"The geekiest thing I've ever done" / Aberrant play report

We played Aberrant last night. Once we'd finished, one of the players remarked that "that was the geekiest thing I've ever done". This was primarily because one of our core players is unfortunately over in Germany for three weeks on business, so joined via a G+ Hangout and Viber.
He paid €3 to watch me on a computer screen for two hours. I feel dirty yet oddly thrilled.

The players had opted to forcibly enter a Project Utopia Nova containment facility for questionable reasons - I.e. a wanted criminal had told them that bad things were happening there - and had understandably met with armed resistance.
First they took out a unit of heavily armed security guards, and we ended the session with my version of Captain America, Thor and Iron Man - Agent America, Aesir and Machine Man - arriving on the scene.

At the beginning of this session one of the player characters, a tank called Adonis, parleyed with them. He offered complete surrender if they would guarantee the safety of Solar Flair, another of the player characters, but as he didn't formally represent the team, he got punched through a wall instead.

I did have a plan for this session. The opposing team wanted the players to escape with their target so that the players could lead them to the rebel base (as it were).
Machine Man had an existing Mentor relationship with Adonis, so he was going to take a sucker punch from Adonis, letting the team escape and placing a tracker beacon on Adonis in the process.

It didn't go quite according to plan...
Solar Flair's player was 'a bit PMT' and played her that way.
She unleashed aggravated damage on both Agent America and Machine Man, nearly killing the Agent in the process.
Machine Man did manage to place the tracker on Adonis and say "make it look good, kid" whilst leaving himself wide open.
Adonis didn't take the bait. Instead he concentrated on getting the wounded to medical assistance and pretty much ignored the fight.
Max Control, the player's mind controlling bastard, dematerialised and took complete control of Aesir, landing an unexpected blow on Agent America and effectively turning the tables of the battle.

By this point, the dye was cast. The team had bought a gun to a knife fight. Solar Flair had used lethal force with no thought to the consequences. Max Control had violated one of the mightiest Nova's on earth and still retained control of him. A number of dangerous Novas had been released from containment.
The players retrieved their target, a teleporter called Gates, and left with her.
Adonis stayed behind to clean up the mess and recapture the released Novas.
Adonis' player has already created another character, one a bit less tank like.

I left the remaining player characters in the Antarctic, although they don't know that. They just know it's bitterly cold and everywhere is white.

It strikes me that if Novas were to build their own country, then Antarctica would be a place to do it...

Give in to your poor impulse control / Pathfinder Goblin game

This week at Geek Club both the regular GMs were AWOL, so I ran a one shot Goblin only Pathfinder game.
After getting the Goblins of Golarion book for Christmas I statted up a Goblin version of every applicable class from the Core Rules (so no Paladins, Wizards or Monks [yes, I know you can technically have a Lawful Goblin. It's just highly unlikely]), and sketched out a rough 'plot'.
I realised last night that I put more time into the prep for it than we actually spent playing it.
Not that I'm bothered. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of statting the characters.
I went with a set score range of 9, 11, 11, 13, 15, 17, reasoning that this split is slightly more interesting than even numbers.
This produced two types of Goblin; all-rounders and specialists.
Any class that likes a high Dex score came out well, specifically the Ranger (bow user) and Rogue.
The classes with a reliance on Str and Cha - Barbarian, Fighter, Bard, Sorcerer - came out as ... Ok. Their highest stat scores went into their racially deficient attributes, building a Goblin that was generally good at couple of things, but not brilliant at their main shtick.
The Cleric and Druid, two classes that rely on Wisdom, were able to enjoy a high Wis score, but were hit hard by the -2 to Str and Cha.
In retrospect, I can see why Goblins of Golarion states that Goblin Rogues are the most common, and that Barbarians don't last long at all.
But that's still to come.

On the night I had four players: Adam, Chris, Jon and Ni. They chose the Fighter, Barbarian, Bard and Sorcerer respectively.

The set up was pretty simple. It's been a hard winter, and the food store is running low. If fresh meat isn't found soon, the tribe will have to eat the turnips. Or the children. Whichever.

I gave them two choices for food:
On the other side of the hills is a big human town, and sometimes they use hated horses to pull carts along the track through the hills.
At the base of the hills is a human place where they build fences around tall grass and keep moocows.

