Diary of a Roleplay Beginner #4: Taking Charge

Teamaster Rob here!  It's been a while since I last posted an article in the DoaRB series.  When I penned the first article in the series, it was intended as a shared experience to help new players see that taking a step into the big old hobby-world of roleplay needn't be so scary and overwhelming. There are so many systems out there, and so many people who take the hobby so seriously, that to someone starting out it can seem very intimidating, and this series of articles was intended to show the story of my own personal introduction into it all.

Article #1 in the series was an introduction, talking about my initial interest in the hobby, how I fell upon my first roleplay system (Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms, if you were wondering), and the first session I ever sat in on, despite not participating.  Article #2 told the tale of my first session of active involvement, and how I slowly got to grips with the "Seriously, you can do ANYTHING!" mechanic of roleplays.  With my first session being purely narrative, Article #3 focused on the following session, which was my first taste of roleplay combat, as well as a few comments on my first negative roleplay experiences.

With those basics covered, the series dried up as I quite simply no longer considered myself to be a roleplay beginner.  Not a veteran, by any stretch of the imagination, but at the very least an enthusiastic amateur.

In the following year I had the pleasure of trying out another couple of systems; Firefly and Through the Breach, albeit with just a single session in each.  Again, I enjoyed the systems, and it was great to experience different rulesets, different GMs and different settings, not to mention the opportunity to play radically different characters.  But there was one feather left to add to my roleplay hat, and that's the topic of this article...

Enter the GM

That's right, the Teamaster is now the Gamemaster.  I've always enjoyed writing, and since getting started in the roleplay hobby I've been aching for a chance to get behind the wheel and run my own session, but - just like my entry into RP - the question of where to start reared its ugly head.
In terms of system, Iron Kingdoms seemed the logical choice - it was, after all, the system I was most experienced with.  From what I've gathered from my limited experience of the various systems, it does seem to be fairly standard practice to provide an example scenario with the rules, and Iron Kingdoms was no different.  There's a decent-length one shot session available to download from the Privateer Press website, providing a multiple-ended scenario, and all player characters, NPCs, and encounters laid out to take the bulk of the work off a new GM.  As I started to assemble a team of players, this scenario was the one I planned to use for the evening.

But, fortunately, my brain never ceases to run with new possibilities.  As tempting as the easy option was, it's always seemed like it would be more fulfilling to be capturing the imagination of your players and holding their attentions with a story of your own making, and so the Iron Kingdoms plan began to slip away in favour of something a little more ambitious, a little more exciting... a little more spacey...

Just because I adore board and card games, doesn't mean I don't enjoy my share of video games as well, and none more so than Bioware's Mass Effect trilogy.  Not only do I love the story of the games and the characters, but it's an incredible universe in which the games are set, and so I decided it would be a wonderful setting for my first roleplay.
This then moved me on to a brand new problem: which system should I use?
Iron Kingdoms may have been my most familiar, but it's not exactly compatible with a futuristic space adventure.  Storyweaver's High Space was a logical option, but would have required a fair chunk of reading and it wasn't a familiar system to any of my prospective players, so would have been slow going.  So I did the smartest thing any geek with a problem can do in this day and age: I threw it out to the internet!
Within 24 hours, @N20Games on Twitter threw back a suggestion of Fate - a name which vaguely rang a bell with my limited roleplay experience, but which I'd never looked into.  And ye gods, I was grateful for the suggestion!

Fate, from Evil Hat Productions.  For those unfamiliar with Fate, it's a rules-light, narrative-heavy roleplay system, designed to be generic enough to fit into any genre.  Unlike other systems which have their own established universes, Fate is meant for gamers who may want to run a roleplay set in their favourite franchise (Star Wars, Marvel, Game of Thrones etc), or simply based upon their own original concept.
For those who are absolute beginners to the GM world, there's also Fate Accelerated Edition (or FAE for short), which is effectively a set of quick-start rules for the system.  They're quick to learn, quick to teach, and seem quite fluid to play, so FAE ended up being the template upon which my Mass Effect one shot would be based.

