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The drama of a bored geek (3)
July 07th, 2021
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Unexpectedly, I'm here with another episode of my
adventures as a RPG master.
After a couple of days of settling, I found my niece
drawing a fantasy-style map, taking inspiration from
the one I drew for the campaign. This time the thing
surprised me for real. The fantasy mood actually caught
on one of the girls, after all.
I took advantage of her interest for the artistic side
of it, and we started to draw more things together,
such as weapons and pieces of equipment to clip
together with the character sheets.
After that she really seemed interested to give it a
try. We addressed the lack of a die by drawing numbers
on a cube shaped magnet. I've to say that Having a
magnetic die is not ideal, but is far better than no
die at all.
So far we had a couple of sessions, which turned out to
be somewhat hard to master, yet quite entertaining.
Besides the magnetic die, some technical difficulties
arose from the excessive simplicity of my rule-set.
After the first session I had to refine it by adding
Perception and Charisma to the player's properties, and
devising a slightly more complex combat mechanics.
By the end of the second session the girls showed signs
of being bored, or maybe they were tired. I'm not so
sure about how many sessions we are going to hold, but
I'll try to follow up each session with a recap here,
on my phlog.
As already mentioned last time, I've devised a rough
track of a storyline, just avoiding to be too specific,
since I'm aware that the things might go in a
completely different direction than what anticipated.
So, we have a war lord that is driving raids in the
area. The party gathered in the tavern to have a
conversation about their latest adventures, when a
wounded man enters dramatically from the door and asks
for help.
The party is expected to learn about what is going on,
and to go after the raiders. They will find that some
of them are skeletal warriors. If the campaign goes
beyond the first couple of battles, it should lead to
uncover the actions of a necromancer.
== What actually happened so far ======================
The party is made of three characters, backed by my
wife and our two nieces.
As the wounded man entered the tavern, the party
started to act confusely, while trying to extort some
information to the poor fellow. They didn't manage to
get any useful information, and the streacher bearers
bring him away.
The party decides to follow them to the village
hospital, where they're not welcome: the doctor insists
that the injured man should be hospitalized for the
night, and pushes everybody out.
At this point, any reasonable person would probably
just wait for the morning, but the party decides to
stun and impersonate a nurse, so they can approach the
man and talk to him. Tough luck, they didn't manage to
stun the nurse, who got alarmed and went to call
reinforcements.
The youngest of the girls started to panic, her
character entered in cover-your-ass mode, and ran off
the hospital in search of a alibi. She ended up
reporting the remaining of the party to the patrol
guards. A couple of minutes later more guards reached
the hospital, alarmed by the nurse.
The following part is somewhat confused, and ended up
with the two girls' characters being imprisoned for use
of force against public official (yes, the youngest one
knocked down the guard with a punch!). My wife's
character, on the other hand, managed to play innocent
and did the sensible thing: she waited till morning,
queried the wounded man, reached the swordsmith, bought
weapons, and left for the nearby raided village.
The two girls who managed to escape from the prison,
but something tells me they're going to be captured.