They chose the farm.
Events proceeded along these lines.
The Fighter braced the front farmhouse door shut with wood from the log pile.
The Sorcerer used Burning Hands to set light to the door and fire wood.
The Barbarian and Bard tried barricading the back door with hay, but were startled by a dog barking.
The Bard began using Mage Hand to catch chickens so he could eat them.
The Sorcerer decided to check out the barn.
The Fighter tried to throw a burning log onto the roof, fumbled, and took for points of damage.
The farmers forced their way out the partially barricaded back door, and were instantly sent to Sleep by the Bard, who correctly surmised that they wanted to take the chickens off him.
The Bard, Fighter and Barbarian then spent about three rounds failing to Coup de Grace the helpless farmers.
Some more chickens were killed as well.
Meanwhile, the Sorcerer had discovered that the barn was full of moocows, and jumped into the middle of them with manifested Aberrant Bloodline claws, doing a massive 1d3-2 damage.
Once the two farmers were dead, the Fighter went off to find the dog, the Barbarian went to investigate the sudden, terrified mooing coming from the barn, and the Bard raided the hen house.
By this time the cows in the barn were terrified, stirred up by the smoke and the smelly Goblin ineffectually clawing them and Acid Splashing them. Which is an excellent time for the Barbarian to throw open the doors.
The cows stampede.
The Barbarian survives through sheer luck, rolling a crit on the first cow, knocking its legs out and creating a bovine wall to shelter behind as the rest of the herd trample past/over.
Meanwhile the Fighter has survived a drawn out battle with the ferocious Jack Russell chained up behind a farm building and the Bard continues to loot eggs.
I decide that the night is wearing on, and throw in a CR4 Bison and tell them the Bull is loose. I realise too late that it's got a +10 to hit and does 2d6+12 damage. Damage and attack rolls are fudged to ensure things are not a complete forgone conclusion.
The Barbarian survives the first attack, and is joined by the Sorcerer and Fighter.
Meanwhile, back in the hen house, the Bard faces up against that rarest of fowl, a Dire Rooster. It has baleful eyes and a comb of blood red.
The Fighter is dropped to minus hit points in his first turn of combat with the Bull. The Sorcerer makes it to two rounds and the Barbarian is killed the round after.
The Bard rolls well against the Dire Rooster, which rolls horrendously, and emerges from the hen house to find a farmyard strewn with dead and dying cows, chickens and Goblins.
He eats well, and sings a song about chickens.

The attached picture was drawn by Ni during the session. It's pretty ace.

Technology Fail / The joys of remote gaming

I'm pretty pumped. I've just finished my first internet gaming experience, and it went well... sort of.

I'm running a game of Fear Itself for a group of six players, three of which i've never gamed with before, one of whom has never gamed before. Tonight was a dry run for the technology and a character creation session.

The technology was a massive pain in the ass.

I'd committed to Google Talk, because I believed it allowed conference calls. Noooo. One conversation at a time. Fail.
So we tried a Google+ Hangout, which would've worked just fine, except one of the players couldn't get in. Apparently G+ was full. Or so it told him.

So then we switched to BigMarker.com, which is a free web conferencing service, with video cams, 'unlimited' users, text chat, file sharing and an interactive white board.
After five minutes of setting up, we were in, and then my Shockwave crashed. Luckily it didn't close the conference, so I just rejoined. One other player had an issue, so this is what we're using going forward. It worked really well.

Once we were all on, we went through character creation and the basics of the rules. Then we had a fight.

The fight was fucking great.
I've not GM'd or role played for over a year, and by god I've missed it.
I set the players up in a standard tavern brawl, with a last man standing brief, and let them go mad.
It was gratifying that the 'combat specialist' died in only two rounds.
They are so fucked.
We didn't get round to doing Stability loss, however they're most likely to go insane before they die.

I am itching to get into the game, now.
I can't wait a week...

Antagonist design

I chose Hunter: The Vigil as a good game to run for my local club for two main reasons.

1. The core concept is fairly simple to grasp, and doesn't deviate much from, say, 'traditional' D&D. You are hunting monsters. You do so either for money, entertainment, to settle a debt / grudge or to protect the people and places you hold dear.
2. Hunter is a good gateway drug to introduce the players to the other World of Darkness games.

I try to keep these two aims in mind - keep the concept simple, introduce the players to other supernatural beings - when planning sessions.
Ok, you might point out that last night was only the third session proper for this game, however i've kept it up so far.
The first story arc I ran, which as discussed earlier was only supposed to last a session, was about hunting a neonate vampire. It had a quick investigate / locate / fight structure, and served to introduce the players to the system, both roleplay and combat.

