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I remember hearing talk about a pen & paper game, but I'm really impressed that we got Green Ronin. Whether they're going to use True 20 as a base for Dragon Age classes (Warrior, Expert, and Mage map pretty well to DA:O base classes) or develop a whole new system, I know they'll do it with respect for the IP.
My own gaming is going on the back burner until life slows down a teensy bit, but one idea that's been kicking around ever since I first flipped through the rulebooks. Has anyone already started running or designing something like this?
Modern (or WW2, anyway) setting, Indiana Jones-style adventuring. Players can be rogues, warlords, fighters, or rangers. Melee weapons, armor, and shields are for the most part replaced with the idea of combat training -- changing the flavor, keeping all the rules. Your Brawling does 1d8 damage, and yeah, it can be disarmed, which is you being knocked off balance and losing your style (which sounds artificial until you think about boxers and martial artists screwing up an opponent's style), and your defensive guard occupies an arm and makes you harder to hit. Ranged weapons, and all abilities tied to such, become firearms.
I'm having images of fighting Nazis on top of a moving train while it approaches the stereotypical low-hanging tunnel, and instead of d20 Modern, to which I would have gamely added knockback rules, bonuses for Bull Rush, and Balance checks, heroes can actually knock opponents off the edge.
Likely destined to be a one-shot or a play-by-e-mail, although I've heard that PbEM takes long enough to be un-fun in 4E; thoughts?
This episode felt really good in a lot of places. There are a few things that I really wish I'd done differently, but overall, it still felt like a success.
Die Mutantfuhrer
The heroes appeared appropriately cowed, as might be expected by the fact that before he even arrived, his aura had left them Shaken (-2 to all rolls), cold (approximately -40), and half-blinded by unnatural driving rain as storm clouds swept the horizon. When the Mutantfuhrer himself came into view, tentacles flailing, the heroes were pretty much looking entirely to retreat.
They survived (although not before the big bad drained powers from both Sparks and Stranger) and teleported to safety. Frankly, I'd expected a TPK-and-then-rescue, so seeing them hold their own, with more than one person still conscious, was great.
Talking
The investigative part went well. People seemed to enjoy talking to their alternate-world counterparts, and they uncovered Lightspeed as the spy in their midst. They didn't uncover the actual traitor, but Lightspeed gave them some good inside information.
Moonbase
This was supposed to be "the heroes are captured, because they didn't find out about the traitor", but the dice didn't roll that way. And here's where I made my big mistake. Impact, an NPC along with the heroes, blazed out to fight Hitler. He rolled a 19, which is actually about what he needed to hit (he only hit because he was charging). And Hitler rolled a 3 on his Toughness save -- so Hitler was stunned. Next round, Impact rolled another absurdly good roll, and Hitler blew his Toughness save again, and was out of the fight.
Which would have been great to see, yes, if a player had been doing it. As it was, I felt like I'd robbed the heroes of the coolest villain by having their ally be far cooler than they were. Since they weren't supposed to win the fight anyway, though, this isn't a killer, just something to bear in mind for next time. As it was, the heroes still had an ugly fight, and they escaped into the past rather than defeating all the villains.
The heroes escaped, traveled back to the 1940s (but were still on the moon, and had a great moment of learning who could breathe in space and who couldn't, until Aether the elemental turned into air and let people breathe her. They dropped down (with Aether the fire elemental using fire control to stop people from burning up on re-entry, and then all the fliers helping the non-fliers land safely), found the beaches of Normandy, and proceeded to stomp Nazi butt.
Seven Shattered Souls
My biggest problem with this fight was that, as always, it was coming too late in the evening, and I sacrificed flavor for speed. I had a couple of nice villain monologues, but the flavor quickly fell by the wayside, as it always does.
Nevertheless, it was a hell of a fight. Seven PL10 villains (plus some Nazis that got blowed up pretty quickly and didn't contribute much, except for, as I recall, one very lucky hit on someone) against five PL11 heroes. There were brief moments when people were actually worried -- two people were down, and two of the villains emitted a field that disabled healing and regeneration powers -- but then the tide turned, with no help on my end, and the appropriate whoopass ensued. Having villains with ambient area effects (one guy disabled healing, one guy disabled regen, one guy disabled the Impervious extra, one guy disabled the Autofire extra) really helped the waterfall effect -- one guy would go down, and his knockout would disable his effect, so all of a sudden, the heroes were Impervious again, for example.
