(Final) Night of (Preperation for) Dissolution

It has been  few days since I last wrote so I thought I would update on the preparations for the big gaming marathon that is happening tomorrow which is the big ’season finale’ of our Ptolus campaign – The Night of Dissolution module.  I have been working on prepping for the game (my weak spot as I tend to run on the fly).  It makes me respect those endless preppers who have tons of material ready to go.  Usually our sessions are about 5 hours in length but we’re a chatty group so if we get in 3 hours its a good night.  Tomorrow I am faced with 10 hours to fill and a clear objective to reach the finish line of the module.  How does one plan for that much time?

My first thought was to try to make it a special session so I am providing a meal at the halfway point.  BBQ is a quick way to get a meal into everyone and with disposable plates and such it will be an easier clean-up as well.  All of this gets us back to the table quickly and ensures by ‘banished-for-the-day-wife’ does not come home to a messy house.  Saves everyone cash as well and the interruptions of various delivery guys showing up breaking up the game flow.

Next I decided to move the game out of the basement area we usually play in and around my hopefully large enough kitchen table.  I am hoping this will keep the side conversations at a minimum as people feel a little less relaxed but more focused on the maps and such.  The seats are padded and quite comfortable so hopefully we can make it work.

With the extraneous parts of the gaming experience settled I then had to look at what I needed to do to actually run  the game.  As I said, I am a horrible at game prep as I am a storyteller, character player so I play fast and loose most of the time relying on my imagination and ability to think on my feet to get me through most sessions.  A cursory look at the module that I run is usually the best that I do for prep.

So far, I have read through the module twice and have taken the pdf of the sections of the module we still have left to run and printed out the sheets that had significant monsters and NPCs.  I cut these out and put them on colour coded index cards to make them easy to distinguish as I run on the fly.  I used red for enemies and green for NPCs.  Hopefully this will cut down on the page flipping during key scenes/fights.

With my ‘bad guys and allies’ ready I have been also working throughout the week on my secret project to make the finale something special.  My wife is the ‘crafty’ person in the house so her knowledge has been helpful.  I’m keeping things vague here as I don’t want my players to read too much before tomorrow.  I’ll post some pictures after the event so you can see what I was working on.  I had to scale back a bit on my grand plan due to time and skill constraints but I still think it will work out okay.

Today, I have to do the grocery shopping for the BBQ; look for some special miniatures for key villians the party will face tomorrow; get some more supplies to finish the special project; finish the special project and; level up the party’s NPC cleric.  Tomorrow morning, I have to get all the burgers made up and ready to cook so that we can just break; cook and eat in relatively quick order.  I also have to get all my necessary gaming supplies upstairs so they are on hand for easy access.  All in all its going to be a busy 24 hours as we launch into the game at 1pm Atlantic time tomorrow. 

To make things extra interesting, there is a huge all day outdoor concert going on featuring the Eagles which is going to draw about 80,000 people which almost equals the population of the city.  Needless to say I expect traffic today and tomorrow to be a nightmare.