That could have gone better.
Things are fairly peaceful in the Greenwood right now. Turgut is officially the leader of all the tribes. We still have our agreement with Gallia though, and the enchantress showed up to talk to us. Lord Vexil has gone mad. We explained something of what had happened with the White Witch of Gallia, but not really understanding what happened myself, I don't think it was a very clear explanation.
Some of the forest fae also showed up, to warn us that some redcaps had now gone to join up with the wendigo. At some point we would have to deal with them, but that didn't necessarily mean having to fight them. I don't want to fight my own people.
We came up with a plan where we would hide our tribes' forces and lure the hobgoblins into an ambush, while the enchantress arranged for a distraction at the walls of Gallia, and we would sneak in and try to deal with their leadership.
Well, we tried.
We got in without attracting attention, following Vared's lead. I enlarged Turgut and we went in to fight. We were up against a formidable enemy - the lead hobgoblin and his pet wolf, the lesser wendigo, and some kind of devil. Yes, a very impressive beard, and he stuck it right into Aunold.
What happened? Well, the wolf got blown up by Aunold's first fireball. Turgut took on the lesser wendigo, and a joint effort between Aunold, Vared and me dealt with the devil. But the hobgoblin leader was horrific. He managed to knock out Vared just with the power of his words. And he almost killed all the rest of us with some kind of necromancy. Aunold was taken down, and the only reason I survived was because I was just outside the spell's range. Turgut, being undead, was healed rather than injured by the spell.
I ran. Or rather, I flew, shouting to Turgut to run away. We were in no state to fight this creature. We got Vared and Aunold back, with some help from the enchantress. Now we have to decide what to do next. The hobgoblin siege will hopefully be broken with our tribes' help, even with their leader still alive. But there is still the wendigo.
I know, you want me to be the leader. The child of the forest. It's not what I sought out, but if we are able to fight the wendigo then Turgut's obligation will be complete and he will be no more. Someone has to step up then, and I will not say no to you. But that will only happen if we succeed where our ancestors failed. I don't know if I'm ready for any of this. But I have to try.
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Friday, 31 January 2020
Thursday, 30 January 2020
A Long, Dark Day
Six of us sat down on Saturday afternoon to play the modern day Call of Cthulhu scenario, Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home.
The scenario comes from The Things We Leave Behind, a collection of modern day scenarios from Stygian Fox. It's written for Call of Cthulhu, but we played it with Cthulhu Dark - or rather with the GM's own slight variation on Cthulhu Dark. For a one-shot pick-up game that was a good choice - character creation takes minimum time and effort so the GM didn't have to go to the effort of making pre-gens or worry about exactly how many of us there were.
This scenario has the PCs playing the members of a child abduction response team. We assembled a police pursuit driver, a forensic IT specialist, an FBI field agent, an FBI profiler and an ex-military paramedic.
(Apparently FBI agent is my default character in investigation games in the same way that ranger used to be my default class in fantasy games.)
The story involves searching for an abducted child, although it rapidly becomes apparent there is a lot more going on. The scenario is very well put together, and comes with a bunch of handouts, plus one particularly interesting thing. One organisation the PCs end up looking into has a website, and said website actually exists. Being able to browse the site on a phone made it feel a lot more real than just reading it off paper.
There's also a bunch of material for the GM, including a chart with key clues in boxes, which the GM was marking off as we found each one. (I would recommend using a screen when running this adventure, as I had to make an effort not to let myself read anything when he was using this chart.) What it apparently doesn't include is a timeline of events up until the present, as the GM had to write his own.
One oddity of this scenario is that as a fairly genre savvy person I'd figured out pretty early on that certain actions would be at best very unwise and at worst disastrous. The characters don't know they're in a horror story though, and so we were having them act accordingly. Trying to find the right balance between having the character act like a real person and my own reactions to all the weird things going on was quite a challenge.
Ultimately we failed to avert disaster, ironically by being compentent at our jobs and still clinging onto sanity. Had we taken longer (in game) to complete our goals, things might have gone differently, and had my character failed that last sanity check it would have pushed her over the edge to the point where she might have done the thing that needed doing. But we all kept it together until the end. And it really was the end.
This scenario is one of a set of six, and apparently there is an overarching campaign thread that can be used to tie them all together. Unless this is the last scenario in that campaign, I can only assume that it expects the investigators not to fail the way we did.
Despite our absolute failure I liked the adventure, and it worked very well with the Cthulhu Dark rules. It did take a very long time to play. We started some time after lunch, took a break for dinner, and finished in the late evening. I hope I can find an opportunity to play the other five scenarios, but we're going to need to allow a substantial amount of play time if they're anything like that one.
While not the best Cthulhu adventure I've played, this one is well worth a look, and I feel like I could run it myself with reasonable competence despite not having done much horror GMing. And while the Cthulhu Dark rules are a little on the light side for my tastes, they work well, and for this type of game I can't fault them.
The scenario comes from The Things We Leave Behind, a collection of modern day scenarios from Stygian Fox. It's written for Call of Cthulhu, but we played it with Cthulhu Dark - or rather with the GM's own slight variation on Cthulhu Dark. For a one-shot pick-up game that was a good choice - character creation takes minimum time and effort so the GM didn't have to go to the effort of making pre-gens or worry about exactly how many of us there were.
This scenario has the PCs playing the members of a child abduction response team. We assembled a police pursuit driver, a forensic IT specialist, an FBI field agent, an FBI profiler and an ex-military paramedic.
(Apparently FBI agent is my default character in investigation games in the same way that ranger used to be my default class in fantasy games.)
The story involves searching for an abducted child, although it rapidly becomes apparent there is a lot more going on. The scenario is very well put together, and comes with a bunch of handouts, plus one particularly interesting thing. One organisation the PCs end up looking into has a website, and said website actually exists. Being able to browse the site on a phone made it feel a lot more real than just reading it off paper.
There's also a bunch of material for the GM, including a chart with key clues in boxes, which the GM was marking off as we found each one. (I would recommend using a screen when running this adventure, as I had to make an effort not to let myself read anything when he was using this chart.) What it apparently doesn't include is a timeline of events up until the present, as the GM had to write his own.
One oddity of this scenario is that as a fairly genre savvy person I'd figured out pretty early on that certain actions would be at best very unwise and at worst disastrous. The characters don't know they're in a horror story though, and so we were having them act accordingly. Trying to find the right balance between having the character act like a real person and my own reactions to all the weird things going on was quite a challenge.
Ultimately we failed to avert disaster, ironically by being compentent at our jobs and still clinging onto sanity. Had we taken longer (in game) to complete our goals, things might have gone differently, and had my character failed that last sanity check it would have pushed her over the edge to the point where she might have done the thing that needed doing. But we all kept it together until the end. And it really was the end.
This scenario is one of a set of six, and apparently there is an overarching campaign thread that can be used to tie them all together. Unless this is the last scenario in that campaign, I can only assume that it expects the investigators not to fail the way we did.
Despite our absolute failure I liked the adventure, and it worked very well with the Cthulhu Dark rules. It did take a very long time to play. We started some time after lunch, took a break for dinner, and finished in the late evening. I hope I can find an opportunity to play the other five scenarios, but we're going to need to allow a substantial amount of play time if they're anything like that one.
While not the best Cthulhu adventure I've played, this one is well worth a look, and I feel like I could run it myself with reasonable competence despite not having done much horror GMing. And while the Cthulhu Dark rules are a little on the light side for my tastes, they work well, and for this type of game I can't fault them.
Wednesday, 29 January 2020
Crew of the Aliya, part 13: Rescue
Pulling the ship's log had revealed something important. This wasn't actually the Fatima's Bounty - just a very simliar looking ship. We were actually aboard the Akander. Perhaps we could leave the cushions after all.
There was still the matter of the crew, however, one of whom was dead on the bridge, having failed to get his spacesuit closed in time. Looking down the corridor that lead to the other airlock, we found a second body.
Gurgeh sent in his drone to observe, and confirmed that the body was definitely dead. We could see now that the second airlock had become damaged, and wouldn't close. Past it was a corridor leading into the asteroid. Once again the drone took the lead, finding some strange writing on the wall. It looked a lot like the writing we'd seen on the towers on Kua, but Lila confirmed that it was a more modern version of that script, unlikely to be used by portal builders but potentially the work of the first come and around three hundred years old.
Alqadi took up a defensive position near the writing, to ensure we had cover as we approached the end of the corridor. There it widened out into a small hall. Another body lay on the floor, dead and burned according to Gurgeh, while another floated in the minimal gravity. This one was different, however. Not only did a green light on his suit suggest that he was still alive, but when we checked the name tag on his suit, it read 'Lavim'.
Above the bodies was a strange black inverted dome, depicting some kind of white flower that Sayah recognised as a Zarak flower. Gurgeh recalled that they were said to have healing properties. But this wasn't the time to hang around admiring the scenery. Lavim was badly injured, and we would have to work fast to get him back to the ship. Sayah was getting increasingly on edge from the number of dead bodies, reminding the others that last time she saw this many corpses they'd got up and ripped Lila's arm off. Along with the worrying messages she was getting from Suleiman about something trying to affect his systems, she was keen to leave, and nobody disagreed.
Gurgeh took Lavim down to the med lab while Sayah took Jinna up to the arboretum to keep her out of the way. It was obvious that Lavim needed a proper trauma lab if he was going to survive, so Gurgeh stabilised him and put him in one of the stasis pods to keep him alive while we flew back to Djachroum.
Tahir took the helm, and the rest of the crew settled down to various activities. We were maybe ten hours into our journey when we got a sudden warning message that we had strayed into Legion space and were required to change course immediately. Tahir made the course change and tried to find out what had happened. We shouldn't have been anywhere near Legion space on the course he'd set.
We consulted Suleiman. He didn't seem to think anything was amiss. He was following the set course. Everything was fine. Finally we got him to compare the position of the stars with where he claimed we were and what appeared on the maps.
"The stars appear to have moved."
There was nothing for it. Something had gone badly wrong with Suleiman and we were going to have to do a restore from backups. Out in a particularly dicey bit of space didn't seem like the ideal place to be doing it, but it was the best of the available choices. Fortunately Sayah had come down from her latest opor high, and was ready for work. Essential systems were switched to backup, and the reboot began.
Without Suleiman to help, it was down to Tahir to pilot alone, but even his skill wasn't enough to avoid a huge ion cloud. We could only watch helplessly as electricity and radiation coursed across the hull. The Aliya was well shielded though, and it looked like she was going to weather the storm.
And then the light on Suleiman's console went out. Sayah's scream could be heard throughout the ship.
Of all the Aliya's parts, Suleiman was the only one that wasn't a good fit. He hadn't been made for light freighters, and even after having to leave parts of him behind on the Ghazali, his installation was very much a case of shoving bits in wherever they vaguely fitted. With Gurgeh busy monitoring Lavim, it fell to Sayah and Tahir to locate and repair the fault. A few fervant prayers later, Tahir had spliced the damaged cables back together. Sayah waited with bated breath until finally the lights came back on.
Suleiman was brought up to speed on recent events. Tahir set a course for Djachroum. Sayah spent the rest of the journey hugging Suleiman's data cores.
We made it back to Djachroum without further incident this time, although it was obvious the ship was going to need a full service before we could risk flying again. Karim managed to get us booked in for repairs at a reasonable price, but soon had other problems to deal with when the harbour master complained that the mineral extractors we'd sold were defective, and also refused to let Lavim out of the ship without paying his debts. The situation was only resolved when someone from the Union showed up and browbeat the harbour master into letting us through.
Alqadi and Karim took Lavim down to the local surgeon, accompanied by Jinna. They were treated to the unsettling sight of a spider doctor robot opening up Lavim's skull and doing extensive work on his brain.
Lila had more interesting things to think about. Lavim had had a small stone in his hand, decorated with the same white flower as the dome we'd seen on the asteroid. Unfortunately, despite heartfelt prayers to the Gambler, she was unable to learn much about it.
Back at the ship repairs had been carried out and the Aliya was spaceworthy again. It was time to get answers to some questions. Why had we felt so ill on the journey back? What was causing the nosebleeds? What had happened to Suleiman? And most of all, what would Lavim have to tell us?
There was still the matter of the crew, however, one of whom was dead on the bridge, having failed to get his spacesuit closed in time. Looking down the corridor that lead to the other airlock, we found a second body.
Gurgeh sent in his drone to observe, and confirmed that the body was definitely dead. We could see now that the second airlock had become damaged, and wouldn't close. Past it was a corridor leading into the asteroid. Once again the drone took the lead, finding some strange writing on the wall. It looked a lot like the writing we'd seen on the towers on Kua, but Lila confirmed that it was a more modern version of that script, unlikely to be used by portal builders but potentially the work of the first come and around three hundred years old.
Alqadi took up a defensive position near the writing, to ensure we had cover as we approached the end of the corridor. There it widened out into a small hall. Another body lay on the floor, dead and burned according to Gurgeh, while another floated in the minimal gravity. This one was different, however. Not only did a green light on his suit suggest that he was still alive, but when we checked the name tag on his suit, it read 'Lavim'.
Above the bodies was a strange black inverted dome, depicting some kind of white flower that Sayah recognised as a Zarak flower. Gurgeh recalled that they were said to have healing properties. But this wasn't the time to hang around admiring the scenery. Lavim was badly injured, and we would have to work fast to get him back to the ship. Sayah was getting increasingly on edge from the number of dead bodies, reminding the others that last time she saw this many corpses they'd got up and ripped Lila's arm off. Along with the worrying messages she was getting from Suleiman about something trying to affect his systems, she was keen to leave, and nobody disagreed.
Gurgeh took Lavim down to the med lab while Sayah took Jinna up to the arboretum to keep her out of the way. It was obvious that Lavim needed a proper trauma lab if he was going to survive, so Gurgeh stabilised him and put him in one of the stasis pods to keep him alive while we flew back to Djachroum.
Tahir took the helm, and the rest of the crew settled down to various activities. We were maybe ten hours into our journey when we got a sudden warning message that we had strayed into Legion space and were required to change course immediately. Tahir made the course change and tried to find out what had happened. We shouldn't have been anywhere near Legion space on the course he'd set.
We consulted Suleiman. He didn't seem to think anything was amiss. He was following the set course. Everything was fine. Finally we got him to compare the position of the stars with where he claimed we were and what appeared on the maps.
"The stars appear to have moved."
There was nothing for it. Something had gone badly wrong with Suleiman and we were going to have to do a restore from backups. Out in a particularly dicey bit of space didn't seem like the ideal place to be doing it, but it was the best of the available choices. Fortunately Sayah had come down from her latest opor high, and was ready for work. Essential systems were switched to backup, and the reboot began.
Without Suleiman to help, it was down to Tahir to pilot alone, but even his skill wasn't enough to avoid a huge ion cloud. We could only watch helplessly as electricity and radiation coursed across the hull. The Aliya was well shielded though, and it looked like she was going to weather the storm.
And then the light on Suleiman's console went out. Sayah's scream could be heard throughout the ship.
Of all the Aliya's parts, Suleiman was the only one that wasn't a good fit. He hadn't been made for light freighters, and even after having to leave parts of him behind on the Ghazali, his installation was very much a case of shoving bits in wherever they vaguely fitted. With Gurgeh busy monitoring Lavim, it fell to Sayah and Tahir to locate and repair the fault. A few fervant prayers later, Tahir had spliced the damaged cables back together. Sayah waited with bated breath until finally the lights came back on.
Suleiman was brought up to speed on recent events. Tahir set a course for Djachroum. Sayah spent the rest of the journey hugging Suleiman's data cores.
We made it back to Djachroum without further incident this time, although it was obvious the ship was going to need a full service before we could risk flying again. Karim managed to get us booked in for repairs at a reasonable price, but soon had other problems to deal with when the harbour master complained that the mineral extractors we'd sold were defective, and also refused to let Lavim out of the ship without paying his debts. The situation was only resolved when someone from the Union showed up and browbeat the harbour master into letting us through.
Alqadi and Karim took Lavim down to the local surgeon, accompanied by Jinna. They were treated to the unsettling sight of a spider doctor robot opening up Lavim's skull and doing extensive work on his brain.
Lila had more interesting things to think about. Lavim had had a small stone in his hand, decorated with the same white flower as the dome we'd seen on the asteroid. Unfortunately, despite heartfelt prayers to the Gambler, she was unable to learn much about it.
Back at the ship repairs had been carried out and the Aliya was spaceworthy again. It was time to get answers to some questions. Why had we felt so ill on the journey back? What was causing the nosebleeds? What had happened to Suleiman? And most of all, what would Lavim have to tell us?
Tuesday, 28 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 9: Bodyguarding
Marlon's player was away this week, so Rolando's player was actually controlling him this week. The band mentioned below are the PCs from a previous Cyberpunk 2020 campaign, that was if anything even more insane than this one.
We learned that one of the girls was Angeline, the daughter of one of Night City's biggest drug barons, and her friend Mandy. She was extremely worried that we might be working for her father, and was very relieved when we said we weren't. She asked to hire us as a private security team, which we weren't sure about until she offered us a daily rate of 1000eb each. She explained that she and Mandy were going to join a church called Trinity, and her father disapproved. Given that Trinity were the same people who'd shot at us and tried to steal our netrunner several weeks earlier, we weren't too impressed with the idea either.
"Aren't they run by a pervert?"
"Which one?"
"The one we saw on TV."
Requiem decided to take advantage of the fact they were now all staying in the penthouse of Night City's most expensive hotel, and ordered room service on Angeline's bill: six burritos and a bottle of WD40. Angeline was planning on a bit of a party in the room before any religion joining happened, maybe hiring some hookers.
Rolando: "They come wherever you want."
Mandy's opinion on this was unavailable as she was in the bedroom with Marlon, a.k.a. Bruce Leeroy. He had recently acquired a Jeet Kun Do martial arts chip, and while it hadn't settled into his mind properly yet, he was still quite determined to attempt to teach it to other people.
Or at least, we assumed that's what the sounds of vigorous exercise coming from the bedroom were.
Room service arrived. Real food was a bit of a novelty for the team. For Requiem it reminded her of the only other time she'd eaten real food: her first date with Ricky. She put an Adele cassette in her Walkman and sat down to cry for a while.
The night passed uneventfully, the only thing out of the ordinary being Mandy getting up in the middle of the night for a snack and being surprised to find Quinton still awake. (As an appropriately accoutremented borg, he didn't need to sleep every night.) Mandy wasn't quite so keen on joining Trinity, despite having already received the 'first blessing', and reckoned Angeline would be bored with it in about a week and they could move onto the next thing. Quinton wasn't quite so sure that was the way cults worked, and giving her a careful scan he noticed that her muscle density was significantly higher than usual.
