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You Don’t See That Every Day:
As I stated in an earlier post, I made the decision to end a chapter with the departure of two characters and start a new one. The question was where I wanted to go from here. I already had some ideas about where I wanted the PCs investigations to lead (more on that later), but what I needed was a hook. I needed to get them started.
It started with a phone call to our resident Former FBI Agent (technically on leave) and Guardian of the Veil Argus Guille. You see, the Werewolf half of the campaign had just helped him close a cold case (they solved the crime, he reported the findings for them), and so he received a phone call from Officer S. Murphy.
“Goodevenin’ Agent. I hear you recently closed a big case. Congratulations.”
:::pause so Argus can pat himself on the back:::
“I hear rumor it was some sort of ritualistic cult thing or other. Does this mean you’re back on active duty then?”
:::pause so Argus can say he’s easing himself back in by consulting:::
“I got a weird one for ya. Paramount Building on Broadway. 31st floor. Ain’t seen nothin’ like it ‘fore.”
:::pause so Argus can ask what he means by that:::
“Y’might wanna see for yourself Agent. Good t’have ya back.”
:::end conversation:::
What could possibly be a better investigation hook than the dead body of a stop motion animator that has been filled with skin colored modelling silicone? You see, in my World of Darkness “Celebrity Deathmatch” is still being made in good old New York City, right where it should be. On a routine overnight walk-around a security guard spotted the body of an animator sprawled across the entryway to a shoot room. He had been vivisected (think autopsy) and his body cavity had been stuffed with skin-colored modelling silicone. You don’t see that every day.
There were many paths that the investigation could have taken, and the players actually covered their bases well on this one. They were smart enough to investigate the stop motion camera, which did in fact have a few very interesting still frames shot due to the animator having tensed and squeezed the shoot button as his head was bludgeoned in by something that can’t be seen on the film. This is interesting because judging by the angle they are seeing the blows at on the still frames they really should be able to see what hit the poor guy. And then of course there is the fact that his head isn’t looking very bashed in at the moment.
They searched through the security camera tapes, but aside from the door closing a bit slowly at one point when somebody entered there was nothing concrete there. Argus did a search of the body and found some odd markings under a flap of skin where he had been dissected. A WITS+COMPOSURE roll made him think of a painter’s pallet… little swatches of color, almost like there was real effort made to match the colored silicone to the animator’s skin tone. Max Factor would be proud! No happy little trees here though.
Clearly Post-Cognition was called for. This session happened at right about the time that I started to become more comfortable with this spell, and really learned how to make Aenaiyah squirm and throw up a little in her mouth. I knew all about the moment the animator had died, what the reason for his death was, and what happened later. Bring it Acanthus! Right on schedule, she does. She asks me to see the silicone being stuffed into his body. I ask her to step out of the room and into the hall. I know that one of the best things about Aenaiyah is how her player reacts to things. This is clearly going to be priceless.
This pleases me.
She can only see a few moments of time around an event at this point in her Magely Learning, so I only tell her that she sees small, stubby little hands pulling back the flaps of skin, and working the silicone into the poor dead man. It looks like they are being extremely careful about the work. They seem to be very detail oriented. She shudders, and says “I look around me… what do I see?”
You see stop motion puppets. Hundreds and hundreds of small silicone celebrities. They’re all around you.
Freakout in 3…2…
Sometimes I love being the GM!
Love At First Sight
Some Game Masters will ask you for a backstory because they want to torture you by making you write one. Torturing players is kind of our gig, so you really have no right to blame us for it.
Some Game Masters will ask you for a backstory because they are trying to get a feel for what the table is looking for in a game. If, as GM, you receive a bunch of backstories that basically amount to “I pick things up and put them down” you will probably not want to run a game of political intrigue with this group.
Some Game Masters will actually use and abuse your backstories in the worst ways imaginable. For the record, I am one of those Game Masters.
