Dawnforge Characters

[Nighthawk]

I purchased my copy of Dawnforge yesterday. From what I have seen so far, I have a favorable impression of the book. Of course, I have only read to page 98 at this moment.

 

[LiVeWiRe]

Yesterday I GMed my first Dawnforge session.

PCs (L1): minotaur fighter (m), tiefling wizard of entropy (m), tiefling sorcerer (f), yuan-ti thinblood monk (f), human lowlander shaper (m), gnome shaman (m), night elf rogue (m), ogre ranger (m)

Thanks for posting! Sounds like you have quite a mixed group...just curious, how did you get all of them together?

I was extremely generous with starting equipment - no masterwork stuff, only minor magic items from the PHB, everything below 350 gp was granted (and the ogre even received a mighty (+6) composite greatbow).

*nudges Morpheus* Hint, hint...

The Cardinal-Hope your game goes well and great fun is had by all!

LW

 

[LiVeWiRe]

Looks like I will most likely be running a Dawnforge campaign for my co-workers starting next month

Good luck Ramien!

Not sure if you saw the link to the Dawnforge site above, but they have a forum on the site. There is already some activity there and various ideas about campaigns, etc. posted.

The link is: Paths of Legend

LW

 

[Pyske]

Yesterday I GMed my first Dawnforge session.
[...]
Still the party was nearly wiped out in their first encounter: a bar room brawl with 6 highlander barbarians. Then they experienced a blatant "Seven Samurai" rip-off when they were hired by three poor peasants from a village north of Elnaria where the nearby fort of the Griffon Company had been closed last summer...

Sounds interesting. Still, I'm curious: what elements of the session really brought home the Dawnforge "feel" for you? How was it different from a standard D&D game? In particular, what are the "world-shaping" characteristics of the PCs?

. . . . . . . -- Eric

 

[Samothdm]

The DM for the game I play in is just now wrapping up his current campaign (3+ years playing in a Fourth Age Middle Earth) and has picked up Dawnforge as the basis for his next campaign which I imagine will start sometime in late Spring. He's trying to finish up our current campaign before one of our players has a baby.

He's been very impressed and excited about the book - he e-mails me pretty much daily with new cool stuff he's read about. I'll definitely be purchasing it and posting my character ideas here later.

 

[LiVeWiRe]

He's been very impressed and excited about the book - he e-mails me pretty much daily with new cool stuff he's read about. I'll definitely be purchasing it and posting my character ideas here later.

I think everyone in our upcoming campaign is excited about the new setting too!

Thanks Samothdm--looking forward to seeing more character ideas. Perhaps we'll be able to share our own ideas and creations by the time you are making a character for your new game.

LW

 

[MEG Hal]

Just got my Dawnforge book, woo hoo, will be looking it over, over the next few days.

 

[The Cardinal]

Thanks for posting! Sounds like you have quite a mixed group...just curious, how did you get all of them together?

Well, like I said: they were all stranded in the absolutely cheapest inn in all of Riversend - with no job, no money, and no idea how to get through the coming winter. Then those peasants witnessed the group fight half-a-dozen drunk and raging highlander barbarians...
Why they ended up in Riversend in the first place? Because all of them had a good reason to leave home: the night elf wanted to escape a civil war and a cult that he didn't like, the tiefling wizard had "difficulties" with his teacher, the sorceress fled from an arranged marriage "to strengthen the bloodline", the lowlander just wanted to flee from life as a farmer and develop his own strange gifts, the yuan-ti just fled from her low-caste fate in the homeland, the ogre didn't want to end his life as a retainer of the giants, the gnome was just curious about all those unknown lands out there in the west - and the minotaur never had a home anyway...


BTW: one of the PCs is a doppleganger - but no other player knows about this...

 

[The Cardinal]

Sounds interesting. Still, I'm curious: what elements of the session really brought home the Dawnforge "feel" for you? How was it different from a standard D&D game? In particular, what are the "world-shaping" characteristics of the PCs?

it's hard to say where the "feel" came from - but the effect of DF was that a lot of the usual d20/D&D3.5 stuff seems right now: the archetypical classes, the hit point systems, the "simple" plots. We're at the beginning: things should be archetypical, and powerful, and "simple".

All PCs had been generated with above-average ability scores (the players could choose between several dice-rolling methods, all resulting in high average results).
Beyond that they also were confronted with some odd sayings of the old blind seer of the village: they learned that she was ashamed to have called them, just to satisfy her need for revenge against the bandits who had killed her grandson. Why the shame? Because her visions showed her that from the members of this group - who, without this "job", would all have lived out their lives without any greater impact or meaning to the world at large - would grow powerful forces which will ultimately cause TEOTWAWKI...

Another important part of DF is to describe the players a world still full of natural and *living* magic: it is not unusual to meet a nymph or satyr deep in the forest. Maybe let them even encounter one or two "talking animals" - a fish living in a small pond maybe - and don't explain. Weapons are not just made of steel and mithril, but of ice or shadow. Think of legends and fairy tales, not of Tolkien and Howard. Think Arabian Nights, Grimm, Beowulf, Niebelungenlied, Kalevala, Hercules, and Ulysses (Odysseus) - think Amber, Melniboné, and Malazan (Caladan Brood, Anomander Rake, Cotillion, Icarium, and Kalam - not Fiddler or Crocus).

 

[MEG Hal]

I am surprised no one commented (good or bad) about my tiefling paladin idea...I need to look at the book and see how outrageous this may look, but from a RP perspective I think the challenge would be cool.

Cool ideas Cardinal---keep up the ideas, it is getting me pumped to start the new campaign...want to blow off gameday .

Ok, maybe not...