How EA can fix Story Progression in The Sims 3

My last post was about Gen Con, and that was two weeks ago. The last couple of weeks have been pretty barren as far as gaming goes. I cancelled my World of Warcraft account again. I got a free month of Rift at Gen Con so I’ll probably check that out before too long. Then Star Wars: The Old Republic will be coming out some time this year and I’ll check that out too.

Mike and Kevin hadn’t seen Portal 2, so I played through that for them to watch. I love that game. The concept is smooth, the puzzles are well designed, and the writing is amazing. I love everything that comes out of Cave Johnson’s mouth. The replay value is a little sketchy. There were some rooms that took me forever to figure out the first time I did them, but once I’d figured out the solution it was really easy to remember the next time I played.

On the tabletop games front, I’m getting into a play-by-post Pathfinder game that is going to be following the Carrion Crowne adventure path. I’ve never done play-by-post before, but I’m excited to see how it goes. I’ll be playing a Halfling Paladin. I’m going to do my best to play a lawful-good paladin without being the giant d-bag that the class is known for. I’ll let you know how that goes.

On Monday I went to my friend Nicky’s place for her weekly game night. I played a game called 7 Wonders that I had heard good things about but hadn’t had the opportunity to play. I really liked this game. The sequence of play was very simple and after a few rounds we had it figured out, but the strategy is really involved. There are about six different ways to gain victory points and several of those involve the cards that the players on your left and right have played. I didn’t win either game that I played, but I had a great time anyway. Another group there was playing a game called Telestrations that also sounded like a lot of fun, but I couldn’t work in a game.

This brings me to the meat of the post. I’ve beenn playing The Sims 3 on my PC for a while. I’m trying an experiment this time. I’m making a family specifically so that they can make Ambrosia. Then I’m going to make them friends with all of the characters in the game that I’ve created to represent my friends. I plan on keeping my immediate circle of friends young, but allowing their children to grow naturally. I don’t know how well it will work, probably not at all, but that’s why it’s an experiment.

One thing that I’m somewhat disappointed about with The Sims 3 is the way they decided to handle Story Progression and Ageing. When the game launched you could turn Story Progression and Ageing on and off (seperately) for the entire town. Then they released a patch where they said that if you had directly played a household then Story Progression (and I think ageing as well) would be off while you were playing other households. Well, that didn’t work out apparently.

What I did in my experiment was I created my family and our circle of friends and placed them all in the game. I built each family’s house and played them long enough for everyone to get a job. Then I created my Ambrosia family and pretty much ignored the rest while I was working on their skills, confident that my sims would remain exactly as they were aside from relationship scores. Then I send one of the Ambrosia family to the house of my wife’s and my characters to make friends, only to discover that we had both aged to Elder and had children. I was unhappy with this and immediately turned story progression and ageing off for the entire town intending to delete the existing characters and replace them at a later date. I hope that works out the way I intend.

What I would really like to see, and EA can take this one for free, is for Ageing and Story progression to be able to be affected on a per-household basis. Just give me a little toggle when I’m on the Edit Town screen to flip those settings for each household as I see fit. I can’t imagine that it would really be that monumental a programming challenge. And if it’s not something that can conceivably be worked into a patch, at least work it into The Sims 4.

That's all I've got for now.
Good Gaming!

Gen Con 2011 Wrap-up

Gen Con Day 0:
Wednesday, August 3rd 2011
I'm an Indianapolis local. That means that I'm lucky enough to not have to fly to Gen Con every year. I actually work close enough to the Indianapolis Convention Center that I was able to work half a day on Wednesday and then walk to get our badges from Will Call. I heard that the Will Call line was around a quarter of a mile long, reaching all the way back to the J.W. Marriott when Will Call opened at noon. I really feel sorry for the people who waited in that line in the heat. I hope some company decided to get some good PR by handing out water. Once Will Call opened, though, they must have really been running hard. By the time I got in line around 1:30 it was hardly into the next room and I only had to wait in line for about 20 minutes.

