RPM Mistakes- some made, some avoided

My brother moved across the country a few months ago, and to help deal with his social isolation he got up the energy to convince me and some other family members to start a new GURPS campaign. It's been going swimmingly, recaps may or may not be in the works.

That said, it's been a long time since I've GMed a campaign that uses Ritual Path Magic (and the last time the only PC caster was using alchemy), which means it's a perfect opportunity to go over mistakes we've made, as well as pitfalls we've avoided that have come up in play.

Delivering a Spell via Melee Attack is not a Free Lunch

I choose to accept a very broad reading of page 17 of Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic to allow attaching a spell to an attack:

Once created, the missile has to be delivered by touch
(using DX, Brawling, etc.)

Activating a charm requires a full Ready maneuver. Before we realized this the resident mage was thwacking people with his staff and loading additional spell damage beyond what would've been reasonable given the overall action economy of the game.

Yes, you can put a conditional on the weapon so that a spell takes place when it hits, but short of extremely careful preparation of conditional triggers (good luck convincing your GM to let that slide), you're looking at being one and done as far as those go.

Even the option presented in Pyramid #3-66 The Laws of Magic for Charm 'R' Us doesn't get around this - a ritual charm meant to deal damage after a melee attack still has to be activated with a Ready maneuver, even if the charms inhabit a physical wand or staff, or other object.

For those wondering why delivering a RPM spell via melee attack is still an appealing option:

1. Cheaper than adding range and subject weight for internal damage
   
2. No range penalties from attempting to utilize a missile for external damage
3. Having actual melee weapon skill allows for better parry than raising Innate Attack skill

Important note: Compartmentalized Mind has no interaction with charms themselves due to the requirement of a Ready Maneuver.

Tapping Energy Reserve is a Free Lunch

Tapping Energy Reserve takes a Concentrate maneuver, meaning that as long as you tapped enough energy for the full spell cost, the spell happens immediately.

On the caster’s turn in which the last necessary point of energy has been acquired, he rolls against the appropriate Path skill (Choose the Skill, pp. 19-20) to cast the spell.

Blurring the Lines between Conditionals and Charms is a Bad Idea

Initially, I waffled on how concretely to treat Charms, whether they were physical objects, or something more akin to Vancian Magic where you just prep the spell ahead of time and then get to activate them at will.

Ultimately, forcing Charms to be physical objects that must be readied to use became important to ensuring that mages don't become magic machineguns, dishing our 7d of damage turn after turn after turn. This also introduces potential counter-play (by creating opportunities for enemies to respond before charms are utilized), allowed for people to steal charms created by others, and is overall more consistent.

It also forces more careful thought about the use of conditional spells in general.

The Rule of 16 is Important

Per B349:

If a supernatural attack (magic spell, psi ability, etc.) offers a resistance roll and the subject is living or sapient, the attacker’s effective skill
cannot exceed the higher of 16 and the defender’s actual resistance. If it
does, reduce it to that level.
Example: A wizard has an effective skill of 18 with his Mind-Reading
spell. If he tries to read the mind of someone with a Will of 16 or less,
he rolls against 16. If his subject has a Will of 17, he rolls against 17.
And if his target has a Will of 18 or higher, he rolls against 18.

In our specific circumstance, the Rule of 16 should've kicked in when a practitioner with Path of Mind 19 whammied the party with a Terrify spell. With fright checks, rolling without -3 in penalties can be the difference between being stunned for 1 second and having to roll vs Will to snap out of it, or being stunned for 1d seconds then having to roll vs Will to snap out of it.

No, You can't Bestows a Penalty to the Resist Roll

I largely view this as a case of using magic to get better at magic, which is explicitly forbidden. You can hit someone with a spell that saps their HT or Will, or a spell that gives them Magic Susceptibility, but those spells have to defeat the target's Resistance Roll mano-a-mano before taking effect, and they only benefit the following spells that affect the target.

Penalties that take effect after the magic has successfully affected a target are generally fine.

This one we avoided.

Path Skill Defaults Can't Exceed 12

Path Skills default to Thaumatology-6, but cannot exceed 12 at Default. Beware your preferred character sheet program of choice 'helpfully' increasing Path Skills above 12 if a character's Thaumatology exceeds 18.

Drinking a Potion is yet another not Free Lunch

Per page 29 of Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic:
 

Before using an elixir, you must have it ready. If you
have it exposed (e.g., in a bandoleer), this takes only two
Ready maneuvers (one to draw it, one to open or ready it).

This is one that my group is still coming to grips with, along with another important note on potion use.

No Administering Potions to Unconscious Individuals

You cannot administer a potion or powder to an unconscious individual. 

GMing Advice: Your Game Should be What it says it is on the Tin

A friend of mine recently had a very amusing experience running Rogue Traders for his group. He presented his group with an assassination contract, meant to disrupt an upcoming vote on who would get to rule some lucrative mining planet.

He was completely floored when his players decided that instead of settling on just doing an assassination, they could rig the upcoming vote so that they would gain control of the lucrative mining planet.

Clearly my friend is blessed with ambitious players. Every single instance of players going off the rails to do something ballsy and epic is a gift that should be cherished by a wise GM.

He summed up the experience by stating:

"In my experience, players will create the type of sessions they want to play through their actions. You just need to follow through once they tell you what they want. Get out of the way."

It's excellent advice, assuming that the game your players have fun playing is a game you have fun running.

This post is largely geared towards readers who are recruiting players blind, and possibly people attempting to coax friends into forming a TTRPG playing group.

Incongruous Expectations

When a GM decides to start a campaign, they tend to have an idea what it will be like. Typically, just choosing a game system is a fairly binding choice right out of the gate. If you're playing in PARANOIA, or Exalted, or the World of Darkness, you have some pretty solid foundations that you can assume will hold true in most campaigns.

But even within the confines of game systems, there's plenty of variance on how each game can be approached. Saving the world quests, hack and slash combat, and political shenanigans are all three distinct campaign styles that you could run in each of the systems/settings above. (If Friend Computer says you saved the world, you saved the fucking world. Happiness is Mandatory.)

With all of that wiggle room and ambiguity, it's easy to see why horror stories abound of people joining new groups, only to discover that what the group considers (fun/acceptable/normal) is completely different than what the new player/gm expected. 

Even assuming some of those horror stories might be attributable to troglodytes and misanthropic assholes, I'm certain that a good portion of them are related to GMs/Groups failing to properly get on the same page about what everyone wants out of the game.

What the GM Wants

I certainly approach a new campaign by asking 'What do I want?'. After all, a GM who isn't interested in the type of game that they're supposed to run is in for a bad time. And so are their players.

Lately some family asked me to start a campaign for them so my goals were loosely:

• Introduce completely green players to GURPS and TTRPGs
• Not run a modern action game because I'm already running one
• Considering that the players are new, whatever I come up with should have some heavy structure to it- I ended up choosing a central heroic quest that they'll hopefully latch onto and enjoy undertaking
  

Usually a GM's goals will align with the system, setting, genre, and premise that they present to potential players. The better you can do this, the easier a time you will have finding players who mesh well with you and the group.

Know Thyself

The Exalted Guru I know is an expert at weaving storylines together and does an excellent job of balancing the spotlight for players who frequently have extremely different gameplay goals. That said, I can't picture him running a mega-dungeon, or staying interested in a hack-and-slash campaign for very long.

I have another friend whose GMing talents revolve around heavy systemic world-building, coupled with good skill at stringing together missions to form a campaign. Building that world and doing the ground-level prep necessary to set players loose in those settings as a sandbox without firm rails is not really within their GMing toolbox.

I myself mostly run skulky-action games set in the modern age. My attempt at running something closer to super-heroes and every single one of my attempts to run Blades in the Dark have been utter failures.

Clearly, it's beneficial to be honest and aware of what you do well, what you can handle, and what you should recuse from and let someone else helm if that's what the group wants to play.

If you set out to do X, tell players they should expect X, and then fail to do it well because you're actually better at Y and unintentionally running Y, you've set yourself up for problems.

Know Thy Players

Discussion of player motivations and how to categorize them into taxonomies have been going on for decades. Given just how much those motivations can affect the course of a game, it's clear why it's a topic that's always good for sparking long conversations with your local grognards.

