Okay, I know this is really behind. I would have done it earlier, but I really wanted to finish telling the backstory from the Mage game before I moved on to anything else. So here's my bit about Gencon 2009.
2009-08-12 Wednesday
My wife and I got to Indy on Wednesday evening and checked into our hotel. We already had our badges and all of our event tickets (I need to remember to get a few generics next year). It was about 8 when we got all of our stuff up to our room and settled, so we decided to go ahead and see if we could get our swag bags. The hotel that we stayed in is about a 15 minute walk from the convention center if you're not in any hurry, so we got there and the staff was telling everyone that the desks were all going to close at 9. The line for badges & tickets was pretty long and I don't know if everybody that was in it got through, but we just jumped in the swag bag line and had our bags in less than 10 minutes.
The bag was a bit lighter than last year, but I can't really complain. There was the obligatory "Gen Con '09" d6, a Magic booster pack, a flyer for a local gaming store that I still haven't been to, a few post card sized ads, and a "University of Catan" bumper sticker. one thing that was an upgrade, even if a small one, was the badge holders. Last year the badge holder was a small plastic envelope with two little pre-cut holes in the corners to feed a little elastic band through. They handed out lanyards with clips, but the only way to get the clip to fit to the badge holder was to punch the hole yourself for the clip. Of course the only punch thy had was a standard 3/16" round hole punch. This year the badge holder was of a slightly thicker plastic that didn't tear as easily and it came with the hole for the lanyard clip pre-punched. I know it's a tiny thing, but it made an impression on me.
After looking through the bag for a little while, we started looking through the convention hall for an event guide book. we walked almost the whole length of the convention hall before we found one. So, then we headed over to Steak N Shake to eat and look through the book for something more to do. we didn't really find anything much that interested us for Wednesday night, so we went back to the room to get an early start to our Thursday.
2009-08-13 Thursday
Thursday was the official beginning of the con. We hung out at the front of the vendor hall around 9:30 in hopes of seeing some of the opening ceremonies before heading off to our 10:00 game. Unfortunately the ceremony didn't get started until after I decided that we had to leave if we wanted to get to the game on time.
Our first game of the con was Desolation. Desolation is a fantasy RPG set after an apocalyptic event called the Night of Fire. It's kind of like playing in the Wheel of Time 18 months after the Breaking of the World. I was playing an elf sorcerer who could wield the powers of fire and air. The other members in the party were a Rover performer, a Dwarf scavenger, and a Mongrel Ranger.
We were all from a small settlement that had managed to survive through the Long Winter. Unfortunately the settlement, I think it's name was Green, had been swarmed with locusts and lost all of its crop. We had set out for a place that had been a town in the Before. On our trip through the forest we were attacked by a 2-headed bear that looked like it hadn't eaten in weeks. I noticed it before it pounced, so I solidified the air around its feet to slow it down enough for the others to get in more attacks. It managed to break through and took a swipe at me, but we put it down without much trouble. On the corpse we found a brightly painted collar.
On up the road we found the burnt out remains of a wagon. It looked like the fire had happened about a day before. As we kept going we found another small settlement. Camped outside the village was a troupe of performers and animal handlers with wagons that looked like a match to the remains we had found. After some pleasantries where I tried to convince the carnival that I was nobility and that the others in my party were my servants, the ringmaster asked us to help find a few animals that had been lost in the brigand attack the night before.
We failed to mention seeing a two-headed bear with a bright collar, but we did say we'd help look for the missing wolf. We tromped through the forest for a while more and eventually found what seemed to be tufts of fur high in the trees. we followed them and came to a cave. A wolf-man jumped out of the cave and swiped at me before bounding off a short distance and proclaiming that it wasn't his fault and he hadn't meant to do it. feeling the need to lash out, I pulled out the trick I had used earlier and solidified the air again. This time the air that I solidified was around the wolf-man's head. It didn't take him long to realize that he couldn't breathe, but at that time the carnival troupe had come up behind us and proclaimed that I was an evil magic user and had to be killed. A big fight ensued that ended with few of them dead or unconscious and the rest fleeing. I also passed out from the strain of casting. It wasn't a very satisfying end to the game, but it was only a two-hour game.
That was the only event we had that day before the vendor hall closed at 6:00, so we went over to the hall to look around. The first stop was at the Cheese Weasel booth. They have a little scavenger hunt type quest, if you visit a bunch of different vendor booths and watched their demos you'd get an entry into a drawing for prizes including a pass to Gencon 2010 and even a gamer cruise. Since we were planning on stopping by almost all the booths anyway, it seemed like a fun little addition.
So, we got to walk through the vendor hall for six hours on Thursday. In most cases I'd think that we'd get around most of the hall in that time. After all, I've been to renaissance fairs that took less time to walk. Gencon is not at all like that. I think we might have gotten through a quarter of the vendor hall in those six hours.
So, at 6:00 I was in a preliminary game of a Robo Rally tournament. Winner of the tournament won the board that we were playing on. That board was built with Hirst Arts Castlemolds and was a recreation of one of the boards from the game. I was doing really well in my game at the beginning. There were 3 flags on the board. By the time I hit flag 2, only one of the other players had hit flag 1. Unfortunately, one of the other players decided that since he wasn't going to win, the guy in front wasn't going to win either. I'm not actually upset about it, because it was a really good game. Really, bad cards did more damage than that guy did anyway. So it was a good game and I had a lot of fun playing.