My villain designed to challenge Stranger, an opponent immune to all damage, went wonderfully, Stranger took some ugly hits, figured out that hitting the guy wasn't accomplishing much, and promptly possessed him -- which, given that Stranger is nigh-invulnerable to damage anyway, wasn't that big a problem.
At the end, the heroes were a bit surprised that they had won, which I think made it a good fight, even if, as always, I stopped doing the fun comic-book flavor text halfway through and got more tactical.
Next Up: THE DEATH OF CRIMSON CRICKET
My big major critique is, "Let me buy it."
Enter Gladiator Slaves of the Star Cultists!
That was actually one of my selling points (although why one needs selling points when doing something that nobody else is going to ever see is kind of a mystery), the notion that when I made a language, I wasn't making an entire language, which would involve a thousands of words that nobody including me would ever know. I was making what are apparently minimalist languages, languages with very few words that use basic terms and then lump then together to make bigger words. Or something along those lines. One of the advantages of doing this with absolutely no linguistic training at all whatsoever is that I can do whatever I want, and while any linguist who ever looks at my languages will weep silently at watching some guy with no education in that area tromp all over the basics of linguistic theory, much as I weep when someone with an "anyone can write, they're just words!" mentality decides to helpfully put words into the game without checking with a writer or editor first, nobody else is going to care.
I made the first language while bored after injuring my hands from typing too much. I was going crazy, so I held a pencil in one clenched fist and made a simple language with an extremely limited and conceptual vocabulary. I had no idea what I was going to use it for. I tossed it into a short story at a writing workshop a few years later (The Fourth Verb, which a few of my Clarion West buddies may remember more colorfully as The Otter Sex Story). I modified it later for use in a big long D&D campaign, and some of my players got good enough at the language to speak it with me. (It was the language of the ancients.) Most, at least, got good enough at it to recognize that anything with the word "pur" in the name was going to try to kill them. My favorite memory of the language in that game was when an archwizard asked them to deliver a package.
Wizard: It's called the tasan for short.
Party Ranger: Short for what?
Wizard: Tasanbardeljuntashyrtathonpur.
Party Ranger: Wait! I'm getting my cheat-sheet!
Party Sorcerer: Crap, it ends in "pur".
Party Bard: Immediate physical force... change eternal... distant death.
Party Ranger: Okay, yeah, that's bad.
Wizard: It's more commonly known as a prismatic bomb. It's perfectly safe, unless you drop it. So, who wants to carry it?
Party Bard: Not it!
Party Ranger: Not it!
Party Sorcerer: Oh, come on!
I used the second language in a couple of short campaigns that never took off, and in the most recent novel, The Palace Job. I wanted something that felt more like a real language, which in my non-linguist mind meant "longer words". I still wanted a simple language, but I wanted something with the illusion of complexity, which occasionally made forays into actual complexity, and I wanted a larger vocabulary so that I wasn't tossing off variations of the same four one-syllable words half the time. I also wanted it to sound more... romance-ish, without being a romance language. That made it harder for a friend to pick up the language and learn it, but it made it something that felt better in a novel.
First language: e a tara mir
New language: kufuiralis
In both cases, I'm saying "He doesn't see me," which is apparently important, given that it's come up both times. Maybe it's because the players in the campaigns who like languages tend to play rogues. I dunno.
I always think of myself as not really doing worldbuilding in either my stories or my games, but then I remember that I've made up languages, so apparently my worldbuilding just tends toward the esoteric.
Anybody ever learn a language for a game? What's your favorite made-up language in a novel or series?
Today, 12:25 PM:
Listen, I understand that people are trying to help. The outpouring of support I've received since writing my original post really shows the strength of the gamers as a group, and it also supports the point I've repeatedly made, that no one but me seems to understand, which is that there is definitely a market for this. I am tired of being oppressed by rules systems that don't deliver what I want for my own specific campaign. I am sick of having to modify everything to get the flavor I want. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. All I'm saying is that I think that I am entitled to a Farseer-Specific RPG, and I am disappointed that nobody has made it for me.
Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy, and the spinoff trilogy in the same world, the Liveship Trilogy, is an incredibly well-respected series of books. I don't have the exact sales numbers, so stop asking, but almost all of my fantasy-reading friends have heard of the series, and the ones who hadn't sounded interested in reading it someday once I told them about it. If a show like Firefly that hardly anybody watched can get its own RPG made, I don't think it's too much to ask for a very popular book series to get its own system as well. I mean, how much work can it be to research a fantasy world, come up with rules to support the feel of the novels, playtest those rules, contract some color illustrations, and get it published?
And yes, to all of you who somehow think I can't read, I do appreciate your suggestions, but for all that you've questioned my literacy, none of you apparently read my first post, in which I stated that I was only interested in official publications, not house rules! VerityFarseer12, I understand that Blue Rose would do some of what I want, but I don't think that it could really capture the true depth of the Skill and the Wit, and really, it's set in a world called Aldea. Really? Aldea? How are my players supposed to get into the Elderlings and the scheming machinations of Regal to undermine Verity's rightful rule when they're tripping over, I don't know, unicorns and stuff every few pages? And no, True20 doesn't help either -- it doesn't even have rules for how a Witted animal companion would work, and I'm not some kind of crazed gamer geek who has all kinds of time to come up with these rules on my own. And anyway, my group doesn't even have the time to learn all the rules differences that made d20 Modern impossible to play relative to normal D&D, so telling them to toss out all their dice except the d20 is totally unrealistic.
To those of you who continue to push your own pet systems, I think you're revealing your own biases, and I feel sort of sorry for you, to be honest. Oh, Grim Tales is what I want, FitzChivalry227? Really? Could Grim Tales differentiate Fitz's earlier combat style as a nimble opponent striking for light damage from his later style as a powerful axe-wielding warrior? Does Grim Tales have comprehensive rules for poison, insanity, and ship-based combat? Maybe it could, if I was interested in doing all kinds of work personalizing it. Sending me your own homebrewed rules is fine, but please -- I don't have time to make my own system. I'm pretty sure I don't have time to download the doc you sent me, see if it's any good (no offense, but I don't even know you), and then waste all kinds of paper printing it out and then having to staple it or something. My players might even want copies. That's just an absurd amount of work. I doubt your homebrew document even has color illustrations of Fitz being tormented by Regal.
WittedPrince, I know that you like Mongoose's Babylon 5 and Conan RPGs, but really, there's no way that using the Conan rules system and combining B5's telepath feats and skills for magic is even remotely feasible. I mean, I'd be using two books at once. I'd be looking at the rules for armor damage, and then someone would want to use the Skill to blind an opponent, and I'd be like, "Whaaaa?" If you're going to offer up suggestions, please make suggestions that don't involve trying literally to juggle two books at the table.
I refuse to even address the people who suggested Mutants & Masterminds.
I guess I'm just disappointed that so many people want me to "do it myself" or "use the rules I came up with" instead of standing with me and demanding what we rightfully deserve as fans of a very successful book series. For me, the true roleplaying game captures the essence of an idea that I love and then gives me limitless potential to build my own world, my own characters, my own plots and intrigues, and ultimately my own story. All I want is a custom-made professionally bound book that does that for me.
Also, please note that I will not purchase any book that uses material from the Tawny Man trilogy, as I do not consider it canonical.
"I'm not going to lie," Dawnblade (who has registered a formal petition to change his name to Nightblade) stated in a recent interview with Bardic Lore Monthly. "After my liege lord forced my sister into an arranged marriage with what turned out to be an undead monster, I killed him in cold blood, turning my back on the path of law and goodness forever. I paid the sorcerer to summon a demon so that I might bind my soul in service to the hellish realms of the hatesworn, making my fall from grace complete. I knew what I was doing. But really, I was kind of thinking, succubus, you know?"
Instead of a bat-winged seductress intent on luring the fallen paladin to the ways of evil through pleasures of the flesh, the outsider with whom Dawnblade must make a binding oath as part of the requirements for becoming a blackguard was a vrock, which looks like a bipedal vulture.
