GenCon 50 – Planning for Games

It’s always an exciting day when I get an email from GenCon. Especially one announcing Event Submission.

This year I’m cutting down on the number of events that I’m running because I’m bringing my two boys. I’m sure I’ll have another post on that later. I’ve decided to just run one scenario twice, instead of two scenarios two times each. This will give me more time to go to games, tour the show floor, and get in some different activities with the boys.

With one scenario, I’ve decided to continue the characters from Return to Gilligan’s Island and incorporate a different TV show. Right now I’m leaning towards them rescuing the cast of the Love Boat, but things could change.

The system will stay 5e, and first step is to level up the PCs. Last year they were level 2, so moving to level 3. For some of the characters this means focusing their class, and for the spell casters it means 2nd level spells. Even with all of that it is an easy process. More important than stats is to update any relationship opportunities. Skipper and Gilligan keep the same relationship between each other, but there are changes that could be made to Sister Bertrelle (Flying Nun), Jed Clampet, Samantha Stevens (Bewitched), or Herman Munster.

If it’s going to be the Love Boat, that means two things right away, stating out the crew, and finding a good map for the ship. Working on the crew often leads to some options for plot, or at least encounter opportunities. The same thing is normally true for a map. Plotting out the different locations from the TV show can lead to options for overall plot and specific encounters. With a ship the size of the Love Boat, it might be better to just have individual locations plotted, and not try and map the entire thing.

One difference between Gilligan’s Island and The Love Boat is the weekly guest star. The Love Boat always had guest stars and they often drove the plot of that weeks show. A guest star is another NPC (or multiple NPCs, there were often more than one) that has to be factored into the plot of the scenario.

Of course none of this has to be done by late January. All I really need to have is the description of the game for the event registration form (plus some extra stuff like when and what system). But, it does help to have an outline of the adventure to write the description from, instead of writing an adventure based on a description I probably wrote months ago.

Look for character stats and the adventure description as soon as I post the information to GenCon.

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