Anthony e-mailed me a month or more ago, saying that he was hurting for some gaming, heard I was gaming regularly and wondered why we never gamed together.

I responded that I always told him he only had to ask and we could game together.

A month or more of figuring out all of our schedules and here we are.

I put a bunch of games on the table and pushed for Otherkind. No one seemed seriously leaning towards any one game, so Otherkind it was.

I read the bit about the kinds out loud, paraphrased the intro and off we were to character generation.

Aaron, veteran of my DitV games and the weekly Burning Wheel game, made an Elf, not a surprise. His angle on it was neat.

Aaron 2, who hasn't done much gaming, wanted to make a dwarf but so did our host Anthony. In the end they decided to be brothers.

Andrew, who has gamed lots of White Wolf but other than that, I'm not sure of his RPG background, picked a Troll.

I wrote out the four things: Narration, Motion, Life and Safety on the manilla envelope that I kept the Overkind stuff in. It helped to put the dice for each roll in each circle.

Name: Thorfin

Kind: Dwarf
Spade/shovel: Graceful
Humming & Whistling: Artful
Growing: Powreful

Description: Short, Stout, Green Hat, w/ pipe of grass between my teeth, hard, strong & fair impression

Name: Pick-up
Kind: Dwarf
Ax: Graceful
Clicking/Humming: Artful
The earth speaks to me: Powerful

Small but strong, sweet face, honest, purple eyes, short beard, covered in robes (what's underneath), bounces around the world, humming to the eath as the earth hums back.

Name: Hob
Kind: Troll
Hammer: Artful
Facemaking: Artful
Hiding: Artful

Description: A wonderful picture of a spiky, hairy troll with two fanged teeth and a hammer.

Name: Caern
Kind: Elf

Staff: Artful
Singing: Powerful
Show the beauty of life: Powerful

Description: A mixture of an elf and an oak, sinking roots with every step. Noble, fierce, defiant. Robed in natural colors. Believes humans are not lost.

The game started when they heard iron church bells ringing in a sacred grove. It struck the twilight hour, ringing 8 times on a warm summer day.

Dice were first rolled as Aaron wanted Caern to sing a return song, a song like thunder rolling over the horizon, overcomign the town.

He put a 1 in the Life bracket, so someone died.

He left the narration to me.

I decided that the honored priest who rang the church bell for the first time heard his reply and fell off the tower, hit the ground dead.

When they got to the town, just a few minutes before the hour of nine would be struck out, the entire town was in the church, a priest giving a hellfire and brimstone speech against the OTHERS, who the iron bell would drive away.

The game worked well.

Andrew was used to a more traditional RPG experience and I think didn't grokk right away that in order to contribute meaningfully to a scene with his character, he had to roll the dice and have a stake in it. He came to the table more in the latter part of the game but I would've liked to have drawn him out sooner. I loved his character and wanted to see more of Andrew gaming.

There was a scene in which one dwarf brother was talking to the priest before his congregation and the other dwarf was climbing to the bell tower to cut the rope they use to ring the bell.

I didn't do enough during this scene to involve Aaron (elf's player) and Andrew (troll's player). Aaron knows my GMing style and so he muscled his way in after a while but Andrew doesn't know my gaming that well and kind of got phased out. I should have pressured Andrew to do something, mayhaps.

In the end, the bell was left covered in moss and broken while the church was rcoked by an earthquake.

The players ran for the woods, barely getting out in one piece. Then the troll found a good hiding place with the use of his friends' skills.

The players found a really interesting solution to a small town being founded in their grove.

Essentially, they were split.

After being drive from town, trying to reason with the people, the dwarven brothers were split.

One and the elf wanted to show the people the magic and majesty of Elsewhere.

The other and the troll wanted to get rid of 'em all.

I had the two groups each roll their dice, each trying to send the grove onwards in their own way.

They each rolled really high, one rolling 3 6's and the other rolling 2 6's and a 5.

They each put a six in narration.

I asked them to work out how it happened as a group.

They did.

The troll and the angry dwarf, Pick-up, summoned the creatures of the forest, bringing forth a massive earthquake.

The elf and the well-adjusted dwarf put the townsfolk to sleep, having the vines and the trees ease the town off of the grove, putting it underground, in the fissures caused by the eathquake.

The townsfolk never woke up and the angry villagers in the forest who were looking for the others who came and wrecked their church, came home to find their village gone, the townsfolk sleeping fitfully where it had been.

Thoughts:

- Speaking bears, woodswomen, and the elk are mentioned and naturally, I wanted to see how they'd work in play.

- I should have been harsher in making them describe their loss of life as they killed. I think 3 mortals got killed and I should have had them describe their shortcomings. I missed the boat on that one.

- It has this odd feel of a kind of inverted Dogs in the Vineyard somehow. There is something going on about community in this game too.

- What does the artful, graceful, powerful descriptors signify? I didn't understood what role they played in the game. Are they just there so that others narrating the scene can narrate someone's powers as they envision them?

- I was having a bad day when I ran this, a really just shitty day. Gaming pulled me out of it a bit but I'd love to run this again when I was having a better day, all in all.

- Something in me would like a 6 to mean that you can have anyone at the table narrate the scene, you get to choose.

- I hope I get to game with these fellas again, try our hand at some other lovely games on my shelf that need-a-playin'.

Something in me would like a 6 to mean that you can have anyone at the table narrate the scene, you get to choose.

I think you are spot on here. In my one outing with Otherkind, I changed the rule on narration to mean that a high die meant you could choose who narrated, and a low die meant the GM chose.

Suddenly the narration die became vitally important to everyone, rather than a nerf slot. Interestingly people often set a high die for narration and then picked another non-GM player as narrator.

rafial wrote:

Something in me would like a 6 to mean that you can have anyone at the table narrate the scene, you get to choose.

I think you are spot on here. In my one outing with Otherkind, I changed the rule on narration to mean that a high die meant you could choose who narrated, and a low die meant the GM chose.

Suddenly the narration die became vitally important to everyone, rather than a nerf slot. Interestingly people often set a high die for narration and then picked another non-GM player as narrator.

Nice, I'm glad someone else was on the same page with that one.

Oddly, I'd still want 1-3 to mean the GM narrates and 4-5 mean that the player narrates. But 6 being the player's choice seems like a stylish way to go.