Been a while since I GMed anything, and I am excited for it, but I'm also nervous. The group is my coworker Chad + Jason + two others from the University who are friends with Chad — I started boardgaming with them about this time last year, and I have really enjoyed it. One of them, Cory, has been craving a narrative-oriented TTRPG, which is kind of My Jam.

Daggerheart is a good mix of mechanics for the folks who like crunch but a more fiction-forward system that strips out a lot of the fiddly-ness of D&D (spell slots and the hard-to-explain things). It's right up my alley! But also, y'know, GMing for a "new" group is always scary. Hopefully I live up to folks' hopes/expectations.

Gonna run session zero as a ground-rules/tone-setting session + collaborative worldbuilding + character creation/base mechanics overview. I love indie, rules-light, narrative TTRPGs, so I'll run a combination of Cartograph + Bottled Cities for the worldbuilding.

Glassbound Campaign Frame

Okay, so I've had a few days to let it sit, and I think the session zero went well.

The group has been gaming together for a while, but even when I brought up a conversation on tone and triggers and consent, and mentioned some of my lines-and-veils items, some of them shared difficulties that the rest of the group didn't know about, which made the conversation feel like I wasn't rehashing old ground or forcing this on them.

They were really open to letting me read some box text (short narrative I like to give at the beginning of a session, usually an in-world recap but sometimes just flavor to bring folks back to the world), and they all jumped right in to our worldbuilding games without fear — which I was a little concerned about because of what it asks of folks.

Chad told me on Monday that he had unexpectedly fallen in love with the connections questions we did, and how much he liked that it forced him to think about aspects of his character that wouldn't have come to him naturally, and that he walked away with a better grasp of the character. He liked that it hand-waived away the "and you meet in a tavern" buy-in.

Jason, Chad, and Cory went on a walk today at lunch while I was in interviews, and Jason said Cory and Stacey were both up for playing this week — "I technically have an event, but I can leave early if we're going to play Daggerheart" and "I have a football game, but I'll skip that if we're going to play Daggerheart."

Cory also tried to come in to talk to me after the walk, but I was still in interviews, so he messaged me instead: "BTW Session 0 was fire. great job. Stacey and I enjoyed it very much. was by far the best I have taken a part in."

There are definitely things I forgot (subclasses!! they do get their foundation card at level 1!), but that can all be cleaned up at the front of the session. Now I just have to build the vague outline of a plot (to hold gently to and let the players guide) and put together a Session One.

:>>> I'm so proud of you!