So my circle of friends and gaming group never know exactly what to do with ourselves on New Year's Eve. Because some of the above host a terrific Yule Party, it has often fallen to my Lovely-and-Long-Suffering-Wife and I to have a New Year’s Get-Together at our place. In the past we have sometimes done an evening of board games, a couple of beers and Auld Lang Syne at midnight [OK, we don't sing. But we usually do mark the turn of the year with a countdown and cheering or a toast, then get back to more important things like rolling dice].

 Because my friend Rick went all out putting on his annual ‘Rickfest’ [a day-long celebration of gaming, friendship and food that he hosted at a local community center for upwards of 25 eager and appreciative gamers] just a couple of days before New Year’s, we decided that more board games two days later might not be greeted with the usual enthusiasm.

So I offered to run a one shot session of Honor & Intrigue, a role playing game of swashbuckling action, daring-do, sword-fights, cults and conspiracies, written by Chris Rutkowsky and published by Basic Action Games. The rules for H&I are actually based on the Barbarians of Lemuria RPG by Simon Washbourne from Beyond Belief Games [which I own but have not had the chance to play – yet; one of my Resolutions for the new year is to pick up the forthcoming new and improved, decaffeinated edition of BoL and PLAY it].

Chris Rutkowsky has reworked the Conan-esque sword and sorcery goodness of BoL to fit the swashbuckling idiom of the Three Musketeers, The Princess Bride, Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Blood. I am not actually doing a review of H&I right now, but Mr. Rutkowsky has done a fine job. The mechanics are simple, the gameplay fast, fun and fluid enough to not only allow but encourage, swinging from chandeliers, running headlong across rooftops giving chase, fighting atop out-of-control coaches and other such exciting set pieces of the genre. We had a blast!

But, as great as Honor & Intrigue is, let us now move on to what I really want to write about - preparing for a one shot or short campaign arc, using a system and setting that is new to player and GM alike.

Obviously, the bulk of the work before the game session falls into the GM's lap. It is a little more involved than the usual stuff a GM needs to do before a session. You have to, roughly in the order below:

1. Invite your players and hype the game
2. Acquire a good command of the game system and how it will play
3. Work out characters or set up a session do so
4. Decide on setting and provide basic setting information
5. Write out a scenario, NPCs, and other encounter-ables for the session.

OK, so these are pretty much all the normal steps for any GM running any game. In this case I had a few other things on my list, like cooking for the party, familial socializing, etc that hyped the tension a little more. On the other hand, my wife did EVERYTHING ELSE so that I could get done what needed to get done. On the other, other hand, she is one of my players, so there would be a pay-off for her too.

I have run a number of one shots in the past, so I had included a few more things on my list [as sub-headings under some of the main 5 above]. I thought I would go through these, in case you want to try something similar, as they help pave the way through comprehension of the rules in the direction of fun.

Under number 2, Acquire a good command of the game system and how it will play – I include:

• Decide how best to teach the system to the players.

Generally, do NOT actually try to teach the system to the players, especially not by way of a long lecture, or worse, insisting that they read the appropriate sections of the book. This is not college, and you are not students and professor.

If you have a bunch of people that really like reading rules systems and new games, maybe this work will largely be done for you. I don’t. Some of my players like to master a system and setting by reading the game cover to cover, but others prefer to discover the rules along with the setting, and in some cases, they either don’t concern themselves with the rules, or don’t find them easy to comprehend. I am sure that this is an issue that arises around a lot of game tables. Probably the single biggest problem in getting people to game, especially new games, and especially new gamers, is the learning curve of the rules themselves. Every group, and every GM, needs to come up with a way to allow for these styles, or the game, and the people will suffer. If you’re smart, you will focus on the fun of role playing, not rules-mastery.

How do we do that?

