Category Archives: What’s he playing?

And what does he wish he was playing?

Hunter: The Vigil – War Stories

By | | Hunter - Shadow Wars, What's he playing?
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Friday night we had the latest episode of Hunter – Shadow Wars.

It didn’t go all that well.

The pace of the adventure lagged, and there was much flailing about by the players trying to find the plot, and a full helping of player frustration throughout. All of which was my fault.

I made two primary mistakes with this adventure. First, I left things a little too open – I gave only the vaguest sort of hook into it, no real direction other than pointing to a place where things may or may not have happened, and didn’t work hard enough to correct the problem in play. Second, I inadvertently stuck in a couple of big honking PLOT HERE signs that were not intended to be part of the scenario, and I couldn’t figure out a good way to tie them in, so the characters spent the bulk of the session chasing down red herrings.

Now, the red herring thing is not necessarily bad in an investigation game, but it led to me violating one of the objectives of this campaign: keep the stories one session long, and the adventures episodic. By the end of the evening, they had just got to the actual plot I had developed.

I stole the main idea for the scenario from a White Wolf .pdf called Host of the Clutter, which deals with a pack of feral, sort-of-possessed house cats as the main threat. I liked the idea of the cats as antagonist, but completely reworked the everything else to tie it into the style of game this is and the backstory of one of the characters. So, the game started with one of the characters (who is actually a martian – part of a covert invasion force gone native) getting a message to check out a report of disappearances and UFO sightings in a little town about 80 miles out of the city. She called up the rest of the group (including a new player – welcome to the game, Vicki!), they did a little bit of research to figure out that there had indeed been a few disappearances, but not the dozens that the report had indicated, nor could anyone confirm UFO sightings.

Out they went. As they drove out, I gave them some background on the town they were going to in order to set the scene.

Here’s where I ran into some problems. See, I grew up near this town, and know a fair bit about it. Some of the stuff I changed to make for better game material, but the main point I was trying to bring across is a phenomenon that’s occurring more and more in small towns in southern Manitoba, especially company towns. They’re dying.

Pinawa, the town I used as the setting, grew up to support a test plant for a nuclear reactor that Canada was manufacturing and selling. Now the plant has closed down, and most of the people who worked there have moved off to other reactors and other jobs, leaving behind a town with fewer and fewer families, and more and more retired people.  This is the vibe of the place that I wanted to capture; the town with fewer young people and more old people, a third of the (very nice) houses empty, thick forest spread through the town, deer so plentiful that they’re pests to the people who live there, deserted streets after dark, that sort of thing.

But you know what people latched on to, right? Something that was completely in my blind spot because of my familiarity with the area.

Yeah. Nuclear reactor.

Then when I mentioned another (relatively) nearby installation, Whiteshell Underground Research Laboratory (created to test the feasibility of storing nuclear waste in Canadian shield bedrock), they just couldn’t let go.

And who could blame them, really? These clues – unintentional as they were – were far more interesting than the actual clues about a missing child and an old woman dead in her home and partially eaten by her cats.

I tried to work the nuclear plant in, but had total imagination failure, and couldn’t come up with a way to connect it to the cat backstory that I didn’t want to change because of its connection to a character backstory. I kept looking for ways to drop some important clues in while the group was taking an illicit tour of the abandoned plant, but couldn’t come up with a way that wouldn’t invalidate the other clues and the story as it had already been exposed.

Of course, the next day, I had a dozen decent ideas. I just didn’t have them when I needed them.

So, the first three-quarters of the game wound up being a complete wild goose chase for the characters because I couldn’t figure out how to fix it on the fly. Don’t get me wrong; we had some fun and there was some great roleplaying and interaction, and nice building of atmosphere, but the plot did not advance.

Anyway, they finally made it to a place that I could throw the cats at them – the house of the woman who had died and been eaten by her cats. I put a few cats in the attic, and one of the characters got her face badly gouged when she stuck her head up there. Then, the cats fled, and they stayed at the house to do a little research, with one character outside keeping watch. The group found out a few things, such as the fact that the woman was the grandmother of the missing child, and that the child’s parents both worked for a Winnipeg-based cosmetics research company. The martian found a recognition sign on one of the company’s pages that indicated they were also doing weapon development for the invaders.

Which is about when I brought the cats back. A few dozen of them, moving in an organized manner through the woods, sending scouts ahead, crossing the open ground in small parties, and climbing the side of the house to creep into the attic. I tried to make the image unnatural and disturbing, and I think I pulled it off. When about twenty of the cats had made their way into the attic, the character on guard ran back in to warn the rest of the group, and they all got to face a blanket of snarling, spitting, strangely-organized feral house cats bent on shredding them. Individually, none of the cats were a real threat, but the numbers began to tell, and a couple of the group were pretty hurt by the time they chased off the swarm.

At that point, it was pretty late, so we called it a night. I’ve got to schedule the wrap-up session, soon.

And I’m going to make sure it’s more focused.

Down and Dirty: The DFRPG Combat Paradigm

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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Important Note

In this post, I’m talking about combat: physical conflict, as the rulebook calls it. I’m choosing this focus because it has some of the clearest examples of the things I’m talking about, and is the most readily accessible example of conflict for people new to the FATE system. Everything I say below is also true for mental and social conflicts – keep that in mind as you read.

One of the biggest things to get used to in DFRPG is that combat works very differently than in pretty much any other game I’ve played. In most other roleplaying games, the combat strategy that works best is to hit the target, depleting its hit points (or whatever that system calls it) until it falls down. All other aspects of combat are focused on increasing the opportunities to do damage or the amount of damage done. Teamwork generally means focusing on a single target or working to enhance the damage-dealing ability of one of the primary combatants.

DFRPG combat looks similar on the surface: characters have stress tracks that you’re trying to deplete to put them down. It’s easy to think that the best strategy is just to hack away at the target, wearing down the stress track until you can take the target out. That’s what I thought at first. After all, the character is taken out if it takes a stress hit that goes off the end of its stress track.

Now, this is complicated by consequences: the character being hit can buy off stress by taking consequences of varying degrees. These are the actual damage being done to the character – this is where you get a split lip or a ruptured spleen. But consequences won’t put you down; only stress hits will do that.

The Damage Model

So why is stress different from hit points?

Two reasons that I can see right now: first, it reflects resistance to getting hurt rather than capacity for getting hurt, and second, you can bypass it.

Resistance vs. Capacity

Hit points in D&D (and a lot of other games) measure your ability to continue fighting. As you lose hit points, you become damaged. In early versions of D&D, and in other games like RuneQuest, hit points were a direct measure of how much physical damage can be done to a person before they fall down. In 4E D&D, hit points factor in things like fatigue, morale, skill, and all the other things that keep you on your feet and fighting. But it’s still a value that decreases as damage is applied, and is the main value that you need to preserve to keep on fighting.

Stress in DFRPG (and other FATE games) doesn’t measure how hurt you are – it measures how close you are to becoming hurt. It is, in many ways, more like ablative armour than the D&D idea of hit points. As long as you’re taking stress hits, you’re still good. It’s only when you start taking consequences that you are actually being injured. So taking a hit to one of your stress boxes is… well, it’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s sure better than taking a consequence or being taken out. It’s your padding, and it’s where you want to shift all incoming attacks to.

But it is still a finite resource that you have to husband carefully.

Bypassing Stress

Ideally, to take a character out in one attack, you want to apply a stress hit that goes off the end of their stress track, even after they’ve applied all their available consequences to it. Now, a normal human character has 2 physical stress boxes, plus 4 consequences (minor, moderate, severe, extreme) that can buy off a total of 20 stress – that means that you need a 23-point stress hit to take someone out with one hit. Now, the majority of opponents the players will fight generally won’t fight to the death – they’re effectively taken out at much earlier points, depending on whether they’re nameless, supporting, or main NPCs.  The non-vampire example of Tim the Sniper in the rulebook (p328 of Your Story) can be taken out in a single 11-point stress hit, because he concedes after suffering a moderate consequence.

Consequences

The meat of the damage system, though, is consequences. Consequences are when things really start hurting a character They are wonderfully descriptive injuries, and they also have inherent wound penalties, because they are Aspects and can be tagged for all the regular Aspect fun and games.

By default, each character only has one of each type of consequence – minor, moderate, severe, and extreme. These are shared by physical, mental, and social conflicts: if you’ve taken a moderate physical consequence (Sprained Wrist, say) then you don’t get to also take a moderate mental consequence if you get into a mental conflict. The rationale for this is two-fold: one, it keeps the game balanced a little better, and two, if you’ve got a sprained wrist, the pain is going to make it a little harder to concentrate on the fine points of the Unseelie Accords that you’re debating, for example.

One of the coolest things about consequences is that each player decides when to take them for their character, and gets to pick what the consequence is. Yeah, this means that you get to decide how your character is hurt. You get to weigh how hurt you’re going to be against the buffer that is your stress track, and what you need to do to finish the fight. You get to choose the wording of your consequence – subject to GM negotiation, of course – so you can decide where the bullet hits or the claw slashes.

Husbanding this resource can be a little tricky: minor consequences offset 2 points of stress, moderate ones do 4, severe ones do 6, and extreme ones do 8. You don’t get change back if you don’t need to offset the whole amount of stress the consequence is capable of eliminating. That means that, if you only have to offset a single point of stress, you need to use a minor consequence, and the extra shift of stress that you could have offset is wasted. Seeing as you have a limited number of consequences, it’s wise to spend them carefully.

Despite my focus on consequences as real damage as opposed to the damage buffer of stress, they are just another buffer keeping you from being taken out – though a buffer with a more direct affect on the combat.

Taken Out

This is what the game calls losing the fight. If you take a stress hit that goes off the end of your stress track, and you can’t reduce it by taking consequences, then you’ve lost, and you are taken out. That means that your opponent gets to decide what happens to you, limited only by the scope of the conflict that got you here. For example, in a physical combat, you could be dead, knocked unconscious, paralyzed, whatever. In a mental conflict, you probably couldn’t be killed outright.

