Fireborn: First Impressions - The Fire Within
Previously in "First Impressions": Character creation | Gameplay/Combat
I recently talked my roleplaying group into starting up a game of Fireborn, an RPG where all the characters are reincarnated dragons living in human bodies in the modern world. This is my continuing documentation of our gameplay experiences, in hopes of providing fellow dragons and fellow roleplayers with a detailed look inside the system.
In mid-December, we finally managed to sit down and officially kick off the campaign. Although I am including a vast amount of homemade material, the core of the campaign is the published Fireborn adventure titled "The Fire Within." It advertises itself as "the official introductory adventure for the FIREBORN roleplaying game. ... This adventure showcases the best that FIREBORN has to offer, helping you start your new campaign off with all the power, mystery, and savagery of an elder dragon."
Well, it certainly is an ambitious adventure, I'll give them that.
"Act One begins by throwing the characters full-force into the action," it promises, and it does exactly that. The first two tasks that the players face are (in a flashback) averting a war through impromptu diplomacy and then (in the modern day) fighting desperately for survival against an oncoming mob of fanatical enemies. They're both big, dramatic scenes, and in theory could be a smashing introduction to a new adventure -- but in practice, with both players and GM still feeling out the rules, it overreaches.
This is not to say that it is a bad adventure. On the contrary, it's a rich source of ideas and atmosphere, with great plot hooks for an ongoing campaign. Once it recovers from its initial stumbles, it's tightly written and hard-hitting. It's just not the "perfect beginning to any FIREBORN campaign!" that they promise on the back cover. At least ... without preparation, it isn't. The good news is that, knowing what to expect, you can route around the worst of its problems.
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Closing Thoughts
Should you use this adventure module in your Fireborn campaign? Yes. Which is to say: Given the choice between including its content in your campaign and ignoring it, you could do worse than to include it. However, you must plan ahead and find ways to minimize the front-loaded problems, so that you can push through them and enjoy the good bits.
Even if you're not going to run The Fire Within, it's worth a read -- you can strip-mine it for ideas, and its expansion of some of the modern-era content from the GMG (such as how LN-7 will evaluate and treat the characters once the two groups come into contact) should be considered essential.
I recently talked my roleplaying group into starting up a game of Fireborn, an RPG where all the characters are reincarnated dragons living in human bodies in the modern world. This is my continuing documentation of our gameplay experiences, in hopes of providing fellow dragons and fellow roleplayers with a detailed look inside the system.
Well, it certainly is an ambitious adventure, I'll give them that.
"Act One begins by throwing the characters full-force into the action," it promises, and it does exactly that. The first two tasks that the players face are (in a flashback) averting a war through impromptu diplomacy and then (in the modern day) fighting desperately for survival against an oncoming mob of fanatical enemies. They're both big, dramatic scenes, and in theory could be a smashing introduction to a new adventure -- but in practice, with both players and GM still feeling out the rules, it overreaches.
This is not to say that it is a bad adventure. On the contrary, it's a rich source of ideas and atmosphere, with great plot hooks for an ongoing campaign. Once it recovers from its initial stumbles, it's tightly written and hard-hitting. It's just not the "perfect beginning to any FIREBORN campaign!" that they promise on the back cover. At least ... without preparation, it isn't. The good news is that, knowing what to expect, you can route around the worst of its problems.
( Collapse )
Closing Thoughts
Should you use this adventure module in your Fireborn campaign? Yes. Which is to say: Given the choice between including its content in your campaign and ignoring it, you could do worse than to include it. However, you must plan ahead and find ways to minimize the front-loaded problems, so that you can push through them and enjoy the good bits.
Even if you're not going to run The Fire Within, it's worth a read -- you can strip-mine it for ideas, and its expansion of some of the modern-era content from the GMG (such as how LN-7 will evaluate and treat the characters once the two groups come into contact) should be considered essential.
