So, this is the first post for this site. To be upfront, I do not know what I am doing, I do not know if this will ever be read by someone else, and I am in all reality, a hack and a fraud.
And that’s what this is about, I would like to discuss imposter syndrome as I feel it within gaming, even when it is a piece of performance, or content, or gaming for my closest friends. Without a doubt, every single time I have run a game, I do not think it will be good enough. And that’s okay.
With every time I sit behind the screen, it is one more opportunity for my anxiety to skyrocket for a good 4-8 hours (I know that my group is unable to have a short session). I love it for some reason and it has continued to bring me back to the table again and again for some 22 years.
Now, how does this pertain to the wonderful module prepared for us by Tuesday Knight Games and Written DG Chapman, Luke Gearing, Alan Gerding, and Tyler Kimball? It has to do with the mindset that time scarcity fuels action. For the players, this was the changing of the module to all fall within a 24 hour window, start to end of in game time, the crew knew that they were on a timeline for evac because of the storm. For me, this was enforcing a strict prep schedule that I have struggled to do in the past.
So what did preparation look like for me? A little background for this, I picked up mothership on a whim at a local game store. Immediately knew I wanted to run some games but wanted to start off small. I picked up Ypsillon 14 and ran it for my normal group. As a bit of a departure I decided I wanted this to be old-school, pen and paper, physical handouts, no screens, and just a composition notebook for notes. It was a blast and truly one of the best experiences I have had with a tabletop.
How could I follow it up? Panic set in, I have found that one of the worst things I can do is set myself up with what I feel is a great session, it is a surefire way to assume that I will be hounding myself. For better or worse, this wasn’t an immediate issue. The other future contributor here runs our other ongoing D&D game and this gave me time to think on things. I am however also a procrastinator, and as a result proceeded to struggle to get my process going.
What saved me? Ripley, seriously eventually I decided to put on Alien, and for the duration of the film, I prepped. It was a perfect, condensed, theme appropriate backdrop to think about how to have the survivors of Ypsilon 14 begin their mission to free themselves of company liability. I had my perfect method for focusing up and not letting myself get in my own way for prep. That brought us to our first session of Another Bug Hunt.
The game progressed as expected, our five players landing planetside with a rough and bumpy landing at Greta Base. The initial crawl is an excellent start in to Samsa VI, plenty of immediate questions, intrigue, and room for red herrings. With the discovery of perished marine after marine, the crew grew more suspicious of their surroundings. Coming freshly off of a Ypsilon 14 run with the same characters really sent them spiraling with being sent by the company on another shit detail, and that’s when our marine Octavia attempted to make contact with the ship… becoming our sacrificial member for the “krebslieder” or “crabsong”. We now had our second time crunch that would become a focus for the remainder of the scenario.
The session went on until their discovery of Sgt Abara and Demar in the hanger, their first fight went off with a bang and the lurky crawl suddenly invited a xenomorph into the equation. With a wound dealt with some clever tactics on the crews part, that took us to the end of session one with the crew in possession of an APC, a deranged Demar, and one infected marine with a fairly lucky timescale roll.
And that’s all for now, next time I’ll dive into my process further and see about embracing imposter syndrome and running my crew through the rest of their time on Sansa VI
Thanks for reading, hope to write more, improve and continue this soon.
-Cole
GM to DM 