The next morning the team awoke bright and early, unlike Angeline and Mandy. There was just one issue with being a security team however; weapons. All they had on them at this point were their Arno pistols and Requiem's mono power wolvers, and while this was a pretty respectable armoury by itself, it couldn't hurt to add a few bigger guns. So Nemo and Requiem went back to the house to collect weapons, photos of Ricky, and Virtue, as the team expert on Trinity.
With Angeline and Mandy finally awake and drinking bloody marys (inexplicably without petrol or hardware), Virtue attempted to convince them what a bad idea joining Trinity would be. They were not swayed, however, and Angeline wanted to go shopping.
Several hours of torture followed, as Angeline tried on almost everything in the shop, until Requiem noticed some suspicious looking types that were staying unsettlingly close to them. She asked Nemo and Quinton to go and talk to them, and there were almost weapons drawn until we established that they were actually working for Angeline's uncle Jorje who was there to attempt to convince her to come home. He failed.
Back at the hotel, the attempt continued, with Requiem finally making some progress by pointing out that the cult would probably take her clothes away and make her wear boring stuff instead. Before we could get much further down this line of reasoning, however, she decided that she wanted to go out for the night.
Quinton booked tickets for a nearby venue that were hosting a Doomcow concert, paying a small fortune in Angeline's money for VIP tickets for all of them.
The venue was heaving with several thousand attendees, and even the VIP area involved a queue to get in, but once inside they were treated to Doomcow playing some of their greatest hits, including 'I'm On Fire' and the classic 'Bro Tube'. With the entire band being heavily addicted to sweetness and therefore subject to severe time dilation effects, it was always 50:50 whether a Doomcow concert was going to be prog-rock or speed metal, and this time it was prog-rock.
Dancing ensued. Quinton and Requiem both gave creditable performances, but the star was Bruce Leeroy whose moves quickly got the attention of most of the club while everyone else took notes. Nemo, Rolando and Requiem decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get drunk on someone else's dime, Requiem being particularly keen to get blackout drunk as her obsession with Ricky Sixx had returned full force along with her empathy. Unfortunately with her cyber liver activated she was unable to get drunk at all, and even after turning it off could only manage moderately tipsy despite a lot of vodka.
At last they left the club. Quinton had called a battle cab, but when it arrived he noticed that the driver did not match the picture on the cab's registration. He refused to get in, and we all started walking back to the hotel instead.
Part way there, we noticed the same cab was parked on the street we were walking down. We pretended to ignore it, but then it suddenly started up and drove right at us.
Requiem grabbed Angeline and dragged her out of the way. Quinton jumped onto the roof. Bruce Leeroy attempted a flying kick to the windscreen, went right through the screen guard, kicked the driver in the face and ended up stuck in the car. Requiem and Rolando shot at the car, wrecking its wheels and bringing it to a stop. Then the car exploded, as cars are wont to do in Night City. Quinton survived unscathed. Bruce Leeroy survived, thanks to emergency medical intervention from Quinton, but his right leg remained in the windscreen while the rest of him was carried away.
Will the team successfully infiltrate Trinity using Angeline as an unwitting mole? Will she decide that having to dress in religious garments is too horrible to contemplate and go home to Daddy? How will Bruce Leeroy react to having lost yet another leg? Find out in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage!
We learned that one of the girls was Angeline, the daughter of one of Night City's biggest drug barons, and her friend Mandy. She was extremely worried that we might be working for her father, and was very relieved when we said we weren't. She asked to hire us as a private security team, which we weren't sure about until she offered us a daily rate of 1000eb each. She explained that she and Mandy were going to join a church called Trinity, and her father disapproved. Given that Trinity were the same people who'd shot at us and tried to steal our netrunner several weeks earlier, we weren't too impressed with the idea either.
"Aren't they run by a pervert?"
"Which one?"
"The one we saw on TV."
Requiem decided to take advantage of the fact they were now all staying in the penthouse of Night City's most expensive hotel, and ordered room service on Angeline's bill: six burritos and a bottle of WD40. Angeline was planning on a bit of a party in the room before any religion joining happened, maybe hiring some hookers.
Rolando: "They come wherever you want."
Mandy's opinion on this was unavailable as she was in the bedroom with Marlon, a.k.a. Bruce Leeroy. He had recently acquired a Jeet Kun Do martial arts chip, and while it hadn't settled into his mind properly yet, he was still quite determined to attempt to teach it to other people.
Or at least, we assumed that's what the sounds of vigorous exercise coming from the bedroom were.
Room service arrived. Real food was a bit of a novelty for the team. For Requiem it reminded her of the only other time she'd eaten real food: her first date with Ricky. She put an Adele cassette in her Walkman and sat down to cry for a while.
The night passed uneventfully, the only thing out of the ordinary being Mandy getting up in the middle of the night for a snack and being surprised to find Quinton still awake. (As an appropriately accoutremented borg, he didn't need to sleep every night.) Mandy wasn't quite so keen on joining Trinity, despite having already received the 'first blessing', and reckoned Angeline would be bored with it in about a week and they could move onto the next thing. Quinton wasn't quite so sure that was the way cults worked, and giving her a careful scan he noticed that her muscle density was significantly higher than usual.
The next morning the team awoke bright and early, unlike Angeline and Mandy. There was just one issue with being a security team however; weapons. All they had on them at this point were their Arno pistols and Requiem's mono power wolvers, and while this was a pretty respectable armoury by itself, it couldn't hurt to add a few bigger guns. So Nemo and Requiem went back to the house to collect weapons, photos of Ricky, and Virtue, as the team expert on Trinity.
With Angeline and Mandy finally awake and drinking bloody marys (inexplicably without petrol or hardware), Virtue attempted to convince them what a bad idea joining Trinity would be. They were not swayed, however, and Angeline wanted to go shopping.
Several hours of torture followed, as Angeline tried on almost everything in the shop, until Requiem noticed some suspicious looking types that were staying unsettlingly close to them. She asked Nemo and Quinton to go and talk to them, and there were almost weapons drawn until we established that they were actually working for Angeline's uncle Jorje who was there to attempt to convince her to come home. He failed.
Back at the hotel, the attempt continued, with Requiem finally making some progress by pointing out that the cult would probably take her clothes away and make her wear boring stuff instead. Before we could get much further down this line of reasoning, however, she decided that she wanted to go out for the night.
Quinton booked tickets for a nearby venue that were hosting a Doomcow concert, paying a small fortune in Angeline's money for VIP tickets for all of them.
The venue was heaving with several thousand attendees, and even the VIP area involved a queue to get in, but once inside they were treated to Doomcow playing some of their greatest hits, including 'I'm On Fire' and the classic 'Bro Tube'. With the entire band being heavily addicted to sweetness and therefore subject to severe time dilation effects, it was always 50:50 whether a Doomcow concert was going to be prog-rock or speed metal, and this time it was prog-rock.
Dancing ensued. Quinton and Requiem both gave creditable performances, but the star was Bruce Leeroy whose moves quickly got the attention of most of the club while everyone else took notes. Nemo, Rolando and Requiem decided to take advantage of the opportunity to get drunk on someone else's dime, Requiem being particularly keen to get blackout drunk as her obsession with Ricky Sixx had returned full force along with her empathy. Unfortunately with her cyber liver activated she was unable to get drunk at all, and even after turning it off could only manage moderately tipsy despite a lot of vodka.
At last they left the club. Quinton had called a battle cab, but when it arrived he noticed that the driver did not match the picture on the cab's registration. He refused to get in, and we all started walking back to the hotel instead.
Part way there, we noticed the same cab was parked on the street we were walking down. We pretended to ignore it, but then it suddenly started up and drove right at us.
Requiem grabbed Angeline and dragged her out of the way. Quinton jumped onto the roof. Bruce Leeroy attempted a flying kick to the windscreen, went right through the screen guard, kicked the driver in the face and ended up stuck in the car. Requiem and Rolando shot at the car, wrecking its wheels and bringing it to a stop. Then the car exploded, as cars are wont to do in Night City. Quinton survived unscathed. Bruce Leeroy survived, thanks to emergency medical intervention from Quinton, but his right leg remained in the windscreen while the rest of him was carried away.
Will the team successfully infiltrate Trinity using Angeline as an unwitting mole? Will she decide that having to dress in religious garments is too horrible to contemplate and go home to Daddy? How will Bruce Leeroy react to having lost yet another leg? Find out in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage!
Monday, 27 January 2020
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 12: Giants
It has been nice being back in the forest, even with everything we've had to deal with.
Once Aunold had stopped being a squirrel we had to decide what to do next. Our own people were safe from the undead threat, but there were still the giants attacking the Blood Druids, the hobgoblins attacking Gallia, the sea devils attacking the port, and of course the White Witch of Gallia and the ongoing threat of the wendigo.
We concluded that while the Blood Druids were our enemy, they were our enemy, and we didn't want them to lose, especially not now that we'd heard that Taint had survived being nailed to a tree and had become their religious leader.
No, I don't know what happened to the tree, but I doubt it came out of the experience intact.
We headed for the giant's camp, and Aunold and me put on our cloaks and flew over to scout. Quite a lot of them weren't actually giants. If we called on the remains of our tribe, they would be well able to handle the smaller threats while we took on the leader and his fellow giants.
We began in our usual style, with Aunold and me sending in some fireballs. I summoned a flytrap to provide Turgut with some melee backup. And it would have all gone smoothly if the leader hadn't turned out to be some kind of shaman like Aunold. Fighting someone who couldn't be hurt by spells was quite a challenge. The invisible wall he put up wasn't helpful either. All in all it was quite an embarrassing fight.
It would have been more embarrassing if we'd lost, of course. Once you've won it's much easier to triumphantly appear on top of a hill and declare your magnificent victory.
The White Witch showed up again afterwards, apparently not unhappy with us. It probably helped that certain people shut up and let me do the talking, of course. I seem to have a little of the fairy charm that my tribespeople lack. I still don't really understand what her plan was, and why it involved quite so many armies and manipulating people into fighting them, but she has promised to release her control over Lord Vexil. Whether that turns out to be a good thing I couldn't start to guess.
Then she turned into a silver dragon, which by this point didn't really surprise me at all.
I think we're going to help the Gallians next. We have an agreement, after all.
I really hope this isn't what the wendigo wants.
Once Aunold had stopped being a squirrel we had to decide what to do next. Our own people were safe from the undead threat, but there were still the giants attacking the Blood Druids, the hobgoblins attacking Gallia, the sea devils attacking the port, and of course the White Witch of Gallia and the ongoing threat of the wendigo.
We concluded that while the Blood Druids were our enemy, they were our enemy, and we didn't want them to lose, especially not now that we'd heard that Taint had survived being nailed to a tree and had become their religious leader.
No, I don't know what happened to the tree, but I doubt it came out of the experience intact.
We headed for the giant's camp, and Aunold and me put on our cloaks and flew over to scout. Quite a lot of them weren't actually giants. If we called on the remains of our tribe, they would be well able to handle the smaller threats while we took on the leader and his fellow giants.
We began in our usual style, with Aunold and me sending in some fireballs. I summoned a flytrap to provide Turgut with some melee backup. And it would have all gone smoothly if the leader hadn't turned out to be some kind of shaman like Aunold. Fighting someone who couldn't be hurt by spells was quite a challenge. The invisible wall he put up wasn't helpful either. All in all it was quite an embarrassing fight.
It would have been more embarrassing if we'd lost, of course. Once you've won it's much easier to triumphantly appear on top of a hill and declare your magnificent victory.
The White Witch showed up again afterwards, apparently not unhappy with us. It probably helped that certain people shut up and let me do the talking, of course. I seem to have a little of the fairy charm that my tribespeople lack. I still don't really understand what her plan was, and why it involved quite so many armies and manipulating people into fighting them, but she has promised to release her control over Lord Vexil. Whether that turns out to be a good thing I couldn't start to guess.
Then she turned into a silver dragon, which by this point didn't really surprise me at all.
I think we're going to help the Gallians next. We have an agreement, after all.
I really hope this isn't what the wendigo wants.
Saturday, 25 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 8: Out On The Town
Roleplaying therapy had proved highly effective, and the team were feeling a little more sane by the end of it with some basic grasp of how to human again.
Well, most of them. Exactly what had happened to Marlon was a bit of a mystery. Bross Kemp was still popping up from time to time, but interspersed with Dick Hunter, Kirk Shatner, and a variety of other characters. Fortunately the therapy meant that Requiem was dealing with this pretty well, and had even managed to stop listening to The Smiths and switch to Adele. She had remembered the assassin who attempted to shoot at them during the gang war between Bushido and Stomp Street though. She kind of wanted to kill him, but felt that perhaps questioning him about why he had been trying to shoot them might be a good idea too, especially given that he definitely had high level trauma team cover.
Quinton, having got the assassin's ID details while treating him, looked up his details. His real name was Henry, although he went by a number of aliases inclusing Deadyeye, Heatseeker and William H. Bonny. Also, Arasaka had a bounty on him from several years ago when he supposedly stole one of their cars. A 50K bounty definitely sounded like someone worth finding.
Everyone hit the streets to try to learn more about him, where Nemo quickly discovered that Henry was currently going by the alias of Heatseeker - but more importantly (and annoyingly) the bounty was out of date. Nevertheless, Requiem was still interested in finding him, so the team took a trip to the Afterlife, a solo bar in a rather nicer part of town.
After complaining about the parking fees and the entry costs, the team got down to the serious business of complaining about the drinks. On the second level they encountered a fixer, flanked by two catgirls. He apparently knew all about Heatseeker and could tell them practically everything about him - for a price. Since the price was 50K and all they really wanted was his ICQ number or AIM screenname, they rather lost interest at this point and returned to complaining about the drinks.
"Why is my drink made of petrol and worms?"
Nemo was very keen to find a ninja, having heard there were some in the buildings, so along with Requiem he headed for the third level. It wasn't long before Requiem spotted the ghost suit clad ninja following Nemo, and sat down with a couple of other guests to enjoy the show. Instead, Nemo was invited to visit the fighting pit in the basement.
After a bit of confusion where it was established that nobody actually wanted to fight a ninja, everyone found seats in the fighting pit's spectator area and watched a fight between Average Joe and Mike the Masher. Rolando bet on Average Joe. It seemed like Mike was going to win at the point he had Joe on the floor, sitting on him and preparing to beat him to death. However, this was, as Requiem predicted, the point at which the fight got more interesting when Joe sat up and bit the end off Mike's penis.
Rolando collected his winnings. Requiem, suddenly reminded of earlier conversations, reminded everyone that she had not been on any dates before Ricky and did not have a drawer full of severed penises. Much ribbing speculation then occurred about whether she had them about her person instead. She insisted that she only had one, and it was in the shrine at home. Rolando teasing her about the shrine was not appreciated, and when Nemo backed her up, reassuring her that her pain was justified, she kicked Rolando. It was an impressive and educational display of martial arts, but despite this and her cyber legs, she only gave him a light bruise, much like when she shot Nemo.
Around this time it was decided that leaving the bar would be advisable.
Outside, they were walking back to the car when some of the team noticed something odd: two sedans about to perform some kind of pincer ram on a limosine. (Requiem for once didn't notice, being both irritated and somewhat adrift without anything to focus her obsessiveness on.) What to do? It was impossible to know who the baddies were in this situation. Before they could do anything though, the cars crashed and people got out of the sedans.
Two of them had SMGs. Remembering what happened last time they'd taken on a group involving SMGs, Requiem drew her Arnos and killed both of them. The others started taking down the rest while Marlon, who by now had settled on the character of Bruce Leeroy, attempted to communicate with the occupants of the limo.
The remaining attackers shot rather ineffectually at Requiem, causing only minor scrapes to her cyber limbs. Realising they were somewhat outgunned, some of them got back in their car and started driving away. Rolando shot at them, as did Requiem after taking out the last two people from the other car, but they were unable to stop the vehicle.
Finally, the limo door was opened (largely due to Quinton pulling until it came off). Inside were two frightened looking girls, one of whom was holding a small pistol with the safety on. Quinton went to apply first aid to the unconscious driver, and Requiem got in with the two girls.
"Call that a gun? Now this is a gun."
The girl dropped the pistol, and Requiem put the Arno away.
The girls were on their way to a hotel, and were clearly in need of an armed escort. Perhaps some sort of compensation could be arranged on arrival? Quinton, after much insisting from Requiem that he not be shoved in the glove box (she was sure that's not what Persophone Cardiff would have done), put the driver in the recovery position in the back of the limo, and drove everyone to the hotel.
Will the girls' family pay for the armed escort? Is Heatseeker relevant to anything? Will the GM remember to stop expecting us to be decent human beings and get us railroaded back to the actual plot? Find out in the next appalling episode of Ramos Reportage!
Well, most of them. Exactly what had happened to Marlon was a bit of a mystery. Bross Kemp was still popping up from time to time, but interspersed with Dick Hunter, Kirk Shatner, and a variety of other characters. Fortunately the therapy meant that Requiem was dealing with this pretty well, and had even managed to stop listening to The Smiths and switch to Adele. She had remembered the assassin who attempted to shoot at them during the gang war between Bushido and Stomp Street though. She kind of wanted to kill him, but felt that perhaps questioning him about why he had been trying to shoot them might be a good idea too, especially given that he definitely had high level trauma team cover.
Quinton, having got the assassin's ID details while treating him, looked up his details. His real name was Henry, although he went by a number of aliases inclusing Deadyeye, Heatseeker and William H. Bonny. Also, Arasaka had a bounty on him from several years ago when he supposedly stole one of their cars. A 50K bounty definitely sounded like someone worth finding.
Everyone hit the streets to try to learn more about him, where Nemo quickly discovered that Henry was currently going by the alias of Heatseeker - but more importantly (and annoyingly) the bounty was out of date. Nevertheless, Requiem was still interested in finding him, so the team took a trip to the Afterlife, a solo bar in a rather nicer part of town.
After complaining about the parking fees and the entry costs, the team got down to the serious business of complaining about the drinks. On the second level they encountered a fixer, flanked by two catgirls. He apparently knew all about Heatseeker and could tell them practically everything about him - for a price. Since the price was 50K and all they really wanted was his ICQ number or AIM screenname, they rather lost interest at this point and returned to complaining about the drinks.
"Why is my drink made of petrol and worms?"
Nemo was very keen to find a ninja, having heard there were some in the buildings, so along with Requiem he headed for the third level. It wasn't long before Requiem spotted the ghost suit clad ninja following Nemo, and sat down with a couple of other guests to enjoy the show. Instead, Nemo was invited to visit the fighting pit in the basement.