Obviously, any game has rules for a reason, and you can’t just decide to ignore them all without descending to the ‘I got you!/ No you didn’t!’ of the school playground. So I wrote up a fast play version of the rules – a ‘rules light’ rendition of game play that included the dice mechanic [roll 2d6, add a stat, add a combat skill or career, equal or exceed 9, after modifiers for situation and circumstance are applied], Combat and turn sequence, Careers – their impact and import, an explanation of the character sheet and stat, as well as unusual resources that the character have available to them – in H&I these are Lifeblood, Advantage, Composure and Fortune Points. I managed to get all of it on a two-column landscape sheet of paper, and made sure that I had a copy for each of us [myself included] when the game started. This Reference Sheet allowed me to explain the essentials of the rules in under 10 minutes, with the players following along on their copy and me answering questions as they arose.

Now let’s go back a bit, to getting a group of characters together.

After all the players had decided they wanted to attend, we had to work out characters. We did this via email exchange. I provided a bullet list [which I pulled from the 30+ archetypes provided in Honor & Intrigue, along with a few of my own specific to the setting I had decided on] as a starting point. Player could choose from these as a starting point, and we would tweak them into whatever that player had in mind. This worked really well. The archetypes are great as they stand but by swapping out Boons, or Careers [see the next paragraph] they can easily be customized, so the Masked Spanish Hero archetype [read Zorro] became Bella Morte, a spoiled lady-in-waiting to ‘The Contessa’ who spends her nights thwarting her mistress’s nefarious schemes], while the Artifact Hunter [an Indiana Jones-y sort of explorer/scholar, but with a rapier and flintlock pistol instead of a whip and .38] morphed into Marie d’Aquitaine, a shifty seeker of mysteries and current owner of ‘The Therese Rosary’, a magic item, artifact and relic.

H&I made it easy to come up with exciting and evocative characters that really seemed to get the players going. There is enough detail in the character write-up alone to get you thinking about back-story and how the character will act and react, such that in very short order, the players were pretty fully invested in the characters. I think a large part of how that occurs is due to the Career system that H&I uses to model skills AND background. I have seen similar things used in other games [13th Age comes to mind, among others], but I think H&I does a particularly good job of it. Starting characters get four careers and 4 points to spend in them [even a 0 in a Career is more useful than not having the Career], which reflect the past life of the character. Each career allows the player to add its numerical value to any skill or knowledge roll that makes sense for that career. So a Farm Girl will have familiarity with animals, crops, the seasons, local knowledge, maybe even a little simple herbalism, and other farm-y stuff; a mercenary will know about mass battles and tactics, privation and exhaustion, weapon maintenance, possibly riding and care of horses, and more besides. Each Career is open-ended, so if the player can explain why the career makes sense, the GM can, and is encouraged to allow the bonus to the roll.

Having 4 Careers [or more; I think three of the six characters had boons that gave them an extra Career and Career point], set out in order, with numerical values to suggest amount of experience or exposure to that lifestyle, is like a short hand to building a character's back story, something really crucial in a one-shot or mini-campaign.

For example:

The Criminal, with Farmgirl 0, Thief 2, Brigand 1, and Prisoner 1, quickly became Erragina, a Basque girl from the mountains, who came to Zaragosa a few years back, fell in with a bad crowd, and learned to live outside the law, relying on her cunning and a harsh disposition to stay ahead of the Contessa’s guards – mostly. Taken up for thievery at some point in the past, she spent time in the ‘donjon’, receiving the Mark of a Thief, a ‘T’ branded into her shoulder, before regaining her freedom. As a result of the Mark, if she is caught again, she will face the gallows.

Referring back again to Number 2 in the list above, after creating the Reference Sheet, I made up a Cheat Sheet specific to each character. This gave each player a break down of the character boons and flaws, career specific abilities [if any], and a number of maneuvers that made up a sort of fighting style for each character. The list of maneuvers is how I addressed one of the aspects of Honor & Intrigue that most worried me as a GM. There are a lot of maneuvers available in combat. The game models several period fighting styles [The Spanish, French and Italian Schools, among others AND rules for how to create new schools, which as a student of medieval martial arts made me very happy], at the same time providing for the possibility of the madcap action you see in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean or The Three Musketeers. It does this with a very good, but at first blush, daunting set of a couple of dozen maneuvers available to all characters in combat. In recognition of the fact that it might be a little intimidating, each archetype in the game has a number of Favored Actions [a subset of the above maneuvers] which provides some hints at things the character would be likely to do in a fight.

