Category Archives: MtAw
Ain’t No Rest for the GM
Chances are that I’m not the only one reading this who is currently recovering from a failed STAMINA+SURVIVAL check or two during the Thanksgiving festivities. Fortunately I blew some character creation points on the Iron Stomach and Toxin Resistance merits, which helped me to not only handle the pumpkin pie objective, but also to struggle my way through the tryptophan encounter.
Alas, neither merit will help me write something entertaining in the wake of yesterday’s events. (Apologies to the readers.)
Pretty soon I’ll be hitting the checkout button on a large portion of my Christmas shopping (no stores for me! :::shudder:::) and then settling down for a long winter’s nap… or at least a long weekend’s nap. It will be a well earned opportunity to recharge my brain as I ponder what evil things to do to my players next. As it happens I have some fairly big decisions coming up.
The Players’ Cabal is currently negotiating a prisoner exchange with a quite powerful Seer of the Throne. Complicating matters is the fact that Seers tend to let their Exarch make the big decisions for them. How important is this captive the players are holding to the Exarch’s plans? Sure, she’s important to the Seer they are negotiating with (she’s his granddaughter), but to the Exarch? Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. In the sight of The Eye she has already failed in her mission to ensure that Damien is brought into the fold. So when you come right down to it, how much is The Eye likely to approve of exchanging for her?
And then there is the rest of the Cabal’s “To Do” list. I have more than one player looking at various Legacies. I’d like to have that unfold naturally in the campaign, but so much of what they have been doing as of late has been secretive enough that it’s been difficult to have them be approached. Of course, certain players have been less secretive than others, and I have to decide what happens when someone places an object in the Holy Water at the Vatican and that seemingly simple coin sizzles the Holy Water right out of the font in a big steamy cloud. Surely no good can come of that. Fortunately no one brings cameras or cell phones into the Vatican. (#facepalm)
And what of the remaining coins? To date the players have one, and they suspect that they know who has another. Are more of these still floating around? (I’ll give you a hint: the answer isn’t ‘no’.)
There are, of course, other bad things going down simultaneously. New York is a big city. I would like for the players to take advantage of a little character down time in the near future, but they might wind up stumbling into some bad things during that down time. Hell, they may cause bad things to happen during that down time. Come to think of it, they may have already caused bad things to happen during that down time!
To quote a favorite web comic of mine… “Rejoice. For very bad things are about to happen.”
Giving Thanks
Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching. It’s hard to believe that next week I’ll be gorging myself on excessive amounts of turkey, sweet potatoes, stuffing, corn, banana bread, pie, and anything else at hand that happens to be delicious.
In the spirit of the season, there are a few things that I, as GM, feel the need to give thanks for:
Family: No, no, no… not MY family! I’m talking about the innocent and totally defenseless families of my player’s characters. There is a special kind of cheer that only knowing you have your Time Mage’s sister trapped in Arcadia can bring. If you’ve never felt that special feeling then take it from me, you’ve not truly lived. Family, when powerless and in the hands of the antagonists, makes my heart all happy.
Of course, I would be remiss if I did not also thank the player character family that is in fact the antagonists of the campaign. Watching the dawning realization break across the player’s face as he realizes that his character’s own family is on the other side… priceless. And then of course there are the cabal mates who now begin to wonder if they can trust this guy at all. OK, maybe that ship had already sailed, but now they trust him even less!
Thanks Family!
The Gift of Giving: It has been said that it is better to give than to receive. This is never more true than when you’re giving someone a cursed coin that they can use to free their sister from Arcadia if only they can figure out how it works. Knowing that this power is right there in her jacket pocket and that all she needs to do is wield it, and watching her not let herself do it no matter how torturous and tempting a thought it is, now that is the gift that keeps on giving.
No, really, don’t thank me. Thank You!
Home: For some, it’s where the heart is. For a certain cabal of Mages, it’s where the event horizon is. I mean was! Yeah… was… nothing to see here.
Home, I thank thee.
Friends: The Mage game just wouldn’t be the same without them! For one thing it would be a book, and the characters in it would do things that actually made some sort of sense, but I digress. The fact of the matter is that without the fantastic troupe of players I found through Long Island Role Players (see below!) this game, and this blog, would never have existed.
Thanks guys!! (No, really, I’m being sincere this time… don’t get used to it.)
Happy Thanksgiving!