Dawnblade stresses that he has no regrets about his decision, but he does wish he'd been tempted by a demon more popular or feared in general society. "I mean no disrespect to the vrock. I've heard that their stunning screech ability has a pretty high save DC, and they do something with spores, too. I don't remember what. I just... the thing is, I was a paladin. Maybe you bring a vrock when it's an ordinary fighter/rogue who wants to walk in the deepest paths of darkness, but when it's someone who was one of the brightest champions of light, the living incarnation of goodness, I'd think you could maybe send a balor or something. Or a glabrezu, at least. They've got four arms. Heck, send an erinyes. I've got no problem with Lawful... and I hear that they're, like, the succubi of the devils."
For its part, Yergalash Dungtooth, the vrock summoned to complete Dawnblade's fall to evil, maintains that vrocks are extremely popular, and Dawnblade should feel honored. "Eldamar is full of a lot of hatred and anger right now, and I appreciate that. Possibly he's overlooked the fact that, if I'd brought a couple of friends along and we'd danced in a circle while screeching for a few rounds, our dance of ruin ability could do 20d6 damage, Reflex half, to everything within 100 feet. Well, everything within 100 feet that didn't just move away when we started dancing, that is. I mean, I know, in earlier editions, we weren't all that scary, but you look at us today, man, and it's like, vrock power! Anyway, I'm honored to guide Eldamar into a new and evil part of his life, and I'm sure that he'll be satisfied with the services I can provide. I mean, mirror image, teleport, greater teleport... once per day I can unload a heroism... honestly, that's about it, but still."
Dungtooth added that it had, in fact, attempted to summon another vrock, who would in turn summon another vrock, to show off the aforementioned dance of ruin, but its summoning ability only has a 35% chance of success, and the roll was a 62.
Party: Okay, we need to lure the human mercenaries out or something, so they can't sound the alarm and wake up the vamps.
Me: Done. Coric walks up and knocks on the door.
Party: Oh, good lord. Okay, we hide.
Me: I look. How'd they do?
The party rolls. Most people roll decently, save the paladin in half-plate, who ends up with a net of 3.
DM: Most people blend into the crowd pretty well. The paladin sticks out like a sore thumb.
Me: Good, good.
DM: The door opens, and a shifty man in armor pokes his head out. "What?"
Me: (bored voice) "Would the owner of this home kindly present himself for reparations from the church?"
Shifty Guy: What?
Me: (bored voice) "When the church sold this land to the Keenites, it evidently did so on unsafe land, and is now legally bound to pay reparations." Coric points at the paladin.
Paladin's player: I look pissed off.
Me: "See? There's the church representative."
Party and DM: Wait. Let us get this straight. You're using zoning regulations as your bluff?
Me: Yep.
DM: Bluff check!
Me: 18.
Party: Is he penalized for the paladin being in plain sight?
DM: Nope. He incorporated her.
Me: Woo!
Shifty Guy: Yyyyeah. I'll get the owner. (Hey, Bob! Bob! Wake up! They're giving out money! Yeah, you're the owner. Come on out!)
Bob: What?
Me: "We're giving out money."
Bob: Great. Gimme.
Me: (bored voice) "Please step out into the street so that the evidence of the church's wrongdoing may be visible in the eyes of all."
DM: Bluff check. Hard bluff check.
Me: ...27.
DM: Okay. Out they come. There are three guys, all ready to receive their money.
Me: Good, good. "Will the church representative now present her weapon, so that I may ritually strike it from her hands with my weapon to symbolize the church's error in this matt--"
DM: BLUFF CHECK!
Me: 31.
DM: Holy... Okay. Go for it.
Paladin's player: I draw my sword and look bored.
Me: (bored voice, reading from fake scroll) "In recompense for having sold land to this homeowner while it was known to be infested with vampires..." SNEAK ATTACK!
DM: Wow. That is fantastic.
Party: Zoning regulations. Seriously.
DM: Okay, roll away,
Me: ... Natural 1.
I believe that this series of events captures the spirit of my character in a nutshell.
Expected to hit shelves in mid-2008, the roleplaying system has been hotly debated, with many concerned that it would be harmful to the gaming industry and their own lives. A lack of hard evidence regarding the dangers of Fourth Edition (4e) prevented authorities from moving forward, but that all changed on the night of November 6th, when 4e allegedly entered the home of Gerald Becht, a Fremont-based roleplaying gamer.
