*coughs*

Well. Turned out the fun 'write a quick novel in June' became 'Oh, I'm doing this story instead, and it's damn hard and I have no time to do anything else'. Which hadn't been intended, but still happened. Sparkie will punish me for this, never fear.

Game wise: Should be able to get back into things in July, though I may be dog-sitting for a few days early on in the month again. I have no plans to run and/or play games more than 3 nights a week at present, however. I am aware the kind of games I run don't fit that model too well, but I can't run games 4-5+ nights a week and work on other stuff I want to get done, so something has to be scaled back a bit.

Shall see how it goes And if I hold to this at all :)

Talents and Characters

Harold Allison (Chaos)
Desc: He is a bearded young man with messy hair and clothes that probably belong in the 80's. A red and pink sweater worn inside-out over his body and a torn pair of black windbreakers with neon stripes around the hips. He smells like he hasn't bathed in a few weeks.
Notes: Has a talent for 'seeing things as they are' that includes discerning truth from falsehood. Left Argleton to go out into the world, got his heart broken and came back.

Hollie Keys (kentari)
Desc: She is a woman whose well-kept dark brown hair falls in ever-so-curled waves with all the liveliness of a coiled spring -- or viper -- to frame a forgettably statuesque face. She wears crisp greys and lacks much adornment, but what she does carry has a certain refined air about it suggesting either time or money involved in the acquisition. In not so many words, she's a dangerously benign blend of beauty and bland.
Notes: Can make doors lead from one place to another; is apparently in the Brigade on loan from some other organization.

Sophia Ransom (Caltak)
Desc: A young girl in her early teens with medium-length dark brown hair wearing a nondescript hoodie, jeans, and sneakers and with a backpack.
Notes: She is studying at the college and has the talent to enter the bodies of others and control them.

Citizen Brigade NPCs

Emma Tompkinson
Notes: Unmet thus far, has a Talent for keeping her cool in any and all situations.

Jamie, 'ghost'
Desc: he's albino-pale, tall and thin, wearing jeans and a t-shirt that are ripped and torn: though, unlike Harold, his clothing is expensive rather than style. He's also transparent.
Notes: A 15 year old kid who has only been in Argleton a week, Jamie is the only volunteer for this program and is as friendly and cheerful as one can be when permanently intangible to the world. On the plus side, he can become close to invisible if he needs to.

Lance Christensen, police officer
Desc: Lanc is a tall, ex-football player kind of guy, all blond hair, blue eyes and an attitude that just screams 'police officer'.
Notes: He can tell if other people have a Talent and what it is at a glance.

Treyvan Donison, mayor's grandson
Desc: A shorter, bland looking guy of about 20 is sitting on one of the chairs, looking bored. He can best be described as doughy
Notes: Can regenerate, reportedly to absurd degrees, though he still feels pain. Seems to prefer watching to participating at the moment.

Veronica Lake, activist
Desc: a stern-looking woman in her late 20s who looks flat-out furious to be in the room, let alone sitting in one of the chairs. She is favouring the world with a scowl that seems to say the world had better back off or she's going to rip it a new one
Notes: She is 100% pure human, a martial arts expert and harbours a serious grudge against Talents for ruining human achievement. She used to want all Talents dead but seems to have mellowed a little over the years.  A little.

Other People


Martin & Suzie Gaylord: Brother and sister who are robbing small stores together. He gives people bad luck, she paralyses with a touch.

Anna-Jean: old bag lady who doesn't like to be touched; she claims she kills anyone she touches, and at least believes this to be true though no one has seen it happen.
Barry: a homeless man who can set his own body on fire. It only hurts if he loses control.
Carlos: regular homeless guy.
Dieter: 'leader' of the small homeless contingent in Argleton, Dieter is a binder who can make people do what he wants when sober. As such, his friends keep him at least buzzed pretty much all the time.

Axis Mundi: GM Summary

UA SESSIONS TO DATE:

What has gone before ....

Hugh has been hired by one Amylin Hart to find out what happened to her mom, Laura. It transpired that Laura visited her mom at work (Grandma's Learning Centre) and had glowing reviews by customers. Apparently her mom raised her hand to hit Laura for driving drunk and then stated, "It's gone. It's all gone," and became irresponsive.

she was taken to Ravenshead Correctional Facility and placed under the care of one Dr. Jeremy Munroe (who transferred her to their country estate, Smithy Acres (aka Shitty Acres) and has refused to let Amylin see her mother at all. The walmart cashier has paid Hugh what she can to try and figure out what is going on, but his one trip to Shitty Acres just reveals what looks like, for a moment, an angel wrapped in chains in one of the windows of the walled house. The staff inform Hugh over the intercom that he has to make arrangements with Dr. Munroe for a visit.

According to Hugh's acquaintance, Dennis (who maintains his website) someone spent two hours trying to hack into it that evening; the why remains unknown, and Hugh decides Dr. Munroe in the morning.

