Mage Pre-Planning, or "OK, I want to run a game, how do I do that?"

If you're a player of tabletop roleplaying games, chances are you've already got a head start on running a Mage: The Ascension game. You've got dice and pencils and character sheets and rulebooks, or at the very least access to them. You know what your ST, or Storyteller (AKA: GM, Game Master, DM, Dungeon Master, person running the game, etc.) does that you like, and you have some idea of what you might change if you were running the show.

Now, if you're totally new to TTRPGs, you have a bit more work ahead of you. Unless you're running your game over an app or service that offers digital tools to run a game - and there are several out there that offer things like a digital tabletop, voice and text chat, file sharing, die-rolling and more - you're going to want to stock up on dice and pencils and... yeah, the stuff I listed above, including the rulebook of the game you want to run. Your friendly local gaming store is just a Google search away, and those stores always welcome the business. Sure, you can find a lot of that stuff online, but I'm a big fan of supporting small businesses, and game stores are firmly in that category. Amazon isn't going to miss your dollars, I assure you.

As a side note, Mage will save you money in one area: Miniatures. Unlike D&D and its close cousins, buying and painting miniatures isn't a requirement, and neither is a battlemap for them. I know some people like that part of gaming, and I certainly have miniatures of my own that I use for my other gaming group, but Mage and its sister games are part of a ruleset that encourages more free-form gaming and doesn't want to bog players down in such rigid details as how many squares away is the bad guy and if you'll provoke an attack of opportunity from the minions around him. Having some indication of environment and clear descriptions of people and places does come in handy, though, and we'll get into that later.

So, you've got your dice, your pencils (only noobs use pen), your sheets, your books, what else do we need?

Oh, right, players!

If you're part of a gaming group, chances are good you'll be able to recruit them into your game. It's how I got my first players, by recruiting straight from my gaming group. I also recruited from friends who wanted to check out what this RPG thing was all about. Between fellow gamers and my own circle of friends, I had the beginnings of my very own gaming group. If you're OK with casting a wide net, you can usually put up a notice in your local gaming store informing other gamers that you're looking for players. Most gaming stores even have table space for running your session at the store, if you're not comfortable inviting strangers into your living room, and I've run game sessions in cafes before.

So, how does this translate to my own Mage game prep? Well, I've been at this gaming hobby for a while, so I already had dice and books aplenty, dating all the way back to Mage: The Ascension 1st Edition (and you can get just about every Mage book as a digital or print-on-demand copy from Drive Thru RPG). I wanted to game with people I already knew, so I tapped my gaming partners, as well as friends who I'd gamed with before and their significant others. Out of the 7 people I approached, 4 of them said yes. Not half bad! Since my players are scattered all over SoCal, I set up a Facebook group and Google calendar for coordination, and opted for Discord as our gaming medium.

Next we'll discuss deciding on what kind of game to run for your players, but if you have questions regarding the pre-planning stuff above, post them below or over at my chronicle thread on Shadownessence. I'll answer every question that comes my way!