|
Due to the last minute cancellation of a game last week by the GM I ended up running an impromptu one-shot session with all of 15 minutes planning. It turned out to be one of my favourite games of late. The party started as steampunk-esque sky pirates, boozing it up on a pleasure island after a big score. This doesn't last long before an imperial patrol turns up to bring them to justice. Out-gunned and desperate they flee the island, managing to stay ahead of the patrol only thanks to some clever planning by their navigator and the ship's clockwork AI. They hadn't had a chance to resupply, so they stop at a supposedly uninhabited island to hunt animals, gather fruits and the like. Highlights of the next few hours include: The discovery of a local tribe who speak a dialect based entirely around technical jargon, being the descendants of a crashed engineering crew. The protocol bot was the only one who could understand their language initially, so all negotiations between the party and the locals consisted of me whispering messages to the bot, and the bot interpreting them and passing them on to everyone else in whatever manner he liked. The discovery that the huge crabs they'd found on the beach earlier were used by the natives to produce a highly hallucinogenic liquer, leading to much of the party tripping balls on crab juice. One of the players asking if the locals had any interesting beliefs or quirks and rolling really well to find out. I'd had nothing in mind so decided that yes, the main interesting local quirk is their Rite of Manhood: To become a man on the island each youth basically bungee jumps off the edge of the island and through the swarm of sky-sharks below. Those that survive are fully fledged men. Of course the party decides it would be an excellent idea if young Theo The Cabin Boy were to undergo this process... mostly so that the rest of them can rob the village while everyone is gathered on the beach for the ritual. A plan is formed! Theo makes his ritual jump, the party grabs a big shiny stone from the village and makes their way towards their ship. Their resident aeronautical adventurer swoops down on his glider to pluck Theo from the end of his bungee cord and return him to safety. But suddenly! The would be thieves are noticed by the crowd and the engineer and adventurer are set upon by a swarm of sky sharks. Theo and the adventurer swoop under the island and back around the other side, as the ship's AI brings it in over the beach to rescue the rest of the party from the angry locals. Everyone gets aboard and under way just before the sky shark swarm reaches the beach, and they sail away with their glowing prize and the sounds of native/shark related carnage on the air behind them. The glowing rock turns out to be an Imperial control stone, giving them the potential to shut down the Imperial fleets at will. With some planning, some favours from other pirates, and a healthy dose of insane bravado brought on by the huge quantities of hallucinogenic crab juice they're all still chugging they set about crashing the Imperial throne room, killing the emperor, and declaring a republic. They manage to do this, thanks in part to catching a leviathanesque sky-whale and hiding the control rod inside it. They casually sacrifice the rest of the pirate fleet and countless civilians to get their whale past the outer defences, activate the control rod, and open a way into the throne room. Things get bloody as their by now religious visions turn them on each other as well as the emperor, but by the time the dust settles Captain Shellshock is the head of a bold new Utopian republic in the sky. The players have asked for a sequel session, 200 years later, in which the True Sons of Theo the Cabin Boy gather to overthrow the by now corrupt republic. I think I'll update things to less steampunk and more Sky Captain And The World of Tomorrow type antics for that. I consider this a success for a game with no planning, where everything was being made up half a step ahead of the players' actions.
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2012 16:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:40 |
|
|
Today I had a game that was both a best and a worst. The worst part: I'm running a 7th Sea campaign with five players, four of whom are excellent, the fifth is Larry. Other than generally having a slightly irritating personality (it's like sitting in a room with 4chan incarnate), Larry appears to be one of those people who just can't make a character that fits the party/campaign. In a previous game that was centred around investigation and intrigue he built a combat monster, complained that he had nothing to do because there weren't many fights, and then didn't use his non-combat skills in situations where they were relevant. For this game, having been told that it's about a bunch of heroes and rogues with hearts of gold in a world of pretty black and white morality he turns up with... a morally ambiguous assassin working for a family with a reputation for being evil. I'm dubious, but he assures me he won't act like a dick with the character, and has a reason for the character to be associated with everyone else (they have a ship, he has a lot of money and wants to leave town fast, so signs on as a passenger and bankrolls the voyage). Three sessions later he has been consistently antagonistic to every other character and it's reached the point where the captain is struggling not to throw him overboard. They have a conversation where he insists he hasn't done anything wrong. At this point we actually break and have an OOC conversation to work out what is intentional character stuff and what's not. Turns out he really isn't aware that he's been constantly antagonistic towards everyone. What follows is a half hour derail in which everyone explains to him the issues that have been coming up. I tell him that I don't mind him having an unpleasant character as long as he's aware of it, and as a player is okay with the consequences of his character not being liked. If that's not a role he's comfortable in he is welcome to re-do his character to gel better. Hopefully the talk will have cleared things up, but if he doesn't improve I may end up asking him to leave after the next session. On a brighter note though, the bits of the session that weren't Larry based were some of the best I've had recently. All the other players have very well developed characters with a lot of interaction going on. The players are calling for scenes based on what will be dramatically interesting, I'm not having to do any prodding to get good roleplay out of them. This session I basically did nothing as a GM other than say "Okay, let's cut to a scene between you two now," or "Alright, you walk in at this point." I didn't have to throw a single outside event at them the whole session and they loved it. People were standing up, acting out the physical elements to go with their conversations, getting very intensely into it. I almost feel bad about how little work I'm having to do, but everyone says they're having a great time other than issues with Larry.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2012 01:54
|
|
|
I've been playing in a fun little Lady Blackbird campaign (a free rules light sky pirates type thing, for those who haven't seen it), and the GM just tried an experiment that I think worked out in quite a cool way. We'd been getting close to finally meeting Uriah Flint the pirate king, the man we were on a mission to find. Rather than have the meeting the GM skipped us ahead to immediately afterwards, where some sort of drastic poo poo/fan collision had occurred. All the players had to give a one sentence summary of what was up with their characters after the disaster such as "Cyrus is on a mission" or "Kale is lost and confused." The player playing the pilot in our group chose "Has turned his coat." He started the game in our ship, The Owl, leaving most of the rest of the crew behind to be captured by Imperials. I was playing Cyrus Vance, owner of the Owl, notorious smuggler, and former Imperial Navy officer. I started off on an Imperial garrison world, on a mission to get The Owl back. You have no money, no ship, and you're stuck on a rock full of enemy soldiers, what do you do? Steal an Imperial ship obviously. Of course, they need a crew of hundreds to fly so you're going to have to steal a crew too. One back-alley murder later I had a Captain's uniform and a ship now lacking a Captain. I stride aboard full of pomp and bravado and manage to intimidate the rest of the crew into believing I'm from Imperial Intelligence and that they've just been assigned to for a special mission. Some other things happen with the rest of the players who are scattered around the place, there are some explosions and bold escapes, and we reach a confrontation. Snargle the pilot has just resupplied The Owl on the equivalent of Tortuga when my stolen warship arrives to demand his surrender. We get the following exchange:  = Cyrus = Snargle: Crew of the Owl, by authority of the Empire you are commanded to stand down. Cut your engines and prepare to be boarded. Failure to do so will result in your being fired upon.: Captain? I expected you to turn up but I didn't think you'd bring a warship with you. *revs engines*: This is your last warning, stand down now and no one needs be harmed. *fires a warning shot across his bow*: You may wish to brace yourself captain.: What? Oh crap, evasive maneuvers!Because at that point he accelerates to ramming speed and attempts to ram me with my own drat ship. We end up with the much smaller Owl embedded in the side of the warship and have to do an emergency landing on this pirate rock. The pirate rock where no Imperials have set foot for 200 years. So that's going to be a major diplomatic incident. Everyone survives the landing, Snargle is dragged out of the ship and clapped in irons. I have the ability to once per session teleport myself or something I'm touching anywhere in line of sight. I go up and pat Snargle on the shoulder and ask the GM "So, can we see the sky from here? Yeah? Okay, as I pat Snargle on the shoulder I'm teleporting him. 20,000ft. Straight up." So away he goes, but not before he manages to out my real identity. So now the rest of us are in a ship full of Imperial soldiers who might be about to kill us, on a rock full of pirates who are definitely about to kill us, and our own ship is embedded in the hull of the warship. Oh, and our pilot is dead. Next session we get to go back and see what the disaster was that led us here. I would feel bad killing another PC, but he agreed before hand and at least it was a cool death.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2012 13:40
|
|
|