Here's a rundown of the swag for this year, omitting fliers and things that were purely advertising:

• Full copy of the Rift video game


• 30 card Magic the gathering starter deck (I got the white deck, Maria got the Green)


• True Dungeon treasure token (I got a Bone Scroll Case, Maria got a Nixie Vest)


• Voucher for the yearly commemorative Gen Con die from Crystal Caste


• Gen Con coupon book

My next stop was the Cheese Weasel booth. Cheese Weasel Logistics is a marketing company. Every year they hand out quest cards to con goers. The quests are really simple: while you're in the vendors' hall, visit the booths that are advertised on the quest card. You do a product demo or listen to a short presentation and they punch your card. If you get all of the punches on a card you get to enter it into a drawing for prizes.

After picking up the quest cards for use Thursday through Sunday, I started wandering around the convention center looking for QR codes associated with Wizards of the Coast’s “Explore Neverwinter” con game. Eventually I ran across some friends from Game Paradise and we hung out until Maria was able to get away from work and then we headed to the Stink.

The Stink had its own swag, so I’ll list that here:

• Stink Die


• Untold Undead card miniature standees from Clerics of the Midwest


• Lanyard


• Gen Con 2010 T-Shirt


• ”Bathes Daily” Badge Ribbon


• ”You Stink!” Badge Ribbon


• ”Thanks for Bathing” Badge Ribbon

Gen Con Day 1
Thursday, August 4th 2011
Thursday started off right at 10:00 when the exhibit hall opened. Unfortunately, we missed the opening ceremony. Actually, I don't even know where it was this year since the Convention Center was revamped. So we hit the Exhibit hall and ran straight for the couple of booths that had free stuff in the coupon book.

After about 3 aisles in the exhibit hall we decided we needed lunch and headed to our first seminar titled “What is the Pathfinder Society?” It was two guys from Paizo who are heavily involved in the creation the the sanctioned adventures that make up the Pathfinder Society games. Maria and I hadn’t played pathfinder before, but knew it was a lot like D&D 3.5. And we’d never played in any organized play events either. We’re not members of RPGA, DCI (okay we’re members of DCI now because of a game we played on Saturday, but we weren’t then), the Camarilla, or anything like that. The Pathfinder Society, however, just sounded cool. I’m pretty sure we’re going to try to get into some games in the near future, though it may have to wait for Who’s Yer Con in March.

After “What is the Pathfinder Society?” we headed off to our next seminar. This seminar was about designing adventures and adjusting existing adventures to fit your group. It was run by a few guys from Wizards of the Coast. I was hoping to learn some great tips for designing a few con games that I'm hoping to run in the future. I did pick up a few pointers, but not as much as I was hoping. We ended up skipping the other seminar we had scheduled for Thursday and headed back to the exhibit hall.

Thursday night we played a game called Jumpers. In this game you play yourself. You rate your physical and mental attributes from one to five then roll your magical attributes. As you play through the game, if you need a skill that you personally have but you haven't written down, you just write it down and rate it from one to ten, then roll it.

We started out where we had all been on Wednesday evening, so three of us were at Gen Con and the fourth was sitting at home painting minis. There was a huge storm, lightning, chaos, panic, then we all woke up in the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago inside one of the bear enclosures. We snooped around and found something that told us the year was 1991. We decided that it would be really tough to explain ourselves, so we avoided security and snuck out of the zoo. Shortly thereafter, we jumped again.

The place we jumped to this time was a desert. We were on a highway and the sun was directly overhead. We walked along the highway for about an hour or so and the sun didn't dip an inch. I want to say that at some point we passed a sign that said we were in Arizona. Anyway, we found a little town off to the South of the highway, so we got off at the exit and headed for it. Then we noticed that the sun had jumped about 2 hours worth in the sky. Walking back to the north caused the sun to rise again toward Noon. When we reached the outskirts of town it was almost dusk.

A general store held some tools, supplies, and clothing. There was no one in the store. The date on the newspaper said it was in the Seventies. When we checked the back room we found our first person on this world. He was frozen in place and didn't move a muscle even to breathe, though he seemed warm to the touch. If we moved inside the room in a North/South direction he moved as if her were reaching for something on the shelf. We quickly ascertained that those of us that were standing in different parts of the room observed the clerk in different positions.

By this point we had all been up for close to 30 hours, so we headed to a hotel for a few hours rest. In the hotel we saw several more people frozen in time, and again they all seemed to go throughout their motions as we moved in a North/South direction. We decided to set watches and those who were awake heard a periodic sound of a screen door opening and banging shut. One person saw a bright light coming from the open doors of the church at the center of town.

