Revamping Our RPG Sessions: From Burnout to Engagement

It’s been a while since we’ve written up some thoughts on our ongoing Shadowdark Open-Table game. Over a year even! The campaign continues strong, with a fairly regular core of players (that has shifted over time) and a reliable cast of folk rotating in and out. It hasn’t been without challenges and stumbles, but it’s been a popular and regular game night for some time, and we’re really proud of that.

Of course, like many campaigns and like many GM’s, wear and tear began to show. The cracks in the foundation of our format, the fatigue of shoe-horning things to work eventually led to a burnout of sorts for us. The sessions began to drag. Things didn’t feel right, people were chafing against the adventures, prep was becoming a dreaded chore. We were no longer excited to share adventures with the party, but dreading the exercise of finding yet another dungeon crawl that didn’t fit our world, our session timing, our circumstances, our tone, and ultimately – leading to sessions being unfulfilling and incomplete. Something had to break. Heading into October of 2025, we needed a break.

We’d been itching to run some Cypher System and some Sci-Fi games for a while, but had been struggling to find a way to make it workable in the Open-Table format. October gave us a chance to run some Spooky Cypher Sessions using pre-gen characters. The players were game for that. We ran two published adventures and two of our own creation, with the players unaware which were authored by whom. Our adventures were the favorites of the month – not because we’re some secretly brilliantly talented RPG writer, but because they were perfectly tailored for the session length and pacing we had at our disposal, as well as an excellent fit for style of GMing. We played to our strengths, of course, and had the right amount of content for our 2.5-3 hour sessions. The published adventures did not have those built-in advantages. It is not their fault.

As we headed into the holidays, it was time to really take stock of what we wanted to do. After months of being unable to figure out how to get a Cypher System Open-Table game working, we had to gut-check and chuck the idea out. It wasn’t going to work, and if we ever wanted to run sci-fi adventures, it wasn’t going to be in Cypher System. Shadowdark has been an excellent rule-set for an Open-Table, with flattened math and easy character creation, so newcomers don’t feel underpowered among veterans, and managing rules questions and character creation for newbies and drop-ins is easy. It was clear that we needed something rules-lite, easy to pick up, easy to work with. We started assessing options in November and December, teasing a new sci-fi campaign in the new year.

We looked at Stars Without Number (too crunchy), Ironsworn: Starforged (too solo-oriented), Cypher System (of course, but too crunchy in character creation), Traveller (also too crunchy, especially in character creation – but what a great system) and a few others. What we really needed was Shadowdark, in spaaaaaaaace! So we looked at Junkers (too limited), Shadows of the Star Knights (too Star Warsy, we wanted more like SWN/Traveller/Alien vibes), before finally discovering – and settling on – Darkspace. We sadly missed the kickstarted for the full game by mere hours – hours! – but the core rules were expansive enough to set us off to the races. We started bashing together random tables from SWN and Ironsworn, we decided to use the setting of Starforged, and we meshed it in with our “you owe your life to your corporation, they tell you what jobs to go on” dystopia. That way we gave some in-world justification for why characters would be dropping in/out and unable to say no to the session planned. If you’re interested, you can learn more about our setting here.

To really match the ease of shadowdark, we needed one more thing – a Shadowdarklings-style character builder. It’s our understanding that the Darkspace team is working on one…but it wasn’t ready in January, and it’s still not ready at the time of this writing. Thankfully, we had an easy way to solve that – to create our own. Thanks to the massive speed-multiplier of AI-assisted coding, we were able to build a working character builder for Darkspace in about a week. Our players still use it to this day.

The last thing we really needed to do was to fix the session energy problem. We didn’t want Darkspace to turn into more slow, grindy, unsatisfying sessions – in spaaaaaace! We went back to those Spooky Cypher Sessions that worked so well and started work on automating that sort of prep for maximum repeatability with as little friction as possible. Again using AI assistance, we coded an RPG Prep Machine. We built a system where we could put in any number of random tables, even nested or conditional tables, as we like, and then select which ones to use for a given adventure. We pre-loaded our Campaign background and truths. We created a two step process where first we roll up random results off the desired tables, keeping desirable results and re-rolling nonsensical or ill-fitting ones. This kept sessions plots from being too gonzo to work with. Finally, we set up some guardrails and prompts to have AI suggest ways to tie it all together in an adventure outline, fully customized to our setting and in the format that had proven to be the most popular – a Strong Start, Three Acts, and a short Conclusion.

After that outline was generated, we sit down, cut out any stray or extraneous plotlines, and flesh out each section with our ideas and modification, throw in some treasure or NPC names, and use it for our session notes.

Immediately player satisfaction and engagement skyrocketed. We’re using this format for Shadowdark too and it’s been a hit every week. No more dragging sessions. No more confusing dungeons and time wasted. No more sessions that end in the middle in an unsatisfying way. The few times we’ve had to carry over, there’s been a ready-made cliff-hanger at the end of an Act just waiting for us!

We love wilderness exploration and dungeon crawls. We love the idea of warping off into the unknown, encountering random alien phenomena. We love randomness and surprise. We love Cypher System and Traveller. But we love fun sessions even more – so we had to kill those darling ideas so that fun sessions could bloom on the other side.