Tonight I’ll be running The Shadow of Yesterday for the first time. We’re going to be playing a swashbucklers and pirates kind of game, hopefully running weekly for the next two or three months.

We got together last Wednesday to figure out what system we wanted to use and what sort of game we wanted to play. We set aside Capes, Donjon, Inspectres and Primetime Adventures pretty quickly, settling on the TSOY Swashbucklers idea without any real argument from anybody. We were all excited about it. We went ahead and made up characters then and I’ve been working with players to tweak their concepts and backgrounds over the last week.

I’ve been preparing for the game using some techniques that are very different from the stuff that I usually do. Well, the stuff I usually do is really not very well-defined anyway, and is pretty strongly Illusionist/all-roads-lead-to-Rome anyway, with heavier Force used for one-shots to get them where I want them and less Force needed for ongoing games that have room to spread out. Either, way, though, it wasn’t a lot of fun for me to prepare for a game.

This time, though, I started out by taking all the supporting characters mentioned by the players during character generation and I drew up a conflict web. That was a tremendous help. In figuring out how NPCs knew each other and were connected by lines of power, duty, responsiblity, antagonism, and love, I was able to very rapidly establish a lot of backstory and motivation for each of these characters.

That was the biggest part of my preparation. I tried my hand at flag framing, but building the web was really quite a bit easier for me. I don’t yet have the hang of targetting Flags with situation. Hopefully I’ll get better at that as we go along.

Once the players have been exposed to all this prep I’ve done, I’ll post some pictures of my relationship map and conflict web, and probably notes on what I worked out before the game. I think this may be the first time I’ve prepared for a game in a way that I’m honestly willing to show to people. I’m pleased with what I’ve done, and that at the very least says to me that I’m having fun.