The Forge Archives

Hey.  We played a first session of OtherKind and it went pretty well.

We took it nice and easy.  I GMed.  Meguey and Emily made their characters there at the table, and I made a point of saying that staying behind to preserve Numina would be personally destructive, permanently, and that they're doing it anyway, and why are they?  

Meguey's orc, Osprey, loved a wood-woman, whose grove was cut down for lumber and who left for Elsewhere long ago.  Osprey's going to find the numinous wood from her grove, wherever it is, and bring it back to her.  I forget who mentioned the possibility of a numinous ship made from the wood, but that's likely what it'll be.

Emily's troll, Yon, loves the landscape, feels a deep connection to and affection for his mountainous coast.  That led me right into the first scene: people quarrying stone to build a church, splitting out big chunks of his mountain and dragging them with iron chains.  Yon's wind-oriented - one of his descriptors is wind magic and he transforms into wind - so I talked about how the iron smell stays in the air even when the people have gone.  (I can see Yon never going Elsewhere, just giving up connection to Life until he's an immobile wind-carved stone, high in his mountains.)

So it went from there.  Like I say, we took it easy.  We didn't hit all of the mechanics, we just opened up the situation and got comfortable.  Next session'll start with a bang.

My big concern just now is the whole economy of Numina and Radiance.  Every 10 points of Numina you save lets you write a retiring-hero sentence, and is that often enough?  If the game's only going to go 3-5 sessions, wouldn't you want to write one pretty much every session?  That means saving 10 points of Numina per!  I'm thinking strongly of doubling it to a sentence per 5, or I'm afraid I won't even see it in play.

A thing I liked: Early on, Yon the troll used wind magic to call up a supernatural darkness and storm, to drive the slaves and overseers out of the quarry.  Emily rolled a very bad roll, twos and threes and just one five.  I narrated that instead of driving them out, the shadows and winds made them work faster, chopping crudely at the stone and shouting to be heard.  A stone slid and crushed a slave's leg, and they just dragged him out of the way and kept working.  I thought it was a nice non-whiff.

Oh!  I didn't comment on this thread, but I should've.  Y'all are an inspiration!

-Vincent

Hi Vincent,

I think that "economy" issue is probably the key one, and only extended play is going to tell the tale. I really, really like the "personal reason" that you guys put into the game, for each character. I didn't do that with our group - we just bombed into things and I think that's why each character came off a little flat.

"Pressure" is a related issue. I tend to be high-pressure on the characters in a game like this one - every scene brings another choice, with many NPCs or circumstances bringing in another nuance of the system (e.g. Iron especially). So their Connections to Life came under fire pretty quickly, and I think two of the characters dropped by 1 in the first session.

Best,
Ron

Hey, so talk to me about pressure, if you want.  How do you build it?  What makes an NPC or a situation good for it?  When you played, how high did you go with Iron -- 4? 5? Even higher?  (Did you ever split Iron between the Motion and Safety dice?)

I've made a big deal out of how brutal and ugly the people are, and I'm looking forward to undermining that with Moonlight.

-Vincent

Oh, and I have an irrelevant terminology question, it's so irrelevant that I'm sticking it here instead of in its own thread.  I'm pretty confident it won't derail this one.  It's: why is it FLGS, not FNGS a la Spiderman?

why is it FLGS, not FNGS a la Spiderman?

FLGS = Favorite Local Game Store
FNGs = Fucking New Guys

Ah.  Naturally.  Shoulda seen that myself.

Hi Vincent,

I piled on the pressure in two ways. The first way is quantitative, using Iron, in whatever combinations of Safety and Motion seemed sensible at the time. In truth, and recalling that GenCon occurred between then and now, I can't remember how I split it in any given instance.

The second way is situational, in terms of the data I presented to them in scenes. I wasn't vague, which is the usual way a GM keeps the players in an "ambiguous" situation. Instead, I described people trying to keep themselves alive and conduct their affairs in a practical, agricultural, plain old human way. The main Iron dude was a pretty tough, decent, necessary guy for the community. They were also using a Numinous place to sacrifice animals and generally do "Numinous-screwing-up stuff." So the players could see that nothing abominable was going on in human terms; it wasn't as if they were destroying the local ecology or sacrificing captive Otherkind or anything else villainous. Yet they had to stop it to save the Numinous grove.

Best,
Ron