House of Ainsley: Out-of-Character Discussion

Oh, I'm convinced that Windows 8 is just Bill Gates chasing after the next Shiny Thing (in this case, all of the iPad iPhone tablet touchscreen stuff which is oversaturating our city cultures), and saints forbid that we shouldn't join him in his latest obsession (or pandering angle, depending on how cynical you are).  Plus, he wants to rake in the profits for a new version of Windows, so he's once again doing what he does every five years or so: roll out a new version of Windows, then discontinue all support for the oldest versions of Windows.  Have we gotten any security updates for Windows 98 lately?  

That's why I'm sticking with Windows XP and Windows 7.  Sure, Windows XP is getting pretty close to Microsoft's chopping block, but I'm determined to hang onto it for as long as I can.  And if Bill keeps pushing me and trying to milk me out of my paycheck every five years, maybe I'll take up Linux.  Power to the people, Bill.

But anyway, I agree that complaining does help.  Of course, for every person saying "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," there's another person saying "The mosquito that buzzes the loudest gets swatted first."  So I guess the moral of the story here would go something along the lines of "Complaining is good, as long as you're not being a jerk about it."  

Speaking of complaints, East Texas Cable seems to have finished screwing around with my network.  They even sent a service guy to my house to ask me if everything was all right with my internet connection.  Time will tell whether or not they actually improved my connection speed and data transfer rates, but I'm still holding them to those two free weeks.  And if they don't add that discount to my next bill, I'll raise a stink about that too.  

On a related note, I see that Forumotion screwed around with our text editor again.  And whoa, look at the size of that color palette!  I don't really know whether I should like it or not.  How am I going to find my Lime Green among that mess?  

Double post time!  

Now that White Wolf has re-released Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse as 20th Anniversary editions (with Mage: The Ascension's "M20" version coming out later this year), I find myself wondering when or if Wraith: The Oblivion will be returning to the limelight as well.

Out of the eight Classic World of Darkness games, Wraith and Mage were pretty much tied for my favorites (with Changeling trailing not far behind in Third Place...sorry, Vampire, but you're tied with Demon for Fourth).  It's true that Wraith never sold well, and White Wolf killed the game off with Ends of Empire--which launched well before the Time of Judgement line--then regurgitated the remains as Orpheus before they burned the entire Classic World of Darkness down in time for their New World of Darkness line-up.  Lo and behold, the NWoD games weren't quite the cash cows that White Wolf had hoped they would be.  So that's probably why we're revisiting the CWoD with these 20th Anniversary editions.  Welcome home, White Wolf.

It's been said over and over that Wraith was the least popular of the CWoD games because its subject matter was also the grimmest, bleakest and heaviest of the CWoD games, and it spooked off a lot of players and Storytellers who just didn't have the steel to handle it.  And I think that's a damned shame, because Wraith was also the WoD game which got the players most involved with each other's characters and their personalities.  In most roleplaying games, we don't really get all that deeply involved with what makes everyone else's characters tick.  "Your character is Thorgard the Barbarian.  He wields a Greataxe +2 which delivers a thunderclap with every hit, he gets two attacks per round, his Armor Class is 25, he's a skilled horseman and he has a strong taste for dwarven whiskey."  We sort out whatever details of that player's character may benefit or hinder our own characters, along with an obvious personality trait or three, and we go no further than that.

But Wraith cut far deeper than that.  In a world where a character's emotions, experiences and history can empower him, cripple him, destroy him or rejuvenate him at any moment...in a world where your most trusted comrade can instantly become a horrific mortal enemy with just a few good proddings from his inner demon--or with a more external enemy pushing just the right psychological buttons...in a setting where players control each other's inner demons and can at times take forcible control of each other's characters, for worse or for even worse...in a game where Arcanoi such as Castigate and Lifeweb work more effectively if you know your subjects inside and out...oh, yes.  Wraith: The Oblivion gave players plenty of good reasons to get to know each other's characters on a more personal level.  "Your character is David Baumgartner, former insurance adjuster and present Usurer for the Hierarchy's Emerald Legion.  He can do six-figure arithmetic in his head.  He was writing a science fiction novel which he hoped would be his ticket to fame, a drunk driver killed him before he could finish the book, and his biggest regret is that he didn't start writing the book years earlier.  He has no pity or sympathy for alcoholics, and he sees addiction as an unpardonable weakness of character.  Orchids are his favorite flowers, and his wife made sure that the church's vestibule was pretty well covered with orchids at their wedding.  And when he was five years old, his neighbor had a perky Scottish Terrier which he loved with all his heart.  But the dog got trapped in a bedroom window when his neighbor's house burned down, and all he could do was stand at the fence and watch that dog die.  And he's been a stuttering pyrophobe ever since."

Yeah, stuff like that.  How often do you see the other players at your gametable get that much information on your character outside of a Wraith game?  Not very often, I'll wager.

So I was poking around through my Wraith books after hearing about the 20th Anniversary releases, and I dug up some notes for a Wraith campaign that I never got to run.  And a thought came to me: In the CWoD supplement Blood-Dimmed Tides, White Wolf added a caveat to Wraith's rules; to most wraiths and spectres, the surface of water is treated as solid...wavering and rippling, but solid.  Wraiths can stand on it and walk on it, and if they fall on it from any height, it's just like falling on solid earth.  The only exceptions are the wraiths and spectres of people who drowned or otherwise died while submerged in water or similar liquid (ie. the proverbial vat of beer); they can sink, swim and dive in water just like the Quick (aka. living people) can.

So then I thought, "Hey, why should these drowned ghosts get an extra perk from their Deathmarks while all of the other ghosts get jack squat?  What extra little benefit do all the other wraiths and spectres get after having to go through all the other eight-million ways to die?"

