Introduction: The Fellowship and the Naming of Names

Apologies if I didn’t quite get all the details (or get them all correctly). There are a few places where I got distracted (or was busy scribbling down details for my character).

Introduce Your Hero!

VIRENS [Bill] – Orc:

Hero - fighting champion of the One Fang clan (the wanderers/nomads), from Tosk. Faramir, but everyone treats him like a shifty Boromir.

Why champion? Was volunteered to take care of this (undefined problems in the hinterlands), because we owe it to our dominions.

  1. Powerful, warlike, but treat subjects well. You can always gain citizenship by fighting for them.
  2. Don’t resolve by conflict – use conflict to clear the air. Violence isn’t the point, just a tool. Fist fights in the legislature.
  3. Dislike and distrusted because of their battle ready nature. Thugs! Barbarians!

CARABAS [Dave] – Halfling:

Tell us about your hero … An adventurer from his people, dedicated to gaining glory, recognition for the weak, for his people, and,course, for himself.

Basically talked his way onto the team. Why is he the champion? Because he convinced the Fellowship he was.

Three facts about the people …

  1. Insular, and quite smugly satisfied as to their superiority about it. Sure, people come to us to trade for pipeweed, but they come to us … and don’t stick around along.
  2. Mischievous and troublemakers. Yes, they can scratch and bite, but are just as likely to be passive-aggressive by putting a dead bird in your beer.
  3. Sleep hard, eat hard, party hard, sleep hard some more.

WYNN [James] – Remnant:

Sword protect of the city of Nelres; when the Overlord rose to power, the city and empire fell and were slaughtered. The Protectors had sworn an oath to their gods, and the admixture with the power of the Overlord condemned them to remain on the Earth.

Champion because they’re the only one who remained in Nelres.

The city was protected by something that helped others ignore / not find them. Which is what the Overlord wanted (and took).

  1. Kind of dicks. Very content with the way things were.
  2. Falling from their oath renders them vulnerable to being a minion of the Overlord (Forsworn)
  3. Bodies are dust, held together by magic. (Elementals?)

ANN [Margie] – Squire:

Not a squire! A wrangler. Horses, people.
Leathery skin – 25? 75?
Cantankerous. “Here is why you’re being an idiot”
From an area on the fringe of the Empire.

ROWAN GREENHAND [Mike] – Harbinger

Council of Wizards. Interested in helping and interfering. Like the Doctor.
You folk drive me crazy, I’m going to hang out with the animals. Less wizard, more druid.
And when he came back, he found a lot of his people were signing up with [the Overlord].

  1. The High Council has become effectively immortal. (via the Overlord, maybe?)
  2. All wizards have different powers/abilities/focii.

The atomic bomb axe!

Agendas and Move and Gear (Oh my)!

VIRENS

4th Agenda: Born Rebel.
Daughters of Chaos
Self-Orctualized
Sweat of Your Brow
Core: Fire … [crafting weapons] Kill Them without an Advantage (break weapon).

Gear: Moonshine, Something You Found Over There, (more) Orcish Moonshine, Riding Warg.
Tough as Nails (expend uses as armor), Scary as Hell (intimidate to Talk Sense), Cunning As Can Be (Look Closely without Rolling)

CARABAS

4th Agenda: Get Some Recognition
Mischievous Tricksters
Core: Little Folk
Core: Sting Like a Bee
Custom: Talk Nonsense
Custom: Courage of Halflings

Gear: Burglar Gear; Riding Dog (and spear); Halfling Pipeweed; Address Book.
Companion: Mastiff Riding Dog (Loyal Friend, Good Nose)

WYNN

4th Agenda: Don’t Forget (dwell on pain of how things used to be)
Curse of Dust: Pain does nothing, and natural armor of 2 uses, prevent harm to others. When Feed on Pain, can recover armor.
Core: Unending Despair (no Hope or Despair)
Core: Feed on Pain (harm → healing)
Core: Lost Ones: lore on curse, ruins, people, my death, where I’ve been before.
Inner Darkness: Can’t die or Taken Out … so lose all agendas and Darkness Reigns (and Overlord influence)
Bogey Man: When out of the light, can keep enemies busy
Unnatural Tenacity: pain needs nothing, so damage stat acts as though Hope.

Gear: Ancient Weapon, 2 armor.
Weakness to Water (no swimming, rain, running water)
Birds

Open Ground fast travel
Mundane weapons and arrows only slow.

WRANGLER ANN:

4TH Agenda: They Need Me.
(Always stick with others, even when impossible)
No limit on number of Bonds.
Fast Friends: Speak Softly or spending time, get a bond. (Not companions)
Please Just Listen: Talk Sense.
Dangerous to Be Alone: watch someone’s back.
Power of Friendship: Bonds have tags of Precious and Useful.
Voice of Reason: I told you so! = Hope.

Gear: Extra Food, A Friend in Need.

ROWAN:

4th Agenda: You’ll Get Through This
Doom stat: Finish using leads to Overlord stuff; 1 bond per person.
Do not trifle with wizards: powerful spells that exhaust.
Tiny spells.
Custom: Wildspeaker: speak the language of beasts and monsters.
Wizardly trinkets
Forestfell Axe (Melee, Dangerous, Area) … collateral damage
Staff of Safe Travel
Strange Beast: Rock Ferret. Loyal Friend, One With The Earth
Ley Lines: 2 uses. Unseal a Location, Seal a Location.

THE OVERLORD:

Ursula Tenebrios, the Great Corruptor.

  • Create Opportunities to Do Good
  • Play to find out what happens
  • Place Wonderful Things on Jeopardy.

Stats:

  • Mythical
  • Hidden Base
  • SkinChanger

Note, Overlord is a “myth” (doesn’t exist, that’s back from the olden days, we have bigger powers, a distant problem that’s not our concern, Fake

Army: The Organization (a corrupted Fellowship of mini-bosses)
Spread corruption and blight.

Weakness: a blessing of some sort. Something common.

Foibles: all of them.
Basic Moves: all of them

Was responsible for the fall of Wynn’s people.
Corrupted the Harbingers.

Player Questions

  1. Hit first and hardest? Wynn’s people (and then Harbingers, the next time out)
  2. Ignored? Tosk and the Empire? No, the Catlings, because she’s not a cat person and they are not useful as yet.
  3. Impossible Thing: her servants are the Old Champions / culture heroes.

Bonds

Bonds with the Overlord

  • Rowan’s people serve me now.
  • Carabas knows the details of my previous defeat.
  • I have cause great harm to Wynn’s people
  • I killed somebody important to Virens.
  • Only Ann knows my Weaknesses: Copper Cages

Next Time …

… pick up next time

  • Rumors
  • Bonds
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First off, thanks so much for getting this down, Dave.

Second, it probably won’t be Blanket of Ash, ultimately. I dunno what, yet, but probably not that. (That’s honestly a really good tag for a game doing Fellowship: Empire, so… some day?)

Glad to assist.

And we can always rename things. :slight_smile:

Hmmmm. Saga about the rise of a terrible force that will eventually become an empire, masterminded by an unseen and unbelieved-in mythical threat that harkens back to ancient and evil times, opposed only by a band of brave heroes who are outclassed and doomed to corruption before they even know it’s coming?

Maybe call it something like “The Phantom Menace”?

If Myths and Legends wasn’t already taken, I would think that would be a good name: our Evil Overlord is considered a Myth and we have the Legends of the past are under her sway.

If we swap the words around and delve into some of Bill’s comments on there being Mists, we could get something like Mistland Legends which is… okay. Legends of the Mistland is also okay.

We could also just go with The Fellowship, which allows for a titling device that I enjoy… Chapter 0: The Fellowship and the Prelude, Chapter X: The Fellowship and the Ruins of Nelres, Chapter Y: The Fellowship and the Caves of Mist, so on and so forth.

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@Dave, an “important” question that I don’t think got asked last night: what breed of mundane cat does Carabas resemble and are there as many different types of catlings as there are breeds of cats?

FANTASTIC QUESTION!

Carabas is a general medium-hair mixed breed, in color a dilute tortie, cream-blue with a few white patches. He has lovely blue eyes.

Catlings come in an array of cat colors and markings, as well as “breeds” that are analogous to human ethnicities and races, or even family lines. In the Shire there’s both a breadth of forms and a cross-breeding smoothing of the differences; smaller and more isolated populations elsewhere would probably be more pointedly homogeneous and distinct.

There is no particular race prejudice between catling breeds (there may be some slight tribalism between geographically different population groups as to who was most clever in their choice of dwellingplace). They tend to save the prejudice toward those unfortunates who aren’t catlings.

Finally got the session 0 recording up. Cleaned out a lot of my rambling and tightened it up by almost an hour. Downside is the image render resolution isn’t very good.

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Awww … the rambling is our favorite part!

(Well, mine … it lets me catch up with my note taking.)

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