When your game allows the players to do the things they find interesting to do in play, you're in for a good time as a GM. Especially if what they find interesting also happens to be fun for you to watch.

Which is why it is so vitally important that the way you talk about the campaign accurately represents what the campaign will be like. If players accurately know what they're getting into, the better the chances that they will self-select OUT if the game wouldn't be a good fit for them.

In Summary:

Games are a blend of both what the GM and the Players want. The closer the premise and style of a campaign matches with the temperaments and goals of the players, the less friction there will be.

The better a GM is able to understand their tendencies, and the more accurately they represent themselves and their games, the easier time they'll have gathering players of a similar mindset.

A GM's capability to execute on what they try to do, their skill at the craft, and their improvisational chops  will determine how well things go when expectations clash, or unanticipated situations happen.


To his credit, my Rogue Trader pal handled the curveball from his players with aplomb. If the players pull off what they're planning, it will be a story they retell for years.

Final Thought:

It's important that you've reached zen acceptance that allowing other people to do things in an imaginative space where decisions actually lead to logical consequences will inevitably lead to the game not looking like the color-by-numbers you had originally envisioned in your mind.

If the emergent dynamics of a campaign freak you out, might I suggest becoming a novelist?

The Basics of Using GCS: Equipment

This is part 2 of my introductory series to utilizing the program GCS for creating GURPS Character Sheets. In it, I'll be covering the options for editing equipment to suit your needs.

Other Parts:
Part 1: Introductory Basics

Equipment:

Adding equipment to a sheet is the same as adding any other entry to your character sheet- either dragging the entry onto the sheet with the mouse, or hitting CTRL+SHIFT+C.

A bog standard edit equipment Window

The top half is the same for all equipment and encompasses the typical stats that would be applicable to equipment regardless of function- price, weight, quantity possessed, and so on. There are really four things to note about the top section:

1. The notes field will show up under the item in the character sheet view- useful for noting specific rules or bonuses the gear might give.
2. The Extended Value and Extended Weight fields will dynamically update with modifiers added through the modifier tab
3. The checkboxes for Equipped and Ignore for Skills will make the item count or not count against encumbrances. The equipped box will also clear any skill bonuses for equipment that give those if it is unchecked.
4. CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN will increment and decrement the uses of an item on the character sheet, making it easy to use the field to keep track of things like say, shots remaining for a gun.

The Melee Weapon and Ranged Weapon Tabs

Now let's break down the Weapons Tabs:

This first section is where you add the usage of attacks. Some weapons have different styles of attacks- such as stabbing with a sword instead of swinging it- and others have numerous types of ammunition that can be used (such as the Buckshot/Rifled Slug shown above). 

The red circle in the image above shows where the + and - buttons to add and remove a weapon usage are located. They do not render (but function) properly on some Windows computers, a known bug.

The second section deals exclusively with the damage line that will show up on your eventual sheet. Most of what is here is strictly what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG). All of the fields have helpful mouse-over text to denote what they are.

This last section hooks up the specific piece of gear to the skills on the character sheet, so that its specific entry in the weapons on your character sheet can be calculated correct. (Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that I never did this for the Slug usage option, which is why it displays a level of 0 above.)

As shown above, you can specify way more than just 1 of these- allowing defaults to be handled pretty elegantly.

The first box (going left to right) is for the skill, and the second is for a specialization, if any. Both of these fields are case sensitive and won't work well with typos or misspellings.

The third box circled in red is the one you want to edit to emulate bonuses such as weapon bond that improve skill ONLY for that particular piece of gear. (EDIT: Turns out with a recent update the features tab now has a selection for "to this weapon" for Weapon Damage Bonus and Skill Level Bonus, which is awesome and makes the work-around above obsolete for some use cases.)

GCS will default to displaying the highest valid option on the final stats on the character sheet.

The fields for a melee weapon are very similar, but omit rate of fire, range, and such in favor of Reach, Parry Modifier, and Block Modifer fields. Again, most of the fields are WYSIWYG. 

Prerequisites:

This tab allows you to specify traits that are necessary to use the item. Without them, the item will show up in Red Text on the character sheet. This is normally more of a concern for checking for advantages or skills, but maybe your sword requires Magery or high IQ to wield or something. Fairly self-explanatory.

Features:

This tab allows you to attach bonuses and penalties of various types to the item, which will always be in effect as long as it's equipped. This is best suited to bonuses that are passive and constant, such as the DR afforded by wearing armor, or the Strength Bonus granted by wearing enchanted gauntlets.

Notably, the "Gives a weapon damage bonus of" field is where you'd want to look for setting up traits such as Weapon Master, Trained by a Master, and the damage bonuses afforded by Karate (although some skill entries also use this field, so make sure you're not double-dipping if you want to avoid GM ire.)

Modifiers

This is the latest addition to the equipment tabs, and it's a doozy for all of you who want a Bedazzled Light Halberd. Some of the options overlap with those in the Features tab- but modifiers allow you to affect the weight and value of the equipment at the same time, making it very flexible.

Take note of the Extended Value entries above- they differ quite a bit from the base Value and Weight!

The Basics of Using GCS

Someone on a Discord server I frequent was attempting to learn the ropes of GCS, and was unimpressed with the level of documentation available on how to actually utilize the program.

I've been using GCS for years as I've found it to be a very convenient and powerful tool for making character sheets. I consider myself a bit of a GCS power user, so here's the start of what may become a series of posts on the basics of using the program. (In fact, part 2 dealing with equipment is now up!)

When you first create a new character sheet, you'll be presented with a blank sheet filled with some pregenerated character fluff (Height, weight, eye color, etc), and baseline GURPS stats.

Click to Expand

Of note, the Master Library contains the bits and pieces you'll most likely want to add to a character sheet- advantages, disadvantages, and skills. The libraries for Basic Set Advantages and Basic Set Skills will likely be where you'll spend the majority of your time searching for what you want to add to your characters.

Most tabs will have a blank line at the top that functions as a search bar, as well as a drop-down that usually filters by categories.

I've typed warp into the Basic Set Advantages Library here

On a character sheet, blue text means that that field can be directly edited. The fields for your stats (ST, DX, IQ, etc) will decrement unspent points appropriately as they are increased. Additionally, GCS will update derived stats appropriately (increasing DX will increase related skills, and basic speed calculation, for instance).

Some traits have way more modifiers
than others...

To add something from a library to the character sheet, you can either drag and drop it onto the sheet, or hit CTRL+SHIFT+C. Depending on the trait being carried over, a dialog box might open with modifiers related to the trait- CR ratings for disadvantages, enhancements for advantages, etc.

To edit a trait in GCS, either double-click on it, or select it and hit enter.

For advantages and disadvantages, the top portion contains fields for how to price the trait, as well as fields that help with categorizing it.

The dialog window that opens will also usually include the following tabs for most traits, including equipment:

• Prerequisites- These will turn a trait red if your character fails to have the listed traits. (Example: Cinematic combat skills without Trained by a Master or Weapon Master.)
• Features- These are how you can tell GCS that an advantage should give a modifier to a character- such as voice improving reaction modifiers and giving bonuses to certain skills, combat reflexes increasing defense scores, or the damage increase Striking ST gives to attacks
• Modifiers- these are the limitations and enhancements present on numerous advantages and disadvantages
• Melee Weapon and Ranged Weapon- these tabs allow you to specify that an attack should appear on your character's sheet, and allow you to define the statistics of those attacks
• User description is a field that allows for entering notes.

Skills have largely the same dialog window, but have a tab for Skill Defaults, and the top portion has different fields specific to skills, which I'll drill down deeper into in a future post.

Modeling Osteogenesis Imperfecta in GURPS

Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a congenital disease where the body doesn't produce collagen in sufficient quantity or quality, depending on the specific type the subject has. Due to this, people with the disease break bones very easily. It's more commonly referred to as Brittle Bone Disease.

OI Can generally be split into 3 Types:

• OI Type 1- the mildest form of the disease.
• OI Type 2- normally fatal within the first year of life
• OI Types 3+- Moderate to severe types of the disease with differing clinical presentations

My friend has OI Type 4, which is a moderate to severe type. They broke her foot attempting to walk across concrete in socks. Accidentally kicking the leg of their bedframe broke their toe. A fall in the kitchen broke their elbow. They've cracked ribs, herniated a disk in their back, and had a metal plate in their elbow to correct a break from before I met them. To say that OI doesn't seem like an appealing Player Character trait is entirely accurate, as I'll illustrate below.

