VA campaign starts - a new challenge awaits [warning: long-ish]

[Bismark]

Specifically, a challenge I have never had before. During the last 3 years (and especially the last 2), the role-playing society I belong to at the local university had a drop in membership combined with a shortage of players compared to the number of would-be GMs. This led to a situation where one of my friends shared the GMing duties with me - I was running a Turakian Age HERO campaign on alternate weeks and he would run Pendragon during the other weeks (with the same players, on the whole - I played in his campaign and he played in mine).

 

As this situation worked so well, we decided to keep it for this year. Guess what happened - this year saw the biggest upsurge in membership the society has had for along time, and less of the newbies (as a percentage) want to GM than in the last 2 years.

 

Added to this, the prospect of alternating systems and GMing styles appealed to rather more people than we expected. While Chris (the other GM) is used to large groups and has run games for them many times in the last 15 years, I am a n00b at this sort of thing (the most players I have run games for is 5, and I now have 9 ). I also made a bit of a rod for my own back with my choice of PC power levels, which was chosen last term so I could get the concepts from, and design characters for, the players I knew would be back this term:

 

Bearing in mind that this is VA, not TA, we are using 150 point characters (built as 100 + 50 disads, starting all characteristics at 10). I am not enforcing Normal Skill Maxima (except for Sorcery - and none of the players really want to play an S&S sorceror apart from our Brewmaster, who only needs default level skill plus a few Knowledges and a PS: Brewer), but I am using the 'No Skill Levels apart from Combat/Penalty Skill Levels' option.

 

Nine characters of this level are actually a bit 'hot to handle' in Elweir (especially as I have yet to attain the encyclopaedic level of knowledge I like to have where settings are concerned, and this is rather necessary to set adventures in a city of sufficient complexity for this party).

 

The cast of characters is:

 

Haile - an Abyzinian merchant with mucho bureaucracy skills;

 

Mbembe - a massive Savannah tribe warrior with big shield and spear, plus one of those spiffy multi-bladed throwing knives - he has mucho MA with his spear;

 

Bayan - a north Pelosan Steppe nomad with the classic Bow Tricks and Riding Skills;

 

Freya - a Khorian Brewmistress with an impressive frame (and COM 20 to go with it - a 1.85m tall blue-eyed redhead [yes, she is a wish-fulfilment character on my part ]);

 

Tarja - a Pelosan forest-steppe boundary tribeswoman with a spear, lariat and a savage reputation (think savage pagan Finnish tribe like the Burta or the Moksha);

 

'Synthia' (name not yet finalised by player) - a Cynthian Rider (female, good-looking [COM 14]) with the usual gear, plus a shield faced in human bone and a human skin undershirt and a drinking cup made from a skull;

 

Tessa - a barbarian from the Crumble (female, COM 20) with a big axe, a long 'flat bow' (which can stand extreme cold without breaking) and Beast Speech;

 

'Nimblefingers' (name not yet finalised by player) - an Elweirnian sophisticate with an amazing array of skills appropriate to his profession (a rogue and smuggler);

 

'Stabby' (name not yet finalised by player) - another Elweirnian sophisticate who specialises in the darker side of roguery [he knows Brew Poison - go figure]

 

Somehow I have to come up with adventures that can involve that lot - I started by getting everyone introduced with a little delivery errand inside the city, and now they are going out into the Nylssen Forest to retrieve an artifact which was stolen from Abyzinia a very long time ago and news of it has just surfaced recently. This will keep three party members really happy as they are very good riders (and the party have been given horses for the duration of the mission).

 

This campaign is going to be a challenge - I want to keep everyone involved as much as possible (there are signs of intra-party bonding, which is good).

 

The real novelty of this party is that, of the 4 female characters, 3 of them are actually played by females (and they all requested the seriously OTT COM scores - so it wasn't just my idea).

 

Wish me luck!

 

Any helpful ideas regarding handling big parties are most welcome.

[Gunrunner]

Re: VA campaign starts - a new challenge awaits [warning: long-ish]

 

Best of luck! It's good to see people enjoying swords and sorcery instead of high fantasy for a change. If I were in the UK I would definitely look you up for a game As far as handling big parties goes, have you considered an assistant GM? You could assign certain tasks/NPC's/scenarios to your assistant so you can keep things moving in a speedy, orderly fashion.