Les Ombres d'Esteren - Forum officiel

Very nice! Truth be told, I am pleasantly surprised that you managed to go through such long and rounded out campaigns. It looks like the PCs got to explore very interesting storylines, and I hope that your third campaign will be as successful.

And as always, if you need any advice, you know where to ask

Yes, those campaigns sound very interesting, and I would enjoy hearing more about them if you ever feel like going into more detail.

My gaming table's comprised of my lovely wife, her sister and myself. The girls are the players, while I harass them with deadly threats (ahem) and brain-racking riddles (cough).
We are playing quite irregularly. Our first three sessions have taken place in about 4 weeks, but overall, we're aiming for at least one session per month.

Our vision of Esteren is, overall, quite similar to each other: We want to experience a dark and grim world, where people strive to survive every day, because the lands are harsh. Life is hard and cruel. Horrible decisions have to be made on a regular basis. We're going by the saying of 'homo hominem lupus est' - man's biggest enemy is another man.
The threat of Feondas is omnipresent - though we've agreed on treating them as mostly superstition, tales by frightened people, by men who are embarassed to have fled from an animal and tell grand tales of dark beasts. The truth, however, is out there, and quite likely to find the PCs sooner or later...

We're playing a homebrew and sandbox campaign entitled The Travels of Melis Lochlàn and Shanja Khan (which you can read about in this very forum). The PCs are not extraordinary: Both are bards, singing and playing for lodging and food. Shanja Khan, a born Tarish, is also secretly a thief, always waiting for a good opportunity to add some ember daols to her stash.
The PCs have left their hometown of Seòl, travelled northwards through a town called Ruochwòd, solved a small mystery and are currently on their way to Kel Loar, where they'll probably stop for a while before continuing onwards to the town of Crail in southern Reizh.

Currently, there isn't really any meta-plot, as we're rather striving towards experiencing Tri-Kazel in all its facets, but I'll probably try to have them uncover some of the world's secrets. I have some ideas when it comes to combining the threads given to us by Book 1, but as of yet, everything's too big for the PCs, so it'll probably be some time before they actually stumble upon the heavy stuff. Hints, however, may always appear...

Hello !

You know, the group doesn't have to be extraordinary or strange from the beginning !

... as well as they don't need a meta-plot immediately


The most important thing is to have a good time together and it seems to be !

It's true that there is no need for the adventure to be particularly laden with mystery and supernatural elements, but in the long run, making Esteren too grim & gritty may be a downer for Players who want some spice in their sessions... so I think you are right to drop a few uncanny elements here and there, and have the PCs stumble upon things that will truly make them different from other people. The difficulty is to keep it all balanced to reach the "low-fantasy" happy medium!

I just started a SoE campaign.
The premise is that the players' father had been killed when returning from a journey to Gorm and they will go on an investigation to check on what really happened with him.

The three characters are:

An aloof fighter that can't notice a lion in front of him.
His sister, an awkward Demorthén girl that's somewhat pretty and charming.
And their half-brother, a Temple Priest that got expelled and went on to study Magience, but still believes in the One God (he's in for a world of hurt, trust me! ).

In the first, introductory session they had their father's funeral and met an old friend of his, who told them he went to Gorm to fetch some medicine for their ill mother.
In the night after, the friend dies mysteriously, with his throat slit by something that got into the house without leaving a trace, and they decided to take the plunge and follow the footsteps of their father and go to Gorm.

Oooh, a family story! Interesting!

I just started a session report over here:
http://www.esteren.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=1486

Feel free to post ideas for the campaign.