So that left the small matter of the story!  At the time of posting this article the session is still a week away (and I will be uploading a follow-up article to talk about the results after the event), so I'm being cautious not to issue spoilers just in case any of my players may be reading!
Being good friends with The Hobbynomicon's Caustic Triton, we very often talk about roleplays, and some advice he gave me a while back about writing a session came back to me very quickly.  With a notepad and pen handy, and a decent knowledge of the background material already rattling around my grey matter, I started to write.
One of the worst things a GM can do to their players is make them feel railroaded.  A roleplay should feel like an open world to players, and if the GM is clearly funneling them down a narrow pathway then nothing they do will make the experience a good one.  With this in mind, I wrote out a nice, descriptive opening scene to set the tone, and then proceeded to set out a series of bullet-points, with branches off a number of them to account for player decisions.  To start with it seemed difficult, but once I'd got a very basic overall plot in my head, additional ideas started coming every hour or two, no matter where I was.  Within the space of a week I'd got a pile of maps drawn up, NPC details, and a list of key events.  I was pretty much ready to go on the story front, although more ideas continue to get added to the list of possible events for the session!

With a week and a half until the session, this left me with just enough time to indulge one of my favourite elements of the gaming hobby in general: miniature painting.
As much as I'd love for it to be the case, no one has released a series of Mass Effect miniatures to this date.  Mantic Games, however, have done some pretty damn good proxies in their Deadzone game.  Seeing as many of my Deadzone miniatures were assembled but unpainted from my release-day purchase of the game back in 2013, I dug out the box and began to paint.  With a week still to go, the lineup of player characters is starting to look pretty sweet...

Two humans, an asari, a quarian, a salarian and a turian are ready to report for duty, with a krogan next in line on the painting table.  A handful of NPCs are also lined up in case I have time to paint them, but if not then I'll be happy with each player having a painted miniature to use.

The Fate system (and FAE in particular) is quite easygoing when it comes to combat, so most of the session's going to be descriptive, but I am planning a couple of epic moments for the toys to come out and shine!


So I think that's all I can say for the moment without risking spoiler posts!  The session will be taking place next weekend, so hopefully I'll be able to come back with another update shortly afterwards, and talk about how well (or otherwise) it went!  So for now, keep rolling, and may the dice be ever in your favour.

Diary of a Roleplay Beginner #3: LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!

This diary entry is perhaps a little bit overdue, being a good couple of weeks after my last roleplay session, but there are two reasons behind this gap.  The first is a simple matter of time contstraints; it's been a busy couple of weeks (hence the long silence on the review front), and the roleplay diary was in a perpetual state of being on the back-burner.  The second is that emotions were running quite high amongst a few of the group's participants after the last session, and I didn't want to start posting things to Games & Tea until I'd had some time to look back on them with a clear head.

 

 

But I fear I'm getting ahead of myself!  In the last entry I mentioned how much I'd enjoyed taking part in my first roleplay session - a purely narrative experience - and how I was looking forward to my first taste of combat in the next session.

 

The first major difference between a combat session and a narrative session is the tabletop element of gameplay.  Now from what I've gathered as a novice overhearing talk of other systems, this does vary from one roleplay to the next.  However, only having experienced Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms thus far, I can only comment on its mechanic.  With the combat system represented by miniatures on a tabletop laid out by the Game Master, each player needs to provide a miniature to represent their character, allowing everyone to keep track of their place in the action.

Finding a miniature for my character proved to be trickier than expected.  Being a Gun Mage/Rifleman I obviously needed it to be a male character with a long rifle, but with my character's backstory being one of 25 years of mercenary work, I particularly wanted a model which looked like it was not to be trifled with.  The obvious answer would have been Kell Bailoch from the Mercenaries range of PP's Warmachine, having a grizzled look, a long rifle, and even an armoured greatcoat just like my character.

