The rulebook advises starting FIRST session with the PCs in some sort of tense or perilous circumstance. This allows the GM to have a least some planning in place. Assuming “completion” of the immediate threats in the first session, how does one start the SECOND session without railroading the character’s choice?
The rulebook advises starting FIRST session with the PCs in some sort of tense or perilous circumstance.
The rulebook advises starting FIRST session with the PCs in some sort of tense or perilous circumstance.
Give them three options and be prepared to improvise if they choose a fourth.
Seriously though, as long as you have an idea of where you want the campaign to go and have a good understanding of your players and their characters, you can create a limited number of choices that let you have some control of the game and let the players have some choice.
Depending on the way the last session ended, it totally works to have them in some sort of tense situation.
It need not even be a “serious” situation. Maybe a drinking contest, a game of chess with a genius, or puzzling over some archaic lyrics.
Weather it is the first game or the hundredth, starting with something interesting that the players can engage in is always a good way to go.
I reckon the best possible preparation for session two is:
1. Really, really good questions to ask during the first session, that’ll not only flesh out the player’s characters and the immediate threats, but also the world. If this is done right, you should end up with such an intriguing and varied world that the second session flows naturally from what the players want to most explore. If your players are a bit n the shy side, or less forthcoming, that’s where more good questions come in, specifically aimed at building on stuff they’ve already hinted at.
2. a willingness to absolutely go with what’s generated during play and expand on it.
So, you’ve got your cool location to explore from the world creation in the first session: if you ended with a quiet bit (I.e. after killing The Bad Guy) then that’s a golden opportunity to kick the next adventure off with something based on their info, though the urgency needn’t come from an immediate threat. At this point its also awesome to think behind the scenes; grab something someone has given you and turn it into a Front, though they needn’t know yet…
e.g. As “dawn breaks, you notice Brian Tinyfoot, your halflng nemesis who stole your drink earlier! He’s fleeing towads the ice caves that Fishhead thinks are haunted, and he’s taken something precious of yours!”
And if the characters say “He stole my clock! I never liked that clock anyways, I hope that halfling freezes and haunts those caves forever. Let’s go back to town; I heard Magritte’s voodoo shop swam up now her giant alligator can get over the flooded canals”
…then that’s also cool. Shame they’ll never find out about the shady antiques warehouse the demi-lich is secretly building in the ice caves.
(until it’s too late to stop him!)
You can also just ask them explicitly at the end of the first session what their plans for the next are, and then plant them squarely in the middle of that.
think about whose toes they might have stepped on in whatever they did in the first session. Maybe that cave of kobolds was actually a shadow of a larger force who decide to get justice for their fallen comrades. Maybe the cave of kobolds was just that, but in taking it down they’ve earned the ire of the local adventuring guild.
Ask questions throughout the first session. Use the answers to generate fronts. For Example, Wizard, how did you learn magic? Oh, an archmage taught you? Where is he now? He´s a lich? Front