After the game and dinner, my wife and I took a break before walking back to the hotel and played one of the games that we picked up. The game was called Vapor's Gambit. I'm not going to do a full review of the game here, but I will say that the idea behind the game was okay, but the execution wasn't very good. We did kill half an hour or so before packing up and going to the hotel.
2009-08-14 Friday
Friday started right off by hitting the vendor hall as soon as we got to the convention center. We walked around there for a bare few hours before going to a workshop where I got to build a scalemail dicebag. I've done a good deal of work with chainmail, but I'd never worked with scales before. I was quite happy with how it came out. The only problem is that the scales are a type of steel that rusts really easily. I think I'm going to make a new, larger one out of a different material because I do kind of like the way it looks.
After making the dice bag we went over to the True Dungeon. I'd never done a True Dungeon event before, so I was kind of excited about it. we had signed up for the mini quest. The mini quest was only 4 rooms, as opposed to the usual 8. It was also less intense. We were all given one item token that would represent our Rusty Dagger. The tokens were actually other weapons, but for thepurposes of the mini quest, they were all Rusty Daggers. Also, if we had any tokens from previous runs, we weren't allowed to use them.
If you haven't done a True Dungeon event before, here's how it goes. For each room you have 12 minutes to solve the room. After 6 minutes a gong sounds. After 11 minutes the music picks up and gets really loud. If you haven't solved the room yet at the end of 12 minutes, you are pushed to the next room and take damage.
The first room was the outside of a temple. We had to find a way to cross a moat, then open 3 trick locks. We had one person fall in the moat and take a damage. The locks really were tricky. The one that I opened was fairly simple, it required that one of the buttons on the back of the lock be pressed while the key was turned. The others were a bit harder. We actually almost didn't get the last one.
In the second room there was an all-seeing eye. We had to crawl around the room and not be detected by the eye. I don't know what would have happened if one of us had been seen, we all made it through. Then we had to fire a crossbow at a rune on the wall to deactivate a wall of force. We did finally make that one.
At the entrance to the third room there was a rope maze with some lights attacked to it. The lights represented bells. We had to crawl through the maze without ringing any of the bells and waking the guard. Anyone who made it through before the first person to ring a bell would get a free shot at the guard. Unfortunately the first person set off the trap, so none of us got a free shot, but we did kill the guard.
The last room held a table, a chest of small drawers, and a plaque on the wall that said we needed to knock on the topand speak what we sought to be ushered forth. Or something like that. Anyway, someone knocked on the chest of drawers and said "We seek the truth" (that was a clue we got from the plaque) then we were able to take the drawers out of the chest unharmed. On the bottom of the drawers were letters. We had to spell out a sentence with the drawers, which said "Look to the silver". There were gold medalions along the walls of all the inside rooms. They were spaced about ever 3 feet or so. Well, there was one in the room that was silver instead of gold. That one came off of the wall and was actually the amulet that we were searching for. We all won, hurray!
I had actually noticed the silver medallion almost as soon as we entered the room. didn't actually try to take it off the wall, but I did finger it a bit while we were pondering the first riddle. The GM in the room said that I kind of freaked him out when I almost pulled it right off the wall.
The weapon that I'd been using as my Rusty Dagger was actually a +1 Longsword. For beating the dungeon I got to pull a token from a box and got a biece of armor that added +6 to armor and +7 against missiles. If I play again, I should be pretty well off for someone with so little experience.
We were done with True Dungeon around 6:30 and we had a 7:00 game, so we didn't loiter before heading down to play Legend of the 5 Rings. We've never played Legend of the 5 Rings before, but we go to Gencon mostly to try out new games and systems, so we signed up for this one to see what it was like. When we got to where my table was supposed to be we were told that they had a big event in that room and our game had been moved next door. That room was packed, the fire marshal would have had somesern words to say. There weren't enough tables, some groups had to sit on the floor in the hall. we couldn't find the group where we were supposed to be, and the organizers couldn't figure out where to put us, especially since we hadn't played before. Eventually, we just left. We weren't impressed with the organizers for that event in the slightest. It wouldn't have been so bad since they were moved to a different room, but the big event that was in the room that we were supposed to be in was by the same organizers.
So, with nothing much else to do with the evening, we went over to the Red Dragon Inn that was set up at the Marriot. I guess the guys from Slugfest had come up with a few drinks that were inspired by the game Red Dragon Inn. The atmosphere was cool, the drinks were good, we had a good time.
2009-08-15 Saturday
Originally my wife and I were supposed to meet up with some friends Saturday and hit the vendor hall and do some seminars. They ended up not coming until evening, so we just wandered around the vendor hall from open to close. We managed to see all of it and to complete the afore-mentioned quests from Cheese Weasel. We also picked up a whole bunch of books and games.
After meeting up with our friends for dinner we all headed back to the Red Dragon Inn to have some drinks and to actually play Red Dragon Inn. It was a lot of fun and once again, the drinks were good.
2009-08-16 Sunday
The last day of Gencon and we didn't set aside any time to hit the vendor hall. At 10:00 I had a workshop on building terrain using Hirst Arts Castlemolds. Yes, the same bricks used to make that Robo Rally board. That was fun, but it was really hard to find bricks that went together coherently. I ended up making a very broken-down tower because rubble is easy to cobble together. Plus the piece of foam that I had for a base wasn't very large.
