Campaign Starts!
After months of planning and trying to find a time when everyone could be in town on the same day, we finally have lift-off! Last Sunday we kicked off our new campaign, running the Iron Gods campaign from Paizo in Pathfinder for Savage Worlds.
I think I’m feeling more confident in Savage Worlds as a system. The character creation especially is much different than D&D. Pathfinder for Savage Worlds (man, I’ve got to find a shorter way of typing that!) is a class-less system, but they implement all the classes in Pathfinder as “Edges”, basically akin to feats in D&D/Pathfinder. So you take a class edge, like Fighter or Wizard. Some edges grant power points and access to a limited suite of powers, others grant abilities like a Barbarian’s Rage or a Fighter’s ability to excel with multiple weapons. It’s certainly an interesting approach to character creation, and I can see how it lets you be much more flexible with a build. But it’s hard when you bring baggage from 3.5/PF/5E into it, because you might unintentionally mold your expectations around the character. In 5E, you’d be pretty hard pressed to make a Fighter that’s terrible at fighting. But in PfSW, it’d be possible. They’d have to be a little better than nothing at Strength at one kind of fighting, but you could do it. But that flexibility intrigues me. There’s a lot of character concepts I’ve thought about over the years that just don’t work in 5E. As one example, an “academic” ranger who has learned everything out of books, but doesn’t actually know much about actually surviving in the wilds. Much easier to do in PfSW than in 5e. But it’s interesting to see the charactes my group has come up with, especially given the Sci-Fi influences of the Iron Gods settings. Two of them are playing Androids, one is a robot/android hunter akin to a Blade Runner, another is a archaeologist/wizard, and the last is a half-orc, but I can’t even pin down a class.
I’m also experimenting with using this as a platform to host some of the written record of the campaign. My group uses a mix of Discord, Reddit and texting to coordinate games; I write a recap for each game and post it to our private subreddit, and then we have various kinds of discussion there, via text message and Discord. My problem in the past is that if I want to refresh my memory about a specific session, it takes a while, because I’ve just given them names like “Reign of Winter Session 74”. So I’m going to try having a brief summary of each session with a link to the more in-depth description.
