GM Notes: Jewel of the Sea
Added 2021-07-07 16:44:21 +0000 UTCHello, Realmers.
It is I, Jordan! Reporting to you with some notes on our Pirate Oneshot, Jewel Of The Sea.
I wish I could say there was an overwhelming amount of prep on this one but there certainly wasn’t. That was by design! After reading the ruleset for Jewel Of The Sea, I felt that created a series of playgrounds for the cast to then improv within was the best way to approach the game. I wanted to make sure that there was something of a narrative through-line however, and so one thing I did do prior to our play session is give one of our players (Jesse as Lucky) special information only he was privy to. Creating a distinct divide in loyalties before we even began play.
The problem with one-shots is you have to get a lot of information within a very condensed timeline. One way to expedite this process is using the context of the setting to inform a lot of the world building. Pirates for example, are synonymous in most peoples minds with gold, debauchery, ships, shanties, etc etc. So having something so laced with tropes hopefully allowed you all to get invested and oriented quickly!
Of course this loosey-goosey approach gives players plenty of opportunity to surprise you and surprise me they did! But so long as you have the genre touchstone many of these one-shots tend to have, you always have an ace in the hole to fall back on in the form of something “of that world”
Well that was a bunch of gibberish but I hope it was insightful in some way!
See ya in another realm!
Jordan
