Earthdawn: First Dawn, Session 1
We finally had a chance to start First Dawn, the Earthdawn campaign that I'm running, this last Sunday. After talking to the players, we decided to start this campaign a little differently than our normal style. I wanted the characters to be more powerful than starting Adepts to rationalize their choice to be leaving their Kaer, but not all of the players were familiar enough with the game system to make more advanced characters without a lot of help. So to speed character generation and to help build a more cohesive group, we met a couple weeks before our first actual game session for a character generation session where the players would design their characters and personalities and I would take those and create stats later.
After giving the group the rundown of life in the Kaer and the different races and disciplines that they might have to choose from, everyone came up with their general character concepts. From there we began fleshing out backgrounds and motivations, tying the characters together while at the same time developing the Kaer where the game would start. Before the character generation session I had known what sort of overarching plot I wanted for the campaign, but I hadn't imagined that the players would hand me the perfect vehicle to make it personal for them during character generation.
Earthdawn: OneStep System
My current group has decided to set aside Star Wars for now while one of our players settles in to his newfound role of fatherhood. Instead of waiting for him to be able to play again, we've decided to run another semi-short term game to give the rest of us something to play while he gets used to his new schedule. Since I've had some ideas for a short term kaer-emergence Earthdawn game called First Dawn floating around my head (I almost decided to run it as a play-by-post), I volunteered to be the interim GM.
The group as a whole has had very little experience with the Earthdawn system, and given the intent to have a short term game to begin with, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on system explanation. In addition after talking to one of the players I learned that while he didn't have a problem with the system, looking up what dice to roll for a given test was a little annoying.
Personally Earthdawn is probably my favorite RPG to run and play and I enjoy the varied dice of the Step System. That said I want to be sympathetic to my players' complaints and I want to make the game run as fast as possible for this mini-campaign. In addition I love tinkering with rule systems; making little tweaks to the mechanics to make certain aspects of a game run more like my preferences. As a result I've decided to make a few slight modifications to the Earthdawn ruleset for this campaign.
Categories
- Warmachine & Hordes (78)
- Miniature Painting (183)
- Role-playing Games (46)
- Other Games (15)
- Kitchen Sink (11)
Recent Comments
- Ivan on Troll Sky Raider
- moondog548 on Absylonia, the Terror of Everblight
- Dankelzahn on Visgoth Rhoven & Honor Guard
- EDC on Visgoth Rhoven & Honor Guard
- Dankelzahn on Carnivean
- Bryan on Carnivean
- Moondog on Gorman di Wulf, Rogue Alchemist