Tsed posted:Fixed that to follow one of my favorite rules bits in Lady B :p Hah, that's a pretty nice twist to spring. I've been enjoying just how simple and elegant the LB system is, and the use of Keys. I've been running a 7th Sea campaign for a while now, inspired by the writeup over in the FATAL and Friends thread, and we've just switched system mid-campaign to use LB instead. 7th Sea is a wonderful setting but not so great as a system. Also, here's a story from a different game to keep the thread going. It was a two-part filler game as a break from our main campaign while one of the players was away. The set-up was Extreme Psychotherap, solving mental illness through superior firepower. A little bit Inceptiony, the group went inside the minds of clients and helped them out by shooting the manifestations of their problems. They've gone to help a guy with a gambling addiction and found the problem a lot bigger than they expected. Intstead of just one target to shoot as the manifestation of the problem they've got an entire twisted dream version of Las Vegas. In the first session they have a flashback to "The Georgia Job", a mess up where they went to cure someone's fear of birds and accidentally killed his kindness and empathy too. This becomes important later. In the second session they meet with the embodiment of the client's desire to get over his addiction, who takes the form of a dog with the hands of a man, calling himself the General of the resistance against this city. Around this point I figured they'd probably decide to try blowing up the whole city or something and spend the session getting a nuke. Oh no. Instead they decide to go to Town Hall. They've decided the dream-logic way to shut down the city is to meet the mayor. So they turn up and find the town hall is a huge gothic cathedral, empty except for a complex network of pipes converging in the middle, running through and around the mayor's twisted old body. The mayor begs them for death. Unsure of what will happen if they kill the mayor they come up with an alternative plan: The mayor controls the city, so if they implant the desire to get over the addiction into the mayor's brain then he'll turn the city into something that isn't Vegas, solving the problm without bombs. A plan summed up by the line "Look, we can fix the pipes if we put the dog in the mayor!" So they build a replica of their dream machine inside the dream and go deeper. Inside they find a psychiatrist's office and note adressed to them. "Hello, do you like this little trap I prepared for you? I hope you die screaming." Signed by the customer from the Georgia job. Apparently that's why the addiction was so much more complex than anything they'd seen before, it had all been set up to lure them here and get them trapped in someone's head until they died. At this point, two things I didn't expect. The player of the dog asks "So, if this whole brain is a trap, and I'm part of the brain, does that make me an element in the trap? Maybe bringing me in here is the trigger for it." That seems to make sense, so sure, this player has just become the boss fight I guess. As they fight the party tech freaks out. "This whole thing is a double layered trap? Do you know how hard that would be to do? Do you know how many people in the world could set this up? Only me! Wait... did I set this up?" And so it was agreed that yes, in return for having his family looked after he'd set up this brain trap and come in with the others to ensure they died. It was far too good a revelation not to use. So yeah, I managed to run a game where no one saw the twist ending coming, including me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2012 14:10
|
|
|
More storygame fun times today as we did a session of the old ashcan version of Psi*Run. The setup is this: You've just survived some kind of crash, you have amnesia and strange powers, and someone is after you. Characters are defined by four questions they want answers to. Whenever you take an action you roll a pile of D6 and assign them to whether you succeed, whether you're harmed, if the pursuers catch up, whether you have a flashback, and whether your powers cause collateral damage. So in the party we had characters with the following questions: Me - What happened in Kosovo? Who is Leonard Goldstein? Why am I so fascinated by mirrors? Why are my legs horribly scarred? Andrew - Why am I clutching a dead cat? Why can I hear people's thoughts? What is the Grand Show? Why am I constantly numb? Helen - What is TWK? Why am I craving TWK? Why can I turn invisible? Who is the man in this polaroid? Natalie - Who is Elaine? Why am I in my pyjamas? What's this key around my neck? Where is 13 Greater Old Street? We start off stumbling out of a crashed train in a tunnel somewhere. The tunnel is filling up with smoke and we can't see an end, but there's a locked service door set into the wall. Natalie decides to make a power roll - she succeeds but the power goes wild. Instead of just busting the door's lock she blows a hole in the wall, injuring a bunch of people on the far side. Turns out we're below Charing Cross Station. There's a lot of running around panicking, people think some kind of terrorist incident has occurred, we merge with the crowd and get out of there. As we try to put some distance between us and the station Andrew ends up triggering his first flashback. The game has a nice mechanic were you don't answer your own question, you pick another player to do it. So flashback, he's in a lab somewhere, freaking out in a padded room, until a scientist gives him the cat. He clings to it and is calm for the first time. Back to the action, and since it's our only real lead we decide to look up 13 Greater Old Street and go there. The pursuers are hot on our heels the whole way there and we get cutscenes of a many-angled metal guy following a trail of bubbling pitch left where we walked. There's no number 13 on that street, Helen uses a power to see if it's there but invisible. Success, but with collateral damage. The house was out of phase with reality and in pulling it back in she accidentally sends the rest of the street... elsewhere. An entire street in North London vanishes into some nightmare dimension and we're left outside number 13. Things we've learnt through flashbacks at this point: TWK is a drug that gives weird powers, the man in the polaroid is Leonard Goldstein is the human disguise of the metal guy chasing us. He's the leader of a weird shadowy syndicate with a lab under this house. Me and Andrew were both test subjects here, TWK gave him the ability to hear thoughts and me the ability to see alternate worlds in mirrors. Helen is addicted to TWK because it lets her phase through realities but if she doesn't take it regularly she'll phase out entirely. Natalie worked here as some sort of lab tech. She administered a megadose of TWK to Andrew and let him briefly hear the whole world. When it wore off the silence inside drove him a bit mad, hence the numbness. Inside the house, we know from the flashbacks that there's a lab in the basement but the door is locked. I try to break the door down and succeed but the metal man catches up with us. We're running for the basement and Andrew tries to read his thoughts. They're like a buzzing hive, a cacophany of hungry nightmares all calling for attention at once. And his power goes wild so we hear this too. Everyone in London hears it. It drives Natalie a little mad and she starts to go sinister. Helen buys us some time by phasing him out of reality temporarily, and we run into the lab looking for a solution. Well, we think we're looking for a solution. We're following Natalie's directions because she used to work here, we open a door that she tells us and find the cell Andrew had been in when he had the megadose of TWK. And she shoves us in and locks the door behind us. She gets the flashback to her final question - Who is Elaine? - and the metal man catches up with us again, appearing in the room. The rest of us step outside to decide the answer to the question and then go back in to narrate the flashback: Playing in a garden as a young child with her beloved younger sister, meeting the sister in a bar some years later when things have gone bad and the sister is mixed up in drugs. Getting involved with a company that offered "experimental" drug treatment programs to try and help her sister. Performing unethical experiments on people like me and Andrew, justifying it because some day it would save her sister. And now, the amnesia wearing off, locking her sister in a room to die at the hands of the metal man. Elaine was Helen was her beloved sister that she'd done all this to save, and now she'd inadvertantly killed her. All the dubious experiments, atrocities and Faustian bargains had been for nothing. It was admittedly a somewhat dark ending, three of us dying and the fourth realising what a monster she'd become. But it was really fun watching the story emerge as our flashbacks created the details of the world, and seeing the pieces naturally flow together to give a pretty satisfying ending that hadn't been planned at all.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2012 01:25
|
|
|
Triangulum posted:Drunk-rear end Dwarf. That reminds me of Jensen, who was almost responsible for a no drinking and gaming rule in our group, before we decided to just have a no Jensen rule instead. Jensen has a drinking problem. Jensen is also a lightweight. I have no idea how he manages to have such low tolerance despite drinking regularly. Everything that happened in this story happened after three regular strength beers and one weak vodka and coke. We're playing Unknown Armies and Jensen is a Dipsomancer, a mage fuelled by booze. So he's drinking to get in character. I've had other people drink during games before without it causing a problem (hell, we ran a drinking game session at one point), so this seemed fine. For the first three hours or so he's completely fine, no indication of drunkness whatsoever. Over the course of the next half hour he rapidly goes incoherent -> belligerent -> unconcious. We've got a half hour or so left of game so we figure we'll let him sleep on the sofa til we're done and then wake him. Waking him turns out to be a challenge, and we briefly consider leaving him there. But 1)We don't want to be responsible if he dies or something, 2)We're playing on university property and don't want trouble if security finds him and 3)He has work the next day and we're not dicks enough to leave him there. So we eventually get him up, he says he's going to the toilet, we wait there for him. Ten minutes later he isn't back. Oh dear. Check the toilets and yup, those are his feet under the cubicle door. Banging on door and calling his name has no effect. Climbing up on the sink and looking over the top we see him passed out on the toilet, pants around ankles. What to do? Aha! We fill a pint glass of cold water and dump it out on his head. No response. Eventually someone has to lean over with a stick and slide the latch so we could get the door open and drag him out. We get him concious enough to walk and drag him off campus to the nearest tube station. My involvement ends her because I was travelling the opposite direction, but a player who lived near him agreed to help him get home. Along the way he apparently threw up on two different trains, refused to be moved from the floor of the train, took them on a wild goose chase for a cab that didn't exist, had to be physically carried off a train, and threatened to kick a stranger who was helping move him. He was fortunately too drunk to actually carry through with his threat. In the end the kind player who'd been looking after him stuffed him in a taxi and paid the £15 fare out of his own pocket. And this is why Jensen isn't allowed in games any more. (Also it later turned out he was an awful human being with a history of doing lovely and unacceptable things.)
