Ø2\\'3|| - A little play-report with notes (Season 1, Episode 1: Deadly Electric Pussy-Cat Fart)

I had an opportunity to DM Ø2\\'3|| the other day, first session of a two-session gig (favor for a friend, nice people to game with). Other than having the pleasure to get some more gaming going (aside from play-testing THE RISE OF ROBO-HITLER), it was the first time I was able to use the printed book for the game, which was all kinds of interesting in itself. Since that first session went (imo) exceptionally well, I thought it might be a good idea write a play-report and give you guys an idea what Ø is like at the table and why ... I'll write this up as it emerges for the players, general description of the setting aside (which you can read here, if interested).

THE SETTING

Using the District Generator the game comes with, I created the basic hex where the characters reside and the six neighboring districts. 3 hexes (including the main one) stick out to be some sort of play ground for a game I ended up calling "The Vales of Evardonn". Main hex is a poor area that is used to initiate new citizens ("NuPees") into their citizenship under the United States of Europe (USE, for short). I decide to make this the District Grünau in the greater Berlin-Leipzig city cluster. Here NuPees will train to join the "Halls of Heroes" in the District Friedensaue located just NW of Grünau, which would allow them access to the vales in the NE.

Basically, the characters believe that they are part of a huge, real life MMORPG, which is nothing more than the state and big corp gamifying work through all-encompassing augmentation. Since citizens are already indoctrinated in the artificial womb they are raised in (think Matrix meets Teletubbies), they actually believe that what they see is reality. They might believe they are hunting down goblins for xp, while in reality they are slaughtering, for instance, some illegals or commit other atrocious acts without even realizing, since it's all nicely augmented. Rainbows included.

So while the characters live an extended Anime experience on a sugar rush, training to be "heroes", reality is a dirty and improvised mass living complex under the totalitarian regime of The Family, looking a bit like this:

This will be available as a poster, eventually ...

THE CHARACTERS

Character creation begins with the characters realizing tat they are being lied to and how they react to that (blue pill/red pill moment). The players describe how they'd been playing when a terrorist attack took away the veil. They saw reality for the first time, didn't like it and decided to take care that somethng like that won't happen to them again. They told the officials the same, hoping to be recruited as terrorist hunters or something like that.

Since they didn't opt for a higher social status (which would have been costly), they remained being small fish, but seemed content with playing the game and supporting the family (making life miserable for others if opportunity arose, for sure).

And that's the set-up. After that the players described how they imagined their characters to be. We ended up with:

PAULINE - Augmented, she looks like a nice little girl in a white dress, behind that veil, the dress is less glorious (more like ripped, bloody and dirty) and half her face as well as one arm are replaced with cyberwear.

[source]

MR. SMITH (aka Boss Baby) & MR. NOBODY (modified Smart Assisstant) - Chubby little guy (puberty blockers and a sugary diet will do that to you) with a black suit and sun glasses, capable Hacker. The augmented version is way more slick and cartoonish than the meatspace version.

GRUBS & POOPSIE - Augmented Grubs looks like a little cherub, wingy and all. In reality it's a fat little kid carried around by huge, spidery legs implanted in his back. Too lazy to walk, in his hands always something sweet and an energy drink. Poopsie is the electric cat he carries around in a duffle bag.

They assign their potentials and roll for Anger (9, 11 and 14, not Falling Down, but still quite angry ... good). With that, the character creation is done. The basic idea is that they can be whatever they want in the scenario as long as all agree and they are willing to make the DM stronger when they describe powerful character features (which they did ... I ended up with 14 Pennies to start). I also gave a short introduction to the rules and after that we were ready to roll.

Season 1, Episode 1: Deadly Electric Pussy-Cat Fart

DISCLAIMER: What follows is the mash-up of the established setting with the characters in it, the Narrative Encounter Generator (NEG, based on this, but specified to emulate dystopian fiction with an Anime bent) and a SF-Fluff table the game offers. The NEG offers a direction, but the characters are free to act as they please. It is a sandbox with narrative impulses ... It is also SATIRE. You have been warned.