OI leads to numerous effects that could be relevant to a GURPS character, which I'd consider core to the trait:

• Propensity for bone breaks
• Hypermobility (A propensity for dislocated joints)
• Chronic pain
• Distinctive Blue Sclera

Let's start by modeling the bone breaks. Let's flip Injury Tolerance (Unbreakable Bones) on its head, and then address the duration of crippling injury.

Injury Vulnerability (Easily Broken Bones) [-10 or -20]: Your body is especially vulnerable to crippling injury.
Mild: Your limbs become crippled when they take damage over HP/4. Your extremities become crippled when they take damage over HP/6. -10 Points.

Severe: Your limbs and extremities become crippled when they take damage over HP/10. -20 points.

Injury Vulnerability (Long-lasting Crippling) [-10]: When you roll HT to see if a crippling Injury is Temporary or Lasting, you roll at HT-4.

Now for modeling the frequent dislocations, I suggest using the rules for Bad Back- the rules fit suffering painful dislocations very well.  

Likewise, Chronic Pain also works right out of the basic set. I could see mixing the triggers of Bad Back and the effects of Chronic Pain to simulate bouts of pain triggered by unwise physical activity, which is true to my experiences with my friend.

Distinctive Features covers the Blue Sclera as a Quirk.

Now in real life, OI can lead to additional effects, some of which will come down to a case-by-case basis:

• Hunchback, per basic set, in the case of deforming types of OI
• Lame (Crippled Legs or Paraplegic), or One Arm, or No Manipulators in the case where OI leads to compression of the spine, resulting in nerve damage that causes one to use the use of their arms/legs.
• Loss of Basic Move

And for Cinematic Icing:

• Flexibility (Double-Jointed), if the Hypermobility has beneficial uses, although people with Ehlers' Danlos Syndrome are better fits for it.
• Bonuses to Weather Sense, or Detect (Low Pressure Atmospheric Conditions) since we all know bone breaks react to atmospheric pressure.

My Players, and Working with them

Every gaming group is different. I do believe there is a spectrum that most people fall on between Thespian Method Actor and Hack N'Slash Munchkin. It's safe to say that a normal distribution is probably appropriate- most players appreciate a mix of both, and the populations of fanatics tapers down on either side.

That said, groups also differ on how they approach problems, how much they like to plan and prepare, and even on how much in-character banter they want to have.

So I'm going to talk a bit about my players, and how I adapt my games to run more smoothly with them.

As a Group:

• Group preference is for text-based campaigns. When I floated using voice chat reaction was nearly unanimous that text was the preferred medium.
• Pace of play is fairly slow and methodical- while not nearly as slow as PBP, it's still objectively on the slower side.
• Every player is capable of not being in the spotlight. It is hard to overstate just how easy this makes things for me. Try as I might, occasionally someone gets injured and has to recuperate, a single PC dominates the screen time of a session, or someone gets stuck on overwatch outside while the stealthy party within aces things and no outside threats emerge. None of my players have ever raised this as an issue.
• Engagement is generally high- this is aided strongly by the text format and the maturity of my players. It's highly unusual for people to be unaware of what's going on in game- largely sidestepping issues of having to catch people up on recent events because they went to go pee, or were stacking dice, they got bored because their PC had nothing to do, or had to help their roommate snap out of a flashback.
• The group is Focused. Everyone is highly aligned on the group goal, and having their PC contribute to the mission. This group does a really good job of not deeply exploring what I consider to be roleplaying empty calories- wenching, asking what booze is available at the bar, etc.
• The group thrives off preparation, planning, and executing their strategies. While willing to improvise when needed, they generally take a very methodical approach.
• Pinebox as a campaign doesn't have a huge emphasis on Roleplay, with more focus on the tasks at hand for the PCs. That's not to say that the Players don't Roleplay their characters, it's that they've rolled with the pacing and campaign structure. This goes back to how focused they are.

Individually:

I'm going to use the PCs names as pseudonyms for my players to maintain their privacy.

Gaston is the newest player to join the group, currently playing the team doctor/demolitions expert. He's attentive and does a really good job playing up the generous/selfless nature of his character. Being last to the table and chargen, he filled in missing skills for the group, and has crushed it ever since, which isn't always easy in my games. I might encourage him to consider playing a face the next time a new campaign comes around.

Otto is one of my two players who have stuck around since Agency 17. Otto's instincts for combat tactics are among the best in the group- if he's thinking it's a good time for a retreat, it's probably time to get out of dodge. Otto frequently keeps me on my toes, oftentimes recalling old plot points, NPCs, or piecing things together from clues. He pays way more attention to things than he lets on.

Alex is a long-time IRL friend. His flexibility and overall competence has allowed him to fill numerous roles within the group- from skulk, to hacker, to combat heavy. It's really hard to single out things that make him such a good player, although I will say having the shared context of knowing him about a decade does make dumping specific things into the game much easier. For example, I knew he'd know what the Mirai Botnet was when I referenced it in-game.

Hassan has continually been the one stuck with the leadership role in the group since they participated in my Agency 17 campaign. I largely think this is due to his good executive function and capability to break problems down into actionable items. We have a rapport where he seems to just innately get how things function in my campaigns- which means that if he whips up a plan, there's a high chance his enemies are going to be in for a lot of pain.

Kujo has had the most PC deaths/injuries out of any of my players, a consequence of their preference for playing combat heavies. Kujo is starting to grow into being the closet thespian of the group, steadily improving their roleplaying and characters since their beginning losing their PC session 1 of Prohibition Mob. Kujo's often responsible for bringing a little bit of zaniness to things, helping bring humor and vibrancy to what's going on, all while being just as laser focused as the rest of the gang.

Accommodations :

Currently, we've been playing Pinebox for 122 weeks- 2.3 years. At this point we've settled into a steady rhythm, so it's not so much of active accommodations as it is continuing what already works.

• I generally allow the players ample time to plot, plan, and discuss their next actions. Obviously this doesn't apply when combat's going on or they're on a crashing plane, but there are very few situations where they're rushed.
• I put a large emphasis on allowing the players to decide how they want to pursue their goals. While the campaign has rails ("Your objective is to prevent Imprint Technology from being finalized"), those rails aren't very restrictive. As the plot demands I might throw constraints at them, but the onus is on them to decide what they're doing.
• I do my best to telegraph information to my players when appropriate. They're playing badass operatives, they might just have a hunch that someone approaching them can throw down without needing to roll. Their planning habits also thrive off having information at hand.
• I occasionally skip skill checks when it's obvious success would be trivial for their characters.
• I stop play when it's clear that I'm getting gassed or need time to plan out ahead.
• I allow the players to create unfair situations for their enemies and then curbstomp them.
• I don't fudge results in combat, and the group has occasionally gotten caught with their pants down, wound up in an unfair situation, and almost got hosed because of it. ("Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.")
• Enemies generally don't have good enough intel on the players to specifically plan for their individual capabilities.

Observations on GMing Mistakes and Momentum of Play

Some sessions are going to be less energetic than others. Maybe there's a person at the table having a difficult day. Maybe there's multiple players having difficult days. Outside of the external factors, campaigns will naturally ebb from high energy to low, as the story has its beats, rising actions, climaxes, and the fallout.

That said, if a GM mishandles things, it can completely grind a group's momentum to a crawl.

Preparation, usually the lack thereof:

It's on the GM to prepare enough that they can give the players avenues of action that they can take. This varies depending on genre, but if your players can't seem to come up with something to do, chances are there's not enough prep going into the campaign.

For a dungeon crawl game you should likely have an idea of the dungeon the group is going into, a sense of the denizens, or at least the capability to improv on the fly. For games not quite running on the Felltower wavelength, you really should be fleshing out factions, NPCs, and providing hooks.

It's entirely possible to have players who are looking for a quasi-sandbox experience who will hit that wall of not knowing what to do next- even if they are fully engaged actively trying to find a direction.

If your players seem interested in a hook you improvise the shit out of that hook, even if it's not necessarily what you had in mind, or anything you had planned. That interest, that desire to explore and check things out, that's the flicker of momentum starting. A hook meant to develop sessions later is probably better used now if players would otherwise be twiddling their thumbs.

