Dwarves in Eden – Trouble in Paradise

After a nearly 2-year hiatus, my group has finally returned to our Dwarves in Eden campaign. We brought in a new player and one of our other semi-regular players decided to burn up a new character as well.

While we helped them create those characters we caught up a bit on what had happened before and where things might be going.

So we have two existing PCs: Kardin (the crafter, Runecaster) & Flint (super-greedy ex-adventurer & civilian leadership) and two new PCs: Hastur, a human scout with major leadership problems (Anarchist character trait) & Reorx a Dwarven scout that had been travelling with the Prince’s party who had been having a secret affair with the royal mother (the Prince’s mother) before the exile.

This session was mostly about getting reacquainted with the setting and introducing the new characters.

Dark Actual Play

Shortly after my last post about Dark, I got the chance to run it for a couple players. And, then for whatever reason I kept putting off posting an AP report. So, hopefully my memory doesn’t fail too hard here!

I ran the scenario that came with the beta kit sent out to Kickstarter backers. If you think you might get to play that and spoilers are important you may want to stop reading since I probably won’t be able to avoid spoilers.

Setup

I started out by explaining the system a bit. How performing actions worked and how playing cards down work. That part is pretty straight forward. I went ahead and let them pick from the pre-made characters so they could have a sheet to reference as I pointed out things. One player chose Somerset, the other with Larkish.

Then I presented the players with their initial decks (consisting only of A-4 of each suit) and explained how to spend the XP they started with to add more cards into their deck. There was some confusion on how buying face cards worked, but we were able to eventually sort that out. I think I just need to find a way to more clearly explain that in the future.

I also let them know that the adventure didn’t necessarily have a lot of focus on social skills or using a disguise, but that I had a good idea of how to handle those things so they didn’t need to shy away from them completely. I just wanted to make sure they understood that those would be semi-unexplored areas without a lot of rules in the beta kit to back them up.

I gave them the starting pitch for the game that they were on a mission to get a very valuable jewel from a courier that was stopping for the night in a tavern. At that point we were ready to jump in and play.

All told, all the set up took, at most, 30 minutes.