Book Scorpion's Lair

Shadowrun Rat's Nest: Ghost Parasite

2016-08-21T13:29:00.002+02:00

Stanley has been depressed lately, seriously so. After consulting with two mages, he finds out that it's because he has some sort of awakened parasite, a spirit that feeds on his negative emotions. The group comes up with several plans to help him: duking it out with the spirit when it comes to feed on him, putting Stanley on a suborbital flight to banish the spirit (spirits can only exist in the Gaiasphere), looking for the spirit's true name to destroy it, putting so much cyberware into Stanley that he's no longer interesting for the spirit and, courtesy of the Technomancer, having him spend a month in the Resonance Realm. Which Stanley wasn't exactly excited about and I got the distinct impression that it was aclose call between that and getting killed by the spirit.

The spirit didn't feed on Stanley that night, so suborbital flight to St. Petersburg it was. While Stanley does some touristy things there, the group does detective work and finds what probably was the first victim of the spirit, at least in Seattle. A ganger living in Puyallup. They go there and search for its true name in a squatted house, admist people so high on Tempo and other drugs they don't even move when the group kicks down the door to the apartment. But they come up wit nothing.

The best scene was when Zach, while waiting in the parking lot for the others, decided that he needed to help a guy with a run-down car. The owner was inside the soup kitchen, getting a meal and Zach opened up the engine hood without asking. He does that, going straight from: I want to help that person! to I'm gonna do it! without actually asking if his help his wanted. He's seventeen, maybe he'll survive long enough to learn. The owner of the car came back and, with Zach obliviously studying the insides of the car's engine, he closed the hood and leaned on it. Fog and Kiki came back just in time to safe Zach from getting a beating or worse.

Some OOC highlights (both by Zach's player):
A McDonald's run solely by drones: MechDonald's
Players find a cat. GM: Do you know anything about cats? Player: Sure, I have Botany as a skill!

DMing is a Performance Art

2016-08-17T10:47:00.002+02:00

I came across a post written over at Monster Darlings about DMing and how it absolutely is a performance art. Go over there and read it, it brings up a lot of interesting stuff.
Don't Take Away the Player's Turn is another good post there.

Shadowrun Rat's Nest: Arcology Run

2016-08-08T10:53:00.000+02:00

Campaign Wiki is here

The group did a run to get someone out of the former Renraku Archology, by now a low security prison/social housing project that's pretty much a black box where poor people go in and almost no-one comes out. They had some serious problems and some inspired solutions for them and in the end, they found their target and smuggled him out successfully. By the time they were on their way down, with more than 50 floors to go, morale was not so good because they knew perfectly well that the way down wouldn't be one bit easier than the way up. They had pissed off a lot of people and they had been attracting attention all the way.

Then I told them that there was a mass panic, with people running away from the way they were headed. They ducked into a room and with a drone, they went scouting. It turned out that there had been a fight and security had send four massive drones to break it up. Think Boston Dynamics mule, only bigger and with cattle prods. Normal people would be like: oookay, we're going to lie low. The group was like: holy shit, let's steal those drones!

They spent about 15 minutes (in-game) discussing this and coming up with a plan. By the time they were done, the last drone was on its way into the elevator and their rigger, wearing a chameleon suit, just made it into the elevator with the drone. The rigger isn't very good at her job because she's been a rigger for two weeks or so and she has been driving the group nuts with less than well-thought out plans and actions. But now, she shone, with some help from the group's free spirit. She followed the drone into its garage undetected, rigged it and then activated patrol mode in the floor the rest of the group was waiting. With that, they had basically a get out of jail free-card for the rest of the trip.

This cut the story much shorter than I had planned and I could have gotten them into trouble, for example by letting the professional runner team that was on their trail (but pretty far off) just find them. But I honestly see no reason for that. Their exit may have been a bit anti-climatic, but they came up with a good solution for their problem, they didn't make any mistakes while executing their plan and frankly, it was beautifully done. That should be rewarded. I do love getting my players into trouble, but it would simply have been unfair in that moment.

Deadlands: Runaway Train

2016-08-03T09:45:00.000+02:00

Cast of characters:

Caleb Jones - ex-soldier and your humble narrator
Thomas Edward Silver - British scientist/monster hunter (??) and greenhorn at getting by in the Wild West
Otto Kaltenbrenner: German scientist and definitely, absolutely sane genius
Ghost: Kaltenbrenner's metal dog
Doctor Frances Grey: physician and by now seasoned adventuress
Kenneth Lake: Southern gentleman and poker player
Dim: lumberjack, very big and not very bright

I wasn’t looking forward to Chicago. Too much military for my taste, makes me feel like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Good thing we left quickly. On a train full of scientists, all headed for Dodge City and Hellstrom’s science convention. What could go wrong.

We chaperone our own scientist, Eliah Bailey. He’s a coloured man, but none of his fellow scientist seem to mind, I guess he really is a genius, for no-one to comment. Specially since they have plenty of gossip to share about each other and take plenty of pot-shots at everyone when they can. There’s not much love lost between them all. We got introduced to a couple of them, one of them even had a machine butler, he called him Max. A robot, he says Max is. Whatever he calls it, it’s a damn sight to see.

I was pretty interested in the guy who used to be a Confederate soldier and prisoner of war and says he has been granted his freedom to visit this convention because he impressed people with his inventions. I’d guess he rather traded one of his inventions for his freedom and good for him. There was even a woman scientist and no-one seemed to mind that either. She can probably hold her own against anyone who would mind.

Mr. Bailey had asked Kaltenbrenner to mix some kind of concoction into the engine grease and while Mr. Silver and I kept the engineer busy, he did. There’s a strict rule against tampering with the train, but we quickly learned that Bailey wasn’t the only one who hadn’t paid any attention to that.

But before that, we spent the night standing guard in the baggage coach to keep anyone from sabotaging Mr. Bailey’s inventions. Talked for a bit with Doctor Grey and of course she asked me why I had bowed out of visiting her family. All I could come up with is that it was a private matter. Close enough to the truth, but not really an answer and we both knew that.

I was saved from more questions by a ticking sound and after some searching, we found a bomb. Three sticks of dynamite strapped to an alarm clock, with two minutes to spare. Didn’t fiddle around with it, just threw it off the train. Killed a few sheep, but the train just drove on. We tried to search for a trace of the dynamite with Doc Grey’s dog, but no luck.

I had had a dream, seeing the train burn like a torch and it felt like one of those dreams again. Might have thought that the bomb had been the reason for that. During breakfast, a couple of other scientist revealed that they had tinkered with the train and each invention was designed to make it go faster. Each one on its own would have been fine, but everything together made the train go much too fast. Doc Grey and I were back in the baggage coach and had our hands full trying to keep all the crates in place. Pretty soon it was hard enough not to get crushed by them. The train was close to jumping the rails.

