[Your Gods are Dead] First session - Murder at the Inn

[Tobias]

Ran the first-ever session of YGAD with my fresh new playgroup yesterday. Quick overview of the dramatis personae:

Ciska playing Dalena - 15yr old girl grown up on a 1870 plantation, creole heritage, dimension-hopped but amnesic about it. Into voodoo, remarkably strong.

Roelant playing Eugene - Disease-stricken circus artist turned traveling healer's bodyguard.

Jaroen playing Flemens - traveling healer/alchemist.

The setting is not the YGAD setting, since I'm still working on that, but a more traditional late-medieval low-fantasy setting, with Dalena a hold-over from earlier campaigning. So it was as much a test of the group (which was good together) as of the YGAD rules as of the world/style of adventure we prefer.

I'd done character creation and some general descriptions of the setting a different day. That was in WW's system, but I translated them to YGAD myself.

The session was a fairly straight-forward ice-breaker - they travel into a town where Eugene's recognized by the enthusiastic son of the innkeeper, get invited to the inn, spend the night there, cue blood-curdling scream, rush over (Eugene), discover horrible murder committed on innkeeper and innkeeper's wife - with one of Eugene's own throwing knifes (the frame-up). From there on, murder mystery, suspicions, confrontation with the bad guy, etc.

Some of the things the group have learned: don't split up too much, and the relations between characters have gotten a bit clearer (Eugene and Flemens are both rather stubborn - and the players have a bit of a tendency of that as well, but nothing too troubling).

I'd adapted the contents of the 'bag' (central chance mechanism of the game) a little to have:

30 Red stones - successes
3 Red stones with white sticker - success and 'contact' activates
62 yellow stones - no success
1 yellow stone with white sticker - gain a karma
1 yellow stone with black sticker - lose a karma
3 yellow stones with player name - narrate result of draw

100 in total. The bag itself was a convenient fake nubuk airline toiletries thingamajig.

Some results that need monitoring/adjusting from testing:

1. I need to make the distinction between lightly skilled and non-skilled people a bit bigger (penalty for non-skilled?)

2. The players want a chance for actions/draws to fail more severely (hadn't needed the normal rule for it yet).

3. Have to clarify the effects of benefits/hindrances more (was totally unfleshed out anyway, but this priority's moving up)

4. Drawing the right number of stones was an issue sometimes, but that got better with practise. The amount of different stones (colors, stickers), was not a problem after half an hour - this could be more, but best to start them off easy.

Some good stuff that was really liked:

1. The frequency of 'contact', 'narrate' and 'karma' tiles was good. Eugene had contact twice in the session, Flemens once. All players got to narrate the results at least one action from a different player. Lots of Karma results as well, but that may be a bit of a fluke.

2. Narrating by players is heck of a lot of fun (so all think) and really helps shape the story. I might even double the amount of narration stones.

3. The combat system seems easy, fast and deadly enough, once explained thoroughly. There were only 2 turns of combat as Eugene encountered the murderer (that wasn't known yet at the time) in an burned-out watermill and a knife- fight happened, in which Eugene took an arm wound. More testing needed.

Some stuff that still needs to be tried:

1. Inititative rules - no mass combat yet, so no testing of it

2. Dreaming contact - what happens?

Best moments (from where I'm sitting):

Eugene suggesting to Flemens that all experimental potions he drinks should be tested on rabbits first. Flemens thought it a ludicrous idea, but went with it anyway.

Flemens attempting to brew a revigorating mixture, but failing, and Roelant getting narration right - and describing how it became a sedative. After administring this sedative to a rabbit, the near-death innkeeper's wife and Eugene, amazingly enough Eugene managed to draw 'contact' when consuming the beverage - thus fluking it to work for him accidentally.

Eugene getting the innkeeper's son to confess to acts best left undescribed by the murderer in the past.

Dalena playing a quiet but informationally influencing role.

Next week, next session.

[Jasper]

Sounds like a good game, Tobias.  Glad to hear that the bag worked out well in play, especially with the player narrations.  I'll be looknig forward to next week.

[Tobias]

Thanks, Jasper.

If anyone's got any hot ideas for my threesome of characters to tackle, they'd be more than welcome - I want to break out of the mold of 'standard' things I run. Heavy combat's probably not such a hot option, since the characters would go down quick.