 

 

In fact the model was, frankly, perfect for the part.  If anything it was too perfect, and upon inspection I decided he was a little bit too grizzled, and I'd rather go for someone with perhaps a few less scars and a slightly more sinister look to him...

 

...and so I said farewell to Kell Bailoch, and hello to Lazar Grigsov; a Khadoran rifleman from the actual Iron Kingdoms miniatures range.  Aside from the cloak instead of the greatcoat, Grigsov fit the bill just as well, and had a little bit more of an edge in my opinion.  After speaking with the GM the "artistic licence" card was played, and I happily went ahead and ordered him in.

Sadly the miniatures range from Iron Kingdoms has been discontinued, so I had to pick him up from an eBay seller in the US, and as a result he didn't arrive in time for the required session (in fact just to rub it in, he arrived the following day!).  However, the GM knew I was waiting for my model's arrival, and so he approved my choice of proxy model...

 

 

Yes, I went with Batman, from Knight Models' Arkham City tabletop system.  Now at this point I should mention that it's fairly common courtesy to play WYSIWYG - or as close as you can get - with roleplay models.  It helps to keep track of which characters are where, and it creates an altogether more involving experience.  With this in mind I wouldn't recommend to any beginner to just show up with such a drastically out-of-character model, but in this case it was actually something of an in-joke amongst our roleplay group, and so the GM gave it his blessing for this one session :)

 

Anyway, I'm getting slightly carried away with the miniature selection aspect of the game!  With my far-from-obvious Gun Mage/Rifleman chosen, I turned up for our session, ordered myself some Chinese food and we all got started...

 

The session began with us all preparing to enter the town's sewer system, hot on the trail of the missing arcanist we'd been scouring the town for in our previous session.  We all knew there'd be something nasty awaiting us down beneath the city's streets, but in spite of a fortnight's guesswork, no one quite managed to anticipate quite what that something would be.

...well

...almost no one ;)

 

As it turned out, during a chat on Facebook the GM let me know about what we'd be facing, on account of the fact that I'd be getting snatched by one of them at some point in the adventure!  For those familiar with Iron Kingdoms, we were facing up against Thrullgs.  For those unfamiliar, we were facing up against 10-foot tall, hulking, purple, tentacly monsters which prey upon magic users.  Obviously I had to keep this information to myself, and it did feel very good to know that the GM had faith in me to keep this nugget from the rest of the group.  At this point you might be wondering why he clued me in at all, but it makes perfect sense as it was my responsibility to describe these big tentacle monsters to the rest of the group after the event.  I did have a good laugh to myself at one point in the days leading up to the session, when two of the group started speaking to me about their theories regarding our imminent enemies, to which I just had to smile and nod and pretend I was as clueless as they were!

 

Anyway, I'm digressing again!  We entered the sewers with a couple of NPCs to carry on our search for this arcanist chap.  Now even though this was my second session, this was a slightly new experience for me in comparison to the previous outing.  In our last session we were splitting up and searching different areas of town, whereas down in the sewers we were working together as a single group.  This made me feel quite at ease, as it meant that I could tag along for a while at the back of the pack, waiting until I found my novice roleplay feet again!  Being one of only two characters with a rope and grappling hook, I was called upon quite early on which kept me feeling part of the team, but aside from that I was able to just sit back for a while and let the more experienced players guide the action.

In all honesty I did find navigating around the sewers a bit of a struggle.  I've always had a problem creating mental images of locations, whether it's a passage in a book or someone verbally trying to set a scene.  As a result, in spite of some good descriptive work from the GM, I really couldn't picture the location we were searching, and so sometimes needed a bit of prompting from the other players (a perfect example was an occasion I neglected to investigate a balcony, on account of the fact I forgot it was there!).

After we'd done some solid investigative work, and I'd failed rather spectacularly on some skill-based dice-rolling, we began backtracking the sewers when suddenly...

