On Sunday I started a duet The Electrum Archive campaign with an old buddy of mine. The majority of my roleplaying has taken place with this friend of mine in the form of duet play, often where I run a DM PC or two (we also had a brief co-op campaign of 5E using The Solo Adventurer’s Toolbox). We play really well together, having the same or similar expectations for the games we play, so we don’t have to get bogged down with expectation setting or coordinating amongst a larger play group. It just works.
TEA is very different from the games we are used to playing, having a lot less crunch, and this first session was our first foray into OSR/NSR-style play. In fact, most of our games have been D&D 4E, which we played together extensively through middle school up until the present (with some long hiatuses interspersed).
We had a Session 0 the week before where we created his character, talked about the differences between TEA and the games we were used to playing, and decided where in the world of Orn we would start. He created a warlock with an interest in elder ink tech and a desire to become aligned with The Electrum Archive, and we decided to start his character in Titan Port, partially because I wanted to start with The Grafter’s Tomb, one of the adventures contained in the second issue of TEA. We decided to use two of the pre-generated characters that Emiel Bovin has on itch.io, Marn and Sovai, who will accompany the character on dangerous adventures, but will generally be elsewhere during downtime or information gathering. In between Session 0 and our first actual play session, my buddy created a name and backstory for his character: he is called Puck, and he grew up in Mar Ruun, until his mother went missing and he decided to go to Titan Port to seek his fortune and to avoid the growing presence of The Children of the Crimson Moon.
I started the characters outside the dungeon. Puck and his companions proceeded in very cautiously, carefully checking each room for traps. While Puck investigated the idols in the altar room (in which he found Kaboro’s incense burner and noticed the freshness of the blood), he was approached by experiment 3 and 4, hunting for food. Based on a disposition roll, I had the experiments approach non-aggressively, and Puck decided to give some rations as a peace offering while he and his companions retreated. Then, he used his spell, Pulsing Guide, to place something like a radar signal on experiment 4. I decided this would be a minor effect and Puck used about 11 drops of ink to put a pulsing magical tracker on the creature. After a brief retreat to the first room, the adventurers followed the experiments north at quickened pace. This ended up being folly, as Puck did not catch the tripwire in the trapped room in his haste and had a brush with death, leaving him with a scar and a deeper connection to the Realm Beyond. With this new spiritual connection, Puck was able to notice the presence of the water spirits in the entrance room before he would have aggravated them. At the revelation, we ended the session.
Overall, we had a really nice time with this first session. We’re both really excited by the setting and adapting to the more rules-light NSR playstyle. I feel like I might’ve done a better job telegraphing the trap, but I remedied that by not requiring an archive check to revive Puck (just a use on Marn’s medical tools). I recently purchased some of the Cloud Empress adventures, which I think I’ll end up adapting to Orn.
Thank you for reading!
