It has been a long time since I last ran a serious tabletop roleplaying game, but yesterday was the first session of my new campaign Tuliunikko 2, a new attempt at a campaign from a year ago which I felt ran into a creative dead end.

It was fun. It felt like using muscles I’d almost forgotten I had, like riding a bicycle for the first time in years. Almost all of the players were new, so there was a nice sense of creative uncertainty to the whole thing. There’s a cliche that says that the players will always ruin the best plans of the game master. I’ve found this to be true only of game masters who make bad plans. However, I’ve also found that it takes away the energy of the game to plan everything to be player-proof, so I tried to include an element of risk.

(Maybe also because it’s boring to run games where you always know what’s going to happen.)

It obviously helped that I used a lot of material from the first run of Tuliunikko. It’s easier to plan and improvise when some of the stuff has been tested, a rare situation in roleplaying games.

The game has a blog here.