I recently ran a session of my Serenity RPG where the players decided to not to go on either of the plot hooks I expected them to, but instead went to an Alliance shipyard to be refueled. For some reason, they didn’t trust Nishka/Niska to give them the fuel without betraying them somehow.

Only problem: I hadn’t defined the shipyard at all! Didn’t even know it was there (Derek was measuring out distances on his map of the systems and found they were “just” in range.) So, great invention needed as they wandered through the shipyard getting into all sorts of trouble. 

The major problem with the final session was that it didn’t give enough for certain characters (like Aidan) to do. My original outline had the characters interacting with NPCs that they’d met in previous sessions on Ezra, which meant that the wheeling-and-dealing of Aidan could really come out. When they stepped aboard the Fed shipyard, all of that went out the window, and I didn’t compensate with a new character who’d interact well with Aidan. (In retrospect, it seems likely that there’d be a shady side to the shipyard he could have worked well with).

It should be noted that the Serenity game I’m running is very character-based and rules-light. There was a session when the folder with all the character sheets was missing, and a couple of players were panicking. Sarah (who plays Miss Roux) looked at them and asked them if they’d noticed how little attention I paid to the rules. 

My complete madness and panic in the session came down to me giving them the “sealed orders” and describing them as a hunt for an experimental ship (i.e. the Jailbait) that had been stolen by “Doc’s crew” – a gang of criminals they’ve run into in the past. I’ve had this ongoing thread about the Jailbait not being searched for by the general military, so after the session I was going, “What have I done?! What have I done?”

Thankfully, I did describe them as sealed orders (and they weren’t opened in the session), so I’m going to have them be orders for looking for a covert asteroid base instead of the Jailbait. (My original plans for the next session involved such… as I said, I panicked). 

The preparation I *really* need to do for this game regarded NPCs. D&D may need monsters and traps, but Serenity needs NPCs and motivations more than anything else. A plan of the shipyard might have been nice, but I don’t run this game in a detail-orientated way. Instead, an idea of what locations can be found and the NPCs within? That would have been nice.

Creating one minor NPC on the fly? Easy. Creating several major ones? More difficult!

In old D&D, I’d just run up a few monsters. This campaign needed different handling.