During their visit this Christmas, my nephew said he saw the “Fantasy Roleplay” game in my closet and could we play. He had no idea what it was or what it was about, but he knew something about role-playing games from computers and wanted to try it.
So, I brought out the stuff and let him flip through the character cards, telling him to chose a basic one he liked. He liked the advanced careers, but went with an apprentice wizard. What kind of wizard did he want to be? A necromancer. Okay, then. I dug out the Amethyst order talent a handful of level one spells. I put down some generous stats on a character sheet and found a useful Focus and we were off and running.
He got the hang of building the dice pool pretty quickly, although interpreting the rolls was a bit challenging. It was really fun watch him realize that he could try anything, and that the game wasn’t limited to what a computer was programmed to do. At first he tried to narrate the NPCs’ responses but once he caught on that he was limited in the magic he could cast it went pretty smoothly.
The ‘adventure,’ such as it was, was pretty short and weak, as we didn’t have much time. He’d been sent to investigate strange goings on at a Garden of Morr. Since the gate was locked he tried to climb over but, being an apprentice wizard with Strength 2, failed. A chaos star brought out the priest.
My nephew tried to intimidate him using a spell (can’t remember which), but that didn’t go very well. The priest then used a very similar blessing, which confused him—was he a wizard or a priest? So, I had to explain that genre concept.
Unfortunately, we were interrupted about then and weren’t able to continue with the skeleton attack I had planned, but fun was definitely had and we’ll try again the next time they come for a visit.
I was pretty sure he wouldn’t have a problem with it. He’s played CCGs like Pokemon and Magic so I thought he wouldn’t have problems with the action cards. There was confusion over when he needed a card and when he could just do stuff, but I think that was a failure on my part to properly explain the purpose of the cards.
There was a lot of stuff I glossed over; I certainly picked and chose what he needed to know, but we played by the rules and it went really well. I only wish he’d rolled a chaos star during casting his spell so I could have broken out the miscast deck.