Over the summer, I took a few months off from running and playing TTRPGs. I wasn’t burned out, but in retrospect, I did need a reset with my longest running group. After the summer, we met to discuss logistics, and being me, I wanted to run a new system. We settled on trying Fabula Ultima.
Three weeks and a Quickstart adventure later, we sat down for Session Zero.
And it was awesome.
I’m not writing a guide on how to run Session Zero. There are many other incredible guides out there. However, I was so excited about how it went that I had to write a few thoughts on what worked for me.
Don’t plan: pitch
The best campaign I ever ran had the barest premise.
And yet, I never really learned from that. I have since run a number of campaigns, and I always felt like I had to start with something: a campaign frame, a module, a concept, a local area, a theme.
I’m not sure why, but I was somehow scared to do something thinner. I had one campaign where I drew the world map, had the big arcs figured out, gave handouts with lore, and just generally made it very rich. I left plenty of room to not railroad, but in the end, the players never got quite so grounded in what I thought was cool about the world, and we didn’t finish the campaign.
This time, however, I had only prepared three things.
First, we would play Fabula Ultima.
Second, I provided the rulebook so they could start thinking about character concepts.
Third, I asked if they wanted to play:
- High Fantasy
- Techno Fantasy
- Natural Fantasy
to match the three major world themes of Fabula Ultima. The players picked Natural Fantasy, and then I subsequently ignored them and said that the world would have all three in different places.
Still, that was enough to give them the shape of the world.
Fit the world to the characters
In the real world, you are not the center of the universe.
In a TTRPG, the players can be the center of the universe.
As a GM, the worldbuilding can be fun, but all the really matters is what the players see happening at the table. And the best version of that probably deeply woven into the PC’s personal relationships and their impact on the world.
Perhaps that was my biggest mistake with the campaign I mentioned above. I had already come up with the structure, then figured out how to fit my players into it.
Instead, I left the world almost entirely undefined so that the players could tell me what mattered.
Follow the conversation
Fabula Ultima has a whole chapter dedicated to starting a campaign. Very confusingly, the chapter is also called “Press Start”, just like the Quickstart adventure.
Anyways, it explains how to do everything starting from safety tools through world creation to character creation.
It’s a solid starting point that I loosely followed. Instead, I used it as a series of icebreakers and broad topics to keep the conversation moving along.
What really mattered was letting the players talk and asking leading questions. People need constraints to be creative, so I had to ask the right leading questions. From there, however, the conversation took on a life of its own. By stepping back, my players were telling me what they were excited about just by continuing to go deeper along on topics.
Brainstorming in-person is good
Since COVID, I think there was a big shift to playing online. Of course, all sorts of logistical reasons can move games online, but playing in-person is the gold standard for TTRPGs.
This is absolutely true for Session Zero as well. When people are flinging around ideas and reacting to each other, we rely on all of our social cues to react to each other to make it work. I really, really needed to feel the energy and redirect an open-ended, brainstorming session to capture as much as possible about what the players wanted.
Is this even a Daggerheart blog anymore?
In short, no.
Right now, I’m only running a single campaign, and it’s Fabula Ultima. As much as I love Daggerheart, it is hard for me to write about something that I’m not actively playing.
That being said, I hope to write content useful for running a variety of TTRPGs. Having taken a break, I’m excited to write again. And even if it isn’t exactly Daggerheart, perhaps it will inspire others to borrow concepts from other systems. My GM style is shaped by running different systems, and my style in turn attracts me to similar games.
I’ll write another post soon about why I picked Fabula Ultima, but I’ll get a few more sessions under my belt to talk from experience.
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