The first session of this scenario is discussed here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14027 and my prep for this session here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14098 .

In summary, last night’s session rocked. Here's what happened:

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(Credits roll…)

Katrin on foot, accompanied by Roland’s riders. Snowfall deepening, dogs cavorting.
The forest opens on a sharply jutting mountainside.
The group winding their way up a narrow ledge in single file, riders now leading their horses.
Katrin looks up as winds howl above, then both above and below; around the group the snow swirls gently.
A half-broken stone wall, a ruined tower. Ramshackle buildings, shown to be of wood covered with patched hide and bark where the snow has been blown off.
A doorway and a few steps down.
Katrin now in the lead, flanked by the snow-encrusted guards, strides into:

(Credits end)

***

A Dornish hall, half sunk into the ground. Tables running along both walls, a head table on a dais at the far end that spills over with rugs and tapestries: more splendour than Katrin has seen since leaving Baden’s Bluff, yet without elegance or refinement. Clearly, a great raider’s den.

At the head table sits Roland: a grey-bearded, massive man with a laugh that fills the hall with thunder as the dogs race to greet him. At his shoulder stands a woman Katrin has known, years ago: Veddia Allin, the older sister of Katrin’s lover Tam.

***

We flash back to a radiant, seventeen-year old Katrin hurrying down a garden path holding a brand-new sword; pausing by a window. Inside, her father at his desk, still and silent, his face in shadow. From behind him the voice of Veddia, passionately, desperately complaining. “When will you acknowledge me? When will you finally acknowledge me? Iodor?”

Katrin comes quietly around the corner just as the door flies open and Veddia comes cannoning right into her, tears streaming. “Hello?” Katrin smiles and steps aside. Veddia flees, her face averted.

“Father?” Katrin sits down across from her father, leans her sword against the desk. On the desk, his hands are shaking, crushing papers they are pretending to sort through. Other than that, he’s as still as stone.
“Father? What was that about?"
Silence. Papers shivering, crackling.
“Father? I’m no longer a little girl. You can tell me about it?”
Iodor stands, turns his back, starts giving irrelevant instructions of some sort, voice choking.
“Already done," Katrin says, with deep frustration. Her father comes around the desk and puts his arms around her, leans on her, kisses the top of her head. “Kat,” he murmurs. “Ach, Kat.”

***

Back in Roland’s Hall, Roland stands and comes forward as Veddia bows deeply, formally. “Our good cousin Katrin. Welcome, welcome!”
They meet in the middle of the Hall with long strides, hands gripping wrists in the traditional Dornish warrior’s greeting. Katrin hasn’t been brought up in Baden’s Bluff for nothing: she knows her politics and is doing her best to present herself as a warrior, and it is evident that Roland likes what he sees. “A meal? Some rest perhaps? Or should We show you Our little kingdom?” Katrin wants the tour, to Roland’s obvious pleasure. Another not-so-subtle test passed.

***

Outside dusk is falling. Snow whirls. Katrin notices the longbow on a guard’s back. Roland nods: “Elven arrows. The best.”
They end up at the edge of the plateau, talking orcs. “We must sweep them off this continent!” Roland insists feverishly. “Off the face of Aryth!” Beneath them, snow falls into the darkness in which the winds howl. Katrin crouches and lets a handful of snow powder through her fingers. “So do you think you are up to the job?” she says, deliberately, and grins up at Roland. Thunder gathers on his brows – and erupts in a boom of laughter as he slaps her on the back mightily. She takes his offered hand and pulls herself up. “Well,” she says, serious now. “Are you?”
“It would be a lot easier if those cold bitches of snow elves weren’t stabbing us in the back. On top of everything else.”
“We will have to discuss snow elves,” Katrin says stubbornly.
“They are traitors," Roland insists.
Both break eye contact at the same time. Side by side, stubborn, they stand and stare into the falling snow and gathering darkness.

***

As Katrin brushes her hair out and puts her leather jerkin back on over a fresh shirt before dinner, Veddia comes in with an armful of dresses, which Katrin refuses tactfully. (Not only that all of these particular dresses would look horrible on her, but she means to go to dinner as the warrior, in her jerkin and breeches and with the sword on her back.) The two women exchange news hesitantly. Veddia seems lonely and eager for news from home, but is flabbergasted (unnoticed by Katrin) at learning that Katrin means to marry her little brother, Tam. Veddia hints that Roland is getting old and stubborn and advises Katrin to accede to her “Lord’s little wishes”. Katrin smiles.

***

Dinner. Which has progressed to the stage where the food has been devoured and dogs fight over bones in the middle of the Hall, while bawdy jokes fly and wine slops freely across the tables. They have an orc here, too, a live one, on a chain, that someone drags in for entertainment. A female, its eye cavities empty, its body covered in new sores and old scars. It’s strangling a dog to death about a scrap of meat as Katrin notices it for the first time (just as a heavily drunk Roland pours more wine for Katrin), registers that those scars speak of things much more horrible than battle – and acts.

