A Gift from Dave Morris - Silent Night

Dave Morris has provided everyone with a Christmas present; a detailed, atmospheric, Yule-themed adventure - Silent Night. If possible, I plan to run it while we're away over the holiday. 

Yippee! It's Christmas! Let's Danse.

I'll have convert it - it is written up for GURPS, with which I have zero familiarity*[1]. But to what? To Dragon Warriors? The adventure is set in Legend, after all. And that is a possibility - I actually think that Dragon Warriors is a pretty nifty system for handling gritty D&Dish games. But unless you are going to populate the PC party with a bunch of magic using characters, or exotic Assassins, mechanically the PC Knights (and maybe a Barbarian or two) will be pretty much the same. That's fine in a game where character, personality, and history emerges through play. But for this one shot - that is not so much focused on combat - it is more likely I will try to run it in a d100 system, considering OpenQuest 2e, RuneQuest 6, and Magic World. 

As attracted as I am to RQ6 - it is a wonderful, elegant iteration of d100 fantasy - the players will be my wife, brother, sister, mother, and cousin. That's Christmas for you. While they all have played RPGs before, it'll need to be straightforward pick-up-and-play. When I started to stat-up some pregenerated characters in RQ6, I realised that the character sheet would likely baffle a player being handed the sheet ten minutes before the game begins. Plus, we'd have the confusion over Special Effects, which are a breeze... once you have been involved in combat as few times. So I decided that I'd run it using OpenQuest 2e, which won out over Magic World thanks to the rationalised skill list and the greater versatility of the magic system.*[2] 

The players will have the choice of the following pregenerated characters:

Sir Werian Keppel

A knight, returning from the Crusades. Pious. Uncomplicated.

Brother Abel

Werian's personal priest and tutor. Impatient. Stern.

Hugh Smithson

Werian's squire. Hulking. Brutish.

Alan of Barndale

Troubador. Cynical. Flippant.

Soliman the Saintly

A Ta'ashim convert to the True Faith. Self-taught theologian and Ellesland-ophile.

Nick Lliedr

A greedy rogue. But has a knack for solving problems.

I will be trawling the internet for suitable images with which to decorate the character sheets, and thinking carefully about the place of Battle Magic in a game with the atmosphere of a fantastical Dark Ages/Early Medieval Britain.

*[1]Gurps intimidates me. Even GURPS Lite sends me running for the hills... while I can see the appeal, I can't see it being the kind of game that I could interest our players in.

*[2]In other circumstances I might well make a different choice. With strong player commitment, RQ6 would edge closer to being my choice, while Magic World is a good for Sword & Sorcery thanks to the way that magic using PCs will, by the book, be uncommon.