Meanwhile, Jackson has finished a shift at work. Gustavo the butcher has left early and Vera and he close up, though Vera cutting up meat makes Jackson feel uneasy, as though she's listening to the echoes of some distant song. He leaves work and spots one spanish kid spraypainting garbage bins (with 'No babies!!!') and arrives at his apartment building to learn some ex-military man (Isiaha) has moved in and Sean -- across the hall -- has finished a counselling session with a thin 20-something named Snake. Snake takes one look at Jackon and runs off down the hall for reasons unknown.

Inside the apartment Thalia has been in her wheelchair watching PBS. They talk for a time and the girl next door, Mary-Anne Throckmorton, comes over with her autistic son Stanley. As usual, Stanley latches onto Thalia and watched her curiuously as the adults talk and eat; Stanley is =having a good spell though Mary-anne misses the nice lady at the one Learning Centre she takes Stanley to who seems to have retired. Stanley reluctantly goes home later.

The next day Hugh goes to visit Dr. Munroe, who produces a raw egg from his desk and breaks it with a hammer to demonstrate the frailty of the human psyche and why it would be dangerous for Laura Hart to see her daughter. Hugh asks about second opinions only to be told by Jeremy Munroe that:
"I am afraid I cannot release any case files due to confidentiality; I could release them to another doctor if Amylin requested such, but said doctor would be operating under the same penumbra of what is best for the patient," with an emphasis on patient. "I know it must be hard for Amylin to have no idea when her mother will get better." He offers up a washed-out smile. "It is rather difficult to try to explain to someone that their mother may well be cured when she stops being her mother."

Jackson head to work and feels himself being watched when he finished, ducking into the local Waffle House to find it was Snake, the boy he somehow spooked earlier. Snake claims to be in the business of buying and selling information and offers up, for food and coffee, that Jackson has a very weird aura and he thinks he knows what Thalia really is. He once saw someone to an exorcism in reverse, their heasd filled with fire, calling something foul into the world and he things that whatever happened to Thalia is like that.

Hugh has dinner with Tiff, his sometime-gf, which turns out nice and normal.

The next day is a Friday and ... a new session! Dr. Munroe is supposed to contact Hugh about meeting Laura Hart and Jackson is hoping Snake doesn't sell informatio about him and Thalia to the highest bidder.

A Time of Talent and Terror ....

(Updated May 7th)

100 years ago something Happened in the town of Argleton. To this day, no one knows what. All that is known for sure is that Argleton no longer shows up on most maps and no longer seems located in the county it used to be in: and no one can even agree where that was either. It is a town people find due to need and desperation and one very few of them ever leave.

Because being in Argleton changes you, if you let it. And in some cases, no matter what we wish or let, things happen. Some call if the Curse or the Blessing. Most call it the Talent and become capable of strange tricks and skills that are seldom normal at all: a few even have the same trick in varying degrees of strength (this is especially true of siblings) and some people are never even aware they have a Talent at all.

The flip side of all this is that there are those who are dividing the town into the Talented and the untalented, some trying to make use of Talents for nefarious ends and rumours of talents being taken out into the World for experiments or that certain drugs can boost Talents and so forth. Over the years, the minor curiosity of a few people with tricks has blossomed into over 10% of the entire town and the only thing that seems to be holding things together is the mayor, who seems to be immortal, and the chief of police – who is, as far as anyone can determine, immune to Talents.

But even they are hard-pressed to keep a lid on the simmering pot of resentments and ideologies and have/nots that threatens to boil over. As such, a Citizen's Brigade has formed,a semi-official group to straddle the line between law enforcement and by-law enforcement for the town, and the PCs have been selected to be part of this. Perhaps by choice, or for community service, orders of parents or to impress someone: you're reasons aren't important to the mayor, who just wants the town  to hold together.

Important Notes: Argleton is outside the modern world. Radio's work, local tvs work, but anything requires satellites won't, ditto with internet access. Pop culture does drift into it, via people coming into Argleton with items and there are some mysterious traders who seem able to enter and leave and will, often bringing newspapers and DVDs, but knowledge of the outside world is sketchy at best and some of the papers and DVDs seem to come from other earth's entirely.

ARGLETON

Argleton is a large town surrounded by farms, hills and a thick forest. The hill-folk tend to be quiet and insular, whereas the farm folk come in daily with food and supplies. Without the farms, Argleton would be a ghost town and the people on it are hard and tough, able to take what the land deals out and deal it right back when they need to.

Almost all the farmwork is done by hand but even if it wasn't, a town needs more than food and drink to survive. The hillfolk mine deep and sell what they find, but it is the grey-clad Traders who come into town with goods and items from the world that keep the town as part of the modern world, or at least try to do so.

SYSTEM

Risus!

12 dice, no one trait can have over 4-5 dice in it. PCs are expected to have , Life/Job, hobbies and such. While comedic use of cliches won't be allowed (say, pitting 'draw funny faces' against 'martial arts master via the back of a comic book' won't win via drawing a silly moustache on the enemy), the GM may allow PCs to buy double-pump if it fits a specific Talent. 

