Last night was the first session of what is hopefully going to become an ongoing campaign, so I did not have to worry that character introductions would take too long. Nonetheless, I decided to start media res. This gives me the advantage of exploring character back stories later on, but it also allows the players to adjust their characters where needed.
As I told before, we got a varied party which includes a human serious deathknight of the Raven Queen (Raymond), a wise githzerai artificer (Arno), a scared human girl with chaotic sorcerous powers (Myrthe), an oblivious and new-born shardmind psion (Alwin), a traitorous tiefling rogue with a mysterious past (Xavier) and a gnome who has mastered illusion magic (Jelte, a new addition to the Knights).
This colourful bunch experienced a flash of light and suddenly found themselves in a dark room, only lit by candlelight coming from a hallway. As they were trying to come to terms with their situation, an old bearded man greeted them. The players weren't really comfortable with a blind old man calling them clueless and trying to feel their faces (who would be comfortable with that anyway?). Especially Myrthe's character was confused with the situation, wondering if she went underground or something due to the dark nature of the building she is in. The old man did give them some clues that they were in a huge building in this place called "Sigil".
As they made their way through the building, they discovered that they arrived in Sigil's Mortuary, where several guys in brown cloaks were treating corpses and trying to send them off to their home worlds as a burial rite. Especially Alwin's character was puzzled by this entirely strange and new situation, and even tried to telepathically link to a corpse.
Finally, the party arrived at the bottom floor of the huge building that they arrived in. A huge and sprawling metropolis awaited them. As they first tasted and smelled the Sigil air, they noticed that the square in front of them was crowded, overcrowded at least. Apparently they weren't the only new arrivals. At the bottom of the Mortuary a little argument was taking place between this small, mousy, gnome and this huge bear of a man in full plate. "Alright, you little twerp, you are going to guide us around, even if you don't want to!" the hulking bastard shouted in the gnome's face. "Ah there they are! See! I told you my clients would arrive at any time!" the gnome retorted, pointing at the party. "We'll see who you will work for if they are DEAD!" was the response. Poor Raymond tried to be reasonable with this rather unreasonable fellow.
A new rival party appeared!
This was a fairly easy combat, especially because I designed it for five players originally, but I decided to not add a 6th combatant on the enemy side so that I could assess how much trouble Jelte would have with mastering a new system.
Apperantly he had no trouble at all, because the combat went quite smoothly except for some GM screw-ups (But as Xavier pointed out: Cut the new GM some slack). The party ended up in a skirmish against their foes as the crowd watched on (the crowd counted as difficult terrain for gameplay purposes). The first opponent to bite the dust was the female wizard. As she died, in the back, behind the crowd, a huge magical glyph appeared in the sky, over the crowd.
The party battled on, pwning their opponents one by one (Alwin actually mind controlled the brutal enemy fighter and had him kill his own partymember, nasty). And then the Dabus decided to intervene. A level 14 artillery creature using his stunning-save-ends-close burst 5 recharge power isn't fun. Despite the huge level difference, the Dabus nearly missed Myrthe's character. At that point, only the enemy paladin and dwarf were left standing. At this point, I just decided to let the dice do the talking, the party had every in-character reason at this point to finish up the party and then go for the dabus, thanks to their lack of knowledge of the setting. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for the enemy dwarf, the dwarf made his save vs. the stun and decided to charge the Dabus before the party had the chance to do the same. His head went splut as the dabus enveloped it with magical runes. (He only had 5 HP left anyway.)
BOTH paladins (Raymond and the NPC) took at least 5 turns to roll higher than 10 on their save. But after that humiliation, they followed the Dabus into town. The Dabus were trying to round up all the adventurers causing trouble and they were trying to lead them to the many inns in Sigil to offer them shelter. Thanks to the unfortunate location where the party spawned, they were the last adventurers to be picked up.
Just before we had to end the session, we ended up at the Dead Dragon Den. One of the seediest inns in the whole Hive. The inn partially consists of the dead bones of a HUGE wyvern, covered in canvas, with a rowdy common hall underneath it. The innkeeper (a surly bauriaur) was rather relucntant to let the party stay in his already crowded inn, but a quick rebuttal with a dabus convinced him otherwise. Unfortunately, at this point, I had to cut the session short and I had to railroad the players a little to stay together. I promised to go back to this point in time next session so we can explore some more roleplay. But before we ended, I introduced them to their home away from home, for now: The honeymoon suite, located in the wyvern's skull.
All in all, it was a really good session, it felt a lot better than my GURPS one-shot. Less chaotic, more structured and the players seemed to have more fun. Laughs were had, and I got to expose a little of the mood that I am trying to go for. I just hope we can get some more story in next session and that I keep improving my GM skills.
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