Family Tegel Manor Game, Sessions 0+1
I've been wanting to run Tegel Manor for a few years now, I keep thinking of it as a Halloween one-shot, but that just never panned out.
So instead I am running it for my partners and their kid, as our previous family game, Copperopolis, kind of died out months back. Since I did not want to deal with rulesets and since the kid struggles with them anyway, we are doing Primeval 2d6, or something of that ilk. Inspired by reading about Havoc's Arden Vul Weasels game.
Each of the players get 3 hearts or "hits", a general class or occupation, two things they are good at, one thing they are bad at, three possessions of note and a magical skill or ability of some kind.
The party in this case is Polly/Princess Petunia, a Party Princess/children's entertainer, Kala the Cat Witch, who is.....a cat and is a witch, and Ser Jokel Rump, a rural noble and distant relation to the Rumps of Tegel Manor.
Session Recap
The trio of characters find their way to Tegel Village, where Polly and Kala had been hired to host a birthday party for the child of one of the local well off farmers. At this party they are approached by Sir Runic the Rump, one of the few living Rumps in the area who tries to convince them to buy off Tegel Manor off him for the simple sum of 99.99 (of what? I dunno, what have you got?)
The party agree and the next morning get in Jokel's coach and head out to the manor. Along the way they are stopped by a trio of green fog-like cultists of Tsathoggus, the frog god, who attempt to press the party into becoming cultists too.
Polly agrees to it, but insists the group does need to go to Tegel Manor first, but promise they'll be back to join the acolytes later. The acolytes give them a token (a dried frog stretched on a wooden frame) and direct them to their temple, then leave.
Arriving at the manor house the party go in through the front door, are met with Bertalan the butler, who is a Balrog Ghost. After chatting with him for a bit they are left to their own devices, and spend the rest of the session mostly examining the various portraits of the Rump family tree hanging around the grand foyer. This results in Polly being cursed with anger and itchy feet, and Jokel with a small rain cloud that follows him around.
The anger Polly deals with by spending some time in introspection, the itchy feet curse is lifted by Kala's witchy magic. Unfortunately she did not have the right ingredients at hand (paw?) to dispel the rain cloud, so Jokel spends the rest of the time slightly damp and hiding under his umbrella.
For their next course of action the group decide they should head to the west wing of the house to try and get into the western tower and get a good look of the surroundings.
Observations
This was only an hour long session, since I don't really have much more than that in me for this type of game, and the kid won't really handle more anyway. The game is effectively freeform, save for simply rolling opposed 2d6 a few times to see some results.
One of those was in the case of Polly, who used her ability to do a magical girl transformation and get into her Princess Petunia character to avoid the magical rage, and then used that power of friendship and positivity to work her way through that rage (requiring a roll which she succeeded).
I was not really intending on writing session reports about these games, because they're going to be a very impromptu and short affairs, again mostly done for the benefit of the kid, but I have been intrigued by Tegel Manor and so I think I'll try and write about them when I have something worth saying.
Right now what I have to say is this - I am going to print out the Revised version of the adventure and use that going forward. It's not a lot, but the minor expansion of the key helps out (the judge's guild classic minimalist keys are great, but I do not want to be putting in...like any effort into this game outside of running it), and it also lists where all of the Rump family portraits are located next to the portraits themselves, not just as simple small notations on the map!
Beyond that - I do really like the map for this dungeon, Tegel Manor is just pretty in that big, sprawling and nonsensical way that a proper haunted house dungeon/adventure location should be!