Last Saturday ((I’m falling behind again. Work has been nuts. On the up side, I’ve got the bare bones of two blog posts that aren’t game reports on the back-burner. Look for them soon.)), Clint ran the latest installment of the New Centurions campaign, and we wrapped up the invasion storyline.
He also took the opportunity to roll out his new experience system.
Why a new experience system? Well, as he quite rightly pointed out, most comic book characters don’t really level up. Some things about them change, but they don’t often gain new powers, or become permanently stronger, or stuff like that ((Yes, there are exceptions. But for the most part.)). Most experience and advancement systems not only allow, but encourage you to ramp your character up to new power levels, and that didn’t fit for the kind of game he wanted to run.
On the other hand, as players, we’re conditioned to want our characters to get better over time. We want to develop new powers and get better at using our old ones. And he didn’t want to take that motivation away from us.
He came up with a compromise heavily based on the idea of Milestones from The Dresden Files RPG. It focuses on Challenges, and overcoming a Challenge (a fight, a plot, a trap, a complication, etc.) grants certain benefits, which vary depending on how tough the Challenge was. At the lower levels, it lets you tweak some things about your character, and at higher levels, it gives you some experience that you can bank towards a bigger change. Challenges also give you Fame and Infamy, depending on how you resolve them.
So, after a brief talk about the experience system, we got down to play.
We picked up the game right where we had left it, with the New Centurions bursting onto the bridge of the voidship, filled with the illithid crew, with our poorly-armed army of ex-slaves at our backs. The rest of the evening was pretty much taken up by the epic combat that followed.
I’m not going to go through that combat step-by-step, but I do want to comment on a couple of things:
Everyone’s getting better at coming up with interesting things to do in combat, beyond the move-hit paradigm. And that’s so important to the feel of a superhero game. Jumping around, throwing enemies, making called shots on brain-controlling parasites, all of that happened. It was an action-packed fight.
Little plastic shot glasses make awesome forcefields and flying bases. And they’re cheap at the dollar store!
Figuring out how to use the minion rules to your advantage as a player has some real benefits.
D&D monsters make great extra-dimensional villains. Illithids and a bullette surprise!
Going into the fight with only 21 hits ((Out of a total of 100.)) made the fight extra-nerve-wracking for me. I figured S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was gonna go down in a valiant sacrifice, but I survived with 6 hits left.
This spiced pecan recipe is very good ((What does that have to do with the game? Nothing, except I made them to bring with me, and they were yummy.)).
So, we defeated the illithids, but during the fight, the ship passed through the barrier into our world. The last several minutes of the battle had us hovering over the war-torn Manhattan landscape, trying to get the psychic computer in the ship to help us defeat the incoming armies of returning raiders without blowing up their ships full of captured slaves. We managed to work out an arrangement that allowed the illithids to release their slaves, then stay trapped in their shuttles until the slaves controlling our captured ship released them back on the other side of the barrier.
There were some interesting hints about why our world had a dimensional barrier at all, and some fun stuff with the Defenders superhero group getting most of the credit for helping out during the disaster ((After all, we were no where to be found, having chased the illithids into another dimension.)), and some dark government cover-ups put in place, and S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. reuniting with Shannon, his tech and lifeline. Then we called it a night.
Now I’m looking over the experience system, trying to decide what I’m gonna do with my brand new experience points.
Friday night was the latest installment of the Feints & Gambits Dresden Files RPG campaign I’m running, set in Dublin. We picked up right where we had left off the previous session, the early evening of Holy Saturday, with the gang hauling the half-bog-mummified young necromancer they had saved from his rooms in Trinity College back to The Hole in the Wall ((The alternative bookshop/tattoo parlour owned by, and sometimes even operated by, Mark and Nate O’Malley)), which is the gang’s default base of operations.
The cast for the adventure changed slightly, with two of the folks who were at the previous game unable to make it, and the player who had missed the last game attending this time. This necessitated a little fast narrative footwork, and we decided that Aleister had gone off to tap his contacts about what might be going on, and Mark needing to have a little lie-down after his valiant exertions keeping the death spell from killing the boy they had rescued. And we brought Nate in with a cast on his arm on which a rude word had been written ((This was an interesting development that I was pleased to see the game could handle in an interesting and entertaining fashion. Nate’s player pulled me aside when we were going to reintroduce him to the group. I had asked him what he had been doing that kept him out of the action last game, and he wanted to clear some stuff he was working on offstage and writing up as fiction on the forum. He explained the background of what he was doing to me, and asked if he could start with a cast on his arm. I gave him the option of having a cast on the arm that was just jazz, with no game impact, or actually taking the Broken Arm moderate consequence, for which I would give him two Fate Points. He opted for the latter, and it came back to cause him some problems in game, which was nice. I also said he had to decide what his brother would have written on the cast, because Mark would certainly have written something. He thought for a second, and told me the rude word that was written on the cast, and added that Mark, a pretty good Thaumaturgist, would also have turned the cast bright pink and made sure that nothing else could be written on it to cover up his handiwork.)).
Faced with a young man half-way to being a bog-mummy, Nate decided to see if he could try to cleanse him of the evil magical influences, using his evocation of the spiritual nature of water to wash away the watery necromancy used on the boy. I decided this was an interesting idea, and asked him how he’d do it. He put the boy ((I keep using the word “boy” to describe the victim. The guy’s about twenty – a college student – but that makes him a boy to the majority of the players in this game. With one notable exception, we’re all old.)) in the bathtub, and used his evocation to wrench the bad water out of him, replacing it with good water. The first two attempts went poorly, because he didn’t use enough power. The third attempt ((Third time is, after all, the charm.)) resulted in an explosion of peaty bog water in the bathroom ((“Well, I want to be gentle about it.” “If you wanted to be gentle, you wouldn’t be using evocation.” “Oh. Damn.”)), which left the boy’s body floating in a tub of clean, pure water.
