Wandering Blades with Daniel Kwan 

I pledged the Wandering Blades Session with Daniel level of the Wandering Blades Kickstarter and recently had the opportunity to collect. Prior to the session, I asked pretty much every gamer I know if they wanted in. I mean, it was a session with the game designer. How can you say no to that? I was only able to rustle up one friend.

We decided our characters were twins from an important family. And in the interests of not complicating the succession, I was left with a peasant family after we were born. Something happened, and the family fortune was wiped out, leaving my twin sister to fend for herself via an enormous war hammer. Through the power of dramatic necessity, we found each other and went in search of the younger sibling that I didn’t know we had, which brings us to the beginning of the game.

Before we could start, we needed names. Our knowledge of historically appropriate Chinese naming conventions was absolutely zero, and left to our own devices our characters would probably have ended up being named the Chinese equivalent of George-Pierre San Ponc Bottom or something. After discussing it with Daniel, since we were twins armed with a war hammer and a sword, we settled on Crushing Skull and Cleaving Skull.

After that, it was off to Old Dragon’s Nest inn to try and find Yellow Weasel, a merchant who allegedly had information on our brother’s whereabouts. Well, one thing led to another and we were fighting the secret police. It was at this point that my friend and I learned we’d inadvertently built synergistic characters. That was good, because five turns’ worth of bad guys vs. two turns’ worth of good guys is tough odds, even for kung fu bad asses.

After trading blows and burning some qi, I succeeded in getting the soldiers to run away via Show of Force. After that, we defeated their captain through some good ol’ fashion’ face smashin’. A bunch of rebels showed up, and our younger sibling ended up being their leader. While it was nice to be reunited with family, he wasn’t happy that we’d just killed a bunch of secret police at the inn he was going to lay low at. Whoops!

That concluded the adventure. Overall, I really enjoyed it. The tension around fast and slow turns was something that I’ve never seen in a ttrpg, so it was great to feel out a new mechanic. The other systems fit together well and character creation wasn’t particularly difficult. Though we did forget to use our reroll.

We also had the opportunity to speak with Daniel about the design of Old Dragon’s Rest inn.

SPOILERS

Daniel doesn’t like running the same adventure twice. Consequently, Old Dragon’s Rest and its NPCs facilitate telling more than one story. Each NPC, or group of NPCs, had a setting role and a narrative roll. For example, there were several musicians at the inn who were also secret assassins. There was a family at one table who were also thieves. The owner of the inn was a nice lady and a retired assassin. And so on and so forth. While we were involved in our story, they played their setting role.

The physical structure of the inn had a few secrets of its own as well. There was a basement that customers would occasionally be disappeared to. These unfortunates would be processed and served to customers that pissed off the owner.

While I’d seen adventure design similar to this, a location where there are a number of possible quest givers, for example, this was the first time I’d seen this dual design of NPCs. It aligns well with the assumption that campaigns will be shorter. Rather than having to constantly go looking for new adventures to run, you can simply work through each NPC’s narrative function. I don’t think I’ll have the time to run Wandering Blades for a while, but I sure hope I have the opportunity to play again soon.