Hey folks, not sure if you remember, but some time ago I told you about how I started my first three player group (I’ve only played 1 on 1 games before that), so I’m here to tell you about the next two sessions we had(this is going to be a long post, folks!) One thing of note is that I won’t be explaining what happened during the first session, since I already had posted about it here before.
The second session was a bit of a letdown. We had a new, fourth player, one of our friends who unfortunately couldn’t join us on the first session, so I talked with her privately about how should we introduce her to the rest of the group (planning some kind of surprise introduction, since we play online she would log on to roll20 the moment I gave her the signal)
She decided that she would play a cleric that had been locked in some kind of magical stasis for something like 50 years, inside the catacombs the group were exploring (kinda like captain america). The other players loved the surprise (I had told them that she wouldn’t join us again) and released her from her prison right away. And that’s when I made a mistake.
She told me she had experience playing tabletop RPGs, as she had played on a Vampire: the Masquerade group some years ago, so I thought that she would get the Dungeon World rules quite easily, and we both decided that she would create her character during the session, and well, she didn’t get the rules as fast as I expected, as I’ve spent roughly an hour explaining character creation and the basic rules to her (I should have done that before the session began), so we didn’t do much else after that , the players had an encounter with a kraken, which was pretty fun, but we decided to finish the session after defeating it, as it was already late.
The thing is, the players still enjoyed the session nonetheless and still wanted to play (I was relieved with that, really), so I promised myself to do better next time, and that I did.
The third session was last saturday, and our players finished exploring the dungeon with an epic fight against a cultist trying to sacrifice the mayor’s daughter (they were looking for her) in a ritual to revive Ur-Gammon, the wizard they’d fought on the first session (the cultist was guarded by an abomination by the way). After killing the cultist and disrupting its ritual, Ur-gammon’s spirit was totally mad with them, and turned the cultist’s body into a chaos spawn that almost killed the party (the PCs had already taken a beating).
After slaying the spawn, our characters decided that it would be best to return to town, taking with them some gold, a magical shield and some notes the cultist’s journal. The notes explained about an ancient god’s cult, led by Ur-Gammon himself. This cult had been performing rituals like the the one our PCs disrupted for generations, always reviving Ur-Gammon so he could keep working to bring this ancient god into the mortal realm. With this important info, the group left the dungeon and went back to town.
The thing is, while they were outside, the bandits they fought on the first session had regrouped and were now literally raiding the town, their numbers stronger than ever. The session ended with our character’s finding the guard captain’s body, slain by the foul bandits, and now they want to get to the mayor before the same happens to him.
I think our third session was the most fun and dynamic we had by far. There was a lot of action and we discovered a lot about the land and its gods and kings (play to find what happens, right?), and right now I believe the whole group has fully grasped the rules (even our newest player).