The Game Master is the most essential member of the gaming group. If one or two players are missing, that’s no big deal, but if you’re not there then the game cannot happen at all. This means you have a greater responsibility than the players do in keeping the game running. This can be a lot to handle. It’s natural for even experienced GMs to have performance anxiety when it comes to running a session. If you’d like to run Last Odyssey but don’t have the courage quite yet, you can always join someone else’s group as a player first, and pick up the system that way. Then, when you’re comfortable, you can start your own group as well. At minimum, as a GM you need to be familiar with all of the rules of the game. That means reading the entire corebook cover to cover. You will probably forget the rules from time to time, especially at first, so when you run the game be sure to have the corebook on hand to reference if you need it. Your other responsibility is to narrate the world and its attendant NPCs. In practice, much of this will be done improvisationally, but it’s important to have a clear idea of who is doing what, and why, so that when players push against the world you know how to make it push back.
A lot of your job as a Game Master will be answering player questions and determining what their characters can and can’t do. Let’s say that, during free play, one of your players asks you whether or not they can throw a lantern safely over a ravine to someone on the other side. In FRP, your answer to that question is called a ruling. The function of Last Odyssey’s rules is to give you rituals for determining the outcome of moments like this in ways that prioritize setting the appropriate tone without needing to have a full understanding of the physics of projectile motion, air resistance, or the average medieval knight’s throwing arm. For every player question or attempt at changing the world, the GM has three possible answers: yes, no, or appealing to the rules. In the majority of cases, the first two options will be rationalized by an appeal to the fiction. In the example stated earlier, perhaps the ravine the player wants to throw their lantern across is small or the GM doesn’t think it would serve the narrative for the party to lose it (or both), so they could say yes and let them throw it across safely. Alternatively, they may determine that it is impossible for the player to do this, maybe because the ravine is miles long.
The third possibility is that the GM could make an appeal to the rules of the game. This means that a part of the fiction is simulated by the materials used for the game, usually the dice, rather than solely within the minds of the participants. Rules as written, there are two ways this action could be handled. The GM could either present it as a skill challenge, in which case the player’s attributes and the dice would interact with their own estimation of how difficult throwing the lantern would be to determine the outcome. If the circumstances are appropriate, they may also treat this moment as a Scene, in which case the outcome is determined by what the player feels they are risking (perhaps their own understanding of themselves, or perhaps the possibility that they may never see this lantern, which was their mother’s, again) and the outcome of the dice. To use an analogy, you can think of the rules of Last Odyssey as a set of laws, and yourself as a judge. You must follow the law, but the law is always interpreted differently depending on circumstance. When making rulings, it’s important to be fair, and in this regard the author recommends that you be consistent with your rulings over time. If it’s difficult to cross a bridge one day, it should be difficult the next unless something has changed.
At times, there will be situations within the fiction that aren’t covered by anything in the rules. This is by design, first because it is impossible for Last Odyssey to cover everything that could happen by the nature of FRP and because it is meant to be a ruleset that interacts with your own shared fiction, which will vary from table to table. As an example, the Artificer’s Scan ability could become a source of much debate. When it’s used on something other than an enemy, what happens? Does it reveal traps? Does it let you ask extra questions? Does it let you see in the dark? This author recommends that, in these cases, the group appeal primarily to the fiction. If it has been established prior that the Artificer’s Scan takes the form of an ocular implant that downloads information from orbital computers, then what can be learned by Scan is then determined by what information is on those computers. If Scan employs divination magic in order to function, then the rules of divination magic will be established both by lore (and possibly Lore) and over time by the rulings you make during play. This is intentional! So long as what you decide is done in a way that is consistent with the established fiction, there won’t be any issues.
The reality is that most gaming groups will not obey the rules of the game as written a hundred percent of the time. Instead, they will often decide on extra rules called house rules. Whenever you include a house rule in your game, you are changing how it plays. Last Odyssey, as written, is meant to replicate the feeling of hyper fantasy adventure video games. If you modify its rules, your experience will deviate from the intended one, often in unexpected ways. If you’re alright with that, or if you like Last Odyssey’s ruleset but think you could use it to tell a different kind of story than intended, then a house rule or two might be the option for you. As an example, let’s say you want to run a game that has a greater element of psychological horror. You might add a sanity mechanic, where players can lose touch with reality if they come into contact with things that are too horrifying for them to understand. If you love this game’s travel mechanics but don’t want to deal with combat, you can remove it entirely and run a game that’s just about traveling from place to place, solving puzzles, gathering Lore, and experiencing inclement weather.
There will undoubtedly be edge cases in which the rules have to be adjusted to fit your group’s understanding of the game’s intentions in the event that the author’s vision deviates from your own. A good rule of thumb for these moments is that changing more fundamental mechanics will alter the game experience in a fundamental way. As a demonstration of this principle, consider the effects of changes to the mechanics around death. If you were to replace a character becoming downed in combat to them being killed, this would both make the game hardcore but also greatly increase the importance of the Healer job, since their Revive ability now not only saves characters in battle but also can function as a replacement for Anima when needed. It also means, frankly, that most characters won’t last very far past tier one. By contrast, getting rid of death entirely would mean that Antagonists, rather than being unique, would merely become slightly more powerful monsters, in addition to a thousand other small interactions. Don’t let this discourage you from experimenting with house rules if you want to. Just know that Last Odyssey is robust enough that changing it may have unintended consequences.
