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C2 Ep.1 Session Zero!
605 Plays5 years ago
The crew sits down to preview the new campaign!
This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of our amazing Show Sponsors: Laura Pickrahn, Darrin Katzska, Irene Viorritto, Ryan Royce, Darrell DeLaney, Jessica Smith, Charles Compton, Richard Cree, Nastasia Raulerson, The Kamm Family, David Scrams, Elizabeth Clark, Rebekah Miller, deviouspoptart, Eðvarð Arnór Sigurðsson, Michael Clark, and Dustin Troupe.
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:27
Speaker
The following episode is brought to you by the generous donations of...
00:00:38
Speaker
D20 radio, your game is rolling.
Meet the Hosts and Campaign Introduction
00:01:15
Speaker
I'm your game master, Eric. I'm Philip. I'm Trevor. I'm Randy. I'm Jeff. And welcome to session zero, aka Eberron Previewed for campaign number two. This is exciting. Certainly not the way we would have wanted to do this, but we are here and the time has come to kick off campaign number two.
00:01:42
Speaker
Um, so we just wanted to do an episode for you all to kind of preview what to expect with the next campaign, introduce you to the player characters and the section of Sharn that they're going to be existing in, at least for the early parts of the campaign, primarily.
00:02:00
Speaker
and give you all a little preview of what to expect.
Preview of the Eberron Campaign
00:02:04
Speaker
So yeah, let's just go ahead and kick off with, okay, so before we get into character introductions or anything like that, I just wanted to give you all as the Game Master kind of a high level overview of the general tone and what to expect going into this new campaign. And what that basically means is
00:02:27
Speaker
Last campaign was a very high fantasy. If our heroes fail, the world shall end and all shall be brought asunder and yada, yada, yada. That's not the kind of story that we're setting out to tell this time around. The campaign is going to start and exist in Sharn, the city of towers. And our heroes are going to be based out of the lower part of the city.
00:02:57
Speaker
the Lower Memphis Plateau.
Adopting the Genesis System
00:03:01
Speaker
And the problems that they are going to deal with and interact with are largely going to be city-based. They're going to be urban issues. And the reason for
00:03:14
Speaker
that is kind of a symbiotic relationship of we knew we wanted to do something outside of D&D. We had had conversations surrounding that. And I wanted to tell a different kind of story with the next campaign.
00:03:29
Speaker
And D&D doesn't do well with smaller intimate stories once you get past level eight. So that kind of facilitated a change in system. And Genesis is a great system, but a lot of times it doesn't do the super epic high fantasy as well as D&D does. So it's very much a symbiotic relationship of the type of story we're telling and the system that we're using to tell it.
00:03:58
Speaker
um he's just there ended a bunch of genesis fans i know a bunch of dnd fans yes i i offended everybody so um yes say something about savage world eric i played it once it was okay mom eric um
Setting and Character Development
00:04:15
Speaker
So, yeah, the campaign is going to be very grounded, set in an urban environment in the lower parts of Sharn. And our heroes are going to be much more, I don't want to say grounded individuals, but the power growth that they're going to undergo is far less drastic than what we saw with
00:04:40
Speaker
Um, Dex, Barrick, Theradac, Draconos, Booyah, and all the rest. Um, so yeah, uh, one house rule, there, there's a lot of house rules going into this in the form of, uh, created content. Um, I did want to give a quick, uh, shout out, um, specifically, uh, to Scott Zumwalt for his something strange supplement, uh, on the Genesis foundry at drive through RPG.
00:05:09
Speaker
Joshua Taylor for Critical Elements. Those two supplements, oh, and Keith Kappel for Ready Fight. Those three supplements provided a good deal of the talents that were stolen to further flesh out an Eberron Genesis conversion, in addition to a lot of homebrewed
Influences from Star Wars RPG
00:05:30
Speaker
stuff. But one thing we're going to be discussing when we introduce our characters is the concept of obligation.
00:05:35
Speaker
Fans of the Star Wars role-playing game that is the predecessor to Genesis may remember this from the edge of the empire where our characters have certain things that they are obligated to deal with from time to time.
00:05:52
Speaker
And so each of the players has selected an obligation for their character and we're going to be doing the obligation mechanic where we will roll rather than at the beginning of a session like the rules state we're going to do it at the end of the session.
