[Actual Play][Exalted PenDragon-Blooded] Arthur Exeunt (longish)

[Future Villain Band]

Last night's game concluded my PenDragon-Blooded campaign, which I've discussed at:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=123372
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=125983

A lot happened, so to sum it up quickly, the game breaks down into a prologue, three scenes and an epilogue.

Prologue: The City of Wall
Tanayan, the outcaste servant of General Sesus Jazyr, High King Aspirant, meets with the Satrap, Sesus Anokim. They discussed exactly what Tanayan must do to earn his jade and a position in the post-Jazyr Isle's government, which is to murder Jazyr before his forces engage the satrap's during the coming war. There's a cool moment at the end where Anokim asks Tanayan why Tanayan, an outcaste with a reputation for treachery and sadism, would betray the only man who's every trusted him as a brother. Tanayan responds that he loves jade more than any man. The satrap, disgusted, dismisses him.

Scene One: Pinnacle Fortress Manse
The armies of Sesus Jazyr prepare to march to the Shining Sky Lake to face the armies of the satrap and his allies in the old High King's family. The Abbot of nearby Towering Fist Monastery and Jazyr have a meaningful discussion about the nature of Jazyr's dream for the island, and the Abbot throws in his support for Jazyr, although his best monks still wander the land on a Wyld Hunt. Jazyr sends messengers to each of his vassal-kings to bring their men to Shining Sky Lake.

Scene Two: Anokim's Tent, Shining Sky Lake
The Satrap Sesus Anokim's forces arrive to meet Jazyr's. Anokim has 12,000 men, while Jazyr has 2,000. Jazyr and Anokim meet in the center of the battlefield, where Anokim prepares tea.

Anokim begs Jazyr, as a fellow member of House Sesus, to cease this folly and return to the Blessed Isle. He tries to appeal to Jazyr's ego -- Jazyr has united much of the island, no small feat, but he cannot hope to stand against 12,000 men. Jazyr points out that his vassals are on the way, and then he will have 10,000, but Anokim reveals that he has bribed the Tribes of the Ten Ladies to run amok in the interior, occupying the forces of the vassals. There will be no reinforcements.

Anokim, seeing that Jazyr is still bent on fighting, asks Jazyr why he is doing all of this. Jazyr asks if Anokim has ever believed in a dream so powerful that even death would not end the dream. When Anokim says no, he has never felt the pull of such a dream, Jazyr says, "Then you can never understand me."

Inspired and upset that fate has doomed two such paragons of the Dragon-Blooded to face one another in a battle in which only one will survive, and privately disappointed by the treachery about to follow, Anokim toasts and salutes Jazyr and promises him proper burial rites when the battle is over. Jazyr salutes Anokim back, and proceeds to get his forces in order.

Scene Three: The Battle, Shining Sky Lake

At the last possible moment, two of Jazyr's vassals appear with their men roughly intact. These two -- Meredin the Red and Tadgh the Bloody-Handed, are two who hate one another, but whom Jazyr wildly impressed in the previous year. They bring with them 5,000 men, still not enough to turn the battle definitively in Jazyr's favor. Expecting death, they all take their positions.

As the Satrap's forces engage Tadgh and Meredin's troops, Tanayan, the outcaste aide of Sesus Jazyr, draws a dagger and tries to slay him. The forces separate as this aristeia begins. The battle takes place over a minute's time, with Jazyr nearly falling before his foe's blades. At first, Brother Po interecedes on Jazyr's behalf, until his mortal reserves are gone, at which point another of Jazyr's followers, Tepet Elena, pulls Po out of the combat.

Jazyr and Tanayan's anima flux has made it so that mortals and Exalts alike dare not get too close to their duel. Just as Jazyr seems dead, he lunges forward, bringing his daiklaive up and slicing Tanayan crotch to sternum. Tanayan is dead.

Jazyr raises his sword in victory, only to see the Satrap's personal guard begin marching toward his forces. Jazyr utters a moving speech about immortality, and then charges the satrap's forces. In a matter of minutes, the Satrap's forces have reduced Jazyr's 2,000 man unit to a few hundred men. Separated by a great melee, Brother Po and Tepet Elena watch as the satrap and his outcaste retainers corner Jazyr -- brilliant jade daiklaives are raised, there is a spray of blood, and then Jazyr's Anima flux spirals into nothingness.

