Category Archives: WoD
What will they think of next?
A time honored dilemma of GMs everywhere is trying to figure out what those annoying PCs are going to do next session so that you can plan adequately for it. I generally try to only plan for the various pieces of information that will be available for them to find without worrying too much about how they will find that information. This method frees me up a bit in session by allowing me to adjust to their ever changing assortment of crazy schemes.
For example, recently my players ended a session on the decision to storm the antagonist’s headquarters. I won’t lie to you, this was a bad plan. It did have the charm of being a plan I was ready for them to execute however. (I do so love the word “execute”!)
Instead they decided to kidnap one particular antagonist in the middle of Central Park. It being Central Park, no bystanders reacted to this event. (It helped that they had a Fate Mage to help steer people away from the area.) This I was completely unprepared for. So was the antagonist in question, who promptly botched her sense motive roll (WITS+EMPATHY) and convinced herself that they were ready to talk. (See: The Hits Just Keep On Coming) Now I have to start my session with the players holding an NPC in the Consilium prison. This causes much more work behind the scenes than the players realize (grumble grumble grumble), and leaves me wondering what their next move is.
Interrogating the prisoner would seem to be an obvious next step… but not necessarily to these guys. After all, the last time they captured an antagonist alive they wound up finding out that he had let loose a Goetic Demon in a park in upstate NY and they never did get around to asking him where in this many acre park he might have left it. That would have made way too much sense! Instead they decided to go to this park and just wander around until they stumbled across it with no idea what its bans might be. Sadly, I had planned on them interrogating the antagonist, finding out some interesting things about him and his goals (and the origins of one of the other PCs who had no memory of her past), and then going off to take care of the Goetic Demon. Instead I had to improvise and ask them precisely how a group of 6 people without a single Resource Dot between them intended to get to upstate NY and hilarity ensued. (You’ll have to remind me to post that tale here at some point… it was more than a little hysterical.)
So interrogation… not necessarily. They may decide to actually SPEAK with the prisoner, but since all she wanted to do was talk to them in the first place (and look how that wound up) this seems highly unlikely. I do have one player (a Moros Mage) advocating to kill her and interrogate her ghost… which does sort of qualify as an interrogation and could get interesting on many levels.
Another interesting option has been proposed by her Mastigos ex-husband who is contemplating taking a stroll through her Oneiros. (For the non-Mage players that would be her personal dream space – her unconscious mind) This is an extremely interesting idea that I actually like a lot, and I’m hoping to get a bead on what areas of her Oneiros he’ll be specifically looking for so I can make them suitably awesome. (Damien – I’m looking at you.) I actually have a solid back story for this character already since she is a a PCs ex-wife which makes her a pretty important character.
You never can tell what my Obrimos Guardian of the Veil will do (for the record, I totally blame my power outages this week on Argus!), and my Thyrsus Silver Ladder is convinced that the missing kid-sister of Aenaiyah the Acanthus is being held in a little town in upstate NY named Arcadia. (Don’t think I haven’t thought about how hilarious it would be should he be right!) Neils won’t be there this time around, which means I will have to come up with some awful reason why his character isn’t there. (Mua-Haa-Haaa!) My remaining Moros Mage (an Adamantine Arrow) worries me in that I have not heard him weigh in on what they should do with her just yet. This can only lead to madness.
And then of course there’s a little something that my favorite Time Mage has which could yield some interesting results. I had only considered the implications of this as I was leaving the house for the last session, and I came up with the most wonderful possible result before I reached the game store. It really would be fun on many levels – for the whole family!
No matter what happens, it should prove to be an extremely interesting session!
Player Priorities
One of the trickier things to deal with when running a long term campaign is player absences. It’s bound to happen from time to time when a campaign stretches out over a couple of years, and when it does it leaves you stuck figuring out what to do with that player’s character during the session they missed.
Many GMs would say that this is the perfect time to put that character in mortal danger. This approach does have the advantages of:
- Being fun
- Making an example of this player to others who would dare miss your glorious session
- Being really fun!
- Deterring this person of questionable priorities from ever missing another session
- Did I mention that it’s fun yet?
The Hits Just Keep On Coming
It took some doing, but I did finally manage to put together a mostly coherent timeline based upon all that horrible brain busting stuff I posted last week.
Here’s where we stand:
The PCs (AKA: “The Good Guys”) lured a Seer of the Throne to Central Park with claims of wanting to talk with her. She specifically asked if she was to show up alone, and when Damien (“Good Guy”) said “No, you can bring someone else” she dropped her guard a bit and brought someone.
The PCs (“Good Guys”) shoved her through a portal and started beating on her as she tried to escape.
~~~~~REDACTED: To Prevent Sanity Loss~~~~~
The PCs (“Good Guys”) continued to beat on The Seer while she couldn’t get away.
The Seer (Evil Doer) healed herself in the hopes of escaping when the spells that held her in place wore off, if she lived that long. She was kind enough to warn Aenaiyah that if she dies it will be harder to get to Betsy.
Rex (“Good Guy”) said that it wouldn’t be a problem because they would simply interrogate her ghost – so no one should hold back and they should just kill her. He uses plasticity to mold a chunk of concrete over the portal so that Seer +1 can’t use the portal to get into the room with them.
