Author: Josh Mauldin

TL;DR

I talk about my group’s Duskwall regarding Whispers and spirit anchors. All of this is just our own personal worldbuilding.

Just a quick update on our campaign – we went from me GM’ing a group last Saturday with 2 PCs to one of the PCs taking over as GM tonight with 3 total PCs participating (myself included).

We spent an hour character building (about 20 minutes) and roleplaying introductions/working the two new players into the crew (about 40 minutes). Then we did a score for 2.5 hours. We ended up just starting development/clean up at the end, but we decided to push it to next session due to time.

I don’t know where I saw it, maybe in the Quickstart, but our group is far more comfortable with the pace of about 1 score per night based upon how long it’s taking us instead of 2 scores per 3-4 hour session. Maybe the time required for a score will go down, but at this point I think we’re relatively comfortable with the mechanics. We’re just adding a ton of flavor in, and we love it. Our GM made a good point that we’re doing a LOT of world building right now and that’s taking up a significant amount of time.

That’s about it for now, but I did want to share a lil bit of our world building. 2 things we came up with that I thought were cool to share: how our Whisper interacts with spirits and some details we fleshed out about spirit anchors.

We added a Whisper to our group and had fun exploring that. He’s an Iruvian noble who has an oil lamp (that you’d probably want to rub for some wishes) as a spirit anchor and his spirit mask is a silk scarf he wraps around his head to cover his face. Side note: the spirits in our world love the smell of peppermint, and it’s like an Iruvian trick-of-the-trade. So his silk scarf is not only enchanted to be a spirit mask, but as a part of that ceremony/manufacturing-process it was soaked in some special peppermint concoction.

Different Whispers or even non-Whispers who have some attunement to spirits will display that connection to spirits differently. Our Lurk who has a point of Attune will have his eyes roll back in his head as he attunes with spirits. Our Iruvian Whisper uses his demonic gift (passed down through his family from a demon patron in Iruvia) to speak Demon’s Tongue. Those mystical words he speaks pass through his enchanted, peppermint-soaked facewrap and become weapons or tools to use against spirits. Anyways, that’s how he compels/commands/interacts with that part of our Duskwall.

Regarding spirit anchors themselves, we sort of settled on 3 different types: spirit trinkets, spirit anchors, and fine spirit anchors. Spirit trinkets are essentially one-time-use spirit anchors. They had some kind of special value to someone, enough to leave a lasting emotional bond which is one of the requirements for spirits to be bound to a physical object. However, these items are mostly mundane and/or have been lost by the original owner. Anything can really be turned into a spirit trinket given the right emotional connection, but after a spirit inside a trinket is released, it would be a feat to get it to return to the same minor vessel. 

Spirit anchors are items of some value or made of a finer material. In order to bind a spirit anchor to a living person, that person has to pour some of their own essence into the anchor. A single person can only have one spirit anchor bound to them because of the emotional and otherwise spiritual toll it takes to bind yourself to the vessel. Touching the spirit anchor is akin to touching the person themselves, and one would never want to be separated from that object that holds some of their essence. It’s pretty heavy to take a spirit anchor, but that’s also what gives it the strength to be a (reusable) vessel to hold a spirit. Capturing a spirit and binding it inside your spirit anchor gives you command over the spirit and makes it your own for you to take out and put back in as often as you can attune with the spirit. 

A fine spirit anchor is like a spirit anchor, but made of only the finest materials and requires an extreme effort to craft and bind to a Whisper. Only full Whispers can harness the power of a fine spirit anchor due to the spiritual toll it takes to pour one’s essence into it. Whereas our Lurk who can attune would be able to get a normal spirit anchor when our Whisper finishes crafting it for him. Unlike a normal spirit anchor (or even a spirit trinket) that can only hold 1 spirit maximum, the fine spirit anchor can hold as many spirits as the Whisper is able to control based upon his experience, strength of will, and strength of the fine spirit anchor. It’s not a set number, but our GM basically said if our Whisper tried to put too many in, one risk would be that the fine spirit anchor broke and all of the spirits were released (just for example). But when more than 1 spirit lives inside the fine spirit anchor, they may or may not “get along.” In the event that the spirits grow hostile to each other, they may try to dominate or even consume the weaker spirit, giving the surviving spirit a strength/power/effect boost for some time. 

Anyways, that ended up being way longer than I ever intended, and if you made it this far, thank you for reading and I’m sorry it took so long. This kind of stuff is probably why we can only fit 1 score into a session. 

I’ve done my first 3 sessions this week, with 3 different groups. The first two I was a player, and in the 3rd I was the GM. All three sessions took between 3 to 3.5 hours. All three sessions consisted of character creation and then 1 score + development rolls.

I would say the average was 45 minutes for character creation, and that was because we took an effort to talk about backgrounds and RP it out a little. The first score took about 2 hours while people get comfortable with mechanics.

The development rolls and downtime was kind of the most frustrating part, but I don’t know if that was because we were tired at the end of the session, confused about some of the downtime/development system, or both.

I think the ordering of the pages for the downtime/development system is the roughest part. We found ourselves jumping around between the beginning (page 5?) and the end (29 and thereabouts) to do everything we needed to, and even then, I feel like I’ve missed some of the clean up in all 3 sessions.

Obviously, I’m having fun, because I played in 3 sessions in one week. Just trying to throw my 2 cents in for what I thought was the part of the quickstart that needed the most loving.