Hey Mythopoeians! 

Over the past year I've run something like 40+ sessions of RPGs in a variety of systems, from one page games like Honey Heist, GMless fare like our The Love Balloon, and slightly more traditional narrativist systems like Blades in the Dark, and of course The Wildsea. I've also had the pleasure of playing under many different GMs during the last year, picking up what I liked and maybe liked less from their respective styles.

In any case, as of February 8th, 2021, this is my procedure for running RPG one shots.

It works for me, and maybe it 'll work for you. 

Icebreakers

First, it's important to get comfortable with your table and players. When a session begins, take the first five to ten minutes or so breaking the ice by making small talk. Ask about your players' day, where they're from, the weather, games - anything really to just get them comfortable and ready to play. This is especially important in one shots where we're playing with strangers. 

The entire process of roleplaying is a social interaction between a group of people. The success of the game ultimately hinges on the participation of all parties, not just the GM. From one angle, the game is a constant feeling out process between players framed by the ritual of a game and the agreement of a set of rules to abide by. That's why home games are always better than public ones - you know your friends, and your friends know you. Nonetheless, the better chemistry you build with your players - the more comfortable they are - the more likely your game is going to be great. 

Safety Tools 

Safety Tools are important, especially when playing with strangers. When I run public games, I always make sure to go over the safety tools I'm using. My go-tos are the X Card, Lines and Veils, and Open Door Policy. I adopted these three from Glendale Story Games, stewarded by Tomer Gurantz, who has always ensured that his communities are open, welcome, and safe places to game. I recommend you use them in your games, especially when gaming with strangers. 

Read more about Safety Tools here. 

Characters & Questions

At a certain point, transition from small talk to Character Creation/Introductions. This is pretty standard - I pass spotlight to players so they can introduce their characters. The most important thing, though, is listening to what they have to say and asking questions that deepen their understanding of who the character is. 

"What is the most beautiful thing you've seen on the waves?"
"Where did you learn how to program / hack?"
"What is the closest you've ever come to death?"

This is what roleplaying is - asking questions and fostering answers from the characters. There's a sweet spot with a question that helps a player deepen their character and one that is either too specific or too broad to answer easily. This is mostly a feel and experience thing - I think of it like a degree or two away from armchair psychologist.

You want questions that helps players understand their characters better but ones that they don't have to spend more than fifteen seconds to come up with an answer. This is variable depending on the player, - some players are very comfortable with improv and coming up with things on the spot, others may be more timid.

Remember, the most important thing is to read your table and adjust accordingly.  The better you know your players, the more you can cater the experience that what they want. 


Breaks 

Don't forget to take regular breaks in your game! I like to take the first break after character introductions and typically take a break about every hour or so of gaming. I might take less breaks for a home group or if the table is particularly riveted - again, read your table and adjust accordingly. 

Breaks serve two main functions:

• They allow us to stretch, use the restroom, and take care of our bodies which have otherwise been sitting for an extended amount of time. Very important. 
• They allow you, the GM, to regroup and think about what comes next.

On the latter, often a quick pause is all you need to compose your thoughts and lead the session through to its next phase. You'd be surprised as to how much stuff you can come up with in just a couple of minutes. Calling for a break can really help unstuck you, so don't be afraid to call for a break if you're stumped! 

Beginnings

Once the first break is over, it's time to begin the game in earnest! Beginnings are very important in any type of roleplaying scenario, but especially so in one-shots. This is your opportunity as the GM to hard frame the situation, set the scene, and propel the narrative forward. 

So what makes a good beginning? I think a good intro... 

• Holds the Player's attention.
• Lets them know it's time to play.
• Engenders an immediate action or reaction. 

What you are trying to avoid is a situation that is unclear or unmotivated from the player's perspective. You don't want characters fapping about talking about the weather or watching NPCs talking to each other. You want to create a scenario that allows them to actively participate and take agency in the scene and propel the story forward. 