PCs must have a minimum of 3 cliches at 2 dice each.

Optional rule: Talent dice can be divided further into Power and Skill. So if you have 'burn shit down' at 4 dice, but want it to be more "I get mad and can't control it", you make it Power 5 and skill 3, for example. So any use of just fire comes in at 5 dice, any attempt to actually control the Talent is 3 dice.

Experience: This will be given out infrequently at best and is liable to be 'turn d6s into d8s' more than getting new cliches, unless PCs teach each other ones they know.

Notes

A Talent is pretty much a single trick that defies conventional reality. Some are terrifying, some are rather mundane, and many make no sense to anyone at all. The use of any Talent burns off energy, so how one loses and replenishes that energy is up to each pc. Generally, weaker talents burn les energy, and this holds true for a talent like 'fly in the air' vs. 'manipulate gravity': the more specific a Talent is, the less energy it will burn even if it is quite powerful.

What is known is that Talents develop sometime after puberty and often under stress. Existing skills can become Talents as well, so guy who used to be a Computer Genius is now a Tech Wizard and the like.

KNOWN TALENTS

Brute: Any talent involving one's own body. Toughness, strength, claws and such fall under this very broad rubric.
Elementalist: anyone with a talent for control over one or more elements. This is by far the most common Talent.
Finder: A knack for finding people and things.
Gearhead: Anyone whose talent involves tech and making things. Most forms of genius get lobbed under here.
Green Thumb: A talent generally held by at least one member of any farming family: stuff they plant grows very, very well.
Healer: Healers are uncommon and most end up working at the small hospital that services Argleton.
Lucky Duck: anyone with a talent over luck or possibility.
Mender: The common name for regeneration, but also applies to people who can fix items or stop them from breaking down.
Minder: Anyone whose talent involves the minds of others. Telepaths, naturally, are painted as bigger boogeymen than they really are.
'Porter: Teleporting, phasing and so forth. This is a pretty dangerous talent to the user, but does exist.
Transmuter: Aka a changer: Turn one thing into another. Limited by mass, volume, and a host of other things.

Many minor talents that  are just improved normal ones exist as well and likely increase the amount of people with Talents far beyond the 10% of the town with impressive/visible ones.

Note: The Talent 'lottery' seems set to random. Few people end up with a talent that magically cures or fixes some existing issue in their lives. (For these people, The Witch can be a godsend if they can make a deal for a talent they'd like instead.) There are also very few cases of a Talent physically changing someone, though temporary changes [due to Pumping] may happen at times.

RUMOURED TALENTS

Binder: Someone whose words can bind others to a geas.
Booster: Someone whose sole Talent is to improve the talents of others.
Creator: A person whose talent is to create things from nothing. (Transmuting is confused with this at times.)
Death-touch: Or glare, or anti-healing. The ability to kill with a touch. Considered to be anti-Talent propaganda.
Destroyer: Someone who can will things out of existence.
Phoenix: Someone who can die and come back.
Phoenix, flawed: you die, and you come back with some very minor Talent each time. Rinse, repeat.
Trickster: Shape-shifting. All reported cases have turned out to be Minders making illusions in people's heads.
Vampiric: Talents that involve sucking energy out of others and so forth.

TALENTS THAT DON'T EXIST

Anti-Talent: Someone who can shut down the talents of others; if this exists, logic states it would have been used against the mayor by now.
Medium: If anyone can actually speak to the dead, they are keeping mum about it. (This doesn't mean there aren't charlatans who claim they can, naturally.)
Multiple Talents: Aside from what the Witch can do, no recorded person with more than one Talent exists.
Mimic Talents: Also never recorded, believed impossible as an actual talent.
Seers: Any talent involving the future and time aren't known. Anyone who has claimed post- or pre-cognitive talents has been shown to be lying.
Time Travel: Many would want it, no one has it

MAGIC

Magic is a tricky one: a lot of things a gearhead makes can qualify, and might, but in general magic is known to exist -- at least in Argleton -- and allow practitioners to learn specific spells with limited effects. The use of magic requires time, rituals, will and is exhausting physically, mentally and spiritually. All miracles fall under the classification of magic as well, as much as it angers some of the devout.
Unlike Talents, anti-magical spells do exist and magical charms and talismans of dubious provenance are sold in sketchy shops. Further, no one with a Talent is capable of working magic though they can assist in magical workings.  Most Talents somehow provide an inate resistance to magic. Lastly, magic has never been observed to work outside of Argleton while some few strong Talents have.

PEOPLE:

Mayor:

Rudolph Donison: the nayor of Argleton, he has held the post for over 90 years and still appears to be 32 decades later. His only surviving son, Victor, is now in his 50s and rather bitter that he is getting old and dying. Rudolph has been known to deal with problems first-hand and thus far nothing -- in this world or of any other -- seems able to harm him. If need be, he is simply not where it lands but his body is also impervious to harm. He is quite willing to find and stop monsters to protect the town and his people. No one has even bothered with elections in the last 10 years.

