Category Archives: Gaming
And I Feel Fine
Happy B’ak’tun!
If you’re reading this, then the world has in fact not ended and I’m feeling the need to celebrate this achievement. We have completed the 13th B’ak’tun, and have embarked on the 14th! This momentous occasion has been thousands of years in the making, and we get to live to see it.
I don’t know about you, but I intend to party like it’s 13.0.0.0.0!
Unless of course solar flares cleanse the Earth with fire. My siblings just received an order of Omaha Steaks, so I’m not ruling that possibility out just yet.*
The real question is: how are you going to commemorate this in your game? Will your players be rolling DEXTERITY + ATHLETICS to dodge meteors? Will they be doing some WITS + CRAFTS to come up with some Super Suit of Fiery Death Avoidance? Will they be focusing on some RESOLVE + COMPOSURE rolls in their attempts to ascend to the 4th dimension? (and if they are remember to ask if their characters are wearing all natural fibers because, as I’m sure we all know, synthetic materials will vanish during the transition and nobody wants to see that.)
Of course, if the world is going to end and all life as we know it is about to.. well… not be here at any rate, I don’t want to invest too much of my remaining hours writing a blog entry no one will ever get to read because that’s just sad. So remember to keep your towel handy, and face the day with aplomb. Enjoy your Apocalypse everyone!
*The two times my siblings ordered steaks our area was hit with power outages lasting weeks… both times… and as such they had been informed that they were never to order steaks again. So if there is cleansing fire we all know who to blame, and it isn’t the makers of yummy delicious steaks!
Innocents Musings
I’ve written my first module for World of Darkness: Innocents! I haven’t run it just yet, I’ll be doing that at RetCon on Saturday night, but if how much I’ve enjoyed writing it is any indication everyone will be pleased.
One of the things that struck me as slightly odd about Innocents is that it doesn’t use the Virtue/Vice system. Honestly, I can’t imagine why since the entire rest of the World of Darkness line does. The idea of Innocents is that the main protagonists are children (boogie man in the closet kind of stories) but it’s hardly as though children don’t have Virtues and Vices. Children can be every bit as Wrathful, Envious, Proud, Hopeful, Prudent, and Charitable as adults can. So why not Virtues and Vices? Why does Innocents switch to “Assets and Faults”?
I have no answer for that question, and here is another question I have no answer for: why wasn’t “Assets and Faults” made the universal personality trait for all of the World of Darkness instead? Now that I’ve seen the system in Innocents I can’t understand why it wasn’t used across the gamut.
I’d guess that most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins that Vices are based on, and of course the Virtues are all familiar enough as well. The thing is, while Envy is simple enough as a concept, to covet that which someone else has, it’s a little less easy to role play effectively. Envy is a subtle inner conflict that doesn’t always play well at the game table.
In contrast, the Assets and Faults of the Innocents system are all concrete and easy to communicate at the table. They are also well balanced, so that for the various positive qualities a character might have, there are opposing negative qualities: Bravery and Cowardice, Kindness and Cruelty, Generosity and Greed. As for the replenishment of Willpower Points, they work exactly the same way as their counterparts in the other systems: the indulgence of a Fault replenishes one point of Willpower, and the portrayal of an Asset replenishes Willpower to the character’s maximum.
In the Virtues and Vices system I tend to stick to a core few that I use to make pre-generated characters for convention modules because I want to be sure that players with no experience won’t have a hard time portraying the various characters as written on the sheets. I didn’t have that problem at all writing characters in Innocents. I didn’t see any particular quality that wouldn’t be fun to portray at the table. They all feel like they will work well in a group dynamic.
Of course, I’ll know more after Saturday night’s session!
Requiem for a Douchebag
The Mages now have two bodies on their hands: both fellow Awakened. The ghost of this latest victim is somewhat drunk, and so is not likely to be of much help. They do know a little bit about him though.
