On Bucket Lists and fighting the real enemy: Time Management

The Dilemma

What to do, if you’re like me and have hoarded a lot of adventure modules and settings (not unlike a dragon, actually) and realize you’ll probably never find the time to play them all properly, because we’re not kids anymore and time management became the arch enemy of ongoing longtime play?

In my case, (part of) my current bucket list consists of four things:

• I want to play more Old-School Essentials and collected quite a lot of adventure modules for it.
• I want to run some “classic” AD&D modules like B2 - Keep on the Borderlands, mainly because I enjoy Seth Skorkowskys AD&D reviews a lot.
• I want to run a Dolmenwood game, because I love what Gavin Norman cooked up with this setting.
• I backed Wildendrem - The Valley of Flowers on Kickstarter and I enjoyed reading the book and its ideas.
  

That is a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Possibly years of play with multiple groups and every organizing issue that may come with this.
Complicating the issue further: I also run a game set in Eberron and I am a player in two regular campaigns.

So, what to do, other than surrendering to fate and accepting that some things simply aren’t meant to be?

The Solution

Now, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here and a lot of more eloquent people have elaborated these things on their blogs before, but here’s my approach.

Pt. 1 - The Setup

Take the best parts and mash ’em together! Luckily for me, all of the above are quite similar in theme and tone, or can be relatively easy modified to fit them. I wrote up a minimalist setting and did what every sensible GM would do: Stuff. Everything. Into. It.
The result is a hexcrawl with a total of 130 hexes, filled to the brim with Landmarks, Hidden Things and Secrets, consisting of adventure module parts, Locations from Dolmenwood and the Valley of Flowers and other things, in a Dune-like setup.


In total, there are dungeons, villages, NPCS, monsters and points of interest from 40 different sources in it. It’s dense.
In fact, it’s almost certainly overkill. We probably still won’t be able to see everything, but we’ll decide together what we’re most interested in and take it from there.
But first and foremost, it’s a toolbox. It took a lot of work to fill it, but now it’s ready to be used. Doesn’t matter when. Almost doesn’t matter where. Even if this experiment doesn’t work out now, I can use it again anytime in the future.
The framework is an Excel sheet in my google drive with multiple pages, like this:

It contains everything I need to run a game, aside from individual module texts.

Pt. 2 - Find interested players

Two players of my regular game were interested in trying this out with me. Admittedly, that is a small group, but it helps immensely with time management and getting the game going.
Since they didn’t want to run several PCs at the same time, it poses a challenge when most of the adventure models are designed with a party of 6-8 PCs in mind.
In our Session Zero, I proposed some houserules, like adapting the Luck-Attribute from DCC and thus the possibility to find a downed PC still alive if a LCK-Check was successful.
The latest KNOCK! issue contained an article originating from a blog article by Joseph Manola about playing OSR D&D in a romantic fantasy narrative. Our group liked the concept, so we’ll try it out. The game focus hence will be more on the social side of things, rather than combat, further alleviating the smaller PC count, although henchmen and helpful NPCs will still be around.

Pt. 3 - Time management

If I’ve learned anything from my ongoing Eberron game of two years, it’s that for us, a regular, bi-weekly date helps immensely with planning when everyone involved knows what day they need to keep free of other activities. Playing remote certainly helps a lot as well.
So, naturally, we’re going with this approach again. We also decided to only plan for two hours of play, leaving more wiggle room if LIFE decides to throw stones in our path. That way, it will hopefully be like watching a movie.
Almost everyone can make time to watch a movie together.

Closing thoughts

This is an experiment. And it’s a fun and promising one. Maybe it won’t work out. But even then, I’ve learned a lot and I don’t regret having put in the work I did. Maybe I’ll start writing session reports in this here blog, further elaborating on elements and techniques I use.
We decided to begin with B2 - Keep on the Borderlands, starting tomorrow. I’m excited to see how it goes. :)

Further reading:

W. F. Smith wrote a brilliant guide on creating hexcrawls over on his blog Prismatic Wasteland: Part 1 & Part 2
Further elaborations on playing in a romantic fantasy narrative by Joseph Manola on his blog Against the Wicked City: Part 1  , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 (To my players: Please don’t read Part 4, yet. ;))