The others tried to remove the inventions from the engine. Hard to do when the train’s going seventy miles per hour. At least one scientist had a helpful idea - mechanical ants, as big as kittens. They clambered up on the engine and shut off the inventions, slowing us down to a safe speed. I really hope that this is what the dream meant.

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During the scramble to get the inventions off the train, Kaltenbrenner tried to send his dog to remove the one attached to the train's wheels. He picks him up and shows him the wheels: 'Do you see that device on the wheels?' And the dog goes 'No.' Next, he suffers a catastrophic failure of his magnetic paws when Kaltenbrenner tries to send him up on the engine's roof. Who's a clever boy? You are, Ghost!

Deadlands: New Group

2016-07-28T23:15:00.001+02:00

Cast of characters:

Caleb Jones - ex-soldier and your humble narrator
Thomas Edward Silver - British scientist/monster hunter (??) and greenhorn at getting by in the Wild West
Otto Kaltenbrenner: German scientist and definitely, absolutely sane genius
Ghost: Kaltenbrenner's metal dog
Doctor Frances Grey: physician and by now seasoned adventuress
Kenneth Lake: Southern gentleman and poker player
Dim: lumberjack, very big and not very bright

I don’t do all that well no my own. Go stircrazy after a few days without talking to anyone. So I found myself some people to travel with. Some pretty strange people they are, but I like them well enough and I don’t care much where we’re going, as long as it’s not back to New York or south. Had enough of that for a lifetime.

First the plan was to go West, but then the doc got a telegram from home. Told us she was going back to Chicago, to accompany a friend of her family back here from some science fair. The guy seems to live in his own head too much to find his way alone or something. Anyway, we all agreed to come with her.

Company nor not, I’m still not sleeping. And if I sleep, I dream. Never used to remember my dreams, but now I not only remember them, they come true. Not always, but often enough. This time, I dreamt about tents filled with corpses, frozen to death, everything shrouded in mist. Told myself that it was nothing, just one of the war dreams. I’ve seen worse in real life.

That was the first night of our journey, spend out on the prairie. In the morning, we saw smoke signals, but none of us had any idea what those might mean. Then the spider broke down. Yeah, right, some of the group are travelling in a huge mechanical carriage that looks a lot like a spider. Pretty impressive. No idea whom that thing actually belong to, but the German scientist, Kaltenbrenner, takes care of it and keeps tinkering with it. Or with his mechanical dog. Or whatever else he comes up with.

The spider is still able to walk, just not quickly. But then, we’re not in such a hurry. In the afternoon we did come across tents, all abandoned, with carts and timber standing around. Someone was on his way to settle somewhere, but they never made it. They all died in their tents, just like I had dreamt. Didn’t mention that to the others. We buried the dead and then spent the night there, it was too late to go any further. Nothing happened during that night and I think I even got a couple of hours of sleep.

We arrived in town the next day. Seemed nice enough, as far as town in the sticks go. And there was a circus in town. The doc, Dim and I went over to have a look, but we were turned back by the ringmaster. So we decided to go back during the night. Dim got himself picked up by one of the whores, so he had something better to do, but the rest of us went. Wasn’t much to see, the usual stuff. The doc and I snuck into the wagons and she was all for opening the coffin with the Aztec prince mummy, but that wouldn’t have been quiet and people were too close to us for comfort. We snuck out again and were on our way back to our hotel when we heard a scream.

Doc Grey says she saw a sort of shadow or piece of mist float back towards the circus. No-one else saw anything, but she doesn’t seem the type to make stuff up. Back at the hotel, someone had been killed. The resident doc said it was a heart attack, but Doc Grey seems to disagree.

I dreamt again and this time I saw the mist the doc talked about. It formed into a Confederate officer, who got shot and died. I don’t know if they took someone’s body for their mummy or what else is wrong. Not like I get some explanation for the dreams.

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It's been a while since I've written one of these and a lot has happened. The very short version: Alan and Lily have been killed by demons. Eliah killed his demon, but decided to leave the group after seeing his friends die and live with Alan's tribe who had welcomed him as one of their own. I had been planning to retire this character for a while and this was a very good point to do it.

So - new character! Caleb Jones is an ex-soldier who fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. He has been a civilian again for about two years and has attached himself to the group in Dodge City, having nothing better to do at the time.

Grey Ranks

2015-11-23T11:12:00.000+01:00

July 2nd, 1944: a letter authorising to break curfew and a pair of boots spotted with blood

Lukasz, Julia, Jadwiga and Janusz, teenage members of the Grey Ranks, are gearing up to steal some gasoline right out of a truck with German soldiers sitting in the cabin, at a checkpoint. It's the middle of the night and everything's quiet. Jadwiga takes the letter authorising her to break curfew and walks up to the barrier to distract the soldiers. Meanwhile, Janusz does his best to open the tank stealthily and to not choke on gasoline when he siphons it out. The first can is filled with gasoline and Lukasz takes it and runs.

At the checkpoint, things are not going too well and Jadwiga turns on the waterworks. One of the soldiers in the truck gets out to see what's the problem, Julia and Janusz take a dive under the truck. They have a little more time to half-fill the last can, almost attract the attention of the soldiers and can make it to the meeting point. A couple of minutes later, Jadwiga joins them, the soldiers allowed her through. At the last moment, she spotted the blood on the soldiers' boots and it was all she could do not to run. There is some bickering between the four, but on the whole, their first mission for the Home Army went well.

July 27th 1944: A freight train, a bridge, a soft-hearted officer and some rags, bottles and ten litres of gasoline

A lucky accident has played into the hands of the group: they have the time table for a train carrying horses and other goods to the Easterns Front. Eager to make a contribution, they plan to stop the train on a bridge outside Warsaw so that the Home Army can raid or destroy it. Jadwiga steals papers and tickets to Krakow for Janusz and herself and Lukasz steals a truck from a greengrocer as transportation and to barricade the bridge.

Janusz and Jadwiga, carrying a big chest filled with the bottles and the gasoline, pretty much just walk up to the train and don't get noticed among the forced labourers who are loading the train. They hide away in the carriage with the horses and soon, the train starts moving. They have some time for a talk, fuelled by some wine left in one of the bottles. They talk about their families - Janusz is Jewish, his father is hiding in the woods around Warsaw and Jadwiga's family disapproves of her being part of the Grey Ranks - and about what they would do if the war ended tomorrow. Janusz wants to open a nursery and Jadwiga wants to go to university. They make a pact that they will go to Paris together once this is all over and both are only half joking.

