A small, satifying session

Today, I ran my TS&R Jade game, but only one player besides my boys could come. Tomorrow is my wife's birthday, so before the game we went out and my mother-in-law treated us to Korean style sashimi and spicy fish stew, so we were stuffed and kinda tired. 

With only three players, and my younger son pretty tired when we stared, we only played for about 2 hours (well, 1.5 hours after all the initial chit chat and organizing). 

But, it was still a pretty fun and satisfying session. The characters did some shopping, including buying a variety of signal whistles and deciding what meaning each one had. Steven (my younger) bought five. They also bought war horses and/or barding for the horses.* 

We went over a few recent rumors, but they decided to follow the one new rumor, which was that the nearby yokai village had a smith who could make special weapons. They set out from town on their new horses. The first leg of the journey, on the main road, was uneventful. Then they turned off the main road, forded the river, and headed cross country to the village. 

Here they had a random encounter, with a pack of seven giant ferrets. They hadn't encountered them before, and weren't sure how tough they would be to fight, so they considered running away. But then Steven decided that his PC would blow his "cat" whistle. I rolled reactions on 2d6, got a 3, and so decided the ferrets were hostile and headed towards the party. After more discussion of what to do, Steven decided to blow his "eagle" whistle. One failed morale check (with penalty) later, the ferrets scattered from the "predator."

At the village, which was an abandoned human village, everything was quiet. Denis is playing a hengeyokai, so I told him that he knew most yokai are more active at night. They went to one house, in inhabited by kappa (frog/turtle/monkey river creatures) who gave them directions to the smith, but suggested they spend the day at the inn. They went to the inn, run by shun yao (Chinese dryads), and got rooms. They then went to the shrine and left offerings to hopefully build a good relationship with the yokai. 

In the evening, they briefly toured the yokai's bakemono (goblin) market. Then they went to the smith, who they found was a mujina (Companion Set version, faceless humanoid). After a scare, they returned and negotiated the silvering of some weapons, and insetting of jade in other weapons. 

The silver weapons are of course good for lycanthropes, some undead, etc. Jade weapons have the 3E weapon property of "ghost touch" so they can be used to fight incorporeal creatures without being magical. 

That's where we ended the session. Next time, I'll hit them with the yokai village's request...a powerful monster they need driven off or destroyed.

*And I realized I'd made a mistake with the barding ACs in the equipment lists, which I need to fix.