Picking up from the previous session, pregame discussion for the penultimate scheduled session asked participants to reflect upon narrative endings–namely, what makes for good ones and why those are good. Part of the purpose of the discussion was to gesture towards the stated desire for overtly educational content in the game; part, too, was to develop materials for the final session. As previously, while there is hope for continuation in a future term, there is no guarantee of the same; sequel hooks are already in place if there is a return to Hanlon, but if there is not, then there will, at least, be some resolution to be found for the players and their characters.

Within the game, proper, players’ characters continued their attempt to withdraw from the dungeon they had been investigating for the last many sessions. It is the case that their decision to do so in the previous session came as a surprise to me, and it was not a universal that they wanted to do such a thing; there were a couple as wanted to press on, but the majority thought they should escape. I’ll confess to a little chicanery in keeping them in the dungeon for the remainder of the previous session, although I had evidently given myself enough narrative room previously to make it make sense in context. (The characters had, some time back, tripped a trap that had no visible effects at the time; the players accepted that the effects manipulated the layout of the dungeon to some extent. It was serendipitous; I wish I could take credit for foreseeing things in such a way. I suppose I have more to learn about running games, even all these years into doing so.)

I suppose there is a lesson to take from the experience in that having things happen without obvious effect now allows flexibility in storytelling later, something of a variation on Chekhov’s gun. I’ve done a few such things, as I think on it, whether a pressure plate triggering some strange ticking or a spell scroll making itself available to one or another of the players’ characters’ who might, if it is remembered, find some use in the party’s current situation. Railroading–that is, forcing players’ characters into a single path of action–is generally regarded as a bad thing in tabletop roleplaying games; players like to have agency over their characters’ lives, even if those characters are moving through a dungeon that generally admits of “forward” and “backward,” with the latter leading to no treasure or glory and most characters being actively interested in at least one of those things. If there is to be any of it, whether because of outside demands or because a person running a game has to scramble to address something entirely unexpected and has to stall for time to do just that, it works far better if there is something on which it can be predicated sensibly within the context of the game, itself.

How and whether I will make use of any such lessons, I cannot know. Whether or not I will run a game again is uncertain, honestly; I am not so young as I once was, and other things increasingly command my time and attention. Gone are the days when I can spend many hours of each day poring over the books and staring at the webpages I’ve needed for the games I’ve played. I do nurture some hope, though, that some of what I’ve been able to do at the table so far will translate to others taking up the work of running games, helping others to sit around their own tables, rolling dice and telling lies to the delight of those taking part.

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