We start on a September evening. The characters are enjoying their free time hanging out at their apartment when an explosion shocks the building and the augmentation starts stutering, interwoven with the message, that their existance is a LIE and that they need to WAKE UP ... Of course, it's those damn domestic terrorists again. Normaly The Family would just activate the population to act as D/escalation Troops (the chip every citizen has implanted in their brain would activate to change them into mindless drones), but the explosion seems to interfere with that as well and the characters see their opportunity to finally shine!

Mr. Smith tries his hands on finding out where exactly the explosion has occured, but the roll fails and nothing he could come up with would change that (which makes him slightly more angry: Anger is raised by 1). They decide to just follow the destruction. Mr. Smith wants to go armed, so he grabs the one weapon in his possession. His roll comes up with a gadget that has two usages left before being useless ... a boom stick! That'd be his second Slot. They head for the door.

Outside the apartment they see some smoke and some scared neighbors (flickering between weird cartoon zoo and chubby-dirty freaks, as the state augmentation keeps switching on and off). They follow the trail of smoke to find a huge pile of rubble and a whole in the ceiling, several stories above. Had been a long time for them to see the blue sky. The whole district is one big building, basically, with no real infrastructure but the one big corp installed throughout the district, which no one living here is able to use due to the low social status citizens living here have.

In the middle of the free space the bomb created, they see a digital graffiti that says YOU ARE ALL SLAVES OF THE SYSTEM. No other signs of the terrorists, but Mr. Smith wants to try his hacking skill on the signature, with the hope that it might lead to the terrorist cell responsible for the bomb and interferrence.

The roll's a close call, so Pauline decides to offer a Relief Die for support. She connects herself to Mr. Robot, rolls the dice and it's a Double 10! That adds 20 against the difficulty, more than enough to know EXACTLY where the terrorists hide (somewhere on the roof, in a secret hideout between giant air conditioning vents). Pauline also gains an Achievement for the Double: it'll be easier for her to track down those terrorists from now on.

They decide to climb the rubble up to the roof, creating new Slots along the way: Pauline can shot her cyborg hand as a grappling hook and the spiderlegs coming out of Grubs' back are quite capable of climbiung almost every surface (to keep the illusion up that Grubs is a flying cherub, of course). They see military transport helicopters crossing the hole in the roof as they make their way up.

Mr. Smith resorts to just climbing, but as soon as they arrive on the roof, he's left behind fast by the other two speeding towards the hideout and what sounds like gun-fire and explosions. He hacks himself a ticket for a flying taxi to catch up with Pauline and Grubs at what seems to be the border of a prohibited area the military set up digitally as they engaged with the terrorists.

They approach the hideout and only find signs of battle. The prohibited area seems to have moved with the battle. Grubs sends Poopsie to scout. The cat does cat things while going through the rooms and ends its scouting at a huge hole in one room that leads outside again. In the distance the cat sees a dog fight (ha! sorry ...) between military and terrorists in front of a massive shopping mall that displays an insane shoppingspree-lightshow on its outside.

[source]

The group assumes that there's still a chance to help, so they move on towards the battle. Shortly after that, the whole block goes into Lockdown as the battle seems to shift down into an urban canyon (I had to spend 10 Pennies due to a high Oppression Die result, they had to go somewhere ...).

With the circumstances changed like that, they need to find a Safe Space or an excuse really fast, as drones are already swarming the area and they see D/escalation Troops appear on the roofs as well as a Bias Judge crawling towards the scene of the skirmish. They decide to go for an excuse. After all, they still want a chance to get those terrorists!

So it turns out Grubs is still in good contact with the Family beaurocrat that debriefed them after they had experienced that first terrorist attack (he created a Contact Slot for that). Isabel, that's how she identifies, likes the chubby little cherub and would love to help, but giving military authority is no easy task and she plays coy about it. Grubs decides to put some preassure unto her, burning the contact for that Season, but giving his roll a whopping +18.

It'll take a while and some nice cherub pics to get her back in the friend zone, but the test is made and the authority to hunt for the terrorists is given. Just in time, as they are already approached by some D/escalation type. Now the frowning smily on the mask turns into a smile and the meat-drone turns away, looking for other dissidents and trouble makers.