Victor Donison: The mayor's last surviving son, Victor is a cold and bitter man who ran against his father three times for mayor until people decided having elections was rather silly. He has forgiven no one for that and runs a small pawn shop on the outskirts of town, selling weird things and information. Everyone is aware that his father disowned him 10 years ago owing to the horrible things Victor was doing to his son, but the details of those are unknown.
He is also one of the few openly practising magicians in the town.

Treyvan Donison: His grandson, now 18. While he does age, Victor possesses a regenerative talent that borders on the miraculous and allows him to heal from anything he's faced in his life thus far. On the flip side, he does feel pain so he's not exactly eager to test the limits of his talent. He is quiet by nature and tries not to use his family name for anything, but has finished school and is at loose ends.

The police:

Carmichael Jones: The Chief of Police. Carmichael Jones is a tough, grim man who has seen man's inhumanity to man and is known to be extremely hard on talents who abuse their powers against humans. He is human but considered by many to be the meanest and toughest man in the town when he has to be.

Wayland Chashi: The only flat-out Talent in the police department, Wayland is inhumanly strong and deals with rogue talents by hitting them until they don't get up again. It is widely believed that he sold his soul for his talent and that only Jones keeps him narrowly on the side of good.

Lance Christensen: Lance is a new hire for the department, since Jones was told he needed more talents. Lance's talent is to be able to spot the Talent in others and he is very, very good at it but also damn good at his job, much to Jones' chagrin.

The other four police officers work rotating shifts; all are male, which has been causing some fuss of late so the Citizen's Brigade has been ordered to incorporate more women.

The Policed:

Peter Spalding: Peter is a thin, balding man in his 50s who has the record for most time in jail in the entire town owing to a talent for telepathy, the fact that using talents on others is illegal, and lastly that his control has never been all that great. He spends most of his time very much alone and more than a little mad.

Mad Jack Jacks: Jack doesn't have a Talent, while the rest of his family does. Or did, until he dissected them all and attempted to figure out how Talents work. He's known to be somewhere among the hillfolk but beyond that no one is sure what he's doing or why, only that he is Argleton's Most Wanted and has somehow managed to hide from everyone and everything seeking him out for a damn long time.

Lenny Yu: A bright and fearfully ambitious man, Lenny is in his early 40s and convinced War Is Coming and builds things. Often weapons, and then he tests them, though seldom on people. Hence often being in jail and let out because he has a weapon or plan the town can use. He doesn't hate talents, like some people claim, but he hates the fact that they can do stuff that tales him years to learn and work out in mere moments.

Other People:

Mad Madeline: An old woman who is also a finder, though her talent manifests in finding things via seeing through the eyes of animals.

Trader Joe: One of the best-known traders, Joe has phenomenal luck and, for the right price, can find anything for anyone. He is also the only Trader to reveal his appearance, which is that of an albino man. He doesn't reveal how traders leave or return to Argleton and attempts at pushing him lead to finding out just how many people own him favours.

The witch: She goes by many names, none of them real, and moves about. Sometimes in Argleton, sometimes in the world, and currently goes by 'The Dealer', running a casino where you can trade anything for anything, because that is her Talent. If you want to trade something, she can make it happen. Talents, free will, skills, memories, limbs, even one's own life can be traded if both parties are willing. If she was ever human at all, she isn't anymore.

your typo of the night

Less than five minutes into a session:

* Dakota`^ heads into her room and promptly kicks Sam out, telling him to go to Gwyn
<AlcarGm> He wakes, looking a little better, and has indeed made himself a nest of sheets to curl up in. He lawns sleeping, pouting a little. "Nom?" hopefully.
<AlcarGm> err ,yawns sleepily. It should have been.

Small Games

I've been giving thoughts to game concepts and ideas lately, mostly mulling things over in my head, problems of genre and possible solutions.

To whit: the fewer players a game has, the 'better' it is. This not only allows the players and GM to develop both characters and supporting cast more fully but makes for a more solid game all around. A smaller game is also more likely to survive one or more players going AWOL for various RL reasons and should be able to factor the player's absence into the game narrative or pause the game without that much difficulty.

Genre Conventions: If the PCs are playing police officers, they play police officers. They don't quit the force when then going gets tough, fight to be reinstated when fired and so forth. The implied player/gm contract needs to explicit regarding PC occupations and how this affects the overall game. Are the PCs jobs going be connected to the game and plots or is it just office work they go to for X hours a day that will be glossed over? If it's intended to be a buddy cop game, are the players willing to work together to ensure this happens? And so on, and so forth.

Teamwork: Assuming the PCs are intended to work together, is there some necessary extrinsic force promoting this? Is it necessary? What happens when one player can't make the session?


Thoughts for future games

I think I'd like to try a setup where the PCs are either paid for Plot/Game stuff or paid enough in Day Job (or, being wealthy, don't need one) to be able to gloss over the problems of what is done for a living. A game where the PCs are wealthy enough not to need to work can be done with only mild moralistic fun and games on the side.

