Tag: Charles Simon (umbralAeronaut)

#AgeOfBlood

Age of Blood v0.5 / Playtest 1, Session 2: Fuller House

Our characters are:

– Kasseri, the Voice.

– Lord Eddard Baldwin, the Captain.

– Eberhard Monheim, the Cultist.

– John Comber, the Ascendant.

and introducing:

–Sir Rowen, the Slayer.

With the town of Crumble pacified, our crew of adventurers marched home through the night. Our first action was to address the Complication that I rolled off-screen: Band Trouble. One of the blacksmith brothers had a tavern tussle with a fellow who was traveling through town, and the fight spilled out into the cold night and was being played out on the side of the road near what remains of Wygrove’s north gate. The players stumble upon the two in the final awkward moments of their drunken brawl: the sort of sad, slow-motion embrace of two exhausted boxers.

Lord Baldwin separated the two gentlemen to discover that the blacksmith’s adversary was a relatively well-done man wearing a coat with the heraldry of an apocryphal family: House Sanguine. He does not immediately recall any information about them, perhaps they are an obscure Eastern nobility. The fellow, apparently drunk beyond rational comprehension, has a note tucked into his belt. Baldwin takes the note without the man noticing but before they can restrain him further the courier breaks free and stumble-runs off into the night.

The note is sealed with a wax signet stamp but is otherwise utterly unremarkable, and is addressed to someone named “Ciel”. As they return to the fort the players comment OOC upon the ethical ramifications of pilfering the note (Lord Baldwin reveals here an interesting hint of opportunistic amorality), as well as the possibility of a perceived slight that their cohort has inflicted upon House Sanguine. They elect to make a public example of their cohort.

The morning after, as the seasonal laborers and farmers of the town gather to dole out assignments in the town square, Lord Baldwin takes a stage on what was once the town gallows and lectures the people on orderly and civil behavior, a shamed blacksmith at the side. We took this opportunity to introduce our fifth character, Sir Rowen, a former duelist instructor and bodyguard to the crown who was shamed and reassigned to the east. Sir Rowen is looking for an opportunity to pledge his service to a noble who will provide him employment, and moves to speak with the group once Baldwin is finished. He’s hired!

Now onto downtime actions:

Sir Rowen trains and acquires some temporary laborers to begin working at assembling rudimentary town defenses. I rule that this long-term clock, once completed, will result in a fleeting bonus to help against the first attack/raid the town sustains before they crumble uselessly (actual serious fortifications, like a permanent Stockade or the rebuilding of the Fort, are Holdings that must be acquired through the expedition reward structure, and I don’t want to undermine that system).

Eberhard opens the note that was swiped from the courier and discovers that it is an encrypted communication with scrambled letters. He embarks on a long-term clock to translate the letter, interspersed with a strong gather information (Study) roll on House Sanguine’s couriers. I tell the group that the couriers are regional locals who, judging by the somewhat careless way they dress in their House’s liveried coats, appear to be newly pressed into service. The same one is never seen twice, and they uniformly pass through the south-east gate of Wygrove on their way west. They appear somewhat dream-like in their actions, as though short on sleep.

Lord Baldwin clears stress through a Pursue Motivation roll, which we decide is a scene of him praying in the chapel alongside John. He also seeks some healing for the light sensitivity harm he acquired last session.

Kasseri helps decode the letter cipher and leads a short pilgrimage of a few faithful townspeople back to Crumble to throw sacred ash upon the Eternal Flame that they lit, advancing Coroz’s influence clock. She sees a vision in the flames of a Harthkin chieftain assembling warriors in a newly-built longhouse, which both starts AND completes a long-term clock for the party to anticipate the incursion being planned by Edric Stonehand.

John pitches in on the town defense preparations as well as gets some training in the ritual mysteries that Kasseri is employing.

The letter from House Sanguine was fully deciphered through some strong Study rolls, and it’s determined that the coded missive is a list of lost or buried relics of House Sanguine’s past in the region of Vanderia’s capital Trinehold. It looks like the House is attempting to build a historical association of legitimacy in an effort to regain status and peerage in the noble court…

After some gather information, debate, and a little GM nose-leading, our next expedition ended up being a Transport plan where the players move to defend a wagon train of valuable minerals on behalf of the Balfar Mineral Rights Commision, which they want to earn back some favor with. The BMRC employs mercenaries to guard it’s wagon trains but the expense is considerable and their forces are stretched thin, so having assistance would go a long way to quelling their discontent. Sir Rowen realized that he had a contact who could help us here; his rival, Isawa, a “foreign mercenary”. Delighted, I threw that +1 die into the engagement roll (one of my goals with this campaign and the AoB ruleset is to give more incentives for the players to dredge up their playbook contacts, especially Rivals, more often).

