Annotated 2-24
This one simple poster is designed to hook all five of our apparent protagonists as neatly as possible. But it’s not, like, targeting any hyper-specific aspects of their characters: there’s no “prove you’re tougher and more professional than anyone else! Rewards include peace talks, wartime reparations, and an epic song composed in your honor!” It’s just, anyone with even baseline decency agrees that helping rescue kids is the right thing to do, and all of them are freelancers or freelancers-by-default who need to eat.
“Contact Marshall Ardaic at the barracks for more information.” We won’t see Ardaic before we see the noble families themselves, but it’s safe to say he’s acting as a kind of buffer here: drifters and riffraff who’d love an open invitation to a noble family’s estate will need to get his approval first. If Bandit were free and the first to see this poster, she might have been tempted by this job, but she wouldn’t want to do it badly enough to let the local police chief get a good look at her face.
And here we have one final “failure to meet,” as Best could have joined up with the rest of the group here but didn’t, because he’s the kind of dick who takes down a help-wanted poster when he applies for the job instead of copying or memorizing its information.
I don’t think I’ve had a single dnd session that didn’t begin with “you wake up face down in the dirty straw of your cell.”
or Elder Scrolls game
I’ve run a few GURPS campaigns–and am running one now–set in the Elder Scrolls universe, and every time I make a point to start the players off this way. It just wouldn’t feel right otherwise.
I had 1 game when the DM tried to do this opening. but we had a “pre-game start”
long story short, we never saw the dungeon, the king died, and the world ended instead. yes, literally all because fo the pre-game opening XD
“You start in a dingy dungeon. How will you escape?”
“I try to pick the lock”
[Rolls a 1]
“You fail so goddamn horribly it’s impossible to open now, the world is doomed and it’s your fault. See you next Saturday!”
naw – my character was going to be thrown in jail for daring to show her face at a tournament the king was attending (my character was an oppressed minority). DM actually rolled combat instead of fiat’ing the loss. I promptly failed to lose. King got angry (and drunk) and charged me with a sword. I countered. With a crit. max damage. so…um, yeah. Problem – the kingship literally kept the world stable. so, me killing him ended the world. we spent the next 7 adventures desperately trying to get a new king that could survive being the pillar of the world. we failed miserably XD one wild ride though XD
I have little to no experience with REAL D&D (mostly video games), but either that DM was super bad at adjusting or super good. He didn’t just fix those events to let that shitfest go down, but then he made a massive 7 adventures out of it.
I thought the DM was pretty good, but it did get frustrating – by the end, it felt like there had been no actual way to succeed?
Like, if we’d know x, y, and z, we could have short cut’d through part A into part D and maybe made it in time, but we only learned about y in part C, which was way too late. it was that sort of hot mess. A fun hot mess, and maybe we could have salvaged something in the end (but by then we started hemorrhaged players, and you can’t play a game without those, sooo)
I hear the number one cause of campaign death in D&D is heavy player loss. There was nothing you could do. My condolences.
Well, the first one I ever ran started on a boat crewed by self-proclaimed treasure hunters. But that ship has sailed…
And here is our first look at innocent little Taro. What a cutie!