Good question, huh?  Naturally, I had to go about thinking up some answers (convertible to house rules for a future Wraith campaign, of course).  For some of my ideas, I didn't get any more imaginative than bestowing resistances or immunities, possibly bestowed by whatever post-mortem trauma the wraith's still carrying around; no knife wound could possibly hurt worse than the one that killed you, right?  So maybe something like:

• Death by gunfire: Double Stamina to Soak damage from firearms (including Relic firearms and Artifact firearms).  Stygian Steel bullets will still deal Aggravated wounds, but the wraith/spectre can Soak them.

• Death by knife/axe/club/any other sort of weapon: Same as death by firearm, but applicable to that sort of weapon instead.  The same caveat for Stygian Steel applies.  While firearms are uncommon in the Underworld, melee weapons are considerably more plentiful, thanks to all the ancient warriors who quite literally lived and died by the sword.  Melee weapons don't consume Pathos, either.  So that balances things out a bit.

• Death by fire: The wraith/spectre may spend 1 Pathos/Angst to become immune to all fire and fire-based damage for one round.  This includes damage from Balefire and Moliated fire weapons.  (The image of a burning man calmly walking through an inferno to get to you is always a frightful image, isn't it?)

• Death by electrocution: The wraith (or spectre) may spend 1 Pathos (or Angst) to wreath his or her Corpus in lethal electric arcs for one encounter or scene; when grappling or striking unarmed in this state, the wraith's/spectre's attacks deal a number of extra damage dice equal to the wraith's/spectre's Stamina.  This extra damage is considered electrical damage.  Also, such wraiths or spectres using Inhabit's electrical or electronic applications do so at -2 Difficulty, but all Failures become Botches instead.  This Deathmark does not grant immunity to electricity, as the wraith's corpus can still overload, short out or burn out from too much amperage.

• Death by live interment: Double the wraith's/spectre's Stamina to determine how many rounds the wraith/spectre may remain insubstantial when passing through solid objects.

• Death by beheading: The wraith's/spectre's head can roll or bounce by its own volition, traveling one yard per turn for each rank of the wraith's/spectre's Dexterity; certain uses of Argos can allow the head to fly or teleport as well.  The head and the body remain aware of each other and can coordinate their movements.  As wraiths and spectres don't need eyes or ears to perceive their surroundings, this perk essentially allows them to be in two places at once.  But the head is still defenseless, and since the head and the body share the same Corpus pool, careless use of this perk can usher a wraith right into a Harrowing (or catapult a spectre straight into Oblivion).

• Death by underlying medical condition (cancer, cerebral aneurysm, liver failure, etc.): Thanks to their inherent Deathsight, wraiths and spectres can foresee a Quick person's death within a few hours of it.  With this Deathmark's perk, a wraith or spectre can foresee the person's exact hour of death within one month of it, provided that the cause of that death will be an underlying medical condition.  (For any duration longer than that--or to foresee a death which comes through other means beyond a few hours in advance--you need Fatalism.)

• Death by falling or other high impact: For each rank of Stamina, subtract one story from the length of the fall for the purpose of determining damage.  Reduce the wraith's/spectre's maximum falling damage by this amount as well.  The damage can still be Soaked, as usual.  (An Old Soul with a very high Stamina could routinely use the "Gravity Express" as a means of expedient descent...as long as he didn't mind reliving his death every time he did that, perhaps.)

Most of these perks would apply whether the wraith or spectre was in the Underworld or manifested in the Skinlands (usually via Embody, and spectres need Shroud-Rending as well).  But considering what wraiths and spectres are and do, I'm still stuck on ideas for perking up the Deathmarks for certain "final exits":

• Hanging
• Suffocation/asphyxiation/other lack of oxygen
• Poison/drug overdose
• Disease/pestilence
• Crushing
• Freezing/hypothermia
• Animal attacks/insect attacks/devouring

Wraiths and spectres appear in the Underworld with their Deathmarks, which are false wounds or telltale manifestations of their means of death appearing on their Corpi or Corpuses (ghostly bodies).  So if you die from a broken neck, your wraith will never be able to hold his or her head up straight, even though wraiths don't have actual anatomies (and hence, no spines); either your wraith's head will swing around or rest limply on your shoulder, or your neck will be forever bent at an unsettling angle.  Or if you burn to death, your wraith might have ghostly fire constantly "burning" and leaping from his or her body (though the fire's cold and can never ignite anything); the fire becomes a part of your body too, so if another wraith hauls back with a Relic baseball bat and hits your flames, you take damage.  Or some Deathmarks might be aural instead of physical; if you die from a heart attack, your wraith's corpus might endlessly murmur with the sounds of a faltering human heartbeat.  So in the same vein, someone who dies by hanging will appear in the Shadowlands with the noose and a length of the rope still hanging from his neck.  Maybe I could make the rope prehensile or something.  Or would that make no sense at all?

Maybe I'll think of all these perks eventually.  Or maybe I'll just have to play it by ear and come up with perks on the fly, provided that this campaign ever gets off the ground one day.  Like I said, there are plenty of ways to become a wraith, and I couldn't possibly predict them all in advance.  Like all of those people in Boston who got killed by that molasses flood about a century back, or one of those people who get killed by rare things like meteorites, falling icicles or falling animals.  What kinds of Deathmark perks would those wraiths get?  

• • •

And one other thing about Wraith: The Oblivion that gets me: So Charon, the Lord of the Dead, created the whole Underworld so that people would have some place to go after they die.  But some parts of the Underworld outgrew him and propagated on their own, most notably the Tempest and all of its horrors.  Gorool was this humungous kraken who roamed the Tempest and ripped up everything in its path; by earlier accounts, Gorool was simply a Tempest creature which grew too big for its britches, but later books ID'ed Gorool as Charon's own Shadow, which separated from him kind of like how wraiths initiated into the Boatmen's Society must separate from their Shadows (which then become Pasiphae) in order to become Ferrymen.  Either way, Charon went out and fought Gorool, and then they both disappeared and everyone in the Underworld started worrying about where Charon went.  Little did they know that the much-reviled Mnemoi were in on the whole thing: Charon was basically taking a break from the Underworld by taking mortal form and moseying around the Skinlands (kind of like Neil Gaiman's Death does every century or so).  So the Mnemoi, acting on Charon's orders, waited for Charon to live his life, die like a normal person and come back to Stygia, where they promptly reminded him that he was Charon and restored his memories.  Then he Transcended, and that was the end of him.

