Prepping to run Lasers & Feelings at GenCon

As I’m getting ready to go to my first GenCon and hopefully run a heavily-improv game like Lasers & Feelings while I’m there, is doing any prep technically “overprepping”? It feels presumptuous to do too much when one doesn’t know what PCs the players are going to even create, but it’s a good idea to have a backup plan in case you start improvising and end up like the Borg in a tractor beam. Can you draw a line to do just enough? Well, there is a small seed that Lasers & Feelings gives you, so I started there — by rolling four six-sided dice to find out our adventure: “Zorgon the Conqueror wants to destroy/corrupt a quantum tunnel which will enslave a planet.” OK, that wasn’t enough for me to feel comfortable — even after looking up quantum tunnel and falling down a rabbit hole to watch some mind-blowing videos — so I needed to do more to prepare.

Last year as I ran a many-session Wild Beyond the Witchlight D&D campaign, I’d grown accustomed to using the templates created by Sly Flourish (a.k.a. The Lazy Dungeon Master), so I figured I’d start there. I created a couple quick NPCs and possible scenes, but it felt like I was trying to fill out requirements that were way larger than they should be for improv, and I didn’t have all the answers anyway. I knew I agreed with his point to create lists of things to be used anywhere in the story rather than expecting a specific sequence of events, but I didn’t have enough yet, and was gripped with fear thinking about the third or fourth hour when improv had gone so far off the rails and my energy might be waning.

Lasers & Feelings is short on actual-play videos, so to find more inspiration, I looked at more suggestions for creating scenarios regardless of system. I found 5-Room Dungeon and Katrina Ostrander’s description of optimizing for a one-shot, which each had similar structures of about five parts with a twist in the middle and a climax at the end. Even though I still wasn’t going to prescribe which events would show up in what order, focusing on a structure made me more confident that I could picture transitioning to different beats (roleplaying, combat, or mystery) each hour.

Feeling like I’d already looked at more different perspectives than I needed to, I still wasn’t content, so figured I’d double-down and invest more time in understanding how to save time in the future by listening to Lowell Francis’ talk on how to run one-shots (a master class of an episode). He described that similar five-act structure, but offered an alternative to divide the PCs into pairs where they have to then come back together at the end just before the final climax. Lowell’s main emphasis, though, was the importance of pacing, and, as I’ve seen in his games I’ve been privileged to play in, he starts sessions off in media res. This helped because it reminded me that I’d used this before — Forged in the Dark games have the same suggestion to put the characters right into the action — and I took a look at the Scum & Villainy starter scenario for bounty hunters. That’s where I had a breakthrough.

Because the scenario suggested that PCs find their target bounty in the first scene (firing at them from a hoverbike while escaping), I realized I had the freedom to think of Zorgon as a maguffin rather than as a central figure I had to build the session around. If I introduced Zorgon right away rather than having to introduce four scenes preceding that intro, then technically Zorgon’s fate was part of the improv right away — to escape, get killed, or come along for the ride — and the group could go in a totally different direction. I’d spent hours thinking I didn’t know how to fit a plot around Zorgon (even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to because it’s improv) and now realized Zorgon could just be one small part of a much more sinister plot. This meant my requirements for locations, NPCs, secrets and loot could be totally unrelated to Zorgon. Why does that matter? Well, it just gave me more flexibility. On top of that, I’d read somewhere that Lasers & Feelings (which I ran once, though shortened to an hour) is best when you can get players off the bridge and into the real world, which opened up the idea for even more varied locations rather than just stuck doing some initial ship-to-ship combat.

Coincidentally, I’d just watched a video by Matt Colville suggesting prep start with maps which fit with the idea of finding a location for PCs to start in other than their ship. His point is that maps tell a story visually and inspire you to come up with monsters who would live there. I took his advice and looked at Cze & Peku who now even have sci-Fi maps. I found some gorgeous ones that looked like they had portals in them to go along with the quantum tunnel aspect, and other nefarious features. Now, before you start thinking that maps sounds like a trad game, not a rules-light indie game, I have learned from running other story-games in the past, like Scum & Villainy, that a map of a location can be very helpful, especially in a game that has unclear fictional positioning (in other words, lore that the players don’t know very well). A map can help players who aren’t confident in the context of the world they’re in, and a GM’s job is to help provide a better understanding of the world so players feel they can make choices. It’s true that there’s a risk that maps lock players in to such specifics that the game slows down with crunchy conversations about distance — but when you play in a light game, and you don’t have to measure distance, etc., a map is a nice visual reference to help the whole group move the story forward.

Though I had locations and a structure, I still needed a strong start. I liked the Scum & Villainy idea of starting in combat with the threat, but with the freedom that Zorgon could go away immediately came the panic of not knowing what to do next. For inspiration, I looked through my library at other RPGs where someone was actually paid to think through all this, and found my copy of the Star Trek Adventures Starter Campaign Booklet: A Star Beyond the Stars. Funnily enough (trying to avoid spoilers), it had a lot of similarities to the adventure I’d rolled up for Lasers & Feelings but had more gravitas. I’d been concerned that I kept picturing silly plots (which still could come into play, mind you), where Zorgon was a parental figure trying to redirect a quantum tunnel away from a baby alien being kept awake (and getting dangerous superpowers), unintentionally pointing it at a planet that would be brainwashed as a result. I got here a little bit from Matt Groening aliens and Alan Moore plots in Tomorrow Stories given I wanted it to have a deadpan commitment to science being abused in ridiculous ways.

Now, with inspiration from Star Trek and a consensus around a certain structure, I felt confident that I had a couple hooks in my back pocket, even though in an ideal world I wouldn’t need expectations about how the story would evolve. Still, this gave me more to work with, and I finished up creating pregen PCs (just in case players needed starting points), some NPCs that could appear in scenes as I’d envisioned them or Star Trek had guided me, and fun loot from the Mothership adventure The Desert Moon of Karth. I put this all down in the Sly Flourish template and a big spreadsheet, leaning on the Games on Demand Diversity Training video when creating pronouns, names and headshots for pregens and NPCs. And then, in case of emergency, I created more lists: sci-fi characters and warp drive names using DonJon, a list of sci-fi nouns from Perchance to have on hand for improv, and cherry-picked sci-fi tropes to trigger my brain.

That’s where I’m at. It’s been a fair amount of effort over the last week for such a short session, but, admittedly, I hadn’t run a game for a few months, so this was as much an exercise in warming up for more games as it was specific to a one-shot. And it was also just a fun way to engage with sci-fi overall, read most of a Star Trek adventure, read a bunch of stuff from Mothership, play with Adobe Illustrator to optimize maps to show up on my black-and-white printer, and come up with character motivations and NPCs related to the pregens. I kept thinking I’d solo the game a little to try to get more confident with how Lasers & Feelings would run, but I think with everything I’ve got, especially a clear plot hook, some locations, NPCs, and loot, I think I’m ready. That said, I’ve still got a week before the con, so, with some fresh eyes, I could still see whether I’ve got any edits to make. But that… THAT would probably be too much prep.