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The Turnabout Intruders:
Having been removed from the house of the alleged book thief rather unceremoniously, the Mages decide to regroup at the edge of the grounds. Once Rex has finished telling Nokoni and Marissa about the Argus Follies and everyone has stopped having a good laugh at Argus’ expense, soon to be a recurring theme of the campaign, they formulate a less crazy plan to re-enter the estate under cover of darkness and steal the book from the person who stole it from them. After all, turnabout is fair play.
Queue: Mission Impossible Theme Music
The mission, should they choose to accept it:
- Crawl through the sewer drain uncovered by the Acanthus child, Marissa
- Break into the massive estate house
- Find and retrieve The Loquacious Grimoire
- Bring the book to the NY Public Library Mysterium Reliquary unharmed
- Get Marissa to bed before 9pm EST and head off to the pub for some much needed refreshment
The crawl through the sewer drain went far more smoothly than I had hoped. I blame Nokoni for abusing his powers as a Thyrsus Mage to clear the path of verminous critters. As they make it to the point where they can see the outlet onto the house grounds (way too many characters have the “Direction Sense” merit for me to even bother having them make rolls to make sure they are going the right way, damn them all) Argus goes invisible. Surprise, surprise!
But… attack dogs can still smell him! Hah-ha!
Damn Thyrsus Mage, Nokoni, “Triggers the Lizard Brain” and makes them all playful of course, so they really don’t care about the invisible guy trying to shoot his way through the enormous door lock with his sizeable handgun. You’ll note I said “trying”, not “succeeding”. It’s an important distinction.
Thanks to “Sound Mastery” no one could actually hear the gun shots, but his partners in attempted crime had no problem seeing the rather large holes being put in the wall near but not quite on target with the locking mechanism. It also prevents Argus from hearing his fellow Mages laughing at the FBI Agent’s inability to hit a stationary target. (The GM had no problems hearing them whatsoever.) This one is a job for the Moros Mage! Rex turns the deadbolt into paper so that it will fold and pull right out of the wall. A simple DEXTERITY+ATHLETICS roll later (to avoid ripping the deadbolt as they open the door making it impossible to cover the signs of their passage later – and only because they came up with the idea of opening the door carefully themselves) and they are in.
This leaves Rex saying “You’re up!” to Argus, who attempts to use the Locator spell to try to find a book that he has no sympathetic connection to. As you might imagine, this does not pan out. Neils uses Prime magic to attempt to find any spells that might be securing the book. Sadly, DeLacey does not have the ability to cast Ward spells and so there are no spells to find. Nokoni keeps the attack dogs happy and quiet so that they don’t wake anyone up. Marissa casts a Fate spell and wanders aimlessly to see if she can happen to stumble upon the room the book is in (stupid Acanthus Mages!), while the GM makes WITS+COMP rolls for the book thief and his staff to see if anyone happens to notice that a group of Mages has broken into the building and is wandering about aimlessly.
Naturally everyone at the DeLacey estate who belongs there happens to be having the best dreams they have ever had in their lives and not a single one of them hears a thing. #grumble
Marissa leads the group right past all of the rooms filled with dangerous people and things and right to the room with the book in it. One more paper deadbolt and a quick Post Cognition, to see where DeLacey put the book when he was done with it, and the group is heading stealthily (enough) out of the door to avoid disturbing the dancing sugar plums in the heads of their adversaries. Then it’s back to the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and from there the portal is reopened and they are back in New York where it just so happens to be Miller Time.
It’s only the end of the second session and already I hate these guys!
Expert Reconnaissance:
Armed with the identity of our book thief, and the possibility of an international incident, our Mages are off to the Delacey estate in hopes of retrieving the stolen grimoire.
Their first step is to case the estate. The Thyrsus Mage consults with some spirits in the area to find that there is not much going on here that has been of any particular interest to them. Every once in a while a delivery van will come and go, or an employee will arrive or leave, and that’s about it. DeLacey himself appears to be a recluse, at the very least he hasn’t been seen leaving the grounds in some time.
The estate is modeled after the Chateau de Chenonceau. As you can see in the picture, the building is only approachable by the stone bridge that connects it from its location in the River Cher to the mainland. There is a guard house on the bridge, and the Player Characters can hear dogs barking on the grounds.
With step one accomplished, they now need some pretense under which to enter the grounds and search for the book. After a few minutes of deliberation (and a quick phone call to their home Consilium) the Mages decide on a cover story involving a rare acquisition at the NY Public Library that DeLacey might be interested in sponsoring. They would love to talk to him about it. As GM, and realizing that I am dealing with a Mage here, I did take the precaution of making it difficult for the players to simply bluster their way through. Sadly they realized that with their connection to the NY Public Library (it is their home base) they could come up with a reason why he might actually want to listen to them. And since they did well with their MANIPULATION + PERSUASION rolls he decided to let them in for an appointment the next day.