After a bit of confusion where it was established that nobody actually wanted to fight a ninja, everyone found seats in the fighting pit's spectator area and watched a fight between Average Joe and Mike the Masher. Rolando bet on Average Joe. It seemed like Mike was going to win at the point he had Joe on the floor, sitting on him and preparing to beat him to death. However, this was, as Requiem predicted, the point at which the fight got more interesting when Joe sat up and bit the end off Mike's penis.
Rolando collected his winnings. Requiem, suddenly reminded of earlier conversations, reminded everyone that she had not been on any dates before Ricky and did not have a drawer full of severed penises. Much ribbing speculation then occurred about whether she had them about her person instead. She insisted that she only had one, and it was in the shrine at home. Rolando teasing her about the shrine was not appreciated, and when Nemo backed her up, reassuring her that her pain was justified, she kicked Rolando. It was an impressive and educational display of martial arts, but despite this and her cyber legs, she only gave him a light bruise, much like when she shot Nemo.
Around this time it was decided that leaving the bar would be advisable.
Outside, they were walking back to the car when some of the team noticed something odd: two sedans about to perform some kind of pincer ram on a limosine. (Requiem for once didn't notice, being both irritated and somewhat adrift without anything to focus her obsessiveness on.) What to do? It was impossible to know who the baddies were in this situation. Before they could do anything though, the cars crashed and people got out of the sedans.
Two of them had SMGs. Remembering what happened last time they'd taken on a group involving SMGs, Requiem drew her Arnos and killed both of them. The others started taking down the rest while Marlon, who by now had settled on the character of Bruce Leeroy, attempted to communicate with the occupants of the limo.
The remaining attackers shot rather ineffectually at Requiem, causing only minor scrapes to her cyber limbs. Realising they were somewhat outgunned, some of them got back in their car and started driving away. Rolando shot at them, as did Requiem after taking out the last two people from the other car, but they were unable to stop the vehicle.
Finally, the limo door was opened (largely due to Quinton pulling until it came off). Inside were two frightened looking girls, one of whom was holding a small pistol with the safety on. Quinton went to apply first aid to the unconscious driver, and Requiem got in with the two girls.
"Call that a gun? Now this is a gun."
The girl dropped the pistol, and Requiem put the Arno away.
The girls were on their way to a hotel, and were clearly in need of an armed escort. Perhaps some sort of compensation could be arranged on arrival? Quinton, after much insisting from Requiem that he not be shoved in the glove box (she was sure that's not what Persophone Cardiff would have done), put the driver in the recovery position in the back of the limo, and drove everyone to the hotel.
Will the girls' family pay for the armed escort? Is Heatseeker relevant to anything? Will the GM remember to stop expecting us to be decent human beings and get us railroaded back to the actual plot? Find out in the next appalling episode of Ramos Reportage!
Thursday, 23 January 2020
Call of Cthulhu: The Case of Cinthia Castillo
This is the character I played in a modern day Call of Cthulhu game at Tales from Dreaming Spires. While 13 is not my record for SAN loss in a single game of Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green, never before have I had a character end an adventure so utterly broken. Which means the only way to get her out of my brain is to tell her story.
"It would really help if you could tell us what happened."
Cinthia Castillo sat hunched up on the bed, arms wrapped around her legs. Physically she was looking better. Neat dressings covered the tissue damage, and she'd finally submitted to having her hair brushed. But one look into those haunted brown eyes was enough to see that she'd suffered far worse than physical damage.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"You won't believe me."
Not the first time she'd heard that. "Miss Castillo...may I call you Cinthia?" She waited for a nod, then continued. "Cinthia, I've heard a lot of strange things. You can tell me anything. There's no need to hide. I need to hear the truth so I can work out how to help you."
She watched the girl. No words, but the shift in body language gave her her answer.
"Shall we start with the plane?"
"We were all sitting together at the back." Cinthia's voice was hesitant. "Me and Doctor England. Doctor Chandrasekar and Doctor Green. Nick, the other student. The Japanese doctor - Hina? Doctor Gates. The Russian and the Italian I...I can't remember their names." She took the offered tissue, and composed herself again. "There was turbulance, but I wasn't worried about that. Someone said we'd been struck by lightning, and then...then the crash." She paused for a deep breath before continuing. "Nine of us made it. The others...all we could do was make them comfortable."
Nine survivors. There had been considerably fewer than nine people airlifted off that mountain.
"We could smell the jet fuel, so we grabbed what we could and ran. We were in the forest by the time it exploded. We had to keep walking. It was the only way we could keep warm. We found a river and decided to try following it downstream. That's when we found the writing."
"Yes?" She could guess which writing. One of the survivors was still clutching a book, with notes scrawled in two different hands and two different alphabets.
"It was written on the trees. We thought it was old Norse at first, because of the runes, but then we realised we could read some of it. So we made a copy and I wrote it out in English, but I was still working on it when we found the first stone. It had carvings on it, and...blood, I think. Doctor Green was the first one to touch it. He went a bit strange for a few moments, and then told us about how he'd seen himself as some kind of barbarian with a spear. So we decided we should have several of us touch it at once. Doctor England was doing it and I couldn't let him think I was scared."
"You were Doctor England's research student, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"But you were paying your own way on this trip. A long way to go for a conference. Was there more to your relationship?" A long silence followed that question, which nonetheless spoke volumes. "I'm not here to judge. Just to understand."
"No. But I hoped if...if we spent this time together..."
She handed Cinthia more tissues. "It's OK. I understand. Shall we go back to the rock?"
"Yes. Yes. We all put our hands on it together. I thought maybe I'd see something like what Doctor Green talked about. But it was...it was..." She hugged her legs tighter as her whole body began to shake. "I was trapped in a box. Surrounded by fire. My shoes were melting. Then my feet were burning. I thought I was going to die. And then I was back with the others and they were talking about Romans and stuff but all I could do was scream."
A hallucination, of course, but nevertheless one that had profoundly affected her. It was some time before she found the strength to talk again, and when she did it was in a quieter voice.
"It was getting dark. We went back into the trees and the others lit a fire. I was so cold. But I couldn't...I couldn't..."
"It's OK. You're safe here."
Cinthia nodded, took a few deep breaths, and carried on.
"We managed to get some sleep, but when it got light something had happened to Doctor Gates. She started wandering off back to the stones, and then she fell over. Doctor England said she'd had a stroke. If we could have got her to a hospital she might have been OK, but out there there was nothing we could do. There were these little crystal things in the ground that froze anything they touched, so we pushed her onto one of them. So at least it would be quick and painless."
She didn't wait for the offer of tissues this time, reaching out to grab a handful instead.
"We had to leave her. We followed a game trail through the trees. There was a little hut and the others found some old things there. Someone else who'd been here years ago. And then we found the clearing with the stone altar. That's when they started putting it all together."
"They?"
"The others. Some of them saw that altar when they touched the stone. We found remains in the snow. Romans. Some of them saw Romans. And the messages on the trees. It all fitted. But we'd left two people in the hut. I don't know what happened but when we went back..." She paused for a moment, steeling herself to continue. "One of them was dead. The Italian, I think. The other one killed him. He came out with blood on his face. He was holding an arm. I think he'd ripped off the body."
"Did you see the body?"
"No. One of the others did. But I couldn't go in. We ran when he came out, back to the altar. They'd all figured it out by then. The reason why the tree messages said the way out didn't work with only one. The way to escape was to sacrifice someone on the altar."
"And did you all choose someone to sacrifice."
"Yes. They chose me."
She was rocking back and forth now as well as shaking, and had given up any attempt at keeping her eyes dry.
"I ran, but they chased me. All except Doctor Chandrasekar. And Doctor Green wasn't well and couldn't keep up, but it was...it was Doctor England who caught me. I tried to stop him. I tried to make him understand. But I was so cold and so scared and he dragged me back through the woods to the altar. That's when I saw what happened to Doctor Chandrasekar."
For a while she was sobbing too hard to carry on, but with an effort she managed to pull herself together enough to speak again. "The Russian. He wasn't even human any more. He stabbed Doctor Chandrasekar with a pen. I saw him die on that altar. He was the only one who didn't try to kill me, and all I could think of was how this meant I didn't have to die."
"What happened to the Russian?"
"The others tried to fight him, but none of us knew how to fight. I stuck him with an epipen and he ran off. And that's...that's all I can remember before the helicopter arrived."
"That's OK. You've done really well."
Five people had been pulled off that mountainside alive, all frostbiten and hypothermic. She had wondered how Cinthia had been the worst affected, despite being the only one wearing a proper coat. Now she understood. But the frostbite was already healing. There were other wounds here, that had cut much deeper than mere snow and ice. And they would take longer to heal.
"It would really help if you could tell us what happened."
Cinthia Castillo sat hunched up on the bed, arms wrapped around her legs. Physically she was looking better. Neat dressings covered the tissue damage, and she'd finally submitted to having her hair brushed. But one look into those haunted brown eyes was enough to see that she'd suffered far worse than physical damage.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"You won't believe me."
Not the first time she'd heard that. "Miss Castillo...may I call you Cinthia?" She waited for a nod, then continued. "Cinthia, I've heard a lot of strange things. You can tell me anything. There's no need to hide. I need to hear the truth so I can work out how to help you."
She watched the girl. No words, but the shift in body language gave her her answer.
"Shall we start with the plane?"
"We were all sitting together at the back." Cinthia's voice was hesitant. "Me and Doctor England. Doctor Chandrasekar and Doctor Green. Nick, the other student. The Japanese doctor - Hina? Doctor Gates. The Russian and the Italian I...I can't remember their names." She took the offered tissue, and composed herself again. "There was turbulance, but I wasn't worried about that. Someone said we'd been struck by lightning, and then...then the crash." She paused for a deep breath before continuing. "Nine of us made it. The others...all we could do was make them comfortable."
Nine survivors. There had been considerably fewer than nine people airlifted off that mountain.
"We could smell the jet fuel, so we grabbed what we could and ran. We were in the forest by the time it exploded. We had to keep walking. It was the only way we could keep warm. We found a river and decided to try following it downstream. That's when we found the writing."
"Yes?" She could guess which writing. One of the survivors was still clutching a book, with notes scrawled in two different hands and two different alphabets.
"It was written on the trees. We thought it was old Norse at first, because of the runes, but then we realised we could read some of it. So we made a copy and I wrote it out in English, but I was still working on it when we found the first stone. It had carvings on it, and...blood, I think. Doctor Green was the first one to touch it. He went a bit strange for a few moments, and then told us about how he'd seen himself as some kind of barbarian with a spear. So we decided we should have several of us touch it at once. Doctor England was doing it and I couldn't let him think I was scared."
"You were Doctor England's research student, weren't you?"
"Yes."
"But you were paying your own way on this trip. A long way to go for a conference. Was there more to your relationship?" A long silence followed that question, which nonetheless spoke volumes. "I'm not here to judge. Just to understand."
"No. But I hoped if...if we spent this time together..."
She handed Cinthia more tissues. "It's OK. I understand. Shall we go back to the rock?"
"Yes. Yes. We all put our hands on it together. I thought maybe I'd see something like what Doctor Green talked about. But it was...it was..." She hugged her legs tighter as her whole body began to shake. "I was trapped in a box. Surrounded by fire. My shoes were melting. Then my feet were burning. I thought I was going to die. And then I was back with the others and they were talking about Romans and stuff but all I could do was scream."
A hallucination, of course, but nevertheless one that had profoundly affected her. It was some time before she found the strength to talk again, and when she did it was in a quieter voice.
"It was getting dark. We went back into the trees and the others lit a fire. I was so cold. But I couldn't...I couldn't..."
"It's OK. You're safe here."
Cinthia nodded, took a few deep breaths, and carried on.
"We managed to get some sleep, but when it got light something had happened to Doctor Gates. She started wandering off back to the stones, and then she fell over. Doctor England said she'd had a stroke. If we could have got her to a hospital she might have been OK, but out there there was nothing we could do. There were these little crystal things in the ground that froze anything they touched, so we pushed her onto one of them. So at least it would be quick and painless."
She didn't wait for the offer of tissues this time, reaching out to grab a handful instead.
"We had to leave her. We followed a game trail through the trees. There was a little hut and the others found some old things there. Someone else who'd been here years ago. And then we found the clearing with the stone altar. That's when they started putting it all together."
"They?"
"The others. Some of them saw that altar when they touched the stone. We found remains in the snow. Romans. Some of them saw Romans. And the messages on the trees. It all fitted. But we'd left two people in the hut. I don't know what happened but when we went back..." She paused for a moment, steeling herself to continue. "One of them was dead. The Italian, I think. The other one killed him. He came out with blood on his face. He was holding an arm. I think he'd ripped off the body."
"Did you see the body?"
"No. One of the others did. But I couldn't go in. We ran when he came out, back to the altar. They'd all figured it out by then. The reason why the tree messages said the way out didn't work with only one. The way to escape was to sacrifice someone on the altar."
"And did you all choose someone to sacrifice."
"Yes. They chose me."
She was rocking back and forth now as well as shaking, and had given up any attempt at keeping her eyes dry.
"I ran, but they chased me. All except Doctor Chandrasekar. And Doctor Green wasn't well and couldn't keep up, but it was...it was Doctor England who caught me. I tried to stop him. I tried to make him understand. But I was so cold and so scared and he dragged me back through the woods to the altar. That's when I saw what happened to Doctor Chandrasekar."
For a while she was sobbing too hard to carry on, but with an effort she managed to pull herself together enough to speak again. "The Russian. He wasn't even human any more. He stabbed Doctor Chandrasekar with a pen. I saw him die on that altar. He was the only one who didn't try to kill me, and all I could think of was how this meant I didn't have to die."
"What happened to the Russian?"
"The others tried to fight him, but none of us knew how to fight. I stuck him with an epipen and he ran off. And that's...that's all I can remember before the helicopter arrived."
"That's OK. You've done really well."
Five people had been pulled off that mountainside alive, all frostbiten and hypothermic. She had wondered how Cinthia had been the worst affected, despite being the only one wearing a proper coat. Now she understood. But the frostbite was already healing. There were other wounds here, that had cut much deeper than mere snow and ice. And they would take longer to heal.
Wednesday, 22 January 2020
Crew of the Aliya, part 12: Breadcrumbs
The crew spent some time on Coriolis, restocking the ship. Hamsa had business elsewhere, so had disembarked, taking his collection of spare parts with him. While shopping for replacements, Tahir ran into the person who'd sold him his second hand environmental scanner. He was quite keen to get off station in a hurry, and we were very much in need of someone better at negotiation if we were going to keep paying the mortgage. Karim joined the crew.
We had already been looking at the Rimward Reach after our experiences on Kua, so when Jinna contacted us, worried about Lavim once again, we were ready to listen. She'd had a message from him, giving coordinates out in the Reach, near Djachroum station, and while it looked a lot like a trap, we weren't going to miss out on an opportunity to get to the crew of the Fatima's Bounty.
The mortgage was still on our minds, however. It was a three week journey, and it made sense to pick up some cargo to take with us. Karim got talking, while Sayah searched online, and between them got us some work transporting a cargo. Good pay, no questions asked. Karim managed to squeeze an extra 2000 birr out of the deal. Along with a few tons of mineral extractors that we were confident would be an easy sell at Djachroum, and a surveillance mission to carry out on arrival, we'd covered the cost of the journey with some profit on top.
Jinna was keen to come with us and see for herself what had happened to Lavim. There was some initial doubt about whether it was worth bringing her, but after she auditioned as ship's cook by making us a three course meal, we were finally convinced. She also saved us the trouble of getting a pet for the ship by bringing her own cat.
The three week journey passed uneventfully, and we arrived at Djachroum. Jinna was keen to get going, but first we had cargo to deal with. We unloaded the 'no questions asked' cargo and picked up our pay, and found a buyer for the mineral extractors. We were tempted to stay longer and investigate the supposedly haunted part of the station, but Jinna was very insistant, and with no real reason to delay, we set off again to the coordinates she'd given us.
When we arrived we found only a signal buoy. Tahir spacewalked out to pick it up, and Sayah extracted the message. Another set of coordinates and a message that he hadn't been able to wait any longer. It was looking more and more like a trap. But we weren't deterred.
We found the Fatima's Bounty, attached via airlock to an asteroid. Something wasn't right here. The ship was dark, and as we approached, the sensors failed to locate any life signs aboard. Closer inspection revealed the ship didn't even have atmosphere.
We suited up, and attached the Aliya to the ship's other airlock. With some help from Suleiman, we got aboard. There was some debate as to what to do with the ship given our history with them. Sayah's suggestion was that stealing their cushions seemed appropriately petty.
Karim: "Do you know how uncomfortable it is trying to fly in a ship with no cushions?"
Others: "Yes! And it's all because of them!"
All the same, there were probably people in trouble here, and unlike the Fatima's Bounty crew, we weren't the kind to abandon people. After sending in Gurgeh's reconnaisance drone, we made our way to the bridge. Power was down, but Gurgeh managed to rig up enough power for Sayah to pull the final logs from the ship's computer.
It didn't make for comforting reading. Two boarding parties had been sent out. Both had lost contact after only three minutes. Not long afterwards, something had started affecting the ship itself, causing it to fire one of its torpedos with the torpedo bay door closed, and finally an infection of data memes lead to a complete shut down. Gurgeh told Suleiman to separate himself from any of this ship's systems immediately.
We could walk away, taking the ship's cushions and abandoning the crew to whatever fate had become of them. But that (apart from the cushions, at least) wasn't who we were.
We had already been looking at the Rimward Reach after our experiences on Kua, so when Jinna contacted us, worried about Lavim once again, we were ready to listen. She'd had a message from him, giving coordinates out in the Reach, near Djachroum station, and while it looked a lot like a trap, we weren't going to miss out on an opportunity to get to the crew of the Fatima's Bounty.
The mortgage was still on our minds, however. It was a three week journey, and it made sense to pick up some cargo to take with us. Karim got talking, while Sayah searched online, and between them got us some work transporting a cargo. Good pay, no questions asked. Karim managed to squeeze an extra 2000 birr out of the deal. Along with a few tons of mineral extractors that we were confident would be an easy sell at Djachroum, and a surveillance mission to carry out on arrival, we'd covered the cost of the journey with some profit on top.
Jinna was keen to come with us and see for herself what had happened to Lavim. There was some initial doubt about whether it was worth bringing her, but after she auditioned as ship's cook by making us a three course meal, we were finally convinced. She also saved us the trouble of getting a pet for the ship by bringing her own cat.
