Medallions d20 Modern (Update Wednesday 09-20-06)

[Old Drew Id]

Session 2 (5/14/2003) The Library

Session 2 (5/14/2003) The Library

The library window had been repaired, the doors replaced, and the blood had been washed from the carpet. Overall, unless you knew just where to look, the library was identical to how it had been before the attack on Sunday night. Still, something about the place gave Willie the creeps. He looked at the giant globe in the center of the room and remembered laying on his back, looking up at that same globe just three nights ago, wondering if he was going to bleed to death before the ambulance arrived.

As before, the place was deserted except for Willie and Taylor, and it was still eerily old-fashioned.

“What nasty crap you bring into library? You take dump in bag and want to leave it here? Get bag out of here!” Taylor yelled at him as he set the evidence bag down on the front desk.

Willie winced as he sank into one of the chairs at a table nearby, and tried to calm her down. “That’s evidence, baby, and you don’t need to tell me it’s nasty. I just limped my butt a mile down the road carrying that thing.”

“Evidence of what? You had corn yesterday? Get it away from my desk, it smell awful!”

Willie started to get back up to move the bag, when the front door swung open and Joe walked in. He walked right up to the front desk and looked at the bag.

“See, that’s why I don’t eat Chinese food. Jeez, Taylor, what are you eating?”

“That’s not mine, fat bo--- I’m not Chinese, I’m Korean!”

Joe sat down next to Willie, and commented to no one in particular, “So the church girl wants me, so now I got that to deal with.”

“Get this crap off my desk!” Taylor screamed.

“So I told her, Baby, you know, I can’t be tied down to any one girl.” Joe continued.

“Taylor, I keep telling you, it’s evidence, baby. That stuff might be the same thing that the guys who jacked us were puking up at the hospital” Willie was rubbing his temples, but the headache was already well on its way now.

“So then she starts bawling, and then I got to ditch her and get back here---” Joe droned on.

“So all evidence have to sit on my desk? Wait---this puke? You put puke on my desk?!” Taylor was absolutely livid.

“So now she’ll probably be calling me. I can’t help it. I just have this magnetism.” Joe finished complaining.

Brother Cooper finally walked in.

. . .

Willie thumbed the transmit switch on his walkie-talkie, “Okay, I see the power box now.” He was fumbling with a small flashlight and his .38 in his other hand. He had left his cane back inside, and was limping heavily and slowly through the trees around the back of the library building.

“Roger that” Brother Cooper’s voice chirped through the radio.

“Okay, I can see it now. It’s been unlocked and opened, and then closed back…and yep, there is the same kind of symbol scratched into the paint like I saw at that church. There’s a couple of branches broken back here too, like some dude broke them when they were walking back here before.”

“Copy that. Joe is gonna come out and take a look.”

A moment later, a second flashlight came bobbing around the corner, and the light pointed right into Willie’s eyes.

“Get that light out of my eyes!”

“Oh, sorry!” Joe grinned, and then turned to examine the runes on the power box.

“So what do you think, Joe?”

“Hmm…some kind of mystical symbol, I think.”

“Thanks, Joe, never would have gotten that.”

“Jeez, man, and you’re the private investigator?” Joe took the end of his flashlight and started to scratch at the paint on the symbol.

“Be careful, Joe, don’t be a---”

An arc of white-blue electricity shot out of the power box and straight into Joe’s arm. He lurched backwards and stumbled onto the ground, cursing vividly.

“Yeah, I thought that might happen,” Willie admitted. “It should be harmless now though. You okay?”

Joe stood up, grabbed his flashlight, brushed himself off, and stormed back towards the front of the library. Smiling, Willie followed shortly behind him.

 

[fenzer]

Boy Fludogg, alot of that write up hits too close to home. Great stuff.

EDIT: Drew, it looks like we posted at about the same time. I love Taylor and her broken english. Nice touches throughout, thanks.

 

[Old Drew Id]

Session 2 (5/14/2003) The Library Again

Session 2 (5/14/2003) The Library Again

“I may not be an expert in such areas, but does anyone else here find it peculiar that the ‘Occult’ section of this library is five times larger than the rest of the religious section?” Brother Cooper asked, as he carried another stack of dusty books back to their table.