The wagon train is predictably attacked by Harthkin raiders led by Jurgen Wolfheart, a vicious jarl seeking to expand his foothold in the region through violence. Horns echo through the foothills as the wagons approach a vulnerable valley river crossing. More on that later though…

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Session Thoughts :

The expedition planning was a speed bump this session, which isn’t immediately concerning (in Blades in the Dark I felt that as GM I was still spoon-feeding score plot hooks for the first several sessions as well, until the momentum of the existing clocks, entanglements, and faction statuses lifted the whole thing off the ground) but it’s worth thinking about filling in my map with a few more close-by plot hooks. I don’t want the area around Wygrove to be too crowded however, there should be a gentle push within the game to get players to want to embark on more ambitious expeditions.

With a fifth player joined I’m officially calling this roll20 campaign at maximum capacity. I’m not sure how this load test will go, and was careful to let the players know that I have no idea, but if this session was any indication it might go much smoother than I had worried. Based on feedback it feels like we successfully hit plenty of interesting scenes without leaving anyone behind, at least this time. It will be interesting to see how different Expeditions look to my previous Blades in the Dark game, which had 3 PCs and was a very personal experience.

#AgeOfBlood

Age of Blood v0.5 / Playtest 1, Session 1: “Better Ask Mom”

Our characters are:

– Kasseri, the Voice, a Nun on the Run.

– Lord Eddard Baldwin, the Captain, who now has a first name that should basically sign-post everything you would ever need to know about the character.

– Eberhard Monheim, the Cultist, who lowkey knows a little blood magic and stuff but is keeping it on the DL.

– John Comber, the Ascendant, whose last name was changed between sessions in order to protect the privacy rights of dead Romantic-era poets.

Fresh from checking the Old Fort and negotiating an understanding with it’s former squatters, John leads his new best friend Lord Baldwin (and that suspicious Gannic fellow, Eberhard) back down the hill to the rotted Chapel that represents the civic center of town. There they are introduced to Kasseri, who we decide had been busily ordering the chapel’s meager library this whole time. Kasseri showed up unannounced on the chapel’s steps one day a week or so back and while she hasn’t said much about her past she won’t stop talking about Coroz, which fortunately is an interest she and John share.

As discussion turns to next moves to secure the region, John realizes with a guilty start that he needs to consult with the local authorities. It’s time to call mom.

After a hand-waved time skip for John’s request for audience to reach it’s destination and come back, Inquisitor Malencia arrives off the road with a small entourage of acolytes. She is greeted by the most royal welcome Wygrove can offer: Lord Baldwin’s banner flying in front of his half-dozen strong militia cohort and 3 of the 4 erstwhile adventurers arrayed out front. Malencia, we establish, is the source of John’s authority but a distant figure who must oversee the sanctity of countless Vanderian souls scattered across a large frontier. She is also on the lookout for Kasseri, who fled a nearby convent under suspicious circumstances a few weeks ago (Given ample warning of the Inquisitor’s arrival, Kasseri called in sick that morning and stayed back at the chapel. This is an awesome relationship triangle that we will definitely explore but we weren’t in a rush to throw that at the wall just yet in session 1).

John eagerly and a bit nervously introduces Eddard and Malencia, stuttering out his hope that this noble knight commander (who he has by now realized was not actually sent by the Church) can be allowed to stay and keep being his cool friend driving back the darkness. The Lord drops to a knee and greets her, leading off with his admittedly-storied lineage and pledging his faith and devotion to the crown and Church. This is an Influence roll, which gets the 6. Makes my job easy!

Inquisitor Malencia, a taciturn woman shaped by her former life under a vow of silence with the Quiet Sisters, instructs Lord Baldwin to rise with a curt hand gesture. She motions up her scribe, who one signet ring later presents the Lord (via John) an official Letter of Cachet giving Baldwin broad remit to Secure Wygrove and the Lands Thereupon from Corruption and Deliver Them Unto King Valten III’s Rightful etc. signed, sealed, and so forth. Malencia knows not to look gift horses in the mouth, and this one is convincingly promising to secure a lawless border town nobody else can be bothered to spare resources for. Seems like a slam dunk. She stays just long enough to ascertain that the people of the town don’t look any worse off than the last time she visited, and hits the road again to leave our party safe in the comforting knowledge that they have a very official scrap of paper to back up their authority with.

