Hey Everyone,
I have been planning on running AoW for a while now and i finally have found some people to play with. But when i look at WC i can think of a way to start of the campaign. I was thinking that the first (intro) session all the players would come over and create there characters and let the characters talk among themselves about background and things like that but i wasa also thinking that maybe they could explore the Diomond Lake and even run into a fight or two.
Overall i real dont know what im going to do so ANY suggestions would be appreasiated.
We use online forums to communicate between games, so about a month before we started, I information overloaded my characters with Diamond Lake stuff. I also made all but one of the characters have connections with other NPCs in the town. The first adventure consisted of no dice, just talking, so the players could find voices for their characters.
It ended with two of the characters in prison :) Allustan and Smenk conspired to free them--the favor they owed Smenk came in handy later in the campaign.
I think it is a pity that there is so much info about Diamond Lake, and relatively little time spent there--take advantage of it while you have it. It's a fun town. If you've got four or fewer people, it might not be a bad idea to to get them to level 2 (or close to it) before you start Whispering Cairn.
I think it is a pity that there is so much info about Diamond Lake, and relatively little time spent there.
My players took over Diamond Lake after Ilthane ravaged the town. The rogue's the new Mayor and they've run Smenk (who wormed his way out of jail time for the Ebon Triad incident) out of town on a rail.
One of the suggestions in the first AOW issue is that all the characters know one another before the campaing begins; that they've been in town for quite some time. I made each player work out at least one connection to two of the other players - i.e. the druid in the party knew the rogue during a recent war, the rogue had run errands for Allustan, who was apprenticing the mage in the party, etc.
Hey Everyone,
I have been planning on running AoW for a while now and i finally have found some people to play with. But when i look at WC i can think of a way to start of the campaign. I was thinking that the first (intro) session all the players would come over and create there characters and let the characters talk among themselves about background and things like that but i wasa also thinking that maybe they could explore the Diomond Lake and even run into a fight or two.
Overall i real dont know what im going to do so ANY suggestions would be appreasiated.
Well, you might want to take a look at the next adventure (if you haven't already) and try to work a little foreshadowing in there.
The other thing you might want to do with the characters and their initial relationships is to suggest that two (or more) of the PCs be family. Afterall, Diamond Lake is a relatively small town, and if the PCs are all going to be from there anyways...
Note: I started a thread about Siblings in AoW a couple of weeks ago, since another player and I decided to make our PCs brothers when rolling up the characters during our initial character creation session prior to kicking off AoW. This then got a little out of hand as the rest of the party latched on to the idea as well. Out of 7 PCs, 5 of them are related to each other, either siblings or cousins.
Our DM though loves this idea, since not only does it give us a tight background with each other, but he gets to pick on the whole family at once with nasty DM tricks. Like making the head St Cuthbert priest a fanatical religious fundamentalist who thinks that adventurers are just one step higher on the social ladder than Smenk. And who also happens to be an estranged member of our clan, and he finds us to be an embarrassment... one he'd like to run out of town. Stuff like that.
And I know there is going to be a much more emotional and dramatic tie to the return to Diamond Lake and our family farmstead after our adventures in the Free City, but I'll just leave that to your imaginations, as I don't want to spoil it for anyone. But I'm sure anyone that has run AoW to that point can imagine exactly what I'm thinking is going to happen when we return.
Look ahead in the AP and try to tie characters into future adventures. IMC, for instance, one PC is Marenza's best friend, while another is her lover. A third PC was brought to Diamond Lake by Balabar Smenk himself, to help with the Ebon Triad situation (Balabar wants access to smoke powder, and the church of Gond has interest in gaining access to the raw materials being mined.) So, not only are they all motivated to work together in the begining, 3FOE and EaBK have hooks into the PC's Backgrounds.