Seeking opinions: What’s the best information for me to put in the updates? Do folks prefer to hear about the story, character moments, collaborative techniques I’m using, or how players are interacting with goals? I’d like to format my posts in a way that’s the most helpful. Posting my in-person Daggerheart games in three different threads here… Please post accordingly so I know which game you’re commenting on. 🙏 One thing I’ve noticed is that emergent/proactive play is pretty streamlined in the Daggerheart system during world-building and character creation. I’m also taking some of my lessons learned from previous campaigns since reading the PARP guide and gauging ahead of time how proactive and goal-oriented the players want the campaign to be. That means these three different campaigns may have varying levels of proactive versus reactive play. Stay tuned!

I pulled together a group of story focused players to try an emergent campaign (collaborative+proactive). I am going to use this thread to share periodic updates on how it is going and what is working. Meetings will be sparse this fall and then weekly after the new year. It is five players from my in-person games who had to move out of town.

So for Christmas I got my first 3D printers, a FDM and a resin one. I've since been printing up a storm. I found the file for the dragon on the right and thought "this is my BBEG!" Then I found the dragon on the left....and now THIS IS MY BBEG!! I'm undecided if the smaller one will be the bigger one's lieutenant or if the smaller one will turn into the bigger one when the crap really hits the fan in my final boss fight. Either way I love how these turned out. 🤩

The latest session of my long term campaign was yesterday. Two of the players were trying to infiltrate the rich side of town and quickly realized they would need to procure a change of clothes sp they would blend in. I had to improvise a merchant NPC on the spot. Being an avid fan of STP and his discworld series, my mind reached for the only character that fit the bill - Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler 😄. I played the character up just as he was in the books. On of the advantages of being older (I'm in my 50's, most of my players are 20s/early 30s) and from another country (I'm from NZ but live in Utah) is that I have been exposed to cultural influences that my players haven't. Not a single one of them has read Discworld, so Cut-me-own-throat Diibbler is completely new to them, and I could shamelessly use (rip off) the character without them knowing. I hope that one day at least one of them reads the books and smiles knowingly.

Last night was our first session of our open table Blades in the Dark game! Thanks to @James Willetts @Richard Mills and @Beth Bachuss for taking the plunge and pulling off some daring heists! I’ll update this each week with an overview and quick summary of the session, the prep, the post-game accounting, and some insight into the proactive process, to hopefully make the motions of running a proactive game a little more open and approachable. This week, we kicked off by choosing some pregenerated characters (to my great disappointment, no one picked “Jon’ah the Pungent”) and learning a few basics of the system. Then we got right into the action! I haven’t had the chance to make a poll and decide crew type (look out for that tomorrow!) so I chose cult to get us started and the group decided they wanted to steal the shiny ancient obelisk described on their crew sheet. In Blades, every crew type has a bunch of Claims—valuable turf, places, or objects currently held by other factions. Since we’re just starting, I substituted the claims sheet for goals to get the ball rolling quickly. I’ll talk more about my plans to make this a bit more proactive in my post-game section. The heist was good fun! The players decided that the Church of Ecstasy probably had the obelisk, and that it was being brought to their large temple by the Gondoliers. Meanwhile, the Keepers of the Flame infiltrate the church for cultish purposes… Highlights include James’ leech unleashing an unknown horror from a prison to wreak havoc and destruction, Richard’s whisper unleashing an indoor hailstorm to spook off some guards and loot the organ loft, and Beth’s lurk pretending to be a wealthy donor and strongman the delivery men into moving the obelisk for her. We opening and closed with critical successes, so things were mostly in a pretty safe position thanks to great rolls and clever plans! Downtime included pissing off the yet-unnamed rival gang, who have vowed revenge and will return at a later time. Also some training and some inventing of dangerous anti-ghost substances.