Be practical about your preparation. You really don't need a full character sheet for most mooks or minor characters. It's often times safe to not have full character sheets even for important NPCs who can be reasonably expected to not participate in combat. It's perfectly fine to only lay out combat traits for combatants, and maybe note important social skills for a character who only serves as a merchant, informant, quest-giver, etc.

Furthermore, If players aren't going to interact with it, don't make it a big focus of your preparation. Having the players being adjacent to the most interesting thing going on in the campaign world is often a bad idea, unless that most interesting thing is invariably deadly (plague, mustard gas, swaths of destruction*, etc). It's pointless to make complex magic systems if your players don't want to interact with a byzantine magical system and instead wonder why their death spells get less DPS than an assault rifle. It's a bad idea to create a massive cosmology/pantheons of Gods if people are largely interested in playing secular or atheist characters.

Leave room to react, only the most linear of games allow for planning things out like a TV show. Games are volatile. Some settings allow for resurrections, some don't. It's not particularly fun to have to ass-pull or fudge something when the dice say that a critical (N)PC just ate a x4 damage headshot putting them well beyond -5xHP. Planning too far ahead isn't practical, especially if it's predicated off actions the players are *supposed* to take.

"I don't want to prep too much until I know what the PCs are doing"

So, this at first brush seems like a chicken or egg problem. GM doesn't want to over-invest in prepping in areas where it won't matter (good), but likely doesn't prep enough for the current situation (bad). I see it as coming from a few factors.

Lack of group direction/purpose. Everyone meets in a bar and then just randomly decide to join up together and form and adventuring crew? We've all heard this cliche, and it's a rotten way of starting a campaign unless you've got a good crew of thespians who want to hammer out why everyone's working together in-character for a session. I vastly prefer having strong purpose for the existence of a group of PCs. 

"You're part of the clandestine organization Agency 17, the existence of which is hidden even from the other 16 members of the US Intelligence Community."

"Prohibition has rocked 1920s New York City, leading to ample opportunities for criminal enterprises and their members to catapult themselves to wealth and infamy."

"You're a group of Augmented Humans hand-picked by an angel to fight off the forces of Hell."

This is almost entirely on the GM, right from campaign conception. Unless you're starting session 1 with a strong sense of what the PC purpose is, or an iron-clad** way of determining it through play, you're already behind the eight ball.

Related to overall group purpose there's Lack of Immediate direction. This usually results when players don't have paths, hooks, or things to do/react to. The players might be rip-roaring to do something, stacking dice and browsing on their phones while the group spins its wheels, but without something to actually *DO* it's pointless. This is almost always a result of not enough prep.

Players need information and context to make decisions. In a linear game, some of this can be taken away ("Your next mission is..."), but for many games players are going to be on the hook for choosing their next objective or goal, and they need a solid informational ground to stand on. They need to know the situation, the NPCs, the factions, maybe cultural or geographical details. It is explicitly the GM's job to provide these details.

Other Momentum Killers:

• Allowing players to spin wheels too long, and/or rehash the same conversation multiple times while discussing plans
• Not allowing players enough time to incubate and ruminate on plans
• Not allowing players the capability to follow up on things they find intriguing
• Allowing too much focus on extraneous BS (seducing wenches, drinking plans, trivial travel plan details, etc)
• Specifically tailoring challenges so that a single player has a bad time (because once they clock out, risk of others doing the same goes up)
• Being overly adversarial with players (Are you here to beat them or provide a fun experience?)
• Not properly adjusting your campaign style to ensure it suits your players (grimdark campaign + players who just want to goof off = bad time)
• Making or allowing others to make a player uncomfortable.
• Not recognizing when things aren't working well and changing course/stopping

*A friend of mine knows someone whose Ranger's favored enemy type is Swaths

**Seriously, if you initial sessions happen and the group doesn't gel or establish a purpose, wrap things up cause you likely just scuttled the campaign right out of the gates.

My thoughts on the SJG/Bill Webb partnership

Like I imagine most of you do, I follow diverse types of people on social media. Two circles I tend to follow closely are GURPS content creators, and those interested in left-leaning politics.

One of my politically minded friends (who is an Exalted aficionado and kickass GM) replied to the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/dorkland/status/1117096486876086272

This obviously caught my attention. GURPS is by far my favorite RPG system, I run it, I play it, it has been my go-to for close to a decade now. I very much like a lot of what SJG does.

But stuff like this is troubling. I've been party to some discussions on the matter among my circles, and seen some of the various posts from those involved.

The central talking point was a single incident of harassment that took place in 2017, at PaizoCon. The victim in that circumstance clearly wants to be done on it and move on, a sentiment I heard expressed as a reason to let the matter drop.

Matt Finch, a partner at Frog God Games, wrote the official statement from Frog God Games:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/rpg-industry-sexual-harassment-mentzer-abuse-and-what-do-we-do-about-it.817741/page-35#post-21452429

It's a very measured response, very carefully tailored to make it clear that Finch took the utmost care to be sensitive of the victim, while also very carefully avoiding implicating Webb or shaking the hornets' nest in any way. It's 'empathy' draped in the careful maneuvering of a lawyer seeking to reduce the exposure their client might present after screwing up. Finch is NOT unbiased/impartial, given that he's a frequent collaborator with and an employee of Webb. The conflict of interest there cannot be ignored.

Webb certainly could have attempted to rehabilitate himself- laying low, giving a genuine apology, demonstrating that he's learned from his mistake and changed how he behaves. Instead, his business partner blandly apologized on his behalf.

The line "Bill does deeply regret his actions, and understands that they were inappropriate and upsetting. " has all the sincerity of a defense attorney spinning things to his client's advantage.

The stoic silence, predicated on "Mr. Webb is also under instruction not to discuss this matter in public, in case peripheral details... might allow the identification of the person..." doesn't excuse that an apology could have been made by Webb. You don't have to discuss details to express remorse, and I suspect Bill only regrets that it blew up in his face in a very public fashion.

So it's one incident of harassment, the victim doesn't want it dredged up, Bill's business partner is convinced of his sincere regret, Bill is keeping his mouth shut, no problem, right?

I find the undercurrent beneath all of this frightening- where are the people saying that Bill's belligerent drunken behavior is being exaggerated, skewed, or is inaccurate? It seems very clear to me that Bill's public behavior is consistently toeing the line of how one should conduct themselves at conventions. I would not be surprised in the least to learn of undocumented/unreported incidents, most of which weren't severe enough on their own to present a problem, but as a pattern are very insidious.

I'm inclined to pay attention to that undercurrent.

Enter SJG and The Fantasy Trip. They're an older company, with a founder who is in his grey years, and let's be honest, they're very much a company that hasn't changed much over the years.

But they really should have seen this backlash coming. Times are changing, and with more mainstream attention zeroing in on Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop gaming in general, the behavior of your business partners isn't really something you get to be ignorant of.

Steve's response is pretty lame, more or less stating that people being mad about harassment is no reason to cut off a business deal. The olive branch of giving refunds is a little muted given that they're still putting people on the hook for fees and whatnot- wouldn't want their customers' moral fiber cutting into the business' financial ledgers, after all.

Phil Reed statements in this thread are the closest anyone has gotten to actually stating that Bill Webb's actions at Paizocon were truly egregious. Given even that, the statement is still too sterile to really paint SJG's response as anything but tone deaf at best.

The Tabletop community is still small, especially once you look at authors churning out RPG content. There's not many people who walk that walk professionally, and that contributes to the formation of an echo chamber. Maybe SJG didn't hear the rumors, the undercurrent, and was blindsided by the accusations, being trapped within the chamber. Maybe the other voices in the chamber are downplaying Webb's actions, and propping up Finch as a reputable source even though Finch's neutrality is disingenuous and deceptive.

That said, I'm not particularly sympathetic that SJG is feeling quite a bit of heat over this. They should have known better than to collaborate with someone who makes the spaces we nerds like to inhabit unsafe for some of the more vulnerable members we share it with. I hope that the wave of refund requests prompts them to rethink their business deals with FGG, and that they will pay more attention to these types of concerns in the future.

I'm certainly going to think hard before putting down money on the next Monster Hunters or Action PDF that tickles my fancy.