Upon meeting DeLacey the first thing that our intrepid Player Characters confirm is that he is a Mage. Whatever his abilities are, they do not seem to involve masking his aura. He is clearly from money, and while willing to discuss topics that he finds interesting, his interest in the Player Characters is limited at best. Our Guardian of the Veil decides to do most of the talking, with two Free Councillors (Neils and Rex) following his lead. As Argus does his best to be distracting (and he does quite well babbling about antique books), his cohorts run various covert magical scans of the area to see if they can locate the book. While they are having a problem pinpointing its exact location, they do sense that it is somewhere in the building.
Our Thyrsus Adamantine Arrow is keeping an eye on the Acanthus child outside. His cover is that he is painting the beautiful estate, and his daughter is with him playing in the grass. He stays at a safe distance, while magically scanning for dangers of the animal or plant persuasion. Aside from the pack of guard dogs things seem relatively safe. Marissa stumbles across a storm drain that might be useful to circumvent the guard post on the bridge if the need arises.
It is at this point inside the estate that our Guardian of the Veil comes up with a bold and cunning plan. He decides that he is going to try to get a piece of hair from Mr DeLacey that he can use to scry on the man after they leave in the hopes of seeing him reading the grimoire. This is not a bad plan. The execution of this plan however leaves a lot to be desired.
Argus starts off with an unsuccessful WITS + INVESTIGATION roll to see if he notices any stray hairs on DeLacey’s shoulder that he can perhaps stealthily remove. A botch result prevents him from finding one. He then decides that it would be brilliant to try to snag a piece of DeLacey’s hair in his watch-band by stumbling into him as they walk and talk.
I imagine you can easily come up with the three letters that were my reaction to this plan, but I’ll give you a hint anyway: they didn’t stand for “Werewolf The Forsaken” when they popped into my head at that moment in time.
So first he has to stumble into DeLacey, he then has to make it appear to be a casual mis-step, and on top of this he needs to snag a piece of the man’s hair in his watch band. This will call for some skill rolls.
- DEX + BRAWL: To execute the stumble maneuver and hit his intended target
- DEX + STEALTH: To execute the maneuver in such a way that it appears to be an accident
- DEX + LARCENY: To manage to snag a strand of hair in the midst of stumbling in such a way that it appears to be an accident.
As it happens, Argus is pretty dextrous, so in theory this shouldn’t be so bad.
He makes the Brawl roll first, and manages to direct his stumble into DeLacey. Next up is the Stealth roll, and he botches it beautifully. Despite this botch he goes for the Larceny roll anyway to see if he can at least get the hair off of the man’s head. Sadly, he rolls a multi-botch.
Now, technically in the World of Darkness you can only get a dramatic failure on a chance die. I am of the opinion that this is a steaming load of crap. The more you know about a thing, the more assured you are that you will pull it off without a hitch, the greater your possible failure can be. The chance of failing in this epic manner is reduced by your skill (represented in game terms by the fact that the more dice you have in your pool the greater the chance that at least one of them will have a success on it), but if you have that much skill and still manage to not just fail but actually botch – well, you have the skill to know exactly what the worst possibly thing you could do is and clearly you did it anyway. My players and I are on the same page here. As a result Argus stumbled into DeLacey on target, but instead of merely bumping into him he caught his foot on the edge of a throw rug and really hit him, knocking them both sprawling to the ground.
Making matters worse: while he did manage to snag his watch band into DeLacey’s hair, DeLacey’s hair was actually an expensive toupee which is now attached to Argus’ watch and dangling from Argus’ wrist.
As you might imagine, it is at this moment that the Mages were escorted off of the property.
In the immortal words of Rex the Moros Free Councillor: Smooth.
Now Wilt Thou Quest for the Book?
I’m generally not a fan of making the players decide to do any particular thing. Sadly, when you’re at the start of a campaign you have few other options. Over the course of time the characters start to have agendas of their own, but in the second session, with new players joining the table that session (and more new players to come in session three) that kind of thing just hasn’t had time to happen yet.
As a result the players quickly came to the realization that if any of them decided that they just didn’t feel like helping Meijis, Mysterium Librarian and Steward of the New York Public Library based reliquary/sanctum, retrieve this grimoire it was going to be a very short session.
And that very short session would likely end with Narsil, our NPC Guardian of the Veil, making people’s heads explode when he saw the results of leaving an unattended Awakened child in his office. This would have also resulted in it being a very short campaign.