Fudge: It’s Not Just for Brownies Anymore
Sometimes #RPGChat on Twitter inspires me to write about a particular topic on the blog. Last night’s chat was no exception.
To Fudge, or not To Fudge? That is the question.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to say “to hell with THAT!” and give the Big Bad extra hit points during a fight with the PCs?
There are those who will proclaim that it isn’t fair to fudge in the Big Bad’s favor. There are those will will say that it is breaking the rules. But really, what’s the better story here: “our group trounced the monster in the first round before it even got the chance to move”, or “it was an epic struggle, the battle waged on and on, and then I bit Cerberus’ balls off!”?
(Yes, this actually happened.)
You really need to consider carefully before you fudge. Sometimes the PCs do something that is just so incredibly epic that letting them kill that baddie so fast is just the right thing to do. For example, years ago when a friend of mine rolled a critical hit – decapitation instant death and killed a dragon in the opening shot of an encounter (a fight he was supposed to avoid mind you)… as a first level character… that was a pretty big moment and the GM absolutely let him have it. He should have had that moment. It’s a great story!
Other times the fight ending early is just anticlimactic. The first time we brought the Mages and Werewolves together to fight a big bad evil spirit we severely underestimated the amount of damage they could do. When we constructed the baddie we didn’t build a high enough defense for it because we wanted to make sure it was possible for them to hit it. They had ludicrous rolls with all kinds of roll-ups and it wound up totally spent before the end of the first round. Sure it happens to all guys every now and then, but does that mean they want to tell their friends all about it for years to come? Hells no! So my co-GM and I exchanged a quick glance, tripled its original hit points, and continued the fight. The players never even knew. (Well… they know now.) “Cerberus” (we never explicitly called it that, but the legend comes from somewhere!) got to try out a few nifty abilities, the PCs were battered around a bit, and yes… the fight ended when a Werewolf castrated him with his teeth. Two years later we still talk about it!
The fact of the matter is that those stats: the Defense, the Hit Points… they were just numbers we chose. Sure they were based on various other stats, but we made up those stats too! We could just as easily have made up higher numbers to begin with, and truth be told we almost did but wanted to make sure the PCs had a fighting chance. No matter how hard you try sometimes you get it wrong. Sometimes you need to adjust on the fly. What’s important is to remember that everyone is at the table to have fun, and in the case of RPGs (generally speaking) to tell a good story. If you err in the service of those two goals then chances are you’ll be forgiven if you get caught.
Just remember… next time you give that baddie more hit points! And better armor… and minions…
Morbid and Creepifyin’
With Halloween right around the corner it seems like the perfect time to talk about bringing some terror into your players’ lives. It’s only fair, since if your players are anything like mine they make you shudder with fear and loathing every time they show up for a session. You need some pay back, and I’m here to help.
The fact that my campaign takes place in the World of Darkness makes it somewhat obligatory to have an element of horror, but you don’t want the horror to become too “one note”. You can only hold suspense for so long before the players simply get used to it. Additionally, it can be difficult to sustain a feeling of dread when you have to pause and pick things up next session. That said, there is no reason to not add horrific elements into your long-term campaign.
My current chronicle started out as so many do: with a dead body. The scene was pretty gruesome. A stop-motion animator had been killed (Sorry Matt!), and his body had been vivisected and filled with modelling silicone. A careful examination of the body revealed that whoever filled the body’s cavity with silicone actually color matched it to the animator’s skin. There were small patches of silicone on a flap of skin at the wound site that were clearly a form of color palette.
This sounds like a job for Post-Cognition!
Since I am a particularly evil and twisted GM I was prepared for this. I pulled the Acanthus aside and asked her what she was looking for. I was prepared for any number of things she might want to see. How did the animator die? Why was he killed? Who was the last to see him alive? The event she asked to see happened to be the one I was hoping she would ask for: how did the silicone wind up in his chest? I thoroughly enjoyed describing to her in gruesome detail the small, stubby hands cutting him open with the sculpting knife, testing shades of silicone against his skin, and squeezing gob after gob of silicone all around his internal organs. She asked the natural question, “Small, you mean like a child’s hands?” Oh no… I mean very small hands… hands that don’t look quite real… in fact they kind of look like they might be made of silicone.
“We’re in a stop motion animation studio filled with puppets… aren’t we?” The GM smiles innocently in response. “And they’re being ridden by something… aren’t they?”