This is a bad thing to have happen to you. Very bad. This is pretty much the only way a character can die in DFRPG. Thankfully, you can always avoid this by conceding the combat.

Conceding

If you don’t want to get killed in combat, you can concede. This means you still lose the fight, but you get to choose how. So, instead of your opponent taking you out with his sword and saying, “I decapitate you and toss the head into the river,” you get to say, “You cut me across the throat and I fall into the river, washing up a few miles downstream, cold and mangled, but alive.” You can choose to concede at any point up to when your opponent would take you out.

This is a big deal. What this means is that, if you pay attention to what’s going on in the combat, your character only really risks death if you decide it’s important enough. If the objective of the combat is big enough that your character is willing to fight to the death, well, he may die. If it’s not, he can be defeated and live to fight another day – albeit, he may be living in a more problematic fashion, such as imprisoned by the enemy.

This is also a great way to mine Fate Points. You get a Fate Point for every consequence you’ve taken in the combat up to the time you concede. Why did you think Harry keeps getting the crap kicked out of him? He needs those Fate Points.

Summing Up Damage

So, the important points about the damage system:

  • Stress is a buffer that keeps you from getting damaged.
  • Consequences are damage, and a buffer that keeps you from being taken out.
  • Getting taken out can kill your character.
  • Conceding loses the fight but can save your character.
  • You get to choose what consequences you take and when, and whether or not you want to fight to the death.

Tactics

So, what does that mean in terms of combat tactics? It means, primarily, that it can take a long time to whittle down an opponent if all you’re doing is attacking. To make combats go faster – and, incidentally, to play out more like a good scene in a movie or from one of the books – you need to look at all your tools, and make good use of them.

Attacks

Attacks are good. Attacks are how you hurt the opponent. But attacks alone aren’t going to be enough to carry the day most of the time. Let’s look at the example of Tim the Sniper I made reference to earlier. Sure, you can take him out with a single 11-point stress hit, but the odds on that are pretty small (assuming you have a Superb Guns skill, roll +4, and are using a Weapon:2, you can do it if his defense roll is Mediocre or worse, but that’s a long shot). So, you whittle away at him with a number of smaller hits, depleting his stress and consequences, until he concedes or you take him out. At some point, you’re going to have to attack, but there are things that you can be doing instead of attacking that make it more likely your attacks will be effective. This is especially true if you’re using Evocation in combat, because each time you use it, it causes stress to you, depleting your own stress tracks.

Blocks

Blocks are a good way to keep someone from doing something – either attacking you, or escaping, or using magic, or whatever. While they don’t necessarily do anything to deplete the opponent’s stress or consequences, they keep you in the fight (and him from running) while you set things up to take him out.

Maneuvers

This is should be your go-to action in combat. First off, maneuvers are easier to land (in most cases) than attacks. Second, they can layer Aspects on you or your target to make sure that, when you attack, you can maximize the results.

Each successful maneuver puts an Aspect in place. These can be offensive maneuvers (aiming at your target, tripping him, throwing sand in his eyes, etc.) or defensive maneuvers (diving for cover, grabbing an impromptu shield, jumping to high ground, etc.). Every time you put an Aspect on a target, you get a single free tag of that Aspect. Save them up, and use them on a single attack to make it really count.

For example, let’s say you’re shooting it out with Tim the Sniper. You spend one round using a maneuver on yourself (Discipline: Calm and Focused), then another round using a maneuver on the scene (Athletics: Sniper’s Perch), and a third round using a maneuver on Tim (Alertness: In My Sights). On the fourth round, you pull the trigger. Assuming a Superb Gun skill, a roll of 0, and a Weapon:2, you can tag all three Aspects for free and give you an end result of 13 shifts. That means you take him out if his defense roll is Fair or less. And that’s on an average roll for you: it gets better if you roll well, or if you spend some Fate Points.

Anything you do in combat, anything that can give you an advantage over the opponent, is a maneuver. Sticking him with an Aspect by tricking him or blinding him or aiming at him works. Sticking yourself with an Aspect by moving or dodging or preparing works. Sticking the scene with an Aspect by tipping over a barrel of oil or setting something on fire or crashing a car through a wall works. Look for opportunities to do something cool, think about what you would like to see in a movie, and go for it.

Other Aspects

Aspects placed by maneuvers aren’t the only ones you can use to your advantage. Figuring out Aspects already in place in the scene or on your opponent is just as good. This is where assessments come in – you can use an assessment to try and figure out what sort of Aspect something has. Or you can guess. Guessing’s good, too. Most GMs will give you a bit of a clue as to what types of Aspects are in place in a scene or on a character through description, so pay attention to that. If something is reasonable to expect within the scene, odds are there’s an Aspect representing it: a cluttered warehouse probably has Piles of Crates, while a haunted house probably has Rickety Floors. And, if you guess something really cool, the GM will probably allow it even if he hadn’t thought of that Aspect himself.

And then there’s declarations. Declarations are a kind of maneuver, really, when you use a knowledge skill like Lore or Scholarship to stick something with an Aspect. This is a bit trickier, and the GM can set the difficulty rather arbitrarily high if he thinks the Aspect is a game-breaker, but it’s a good way to show a smart and knowledgeable character using that knowledge to shape the combat.

You’ve got your own Aspects to invoke, as well. That can be a little costly, requiring Fate Points, but they are tailored for you and many should be generally applicable. Don’t be shy if you need them.

And there’s another place Aspects can come from: consequences. While it’s nice to take a target out in a single hit, that’s not always going to be possible. Hitting him enough to put a consequence on him not only makes him easier to take out because of depleted resources, it also makes him easier to take out because you get a free tag on the consequence.

Teamwork

Teamwork can be huge in this game. Consider these scenarios:

  • One character uses Athletics to slip around an enemy, sticking him with the Aspect Flanked, while the other character uses Weapons to press the enemy, sticking him with the Aspect Hard-Pressed. Next round, the character in front of the enemy uses Intimidate to stick him with the Aspect Rattled, and the character behind sticks the shiv in with an extra +6 right off the hop.
  • One character uses an Air Evocation to whip up a windstorm, tagging the scene with a Raging Winds sticky Aspect, while another character uses Might to push down a tree, tagging the scene with a Fallen Tree Aspect. Now, either one can tag one or both Aspects to provide a +2 or +4 defensive bonus against incoming gunfire.
  • One character uses Presence to get a monster’s attention, tagging it with the Focused On Me Aspect, while the other uses Discipline to stick himself with the Focused Power Aspect. Next round, the first character uses Athletics to tag himself with the Nimble Aspect to help dodge an incoming attack that he knows is on the way, while the second character unloads a blast of fire with a +4 bonus from the Focused Power and Focused On Me Aspects.

Look for ways to help each other out in combat, building the kinds of plans and tactics that you like to read about or watch in a movie. Team comic books – X-Men, JLA, Teen Titans, etc. are great sources for ideas.

Summing Up Tactics

So, the important things about tactics are:

  • Don’t focus on filling up the target’s stress track.
  • Stack up positive Aspects using maneuvers, assessments, guesses, declarations, and consequences.
  • Use blocks to keep the target from getting away or hurting you while you’re stacking up Aspects.
  • Unload with an attack, using your stacked Aspects, to take the target out – or at least inflict a consequence.
  • Don’t forget your own Aspects.

Conclusion

This is a very different approach to combat in games like D&D or RuneQuest or World of Darkness or pretty much any other game I’ve played. It’s a new way of thinking about combats. It values more elaborate strategies and more cinematic actions. It leverages teamwork to an amazing degree, as people co-operate to bring down tough opponents. And it puts pretty much all of the most important decisions into the hands of the players. The attack isn’t the be-all and end-all of the combat – it’s just the cherry on top.

That said, don’t sweat it if it doesn’t come together right away. Like any new thing, there’s going to be a learning curve. That’s fine. Relax and go with it. Just keep playing and having fun.

It’ll come.

And you’ll like it when it does.

Fearful Symmetries: Blood Hunt

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Last Friday was the latest episode of Fearful Symmetries. We had ended last session with a cliff-hanger of sorts, our heroes down in the tunnels under Old Town, surrounded by a swarm of Red Court Vampires led by a Black Court Vampire. I wasn’t sure at the time which way things would go – if I wanted to lay the whole vampire plotline out so soon, or if I should try and keep it at arm’s length for a little longer.

During the time between sessions, I did some thinking about it, and decided that I didn’t want to expose everything vampire-related just yet; that, I believe, would have made the vampire plotline central for some time in the game, and I didn’t want to dictate the focus for the foreseeable future to the players, preferring to let them find what they care about most in the game.

So, when I opened up the session, I did it with talking. The characters got to have a rather tense conversation with the Black Court woman, during which they gave the name of the Red Court Vampire who was stepping over the line. There were veiled threats, implied promises, and some less-veiled threats, but in the end, Emric, Izabela, and Marco made it back to the surface safely.

At which point I was a little stuck. The story had reached a point where it could conceivably end, though not in a very satisfying manner. The main focus of the characters as they talked about what to do next seemed to be to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, and kill any Red Court Vampires they found above ground. I didn’t want to degenerate into just having the characters wait around for stuff to happen, so I decided to make stuff happen right away. I killed Marko.

Time for me to spill a dirty little secret about my GMing. I hate sending an NPC along with the PCs into a dangerous situation. For one thing, it’s too easy to use the NPC has the mouth-of-plot, which can undermine the choices of the players. For another, players can come to rely on the NPC too much, which makes it very easy for the GM to use the character as his own PC. And the third (and most telling) thing is that I’ve already got enough stuff to keep track of without having to worry about the NPC spear carrier.

