Legend in the Mist & Learnings

Last night we played a quick session of my own homebrew campaign on the Legend in the Mist system. It's a great system, because of its flexibility in story telling and my homebrew campaign fit quite perfectly. Since it was a busy and tiring week for all of us, I didn't want to dump a lot of rules, so I started just with status effects on a completely blank sheet of paper. Also, in retrospect it worked quite well because player characters had lost their memories, so a blank sheet fit perfectly.

We started tracking just some status effects in the game, which I didn't have too much trouble keeping track of in my head. This kept the story flowing without people being overwhelmed with rules etc. I also had created some AI generated images depicting the places the party was going through, this also helped a lot more. Relying on imagination is nice, but using images helped a tremendous amount, to establish the stakes of the situation. Sometimes adversaries were particularly scary, or a village looked particularly cute, which lent to the state of the characters, whether there were stressed or calm.

Having some sort of mid-sized map, is tremendously helpful, compared to a campaign-wide over-world map. The problem with map encompassing huge areas isn that the players have to put in a lot of effort move between them, even though the world around them exists, most of their actions probably won't be affected by, or affect the wider world. I suppose it's quite important to provide maps players can wrap their head around and have some observable control over their movement. This doesn't necessarily have to be a road-level town map, unless the quest asks for it. But I guess quests with maps is very helpful, and it is also helpful for you, the GM.

I also wrote on paper notebook, instead of writing on Obsidian. Not having the laptop on my face all the time helped a lot! Most of the time, my players don't do too much that I have to look things up on my digital knowledge base. Writing on paper notebook also allowed me to stay in the moment with my players, which is a big bonus in my opinion. During our Daggerheart sessions I was using my laptop mostly as a GM screen, but I think it's time to upgrade to a real GM screen and still use pen and paper. I still used my laptop to switch the environmental images.

I created a simple ID system to identify which point corresponded to which images, which also reduced a lot of mental load from me, when need to figure out which image I should show. It does take a little bit of time to create all the images, but it's still not as high on preparation time compared to creating multi-level zoomable maps. There are a lot of software that does allow me to solve a lot of these problems, but as a GM, I also want to have fun with my players, so not using too much technology, specially when playing in person was quite nice!

I also added some scary but funny characters, for fun! But I am not sure how those were taken by the party. I have a feeling it didn't work very well.

I am yet to learn how to draw maps quickly but giving it enough flair that they demand to be explored; I took inspiration from rouge-like video games, but maybe I can make it better. But also I would like to remain a low-prep GM. I guess only by next week, I'll know what my learnings do for the next session. Speaking of maps, however, I wonder how it is best to present maps to the players. If they are trailblazers, how would they even have a pre-drawn map. But on the other hand, the map helps facilitating exploration in a made up world. I guess that's something for me to think about for my next session.