Enigma had been an ill-respected member of the Mysterium. He was somewhat lazy and self centered, and really only landed in the Mysterium because he had been a professor at NYU. He had been with the english department until some scandal involving a student caused him to lose his job. If anyone in the Mysterium who knew him told you that they were surprised by this they would be lying. Enigma reeked trouble, which is why he never found a cabal to fit in with. He was universally distrusted. As a result he found no sympathy when the following story reached the Consillium’s ears.
Karen Myers, a student at NYU, was taking American Literature with Professor J Dowe (AKA: Enigma). She hadn’t been doing well in the class. Otherwise a straight A student, Karen set up an appointment to discuss her poor grades with her professor. Karen, in the habit of recording her classes with a digital voice recorder, recorded the meeting as well. It became clear to her during the course of the meeting that Professor Dowe had taken a liking to her and graded her harshly in an attempt to obtain favors from the young woman. The dean of the literature department and the president of the university agreed with Karen, and Professor Dowe was dismissed. Seeking to avoid bad press, the University arranged a settlement with Myers that included a full scholarship, and the re-evaluation of her coursework by the Dean of the English Department. Myers, only seeking to be treated fairly, agreed to not drag either the professor or the university (or herself for that matter) through the disgrace of a public trial. She was happy to have her tuition and board covered by the settlement, allowing her to graduate without facing years of student loan payments.
This gives the Mages a place to start. Perhaps there is something about the Myers case that will lead our friends to some link between Enigma and Matt, the animator who hadn’t even been a Mage long enough to have chosen a shadow name. Maybe there is something about NYU that will lead the Mages closer to this multiple murderer.
And heck, if not maybe Argus can find a date: Changeling Pick-Up Lines
Those Meddling… Puppets?
The first thing Aenaiyah spotted as she walked from work to the train platform was his feet sticking out from behind a car. As she got closer she realized that she recognized this man from the bar. He had been there quite a bit lately, usually the last one to leave. At first she thought that maybe he had simply passed out, but soon realized that he was well and truly dead. Not being overly fond of dealing with corpses, Aenaiyah decided to call on Riff-Raff. Both as a Moros Mage and a former NYPD Officer dead bodies were no problem for him. At first glance it did appear to be alcohol poisoning, but Riff-Raff did pick up spell resonance here so he cast Forensic Gaze to see what really happened.
What really happened was that someone had bashed this man’s face in with a heavy, blunt object. This is precisely what had really happened to a certain stop motion animator. If the puppets hadn’t tried to fix him…
Did I forget to tell you that part? I think I might have. You see the animator had tried to attune himself to his tools, in this case puppets, to bring about a harmonious accord that would help him in his work. He had believed this to be some new age meditation thing, but in truth it had been a spell that would rouse the innate spirit of an inanimate object causing it to become a Supernally Honed object. Normally this would only have caused the puppets to not show wear and tear as much, or maybe to hold position a little better while Matt was setting up takes. For whatever reason, this time the spell had done something more than that. Matt’s job involved animating the puppets, and so that’s what the spirits in the studio did. Fortunately for Matt (and everyone else at the studio) the studio spirits were by and large a fun loving group. They enjoyed having these nifty bodies to move around in, and they liked Matt. When they saw Matt get broken, they figured that somebody had to fix him. They tested out colors to match against his skin just like the puppet doctors did when they had to fix worn out puppets. They cut him open with a sculpting knife to fill him with more silicone, figuring that he had worked so hard that he had worn his out and that might be why he wasn’t standing up anymore. As hard as they tried, all they wound up with was a gruesome mess of a corpse that was found by a security guard, who called the police, who called a certain FBI Agent he knew who tended to wind up with the weird cases. Had the puppets not tried to fix Matt the security guard would have found a much tidier corpse, and the police would have written it off as a drug overdose even though Matt had no prior history with drugs. Whoever killed him saw to it that there had been plenty of evidence in him to trigger that conclusion. Whoever killed him knew exactly what they were doing, and they would have gotten away with it too… just like they had so many times before.
Mage Mistress 