Like a hero from an earlier, more glorious age, she leaps up on the table and bounds along it, sword drawn. Her blade screeches along the chain, lobs most of the orc’s skull off. The orc twitches and hits the flagstones at Katrin’s feet, already a corpse. “We are Dorns!” Katrin cries out in a ringing voice, sword raised high. “This is how we treat our enemies!”

Between two heartbeats, the people at the two flanking tables stare. The white-haired man who’d just been struggling to get away from his neighbours, dagger out and sputtering with fury at losing his best breeding bitch to the “stinking orc pig”, sits back down with a slump.
Roland, who’d thought Katrin was meaning to do a little war dance on the table and was grasping for her ankles to try and trip her over (fair game), comes sliding along the table on his stomach.

He scrambles to his feet and raises his own sword, swaying slightly. “Who do you think you are, to kill my orc in my own Hall?”

Time itself slows down to let the two Dornish leaders face off across the dead, maimed orc. Choosing to overlook Roland’s implicit challenge, Katrin sheathes her sword. “This is how we treat our enemies,” she says quietly.

“You will make amends for this,” Roland hisses; but as Katrin turns and strides out, support from the people in the Hall is partly with her and not with their own Lord.

***

A little later, Katrin wanders unsteadily along a nightly hallway, opening roughly-made doors at random.

“Hello.” A slim young man with a tallow candle and a huge book smiles shyly. “You lost?”

Katrin lets out a breath. “I think so. I’m Katrin Baden. Who are you?”

“Reifels. Roland’s son. I’ll set you on your way to the guest rooms if you like, come this way.” They walk. He drags his left leg, and his left arm wrapped around the book is like dead branches. “You’ve got –”

“His son? I wasn’t aware Roland had any children!”

“Well. Yes. I don’t like to be at those dinners. You’ve got wine all over your …”

“Not wine.”

Reifels cringes. “They killed a dog again?”

Katrin stops and faces him. “No. I killed the orc. Your father wasn’t too happy.”

“You what?!” Reifels sidles back from the looming Katrin.

“Sorry. I won’t hurt you.” She laughs and looks lost. “Tomorrow I’ll be sober…”

“Oh no, don’t worry, I’m not –” The book slides from his arm, Katrin catches it. “Don’t! Don’t let blood get onto it please; here, I’ve got a handkerchief.”

They walk down some narrow stairs, Reifels carrying the candle and fishing for a key, Katrin dabbing at herself with his handkerchief, holding the book well away from her stained jerkin.

“Here, my study. My father doesn’t like me to have books lying around everywhere.”

Katrin admires Reifels’s incredible wealth in books. He says there must be almost a hundred of them here, he tried to catalogue them once but misplaced the parchment. He offers her tea from a pot sitting by the fireside (a couple of days old and who knows but the inkpot may have fallen in as well), and they sit and talk about this and that, about their fathers and the difficulties of being an heir.
There’s a bit of a glitch, hastily covered over, when Reifels mentions Veddia and expresses his hope that his father won’t be marrying “beneath his station” – and Katrin simply informs him with a smile that she’s going to marry Veddia’s brother Tam, “in the spring. If we ever get there.”

Reifels has good knowledge of Dornish family trees it seems, he has Katrin’s parents and their ancestors by rote. He puts the book Katrin carried for him away and wrestles an even bigger folio from an upper shelf to show her illustrations of the New Palace in Baden’s Bluff, destroyed by dragon’s breath in the Last Battle. They pore over the ancient drawings, their heads close together. “Beautiful, isn’t it,” Reifels whispers.
Katrin nods. “We should make it like that again.”
A smile dawns on his face. “We should, shouldn’t we?”
“One day,” Katrin tells him.

At which point Reifels’s worries pour out. He’s been observing Veddia’s influence on his father with concern, he says; apparently Roland is getting more and more paranoid and is turning in on himself and away from his own people, and it is Veddia who seems to be the cause for that. “These days you can hardly speak to him without going through her. I shouldn’t be asking this of you, but… “ Perhaps Katrin could speak to his father and warn him against Veddia’s growing unhealthy influence?
Katrin’s soft heart takes over and she agrees to try.

On this note they say good night: Katrin promising to meet again (when she’s sober) and wondering whether Roland will ever talk to her again, Reifels being of the opinion that you never know but that Roland not having killed Katrin on the spot nor having had her thrown off the Pike is probably a good sign.



