Author Archives: Mage Mistress
Alas, Poor Cerberus…
Scaling battles is one of the most difficult parts of GMing World of Darkness. At least, it is for me. In a “leveled” game system you can gauge the challenge by the level of the characters in the group and the number of characters in the group. In “World of Darkness” I have no such luck. Yes, I can (and do) take into account the number of experience points I have handed out up until the session with the fight, but those XPs don’t always get spent on things that will help the characters in combat. This is only compounded by the way that dice pools work in WoD. I have way too many times seen someone with a 10+ dice pool roll zero successes, or even a botch. Now, technically you can only roll a “botch” (aka: dramatic failure) with a chance die, but I have always felt (and my players tend to agree) that botches are part of the fun as long as the GM doesn’t go overboard with them.
On the other hand, I have seen the exact opposite on at least as many occasions. I can’t count for you the number of times I have seen someone have 2 dice and get three or more successes due to roll-ups. It becomes difficult as a GM to have any feel for how a combat will go. This only becomes more difficult to estimate when you’re dealing with a mixed group of Werewolves, which are built for combat, and Mages, which are built to make me weep. I thought that a Mythical Beast with multiple heads that was so large it caused earthquakes by walking around would be a bit of a challenge. (Note: the Mages had jumped through a portal and were not in Kansas anymore at the time.) Instead I wound up with monstrosities with 16+ Dice Pools, Supernal Luck (8 again), and Force fields protecting them as they ripped poor Cerberus to shreds in the first round of combat.
Lessons Learned:
1) In the World of Darkness it is always, always, always preferable to have your players squaring off against a group of baddies rather than one Big Bad. Yes, Cerberus (if that’s what the creature truly was) made an impressive entrance. The problem is that when you are facing off against multiple attacks per round your defense decreases by one for each attacker. When you have some purple-haired person who shall remain nameless casting Acceleration on her combat-monster buddies so that they can kill things at ludicrous speed your Big Bad will be a Big Bloodsplat before everyone even has a chance to get a shot in. On the other hand… fill a house with acid-vomiting zombies and the players will start hosing each other down with cleansing fire in an attempt to escape the building.
2) Pit the Player Characters against each other. This is a tried and true method for making your life as a GM much more fun and easy! Not only are you dealing with less attackers on each side because you have split the group, if they kill each other’s characters they’ll whine at each other and not you! You just get to sit back, relax, and gloat.
3) When your friends ask you if you’ll run Mage… YOU SAY NO!
Hollow Laughter in Marble Halls
In a long running campaign it’s important to allow the players some time for character development. If you play your cards right they will think you’re being the magnanimous sort of GM who is willing to indulge their frivolous whims. It is important to not let them realize the truth of the matter too quickly. The truth is that you are accomplishing two aims for yourself: not having to come up with plans for the session, and giving the PCs enough rope to hang themselves.
My PCs wanted to play tourist for a session since two of them are newly arrived in America. They wanted to take a group trip to see the Statue of Liberty. I convinced them that they wanted to do this on New Year’s Eve so that they could enjoy the spectacular view from The Torch. Yes, yes, I know that The Torch is closed on New Year’s Eve at midnight, but we’re talking about a group of Mages and Werewolves here so surely they can find a way to make this happen.
The first half of the session was spent causing trouble on Liberty Island. The players made it abundantly clear that they were doing quite a bit of drinking this day. Hello negative dice pool modifier! I’m so pleased you could make it to the party!
This naturally lead to questionable decisions like the desire to scratch the words “Lars Was Here” into the base of The Statue with Steel Rending Claws. Sadly, this effort was ultimately thwarted by the group.
My favorite bad decision of the evening took place inside Liberty’s Arm later that evening however. Tell me, if you’ve broken into someplace that nobody is supposed to be in and you find a magic portal, are you stupid enough to leap through it? If you are I’m pretty sure there is a science lab accepting applications. The retirement benefits suck, but there will be cake!
Also, you might be one of my players.
My players opt to leap through the portal with no concern for where it will spit them out, or how they will make it back. Well played players, well played.
Where they landed wound up being a vast field of happy little warrior corpses. (Where’s Bob Ross when you need him?!) In the distance is a large, formidable keep. As they grow closer they realize that the keep is made of marble, and covered in ancient runes. Much of the weaponry and armor that litters the field is also runed, though the material seems unremarkable. The players have stumbled upon a relic hunt at the site of the final stand of the Dogs of War.
My plan was thus: The Dogs were one of the more extreme factions of the Adamantine Arrow in the days of Atlantis. Of course, in their eyes they were doing what needed to be done to protect Atlantis. In the eyes of the Guardians of the Veil they were reckless war mongering fools who were going to wind up destroying the city if they weren’t stopped. The other Orders were divided on the issue. As such, I had the players roll INTELLIGENCE+COMPOSURE or INTELLIGENCE+OCCULT, which ever they preferred, and if they got at least one success I told them the following:
- If the player is an Adamantine Arrow the Dogs worked tirelessly and without thanks, often giving their lives, in defence of the people of Atlantis.
- If the player is a Guardian of the Veil the Dogs were crazy and reckless and needed to be kept a safe distance from the people they were “trying to protect”
- Anyone else was given both viewpoints.
I then told them that since no one had any way of knowing what the truth was they could make up rumors about the Dogs as they saw fit. After all, they might have heard anything, and any of it might be true. I could then listen to what they came up with and decide whether or not I wanted to work it into the campaign at a later date. (I didn’t tell them this last part.)
Most players offered me nothing to work with. Contrary to what one would normally expect (unless one happens to read this blog regularly of course), the Guardian of the Veil (you know… the keepers of secrets and such) comes up with a wild tale of The Tooth of Fenris.
He, both out of character and in, has no idea that Werewolves have a name for Fenris: Father Wolf.
Always count on stupidity.
*Yes, as a matter of fact I did have Pink Floyd’s “Dogs of War” playing in the background for the occasion.
Operation: Blow-up Doll
Have you ever had one of those sessions where there is something so completely obvious that the players should do and they just completely refuse to do it?
One of the earlier incidents of players behaving oddly (I have many from which to choose) has since come to be known as “Operation: Blow-up Doll”
It was simple. The Mages (Aenaiyah, Argus, Marissa, Molly, Neils, Nokoni, and Rex at that time) had just captured a group of Mages running a dojo who were causing people to be tainted by the Abyss. The thing of it is, they really didn’t intend for that to happen! Had anyone thought to actually talk to these people they might have found out that they really did believe that they were helping people find their paths to a Supernal Watchtower. The problem is that they had been duped by an Abyssal Entity. It was an honest mistake!
I had planned for these characters to be recurring. I had the Mage cabal find various things in the dojo that they took home with them including Busy Bea’s watercolor paintings (she was actually quite talented with solid scores in Crafts and Dexterity!), and Master Wu’s diary. I found some nice watercolor images online that I downloaded as examples of her paintings, and I even wrote out part of the diary! In Japanese! (OK, it was English printed in the Japanese font… but it looked neat dammit.) Hidden in the diary were hints that this man may have information regarding Marissa (the mysterious Acanthus child) and her family. I went so far as to determine levels of success in translating the diary as its writer was a reasonably powerful Mastigos Mage who had protected his diary against Supernal decryption. I wrote the passage in English, converted to the Japanese font, and then printed multiple copies of it with larger sections translated (printed in Calibri instead of Japanese) each time. I ranked each section by how many successes they would need to roll to unlock that stage of the translation. I thought it was cool enough to be worth the work. Hell, I even wrote a Haiku! And I gave the Haiku the same treatment!
I made it clear that this particular Mastigos had performed at least one (and quite possibly more…) Goetic Summoning. He had pulled a Vice out of his head, and then found himself unable to bring himself to destroy the demon. As a result he found it a home instead. That home was a lovely Japanese Stroll Garden in upstate New York, based on the very real Hammond Museum and Japanese Stroll Garden.
So the Mages knew that there was a Goetic Demon living in a garden, they knew that it was based upon Master Wu’s jealous rage, and they didn’t know which garden. I figured they would ask him. After all, they do have him conveniently locked up in Consilium Prison. If, by some chance, they figured out which garden on their own (as it happened they guessed correctly), I was smart enough to choose a large garden in the hopes that they might think it a good idea to ask whereabouts in this garden the Goetic Demon might be. (Note: when I ran this scenario there was a map of the garden at the website that does not appear to be there now. I used the actual garden map for the scenario.)
Clearly good ideas and my Mage troop have never been formally introduced.
The problem with this is that I had figured an interrogation would take some time during the session. I was hoping for a little Mastigos-a-Mastigos action! A battle of Wits in the truest sense!
Instead they said “it’s a Goetic Demon. How hard could it be to track it down?” and tried to scrounge up enough money for bus fair. (Except for the Thyrsus, Nokoni, who opted instead to turn into an eagle and fly there.) As it happened I did pick a precise location for the demon, and as they wandered to every area on the map EXCEPT THAT ONE… well nothing happened. They wandered, and wandered, and eventually they stumbled across the demon. Mind you, it took some doing before they figured out she was there, and she got several great mind attacks off on them before they did. Suddenly Neils was jealous about Argus being the de facto group leader, Rex was jealous about the other folks being so much younger than him, Argus was jealous of everyone else’s freedom from responsibility on account of they let him make all the decisions, Molly was jealous of Aenaiyah’s slut-tastic wardrobe (Molly was a 16 year old Mage) and they went at each other’s throats like they were actually related!
Ultimately however the characters did realize that this was the doing of a certain Goetic Demon. The players figured it out but their characters apparently aren’t all that bright. (I imagine you’re as shocked about this as I am.) One player eventually did something I expected and walked up to the demon (it had manifested by this point) and asked “Are you my Mother?” What she didn’t realize was that this time (this had been her running gag of the campaign) it was! This particular demon was a manifestation of Master Wu’s desire for the woman he loved, and that woman went on to become Marissa’s mother! Marissa’s player had let me make up the character’s backstory any way I wanted on the grounds that the character had been trapped in a chronic hysteresis for a couple of decades and had no idea why or how. This should have been a revelation of some kind. This was a clue to the mysterious character’s past. This man might know who she is… and why she had been trapped… and…
THE PLAYERS NEVER BOTHERED TO QUESTION HIM ABOUT THIS!
EVER!!
My other Acanthus, despite the fact that she couldn’t actually see the demon herself at the time, decided to go off an a rant (shocking!) and inform the demon that when it really came down to it she was really nothing more than a fancy blow-up doll for Master Wu to get his kicks with when he felt like it. I will admit that I had never figured on that particular phrasing, but I did make the demon’s bans include:
- The fact that Marissa was the daughter of the human she was based on
- The fact that she wasn’t actually the woman Master Wu loved, but was merely a copy
These things played upon the demon’s own jealousy and drained it of essence. Aenaiyah, noticing the demon’s reaction to her insult, ranted through the whole fight! Even after the demon manifested in her face! It was in the middle of this ranting about sex toys that the child Acanthus Marissa asked the thing if it was her mother! And when it raged and started shrieking in pain Aenaiyah realized that she had been calling Marissa’s mother a blow-up doll for the past half hour! PRICELESS!
Eventually, using Spirit Magic and the Demon’s bans they did manage to defeat it. Then they had to find a way home after the buses stopped running for the evening. With only one dot of Resources between them at the time Nokoni once again turned into an eagle and flew away. (Clearly he was the wisest among them, not that he had much competition.) The others rented a moving van because the dice were on my side for once so I deemed it all they could afford that would fit all of them.
Let’s just say that for those in the back of the van it was a long… dark… long… way home….with an excitable purple haired Acanthus…good times.
I-Con 31 FTW!
I-Con was a blast! Not only did I support the economy by spending far more money than I should have, I got to see some people I don’t get to see nearly often enough, met some new cool people, and oh yeah… there was gaming!
There was lots of gaming.
And the gaming was good. Nay… great!
In my Hunter game alone we had a folks bribing their way through the “indigenous inhabitants” of the undercity with pain pills, fun with flamethrowers, the building of a staircase down to the bottom of a sinkhole using accident wreckage and discarded construction materials, an officer of the law shooting someone in the face for trying to prevent his friend from being possessed by an Azlu, a giant demonic creature being attacked by a crazy woman with a wrench, cleansing fire, an ambulance driver who decided to “stay here to keep an eye on the accident victims… in case, you know… they might need help or something” (his Vice was Sloth), did I mention the flamethrowers?… and these weren’t even the prize winning moments!
Though charging the enormous half-human half-monstrosity with a wrench did deserve an honorable mention!
Ultimately though we all agreed that the Paramedic using her knowledge of chemistry to turn her jury-rigged “flamethrower” into a massive ball of explosive, fiery death (GM Approved!) and the Subway Worker who attempted to flamethrower the face off of someone with a nosebleed because it may (or may not) indicate an Azlu possession in the name of the Lord were simply too awesome to not walk away winners!
Although, honestly, the Paramedic deciding that it would be a great idea to try to dig an Azlu out of someone’s head with an epic sized pair of tweezers was also incredibly entertaining! (Brava Paramedic!)
And that was just one game! That doesn’t even begin to cover the Mastigos who twisted up the meanings of “Vulgar Spell” and “Covert Spell” to try to get a Seer of the Throne to unleash Paradox on himself, the Obrimos who turned gravity on and off to slam the guy into the ceiling and the floor, and then the ceiling, and then the floor… over and over again… or the fact that this time I was the Acanthus, and my Acanthus was the GM! Revenge is mine! Sayeth me baby!
Demons were slain, Canopic jars filled with fresh human entrails were hurled out of penthouse windows (sorry pedestrians!), I told my Cabal Mate in the future to leave a note in my wallet so I would have it in the past and naturally didn’t actually flip the card over to see said note until it was too late to be of use (and I still say it was all that purple-haired Acanthus’s fault we wound up three days ago and not mine but the memory bit was absolutely all Lyric’s fault!), and sweet sweet stuff was purchased. With all of the tables of gaming going on around me (had to be a few dozen tables) I can only imagine how many crazy stories unfurled last weekend. A successful con indeed!
Now I’m looking forward to doing it all again for RetCon!
Hope to see you there.
Letting My Geek Flag Fly
It’s been a busy week getting ready for I-Con 31!! I’m very excited to be GMing at this year’s event. In fact, I’m all over the schedule, running events for “Mage: The Awakening“, Generic “World of Darkness” (Humans vs Supernatural), and “Hunter: The Vigil“. So yeah, I’ve been busy. Even the adventures I’ve run previously need to be combed through so that handouts that have been previously handed out are replaced, and of course it’s always nice to refresh my memory as to how the adventure is supposed to run.
And then of course there’s the adventure debuting at I-Con 31: “Your Safety is our #1 Concern”. (See Link Above) I’ve never run “Hunter the Vigil” before so it was a bit of a challenge making sure I had everything together properly, and scaling the challenge to the characters. Of course, this being a convention and not a campaign I only have to worry so much about whether or not there is a TPK. After all, even a party wipeout can be lots of fun as long as the fight is worthy of drunken tales in the hotel bar later that evening. I believe that in that regard I have a winner! (Of course, I may be biased.)
Honestly, the bigger challenge in planning convention events for me is one of pacing. In my campaign it doesn’t matter if they don’t get as far as I figured they would in one session. In fact, sometimes that’s a blessing as it gives me a bit of a leg up on the next session. Conversely, I’m all too used to my players going off plan and I can improvise around their weirdness. I’ve grown used to their weirdness. At I-Con I’ll have all new weirdness to adapt to, which should be interesting!
Of course my bigger concern is that at a convention game there is no next session. You have to make the one session count! It has to have enough going on to fill the time slot without feeling like filler, and you have to reach the final challenge before the session ends. I tend to like planning a bit more than I think we can cover, with modular areas that can be dropped if we’re running short on time without negatively impacting the story’s flow.
One of my favorite things about planning a one-off convention game though is the researching. I’m kinda weird like that. I love wandering aimlessly through internet searches for keywords like “abandoned building”, or “subway urban legends”. I’ve found some incredibly inspiring things that way, that help me give the scenario that splash of reality that I like to bring to the World of Darkness. It may not be exactly like the world we know (especially if I’ve messed up my physics a bit since I haven’t had to calculate breaking distance in… well in quite a while let’s leave it at that!) but it should be close. A splash of realism makes the event hit that much closer to home, which is always creepier.
See you on the gaming track!
Mage Mistress 