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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Trickstergod" data-source="post: 1352774" data-attributes="member: 10825">The first few sessions of my Ravenloft game. It initially started with the characters all arriving in a town for various reasons - one seeking out rumors of a demonic master of song, another to claim an ancestral legacy and another having already lived there throughout the previous winter, working at the local inn. From there, while the characters were all taken along the general act of getting to know one another, and looking into their own personal matters (and bringing the other PC's along after being all properly bound together), I also began to familiarize them with the family that ran the inn, having the PC's and the family get to know one another rather well, along with the half-elven cleric who'd come to study the local religion, but had to hide her elven heritage away due to the xenophobia of the village. At which point, I rolled my plot in. Which involved a creature of nightmares attacking the family and those who stayed at the inn one night after another, which led to increased tension amongst the family, bringing about spousal abuse, an eventual suicide, and then the suicide spawning an Allip. One by one, the PC's saw the family and friends they'd come to know and care for attacked, some of whom eventually died, while they were scrambling to find out just what was doing this in the first place, eventually having to make a deal with a hag to take care of the problem. It had been a particularly emotionally draining string of sessions, leaving me one night in my house alone after game just introspecting. However, they were probably some of the best games I'd run, and my players all agreed. They were all emotionally involved, and it helped tie the characters together quite strongly, and define them to a degree. I had a similar experience when I ran the starter adventure out of Midnight. I used the little girl who'd become a Fell, and played it to the hilt, leaving the players in a moral debate for about an hour before they - quite hesitantly - finally did what they needed to do, and killed her. Not that all my games are so morose. I've had plenty of games defined by perfectly in-game laughter (as opposed to just general screwing around), such as, again, Ravenloft, when they met up with the Carnival. Wood'n'Head, one of the "freaks" of the Carnival, proved a welcome relief to all their previous troubles, as he quite gleefully showed off his ability to have things nailed into him, stabbed through him or even be shot, without any more reaction than a cheeky grin. Those are the ones that stuck with me, anyway. Only one was a real module, per se, but there you have it.</blockquote>

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