This is a story of the heroes of the Tribe of Sky and Fire. Our players were introduced to each other at Gamestorm, signed up for Storming after seeing it in the Indie Hurricane crowd. Two of my players were new to the Indie Scene. Two were Indie Game Designers (Joe McDonald and Jackson Tegu).
Each player was given the option of playing a pre-made Character Type from the list. We ended up using the Warrior, the Shaman, the Healer, and the War Leader. I had pre-rolled one set of 6 D6's, and then divvied them up between the Stats as would be appropriate for a generic example of each Character Type (Observation: This could work really well for creating a Random-Gen game that does not un-balance PCs. Maybe a system where you pick what Type you want to play, and it tells you what order to put your highest to lowest dice?)
The Warrior and the Shaman were played pretty straightforward. The Healer (Jackson) was an older (but not elderly) woman of the Tribe. The War Leader (Joe) was elderly, being a War Leader that had given up his mantle to Gentle Thunder in order to await what he expected would be a death coming soon.
The game began with them going to see an Oracle, Mother Moon who stayed year-round on the edge of the Northern Forest, while the rest of the Nation traveled the Great Path. In her tent they saw a vision of three animals doing strange things, and finally a waterfall. (This turned out to be foreshadowing i could not deliver on.)
Trying to deduce what this could mean the four were left unsettled by the vision, and asked the tribe to double the watch that night.
David suggested i add details to this next scene that would help me create the illusion of difficulty, so that, when i have the plot point drop in their lap, the players don't all go, "Didn't we say to double the night watch?"
But, as the night wore on, each discovered the situation was less than optimal. The Warrior snuck upon two of his guards, finding them asleep on duty. The War Leader thought he'd found a danger lurking in the fog that rolled in, but found it to be just a child from a neighboring tribe, coming to flirt with one of the young women of his own tribe. And the Healer noticed the whole of the tribe seemed to be moving about, uneasy.
So, it was little surprise when a young girl had gone missing by dawn. The group, with some orders by Gentle Thunder, investigated the girls father, but did not bother with him for very long. (Here i'd prepped several hits for Perception against him and her tepee. Few were bothered with. They pretty much took immediately to the woods.)
In preparation i had decided to have the girl return as a Wolfwalker (to be explained later) and while she was attacking the camp, in the confusion another victim would disappear. So, in order to facilitate her mysterious return, i had to have her vanish until it was appropriate.
In our Diceless Dry Run, DRDrake told me that having the girl disappear and giving the players nothing to do about it would alienate them. He was right.
The four characters were
very intent on finding the girl. This is where the game started to fall apart. I had them follow her trail into the woods, where her footfalls vanished among wolf-prints. They did a little Arcane checks, but all that yielded them was "They are Spirit Wolves." Not much good. Then i was a total jerk. I said the tracks split into all directions…and to top it all off, a thick rain (which was foreshadowed, at least) falls, wiping away any tracks they could have followed. This resulted in Joe saying, "I'm going to go talk to Mother Moon. I just don't know what to do."
So i had to just straight up tell them, "Look guys, i'm sorry. I had some prep for this game, and i needed to steer you with these plot points." All four players were awesome about this, and we moved on to that night, where the Gaunt Wolves and the Wolfwalker made their appearance. That fight went well, but took a long time due to explaining how the system works for the first time.
The next character to wander off was a small boy. Now, i'm going to explain what i had prepped, and then i'll tell you what happened.