My campaign had lost two players, bringing us down to a party of 5:
- Aenaiyah: Acanthus Mysterium
- Argus: Obrimos Guardian of the Veil
- Neils: Obrimos Free Council
- Nokoni: Thyrsus Adamantine Arrow
- Rex: Moros Free Council
This was not an incredibly easy group of people to deal with. It was rather like herding cats. My Guardian of the Veil had already been broken by his fellow players: Rex the curmudgeonly old man who is deliberately contrary, Nokoni the Adamantine Thyrsus who can turn into a bird and fly away when the going gets annoying, Neils the mad scientist in the basement, and Aenaiyah the purple haired bane to my existence. Yet, as I lost two players I had two more chomping at the bit to join the troupe, and somehow or other I had already lost enough sanity to agree to this. One of these is someone I have played with before. He is an excellent player who decided that his character is an ex-police officer Adamantine Moros who had seen some bad things and may or may not have gone slightly insane causing him to “think” he can talk to ghosts. (Spoiler: He can.) I had hoped that he might decide to step up and help the Guardian get folks under control. The second new player was a mystery to me. I had never met him, but I had heard good things about his play style… from Aenaiyah’s player. Now, she’s a great player don’t get me wrong… but she lives to make me weep. I am on the fence about this.
And then I receive the backstory of Damien Goetz: Mastigos Free Council.
It is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen. We aren’t just talking about the two page well written story of his Awakening, I think he may even have spell checked, but the bulleted list of important figures in Damien’s life. For the first time in this campaign I was weeping tears of joy. This guy is a scum-bag lawyer who defends people he knows damn well are guilty as hell for the good of his own wallet, has an ex-wife he cheated on, was a rising star in his ex-father-in-law’s well connected law firm, has parents he doesn’t particularly get along with, and someone plunged an enormous knife into his chest recently and left it there. Oh, and he doesn’t know who tried to kill him or why. I get to make that up. And…and… when I tell him straight up that in the places where he has people’s motivations written down I figure that’s only Damien’s impressions of what their motivations were because at the time he couldn’t have known… he says: “I like that!”
Foolish, foolish, man.
This is a guy who voluntarily took the Narcissism derangement because it fit the character. This is a guy who prefaced various things he did in his early days of joining the campaign by saying “I hope you guys realize that I’m not an asshole. Damien is an asshole, but I swear I’m a really nice guy!” And what a glorious sphincter Damien is! He is perhaps one of the most vainglorious bastards I’ve ever seen.
Yes, over the course of the campaign since then I have had great fun letting Damien’s player know exactly how badly he screwed himself by giving me so much license with his backstory. His fellow Mages trust him less and less with each and every reveal.
It makes that dark little hole where my heart should have been all happy.
Keep the Change
The defeat of the Scelesti, and the departure of Molly and Marissa, was a time of change for the campaign. As mentioned previously I had plenty of material to keep this story line going for a bit, but since Marissa’s background was so heavily tied into things it seemed a clean place to end the chapter. Onward and upward!
I’d already had some ideas for other places that the campaign could go, so that was no problem. I decided that it was time to bring in a more subtle antagonist. Scelesti are the accursed, and while it’s certainly plausible that they might be luring in demons in the hopes of killing those demons (or attempting to gain weapons against even worse demons), by and large the Scelesti are bad folks. I was looking for more shades of gray in the campaign. I was looking for Seers of the Throne. The Seers can absolutely be played as mustache twirlers, and that can be a valid interpretation of them. It isn’t the interpretation I was craving though. I felt that it was time to bring in a group that might make the players question their loyalties a bit. I was hoping to make them wonder if maybe this group that is in opposition to their Consilium actually does make a few good points. I was looking for a chance to twist their little minds!
In addition to the introduction of a new set of “Big Bads” I had the introduction of new player characters at this point in time as well. I may have lost a Mastigos and an Acanthus, but I gained a Mastigos and a Moros. I will happily trade an Acanthus for a Moros any day of the week! I had gamed with the Moros previously, but I had never gamed with the Mastigos before. Mastigos have the ability to read people’s minds, and to change people’s minds, and I had my concerns about a brand new player at the table tossing those abilities around. I have seen egregious abuse of mind control powers in the past, and the player was someone I’d never met. Sure Aenaiyah had gamed with him previously and was willing to vouch for him, but that wasn’t exactly inspiring confidence in the GM. (Don’t know why? See: The Principles of Time Travel a users guide to time by guest blogger Aenaiyah)
Then I received Damien the Mastigos’s back story, and suddenly I knew it was going to be alright.
Tune in Next Week for “Love At First Sight”!
Caveat Acanthus
Before the face of the child in the ritual circle could even reach the Mage’s retina her throat was torn out by a Werewolf. I blame several factors for this:
- The Werewolves had never met Marissa, and had no idea that the Mage’s knew this child.
- The Werewolves were all hopped up on acceleration spells and there was Great Danger to the city here: the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one) and all that.
- Marissa did cast several spells asking Fate for something interesting to happen during the last session she attended. Challenge accepted!