After we woke up, we all decided to check out the church. Inside we found the disemboweled corpse of the man who had probably been the town’s pastor nailed to the cross. There was also a smooth-talking man in an impeccable suit standing in front of the alter. He told us, “This is my place,” and that we should leave in that manner people assume when they are supremely confident in their ability to persuade/force you to do whatever they want. Something about the whole situation just screamed “demon!” right in my ear, and I was perfectly willing to walk right out that door and on into the backwards sunset. Maria was about to join me too, but then the demon said something that made Maria stop, and I was obligated to stay with her.

When it became clear that we were going to pick a fight, the demon started to remove his jacket so he wouldn’t get our insides on it. Maria took one of the milk bottles I had filled with water and headed to the font to put holy water into the bottle. Apparently that turns the entire bottle into holy water. One of the other players had picked up a shovel at the general store and he charged the demon while his back was turned. He rolled spectacularly, so our Jump Master ruled that the head of the shovel had cleaved through the demon’s shoulder and buried itself in his chest. This rather displeased the demon. As he screamed, tore through his nice suit and grew to a size larger than the church, we jumped again.

This time we found ourselves on a beach. Looking around we saw a wooden dock a ways down the beach, and what looked like a Roman city along the cliff above us. While we were discussing what we should do, a couple of Roman spearmen approached us and started talking to us in Latin. None of us could really figure out what they were really saying other than that they probably wanted us to identify ourselves. Maria tried speaking in Spanish, but apparently Spain didn’t exist yet. Eventually we ended up attacking the guards, probably not our wisest choice but it worked out.

After subduing the guards there was a large earthquake. We looked up to see what was apparently Mt. Vesuvius erupting. Immediately we started sprinting for the docks. Everyone else jumped onto the last ship as it was leaving, but I missed and fell into the water. Just as the pyroclastic flow was reaching our location we jumped again in time to save our bacon.

That was the end of the Jumpers game, as it was midnight. I had a really good time playing and I wish we’d been able to make it to the Mega-jump on Saturday night, but we already had a game scheduled for that night. The Jump Master (Josh) gave us some T-shirts and buttons and we said our goodbyes. After a quick stop by White Castle, we called it a night and got ready for Friday.

Gen Con Day 2:
Friday, August 4th 2011
Friday was our big hall day. We wandered the hall, we were very careful to at least go past every booth. I’ve lost track of all of the demos we did, but I did pick up a whole mess of business cards and I hope to start working through them once my Internet connection is repaired. One of the things I did keep our eyes open for was a virtual tabletop program. If you don’t know already, a virtual tabletop is a program that allows players in different locations to have a common space to play their game. Typically there are in- and out-of-character chat channels, dice rollers, maps, tokens, and some whatnot. This was important to us because we wanted to see if it would be possible for us to continue gaming with our current group, even though we’re scattering across the globe. We saw a few of them, but the one we settled on was Epic Table. It’s still in beta now, but it’s already pretty slick without having a lot of extra stuff that you have to pay extra for.

Friday night was a game called Genesys. Genesys is a universal roleplaying system. Largely what that means is that it’s a system, and you can add your own setting to it and it should work out. The dice systems are pretty standard, but what they innovated with was a system they called Fate. At the beginning of the session you get a couple Fate Points, if you roleplay well you get more kinda like with Style Points in the Ubiquity system. In a combat situation, initiative is handled by dealing out cards like in Savage Worlds. What was different was that each card has 2 traits on it, a Light Side trait and a Dark Side trait. When the cards are dealt to you these traits do not apply, but if you choose, you can spend a Fate Point to activate the Light Side trait to affect you for the round. A Fate Card is also laid down for the combat and whichever side of the card Light Side or Dark Side is right-side-up to the DM affects the entire round of combat. If you like, you can also spend a Fate Point to negate the effects of the group Fate Card. Fate Cards are then dealt again for each round of combat. It’s an interesting system that could use a bit of refining, but that’s why it’s still being playtested.

