I’m contemplating a return to lunchtime gaming. It’s been on hiatus for quite a while do to an overwhelming lack of time, but I miss it and so do the rest of the Gamer Working Group.
As a brief re-cap, the Gamer Working Group consists of a few RPG players at my day job and one or two local gamers. It typically meets once a week over lunch. We play for about an hour, which means in the course of a month we can get in the equivelent of one four-hour gaming session. It makes for slow progress through a campaign, especially since things like work emergencies, unavoidable meetings, and holidays can play havoc with the GWG schedule.
Learning from what’s come before, I’d like this iteration of the GWG to be more streamlined with less game prep. Previous iterations featured fast playing games like Savage Worlds and Dragon Age that were easy to prep for, but more recently we’d been playing Dungeons & Dragons. That’s not a problem – you can easily play D&D over lunch – but I did find myself falling into the same prep routine I used for my twice-a-month Sunday games … and they’re not equivelent. WIth a lunchtime game you’ve got to focus on bite-sized chunks of content, shorter story arcs, and much shorter prep times.
Recognizing this, I’m looking to run the upcoming Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (Amazon) adventure from Wizards of the Coast. It looks to be a shorter campaign that takes characters from levels 1-5, which is perfect for our lunchtime game. It’s set in the city of Waterdeep, which means urban adventuring and lots of opportunities for shorter encounters. Being Waterdeep – and the Forgotten Realms – there is a ton of source material, so I won’t need to create much of my own content. That will take discipline as the urge to write my own material is very strong, but that’s not the point of this campaign. Of course, I expect I will end up creating some of my own content, but the focus will be on leveraging what’s already out there.
In addition, I’d like to use the Roll20 pacakge for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist so that our battlemap is entirely virtual and to play in one of the meeting rooms at work rather than driving to my house for sessions. This will radically decrease travel and prep times while also reducing the stress associated with running the game. We’ll still meet in the real world – this won’t be an online game – but the hope is that Roll20 will let us get to the action quickly … and the online module will let me do that without a ton of offline prep time.
The other adventage to the Waterdeep campaign is that Wizards is releasing the Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage (Amazon) in November 2018, so once the Dragon Heist introductory adventure is complete we have another adventure we can easily move on to.
Other Future Games
While my current focus is on Dragon Heist there are other games I’m thinking about.
- Weird Pulp: The Lost Library: A return to our Savage Worlds campaign in which our heroes travel to the heart of Africa looking for a library belonging to the ancient Empire of Mu.
- Spellcrash: Sure my Spelljammer-meets-Planet Hulk inspired mashup is mostly an excuse for world building … but it’d be fun to run it as well.
- Star Trek Role-Playing Game: I love the idea of a short campaign using the new rules from Modiphius. I don’t know if I can sell it, but I’d love to run it.
- Delta Green: I got the core books for this game of modern conspiracy and horror over the summer. There’s been a ton of supplemental adventures released for it; I’d love to run one of them with my gaming group.
- The Kids Campaign: My son’s wants to play more D&D. I’d like to help him get up and running as a dungeon master with his own gaming group.