This week I ran a session for my ongoing Fellmyr game and turned up with the rules, dice, realm map, dungeon map, pencils, and the character sheets. I did, however, forget my dungeon notes with the key to the map.

The game was loads of fun because I just ran from a combination of memory and improvisation. The first part of the session was in a section of the dungeon already populated and run from memory. The second part of the session was improvised because the PCs went where I hadn’t prepped.

Firstly, I learned that the act of prep is more important than the notes generated. Certainly, I would prefer to have my notes and reference them – largely for consistency’s sake – but because I had designed some rooms I realised that I had already internalised them. This is the strength of writing your own location keys.

Secondly, I learned (again) that I am pretty good at improv and generated some stuff that felt loads of fun to me and went down well with the players. The thing that I noticed here was how much heavy-lifting the procedures of play achieved. The most tense situation in the session came from a wandering monster roll.

Writing down the stuff I’d improvised into the notes (after I had recovered them) has addressed my desire for consistency. I was also able to build on and improve the improvised details when sat (over lunch) writing up some additional entries for the map key. On top of that, some cool random rolls on treasure tables have made the whole area potentially very rewarding for the PCs.

Overall, I am glad I forgot my notes. It was so much fun that I might decide to forget them again sometime.

Game on!