Pine Box Consulting: Session 1 (Dec 11, 2017)

I have recently tapped a friend to begin transcribing the Pine Box Consulting sessions, going through the Discord channel me and my players have used to play since Dec of 2017.

The Players:

Hassan: Formerly attached to Egyptian Intelligence, Hassan is an expert Intelligence Analyst, Interrogator, Pistolero, and dog person.

Kujo: Former LAPD, was kicked out of the force for having anger management issues and problems with proper escalation of force. The most combat heavy of the team.

Alex: Hacker and Sniper extraordinaire. Alex has a lot of illicit contacts, and his access to places he really shouldn't be poking around in would probably have landed him in jail for life if not for his PMC occupation.

Otto: Electronics whiz, tinker, and the other combat heavy for the team. Otto appreciates extreme sports, drones, and suffers from being Easy to Read.

Gaston: Gaston is a world-class surgeon and medical mind. He's also the team's primary demolitions expert.

It’s 8 in the morning on the first day of August and it’s soon to be scorching hot in Tampa, FL. Pine Box Consulting has called the group back from their Rest and Relaxation and they’re all ready to assign them their next job with one of the account executives, Angela Apolonia, being the one leading the briefing with the team. They’re all familiar with Tampa’s office, despite being in the armpit of the US, it’s also the largest in the state and it’s a common pit stop for people that are going to be dealing with affairs south of the border in Latin America.

The group convenes as Otto jumps into a chair into the conference room and immediately plops his recently dirtied shoes (dirt biking is always a hazard to welcome mats) onto the table while Hassan shows up promptly 15 minutes early with heavy messenger bag in tow. Kujo marches in about 5 minutes early to the meeting and, not finding a dark corner to lurk in, declines a seat; instead he leans against the doorway and pulls a cigar case from his pocket and chomps down on one of them in a bit of a ritual.

Promptly at 8am, Angela walks in with an armful of manila folders and a laptop bag slung over her shoulder. A quick headcount later and it’s immediately obvious that she’s displeased with the fact that several of the group are running late and passes out the folders. Barely a moment later Alex walks in, playing on his smartphone looking like a tourist before slumping into one of the chairs. The next second in walks the last of the group, Gaston, with his nose buried in a book until he gets to his seat where he places a bookmark in to mark his place and takes one of the distributed folders. In a show of disinterest, Otto ignores the folder given to him and instead pulls out his phone as well to start playing drag racing and asking how everyone else’s weekend went, the only people to respond being Kujo, telling him that he just went to the gym, and Hassan saying he went to a bar but was quickly bored by the poor conversationalists there (even the drunk ones) and that war criminals were more interesting.

Deciding to just get on with the briefing, Angela addresses the group while going through some rather sparse slides on PowerPoint. Their Rio branch had gotten a tip from some of their local contacts that a man wanted by the State of Israel was living in the area. The local contact, Hubert J. Makovich, was a British national and entrepreneur that moved to the area to try and capitalize on the Olympics. A few slides showing information on the man, his photo, his merchandising company, and his accounting records that show his very rapidly diminishing net worth and plummeting stock prices. He was hired to pose as a venture capitalist to server as HUMINT (Human Intelligence). Slides change from Hubert alone to distant photos of him shaking hands with investors.

Hubert has managed to survive in that position for years, despite being a known information security risk as the next few slides show with him in various stages of undress with a large amount of ladies that were previously featured in past slides in much more (formal) attire. Finally paying attention, Otto asks if someone is after Hubert. The only thing Otto got wrong was the tense as Angela explains that he was found dead almost a week ago, snatched by a local gang who then tortured him before disposing of him.

Kujo asks if Angela wants them to go over the local gang while Hassan snarks about him seeming like a pillar of the community, on the other hand, Alex is excited by what he managed to accomplish on his phone. Angela’s responds that they were prepared to write off Hubert until his last report caught some attention… Apparently, it’s not every day that a low-level asset manages to turn some heads in Mossad. She pauses for effect, to see how the group handles that bit of news.

Otto spins in his chair a bit while Hassan mentions that Mossad’s interests outside of the Middle East tend to be very limited and very focused while Kujo questions why the Mossad are outsourcing their kills, why aren’t the targets dead already.

Angela explains that they’d normally be all over Nazi fugitives but due to the political climate, it’s just too difficult for the Mossad to directly act. And while Kujo expresses delight and excitement at the prospect of delivering long overdue justice, Angela explains who they’ve found with the best picture they had of him, almost 20 years old back in the 1940s. Heinrich Günther, a scientist specializing primarily in physics and biology, an impressive intellectual prodigy that eagerly participated in the science programs of the time and while most records past the end of WWII are scarce or non-existent, recent indications show that he made use of a Ratline out of Austria at war’s end. Hubert’s digging around landed him on some financial records that indicate that Heinrich is still alive in Rio de Janeiro.

Alex is now finally interested in what’s been going on and puts his phone away and begins to dig through the folder in front of him while Hassan inquires as to how a failed venture capitalist managed to get the attention of the good doctor. Angela has to admit that they have no idea of Hubert’s death was related to his findings or not, just that the company is interested in the Israeli bounty on Nazi war criminals.

Responding to Hassan’s question about their objective and the rules of engagement, they’re told the objective is to locate and then either lift or liquidate him. The mission isn’t sanctioned by the US Government so they will disavow all knowledge and the company’s propaganda team are already arranging stories of anti-fa hit squads coming out of Connecticut in case the Brazilian authorities become alerted to the team’s activities. Civilian casualties are to be minimized, but unless it’s a complete cock up then minor accidents may be overlooked.

Kujo jokes around it being similar to LAPD’s departmental policies while Hassen mentions he may have trouble fitting in as a college junior before the rest of the information unfolds. They’ve got a funeral home cover in Rio, but local politics keep them from truly establishing themselves in the area. The Funeral Director’s name is Robert Smith, a resident of the area for many years and quite reliable, but resources in the area are limited meaning that his armory and garage are more meager than what the company has Stateside, this means that the team will be sent out with their own bit of kit.

While most agree things will be fine if they can bring their own kit, Hassan makes a point to ask for their preference on Henrich’s condition. Despite being previously explained that they can bring him back alive or dead, bringing him back alive will be a rather large PR boost in finding and arresting a War Criminal. However, 90-some year-old men are also notoriously fragile and will be taken into account. Extraction will be tough so it’ll have to be secured on the team’s end once Henrich has been dealt with.

With some probing from Kujo, other than the photo from multiple decades ago and the financial records from recently, there’s no real clue to Heinrich’s location which is somewhat of a benefit as if it was known, then it would be likely that the Mossad would already be on their way. Instead it’s up to the team to be able to investigate the location and survive the violent environment in the Rio underworld.

There are no more questions, just folks confident that they can handle the job of locating and dealing with an old Nazi and climbing the Chriso Redentor despite the objections of some of the party.

The fight down is a sight-seeing tour plane that takes a 12-hour one way trip, looking any deeper reveals that it’s thinly veiled criminal enterprise that specializes in trafficking around customs and border patrols. Everyone has their bags packed and ready to go as a new companion shows up to flirt with a cute receptionist while the rest of the team discuss how shady their flight is and that it’s quite obviously not baking ingredients causing the white flecks all over another passenger’s luggage. Having failed with the receptionist, Salvador comes up to rain on the team’s parade by informing them that even if they managed to lift the smuggled cocaine, it wouldn’t be any good to use as blackmail materials as the South American cops are more likely to suicide them via beheading than capitulate with any attempts at blackmail.

Most are minorly dissuaded from attempting it, they start boarding the plane with Kujo asking if it’s a smoking flight. True to their reputation for customer service, the steward informs Kujo that he has no idea in rather colourful language and assuming the best, Kujo lights up a Churchill as he takes his seat. Otto, however, having stayed behind for a moment quickly grabs the rather obvious bag of cocaine while its own was distracted and immediately moves away and onto the plane and stows it away.

With the exception of Alex and Salvador, the rest of the group takes the time to relax and do their own thing. Alex decides to research what he can about Rio’s telecom systems and maps to be able to navigate his way around the Latin American city while Salvador attempts to find some form of “in-flight entertainment”. Unfortunately, the most entertainment available is Otto playing candy crush, listening to Skrillex too loudly through his earbuds, and attempting to sneak lines of coke in the airplane bathroom when he thinks that no one is looking. Otherwise it’s getting drunk with Kujo or reading a book.

