Blog Archives
@#$% ACANTHUS!
I had a perfectly good game session planned for last weekend, and once again my players ruined everything. Also once again, it was that damned Acanthus Mage who ruined everything the most.
They kept telling me that their plan for this session was to be a direct assault on the Seers of the Throne. I was prepared for this. In fact, I’d been prepared for them to come to this decision (or at least stumble into it blindly) about 6 months ago. It was, admittedly, a very bad plan. Also admittedly, this is what made me like it all the more. Their good plans always leave my poor Seers at a loss. Their bad plans make me giggle. I was giggling a lot last week.
But nooooo…
The Acanthus Mage had to decide to cast Divination to decide whether or not ‘storming the castle’ (so to speak) was a good idea. Then, just to add insult to pain in my ass, she had to cast Interconnections to see if she had any Fate ties to the location in question that might indicate that her allegedly kidnapped sister was there. When she discovered that she had no connections to the “Seers HQ” (alleged), and after her divination brought to mind Gimli’s thoughts on storming the gates of Mordor, she convinced the rest of her Cabal to call off the assault.
So what do they do instead? They decide to call a meeting with a woman they strongly suspect to be a Seer of the Throne, who they know as Hannah (AKA: Damien’s ex-wife (See Here: Hook, Line, and Sinker )). She accepts their meeting. After all, she isn’t unreasonable. She just wants to serve her Exarch and get on with her life just like the rest of us. She has nothing in particular against the Cabal… well except maybe her douchebag former husband who cheated on her multiple times with whoever didn’t say no. Even under the circumstances she was willing to be the better person and have a rational conversation with him. She lets him choose the place. She lets him choose the time. She asks up front if this will be a private meeting, and when he says to bring one other person she does. She gave him everything he wanted. She gave him the best years of her life! What does she get in return?
She gets pushed into a waiting portal so that his Cabal Mates can beat on her as soon as she materializes, that’s what!
Poor Hannah botched her WITS+EMPATHY roll to sense his cruel and underhanded motives. She trusted him again, and again he betrayed her sacred trust. So she materializes in a place fortified by Damien’s Cabal, and immediately everyone starts beating on her. They magically punch her in the brain, they root her to the space she’s standing in, they try to counterspell her magic shields. She has done NOTHING to them! All she tries to do is leave. That’s it… just leave. Hannah is no joke of a Mage, and so she weaves a Time spell to shunt herself backwards in time a bit. She isn’t looking for anything huge, just enough time to teleport herself elsewhere (the Space anchors wouldn’t be in place yet) and then jump herself back to her normal time frame in a place where this Cabal of jerks is not laying in wait to beat her face in for no apparent reason. Is that really so much to ask?
Meanwhile, back at the meeting place, her agreed upon companion realizes that she has disappeared. Her agreed upon companion also realizes that the new skank her ex-husband is hanging around with is still there. As such, her companion (being no fool) decides to turn the air around the skank’s head into chloroform. Why? It will do no lasting harm, and this purple-haired tramp might give leverage if needed. Also, by casting on the air around this lady she gets no defense bonuses or resistances to the spell. The plan is simple and effective. Or so it would seem.
The purple-haired tramp twists Fate to get out of the affected area of the gas before passing out completely, and then jumps through the bloody portal! Discovering that she has just missed Damien’s ex, who cast some kind of spell to get outta Dodge, Aenaiyah (AKA: The Purple Haired Slut) scrutinizes the area. Aenaiyah realizes that this is the work of Time magic (she is an Acanthus Mage after all), and decides to ritually cast a spell to throw herself backwards in Time after poor abused Hannah. She can’t make it back as far as Hannah did, but does make it back far enough to leave herself a message (in the past) to use Time magic to prevent other Time spells from being cast in this area for a while when they are fortifying everything. She is smart enough to not give the messenger a specific reason why (because if this works that reason would now not exist and my brain would explode), beyond that it is a good idea to do it – and that afterward she should maybe pop back and tell herself it would be a good idea to use Time magic to prevent other Time spells from being cast in this area because otherwise she might forget to do it.
Honestly, can’t you just stick to Post-Cognition?
I hate Time Mages.
