Sunday Holmes, Sessions 1 and 2
Prep
None whatsoever. A few slapdash rumors, but the players ignored those. I scheduled the game on Thursday and picked a system on Saturday. I went with Holmes Basic, despite having never read or played it. I planned to use Zenopus Archives as a crutch during play. This did not work out the way I intended, but luckily the game's flow wasn't impacted.
Session 1
In which everyone (besides Kargay) gets a canoe
We started with character generation. I expected it to take 15 minutes; due to my lack of experience with Holmes it ended up being closer to 45. Under the (mistaken) impression that Holmes did not have race-as-class, I let people be whatever they wanted on the promise that I'd come up with some cursory mechanics later. This led to a fairly diverse cast of characters:
Dan III, Human Magic-User
Pusfegendos "Pusfeg" the Creepy Watcher, Goblin Cleric
Kargay, Elf Thief
Spoonbreaker the Discerning, Dragonkin Thief
"Beetrice", Apiary Golem1 Fighting-(Wo)man
Dan and Pusfegendos were named by a Holmesian Name Generator I'd found through Zenopus Archives. Beetrice was nicknamed by the party. Everyone else made their names up on the spot.
I had people generate equipment using necropraxis's Equipment by Hit Die. This led to the funny coincidence of everyone besides Kargay starting with a canoe. It also took for-fucking-ever. Next time I'm using equipment packages instead.
Since almost everyone had a canoe, I decided the setting was riverine, and that most travel was done by in boats. Dan's player also rolled up a horse as equipment. The horse and canoe combined to become what was dubbed a "canorse". We collectively decided that the closest thing to a canorse was a moose. The moose was then named Anick the Exotic by the same generator that named Dan and Pusfeg.
With characters generated, play finally began. Dan, Pusfeg, Kargay, and Spoonbreaker were traveling through the village of Barncoma. They'd heard some rumours about adventurous things happening in the area. They'd also noticed an unusual amount of large bees around. Dan and Spoonbreaker went to investigate the bees, discovering Beetrice lying dormant behind the blacksmith's shop. Meanwhile, Pusfeg decided to rappel down the town well on a rope held by Kargay, having heard rumours of an ancient crypt.
Beetrice woke up and Spoonbreaker fled from the horrific 9' tall medieval beekeeper. Dan, rooted to the spot, croaked, "..hi?" Meanwhile, Kargay tied the rope that Pusfeg was on to a post and went to piss in the bushes2. Spoonbreaker rushed into the square just as Pusfeg rappelled into a tunnel and shouted (so loudly it was audible aboveground), "fight me!" to whatever sinister forces might lay in the dark.
Beetrice, followed by her new best friend Dan, lumbered into the square. She joined Spoonbreaker in hauling Pusfeg out of the well. Then everyone headed to the docks and left Barncoma for good.
Session 2
In which a secret is found beneath a Saint
After a week of travel, the party was broke and hungry. They decided to stop at an inviting riverside town. After docking their canoes (and stabling Anick) the crew debated how to make some money. Beetrice set up a stall and Dan hawked some of the honey she'd produced, while Pusfeg, Spoonbreaker, and Kargay asked at the local pub for work.
They learned that there was a reward out for the return of Old Joanne's granddaughter, who had disappeared out in the forest. The barman said a troll had done it, and was lairing in the grotto shrine of St. Spogden, a local martyr known for healing lepers by placing a finger on their foreheads, even after his arm was severed.
The party made their way to the shrine, stopping to kill and skin a jackalope on the way. The forest was dark and, as they pushed deeper, echoed with children's laughter. Huddling closer, the group made it to the shrine. The cave mouth was surrounded by a semicircle of stone cairns. Pusfeg added three stones to the top of each using alternating arms (Left, Right, Left), then removed the additions with their left arm.
Following that, the PCs entered the cave. They found a wooden statue of St. Spogden holding his severed right arm in his left hand. Noticing scuff marks on the floor, the group shoved the statue aside to reveal a trapdoor and a narrow spiral stair with an open center beneath. Descending carefully, Spoonbreaker spotted a step with a pressure-sensitive top, connected to a blade trap. Beetrice ripped the razor-sharp blade out of the wall, slinging it over her shoulder like a greatsword.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, the party found a pool of dark liquid in the center well of the staircase. Pusfeg licked and then dived into the liquid; it took the rest of the party combined to pull them out. They swallowed a bit of the goop, which wriggled as it went down.
Just as Pusfeg was freed from the pool, a cherubic toddler waddled into the party's circle of torchlight. Well, cherubic in exclusion of the crayfish head it sported instead of a Gerber Baby face. It held a stiletto dagger in its chubby hand, but seemed more interested in playing with the party than knifing them. After a few rounds of catch, Spoonbreaker tossed it a scrap of bread. The toddler's crayfish head split into four quarters and a whiplike tongue snatched the crumb from the air.
After that the party decided playtime was over. They crept down the hall the baby had come from and found themselves in a large square room. The ceiling was high, domed, and frescoed, and a walkway sat halfway up the wall. In the center of the room rested a bloated baby, 20' tall, with a crab head and a hive of holes all over its stomach. The PCs watched, disgusted, as a slime-coated toddler with a translucent crayfish head squirmed its way out of one of these holes and slid down to the floor with a squelch.
The rest of the room was filled with the crayfish toddlers: carrying things, resting, and flying about with improbably small dove's wings. They clustered around Beetrice, looking hungrily at the jackalope carcass she carried. Disturbed, the group moved through the crowd and out, finding themselves at a crossroads. One path sloped down to the right and the other went 45 degrees to the left. The toddlers were mostly going down the left hand path.
Faced with a decision to make, the players debated as I closed out the session.
Reflection
Session 1 was chaotic. Part of that was my lack of understanding of the rules, which slowed character creation to a crawl. Part of it was a lack of group cohesion and any central purpose to drive the party. Not having a goal to start with gave my players decision paralysis, which was exacerbated by the fact that I didn't have any setting conceits prepped to guide decision-making. Most of the session ended up being spent on introducing Beetrice to the rest of the party, since her player had a very specific character idea and story in mind.
The group abandoning Barncoma was fine. It was a randomly generated town name with a handful of bare-minimum hooks I'd thought of the night before. Nothing of value was lost.
Session 2 went well! I improvised everything, crayfish babies included. This session was, if not less chaotic, more focused in how that chaos was employed. Session 1 was all over the place in terms of tone and action, but Session 2 was more constrained. Sure, people killed a jackalope and licked some goo, but that's fairly expected.
I'm working on adjusting my running style to the group's playstyle. The different players pull in separate directions, but I'm finding there's a solid core in Dan, Pusfeg, and Spoonbreaker's players. They work well as a team and have a tendency to bring everyone back together when party cohesion starts to fray.
I have a few ideas of where the game might go next, but nothing concrete. I'll probably force the group into some tense situation and see where they go from there.