Session #1 Report Part 1

We had the 1st session of the Mount of the Red Doors campaign on Saturday April 11, 2015. I think it went very well. I certainly enjoyed myself. And I believe the players enjoyed themselves. (Players: if you didn't please let me know where I could improve.)

This post will cover aspects of the session except the event and story elements of the sessions. I'll post about that in my next post.

Players and Characters

Unfortunately one of the players could not attend due to unforeseen circumstances. Hopefully he will be able attend the next session. As a result we only had 3 players and so as described in my very first post, I wanted the party to have at least 4 Player Characters. So each player controlled two PCs. In random order:

Brian: Frocensin Verth and Vrocensin Verth (brothers)
Jeremy: Dravin Stormblood and Milo Tealeaf
Chris: Anders Blackwood and Thagmar     

Party was joined by Frocensin's squire Kelyn Robinsworth.

More about PCs

Setup

I have a collection of 3D dungeon tiles from dxContent. Jeremy brought over a collection of cool miniatures which was better than my paper figs. Unfortunately, I forgot to take some pictures at the session. I'll post some pictures at a later date that shows the combination of the miniatures and tiles.

I originally planned to just use the dxContent tiles, swapping tiles, in and out as needed. I had used paper tiles in the past. Even when I had organized the paper tiles before the session, swapping tiles became tedious and interrupted flow of the game. So I decided to use the tiles only for combat and used the Smart Image feature of Realm Works for exploration. And while there were interuptions in the game flow as I revealed each area of the map, I think it was better than swapping the tiles. Below is an image of the area of the Mount the characters explored this session.

The red letters were for convenience of reference. When players talked among themselves or to me they referenced an exit of the room they were currently located by letter. "Anders will listen at door B." When I added the letters, I made sure all exits were unique from a given room. Next time, I think I'll make each reference unique within an entire section of a map. As more of the map was revealed, there were a few occasions of confusion about what letter "A" was being referenced.

What didn't work

The most obvious was the audio recording. I had my mac laptop on my table running QuickTime player to record the audio of the session. When I went to stop the recording and save the audio, I got an error message and the app proceeded to close without saving. So I'm going to have to write everything based on memory.

Where I want to improve

I had created some tables for Inspiration Pad that would randomly generate sentences that described the result of combat kill hits - "After ducking your foe's attack, you slash your weapon into your foe's abdomen." I used it early on. However, by the end of the session I realized I returned to my default "he's dead." I want to keep the descriptions more interesting.

What to do at next session.

• Take pictures of my table setup and some of the combats.
• Have more than one recording device.