The group was gathered around a table on the second floor of the library. Closing time had come and gone. Taylor had made coffee, locked the doors and allowed everyone to remain behind while they researched the strange symbol they had found.

“Actually I think its strange how crappy these books all are,” Joe answered, looking up from a copy of Masonic & Occult Symbols Illustrated. “No offense, padre.”

“What do you mean, Joseph?” Brother Cooper responded.

“Well, I don’t know.” Joe answered. “I just figured this place, what with Ward being all into this weird stuff, would have, like, some old original books or something. You know, like scary forbidden magic book kind of stuff. But all of these here are just things you could find at Books-A-Zillion.”

“Are there closed stacks somewhere, Taylor?” Willie asked.

“Nope. We’re like the Gap. Everything we have is out here.” Taylor answered, setting down another book in failure. “We don’t even have a back room.”

“Do you have a basement?” Joe asked hopefully.

“Nope, just first and second floors, and attic space, but that’s condemned.” Taylor answered, and grudgingly picked up the next book in her stack. After a beat she looked up, and everyone was staring at her.

“What?”

. . .

The stairwell was dark once you went up past the second floor landing, and it turned abruptly before ending in a blank wall with a ladder leading to a trapdoor in the ceiling. The trapdoor had a clearly visible lock that Taylor said she did not have a key for.

“Willie, can you pick that?” Joe asked.

“Oh sure! We got to break in somewhere. Ask the black guy! Look, just because I’m black does not mean that I know how to pick locks, or sing gospel, or make fried chicken.” Willie spouted as he pulled a small pack of tools from his jacket pocket and began to climb the ladder. He examined the lock for a moment and then set the tool pack onto a rung of the ladder and began fishing inside for the right pick. He glanced down at everyone watching him. “Well, okay, I do know how to pick locks, but only because I needed to learn for my job. It has nothing it all to do with me being black.”

Finally after twenty minutes, there was a hollow click from the trapdoor, and Willie smiled as he gathered his tools and climbed back down the ladder.

Brother Cooper raised an eyebrow, “Wilson, aren’t you going to go up?”

“Oh sure, but I’m not gonna be first,” Willie answered, un-holstering his gun and clicking on his flashlight. “Exploring dark places where nobody belongs? I’ve seen enough movies to know the black guy always dies first. I’ll let you guys go on, and I’ll follow.”

“I’ll do it,” Joe decided, and climbed the ladder up to the trapdoor. He opened the trapdoor with a surprisingly quiet creaking sound, and poked his head and flashlight up through to look around. “I feel like that kid from the Goonies. One-Eyed-Willy, you up here?” He paused and squinted in the dark, then spoke: “Wow.”

Soon everyone had clambered up the ladder and into the attic. The ceiling was low and angled in most spots, but rose up to allow comfortable walking room in the center of the building. The floor and the walls were all natural wood, with numerous exposed beams and support posts for the roof. The streetlight outside filtered in through three shuttered windows, creating long pale shadows. The floor was painted in spots in multi-colored dark paint, and through the dust, a series of large circles with numerous arcane symbols was painted over the whole room.

But most importantly, the attic was half-filled with bookshelves, tables, and chairs, all covered in a light layer of dust and cobwebs. The bookshelves contained perhaps a thousand books in total. And even in the pale slits of light offered from the windows, it was obvious. These were the kinds of books that Joe had been talking about.

 

[fenzer]

More! MORE!

 

[ledded]

Boy Fludogg, alot of that write up hits too close to home. Great stuff.

EDIT: Drew, it looks like we posted at about the same time. I love Taylor and her broken english. Nice touches throughout, thanks.

This is Ledded/Jim/"Willie" here again:

Yeah, Fludogg always has interesting and hilarious characters, and plays them with such style and deep, immersive role-playing that you sometimes wonder about his sanity.

Oh, and the best part of Taylor's accent... it really does get *much* worse the more upset or excited she gets, to the point where she's screaming into a walkie-talkie and you dont know whether someone is being murdered or has just broken a nail.

 

[fenzer]

Ledded, your group sounds like a blast. I would love to sit in on one of your games.

