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Post by Randy Shipp on May 7, 2004 15:42:14 GMT -5
Jeff, Susan, Aaron -- stop reading now...
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OK...I've decided to borrow a fair amount from the ideas of gospog. The three characters (probably a n'anga and two gamba fighters), all 1st level, all live in the same kraal in Shombe-land. As part of their coming of age, they are told to go hunt down the lion that has been carrying off livestock lately. Before they go, they'll be getting a sort of briefing from the Council of Elders (also a way to introduce the heads of the various families).
There, they'll meet an older man called Nyuni whose face is badly scarred, with one eye missing, and the right side of whose body is paralyzed. He will tell them about the times when youngsters went on their coming of age hunts by themselves. But, he says, it got too dangerous as the number of creatures and, especially, entare rose in the area. So, he says, he was one of the first to go on his hunt with a group. He and three other youths went into the bush and were told not to return for two weeks and not to stay close enough to home that herders from their village would find them. About a week into their ordeal, they tracked what they thought was a game animal but which turned out to be an entare scout. The powerful creature taunted them, seeming to enjoy playing with the party. Unfortunately, one of the gamba insulted the creature and it attacked, killing the gamba almost immediately. Nyuni tried to help his friend and was viciously clawed and left for dead while the enraged entare tracked down and killed his friends. With the help of the ancestors, Nyuni was able to drag himself back to the village without being found by hyenas or worse, and now warns the party to beware the hazards of the bush. He seems to enjoy telling the story, since it's fun to watch the youngsters squirm, but it's also clear by looking at him that the dangers are real.
The party sets off, eventually spotting the lion's tracks and beginning the hunt. One night, the party will be harassed in their camp by hyenas. The next day along the trail, the characters see a small group of three hyenas (perhaps the remnants of the pack that attacked their camp) stalking a gazelle near a watering hole. Just as they are about to pounce, there is a flash of yellowish fur from the brush, and a mpisimbi rushes out and attacks the largest hyena, easily killing it. The omen is something along the lines of "the hunters become the hunted." Indeed, later the trail becomes a bit confused, as if the lion was doubling back and crossing its own trail (or there were multiple lions here). In reality, the lion is gone, and the party has somehow started tracking a lone entare. When they later come upon the viciously slain mpisimbi along the trail of the "lion," they should really start to worry. I might throw in another omen along here somewhere indicating a need to go home, if they insist on going further.
Now, with increasing signs of the entare's pursuit, it'll be a rush for home. Then, near home, the entare catches up to them, and only the appearance of a strange foreigner (who chants something at the entare that makes it grudgingly leave) saves the day. He will return to the village with them and be welcomed by the chief as a friend.
(In reality, he's in cahoots with the nobility of Taumau-Boha, which is under the influence of...well, p.168, bullet 3. hehe)
It's a fairly simple wilderness scenario, with a little bit of getting used to foraging for food and water, some firsthand experience with savannah predators and scavengers, a glimpse of their first real monster (the mpisimbi) and a lesson, hopefully, in the value of sometimes running away, since there are lots of things out there that can kill characters. Finally, I introduce the very beginning of my long-term campaign plot.
Thoughts?
Randy...
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Post by Nyambefan on May 10, 2004 18:49:19 GMT -5
Randy,
This is great stuff! You have a good knack for story telling. You "simple" wilderness adventure introduces many themes and provides for a great sense of discovery that your players should just eat up.
I assume that the entare and the foreigner are allied or at least have some kind of understanding. Great stuff.
The story of Nyuni is very good.
It reminds me of the chilling story told by an old scared man of the coming of the Ven when he was a boy in the movie "The Thirteenth Warrior". "They could see in the dark, they could, claws like a lion, teeth like a bear!"
I just read a childrens book from my local library that contained an african mythological story of a family of spiders and the origin of the moon. It is called Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti (An Owlet Book) by Gerald McDermott . It would make a great follow up story for Nyuni to tell later on in the campaign. Kind of setting him up as an elder and teacher of these adventurers.
