I never prepare a scenario in advance, especially when playing Hero Wars, I improvise all the way if I can, making up NPC's as I go along, generating the plot as the game flows - in fact I find GM'ing from prepared notes extremelly distracting. All the scenario's I have had published have come from this sort of improvisational play, with them being stat'ed after for other peoples convenience. I may use the occasional prop such as Maps or even childrens history book, but little else, although I must admit I do like to grab hold of Anaxial's Roster once in a while. My NPC's are always very simply stat'ed with abilities like King 10w2, or Weird Shaman 15w and very little else is needed - sometimes I make notes between games, but I invariably loose them which causes more annoyance than help. At the begginning of each weekly session I ask for a quick recap, I assess the mood of the players based on their descriptions of the previous events and then pace the session accordingly. This method is very difficult to do, I GM a lot, with good resourceful players and it can be a little tiring after six-eight hours (the length of each part of my Lunar Game). The biggest danger is getting lost in the plots, NPC's tend to come and go, that may be why I like big city games or games in which the bad guys only hang around for a week ago. I usually have some form of nemesis, with the players having various relationships to them this character reoccurs, but is often off scene so that I can change their abilities to suit the game, without causing player animosity, they only need to know his actual skills on the day they conquer him. I do occasionally get bored with an idea or campaing and will switch games a little too frequently, this may be because I am too tired to improvise or have run out of ideas for that game, somthing that may happen less for those who construct carefully crafted timelines and plots. Then again when you have a group of players that have the following mantra then carefully crafted plots don't stand a chance.
Rules of Play
Cheers Simon Bray
The Unspoken Word - The Magazine for Gloranthans and Heroes http://www.celtic-webs.com/theunspokenword/
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