For the next story arc, I wanted to introduce another denizen on the WoD, and ran through a few options in my head.
A Promethean? Good idea, but possibly a bit too hard for them at this stage.
A Changeling? Again, good idea, but too complex at this stage.
Another Vampire? That would set a precedent and establish Vampires as the main antagonists of the game. I'd like to avoid that at the moment.
A Werewolf? Even a single Werewolf would tear them all to shreds right now. Maybe a challenge for later on.
A Slasher? I thought about being lazy and using one of the pre-gens from the Slasher book. I quite like the idea of Slashers as a distinct adversary within the setting. Maybe next time.

Instead I settled on using a ghost. Ghosts are supposed to be a core element of the new WoD, with specific Werewolf tribes, Mage paths, Promethean lineages being dedicated to them. And, of course, there's Geist.
So, ghosts are supposed to be fairly common, yet I feel they're often overlooked in favour of the game line specific baddy or other more exotic concepts.

I started by looking at the pre-gen ghosts at the back of the WoD core book. The 'deceiver' ghost looked most like what I wanted.

I then started thinking about motivation and anchors and the like.
I knew that the group would be challenged by a ghost, as they had no way of directly harming it, and the only way they would be able to resolve the challenge would be to either destroy its anchors or complete its unfinished work.

I knew that I wanted a hateful, murdering ghost and, because I wanted to keep things simple, decided that the ghost was a hateful murderer in life as well.
I'd been thinking about what fun I could have with the Phantasm numina, which is essentially an illusion only one person can see, and thought about having a cop shoot an innocent bystander because an illusion showed him brandishing a weapon at the cop.
Seemed like a classic way to get people killed or cause complications for somebody using a simple illusion, so I used it as the starting point for the concept.

Looking at anchors, I had a mobility problem.
I wanted the ghost to move around, yet most anchors are stationery, or if they can move, the ghost is unable to control that movement. Also, if I made a living person an anchor, they would have to kill them to banish the ghost. Whilst this would make for an interesting moral quandry, I don't think they're ready for it yet.
In the end, I settled on two anchors - an old taxi cab and an old shed. This gave me two distinct places / objects to be investigated and destroyed, and allowed some mobility.
Maybe a ghost shouldn't be able to drive a cab, but I fudged that.

So, the concept ended up as: Serial killing taxi driver returns from the dead to a/ continue his great work, and b/ extract his revenge on the cop that killed him. The dead cabbie haunts his old taxi cab, which he uses to collect fresh victims, and a shed on the outskirts of town, where he used to cut up his victims.

With this in mind, I had another look at the Deceiver template, and decided that it wasn't quite what I needed.
I statted my own ghost, of similar ability, and gave it telekinesis and animal control instead of ghost sign and terrify.

The finished product, plus my own notes for play, are below.
Unfortunately the group spent too much time dicking around investigating the last story arc to actually meet this guy, but hopefully next week...

Bill Redwood


Ghost



Attributes: Power 4, Finesse 3, Resistance 4

Willpower: 8

Morality: 4

Virtue: Temperance

Vice: Lust

Initiative: 7

Defence: 4

Speed: 17

Size: 5

Corpus: 9   

Numina:

Animal Control – Cost 1 essence. Power + Finesse – animals Resolve. Control 3 animals at once

Phantasm – Cost 1 Essence. Power + Finesse. Negative modifiers applied for complexity. Target makes Wits + Occult roll to disbelieve the illusion.

Telekinesis – Cost 1 Essence. Power + Finesse. Successes = ghosts relative strength. -3 modifier to attack directly, ignores Defence, cover and armour.



Anchors: Old taxi cab, Killing hut in South West Philadelphia



History: Bill Redwood had been a cabbie in Philadelphia for ten years when he got stiffed for a fare. He chased the fare down and when he caught up with him, a fight ensued. Bill didn’t mean to kill him, but when he did, he was left with blood on his hands and a body to dispose of.

He took the corpse to an old warehouse near the airport that his Uncle used to work out of, cut the body up and fed it to the local stray dogs.

Whether it was the act of killing, or the cutting and dismemberment afterwards, but something broke in Bill from that point.

The next fare dodger was hunted down and disposed of in the same way. And then another. Then Bill started driving the long way round to bump up the fare. Then he started looking for other reasons – Queue jumpers. Rude people. Ugly people. Pretty people. People who wouldn’t be missed.

This carried on for months, all the while Bill upped his game and targeted more and more challenging prey.

People soon noticed, and Philadelphia became gripped with a fear of the Cabbie Killer.