The game we were playing was 1950s pulp. We were called together by a museum curator who told us that a magical artifact had been stolen and that it was going to be used to resurrect a particular evil goddess whose name escapes me. We were all given other magical items and then we boarded a plane to Iraq, at least I think it was Iraq. During the flight three women who were traveling with us, a professor and her assistants I think, were possessed by demons and attacked the curator and tried to crash the plane. A few rounds of combat while shoving each other out of the way and they were brought down, but they did almost break down the door to the cockpit.

Landing in Iraq we found that there had recently been a coup and the woman who met us on the ground told us to refuel and leave immediately. We told her we couldn’t and eventually she gave us a truck. An hour or so down the road the truck dies and we start seeing Iraqi military heading our way. My character had a mechanics background, so I threw up the hood and managed to get the engine restarted (it had been sabotaged by the woman at the airport) in just one skill check. We jumped back into the truck and avoided the entire encounter. To the DM’s credit, while we hadn’t been intended to bypass the encounter so quickly, he let us do it anyway.

The next trick was finding our way to a monastery in the mountains. Out information told us that somebody in this particular village would know, but that they didn’t commonly share such information with strangers. On our way to the village we saw a man and boy walking along the road. Maria’s character had some telepathy, so she decided to figure out what she could glean from them. She rolled really well and was able to get the exact route to the monastery from the boy’s head. Later on the DM told us that he’d had groups spend an hour trying to sneak into town to get the information covertly.

At the monastery we met a monk who had not heard of a temple to the goddess we were talking about, but he said there was a temple to Lilith in the mountains, but no one entering has ever left. Eventually we persuaded him to show us where it was and he took us there. The entrance was underwater in a small pool. We had to enter one at a time. As soon as the first person entered the first monster appeared and we went into combat. Then when the second person entered the second monster appeared, and so with the third. There were only three monsters, and there were six players, Maria was in the back of the line outside and didn’t even know there was something going on until it was over, she didn’t get to participate in the combat at all. I think that particular encounter needed to be tweaked.

We solved a couple of riddles, found our way to an alter and the museum curator raised the goddess. Big surprise, right? So Maria took his head clean off with a shotgun preempting him turning into another monster for us to fight and we started fighting the goddess. It took us a few rounds to think of screwing with the statue that had been used to summon her, that took half of her life away. And eventually we killed her. Another fun game under our belts. I don’t know if I’ll be picking up Genesys when it finally gets released, but I’ll at least think about it.

Gen Con Day 3:
Saturday, August 5th 2011
Saturday was a big game day for us. We started bright and early at 10:00 with Desolation. Now, I know I’ve said in the past that I love desolation. I’m actually planning a Desolation game to run at a con in the future. But this time it was not so great. All of the players seemed pretty into it, we were ready to have a good time, but the DM seemed a bit less fired up. Maybe he hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before, maybe he was hungover, maybe it was just starting to feel too much like work, whatever the reason he just wasn’t on fire.

It was a short game, only scheduled for 2 hours. We were exploring some old Dwarven caves when an earthquake brought down the passage we’d been in previously. Trying to find our way out, we happened across a pair of Dwarf women, twins, who were also trying to find a way out. I was playing a Dwarf, so I knew what the women were scared of. The Deep Horrors are a somewhat insect-like race that can take over humanoids and turn them into warriors. They are the bogeymen that Dwarven mothers tell their children about, except they’re real.

The women thought they knew a way out, so I was all about heading that way with as little delay as we could. Unfortunately, the other party members wanted to explore every side passage along the way. In one side passage we found what had once been a Dwarf but was mutating into something else. After a few rounds of conversation we put a merciful arrow through his skull and went on our way.

We went further along our path and faced a group of Dwarf corpses that were animated by corpse fungi. in the real world there is a fungus that can infect ants that will cause them to do certain actions (mostly just walking around) even after the ant had died. Desolation’s Corpse Fungus works pretty much the same way except it will cause the infected corpse to fight somewhat and to exhale spores.

After that we started to find our way out and came upon the brothers of the women we’d been traveling with. Of course they had already been turned by the Deep Horrors so we had to destroy them, but that’s usually the way these things work out. A few rounds of combat and we were back in the light of day.

After Desolation we went to the Wizards of the Coast room to have our first introduction to Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. We played in a rather extensive D&D 3.5 game and I have prepared a few others that we never actually played so we have some experience with D&D, but we hadn’t yet tried out 4th edition and we were interested to see what was different.

