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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.
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?
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!
Mage Mistress 