Olives and Salt: Test Game 1

[Jubal]

Five new players, five hours of TTRPG play, and I ran a new one-shot, entitled Olives and Salt. This is one of three stories/scenarios that will ultimately, I hope, be in the Heart of the World Kavis book, set in the southeastern Heirophancy.

The characters included a gem merchant, a former Heirophant fleeing from her old life, an assassin on the run, a wizard with a deeply personal interest in the fey, and a dung-flinging goblin (literally had Trademark Weapon: Bag of Manure).

Path taken:

• Manor (Heirophant)
• Manor (Prison) - sensibly talked to the kids
• Mill - the gem merchant was in the table society of the miller, he gave them other NPCs to go for (shrine keeper, priests, nursemaid)
• Village - Quizzed shrine keeper, got general info about people interacting with fey
• Temple - Found secret door, boot prints of bandits, made a poor impression
• Night - Goblin got fatigued but saw bandits visiting the temple
• River docks - mention of danger in water, got a boat via persuasion
• Gharial - no way for them to easily injure it, escaped via Entangle
• Nurse - discussion of fey and songs
• Olive groves - talked to the Tessacare, talked to Rostom the boy, got the Nurse to take his place
• Final fight - with the priest and bandits

Notes:

• Forgot some key NPCs. Having a guard available and named in advance was sensible and I might characterise two senior guards. Also needed to introduce a second character who might have been an obvious "swap" at the end (the party found one but I didn't have a great backup).
• I made the Gharial far too powerful for a newbie party: I should either have made it a young one and weakened it, or given the players (none of whom had boating) a boating NPC to make skill challenges etc and fend off the Gharial's attacks.
• I don't know how best to add interest to low level fights without adding tons more rules weight: I'd like to make the surroundings more interactable maybe? A lot of my combats feel like they're happening in a void and I'm not sure how to avoid that.
• The players approached things more or less as I'd expected. I wonder if for more advanced parties or people playing with more time, some additional complexity or complication needs adding.
• Working out how to condense things for a one-shot is really tricky! I think six hours wasn't bad given that probably 90 mins was spent. I could have sped things up a bit with better setup and a shorter starting fight, but probably that's not more than 40 mins of cuts.