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2012 02:04
|
|
|
Another fun 7th Sea session today. In a previous session the party had inadvertantly started a small peasant rebellion in a Montaigne village a few days ride from the capital. From there they'd travelled to the capital to seek medical treatment and check up on a friend of theirs who was performing at l'Empereur's court. Unfortunately, they'd left a couple of injured nobility loose in the village after dealing with the rest. Nobility who'd seen their faces. So as Captain Ursidae and The Baron are mingling at court, unarmed and in their finery, who should arrive? The injured noble, here to beg for assistance putting down the rebellion. He of course recognises them, they're arrested, and promptly thrown into a cell beneath the palace. The rest of the party, who had been recovering from their injurie, hears rumours on the streets that something happened at the palace. The detail range from it being a pack of anarchists trying to blow up l'Empereur to it being a pair of Avalonian spies. They figure out it's probably their friends and start putting together a rescue plan. Linnus, the party's mad inventor/anarchist gets in touch with some of his Rilasciare buddies (a secret society opposed to the nobility), and manages to secure maps of old tunnels that run beneath the palace. The problem is that these tunnels are mostly flooded. The solution? To invent the submarine. One large barrel, sealed with wax and leather, and a crankshaft powered propellor later, plus a pan of potassium nitrate to burn for oxygen, and they had a crude submarine. Very crude. Leaking, in fact. Oh, and they had no window or method of producing light underwater, so navigation was difficult. They set out in their crude submarine/underwater tomb, and through some extremely lucky rolling manage to get into the bowels of the palace before the sub completely fills with water. Drenched up to their necks they sneak into the building and pluck The Baron and Captain Ursidae from their cells. Captain: "You came to rescue us! But how did you get in? And why are you dripping?" Linnus: "We came in a submarine." Captain: "A what?" Linnus: "It's like a boat, only instead of going on the water it goes under it." Captain: "How... how many of these can you make?" Sneaking through the building to avoid guard patrols they eventually find themselves on a balcony overlooking a large hall in which a meal is going on. At the far side of the hall they can see a courtyard leading out to the rear of the palace and freedom. Suspended over the hall are a series of chandeliers. They naturally decide to take the most swashbuckling route to freedom. Swinging from chandelier to chandelier they cross the hall. As the final chandelier swings forward with the four of them on top Captain Ursidae cuts the rope, allowing it fly forwards, and Linnus shoots out the giant window in front of them with his flintlock pistols. The chandelier flies through the air, out the window, and crashes into a stable in the courtyard as the party leap off it and into a haystack. Chaos ensues as horse bolt loose from the ruined stable. Guards are running everywhere trying to work out what on Earth has happened. The party sees two wagons bearing the imperial seal, wagons that had been heavily guarded until a quartet of people riding a chandelier came smashing out the window and caused chaos. They leap onto the wagons and accelerate out the gate, figuring this is the closest form of transport. A chace scene ensues as they try to ride these two wagons through the twisting streets of Charouse, musketeers on horse back chasing after them. Linnus clambers atop one wagon and begins firing back, drawing and shooting with his brace of pistols as fast as he can manage. The Baron, who's driving the rear wago by himself decides to jackknife it, sending it tumbling onto its side, while he leaps to the other wagon. He pulls it off flawlessly, managing to not even scuff his waistcoat. The fallen wagon provides enough of a roadblock for the party to pull away and dart down a side alley. There the Baron works a bit of glamour magic to disguise the wagon as a haycart. Linnus goes to see what was in the back of the wagon that they just stole. Linnus: "Captain... you might want to look at what we've got back here." Captain: "We haven't accidentally kidnapped l'Empereur, have we?" Linnus: "No, it's something that's actually good. I think we've stolen their warchest." So yes, the two wagons had been carrying the payroll for the army out on the Ussuran front. The party's escape vehicle had about 80,000 Guilder in the back, enough to buy and provision a decent size warship. They're now talking about using their money to set up their own drydock facility and start producing better submarines to revolutionise naval warfare. Linnus is wondering if he can afford to open a foundry and invent the steam engine. I'm looking forward to seeing what four glory hungry swashbucklers with vast amounts of wealth and a crazy inventor will do to overcome future problems.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2012 01:13
|
|
|
Following on from that 7th Sea story, Linnus's player has sent me blueprints for 17th century sea mines.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2012 12:26
|
|
|
So, last weekend my gaming society had its annual 24-hour gaming marathon: 20 games spread over 5 time-slots, from noon Saturday to noon Sunday. It's both the best and worst idea. For part of the best side, the last game I played in, starting at 8am Sunday, was a session of Don't Rest Your Head. Which, if you don't know it, is a game about insomniacs who've been awake so long they become Awake, and can see the Mad City that lurks behind reality. And it can see them, and there are lots of things their they'd rather not be seen by. So playing that after 20 hours of gaming without a break, and 26 hours of being awake, that made for an interesting experience. The party was all just broken desperate people. We had Lucy, who had ventured into the markets of the Mad City looking for a friend, but couldn't accept anyone because she wasn't comfortable accepting herself. All interaction between her and the GM took the form of a dialogue between her and her psychiatrist. There was a struggling writer who couldn't finish any work because he had no muse, and wouldn't allow anyone close until he finished something, because a failed writer didn't deserve friends. He's sold his potential future success so many times in deals with creatures that offered to sort him out, to the point where if he ever did succeed he'd get nothing out of it, having bartered it all away in advance. And then there was Caleb. Caleb wasn't like the others. Caleb was a winner. Caleb was a winner because he'd met a winner, killed them, and taken their life. Everything about him was stolen. His goal was to erase the differences, to become his victim perfectly. Because then that guy wouldn't really be dead, he'd live on in Caleb, and if he wasn't dead Caleb couldn't have murdered him and wouldn't have to feel so guilty. Caleb ended up tracking down and inhaling the guy's last breath, to be more like him. It was a weird game, and we lost one player to sleep, but definitely an interesting experience. There were other highlights throughout the marathon, but DRYH was certainly one of the more interesting gaming experiences I've had.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2012 20:17
|
|
|
I've been playing quite a lot of Psi*Run lately, and it is consistently a best experience, whether I'm running it or playing in it. For those who haven't played it Psi*Run is an interesting indie game, designed for one shot play. At the start of the session all you know is that you've been in a crash, you have a special power, and someone is after you. That's all the GM knows too. Every player has a set of questions they choose during character creation, and as those get answered they define the world, slowly forming a plot. It has this wonderful thing, which has been consistent over every game I've seen: The first hour consists of running around, not knowing what you're doing or why, convinced that things are an incoherent mess. Then questions start getting answered, a story begins to form, and by the end you have a tale so perfect and tightl constructed that it seems like this is the only possible outcome, it must have been planned from the start, there's no way anything else could have happened. Except that's not true, it's all improv. The mechanics make railroading drat near impossible. In the most recent game I ran, literally every time someone answered one of their questions they'd fall to their knees and yell "Nooooo!" Everything they found out just made their situation worse. There were three different sets of horrible things hunting them through a ruined city, all of their own devising. And the finale involved a piece of player created theological genius that I have to include in the back story of a fantasy game some day (essentially: they had accidentally pulled the sun out of the sky. They got the sun back but couldn't return it to the heavens. So one character ended up trapped as the man whose job it was to carry the sun around the world, bringing its light to all people. His descendants formed a monastic order to continue this duty, eventually becoming corrupt and selling the light of life to the highest bidders). I just love starting a game where as a GM I'm not allowed to know anything more than the players, and 4 hours later having a really tightly knit story. I have full write ups of the last two sessions, written by one of the players, but they're pretty long.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2012 02:23
|
|
|
I've been running a 7th Sea campaign for quite a while now, with a generally excellent group. Today they found themselves maquerading as actors in order to infiltrate a masked ball at a manor in Vodacce and assassinate a noble who had been marked for death by the Rilasciare. The director they were working with to pull this off had lost his scripts, forcing them to improvise. He was also quite drunk on the local wines and could only remember that his play was a satire about the Sun King which ended with a death and a marriage. Whilst they could have pulled off their assassination and escaped before the curtains rose they decided that dammit, no, they were going to do this play whether they strictly needed to or not. What followed was three acts of bizarre improv centering around the Sun King's depraved sexual peccadilloes and a confusion between the words peccadillo and armadillo. Thanks to some spectacular performances and an inebriated audience the play took the crowd by storm, getting them a standing ovation and plenty of time to go about their work afterwards. I love this group.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2013 06:43
|
|
|
I played in Psi*Run game this weekend gone which was both amazingly bleak and also a comedy of errors. For those that don't know Psi*Run it's an indie game designed for one shots with the setup that you're all basically amnesiac psychics. At the start of the game no one knows quite what's going on (including the GM) but the players all set questions important to their pasts, and the answers to those shape the world as they come up in play. This game begins with us crashing a carriage in a cave. One of us is carrying a bottle of wine, and we know we're being chased. We flee down the only available path and end up in a huge cavern in the cave, walkways above us with obvious signs of inhabitants. One of the players has taken super speed as his psi power and uses it now to search for ways up to the walkways. He rolls just staggeringly badly. Really, statistically improbably badly (Five 1s and a 5 on 6d6). That sets the tone for the rest of the game. As a result of his roll the things pursuing us catch up. What follows is three hours of real life time for about 3 minutes of in game time as we try to end off the things that have turned up to capture us, fail, get someone killed, revive them, get caught again, etc. Along the way though we answer a bunch of our questions and define the world and plot. It's near future America and society is split in three. The middle classes live on the surface. A toxic cloud makes them all sick but they can afford to buy treatments from Pan-Europa to make their lives fairly normal. The poor, who can't afford treatment, are forced to live underground. The rich live in vast arcologies above the viral clouds. Pan-Europa is actually manufacturing the disease as well as the treatment, and suppressing the cure to ensure their profits on the treatment. That wine bottle? It's the only extant sample of the cure. Our party turns out to be the researcher who developed the cure before P-E tried to kill her, the professional thief who helped her steal back her cure from their offices, and a genetic freak immune to the disease who acted as the final ingredient to the cure. And we had a goal: to get the cure to the office of rival firm American West so they could start manufacturing it. My Psi power is to channel the major arcana of the tarot. During a breather I summon the Chariot and whisk us to the office of American West. Things go wrong (because we're still rolling terribly), the underground hell we've just left merges with the office, flaming rocks start wrecking the building, and the CEO of AW emerges. And with that we get the last memory reveal and end the game. Turns out American West and Pan-Europa are subsidiaries of the same company. And we knew that, which was why we went underground in the first place, but our memories came back in the wrong order and we just broke into the office of our enemy to hand them exactly what they sought. Oops. The CEO takes the cure from my hands, throws it out the window to shatter on a street miles below, beneath the viral cloud. The immune guy and myself are shot in the head and also dumped out the window. The researcher is lobotomized to remove her psi powers and emotions and put to work in the R&D labs. What none of them knew was that we'd accidentally disabled the treatment they were selling, psionically shut down its effectiveness. Some months later the first untreated case manifested. And then everyone on the surface died. It was just an utterly bleak game where the party succeeded in nothing and the whole world got screwed over, but also a really satisfying story to develop as we played
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2013 06:30
|
|
|
Tatum Girlparts posted:For me it was going from a sparrow into a bear, nothing says 'gently caress you I'm a Russian mage' like dropping a bear into the middle of a ship deck. My group has also done the bear from above more than once. They've recently started discussing awful things to do with Porte magic. Primarily blooding arrowheads and either firing them over an enemy ship, opening a portal, and pouring burning pitch through, or just shooting a guy with one and reaching through the portal to get his heart. Players just love loving with magic. (We've also got a slightly weird group, in that three of the party are Avalonian nobility, one's the daughter of a dead Montaigne nobleman, and the last is a Rilasciare assassin. That creates a little tension.)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2013 04:20