 

A short sigh of relief later they are already looking how to exploit their new powers. They have some access to the military feed and at least know where the conflict is hot. This is where Pauline's Achievement comes in handy: she finds some terrorists hiding in a nearby club with a bavarian alp theme (based on some crazy tv show). There are six of them and they seem to have some skilled hacker among them that was able to shield their presence from the military.

Bad luck for them that Pauline had rolled that Double ... 

It doesn't take the group long to come up with a scheme that does not involve direct assault. They hack into the video feed and see those criminals in the main club room, waiting it out, laying on the fake meadow that is the floor while lazily waving away some nanite flies (it's an all-in "authentic" alp-feel club house). The hacker seems busy keeping the fuzz away.

It all lines up beautifully for the characters, it seems. The plan is to send Poopsie inside, as part of the scenery (fittingly so, it appears). Grubs also explains that he had that cat "weaponized" with a fart canon of sorts (creating a Gadget Slot for that), which turns out to be quite weak (just Stage 1, not even enough to make damage). However, if they succesfully hack the cat, they could actually do some damage, weakening the opposition in the process. Not a problem, is what Mr. Smith says. The others are on stand-by to support the roll with Relief Dice, if need be.

Alas, Mr. Smith comes up with a Triple 8! That's not only 24 as a result, it's also a Season Highlight (which creates a DM Slot and counts as absolute success)! Mr. Smith added another 14 Anger Points to the result (he had gained three more Anger points in a failed test before, so he had 4 remaining) and using the cat gave another 6. It resulted in enough damage to take the room out (and was quite satisfying to get all that anger out of the system). That cat was weaponized with a fart from hell.

I think we took ten minutes to describe how it all went down because we laughed so hard: the cat would enter the room and do cat things, like sweeping some legs and looking for attention. When in the middle of the terrorists, the gas would be released, and one would imagine that they first looked around who might be the culprit ... then the dying would start :D

[Source]

It was glorious, and pretty much where we ended it. They called the authorities and Mr. Grubs took care to make a "cat video" of the incident and put it online (to some effect, it raised his Social Status a bit as people seemed to like what they saw), and that was that. The DM received two Pennies since the other two players forgot about their Social Media presence (if you aren't posting regularly, the state gets suspicious, too).

Thoughts

It turned out to be sufficiently "cyberpunk". The players ability to come up with skills, gadgets and contacts as they need them allow for a wide range of wild results, all with individual touches.

The district generator already gave me lots to work with, the NEG and Fluff results added to that. They gave me the opportunity for the characters in the beginning, the signs of the gun battle, the dog fight in the distance in front of a huge building going crazy with advertisement, the struggle in the end, the nanite flies ... all those little bits and pieces I could use to build on and make it a rich experience with relativeley little preparation (and completely flexible ... I had no idea where this all would go).

Pretty much what I'm writing about here.

I had to put more work into getting my brain around the system again as I thought I would (I'm balls-deep into be67 right now and this was rather short notice), but once it clicked again, I found a new rhythm quite fast. The game seems complex in the beginning, but as soon as you see it all realized at the table, I'd wager it'll all fall into place quite easily.

The tools provided in the book did their job, which was great. However, I already saw some room for improvement. I think one of the future supplements should be a DMs Guide, or something like that. The DM part in the book is already extensive and full of examples and all that, but I found there is still more to say, and maybe room to discuss some tricks and traps (and, maybe, an errata of sorts, if I find any really bad hickups). 

All in all, it ended up being satire again, which is also nice to see. The setting is so dark that people seem to gravitate towards humor to lighten the mood. Just as intended. That critical fart was just plain random luck, though. You couldn't come up with that :D

I'm looking forward to the next Episode. I'll send this to the players as well, and maybe they'll add their thoughts and impressions in the comments :)

------------

In other news, I will keep the discount on Ø2\\'3|| up until end of July and you can check out a free preview of the book right here (or go and check out the first reviews here).

If you need more convincing, maybe this post might get you there. If you already checked it out, please know that I appreciate you :) It'll certainly help to keep the lights on here ...

 

D&D RC Campaign Summerbreak Summary Part 1: It's a Heist, Baby!

