Tips for new MCs

Many are the responsibilities of the MythCrafter (MC). As rules referee, main villain, a whole host of supporting characters, and the adventuring party’s number one fan, you have many roles to fill. MCing can be a tremendously rewarding experience, but it also takes significantly more preparation than simply playing the game.

Whether you’re new to MCing or you’ve been running TTRPGs for years, it can be helpful to skim through this page. Thispage helps you consider what kind of game you want to run, best practices for managing your players, and offers a guide to getting the most out of this book.

New to TTRPGs?

A TTRPG (TableTop Role-Playing Game) is, in the broadest sense, a collaborative storytelling game. One player (the MC) will present scenarios to the other players (the adventurers), and together the adventurers will work as a team to complete the quests that the MC offers them. TTRPGs share some roots with improv acting as you are collectively telling a story together. However, when the outcome of an action is uncertain, you determine success by rolling dice and adding your character’s skills or abilities to those die rolls.

A game of MythCraft will typically be played over many sessions, much like a narrative video game. As the heroes grow in power, they will explore more of the world and face bigger threats, cementing their legacies in the annals of history.

The MC Section is designed to make MCing as easy as possible. It provides many tips for running a good game session with your friends, designing memorable campaigns, and customizing NPCs and monsters. It also offers plenty of plot hooks to help you get your ideas flowing. The Exploring Ancerra page also include detailed lore on one of the continents of Ancerra (the first official world setting of MythCraft) and Manor Uvior is a fully fleshed out adventure for low-level heroes that you can use to get your campaign started or test out the system.

Session Zero

Colloquially known as “Session Zero,” it is highly advised to take some time and have a conversation with your group of players before playing the game. This could be the entire first game session that you get together as you embark on a long campaign, or it could be the first 5 or 10 minutes of a one-shot game.

The purpose of a Session Zero conversation is to ensure that both you as the MC and all of your individual players are more or less on the same page with game expectations and general interpersonal etiquette.

Note that in a long campaign, it can be helpful to have multiple Session Zero style conversations, typically between adventure arcs. Checking in and ensuring that everyone is having fun - or, if they’re not, what changes might be made - can help ensure the long-term health of an extended campaign.

A few suggestions for Session Zero discussion topics are provided below.

Game Expectations

What are players committing to by joining your campaign?

Here are a few considerations:

Campaign Length: Roughly how long do you expect your campaign to last? Is this a one-shot that will be done at the end of the night, or a short campaign that will span a half- dozen sessions, or a multi-year saga?

Player Absences: Schedules get tricky, and sometimes it’s impossible to get everyone together. Do you still play if you’re missing one player? What about two? If you cancel a session, do you call the night off entirely or do you play an interlude-style one-shot set elsewhere in the world? Maybe it’s time to break out a dusty board game and pick up your MythCraft campaign once you can get more of the party together.

Characters when a Player is Absent: If you play a session and one of the players is missing, what happens to their character? It can be difficult to narratively justify the character being absent, so does another player want to temporarily handle both their own adventurer and the adventurer of the missing player? Or perhaps your table would rather ignore realism for the sake of simplicity, and rule that if a player is absent, their adventurer is also absent.

Player Responsibilities: Because the MC does significantly more preparatory work before each game, it only makes sense to delegate certain responsibilities to your players. This might include coordinating snacks and dinners, managing a game schedule, or taking care of certain bookkeeping responsibilities like the group’s treasure hoard or tracking Initiative.

Adventurer Code of Conduct: In most TTRPGs, adventurers must work together to accomplish a common goal. This does not mean that they must always get along with one another; some of the most memorable adventures contain heroes that hold significant moral and strategic disagreements with one another. It is important, however, to make sure everyone understands that this is a cooperative game. A sneaky pickpocket should generally consider the other players’ adventurers to be off-limits for thieving. If an adventurer feels very strongly about not pursuing a course of action, but the rest of the party is determined to proceed, then that player should be encouraged to come up with a justification - even a flimsy one - for why their adventurer would reluctantly continue traveling with their friends. Be sure to determine ahead of time whether PVP (player vs player) combat is allowed under any circumstances.

Real-Life Conflict: Conflicts that arise in the confines of a shared fictional story should never spill into the real world, and likewise, conflicts that you may have with your friends in the real world should not bleed into the game. Especially as an MC, do not act punitively by punishing a player’s character within your narrative as a way of retaliating due to outside circumstances. Resolve outside conflict maturely. Usually this may warrant a one-on-one conversation, but on occasion it might be better to handle a conflict by talking through it respectfully as a whole group. Always strive to hear the other person’s opinions in good faith; it is often safe to assume that someone is not intentionally causing real-world conflict and also wants to resolve the conflict as badly as you do.

