wingsandsword
Legend
A while back I posted about a New World of Darkness game I was playing in (http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=161860)
Well, a month into the campaign, and 4 sessions later, things have only gotten. . .more interesting.
After the prelude, our PC's (normal, mundane mortals) were kidnapped in their sleep by an elder Ventrue, and thrown into what we later found was called "The Pendragon Labyrinthe", this huge maze complex he keeps to torment those who have displeased him, or to challenge those he wishes to test.
Well, besides her taking offense when I described the campaign to date as "Vampire: The Dungeon Crawling", the actual complex, in what is supposed to be a modern day setting, just pushes my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
We've walked for an hour in a straight line before encountering a wall before, this means the complex has to be 2 or 3 miles on a side, and there are many rooms with 200 foot ceilings and 50 foot pits (rooms set up as climbing-wall challenges over shark pits, false jungles filled with deadly animals to navigate through, poison gas filled rooms where the party must solve a puzzle to get the combination to the door out before everyone dies, or spike and flamethrower filled deathtraps to avoid, and apparently the entire labyrinth changes: rooms spin around, passages slide and reorganize, hidden walls slide down, and the entire layout completely shifts every 6 hours, making any attempt to map the labyrinth futile.
There are at least 4 levels of this complex, with each level being at least 250 feet tall and around 3 miles square on each side, with all 4 levels having apparently a massive and complex set of hardware to completely rearrange the layout by sliding around all the rooms and rearranging them. Not to mention a network of slides that drop people to lower levels, access passages and saferooms and medical chambers that are all of the quality of a hospital emergency room. Not to mention a huge network of surveilance cameras in the entire place.
In some of the rooms, there are virtual reality gear that's actually better than "The Matrix", just chairs you sit in, and put on some VR glasses, and suddenly, you're in a completely immersive VR environment, where you can't remove yourself from the system (including trying to take off the glasses), and any damage you take in the simulation is reflected to you in reality. The GM insists that technology like this exists and it's not implausible, and I couldn't explain to her how real VR doesn't quite work like that, and how incredibly advanced what she's describing would be, and she swears up and down she's seen things like this on display.
In many of the chambers, there are challenges with animals to be overcome. In one, a giant room was dressed up as a faux-jungle, filled with hundreds of ghoulded vipers to be dealt with, in another, 15 ghouled crocodiles in a giant faux-swamp was a challenge, while in another, an entire hall was covered in a giant, regenerative, aggressive, carnivorous "creeper vine" which was also ghouled (and virtually immune to everything except large amounts of fire damage).
That's bad, then we find out this entire complex is in Sicily. A giant complex this big, in Sicily, made by an elder Ventrue just as an amusement. Just building a complex 1000 feet tall and 3 miles on each side would be an incredible undertaking and certainly the largest building in the world, doing it in Sicily would be amazing, adding the engineering of all the rearranging rooms makes it boggling (not to mention the legions of ghouled plants and animals, and the super-VR), then we find out later that the entire complex is underground, as the bottom level is apparently right above magma, and that absolutely nobody has ever heard of this complex, outside of rumors among the vampire community.
We've now had other PC's added to the party, which this Elder Ventrue captured as they were tourists in Rome. Yes, the creator of all this goes out on the town himself to capture random people just to torment in there. He either utterly incapacitates them with a wave of his hand (like one, he flicked a coin at one guy and did 6 Lethal, knocking him out and letting him be dragged away, or just Dominates them and tells them to come with him), and then just dumps them in his giant labyrinth to watch them on the cameras as they try to escape and likely get killed in the process.
That was beyond the breaking point. A complex which would doubtless costs tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars to make, in a modern day setting, requiring incredible feats of engineering, all as a diversion for an elder vampire, and nobody knows anything about it, because of course, it's an Elder Vampire, so he obviously just Dominated everybody involved to not remember anything about building it, and manipulates all satellite and scientific data to completely hide the complex, and everything associated with the construction.
When the players made it clear to the GM that when they get out, they fully intend to kill this vampire, for kidnapping them, dragging them across the world, and putting them through dozens of death-traps and insane puzzles, the GM openly scoffed at us, using her plot device DMPC to tell us just how old and powerful this vampire was, how insanely potent he is, how unstoppable he is, that there is almost no force wieldable by mankind that could hurt him short of a nuclear weapon, and how he could kill us all in a second if he wanted, and no mortal alive could even dream of harming him. In other words, the GM told us: Suck it up, and dance for my pet NPC.
It just seems to take suspension of disbelief, and utterly tear it apart. I'm tired of the belief I've seen in too many World of Darkness (new and old) games that Elder Vampires are nigh unto demigods, and can afford anything, no matter how expensive, can do anything, withstand any attack. make anything secret, and are the ultimate invincible and omnipotent deus ex machina. There is the old cliche of "A Wizard Did It" to explain something nonsensical in a fantasy setting, now it seems like "An elder Vampire did it" in WoD games.
