Sammael
Adventurer
Alright, I have to brag about this.
A good friend of mine planned to celebrate her birthday today with a special RPG session that was meant to last 8-10 hours; the DM was going to be another mutual friend, but, due to real-life complications, she had to bail out of it yesterday.
On the spur of the moment, I offered to jump in and run an adventure myself. Since it was going to be a one-off, and I didn't want us to waste time creating characters, that meant pre-gens. I knew that most of the players (birthday girl included) were much more concerned with the story and role-playing than with the rules and tactical combat intricacies. So, what should I run that can be relatively rules-light, yet compelling and story-driven? Planescape, that's what.
I had a grand total of 4 hours to prep for the session. I spent 3 of those 4 hours on pre-generating characters. A lot of that time went into converting various Planescape fluff into feats and special abilities for my own d20 system. Eventually, I had my Sensate Elf Rogue, Dustman Tiefling Bard, and Guvner Githzerai Mage. Oh, and the Clueless Prime Human Fighter (to be played by a guy completely new to RPGs in general).
The remaining hour was spend mapping out the "maze" - a series of interconnected outer planar portals that branched out to every outer plane (save the Outlands). In keeping with the setting flavor and the Rule of Threes, every plane had 3 exit portals. Some of the portals are one-way, and some are two-way. On each plane, the characters had to discover one piece of the portal key for the "main" portal that would let them out of the maze.
I then wrote a single sentence for each plane, meant to describe the location of the key on that plane and the easy way for recovering it.
Believe it or not, the players actually managed to visit 7 of 16 outer planes - Beastlands, Limbo, Arborea, Elysium, Ysgard, Acheron, and the Grey Waste, and they came up with a number of creative and unexpected solutions to the problems I presented (and each plane had a very specific problem, related to the nature of the plane). The play time spent varied from 10 minutes (Elysium) to an hour and a half (Ysgard). But, believe it or not, the time was more than sufficient for them to get a feel of the plane and its inhabitants.
Normally, in a typical session, these same players have difficulty navigating more than 3-4 dungeon rooms due to the constant bickering and inability to reach consensus. For some reason, this was much different - and a huge accomplishment in my eyes. Maybe I should just run Planescape more and worry about the rules less?
A good friend of mine planned to celebrate her birthday today with a special RPG session that was meant to last 8-10 hours; the DM was going to be another mutual friend, but, due to real-life complications, she had to bail out of it yesterday.
On the spur of the moment, I offered to jump in and run an adventure myself. Since it was going to be a one-off, and I didn't want us to waste time creating characters, that meant pre-gens. I knew that most of the players (birthday girl included) were much more concerned with the story and role-playing than with the rules and tactical combat intricacies. So, what should I run that can be relatively rules-light, yet compelling and story-driven? Planescape, that's what.
I had a grand total of 4 hours to prep for the session. I spent 3 of those 4 hours on pre-generating characters. A lot of that time went into converting various Planescape fluff into feats and special abilities for my own d20 system. Eventually, I had my Sensate Elf Rogue, Dustman Tiefling Bard, and Guvner Githzerai Mage. Oh, and the Clueless Prime Human Fighter (to be played by a guy completely new to RPGs in general).
The remaining hour was spend mapping out the "maze" - a series of interconnected outer planar portals that branched out to every outer plane (save the Outlands). In keeping with the setting flavor and the Rule of Threes, every plane had 3 exit portals. Some of the portals are one-way, and some are two-way. On each plane, the characters had to discover one piece of the portal key for the "main" portal that would let them out of the maze.
I then wrote a single sentence for each plane, meant to describe the location of the key on that plane and the easy way for recovering it.
Believe it or not, the players actually managed to visit 7 of 16 outer planes - Beastlands, Limbo, Arborea, Elysium, Ysgard, Acheron, and the Grey Waste, and they came up with a number of creative and unexpected solutions to the problems I presented (and each plane had a very specific problem, related to the nature of the plane). The play time spent varied from 10 minutes (Elysium) to an hour and a half (Ysgard). But, believe it or not, the time was more than sufficient for them to get a feel of the plane and its inhabitants.
Normally, in a typical session, these same players have difficulty navigating more than 3-4 dungeon rooms due to the constant bickering and inability to reach consensus. For some reason, this was much different - and a huge accomplishment in my eyes. Maybe I should just run Planescape more and worry about the rules less?