The three week journey passed uneventfully, and we arrived at Djachroum. Jinna was keen to get going, but first we had cargo to deal with. We unloaded the 'no questions asked' cargo and picked up our pay, and found a buyer for the mineral extractors. We were tempted to stay longer and investigate the supposedly haunted part of the station, but Jinna was very insistant, and with no real reason to delay, we set off again to the coordinates she'd given us.
When we arrived we found only a signal buoy. Tahir spacewalked out to pick it up, and Sayah extracted the message. Another set of coordinates and a message that he hadn't been able to wait any longer. It was looking more and more like a trap. But we weren't deterred.
We found the Fatima's Bounty, attached via airlock to an asteroid. Something wasn't right here. The ship was dark, and as we approached, the sensors failed to locate any life signs aboard. Closer inspection revealed the ship didn't even have atmosphere.
We suited up, and attached the Aliya to the ship's other airlock. With some help from Suleiman, we got aboard. There was some debate as to what to do with the ship given our history with them. Sayah's suggestion was that stealing their cushions seemed appropriately petty.
Karim: "Do you know how uncomfortable it is trying to fly in a ship with no cushions?"
Others: "Yes! And it's all because of them!"
All the same, there were probably people in trouble here, and unlike the Fatima's Bounty crew, we weren't the kind to abandon people. After sending in Gurgeh's reconnaisance drone, we made our way to the bridge. Power was down, but Gurgeh managed to rig up enough power for Sayah to pull the final logs from the ship's computer.
It didn't make for comforting reading. Two boarding parties had been sent out. Both had lost contact after only three minutes. Not long afterwards, something had started affecting the ship itself, causing it to fire one of its torpedos with the torpedo bay door closed, and finally an infection of data memes lead to a complete shut down. Gurgeh told Suleiman to separate himself from any of this ship's systems immediately.
We could walk away, taking the ship's cushions and abandoning the crew to whatever fate had become of them. But that (apart from the cushions, at least) wasn't who we were.
Tuesday, 21 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 7: Group Therapy
The GM had contracted some kind of LARP plague, and wasn't able to run the game. The rest of us still wanted to play though, and one of the group just happened to have something prepared...
After seeing Bross, Rolando and Requiem standing by doing nothing while a ganger was about to beat up old people and children, Quinton Smith was starting to worry about the gradual erosion of the team's humanity. It was clear that everyone was in desperate need of some kind of therapy. He decided to try a simple roleplaying exercise.
Nemo agreed to run a one-off game of Night's Black Agents for the group, with some pre-genned characters. It was set in the present day, but in a bizarre alternate reality where nobody had any cyberware but computers were impossibly powerful. All the characters were CIA agents. It would be a good opportunity for the team to practice behaving like normal people.
Quinton selected Hung-Ke Lee, an American hacker for his character. Rolando picked Oliver “Ashcan” Quinn, Irish explosives/wheelman and former member of the IRA. He made a creditable effort at keeping the accent going.
Requiem initially wanted to play the French assassin, but this didn't seem like a particularly theraputic choice. Instead she selected Persephone Cardiff, a British analyst who previously worked for MI5. Persephone was blonde, blue eyed, and could easily pass for Scandinavian. Requiem had always wondered what it was like to be blonde.
Bross/Marlon unsurprisingly had a lot of trouble choosing a character. He also considered the French assassin and flirted with the idea of playing the Colombian thief, but ultimately settled on Mace Hunter, American infiltrator and con man. (Immediately renaming him to Dick Hunter). Dick had acting experience, and was highly skilled at disguise, enabling him to effortlessly slip into different roles.
Perhaps this wouldn't be quite so therapeutic to Marlon after all?
Consulting their personality and relationship descriptions, Quinton and Requiem both discovered their characters were huge fans of Dick Hunter, having complete confidence and trust in him. Oddly enough, nobody entirely trusted the deranged Irish bomber. What was he doing in this CIA cell anyway?
We received our assignment. As is traditional, all rules about the CIA only operating overseas were immediately chucked in the bin and we headed for Virginia with fake FBI badges to look into a large agri-business called Bio-Novis. An extremely popular company, regarded as highly innovative and good to work for - with the slight caveat that nobody seemed to know what the company actually did. We had only one lead - someone called Eddie Joiner, who was somehow involved in financial irregularity and was supposed to be coming forward but hadn't.
Some initial surveillance at Bio-Novis HQ got us information on their security - seriously locked down. We decided the best plan was to kidnap one of the employees (preferably one who looked a bit like Dick) and use his credentials to get Dick into the building. Then we remembered that we were actual legitimate government agents with badges and everything, and were able to do stuff like question people.
Surveillance identified a suitable person to talk to, and rather than pick him up at work, we decided to be less conspicuous and go to his house instead. Dick took the back entrance (yes, jokes were made) while Hung-Ke Lee and Persephone covered the front.
Once picked up, we bundled him into the van. Lee was about to make the house look like it had been robbed, until we remembered again that we were legitimate government agents, and just left a note on his door to let his friends know that he'd had an emergency and couldn't make the game.
We questioned the man without any violence or even any threats, just showing him our badges, and he was quite willing to talk. We learned more details about Bio-Novis. The CEO was Catherine Alto. Her husband, Owen Alto, was also high up in the company. Our man worked in experimental farming, producing medical cannabis with an extremely fast yield.
He knew Eddie Joiner, and was a bit worried about him. He'd looked bad a week ago at the running club but didn't want to take time off. Now he was actually off sick. Eddie's hobbies including running, hiking and weightlifting, so he should have been very healthy. His actual job was chemical compliance and risk assessment, but like most people high up in the company, he didn't actually do much of that work himself.
Our man didn't know much else that was useful, but he did have a laptop with access to the company's VPN. That was enough to let us corroborate what he'd told us, and also pick up more information.
We learned that Bio-Novis had a data recovery pick-up scheduled, and decided to intercept it. Dick posed as an employee of the data company, and Oliver drove us to the HQ where we picked up a lot of old hard drives scheduled for destruction. The data on them was encrypted, but with a brilliant hacker like Lee on the team, we were soon able to read what was on them.
(There was a brief digression at this point on the subject of data storage. We were skeptical when Nemo started describing terabytes of data ("That's, like, more data storage than exists in the world!") and when he got onto petabytes and exabytes we accused him of making up words. Quinton couldn't believe that with all this computing power, he still had to use a keyboard and screen to access it instead of just plugging in his neuralware. And for some reason we all felt that for the hacking he really needed five additional monitors, a blowjob and someone to point a gun at him.)
What we learned from the recovered drives was disturbing. There was, as we had suspected, a pattern to the layout of the lab buildings in Bio-Novis farmland. It took Oliver to figure out what it was though. The position of the buildings matched the stars in the constellation Ophiuchus - the serpent bearer.
There was more. Cannabis wasn't the only thing the company was farming. There were also animals, and a lot of them were being born stillborn and deformed. Cows were dying of stress fractures caused by physical trauma. Security dogs had been found killed and gutted.
(Requiem reckoned it was aliens, but Quinton didn't think proper CIA agents would jump to the alien hypothesis quite that fast, so GMOs were picked as a more plausible conspiracy.)
Based on the recovered data, experimental farming was only the outside image of what Bio-Novis did. They collected data about people. Vast amounts of data.
We still wanted to find Eddie Joiner though, and having obtained his phone number, we did some triangulation and tracked him to North Dakota. We decided against a 27 hour drive to get there and decided to fly instead, remembering once again that we were a legitimate government agency and could do things like use an official CIA aircraft to get there.
We found Eddie Joiner in a farmhouse in the back of beyond. After a brief stand-off where we remembered we were legitimate government agents with badges and didn't have to go straight to shooting, we realised that the extremely unwell looking man before us bore little resemblance to the middle aged fitness addict that had been described to us.
Dick called a friend in the CDC and described the symptoms. Persephone suspected radiation, but the CDC thought organo-phosphate poisoning was more likely. Eddie was still well enough to talk though. He was able to tell us that Owen Alto (who was incidentally not being faithful to Catherine) had been kidnapped in Dubai (or at least, that's what Catherine thought.) Catherine had embezzled large amounts of company funds to allow her to pay a ransom for him. He also knew that the injured cows were due to some experiments that Bio-Novis were doing on predators.
At that point, Persephone's combat sense activated (apparently she did have one thing in common with Requiem) and she grabbed Eddie to throw him to the ground, preventing him being shot by a sniper outside. Unfortunately, the round instead went through Eddie's laptop where he had all the evidence of everything he knew.
Dick ran outside to deal with the sniper. He got shot, through and through, but brushed it off and caught the sniper. Oliver got back in the van to run the sniper over if he tried anything silly like running away any more. Persephone got a phone call from a friend, wanting to know if she was in North Dakota, and if she was in any way involved in a meth lab that local law enforcement were on their way to.
It was clearly time to leave. They all piled into Eddie's jeep, along with Eddie who didn't feel he had anything better to do with what little was left of his life at this point. For part of the drive they were pursued by a garbage truck, which Oliver easily outdrove, but more worryingly, the data signal on their phones kept cutting out. Not entirely unlikely when driving through rural North Dakota, but it seemed to be a bit more than that.
("You can do netrunning on a phone???")
Oliver took us to an airport, where we ditched Eddie's jeep and went to talk to the huge crowd of emergency services personnel who were gathered there. Our badges got us past the barriers and in for the proper briefing in the hotel lounge. Oliver and Persephone went straight to the bar to investigate the whiskey supplies.
The problems with the data signal didn't only apply to us. It was happening all over the US. We finally managed to get in touch with our contact in Canaveral. There was something in the sky that shouldn't have been there.
("It is aliens!")
Catherine Alto and Bio-Novis had thought they were collecting data as a disaster recovery project. In fact, they had been given the job by the very people who were about to bring about that disaster. Bio-Novis had played right into the aliens' appendages.
There were five days of silence before the attack came. When it did, it lasted only nine hours. Humanity surrendered.
("Sorry, guys. This was supposed to be therapeutic. I didn't expect it to get this dark.")
Has playing a tabletop roleplay game positively affected the team's sanity? Will Marlon be able to let the Dick Hunter personality go? Find out in the next bizarre episode of Ramos Reportage!
After seeing Bross, Rolando and Requiem standing by doing nothing while a ganger was about to beat up old people and children, Quinton Smith was starting to worry about the gradual erosion of the team's humanity. It was clear that everyone was in desperate need of some kind of therapy. He decided to try a simple roleplaying exercise.
Nemo agreed to run a one-off game of Night's Black Agents for the group, with some pre-genned characters. It was set in the present day, but in a bizarre alternate reality where nobody had any cyberware but computers were impossibly powerful. All the characters were CIA agents. It would be a good opportunity for the team to practice behaving like normal people.
Quinton selected Hung-Ke Lee, an American hacker for his character. Rolando picked Oliver “Ashcan” Quinn, Irish explosives/wheelman and former member of the IRA. He made a creditable effort at keeping the accent going.
Requiem initially wanted to play the French assassin, but this didn't seem like a particularly theraputic choice. Instead she selected Persephone Cardiff, a British analyst who previously worked for MI5. Persephone was blonde, blue eyed, and could easily pass for Scandinavian. Requiem had always wondered what it was like to be blonde.
Bross/Marlon unsurprisingly had a lot of trouble choosing a character. He also considered the French assassin and flirted with the idea of playing the Colombian thief, but ultimately settled on Mace Hunter, American infiltrator and con man. (Immediately renaming him to Dick Hunter). Dick had acting experience, and was highly skilled at disguise, enabling him to effortlessly slip into different roles.
Perhaps this wouldn't be quite so therapeutic to Marlon after all?
Consulting their personality and relationship descriptions, Quinton and Requiem both discovered their characters were huge fans of Dick Hunter, having complete confidence and trust in him. Oddly enough, nobody entirely trusted the deranged Irish bomber. What was he doing in this CIA cell anyway?
We received our assignment. As is traditional, all rules about the CIA only operating overseas were immediately chucked in the bin and we headed for Virginia with fake FBI badges to look into a large agri-business called Bio-Novis. An extremely popular company, regarded as highly innovative and good to work for - with the slight caveat that nobody seemed to know what the company actually did. We had only one lead - someone called Eddie Joiner, who was somehow involved in financial irregularity and was supposed to be coming forward but hadn't.
Some initial surveillance at Bio-Novis HQ got us information on their security - seriously locked down. We decided the best plan was to kidnap one of the employees (preferably one who looked a bit like Dick) and use his credentials to get Dick into the building. Then we remembered that we were actual legitimate government agents with badges and everything, and were able to do stuff like question people.
Surveillance identified a suitable person to talk to, and rather than pick him up at work, we decided to be less conspicuous and go to his house instead. Dick took the back entrance (yes, jokes were made) while Hung-Ke Lee and Persephone covered the front.
Once picked up, we bundled him into the van. Lee was about to make the house look like it had been robbed, until we remembered again that we were legitimate government agents, and just left a note on his door to let his friends know that he'd had an emergency and couldn't make the game.
We questioned the man without any violence or even any threats, just showing him our badges, and he was quite willing to talk. We learned more details about Bio-Novis. The CEO was Catherine Alto. Her husband, Owen Alto, was also high up in the company. Our man worked in experimental farming, producing medical cannabis with an extremely fast yield.
He knew Eddie Joiner, and was a bit worried about him. He'd looked bad a week ago at the running club but didn't want to take time off. Now he was actually off sick. Eddie's hobbies including running, hiking and weightlifting, so he should have been very healthy. His actual job was chemical compliance and risk assessment, but like most people high up in the company, he didn't actually do much of that work himself.
Our man didn't know much else that was useful, but he did have a laptop with access to the company's VPN. That was enough to let us corroborate what he'd told us, and also pick up more information.
We learned that Bio-Novis had a data recovery pick-up scheduled, and decided to intercept it. Dick posed as an employee of the data company, and Oliver drove us to the HQ where we picked up a lot of old hard drives scheduled for destruction. The data on them was encrypted, but with a brilliant hacker like Lee on the team, we were soon able to read what was on them.
(There was a brief digression at this point on the subject of data storage. We were skeptical when Nemo started describing terabytes of data ("That's, like, more data storage than exists in the world!") and when he got onto petabytes and exabytes we accused him of making up words. Quinton couldn't believe that with all this computing power, he still had to use a keyboard and screen to access it instead of just plugging in his neuralware. And for some reason we all felt that for the hacking he really needed five additional monitors, a blowjob and someone to point a gun at him.)
What we learned from the recovered drives was disturbing. There was, as we had suspected, a pattern to the layout of the lab buildings in Bio-Novis farmland. It took Oliver to figure out what it was though. The position of the buildings matched the stars in the constellation Ophiuchus - the serpent bearer.
There was more. Cannabis wasn't the only thing the company was farming. There were also animals, and a lot of them were being born stillborn and deformed. Cows were dying of stress fractures caused by physical trauma. Security dogs had been found killed and gutted.
(Requiem reckoned it was aliens, but Quinton didn't think proper CIA agents would jump to the alien hypothesis quite that fast, so GMOs were picked as a more plausible conspiracy.)
Based on the recovered data, experimental farming was only the outside image of what Bio-Novis did. They collected data about people. Vast amounts of data.
We still wanted to find Eddie Joiner though, and having obtained his phone number, we did some triangulation and tracked him to North Dakota. We decided against a 27 hour drive to get there and decided to fly instead, remembering once again that we were a legitimate government agency and could do things like use an official CIA aircraft to get there.
We found Eddie Joiner in a farmhouse in the back of beyond. After a brief stand-off where we remembered we were legitimate government agents with badges and didn't have to go straight to shooting, we realised that the extremely unwell looking man before us bore little resemblance to the middle aged fitness addict that had been described to us.
Dick called a friend in the CDC and described the symptoms. Persephone suspected radiation, but the CDC thought organo-phosphate poisoning was more likely. Eddie was still well enough to talk though. He was able to tell us that Owen Alto (who was incidentally not being faithful to Catherine) had been kidnapped in Dubai (or at least, that's what Catherine thought.) Catherine had embezzled large amounts of company funds to allow her to pay a ransom for him. He also knew that the injured cows were due to some experiments that Bio-Novis were doing on predators.
At that point, Persephone's combat sense activated (apparently she did have one thing in common with Requiem) and she grabbed Eddie to throw him to the ground, preventing him being shot by a sniper outside. Unfortunately, the round instead went through Eddie's laptop where he had all the evidence of everything he knew.
Dick ran outside to deal with the sniper. He got shot, through and through, but brushed it off and caught the sniper. Oliver got back in the van to run the sniper over if he tried anything silly like running away any more. Persephone got a phone call from a friend, wanting to know if she was in North Dakota, and if she was in any way involved in a meth lab that local law enforcement were on their way to.
It was clearly time to leave. They all piled into Eddie's jeep, along with Eddie who didn't feel he had anything better to do with what little was left of his life at this point. For part of the drive they were pursued by a garbage truck, which Oliver easily outdrove, but more worryingly, the data signal on their phones kept cutting out. Not entirely unlikely when driving through rural North Dakota, but it seemed to be a bit more than that.
("You can do netrunning on a phone???")
Oliver took us to an airport, where we ditched Eddie's jeep and went to talk to the huge crowd of emergency services personnel who were gathered there. Our badges got us past the barriers and in for the proper briefing in the hotel lounge. Oliver and Persephone went straight to the bar to investigate the whiskey supplies.
The problems with the data signal didn't only apply to us. It was happening all over the US. We finally managed to get in touch with our contact in Canaveral. There was something in the sky that shouldn't have been there.
("It is aliens!")
Catherine Alto and Bio-Novis had thought they were collecting data as a disaster recovery project. In fact, they had been given the job by the very people who were about to bring about that disaster. Bio-Novis had played right into the aliens' appendages.
There were five days of silence before the attack came. When it did, it lasted only nine hours. Humanity surrendered.
("Sorry, guys. This was supposed to be therapeutic. I didn't expect it to get this dark.")
Has playing a tabletop roleplay game positively affected the team's sanity? Will Marlon be able to let the Dick Hunter personality go? Find out in the next bizarre episode of Ramos Reportage!
Sunday, 19 January 2020
Tales from Dreaming Spires #1
It's a fact about RPG events that it's entirely possible to find the entrance to somewhere you've never been before, just by arriving at the right time and following the trail of nerds. This successfully got me through the door of the East Oxford Community Centre, and from there there were plentiful people in t-shirts to guide me. I am loving the t-shirt trend.
This is the first time I'd attended an event with advance game sign up. I was quickly directed to the table for my morning game. A poster with the game name was up by the table, and a print-out with a list of names was on the table. There were also pencils and post-its. All very well organised.