"We had just started our weekly game," Becht reported, "when we heard this banging on the door. (Dungeon Master Mark Andrute) looked through the peephole and saw that it was 4e, and we decided not to answer, because we didn't want it ruining our game. We figured that it wouldn't bother us if we just didn't let it in, but after a minute or two, it started kicking."
Soon, 4e had pushed its way inside. According to Becht, the roleplaying system demanded to hear details of the group's running campaign, and began berating the group for not using miniatures or a computer.
"We thought we could ignore it and just play," Becht said, "but we were wrong. God, were we wrong. We were in this negotiation with a demon prince, and Fourth Edition started yelling for us to shut up and start combat... that there was a system to handle the negotiation with dice rolls, and we shouldn't waste so much time. Then Mark asked 4e to stop, saying that this was the lead up to our big fight with the ruler of the demons, a succubus queen. And Fourth Edition gets this funny look and says, 'Succubi are devils now.'"
According to Becht, that was when 4e attacked the gaming group, killing three of the gamers and critically injuring Andrute. When John Stern begged for mercy, complaining that 4e had attacked them by surprise, the roleplaying system reportedly responded by noting that when it was released, there would only be one Armor Class. "Stern played a gnome monk-illusionist," Becht recalled with a shiver. "Fourth Edition spent a long time on him."
When the violence had ended, the Fremont-based campaign was gone forever.
According to an online gaming fan who goes by the handle "Zarr", these murders are not unexpected. "I warned them," the fan posted in a message at the popular gaming site ENWorld. "I warned them, and they refused to listen."
The whereabouts of Zarr's mother and dog are currently unknown, and Zarr has reportedly asked authorities to investigate the matter and determine whether Fourth Edition is responsible.
From what I've seen in my own experience as a GM and a player, people in D&D specifically will dump Intelligence (fighters, clerics, paladins), Strength (arcane casters, some rogues, druids), Wisdom (fighters, bards), and Charisma (almost everyone except Bards and Paladins). I've rarely if ever seen anyone dump Dexterity or Constitution, though, except people making one-shot characters specifically for short adventures, or people who knew that they were hindering their character but specifically made a roleplaying decision to do so.
Dexterity: Affects ranged attacks, Initiative, Reflex saves, armor class, and many good skills.
Constitution: Affects hit points, Fortitude saves, and one skill (Concentration) that only a few classes need.
My theory is that almost nobody dumps Dex because Dex is too fun to dump -- you get too many good things for having a good Dexterity -- while nobody dumps Con because Con is too important to dump -- hit points aren't necessarily fun, but they're so important that you have to have them.
Have other people had radically different D&D experiences? How about in other systems?
Accepting that it always varies from campaign to campaign, I'm thinking specifically of games in which combat plays a major roles (as in, it's a very rare session that doesn't have any combat, and most sessions have several minor combat encounters and one or more major challenging combat).
It relates, tangentially, to Dad-dom, so if you skip my kid-posts, you might want to skim this bit.
The Dude taught me some interesting lessons about comedy when he was just a few months old. He loved to be tickled, or for me to make faces, and we've got a few treasured movies of him giggling hysterically as I make an idiot of myself for his amusement. What's interesting, though, is how I ended up getting the laughs. See, if I just came up and tickled him or made a face, it wasn't funny -- it was an uncomfortable surprise that could sometimes result in tears (yay, Dad, making the kid cry!).
So what I had to do was to come up, raise my hand up in the air while saying, "Uh-oh, it's the tickle monster! Watch out! Watch out!", and then I'd hold my hand there for a moment as he kicked his legs in excitement, and I'd leave my hand there for just a moment, and then I'd swoop in with the tickle, to roars of tiny giggles.
It wasn't the surprise that made it funny. It was the combination of anticipation (I know that Dad is going to tickle me) and uncertainty (when is he gonna do it? Now? Now? How about aaaaiiiieeee!) that made it funny for him. Anticipation plus uncertainty equaled tension, and tension was good for comedy.