But then Demon: The Fallen came out, and that game touched down on Wraith and deconstructed Charon; suddenly, he wasn't some mysterious archwraith who came out of nothing, nor was he the cosmic Grim-Reaper-like personification of death, nor was he a common schlub who died and was groomed to become the Emperor of Stygia by the equally mysterious Lady of Fate.  Suddenly, he was one of the Angels of Death back in the time of the Creation, only he rejected both Heaven and Hell during the Rebellion, choosing instead to form and govern the Underworld.  And the rest is history.

But if Charon was an angel and not a mortal soul, then how could he reincarnate (which is theorized as one of the possible outcomes of Transcendence) and eventually Transcend for good (if indeed he has)?  Wraiths can Transcend, but angels and demons cannot...at least, not as far as I know, because Transcendence only comes about when a wraith casts aside all of the Fetters and other remnants from the life left behind that make him or her a wraith in the first place.

Is Demon just feeding us a line here, or is one story only good until another is told?

Discuss, if you will.  

*Looks at the massive wall of text*



  I like waffles.

Dude.  I've seen the size of your D&D library before.  You can read walls of text in your sleep.  Don't give me that static about waffles, now.  

And I'm back for yet another triumphant return from the doldrums.  Apologies for the big, two-month delay, but there's been more ugly crap going down at work, and as usual, the resort's big boss just comes at me like I'm some dog-faced evil guy, belabors his points to death, won't let me breathe half a word to defend myself and generally treats me like I'm a glob of snot on his new khakis.  So I have thirteen days of vacation saved up and I'm doing my damnedest to burn them all in one shot, just to get the hell away from the place for a good, long while and clear my head.  Maybe I'll start looking for a new job, maybe I won't.  But the girl who's at the root of this latest mess is leaving for college in a month, so we'll see.  

I'm also getting off my depressed butt and finally installing that new slate tile floor in my bathroom.  And it's true: manual labor really does help clear the mind.  It also helps that my new floor's going to look wonderful when it's finished.  The mortar's curing as I type this, and by tomorrow evening the tiles will be ready for grouting. About a day after that, my bathroom will be ready for use, which is good, because my toilet's sitting in my bedroom right now and I'm not entirely pleased with that arrangement.

Take a look!


(Clickie)


(Clickie)

Lookin' good, isn't it?  

The wooden subfloor over by my shower stall was starting to rot, so it looks like I got on this job just in time.  One of the worker bees over at Lowe's tried to sell me two sheets of hardy board to put between the subfloor and the tiles, to stop the tiles from popping up whenever the subfloor shrinks or expands with the humidity and all that.  But come on, those are 16-inch stone tiles, and they're a quarter-inch thick.  It would take an earthquake to pop them off the subfloor!  Some people will try to sell you anything, I guess.  

So anyway, the grout's saddle gray (to match the slate color) and so is the caulk that goes between the border tiles and the shower stall.  Soon, after the floor is done, I plan on doing something about those walls.  I'm thinking about stripping off that tacky 20-year-old wallpaper, going over all of the studs with sheet lumber, painting the whole thing slate gray and invoking my artistic talents to drybrush on some streaks and splotches of bronze, copper and rust paint, so the walls match the floor in both color and pattern.  I might as well give the ceiling a similar paint job while I'm at it.  Think it might work?

But thanks to all of that work, I smell like a boar hog.  Give me about a half-hour to shower and shave (in our house's other bathroom, of course), then I'll be back to ride this wave of elation further and give Sylvea and Karnoz their much-deserved updates.  Bee are bee!

There we go. Karnoz and Sylvea are now back in action.

While I was editing the Party thread to add Experience to Sylvea and Ariean, I figured that since Karnoz and Sylvea are our most active characters (if not our only active characters) right now, I should move them to the top of the list. And so I did. That should make it a bit easier to find your stats and stuff now.

On a related note, I spent a chunk of my day gathering my House of Ainsley notes, looking them over and maybe getting a few new ideas. And I think I'd like to reach out to SEAMUS, Jazman and Taljor and invite them back to the game now. I checked on my Campaign Cartographer and it still works, so brewing up some more overland maps for some of the surrounding nations is in the forecast.

For now, I'm skedaddling off to work, where Illusion Vale is still blocked from our workplace computers. But maybe my new laptop and its wireless tap can get around that. Plus, I have a bunch of vacation days coming up, so stay tuned.

*SQUEEEE* New post!! LOLZ

Ok, girly moment over XD

Those tiles look awesome dude! Any updated piccies to come?

Well, I should be finishing the grout work tonight or tomorrow.  After that, I give the grout a day to cure/dry/harden/whatever grout does.  Then I can call my Dad over and we can finally get the toilet out of my bedroom and put it back where it belongs.

I can't wait.  

So anyway, more bathroom floor pics to come. Enjoy the Sylvea post.  

Awesome

*pokes y'all again*

Also, I've taken my desktop offline for a day or three.  The old system hard drive had multiple failure states and warning states, it was dying and it was running like a brick as a result.  So I got a new hard drive to replace it, and now I'm reinstalling Windows and pretty much all of the programs that I currently use (while leaving out all of the old, obsolete junk).  Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to wipe out everything and start over.

As soon as I get the desktop (and its scanner, Paint Shop and camera ap) running again, along come photos of my new bathroom floor, as well as pics of my new history book ("Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra", a book about the last generation of Russia's reigning Romanov family), my new Tarot of the Vampyres and my new used "Stormwrack" book for D&D, which will be a pretty big expansion for this campaign (especially if SEAMUS ever comes back).  Stay tuned.  

Okay, it looks like my scanner's working again.  Now for another segment of Stuff I Bought On My Last Run to Hastings!



