New Year's Eve Geekfest - Honor & Intrigue RPG - Part, The Second!

In Part the First, I went on about the coolness of Honor & Intrigue and how I jump started a One Shot session on New Year's Eve which has become a mini-campaign of [at least] three parts. Today, I thought I would give you a bit of background on the setting that I chose for the campaign.

The Sainted Heart - An Honor & Intrigue RPG  Mini-Campaign

When I was doing the heavy lifting for the setting I decided that I would wait until the characters were pretty much finished and see what they said to me about placement in the world of Swashbuckling Europe and Beyond. Would this be a ship full of English privateers sailing one step ahead of the Spanish pirate hunters that lurked in every cove and delta of the Caribbean? Or perhaps a band of mercenaries, wandering the wasted lands of central Europe during the chaotic events of the Thirty Years War? Either is equally possible with the game, and more besides. Chris Rutkowsky did a great job of an overview of the world in the period 1560 to 1760 or so, for those who are daunted by the historical context.

But what had grabbed me from the start, and what I had pitched to my group was the idea of a hidden war of cults, conspiracies and sorcery, operating mostly in the background of the normal world. This is provided as an option in the H & I rulebook, for those that want to add weird to their swashbuckling. Demons and the sorcerers who serve them, working to forward the agendas of their otherworldly masters, would add some additional spice to a straight historical game, which I knew would have been a tougher sell with some of my players.

So some of the character customization that we had done was adding in touches of the arcane, or just the weird. So, for example, the artifact hunter had an actual magical artifact, not too powerful, but more than enough to see her imprisoned and questioned at length about how she acquired a holy relic. The spy, instead of serving a government or a French Cardinal, worked as a disposable resource for a cabal of White Magicians, working to foil the plots of demons and their minions, he thinks.

Once all the characters were mostly done, I had to decide on a locale to at least start them in. Because Doctor Nazir was a Muslim scholar from the Islamic Mediterranean, I ruled out regions further afield and opted for Southern Europe. I then did some searching on the Internet for cities and histories that I could quickly get a handle on and that would provide good fodder for the a game of sorcery and secrets. I opted for Zaragosa in northern Spain and the year 1621.With over fifteen centuries of settlement, first as a Roman legionary encampment [Caesaraugusta, which becomes, over time shortened and morphed to Zaragosa], then later central to the Reconquista, the intrigues and battle of Castile and Aragon, and most important for my current needs steeped in stories of witchcraft, wizardry, magic and the Inquisition. The thing that really decided me on Zaragosa, however, was the terrific painting, done in 1647, by Baroque portrait and landscape artist Juan Bautista Martinez de Mazo, which displayed all of the city from across the Ebro River. It is very evocative, shows the skyscape and some of the city's character only a quarter of a century removed in time. AND I found a 6 meg version of the image, so I could zoom way in without losing resolution. I could show this to the players and enhance my description of the city.

OK, on to the scenario, which I cannot fully disclose because of spoilers to my players.i didn't want the characters to have to know each other at the start of play, which made things a little trickier. But H & I handles disparate actions and split parties quite well, so I decided to place everyone in central Zaragosa, but not gathered as a group. Bella Morte was in her family's urban salon, listening to her sister playing the harpsichord, the cabal Initiate and his erstwhile ally the Artifact Hunter were prowling the nearby square for their local contact, the Puritan had wandered into the city days before after a grueling passage through the Pyrennes, Doctor Nazir had just stepped off a riverboat from the east, invited by some of the more open-minded doctors of Zaragosa to demonstrate anatomy via dissection, and Erragina the Basque emigre and street tough was on the prowl for purses to lighten or heads to cosh.

I described some of the chaos of the rising undead in my previous post, so I won't go into it again. What I wanted to mention was the way that I prepped for the disparate origins and placement of the characters at the outset of the action. I wanted to jump right into the action and give the players a chance to get familiar with the rules, their characters and each other right off the bat, So I prepared several scenes, each essentially separate and available to more than one of the the characters. I tried to keep swashbucking action in mind for these, but also wanted to make sure that the hooks were there to pull them together and get them interested in the plot. But I had only a vague idea of how they would fit together, trusting that I, with the help of the players, would make the connections plain in due course.

This is not how I normally do things. I generally like to have a decision tree of scenes, NPCs, etc, that the players can work their way along, navigating some of the points, but opting out of others, or hitting them at a later point, depending on their choices. I was worried about us finding the game sitting on an unused corner of the decision tree, because of events bringing the characters together, so I chose to go with a more flexible approach that might require more winging-it on the fly from me during play. In the first session, it worked. The players faced things largely as individuals or partners in the first scenes, but were brought together by proximity and action, until, midway through the night, they were operating as a group bent on figuring out what was going on.

For the second session, perhaps buoyed up by my previous success, I decided to keep to the same loose design concept. It resulted in a game that was a bit of a muddle, with the players floundering because I had not sufficiently thought through the connections required to carry the developing plot, and their investigation of it forward. I think we still had fun, got a chance to introduce some NPCs of note - the Contessa in charge of the city and her right hand man, the Baronne, along with his crew of cutthroats, the mysterious Doctore Anibale, spymaster, comedia del artiste, and puppeteer [in more ways than one], and a famous explorer swept up in the same collection of foreigners that gathered some of our heroes to be brought before the Contessa's Court for questioning.

We also had a couple of duels, or at least brawls, a narrow escape or three, and a jailbreak - facilitated by Bella Morte, in her alter ego as a lady in waiting to the Contessa, all while the group, or parts thereof, put together enough of the plot to move things forward.

See in session one, someone tried to start a riot by carrying the body of one of the dissection subjects, an 11 year old boy whose heart had been removed, through the streets, crying for vengeance against the Jews who the instigator claimed hoped to poison the city. Investigation turned up a historical incident reported by King Alfonso the Wise, about a Jewish plot to do the same several centuries in the past. Someone was obviously trying to incite panic and sectarian violence by trading on the legend. Putting the pieces together, had them eventually arrive at the location that would be required to complete the ritual - the Cathedral de Seo, which they staked out, waiting for the sorcerers.

And that is where we left things. So it was a success, but could have been better. Hopefully lesson learned for me.

Links:

Painting of Zaragosa, by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vista_de_Zaragoza_en_1647.jpg

The Story behind 'The Sainted Heart' - St. Dominguito del Val:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominguito_del_Val