This weekend, I had the opportunity to run REIGN for the first time. We wanted to get the full feel of the ORE system, so we went for one roll characters and a one roll company. The next time, I'd probably do the company first and then set a few dice for character roll-up so that the characters fit the company envisioned, but in our case, things worked out quite fine. 

In the days before we played, the others popped some ideas about what they wanted to play, thirty years war, the black guard and a siege scenario were mentioned. I went into the game unprepared, having the chance of the dice rolls lead the way to adventure.

The players had a blast with One Roll Characters. All of us have a fondness for life path systems, although we're all more used to more elaborate setups (Artesia, for example). Two of the three players, J and T, rolled highly similar life paths, so they decided to play twins. The third player had a somewhat different character, but we had no problem tying the three together with a shared past. Since all of them came up with the "abled sailor" or better result, they opted for a pirate scenario. This was a fateful decision, since I had acquired the news Pirate's Guide to Freeport in pdf form only two days before that.

REIGN and Freeport mix well. In case you don't know; the PGtF is a systemless source book Green Ronin put out recently to build upon it's adventure and setting line (they plan to make system support booklets, so they won't be bitten again when D&D gets a new edition). It has rough sketches of a game world in case people don't know where to place an island with a pirate/trader port on their game world's map, and has just enough information to proxy as a generic fantasy world.

I started in medias res and had the players run into an ambush of two dozen mooks while they were underway on a sabotage mission to stop the elven longship to leave the harbor the very next morning. At first I hesitated to send two dozen mooks against a group of three PCs, but with a bit of Lie and Intimidate, those two dozen were two halved dozens before anyone reached combat distance ("You just lead the charge brother, you won't last very long with the blue pox anyway!"). The rest of the mooks were easily dispatched by the spear wielding officer and singing herald on one side, and the dodgy twins on the other. Morale of this scene: If you want mooks to be effective, take at least ten per PC, they will thin out quickly! In other words: The mook rules work, and make for heroic entrances.

After a bit of intimidating interviewing, our little band of maritime ne'er-do-wells stole a boat and rammed it into the steering rig of the elven longship, just to realize the sturdy boat they were in was in fact a smuggler boat with a lot of hidden compartments, so it broke apart under their feet. With a bit of jumping and acrobatics, two of the guys got to the quay, while the other struggled a bit. Their flight from the docks was less than heroic, and one of the ship's guard managed a lucky slash across the younger twins' face – two wound boxes of killing damage to the head turned a funny-happy situation into an "uh-oh" moment – the transition from mook fight to minor npc fight was quite intense (on another note, I could have send another thirty mooks with about the same amount of danger, but we already had that, and I wanted a bit of a real fight).