First up is "Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra" by Peter Kurth.  The book comes in two or three different covers and jackets, apparently, and since my book's too big to fit on my scanner, here's the version that I got.  It's a great book about Nicholas II (the last tsar of Russia, for those of you who aren't down with history), his wife (the tsarina Alexandra), their five kids, the opulence of their reign, key figures in their reign (most notably, Grigori Rasputin, who gets an entire chapter all to himself), the tsar's role in World War I, the rise of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks, and ultimately, the imperial family's untimely end in a Siberian basement and the aftermath of that massacre.  Sorry, but contrary to legend, Anastasia didn't make it out alive.  And contrary to some historical accounts, it wasn't a clean execution, either.  Firstly, Yakov Yurovsky (the Bolshevik commander charged with the Romanovs and their fate) couldn't find any Red Army soldiers who were willing to shoot kids, so he had to settle for a pack of brutal and amoral Latvian mercenaries.  The room was also pretty small, with maybe just enough room for the seven Romanovs, their doctor, three of their servants, their dog and Yurovsky; the Latvians had to crowd up in the hallway and fire over each other's heads and shoulders to kill the Romanovs.  On top of that, the four girls had squirreled a mess of gemstones in their corsets (since the Bolsheviks would have taken the gems otherwise); this effectively turned their corsets into bulletproof vests, and the bullets ricocheted and went scattering all over the room as soon as the Latvians turned their rifles on the girls.  They ended up clubbing the girls to death with their rifle stocks.  Pretty savage stuff there.  

Nicholas II may have been a pretty weak tsar; his family's lavish spending and luxurious lifestyle came at the expense of the starving, impoverished Russian commonfolk, and the rise of the Soviet Union (and with it, the advent of Communism in Russia and scattered around the rest of the world) can be laid at his feet.  But he was a loving husband, father and family man, and he was a respectable leader in times of war.  So he and his family certainly didn't deserve the cruelties that they suffered while in Bolshevik captivity, and if Yurovsky felt guilt and remorse over carrying out Lenin's orders and murdering the Romanovs (and evidently, he did), I say, "Good.  He very well should have."

But all in all, Tsar is a great book for any history buff to have.  Apparently this book is easily selling for over $100 online, so getting a used copy in almost-perfect condition at Hastings for only $4 feels like grand theft.  I'm glad to have this book in my study now.  

(I probably could have gotten along without the photo of Nicholas II skinny-dipping, though.   )


Now on to other stuff.  Even though my Tarot-reading days are well behind me now, I can still appreciate a good Tarot deck with gorgeous artwork.  So when I happened across the Tarot of Vampyres at Hastings for about $30, I had to scoop it up.


And even though some of the cards' pictures are better than others, not one of the pics disappointed me.  The pics all range from "pretty good" to "words can't really convey how stellar this pic is".




See?  

Also, that box art up there is the art for the Empress card, so it counts too.

(Wait a second...those rays of light in the Fool card might be just a little too sharp to be moonlight.  Is that sunlight breaking through those heavy clouds?  A "Fool" indeed!   )

The names of the Major Arcana are mostly unchanged, which is a bit of a relief; I don't like it when Tarot decks change the names around, like renaming The Tower "Destruction," Death "The Close," The Devil "Temptation," The Chariot "Victory," The Star "Inspiration" and all of the other static that I've seen among various Tarot decks.  The Wheel of Fortune card is simply named "Fortune" here, but that's pretty much it for the Major Arcana name shifts.

The suits of the Minor Arcana have been changed a bit, as have the court cards (to a greater degree).  Swords are now Knives, Wands/Rods/Staves are now Scepters, Cups are now Grails, Coins/Pentacles are now Skulls, Pages are now Lords, Knights are now Queens, Queens are now Princes and Kings are now Daughters.  The court cards can thus be quite confusing to people who are very familiar with traditional Tarot court cards, but the suits should be pretty simple to sort out.  And honestly, I think that "Scepter" sounds much catchier than "Rod" or "Wand".  How about you?   

It's also a bit of a relief that all of the pictures for the Minor Arcana cards only feature one, maybe two knives, scepters, grails or skulls in the artwork.  The traditional approach is to cram all of each card's items into its picture, so the picture for the Ten of Cups includes ten sporkin' cups.  This approach means that the pictures for the higher-numbering Minor Arcana cards can get really friggin' crowded, leaving less and less room for the scenery and figures around those items.  So it's nice that Tarot of the Vampyres trusts our ability to read the cards' text and cuts down the number of trinkets and doodads, leaving more uncluttered space for the vampires.  Elegant, beautiful, regal and occasionally monstrous and frightening vampires.  


There aren't any vampires in the Ace cards, alas.  In compliance with tradition, the Ace cards are all about the doodads.

I've also noticed the insertions of various astrological and alchemical symbols into the artwork.  I'm still trying to sort out the meanings here.  The Emperor is wearing the symbol of Aries for his medallion, and Aries is the "leader" of the Zodiac and one of the "natural born leader" Fire Signs (along with Leo and Sagittarius).  So maybe that's a start.

But the correlation between the artwork and the card's meaning may be hit-and-miss here.  The Four of Cups Grails, for example, is traditionally a card that signifies contemplation, wishful thinking or a lack of focus on the here and now (at least in its upright meaning).  I'm not really seeing much of these meanings in that card's picture, though...unless that woman's "donating" willingly and is either perfectly cool about it, wishing that she could be a vampire too or spacing out from blood loss, maybe.  The accompanying book's description suggests that the Four of Grails is the card of luxury or contentment (again, when upright), which is a bit different from the traditional meaning.  I've picked up a few differing meanings among the other Minor Arcana cards as well, though the meanings of the Major Arcana cards are pretty much intact.

Eh.  It wouldn't be the first time.  It seems like every other Tarot deck out there gives new meanings to the various Minor Arcana cards.  Maybe the lack of a universal standard here is why I stopped trying to read the silly things in the first place.  Want your custom-made Tarot deck's Two of Pentacles card to mean "A Double Whopper with extra cheese and mayo, hold the pickles"?  Go for it.  