Puppets and modelling knives cover virtually every surface, except of course the ones covered with bottles of turpentine, cigarette lighters, and the tools you need to build small scale set pieces: duct tape, hammers, nails… caltrops anyone?
The fact of the matter is that the puppets didn’t kill the guy – they were just a red herring. Still, I had hoped that a rampage through the studio would commence. Of course I couldn’t count on my Guardian of the Fail to point out that keeping spirit ridden puppets around isn’t a good idea. Instead he’s totally fine with teaching them to tend bar in the sanctum’s basement. #facepalm
Then again, using the puppets to help clue the players in to the fact that something was decidedly wrong in their basement several sessions later was enjoyable, but I digress.
When they finally did get around to Post-Cognitioning how this poor guy actually did die it involved blunt force trauma to the head perpetrated by an invisible assailant, a very strong invisible assailant. They couldn’t tell at first because the assailant, clearly a Mage, had cast Corpse Mask to make it look as though this person had died of an overdose of some sort. The detail I gave of the actual killing was just enough to be creepy without taking away the player’s imagination as a factor completely. Always let the player come up with some of the detail in their own mind. What they come up with on their own will always be creepier to them than anything you make up for them! Instead of describing the damage itself, try describing the type of action that would have been necessary to cause “this kind of damage”. It gets them every time.
Afterward Aenaiyah found a dead guy in the parking lot of the bar where she works. Hello Post-Cognition old friend! Don’t worry Aenaiyah, I won’t make you see anything too gruesome…
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a science guy – a guy who does science. Your mission in life is to find out how and why the universe works, and you’re doing pretty well with that (you think) until you hit this stumbling block. There’s this point in your theories where something is wrong. There is some piece of vital information that you just dont have. There is one elusive key ingredient with which you could unlock the mysteries of everything if you only knew what it was. How irritating is that?
And then one day you wind up figuring out that the piece you were missing was the the Awakened Will… and now you have one! Good Morning Niels!
So now what? Sure, you’ve Awakened, and you have all this power… are you just going to throw away your quest for the answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything?
HELLS NO!
This is when you can really find things out. You’re gonna play with it! You’re gonna push the boundaries. Sure, the “Wise Mages” know that there are limits to the understanding of a young Mage that should limit what spells that Mage attempts… but as a scientist you understand more than the average newly Awakened rube! Why shouldn’t you try playing around with making ephemeral lab assistants and turning your lab space into a hallow? Paradox shmaradox. That never happens! Honestly, it’s probably just a scary story the elder Mages tell the younger Mages to keep them in line while taking bets as to how long it will take them to figure it out. Honestly, when was the last time you managed to invoke a paradox?
OK, there was that one time when Arrow claims a paradox he induced turned his toilet brush into a non-sentient and nondescript hotel maid while trying to disguise himself… but no one else was there and there aren’t any pictures so did it even really happen? And besides, if you can’t repeat the result by following the same steps then it’s scientifically insignificant anyway! He probably just miscast the spell.
And speaking of repeating the steps of an experiment to see if it can produce the same outcome, maybe it’s about time to try recreating that situation that happened in the basement a few weeks back. Yes, I know, Aenaiyah swears that it would have vaporized Manhattan in a billowing cloud of fiery death in 24 TO 48 HOURS (!!!) but who really believes her anyway? She’s just being excitable is all. That girl drinks way too much coffee… I mean tea… something with caffeine and sugar in it.
And I suppose that walking manifestation of Prime Magic that looked just like you was a bit unexpected, but it was also pretty cool wasn’t it? Can’t the world use another Niels? Sure it can!
Then of course there was the extra-nummy mana! All that double-strength super-potent glowy goodness flowed right into you every time you stepped foot in the lab. You have to admit that was pretty awesome. The speed of light may have been slightly altered by some aspect of the effect, true, but you can probably fix that problem if you have enough time to tweak the experiment. Just think of all that super-charged mana that could be yours! Eyes on the prize Niels!
And really, what better time than when your cabal mates are mucking around in Damien’s ex-Wife’s brain? It’s hardly as though they’re paying much attention to what Niels is doing at the moment, what with their being all preoccupied with astral constructs and stuff, and since your player has missed the last two sessions it really does feel like the right time for another breakthrough, doesn’t it?
Why, if you keep on experimenting Magekind could benefit in many ways… many of them good!
What could possibly go wrong?
Mage Mistress 