AP: Beyond the Breach Session 2 (Burning Wheel)

This past Sunday was session #2 of our ongoing Burning Wheel campaign Beyond the Breach. You can read about Session #1 here.

This session saw the introduction of a new character:

• Conway – a scout and hunter who has lived in Providence for about half a year. Conway is a bit of a loner – a wiry, hard-drinking man, who fled the civilized southern lands after being accused of rape. He has some really nifty beliefs for me to work with including Love leads to nothing but trouble.

As I’ve written about earlier, I’m using an episodic format for the game to allow for missing players and give a sense of “time passing” rather than the game’s events occurring over the span of just a couple of days or weeks.  Thus, each episode is self-contained and days to months of game time can pass between episodes. For episode #2, I chose the title “The Big Chill” and thus decided to sent them into the frozen wastelands beyond the Barrier. Episode #2 picked up a few days after episode #1 ended, thus allowing Corvin to settle in to town and Gator to get a handle on his new business opportunity.
For this session I had settled on a list of scenes I wanted to try & include:

• A scene between McCormick & Corvin discussing how to make Corvin a suitable candidate for constable.
• A scene introducing Conway by having Gator seek him out to serve as a guide beyond the Barrier.
• The first sights of the lands of Winter which lay beyond the Breach.
• A visit to the Drakari Village & negotiations between Gator & the Drakari chieftain over trade issues.
• A battle between the group and a massive troll (I’m using the Iron Kingdoms dire troll as my inspiration) – this scene would introduce the Fight! mechanics.

Here’s what happened (game mechanics are shown in red, my thoughts and OOC info in blue) in terms of the scenes that took place – I aggressively framed these so we jumped between scenes rather that playing out every step of the way and constantly asking “so now what do you do?”

• Corvin met with McCormick to discuss the suitability of Corvin as a candidate for constable. After some discussion, McCormick agrees that Corvin could be useful as the constable but points out that Corvin is a nobody in town and thus needs to build some sort of reputation, and fast, so that McCormick can nominate him for the position. No actual rolls going on here, just pure roleplay.
• Gator meets with the Barbary Trade Co. owners (Isarn Rabe & Niall Duran) to plan out the expedition. They tell him to hire himself a guide and some armed guards – they will front him some money, as well as give him a 25% stake in the profits from the trade route, but can’t offer him any help in terms of man power. No actual rolls going on here, just pure roleplay.
• Gator heads off to McCormick to see if he has some trained warriors to lend. McCormick has some really nasty things to say about Rabe & Duran, but likes the idea that Gator has gotten in on the action because maybe it’ll open up new possibilities for McCormick’s brothel and liquor businesses. Corvin volunteers to go on the expedition (to make a name for himself) and McCormick agrees this is a good idea. He also suggests that Gator hire some miners and a couple of local thugs because they’ll be cheap and are too stupid to worry about the danger. Largely just roleplay – there might have been a skill check or two to determine some knowledge or insights though.
  
• Gator goes to see Conway to try to hire him as a guide – Conway is one of only a handful of men who have traveled beyond the Breach. Though it’s mid-afternoon, he finds Conway sleeping off another alcoholic binge and not in a good mood. Conway and Gator do some verbal sparring, but Gator finally convinces him to act as a guide by appealing to his need for money. A couple of skill checks took place to see the validity of the advice offered about supplies and the details of the expedition – normally I wouldn’t require rolls for this type of stuff but they were heading into the lands of Winter and no one on this side of the Barrier has experienced temperatures colder than 5 degrees Celsius in over a thousand years. Lots of blown rolls and thus some poor decisions were made about what to take. We also had some funny discussions on what “snow” was and how difficult it was going to be traveling in it.
• Gator arranges supplies. This was largely done as a wave of the hand because roleplaying buying boots and cloaks is not what I consider fun. We did include a couple of tests (Circles, Resources, & Merchant-wise). We ran the Resources test after doing some a haggling test in which Gator crushed his opposition and ended up getting everything for a very good price.
  
• In the next scene, Conway meets Caitlyn MacPhee – Conway heads off to outfit himself to head north and meets a pretty, young woman who is struggling to find some foodstuffs amongst the chaos that is Providence. Conway of course offers to help. They make some small talk and exchanged pleasantries but of course this ended by the revelation that she’s a prostitute working at for Madam Craig’s House of Companionship.  – With a belief like “Love leads to nothing but trouble” I just had to introduce a love interest for Conway. This also sets up some potentially interesting conflicts later on because the brothel owner is a direct competitor of McCormick (and of course Corvin is setting himself up to be McCormick’s right hand man), plus a love interest who happens to be a prostitute is just rich and tragic and loaded with tension.
• Next scene involves traversing the Breach and entering the lands of Winter. They travel northward, noting the alien landscape (a land of eternal ice and snow), and after a few days (during which they discover they are poorly equipped to deal with the weather) they reach a Drakari Village. Lots of skill tests, primarily centered survival and foraging type activities, going on here.
• The group arrives at a Drakari Village, discovering that the Drakari are a very tall (even the women are nearly 2m tall), fair haired (virtually everyone is blonde), primitive, tribal people (picture peaceful Vikings if you want some sort of image). The group met the village’s chief, a man named Skùli Isarson. The chief reveals a lot of very unusual information in the course of their discussions.  Most of this was handled via tests – I originally intended on using a Duel of Wits but decided that the consequences of the group losing wouldn’t yield anything really interesting and would slow down the story; I was also running out of time for the session. Amidst some of the more poignant information:
  • There are a number of settlements but they do not have a lot of contact with each with the exception that they trade wives every few years.
  • He keeps referring to Winter as if it is a sentient being.
    
  • He refers to the people of summer and how they locked away the Drakari and Winter.
    
  • He speaks of ancient ruins in the distant north where wives must be taken when the blood moon appears (Gator concludes this is referring to a phase of the moon in which it has a red tinge which occurs once per year).
  • He is interested in establishing trade exchange with the southern men, trading ivory, furs, and rare woods, for steel weapons and tools. Oh and alcohol after Conway decides to introduce brandy to the Drakari.
    
• The climactic scene of the episode involved the group being ambushed in a clearing by the massive, hulking form of a dire troll. This is a creature straight out of their nightmares since there are no “monsters” on the other side of the Barrier. The group battles the creature and ends up slaying it after Gator momentarily stuns it with a Fear spell, Conway shoots it in an eye with an arrow, and then Corvin finishes it off by driving his blade up to its hilt through the roof of the troll’s mouth and into its walnut sized brain.  This was our first use of the Fight! rules and it was very, very clunky – I was struggling to remind myself of some of the rules (particularly how damage worked) and it was also a pretty stunning jump in complexity for the players, most of whom are used to either very narrative based games or stuff built around D20. In the end the fight was a little anti-climactic because of a very poor roll that left the troll hesitating for 4 actions, and then Conway and Corvin making some very massive roll. What really tipped the scales though was that Corvin’s player rolled 4 sixes on his attack and then plunked down a fate point for luck and opened up those 6’s and got 2 more successes. That spelled doom for the troll. Thus my massive troll got cut up really quickly. However, in retrospect we were running out of time and it did actually create a pretty cool result – I just wish I had felt like I handled the rules better in the process of getting that result.
  
• The final scene saw the group return to Providence with the massive body of the dire troll being dragged by their mounts. Obviously this scene definitely established Corvin (and the others) as celebrities in the town but also is going to lead to a lot of hysteria given what they brought back with them.

That’s it. The game finished an hour late which was okay but meant that the last couple scenes really got rushed. Ideally, big, climactic scenes should occur a little earlier and not under so much time pressure but oh well. I’m still really digging Burning Wheel but it’s a steep learning curve: The Fight! mechanics are pretty tough to decipher and all the options make it especially difficult to explain to a table full of players. While I could have just used a Bloody Vs. test, that didn’t seem like an appropriate choice for what was supposed to be the first life & death battle the group faced. I definitely need to read through the Fight! rules a few more times and perhaps pare down the options to create a more streamlined system for us to use (perhaps something akin to what Mouse Guard uses). Once the players have a hang on the basic moves, perhaps then I can include some more of the actions. I also am not sure I like how long it takes to fire a bow in the Fight! mechanics. While I completely understand the reasoning behind the rules (i.e., the realism of them), my bow wielding player wants to be a little more like Legolas. Thus I may tweak the rules a bit to shorted the time just a bit.

One other bit I’m still struggling with is the fact the PCs are very niche oriented – Gator is practically helpless in combat (most of his spells are not combat oriented and he has no weapon skills), Conway is largely a “ranger” kind of guy, and Corvin is a monster in combat but lacks many other skills. Thus the characters tend to fall flat if put in to situations that aren’t their forte – I think I’d prefer if they were just a bit more well-rounded which is something the burning process doesn’t really encourage.

Next episode will take place about a month after episode #2 ends and will probably involve the appointment of the constable and some issues around the town but I’m still thinking about scenes for that one.