Lucian's Ussura Campaign, Take Two

Season one, in which everyone meets and manages to stop a civil war.

Season Two begins! We're gaming on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, from 3:30-6:30 Pacific (6:30-9:30 Eastern).

The plot! This time around, I have a greater grasp of where I think it would be fun to take the campaign, and it involves a lot of the prime movers and shakers of the country. I have some ideas about where to tie you all into these plots, but do let me know if there's some aspect of your character you're interested in exploring. To some extent, you can do that with your character sheets--anything you spend XP in I'll assume are things you want to do. But I'll try to have some discussion on-MUD about these things, and feel free to e-mail or start your own discussions, too. To recap the unresolved plot threads from the end of the last campaign:

• Alixandre (Sargent) had flown into a Porte hole; current whereabouts unknown.
• For that matter, so did Fleur (Raelynn's double) and Devoe (Alix and Seb's erstwhile superior, and the main bad guy of Season 1).
• The GM keeps hinting about something to do with Pyotr. What's up with that?
• Montegue is still making his way towards Pavtlow in the west, and Charles has his pendant. Tamara will be *quite* interested in this, should she find out.
• Emet (Era's brother) knows something about Lavache, which Charles is keen on finding out.
• What exactly were those bugs, anyway? And why does it seem like one of their limbs came out of a Porte hole?
• (Anything else?)

XP! You all get 18 XP from the end of the last session. I never gave you this before, so it's all new! (Previously, you should have gotten 2 points from the intro, 10 points after session 7, and 10 points after session 12. So, a total of 40XP since the start of the campaign.) If you have a Background that showed up (and that's all of you who have one--I just checked), give yourself an extra 2x that background level in XP. That should be enough to push some of you to Journeyman in your sorcery/swordsman school of choice (do note that there are some new rules about this). Tamara will be happy to find people to train you in whatever you want, with one exception: if Raelynn wants to up her Porte skills, that will be a lot harder. I have an idea here if that's what she wants to do, but it's adventure material, not between-adventure material.

And, in a similar vein: You all had +3/-1 repuation as of the monastery; at the end of the Season 1 campaign you all now get an additional +8.

For new people: talk to me. There's a lot of stuff going on right now; enough that trying to incorporate a brand new thread into the mix will be tricky. Rewarding, I would hope, but tricky. I felt the main thing that made the campaign work last time was to incorporate aspects of people's backgrounds and stories into the plot, and I'm still interested in doing that for you, but we might have to meet halfway.

One thing I would like to do this time is to actually hand out XP at the end of each session, instead of in big chunks every 7 sessions (oy!). So, if I don't remember to give you XP, remind me. If you missed a session, you won't get the XP, but if you like, I can give you an extra credit assignment to make it up. No, I'm not sure what that means, either, but it sounds fun ;-)

Also, here's the list of the cast from last time. In brief: Returning characters from other campaigns were Sara as Era, a Ussuran noble, Jota as Charles, an Avalonian sailor, and katre as Pyotr, a Ussuran backwoods hunter. Joining the group was Duchess playing Raelynn, a young Montaignian ingenue, and Sargent and inky playing Alixandre/Alexeij and Sebastien, Montaignian diplomats from Ussura and Castille, respectively.

Here's some other informational pages, mostly posted before the campaign began. Some of them have been updated, which, uh, I should note. I'll do that in a bit.

• A summary of everyone's stats and dice.
• The initial post describing why I'm running the game.
• The setting I'm thinking of, as well as some of the inspiration for the 'secret' bits.
• What kinds of characters you can use.
• The new rules I plan to use during the game.
• Some new sorcery rules.
• Some hints for creating a new character.

Also, Alderac posted some bits that didn't make it into the Ussura source book; you can read about them on their web site but I've copied it here: the Ussuran pravda (set of laws governing the country), a Fhideli (gypsy) lexicon, and some Ussuran regional advantages. Actually, the first two seem to be gone from the site, so I'm glad I copied 'em over.

Finally, I went on an eBay spree and bought all the old nations and secret societies books. So if there's anything you want to know about or use for your character, ask and I'll pull it out for you. (The one thing I can think of right off is that there are a variety of new Glamour knacks from the Avalon book. There are lists on-line, but for details, talk to me.) The only book I'm planning to deviate from significantly is the one for Sophie's Daughters. It's a bit too much mega-conspiracy, and not enough saving-women-in-trouble, which is why any player would join it in the first place. Of course, this the one society that two of you have actually joined. Sigh. But anyway.