I still think a game involving playing siblings and/or other family members could work in a small game (one could be adopted, perhaps). It creates a dynamic from the start and solves a lot of pesky problems regarding knowing each other and the like.

If the teamwork function of a game is extrinsic, making a game where the PCs have some some edge over normal people but not enough to take on Bad Guys without working together and so forth would be both handy and necessary: the idea of the PC as unique rather than Unique being a kind of selling point for a game.

on the nature of pcs

Sooo .... I've been reading about world war III stuff and such lately (aka the news) and begin thinking about the current game and the nature of PCs. To whit: If we ran Middle East: the RPG, PCs would be nuclear weapons. They don't all go off, but they have the potential to. They change the world just by existing in it. If the world were a river, the PCs get to be stones and dams and anything else that fits that metaphor.

One of the major aspects of the world is that PCs Matter. The things you do create ripples, spreading out. The world isn't as much a powder keg as it is stuck in a stasis that the existence of PC s breaks, both for good and for ill. The things you do and friendships your characters make -- to say nothing of enemies -- echo into the wider world as they do. The point of PCs is that they change the world: having kewl powerz and such is only one aspect of being awesome and the stars of the show.

What is made of it depends on Sparkie, of course :)

How social media ruins rpg games ....

A lot of novels are no longer set in the present. This tends to be true of games as well, and for the same reason: social media. The internet. Facebook. Twitter. All games have problems in that that need solving, all quests have some mystery/discovery lurking in them waiting to be solved. Or you can just google it. Need help? The police are just one cell phone cal away. So are family, friends, co-workers. And why bother meeting in person if you can use google+, set a limited group as 'other pcs' and use that?

Granted, a GM can obfuscate things: the internet is an awesome source of flat-out lies and mistruths. For example, have a pc use wikipedia as gospel and just smile at them in the certain knowledge that the Big Bad had been editing certain pages for years under various sock puppets because it's the best way for a vampire to get prey these days. And cell phone coverage can be spotty, to a degree, but the chief problem is that such plot  devices make PCs lazy.

(This is much the same issue as skills in D&D: why look for anything when you can just roll Detect Traps and so forth. Laziness is roll-playing, role-playing is less so. (But using lots of dice is fun, and fun isn't lazy - Sparkie))

There are ways to use this and make it fun, no doubt, but the overall issue is that a lot of tropes uses in games and novels came into existence long before the internet, which tends to hinder and limit them. Sort of making PCs all Amish [which would rock....] or just not having FB and such come up as options I'm not sure what can be done with this problem, insofar as it is one. It can be useful: I would quite like to see a game where the players make social media avatars for their PCs and do in-game stuff with that between sessions but a lot of genres don't work as well when PCs have access to too much information or can exploit the ruthless common sense that comes with it.

At which point the GM pay well drop an EMP on the world :)

CSI: Trail

CSI: TRAIL

(aka: alcar is actually giving this some thought. Be scared.)

System: BESM3, 250 points, minimum 50 in skills. (Vanilla humans cannot get Dynamic Powers, no one can get Resurrection.)

The PCs are people living in the land of the Lords of Life and Death. Vampires and werewolves roam the world, terrible in their power, while magicians slink about the edges of the world practising their forbidden magics and the remains of the once-mighty fae hide in shadows and dream of better days.

You are all a forensics team sent to Trail to investigate the death of the last dragon. Because even in a world where myths and monsters walk they still manage to die and someone has to file paperwork, figure out what happened and survive the attempt to arrest the perpetrators. Most humans are scared of the monsters, thanks in part to the vampire publicity machine cranking things up to 11 but you've dissected enough corpses to know that anything that was born can die, no matter what it might become, and that can be dangerous knowledge in such a place and at such a time. Trail, as always, is a powder keg and the PCs have all the potential in the world to be matches just by asking the right questions and turning over stones to find out what lies beneath.

Note: Vampires and werewolves are the top dogs of the setting. While this may not be true in terms of actual power they are the humans of the supernatural world: they win with numbers compared to other critters out there and, like humans, have a wider variety of abilities and powers than the other kinds of monsters who infest the world.

GM Note: Vampire and were PCs are not allowed. You have Law on your side, a lot of skill, access to magic and technology. Some of the PCs may know magic, others not be entirely human at all or some other variety of monster in the employ of a Crime Scene Unit. Players are encouraged to make characters who'd fit into such a setting and provide useful skills for the group as a whole.

Other PC Concepts: if a player doesn't want to make a CSI-affiliated PC, there's always making a local guide to the weird for the government agents and the like if need be. New PCs can be agents sent into the game, or even from other government departments.

Genre: LOLAD was first and foremost about fun and adventure, and monsters being able to alter the world and become powers in it, upstarts who shook the balance of the old and established powers. They have done this, quite well in fact, and now it it time for humanity to try and reclaim some lost power and prestige of its own ...

While the game will begin with a mystery (Who Killed Cecil?) this can be seen as akin to the Amanda Palmer killing in Twin Peaks: it's an initial plot-thread but not the impetus of the game and will likely slip into the background of plots as PCs become involved in various going-ons in Trail and the attempts by humanity to take back the night, or at least find a new status quo for the world.

