Sorry, not those sorts of passions, or at least not much, as we’ve been playing. We’re continuing with my more-or-less faithful extraction of the AD&D 2nd edition Dark Sun, plus a bit of 4E, using The Pool, as described in Dark + Sun + Pool and It always goes to the arena. The six sessions of the initial story are now the foundation for a new one, of which we’ve played two at the time of this writing.
As you may recall, three (3) of the four player-characters died during the prior events, so here we’re introducing Xurto, a native of Nibenay, water street merchant, played by Erik (and drawn by him); Sharukh, or rather, not introducing him but moving him into player-character status, played by Denica; and Hans, a tough fellow from Raam who’s looking for the deceased Trixie. The remaining original character is Axvhol, the thri-keen raised by dune reapers, now much mutated.
As I mention in the after-talk in the video, play in this session and, as you’ll see soon, in session 8, has a scattered quality which may not be a feature but a flaw. The long delays between sessions, including an immense amount and diversity of play in the interim, might be a good excuse … but I think the same thing would happen anyway.
It may be a lesson for me that group-ier concepts are necessary for a game like this, in which setting is textually front and center, encounters are plain and straightforward to resolve, but situations require more focus than anything in the text can help with. The easiest route to such focus is saying “you’re a group, say how, and stick with it,” and easy doesn’t mean weak or stereotyped. It was fine for the first six sessions due to beginning with the caravan and moving into the arena context, with a central and powerful NPC involved. Now it’s sprawling.
The secondary flaw which arises from this one is that I’m too easily roped into prolonged attention to whoever happens to be most proactive at the table, which is flatly bad practice. I recognized it in session 7 and tried to amend it a bit in session 8. (I’ll write about session 8 in the comments after I finish editing it and include it here.)
One response to “Hot passions, hot place”
SESSION 8
A couple of things … first, that one conceptual change I’ve made for the textual Dark Sun setting, which feels like a “correction” to me, is to remove any and all magic except psionics. Therefore what look like elemental forces, which textually are clerical or druidic, are merely more psionics in the brains of people who are hung up about spirits and gods. It’s relevant to the events in this session, as you consider the corpse-disposal shrine place and its fiery inhabitants.
Second, that Filip is really not getting his due in play, and I’m determined to correct that next time.
Here’s the session, inside the playlist.