 

 

"You hear a scream.  Rob's no longer there."  I have to confess to a smug little grin at these words from the GM.  Okay, my character's life was suddenly in danger, but I was hit by this wonderful feeling of "Yep, I knew this was coming.  Now who's going to throw themselves in to help me out?"  As it turned out, most of the group suddenly rounded on the unfortunate Thrullg, and it quickly dropped me and fled deeper into the sewers.  I recovered my rifles which had been picked up by one of the NPCs, drew my magelock rifle (the heavy-hitter of the two), and it was time for us to get stuck in!

 

We all gathered around the sewer layout which had been pre-prepared for us, arranged our miniatures, and then started to spread out.  At this point there were no enemies around, so we were very much scouting the area.  Being a ranged attacker my first instinct was to get to an elevated position to sweep the area, and so along with two other party members that was exactly what I did.  Although I still feel out of my depth from time to time in the narrative element of roleplaying, I'd customised my characters skills and loadout very specifically, so when it cam to combat I knew exactly what I wanted to be doing, and so wasn't afraid to head out and get started.

As it turned out we didn't encounter our first enemy for a few activation turns, spending a few minutes pursuing a ghost around the sewers instead!  The ghost soon vanished though, leaving a Thrullg in its wake, and me with a nice juicy target.  One of the interesting things about combat in a roleplay is making sure that you look at things from your character's perspective rather than your own.  Obviously you can see everything that's going on across the entire field of battle, but your character can only see in front of his or herself.  Obviously the GM can override the decisions of any player who ignores this fact, but if all players respect it and work to it anyway then it just makes for a much smoother-flowing game.  In fact when that first enemy appeared I actually had my back to it, but it was a warning shouted by another party member which alerted me to it and allowed me to move my miniature into a better firing position.

I won't go into too much detail about the combat itself, but I can confirm I had some abysmal dice-rolling luck to begin with (three 1's off three dice is pretty poor!), but once I switched dice (any experienced tabletop gamer can confirm the validity of this tactic) things started to change, and I was able to make the kill-shot on two of the three Thrullgs.  I like to think that my character was so enraged at their audacity of trying to grab him that he went on a kill-spree worthy of Schwarzenegger.  The experience was a very good one in the way that we worked together.  Once I cottoned onto the fact that they were attracted to the nearest magic user I stowed my magelock rifle and switched to a bog-standard repeater, allowing me to keep dealing damage as another mage kept it distracted with a sustained fire spell.

 

With the beasties all subdued, the ghost was chased into another room, with some cracking roleplaying by two of the group - a warrior priest who was hell-bent on destroying the ghost, which he saw as an abomination, and another mercenary-type who was trying to bring the priest under control.  The exchange between them was frankly a masterclass of how to stay in character, and made a fantastic bit of entertainment for the end of the session.

The ghost turned out to be that of the arcanist we were searching for, and we soon left the sewers, reported back to our employer, and then wrapped the session up ready for next time.

At the end of the session the GM rewarded us all with some XP, allowing us to develop new skills or learn new spells.  Now whilst the rulebook itself gives a wide berth on this front, the GM insisted that any new skills had to be justified.  For example, a character who spent an entire session swimming won't have suddenly learned the skills needed for rock-climbing.  Or a character who has thrown themselves into combat all evening won't suddenly be a master of seduction.  We were only allowed to learn new skills relevant to our experience, and I thought this was a great way to ensure even character development.

 

At the beginning of this entry I mentioned emotions running high.  As much as I'd like to say this was because of intense gameplay or something along those lines, the sad truth is that it was down to something of a mixed session.  The ongoing story is still good, and the combat was a lot of fun, but this was my first experience of how other players can create a negative effect on the gameplay as a whole.  There was certainly a lot of good gameplay going on, but it was let down by some instances of someone actually taking issue with others for acting in character, some acting out of character entirely, some poor roleplaying which slowed the pace of the game, and some attempts by one player to dictate the actions of everyone else.

All in all it was still a very enjoyable evening, but it did definitely give me my first glimpse into the potential for a more negative experience.

