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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fuzzybear" data-source="post: 8753139" data-attributes="member: 6917259"><h3>Episode 7 - Pursuers</h3>This episode starts with a planned game time with the players! Winry will a few times in the campaign start up an icebreaker style game for the party to play in order to get to know each other a little bit better. These have been really fun for the players, as well as opportunities for me to poke them a little bit for secrets that I may know that the party does not yet. This is the first of those occasions and it goes over very well each time. A lot of really interesting items were brought up from people's backstories, including Bryn's child and husband as well as Jack's family, but the thing that I enjoyed the most about this was poking at how important names were for this group. We have a couple of nobles as well as a more shrouded backstory, all of whom have interesting last names that tie into them. Jack is from a noble family but hiding his past as he does not want it to define him. Myetharia similarly is nobility, and while she doesn't actively try to hide it, she doesn't like that aspect of herself. Rayland on the other hand has a lot of his secrets attached to his name. It made sense once it came up organically for me to prod this sensitive topic a little bit and see who wanted to break and share. I also got to make up a last name for Torrent! No big issue, but I decided on something light and reminded me of water. It is fairly Elf sounding, but I don't mind that. The other thing of note here would be Winry's past with the Monastery. She wanted to be a monk, but didn't love the idea of the lightning aspect that the Player's Guide gives, so we did some slight modification to it. Instead of being trained formally, we decided that it would fit her snow leopard looks to have her powers be cold based instead. As there are a pretty similar number of cold spells, I decided that we could make it works just change the damage type from the guide and keep everything else pretty much the same as the class. But having changed the theme, I didn't want to change the Monastery itself too much and re-flavor the encounters there, so we decided that she learned on her own by watching the monks. Her style is similar, but just a bit different as she attuned to a different element. Because of this, she was denied entry by those she looked up to and led her to adventure instead.After story time, we get to combat instead. The group currently has a bit of a play for triggering traps and watching the results, and this is the first time we get to see it in action. They notice the ambush, but don't understand it. So they try to trigger it and get the jump on them instead. The ambushers instead are waiting for a full group to go past, not just Jack on foot, so they don't spring the trap yet. It turns a bit silly, but evolves into a fun combat anyway. I did change a few things about this combat. First the party rolled so incredibly badly at the start (count the 11s and 12s) that I didn't want to overwhelm them too much at first. I made the reinforcements take a few rounds to arrive in order to allow them to deal with things a bit more first. This episode cuts off in the middle of combat, but I really didn't want Kathor to arrive too early and start cutting people to shreds or die.I also played Renard a bit more fun. Instead of making him overly serious, I took his penchant for overly complex plans to a more fun way and made him more of a comedic character in his delivery. This did not blunt his potential danger, but made my players have a bit more fun than the typical hardened bad guy. I like to have some levity in fights that are not "boss" level encounters, so this allowed me to have more fun knowing that the Inquisitor was around the corner.The encounter itself did not go anything like how I had imagined it. As Renard says, "You're ruining it all. You were supposed to have kept riding!" Instead of getting into the gauntlet and having a chaotic horse riding battle, we get a brawl in the canyon. It all works out well either way, it just missed some of surprise and chaos that could have occurred instead.We also get to see the origin story of Jack the horse killer. It has been a running joke at the table now every time we see horses that Jack is going to torture or kill it. His smart but terrible casting of Heat Metal on the horse's bit to toss Renard off is where it all begins. Next time, finishing a fight and meeting a medium.</blockquote>

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