Eager to maintain the momentum of the nascent crusade that he hopes will save the beleaguered hamlet, John seizes the opportunity to mention that travel on the roads is very difficult for people who aren’t heavily-armed Inquisitors. You know, what with all the bandits around. Just look north, at Wygrove’s closest neighbor! Crumble used to have another name, we think, back when it was a place where respectable people lived. Now it’s just a nexus of bandit, or even worse, tribal activity. John whispers this last bit to Lord Baldwin, eyes askance at Eberhard who is jotting notes in a journal and fixing the Lord’s maps with accurate assays of the local geography.

Lord Baldwin keeps his thoughts about all of that to himself but happily agrees to flex muscle in the region. More local Control would be good! (it replaces Rep as the mechanism for Tier level-up for Age of Blood).

Information-gathering leads us to believe that a prominent temple of the faith was overrun there, and it’s a current hub of activity for highwaymen restricting traffic on the King’s Roads. Candidates for approach include Assault, Stealth, and, uh, Social? Yes, Kasseri insists we should come as friends! Unfortunately for how amazing that might have been, she is outvoted by the hawks in the room who are eager to test the town’s Militant special ability (+1 die to assault plans). Although we discuss the possibility of using the town’s Underground Maps to stage a daring assault via the abandoned aqueduct system that once linked the rivers in the region, Lord Baldwin insists on a bold approach: straight through the front gate to fly the banner high and dare defiance of the new order. John backs him up and Eberhard pragmatically agrees. Everyone decides on their loadout, and while the town’s coffers are completely empty and thus unable to augment the baseline Provisions set for the party the journey is within a day’s comfortable march anyway. I won’t demand any action rolls for overland travel… perhaps we’ll get to explore that mechanic later.

The 4d Engagement Roll comes up a critical. Word of Lord Baldwin’s arrival must not have spread very far yet or the rumors were simply discounted as too ridiculous to be credible, as the lawless vultures dwelling in Crumble are completely unable to muster even a token of resistance on the road: just outside their target the party sees an abandoned pile of wooden stakes clearly meant to barricade the road. The sheer audacity and swiftness of the party’s approach simply catches their targets out.

The overgrown tenements of Crumble come into view through the encroaching tree-line. At the center of town is a great circular stone structure: the open-air temple to Coroz that once burned an eternal flame, now guttered out for a decade or more. All around in the woods on the outskirts of town can be heard hasty movements, fires being doused and tent camps struck. The cockroaches are choosing to scatter into the woods rather than face justice. Lord Baldwin marches his troops (and the other PCs!) straight up to the ancient chapel and loudly proclaims his intent to secure the roads and instill order. Who here has the will to resist the imposition of rightful Law?

Right as the evening sun begins to sink to the trees, finally some organized resistance makes itself known. A knight dressed in the ignoble colors of House Vert marches out of the treeline at the head of a band of masked footpads to confront the invaders. The brigand-knight rudely questions the lineage of “Lord Baldwin” and suggests that they offer up the church’s writ of authority for display, so that he may wipe his arse with it.

Before words can turn to weapons however, Kasseri squeezes her way out of formation and bubbles over to the newcomers with a suggestion that a peaceful solution may be possible yet! After all, we’re not really super threatening and couldn’t possibly maintain an offensive war against you given the forces we have available (the Demon’s Bargain here is that Kasseri inadvertently reveals information about Wygrove’s forces and the extent of Lord Baldwin’s martial command: You’re looking at the entirety of it.). While Kasseri’s words are perhaps poorly advised from a strategic sense, they do de-escalate tensions and open the door to something more reasonable than a mutual slaughter.

Her optimism strikes a chord with House Vert’s lawless champion, who was starting to suspect his bandit band’s shaky morale wasn’t going to be quite up to open warfare against this organized force. Trusting in his own skill at arms more than the flaky cowards he leads, the knight raises his flail to point at Lord Baldwin.

“She’s right, no one else’s blood needs to be spilled here. A duel then: your pretend lord against ME.”

Lord Baldwin is completely powerless to resist such a challenge (it’s possible that the GM knows this particular player’s weaknesses a little too well). Drawing sword and shield, Eddard Baldwin prepares to defend his honor and establish his right… via might. Baldwin is no slouch, boasting 1 action dot for both Skirmish and Sunder (the pair of actions most directly tied to melee combat in AoB), but he’ll be cut off from Assistance unless the party wants to risk accusations of cheating the laws of the duel. The Brigand meanwhile is a towering presence with a casual command of his chosen weapon, a cruel spiked flail.