The room itself was split in half with a set of dividers, with I think three tables on each side. Round tables, which I consider vastly better than the usual long thin ones (not that venues give you any choice in the matter, in my experience.) It was a little on the noisy side and I wonder how that could be reduced. The Northampton event was quieter - could it be down to the gaming mats covering the tables? Could the same be achieved with some paper tablecloths?
This was a brand new game, still in playtesting. The system is interesting. At its heart is the same 2d6+skill with target of 8 that I've recently encountered in Liminal, but there are sub-systems for combat and magic, and an entirely different way of representing injuries. It all works, and is put together in a thematic way. My only concern is that it does require a hell of a lot of dice. My combat pool was nine d6s in three different colours, and if I'd used my magical abilities I could potentially have needed two full sets of polyhedrals as well. The GM was prepared, with enough dice for everyone, but I wonder how many people are prepared for something that dice-heavy.
Setting-wise though, I loved it. It's an alternative history version of London, where religion has changed significantly and magic is both real and frowned upon. What I feel are the key themes for a Victorian setting - things like class inequality, and the general technology level - remain intact.
The adventure we played through had us looking into not so much a mysterious death as a mysterious corpse desecration. We didn't have all the answers by the end, but we had stopped a cult from wiping out most of London, so overall I'd call that a win. All our characters had motivations beyond what we were sharing publically, which made for some interesting roleplay. The GM told us our character's backstories privately before we began the game; I would have liked to have a handout to refer to as well, as my brain functions a lot better with both, but it was enough to inform how I played the character.
Overall a game I'll be looking out for, although it's possible I might ditch parts of the system in favour of something a bit less dice-intensive.
Timings were odd for the day. Morning games ran 10.30am to 2.30pm. Afternoon games didn't start until 4.30pm. Cowley Road has plentiful eating establishments, but given the vast pile of bacon I'd been fed that morning, I decided to go for something a bit lighter and bought some food in Sainsbury's instead.
I filled up the remaining time with a chat with a fellow larper (although not one I've ever played with) and a visit to the historical weapons display. There was a fair bit going on besides the RPG tables at this event, with a miniature painting stall and apparently some board gaming going on upstairs - not that I saw any of that because 4.30pm had rolled around and it was time to play Call of Cthulhu.
One interesting bit of the game was a handout of some writing written in runes. At this point I had to check with the GM whether he wanted me to be able to read it. I only know a couple of letters of the Futhark, but as a cryptography enthusiast I knew that if I stared at it for a couple of minutes I'd be able to read it.
Fortunately that was fine (I don't know what would have happened if there hadn't been someone with that particular hard skill at the table) and while one of the other PCs had bizarre hallucinations, I wrote down a translation. It helped. It helped the other PCs conclude that the way out of there was to kill me. Wonderful.
One of the best and most memorable games of CoC I've played. And not just for the moment when one of the other PCs got killed with a biro. A biro that one of us had given to the killer.
And then it was time to go home. I think some people were sticking around to go to the pub, but it was 8.30pm when the game finished and I wanted to get home.
Gender balance was relatively good. I think most games had at least one woman in, and the ones I played actually had a 50:50 split of players. Very nice to see.
My first experience of an event with advance sign-up was good. While I like the spontanaity of Concrete Cow and its imitators, showing up knowing what I was going to be doing was pretty reassuring. Everything felt very well organised. The only thing missing was name badges. I have absolutely no idea who I just met. There were people I follow on twitter there, I know, but without badges I have no idea who.
I wasn't sold on the weird timing. I didn't get home until past 10pm last night. Starting morning games a little earlier and leaving a smaller gap between morning and afternoon games could have seen things wrapping up at 7pm. I could either have got home in time for dinner at a vaguely reasonable hour or, if I'd known more people, gone somewhere for dinner in Oxford before driving home.
It was a pretty ambitious event, having all the additional stuff going on besides the RPGs. I have no idea how that side of it went, but hopefully it got some additional people through the door. And six or seven games at a first time event is pretty damn good already.
Overall I had a great day out, and hope to repeat it. I'm told that Tales from Screaming Spires is going to be a thing in October - a similar event but with a focus on horror games. I already have three LARPs in October, so may not be able to make it, but if it's a weekend when I'm free I'll absolutely be there.
This is the first time I'd attended an event with advance game sign up. I was quickly directed to the table for my morning game. A poster with the game name was up by the table, and a print-out with a list of names was on the table. There were also pencils and post-its. All very well organised.
The room itself was split in half with a set of dividers, with I think three tables on each side. Round tables, which I consider vastly better than the usual long thin ones (not that venues give you any choice in the matter, in my experience.) It was a little on the noisy side and I wonder how that could be reduced. The Northampton event was quieter - could it be down to the gaming mats covering the tables? Could the same be achieved with some paper tablecloths?
Game 1
My morning game was Sainted London - a game of supernatural horror in Victorian London. I tend to sign up for things at conventions that I don't get to play elsewhere, so the setting was definitely of interest. I love the Victorian setting, and I've run two campaigns of Victoriana before, but as the person in our home group who normally runs the weird games, I've never got to play in it outside of convention games.This was a brand new game, still in playtesting. The system is interesting. At its heart is the same 2d6+skill with target of 8 that I've recently encountered in Liminal, but there are sub-systems for combat and magic, and an entirely different way of representing injuries. It all works, and is put together in a thematic way. My only concern is that it does require a hell of a lot of dice. My combat pool was nine d6s in three different colours, and if I'd used my magical abilities I could potentially have needed two full sets of polyhedrals as well. The GM was prepared, with enough dice for everyone, but I wonder how many people are prepared for something that dice-heavy.
Setting-wise though, I loved it. It's an alternative history version of London, where religion has changed significantly and magic is both real and frowned upon. What I feel are the key themes for a Victorian setting - things like class inequality, and the general technology level - remain intact.
The adventure we played through had us looking into not so much a mysterious death as a mysterious corpse desecration. We didn't have all the answers by the end, but we had stopped a cult from wiping out most of London, so overall I'd call that a win. All our characters had motivations beyond what we were sharing publically, which made for some interesting roleplay. The GM told us our character's backstories privately before we began the game; I would have liked to have a handout to refer to as well, as my brain functions a lot better with both, but it was enough to inform how I played the character.
Overall a game I'll be looking out for, although it's possible I might ditch parts of the system in favour of something a bit less dice-intensive.
Timings were odd for the day. Morning games ran 10.30am to 2.30pm. Afternoon games didn't start until 4.30pm. Cowley Road has plentiful eating establishments, but given the vast pile of bacon I'd been fed that morning, I decided to go for something a bit lighter and bought some food in Sainsbury's instead.
I filled up the remaining time with a chat with a fellow larper (although not one I've ever played with) and a visit to the historical weapons display. There was a fair bit going on besides the RPG tables at this event, with a miniature painting stall and apparently some board gaming going on upstairs - not that I saw any of that because 4.30pm had rolled around and it was time to play Call of Cthulhu.
Game 2
What a great game! It started with a plane crash in the Alps and got significantly worse as we had to compete not only with a mythos entity but the extreme conditions that we were in no way prepared to deal with. By the end my character had lost 13 points of sanity and had had the most traumatic experience of any CoC character I've ever played. From the plane crash itself to almost the entire party pursuing her through the woods intent on murdering her, everything went terribly for her. She made it out alive, but is not going to be OK for a very long time.One interesting bit of the game was a handout of some writing written in runes. At this point I had to check with the GM whether he wanted me to be able to read it. I only know a couple of letters of the Futhark, but as a cryptography enthusiast I knew that if I stared at it for a couple of minutes I'd be able to read it.
Fortunately that was fine (I don't know what would have happened if there hadn't been someone with that particular hard skill at the table) and while one of the other PCs had bizarre hallucinations, I wrote down a translation. It helped. It helped the other PCs conclude that the way out of there was to kill me. Wonderful.
One of the best and most memorable games of CoC I've played. And not just for the moment when one of the other PCs got killed with a biro. A biro that one of us had given to the killer.
And then it was time to go home. I think some people were sticking around to go to the pub, but it was 8.30pm when the game finished and I wanted to get home.
Reflections
This is the most expensive one-day game day I've been to, largely because of the parking. While the actual event price wasn't much different, the most I've previously payed for parking is £5 for a day in Birmingham. Oxford charged me £15, which seemed a little steep. (There's also a park and ride, but once I'd figured out the price of that and considered the extra time it would add to the journey, I decided to stick with the nearby car park.)Gender balance was relatively good. I think most games had at least one woman in, and the ones I played actually had a 50:50 split of players. Very nice to see.
My first experience of an event with advance sign-up was good. While I like the spontanaity of Concrete Cow and its imitators, showing up knowing what I was going to be doing was pretty reassuring. Everything felt very well organised. The only thing missing was name badges. I have absolutely no idea who I just met. There were people I follow on twitter there, I know, but without badges I have no idea who.
I wasn't sold on the weird timing. I didn't get home until past 10pm last night. Starting morning games a little earlier and leaving a smaller gap between morning and afternoon games could have seen things wrapping up at 7pm. I could either have got home in time for dinner at a vaguely reasonable hour or, if I'd known more people, gone somewhere for dinner in Oxford before driving home.
It was a pretty ambitious event, having all the additional stuff going on besides the RPGs. I have no idea how that side of it went, but hopefully it got some additional people through the door. And six or seven games at a first time event is pretty damn good already.
Overall I had a great day out, and hope to repeat it. I'm told that Tales from Screaming Spires is going to be a thing in October - a similar event but with a focus on horror games. I already have three LARPs in October, so may not be able to make it, but if it's a weekend when I'm free I'll absolutely be there.
Saturday, 18 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 6: Making a Documentary
Back at the base, Rolando put together the footage to construct both an exciting broadcast about the gang war and an advert for Trauma Team. We contacted Trauma Team to see if they were interested in sponsoring us in further episodes of Bross Kemp On Gangs. They were interested, but on rather restrictive terms, including producing 12 episodes in the space of 26 weeks. With no guarantee that Marlon would be able to maintain this personality long enough to make that happen, we didn't agree to anything just yet.
Still, we had a job to do, and getting Bross Kemp to report on the local slav gang seemed like a good way to go about it. We recruited an old friend of Quinton's - a conman called Nemo - and got in touch with the slavs.
We met in a coffee shop. Bross Kemp talked to the slav contact about how he'd heard they were the hardest gang in Night City, and wanted them to appear in his documentary. He successfully persuaded them, and we were invited on a ride-along.
Requiem: "Would you like me to come with you?"
Bross: "Naaaaah."
Requiem: "Would you like me to pretend to be feeling really insecure so that I need to stand next to you for comfort?"
Bross: "...Yes."
All the same, by the time our contact Ivan, Bross and Rolando had all got into one car and the rest of the slavs had got into another, there wasn't much room left. So Requiem drove the team's van with Nemo and Quinton.
They arrived at a hand-made furniture shop. Rolando and Bross followed the slavs inside, with Requiem hot on their heels, while Quinton and Nemo waited in the van, listening in on comms. Inside were a family with two children, who apparently hadn't paid their protection money. Screaming ensued. Bross insisted that documentary makers did not interfere. Requiem, whose ability to human was quite diminished by this point, followed his lead. Rolando kept the camera rolling.
Nemo and Quinton had other ideas though. Beating up old men and kids wasn't their idea of proper gang behaviour. They came charging in together, and in only a few seconds had taken out every one of the slavs, one of them with a headshot that left both Bross and Requiem splattered in blood and brains.
Bross slipped over on the blood (or so he claimed), collapsing behind the sofa in the middle of all this. Requiem, struggling to deal with something that reminded her so much of Ricky's death, ducked down with him and attempted to comfort him, no easy task for someone with such a fragile grasp of empathy that it was all she could do to act vaguely human.
The sudden ambush obviously posed something of a difficulty regarding the documentary, but Bross reckoned they could pull it back if they attacked him as well. Nemo shot him and threw a chair at him, but inflicted only minor wounds. He also referred to Requiem as 'Chastity', which she felt was sufficient reason (along with adding to the verisimilitude of the attack) to shoot Nemo. Only gently though. Just a love tap really. She wasn't entirely happy about him shooting Bross's legs either, given that they used to be part of Ricky, but she managed to let that one go.
Finally Nemo shot Bross in his one remaining original arm, tearing it to shreds, which was considered a sufficiently serious wound for Trauma Team to deal with. (Bross had already snapped his card.) Requiem picked him up and carried him outside (being sure to get some good shakycam footage from her hat camera) ready for Trauma Team to pick him up. She would have stayed with him (apparently her obsessive personality had found a new target) but didn't want to argue with a Trauma Team armed AV, and rejoined the others.
With the help of Nemo, who turned out to be exceptionally good at producing forgeries, Rolando produced a film that carefully avoided showing faces, in order to maintain the story that the ambush had been committed by members of Stomp Street. They had killed all of the slavs, but Requiem had managed to drive them back enough to escape with Bross and Rolando.
Despite extensive use of stock footage, voiceovers, clips from the previous film and wilhelm screams, the resulting film was still convincing. Rolando added sad music where appropriate (raiding Requiem's music collection, which since Ricky's death had consisted almost entirely of The Smiths). They showed the footage to their contact with the slavs, and were able to convince them to go and start trouble with Stomp Street. Once again we were invited to ride along, despite the fact that Bross had returned from the hospital, still with only one arm.
What will Bross Kemp report on next? How will Requiem react when he inevitably gives up on this personality and goes back to being Marlon? Find out in the next disturbing episode of Ramos Reportage!
Still, we had a job to do, and getting Bross Kemp to report on the local slav gang seemed like a good way to go about it. We recruited an old friend of Quinton's - a conman called Nemo - and got in touch with the slavs.
We met in a coffee shop. Bross Kemp talked to the slav contact about how he'd heard they were the hardest gang in Night City, and wanted them to appear in his documentary. He successfully persuaded them, and we were invited on a ride-along.
Requiem: "Would you like me to come with you?"
Bross: "Naaaaah."
Requiem: "Would you like me to pretend to be feeling really insecure so that I need to stand next to you for comfort?"
Bross: "...Yes."
All the same, by the time our contact Ivan, Bross and Rolando had all got into one car and the rest of the slavs had got into another, there wasn't much room left. So Requiem drove the team's van with Nemo and Quinton.
They arrived at a hand-made furniture shop. Rolando and Bross followed the slavs inside, with Requiem hot on their heels, while Quinton and Nemo waited in the van, listening in on comms. Inside were a family with two children, who apparently hadn't paid their protection money. Screaming ensued. Bross insisted that documentary makers did not interfere. Requiem, whose ability to human was quite diminished by this point, followed his lead. Rolando kept the camera rolling.
Nemo and Quinton had other ideas though. Beating up old men and kids wasn't their idea of proper gang behaviour. They came charging in together, and in only a few seconds had taken out every one of the slavs, one of them with a headshot that left both Bross and Requiem splattered in blood and brains.
Bross slipped over on the blood (or so he claimed), collapsing behind the sofa in the middle of all this. Requiem, struggling to deal with something that reminded her so much of Ricky's death, ducked down with him and attempted to comfort him, no easy task for someone with such a fragile grasp of empathy that it was all she could do to act vaguely human.
The sudden ambush obviously posed something of a difficulty regarding the documentary, but Bross reckoned they could pull it back if they attacked him as well. Nemo shot him and threw a chair at him, but inflicted only minor wounds. He also referred to Requiem as 'Chastity', which she felt was sufficient reason (along with adding to the verisimilitude of the attack) to shoot Nemo. Only gently though. Just a love tap really. She wasn't entirely happy about him shooting Bross's legs either, given that they used to be part of Ricky, but she managed to let that one go.
Finally Nemo shot Bross in his one remaining original arm, tearing it to shreds, which was considered a sufficiently serious wound for Trauma Team to deal with. (Bross had already snapped his card.) Requiem picked him up and carried him outside (being sure to get some good shakycam footage from her hat camera) ready for Trauma Team to pick him up. She would have stayed with him (apparently her obsessive personality had found a new target) but didn't want to argue with a Trauma Team armed AV, and rejoined the others.
With the help of Nemo, who turned out to be exceptionally good at producing forgeries, Rolando produced a film that carefully avoided showing faces, in order to maintain the story that the ambush had been committed by members of Stomp Street. They had killed all of the slavs, but Requiem had managed to drive them back enough to escape with Bross and Rolando.
Despite extensive use of stock footage, voiceovers, clips from the previous film and wilhelm screams, the resulting film was still convincing. Rolando added sad music where appropriate (raiding Requiem's music collection, which since Ricky's death had consisted almost entirely of The Smiths). They showed the footage to their contact with the slavs, and were able to convince them to go and start trouble with Stomp Street. Once again we were invited to ride along, despite the fact that Bross had returned from the hospital, still with only one arm.
What will Bross Kemp report on next? How will Requiem react when he inevitably gives up on this personality and goes back to being Marlon? Find out in the next disturbing episode of Ramos Reportage!
Friday, 17 January 2020
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 11: A Second Chance
Hello, little ones. It's good to be back in the forest.
We went back to the enchantress's home once we'd recovered a little from the encounter at the bothy. Vared and Aunold made magic cloaks for us. We got a lot of messages over the next few days, and all of them were terrible. Sea devils coming to shore at the iron docks. Hobgoblins marching on Gallia. An army of the undead approaching the Greenwood from one side, and a horde of giants and dragons attacking from the other. And of course, the wendigo.
Taint left for the north, muttering about mountains and bear hearts, with Tonk following to keep an eye on him. We discussed where the rest of us were going to go, but there was only one place I wanted to be and that's home.
So we left Gallia for the Greenwood, avoiding the hobgoblin army, and went back to the Winter Bears where we belong. The Elthani are with us, and the Blood Druids are to the north, taking on the giants and dragons with support from Tonk and Taint. We went to take on the undead.
Aunold and me can both fly now, and the new cloaks let us turn invisible, so we went to scout ahead. Most of the army were mindless undead, but they did have a commander. One we'd seen before. One I knew all too intimately.
We came up with a plan and it wasn't a very good one, as we soon realised. Aunold's bird drew away the mindless undead for us, and we were able to get to his two zombie guards and the helmet that he was currently possessing. We sent in the usual fireballs to cut down the guards, but before we could smash the helmet and bring him out into the sunlight, he possessed Vared again.
Another awful fight followed, as I tried to give Vared the strength to drive the thing out and the others did what they could to restrain him. I didn't dare come close for fear that he'd possess me again and turn my power against my friends.
