Wilderlands: Session 0

 

 

This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar.

This session was run on April 4, 2022. 

This week, the transition of my Monday night game from Tekumel to our new setting was completed with our first session in the Wilderlands. Along with the change of setting comes a change of rule set to Castles & Crusades. I am a long time player and Castle Keeper of Castles & Crusades both in home games and at conventions. I used C&C for one of the groups in my long-running Stonehell campaign, and I ran an in-store C&C campaign set entirely in the City State of the Invincible Overlord (the central city of the Wilderlands).

Based on a survey of what kinds of elements my players wanted to see in our new campaign, I made several additions to both the Wilderlands setting and Castles & Crusades. On the list of games that my players considered for the next campaign, Gamma World, Glorantha, Traveller, and Metamorphosis Alpha all finished well. I decided to add several races from Gamma World, and the Ducks from Glorantha. I'll be sharing those in future posts. 

I also decided to leverage the existing background for the Wilderlands, which involves two space empires clashing over control of the planet Gaia in the distant past. I am going to use this as an opening to bring some Traveller Third Imperium elements in at some point. We will also be flashing to a second group of PCs aboard the Starship Warden from time to time. Unknown to the characters on Gaia, the spies from the space empires, or the characters on the ship, Warden is drawing close to Gaia and its arrival is sure to have consequences for all involved.

Flashing between different groups was a big part of my Tekumel campaign, both because the players had a habit of splitting up the party in ways that meant they would not regroup for months (mostly jumping through strange nexus points) and because I designed the game with the idea that there would be interludes set in different areas of the world. I plan on continuing with the interludes, but hopefully there will be less party splitting. When the Tekumel game ended there were three full groups of PCs, and another group that seemed to be emerging around a PC that was separated from the others due to a long term injury.

The first regular session will start with the characters as prisoners forced to work in a mine by the overseer Custalcon. I asked each player to give me a vague background on how they came to be working in the mine. 

The characters that make up the main group are:

 

 Gwythian: a human fighter (bard half class) who was arrested as a consequence of a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding grew out of a gig he was hired to play that turned out to be an anti-mine protest.

 

Sir Duycken: a duck knight/wizard who rides a giant turkey and has a chicken familiar. He was shanghaied after showing up for a fake tourney.

 

Stranger Come Knocking: a hoop druid (rogue half class) who started a campaign against the mining syndicate and was captured by mercenary enforcers after starting a protest (riot).

 

Uggmar: a half orc monk (rogue half class) who is very unlikable and mean. He made his living stealing things and reselling them until he got caught stealing from the mine.

 

Vargr: a Skandik human cleric/barbarian who came down from the hills and was arrested for trying to convert the followers of Mokmalla amongst the mine workers to the worship of the Norse pantheon.