At noon we had our last game of the con. It was a pulp adventure game called the Hollow Earth Expedition. It used the same Ubiquity system as Desolation, so we largely knew what we were getting ourselves into. There were only 3 players in this game. Myself, playing the crazy stunt-pilot chick from the surface. My wife, playing a crazy witchdoctor woman with a voodoo teddybear from the Hollow Earth. And another guy playing an amazon warrior also from the Hollow Earth.
Things start off swimmingly as we are in our hot air balloon being chased by Nazis into a stormcloud. Of course we get hit by lightning, and start plumetting to our our collective doom. The first thing that we attempt to do is repair the balloon, put out the fires, and get the engines to give us some lift. The GM tells us the rolls that we need to make to do this, and it turns out that I'm the only one with the actual skill that I'm trying to roll The others are making their rolls untrained.
We manage to get to the ground at a survivable velocity and jump out of the balloon to start running from the machine gun fire that the Nazis are shooting at us. (oh, I forgot about those guys) We are saved by a group of bird men who attack the Nazis and drive them off. They are nice enough to take us to their flying city (I'm not really sure why we wanted to go there, but it worked out) and tell us that they've had dealings with the Nazis in recent days.
The king tells us that the city is losing altitude and they don't know what to do about it. It's not falling fast, perhaps an inch a year, but it is definitely falling. I offer to take a look at the device that keeps it aloft, though I have no idea how my character would know where to start with the thing. The king also wants us to look at a flying saucer that they've uncovered. I don't actually remember why we needed to look at it, it turned out that it flew very well.
So, we were led to where the saucer was by a bird man with a broken wing. The saucer, predictably, wasn't there. It had been sold by the captain of the guard to the Nazis. We were convenient fall guys for its disapearance. So, the captain of the guard accuses us of consorting with the Nazis and the Amazon struts over and smacks him. At this point the GM loses it. It turned out that he was pretty easily amused, and he'd never had a player just stroll over an hit the guardsman. So we fought. The dude with the broken wing got thrown over the side, but I was able to catch him because my character came packaged with a Rocketeer style jet pack. So we killed a few guards and then were arested when the entire militia showed up and demanded our surrender.
One somewhat tedious trial scene later the king tells us where to find a rocket ship to go after the Nazis with. It needs some parts, and we have to sneak around and steal stuff since we've just been convicted of conspiracy. So we steal some seats and a navigational console and fly to the moon. Not the real moon, the Hollow Earth has a moon too. It's where the systems that regulate the weather are kept. There's an AI that tells us that no one's been around in a while to do maintenance, but that there were some Nazis there looking for something. We get some crystals to help restore power to the bird people's city, promise the AI that we'll be back to do some repairs, and head out looking for some Nazis.
When we see the group of Nazis, there is a zeppelin, the flying saucer, and a few troops with rocket packs. I fly the rocket ship right through the zeppelin and take it out fast. I thought that deserved some kind of reward for being crazy, at least a style point, but it turned out that it was how the GM had intended for us to beat the zeppelin. Whatever. The rocket had some guns, and the Amazon decided to jump on top of the flying saucer to do combat with some dude in power armor. It didn't take us long to take out the flying troopers, and the Amazon managed to beat the power armored soldier until she ripped off one of the suit's arms. She then opened the hatch on the saucer and fired the gun on the power armor arm at random into the cockpit. That would probably have been enough to make anybody surrender, but she also hit enough of the controls that the saucer couldn't be piloted anymore.
That pretty much wrapped it up. We delivered the prisoners and the crystals to the sky city and were exhonerated. We returned to the moon and did some repairs up there. And that was the end of the game. I had a lot of fun and our GM was a blast.
The Hollow Earth game was scheduled for 4 hours, but since there were so few of us, it actually only took us about 2 and a half. So we found ourselves with a little bit of time left to head back to the vendor hall and grab some last minute deals.
That was our Gencon 2009. We had a lot of fun and can't wait for next year. Here's a list of what we picked up while we were at the con. I'll probably talk about some of it in later blogs.
Board Games
Bill of Rights
Blasphemy
Dominion
Munchkin Bites
Red Dragon Inn
Red Dragon Inn 2
Vapor's Gambit
Books
Some 3.5 Dragonlance books
Some OGL Babylon 5 books
Desolation: Survivors
Hollow Earth Expedition: Mysteries of the Hollow Earth
Shard
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Mage: The Continuation
This is the second part of me blathering on about the Mage: The Ascension game that I'm a part of. Last time I talked about the players and the characters that they're playing. This time I'm going to be bringing you the story so far.
First, a little background on where our game falls on the timeline of the World of Darkness. In the published World of Darkness, there are two factions of mages. There is the Technocracy, who is portrayed as being bent on holding humanity back and limiting what can be done in the world with the available technology. They're like the FDA of tech. An example is that before the telephone was "invented" there was a group of people who used a magical effect that allowed them to speak with one another across great distances. In order to make this easier, they used a focus that they could speak into and then hear out of. Over time the Technocracy refined the effect and brought humanity around to a point where they could believe in such an effect. Once people were ready to believe that it could happen, the technology was released and it became a part of The Consensus.
The other faction is known as the Traditions. Notice the plural. The traditions are not a single entity and almost never act as one except to thwart the evil machinations of the Technocracy. Individual mages of different traditions work together all the time, but the organizations as whole enteties have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye. The Traditions are supposed to be striving for "Ascension", either personal ascension or the ascension of humanity as a whole. Given this idea of ascension, the Traditions are supposedly in it for the good of humanity where the Technocracy is only there to keep humanity down. PCs are almost always members of one of the traditions.