I won’t bore you with the differences that we found, most of you have already played 4th edition by now anyway. The encounter was just six of us in a field with 2 wolves and 2 goblins. We were all 1st level characters and none of us had played 4e before, so we didn’t exactly trounce them, but it wasn’t a difficult fight. What really stuck with me though, was that the woman running the game was easily the worst DM I have ever gamed under. She didn’t know her stuff, she discouraged playing in character, she didn’t even have a book.

We grabbed some food and headed to the Pathfinder Society room to try out what they called a Delve. The delve was basically one encounter in an arena to teach us some mechanics of the game. We were kind of hoping for a little more than that, but it’s what they had that was free. There were 7 players at this table including a couple who was probably in their 50s and had never played an RPG before. I don’t know what possessed them to try it out, but they seemed to have a great time. The DM was kind of confused with us because we already knew basically what we were doing, and since the new couple was sitting next to Maria, they kept asking her questions instead of the actual DM.

Through with our quick little delve, we headed on to our next game: Hollow Earth Expedition. Hollow Earth uses the same Ubiquity system as our earlier Desolation game but is set in a 1930s pulp world. Kinda like Indiana Jones in a lot of ways. This particular game was not set in the default setting. It didn’t even have anything to do with the Hollow Earth. We were playing a double feature, the first two hours were a western, the next two hours were a 1001 Arabian Nights kind of deal. The DM ran both games like we were in a corny movie on SyFy.

In the western I was an Apache boy who had been raised in England and trained as a doctor, now returned for revenge on the man who was responsible for destroying my village. Maria was a Chinese miner with martial arts training. The whole party was out for the blood of one man in particular. We rode into town on a rainy day that happened to be his funeral. We demanded to see the body and one of the pallbearers dropped the casket into the grave, which made an odd sound. I decided to go all in and jumped into the grave on top of the casket. The bottom of the pit gave way and I fell with the casket into a mining tunnel. There were strange creatures down there and the rest of the party soon followed me to confront them. They were kind of like the ugliest Nosferatu you’ve ever seen in a movie, and they were pretty feral, attacking their dead instead of us. We made short work of them then checked the casket to find, not the man we had all been coming to kill, but a woman who fit the description of his most recent mistress.

We headed down the mining tunnel toward the cliff face. We picked up an NPC who told us that he had seen several shackled women and children being moved through the tunnel. We came out of the tunnel into a large underground chamber that had a large lake and a ship moored inside. There was a firefight and a lot of maneuvering for cover before we finally found and killed the sniper. Next was the ship’s cabin and the man we had all come to kill... wielding a Gatling gun. The truth be told, I couldn’t tell you how we got him, all I remember is that I wasn’t very instrumental in it.

In the second part of our double-feature I played a 1300 year old Djinn who had been transformed into a 13 year old boy with no magical powers. Maria played a man who had been transformed into a monkey. We were all a part of Sinbad’s crew. We started at night, on deck. Apparently we were the most worthless members of the crew and were forced to sleep above deck.

During the night a giant bird breathed fire onto the ship and landed being ridden by a man in a golden helmet and a woman in chains. The man summoned four skeletons and then took the woman and walked into Sinbad’s cabin. We all started hacking away at the skeletons and the bird while Maria, as a monkey, climbed the rigging over the bird and went to help Sinbad. We had a warrior princess with us who took care of the skeletons handily and we managed to get past the bird. I’m not really clear on how exactly it went down, but the man in the helmet was a mage and he somehow got Sinbad to the bird, who took off with him, before we knocked him out and I stole his helmet. Then we remembered that the ship was on fire so we decided to swim for shore.

The woman had a spyglass with her that had Djinni writing on it. The magician in the group (who I knew was a fraud, but I didn’t out him because I thought it was funny) said he’d study the device to determine what it did. I casually walked over and stared at the spyglass in a wide-eyed 13-year-old manner, read the inscription on the spyglass, and said something in a tone that only the magician could hear that amounted to “Wow, I’ll bet it can see through illusions and stuff,” then walked away.

After a bit we were given clues that led to the basement of a building by the bay. On the wall there were alcoves that after a bit of investigation formed a pattern resembling a star constellation. The Magician sweet-talked the first mate of a ship owned by the Caliph himself to take us out to where the stars pointed. once there the area was surrounded by thick mist, but looking through the spyglass allowed us to find the safe way through the reef surrounding a sunken island.

