Category: The Gauntlet: Our Community

Symbaroum run by Darren Brockes last night was great (pic from the core book)! I didn’t expect such a good starter adventure. Somewhat disillusions you as the colonizers escaping their dying land and going into a new one, where indigenous folks are already about without the knowledge of the PCs, who are fleeing their dying lands.

If you don’t mind spoilers for the adventure in the core book, continue reading!

Our characters were all a part of a caravan going to the new land. To get on we had to fight some guards to prove ourselves able and basically entertain the leader, who was fucking with us. It’s a fairly trad game. Somewhat like Dnd, but you roll under your target numbers. You take abilities, Boons, and Burdens; the later of which really help you create a unique character.

Variol Hope, my character, is a witch hunter that specifically goes after abominations. Blighted, corrupted creatures. But on a hunt years back sustained an injury from one such creature, twisting her nature with Dark Blood (Burden), granting her a Bestial trait (Boon). Her skin is tough as nails and she has unnatural strength, making her Robust (Boon) and bloodthirsty (Burden). As a witch hunter she now keeps this Dark Secret (Burden) from everyone. If people knew this there is a chance other witch hunters would strike her down for this corruption, for fear she too would become an abomination.

You can really see how these choices springboard character concepts. Originally I just was thinking I’d like maybe some sort of ranger.

Anyways, since we had to fight these caravan guards there is a chance Variol would be revealed. If she’s wounded she becomes blood thirsty and when she uses bestial traits, there is also a chance of being discovered.

I actually ended up being able to describe some pretty awesome combat maneuvers instead, though. Rushing in and attacking the guard and striking their armour, then using her bestial strength to push through it and draw just a bit of blood, which was all that was necessary for the challenge. The second guard got pretty messsssed up by me because I used an ability called Twin Strike, doing a double attack and a d8 and d6 of damage on the poor fella. but I still wasn’t discovered. Woot! Also, I remembered near the end of the session that if you did meet their HP you can choose to knock them out or whatever, you don’t have to kill them.

We all made it on. Iomigoi, played by Agatha was doing some pretty epic action, too. Shadow stepping about and what not. We also had a new player, I think? I hadn’t played with Angel before and so I won’t go into detail about his character just in case.

Anyhow, along our path NPC rangers in the party hunted in the forest for food. On one such trip, they were set upon by a Hunger Wolf (kinda like a dire wolf) and we rushed in to help. I’ve the slowest Quick stat in combat so I always go last. A great and quick (hah) way to handle initiative. Iomigoi got a massive hit in first so when I went I let off a well aimed shot that was pretty epic. I described it kind of like a Princesses Mononoke scene, racing toward them on a horse and using my bow to bury my arrow in the wolf’s head. But just then, to my/our horror, the wolf transformed into an elf. So I pretty much murdered someone when Variol’s personal goal is to find a way to rid herself of her bloodthirsty nature, as well as start anew and leaving her past behind. Thematically this was so damn compelling and kicked me right in the feels.

As we proceeded two elves approached and demanded we give over the two rangers, claiming they were corrupted and as good as dead. Importantly, though we had killed one of their companions, they were nothing like what our lore of elves suggested; essentially painting them as rabid forest creatures.

Obviously, the characters’ preconceptions were entirely wrong. Though we had murdered one of their own they did not want to start a war and were there to make sure abominations weren’t born from the ostensibly corrupted rangers of our group. Even though they definetly had some righous anger re: you know, murder.

After some deliberation, Iomigoi purposed we ask that the elves to follow us and if the rangers “turned”, we would end them. When this was purposed to the elves though, already during this discussion a ranger turned. The talk turned into a fight to slay the abomination instead. Clearly the elves were right all along about this as well.

I really liked this because it showed the massive biases we had as playing the main human colonizer folk. And struck a cord with the themes I was going for with my own character. The other players were also great and Darren ran the game very well! I am stoked to play more.

You can also watch the recorded session here, if that interests you: https://youtu.be/EqP2Z7YM44c