First session problems and issues with our campaign setup.

(minor Tower of the Stargazer spoilers)

We played our first LotFP session and it din't really go well. 

Note that two players were late and we quickly created their characters without taking the time to discuss well about the setup. This din't help, but I feel that my setup also din't help and is maybe problematic, now I wonder if I should change it.

Some context:
I run a Labyrinth Lord campaign with 3 of the same players and it work really well, we really had a good experience with LL. We use the West Marches model: a base town where there is nearly no roleplay and a uncharted wilderness where everything happen. The characters have no background, they are just adventurers that we rolled up and we discover their personality as we play. The setting and it past is discovered and created by accumulation through a mix or random encounters, prepared dungeons and unique locations that color each zone of exploration. This work very well, it is really fun to explore each zone and to piece together it history, ecology and theme. Characters are interchangeable (and die) and group composition often vary, but the sessions are still very atmospheric and immersive. Roleplaying encounters is very fun.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, our first session:
I choose to use a alternate history version of our world to setup our campaign. I used a real world map of late medieval France and I placed clue about weird location and LotFP modules on it. I wrote a general encounter table for travelling on roads, one for wilderness encounter and one for town rumors. 

I thought that characters were more significant in LotFP (well compared to our West Marches campagin) and I tried to link them more the setting, so I created them a family with a huge debt and given them in heritage the Stargazer Tower (from a long forgotten ancestor... Call of Cthulhu style). I wanted the family to be a common point for the characters, to explain why they are a group (some were family members, some were just family friends or former employee).

Since I like the investment rules, I also wrote some NPC linked to investment opportunity.

Our opening scene was the funerals of the character's mother who had ruined the family, it was the occasion for the character to meet each other and to meet some NPC. But since we din't know those characters, the roleplaying was clumsy and we awkwardly cut the scene. Still the players managed to get some clues about other exploration location by talking with some of the NPC. Now in retrospective I feel that this was not a good first scene since there was too much information dropping.

Anyway we moved on, and the group left for the tower. During the travel we rolled some encounters but din't get any. The group camped near the last town before the hills and then moved toward the tower. Again we rolled for encounters but din't get any. Managing the road travel in civilized land through the hex map was not interesting and maybe we should have skipped it. Travelling through the hills was a little bit more interesting, but not so much. At this point we felt kind of disconnected and it was hard to get any atmosphere or immersion. The feeling of wonder and exploration from Labyrinth Lord was not there.

Once the characters arrived at the Stargazer Tower, the game atmosphere was not really gripping. I tried to describe a ominous tower, but our immersion level was already low and once I had to start transmitting the measurements of the tower for the map it din't help to build the atmosphere.

Anyway, the player started to explore the tower exterior: two of them run to the doors and the specialist choose to check the corpse. And he managed to roll 0o1 on it d%, failed his saving throw and was fried by a lightning bolt. The fighter in chain mail who had kept is distance from the blasting zone run to the specialist body to see if he was still alive to maybe drag him out of the dangerous zone... but incredibly he also manged to roll a 1 and to fail his saving throw and got fried on the spot... We all felt weird because their death had no impact on us, we were just... baffled...

The other two characters at the front doors hesitated between using the metal knockers or the snake handles, the cleric suggested the knockers, but the magic user said that since the tower was their inheritance, it was rightfully their and that they should not have to knock and should just open the doors. So they choose to open the doors together, both using the snake handles. I was thinking ok... TPK... but they both succeeded  their saving throw. They choose to get a quick look inside before heading back toward town to get reinforcement. They explored the two first room then exited the tower and we ended the session there because we where still thinking about how to cope with the two characters dead.

The two players with the dead characters were baffled by their character dead, but took it well, the odd of the situation, both of them rolling 001 and 01, was just too funny.

So at the end of the session we felt confuse because our Labyrinth Lord campaign, with it exploration game play, felt way more gripping, atmospheric and immersive then this first session.

I feel now that using our real world Europe, the family setup and wanting to create "significant" characters tied to the setup instead of interchangeable characters, somehow din't help us. And now I ask myself if I should simply just scrap our historical setup and just use a fictive frontier town like in the West Marches or if we should try to breath more life into our setup and to work with what we have, or I don't know.

Last edited by Gwion (2012-03-02 16:44:34)