The boy’s unbreathing body.
Some quick CPR followed, which got his heart going again, and cleared his lungs of water, and got him sorta-stabilized. The brown stain was gone from his skin and, while still pretty much emaciated, he no longer looked shriveled. They brought him into a hospital emergency room and ditched him there once the doctors got to him, thus avoiding unpleasant conversations with the authorities – both mundane and magical. It was nice to see how the idea of a First Law violation, even by accident, got the group moving to set things right. The Warden, while he gets bad-mouthed a lot by the group, has obviously made a strong point about his power.
Then it was back to Trinity to try and find the nine other wannabe necromancers, and possibly the big bad guy behind them. It being Holy Saturday, a night traditionally associated with the absence of divinity in magical symbolism, they figured that whatever necromantic ritual was being tried would happen tonight, and probably in one of the chapels. Kate remembered that the main chapel had some historically significant people interred in it ((I’ve got zero idea whether or not this is true, but it was a good way to give them a clue about where on campus things might be happening.)), so they went there.
Outside the chapel ((I’ve got to pause here to recommend the iPad and Google image search as invaluable tools for setting the mood and location in modern games. Sixty seconds of searching, and I was able to show the players a picture of the front of the chapel at night. If I’d known that’s where things would have been happening before the game, I could even have eliminated that little lag time.)), Firinne glamoured Rogan to invisibility, and Rogan shifted to her smilodon form to creep in and do recon ((They checked for a threshold first, and found that the normal barrier posed by consecrated ground was gone – all part of the Holy Saturday thing.)). The others followed along behind her. They found seven of the young cultists chanting around the altar, waving knives and wearing black robes.
There ensued a nice little brawl, with Rogan disrupting the ritual, Nate disarming the cultists with a little magnetic evocation, Firinne shooting down the two guarding cultists crouched down in the pews ((She didn’t want to kill them, so I let her incapacitate them without killing. Part of me thinks that this might reduce the threat factor of guns in the game – I want guns to be scary – but the rules do say that, when someone is taken out, the victor gets to decide what exactly that means. Also, she bought the Guns skill up to Great, so it feels kinda prickish to not let her use it.)), and Kate summoning a spiritual aspect of the Great Mother to protect the altar. This last little bit of magic revealed a mystical whirlpool in the air, leading up and away to somewhere else, but the spirit broke the connection, which caused all the cultists who were still up and around to collapse like puppets with their strings cut.
The gang grabbed one of the cultists and scarpered before the police arrived to investigate the gunshots, and took him back to Kate’s flat near the College. Her home has the strongest wards they know of – at least, of the places they have access to – and they were worried that the black cloud they had encountered twice before might try to follow the cultist to tie up that loose end. Just before they reached her place, midnight arrived, and Holy Saturday turned into Easter Sunday. At that moment, Kate felt a massive snapping of mystical tension, as if a huge magical rubber band had been stretched tight and then cut. She didn’t know what it meant, but it added one more layer of worry ((This is, to me, an important part of the game world. I throw out a number of threads for the characters to follow and, wherever they go, they find adventure. But the other threads and plotlines don’t go away, and they don’t wait for PC involvement. If you ignore something, it still progresses. What she sensed was another plotline happening elsewhere.)).
Back at Kate’s place, Nate used The Sight to try and assess what was up with their new prisoner. He saw him as a deep, dark emptiness in the shape of a man, with a tiny figure, far away in the depths, desperately waving its arms as it drifted deeper into the void. He also took a peek at the other characters there, and I gave him a quick image of each of them: Firinne as an elfin figure, Rogan as a human straining to hold back a snarling sabertooth ((Very reminiscent of the Strength card of the Major Arcana, now I think of it. Note to self: look at Tarot decks for visions using The Sight.)), Kate as being surrounded by the spirits of her female ancestors. There was some discussion about him looking out the window at the city, but after I cautioned him about the dangers of looking at a city with over a thousand years of history, violence, death, and fey games, he decided that he’d prefer it if his brain remained inside his head.
It was around midnight in the real world by then, and we’d reached a reasonable stopping point, so we called the game. All in all, it went pretty well, especially considering I had no idea what direction the players were going to go, so I had done no extra prep after the last session.
First, I’m using a published adventure for this leg of the campaign, but he group doesn’t know what that adventure is. Please don’t tell them if you recognize it.
Second, because this is a published adventure, my accounts are going to have spoilers in them. If you start to recognize this as the adventure you’re playing – or going to play – you may want to avoid reading on.
***SPOILER ALERT***
This past Sunday saw our return to the Storm Point campaign, after a hiatus of five months, when I ran the Gammatoba mini-campaign. I was gratified to have a full house for this first session back, and was very pleased to get back to the game.
Anyway, the gang is almost tenth level, so I want to move them out and away from Storm Point, into the wider world and beyond. To that end, I decreed that a year and a half had gone by in the downtime, and started the session with a description of how things had changed in the area: the town of Storm Point prospering, the dwarven city of Silverfalls being resettled now that the heroes had cleansed it, and a little village growing up around the hospital the players had constructed. I emphasized the way things were pretty tame in the neighbourhood, now, and that, prosperous as the town was becoming, it still couldn’t match a larger city for the purposes of selling loot or buying stuff.
With that done, the party was primed and ready when a dwarven merchant asked them to look into missing caravans between Silverfalls and the city-state of Belys, on the far side of the Bitter Mountains. They haggled with the merchant, getting him to make them shareholders in his company and providing them with letters of introduction to merchants in Belys in return for their assistance. Then they tried to get him to give them the carts, horses, and provisions they would need to create a fake caravan to try and trap whoever was responsible, but he wasn’t having that – he was paying them to do a job, they were responsible for getting the job done.