 

[Old Drew Id]

Session 2 (5/14/2003) Into the Creepy

Session 2 (5/14/2003) Into the Creepy

“Okay, this can not be the real thing,” Joe rolled his eyes, but still he didn’t pick up the book. “There is no such thing. It was made up.”

Taylor walked over to where Joe was standing. “What you babbling about, fat boy?”

Joe glanced absently over at her, and then back at the book. On the shelf in front of him was a single book, laid flat, exceedingly old, and bound in strange black wrinkled leather, and titled in silver: Necromonicon, and then in small letters underneath that, “Book of the Dead, by Abdul Alhazred, as translated by Dr. John Dee.” The letters in the title were not so much printed into the cover as they were formed, from the wrinkles in the skin. Joe motioned to the book dismissively, “This is fake. There is no such thing as the Necromonicon.”

Taylor, perhaps expecting something more forthcoming, shrugged her shoulders and moved on. Joe watched her go over to help Brother Cooper and Willie, who were examining another bookshelf full of books across the room.

Joe, remembering the shock from the power box, slowly brushed on finger against the book, half expecting it to crumble to dust when he touched it. The book felt normal. He guessed if t had been real it would have been ice cold, so with confidence, he stroked the front of the book with his hand.

The cover was soft, wrinkly, and a little squishy, and he had to admit, it felt an awful lot like human skin, but this certainly was not a real book. Just in case, he mumbled “Klaatu Barada Niktu” and then pulled it up off the shelf. He thumbed it open to a random page and began reading.

Strange diagrams, mad ramblings, various references to Elder Things… yep, just what it should be. Then, something more. There, on a page of scribbled text near the end of the book, a word caught his eye. ‘Agamotto’. Agamotto was not part of the Cthulhu mythos. Agamotto was just a spirit that Dr. Strange would call on every now and then. And Dr. Strange was not supposed to be in the Necronomicon.

There was another reference on a different page. “By the mystic moons of Munnopor, By the demons of night and day, By the flames of the flawless Faltine, Let yon spell be dissolved away!” That was specifically a spell that Dr. Strange used in Strange Tales. Joe couldn’t remember the issue number off-hand, but it was in the one-hundred-forties.

Joe paused. He knew this pretty well, considering he owned every issue of Dr. Strange ever printed, and had even dressed up as Dr. Strange for Halloween last year… well, okay, for the entire last half of October last year.

So, what was a copy of a fake book doing in this attic, and why was it making references to Dr. Strange comics?

Joe sat down at one of the dusty tables and started reading. The book was engrossing, disgusting, and disturbing. Mixed between the ramblings on about Cthulhu and watery cities and far realms, again and again there were references to magic from the Dr. Strange comic books. There were instructions, written like vague riddles, describing rituals, with further riddles as to what the rituals would do if enacted correctly.

Taylor tapped him on the arm, “Hey, fat boy, you deaf? Time to go home.”

Joe looked up. Brother Cooper and Willie were gone, and he could see that Taylor had gone through a large stack of books already. Joe looked down and realized he had only read a handful of pages. “Where did the guys go?”

“They went home an hour ago. I’m tired, and I’m ready to go home too.” She motioned to the book. “You can take that home with you, if you want.”

Joe’s brow furrowed. “Has it been an hour?”

“Yeah, you been reading for like, two hours, now.” Taylor yawned. “Get up, fat boy, time to go home.”

Joe shrugged and closed the book. A sudden feminine yelp erupted nearby, and Joe realized only in the back of his mind that he had been the one to make that sound.

The cover of the book had changed. At the top left, above the title, the wrinkles had changed or somehow been moved. In large letters, in addition to the original title and other information, the cover of the book now clearly said “Joe.”

. . .

Brother Cooper was tired, and the book he was reading was almost certainly a waste of time. The author was not a very skilled writer, and the subject matter was meandering and often contradictory. It was no wonder Christianity had beaten out the pagan religions, he thought, if this was how poorly they were all presented. Brother Cooper decided he would give it one more chapter and then go to sleep.

He shifted the pillows behind his back to get more comfortable, adjusted the blankets on the bed to keep his toes covered, took a quick sip of water from the glass on his bedside table, and went back to reading.

