Mothlands, Game 1

Mothlands, Game 1

Today I GMed my first game of blades. In an original setting, no less.

And it went even better than I could have hoped.

When we went around the table for character creation, I had people explain their backgrounds and heritage and everyone immediately started getting into character, tying their stories together and explaining how they knew one another.

Which was good because for the last two dots I’d had the idea of asking them to think of a positive and a negative bond with their fellow player characters. I essentially got a nice little pre-game narrative in which the team agreed to hawk what they THOUGHT were strange worthless baubles off on chumps. Before the game had started we had the seeds for our first score.

The last hour or so was spent in free play with the training wheels off. They researched angles of attack, they talked to contacts, and they dabbled with the wares only to discover they weren’t so worthless after all. As we played the scenes we were also discussing what their first crew special ability would be and they chose the equivalent of “bound in darkness” (I’m using custom character and crew sheets for my setting). Suddenly, we had a reason to rope in the more hesitant PC as the activation of the device loosely connected their minds to one another by way of a silvery implant. Play inspired the advancement decisions and those initial advancement choices inspired the role play.

So now the crew is on a mission to sell the damn things BACK to the people who offloaded them on the crew in the first place. Not a bad idea considering they happen to be a network of gossips and spies. The perfect product, perhaps, but one that’s going to have far reaching political and societal implications, and they’re only just getting a foot in the door.

I was really surprised the directions the crew took and how easy it was to improvise with good input from them. We even ended up starting out the story in a different city than I had expected based largely on three of the characters sharing a common heritage.

What’s more, I had a lot of opportunities to describe (and flesh out) the setting based on their questions and their choices, and I hinted at a thing or two down the road with a couple ambiguous clocks. That really got their intention.

Considering this was the first official game for all of us, I have to hand it to John for making an evocative, intuitive, and functional game. Even with a lot of the knobs tweaked, the good stuff shined right on through.