Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

WRITING UP
Writing up your notes between sessions fixes the details
of the last game session in your mind and reminds you of
things you need to address before the next session. It’s also
the perfect opportunity to take all the notes you’ve made
about the game session and pull them together in some
meaningful way. You can add character details that you
made up on the spot or which evolved during the course of
the game to the master file for the characters, for example.
Don’t rely entirely on your notes, though. Players’
memories can be funny things. It’s often a good idea to
start off a new session by having one of the players recount
what happened last time. It’s a little bit like one of those
“last time on…” collections of clips that you get before some
TV shows. It helps set the scene and get everyone in the
mood before the sessions starts. It could turn out, however,
that the players remember the session slightly differently
from the way you do. If that’s the case, and the variations
between the two different versions aren’t huge, then go
with their version. It’s so much less trouble than trying to
persuade them that it happened the way you remember it.
Writing up is also the first step in preparing for the
next session. Most players spend the time immediately
after the game session ends, while you’re packing away
your books and everyone’s fetching coats, to discuss what’s
going to happen next week. If you possibly can, without
being completely obvious, grabs some notes about this as
well. This is the best clue you’re going to get about how
the chronicle will develop in the next session and the sort
of things you’ll need to prepare in advance.
CLIFFHANGER OR CONCLUSION?
Knowing when to end a session is sometimes obvious.
If you’re playing in a pub and the throwing-out time is 11:30
PM, you’ll have to be done by then, whatever stage the story
is at. If you have more flexibility, however, you should try to
aim for one of two end points: a cliffhanger or a conclusion.
Cliffhangers are great, because they leave the players gasping
for more. “What happens next?” “How do we get out of
this?” They’ll spend time between the two games speculating
on how the next session will start. They can also be a right
pain, though, if too much time passes between sessions or if
someone who was at the last session can’t be at the next one.
In that situation, a conclusion point is a better way to finish
the session. Ideally, the characters should have just overcome
some challenge, be it a fight, extracting some information
from another character or striking a meeting between packs.
This gives the players a sense of achievement at the end of
the session, even if the story itself isn’t over. You can then
keep them engaged with the story between sessions by contacting
them by email or phone to find out what the characters
plan to do next. It’s a good way of doing things that only
one character is involved with, too, as the rest of the players
aren’t sitting around waiting for that section to conclude.
That way you can start the next session with the characters
all assembled, their individual agendas already resolved.
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DOWNTIME
Werewolf: The Forsaken presents particular problems
when dealing with “downtime” — the time that passes
between stories, which isn’t actually played out in a session.
The pack’s job of maintaining its territory is a constant one.
Its members should be in position to spot any changes within
that territory, be they physical or spiritual, pretty quickly.
The players would be well within their rights to be annoyed
if you use a period of downtime to allow a new threat to
build up within the territory. The characters would have
spotted it while they were patrolling their territories.
Two solutions exist for this problem. The first is to
avoid significant downtime entirely. A week or so might
pass between stories, where the pack patrols its territory
and finds nothing amiss, and the next story starts when the
pack catches the scent of a problem. Many players prefer
the story to develop only when you’re all gathered to play.
It makes less work for you and gives you plenty of time to
catch up on your game paperwork and plan for the next session.
It’s also a familiar pattern from most TV shows, where
nothing usually happens between each broadcast episode,
no matter how much time has passed in the setting.
You might not be able to meet for several weeks,
however, and you want to maintain some momentum for
the game by pursing some downtime activity, either over the
phone, through email or in online messaging. In that case,
it’s better to focus on the pack members’ individual efforts to
patrol their territory, keep up with friends and family and do
what they can to protect and improve the area. Pack activity
is difficult to coordinate when everyone is separated, so this
focus on the individual characters is easier to accomplish. It
also helps give each character some segments of ordinary life
without having to sacrifice valuable table time to focus on
one particular character during the sessions where everyone’s
together. This can make threats to the character’s friends
and family seem all the more real and important if they’re
introduced in the run of a story. The character has spent
time interacting with these people, even if the other players
haven’t seen it occur. That existing relationship heightens
the sense of horror. You can also seed hints of the upcoming
stories in each character’s downtime activities. These should
just be odd hints: rumors, unexpected scents, unusual patterns
of behavior in either the spirit or physical worlds, that
sort of thing. It shouldn’t be enough to make the characters
want to go off and investigate immediately, but it should be
enough for them to bring it up the next time the pack meets.
Downtime Storytelling is a useful way to deal with
character advancement, though. If you choose to have
spirits demand services from the characters before they
teach new powers, then the quest to find the spirit, negotiate
with it and perform the required service can be carried
out using the time between sessions. The same applies to
more mundane forms of training, which can occur without
detracting from the main flow of the plot.
At the Table