- Werewolf
Now I know what you’re thinking here. You’re thinking “Wait a minute, did you just imply that the child in the ritual circle was a player character?” Why yes, yes I did. In fact, I am flat out stating that the child was a player character. I fully understood the danger inherent here, but had contingencies for enough potential outcomes that I felt OK with it.
You see, in my original plan this scenario was going to play out over the course of two game sessions: one in which the group’s legal drinkers wreak havoc on Liberty island and ultimately get sucked through a portal while the “meddling kids” have “something interesting” happen, and one in which they deal with the terror that is about to take place on New Year’s Eve. The first part of this plan worked like a charm ending with an awesome monologue… EXCEPT… the people playing the underage characters were not able to make it to the session. This caused a slight kink, but only a slight one. After all, there was no reason for the players to not meet up on the roof tops, and there was no reason in my mind for Marissa to already be in the ritual circle when the others arrived. She and Molly could just as easily have been talking with the people on the roof.
Incidentally, the people on the roof were Marissa’s Mother, Father, and Brother. The intention here was to reveal chunks of the backstory that I had come up with for Marissa, and hit her player with some interesting decisions to make. Was Marissa going to continue to be an eternal child, or would she start to age? Would she take conscious action to remain young, or would it be something she was doing unknowingly? What would the repercussions be?
Sadly, once again the players did not attend.
At this point a sane and rational GM might have changed their plans. After dealing with this troupe month after month I could no longer lay claim to those adjectives. Still, I tend to think it’s pretty bad form to kill someone’s character when they aren’t at a session. I could just as easily have made this some other child, and had the group of Scelesti Mages on the rooftop have been some other group of Scelesti Mages who had nothing to do with Marissa whatsoever. Instead I figured that since the ritual was not intended to kill the child (her parents had been keeping her alive, unharmed, and unchanged for 40 years or so by this point) so chances were that she would live through the fight. After all, when you see a child in a ritual circle in a movie you try to save the child, don’t you?
Enter the Werewolf.
With the kind of Intitiative roll that only a 4th Dot Time Mage can grant one of the Werewolves tears ass across the rooftop they are on, leaps the narrow alley, shoulder-rolls his landing back onto his feet, and springs up through the air hitting the child’s throat with his teeth and ripping her esophagus out. No one on the rooftop that night saw that one coming.
I however was not on the rooftop.
I know my players, and if there is one thing I know it is that they will make the worst decision possible. That kid was going down, and I knew it. I had absolutely planned for the demon that was to be summoned with the addition of the child’s blood to the circle to decide that her body looked like a nice cozy home now that she wasn’t using it. The moment the thing’s round came up and it turned her head (still in the jaws of a Werewolf) and asked that Werewolf “Are you my Father?” was priceless.
Clearly that player has seen Ghostbusters, because he knows that when someone asks you if you’re a god (or their Father) YOU SAY YES! This is why, throughout the fight, when the demon was stealing hit points from the other PCs and giving them to the Scelesti Mages, it was giving them to the Werewolf too. Even as he fought against it the demon was giving him his friend’s hit points. The demon wasn’t about to let its father stay hurt!
At the end of the day the players beat the hell out of the Scelesti. It was a tough fight though! The players had the Scelesti badly outnumbered, but Marissa’s Mother, the head of their cabal, was a ridiculously powerful Thyrsus Mage who was able to do some real damage, even to the Werewolves while also healing herself and her cabal. What she couldn’t do was teleport or portal herself out of there because that accursed Guardian of the Veil (ARGUS!) killed her Space Mage outright in the surprise round in one lucky shot. If that hadn’t happened, if he had randomly picked anyone but the Space Mage, they would have been able to leave the fight and live to summon demons another day. It simply wasn’t meant to be.
As for Marissa… as I’ve said, it’s poor form to kill off someone’s character when they aren’t at the session. This is why I would have been quite happy with the idea of Marissa being at the next session (or some later session) and showing up to knock on the Sanctum door because she had lost her key. The player wouldn’t have known why everyone at the sanctum would be surprised to see her, hich would be consistent with the character having not one single clue about what had just happened. They could have dealt with explaining it to her (or not) in character. It could have been an interesting way to explore her backstory. What really happened on that roof? Was that a random child altered by Life Magic to appear to be Marissa for some reason? Did Marissa have an identical twin? Was it a clone? Was that some “future Marissa” Brought back in time to serve her purpose here and now, still alive and unchanged at some point in the distant future? Was the Time Line messed with in some other way? (The child IS an Acanthus Mage after all.)