Julia and Lukasz have reached the bridge and Julia walks up to the checkpoint. She spins a story about needing to visit her grandmother in the next village and the officer is kind-hearted enough to let her through. Once she reaches the checkpoint on the other side of the bridge, she attacks the guard and shoves him off the bridge. She then climbs up on the bridge's support beams to distract the soldiers who start shooting at her. This gives Lukasz the chance to drive up on the bridge, ramming the two soldiers in his way and probably killing them. But they don't stop to check, just firebomb the car, steal the weapons and get off the bridge. The train is getting close and starts to slow once the engineer spots the burning truck. Janusz and Jadwiga jump off and throw Molotov cocktails into the carriage, setting the straw and the horses on fire. It's chaos in a matter of seconds and the Home Army attacks. The screams of the dying horses follow them into the night.

August 4th 1944: German police are abandoning Pawiak Prison, a midnight blue dress, a box of chocolates and a supervised visit

Pavel Wiczek, an engineer with important knowledge, is supposed to be brought to Germany in the next few days and the Home Army wants to keep him in Poland. The group uses the confusion of the last days before the Germans will abandon the prison to try and get him out. They have organised a box of chocolate, papers that make Jadwiga into Pavel's daughter and a beautiful blue dress that unfortunately belongs to the wife of the prison's commander. Jadwiga has never before worn anything like this, cannot get the zipper of the dress closed and calls Janusz for help. He navigates that situation pretty well, if a bit taken aback by the sight of Jadwiga in a dress and high-heeled shoes.

A couple of hours later, everyone is in place: Janusz on a rooftop, ready to snipe away at the guards, Julia and Lukasz in the sewers, ready to get Pavel out. Jadwiga gets into the prison without problems and visits Pavel. When he's brought back to his cell, he passes right next to the courtyard with the sewer grating Lukasz has just climb out of. Lukasz attack the guards and at the same time Jadwiga has to make a run for it because soldiers recognise the dress. The prison suddenly is in uproar, Pavel gets shot in the leg, Janusz starts shooting and Julia throws a grenade at the guards who try to stop Lukasz. They make it back into the sewer and run for it, as fast as they can. Lukasz keeps himself upright through sheer willpower, he has been peppered with grenade fragments and is bleeding heavily. Once they reach the support troops of the Home Army who take care of Pavel, he collapses. Julia does her best to dress his wounds and sings a song for him, like her mother used to sing for her. But Lukasz is unconscious and does not hear her.

August 7th 1944: An apartment near the ruins of Leszno Street, a thick album full of family photos, a brief moment of peace and Unterfeldwebel Walter Singer and his battle-hardened squad

The four are sitting in the apartment of Janusz' family, now a ruin missing the entire front wall. They have come here to make plans, but Janusz has found an old photo album and leafs through it, showing the others the photos. Everyone listens to his stories about the past, when life was still good and there was hope. From outside, they hear the sound of a violin - someone is playing amidst the ruins.

Their short moment of peace is over when the door gets kicked in and they recognise Walter Singer, an Unterfeldwebel with a very bad reputation. Jadwiga starts shooting immediately, Lukasz grabs the maps and plans they had spread out on the table. One of the soldiers throws a grenade and so does Julia. Jadwiga grabs the album and drags Janusz simply out through the destroyed wall, falling a couple of meters. Lukasz is too slow and gets caught in the blast of the grenades, he's badly hurt but makes the jump down to the street at well. Julia jumps, too, and they all run, while the rest of the German patrol is shooting at them.

They make their way to the cemetery near the street where they hope to find a hiding place. When they arrive there, Julia is not with them. Jadwiga give Janusz the album and then goes to look for Julia. She finds her cowered into a doorway, staring at a photo of her and her family. Unknown to the others, Julia has seen the old man playing the violin while they ran. He smiled at her and then collapsed, hit by one of the bullets meant for them. It takes a while, but Jadwiga manages to talk her into getting up and they join the others at the cemetery.

September 2. 1944: Dozens of Polish children are kept hostage at their school, a Nazi informant, a 14 year old deaf boy lost in hostile territory and a sniper picking off people one by one

After a tip by an informant, the Germans have imprisoned dozens of Polish children at their (illegal) school. The group is on their way there to free them when they come across a young boy wandering through enemy territory. Other Home Army soldiers have been trying to reach him but they have been shot by a sniper. The boy does not hear their frantic calling and so they come up with a desperate plan: Janusz climbs up high to get a good vantage point and will try to snipe the sniper. But he needs one more shot to spot him. Lukasz will draw fire by running out into the street. At least he picks up a helmet lost by a German soldier. Before Janusz leaves, Jadwiga hugs and kisses him for the first time. The plan works, although Lukasz gets shot in the shoulder and Janusz's rifle jams on the first shot.

They get the boy to safety and make their way to the school. The boy has escaped from there and has told them that the soldiers are Russian auxillary forces, well known for their cruelty. By chance, two other Grey Ranks members, Radio and Alice, have captured a German tank and Julia climbs aboard, to try and draw the soldiers out. Lukasz and Janusz hide, planning to shoot at the soldiers when they leave the school and Jadwiga makes her way to the back of the school to get the children out. At first, this plan also works. The soldiers are so glad to see one of their own tanks in what is more or less enemy territory that they do leave the school. Jadwiga shoots two guards, gets shot herself, but she can lead the children out at the back.

Radio opens fire with the tank's main gun, pulverising many of the soldiers and a fire fight begins. In their panic, many of the children run off in the wrong direction, right into the line of fire. They are almost all cut down, Jadwiga can only save two of them. One of the soldiers fires a Panzerschreck and Janusz is too slow to stop him with his very last shot. It's not a full hit, but the tank is damaged badly, driving right into some ruins. The fighting has drawn other Home Army soldiers and the Germans retreat. When the group gets to the tank, they find Radio and Alice dead and Julia in bad shape. On their way home, Janusz almost breaks down and they all try to tell him that he did all he could and that there is sense in what they are doing. He is half-convinced at best.

September 10th 1944: The headquarters of the 4. Panzerdivision in Ochota, a talk about love, patriotism and faith, a solemn promise and driving away the one you love for their own good

The Russians have arrived, but they have stopped and do not advance on Warsaw, leaving the Home Army to fend for itself in a desperate situation. The group has orders to attack the headquarters of the 4th Panzerdivision and to kill as many officers as possible. Before they go, Jadwiga takes Janusz aside and they promise each other that if they survive, they are going to flee the city and make their way to Paris. Lukasz hears that and waits until Janusz is alone before he confronts him. They have a heated discussion about patriotism and duty. Lukasz throws Janusz's own words into his face about how he wanted to do something, to fight for a better future and Janusz throws a punch. In the end, Lukasz cannot convince him and walks away, disappointed.

