Author Archives: Rick Neal

Welcome to Gammatoba

By | | Gammatoba, What's he playing?
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So, the Storm Point crew and I are looking at taking a bit of a hiatus from D&D to play some Gamma World. Maybe. If the whole gang wants to. I’m kind of pumped to give it a try, so here’s the set-up I pitched them to drum up interest:

The settlement of Fort LoGray in Red Valley grew up in the early years after the Big Mistake. It coalesced around an old set of fortifications that grew and multiplied as the various timelines overlapped and stayed. The strange combination of walls and buildings provided safety and security, even so near the devastation that struck the Great City One to the south (called in the oldest stories Winter Pig, though no one knows why). In the Red Valley Confederacy, Fort LoGray stands as the vigilant protector, providing elite soldiers and armaments to the villages and towns of Red Valley, and the young people of Standroo, Selk, Locks, Raw’s Deal, Eepul, and Weepul all dream of joining the ranks of the LoGray Legions.

You have all come to Fort LoGray in order to attain that honour. Each of you is a hero of your home village, with unique abilities and the mixed blessing of the Flux, the twisting of timelines and parallel worlds that grant you your various mutations. You have also each been given a valuable piece of Omega Tech and the best wishes of your friends and family to aid you in your endeavour. You have passed the initial interviews and gone through basic training, getting to know your fellow aspirants. More than half of your initial class of recruits has already washed out and been sent home. Now, you have one last test to prove your skill, adaptability, and determination.

As with each new squad of Legionnaires, you are being sent south down the river, to Great City One. To gain admittance to the Legion, you must return with some great artifact of the Ancients. Many before you have turned aside on their final quest, fearing the rumors of the Energy Spirit, the Black Bombers, and the Forks Tribes. But you will not shame your clans in this way. You will succeed, and take your place among the elite warriors of Red Valley.

If they go for the pitch, I’m planning to have them each write up a sentence or two about their hometown in the area (north of Winnipeg along the Red River), and another couple of sentences describing a rumour or legend about Great City One ((If you’re wondering where that name came from, the slogan for Winnipeg is, for some lame reason, One Great City.)). I’ll probably toss them a reward for doing that homework, something like an extra piece of Omega Tech. Or maybe start them at second level.

Anyway.

I’ll let you know if they decide to go with Gamma World or D&D.

Fearful Symmetries: Homecoming

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Last session of the Fearful Symmetries campaign was a little unfocused. I don’t think it was too much of a problem, overall, because they’d just completed a big storyline, ending the White Court influence in Prague. Thus, they spent this session looking around for their next short-term goal ((Interesting to note that they’ve got some solid ideas about long-term goals. They’ve both decided that their characters – for their own reasons – want to keep Prague safe.)).

They had a couple of pet projects on the go: Izabela wanted to keep trying to dismantle the curse on Gold Lane, and Emeric had decided to see if he could step into the power vacuum left by the departing Malvora clan. And I had some dangling plot threads to throw at them.

Now, one of the themes that I wanted to introduce was that the Emperor’s spies are everywhere. To layer that in, I wanted to establish some uncertainty in the players about some of the assumptions they were making about how things fit together. I started with the Malvoras.

During their raid on the Malvora manor, Emeric and Izabela had found a room full of documentation on the various noble families of Prague, including the Valdstejns ((Which is Izabela’s family, for those of you following along at home.)). They nabbed some of these files, though most of them were destroyed in the fire that was rapidly consuming the manor house.

As part of stepping into the power vacuum, Emeric and Izabela decided to return the documents to the various families in order to assure them that the blackmail they assumed the Malvoras were perpetrating was at an end. And that’s when they found out that there was no blackmail going on.

Time after time, when they brought the documents to those they concerned, they were faced by incomprehension and disbelief. Lukrezia Malvora had always been a charming, friendly, generous lady, with absolutely no political influence on others. There was no hint that blackmail had been part of her operation, and indeed, there was some regret that she was gone.

Emeric was dealing with some other stuff, at the same time. He had been somewhat shaken by the events in Mstetice the previous session, and was beginning to question his approach to staving off Ragnarok ((His goal is to try and prevent the worst atrocities of humanity, and to help humans maintain hope. The actions of the soldiers and citizens in Mstetice, and the number of times he’s had to unsheathe Beortning is giving him a bit of a crisis of faith.)). Add to that the fact that he got struck with lightning out of a clear sky ((A 12-stress hit. The only reason he survived was because the spellcaster who whipped up the ritual didn’t know how tough Emeric really was. Emeric sucked up the blast, though it hurt him.)), and he was starting to feel a bit persecuted and depressed.

He went to Reverend Nicola at the Church of St. Lawrence up on Petrin’s Hill, whom he suspected of being a priest of Petrunas, looking for some spiritual guidance. He waited through evensong, then asked the Reverend for help. Nicola proved to be much as he always was: a compassionate Lutheran minister with an interest in local history and legend. When Emeric prodded him to admit that he worshipped the old gods, Nicola was honestly confused ((According to the setting document we created, Nicola does indeed worship Petrunas. However, because of the way I’ve been running things, they’re not sure whether I’ve changed that up, or if he’s just really good at hiding his secret identity.)), and when Emeric revealed himself in his true form, his main concern was to offer to save Emeric’s soul.

Still poking around to find out how the Malvora clan was manipulating things, Emeric went to see the Mayor, whom he knew was behind the attempt to arrest him with Kirchoff’s help. He disguised himself as a White Court vampire, and passed himself off as one of Lukrezia’s kin. When he met the mayor, he came on pretty strong, trying to assert the hold he believed Lukrezia had over the Mayor – which caused the Mayor to get a little testy, as he didn’t work for the Malvora. Following a bit of backpedalling, Emeric managed to find out that his arrest had been ordered because Lukrezia had convinced the Mayor that Emeric was a Papist spy.

Izabela and Emeric were starting to realize that the Malvora manipulation must have been more subtle and indirect than they had previously surmised. They also realized that, just because Malvora was gone, it didn’t mean they were safe from White Court machinations ((Oh, and somewhere in there they remembered that they still had a White Court vampire strapped to a table in Amadan’s cellar, and went to kick him out of the city.)).

We wrapped up with our heroes meeting with Captain Amiel, who told them that Emeric might be able to redeem himself if he were able to prove that he had only been pretending to be a spy in order to capture a Papist cell that Amiel’s men had located in Old Town. So, they’re suiting up to go raid the spies’ nest and clear Emeric’s name.

