A Tale of Three Trollbabes [session 5 & coda]

[rafial]

The last installment of our planned 5 session Trollbabe campaign has come and gone.  It was a relatively short session, a little over 2 hours, as the players chose to drive a fairly straight path to resolving the stakes.

The scale of play made it to the organized group level, with the group in question being the Ebon Hand, a circle of wizards who became the overall villains of the campaign.  The stakes were whether or not the Ebon Hand would be able to seize the reigns of power in the city of Port Scar. Interestingly enough, the Ebon Hand was only introduced near the end of session three, as a common color element between the three Trollbabes' stories, and just sort of took off from there.

At the end of our previous session, the Trollbabes had encountered each other by mystical means, and the beginning of session 5 brought them together in the flesh.  Yalla of course was already in Port Scar, Thanna arrived as a captive of pirates, along with the band of trolls who had escaped from Kweli's pirate ship (the Rapier) only to be recaptured by the one carrying Thanna (the Shrike).

Yalla began the session fleeing from the manor of House Hammond, the merchant house she had been allied with.  It seemed that the head of the house had inexplicably freed the wizard Ivveleth and ordered Yalla's death.  Fortunately, Yalla still had allies within House Hammond's soldiery, who arranged for her escape.

Once loose on the streets of Port Scar, in the company of Supernatural Operations Specialist Hewrey, Yalla encountered the pirates from the Shrike leading a chained up pack of trolls plus Thanna.  Kweli added herself to the scene, by stating she was in the process of trying to rescue Mengu, her troll relation who had somehow gotten captured as well.  Between the three Trollbabes, the trolls were soon loose and running amok, and a pitched battle was underway involving the 'babes, the city guard, and the pirates.  Unfortunately Yalla got trampled by some rampaging trolls, and wound up incapacitated.

Here we ran into a little bit of the recovery problem I mentioned in early posts.  In the last couple sessions we've been able to do a good job of framing injuries so that it is possible to justify frequent recoveries for the Trollbabes.  However, this session turned into fairly non-stop action once things got going, and we had the unfortunate spectre of an unconscious Yalla being lugged out of one scene, woken up for the next, and then getting knocked out again as soon as a failure came up.  I even went so far as to introduce the very cheesy device of a healing potion (from the amazing backpack of SOS Hewrey) to get Yalla up and moving for the final showdown with the Ebon Hand.

The showdown itself consisted of the Trollbabes Three vs. Ivveleth plus another wizard, a horde of black robed acolytes, and some mind controlled trolls in an underground temple of major ickiness.  My failure-hound players deliberately played their worst suits against the opposition, with Yalla fighting a giant enraged troll, and Thanna trying to take Ivveleth on in magic.  Thanna got trounced, but Yalla pulled out an amazing reroll and actually tripped the big troll on to a collapsing balcony.

Kweli took out Ivveleth's sidekick (who didn't last long enough to get named) and duked it out with some acolytes.  She briefly got into trouble, but was rescued by the sudden arrival of Captain Ambree, who had perhaps decided that whatever their past differences might have been, she wasn't letting Kweli out of her sight again.

Ultimately Ivveleth was defeated by first stripping him of his necromantic magic by use of a "lifebomb" Yalla had prepared beforehand from the ancient texts she had been decoding.  In true Trollbabe fashion, the "lifebomb" and the back story of its creation didn't exist until seconds before the thing was actually hurled.  Stripped of his magics, Ivveleth's dark master arrived to collect his now useless servant, and drag him screaming down to his doom (almost taking Thanna with him in the process).

A mechanic of note: we were looking for a way of having two Trollbabes cooperate to improve their odds, and hit upon the following idea:  treat it as a multiple action type roll, with each Trollbabe contributing an action (possibly of the same action type).  If either die roll is successful, the total roll succeeds.  If they both fail, then the failure is treated the same as if a multiple action failed (skip an extra box down the diagram).

