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svensson

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Blog Entries posted by svensson

  1. svensson

    Background to the Campaign
    Well, it's been awhile. OK, I'll admit it, I completely forgot I was doing a blog on this. *sigh* I'm not the greatest diarist in the world so this is something of a mental discipline for me. Apologies to those who might have waited for a follow on.
     
    1. What Has Gone Before:
    I've introduced my new players to the system using some 'average Jane' characters. These were built to be good at their stated role but average in every other respect. The Hoplite, for example, had 15s in her STR, DEX, CON, and SIZ but 10 everyplace else. The idea was that the characters could be reasonably disposable if the system turned against their skill rolls. I feel it's important to show a computer gamer that in the table top the odds of dying are there and real, especially in a system like BRP/CoC/RQ.
    "In RuneQuest, there is no QuickSave"
    We then had a break because of 'this thing called life', BUT by happy coincidence that break took place when the Starter Set came out and I thought it would be a fine time to convert the setting to Glorantha. The next time we got together we tried that using the SoloQuest/Battle of Dangerford. Once we got done with that, the girls decided they preferred the Atalan setting. OK, I guess I have more writing to do.
    So I generated several 'real' characters and got a pretty good batch. After being given a stack to choose from, I now have a Light Cavalry-woman Poseidon cultist, a Leatherworker Athena cultist, and a Healer Apollo cultist. My ref NPC character is an Hunter Artemis cultist..
     
    2. My Referee Emphasis ['emphases'?]
    This is the first time in my gaming life that I've had a table of just women, and one of them an impressionable tween. Now, I grew up in a house full of women in the 70's. Things have changed a bit since then. These are the identifiable issues I see with all this:
    a. The girls are not as aggressive or combative as most male tables are. I have to make sure to adjust my scenarios to include more success without combat options. Thank Greg that the RQ/BRP is very amenable to that, more so than DnD or other systems. This is just a mental thing on my part.
    b. Sexuality is being kept to a low key. I don't want my grand niece to feel as if her character has to be pretty or use sex to succeed in the game. OTOH, social manipulation is part of every game and I want to leave that avenue open.
    c. De-emphasizing cults. In Glorantha, cult advancement is a vital part of the game. I think that many of us think of achieving Rune level status as a benchmark of advancement... RQ's version of 'DING! I just levelled!'... and I want to open up the Atalan game to success beyond just religious affiliation. I'm still working out how to do that.
     
    3. Where We Are Now.
    With the new characters in hand, the party has just stepped on to the dock of Soldier Port of the RQ3 Griffin Island boxes set. This will be, with extremely heavy modification, my starting sandbox. If the players get bored with that, I can always load them on another boat.
    Maugre has become Master Tythos, an Atalan factotum who has taken over and fortified a township as a 'Hudson's Bay' style operation. Society in Soldier Port is an mixture of Atalan overlaying the local culture. I'm basing much of the local culture off the Ashtanti of Ghana. There is also a layer of generic 'people from everywhere' in a kind of 'Old Coaster' society. Atalan hasn't colonized or claimed Soldier Port, it's a profit-making enterprise... a fortified trading post with a native village outside it. But there are several mainstream personalities in town who might be exiles or whose lives just washed them up on this particular shore.
    The first mission for the team will be a reverse path from their earlier characters... they'll be sent to find the wreck of the ship their original characters survived. At that point, they'll get all their old treasure back 😁
  2. svensson

    Background to the Campaign
    Alright, once I got my nieces on board with the idea of a game and they chose the genre they wanted to play in, I had to figure out the actual nuts and bolts of this project.
    My goals were three-fold:
    a] MAKE IT EASY TO LEARN
    b] MAKE IT LOGICAL
    c] MAKE IT FUN
    With those guideposts, and taking a few cues from previous experience as a gamer, I decided that I'd just put together pregenerated characters rather than have everyone grind through character generation in RQG. The second thing I decided was that I'd have everyone's character just be an 'average guy'... they all had the same statistics [STR, POW, etc.], but different Occupations. This was to illustrate that training counts for more than badass stats. The third thing was that I wasn't gonna put a lot of effort into background and setting until I found out just how interested everyone was.
    The occupations I chose were: Hoplite [Heavy Infantry Warrior], Hunter, Sailor, and Temple Initiate /Scribe.
    The basic scenario is one that I love to use when introducing new players to a game system: 'Disaster Survivor'. The basic idea is that the characters begin with 'You wake up...' and then I describe their physical situation. In this particular case I used a shipwreck, so the group has washed ashore... they're soaking wet, slightly hypothermic, and literally have nothing but the clothes on their back. They're on a rocky coast [using photos of the Pacific coastline of Washington State] and there, across a lagoon, is their ship. Or rather, what's left of it. The ship has broken her keel on the reef, and her aft section is lies at a 25 degree angle on the ocean side of the reef, while her prow juts up at an angle high-centered on the reef itself.
    I began by describing the storm that got them here, then described their current situation. Instead of just asking 'what do you do', I called for Perception skill checks... whereupon the Sailor [played by Niece C] made a critical Scan roll! In her 'expert' opinion, the ship is irreparable and would probably not survive the next high tide.
    Note: I'm not a sailor myself, but I'm a military historian who's done quite a bit of reading on island landings, the Normandy Invasion, and other instances where tidal conditions were important. Beyond that, I live in a maritime community and have absorbed some abstract knowledge on tides and high water lines over the years.
    The Sailor concluded that high tide would fully cover the reef, lifting the prow enough that it'll probably slide down into the ocean. She didn't know how long it would be until high tide, but she guessed they had about six hours max to retrieve anything they wanted off the ship and somehow get it to shore.
    This spurred everyone into various brainstorming ideas and skill checks [which was the point of this session]. The first game session got them all to figure out the situation they were in, understand why they needed to get gear aboard the ship, learn the skill system, and get to the prow of the ship.
     