If you've crafted an intriguing beginning, that's often all you need to get the entire session going, especially in fiction-first systems that bake in narrative structure into the mechanics. Frame a situation, ask what the players do, and let the story unfold from there. If it doesn't seem like they're doing anything, that means you need to do something to them. This is the balancing act between GMing and 

Time Check

After the second break after about an hour+ of gaming, make sure to check in on your players and their available time remaining to play. The main purpose of this time check is so that you can begin to internally pace and drive towards a satisfying ending. Having, say, two hours left, versus one hour left, should drastically effect how you manage the session. 

Structure

A typical three hour session will typically have no more than 4-6 scenes, with a scene about every 45 minutes. Moments of intense action should be contrasted by more social or reflective, quieter scenes. Try to bounce between the two - external stake, internal stake, external stake, internal, etc. Action / Talky / Action / Talky. Doing so helps ensure there's a variety of scenarios and room for characters to grow. 

Some systems have built in metanarrative that helps you plan out what happens. Otherwise, you may want to look into scaffolding material like the 5 Room Dungeon which is essentially a narrative structure adapted for RPGs. Again, you'll get better at this with experience, but generally speaking bounce between moments of action and moments of characterization. Too much of one thing leads to a feeling of blandness. 


Twists

One common trope that you might want to incorporate is to present a Twist about 2/3rd through the session. This can be anything from a moral quandary, villainous reveal, or maybe just a straight up escalation of events. 

Either way, the 2/3rd point of the session (keyed by time, hence the Time Check) should mark an escalation point that ramps up the stakes and intensity, driving towards the climax and ending. 

Endings

Beginnings and Endings are the most important part of a session. Beginnings hook the players and spurs good play, while Endings - more than any other aspect - determine how your players feel about a session once it's done. 

What a satisfying Ending looks like depends largely on the story that's unfolded. Your players will be signaling to you through the construction of their characters what they want to see. Your goal is to deliver on some of that right at the end of the session if possible. You don't have to deliver on all of the character's wants. Often, keying in on one or two characters and completing their loop or arc is enough. 

You should be thinking about how to end a session when you have about an hour or so left of game time and begin driving towards that ending. Push if you need to. Have something vaguely in mind, but be flexible enough to change it all the way until the last minute. 

Remember, the most important thing is to read your table and adjust accordingly.  

Try your best to deliver a good ending. Do everything in your power to do this. Nothing kills a session faster than mismanaged time and a player announcing they have to leave before you can pay it all off. Again, that's why you check on time, that's why you keep an eye on the ball, and that's why you  start thinking about how to end a session well before it actually ends. 

If you have the end in mind, you can drive towards it, no problem. Don't wait until it's too late to think about it. 

Denouement 

Once you nail the ending, give the players spotlight to narrate what happens to their character. You may want to jump forward in time, but either way the most important thing is they get a sense of closure at this moment. 

Once that's done, thank everyone for playing and give yourself a pat on the back. Congratulations. You did it! You ran a kick ass one-shot! 

- Ray

Ahoy Mythopoeians! 

Happy New Year! I'm a little bit tardy on my January post but here I am! Since starting to blog in January I've been trying to crank out about a post a month just to jot down random thoughts and to keep people afloat as to what we're up to. Here's to continuing blogging in 2021! 

I thought today might be a good time to go over some things I've been enjoying for the past couple of months. These are all just things I've been consuming and enjoying lately, and my thoughts about why. 

​Here we go! 
​

Up first in comics is the Italian pulp horror classic Dylan Dog. Created in the 80's, Dylan Dog follows the eponymous paranormal investigator as he tackles on all matter of strange cases, crimes, and personal entanglements. The Long Goodbye finds Dylan Dog reunited with a childhood flame with a strange past. 

What I love about Dylan Dog is its mastery of pacing. Each page (usually between 4-6 panels) moves the story forward at a brisk pace, unfolding a romance mystery steeped in pulp tradition - old flames, flashbacks, and of course new clues! 

This particular story tells a bittersweet tale of young love, regret, and choices not made. It hit hard in the feels and legitimately made me long for something I can't quite put into words. It's a fantastic comic and one I recommend with full enthusiasm. 
​
Dylan Dog is published by Epicenter Comics​ in the United States, and is in wide syndication all over the world. 