But at last Vared was unconscious, and the ghost jumped from him into Turgut's sword. We smashed into fragments and the ghost emerged, paralysed in the sunlight. I summoned a unicorn, and the blessed creature was able to not only destroy the ghost but to heal mine and Vared's wounds. Since his transformation, there was nothing it could do for Turgut, but Aunold has the magic to repair him now.
We have lost a powerful item in Turgut's sword, but we all agreed it was worth it to destroy that monster once and for all.
His destruction brought the attention of his master, who came to visit us. She calls herself Eloise Vexil, but we are calling her the White Witch. Yes, I am a witch, but I see myself more as a green witch, especially with this new cloak. And she wears white. Very impractical for forests. But that's not my point.
She wants to rule Gallia. I have no doubt that she can do it, even against the wishes of the Enchantress. She seems inclined to leave the Greenwood alone, providing we don't interfere. A tempting offer, aside from the fact that we would have to break an agreement with the Gallians. I talked to her about the wendigo. If I could persuade her to take it on then perhaps we would be rid of at least one problem. But I don't think that is going to save us.
She also turned Aunold into a squirrel, but I think it's wearing off.
I don't know what to do, little ones. Everything is too big. It would be easy to take the White Witch's offer but I don't think it would do us any favours in the long run. Somehow we have to do the right thing. I wish I knew what that was.
We went back to the enchantress's home once we'd recovered a little from the encounter at the bothy. Vared and Aunold made magic cloaks for us. We got a lot of messages over the next few days, and all of them were terrible. Sea devils coming to shore at the iron docks. Hobgoblins marching on Gallia. An army of the undead approaching the Greenwood from one side, and a horde of giants and dragons attacking from the other. And of course, the wendigo.
Taint left for the north, muttering about mountains and bear hearts, with Tonk following to keep an eye on him. We discussed where the rest of us were going to go, but there was only one place I wanted to be and that's home.
So we left Gallia for the Greenwood, avoiding the hobgoblin army, and went back to the Winter Bears where we belong. The Elthani are with us, and the Blood Druids are to the north, taking on the giants and dragons with support from Tonk and Taint. We went to take on the undead.
Aunold and me can both fly now, and the new cloaks let us turn invisible, so we went to scout ahead. Most of the army were mindless undead, but they did have a commander. One we'd seen before. One I knew all too intimately.
We came up with a plan and it wasn't a very good one, as we soon realised. Aunold's bird drew away the mindless undead for us, and we were able to get to his two zombie guards and the helmet that he was currently possessing. We sent in the usual fireballs to cut down the guards, but before we could smash the helmet and bring him out into the sunlight, he possessed Vared again.
Another awful fight followed, as I tried to give Vared the strength to drive the thing out and the others did what they could to restrain him. I didn't dare come close for fear that he'd possess me again and turn my power against my friends.
But at last Vared was unconscious, and the ghost jumped from him into Turgut's sword. We smashed into fragments and the ghost emerged, paralysed in the sunlight. I summoned a unicorn, and the blessed creature was able to not only destroy the ghost but to heal mine and Vared's wounds. Since his transformation, there was nothing it could do for Turgut, but Aunold has the magic to repair him now.
We have lost a powerful item in Turgut's sword, but we all agreed it was worth it to destroy that monster once and for all.
His destruction brought the attention of his master, who came to visit us. She calls herself Eloise Vexil, but we are calling her the White Witch. Yes, I am a witch, but I see myself more as a green witch, especially with this new cloak. And she wears white. Very impractical for forests. But that's not my point.
She wants to rule Gallia. I have no doubt that she can do it, even against the wishes of the Enchantress. She seems inclined to leave the Greenwood alone, providing we don't interfere. A tempting offer, aside from the fact that we would have to break an agreement with the Gallians. I talked to her about the wendigo. If I could persuade her to take it on then perhaps we would be rid of at least one problem. But I don't think that is going to save us.
She also turned Aunold into a squirrel, but I think it's wearing off.
I don't know what to do, little ones. Everything is too big. It would be easy to take the White Witch's offer but I don't think it would do us any favours in the long run. Somehow we have to do the right thing. I wish I knew what that was.
Wednesday, 15 January 2020
A Dark Path
D&D and its sibling game Pathfinder are, basically, heroic fantasy games. They're not the games I would instinctively look at for running a dark fantasy campaign. I'd be going for something like Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, or maybe one of the newer arrivals like Symbaroum. But that doesn't mean you can't use them for dark fantasy.
Our current Pathfinder campaign is doing it pretty well. Here's what I think is making it work.
This is absolutely crucial. If you've been following my game write-ups you might have noticed that the characters created by the Thursday group can be a bit...wacky. However, with this game the GM was up front that he wanted to run a dark and gritty game and we've made characters to fit in with that.
There's nothing wrong with the nice temperate biome where Standard Fantasyland appears to exist, but things just don't feel that dark when you've got the glory of Fantasy New Zealand spread out in front of you.
Our current campaign takes place in a region that's a mix of boreal forest and tundra. The cold is constant, and snow can be as big a threat as any monster - bigger, even, because you can shoot a wolf but you can't kill the weather. Our people are foragers, and we value the Greenwood where we make our home as much as any god.
This doesn't come up much from a mechanical point of view. Our characters are mostly human, all from the same tribe, and know how to survive in harsh conditions. Only in extreme circumstances are we making rolls for survival. But the narrative threat of freezing or starving is constantly there.
Death isn't scary. Death is an inherent part of Pathfinder. Characters die, you make a new one and carry on.
You know what's scary? A monster you can't fight.
As the saying goes, if it has stats you can kill it. But at the level this thing is at, we might as well be up against Cthulhu, and anyway, being killed by it is the least of our concerns. What matters is the corrupting effect it's having on the inhabitants of the Greenwood.
War is threatened from multiple sides, and if it happens it will be devastating. Our homelands ravaged, our way of life destroyed. Entire tribes, including our own, could be completely wiped out. One of the city lords is pushing for war, and right now he's winning. Killing him won't help - at best someone else will take his place, and at worst we'll be blamed and the war will happen faster and be our fault. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, but he's a master player and we don't even know the rules. How in the world are we going to stop him?
We might be amazing at taking down appropriately levelled monsters, but in the face of the current situation we are small and weak.
Characters are very accustomed to having their bodies damaged. The same can't be said for their minds. It's one thing to fight a monster, but quite another when the monster is possessing you and forcing you to hurt your friends and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
We encountered some kind of ghost that was able to possess one of us and take control. I'm not sure who had it worse; the one who critcally failed and could only watch helplessly as the ghost puppeted their body around, or the one who merely failed and could fight back each round - but still failed every time.
We all lived. But that came at a price.
Losing hit points isn't scary. Helplessness is. Whether on the small scale, with the ghostly possession, or on the large scale with the monster we can't fight and the politics we can't stop. This Pathfinder campaign is darker than any game of WFRP I've played, because between the players and the GM, we're playing it that way.
Our current Pathfinder campaign is doing it pretty well. Here's what I think is making it work.
1. Player buy-in
This is absolutely crucial. If you've been following my game write-ups you might have noticed that the characters created by the Thursday group can be a bit...wacky. However, with this game the GM was up front that he wanted to run a dark and gritty game and we've made characters to fit in with that.
2. The right setting
There's nothing wrong with the nice temperate biome where Standard Fantasyland appears to exist, but things just don't feel that dark when you've got the glory of Fantasy New Zealand spread out in front of you.
Our current campaign takes place in a region that's a mix of boreal forest and tundra. The cold is constant, and snow can be as big a threat as any monster - bigger, even, because you can shoot a wolf but you can't kill the weather. Our people are foragers, and we value the Greenwood where we make our home as much as any god.
This doesn't come up much from a mechanical point of view. Our characters are mostly human, all from the same tribe, and know how to survive in harsh conditions. Only in extreme circumstances are we making rolls for survival. But the narrative threat of freezing or starving is constantly there.
3. A formidable threat
Death isn't scary. Death is an inherent part of Pathfinder. Characters die, you make a new one and carry on.
You know what's scary? A monster you can't fight.
As the saying goes, if it has stats you can kill it. But at the level this thing is at, we might as well be up against Cthulhu, and anyway, being killed by it is the least of our concerns. What matters is the corrupting effect it's having on the inhabitants of the Greenwood.
War is threatened from multiple sides, and if it happens it will be devastating. Our homelands ravaged, our way of life destroyed. Entire tribes, including our own, could be completely wiped out. One of the city lords is pushing for war, and right now he's winning. Killing him won't help - at best someone else will take his place, and at worst we'll be blamed and the war will happen faster and be our fault. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die, but he's a master player and we don't even know the rules. How in the world are we going to stop him?
We might be amazing at taking down appropriately levelled monsters, but in the face of the current situation we are small and weak.
4. Loss of control.
Characters are very accustomed to having their bodies damaged. The same can't be said for their minds. It's one thing to fight a monster, but quite another when the monster is possessing you and forcing you to hurt your friends and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
We encountered some kind of ghost that was able to possess one of us and take control. I'm not sure who had it worse; the one who critcally failed and could only watch helplessly as the ghost puppeted their body around, or the one who merely failed and could fight back each round - but still failed every time.
We all lived. But that came at a price.
Losing hit points isn't scary. Helplessness is. Whether on the small scale, with the ghostly possession, or on the large scale with the monster we can't fight and the politics we can't stop. This Pathfinder campaign is darker than any game of WFRP I've played, because between the players and the GM, we're playing it that way.
Tuesday, 14 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 5: Gang War
We last saw our team dealing with the horrific death of one of their number in the traditional RPG party manner: dividing up his stuff.
Between the recovery from injuries and recovery from major cyberware surgery, the team took several days to rest and recuperate. Once everyone was well enough to get out of bed, a small memorial service was held for Ricky where they cremated the small amount of him left over once all reusable parts were removed. Requiem cried.
Not long after this some dubious teenagers showed up outside the house. After some questioning, they were identified as members of the Orphans, wanting to offer thanks on behalf of Dove, their leader and the sister of the woman they'd rescued. She wanted to come and thank them personally. We agreed to it, providing everybody stayed outside the house.
We were a little concerned by how easily they'd tracked us down, given how we were all dressed as Bushido members at the time, and how they recognised Requiem, given that she'd just got a new face. They didn't appear to be hostile, however, and they went away without any violence ensuing.
Rolando did a broadcast with some of the footage from the fight, carefully focusing attention on Marlon's superb performance as Shogun while avoiding showing much of the rest of us, but pointing out how Ricky Sixx was brutally murdered by the Stomp Street gang after he heroically attempted to rescue an innocent woman.
After a few more days of rest, we got word that gang warfare between the Bushido and Stomp Street was imminent. We decided this was clearly the kind of thing that our pirate news station should be reporting on. First we made a few phone calls. Marlon called his family (the Glitterboys) because he wanted a sniper rifle and they happened to have one available. Requiem called her friends in the police to let them know about the heavy weaponry amassing in the combat zone. Then the team packed up a minimal amount of kit (so as not to be in a recognisable van) and headed for where everything was about to go down.
We found a good spot to watch the fight in a warehouse. Rolando started dual-wielding: one camera in his hand and his second eye camera for backup. Requiem also activated the camera in her hat (Requicam) and started assessing the area for threats. Thanks to her exceptional combat sense and enhanced cyber vision, she managed to spot someone wearing a ghost suit in the opposite warehouse. Her initial call of 'sniper!' got a response from Marlon with his new rifle, and her further claims that it was an actual ghost and they were being haunted seemed to just confuse things further. But the Bushido were busy laying anti-personnel mines, which was definitely worth filming.
Marlon found his new role: Bross Kemp. The sniper issue seemed to finally get through to him, and he took up a position against a wall, concealed from threats, while claiming he wasn't scared, just cautious. Rolando continued filming, taking a moment to get someone else to hold the camera so he could appear in shot briefly. This was clearly due to him needing to establish his presence for credibility purposes, and not at all due to his latest cyberware additions giving him a raging ego.
But he was back to filming the scene below when he was suddenly tackled to the ground by Requiem. Initially he assumed that with Ricky gone, she'd started obsessing over him instead (after all, he was handsome and in his opinion, amazing) but the sniper round hitting him in the shoulder suggested it had more to do with her combat sense after all.
Requiem returned fire with her Arnos, hitting the sniper in the head and torso and causing them to drop to the floor out of sight. Rolando returned to filming, while Bross Kemp narrated the carnage below.
It wasn't long before an AV appeared, heading for the roof of the opposite building. Presumably the sniper had Trauma Team cover. Some of the gang fighters below started firing at the AV, causing it to crash onto the roof. Quinton decided that as a doctor, it would be a good idea to go and help out, so with the traditional shout of 'parkour!' he ran and jumped his way from our building to the one opposite. Over the radio we heard him attempt to persuade the Trauma Team members that he was a doctor and could help. We all made notes about how insulting people to their faces did not always go well when attempting to be persuasive. And also that having unconsciously started imitating the voice of Bross Kemp probably didn't help either.
In the street, heavy weapons had been brought out, and despite having brought mono-katanas to a missile fight, Bushido seemed to be getting the better of it. On the other roof, further Trauma Team AVs with miniguns arrived, while Quinton, despite the terrible impression he had made, was allowed to assist them with the patient. He resisted the urge to take out the sniper while nobody was looking, but did get a picture of him and a copy of his ID.
The carnage continued, and we decided it was time to get out of the way. Bross Kemp lead the way, continuing to insist that he wasn't scared, just cautious and reminding us that the gangers were all slags.
We returned home with some great footage to edit and broadcast. 'Bross Kemp On Gangs' sounded like a great idea for future broadcasts as well, reporting on gangs of the combat zone. Perhaps we could even use it to make progress in our actual job. What was that again?
Will the team actually remember what they're supposed to be doing and get back somewhere near the actual plot? Will Marlon be able to keep the same character long enough to film further episodes of Bross Kemp On Gangs? What does a Mr Studd implant look like anyway? Find out (or not) in the next exciting episode of Ramos Reportage!
Between the recovery from injuries and recovery from major cyberware surgery, the team took several days to rest and recuperate. Once everyone was well enough to get out of bed, a small memorial service was held for Ricky where they cremated the small amount of him left over once all reusable parts were removed. Requiem cried.
Not long after this some dubious teenagers showed up outside the house. After some questioning, they were identified as members of the Orphans, wanting to offer thanks on behalf of Dove, their leader and the sister of the woman they'd rescued. She wanted to come and thank them personally. We agreed to it, providing everybody stayed outside the house.
We were a little concerned by how easily they'd tracked us down, given how we were all dressed as Bushido members at the time, and how they recognised Requiem, given that she'd just got a new face. They didn't appear to be hostile, however, and they went away without any violence ensuing.
Rolando did a broadcast with some of the footage from the fight, carefully focusing attention on Marlon's superb performance as Shogun while avoiding showing much of the rest of us, but pointing out how Ricky Sixx was brutally murdered by the Stomp Street gang after he heroically attempted to rescue an innocent woman.
After a few more days of rest, we got word that gang warfare between the Bushido and Stomp Street was imminent. We decided this was clearly the kind of thing that our pirate news station should be reporting on. First we made a few phone calls. Marlon called his family (the Glitterboys) because he wanted a sniper rifle and they happened to have one available. Requiem called her friends in the police to let them know about the heavy weaponry amassing in the combat zone. Then the team packed up a minimal amount of kit (so as not to be in a recognisable van) and headed for where everything was about to go down.
We found a good spot to watch the fight in a warehouse. Rolando started dual-wielding: one camera in his hand and his second eye camera for backup. Requiem also activated the camera in her hat (Requicam) and started assessing the area for threats. Thanks to her exceptional combat sense and enhanced cyber vision, she managed to spot someone wearing a ghost suit in the opposite warehouse. Her initial call of 'sniper!' got a response from Marlon with his new rifle, and her further claims that it was an actual ghost and they were being haunted seemed to just confuse things further. But the Bushido were busy laying anti-personnel mines, which was definitely worth filming.
Marlon found his new role: Bross Kemp. The sniper issue seemed to finally get through to him, and he took up a position against a wall, concealed from threats, while claiming he wasn't scared, just cautious. Rolando continued filming, taking a moment to get someone else to hold the camera so he could appear in shot briefly. This was clearly due to him needing to establish his presence for credibility purposes, and not at all due to his latest cyberware additions giving him a raging ego.
But he was back to filming the scene below when he was suddenly tackled to the ground by Requiem. Initially he assumed that with Ricky gone, she'd started obsessing over him instead (after all, he was handsome and in his opinion, amazing) but the sniper round hitting him in the shoulder suggested it had more to do with her combat sense after all.
Requiem returned fire with her Arnos, hitting the sniper in the head and torso and causing them to drop to the floor out of sight. Rolando returned to filming, while Bross Kemp narrated the carnage below.
It wasn't long before an AV appeared, heading for the roof of the opposite building. Presumably the sniper had Trauma Team cover. Some of the gang fighters below started firing at the AV, causing it to crash onto the roof. Quinton decided that as a doctor, it would be a good idea to go and help out, so with the traditional shout of 'parkour!' he ran and jumped his way from our building to the one opposite. Over the radio we heard him attempt to persuade the Trauma Team members that he was a doctor and could help. We all made notes about how insulting people to their faces did not always go well when attempting to be persuasive. And also that having unconsciously started imitating the voice of Bross Kemp probably didn't help either.
In the street, heavy weapons had been brought out, and despite having brought mono-katanas to a missile fight, Bushido seemed to be getting the better of it. On the other roof, further Trauma Team AVs with miniguns arrived, while Quinton, despite the terrible impression he had made, was allowed to assist them with the patient. He resisted the urge to take out the sniper while nobody was looking, but did get a picture of him and a copy of his ID.
The carnage continued, and we decided it was time to get out of the way. Bross Kemp lead the way, continuing to insist that he wasn't scared, just cautious and reminding us that the gangers were all slags.
We returned home with some great footage to edit and broadcast. 'Bross Kemp On Gangs' sounded like a great idea for future broadcasts as well, reporting on gangs of the combat zone. Perhaps we could even use it to make progress in our actual job. What was that again?
Will the team actually remember what they're supposed to be doing and get back somewhere near the actual plot? Will Marlon be able to keep the same character long enough to film further episodes of Bross Kemp On Gangs? What does a Mr Studd implant look like anyway? Find out (or not) in the next exciting episode of Ramos Reportage!
Monday, 13 January 2020
Northampton Role Play Games Day #1
I've been attending the MK RPG club's Concrete Cow games day for years, so I was pretty excited to find out someone was organising a similar event practically on my doorstep. I signed up immediately. And for the first time, I decided to offer two games.