Balanced with this is my desire to establish NPCs in the setting that the characters have a real connection with, for good or ill. That means fleshed-out NPCs with characters that are consistent and sensible, and that continue through the campaign, so that the relationships can build and change.

Emric had already made a good, solid connection with Marko, and I think he liked him a fair bit – certainly, he respected the man for being brave enough to go with him into the lair of a vampire. I weighed things in my head, and decided that killing Marko would be a good impetus to get Emric pushing to get rid of the rogue Red Court Vampires. To make the threat come home to both the characters, I had Marko killed and left outside the rooms Emric was renting for him to find.

It got the players moving, alright. Izabela whipped up a divinatory ritual, and saw how Marko was killed by two women who looked very much like a couple of prostitutes that used to work for Zuckerbastl. She also went back to the brothel (burned to the ground the night after they had visited), and conjured up the ghosts of the people who had died there to get some information about Dregana, the woman who had been running it. After that, she started trying to figure out how to find where Dregana was hiding (and also to take care of the children of one of the women who had died in the fire).

In the meantime, Emric took Marko’s body to Zuckerbastl, letting him know what had happened. Zuckerbastl was grateful, and he and Emric bonded a little, before Emric went off to try and find someone who could help him find Dregana’s hiding spot. He rousted Amadan from his rooms, and convinced him to use his resources to locate her. After a stroll through the parks in Hradcany, they retired to the Goblin’s Brewery, where Amadan revealed the address of Dregana’s house.

Off went our heroes, a good hour or two before sunset.

The fight here didn’t go as easily for the characters as the previous invasion. The bad guys were waiting for them, but no mortals were really a match for either of them. In fact, in the confusing muddle of the fight, Izabela blew the head of what seemed to be an ordinary (non-infected, non-ensorceled, non-enthralled) human mercenary, and is now quite upset over what might be a First Law violation. The warped dogs were much easier to deal with.

It was the nest of four Red Court Vampires, newly turned to help Dregana now that her support from the tunnels had been cut off, that really caused a problem for the characters. The vampires used maneuvers and group tactics to gang up on the characters, and proved to be a significant threat. Still, in the end, through co-operation and a good use of Aspects, they managed to eliminate the four vampires and finally confront Dregana. The fight with her was relatively brief, leaving her lying on the ground with all three consequences used up, pleading for her life. And Emric ran her through.

Leaving the house, they were met by a small man with coppery-red skin of indeterminate age, who thanked them, and said that his master was pleased that they were able to do this favour for each other. He gave them each a ring as a token of his master’s esteem, bowed, and went away. The characters think he probably represented the vampire king in the tunnels that they have heard about, but never met.

And so our heroes retired to lick their wounds, and plan for a new day. I gave them a significant milestone at the end of this session, and asked them to start thinking about what their goals are in Prague, so that I can tailor the later scenarios to them. All in all, we were all happy with the way the session went, and the way the campaign seems to be going.

Meta-game-wise, we’re all getting more familiar with the system, and things are flowing more smoothly when it comes to mechanics. I made up a cheat-sheet for Izabela that helps us handle her spellcasting abilities in a more timely fashion during play, and it worked pretty well – well enough that I’m making one for Emric, as well.

Now I wait to see what sorts of goals my players send me, and then I make a new scenario.

The Lightning Bug and the Lightning: Aspects in Dresden Files RPG

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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This post has been a tough one to write*. The topic of Aspects in DFRPG (or any FATE game) is so central, so important, and so rich that trying to write about it can be daunting. More than the dice mechanics, or the powers, or the stunts, or the skills, Aspects are the beating heart of the system.

Mark Twain famously wrote:

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

The same is true of Aspects. And what I’m trying to do in this post is to help you choose the right Aspect, rather than settling for the almost right Aspect.

Now, Your Story has a nice discussion about picking Aspects that highlights what I call the Aspect trick: you need each of your Aspects to do triple-duty for you:

  • You have to be able to invoke the Aspect when you need a bonus or a reroll.
  • The Aspect has to complicate your life to some extent, so it can be compelled to gain Fate Points.
  • You also want to be able to invoke the Aspect for effect.

Most of the time, an Aspect is going to lend itself better to one or two of these than to all of them, but the ideal is come up with at least one situation you can envision in play where you can use the Aspect for each of the three ways to use them. Let’s take a look at each of these functions.

Invoke for Bonus

A sucky roll is a sucky roll, and that’s the truth from system to system. And sometimes even a great roll isn’t going to be enough to let you do what you need to do. Now, you can always just spend a Fate Point for a +1 to the roll, but you get more bang for the buck (or point, anyway) when you use that Fate Point to invoke an Aspect: +2 or a reroll of all the dice. Now, from a statistical point of view, the reroll only really makes sense if you’ve rolled -3 or worse on the dice, but it’s nice to have that option there. So, for this to work, you need to have your Aspect say something positive about your character or his or her abilities.

Compel

Fate Points are the currency of game play. You want Fate Points. You get Fate Points when one of your Aspects constrains your character’s options in a way that causes you some difficulty. Got an Aspect called Bad Temper? You get a Fate Point whenever you blow up at someone and it makes your life difficult. This means you want an Aspect that talks about a complication in your character’s life.

Invoke for Effect

Let’s say you need to get in to see the CEO of a company. You don’t have an appointment, and none of your skills are up to the challenge of hoodwinking the CEO’s personal assistant. You’ve only got a single Fate Point to spend on trying to get past the gatekeeper. Well, you pay your Fate Point and say, “Because I’m a Wealthy Man About Town, I’ve met the CEO at the Sinclairs’ fundraiser last week, so I just tell the assistant to let him know I’m here. He’ll want to see me.” Boom. You’re in. This is invoking for effect. Getting to do this is an often-overlooked bit of Aspect capability, but potentially the most powerful. To make this work for you, you want your Aspect to state or imply some ability or association that has its own effects.

Beyond the three mechanical functions of your Aspects, there are a few non-mechanical things you want to think about when choosing an Aspect.

You want your Aspect to have a story.

The Aspect should come out of what’s happened to you, and should tell people a little bit about your character. Now, this may seem like a no-brainer, especially with the way character creation phases work, but it can get lost in the mix if you’re not careful. Make sure that, when you choose an Aspect, there’s a reason coming out of the phase that grants you the Aspect that supports it. And make it intriguing enough that, if someone were to find out about the Aspect, they’d want to know the story behind it.

You want your Aspect to link you to stories.

The GM advice in Your Story for creating scenarios recommends looking at the Aspects the characters have, and the Aspects you’ve created along with the city, pick the ones that catch your fancy for this scenario, and work with those to create the situation and opposition. So, you want your Aspects to give lots of good ideas to the GM, because then they’ll get incorporated into the scenarios, and your character will get to strut his or her stuff.

You want your Aspect to support your high concept.

You’ve picked a high concept for your character. All the other Aspects should feed into or flow out of that high concept. Now, that’s not to say that if your high concept is Wizard of the White Court all your Aspects have to be about wizardly magic, but they should all be about what kind of wizard you are, or what kind of person being a wizard has made you, or what made you become a wizard. High concept is very central to the character; your other Aspects add detail, colour, and shading to the high concept.

You want your Aspect to be cool.

Hey. This is your character we’re talking about. You want to make sure that, when you look at each of the Aspects you’ve chosen, they all make you glad you’re playing this character. Each one has to do its share in bringing the cool to your character, reinforcing and supporting the original cool idea you had.

Okay. So now we know what we want our Aspects to do. We still need to figure out what to use for Aspects. I generally take something from the following list:

  • Something you are. Your job, your nationality, your hobby, your race, whatever.
  • Something you do. More of an avocation – helping the helpless, reading voraciously, good cook, things like that.
  • Something you say. A catchphrase, or a line that sums up some facet of your character.
  • Someone you know. A friend, an enemy, a rival, a lover, a family member, and so on.
  • Something you have. An item with special meaning for you – your grandfather’s sword, a custom car, a friendship bracelet from your daughter.

Now, a lot of these shade over into each other: a friendship bracelet made by your daughter really says more about your relationship with her than about the bracelet itself. But still, the list is a good place to start looking at Aspects. Once you have one, run it through the test: ask how it meets the mechanical demands and the non-mechanical ones. If it’s weak in one area or another, look at ways to fix it.

Selecting Aspects can be tough. There’s a lot of ground you want to cover with each one, but you also want to keep it fairly short and snappy. The best way I can show you some of the tricks I’ve come up with is to walk through the Amadan example I used for the character creation phases to show what I came up with, Aspect-wise. In the examples below, I lay things out as if I were creating Amadan in a vacuum, but it’s important to remember I was working through the character with two other people, and we brainstormed different Aspects for each of the characters as a group. Some of the brilliant ideas below probably came from either or both of them – one of the joys of group character creation.

Aspect 1: High Concept

This one is often the easiest to come up with. The template you’re using for your character gives some guidelines for what needs to be in the Aspect – Wizard, or Changeling, or Soldier of God, or whatever. But you don’t want to just leave it there, because that’s usually not cool and unique enough.

For Amadan, I knew that I wanted a trickster fey, so that goes into the high concept: Faerie Trickster. But I want something to say a little more about what makes him different from all the other tricky fey concepts out there, so I thought about the rest of his background – too close to mortals, cast out by his court, trapped in the mortal world. And I decided to make him a drunkard. Faerie Trickster Drunkard, however, felt a little too comedic for what I wanted – it didn’t have the sense of hurt and sadness that I wanted to come across, so I twisted it around to Dissolute Faerie Trickster. That, to me, gives the right feeling of partying to hide the pain.

Now, for the test: Invoke for bonus? Check, especially for pranks and tricks. Compel for Fate Points? Hello, dissolute. Invoke for effect? Well, his fey nature and trickster predilections gives me some ideas for that. It is linked to my entire backstory, and gives me an interesting Byronesque (yet pre-Byronic) image of the character, so that fulfills the other requirements.

