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I finally got a group together to play Fellowship! Everyone is very excited. I get to do what I did before with Dungeon World and introduce someone to roleplaying with this, too, and she's extremely hyped to play the Harbinger. I had a question from my players that I don't really know the answer to: why do the players get to know the Overlord's Weakness, even if their characters don't yet? I don't really have any issue with it, but one player thinks she'll have a hard time separating her out-of-character knowledge of that fact from her in-character knowledge and is curious why it's designed that way. (That said, I'm going to suggest that she take the "______ is the only one who knows my Weakness" Bond with the Overlord so that it doesn't matter if she can't separate that knowledge--it's in-character knowledge, too!)
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May 25, 2018 13:57
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:28 |
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Cool, that makes sense. I think what I might need to do is make sure the players are aware of how thoroughly non-adversarial this game needs to be (which is true for every game I GM, but some of these players I haven't played with since I started to become a better GM and might not be used to it yet). You don't need to try to trick me or scrape together every little advantage you can so things turn out well for your character--that's not the point. I'm not the computer you're playing against in a video game. Similarly, it's not me telling you a story--we're co-authoring that story. My own instincts still want me to keep secrets from the players so that I can pull out surprises on them, but hopefully the necessity of sharing the Overlord's Weakness will help me do a better job of being open when it will actually increase the fun.
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May 25, 2018 15:45
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Anyone have advice on how to have a good first session with Fellowship? The book has some good recommendations for the kind of scenarios to start with, but I'm more wondering what the best way to begin painting in the world is. It's been a long while since I've GMed something that didn't have a predefined setting (read: Fragged Empire) so I'm a bit rusty with building a setting as we go.
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Jul 2, 2018 15:41
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Pollyanna posted:How much does a player really get to decide about their people? I noticed that the Elf playbook offers one of four choices for what an Elf is - fairy, mermaid, alien, or standard fantasy wood elf - and I'm wondering if that doesn't run a little counter to the freedom players are meant to feel in deciding what their people are like. You're able to mess around quite a bit within those options--often it's just a matter of changing the name. For example, in my game, the player of the Elf wanted her character to fall into the Star Elf archetype, coming from this far away, alien place with unfamiliar technology. We decided that the setting we were building didn't really have room for space travel, but because the whole thing takes place on floating islands, we decided that her Elf comes from a hidden island high above the others, shielded from view by the Upper Cloudsea. That way her character still comes from higher up than anyone else and still has unfamiliar tech, but we don't have to deal with space travel stuff. Meanwhile, the Orc in this game is a lizardfolk guy and the species call themselves "dragonspawn." They consider the term "orc" to be offensive--it connotes, to them, a mindless horde of violent savages, and while they're certainly not the most level-headed bunch (the player has basically fashioned them as having a society based on strength with an aesthetic that can be summarized as "what if Mad Max, but airships"), they're also not a swarm of unthinkingly evil barbarians.
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Jul 9, 2018 16:50
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Pollyanna posted:Which is why it seems kinda strange that the elf playbook says “here’s where the elves came from and what they’re like”, if the intent is just “they’re graceful and mystical”. Maybe options instead focusing on “they’re mystical”, “they’re secretive”, “they’re graceful”, etc. would work? Well, all of those things are true of all elves, no matter what you choose for the "What Is an Elf?" selection. Ultimately, I think what you're noticing is maybe a difference in how fantasy stories tend to treat different races. You noticed that the Elf and Orc playbooks focus on what an elf or an orc is over what one does, and looking across a lot of fantasy stories, that's sort of how most stories differentiate their elves and orcs. What an elf does is rarely the question, but what an elf is varies pretty widely. You can even see that within the same setting--how many different subspecies of elf does Forgotten Realms have now? Meanwhile, well, dwarves don't vary that much story-to-story on what they fundamentally are, but you do see a wide variety of different cultural takes on dwarves--maybe they're diggers and miners, maybe they have a mystical kinship with the earth, maybe they're great tinkerers and crafters, that sort of thing. But they're almost invariably short people who tend to live in and around mountains. You vary that too much and they're not all that dwarf-like to most players anymore.
