Tales from the Table - Dootridge

A round of questions with a long-time beta-tester

1. Say hello! Introduce yourself with whatever name you would like us to use, and briefly describe your player characters in .

Hello! I usually go by Dootridge online these days. I have two characters I have played so far!

For the Dalhart campaign I play as Gem Honda: a visibly half-Oni Keeper who is 7 feet tall and wields two kanebos. She was raised by her father in the Republic of Texas with her full-human younger brother. She does not have a good relationship with her Oni mother. She is a Keeper in the Dalhart chapter with her partner Baltier (aka Bal, they went to school together) and the venture leader Zacques. Her specialties are sympathetic touch magic and being ridiculously strong. Every time her venture or companions start to do something kinda (or very) illegal, she has to walk away because she cannot lie as a half-fae. This happens often. She has a second job because her opus is data entry and she figures she might as well make money doing it. During her downtime, she takes care of her Maine Coon cat, Coopurr, avoids her nosy neighbor, and sews/embroiders.

For the Arroyo campaign as Adusa Day: a human Archivist/Medithurge who grew up in the local reservation and left her family to join the Amagium after realizing her twin brother had been erased. She thinks that the Amagium may have the answers to what happened to him and this leads to an obsession with learning about Xenomancy, a type of magic that is not supposed to exist. Her venture is very close knit but she has a huge crush on the leader of another venture. Once got a younger aspirant medithurge (another member of the party) expelled for cheating during an exam she was proctoring and she feels very guilty about it. Because of this, she is more lenient about breaking the rules now. With two specialties, she does not have a lot of downtime, so I guess it is a good thing her opus is bookbinding and can be done at work.

2. What are your favorite moments with those characters so far?

For Gem, it was a fun combat moment. The party was fighting undead in a small area and we were not doing so hot because this was the last of a long series of fights. Gem is normally very controlled and never risks going into exus but here she was cornered and tired so she let go more than she would normally. As a descendant of the Spring Court, she has water magic. So she encases her enemy in a globe of water, freezes the globe, and then punches it with a spell that unleashes agony upon the enemy. This combo pushes her straight over her Exus-limit so she vanishes immediately upon landing the punch.

Exus let her do more than she would normally be able to but as a consequence, she now had to have a heart-to-heart with her Oni mother in the Faed. A grave punishment indeed. Half-fae get to choose to either serve the court they are born into or stay in the human reality. Gem has chosen to serve the Amagium and stay in reality, but her mom constantly is trying to get her to join the Fae as a military general. So Gem now had to convince her mother that she still stands by her decision and wants to return to her team. She manages this and leaves the Faed with a ring that will return her to her mother's side if she changes her mind.

With Adusa my favorite moment was the opening scenes/battle of the campaign. She had just gotten in a car accident after a medithurge shift during a flood so she was fighting without her specialty anima, without her weapon, and while soaking wet (which makes all the spell checks harder to pass). It was a huge challenge to figure out what she could do since any magic checks would be severely unfavorable and she has almost no physical abilities without a weapon.

I had to stay close to the middle of the fighting to be able to cast simple buffs on my teammates and rely on reactions to damage my opponents. But I was able to use the Action "Life and Death" for the first time, gaining extra 7AP to be able to rush across the battlefield, drag a civilian out of harm's way and stabilize him so he didn't insta-die. Super satisfying.

3. How experienced are you with fantasy, TTRPGs, and gaming in general? How does compare to other TTRPGs you've played?

I have consumed fantasy fiction for as long as I can remember as my father was also a huge fan. I have read and watched most of the major fantasy franchises so I am well versed on the history and tropes. However, I am not as experienced in gaming. My intro to gaming was in college, which was my gateway game into many other games since. Before these campaigns, I had only played two other TTRPG campaigns: one homebrew and one modified Dungeons & Dragons 5e. Compared to the other two campaigns, I feel like there is a lot more synergy between the role playing and the fighting portions of the game. While the combat seems complicated at first, the variety of options allows for more of a roleplay feel, allowing you to show more of your character in your action choices.

4. Tell us about learning the game. What mechanic took the longest to figure out? Did anything click immediately or take you by surprise?

The Techniques. Since they are a combo of magic and physical attack, they require both a dice roll to see if it hits and a card draw to see what it does. It took a while for me to remember what to do and what order to do it in when I wanted to use a technique. But the spells actually were easy for me to use from the beginning, I definitely relied on them more quickly than other options. Now that there is more variety in Actions, I find myself playing with them a lot more too. I definitely did not use them much when we started playing so it's fun to mess around with them now in the second campaign.

5. Where the setting and lore is concerned, what do you think is the most intriguing or exciting aspect of the universe?

I really like the parallels between this world and our actual world. Because the story is loosely similar to our reality, we can pull in references and lore from culture and history that already exists to enrich plotlines in the game. Seeing how magic being an everyday part of life alters the world is fun and interesting. I really like how this addition leads to societal status changes, like how much magic someone has or whether they have Fae heritage. There are still the same old prejudices, but now we have new ones too that change dynamics in interesting ways. We have had half-fae in both of our campaigns so far and it is fun to see how everyone works with the social prejudices and RP restrictions (as they effectively cannot lie) differently.

6. If somebody were to ask you about , what is the first story from around the table that comes to mind?

One of the characters in Gem's party, Mac, is a regular asfalis dude who accidentally absorbed/got possessed by a sentient grimoire that allows him to do... mouth magic? Tongue magic? (My character and I tried not to think about it too hard.) He casts his spells by spitting on or tasting things, which is pretty gross to the rest of the party. He is also pretty anti-establishment which makes him a hard ally to work with, even after the Keepers "deputize" him so they can keep him close and make sure the grimoire doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Early in the campaign we fought a bunch of vampires and needed to find out why they were there and if there were more of them after we had already killed all of them. To make sure we could maintain plausible deniability about the grimoire's… , Gem had to go take a walk outside while Mac... licked... some of the items left behind and the party decided on which path of legal dubiousness we should follow/what we should tell our superiors. I feel like Gem had to take a lot of walks during this campaign, haha.

Just like any other TTRPG, you have to make choices based on the roles you play, but I feel like there are a lot more interesting types of characters you can build immediately because the system is so flexible which leads to greater possible shenanigans (if that is what you like) both in and out of combat. Overall, the game can be as straightforward or as wild as your players want it to be.

7. What improvements would you like to see in the future?

Not so much an improvement, but I would like to see more storylines based on other Amagiate disciplines or even Asfalis roles. We started with a Keeper-based story since that is the foundation of the system and the world. Our second campaign has been a mixed bag of different roles, which is definitely interesting. I think I would like to try other campaigns set in other roles to explore the world more.

8. Anything else you would like to add?

It has been super fun playing in this system and the fact that we have managed to run two campaigns over almost three years with essentially the same group of players shows that there is definitely something here to enjoy whether you are brand new to TTRPGs or very experienced. We also have a cool mix of those who have read the fiction based in this world and those who have not, which makes it very entertaining. But I can see that there is still a lot planned to improve and expand the system in the future, which gives me a lot to look forward to. I have never wanted to GM a game before (I am not extroverted and I do not like to share my creative writings) but my best friend agreed to be Co-Fate Masters with me in an upcoming campaign. Wish us luck, haha.