The Great Pendragon Campaign: Epic Play-through Year 487

Summary: Our group is attempting a complete run of the Great Pendragon Campaign  using 5^th edition rules. Players are Matt, Mark, and Lilith. I am the GM.

Year 487

The third year in the Uther Period, with Uther Pendragon as king of Britain.

Our current roster of characters:

•         Sir Eleanor of Dinton, played by Lilith.
•         Sir Conmorl of Winterbourne Gunnet, played by Matt.
•         Sir Aeron of Pitton, played by Mark.

Overall events, King Uther’s bastard son Sir Madoc leads a big naval operation against the Saxons, but our player knights decide to perform a diplomatic mission instead, accompanying the King northward to Lyndsey and Malahaut to visit Duke Corneus and King Heraut respectively. They tell the tale of Excalibur to these rulers, trying solicit alliance with King Uther based on the mantle of the Sword of Victory. This goes well with Duke Corneus, but not so great with King Heraut. More courtly skills get a workout. Our knights are still pretty young and not particularly glorious, so a lot of courtly skills had failed rolls. On a hunt with King Heraut, Sir Conmorl is ambushed and kidnapped by bandits, and Sir Eleanor and Sir Aeron ride out and rescue him.

As the knights begin to look around for likely matches in marriage, this is when I started keeping some more detailed records of the other families in Salisbury, using a shortened year-end procedure to randomly determine what was happening with births, deaths, and marriages in the other peer households. This has over time turned out to be a lot of work and a lot of lonely fun, but I’ve kept it up throughout the campaign and have a pretty robust history of families and relations between the various households in Salisbury.

Sir Aeron and Sir Eleanor both get married this year. At this point, we have the conversation about the childbirth table, which includes a 10% chance of death in childbirth for the mother. Lilith is not interested in having her knight die on a random chance from a once-a-year roll, so we rule that player knights are exempt from the death in childbirth result.

Thoughts: This was an interesting session! The heavy emphasis on diplomacy was interesting, but the reaction of the rulers is pretty heavily scripted in the book. I decided to start to step afield from this and allow the player’s rolls to have a larger effect on the attitude of the non-player characters they are interacting with. This decision gives a lot more agency to the players, but also had some large unexpected results later in the campaign. Also, it really highlights how weak the diplomacy rules are in the game. Sure, there are social skills, traits, and passions, but how that interacts with another character’s attitude or actions is sketchy at best, completely missing at worst. I pretty much just winged it.

Last note: Earl Roderick of Salisbury randomly had a child this year, a girl named Ishild. This was determined by my year-end NPC rolls. No mention of any of Roderick’s kids besides Robert, his heir, is made in the book, and I applied the same rules to his family that I was doing to all the rest. This is super important later in the narrative, as is Ishild, but just a side note for this year.

The Great Pendragon Campaign: Epic Play-through Year 486

Summary: Our group is attempting a complete run of the Great Pendragon Campaign  using 5^th edition rules. Players are Matt, Mark, and Lilith. I am the GM.

Year 486

The second year in the Uther Period, with Uther Pendragon as king of Britain.

Our current roster of characters:

• ·        Sir Eleanor of Dinton, played by Lilith.
• ·        Sir Conmorl of Winterbourne Gunnet, played by Matt.
• ·        Sir Aeron of Pitton, played by Mark.

Outside threats are the Saxons, wreaking havoc up in Caercolun. The Duke of Lindsey is killed fighting them. These guys are calling themselves the East Saxons at this point, and they’ve seized a lot of territory. There are already some Saxon enclaves in Sussex and Kent. The Kents are actually Jutes, not Saxons, but to our players they are all Saxon invaders.

In this session’s big adventure the player knights all get called upon by Merlin to help him out. This serves as a tutorial on the personal combat system, after last session’s tutorial on the battle system. The knights all fight a three-eyed giant, demonstrating again how dangerous combat can be. They are lucky and don’t get hit by using terrain and ganging up on the thing, and manage to take it down. Following after Merlin, he instructs them to defend him while he busies himself in a boat on a small lake. A strange green knight that appears to be made entirely from plants appears and fights the player knights. Again, with teamwork, they dispatch the creature.