Final Aspect: Dissolute Faerie Trickster

Aspect 2: Trouble

Well, the common trickster problem is that they often get caught in their own plots, and wind up hoist on their own petard. Hoist On My Own Petard has some potential for this Aspect, but it’s hard to see how it can be invoked for a bonus, so I start looking a little farther afield, thinking about what it is that gets the trickster into trouble. And it’s usually trying to be too clever. Too Clever, though, doesn’t quite have the ring to it I’m looking for. I play with it a little – Too Clever For My Own Good, Not As Clever As I Think, Too Clever By Half. I like the sound of that last one.

The test. Invoke for bonus? Check on the clever. Compel for Fate Points? Check. Invoke for effect? I can see invoking it to just happen to have some obscure item that fits a situation, because of an extensive and convoluted plan involving something else entirely. Of course, that means that I’d have to come up with that convoluted plan to persuade the GM, but that could be fun, too. So, check on that. It ties into the story, supports the high concept, give the GM a hook for stories, and I think it reveals some cool things about the character.

Final Aspect: Too Clever By Half

Aspect 3: Where did you come from?

For this phase of character creation, I came up with the following:

Fox-like faerie trickster of the Summer Court who prefers to spend his time among mortals, enjoying their passionate nature and gullibility.

Based on this, and building on the high concept and trouble, I think of a few of things that could work: Student Of Human Nature, What Fools These Mortals Be, People Are Toys.

I like Student of Human Nature, but it doesn’t really lend itself to compels very well. Also, it’s not very catchy as a phrase, especially not when compared to What Fools These Mortals Be – kinda hard to top Shakespeare for good quotes. People Are Toys has two problems: one, it’s a little too on-the-nose, and two, it makes him seem more like a heartless manipulator than I want him to be.

Of the three, I like What Fools These Mortals Be best, so I run it through the test. Invoke for a bonus? Big time, when fooling mortals. Compel for Fate Points? Well, one of the things that makes Puck work in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is that he thinks this about mortals without really understanding them at all, winding up looking more foolish than the mortals in a couple of situations. So, working with that vibe, underestimating mortals makes a good compel. Invoke for effect? I can see using it to produce a number of ongoing scams to net the character resources: “I’ve been running a crooked dice game at the tavern, with these foolish mortals, so I’ve got enough silver coin in my pockets to melt down for bullets to use against the werewolf.” Check. Again, it comes out of story, showing Amadan’s preference for mortals and his sense of superiority over them, which also reinforces the high concept while setting him apart from other fey. It suggests possibilities for stories and it’s a good quote, so the cool factor works.

Final Aspect: What Fools These Mortals Be

Aspect 4: What shaped you?

My story for this phase of character creation was:

After an elaborate prank embarrasses the Summer Knight and, by extension, the Summer Lady and the whole Summer Court, Amadan is shunned by his fellows, and not informed of the decision of the Courts to withdraw from the mortal world. His first inkling is when he tries to return to Court and finds all the Ways barred, and he is trapped in the mortal world.

So, he gets ditched like a geek at a junior high party. The ideas I’m working with for Aspects here are being left out in the cold, abandoned, but not officially kicked out. Just, as I say, ditched. I start with that idea, Ditched, as my Aspect, but it’s a little colourless, and I think I’d have to go through too many convolutions to invoke it in any sort of positive way.

Ditched By Summer has some potential, because by adding the reference to Summer, I can think of ways to invoke the Aspect to reinforce the fact that he is officially part of the Summer Court, as well as to gain favour with those who don’t like Summer by relying on the Ditched part. Still, though, I don’t like the phrasing – Ditched sounds too modern for a 17th-century game. Playing with different synonyms, I get things like Exiled, Cast Out, and Outcast, before I get to Cast-Off. This has the right feel of being thoughtlessly discarded, so I go with Summer’s Cast-Off, and run it through the test.

Invoke for bonus? Check, as discussed above. Compel for Fate Points? Check. Invoke for effect? Sure. Tied strongly to the story of the character, supporting the high concept, and offering convenient story hooks to the GM? Check. Cool? Well, I like it. It gives me some thoughts about the spiteful rage that’s probably simmering under the dissolute, friendly-seeming surface of the character.

Final Aspect: Summer’s Cast-Off

Aspect 5: What was your first adventure?

Here’s my first adventure:

The Long Journey Home

Left behind when the fey retreat, Amadan finds all the Ways back to the Faerie Courts closed to him. He travels the world, seeking desperately to find a way back, but eventually comes to realize that he prefers life among the mortals.

The story is there to give the character a reason to linger in Prague, no longer searching so desperately for a way back to the Courts. I can see a lot of different ways to go with an Aspect here, from giving him something that reflects traveling the world, to one that further emphasizes his connection with mortals, to one that links him more strongly with Prague. If this were a PC instead of an NPC, or if the game was more of a road-trip game, I’d probably go with the first or the second. But Amadan is an NPC in a game centred in Prague, so I’m going to emphasize that.

The first thing I thought of for this Aspect was Right Where I Belong. The more I thought about it, the better I liked it. It could be read as either satisfaction or resignation with the current situation, and it has a lot of good uses, both positive and negative. It’s the kind of Aspect that I like most: evocative, flavourful, and generally applicable without being bland. So, it passes the test with flying colours.

Final Aspect: Right Where I Belong

Aspect 6: Whose path have you crossed?

This phase had me co-starring in Izabela’s story:

The Warlock of Vienna

Sent to infiltrate a suspected Huguenot movement in Vienna, Izabela falls in love with a young rebel and they end up working together to stop a powerful warlock from sacrificing a group of children that he has kidnapped. Amadan trades favours with Izabela, using his knowledge of the Mittelmarch to spirit the children out of the city in return for a future favour.

My thoughts on coming up with this section were to make Amadan more of a favour-broker, giving me a way to tie him in with the characters later on. I thought about an Aspect like And What’s In It For Me?, but that felt too mercenary, and didn’t develop the web of relationships I sort of wanted to create here. I settled on A Favour For A Favour, which had more of a bargaining feel to it, and the suggestion that Amadan is keeping track of a complex network of who owes him and who he owes.

So, the test. Invoke for bonus? Sure, especially in the area of bargaining. Compel for Fate Points? Yes, because he owes favours as well as being owed them. Invoke for effect? Definitely, paying a Fate Point to say that someone owes you a favour is gold. It’s tied into the story of the character, and it supports the high concept, and gives story hooks. Cool-wise, it adds a side to the character that I hadn’t been expecting, so score.

Final Aspect: A Favour For A Favour

Aspect 7: Who else’s path have you crossed?

The final phase had me co-starring in Emric’s story:

Blood Eagle

The last of the Svear dynasty resurrects an ancient, bloody ritual to direct the wars of Gustav Adophus. Can Emric save his friend, the new king, and put a stop to the sacrifices? Izabela observes the dark wizard’s preparations and advises Emric on how the ritual can best be interfered with or stopped. Amadan disguises himself and Emric to infiltrate the ceremony. When they are captured and brought to be sacrificed, Amadan magically frees them both, claiming that this was his plan all along.

In this bit of Amadan’s backstory, I wanted to build in the idea that his plans are either very convoluted – his claim – or random guesswork, luck, and desperate improvisation – what most people believe. My first impulse was a very Black Adderish Aspect: I Have A Cunning Plan, but that reference would work mainly for laughs in the game, which wasn’t the vibe I really wanted here.

I did want to hang on to the idea of a plan that seems to go horribly wrong, only to somehow actually work out in the end. See, one of my favourite ex-characters always had these brilliant plans that were terribly, terribly risky: they would either work, or doom everyone involved. Mostly, he had the ability to make them work, but it was often a close thing, and he wound up taking the brunt of the consequences no matter what happened. I just loved the look on the other players’ faces when I said, “I have a plan.”*

But I also wanted a little more flexibility and subtlety, and the ability to adapt things to the game a little more easily. I wanted Amadan to have the reputation for dangerous, risky plans that often came through, but I also wanted the feeling that he was often working on many more layers of plotting than most people suspected. Which led me to think of the Dune series, and gave me the Aspect I needed: Plans Within Plans.

I ran it through the test: invoke for bonus? Check. Compel for Fate Points? Sure, because plans can grow too complex, fed by or feeding into his trouble. Invoke for effect? Tougher, but doable – if he were a PC, I’d probably want to rethink the wording slightly, but being able to spend a Fate Point to prove that you had planned for a given eventuality is not too bad. Again, it builds on the story, ties into the high concept (and especially his trouble), and gives a GM a whole heaping helping of ways to wire him into a story. And it says some cool things about the character.

Final Aspect: Plans Within Plans

Other Aspects

Well, that’s how I build Aspects for characters, and the sorts of thought processes I go through to get the right sorts of Aspects. Now, when I’m pulling together Aspects for things other than characters, I use the same sort of thought processes, though I scale it based on how important the thing I’m creating the Aspect for is to the story. If it’s a part of the overall setting developed during city creation, you better believe I put the same sort of thought towards it, making sure it’s doing the duty I need it to, though I’m more concerned about how it fits story than with any mechanical functionality. Same thing with the faces.

On the other hand, Aspects on scenes that aren’t going to repeat – a fight in a random alley, exploring an unremarkable cellar, things like that – I don’t sweat the Aspects so much. I make sure there are a few Aspects to every scene, but I just jot them down quickly as the scene starts, based on the description I give to the players. I don’t need to be too precise, here, unless there’s something very specific I need to accomplish with the scene. And if there is, I’ve probably planned it out in advance. With scene Aspects, precision and poetry isn’t really necessary or desirable; you want Aspects whose existence is suggested by the description of the scene, and that the players have a chance to guess. An Aspect on a scene that they can’t figure out is like a secret door in a dungeon that they can’t find – it might as well not be there.