|
|
|
Volmarias posted:I... what? I had a group do something sort of similar once and get away with it. They're a bunch of supernaturally enhanced investigators trying to find an item in the British Museum that's been killing random people. One of them, Johnny Necroleptic, has the power to die and come back again. The plan is to use this by having him die, talk to the ghosts of people who've died in the museum, and get some clues. Except what Johnny hasn't told his colleagues is that he doesn't just fall over dead or something, someone's going to have to kill him. Johnny and George "The Living Jinx" Fortune go into a disabled bathroom while Mark Two (A slightly stupid combat robot in human skin) waits outside. Johnny whips out a knife and hands it to George, tells George to stab him. George freaks out because this is the first he's heard of needing to do this, and he's terrified of violence. There's a bit of confusion, Johnny eventually manages to get stabbed and George freaks out and starts screaming. Mark Two hears the screams, assumes something has gone wrong, and punches the door in to be confronted by the sight of a screaming George waving a bloody knife and Johnny lying in a pool of blood. He also didn't know about the stabbing requirement and jumps to the worst conclusion: George has gone crazy and needs to be knocked out. Naturally all this draws the attention of museum security who come to see what the hell is going on. You have a huge hulking guy choking out a screaming nervous chap with a knife, and a dead body on the floor. This doesn't look good. Until Johnny, aware of what's happening, returns to his body and comes back to life and begins to explain: "Oh, I, I'm sorry. It's a sex thing you see. Yes. We were... well, it's embarassing but we didn't think the door would open like that. I have some very specific fetishes and we really didn't mean to cause any harm or be seen by anyone..." He carries on in this vein for a bit and manages to keep the guards confused and horrified long enough for the final party member to arrive and fix things with a spot of memory wiping.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2013 01:06
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:
I ran a two part game once set in the Lies of Locke Lamora universe (a sort of fantasy renaissance Venice, with cat burglars, for those who don't know it.) The party were a group of thieves turning up in town a few months after the events of the book, having been blackmailed into a nigh impossible task: Kidnap Duke Nicovante. What with the assassination attempt and the riots and the like in the book the Duke was now a pretty paranoid man. He never made public appearances, he rarely threw parties for the nobles, and when he did they were insanely high security. Oh, and he lived at the top of an incredibly tall tower made of effectively indestructible magic glass. So it seemed like getting him to would be tricky. What did the party do? They set about faking the existence of a new artistic movement, setting up cover identities as gifted artists, and then spending a few months making the nobles of the town believe these were going to soon be incredibly trendy and valuable. They only actually had one sculpture, but they pretended there was a whole movement, until one noble gave their single sculpture to Duke Nicovante as a gift (having thoroughly checked it for concealed poisons, bombs, etc). Then nothing would do but that the Duke be the first person in town to have one of these custom made, so they get brought into the palace and ordered to do a sculpture of Nicovante himself. They can't actually sculpt is the problem, and they can't bring in anyone else because of needing background checks, so they have to turn up with a series of part sculpted works which they slowly reveal in sequence, making it look like they're working on one. The final state is actually hollow, and after being there a few nights they cosh the duke, shove him in the hollows statue, escape down to the ground, and trigger a riot on the way out to cover their exit. So that's how the party faked a cultural movement and pretended to be sculptors to kidnap the most protected man alive.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2013 12:42
|
|
|
Kerzoro posted:7th Sea I love the 7th Sea setting and the craziness it produces. (Though I'm not so keen on the system) I ran an almost 2 year long campaign, highlights of which included the Pyeryem user discover the wonder of having both seagull and bear forms. Nothing dismays an infantry squadron like having a furious grizzly dive bomb them. There was also the time a player uttered the words "I can fix this! I'm going to roll to seduce the Sun King." There was also a wonderful friendship between the ship's captain - a 17 year old Vendel girl who'd run away from her merchant parents and ended up in charge of a ship, and her valet - a former street urchin who'd spent the last 250 years working for a Glamour mage whose house had that "No one here will ever age or be hungry" enchantment on it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2013 21:07
|
|
|
Okay, I have a good story to write up. Apologies if this gets too long. We've recently started doing a Supernatural-esque road trip across America fighting monsters type game, using the Unknown Armies rules. (We're deviating from UA's focus on everything being caused by people and monsters not really being a thing.) For those who don't know, magic in UA is driven by obsession. You're so convinced that a certain way of thinking is the true nature of the universe that sometimes the universe just says "Fine, whatever, have it your way" and lets you do the blatantly impossible. So a dipsomancer gets more magical the drunker they are, a bibliomancer by collecting books, an entropomancer by taking dangerous risks, and so on. Oh, and they're all broken hosed up individuals because they're that obsessed. Don't be an Adept if you want good mental health. That's the intro to the system, now for the cast of characters: Amber-Lynn - Shy, socially awkward, Amber hates change. She still lives in the house she grew up in, and works as an English teacher at her old high school. She's never really left the 9th Ward of New Orleans. She hates for it and self harms, powering her magic - Epideromancy. Marcel - A drifting con artist whose discarded identities are wanted for a string of petty crimes, Marcel's favourite time of year is Halloween with all its masks. He's a personamancer, an Adept based around false identities. Ray - Ray is every cubicle worker you ever met. He hates his bland grey life and bland grey job, and takes every chance he can to go snowboarding, skydiving, mountaineering, or anything else that might feel exciting. His magic? Entropomancy, the power of risks. Jack - Jack went into the infantry straight out of highschool. Jack did not have a good time in the infantry. Jack was medically discharged and still has flashbacks. Jack is afraid to sleep. Jack practices Oneiromancy, making the world more dreamlike by refusing to sleep. Lucy - Lucy says she works in a bar. That's true for this week. She drifts from low payed job to petty crime on a regular basis and does Kleptomancy, the magic of theft. Mercy - Mercy has, on the surface, done the best of them. She's a successful psychotherapist. But she hates her whiny loving patients and wishes she could tell them how pathetic they are. God they make her mad. Which is handy, as she does Irascimancy, the magic of pissing other people off. Alright, there's our cast, now the story: (Prologue bit, agree out of character with the players) The six of them went to high school together in New Orleans, graduated in 1997, and all moved off in their own directions. They were friends in high school but only maintained vague contact afterwards. Ten years later they meet for their school reunion, which happens to fall on Halloween. They enjoy catching up and decide to head out to the bars on Frenchman Street to keep things going. There's this one creepy guy there, dressed up as some kind of burnt-faced zombie, all twisted scar tissue. He keeps following them around, but never says anything. They finally wrap up at around 3am, taking cabs back to Amber's house to sleep off the booze. Except when they arrive the zombie guy is already there, in her front room. He won't leave, a scuffle breaks out, and he goes through the glass coffee table. Between the awful angle his neck is at and the shards of glass through his body he's looking pretty dead. That's when they find out his mask isn't a mask, and his blood is a thick black ooze. (End of prologue bit) That's where the game starts, with them drunkenly freaking out about the dead thing that shouldn't exist on the floor. They decide the best solution is to take it out to the edge of town, dump it in Lake Pontchartrain, and act like none of this ever happened. Of course, they've all been drinking, so the three of them who go to do that get pulled over for drunk driving. Lucy gets arrested after trying to steal the officer's handcuffs from his belt while Jack and Ray speed off in her car (having first backed into the squad car at speed to deter pursuit). Some lucky driving rolls see them escape and Lucy gets taken into custody. In custody, Lucy is held in an interview room for a long while before a tired looking detective comes in. "Do you know Johnny Montfort?" he asks, "how about Zane Brooks? Charnelle Napier? No? They were all at a bar you were out at earlier. How did they look when you left?" "Fine, I guess? It was busy. I think that Zane guy bought me some drinks?" "Hmm. This is how they look now." He slides across photos of some loving awful looking murders. "In fact, everyone who was at that bar looks that way near as I can tell, except you and a handful others. So you can see why I have some questions for you, Ms. Taylor." Meanwhile, Marcel, Mercy and Amber (oblivious to the mass murder) are formulating a plan to bust their friend out of jail using a photocopied FBI ID and a little bit of Marcel's magic. Jack and Ray have just dumped the body in the water, and are wondering what that splashing noise is coming from pretty much exactly where they dropped the body is. (Having apparently forgotten the bit earlier where someone mentioned that these creatures are brought to life by the lake. Maybe the lake wasn't the ideal place to dispose of the body.) So now they have zombies, a mass murder, and a harebrained rescue plan. And that's just the end of the first short session. I love the madness this game produces.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2013 22:27
|
|
|
Another good story from the Unknown Armies campaign I mentioned a few pages back. Before getting onto the content of the adventure itself: One of the party is playing a therapist and started this session off with a 40 minute group therapy session for the party, to address the awful stuff they've been through since discovering the occult. The player even prepared evaluation forms and questionnaires which she brought to the session and handed out. There was some great character development. The group has a collection of notes left behind by the owner of the RV they've "borrowed", a guy named Dale who appears to have been heavily involved in dealing with the occult. They've decided to follow one cryptic note which reads "Where is Cathelroy? It's meant to be in South Dakota. Too many artifacts left there, must find it. King Arthur's home, KB2562." After some aimless driving across South Dakota, stopping occasionally to question bar staff and truckers about the location of anywhere called Cathelroy (and leaving quickly every time the party Kleptomancer lifted a trucker's keys and wallet) they manage to establish that lots of people think they might have heard of this town but no one can recall where it is or precisely what context they remember the name from. Some more investigation of maps and they eventually work out a place where it looks like a town should be, but isn't. They get there, and with a little effort find themselves in Cathelroy. Only Cathelroy appears to be the happiest 50s town everywhere, where everything is nice and everything is always wholesome. The first thing they do is spot a place called Camelot Self Storage, figure out the "King Arthur's home" thing and that KB2562 might be a key number. The owner of the business is happy to help them, and eager to tell them that nobody is doing anything wrong in this town. Nobody is stopping anyone from leaving. They collect a whole pile of assorted mystic crap from Dale's storage locker (which I am looking forward to them experimenting with) including voodoo dolls of themselves bound in red ribbon, with the note "Phase 1: Get them all together somehow." More quizzing of the guy who runs the place and it seems he can't remember a time when it wasn't 1952. He assures them that he isn't lying about that, that he wouldn't lie. After all lying isn't what wholesome business owners do. He's here to help them in an affable and friendly manner, and file his taxes on time. Who's making him act so weird? Why, nobody. Who's trapped this town in 1952? Nobody did that. Who did he vote for in the recent mayoral election? Nobody, just like everyone else. Nobody cares. Nobody will keep the town safe. The group start to suspect that maybe Nobody is somebody and go to check out the mayor's office. His secretary is the embodiment of 1950s secretary and with a little magic they get past her into his office. Key things they find there: A phone book for the town with all the names tippexed out and descriptions written over them: "Barkeep", "My Secretary", "Enforcer", "Friendly homeless man", "Honest priest", and so on. There's also a very nasty magic trap in a desk draw, protecting a photo of nine men in suits, 8 with black Xs marked over their face, the 9th with his face cut out of the photo. They put this together with everything else and stuff they learned previously to work out what's going on: In the late 90s a cabal of 9 men wielded the power of True Names and generally used them for good. One of them got drunk and killed a girl, tried to cover it up with his magic, so the rest of the cabal cast him out and stripped him of all names. They made him Nobody. Well now Nobody has found a town and taken it's name away, turning it into his own private playground. Oh, and someone told them that tonight the local highschool is having a (wholesome) Homecoming. And who's going to be crowned Homecoming King? Nobody is. Next session we'll find out what they plan to do about Nobody, and I'm sure those three people named Enforcer in the phonebook won't be an issue...