Although the Ebon Hand was vanquished (for now) the Trollbabes still had to escape the flooding canal waters which the escaping acolytes had diverted into the temple.  Here we committed a minor procedural error, as dice hit the table before we managed to work out that the issue at stake was not so much the personal survival of the 'babes, as the freeing of the remaining troll prisoners.  That was sorted out with a little bit of open negotiation, but did serve as a reminder to always think things through before grabbing for the dice.  Unfortunately, a few bad rolls came to visit our heros, and Kweli was the only one to make it out intact with Mengu in tow.  Captain Ambree however was not so lucky, and perished in the flood.   Thanna failed to rescue any trolls, and wound up unconscious and wedged into a water discharge grating.  And Yalla?  Well, Yalla wound up in the fourth box of the series diagram, and the player took his option to narrate her death.  So Yalla was able to heroically rescue the remaining troll prisoners at the cost of her own life.  This was perhaps not strictly correct, as the final box represents goal failure... but heck, it sure made for some nice narration.

We played closing scenes for Kweli and Thanna, in which Yalla's player was able to make use of her relationships to participate in significant ways.  Thanna was rescued from the storm drain by indefatigable SOS Hewrey, who carried her off to nurse her back to health, thus transferring the relationship to Thanna.  Meanwhile Kweli returned to the Rapier, and convinced the crew that she was heir to Captain Ambree.  This took the assistance of Petrus the Werefox, another of Yalla's relationships (which was then transferred to Kweli).  And so Kweli and the Rapier sailed off into the sunset.

[rafial]

And now, a few words about the overall extended Trollbabe experience.

Good stuff: I really grooved on collaboratively constructing and populating a world.  We started with a vague map and three PCs, and at the end of five sessions had several distinct cultures and settings and a roster of memorable NPCs.  And I didn't have to do much work at all besides throwing out names and riffing off the players.

It's not all sweetness and light for the GM though.  Trollbabe is a game that trades some of the grind of advance prep for a requirement that you be fast on your feet.  One of the players summed it up well with the comment "I got the impression that there was always this plate spinning act going on."  And he was right, for good or ill.  When it works it looks pretty cool, but you also occasionally lose a piece of crockery.

I found prep for the earlier sessions in the campaign easier, for a couple reasons.  First of all, I think I had a better sense for how to establish stakes at the personal level, and especially how to make those stakes emotionally engaging.  Also, the longer we went on, the more the established themes and story constrained what was possible going forward.

On a mechanical level, I think the Trollbabe rules generally do exactly what they need to do with a minimum of fuss.  As we became more comfortable with the mechanics, I noticed that players tended to make less and less use of rerolls simply for the sake of succeeding, and rather tended to use them as a mechanism to take control of the action.  In fact, as has been mentioned before, by end the players were often hoping to fail for the express purposes of waiting to bring an item or relationship into play with a reroll.  We even had a discussion regarding the possibility of a "choose to fail" mechanic for Trollbabe.

I will say that I am now firmly in the camp of Ron's proposed alternate social roll (defining social success as the smaller range that includes the Trollbabe's number).  Trollbabes are plenty competent as is, and usually have lots of opportunity to arrange situations so they can confront them on their strongest suit if they so desire.  Providing slightly more room for failure just allows for more interesting complications to arise.

The only mechanical part of Trollbabe that I consistently had trouble with was the injury rules.  When you are dealing with an injured Trollbabe, suddenly all your flexibility of pace goes out the window, because extended conflicts are a fast track to incapacitation.  One alternate rule that I am mulling is that the first die roll of a series is always succeed/discommode and the only way to get from injured to incapacitated is on a reroll.

And finally, as my second campaign experience with a game that is designed to facilitate Narrativist play (my first being Sorcerer), I found myself winding up with some of the same vaguely unconvinced feelings about the story we had just created.  The little simulationist that sits on my left shoulder kept whispering in my ear, "yeah, you made up some cool stuff, but it didn't really HAPPEN."  And the little gamist on my right shoulder tsk'd and said, "he's right you know, where was the challenge?"

Still at the end of it all, I had a much stronger sense of "yeah, I'd do that again," than I received from my experience with Sorcerer.  Vanilla Narrativism... it's a good thing.  It's just that it's left me in the mood for something... crunchy! :)