Temporary Aspects – especially consequences – require a middle-of-the-road approach. You want the Aspect to be cool and colourful and serve a mechanical purpose, but you also don’t want to spend five minutes in the middle of combat having to think one up. For these, I generally take a minute or two and brainstorm with my players to find something that fits what we agree is going on.

And that’s pretty much what I have to say about Aspects.

The important thing to remember with Aspects is that they are a phenomenal way to add cool to your game. Yes, they encourage roleplaying. Yes, they work in an interesting mechanical way. Yes, they substitute for a number of modifiers that otherwise would need charts. But the real thing they do is build cool stories.

Keep that in mind.

 
 
 

*Also, a long one. Back

*I miss Julian. Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last night was the latest instalment of the Storm Point game, and we wrapped up the Floating Island adventure. It was an interesting game, because three of the six characters had undergone greater or lesser changes as a result of the opportunity I had given them last session to rework their characters. These changes ranged from swapping a couple of powers to completely changing class. So, there was a bit of a learning curve as people got used to what is, in effect, a different character.

I had also wanted to make the combat for this session a little bit interesting. One of the things this group does well is manoeuvre the battle to their advantage, taking advantage of being able to move around while restricting the ability of their opponents to do the same. I wanted to see how they handled having their movement rather severely restricted.

To restrict the party movement, I set the combat in a store room, with long, narrow aisles between tall, heavy stone shelves. The opponents were some constructs: three scythejaws and four whirling blade automatons. I hid the scythejaws in boxes on the lower shelves down the centre aisle, with the idea that they would trigger at different points in the combat: two would trigger when a character was adjacent to them, and the third would trigger a few rounds later, at the opening of the aisle, cutting off retreat. The automatons I had drop out of the ceiling on the first round in the corners of the room and start in on the characters.

The scythejaws worked beautifully, and did a ton of damage. The narrow quarters for fighting limited what the party could do, making them rather nervous and desperate, and I managed to isolate them in about three little pockets to pound on them individually. However, the narrow aisle also really limited the effectiveness of the automatons: their burst 1 attack could catch at most two characters at once, and didn’t do a whole lot of damage. I also forgot their blow-up-on-death power, but that wasn’t such a big deal, overall. They acted as a nice distraction and impediment to movement, while the scythejaws chowed down mercilessly on the characters they were next to.

I got a few of them down to single-digit hit points at the same time a couple of times.

Now, the whole point behind setting the combat up the way I did was not to screw over the players, or to invalidate the way they’ve built their characters and the things the characters are good at. My goal was to pose an interesting tactical challenge, and see how they responded. Sure enough, they had to change their typical tactics, and think about things somewhat differently. It was a fun exercise, but I made sure that the combat wasn’t too overwhelming so that they had a good chance at surviving it, even when they were not in their tactical element.

But I didn’t want it to be too easy. If it’s too easy, there’s no sense of victory.

After this encounter, which was the last defence before the dragon’s lair, they found the loot, and headed back to Storm Point. One of the characters has requested that the next adventure be an expedition to Silverfalls, the ruined dwarven city in the mountains, to find the bones of his grandfather, who fell in the final defence of the city while the dwarves were evacuating.

Sounds like a good adventure to me.

At this point, the characters are 8th level, so I envision this adventure bringing them up to 10th or so, right on the edge of Paragon Tier. The group has also expressed some desire to find a bigger city to use as a base, and I think Paragon Tier is a good time to do that. On the far side of the mountains is the city of Belys, a thriving metropolis ruled by a dynasty of genasi, that I envision as a sort of Arabian Nights Baghdad, so that’s where we’re going next.

On a (sort of) related note, we also had a discussion about the future of the campaign in the real world. I asked folks if they’d be willing to take a hiatus from Storm Point for a few sessions starting in November. Why? Because, in October, Wizards of the Coast is releasing the newest incarnation of Gamma World, and I’d like to give that a try. And this group is pretty much perfect for the traditional weird and wacky world of Gamma.

They all enthusiastically agreed.

But that’s a way off in the future yet.

From the Armitage Files: Monument Creek

By | | 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 episode in my Armitage Files game. This story was the one I had the most trouble with sorting out from the material in the files. I was worried about staying true to what the documents said, but also working things in a manner that made sense, considering the larger things going on in the background.

Am I being cryptic? Kind of. See, while I put that spoiler warning up at the top of this post, that’s there so that others playing the game will realize that reading the post might give things away. But I really don’t want to reveal any of the metaplot to my players, even inadvertently. And I know at least two of them read my blog.

So, by way of explanation, I’m going to present a theory that my players have come up with, and show how it makes things difficult. I’m not saying their theory is correct; I’m not saying it’s not. It just happens to fit some of the pieces they’ve uncovered, and it can be used to illustrate what I’m talking about.

The players think the mysterious documents the Armitage Group have received are being sent back in time from the future, though they don’t know exactly from when, and they don’t who is sending them. This, they say, explains why the writing is admittedly that of Henry Armitage, but no one remembers the incidents or investigations mentioned in them.

Let’s assume that’s true. If the documents talk about, say, a mysterious item being transported in a truck to the hospital, and the players decide to follow that particular clue up, I need to figure out when the incident happens, what leads up to it, and what stage things are at right now. And if I want the characters to get involved and the players to enjoy themselves, I have to figure out something cool and interesting to be going on right now that also makes sense given what the documents say is going to happen in the future.

See the kind of thing I’m talking about?

What I’m saying is that it took me a couple of reworkings to get the spine of what’s going on in this particular investigation, and I scrapped a couple of very nice, interesting ideas along the way just because they didn’t fit the metastructure constraints quite properly. Oh, I probably could have got away with a little fudging, but that feels too much like cheating.

But that’s okay. I came up with a final (sort of) version that I was happy with, and it worked pretty well last night.

As a general observation, I am amazed at how easy it’s getting to improvise scenes and clues. I really thought that the investigative structure wouldn’t lend itself well to this style of play, but it actually does. I haven’t gone the whole way to improvisation that they talk about in the book, where the actual secrets behind everything are decided upon during play, but figuring out where to put clues in order to let the characters drive the actual scenes turns out to be very intuitive. And by keeping a list of the investigative skills of each character (or asking to take a look at a sheet every now and then when you need to make a judgment call) makes the rules mostly transparent. The only times I cracked a book last night was looking at a list of the skills or trying to find a particular name.

Enough of me blathering about running the game. Let’s get to what happened in the game.

This session, the characters decided to follow up an account in the second document, talking about a mysterious car and truck delivering a strange item to the hospital, and Temporary Operative Olsen still being on an army base. They located the hospital from a reference to Crown Hill, but the nearest army base they knew of was Fort Devens, 150 miles away. As for Olsen, they had no idea.

Given that they have a doctor, a con woman, and a bookseller who had been bitten badly by a rat-thing in the group, they decided on a combined approach to the hospital, with Aaron Moon checking in to have the nasty wound on his leg examined, and Dr. Solis and his lovely (if vapid) assistant Twyla Petty (again played by wealthy con woman Roxy Crane) asking to examine patient files in order to do a demographic study of illness and injury in rural Massachusetts.

The patient files showed a number of military men being treated for minor injuries over the past couple of weeks, which led Solis and Roxy to dig a little deeper and discover that the army was in the process of clearing ground and laying foundations for a new base out at Monument Creek, about 25 miles from Arkham. With no infirmary in place, the Lieutenant in charge of the work detail made arrangements with the local hospital for treatment of his men.

Aaron had a nasty night. He hadn’t been sleeping well since having to kill the rat-thing a few days ago, compounded with the nasty things he read in The Book of the Voice giving him nightmares. This night was no different, with a dream of waking to find the hospital a ruin around him. Then, when he awoke for real, he somehow lost four and a half hours between looking at the clock beside his bed and walking down the corridor to the nurse’s station.

These events disturbed him a great deal and, when his companions returned to the hospital in the morning, they went to look at one of the rooms in the hospital that Aaron had seen in his dream. It was occupied by an elderly woman far gone with senile dementia, and they found no clues as to the source of the dream or the lost time. Still, Aaron agreed to stay in the hospital another night, mainly to give Roxy and Solis time to break into the administration office to look for anything interesting.

They didn’t find anything in the office, but Aaron did find an old grocery sack with the remains of someone’s lunch in it in a trash can near the loading dock. The bag was marked Olsen’s Family Market. And in the morgue, Roxy and Solis found a record of a young private killed by a falling tree, whose postmortem exam revealed strange calciferous tumours on his soft tissues. The body had already been released, so they couldn’t examine it first hand.

The next day, they went to the county office, and found out that the military was indeed building a new base out at Monument Creek, so named because of the neolithic mounds and standing stones near the source of the creek. They decided that they needed to go out and take a look at the base (and maybe the mounds and standing stones), but first went to Olsen’s Family Market to check it out. They spoke to Olaf Olsen, the owner and proprietor, and found him a genial but thoroughly mundane fellow.

So, out to Monument Creek, with camping equipment, firearms, medical kit, tracing paper, charcoal, binoculars, and bird books. They set up camp on a hill overlooking the military base under construction, and were invited down to dine with Lieutenant Bennet, who was in charge of the construction project. There they found out that Fort Devens, which is primarily a recruitment and training base, needed to expand its facilities, and it was decided to open a new base to handle the increased recruitment. Aaron knew that Fort Devens also based three divisions of military intelligence, so he was suspicious. But he also knew that Lt. Bennet’s father had written a book about the native beliefs of the Southwest tribes, so he managed to make a more personal connection with the Lieutenant.

And Roxy was the only woman around for miles.

They also learned that the base had their supplies trucked in from Arkham, which led them to the conclusion that the fresh produce was probably delivered from Olsen’s Family Market.

They retired back to their campsite, determined to head upstream in the morning to check out the standing stones that the creek was named for. Their rest was disturbed, however, by a sergeant sent from the camp asking for Dr. Solis to come see to a medical emergency.