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 01:29
|
|
|
More Unknown Armies fun, with a couple of quick highlights from their showdown with a rogue Appelomancer (who'd used his power over names to turn a small town in South Dakota into his private playground, forever stuck in an idealised 1952). The party Kleptomancer decided to prepare for their showdown by spending a day breaking into houses and taking things in order to generate magical charges. One thing lead to another and a couple of critical fails later she found herself in the front room of the town sheriff, holding a fistful of his valuables, as he tromped down the stairs. She tried to escape through the (closed) window for lack of any better route out, failed that, got shot by the sheriff. Things looked bad until she rolled the best possible crit success to use her Steal Breath spell and asphyxiated him. The rest of the party heard the gunshot from their house a few doors down and arrived to find Lacey bleeding from a bullet wound on the picket-fenced lawn, a blue-faced dead sheriff next to her. The showdown itself did not end how I expected at all. Knowing the Appelomancer was going to be crowned Homecoming King that night they disguised themselves in appropriate attire (the kleptomancer stole the sheriff's hat and used a spell that made her perfectly resemble him as long as she wore it) and attended. They wait for him to get up on stage, the klepto climbs up next to him. "Ah, my loyal right-hand man," the appelomancer announces. "I do believe there are some ne'erdowells here tonight. That's one," he says, pointing at another party member, "kill him for me." The klepto plays along, draws her gun... and then unloads it into the appelomancers gut at point blank range. He goes down and most of the party run for the stage to sort things out. By the time they get there though he's just some random dead highschool kid, and someone in the crowd calls out "the fun thing about being Nobody is you can be Anybody!" before sucker punching the party's tough guy. I figured there'd be some sort of fight here, that they'd do something to lure him away from the crowd and trap him in one body, that they'd use the special weird spirit sword they'd found earlier to hurt him. Anything really. That is not what happened. The epideromancer, who draws her power from self harm, asks "When it says I can use a major charge to redesign someone else's body, how much can I redesign them?" "Well, major charges are basically plot devices, so as extensively as you want really. But you know that getting a major charge means-" "Yup. I disembowel myself." So the rogue appelomancer suddenly turns into a featureless blob of flesh, unable to use magic, and the epideromancer collapses to the stage, bleeding to death from her self-inflicted machete wound. It so happens, by genuine coincidence, that she's wearing a necklace the party found back at the start which contains a one-shot resurrection spell. But none of them know that, including her or the character with a decade long unrequited crush on her. So that's a fun cliffhanger. I think what I love about this game is the way that all the adept schools drive the players to get themselves into all kinds of trouble without the GM needing to prod them much. When your party members gain magic power by variously hurting themselves, stealing things, taking risks, not sleeping and making people angry it pretty much writes itself.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2014 21:54
|
|
|
XyloJW posted:
What is it with players who insist on making characters that go against the basic premise of the game? I had a player like that once - A game billed as a low combat occult investigation? Makes a former military death robot with no non-combat skills. A game about swashbuckling rogues with hearts of gold? Makes a morally ambiguous assassin for the main "evil" faction. That same game about swashbuckling rogues? Makes an ordinary crewman who refuses to get involved in heroics or do anything that might make him stand out. I can understand if you want to play a game about a particular thing, but when the group as a whole has agreed some themes why make something that goes against those themes? If you don't like the game concept say so before it starts, or find another game. In general he just didn't seem to get the concept of fiction or fun. After the first session of the 7th Sea game he was in we all received a long message about how unrealistic it was for the party to start with a ship, given the expense of them. He also objected to the way they'd just sailed out of port after getting into a brawl with a rival crew. Shouldn't the harbourmaster have reported them to the appropriate authorities? Didn't they need to hire a tug, or complete their bills of lading? The rest of the party did not want to play 7th Accountancy, and he ended up being asked to leave due to his lack of understanding of what fun is.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2014 19:10
|
|
|
I've just remembered my 7th Sea campaign, and how the party ended up paying their bar tabs with priceless artworks. In pursuit of a plot McGuffin the party had run a Montaigne naval blockade to reach a besieged Castillian town. The item turned out to be in the hands of a famous artist (as in, wars have been fought over her paintings type famous) who was hiding out in this town because while the siege was up the Inquisition couldn't get in to prosecute her for her blasphemous works. She was adamant that she wouldn't hand the item over. The party takes a pivotal role in lifting the siege (including their Pyryem user making liberal use of his bird and bear forms to do a lot of death from above strikes on Montaigne commanders), suffers some losses, comes back to town as heroes. After mourning their dead and receiving their glories for saving the town they head back to the ship. The artist is there waiting for them: now that the siege has lifted, she says, the inquisition will find and kill her. They broke the siege, aren't they morally responsible for her life? The captain thinks for a moment and says okay, they'll carry her to safety and she can live aboard their ship (the fastest vessel on the ocean), safe from the inquisition, but at a price: The McGuffin, her backlog of paintings, and she gives the first mate's daughter art lessons. She agrees. A few sessions later the group have decided to drink every single drop of alcohol available in an Avalonian tavern, to celebrate the captain's birthday. The next morning they come to settle the tab and realise none of them actually have cash on them. "Hold on," says the quartermaster, "I have an idea!" He runs off to the ship and returns a few minutes later with a frame draped in an old curtain. "This should cover the cost of... well, everything," he says, whipping off the curtain to reveal an original artwork, "do we own the bar now?" How could I say no? So that's how the party got drunk and bought a bar with the equivalent of the Mona Lisa. This was not the last time this happened. Exculpatrix fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Apr 18, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2014 22:21
|
|
|
VanSandman posted:One of the most fun parts of playing for me is, even though I OOC see the danger coming a mile off, skipping merrily into the jaws of hell IC. Something I'm loving about the Unknown Armies campaign I run is having an Entropomancer in the party. He gets magic in return for taking risks. The more dangerous they are the more mojo he gets. It's great having someone mechanically incentivised to dive headlong into trouble. (Even if he did get the party exploded that one time, and stop them ever being able to go back to Canada...)
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2014 19:49
|
|
|
In the Unknown Armies campaign I've been running for a while the party dipsomancer (a wizard who gets more powerful the more drunk they are) finally decided to cast Party Like Hell. Party Like Hell is a spell which summons a demon. It specifically does not provide any means of control over the demon or any method of getting rid of it. It's basically a big button to press when you want a situation to be more chaotic than it already was. The casualty count is already in the double figures.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 01:16
|
|
|
CzarChasm posted:In my head, the demon has a magical boombox that keeps playing "Party Party Party", "Party All the Time", "1999" and "Party Hard" Well, now I know how we're starting the next session.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 20:26
|
|
|
Just done character gen for a new campaign, and pretty excited for what the players have come up with. The setting is the Axis Milo, the secret magical city at the heart of the world, located in a parallel Manhattan. The characters are all students at the Scholomance, the elite boarding academy where the wealthy and the mystically powerful of the Axis Milo send their kids. The general feel is somewhere between Gunnerkrigg Court, Hogwarts, and Morning Glory Academy. Our cast so far: Chet Drakenberg: Total 1%er. His family are basically the magical Kennedys, complete with assassinations. He has the power to turn things (including himself) into dragons, and sometimes to turn dragons back into things afterwards. Cassie Keys: Scholarship student from a family of shape shifting private eyes. Can't afford gravity in her dorm room. Can possess people, and has boundary issues. Jacob Borges VII: Latest in a long line of necromancers, supplying the elite of the AM with obedient skeletal staff. Has a box of bones in his room, just in case he needs some helpers at short notice. Oliver: Not actually a student, or human. Cassie's shadow, gained sentience in a lab accident. Took three days to work up the courage to tell Cassie he was alive now. Wants to enrol so he can have his own room, with gravity. Katherine Rowley: Newly arrived British exchange student. Had no idea prior to arriving that anyone in the world other than her could do magic. Struggling to adjust to life in the Scholomance. Has somehow managed to avoid telling anyone her name, so everyone else has just started calling her Hermione on account of the accent. In the actual play we've managed to do so far we've established that something weird is going on with the choir (which the staff claim doesn't exist), there may be a razor-wieldng hobo god stalking the school, and smuggling a cerberus onto school grounds then just leaving it in the lacrosse fields is a bad idea.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2015 20:15
|
|
|
We did character gen yesterday for an Unknown Armies campaign, using the playtest rules for the new edition. It was quite a long character gen process (about 3 hours), but really fun and it definitely sparked off a lot of potential game hooks. The character gen process encourages having a corkboard/whiteboard/similar, to which the players add various NPCs/locations/other interesting things and link them up. We went with a corkboard and some red string, plus a big stack of interesting and evocative photos. The end result is a pleasingly confusing conspiracy board that definitely feels very UA:  The group of PCs is an interestingly dysfunctional bunch, as to be expected from a game where routes to magical power and cosmic englightenment include self-harm and alcoholism. We have: Hudson: A recent arrival in New Orleans, Hudson works as a stuntwoman on various film productions, has a weird hosed up family of some kind, and is a motumancer - a school of magic that's all about constantly pushing your own limits and rejecting the status quo. Dr. Karima Requiem: A surgeon who moonlights treating injuries for people who would really rather not have their injuries brought to the attention of the police. Dr. Requiem saw some bad stuff during Katrina. She's also an epideromancer, cutting herself to experience the same rush of life as the patients she saves from traumatic injury. Lennox Cross: A roadie who washed up in town a year or so ago after a tour ended. She occasionally wonders whether she's really who she thinks she is, or if she's actually living the life her twin - who died at birth - was meant to live. She's a cameraturge, obsessed with defining people's identities by pinning them down in film. Laura Crawford: Reclusive hacker who really wants to learn to be more socially capable but isn't much good at it yet. A user of GNOMON, a website that sometimes alters reality for you in exchange for doing it favours. GNOMON might be a demon, or a rogue NSA project, or the sentient will of the internet itself. (The player is building a website to use as a GNOMON prop). Lynn Marshall: A camera technician, coworker of Hudson. Moved to New Orleans from Canada to avoid some legal trouble back home, and is now despearately trying to fit in somewhere. A sociomancer, the school of magic that's all about joining subcultures, conforming to them hardcore, then moving on to a new one when they lose their buzz. (Interestingly, we had a pile of 70 odd photos to use as potential PC portraits. 4 of the 5 players immediately chose very androgynous photos, and we've now got a party where none of the characters identify as male - Lynn uses they/them, and the rest are all she/her. I've not seen that sort of party composition before.) We didn't have time to actually play after character genning, but everyone seems pretty keen to get started after spending those hours building up their characters and the world around them in such a visual-heavy way. What we do know, when we get round to properly starting, is that the PCs have all just taken ownership of a dive bar with ties to the occult community (previously owned by a friend of theirs who killed himself, or was killed), and that the previous owner left them a big book of notes on the occult underground. I've made a phys rep for that - a 200 page notebook of handwritten plot hooks, occult research, rituals, things to look into, etc. It's pretty much a big pile of potential things to do, for the PCs to look through and decide what interests them, then go poke that thing.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2016 09:38