The book Guyzell had chosen was apparently about geomancy. It was written by a man who obviously believed that magic was real, and the book was apparently intended as a textbook on how to perform various rituals dealing with ley lines and places of power. It annoyed Brother Cooper repeatedly, because the man referred to the place where ley lines touched as a ‘nexus’, but then referred to them in the plural as nexii, instead of nexuses, which Brother Cooper had looked up to confirm was the right term.

Anyhow, the author was apparently into a variety of new age disciplines, and why was there a man standing there in the doorway?

Brother Cooper jerked the book down into his lap and looked up at his bedroom door. The light was on in the hallway, and there was no one there. He had seen him only out of the corner of his eye, but there had been a man standing there. A dark and hulking intruder, and very tall.

Praying for protection, Brother Cooper rolled out of the blankets and pulled his shotgun up out from underneath the bed. Taking a deep breath, he moved into the hallway.

. . .

Willie had browsed through the books in those shelves for a while, but everything was way too cryptic for his tastes. Every book was something about magic voodoo or hocus pocus, and it all seemed just a little too silly. Shoot, Willie had a great aunt or something that was supposed to be some voodoo lady down in New Orleans, but even he knew that it was all just a bunch of superstition and wishful thinking.

Willie was surprised to see Brother Cooper getting into the books so much, but he guessed if you had faith in so many holy things in the world, you had to have a pretty easy time with the less holy stuff too. Anyhow, there was nothing for Willie in those shelves, until he saw one familiar name.

Ward. Specifically, G.B. Ward. A small hand-bound volume titled The Reason for Numismatics. Shoot, before this week, Willie didn’t even know what numismatics was. He certainly didn’t understand the need for such a fancy word for coin-collecting. Definitely a white people thing.

Anyhow, if this was by the guy that built the library, then this was probably the best place for Willie to start reading.

Willie caught a ride back to his apartment from the preacher, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and settled into his easy chair. Willie had originally inherited this chair from his Gramms, and back then, it was just a chair. But he had to admit, after limping around on his leg all night, especially after having to climb that ladder, it sure felt good to sit down with a beer in that soft leather, recline back, and pull the lever to pull his feet up.

So Willie popped open his beer and started reading. And at once, he started cursing. Apparently this guy hadn’t done a very good job binding his book. All of the pages were out of order, and were not numbered.

Willie started skipping around in the book, and eventually began to make sense of what it was saying. The book read something like a journal, or a diary. But in general, the book was an essay putting forth Ward’s theory of how magic was supposed to work.

According to the book, Ward believed that there were a number of coins or medallions scattered around the world, and that these coins held the “key” to magic. These coins acted as focal points for magical events and magical energy and all of that kind of stuff, and apparently these coins had been around since prehistoric times.

Apparently there was more to it than that, though. Ward believed that the coins (and Willie guessed, magic itself) waxed and waned in power over time. Ward believed that the coins had once been really powerful back in ancient times, but all of the coins had gradually gotten weaker in power, leading into this long quiet period.

Ward believed that the coins were getting ready in his time to begin growing in power again sometime in the near future, and when they did, then magic would again be a powerful and real force in the world.

Willie burped and realized he was out of beer. He un-reclined the chair, set the book down in his seat to mark the page he was on, and limped the three steps into his tiny kitchen to grab another beer from the fridge.

When he turned back around, the book was no longer in the chair. Willie’s eyes focused on the top shelf of his bookcase, completely across the room from the chair. The book was sitting there, nestled neatly between a framed picture of his mom and a stack of old magazines.

Willie silently set the beer down on the kitchen counter, and drew his gun from its holster.

 

[fenzer]

Boy Drew, three posts in 24 hours! Man, that is some kind of record on these boards, jonrog could take a lesson or two.

Not that I have been lurking like a junky looking for his next fix or anything.

Love the Evil Dead reference. Love the whole coin/magic idea. Love these characters. I feel like I could hang out with any of them.

Again, nicely done.

EDIT: I always think of stuff AFTER I have posted. Anyway, it sounds like you are borrowing from Rifts as well as Cthulhu. What else are you using?

