Setting the Scene: Dragon Age Tabletop Gaming

I'm running Dragon Age for the first time this week. I've decided to run the intro adventure written in the box set (seriously - this is why box sets are awesome - it's all you need!), and I really want to hook my players. We did character creation on Friday and ended up with a human Circle mage, a city elf Circle mage, a surface dwarf rogue, and a freeman (human) warrior. During character creation we picked long-term goals for everyone and some short-term goals on how to reach them.

I find that we tend to skip this step quite often when making new characers. A big part of it is that we don't actually play really long campaigns that often. We like to jump from system to system or GM's adventure to different GM's adventure (as happens with D&D 4th Ed. mostly), and that means we don't get much past 2 or 3 character levels into a game. I want Dragon Age to be different. The first box set narrowly confines players and GM's alike to levels 1 through 5, and then we'll get three more box sets covering the next three sets of five levels until we hit level 20, or the level cap. There's something about this approach that's really inspiring to play a long campaign straight from levels 1 through 20. Another big part of it is that I intend to run one published adventure after another. the box set has one, then the DM screen has one, and the adventure book, Blood in Feralden, just released, has three more. Beyond that it also has several adventure seeds to get others going. That's a lot of adventure (at least one per level), and it makes my job that much easier.

I also am trying something else new with Dragon Age. I just got a Droid X two weeks ago and am completely loving my new little (huge) smart phone. Dice roller apps are fun once, but I wanted to figure out how I could run a game completely using my phone for notes to monster stats to tests for the players to roll for. I'll have my book with me on Friday, but I've prepared notes and taken pictures from the book and completely loaded up my phone.

So Dragon Age has been a bit of an inspiration as of late. You can expect articles in the coming days or weeks talking about our character hooks, planning a session using only my phone, and reporting back on the game play. Of course, just as another little preview, we're also going to be doing some Christmas gift idea posts/year in review articles very soon. It's a busy time of year, so why not be just a little more ambitious?