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NaNoWriMo FTW!!
As you can see at the bottom of the page I have posted a NaNoWriMo win! That means that I have written 50,000 words in one month on one coherent topic. I certainly can’t manage much coherence today having just finished that! After a month of solid writing and deadline meeting I have to admit that my brain is more than a little fried.
I am certainly not destined to be on the NY Times Best Seller list, as my writing here can attest. A large part of my NaNoWriMo participation involves giving myself an excuse to get in closer touch with the NPCs in my campaign. It gives me some pressure to develop plot-lines on a deadline beyond the next game session. I can ‘t guarantee what the player characters in my campaign will do, but I can get inside the heads of my NPCs, and if I’m lucky come up with some things that will make interesting one shot modules.
This year I believe I have somehow managed both.
It is likely that a full NaNowriMo novel will not appear on my blog, though I suppose it’s possible. Much more likely? Well, it’s more more likely that I will post excerpts, and that I will write some modules based upon them. One excerpt has already been posted at my author’s page at NaNoWriMo.com.
I introduced Hunters into this year’s NaNoWriMo, and that is no accident. I plan on running a Hunter module at I-Con 2012, and I haven’t figured out all the details yet. NaNoWriMo forces you to get into the heads of the characters, and do it NOW! You can’t keep putting it off. You have a deadline, and you’ll make it or you won’t. That’s what makes NaNoWriMo great! (Well, part of what makes it great.)
Please consider supporting NaNoWrimo by clicking on my link below. If you can’t donate (and believe me I understand that!) then consider participating next year! It’s a great excuse to indulge the muse.
For now, I will indulge in some well deserved sleep! I haven’t had much of that in the last few days. I’ve had a deadline to meet!
For next week I am planning the first piece in a chronological look at the campaign’s events. With a little luck, by the time I am caught up to now (the December 2011 session) it will be OK for me to reveal all of what has happened over the past 2+ years. It has been a wild ride! I have been chomping at the bit to do so, but I have hesitated on providing my players with spoilers. They are all great players, and completely capable of separating character knowledge from player knowledge, but surprises are part of the GM’s fun!!
Up next: A Critical Look at my Very First Session as a GM!
I Sleep Now
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…
Mage Mistress 