The Crown is a dramatization of the British royal family during Queen Elizabeth II's reign, from her ascendancy following her father King George VI's death up to Princess Diana and Prince Charle's troubled marriage through the early 90's in the current season four. 

I'm a sucker for palace intrigue. Throw me some elaborate costumes and whispers of betrayal and I'm all in. The Crown takes the genre to another level - in terms of storytelling, staging, and dramatization. I'm not sure how true to life the show is, but I can say that watching it feels like watching history. 

The Crown is about as well written of a show currently out there. There's been multiple times while watching where I've audibly muttered to myself "what a scene," especially during the teaser intros. This may sound slightly snooty, but the Crown feels like one of the paradigms of dramatic writing that will be cited, referenced, and drawn from for years to come. I'm willing to bet that much like the historical plays of Bill the Bard, this is a show that will transcend its own time. 

The Crown is executive produced by Peter Morgan and distributed by Netflix. 

I'm sure Cyberpunk 2077 needs no introduction, but I personally just completed my first campaign of the game, going through two of the available endings. I didn't really follow the game through its development cycle and am uninterested in the ensuing drama that the hype / disappointment cycle has fed. 

Cyberpunk 2077 explores themes and motifs that have really matured for me personally over the past couple of years. I'm a newcomer to cyberpunk as a genre, but the events of the global pandemic and political turmoil have really put into focus the themes that the aesthetic explores: transhuman consciousness, corporate megastates, & environmental disaster. 

God is Man and Man is God. 

Without going into spoilers, one aspect of video games that is fascinating to me is that as the medium matures, so too does the exploration of melancholy and/or bittersweet endings. That does tend to lead to a bit of cognitive dissonance as the narrative arcs of these games - The Last of Us, Red Dead Redemption, Almost Human, to name a few - has to ultimately reconcile with the presented gameplay. Some games do this better than others; in The Last of Us, you play a hardened post apocalyptic murderer, and the game leans fully into a bone chilling exploration of what that really means.

Other games struggle; Red Dead Redemption often has you mowing down armies of cowboys only for characters to be laid low during the cut scenes. What Cyberpunk does very well is make it feel like you are but a cog in mechanisms beyond your control. However strong you are, you are but one person grasping at things beyond your reach. That, more than anything, coalesced what the genre expectations of cyberpunk are and has my brain abuzzing about the psychological and philosophical ramifications therein. 

I'm looking forward to playing this game again when all of the various bugs and features are patched over. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is developed and published by CD Projekt Red. 

​

There you go! Three things I liked at the tail end of 2020. Do you have any choice picks? Let us know in the comments below! 

​Ray 

Ahoy Mythopoeians! 

Can you believe it? We now find ourselves at the end of the longest year in memory. 2020 has been one for the history books, but we're not going to get into all of that again. Instead, I'd like to spend some time to talk about our year here at Mythopoeia; how we set goals back in January wound back to us in unpredictable and wonderful ways. 

Vince and I have had RPGs on our to-do list for a while now, going way back to 2015 when Josephe Vandel introduced us to the Blades in the Dark ruleset. At the time I was about two years removed from my last RPG experience - Pathfinder 1E. I distinctly remember the reason why I had to stop - the time and energy spent Game Mastering was drawing straight from the same well as our other creative endeavors. There was simply no way I would be able to do both without one suffering. Given that we had just been funded to make a comic, it made the most sense to me to drop the hobby to embrace the profession. 

Reading Blades in the Dark changed all that. I missed the wave of Powered by the Apocalypse a couple of years prior, so Blades was the first time I was exposed to the concept of narrative dice - a system of rules that supports improvisational play designed to drive the story forward, easing the preparatory burden of the Game Master. 

I didn't understand everything I read at first, but I knew the rules in front of me were a gamechanger. My years steeped in the hobby told me as such. The problem was it was almost impossible to find a game! Finding people to play RPGs with is tricky at the best of times. We often engage and agree in search of some platonic ideal informed by nostalgic memories from childhood, and the reality is the heights of the hobby are rarely achieved. We chase the dragon because we know how good these games can be, but we often play in spite of the drudgery of how they sometimes unfold. 