At the heavily guarded headquarters, Jadwiga takes a British-made time-fuse and some explosives to blow up an ammunitions depot as a diversion. She gets into the compound unseen, as do Lukasz and Julia. But the depot explodes way too early and Lukasz and Julia are caught out in the open, between the guards and the soldiers coming out of the headquarters. Janusz does his best to snipe as many enemies as possible. Lukasz grabs his grenades, shoves Julia over to keep her from following him and runs into the house to take out as many people as he can. By the time Julia has gotten to her feet again, the explosions have started. Janusz has to watch Julia getting overpowered by German soldiers. He takes aim to shoot her, but he cannot do it and she's taken away. Jadwiga does not return. When Janusz makes his way back to the meeting point, only Lukasz waits for him there.

October 3rd 1944

The Home Army puts down their weapons. The fight is lost.

In the end, Jadwiga died when the time-fuse malfunctioned. Julia was taken prisoner, tortured and died. Lukasz committed suicide when his personal hero Bór, commander in chief of the Home Army, capitulated and the country was lost. Janusz made his way to Paris and, after the war, opened a nursery. He returned to Warsaw in 1994. On a memorial, he found the names of Julia and Jadwiga. Lukasz fate is unclear and Janusz prefers to keep it that way, he'd rather think of Lukasz as alive.

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Grey Ranks is a freeform roleplaying game set during the time of the Warsaw Uprising. We played it in a single, long session and cut a few scenes - it is meant to be played over three sessions normally. But it still worked very well. Players pick situation elements for each of the ten chapters and with hindsight, it was interesting how we automatically raised the stakes for our characters. We took a break after each chapter and particularly for the last three, it was badly needed. If you haven't gathered as much from the theme, Grey Ranks does not make for light-hearted play. Things got very intense.

Proceed with caution and do absolutely not skip the suggested pre-play discussion about themes you'd rather avoid and the talk about the game afterwards. But it's absolutely worth playing. I suggest that you read at least the information provided by the rulebook about the Grey Ranks and the Warsaw Uprising and maybe do some more research. The game is absolutely playable without detailed knowledge, though, and provides important information with Radio Lighting broadcasts before each chapter. These are also very handy to set the mood for the chapters and to get a sense of the passing time.

The Warsaw Uprising Museum has produced a documentary of original footage, colourised and with added dialogue taken from eyewitness accounts. You can watch it here:

Out of Dodge

2015-09-30T11:01:00.000+02:00

After a botched heist, Mole leadfoots it out of there, with Toad bleeding all over the backseat next to Badger and Rat riding shotgun. None of them really knows what went wrong, just that there were a lot more people in the shop than they reckoned with and,more importantly, a lot more serious firepower.

Toad has managed to grab a bag that he says contains the gold. The others are sceptical and after some bickering, Badger grabs the bag and opens it. It contains coins, Reichsmark to be exact. Not the loot they were hoping for and nothing they can sell quickly. Toad begs them to take him to a doctor and Mole says that they’ll cross the river first to get some more miles between them and the crime scene, then they’ll just put a gun to the head of the next doctor they find.

Badger comes up with another idea: how about they ask the Afghan, you know, Mole, that guy who bought all that heroin from us that time? Mole stops the car and turns on Badger. „We don’t fucking talk about the Afghan! You know I want nothing to do with that guy! Apologise or we can sit here all day, fine by me.“

Badger not only doesn’t apologise, she cannot fucking believe that Mole still has a chip on his shoulder about the Afghan. „Come on, the guy can help us! He’ll give us a good price for the coins AND he’ll have a doctor for Toad. Hands up everyone who’s for the Afghan.“ Two hands go up in the backseat, Rat’s undecided and Mole is pissed off, but at least starts driving again.

„Okay. Here’s an idea, how about we go to Prague?“ Badger almost punches Mole at hearing this. „Prague? Are you out of your mind, we can’t go back to Prague! I don’t even want to THINK about Prague. Man, I never puked so hard in my life, what were you thinking doing THAT to the guy in OUR hotel room? Fuck Prague.“

Toad interrupts the discussion by dying noisily and in agony. That solves the doctor problem, but not the problem of where to go and adds the problem of where to put the body. Another problem is that the ferry won’t leave for some time. Still, they take a break at the small harbour, Mole goes for a smoke and the three people left in the car start to wonder if there might be a rat among them. Everyone looks at Rat. „Jeez, guys, it’s a codename!“ It does nothing for their peace of mind that Badger recognises a car that she thinks she has seen at the jewellery story. They drive off again and Rat really starts to dig into Badger, harping on how it was her contact who came up with the idea for the heist.

Mole tells her to check Toad, to see if he’s wired. Badger does that, pulls Toad’s gun and shoots Rat in the head, splattering the windshield with blood and brains. Mole almost drives the car off the road. „You cannot shoot people while I’m driving! Couldn’t you have waited until we pull over again?“ Badger isn’t very sorry for what she did. „That guy got on my nerve.“ On cue, they encounter a parade of five tractors, driving very slowly. There is no way they can have missed all that blood. Five hundred metres down the road, there’s the annual firefighter festival, with even more people and, of course, firefighters and police.

Mole takes a desperate turn to get off that particular road and fairly quickly, he no longer has any idea where they are headed. „We’re NOT lost,I just don’t know where we are going!“ With only the two of them in the car, talk turns to Mole’s therapy (he no longer goes and may or may not have killed his psychiatrist), bickering about Prague and the Afghan („We don’t fucking talk about…“) and the realisation that it might be a good time to take a break from each other.

Mole makes a stop at a small dirt track to give them a chance to hide the two bodies in the boot of the car. He takes his pistol because he’s not an idiot and has a bad feeling about Badger, but she still gets the drop on him and he goes down with a bullet to the head. Badger takes a deep breath, enjoys the quiet for a moment and then realises that she’s standing next to a car with three bodies, with rubbish coins for loot, that she cannot drive and is in the middle of nowhere. She can only hope that the Afghan will make good on his promise.

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And that was our game of Out of Dodge. For me (Badger),it really picked up speed when the Afghan was brought into play. He immediately turned into the Keyser Soyze-figure and suddenly, Mole and Badger had a past together.

The way the game works is that everyone has a keyword they are supposed to work into the conversation. That word is a prompt for one of the others to say or do something specific. If anyone dies, they can still play – sniping the conversation with suggestions like: don’t you think she will betray you? Wasn’t Mole supposed to be in therapy for that? Didn’t work out or what?.

The timing of me shooting Rat and the tractor parade was flawless. Mole had just said: ‘people will see all that blood!’ when they came into view and they would have had to have been blind indeed to miss the blood if this had been real.

It’s not strictly neccessary, but we took nerf guns along for the ride, without ammo, and that made for some extra realism. Please do not wave fake guns around where people can get nervous about it. Also a nice surprise: Mr Ook had switched our generic fake coins to real Reichsmark without telling me - I had asked him to prepare the props and character envelopes because I didn’t want to spoil myself.

So, if you’ve got a car, three friends and some time on your hand, go play this. It’s hilarious and there are no rules to learn, just: improvise. Don’t be afraid to make a mess of the situation…what AM I saying, the situation IS already a mess. Roll with it.