It takes them quite a few hours before they manage to reach Brazil where the pilot points out Chriso Redento to fulfill it’s purpose as a tour plane and then after the rubbernecking out the windows is over, it swings around for a final approach for touch down. The pilot kicks the passengers off the plane with just long enough for them to grab all their luggage before he taxis it into a nearby hanger and while they group up and try to figure out their next step, the rest of the passengers from the tour plane get into a hired car and start to drive off before being immediately surrounded by police. They decide quickly to get the hell out of dodge and start to move away from the police presence as unobtrusively as they can when a van pulls up right next to them.

The driver tells them that the hearse broke down and that he had to take the backup vehicle. Grateful for any way to get away from the cops, the team piles in with Kujo calling out shotgun. It turns out the driver is Carl, sent for the group by Bob and that business is booming with funerals happening left and right. Rio is a mess, the government has had to deal with numerous corrupt scandals, that gang violence hasn’t been too affected by UPP, and that almost every cop is dirty. This may explain why Bob stayed back at the funeral home, the rather tasteful three story affair with a small graveyard in front.

Complementing and joking about their current digs, the team starts to offload their luggage into the house where they are greeted by Bob and a short woman in bloody medical scrubs. Bob is rather amused by the fact that it’s not everyday that he gets to play host to undertakers instead of corpses while the woman in introduced as Marigold, the pathologist that seems to do the reputable work as a side job when she’s actually the head of security and the only cleared field op they’ve got down there since Bob was deemed too important to lose in the field, especially as the previous funeral director was mailed back home to his family in pieces, a fate which Bob has managed to avoid so far. Still, with the long flight and the long day they offer to let the team get some rest before starting the briefing in the morning.

On the side, Alex speaks with Bob about what he can expect in terms of electronic support. There’s an old Pentium 3 sitting alongside a first-gen DSL modem that mildly horrifies and disgusts Alex before he learns that they also don’t have any radio support either and they mostly use cell phone service. It’s looking to be rather scant for the tech down here.

In the meantime, since they slept on the flight down, some of the group end up going out to the bar with Otto finding himself the center of popularity while Salvador finds an ex-girlfriend that dumped him after he was caught in a threesome with her sister and cousin. Gaston stays back at the funeral home and unpacks before asking Marigold if she needs some help with anything. Hassan attempts to lure others into a game of cards with Kujo begrudgingly joining in. Back in the bar, Salvador has managed to mollify the girl with the promise of a buying her a drink, trying to get him to buy her something from the top shelf. At the funeral home, Carl and the other lackey have joined the card game, Bob has opted out, and Marigold and Gaston share a moment over Hubert’s corpse.

Marigold explains that Hubert’s corpse wasn’t handled correctly by the local law enforcement and they had to even pay them a few grand to get the body delivered to them. Alex subverts local internet traffic for his own purposes as two medics note down the notable findings on Hubert’s body.

It appears that some of his initial wounds had time to partially heal, indicating that he’d been worked over for at least several days, he was missing fingernails from his left hand, he was missing one testicle, three ribs were broken, a lung was lacerated, a kneecap was busted from an source uncertain because the body had also been left out in the elements for at least a day and there are signs that some sort of scavenging animal had been having a good meal.

Police also refused to release his possessions and it’s unknown if his apartment was searched either. The report was sorely lacking in even the most basic details and the attack was written off as gang violence due to the location the body was found and didn’t bother to probe further, or at least any attempts to was overturned as it also appears that the report was rather poorly edited too. Some posit that it may have just be thugs, or it could have been trained interrogators, it could go either way depending on how they obvious took their time working him over. It could have been corrupt cops looking to make a quick buck or folks that have paid off the local police like Heinrich. Regardless of all the speculation, they decide that it may be a good idea to check out Hubert’s apartment and Bob lends the crew the van.

Hubert’s apartment looks rather squalid and obviously was most propped up to the funds coming in from Pine Box. Kujo heads inside to try to deal with the apartment door but trips and ends up with a used syringe protruding from his leg, getting it removed the best he can while Salvador “entertains” the neighbors. Gaston helps to treat Kujo quickly before they head back in, finding the apartment already tossed and trashed. Hassan digging into wreckage and extracting an intact hard drive from a wrecked computer.

The crew takes some time to do some crime scene reconstruction, Salvador joining in midway through adjusting his outfit. It becomes obvious that the tossing happened while Hubert was absent, there’s no blood, no signs of a violent encounter, and very obviously no signs of someone trying to clean up after themselves. Alex alerts the crew that they’ve got some company coming down the street checking out vehicles and Otto decides that means they need to get going. The company stops by a car, knocking out a window and grabbing a radio as the crew pack up. Alex gets the van going to the meeting spot, the gang banging the side of the van with a bat as he drives by, scoring a loud thump. Once around the block, the crew piles into the van with their findings.

The hard drive itself has three partitions, the OS, a Restore Partition, and an Encrypted partition. Alex makes sure to take a backup image of the hard drive before he starts attempting to decrypt the partition. It appears to be a bad install of tails that Hubert didn’t do quite right and back at the funeral home they explain what they found and that it looks like it would take a few days to crack the encryption. Alex attempts to think of ways to speed up decryption before finally deciding to head down into the basement with Kujo and Otto. They jury-rig an old scanner and camera to start taking and uploading pictures of pages they have found to attempt OCR on the drive. It takes an hour and a half to get Hubert’s book and rolodex uploaded and scanned.

With this new data, it takes only five minutes to crack the drive. Hubert was huge on computer security as he used Candi followed by his birth date as a password and while Salvador notes down Candi’s contact information, they find communications and financial records on the drive. At least some of which was Hubert contacting Heinrich and attempted to blackmail the old scientist. Apparently Hubert knew less than they would prefer, but the blackmail makes sense as Gaston’s financial forensics discovers that Hubert owed thousands to local gangs and a few Russians and his credit was so bad that even local banks wouldn’t lend him money.

Using this newfound information, the crew try to figure out how to use this to their advantage. Either baiting Heinrich into responding to more e-mails, finding the cop that altered the report. Maybe send him e-mails from another account to bait him into clicking a phishing link that would give away his location while they attempt to get information on the police reports. Though the fact that Heinrich may know that Hubert is dead could also explain the redacted police reports and tossed apartment. All the searching and talk of e-mail inspires them to check out the origin of the one that Hubert contacted Heinrich through, apparently it was an e-mail account from a company called Protroleum but it doesn’t appear that Heinrich is an official part of the company. The crew decide that might actually be worth a look as the session ends off.

Return to Ceteri 4: Home Hunting

Our Cabal:

Aggravaine Tashalan: Inhumanely attractive and a genius spellcaster, Aggravaine is trying to make a name for himself in the supernatural world of Ceteri.

Leo: A werewolf private investigator. Leo has a fondness for Twinkies and is a disappointment to his family.

Ranulf: Paperpusher, ley line expert, and victim of Brimstone Law. Ranulf really wants his old life back, but likely won't get it.

Marv: A man of many hats, Marv hasn't run into many situations that he hasn't run into something similar before.

Events:

We get a lead from Cleo about new digs in Boston- a swanky historical building with some kind of fairy infestation, complete with lots of unreturned library books.

The Library. Not just Boston Public Library.

We're given a key, which opens a door that's hidden with magic in the basement.

We hear the rustling of wings once we enter.

We've entered a massive pixie nest.

A pixie lands on Leo, attempting to steal a twinkie from them.

Eventually we're able to get one forward to negotiate- we offer food in return for use of the space and the Pixie's services as guards for the space. They're initially open, although all four of their leaders will need to approve.

With Leo's assistance to ensure no loopholes are in the contract, we seal a deal. The pixies give us a tour- there's an almost completely library, an alchemy lab that's set to explode, and some rooms that used to be for stay overs. There's access to the subway through a door in the basement. 

Aggie begins cleanup of the lab, finding a half-complete homunculous inside, also disposing of numerous magical bits about ready to explode.

Five months pass as we work on our lair.

Besides the resident pixies, we have a Rakshasha valet, and numerous housekeeper spirits.