Anyway, how about that artwork?  Huh?  Huh?  *nudge nudge*  


And finally, something a touch more relevant to this forum: I also picked up Stormwrack!


In brief, Stormwrack is a D&D 3 supplement that fleshes out sea adventures, whether on the waves or under them.  It adds new sea creatures, new ships, new Cleric Domains, new spells (most of them sea- or water-related, of course), new playable races (though I may opt to leave out the Hadozee, who are basically sentient apes with flying squirrel wing flaps...trés ridiculous), new Prestige Classes and a few other odds and ends.

But why should I tell you about the book when I can show you by sprinkling the contents into the campaign?  Let me get right on that.  I need to finish off the topic about Cleric spells anyway....  

Welcome back, GD! Where have you been?

(Also, your post is coming tomorrow. )

Okay, slight complication here: About five days ago, my StarLogic LCD monitor, after eight years of reliable and semi-reliable service, finally died.  So unfortunately, I won't be able to use my desktop PC until I get a new monitor.  Fortunately, my new laptop still works.  Fortunately, I keep Gametable on a portable drive and can run it on any computer, including this laptop.  Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Paint Shop Pro, which I use to edit the Gametable maps for these updates, which is still on my desktop and which is probably too registry-dependent to run off a portable drive plugged into another computer anyway.  So I won't be able to upload and display any Gametable maps until I get that new monitor and get my desktop back in working order.

The campaign can still continue; we'll just have to make do without the maps, that's all.  I'll try to crank the flavor text and scenery porn up to 11 to compensate for that lack.  Will that be any problem?


Also, I found a new game shop in Tyler!  Geek World!  It's considerably closer and easier to find than Ground Zero is, and like Ground Zero, it's annoyingly supersaturated with Magic: The Gathering players and Magic: The Gathering events.  But I can still try to get a regular weekly or bi-weekly game table going, and this new laptop can help.

So I just have to decide on what campaign I want to run.  I still have my notes for my old two-sided In Nomine campaign, but I'm not really in an In Nomine mood this year.  The two strong contenders?

--A Street Fighter campaign.  Street Fighter uses hex maps, and as soon as I get my desktop back (and my printer back with it), I can print up Gametable hex maps and some stand-up building fronts for scenery.  I never really did Street Fighter much justice in the past; in practice, it runs more like Streets of Rage: The RPG.  So I was going to run with that and get a stand-up pegboard so I can display the player-characters' Health bars on one side, their enemies' Health bars on the other and any applicable clock or timer countdown in the middle...you know, like in your typical 2D fighting game or sidescrolling beat-em-up.  Appropriately sized Matchbox cars (of which I have plenty) can flesh out any urban scenery, since you'd expect streets, roads and multilevel parking areas to have vehicles all over the place, right?  And my laptop--with some top-end portable speakers--can provide the background music, which would feature tunes from various fighting games and side-scrolling beat-em-up games, and in great abundance.  It would be a globetrotting campaign, as one might expect, and newbie fighters aren't going to be taking on M. Bison right off the bat, of course.  The campaign would start with low-level thugs and street gangs for villains, and as the player-characters become stronger, tougher and more worldly, the street scum and riffraff would give way to tongs and triads and crime rings and crime families and terrorist cells and ninja clans, and finally all the way up to crime syndicates, corrupt national governments, global shadow governments and the top branches of Shadaloo itself.

--A Wraith: The Oblivion campaign.  A brightly lit game shop may not provide the best atmosphere for a heavy-gravity game like Wraith, and players Shadowguiding each other might creep out some of the onlookers.  But I've been itching to get back into an Old World of Darkness campaign for a while, and running a successful Wraith campaign could be my crowning achievement.  And for bonus style points, I wouldn't even let the players know that it was a Wraith campaign right off the bat.  "Okay, we're playing a generic pan-World of Darkness game. You guys are playing ordinary mortals, so roll up some ordinary mortals. Yes, it's gonna get interesting; it's the World of Darkness, after all.  Any age is fine, any sex or ethnicity is fine, any walk of life is fine...oh, and you can take as many Backgrounds points as you want!  Is there a catch?  Of course there is. But I'm not telling you what it is just yet. Oh...and let's go into some intricate detail here: all your characters' wants, fears, virtues, vices, aspirations, childhood and other history...the works.  Ready to play?  Good.  This is an ordinary day in your lives.  This is another ordinary day in your lives.  Okay, this day isn't quite so ordinary...oops!  You're all dead!  Now the real campaign begins...."

So which campaign sounds like the better bet overall, anyway?  Thoughts?

Also, I got a new monitor for my desktop yesterday.  It cost me $160, but at 1920 x 1080, it's the biggest resolution I've ever had.  Bathroom floor pics should be coming soon.
 
And just to make sure that it's just my Google Chrome acting squirrelly, you people still see my avatar as the House of Ainsley coat of arms, right?  Chrome's showing it as two frumpy-looking protesters for some reason, but IE's being normal. Maybe I was a bit hasty in forsaking IE for the sake of Chrome, now that Google has become the Satan of the internet.
 
So, about that campaign question in the last post...

Yes, your avatar is showing just fine.

What is the playing style/experience of your troupe? If they are the cookie-cutter, hack and slash dungeon crawlers, then it might just be fun to play Street Fighter. If they are hard core gamers who want something more than 'Urg, me punchz in dA FaCe!!" try out Wraith.

Have you asked them what -they- want yet?

GoldenDrakon wrote:

Yes, your avatar is showing just fine.

I reuploaded my avatar through Chrome, just to be sure.  I'm seeing nothing but Ainsley coat of arms now, so it's good to see that the problem wasn't persistent.  Thanks.  

