Nev the Deranged
First Post
So! Played some Agon, and ran some Don't Rest Your Head. Both rocked. Here are the bits I remember, hopefully my fellow players can fill in their recollections as well.
Agon, in the AM. Competitive Greek heroics. It took us a while to get up to speed with this one, partly because we did full-on character creation. However, I think Reidzilla was right to start us off at zero, because chargen is a fundamental part of the game, and gave us a feel for what we were about. We didn't all make the best decisions at this point, but we were all newbies and everything worked out fine. Tim made the decision to be the son of Hermes, giving him a huge bonus to every single roll, which made him pretty much the glory hog of the whole game. We let him get mauled by beastmen, though, so it was ok. I think after 2 or 3 sessions of this game, it would really hum. I was kind of surprised the quest was as short as it was, but I don't know if Reidzilla tweaked it at all due to time constraints or whatever. Theoretically, as I understand it, there were three quests we could have accomplished in an all-day sitting had we been so inclined.
Anyway, I liked it enough to buy it, I really like the tactical mechanics, and I think the one-upsmanship and comradely machismo of greek heroes on a quest together would be really fun to play to the hilt once the players are more familiar with the rules. I also think the game lends itself well to both narrow character schticks and more well-rounded approaches.
All in all, a good time.
Then I ran Don't Rest Your Head for Tim Koppang, Pvt. Patterson, and ...The Guy Who Played Bishop (sorry man, I suck with names). I am actually glad we ended up with 3 players, because I had a hard enough time juggling that. 4 would have been too chaotic for me as a first time GM, I think. That said, it went way better than I could have expected. From the get-go, everyone came up with pretty scary characters. Bishop was a serial killer whose path was to see how much he could get away with without getting caught. Patterson (Azriel) was a blood-fetishist gothbaby whose Madness talent was a demonic form (a minion of Lordi, perhaps?). Tim's character Clive was the most normal, stressed out from juggling several part time jobs to make ends meet. In fact Tim spent most of the game trying to get Clive back to his job at the gas station and away from the strangeness going down in the City. He did eventually make it... but alas, the strangeness followed him.
Blue = Game Fiction, so that people can seek or avoid it as they desire.
Green = Out of Character, for the same reason.
Fictionwise, they were all members of a goth rock band, Serious Moonlight. They had just finished a gig at Mad's Place, a club they played regularly. During the show they noticed several audience members who were just watching them intently, not rocking out like the rest of the crowd. After the gig they were packing their gear into the van in the alley behind the club, when a fan runs up to them with a gun. Before they can really react, he cries "Please! Make it STOP!" and BLAM! splatters his own brains across their van. They are understandably shocked by this. Hank Madigan, who owns the club with his partner Maris Haier, comes running out the back and sees the corpse. He asks what the hell happened, and as they are explaining, the six audience members appear at the end of the alley and begin advancing on them all. Hank is yelling at them to just get in the van and go, he'll take care of it, but they aren't listening.
At this point we had our first conflict. Bishop said he was climbing in the back of the van toward the driver's seat, so I had three Audience Guys come around each side of the van, coming after Clive and Azrial respectively. Because of the way DRYH works, I ran each conflict separately.
Clive is trying desperately to call the police on his cell phone, and manages to do so by projecting a wave of apprehension at the three Audience Guys (his Madness talent is empathic projection) (oh, and pardon me if I jump tenses a lot, I'm not much of a writer). So he gets his phone. Meanwhile Azrial has started to vamp out, growing fangs and claws. Taking down two of the Audience Guys with one claw each, he grabs the third and bites into his neck... and is sprayed with a gout of black, acidlike blood (Pain dominated! Woot!) which burned his mouth severely.
At this point, a line of flames springs up between the PCs and the remaining Audience Guys, and they jump in the van and peel out, leaving Mad (Hank's nickname) to face the three alone as they step through the flames and don't seem particularly distressed by their smoldering clothing and hair.