Our heroes took that in stride, however, and outfitted their own one-wagon caravan, and set off through the mountains. The trip took them about a week to get through the pass, and then they reached the Gloaming Wood, a crescent-shaped wood that circled about half the plains that surrounded Belys. A couple of days traveling through that wood, and they could tell that the Feywild was very close. Galvanys had heard tales of the Gloaming Court, one of the minor factions of the eladrin, that he thought held sway here, but didn’t remember too much else.
About a day away from leaving the wood, they spotted some suspicious piles of leaves in a clearing by the side of the road – suspicious in that one had a bloodied arm sticking out of it. They stopped the wagon, got out, and Ssudai crept up on the piles stealthily, while the rest of the group advanced more openly. That’s when they spotted the harpies in the trees, and Thrun decided to try and scare them off.
At this point, the corpses in the piles of leaves revealed themselves as dryads, we rolled initiative. The fight had some interesting movement in it, with things being swept back and forth across the battlefield, and some tree climbing by Ssudai. It took a pretty long time to get through, though, mainly because everyone was trying to remember how to play their characters during the Gammatoba hiatus. Things got a little tense, but really there wasn’t that much danger overall.
The point at which they decided they might really be in trouble was when they killed the first dryad. Her eyes rolled back, she convulsed, her bark and wood turned grey, and mist started to rise from her eyes, mouth, and fingertips. She only stuck around for another round, getting in one more attack before crumbling to rotted wood, but the rest of the monsters followed the same pattern, which weirded the party out a bit – as it was supposed to.
After the fight, the group examined the bones and wood of their opponents and found runes carved on them, still leaking the grey mist. Milo analyzed the markings, and determined that they were necromantic sigils meant to drain off and channel the life energy of whatever the creatures killed, and Faran determined that they called on the power of old, dead gods.
At this point, it was getting a little late in the evening, and wanted to move things on to a specific stopping point, so instead of making it a big puzzle to figure out where these fey creatures had come from, I let the party follow the grey mist rising off the remains of their foes. It led them into a glade where the trees were dark and twisted, and in the midst of it all, two ancient, half-dead oak trees had grown into a portal to the Feywild, and the next stage of the adventure.
There was a brief moment of panic on my part, as the party started talking about how they could just close the portal, and how stupid they’d have to be to pass through it. My initial response was to force them through somehow, but then I just calmed down and decided that, if they didn’t go through this one, I could get them to the party some other way, and let them decide what they were going to do. In the end, they decided to go through the portal after all, so I needn’t have worried.
And that was the point I stopped things.
It was good to get back to Storm Point after the hiatus, but the hiatus was nice. It let me recharge my enthusiasm for the game, and to think about what’s working and what’s not. In general, I’m happy with the game, but I want to bring in more variety of play – make it less of a fight-of-the-week game. To do that, I’m looking at ways to encourage other types of adventure, more exploration, and more interaction. I’m also trying to make the fights move more quickly, but that’s an uphill battle with this group’s attention span. I’ve got some ideas in that area, though.
Friday night was the latest session of my Feints & Gambits campaign. It’s been some time since the last one, so it was good to get back to the game. We had almost a full house, too; only one of the players couldn’t make it.
It being Good Friday, and the game being set in Dublin, there seemed only one storyline that I could use for the centrepiece of this adventure – the refighting of the Easter Uprising by the fey courts, using ghosts and faeries as soldiers, with the ghost of Padraig Pearse acting as judge. The fey courts use this as part of the game they play for control of Ireland, and the group has run into the edge of this thing previously, and, well, it was Easter weekend.
So, rather than use my master list of Aspects to generate the structure of the scenario, I pulled out the Aspects related to the main story and mapped out their relationship. Then I rolled a few more random Aspects to give the characters a way in to the situation.
At the start of the session, I decided I wanted to have a quick scene with each character to give them a hook into the scenario. I had worked out a few of them before play, but swapped a couple of them around and came up with new ones on the fly to fit things a little better, and to make sure that each character got the spotlight for a few minutes ((The random rolls I had done pre-game to select character Aspects to use to hook the characters had pulled up Aspects for the same characters for the last few games, and I wanted to spread things around a little more.)). The scenes I came up with were:
A fey messenger warning Aleister that Baglock wanted him to keep out of it, without telling him what “it” was.
Kate returning to her flat to find an unsigned note warning her to be careful with her ectomancy, because she was close to violating a Law of Magic.
Macha warning Mark that, because the group had involved themselves in the Game previously, they might get tangled in it during Easter Week.
Rogan got a prophecy from Mad Mary, saying that someone was trying to change the rules of the game, and it might be the end for an unspecified “him.”
Firinne got a call from one of her business contacts, who had someone wanting to buy thirteen black iron athames.
The main thing I was wanting to accomplish with these scenes was to hint that something big was going down, and let the fact that it was Easter point them towards stuff to investigate. After all, they had built stuff during setting creation that tied into the whole thing.
But I misjudged. Thirteen black iron ritual knives was just too sinister for them to just let them go. Firinne was very concerned that they could be used to nasty effect ((In some ways, she’s one of the more responsible and cautious characters in the group, which is odd for a trickster changeling. Obviously, I need to compel her trickster nature a little harder.)), and roped in Kate and Mark to help with that. They were able to give some general answers as to what such things would be used for, but weren’t able to get specific. However, all the general things tended to sound rather… unpleasant, so everyone agreed that they needed to figure out what was going on.
Firinne used her glamours to disguise thirteen empty beer bottles as the knives, and Mark put a tracking spell on the box that held them. Rogan decided to accompany Firinne as backup to deliver them to her contact, who worked out of a dance club called Jesus Murphy ((It got named this way: Firinne asked what the club was called, and I turned it back on her, saying she had invented the contact and where he was located, so she’d have to come up with the name. She responded something along the lines of, “Jesus Murphy, now I have to come up with the name of the club, too?” And thus it was named.)). The knives were delivered and payment accepted, but Rogan got a whiff of something odd with her supernatural sense of smell. She followed the odour, which was that of death, to a trio of young women dancing on the floor of the club.