GoldenDrakon wrote:

What is the playing style/experience of your troupe? If they are the cookie-cutter, hack and slash dungeon crawlers, then it might just be fun to play Street Fighter. If they are hard core gamers who want something more than 'Urg, me punchz in dA FaCe!!" try out Wraith.

Have you asked them what -they- want yet?

Well, there's the rub: the troupe doesn't actually exist yet.  Right now, all I have is a pool of game shop denizens who may or may not be up for a pick-up campaign.  I've run pick-up campaigns before, back when I was in St. Louis haunting the Enchanted Chasm (which closed its doors back in 1990, alas) and two or three of the Fantasy Shop branches; you just draw up a notice detailing what game you're running and what time of day and what day of the week you'll be running it, then you pin it to whatever passes for the shop's bulletin board, then you show up for the first day and see who else shows up.  And half of the people who join haven't even seen that notice; they just come in to do some shopping, they look over and see you with your game stuff spread out all over the table and they sit down and introduce themselves.  Those experiences taught me that, while you can never predict exactly which sorts of players will join up, you can at least make a semi-educated guess depending on what's popular at each shop (and possibly the shop's general types of clientele as well).

Of course, half of those experiences came before collectible card games rose and dominated the market, and the climate of game shops has changed over the last decade as CCDs have ascended and traditional roleplaying games have declined, in regards to popularity.  And though I've been itching to run a Wraith campaign for years, I worry that the bubble gum players and powergamers who give WotC a reason to crank out a new Magic: The Gathering expansion every six months will cause problems if I invite them to a Wraith campaign, particularly when we get to things like Relics (which in Wraith parlance are "ghost objects," the psychic remnants of certain objects with which a character grew a strong connection in life yet were forever lost or destroyed before, when or after that character died and transited to wraithdom.  "So, Joey...what tangible items, if any, did your character (*gag*) Rock Slaughterhouse grow attached to while he was alive?"  "A bazooka!"  "...really?"  "A repeating bazooka!  With high-yield fragmentation shells!  +5!"  "Dude.  For one, weapons like that don't actually exist.  For two, Charon himself doesn't have enough Background points for a Relic like that!"  "Okay, so how about a minigun with a laser sight?"  *facepalm*

Eh.  Maybe I'm underestimating my own ability to keep munchkins on a leash, or maybe I'm just underestimating the Geek World regulars.  After all, you and I are a couple of pretty solid World of Darkness players, and we both gave our pounds of flesh to the Magic empire too, right?  Just because our Mopey Goth Factor is hovering right around zero doesn't mean that we can't muster up enough gravitas to play a respectable World of Darkness game.  So maybe I should take a leap of faith and prep my Wraith campaign.

...or maybe I should play it safe and go with the more munchkin-tolerant Street Fighter.  Street Fighter's a pretty solid beer-and-pretzels game for the action crowd.

But then again, munchkins--shallow thinkers that they are--are fun to watch when you shove them out of their element, and seeing one sweat and flounder his way through a Harrowing might be sadistically amusing.  "...You finally return to your senses after being hacked to pieces by the screeching Nephwracks, but you don't have any idea where you are...at first.  But then, the grim realization creeps into you: it's the gymnasium of your old grade school. It's the district's opening game against the McKinley Beavers. Your free throw just sailed wide, and the entire crowd is now laughing at you...very, very uproariously.  And oh, my...with every thundering step he takes, Coach Brinks seems to grow twice taller, twice angrier and ten times more menacing as he storms up to you like a dark, howling hurricane, bellowing his lungs out.  'You stringy weakling!  Idiot!  I should have cut you from the team the moment I....'"  "I cuss him out and kick his ass!"  "Not likely.  Remember how you were when you were nine years old?  Well, welcome back."  "...uhh...somebody help me?"  "Yeah, that's not likely either.  This is your own nightmare.  You're all alone, your Relic weapons are nowhere to be found, you're small and weak, and are your eyes just playing tricks on you or is that crowd of parents and teachers and other kids looking ever so slightly more monstrous and leering now?  You might actually have to think your way out of this jam.  Or should we just erase one of your Corpus points now?"  "I'm thinking, okay?"  "Yeah, this should be interesting."   

Or I could be completely misjudging the people at Geek World, and there's actually not a shallow munchkin in the entire place.  They could be playing CCGs because they can't find anything deeper and more involving...like, say, a traditional RPG.  My campaign could be a rare breath of fresh air, for all I know.  In which case, why not Wraith?  Or Street Fighter?  Or (if I really want to tax my free time) both?

Hmm.  Decisions, decisions.

This would be a fine place for Caine to make his introductory post, wouldn't it?  

Well, I'm glad to see that people are posting here again.  I was feeling a mite lonely.  

So anyway, I had to go back to Geek World and sell off my entire Magic: The Gathering collection last Sunday, because being unemployed sucks.  They were going to give me $450, but I haggled them up to $475 because I'm smooth like that.  It still hurt to part with those old cards, though.  Good memories and all.  But I haven't played Magic since I left the Air Force in '96, and I have bills to pay, so it had to be done.

But while I was up there, I went back to talking with the shopkeeps about running a game up there, and I've decided to go with Street Fighter.  They really liked the idea of me buying a black pegboard from Office Depot and using it to keep track of health levels for player-characters, allies and enemies alike.  How do I plan on doing that?  Well, you know the formula that Final Fight and Street Fighter II started, where you have some guy's picture, and his health bar right next to it, and his name underneath that, and there's a timer in the middle somewhere?  Yeah, just like that.  Except the good guys' names, pics and health bars (depicted with pegs in the pegboard) are on one side, and the bad guys' names, pics and health bars are on the other.  And if Joe punches Brad and does 3 Damage (after Soak), I just reach over and take three pegs out of Brad's health bar.  And if Brad doesn't have any pegs left, then he just got knocked the spork out.  It's pretty simple, really.

