Just like my D&D session planning posts there has to be some house keeping.
SPOILER ALERT TO MY ADVENTURERS! The following post contains spoilers for the up and coming Vaesen One-Shot. You may want to avoid this post and join me in a future one.
As I said in the short (for me) post about where our D&D campaign currently is, the current plan is to run the introductory mystery from the Vaesen RPG, The Dance of Dreams.
This will be an interesting first for me as a novice GM as I haven’t run a published adventure before, nor run a none D&D game either.
There is also the added pressure of this is a completely new system not just to me but also to those playing.
I have the Vaesen bundle that Free League sell. Which is the rulebook (plus a digital copy), GM screen (it finally arrived yesterday), initiative and Vaesen cards, 6 d6 dice, and a map.
It’s going to be a safe bet that I will have the only copy of the rules. So I will need to teach the basics of the version of the Year Zero system that Vaesen uses. I have found some cheat sheets to give to the players to aid them. I also plan to print out the pages of the mystery so that the rulebook is freed up for reference by everyone.
Unlike the starter kits for D&D, Alien RPG, The One Ring or many other systems Free League have not put together any pre-generated characters to be used with this introductory mystery.
The only stuff Free League have for downloading on their website are blank character and HQ sheets, handouts for the introductory mystery and one other mystery (you can get them here).
So my first task for this one-shot other than reading the rules is to create some pre-generated characters for use with the one-shot.
We can visit character creation as a group if we decide to run a campaign or further one-shots at a future date. Using pre-generated characters also means that more time of the session will be spent playing.
I’m planning on our session being about three hours in length, and aiming for us to wrap the mystery up in a single session.
Free League suggest at the start of The Dance of Dreams that it “…should take approximately two to three sessions to complete.” However “If you would rather finish the mystery in a single session, you may skip the first steps and start with the journey to the location. Simply recount how the player characters got the Invitation instead of playing it as a scene. You can also skip the part where each character gains an Advantage.”
Which is great advice. Although I’d love to know what duration they are using for a session. I have an idea for the Advantages which I’ll expand on in another post if after reading the rules I think it’s do able!
I think that’s enough for the first session planning post. I’ll leave you with the official Vaesen teaser.