A Roleplaying Vacation

I went on vacation last week to Dewey Beach, Delaware. It was a family thing, with my mother in law and my nephew who lives with her, as well as my brother in law, his wife, and their three sons. Along with me were my wife, and our son Klaxon. We had a great time, and loved the family time, but I don't post about boring crap like that! I post about boring crap that has to do with gaming!

They had asked me to bring dice and character sheets to run a game for the boys. I brought OHMAS and Outremer, and they brought StarCluster 3, Outremer, and Blood Games II. We decided to play OHMAS, because it needed little setting knowledge, and we could more or less jump right in. Playing were my brother in law's three boys, 11, 16, and 17; my other nephew, 18, and Klax, 27. My wife did not play so she could fend off the other adults, keeping them entertained with gossip, pinochle, and chat.

We launched into building an Association, the group voting for purchasing an abandoned abbey just outside of London, underneath which were extensive caverns, leading to the old Roman sewer system beneath the city. They decided to be Arcane Bounty Hunters, finding and taking malevolent magical creatures and people. The Association consisted of a powerful Fairy Changeling Warlock, who many thought was evil, a Hunter who had served the queen for long on the high seas as a privateer, a brash and dirt poor female Templar, an Immortal whose first death was long in the past, and a Human Changeling, who was taken by Fairies just after the change of the millennium, and raised for eighteen years in the Fairy pocket while centuries passed outside.

They were asked by Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, to find out why the city of York was now suddenly free of rats. They accepted the job for 9 Association build points, and headed immediately for York. There they rented rooms at an inn - at first they tried to refuse service to the Warlock and his associates, but a thinly veiled threat took care of that - and began talking to people about the rats.

Long story short, the rats were all part of a gigantic Rat King - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king_%28folklore%29 - composed of perhaps a million rats. A nasty Warlock - with the help of a group of nobles - had created it, then summoned the spirit of an ancient pagan god, anchored it in the Rat King, and dispatched it to kill the Earl. The PCs, realizing that attacking the thing with weapons merely killed a few rats, dumped lamp oil over it from a church steeple then lit it on fire, then when the fire went down, the Warlock summoned a powerful water spirit from the river Ouse and drowned what was left.

We had a kick ass time! The kids were great roleplayers, and we all enjoyed the hell out of the game!