And I'll have a big "Time:" thingie in the top center, between the good guys' stuff and the bad guys' stuff; most of the time, it'll have an infinity symbol under it.  But if the PCs are on a timed mission, I can put a number for how many rounds they have left to do what they came to do.  Running out of time can have any in-game effect from more goons showing up, to something big and nasty (like a bulldozer or a sewer monster) catching up with them, to the archvillain getting away in his helicopter, to a factory-razing bomb detonating...it depends on the situation.  It won't ever insta-kill the good guys like it does in Final Fight, though; video game homages aside, it is still a roleplaying game.  

Street Fighter uses hex grids, and I can easily load my printer with cardstock and get Gametable to print some modern-era areas (like streets, alleys, elegant penthouse interiors, barns and cornfields, squalid Chinese villages, Brazilian jungles, whatever) with those hex grid overlays.  Since there's more to do in Street Fighter than just fighting, this can be handy for any number of uses, from mingling with a crowd of socialites, to evading a series of laser tripwires, to jumping in your car and chasing a moving van through the streets of Manhattan.

My laptop will be there to help me run the game (thank you, Gametable) and to supply some background music.  I've already been hitting the YouTube MP3 site and ripping a ton of theme-fitting music, a la:


And many more.

On top of that, Hero Machine 3 is out!  If I can get a small color printer to go with this laptop, that means that I can print up some cut-out cardstock miniatures for player-characters on the go, perhaps at the end of character creation.  "Okay, my guy's Puerto Rican, so give him a good tan and some slicked-back hair...oh, and a ponytail over his shoulder.  And some red boxing gloves.  No, smaller boxing gloves.  There we go.  Can I get some blue stars on the sides of his kickboxing pants too?  Cool!  I think that's it.  Go ahead and print him out!"

I've already been working on some stock characters, too.  As most of you know, I'm a Game Master who's not a fan of railroads.  I greatly prefer to create open-ended campaigns, play off the cuff and let the players do as they will...with reasonable restrictions, of course; if my campaign's set in 16th Century Scotland, then no, you cannot play a ninja.  But Street Fighter is best played as a globetrotting settiing, and one of the major details of character creation is nationality.  That means that I have to be prepared for something like three players, with one character from Canada, another from Venezuela and a third from friggin' Madagascar.  And since I'm also not a fan of the cheap-ass "You all meet in a bar" and "You've all known each other since childhood" devices, that means giving each character their own introductory mini-adventure, in Canada, in Venezuela, in Madagascar, in Antarctica...wherever.  And then I have to find ways to bring all of them together, which is actually the easy part.  "Okay, Mickey beats up the Canadian elk poachers and learns that they were outfitted by some Wayne Westheimer guy in London, England.  Luisa beats up the Venezuelan drug runners and learns that they were selling product to...one Wayne Westheimer in London, England.  Kumibe beats up the diamond smugglers who have brought so much strife to his native Madagascar, and he learns that they were shipping diamonds to a company owned by...yes, yes, a certain Wayne Westheimer in London, England.  So what now, guys?"  Sure, it's a little bit cheap, but it works.

Of course, if the players want to cause me convenience and speed things along by agreeing that they all happen to come from Coney Island and that, yes, they all grew up together, then I can definitely handle that.  

Languages (and their related Knowledge) are also crucial, and I would ask that my players all agree on a common language for their characters to speak...not necessarily English, mind you.  They could all decide that their characters are all fluent in Manchu...you know, the language which was once spoken by millions of people, before the Manchurians all decided that they liked speaking Mandarin Chinese better, so now fewer than 100 people worldwide speak Manchu.  It would give the characters their own "secret" language, but social penalties are still in effect.  It's human nature to bristle at the sound of someone speaking an unknown language, particularly if they're on your turf.  The French, in particular, are known for being legendarily rude to anyone who comes to France with a less-than-fluent grasp of the French language.  So our little clique of native Manchu speakers had better pick up some more popular languages as well, or they can look forward to irritating about 99% of the planet.   

But I digress.  Now, I can fudge with the NPC cast a little; street gangs looks kinda-sorta the same whether they're in the USA, Canada, Australia or most of Europe, so dress up some people of mixed ethnicities in an assortment of cut-off jackets, do rags, tattoos and wacky hairstyles, and presto!  I have my multiregional street gang.  The same could be said of organized crime and corrupt corporations; upper-class criminals in nice suits are pretty much a staple in any First World nation.  So if the white guy in the black suit's in New England or Italy, he's probably with the Cosa Nostra.  If he's in Russia or Eastern Europe, he's with the Russian Mafia.  And so on.  That serves well enough, to a point.  But then we get into the cultural nuances which separate African Nation X from African Nation Y, and things like how Filipinos don't like to be mistaken for Samoans, and how American biker gangs are absolutely nothing like Japanese biker gangs, and that China and Japan are about as different from each other as France and Germany are, if not more so.  If I put a Black Belt karateka as a triad boss in Beijing, someone is going to call me on it.

So I have to crank out a few stock characters for pretty much every culture...or at least the more popular and noteworthy ones.  Chances are good that no player is going to start his character off in some place like Iceland, Denmark, Lichtenstein, Antigua, Pitcairn Island or Antarctica, so I can probably ignore those places in favor of big-name places like the three big North American nations, most of Western Europe, Australia, Russia, Brazil, India, Israel, Jamaica, Turkey, China, Japan, Thailand, both Koreas, the Phillipines, Samoa, possibly Vietnam and Saudi Arabia, and so on.

So anyway, I've already recycled some characters from my old Street Fighter campaign, including German freestyle wrestler Ingrid von Straussberg (a potential ally) and American cruiserweight boxer Tony "Tank Man" Woodrow (an archvillain).

 

Yeah, I probably need to shrink them a bit before their three-sided cut-outs will fit inside an inch-wide hexagon.

