Man, this game was great. I'm not going to give a moment-by-moment recap of the game play, but I will offer some highlights, some observations, and a few amusing anecdotes.

If you've been in the loop, you know that the main purpose of this entire "Noob Crew" project is to find some locals who are interested in gaming and foster that interest into an active hobby. This session was our very first gathering, and had a nice mix of friendly players with varying levels of gaming experience, from complete noobness to veteran-grade storytelling. The chosen game system was Savage Worlds, a fantastic (in my opinion) and super-simple gaming system which I totally adore, and which I felt would be excellent for introducing new gamers to the basic nuances of the hobby. I'm really glad that hypothesis proved correct.

The adventure for the session was called Animal Day, and is a free online adventure produced by some of the folks who worked on the actual game system. It's a quick-and-dirty adventure with a lot of action and a fast pace, and a whole lot of dice-rolling. I chose it for just those reasons, and was glad that the players seemed to pick up the mechanics fairly easily.

In this scenario, the players took the role of members of the Hilliard family, living in a nice picturesque less-than-10,000-people Small Town in the Pacific Northwest area. The adventure started with the family being assaulted by their oddly-coordinated and quite enraged family pets, and followed them through their attempt to get armed and escape town while under sttack from the city's entire animal occupation.

Here's the roster, in alphabetical order:

• Beth, a slightly-experienced proto-gamer playing "Uncle Steve"
• James, a fairly experienced gamer playing "Dr. Dan Hilliard" (the father)
• Julia: another fairly experienced gamer playing "Ralphie Hilliard" (the 9-year-old)
• Nathanael: Me, a well-versed gamer filling the role of Game Master
• Nievita: another well-versed gamer playing "Cindy Hiliard" (the 15-year-old)
• Rebecca: a novice gamer playing "Eleanor Hilliard" (the mother)

Everyone got into their characters and game roles pretty quickly, although I think Cindy was a bit outclassed for the scenario, as her abilities were mostly social. While the scenario offered a few "social alternatives" to a small handful of situations, most of the emphasis was on action and either fighting or escaping, and social skills have little worth against enraged animals. Ralphie had Animal Knowledge, and while it was theoretically possible for the two characters' players to work together and socially resolve an encounter, the likelihood of that happening in one of the scant few moments of social possibility in the scenario made that option inconvenient, and thus completely forgotten and/or ignored.

Also, the Ralphie character needed at least a single rank in Fighting or Shooting to be useful - having a high throwing skill but a low Strength made it useless, and without shooting the slingshot was pretty worthless too. Same for Cindy - she and the uncle were the best fighters, but her low Strength (which didn't match her background as the "Jock") made fighting pretty ineffective. Another clash with Cindy was her lack of a climbing skill.

The characters got wounded very quickly, but somehow they just barely managed to make it out of town alive.

My personal favorite moments:
* Ralphie going hog wild crazy with a bat and never ever hitting
* James's consistently unfortunate dice rolls, which earned the dad the title Dr. Useless
* Rebecca's consistently amazing dice rolls, which turned the mother into one animal-massacring force of a murderous motherly doom machine
* Nievita's second encounter with the occupants of the Short Bus. I sense Glenn and Renee and the Big Black Bus Driver becoming common cameos of future games.
* The various adventures of Uncle Steve - emotional elephants, obstructing car windows, hardware store clerks and more, Steve will be a force with which to be reckoned in the chaos of the new age.
* The labradoodle. Definitely the labradoodle. I wonder if that kid ever got away...

Also, for the first time ever, my favorite quotes of the session were from my own mouth. =)

Anyway, the session was awesome. They survived the assaults and got to the boat and hauled out of town. The lion almost destroyed them, but they made it to the docks with only one benny left amongst them. Good job! Everyone wants to play more, so perhaps next month will see the return of the Hilliard family, back to reclaim the streets of Earltown?

I posted a Story Time thread on the Savage Worlds forums, too.