This was the second session and venture in my Circle of Hands group, I posted about the first one here.

I was frustrated after the opening scenes of this session, and at times afraid that the game was falling apart. I’ll try to write what happened and how I felt and then end with some reflections.

Planning the venture

I rolled a black 5, a white 6 and a red 3. This meant a single component – a single monster, beast, avatar or undead. I thought about it for a few days and then decided that I wanted a Wyrm.

I imagined the place Baldring in southern Rolke. Coastal villages surrounding a fortified settlement at the top of a cliff. Rich with trade, producing honey, dried fish, textile and amber jewelry and importing iron from inland settlements and precious metals from Spurr. In the caves below the cliff lived a Wyrm. The Wyrm protected the nearby villages in exchange for exceptional jewelry and other craftsworks. The village had a tradition of offering gifts to the wyrm every few years, and especially as a ritual for new chiefs or prominent people to show off their wealth. The next gift was soon due, and the wyrm knew it.

Named characters

• Ausma Ravsmed –  female professional jeweler, wanted to make the finest amber and silver tiara ever seen to present to the Wyrm, and to in return get enough social status to start her own trade with Spurr.
• Gunnar Knutsætt – male gentry, wanted to present a gift to the Wyrm so that it would continue to protect the coast. He had traded sons for fostering with the southern chief Kunibert as part of a deal to secure trust and even more trade. However, Gunnar had deceived the Spurr chief by sending a young man who was not in fact his biological son.
• Kunibert Siegwartson – male gentry from Spurr. A raider-chief who had found out about the deception with the foster son and wanted bloody revenge – especially to place the Wyrm’s head on display to show the defenselessness of Baldering. He had already laid waste to an undefended fishing village as a test of their defences, and would return.

Tripwire: If the wyrm did not get its gift, it would attack the fortified settlement.

Knights

I told the players that they would be starting in a coastal village where the oldest wyrm in Rolke is said to reside. They chose:

• Siegfried, male martial high, scholar AND merchant from Spurr (wits 10). His Key Event involved him waiting at night for a shipment of goods that never arrived. He understood that he was in trouble when his client did not get his promised delivery, and left Spurr. Played by Alex.
• Eber, male peasant from Rolke. His Key Event involved him killing his way through villagers in his home village in an effort to get rid of the influence of a Guide, even killing the Guide. However, while walking away from the village he saw in the distance the Guide reappearing, gathering the children of the village around it. Played by Rune.
• Oswald, male freeman from Rolke. His Key Event involved seeing undead massacre his village, trying to help but not being able to make a difference against the attackers. Played by Bjørn.

The “plot important” charm roll fails

• Eber was housed among farming peasants a bit inland. He had a mutated, black arm as a result of an Rbaja gift and was initially viewed with great suspicion. I set a scene on the night of a summer festival celebrating the flowering of a certain plant, and after describing how Eber was mostly left sitting by himself I called for a Charm roll. Eber made it, and discovered that the locals had been respecting him for his hard work and amazing strength, calling him “strong-Eber”.
• Oswald was housed more in the outskirts among forest farms focusing on hunting and trapping. He was deep in the forest with other men at the night of the festival, and they were celebrating with grilled meat spiced with the flower. I thought that if Oswald failed his charm roll here, isolated in the woods with a tight-knit group of hunters, this might go straight into combat. But he made the roll, and the otherwise quiet hunters started sharing legends they had heard about the Circle. 
• The evening was celebrated differently among the fortified houses on top of the cliff. Siegfried had been housed with a local brewer, and had beend treated politely but seen as an outsider. He noticed several pairs of eyes following him this evening and I called for the roll. He failed and his status as an outsider was cemented. A group of youngsters from the Spurr trading ships currently visiting went up to him and started, drunkenly and boldly, to mock him. Siegfried left them and hid in the house of his host, knowing that this settlement was dangerous to him. With his backgrounds he had percieved a lot about the general social and economical dynamics of Baldring, but the concrete facts about the people and the wyrm were never discovered.