Pushing himself up to a 2d Risky/Standard Skirmish roll to start the fight on cautious footing and find a weakness while keeping his skull safely intact, Baldwin gets a 1 and a 2. I cackle at the opportunity to finally do something to the players (6s are so boring, guys! Nobody ever listens to me though..) and narrate the frighteningly formidable brigand-knight’s fighting technique: the flail is a clear and present threat which will of course devastate a fool if you’re not paying attention, but the primary tool here is the knight’s mastery of offensive shield techniques which are being used to hedge out any attempt at counter-attack and bully Eddard all around the impromptu dueling circle. A cruel shield bash (level 2 harm) is resisted, as is the flail trip (worsening position!) that is the knight’s cunning follow-up. Baldwin is suddenly running hot on Stress, beads of sweat pooling in his helmet as he stays inches ahead of his adversary’s overpowering combat style.

Seeing their champion being pushed to the limit, John and Kasseri begin praying to Coroz. Perhaps the PCs didn’t intend to interfere with a duel, but the players are definitely clear: it’s way too soon for Lord Baldwin’s career to end on as abrupt a note as flail spike introduction to the inner cranium. They Channel the last rays of the setting sun, which flares bright with Coroz’s blessing, blinding the knight of House Vert at a crucial moment in the duel.

Baldwin seizes this opportunity to turn the tables and throws everything at a Risky/Great Sunder roll, which gets a 4. Trusting in his Marshal’s Armor to save him from a retaliatory flail strike, he takes his longsword in both hands and steps into the brute’s reach to deliver a critical strike and end the duel. The glass-jawed brigand crashes to a knee and raises a hand for clemency. Eddard Commands the thug to depart these lands and bother not the fair people of Wygrove again, terms the humiliated knight is hardly able to refuse. I mark House Vert Bandits on the ever-growing Faction sheet; their story is linked to the region’s precipitous decline and will be an interesting foil to explore and compare against the noble mission the PCs have set for themselves. He and his brigands slouch away to spread the word that the roads around Wygrove are no longer a soft target for their kind.

The rest of the expedition is clean-up, really: Kasseri uses her Spirit Ritual to relight the eternal flame of Coroz at the center of the abandoned temple while Eberhard takes the opportunity of the events in the town center to stealthily scout around the woods and observes some Harthkin outriders from the clan of Edric Stonehand watching the duel from afar. Both events start long-term clocks so that the players can have some things to think about going in to their first downtime.

Our last act of the session was to try out the rules for the Loot roll, which in it’s current version is pasted below. This was a pretty low-stakes job so didn’t amount to a ton of dice, and the luck wasn’t with the party on it. So they didn’t get a chance to choose any fun results this time unfortunately (I chose “+2 Control and -2 Coin” result for them because I felt it represented the fiction well. Crumble is a target of value for it’s strategic and symbolic importance only).

The swinginess of the Loot roll is something I’ll be searching for feedback on as we go further: it’s positioned right now as a way to spice up the payoff structure, put the “where are my Magic Items” question squarely in the hands of the players, and let the GM recuse themselves of the incessant decision-making about how much Coin/Heat a given score was worth (I didn’t mind it in Blades but I sort of wanted to explore the space here, especially given the dungeon-crawling touchstones). I set up the math so that a firmly moderate baseline of Coin, Control, and Threat is always generated (based on the Tier of the target of the expedition) so that a bad Loot result doesn’t rob the players of the fundamental Coin they need to play the game, and on the high end a lucky Loot roll can be a big boost of value and story opportunities. It’s something I’ll have to monitor as we go, especially given the opportunity the lower rolls give a GM to mess around with the players. What do you think?

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Session Thoughts : Eberhard’s player (who is new to this BitD thing) did not earn a lot of XP at the end of the session, which is certainly at least somewhat on me as GM for failing to properly convey a.) the full details of the Action Roll system, which I think might have lead to hesitance to engage with the mechanics until later on in the expedition, and b.) the player-driven nature of how our group runs a table. I feel a little bad but I hope they’ll forgive me, expressions of continued interest were made and the veterans at the table assured them that it can take a little time to hit the stride of what Blades in the Dark asks of a player.

