I’m going to GM three TTRPG oneshots in Ropecon this summer: two sessions of Night of Blood (Warhammer Fantasy / Forged in the Dark oneshot) and one session of Under Hollow Hills.

This year, I’ve been really upping my prep game for both scenarios. Let me tell you about some of the things I’ve done to prepare running the Under Hollow Hills oneshot.

What is Under Hollow Hills? Why, it is a TTRPG by Meguey and Vincent Baker about a fairy circus. The circus travels both the fairy world and the mundane world and performs in different occasions. And each of its performance changes the audience. And maybe also the performers.

Photo: Clubture Network, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Btw I have translated some of the Under Hollow Hills playbooks to Finnish. You can find them here.

Frozen occasion

There was an interesting discussion on how to prepare an Under Hollow Hills occasion on the UHH Discord this spring. The gist of it for me was that creating a situation that had all the parties stuck in their ways is the way to go. It can be a frozen conflict, or just a sad or unlucky situation where no-one can see things not being the way they are right now.

I really took this onboard during my prep and rewrote my oneshot occasion situation to really be stuck and thought of the ways that different characters would justify that this is just the way things are and how there is no hope in trying to make things better or different.

Scene prep sheets

I think myself as being a pretty good GM at going with the flow, reacting to players doing stuff and improvising. That being said, many of my regrets when GMing relate to repeating myself – my off the cuff impulses leading down familiar alleys and so on.

To mitigate that I wanted to really focus on giving myself fresh options and material to keep my improvisation fresh and original.

To do this, I came up with these scene prep sheets.

They have room for story synopsis (the spine of the scene), imagery (that I could draw from to describe different things), options (seeds for stuff to use while improvising) and 2 NPC descriptions. I filled one for every major scene I have planned for the oneshot.

If you want to try these out, you can find my scene prep sheet files here.

Advice from Meguey Baker on running Under Hollow Hills oneshots

Meguey Baker wrote some useful advice on running Under Hollow Hills oneshots on the UHH Discord the other day. Here is two things I took away from that.

First is to describe the occasion that the circus troupe is traveling to for the oneshot to the players before they create (or polish) their characters. That helps them inform their choices during the character creation.

And second: Have the player characters arrive when they are finishing creating their characters, incorporating their imagery to the first scene. And having NPCs interact with the player characters briefly to start things up.

And of course I have incorporated both of those things for my oneshot prep. Let’s see how it goes.

Circus imagery

Finally, I want to give all the players some food for thought to plan their circus performance. As you might know, in every Under Hollow Hills session the player characters plan and run a circus performance. The performance has the power to influence the audience, so it is a big deal.

Not every player is as familiar with circus as the others, so I want to level the playing field. Towards that end I have printed out a set of circus photos I found online. Just to give players some new ideas, I hope. Let’s see how it goes.

I guess that covers most of my prep for the Under Hollow Hills oneshot. Still one sleep before Ropecon and three sleeps before my Under Hollow Hills session, which is going dwn on sunday, the final day of the Con. Wish me luck!