Merlin gets good old Excalibur from the lake, and the knights head back to Uther’s court. We get some cool early medieval flavor here, as the king inspects the spoils from the battles against the Saxons this year, and gives a gift out to every knight in the court from it. Merlin then presents the sword Excalibur to the king, and asks one of the player knights to tell the tale of their adventure. This brings us into the courtly skill part of the game, and Sir Aeron steps up to do the honor. He comports himself well, impressing the king and earning some Glory for himself.

Thoughts: At this point we’ve seen all of the different systems in the game, and I like how the Campaign is walking us through this as a starter, doing battle, personal combat, and courtly activities all within two sessions to get you up to speed. The Excalibur business was interesting, but the player knights seem like a bit of a third wheel in this adventure, getting led around by Merlin and witnessing some epic event but only sort of participating on the fringes. Thanks to the constant threat of lethality, there is a certain amount of emotional remove between you and your character that the system itself seems to encourage.

The Great Pendragon Campaign: Epic Play-through Year 485

Our group is attempting a complete run of the GreatPendragon Campaign. We’re using 5^th edition Pendragon rules, and we’re trying to play it by the book if possible. A few tweaks and add-ons are being used, some tables that can be found online, specifically for feast and courtactivities.

Players are Matt, Mark, and Lilith. I am the GM. This narrative will go over our experience with the game year by year and I’ll call out areas where we had trouble or made some adjustments for our group comfort (generally with rules).

Year 485

This is the start of the Campaign book. Uther Pendragon is the king of Britain. The campaign focuses on the county of Salisbury, and we did standard startup based on the book. All of our knights are landed knights from Salisbury, in charge of a manor.

We had a bit of discussion regarding gender in the game, since Lilith wanted to play a female knight. The rules discourage this a bit, but there is a section on creating women knights. We decided that succession rules in our fantasy Britain favor male heirs, but a woman can inherit if no male heirs are available. Also, female knights are not unheard of. They are somewhat unusual, but are generally accepted, especially in families with no male issue or a tradition of the practice. Lilith also expressed some concern about her character dying in childbirth on a single winter phase roll, and so we ruled that player characters are exempt from childbirth mortality.

Our final roster of characters:

•          Sir Florentina of Dinton, played by Lilith.
•          Sir Galmwr of Burcombe, played by Matt.
•          Sir Aeron of Pitton, played by Mark.

The big event of 485 is the Battle of Mearcread Creek. King Uther calls up his knights to fight the Saxons of Sussex and the freshly knighted player characters follow their lord, Earl Roderick, to the battle. We were still learning how things work in Pendragon, and the reason the rules advise you to create a backup character along with your first quickly becomes obvious.

The players all tried to invoke their Hatred of Saxons to gain an advantage in this battle. Passions, when successfully rolled, allow a major bonus to skill rolls. There is a danger in failure, however, and Matt fumbled his Hatred: Saxons roll. On a passion fumble, the character goes mad from their lack of conviction, and run off to the woods. Since the roll occurred at the beginning of the battle, we decided to let Matt play through the fight and then run off mad. Once a character succumbs to madness, it is entirely up to the GM when they return.

The battle was joined and we got a taste of Pendragon lethality. Sir Florentina was hit with a critical from a Saxon axeman, and was killed outright. It was kind of shocking to lose a player character literally in the first session, but we all rolled with it. She had a backup character, Sir Eleanor, Sir Florentina’s twin sister.

The Battle of Mearcread Creek ends indecisively, neither a side a clear winner. Big picture politics: Franks have capture Soissons on the continent, a large Saxon expeditionary army has landed in Colchester and defeated the Britons there. More battles against Saxon loom for certain.

Our tally on player characters as winter phase begins is one mad, one dead, and one survivor. Pretty grim for a first session! We run through our first winter maintenance phase. Sir Aeron, our survivor, gets married. Matt decides he’d like to leave Sir Galmwr’s fate mysterious for a bit and brings in his backup character Sir Conmorl.

