I started by giving them the Heorting Cultural keyword, at 13, since this is supposed to be what everyone learns as children.
Then we did Occupations, and started to run into trouble. The chap with
the 18 POW and 18 Piety (yes, Pendragon Traits) who's a junior
trainee priest (no choirboy jokes, please) took Godtalker at 12,
dropped the "Initiate To", and was happy.
The fisherman got a modified version of Hunter: not too hard to sort out.
Level 12 again.
The ones with crafter backgrounds we just had to make up.
And the guys whose background was mixed: learning hunting from dad
and brewing from mum, for instance, got one keyword at 10 and the
other at 8. If the same skill was listed for both, they took that one at 12.
That's one bit of rules I couldn't find. If two starting keywords give you the same skill, but at different levels, what are you supposed to do about it?
Then on to Magic.
All three blokes present looked through, and eventually picked Orlanth
Adventurous, so that was easy enough. They've only been initiated for a
couple of seasons, so they got that at 12.
Su looked through the Ernalda options and picked the Healer. Again,
no problems.
In the earlier campaign, they'd been initiated into their bloodline, getting the bloodline spirit spell from the guardian spirit of their family, so I really had to cover that somehow. We already know that each bloodline is tied to a plant (and the four plants together cover the ecology of converting marsh to dry land, which is how the clan works). So I gave each bloodline an Affinity to that plant (at 10), and a single Feat to describe the spirit magic spell. So frex the Magnussons have an Oak affinity, and a Feat of "Strength of Oak", which is known to only work if they drink Oak Beer. I'm probably going to put an upper limit on advancing this, since these are really pretty small spirits.
Another example of why I really, really, like HW, BTW. I'd been trying to simulate this Oak Affinity business under RQ, and just couldn't do it.
Anyway, then all we had to do was the two characters who'd had further
initiations. The Vingan was easy. Again, a very new initiate, level 12, as
if she'd just got the initiation in play. But the Trickster: now he's going to
be difficult! Not that there should be a defined list of affinities for
Trickster, of course. We ended up wth Change, Deceit, and Sensuality
(having read the Yinkin description)
Then we looked at the adventures they'd had so far, any other skills they'd developed, and slapped those in at a level that seemed to reflect how well they'd done. (Anyone who can earn money by singing in taverns should have the skill, after all). We picked a skill to increase to 1W (all craft related), and two to go up to 17.
And that was almost it. Until we looked at the Close Combat skill, and said "spear & shield 13, sword & shield 12, what's the CC skill?" And totally failed to find it in the rules or examples. What is it? Lowest skill? Highest skill? Something else?
Same for Ranged of course: what does my ex-hunter Vingan, with Archery 8 and Javelin 12 get for Ranged Combat?
And we'd already decided we needed a generic Craft skill for one chap
(he had Devise at high levels, plus Craft Wood, Craft Reeds and gods
only know what else). The same rule will apply, when I find out what it is.
I have still to look up weapon ranks, edges, and armour (we ran out of time). I'm hoping this will simply be looking up the numbers and writing them in (pp145-147, from the look of it)
And we have the various family and followers to do. I decline to worry about whether they're allies, dependents, followers, or what: they're *people*, and which category they fall into will depend on what we're doing that session. Quite a lot of them have been PCs before now.
I now have a fortnight to re-type the character sheets, do the looking up, and take any comments, suggestions, and advice on board. And then we might go and find out who nicked those sheep. (From the Poss, BTW. I already know they go in for sheep, and there's already a plothook set up for the Poss to ask the PCs for help. Just don't ask who was nicking the Poss cows!).
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