ESCHATON Report #1
Welcome to the first play report for ESCHATON, my Campaign26 entry. If you're only interested in the in-game events of session 1, skip down to the "Scenic Glacier National Park" section.
Getting Started
Going into this session, I was pretty prepared. Not just with a good starting scenario for the PCs, but with HOW I wanted to run this session. For starters, knowing we had 2.5 hours from the players arriving at my apartment to a hard-out, and that we still had some parts of character creation to do, really influenced HOW I prepped this one.
Creation, Exercise, Tarot
We began the session about 13 minutes after everyone arrived, giving us time to catch up, grab a bite, and get seated. Crucially for this next part, we were not yet in "the zone". But I had some ideas of how to get us there, making the transition from "we are vibing" to "we are gaming".
First, character sheets. Everyone had been given a 1-page primer on the game a week in advance, and had spent that week chatting with me on- and off-line about the character they wanted to make. So I had a great idea of who everyone was BEFORE they sat down first. And this allowed me to pull the magic trick of writing up custom abilities and/or items for everyone, and handing those out on little index cards. That definitely provoked excitement. Other than that, character creation in this knock-off Savage Worlds hack was lightning quick - we were done putting numbers on paper by the 30 minute mark from when people arrived.
Second, I gave everyone 3 minutes (on an actual timer) to write down their answers to an in-character prompt. For session 1, I went with "What's your favorite place you've ever been, and why?". After everyone was done, I gave everyone the chance to share - 1/4 players did share! Everyone else kept it to themselves (reminder to self: read their unshared answers before next session!).
Lastly, we opened a brand-spanking-new tarot deck, shuffled, and drew a card. I gave a little spiel about how the cards will be drawn at every session start, and they're simply here to act as a ritual component of play and possibly maybe inspire you for the creative parts of play. Session 1 gets the 5 of Wands! We did a bit of googling what this meant, and explaining to each other, then I kicked things off!
Scenic Glacier National Park
With 2 hours til a hard out, we launched into play! I asked the players to introduce their characters "to the level of information that the other hunters get when they meet you at motel check-in the night prior". They did so, thus producing my first chance to share the cast list for ESCHATON!
- Valentin, a monster-hunting Catholic priest from Mexico.
- Marvin, an aging conspiracy theorist with a his briefcase.
- Bridger, a burly mountain woman with a big gun.
- Olga, a sword-girl from a monster-hunting dynasty.
The hunters drive into Glacier National Park at first light, intending to meet their park ranger contact, who's alerted the Hunters Guild to a spike in missing hikers. They find her station broken into violently, with signs of a one-sided gun fight and nobody home...They fan out to investigate, and eventually find the ranger's trainee barricaded into the office under attack from two horse-faced creepy-crawlies. A brief fight ensues, and the hunters mop up handily.
From there, some investigating! They find their actual contact dead in the gift shop, mauled by the same creepy-crawlies that they'd just taken down. They find their contact AND the trainee survivor - Mary - bodily marked by some sort of witch-symbol. Later, they get suspicious of the massing birds that keep trying to eat the monsters' corpses, so they construct a pyre outside the station and notice that time has gone all wibbly, and the sun is now setting...
With more and more birds massing, the sun going down in an untimely fashion, and more witch-symbols marking all the maps in the visitor center but especially the ominous mountain nearby...the hunters take action. They hop in Olga's very nice SUV, take Mary with them, teach her a protective "spell" (just some old Hebrew, no effect), and drive down toward the river.
Crossing the car bridge, Olga floors it when she notices spikes of ice bursting out of the partially-iced river. They barely make it across without banging up the car, and arrive at the end of the road on a foot path leading up the mountainside.
They can glimpse a cave up the path, and as they dismount the SUV, spot a hideous bear-like monster with a face covered in waving pink cilia looking down at them. It scents the air, recoils, and retreats into its apparent den. So naturally, up the path the hunters go.
At the cave mouth, hearing the sounds of witches chanting and laughing maniacally from within, the hunters hatch a plan! Mary approaches the cave, while Bridger poises above it with rifle ready to shoot whatever comes out, and hunters Valentin, Olga, and Marvin waiting in tree cover nearby. They succeed in luring out the cilia-bear-thing, fail at killing it with the first volley, survive its downhill rush toward them, and finally take it down with a sword strike!
With the apparent threat cleared, and the witchy cacophony briefly halted, Olga clicks on a flashlight and aims it into the cave. She sees a horrific coven of nine witches, all gathered about a channel in the bottom of the cave filled with churning blood, stirring it with long implements like metal oars...The closest witch, a blindfolded ethereal ice-blue woman, whispers an ominous dissuasion...
And we end there, with less than 20 minutes til our hard out!
GM Notes
Overall a smash hit of a first session that had everyone cheer at the cliffhanger! What a rush in-person gaming is, after just online stuff for a couple years! Oh how I missed this! A great start, with just a couple things I noticed that I want to improve on.
First and foremost, I am definitely going a bit "soft" on them re: monsters in combat. I have a little initiative procedure whipped up as part of the rules, but I found myself instead turning to a free-form proceeding. It went fine for the short, limited combats in this session, but in the future I want to jump into an Actual Combat Sequence when it's called for. It's easy to just...handwave things, but while that gains you time and flow, something else is lost...
Also, calling out target numbers before people roll! I did pretty good about this, but once or twice did catch myself simply asking for a roll without giving a target number beforehand. I'm fine with a difficulty SOMETIMES being secret...but only with good reason!
Last but not least, shoutout to the whole crew (myself included, but really especially my players) for the pacing on this one. We packed in a great intro session into under 2 hours of playtime!