Every session of Last Odyssey besides session 0 will be focused on storytelling. If you’ve never done FRP before, your intuition might be to try to plan things the way you would plan a short story, with specific events that will occur along the way. Unfortunately, no plan for game of this type (or of any other type, for that matter) will ever survive contact with the players. By its very nature, FRP is unpredictable, and the narrative will inevitably go places you didn’t expect. This is why it’s more important to try to lay out the components of the fiction in whatever detail is necessary, including relevant NPCs, locations, dungeons, monsters, paths, and nodes. You can read the Exploration rules and the Monster Manual for tools that can help you put together the necessary elements for your game. In particular, this author finds that, even if you plan nothing else, it is very helpful to have as many of the numbers that might be relevant as possible. Monster statistics, merchant items and their costs, danger ratings, difficulty ratings, and so on are harder for the average person to improvise than plot elements like the color of someone’s furniture, so creating a bunch of those is a good way to prep for a session.
Beyond the quantitative, there are a few other elements that you might want to consider when planning a session of Last Odyssey. Character advancement depends on the players earning both XP and Anima, meaning that the personalities of their characters will be front and center. Something the author will do to spice things up is “spotlight” individual character backstories during different sessions by having them revolve around their Relationships or their Aspirations. If you plan on having the players discover Lore, you might want to write out what discoveries count as Lore ahead of time. If you want to have the session revolve around a puzzle, you should also write down the problem and the solution ahead of time, and so on. The author knows some GMs who will write down no more than three words in order to plan sessions, and other GMs who will use proprietary tools to draft detailed, accurate maps of all of the locations the players will visit throughout the campaign. Whatever you end up doing, remember that the players should always be given the opportunity to engage with the mechanics of the game on their own terms.
Last Odyssey’s combat is tactical, and thus involves many extra considerations that aren’t present during free play. In theory, the GM controls the players’ opponents, and the two groups are on equal footing. In practice, your job as the GM is not actually to win against the players, but to play a compelling “heel” for them to overcome. This is a delicate balance, and everyone resolves it differently. When running combat encounters, this author’s advice would be to act in ways that support the fiction over and above the goal of victory. All of the enemies in the Monster Manual come not just with combat abilities but descriptions of their behavior and habits of mind. Play them like characters, not just pieces on a board. Would a goblin stay on the front line of combat if their HP was low? What about a soldier? What about a dragon? Ultimately, the purpose of combat in Last Odyssey is to create an interesting tactical challenge, but also to create tension and to give context to the other game mechanics. Players will spend a lot of time preparing for combat or recovering from its consequences, and this will bring them into contact with pieces of the world they might not bother thinking about otherwise. Don’t let this prevent you from making things difficult, or easy, or scary, or fun, or whatever else you want to do. Just be mindful that you are not the players’ enemy. In point of fact, you are their biggest ally.
If you’ve got a session all planned out, it’s natural to expect the players to respect that. Unfortunately, chances are good that even players who have the exact same vision for what your game will look like as you do will step off of the path you intended for them to take. That’s totally okay–in fact, it’s one of the things that makes FRP unique as a storytelling medium. Your first impulse might be to distort the fiction in order to force players to continue along the intended path. There is a term for this in FRP: railroading. It has negative connotations for a reason. Railroading is an easy way to keep things on track, but there is a high risk that they will come away feeling like their contributions to the game are being disrespected. Remember, it’s not just your story being told, it’s the entire group’s. When players step outside of the planned boundaries of a game you are running, here are some options you can take instead of railroading:
You, the GM, have more responsibility than the players do. That’s just unavoidable. What this doesn’t mean is that you have any less of a right to have a good time than anyone else does. You deserve to be able to assert your boundaries around your own time and the amount of effort you are putting into the game. The satisfaction of being a GM is often secondary–the author is gratified when her players have fun and feel cool at the table. If everyone else is having fun, but you’re tired, cranky, or just plain bored, pay attention to that feeling. Eat something, take a break, or drink some water, and don’t be afraid to close session out early if you’re just too tired to continue. Additionally, if you’re making your players miserable with your GMing, something is wrong as well. This isn’t a classroom, and you are not the arbiter of the “right” way to play the game any more than your players are.
In a lot of ways, your role at the table resembles the role of the “heel” in pro wrestling. A heel is a person who plays a villain, and whose job it is to turn everyone against them so they can be defeated by the hero. Remember, though, that you are not actually a villain. Every “sadistic” move you make is designed to hurt the players in a way that is ultimately cathartic. There is a fine line between a difficult game and pure torture, and where that line is is different for everyone. If you’re ever not sure if you’ve crossed that line, it’s always good to check up on your players. If your session is ever emotionally difficult, especially in a way you didn’t expect, it can be good to have an informal debrief in which people have the space to share their feelings. This applies to you just as much as the players. If you’re a player and you’re reading this section: look out for your GM. They do a lot of work on your behalf.