[TWoN] About Pere-di-fey
Paolo D.:
Finally I got the time to write.
That was a great night, here's a couple of interesting things:
- I asked the players, at the table, how much I'm authorized to mess with their backstories.
Stefano (Sidonie's player) told me that, of course!, I can mess with his character as I want, because he choose a character with a mysterious past just to enjoy this kind of messing. So, fuck yeah, let's go for it.
Andrea (Moonrat) told me that all the time before he ran from his Ammeni master, is basically fair game (so, in practice, I can mess a lot with his past and his origins).
And with Francesco (Cador) there is no past to mess about... He has a very straight character concept and, easy enough, his past is not on he table as an interesting premise for our game (we'll come back on this matter, should this thing change).
By the way, my point is that there's no "right" answer to my question, I was just interested in draw a line about it (as I mentioned above, we as a group have had plenty of disfunctional experience with campaigns where this line wasn't draw at all) so I'm well satisfied.
- Hah, Moonrat's turning-point day!
His crew/litter abandoned him after a very crucial conflict - they threw him off board and they went with Yellow Fang, a rival ratkin (female, kind of a "horde mother" full of ratkin's mental powers, and always pregnant by the way). Lots of buyoffs, lots of xps, a deleted secret (his ship - now "property" of Yellow Fang), and of course a lot of stress, regret and vengeance desires.
His Kairakau tutor, priest of the Halatu, told him "Now that you are empty, you are ready to be filled, if you want to", and so Moonrat decided to learn how to speak with the Land and to aquire knowledge from it. Now he's a priest of the Halatu too! He had plenty of advancements and was ready to aquire new secrets and keys to reflect the change: Key of Vengeance (Yellow Fang), Key of Outcast (his former litter), Key of the Halatu and Secret of Prophecy (based on Land-speech). He wants to use these powers to found more infos about the meaning and the contents of the Arcane Fog (at least, that was the reason that guided him to this Kairakau priest in the first place, but things are differents know, so we'll see).
And his tutor, in a refreshment scene, showed him an underwater cave full of weird glimmering corals (and living symbionts), with kind of a ratkin-like coral formation melted with the rest - he told him that this was a ratkin like him who discovered the link between his race and the Talalag, and that finally choose to became part of the Halatu. And explained him how to awaken that link. So now Moonrat has acquired the Secret of the mental Rat-symbiont, and a very ugly Vigor symbiont just to start. Yay!
(and it's just the start - I think that he'll meet other npcs with other ideas about what he should do and how he should think of the origins of his race)
- Sidonie found in her ship some ancient gold coins, and she decided to spend some of them to exhaust the debits of the last living member of the family of a guy of her crew (she really cares about them, they are all that's left to her of their former life). The merchant (an Ammeni smuggler) told her that these coin are old thousands of years and that they were produced at the time of a very old Ammeni lord: so he asked her where she took them, and she didn't tell him... But this smuggler knows of the Arcane Fogs, so the avalanche has just started ;-)
Just to make things worst, Yellow Fang just joined Sidonie's little pirate league (a small, poor league that would accept almost everybody just to add more ships to the fleet, and Yellow Fang now has two of them).
Ok, that's it for now. I'm writing some more crunch options for Moonrat, maybe I'll post them later.
Eero Tuovinen:
Ha, that's sounding quite fun!
Perhaps you could get some traction with the Moonrat by introducing some Kairakau NPCs to interact with? I'm thinking of a suitable refreshment scene where he could meet with some heroic boomerang hunter or virginal ship's mascot or whatever - some likeable people to mirror himself and his revenge against. I also like Yellow Fang, a down-to-earth denmother is a logical choice for an usurper from an idealistic, crazy albino captain.
I'm curious, did you assign the Harm for taking on a symbiont, and how large was the Vigor symbiont? Did you roll for how large it would be, or did you just assign it? (Both of those are valid - I'd assign a value if the symbiont was given by a NPC, but roll for it with Landspeech if a character was searching for one himself. Or, I guess I could give a 1-size symbiont of arbitrary SG choice to anybody without a check; the Talalag are pretty common in the ecosystem, I imagine. As long as you don't care what you inject yourself with and have the patience to search a bit, anybody can probably find some small, common symbiont just lying on the beach or attached to some plant or plant-like larger Halatu-creature. I think you don't need any particular Secrets or Abilities to take them, unless I misremember, as long as you're fine with the Harm.)
I like the underwater cave as a fictional element, it's rather exotic and fantastic, just as it should be. I imagine that one thing that makes heroic captains and landspeakers cool and otherworldly is how they have this whole another world they can visit; I intentionally made the symbionts that aid in aquatic life simple and common to make this the first detachment these people get from the rest of humanity. It occurs to me that none of the three primary Pool symbionts allows one to see in the dark, though, which would be useful in the dark recesses and deep trenches... that probably should come with the pressure/temperature symbiont, whichever it was - no sight, exactly, but some mysterious sense (electromagnetic, like fishes have) that helps a bit.
Anyway, jolly good job. Let us know how the game proceeds!
Paolo D.:
About the symbiont: in this refreshment scene in the cave, his Kairakau tutor attracted a swarm of symbionts from the nearby, and Moonrat was able to choose the one he wanted to take, in terms of size and powers. This was some kind of initiation ritual, so I thought that it could be right in this case to just let him choose which symbiont should represents better his desires in terms of power, and his willingness to risk in terms of size.
He choose a size 3 Vigor symbiont, and so, as per the book, he took an unresistable 3rd level Harm (under Vigor; the Pool it's not stated explicitely in the manual, but it talks of "phisically painful", so I just thinked that Vigor could be the one). No check allowed to reduce it, but there's a Secret dedicated to this after all, and maybe he'll take it sooner or later.
Next time, I think that he won't be able to just choose, but he'll have to search for the symbiont he wants in some way, he's able to take care of it with his Litter-bond (I) now, after all.
For the supersense symbiont: I think that this could deserve a symbiont of his own, like a second brand new "Istinct Symbiont #2" or something like that.
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