The highest point on the island was still above water and we climbed the volcano until we looked over the rim and saw the mage that had transformed me into a boy and Maria into a monkey. Sinbad was bound to an altar and the giant bird was standing off to one side. The first thing I did was toss three grenades, I had demolitions for some reason, then our warrior princess jumped down to the mage and the bird took off to breathe fire on us. When the bird got up to us to incinerate us I tossed a few grenades down its throat and its head blew pretty well off.

When the princess dispatched the mage he turned into mist and started to invade Sinbad’s body. The princess grabbed the body and started moving him away and I jumped down to the alter and pulled out the lamp that had once bound me. Saying the proper incantation I bound the mage to the lamp which reversed his spell on Maria and myself. Since the lamp that had bound me was already occupied, I was a free Djinn, free to cause all sorts of mischief. I ended the game by transporting all of us to Baghdad.

Gen Con Day 4:
Sunday, August 7th 2011
Sunday of Gen Con always seems to have kind of a somber feel to it. Everybody’s backing up, getting ready to leave, talking about what they’re thinking about for next year. I think we’re going to try to plan more events on Sunday late in the day so we can keep going to the last minute without just wandering through the exhibit hall trying to figure out if we have the budget to buy just one more book.

This was my fourth year going to Gen Con. I always have a blast and this year was no different. We’re planning our budget better for next year and we already have a list of stuff we’re looking at buying. I’ll miss it, but it’ll be back next year and so will I.

That wraps it up for the Best Four Days in Gaming.

Until the next post,
Good Gaming.

Another year between posts.

Well, it's almost Gen Con again. it looks like the last time I actually wrote a blog I was also talking about Gen Con. Excuses aside, it's been a long time. What's that? "What have you been up to, Mike?" I'm glad you asked.

General Life:
Dante's a little over a year old now. He's really cute. I know some people say that all babies are cute, but they're lying. Dante, however, really is cute. He gets that from his mother.
My friends and gaming cohorts, Elly and Mike, got married in December. Elly got into The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme so she and Mike are moving to Japan for the next one to three years. Other friends and gaming buddies, Victor, James, and Solomon, are moving to Chicago. We really need to find new blood for our tabletop group.

Tabletop Games:
I really wish I had more to report on this one. We finished our end-times mage campaign. I personally stiched Ananasi and the Weaver back into one being. We released the Wyrm. And the Wyrm destroyed the world. we all died, but we got the satisfaction of knowing that the Tellurian was preserved so the world could be remade within it.
After that we really haven't tabletopped other than the occasional board/card game like Dominion or Red Dragon Inn. I'm working on a bite-sized Desolation adventure that could be run at a con, but it's kind of stalled for the moment. I would love to get back into a tabletop RPG. Time to start looking for new bodies.

Video Games:
This one I have been doing a lot in. I finished God of War III, Dante's Inferno, Portal 2, and Bayonetta. I started The Force Unleashed, Assassin's Creed, Infamous, and Mortal Kombat. I've been trying to earn a platinum trophy on Final Fantasy XIII, so I haven't finished that one yet.
Cataclysm came out. I got it and took launch day off of work to play it. In February I was still only 83 and let my account lapse. I started it up again in May and finally hit 85.

Stuff I'm Looking Forward To:
I'm really looking forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic. I wouldn't consider myself a "huge" Star Wars nerd, especially compared to other huge Star Wars nerds. Having said that, I have high hopes for The Old Republic.
Along with a significant portion of the population, I am eagerly awaiting Diablo 3. Hopefully we'll get more information at BlizzCon. Also from Blizzard, Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm has been revealed and looks awsome. I really need to finish Wings of Liberty. And I am really hoping to hear about Blizzard's new IP MMO.

That pretty much sums it up. I promise that I'm planning on updating more regularly. Luckilly, I'm not really apologizing to anybody because no one reads this blog anyway. Who knows, maybe that will change soon. My next post will most likely be a Gen Con recap.

Until then,
Good Gaming.

