For you first session? Prepare 1 single sentence. The very first thing you tell them when the session starts. It needs to be in media res.

For example!

"You stare at the giant, ominous structure. It's high, dark grey spires look like tendrils coming out of the ground. You know exactly what they conceal and you are there to stop it. What do you do?"

Then procede to asking them what's in the tower, why they got there, why they care, how many Bothan spies died giving them that information and so on. This is their world, let them create it. You're just the audience (with some voting power).

Imagine they say the dungeon is the home of a necromancer. It tells you quite a few things:

1- The dungeon is populated by the undead.
2- The players want to fight gross monsters and be exposed to gory scenes
3- There's probably a creepy lab with a monster built from spare parts, and probably a torture chamber.

and voilà, your prep is done, and they get to fight what they want to fight, and you get to relax. Just take a bunch of notes.

When they leave that first dungeon, pull out a piece of paper and stick in right in the middle and go: So, what's around the dungeon? I'm guessing there's probably a village close-by... And so on. Your players will surprise you, I promise.

@Adam: Uh, well look at that! Go ahead though, play around with the orcs! I didn't want to give bonus damage to the orcs because it felt too easy. I really like the "disgust and impress" of the orc thief, I feel like an orc thief is very much of a sneaky thug, a guy who would make an example out of someone. Then again, I've always loved the concept "Brutish and strong thief". Backstabbing with a 2-hander ftw!

Adam speaks truth.

The hard part is to just accept that your players, as 3-5 creative minds, are probably able to make a more interesting story than you could on your own. It's about trust.

See yourself more like the audience of a Reality TV show. You are enjoying the hell out of that show and every now and then, the announcer asks the audience to call in and vote on what happens next! So just let them roll until everything stops and they look at you. Then pick a move and let them deal with it, see what happens. Rince and repeat.

Just GMed a game with a druid involved. The player was a newer gamer, still working on getting out of his shell and finding his creativity, but we had some pretty awesome scenes.

He was a halfling druid of the River Delta (halflings were a race of barbaric nomads), he absorbed a bear at some point too. Amongst the highlighs of the game were him falling from a castle wall as an Elk, and turning into a bobcat in midair to land safely (shame he failed!)

Also saw him as duck, an alligator and an anaconda (with which he tripped a stone golem using the moves "Constrict anything" and "Coming out of freaking nowhere")

My only comment on the druid would be his low damage. I felt like he was doing all of these cool things in combat but it didn't do much, and given the fact that the druid, at least at level one, seems, at first look, to be a fighty class, I feel like the class should get a D8 of damage. I know this can be achieved by levelling, but still, his damage felt extremely minor for most of the session.

Can you cast spells (if you have access to them) while in animal form? I'm just curious.

Oh Sage, you guys think of everything!

/kissass_fanboyism

The druid playtest just appeared on Kickstarter. What do you guys think?

I've never been much of a druid kind of guy. I voted barbarian. But I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. It's not what I expected (a spell list and such) but by the gods, I would play that druid and play it hard.

Actually, Druid is on its way. It was one of the stretch goals on the kickstarter, and rumors say we should see the play book at some point in the near-ish future.