New Gamemaster Month Session Prep Part 1

By EricMesa

- 3 minutes read - 522 words

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m participating in New Gamemaster Month. The homework for the first class was to choose a game system to learn and run. I chose Tales of the Valiant because I like it and I will be running a huge ToV campaign for my kids in the coming months.

The organizers recommended practicing what you’ve learned by the end of the month by running a game. The second class was about selecting an adventure and finding players. Kobold Press recommended The Impregnable Fortress of Dibs as it’s short, fun, and is a great level one introductory adventure. For finding players they had a few recommendations, including the #LFG channel on their Discord server. (LFG stands for lookign for group) Finally, potential new GMs were supposed to read the introduction to the Players Guide. I’d read it before, but I re-read it to get it fresh in my mind.

Since I’m trying to learn new GM skills and since I’ve never run a game that wasn’t for my kids, I decided to try and get some unknown folks to be the players when I run the Dib adventure. Since Kobold Press doesn’t have their own Virtual Tabletop (which is fine; they’re a publisher - let a VTT company make a great VTT) I decided to use FoundryVTT, which I have because it’s how I want to get the VTT tier I bought for Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere TTPRG. As I was reading the adventure we’re supposed to run, I saw that I need to have 5 goblins, but one of them, the eponyous Dib, has an extra attack. I asked on reddit, the FoundryVTT discord, and the Kobold Press discord and no one knew how to do it. So, since there was a knowledge gap out there, I decided I would figure it out and turn my session prep into a series of videos to help other gamemasters (new or otherwise) who were trying to figure out how to do things like this with Black Flag Roleplaying (the SRD equivalent for Tales of the Valiant). Here are the first three videos I’ve recorded as I work my way through figuring things out in advance of running my first game for non-family members:

In this first video I do the setup for Black Flag Roleplaying in FoundryVTT and figure out how to modify the goblin.

I’m happy to say that as of the time of writing this blog post, 2 people have commented on the above video that they learned something from my experience. When it comes to creating content online almost nothing could make me happier than to have a positive impact on others.

For the second video: now that I have my enemies set, it’s time to make the maps we’ll need to run this game.

The adventure starts off with the goblins hiding in a wagon that they use to attack the party. It has its own attacks and also has HP. In this third video I create an “actor” (in the FoundryVTT parlance) to represent the wagon and its ability to attack and lose HP.