Bishop drove the van around aimlessly for a while, everyone sort of in a state of shock. He pulled up at the gates of a cemetery and everybody got out to catch their collective breath and try to hash out what the heck had just happened. Bishop had searched the suicidal fan's pockets right before Mad came out, and found a crumpled flyer for the band's performance that night, with a phone number and the name "ACE" on the back, with a little spade symbol. He proceeded to call the number on his cell, and had a short conversation with a rather beligerent mystery voice, who asked him where he was and told him to stay there, and hung up. Clive approached the gate, but it was opened from the inside by a man whose voice matched the one on the phone- Ace.
Ace basically told them they needed to go home and get some rest and forget about all of this, but they weren't having it. After some argument, he sighed and asked them if they could see the mausoleum in the middle of the cemetery, which they said they could. He explained a bit about being Awake and how normal people just saw tombstones belonging to people nobody knew. Then Azrial glanced over and saw an indistinct grey shape. Ace followed his gaze and freaked out, shouting "don't stop looking at it!" and bolted, his form becoming less visible as he ran, much faster than normal (his Madness talent was a sort of phased teleportation, which is how he got to their location so quickly). As all of the band members looked at the grey thing, they heard a strangled cry and a CRUNCH from the direction Ace had fled. Looking that way they saw another grey thing, much closer, palming Ace's crushed head like a basketball next to a bloodied tombstone.
I had originally planned to have Madigan sort of mentor them about being Awake, and then die horribly- basically 1) for an emotional hook (he was presented as a friend of the PCs), and 2) to show the stakes were deadly serious. They did later find out Mad had died, but Ace ended up fulfilling this role pretty well in his stead.
And I'm gonna take a breather here, because my brain is fizzling out. More later, any of my players can feel free to jump in with their thoughts too.
All in all, I felt like the players really helped contribute cool stuff, and also let me contribute the cool stuff I had in mind. Really, I can't ask for more than that out of a game. I usually let them narrate when they won a conflict, and they did a fine job of it, even the two who have a mostly D&D background. The Guy Who Played Bishop told me during a break that even though it was very different from what he was used to (more freeform, I think he said) he was enjoying it. And he was certainly getting into it, especially since a lot of events ended up revolving around his character. Tim had his characters split off early on and basically said right out that he was defying any attempt to keep the "party" together. I was ok with that, although it did make it more difficult to frame him into conflicts that related to what was going on with the other two. He helped though, so it went ok. He did tell me a couple times that I needed to ratchet up the conflicts, and as I took that advice, I realized he was right. DRYH lends itself to a steady cranking up of the pitch, at least for a one-shot.
I didn't use the background outlined in the book, which the author has said was just suggestions, not meant to be "canon". I did use a lot of "Dark City" tropes, combined with some ideas of my own. One way I tried to keep tying Clive back in with the other characters is by having newspapers, any time someone saw one, always be current- and by that I mean up to the minute current- on events in other parts of the City. Another was by sort of recycling characters, bus drivers, cops, pedestrians, almost like they were on a kind of "loop" like characters in a computer game that just do their particular schtick over and over.
Also, everyone kind of worked together to bring their characters to satisfactory endings, which was awesome. The story was "finished" for these characters, but left unresolved enough that I can easily see picking up a new set of characters in the same paradigm set, dealing with the repercussions of this "chapter".
All in all I was really pleased with how easily everyone caught on to how the dice pools worked, it's really an intuitive system. Nobody held back on their Exhaustion or Madness, either, which was both good for a one-shot, and fitting for the edgy-out-of-the-gate characters they had created.
I will perhaps post more of the fiction when I am better rested and more coherent... I go now to Rest My Head...
Dave (aka Nev... or is it the other way around?)
nevthederanged@aol.com
(ps. Pvt. Patterson, I know you were fishing for the possibility of me running more indie stuff, and the answer is yeah, it could happen. I'm busy a lot, but I'm definitely down for working it out if you have players who are interested.)
