wingsandsword
Legend
Of various horror stories of games gone totally wrong or bad experiences, one special subset I've seen over the years is the "unbreakable masquerade", where something in a WoD game should have completely exposed the supernatural world and its secrets to mundanes, but for some reason (like the GM not wanting to deal with the consequences) it doesn't, and typically there are only token consquences (if any).
The worst example I saw in actual gameplay was a larp where the GM's really didn't want to deal with a real masquerade breach so they made cover-ups ridiculously easy and the PC's didn't care. For example: the recurring antagonist of one plotline was some kind of unique undead that was nigh-invulnerable and had a vendetta against certain vampires. Presumably there was some plot way to weaken/defeat/fend it off, but the PCs wanted to use ever-bigger amounts of firepower. Rifles and shotguns didn't do it. . .then machine guns didn't do it, so heavy machine guns and rocket launchers were used, which barely scratched it. The PC's didn't get the hint, and kept trying to track it down to use ever-bigger weapons (and cover up the mayhem of doing drive-bys with heavy machine guns in a city by spending a couple of points of Police and Media influence).
So, they lay out an elaborate ambush with as much firepower as they can muster. . .in downtown (where it was often seen wandering at night, looking for hunting vampires to destroy). The game was set in Lexington, KY, so it was a city of ~300,000. When they see the unique undead, they unload their ambush. A kill-zone of interlaced heavy machine gun fire and rocket-propelled-grenade bombardment, Tremere mages throwing fireballs while telekinetically flying around, and culminating with an ANFO truck-bomb (as in the Oklahoma City kind) driven by a Dominated minion, plowing right into it and blasting it with enough firepower to bring down the large building they were all standing by. . .
The monster was unfazed, taking a few levels of bashing (!!) damage from this entire sustained assault, it proceeds to methodically put a stomp-down on the two-dozen vampires engaging in this open melee on Main Street on a Saturday night in a city of ~300,000, doing ~8 Aggravated damage per punch and with 4 attacks per round it's plowing through resistance and killing 1 or 2 PC's per round while taking no damage.
After a few rounds of this (and a hefty body count), the antagonist teleports out, and the GM's (ST's, whatever) call an end to the scene. The PC's are assumed to be able to make it back to their lairs or Elysium without incident (never mind the presumably huge Police response which should be showing up within moments)
After this massive battle, to fix the masquerade breach they just had PC's spend a certain number of Police, Media and Bureaucracy influence to cover it up, that's it. Just spend some points of influence between sessions to represent bribing/pressuring the media to publish the cover story without question, the police to not investigate it, and the city government to declare it all the result a big gas main explosion that blew up an illicit LSD lab (hence what everybody saw was just a "hallucination").
Of course, if the GM's didn't want to whitewash something, then on the flipside even something minor would become an incredibly big potential breach. My PC ended up blood-bound to the Prince because he was confronted by the local Brujah goon squad in an empty industrial park and to escape made a running jump jump (telekinetically enhanced) over a chain link/razor wire fence to get away. Since the jump was "superhuman", the Brujah tattled that my PC "broke the masquerade" by using powers in "public" (even though there were no mortal witnesses), after a big lecture and public shaming by the NPC Prince, it was decreed that he be blood bound or die. . .and later that session PC's would engage in open warfare against Sabbat strike teams in the streets (with "blatant" powers like Celerity in use) and it would be whitewashed away with a few points of Influence.
Or, in another game, a tabletop one with a completely different group of people, the issue was that no matter how hard a PC tried, they couldn't break the masquerade. Every prominent mortal politician, businessmen, media mogul, ect. was either a ghouled/Dominated or otherwise a minion of vampires so they all conspired to keep things secret and were extremely efficient at it, and incredibly good worldwide internet censorship meant that any attempt to even discuss kindred online meant the conversation would be censored and minutes later vampiric or ghoulish enforcers would appear at your door to inflict punishment. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't break the masquerade, but if you ever tried you'd be smacked down incredibly hard.
Now, part of me wants to lay the some of the blame on White Wolf itself for this mentality. In the original WoD there were a handful of incidents in setting history and metaplot that should have, by all rights, been enough to break the masquerade into a million tiny pieces, like Czar Vargo. . .
For those who don't know, Czar Vargo was a Mage (Son of Ether) who decided to make a (misguided) stand against the Technocracy. In 1914, shortly before WWI broke out, a fleet of his airships appeared over the skies of New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Rome demanding the surrender of world governments to him so that the world could be ruled by "enlightened" mages. Massive battles are fought in the streets and skies of all four cities as Vargo's forces fight technocratic robots for several days, only ending when the technocracy deploys cloned armies, which Vargo was unable to fight due to his moral compunctions against killing. He flees Earth and takes his fleet into he Umbra, and the Technocracy sweeps the entire thing under the rug.
A massive (presumably Paradox accruing) days-long battle between a fleet of combat zeppelins and legions of robots, with death rays flying from both sides, in the streets and skies of New York, London, Rome and Washington DC in 1914 was just covered up with a handwave about Technocratic brainwashing of the masses, so that almost everybody forgot about it and all evidence vanished, and some vague mention of it being a real effort for the Technocracy to cover it up and the paradox incurred from having combat robots openly in the streets of major world cities in 1914 pushed back their further development for decades.
