Let's Play

[Elusive_Lemon]

Session -1:

Several years ago, I really enjoyed reading the DM game summaries posted by Shamus Young here. I haven't seen many things like it since, but loved the GM perspective and the discussion behind decisions and so on. My own experience running games is limited, having dabbled whilst at university but never really having any regular group for more than 2-4 sessions. In that time I have run one-shots or short games in various D&D versions, Call of Cthulhu, PARANOIA and Edge of the Empire but have definitely spent more time reading and planning than in game. I have actually only been a player once in a D&D game, but as the only Skype player...

Anyway, over the last few months I randomly decided to start a D&D 5th ed game, actually getting my wife (who has never played any RPGs) to make a character. I then invited two friends whom I played with in my sole PC game via video chat who were keen. My wife insisted I also invite one of her friends, who loves fantasy, but had also never played anything like this before. Suddenly, I have a regular group and we are now 17 sessions in. This is an unexpected delight!

What I am now hoping to do is write up the nuts and bolts of these sessions and hopefully they will be of interest to someone. If this is irritating or the thread is in the wrong place, I apologise. Hopefully this might generate some discussion too and that could help me out! As sessions go on, I can already see things I would have changed in retrospect... and some truly daft things that I keep doing... Why do I keep giving NPCs painfully similar names to each other?

Anyway, I will update soon!

 

[Elusive_Lemon]

Session 0:

A caveat: Whilst I like to think of myself as a gentleman cat burglar, I am really just a common thief. There are definitely things in this game that I have stolen adapted from other games, 'Let's Plays', Podcasts and transcripts and I will do my best to cite my sources wherever possible. However, I have read a lot of more about other people's games than my own and I am awful with names. If anyone spots something, please let me know and I will give credit where it is due. But as a general rule, anything here that looks clever, well-crafted or thrilling is probably nicked.

Thanks to Covid-19 and distance in general, my group will rarely sit in a room together. Given that we started playing in January 2021 in the UK, the very idea was right out. So rather than a usual session zero with ideas going back and forth I found myself chatting to people individually in the build up tot the first game. I don't know if this affected planning, but it did mean that getting players to shape the world was difficult as I found my four were reluctant to say what they wanted from the game. For my wife and her other first-time-friend, it was fair that they didn't really know what they could have either, though their approaches to this were quite different.

I feel this is reflected in their characters.

Ethawien:
My wife's friend, a first time to RPG player was called up and taken through character creation step by step. Ethawien in real life is possibly the most prolific reader that I know and loves the fantasy genre. Of all my players, she was the one who has needed the least prompting for her backstory. Based purely on decription, she chose to play a tiefling and a bard. I then used the additional tables in Xanathar's Guide to give her a few prompts that she ran with. These indicated that she was a scholar (from her background) and that she had one rival.

Using the notion of human fear and disdain for halflings, she decided that she had been raised by a scholarly enclave after being abandoned as an infant. She created the Scholarly Order of Penathrion and The Great Library of Astra where she grew up. ... all wonderful hooks for me to jump on. She then decided that she had been unfairly disgraced, in order to have left the enclave. To this end, she spontaneously tied in her rival, her ex-lover and now fellow scholar Parsevan, who had accused her of studying necromancy (maybe not so falsely...) and therefore had her stripped of her academic robes and cast out. Destitute, she had the fortune of being found by a wandering member of the College of Glamour, Lady Delfilia who took her under her wing and taught her the bardic ways.

Glorious! From this one conversation I now had two NPCs for hooks and conflict and little more to add into my extremely sparse world, (that I will outline after the next characters.) Additionally, Ethawien would go on to develop her character further and would easily drop in more details for fodder in coming sessions.

Eryn:

Azeria:

Elindor:

The Land of ??: