GMing for Children #1: Abstract Resources & Tangible Objects

The first time I picked up a set of dice and rolled up a character, I was 9 years old. The first time I got a taste of GMing I was 13.

For the last 7 and something years, since the age of 16, I’ve been employed as a professional GM for children and young people at a business that uses roleplaying to teach history, teamwork, problem-solving, and empathy.

Suffice then to say that I have some experience GMing for children.

How to introduce kids to RPGs is a perennial topic in the hobby, but it seems to be one that’s picked up traffic in recent years.

The original generation/s of roleplayers are now of an age to have children, and for those children to be old enough to read, and do addition and subtraction, and hold a conversation, and possess all those basic human skills necessary for roleplaying.

And so, of course, there is now a generation of kids being introduced to roleplaying by their parents.

Children are natural roleplayers already: they take on other roles and characters as easily as they breathe, they have a near limitless capacity for invention, their imaginations are boundless and creative beyond many artists and authors I know.

But while they have a natural inclination towards roleplaying, they are still children.

Certain aspects and demands of roleplaying games are difficult for them; certain skills required of players rely on patience and focus they may not yet have.

In order for kids to have the best possible experience as they’re introduced to roleplaying games, it helps to adjust some techniques and reassess some assumptions. That way the GM knows what to expect, and the players aren’t confronted by demands for which they aren’t yet developmentally prepared.

One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the years is children struggling with the abstractness of RPGs.

There is a lot of resource management in most RPGs, from the near-ubiquitous concept of hit points/health/similar equivalents, to the concept of spell slots or abilities limited per day in D&D (due to its popularity, the most common RPG used to introduce kids to gaming).

And these resources, in the default form of most games, are entirely abstract.

They are written down, tracked only in numbers and in the head of the player, and their proportional relationship – that hit was half of my HP, using a spell is a third of my resources – is intangible.

Children, particularly those between 7 and 10 (the main demographic I GM for) don’t do well with abstractness and intangible numbers.

They happily take hit after hit during fights, but are visibly shocked when eventually they look down and see they’ve only got 5 hit points left. They conserve all their spells slots through the day just in case and never end up spending them, or else blow them all on the first dice-roll of the day despite being warned they won’t get to rest and get them back.

The grasp on these numbers – of hit points, of spell slots, of limited-use abilities – necessary to manage them effectively eludes children, because in a very literal way these numbers aren’t real to them.

They can’t see them, they can’t count them as real things, they can’t touch them or feel them.

And so, I’ve found, the answer is to turn abstract resources into tangible objects.

Give them something that they can touch, and count in a way that’s sensory and meaningful. Give them something that they can visually identify is only half of what they started with, or a third, or a quarter, or only one left. Give them something that lets them understand the gravity of using a limited resource, or lets them feel the impact of losing an amount of hit points.

Give them coloured toothpicks for hit points that they have to snap as they lose them.

Give them spell-tokens, shiny and magical-feeling, that they must expend to use their arcane powers.

Give them cards for limited-use abilities, and better yet put the rules on them in child-friendly form.

You could even go so far as to make specific tokens for each type of thing they can do in a combat (a Movement, an Action, a Reaction) and reissue them at the start of each new round.

(There are already some games for adults that do this transformation of abstract resource into tangible objects brilliantly: filling in the Harm clock in Apocalypse World, turning a dice from side to side to track increasing insanity in Cthulhu Dark, using poker chips to track Trust tokens in the Mountain Witch, everything about the resolution mechanics in Dread and Ten Candles. Look to these games for inspiration.)

Make resources tangible. Make them meaningful.

Make them visceral, if you’d like and you think it will enhance the experience.

(The toothpick idea above is one attempt to do just that.)

Kids are more than capable of giving you some of the greatest RPG experiences of your life, and it’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to watch them create their first characters and let their imaginations flourish and run wild.

All you have to do is rethink some assumptions, give them a hand, and watch them fly.

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Across the Endless Sea: Structure and Game Resolution (#2)

(Across the Endless Sea is a storygame I’m writing, blogging the process here to entertain and hopefully get some advice/feedback. For the introductory post that lays out the design goals of the project, look here).

So, what does Across the Endless Sea look like as an actual game? This is the first and most important question that needs answering.

Every other mechanic and piece of writing must flow from this basic place: What is the structure of the game, and what is the resolution mechanic?

Let’s begin with structure.

Some years ago, I read Avery Alder’s Dream Askew: a GMless hack of Apocalypse World that presumes a slower-motion apocalypse and the formation of alternative and queered societal models to cope with this advancing frontier of weirdness and apocalyptica.

I haven’t yet got a chance to play it, but one thing stuck with me: players with multiple Playbooks to run.

In Dream Askew, every player is running two Playbooks at once: a character (slightly different from the normal AW list, but essentially similar) and a part of the world’s apocalyptic state.

The fictional tapestry controlled by the GM in Apocalypse World is carved up and parceled out among these “GM Playbooks” that give narrative authority over the aspect they describe: the world’s Psychic Maelstrom; a Warlord leading other survivors, violent and opportunistic; Grotesques and their cultists and believers.

Every player controls an aspect of the world and generates antagonism that originates from that thing. Every player controls a character who can confront the aspects of the world’s badness, except for one.

(Sidenote: The idea of making thematic statements by pre-determining these links is an interesting one. Whoever plays the Gunlugger must also play the Maelstrom; guns have no power over the bleeding psychic hole at the heart of the world. Whoever plays the Brainer must also play the Warlord; psychic fuckery cannot stop a soldiers well-led and armed with bullets. But this is a thought for another time…).

So: in Across the Endless Sea each player controls an Aspect of the People whose journey we tell the story of and a Threat of the Endless Sea upon which they travel.

This idea has been part of the game since very early on. One of the earliest things I wrote was:

• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Aspects of the People (that’s what they call themselves). You might be the Heart of the People, the Hands of the People, the Eyes of the People, the Memory of the People, etc.. Your sheet offers choices that define some of the cultural practices and values of the People, and your Moves provide ways to interrogate the fiction regarding things that the Endless Sea presents and ways to overcome them.
• One set of them [Playbooks] represent the Threats of the Endless Sea. You might be the Weather of the Endless Sea, the Tides of the Endless Sea, the Islands of the Endless Sea, the Dwellers in/on the Endless Sea. Your sheet offers choices that define the environmental aesthetic of the game and the world the People move through. Your moves provide ways to flesh out and elaborate the randomly-generated prompts for what the Endless Sea presents, and establish challenges for the People to overcome.

As mentioned in the text above, inherent also in the design of the game has been the idea that the encounter that the People have on the Endless Sea are drawn at random from a deck of prompts.

There is a Twitter account that I dearly love called @str_voyage, a bot that generates an “endless nautical story” using random procedural generation.

The content it produces doesn’t always make sense, but more often than not is evocative and provokes the imagination. If a simple bot can produce coherent consistent story using procedural generation, I’ve always wondered, what could a table of creative and cooperating players do with a similarly-limited set of basic building blocks as their source material.

All that being said, then, here is the basic structure of the game:

1. There are playbooks for the People and for the Endless Sea. Each player runs one of each.
2. The structure of the game involves a series of encounters, prompts for which are drawn from a deck.
3. One player, controlling a suitable Threat, fleshes out the encounter.
4. One player, controlling a suitable Aspect, leads the People in confronting the encounter.

This is basically all there needs to be. 

I have an idea that there’ll be some special mechanics for the end-game, when the People arrive wherever they’ve been going, but the overwhelming majority of the game’s rules and play are going to rest on having these encounters.

What do these encounters look like, mechanics-wise? Here’s the current draft:

1. Time passes, triggering an encounter
2. An encounter card is drawn
3. The group determines which Threat the encounter belongs to
1. The Threat player should get to answer some questions (define some things) and ask some leading questions (force others to define some things)
4. The group determines which Aspect player will meet the encounter
1. The meeting of it should be a group effort; the lead Aspect player directs the confrontation, but choices/moves of the others may be involved
5. Mechanics happen – roll dice? draw runes? look at Blades & Sundered Land for inspiration –that resolve how well/badly things go. 
1. Possibly modified by whether the Aspect was a good choice to meet the Threat in question?
6. Consequences occur as a result of the encounter; something is lost, something is gained, something is learned
1. Are these the choices made by other players? Maybe?

Recently I’ve been watching Adam Koebel play Vincent Baker’s forum game A Sundered Land on his Twitch channel (slightly adapted), and a lot of the way this resolution mechanic is shaping up is inspired by that.

I’m loving the way A Sundered Land uses leading questions as a central mechanic: it’s entirely functional, it emphasizes those old AW ideas of “make the world seem real” and “always say what honesty demands”, and it leads towards fiction that is both compelling and non-generic/unique.

Interestingly, it’s the dice mechanic for combat in A Sundered Land that I find least interesting.

The most evocative confrontations in the several games Adam played were when he and Twitch-chat went slightly off-script and forgot about the combat dice.

So maybe the resolution mechanic for Across the Endless Sea should involve no dice or randomization at all.

Hm. A thought to return to in a future post, I think.

Land of a Thousand Autumns: Introduction (#1)

Nearly a decade ago, as a teenager, I was exposed to two pieces of media that left a real impact on me: Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary Princess Mononoke, and the Tales of the Otori trilogy by Australian author Lian Hearn.

Both presented a mythicized fantastical version of Japan, using the supernatural as a lens to draw out and enhance the cultural distinctiveness of tribes and ethnic groups that had once roamed the islands.

Both were also infused with classic Buddhist themes - impermanence, fleeting beauty, mortality and morality - and the most integral conflict in traditional Japanese fiction: the clash between giri (duty) and ninjo (human feeling).

Years later, around the age of 18, I was exposed to a game that called back to these works: Timothy Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch.

Though I remain unconvinced about certain aspects of that game mechanics, I was compelled by its atmosphere, the story it framed, and the basic premise of a Reservoir-Dogs-style blood opera of betrayal and suspicion. I was also deeply impressed by my favourite mechanic from the game: the giving and spending of Trust, which enables the rōnins’ passage up the mountain (through teamwork) but becomes a knife in their hands when their secrets and destinies turn them in on each other at the end.

The Mountain Witch is a game I’ve been coming back to for almost 5 years now: I’ve run it straight, written alternate mechanics to fit around the Trust system, discussed it and loved it.

Someday, if I’m lucky, I may even get to play it.

***

In 2015, inspired by the existence of a Mountain Witch hack for playing desperate soldiers in an Apocalypse Now-like context, I drew from all the parts of the game I loved to create my second convention game: To Tread the Spiral Path.

“Mythic Ireland. Five outcasts quest for a chance to regain their honour and place in society.

Five warriors, five wanderers, five exiles. Bear, Fox, Hare, Lynx, Wolf. Five lost souls offered a chance to reverse their exile.

These three things stand in their way: the spirits and little gods of the Otherworld; a druid dark and rotten as the corpse of a kinslayer; the weakness and frailty that doomed each to exile and leads them on towards a tragic wyrd.”

It was an excellent con.

I ran the game 9 times, and all but one session embodied the tonal and thematic ideas – uncertainty, betrayal and trust, the bonds of honour versus the bonds of feeling – that I had responded to in The Mountain Witch and set out to explore and evolve.

 And at some point, in that fruitful void between what I remembered and learned from the con and a rewatch of Princess Mononoke a few weeks after, the seed of another game was planted.

***

Land of a Thousand Autumns is that game.

It is a mythic Japanese setting filled with tribal peoples drawn from Japanese history and folklore, strange magics and gods, and dangers that duty demands must be confronted whatever the cost.

It is inspired by the “symbolic neverwhen clash of three proto-Japanese [cultures]” presented in Princess Mononoke and the clear cultural barriers that separate social groups – the nobility, the monks of Maruyama, the pacifistic Hidden, the Tribe – in Tales of the Otori.

It is concerned with that same set of themes: loyalty and trust, uncertainty and betrayal, the ways we make relationships on an individual level and to higher concepts: religion, tribe and village, culture.

It aims to tell stories of tribal champions sent out to deal with the threats that endanger the precarious survival of their people. It aims to tell stories of the heavy burdens these champions carry, the hopes and fate of their people and the chains of duty and obligation. It aims to tell stories about the messy ways that people come to love and connect with each other, and how the heart is just as dangerous as sorcery or the sword.

At heart, Land of a Thousand Autumns is a game about people with strong ties to their village and culture and heavy obligations to them, torn between the demands of those duties and the human feeling they have found in their fellows. 

I ran a conceptual playtest (an alpha test, to borrow Australian convention-writing parlance) back in November to see if the idea was worth running with. I learned (with total consensus from players) that the answer was yes, and learned more besides about the structure and nature of the game.

Currently I've finished a round of updating the basic moves and playbooks, and am starting to look at another playtest once I get the GM stuff for the first session worked out. 

I hope to report back soon!

Across the Endless Sea: Introduction (#1)

When I was around 11, my mother brought me a compiled edition of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.

It was a thing of beauty: tall and hardbound, and very heavy indeed to my child’s hands. The front cover was blazoned with a watercolour map of Narnia, giants marching and Aslan’s great head peering out at me. I must have read it a dozen times cover-to-cover as a child, my insatiable hunger for fantasy latching on to the world presented within.

I loved all of the Narnia books, but my favourite was the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

These days my relationship to Narnia, and Lewis’ work, is more complicated. The sheer transparency with which he parallels Christian motifs and symbols I find jarring; his treatment of Susan (and Lucy) I find uncomfortable. But still, I find a magic in reading about the Dawn Treader’s voyage across the sea into the East: about the islands encountered along the way and the mermaid kingdoms just below the surface of the ocean. 

It’s a magic that’s far from unique to C. S. Lewis, of course.

The closing chapters of A Wizard of Earthsea, as Ged departs to chase his shadow and sails the Archipelago, have the same wonder (as do parts of its sequel The Farthest Shore).

Terry Brooks’ trilogy The Voyage of the Jerle Shannara spends the first and third books telling of an airship voyaging across strange and distant seas, sailing amidst the clouds and stopping at strange and enchanted islands, and captures the same essence.

The ancient Irish folktales of Immrama concerned the same motifs, as do animated films like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Even works like Moby Dick and its many cousins have something of the quality in question about them.

There is a long and proud tradition in storytelling of this motif: the surreal fantastical voyage across uncharted and dream-like seas. Bizarre creatures lurking in the deeps below, savage weather raking the deck, islands and impossible encounters delaying the journey’s progress.

And so, Across the Endless Sea

Across the Endless Sea is a storygame, a collaborative experience for up to five players chronicling the voyage of the People (as they call themselves) through the Endless Sea.

I’m going to be chronicling the design process publically here on this blog, opening the refinement of this inchoate game up to outside scrutiny and hopefully starting a dialogue of commentary and feedback that will allow me to make this game better, stronger, and stranger than I could have on my own.

Mechanics-wise, I’m going to be borrowing from the Playbook/Move structure of Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, and the innovation of having each player take on both a protagonist and an aspect of the story’s antagonism from Avery Alder’s Dream Askew.

My goal is to create a game that captures that feeling of wonder and dream-like reverie that I loved in Voyage of the Dawn Treader as a child.

• I want it to be GMless, not least so that I actually get a chance to play it (unlike anything else I write).
• I want it to be inspiring, the text capturing a mood to put the players in the game’s tone and mood.
• I want it to be invisible, a framework that helps create great stories and guides creativity in organic and unobtrusive ways.
• I want it to play with ideas of collaboration and opposition in RPGs/storygames, allowing fluid movement between the roles of environment and explorers.
• I want it to leave a space open for groups to shape their emotional landscape: longing, or bittersweet, or joyous, or desperate, as the group deems appropriate.
• I want to be able to release it for first-stage playtesting on my Patreon by the end of April.

A Fresh Start

I’ve been away for a while (what’s it been, like 5 months?), but gamesfromthewildwood is now officially back online.

Now that I’ve completed my Anthropology degree I’ve got a lot more time free than I did last year, so I’m going to spend 2017 making up for all the RPG goodness (both playing and GMing) I had to miss out on while writing my thesis.

I’m moving away from the previous style of this blog (mostly play reports from games I GM) as something that takes time away from the actual playing and running of games, and more towards new kinds of material.

So: new year, new content, new blog. What can you actually look forward to on here from now on?

• Snapshots of my game design process for whichever storygame or microgame I’m currently working on. The project first up is a collaborative storytelling game about surreal fantastical sea journeys called Across the Endless Sea.
• Homebrew content for a variety of published games, including 5^th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and Avery Alder’s brilliant Monsterhearts.
• Thoughts on the art of GMing and the broad mechanics and themes of roleplaying games, some of it advice/tips/tricks and some more abstract theory.
• Behind-the-scenes material for All Things Under Heaven, my upcoming online campaign that will be streaming on my Twitch channel. This includes the various systems and house rules for the game, dungeons that have been resolved, original mechanics and races, and setting posts.
• Reflections on GMing for children and young people from my decade-long employment doing just that. This will include techniques and principles that I hope folks may find useful for introducing their offspring (or other youngsters) to the hobby.
• Mechanizing (or making gameable) concepts from anthropology and history that speak to me or I feel are well-suited to find a place in people’s campaigns and one-shots.
• Updates on Land of a Thousand Autumns, my mythic-Japanese PbtA game of clan obligation and personal feeling, and reflections on playtests and the overall design process.
• Other assorted snippets, including: microsettings or game ideas, half-abandoned design thoughts, updates on the progress of my game for this year’s Phenomenon (an excellent Australian roleplaying convention), and thoughts on and personal experiences with the Australian roleplaying scene.

I’m looking at a twice-weekly schedule, probably publishing one post mid-week and another during the weekend.

During weeks and months when I’m particularly productive or I have a lot to report I may post more often, but my hope is to stick with two posts every week unless work commitments make that impossible in a given period (the intensity of my workload is variable).

I'm looking forward to talking shop with y’all, and hope you stick around!

All Things Under Heaven, Session #7

Our Setting: Iron Springs is a moderately-sized town at the north-western frontier of civilized Tianxia, looking out over a region that many call only The Wastes. The town is built on the broad banks of the Lièkǒu River, the only lifeline that it has back to the Imperial world of bureaucracy and well-tended order, and is supported by terrace-farms cut into the surrounding hill country. It is home to around a thousand souls, making it the largest inhabited center in the surrounding lands.

From Iron Springs a rich tapestry of terrain stretches out towards the sunset: vast and trackless forests, stinking marshes, windswept plains, rugged hills and towering mountains where the workshops of the old Zhang witch-alchemists may still stand. These Wastes are wild, untamed, dangerous, and haunted by beasts and spirits and yet stranger things.

Iron Springs’ extreme remoteness and the wild and untamed nature of The Wastes have contributed to its reputation as a place of last resort, somewhere that only the greedy, the foolish, or the desperate would try and make a life. Those who chafe at the yoke of Imperial authority find the distance from any real governance appealing, while scholars and seekers after the weird and macabre find it a valuable source of information and research subjects.

The Wastes beyond Iron Springs are the stuff of many a legend, promising all those things that are best in life: wealth beyond measure, endless opportunity, danger to be faced, glory to be won, secrets and wonders to behold and uncover, and a means to transform your life. Tame the Wastes, the buzz in the teahouse goes, and the Emperor has promised that a noble title will be yours along with deeds to whatever you manage to wrest from the trackless wilderness.

Our Cast:

• Mei-Xiu, a human Monk (Way of the Tiger's Soul). Given away as a child to a warlord, one of the Rén catfolk. She was raised as an assassin, and now wanders the Wastes to challenge the strong. 
• Major Quest: Find someone with knowledge of how to revive her fallen master.
• Ling, a Paladin. One of the Bie turtlefolk, from the Tribe of the Tortoise. She fought against and alongside Mei-Xiu and Shi on distant battlefields, and now wanders the Wastes to increase her wealth.
• Ming-Hua, a Wizard (School of Evocation). One of the Guàn birdfolk, from the Tribe of the Ibis. She tired of reading about the arcane in dusty libraries, and now wanders the Wastes to study the weird. 
• Major Quest: Become a student of the immortal alchemist Xianbal. 
• Shi, a Fighter (Champion). One of the Rén catfolk from the Tribe of the Leopard. He was a criminal back in the civilised world, and now wanders the Wastes to encounter the strange. 
• Sun Thuy, a Rogue (Swashbuckler). One of the Rén catfolk from the Tribe of the Fox. She was heir to a noble family back in her homeland, and now wanders the Wastes to protect the weak. 
• Xiang Wang, a Druid (Circle of the Five Elements). One of the Guàn birdfolk, from the Tribe of the Heron. They were a roamer and a vagabond already, and now wander the Wastes to seek the path. 
• Major Quest: Find the surviving lizardfolk and deliver their master's message to their leader.

The Session

Day Five (cont.): Mei-Xiu charges over to defend Ming-Hua as the group set Death in their sights and focus their attacks on the shrouded creature. The shroud tears and people begin to see what lies beneath - for Mei-Xiu, the bloody shrunken face of the Warlord Zang; for Sun, the severed head of a lower-class friend executed for rebellion against her parents; for Ming-Hua, the broken corpse of her dead child - and Ming-Hua flees the emotional trauma into unconsciousness. 

Death's touch overcomes Mei-Xiu, causing her to pass out beneath Xiang's sphere of flame and perish from its deadly heat. Death moves on to Shi, grasping his face and trapping him in an illusion of being conscious of his own dead body's decay. 

Xiang wakes Ming-Hua from her stupor, and in a frenzy of rage and sorrow over the reminder of her dead child and the fall of Mei-Xiu the wizard sends a raging torrent of flames to incinerate the shrouded figure of Death and the skeletons around it. 

With its shroud gone, Death's bones collapse into a heap on the floor and then into dust along with the skeletons. For a moment the group simply stand, shell-shocked and speechless, and then Xiang reaches out with their magic and tears the mural on the wall into ruined shards with a scream of rage. The destruction reveals a dark recess in the wall with a scroll inside, written in an unknown language.

The group take the scroll, along with the bronze gong and stone flask they noticed before, and build a stretcher to bear Mei-Xiu out of the Tomb of the Nameless Hero. They set up camp in the lee of the Tomb's tunnel entrance as they did on their first visit and settle, exhausted and weary with grief, into sleep.

Day Six: As the sun rises the group spot a figure on the horizon, approaching across the plains. She turns out to be a Bie named Ling, an old rival of Mei-Xiu's come to stop her from wasting her life trying to revive her master. The news of Mei-Xiu's death is broken to Ling and she decides to join the group on their journey back to help bear the body home for burial. 

The group press themselves hard through the day, setting a punishing pace as they move through the lush rolling wetlands before settling in for the night in a spot cradled and concealed by gentle hills. They set a watch, and Ling raises the alarm during the night as a group of five rat-demons launch an attack from the hilltops above.

The fight is short and brutal, Ling proving her worth by holding off a pair of the creatures as Sun picks them off from behind and Ming-Hua blasts away with sheets of flame. Xiang and Shi provide support from a distance and the group swiftly wipe out the creatures, cleansing the Aoxian Plains of the rat-demon menace for good.

Day Seven: The group continue to run themselves ragged with a punishing pace, passing from the lush wetlands into the flatter land of wispier grass beyond. By the time they stop, the hills around Iron Springs are in sight and the group decide to settle down for the night, passing a quiet evening. 

Day Eight: Still the group press onwards, arriving at the Shetou River around midday. Shi, Sun, and Xiang cross easily, while Ming-Hua is slowed by the need to protect her various valuable scrolls and Ling is weighed down by Mei-Xiu's body. Halfway through the crossing Xiang notices floodwaters upstream, a wave bearing down on the group with jagged rocks riding the swell and the whole picture resembling the maw of some great serpent. 

The rest of the group race for shore but Xiang freezes, stuck in their tracks as they recognise the smell of draconic chi coming from the incoming water and connect it with their old master. The rest of the group throw them a rope and pull them onto dry land just before the wave crashes down and quickly subsides. 

After recovering their breath, the group resume their journey and come into Iron Springs just as darkness slowly falls and the town's lights are kindled.

In Town: The group immediately seek out the temple, and with the help of Priest Yan (an elderly Bie) say their farewells to Mei-Xiu. Her body is laid out before the temple's statue to Kwan-Yin and prayers and chants sung over it before it is bodily consigned to the Celestial River, dissolving into pure white light as incense rises up to Heaven. 

Returning to Broken Spear's teahouse, the group retire for the night and mourn in private for Mei-Xiu before falling into heavy and cathartic sleep. 

The following morning they visit the broker and receive some extra gold from their vases' sale in the Capital and sell the antique bronze gong. They also visit the apothecary and have the contents of the stone flask identified: a powerful sleeping draught. The group also invest in the town, providing money for the improvement of the temple and the expansion of its library and purchasing a small house for their own use. 

Ling speaks with the town guard, repairing the damage done by Xiang and Mei-Xiu and hearing rumours of a wolf-headed Celestial with power over the storm out on the Aoxian Plains. Sun and Ming-Hua busy themselves in the library, but find its current paucity inadequate to their needs, while Shi attempts to follow up on rumours about god-boars on the border of the Niron Fens and Gulao Forest but fails.  Xiang investigates the local rumour mill, discovering a number of locations where the native lizardfolk of Tianxia may still endure. 

Nights draws in and the group return to their new home. They drink a last toast to Mei-Xiu as the town goes dark and drifts into slumber, until the only light is the candles in the temple that illuminate a plume of incense still rising up to the heavens for Mei-Xiu. 

END OF SEASON 1.

All Things Under Heaven, Session #6

Our Setting: Iron Springs is a moderately-sized town at the north-western frontier of civilized Tianxia, looking out over a region that many call only The Wastes. The town is built on the broad banks of the Lièkǒu River, the only lifeline that it has back to the Imperial world of bureaucracy and well-tended order, and is supported by terrace-farms cut into the surrounding hill country. It is home to around a thousand souls, making it the largest inhabited center in the surrounding lands.

From Iron Springs a rich tapestry of terrain stretches out towards the sunset: vast and trackless forests, stinking marshes, windswept plains, rugged hills and towering mountains where the workshops of the old Zhang witch-alchemists may still stand. These Wastes are wild, untamed, dangerous, and haunted by beasts and spirits and yet stranger things.

Iron Springs’ extreme remoteness and the wild and untamed nature of The Wastes have contributed to its reputation as a place of last resort, somewhere that only the greedy, the foolish, or the desperate would try and make a life. Those who chafe at the yoke of Imperial authority find the distance from any real governance appealing, while scholars and seekers after the weird and macabre find it a valuable source of information and research subjects.

The Wastes beyond Iron Springs are the stuff of many a legend, promising all those things that are best in life: wealth beyond measure, endless opportunity, danger to be faced, glory to be won, secrets and wonders to behold and uncover, and a means to transform your life. Tame the Wastes, the buzz in the teahouse goes, and the Emperor has promised that a noble title will be yours along with deeds to whatever you manage to wrest from the trackless wilderness.

Our Cast:

• Mei-Xiu, a human Monk (Way of the Tiger's Soul). Given away as a child to a warlord, one of the Rén catfolk. She was raised as an assassin, and now wanders the Wastes to challenge the strong. 
• Major Quest: Find someone with knowledge of how to revive her fallen master.
• Ming-Hua, a Wizard (School of Evocation). One of the Guàn birdfolk, from the Tribe of the Ibis. She tired of reading about the arcane in dusty libraries, and now wanders the Wastes to study the weird. 
• Major Quest: Become a student of the immortal alchemist Xianbal. 
• Shi, a Fighter (Champion). One of the Rén catfolk from the Tribe of the Leopard. He was a criminal back in the civilised world, and now wanders the Wastes to encounter the strange. 
• Sun Thuy, a Rogue (Swashbuckler). One of the Rén catfolk from the Tribe of the Fox. She was heir to a noble family back in her homeland, and now wanders the Wastes to protect the weak. 
• Xiang Wang, a Druid (Circle of the Five Elements). One of the Guàn birdfolk, from the Tribe of the Heron. They were a roamer and a vagabond already, and now wander the Wastes to seek the path. 

The Session

In Town: The group head out from Auntie Ma's into Iron Springs, selling the pair of gems retrieved from the rat-demons' lair for a good sum, though slightly under their value. Sun hangs around the teahouses and hears rumours of a dry lakebed out in the Huangdi Fells caked with valuable alchemical reagents, while Ming-Hua investigates further information on Xianbal, the alchemist who lives in the mountains beyond the Niron Fens.

She finds mention of him in historical records going back to the last days of the Nine Kingdoms period, suggesting that he has attained that greatest of alchemical goals: immortality. She also uncovers writings that attribute the discovery of tulpa - solidified thought-constructs capable of physical action and even violence - to him and identify him as the greatest outwardly-focused internal alchemist still living. 

Each new discovery about the alchemist further inspires and fascinates Ming-Hua, who sets her heart on becoming his student. She asks the group for assistance, but Shi wants to pursue rumours of god-boars dwelling on the border of Gulao Forest and the Niron Fens and Mei-Xiu wishes to return to the Tomb of the Nameless Hero. Sun sides with Mei-Xiu and is insistent that first the group must return to the tomb before it stays unsealed too long, and the group are won over by this argument. 

They restock on supplies and visit the town fortuneteller, preparing themselves to return to the demon-haunted Aoxian Plains.

Day One: The group depart from Iron Springs, sticking to the valleys of the hill-country around the town and trying to keep a low profile. A few hours out, however, they encounter a small herd of rhinoceroses and their calves and are forced up onto the hilltops to avoid them. Returning to the valley, they travel on and cross the river that runs between the hills and the Aoxian Plains in late afternoon.

An hour into setting up camp they spot a group on the horizon: travelling hunters and poachers carrying rolled-up pelts and cured haunches of meat who Shi identifies as coming from the western shantytown of Mowangzhi. The travelers are invited to share the camp for the night and trade for a pangolin scale (which the hunters' shaman claims has magical powers) and a number of warm pelts. The two groups set up a shared watch, and the night passes safely.

Day Two: The group farewell the travelling hunters and strike off again north-west, travelling without incident until they spot a group of strangers attempting to sneak through the tall grass of the plains around midday. Emerging from concealment (but leaving Shi hidden at a distance just in case), the group attempt to make peaceful contact.

The strangers turn out to be intensely paranoid and xenophobic, mistaking the beast-folk for demons and Mei-Xiu (the sole human) as a sorcerer and rejecting overtures of diplomacy. The situation threatens to escalate to violence until Sun, backed up with displays of supernatural prowess from Mei-Xiu and Ming-Hua, plays into their misconception and threatens them with demonic wrath unless they flee.

The strangers flee in a panicked hurry as the group press on, making good distance before settling in for a quiet night.

Day Three: The group travel onward, the landscape changing around them from flat plains covered with long wispy grasses to gentler rolling country with lusher reeds and grasses. Coming up on a hill in the early afternoon, they surprise a grazing rhinoceros and are aggressively charged. They strike even as they dart out of the way, weakening the great beast without it harming anyone until Ming-Hua is able to burn through its chest with a blast of flame.

Settling into a safe camp, they pass the night in peace.

Day Four: The group travel stealthily onward, coming into territory they recognise from their previous journey and starting to get their bearings toward the Tomb of the Nameless Hero. The day is quiet and without danger, and the night the same. 

Day Five: Around sundown the group come into sight of their destination, and Xiang and Ming-Hua repeat their respective divinatory rituals to learn that demonic chi from the nadir to the south is being drawn into the Tomb of the Nameless Hero now that the seal has been broken. The group hurry on inside, concerned about what awaits them but unwilling to wait. 

Passing through the empty chambers of Failure and Suffering as Xiang summons a crab-spirit to strengthen their numbers, they find themselves once more lurking in the doorway to the chamber of Death. The group press on inside, finding a room empty save for a tarnished bronze gong in one corner and a stone flask on the floor in another. 

The silence in the room has an almost palpable weight and dust lies inches thick upon the floor, and the mural that hangs upon the wall is a shadowed featureless black. Mei-Xiu approaches the mural with torch in hand, illuminating a buried human figure draped with a brilliantly-white funeral shroud. The figure stirs with a rattling deathly groan that creates a sympathetic vibration in the gong, setting the dust on the floor to trembling and reforming into a quartet of skeletal warriors. 

Mei-Xiu leaps into action against Death, her blows proving ineffective but drawing the creature's retaliation away from the rest of the group. Ming-Hua provides magical support, while Xiang, Shi, Sun, and the crab engage the skeletons, more of which are forming from the dust with each passing moment. 

Sun cuts down a number of the skeletons on one side of the chamber while a pair of them on the other side tear the crab-spirit apart, flesh and spirit alike. Xiang conjures a sphere of flames that rolls into death and sets its grave-shroud to smoldering and scorches a number of the skeletons. 

Death finally lands a blow on the elusive Mei-Xiu, the touch causing her awareness of her body to dull and become distant, before the creature moves over to where Ming-Hua is surrounded by skeletons and comes very close to seizing her throat in its bony hand. At the same moment, indistinct skeletal figures slowly emerge from the painted recesses of the shadowed mural and begin to stumble towards the lighted room...