Between Ages

Ref and the players are sitting down for their first session in a while. Ref: Okay, so I thought rather than trying to pick up where we left off we could move into a new Age. This is generally twenty years or so, advancing you both from being Young Knights to being Mature, in your prime! Moss: Oh right, we might improve our Virtues here, I think. Ref: Yeah, you can reroll each of your Virtues on d12+d6, keeping the new result only if it’s higher than your current score. The players both do this, improving some of their Virtues. Moss: Hey, my Vigour went from 6 to 18! Tal: What!? That can’t be right. Ref: Remember, this has been decades since we last saw the characters. Moss, think of what might have happened to cause you to improve your Vigour so much. Moss: Well it was pretty bad before. I guess I started out kind of soft and have been hardened by all these years as a Knight. Ref: Yeah makes sense. Now you also both choose a Pursuit. Ref shows them the Pursuits list and each player chooses one. Ref: Now I did some rolls before we started to see how things have changed around the Realm, but you’ll have to discover that for yourselves. Tal: Wouldn’t we know how things are going? Ref: Right… well, I’ll give you a brief overview, but let’s say that you’ve spent the last few years away from the Realm, returning now to see what’s happened. Ref gives them a very broad description of what’s changed in the Realm, who rules each Holding, but leaves it very vague. Ref: Okay, let’s work out where you start.

Advancing the game to the next Age can be daunting, leaving a narrative gap of a few decades and sometimes having the characters go through dramatic changes, like we see here with Moss. This should be embraced rather than feared, and Moss seems happy enough to justify their sudden surge in Vigour when Ref reminds them that it wasn’t all that sudden in the fiction of the world. We see there’s a slight disconnect between the knowledge of the players and their characters. Ref is clearly excited for the players to go and explore the Realm, seeing what’s changed, but Tal points out that the Knights would probably already know many of these things. Saying that the Knights have been absent from the Realm is a decent fix for this, but Ref could also have the players ask the questions they want to know. Maybe even make a game of it, saying that they can each ask three questions, representing that their Knights wouldn’t know of every happening in every corner of the Realm. Giving them a surface level overview of the whole Realm might be excessive, when it’s likely that they just want to know about some of the non-player characters they’re invested in. It’s another good example of the power of just asking the players what they want, instead of trying to second-guess them.