GM 101
Our flagship event is our workshop, which we call GM 101. It introduces aspiring and novice GMs to the fundamentals of the craft, answers their questions, and provides coaching on technique.
This allows GMs who are exploring ideas about adventure design and game-running to experiment with those ideas. The four-hour workshop is divided into two parts, with the first part leading into the second.
Dungeon-Storming
The location-based adventure, or “dungeon crawl,” is a staple of TRPGs. It shows up in horror games as the haunted house, in sci-fi as the derelict spaceship, in post-apocalyptic games as the abandoned industrial complex from before the Collapse, and many others. Scaled up, it’s the hex-crawl through a wilderness or across a space sector. But there’s a lot of confusing and contradictory advice about what you need to do to prepare such an adventure.
The dungeon-storming exercise starts with the question, “What’s the story here?” in order to lead you through an adventure design process that focuses on getting the big picture down first and then filling in the details, the dangers and discoveries the PCs may encounter.
At the end of this hour-long exercise, you’ll have a complete adventure to run—which is the very next thing you get to do.
The Quick & Dirty Dungeon Crawl
We’ll have you take turns rotating through the GM’s chair as you run the adventure for other participants in the workshop. The Q&DDC is a metagame, a game about gaming. When you’re playing as a PC, you have a fictional game-character with stats to interact with a fantasy world as well as a fictional player-character with preferences at the table for the kind of engagement they want with that fantasy. You get experience points for playing the player-character’s preferences!
When you’re playing as the GM, you have a menu of techniques to try out, and you get experience points for experimenting! As you’re doing that, we’ll be giving you feedback, providing suggestions, and answering your questions, providing feedback, coaching, and encouragement throughout.