 

But I'm certainly not going to lose faith at all!  I'm still loving Iron Kingdoms as a whole and our campaign in particular.  My Lazar Grigsov miniature is now painted up and ready to go for the next session, so hopefully I'll be able to report back in a few days about how things are going!

 

 

Diary of a Roleplay Beginner #2: First Session

So just a few short days ago I was talking about how excited/nervous I was about my imminent first roleplay session, and how I'd been throwing myself full-on into the world of Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms system.  Now I can say I've sat through my first session, and can ramble needlessly about how it felt.

Even though I'd watched the first session of this new campaign, and had thoroughly studied the core rulebook to give myself all of the necessary background, I still felt nervous sitting down amongst the other party members and taking on the role of my Gun Mage for the first time.  I knew every facet of his history and  how he'd react to people from various walks of life, but still actually giving voice to the guy seemed more than a little intimidating.
The session kicked off with a little bit of a "here's your present situation" summary following the events of the previous session, at the end of which the party was set an investigative task and introduced to the two men who'd be assisting them: myself, and another newcomer to the group.  And so I had to take it from there!

From what I gathered whilst spectating, adopting a voice for your character isn't an essential part of roleplay, but it is a nice way of giving your character an extra bit of flavour.  With my character being more than a little hard-nosed and pragmatic, I'd decided to give him a sort of Russel Crowe-Gladiator voice.  The first time I opened my mouth to speak I have to admit I felt a bit daft, but as soon as I started talking and wasn't met with fits of laughter or eye-rolling from the rest of the group I immediately started to feel more comfortable and could happily throw myself into the character.
And I think this was something I hadn't been able to fully appreciate when looking in from the outside; at the end of the day we were all there to have fun and lose ourselves in another world as a completely different person.  Making fun of another player or the way they portray their character would achieve nothing aside from spoiling that player's experience and creating a negative overall atmosphere.
Of course that doesn't mean that all of the characters have to be nice to one another, and it's a lot of fun when two characters butt heads!  By the end of my first session I'd managed to rub up one character the wrong way with my gruff nature, but found my way into the good books of another for the exact same reason.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The session turned out to be a purely narrative one, which I was more than happy with as it gave me a chance to practice the social aspect of the game before having to get to grips with the combat system.  An arcanist - who happened to be a close friend of our employer - had gone missing a few days ago, and it was our job to scour the town and gather clues.  The GM presented us with a list of locations we could visit, and let us make up our own minds as to where to investigate first.
The party began to split up, and so, still a little unsure of myself, I joined the largest group and followed them to the Arcanists' Guild, and it was here that my confidence was able to start growing.  We entered the guild as a party of 5, so I was able to mill around in the background a bit, but it turned out that only arcanists could visit the missing man's quarters, which narrowed the party down to myself and one other, forcing me to start taking a more active role in the hunt for clues.  By the time we'd well and truly looted his room I was feeling more confident, and headed out on my own to see where the trail lead me.
I really enjoyed this gradual step-up system, going from being part of a crowd, to one of a pair, to striking out solo.  With so many characters in our party I had plenty of time to think about my next avenue of investigation whilst the GM was doing the rounds with the others, meaning I never felt pressured or as though the spotlight was particularly on me, and I quite happily hopped around town following the trail of breadcrumbs our GM had laid out for us.

There were some interesting events throughout the session, with my false cover almost getting blown during one part of my investigation, another one of our party almost starting a bar fight and laying a criminal low with a bottle and tray, and an exciting climax to the evening when our resident gambling addict found his way to a gambling den and had us all cheering on his frantic dice-rolling!

So my overall first RP experience was definitely a positive one.  I stuttered and stumbled at a few points, but the rest of our group was patient with me and the GM was happy to do another round of the table and let me recompose myself.  I'm still nervous about going into my first combat experience, which seems to be all set up for the next session, but I now feel comfortable about taking parts in the more narrative aspects of the game.  All I can say now is roll on session #2!