That's the world that is published. In the world that we're playing in, the Technocracy is not evil and is not in it to keep humanity down. The Technocracy is just another faction of mages just like any of the individual traditions. The difference is that the Technocracy has a much higher membership, and a lot more power in the modern world.
So, here goes the recounting of our Mage game. Some of these events happened several months ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy:
We start the game with Bob, Jody, Maria, Allen, and me. We all know one another and share a house. The house is legally owned by Bob and Jody because they both took 5 dots in resources and are richer than probably anybody else in Japan. The property is a located on a Node, which is a place of power where ley lines intersect. Together with a really powerful Spirit mage, the 5 of us dedicated the node to us as a group and created little pocket realms where we could work magick and develop skills without Paradox.
So in the opening game we are approached by a group of Shinma. These are basically animal spirits who inhabit human bodies after the human whose body it was has died. It was largely a getting to know the setting game and not much was really accomplished at this meeting. The next day, while Jody was at work (as an emergency care doctor) we got a visit from a few men in black suits who wanted to talk to me. I don't really remember why they came looking for me, but they did. I was more than happy to show them around some of my more stable experiments. It turned out that they were from an organization called Strike Force Zero who deal with supernatural creatures... usually fatally. They wanted me to develop some tech for them. I said that I'd be happy to take the challenge and we set up a meeting a few days later in Tokyo at their HQ. As they were getting ready to leave I noticed that one of them had done a magical effect targeted at my computer system. I immediately started looking over my equipment checking for what had been done, but I had no real way to accuse the men. I don't remember the exact context, but one of them told me "You just can't trust technology."
While I was inside talking to the agents Allen comes home. He sees the strange car in the drive and decides to do some snooping. The idea of snooping was a good one, but the execution went poorly. Somehow Allen got inside the car (go him!) and snooped around but didn't really find much of any importance. He did find a rather nice, large gun. I think it was a rifle of some kind. He decided that he wanted to ensure that the gun didn't work properly, so he decided to heat up the bullet in the chamber so that it would swell and lodge itself in the gun. At this point the GM gave Allen the predictable "Are you sure you want to do that?". Allen has not been gaming for very long, so he didn't recognize this as the warning that it was.
There is not really a mechanism for what happened, so Victor had to wing it a bit. The short version is that Allan heated up the bullet and the gun enough to trigger not only the bullet in the chamber, but also the rest of the clip. It probably wasn't very realistic, but it was very theatrical. The next problem with this scenario comes from the fact that Allen was inside the car with the gun, right next to it in fact, when it exploded. Allen took a substantial amount of damage, exited the car, and hid in the bushes next to the house.
Of course, an explosion like that attracted the attention of everyone on the grounds and soon we were all looking at the agents' car with it's windows blown out and shrapnel all over the interior. The agents were sputtering, but everyone that they knew to be home had been accounted for. I looked at the agent who had said it to me before and repeated "You just can't trust technology." I got extra experience for that.
After the two agents drove off Bob, who was up on the roof looking for who could have caused the explosion, noticed a rustling in the bush where Allen was hiding. Assuming that whoever it was wasn't supposed to be there or they wouldn't be hiding he threw a knife toward the bush. Bob actually intended to miss the bush and flush out whoever it was so that they could be questioned. Bob botched on his roll and hit Allen, who had already taken substantial damage. Allen falls out of the bush unconscious. Being the kind, loving souls that we are (and knowing that none of us have the required Life sphere to heal him) we call an ambulance to come and take Allen to the hospital.
Around that time, Bob gets a ping from his Twin Soul feat that tells him Jody's is in danger. He hops on a motorcycle, Maria hops on behind him, and I jump in a car attempting to follow them. To keep Allen from feeling left out of the game, Victor had his spirit separate from his body and float through the air above the ambulance.
As Allen is floating around, he sees Jody being attacked by a specter. Wanting to help out, Allen throws a fireball at the specter. The specter sees the fireball coming, puts Jody between himself and the fireball, and pulls Jody through the shroud long enough for her to see Allen throwing the fireball and to take the effect in place of the specter.
**NOTE**
Having come back to this retelling many times I have finally decided that it's getting way too verbose for its own good, especially for a recap. So, I've decided to up the pace a good deal and start again from the beginning.
**NOTE**
It turned out that Jody had been abducted by a small group of Kitsune (Werefoxes). We beat up the Kitsune until they limped off and then we headed home. A few days later one of the Kitsune showed up at the house saying that he'd been disowned by his tribe and he wanted to make reparations. I'm not entirely sure why, but Jody convinced everyone that he shoud be given a room. For my part, I was facinated by the boy. As a genetecist I was enthralled by his ability to change back and forth from human to fox to something in between. Not to mention that during the fight we had seen that the Kitsune in their hybrid forms had multiple tails. For some reason I really creeped the kid out, but I can't imagine why.
A few days later we all headed to Tokyo for a few different reasons. I had a meeting with higher-up members of Strike Force Zero, Jody wanted to visit the brother of the Specter that attacked her, and everybody wanted to visit the bookseller's district to try to improve our library backgrounds. At one point we got split into two groups. Jody, Allen and I went to the restaurant to meet with Strike Force Zero, and Bob and Maria ended up investigating an alleyway that seemed to be oozing a lot of oddly corrupted chi. Jody was able to describe the alley to our hosts and they dispatched a team to close up the rift.
