The Tournament: Set up and Play-By-Post

In the last session we advanced the season to autumn. The players wanted their characters to reconvene at Barow Castle to celebrate the Feast of the Stars. As it is “a night of honours, unions and contests” I decided that Barow Castle would host a Grand Jousting Tournament and the players wanted their characters to take part in it. For scheduling reasons we decided to play the fourth session of the campaign as play-by-post (pbp). 

"I use Focus to dismount."

Play-By-Post

I set up a discord server with three channels: In-game, out-of character and the dice roller (dice maiden, which seems to be the most popular one on discord). We established some ground rules about posting frequency, etiquette and formatting: Post at least once a day or communicate in advance if on a given day you won't be able to. Allow other players to chime in before you post again, unless you are alone in a scene. Put what your character does in italics and “direct speech” between quotations. Out of character questions should preferably be handled in the ooc channel, although sometimes we would post them in the in-game channel to save time but we would put them between brackets or blacken them out through the spoiler formatting.

To prepare the tournament I made a list of 12 other knights with names, their houses and rolled on the Knights table for each of them to get unique types (there shouldn't be another Salt Knight or 2 different Iron Knights). I decided that half of them would be Knight Errants and the other half Gallant Knights (who roll their GD with 2d6). Gallant Knights would have a seat on the Council of a Holding, which allowed me to to impart setting information in a diegetic way. I then put all the names through an online random bracket generator and got the following pairings.

Oh-oh: pvp in the first round!

The Rules of the Joust

The knights are given a tournament lance (d10 long / hefty when mounted), they have armour and shields as established (if it is not on their character sheet they don't have it). They can take any other weapon from their possession into the fight if they wish to. Everyone has at least an additional dagger (d6).

The Knights ride towards each other trying to dismount the opponent. Whoever is dismounted loses. If both knights fall in the same meeting the fight continues on foot until first blood is drawn. Whoever harms their opponent first wins. If both are harmed at the same time the fight continues until one knight is incapacitated. It is deemed unchivalrous to kill or gravely wound the opponent ... but shit happens!

The price for this tournament (on top of the Glory of course) is a Longsword (2d8) and a Round Shield (d4, A1) with the crest of house Barow (a buck head and star).

They rolled 1 and 9: Betrayal (Family)

The Drama

Although the focus of the session was supposed to be the jousting I wanted the players to have enough opportunities to interact meaningful with the setting outside of combat. I didn't prep anything in advance but would roll on the drama table for the NPCs they chose to - or were (in the case of their jousting opponent ) forced to - engage with. I also wanted the drama to be relevant to the ongoing power struggle so I interpreted a lot of the results in the context of the war that had been taken place to topple the old king.

The text in the next couple of posts is taken verbatim from the in-game channel. There were a lot of questions and clarifications in the out-of-character channel that are omitted as are all the mechanical bits.