In 2015, I had no idea where to look for people to play indie RPGs in Los Angeles. I tried Meet Up, online groups, and Google Plus - all to no avail. I knew intuitively it would take playing these games to understand the complexities of the mechanisms laid before me, but had no way to find a game.

And so it went for a couple of more years. On and off we would pick back up the Skies of Fire RPG, a hack of Blades in the Dark, only to bang our head in frustration at trying to retro engineer something we poorly understood. Fits and spurts, fits and spurts until January 2020.

At the beginning of the year, we made it a goal to make RPGs part of Mythopoeia in a big way. We started out with two full revisions of Skies of Fire before jumping into the hobby full force. I found and began attending Story Games Glendale, a local Meet Up group, along with the Blades in the Dark Discord and a handful of other online communities. 

My personal playtime skyrocketed exponentially. I played all sorts of games with all kinds of people. Over the next six months Vince and I wrote and published over 12 different games - most of them small, but each improving our understanding of the medium as a whole. 

What a year it's been. Good times. Still going. We have a game to publish now, and a whole lot of things ahead of us. Here's to persistence and making plans. The road is winding but intentionality leads to opportunity. 

Cheers,

​Ray 

Happy November Mythopoeians! 

It's election day and the world is on edge. What will the results of tonight bring? A turning of a page? More turmoil and political unrest? The world waits with baited breath and watches as the fate of America's democracy unfurls before us.

October was a very fruitful month for Mythopoeia, culminating in our first outside published work and largest crowdfunding campaign yet. We are very blessed to have found favor and some modicum of fortune during these trying times and it's not something we take for granted. 

Today I'd like to talk a little bit more about systems by making a couple of observations. 

When the United States decided to reboot their system of government in 1790, the founding fathers came up with a cutting edge means of participation predicated on the principles of separation of powers and federalism. The Constitution became a model for law all across the western world and is arguably the country's greatest export next to cinema and corn dogs. 

As an American, we're taught to revere the Constitution and it's elegance. The nasty bits, like Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, are brusquely and briefly mentioned while items like the Bill of Rights are enshrined as reasons why our system of governance is superior to all others in the world. 

Systems are means of function predicated on consensus. As a game company, we understand that the strengths and weaknesses of any given system cannot be fully understood until tested by a critical mass of users.


Example 1: League of Legends

In 2012, Riot Games implemented a system called Honor, whereby players could honor their opponents to reward them a form of virtual currency. The idea was to encourage positive behavior and mitigate toxicity. And it worked! For a time. 

Pandemic is fun but suffers from a syndrome called "quarterbacking" in which one or more players can become too dominant and dictate moves to other players during their turn in service of achieving the win condition.

With enough experience, the game can be more or less solved even on the hardest of difficulties, with only small bits of randomization inserting chance as a variable. This is a common problem amongst board games, and indeed games writ large. For the first several playthroughs, players are unfamiliar with the rules of the system and tend to make unoptimized moves. That in turn allows a greater variance in outcomes, which often leads to a perception of enjoyment or fun. 

As players become more familiar with the system, they tend towards optimization. If a game is easily solvable, the perceived enjoyment goes down for a large percentage of the userbase. How many times have you played a game that you enjoyed the first couple of runs, but by the fourth or fifth time it feels repetitive and like you're going through the motions? I certainly have felt that sensation with Pandemic and a whole lot of other experiences. Tabletop games can somewhat mitigate that experience because they are for the most part in person experiences that require a large amount of commitment to begin, and so the total expected playtime per player numbers maybe in the dozens of hours as opposed to say the hundreds with an online experience. 

The less familiar you are with a system, the less likely you are to recognize its boundaries and points of exploitation.

Example 3: Mitch McConnell 

So that brings me to one of my least favorite people in the world, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Over the course of his tenure, Mitch McConnell has done more to exploit the weaknesses in the American system of government than any other individual.