Epilogue: Anokim's Camp/The Towering Fist Monastery

As Sesus Anokim prepares to perform the cremation rites for Jazyr, the Abbot of Towering Fist Monastery and his Wyld Hunt appear, claiming the body for the vassal kings in the center of the island. "He does not belong to the Realm, anymore, Satrap." Brother Po and Tepet Elena follow the Abbot and his monks as the body is walked back to the monastery.

As the body is prepared to be cremated, the kings and vassals of Sesus Jazyr each toss a brand onto the pyre, intoning that they will follow his dream even beyond his death. At last, Jazyr's new wife passes, as well -- her belly swollen with child, his daiklaive being carried by her retainers.

Exeunt Omnes.

--Eric

[hong]

Eric is the master. I bow before Eric's GM-fu.

[Future Villain Band]

Now that the story's out of the way, let me sum up the high points and low points of last night's game.

The Low Points:
The player of Tanayan had been doing concrete work all day, and was sunburnt, tired, and by the time the big duel actually occurred, not in the mood to Stunt or give flowery speeches. This, in short, made the duel seem a lot more dull than it should have, despite the other player's energies. Afterwards, he explained why he was out of sorts, and we informed him we happily would have called the game quits for the evening, but he didn't want that.

That player of Jazyr was really, really frustrated when Tanayan tried to assassinate him. The dice were going against him, the betrayal came as a shock during what he thought would be the high point of the campaign, and it was a bummer. I pulled him aside after the first turn of the duel and talked to him in another room and reminded him that this was his moment! This is the moment that we've all been waiting for, live or die -- the betrayal, the massed army of foes, it was all a vehicle for Jazyr to shine, live or die. That pumped the play up immensely, and he single-handedly carried that duel, with powerful speeches, cool Stunts, and Combo use. His butchering of Tanayan came as a surprise to everybody and was dramatically unmatchable -- the kind of thing that a planned battle can never match, the kind of happy shock that randomness and player skill can only bring you.

The High Points:
We watched the Angel series finale before we gamed, while eating Chinese, and that got everybody in the mood to kick ass and go down fighting. The proper mindset was key, and everybody eventually latched onto it.

The Satrap turned out to be a powerful character but still unmistakeably an adversary -- his conversations with Tanayan and Jazyr managed to paint a really deep, complex, flawed character in a few short minutes of roleplaying.

The characters are just as jazzed now as they were when the campaign was going on -- they all want to revisit the Isle 20 years later, when Jazyr's son takes up the daiklaive. Jazyr's player, who's moving a state away, has already begun character generation and plans on making a three-hour drive in order to play a few times this summer. That's the biggest compliment a GM can have, methinks -- of the end of the campaign didn't damp everybody's passion, instead kicking it into overdrive.

So, thoughts?

--Eric

[hong]

The climax of the duel sounds like a real Kodak moment.

How do you think the game would have went if you'd used solars, instead of dragon-blooded? Too powerful for the sort of challenges you envisage?

[Future Villain Band]

Hong,

First up, thanks for the kind words.

Second, as to your question concerning running the game with Solars, I think there would have been a couple of significant differences.

1) Feel-wise, using the Dragon-Blooded let me get a real "receding civilization" feel, with a new dark age encroaching and the players being helpless to stop it except for on a local level. Jazyr's personal troops were the best on the island, and there was a real feel that they were a finite resource, since there were no "Instant Uplift" Charms in the Dragon-Blooded repertoire where you spend a week with some gutter-vermin and at the end of it they're Navy SEALs, and or where you spend a couple seconds looking at a bureaucracy and all of a sudden it functions 200x faster.

Plus, a lot of the smaller threats, like arranging alliances and marriages and taxation schemes and avoiding somebody poisoning you would've all been easily handled by Solar social and bureaucracy Charms, whereas the Dragon-Blooded really had to work it.

So I think that using Dragon-Blooded really gave it an "Arthur, Last of the Romans" feel, whereas if I had used Solars, I think they would have been able to steamroll past most of the earlier threats and get to "Arthur and Shining Camelot" before things started to hit the fan.

2) At one point, most of the group were Heroic Mortals/God-Blooded of some sort, with only one or two Dragon-Blooded. That changed later, but I definitely think the Heroic Mortal-level PCs would have had far less to do in a Solar game, whereas the high-end mortals and starting Dragon-Blooded were almost, but not quite equal.

Does that help?
--Eric