How GR, Inc., Stole Xi-Mas

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Every year, my friend Dave runs a charity game day at Imagine Games and Hobbies. Proceeds go to Winnipeg Harvest, and the entry fee is a non-perishable food item. It’s a fun day, with Christmas-themed games and great prizes. Originally, it was just Warhammer 40k that was played, but in recent years, it’s expanded to include War Machine, Wings of War, and (for the first time this year) Gamma World.

Yes, this year, Dave asked me to run a Gamma World game ((Okay, that’s a lie. He asked me to run a D&D game, but I pitched Gamma World as being a wackier game, and a better fit to impromptu crazy one-shots, and he acquiesced.)). There were two catches – the game had to be Christmas-themed, and it had to be competitive.

I forget what initial ideas I had for the game ((Really, from what I can recall, they’re best forgotten.)), but eventually I came up with a workable idea for a scenario. Here’s the opening pitch I gave to the players:

How GR, Inc. Stole Xi-Mas

This is the story the elders tell, each year when you gather to receive the gifts of the season.

They tell of the Big Mistake, when the worlds collided, and the walls between the real and the not-real were torn down. They tell of the founders of Whatville, of how they banded together to build a place of safety in the wilderness. They tell of Fall of the Machine, when the great manufactory from the robot-ridden world of Xi crashed into the mountain nearby. They tell of the noble warriors who defended the Machine from the assaults of the evil mutants from Genome Reassignment, Inc. And they tell of the pact forged with the Machine, when it had recovered enough to flee to the northern wastes at the top of the world.

This season commemorates that pact, when the skysled arrives from the workshop in the north, laden with Omega Tech produced by the Machine – a gift to the descendants of those who defended it as it struggled to repair itself in an unfriendly, alien world. These gifts are what have allowed Whatville to flourish in the shadow of GR, Inc.

But one year, GR, Inc., HQ stirred once again. A leader arose among the twisted creatures that dwell there, a mutant of great cunning. The Xi skysled was shot down, and the bounty of Omega Tech destined for Whatville was instead claimed by GR, Inc. With this weaponry, they would have the ability to wipe Whatville from the map.

This is the tale of the season. The story of the valiant defenders of Whatville who refused to stand and sing in the shadow of death. The brave mutants who went up the mountain to regain their stolen gifts.

And of the greatest among them, who became a legend.

The tougher part was coming up with a way to make the game competitive, but not have it degenerate into a PvP slaughterfest. I wanted to preserve the co-operative nature of an adventuring party ((Also, I felt that having the characters turn on each other would be, I dunno, sort of not-Christmasy.)), but I needed a way to secure a single winner. I also didn’t want to be the judge – too easy to display favouritism, real or perceived.

So I did what any good GM does when faced with a decision that he doesn’t want to make: I foisted it off on the players.

I awarded a poker chip to every player whose character survived an encounter ((Why only the survivors? Well, if someone dies, it doesn’t directly penalize them in the voting. In fact, it penalizes the rest of the party for letting that character die – that’s one less chip going to someone who survived. Incentive to keep everyone alive, and a cushion for those who decide to make a heroic sacrifice.)). They then had to give that chip away to the player of the character that they felt had done the coolest, most heroic, or most amusing thing during that encounter. At the end of the session, the player with the most poker chips won. This way, the players were encouraged to try bold, heroic things during the session, and they were competing to impress each other with what their characters were doing. And, of course, it took me out of the loop for the voting, so I had no say about who won ((Well, not directly. I did have a little influence, as I reminded people of cool things that happened during the encounter.)).

As for the adventure itself, I reskinned a few monsters from Gamma World and D&D. The horl chus became tinselballs and mistletoes, bloodthorn vines became holly bushes, hoops became nutcrackers, porkers became teddy bears, and I converted a hoop warchief to an elite to make the dreaded green-furred mutant, Jemkayree. I also kitbashed some reindogs and dire reindogs.

The adventure had three encounters: the tinselballs, holly bushes, and mistletoes outside GR, Inc.; the reindogs and dire reindogs in the basement of the complex; and Jemkayree, the teddy bears, and nutcrackers in the lab with the bag of Omega Tech. To get the size of encounters I wanted with the creatures I wanted to use, I decided it was best to start the characters at second level ((This also gave me the opportunity to see the critical powers in action for the first time. They are cooler than I had expected, just having read them.)) and with two pieced of Omega Tech each.

One other thing that put a fun twist on the game was a house-rule that’s traditional at these charity games: one table always has something on it that can throw random stuff onto other tables to mess up what’s happening there. It hit my table three times, though only twice during an actual encounter – once to crash Santa’s sleigh onto the field ((I tossed a card box blind onto the map. It wiped out one of the tinselballs and created an obstacle during the encounter. Afterwards, the characters looted it for two more pieces of Omega Tech each.)), and once to airdrop a squadron of gummi bears onto the table ((Same encounter, actually – seven gummi bear minions. I set their attacks at +5, 5 damage on a hit, and defenses at 15. The player who killed one got to eat it.)).

I had four players, and we got through character creation and the entire scenario in about three and a half hours. Some highlights:

  • The dream grenade that, on the first action of the first round of the first combat wound up expanding its blast to put pretty much everyone on both sides to sleep.
  • The use of the Explode alpha mutation that missed two out of three reindogs, but hit (and killed outright) the Rat Swarm Speedster character. It incidentally also left only the Felinoid Rat Swarm as the only character facing two dire and one normal reindog.
  • The double whammy of eau de roach and portacomp that dumped Jemkayree through the dimensional portal and then closed it down ((He hadn’t even been bloodied, yet. That was when his heart was going to grow three sizes, and he was going to become seriously badass. Well, more seriously badass.)).

The prize was a wonderful edible scuplture of a Santa sack full of stuff (including Squiddy the Christmas Squid) being grabbed by a cluster of tentacles ((It was also terrain, with the tentacles attacking any character that started its turn within two squares of it.)).

All in all, a great success, I think. Thanks to everyone who came out to play and support Winnipeg Harvest, to Dave for organizing the day, and to Pedro and Wendy for hosting it at the store.

And just wait for next year: The Revenge of Jemkayree!

**Edit**

Pedro kindly sent me a photograph of the prize, as it was serving as terrain and threat during the game. Thanks, Pedro!

Stolen Omega Tech

From the Armitage Files: What Are You Willing To Do?