SETTING:

A century ago the world only knew of monsters from stories, thanks to the stringent efforts of the vampires. When you can live centuries and enjoy compound interest and blackmail you can accomplish many things, and among those was hiding the truth of the world from humanity. Some thing the vampires did that because humans would destroy them, others that it was an amusing game. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle of that.

A decade ago things began to fall apart: the internet, camera-phones and twitter came into existence and the vampires were old, and terrible, and not able to see the shape the future was taking in time to truly stop it. Oh, they tried – the RIAA is theirs, and SOPA and all things of that ilk – but the truth about the world is now an open secret in many places, the first among those was the small town of Trail in BC, Canada, where an exceptionally strong group of were outed themselves to the media in defiance of local vampires. How much of this was an accident is, also, open to debate, but the town is one of the few places now where the existence of monsters out of myth is not so much 'open secret' as much as 'accepted fact' and the town deals with this as best they can.

Property values have plummeted and yet people move to the town, some hoping to become monsters, or slay them, or attracted by high pay or danger, or simply being too damn stubborn to leave. There are now enough monsters in the town to fit into a major city and the clashes of new powers vs. old and the New World vs the Old World happen often enough that the detritus left behind must be cleaned up, catalogued and explained.

It's a plum job, if you make it out alive: having Trail on the resume looks good almost anywhere, after all ... if you can survive it here, you can make it anywhere.

THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

Weres and vampires have no desire to be catalogued and understood – who does? – but some general facts are relatively well known among those who know about them. (As with the moon landing, there are a lot of humans who still refuse to believe weres or vampires exist at all.)

Weres: In general, were are stronger when they're younger and their powers fade with age; as such, were Packs often have competent leaders being beaten by younger were and don't become anywhere near as powerful or competent as they could. All were heal phenomenally quickly and many can be harmed by silver in one form or another. Most tend to be physical and dangerous beings, not the least because they have senses humans don't and tend to be driven by a sense of morality that often isn't human a all.

Vampires: Vampires do lack the raw power of were and sunlight (and fire) are seldom their friends. While a vampire can be active in sunlight their actual powers – which are many and varied – tend to be much reduced. However, vampires can live for decades and even centuries and only grow in skill and cunning over time. It is said of the old master vampires that, while they may not win, they never, ever lose. The downside of such a mindset is that vampires tend to plan for the future and not the short term, finding the acquisition of wealth and mutual funds – to say nothing of influence – far more important than actual vampiric powers.

Magicians: Magicians exist, human and otherwise, individuals capable of making their desires real, of manipulating energy and changing the shape of the world. While magic is power it also takes a lot of energy, often time, and is frustratingly limited against vampires and weres, though not other kinds of monsters. Most magicians keep to themselves and try to make their magics as mysterious and unknown as they can.

Humans: The problem of living centuries lies in falling behind; the problem of having the raw power of a were is forgetting other forms of power. Or, put another way, gun beats spear. And magic. And often monsters. Human monster hunters do exist and are generally terrifyingly good at what they do, at least up until they get eaten – or worse.

TRAIL:

The lords of life and death are the true powers of the town but divided into several factions which can, in theory, be played off against each other. Certainly the mayor tries his damndest to do so.

Cameron: an old-school vampire who owns/runs a mansion just outside the town, he's been known to take in any strays and has a wide range of alliances and allies throughout the town and beyond. He prefers to consider a sheathed sword more dangerous to one waved about and counts Frankensteinian monsters and fae-damaged humans among his stranger allies.

Sophie: The leader of the Vampire Nest in the city of Trail. Sophie and Cameron had a falling out years ago and Sophie decided to become a Power in the city, whereas Cameron preferred to work from behind the scenes. Sophie is young, as vampires reckon things, but makes up for power with sheer brutality and a willingness to do terrible and awful things at the drop of a hat.

Simon: The leader of the foremost Pack of were in Trail, he reputedly tries to avoid open war with Sophie and is a friend to Cameron. It's said he was in Trail since the beginning of things and knew Faline before they were even were but there's a lot of stories about him and most of them are riddled with lies.

Old Rabbit: A native american were who still has some power over the weres in the local Tribe. His 'pack' is rather small but fiercely loyal to the old man. He once ruled all of Trail and the well of bitterness runs deep within him that so much has been lost and will never come again.

Out Lady of the Claws: Faline is said to be a goddess , something perhaps far more or less than human. Most believe she was a were, though some think she was a fae in disguise. Sightings of her are as rare as those of a bigfoot and whether she is really any kind of god or not is a subject of much debate. That she was real is accepted – though, as with Jesus, there are doubters – but whether she is dead or something else entirely is a matter of some debate.

Lyn: the local magician-in-charge of the coven of magicians who operate in the town. (Well, she would be in charge if they bothered to vote and since they haven't she is.) Little is known about her save that she tries to keep her people out of harm's way from the mightier forces abroad in the city and, like everyone else, is said to have known Faline.

