On the Razor's edge

After a summer break we are back with more Solum playtests. This time we started out in Razor's Edge, a rural small village on the border of civilisation. The adventurers crawled back after their ordeals in the Razor Hill mines, only to discover that all was not well in the little village...



So we started again! This time with smaller adventures that will hopefully only take a couple of sessions to complete. Given that we play once a week for around three hours (at best), etc that seems to be a better format. We will see.

Another thing it lets me do is try different things. The mines of Razor Hill was great, but it was a dungeon crawl only, so those rules got a deep test you might say. But the wilderness and urban crawl rules did not, nor any other parts of the rules really. So there's that to look forward to.

Anyway, in this weeks start up we have made some other changes as well: Each player (all two of them) have created a second character, the cleric Ord and the wizard Carlton Tattershall. We are also expecting guest appearances from a third player, so all in all the party size is better this time around. It should let us test the balancing better.

But enough ramblings, on to the session:

The heroes return
The would be heroes returned in the middle of summer to Razor's Edge, the small rural village on the edge of civilisation, they dragged their sore bodies to the local inn and drank to their health.


In said inn they encountered our two new characters, and after much drinking the four decided to join forces. Reem, the rouge dwarf, drunk himself into a stupor and fell asleep, so he missed the rest of the action.

Dark tidings
In the evening Carlton was out in the bushes (for some personal time). He heard commotion from the gates, but was too scared to do anything about it. Serena (the warrior) and Ord went to investigate.

It turned out to be Theregor, one of the villages hunters, who hastily returned in the night. He had been chased off his hunting grounds in the Brown Marshes (around a day's travel to the north west) by unnatural screams in the night and was pretty shaken up.

The town elder, Maron, took him to the inn and everyone listened to the story of him waking up to these screams, at first thinking it was some wounded animal, but later realising it didn't sound like any animal he knew of.

A brave man, he took his spear and went to investigate, and while doing so he found himself in a pickle, surrounded on all sides by humanoid shapes. He up and ran for it then, and rand pretty much all the way back to the village.

The town elder, Maron, approached the characters, asking for their help to investigate this mysterious circumstance, and they readily agreed. As the evening went on they decided to try and do some shopping in the morning and then leave to investigate the scene of the event.

Shopping spree
The village is small, so there is no shop as such. Instead the characters had to ask around to find things to buy. It turns out they were enjoying themselves a lot, so we took a long time to just sort out everyone’s gear.

We also tried our hand at some haggling, and the system itself (it's no different from any other opposed skill check, so it's not really a system as such) works fine. Read more about Solum rules here. And here.

Setting out
I had it in my mind to test the wilderness crawl rules in this session, so as the evening went on with ever more shopping I tried to nudge the players out the gates as it were. It turns out that the players were knackered at this point though, so we didn't get to try things out as much as I wanted.

But we did do half a day's worth of crawling.

They set out, and I described the landscape as they walked along. It's something I've really missed, and something I used to do a lot when I was leading MERP games back in sweden. But I have specific restrictions in mind nowdays. I will keep my descriptions very short, maybe five sentences max, and following a specific format (I'll talk on this more in a later post). It felt a little odd, but I think it's a good thing, though it's hard to tell with the players being tired.

Wilderness crawling in Solum is meant to be pre planned but improvisational. Basically each area has a general random encounter table, and each hex has specific keyed encounters that are interesting places or other things. Each hex is rather large, so more than one thing can happen in them (again, I'll elaborate on this later on).

Each day the group rolls to not get lost, how well they travel and how aware they are, and the GM rolls three random encounters (1 in 6).

In this case, the players did not get lost, they travelled without incident and they were reasonably aware. I rolled one encounter, a pack of wild dogs.

Dogs!
Said and done, at their lunch camp they got ambushed by said dogs. The wizard was surprised, while the other characters were on the ball. The warrior intercepted the dog that lept for the wizard, while the rest of the dogs ganged up on the cleric and rogue.

The battle took three rounds, but already at the beginning of the second round the dogs had to roll morale because more than half of them were down. They all succeeded however, and only at the end of round three the last dog decided to flee. Poor thing.

Ending with a battle was good, it got us into the game again and the combat system is the one thing that has been tested a lot so far, so it feels like it's working very well.

Finally
So there we have it, our reboot. It feels really great to start again, I've missed it, and I'm looking forward to playing more, testing more sections of the rules and all sorts! Also, while the adventures that I've planned are small and simple for now, I do think they're interesting and will be fun to play and lead. We'll see how they do next week!