And so our player characters are off to France!
In his pre-Awakened life Argus Guille was an FBI agent, currently on a leave of absence, and so he knows how to conduct an investigation. Let’s go to the video tape! I know… I know… it hardly seems likely that a French Consilium Reliquary would make use of anything as mundane as security cameras, but with as many successes as he rolled I pretty much had to give it to him that they did. There are spells that enable Mages to transfer things that they have witnessed to transferable media (Flash Drives… DVD’s… video tape…) so I suppose that some French Mages took care of that after some careful Post-Cognitive work (none of the players at the session were capable of casting that spell) while our guys were en route. Since he did have a great many successes on his roll (more successes than he had dice in his dice pool if memory serves correctly) I allowed for a few different things:
- There was indeed a recorded record of the book being stolen.
- Someone else had previously viewed the tape and queued it to the point where the book was removed from the shelf saving him some time in the viewing room.
- He was observant enough to realize that the books on the shelf had been fairly tightly packed, and that one of the books moved slightly “all on its own” before the grimoire in question floated off of the shelf and out of sight rather ungracefully.
In fact, I even pointed out that it almost looked as if someone had cast an invisibility spell and then taken the book while they were invisible!
It seems that Player Characters aren’t the only ones with access to that spell, eh Argus?
While Argus is going over the tape, his fellow Mages are trying to come up with a list of potential suspects independently. They figure that if they come up with different lists using different methods, then the names that are on both lists are the short-lists. It isn’t a bad plan at all. Our Fate Mage, the 9 year old Marissa, is wandering aimlessly about and stumbles upon a list of known french bibliophiles thanks to the successful application of a Fate spell. Our Prime Mage, Free Councilor Neils, is looking for evidence of portals or teleportation magic. The Morose Mage, Rex, is carefully examining the walls to see if it’s possible a door was created using plasticity, or some transmutative spell. If spells were used to enter the area then there will be resonance left behind that can be carefully scrutinized to help pinpoint the thief. Adamantine Arrow Mage Nokoni is looking into possible ways for the thief to have entered and exited the premises that do not involve the use of portals, teleportation spells, or alteration of matter, in case Neils and Rex find no evidence of those things – which as a matter of fact they don’t since the French Mysterium carefully warded their library! It seems as though the most likely case scenario here is that either our thief is someone whose presence would not be questioned who became invisible only to sneak the book out after arriving normally, or the thief was smart enough to sneak in invisibly behind someone else who had access.
Meanwhile, Argus rolls about 8 million more successes to lift fingerprints off of the book that was pushed aside on the shelf because, apparently, our thief is not a very good thief and didn’t consider the possibility that simply because he was invisible that didn’t mean he wouldn’t leave fingerprints behind.* The fingerprints point to a man named Jean-Claude DeLacey. His name also appears on the short-list of people who might have an interest in the grimoire that our young Acanthus stumbled across. You see, this particular grimoire dates back to the days of the French Revolution, and DeLacey is a scholar of the period. DeLacey is also fabulously wealthy, and well known to be a lover of antique books in general (though the revolutionary period is his specialty), and a wealthy patron of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France – home of the French Mysterium Library. If this isn’t handled discreetly the Mages could wind up with an international incident on their hands!
Good thing the American Consilium sent their best and brightest! </sarcasm>
*GM Note: I had actually pre-decided that an exceptional success would result in this very thing happening. Our book thief really was never intended to be very good at thievery. It is way too menial for a man of his means! A simple investigative success would have resulted in a partial print that would have narrowed the list of suspects, no successes would have resulted in blurred prints, and on a botch the only prints on the book belong to Argus who would have forgotten to put on gloves before picking up the book to fingerprint it.
What Child Is This?
Shortly before the second session of the campaign I was tossed a curve ball. Two people I had never met before signed up for my game, and I would be seeing their character sheets for the first time at the game table. Mage is a complicated game, to put it mildly, and as a still newbie GM (having only GMed once before – the first campaign session) I can’t pretend I wasn’t a bit unnerved. One of my promised regular players who had been unable to attend the first session was going to make it this time. This gave me the following cast of characters for the session:
Argus: Guardian of the Veil – Obrimos
Neils: Free Council – Obrimos
Marissa: Apostate – Acanthus
Nokoni: Adamantine Arrow – Thyrsus
Rex: Free Council – Moros
The session opens with Argus and Neils called into Narsil’s office to figure out what to do with the child they rescued during the first session. Narsil is a quietly menacing kind of Guardian who helps to herd the freshly Awakened and try make sure they don’t unleash massive Paradoxes or put on grand displays of Magery for the average Sleeper on the street. The first image that came into my mind when I needed an NPC to send the players on missions was the scenes of Aragorn at the Prancing Pony telling Frodo he needs to not do things like put The Ring on in the middle of a crowded bar. As a result the character absolutely has that Viggo Mortensen “Fellowship of the Ring” kind of thing going on with the long dark hair, blue eyes, and you really hope he’s on your side because he means business for whichever side he is on.
