http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9688 for a little bit of info on the game.

I had the first session of this game this saturday and it was great, even if it was just prepatory material and one player was absent.

As a preface, I'm including several house rules in the game:

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Any action which causes you to lose a point in a spiritual attribuite and gain a point in another gives you 3 points in the one that you gained.

Fast & Loose item handling.

Switching around some profiencies(Something I'm not entirly clear on), polearms lets you use lances and is compatible with shields.

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So the second player's character was added in to the story, Alithena, a female urbanite/swashbuckling Lady driven largely into her involvement with this scenario as Revald, the sadistic canidate for Xanarian Empricy, happens to have a friend of hers locked in one of his estates, rescuing her would be of great intereast to Julian(the more sensible but shadowy canidate for the throne) as the captive happens to be of relation to the high priest of Xanaria, her exposure would very easily destroy Revald's popularity with the church.

Alithena was brought up in a religious house, but after continued unfriendly exposures to the church she's driven towards athiesm, attempting to avoid a public exposure of it.

Also in the picture are a venerated group of bandits hanging around Xanaria, they are nomads from a Shirayi missionary branch of the three-becomes-one church, estranged from the communication with the Church for so long that they had become even more corrupt than the Church itself, as well as possessing very confused idealogious. Led by three figures based on the Three-Becomes-One. Because of their function as missionaries, The Church more or less promotes ignoring the bandits' criminal behavior, wheras Julian has always shorn scorn for them as any regular theif. That choice has caused some amount of unpopularity with the Church and the public at large.

Alithena's SAs:
Luck 3
Conscience 2
Drive: Free her captive friend 2
Faith: Athiesm 0
Destiny: To meet God 0

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Next session will be partly prep to incorperate the absent player but also to finish up a little bit on a few things we didn't touch on. I'm wondering about running a test-combat. How nessecary do you think it is? I think it would be nice since the player's main knowledge of roleplaying comes from D&D and the system is radiclly different, and when the game does naturally come to a combat, I'd like them to be well-prepared, and i'd like it to be fast moving with a decent knowledge of what's going on.

Still, I have some reservations against it, as it's time that doesn't really add to anything other than decreasing search time in the future.

If I do run a test combat, do you think one would be enough or should I try two, to display the different kind of tactics that could happen?

Any ideas on improvements to the story or other hooks I could throw in?

Yes!

You MUST run several test combats. Thus can be done as an out of game exercise, or even in-game - one way to do this is to use throwaway characters, another way is to use their real characters but specify that it's a series of "friendly duels" where everyone is pulling their blows etc.

Whatever you do, make it hard, fast and brutal. Try as hard as you can to
kill off the players (alright, their characters) and do it using as many different maneuvers etc as possible. They'll get the idea pretty quick.

Once you're actually playing and you get into combat, don't let any NPC use a specific maneuver in combat until at least one PC has successfully used it, this way the players/characters will drive how quickly the combats get complex.

Brian.

Alright.

Personally, I'm planning for the antagonistic forces/NPCs to be roughly modeled on the priority system, and to have a set amount of spiritual attribuites.

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Heroic antagonists would have the priorities A,B,C,D,E,F with 8 Spiritual attribuites.

Prominent antagonists would have the priotities B,C,D,E,F,F with 6 Spiritual attribuites.

Common foes or thugs would have the priorites C,D,E,F,F,F with 4 Spiritual Attribuites.

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This would be subject to change if those types of characters turned out to be too weak to give the PCs much trouble.

That isn't really my main concern, as much as how those characters would scale to NPCs. It seemed like that would put most sample npcs, like guardsman, pretty close to the power of a "prominent antagonist". Scaling against beasts I'm not too concerned about. Would seem kind of intereasting if animals/monsters had a little bit of a boost, as I like the Tros take on them, something to be feared and not just mindlessly battled.

Do you think I should having the Players test-fight against one "Prominent antagonist" and one "Heroic antagonist" would be a good way to run the test combat?

Hmm.. firstly, I would only give SA's to important NPC's, not to your run-of-the-mill ones. YMMV of course, but to me, SA's are really a player bonus and I only ever give them to PC's and very important NPC's (level end-boses, if you like).

As for the samples, do whatever seems to work for you. The idea is to give the players a chance to experience combat without endangering their PC's, so that when they finally do get into a dangerous situation, they know the score and (hopefully) wont do anything silly. There's no reason not to throw uneven numbers against them (so they can try out terrain rolls), animals, weak opponents, strong opponents, etc.

Also, try and bring SA's into the fight halfway through. Their little eyes will light up when they realise they just got several extra dice because the fight was important to the character, and they'll be hooked from that point onwards.

Brian.

Bringing SA's into a fight:

Souns like an excellant idea. Even though the test fight would take place in an imaginary-vacuum inside of an arena where the events/injuries do not effect the game, I'm wondering about ways to make SA use as dramaticly charged as it should be.

For Julian:
Passion: Hatred for his brother, Revald
This I could see as after a round of fighting, a hooded opponenet is seen as Revald's personal strong arm.

For Alithena:
Besides Luck, Conscience I could see in applying to alot of possible situations, but none that immediately spring to mind. A possible scenario would be too have one of the opponents be a warhouse of failing health, and any attempt to show mercy would be aided by Conscience.

If they(And the third PC)were still standing, a Gol captain'd step in(Possibly to finish off the old man who isn't doing his job, another oppurtunity for the use of Conscience) along with a Great Cat. I figured that that should pretty likely lead to the PCs succumbing some damage, to understand the lethality of the combat system.

After that, I'm not quite sure. I was considering a skeletal monstrous being perpetually burning in a dark red flame. It's announced that anything that touches it's fire is damned eternally to hell. I figure that this'd be a good way to kick up the PC's atheist/non-3-becomes-1 SAs if they would come near enough to the flames to fight it. If the PCs wern't killed by it than that means they did a damn good job picking up the strategy of the game. Either way I'd let them have any points they increased in SA's as Insight points.

I'm a little concerned about how over-the-top the last encounter would be, perhaps if they could could out it was just some expert showman.

Also, the general design of this is somewhat railroady, perhaps by nessecaity to point out specific game details clearly in a limited alotment of time. I hope they won't assume that sort of design is par for the game.