  3. svensson

    Background to the Campaign
    Well, Post Number One, or 'How We Got Here'
    So with the COVID lockdown, my wife has been working from home in our apartment. Due to space constraints, her home office setup is in the living room while I occupy a bedroom set up as a library /computer /junk room most of the day. I've been pretty bored, especially since I quit Facebook in the wake of Election Assault on the Capitol. I've been trying to pay more attention to my family during the crisis, and slew of birthday presents had me asking one of my nieces if she'd like me to teach her and her older two girls how to play RPGs. She enthusiastically agreed.
    The Cast of Characters:
    Me- I'm an Old Geek in my mid-50s. Been gaming since the 70's. I'm a US Army combat veteran and have been diagnosed with PTSD and a couple other things, for which I am in treatment. I have some empathy issues and a bit of temper [nothing violent, but I have a cruel streak that isn't very pretty] and I'm determined to keep the worst of my mental issues away from the kids in my family. This has naturally led to some distancing between my siblings, their children, and I, but most of them understand to a degree. Since the lockdown, I've been trying to reconnect with family, keeping track of birthdays and what-all, and I see gaming as a way to share something I love with people I love.
    My Spouse- My wife, Aunt E, is a bit younger than I am, but she's an Old Geek like me. She got into gaming in junior high school in the early 80s and had to deal with all the knucklehead pubescent male nonsense at a gaming table. She learned to get pink pens and dice to make sure she them back after a game session 😂 She once worked for a major game producer for 15 or so years and has had trouble in the past with fanboys trying to use her as an entrepot into the industry. Because of this, she's asked me to keep the personal details to a minimum.
    My Niece- A nice woman with four children. She got pregnant fairly young and hasn't had much of a chance to let her imagination loose and I think gaming will be JUST the thing for her.
    Grand-niece #1, or Niece C- Is the most interested among the kids. She's in her early teens and is pretty impressionable. I have to take real care to keep some of my latent cynicism reined in around her. She hasn't missed a session yet and is an incredibly smart young girl. Some of her decision making has surprised me a great deal.
    The Setting:
    When we set all this up, I asked 'the girls' what milieu /world they wanted to play in. My niece and her kids don't have a real huge background in RPGS, just some computer games [Skyrim mostly], so I didn't want to hit them with a huge Wall of Text that playing Glorantha would require. Instead, I offered to adapt the RuneQuest in Glorantha rules set to whatever setting they wanted. I figured it'd be Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings... but NOPE! Surprise #1 is that the Niece C is currently reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books and was interested in that. I didn't want the PCs to demigods per se, so I countered with Atlantis. And here we are.
    I have renamed Atlantis 'Atalan' and taken some of Plato's work and other sources to create a setting where the Atalan subcontinent still exists. It is about the size of Greenland and sits in the North Atlantic. It's southernmost points are near the Equator and have jungle terrain, and it's northernmost reaches are near the permanent ice pack. The Atalan nation is what could be described as a 'theocratic confederation'... The Atalans know themselves to be the Children of Poseidon and have a semi-divine extended family that rules over them. The principle line are the Emperor[-ess] Priest who rule the capital city and surrounds. The 'cousins' of this main line rule one of eight kingdoms as King/Queen-Priests. While everyone in the family is mortal, when one ascends to the throne they are imparted with a certain divine power that increased their lifespan and preserves their mental faculties. The family exhibits many of the same character faults and foibles as normal humanity, but the rulers themselves have a remarkable ability to stay sane and senility is unknown to them.
    Each kingdom is run independently by their respective ruling family, owing taxes, troops, and goods to the empire as a whole to be used for the greater good, and each one has certain unique qualities about them. At some point, I'll even get around to detailing just exactly what those are 😁
    What I am sure of is the following:
    - Atalans consider themselves to be the only 'civilized' people on Earth, with all others being 'barbarian' to one degree or another
    - Atalans understand hydrology better than anyone on Earth, including water tables, sanitation, tides, currents, weather, and so on.
    - Atalans field an army consisting of the classic Greek hoplite phalanx, supported by crossbowmen, light cavalry on horses using spears and javelins and heavy cavalry using elephants.
    - Atalans forge a mystical metal named 'orichalcum' [no relation to Earth Prime's metal of the same name]. This metal is an alloy of copper, tin, and 'orichal', a reddish mineral that causes standard bronze take on the properties of mild steel. Furthermore, it is more accepting of enchantments than bronze or iron. No orichalcum smith is allowed to leave the Atalan subcontinent, and no outsider is ever taught the secrets of orichalcum. To date, the Atalans have never found a source for the orichal ore anyplace other than the Atalan subcontinent.
    There will be more about the Empire, Kingdoms and People of Atalan as I get it written.
    Stay tuned.
     
