The purpose of this page will be to record my notes and thoughts for each session.

If you are a member of this campaign, you should not read this.

Judge’s Thoughts

Session 0

    We basically just rolled characters this session and introduced everyone to the campaign structure and setting. Brad and Bill joined initially, with Mark joining about an hour and a half late. Sessions start at 18:30, and Mark can only join at 19:30 at the earliest. I hope this won’t be too much of a problem. Our stated policy of always playing, even with only one player present (with the Judge or present players controlling the absent players’ characters), will hopefully mitigate this. My goal is to try to play each week, no matter what, to build consistency and momentum, and also allow the players to be able to rely on the game being played each week.

    I currently have six players who have stated that they want to play in the campaign: Bill, Brad, Jake, Mark, Sam, and Earl. Earl said ahead of time that he would be absent the first two sessions, and Jake also said that he couldn’t make session zero in advance. Sam missed the first session due to communication issues. As time goes on, if people keep missing sessions, I may need to recruit more players. Possible options are Kevin, Ivan, or putting out advertisements on the internet. I don’t want to have to kick people out of the campaign, but maybe I won’t have to. Sometimes, players just slowly stop attending in campaigns where sessions are played without full attendance.

    This was my first time using Foundry VTT, and I decided that I really liked it. I think the players did too. It was a bit of a pain to find all of the tables needed to roll for our characters in the UI, but I believe this will get easier with practice. We also had some issues with folks navigating the invite and join process, but I also think this will get easier over time. Doing this campaign in a VTT takes up a lot of prep time. I think most of my prep time is spent on the following, in order of most time taken:

  1. Adding monster stats and tokens to Foundry
  2. Adding and configuring the maps to Foundry, including placing walls, light sources, and creatures
  3. Editing the module’s PDF to underline sentences in the room keys that need to be narrated to the players, as well as underlining trap and monster triggers, secret doors, etc.
  4. Reading the module (it clocks in at over 1,200 pages, so this does take significant time)

    However, I’m not too worried about the prep time, as it’s mostly front-loaded, and I sort of enjoy it. Right now, I need to make the maps for Sub-levels 1 and 4 in Dungeondraft, as well as upload, configure, and populate them. I need to try to get this done before the next session, as the party may stumble across entrances to those levels based on their current path.