Mine is a World with Many Paisley Curtains
It has recently occurred to me that some of the folks reading this blog may be of the impression that I have some great wisdom to impart. Some of you may have convinced yourselves that by reading my blog you will become better GM’s. You may be right about that, but not because I have any idea what I’m doing.
The most important thing to remember about GMing is to make it look like you know what you’re doing. When a player asks what color the bad guy’s curtains are you can:
- stammer because you never considered that antagonists might have curtains
- yell at the player for being a royal pain in your ass
- smoothly tell your player how their character was hit by a meteor that happened to sail through the window just as they were walking over to get a closer look at the lovely paisley pattern on the curtains.
- Both 2 and 3 (not necessarily in that order)
It’s easy to get caught up in planning a thousand niggling details for every session in case the players happen to ask. I have found that if I do that much planning not only will the players not ask those questions, they will ask other questions that are far more annoying and niggling! This problem is compounded in a game like Mage by the player’s abilities to interrogate ghosts, talk with the animals, and use Post-Cognition. For example, you you might have every member of a victim’s family and workplace fully statted out and given a personality, and instead of actually trying to make contact with any of these potential leads the PCs will instead wander around aimlessly on the college campus where this victim was a teacher, poke their head into a classroom full of students this teacher didn’t teach, and ask if any of these hundreds of students that never met the victim in question have supernatural markers in their auras. They also might ask you what the foundry marking on a bell is… or the ISBN number of a book. It doesn’t matter what detail you didn’t bother to come up with, the players will find it! They will find it, and they will ask it, and you WILL hate them for it. You will hate them all!
I have often found that the best thing to do in these situations is really to do nothing at all. Practice the slow spread of an evil smirk in the mirror while you’re getting ready to head to the game. There is nothing that will freak out your players more than a nice long pause after a question that they have asked… if it is accompanied by that evil, maniacal grin. They will assume that they have just stumbled onto an important fact. They will say something like “Oh noes.. there is no ISBN number on that book!” Whatever is the worst possible thing that they can think of in that moment will come flying out of their mouths, and if you’re smart you will just sit there and keep grinning at them. Let it sink in. Let them say more. Don’t try to stop them! Whatever they are saying right now is probably their worst fear come to life!! And you didn’t have to come up with any of it.
Well played!
The downside of this is that the players will think they were so smart that they figured out what you had worked so hard to plan. They’ll convince themselves that they have outsmarted you and maybe get a little smug about it too. That’s OK though. We know better. We know that in reality they were dumb enough to do all the heavy lifting for us. Let them have their moment of glory.
If they get out of hand you can always whip out the meteor. Then they’ll know who the smart one at the table is.
Tales from RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention
Game Convention GMing is like a box of chocolates… you never know what players you’re going to get.
I’ve been playing games for a long while (longer than I’d like to admit), and GMing for the past two years. In that time I’ve grown accustomed to my Cabal of Mages. I’m even starting to get a feel for what crazy tangents they will decide to follow, and which sane and rational options they will totally ignore. (don’t tell them that!)
At a convention you have to throw that comfort zone right out the window!
I had written what I felt was a solid adventure pitting mere mortal humans against the supernatural. The setting is an abandoned asylum, very loosely based on the very real Pilgrim State (not far from where I live, appropriately enough). The characters are a film crew sent out to shoot a reality TV series: 1 Paranormal Guru with alleged post-cognitive abilities (to host the show), 1 Producer, 2 Camera People, 1 Lighting Technician, 1 Production Assistant, and 1 Sound Technician. I gave them each very brief backgrounds with “internal monologues” that would be easy to read quickly at the top of the session while giving each player (I hoped) a good feel for their character’s mindset, and lots of opportunities to do crazy stuff to each other if they felt like it. (Not that players EVER do crazy stuff to each other… NEVER!) I had all of my location triggered events worked out, some nice handouts for successful “WITS + COMPOSURE” or “WITS + INVESTIGATION” rolls, a wild and crazy “end game” that I could trigger when the session’s time slot was close to over, and all that was left to do was wait until game time.
It really is the hardest part.
Throughout the day I checked the sign in list to see who I would have at my table. I did not see even one single name that I recognized.
I was more than a little terrified by this.
