Wolfspell Actual Play - Part 1, Setup

On Sunday afternoon, I gathered to me three players, some dice, paper, and a few copies of the rules for Wolfspell.

After settling in and waiting to see if any of my other players planned to make it that night, I took a deep breath and started. I had read the rules a couple of times, I’d envisioned a few scenarios, but I took it to heart not to force anything. I wanted to see this game work in it’s intended, no prep environment.

More or less, we flowed through the rules in order. The premise - You are adventurers changed into wolves to complete a quest or curse - then, I showed my players how the dice worked - One die is blood, One die is Wolf, Subtract the lower from the higher for your total. Results range from 4+ Blood to 4+ wolf, with a 0 being either a Blood 1 or Wolf 1. After that, we jumped right into character creation.

Check it out, below.


Wolfspell generally makes this easy. At the core, you have a list of blurbs which describe character traits and players choose from them, each granting a bonus. Usually, a +3 to their blood die on a specific task. 

I started with laminated 4x6 index cards, upon which I’d put each blurb and power from the book, and a line for recording Feral . After reviewing them all and letting players talk, we ran into a slight snag - I was not sure if the rules implied we should dole out one apiece, or dole out the remaining abilities until all of them were in play. We opted for one card apiece.

The first person to lock in chose “Many have tested my sword-arm…” followed by “I am most alive in the houses, halls, and alleyways…” and “I am witness to stranger worlds than most…” after that we started the important bit - Asking each other leading questions.

“Name one of the people your sword-arm has slain who now waits to take revenge in the afterlife?” I asked our sword-armed player. And almost without missing a beat she offered “My Father” and I knew this was going to be good. It turned out that Jona had killed her father in a duel, which wasn’t supposed to be to the death. Oh, and he was the King of the clan. After he died, since they obviously couldn’t promote her after such an incident, someone else took the throne.

Our very human-oriented Houses and Halls character, Vegeir, decided he was the steward who had run the King’s mead hall. “What made you leave your post at the mead hall?” He said he walked off the job, rather than serve the ‘unblooded whelp’ of a new king, who certainly hadn’t collected anything like the trophies which graced the hall. He ended up going to stay outside of the town with a loner, rather than live in the center of the clan where he would have to deal with this inexperienced usurper.

I asked that loner , Inwyr, “What was your first supernatural encounter.” “When I summoned a Raven to me, with a sacrifice of blood.” Inwyr had been called a charlatan, when he tried to warn the king about a prophecy of peril. He’d then performed the summoning as a first step to try and prove to the king that he wasn’t lying - Even though he had been at the time, for his own purposes. The Raven he summoned told him, he hadn’t been far off the mark. Asked where he learned it, he said from his grandmother - but until then, he had never believed her tales of magic.

I, looking a little bit forward, wanted to go beyond these and asked the players about some personal, important belongings of theirs. Ones I intended to make part of the sacrifice for the Spell. Jona was easy - “What is your sword’s name?” she said it was Crow’s Breath. What did Vegeir take from the mead hall? At first he said a troll head, but that didn’t seem all that portable, so we chose a necklace of troll ears instead, slain by the old king. Inwyr went with a pouch of medicinal herbs from his grandmother.

Each time folks offered the item, a few nods went around the table. I think there was a general little thrill about where this was going, people could see that having these cool things made them a bit vulnerable.

In my head, I thought about how to spread the items out - Arms, Glory, and Wisdom went down in my notes. I also briefly imagined that a cool nod might be making the herbs - after their sacrifice for the spell - a key element they might have to retreat and get to cure some injury. I didn’t end up using it, but the idea stuck, and I might refer to it in a future game.

I found that because of Wolfspell’s no prep nature, I ended up with with a lot of these little ‘That isn’t perfect, but maybe next time…’ details to draw upon. I didn’t feel like I was losing anything, letting them fall aside where they might be imperfect for the game at hand.

Next, came the spell. I went over the options, and two players jumped at the idea of some kind of curse, and they would have to change their skin and go drive a rival clan out. The Inwyr’s player hesitated. He had originally envisioned a game that didn’t have so direct a combative setup. We talked a bit, and with reassurance that there would certainly be more going on in the game, he agreed to stick with that choice if we incorporated some other elements.

I think here, one of the key factors was explaining that in the end, the roll each spell talked about would not, necessarily, be better for the players if they got more +blood bonuses. I tried to kind of not call out the results of the ‘When the spell is lifted…’ roll - The roll you make at the very end of the game to get a kind of long term outcome of the spell - myself I don’t think hiding that roll from the players is the right answer, but I do feel like it’s a big punchline, and *I* don’t want to be the one to kind of speak out loud of it. I think even if people know it is coming, if I don’t come out and talk about it until the end, it retains a great deal of tension. That said, I’m not sure what the best answer is, here.

