120xp in hand
Still WIP but already have him named. Spending 100xp for Instinctive Diction. This means I've got a long way to level BUT less likely to blow myself up with a s&@#ty roll.
*Updating Magick language back up to 10 from my 40 pts....
Thanks, just at a quick scan it's striking how many routes even internal to Reikland are listed at the maximum double-skull danger level.
I guess it fits with something I read elsewhere, probably in the Core book? That most villages & hamlets in Reikland are clustered near the big city. Which means lots of wide unsettled land in the areas between for wild things to lurk.
There’s definitely no completely safe way to move around the Reikland. Just traveling from Ubersreik to Atldorf your group in the other game had 3 battles and an encounter with a Highwayman in a 12 day trip.
120xp in handStill WIP but already have him named. Spending 100xp for Instinctive Diction. This means I've got a long way to level BUT less likely to blow myself up with a s*%~ty roll.
*Updating Magick language back up to 10 from my 40 pts....
Insticntive Diction and Aethyrric Attunement are crucial talents for reducing your chances of dying, or worse, from your own spellcasting.
Consider reagents when you have enough money to get some as well.
For those not in our other game, the Wizard there cast a spell & easily won a minor battle for us. He also unknowingly killed a man & his horse several miles away...and that's a not-altogether-horrible miscast.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I looked into travel issues a bit more, and one source from 1E had travel speeds around half of what you quoted. Seems there is a lot of variability.
For the purpose of this adventure, the barge will be travelling at speed of plot. I think we'll be starting in Ubersreik or a town nearby. Then all I need to decide is the destination and what is between those points.
***
For everyone: since this is a river travel adventure, your friendly GM will point out a few mundane details. First, Sail is an Advanced skill. If no one in the party has it, you will need to hire someone to do the sailing or hire on with someone.
Also, Swim is an advanced skill. If you do not have at least one Advance in Swim, you cannot swim at all. Thrashing about helplessly in the water before you sink and die (if not rescued) will be your speed in water too deep to stand in. I don't plan to endlessly dump everyone overboard, but it wouldn't be river travel if going into the water wasn't a legit threat.
If you want to get advances in either or both of those skills and they aren't on your career list, spending 20 xp at character creation time is always an option. If you do that, spending a bit of background text on how you learned those skills wouldn't hurt. Or you can probably learn them en route if someone is available to teach you.
Ludger will take 1 Advance in Sailing for 20 XP and remove 2 Advances from Climb.
Growing up literally feet from the mighty Teufel River, young Ludger was fascinated by the skills displayed by the crews of the merchantmen sailing to the docks. Once his older brother started his career on the river, Ludger begged and pestered his brother until he taught Ludger the basics of sailing.
I'll pickup Swim with 20 of my 25 points remaining.
Likely had some more experienced hunters "encourage" him to learn before visiting the "Wetlands".
spending my xp to get 1 adv. for swimming and 2 adv. in dodge.
got 95 XP to spend...
20 Xp for swimming
20 Xp for sailing
50 XP for +2 to Willpower (now 45)
5Xp left
If you want to get advances in either or both of those skills and they aren't on your career list, spending 20 xp at character creation time is always an option. If you do that, spending a bit of background text on how you learned those skills wouldn't hurt. Or you can probably learn them en route if someone is available to teach you.
Coincidentally I have 20xp... that buys Swim 1 buuuut that's all that's needed.
Hoping to get something together by Monday. If you don't have character background information yet, it would help if you got something ready for that by then.
Hoping to get something together by Monday. If you don't have character background information yet, it would help if you got something ready for that by then.
Sounds great. I'm really looking forward to being playing a character instead of only GM'ing.
Raised on the outskirts of Ussingen - not far from the river Schilder, Axel was raised only knowing his Grandfather, Hans. Hans was a stern and humourless man. For much of his youth he was just used for general labour. Then as he came into his teens he found that he spent more and more time in his presence found that some of the things he'd been taught as a child were preparation for the great revelation. His grandfather was a warlock, who had stolen his first born grandchild because the omens said that Axel too would have 'the gift'.
He started living two lives. By day he worked where ever his Grandfather rented his labours out to and by night he studied magicks and its language. His first taste of magic was when he was 17 where he calmed an angry dog. His grandfather beat him when he reported such... the risks were too great. What if he was caught? What if the spell had backfired.
Life went on. As a young man he befriended a Barge girl and friendship turned to romance. She taught him to swim... and he confided in his secret. It was not long after that the Witchhunter arrived. Axel was able to get away - his grandfather was led away for trial and execution.