---



Notes to follow, mine probably tomorrow. Katrin’s player Lucy will hopefully be chiming in before that. As usual comments welcome – regarding nifty ideas on possible future developments though, I’d be grateful for those (if any) to be posted in the prep thread I linked to above, so that Lucy can join in here without worrying about spoiling her own surprises. Thanks!

Thanks for the scene summary Kerstin, and for a wonderful session!

Okay, where to begin? As Kerstin mentioned already, last night's session rocked. The incredible, wonderful and amazing thing was Katrin's (and my) reaction to the unexpected Bang of the tortured orc in Redguard's dinner hall, and the extended contest that followed. I feel like now I actually understand what "Story Now!" is all about. It's moments like that, when the character unexpectedly rises up and does something that tells you something about their personality that you never knew before. (Garbled sentence, but you know what I mean!)

The whole session felt like new ground again, which meant lots more negotiation and "stepping back" out of character than I'd been used to before. That was a good thing, and made for a cooler session. I discovered that I still have the D&D-instilled reaction of "how do I win in this scene?", which is slowly being replaced as I figure out what Katrin's goals are and how she's trying to achieve them. I'm at a strange halfway-point: I still think Katrin needs a crushing defeat, but I'm still tempted to spend a Hero Point every time she loses a contest (or a round of a contest). And yet, oddly enough, I'm still cautious about augments.

It seems like this game is getting stranger and more wonderful by the session. I love it! And I feel like we really discovered Narrativism: my PC leapt up off the page and into action, and told me exactly what she was and wasn't willing to risk, and for what reasons. I barely had to do a thing.

It was incredible.

randomling wrote: I barely had to do a thing.

The whole session felt like new ground again, which meant lots more negotiation and "stepping back" out of character than I'd been used to before.

I still think Katrin needs a crushing defeat, but I'm still tempted to spend a Hero Point every time she loses a contest (or a round of a contest).

Wow, sounds like a great evening of play. No useful feedback, although I'll echo Mike about how it would be nice to see how you handled certain things mechanically.

Mostly just chiming in to say it sounds like it was fun!

--Bryan

Thanks for feedback Bryan! It was a fun game and it's good to know you liked reading about it.

Mike Holmes wrote: I'll bet you didn't have any major or total defeats, did you? Kerstin, you aren't getting around to that stomping yet! :-)

When are you going to have another player in there? :-)

Anyhow, some mechanical details would be cool. I like what I read (which actually is unusual, I personally feel that RPG play is mostly enjoyed in the playing), but it would be fun to find out what happened behind the scenes. What worked, what didn't?

StalkingBlue wrote:
Miserable failure. :-)

Mechanics:

We had only one contest, the extended one around Katrin’s mercy-killing of the orc. Most of the abilities on her character sheet applied as augments in this contest (bringing her over the w3 threshold) – which goes to show how major this impromptu Bang was. After a bit of discussion, Lucy stated Katrin’s goal as “Teaching these Dorns a lesson about humanity by killing the orc”. Because if in order to win the war against the Shadow you have to become “like one of them”, Katrin had rather lose.

Second round: Lucy bids about half of her remaining AP, which Roland can’t match, so again Katrin goes first. Hazy on the details here, Lucy can you help perhaps? Some talky ability used on Katrin’s part (which one?), but not sure whether that was the “That’s how Dorns should treat their enemies” spiel or something else that I’m forgetting about? Second HP spent, which leaves Roland out of AP (at -2 or so).

What worked well:

- Having contest resolution, not task resolution. (Yay HeroQuest.) I may not have succeeded in conveying this in my play report, but the scene was very tense and came very, very close to Katrin and Roland jumping at each other’s throats. Lucy stated, “I leap up on the table, draw my sword and lop that orc’s head off in one blow.” In DnD it would have remained at that: “You sure? Ok, roll initiative.” Which would have decided where the situation was going. In HeroQuest it was, “Interesting. Let’s stop and think for a moment what you want Katrin’s goal to be here.” We could never have played this scene this way without HQ rules support, much less with a set of intrusive wargame rules screaming to be used in the background.

- Augments. There weren’t very many things on Katrin’s char sheet that didn’t come into play in this contest, and that was highly appropriate... and surprising. Neither of us two realised what power this particular Bang had.

- Using poker chips to represent APs (Ian Cooper's trick). Makes bookkeeping much easier and is worlds more dramatic than scribbled notes.

- Having active NPCs ready to grab the PC. There wasn’t an instant where the pace lagged. Not to say we had tension or action all the time, far from it, I think we managed to vary the pacing and mood a lot from scene to scene. What was even better is that it helped me with one peculiar thing in my style that has always created trouble for me in other styles: my NPCs tend to run away with the story. Instead of playing someone “as written” I’ll play them as characters, same way as if they were PCs. I improvise a lot; and I love playing off of my players’ emotions. This works so much better with all those nifty tools like Relationships, goals and Bangs! It almost shouldn’t be allowed.