Diary of a Roleplay Beginner #1: Introduction

Greetings, readers, this is Rob from Games & Tea (which you probably knew as you're on our blog).   So far G&T's been primarily concerned with board and card games, with the occasional look at game systems which verge on being board games (I'm talking about you, Puppet Wars and X-Wing).  But a few weeks ago we were approached by the lovely folks at StoryWeaver and asked if we'd be interested in reviewing some of their roleplays.

Now whilst we have no issue with the idea of reviewing RPG's, the fact of the matter is we've never played one before and so wouldn't have a clue where to start.  However, I've always been roleplay curious, so have decided to take the plunge and throw myself into the world of D20's, character sheets, and furious pencil work.

 

I personally have a number of friends who have roleplayed in the past, and many who still do, but I know a fair few who - like myself - are interested in roleplay but don't know how to go about getting into the hobby.  The whole notion of roleplaying can seem very intimidating to an outsider, and so I'm planning to run this diary within Games & Tea to chronicle my early steps into what looks to be an awesome side of the hobby.

 

What I won't be doing is bringing you detalied reports of every roleplay session, I think this would stray away from the point of these posts, and I imagine even the most awesome roleplay events to fall into the category of "you had to be there".  What I will be doing is talking about my experiences immersing myself in these new worlds for the first time and creating my first characters, the feeling of being involved for the first time in both the narrative and combat sides of roleplay, and perhaps in time even going on to my first experiences as a Game Master.  So to start with I'm going to have a ramble about how I've managed to get myself into a roleplay group, and the past couple of weeks spent studying the rules tome (the word 'book' wouldn't really do it justice) and creating my character.  You may want to read all about it, you may not.  Either way, I'm going to keep talking.

 

The Beginning!

 

Between tabletop systems, board games, card games and TCG's, I've been an active hobbyist for roughly 12 years now (I was a late bloomer), but roleplaying is one aspect of the hobby I've never ventured into.  I've always liked the look of it, but breaking into RPGing seemed to be the issue holding me back, and from speaking to a few people I know it's not an issue I'm alone in.  Unlike a new board game or even to an extent a lesser-complicate tabletop system, RPGing never looked like something a group of inexperienced gamers could just sit down and have a go at.  At the very least the GM really needs to know his onions, and to help facilitate smooth play at least one of the players does as well (again, all from an outsider's perspective).

 

So I'm a frequent loiterer at our FLGS Titan Games, and a few weeks ago I was hanging around on a Sunday afternoon, playing board games, buying things I couldn't afford, stroking peoples' faces, and just doing all of the other usual gaming store activities.  As the hours wore on and closing time approached, some friends of mine started to congregate around the large gaming table at the front of the store; it seemed I had unwittingly stumbled into a roleplay group, and they were gearing up to start off the first session of a new campaign.  Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to see what roleplaying was all about, I pulled up a chair, ordered in a pizza, and sat down to watch these guys lose themselves in a fantasy world for a few hours.

This is the nice thing about having a hobby store to hang around at; if you're interested in trying something out then the chances are there'll be some people around who also want to give it a go, and also that there'll be people ready to hand-hold you through those crucial first steps.

 

 

In this instance, the fantasy world was that of Western Immoren, the setting for Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms system.  Those who are familiar with tabletop wargame systems may already be aware of Iron Kingdoms, as it shares the settings with their popular tabletop systems Warmachine and Hordes.  Not having played either of these games before, a lot of the background of the characters was lost on me, with religions, races and classes meaning absolutely nothing.  Even so, I sat there quietly (for the most part) so as not to interrupt the flow of the game, and took in as much as I could about the goings on of their party.  The GM did kindly offer to let me fill in the conversational side for one of the NPC's (non-player characters), but having no roleplay experience I didn't want to mess up the game's setting and so declined.

 

The first thing I noticed was how pretty much anything is possible in a roleplay scenario.  This is something I'd heard tales of before in tail-ends of conversation, but had yet to witness first-hand.  After the party had been set up on their initial starting point, one member (a priest) headed into the streets to feed the poor, one (an aristocrat) decided to go and worm his way into the local noble's good books, whilst the rest of them just decided to all start drinking for a while.  Whenever an incident came up which required a dice roll to determine success or failure I tended to get a little bit lost on how the GM reached the result, but still thoroughly enjoyed the narrative element of the game.