00:06:07
Speaker
to see if anybody's obligation is going to play a sizable role in the coming adventure. But a fun thing that we're going to incorporate is we're going to do that role on the air so you all will get to hear and potentially speculate as to how their obligation will manifest itself in the coming arc.
00:06:29
Speaker
So yeah, I feel like you all have heard plenty from me for the time being.
Character Introduction: Milo Kegbottom
00:06:34
Speaker
And so I'm going to cede the floor to the wonderful players that are going to be participating in this campaign to introduce you to our primary cast of characters and how they know each other and what their relationships are. So let's go ahead and just for
00:06:54
Speaker
just to make it flow smoothly. Randy, how about you go first and introduce us to Milo Kegbottom. Okay, Milo is halfling, a little younger than middle-aged, I believe, and he used to own a small bar that
00:07:16
Speaker
in his mind anyway, he believes was intentionally burned down. It killed his wife and he escaped with a nasty wound thanks to a friend that you'll meet in a minute. He's a mage that has just acquired his powers. Milo is obsessed with
00:07:45
Speaker
finding out who their perpetrators are. And there may or may not be any, but in his mind, he believes there are, and he is obsessed with finding those people. And I think that's about all for him right now. Milo, now that he has the magic, he is essentially a shadow sorcerer.
00:08:14
Speaker
So we'll see how that plays out. Very cool. Cool. Jeff, do you want to introduce us to
Character Introduction: Hob
00:08:22
Speaker
Hob? Sure. Um, character's name's Hob. He big. He strong. He protect. Um, he is, uh, he's, he's, he's a, he's a Goliath. So he's a big boy. Um, he,
00:08:41
Speaker
was honestly, in a way that I've not decided yet, left his Goliath clan, took up with the blood of Vol, practiced their ways,
00:08:55
Speaker
one might equate it to a monk from D&D because that's what we did. And some things about Hob. Hob is a nickname given to him by the Boromars themselves. When he began to work for them and didn't really have his own surname, they thought it was funny to give him a halfling name since he's seven feet tall.
00:09:17
Speaker
So he goes by Hobb. He's fiercely loyal to wherever he's at who has ever taken him in. He really thrives on a sense of belonging. So he is fiercely loyal to our gang in particular and the Boromar crime family syndicate writ large, which sometimes leads to recklessness, which is a problem.
00:09:45
Speaker
He came upon Milo's bar while it was burning. It was on his protection racket. He was collecting, checking up around everybody, making sure everything was okay. That's true. I forgot to say that he was running numbers and now he's a low level accountant. Sorry, go ahead, Hob. Sure thing. Um, but so he's always, or since that point he has
00:10:11
Speaker
he feels that he failed protecting Hobb, protecting Hobb's business, or Hobb, pardon me, protecting Milo, protecting Milo's business, and particularly his wife. So he has a sense of indebtedness to Milo, although it sounds like with Randy and I talked about it, Milo is not trading on that in any real way.
00:10:31
Speaker
And the other person in our gang, he feels particularly close to, although it's certainly a, again, a need or a feeling of a need to protect, whether or not he actually does need to protect her, is gonna be Phillip's character. So I'll let him do the talking about that. But the obligation that I chose for Hobb is that there is a bounty on his head.
00:10:59
Speaker
Eric, do you want me to go ahead and say what my thought was or leave that to, no, you can, you can say what happened if you want. Okay. So when hob first started working for the Boromar clan, uh, because he gets over zealous when he gets into a group, he went to collect some outstanding debts from somebody who was more powerful than hob realized. And he embarrassed this person in front of people. This person did not want to be embarrassed in front of.
00:11:26
Speaker
And so it's a low level bounty. It's not even necessarily bring me his head for this amount of money, but it's if you see this guy and you can get this guy to me, you get this guy to me because there's retribution to be made. So that is the reason he has a mark on his head. He also has a bunch of tattoos, which are marks on his head. Awesome.
00:11:50
Speaker
Um, well, that kind of transitioned us into, um, Philip, uh, speaking about Eris, if
Character Introduction: Eris
00:11:57
Speaker
you'd like. Uh, yeah, I'm going to be playing Eris. Eris is a, uh, a young woman, um, who looks like she's around, uh, 20. Um, she is small, uh, and, um, where's big, long.