Suspecting they were undead, she wanted to interrogate them, but not in the middle of a dance club. So, she started a fist fight ((The group seems to love them some bar brawls.)) in order to get the bouncers to toss all five – Rogan, Firinne, and the three suspected zombies – out, where they could settle things in private. This worked marvelously, but the follow-up didn’t go the way they had planned.
See, Firinne isn’t much of a fighter. She carries a gun for when she absolutely needs it, but prefers not to pull it. Rogan is a combat monster, but only in her smilodon form. And these three scrappy young women proceeded to mop the pavement with our heroines. They got to experience first-hand the hard lesson Aleister learned in the first game: numbers are a big advantage, especially when they use teamwork.
Rogan finally shifted her form, which freaked their targets out, and then everything went black and cold. A deep voice spoke out of the blackness, threatening and taunting Rogan and Firinne, and filling Firinne’s lungs with peaty bog water. Our heroines took the better part of valour, and scampered back to the waiting car.
This is the point where I had the others show up – Firinne had called them between getting booted from the club and the fight starting outside. With the numbers so bolstered, they went back to see what was going on, and found three bog-mummies – very much inanimate – that had been living humans shortly before. Rogan had had some inkling during the fight that the women weren’t undead ((You can get quite a good sniff of someone if they’ve got you in a hair-pulling headlock.)), but that the smell had been the taint of death, rather than actual death – more a metaphyiscal thing.
This, coupled with Kate’s use of The Sight on the scene and her sense of necromantic energies at Trinity College some months previous, led the group to decide that there was, indeed, some big necromantic badness in the offing. Some investigation and lurking back at the club ((Also some magic and some breaking and entering, but don’t tell anyone.)) revealed that the fake knives were still there, and they concluded that the women they had fought had, in fact, been there to pick up the knives. Come dawn, Firinne refreshed her glamour, and Mark his tracking spell, and they went to get a little sleep.
So, on Saturday, a day associated with the triumph of death and the absence of god in Christianity, the daggers moved. The gang followed them to Trinity College, where they saw ten obvious students divvying them up and heading off. One of the students kept the box and the extra three knives, and that’s the one they followed back to his dorm room. When they tried to bully him into talking to them, they found a very powerful ward set up in his doorway and, when they pressed the case, the darkness and cold came back, and their target started gurgling and gasping.
Kate used a magic dissolving potion to pull the ward down, and they snatched the boy out of his room. He was already turning brown and withering, with brown, peaty water pouring from his mouth. Mark almost blew a brain gasket, but managed to interfere enough with the incoming spell to break it and save the boy’s life. The group bundled him up and took him off somewhere safe to recover before the bad juju came back.
And that’s where we left it. The investigation is going in a different direction than I had anticipated, and leading up to a very different climax, but it should still be a good one. Next session should finish it off.
Long ago, in the before time ((Which is to say, back in the heady days of Unknown Armies and D&D 3.x.)), I wrote some RPG stuff for pay. I’m not sure if Fred Hicks recalled that ((Though possibly Chad Underkoffler remembers some of our shared credits on UA stuff.)) – I had used it as a selling point to get in on the Dresden Files bleeding alpha playtest, but that was a long time ago – or if he was asking me primarily as a courtesy because of all the stuff I’ve written about DFRPG on this blog, but he asked me if I’d consider writing one of their free one-shots.
I had to think about it for a while. There are reasons I stopped writing for the industry, but the main two were that it ate up a lot of time and creativity that I could be funneling into my home games (or even work), and that the people I respected and trusted as editors and publishers weren’t looking to buy the kinds of stuff I wanted to write ((Though the ever-charming Dr. Michelle Nephew encouraged me to write a card game for Atlas when they stopped doing the d20 stuff. I really wish I could have figured out how to do that.)) and I didn’t want to work with the people who were buying it.
This was going to be a short scenario, though, and I already knew the folks at Evil Hat were good, professional folks, so I said yes, and pitched them some ideas. Night Fears was one of them ((It was originally called Dare, but I changed that when it was suggested that I follow the Dresden Files naming pattern.)), though not the top option on the list. It was, in fact, number two.
The one Fred and I liked best was a court trial, where the bulk of the action would take place in flashbacks, allowing the characters to build the backstory dynamically as the trial proceeded. I thought it was a cool idea, and could make for some great storytelling, but it was kind of daunting, so I decided to test the concept in my Fearful Symmetries game. After playing, I was reluctantly forced to admit that it would take way too much work to hash it into a pick-up-and-play form that anyone could run at a convention or evening of play.
So, we fell back on the Night Fears idea. I liked this one because it let me work a standard haunted house horror scenario into a DFRPG world, and to focus on being scared, rather than on being hurt ((Don’t get me wrong; the characters can get hurt bad in the scenario, but that’s not the primary focus.)). It also let me cobble together an interesting group of young teens to tackle the problem – I’m really happy with the characters as they turned out, and I think they’re good enough to lift out of the scenario for other teen-centric one-shots.
The other thing I think is important about these characters is that they’re set at Feet in the Water level, the lowest power level in the game. I’ve got a bit of thing about games with sliding power scales – I like to see if they work as well at the lower end as at the higher end. And by “work as well as,” I generally mean they can tell stories that are just as interesting, just as threatening, and just as heroic. I took the low power scale here as a challenge to myself, to put together something that would be as fun to play as dueling Submerged wizards ((The other thing about the low power level is that the characters are very simple to play, so it’s a good scenario to spring on newbies, even if it doesn’t show off the magic system.)).