By the time the session's big combat encounter came along I was quite invested in the party's characters, and even though I was just an observer, I found myself genuinely caring whether they made it through the battle in one piece!

Anyways, to cut a long story short, they scraped through (again, most of the mechanics of the combat went straight over my head), and the session came to end with the story ready to be continued next time.

 

Having thoroughly enjoyed sitting in and seeing how a roleplay works - and with a copy of the Iron Kingdoms core rulebook on the shelf in Titan - I immediately picked it up and threw myself straight in!  It did help that the next session wasn't due for another few weeks and that I was about to go on holiday for a week, so I'd got a deadline in which to learn the ins and outs of Western Immoren, and create a character to slot into the group.

As soon as I picked up the book I realised I'd set myself something of a monster task, with it clocking in at a total of just over 350 pages.  The first 200 of these are all about the titular Iron Kingdoms themselves, and so whilst they aren't necessary for understanding how to play the game, an overview is needed to understand the world you're inhabiting, as well as the way your character is going to behave and respond to certain events.  With no small amount of trepidation I found myself a suitable bookmark and started reading.

The background section proved to be an overall interesting read.  There were some sections which were true page-turners, and some which trundled along like a dusty old history textbook, but with over 10,000 years of Immorese history to get through that's no real surprise!  Along with the history, there are sections on the main nations, people, and races of the Iron Kingdoms, as well as cultural points including religion, law, commerce, education, technology, magic... pretty much everything you could want to know about the world lies within these 200 pages.

 

After reading about history, the major nations and their inhabitants, I started to get restless, and so skipped ahead to the character section of the book.  By this point I'd got enough background knowledge that I felt I could comfortably start creating my Iron Kingdoms character.  I already knew I wanted to be a male human, and I'd chosen his nationality.  After a good old flick through the character pages I chose his career paths, selected his skills, and then started his mini-biography.  Now I love writing (hence rambling away on Games & Tea any chance I get!), so sitting down to flesh out my character gave me a massive buzz, and it was here that I found the gameplay and background parts of the book starting to mesh nicely.

I'd start to write a bit and then think "hmm, does this fit in with his culture?" so I'd flick back to the reference part of the book, tweak his background a little bit, and keep going.  After I thought I'd finished, I went back and carried on with the reference section, and every few pages was finding some small detail which would really help to embellish my character, or a point which would cause an issue with the history I'd written for him.  This constant reading/tweaking really helped to give my character an organic feel, and on some nights of the holiday I'd lie in bed thinking about how else I could give him more depth.  In the end my first ever roleplay character took just over a week to create, and at the time of writing this I'm extremely excited about getting myself into the fray.

 

Reading the rulebook has helped to throw a lot of light onto that first session where I sat by feeling a bit lost, but I genuinely think it helped to watch that session as a non-roleplayer.  Whereas some sections of the rulebook probably would have left me scratching my head, the experience of watching other people roleplay first allowed me to put examples to the rules, and the whole thing made a lot more sense.  I'm sure I'll need a bit of hand-holding to begin with, especially in the narrative areas of the game where there are no real limits to your gameplay options, but with a supportive GM and understanding players, I'm confident it's going to shape up to be a brilliant experience.

 

So at this point I don't have much more to add.  I'll be posting an article next week about how I'd found my first session as an active player, and hopefully more in the future as I gain experience and start taking a look at other systems!

 

And speaking of other systems (I really should give them another nod for gifting me with PDFs of their rules), the two StoryWeaver roleplays I now have in my possession are Rapture and High Space.  While it may be some time before I get round to branching into another system, Games & Tea's friends over at fellow hobby blog The Hobbynomicon have recently played their first Rapture session, and I understand The Caustic Triton is planning to write up an article about it so pop over and pay them a visit!