Stonetop: The Great Wood arc, Session 1
My table's first Stonetop session was, of course, a walk in the park. I mean this relatively literally because my players left town and immediately headed towards the Great Wood, escorting some reckless travelers from distant lands back to their homes.
The setup was that my players had earned insight into something that was troubling their village at no cost--in other words, they learned about an opportunity to address a problem without that knowledge coming to them in the form of a problem. Their biggest issue to date was that Crinwin--little goblinesque things who poorly imitate civilization--were antagonizing the town. Easy.
I dropped some strangers off in the town pub, aforementioned reckless travelers. They had been on the road for possibly as long as a few weeks, trading for iron at the nearby-ish mining town and stopping in Stonetop for food, drink, a place to stay... and helpful residents to escort them across a dangerous forest. The travelers were offering information about a way to keep the Crinwin away, but would only share such information if they were brought through the forest to their homes in one piece.
This framing worked pretty well for us and allowed us to get familiar with a few steps in the gameplay loop. It's a PbtA game, so the steps for embarking on an adventure are grouped into meta actions that function somewhat like checklists. In our case, we reviewed our gear, made sure every member met the requirements for the expedition (this isn't defined necessarily, it's just an opportunity for the GM to make sure everyone's bringing warm clothes/food/a knife/the cursed amulet, whatever applies), and set off with food and followers.
Our party count pretty much exploded as soon as we set foot outside. We had five player characters, three followers, two horses, and two NPCs (who brought the horses). Our Blessed (read: Druid) currently has advantage on his next horse-related roll because he took the time to go outside and ask them about if they've been overworked on their travels.
The Blessed can talk to spirits as well as beasts, and Stonetop is absolutely riddled with spirits. At one point in the session, he asked a primordial spirit in the party's campfire if their Mage-adjacent PC could walk her talk. Said Mage (called a Seeker in these rules) has a staff of elemental directing that she can barely control--more on that another time.
We were inside a creepy and dangerous forest, so I decided to lean into this by answering the expectations they telegraphed with their decisions. They organized who would go on watch and when, which told me to lean into how silent the forest was at night before announcing that a loud crashing noise happened nearby. They were armed and itching to fight, so I walked some Crinwin towards the party to see what they would do.
The Crinwin encounter opened an opportunity for me to reveal something unsettling to the players: they were copying the party's appearances, donning makeshift costumes that represented their garb and tools. One of them appeared to be in costume as a horse. As I write this, I'm kicking myself for telling the party what the Crinwin looked like when I had an opportunity for a leading question: what is it about the Crinwin that tells you they're in costume... as you?
When I toted these strange things up to the party, I knew they would resort to violence instantly and that they would probably be successful. Only one of them really got hurt, a sudden confrontation. I wanted to show them that there was more to these creatures than they thought--sure, they murdered a bunch of their family members once upon a time, but up close they're also weird little guys with uncertain goals. What will they do with this knowledge in the future? I suspect this party will have an exterminationist attitude, but I also might be able to play into the Blessed's love of beasts and living things to drum up more inter-party disagreements.
A last note, the NPCs were a smash hit. I played them like absolute freaks, uncomfortable types to be on the road with. Ulrik, the brash and impulsive one, is a mansplainer who can be tempted to say too much about what he knows if you give him enough drink. Meike, his counterpart, is more stern and cold, taking a cynical view of the world. I leaned into the archetype of a middle aged woman who carries some internalized patriarchy, emphasizing that she trusted and liked our party's traumatized failson hero on sight simply because he was a young man. Cadfael (the young man) told her that he had killed people before, thank you very much, and the words "That's awesome!" slipped from me in this conversation. The table lit up. Something I didn't even realize I said in the moment turned into Meike being the kind of person who praises violence. It worked so well for her character that it just became truth.
There are myriad other little details like this that made the night sparkle. I will admit now that I was nervous about how this would go. I have a strong desire to be seen as competent, so fucking this up was not going to be acceptable. It ended up not mattering--Stonetop encourages GMs to lean on the players, so when we hit a point where I wasn't sure where we were going next, I asked them what they were ready for. This went okay. I think it was surprising to some but for the most part we had an understanding that check-ins were normal and routine.
For our next session, we're going deeper into the Great Wood and encountering scarier things. They have a follower who pretty clearly has strange and possibly dangerous secrets--a big challenge in front of me is making sure they have meaningful reasons not to just shank him when no one else is looking. Or to show that if they do, there will be heartbreak later. I wonder if they'll compromise with him, or realize that they can't. Above all, I want to offer them irreversible decisions and see what they do.
Finally, for all my quibbles with PbtA, Stonetop is gorgeous. The game readily expands outward from a single idea. Tug on one thread, and the whole tapestry shifts. It's like crack for me personally--when I really break it down, these rules are an organized series of creative writing prompts I can run with and ultimately was what I've been wanting most of all out of a game for a few years, at this point.
There's something in me that feels interested in more statblocks, more hard rules, etc., but I mostly get that in my Burning Wheel group. And speaking of Burning Wheel... I'll have to end this post here for that table's play report.