Hopefully, I succeeded. You’ll have to let me know.
Anyway.
The whole experience of working with Evil Hat has been awesome. Matthew Gandy has taken his place in my list of top editors ((The other three names on that list are John Tynes, Greg Stolze, and Michelle Nephew.)) to work with – he asked the right questions, called me on my flaws, and just generally dragged the stuff I’d written up to a higher level. Thanks, Matthew.
Fred Hicks is just magic. I mean, you’ve seen his layout stuff – he does an amazing job of making his books look both classy and fun, which is a bit of a balancing act, in my mind. Beyond that, he is great to work with, very communicative, supportive, and (maybe most importantly for freelancers) quick to pay. He went above and beyond keeping me in the loop on where things stood with the book, sending me art previews and layout previews. It’s great to feel so involved in a project.
And Kathy Schad is an amazing artist. I don’t know enough about art to discuss her stuff intelligently, so I will just say that she made the stuff in my head look better than I imagined it could. Check out her site.
One of the coolest things about this project happened today, when I got to follow Ruben Smith-Zempel’s tweets as he pulled the map in the book together in an amazingly short time. It’s a great map, and I can’t believe how quick he was with it.
That’s about enough of me prattling on about the scenario. I’ll shut up now. But I encourage you to go check it out – it’s free, after all – and let me know if you run it. I’d love to hear your war stories.
This past Sunday was the final session of the Gammatoba mini-campaign I’ve been running as a break from the Storm Point D&D campaign that’s been going for about two and a half years.
When we last left our heroic mutants, they had just entered the Karney Key Library, after overcoming the ark defenses. The dying ark leader laughed at them and said that they Librarian would take care of them. We opened this session with the heroes opening the doors of the library and seeing what waited for them.
Now, I haven’t been very strict with making encounters in Gammatoba. I just throw a number of cool monsters together, and run things off the cuff. For this game, I came up with the Librarian – basically, I reskinned the Eater of Knowledge Mindstrike from Pyramid of Shadows as a cyborg-centaur kinda thing, with a couple of new tweaks. For the rest, I threw in a double-handful of ark minions and some interesting terrain.
The first room had some sandbag fortifications and over a dozen of the ark minions. The looks from my players – all seven of them were present – were worth the price of admission all by themselves. They were hoping the arks were minions, but they didn’t know for certain, and I’d told them that I planned to leave a few of them dead on the floor this session. They took those out in very short order, with the last three fleeing into the main reading room of the library, where I planned the final combat.
I had expected the group to take a short rest before pressing on, but they didn’t – they just charged after the fleeing arks. So, I started placing every figure I had brought with me ((Well, almost every figure. I didn’t place the chuul figure that I had been using for the warrior-accountant giant crayfish.)) on the balconies and behind the shelves, ready to open fire. I used a sword spider figure for the Librarian, and rubbed my palms together in anticipation of the mutant blood about to be spilled.
The players were scared, which was the right reaction. They knew they were going to die.
And then they proceeded to completely dismantle the encounter.
A lucky draw from the Alpha Mutation deck got one of them machine control, which he threw at the Librarian because I had described it as a cyborg. It only gave him one round of control, but it also kept him dazed for a few rounds. Then the stun whips came out, and the Librarian was repeatedly stunned. Meanwhile, the bulk of the characters concentrated on taking out the ark minions, keeping them off the backs of the mutants taking turns putting the boots to the Librarian.
I got one round out of the whole combat (about eight or nine rounds in total) where the Librarian could attack. He blasted the brains of the group, and then used a special power I had given him to summon in some defensive data constructs ((Basically, some more minions to mess things up.)), but went down before his next turn came up.
Still, it was a tough fight. The group fought smart and used their resources well, but the sheer number of the minions and the damaging aura that the Librarian had almost did for a couple of them.
At the end of the fight, they were all still standing.
I had thought about a skill challenge kind of thing to hold the building until the Ishtarian forces arrived to take possession, but it was getting a little late, and I judged it to be kind of anticlimactic after taking down the Librarian and his minions, so I had the fish-warriors of Ishtar drop in on columns of light and erect a force dome over the library. The group got the crystal charging device they had been promised, wrenched the flying saucer out of the ground again, and flew home to Fort LoGray as heroes – the Fort LoGray Legion’s First Airborne Wing.
That’s where we closed the game.
I want to thank all my regular players for indulging my desire to take a break from D&D to try Gamma World, and to thank Cody for sitting in and playing with us. I had fun.
Now, it’s time to get back to the Storm Point game. I’ve got plans for that one.
The Armitage Files is an improvised campaign structure. It uses a number of stock pieces, such as NPCs, organizations, and locations, that are strung together by individual GMs to fit player action. The adventures I create with it may or may not match any other GM’s version of the campaign. That means that reading these posts may or may not offer spoilers for other game groups.
**You Have Been Warned**
**Extra-Special Spoiler Warning**
The basic spine for this investigation is outlined in The Armitage Files book. The adventure below doesn’t follow it exactly – with the improvised structure of the game, there’s really no way it can – but the report below can be pretty spoilerific as to the broad strokes. So, think carefully before reading this one.
**Seriously, Dude, You Have Been Warned**
Saturday night, we got back to The Armitage Files. It was the start of a new investigation, and after the little trick I pulled last session, wherein Aaron Moon got a brief glimpse of The Tears of Azathoth, the group decided to follow up what they could on that elusive tome. They had a new set of documents to wade through for clues, as well ((Document Four, for those of you playing along at home.)), so they wound up with a number of references to the book.
I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the tome in question: which version did I want to use, did I want to get it into their hands now, what did it contain, where was it, all that sort of stuff. Flipping through the book for inspiration, I found that one of the sample scenario spines dealt with trying to get the book, and had an interesting side element involved, as well. I read it over a couple of times, thought about it for a day or so, and decided that I would use the basics of that spine ((With a few little tweaks, of course.)) for this investigation.
