Here's a write-up of our first ever RPG experience. Excuse the fact that parts of it seem to be addressed to other noobs rather than vastly experienced RPGers such as yourselves — I've copy/pasted this from a football forum on which I've been discussing the game.
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So we played our first game last night, I was nervous beforehand but needn't have been as it was funny as
fudge, went really well.
A few weeks ago I decided I'd attempt to create a gameworld and campaign setting from scratch, and after much thought (mostly daydreaming whilst at work) I came up with the idea of The Kingdom of the Burnished Isle — an island nation kinda sandwiched between two great continents, the Arterian Empire to the East and the Usaffron Alliance in the West.
My three players are — Sam (my gf), Ash (my mate) and Jord (Ash's stepson). In-game I informed them that they'd be playing as fledgling members of a highly influential organisation of mercenaries known as 'The Guild'. They'd start the game as teenagers fresh out of Blackrock Chapter House, one of The Guild's primary centres for training.
Ash chose a Rogue class and named his character 'Rouge' (pronounced like the French for 'red'). A 15yo boy recently and reluctantly sold to The Guild as payment for the debts of his own bankrupt father.
Jord next chose a Mystic class named 'Ebbenweave', a 15yo long-term Guild trainee following in his father's footsteps in an attempt to trace the man's whereabouts after he went missing serving The Guild in the lead-up to an important battle.
Sam's character, a Sorcerer, is a 14yo Arterian waif and escaped slave named 'Ergle'. Washed up on the coast nearby Blackrock, she joined The Guild seeking to someday better understand the elemental power she inadvertently used on her captors whilst at sea.
Here's a map of the starting area:
So we went through whole character creation process, which was somewhat laborious but we plowed through, and then got right into the role playing. The three PC's were sent to see the commander of Blackrock, and he informed them that they were to receive posting to the small mining town of Maker's Ridge, where they would serve the Guild by attending to the locals there, solving problems for payment.
First they had to visit the quartermaster to get tooled up, and then they'd go down to the docks to get their ship to Maker's Ridge.
At this point Jord passed me a note explaining that his character had a secret he didn't want revealing to the other players — he had a cloak of invisibility that his father gave to him when last they saw each other, and his character was intending on missing their ship to instead retrieve the cloak from a nearby hiding place, upon doing which he'd then board the next available ship to Maker's Ridge.
As GM it was up to me whether or not to allow this. Players cannot just spawn powerful artefacts without the GM's say so. I considered simply rejecting the request, but came up with the better idea and gave him the green light. The other players didn't at that point know what we were talking about.
So eventually after a day's travel by sea via two separate ships which meant my having to simultaneously act the part of two different captains that both sets of PC's were eager to chat to, the party arrived in Maker's Ridge.
Here's the map of the town given to them upon arrival:
Rouge and Ergle arrived half a day ahead of Ebbenweave's ship, and so they promptly made their way to the nearest tavern to get drunk. Rouge was trying to be something of a troublemaker, chatting
doodoo at the locals in an attempt to start a fight. Nobody seemed too bothered about a pissed-up 15yo calling Maker's Ridge folk wankers though and he eventually just sat down and cried into his pint.
Ergle was practicing cartwheels. Sam had decided that she was a bit of an oddbod, scarred by years of abuse at the hands of slavers — she didn't talk much and scuttled around like a crab kind of when she walked.
Then Ebbenweave made his appearance. For little apparent reason (afterwards he said it was because he saw Rouge crying) he picked up a glass, squared up to a big miner fella and tried to smash it into his face. He rolled dice for the result, got a 09 out of possible 100 —
doodoo — and so missed the guy completely. The tavernfolk began to laugh at him, and so he picked up a chair and tried to swing it at his target. He once again rolled a 09, which now because the maneuver being attempted was 'Difficult' as opposed to 'Medium' with the glass (+he had a negative modifier due to having low strength stat), this caused him to not only miss but to fall over and sprain his ankle.
Embarrassed now with the whole tavern in stitches, Ebbenweave slunked off to a backroom whereupon he figured he'd go nuclear. He donned his invisibility cloak and came back out wielding double daggers and slashing them around.
What I hadn't told him about the cloak however was that his father had been lying to him — the cloak in fact had no magical properties whatsoever. So there he was under this regular cloak, fully visible to everyone, swishing daggers around thinking he was invisible, trying to attack a man twice his size. I made him roll on the 'Sheer Folly' maneuver column due to the absurd nature of his actions, and this time he rolled a 04 out of 100. He was lucky to survive tripping and falling onto one of his daggers as previously Ergle (who had skills in First Aid) had readied the bandages she'd picked up from the quartermaster and was able to stop the bleeding from Ebbenweave's arm.
They all left the pub with the sound of raucous laughter behind them.
That's about where we ended the session. It doesn't sound like much when written down like that, but this went on for about 5hrs and other than during some of the more finecky aspects of character creation we were all very much laughing and enjoying ourselves throughout. I was worried that the game might fall flat with nobody really knowing what they were doing, but this wasn't the case at all as all three players (total RPG noobs like myself) seemed to be eager to role play and each contributed much to the storytelling. There's quite a bit of lore and a more involved story beginning to unravel, much more than described above, and all the players said at the end that they didn't want to finish (it was 3:30am) and also that they couldn't wait to find out what's going to happen in the next session.
