Some Arkham Heat Thoughts

I've been down in the Suck for the last few days. Fragging cold has me locked down and out, leaving me feeling like doing zero, zip, and zilch. Some dice chucking was had Saturday night, and I have about a third of Arkham Heat, Session 2 written up for your reading pleasure. I'm not sure how many people enjoy reading those things. Last session was pretty busy and I the Investigators decided to be a pain in the ass and split up into three diffrent groups. The result was a lot of chaos and scene juggling by myself. In the end I thought I handled it well and it was a pretty fun session. Things are shaping up nicely. In fact I'm thinking that after this Call of Cthulhu campaign ends I may run a Savage Worlds powered game. First I may take a break just to recharge the old GM batteries. Anyway here's a few thoughts I've had since I started running this camapign:

1. Pre-Written Scenarios. I've learned that I enjoy running scenarios I write myself much more than canned adventures or secnarios. I like to have pre-written stuff to get my brain working, steal little chunks of them like NPC names and that sort of thing. But over all I enjoy myself much more when I create my own stuff for my players.

2. Scenarios On The Fly. I've discovered that if you have the right material prepped in advance running a scenario on the fly is a breeze and a joy. I have a little notebook that I write all my stuff down in. In it I have a little calender, some basic stat blocks for thugs and monsters, a list of random names, and a list of important NPC,s I also put some notes beside those important NPCs on what their goals and personality are like. My notes are really rough and are probably only understandable by myself.

3. Creating Adventures. I have a basic skeleton written down in my notes of how the scenario might play out. I include shit the players will most likely investigate, a few clues, some NPC,s and a basic outline of how things went down before the PC'S got involved, and how they might procede when the PCs do get involved. I try not to stress to much on this. No plan survives contact with the enemy, and I count on the fact that my players will attack the problem in a way that I wont be able to anticipate.

4. The Battle Mat. I wanted to stay away from the battle mat and tokens for this campaign. Last session we had a number of fights that were pretty simple. I'm not sure if it was a failure on my GM abilities, but it became clear fairly quickly that a lot of headache could have been avoided if we had a battle map and tokens laid out. Next week I plan of brining out the wet erase map. Kinda a shame but I'm not sure how to otherwise solve this problem.