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Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad
One of my favorite parts of GMing at RetCon is not having to deal with having a bunch of insane, over-powered monsters at my table. I go into the convention assured that my players will indeed be insane, but at least for two out of three sessions they won’t be able to stop time, summon supernal demons, and change the laws of physics. For two out of three sessions I will be torturing mere mortal humans. It is exhilarating!
I enjoy running Mage, truly I do, but after a while it becomes difficult to find ways to challenge characters that can do pretty much anything. RetCon gives me a chance to scale back a bit. I don’t need a house filled with hundreds of zombies, and a variety of traps, and an over-powered Mage with a ridiculous familiar… a dozen or so zombies and a crazy guy trying to raise a loved one from the dead will suit my needs nicely when the protagonists are a TV Crew.
I also like setting up pre-generated characters for the story. I wouldn’t want to hand out pre-gens for a long-term campaign because I’d rather give the players in a campaign more freedom about the type of character they want to play. This often taxes my brain trying to figure out why the characters are working together. (If they are… sometimes they just try to kill each other randomly which is always fine by me!) It also vexes me when players have things in their back stories that are difficult to reconcile with the reality of the campaign world. For a convention one-shot I build the protagonists to the story that will unfold at the table. I can balance them so that each of the players has something important to do. I can give them motivations to make sure that they stay reasonably on track if they are actually trying to play the characters as written, though I must admit that it doesn’t always work out that way. For example, my previously mentioned TV Crew adventure was run twice. The first time I ran it the players saved each other from near death and walked away with some great footage! The second time around… well the character that had the keys to the van survived. The camera with what little footage they actually got… yeah not so much. Probably a good thing too, since most of that footage was of the camera person and the lighting guy trying to kill the on-screen talent for no reason whatsoever. (Somebody call TMZ!)
Of course, the third session will be Mage. I kind of feel obligated to run it, I am the Mage Mistress after all, so it’s a good thing I know how to have fun with it. I might decide to use a setting that I put my regular group through with a few tweaks to see how the convention crowd fares against my “regular” troupe. Or I may write something entirely new and different. I haven’t completely decided yet. I should probably do that soon because RetCon is less than a month away!
And be warned, pre-registration for RetCon will be closing at the end of the month. Which is to say that your last day to pre-register and save 25% is this coming Tuesday! So what are you waiting for? Run… go… now… get to the preregistration site! http://www.theretcon.com/register.htm
Shameless Self Promotion
If you’re reading this blog, then chances are you like gaming. Do you know what’s better than a reading a gaming blog? I know, there isn’t much in life that’s better than reading MY gaming blog, but playing some games at RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention is… especially if they are games written and run by me. (Games written and run by my good friend Aenaiyah over at Adventurer Misadventures are likewise sure to induce sanity loss.)
Right there at the top of your screen you’ll see some links to my previous RetCon modules: “Asylum”, “The Naos of Serapis”, and “Your Safety Is Our #1 Concern”. This year I’ll be debuting three entirely brand new adventures for “Mage: The Awakening”, “Hunter: the Vigil”, and “World of Darkness: Innocents”. Stay tuned to this page for module teasers!
Registration for RetCon 2012 is currently open, and you can save a sweet 25% if you register online before the end of this month. That’s money you can be spending on dice, T-Shirts, and a vast array of cool stuff in the dealer room! You know you want cool stuff, so come join us at RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention this August. Meet some people, play some games, buy some stuff, fun will be had – THIS I COMMAND!
I’ll kill your character, I mean see you (yeah, that’s it) there!
Requiem for a Douchebag
The Mages now have two bodies on their hands: both fellow Awakened. The ghost of this latest victim is somewhat drunk, and so is not likely to be of much help. They do know a little bit about him though.
