This was a campaign run for a different group than my usual, using the Wild Talents system, which I had never even heard of, and took some time to get used to. As such, there’s no archive of this to listen to, so unfortunately there’s no retrospective review to be had. Sonata’s playlist can be found here.
The setting behind the game, “The Thunderchild Initiative” was based on the premise that H.G. Wells’s War Of The Worlds actually happened, but instead of being defeated by the flu, the Martians were repelled by people with superpowers, known as talents. The organisation that looked after these Talents was named the Thunderchild Initiative, or TI, for the battleship that was sunk during the invasion, as a testament to the human spirit. It’s been years since that incident that we join the story.
Following from Branma’s arc and exit from the party, the next character to join the cavalcade was the Aerenali Elf Beastmaster, Tanar’ri. Notable that her name isn’t typical. I actually looked up an Elven dictionary;
Tanar’ri – ‘Outcast/Cast Out’,
Arael – ‘Heart’,
Mor – ‘Darkness’, which I would hope makes it obvious that’s not her real name. This was core to the character, and her outlook, coming to the party with a very different dynamic to Branma. Linked here is not the first episode of the campaign, but it is Tanar’ri’s first episode:
Following the Phandelver campaign, our group kept the same roster of players, but rotated the GM. Absolutely no disrespect to the previous GM because I think he did an awesome job (much better than I could’ve done), but that was his first campaign, whereas the current GM is more experienced, especially in the Eberron setting, which is where the game is set.
After the Mass Effect/Fantasy Age game and the Edge Of The Empire game, the next campaign our group found ourselves in was the starter module for 5E: The Lost Mine Of Phandelver. This was good for a few reasons. Firstly, we added a couple players that have been great to play with. Second, by the time we started, I had gone and bought the physical 5E books and started running a campaign myself so I was familiar with the system. And thirdly, it gave more structure that the previous games could stumble on.
Going from a homebrew conversion of an unknown system to a standard version of an unknown system was in some ways better, but EOTE is a reasonably improv-reliant system, which I admit now I wasn’t entirely prepared for. I’m a little more used to taking cues from existing sources, whether they be other players, the GM, the dice, or your character’s background for example. Having to interpret new dice and come up with useful and interesting things on the fly was a little taxing, and I think VK suffered as a character because of it.