Oh, another idea. The entare could be a recurring villian. Just how did he fool the hunters into thinking he was a game animal anyway? They (entare) advance by character class so some fun options are open here.
Would you consider posting some of your campaign logs or info to these boards? I can easily set up a new area for you if you like.
Would you invite Jeff, Susan, Aaron to the boards? It would be great to have them post their ideas for both your campaign and Nyambe in general. As long as they don't "peak" in on things you don't want them to read, of course.
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Post by Randy Shipp on May 11, 2004 1:06:42 GMT -5
Randy, This is great stuff! You have a good knack for story telling. You "simple" wilderness adventure introduces many themes and provides for a great sense of discovery that your players should just eat up. Thanks! I'm hoping things could be even a little more elaborate than that, especially during the "pre-game," before the characters ever head into the bush. I'd like to take a hint from the folks over at www.tlucretius.net/Nyambe/ and come up with interesting NPCs to populate the village: at the very least, the heads of all the clans who make up the Council of Elders (and a sketch of their relationships), and perhaps even a few other interesting people. Because when the mysterious stranger comes into town, it's going to be a lot about tribal politics... I assume that the entare and the foreigner are allied or at least have some kind of understanding. Great stuff. Well, the way it's going in my mind now, it's more about the entare having an imperfect understanding and deciding not to push his luck. The stranger says something in a language the entare understands but the PCs don't -- sylvan, perhaps -- and basically bluffs the entare into thinking that the stranger is claiming these three doomed souls on behalf of some fiendish orisha with which the entare is familiar. (The foreigner has done his homework!) The entare opts not to tangle with what he perceives to be the servant of a nasty and powerful spirit and leaves. I might roll for the n'anga to somehow catch the garbled name of a fiendinsh orisha (Knowledge (Religion) with a penalty for the language barrier). I haven't written up a character yet for the stranger, but I'll need to before long. The story of Nyuni is very good. It reminds me of the chilling story told by an old scared man of the coming of the Ven when he was a boy in the movie "The Thirteenth Warrior". "They could see in the dark, they could, claws like a lion, teeth like a bear!" Yeah, much the same! Except my old man will be having fun, hamming it up a bit. It's a serious subject, but I want this guy to be like that, plus it'll send fun mixed signals to my players! Muahaha! ;-) I just read a childrens book from my local library that contained an african mythological story of a family of spiders and the origin of the moon. It is called Anansi the Spider: A Tale from the Ashanti (An Owlet Book) by Gerald McDermott . It would make a great follow up story for Nyuni to tell later on in the campaign. Kind of setting him up as an elder and teacher of these adventurers. I hadn't fully thought it through that far, but I agree. I think this NPC can end up being someone they have a lot of contact with later. I'm just really so stoked about Nyambe...there's no reason I couldn't have gotten inspired to do all this same kind of stuff in a more generic fantasy village, but it's Nyambe that's got me actually doing it! I'll absolutely have to check the library for that book! Sounds great. Oh, another idea. The entare could be a recurring villian. Just how did he fool the hunters into thinking he was a game animal anyway? They (entare) advance by character class so some fun options are open here. Again, not something I'd thought all the way through but, now that you mention it, I'm excited about the idea of being able to file away a monstrous NPC to use for another encounter someday. All I really have to do is give this particular entare some distinguishing mark or characteristic that will clue the characters in later that they've met him before. Plus, when the stranger warns him off, he can taunt them with some memorable threat (something like, "Hmph. Run along, little cubs, back to your mother's teat...Should you somehow live long enough to dare these plains again, you'd be wise not to cross my path again!" Might also make them wonder a bit about the stranger.). I like it. Would you consider posting some of your campaign logs or info to these boards? I can easily set up a new area for you if you like. Absolutely! A different area shouldn't be necessary...this area will do fine. Would you invite Jeff, Susan, Aaron to the boards? It would be great to have them post their ideas for both your campaign and Nyambe in general. As long as they don't "peak" in on things you don't want them to read, of course. Perhaps if I think they've learned enough about the setting to contribute something, or once we're underway and they have some experiences to talk about! But mainly, I want them to not have too much information, as their slow learning process about this dangerous land is where the fun will come from! Randy... |
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Post by Randy Shipp on May 17, 2004 22:07:31 GMT -5
My Nyambe game finally kicked off Sunday evening. Character creation was finalized, with my PCs ending up being Imara, female nanala who has a really bad attitude and thus has never been recommended for "promotion" to the adventurer stage of life, her brother, Mkamba, who is quite a bit younger and is a very by-the-book gamba wannabe who idolizes his older brothers, all accomplished warriors...and Rashaad, an up and coming n'anga who just happens to be 14 years old and already 6'10" and very skinny.