Now, I had prepared a lot of stuff around the gentry. Some of it was even happening in the head of a Spurr chief who was about a week away from attacking the area at the time of the festival. When Siegfried failed his roll, I felt unsure of what to do next. I mean that I knew I was “supposed to” not do anything, but I was unsure if Alex (playing Siegfried) was having fun and unsure if the players had enough to go on to decide what to do. The players seemed a bit confused as well, Eber and Oswald comfortable in their welcoming communities and the players not jumping to action.

Siegfried looks for the Wyrm

Siegfried, however, decided he wanted to find the wyrm cave. As he was a scholar, I told him he knew wyrms were intelligent and that there were tales of them making deals with humans – usually ending with the wyrm punishing those who did not keep their promises. I don’t remember how we got there but he also understood that the wyrm probably lived in the caves beneath the fortified settlements, facing the ocean. At this point one of the other players started questioning Siegfried’s motivation – why would he want to enter a wyrm cave? If Siegfried was so intelligent, what was his plan here?

The knights find a boat

Siegfried sent word for the other circle knights. When they arrived, Siegfried tried to convince the visiting Spurr traders to lend them a boat in order to try and find the cave entrance. He failed his Charm roll and the traders gave the menacing, short answer that Siegfried would not get anything from them – clearly ready to back it up with violence if Siegfried pressed the issue. Eber asked some fishermen for help instead. He made his roll, and they were happy to help “Strong-Eber” and his companions. The men were all out fishing at this time of day, so there were not many fishermen around to help. An old man and a young boy found a working boat and started to row them towards the wyrm caves.

I think it was Eber who asked the fishermen about the wyrm, and they told the knights that the wyrm sometimes destroyed boats and that a few people died now and then. The fishermen regarded this a bit in the same way as a storm – a natural phenomenon that was part of life. They did not ask for help with the wyrm.

At this point the other two players were again questioning Siegfrieds motivations, either directly as players or (as I saw it) indirectly by playing their characters as servants or followers of Siegfried. If Siegfried wanted this then oh well, I guess we’ll just go along. This made me afraid that the players were not having fun and worried about potential conflict between the players. Was there something about Circle of Hands that I, the players or all of us did not understand? I don’t remember if I offered advice at this point, but I kept thinking if there was a spell or some piece of information I had forgot to tell the players about.

The wyrm is killed

Siegfried cast Forward, enabling him to see the safest path for the boat in the dangerous waters beneath the cliffs. They found a low entrance that just barely fit the boat, leading into a larger cave. They left the fishermen in the boat just outside, telling them to leave if the knights were not back in ten minutes.

Oswald the outdoorsman heard heavy breathing and I described the feeling as entering the den of an animal. This was me trying to warn the players that a wyrm can be dangerous, maybe dreading a “total party kill”.

They went further in and I decided that the only thing that made sense here was for the wyrm to attack the group of strange magicians stomping through its home. Oswald made a wits roll to warn everyone just before the wyrm’s venom spit hit them. A large wyrm head came rushing towards them and then we had a fight.

Very early in the fight someone cast Web and pumped brawn to reduce the resistance roll to 1d6. The wyrm rolled badly, and never broke free of the web (I rolled 1 or 2 on two or three consecutive rounds). This meant that the knights constantly had the advantage in the clashes. At the beginning of the fight (though after casting Web) Siegfried tried to talk to the wyrm. Later, Eber also tried to wave his arms and say that they wanted to talk. Of course, the wyrm understood this but was enraged by the intruders (and in any case could not speak human language). The knights hit the wyrm hard several times, there was some luck with the dice and the advantage die meant that even the wyrm’s armored scales could not protect it. The most ancient wyrm in Rolke was axed down by the circle knights. I kept thinking that I was maybe missing some rule here, that I had set up the situation wrong or should “do” something to make the fight more dramatic and/or difficult.

