The first half or more of the session was spent on PC building (despite my admonition to the players that they could only have 1 hour). With three players, we got 3 PCs: an eladrin bard with the virtue of cunning (with the Veiled Alliance theme); a mul battlemind gladiator (with the gladiator theme and wielding a battle axe); and a half-giant barbarian gladiator (with the wilder theme and wielding a glaive).
I came up with a list of background options - the standard stuff like a +2 bonus or a bonus language or adding a skill to the class list, plus some other stuff I took from somewhere or other (maybe some FR backgrounds from some book or article? I made this list a long time ago), plus some Dark Sun specific stuff like one wild power or the ability to cast Arcane magic as a preserver. (Otherwise, I had said that Arcane defiles by default.)
The bard's background choices were Preserver (I am treating bards as psionic - and avengers likewise - but he is a multi-class wizard with Beguiling Strands) and Sensing Eye as a wild power. The mul's background choices were Perception as a class skill and +2 to initiative. The barbarian chose Body Equilibrium, and a +2 bonus to saving throws vs Charm and Fear effects.
As the final part of PC building, and trying to channel a bit of indie spirit, I asked the players to come up with "kickers" for their PCs.
From
The Forge, here is one person's definition of a kicker:
A Kicker is a term used in Sorcerer for the "event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins."
For the player, the Kicker is what propels the character into the game, as well as the thing that hooks the player and makes him or her say, "Damn! I can't wait to play this character!"
It's also the thing that the player hopes to resolve at the end of the game. At the start of the next game with the same character, the resolution of the Kicker alters the character in some way, allowing the player to re-write the character to reflect changes.
In my case, I was mostly focused on the first of those things: an event or realisation that the character has experienced just before play begins, which thereby propels the character into the game. The main constraint I imposed was: your kicker somehow has to locate you within Tyr in the context of the Sorcerer-King having been overthrown. The reason for this constraint was (i) I want to be able to use the 4e campaign books, and (ii) D&D relies pretty heavily on group play, and so I didn't want the PCs to be too separated spatially or temporally.
The player of the barbarian came up with something first. Paraphrasing slightly, it went like this:
I was about to cut his head of in the arena, to the adulation of the crowd, when the announcement came that the Sorcerer-King was dead, and they all looked away.
So that answered the question that another player had asked, namely, how long since the Sorcerer-King's overthrow: it's just happened.
The other gladiator - whose name is "Twenty-nine", that being his number on the inventory of slaves owned by his master - had been mulling over (no pun intended) something about his master having been killed, and so we settled on the following:
I came back from the slave's privies, ready to receive my master's admonition to do a good job before I went out into the arena. But when I got back to the pen my master was dead. So I took the purse with 14 gp from his belt.
(The 14 gp was the character's change after spending his starting money on gear.)
Discussion of PC backgrounds and the like had already established that the eladrin was an envoy from The Lands Within The Wind, aiming to link up with the Veiled Alliance and thereby to take steps to save his homeland from the consequences of defiling. So his kicker was
My veiled alliance contact is killed in front of me as we are about to meet.
(A lot of death accompanying the revolution!)
With all that in place, we started the session proper. I started with the barbarian, describing him standing over his defeated foe in the arena as the cry comes through the crowd "The tyrant is dead!" - taking all attention away from his victory and the pending kill.
I then cut to the mul slave in the pens. I told him he could hear someone moving off in the corridors and cells under the stadium; and also that the sound of the crowd sounded more worked up than normal. He decided that, with his master's unexplained death in front of him, he would head to the arena gate rather than back into the warrens. The gatekeeper recognised him, and at first told him that his time hadn't yet come to enter the arena. Twenty-nine tried to talk him around - and succeeded on a Diplomacy check - and I narrated a blast of psionic energy coming from somewhere above in the stands and exploding near the gate. The gatekeeper released that the insurrection was on in a serious way, and left his post - so Twenty-nine was able to open the gate himself and enter the arena, where he could see the wild barbarian (whom he knew by reputation if not as a personal friend) standing over his defeated enemy.
The barbarian, meanwhile, followed through on his exultation in victory and killed his defeated enemy despite the lack of crowd attention. (No roll was required for this.) Members of the crowd objected, however, calling out "No more murder!" - and some jumped over the low wall down into the arena, to try and remonstrate with the gladiator. I rolled some dice and decided on 10 people. Either another roll or an arbitrary decision - I can't remember which - told me that two fell into hidden pits in the sand before they could close, but that still left the gladiator facing 8 angry people (mechanically 2nd level Human Goon minions from the MV).
Twenty-nine saw this and ran across the arena to close the 17 squares. (And at this point I think got a slight speed boost, as we hadn't yet remembered to factor in the speed penalty for scaled armour.) He used the flat of his bone axe to knock down one of the commoners (ie non-lethal reduction to zero hit points); when the barbarian then got a hit in, after taking a bit of damage himself from the NPCs, I asked him if he was using the flat of his obsidian-tipped glaive, to which the reply was "It has a flat?" One dead NPC.
Up in the stands, meanwhile, the eladrin envoy - a student of the ancient tactics of the eladrin, and visiting the arena (i) to see how the people of this land fight, and (ii) to meet up with the Veiled Alliance - saw his contact approach, giving the secret signal of recognition that the eladrin had been told to expect. Then the contact feel down dead. The eladrin used his Sensing Eye to try to inspect the body and identify an assailant, but even with a +2 bonus (for clairvoyance) the Perception check failed, and so instead he attracted the attention of a Templar who noticed his psionic sensor. He succeeded in persuading the Templar that he didn't know the dead Veiled Alliance member, but not that his interest in the matter was innocent (there was a successful check in there somewhere - Diplomacy, I think, which is +4 CHA +5 training +5 Words of Friendship and so hard for him to fail - but also a failure, maybe on another Perception attempt). So when the Templar insisted that he come with him he teleported down into the arena itself, just as the events described above were unfolding.
The Templar (I was using a MM 4th level human wizard re-specced as a 2nd level elite) unleashed a psionic area attack that took down 4 of the NPCs (no good killing them when they make useful slaves later!) and dazed all of the PCs. The two warriors charged across the arena and scaled the wall - Twenty-nine making it only with the help of some people in the stands (which was my narration of his failure - ending up prone with no movement left at the top of the climb). As they took the fight to the Templar two of his bodyguards (MM 3rd level human guards reduced to 1st level) were approaching from higher up in the stands.
The last two commoners in the arena ran off rather than be embroiled in this, inviting the bard to come with them - but he declined.
The bard's player rolled poorly over the next few rounds, but the two warriors were able to take down the templar and then the two guards, the barbarian shining in the damage department but the mul showing off a defender's AC and hit points. At the end of the fight some quick maths showed that it was a Level 5 encounter for three PCs, so everyone earned an action point for the milestone, we spent some surges for a short rest, and ended the session there.
Two of three kickers are still unresolved, and eventually there will be two more PCs to integrate (one will be an eladrin artful dodger, who should fit in nicely into the eladrin contingent). But I felt that, for the opening of the campaign, it was suitably Dark Sun-ish: gladiators, slaves, templars, insurrection, and brutal death. The only thing missing was desert.