You see I knew that could run the scenario with a heavy dice rolling emphasis, but I also knew that it would be SO MUCH BETTER if I had a really solid Role Player to take on the part of the Paranormal Guru. The handouts were largely for this character, and the idea was that this player could interpret what they were seeing any way they wanted to. Can the player opt to roll “PRESENCE+EXPRESSION” to say something cool into the camera? Absolutely!! But how much more fun is it to make the roll, and then either say something cool or something not-so-cool based upon how well you rolled? I knew I had to track down someone to give this character to. I practically begged one of my Mage players to do it, and he accepted.
So I faced a table of unknowns with 1 of my regular players and his fiancée who joined us as well. Having two people I trusted absolutely dropped down the terror level a bit – but it was still at least around 5. The players arrived to choose their characters, and we were all set to begin.
I totally shouldn’t have worried.
These folks were absolutely brilliant! As much as I love my Mages (once again, no fair telling!) this was absolutely the best GM experience I’ve ever had. The players were in character the entire time. They even called for their Contracted Union Breaks to go grab beers! They did the craziest stuff to each other, and to themselves, all in the name of great TV. In the end-game (no spoilers!) they settled their differences and everyone made it out alive but let me tell you it was close! I couldn’t have cast better actors for these parts if I was making a multi-million dollar feature film, and I would absolutely hire these guys to make a TV show with me. For reals.
There is absolutely great gaming happening on Long Island. You can find it at RetCon: Long Island’s Gaming Convention!
Nothing To See Here
It’s the perfect hook. One of the characters works at a bar, and there’s a dead body in the parking lot. At a glance: alcohol poisoning. It isn’t difficult to believe with the number of nights she’s seen him there when she arrived, and kicked him out at closing. All the same, she calls her Adamantine Arrow cabal mate to examine the body. He’s a Moros Mage, so he can get a bead on the cause of death with a simple covert spell called “Forensic Gaze” without the need for her to use Post-Cognition and actually watch the poor guy die. Just to be sure.
When her cabal mate arrives he thinks she’s just being paranoid. After all, these things happen at bars sometimes, and this guy clearly has a history. That doesn’t mean he isn’t going to humor her by casting the spell. He breaks out the dice and calculates his dice pool, all the while suspecting nothing.
And then I tell him that there’s a -3 dice modifier to his role.
Nope, nothing to see here!
This is why I hate, and I do mean HATE (all caps – no holds barred – can not stand!) negative dice modifiers to rolls. Give me a contested roll that gives me a dice pool against, give me an increase to the number of successes needed to ascertain certain information, but once you whip out a negative dice modifier there is no way the players are going to buy into the perfectly logical explanation that presents itself at first glance.
Furthermore, it makes even less sense on attack rolls! OK, I can expect my players to not overly meta-game and accept it if they know something strange is afoot at the Circle K but their character doesn’t. I’m a lucky Story Teller like that. Of course, once I tell them how many defense dice to pull out of their attack pool they start using that information to figure out all sorts of other things about their opponent. They may not be trying to do it, but rest assured that somewhere in their devious little plot-wrecking brains they ARE doing it. It’s what they do. It’s ALL they do!
What’s a GM to do? #sigh
Every Guardian’s Worst Nightmare
Do Guardians of the Veil dream of Supernal Sheep? On a good night… perhaps.
What of the bad nights? What fills his nights with terror ’till he awakes screaming in his sweat-soaked bed? Is it demonic manifestations of the abyss, dragged into the Fallen World by the paradox of raving Banishers?
Meh. These things happen.
Is it the Seers of the Throne? They spend their days on bent knee before their Exarchs plotting the demise of the Atlantean Pentacle and all those who seek its wisdom, but even they can not shake a Guardian to the foundations of his very soul.
Oh no, it takes much more than these to fill the Guardian’s heart with dread.
What does it take?
It takes one Acanthus Mage.
A Mysterium Acanthus Mage. A young woman with spikey purple hair, a smarmy British accent, and an overachieving sense of urgency. The worst part about this Mage is not that her Tarot Card is “The Fool”, nor is it the fact that she has at her command the power to warp both Time and Fate to her will.
The truly terrifying thing is the cabal in which she is the voice of sanity and reason.
:::shudder:::
Aenaiyah: The Voice of Reason
Mage Mistress 