This November, I started playing Magic The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers on Steam. If you follow me on twitter, you may remember that I referred to this as #eggquest. I had a fun time playing it, and one reason for that was DOTP’s cutscenes including lore from the Magic universe. In one of them, the game informs you that Ravnica is a world covered in city. I remarked on how cool that seemed, and kept playing.
Through the week after that, the idea of Ravnica kept coming back to me. Eventually, I mentioned to my husband how cool it would be to play a Pathfinder game that was in a world covered by city. He replied that if I ran it, he would love to play in it. I decided at the beginning of January I would go through with it, and got full approval from our Pathfinder group to start this campaign in the new year.
This is actually my first RPG campaign!
What I want to talk about in this post is the to startup sessions I’ve just finished. I will be starting the campaign proper in a week with third level characters. The startup sessions happened two days apart, so they were fresh in the players’ minds.
Startup Session 1: Lords of Waterdeep
One of my favourite board games I bought last year was Lords of Waterdeep. The components are beautiful, the gameplay stays fresh and challenging, it’s great from 2 players to 5 players. Everyone sat down to play a game of Waterdeep. To adjust the game for campaign setup, players did not have Lord cards and we did not keep score (Lords of Waterdeep always ends after 8 rounds of play).
At the end of the game everyone handed me their completed quests, which are part of their character’s backstory and part of the world I’m making for the game. Everyone took quests that interested during the game, so their completed quests gave them a background they were excited about. My husband even handed me his quests in chronological order so that they described his character’s arc from influential rogue to cleric.
Startup Session 2: A Fiasco, to the tilt.
The second startup session was a game of Fiasco with a custom playset I made for the game, using elements that came up in the Lords of Waterdeep session and my own ideas for the campaign. Because it is only a ‘single use’ playset, it is 3×3 insead of 6×6. You can read it here.
The game was an interesting change from a normal Fiasco session. Rather than a caper film, the scenes in the game proceeded like a series of flashback vignettes that got into detailed character histories and connections. Many elements were introduced by the group and decided upon while they told the story during Fiasco. The game ended up running short – in round 7, the party all came together in a tavern with a quest to do. Since they had a natural launching point to blend into a Pathfinder game, the party elected to stop the Fiasco there.
These are my two startup sessions. I think that they serve two purposes that I’ve always been frustrated by during game startups in the past: Coming up with a coherent backstory, and establishing an inter-party relationship in the first session. With these sessions, the characters have specific quests under their belt, and they had the chance to get to know each other without the rules or character death risk getting in the way.