We started the game with our plucky (but increasingly nervous) heroes latching on to the idea that the book was probably still in the MU library, but lost or misfiled or concealed. They talked with several of the members of the Armitage group who were mentioned by name in the documents as having something to say about the book, but didn’t get a lot of traction. None of them remembered it, until they got to Rice, who thought he had recalled Llanfer (the librarian) mentioning it to him.
The investigators were already somewhat suspicious of Llanfer, because he seemed reluctant to let them paw through the rare book collection unsupervised, so the fact that Rice seemed to be giving him the lie really roused their suspicion. The explanation to this whole bit is under the spoiler tag:
There was some discussion about breaking into the library to search for Tears without interruption ((Which prompted one player to say, “You realize we’ve descended to the level of the Whatley clan, right?”)), but they decided to actually ask for permission first. With Armitage’s blessing, the group was given leave to search the rare book collection at MU. I used this opportunity to show why Llanfer was so reluctant to let the unwashed masses ((Yes, Moon is very mindful of the proper way to store and handle books, but really, he’s a tradesman, not a true collector. 😉 ))run rampant through his books – the security procedures, the care in handling, the specific storage requirements for rare books, and so on. By the end of the search – which did not turn up the book – everyone had a better idea about what the rare book collection was about.
So, they pulled a name reference out of the file – Wolfe-Dietrich Gudzun, who is listed as a “late fortune-teller and embezzler,” and started looking for him ((Actually, now that I think about it, Roxy was working on this from the start, while Moon and Solis went snooping around the library. She also sent a telegram to Austin Kittrell, recuperating in Europe, telling him to look for the book. The response was less than agreeable.)). She tracked down a reference to him operating a spiritualist scam in Kingsport about a year and a half previous, when he vanished from the jail cell after being arrested for fraud.
This sounded promising, but further investigation into his mysterious disappearance uncovered a pretty mundane explanation: the mob had threatened him if he didn’t share the proceeds of his scam, and got him arrested to make their point. Gudzun bribed a sergeant to unlock the door and look the other way while he scampered off to New York and a new identity.
They tracked him, now with the name Wallace Goodson, to New York City, where he was working as an accountant. Bearding him in his den, as it were, they managed to reassure him that they weren’t here to hurt him or to muscle in on his current scam ((Said scam involved moving a lot of money in and out of his clients’ accounts to create the expectation for these sorts of transfers at the bank and rudimentary, ponzi-like reallocation of funds, showing each client that the short-term loans always produced a nice profit. Meantime, he was dosing himself with household cleansers to appear sicker and sicker. That way, when he faked his death and all the money disappeared into his pockets, no one would come looking.)), he relaxed and spoke very frankly with them. Unfortunately, he could offer no information about the Tears.
During the conversation, though, he got steadily more agitated and distracted, until he finally dug a quarter out of his pocket and stuck it into a strange, bronze coin bank on his deck. Immediately, he calmed down, and was able to focus again.
Moon took a good look at the statue, and I showed the group this picture, while giving Moon a rundown on what his Occult skill told him about Buer, the demon represented there. Solis’s Medical skill told him the behaviour they had witnessed was similar to morphia addicts needing a fix. When questioned about the bank, Goodson was again quite forthcoming, telling them he had bought it from a street peddler in Five Points ((Okay. This is New York City, in a Cthulhu game. I fully intended to use Red Hook as the setting for the peddler bit, but Michael, one of the players, immediately started talking about how the adventure was going to end up in Red Hook as soon as I mentioned NYC, so I changed it on the fly to Five Points. Screw you, Michael.)).
Not getting any solid lead on Tears, the group left, planning to keep an eye on Goodson – Roxy was pretty sure that they had spooked him and that he’d bee cutting and running now. On the other hand, they didn’t want to spook him any more than they already had, so they gave him a little distance, going for supper before beginning surveillance.
And, of course, they lost him during that time.
So, Moon and Solis decided to break into his office – Roxy, the skilled burglar, was watching Goodson’s home in Greenwitch Village. The burglary was ham-handed and unsubtle, but effective. They found that three files had been taken from his office, along with the Buer bank.
Roxy, meanwhile, was caught up in another vision of the watery, giant city that she’s been haunted by. She regained consciousness just as Moon and Solis arrived to join her, and they broke into Goodson’s home. There, they found two of the three files that had been taken from his office, evidence that he’d packed a traveling case in a hurry, and a missing kitchen knife. They knew the name of the client for the file that was still missing, so they looked her up in the telephone book and took a taxi to her home.
Which was surrounded by police. Goodson had broken in and stabbed her to death, but had been shot by police as he tried to open her safe and empty it of valuables. Solis and Roxy talked their way past the police line to examine Goodson’s body, and retrieved the Buer bank. Meanwhile, Moon caught sight of a shadowy figure slipping away down an alley, and gave chase.
In the alley, he saw a man with a large duffel bag on his back fleeing. He also met a nightgaunt that almost managed to drag him off to god knows where. He slipped out of its grasp, though, and fled back to the street and the police, and the fleeing man called the creature off.
It being late, our intrepid heroes decided to retire for the night to a hotel and get some sleep in shifts before trying to track down this mysterious peddler the next day. Each of them had a dream that night that struck at their drive:
Moon (Thirst For Knowledge) dreamed of a vast stone temple, almost Greek in style, with The Tears of Azathoth sitting on a plinth in the centre. He tried to approach it, but was stopped by a strange man who asked what he’d give for the book. Moon tried to push past him, and woke up in bed with a bloody nose.
Solis (Curiosity) dreamed of a strange blue puzzle-box being delivered to the hotel room, and a strange man saying that he could have it, if he was willing to pay. Solis turned his back on the box (and his drive), and woke up very shaken.