Vampire: Don't Drink the Pianist

2015-04-20T08:43:00.001+02:00

Here's a transcript of the diary I found at the archive. It's been badly damaged by mold and mice, but it's still readable, mainly thanks to the owner's Copperplate penmanship. A lost art, methinks. Anyway, read it and tell me this isn't huge.

14.3.1947

The Prince held the first Conclave for ten years and he has opened his own house for it. It was a grand occasion and people had dressed the part, which meant that fashion styles from the last five hundred years were being worn. It was the first time I had ever seen all of our society in one place and there were quite a few people I hadn't met before or only heard about. Rolf introduced me to some and later I made my own way around the room, ending up at a table with some archeologists. There were discussing the possibility of an expedition to Russia and Poland to recover artifacts, but decided that the time was not yet right for this. And after all, there was so much still in Germany. Which is a very polite way of saying that the Germans have stolen and plundered their way across the continent.

The talk was interrupted, mostly pleasantly, by Lysann Couronne who captured everyone's attention with a beautiful piano piece she performed on the Steinway and dedicated to the Prince. He was flattered indeed. Quite to my surprise, he invited me to keep him company when Rolf introduced me. A few minutes later, I found myself in the library with the Prince, Miss Couronne and Professor Justus-Emmanuel Hoffman, the archeologist who had advised patience in the matter of the Russian expedition. The Prince told us that he is expecting a train from Berlin and for reasons unknown to him, it's three days overdue. That is late even considering the fact that the route has just been restored from the damage it took during the war. The reason he is so eager for the train to arrive is that an heirloom of his is on board, a dagger supposedly enchanted by the Tremere. It enables Ventrue to forgo their clan weakness and chose any vessel to drink from. We have been charged with finding that train. Despite my low status, my ability with languages has made me part of this. I suspect that my experiences during the war have been taken into consideration as well.

Before we left the room, Lysann noticed that a single rose placed in a vase had moved even though none of us were anywhere near it. We also saw someone making a very hurried exit from the main room. I followed him, but once outside, I saw no-one, except for one of the British soldiers guarding the house. He told me that he had seen no-one. Well. For someone with enough practice in obfuscating themselves, the guard wouldn't have been much of a problem. Professor Hoffmann had followed me and searched for tracks, but found none. However, I did find a soldier, half-hidden in the bushes with his neck broken. The same soldier standing guard outside the door. Who was gone when we looked again. This, too, is possible for someone who has a higher degree of Obfuscate, but we hadn't heard anything. I know of no clan possessing that kind of power. Rolf did, when I asked him, the Assamites.

I told the Price of my suspicion. There had been rumours about the Sabbath making their way into Germany from the East and it seems they are true. After checking the guest list, one name turned up: Arno Friedman. Apparently a Russian spy who disappeared right after being captured. His real name is Nikolas Poliakov and the Prince identified him as Ragna, an Assamite who has been feuding with him for the last two hundred years and who will now be on his way to get the dagger for himself.

This has made our mission that much more dangerous and urgent. We left Hamburg the next evening, equipped with fake travel documents, a truck and enough gas to last us the way. I volunteered as driver, I've always enjoyed it. We all brought along our ghouls. I do hope Miss Couronne's ghoul is less of a Quex that he looks to be or Peter may be hard-pressed to hold his tongue. While driving, I found myself telling Miss Couronne about my past. Not in detail, but if she hasn't known before, she and Hoffmann now know that I fought in Warsaw, once on the winning and once of the losing side.

We were stopped by the British when we left Hamburg. Apparently, they are on the lookout for a murdered. Miss Couronne solved the situation by charming the Sergeant. It's a useful skill to have, I must admit. I'm sure we'll have need of it again before this is over.

So. Did I promise too much? I don't think so. I haven't found out much yet, but the diary's owner is one Albin Wozniak, a Pole captured during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and brought to Germany as a Fremdarbeiter (the other Battle of Warsaw he mentions is probably the 1920 one). Official records state that he was killed during the bombing of the Lagerhaus G, a subcamp of the Konzentrationslager Neuengamme. I haven't yet found out about the people he's working with, but give me time. I don't know if you know what a Quex is, I had to look it up. Seems that the guy looks like the perfect model for the Hitler Youth. Probably not something that wins him any sympathies with Albin.

It's an intriguing find, wouldn't you say? I'm very sure that it's genuine.

--------------------------

It's been ages since I last played Vampire: The Masquerade. It was my first roleplaying game and I love it very much. I was a bit afraid that this might be nostalgia, but so far it's holding up. The dreaded meeting of the characters went really well, we connected over a couple of things and it wasn't just the Prince's order to work together.

I did a lot of reading for Albin's backstory - Polish history is complicated. I always played older vampires, but he's only 2 years old. Very much a child, as far as the others are concerned. And he still feels connected to his old life, I doubt that this will stop any time soon.

Strange Beasts: Harvestmen

2015-03-31T12:21:00.000+02:00

The enemy troops come into view and while the foot soldiers look like any other army except for the masks they wear, the cavalry is seated upon high-legged beasts resembling spiders. They are colourful, have spikes all over their body and prove to be dangerously fast. Their stench fills the air over the battlefield, huge jaws grab soldiers and cut them clean in half and they just won't fall, even when soldiers band together and manage to hack one or two legs off. Indeed, the beasts will drop legs on their own accord when attacked, leaving the soldiers to deal with the thrashing limb while they stalk on. After a while, the smell becomes almost unbearable and the reason for the masks apparent: any soldier without one becomes sluggish and some even fall, unconscious or dead.

I'm sure you have seen harvestmen before. They look a lot like spiders, but they are their own order of arachnids, the Opiliones (shepherds). They are perfectly harmless and even beneficial because a lot of them feed on decaying plant and animal matter, some even hunt for insects. One species has specialised in eating slugs.

In their normal size, I think they are adorable. But let's make them big enough to ride. They will tower over everything and they will be freakishly fast. Many of them can indeed drop legs when attacked. And all harvestman species will secret a smelly liquid when they feel threatened. The liquid is irritating to skin and lungs (although one harvestman will not secret enough of it to bother a human). For invertebrates, it can make them unconscious or even kill them. Put enough harvestmen in a container and they will knock each other out with it (please don't actually try this). So, you have a steed that is big, can cover a good distance in one stride, it has fangs and it even carries a built-in chemical weapon. What's not to like. Also, it looks badass.

A List of Strange Beasts

Shadowrun Rat's Nest: Schrödinger's Biker

2015-03-29T16:35:00.001+02:00

The group is driving along Lake Erie and decided they'd rather not drive through Cleveland. Apologies to Clevelanders, but I decided that the city was in the throes of death, with next to no jobs left and people abandoning ship. So they left the highway and made a detour through the suburbs, which didn't look any nicer. Lots of abandoned buildings, squatters, gang tags everywhere, burned out cars sitting in the road, the works.