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

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**

Last night was the latest session of my Armitage Files campaign. I had to poke the players a little bit in the downtime to get them to let me know what avenue of investigation they intended to pursue this session; specifically, if they were planning on continuing to look into the carnival, or if they wanted to move on to something else. The upshot of the conversation was that they decided not to bother with the carnival any longer ((Solis was very interested in finding out what was up with the half-human boy from the freak show, but Moon didn’t want to risk his neck with carnies and bank robbers if there was no supernatural element involved. Roxy was the deciding vote in favour of moving on, because she had… well, let’s call them ethical issues with ratting out a bank robber.)), but to move on to the American Preservation League.

That came in Thursday, so I spent Friday night putting together the situation for the session ((Using Omnigraffle on my iPad. It’s bastard expensive for an app, but is the only one I’ve found that handles this kind of mindmapping the way I like. And seeing as I use that functionality for all my games, I can kind of justify the expense. It’s very, very nice.)), and Saturday reading over the bits of the documents and campaign book that I needed.

The game started with the usual scrambling about to try and get external confirmation of the stuff in the documents they were working from. As usual, there was none to be had, beyond confirming the existence of the APL and its leader, Fred Jahraus. This part of the investigation brought Moon, who has dropped to 6 Sanity through the adventures and has started drinking heavily, into the office of Dr. Peasley, one of the Armitage group and a psychiatrist. He recognized Moon’s deteriorating mental state ((Michael’s doing a good job of making Moon a dangerously paranoid character.)), and advised him to back off for a bit, or at least uses some sleeping pills, which he provided.

The team then joined the APL’s mailing list, under an assumed name, paying their dollar for associate membership, and donating another four dollars for as many back issues of the group’s newsletter as they could. Some analysis of the documents allowed them to map the development of the group, starting with Jahraus and expanding as it got more powerful and wealthy. The doctrines were pretty basic ones for far-right political groups in 1935 – avoiding entanglements in Europe, restricting immigration to northern European ethnic groups, reassigning electoral votes to favour areas with pure populations, things like that. Also interspersed through the documents were strange mandala patterns that seemed to be part of some sort of information system that none of the characters could interpret.

The real weirdness really started when the began following up on the group. The printer who printed the newsletters talked about how Jahraus was odd, but very friendly, even to the black worker in the print shop. The neighbourhood gossip told how Jahraus shared his house with his mother and a number of her former foster-children, many of whom were Asian or Latino, and that they were all members of the APL, as well. When Solis and Moon went to speak with Jahraus in person, they found him to be a very odd man ((I tried to play him as a combination of Rain Man and Bob Newhart, which was an interesting kind of challenge.)), and the photos in the house did not back up the stories about the all-male foster siblings of mixed ethnicity. Oh, and while they were staking out the APL house, they spotted Wally Endore, a union organizer they had run into while investigating Moon’s predicted death at the warehouse.

My goal here was to provide them with an overwhelming number of things that didn’t add up, but didn’t quite fit together, either – a barrage of inconsistencies that didn’t paint a new picture. That sounds kind of like cheating, but the thing that I decided was going on behind the scenes did not lend itself well to exposure through secondary sources, which meant that I needed to pique their curiosity enough that they would engage directly with Jahraus and company to get access with clues that would lead them to the actual secrets behind the APL.

And then, just to muddy the waters a little more, I had Austin Kittrell show up at their stake-out pad, disguised as a working-class member of the neighbourhood ((I enjoy tossing Kittrell into the mix every so often. The group distrusts him intensely, for no really good reason, and he makes a good ambiguous foil for them. I’m using him as a sort-of male counterpart to Roxy.)). He was quite willing to let himself be searched and questioned, though he kept trying to make the point that he had come to the group in good faith, wanting to share information. And then Roxy drugged him.

She gave him a glass of gin with some of Moon’s sleeping pills dissolved in it. Their plan was basically to take him to a secluded area to intimidate more satisfying answers out of him. This is a great plan in a Leverage game, but in a mainly-Purist Trail of Cthulhu game, I thought it shouldn’t quite have the desired outcome. So, they hauled the drugged Austin out to an abandoned basement that some of Roxy’s more colourful friends knew about, and waited for him to come around.

And waited.

And waited.

I reminded them that Peasley had told Moon not to take the pills with alcohol, and they started panicking. Solis checked him out, and found him to have depressed heartrate and respiration – he was essentially slipping into a coma, and probably going to die. Some Medicine spends got him stabilized, and when he finally came around, he was in terrible shape, convinced that the group were going to kill him. Instead of an interrogation, it turned into the group trying to explain why they had done this to him ((It was very interesting to me to see this group try to justify the drugging, kidnapping, intended interrogation, and almost death of this man as a reasonable thing to have done to him, and the confusion when he didn’t seem to agree. The game has bred a charming trio of sociopaths.)).

It was a pretty fun scene for me to roleplay, and I think it actually unnerved a couple of the players to look at what they had done, and why. I tried to make the point that the reason they didn’t trust Kittrell was that the first document said not to – they never really questioned that admonition, though they question a great deal of other things about the contents. I also made the point that they don’t really know who wrote the documents, and that the documents themselves state that parts of what’s written is unreliable.

They got Kittrell bundled home to his staff to look after him, and regrouped to decide what to do about the APL.

Paying a political rally to invite the APL to speak got the majority of the residents out of the rooming house Jahrous’s mother runs, so Solis and Roxy decided to break in, with Moon keeping a watch in their stake-out pad ((Keepers, don’t you love it when the party splits itself? Especially when they leave the character with the lowest Sanity alone somewhere with some responsibility?)). Inside the house, they ran into Mrs. Jahrous, who they frightened somewhat by knocking on the door of her room when the house was locked and otherwise empty. They wedged a chair under her door, then continued searching. They found Fred’s room, which had only one thing of interest: a bookshelf full of diaries, each of them filled with the mandala-like symbols from the newsletters. Roxy grabbed a couple, then they started back down and out of the house. Except the stairs seemed to keep climbing down to the second floor, even when you started on the second floor – they wound up caught in a loop of some sort.

Meanwhile, it was time to mess with Moon a bit. He caught the stench of the thing that had come after him in the alley outside Hutchinson’s offices way back when, and spotted the tall figure of it standing under a streetlight. There was a weird, flickering discontinuity, and it was suddenly standing on the porch of the rooming house he was in, without having changed posture in the slightest. Another flicker, and it disappeared, but the stench was coming from inside the house, now.