I was, as always, a kinda crappy GM for the session. I felt nervous and rambled during the introductory material. I got the names of people like the chief and the old man confused, and I think it took an awful long time to get to the story where the PCs got to start making decisions. I'm trying, I promise...
After hearing about how Mkamba really idolizes his brothers and the other older warriors, I had his uncles appear as they were being sent off after the lion, carrying a masterwork heavy spear, which his brothers used in their trials, and their father and uncles before that. He was suitably impressed with that. The n'anga was gifted with a masterwork natural medicine kit, gris-gris of Cure Light Wounds and Bless, and a Potion of Protection from Evil.
The n'anga's player, who has been the most excited about the Nyambe setting since I started setting this thing up, immediately started getting into the whole omen reading thing, asking me almost from the beginning for signs and portents for him to interpret. When they were shown the mutilated carcass of the cow that had last fallen victim to the lion, Rashaad began calling out to the orisha of the cattle, invoking its help in finding its killer. I don't know if I was handling things correctly, but I was impressed with the roleplaying, so a minute or two later, I put it to use a bit. Mkamba was searching the area for the tracks of the lion, and had rolled a fairly mediocre result. Instead of just telling him he succeeded, I said something like, "You've basically given up on finding any tracks in the blood-streaked grass that surrounds the fly-swarmed carcass, and you turn to look over to your right...but as you start to turn away, a puff of wind parts the tall grasses for a moment, and you spy a wisp of tawny fur a few paces away..." A thorny bush had snagged the lion, leaving a bit of fur behind, and showing him where to find the tracks.
In retrospect, I think I'm going to try to do stuff like this a lot. I think it could be really cool to get both the PCs and the players feeling a little superstitious about the orisha. When they make efforts to honor and placate them, there might be good results with some frequency. When they ignore or disrespect them, there might be results from that, too. Imara has been basically refusing to follow the traditional forms when it comes to respecting the orisha, and I can picture that making things subtly hard for her as things go on.
Anyway, they tracked the lion along a game trail until dark, at which point a green snake crossing their path seemed to indicate that it would be good to camp near a stand of trees off to the right of the trail. Rashaad stayed up for the first watch and spent the time giving thanks to his ancestors. Lost in meditation, he was aware a hair too late of the hyenas who had surrounded the camp and they attacked while the others were being awakened. (I found a hyena laughing sound effect on the Internet as we were playing, which added a nice touch.)
In the ensuing fight, Imara was bitten fairly seriously, losing 6 of her 9 hit points, and Mkamba lost 9 of 12 at one point before he found the strength to strike with his family's spear, impaling one of the hyenas before charging and leaping over the campfire to mortally wound the second hyena and send it running. Rashaad called the light of the setting sun to shine forth from his shield, and the hyenas, sensing a tougher fight than they had planned for, skulked away into the darkness. That's all we got to in the first session.
Combat was a little clunky. Mostly, that's because I don't have a ton of experience GMing D&D. Partly, it's because I only have real experience playing 3.0, and I made the...well, the bad decision to use 3.5 for this game. It just gave me more to think about than I'm really comfortable with, and it slowed things down. Again, I just need to read the rules, get my players to do that some more, and practice practice practice, concentrating mainly on the roleplaying.