Axel scrapped up what coins his Grandfather had hidden and bought passage on a river boat. He's been hiding on the rivers, moving from one place to the next ever since... its hard for witchhunters to track water after all.
"Bah, I don't want to learn how to operate a big cart that never touches land. It ain't natural, I tells ya!"
Yesterday was busier & more distracting than I thought it would be. I'll try to pull things together today though.
I got a chance to look over the character backgrounds yesterday and do a little start-of-adventure planning. I'm not there yet, though.
I did end up compiling a list of character-specific notes and questions, which I'll go through in separate posts.
Short-term Ambition: gathering funds is a fine ambition, but in order for it to serve a mechanical purpose, we'll need to have a way of knowing when it is complete.
Long-term Ambition: I'm not seeing any problems here. Again, there is some uncertainty about when you've achieved 'rich & successful' but when you feel like your character has reached that state, bring it up and I'll decide if I agree.
Background:
* A major theme running through your ambitions is that you want to become a wizard rather than a witch. I'm going to presume that Hans had a reason that he didn't do the same thing, though. Witches always have the option of turning themselves over to the Church of Sigmar, although methods of doing so probably carry different levels of risk. Throwing yourself on the mercy of the first Witch Hunter you see puts you at the mercy of their whims. Your character may not have had a real opportunity to do so, but Hans did. He not only avoided the Witch Hunters but brought up his grandson away from them as well. What did he teach Axel about living as a Witch? What drove him to live outside the system, and why is Axel different?
* What are Axel's feelings about Hans's execution? Does he resent the Witch Hunters that killed his grandfather? Does he think that Hans deserved it?
* Axel's plan of relying on river travel to escape capture by the Witch Hunters isn't a bad one, but roaming endlessly from place to place is a good way to fritter away all of your money. How is Axel maintaining himself? Alternately, is he at the end of the funds he fled with and desperate for another solution?
Marven's Magnificent Curios: the peddlar that goes by the aforementioned name is my attempt at doing 'you all meet in a bar' without actually going that way. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Marven's outfit as you guys decide how you each relate to it though. What business do you have with the peddlar?
Short-term Ambition: what ship is Bolka on currently? By 'the ship', it's possible you could mean the ship the party will be travelling on. If so, why is that a personal ambition of Bolka's? I could see it being a party short-term ambition and it's OK for a personal ambition to match up with that of the party, but there should be some reason why the character is invested in that goal themselves rather than as a member of a group.
Long-term Ambition: Unlike a Motivation, achieving a worthy death is a fine Long-term Ambition for a Slayer. The 500 xp you gain from completing a Long-term Ambition won't do her much good, but the system anticipates characters optionally retiring upon achieving an Ambition like this, and death is as good a retirement as any.
Marven's Magnificent Curios: the peddlar that goes by the aforementioned name is my attempt at doing 'you all meet in a bar' without actually going that way. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Marven's outfit as you guys decide how you each relate to it though. What business do you have with the peddlar?
Short-term Ambition: having a quiet evening is probably too easily achievable to qualify as an ambition. I suppose that your character could be in a position where they've lost the ability to spend a quiet & peaceful ending, but for most starting characters it's a matter of spending some money and not doing anything. Is there something that makes achieving this goal hard for Magda?
Long-term Ambition: owning a hospital and starting a family are both fine long-term ambitions. Saving ten lives is probably not, as a physician can probably do that in a week or two of work. Because your character will need to fit in with our current rogue's gallery, I'll nudge a bit in the direction of owning a hospital, solely on the basis of that it would give your character a good reason to take some risks in order to get some money...although you do address that in your background as well.
Marven's Magnificent Curios: the peddlar that goes by the aforementioned name is my attempt at doing 'you all meet in a bar' without actually going that way. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Marven's outfit as you guys decide how you each relate to it though. What business does Magda have with the peddlar?
** spoiler omitted **
Motivation: the idea that Bolka wants to help troubled young women is fine, but Motivations should go deeper than that. Why does Bolka want to do this? She had a bad experience of her own, but that itself isn't a why. She could be selfish and not care in particular about their plights over anyone else's. This Motivation has similar problems to your first one, though not as severe. Unless I install troubled young women along the way, Bolka will have difficulty regaining Resolve. The core book recommends single-word Motivations and although that isn't a requirement, it shouldn't need more explanation than that. Looking at the rest of your background, maybe Redemption?
Okay, I can see redemption working as her motivation, but I think that Freedom might be a better fit, now that I give it some thought.
Short-term Ambition: what ship is Bolka on currently? By 'the ship', it's possible you could mean the ship the party will be travelling on. If so, why is that a personal ambition of Bolka's? I could see it being a party short-term ambition and it's OK for a personal ambition to match up with that of the party, but there should be some reason why the character is invested in that goal themselves rather than as a member of a group.