So, like any real hero, he jumped out the window.

Inside the Jahraus house, Fred appeared pretty much out of nowhere, confronting the pair of burglars. He told them that his mother had already called the police, and Solis bolted. Fred hit him with some weird energy that caused a bit of his chest muscle to twist up and necrotize, causing him intense pain, but he kept running down and down the same stairs over and over. Roxy, meantime, made a pretty big Assess Honesty spend to see if there was something possessing Fred, and I explained that there wasn’t. Not really. Instead, it seemed that the intelligence that was Fred was having trouble communicating within a frame of reference that others could accept, which led to his weird speech patterns. The fact that he had trouble picking up the social cues from others in this frame of reference led him to seem strangely trusting and feckless, but it was mainly because of a lack of common experience, not because he was in any way simple.

With the sirens getting closer, she kissed Fred, distracting him for a moment, which let Solis make it down to the ground floor. Fred, hearing the police approach, tried to bash his head against the wall to injure himself for when the cops burst in, but Roxy grabbed him to prevent that, and bashed her own face against the wall, tearing her dress, as well.

Moon was face-to-face with the yeti thing, now, retching and coughing from its stench. It held out a hand to him, and gave Moon a bullet covered in blood, then vanished. This freaked him out a great deal ((I just checked back through the posts, and can’t believe I didn’t mention this. The previous session, Moon came down to breakfast one day to find himself already seated at the table, eating oatmeal. He drew his pistol and shot at the apparition, which did the same to him and then vanished. After the fact, he found a bullet stuck in the doorframe by where he had been standing, but no sign of the other him, or the bullet he had fired. So, yeah, that’s why that was freaky for him.)), and he scarpered, still overcome by the smell, before the cops could snag him.

Despite Roxy’s tearful and roughed- up demeanor, the police took her and Solis into custody on the basis of the testimony of the residents of the house. With conflicting stories going around about who had done what to whom, and the fact that Roxy no longer had the diaries she’d tried to steal, our heroes spent the night in a cell and then were charged with criminal trespass, fined, and released.

We called it an evening around then, with the plan being that they’re going to keep pushing after Jahraus, whom they really dislike now.

All in all, it was a very fun evening. There was a lot of neat roleplaying for me to do, and some fun twists to the way things went. Everyone is excited about the next session. Now we’ve just got to schedule it.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Been a while since we visited the fellows in Storm Point. The last session, the focus just wasn’t there. I spent an hour trying to get the group to make a single Stealth check before giving up and teaching them to play Fiasco instead ((Used the Lucky Strike playset, and everyone had a great time.)). The time before that, the game was the fifth one I was running in four days, and I wimped out to run the Gamma World game day adventure for them, instead ((A mistake. I was tired and stressed and short-tempered. I should have just canceled the game.)).

This meant that it had been about two months since the previous session, and the Silverfalls adventure had gone on far longer than I had planned. I wanted to wrap it up, which meant unleashing the beholder on them.

See, I’d been carrying around the beholder ultimate tyrant miniature for the previous several sessions, and taunting my players with it. They all know by now ((Or think they do, anyway.)) that I’d never throw something like that at them at their level. Well, I was planning to do just that, but using the stats of a bloodkiss beholder. This was just the only beholder miniature I had.

The release of the Beholders Collector Set fixed that problem, and the release of Monster Vault provided a stat block for a level 9 solo beholder, so that all just worked perfectly. I bumped the level of the beholder up to 10, to take into account the fact that I’ve got six players, and went to town.

I’d never used a beholder in a game before. Honestly, I think they’re kind of silly monsters. But they are iconic, and the ones in 4E are much simpler to run than in previous editions, so I was looking forward to how it played out. For the first round, I became very afraid that I had built a TPK – most of the characters had their encounter and daily powers stripped by the central eye, and the petrify eye had locked down the main tank. Things looked grim.

But they rallied ((Most of them, anyway. The guy playing the cleric spent pretty much the entire combat either petrified or immobilized after only a single petrify ray attack. Sorry, Mark.)), and came on strong. The whole fight was about as good as it could have been, with the party pretty much terrified that they were going to die, and horrific eye rays firing off like a disco laser show. The mechanism for having an eye-ray fire at the start of each character’s turn is a great way to make the beholder feel like a whirling ball of death.

They managed to put it down without losing anyone, though there were several close calls. And then they found the bones of the dwarven ancestor they had come to retrieve, and decided to call it a day.

I didn’t like that ending, though. It lacked the sense of achievement and heroism that I thought the lengthy adventure deserved. So, I had the ghosts of the dwarven warriors appear and ask to be bound to defend the home they had died for. The group used a skill challenge to throw together an impromptu binding ritual, and I described how the ghosts of all those who had died in Silverfalls came back to drive out the drow, troglodytes, minotaurs, and their mind flayer masters ((I had a mind flayer encounter prepped and ready to go if I needed it, but it would have been really nasty to throw it at them right after the beholder fight.)).

So, now Silverfalls is cleansed of the evil invaders and open to resettlement. And the gang are even more heroic than they thought they’d be.

I call it a win.

We’re talking about running a more extended Gamma World adventure next, so it may be a while before we come back to Storm Point. But I’ve got some plans for when we do.

Feints & Gambits: Armless

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Feints & Gambits, What's he playing?
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This past Saturday was the inaugural game session of my new Feints & Gambits DFRPG campaign. We’re running this game quorum-style, so that we play as long as three of the six players show up. For the first game, we had four players ((The holiday season always makes scheduling somewhat more challenging, what with everyone’s family commitments.)).

I spent the first half-hour or so making sure everyone was up to speed on the game system, and answering any lingering questions about characters and mechanics. I’ve gotten pretty good at giving a condensed overview of the FATE system in about fifteen minutes; I expanded things here, because we’re looking at a long-term campaign, and I wanted to make sure that everyone had a decent grounding, so they understood their options.

First games of new campaigns are tricky things, I find. You need to take things easy as people get up to speed on the system and what their characters can do, but you also want some interesting stuff to happen so that the players get hooked and want to keep coming back. So, that means finding exciting action that is still fairly simple, mechanically speaking.

The collaborative city-building can really help get things rolling, because the players are already anxious and interested in playing in the setting they’ve built, and finding all the cool stuff they put there. And in finding all the neat little connections and secrets that have grown from the basic groundwork. There are already things they care about, and they already have some enemies and allies, thanks to the story phases of character creation, so really it’s just a matter of picking and choosing.

