The Prep

ArcaneCon 2026

I'm in the final stages of game prep for ArcaneCon. I've created rough drafts in my notebook and marked them up and now I'm filling new pages with finished adventures.

Fun Fact: Annic Nova, a spaceship dungeon-crawl module written in 1979, has bathrooms. It also has a kitchen, a pantry (stocked) and a bar (also stocked). Yeah. Realism, baby.

Fun Fact: Expedition to Zhodane, a pivotal module in the Traveller canon that introduces the Zhodani telepathic human branch species, features a short spaceship dungeon-crawl and has no bathrooms. Or a kitchen. I had to add it.

Lesson 1. You don't need all that.

You do not need a paragraph of description per room at the table. You need 3 to 5 bullets. A map is pretty nice too and saves MANY words.

Lesson 2. You're going to need more than that.

My notebook is too small, and the notes are crammed anyway. Even with all the filtering I did in lesson 1 it's crowded, but I got it onto facing pages. Graphics on the left, words on the right and I've arranged the ship from bottom to top. It's playable, but I feel like I should ink it.

I promised myself that when I fill up this notebook, I can transition to the bigger one. I just had a thought that maybe I should use the small one for drafts and start using the big one. That will be something to ponder, but the next lesson looms large.

Lesson 3. The rest of the owl.

Zhodane is next. I managed to get it on two facing pages the first time, but that's because I glossed over the second and third act. I will build a couple more maps for this one, which will bring my total to three. The flow of this adventure is something like, dungeon-crawl -> point-crawl -> investigation -> raid. I planned it as a showcase for the flexibility of the system and how to take a module like Zhodane which covers potentially a dozen or more sessions, and distill it down to 4 hours or less with lifepath character generation at the table. I am lacking a bit of confidence in the point-crawl and the raid at the moment. I'm pretty sure they're going to come together. Each time I take a run at them they get better.

Last is the Kinunir scenario, which is also a dungeon-crawl. But let me tell you, there ain't no dungeon like a space dungeon, and there's even less likelihood of my space dungeon being a non-unique experience. Buckle up. Kinunir is a ride. However, I've now run it 5 times or so over the last year and iterated to the current heist/raid dungeon format and had a chance to playtest it. I think Kinunir is going to be fun and challenging.

Tying in the Hyperlite mythos.

At this stage, I'm essentially bolting my narratives onto these Classic modules. I'll have my own adventures soon enough, but for ArcaneCon I feel an obligation to run these true classics of the genre, but by now I've done it enough that I'm confident that my (I think) more modern take on the themes and how RPGs are enjoyed is better than trying a by-the-book-out-of-the-box approach.

But this may be what Marc and the gents at GDW intended the entire time. I'd like to think it is.