Eventually we met up with James, who Maria knew from a magical ritual several months before. We were getting drinks when we all felt some strange spiritual shift in the universe that seemed to be centered on the alley. When we went back it was just a normal alley, like any other.
The next day we went to the house of the specter's brother. There was an epic battle facing Jody, Bob, and Maria against the specter. The battle lasted about ten rounds, but since it was all happening in the spirit realm, it only took about 30 seconds or so while the living brother was making us all tea. I didn't participate in the battle because my character never noticed that anything was going on. We managed to dispatch the specter and send him on to the Shadowlands, then we bid the brother farewell and went to buy some books for our libraries.
Shortly after ariving back at our house we received a request from a group of Hermetic Mages. Okay, actually Allen got orders from the tradition, and he begged and pleaded for the rest of us to help him. They were going to be assaulting a stronghold in Japan where some Tremere vampires had set up shop. We all agreed to help for various personal reasons. Being a bioengineer and a scientist, I made a few fun toys for us to test out on our assault. I created a bacteria that ate sugar and produced ultra-violet light. I also modified maggots that were about finger-sized and would eat vampire flesh. The UV bacteria I put into a big sprayer that was worn on my back, like they use to spray pesticides. The maggots I put into glass christmas tree ornaments for use as grenades.
At some point, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Allen became host to the spirit of Caine. Yes, Caine. We all knew that there was something else inside him, but none of us knew what it actually was. Around that time, Maria was impregnated by Lilith.
So, we assaulted the castle along with a bunch of Hermetic Mages and a few other vampires. At the bottom of the complex we found a vampire floating in some kind of field that was being maintained by a group of Tremere mages. It turned out that the floating vampire was Tremere himself, who had been taken over by the spirit of Saulot (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's Vampire: The Masquerade storyline stuff). Saulot said something that I can't recall and then he burst into flames. Every vampire on the planet with either Tremere or Salubri blood fell over and rotted on the spot.
As for my experimental weapons, the "goo" worked better than I had actually anticipated. It caused massive amounts of aggravated damage especially when applied to the skin of a vampire or ingested. The maggots weren't such a success. They worked as designed, but they were far too slow and only truly useful as torture implements.
We returned from the raid and had some down time where nothing much happened. Jody noticed that the Kitsune that had been staying with us was having trouble sleeping. Maria, Jody, and Bob all decided to ride along in one of his dreams to see what was bothering the boy. Once again, James and I got left out. They saw in the Kitsune's dream the visage of Gaia, caught and pierced by the Weaver's web. Bob decided to cut through the webbing and the motion jostled Gaia's form and caused her great pain. She cried out that she finally had a purpose for the Kitsune. Her purpose for them was to end her and thus, end her suffering. My character wasn't there for that, but as a player my mouth just dropped. Victor had never actually said who the bound woman was, but I had figured it out. Bob and Jody hadn't figured it out yet. I thought it was a pretty twisted plot point, but it is an end of the world campaign.
The Kitsune child left to go back to his family. We learned that the Shinma have been given the keys of Heaven and are free to return there as they choose. I was aproached by the Zaibatsu with a job offer giving new perspective on projects that their researchers are working on. We also see a wraith hanging around Allen talking to the shadow inside him that we don't know is Caine.
A few weeks later we got a letter saying "Thank you. Your services are no longer required." There was no indication of who had sent it, but there was a return address on an island off of the western Japanese coast. Bob decides to hop over into the umbra to scout this island out. The chi (quintessence) coming from the island is horribly corrupted and vile. It is like a blight on the umbra itself. I put in a call to my superiors at the Zaibatsu and they told me that I should have nothing to do with that island, horrible things lived there and nothing good would come from a visit. So, of course we went right on over.
There was a ferry to the island with only one crew member. The boatman. The channel that we passed through was filled with bodies and people screaming, trying to swim. Jody tried to pay for passage for one of the people in the water. The boatman, who never spoke, indicated that the people in the water had already paid and were in the water on their own will. Eventually we got to the island and saw the inhabitants were a depressed, forlorn people. There was no joy in that place. Bob was given a vision of a great dragon breaking free of its confinement and devouring the entire world. He was told that it was something that had happened in the past and was about to happen again. There was also a creepy midwife who wanted to look at Maria's baby.
It turned out that the inhabitants were from a race that were known as Fomorians. The basic premise was that the world that was created included all sorts of things, but it did not include Chimera. It didn't account for those things that were created by sentient (in our case human) imagination. So when the wheel turned and the world was destroyed and remade again, the dreams from that age were not destroyed. They became the Fomorians. Tragic really.
After looking around for a bit and deciding that we hated the place, we tried some woogy-woogy to try to cut the node on the island off from the rest of the world. I was trying to be kind of subtle about it and not draw too much attention too early. Bob decided that what we needed to do was suck all of the quintessence out of the node all at once and destroy it. It really didn't work, but it did really piss off the inhabitants. Basically, what we ended up doing was move the entire node about two feet to the left. Let me tell you, that will shake up an area something fierce. Sensing that we were no longer welcome, we fled rather shamelessly.
We had a couple more weeks of downtime, and Maria was getting ready to give birth. It turned out that contact with the Fomorians had warped Maria's mind and she had become a Marauder. Once Bob figured that out, he wanted to kill her immediately. There was a rather epic battle around Maria as she gave birth to an incarnation of Lilith. Maria died when Bob tried to fireball the kid. The child then flung all of us into the Deep Dreaming.
