If you’re playing in my game, don’t read this. If you do, I’ll throw you into the sun.
We’re only playing once every two weeks because people are busy, so I figure I might as well post a retrospective on the previous session that goes into some of the behind-the-screen sort of stuff. So that’s what this is going to be! Have fun.
So first, let’s talk about a couple dumb mistakes I made. This is my first time running a sandbox style game, and I wanted the players to start out with a bunch of hooks to different adventures to prevent a situation where they have their first hook and that becomes the first thing they do because… what else are they going to do? So every character started with a hook to a different adventure, but I screwed up communicating that to everyone, so there were a few players who started out thinking that each hook was to the same adventure and that was going to be how everyone came together as a party. That would have been a good idea, but I had a different idea that would get us straight into player-led sandboxy goodness. Only… I messed that up too. When I was writing the hooks, I had this idea in my mind that each character would have some idea that the associated adventure would be too much for their character alone, so they would naturally be interested in getting together with other likeminded heroes. But I ALSO failed to make that clear in the hooks and didn’t tell the players directly. What a fool I am.
But in spite of all that, it still went pretty good! Honestly, the awkwardness that all caused did a pretty good job of simulating the awkwardness of 5 very nonhuman people showing up in a very human town that was at best quite chilly towards them. There was some really good roleplay going on and I was hugely impressed with how quickly my players had an idea of who their character was and actually put it into the world.
Now, onto some specifics. Michael Thornberry might die next session, or maybe the one after that. He’s just a guy and he’s wholly unprepared to find anything other than muck in the swamp. He’s probably going to want to leave very early into Friday’s session, but there’s a chance that he gets killed if he tries to leave on his own. If the party keeps him alive throughout the adventure, there’s a very good chance he wants to curl up in his tavern a cry. I don’t think he’s going to stick around with the party long term.
We had our first fight of the campaign after the session! It didn’t actually happen, but I ran out of prepped material while we still had time so we went back to the War Dogs that the party passed as a little white room scenario. Two characters very nearly died! It was basically a standard encounter according to the monster rules as they currently are, but my players are new to this game and I think they’re just used to DnD combat where you basically have to just wait until after an encounter is done to meaningfully heal. In Draw Steel!, you can use a maneuver (basically a bonus action in DnD terms) to heal 1/3 of your stamina, and you can do that quite a few times before needing to take a rest. I think even the elementalist in the party has 8 of those he can use, so it’s a pretty large amount of health. The tactician really saved the party in that combat because when the PCs damage the enemy he has marked, they can use one of their heals without using a maneuver, so once things started looking dicey for them they had an easy way to stay alive.
Lastly (and this has more to do with next session than the previous one), I made my first Draw Steel! homebrew! It’s a very simple environmental hazard (and honestly very similar to one that’s already in the monster packet they sent out) but it’s mine! It’s a hidden evil vine that’s going to try to drown the PCs in the swamp! How fun!
I’m pretty happy with how visually similar this is to the monster stat blocks that MCDM has released for Draw Steel! while only using google sheets. I’m not sure about whether EV 3 is accurate (one Level 1 hero is roughly EV 6) but we’re going to find out! My hope is that the vines will take up enough of the heroes’ action economy that the ogre becomes a big enough threat for them. Otherwise it’ll get stomped pretty badly, I think.
Blog Steel! 
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