Hey there, friends! It's been a while. I have been so busy, it's not even funny anymore (somewhat gaming related, just not yet blog related). Didn't have much time to do anything with Lost Songs in the last couple of months either (it's been months! damn). What I kept doing, though, was playing. So when I decided to take a break from Lost Songs, we got back to playing more D&D! Here's the first part in an attempt to summarize those sessions ...

Prelude: This is how we roll

A couple of words about our game. We play a heavily house-ruled D&D Rules Cyclopedia, with a huge dose of HackMaster 4e, some Arduin and all kinds of little things I came up with in the last 7 years or so. Check out the last 3 posts to get an idea about the combat and parts of the character generation. Players are usually pointed towards Labyrinth Lord for reference.

By now the game features roughly 23 classes and it is all over the place. There are barbarians, strangers from different worlds, pixies, charming princes, dwarven snipers and many others added to the core classes (every player can build characters, I write about our process here).

It's also a rather vanilla affair, with huge doses of anime and (happy) gore: a peaceful valley under feudal reign some 100 years after the fall of "The Empire". Riddled with dungeons and mysteries, of course. You can read a bit about the setting Schwarzaarlen and its main city Deverron here.

As vanilla as it gets ... [source]

Books I use at the table are the Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia (the book of books, I say) and the Expanded Petty Gods (because: fun). I also heavily use the Random Narrative Generator.

We play it as a sandbox, which means the players and I take turns in not knowing what's going to happen next as the story emerges from random encounters (with random encounter reactions!), the setting and random narrative twists. I didn't know what kind of story we were going to tell. Which is a good thing. Keeps me on my toes.

Trouble follows you ...

The group consists after the first two sessions of a fat wizard, a moping princess, a melancholic barbarian, a prince charming, a fat cat humanoid and a rogue. They just arrived in town for the annual cider festival. Most arrived with a caravan that just hit town, the prince charming came from the elven woods in the north.

It's perfectly shitty autumn weather when the characters start exploring the city: a little cold, a little wet, a little gray (a d12 for the month, a d20 for the weather). Not very inviting, but the mood is good and Deverron does its best to be festive and busy. Things take a dark turn as the group makes room to let a heavily armored wagon pass, only to witness its robbery (random narrative generator, RNG from now on).

Well, they don't see that much, since the street just disappears under the wagon. The rest is screams and damage spells. The only thing they see when approaching the gap where the road used to be, is a giant spider vanishing in the canalization, the wreck that'd been the armored wagon and the corpses of those who protected it.

The city guard shows up and takes the characters into custody for questioning. They don't seem to believe that the characters had been that close without being somehow involved (RNG and Encounter Reaction Table, ERT from now on).

The characters are no happy campers at that point, feeling a bit helpless, being new in town and all that. But they'd been good friends with the chief of the caravan and as their way leads past the market place where the caravan is being off-loaded, their friend sees they are in trouble, calls a couple of his handymen and intervenes on the groups behalf (a random roll where they are headed and the RNG doing its thing).

A bribe later they are free to go. One thing they'd learned while talking to the guards: that armored wagon was a cider delivery from the Oldinges family, a local political entity.

Busy medieval streets and a castle in the distance [source]

A Feast is a Feast

Tired of walking around aimlessly, the characters ask around where the eating is good and where they also might crash for the night. The caravan leader has connections and gives them directions to a tavern that always keeps some room for people arriving with the caravan. Off they go.

That tavern is huge and business is humming. The characters are lucky to find a table to sit and the fat wizard casts a cantrip to highlight their position for the waitresses to see (a giant red arrow floating in the air, pointing at them). Turns out that's about as much magic as is allowed in here. They have magic blockers here to hinder fat wizards from skipping out on the tap.

Anyway, a waitress turns up and takes orders. As they wait for that, they are approached by a bland young priestess of the Goddess of Boredom (Expanded Petty Gods, from now on EPG). She tells the group that she knows about their involvement with the heist and asks them for help. The delivery that got stolen was a bottle of the legendary cider called "Goldspritz", worth a five digit sum in gold.