A lone biker starts following the truck.

He does not look like someone who just drives around his midlife-crisis Harley Davidson.

The players start worrying. Oh shit, they say, he's a ganger. He's going to call his buddies and we're going to be toast. They'll have a barricade further along the road. Can we fight our way out of this, do we try to just drive through it or do we stop and negotiate? In the end, they stopped, got out and the biker (now with two friends) remarked that hey, this is a nice RV and wouldn't it be a shame if something happened, the streets are so unsafe these days, it's a shame, they're just keeping an eye out. 500 Nuyen later, the players are on their way again.

This was Schrödinger's Biker. I had no plans at all for him. I just let the players tell me all about him. After this display of high-level paranoia, I was a bit worried that they wouldn't bite the next story hook because, ideally, I needed them to go and join some strangers for dinner. But not to worry, when I mentioned the nice, big farmhouse they could see from the rest stop they had chosen for the night, they went: heeey, let's go there and ask if we can stay there instead. Story saved.

Deadlands: Blizzard

2015-02-15T18:31:00.001+01:00

Cast of Characters:
Alan Trehorn: Half-Apsalooke/Crow scout who might be taken for a greenhorn, but at your own risk.
Etienne DuMont: Texas Ranger. He used to be dead, but he got better.
Kenneth Lake: Professional poker player and reluctant participant in these events.
Dr. Frances Gray: Doctor and a strong believer in science and natural explanations.
Sister Elisabeth: A nun of maybe questionable past, but unquestionable faith.
Eliah Davis: Black cowboy who has seen some weird shit in his life. He spins this tale for you, somewhere at a camp fire on the prairie.

last time

I've always hated travelling in the winter and I usually see to it that I have employment on some farm well before the snow starts. I didn't plan to start doing things differently now, but travelling with Alan and the others, hunkering down somewhere was not in the cards. We found our way to Downsville, like Etienne was ordered, and arrived there with the first snow.

People here make their living with fur trading and mining mostly and a lot of men camped up on the mountains, closer to the actual mine. The mayor of Downsville told us that they hadn't heard from the camp for a while now and that the last they had heard was that there was some kind of plague. The doc had already sent for drugs, but the stagecoach from Denver was overdue already. We agreed to go look for the coach and bring the drugs to the snow camp, if we could.

The weather got worse when we set out. It snowed, but the worst thing was the sharp wind. The cold sets into your bones in that kind of weather and you just can't get warm, not matter how many clothes you wear. If you work up a sweat or get your clothes wet another way, you die.

At least we found the stagecoach. It had slipped down a steep hill and crushed its driver. The horses were dead, too. At least there were no passengers. The drugs were there and none of them damaged, too. Elisabeth came down after me and almost threw Kenneth off the rope we were using to climb, she was that eager to reach the coach. It had valuables on board, money and other stuff, and when we didn't agree to take them with us, she tried to steal some gold coins, but I caught her.

We took the drugs and the letters for the mining camp with us and decided to make our way there directly. We didn't make it in one day and got caught in a blizzard in the canyon leading up to the camp. In the middle of the night, wolves attacked us - they were mangy and sick, maybe suffering from the same plague as the people at the camp, the winter wasn't nearly long enough for them to be in such bad shape. They bit some of us and some of the horses, but we all survived and came to the mining camp the next day.

RPG Blog Carnival: Game Prep

2015-02-09T09:28:00.000+01:00

The theme of February's RPG Blog Carnival is How and Where I Write and/or Game Prep.

I improvise a lot during my sessions. But you do need some prep, even if it's only coming up with non-ridiculous character names or some cool photos of locations as inspiration. We play weekly, so I do bits and pieces whenever I find time, mostly on my laptop, where ever I might be at the moment. It all gets transferred to my tablet and/or sheets of paper stuffed into the rulebook and that I take with me to game night.

Actually coming up with ideas for scenarios and adventures is the hardest part for me. That's why I do most of that at the breakfast table with Mr Bookscorpion. He's a gamer himself, but I don't think that this is strictly necessary. I would just need someone willing to listen and to think about how the story could go. I throw ideas at him and he makes suggestions. Whether I take those up or not, explaining the situation to him and talking about where the group could be headed next helps a lot. Usually, I think about what we have come up with for the weekend, turning it over in my head until the rough edges are gone and then I go ahead and start the actual game prep.

The Carnival is hosted at Leicester's Ramble. Age of Ravens has a short survey about game prep, so if you have two minutes (six questions only), why not go and take it!

Deadlands: A Rain Will Come

2014-12-13T17:10:00.003+01:00

Cast of Characters:
Alan Trehorn: Half-Apsalooke/Crow scout who might be taken for a greenhorn, but at your own risk.
Etienne DuMont: Texas Ranger. He used to be dead, but he got better.
Kenneth Lake: Professional poker player and reluctant participant in these events.
Dr. Frances Gray: Doctor and a strong believer in science and natural explanations.
Sister Elisabeth: A nun of maybe questionable past, but unquestionable faith.
Eliah Davis: Black cowboy who has seen some weird shit in his life. He spins this tale for you, somewhere at a camp fire on the prairie.

last time

That night, nothing much happened. We all got some sleep and when it got light, Alan, Kenneth and me left to follow the tracks Alan had found. They led straight to the scientist's barn. No-one seemed to be around, so Kenneth climb through the window into the man's bedroom and opened the door to the main room. He ducked just in time to avoid having his head shot off his shoulders and he was kept down by something we took for a Gatling. Alan and me went around to the front of the barn, pulled open the door and looked down the barrel of another huge gun. Alan managed to hit the machine that fired the Gatling, so Kenneth could get out and we turned to run because the whole machinery inside looked like it was going to blow up any minute.

Which is exactly what it did, flattening the whole barn. And whatever that guy was working on, the stuff that had killed the miners, it was spreading in a cloud that drifted towards the village. We had just about enough time to warn everyone and to get our stuff. We took as many people as we could, I loaded a couple of kids on Sal with me and we got out of the village to high ground. The cloud was eating away everything in its path, leaving black and shrivelled grass and trees behind. The people who couldn't run fast enough took cover in the church and Sister Elisabeth stayed with them. The woman has guts, I give her that. Not a whole lotta brains, but guts. And a lot of trust in her god.

We watched from the top of a hill as the cloud spread over the village. I was pretty sure that we'd seen the last of the people in the church, but just in time, there was a rainstorm. And a mighty strange one, I've never seen one brew up so fast. And only over the village. I didn't know Sister Elisabeth could pray down rain, but I guess in such a situation you learn fast. It washed away the cloud of gas, leaving the village almost destroyed, the houses eaten away by the acid, trees crippled like they had tried to run away. A few people had been caught outside, there were only heaps of black ashes now.