- Having some Bangs prepared, mostly because this meant I had thought quite a bit about how to put Katrin in a quandary. What I had prepared didn’t come into play all that much (yet), but it enabled me to sense I was on to something when I dropped that orc into the dinner scene and saw Lucy’s reaction. I merely had to turn the gruesome detail dial up a bit and, wow, “bang”. (I was really going somewhere else with the scene until I saw Lucy’s face change.)

What didn’t work so well:

- I wish I had suggested more contests.
The moment of mental wrestling about the snow elves between Katrin and Roland at the edge of the cliff would have deserved one I’m thinking, and would have provided us with guidance on where to take this dramatically, instead of sort of saving it for some future scene. (I guess this is why they don’t call it “Story Later"…) The scene was fine as far as it went, it established nice bits of Dornish colour we’d never been able to get in the past and ended on a stylish “deadlock of wills” note, but didn’t go anywhere much dramatically. I suspect we could have got quite a bit more out of that scene by considering where the clash between the characters was and how to express it in a contest.

- I should have driven the game a lot more forcefully, and could have put a great deal more pressure on in much shorter time. I was stepping way more softly than I need to in this style, have to get used to that.
(Although to be fair we spent a lot of time talking about Katrin’s goals and options in the various scenes, and it felt like that was very important for Lucy, to learn how much her range of options has widened since dissing the old system. Lucy? Kick me if I am talking nonsense here?)

I forgot to say: after the extended contest I asked Lucy which of Katrin's abilities had been most passionately engaged in the contest. She said Honourable, so I gave her three directed HP to increase the rating of that.

That's in response to whoever suggested rewarding instances of impressive play immediately. Thanks for that, wonderful advice.

randomling wrote:

StalkingBlue wrote:
Miserable failure. :-)

Can't say I noticed you trying to crush me! :)

My memory was that my actions were:

First round, slicing off the orc's head, with a Hero Point.
Second round, holding up my sword and shouting "Is this how we Dorns treat our enemies in these dark times?" Lost some AP on that. No Hero Point.
Third round, much more personal: looking straight at Roland, and saying, "Is this how we treat our enemies?" Hero Point, and just about winning the contest.

I think we even discussed a rolling-initiative style element to the contest at one point, and decided against it because it was too mechanical.

Yeah. The "Oh heck, what do I do now?" moment was wonderful. It just seemed to play exactly into Katrin's mindset. but I'm dying to know where you were going with that scene before I had a reaction to the orc! :)

Yeah, I felt by turns very excited and utterly bewilderedin that session, so a lot of the soft-stepping and out-of-character talking and negotiation was necessary for me. I guess I'm still getting used to this new style a lot more than you are - it can be hard to get a handle sometimes on what I want and how to drive the scene dramatically. More pressure would have been hard for me to handle just then, I think.

StalkingBlue wrote:

randomling wrote:

StalkingBlue wrote:
Miserable failure. :-)

Can't say I noticed you trying to crush me! :)

Erm, I wasn't.

Then again I'm still too enchanted to see you come out of yourself and actually play, not to mention dare play Katrin as a big, flamboyant hero. If you don't mind my saying so.

But yeah, something stomping this way comes...

I think we even discussed a rolling-initiative style element to the contest at one point, and decided against it because it was too mechanical.

Huh? I don't get it. What could that have been? There's no such mechanic in HQ.

Seriously though, moments like the one last session won't be likely to occur in every game. Smaller ones, sure. (For example Katrin's brief dilemma about whether to accept a dress from Veddia to make her happy was a really really small one, a micro-bang if you like.) But I do think that this one was special.

randomling wrote: I don't remember clearly, but we (briefly) talked about using a contest to determine who would go first. Or something like that.

Hmm. I'm a tad confused about the whole "daring" thing in terms of who goes first. Do you mean something like percentage of starting points bid? Because, otherwise all I'm seeing is code for "biggest bid." Given that bid size has to match the action.

I think you'll see more contests in the future. If you're looking back now and seeing opportunities, then you'll start to note them more and more in play.

In technical forgespeak, these are techniques, but tools works just fine, too.

Consider that a lot of that stuff that you say "didn't work so well" is just fine play. That is, you're human. Yeah, maybe you can do better. But it sounds like it's fun already. So don't strain too hard to push more or to get play to look like something else. It already looks pretty good from here at least.

<shrug> I'd play. Hell your game sounds as good as mine already. :-)

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Hmm. I'm a tad confused about the whole "daring" thing in terms of who goes first. Do you mean something like percentage of starting points bid?

Third session reported here.

Using poker chips to represent APs (Ian Cooper's trick). Makes bookkeeping much easier and is worlds more dramatic than scribbled notes.