Agon, in the AM. Competitive Greek heroics. It took us a while to get up to speed with this one, partly because we did full-on character creation. However, I think Reidzilla was right to start us off at zero, because chargen is a fundamental part of the game, and gave us a feel for what we were about. We didn't all make the best decisions at this point, but we were all newbies and everything worked out fine. Tim made the decision to be the son of Hermes, giving him a huge bonus to every single roll, which made him pretty much the glory hog of the whole game. We let him get mauled by beastmen, though, so it was ok. I think after 2 or 3 sessions of this game, it would really hum. I was kind of surprised the quest was as short as it was, but I don't know if Reidzilla tweaked it at all due to time constraints or whatever. Theoretically, as I understand it, there were three quests we could have accomplished in an all-day sitting had we been so inclined.
Anyway, I liked it enough to buy it, I really like the tactical mechanics, and I think the one-upsmanship and comradely machismo of greek heroes on a quest together would be really fun to play to the hilt once the players are more familiar with the rules. I also think the game lends itself well to both narrow character schticks and more well-rounded approaches.
All in all, a good time.
Then I ran Don't Rest Your Head for Tim Koppang, Pvt. Patterson, and ...The Guy Who Played Bishop (sorry man, I suck with names). I am actually glad we ended up with 3 players, because I had a hard enough time juggling that. 4 would have been too chaotic for me as a first time GM, I think. That said, it went way better than I could have expected. From the get-go, everyone came up with pretty scary characters. Bishop was a serial killer whose path was to see how much he could get away with without getting caught. Patterson (Azriel) was a blood-fetishist gothbaby whose Madness talent was a demonic form (a minion of Lordi, perhaps?). Tim's character Clive was the most normal, stressed out from juggling several part time jobs to make ends meet. In fact Tim spent most of the game trying to get Clive back to his job at the gas station and away from the strangeness going down in the City. He did eventually make it... but alas, the strangeness followed him.
Blue = Game Fiction, so that people can seek or avoid it as they desire.
Green = Out of Character, for the same reason.
Fictionwise, they were all members of a goth rock band, Serious Moonlight. They had just finished a gig at Mad's Place, a club they played regularly. During the show they noticed several audience members who were just watching them intently, not rocking out like the rest of the crowd. After the gig they were packing their gear into the van in the alley behind the club, when a fan runs up to them with a gun. Before they can really react, he cries "Please! Make it STOP!" and BLAM! splatters his own brains across their van. They are understandably shocked by this. Hank Madigan, who owns the club with his partner Maris Haier, comes running out the back and sees the corpse. He asks what the hell happened, and as they are explaining, the six audience members appear at the end of the alley and begin advancing on them all. Hank is yelling at them to just get in the van and go, he'll take care of it, but they aren't listening.
At this point we had our first conflict. Bishop said he was climbing in the back of the van toward the driver's seat, so I had three Audience Guys come around each side of the van, coming after Clive and Azrial respectively. Because of the way DRYH works, I ran each conflict separately.
Clive is trying desperately to call the police on his cell phone, and manages to do so by projecting a wave of apprehension at the three Audience Guys (his Madness talent is empathic projection) (oh, and pardon me if I jump tenses a lot, I'm not much of a writer). So he gets his phone. Meanwhile Azrial has started to vamp out, growing fangs and claws. Taking down two of the Audience Guys with one claw each, he grabs the third and bites into his neck... and is sprayed with a gout of black, acidlike blood (Pain dominated! Woot!) which burned his mouth severely.
At this point, a line of flames springs up between the PCs and the remaining Audience Guys, and they jump in the van and peel out, leaving Mad (Hank's nickname) to face the three alone as they step through the flames and don't seem particularly distressed by their smoldering clothing and hair.