I refined the Favored Actions a bit by expanding the actions for each character slightly, choosing a couple of Major Actions, Minor Actions, and Reactions for each. I haven’t mentioned these terms yet, but each player character gets a Major and a Minor action each turn, things like a Bladework attack or a Beat maneuver, or Footwork to put your character in a more advantageous situation. But a Major can be downgraded to become a Minor as needed, and either can be used as a Reaction [like Parry, Dodge and Riposte] as required. I made sure each character’s cheat sheet had at least a couple of each type of action that were [hopefully] evocative of that character, and carved out some territory for each one to have its own COOL factor in play. The goal was to give the player a ‘signature fighting style’ and a manageable number of choices. I also told the players [during the initial introduction to the rules and the setting at the start of the session] that I wanted them not to worry about how to do something mechanically, and to tell me what they wanted their character to do without being burdened by fitting that into the ruleset – essentially removing the players from having to understand the bulk of the rules. As things came up, I would describe how the rules handled it, or what maneuver this was, so players could note it to their Cheat Sheets if they wanted to.

This worked well, but it put the onus of rules comprehension squarely on me. Given that I had never played the game before either, I was worried that I would not have sufficient command of the system to keep up. I boned up on the rules as much as I could, but I had to balance that with all the other GM stuff, Christmas, Family, Cooking, Visiting. Well you get the idea. It was a fair a mount of work, which I enjoyed immensely, made MUCH easier by the fact that my wife was a willing co-conspirator in the project, who would benefit from the result, if things went well.

And they did go well. We played for about six hours, began ‘in media res’, getting the characters together in suitably rip roaring style, and waded hip deep into thwarting a conspiracy of Dark Sorcerers^TM to poison the populace of the city and incite rioting against the local Jewish community.

A few of the many excellent moments from out session:

• Bella Morte, the masked vigilante of Zaragosa, escaping the confines of her family's salon and her little sister's attempts to interfere, then jumping from rooftop to rooftop before leaping into combat with a walking corpse.
• Erragina, the branded thief and street tough, using a grappling hook and a handy fulcrum to hoist another walking corpse up and away from the beleaguered Doctor Nazir, who was, at that moment, not yet ready to accept that such things as walking corpses could exist. 
• Scarred, albino puritan wanderer Wolfe [think equal parts Elric of Melnibone and Solomon Kane] removing his helmet and, with stern scowl and oration, cowing a raging mob bent on sectarian violence into inaction.
• Spy and Cabal Agent Carlo using his Master of Disguise boon and a Fortune Point to appear in the middle of the action, throwing off the cloak of a guardsman in time to help turn the tide.
• Doctor Nazir, who, in the middle of burning dissection room, discovered a Vital Clue as he surgically removed from one of the defeated corpses the portion of the skull that contained the symbol responsible for its animation.
• Artifact Hunter Marie, who played Nine Pins with the severed head of a [formerly] walking corpse, bowling it into an evil sorceress, knocking her off balance when she had been handing out a beating to a few of the other characters.

In the second part of this article I will talk more about the setting that I decided on and some choices I had to make using Honor & Intrigue to facilitate it. I will also detail some more about the scenario and how I prepared it, which was a little unusual, at least for me. I might even give you the whole write up so you can run it yourself it you want to. Bur I have to wait until after all that happens, so the players don’t see the spoilers.

Links:

Honor & Intrigue - http://www.bashrpg.com/HonorIntrigue.html

Barbarians of Lemuria, for those that are curious - http://beyondbeliefgames.webs.com