The offer is, if the characters help the temple to find the missing bottle, they get room and board and, far more important, protection from other groups that are also involved in this affair and don't believe that the characters had just "been there by accident". It's an offer they won't refuse and they agree to come by the temple later today. As she leaves, the characters notice she passes a sinister figure that looks angrily at the priestess and the group ... (all RNG).

Their order arrives. Prince charming has the brilliant idea to tell the waitress that they are with royalty, pointing at the princess. The princess smiles and waves her hand. The waitress is impressed enough to inform the owners and it turns out that they actually know that old noble bloodline from songs and stories. They have some really romanticized ideas about the old empire and make lots of fuzz about the whole affair.

It might have helped that the princess's last name literally translated to "from the money", but the owners acted fast and gave the group a private room and all kinds of courtesies, including a meal with several courses and all kinds of luxuries.

As the innkeeper seems to believe that prince charming is the princess's spokesperson, he takes him to the side and asks him how they intent to pay for all that. His reasoning is, they can't do something like that for free, but since she's a princess, money shouldn't be an issue. Right?

Prince charming is the first to sneak out of the tavern, with the rogue close on his heels. The wizard tries to negotiate terms and almost succeeds to talk the keep into reducing the price to half. However, half of 1400 is still too much (D&D RC, 3d6x10 gp for level 1 characters).

The innkeep gets wind that something is up and posts a polite henchman at the entrance. Among the last of the group to realize that they are in trouble is the barbarian. She really doesn't take kindly to the idea that they are not invited and have to pay, so she cranks up the foreigner and escalates towards the guarded door with enough gusto that she takes out both door and guard.

They make a run for it through the inn's busy main room. The innkeep didn't have enough time to get all his ducks in a row, so there's actually an opening for them to use. The fat cat is the slowest of the bunch and one of the innkeep's goons actually manages to catch her tail as she jumps through the window to make her escape.

A busy tavern! [source]

The rest already made it out, only the cat woman is in dire straits. But the rogue comes to the rescue, dagger in hand. The henchman backs of immediately as he sees that weapons are in play, mumbling something like "They don't pay me for shit like that."

It's almost dark outside and Devorra doesn't have any street lamps, just the light people carry and the lampions they put up for the festival, so the group has it easy to disappear in the busy and dark streets, heading towards the temple district ...

Next: The Temple of Boredom

And that's roughly the first two sessions. It's been a bit awkward to start the game with the RNG, as things kept happening to the characters without them being able to do a lot about it, but it actually made for a vibrant and complex setting. No fights at all in the first two sessions. The RNG throwing curve balls all the time seems to be the cause of this, another interesting side effect.

Took me totally by surprise that it turned out to be a fantasy noir story a la Garrett P.I.. D&D is good for that kind of story, it turns out.

Next time the group will meet some rivals and I walk a thin line trying to make bored characters interesting for the players. And the guard gets involved ... Read Part 2 here!

Review: Expanded Petty Gods

This is due, folks. And I really haven't seen many people praise this book beyond "It's out! Get it!". So let me talk a bit about the Expanded Petty Gods Tome of Awesome (EPG) and why it's something every fantasy DM should at least check out. If you think this is going to be a positive review, you won't be surprised that much ...

Disclaimer: I did three pieces for EPG. Two of them without any hope to see them published other than on the blog and the third one happening because there was some more room for the Shroom and the Ranger obliged ... Of course I'm happy to see my name in this thing, but I would have to be very desperate to make this about my small contribution to this HUGE book. Anyway, read it with a grain of salt, as they say, and I'll try to write it with the proper distance.

Honestly, I love that cover.

Hard Birth of the Mighty Expanded Petty Gods

I won't bore you with the details, but this book has seen several hands before it manifested the way it did there in the end. Let's say someone started this idea of a collection of Petty Gods and many others liked it, but the sheer scope of the project (and other factors, I'm sure) hindered it from happening until it just didn't happen. Lots of gods already written and drawn, lots of enthusiasm for naught.

