Three Princesses: The Beginning
His Imperial Majesty, desperately clinging to the tatters of a failing reign, hits upon the time-honored solution to the “barbarian problem” of marriage as a stop gap. He orders three princesses of minor southern subject kingdoms to sail off and marry the sons of the smelly bearded boat guys who threaten his northern provinces.
So begins the inaugural campaign of the BROSR’s Junior Wimminz Division.
Backing up, I gave the three lovely young ladies two options for their first real RPG campaign: we could roll up a series of situations and settings and such from the Fantasy Tome of Lists: 115 Random Tables for Fantasy RPGs, or they could roll up the three princesses. It made no difference to me, being a ZeroPrep supremacist, but I wanted the girls to have the choice of more improv or more structure. They chose the latter, and the game was afoot.
Prior to rolling up characters, I gave them three options for guardian troops on the journey with them and three NPC advisors. In this manner, the three of them have a force-multiplier that should allow them to better deal with the hazards ahead. It also allowed for some light role-play straight out of the gate, and gave them a few more resources to use in the session. To determine who got what, we ran a bit of a Draft, with ten NPCs laid out on index cards, and the three different types of troops. The NPCs were rolled up using the tables and charts in the AD&D DMG, including the random character types from Appendix C (Character Subtable, Page 175), which led to a good mix. For the troops, only three cards were on the table:
- The soldiers – heavily armored spearmen, loud, and stalwart
- The woodsmen – lightly armed bowmen, hunters, and trackers
- The sailors – fractious and reckless, but doughty and skilled in many trades
The Draft order broke down as sometimes the three girls haggled a bit, and made sure that each player got the Big Thing she really really wanted, and sometimes a player deferred a choice because she didn’t really have a strong preference. Very typical behavior for grown-up RPG tables, and a pleasure to watch. These players are very clever and considerate and pretty and I’m not just saying that because one of them is my daughter.
Moving on, we rolled two sets of stats, one using 4d6 drop the lowest and one using a dozen sets of 3d6, drop the six lowest. Naturally, they chose the latter sets, as each had a single 17 rolled, with a minor power and four average stats. We wound up with the following:
- Maya, a swoleceror of the Macho Mandalf School of Wizardry and her friendly woodsmen, played by Evangeline
- Sycamore, a standard thief and her brave soldiers, played by Rory
- Izzy a very charismatic but broke-ass fighter and her sailor friends, played by Izzy. (There’s always one.)
Two quick notes on the NPCs, of whom we shall read more later. The thief named her illusionist advisor ‘Leonardo da Finchi’ and her monk “bob. The fighter named her spider climbing wizard ‘Peter Parker’. I’m telling you, these kids are naturals!
After an hour or prep, we weighed anchor and things went south – literally and figuratively – almost immediately. What should have been a stately seven day cruise into the bleak arctic seas turned into a harrowing seven day nightmare. Unseasonal storms from the north blasted the I.M.S. Skyhook completely off-course and only through the heroic efforts of Captain Jack Cardinal (name supplied by one of the girls) were they able to keep the ship afloat. When the skies finally cleared on the seventh morning, the lookout aloft spotted a line of green beneath high, white clouds on on the horizon two points off the port stern. With the Skyhook taking on water, the Captain turned her bow that direction and managed to coax the vessel to soft, sandy landing in the middle of a sheltered bay roughly three miles across (Island Hex 13).
Leonardo Da Finchi sent his owl familiar aloft for a quick scout of the island and after an hour it returned, speaking of an island about thirty miles across, with twin high peaks, woods, plains, and rough hills as shown above. The subhexes are five miles across, making this the perfect size for a hex-clearing campaign, should the players opt for that direction. Wow, it’s almost like it was designed for such a thing.
With their first major decision of the game, the girls elected to land the ship near a broad river that depended into the bay (Subhex8), rather than the more easily secured peninsula to starboard or beneath the lee of high cliffs to port. With two-hundred yards of water between ship and shore, the crew set about moving everything they could onto the beach, using the three ship’s launches, and set up a rudimentary camp.
At this point, it’s worth pointing out that the maps are all the prep I’ve done. Every encounter in the session, and the map and key to the dungeon they would explore, was rolled openly in front of them, which really helped instill in them a sense of discovery. This hampered any sort of information gathering, however, and we’ll need to address that in future posts. More on that later.
As the men worked, spirits low, the girls recognized the call of adventure screaming their names. A whole island to explore? Let’s get to it! They had the option of using wood from the forest to the northwest to repair the ship, but opted instead to use material from the ship to make a rough basecamp there at the mouth of the river. Captain Cardinal acquiesced, but insisted that his mission was to get them safely to the north, and that he would die trying. He acknowledged that he needed information about the island, but that it would take time to secure safety here on the beach until they knew more about the natives. After a day of rest and settling in, he would send his men out, while the girls waited safely on the sidelines.
They had other ideas, as we’ll learn in future posts.
We’re running up against the thousand word limit of my writing time, so let me end with two bits of retcon and a quick look to the future.
Once the ship was ashore, we realized that Izzy the Bankrupt Fighting-Lady had been given no troops by her useless father. Instead, she used the week of the storm to cozy up to and charm the men of the Skyhook. So charming was she that many of them will come to take up her service and engage in a little light mutiny against the Captain. This was the first of two bits of ret-conning in the early session. Maya’s player requested a friendly little mushroom man mascot, and rather than give it to her, I offered to let him be swept off the ship in the storm, with the assurance that he was somewhere on the island. In this manner, we improvised a little side-quest sure to add interest and motivation. It also helps assure the girls that they are active creators directing this game down paths of their choosing. In the house of Wargaming, we don’t believe in ‘pretty hallway’ campaigns.
And it must have worked, because the girls had the time of their lives, and are very much looking forward to the next session. They are as eager as I am to find out what happens next.