In the deep dreaming we argue, then split up. James and I went one way, Bob and Jody went basically the opposite. We found out that the armies of Arcadia were on the move back to the mortal realm to destroy all of the Changelings for corrupting themselves. (This was almost all out of character knowledge. The events were thrown in not because the characters would understand them, but because the players would.) We found our way to where the child of Lilith was, which happened to be the mountain where the Wyrm was being held captive. All of us got there at the same time. An epic battle ensued where Bob and Jody were trying to free the Wyrm and also kill the child. I was trying to keep the Wyrm contained by distracting Bob until the Weaver's agents could get there to repair the damage. James was mostly trying to get us all to stop fighting.
In the end, the Wyrm was not released, bob and Jody made it back to the mortal world as soon as they saw that there was a portal there, James ran away never to be seen again because Bob would kill him on sight, and I died when Jody turned all of the oxygen in my body to chlorine. In the wake of this, Bob also fears that Jody is turning into a marauder. In actuality, what Victor did was he gave Jody a shadow with the basic rules from Wraith, and Maria is playing that shadow along with her new character.
So, James, Maria, and myself all made new characters. James is a Dreamspeaker, Maria is a Verbena marine biologist with a TV show, and I'm a member of the Zaibatsu in a division similar to the Void Engineers of the western Technocracy. Maria and I are also married, which is very strange for a tradition mage and a technocrat. We debate a lot.
There was a new alliance between the Council of Nine of the Traditions and the Technocracy. The idea was that they'd go back to bickering as soon as they were sure there was going to be something to bicker about later. Orders came from the Akashic Brotherhood that Bob was to give Maria and I all the support and cooporation that he could. James just sort of showed up saying that he'd been sent by a dream and Jody told him that he could stay.
So, we all went in to Tokyo to get to know each other and whatnot. Maria had to check in with the office to start on some of the studio portions of her show including voice-over work. I also needed to check in with the office, but that will happen in the next game, I'm guessing. While we were at the studio getting the tour we found out that it had merged with an American company and a lot of the westerners had spiritual parasites. Further research indicated that the American company was owned by Pentex.
That's pretty much where we left off. And now I'm finally caught up. Wow. That was a lot.
First, a little background on where our game falls on the timeline of the World of Darkness. In the published World of Darkness, there are two factions of mages. There is the Technocracy, who is portrayed as being bent on holding humanity back and limiting what can be done in the world with the available technology. They're like the FDA of tech. An example is that before the telephone was "invented" there was a group of people who used a magical effect that allowed them to speak with one another across great distances. In order to make this easier, they used a focus that they could speak into and then hear out of. Over time the Technocracy refined the effect and brought humanity around to a point where they could believe in such an effect. Once people were ready to believe that it could happen, the technology was released and it became a part of The Consensus.
The other faction is known as the Traditions. Notice the plural. The traditions are not a single entity and almost never act as one except to thwart the evil machinations of the Technocracy. Individual mages of different traditions work together all the time, but the organizations as whole enteties have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye. The Traditions are supposed to be striving for "Ascension", either personal ascension or the ascension of humanity as a whole. Given this idea of ascension, the Traditions are supposedly in it for the good of humanity where the Technocracy is only there to keep humanity down. PCs are almost always members of one of the traditions.
That's the world that is published. In the world that we're playing in, the Technocracy is not evil and is not in it to keep humanity down. The Technocracy is just another faction of mages just like any of the individual traditions. The difference is that the Technocracy has a much higher membership, and a lot more power in the modern world.
So, here goes the recounting of our Mage game. Some of these events happened several months ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy:
We start the game with Bob, Jody, Maria, Allen, and me. We all know one another and share a house. The house is legally owned by Bob and Jody because they both took 5 dots in resources and are richer than probably anybody else in Japan. The property is a located on a Node, which is a place of power where ley lines intersect. Together with a really powerful Spirit mage, the 5 of us dedicated the node to us as a group and created little pocket realms where we could work magick and develop skills without Paradox.
So in the opening game we are approached by a group of Shinma. These are basically animal spirits who inhabit human bodies after the human whose body it was has died. It was largely a getting to know the setting game and not much was really accomplished at this meeting. The next day, while Jody was at work (as an emergency care doctor) we got a visit from a few men in black suits who wanted to talk to me. I don't really remember why they came looking for me, but they did. I was more than happy to show them around some of my more stable experiments. It turned out that they were from an organization called Strike Force Zero who deal with supernatural creatures... usually fatally. They wanted me to develop some tech for them. I said that I'd be happy to take the challenge and we set up a meeting a few days later in Tokyo at their HQ. As they were getting ready to leave I noticed that one of them had done a magical effect targeted at my computer system. I immediately started looking over my equipment checking for what had been done, but I had no real way to accuse the men. I don't remember the exact context, but one of them told me "You just can't trust technology."
While I was inside talking to the agents Allen comes home. He sees the strange car in the drive and decides to do some snooping. The idea of snooping was a good one, but the execution went poorly. Somehow Allen got inside the car (go him!) and snooped around but didn't really find much of any importance. He did find a rather nice, large gun. I think it was a rifle of some kind. He decided that he wanted to ensure that the gun didn't work properly, so he decided to heat up the bullet in the chamber so that it would swell and lodge itself in the gun. At this point the GM gave Allen the predictable "Are you sure you want to do that?". Allen has not been gaming for very long, so he didn't recognize this as the warning that it was.
