Alright, time for me to reflect on our game of Megalos that ran from July 2023 to August 2024 and jeez, these games always last longer than I think they do. Assuming we play every week, it takes 52 sessions to play through a whole week but I think on average, it’s closer to every other week, so about 26ish sessions a year. With 29 sessions, we came pretty close to that estimate.
Early on, I think session-to-session storytelling went okay. Things were much more episodic as we are all finding our footing with this new game and I really think that this is the best way to kick off a new game: adventures that last about a session with minimally interconnected NPCs so that folks can gravitate towards the elements of the story that they like the most, which signals to me what I should focus on. It’s a good feedback loop.
Lessons Learned: Early on, plan sessions, not storylines. The story will appear in hindsight.
During character creation, I screwed up by not making sure everyone knew I was using the default setting of the Unshrouded Lands. This led to be a bit of stress for James when he realized that he’d made a character that didn’t fit in with that. We were able to pivot, but I feel bad for having stressed James out like that.
Lessons Learned: Better communicate with players the tent poles and expectations of the game setting, even if we play around with those later.
There were some characters introduced in the Imperial era (a rival group of adventurers whom were met at the Air Temple) that I probably should have introduced earlier to give a better sense of depth to the world and give another low-level threat to the PCs other than just Barry and the Mist Miners.
Lessons Learned: Give a variety of threats and challenges early on, even if you’ve already found things you like personally. The players might like the new things even more.
I think we quickly established some threats and some storylines for Carabas, Serius, and Xeric very quickly early on (the threat of Carabas’ past, Serius and the Atlanteans, and Xeric’s past with the Empire and Gwin) but I don’t think I did so as well with Auoy. We had the Eldashi Blood Elder, but they only showed up in two sessions: #10 and #27. That said, I don’t think that this held Margie back at all for getting herself involved in things, but I should given her more to work with.
Lessons Learned : Make sure everyone is getting an equal amount of the storyline spotlight.
Naxas and Azure, the two major Imperial characters, were ones I’ve been using for a while and was easily able to incorporate into the storyline of the Arlyte Empire: Naxas is an ambitious middle manager who is willing to climb over anyone else to get further up the ladder, while Azure is his heavy whose motivation is just to be able to exert power over anyone he sees as beneath him. I don’t know how well they went over with the players (leave your comments below) but I think I hit the sweet spot of giving them enough characterization that the PCs knew exactly who they were and what their deal was.
The lower level Imperials could have faired a bit better. Kavo is the only other Imperial with a name and he was quickly suborned by the players and given to the Aarons. While that was a great storyline, I think I could have been better about characterizing the other everymen of the Empire, but I could say that about most of Foothold.
Lessons Learned : Give some thought to the supporting cast and background players. Give the overly romantic records clerk a name, dammit.
Combat hit a couple of walls very early on. About the time we got to session 8-9, I really started to feel like, for as interesting as the PCs were, the enemies all came in two flavors: minions and not minions. Same defenses, same HP, same damage dealt. This really started the process that eventually became my own version of the enemies that seemed like it worked well enough. While this helped differentiate enemies (even if it just between four roles and bunch of factions), I think this also helped the combats feel a little fresher. Before I made the changes, I remember hearing comments of “they’re still up?” when an enemy survived a round, because it meant they got to act again during the Elite’s 2nd turn. After the change, however, this never seemed to come up (except with a couple foes whose gimmick was being tough) but this could be confirmation bias. There was a few knock on effects (like a couple of statuses no longer being quite as good or having as much a use) but I think overall this was positive.
Lessons Learned : If you feel something needs changing, it probably does. Just make sure you get everyone’s buy-in before doing it.
Corollary : No indie game comes fully baked. You’ve got to do a little bit of homebrew to make it work with a given group. And what those changes are may change from group to group.
I think I could have handled the final session. Maybe planned a couple scenes with some characters instead of just leaving everything up to the players to decide. While I definitely loved a lot of the moments that came from all this, I do think it would have benefited from a bit of structure.
Lessons Learned : Always have a scene to fall back on when things seem to be sluggish.
While I didn’t feel too confident with how I used zones, I think I have to accept that everyone else seemed to enjoy them quite a bit. I am probably just overthinking things due to my preference for either grid combat (like D&D) or more freeform (in another game I run, we don’t use a grid and instead just use the measuring tools in Roll20 for everything) tactical movement. I don’t know if any of my one shots use zones, but I’ll take away what I learned from running Megalos with zones forward.
Lessons Learned : You can be pretty freeform with zones and come up with new mechanics for zones and, so long as you signpost these things to the players, most people seem to like them just fine.
People just love incorrect quote threads. We probably need one of those for every ongoing game. 
Lessons Learned : Make an incorrect quotes thread by session four.
So now I’ll ask you folks what you thought? Did you come to any different conclusions than I did for the above points? Or are there things that you think I overlooked here?