Roxy (Ennui) dreamed she was in an empty, bare room with a single silver door. She sat there for a while, until she got bored, and then picked the lock to find a long staircase leading down. A strange man started to make a pitch to guide her to a land of incredible wonders, but was interrupted by some deep, resonating, booms far down the stairs. Then water started flowing up them. He looked at Roxy, terrified, and said, “Who else is in your mind?” Cue the tentacles bursting through the floor, grasping them both, and dragging them into the depths. Roxy woke up somewhat disturbed.
And that’s where we left it. They’ve got a number of questions, and some good clues and hints to follow up. I expect to wrap this particular investigation up next session, though there are loose threads that will probably wind their way into future investigations.
Last night was the latest installment of Clint’s New Centurions superhero campaign.
We had left off just after boarding the invading interdimensional aliens’ voidship, so we picked up with our exploration of the vessel. Our plan was simple: capture or disable the vessel, and stop the invasion.
The inside was huge – bigger than any aircraft carrier – with massive hallways and doors. The walls were something like lacquered sandstone or coral, in vertical striations, looking very organic. The floor was a leathery substance with octagonal tiles. The first doors we made it to were aircraft hangar sized, and Queen Celeste needed to use her magical abilities to open them.
Beyond, we found the slave pens – rows of large, barred cells, filled with a myriad of aliens, each with a small parasite attached at the base of the skull, controlling them and keeping them docile. A small band of them were being moved somewhere by four of the invaders, so we rushed into the fray and took out the slavers, thanks in no small part to a well-timed fastball special, with Paladin tossing Widowmaker into the mix. A little experimentation managed to remove the parasite from one of the creatures, and she pointed us to a control node in the wall, where Queen Celeste was able to remove all the parasites, open the cell doors, and access some vital information.
Information such as the layout of the voidship, the number of slaves aboard (about 3400, if I remember correctly), and the number of invaders aboard (a little over 700). With this data, we formulated a plan to take a hundred or so volunteers with military training from the slave population and push on to take the bridge. Another group, made up of a few hundred, decided they wanted to try their own plans for looting and capturing the ship. Paladin managed to arrange an agreement with them that, no matter who took the ship, there would be co-operation between the victors and the other groups. Queen Celeste then used her suggestion ability to send this group, made up of many of the largest and most troublesome slaves, to attack the forward guard stations, where we had determined the largest number of guards (and weapons) would be.
With our stalwart band of followers, we pushed on toward the elevator that led up to the command deck. Widowmaker used her forcefield to bottle up a room full of guards, and then we ran smack into a trio of priest invaders, with mind-blasting gems, psychic armour, and force swords.
This showed up one of the interesting artifacts of a system like BASH that has a very chunky progression ((And by chunky progression, I mean that there are very few steps in the progression latter of abilities, and the difference between adjacent ranks is large.)): the initial aliens we fought in the ship were pushovers, and these were devastating. Now, obviously, there were other factors involved than just the chunky system: the initial aliens were minions, while these were not, for instance. But there is a real difference between fighting someone with a hit, damage, or defense multiple of x2 versus a multiple of x3. This is partially addressed by the half-step system that Clint is using, providing mid-steps, but there’s still a big difference.
Case in point, these three illithid priests pretty much ate our lunch. We had to pull out all the stops to take them down, and would have been completely routed except for Queen Celeste’s power stunt of using her weakening touch to deactivate their armour, and Widowmaker’s massively successful gravitic smash ((Pun intended.)). As it stands, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. is running around at about 20% of his hit total ((I can’t complain, really – this is only the second or third time he’s been damaged at all, so he was due for a pummeling.)), with no way of getting any back, because he’s a machine and the alien healing tech doesn’t work on him.
Now, this is not a criticism of the game or the fight – it was a great fight, and very much in keeping with the genre to force the heroes to get creative and sneaky to take down strange and terrible foes.
So, we pushed on at speed to the elevator, took it up to the command deck, and did our best to disable it. Then we stormed the bridge, catching the captain and the rest of the bridge crew apparently by surprise.
That’s where we left it – we burst through the door onto the bridge, and the captain and bridge crew turn to see us crowded in the doorway.
I wrote the following post late last night. Reading it in the harsh light of day with a more critical eye, I can see several ways it can be interpreted and understood in a less-than-positive way. I’m not going to change it, though: I don’t like to do that once something is released into the wild. What I will do is preface it by saying that I mean the post in a positive, charitable, and constructive way. It’s more introspective than most of my posts, and that can lead one to see it as self-indulgent, or a passive-aggressive attack. Neither is the intent. The intent is summed up as follows:
Even the best of us can have a bad day. We need to watch how we handle it, because we’re responsible for how our behaviour impacts others.
This is especially important in roleplaying games, where strong emotions are often being evoked by the scenario and characters, but it’s also good advice in everyday life. Remember Wheaton’s Law.
So, if you read on, please assume positive intent on my part.
Normally, I try to be pretty positive about gaming experiences, because they’re fun. They’re my main hobby, and I enjoy gaming, and I enjoy the people I game with. So, when I write about player behaviour, I like to talk about good behaviour – stuff that contributes to the fun of the game.
Tonight, though, at Clint’s New Centurions game, one of the players got frustrated, argumentative, and confrontational. The GM even stepped in to calm things down. That’s totally not cool.
The worst part is that I was the player.
I like to think I’m a pretty laid-back guy, and a fun person to game with. I like to think I enhance the play experience for everyone at the table. Generally, I think this is the case.