My objectives for this session was to give each of the four players a chance to do something interesting and special with their characters, and to wrap up the adventure in a single session ((Though the repercussions are probably going to stretch out longer than that.)). When I build adventures like this, all I generally do is come up with the situation – who, what, where, and why – and then I expose one bit of the resulting situation to the characters ((Of course, the bit I expose to them has to be something that impels them to take action.)). After that, if I have a fairly solid idea of the situation, it’s pretty easy to properly adjudicate character actions and let them choose their own path to resolving the situation ((This approach works far better in games where it’s simple to come up with stats and challenges on the fly – like DFRPG or Trail of Cthulhu – than ones where it’s more difficult or time-consuming, like D&D.)).

The result, I find, is a fairly organic structure that responds properly to character actions, and leads to character-directed action, rather than set-piece encounters ((Though, to be fair, I usually put together a page or two of stats and notes that I can turn into interesting set-piece encounters on the fly, because those are fun and exciting sometimes.)).

That’s what I did this time.

Things started out with the characters showing up at The Silver Arm, the local supernatural pub, to find no music, and everyone being very quiet. Turns out that the pub’s sign ((A silver armoured arm and hand that hung outside above the door.)) had been stolen, and the owner, Macha MacRuad, was furious. She wouldn’t let anyone even talk about it in the pub.

That got everyone motivated to go find the sign. They managed to trace it to a house in a pretty run-down neighbourhood that was being used as a clubhouse by the Snowbirds, the Winter Court gang that hung around the Millennium Spire. Stealing the sign was apparently a new move in the ongoing games of one-upmanship between the fey courts. The Summer Court gang, the Sunshine Boys, were rumoured to be getting ready to snatch the arm themselves.

A little bit of scouting found them a way in, and Kate had a couple of good veiling potions for her and Rogan. Firinne was able to use her glamours to veil herself. That left Aleister, who wasn’t all that sneaky. He set himself up in a sniper’s nest across the street with a paintball gun, and acted as a distraction.

Things went pretty well at first, with Aleister drawing out most of the gang members and the other three sneaking in through an upstairs window, thanks to a convenient shed ((Placed by using a Burglary declaration while casing the building.)). Things turned a little south when the gang used some pixies to find Aleister and he had to leg it out of there, and the folks inside the house found that there was still an ogre left on guard.

We got to some action here, though, interestingly, not a one of the characters tried to attack anyone. Aleister’s goal was not to beat anyone up, but to lure them away from the clubhouse to give the other three time to find the arm. The three inside knew they were completely outclassed by the ogre, so they just wanted to grab the arm ((Which had been nailed to a block of wood and turned into a lamp.)) and run like bunnies.

They all managed it, though Aleister was completely overwhelmed by the gang members ((Ganging up on someone and spending an exchange or two to use maneuvers to layer on the Aspects is a devastating tactic.)), and wound up conceding the fight – he had the gang members kick the crap out of him and dump him in the Liffey. Inside the house, the veiling the characters used kept the ogre from effectively targeting them, and then Kate threw a handful of iron filings into his face to keep him distracted. Rogan tripped him up with a chair, and Firinne swapped the lamp for a manikin’s arm that she had glamoured up to last for a few minutes ((She also left a taunting note, being a trickster-style changeling herself. THAT’s not gonna come back to bite her, at all. Good use of a compel, I thought.)).

So, they got the sign back, got Aleister to the hospital, and called it a night.

Over all, I think the game went quite well, and everyone seemed to have a good time. It was fairly light, and everyone took to heart the dangers of violence ((Especially at their power level.)), but they’ve also made some interesting choices about the sides their on, and there’s going to be an ogre Snowbird looking for a certain witch with payback in mind.

Yeah, I call it a win.

Fearful Symmetries: Kirchoff’s Fall

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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We picked up the Fearful Symmetries story this session with Emeric and Izabela interrogating the captive White Court vampire that Amadan had acquired for them. The prisoner knew that he’d been left to twist in the wind by Lukrezia Malvora and the rest of the family, and that his only hope of escaping with his life was to give his captors what they wanted. He bargained as well as he could, though his position was hardly one of strength, and secured the promise that, if the information he gave to Emeric and Izabela helped them catch up with Lukrezia, they would set him free, as long as he promised to leave the city and not come back.

He didn’t know where Lukrezia was, but he offered his best guesses, saying that the best bet was that she had gone to Mstetice, the little village where Marta ((Marta was the maid who had raised Izabela, and really the only member of her family in Prague that she cared about.)) lived.

Now, I had decided going in that, given the White Court predilection for complex plotting and working through intermediaries, that the end-game for the Malvora storyline was going to be all about hard choices and mitigating damage, rather than out-right success or failure. And to simulate that Lukrezia is more intelligent than I am, with a vast experience in messing with people, I cheated a little, planning-wise ((This is a basic technique that is advocated in Amber Diceless Roleplaying, to help you play the elder Amberites, who are smarter, sneakier, craftier, and better prepared than you will ever be. I call it cheating, because it’s a tactic designed to outflank the characters, no matter what they decide to do, removing their ability to cleverly counter or prevent the plot. As such, I use it very, very sparingly, because it’s not fair to rob the players of cool. I only really use it when I have a different sort of cool in mind for this particular game session. And I try not to be heavy-handed, even when I do use it.)). Basically, I worked out a few different plots that she could have in place, with the understanding that I would use whichever one seemed best when the characters caught up with things – and by best, I mean whichever one put the characters in the toughest position.

The basics of the thing were going to be the same: the White Court was going to do its level best to destroy Mstetice and everyone in it.

The simplest version of the plot was that the characters were going to be too late getting to Mstetice, and find that it had torn itself apart with rioting and murder. The players bypassed that by deciding to travel through the Mittelmarch ((Which is what the inhabitants of Bohemia in 1620 call the Nevernever.)) in order to get to Mstetice in an hour or so, rather than in two days.

It was a little sloppy of me, but I hadn’t actually thought of them doing that ((Yeah, in retrospect, it’s a pretty obvious tactic, but sometimes you just miss stuff.)). I asked the players to give me five minutes, and came up with a simple sketch chart for the trip through the Mittelmarch – just a few nodes with single-word descriptions like Fork, Valley, River, Ridge, and the like, with some connecting lines and decision points.