Edward D'Eath: A special police constable who often deals with monsters and weirdness in the town. He isn't liked by any faction and collects secrets like other men collect STDs.

Thoughts on D&D

So, the next edition is coming out in ~2 years (2013 at some point). I was not a fan of 4e -- admittedly, I didn't play it often and only read through the rules twice but it pretty much struck me as D&D trying to be an MMO and failing, to say nothing of being more complicated than it needed to be. I find as I get older I get tired of games involving flipping through acres of pages and legacy systems that make little sense. So .... some thoughts toward 5e of D&D.

1) The stats will remain as they always were. This is, pretty much, a given. Ditto for HP and AC, however unwieldy they've perhaps become. A thought: give fewer options. So, random dice roll, stat at a time, and you're stuck with them. This will prevent a lot of the min/maxing that begins right at the gate. I would allow for an optional rerolling of all if more than 2 stats are 9 or lower, but that would be it.

2) Scrap the obsession with balance. Classes are not balanced: you play X because it is the best at X, and won't be as good at Y and unable to do Z. Trying to make every class even seems to do a disservice to all of them.

3) If every race can be a PC, then have them all as options from the get-go. People aren't spending money on RPGs like they did back in the day: said model isn't working, so don't piss people off by trying to force it on them.

4) Reduce the amount of books.
PHB (The basic classes, with instructions for how to make everything else into a PC class. Ta-da. Combat stuff. Magic. Also psionics. They'll show up, put them in as part of the main thing from the start.)  
DM/M&M: One book. Cull stuff, streamline and focus things.
Optional book:  The M&M species done up as PHB ones. The rules should allow the GM to do that on his/her own but this could be handy and include the 'full' M&M list of monsters to make certain people happy.

Also, if one will be making Settings -- which one will -- have some idea as to what and the relevant feats in the main book rather than setting-specific ones. Just a thought.

5) Character generation can be complicated (See: spells, keeping track of). Make an online PC creator, make it free, give .html and .rtf formats for finished PCs.

6) Toss skills out the window, as they're just excuses/reasons not to role-place. Assume everyone can do X at a certain level, add in feats if they want to be better. So anyone can Climb, if you have a feat you can climb really well (and without the equipment). D&D is focused on dungeon crawls and killing monsters -- this has never changed, from a system POV. If skills vanish, it requires actual player skills to work things out, not just 'I check for traps.' *roll dice*. Rolling dice should be for social and physical combat, not broken things like diplomacy checks devoid of role-playing.

7) Cull things. If need be, add all those in as pdf/pod things later on for those who insist on having weapon X and Y and armour Z.

8) Recognize that the Epic 20+ level D&D stuff has never worked; don't bother trying to get it to.

Esper.net issues

Esper.net seems to having issues (perhaps owing to just five active servers at the moment). As it would be nice to avoid the dal.net meltdown of yesteryear, this is a general announcement:

If you can't get on esper, or it dies entirely, the dal.net #game1 IS still active (and Sparkie is generally in it). Sessions can be run in it, or game1 move back to it if need be.

Coupe De Foudre Game

Season One: The Clock Strikes Ones (2011 - 2012)

This is the first season of Coup De Foudre (a thunderbolt/love at first sight). The episodes are directed by Alcar, produced by Sparkie and feature the prominent voice talents of Chaos`^ . The episodes are based on a maga series created by Game1 Studios and the first seasion covers the protagonist, Quinn, becoming aware of other Elemententalists and acting in the wider world. 

The episodes use the same opening theme, "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper 

The ending theme of the first season is "Clocks" by Coldplay

(It is widely believed that the show's entire budget was spent acquiring these songs.)

Episode 1 - A Life Gone Widdershins (Sessions 1-4)

Quinn teams up with a complete stranger to beat up a kid and destroy a library, followed by learning the secret dimensions of the world via throwing the street at someone and prepares to break her GF out of a government prison.

(This is pretty much the first sessions done up as the infamous Wizard of Oz tv listing:

'Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete stangers to kill again.']

Episode 2 - Time is on my siiii -- shit! (Session 5)

And then she died. Only not. 

Axis Mundi: less than unknown

Aka session times and such. Ken is on board, with PC done, and Caltak has had one session*.
For the remainder of this week sessions (defined as starting after 6 pm PST) can be: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Possibly Sunday night as well.  Ideally one of those nights will be Ken's intro session on his own.
Next week: Tuesday, Wednesday, possibly Friday. After xmas I have the 27th and 28th entirely free, nights free after that.

Schedules in the new year can be determined by everyone and work from there. Ideally we should try for at least one session a week with the PCs together and such and figure stuff out from there. The PCs differing talents, skills and allies should ideally lead to them needing each other's help but we shall see how it all plays out :)

Axis Mundi clarification

A few clarifications on the setting:

The idea of the City (and by extension the world in general) is that the pretense of schools for Adepts is tossed right out the window: each adept masters different tricks, makes their own and few of them even consider their stuff the 'same' as that of someone else. Oh, the power might come from the same general impulse but the execution of it, the meaning of it, is what matters. Further to that, a lot of Avatar-touched people exist, ones who have Channelled something bigger than themselves at least once and fled it, never understood it, embraced it or so forth.

