I’m going to try writing weekly recaps of the games I’m in, or games that were talked about, and see if that helps organize my thoughts about gaming in general. Let’s start with this week.

First, an outline of my general gaming schedule. Things have moved around a bit for me in terms of weekdays, but here’s where we are now.

• Monday: Henshin on alternating weeks. This is a blast, and everyone in the group is some kind of toku fan to a greater or lesser degree.
• Tuesday: I run Fate Condensed for a couple of players on my Discord, in a world inspired by Larry Niven’s SF but not explicitly drawn from any of his actual stories.
• Wednesday: currently no game, I have a regular event on this day that would interfere.
• Thursday: the long-running Thursday group just wrapped up MEGALOS and are playing one-shots of Sentinels Comics while we ramp up for what’s probably going to be Brindlewood Bay.
• Friday: a combination game and playtesting group. I just wrapped up MEGALOS and we are looking at one-shots while we figure out our next plan.
• Saturday: no game at present.
• Sunday: I alternate between groups, with Mechatron one week and the WEG Star Wars game the next.

This was a week for cancellations. Henshin, Fate Condensed, Thursday, and Sunday all didn’t happen for different reasons. The only game that really happened was my MEGALOS game, which wrapped after something like two solid months of cancellation and delay. So let’s focus on that:

• The characters are air pirates, protecting small independent floating islands against natural hazards and the encroachment of the Arlyte Empire.
• They take on a runaway nobleman’s brat, Ruprecht, encounter a sky dragon wishing to protect its egg, and face off against Osterath, a fanatic who wants to spark war between the independents and the Empire.
• In the last session, Osterath is defeated and many of the long-running threads got wrapped up in what I hope was a satisfying fashion.

I introduced a mechanic in the final fight. Rather than having specific attacks (“AOE against 3 targets, does X damage, has these other effects”), I gave Osterath a single move called “The Last Battle”. He’d use this move every round, and it would do 20 damage across any targets he wanted - starting with the story objectives on the battlefield, which had between 30 and 60 total HP. The catch was that if a player character was engaged in melee with him, they got to choose where the damage went, including to themselves. So every round, there was incentive to stay engaged so you could keep any one objective from being totally destroyed. Narratively, this is Osterath firing weapons, operating controls, and doing whatever he’s doing in the moment. It worked in that the players felt the incentive and put a lot of effort into controlling it.

Today I’m working on the final rewrites for cards in The Moment. I know what needs doing and I’m on a good track, it just takes time to polish.