Pre-game Pitch: Along the Holy Road, people are going missing, both in the lowlands and in the High Moors.

I read over 2 monsters from A Folklore Bestiary and we took two and a half hours getting through the resolution of the cursed People of the Holy City.

I didn’t have to use both monsters but in blending the two together and deciding that they were in the same world and same stretch of haunted highway to a ruined Holy City, both monsters grew more interesting. As mentioned in the post-game Stars & Wishes video below, I did my damnedest to get enough information into the players’ laps so they could make interesting decisions.

Marcus, Iain’s character, is in his third session of this (open table, east marches, whatever) campaign-shaped thing. I love prompting him to describe the previous adventures to hear what the character has taken away from them. Marcus had a scar/mark from his oath with the Dusk-Elves. Going out into the Odd makes you Odd.

Jay and Sam were both playing Into the Odd with us for the first time and it was great seeing them fish out details about their characters, Arnhem & Zachary, from the sparse but evocative info chargen provides. Zachary’s urn with ashes became a centerpiece of the character.

Arnhem was a second generation adventurer/treasure hunter who was in the family business to clear his parents’ debt.

Zachary had been a holder of a few odd jobs, including rat killer and bill collector. When a bill collection went bad, he was prompted to take this job with the Adventurers’ Guild Cooperative to get out of town for a while. Sam’s details about Zachary’s gear-related religion were amazing.

Clearly, bills and debts are on our minds.

There was one fight with a young zealot with a knife and it was harrowing. Two characters very nearly got dropped. They found a notebook and a charcoal pencil in his pockets; 13 names were written and crossed out. This young man had killed more than a dozen people before his 20th birthday.

The character’s interactions with locals, from Farmer Beth to the Widow Kemp to the People of the Holy City’s elder woman with two notebooks.