accomplishedTo put it mildly, Friday night was an interesting and fun game session of character generation, with a bit of other stuff going on as well, and I was pretty happy with the results at the end of the evening. I'm not going into detail about the game universe and the mechanics here, but suffice it to say I gave the players a 15-minute briefing about the game universe, and then the two players got into creating a couple of River of Heaven characters. Both players came into the process with a basic idea of what they wanted, but modified this based on the game system and other "real time" concerns.
Angela settled on creating a bounty hunter, with a bit of an explorer's soul in her, named Malina Arkestro born into the ruling family of one of the Kentauran Hegemony worlds, who wanted more out of life and is something of a thrill-seeker. She works as a bounty hunter, but has been known to take jobs bodyguarding others as well.
Mark, on the other hand, looked through the list of possible profession types, and decided to play Malek Sadarustak, a native of an Outremer world that had been forgottten about for quite some time and had only been rediscovered, a historian with an interest in archaeology. He's also led a bit of a rough and tumble life since leaving his homeworld, and so can defend himself to some degree.
Two interesting characters, to say the least. Both players had a good time creating the characters for River of Heaven, and liked the simplicity of the game system and the character generation process. Both players are fans of the science fiction genre, though hadn't read any of the Alastair Reynolds's novels that are the inspiration for the game. Since we had a bit of time left after character generation, I took the two players through a simple set-up of a basic adventure hook.
The characters have come aboard a small ship (with an NPC pilot, Tavin Derrang) to explore the ruins of a derelict ship floating in space that Malek had heard might have some historical importance; he'd hired Malina to serve as his bodyguard. The two player characters were able to board the vessel, found the bodies of the crew still in a vitrified state, and then discovered they were not alone on the ship. Needless to say, the player characters had a harrowing time escaping the vessel, their own ship nearly succumbing to... well, that would be telling! <g>
Both players agreed that they had a terrific time creating the characters and playing a small sequence, and rather would have continued on, but it was getting late. Needless to say, both they and I are looking forward to getting to play the game once I'm fully ready to do so.
And a good evening was had by all.