Also, some generic thugs:

     

And because street gangs have taken such great strides in becoming equal opportunity employers (*snerk*), generic thug chicks:

       

A generic tattooed Caucasian boss:



A generic spider-themed Pacific Islander boss, because Eskrima involves fighting with paired sticks, batons or canes and the Filipinos really outdid themselves coming up with that style:



(For some reason, I call the first generic boss "Kurt Razor" and the second generic boss "Aranya".  "Aranya" is Tagalog for "spider," of course, but don't ask me about Kurt.  I guess the name just sounds bad-ass.   )

The obligatory dominatrix:



Some generic fighters: a boxer, a wrestler, a karateka and...whatever one-word descriptive you use for a Muay Thai stylist.  Fill me in here, Wraith!

      

A not-so-generic boss: Madame Kyoga, the leader of a Yakuza family in this campaign...possibly an erstwhile benefactor, possibly an archenemy.  It depends on which way the player-characters jump, really.  Naturally, she only shows up in Japan.  But here she is, in both common garb and "fightin' time" garb:

 

Hmm.  I may have made her too big.  But yeah, there are actually women's sumo championships in this day and age...hence, my inspiration.  Progressive stuff, right?  So, fluffy women: don't sit around and get depressed just because you're fat.  Get on a high protein diet and some weight training, put some muscles under that surprisingly useful, center-of-gravity-lowering flab and you can be a sumotori too!  

Also, because there's the odd spot of weirdness in Street Fighter, here's a generic mystic warrior:



A samurai-styled dragon man:



And the Street Fighter version of an earth elemental:



Because mysticism is an element of Street Fighter, elementals are humans who have transcended their flesh-and-blood bodies to merge with one of the Elements.  Which Element you fuse with depends largely on your martial path: the many forms of wrestling (and other styles which place emphasis on great strength, durability and solid stances) lean towards Earth, fluid styles like Capoeira and Wu Shu lean towards Water, forceful styles like Karate and Muay Thai lean towards Fire, and acrobatic styles (like Ninjitsu and most Kung Fu disciplines) lean towards Air.  Street Fighter uses the Western Elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water), but if a Storyteller wanted to use the Oriental Elements (Earth, Fire, Water, Wood and Metal) instead, it wouldn't be too hard to come up with alternate powers and abilities.

...so anyway, I'm so stoked about this gestating Street Fighter campaign that I don't mind setting my Wraith: The Oblivion campaign aside for now.  I might even record my Street Fighter sessions and put the videos on YouTube.  I mean, I'm really, really stoked.   But the sheer magnitude of this post probably told you that much, right?  

Well, this is quite an evening for me to have three of you in one place.  Hello, Drakon, Tiger and Jazman!  

I'm presently putting some finishing touches on the Pantheon thread, then I may have to flesh out the Cleric Domains a bit; seeing as we have two clerics in the campaign and Tiger is rolling up a third, that might be a savvy thing for me to do.

The thought of running into tons of undead must really have you guys spooked if y'all have three clerics in the party.

Good.  

Four people online at once! And posting too!!!

Keep breathing everyone! we might get a little life to flow back into this place yet!!

The House of Ainsley wrote:

Well, this is quite an evening for me to have three of you in one place.  Hello, Drakon, Tiger and Jazman!  

I'm presently putting some finishing touches on the Pantheon thread, then I may have to flesh out the Cleric Domains a bit; seeing as we have two clerics in the campaign and Tiger is rolling up a third, that might be a savvy thing for me to do.

The thought of running into tons of undead must really have you guys spooked if y'all have three clerics in the party.

Good.  

The clerics are all well and good, but the undead can mess with the clerics... I'll hook up with the female ranger hottie! (who is still alive. *Bonus!*)

If you think the undead can mess with clerics, think of how they can mess with rogues.  "I Sneak Attack the vampire!"  "The undead, lacking anything resembling a working anatomy, are immune to Sneak Attacks.  How good are you at fast-talking your way out of an Energy Drain?"  

Yeah, you might want to keep those clerics handy.  Corwin's a fairly strong Cleric, but Sylvea definitely has him beat.  And instead of chasing off the undead or turning them to dust, they both freeze them and turn them into pets!  How cool is that?  

Hawt female ranger trumps undead pets.

...especially once the hawt female ranger learns how to summon friggin' grizzly bears to her aid.  

But by then, the clerics might be creating their own vampires. So choose your poison, I guess.

Now that I'm reading back over a few things, I notice that Pesselrek had originally offered Karnoz the chance to join him in Morribord in about two months' time.  When Karnoz refused that offer, saying that two months wouldn't be an acceptable timespan, Pesselrek was then to amend his offer: that Karnoz would meet Pesselrek on Morribord in a year (more time for Karnoz to settle his affairs, if possible) for an even greater reward; though the reward was not specified, it was hinted that Pesselrek's mentor was working on a feat of great Transmutation.  (OOC: Considering that the Dark College of Morribord specializes in the school of Necromancy first and foremost, one can only guess what this may mean.)

...except that, as I wrote it, Pesselrek never actually breathed a word of the amended offer in the thread.  Oops.  

So I probably should have phrased the raven's words differently, omitting the "Remember" bit and replacing it with something more abrupt or impromptu, a la "Come to Morribord in a year and a day and we can further discuss what debts we now owe each other."  Something like that.

My bad.  


(Also, for the sake of clarification, Karnoz's new Feat is Weapon Finesse: Dagger, correct?)

*pokes GD regarding that last question again, just to be sure*

And there it is again: hardtack.  Highwaymen with hardtack in their rations.  And here's a video which should give y'all a better idea of exactly what kind of food hardtack is, and how much longevity it has:


You're welcome.  

As an interesting note, hardtack goes all the way back to ancient Egypt; though it has had many names over the past three millenia, it's been pretty much the same recipe: take some water, mix it into some flour, maybe add some salt, hold the yeast, then bake the living blue blazes out of it.  When you can bounce a hockey puck off of it, it's done.  For best results, eat before...well, 150 years after you bake the silly thing, I guess.

As another interesting note, Tolkien evidently based both dwarven cram and elven lembas on hardtack.  So if you guys ever come across "cram" or "lembas" or "waybread" in the campaign, it's friggin' hardtack.  Get it?