The venue was Manascrew, a shop whose main focus is Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games but has started to branch out into board games and TTRPGs. It's a little hard to find, as it lack external signage beyond window posters and shares its entrance with a family law office. However, once you've rung the bell and been let in, it couldn't be more welcoming. The owner was there to greet people and show us the facilities, and I instantly felt at home.
Then I was further welcomed by Graham, the organiser. Conveniently he was wearing a Northants Board And Card Gamers Collective shirt, as despite a long email conversation before the event, I'd never actually seen him before. I'd already paid my £4 entrance fee so I handed over my morning sign-up sheet and some flyers for BuzzardCon, collected a playing card, and went in search of coffee. Result! The shop sells really nice coffee for only £1.50.
Morning sign-up began, using the suits on the playing cards to determine order. As usual, we had too many GMs and not enough players, so a couple of games didn't run, but I think we had four games running in the end - not bad for the very first event. I would estimate there were about 25 people there, and at least two other women besides me.
The tables were narrow and set up for card games, with chairs down each side of the table and gaming mats covering the surface. I immediately moved a chair to the end so I could get a better view of the table. The only negative is that with five players in my game, the person at the far end of the table was a bit far away and I had trouble engaging with them as well as the people sitting closer to me.
I had brought my Firely adventure, 'On The Drift', using the Scum and Villany rules. It's the fifth time I've run it now, and every time the players manage to do something new. This was probably the group that managed to figure out the most about what happened on the ship, and probably the group who ended things with the most money and assets. Remembering that I wasn't quite happy with the conclusion when I ran this adventure at Spaghetti ConJunction, I made sure to have some conflict and drama ready to wrap things up properly.
For those who've played this game before, the two items in the game that tend to get given names were on this occasion named 'Globetrotter' and 'Wilbur'. To call the players 'the usual bunch of reprobates' would do a disservice to the creativity of everyone who's played this game with me - they produced yet another unique group of dubious space cowboys. I might reuse this one once more if I go to North Star, but otherwise that's probably its final outing. Now it's time to write the sequel.
Having hung around chatting for a bit after my slot I was pushed for time for lunch, but fortunately Boots was just a few minutes walk away and were selling their short dated sandwiches for 50p. In the interests of eco-friendliness, when I went for a second coffee at Manascrew I took the disposable cup with me to reuse, and discovered that the coffee is 50p cheaper if you bring your own cup!
Afternoon signup was called in reverse order from the morning. I was offering Liminal, specifically the Fang Gang adventure from the quickstart. Liminal is a new enough game I'm confident that very few people would have encountered this adventure before. I had printouts of key areas based on how the online games I ran had gone, so the players had maps, photos and floorplans to work with. The one hassle was redoing the character sheets, as I don't like fixed genders on pre-gens. As someone who strongly prefers to play female characters, I'd prefer not to feel limited in what I choose to play by the characters' gender. Accordingly I had both male and female names on the sheets, and the players told me which name they were using.
I was a little worried about timing, as this adventure had taken quite a lot more than the 3.5 hour slot I had available when I ran it online, but things went a lot faster at the tabletop and the whole thing wrapped up well within time. And with only four characters, it was easy to engage with all the players.
I didn't get to see what was going on at the other tables, but from the noises I heard it sounds like they were having as much fun as I was. I know Symbaroum and A Town Called Malice were amongst the other games being played, and I would have happily got in on either of those if my own games hadn't run.
I chatted some more with Graham (and returned my unused playing card), then headed home. Which, for once, took under half an hour.
Overall I don't think this could have gone better. There was a great mix of people, with both experienced gamers and people who'd never played an RPG before. The price was very reasonable, especially when combined with the bargain coffee and Sunday free parking. I could not have felt more welcome, and I hope this is going to be a regular event in the gaming calendar.
The venue was Manascrew, a shop whose main focus is Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games but has started to branch out into board games and TTRPGs. It's a little hard to find, as it lack external signage beyond window posters and shares its entrance with a family law office. However, once you've rung the bell and been let in, it couldn't be more welcoming. The owner was there to greet people and show us the facilities, and I instantly felt at home.
Then I was further welcomed by Graham, the organiser. Conveniently he was wearing a Northants Board And Card Gamers Collective shirt, as despite a long email conversation before the event, I'd never actually seen him before. I'd already paid my £4 entrance fee so I handed over my morning sign-up sheet and some flyers for BuzzardCon, collected a playing card, and went in search of coffee. Result! The shop sells really nice coffee for only £1.50.
Morning sign-up began, using the suits on the playing cards to determine order. As usual, we had too many GMs and not enough players, so a couple of games didn't run, but I think we had four games running in the end - not bad for the very first event. I would estimate there were about 25 people there, and at least two other women besides me.
The tables were narrow and set up for card games, with chairs down each side of the table and gaming mats covering the surface. I immediately moved a chair to the end so I could get a better view of the table. The only negative is that with five players in my game, the person at the far end of the table was a bit far away and I had trouble engaging with them as well as the people sitting closer to me.
I had brought my Firely adventure, 'On The Drift', using the Scum and Villany rules. It's the fifth time I've run it now, and every time the players manage to do something new. This was probably the group that managed to figure out the most about what happened on the ship, and probably the group who ended things with the most money and assets. Remembering that I wasn't quite happy with the conclusion when I ran this adventure at Spaghetti ConJunction, I made sure to have some conflict and drama ready to wrap things up properly.
For those who've played this game before, the two items in the game that tend to get given names were on this occasion named 'Globetrotter' and 'Wilbur'. To call the players 'the usual bunch of reprobates' would do a disservice to the creativity of everyone who's played this game with me - they produced yet another unique group of dubious space cowboys. I might reuse this one once more if I go to North Star, but otherwise that's probably its final outing. Now it's time to write the sequel.
Having hung around chatting for a bit after my slot I was pushed for time for lunch, but fortunately Boots was just a few minutes walk away and were selling their short dated sandwiches for 50p. In the interests of eco-friendliness, when I went for a second coffee at Manascrew I took the disposable cup with me to reuse, and discovered that the coffee is 50p cheaper if you bring your own cup!
Afternoon signup was called in reverse order from the morning. I was offering Liminal, specifically the Fang Gang adventure from the quickstart. Liminal is a new enough game I'm confident that very few people would have encountered this adventure before. I had printouts of key areas based on how the online games I ran had gone, so the players had maps, photos and floorplans to work with. The one hassle was redoing the character sheets, as I don't like fixed genders on pre-gens. As someone who strongly prefers to play female characters, I'd prefer not to feel limited in what I choose to play by the characters' gender. Accordingly I had both male and female names on the sheets, and the players told me which name they were using.
I was a little worried about timing, as this adventure had taken quite a lot more than the 3.5 hour slot I had available when I ran it online, but things went a lot faster at the tabletop and the whole thing wrapped up well within time. And with only four characters, it was easy to engage with all the players.
I didn't get to see what was going on at the other tables, but from the noises I heard it sounds like they were having as much fun as I was. I know Symbaroum and A Town Called Malice were amongst the other games being played, and I would have happily got in on either of those if my own games hadn't run.
I chatted some more with Graham (and returned my unused playing card), then headed home. Which, for once, took under half an hour.
Overall I don't think this could have gone better. There was a great mix of people, with both experienced gamers and people who'd never played an RPG before. The price was very reasonable, especially when combined with the bargain coffee and Sunday free parking. I could not have felt more welcome, and I hope this is going to be a regular event in the gaming calendar.
Saturday, 11 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 4: One Act Tragedy
In the previous thrilling episode, Marlon Brandroid took on the role of the great detective Cobumbo in the Case of the Missing Legs, a.k.a. The Hunt for Ping. Back at home base, he began planning his next role, considering both Doctor Quim, Medicine Man and Sean Connerdroid. However, another role was soon to fall into his lap.
With everyone finally recovered from the fight with the Bushido, the group tried to figure out their next move. Rolando wrote a truly exquisite script for the next radio broadcast as we attempted to continue framing the Bushido for the raid on Trinity, but unfortunately fluffed the actual execution.
Meanwhile, Requiem had turned the full force of her obsessive personality onto Ricky, who might or might not be regretting buying her a pretty face. Unlike Quinton Smith, who had left a trail of dead lovers behind him, Requiem had never even had a date before, let alone one with someone as stunningly handsome and charismatic as Ricky. He began planning to learn psychology, in the hope of being able to provide her with counseling and hopefully prevent the random murders of any woman who happened to talk to him.
But unhealthy relationships aside, we were a little worried. Our fight with the Bushido had been rather more conspicuous that we'd planned on, and word on the street was that the Bushido were out to get whoever it was who'd killed a bunch of their people. Ricky, as the least combat equipped member of the team, was particularly concerned. Requiem assured him that nobody was ever going to touch him again. Somehow he didn't find this particularly reassuring.
Finally, someone (it might have been Rolando) remembered why we'd ended up fighting the Bushido in the first place - to steal their gang colours. With the Bushido now gunning for us, we decided the best option was to start a gang war to keep them busy.
The plan was simple. Marlon would use his superb disguise skills to dress up as Shogun, the leader of the Bushido. We would drive the van to two of the Bushido's neighbouring gangs, the Orphans and the Gauntlet, Marlon would do a bit of trash talk, the gangs would fight each other and everything would be fine.
That's not what happened.
Marlon's Shogun disguise was impeccable. With the rest of the group dressed in Bushido clothes, we certainly looked the part. We drove the van along the edge of Orphans territory, until we spotted a group of gangers in an alley who were threatening a blonde curly haired woman.
Despite being on Orphans territory, they did not appear to be wearing Orphans gang colours. Any attempt to investigate further, however, became impossible when Marlon/Shogun decided heroics were in order, and jumped out of the van to attack.
With her enhanced combat sense, Requiem managed to beat Marlon to the fight that he'd instigated, letting loose with both Arnos into the toughest looking ganger, a man with a cyber arm and some kind of automatic weapon. While earlier lessons on the proper use of handguns such as 'don't point them at your friends' and 'don't point them at yourself' seemed to have been adequately covered, there was still an opportunity to learn a few more things about the art of shooting, such as 'point them at the enemies'.
The gangers returned fire, sending a hail of bullets into Requiem and a grenade at the others. Ricky and Rolando managed to throw themselves out of harm's way, but Marlon lost his other leg and didn't manage to remain standing this time. Nevertheless, along with the others he managed to take down several of the other gangers, and Rolando's realisation that none of them were wearing proper head protection allowed him to act a little more tactically.
But none of that was any use when the gang leader turned his SMG on Ricky Sixx, firing straight into his eye. Requiem could only watch in horror as Ricky's head exploded in front of her in a hail of brain matter and bone fragments.
Quinton, Rolando and Marlon all turned their guns on the gang leader, but he was still standing when Requiem sheathed her pistols and threw herself at him, mono wolvers drawn. He dodged her strikes, and turned the SMG on her.
With Ricky dead and Requiem stunned and bleeding, it was up to Quinton to finish things. He drew the enemy fire, bullets bouncing off the newly upgraded armour on his borg body, while Rolando and Marlon continued firing from what little cover was available in the alleyway. The gang leader was killed before he got a chance to injure anyone else, and Quinton went to attend to Requiem.
Her right arm had been destroyed and she was minutes from bleeding to death. Stabilising her would have proved near impossible for any lesser talent than Quinton, but he was not to be deterred. The cyber arm on one of the dead gangers was also a right arm, and he was not going to miss out on the opportunity to further upgrade a fleshy meatbag. He ignored her howls of grief and anguish when she regained consciousness, and with Rolando's help, loaded everyone, alive or dead, into the van.
Back at home, Quinton divided up the spoils. Spare body parts were sold to the usual clinic. The cyber arm was attached to Requiem. That just left the matter of the remains of Ricky Sixx.
Quinton briefly suggested installing a small cyber brain that could say Ricky's catchphrases, but decided against it, not wanting to get on the wrong side of Requiem. So what usable organs he had left were added to the spare parts pile, and they turned to his cyberware.
Quinton: "Who wants his Mr Studd implant?"
Requiem: "I'll take that."
Other players: horrified looks
Marlon had been complaining about the Asian leg that he'd had sewn on to replace the one he'd lost in the Bushido fight. Quinton took the opportunity to take it back and instead install Ricky's Speeding Bullet cyber legs.
What will the group do now, having lost the nearest thing they had to a sane frontman? How will they deal with Michael Weathers without their primary contact? How much grief counseling is Requiem going to need? How does Marlon feel about his new legs? Will Quinton succeed in his plan to turn the entire team into borgs? Who will they end up recruiting next? Find out (maybe) in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage.
With everyone finally recovered from the fight with the Bushido, the group tried to figure out their next move. Rolando wrote a truly exquisite script for the next radio broadcast as we attempted to continue framing the Bushido for the raid on Trinity, but unfortunately fluffed the actual execution.
Meanwhile, Requiem had turned the full force of her obsessive personality onto Ricky, who might or might not be regretting buying her a pretty face. Unlike Quinton Smith, who had left a trail of dead lovers behind him, Requiem had never even had a date before, let alone one with someone as stunningly handsome and charismatic as Ricky. He began planning to learn psychology, in the hope of being able to provide her with counseling and hopefully prevent the random murders of any woman who happened to talk to him.
But unhealthy relationships aside, we were a little worried. Our fight with the Bushido had been rather more conspicuous that we'd planned on, and word on the street was that the Bushido were out to get whoever it was who'd killed a bunch of their people. Ricky, as the least combat equipped member of the team, was particularly concerned. Requiem assured him that nobody was ever going to touch him again. Somehow he didn't find this particularly reassuring.
Finally, someone (it might have been Rolando) remembered why we'd ended up fighting the Bushido in the first place - to steal their gang colours. With the Bushido now gunning for us, we decided the best option was to start a gang war to keep them busy.
The plan was simple. Marlon would use his superb disguise skills to dress up as Shogun, the leader of the Bushido. We would drive the van to two of the Bushido's neighbouring gangs, the Orphans and the Gauntlet, Marlon would do a bit of trash talk, the gangs would fight each other and everything would be fine.
That's not what happened.
Marlon's Shogun disguise was impeccable. With the rest of the group dressed in Bushido clothes, we certainly looked the part. We drove the van along the edge of Orphans territory, until we spotted a group of gangers in an alley who were threatening a blonde curly haired woman.
Despite being on Orphans territory, they did not appear to be wearing Orphans gang colours. Any attempt to investigate further, however, became impossible when Marlon/Shogun decided heroics were in order, and jumped out of the van to attack.
With her enhanced combat sense, Requiem managed to beat Marlon to the fight that he'd instigated, letting loose with both Arnos into the toughest looking ganger, a man with a cyber arm and some kind of automatic weapon. While earlier lessons on the proper use of handguns such as 'don't point them at your friends' and 'don't point them at yourself' seemed to have been adequately covered, there was still an opportunity to learn a few more things about the art of shooting, such as 'point them at the enemies'.
The gangers returned fire, sending a hail of bullets into Requiem and a grenade at the others. Ricky and Rolando managed to throw themselves out of harm's way, but Marlon lost his other leg and didn't manage to remain standing this time. Nevertheless, along with the others he managed to take down several of the other gangers, and Rolando's realisation that none of them were wearing proper head protection allowed him to act a little more tactically.
But none of that was any use when the gang leader turned his SMG on Ricky Sixx, firing straight into his eye. Requiem could only watch in horror as Ricky's head exploded in front of her in a hail of brain matter and bone fragments.
Quinton, Rolando and Marlon all turned their guns on the gang leader, but he was still standing when Requiem sheathed her pistols and threw herself at him, mono wolvers drawn. He dodged her strikes, and turned the SMG on her.
With Ricky dead and Requiem stunned and bleeding, it was up to Quinton to finish things. He drew the enemy fire, bullets bouncing off the newly upgraded armour on his borg body, while Rolando and Marlon continued firing from what little cover was available in the alleyway. The gang leader was killed before he got a chance to injure anyone else, and Quinton went to attend to Requiem.
Her right arm had been destroyed and she was minutes from bleeding to death. Stabilising her would have proved near impossible for any lesser talent than Quinton, but he was not to be deterred. The cyber arm on one of the dead gangers was also a right arm, and he was not going to miss out on the opportunity to further upgrade a fleshy meatbag. He ignored her howls of grief and anguish when she regained consciousness, and with Rolando's help, loaded everyone, alive or dead, into the van.
Back at home, Quinton divided up the spoils. Spare body parts were sold to the usual clinic. The cyber arm was attached to Requiem. That just left the matter of the remains of Ricky Sixx.
Quinton briefly suggested installing a small cyber brain that could say Ricky's catchphrases, but decided against it, not wanting to get on the wrong side of Requiem. So what usable organs he had left were added to the spare parts pile, and they turned to his cyberware.
Quinton: "Who wants his Mr Studd implant?"
Requiem: "I'll take that."
Other players: horrified looks
Marlon had been complaining about the Asian leg that he'd had sewn on to replace the one he'd lost in the Bushido fight. Quinton took the opportunity to take it back and instead install Ricky's Speeding Bullet cyber legs.
What will the group do now, having lost the nearest thing they had to a sane frontman? How will they deal with Michael Weathers without their primary contact? How much grief counseling is Requiem going to need? How does Marlon feel about his new legs? Will Quinton succeed in his plan to turn the entire team into borgs? Who will they end up recruiting next? Find out (maybe) in the next thrilling episode of Ramos Reportage.
Friday, 10 January 2020
Ylva Talks to the Fairies, part 10: Scary Bothy
Come close, little ones. I don't feel well.
I refreshed my memory on remorhazes, and we decided we weren't quite ready to take it on yet. We did have an idea where I could try charming it, then use my conversational skills to convince it to go away, but unfortunately they only speak jotun, and while Aunold is good at learning new languages, I just don't have the knack.
So we took a short break at the enchantress's mansion. Vared made some magic things in her lab, while I decided to immerse myself in magic and see if any new spells showed up. I can create stinking clouds now. No! Why would I do that? That would be rude.
Then we headed for the port, since we'd heard there was more trouble going on there. Lord Vexil wants to build some warships, and I thought that having him sail off somewhere in a warship would be quite a good thing since it's not like you can sail a boat into the Greenwood. They were glad to see us when we got there, as apparently they had an undead problem. We agreed to try to sort it out.
Ironic, really.
We followed tracks through the tundra, until we spotted a bothy. Normally bothies are quite welcoming, but this one wasn't. I felt quite scared just going near it, and Vared wouldn't approach it at all. But we were definitely in the right place, and I could see tracks that told me the place was in regular use. So we decided to wait and see who showed up.