[L5R to AW] Latest Stuff

I've been running the L5R Apocalypse World conversion off and on for the last year or two, and it's gotten to a pretty good point. The basic rules are really singing. I haven't built out the really massive number of schools that there are, and I'm not as familiar with the current status of Rokugan, but I want to get the current rules out here for people to view and expand if they care to.

The newest mechanic, and the one that makes the game really sing, is the Love mechanic. All characters have a secret, forbidden love, and this causes them emotional distress. This is what goads these characters into rash action, and that's definitely where the drama is. These rules work great for a convention one-shot, but I think if you worked on a slow build for the love they would be good for a longer campaign.

You pretty much need the Apocalypse World book to run this, I don't repeat much that's already in there.

Here are the rules as they currently stand:

• Universal Moves and Other Rules Stuff
• Archetype Moves - Each character chooses an archetype, like bushi, shugenja, etc.
• School Moves - Each character also studies at a school, giving them a specialization and focus for their archetype. Note: moves in blue are placeholders.

Resources:

• Character Templates - You can use these as the basic character sheet, just add a school and archetype.
• Characters from the Jade Cup Scenario - With the base rules and these six characters you can run a really good convention game.

FATE Core Kickstarter: Fantasy Adventure

So, I happen to be involved with this little thing:

FATE Core Kickstarter

If you clicked that link, you will see that they have blasted past their goal by an unbelievable number. The cool thing is that my contribution to this project was at the $3k level, which has totally been left in the dust. I'm already working on the "fantasy adventure," and I thought I'd describe it a bit more than the Kickstarter does.

My assignment was literally that simple: write a fantasy adventure that uses FATE Core, about 10k-20k words. Everything else was left up to me.

I did get a preview of the Core rules, and the running examples all use a fantasy setup. I'm basing my adventure on this, but I decided to go a bit old-school sword-and-sorcery on it, inspired by Fritz Lieber and Robert E. Howard, pulp fantasists that I enjoy. Once I started down that path, I remembered Howard's Conan story The Tower of the Elephant, a tale of adventure and thievery sitting right where I want this fantasy adventure to be.

I'm not going to reveal too much about this, that's for Kickstarter backers! Here is a quick (unedited) taste of the intro:

They say the Palace of Hadrin is one of the seven wonders of the world. It rises 300 feet, its sheer porphyry walls without seam or mortar, its walls overtopped by minarets and domes made of crystal. Constructed in ancient times by methods lost to modern craftsmen, the Palace was once home to the Satrap of Sarnac. Travelers from all reaches of the world come to the city of Riverton just to gaze upon it. In the days since Sarnac's destruction it became home to the local Governor. The bulk and height of the Palace leaves a whole district on the north side in permanent shadow, a place where the sun never touches. They call this place Darkside, and no travelers come here. Or if they do, they never come out again.

 Darkside is a sprawling slum, a shantytown where a life can be bought for only a few copper coins. The Governor's men do not go there unless in numbers more suited to a raiding party in wartime than keepers of the peace. Darkside's streets are occasionally convulsed with gang warfare, and in those times blood runs ankle deep in the muddy streets. This is not one of those times. Hugo the Charitable rules there now, his Scar Triad thugs walking unopposed. None dare challenge him, even the Governor seems content with Hugo’s rule over this den of thieves.

 At the very center of this vile pit stands a tower, the Tower of the Serpents. Older than the Palace, older than the city, it is made of an unknown material, white and hard as steel. The tower's single spire rises nearly as high as the Palace walls, twin entwining serpents carved curling up the tower's sides. A sorcerer lives there, they say, and this rumor seems likely true. The tower has a garden around it that grows despite the lack of sun, and strange lights shine from the upper rooms at night. No one is ever seen entering or leaving the place, and the single gate in the garden wall never opens. Darksiders say that on moonless nights you can hear the loathsome flutter of unholy wings from the top of the tower, and perhaps it is by this conveyance that the sorcerer comes and goes.

 They also say the tower holds a treasure of incalculable value.

L5R to AW: The Seven Thunders

I ran the AW hack at DexCon last weekend, and so I put together seven characters. The way they work is that each character has a list of moves off an archetype, such as bushi, shugenja, courtier, or monk. In addition, each character also has some moves they can buy from their school of training, like Hida bushi or Bayushi courtier. The school moves must be bought in order, you can't skip over Rank 2 & 3 to buy the Rank 4 move.