The New Inquisition and the like don't exist, as there is no one really In The Know. It's not much an Occult Underground as an Occult Ghetto with a lot of people with competing ideas and theories squirrelled away in their own lives. It takes the idea that no one knows what is really going on and ramps that up a notch: the people who understand how the markets really work aren't going to share those secrets with others, the person who has discovered that they can get more than just a good feeling when they cut themselves will hide it due to guilt and shame. And so on.

That government agencies have probably pieced some things together is inevitable -- though what, if anything, they do about it would be a question of time and budget.  Various religions have some idea what is going on in the world, at least as it applies to their limited paradigm and there is one npc group who have some small clue about avatars but know little about adepts as those worlds seldom interact directly.

Given the nature of PCs to learn and ferret out information, this can make the PCs pretty Important, if they so choose, or the knowledge can send them running away from the game entirely to become bee keepers in Peoria.

Proposed small UA Campaign

UA Campaign: axis mundi inveniendum

Premise: The world is weirder than we want to know.

The world is pretty strange. A casual look at the news can prove that, when you have political parties holding the global economy hostage, American Idol getting more votes than the last major election, random killing sprees, the inexplicable popularity of certain celebrities and so forth. The worst part about this is that the world is even weirder than that.

Because there's a kid who cut himself once and had the cuts talk to him, people who see auras, ways to masturbate and see the face of God, a babysitter who has never once had a kid back-talk her. Weird things, on the fringes of the world, that are somehow part of something that would be more comforting if it were alien. And this has touched you: perhaps you saw something once, or did something, or sometimes when no one is looking, you can make ice cream all fat-free.

As far as you know, it's just you. Oh, there's stories about other things, but the world is full of urban legends (not that you'd ever think yourself one) and for the most part your life is normal. Until other things happen, and you realize that there is a secret underbelly to the world, an odd place of power and will and desire so strong it can change reality. A world you can become part of, at a cost.

Theme: Life vs power.

You have a normal life, with normal friends, family, a job. And then there's this other world, where people can be more than people, where men and women can whistle up things from shadows or cut someone with a smile or sing songs that no human has ever known. It's not just weird, not at all: there's power to be found in symbols, in the real truth of the world, in the manipulation of reality and collective will. Magick exists, and gods within us all, but to become part of that, to be power in the world, might mean giving up all you hold dear.

Power requires a touch of madness to be genius, and the real world has little truck with this kind of genius.

GM Notes:

The basic concept is a slow-burn UA campaign where the PCs become aware of the deeper and wider world that exists within the one they've lived in all their lives. It offers glamour and power and glory, but all at terrible costs. You can get what you want, if you are willing to sacrifice everything else to get it. It's about how the PCs balance their normal life with this world, madness with sanity and how they try and keep it all from crumbling about around them.

Essentially, the PCs begin below Street Level, in UA terms. You're just people with some odd secret, the same as everyone else in the world. Until that secret becomes useful to people who have become more – or less – than people and their world begins to invade yours, full of alien omens and weird abilities and freaks who've become hypersane. It's about how the characters try to adjust to this and deal with the demands of the weird shit world and the normal world.

Imagine you tried your hand at reading tea leaves and managed some good BS about people's futures in it. Now imagine someone revealed that you weren't reading futures but making them and they had a specific future in mind for someone, a knife, and pointed out you didn't need all your fingers. You get away, in the end, but the world is no longer what it used to be, and you can't pretend it is: a veil has been ripped aside, you can see what the real powers and forces that shape the world are and some of them can see you as well. There's something in your eyes now, something deep and half-wild you have no words for and the ground under your feet never felt as unreal as it does now.

Final note: This is a UA game somewhat to the side of the normal rules, in that it's more about avatars than anything else. Not every avatar of the Mother will have the same power, not every adept will use a school of magick in the same way (or have access to the same tricks from it), and a lot of people have one foot into the weird and have to decide to jump in, tread water or get the hell out of dodge. You're one of these people.

Because you're a regular joe with friends, family and a life, and giving that all up can't be worth it. Can it?


Setting


The city, somewhere on east coast north america. It's cold, wet and raining when it's not freezing, the sun baking it brown for two months before more rain slides into the cold of winter once again. The kind of place that's full of promise that few ever kind and the rain never quite washes away all the grime from the streets, where it only takes a single block to walk from mansions to slums, where everyone is crowded together but no one knows their neighbours.

It can be cold and hard, at times, but the same is true of everywhere: the city has wild parks and subdivisions done up in varying styles, century-old hotels nestled next to condos built from an Ikea catalogue. The ice cream vans still come, the factories haven't all closed their jobs thanks to China and most of the kids play in the streets under the watchful eyes of parents It's not all bad, and not all good: like most places, the city is what you make of it and what it makes of you.