I targeted myself for getting to the change in under the first hour of play. I know I tend to run my game long, but I wanted to make a big deal of the setup and drag players into the scenario they’d painted with as much detail as possible. I spent a bit of a time with leading questions, to try and tease out the chain of events that brought the characters together and how they found out about this magic.

We decided the new king had not been the warrior the old one had. He’d allowed for a rival clan to impinge on their borders. He thought he could talk them down, but they had already camped out nearby - And due to an ancient pact, armed conflict within the clan’s lands was taboo. Which is why the Old King had fought everyone off well before they got to the affected lands, and was viewed as a real warmonger and glory seeker.

(After the game, we realized that technically, one might see Jona’s duel with her father as breaking this taboo. Which may be why the rival clan showed up… but we digress)

All three of the PC’s then had reasons to dislike the new king, or at least feel uneasy about those camped nearby, but had their hands tied. However, Inwyr had once found a dead wolf with a necklace. His grandmother had one just like it. When asked, she’d said it was a matter of great magic, which only the giants could bestow.

He proposed this solution, only the clan had already slain all the giants. Except one, according to a scout who Jona knew, who claimed while kind of drunk to have seen one in the nearby, very hard to reach foothills.

To climb up and face this giant though, they would need equipment, and some kind of offering. Vegeir stepped up, selling one of the old king’s chalices for a dozen goats, three casks of mead, and outfitting them for their multi-day journey over snow and ice.

Skip ahead a few days, and the Trio come before the giant, half asleep beside a roaring bonfire in a small vale in the mountains. I kind of wanted this to be a narrative interlude, and start kind of feeding players a sense of awe about the world. While they’d seen troll trophies and heard stories, actually bumping into your first big monster is kind of a big deal.

The Giant seemed a little touchy to be disturbed, but snapped open a cask with his fingernail and took a bite out of a live bleating goat. Seemingly satisfied, he asked them what their kind, who had done so much damage to his, would possibly seek him for.

Magic, of course.

The giant told them that humans were incapable of believing in magic, so Inwyr showed the giant the necklace, and told the giant he was wrong. “Not all humans.” He knew what the necklace was, and that the three of them needed that kind of enchantment.

The giant slowly hauled himself up, looming over them. He told them that Humans needed to forget things, for this kind of magic to work. They had to set aside many of the things that made them human. He told them they needed to put aside Arms, Glory, and wisdom, and then with one giant hand, swept the bonfire off the rock it sat on, and waited.

Jona put her sword down first. Then Vegeir placed the king’s necklace down, and finally, Inwyr put his grandmother’s medicine bag on the stone. The Giant nodded, and pulled out twine and a huge metal awl.

With his bare hands he snapped half of the crosspiece from Crow’s breath, and then used the awl to punch a hole straight through the metal. Then he ripped the ears right off of Vegeir’s strand, and put new holes in them. Finally he poured out the rare herbs from Inwyr’s pouch, and began to tear the ancient, tough leather into strips.

The three of them held their collective breath as the giant broke their heirlooms and treasures, and then with ugly, scrap material from his bag began to weave new necklaces, each with the damaged remains of their belongings front and center.

He said “Rest in this vale and when the moon rises, you’ll have the magic you asked for.”

And as the Giant retreated to his cavern, hauling goat and keg easily, that’s exactly what they did.

I had managed to keep this opening to the first hour, with a little time to spare. The wolves were changed and off and running shortly thereafter, which I’ll get to in a follow up post. I’m not really sure what this says about me and my gaming group in terms of setup. I have a lot of demand for a good, coherent world to play in, and all of these establishing details gave me great hooks to lean on. I think, if this were a con game? I’d definitely step it up. Some situations where I had a question to ask or an angle to play, I deliberately chose to send more time and give the same question to everyone, to build a piece of the world. Making sure everyone played a part in choosing the spell and that they all had something to sacrifice was huge, but I do this a few other times in the second part as well.

I think I kind of wanted to linger, to enjoy playing with such a small table, and really playing up the seriousness of the world. A few scenes in when the players faced their first really perilous task - Climbing down the mountain - and a wolf became injured, I sprung the injury rules on them and people tensed up and realized just how much danger their wolves were in. It turned out to be one of the game’s big moments for me, and kind of hammered home the tone without me having to spell it out too drastically. 

Continued in Part 2