After a two-week hiatus, I had four players reconvene for another session of Demihumans on Sunday.The main focus of the play became a fateful meeting with Wycraft, a mysterious elven mage. It became apparent as the play progressed that Wycraft wants to take the fight to the humans of Florageist, but to do so, Wycraft is warping the magic of the swamp. So the characters of the company faced a major dilemma: Do they join forces with Wycraft (thus harnessing that powerful magic), or do they oppose her (and hence make another enemy)? No easy choices!
The session ended in dramatic fashion with Wycraft revealing a large, dangerous Swamp Chimera, a monstrosity cobbled together from pieces of bear, alligator, snake, and other creatures. Wycraft is monomaniacal and was insisting that the members of the company (along with many members of the Neris the halfling’s family) join in a pact. Surprisingly, it was Donna (dwarf) who was most in favor of joining forces with Wycraft. But, in the end, Zuk the troll used Garden Pathways to spirit away the members of the company and a couple halflings. This left many other halflings, including their family matriarch, to deal with Wycraft and her Swamp Chimera on their own.
One other twist: Ugluk, a half-orc who was healed by Zuk’s Fruiting Bodies move and who now has the strange pseudo-sentient algae inhabiting her body, was involved in the action. She told Zuk to leave her behind to assist with the Wycraft situation, and, as the company fled Wycraft, they saw Ugluk running to some of the halflings and wiping some of the algae from her shoulder wound across their faces.
A few notable game play situations and recommendations:
Given the fact that we were coming back after a hiatus, I thought it would be nice to have players fill in on some developments that had been transpiring with their characters or the enclave. So, after the session preliminaries and the commonweal move, I had each player make a pseudo-custom move (involving a roll with modifiers) to explain developments. For example, Donna explained what she had been doing to help train the enclave members who had taken the Adamantine Pact. She failed her roll, by the way, and this resulted in one of those Adamantine Pact members falling into the party with Wycraft. The traitor, meanwhile, got to explain what was happening as a result of Human Antipathy increasing and got to ask some “Assess the Situation” style questions about what the humans were doing. This procedure got everyone immediately involved in the game play, and it helped to set some themes and stories in motion.
I’ve noticed that the boons, banes, and wants are not consistently coming into play. Players should be reminded of their boons at the start of the session. Even with that notification, they still are forgetting their boons. Here’s what I’m going to do next session: I’m going to remind them of the boons and then note that they are constantly forgetting them in play. The solution? I’m going to suggest that they look for opportunities to use them early in the session: Even if a boon was used for a minor advantage, that would be preferable than not using it at all.
As a demiurge, I’ve been much better at using the wants and banes that are more dramatic. In our next session, I’m going to do the following: For each want and ban in play, I’m either going to state the cost of that bane/want at the very start of the game play OR I’m going to think of the want or bane as a kind of move. I’m even going to consider asking a player exactly how a bane/want is manifesting itself in the enclave and how that directly impacts the members of the company.
One thing that is working well: There is so much drama being generated from the fact that the enclave has different factions with very different ideas about how to deal with the humans. If the demiurge does some good work at establishing some political intrigue and ethical dilemmas at the start, the game will flourish and the players will be faced with some deeply probing dilemmas. By the end of yesterday’s session, I had players jumping out of their seats, pacing, and knocking over chairs--all of this in a good way. They were thrilled with the complex choices that were continuing to bud and blossom.
The special moves are high points of the game play, but they do not get used often. The basic moves are doing their work, but part of me would like to see those special class moves more frequently. The plus side is that those class moves are very special when they are used, and the players are invested in giving them added meaning and import which is quite satisfying and dramatic.
Despite the impression of some of my players, I don’t know where the fiction will take us, but the game continues to generate a level of thoughtfulness and complexity that I have seldom encountered in an RPG. I had my doubts as to whether my play group would go for Demihumans with its melancholic tone, but they are energized by what the game is generating in terms of both the game play situations and in terms of the story.
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