The ground there won't be fertile for a long while now and the people knew it. They packed up their things and set out to find a new home. We didn't stay around either and continued westwards.

next time

Shadowrun: Rat's Nest Campaign of the Month

2014-11-25T16:48:00.000+01:00

The Shadowrun Rat's Nest campaign is Campaign of the Month over at Obsidian Portal! I am so freaking proud of this. We put such a lot of work into that campaign, both into preparing the actual sessions and into the wiki, the adventure logs and the NPCs. I don't even want to think about how many hours I have spent writing all those wiki articles, looking for good NPC photos and keeping everything well linked and tagged. We even got to talk about it in an interview.

If you're unfamiliar with it, Obsidian Portal is a website geared towards gamemasters and their groups, no matter the system. It offers you an easy way to keep track of your characters, host maps and character sheets online, you can create your own wiki and write adventure logs. And if you're looking for inspiration, check out the mass of campaigns hosted there, with lovingly created sites and a lot of great content. The community there is very friendly and helpful.

Update 2018: We have sinced moved the wiki to its own webspace here.

Deadlands: Prison Break

2014-11-17T13:16:00.001+01:00

Castle Blackbird: A Forest

2014-11-15T12:06:00.002+01:00

I completely forgot to write about this, but we finished our Castle Blackbird game a while ago with a third session. The characters decided to flee through the forest and find shelter at a small village. The village was deserted and when they opened the door to the inn, they were greeted by the sight of the Baron's soldiers. Quick reflexes saved them from getting shot, but not form the confrontation with the Baron. Not a man to be trifled with, he used all his powers to capture Konstanze again and those powers included dark magic. It took the combined effort of the group to kill him - and when he died, his troops vanished with him.

The group decided to go back to Amselburg. But when they turned back, the city was gone and there was no trace of it, like it had never been there.

I quite liked the ending of the whole story. After everyone thought that they had saved the day with killing the baron, that came as a bit of a shock. It also leaves a good hook if we ever want to play in the setting again.

Deadlands: Suspicions

2014-11-07T11:16:00.001+01:00

Cast of Characters:
Alan Trehorn: Half-Apsalooke/Crow scout who might be taken for a greenhorn, but at your own risk.
Etienne DuMont: Texas Ranger. He used to be dead, but he got better.
Kenneth Lake: Professional poker player and reluctant participant in these events.
Dr. Frances Gray: Doctor and a strong believer in science and natural explanations.
Sister Elisabeth: A nun of maybe questionable past, but unquestionable faith.
Eliah Davis: Black cowboy who has seen some weird shit in his life. He spins this tale for you, somewhere at a camp fire on the prairie.

last time

We waited in our hiding places, with Elisabeth walking up and down the street. Nothing much happened until we heared screams from somewhere behind the houses. We found a woman yelling her head off and a man with his throat cut. He died, there was nothing the doc could do. Elisabeth tried to save him, but only closed the wound. Of course no-one had seen anything. Kenneth, Alan and I tried to follow the tracks of the murderer. That brought us to a field a short way out of town, with only a scarecrow. These things always give me the willies, can't help myself. Wouldn't have been surprised one bit it if started walking, but it was just straw and some old clothes. The tracks stopped right behind it and we couldn't make heads or tails of them.

The town's resident scientist is experimenting with some kind of missile. At least we saw one go overhead, but when we went to look at the place it came down, we didn't find much of a crater. Just some burned grass and a dent in the earth. Same thing we found behind the scarecrow. When we returned to town, Elisa had been arrested by the good folks of Drywater Creek. Someone had produced a note that names her as the murderer and people found bloody clothes and a bloody knife in her room. Not much use in explaining to them that the clothes were bloody because she had tried to help the murdered man and that we had our eyes on her the whole time.

The sheriff wasn't to be found or maybe he just sleepy soundly. In any case, Elisa got locked into a barn. Not that she noticed because she had been drinking with Etienne and I don't think that's a competition any of us could win. I guarded her because I've seen people decide to take the law into their own hands more than once. This could get ugly mighty fast, people were already talking about witchcraft and how she was the whore of the whole gang who's supposed to commit these murders. In the morning, the sheriff brought her into prison and I stayed with her. He even left us alone and I thought about getting her out and making a run for it. But I don't know this land, we wouldn't have had a chance in hell to get away. We stayed put and we waited.

next time

Fallen London

2014-11-01T15:12:00.000+01:00

I have trouble sleeping, nightmares haunt me. My days are spent dining with devils and scrounging for secrets. Also, rats have infested my lodgings and want to settle the dispute with a game of cricket.

Fallen London is a free text-based browser game in the style of chose your own adventure-books. You must make a living in a city that has been brought underground and is now populated by all kinds of monsters, freaks and desperate people. If you always want to know for sure what is going on, then this is not your game. But if you relish a good mystery, unexplained events and atmospheric worldbuilding, then by all means give Fallen London a try. It's a mix of steampunk, Victorian London and Lovecraft, with some Gaiman thrown in (Neverwhere in particular).

Gameplay is very easy and nicely done. The world is huge, over 3000 storylets to follow, and I really applaud all the creativity that went into this. It's addicting, I can promise you that. But you only have twenty actions and when those are used up, you have to wait for them to refresh (ten minutes/action). That keeps the amount of time spent on the game in check, a feature I'm thankful for or I wouldn't come back to the world above at all.

Shadowrun Rat's Nest: Fun and Games

2014-10-29T14:58:00.001+01:00

My players are on their way to smuggle a truckload of chocolate from Seattle to Boston. After a tornado damaged their RV, they had a bit of downtime and decided to visit an amusement park. Okay, two players decided and the rest groaned and went along.

I had this throwaway idea of a fortune teller who'd give them a cliché reading and then later would be seen leaving the park in a hurry. This worked absolutely beautifully. The characters had found out that the fortune teller was the real deal or at least had actual magical talent. If you are doing something illegal, maybe it's not such a brilliant idea to let someone like this read your past and future, no? Cue major freak out of the players.

I thought they were going to rugby-tackle the poor woman when I describes her heading for the park exit. But the characters were content with some bullshit explanation and the advice to one of them to keep away from the white-water ride. For some added paranoia, they placed an RFID tag in the lady's backpack and where does she seem to be headed? To the town where they left the truck full of chocolate.

The rest of the day didn't go exactly smoothly (there was a guy who might or might not be a vampire and they attracted his attention AND a spirit took over a drug addict and ran amok), but the fortune teller was my personal favourite. I wanted them to feel a bit unsure, but I had not thought that I would cause this amount of panic. And we are not done with Madame Esme because part of the group wants to find her and ask her what in hell all this actually was about?