There is not really a mechanism for what happened, so Victor had to wing it a bit. The short version is that Allan heated up the bullet and the gun enough to trigger not only the bullet in the chamber, but also the rest of the clip. It probably wasn't very realistic, but it was very theatrical. The next problem with this scenario comes from the fact that Allen was inside the car with the gun, right next to it in fact, when it exploded. Allen took a substantial amount of damage, exited the car, and hid in the bushes next to the house.
Of course, an explosion like that attracted the attention of everyone on the grounds and soon we were all looking at the agents' car with it's windows blown out and shrapnel all over the interior. The agents were sputtering, but everyone that they knew to be home had been accounted for. I looked at the agent who had said it to me before and repeated "You just can't trust technology." I got extra experience for that.
After the two agents drove off Bob, who was up on the roof looking for who could have caused the explosion, noticed a rustling in the bush where Allen was hiding. Assuming that whoever it was wasn't supposed to be there or they wouldn't be hiding he threw a knife toward the bush. Bob actually intended to miss the bush and flush out whoever it was so that they could be questioned. Bob botched on his roll and hit Allen, who had already taken substantial damage. Allen falls out of the bush unconscious. Being the kind, loving souls that we are (and knowing that none of us have the required Life sphere to heal him) we call an ambulance to come and take Allen to the hospital.
Around that time, Bob gets a ping from his Twin Soul feat that tells him Jody's is in danger. He hops on a motorcycle, Maria hops on behind him, and I jump in a car attempting to follow them. To keep Allen from feeling left out of the game, Victor had his spirit separate from his body and float through the air above the ambulance.
As Allen is floating around, he sees Jody being attacked by a specter. Wanting to help out, Allen throws a fireball at the specter. The specter sees the fireball coming, puts Jody between himself and the fireball, and pulls Jody through the shroud long enough for her to see Allen throwing the fireball and to take the effect in place of the specter.
**NOTE**
Having come back to this retelling many times I have finally decided that it's getting way too verbose for its own good, especially for a recap. So, I've decided to up the pace a good deal and start again from the beginning.
**NOTE**
It turned out that Jody had been abducted by a small group of Kitsune (Werefoxes). We beat up the Kitsune until they limped off and then we headed home. A few days later one of the Kitsune showed up at the house saying that he'd been disowned by his tribe and he wanted to make reparations. I'm not entirely sure why, but Jody convinced everyone that he shoud be given a room. For my part, I was facinated by the boy. As a genetecist I was enthralled by his ability to change back and forth from human to fox to something in between. Not to mention that during the fight we had seen that the Kitsune in their hybrid forms had multiple tails. For some reason I really creeped the kid out, but I can't imagine why.
A few days later we all headed to Tokyo for a few different reasons. I had a meeting with higher-up members of Strike Force Zero, Jody wanted to visit the brother of the Specter that attacked her, and everybody wanted to visit the bookseller's district to try to improve our library backgrounds. At one point we got split into two groups. Jody, Allen and I went to the restaurant to meet with Strike Force Zero, and Bob and Maria ended up investigating an alleyway that seemed to be oozing a lot of oddly corrupted chi. Jody was able to describe the alley to our hosts and they dispatched a team to close up the rift.
Eventually we met up with James, who Maria knew from a magical ritual several months before. We were getting drinks when we all felt some strange spiritual shift in the universe that seemed to be centered on the alley. When we went back it was just a normal alley, like any other.
The next day we went to the house of the specter's brother. There was an epic battle facing Jody, Bob, and Maria against the specter. The battle lasted about ten rounds, but since it was all happening in the spirit realm, it only took about 30 seconds or so while the living brother was making us all tea. I didn't participate in the battle because my character never noticed that anything was going on. We managed to dispatch the specter and send him on to the Shadowlands, then we bid the brother farewell and went to buy some books for our libraries.
Shortly after ariving back at our house we received a request from a group of Hermetic Mages. Okay, actually Allen got orders from the tradition, and he begged and pleaded for the rest of us to help him. They were going to be assaulting a stronghold in Japan where some Tremere vampires had set up shop. We all agreed to help for various personal reasons. Being a bioengineer and a scientist, I made a few fun toys for us to test out on our assault. I created a bacteria that ate sugar and produced ultra-violet light. I also modified maggots that were about finger-sized and would eat vampire flesh. The UV bacteria I put into a big sprayer that was worn on my back, like they use to spray pesticides. The maggots I put into glass christmas tree ornaments for use as grenades.
At some point, unbeknownst to the rest of us, Allen became host to the spirit of Caine. Yes, Caine. We all knew that there was something else inside him, but none of us knew what it actually was. Around that time, Maria was impregnated by Lilith.
So, we assaulted the castle along with a bunch of Hermetic Mages and a few other vampires. At the bottom of the complex we found a vampire floating in some kind of field that was being maintained by a group of Tremere mages. It turned out that the floating vampire was Tremere himself, who had been taken over by the spirit of Saulot (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's Vampire: The Masquerade storyline stuff). Saulot said something that I can't recall and then he burst into flames. Every vampire on the planet with either Tremere or Salubri blood fell over and rotted on the spot.
As for my experimental weapons, the "goo" worked better than I had actually anticipated. It caused massive amounts of aggravated damage especially when applied to the skin of a vampire or ingested. The maggots weren't such a success. They worked as designed, but they were far too slow and only truly useful as torture implements.