I did indeed mean the ship the group is travelling on. Bolka doesn't have a specific short-term goal, other than surviving to find something worthy of dying to (While killing it, of course), but she sure as shoot doesn't want to die from falling off the side of the ship and drowning.
Long-term Ambition: Unlike a Motivation, achieving a worthy death is a fine Long-term Ambition for a Slayer. The 500 xp you gain from completing a Long-term Ambition won't do her much good, but the system anticipates characters optionally retiring upon achieving an Ambition like this, and death is as good a retirement as any.
Good deal!
Marven's Magnificent Curios: the peddlar that goes by the aforementioned name is my attempt at doing 'you all meet in a bar' without actually going that way. I'm hoping to learn a bit more about Marven's outfit as you guys decide how you each relate to it though. What business do you have with the peddlar?
Information; specifically, information regarding dangerous monsters, altough anything Dwarf-related as well.
Thank you for your patience, everyone! I'm still short some of the information I would like before getting started, but since this adventure is homebrew that will never really go away.
I'm planning to get us started in Gameplay after work today & I've already written the post, so my range of excuses for failure should be narrow.
Following up on how the characters know each other, I was wondering what you all thought about this:
Magda and Ludger - Ludger has been a patient of Magda’s on occasion and appreciates that she doesn’t ask a lot of probing questions about how he got his injuries.
Bolka and Ludger - No definite links but maybe they are aware of each other as Ludger is fascinated by skilled warriors and Bolka may have identified Ludger as one of the tougher looking folks around the docks.
I don’t really have any other ideas right now but am open to anything that anyone suggests for bonds.
That could work Ludger. Bolka would likely want to arm wrestle you given the chance.
I looked into travel issues a bit more, and one source from 1E had travel speeds around half of what you quoted. Seems there is a lot of variability.
For the purpose of this adventure, the barge will be travelling at speed of plot. I think we'll be starting in Ubersreik or a town nearby. Then all I need to decide is the destination and what is between those points.
***
For everyone: since this is a river travel adventure, your friendly GM will point out a few mundane details. First, Sail is an Advanced skill. If no one in the party has it, you will need to hire someone to do the sailing or hire on with someone.
Also, Swim is an advanced skill. If you do not have at least one Advance in Swim, you cannot swim at all. Thrashing about helplessly in the water before you sink and die (if not rescued) will be your speed in water too deep to stand in. I don't plan to endlessly dump everyone overboard, but it wouldn't be river travel if going into the water wasn't a legit threat.
If you want to get advances in either or both of those skills and they aren't on your career list, spending 20 xp at character creation time is always an option. If you do that, spending a bit of background text on how you learned those skills wouldn't hurt. Or you can probably learn them en route if someone is available to teach you.
I actually found the water movement speed in the rule book when I was looking for something else...there’s a table on Page 262 of the rules with travel speeds for various conveyances.
In my post tonight, I mentioned that the horses beat Axel on a tie for Initiative. This is something I have in mind as a house rule so I'll explain more here.
An Opposed Test is handled just like any other Dramatic Test, but both parties make a Test. The party with the highest SL wins the Test. If both participants score the same SL, the party with the higher tested Skill or Characteristic wins. **more**
I think the last sentence is bunk. The fact that one character has a higher characteristic overall (at least for the 10s digit) is already taken into account in the Success Level calculation. If we assume that one contestant is higher in skill or characteristic on the 10s digit, then the lower-skilled contestant must have rolled better in order to force a tie in the first place. There's no obvious reason to reward rolling better over having a better skill.
What I do think makes sense, however, is to use the higher 1s position of the skill number. The game heavily encourages players to get all their skills & characteristics to even numbers of ten in order to score better in Dramatic and Opposed tests, with the 1s position hardly mattering in most circumstances. So giving it priority on tiebreakers seems more than fair, and rewards a bit of strategery from players (41 is better than 40, if only a bit).
So in the instant case, the horses had an Initiative of 15 vs Axel's Initiative of 30. After the rolls were considered, they tied on Success Levels. The 1s digit of the horses Initiative is 5 and Axel's is 0, so the horses win (not that it is very relevant in this case).
For now, if the 1s digit ties as well we'll continue breaking ties as the book describes, with either a stalemate or a reroll.
I'm being both ponderous and verbose in this fight due to it being our first combat and sort of an exhibition fight. Also it was awkward because some party members didn't know about the enemies during the first round of Initiative.
