Sellswords of Punjar, Session 1: Character Creation

Saturday rolled around and I woke up early to cook up some crock-pot chili. I set up the table and started getting prepared. At the last minute I decided to make up extra handouts for the initial quests, story hooks, and rumors that the module suggested I just read out loud. I thought writing them down and handing them out would make it feel more personal and let the players choose what to reveal. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to get all of them done before people started showing up.

Sunny came on time, but Heidi and Chris were late due to a long running football game. Despite wanting to do all characters creation at the same time, rather than let Sunny and Kat just sit around waiting for the others I decided to let them get first pick of class options. Kat wanted to try to break out of the meat-shield mold and try a more brainy class. She made an Eladrin fey-pact deceptive warlock named Tantric... I mean Aletha. We needed a leader-type class so Sunny was willing to give the warlord a try. He came up with a Tiefling tactical warlord wielding a scimitar and a shield named Jym. For this adventure I knew we'd still need a defender and rogue, so when Chris and Heidi showed up I steered them towards these choices. Chris didn't want to play a goody-two-shoes character like a paladin again so I let him be a straight-up fighter. He ended up with a Dragonborn great-weapon fighter named Regnor. Heidi went for another Tiefling, this time a trickster rogue named Mina.

Character creation took a lot longer than I expected. I guess just having one Player's Handbook and passing it around the table while trying to explain all the new rules was not an efficient way to go about things. I think after a solid two and a half hours of character generation everyone was a bit antsy to get started. I let people pick a random quest card, which turned out to work great. Conveniently everyone got an appropriate quest for their class. These cards gave everyone a reason to be in the same place at the same time. I encouraged the players to come up with reasons why their characters might know each other.

I had previously laid out the battlemap with the covering roof tiles and an overview map of the city of Punjar. Then we began the adventure in earnest...