Enigma had been an ill-respected member of the Mysterium. He was somewhat lazy and self centered, and really only landed in the Mysterium because he had been a professor at NYU. He had been with the english department until some scandal involving a student caused him to lose his job. If anyone in the Mysterium who knew him told you that they were surprised by this they would be lying. Enigma reeked trouble, which is why he never found a cabal to fit in with. He was universally distrusted. As a result he found no sympathy when the following story reached the Consillium’s ears.
Karen Myers, a student at NYU, was taking American Literature with Professor J Dowe (AKA: Enigma). She hadn’t been doing well in the class. Otherwise a straight A student, Karen set up an appointment to discuss her poor grades with her professor. Karen, in the habit of recording her classes with a digital voice recorder, recorded the meeting as well. It became clear to her during the course of the meeting that Professor Dowe had taken a liking to her and graded her harshly in an attempt to obtain favors from the young woman. The dean of the literature department and the president of the university agreed with Karen, and Professor Dowe was dismissed. Seeking to avoid bad press, the University arranged a settlement with Myers that included a full scholarship, and the re-evaluation of her coursework by the Dean of the English Department. Myers, only seeking to be treated fairly, agreed to not drag either the professor or the university (or herself for that matter) through the disgrace of a public trial. She was happy to have her tuition and board covered by the settlement, allowing her to graduate without facing years of student loan payments.
This gives the Mages a place to start. Perhaps there is something about the Myers case that will lead our friends to some link between Enigma and Matt, the animator who hadn’t even been a Mage long enough to have chosen a shadow name. Maybe there is something about NYU that will lead the Mages closer to this multiple murderer.
And heck, if not maybe Argus can find a date: Changeling Pick-Up Lines
Those Meddling… Puppets?
The first thing Aenaiyah spotted as she walked from work to the train platform was his feet sticking out from behind a car. As she got closer she realized that she recognized this man from the bar. He had been there quite a bit lately, usually the last one to leave. At first she thought that maybe he had simply passed out, but soon realized that he was well and truly dead. Not being overly fond of dealing with corpses, Aenaiyah decided to call on Riff-Raff. Both as a Moros Mage and a former NYPD Officer dead bodies were no problem for him. At first glance it did appear to be alcohol poisoning, but Riff-Raff did pick up spell resonance here so he cast Forensic Gaze to see what really happened.
What really happened was that someone had bashed this man’s face in with a heavy, blunt object. This is precisely what had really happened to a certain stop motion animator. If the puppets hadn’t tried to fix him…
Did I forget to tell you that part? I think I might have. You see the animator had tried to attune himself to his tools, in this case puppets, to bring about a harmonious accord that would help him in his work. He had believed this to be some new age meditation thing, but in truth it had been a spell that would rouse the innate spirit of an inanimate object causing it to become a Supernally Honed object. Normally this would only have caused the puppets to not show wear and tear as much, or maybe to hold position a little better while Matt was setting up takes. For whatever reason, this time the spell had done something more than that. Matt’s job involved animating the puppets, and so that’s what the spirits in the studio did. Fortunately for Matt (and everyone else at the studio) the studio spirits were by and large a fun loving group. They enjoyed having these nifty bodies to move around in, and they liked Matt. When they saw Matt get broken, they figured that somebody had to fix him. They tested out colors to match against his skin just like the puppet doctors did when they had to fix worn out puppets. They cut him open with a sculpting knife to fill him with more silicone, figuring that he had worked so hard that he had worn his out and that might be why he wasn’t standing up anymore. As hard as they tried, all they wound up with was a gruesome mess of a corpse that was found by a security guard, who called the police, who called a certain FBI Agent he knew who tended to wind up with the weird cases. Had the puppets not tried to fix Matt the security guard would have found a much tidier corpse, and the police would have written it off as a drug overdose even though Matt had no prior history with drugs. Whoever killed him saw to it that there had been plenty of evidence in him to trigger that conclusion. Whoever killed him knew exactly what they were doing, and they would have gotten away with it too… just like they had so many times before.
Mage Mistress 