|
|
|
I'm running an urban fantasy sort of thing, following half a dozen dysfunction wizard-addicts. I've been GMing for this group across various campaigns for about 6 years now, and somehow I still haven't learned that they will always take the most terrible/stupid option. Several sessions ago the party discovered the existence of a cataclysmic big bad, the likes of which they dare not yet approach. They also discovered that a morally dubious but very powerful NPC is in the pocket of said big bad. One of the characters has a spell which enables her to ask "What would it take to make X do Y?" She cast this and ask "What would it take to make Robert Johnson abandon the Red Throne and side with us?" I thought about it for a few moments before asking. He's the ultimate deal maker, the merchant personified. All he wants is to own everything. Whatever the other side offered him, it must have been big. How could the party top it? "He'd join you if you could give him complete control over the Pope. Like, total, utter domination." I finally answer. I figured that would be the signal for them to pursue other avenues. They're a rag tag bunch of weirdos in San Francisco, they have no leverage over the Pope, and they have a bunch of other leads to follow. But no, my players do not do sensible things. They spend the rest of the session debating ways to take control of the Pope, ranging from "What if we could get an extradimensional parasite in his flesh somehow?" to "What if we could disguise ourselves as the Pope, murder some people, film it, and blackmail him with his murder tapes?" That was three sessions ago. Today they started off crashing a car directly into the Pope's bedroom, having called in a favour from the Goddess Mnemosyne, after one of the party gained the ability to steal souls. Sometimes I despair.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2020 22:31
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:Players, being driven entirely by the fickle and capricious whims of errant desire, will always take the chance to not only do the most ridiculous thing possible, but will likely invent whole new vistas of madness just to go even deeper into insanity than you previously thought possible. True that. It doesn't help that one of the characters is an entropomancer and literally gains magical power by taking wildly unnecessary risks. Which once lead to him going "What happens if I pull this cable out?" while the party were negotiating with a man who had a bunch of Semtex hooked up to a dead man's switch. Explosions. Explosions were what happened when he pulled that cable out. And this is why the party can't go back to Canada.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2020 21:46
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:That would be "no plan survives contact with the I went into this campaign with a starting premise for why there were all back together (It's the sequel campaign to one I ran years ago. Everyone loved that game, and I said I'd only bring it back if there was a really good reason.) I had no idea what the middle or the end would be. Somewhere around session 15 I started to put together an ending based on the plot threads they were tugging on. We're at about session 50 now, and I think maybe 15-20 away from an actual finale. For those who are curious: The original campaign was all about finding the power to define the "New American Century" and scope out the next chunk of history in their image. The party ended up breaking the cycle of history by using it to stop anyone in the future having that same power, and also making their own lives happy and perfect. We started the new campaign with all of them in a mental hospital after their perfect lives had gone wrong. They just recently discovered that there was a world in between the first campaign and the current campaign. In the between world an apocalyptic threat happened but they were all too perfect and lovely to deal with it. So eventually they used the last of their power to reset the world one final time, and curse themselves to always be magnets for drama. So this time round the apocalypse is still looming, only now they've had a few years of suffering to toughen up and deal with it. And that's where we come in.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 19:56
|
|
|
Also, if anyone is curious, I have half a dozen campaigns with roughly the same core group of players. They've definitely been my favourite people to game with, and I hope their stories might entertain all of y'all. (Some of these campaigns overlapped, hence having 5 multi-year games with the same people in the space of 6 years.) We have: The original UA: A campaign using the Unknown Armies mechanics, but making the world a bit more magic. Heavily influenced by the early seasons of Supernatural. Axis Milo: An urban fantasy game set in a magical city in the secret heart of New York. We started with all of the players in high school, by the end they were tackling Lilith. Void Feather: A fish out of water sci-fi game. Farscape meets Simon R Green's Deathstalker series. This campaign never got a real conclusion, because of schedule issues, but still had some moments along the way. Cajun Mike's: Another UA game, semi-sequel to the first, centred around my favourite New Orleans dive bar. Saw an entire session devoted to the debate over whether or not it was okay to shoot another PC in the foot for magical power if it was really important. (This campaign lead to my favourite gift ever: one of the players made me a little diorama of all the PCs stood outside the bar they owned.) The new UA: This is the true follow up to the first one, and is the game where they now own the Pope. So yeah, which one would people like stories from? Also, every game has featured at least one Christmas special. Whatever the date in character, the last game before Christmas is always festive themed. It's become increasingly hard to come up with new festive plots, so they've gotten increasingly niche.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2020 20:15
|
|
|
Fair, in which case, let me introduce y'all to the game with which this group started, and your cast of characters. (Note for Unknown Armies fans: this game used the UA mechanics and took some inspiration from the themes in the book, but wasn't running entirely purely with the lore as set out by Stoltz et al. Notably, in this version of things there was only one of any given type of adept in the world, rather than schools. That was to make the PCs feel more special.) So we have Amber-Lynn Hemingway: The epideromancer. She gains magical mojo through a cheeky little sport of self harm. She's quiet, nervous, and has never gone more than 5 miles from where she grew up. She lives in her parents' old home, inherited after they died, and teaches English at the same school they all attended as kids. Has two pet ferrets, Jeph and Jeff. Lacey Turner: The kleptomancer. Steals for kicks. Trailer trash, grifter, spent the last decade drifting around Louisiana stealing poo poo. Ray Martin: Looks like the Rock. Wants to be a pro motocross rider, but actually works in insurance adjustment. Adrenaline junkie whose greatest fear is a slow death, ever since watching his father die of Leukaemia. Unsurprisingly, Ray is the entropomancer who takes risks for mojo. Jack: Just Jack. An oneiromancer, whose dreamy powers are fuelled by insomnia. Can't sleep, not since the things she saw while serving a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Marcel Bronte: Man of a thousand identities. As a personamancer he gains mojo by pretending to be other people. A con artist by trade, he's put on so many different masks at this point that he isn't entirely sure Marcel is even his original name. Theresa Le Carre: Therapist. Hardcore bitch. Hates all her patients. Irascimancer - she gets power by making others angry, but loses it if she ever feels anger herself. Used to be married, it didn't work out, on account of she's the worst. We start out on Halloween, 2008, New Orleans. It's been 10 years since the members of the group really all hung out together. They used to be close in school but life happened, people went in different directions, y'know? But it so happens that the school's 10 year reunion is organised right next to Halloween, so it seems like a good time for everyone to get together. And note: At this point none of them are adepts, no one has any magical talents, or any knowledge of the occult. They're just old friends getting back together for the first time in a long time. Very first scene of the game: It's about 3am, they've all ended up back at Amber's house after a night out on Frenchman Street. And this rear end in a top hat dressed as a zombie who had been creeping on them all night is there in the living room. So someone shoved him, he went through a glass coffee table, caught his head on a wall. Neck went round at a wrong angle. And the ferrets are chewing on him. Not much blood though. There's a lot of freaking out, a lot of "poo poo, is he dead?" "His head is on backwards, of course he's dead." They check him for ID, he doesn't have any. They try to peak under his mask, he's not actually wearing one. They start to realise that something is off, that this guy should have been dead a long time before they killed him, judging by his wounds. Only, y'know, they can't just tell the cops that, right? No, it would be a lot of trouble. And Lacey and Marcel definitely both have warrants. So Lacey, Jack and Marcel load the corpse into the back of a car, with the plan of driving it out to a swamp and ditching it. Why did they send the two wanted criminals with the corpse? Who knows why players do things. You will be shocked to learn that things did not go to plan. A few failed driving roles and a lot of swearing later, they get pulled over for a busted tail light. And, when it becomes obvious that they've all been out drinking and are all well over the limit, the officers demand to search the car. Well, that won't do, there's a corpse in there. So Marcel, being closest, dives back in, floors it. Lacey and Jack run a distraction while he gets away. And when I say run a distraction I mean they try to climb over someone's garden fence, fail, and get arrested. Meanwhile! The rest of the party have decided to backtrack to the places they visited that night, find out if anyone else saw their stalker/victim. They get to the first bar and find it closed off, with ambulances outside, police, lots of body bags. And listening to what people are saying, some dude in a zombie costume flipped out, tore people apart? Only that couldn't have been their guy, it happened at the exact same time that they killed the dude in the house. There's two of them? Well that's not good. Is it a cult or something? Ray wants to investigate further, but they get a call from Marcel, who fills them in on how badly that whole side of things had gone wrong. A plan is formed! Theresa is a licensed therapist, she'll turn up at the police station, claim that Lacey and and Jack are two of her patients, they were on day release, and would the