I think that when you're trying to create a character, and said character is, let us understand, not intended to be used in an in-depth character study that extends our knowledge of the human condition, but rather, you know, entertains us, a similar approach is what works. You create a character who is broad and simple enough that the audience (or other players, for a tabletop game) knows, generally, how that character is going to react in any given situation, but you leave enough wiggle room in the character or the situation to provide some uncertainty as to exactly how that reaction will be expressed.
For me, at least, the most fun I've had as a GM or a player in tabletop games is when another player just says, "Okay..." in a certain tone of voice when their turn comes up, and everyone groans, laughs, or leans forward in horrified anticipation, because nobody knows exactly what's about to happen, but everyone knows it's going to be good.
The fact that I wholeheartedly embrace this philosophy may be why people tend to walk away from the rough drafts of my novels saying that the minor characters are good. My major characters often (and by often, here, I mean "almost always") take a few drafts to really hammer out, because they're more complex, but my minor characters are almost always pretty solid in an otherwise rough first pass. (Those who have not read one of my rough drafts may take that as braggadocio, but please note how I did say that my major characters, the ones more important to, you know, the story, aren't nearly so polished, and also how I've completely avoided mentioning either the plot or the setting in this particular round of self-congratulation.)
That said, I'm annoyed enough about the canceled PureSpec game from last week that I'm considering trying to shop the adventure around. It's written enough that all I'd need to do is write a big ol' ton of flavor text, replacing the one-line plot outlines I gave myself with in-depth descriptions for GMs. That may sound like a lot of writing to do, and it is, but it's the kind of writing I can do quickly. I am, with no false modesty, fairly badass at the fluff. I'm good at the crunch, too, but it takes me longer, which is why my GM notes generally consist of exhaustive villain builds capped with flavor text reminders like, "Sister dead? Angry = radiation." That's the stuff I can bluff.
As far as I can tell, I've got a couple of options:
- Try to publish this myself: No. I looked at the OGL rules and the M&M Superlink rules, and my short answer is that I'm fairly secure in the knowledge that I'd screw this up. (Note for non-gamer-geeks who are inexplicably still reading this: Superlink is the license agreement that lets indie publishers put out their own Mutants & Masterminds-compatible supplements and adventures, so it's what I'd need to do to put out my Mutants & Masterminds adventure.)
- Try to sell this to somebody: I love Expeditious Retreat Press, but they're not doing M&M products, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that having a guy who did one module for them contact them and say, "Hey, great news! I'm giving you this opportunity to buy an adventure for a system you don't publish material for!" is probably not gonna fly.
- Change the system and try to sell this to somebody: This removes much of what made this a good idea, since changing this from Mutants & Masterminds to, say, d20 Modern (or Spycraft, if I, say, knew Spycraft) would require tossing out all the character and creature builds and probably rejiggering a lot of the balance issues. Beyond that, the adventure is supposed to be fun in the barroom-brawl sense, with combat being goofy and fast. M&M is good for that, while d20 Modern tends to... not be. I could rejigger d20 Modern's rules for lighter and easier combat, but then I'm building characters and modifying a game system, which is... well, that's essentially building the adventure again from the ground up.
Animalia, the animal mimic, needs a nemesis. She's got one in Chimera, who is Sylar to her Peter Petrelli, so to speak. She mimics animals through magic, while he uses genetic mapping to kill animals and graft their notable traits into his battlesuit.
In a twist that I was personally proud of, although I botched the geek-gasm punchline horrifically,* Chimera's suit is scientific, but it uses a magical catalyst. The suit that Animalia captured contained the skull of St. Francis of Assisi in a crystalline matrix, giving Animalia some hints as to how Chimera gets his power.
Chimera escaped, but Animalia reclaimed the skull of Saint Francis and subsequently freed it. This means that the next time Chimera returns, I need for him to have captured another skull of another famous person-who-does-stuff-with-animals. So far, I've got Tarzan (John Clayton, lord of Greystoke) and Doctor John Dolittle.
Oddly, Wikipedia fails to have a page for "List of Fictional or Mythological Characters who Imitate or Communicate with Animals". This is a major oversight, in my opinion.
* I initially got my old religious guys mixed up and said that it was the skull of Thomas Aquinas, which, you know, would be great, if Chimera were a battlesuited villain who drew upon the doctrine of first causes to think his enemies to death. The Damsel forgave me, having known that I meant Francis of Assisi anyway...
