Last Saturday I played a face to face game of Castles&Crusades with Dennis, Dan, Ed, Mark E. and Noah E. It was really nice to sit around a table and play; it's something we rarely get to do, and I miss it! Face to face is all of our prefered way to game, but life, time, logistics, jobs, family, etc. make it hard to do.
I prepped a very short introductory module called Shadows of a Green Sky, which is simple to run. It took us about three hours to go through the whole thing, but I could have made it longer with an additional encounter or two. I gave everyone 4th level pre-mades (I think Ed brought his own guy), and the system ran very smoothly. The Siege-Engine functioned well to adjudicate challenges (crossing a river, trying to sneak around, slipping on some grease, etc.) The combat was great: I think we all enjoyed rolling a d10 for initiative at the end of every turn (but next time I'd use a 12 or a 20 to make ties less likely). We played theatre of the mind, and for the most part it went well. A few small hiccups: I described something one way but the boys imagined it another way, for example. I said something off the cuff that was out of synch with something else I had said, which caused a bit of confusion. Ed wanted to do something out of pocket, and I wasn't sure how to adjudicate it, which led to a ten minute argument (#Ed). Other than those small things, though, it went great and we all had fun.
As I said previously, I am not doing rollable tokens and things like that anymore. I am doing theater of the mind from now on, which is easy face to face, but might feel different on a VTT. There is only one way to find out! In addition, we as a group are going to have to make some decisions about what we want to see mechanically once we start playing: how do we want to do critical rolls, for example? Do we want to do push-rolls? How do we want magic to work--Vancian, 'spell points', slots, etc.? The good thing about C&C is how malleable it all is: it's easy to add things, subtract things, modify things, whatever. On that note, I have found The Castle Keeper's Guide to be an incredibly useful resource to help me think through this game. I need to spend more time with it, and with the other core books as well. When we were kids, we could spend hours just flipping through old issues of Dragon Magazine, or reading through the old rule books. It's a little bit harder to do that as an adult, although I really do have some extra time on my hands currently.
I have continued to build out a Tier-One gaming environment, with about ten encounters populated, a base of operations with a bunch of NPCs, and a few 'random' encounters, as well as a long rumor table and a table of 'strange things' to represent the odd effects of the Fey/Shadowdark intruding into the area. In addition, I have a C&C module--A Mortality of Green--pretty much ready to go, AND I am working my way through Tomb of the Iron God to add a dungeon component. And four different factions. So, yeah: ready!
I really do want this to feel more sandboxie than it normally does. I want the world to feel stretchy and elastic so it (and I) bend and move in the direction the players want to go. There really isn't an overarching story, although I have added some lore to make it seem like there is an actual history in this region. So far, I feel pretty good about the direction this has all gone in. Now I just need my players to ruin it for me!
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