Questions up front, as I figure I'll get a better chance of answers without making you read the session report to get to them:
Does she have any siblings?
She isn't married to after the Hero Wars "start date", right? What are the chances that she had a child out of wedlock?
If the answer to that is "You can make it up", then that's cool; I just don't want to step wrong with such an important campaign figure.
[Long -- this may not interest you, or you may want to wait for a coffee break to read through.]
After roleplaying for 20+ years, I finally ran a game set *in* Glorantha. We had our first session last Friday evening, and it was fun (ergo successful). And it was completely unlike any first session I've run before. Why?
We played for 3.5 hours, and we did not make any progress into anything that could be called "an adventure".
The players were a mid-to-late-twenties couple whose only real gaming experience to date had been (A)D&D, and a mid-thirties woman who had never roleplayed before at all (though, being my wife, was familiar with the concept after putting up with my weekly absences for so many years).
So -- what did we *do* for 3.5 hours? Well for the first half an hour to forty-five minutes, I answered questions (voluminously) about the setting. I was actually surprised about how much I actually "knew" about Glorantha (have had RQ and HW materials for years, but I've never actually used them in Gloranthan play). Of course, I may have got many finicky details wrong, but who cares about that, right? 8)
Then, we hit a bit of a dry spot. My original notion was to try and start the same way Greg had started his adventure at Gloranthacon: i.e. let's just start playing, and the characters will get fleshed out as we go along.
This wasn't successful; post-game thought led me to conclude that the players didn't even have enough context to figure out where to start, and were unwilling to make any kind of decision at all, for fear of "choosing something wrong".
After fifteen minutes or so of humming and hawing, I finally managed to get one of the players to admit that he had a bit of an idea about the kind of character he wanted to play, but "he wasn't sure it would be 'allowed'". I firmly said that something was better than nothing and what was his idea.
(The basic startup premise I gave them was that they were all
oldish "not-adults" who were almost ready to pass through the
adulthood rites. [Their keyword values would be 15, and
additional traits 12. But they didn't know anything about the
rules, yet.] So, they knew that they were going to be playing
young teenagers. For simplicity's sake, I said it would make
sense for them all to be from the same clan, and to have some
reason to hang about together.)
The player said that he wanted to play a young man whose parents had been captured and sold into slavery when he was an infant, and his burning goal in life was to develop the skills he would need to find them and liberate them.
Given his rather concerted focus in life, it seemed most likely that the rason the two girls would hang around with this rather sorry, obssessive person, would be because of blood ties.
So, I asked my wife, how are you related to this person? She tentatively joked, "Well, I could be his aunt...?".
"Right!", I said, "You're his aunt. Are you younger or older?"
"What? I didn't mean that! That's silly. Maybe I should be his sister."
"No.", I said firmly, "You're his aunt. Younger or older."
"Younger, I guess." she said.
With that, the plug came out of the water barrel, and we spent
the next two and a half hours working out a kinship diagram,
figuring out how these three characters were related, and filling
out some details about their families. The last portion of this
time was spent starting character creation: choosing three
keywords for each player, and listing out the abilities they had
from those keywords. No additional abilities were chosen at this
time: I figure that I'll handle *those* through improvisation
(i.e. when they come up in play), now that the players have a
pretty well sketched out skeleton upon which to hang a hat.
What was quite odd about this was: it was pretty fun, actually
(this was confirmed by the players, although they may have been
being polite). And we didn't really do any "roleplaying" at all,
as one might typically think about it. However, we did start
getting a firm basis on the ground for who these people were and
how they hung together, and think that will play out in big
dividends in future sessions.
Also, I noticed that the simple adventure I wanted to throw at them would probably have been inappropriate for the characters I know have (I wanted to start them off finding a lost sheep): we have young mister tortured warrior who wants to find and liberate his parents (gravitating towards worshipping Finovan), we have the youngest daughter (eight siblings) of a well-to-do initiate of Issaries, who's following in daddy's footsteps, and we have the daughter of a strong-minded weaver whose lower-status father died just after her mother divorced him in a hunting accident (he was mauled to death by a bear: not a good sign, given he was an initiate of Odayla).
(Finally, I thought it was interesting that we developed a very
good picture of who these people were and who some of their
relatives were (especially parents and grand-parents), but no-one
in our kinship diagram had a name... that will obviously be a
step we have to take soon...)
Anyone with any ideas about what I could as a good first, baby-steps, actual adventure with these characters? I wouldn't mind some suggestions to help prod me on to the next stage! 8)
-- Viktor
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