Setting the Tone

Having established the expectations for the game, it is also a good idea to establish the tone that you’re aiming for in your campaign.

Fantasy adventures cover a massive range of tones, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Game of Thrones. Determine what kind of story you want to tell, and converse with your players to come to an accord. Is this a comedic adventure or a grimdark murderfest? How likely are adventurers to die? Is it likely for their actions to have severe consequences? If they murder a town guard, will this come back to haunt them, or will it typically be hand- waved? Are offbeat puns encouraged? What about joke characters like Sir McGuffin of Plotsburg and Herring the Red?

Note that even if you choose a specific tone for your game, you can still incorporate other tones. Dark campaigns cannot be broody and grim all the time; the adventurers will need moments of levity, hope, and redemption to remind them why they fight in the first place. Similarly, games that are primarily comedic can be a great place to explore some heavy themes, like corrupt power and influence.

Yellow and Red Zones

Finally, it is strongly advised that you discuss “Yellow and Red Zones” with your players. Yellow zones are things that players do not feel very comfortable with in the campaign, but will tolerate. Generally, if you consider including something that falls within a player’s Yellow zone, it might be a good idea to consult with them first. An example of a yellow-zone topic might be something as simple as arachnophobia, or something heavier like extramarital affairs. Red zones are things that players want completely barred from your game that should not be on the table at any point during gameplay.

Having had conversations with your players about game expectations, the tone of the campaign, and yellow and red zone topics to be observed, it’s time to dive in and begin designing your first MythCraft campaign!

Preparing for a Session

As you prepare a game session, it is helpful to have a few goals in mind. Your players will undoubtedly take the session in directions that you didn’t anticipate, and it is okay if you don’t achieve every narrative goal that you set out to meet in a game session.

Ideally, each session will spotlight each hero at least once and will advance the story’s narrative in one notable way. Spotlighting a hero will look different for each player’s character. Imagine a party of heroes is traveling across a harsh desert. The ranger might manage to find enough food for the party despite the hostile environment. The troubadour might talk down or even befriend some would- be bandits. The berzerker could take on a ferocious desert monster in spectacular fashion. While each of these three heroes might contribute to solving each dilemma, by emphasizing their strengths in narration you can make each player feel especially proud of their unique contributions.

A notable narrative moment might be an NPC (nonplayer character) revealing information to the party which will allow them to get into the forbidden crypt. They might confront the final boss of an adventure, or complete a side quest for a friendly barkeep. Not every narrative moment has to be monumental, but it’s good to advance the plot in some small way every time you play.

In addition to these narrative considerations, spend some time thinking about what the party has done so far and what you think they might do next. Plan out a couple combat encounters, a couple social encounters, and a couple exploration encounters accordingly. Having two or three encounters of each type on hand will help you quickly respond to the decisions that your players make.

Guides for designing such encounters can be found in the following pages.

Using this Wiki - (Work in Progress)

Each subsequent chapter of this book focuses on a different component of designing adventures.

Designing NPCs offers tools for designing NPCs of all kinds, from simple merchants to world-conquering villains.

Crafting a Campaign suggests different styles of long-term campaigns and provides a few tools for considering your campaign as a whole and breaking it down into manageable adventure arcs.

Designing a Campaign World provides information for running social encounters and exploration encounters. It also has guidelines for designing skill challenges that you can use in either situation.

Designing a Combat includes detailed guidelines for designing balanced (or unfair) combat encounters and what to consider when doing so.

Chapter 6 provides a handful of threats and dangers

beyond simple combat, such as poisons, siege equipment,

diseases, and debilitating injuries.

Chapter 7 offers a hoard of magical items and some

pointers for designing your own.

Chapter 8 offers tables and mechanisms for customizing

your monsters or designing your own creatures to terrify

your players.

Chapter 9 is a lore-focused chapter. It leads you through

the many nations of Gathandia, the largest continent on

Ancerra. It also guides you through the planes of existence,

offering many adventure settings for you to pull from.

Chapter 10 contains a short, fully developed adventure

designed for low-level adventurers. You might use this as the

beginning of your campaign, or you could play through this

adventure to get a feel for the game system before you make

your own campaign from scratch.

Appendix A contains numerous tables that you can use to

quickly generate random NPCs by giving them a name and a

very basic personality.

Appendix B has a complete list of skills that heroes might

learn.

Appendix C has a few quick reference guides and

important rules to help speed up the flow of combat.