Splitting The Party

Running the Keep On The Borderlands for my newb friends have proven to be easy until now. I made up the game so to have a pool of eight players, and three to all of them showing up from session to session. Now, this works well as long as I have all the action centered around a small area, and the party beginning the session entering the Caves and ending heading back to the Keep. Now that I want to introduce some plot, and enlarge the playing area, I have to make a decision about how to handle absent players. I don't really like the NPC-fication of half of the party from session to session, especially since I don't really want to have the "if you're not present your character can't die" rule back in charge. Thus, while figuring out an alternative, I came out with this.

The Rings Of Fellowship: Out of a single piece of Starmetal (yeah I totally stole it from OOTS), a powerful Wizard can craft 4 to 9 Rings Of Fellowship. Rings made out of the same piece of Starmetal are naturally connected to each other, and are called "a series". Every Ring has the following powers:

• Teleport: Once per day the Ring can be activated to teleport the owner near the bearer of another Ring of the same series. There are no limits on distance, as far as the two are on the same Plane and no spoiling magic effect is active.

• Message: Three times per day the Ring can be used to deliver a message of no more than 30 words to all the bearers of Rings of the same series. Sending the message requires full concentration for three rounds, otherwise the message is spoiled and may arrive with delays or incomplete.

Once worn, the Ring is bound to the bearer until his/her death. If the Character gets killed, it can be used by another character. Of course, if the Ring falls in the wrong hands it can be a really kind of a problem given its special powers.

I came out with this on the fly, so if you have any suggestion/improvement I'd like to consider making some changes. Perhaps we could work on a FLAILSNAILS variant.