  4. svensson

    Background to the Campaign
    Well, it's been a couple weeks and the group has finally gotten off the beach. They met a gruff but helpful centaur by name of Khauros who, unbeknownst to our Heroines, is the personal representative of Artemis on Earth. He led them to his herd's pasture where they could light a small fire, cook rations, dry off and get some sleep. At this point the characters are still struggling with initiating things and have to be gently prodded along, but they're getting there.
    I had the incredibly wonderful thrill of taking Nieces G [the mom] and C [her early teens daughter] to the best FLGS in our local area and watch them lose their minds 😁 As our gift to the girls, my wife and I bought them dice, a dice bag, and told them we'd buy a figure for them. And then Niece G surprised me by buying the RQG rules off the shelf. It was a pretty awesome day at the office.
    The next session is going to be pretty free-form. 'OK girls, you're safe for now. But you're on an unknown coast, so what do you want to do?' From there, we'll see which way they jump.
  5. svensson

    Atalan: Before the Fall
    After a long break, we've finally gotten back to gaming. The US West Coast has had literally record breaking heat in the last three weeks and where I'm at, we had 3 100 F /38 C days in a row. Now, we've been described as 'the least air conditioned city in the US' [which really isn't fair considering the US also includes Anchorage and Fairbanks 😁], but it is true that the Puget Sound doesn't generally equip homes with A/C routinely. Add into all this a series of birthdays and COVID shot hangovers and, well, you see what I mean.
    As I put together this campaign, I realized that it would be smart of me to subtly use computer game tropes and styling for my players. While one, Aunt E, is an experienced RPG'er, the rest aren't and so I'm trying to work the typical CRPG pacing into the narrative.
    So far, I've done the following:
    - Shipwrecked the players, teaching them skill checks
    - Gave them the opportunity to salvage something from the wreck, teaching them magic spells, Magic Point and Rune Point use [yeah, the Float spell is DAMNED handy when you're trying to lug stuff from shipwreck to shore]
    - Had a minor fight [wolves], teaching combat and combat pacing
    - Had an encounter with a centaur, Khauros, providing a rest period.
    Next step, move the party towards civilization. The party wasn't made extraordinarily welcome by the centaur herd's stallion /chieftain, so Khauros suggested the group move on. However, there was a problem they could help the herd with. A cave nearby has served as the lair of 'beasts' and these beasts have attacked the herd. Centaurs are claustrophobic and don't crawl very well, so Khauros has offered to guide the party to civilization in exchange for dealing with the 'beast' threat. Enter 'the Cave of Stuff'.
    I took the Rainbow Mounds map from 'Apple Lane' and ran a section of it as my general map layout. The party entered the area, but failed the Plant Lore checks necessary to identify the mushrooms in the beginning chamber. Wisely, they did not test fate by trying to eat any. I put a shallow pool in the middle of the chamber and the party found a damaged Atalan helmet in it, which encouraged them. Moving onwards they found the courage to creep into the famous 'Pancake Cave'... a fan-shaped moderately smooth cave but with a very tight squeeze. They had to move on their hands and knees and some sections required them to squirm on their bellies. Once they reached the 'glittering stuff' they were attacked by several rat swarms.
    And here's the part that made me laugh... 3 party members, with one torch lit [reasonably sensible... they only had 4 torches] and the encounter called for 3d6 rat swarms. I reduced the party's attacks to their Fist Attack percentiles no matter what weapon they chose to use. The rat swarms has 2 AP and 9 HP and could do 1-3 pts. of bite damage with a 5% chance per wound of causing a disease.
    And I promptly rolled a 3 for the number of swarms. 😂🤣😆
    After several rounds of combat, a couple of which were touch and go, the group finally defeats the rats. Only one party member took damage, but was kept alive by the good offices of the Initiate of Demeter and the payoff was worth it: 1 hauberk of 'barbarian' scale armor, one Atalan linothorax, and a VERY nice dagger. I almost reduced the loot, but the party could have faced as many as 18 rat swarms and I rolled that 3 fair and square. Beyond that, they also learned the lesson I was teaching about fighting in adverse conditions and teamwork. So I let them keep the goodies. It'll all need to be cleaned and repaired somewhat, but free armor is free armor.
    The session ended with our heroines exiting the cave, having used all their torches, but they're determined to reenter it very soon and complete the task Khauros has given them.
    Now I have to do some moderately serious writing. The group will heading into civilization soon and I have to give them enough information about Atalan and its society for them to roleplay with.
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