Wow, 5 months

Oh, how the time flies. Was it really 5 months ago that I made my last post? Yikes. Good news: I'm a father! I didn't even have to buy Maria the maternity shirt that says "Yes, my husband logged off WoW long enough to knock me up" but there were some jokes. We now have a son named Dante, and he's great. Maria had some complications, but she pulled through and everyone is happy and healthy. But that's probably enough of my personal life; on to the gaming related stuff.

Unfortunately, Maria ended up having her labor induced just a few days after I made my last post, so the mini D&D game that I was trying to get together fell through. Sadly, we really haven't done much in the way of roleplaying since Dante was born at all. But we're really itching to get back to it, so hopefully soon.

So, what's happened since I last posted? I got my PS3 and my Wii hooked up finally. E3 went down. The launch of Starcraft II came and went. I went to Gen Con. A bunch of games came out that I haven't gotten to play yet.

Let's start at the top of that list, E3. For anyone that doesn't know the Electronics Entertainment Expo is a big convention where a lot of new technologies and games are unveiled. This year there were some much anticipated announcements from Sony's demonstration of the Move, to Microsoft's demonstration of Kinect, and the announcement of the next installment of the Twisted Metal series.

Some of you may have noticed that I've never said anything about owning an Xbox. The reason for that is incredibly simple: I don't. So I don't really have much stake in Kinect, but I can say that the part of the demonstration that I saw reminded me a lot of the games that came in the box when I got my first webcam in the '90s.

I was a little bit more impressed with the showing of the Move, but not so much that I'm planning on purchasing one. Really, the move looks like what it is: Sony trying to tap into the apparently lucrative motion games market that's been cornered by the Wii for so long. The problem with this, of course, is that Nintendo has had some time to figure out what it really is that their customer base wants, and cater to that. Sony and Microsoft are late to this particular party, and are going to have to play catch-up. That's not to say that Kinect and Move won't have any good games, they're bound to have a few, but I doubt they will be enough to entice me to buy the peripherals.

The two games that are coming to mind right now that I'm excited about from E3 are Epic Mickey, which has now been announced as releasing on November 30, and Twisted Metal. I've been a fan of the Twisted Metal franchise for a long time. Before I upgraded my console gaming from a Super Nintendo, a buddy of mine had Twisted Metal 2 for the Playstation. We used to have endless tournaments on that game. I remember I was the only person who could get the hang of using Shadow, and I didn't even screenwatch. So I'm really excited that Twisted Metal is finally making its way to the PS3.

The two modes that were demoed at E3 were a Capture-the-Flag type of mode called Nuke, and a team deathmatch. There's a lot of emphasis on the online aspects of the game, which makes sense because it's something that the franchise has never offered before, but there's really something to be said for sitting in a room with all of your friends, eating junk food, and drinking while kicking the crap out of each other on the screen. I don't have the most stable internet connection at home, so I'm not likely to get a lot of use out of these modes of play, but I'm still looking forward to what I've seen.

The other game I'm looking forward to that was exhibited at E3 is Epic Mickey. I'm not really sure what it is about Mickey Mouse. He's a Walt Disney icon, but he's hardly been in anything at all, and most of it wasn't all that good. But still he represents something magical that we all identify with our childhood and we always look forward to one day there being something awesome featuring Mickey. Epic Mickey may just be that something awesome. You play Mickey Mouse wandering through an animated world armed with a paint brush. Anybody that used to watch Looney Toons remembers that the most powerful tool in an animated universe is a paint brush, it can paint in a door, or it can erase everything that you are until you're nothing but a pair of talking lips. That seems to be the whole premise of this game. With his paint brush (controlled by the WiiMote) Mickey can paint or erase anything in the world. Of course, this is limited to the parameters set forth by the level designers, but I have high hopes for the game.

After E3 on my list comes Starcraft 2. When the videos for this started coming out, I think all Starcraft fans everywhere echoed Tychus Findlay's line from the end of the trailer, "Hell, it's about time." I was lucky enough to get in some games in the Beta, though my flaky internet was a serious hindrance. There's a lot to learn about this new game. But it's going to be a fun time, I can already tell. I think I'll save my impressions on the game for a future post, though.