This turned out to be a private who was pale, clammy, and severely disoriented. Dr. Solis’s examination found that he seemed to be suffering from severe anemia, and had a hard lump under his skin near his appendix. The young man responded strangely to Solis’s questions and actions, seeming to answer questions that hadn’t been asked, or answering in the wrong order. Blood drawn looked almost blue, and quite watery.

During the examination, the doctor noticed that one of the man’s ears seemed to be deformed, with some sort of ribbed growth within the cartilage stretching and distending the shape of it. As he watched, the ribs seemed to extend, stretching the skin and cartilage of the ear even further. When he touched it with a probe, the taut skin split.

While the doctor was asking the sergeant for details of when the illness had come on, the man died.

Aaron and Roxy, looking around, found some strange crystals in the mud on the man’s boots – things that looked like tiny, strange snow men, with two faceted spheres attached to each other, and a long, thin spike ending in a weird starburst jutting from the smaller sphere at right angles to the rest of the thing. A small fringe of spikes also ran down each side of the smaller sphere. The largest of the crystals was about twice the size of a grain of rice, and most were significantly smaller.

Talking to the Lieutenant and the dead man’s squadmate, the characters could find no explanation for the strange illness, nor the tiny crystals. The body was removed and would be sent to the hospital for an autopsy the next morning, and the Lieutenant warned about possible infection or influenza in the camp.

And that’s where we left things last night.

This is the first investigation that’s stretched into two nights, which is fine, because now I get to spend a little time fleshing out the back nine, as it were. I asked the players to think about what they’re planning to do next, and to let me know what their thoughts are. Sure, the game works as an improvised scenario, but if I have a couple of weeks to think up cool stuff to slip in when appropriate, why shouldn’t I take advantage of it?

Anyway, another fun game, with some nice creepy in it. Still fairly low-key, but that’s the way I like the horror campaigns. Keep the mythos strange, incomprehensible, and at a distance as long as possible, so it stays frightening.

Next game is scheduled in two weeks’ time. I’m looking forward to it.

Take the Plunge

By | | What's he playing?
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Warning!

The following post is a little argumentative. What can I say? I feel strongly about this topic, and I’m feeling particularly stroppy today.

You have been warned.

I run a number of demo games, both at Imagine Games and at various conventions. I work the booth for Pagan Publishing at GenCon every summer. I talk to a lot of gamers all over the place.

And I hear one story more than any other:

“Yeah, me and my friends used to play roleplaying games, but then our GM moved away*, so we don’t game anymore.”

And while I nod sympathetically, inside I’m asking myself:

“So what? If you lose your GM, why doesn’t someone else take over? Was your GM the only person in the group who can read?*”

Now, I admit my gaming group is something of an aberration, based on what I see elsewhere. We’ve got a core group of about a dozen, spread through different games, and in that mix we have three folks who run games regularly, one who does so occasionally, and another who wants to start. That’s a pretty high GM-to-player ratio in a group*. In fact, our gaming schedule is so packed that we have to take turns offering new games to the group, so that all the GMs have the opportunity to run if they want to.

But still. Is it such a leap that, if you like to play, maybe you should try to GM?

I hear a lot of reasons that people don’t do it. I’m going to take some time to discuss some of the big ones.

“It’s too much work.”

I’m tackling this one first because it’s the toughest one. Running a game is more work than playing. You generally have to do more preparation, you have to keep track of more stuff, you have to juggle more things on the fly. It’s a fair cop.

But is it really too much work? I mean, at the height of running D&D 3.5 for a high-level campaign, I was putting in about two hours of prep work for every hour of play. Our sessions usually ran for about four hours once a month, so that means I was putting in another eight hours a month. That’s only two more hours a week, and D&D 3.5 is one of the most complex systems to prep for I’ve ever played* – D&D 4E, for example, has me doing maybe half an hour of prep per hour of play because of the great online tools, and games like Dresden Files and Trail of Cthulhu take very little prep time because the systems are simpler and easier to work with for GMs.

Now, really, if you don’t have the time to put in the prep time, you don’t have the time. Real life should always come first. But most people can probably shake free an hour or two a week – certainly, everyone who comes to the D&D Encounters sessions have already done so to make it to the sessions.

As for the work at the table, when you’re running it, well, all I can say about that is that it doesn’t need to be. If you start small and simple, you’ll gain the skills you need at a surprisingly quick rate, and can move on to bigger, more complex things as you’re ready for them.

“I’m no good at it.”

Here’s a secret: neither was any other GM, the first time they ran a game. Honest.

Running a game is a skill like any other. When you start, you’re not very good, but practice makes you better. You know what doesn’t make you better? Not running a game.

Tied to this idea is the thought that your friends are going to judge you harshly. Well, I don’t know your friends, but if they’re your friends, they’ll likely take it easy on you. If they’re not your friends, why are you playing with them? And if you’re worried about your GM judging you harshly, don’t. The second most common story I hear from gamers is, “I always run the game, so I never get a chance to play.” Offer to run a game, and your usual GM is probably going to be so stoked at the chance to sit on the other side of the screen that he or she will do whatever is necessary to help you and make sure you enjoy the experience. Because then he or she will get to play more often.

“It’s too expensive to buy all the books.”

I have two responses to this.

  1. What the hell? You mean you’re okay with freeloading off the one guy in the group who buys the books? Do you seriously not see the issue with counting on one of your friends to spend his or her money to entertain you? I hope you at least pay for the GM’s snacks. Then maybe he or she will let you borrow the books to run a game.
  2. It’s not that expensive. Suck it up.

Now, when I say that it’s not that expensive, what I’m really saying is that there are games out there for every price point, including a wealth of free RPGs available online. You can pick up complete new games, complete in a single book, for under $20 from small publishers. Electronic files of the games are available from many online retailers at a significant discount over the cost of physical books. And used game books can be found both online and in many game shops and used book shops. You’d be surprised how cheaply you can put together a solid collection.

“I have to learn the rules.”

Well – yeah, you do, but you learned the rules in order to play, right? There’s not much more in the way of rules to learn in order to GM in most systems. And you don’t have to learn them all at once. This isn’t an exam; open book GMing is fine. And if you take a little more time than you like flipping through the book to find the rule you need, well, see what I said above about running games being a skill. It’ll come. Just give it a chance.

“I’m too lazy.”

Nothing I can say to this one but, “You suck.”

Okay. There’s all your excuses shot to hell. But why should you run a game? Here’s a list. I’m not explaining them in detail because, quite frankly, if I need to do detailed explanations of the reasons, you’re just not going to understand them, anyway.

  1. Because it’s fun. There’s a reason I’m running four games currently. It’s loads of fun.
  2. Because it’s another creative avenue of expression. Sure, you get to do a lot of neat acting as a player, but you get to do more as a GM. And you also get to shape the entire world the way you want it. Which leads to…
  3. Because of the power. Even if you’re not using the GM chair as a throne to oppress your players, GMs have more control over most games than anyone else at the table.
  4. Because you owe it to your GM. C’mon. Give the poor guy (or gal) a chance to play for a change!
  5. Because it grows the hobby and the industry. More GMs = more players = more sales = more good games. The math is irrefutable.
  6. Because it’s fun!* Honest!

So, take the plunge. Decide to run a game. Pick out a game you like, and read it. Talk to your friends about it, and get them on your side. Start small, but start. Go slow, but go.

 
 
 

*Or got married, or had kids, or enlisted in the army, or died, or whatever. Back

*Yeah, that last question is a little spiteful. What can I say? I get that way sometimes. Back

*We’ve also got a pretty high female-to-male ratio, with roughly half the players in any of the current games being female. But that’s a different topic. Back

*To be fair, Amber was worse, mainly because of the bookkeeping I had to do behind the scenes, and Decipher’s Lord of the Rings RPG, though I loved it a lot, was a lot of work mainly because of the lack of good stats. Oh, and Serenity was a lot of work, but that was mainly my fault for setting the game up the way I did. My Hunter game is a long time between sessions, but that’s mainly because it takes me some time to come up with a cool idea for the next episode. Not the same thing at all. Back

*Yes, I listed that one twice on purpose. It’s an important reason. Back

Tell Me A Story: Character Creation Phases in DFRPG

By | | Dresden Files RPG, What's he playing?
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Last time, I talked about the three initial decisions that you need to make for creating a DFRPG character. This time, I’m going to walk through the five phases of character, talking about how to use these to really bring your character to life.

First thing we need to do is talk about the phased approach and collaborative character building. I’ve come out before in favour of collaborative character building, and I think it’s pretty much vital in this game. It ties in strongly to the phased approach, and really helps you come up with a group of characters that work together to make great games.

By moving through the process in a phased approach, you get the chance to build on what you’ve done before with the character in a reasonable, natural way. It lets you grow your character, rather than assembling it out of the stats you come up with. It also keeps everyone on the same track for the collaborative process, so that you’re all working on the same part of the character at the same time. This is vitally important for the collaborative aspect. At least, it is if you want to get the benefit out of it.

For the collaborative approach to work well, you need to do a few things:

  1. Be enthusiastic. Get excited about your character, and about everyone else’s character. Get pumped about the group.
  2. Talk about your character. Don’t keep your ideas to yourself. Make sure you share your thoughts with each other, so that you can get excited about all the characters.
  3. Talk about the other characters. If someone is stuck, brainstorm. Pitch ideas for Aspects or events or connections. Talk to each other about how your characters would get along, or how they would fit together.
  4. Listen to each other. If someone is asking for help, listen to them. If someone makes a suggestion, listen to it. If someone voices a concern, listen to it.
  5. Be respectful. This is the big one. Don’t shoot down ideas you don’t like. Don’t try and pressure someone into changing their character to be something they don’t want. Do offer constructive advice, or elaborations, or concerns, but remember that, in the end, only you get to decide about your character, and you only get to decide about your character.