As I said, it only took about five minutes to rough it out, and then I asked the characters how they were doing things. They found a place in Prague with similar enough resonance to Mstetice ((In New Town, which is actually fairly peaceful and prosperous under the mayor’s leadership, despite the shadow of war cast over Prague. Quite similar to the feeling in Mstetice. Though Amadan warned them to avoid the New Town Square, with the haunted clock.)), and Izabela opened a way to the Mittelmarch.

I improvised the actual encounters along the trail to Mstetice, which wound up being an interesting challenge for me. See, I based things on ideas from myths, legends, and fairy tales, but I needed to avoid using the actual fey, because the borders of Faerie have been closed by the Queens. So, I put some strange things in, and figured I’d worry about what they meant if the characters actually investigated and paid attention. In keeping with the mythic theme, I decided they needed to pass through three challenges ((They actually faced four challenges, but didn’t pass through the ferryman challenge, so that doesn’t count.)) to reach their destination. The path they chose took them to:

  • A stone table heaped with dried fruit and clay bottles. They didn’t eat anything there, but instead left offerings of their own. I told them to put the Aspect Sacrificed at the Stone Table on their sheets ((This is an idea that I’m playing with, based on reading a bunch of other games, including Leverage, Apocalypse World, and similar things. I didn’t know what the Aspect meant, but I wanted to leave a hook for myself to use later, once I figured out what it meant.)).
  • An old ferryman who offered to take them across a river in return for their names. Emeric gave his name, but Izabela refused, and asked if she could give him something else. He asked for the secret that Odin had told her, and she refused that, as well, so they backtracked to a trail they had seen that led to a bridge over the entire canyon they were traveling in.
  • Spirits fighting a battle for possession of the bridge for their respective kings. The battle always ends with them all dead, then starts again if a living soul tries to cross the bridge, and the spirits try to persuade the newcomers to join their side and tip the balance. Emeric and Izabela tried reasoning with them, but had no luck ((They were very simple spirits.)), so Izabela used her magic to distract and confuse them while the pair escaped.
  • A giant shrike and another horrific monster ((That I made up on the spot as the big, honking THREAT after the shrike proved unequal to the task.)) that attacked while Izabela was trying to open a way back to Mstetice. Emeric took care of the shrike in very short order – one strike – and so I had a big, undefined monster start moving through the trees toward them. They managed to get through to the mortal world in time, and then Emeric held the beast off while Izabela sealed the rift.

They returned on the hill overlooking the village, and saw a large military force camped a few miles beyond it. Fearing the worst, they rode down to the bridge, and spoke with the folk there, to find that it was a Catholic force, and that the town had agreed to surrender at dawn. Izabela and Emeric agreed that was probably the best course, and took some time to cast a locating spell to try and find Lukrezia again. The spell pointed them to the Erlking’s Throne, so they set out.

At the menhir, they had a moderately unsatisfying meeting with Lukrezia, where she promised to leave Prague, to harm none on her way back to Italy, and to never return. Izabela and Emeric then promised not to pursue her ((Emeric threw in a promise of vengeance if she broke her vow, free of charge. He’s generous that way.)). The power of the place was such that the oaths were bound very tightly around everyone involved.

And that’s when Lukrezia told them that Kirchoff had left her service when he was told that they were leaving Prague, preferring to stay and exact his own vengeance on Izabela for the loss of his arm. He was back in Mstetice.

By the time they got back to town, things had gone to hell. In an incident inspired in my mind by the Boston Massacre, the fear in the villagers and the soldiers had spilled over into violence, two dozen soldiers were dead, and the rest were slaughtering the villagers and razing the village.

We ran into some difficulty at that point, because I hadn’t described the scene clearly enough, and we had to go back and change some things as the characters tried to do things that they though should be possible, but that I thought were suicidal. It was frustrating for both sides, because they couldn’t tell what their options were and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t see the available options ((Miscommunication is the underlying problem of most difficulties I’ve ever encountered in gaming. After all, rpgs are entirely exercises in structured communication.)). We solved part of the problem with a quick sketch map, showing why charging the bridge was a bad idea, but that there were other avenues of approach.

They got inside the village, and found the captain of the occupying force unwilling to listen to these two civilians who’d shown up out of nowhere after the villagers had – so he thought – engineered a trap for his men ((Weird, huh? There’s no trust anymore.)). Things escalated, and again got a little frustrating, and again it was my fault.

See, Izabela and Emeric are very powerful. But an army unit of three- to four-hundred men was too much for even them. The only question was how many the pair would take with them. I kept trying to impress this on them, to show them that, even though they were tough and powerful, fighting the whole army here was suicide. And Clint finally said, “So, what, we’re just supposed to run away and let the rest of the village get slaughtered?”

Wow. Of course not. No, these are heroes. Heroes with a personal stake here. I stood there with my mouth open for a second, then handed them each a couple of Fate Points, and said, “No. You’re right. Sorry. But fighting the entire army is suicide. What are you going to do?” And then I stopped trying to tell them how they were going to fail, and helped them find a way to succeed ((This is, I think, a very important lesson that I learned. If you want to run a heroic game, never penalize the characters for being heroic. Instead, look for ways to reward it.)).

Kirchoff was, of course, hiding in the church steeple, and with a couple of muskets and a few grenadoes. They ran him down and killed him, cleansed the captain and the inquisitors of his influence, and negotiated a withdrawal from Mstetice for the Catholic forces ((I decided that, this early in the Thirty Years War, this kind of atrocity hadn’t become commonplace yet, and the captain was wracked with guilt for what he had allowed to happen. It both allowed me to get the army out of there and showed that there were reasonable, honourable men on both sides of the war.)).

The heroes had saved about half the population of Mstetice, including Marta and her family, but the miller who was the de-facto mayor was dead, and so were a lot of other people. Very much a mixed victory for the pair. Still, it wrapped up the White Court storyline ((For now, at least.)), and took Kirchoff out of the picture, so I figured it was worth a Major Milestone.

Now I’m interested in what they plan to do next.

The New Centurions, Issue #5: Street Festival Fracas

By | | New Centurions, What's he playing?
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Last Saturday was scheduled to be our re-start of my friend Clint’s awesome Shadowlands D&D campaign, which has been on hiatus for a few months. However, because both GM and players found the last session of New Centurions to be somewhat frustrating, Clint wanted to run one more session, so that we wouldn’t end on a low note ((Which would probably mean we would never come back to the game, which would be a shame.)).