I turned into a tree, and the others hid in my branches until someone showed. Two men, and two large zombies. Vared and Turgut approached them. Aunold and me hung back. Oh yes, I did stop being a tree. We both flung fireballs. One of the men opened some kind of doorway and disappeared. Vared and Turget engaged with the others.
It didn't go well. We dropped a couple more fireballs, but they were still there. The man cast a spell to blind Turgut. I sent in a gremlin to help out, and the giant zombies were dealt with, but the other man disappeared. Vared started running away from the fight, and we realised that he'd been possessed.
I tried to fascinate everyone, to calm everything down until we could figure out the best thing to do. But it didn't work on Vared, and moments later I felt my mind being invaded.
He used my gremlin to attack Turgut, who could hardly fight back while both blind and attempting to restrain me, until he lay bleeding on the ground. I fought back as he tried to take control of my arms, but he was too strong for me and I could only watch as he used me to fire lightning bolts at Aunold and Vared.
It was a relief when Vared's arrows and Aunold's spells finally connected and I slipped into unconsiousness. I didn't expect to wake up again. Killing me would have driven out the phantom. But Aunold found another way.
A while ago in the Greenwood we'd found a barrow, occupied by a barrow wight who'd been tasked with a responsibility. Turgut agreed to take on that responsibility so that he could rest at last.
So Aunold killed Turgut, who rose again as a barrow wight. And his presence was enough to convince the phantom to leave.
I feel sick. This is all my fault. If I'd been just a bit stronger I could have kept him out of my head. Now I've hurt my friends and Turgut...
Thank you, Mittens. It helps.
I refreshed my memory on remorhazes, and we decided we weren't quite ready to take it on yet. We did have an idea where I could try charming it, then use my conversational skills to convince it to go away, but unfortunately they only speak jotun, and while Aunold is good at learning new languages, I just don't have the knack.
So we took a short break at the enchantress's mansion. Vared made some magic things in her lab, while I decided to immerse myself in magic and see if any new spells showed up. I can create stinking clouds now. No! Why would I do that? That would be rude.
Then we headed for the port, since we'd heard there was more trouble going on there. Lord Vexil wants to build some warships, and I thought that having him sail off somewhere in a warship would be quite a good thing since it's not like you can sail a boat into the Greenwood. They were glad to see us when we got there, as apparently they had an undead problem. We agreed to try to sort it out.
Ironic, really.
We followed tracks through the tundra, until we spotted a bothy. Normally bothies are quite welcoming, but this one wasn't. I felt quite scared just going near it, and Vared wouldn't approach it at all. But we were definitely in the right place, and I could see tracks that told me the place was in regular use. So we decided to wait and see who showed up.
I turned into a tree, and the others hid in my branches until someone showed. Two men, and two large zombies. Vared and Turgut approached them. Aunold and me hung back. Oh yes, I did stop being a tree. We both flung fireballs. One of the men opened some kind of doorway and disappeared. Vared and Turget engaged with the others.
It didn't go well. We dropped a couple more fireballs, but they were still there. The man cast a spell to blind Turgut. I sent in a gremlin to help out, and the giant zombies were dealt with, but the other man disappeared. Vared started running away from the fight, and we realised that he'd been possessed.
I tried to fascinate everyone, to calm everything down until we could figure out the best thing to do. But it didn't work on Vared, and moments later I felt my mind being invaded.
He used my gremlin to attack Turgut, who could hardly fight back while both blind and attempting to restrain me, until he lay bleeding on the ground. I fought back as he tried to take control of my arms, but he was too strong for me and I could only watch as he used me to fire lightning bolts at Aunold and Vared.
It was a relief when Vared's arrows and Aunold's spells finally connected and I slipped into unconsiousness. I didn't expect to wake up again. Killing me would have driven out the phantom. But Aunold found another way.
A while ago in the Greenwood we'd found a barrow, occupied by a barrow wight who'd been tasked with a responsibility. Turgut agreed to take on that responsibility so that he could rest at last.
So Aunold killed Turgut, who rose again as a barrow wight. And his presence was enough to convince the phantom to leave.
I feel sick. This is all my fault. If I'd been just a bit stronger I could have kept him out of my head. Now I've hurt my friends and Turgut...
Thank you, Mittens. It helps.
Thursday, 9 January 2020
Imposter Syndrome
I saw this New Gamemaster month thing.
"Ooh," I thought. "That might be useful. Because I'm pretty nervous about actually pitching a long block game at the club and it's bound to have good tips for inexperienced GMs."
At which point I had to have a serious word with myself.
Because I'm not an inexperienced GM.
I've run two campaigns of Scion. I've run two campaigns of Victoriana. I ran games good enough that people were willing to play them again, despite the fact that none of us like the systems for either of them.
I've run a campaign of The Dresden Files when nobody else was willing to take it on, and it was great.
I've run two Pathfinder campaigns. Pathfinder! Sure, I used pre-written stuff for that, but so do loads of people.
I've run a bunch of short and one-off games - Scum and Villainy, Don't Rest Your Head, The Sprawl, Liminal.
I'm not an inexperienced GM. What I am, from the club's point of view, is an unfamiliar GM.
So I need to keep on pitching games. Maybe they won't all run, but people will get to know what I can do. I'm never going to win over the 'D&D and only D&D' crowd, but that's OK.
This post brought to you by imposter syndrome and a pressing desire to run a Liminal campaign.
"Ooh," I thought. "That might be useful. Because I'm pretty nervous about actually pitching a long block game at the club and it's bound to have good tips for inexperienced GMs."
At which point I had to have a serious word with myself.
Because I'm not an inexperienced GM.
I've run two campaigns of Scion. I've run two campaigns of Victoriana. I ran games good enough that people were willing to play them again, despite the fact that none of us like the systems for either of them.
I've run a campaign of The Dresden Files when nobody else was willing to take it on, and it was great.
I've run two Pathfinder campaigns. Pathfinder! Sure, I used pre-written stuff for that, but so do loads of people.
I've run a bunch of short and one-off games - Scum and Villainy, Don't Rest Your Head, The Sprawl, Liminal.
I'm not an inexperienced GM. What I am, from the club's point of view, is an unfamiliar GM.
So I need to keep on pitching games. Maybe they won't all run, but people will get to know what I can do. I'm never going to win over the 'D&D and only D&D' crowd, but that's OK.
This post brought to you by imposter syndrome and a pressing desire to run a Liminal campaign.
Wednesday, 8 January 2020
Alien RPG - First Look
We're playing a two session game of Fria Ligan's Alien RPG, using the Chariot of the Gods scenario.
Like every Fria Ligan game I've encountered, Alien uses the Year Zero engine, once again modified to suit the specific game. Four attributes, each with three associated skills, makes for a solid base and also makes every attribute equally valuable. (Compare with Coriolis, where Wits has significantly more associated skills than Strength.) The skills make sense for the setting, with Heavy Machinery being the one that most stands out to me - it's not one that shows up in most games, but you know in Alien that at some point you're going to want to get in an power loader.
Besides the skill and attribute sitting in the middle of the character sheet, there's various other bits and pieces going on around the edge. One of them is resources - air, water, power, food. Irrelevant when you're on your own ship but absolutely critical as you explore a derelict vessel in your exo suit. Rather than any kind of tedious resource management, it uses a variation on the innovative system from the Black Hack - roll a number of dice equal to your current rating, and subtract any 1s. There's also a system for tracking radiation exposure, similar to the one in Coriolis.
Stress is probably the mechanic we were most aware of in the game. Any time you make a skill roll, you add additional stress dice to your dice pool, equal to your current stress rating. This means that a bit of stress makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you're doing. It also means you're more likely to panic, because rolling a 1 on a stress die is a bad thing. The official dice illustrate this nicely by putting a picture of a facehugger on the 1 face of the stress dice.
A panic roll is a d6 plus your current stress, and a table tells the GM what the result means. As yet nobody has rolled particularly high on the panic table, with the highest results merely resulting in us spreading our stress to other nearby party members. However, by the end of the session, my character was a 5 stress. That means any time I make a roll, we don't know if she's going to be hyper-competant or completely freak out. Things could get interesting next week.
There was a little concern that things might be a bit predictable. We were all familiar with Alien and Aliens, and some of us had seen the other movies. (I haven't, as it's one of those franchises where I'm reliably informed that any movie after the second can be safely ignored.) We made a conscious effort to avoid metagaming and have our characters act like people who are only vaguely aware of rumours that there might be alien life out there, rather than our own instinct to expect facehuggers at any moment.
And of course we did encounter an alien, but not a xenomorph, facehugger, or anything else we remembered from the movies. While we're only halfway through the adventure, it feels like it's an original story, not just a rehash of one of the Alien franchise movies. While this adventure is intended as a one-off (we've already had one PC death and I'll be surprised if the rest of us all make it to the end) I can see this game working for a campaign.
Sci-fi horror is absolutely my favourite kind of horror, and I'm really excited about how well this game handles it. While there's a limit to how much I can tell from a single session, at this point it's looking really really good.
Like every Fria Ligan game I've encountered, Alien uses the Year Zero engine, once again modified to suit the specific game. Four attributes, each with three associated skills, makes for a solid base and also makes every attribute equally valuable. (Compare with Coriolis, where Wits has significantly more associated skills than Strength.) The skills make sense for the setting, with Heavy Machinery being the one that most stands out to me - it's not one that shows up in most games, but you know in Alien that at some point you're going to want to get in an power loader.
Besides the skill and attribute sitting in the middle of the character sheet, there's various other bits and pieces going on around the edge. One of them is resources - air, water, power, food. Irrelevant when you're on your own ship but absolutely critical as you explore a derelict vessel in your exo suit. Rather than any kind of tedious resource management, it uses a variation on the innovative system from the Black Hack - roll a number of dice equal to your current rating, and subtract any 1s. There's also a system for tracking radiation exposure, similar to the one in Coriolis.
Stress is probably the mechanic we were most aware of in the game. Any time you make a skill roll, you add additional stress dice to your dice pool, equal to your current stress rating. This means that a bit of stress makes you more likely to succeed in whatever you're doing. It also means you're more likely to panic, because rolling a 1 on a stress die is a bad thing. The official dice illustrate this nicely by putting a picture of a facehugger on the 1 face of the stress dice.
A panic roll is a d6 plus your current stress, and a table tells the GM what the result means. As yet nobody has rolled particularly high on the panic table, with the highest results merely resulting in us spreading our stress to other nearby party members. However, by the end of the session, my character was a 5 stress. That means any time I make a roll, we don't know if she's going to be hyper-competant or completely freak out. Things could get interesting next week.
There was a little concern that things might be a bit predictable. We were all familiar with Alien and Aliens, and some of us had seen the other movies. (I haven't, as it's one of those franchises where I'm reliably informed that any movie after the second can be safely ignored.) We made a conscious effort to avoid metagaming and have our characters act like people who are only vaguely aware of rumours that there might be alien life out there, rather than our own instinct to expect facehuggers at any moment.
And of course we did encounter an alien, but not a xenomorph, facehugger, or anything else we remembered from the movies. While we're only halfway through the adventure, it feels like it's an original story, not just a rehash of one of the Alien franchise movies. While this adventure is intended as a one-off (we've already had one PC death and I'll be surprised if the rest of us all make it to the end) I can see this game working for a campaign.
Sci-fi horror is absolutely my favourite kind of horror, and I'm really excited about how well this game handles it. While there's a limit to how much I can tell from a single session, at this point it's looking really really good.
Tuesday, 7 January 2020
Ramos Reportage, episode 3: We Had A Plan
Ricky got a call from Michael Weathers, wanting us to get on with our actual job of exposing the seedy underbelly of the city through pirate radio broadcasts. Specifically he wanted us to report on the recent terrorist attack on the Trinity HQ to force the police to investigate properly.
OK. So which gang were we going to frame for this? A single grainy photograph had been obtained by once of the survivors of the attack on Trinity, showing an unrecognisable Marlon Brandroid in his Ping the Merciless disguise. Based on this, the team decided the Bushido gang would be the best option.
The plan was to steal an outfit from one of the Bushido so that Marlon could dress up in gang colours and do a broadcast as Ping the Merciless confessing to the attack on behalf of the Bushido.
That was the plan.
Requiem felt she was probably up to taking on a single Bushido member to steal their outfit by herself, but decided she could use some help to actually find one of them on their own, so took Ricky with her. In a failure of streetwise knowledge so spectacular that Requiem took notes, Ricky somehow led them not into any kind of Bushido controlled area but into Sakura, a Japanese restaurant owned by the Yakuza. Realising he'd made a terrible mistake, Ricky decided the only thing to do was to style it out and invite Requiem to dinner.
With comms reporting that rather than working on the job, Ricky and Requiem were on a date, the rest of the team decided they would have to do the job themselves. Rolando and Marlon headed out to find the Bushido themselves.
Things began well, with them finding two high up Bushido members and Marlon engaging them in conversation while Rolando filmed. The man was very insistent on them coming back to his crib, however, and eventually guns were drawn.
Guns, and mono wolvers.
Thanks to some truly spectacular combat reflexes, both of them survived without getting ripped to shreds, and decided to sell the two corpses, calling Quinton to bring the van to transport them in. Unfortunately, before Quinton could get there, more Bushido members started to emerge from the shadows.
True to form, Marlon shot Rolando in the face again, and then the Bushido descended with their mono katanas. Marlon lost a leg, but nevertheless managed to remain standing, dodge multiple attacks and take down multiple attackers. Rolando lost a leg and an arm and fell over.
Quinton (along with Tiny) took a detour to pick up Ricky and Requiem, arriving in style with the van out of control, skidding along on two wheels. Balancing impeccably on her cyberlegs, Requiem fired her Arnos and took out two of the remaining Bushidos. Ricky...
Ricky jumped from the skidding van, leaving light trails from his el-wire, breathing fire from his dragon implant, firing his Arno with one hand and holding Tiny in the other as the dog's minigun sprayed bullets at the Bushido. Whether he actually hit anyone seems irrelevant; it was undoubtedly the coolest thing anyone there had ever seen.
Finally getting the van under control enough to stop, Quinton got out and went to deal with the increasingly disintegrating Rolando and Marlon. Rolando he managed to stabilise easily enough. Exactly what he did to Marlon is unclear, and there seemed to be some extra parts lying around, but he did eventually manage to get him to stop dying.
Somehow in all this chaos, Rolando and Marlon had managed to make their Ping the Merciless video.
Quinton and Requiem piled the bodies into the van (while Rolando hung on tight to his detached cyber leg with his one remaining arm to stop it going into the spare parts) and they returned to base to go through the collection. Suitable replacement limbs were sewn onto Rolando and Marlon, with the rest sold to a local clinic that Quinton had made contact with earlier. The non-organic part of the haul included some extremely illegal mono knives and mono katanas, plus the mono wolvers from the first fight.
Requiem requested the mono wolvers, and Quinton got to work implanting them. She emerged from the surgery with a major increase in egotism and a corresponding loss of empathy. Suddenly unhappy with her appearance (a 4 to Ricky's perfect 10) she decided this needed fixing. Ricky offered to buy her a new face; since they were dating he may as well make an investment. Requiem is now a 12, and has also learned to do makeup and wear nice clothes.
GM: "I had this whole chase scene planned..."
OK. So which gang were we going to frame for this? A single grainy photograph had been obtained by once of the survivors of the attack on Trinity, showing an unrecognisable Marlon Brandroid in his Ping the Merciless disguise. Based on this, the team decided the Bushido gang would be the best option.
The plan was to steal an outfit from one of the Bushido so that Marlon could dress up in gang colours and do a broadcast as Ping the Merciless confessing to the attack on behalf of the Bushido.
That was the plan.
Requiem felt she was probably up to taking on a single Bushido member to steal their outfit by herself, but decided she could use some help to actually find one of them on their own, so took Ricky with her. In a failure of streetwise knowledge so spectacular that Requiem took notes, Ricky somehow led them not into any kind of Bushido controlled area but into Sakura, a Japanese restaurant owned by the Yakuza. Realising he'd made a terrible mistake, Ricky decided the only thing to do was to style it out and invite Requiem to dinner.
With comms reporting that rather than working on the job, Ricky and Requiem were on a date, the rest of the team decided they would have to do the job themselves. Rolando and Marlon headed out to find the Bushido themselves.
Things began well, with them finding two high up Bushido members and Marlon engaging them in conversation while Rolando filmed. The man was very insistent on them coming back to his crib, however, and eventually guns were drawn.
Guns, and mono wolvers.
Thanks to some truly spectacular combat reflexes, both of them survived without getting ripped to shreds, and decided to sell the two corpses, calling Quinton to bring the van to transport them in. Unfortunately, before Quinton could get there, more Bushido members started to emerge from the shadows.
True to form, Marlon shot Rolando in the face again, and then the Bushido descended with their mono katanas. Marlon lost a leg, but nevertheless managed to remain standing, dodge multiple attacks and take down multiple attackers. Rolando lost a leg and an arm and fell over.
Quinton (along with Tiny) took a detour to pick up Ricky and Requiem, arriving in style with the van out of control, skidding along on two wheels. Balancing impeccably on her cyberlegs, Requiem fired her Arnos and took out two of the remaining Bushidos. Ricky...
Ricky jumped from the skidding van, leaving light trails from his el-wire, breathing fire from his dragon implant, firing his Arno with one hand and holding Tiny in the other as the dog's minigun sprayed bullets at the Bushido. Whether he actually hit anyone seems irrelevant; it was undoubtedly the coolest thing anyone there had ever seen.
Finally getting the van under control enough to stop, Quinton got out and went to deal with the increasingly disintegrating Rolando and Marlon. Rolando he managed to stabilise easily enough. Exactly what he did to Marlon is unclear, and there seemed to be some extra parts lying around, but he did eventually manage to get him to stop dying.
Somehow in all this chaos, Rolando and Marlon had managed to make their Ping the Merciless video.
Quinton and Requiem piled the bodies into the van (while Rolando hung on tight to his detached cyber leg with his one remaining arm to stop it going into the spare parts) and they returned to base to go through the collection. Suitable replacement limbs were sewn onto Rolando and Marlon, with the rest sold to a local clinic that Quinton had made contact with earlier. The non-organic part of the haul included some extremely illegal mono knives and mono katanas, plus the mono wolvers from the first fight.
Requiem requested the mono wolvers, and Quinton got to work implanting them. She emerged from the surgery with a major increase in egotism and a corresponding loss of empathy. Suddenly unhappy with her appearance (a 4 to Ricky's perfect 10) she decided this needed fixing. Ricky offered to buy her a new face; since they were dating he may as well make an investment. Requiem is now a 12, and has also learned to do makeup and wear nice clothes.
GM: "I had this whole chase scene planned..."