Pantheon Press Blog

Last weekend I, Jason Keeley, ran a small two-session adventure at NerdNYC’s latest two-day Recess, and it was pretty darn successful. There was a minor hiccup when two of the players couldn’t make the second session, but we had some awesome replacement players. In fact, demand was high enough that I added a sixth player for that second session. Luckily, I had made a pregen earlier in the day for just such an occasion.

The scenario was called “The Countess of Blood.” We may be running a shortened version of it at this year’s GenCon, so I won’t spoil any of the plot. Here’s the general synopsis: The PCs are called upon by the Palantine of Hungary to extract a full confession from Countess Bathory, three years after she was placed under house arrest for torturing and murdering over 600 girls and young women. All based on historical fact!

The first day started with character creation, and I was a bit surprised by the characters generated. Given the above description and the fact that Bathory’s castle is in Transylvania, just at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, there wasn’t a Catholic in the bunch. We had two Jewish characters, two Moslem characters, and a wild occult orc from the wilderness. Sure, I never explicit told them to prepare for vampires, but I thought that the location and Bathory’s reputation would have been a giveaway.

Not that I’m saying the countess was a vampire in this scenario…

Also, it was surprising that it took a little less than an hour. Two of the players had made Fortune’s Fool characters before, in an earlier iteration. And another one was Jay Stratton, lead designer. But the other two hadn’t seen the game before and they picked it right up. Since they had copies of the game to look at, I attribute that to the excellent writing and layout of the character creation chapter.

I found it interesting, in particular, to watch Jay make a character, as I don’t think he has sat down to do so (for a game) since the book came out last year. He did pretty well, making a very lucky Jewish dwarf with mediocre stats and skills. He had 14 Fortune Shines! At one point, I was explaining to a first-timer the fact that you can alter your character’s Fate Structure a little by decreasing your Fate Pool or Burning Fortune (see pages 50-51 for specifics), when I heard Jay say, “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” He then exercised that option by burning the Empress to increase his Fate Pool by 2, and then decreasing his Fate Pool by 1 to get another Fate Twist. Of course, by the end of the weekend, he had drawn the Empress at least once! I’m sure he doesn’t regret that decision, as those Fate Twists really helped out the group.

In the end, I’m tickled pink that this game still has the ability to delight and surprise us from time to time.