You know, TROS never fails to surprise me and make me say "cool".

Started a new campaign last night, and used the old "you're guarding a caravan... oops, here comes the raiders" McGuffin.

The players won. Against bad odds. Not one of them even took a wound.

It suited me to have these pre-gen characters killed off before the main character creation and actual start of campaign, so the next night, they were attacked again. 2-1 this time.

They won again. One of them was slightly wounded to the belly, but that's it.

These are novice TROS players mind, not experienced folk. Not novice in brains though, and they were using common sense and tactics, and quickly learning how SA's come into play etc.

Damn impressive to watch and a hell of a lot of fun. Never had a "caravan" start go like that before, that's for sure.

Of course, I really did want those pre-gen's not to survive, so I did a spot of deus ex machina and they were attacked again, with magic this time. They died. And yet even there, they managed to take out one of the very very powerful mages.

Should I have killed them off? Well, rock and a hard place. I would have been quite intrigued to see where they took things if they survived, but the pre-gen characters didn't have much thought in them and were a bit basic, plus I wanted the players to have the chance to make up their own characters ec, so made the decision to make sure they couldn't survive. But hell, if they had lived through the mages as well...

Heh, this is why I love TROS.

Brian.

How were the players with this? Did they understand what you were doing? Did they take it in stride? Or was it a nasty surprise? I mean, the caravan start seems to me to mostly work in that dying off early shows the lethality of the system. Given that this didn't happen, was it still worthwhile to force their deaths? Could you not have just said, "OK, you weren't supposed to survive that, good job. Now we're going to switch over to characters of your own design anyhow." ?

Mike

Hmm... yeah, I guess that what I *should* have done was discuss it with the players and tell them that it was my goal for the pregen's to die and taken them on board with that, I guess.

However, this is a very established gaming group, and I feel they trust me enough that when it became obvious that I was trying to kill them off, they were happy enough with it because it was clearly for a reason and not just because I was trying to be a killer GM. Their deaths (well, the method behind it) were supposed to foreshadow some later campaign stuff that the players would know but the characters would be ignorant of, so there was a reason behind my madness.

Brian.

So... did adding more troops, and bringing in magic to finally kill them, affect the quality of the foreshadowing? Were you originally planning on magic being part of that later campaign stuff, or have you had to alter your plans?

No, it wasn't really any extra foreshadowing, just more blatant.

My campaign world has just humans, no other races, but there are rumors of an old race simply known as "The Others" who were apparently serpentine and who used to exist hundreds of years ago before being wiped out by humans.

So, the original plan was that as the last pregen PC was killed by the bandits, with his last dying breath he would look beyond the firelight and see a scaly green figure directing the bandits... and then die. This way, the character's know nothing, but the PC's have the foreshadow of The Others returning.

Instead, two "The Other" sorcerers kicked their butts, but the effect is still the same in that the characters don't know anything but the PC's do, it was just more blatant than I would have liked.

Brian.