The drama of a bored geek, ep.3

Unexpectedly, I'm here with another episode of my adventures as a
RPG master.

After a couple of days of settling, I found my niece drawing a
fantasy-style map, taking inspiration from the one I drew for the
campaign. This time the thing surprised me for real. The fantasy mood
actually caught on one of the girls, after all.

I took advantage of her interest for the artistic side of it, and we
started to draw more things together, such as weapons and pieces of
equipment to clip together with the character sheets.

After that she really seemed interested to give it a try. We addressed the
lack of a die by drawing numbers on a cube shaped magnet. I've to say that
Having a magnetic die is not ideal, but is far better than no die at all.

So far we had a couple of sessions, which turned out to be somewhat
hard to master, yet quite entertaining.  Besides the magnetic die,
some technical difficulties arose from the excessive simplicity of
my rule-set.  After the first session I had to refine it by adding
Perception and Charisma to the player's properties, and devising a
slightly more complex combat mechanics.

By the end of the second session the girls showed signs of being bored,
or maybe they were tired. I'm not so sure about how many sessions we are
going to hold, but I'll try to follow up each session with a recap here,
on my phlog.


THE STORYLINE

As already mentioned last time, I've devised a rough track of a storyline,
just avoiding to be too specific, since I'm aware that the things might
go in a completely different direction than what anticipated.

So, we have a war lord that is driving raids in the area. The party
gathered in the tavern to have a conversation about their latest
adventures, when a wounded man enters dramatically from the door and
asks for help.

The party is expected to learn about what is going on, and to go after
the raiders. They will find that some of them are skeletal warriors. If
the campaign goes beyond the first couple of battles, it should lead to
uncover the actions of a necromancer.


WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED SO FAR

The party is made of three characters, backed by my wife and our two nieces.

As the wounded man entered the tavern, the party started to act confusely,
while trying to extort some information to the poor fellow. They didn't manage
to get any useful information, and the streacher bearers bring him away.

The party decides to follow them to the village hospital, where they're not
welcome: the doctor insists that the injured man should be hospitalized for
the night, and pushes everybody out.

At this point, any reasonable person would probably just wait for the morning,
but the party decides to stun and impersonate a nurse, so they can approach
the man and talk to him. Tough luck, they didn't manage to stun the nurse, who
got alarmed and went to call reinforcements.

The youngest of the girls started to panic, her character entered in
cover-your-ass mode, and ran off the hospital in search of a alibi.  She ended
up reporting the remaining of the party to the patrol guards.  A couple of
minutes later more guards reached the hospital, alarmed by the nurse.

The following part is somewhat confused, and ended up with the two girls'
characters being imprisoned for use of force against public official (yes, the
youngest one knocked down the guard with a punch!). My wife's character, on
the other hand, managed to play innocent and did the sensible thing: she
waited till morning, queried the wounded man, reached the swordsmith, bought
weapons, and left for the nearby raided village.

The two girls who managed to escape from the prison, but something tells me
they're going to be captured.

Now seriously, what the fuck?? :D


FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS?

Tomorrow I shoud have the chance of reaching a nearby town, where I might be
able to get some actual dice.

I think there's room for at least another session. Stay tuned (but again,
don't hold your breath).