Arrow (Good Guy – note the lack of quotation marks) suggests that killing her isn’t a very nice thing to do, and maybe they really should hear her out since it isn’t like she has attacked them yet! (I feel compelled to note here that Arrow has, if not the lowest Wisdom in the group, the second lowest. I may have to fix that!)
The Seer’s +1 turns the air around everyone in the room into chloroform, which would knock everyone out without lasting ill effect. Sadly, everyone makes their stamina roll and has one more round to act as the gas begins to work. (They were in a big room.) Some take this round to continue beating on a woman who is about to be knocked out by chloroform anyway. Rex (the matter Mage) spontaneously creates respirators to prevent his Cabal from being affected by the gas.
Seer +1 drops the chloroform, clearly it won’t be helpful at this juncture, and turns a chunk of concrete into a massive swarm of wasps. (Wasps can sting more than once, and they provide good cover for his fellow Seer to escape.)
Arrow becomes the Wasp Queen and holds the wasps at bay. His Cabal-Mates take advantage of this opportunity to continue beating on the Seer who has not attacked them even once until she slips into a coma.
The Seer lies dying in a pool of her own blood.
Seer +1, frustrated at this point, finally lashes out and casts “rotting flesh” on Aenaiyah sympathetically and comes close to killing her. Somehow she manages to live long enough for Argus (“Good Guy”) to wipe all the sympathetic connections Seer +1 has to the room, making it impossible for him to breach the ward. #pout
Fortunately for the Seer, Arrow stabilizes her so that they can, you know… talk to her about what she knows regarding the whereabouts of Aenaiyah’s sister. (He does this after he gets the wasps to leave the room of course.) It seems as though they have decided to forcibly invade her mind instead.
And remember… these are the good guys!
Time Keeps on Slippin’
Tomorrow I am faced with the unenviable task of figuring out precisely what actually happened during last month’s Mage session. If you’re wondering why that’s so difficult (after all, I was there), then you don’t realize that last month’s session involved dueling Time Mages.
My brain hurts just remembering that there was a session last month.
Then there is the communication spirit standing around the cabal’s Silver Ladder Mage, Arrow, with a sign telling him that there is a problem with their phones that they noticed just after the poor innocent young woman that they were trying to kidnap managed to punt herself backwards in time long enough to escape from their kidnapping attempt. Except of course that she didn’t manage to punt herself backward in time because a certain purple haired troublemaker (AENAIYAH!) punted herself backward in time to erect a time lock to prevent the punting from ever happening.
Just before all of these actions that didn’t happen Aenaiyah was kidnapped in retaliation for the kidnapping attempt that her friends had just initiated… but that didn’t happen either because – you guessed it – she pushed herself back in time a few seconds to give herself a chance to escape the fact that the air around her head had just been turned into chloroform…wait… was about to be turned into chloroform… by entering the portal to where her friends had been beating on a poor defenseless Acanthus Mage who had just punted herself backward in time before Aenaiyah arrived.
Which didn’t happen because when she arrived and discovered what happened… almost… because it didn’t happen… but when she first got there it really had in fact just happened… sort of…gah!… she went backward in time to prevent it.
Fortunately for her (and for what’s left of my sanity) she left a message with someone who has an Acanthus friend and knows better than to ask certain questions to remind her to cast a Time Locking spell when she stops by later as part of the kidnapping attempt preparations… just because it’s a good idea and she might forget later.
My decades of Doctor Who fandom served my well last month. The fact that “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” is permanently etched into my semblance of a brain certainly didn’t hurt either. (remember a trash can!)
Large doses of alcohol would really come in handy tomorrow – so I’m expecting donations from my players. Hopefully they know what’s good for their characters.
It is a fleeting hope.
Keeping it Real
Life is stranger than fiction. Pretty much anything you can think of, someone out there has tried to do. Scary thought, isn’t it? That very fear makes life excellent RPG session fodder!
Even as I type this I’m watching Ancient Aliens. I know what you’re thinking. Ancient Aliens isn’t exactly chock full of gritty realism – but it is an attempt to explain some pretty strange real world stuff. Could the Carnac Stones have been arranged by space travelers visiting our planet in a long forgotten past? Maybe. Or maybe it was actually Ancient Mages. Maybe Carnac holds some clues to the location of Atlantis, and the nature of the Fall! Atlantis itself gets screen time on the series also, as well it should!
And if you’re looking to build an ancient civilization (Awakened or otherwise), you owe it to yourself to watch Engineering an Empire. Then let your players try to tell you what features should or shouldn’t be in your city! (Bonus: the more you know about the architecture, the easier it is to lay sneaky traps!)
Programs like History’s Mysteries provide wonderful background for modern day stories. My own campaign’s story involves the truth behind the secretive project MK-Ultra, and what hopes (and fears) LSD brought to Awakened societies.
Of course your game world is your own creation, and as GM it’s up to you to decide how to adapt reality to your setting. Remember, any shows you’ve seen or books you’ve read, your players can find them too. If you take things too precisely from the research you may find that your players can guess where the game is headed a little too easily. The research is a starting place, and the truth for your game world need not exactly mirror the real world. You don’t have to stick strictly to reality, but taking a real world situation and tweaking it just a bit can bring a very real sense of dangerous urgency to your campaign.
Mage Mistress 