Back in December, I went to Dragonmeet 2023 in London and offered to run The First Knight at Indie Games on the Hour (IGotH). I orignally wrote this as a public post on my Patreon, and it occurs to me that I should copy it to the game's devlog as well.

In IGotH, GMs offer games in 2-hour timeslots, and pitch them to potential players at the convention. The First Knight has a simple character creation process and a 2-act story structure that fits well into 2 hours (and it's easily extendable for longer timeslots too).

I ran The First Knight for two different groups, and managed to tell two very different stories. Players get to decide on the setting of the story at the beginning of the session, and one group decided to be knights on motorbikes searching for the holy grail in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, while the other group chose to be Greek heroes stopping the Persian army from releasing the Titans into the world.

It took around 30 minutes for the whole character creation process, which includes me introducing the game and safety tools, collaboratively create the setting and have the players pick their characters and answer background questions. This gave us a world that everyone is invested in, and characters that have bonds with each other.

In both games, the story started with the players getting a lead on the artifact's whereabouts. The knights on motorbikes heard a rumour that the holy grail is in a New Age religious site, and the Greek heroes got news that the Persian army is attacking villages in the north.

The first act of the story took each group about 45 minutes. The knights on motorbikes found the holy site under attack by the goons of the Avenger (name of the villain who wanted to use the grail for evil). The knights worked together to dispatch the goons and rescued the New Age priests, who told them that one of the nuns have brought the grail to a safe location. On the stories of the Greek heroes, they found the Persian army had captured the village and used the villagers as slave labour to dig a hole. The heroes fought off the invaders and found a rusted key, as well as a map marking a town nearby.

It took another 45 minutes for each group to complete the second act of the story, bringing it to two hours. The first knight made their way across the wasteland, fighting off truckloads of enemy bikers (they literally rode out of giant trucks), until they got to the sewage tunnels that lead them to the Arena. The holy grail has corrupted the nun protecting it, giving her immense power but also making her evil. The knights managed to knock the grail out of her hand, but then the Avenger arrived. In the end, the First Knight defeated the Avenger, recovered the grail and saved the day. On the Greek heroes' side, they found a town under siege by the Persian army. Two of our heroes (First Knight & Arcane Scholar) distracted the army, while another (Agent) sneaked into town to gather information. Having found out that the box was in Zeus's temple, our heroes got there to recover the box that held the Titans. The siege broke through, and the Persian king (who was also the avatar of Cronus) found the heroes at the temple. An epic fight took place, our hero chosen by Poseidon triumphed over the king of Persia, and secured both the box and the key that could release Titans into our world.

The game uses clocks to keep track of progress (a circle with 6-segment that gets slowly filled in). I found it a useful tool to signal how far the players are getting along in their quest, and also to provide urgency.