Or so it seemed. But then someone else revived it and it got even more attention than it did the first time. Now there were even more gods with more art and great ideas, Michael Moorcock was to write a piece and ... maybe it was just too much? I mean, this got huge, with lots of interest and even more work done up front. But when all was said and done, it remained to be a hobby effort. By lots of creative and capable people, of course, but done in their free time nonetheless. And there are limits to such a thing. Anyway, it wasn't to be. Again.

Imagine, this idea started around November 2010 and it took until November 2014 before the project got its final push and ended up being published a few months later. It took over four years! Well, the cynics among you might mumble something right now about certain kickstarters taking that much time (or more) and still end up nowhere ... But I digress.

What I was aiming for here was that the idea alone managed to gain enough traction over 4 years to not only result in a gigantic community effort worth "327 petty gods, 116 minions, knights and servants, 12 cults and dozens of divine items and spells", it also managed to get published! The work all those people put into this at every stage of the project is just breathtakingly a-ma-zing. Seriously.

What it is and what you get

One of the reasons to write this review (or rather, what made me wanna do now what I intended to do anyway ...), was a (how I see it) unfair comment about this book and a mediocre rating for it on rpg.net. It honestly caught me by surprise. I know we live in a culture of "Meh, I don't like it, so it's bad!" (I just wanted to write "... and it must be bad!", but stopped myself, since there's too much reflected introspective even in that), so I really shouldn't be surprised. But then I checked how many reviews are already out there and got ... not that much. Not in the open wild, anyway.

So this is for those out there stumbling across this post because they had been looking for something like this about the book: Expanded Petty Gods is a collection not only of petty (fantasy) gods, a concept one might be familiar with from such works as the late Terry Pratchett's Small Gods, the often overlooked early D&D supplement Unknown Gods by the Judges Guild or from your Latin lessons about the Roman empire, well, it's also brim full with essays like Create a Religion in your Spare Time for Fun and Profit by M.A.R. Barker and many other great advice about handling religion in (fantasy) campaigns. It also got monsters and spells and items and organisations ...

I'm starting to repeat myself here, but imagine hundreds of people, each putting their creative best to the idea of a book about petty gods and what comes with it and this is what you get: almost 400 A4 pages of inspiration, completely illustrated. The pdf of this huge book is also FREE, for those wondering what such a thing might cost and the Lulu prints are at cost, so the hardcover version of this really, really big book comes down to ca. 22 US $.

One might think that this book is all over the place, given the history it has and the multitude of different writers and artists and what-not, so you might be surprised to see what an excellent editing job can do for a project like this. It's tight, the transitions are smooth, it's perfectly indexed and while reading in it, I always got the feeling that it all connects very well. Richard L. LeBlanc, Jr. (of Save vs. Dragon fame, check out his stuff!) took the helm in the final stages of the genesis of this book and he (with all the others that helped him) did an excellent job to make this look very professional. Expanded Petty Gods is a showcase for why you have professionals for work like this (did I mention that it is free?).

Just a random page ...

Enough praise for now

If you weren't convinced by now, more words wouldn't change it, so I'll leave it at that. This is a huge community effort, with lots of great writers and artists involved (famous and/or not) and professional editing to boot. It's also free and the (at cost!) print versions of it are impressive enough to intimidate most other books of any respective rpg collection (my D&D RC was unimpressed, but that almost goes without saying).

It was written for early editions of D&D and variants, but that shouldn't hinder anyone interested. Most of it is system agnostic or translated to other systems easy enough. So if anything I just wrote resonated with you, dear reader, and you check this out to find new writers and/or artists, use it in your games for the gods (like I do, the players love it ...), as a monster compendium for medium to high level campaigns, as inspiration or just to look at pretty pictures, you won't be disappointed with what the Expanded Petty Gods Compendium brings to the table. Enjoy!

Dirkterwalde: First Session (a welcome and bad dreams of a dark future)

Alright, I got to do those session reports. They'll be as detailed as I dare them to be (and remember it ...), spoiler free (as the players will most definitely read them) and with some musings about the game at the end. Most part of the first session was spend for character generation ...

System: CJ Carella's WitchCraft

Setting: Dirkterwalde, a mysterious backwater-town in East Germany at the end of the 90's (see here for the campaign set-up and here for an introduction to Dirkterwalde).

