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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7431001" data-attributes="member: 42582">We played a short session of In a Wicked Age today. The "worldbuilding" is fun - turn up 4 cards and read off "the oracles". There are four possible oracles to choose from - Blood & Sex, God-kings of War, the Unquiet Past, and a Nest of Vipers. The gang chose "A Nest of Vipers", and so the 4 cards gave us A fallen-in mansion, where by night ghosts and devils meet, the solemnization of treaty between two neighboring principalities, negotiated in the face of brutality and assassination, doomed, a wayhouse in which plague-victims have recently stayed and a conjurer possessed by spirits of uncivil character.We then had to come up with the characters (express and implicit) in this situation. There is no canonical rule for that, so I did it by going around the table twice (for ten characters). This gave us:* Prince Diamond, ready to sign the treaty; * His chief diplomat; * The ghost of the owner of the mansion; * A plague-animated corpse; * A plague carrier; * A conjurer; * A spirit possessing the conjurer; * A demon impersonating Prince Diamond's mother-in-law; * An assassin who has caused strife; * An investigator in too deep.The players chose to play the ghost, the corpse, the conjurer and the assassin. I wrote up the prince and his diplomat, the spirit, the demon and the plague carrier as NPCs. The investigator didn't get written up and never came into it.The final stage was nominating "best interests" for the characters. Some were pretty unsurprising (eg the ghost wanted to confirm that the conjurer was responsible for its death, and then seek vengeance) but others more surprising (the corpse wanted to find its love, and then put down the wicked).The writing up was pretty quick, leaving us an hour or so of play. Because of the constrained time I (as GM) pushed things fairly hard as far as framing, connections between characters, etc was concerned. The GM advice refers to rushing up to a conflict, circling a conflict or drawing a conflcit out, but I didn't do much drawing out and mostly rushed up.The session started in the waystation, which had once been an outbuilding of the mansion and was still standing, and (it turned out) had a view of the plaza where the treaty was to be signed. The corpse tried to find its love - not the conjurer (it turned out), nor the carrier, but the demon in disguise (or, at least, the demon persuaded the corpse of that).The carrier had been buried in a shallow grave, apparently dead, by the conjurer, but then regained consciousness. Around the same time, the ghost of the mansion drove the possessing spirit out of the conjurer (which was wanting to keep its "fleshbag" for itself) resulting in the conjurer losing memory of what he had done beforehand (including to the carrier).The final twist was the plague carrier turning out to be the princess of the other realm (in disguise as a commoner, and infected with plague), which led to a near-failure of diplomacy when she confronted the prince with the accusation that his vizier (the now un-possessed conjurer) had buried her as if dead.The session finished when the assassin resolved both his best interests - he wanted to assassinate the diplomat, and avoid contractingthe plague - when I defeated him in his Nth attempt (N =3, I think) to get the drop on the diplomat and then offered a negotiated resolution: the diplomat is dead if he contracts the plague (due to having been staying in the waystation, plus contact with the princess immediately after she climbed out of her "grave"). The player accepted, and the clock struck.Vincent Baker has <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427" target="_blank">a blog post explaining a weakness in the resolution system</a>, namely, that once a conflict starts the unfolding fiction doesn't really iterate back into its resolution; and we did discover this even in our brief session. Still, I would say as a system for generating colourful characters and situation quickly, I would compare it favourably to <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?586642-Classic-Traveller-session-report-with-reflections-on-the-system-long" target="_blank">classic Traveller</a>.I don't know if we'll come back to it or not. I'd be happy to, but the rest of the gang would have to be on board.</blockquote>

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