Especially when the battlefield is clearer, my intent would be to all of the enemy attacks and defenses at the beginning of the round, in spoilers for each character. Their attacks wouldn't occur until their order in Initiative, obviously.
The spoilers serve the purpose of allowing the players to decide which enemy they are attacking before they know the result of the enemy defense tests. (Honor system!) The reason I preroll is because players have options in combat (mostly using Fortune to reroll, but there are others) and we don't want to bog down a round of combat with multiple back-and-forth if we don't have to.
Ideally, once the players looked at their spoilers they should be able to determine at least whether they hit or missed (or were hit or missed by an incoming attack) on their own.
My goal for combat is one round/24 hours, so you aren't"t even late yet, Helaman.
Quick side note: some of you may have noticed that our elf player never showed up. That's my IRL friend and I didn't know what was going on either until last night.
They had an emergency and weren't available in recent times. It might still take a bit for them to sort things out, but they still intend to play. We'll bring them in when they're ready.
A question came up elsewhere and the answer is relevant, so I'll just make it public:
Advances gained from any source count as advances for all purposes. It doesn't matter if you got it from your species during character creation, from your career during character creation or from paying xp (or anything else that I'm missing).
To my knowledge, the only way to raise a characteristic or skill that isn't an advance are the characteristic talents (example: Savvy for +5 Intelligence). Those are specifically not advances, which makes them awesome.
I'm making some decisions on how to bridge where we're at to the next part of the campaign that will influence things a lot going forward. It shouldn't be too long, but I'm a bit sluggish over it at the moment.
I feel ya mate!
Null sweat chummer!
No worries. I'm glad you let us know you will be absent, but you don't need to apologize for real life pressures.
Regarding Axel wanting to learn Read/Write:
First, I left it out of the in-game discussion not because Hans is ignoring it but because they're trying to square away other matters. Hans isn't sure he'd have much time to teach you letters, but he's not unwilling to put in effort.
Then we get to the mechanical fiddly bits of the question. Learning talents out of the current tier of your career is hard. By the book it is impossible outside of Endeavours (a downtime thing), and even then it is both expensive and risky.
So, even if in-game Axel is learning to read, he's probably a long way from actually acquiring Read/Write. Since that talent isn't available at any tier to Witches, the easiest way to do it would be to move to a different career. Axel could move back to Witch if needed after completing that career, or follow a different path.
I'm perfectly fine with people working toward a goal in-character even if it is distant by game mechanics. Axel could even roleplay out reading small words or very simple phrases before he got to Read/Write, using his in-character work as justification. Just realize what it will take to actually accomplish the goal fully.
Its just a long term goal having its foundations laid.
A bit of houserule talk:
The book states that after a player completes a Short-Term Personal Ambition, they can select another one. It also says that Short-Term Ambitions should take 2-3 sessions to complete. (Sessions being somewhat ambiguous in play-by-post, but assume that a 'session' is completed when you get Fortune refreshed).
In looking around online, I've heard about some groups having problems where perhaps one player is staying on top of their Ambitions and is completing them regularly where perhaps another player forgets them often and falls behind. That concern is speculative, but still real. Neither player is doing anything wrong, but one of them is being left behind anyway.
In the game I'm playing I don't think we have any big problems, but I still see some areas of concern. It has happened to my character that I thought an Ambition would be complete-able in a reasonable amount of time, but the campaign went a different direction. In other cases, I see some characters sitting on their Ambitions for a long time because the campaign went in a direction, however temporary, that isn't fitting for their character's interests. Our dwarf is on a river trip & doesn't feel like their character is much of a sailor type, for instance.
The houserule I'm thinking of actually came to me in part because my character got a bonus reward of an extra Short-Term Ambition slot. It's just hanging around until he completes that Ambition, and he can't choose anything new for it when he gets his reward...it just goes away. I'm thinking of extending that idea.
So the houserule would be that Short-Term Ambitions never get to be automatically refreshed. All of them disappear when completed & the appropriate xp reward is given. Instead, the characters gain a Short-Term Ambition slot (Personal at least but probably Group as well) every three sessions. If a player is slow about choosing or completing their Ambitions, the slots will just slowly pile up over time waiting to be used.
I think a model like that would clear up a lot of problems, both potential & real. If a player's idea for a Short-Term Ambition is far-off in the distance, it will only cost them a delay in getting their xp reward. There's no long-term ramifications of such a choice. Unexpected twists and turns in the campaign don't require a change in a character's Ambitions as often, either: so long as they think they will be able to complete their goal eventually it still works.
What do you guys think?
Still feeling my way through it but it sounds good
I'll try to get something more up later today. If anyone wants to try to renegotiate (other than getting half up front), now would be a good time.