The Seven Thunders are advanced characters, so I let the players take seven advances. This made for some pretty kick-ass characters, but that was appropriate for the game. I also strategically highlighted each characters' best ring, in hopes of getting some good advancement in play, which we seemed to get. Our scenario played out nicely, very much like the canon story, thanks to the input from one of our players who knew the L5R lore backwards and forwards.

Combined with the basic move sheets I've already posted, you can pretty much make an L5R character with the material that's up on the blog now. If you pick a school that doesn't have any moves yet, you'd have to make your own. You will also see the characters from our regular home game below, who have some other schools, including the merchant archetype if you want to play a Yasuki. If there is a move or item that is different between the Seven Thunders and the home characters, use the Seven Thunders version, those are the tweaked ones based on play experience. On of the bushi moves, the Mountain Fall Upon You, has changed, as has katana damage.

The last piece is the the honor and love moves, which are included with the Thunders below. The new list of basic & advanced moves includes these, now. There have been some minor tweaks to these, especially in the Battle of Words move, now the Negotiate at Court move.

A tip for running this: offering a loss of face as a hard choice worked great, and made the players think really hard about what they were going to do. It's a powerful arrow in the MC quiver for this hack.

I'd love to see other people's take on this hack, if you come up with school moves, please post in comments or send PDFs directly to me for posting.

• New Basic Moves Reference (incl. staff, harm, honor, love, face, equipment, and advanced moves)
• The Seven Thunders
• Home Campaign Characters

Grandaddy, ERB, and Me: A Love Letter to Pulp

I was only three years old when my grandfather died of lung cancer. I really don't remember him. My Mom had a lot of pictures and he's always smiling. I've got a nice one of him from the fifties, he's dressed in a short-sleeve button-up shirt and sporting a Walt Disney mustache. He looks very cool. He and my Mom were close, and she has often told me how she regrets Grandaddy didn't live long enough for me to know him. I wear a ring with his initials on my pinky (my hands are bigger than his, the pinky is the only finger it will fit on). His name was Lorin Polk Nunneley.

I'm thinking a lot about him this week because of a movie that's coming out on Friday called John Carter. John Carter is based on the pulp novel A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, originally serialized as Under the Moons of Mars in 1912.

When I was around 10 or so, we were living on the same street as my grandmother and I visited her house often. That's when I discovered the shelves of books in the guest bedroom. I was a voracious reader and I was always looking for something new. Here was a huge collection of first-edition hardback pulps, everything Edgar Rice Burroughs ever wrote. Grandaddy had collected them. Grandmother told me he used to go down to the bookstore as soon as a new ERB book was published and buy it immediately. It was a treasure trove for a reading kid.

I didn't read in chronological order. I started in with the Pellucidar series, still my favorite: Tales of a land in the center of earth, home to dinosaurs, cavemen, and sabertooth tigers. After that, I read Tarzan and its sequels. Then I moved on to the John Carter series, set on a fantasy Mars with four-armed green aliens and beautiful princesses.

By the time I was 14, I had plowed through the entire collection. Burroughs was an amazingly prolific author, and I can't say all of these are particularly good. They are certainly a bit silly, but coming to them as a preteen and early teen, I was the target audience. I was probably close to the same age Grandaddy was when he started to buy the books. Reading through my grandfather's collection gave me with a lifelong affection for the stories.

In some way, reading through this collection made me feel a connection to Grandaddy. I feel closer to him, even though I never knew him, thanks to a shared fandom. Because I share this with him, it means I will continue to stay interested and loyal to these books, and go see movie adaptations no matter how bad they are. I regret never being able to know him. I'm sure he would have loved many of the things I enjoyed as a boy, like Star Wars, maybe even Dungeons & Dragons, and I'm pretty sure he would be thrilled with my work as a game designer. He helped shape my life even though he was not physically present, through the fiction he enjoyed and left for me to discover.

Love you, Grandaddy. Thanks for the adventures.