el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
And so, as my writing up of my “Out of the Frying Pan” campaign story hour nears its end, I have been getting prepared for my next Aquerra campaign, and helping to get my players prepared as well. I have fairly elaborate set-ups for campaigns, coming up with themes and character guidelines for the players, and there is a lot of back and forth regarding backgrounds, classes, skills, feats, etc… before we are ready to go.
Since it is such a potentially lengthy process I wanted to start a couple of months before our first session. I also wanted to give myself enough time to actually finish the OOTFP story hour – as there is no way I will be writing two story hours at once, and I’d like to write one up for the new campaign as well.
Preparing for what had the working title of “The Noble Adventurers” campaign began with rewriting whole the entire Thricia section in my Aquerra gazetteer to bring it up to date with the current rules we use and to get rid of a lot of silly stuff hanging around from when I was 17 and first started detailing my homebrew. This is a work in progress, and I am still progressing. The original dozen or so pages I had written about Thricia over the last 17 years are steadily expanding, and at this point I am closing in on one hundred pages. I still have plenty to do. And except for coming up with reasonable names for the scores of NPCs I am stocking this place with, it has been a lot of fun.
However, there was a speed bump on the player end, so we had to figure out which 6 of the current pool of 8 gamers in my circle were going to take part (see this thread). My players took the matter into their own hands and went with a Survivor-style for the six that would be in it. The other two are alternates.
The final six are:
- Eric M. (posts here as Ciaran; played Martin the Green in “Out of the Frying Pan”)
- Jesse (posts here as mofos21; played Bastian in “Out of the Frying Pan”)
- Eric G. (posts here as Ratchis; played Malcolm and then Ratchis in “Out of the Frying Pan”)
- John (posts here are Martin Olarin; played Kazrack in “Out of the Frying Pan”)
- Sean (posts here as Rastfar; he ran “The Promised Land” Aquerra Campaign)
- Ken (never posts here that I know of ; he played Jeremy in “Out of the Frying Pan”)
Since I had let the players know that the basic concept were behind the campaign would be a group of young nobles of lesser houses taking up the tradition of founding an “Adventurer’s Charter” – to go off and bring glory to their name and that of the family, while accumulating wealth and doing the common good, by defending the common folk from monsters and the like, as is the duty of the nobility – they knew where to start from. In fact, it was the number of ideas I was getting from all 8 possible players that drive me to declare that the actual make-up of the group had to be determined, since I felt bad making two people who would not play waste their time (and I guess mine as well) but sending me stuff about characters they would never get to play.
I also let them know that I had adapted the Noble class from A Game of Thrones d20, for use as an ‘Aristocrat’ that can measure up to the PC classes a little better, and that we would be using an adapted version of the Reputation and Influence rules from that game. Finally, I let them know that they would be starting at 2nd level, but with 0 xp, and that I would be giving them a Campaign Guide to help with the character creation process.
Oh yeah, and they already knew we would be using a stat draft to determine stats.
I left it up to the players to decide how the PCs are connected (if at all) and they ran with it.
This is how the character ideas stand:
- Eric G. – Aristocrat/Rogue – a ne’er-do-well son of House Briareus
- Eric M. – Fighter – a man-at-arms bastard son of the same family as the above character - a sometimes bodyguard
- Sean – Fighter/Diviner – an alumnus of the Academy of Wizardry with ambitions of becoming an eldritch knight.
- John G. – Wizard (diviner as well?) – missing/abducted in childhood, he has recently returned - could be younger sibling of Sean's character
- Jesse – Aristocrat/Priest (or Paladin) of Ra – no more info as of yet.
- Ken – Aristocrat/Fighter? – well, he said “whatever is the equivalent of a cavalier” – so working his way up to the knight or cavalier prestige classes I will create, the Aristocrat/Fighter is probably the best start.
We cannot have the stat draft until Ken, who is moving back to Brooklyn from Albany, returns. So, all these ideas are still in a proto stage – and any of them can change – though I feel some players seem to have a better grip on what they want to do than others, and I expect the players to act cooperatively in the stat draft (though I little competition is fun, too). So I ma thinking the draft will occur sometime over the holidays with the campaign starting in late January.
I will be updating this thread with the process of this campaign coming together, and will be quoting emails and just discussing little about the back and forth with players to create the foundation that the campaign will kick off from. I have built a very sturdy and unyielding frame as a setting for this campaign, but there is so much room within for a variety of ideas, that who knows what I will be called upon to create or smooth over to help things fit.
In the meantime, they have the “Second Son of a Second Son” campaign guide PDF (Click Here to download the PDF) to look through and help guide their choices. Oh yeah, and that was the name I settled on for the campaign…
