Fun At Level One

If you are a player in the Cyfandil campaign setting, please do not read this post. It will spoil some of your fun.

EXACTLY like the actual fantasy Middle Ages. Ex-Act-Ly.

For Session One of the Cyfandil campaign, we will bring all our starting characters to town for a festival. It will be the festival closest to the time of the year in the real world - perhaps May Day or Midsummers Day?

There will be some festival games. Here, the characters can get a boost to their starting stats. I will explain that increasing stats this way is quite unusual and that there will be only a few chances to make such changes as we go forward.

How it works is that each PC who wishes may enter as many of these games as his player wishes him to enter. Each game costs 1 GP to enter. The winner gets 10 GP and a permanent +1 to the relevant stat. 

• Lift Huge Rocks: Str (half day)
• Bible Trivia: Int (half day)
• Scavenger Hunt: Wis (all day)
• Darts Tournament: Dex (half day)
• Bobbing for Apples: Con (half day)
• Talent Show: Cha (this one also takes all day) 

In any case, the total number of entrants will be 10 - we will say there are unnamed NPCs who fill out the slate if there are fewer than 10 PC characters. 

There are two different ways I could adjudicate this. 

First way is: We all make roll-under stat checks. People who make their roll get to go to the next round until there is only one winner.

• This is good because it models high stat = better chance to win without making it autowin. This includes characters with these stats as Prime Requisites.
• If I do it this way, all the NPCs will have 11 in the relevant stat.   

Second way is: We all roll d20 and add the stat modifier. High roll wins. Ties go to a playoff. 

• This is good because it gives people with a crappy stat a better chance to boost it. 

I may do Str Int and Wis the first way and Dex Con and Cha the second way. Just to mix things up.

Then the players can have their characters hire their henchmen or try their luck in the dungeon without help. 

Now I need to find an introductory one-page dungeon to put right underneath town.

EDIT: found it

On Time

Gary famously said that you can’t have a meaningful campaign without strict timekeeping. He had his reasons and they were good reasons: an open table with up to 50 players playing in the same campaign world, dropping in and out as their schedule permitted. He has to keep strict time to keep the events of the campaign world straight for all of them! 

Even if your campaign has different pressures and challenges than his early campaigns did, you will benefit from strict timekeeping as well. 

In my campaign, we observe several time periods. 

The Round is one minute long. This is good for fights, chases, holding your breath, beating the clock. 

The Turn is ten minutes. This is good for exploration and problem-solving, torches and wandering monsters.

The Day is good for overland travel. It measures off healing, spell recovery, and brewing a potion among other things. 

The week is good for spells and spell research. In my game, there are quite a few weeks during which adventuring is quite impossible, due to festivals, harvests, wars, diseases, bad omens, terrible weather, and simply healing up. Characters can spend some of those weeks doing other things like courting maidens and writing scrolls, for instance.

The season is helpful in the same way weeks are. 

The year is very important because characters age and the state of the world at large will change. Favorite NPCs will die. PCs will retire and die. Babies who were born will come of age, and become potential PCs or helpful NPCs themselves. 

I keep a calendar for this reason, with regular events and chances for unusual ones. There are “blue” weeks which are good for adventuring; “yellow” weeks which are good for town events; and “red” weeks and days, where characters are all going to be indisposed. 

For in-game time, once into the dungeon and out again is usually one day, but sometimes longer if the several characters camp out somewhere. 

No one moves or works on Sundays, Christian or not. Exertion is forbidden across Aluvia. There are other days when activity is strictly prohibited for religious reasons as well. 

I’ve tried renaming the weekdays and months. It’s unnecessarily complicated. Saying January and Tuesday is much easier on the brain and doesn’t break verisimilitude. 

NEXT TIME: Character Age and Aging