Our lair includes:

• A scrying chamber
• A damper room that negates magic and spirit abilities
• An alchemy lab
• Hydroponics room full of secret herbs and spices
• Library (good for +1 to all Occult Wildcard/Intrinsic Magic covered topics)
• Magical lab (+1)
• Summoning Room
• It's scry and divination shielded 
• Training room/Gym/Weight room
• Training room for magical pursuits
• Magical power supply (Cooked up by Magnus, leeching power from the MBTA's third rail)
• Meeting Room
• Ley Line tap
• Base is self-contained and can be sealed up as a survival shelter
• Spirit Wards
• Intruder Wards
• Can house up to 25 people
• There's two entrances- via subway tunnels, or down through the basement of the historical building.

During the construction we find Marv, sent on a mission to wipe out the Pixies. We recruit him into our little group.

The head of Hadestown, Giselle, is looking for some help with a magical matter and is willing to pay for help. She's known for being a problem solver, and is half-sidhe.

Giselle runs a bar in Hadestown, which we pay a visit. Her connection to Underhill, and her troll contacts within, has been severed, and finding people willing to travel through Underhill to fetch the portal stone she needs to reestablish the trade line has been difficult. Enter us.

Rumor has it that Underhill has seen recent activity of ancient creatures not usually seen on Earth these times- dragons, chiefly. Ginnar, a norse dwarf, is the craftsman who has made the item she needs.

She hands us a doctor's bag to deliver to him as payment. It's full of reagents.

We have a few options for getting there- the Autumn Road, going through the outlands, or finding a direct portal. Ranulf's gut is that the Autumn Road is likely to be the safest, if weird.

The first two hops along the Autumn Road are pretty mundane, just paths. The third we enter a spider nest, but Ranulf is able to circumvent us around them. We experience 8 hours in the Autumn Road, but arrive almost instantly back in the real world.

The Troll plaza is under The Giant's Causeway, a massive bridge which disappears off into the wilderness.

The locals are viewing us as a mix of prey and curiosity at first- before Leo and Marv decide to put on their war faces, which causes people to actively move aside to avoid us.

Ginnar almost closes up shop when we come close, before he realizes we're carrying his pay. We get the item we've been hired to fetch, and then have to make our way out of town without attracting trouble.

However, the Troll Market is enticing- lots of interesting smells and curios to be had. Ranulf's swindled into buying a $65k hunk or iron ore, and Aggie has to step in to prevent Leo from eating an entire foodcart of grilled meats.

We get back into the Autumn road, having to take a slightly longer trip. We manage to avoid any nasty encounters, but it's a week later. We drop off Giselle's item for her. She installs it into her portal.

We mull over the options- getting a quick $30k, getting a favor from her, or getting a year of free portal access to the Troll Market. We ultimately go with the favor- having her as a resource to tap when encountering future issues might be beneficial, and having access to the troll market for a year is less beneficial when the campaign has time skips of 5-6 months at a time.

That and playing the market doesn't lend well to adventuring.

Also, a week has passed on the outside. When we hunt up other rumors it turns out one of the other rumors we didn't chase ended up in a House completely getting wiped out- seems House Yagani was closer to the brink than we realized.

We decide to check out a shrieking woman who is rumored to appear at night in the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.

The cemetery is protected by a robust blessing, which is maintained at least once a year. Leo has some initial issues pushing through the ward, but his lack of malicious intent allows him to push through it.

Once night falls we find the shrieking woman, sitting on a bench in front of a monument in the cemetery. She's crying. All of us recognize her as the Banshee of Boston, a ghost, not an actuall banshee. She tends to become more active as the city undergoes stress, chaos, or mass death.

Marv approaches her, and she stops crying. She asks if Reginald has come back. Marv responds that he can be Reginald for her if she likes. The Banshee proceeds to say that the marriage can now proceed.

Marv plays along. The Banshee starts to turn on him, binding him with Magic, when Aggrivaine interrupts, offering to try and locate the real Reginald.

Aggrivaine uses sticks to make a casting circle, helped by Marv who uses carpentry to make a pentagram out of greenwood that can be transported. Ranulf locates a ley line he's able to allow Aggie to tap into at a distance.

After an hour of casting in a graveyard suffused by glowing blue ley line energy, Aggrivaine calls Reginald's spirit, who appears.

The Banshee is convinced it's a trick. Marv and Aggie attempt to talk her down. Reginald is standing around in colonial soldier garb. Aggie yells at him to state his name and rank, and Reginald responds by demanding why he's been brought back from death.

We tell him his Betrothed has been unable to pass onto the afterlife. Reginald materializes, and the two spirits start to argue about the circumstances of their situation during the war. They eventually reconcile, and ask to be laid to their final rest.

Agrivaine counters that they need to be married first. Marv offers up that he was once ordained as a priest. While we're arranging the wedding a group of spirits rise, to witness the event.

Marv conducts the wedding in his own special way. We get witnesses to sign off on it.

The Banshee asks Aggrivaine to find her book, then she and her groom both begin to glow, eventually disappearing in a flash of light.

We head back to the base and end the session there.

Return to Ceteri 3: Friendly Extraction

Our Cabal:

Aggravaine Tashalan: Inhumanely attractive and a genius spellcaster, Aggravaine is trying to make a name for himself in the supernatural world of Ceteri.

Leo: A werewolf private investigator. Leo has a fondness for Twinkies and is a disappointment to his family.

Ranulf: Paperpusher, ley line expert, and victim of Brimstone Law. Ranulf really wants his old life back, but likely won't get it.

Jackson Taft: A crack sharpshooter hiding a more malicious second half who you won't like when he's angry.

Events:

We try and determine what to do next. The initial options seem to be investigating the Lion's outpost, or dealing with their own response to our actions.

We opt to head out to their facility. It's warded up to the gills, clouding any attempts at ley sight or similar. They're using ward tokens affixed to IDs to allow people through them,

This is in addition to mundane security. Main transport in/out is via automobile, and the ley lines deflated like a balloon once we stole their focusing device. There's roughly 12 cars parked outside the wards.

We stake out the facility.

Leo crits on Detective! There's 24 people inside, a very good suite of mundane security devices (infrared, motion sensors, etc). 

Aggie also crits on seeing the supernatural security setup. Their supernatural defenses are formidable, including a ritual ward that's ridiculously powerful and difficult to put into place. The only hole is that things can gate in, but that's a one-way trip. The Ward will zap any supernatural intruders- a primary concern for Leo.

Leo's enhanced senses pick up the scent of Magnus inside the facility, and groks his overall position in the facility.

Aggie attempts to turn the ward onto the security enchantments in place- and botches horrifically, taking 5 points of injury from magical backlash, and undoing wards in a massive 100 mile radius.

Leo and Ranulf rush the building. Leo rips a door off its hinges using his werewolf strength. Ranulf follows. Aggie limps to the car and preps their getaway car.

Inside, Leo and Ranulf find Magnus chained to a wall. A guard with an automatic carbine sprays at Leo, who dodge and drops out of the way of the spray.

Ranulf pulls a blocking spell to avoid the bullets himself.

Leo recovers and launches himself at the guard, slamming into him and driving the guard onto the ground. The guard fast-draws a cold iron knife plated with silver and stabs at Leo. Ranulf causes a freak accident to happen, and the guard is fried as a live wire from the ceiling is dislodged in the melee and falls on him.

Magnus is surprised to see Leo, and seems concerned about people being able to utilize his work once its done. The work is locked into a gunsafe, which Leo intends to carry out. Ranulf sees about freeing Magnus from the desk he's chained to.

With a 500lb gunsafe on his back Leo's at heavy encumbrance, and moving about 5 yards per second.

Leo and Ranulf manage to get out without running into anyone else. We tie the gunsafe to the roof of Leo's hatchback and then pile in and drive off. 

Magnus confirmed that Taylor Bloise and Morrow had a falling out about 20 years ago- he doesn't suspect that Taylor was involved in the kidnapping.

We use Helen Taft's house as a safehouse again, assuming that it's already been searched and won't be now that it's cleared.

Evidently Magnus got an idea from the events surrounding some of the wards Aldrick screwed around with during the Babel crisis.

Magnus has a prototype and research notes in the gunsafe. He says it's a new form of magical matter.