Well, a month into the campaign, and 4 sessions later, things have only gotten. . .more interesting.
After the prelude, our PC's (normal, mundane mortals) were kidnapped in their sleep by an elder Ventrue, and thrown into what we later found was called "The Pendragon Labyrinthe", this huge maze complex he keeps to torment those who have displeased him, or to challenge those he wishes to test.
Well, besides her taking offense when I described the campaign to date as "Vampire: The Dungeon Crawling", the actual complex, in what is supposed to be a modern day setting, just pushes my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
We've walked for an hour in a straight line before encountering a wall before, this means the complex has to be 2 or 3 miles on a side, and there are many rooms with 200 foot ceilings and 50 foot pits (rooms set up as climbing-wall challenges over shark pits, false jungles filled with deadly animals to navigate through, poison gas filled rooms where the party must solve a puzzle to get the combination to the door out before everyone dies, or spike and flamethrower filled deathtraps to avoid, and apparently the entire labyrinth changes: rooms spin around, passages slide and reorganize, hidden walls slide down, and the entire layout completely shifts every 6 hours, making any attempt to map the labyrinth futile.
There are at least 4 levels of this complex, with each level being at least 250 feet tall and around 3 miles square on each side, with all 4 levels having apparently a massive and complex set of hardware to completely rearrange the layout by sliding around all the rooms and rearranging them. Not to mention a network of slides that drop people to lower levels, access passages and saferooms and medical chambers that are all of the quality of a hospital emergency room. Not to mention a huge network of surveilance cameras in the entire place.
In some of the rooms, there are virtual reality gear that's actually better than "The Matrix", just chairs you sit in, and put on some VR glasses, and suddenly, you're in a completely immersive VR environment, where you can't remove yourself from the system (including trying to take off the glasses), and any damage you take in the simulation is reflected to you in reality. The GM insists that technology like this exists and it's not implausible, and I couldn't explain to her how real VR doesn't quite work like that, and how incredibly advanced what she's describing would be, and she swears up and down she's seen things like this on display.
In many of the chambers, there are challenges with animals to be overcome. In one, a giant room was dressed up as a faux-jungle, filled with hundreds of ghoulded vipers to be dealt with, in another, 15 ghouled crocodiles in a giant faux-swamp was a challenge, while in another, an entire hall was covered in a giant, regenerative, aggressive, carnivorous "creeper vine" which was also ghouled (and virtually immune to everything except large amounts of fire damage).
That's bad, then we find out this entire complex is in Sicily. A giant complex this big, in Sicily, made by an elder Ventrue just as an amusement. Just building a complex 1000 feet tall and 3 miles on each side would be an incredible undertaking and certainly the largest building in the world, doing it in Sicily would be amazing, adding the engineering of all the rearranging rooms makes it boggling (not to mention the legions of ghouled plants and animals, and the super-VR), then we find out later that the entire complex is underground, as the bottom level is apparently right above magma, and that absolutely nobody has ever heard of this complex, outside of rumors among the vampire community.
We've now had other PC's added to the party, which this Elder Ventrue captured as they were tourists in Rome. Yes, the creator of all this goes out on the town himself to capture random people just to torment in there. He either utterly incapacitates them with a wave of his hand (like one, he flicked a coin at one guy and did 6 Lethal, knocking him out and letting him be dragged away, or just Dominates them and tells them to come with him), and then just dumps them in his giant labyrinth to watch them on the cameras as they try to escape and likely get killed in the process.
That was beyond the breaking point. A complex which would doubtless costs tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars to make, in a modern day setting, requiring incredible feats of engineering, all as a diversion for an elder vampire, and nobody knows anything about it, because of course, it's an Elder Vampire, so he obviously just Dominated everybody involved to not remember anything about building it, and manipulates all satellite and scientific data to completely hide the complex, and everything associated with the construction.
When the players made it clear to the GM that when they get out, they fully intend to kill this vampire, for kidnapping them, dragging them across the world, and putting them through dozens of death-traps and insane puzzles, the GM openly scoffed at us, using her plot device DMPC to tell us just how old and powerful this vampire was, how insanely potent he is, how unstoppable he is, that there is almost no force wieldable by mankind that could hurt him short of a nuclear weapon, and how he could kill us all in a second if he wanted, and no mortal alive could even dream of harming him. In other words, the GM told us: Suck it up, and dance for my pet NPC.
It just seems to take suspension of disbelief, and utterly tear it apart. I'm tired of the belief I've seen in too many World of Darkness (new and old) games that Elder Vampires are nigh unto demigods, and can afford anything, no matter how expensive, can do anything, withstand any attack. make anything secret, and are the ultimate invincible and omnipotent deus ex machina. There is the old cliche of "A Wizard Did It" to explain something nonsensical in a fantasy setting, now it seems like "An elder Vampire did it" in WoD games.
