Once the gang had made their characters, I set them up for their first adventure. I still hadn’t codified the structure of the game, so I kept the first one small.
We established that Lendel, Forram, Agorak and Tony had recently started traveling together. Tony is a vagabond, and one advantage of the vagabond class is that they start with a treasure map. The group was going to seek out that treasure together.
The group started off by arriving in a small village. They started with very little money, so shopping was unlikely to be a priority. I created a few merchants for them to interact with. The one they gravitated toward was the old fisherman, a dwarf named Carlo (he hates fish). They made a deal with Carlo to rent his boat, so that they could take it down the river to their destination faster.
I decided that a fair reward for this was to halve the travel time to their destination. From then on, this has become the standard benefit for doing anything that should speed up travel. The journey would have been 7 days on land, so it would be about 3 days in the boat. This sort of thing is going to be a major focus of my text on gamemastering — guidance on adjudicating benefits for the players’ good ideas. The game’s systems are meant to be very straightforward, so the benefits need to be very clear and simple.
I also used a simple, temporary rule for random encounters while traveling: I rolled 1D6 for each day and each night, and on a 1, there is an encounter. I adjusted this rule several sessions later, when it proved to lead to too many random encounters. Effectively, I halved the odds. Later, I realized that the real problem was that I treated every such encounter as an attack. I started having environmental hazards (like bad weather that forces a saving roll), and more recently mixed in some non-dangerous encounters, like meeting other travelers. I’m not satisfied with the “daily die roll” for encounters, so I’ll be working on that eventually.
The group went to a cave on the river where the map led them. They found an old wrecked Imperial ship there, which served as the “dungeon” for this adventure.
The ship dungeon was almost entirely improvised. I hadn’t written up stats for any monsters yet, and I hadn’t quite worked out how I wanted this sort of thing to work. I made a rough map of the decks of the ship, and I had an old AD&D 1st edition monster manual on hand. I converted the monsters on the fly, and made some things up as needed. I didn’t get more organized until after this adventure.
It was a short couple of encounters on the ship. They explored a little, found some valuables in the captain’s cabin, went below deck and suffered their first trap/hazard: loose floorboards on the stairs. Tony failed his Avoid save, fell through the stairs, and found himself surrounded by bugs that released acid when squished, burning through the floor. The others pulled Tony out and decided to find a different way down. I did not expect this.
I planned for them to explore some rooms, fight some creepy crawly things, trip some traps/hazards, and make their way to the bottom of the ship. They decided to go back to their rowboat and take it around the ship looking for holes to enter the ship through. I decided that this was logical and told them that they found one. This led to the final “battle” of the adventure: Inside the ship’s hold, they found a murky pool of water, and suddenly, skeletal arms swam toward them.
I think the idea of swimming skeletons is neat. I’m not sure why.
The group started to fight the skeletons, but they were hard to find in the dark. Only Tony could see clearly, because he’s a dwarf and they have Ghostsight (the ability to see in the dark, and see/speak to ghosts). He saw that there was a ghost in the hold commanding the skeletons. Tony talked the ghost down, discovering that all it wanted was for the ship to sink completely. They convinced the ghost to let them take the valuables from the boat in exchange for sinking it. They busted a few choice holes in the hull and let the ship sink, helping the ghost pass on.
One of the crates they took had a shipping manifest with directions to a secret Imperial fort, giving them somewhere to go for the next adventure. In retrospect, this seemed a little bit on-the-nose, but it worked fine.
The adventure ended with the gang finally following the treasure map to a buried chest, which had a nice set of bracers made by one of Tony’s ancestors (a good piece of armor for Tony), as well as some gold.
I don’t think I handled the treasure map particularly well. It felt very tacked on. But it helped me work out exactly what I wanted from the idea of treasure maps in this game.
Treasure maps give the group a clear idea of where they can find a valuable treasure. The one thing I realized early on is that you need to make sure that a treasure map is clearly valuable. The group will always have adventures to go on (or else the game would be boring). So the treasure map needs to give them more than just somewhere to go — it needs to give them the promise of a specific reward above and beyond what they would normally expect. In this first adventure, I left the contents of the treasure map vague. After that, I decided to make sure that any treasure maps they acquired would tell them about a specific, unique treasure, like a magical object.
That first adventure was pretty flawed, but everyone had a good enough time to want to do it again.