00:12:19
Speaker
coat with plenty of pockets that is generally sort of dull colors but lots of bright additional sort of added decorations on. She has sort of dark
00:12:38
Speaker
blue dyed hair. And the most noticeable thing is that she carries, she carries a flechette launcher. She carries a magical crossbow that requires no mechanical operation to launch projectiles, but does so through a bound elemental. This is her personally created unique signature weapon.
00:13:07
Speaker
She is a survivor. She's a Chiron refugee. She survived the morning because as a much younger person, she was taken in a raid when the goblins turned on the Chirins and overran and created the country of Dargul. She was part of the population there and as occurred to
00:13:37
Speaker
the various species that lived there. She was enslaved by some of the goblins. She was eventually rescued by a character that I assume Eric will introduce in a little bit when you go into the thing, or do you want me to introduce this character? You can introduce the character, that's fine.
00:13:57
Speaker
She eventually escaped slavery because her owner took her with him on a voyage and their ship was attacked by a Lazar pirate named Ulfin Morkret and Ulfin
00:14:23
Speaker
brought Eris to Sharn where he retired and opened a restaurant and she rinsed a room above his restaurant. But she owes him her freedom. She got caught up with the Bormar clan because she'd never else to go. We've established that Milo was her initial point of contact there and got her set up in the clan.
00:14:45
Speaker
and probably also introduced her to the person who's been giving her under the table majorite lessons, which brings me to her obligation, which is a favor. She owes a favor to her majorite tutor, who is teaching her the art of artifice in an off-the-books sort of manner. She is, by nature,
00:15:14
Speaker
pretty scared, although she attempts to conceal this a lot. She is independent, doesn't warm up to people much, a bit flighty. There's a tendency to cut and run and can be, that can make her very inconsiderate. However, with this group, she feels safe in part because Hob watches out for her. Hob is,
00:15:42
Speaker
a shadow in which she is very happy to hide, living in a rough part of town and being a fairly small person. So she is particularly attached to Hobb from a felt safety degree.
00:16:01
Speaker
Like most chirons, she is highly artistic. She is a musician, although the musical instrument she plays is of goblin origin. But that artistic talent has given her a nice connection and a bonding to the fourth member of our companion, played by Trevor, who will talk here in a minute.
00:16:21
Speaker
And they are theater buddies. So I think I hit everything. Oh, her day job is she repairs slot machines as a major item. She repairs slot machines at the Lucky Nines Casino.
00:16:44
Speaker
Very nice. Well, that's everybody. Yeah. That brings us to last but certainly not least, Trevor, to introduce us to Reynard Turnveil.
Character Introduction: Reynard Turnveil
00:16:58
Speaker
Yes, Reynard Turnveil is an elf that, what did we end up calling him? A rogue bard. Is that what the term would go with? Yeah.
00:17:13
Speaker
So, Reynard comes from a very wealthy family, and he had a history of abusing that wealth and taking advantage of it, and so his family kind of excommunicated him.
00:17:33
Speaker
he's still longing to live that extravagant life though so he definitely likes to pick pockets around the casinos and the theaters and just kind of take advantage of the people who are out and about but also loves the theater himself and that's how
00:17:55
Speaker
a bond was made with Eris. So, Reynard's obligation is, well, is that what it's called? Obligation?
00:18:08
Speaker
Okay, family, which can kind of come into play in a lot of different ways. It is based around my family, which I have a history with. Not my family, Raynard's family. I'm not crazy. That's a Jeff quote.
00:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, and so he very much dresses ornately and still tries to give off an air of being wealthy, even though when he goes home at night, it's just kind of a shoebox apartment.
00:18:52
Speaker
thank all of you for creating an interesting band of characters that it'll be fun to see what happens with them and how the story goes. So, yeah, like I said before, they they're located in the Lower Memphis Plateau and their their places of residence are kind of scattered throughout different districts and things like that. But the the thing that connects all of them is
00:19:21
Speaker
They are members of a small criminal organization that reports to the Boromar clan.
Campaign Rules and Guidelines
00:19:31
Speaker
And they do jobs for the Boromar in various parts of the city of varying levels of ill repute, but a
00:19:43
Speaker
One thing was made abundantly clear to each of them as they joined this organization and got to know the way the city works underneath the rule of Boromar, and that is you do what Boromar allows. So just because we have a adventuring party full of criminals does not mean that we are playing a evil campaign where nobody has respect for the law.