One of the things he did to address the issues of the previous session was to have us all discuss and come to a consensus as to what type of superhero game we were playing. After a little bit, we decided that it was essentially Bronze Age, with some drift into Silver and Iron ((Discussion of the ages can be found here, though wikipedia uses the term Modern Age instead of Iron Age.)) at either end of the spectrum. Basically, what we decided was that the world is somewhat dark, but the worst excesses are off-stage, and the heroes are noble examples of what people can be. Honour and justice are important, and heroes don’t kill.

That discussion alone was a huge help in getting everyone on the same page.

The rest of the session was a long, wild combat, trying to stop the heist of a truck full of (stolen) electronics during a street festival. The mob, which had originally stolen the electronics, was using the street festival as cover to move the truck, and our nemesis, Lady Crimson, was going to take it away from them.

Clint set things up in a very interesting manner. Lady Crimson used some hired help ((Mostly patterned after the villains in Big Trouble in Little China.)) to distract us while her main muscle stole the truck. It almost worked, keeping us tied up dealing with the flying Chinese sorcerer, his conjured giant foo-dogs, grenades thrown into the crowd, and the weird orangutan monster, while the Five Dragons snatched the truck.

We managed to keep the truck from being stolen ((And S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. had it impounded for suspicion of trafficking in stolen goods, completely negating any gratitude the mob might have had for us.)), and we also captured Lady Crimson. She eventually told us where the stolen briefcase we needed to find was, in return for turning her over to a military official of her acquaintance ((Who ran a Suicide Squad type of black ops team, it seems.)) with a promise that she leave the city. We got the money back to La Familia, who delivered it to the Gambinos, who in turn promised to keep the lights on in La Familia territory.

And then the Gambinos sent someone to our secret base to let us know they had appreciated our help, and hoped they could count on our co-operation in future ((S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. is not pleased.)).

Over all, the session was a great success. Clint made sure we had clear objectives and could find a path to achieve them. The objectives conflicted at times, but that’s completely fine – it’s great, in fact, because it means we had to make some interesting choices. The key was that we were able to pull together to decide what to do, and then do it. It was pretty much all combat, except for a little wrap-up at the end, but that was good, too, in light of the previous session being pretty much action-free. It made a good balance to the previous session, and left us on a high note. We all had fun, and are looking forward to playing some more New Centurions.

But we’re also looking forward to getting back to Shadowlands in a couple of weeks.

The Real Story of the Spell: Cooperative Thaumaturgical Preparation in DFRPG

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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So, as you know if you’ve been following my blog, I’m starting a new Dresden Files RPG campaign. In fact, the first session is this coming Saturday. The past week or so, I’ve been helping my players get their characters finished up, and thinking about how I’m going to run this game.

One of the challenges I’m facing is that I’ve got two Thaumaturgists in the game. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, but Thaumaturgy, when it happens and you pay attention to it, can take over the focus for a significant amount of game-time, and with two Thaumaturgists, I’ve had some concerns about whether that will force the other characters into the background ((I don’t really think it will, but it’s something to be aware of, so I can make sure it doesn’t happen.)).

Why? Well, because when someone decides on using Thaumaturgy, they snag the GM’s attention while they work out complexity, make up the Lore deficit, and then do the actual casting, possibly dealing with the fallout or backlash ((Details on all this stuff can be found in these two blog posts.)). That can eat up a good chunk of time for every spell they cast.

And it occurred to me. One of the biggest time sinks in using Thaumaturgy is the preparation phase -  the time when the Wizard was trying to make up the Lore deficit with maneuvers. The player spends some time looking over his or her skill list, trying to see what skill will work to put a maneuver on the spell for that all-important two-shift bump to Lore, while everyone else looks on, maybe making suggestions, maybe having side conversations, maybe wandering away for a bit.

But nowhere in the book does it say that the Wizard is the one who has to put the Aspect on the spell ((I fully expect that many of you were there ahead of me. Sometimes, little observations like this can take a while to make it to my brain.)). In some ways, it’s strongly implied – the examples all talk about Wizards making up the Lore deficit on their own spells. But some of the things you can do to add that Aspect are not necessarily things that need a Wizard.

The main thing with spellcasting in the game is that, mechanically, it is complex enough to require attention, but all the interesting bits happen narratively. That’s why there’s a sidebar stressing the importance of telling the story of the spell – making the preparation and casting of the spell interesting and involving. So, it makes sense that, in a game where you have several characters, that a person casting a spell would rope in some of his or her buddies to help with getting things ready.

So, send your cop buddy out to check the crime scene for blood – the sympathetic link you need to the creature that killed the schoolboy. Get your rich friend to buy you the amethyst you need to powder for the ritual. Send four other folks out to specific points on the map to act as the other points of your pentagram. Get that scholar in your group to look up the proper form of address for Sumerian royalty so that the ghost of the king will talk to you. They’re probably better at these things than you, anyway.

Does that sound like cheating? I mean, you’ve got Mediocre Athletics, so you get your pal with Superb Athletics to climb the cliff face to get water from the spring in the sacred cave. How is that fair? You’ve just co-opted someone else’s abilities, right?

Fair doesn’t enter into it, in my opinion. What you’ve done is taken a character who would otherwise have been sitting around waiting for his or her turn, and you’ve given him or her an opportunity to show off what that character is good at. And the GM can throw in a bit of interesting business with the whole thing, like maybe having to dodge a rock slide or leap over a crevasse, to throw a little bit of the spotlight on that character ((Remember that thing I said back here about helping each other find the cool? Well, here ya go. Concrete example.)).

In fact, if the spell is important enough ((This bit is vital. You don’t want to waste this schtick on every little spell that should be cast without any roll. Save it for when it’s something big and cool and important.)), you can have entire sessions that revolve around the preparation for a spell. Maybe the group needs to sneak into a secure place to work the ritual. The entire process of sneaking in can be a session, adding either a single Aspect that’s needed to the spell, or even adding a whole sequence of Aspects as people deal with things during the stealth mission to make sure that things go off without a hitch.

Like what? Well, how about Security Monitors Spoofed, Guards Rerouted, Doors Barricaded, Approaches Under Surveillance, and The Perfect Spot all working to give the spellcaster enough time to work the ritual without interruption?

