Session 5 - Corina is saved, and then a cruise
Not much to say about this one either, as I am tired and know that, if I don't write this now, I never will.
It went quite well. I went ahead with my plan to move away from the structure with weekly actions I was doing and the game instantly felt more natural. We started out with something they had to figure out (Corina, twin sister of the player Cora, had become upset and turned into a dragon), they succeeded, and then we moved on towards the next interesting adventure.
I'm quite excited for the next one, which will be the spirit cruise-dungeon-thing which I've been preparing. I will post more about this once we play through it.
For future reference, this is most of the prep I had for this session:
Corina has become a dragon:
It is a huge bird, the likes of which are not seen in the planet since Eden, and it loves the sun
If it holds its breath and blows very hard, it can cause storms
It is huge, with a wingspan and length of over 50 m
It has a terrible venom it can inflict with its fangs
Curing - A Merciful roll from Cora or a monk is enough to calm her enough to go somewhere safe, if they bring Belard along even better.
If they fail the roll, Corina will fly away and Atlasso will give chase
We can make this into a bidding match. Atlasso is prideful and unwilling to bend towards a mere student but he also doesn’t want to face a kaiju and knows that once a madman calms down, they can be turned back, so it’s more a matter of navigating around his ego.
The fact the dragon loved the sun and has a terrible venom didn't come up. They didn't fail the roll so Corina didn't fly away, and I settled on not doing the bidding match - by which I mean this. Ultimately we elided nothing at all, so there was no need to systematise it, the players just talked to Atlasso.
After the session we discussed the new structure and the players added that the former structure, despite having more "actions" on a moment to moment, ultimately felt more reactive than the present one because they had less stuff to interact with, which meant they were waiting for more things to happen. Mr. Mann added that this mirrored nicely, in some ways, the lack of control that comes with being that age (they're all ~15), which is a good observation as to why it might feel reactive - it is a reactive period in life.
My goal now is to build up a horizon for them. I want there to be interesting things for them to work towards, distant rumours, deeper characters. I still have to think up exactly what and how, but that's where my mind is at currently. Hopefully we can avoid hiatuses like this one too! There was a 2 week gap between this session and the previous one because life got in the way.