In the game i'd conceived in my head i wanted to give them clues to what was causing this dilemma by letting them make Arcane checks. I wanted them to figure out what the theme of the villain was by showing them a series of characters. The Arcane checks were there to help us all with the unfamiliar 'native american myth' system. The theme would be told by who 'disappears.' But the third or fourth person to vanish they should have discovered that the victims were all people in the Tribe that felt like outsiders. The girl had a bad scar on her face from a wildcat that had attracted her as a child. The boy was un-athletic and lived in the shadow of his warrior older brother. An old woman, whose sister always danced in the Sun Dance, felt like an old woman. An old man in the tribe had no wife and no sons, and felt friendless. Each in turn was being summoned by an Apotompken, a sort of vampire of Native American Folklore. It was created by bitter dreams, and lived half in the spirit world, and called to them in Dreams, luring each by their feelings of dejection. In a trance they would wander into the woods, toward his 'tower' and he would cover them in dark magic, giving them bodies that would allow them to enact what they thought was their vengeance. All this was, in the end, a ruse on them, caused by the Apotompken's desire to destroy his descendants: the Tribe of Sky and Fire.
The girl was first, being made into a wolf, so that she would feel accepted among a pack (the gaunt wolves). On the first night she attacks, and in the fray a boy, entranced, wanders off. When he returns he is a Bear, stronger than his brother or any of the other proud hunters and warriors. In that battle another vanishes, the old woman, who, on the third night, returns to poison her sister as a graceful snake that moves with more natural agility than her dancing sibling could ever display. If i had time the old man would escape as well.
What happened, however, was a bit of the story skewing, and a lot of the time at the con running out (we'd spent a lot of time making characters and explaining rules). One aspect that led to it was the Ravens. I wanted to give them a little bit of hinting right from the start. So i had these Ravens enslaved to the Apotompken that would fly in at night and peck away the dreamcatchers (allowing him to taint the dreams of the dejected). Well, the players caught onto this, but not its significance. Instead they were like, "We're going to follow the birds." Once again, foibled by the fact that the players all know one true fact: There's a badguy out there causing all this, and we can solve the problem by kicking his ass.
So, without the Bear boy returning, skipping the Snake lady and old man all together, the group followed the boy's tracks into the woods, and the Ravens as well, straight to the Apotompken, who had hidden himself in a dark place behind a waterfall. I mentioned their being waste deep in water and surrounded by old burned totem poles. (One of the players asked, misunderstanding me, if the totem poles were 'on fire.' They weren't but as soon as he asked i said, "Yes. Yes they are. Because that is awesome.")
Now, originally i'd planned on their getting to the Apotompken with some knowledge of what they faced. Each Skinwalker they felled had a slumbering victim inside (which i would narrate around being killed when they killed the monster). The victim was impossible to wake, because they were trapped by the bitter dreams that would eventually turn them into an Apotompken. And since the monster had hid himself so well in the woods they would have two options: Face the terrain of the Shadowed Woods and risk physical harm, or face the perils of the Spirit World, following a guide summoned by Mother Moon to lead them to the Apotompkens spirit form. In the first case they would find the last victim (the old man) in an unfinished Skinwalker state, with no animal totem, just claws and fangs and a body made of tendons and bones wrapped around his form. In the latter half they would travel a spirit path, and find the old man's spirit being twisted by the Apotompken, and he would actually be the 'terrain' they fought the monster on, being a giant black tree that grew larger as they fought their nemesis.
Instead, they just went through the woods, behind the waterfall, and all threw command checks to give the Warrior such a wicked bonus that his Tomahawk had pretty much vaporized the Apotompken before they could roll damage as a group.
The only trick i did manage to work in was the Option A or Option B i had worked up. I literally held up two Monster Cards, backs to the players and said, "Okay, i've written this monster up twice. And i'm letting you pick the ending to this game. On the one hand we have a hard fight where you straight up kick his ass for being evil. On the other hand you can fight a 'terrain' challenge that is your attempts to redeem the Apotompken, in sort of a Vader-kinda way. Your call." There was a short debate and they decided on the Ass-Kick ending, with a little dialog beforehand.
The big twist ending is that, after deciding on the fly that the skin they found the little girl in was still a magical item, Joe's old warrior that would not die abandoned the tribe, putting on the skin, and going into the woods to become a wolf. Permanently.