The city’s cab drivers pulled together and attempted to police their ranks. Local government ran campaigns to raise safety awareness. The Philly PD worked overtime to track the killer down.

In the end, it was luck that stopped Bill Redwood. Two bored patrol cops stopped his cab near the edge of the National Wildlife Refuge, and discovered the separated remains of Redwood’s latest victim in the trunk.

Redwood was shot, executed, in cold blood by Officer Phil Davies after he surrendered. Davies’ partner, Nick Richmond, corroborated Davies’ story that Redwood had moved to attack them with a hatchet.

The truth is, Redwood was relieved to have finally been caught, and was willing to hand himself in.

Hunter: The Vigil - Forming / Storming / Conforming / Performing

Ran session two of Hunter: The Vigil for the Bolton gaming group last night, and managed to attract four players: Gemma, Chris J, James and Gareth.

I'd spent the two weeks since the first session sketching out in my head what I wanted to happen. The challenge was to turn what should have been a quick introductory encounter at the end of the first session into a viable session in and of itself.
It's a new game to the group, and the first time i've run 'Vigil, so i'd originally planned a very basic first session - Local druggie drop-out becomes a vampire, and uses his new powers to kill / beat up the local gang members and drug dealers that he'd formally worked for / bought from.
I 'designed' the antagonist to be a brutal thug, as subtle as a brick, and fairly unintelligent, then threw in the horrific murder of his nice, normal middle class suburban parents to give the players some additional motivation to stop him, just in case a bunch of dead pimps, pushers and players wasn't really floating their boat.

The first session started a little later than envisaged due to character creation and my general disorganisation, but I was happy with the quality of the roleplay coming out.
Then the roleplay got a little too out of hand - everybody wanted to explore their character and showcase their 'soft' skills. The drug addict got high, the criminal stole medicine from the hospital.
Not that I mind any of that, in moderation, but it did slow down the session considerably.
The last 'encounter' (still thinking in linear terms, after all this time) should have been a quick fight with the vampire. They'd established his identity, found a pattern to his attacks and determined who would be next. They'd even narrowed it down to a place and time.
They should have just gone there, waited for him to show up and jumped him. A quick combat would have followed and the session ended.
However, we didn't have time, so it carried over to the next session.

So, to return to my challenge, I had to stretch something that should have taken 15 minutes into about two hours.

I started off by thinking about what I wanted to acheive.
It would still be the first combat of the game, so it had to be a 'good example' of combat. Basic, and introduce the players to the possibilities.
It also had to present additional challenges beyond 'kill this one guy'.
They knew that the vampire's next target was a dealer called 'Tuco' (yes, when needing low life villain names on the fly, I ripped off 'Breaking Bad), so I fleshed him out a bit (again, in my head, as I've realised that 60% of prep' doesn't see the light of day) and built up the scenario in which they would meet him.
I also added some faceless gang members and a ghoul retainer to the vampire, and populated the neighbourhood with tricks, johns and junkies.

I'm pleased with the way to players rose to the challenge. They got close to Tuco, without making any attempt to warn him or ally themselves with him. Basically, they put themselves in direct danger from a dangerous criminal so that they could react effectively to the vampire when he arrived.
I can see, at this early stage, that they're quite morally ambivalent. The majority have no qualms about commiting crimes themselves, either to aid the hunt or to aid their pockets, yet have no time or patience for criminals. In fact, the drug dealers and gang members caught in the cross fire were not mourned and barely noticed. Clearly these people have never seen Austin Powers.

I think I wasn't consistent or harsh enough with Morality tests or Degeneration.
James should have had to make a Morality check for shooting the crippled, defenceless ghoul, and Gareth should have had to have made one for accidentally shooting the gang member being fed on by the vampire.
I can see Gareth's TF:V character adopting an alternative code of conduct before too long, anyway. He doesn't seem to be adverse to this suggestion.

The session ended with a wounded ghoul and a torpid vampire being gaffa taped up and bunged in their boot for further investigation / interrogation.

Next session should be next week. I'm having a real think about what to do. I've got a number of ideas, mostly ones I didn't get to use from my old CSI: World of Darkness game, however these are maybe a little too hard for the Hunter Cell at the moment.
I'd like to do something with ghosts, which adds an additional challenge in that none of them can perceive or effect ghosts or spirits at the moment.
I may do something with a demon cult, or I might use some ideas from the World of Darkness: Slashers book (a fantastic book that genuinely gets you excited about eating peoples livers).
Or I might do a mash up.