[Dammit, I forgot to have anyone say "mentors is an anagram of monster..."]

Second episode went well, but not nearly as smooth and awesome as the first ep. I feel this is largely due to the massive constraints on the ep - intro the school, intro the band, deal with Cass' first day in this environment, touch on three character issues, and have a supernatural threat that is resolved in this episode. It took some juggling.

Having two Screen Presence 1 players was very helpful in lots of ways. They did a bit of lifting in getting the ep to run to time, and I felt the pressure was off me there; also, I can aggressively frame their secondary characters in order to make my plot go. Surprisingly, though, the biggest benefit to my GM experience from SP1 players is being excused from thinking about their character stuff. I was able to set all their dramas and situations aside and focus on the other stuff that was going on, and that made the episode manageable.

The monsters worked okay, I thought. Just the right mix of silly and squicky-scary. I think our ending sequence, in which the crew ran up and down a corridor waving a snakeskin at quadruped demonthings, was wonderfully visual.

The three Screen Presence 2 characters all had one-on-one scenes with assigned mentors. These scenes worked okay, sorta. I could have done more with this, and had planned on having a second scene for each pairing, but that didn't eventuate; still, there was enough to get on with.

Having player scene-framing power is awesome. The most entertaining stuff in the game comes from player-framed scenes, to my mind. SP2 can frame one scene related to their issue, SP1 can frame any two scenes, and I think this distinction made sense in play.

The Screen-Presence-as-Initiative thing was less of a big deal than I'd expected - after all, it only really counts in the first round, as thereafter everyone just gets a turn in order. I'll keep trying it out and see if I find more value in it, otherwise I'll strip it out as being more trouble than it is worth... and I haven't ruled out Jarratt's suggestion of multiple actions for higher Screen Presence characters, either.

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The next episode is the last of our 'introduce everything' episodes, and then we get into the season proper. We're planning a 13-episode series, but we'll see how we're going a month or two down the line before settling hard on that number.