• Finish writing the adventure: I can’t run a game night without a finished adventure unless I’m planning to freestyle a few encounters, but in this case I’m not. I’ll get into more detail on the adventure itself in a minute, but as of right now it is only about half-way completed.

• Scheduling: The person running the game usually ends up as figuring out who is playing, when they’re playing, and where. Getting all of your players to agree is sometimes the trickiest part of being a DM.

• Designing character sheets: I’m not a huge fan of the official 4th edition D&D character sheets. They are a useful worksheet for creating a new character or maintaining that character’s stats throughout a campaign, but they’re also very clunky and lack a template for detailing the character’s powers. I intend to have streamlined sheets for my players that leave out all of the unnecessary background math, add easily readable stats and powers, and provide a place for the players to keep track of things like hit points during an encounter.

• Getting my table props ready: Having illustrations to present to your players during the course of the adventure helps to give them a concrete and unified concept of what they’re dealing with. I like to spend the occasional evening scouring a new website I’ve stumbled across for quality fantasy art and filing it away for later use. I also have other print outs to make, like the list items available from the local merchant. Pre-drawing the encounters onto the big graph paper grids I use speeds up transitions between encounters, and having a system of tools and tokens to represent various bits of game state information like status effects and initiative orders makes complex encounters more manageable.

So what is this adventure I’m running? Well I don’t have a title for it yet, but it is a combat-heavy adventure featuring this team of mercenaries drawn by Gabe from Penny-Arcade:

From left to right we have a human captain, dragonborn paladin, warforged fighter, and gnoll rogue. It is a very melee heavy group, and aside from the rogue it’s also a very defensive group. I’ll have further updates throughout the week as I finish up the adventure.