But tonight, I got frustrated ((No, I’m not going to talk about why I got frustrated. It’s not really relevant to the point I’m making.)), and it soured the evening for me – and, I assume, for others in the group. I started to argue, and to be uncharitably critical, and basically turned into a jerk. And it was player-to-player stuff; I can’t even cloak the incident in the guise of roleplaying ((Not that I think that’s an acceptable excuse.)). It’s not like I called other players names, or threw a tantrum, or ruined a friendship, or anything like that, but I was, indeed, a jerk.
So, before going on to talk about the lesson this has to teach, let me say this.
Clint, I want to apologize for creating the situation where you needed to intervene to make me realize what I was doing. You shouldn’t have had to do that, and I’m sorry.
Penny, Tom, and Fera, I want to apologize for being a jerk to you fine folks. No excuse. I was out of line, and I’m sorry. I hope it didn’t ruin the session for you.
But aside from a little public self-flagellation, why write about this? Because I didn’t see the line as I crossed it, and that was the problem.
I’m gonna make an assumption: most folks are not jerks. We like our friends, and like to get along with them, and like to treat them well. But sometimes, we don’t live up to it. We’ve all got our own baggage, our own hot buttons, and our own moods. And if things converge properly – one of our hot buttons gets pushed while we’re tired or in a bad mood – we cross the line and become jerks.
Crossing the line happens. Emotions aren’t always simple and easy to control. When you get that adrenaline hit, and the anger or frustration ramps up, your mood takes a sharp left turn, and you’re over it. The key, I think, is recognizing when we’re doing it, so that we don’t have to act on it. If we don’t recognize it, we’re going to act on our current messed-up emotions, and be jerks.
Easy to say, right? But it’s harder to recognize the line when we’re in the process of crossing it. I know what it feels like to be over the line, but part of the experience is caring more about the current problem – the frustration, in this case – than about how to deal with it. Most of the time, I can see when it happens, because of the responses that come to mind at that point are rather less than charitable, and at least a little confrontational. When my first three responses to what someone says are sarcastic, mocking, or critical, I usually see where things are going and shut my fool mouth before I make things worse.
See, the secret that I figured out tonight is that, while I may have made the game less enjoyable for the others tonight, I totally ruined it for myself. The rest of the evening, I kept thinking about what a jerk I had been, and it soured the rest of the game for me. Because, you see, I had been a jerk to my friends. I sat there the rest of the evening feeling guilty and ashamed of my behaviour, while they got on with playing the game. I ruined my own fun – probably more than I ruined theirs.
What am I trying to say? I’m saying that I think lots of people are basically like me in this respect.
I’m saying that we need to think about where our own jerk line is, and get good at noticing when we cross it.
I’m saying when we cross it, we shouldn’t act on the impulses that emerge. We need to think about our behaviour more carefully when we’re over the line, because we can’t trust our first reactions.
And I’m saying that, when we do act on those impulses, we need to do what I did after it was pointed out to me tonight: recognize that we’re in the wrong, apologize, and shut the hell up until we’re fit for human company again. If that means we stew in silence for a while, so be it; it’s better than digging the hole deeper.
So, here are the three things I’ve decided to keep firmly in mind next time I find myself crossing that line:
These are my friends I’m gaming with.
It’s only a game.
Jerks don’t get invited to play with nice people.
Now, it’s quarter to three in the morning, and I’m going to go to sleep. But I wanted to get this post off my chest before I did.
Last Sunday was the penultimate session of the Gammatoba mini-campaign. We’ve almost made it to the end of our little excursion into the weird post-apocalyptic world of the future.
This session was set to be a big, knock-down, drag-out assault on the Carney Key Library, currently held by the Mad Tooth gang, trying to secure it for the fish-priests of Ishtar ((Just the fact that Gamma World means I get to write sentences like that makes me smile.)). I expected it to last the entire session, and it did. I also told the players that, because we were coming to the end of the mini-campaign, I was taking the gloves off.
We started with a sketch of the crashed flying saucer and the defensive wall in front of the library. I put a bunch of figures on the board, both on top of the wall and in behind piles of rubble in front of the wall, and told the group they could see more of the Mad Tooths converging on the location. The top of the wall had laser ballistae on top of them, and I brought out one of the mutant crayfish warrior-accountants early in the first round ((Which prompted a quote so good, I had to tweet it: “Which is the bigger threat – the laser crossbows or the mutant crayfish?”)) to put the pressure on.
I didn’t really balance this encounter too much. The Mad Tooth gang is made up of arks, so the bulk of the opponents were ark whelps – minions – with some ark scouts manning the ballistae on the walls. The mutant crayfish was a giant crayfish I found in the Monster Builder: it was a solo, which I decided was too tough as I was putting it on the table, so I reduced its hit points by half. I also had stats for an ark hand-taker that was going to be leading from behind the wall.
I just kept pouring the whelps onto the board, adding a couple more each round. Some lucky teleportation got many of them, as well as the mutant crayfish, flung a mile away, and the heroes made it to the top of the wall. At that point, I put a bunch more arks on the table, hunkered down behind sandbags at the front of the library, and gave them guns. I also put the hand-taker on the table, and a second crayfish ((The group was pretty battered by that point, so I reduced the hit points down to a quarter of the solo total.)).
There were some memorable moments:
L’Unite Cinq, the AI Reanimate, going down under a horde of arks, all on his own on the ground before the wall.
Ikto Umoo, the Gelatinous Mindbreaker, blasting the hand-taker down in one amazing shot with his leaky fusion rifle.
Vant, the AI Shapeshifter ((That’s right, AI Reanimate for the T-800 and AI Shapeshifter for the T-1000)), invisibly wrestling for control of the laser ballista.
Skitter, the Ectoplasmic Arachnid, switching the ballista to automatic and opening up on the defenders in front of the library.
Barto Melu, the Temporal Gravity Manipulator, sacrificing himself to use unsafe Omega Tech, and spending several rounds unconscious because of it.
In the end, though, they got into the library, barred the gates, and heard the dying words of the ark leader:
