Category Archives: Campaign Summary
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.
Let’s Get Physical
When last we left our intrepid Mages they were off to investigate a gym in China Town. this is not because they had any interest in joining one, much to the disappointment of a certain Adamantine Arrow Sentinel who wishes they would, but because they have the feeling that something strange is afoot at the Celestial Body Qui-Gong. Like a good Scooby Gang they are off to investigate!
They decide to approach the dojo as if they are prospective members. This seems to make sense since they don’t know for sure that anyone at the gym has done anything wrong. Over the course of a day/evening the various members of the cabal file in to observe a class. The woman behind the counter, Busy Bea (because she’s busy like a bee!), is more than happy to let them watch a class. She’s proud of her family’s gym! The dojo belongs to her father, and she and her husband help him with teaching classes and running the business side of things. Those who can read auras decide to do so, and I tell them that everyone at the gym seems calm and happy. When no one bats an eyelash at that emphasis I have my aura readers make an additional WITS+COMP roll, which is promptly failed. Had it not been a rousing failure I would have said that everyone, including your fellow mages, looks calm and happy. Since it was a rousing failure I somehow managed to restrain myself from giving them the additional information.
And the Mages decided to observe, and even try out, some of the classes.
What they didn’t know is that I had pulled this scenario straight from “Intruders: Encounters with the Abyss“. It’s a go-to book for any World of Darkness GM, but it’s best in the hands of a Mage GM. (/plug)
You see, the people running this dojo were also Mages, and skilled enough to disguise several things. One of these things was the fact that they were masking the aura of any living being in the dojo to look “calm and happy”, a combined spell they liked to call “Happy Customer”. This was meant to disguise the fact that the students’ auras actually were sickly, twitchy, and borderline psychotic. They were also disguising the supernal resonance of the moves they were teaching the students. And so, not penetrating this disguise, the Mages not only obsrved the class, but some of them were fool enough to join in!
This is where I wish they had better DEX+ATHLETICS scores! Had they actually been successful at replicating the moves they could have been touched by the abyssal taint! Instead they just looked rather silly and embarrassed themselves in front of the more skilled students. Because they did not manage to replicate the moves, they didn’t feel any different after trying to perform them, and so they didn’t yet realize that anything was amiss.
This was going to call for a subtle investigation, and really… what could possibly be more subtle than knocking out the electricity for an entire city block?
Coincidence… I Think Not
The Mages don’t have much to go on, but they know that the person with the tentacles sprouting from his chest used to be a police officer, and they sorta know what he looked like before he turned into something with tentacles. Whatever happened must have happened recently. It was time to scan the papers and call in some police contacts.
As an FBI Agent, Argus knows a few officers of the law. He’s able to track down some information on people who had gone out on medical leave recently, one in particular who looks like a promising candidate. This particular individual wound up in the hospital after a brutal fight during a “domestic dispute” call left him with a punctured lung. Punctured lung… surgery on his chest… tentacles coming out of his chest… I believe we have a winner!
It is at this point that I must let you all in on a little secret. One of the folks from a long-ago game group of mine is an ambulance driver. One of the folks at this Mage table was part of that group, and is a lung doctor. It was impossible for me to pass up the opportunity of having both of them show up as NPCs at this juncture: getting the man to the hospital and then giving him a lung transplant. The beauty of this was in letting the lung doctor (he plays Argus) explain to himself how the surgery went. It’s a wonderful way to make sure that those annoying player-types don’t question your lack of knowledge on a subject like lung tranplants!
And so, Argus’ player explained to Argus the successful lung transplant, and then Argus tried to convince his player to give up the identity of the person whose lung was inserted when Argus’ player knows full well that he shouldn’t be handing that information out to just anyone.
It only now occurs to me that this may have been when I broke Argus’ player.
While Argus and his player argued with himselves?… each other?… themself?… other members of the cabal tried to find out more about this domestic dispute. As it turned out, the couple in question had been engaged to be married, and things had been going quite swimmingly. Sure, there were some tense moments involved in planning the wedding because of dealing with the families, but nothing all that unusual. The bride-to-be joined a gym in order to lose those last few pounds before her final fitting, and to help herself relax. She was studying Qui-Gong at this new place that opened up recently in China Town, not far from where she worked. Ironically, it was a couple of weeks after starting the classes that the blushing bride started to get… twitchy. “I always thought that kind of thing was supposed to help people relax”, her fiance said, “but this time not so much.” Their final fight got vicious, and a neighbor called the police. When the officer arrived the husband to be let him in. He simply didn’t know what else to do. The woman he loved was having some kind of psychotic break and he couldn’t handle it alone. She needed help. She attacked the officer, and they fell into a glass table. He wound up with a large glass shard sticking out of his chest, she wound up with one slicing her throat open. She was pronounced dead on the scene. The officer was alive, but his lung was collapsing.
In the kind of quirk of fate that can only happen in the World of Darkness the woman and the officer had the same blood type. She was gone either way, and she was listed as an organ donor, so the fiance told them to transplant her lung into the officer. It was the fight with her that caused his injury, and in saner times she would have wanted to put that right.
“Yes, as a matter of fact I think I do have a flyer from the dojo sitting around here somewhere… yes… on the computer desk. Sure you can have it. I certainly don’t want it.”
I Don’t Feel Tardy
Class was indeed about to begin, but who was about to get schooled? A ranting madman holds Aenaiyah and several others as a captive audience to his lecture on the dangers of city life. Argus stands behind him, invisible for the moment, and a quick switch to Prime Sight shows him that Aenaiyah’s fellow students are Sleepers. Someone will have to get them out of there before anything inexplicable happens.
Enter our second Acanthus Mage and friends. With a quick twisting of Fate she chooses a path that leads to Aenaiyah and Argus. That she has a sympathetic connection to both of them doesn’t hurt any, simply follow the Fate line!
Eventually the others arrive. Argus holds his action, waiting for a good moment to strike (he was smart like that once upon a time!), and eventually it arrives. He steps out of of sight range of the Sleepers present to drop invisibility, as the newly arrived Neils erects a Forces Wall between the lunatic and his victims. Argus steps out with gun drawn, and badge prominently displayed.
“Stop right there, FBI. Get your hands up where I can see them, now!”
(Or something to that effect)
At which point all hell breaks loose.
The madman whirls on Argus, who is standing directly behind him to draw his attention away from the kidnappees, a clever move. His plan works, and more than that it screens the tentacle that lashes out of the man’s chest at Argus’ throat.
Fortunately the Sleeper witnesses blew their WITS+COMPOSURE rolls. Apparently they were distracted by the young girl who wandered over to untie them. They hadn’t been well tied (apparently I roll a lot of rocks) and she managed to get them loose. She then used her Direction Sense merit to lead them back to the platform and away from the fight.
And what a fight it was!
Argus stuck to his service pistol for his first attack so as not to reveal Magic to Sleepers. The Flesh Intruder (though they did not have that name for it yet) lashed out with more tentacles (it has several attacks per round) and did a lovely job of poking holes through our favorite Guardian. Sadly, not lovely enough.
Nokoni was able to patch Argus up, while Neils “I Don’t Need No Stinkin Veil” of the Free Council hurled some Celestial Fire at the creature. Molly the Mastigos punched it in what was left of its brain, while Rex showed off his skill with a nail-gun-walking-cane.
The creature, not one to go quietly, got some more lashes in before finally being subdued by fire. The Mages quickly conferred and decided that burning the body utterly would be best. Before they did that though, they looked for any information they could find as to who this man had once been. There wasn’t much to go on. Rex was able to make brief contact with his ghost, but only enough to know that the man had in fact been a police officer. He was just far too gone to find out more than that.
This will bear further investigation, as soon as Aenaiyah stops screaming at Argus for waiting so long to untie her.
Mage Mistress 