It’s all about dramatizing the preparation ((This is something I’ve been doing sort of half-consciously, but not explicitly enough, in the Fearful Symmetries game, with Izabella’s investigation of the curse on Gold Lane. So far, she’s racked up four Aspects of the spell: Bound Angel, Anchor Points, Christian Magic, and Curse of Unsleeping. She’ll be able to use these Aspects to help her craft the ritual to unravel the curse when she makes up the Lore deficit.)) and involving the entire group. It’ll bring the story of the spell front and centre, and give everyone a hand in crafting it. And that just makes the game better.

It gives everyone a taste of the magical cool that is the Dresdenverse.

From the Armitage Files: Sideshow

By | | GUMSHOE, The Armitage Files, What's he playing?
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**Potential Spoilers**

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**

I was faced with a bit of a game quandary last week. I really wanted to keep the momentum going after the great time the group had doing the city creation for Feints & Gambits by having the character creation session follow close on its heels. The date of November 13 got bandied about, but I had an Armitage Files game scheduled for that night. And given that the last time we got together for Armitage Files, we playtested The Big Hoodoo ((Short, non-spoilery review: you will want this adventure when it’s released.)) which, though fun, meant that we had been away from the ongoing Armitage Files storyline longer than I liked.

We came up with a compromise: Feints & Gambits character creation Saturday night, Armitage Files Sunday afternoon. As a thank-you for my Armitage players being willing to move the game, I also made dinner ((Lamb stew and soda bread. Did I mention I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Ireland lately?)) for the crew.

But the whole week was pretty crazy, and I had next to no time to prep for the game. Add to that the fact that I didn’t really know what the players wanted to pursue after the last adventure until Saturday afternoon, and even then they sent me two possibilities, and I was really feeling the time crunch. So, after everyone left on Saturday night and I had the stew in the slow cooker for the next day, I threw together a quick outline for one of the possibilities. In the morning, I threw together an outline for the other.

Now, this is far less prep than I usually do for a game. Even with the improvisational nature of this campaign, I really like having a solid outline ready when the game starts, even if I change it or abandon it during play. But no time for that; I was going in half-blind.

I want to talk about a couple of spoilery things – not necessarily for other campaigns, but my players probably shouldn’t read what I’ve hidden behind the tags here ((Yeah, Michael, that means you. I know how much you love it when I do this.)).

Spoiler

Okay, I really wanted to throw in a completely mundane bit this session. The group has been dealing with nothing but supernatural threats since the game started, and I really wanted to mix it up, because that way, they will wonder about other stuff. And it’s always an interesting change of pace. So, the outlines I bashed together for the two things they were interested in following up – the strong men at the carnival and the American Preservation League – were both completely non-mystical, though no less dangerous.

I also wanted them to come away from this with a win. The last few sessions have been very downbeat, with the players feeling like they’re not making enough of a difference, and even losing ground. While that may be in keeping with a Lovecraft story, it’ll kill a roleplaying game pretty quickly. So, I had things set up to resolve pretty easily if the characters grabbed the right threads, probably in a single session.

With those ideas in mind, we hit the ground running. The group used their various investigative abilities to track down the correct carnival and where it was heading next: a little town Bliss Corner, Massachusetts ((I know, I know, it’s not really a town, it’s a part of Dartmouth. But the name sort of leaped off the map at me, and I had to use it.)). They loaded themselves into a train and went down to check things out.

They arrived in town a few days before the carnival did, and scouted out the fairground and the town itself. Roxy passed herself off as a photographer doing a feature on carnivals – photographing the fairgrounds before arrival, during setup, during the carnival, during teardown, and after it departed. That got her close while the locals hired by the advance crew were cleaning out the weeds and tall grass, but the roustabouts wouldn’t let her on the lot during setup, for fear of accidents ((So they said, anyway. The group immediately suspected ulterior motives.)).

On the first night of the carnival, they paid their quarters, and went in to see the sights. I drew a lot of the description for the carnival from the excellent HBO TV series Carnivàle ((Which I’ve always thought would be a good setting for a DFRPG campaign. Or Unknown Armies. Yeah, that’d work.)), talking about the various games, a few rides, the sideshow tent, and the hootchie show in the back. They had a good time wandering the grounds, sampling the food, and riding the Ferris wheel. They spotted one of the roustabouts who seemed to be following them, and Roxy got a good picture of him from the Ferris wheel before they went to check out the sideshow tent.

Now, they had figured that this was the heart of the mystery, because that’s what it said in the documents, but I felt it was time to start them questioning assumptions about the accuracy of Armitage’s notes. So, they got in without any problem, and saw the contortionist, the fat woman, the sword-swallower/blockhead, the duelling strong men, and the half-human boy. This last one really creeped them out, and they figured that this was the weirdness that they would need to investigate and understand.

When the show was over, they were hustled out into the midway again, and the roustabout who had been following them knocked Roxy down and stole her camera. Moon and Solis gave chase, but Solis fell behind quickly, and the roustabout shouted, “Hey, Rube!” to get the rest of the carnies to get moon off his back ((There was some fun roleplaying here as Moon mistakenly assumed that Rube was the name of the big guy who had knocked him down, and kept calling him that. Considering that Rube is a derogatory term among carnies of the time, it kept making everyone angrier at Moon.)). The men were ejected forcibly from the fairground, and Roxy followed under her own power, sans camera.

Now more convinced than ever that there was something going on there, our heroes crept back in the middle of the night as the fair was shutting down, and hid in the trees and hedgerows lining the fairground, spying on the carnies after hours. They witnessed a meeting where the trouble they had stirred up was discussed, and the roustabout who had stolen the camera – Mitch was his name – was pretty soundly bawled out by the barker. The half-human boy, now dressed and pretty articulate after his beast-man show, suggested smashing the camera to satisfy Mitch’s worries about a picture and dumping it outside the fairground in case the police came looking for it. If things got tense, the carnival would pull up stakes early and head on to the next stop.

Everyone agreed to that, and it was done. Roxy, suspecting a trap, snuck back in the early hours of dawn to retrieve the camera from where it was dumped. She had made a Photography spend to get the picture of Mitch, so I figured that meant she would still be able to recover it, which she did. A Cop Talk spend revealed that Mitch was actually Garland Mitchell, last surviving member of the Red Clay gang of bank robbers, on the run from the feds.

That’s where we wrapped it up for the evening. Now the players have a couple of weeks to figure out what to do next, and so do I. I had expected to wrap this up in a single session, but now I have the time to expand the adventure and flesh some things out.