School is back in session and so the games club is back and it's bigger than ever. Mike is running warmachine games in the room next to me and I am running an rpg based on the Lord of the Rings.
Originally I was using the d6 (Fantasy) system, but none of us was enjoying it; it seemed clunky, which was strange as I remember playing it years ago and enjoying it.
So, I threw out the d6 system and converted the characters that had been made to a system of my own devising. Is it perfect? Nope, not by a long shot, but it ran smoother and faster and the kids enjoyed it, so I will tweak it and continue to use it. The Lord of the rings game is really just a quick story arc designed to take in 5 or 6 of our Wednesday afternoon sessions, before we move on to other games. It was also designed to attract new players to the club.
The background to the game is that the war of the ring is over and was won when Sauron reclaimed the ring. Since then the world of men has crumbled, the elves are gone and the dwarves are under siege in their fortress halls. The surviving peoples live in small, hidden villages in forests and rugged hill lands to avoid the orcs on the look out to finish them off.
Last week the group heard about an elven boat that was seen going back up the river Anduin in the direction of Lorien and Mirkwood. They followed that clue down to the river, because the elves were all thought to have left for the west. They ambushed some orcs that had destroyed a village the night before and that is where we left off.
Today's game was good. The characters went on with the fight that we were stuck halfway through and finished it quite quickly. They killed the ten or so orcs, with only two injuries in the group and went on to search the orcs and their encampment. What they found confused them. All of the orcs looked as though they had more elf blood in them than orc. They still had orc coloured skin, lank greasy hair and sharp teeth, but apart from that they could have passed for elves.
However, after discovering the elfy orcs, they decided to head further into the hill lands to try and find a hidden village. In typical rpg party style, the idea was put forward by one player and because no one else had a better idea they went with it. Oh well. I will have to find a subtle way to put them back on track.
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2 comments:
In typical rpg party style, the idea was put forward by one player and because no one else had a better idea they went with it.
Yeah, that sounds familiar! What's worse is when the team keeps deferring to that player, even when there's no reason for the characters to do so. I had a group of military characters deferring to my civilian engineer on a military mission in a game once: how crazy does that sound?
Sounds like an interesting game. How many of the kids have seen the movies, and how many have read the books?
http://retroreview.today.com
Only a couple have read the book. All of them have seen the movies of course.
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