Communication distance with Balfar came up even sooner than I expected when John’s player decided we wanted to have a scene with the positive contact on his playbook (Inquisitor Malencia). As GM I eagerly hand-waved us forward in time to get there because I absolutely wanted to explore that scene but I can already foresee the possibility of some narrative dissonance arising from the question that is bound to get raised at some point or another: Just how far away is that place anyway? The answer, for now, is “as far away as the story wants it to be for dramatic purposes”. Balfar shouldn’t feel like it’s breathing over the player’s shoulders but it’s basically the closest point of light on the map to realistically base a number of middle-tier factions. This is an inherent tension between the design goals of a game that is Forged in the Dark and at least somewhat faction map-driven, but also wants to be a sandbox of medieval lawlessness and conveniently loot-filled Dungeonz ™. It’s something I think about often. An answer that ties the whole room together exists I’m certain, just needs more thoughtful care.

Age of Blood v0.5 / Playtest 1, Session 0: Character/Town Creation

Interspersed with a lot of discussion of playtest intent and thematic goals, we finished initial creation and introduced (most of) the PCs and the town. As will the rest of these, this took place via voice chat on Discord with handouts and dice rolls on roll20. The party consists of:

– Lord Baldwin, the Captain, dispossessed noble and last of the Baldwin line who fled east with the remnants of his honor guard when he was betrayed at the height of his house’s civil war. He seeks redemption for his hand in the deaths of his kin and a safe haven from the vicious mythical greatsword, Veritas, which has been foretold to be his end.

– Eberhard Monheim, the Cultist, practitioner of a completely pragmatic and reasonable tradition of pagan blood magic who left his tribe to seek his fortune among the Vanderians (the ‘civilized’ feudal kingdom of the setting, most characters will be of Vanderian descent unless otherwise noted). Eberhard pays tribute to his Gannic ancestor spirits and hails from the Nightwood, a forbidding forest that slumbers in the shadow of the Dragonspine Mountains.

– John Keats, the Ascendant, a simple farmer who died when his farm was burned down (by who, or what?). His miraculous resurrection by the god Coroz was terribly inconvenient for the clergy, which eventually sent him on a holy mission to the impious town of Wygrove to be rid of him. He has been sermonizing in the collapsed chapel in a debatably-successful bid to revitalize faith in the Church there ever since, while vainly waiting for all the help he was promised.

– Kasseri, the Voice, an orphan and former nun of the Quiet Sisterhood who began to uncontrollably Speak with the divine power of Coroz. The sisters would have cut her tongue for defiance of their precepts but she escaped and fled east (it’s the fashionable direction to flee in-setting. Nobody looks for you in the East. Proven fact.). Kasseri unfortunately had to cancel for the town creation session at the last minute but will be properly introduced next week.

All players except for Eberhard are veterans of a Blades in the Dark season we concluded last month.

I and the three players who were present agreed to run generation on the town of Wygrove as an in-character exercise, which I framed as Lord Baldwin learning more about his destination as he continued through the Eastern March. In the regional capital of Balfar, last point of civilization before the final week-long trek to Wygrove, Baldwin observed mercenaries employed by the Margrave shaking down merchant caravans for stiff taxes and holding the city in an uneasy state of martial law. Seeking audience with the Margrave proved fruitless, for Baldwin’s family name meant nothing to the arrogant militia sergeants he met. Baldwin was unwilling to linger in lands he knew little about with the threat of pursuers on his trail, and so chose not to press his luck and interfere. His initial impressions of the Eastern Marches and the rumors he overheard of Wygrove gave him a distinct impression of Savagery (town’s initial Reputation).

As his overland journey wound down to the ‘crossroads of the East’ and the lonely hill on which Wygrove squats, Baldwin stopped in a crumbling roadside tavern to consult his charts and take the lay of the land. He had decided to rebuild House Baldwin starting here in this forsaken country far from the eyes of court intrigue, but where to station his exhausted handful of men? Though it’s battlements are rotting and the walls broken, the Old Fort at the crest of the hill seemed an ideal location (HQ).

It was at this moment that John Keats stepped into the tavern, drawn by the rumor of a lordly knight and his entourage approaching town. John had been expecting help (perhaps a band of noble crusaders?) to arrive for weeks, and threw himself at the Captain, thanking Coroz for the arrival of his town’s salvation. Nonplussed, Baldwin nonetheless invited the raggy parishioner to join them for the suspicious stew that the tavern had on offer.

From cautious discussion with John, Baldwin ascertained that some secretive group had been dwelling within the fort for several weeks. Though the squatters had been careful not to disturb the sleepy hamlet below, John was absolutely certain that unwholesome cult activities were being performed… hooded members entered and left the fort at odd hours, and strange lights flickered within the fort at night. Seeing an opportunity to boost his esteem among what passed for ‘authority’ here, Baldwin agreed to rid the keep of this threat.

