That is exactly what I was going for with this framework!

-clash

Saturday, we began the playtest of Volant - Kingdoms of Air and Stone.We had a "Session Zero", where we created our home Region, the PC's Association, and the characters.

The Home Region - Daktari

Yes, Daktari - Swahili for Doctor. Why? I don't know, the players liked it. Daktari was randomly rolled to be a single region nation, large, and fertile. It has animal resources of Horses and Llamas, vegetable resources of Nuts, Grain, and Spices, and mineral resources of Quartzite, a kind of shipstone. Daktari has a Large city, Gupta, witch is famous for a spiced liquor called Betaljuce. A medium city called Deepta also graces the region, which is famous for llama wool rugs. A small city, called Mohatma, is renowned for its famous Curry Dark beer.

Conditions are Spicy, Hot, Humid, and Rolling.

Cultural Traits are Diplomatic 3, Boisterous 2, and Volatile 2.

Castes are a bit rigid,with a mixed base, and hard to understand.

The government's form is a Chieftainship, but its substance is Democratic.

It has some interesting oddities - children typically work, homosexuality and bisexuality are both common and unremarked, drinking alcohol is an important leisure activity, body modification - typically piercing and tattooing - is fashionable, and children with deformities are ruthlessly culled at birth.

The Association is a league of assassins, called the Hands of Kali. It is headquartered in an abandoned temple outside of Gupta. The highlights - a great deal was spent on Espionage, agents, spy rings, double agents, safe houses, and local sympathizers; they sprang for a flight of six giant owls and a flight of six giant ravens; a squadron of six light warships; two other ships and some horses; a master alchemist and master armorer; superb armory; and a library with historical treatises and alchemical recipes.

The four characters created - more may come as other gamers drop in - are:

Arjuna Randheer - a very rich aristocrat who is a bow sniper - a master athlete and bowman who is expert at riding both horses and birds, sneaking, and hunting.

Kamar Buddhan - son of a skilled laborer who is a thug - an expert at sneaking, and good at fighting.

Sanjay Mataharan - a street rat who is a shadow - master of sneaking and hiding, and good at athletics, slight of hand, and punching people.

Nadila Rajmurti - wealthy merchant's daughter and avian knight - master of riding and the bow, and expert with the sword and athletics.

Next week, on to play!

I looked over the characters last night and Kamar looks decidedly weaker than the others. I looked the character sheet over with my son Klaxon, to find out whether this was due to deliberate choice on the part of the player or to problems in understanding the process, and we discovered the player had made some mistakes in generation.

To explain, character generation is done by selecting a background template, an apprentice template, and by purchasing a number of professional templates with varying costs and varying pre-requisites, then adding up the changes from each template.

It appears that Kamar's player had purchased an advanced and expensive template he was not qualified for, and in doing so, had used up far too much of his allotment of build points. I will be going over the templates in question to see if the problems were due to poor wording in the instructions, or to an honest mistake or misreading. Generally, I assume poor wording unless convinced otherwise.

I'll be contacting the player to let him know what we found, and letting him make any necessary changes.

-clash

Here is the Template Tree for the Avian Squire base template:



These are the template choices you can take once you take Avian Squire. There are 11 of these base templates, though only Thief is as full as this one. This is thanks to my son Klaxon, who took the time to set it up.

-clash

I like the clarity of the presentation as a tree rather than a list/block of text - it's easy to follow.

Yeah, Sean! It's much clearer this way.

Brillaint stuff, Clash. I know a game is going to be great when before its even published it fires up the old imagination. Looking forward to more updates.

Regards,
David R

Thanks, David!

-clash

Trees are great

Yeah! The biggest complaint the players had in chargen was that there were a lot of options, so it was hard to keep track. It's different from my typical chargen - it is basically an enlarged and complex version of the simple two-layer template-based character generation I used in Tools of Ignorance. These have so far been met with delight - not all the players have seen them.

-clash