00:20:08
Speaker
there will be plenty of city watch members that are on the take from Boromar and you are expected to respect them and do what they say. If for no other reasons than to hold up the appearance of their authority. So things like that where this campaign, the intention is certainly not to let it devolve into kill, kill, stab, stab our way through our problems.
00:20:34
Speaker
And if you've ever done an RPG game or campaign where none of the guys in your party did crimes, hats off to you. Did a fully lawful good campaign.
00:20:49
Speaker
So, so yeah, there is a a wide cast of characters that we've kind of discussed in our session zero that happened before this recording that you all will be introduced to. One of them plays into Aeris's backstory with Ulfin, the pirate that helped her out.
00:21:07
Speaker
and Hobb sleeps in the establishment of Savia. The name of the business is Savia's. So yeah, there's a good cast of NPCs that we'll be bringing into the game.
Key NPCs in the Campaign
00:21:22
Speaker
So the three NPCs that you all are going to be introduced to in session one that are going to play a direct role with the party are also fellow members of the gang that they are part of.
00:21:36
Speaker
And just to introduce you to them, the first one being a warforged named Sigil, who has a strong affinity for magic. They are very soft spoken and not at all interested in getting into a fight, much less a battle or a war. They have some some thoughts, beliefs, opinions that many would label as off kilter.
00:22:04
Speaker
Um, not to, not to them though. And certainly not to a lot of people, uh, in, especially the lower reaches of shard. And then we also have a, um, a pair of siblings that are also joining the party on this first job. Um, it is a half orc and a half elf. They are sisters named Kath and Sana. Um, so Kath and Sana.
00:22:34
Speaker
are half sisters that are extremely adept when it comes to combat. And when they go off on jobs, especially with sigil, they they are very much the ones that look out, look out for them. And one aspect of the district, the city that they reside in is the burning ring, which is a fighting ring that kind of transports to different various warehouses and fighting places. And Kath and Sana are
00:23:04
Speaker
noted there when they show up to fight. They are undefeated in the burning ring, whether or not they're going up against other competitors or a monster in the ring. So they are fighters well known in the district. So, yeah, that is kind of a very high level discussion of the neighborhood and some of the characters that our party is going to be interacting with in the immediate.
Episode Conclusion and Future Excitement
00:23:30
Speaker
and an introduction to our characters. I know this is gonna end up clocking in at a shorter episode length than normal, but that's for two reasons. One, it's a preview of the campaign and we're not actually gonna be rolling any dice. And also, session zero took longer than we expected and it's 10.30 on a work night, so. Yeah, we're not the first podcast to put on a filler episode called season two coming soon.
00:23:58
Speaker
This one's like 10 times as long as some of them that I've gotten before. Oh, yeah. OK, so thank you all so much for listening. I hope you all are as excited as we are about becoming campaign and to try out a new system and see how all of this goes in the world of Eberron. But yeah, thank you all so much. Once again, I am your game master, Eric. I'm Phillip.
00:24:27
Speaker
I'm Trevor. I'm Randy. I'm Jeff. And we will see you next time.
Narrative Ending: Scene Setting in Sharn
00:24:34
Speaker
It's a clear night in Sharn. Glasses clink and hush giggles fill up the air on the Skyway.
00:24:40
Speaker
The elites of the elite look down on the city they own, without a care in the world. In a less reputable part of town, the night air is filled with screams and chants from the Organics United protest. Signs that read, no war, no warforged, and send them back to scrap, glimmer in the light of nearby shops.
00:25:03
Speaker
An unknowing warforge walks by peacefully until they realize a flask of acid is just splashed across their back, burning through the metal. The sounds of cheers break up the chance as the warforge runs away into the darkness. A shifter cackles as two large humans punch each other with all of their might as a crowd circles them shouting out bets.
00:25:25
Speaker
The shifter looks over his event, feels his coin purse, and shows his fangs and a wide-toothed smile. A sky slope cuts between two towers as it ascends through the night. A gray-eyed elf fiddles with his bowstring as he looks over to a halfling deep in his own thoughts.
00:25:43
Speaker
A hulking Goliath sees something in the distance and gives a reassuring nudge to the blue-haired young girl next to him. The half-orc and half-elf sisters nod to the others as the half-orc taps the warforged pilot's shoulder and points to a platform up ahead. This city may be in need of heroes, but with this crew, Heroics comes with a bill.
00:26:30
Speaker
you