Characters (see here for a full description of the cast): Vale Viem (witch and owner of a small cabaret), Jan Jester (mundane sausage-salesman and a thief) and Gabriel Zöller (powerful psychic and a nerd).

Session 1 - Welcome to Dirkterwalde

The year is 1999 and it's Tuesday, the 7th of July. A mild summer day, if you believe the records. Nothing really interesting was happening in the news, many people were on vacation. All in all it was a really unspectacular summer in East Germany in general and in Dirkterwalde especially. I would hazard that on a day like this people actually thought more about either seeing Notting Hill again or checking out The Matrix instead (because everybody was talking about it) than about the upcoming Millennium and the end of the world (or other dark topics).

It's a nice evening. Jan and Gabriel decide after training (both frequent the same dojo) to go for a beer and see, as they often do, the evening performance at Madame Viem's Varieté Obscure. Lots of beautiful young women, reasonable prices and it was just a stone's throw from the dojo (it didn't take them long to become regulars).

This is where the 3 characters meet each other. The only event this evening worth mentioning was a poor old Sorbian woman that had managed to get into the Obscure to sell her trinkets to the customers. All three bought a small trinket before the woman was ushered out politely.

They stay until the end of the evening's entertainment and part ways after that, doing whatever business they got left for the day and went to bed after that. As they fell asleep and entered their dreams, a Willpower-check was in order. Gabriel was the only one succeeding and thus the only one being aware that he's dreaming. Jan and Vale accepted the dream as reality (what one might call "dream-logic" worked for Jan and Vale, but not for Gabriel).

A strange and frightening dream followed.

In their dream they were all back at the Varieté Obscure. Gabriel in front of it, Jan and Vale inside. The Obscure and the street going past it looked ruinous and deserted. There was no electricity, just a diffuse flickering light brightening the clouded night in the west of town.

When Gabriel saw a strange group of people with torches coming down the street towards him (they'd looked like Neanderthals in medieval armor) he decided to enter the theater. He heard someone talking, went for the noise and discovered Jan and Vale discussing their situation. Since he believes them to be part of his dream, he chats them up as if they were old friends, uses his abilities to ignite candles and makes them fly around, stuff like that. Jan and Vale on the other hand accept this to be as it should be anyway, since they are not aware of their dream-state.

Now, them talking to each other startled something on the floor above them and they decide to follow that noise. A door leading to a hallway with some stairs to the first floor is by the bar. Jan takes the front. He thinks a gun would be helpful in this endeavor and discovers he's already carrying one. Vale got a sword the same way: it has been there all the time.

They open the door to the hallway leading to the stairs to hear more noise, but this time from the kitchen to their left and confront some small and ugly humanoids with sharp teeth and pointy ears that were on their way out through an exit to a back alley. They snarled and hissed at the group and vanished with the words:

"This ain't your realm no more, humans. It is Zardok's realm now and you are not welcome!"

Closer examination of the kitchen revealed a ghastly surprise in the defunct cold store: eight dead humans, hung up on their ankles like cattle. The stench was revolting and just as Jan was about to close the door again, the corpse closest to him turned his head and lifted an arm to grab him. He closed the door so much faster after that and took care that it stayed shut ...

Examining the first floor they found the first rooms empty and demolished. One showed traces of old blood, another one looked like an improvised camp site. In the fourth room they discover a suicide and a note with the sad tale of a girl that hoped to get a chance and the world disagreeing. Vale checked if she knew the girl, but didn't recognize her.

Meanwhile they hear someone calling for attention down on the street. An old man in his pajamas who seems lost. They identify him as one of the guests of the Obscure just a few hours ago and think that he, too, might have bought a trinket from that old lady.

Things escalate pretty fast from that point on. The man gets attacked by those small creatures from the kitchen (or very similar ones). The group tires to help. After some shots are fired, a dragon makes an appearance and tries to burn the old man, Gabriel and Vale. Both characters wake up before dying in the flames. Jan fights some of the zombies that managed to break free from the cold store until they manage to overbear him and he, too, wakes up before it gets worse.

The next morning begins for Vale with the arrival of a new girl seeking shelter in the Obscure. The session ends with Vale recognizing the young as the suicide from her dream ...