Anyway, Narsil has figured out that it is safe to wake the child up, and he’s whittled things down to a simple dispellation to do it. Since the younger Mages found her, and since it’s a good learning opportunity, and let’s face it – since they are the player characters, Argus and Neils get invited to Narsil’s office to be there when he wakes the girl up. Argus arrives at Narsil’s office first, mostly because Neils’ player was a little late that day.
When the girl wakes up she is disoriented to say the least. Everything is strange to her, and she doesn’t know where her parents are. The last thing she remembers is being lost at an amusement pier for days and days and days… she’s very confused, and speaks of a “magic man” who likes to play spell games with her. She tells the others that her name is Marissa, and it just so happens that Marissa is a very young Acanthus Mage.
Or is she?
Meanwhile, an altercation is taking place in the main area of the Mysterium Library. Someone has given Meijis, the head librarian and steward of the library, some very upsetting news. The normally mild mannered librarian is looking about ready to give a serious ass kicking to a French Mage who has entered the room through a portal direct from a Mysterium library in France.
(GM Note: The Portal in question is a pretty complicated affair. It is actually two Portals that meet somewhere deep under the ocean, one leading directly into the other.The two Mages had to coordinate to open them simultaneously while on different continents. It is constructed this way for two reasons: on the one hand it prevents anyone from reopening the Portal later on without winding up taking a swim, and on the other hand this manner of construction means that neither side had to breach the other side’s protective wards with a spell. It’s the kind of detail that I didn’t have reason to go into at the game table – but that’s what blogs are for!)
Nokoni and Rex, my two unexpected additions to the group, happen to be in the library for reasons of their own when things get ugly. Neils is running into the library and into Narsil’s office just as the French Man is stepping through the Portal with an obvious lack of a certain package under his arm. Neils reaches Narsil’s office and opens the door when the screaming starts. (See how cleverly I work in the fact that my player was late to the table? Yeah, I’m awesome like that.)
Naturally, Narsil runs outside to see what in hell is going on to get Meijis (think Winifred Burkle when she first joined the team on “Angel“) angry enough to yell like that. He asks Argus to mind the child as he dashes past, who naturally passes the buck to Neils, who (being an absent minded professor) tells the child not to cause any trouble and leaves her alone in Narsil’s office. Her player promptly informs me that she has wheeled Narsil’s chair over to a book case and has used it like a step stool to pull his books off of the highest shelves she can reach and use them like blocks on the floor. She alternates this with spinning in his chair until she is dizzy. (As you might imagine, he is not amused when he gets back to his office later.) As she tires of this she wanders out to join the others – because when do children ever do what they are told?
In the main room the players are discovering that the French Mysterium Librarian was supposed to be bringing a very special book with him. The Loquacious Grimoire (See: White Wolf’s “Grimoire of Grimoires“) has chosen its next reader, and it has chosen Meijis. She has been hoping for a chance to be a reader for some years, and is more than a little upset to hear this story about the book having been allegedly stolen from the French Reliquary. People have tried to hold on to the book after it has chosen a reader before, and she has some concerns that this may be another of those times.
Who will be stupid… err cowardly… I mean selfless and honorable enough to step through the Portal to France to find out what really happened?
I’ll give you five guesses.
It was either go to France or still be in New York when Narsil sees the mess in his office.
They chose… wisely.
In The Beginning:
I had been playing Role Playing Games for more years than I’d like to admit to, and I had at times played antagonist NPCs. It is not nearly the same thing as GMing your first game though.
My first session as a GM was the first session of the Mage campaign, back in May 2009. There were issues from the start. For one thing, the game formed at my friendly local game store Ravenblood Games. Ravenblood is hands down the best place to play games ever, but the challenge was running for a public group. Because this was to be an ongoing campaign people signed up if they were interested in staying in the campaign for the long haul, not as a group of one shots with different players each week. Some of the people I had gamed with before, some I hadn’t. Unfortunately, due to a scheduling conflict, some of the people who signed up couldn’t make it to the first session, which gave me a smaller and more manageable group to start with than the one I wound up with. At least there was that!