officers please release them into her custody. They can't be held responsible for their actions, who let them get drunk? Of course that will interfere with their medication. This plan, also, does not work. Along the way Amber gets a call from an unknown number. A voice on the other end introduces himself as Clem, says this is all his fault. He never meant for things to turn out this way, but there about a dozen of those zombies whose only goal now is to hunt them down and kill them. Could they please all get over to his place on the edge of town so he can help. The group are naturally dubious about this. But if it's true it's even more reason to get Lacey and Jack out of prison. They can't very well leave them to be eaten. Long story short, by the time everyone unites at the police station the zombies have arrived and the police are entirely unequipped to deal with this. A detective, who looked almost, but not entirely, unlike Morgan Freeman, had been interrogating Lacey when poo poo kicked off. By the time everyone else got there he was bleeding out in the processing area, his left arm torn off (Detective Marcus would end up becoming a recurring threat). The party get Lacey and Jack out of custody, fight their way through some zombies, and then Lacey in the first of many "Why the gently caress would you do that?" decisions of the campaign, decides to steal Det. Marcus' severed arm. Why? Who knows. It didn't even gain her any mojo, as it had no monetary value. Everyone else was weirded out by it, and she ended up throwing it in a trash can a few minutes later. You know I said Det. Marcus became a recurring threat? This is why. He would have just died quietly if someone hadn't stolen his goddamn arm instead of offering him medical support or even some dying solace. The party hightails it to the address they've been given, loaded down with stolen police firearms, fully expecting an ambush. What they find is Clem. Clem went to highschool with all of them, though no one really remembers him. Clem has been deep into the occult, and his older brother is a monster hunter (and, currently, AWOL). Also, Clem maybe raised all these zombies because he was lonely ever since his brother left. And he sent them to follow the party because they were the only nice people he knew from highschool. He can't go out himself - he was paralysed from the waist down during Katrina - so he experiences life directly through his undead minions. And Halloween is the one time of the year they can walk around unnoticed. He's very sorry, but how was he to know that they'd kill one? The shock of that shorted out his control, and now all the rest are on a violent rampage with just one goal: Eat the party. (Clem was only ever meant to be an introductory NPC, to get the party rolling. I fully expected him to die in the second session. He did not. This was when I learned that my players will adopt loving anything if I let them, and form deep bonds with the weirdest of people/cats/decorative gourds. Clem ended up as a pivotal NPC for the entire campaign.) And that's where session 1 ended.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2020 21:32
|
|
|
My current game, the one where they stole the papacy, recently had one of those odd sessions where I did hardly nay actual GMing and mostly just sat back while things unfolded. I sometimes worry that it's boring to just let them argue amongst themselves for a whole session, but they seemed to have fun? And that's what counts. Due to various hijinx the party in general, and Theresa the Plutomancer in particular, are currently all over the news as homeland terrorists. There was a shoot out with a SWAT team, a nurse got taken hostage, a large amount of semtex was found, and discussions about blowing up the Golden Gate bridge were overheard by innocent bystanders*. Y'know, standard stuff. The party has enough mojo that most of them can disguise themselves to avoid the heat - Lacey and Amber both have spells which allow them to look like other people, Theresa can look like anyone for 24 hours at a time if she writes their name in a special notebook using a fountain pen full of their blood. Ray opened a briefcase which contained $500,000, a set of fake documents, and an enchanted latex mask which makes him look exactly like the woman in the documents. (He doesn't know it yet, but that stuff is all a loan, one which will be called in in a few sessions.) But there are two issues with them all just spending their lives in disguise. For one, Theresa used a Major charge to give herself an aura of richness, such that people just give her poo poo for free if it costs less than $1000. But that only works if she looks like herself, not when she's in disguise. And for another, Marcel, the party gun mage... is an FBI agent. He's been keeping the agency at bay so far while they go on their cross country chaos trip, but he really can't make these charges go away. So Marcel calls up his boss, rolls really well to persuade her that they aren't all terrorists, there's more going on here than it seems. She agrees to call in some favours, shut down federal pursuit of them. But that can only last a few days, and she can't do anything about local PD. They need to turn themselves in, explain everything, get stuff worked out. Marcel tries to persuade the rest of the party to head to the nearest field office and get things sorted. They aren't so keen. Theresa points out that sure, the semtex and the bridge and the dead SWAT officers, there are reasonable explanations for all of those things. But there's no explanation for her being caught on camera holding a gun to a nurse's head. And even if they can explain everything (their planned excuse is "There are other, real terrorists, they've infiltrated everything, they're manipulating us and you, but we can bring them down,") the FBI aren't just going to give them a pat on the back and say "Cool, thanks for the heads up, go have fun chasing terror plots." They'll be held for extensive debriefing, there'll be investigations, lots of time consuming stuff. And the party does not have time. Cue an hour of arguing between the party over what should happen. Eventually I decide to intervene, try to break them out of the argument rut. 20 odd sessions ago the party followed some clues and found a cache of strange magical trinkets in a storage locker at Grand Central Station. One of the things in there was a mysterious egg, about the size of an ostrich egg. They never did anything with it, and I honestly didn't have anything planned for it in particular, I just figured I'd run with whatever came up and made sense. So now seemed like the time for that to be relevant. Their argument is interrupted by a sudden shrieking from upstairs. They all rush up to find the egg hatched and a tiny little man roaming around the desk. He's a perfectly proportioned adult human, but 3 inches tall. And the only thing he seems to be able to say is "AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH". There's a lot of freaking out, they catch him in a glass like a spider, do some research. Turns out he's a newly made homunculus. More research suggests there's two things they could do with him - he could be soul bound to Amber, the epideromancer, and then used for charges. Any injuries she inflicted on him would count as inflicted on herself. A powerful source of magic. Only she's understandably not comfortable with torturing a little sentient creature. The other thing they could do is raise the homonculus up to be a clone of Theresa, and then hand it in to the FBI, let it serve out Theresa's jail time. But a lot of them also aren't comfortable with that. Cue another solid hour of bickering over the right thing to do. Along the way Ray, the entropomancer, gambles everyone's lives with his terrible driving, earning himself a major charge. The session ends with each of them giving their opinions on whether or not to send an innocent homunculus to prison. Theresa, Marcel, Lacey, and Ray are all fine with it. Everyone turns to Amber who says "I don't feel okay-" and that's where we end the session. I've agreed with Amber's player that where we pick up next session will be with "No, I don't care about the homunculus, I mean I don't feel okay," before she temporarily winks out of existence. *The party didn't actually want to blow up the Golden Gate bridge, they were being threatened by a powerful NPC. But then they gave him the Pope's soul, so that's not an issue any more. Back when they were still planning for it, their genius idea to minimise casualties was to organise flash mobs at both ends of the bridge in order to block traffic, and set off the bombs when it was empty. "It's 2008," one of them said, "everyone still loves flashmobs!" Exculpatrix fucked around with this message at 16:06 on May 16, 2020 |
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 16:04
|
|
|
Bieeanshee posted:The number of times I read 'major charge' in that update was both terrifying and absolutely hilarious. They're a handful of sessions from the end, I'm making sure everyone gets a chance to play with one before things wrap up. That said, the party Kleptomancer Lacey has been particularly remarkable in her talent to collect them. Including the time she accidentally stole something worth a major charge, then destroyed it on a lark with Ray. Theresa, who could have also gained a major charge by selling it for cash, was very very unhappy. She went into a self-destructive spiral that ended up in a cocaine habit, two dead cops, and a massive medical insurance bill.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 16:43
|
|
|
Yeah, so a couple of people above have described the main mechanics for magic in UA, and some of the main charging structures. My current party consists of: Lacey: Kleptomancer. Gets a major charge for stealing something worth more than $10m. Ray: Entropomancer. Gets a major charge for risking his own life (at around 50/50 odds) alongside either 10 strangers, or 1 person he really cares about. Which is how he got one for almost killing the entire party with his reckless driving. Amber: Epideromancer. Gets a charge for serious self harm. Has had one so far in the game, from cutting off her own nose and taking a permanent, irreparable penalty to all social roles on account of she's a terrifying noseless freak. Marcel: Gun Mage. Hasn't had a major charge yet. He gains one by either making a gun completely from scratch. Like, completely. Digging up the metal, turning it into a weapon. Remember that guy who spent a year making a poo poo dysfunctional toaster? That but for guns. Or, the other way, is to make a gun that enters the popular consciousness to the same extent as something like the AK 47. He probably has the hardest time getting a major charge, because those are both ridiculous. Theresa: The Plutomancer. As noted, gets a major charge if someone gives her $100m in a single transaction. Jack: The Oneiromancer. Gets a major charge if she has a prophetic dream, speaks it aloud, and then sees it come true. This is the one that most obviously relies on the GM deciding to just make it happen. Generally the schools of magic which can gain charges more easily either have weaker effects, or can lose them more easily.
|
|
#
¿
May 16, 2020 20:34
|
|
|
LawrenceFriday posted:UA sounds amazing and I need to find a game to join. It's really good. My current campaign is the third one I've run using it (though also a direct sequel to the first one). The whole way the magic is an awful addictive brainwrong just constantly drives PCs to put themselves right in the middle of terrible drama, with minimal external poking by me. Mini story: in the previous campaign we had a character named Charity. Her magical obsession was photos, particularly taking photos of emotionally charged moments. She'd gain a minor charge just for spending time taking photos, a significant charge for taking a photo of something really important in a person's life, and a Major by taking a historic shot. The party wanted to learn more about a spectral entity which had just manifested in their bar. Charity had a spell for that! Only, she didn't have enough charges - she was one significant short. She could go out, find a wedding or something, get some pictures? Hell no, that was too slow. Instead she pulls out a gun and shoot's her sister's girlfriend in the foot (who was another PC, to be clear), then takes a photo of them both being super, super loving pissed off with her. Because the day your friend shot you in the foot for no good reason is an emotionally important day, right? It worked to get her the charge, but it fed into drama for a long, long time after.