Thoughts

I was quite happy with this first session. It seems like not much is happening, but it was more important to give the players a feeling for the setting and give them a chance to meet and establish some connection between them. What I wrote about WitchCraft the other day still holds true: very fast, very flexible.

In this first session I only got a glimpse of how powerful those characters really are. Most tasks didn't pose a problem and it became quite difficult to produce some tension because of that. At least within surroundings the players believed to be controllable (that is: reality). That changed quite a bit in the dream sequence as soon as those corpses in the fridge started to move ...

Most fun was the fact that Jan and Vale where immersed in the dream and Gabriel wasn't. Gabriel started to treat the others as figments of his imagination and found lots of opportunities to tell them about his psychic powers, demonstrated them even (which got quite important in the next session and helped getting the group together), while the others tried to find ways to use the dream world to their advantage. A fun first session ...

This got rather long. I'll try to keep the following reports somewhat shorter :)

Dirkterwalde: The Cast

Never done something like a session report on the blog, but it needs to get done anyway, so I decided to give this a shot. And maybe it's a good idea to give you all an impression of what our games are like when I'm the DM (you know, because I talk a lot about how to play the game and all that ...). After introducing the campaign last week, it's now time to write a few words about what did actually happen at the table. Enjoy!

Let me start with the group of characters the players created:

The Cast

Vale Viem (Lesser Gifted)

Resident of Dirkterwalde and a witch. She is owner of a successful little burlesque cabaret called Varieté Obscure. It's a front for her coven and helps sheltering young potential witches that got into trouble (shows are on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays).

Emilie Autmn's live performance was an inspiration [source]

She's famous for her burlesque sword-dance performance, quite wealthy and well connected. The social hub of the group.

Favorite line: "It's not a brothel, you morons!"

Jan Jester (Mundane)

Also lives in Dirkterwalde. He's a part-time sales representative for a local meat factory, but his real calling is robbing those who got rich after the fall of the former German Democratic Republic. A splendid specimen, rather athletic and a competent fighter, he's generally referred to as "Captain DDR".

Captain DDR - actually not what the character looks like ...
(with a little help of HeroMachine, the Gimp and Inkscape)

He's shocked by nothing, never surprised and never out of cigarettes. The supernatural powerhouse of the group.

Favorite line: "I can do that." 

Gabriel Zöller (Gifted)

Unemployed psychologist fresh back from university, lived until recently in his parents' basement in Dirkterwalde. Favorite past-times are Ultima Online: The Secong Age and Kendo. So yeah, he's a nerd (and before it was popular, too).

Opinions differ, but I believe he looks somewhat like this guy [source]

He's also a powerful psychic and focused a large part of his studies on the occult. He's the supernatural powerhouse of the outfit (and somewhat of a mummy's boy).

Best line: "Mother!? NOOOOO!"

Kirsten Schneeberg (Lesser Gifted)

A young female inspector from the big city, hiding in Dirkterwalde from her past. She's a troubled character and a loner. Her powers give her visions and tell her if people lie. Very unpleasant, in her line of work and often enough she drowns her nightmares in booze and smokes too many cigarettes.

She's that kind of girl [source]

She just recently discovered that there are others like her and is eager to learn more. The groups connection to law enforcement.

Best line: "His mother?! NOOOOO!!"


Pepe (Lesser Gifted)

A tough gypsy and a trafficker. Earns his keep by smuggling illegal goods across the German-Polish border, ca. 80 kilometers east of Dirkterwalde. His powers allow him the observation of places far away and some protection.

I imagine him to be a somewhat sleazier
version of this guy [source]

He had never heard of the town before, but now he's knee-deep in supernatural events, confronting them head-on and with an attitude. The group's connection to organized crime.

Favorite line: "Got some booze, bro?"


That's it, so far

I really need to keep those things short. Next up will be the session reports themselves, with dark dreams of the future, a solar eclipse threatening the mystical protection of the city, mysterious strangers and some excommunicated up-to-no-good hillbilly Nazi Teutonic Knights. This should have been a horror campaign, fitting this time of the year.

And I tried. I really did.