Bishop drove the van around aimlessly for a while, everyone sort of in a state of shock. He pulled up at the gates of a cemetery and everybody got out to catch their collective breath and try to hash out what the heck had just happened. Bishop had searched the suicidal fan's pockets right before Mad came out, and found a crumpled flyer for the band's performance that night, with a phone number and the name "ACE" on the back, with a little spade symbol. He proceeded to call the number on his cell, and had a short conversation with a rather beligerent mystery voice, who asked him where he was and told him to stay there, and hung up. Clive approached the gate, but it was opened from the inside by a man whose voice matched the one on the phone- Ace.
Ace basically told them they needed to go home and get some rest and forget about all of this, but they weren't having it. After some argument, he sighed and asked them if they could see the mausoleum in the middle of the cemetery, which they said they could. He explained a bit about being Awake and how normal people just saw tombstones belonging to people nobody knew. Then Azrial glanced over and saw an indistinct grey shape. Ace followed his gaze and freaked out, shouting "don't stop looking at it!" and bolted, his form becoming less visible as he ran, much faster than normal (his Madness talent was a sort of phased teleportation, which is how he got to their location so quickly). As all of the band members looked at the grey thing, they heard a strangled cry and a CRUNCH from the direction Ace had fled. Looking that way they saw another grey thing, much closer, palming Ace's crushed head like a basketball next to a bloodied tombstone.
I had originally planned to have Madigan sort of mentor them about being Awake, and then die horribly- basically 1) for an emotional hook (he was presented as a friend of the PCs), and 2) to show the stakes were deadly serious. They did later find out Mad had died, but Ace ended up fulfilling this role pretty well in his stead.
And I'm gonna take a breather here, because my brain is fizzling out. More later, any of my players can feel free to jump in with their thoughts too.
All in all, I felt like the players really helped contribute cool stuff, and also let me contribute the cool stuff I had in mind. Really, I can't ask for more than that out of a game. I usually let them narrate when they won a conflict, and they did a fine job of it, even the two who have a mostly D&D background. The Guy Who Played Bishop told me during a break that even though it was very different from what he was used to (more freeform, I think he said) he was enjoying it. And he was certainly getting into it, especially since a lot of events ended up revolving around his character. Tim had his characters split off early on and basically said right out that he was defying any attempt to keep the "party" together. I was ok with that, although it did make it more difficult to frame him into conflicts that related to what was going on with the other two. He helped though, so it went ok. He did tell me a couple times that I needed to ratchet up the conflicts, and as I took that advice, I realized he was right. DRYH lends itself to a steady cranking up of the pitch, at least for a one-shot.
I didn't use the background outlined in the book, which the author has said was just suggestions, not meant to be "canon". I did use a lot of "Dark City" tropes, combined with some ideas of my own. One way I tried to keep tying Clive back in with the other characters is by having newspapers, any time someone saw one, always be current- and by that I mean up to the minute current- on events in other parts of the City. Another was by sort of recycling characters, bus drivers, cops, pedestrians, almost like they were on a kind of "loop" like characters in a computer game that just do their particular schtick over and over.
Also, everyone kind of worked together to bring their characters to satisfactory endings, which was awesome. The story was "finished" for these characters, but left unresolved enough that I can easily see picking up a new set of characters in the same paradigm set, dealing with the repercussions of this "chapter".
All in all I was really pleased with how easily everyone caught on to how the dice pools worked, it's really an intuitive system. Nobody held back on their Exhaustion or Madness, either, which was both good for a one-shot, and fitting for the edgy-out-of-the-gate characters they had created.
I will perhaps post more of the fiction when I am better rested and more coherent... I go now to Rest My Head...
Dave (aka Nev... or is it the other way around?)
nevthederanged@aol.com
(ps. Pvt. Patterson, I know you were fishing for the possibility of me running more indie stuff, and the answer is yeah, it could happen. I'm busy a lot, but I'm definitely down for working it out if you have players who are interested.)
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