I made my first foray into GMing after many, many years yesterday while running the introductory Copper Crown campaign for Symbaroum. We played remotely using the Foundry VTT for character sheets and combat maps, with Discord providing voice and video. I’ll maintain a chronicle of how this campaign goes here, with some commentary on the game system, the Foundry and what it was like to GM at the end.
Season 01, Episode 01: ‘The Promised Land’
After a week on the roads through the wastes of Alberetor, the party arrive at the caravan camp, finding it overflowing with carts and hapless refugees. Unseasonable storms threaten to fill the pass with snow early this year, so many of the caravan masters are sitting tight. Luckily, they overhear an excitable traveler at the campfire who has heard a rumour of a Caravan Master willing to risk the journey. Next morning the party are outside that caravan master’s tent at daybreak, to petition him for jobs as caravan guards. After a tense trial by combat, they get the roles, and a day later are walking up through the densely-wooded slopes of the foothills towards the mountain pass.
While encamped in the hills, a caravan mule handler, by the name of Keler, steals the Sunstone from the wizard Bartolm, endangering the caravan should they encounter bad snows in the mountain pass. The party track Keler to an abandoned mill in the forest, where Keler plans to exchange the Sunstone for favour with the undead leader of a band of robbers, Mal-Rogan. They apprehend Keler, but Mal-Rogan arrives with his band of thieves and engages the party in combat by the mill. Mal-Rogan is killed on the bridge over the stream and his accomplices flee the scene.
The party recover not only the Sunstone, but also a grisly trophy – Mal-Rogan’s mummified hand, which he wore on a chain around his neck.
GM Commentary
There were two sources of complexity during the session – first, running Symbaroum for the first time and second, running it on the Foundry VTT. Symbaroum is simple enough, but some of the rules are very poorly explained. I had to read the section on corruption quite a few times to decode how this system should work in play. The rule book doesn’t do a good job of defining basic concepts clearly – Total corruption, Corruption threshold and Temporary corruption – and is equally unclear how these elements are supposed to interact. It is there in the text, but requires some figuring out. Similarly, I’m still unclear on Defense rolls – are these made only by the players? Famously, only players roll dice in Symbaroum. So do I roll as GM for NPC defense attempts? No clue. I simply ruled that only players made these rolls and moved on.
I suspect that Symbaroum’s system of abilities and mystic powers could cause issues as the player’s and their foes scale in power. Each character has a number of abilities, each of which has three levels with different game effects, so it could become a problem to remember all of these in play. Foundry does encode many of these effects in its implementation of Symbaroum, but that brings me to my final point.
I need to figure out Foundry properly. I have the basics down but there are nuances to how it works during combat – for instance targeting and tracking effects like corruption – that I don’t understand well enough. I’m also not sure why it was rolling damage dice for NPCs when the core rules state that NPCs do fixed amounts of damage. I’ll need to spend a weekend reading the Foundry/Symbaroum documentation and tinkering with it a little more.
Overall, I’m very pleased with this session, and more importantly I think the players enjoyed it. I certainly did and I’m looking forward to the next one in two weeks. It’s good to be playing again.
EXOSELF 