before heading to the shops and buying one so surfing the internet for one really doesn’t appeal either.

Do you any of you, my good readers, actually use anyone else’s settings that they come across or do you just read it and maybe crack a smile if you find something you can use in your own game and leave it at that?

Curious minds would like to know.

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