Hullo, folks,
As noted in this thread,
http://greymalkindesigns.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=276, I ran the DESOLATION scenario that I wrote up, "Shadow of the Wolf", at CanGames, 2009 in Ottawa this past weekend. What follows are two posts about the runnings of the game and all. Please note that there are SPOILER WARNINGS for the scenario below, so read the rest of the post at your own risk.
The "Shadow of the Wolf" scenario for DESOLATION is a scenario that I came up with for the game based on the CanGames theme for 2009, "Wolves at the Gate", and I wanted to run something that fit the theme and wasn't one of the DESOLATION scenarios that I've come to know and love over the last year and a bit (Jamie, Stephen, Matt, you know what I mean!
). The scenario can be summarized as follows: The player characters are low on supplies when the find a savagely attacked caravan. Finding a few items, they reach the village of Green Moon, and aid the villagers in dispatching the creature that has been plaguing the villagers for some time. The characters put together several pieces of information and a riddle provided by the villagers, and travel to the ruined monastery nearby to deal with the creature. The only question is whether they will succumb to the Shadow of the Wolf. The scenario has a bit of everything in it, as well as all manner of beasties and critters, and gives the werewolf and lycanthropy a Sconderan spin, so to speak.
The player characters for the game were the seven standard characters that I have really grown to love: Esther LaVore, a noblewoman sorceress; Lem Ollender, a former soldier of the Empire in love with Esther; Tarl Ishrak,a farmer with Faith; Menelaris Covelanar, an elf and an elementalist; Denner Khent, the scavenging dwarf; Krek of Kharhut, the Mongrel outcast forester; and Sasha Veng, the female Rover performer. This group of player characters is really a good mix of character types, skills, and abilities, and the personalities of these characters tend to come out strongly in the hands of the right players.
Anyway, the first running of the scenario was at 2:00 pm on the Saturday afternoon of CanGames. There were two folks who had pre-registered for the game, so I was looking for another four or five players. I was wearing my "Have you spat on an Elf today?" t-shirt, so it wasn't really all that difficult to recruit players for the game, and I ended up with the full seven characters being played for the convention game.
Now, bear in mind that I've run the scenario several times before (four times to playtest it, and once in the campaign I run on Friday nights), but I have to say that this one came out somewhat... strange. One of the players, a friend of mine on LiveJournal, showed up somewhat late for the game, and while I gave him a quick synopsis of the basic rules, I didn't feel that I did justice by him in that regard (although he alleviated my feelings of this later on when we talked about this on his LJ), but almost 15 minutes after the game had started was a bit long - heck, I could have given the spot to someone else, but he told me that he would be there. While these players did a good job of roleplaying their characters, some of them just didn't get the way these characters worked for the most part.
First off, the player characters made enemies out the villagers of Green Moon because the fellow playing the elf, Menelaris, was acting like a totally obnoxious and loud boor. He took offense to the villagers dislike of him, his being an elf and all, and kept making things worse. The player who took on Esther tried to calm things down, but Menelaris kept offending the villagers (and even Lem to some extent, whose player said that if the elf kept this up, *he* would kill him personally and save the villagers the effort!), even saying that if they weren't careful he could hurt them badly with a thought! The player characters were thrown out of the village (actually, they never got into it), and so headed to the monastery to seek shelter! The guy playing Sasha made a good move later, as he got her into the village to see the wise-woman. He learned part of what they needed to know, but not all of it.
Once Sasha told them what they thought they needed to know, the characters headed back to the monastery, but the character playing Esther LaVode didn't enchant the blade to make it magical near the village; she waited to do this at the monastery itself, a bad idea, since the place was Tainted. In the end, the party of characters was slaughtered by the were-creature at the ruined monastery or changed into weres themselves by the taint of the place (Desolation isn't your typical fantasy system, and magic is neat in the system!). All except for Lem and Esther. She had been knocked unconscious while trying to cast a spell, and when Lem became a were, the player actually made the Willpower check to determine that Lem's love for Esther outweighed his desire to eat her, so he picked her up and fled for the nearby hills, the two of them never to be seen again. A truly bittersweet love story!
It was a very strange game, with the two fellows playing Lem and Menelaris completely out of character (except for Lem somewhat at the end). On the other hand, my LJ friend did a pretty good job playing Sasha Veng, getting frustrated at the other characters, and playing the character to the hilt as a dancer and a bit of a coward (the player disappeared from time to time, which annoyed me, but such is life). Sasha died doing a heroic deed, and what more could one ask for? The gentleman playing Tarl, the farmer with Faith, did a pretty decent job with the character, as did the man playing Krek, the Mongrel forester, and the guy playing Denner, the scavenging Dwarf, played things to the hilt when the characters managed to get to the wrecked caravan at the beginning of the scenario.
The players all agreed that the DESOLATION system is really good, and that they had a terrific time, despite the fact that most of the characters died. The game is very much a social game, about communities, trust, and survival, and it was this lack of good behaviour and good will towards the villagers of Green Moon that got the characters, well...toasted. That said, a couple of the players said to me later that the riddle given them by the wise-woman might have been too ambiguous, but for the record, the rest said to me that it was fine. (And as you'll see from the Sunday report, they had no problems with the riddle at all.) Still, it was a highly enjoyable game, and three players told me that they would be back for more DESOLATION at next year's CanGames, should I choose to run it.
Overall, I thought the scenario went rather well, even with the high mortality rate, and what surprised the players the most was that they all had to get out of the standard
D&D thinking fashion, since DESOLATION is very different than most of the other fantasy rpgs out there these days. The two new beasties, the squirrel-like creatures and the were creature, worked out really well, as did the dire wolf-like things that Ihad in there as well, and this was actually the second time in all the playtests and runnings of the scenario that I've done where the characters died. Well, the majority of them anyway.
Anyway, any thoughts or questions about the scenario are more than welcome.