I really did have multiple possibilities for Marissa’s return planned out, but due to schedule problems the players who played the underage characters weren’t able to continue with the campaign. As such, Marissa died that night on the rooftop, and Molly disappeared into the night as was her way. It was a pity, but it certainly was an interesting way to end her story.
The Moral of the Story: Be careful what you wish for, especially if your GM is the MageMistress.
A Scelesti On The Roof:
As one of my Mages correctly pointed out last week (everyone say ‘Hi Neils!’) I ended the previous game session on a pretty tense note. Everyone saw (through their varying Mage and Werewolf sight abilities) that things were about to get real. There was a heavy weight of Death shrouding the city, the Spirits were fleeing the area as best they could, Fate was all a flutter, Time was both wibbley AND wobbley, big happy bursts of Prime were glowing all over the height of the New Year’s festivities, and it was likely to be a hot time in the old town tonight! To Be Continued…
…but wait… there’s more!
Before leaving the Werewolf Alpha, Aldous, wanted to monologue. I have to give credit where it is due and say that he was F&@# Brilliant! He could easily have waited to open the next session with a rousing speech to give himself some time to prepare, but he shot from the hip and even I was inspired to stop the evil from happening!
Don’t worry, I got over it before the next session started.
First things first: The Mages have to get from Liberty Island (where the Statue of Liberty is) to Manhattan Island (where all the evil is going to take place). It’s getting pretty close to midnight, so there are no ferries now. There are a few security guards that they will have to hide from or deal with though. The Thyrsus, Nokoni, yells “CAW!” transforms into a large bird and flies toward Times Square, leaving his friends stranded.
Neils, one of our Obrimos Mages, whips a small raft out of thin air. He doesn’t roll as well as he could have, so he casts again and they lash the two things together with belts that the Moros Mage turns into rope. The Werewolves, being showoffs, act as onboard engines: they swim and push the rafts that carry the Mages.
The Fate Mage casts some hoodoo to keep the security guards from wandering near enough to see all these Paradoxalicious goings-on.
The Guardian of the Veil Facepalms, but makes no effort to stop any of this. Good job!
The paradox dice fail me again. (I know you’re as stunned as I am.)
As the Scooby Gang floats across from Liberty Island to Manhattan Island the Bloody Acanthus starts casting Acceleration on people to get them there faster. They are going to be reaching Manhattan at a point that is not exactly close to Times Square (near the center of Manhattan for those who are unfamiliar) no matter how they cut it, so they are going to need speed on their side.
Everyone is now moving at Ludicrous Speed!
For once the Paradox Dice don’t fail me and Aenaiyah winds up taking a few bashing damage. I believe those dice hate the Acanthus as much as I do, which is why I haven’t smashed them to bits yet. For the record, it is at about this time that I realize that Paradox really needs a stronger bite, and let’s face it a stronger bark wouldn’t hurt either, because with all this crazy vulgar stuff going on I think I managed to stub Aenaiyah’s toe, and maybe break one of her nails.
And so the Supersonic Werewolves run through the streets of Manhattan at about Mach 10 carrying the Mages on their backs. One of those Mages is furiously waving her hands casting fate spells to keep people out of their way. Yes, she took negatives and had to make RESOLVE+COMPOSURE rolls to cast under those circumstances. Of course, this being New Year’s Eve most eyes were in Times Square and so they really didn’t have any problems until they got near that area. This was an easy explanation for her dratted successes.
When they were close enough (and still out of site of people… damned Fate Magic) our Guardian created a Portal to get them to the top of a building. He did this because, you know, he’s a Guardian and that isn’t Vulgar at all. (Note: Space is his third Arcana. There was no Mastigos Mage present at this session.) I believe he took a bashing for that one… so there! Nokoni had already done a fly by (CAW!), and they met to discuss what he had seen.
What he saw on that rooftop was a surprise to all of them. The group of Arch-Mages was to be expected under the circumstances. The ritual circles, arcane chanting, and general feeling of dread were likely accompaniments.
The young child standing in the center of the ritual circle… that they didn’t expect. Sacrifices are not unusual components for these sorts of gatherings, and you pretty much do have to make them younger and younger every year to meet all the purity and innocence requirements.
What was shocking was that they knew this girl.
This girl had been living at their house since the day they rescued her.
This girl was one of theirs.
This girl was the Acanthus Child, Marissa.
Bloody Hell.
Mage Mistress 