Yesterday I ran the first session of Smoke Kisses Sky, a duet campaign I’m running for a friend in the physical world. You know who you are please don’t read any further and spoil yourself on what was going on behind the curtain. Let’s call her Alice in this post, which is not her real name buy beats calling her “my friend” or “the player”.
In proper GLOG fashion it’s stitched together from many different pieces, run on Hilander’s House Rules, except with G24 weapons categories. Alice is playing firstGokun’s Gun Shepherd but also knows Low Alchemy. It is set under the Shadow of Glory, but also along the Jabberwocky river (from the hit yet-unreleased community zine the char3terie). Also it uses doggerland vices and daemons.
I wanted to do a narrative retelling of the session and have two drafts of this post where I attempted to do so, but I have kinda given up on that. It was a fun session and a successfully eased both the character and player into an unfamiliar world, but not one that's easy to retell. It involved a lot of exposition that was dynamic as a conversation, but I haven’t found a good way to translate it into text (a better writer might be able to, but not me as I am now). So instead I’m going to talk about what parts of the session I want to talk about.
As a brief overview, the Gun Shepherd Seo-Yun Matilda arrives in a small town of Yelenin that has been besieged by a terrible beast, hitching a ride on a steamboat owned by a hunter to come here to hunt the thing. The first thing she sees is a ritualized duel, during which she talks with a friendly gnome who explains who all the people are and why everyone around here is wearing face paint. The duel concludes in a stalemate, and in the evening she eats dinner at the local tavern/gambling den/temple, where she hears rumors, learns more about who the local important people are and joins forces with other shady characters here to hunt the beast, one of which helps her get her own face paint. Then in the morning she travels through the swamp with her new companions to the abandoned apothecary half a day’s walk out of town. On the way there they encounter a weird person trying to sell them old junk. Arriving at the cabin they do some classic dungeon exploration, one of the companions has her arm possessed, and the weird person threatens and gets its head instantly beheaded. The session ends with a different monster poking out its head through a hole in the wall.
Arrows in your Quiver
In this session I had a specific objective outside just running a good game. That objective was to organically introduce and teach the four
customs I outlined in my last post.
The custom I feel that I conveyed the best was Painted Faces, and it was also the one we spent the most time exploring. At one point Alice asked what the face paint of one of the character’s was after I forgot to introduce it when they first appeared, and she commented about how useful it was in post session discussion. Both of which I’m needlessly happy with.
The second best communicated custom was Generosity which I managed to set up as a little mystery. In the tavern I introduced the Father as a petty tyrant who went out his way to serve food to everyone himself. Later when I explained how Generosity works, Alice had an “aha” moment when she understood how the people around here are being extorted.
The Law of Blades was introduced with the duel, but took a back seat. Which I think makes sense because it’s not a custom she immediately needs to understand to meaningfully interact with the setting. It’s something that would become more important the closer you get to domain play and the campaign isn’t there yet.
Sauna Speech was not mentioned at all, and the importance of saunas is only hinted at here and there. I didn’t bring it up at all because Sauna Speech is something that will come up naturally during post-adventure downtime and after Alice has familiarized herself with the characters.
Lesson on Characterisation
The Beast of Yelenin is an adventure with 10 npcs, and I added 4 more on top in my prep to add characters relevant to the setting, plus one more gnomish farmer was invented in play. All of them got introduced, but a few stood out. The two characters who intrigued Alice the most was the Glazier, one of the priests I invented to represent the element of Crystal. He immediately grabbed her attention because he’s a skeleton with cracks repaired with gold like with Kintsugi and was destainful of everyone. The second was Dame the Vivisector who has the cool factor of being a huge knight who talks to her enormous iridescent shears. The thing these two share is that they paint evocative images in your mind. I wasn’t able to find the post but Bad Doctor had written once about describing evocative scenes with specific details. I think I understand how to do that more now. Next session I think I’ll be able to bring a little more sauce to the characters who were bland this session. Which actually includes the marsh, since at the time I was trying to sort out overland travel procedures.
Also I'm fond of the bandit Bellum even thought he hasn't had any particularly noteworthy moments yet. He's ended up just being a friendly and easy going guy.
Poor Rosemary
One of the characters who became more interesting during play was Rosemary, one of the hunters attracted by the bounty, who is also a gun-user and a foreigner. One of the encounters was someone getting
possessed, and this threat has been well established beforehand with most npcs commenting to Matilda to get her face painted. So during the exploration of the cabin the dice decided that someone’s arm was going to be possessed by Dogsbody whose vice is Poor Hygiene. At first I was looking over what everyone’s Faces depicted to decide which one Dogsbody liked the most, until I remembered that I completely forgot about Rosemary and how Faceless she is, so she got possessed. There was a moment of tension where Alice wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, then Rosemary started picking her nose. Alice is yet to be told who Dogsbody is or what his deal is, she only knows that Rosemary is possessed. Later when combat starts in the cellar, Rosemary has to fight her arm that is trying to shove expired jam in her mouth. This is all pretty funny and I think firstGokun has nailed it with these rules. They add a good amount of chaos to the proceedings.
Unfortunate Mettie
The cabin is from my
Old Apothecary adventure, which I placed outside of Yelenin since it’s an adventure I’ve wanted to run for a bit. Both times she was encountered the dice decided she would show up as a devilishly handsome business man, and I don’t think I liked how I played that out. I am somewhat tempted to replace that option in her shapeshifting table with something else because the encounter of her trying to sell a rusty old kettle turned out kinda weak. Either way the second time she was encountered was when the party was rummaging in the cellar. Mettie came down the stairs and started yelling at the party to leave, and extending her neck and arms unnaturally. Alice’s character Matilda asked if the it is the beast, to which Mettie responded with “Yes!” hoping to scare them. I forgot which one of us realised it first, but we both realised that Dame the Vivisector would immediately attack Mettie because of how giddy she has been about the hunt she has been. So then I spend some time pulling up the rules for combat, we roll initiative, I figure out what everyone’s HP total is, then Dame kills Mettie with a single snicker-snak of her shears. I think I could have played Mettie a bit more intelligently, but it is what it is. Specifically I should have had her attempt to appear in different forms to try and scare away the party on the way to the cabin, and probably had her whisper into Matilda’s ears to leave while invisible instead of walking straight into the arms of a 7ft tall knight.
Guns
There is an interesting consequence from how Alice is playing a
Gun Shepherd, which is that I had to change firearms to fit the class’s assumptions. The 5 muskets the Family had were changed to be fire lances, which functioned like the Gun Shepherd’s gun but with one less damage die unable to be reloaded in combat. The Son’s pistol was replaced with a long bow, because I just watched Princess Mononoke where bows are cool. The Son’s Wife’s blunderbuss was replaced with a smoke bomb, because I think that fits her character. Rosemary’s musket went unchanged and she has changed to be a Gun Shepherd herself. Tuesday’s pistols are actually upgraded to modern pistols and are specified to be rare ancient artifacts not reproducible in the modern day. Finally the canon also went unchanged.
No comments:
Post a Comment