We returned from the raid and had some down time where nothing much happened. Jody noticed that the Kitsune that had been staying with us was having trouble sleeping. Maria, Jody, and Bob all decided to ride along in one of his dreams to see what was bothering the boy. Once again, James and I got left out. They saw in the Kitsune's dream the visage of Gaia, caught and pierced by the Weaver's web. Bob decided to cut through the webbing and the motion jostled Gaia's form and caused her great pain. She cried out that she finally had a purpose for the Kitsune. Her purpose for them was to end her and thus, end her suffering. My character wasn't there for that, but as a player my mouth just dropped. Victor had never actually said who the bound woman was, but I had figured it out. Bob and Jody hadn't figured it out yet. I thought it was a pretty twisted plot point, but it is an end of the world campaign.
The Kitsune child left to go back to his family. We learned that the Shinma have been given the keys of Heaven and are free to return there as they choose. I was aproached by the Zaibatsu with a job offer giving new perspective on projects that their researchers are working on. We also see a wraith hanging around Allen talking to the shadow inside him that we don't know is Caine.
A few weeks later we got a letter saying "Thank you. Your services are no longer required." There was no indication of who had sent it, but there was a return address on an island off of the western Japanese coast. Bob decides to hop over into the umbra to scout this island out. The chi (quintessence) coming from the island is horribly corrupted and vile. It is like a blight on the umbra itself. I put in a call to my superiors at the Zaibatsu and they told me that I should have nothing to do with that island, horrible things lived there and nothing good would come from a visit. So, of course we went right on over.
There was a ferry to the island with only one crew member. The boatman. The channel that we passed through was filled with bodies and people screaming, trying to swim. Jody tried to pay for passage for one of the people in the water. The boatman, who never spoke, indicated that the people in the water had already paid and were in the water on their own will. Eventually we got to the island and saw the inhabitants were a depressed, forlorn people. There was no joy in that place. Bob was given a vision of a great dragon breaking free of its confinement and devouring the entire world. He was told that it was something that had happened in the past and was about to happen again. There was also a creepy midwife who wanted to look at Maria's baby.
It turned out that the inhabitants were from a race that were known as Fomorians. The basic premise was that the world that was created included all sorts of things, but it did not include Chimera. It didn't account for those things that were created by sentient (in our case human) imagination. So when the wheel turned and the world was destroyed and remade again, the dreams from that age were not destroyed. They became the Fomorians. Tragic really.
After looking around for a bit and deciding that we hated the place, we tried some woogy-woogy to try to cut the node on the island off from the rest of the world. I was trying to be kind of subtle about it and not draw too much attention too early. Bob decided that what we needed to do was suck all of the quintessence out of the node all at once and destroy it. It really didn't work, but it did really piss off the inhabitants. Basically, what we ended up doing was move the entire node about two feet to the left. Let me tell you, that will shake up an area something fierce. Sensing that we were no longer welcome, we fled rather shamelessly.
We had a couple more weeks of downtime, and Maria was getting ready to give birth. It turned out that contact with the Fomorians had warped Maria's mind and she had become a Marauder. Once Bob figured that out, he wanted to kill her immediately. There was a rather epic battle around Maria as she gave birth to an incarnation of Lilith. Maria died when Bob tried to fireball the kid. The child then flung all of us into the Deep Dreaming.
In the deep dreaming we argue, then split up. James and I went one way, Bob and Jody went basically the opposite. We found out that the armies of Arcadia were on the move back to the mortal realm to destroy all of the Changelings for corrupting themselves. (This was almost all out of character knowledge. The events were thrown in not because the characters would understand them, but because the players would.) We found our way to where the child of Lilith was, which happened to be the mountain where the Wyrm was being held captive. All of us got there at the same time. An epic battle ensued where Bob and Jody were trying to free the Wyrm and also kill the child. I was trying to keep the Wyrm contained by distracting Bob until the Weaver's agents could get there to repair the damage. James was mostly trying to get us all to stop fighting.
In the end, the Wyrm was not released, bob and Jody made it back to the mortal world as soon as they saw that there was a portal there, James ran away never to be seen again because Bob would kill him on sight, and I died when Jody turned all of the oxygen in my body to chlorine. In the wake of this, Bob also fears that Jody is turning into a marauder. In actuality, what Victor did was he gave Jody a shadow with the basic rules from Wraith, and Maria is playing that shadow along with her new character.
So, James, Maria, and myself all made new characters. James is a Dreamspeaker, Maria is a Verbena marine biologist with a TV show, and I'm a member of the Zaibatsu in a division similar to the Void Engineers of the western Technocracy. Maria and I are also married, which is very strange for a tradition mage and a technocrat. We debate a lot.
There was a new alliance between the Council of Nine of the Traditions and the Technocracy. The idea was that they'd go back to bickering as soon as they were sure there was going to be something to bicker about later. Orders came from the Akashic Brotherhood that Bob was to give Maria and I all the support and cooporation that he could. James just sort of showed up saying that he'd been sent by a dream and Jody told him that he could stay.
So, we all went in to Tokyo to get to know each other and whatnot. Maria had to check in with the office to start on some of the studio portions of her show including voice-over work. I also needed to check in with the office, but that will happen in the next game, I'm guessing. While we were at the studio getting the tour we found out that it had merged with an American company and a lot of the westerners had spiritual parasites. Further research indicated that the American company was owned by Pentex.
That's pretty much where we left off. And now I'm finally caught up. Wow. That was a lot.
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