More when the Con is over, in case any of the six people who read this blog happen to be in the game. :) Suffice to say that my plans for a paranormal Blues Brothers adventure appear to be coming together.
Asymptote: (to Sparks, at a cocktail party) So, yeah, I can bend myself into multiple dimensions.
Sparks: Which dimension did you leave your ability to make conversation at cocktail parties in?
Asymptote: I actually have a great deal of game, but you cannot see it from this limited plane of existence.
Sparks: I'm going to go get something to drink.
Asymptote: I shall be over by the punch. Because someone I know is there. Yes. (fwoops out of existence)
Sparks: (to Berserker, a crazy Viking villain, at a party) Are you going to try to kill me?
Berserker: Hah! You are a woman! To do so would bring me great dishonor.
Sparks: That's great. Hey, incidentally, my eyes are up here.
Berserker: I shall bear that in mind should I ever wish to look at your eyes.
Legacy: I really like him. I mean, he's going down at some point., but I still like him.
GM: Suddenly, mist shrouds around you, and then coalesces into the ghostly face of the mysterious figure known only as Cocoon...
Sparks: Hey, how's it going?
GM: It's so good to see that this stuff impresses you.
Mel (Sparks' player): My character can throw lightning bolts from her fingers and raise the dead.
GM: Point taken.
(The heroes have just defeated a demon and gained a magical chalice that was resting in the castle's catacombs.)
Crimson Cricket: Hey, what if that was a good demon guarding the chalice, and we just banished it?
GM: That's probably the kind of question you want to ask before killing the demon.
Legacy: Well, good demons don't usually just say, "Mistake" in an ominous voice and then attack you.
Crimson Cricket: I don't know. I could see that happening.
Legacy: Hey, Cold-Snap, Berserker? Would you ever say "Mistake!" and then attack someone with no other explanation?
Cold-Snap: (a hero) No way!
Berserker: (not a hero) Yeah, that would probably be in character.
Legacy: See? We're fine.
With two days before the game, I found out that Diwata and Kid Vortex, who hadn't made it since the first session, were gonna be there, so I
had to figure out some last-minute villains and bump up the number o' baddies significantly (Diwata and KV kinda bring the heat). The game also runs more slowly with 7 than with 5, so it ended up feeling rushes -- but at least it was rushed because people were laughing and trash-talking and generally having fun.
Cocktail Party
Some of the heroes showed up for a big important cocktail party hosted by some eccentric millionaire in a castle on the French coast. They seemed to have fun mixing it up with the additional heroes (and villains) who showed up there. They quickly realized that almost everyone there had a battlesuit like Crimson Cricket's -- arm spines and spines on the head -- but with different powers and origins. My accents were, uh, bad -- Berserker was supposed to be Norse, but he ranged all over Europe, apparently.
Then the rich dude called them all upstairs and started infodumping, but it was interesting and ominous infodumping, so I had everyone's full attention. He informed them all that he was a battlesuit wearer as well (Henry Griffin, hereditary bearer of the armor of the Gryphon Knight, enchanted by Merlin himself), and that while all their battlesuits had different powers and origins, they were all created with some common elements, somehow -- as though whoever had created them had been given some sort of outside assistance on a subconscious level.
He then babbled about their battlesuits using gravitational force as a fundamental connection point, and how he had sampled all their suit's energies and used it to create a wormhole generator (which he brandished -- it looked like a smoky gray crystal), and that he wanted them all to come with him through the wormhole to seize their destinies...
...at which point the lights went out, and when they came back on, Henry Griffin was dead, the crystal was gone, and everyone's battlesuits had been disabled.
Under the Sea
The other heroes were trying to rescue a downed submarine. They initially fought some demon shark monsters (that I gave up and started calling Sharkticons after about five minutes), which was a good chance for everyone to get used to their underwater powers. Animalia went all barracuda on their asses, Diwata enpunchinated with a vengeance, and Kid Vortex mimicked Aether's water power and let both of them whack their way to freedom.
They eventually found the submarine down on the bottom of the ocean, trapped in some sort of crystal tunnel that was filled with undead. The heroes punched their way in and went to town -- 300 zombies lasted approximately one round, given the minion rules and the team's area-effect powers.
