Last Tuesday night California time, I ran the first session of the Riverford Freelancers. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this bi-weekly Pathfinder game is a series of quest-oriented one-shot “pickup games,” designed to be played to completion in a single three-hour session with no ongoing commitment.

Three players showed up for the first session: pjrichert played the half-orc bloodrager Torgallah, BattleCattle the human rogue Zakar Igel, and Gridlocked the totally-not-a-necromancer human cleric of Nirerwen, Maximilian von Stergum. Additionally, Max had a companion he referred to as Butler, which no one could prove was a skeleton under a well-formed disguise. I had planned for five players, but I was confident I could scale down the encounters well enough for three plus a skeleton.

I started the session with some light roleplaying as a way to gauge if the group was on the crunchier side of things or more interested in roleplaying. Rather than just asking people, I like to put a little RP out there to see if anyone bites. I spent some time explaining how the Riverford Freelancers operated, essentially subcontracting and bounty hunting, and then described the office itself.

The office of the Riverford Freelancers is a small stone building amounting to a single room with an overlooking balcony and adorned with simple wooden furniture. The air reeks of halfling pipesmoke and a small shrine to Foroqa, goddess of quests, explorers, and treasure seekers, sits atop the mantle of the fireplace. The retired halfling adventurer Sibit has made this building his home, as well as a place of business.

After that, I let the players describe their characters. Torgallah was described as a brutish, simple half-orc with a large axe, looking to make money and hurt things, Zakar a simple sellsword, just looking to make coin, and Maximillian a noble-born man looking to prove to the people of Riverford that he was better than them by completing these tasks so effortlessly.

After hearing the players interact a bit, I could tell that they were down to roleplay, so I continued describing the scene a bit more before introducing Sibit, the retired halfling adventurer who runs the Riverford Freelancers.

Sibit bounds down the stairs from his raised balcony grasping several coiled scrolls with his arms in a bear hug. He smiles widely with crooked teeth made yellow from years of smoking as he hops up on a stool and dumps the scrolls on a wide table before waving you over with overly dramatic gestures. “Come, come!”

As the characters reacted to Sibit, I tabbed over from the VTT to the SyncRPG website and searched for quests tagged “Riverford.” I found a few that looked interesting, and dragged them into the object layer of the VTT for the players to see. As I read some short descriptions, they could click on scroll objects to readtidbits about the quests. Clicking on the scrolls myself, I saw additional, hidden, information about how the quest was completed, and other GM-only notes. They were presented with five quests, and set loose in the Three Rivers Valley.

They decided that they were most interested in finding and killing the orc marauders terrorizing the nearby hamlets, but Zakar convinced them the 500gp reward for the collecting two large spider eggs would be the quickest “bang for the buck.” The party set out for the Ashwalker Forest, asking locals along the way where they could find the spiders. “The forests are lousy with them” was a common reply.

The party stumbled upon thick spider webs almost immediately after moving into the denser areas of the forest, rolling well on the check to find them, and were able to sneak up on a nest. Spotting two large black widow spiders, the party split up a bit to attack them. Torgallah charged one in a rage, missing wildly with a natural 1, while Zakar snuck up behind another to get off a sneak attack. Both characters were bit in turn by the spiders, but resisted the venom. As Butler ineffectively poked at Torgallah’s spider, Maximilian cast ghoul touch and tried to grab it, but missed.

The next round started with a third spider trying to be sneaky, but failing to beat the player’s Perception checks. It shot out a web from inside some brush, entangling Butler. Meanwhile, the PCs dice had warmed up: both Torgallah and Zakar were doing serious damage to the spiders, and Max landed his ghoul touch the second time around, paralyzing a spider. Butler is crushed, and Zakar is bitten again, failing his fortitude save against the spider’s venom.

As the last spider falls, Zakar begins to feel the full weight of the venom in his veins. He looks up to his companions, but no one has any potions or spells to help him out. Several failed fortitude saves later, Zakar Igel is dead. The Riverford Freelancers has had their first fatality.

Seeing no point in wasting perfectly good materials, Max asks Torgallah how he feels about him animating the corpse of their fallen comrade to replace butler. Out of character, he asks what alignment Torgallah is. “Chaotic don’t-give-a-F...” was the response, and so Butler was replaced with an equally mindless skeleton named Caddy, which BattleCattle dutifully roleplayed for the remainder of the session.

After Max took some time to disguise Caddy, The party returned to Riverford to drop off the eggs and buy some potions and scrolls. When they explained to Sibit that Zakar was killed by the spiders, the halfling shrugged and said with a smirk, “That’s the way things go sometimes! More loot for you!”

After spending a night at one of the nicer inns in town, they set back out to search for the orc marauders. The party decided to follow the Gotian River north, figuring that they’d have a decent chance of running into the orcs camped out alongside it. Along the way they encountered a large frilled lizard, which Caddy was intent to hug and make his friend. The party hit the lizard a few times before it got a solid bite on Caddy and landed a few tail slaps. Tiring of the encounter, Maximilian cast cause fear, and the lizard ran off.

About a day and a half later, after talking to locals and following tips, they stumbled upon three mounted orcs that fit the description of the marauders. Waiting for them at the intersection of two small roads, they had Caddy act as a distraction while the others buffed up and prepared to attack from the side. One of the orc raiders rode over to poke at the skeleton silently dancing in the middle of the road as the warchief shouted in Stormish (Common), “DROP EVERYTHING YOU HAVE AND LAY DOWN!”

Before they can realize what is going on, Max casts obscuring mist and a buffed, enlarged Torgallah runs out of it, landing a greataxe chop on the other raider’s shoulder, shattering it and knocking him unconscious in the saddle. The warchief, mounted on a large wolf with glowing eyes, moved to position himself on a on a small ridge, trying to asses the situation as he knocked his bow. Max runs out of the fog and casts hold person on the warchief, paralyzing him for four rounds.

Torgallah charged at the other mounted raider and crit with his greataxe, decapitating him with a wide, arcing swing. As the worg shouted to his rider, Caddy and Max began to calm the horses. Torgallah approached, lining up his axe on the paralyzed orc’s throat, and even though the worg wiggled and snapped at the bloodrager, his swing was true. Another orc decapitated.

Torgallah roared at the worg before shouting in orcish that he should run away. Successfully intimidated, the worg bucked the dead orc from its back and attempted to run. Torgallah smirked as he took a parting chop at the worg, injuring but not killing it before it ran away.

At that point we called the session, and we hand waved a safe return trip to Riverford. In two and a half hours, we got through some fun RP, two quests, and one random encounter with a frilled lizard. This was all done almost no prep work on the GM side, and with two players using SyncRPG and our VTT for the first time. Our tools and services got everyone up and running quickly, and we were able to spend most of the session rolling dice and not setting things up.

The entire session was streamed live on the SyncRPG Twitch channel. Everything went smoothly and a handful of people tuned in, so I’m planning to stream most of our sessions going forward. I was dumb and didn’t check the box to archive the session, so there isn’t any recording to watch, but it’s checked for next time!

All in all, the session went very well. Nobody had any issues with the technology itself: everyone was able to import their characters via either Google Drive or HeroLab, connect to the server with their VTT, and start mashing macros and rolling dice without too much help. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, even BattleCattle and his animated rogue skeleton, and they all said they’d love to come to a future Riverford Freelancers session.

As of the time of this posting, there are still X slots open for the game on 10/27. If you’re interested in joining, check out the Google Hangout event and claim your slot, or hop over to Twitch and watch live!

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