By following the phased approach, as I mentioned above, the discussions you have as a group during character creation will be focused on the current phase, and will tend to be more productive. To help keep the conversations going and keep everyone on the same phase, when I run character creation sessions, when everyone has completed a phase, we go around in a circle and read what we’ve come up with. That lets everyone know what the other characters are, and gives people another chance to ask for help or offer suggestions.

So, let’s get moving on the phases.

1. Where did you come from?

This phase and the next one tend to kind of blend into each other in a lot of ways. This one deals with your “early history,” whatever that means to your character, and the next deals with your “middle history.” Where one stops and the other starts is open to interpretation, and will change from character to character. For example, if you’re playing a fifteen-year-old changeling, this first phase might last from birth until the month before play starts, while if you’re playing a two-hundred-year-old wizard, this phase might last until your mid-seventies.

What it depends on is having a defining moment transform you from what your were all your life to what you are now. That defining moment is the next phase. This phase is your life up until that moment.

Now, if you’ve started with a solid character concept, you probably have some strong ideas about this part of your character’s life already. Here’s where you get it down on paper, and choose an Aspect. Aspects are a big enough deal that I’m going to talk about them in detail in their own post, so let’s focus on just getting the story straight for now.

And that’s what you want here: the first bit of a story about your character. The rulebook suggests looking at things like nationality, ethnicity, family life, schooling, friends, and an explanation of your supernatural origin, if you have one starting out. What I like to do with my characters is look at the High Concept, Template, and Trouble, and think, “Where should I have started from so that these things make sense, and so that the journey is an interesting story?” And then I start from there.

I’m going to use the running example of the NPC I created during the Fearful Symmetries character creation session. Now, he’s not a PC, so I made some choices that are somewhat less playable along the way, but it still illustrates the process fairly well.

The character is a 17th-century version of Amadan, but he doesn’t match the modern version very much, except in basic character. I decided to make him full-fey rather than a changeling, for one thing. For another, I tied him into the whole story of the Faerie Courts closing their gates on the mortal world. So, here’s where we started:

High Concept: Dissolute Faerie Trickster

Trouble: Too Clever By Half

Template: Fey

Now, the idea I had is that he’s too close to the mortals, and so gets left behind by the Faerie Courts. We already have his “nationality,” in that he’s a faerie, so we just need to flesh out the idea and lay the groundwork for the nest stages. I like to keep the stuff I write at this stage fairly short, giving me room to elaborate and expand later, filling in details during play or whenever appropriate. So, I came up with the following bit of story for this section:

Fox-like faerie trickster of the Summer Court who prefers to spend his time among mortals, enjoying their passionate nature and gullibility.

There, I’ve got the foundation for the rest of the story, which hints at a lot of interesting things about the character, but still leaves room for growth and change and revelation. It’s got a couple of good questions hanging from it, as well, like why Amadan chooses to spend time with the mortals, and what the reaction of the rest of the court is to that.

This is the sort of idea you want. A story that tells you something interesting about where your character started from, with good fodder for further character development. Leave yourself room for growth, and a couple of good questions to explore during play.

2. What shaped you?

This section builds the bridge between the previous phase and your High Concept. It is a pivotal change in your character, either a single event or a slow, gradual change, that sets him or her on the path that you will walk during play. It should tie solidly into your Trouble, too; either produced by, or producing, that Trouble.

If we’re talking in terms of the Hero’s Journey, this is when the Hero leaves the village.

This change can be internal or external. For example, it may not be dramatic, but the decision to go out into the world and seek one’s fortune because of boredom is a solid internal change. It could be more profound, like the realization that you’re walking an evil path, and you need to make restitution for what you’ve done – still internal change, but more dramatic. On the external side of things, maybe having your home destroyed to put you on your way, or being given a quest and sent off to accomplish it.

The important thing to look at with this stage is that it should make sense to you that change would come. It can’t be forced, and there must be change, otherwise you’re short-changing the character. The change should grow out of the previous stage, incorporate your Trouble, and lead naturally to the High Concept.

This isn’t as tough as it sounds. We all know stories. We know how stories work, and what this sort of change is like. We know when something rings true, and when it doesn’t.

So, for Amadan, I want something that leads from the basic idea of the first phase to the Dissolute Faerie Trickster High Concept. Particularly, I want a reason for him to be dissolute. I’ve already determined that he’s been left behind when the Courts withdrew (otherwise he wouldn’t be here to be an NPC, right?), so it’s easy to see that the dissolute quality comes about because of being kicked out of his Court. Why did that happen? Well, his Trouble is Too Clever By Half, so it makes sense that he caused his own problem. Here’s what I came up with:

After an elaborate prank embarrasses the Summer Knight and, by extension, the Summer Lady and the whole Summer Court, Amadan is shunned by his fellows, and not informed of the decision of the Courts to withdraw from the mortal world. His first inkling is when he tries to return to Court and finds all the Ways barred, and he is trapped in the mortal world.

I thought of having him formally cast out of the Summer Court, but decided that I wanted the feel to be less formal, more junior high school. So, the cool kids stop talking to him, and don’t let him know when they change the address of the big party. That leaves him alone, bereft, and probably steeped in both spite and self-pity.

If this were a PC rather than an NPC, I might go a different way with this, making it more of an official exile, so that the result is more of an active character, seeking to redeem himself (or avenge himself), rather than just wallowing as a 17th-century emo kid. But as an NPC, having a more passive character is not always a bad thing.

The point is, I looked at where I was starting from, where I wanted to get, and incorporated the Trouble to make a solid progression in the story from first phase to High Concept.

In many ways, this ends the definition of the character – the next three phases are elaborations of the character. You have formed the core and shaping influences for the character; next, you show how those element interact.

3. What was your first adventure?

The next three stages are one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve come across in gaming. Like all the best ideas, when you look at it, you smack yourself in the head and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It not only develops the character, but it develops the relationships between the characters, allowing you to avoid the standard you-all-meet-in-a-tavern-and-decide-to-go-adventuring start to a campaign. With these three phases, the group has a history, and the characters have relationships with each other, and attitudes about each other.

The first two phases deal with what made your character the way he or she is; these next three deal with what your character does.

The conceit is simple: you write a short blurb describing a story about your character, and what your character does in that story. Then, you pass the story to one of the other players so that they can add their character to it, and then it goes on to a third character, building a shared story with three characters involved. There’s the history and relationships built right in.

Now, in my group, we’re pretty much all word-whores. It’s easy for us to fill up a page with a brief (for us) story about the character. The problem with that is that it usually doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for other characters to fit in, or at least it limits what they can do, which restricts their character development. The solution that I came up with is limiting the story you write in this phase to two sentences: one to set up the situation, the other to say what your character does. It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course; sometimes we go over, and we always seem to come up with lengthy complex sentences. But it’s a good guideline to make sure that there’s enough room in the story for future elaboration, either by other characters adding in their bits or later during play.

When you write your story, you want to look for ways to illuminate facets of your character that have not been covered by the previous phases – things that are important to your concept, but not necessarily as central as the first four Aspects and the Template you’ve picked for your character. Maybe you need one more step to get you past the formative story you completed in the first two phases, or maybe you want to show another opportunity for change and what impact it has on your character. Or maybe you just really want to make sure you cover a certain relationship or character trait you have in mind.

The important thing is that it should grow out of the character you’ve already defined, and toward the character that you want to play. It should fill in some blanks, move the character closer to the ideal, and generally just make him or her more cool.

So, for Amadan, I wanted to put a little bit of resolution to the story about him being left behind when the Faerie Courts left. I decided that the logical thing for him to have done is to have gone looking for a way back to the Courts – and to fail, so that he’s still here. But I also wanted to make him a little more content with the way things are right now, so that he sticks around and I can use him as a recurring NPC. This is what I came up with:

The Long Journey Home

Left behind when the fey retreat, Amadan finds all the Ways back to the Faerie Courts closed to him. He travels the world, seeking desperately to find a way back, but eventually comes to realize that he prefers life among the mortals.

With this story, I bring his quest for a way home to a close off-screen, satisfying the dramatic imperative of the character to try and find a way back, while still keeping him active for play. And I’ve left plenty of room for other characters to jump in and interact – indeed, with Amadan’s search, it makes perfect sense that he would run into the other characters in the course of his travels. I’ve made it easy for them to add their own touches, which is what happens in the next two phases.

4. Whose path have you crossed?

One of the nice bits about this phase is that you’ve got another player helping you think about your character in a different way. I try not to have any ideas for this phase before I get to it, so that I’m not trying to shoe-horn a preconception into the story I get handed. That way, I can read what the other player has written, think about how my character might contribute, and then come up with something cool.

But not too cool – this is the balancing act of the last two phases. You want to do something cool so that your character gets cooler, but you need to remember that this is not your story. Your character is not the main hero of the tale. He or she is a supporting character. So, you need to find a way to do something that, while it makes your character cool, helps make the main character of that story cooler. Don’t steal their limelight; help shine it on them.

What I like to look for at this phase is inspiration for my character to be a little bit different than I had originally envisioned – affected by the situation, or the other involved character(s), or just struck by a new idea. I like to see if there’s something that the new story suggests to me that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. At the same time, of course, it’s got to build on what I’ve already done with the character, staying true to the original concept.

Again, when I run the character creation sessions, I usually impose a one-sentence limit on this phase. Mostly, people wind up going to two or three sentences, but a limit of one sentence generally means they don’t write more than the original character.

So, here’s the story I got for this phase from Izabela’s character:

The Warlock of Vienna

Sent to infiltrate a suspected Huguenot movement in Vienna, Izabela falls in love with a young rebel and they end up working together to stop a powerful warlock from sacrificing a group of children that he has kidnapped.

