These are the character sheets at the end of this adventure, at the moment the characters returned to Hightown. Money has been spent; equipment and skills acquired; and treasure found. Some treasure has been moved from the characters to their horse. Some equipment has been lost—the iron spikes that Charlotte used to bar the door in the foyer, for example.
This reflects only those things that happened during this adventure. The Adventure Guide has not yet calculated the experience gained from the adventure, which means that they have not yet reached second level. Some of them do have experience on their character sheets for using mojo, but the experience total gained for this adventure is likely to be provided at the beginning of the next session.
The players may want to spend any remaining mojo before the Guide gives them that experience total. Once they reach second level, all new spells, fields, and skills will cost more mojo than they do at first level.
Gralen’s player especially may want to use some of his remaining seven mojo to have acquired spells for Gralen’s spellbook. Charlotte’s player will likely want to improve Charlotte’s Psychic fields and add some Psychic skills to one or more of those fields. They will all want to look at what’s happened during this adventure, and what they hope to happen in future adventures, and choose to improve some fields or add skills to some fields.
More Than a Story
The story you have just read is not true. It is better than true. It isn’t even a story. It’s a fictionalized example of the kinds of things characters can do in the Gods & Monsters fantasy role-playing game. The game would have played out while sitting comfortably around a dining room table or on living room couches. The Adventure Guide describes a situation, and the players each describe their character’s actions and reactions. Play proceeds from those choices using the game’s rules to determine the success or failure of those actions.
Everywhere you disagreed with a character’s choices, you could have chosen differently if it had been your character. For example, the characters in this story were very careful. Would you have taken more risks? They chose to explore some rooms but not others. Would you have explored more rooms? Different rooms? How would you have had your heroes react when the goblin skeletons began to overrun the castle? Will’s player took quite a risk volunteering Will to hold off the skeletons while his friends opened the escape route. Will lost all of his survival in that fight. One more successful attack by the goblin skeletons would have injured him, potentially killing him. Would you have risked your character in that way? Was there a better choice? If Sam were your character, would you have been so impetuous when you discovered the secret treasure trove, or would you have announced your discovery and then tried to open it? Would you, as Gralen, have limited yourself to being a walking encyclopedia instead of casting spells, until the final running battle?
What happens in the game is up to you, and your friends, and sometimes the dice.
I didn’t transcribe a real game, because I wanted to show off as many rules as reasonable. But games are not writing, and no story can encompass all that can happen in a role-playing game. We sometimes borrow terminology from writing, from movies, from television series, but this is for convenience, and is little more than calling a train an iron horse. No horse is involved unless the train is broken. The same is true of role-playing games. I hope you enjoyed the story as a story, and I also hope it entices you into wanting to play the game, to roleplay characters such as Charlotte, Gralen, Will, or Sam and choose the actions they take, the secrets they expose, the ruins they explore, and the way they interact with each other.
In a Gods & Monsters game, each of the four characters would be played by a different person. The person who plays each character creates their character using the game’s rules. Most of the time your group will have a warrior like Will, a thief like Sam, and someone who uses supernatural powers like Gralen or Charlotte. Each of the character types can do different things at different times because of their archetype (warrior, thief, monk, sorceror, prophet) and because of their specialties.
You can read the Gods & Monsters rulebook at godsmonsters.com/Rules. The rules provide more information on the game’s rules and how to create characters for game play. The initial character sheets for these example characters are in that book. I’ve also included their character sheets at the start and end of the game here. Character sheets are where you write down your character’s strength, agility, endurance, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. Whenever one of the players in the story spent mojo to acquire something, that something, whether it was equipment or skills, was written down on the player’s character sheet. Whenever a character lost survival points, the player tracked the loss on their character sheet.
One of the players, the Adventure Guide, does not create a player character.* The Adventure Guide creates—or buys, and then customizes—adventures for the player characters to explore. The Guide creates the town they start in and the castle, ruins, or other places they adventure in, and describes each situation for the player characters to react to.
This is not as hard as it sounds. Read the Adventure Guide’s Handbook at godsmonsters.com/Master for advice on how to create adventures, and how to present adventurous situations to the other players and their characters.
This story is based on the introductory adventure The Lost Castle of the Astronomers. The game doesn’t end for the player characters after they leave the castle. Most fantasy games take several sessions to play out, with several individual adventures within the campaign*—much as a novel contains several sections, and might even be part of a longer series.
What happens to these characters next will depend on the choices the players make. Will they investigate the strange creatures of the mist? Or the Druid stones scattered throughout Highland? What about their new magical sword with unknown runes? Where did it come from?
Gralen’s new spells might require seeking exotic ingredients. There’s that confusing reference to a dwarven dungeon beneath the entirely mundane castle of the Order of Illustration. Charlotte wants to travel to the Elves; will they visit Stone Goblin and Will Dearborn on the way? They might choose to return to the Lost Castle of the Astronomers, attempt to overcome—or avoid—the dangers there in order to get more treasure out. They might even try to discover the mysterious ghostly castle that Gralen talked about.
All of these, and more, are possible adventures. What would you do next?
