GM Confidence: 4.5/5. I’m finally back at this one, only two years later than originally predicted. 😛 Despite the usual pre-run jitters, I felt pretty good about this one. I honestly can’t think of anything in particular that went “wrong” in this session, with an admittedly-minor exception.

What’s New

The most drastic change for Season 2 is that I’m now using Fantasy Grounds Unity. I’ve been playing it for quite a while now, but this was my first time running. I’ve gotten used to the quirks, and I still have a problem with some of the changes, all of which made me reluctant to switch. Anyway, I spent some time getting proficient with the new features, and I plan on getting the most out of them. In this session, the combat was certainly enhanced by the lighting features, at least.

The second biggest change is that, once again, I have a couple of PCs with new players: Claudia and Rogers. Claudia was only played once by her original player. Her storyline lapsed during her tenure as NPC, and I’m getting her caught up. Also, Mel has already started writing some prose to flesh out her background. Regarding Buck, I feel that Nosh is a pretty good replacement for his original player, but I’ve also not run with him before, so there’s some uncertainty there. But these aren’t “worries” for me—I expect good things.

Outside of those changes, I mostly just picked up where I left off. I had a long run-up from my initial announcement to the start of the campaign run (including some delays), which gave me plenty of time to research. I managed to get some answers to some questions that had nagged me throughout the previous run—things like the dollar-amount of import/export tariffs, the nature of smuggling, pilotage costs and operations, etc.—and I made more improvements to the spreadsheets (and discovered yet more that were needed).

The Fight

Kicking off with a fight is a great way to let everyone get acclimated. The combat in this session was a set-piece that had, ultimately, been in the works since the end of the previous run. It’s always worrying to me when I find myself stacking the deck against the PCs so strongly. The weather conditions and such were the result of the real-world weather I’ve been using, as was the “new moon”—that is, not something I had deliberately decided to inflict upon the characters. I struggled a bit with how the PCs would actually arrive at the proper location, much less be able to conduct the rescue at all in those conditions, but I obviously found a way. I made certain to spell out all the adverse conditions in much detail well prior to the engagement, so the players had time to fully process and come to terms with them. It didn’t make sense for the bad guys to have a small (PCs-sized) crew, but turning half of them into “non-combatants” kept that from turning into a disaster.

The scenario made a good showcase of some of the new FGU features, and I feel like the novelty of it may have helped make the combat “fun,” rather than tedious. It lasted for a little over an hour; roughly what I had anticipated. I didn’t think about the “Bad Footing” for the beach sand until the last minute, and as such, I held back on enforcing it, having not fully established that condition beforehand—players don’t like that sort of “surprise,” I’ve found. It was similarly late in the process when I remembered Disasters – Hurricane as a source, so I didn’t have time to wrap my head around those mechanics. But I think we all had fun with the results.

The Prisoner

It was the previous run of this campaign where I had identified a problem I had with managing social interactions, and had begun figuring out a solution. Here I made use of the latest iteration: the “Lock & Key”—identifying factors or lines-of-questioning/approach that will cause the NPC to open-up or shut-down. In the case of the county hunter, both were “control”—as long as he feels he can complete his mission, whatever the detour, he will hold fast (bonus to resist Influence); if he feels he is losing control of the situation, he would begin to lose control of himself (penalty to resist Influence). In practice, it seemed to work, but I don’t think the players really pushed the limits. I should have come up with some specific success/fail responses for him beforehand, though, instead of improvising. That said, my “big fail” of the session was not actually knowing the circumstances of the delivery of his prize—a dumb mistake on my part. So I had to come up with something plausible on-the-fly. If I change my mind later: maybe he was lying? 😛 Regardless, this segment took more time than I had anticipated, and is probably the main reason I ended up, story-wise, coming up shorter for the session than I had intended (aside from the delayed start).

Miscellaneous

• I completely forgot to hand out Bennies at the start. I’ll have to make up for that next time.
• Post Season 1 research uncovered a lot of little “errors” I needed to correct at the beginning of the session. The good part: The time taken to issue the corrections gave me some time to ease in behind-the-screen.
• I had actually not prepared for the PCs to end up getting lost or going the entirely wrong direction—another dumb mistake. Always ask yourself: What’s the worst logical result of player involvement, and be prepared for it. 😉
• I was particularly happy with how all the PCs managed to find a little way to “contribute” during the fight, even if it wasn’t dealing damage, that served to highlight their characters’…character.
• Hayden’s “commission” of the bounty hunter in his own search was a complete surprise to me—the idea had never occurred to me at all—but I can certainly make use of it!
• I was fortunate the players didn’t settle on some of their other ideas about what to do with the bounty hunter—there were quite a few I hadn’t even considered (and probably should have).

On top of everything else, I have to get used to writing these things again… 😛