Oh, speaking of roleplaying, I forgot to mention one of the more entertaining episodes. After the fight with the hyenas, during which Rashaad cast two Cure Light Wounds and a Light, Rashaad was overcome by a trance, and was possessed by an ancestor. He leaped up, fists in front of him, and challenged Mkamba...lots of "You think you're so tough, huh?" and told Mkamba he hadn't the guts to hit Rashaad. A fistfight ensued between Rashaad/the Ancestor and Mkamba, with both guys getting a few scratches. Imara was not impressed. I'm not sure I want Rashaad to have these really crazy possessions all the time, but I'm glad he's into it enough to come up with fun ways to handle the orisha's part of the bargain!
How do you guys handle possession?
Randy...
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Post by Nyambefan on May 25, 2004 13:39:36 GMT -5
Wow! Randy, I have read this several times and was waiting to see if anyone else would comment but it has been a week so I just have to jump in. This sounds like so much fun! Don't worry about the fumbles. It takes many years to get smooth at DMing, and even that is no sure thing. Is the masterwork spear an ancestral weapon as described in Ancestral Vault? Great use of the omen to get things back on track. here are some ideas I had on what to use omens for: - Replacing some typical tavern rumors with in-game "clues"
- Getting the game back on track
- reminding players that the spirit world is real and always around them
I would recommend using at least two omens per game session. Possession: I would warn players not to go to extremes such as challenging other players while posessed. It leads to hard fealings and the player is getting away with something that he can later say wasn't his fault. That will surely lead to trouble down the line. Players should view the spirits as otherworldly and wanting to guide the characters. Or maybe they just want to experienc the physical world for a while. I could even see a great warrior spirit wanting to train with a descendant both for the pleasure of holding a spear again and to pass on some combat lore. Again, Randy, thank you for posting a recap of your game session. Can we have another?  |
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Post by Randy Shipp on Dec 16, 2004 9:08:05 GMT -5
Just wanted to drop a quick line to let you know that I hadn't died or fallen off the edge of the Earth or something. :-)
Sadly, the married couple that made up two-thirds of my Nyambe group split up, and my game hasn't happened since then.
Upon returning to the kraal with the foreign stranger after their lion hunt gone wrong, they walked right into the beginning of "Dire Spirits," which I thought went really well. Other than utterly failing to give any sense of the distance that the characters had to walk from Shombe-land to the great forest where the temple is hidden, I thought I did a passing job. The krenshar were good combat encounters, and the stranded wakayambi and awakened lizard and boar were all fun roleplaying opportunities. In the end, Rashaad, Mkamba, and Imara managed to defeat the dark heart and its servants, and Mkamba has discovered the power (well, some of it...) of his ancestral spear. It was good stuff.
The foreign stranger? Well, he didn't make the trip with them, so when they get home, they may find that he's already begun to subtly influence the people of the village to further his dark plan...
Unfortunately, I don't know when I'll be able to resurrect the game, nor who my players will be. But I do hope to try it again someday soon.
Randy...
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Post by Nyambefan on Dec 16, 2004 11:10:08 GMT -5
Randy, I am sorry to hear about the breakup of your group and more. It sounds like both you and the players had a great time. Go to your local favorite gaming store, put up a poster advertising your game and get new players. You have too many good ideas to let sit idle. If/when you do get a campaign going, I would be happy to setup a campaign forum for you and even a one page campaign page for things such as house rules, quests, npcs, etc. Kinda like this one. www.nightwasp.com/daggerdale/lythari/lythari.htm Or this one www.nightwasp.com/daggerdale/oldcampaignpics/ribaldband.htm |
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Post by Randy Shipp on Dec 23, 2004 2:31:23 GMT -5
Well, go figure. I was just talking by IM today to one half of the broken up couple, and she let me know that she thinks the two of them wouldn't have any problem playing in the same RPG. If that's true, I might just take another stab at Nyambe early in the coming year.