During the Obama years, he was largely responsible for the 'do-nothing' strategy of Congress that has in many ways led us to our current political situation. Instead of choosing to compromise and work with the opposition, he led Congress to a a virtual standstill from 2010 that is still ongoing to this day. The only significant legislation that has passed in the ensuing years was a major tax bill in 2017 when the Republicans controlled both chambers of the legislative and the executive; and the rushed CARES Act bill that saw huge corporations gobble up billions of dollars before a second wave of funding enabled small businesses like ours access to government aide. 

Outside of those two pieces of legislation, Congress has done almost nothing. For ten years.

In addition, McConnell blatantly ignored the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution by refusing to hear the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland. 

Within the confines of our grand system of governance - the sacred United States Constitution, Mitch McConnell has found unprecedented ways to manipulate, obfuscate, and grind the wheels of governance to a halt. 

Given enough time and/or users, flaws and exploits will be found within every system.

--------------------------------------------------

Games have the privilege to constantly update their systems, either in the form of patches for digital content or new editions for tabletop games. Unfortunately, updating a system of government is much harder. There are only two means to do so, both beginning with the letter "R." 

If we don't do one, we will eventually beget the other. That is what history tells us. That is what the youth increasingly speak about openly as an inevitability. 

These are dark times. I don't like to talk openly about politics, not on a platform of  creativity and commerce. But if we don't speak now, we will eventually be silenced later. That is what history tells us. That is the lesson we should have learned. 

So let the record show.

​We Mythopoeians choose to speak.

Ray ​

​Here's  anupdate on where we're at with Glow.

It's with a mix of pride and a tinge of sadness that we are announcing that as of Issue #5, artists Anny Maulina and Dia Ja have both officially moved on from Glow. 

It's definitely a little bittersweet, but we knew this day would eventually come. We're happy to have been a small part of their journeys and this is not goodbye forever! We're still in touch with both of them and plan on collaborating on different projects on the future - in fact, we're already working on one of those behind the scenes now. Hopefully we can announce that one soon! 
​

Vinsensius Suriantoo previously helped us develop our upcoming dog fairy tale Sansha and Blanco. He's a monster of perspective and warm expressions. We're honored to have him work on Glow.

Zie Fauzi is a man with many talents, one of which is toy design! In fact, he actually designed the chibi vinyls above. We saw a lot of potential in Zie's portfolio and so far through about twenty pages of sequentials he's just gotten better and better. ​

We're  also super excited to introduce concept artist Arief Russanto to the team! 

Arief has been helping us flesh out maps of the world and Arkadis, the next major location of the story. He's a talented sequential artist in his own right and will for sure be contributing on that end for Glow in the future. For now, check out his sweet maps which are currently being colored! 

So here's where we're at with the next few issues:

• Issue #5 is completely inked, ready to be colored.
• Issue #6 has one last sequence to be inked, about 6 pages
• Issue #7 is completely written with the first 4 pages being worked on this month.
• Issue #8 is still being drafted, about 60% done with the first draft. 

Our plan going forward with Glow is to release a campaign every two issues instead of every issue going forward. My personal goal is to have up to issue #12 written by the end of the year. Two months to go - we'll see what happens! 

For the Glow: Book 1 Kickstarter, we are still tentatively planning on launching sometime in November, but our timeframe is narrowly shrinking. An opportunity to publish another project, The Wildsea, came up in September, and was time-sensitive. I've been building out both Kickstarters including the campaign design, merch, and production for both, but honestly I don't know if I'm going to make it. It's a lot of work and I'm grinding everyday but there's still so many things that have to be done. 

If, for any reason, Glow Book 1 is delayed, we'll probably launch the campaign in January of the new year. We'll still be continuing the work behind the scenes with manufacturing and merch, so it's sort of a matter of how much of the public facing stuff we want done before launching. Gut says more rather than less. 

​Finally, I want to let everyone know that Vince is currently taking a sabbatical from the company due to his health. He's burned out and his well-being is suffering as a result. He's going to take at least the rest of the year on the sidelines of Mythopoeia to get better. Please, if you can, send good vibes his way. 

2020 has been really hard. Hopefully the worst is behind us. Fingers crossed. 
​
- Ray ​