 

[carpedavid]

I just have to chime in again to say that this story hour is great. The characters are all interesting and the writing is fantastic - the subtle details really bring this story to life. I feel like I did back when the X-Files first came on TV - cursing the commercial breaks silently under my breath.

This is well on its way to becoming my favorite story hour.

Keep up the good work!

 

[Old Drew Id]

Sources for Medallions

Anyway, it sounds like you are borrowing from Rifts as well as Cthulhu. What else are you using?

Jeez, everything, really.

We use Vitality Point/Wound Points from Star Wars. We use the Chase system from Spycraft (which I highly recommend). Plus, the entire magic system is a custom job that I have done, which is very different from standard d20 Modern, and which probably most closely resembles a cross between d20 Cthulhu and Unknown Armies. (I will post it up at a later date.) We use the Modern Arms guide and the Modern Player’s Companions as well. Oh yeah, and we use a homebrew edit of the Wealth system to supply custom stats for used cars.

As far as magic goes, I wanted Medallions to have magic that felt different than anything we as a gaming group had seen before, especially the standard fantasy magic. Essentially, I wanted everything but standard fantasy magic. I did not want magic to ever be “flashy” or for it to be taken for granted. There should always be a price and a risk in using it, and a large element of the unknown.

I did not want magic to replace anything, including skills and weapons. I figured magic should be its own form of tool, not just a different kind of gun or a different way to bump up a certain skill.

So, I threw out the standard d20 Modern magic system and just started over. I started keeping notes of everything I wanted to throw in to a new system. The initial list included voodoo, Dr. Strange comics, prestidigitation-taken-too-far as in “Lord of Illusions”, Kabbalah, Asian mysticism, and Wicca just to get started. I wasn’t worried about rules at that point, just flavors, and I wanted every kind of flavor available.

Then I started pulling together lists of spells from every source I had, which included all the 3E books, numerous splat books and 3rd party books, and Call of Cthulhu, among others. Then I went back and ripped out all of the spells that were just too visually “flashy”. Some illusions could stay, but nothing like Bigby’s Interposing Hand or Teleportation made the cut. Then I removed all of the spells that directly caused damage (which greatly shortened the list). If the characters want to just cause damage, they use guns, not magic. I also removed almost all divination spells, since the vast majority of the d20 modern episodes would involve solving mysteries. Finally, I removed all of the spells that essentially replaced a given skill, like Jump or Spider Climb or that otherwise replaced some easy modern method of doing things. The characters get skills for a reason, and it would be a shame to replace them with spells.

So, what was left was a collection of spells that were all “weird” enough. Spells that allowed the caster to do things that they simply could not do with normal methods, but never so flashy that it would attract crowds, or so powerful or reliable that the caster could get too comfortable with their magic. I would offer a list, but even the players have not seen more than a handful of spells from the list yet, and that is part of the way it works. I further pruned a few spells that I just did not like, and added some of my own as needed, and edited what was left to twist it and make it unpredictable.

The players know the rules for spellcasting, if their characters use it. They know the exact details of a handful of spells, and they know the names of a handful of others. That’s it, though. They don’t really know what is available out there, and that seems to work well to maintain the mystery. There is no published spell list for them to view, read ahead on, or plan their advancement around.

There are no “published” rules for the players regarding magic items, though they do exist. Magic items are even more rare and bizarre than magic spells.

I wrote up a new spellcasting system that does not have spellcasting classes or spell per day. Instead it uses skills for spellcasting based on magical schools (like abjuration, illusion, etc.) and where the caster burns a feat to gain access to a set of schools. The caster spends weeks studying each spell that they find and then must make a skill check to actually learn the spell. Then, the caster must make another skill check every time they cast a spell, plus they pay a cost in vitality points, ability drain, etc.

Then I went in and tried to set up ways for each method of magic to “feel” different. This is still an on-going project, but the idea is that if one player wants to play a voodoo priestess, and another wants to play a Kabbalah mystic, then they would likely never learn the same spells, the costs for their spells would be different (perhaps one usually pays in vitality points and another pays in ability drain) and other side effects would be different as well. This part seems to be going really well so far.