Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9843246" data-attributes="member: 42582">This post is a re-post from another active thread. Given that it is all about TB2e actual play, I thought I'd repost it here.A post about Apocalypse World procedures made me think about an episode of Torchbearer 2e GMing this weekend, when the PCs went to the tavern in a village, and so I had to roll on the Tavern Rumours table.The results were:7 Sudden appearance. Your friend, bedraggled and disheveled from the road, bursts into the tavern with an incredible tale to tell. 10 Omen. An omen of things to come…1 An unkindness of ravens mocks you from the trees outside 2 The moon (or sky) is red 3 The road is utterly silent as you depart—no sign of bird, insect, or animal 4 Thunder rolls and lightning crashes in the distance 5 A stone carved with strange runes sits concealed outside the tavern 6 The wind seems to howl your name (I rolled a 1.) 18 Spurned lover. The irate paramour of one of the leaders of this place is in the tavern spinning tales. Roll 1d6. They talk about:1 Their lover’s tainted nature 2 An incoming shipment 3 A strange visitor 4 Their lover’s behavior 5 A terrifying ritual 6 Their lover’s spouse’s secret (I rolled a 4.)Each of these requires the GM to make a decision about what to say next.It was Fea-bella who encountered a spurned lover, talking irately about their lover's behaviour. The village is not far from the Halls of Tizun Thane, where two of the three PCs had already explored (in the previous session). There is little else of interest in the village, or connected to the PCs, so I decided to connect this to the Halls of Tizun Thane. This required adopting a liberal reading of "this place"; but the rulebook says, for Town Events, "Be sure to color these results so that they mesh with the current events of the campaign", and the same logic applies to the Rumours Table.There once were three leaders in the Halls. Tizun Thane is dead, but his two brothers are still alive. Sega Thane is a necromantic weirdo who hangs out with his animated dead; but Diker, while also not without character flaws, is a bit more normal. The scenario (which is from a 1980 White Dwarf magazine) has rumours in the classic D&D fashion, and one of them mentions Diker Thane has sometimes sent men to the village for supplies in the last six months. This implies that Diker himself has not been going to the village; and so this supplied my material: Fea-bella's interlocutor complained that her boyfriend, Diker Thane, hadn't visited her for six months. (And said a bit more about Diker, such as that is monetarily well off, wearing a dark green cape and having a suit of black plate armour.)Telemere received the omen, being mocked by an unkindness of ravens. I decided to link this to the haunting of the village by the Night Things - which had already been foreshadowed by my description of wooden building being rebuilt in stone, and shuttered with metal. The Scholar's Guide includes the following instruction to GMs (pp 213-4):Making judgement calls on how to apply the rules and even how to bridge two systems so that they fit the scenario is an important part of being a game master. Guide with a light (but firm hand), rely on common sense and shape the action so it challenges the characters’ beliefs, goals, instincts and creeds.I saw an opportunity to link this omen to Telemere's Instinct, which is to look if I'm being watched when I enter somewhere new. When he entered the tavern, he could see one of the old-timers say something to the barkeep. Using his Instinct, Telemere's player succeeded on a Scout test, and overheard the old-timer telling the barkeep that the mocking of the ravens indicated that the Elven ranger was going to be a victim of the Night Things. (The PCs learned more about these Night things when they spoke to a village elder.)When I rolled the sudden appearance of Golin's friend, I asked Golin's player to read off his list of friends. One was dead, one was an alchemist quite a way away at the Wizard's Tower, and one was a tinker even further away at the village Nulb. Nulb is the nearest settlement to the Moathouse, which had been the headquarters of Lareth the Beautiful until Lareth was driven off by river pirates and pursued by his (former) Bugbear servitors. The last time the PCs were in Nulb, it had been overrun by pirates.Now, Nink turned up in this far away village. He told Golin how the Bugbears had returned to Nulb and driven out the pirates and most of the residents. So Nink had fled. A series of encounters had driven him further and further north (I narrated NPCs and places that the PCs had experienced, and that it made sense would cause Nink to keep coming north), until he'd come to a village where he had heard there would be work for a tinker (because of all the building taking place).I haven't tried to generalise these examples into any sort of general principle. But I hope they illustrate how I approach Torchbearer 2e; how I try to integrate its classic-D&D-esque elements (with dungeons and rumours and stuff) with its Burning Wheel-esque elements (with Beliefs and Instincts and relationships and stuff); and how I try to handle the low myth aspects of play without going completely mad libs.</blockquote>

Verification