So, at the start of the session I had two people who would become Mage campaign regulars at my table, and one person who intended to play a Werewolf, and ultimately wound up taking over as GM for that group. Argus, an Obrimos Guardian of the Veil, and Niels, an Obrimos Free Councillor, were my regulars. Macabre, a Moros Free Council Mage, was being played by the future Werewolf GM.
My idea was fairly simple and straightforward. The Consilium has noticed that a Ley Line is being corrupted. They want it investigated, but quite frankly New York City is a big place and they have more urgent matters to deal with. As a result, they have called on a few Mages who have been deemed reasonably trustworthy (and not irreplaceable) to investigate. The Ley Line lead them to a house that was so nondescript that it could only be deliberately so, and they did some poking around. I had intended that they decide to stand a watch outside of the house, hoping that when they decided to enter it the cabal of Mages using it would be in the midst of their ritual and have all of their protective wards up. It would be a big, flashy battle and ultimately at very least the leader of the cabal would escape by teleporting away.
Naturally, my players decided to break in right away. A little invisibility, and boom I can pick the lock with no one seeing me. Stupid Mages!
I did hit them with a problem once they got inside though. The Mages using the house had bricked over the way to get into the basement. As high powered Mages they didn’t need it. Clearly, this meant that the basement was where all of the action was happening. Now, how do the players get down there? They are new Mages and don’t have fun spells like create portal, teleport, or plasticity just yet. Various ideas were discussed. These ideas included:
- Creating a workforce of zombified rats from the New York City subway system. After all, we all know that NYC Subway Rats are a special breed, and they should be able to dig through the distance between the nearest subway tunnel and the wall of the basement.
The Guardian of the Veil stepped in and said absolutely not. (Good on you, Argus!)
- Calling upon the Consilium to see if they can help.
This seems like a good idea on the surface, but the Consilium sent the players here for a reason: they simply don’t have time to deal with something this trivial and that’s why they sent the PCs. They are supposed to find out what’s going on, not call in to ask the Consilium to do that for them.
- Using the Atlantean Backhoe that the Moros Mage had written on his character sheet under “Merit: Artifact” to tunnel into the basement.
The GM did not approve this artifact, and that player was summarily thwapped upside the head.
Eventually the resident science guy, Niels, decided to use his Mage sight to see if he could detect any existing shortcuts to and from the basement. After all, Mages have all kinds of abilities that tend to support laziness, and so it might be a good idea to have something that triggers a portal into the basement on your second floor so you don’t have to keep bothering to cast the spell. Sure enough he found a full length mirror that did exactly that, and they went downstairs to investigate.
As GM I figured they would take some notes on what they found, maybe pick up an item or two to bring to an Acanthus Mage (the “regular” Acanthus Mage was away that weekend and couldn’t make it to the session) to see what was probably going on down there. That would seem to make sense.
The players decide to camp out down there, invisible (too many Forces Mages dammit!), and wait to see if anyone shows up. So much for my glorious battle!
While they are waiting the Moros Mage decides to zombify the corpses of any rats that might happen to be near by and I have to come up with rules for that on the fly because the average Moros Mage zombifies people, not rats, and I didn’t have any rules for that handy. We figure something out and he gets a bunch of rats, which makes him all happy.
Eventually the Mages who are using the place do wind up portaling into the basement. They portal in because one of them is carrying a young child who is to play a key role in the ritual they are about to perform. First the security guard of the group comes through to make sure everything is clear, but the dimwit carrying the child botches his timing role and comes through too quickly after him. As he is coming through my Guardian of the Veil, who is invisible, blows the head off of the first Mage through the portal.
Having the brains of his cabal mate sprayed all over his face scares the second Mage coming through more than a little, as it might be expected to do, and he winds up dropping the child and heading back through the portal.
It is at this point that the Moros Mage decides to order the zombie rats to go after him through the portal, and then return. Sadly the portal snaps shut as they leap through after the Mage that is running away. Clearly someone on the other side of that portal heard the gunshot, saw the brain-splattered coward leap back, and decided that closing that portal might be a good idea.
The Player Mages try using the rats as an anchor to scry on the location of the antagonist Mages, but this only leads to a severe headache and a confusing image of a rickety building overlapped with a shopping mall.
Upon returning to the ground floor the players discover something near the kitchen door. Just inside of the dog flap is what appears to be an old flyer, being held by a nearly destroyed skeletal rat. The flyer is for a new tourist attraction in Long Branch, New Jersey: “The Haunted Mansion”. It clearly dates back to the 1970’s.
The players have some mysteries on their hands now. Who are these Mages who are powerful enough to portal through Time? And more immediately, what are we going to do with the sleeping little girl they left behind?
Mage Mistress 