If so, what should I have happen next? In the couple of weeks that it took the three youngsters to go and defeat the dark heart, the mysterious stranger won't have had too much time to do anything drastic at the kraal, but I guess he could very easily have begun to get friendly with the chief and a few of his more loyal elders. There won't have been, I think, enough time for him to really start to annoy any of the other elders. (Eventually, I imagine the Council of Elders being divided: on the one side the chief and his allies who trust the stranger and who think his "abilities" help the village, and another set of elders who distrust the fact that an outsider now has the ear of the chief.)
My thought was that I could kick off this part of the campaign by figuring out some way for the stranger to begin to "serve" the village. Perhaps the youngsters, after being properly celebrated for their success in the jungle, are urged by the chief to hear the stranger repeat a wondrous tale that he told around the fire several nights ago. The stranger may have told of some strange place he passed through on his journeys just outside the grazing range of the kraal's cattle.
Oh, did I relate the story of what happened during the original lion hunt...about the cave they hid in with the stranger? After the encounter with the entare, the group decided to head back to the kraal, fearful that more entare might be in the area and eager to report that they thought the entare had killed the cattle. One evening during the trip back, they spotted a rock outcropping in the distance that turned out to be seveal massive slabs of rock that jutted out of the plains, forming a kind of large "U" shaped area that would be pretty sheltered. Well, during the night they heard the call of some animal or creature in the darkness and Chitendu (the foreign stranger) told them he thought it was something pretty scary, so they looked for a place to hide, eventually finding a small, narrow crevice at the base of one of the huge outcroppings, completely covered by brush. They squeezed down into the hole as the animal sounds got closer and closer. The low, cramped tunnel sloped downward and eventually dumped into a man-made passage, its floor covered in animal droppings and debris washed down from above during many, many years of seasonal downpours. The passage only went a short distance before a rockfall blocked the way, and they discovered the almost compeletely destroyed remains of a painted plaster mural on one wall. The piece that wasn't destroyed showed creatures that look like ungoloku (?) half-orcs, at least as the youngsters had heard them described in stories. The humanoids were kneeling at the feet of some large, seated figure, though only its feet were visible, along with a small fragment of an inscription which they could not read. Anyway, they sheltered there for the night before leaving the next morning.
All of this business about the cave was just setup for later, for something I haven't fully developed. My plan at the moment is for there to be an entire story arc at some point involving this cave. Chitendu may have secretly been much more impressed by the man-made tunnel and the mural than the characters. Perhaps he knows something about it, or more likely he just suspects that such a buried place might be an ancient temple or tomb that conceals a valuable treasure or magic item or something. In any case, at some point he'll want to have the rockfall excavated and more exploration done. My plan is for the place to be a sort of tomb for a Kosan wizard-king from centuries before. The tomb itself could be a series of adventures, with each one ending in some kind of "rockfall" (or puzzle lock, or magical ward, or whatever) that forces the characters to leave and come back later when better prepared. Ultimately, though, I picture the tomb containing a damaged or malfunctioning magical ward, originally designed to preserve the tomb for all time, but which now somehow transports the adventurers back in time to the era of the Kosan domination of Nyambe. The characters would, at that point, need to overcome numerous obstacles, including figuring out how the hell to get back home.
But that's all very long term...for now, I need a way to just advance the story and the characters just a bit, basically just an everyday "episode" of my little Nyambe TV show. So, any ideas? It would help if it involved some suggestion from Chitendu, and if it promises something good for the kraal, such as a beneficial item, relief from some problem the village is suffering, additional wealth (in the form of cattle, perhaps), an advantage over rival tribes, etc. Also, consider the possibility that the adventure have a way to introduce a new PC (if I can convince my wife to try playing)...she would be a Xon'mo sei sorceror, a fire-blooded young woman forced to leave her village to spare her family embarassment.
Anyway, just a few more thoughts.
Randy...
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