I have been very busy with Blight Upon Sombreval, but I have been getting a lot of gaming in, fortunately. I’ve been doing a bunch of cons, but I have also been hard at work organizing my local meetup.
I have been running a BRP game called Cosmic Wound in a long-time setting of mine, as well as Gradient Descent in Mothership. Both are open tables and through the local adventure game meetup. Mothership has been running strong, although it does seem like we’re approaching the end of the module sooner than later.
Cosmic Wound has been great, but it struggled a bit with the open table format. It was also a every-other game, and it had a few unfortunate bouts of getting a few sessions in a row cancelled.
After talking to a bunch of friends at GaryCon, I decided to try utilizing the numbers of the meetup to run an actual West Marches. I have ran and participated in West Marches in the past, some more successful than others, but given my past experiences and recent open tables, I feel like I have a good setup for the campaign. I will do a post on how I set it up in the future, but for now I want to post actual play sessions.
The above is the back of the flyer (sans contact info) for the West Marches campaign. This is a sequel to both the Doomed Reach and Cosmic Wound campaigns I have ran recently, although every campaign always gives an opportunity for a bit of a retcon, as well as trying out alternative takes. This particular take is to shift the setting to be more AD&Dish than I typically run. People often showed up to prior campaigns looking for many of the AD&D or later classes, and it can become difficult to sell people on the 3LBB perspective of “if you want to be a thief, just steal something.”
With the flyer and a bit of cross-group posting, I got somewhere around 30 bites expressing some form of interest. Out of those 30, 16 folks signed up for the kickoff. Here we met for pizza and discussion at an FLGS, talked about the campaign, and made several characters. As this campaign will require the use of downtime due to the utilization of 1:1 time, everyone was recommended making two to three characters.
Once we wrapped up, I wanted to at least try playing a bit, as many folks were either new to tabletop adventure games entirely, or they were new to the style. So I started everyone in front of a recently-discovered dungeon, in search for a ring of some ancient star-mage that the Church wants recovered. 16 characters entered into this cavernous dungeon They found rooms with amphora bearing the symbols of winged serpents. They dug through the sarcophagus of ancient astronomers. A halfling was obliterated by a hammer trap, and the party gave most of his corpse to stalking mountain lions. They fought animated statues, and found a hidden entrance to a deeper dungeon complex before we ran out of time.
Running for 16 people is an interesting experience. I have had 11 and 12 player tables in the past, and obviously every person you add in above maybe 6 or so kind of compounds the chaos. It was a fun experience, but I obviously had to abbreviate a lot of the procedures and systems just so we didn’t get too bogged down, but I think we were able to make sure everyone experienced that traditional adventure gaming experience.
Upcoming is the session report for the first player-scheduled session.