Eberhard meanwhile had been cautiously observing the new arrivals from afar, and sensing the rich scent of Coin approached the table offering his services as a local guide. Although clearly of Gannic origin and thus instantly distrusted by John, the sallow stranger quickly earned Baldwin’s respect through assurances that he knew the lay of the land far better than the charts of dubious cartographic worth the Lord had obtained in Balfar. Eberhard also demonstrated his abilities as a scribe who could both read AND write (2 dots in Study coming in handy!), and was subsequently hired on the spot.

The next morning the band struck out for the Old Fort early, accompanied by Sergeant Garth, the mostly-useless town constable. Pressing into the partially-collapsed Fort, they observed that it was a claustrophobic and unimaginatively-built military structure from the Conquest period of Vanderia’s past: stone foundations built up with wood and left to decay for around the past decade. Faced with a band of soldiers led a knight commander, and one irate parishioner, the inhabitants promptly surrendered and revealed themselves to be a trio of young adepts dedicated to the Entalian Circle, an ancient and disgraced order of Magi. They stated they were using the Keep as a watchpost to observe dangerous cult activity by Harthkin clans in the region, a claim which seemed passably acceptable to 2 out of 3 of the PCs. Lord Baldwin elected to let them go despite John’s protests, while Eberhard took great interest in a circular runic warding glyph drawn in salt that the adepts had hastily erased at the group’s arrival. The party elected to compensate the Entalian Circle for the trouble of taking the fort (-1 Coin, no faction standing loss), and negotiated for some maps and charts of the underground warrens in the local region that the Circle had commissioned (improving to +1 faction standing with the Circle!). A gentlemanly exchange all around, really.

Back out in town, the team quickly looked to establish a mercantile base to begin revitalizing Wygrove’s economic fortunes: out of the woodwork emerged a starting cohort, a tenacious but wild pair of Blacksmith Brothers, eager to once again ply their craft. These smiths were cast out of the Balfar Mineral Rights Commission for their debauched and drunken behavior, but maybe they can be reformed…? Or at least inebriated back into a useful state from time to time. Meanwhile Orista the Antiquarian (town contact) arrived on caravan and set up shop, hopeful that this influx of bold adventurers might help reopen the roads and start a flow of valuable relics from the numerous dangerous ruins of the region. Or maybe she can just pawn some oddities off before moving on to the next town. Capitalism, ho!

All of this logistical mobilization combined with the rugged nature of Wygrove leads to a rather Militant outlook in the town’s dealings (Special Ability: +1d to Assault plan Engagement rolls). Clearly our erstwhile band of adventurers does not plan on going too gentle into that good night! John Keats hopes to bring the light of Coroz to burn out the banditry and wild beasts overflowing in the region. Lord Baldwin seeks to clear these lands and instill order in a resurgence of his family name. And Eberhard thinks he can make a coin or two from the rising fortunes of the region.

I can’t wait to see how well all of that works out for them!

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Thoughts : Coroz was independently picked as a patron deity by a whopping 2 out of 2 of our “divine” characters, which is interesting perhaps (the central religion of the setting consists of a three-god pantheon or ‘trinity’, though unlike the RL christian trinity they are reckoned separately and not considered different aspects of a monotheism). Coroz is a genderless god of flame, sun, and warmth, and doesn’t have much of an overt ‘agenda’ in terms of branding so it makes sense that it might be the most inviting of the pantheon in a way. Unfortunately the two characters didn’t have a chance to interact as Kasseri was gone for the town creation RP, but one thing that will be fun is to introduce agents of the various Church factions and see how that interaction plays out. The Church has “a whole lotta Tier” counting all it’s various sub-factions, possibly a plurality within the setting when taken altogether, but is intended to be very fractious, riven with dissent and internal conflict.

I was still grappling with an issue related to roll20 chat field corruption (there’s a lot of tinkering with custom sheets going on in the background of this one), so we unfortunately couldn’t get any dice rolling results this first time around. Fortunately no particularly risky actions were called for as everyone was just feeling the setting and each other’s PCs out. I am prettty sure I have it sorted out for next time (the trick is to erase chat history using an option from outside of the game client).

The below map is super rough. Green blobs are woods, there’s a blue shape west of the town (the lake of Brittleloch), and the black squiggles are mountains. I need to clean this one up for next time but it’s intentionally got a lot of blank space for now.

#AgeOfBlood