Tonight we had a new recruit (my game is a walk-in game, so if you're in downtown Kingston (ON) on a Wednesday night, visit us at The Minotaur and join in!) and he made a splash at once.
I had very vague plans when I inspired by the megadungeon thread on Dragonsfoot decided to draw some sketches for a dungeon and let it grow in play. Now we have a city of Khazan which I'm evolving based on what's been written about it before, a wilderness around the dungeon, and relations between the characters and NPCs. Thanks to Jeff Rients magnificent Carousing Mishaps table in Fight On! #4, more and more hilarious events keep happening. Tonight our dwarf, who was turned into a eunuch by a trap a few weeks back, suddenly got himself a very insisting girlfriend. A draconian girlfriend. He has a CHA of 1, and is now almost engaged! I never could have planned that.
Before I have always introduced the game fairly quickly, and tossed the new players in the deep end for them to "play the game" from stage one. Today I went for a more involved introduction and since one of the other players was curious about what had happened to him after his carousing, we had two threads that could be fun to entwine. It worked out marvellously well. The chutzpah shown by that new lady rogue when she faced a dark elf wizard of far superior stats and skill, charmed more than just the characters. Add to that the fact that I got to introduce (fleetingly) some pirates, makes it even better. My daughter is crazy about pirates, so no ninjas in my game. Only pirates. Arr.
Those of you who read my musings about how to make undead scary, might be satisfied to know that they were indeed scary. A bunch of skeletons never last long when you've left the first tier of delving, but they at least made an impression. I really liked how the players reacted to the special attacks of the skeletons and made smart adjustments to their tactics. Abstract combat or not, there's still tactics. They took one claw attack to the eyes, and then realized if these guys go for close combat brutality, we'd better hit them hard and from afar. For those who have been reading my posts about combat smarts might want to head over and take a peek at the Combat Trick discussion on the Bridge.
All in all it was a fun session where both the world and the characters evolved a bit in new and organic ways. What I really like about this campaign is that it's never solidifying to much, since we seem to get a nice shakeup once in a while. Fight On!