Last night's game was the seventh "Lost Episode" and was the eighth session I've been involved in this year. It had many successful elements and was a good game, without being a classic.
The plot centred around our old friend Atherton Wing who, disgraced following the duel with Mal and blacklisted by the Companion's Guild, found himself ostracized from polite society. In order to buy his way back in, he contracted with the unregistered former Companion Rose, and things seemed to go well for a while. Until, that is, Rose betrayed him by stealing a large amount of money and, more importantly, some embarrassing documents. And so Ath found himself in need of someone to pose as a dire enemy while at the same time having a perverse sense of honour that would allow Ath to trust him. Of course, such people are vanishingly rare, so the list of candidates was short: Mal Reynolds.
The first success of the night, and perhaps the biggest risk, was that I decided to assign Atherton Wing as one of the potential PCs for the evening, and to recommend that he, Mal, and Inara were the best choices for the episode. The players proceeded to latch onto this, leading to some of the most amusing roleplaying of the Lost Episodes. Which was great, of course. (The risk there was that the players might not have run with it, and I'd have found myself painfully short of material for the evening. Lucky that didn't happen.)
The other character at the centre of this story was Rose, a former Companion turned con artist. However, Rose was a rather more sympathetic foil than Saffron, in that her motivations were driven more by previous pain than by simply wanting advantage. This led to the key scene of the session, after the Crew had captured Rose, and Inara was sent in to deal with the rogue former Companion.
It's fair to say I have some issues with Companions in the 'Verse. Largely because my touchstone for them is the Geisha, and my touchstone for them is "Memoirs of a Geisha". (Of course, "Memoirs..." is fiction, but so too are the Companions so I don't think that's a huge issue.) And I found that film hugely difficult to watch, it being a happy and romantic film... that is largely about child abuse and prostitution. (Consider: the lead character is adopted at a young age, taught art and music and dancing, and then has her virginity sold to the highest bidder. I found that to be hugely at odds with the overall tone of the piece.)
I've been giving the Companion's Guild some thought recently, as they are a key part of this year's Christmas Game ("Memoirs of a Companion"). This week's game served as a little bit of a testbed for some of those ideas, including the character of Rose, and it all seemed to go pretty well.
The other big risk associated with last night's game (and indeed with the "Christmas Game") is that it did touch on some difficult material. Rose's backstory, and the abuse therein, raised a particularly worrying flag.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this game worked out, and most especially in light of my disappointment with the previous "Lost Episode". Though I'm definitely going for a lighter tone with the next one! And I'm also reasonably happy I've got a handle on how to present my material for the "Christmas Game", which is good to know. So, a success!
My next session will be the first part of "Eberron: Dust to Dust", then I'm hoping to get a chance to actually play something for a change, and then it's "Bucking the Tiger", the last of the "Echoes of War" pre-gen episodes for the game. October is going to be a busy month!
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