|
|
#
¿
May 17, 2020 20:04
|
|
|
A conversation I was having with someone earlier reminded me of one of the only times I've had to actually kick someone out of a group. It's happened exactly 3 times: The first because the player turned out to be a white nationalist, which no thank you. The second because the player was an alcoholic and sexual predator. The third, though? That was the only time it happened because someone was just so bad at gaming. I genuinely don't think he understood the concepts of fiction, or fun. So, let me tell you all about Gary. We were starting a 7th Sea game and needed an extra player. One of my regulars said his friend was interested. Said regular was a very good gamer, I figured the friend would be too. I was wrong. Like 8 years later, this guy still apologises for ever bringing Gary along. The starting premise of the game was pretty straightforward: The party are rogues with hearts of gold. There will be swashbuckling and japes, and you'll have access to a ship straight away for doing nautical adventures. Our cast of characters: -Sienna Ursidae, the rebellious teenage daughter of a successful merchant family. She doesn't want a life of accounts and a sensible marriage. She wants adventure, fame, fortune, and the chance to stab dudes. She's won a treasure map from a pirate captain in a dodgy game of poker and needs to get out of town fast before he comes to take it back. -Linus, a naval engineer who saw things in the war in Castille and just can't go back to civilian life. -Piotr, a gentle giant. He owes Linus a life debt from their time in the war and travels with him. Also, he can turn into a bear. -The Baron. A fae-blooded minor noble. His heritage curses him to fall wildly in love each morning, and fall right out of love each night. He's journeying to try and break his curse, and also to escape a string of angry exes, husbands of mistresses, etc. And then there's Gary. What does Gary bring to the table? An openly evil agent of House Villanova, who are essentially the Borgias but more evil and power hungry. He insists that the character isn't all bad, and I figure I'll give him a chance. Session one, they buy a ship from basically Stan the Used Boat Salesman from Monkey Island. They christen it the Extenuating Circumstances and try to get out of port before their piratical nemesis catches up to them. They don't quite make it out in time, there's a big fight on the deck of the ship, Linus rolls incredibly well and shoots the pirate captain in the jaw. His crew drag him away, bleeding, swearing vengeance for this insult. (He and his brother would later appear as recurring villains, the pirate captain wearing a mask to conceal his ruined jaw). The party sails off and heads out in search of treasure. Fun times, right? After the session Gary sends us all a message, raising some issues. For one, he says, it shouldn't have been possible to just buy a ship like that. Ships are expensive and should be commissioned at a national level, you can't just buy them like second hand cars. For two, how did they get out of the harbour without hiring a tugboat to guide them, or completing the proper paperwork? And thirdly, surely the harbourmaster would detain them and quiz them over the fight? You couldn't just have a big brawl and shoot someone without legal ramifications. The other players all tried to explain things like suspension of disbelief, or the basic tropes of swashbuckling fiction. He would not budge, and it became clear that he wanted to play a game where properly filled Bills of Lading were of utmost importance. That wasn't when I kicked him from the group, though. He stuck around, continued being the opposite of fun, and his character continued to be evil and obnoxious to the point where the rest of the party decided to throw him in the brig and suggest he roll a new character. So he returned as Brick, and ordinary crew member. And Brick was very, very committed to being ordinary. The first time the party docked after Brick joined, all the PCs went off to do a thing. Captain Ursidae, to include him, says "We need another person. You there, deckhand, you look competent. Come along." But that wouldn't do for Gary, oh no. He objected that there was no reason for the officers and nobility to take a random crewman along with them. It just wouldn't be the done thing to associate like that. Fine, I said, if I give you a situation where you can do something heroic and earn their attention, will you take it? He says he will. I set up a scene the next session where Piotr's adopted daughter falls from the rigging, and only Brick is close enough to save her. Will he heroically swing from a rope to save this falling child? "I just don't think we'd have been in that situation to start with. It wouldn't be sensible to let an 8 year old on the rigging. I don't understand how this would have happened? I cant do anything here, because it wouldn't have been like this." That, that was the point where I had to stop the session and tell Gary that maybe this wasn't quite the group or game for him. Apparently to this day he doesn't see what he did wrong, and tells new groups that the rest of us made his character unplayable with our unrealistic assumptions.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2020 16:19
|
|
|
I was catching up on Fatal and Friends, and got to some discussion of Geist, and thought I might share some tales of the one time I played a Geist. A while back I took part in a mixed-splat nWoD LARP. Once a month, function room above a pub, lots of drama and no foam swords. The GM wanted the three playable splats to be proportionate to their relative weirdness, so we had 3 Geists, 8 werewolves, and 23 vampires. The setting was a remote Scottish town where the Camarilla dumped their political exiles. The wolf pack had been sworn to guard the town's border, and the geists were just sort of there. At the end of the game the GM told us that the geists had been, collectively, responsible for all of the worst decisions in the game. There was Alan de StCroix, a young student who fell off a cliff while hiking in the area. His geist was the Drowned Woman. His big mistake was agreeing to take part in a terrible and barely understood ritual to join the werewolf pack, immediately after arriving in town. This caused all kinds of fuckery, meant the rest of us didn't trust him, and doomed the wolves to pain. The GM had assumed Alan would say no when asked "would you like to become an honorary werewolf, with undefined mystical costs?" The GM clearly did not know how PCs think. The next geist was Marcus. Marcus was the town undertaker, and the oldest of the three Geists. He'd been murdered one night, about 20 years ago, by a vampire. He didn't remember which one, he didn't know if they were one of the other PCs who met up each month. He just knew he hated vampires. He was also in love with the only werewolf to have been cast out of the pack. Marcus made the second stupid decision - when we (the geists) finally found our way to the underworld, he met a being down there and agreed to sacrifice a mortal for knowledge and power. This sacrifice woke an ancient evil which threatened the whole town. And then there was me. I played the Reverend Caleb Ashbless. Rev Ashbless had died of ebola a few years prior, after going on a mission to Gabon. He was revived by the Martyred Saint. The Martyred Saint hated all authority figures, hated orthodoxy, and wanted the faithful to burn. This was understandably difficult for a young priest to deal with. Rev Ashbless made two terrible mistakes. First up, he fell in love with a vampire, Captain Henri. She was basically Lord Flasheart but female and not quite entirely awful. She ended up being cursed to kill an innocent. Doing that would have been a capital offence in vampire society. So Rev Ashbless took on the punishment for her. He picked an elderly parishioner, said last rites, snapped her neck, then used his powers to ensure there was no ghost left to rat him out. His real mistake though was when he tried to leave town to go poke a plot thing. Vampires and werewolves couldn't leave town, Geists theoretically could. But another werewolf pack stopped him as he drove South. "You can't leave without the Prince's permission," they said. "I don't have a prince, I'm not a bloodsucker." "Don't care. Come back with papers, or gently caress off." Remember how the Martyred Saint hated authority figures? Also, if you haven't ever played with Geists, they are mechanically terrifying. So, those two werewolves died without Rev Ashbless even getting out of his car. He finished his trip, came back to town the next month. The Camarilla, who'd contracted that pack to guard the borders, were pissed. There followed half a session of negotiating, where their starting position was "We're going to bomb this whole stupid town, it was a terrible idea." Eventually they were bartered down to "We're going to execute Ashbless and Marcus." And honestly, Rev Ashbless was ready to go. He'd given Henri a letter confessing his love, not to be opened before his death. But when they said Marcus was being exectuted too, for no good reason? Aw hell no. The two geists went out fighting. 4 werewolves and a vamp were down and dying before they finished us off. Would have been all the werewolves, if the GM hadn't put his thumb on the scale. We fought, we died. Fun fact about geists: If you kill them, a mortal dies in their place. No one else knew this in or out of character (Geist was very new at the time, and the GM has asked that no one read it unless they were playing one). We spent the month before the next game talking up the new characters we were going to play. No one was ready when we came back as Marcus and Rev Ashbless, but angry.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2020 20:05
|
|
|
In the first iteration of my UA campaign, the Entropomancer managed to ram a car into a helicopter. Specifically a helicopter he'd already jumped into. (The helicopter had come down low over the street, about to open fire with the door gun. Ray had put a brick on the accelerator of his Camaro, climbed out onto the hood, and jumped through the open door of the helicopter. Moments later the car crashed into the helicopter. Ray survived with some lucky rolls, tore the door gun off its mount, and machine gunned the big bad in the face, a dozen sessions before I'd expected them to fight him.) This week, in the sequel, the party found themselves on the bridge of a container ship which they were sort of stealing, while The Sales Team, a pair of demonically possessed merchants, flew a helicopter directly at it. "poo poo!" Ray said "They've turned the whole concept around on me!" (He later used a spell which gives him 50/50 odds of avoiding all harm from one source of damage to just stroll through the explosion and shredded steel of the collision, emerging from it in full on cool-dudes-don't-look-back mode while the world went to hell and bits of helicopter scythed through NPCs.)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2020 14:41
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:Never, ever underestimate an entropomancer on a hot streak. Yeah, this is why the party can't go back to Canada. Several of them are legally dead there since the entropomancer got the odds wrong on detonating some semtex.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2020 20:08
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:40 |
|
|
Every now and then in my campaign we have a session where the players set aside their main characters and play someone else. Occasionally this is because someone can't make it and I don't want to progress the main plot without them. Other times it's because running a secondary character adds more drama to the main campaign. Recently my UA party realised they're being hunted by some kind of black budget deep dark government agency, the NPA. (National Para-phenomenological Agency, derisively referred to as Not a Proper Agency by the rest of the intelligence community.) Today, they played the NPA team hunting them down. A task made much easier when they accidentally detonated a container ship full of explosives, almost directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I wanted to share the NPA character sheets here, because I was quite pleased with how they came out. The characters were inspired by a mix of Nights Black Agents and Charles Stross's Laundry Files books. https://imgur.com/a/RkojUk9
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2020 15:56
|
|