We usually play Pathfinder, and were a little over halfway through the "Curse of the Crimson Throne" adventure path when we decided to was time for a change of pace. We did a one-off session of Angel (great D10 system by the way - unlike with World of Darkness you only ever have to roll a single D10 in any situation) and then this week we rolled up characters for the new Planescape campaign, titled "The Spiral Touch."
The group is broken up into three parts. The first part consists of three outcast characters all currently residing on Golarion, the Pathfinder campaign world. Matt wanted to do some a little different than normal, so he went with a lizardfolk barbarian whose intelligence and world view put him at odds with his swamp tribe. Crystal decided to ditch the standard magic user she plays and go with a big burly warrior woman who worships the dead god Aroden, despite his recently deceased status. Megan had been reading through the Planescape Player's Guide to the Planes and liked the idea of playing a bauriar. All of the characters in this group are clueless primes though, so this posed a bit of a problem. We decided her parents, bauriar from the plane of Ysgard, fled to the prime material plane for an unknown reason and never revealed the dark of the planes to her. Most people don't realize she isn't a centaur, and those who know better haven't mentioned anything yet.
The next segment of the party consists only of Glen, who is playing an incorporeal ghost wizard who belongs to the Fraternity of Order faction. Glen's familiar also happens to be his spell book - one of the floating shrunken heads who served King Kalak in the Dark Sun setting and has now been enchanted to act as a mimir (as a side note, Wizards of the Coast is going to release a new edition of Dark Sun with the fourth edition rules soon. I'm not a fourth edition fan but I'll probably get the books just to see what they do with such an awesome setting). The two despise each other, which makes getting information an interesting proposition. Glen is bound the clueless primes in a way that hasn't been revealed yet.
The final segment is composed solely of Jacob, who is currently a blank slate. Jacob wakes up in a back alley of the hive with no memory of who or where he is. Since belief defines reality on the planes, we'll be discovering his class, race, name, and abilities during game play. I'll ask questions like "You currently are holding a sword, do you know how to use it?" or "Are you any good at sneaking past these guards?" or "do these Dustmen know you?" to determine his history and skill set.
I wanted to make the campaign a little more like a video game in style, so I set up a quest board that lists major quests, along with any sub-quests that my be discovered along the way. Each quest will be marked off when it's completed and the party will be rewarded extra experience.
Since most of the players are completely new to Planescape, I also set up a board called "The Chant" where I have all the Planescape lingo written in pencil. When the party hears any Planescape-ism, I'll write it out in black marker and include a brief definition. This way the group of players learn about Planescape as their characters do.
I've also got another board setup that will eventually show all the planes and special locations the characters visit. I printed off a picture of the planar cosmology and cut it up into pieces. Each time the group reaches a new location I'll paste that segment of the picture on the board, and the map will slowly reveal itself. As with our other campaigns, I also have a board solely for pictures of NPCs and monsters the characters meet. I scan any images I need from the books and then print them off on a smaller scale. When a new character is introduced, their picture goes up on the board along with a name and brief description.
I've been spending a good deal of time coming up with odd characters and items to fit the tone of the planes. Rather than having the characters find standard loot, I really wanted to evoke the off beat feel of Planescape: Torment, so I've been coming up with my own unique items and then I'll pick any of them as items the party finds as necessary. For example, rather than finding a scroll containing the "Vilquar's Eye" spell, the group will instead find a sticky eye that looks like it's seen better days, and its pupil frantically follows any movement. Touching the eye to one of the character's eyes fills that character's head with the knowledge of the spell.
One of the first characters the group will interact with on the planes is Brink of Oblivion, a planar human who worships both the lawful evil deity Hextor and the lawful good deity Heironeous equally, seeing both as incomplete halves to a greater whole. This of course makes him a heretic to the members of both religions, who all would love to see his name penned in the dead book.
To get the feel of Planescape just right I'm also using the music files from Planescape: Torment in the appropriate situations. Luckily all the tracks are actually available online. I recommend them even to people who aren't RPG fans, as these tracks aren't just good for role playing atmosphere, they are just plain good music. You can get most of them here. I'm personally fond of the "Ravel's Maze" track.
Oh yeah, and I swapped out two of the sides on my spinning Dungeons and Dragons display today. I wanted to go a little old school, so the sides now consist of Middle Earth Role Playing, Paranoia, Dark Sun, and Earthdawn. I absolutely adore that Lord of the Rings Adventure Game boxed set in the top spot. It's long, long out of print now, but among the best Lord of the Rings material ever released. It comes with a huge number of paper miniatures, large maps, character backgrounds, a full adventure, and super simple rules that only use 2d6 for everything. Two follow up adventures were released in paperback (you can see one of them in the bottom shelf), but then the line got dropped before the company I.C.E. could release the final two. The newer Lord of the Rings RPG stuff is all based on the movies and uses images from the films instead of original art. While its still fun stuff, it doesn't come close to catching the flavor and feel of the older material.
No comments:
Post a Comment