The heroes visited the temple of Sedenya, where I explained what would happen IC as the High Priestess. They were asked to bring general sacrifices (which was abstracted against their wealth) and an appropriate vessel to house their guardian. They went for a set of silver amulets decorated with a rubies. I don't know if a guardian is actually supposed to be able to inhabit a set of objects, rather than just a single one held by the leader, but since this group doesn't have really have a leader (there is probably one hero that most outsides would identify as a leader, since he's a noble, but he doesn't have that role within the group) that sounded unsatisfactory. They want to have one amulet each, with the guardian flitting between them, they can have 'em. YGWV.
Next, they decided what sort of abilities they wanted from the guardian. Everyone had an input here, and they had a few 'second options', in case whatever turned up couldn't quite give them what they wanted.
So, they turn up on the night of the full moon - visible from inside the temple, even though its cloudy outside. A great beam of moonlight shines down from the Red Moon onto the altar, and, in turn, seven Lunar spirits materialised, and made their offers to the PCs. The offers were intentionally broad, so that the players could fine tune them to what they wanted. From an out-of-game perspective, the main effect would be determining the personality of the guardian, and what the focus of the hero band would be. Here's the seven potential guardians I came up with:
All the players picked a first and a second choice from the list. Nobody picked the LBC, and the officer and the bag of bones received only one vote each, leaving four options. The players asked those four what they wanted in return for their support, which, again, I was quite vague about, since I wanted the players to come up with their own suggestions. After further discussion, it was decided that neither the goose nor the debauched man could really offer the sorts of hero band powers the group were looking for, cutting the options down to two.
They didn't really want to offer any of the 'always eat chickens on Windsday' sort of things that spirits tend to go for, and eventually settled on a vow to 'combat the enemies of the Lunar Way'. I decided that the four-armed magician figured that they were pretty much doing that anyway, while the cloak would be happy with 'seek out and combat the hidden enemies of the Empire' - giving the group a clear focus, while getting the cloak to do the sort of skulking about it wanted. So it was the winner, melting like mist into the amulets - whose gemstones transformed to a lustrous reddish-black.
The spirit got a name - Vorkoth - and now I'll work out a more detailed background for it. Afterwards, one of the players commented that even though, strictly speaking, all they were doing was suggesting to me what powers they wanted and what their sacrifice would be, and letting me give that to them, he felt much more invested in the process than he had when we'd used that process alone (with the previous GM, in a Men of the Sea campaign - it hadn't mattered so much there, because we were all already a crew, with no need to figure out exactly what our common bond was). So it all went very well... with the one surprise that everyone liked the debauched spirit so much, they want to take it as an Ally! So I guess I'll be working out more about him as well :)
-- Trotsky Gamer and Skeptic ------------------------------------------------------ Trotsky's RPG website: http://www.ttrotsky.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
Powered by hypermail