So, do other people have horror stories about the times that "the secret" should have gotten out but by handwave or fiat somehow a big Reset Button kept things marching along like it never happened (or when something incredibly petty brought down incredibly harsh reprisal)?
The worst example I saw in actual gameplay was a larp where the GM's really didn't want to deal with a real masquerade breach so they made cover-ups ridiculously easy and the PC's didn't care. For example: the recurring antagonist of one plotline was some kind of unique undead that was nigh-invulnerable and had a vendetta against certain vampires. Presumably there was some plot way to weaken/defeat/fend it off, but the PCs wanted to use ever-bigger amounts of firepower. Rifles and shotguns didn't do it. . .then machine guns didn't do it, so heavy machine guns and rocket launchers were used, which barely scratched it. The PC's didn't get the hint, and kept trying to track it down to use ever-bigger weapons (and cover up the mayhem of doing drive-bys with heavy machine guns in a city by spending a couple of points of Police and Media influence).
So, they lay out an elaborate ambush with as much firepower as they can muster. . .in downtown (where it was often seen wandering at night, looking for hunting vampires to destroy). The game was set in Lexington, KY, so it was a city of ~300,000. When they see the unique undead, they unload their ambush. A kill-zone of interlaced heavy machine gun fire and rocket-propelled-grenade bombardment, Tremere mages throwing fireballs while telekinetically flying around, and culminating with an ANFO truck-bomb (as in the Oklahoma City kind) driven by a Dominated minion, plowing right into it and blasting it with enough firepower to bring down the large building they were all standing by. . .
The monster was unfazed, taking a few levels of bashing (!!) damage from this entire sustained assault, it proceeds to methodically put a stomp-down on the two-dozen vampires engaging in this open melee on Main Street on a Saturday night in a city of ~300,000, doing ~8 Aggravated damage per punch and with 4 attacks per round it's plowing through resistance and killing 1 or 2 PC's per round while taking no damage.
After a few rounds of this (and a hefty body count), the antagonist teleports out, and the GM's (ST's, whatever) call an end to the scene. The PC's are assumed to be able to make it back to their lairs or Elysium without incident (never mind the presumably huge Police response which should be showing up within moments)
After this massive battle, to fix the masquerade breach they just had PC's spend a certain number of Police, Media and Bureaucracy influence to cover it up, that's it. Just spend some points of influence between sessions to represent bribing/pressuring the media to publish the cover story without question, the police to not investigate it, and the city government to declare it all the result a big gas main explosion that blew up an illicit LSD lab (hence what everybody saw was just a "hallucination").
Of course, if the GM's didn't want to whitewash something, then on the flipside even something minor would become an incredibly big potential breach. My PC ended up blood-bound to the Prince because he was confronted by the local Brujah goon squad in an empty industrial park and to escape made a running jump jump (telekinetically enhanced) over a chain link/razor wire fence to get away. Since the jump was "superhuman", the Brujah tattled that my PC "broke the masquerade" by using powers in "public" (even though there were no mortal witnesses), after a big lecture and public shaming by the NPC Prince, it was decreed that he be blood bound or die. . .and later that session PC's would engage in open warfare against Sabbat strike teams in the streets (with "blatant" powers like Celerity in use) and it would be whitewashed away with a few points of Influence.
Or, in another game, a tabletop one with a completely different group of people, the issue was that no matter how hard a PC tried, they couldn't break the masquerade. Every prominent mortal politician, businessmen, media mogul, ect. was either a ghouled/Dominated or otherwise a minion of vampires so they all conspired to keep things secret and were extremely efficient at it, and incredibly good worldwide internet censorship meant that any attempt to even discuss kindred online meant the conversation would be censored and minutes later vampiric or ghoulish enforcers would appear at your door to inflict punishment. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't break the masquerade, but if you ever tried you'd be smacked down incredibly hard.
Now, part of me wants to lay the some of the blame on White Wolf itself for this mentality. In the original WoD there were a handful of incidents in setting history and metaplot that should have, by all rights, been enough to break the masquerade into a million tiny pieces, like Czar Vargo. . .
For those who don't know, Czar Vargo was a Mage (Son of Ether) who decided to make a (misguided) stand against the Technocracy. In 1914, shortly before WWI broke out, a fleet of his airships appeared over the skies of New York, Paris, Washington DC, and Rome demanding the surrender of world governments to him so that the world could be ruled by "enlightened" mages. Massive battles are fought in the streets and skies of all four cities as Vargo's forces fight technocratic robots for several days, only ending when the technocracy deploys cloned armies, which Vargo was unable to fight due to his moral compunctions against killing. He flees Earth and takes his fleet into he Umbra, and the Technocracy sweeps the entire thing under the rug.
A massive (presumably Paradox accruing) days-long battle between a fleet of combat zeppelins and legions of robots, with death rays flying from both sides, in the streets and skies of New York, London, Rome and Washington DC in 1914 was just covered up with a handwave about Technocratic brainwashing of the masses, so that almost everybody forgot about it and all evidence vanished, and some vague mention of it being a real effort for the Technocracy to cover it up and the paradox incurred from having combat robots openly in the streets of major world cities in 1914 pushed back their further development for decades.
So, do other people have horror stories about the times that "the secret" should have gotten out but by handwave or fiat somehow a big Reset Button kept things marching along like it never happened (or when something incredibly petty brought down incredibly harsh reprisal)?