Now, I want Amadan to be important to that story, but not central. He’s got to contribute in some definite way, but not steal the show. Here’s what I came up with:

Amadan trades favours with Izabela, using his knowledge of the Mittelmarch to spirit the children out of the city in return for a future favour.

With this addition, we find out how Izabela got the children to safety, but it’s still clear that she’s the one that saved the children. It also establishes a good, solid relationship between Amadan and Izabela, in that now she owes him a favour. And it sets him up as a crafty fellow, willing to barter favours, but never giving anything away for free, which is in keeping with the character up to this point, though not explicitly stated, nor anything I had thought of before.

5. Who else’s path have you crossed?

All of the above concerns pertain to this one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What this whole process leaves you with is your character’s story, from origin to start of play, mapped out and linked together, with the Aspects you choose at each phase showing how history has shaped him or her. It gives you a solid background, and understanding of the forces driving the character, as well as some history with the other characters. It’s an incredibly rich way of putting together a character, especially if done as a collaborative exercise.

Give it a try.

Next time, I’m going to tackle the beating heart of the FATE system: Aspects.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Sunday was the latest session of the Storm Point game. It was even more scattered than usual, and we got into combat somewhat later than planned, and wound up playing until much later in the evening than we had planned.

Still, I think we all had fun, even if I had to threaten them all with death a couple of times to get them to focus.

With the dragon out of the way, the group was seriously depleted, resource-wise. The main tank had only two healing surges left, and everyone else was pretty beat up, as well. The battle with the wights just before the dragon hadn’t helped any, either. The temple was still jumping pretty randomly through time, and there was some discussion about whether they should just get off the temple and enter the new time period.

I was ready for that decision, but I wanted them to appreciate the gravity of the choice. See, I hate time travel in games. Well, more specifically, I hate player-controlled time travel in games. It just adds so many new layers of headache to running a game. So, I explained to them that leaving the temple and going adventuring in the remote past was a viable choice for them, but that once they left the temple, they couldn’t be sure of ever finding their way back to their own time. I told them I was prepared for that to happen, and to continue the campaign in the new world they found themselves in, but that it was a big decision for them to make.

They opted to stay in the temple, and try to stop it from jumping through time. I handled this with a complexity 5 skill challenge, and was quite glad that it all came down to the final roll*, when the dwarf decided to use his Endurance skill to act as a bridge for the arcane energy to use and complete the mystical circuit. Several of the other characters assisted him, and we had this great image of several adventurers joining hands and touching two different arcane terminals, with mystical power flowing through them to reset the time-jumping magic the dragon had messed up.

What happened next was something I had been planning for some time, but it really surprised them.

I told them that the lightning pillar that had been powering the temple had changed into a vast sphere of silvery energy and, when they looked into it, they saw themselves as they might have been, with different abilities, different training, even different races. I said that they knew that, if they touched this sphere of potentiality, they could be remade into one of their alternate selves – and that they would always have been that person.

Yeah, it’s kind of corny, but here’s my thinking.

When we started this game, the Forgotten Realms settings had just been published for 4E. Since then, there have been a whole lot of new character options that have come along, including new races and classes. I wanted to give my players a chance to look at their characters and decide if they were the ones they still wanted to be playing, without having to bring in a completely new character if they wanted a change. This tied in with the temporal energy being used in the scenario, and gave them the opportunity to think about how they’ve built their characters and whether they want to change them.

I know that one of the players is reworking his rogue into a monk. Another couple may be making minor tweaks to their characters. But mostly, people are happy with the characters they’re playing, and that’s a good thing.

Anyway, after that, they went looking for the dragon’s treasure, of course. They didn’t find it that session, but did manage to find a crypt full of undead that ate up the rest of the evening*.

Next session should be our last one on the Floating Island. After that, one of the characters has expressed some interest in going to see the old dwarven ruins up in the mountains, where his grandfather died. Should be fun.

 
 
 

*11 successes, 2 failures. One roll would tip it either way. Back

*10 zombie rotters, 3 zombie soldiers, 2 zombie hulks, and 2 skull lords, for a total of 2455 xp, a level 9 encounter for 6 characters. Back

Fearful Symmetries: Court of Thieves

By | | Dresden Files RPG, Fearful Symmetries, What's he playing?
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Last night was the second session of Fearful Symmetries. The previous session, the characters had learned that the King of Thieves in Old Town, Zuckerbastl, was keeping a monster that he used to keep his prostitutes in line. Judging from the prostitute that had attacked them, they figured that the monster was a Red Court Vampire.

So, they decided to go see Zuckerbastl, and find out if it was true.

When I was fleshing out Zuckerbastl, I had initially planned to make him the suave, dashing King of Thieves stereotype that seems so popular in stories, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt that was a cop-out. What I did instead was make him someone try to act with the same kind of panache, but not really have his heart in it, so that the brutal, vicious mind underneath kept peeking through.

When the characters showed up at his warehouse (directed by the prostitute who had attacked them), Izabela was concealed behind a veil, and Emric tried to lurk (rather unsuccessfully) in the shadows in order to see who came and went for a while before approaching. That didn’t work out exactly as planned, because of a low Stealth score and bad roll on Emric’s behalf. He got approached and half-threatened, half-invited inside after he said that he was there to see Zuckerbastl and showed them the token he had from the thief he had helped earlier.

Confession time. I hadn’t really done a lot of prep work for this session; most of my game-prep time over the past three weeks had been eaten up with getting ready for the Armitage Files game and typing up our Setting Bible. What that meant was that, while I knew they had to find a link to get them from Zuckerbastl to the Red Court Vampire who was behind the disappearances the characters were investigating, I hadn’t actually figured out what that link should be. I decided to wait and see if the characters could point me in a reasonable direction during play.

Also, I lost one of the pages of my notes, with a bunch of stats I had put together just in case*.

There followed an audience with the King of Thieves, in his warehouse court. Emric presented himself to Zuckerbastl, while Izabela remained concealed behind her veil. Emric found the thief he had aided earlier tied to a pillar, severely beaten, but when he told his story (which corroborated the thief’s own tale), the man was released and restored to his position. Izabela used her magic to check if there were any vampires present, and found a few of Zuckerbastl’s thugs showed the influence of the addictive saliva, but no Red Court Vampires or Infected.

Well, in the ensuing discussions, our heroes managed to convince Zuckerbastl that he couldn’t trust some of his men. Emric was given a purse of coin, thanked, and dismissed, after Zuckerbastl got rid of most of his other men. Emric left, but Izabela hung back invisibly to watch Zuckerbastl give tell Marko (the thief who had been tied to the pillar) to round up some hard boys and burn “her” out, because “she” must be behind it. They then sealed off the maze through the warehouse crates to Zuckerbastl’s court, with Zuckerbastl on the inside alone and Marko hitting the streets to do his job. Izabela was on top of the piles of crates, watching everything.

With the party split, and Zuckerbastl (for all intents and purposes) alone, I figured it was a good time for a vampire attack.

I sent in a single full Red Court Vampire, creeping across the ceiling, wanting to get close enough to Zuckerbastl to get him with its saliva. Izabela spotted it, though, and lit it up with a nice evocation*, which let Zuckerbastl also see it. The vamp tried to swoop down on Zuckerbastl, but got tangled in the ropes and pulleys used to move the crates around*, and Zuckerbastl ran for a blunderbuss.

Another quick Spirit evocation later*, Zuckerbastl and Marko were back in the fight, and things didn’t go well for the vampire after that.

Faced with this rescue, Zuckerbastl gave up the name of the woman who he figured must be behind the vanishing prostitutes and the vampirism – Dregana, who had poached some of Zuckerbastl’s girls and opened up her own brothel. Izabela, Marko, and Emric decided to go pay her a visit the next day, just after dawn.

In the meantime, Izabela did a divination on the blood of the dead vampire, determining that it was probably a few decades old, and was originally a young, Greek man named Demetrios.

Next day, with Izabela once again heavily veiled, they went to the brothel, and broke into the back, finding a number of Red Court Infected and a couple of full vampires. They killed most of them, but one of the infected escaped down in the cellar, and our heroes gave chase. We wrapped up the evening on a bit of a cliffhanger: our heroes chased the fleeing infected thug right into a whole gang of Red Court Vampires, with a Black Court Vampire among them.

Fade to black.

Couple of observations:

  • I talked a little bit before the game about how combat works in the system, the value of maneuvers, and the different paradigm of what happens during a fight from other games like D&D. I think that really helped make the fight scenes work better for the players, but I’ve got to remember the same advice I gave them, and have the bad guys use more maneuvers and such, rather than just going for the attack.
  • Spellcasting is the most complex part of the game, and we’re all still trying to get a handle on it. Looking at the rulebooks this morning, I see a couple of errors I made, and judgment calls that probably should have gone a different way. Still, play proceeded fairly quickly, and a lot of interesting things got done.
  • One of the things I messed up was veils. I forgot that they make it harder to see out as well as in, unless they are specifically constructed to be one-way transparent (extra complexity).
  • Another was that I messed up the way you can use skills during preparing a thaumaturgy spell to tag the spell with a temporary Aspect that you can use to boost your Lore skill for free when comparing it to the complexity of the spell.
  • I need to make a big list of period names to assign to random NPCs. Especially Czech and Slavic names, but also some German, Italian, French, etc.
  • Ditto Prague street names.

All of that is just the learning curve of any new system, though. We all had fun, and we’re looking forward to the next session.

Oh, and I’ve built the preliminary wiki on Obsidian Portal. So far, it’s just got the stuff from the Setting Bible and a few minor additions from the play sessions, but it’s there. Enjoy.

*Which page of notes I have just found. Timing.

*Spirit evocation maneuver, sticking it with the Aspect Lit Up Like a Christmas Tree.

*Bad, bad Athletics roll as it tried to sprint.

*Sending a mental message to Emric that Zuckerbastl was under attack by a vampire.