Delve into the Depths of my Jaded Heart
Coriolis The Great Dark First Thoughts
A fun first session running through the Quickstart adventure, we managed to get through the surface interactions and down into the delve - on the whole, it worked well mechanically, although it's easy to get into a slightly repetitive mechanical mode for the Delving, but probably needs more practice to make this a bit more natural and pull other players into the action and interaction.
There is quite a lot to track and manage in terms of Blight Areas, Shifts, Supply, Hope, Heart, Health and Gear so very lucky to have the excellent FoundryVTT module handling all this from Miguel, see here. I can see this working well at the table, for example, the GM slowly removes your pile of supply tokens one-by-one as you get deeper into the cave system.
I found there is a lot to cover in terms of setting, probably I over-explained this and should have let questions come out as the game progressed, but just who are the Coriolites and the various Guilds?!
A few slightly broken elements in my opinion with the scenario, players are expected to go from being sabotaged to straight out on the rescue mission, this seems a little far-fetched, surely this kicks off a whole round of investigations, but it’s nothing an inventive GM can’t fix.
Also, the quickstart may need a few extra handouts, a player’s version of the maps that can be used in VTTs, that don’t put on all elements that would be discovered during play. Another example handout would be a version of the Delve scan without the blight zones, just in case the bird fails to capture this.
So that was a three-hour session, I think another two hours or so to finish it off. I'm awaiting the campaign with interest, to understand how Delves fit into all the other aspects of the system. At the moment the Delve feels a little D&D-ish, with a bit of interaction at the Tavern and with the villagers, before heading off into the mountain and down into a dungeon to find treasure.
That said, I am now very keen to run the campaign, so for me, actually playing the game has me thinking I was right to back it! And all caveated that this is only session one, we’ve yet to finish it and only the quickstart!