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Jul 9, 2018 21:12
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How would you run a... let's say "subtler" Overlord? We're rebooting our Fellowship game on Saturday because nobody really found that what they'd chosen so far worked for them--a couple players wanted to switch playbooks, and I wasn't happy with how my Overlord was turning out. The players suggested they'd be fine with a full-on cosmic retcon so we're going for that. The Overlord is slightly based on Fou-Lu from Breath of Fire IV, with one of his stats (something that's true of all dragons, which he is) being that he is supernaturally Compelling. Beings around him sometimes find themselves bent to his will without his even trying. At one time in his life, he might not have even wanted people to do things for him, but they would anyway. These days, he's out for vengeance against a world he sees as rotten to the core, so he's flexing this power to the best of his ability. (The reason for this is that the world itself tends to bend around dragons, who are demigods--they exert a sort of gravity on the very fabric of reality.) Unfortunately, on our first run at this campaign, I ended up stumbling backwards into him having a zombie horde of ice minions and it ended up skewing too much towards horror and the Fellowship feeling like they need to cleave their way through mind-controlled minions and it just wasn't working for me. I wanted to encourage them to try more nonviolent approaches, but unfortunately I presented them with an enemy that really invited a guns-blazing approach, which ended up leaving our Halfing and Elf's players behind because they didn't really get into that type of thing. If you were going to run an Overlord whose main power is that he passively bends the world around him to his will--his powers over darkness and cold make the world dim and bleak around him, and mortal beings find themselves doing his will, that kind of thing--what kind of army would you pick? I went for the Scourge originally to emphasize that the very terrain around him changes to suit his aspect, but if I wanted something subtler, what would be a better option?
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Aug 17, 2018 15:54
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Those both sound like awesome ideas. I'm leaning a bit towards using the Organization--my players did say they liked the sound of that one when we talked about armies last weekend. A question about that: how would you differentiate, characterization-wise, a member of the Organization from one of the Overlord's Generals? Obviously a General is a Threat to the World, but I'm not sure how to treat the two kinds of recurring antagonists differently in their relationship to the Fellowship.
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Aug 19, 2018 19:00
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We ended up going with the Organization, largely because my players are very excited about having a group of named antagonists with personalities to compete with and fight against, and how can I deny them that? I think I'm going to be playing them as being well aware that they're serving the Overlord, but they believe they're doing it of their own free will (and, hell, maybe some of them are). They're fiercely loyal to him, maybe even on a personal level. He is, after all, the First Emperor, and he's returned to his throne at least. Not everyone is happy about that, but many have been awaiting his return, telling stories about how he's the only man to have slain a dragon, about how he brought together this nation with his own blood and tears, and how he's come back to lead us all to prosperity. None of this is true, of course. Well, he is the First Emperor, but the rest of it is... let's just say the truth has been massaged in his absence. But the Overlord has a whole nation who believe it now. Zurui posted:Generals are bosses. When they show up, the Fellowship can expect to expend significant resources if they decide to stand toe to toe. This can be a Balrog, an apprentice Dark Lord of the Sith, or an Alliance Operative. They're the perfect way to end an act of your story or something to throw at the players if it's getting too easy, depending on how you run a game. Yeah, I have a decent grasp on where Generals generally (ha) fit in, but I was having a hard time with how, narratively, the Organization army option can kinda step on their toes. Though I suppose one major thing about Generals is that they aren't explicitly recurring enemies the way the Organization are (it's key to the Organization that they frequently live to fight another day, after all). But also maybe the Organization reports to a General instead of reporting to the Overlord himself, something like that.
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Aug 20, 2018 18:21
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Pollyanna posted:Like with all gaming groups, expect it to fall apart a handful of sessions in when people fail to show up/call in sick/get dramabombed out. Exceptions to that rule are apparently rare. That's why I like doing one-shots: less commitment, less dickery and disappointment. Now that my gaming friends and I are all grown-ups with jobs and poo poo, I find that it works best for us to plan around having one long-ish session per month rather than trying to stick to a regular schedule. We all just stay in touch and try to find a good time, then put together a session when we all have a day where we can hang out and play. That helps keep the game from falling apart--everyone has the same expectations for how often we'll play and we plan close enough to the actual date that things don't tend to come up and interrupt us. Right now the group I play with plays online since we're all in different states, which weirdly makes it a little easier, since we don't even have to be in the mood to leave the house in order to have a successful session 
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Sep 4, 2018 20:40
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:28 |
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Holy poo poo Inverse Fellowship, gently caress yes This is some extremely good news.
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Sep 7, 2018 20:28
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