Played this twice as it was my favourite game of ArcanaCon. I can’t espouse enough how amazingly these stories went. The interaction between players was the most creative of any role playing game I’ve experienced thus far, a lot of which comes from the world and character building that involves everyone at the table. It was also the first time I’ve played an RPG where the game master felt like a player, like one of the team.
Meet Arianna Hammond. She’s a monk in the clergy, living in a tyrannical matriarchal society. All she ever wanted was to serve and follow in her mother Linda’s footsteps. But she also couldn’t stand by and watch her brother Chet struggle, as he started coming into blasphemous magical powers. Magic was reserved for the women of the world, and so when they were outed by Chet’s prophecy of a new age of magic, life fell apart.
The Guardian cursed Chet for his sins, and had Arianna sent away for 4 years as penance. And yet Chet’s words still haunt our society. For if the prophecy is to be believed, Guardian Morgana Gray must marry. Always yearning for her mother’s approval, Guardian Gray decided that marrying Anton was her best option to usher in peace and prosperity for the next 1000 years.
But for Arianna, there is something so familiar about the Guardian’s betrothed. Something in the way they move, the way they speak. Then when night falls and sleep claims her, she realises that her closest confidant, her one comfort in this life, the person she spoke with every night in her dreams, was real. And that the Anton of her dreams was about to marry the woman who had cursed her family, the woman she was sworn to obey.
Next time on Good Society: Does Arianna forsake her duty and run off to France with Anton? Did Chet escape and join the rebellion? Has Guardian Gray been murdered? Alas we will never know as this was a one-shot damnit.