The knights knew that the wyrm liked valuables, and they spotted some jewelery and works of craftsmanship lying a bit further into the cave, partially covered by the dead wyrm. They picked up the stuff. Siegfried decided to flay some skin off the wyrm, intending to make a vest – maybe armor – out of it. Eber and Oswald went looking further into the cave system, finding only an exit leading into the ocean.

The local population is enraged

After several hours of flaying and looting, the knights went back into the boat and headed to shore. I tried to imagine what the locals would do after hearing that the knights had entered the wyrm cave – especially considering how unpopular Siegfried (the only knight the people in the surrounding area knew) was. I decided they would try to kill these intruders who went messing with both the ritual for asserting local status and their safety system against raiders. And so, as soon as they were spotted, the local population sounded screams of alarm and rage. Several people from the fortified settlement went rushing down towards them with spears, bows and even a few with swords. The knights kept barely out of arrow-range and tried to row to safer harbor further down the coast. Someone cast Cloud to confuse the attackers, allowing the knights time to get to the first fishing village.

Here, Strong-Eber was respected but the circle knights as a group was feared. In addition, the Cloud spell wore of as the sun set and several armed men were running towards the fishing village, having seen the boat heading there. The players seemed a bit unsure of what to do. My impression was that they wanted their characters to speak to someone and kind of get the message across that they were friendly. They spent some time discussing, and then decided that the knights would flee inland, into the forest and towards Oswald’s hunting friends. I called for a Wits roll for them to navigate the surroundings, and Oswald succeeded. They shook off the pursuers and found safety in the remote forest hunting farms, arriving there in the middle of the night.

There was a very short epilogue where Eber got his horse, mail and stuff from his farm. Then the knights headed out, away from Baldring and the venture ended. We rolled to see if the knights got any stat improvements and went on to general talk about the session.

I try to fix things after the session

After the session I was unsure of how the evening had really gone. I don’t remember the players’ reactions that well, and I can’t say if they were as frustrated as me. I guess they probably were not. I think we talked about choosing different spells next time, and about the importance of Charm rolls.

They may have asked me about my preparations, or maybe I was just eager to “fix” the session retroactively, but I told them all about what I had prepared and what was really going on in Baldring. They had some questions, and my impression was that they were sort of sorry that I didn’t get to show them all this in play. Like, does the GM really prepare all this and then maybe none of it happens? Then we all headed home.

Reflections

This venture did not go as well as the first one. I felt it was more stressful to gamemaster and I was afraid that the players were not being nice to each other and that they were not having fun. I have thought about what I’d like to do differently while writing this post.

• The main thing I’d like to change is for me to stop giving the players advice or trying to guide them in any way. I feel like I kept saying what their options were. I was asking for what spells they had, reminding that charm rolls are only a start and we will play out whatever happens and I kept thinking about how to get the knights “back into the game”. This was a big mistake and a big energy drain. It’s also how I have gamemastered for a lot of my life, so I understand why I fell back on these habits when the fear of not having a good session popped up.
• I can’t make sure the social dynamics of the group are frictionless. If anyone doesn’t like how things are going socially they should speak up and/or leave. But I can be clear about the important principle that each player really does decide everything about their character, and we won’t second-guess why others play their characters in a given way. At least not during the session.
• After the session I shared all my preparation and thoughts about the situation, the characters and their relationships. I’ll hopefully have more sessions to post about on Adept Play as well, so the players can find out about my preparation by reading here. However, I don’t want to make this a part of play or of our sessions. Only what happened, happened.
• Maybe I over-prepared a bit. But I won’t change that yet, because I love daydreaming about the location and the people, and this gives me a foundation for improvising the concrete interactions.
• [A while later…] After leaving this post in drafts for a little while, it strikes me that I feel different about the session now. Yeah the knights killed a wyrm and then took off. Let’s see what happens next. And I’m thinking I often forget about frustration or fear felt during a session. Which is good in the sense that I don’t spend my life worring about past sessions, but it can also make it harder for me to learn and develop as a gamemaster.