The team followed the crystal tunnel, which, disturbingly enough, led toward the coast of France. The heroes had just taken down more zombies (and, uh, rescued people from the sub) when an enormous creature that looked like a hybrid of a manta ray and a shark (referred to hereafter as the mantark) disabled the crystal tunnel and opened a can of whoopass that left Kid Vortex and Animalia unconscious before any of the heroes could really do anything.
The Part that Worked
The heroes at the castle woke up, had about a minute to try to figure out Who, as it were, Dun It, and then saw that the castle was being attacked by hordes of slavering zombies. Whoopass ensued. People took out somewhere between 100 and 300 zombies per round. Fun was had by all.
The undersea people showed up, got healed up, and then tried to figure out a) Who Dun It and b) What To Do. They settled on trying to follow a dream that Sparks had had, in which a demon announced that his demon buddy was gonna steal a chalice from the palace (with some brew that was true, and hey, two or three of my players got that one, and joy was had all around). They ended up finding the chalice and whacking the demon, and then more undead showed up, along with Red Roach (who had fled the death scene) taking off from the castle in a stolen car.
The Part that Didn't
In the alternate universe where I had unlimited time, what happened was that we had several more waves of fighting, followed by a cool WhoDunIt and a grand reveal.
In this universe, we had one big wave in which 1600 undead and 5 boss villains showed up, putting the party into a giant end-fight that finally ended when Legacy ran in with the big plot device crystal and tried to activate it in order to reactivate the suits.
This opened a wormhole into another plane of existence, at which point one of the evil aliens from Aether's homeland (the dimensional world-eating ones) roared out into the world and flew up into the clouds and disappeared. All the undead keeled over, and the bosses all vanished (except for the unnamed leader of the undead, who paused before Legacy, the immortal Japanese ninja, to say "Domo arigato, Yanakama-sempai," which has Legacy's player mildly discomfited.
I'm a little bummed that the WhoDunIt was never resolved, and I'm very glad that I at least partially planned for "The heroes accidentally release a Leviathan into the world", since that has, you know, happened.
On the up-side, people got to take down 300+ bad guys per round, and that was a hoot. So hopefully fun was had.
Me: (As we head toward the hearing, quietly, to the foreign mercenary) Okay, so listen, when we get in there...
Foreign Mercenary: You wish us to stand quiet and look menacing?
Me: Uh, actually, we were kind of hoping you'd testify.
Foreign Mercenary: Oh.
Me: Look, this is a religious hearing, and a lot of these crazy church people are pretty intolerant. So please understand, this is just a prelude to us taking our revenge upon the evil bad guy, a charade we have to put up with. Even if the religious stuff is a lot of stupid nonsense, it's stupid nonsense that we must agree with in order to survive this hearing and get what we want. So please, just avoid mentioning your gods.
Foreign Mercenary: Uh, we worship Tyr, too, just like you guys.
Me: You do?
Foreign Mercenary: (Pulls out holy symbol of Tyr) We go to church every Tyrsday.
Me: Yeah, me too. Praise Tyr! Game on!
(I'm playing BioShock, incidentally, and enjoying it a ton. I'd expected to despise the whole Rand-ian thing and the little-girl killing, but the option to save the girls instead of killing them is just what I needed... and the Rand-ian thing hasn't exactly turned out to be a stirring praise of Objectivism. Will talk more when I've finished it, which, given that I can't exactly immolate splicers in front of the kids, won't be for awhile.)
In any event, in just a couple months, I'll have a game credit, and a game out there with my name on it. It's a bit like getting into the SFWA (whose dues I really need to pay if I'm gonna, unless I want to take a stand against accidental copyright protection screwups and save sixty bucks a year) in that it probably won't change my life as much as I think it will, but it's still what I've been working towards since I got here a few years ago. The acknowledgment that the goal is a bit silly doesn't negate the importance of setting and working toward it. I don't know who said that. Possibly nobody. But I believe it nevertheless.
Maybe a few of my buddies will surprise me and pick up 360s. Who knows?
At the very least, in a couple of months, I'll finally be able to post that Mass Effect / Fruits Basket parody somewhere besides BioWare's spam folder.
Anyway, onward we go.