Then there was Gen Con. I used to always put those together into Gencon or GenCon, but as it turns out all of the logos have it separated, so I guess I'll follow suit. This year I only got to go to GenCon from Friday evening on. Maria, Kevin, and I got in around 7:00 (19:00) and proceeded to wander around the con grounds looking for something to get involved in. We wandered and wandered and eventually we ended up waiting in line to see the Damsels of Dorkington (www.damselsofdorkington.com) who were pretty funny. Then off to Champion's for some drinks and food.

Saturday was our first big day of the con. Mike and Elly came up for just the day, Mike spent the day with Kevin playing a gigantic Axis and Allies game. Elly walked around the convention hall with Maria and me dressed up as Yomiko Readman from Read or Die. There was a whole lot to see this year. I know we spent a lot more than we probably should have. Some highlights of what we picked up include: Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition, Savage Worlds Shattered Skies, Dominion Prosperity (which is supposedly in the mail, but still hasn't gotten here), and a preorder for Red Dragon Inn 3.

Saturday night we played a Savage Worlds game with the Weird War II setting. Weird Wars is basically historical wars, so far fairly modern wars, with the addition of weird things like zombies, magic, and dragons. We were playing in World War II at a point where we had never encountered any of these strange things before. Of course we ended up running into a whole host of zombies in this little village, but we ended up making it out alive. I really thought that I'd do more damage though, when I stuck 30 rounds of ammunition in a plastic explosive, stuck it to the big uber-zombie's chest, and detonated it. I really did a surprisingly small amount of damage.

Sunday was really just more of the same. We walked around the exhibitor's hall and looked at all the neat stuff. Next year we're hoping to be able to go for the whole con and get in to some more events. Last year we had a pretty good time doing True Dungeon, maybe we'll try that again.

Next on the docket is Blizz Con, and while I'm not going, I'm really looking forward to it. Here are a few predictions and hopes for Blizz Con. the release date for Cataclysm will be announced as sometime in November, probably a Tuesday. We'll get some more info on Diablo III, maybe a suggestion about when to expect it, and maybe even the final class will be revealed. I'm hoping they'll finally reveal their new MMO that they've been working on. Apparently it's from a new intellectual property, which really makes me happy. As much as I love Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo, I really think it's in Blizzard's best interest to develop a few new franchises.
That's about all I have to talk about at the moment. Hopefully I'll have some more roleplaying related stuff in the near future. Until then, Good Gaming.

The Long Absence

I'm sure my 1.5 readers noticed a while ago that I haven't updated in a while. There are a few reasons for that; mostly though, I'm lazy. I've not given up gaming, I just haven't written much on the subject. So here's a quick rundown of the state of things.

The Mage game: Still ongoing, but winding down.
The Vampire: The Masquerade game: Finished.
Vampire: The Dark Ages game: Started.
Consoles: Still not hooked up, but soon, I hope.
WoW: Still playing, but I still don't have a character to 80 yet.
The House: Still in a shambles, but it's starting to pull together.
The Wife: Pregnant, will soon be giving birth.

This will tell you how big my wife, Maria, and I are into games. She decided that the best thing to do when she goes into early labor will be to get all of our friends together to play a big D&D 3.5 extravaganza. I'll be DMing this one (wish me luck) and I'm hoing to be able to make it a fast-paced battle-fest. Maria will be in periodic pain, so I don't want to bring much social, political, or logistical thinking into it, I think I'm just going to keep hurling monsters at the party until either everyone is dead or it's time to go to the hospital.

To this end, I am creating the party myself and I'm going to hand the characters out at the game, this helps keep players from being too attached to their characters and they won't mind as much if they die. The pary it thus:

Dwarf Monk/Drunken Master
Half-Elf Ranger
Human Rogue
Half-Ork Favored Soul
Human Fighter (I may throw something else on this one later, I haven't looked at it very much yet)
Half-Celestial Halfling Sorcerer
Human Paladin

I rolled randomly for all of the races. I had all of the class types generally picked out, but I rolled randomly to assign the race/class combinations. I'll write out a run-down of how the game goes. It should be fun.

State of the Blog:
I do want to come back to the blog. I find that writing about the games that I'm in can be hilarious and cathartic. I'll try to fill in the gaps in the Mage and Vampire campaigns soon. The plan was originally to start a Changeling campaign once the house was in order, but with the baby coming soon, and the house still a disaster, I don't know when that will actually be.

So until later,

Good Gaming

Gencon 2009 Report

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

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.