Leo's convinced that Magnus' work is the equivalent of magical radioactivity and would rather not get zapped by it.

Magnus explains- he's learned how to concentrate quintessence using a ley line, and the process enriches Quintessence to be about 100x more powerful than normal quintessence. Being physical magic, Quintessence makes enchantments far easier, and allows for some badass spells on the fly.

It takes Leo an hour to crack the safe. Aggie takes some time to perform first aid on himself, and also reaches out to Olivia to keep her appraised of things.

She's very unhappy about the wards thing, but is relieved that Magnus is alive. She instructs us to drop him off with his house, and to return to her to get our payment.

We talk a bit about what to do with the research when Olivia knocks on the door.

She's particularly unhappy with our methods, and isn't surprised when we mention that Magnus has developed paradigm changing tech.

Olivia completely understands the process to the make the stuff once explained. Olivia casts a spell on Magnus, catching him once he falls. She then placed a geaus on us to not speak about what we found.

All of us are handed three grand as pay, plus whatever we grabbed from the safe. Olivia strongly encourages Aggie and the others to get a stronghold into place, and to integrate more into society,

Return to Ceteri 2: Lines of Influence

Our Cabal:

Aggravaine Tashalan: Inhumanely attractive and a genius spellcaster, Aggravaine is trying to make a name for himself in the supernatural world of Ceteri.

Leo: A werewolf private investigator. Leo has a fondness for Twinkies and is a disappointment to his family.

Ranulf: Paperpusher, ley line expert, and victim of Brimstone Law. Ranulf really wants his old life back, but likely won't get it.

Jackson Taft: A crack sharpshooter hiding a more malicious second half who you won't like when he's angry.

Events:

Last we left off, Ranulf just caused a large explosion. Thankfully, no deaths, but it's still quite the scene. It's chalked up to a gas line leak in the press and 'official' documentation.

Aggravaine is wrapping up tending to some of the wounded, and has successfully implanted a SPY Protocol spirit into the foci of a Silver Lions mage leaving the building.

Ranulf schmoozes to get the names of the lawyers for the building and for the Silver Lions organization at large.

We decide to not stick around. We decide to visit Helen Taft, an aggrieved former employee of the Conclave who raised a stink in the department of Celeric Regulation.

Helen's fighting an aggressive magical cancer, which she's been using magic to stave off for as long as possible. She's busy smoking a cigarette when we arrive, swaps it for a joint later in the conversation, and obviously hasn't lost any of her wit. Aggravaine and Leo help her roll a joint, earning some brownie points.

When we bring up the Lions Helen's willing to talk shop about how much they suck. We bring up the discrepancies with their ley line. Helen brings up Silver Lions recruiting genius magical prodigies that are up and coming, then making them leave broken or disappearing them once they are done with them.

She suspects that they're developing something likely illegal. Helen also makes it clear that taking them on without help is unlikely to go well. Helen suggests that we recruit her nephew, Jackson, to our cabal- he failed the trials, has an anger management issue, and needs a job.

She tells us he's living in her house in Dorchester, before getting wheeled inside for her medicine.

The house in Dorchester is a ranch style apartment. Aggravaine walks in without being invited, summons a housekeeper to clean the place for twelve hours, and begins asking Jackson if he's really satisfied with his unemployed existence.

Jackson takes some motivating, but eventually seems down to join our efforts.

We check out the garage and find her stacks of files on the Silver Lions. The files are about five years out of date, but are chock full of interesting info. Aggravaine locates a facility that they have that's in a state forest North of Boston.

We find a photograph of Bloise Cagliostero, Morrow, and Anton J. Dyer together in army fatigues some time during the Vietnam Era. Bloise is a serious heavyweight battle mage, and has been skulking around trying to improve his standing and that of his own house. Dyer is also a badass combat sorcerer. He lacks Aggravaine's raw magical oomph, but has studied and honed his skills for a long time. Dyer founded Silver Lions.

Ranulf confirms that their North Facility is sitting on a Dragon Well. That particular ley line was approved by Morrow himself, and was grandfathered in once the leyline was 'discovered' to be stronger than initially surveyed.

It was originally surveyed by Morrow. It really looks like Morrow was planted as a mole within the department that regulates ley lines to get Silver Lions a cushy deal on numerous ley lines.

Aggravaine loops in his boss Olivia, sharing we her details of what's been dug up. The explosion in Boston went unreported to the Custos and the National News Media. Olivia wants Aggravaine and the others to continue investigating- without stepping on Cagliostero's toes so that she doesn't have to confront Taylor Bloise about anything.

The SPY Protocol comes back and reports in, typing out what it managed to eavesdrop. They're talking about a valuable subject that they're working with, who's from Cagliostero. They're planning on getting rid of him when they're done. The spirit reports that they have photos of us outside of the office we blew, and they proceed to accuse Aggravaine of sticking his pen in company ink.

They're also aware that Aggravaine is in contact with Olivia. They don't believe that we know about their other facility, but they are locking it down and sweeping for bugs. The SPY Spirit fled once it heard it might be detected.

We take pains to ensure that Olivia gets the new intel we received.

We oscillate a bit on what to do, eventually settling on checking back on the place that exploded after Ranulf brings it up.

The local emergency response has left except for a single cop car. The cop seems out of it, like he's not really paying attention. The mists are significantly stronger than they should be. Ranulf looks at the leyline and whatever the Lions were doing + the Twist Ranulf pulled means that the leyline is more or less permanently busted.

Ranulf believes that they were attempting to create an artificial dragon well to harvest quintessence from.

We try to ascend to the 13th floor, where we meet a guard. Ranulf and Jackson attempt to fast-talk and intimidate the guard. The guard eventually demurs, and Aggravaine spends a moment to commiserate with him about how bad "Mr. Twiddles (Jackson)" is.

Ranulf finds the epicenter of the explosion. Strange stone shards have been strewn about by the explosions. They had the equivalent of a magical nuclear reactor going on, and the residual energy is quite powerful.

Jackson uses Archaeology! and thinks that the pieces are from some kind of ancient statue- which he tries to piece back together.

A guard starts heading upstairs, so Leo falls in behind him to stalk him as he goes upstairs. Jackson and Ranulf toss the research floor- grabbing random harddrives, research notes, and so on.

Leo does his best to signal that there's more people present. He then goes on to loot some important files himself.

Aggravaine finishes distracting the guard with some life advice, bugging out once he feels the rest of the team would be finished.

Some Silver Lions folk are approaching the building. We do our best to avoid being seen by them.

Aggravaine locates the security room, and asks Leo to lockpick the door so that security footage can be erased. Leo scrubs the team's presence from the security footage completely.

We leave and return back to Helen's house.

Jackson starts piecing together the Egyptian tablet he rescued from the explosion. He makes out a single word/string- HEKA- which is the deification of magic in personified form.

The tablet is going to take days to piece back together. Aggravaine speaks the LOGOS Shift to return the tablet back to its original state. It's returned to normal, including the ley line focusing crystal in the middle of it. The tablets are exceedingly valuable and bounce the power of ley lines up a level.

There's a quartz cylinder carved into the tablet.

Jackson's able to read the tablet. He translates the instructions on it to English. The tablet acts as a focusing device, increasing the power of ley lines the longer they're in place. Ranulf can tell that they've been altering the method, because even the tablet and the instructions couldn't produce the results we saw at the office Ranulf exploded.

We eventually realize that when Aggravaine used the Logos he stole the cylindrical quartz that was originally attached to the tablet from wherever it happened to be- likely the state woods facility run by The Lions.

We make plans to hide the focusing tablet and to make sure that Helen isn't retaliated against if they piece together that it was used at her house. Aggravaine drops the ley line tablet off with his girlfriend Trish, while the others go to ensure that Helen is safe.

It appears initially that Helen is just fine. She's interested to hear that we've stolen from the Silver Lions.

Some guys in suits show up at Helen's house where Jackson elected to stay. Jackson locks up, and prepares for a fight.

They breach the back door. Jackson rushes towards them, shouting that he's going to blow their brains out if they don't leave. They screw their resistance roll and retreat. Jackson chases them off the property.

Ranulf casts Off the Grid on Helen, making it unlikely that anybody will be able to track her down or target her.

We end there.