We are on Obsidian Portal

Cook Scorpion: Midnight Soup

2014-10-26T17:01:00.003+01:00

I have no idea where the name comes from. But whenever you eat it, this is a great recipe if you have to feed a lot of people quickly. You can also cook it the day before and it will only get better by sitting for a day. It's a staple for my roleplaying rounds. If you need a vegetarian recipe, I'm fairly sure that you can easily replace the minced meat with tofu.

You will need:

500 gr minced meat (doesn't matter if pork or beef or a half-half)
2-3 onions
some olive/sunflower oil
1.5 litres hot water
1 litre of tomato juice
1 bottle of ketchup (250ml I guess)
400 gr rice
salt, pepper and paprika/chili to taste

Sear minced meat and onions in the oil. When the meat is brown-ish, add the water, the tomato juice and the ketchup and bring to a boil. Add the rice and let it cook gently for 20 minutes (you can more or less switch off the stove after 10 minutes). Season to taste. You're done.
If you let the soup sit for a day, the rice will soak up all the water, but that doesn't change the taste at all. If you want to, add some more tomato juice/water when you re-heat it. Take care it doesn't burn. Goes well with fresh bread. Will feed six gamers with big appetites.

Humans & Households

2014-10-19T14:03:00.003+02:00

The new The Gamers miniseries: Humans & Households. Episode one is the set up and it's all fun and games, but episode two is where the real mayhem starts. I will never look at mailboxes the same way again.
If you want to support them, you can buy the series here for 10$ or more.

Cook Scorpion: Banana Rolls

2014-10-17T13:05:00.000+02:00

Banana Rolls - I came across the recipe here and I had time and almost all the ingredients, so I made them. The recipe is vegan, my rolls certainly are not, I replaced the almond milk with cow's milk and used normal butter. I also didn't have walnuts, but I did have chocolate sprinkles and I don't think you can go wrong with those.

The rolls are best served warm and if you can't do that, at least nuke them in the microwave for a bit. I brought them to my Shadowrun session and almost none of us could eat more than one - and usually roleplayers devour enormous amounts of food, so be warned.

Deadlands: Drywater Creek

2014-10-02T10:23:00.000+02:00

Cast of Characters:
Alan Trehorn: Half-Apsalooke/Crow scout who might be taken for a greenhorn, but at your own risk.
Etienne DuMont: Texas Ranger. He used to be dead, but he got better.
Kenneth Lake: Professional poker player and reluctant participant in these events.
Dr. Frances Gray: Doctor and a strong believer in science and natural explanations.
Sister Elisabeth: A nun of maybe questionable past, but unquestionable faith.
Eliah Davis: Black cowboy who has seen some weird shit in his life. He spins this tale for you, somewhere at a camp fire on the prairie.
last time

We travelled to Drywater Creek, Eitenne had been ordered to go there. With no good knowledge of the land and no maps, that proved more difficult than we had thought. But we kept in what we thought was the right direction and finally we found someone who knew the place. That's a story worth telling, whom we found and how.

A dog kept barking at us and running around until we followed it and came to a crevice. A boy had fallen into it and we pulled him out. The dog was nowhere to be seen once we had gotten the boy out - he told us that it had died a couple of years earlier. Yeah, well, I've seen stranger things than a good dog keeping its eye out for his master even when its dead. We took the boy to his parents, he had broken his leg and couldn't walk. They were friendly enough, we got a good meal and a night in their home and directions to Drywater Creek.

In the morning, Elisabeth got it into her head to heal the boy. I can't really blame her for that, a broken leg is no small thing for a family who has to take care of a farm. It would have been better if she hadn't done it in secret, without telling the parents. The next thing they know, their boy is running around the house, all healed up. And they thought witchcraft, of course. Asked us to leave and backed up the asking with a shotgun.

So we were on our way, came to Drywater Creek not long after that. The first thing we saw was the dead body hung to rot on a tree, with a sign round his neck: murderer. The sheriff told Etienne the story: the guy had been making trouble for a while. He didn't live in town, he was part of a local gang of scum who are camping out somewhere. One day, he got into a fight and killed someone. The townspeople arrested him, waited for the judge and then hanged him. Since then, there has been a murder every night. People are scared and the sheriff is too much of a paper pusher to do something about it. He was glad to accept our help and we decided to stake out main street, with Elisabeth as a target for the murderer. Since no-one else is going outside at night for fear of being murdered, she should make a nice decoy.

The people here are not overly found of anyone who isn't white. They are not that bothered by me, but Alan gets treated like shit. If Etienne hadn't thrown his weight around, he wouldn't even have gotten a room at the saloon. Doesn't make me all that eager to help them out, truth be told.

---------------------

Yes, Lassie wanted to tell us little Timmy has fallen into the well.

And the characters were so pissed at Elisabeth for healing him. Somehow we always end up in trouble when she does that. Okay, not always. But try travelling around a country where the people are at the same time religious and superstitious with someone who works miracles left and right and whose people skills suck. She has a knack of poleaxeing people and only very few of them enjoy being preached at at the drop of a hat.

next time

Shadowrun Rat's Nest: Rain Check

2014-09-17T09:31:00.001+02:00

Instead of GMing Shadowrun, I'm sitting in bed, smelling like an eucalyptus tree and drinking copious amounts of tea in the hope that my cold doesn't turn into something worse. I was lookong forward to today's session. The players have made it out of the NAN and are planning on visiting an amusement park. Well, the two youngest characters want it and the others roll their eyes and go along.

If you happen to be a player in this campaign, I'd rather you not read on, please.

How often do you get the chance for an amusement park setting in Shadowrun? This is a gift. The players are already paranoid about all the horrible things that can happen and I do my best to keep them that way, casually dropping hints about how I've been reading up on accidents in amusement parks or how roller coasters are built. I actually did learn a lot of stuff about amusement park rides - roleplaying has always taught me the most abstruse things. My players have their money on real ghosts in the haunted house, a mascot running amok or a roller coaster coming off the tracks.

I had been fancying the haunted house and I might do it. I have a handful of minor stuff that can/will go wrong and one very big thing. But at first, I will sit back and wait to see if the characters manage to get themselves into trouble. So far, they have been very good at this. This is something I've come to rely on as a GM - most of the time, your players will do something, either really stupid or really inspired, and you just need to run with it.

One thing I am going to do for sure is the fortune teller. Who will take one look at a character's hand, go white as a sheet and give a cliché reading about a dark, handsome stranger and all that. And then she will close up her booth in a hurry and will be seen powerwalking towards the park's entrance not much later. I'm sure that this will ramp up player paranoia no end.

Castle Blackbird: Whitewater

2014-09-16T12:01:00.000+02:00

We continue our Castle Blackbird game and to no-one's particular surprise, we still didn't finish. We could have, I could have rushed the story to an end, but given the choice, my players opted for a third session (we just need to convince the absent player).

By now, the characters are out Amselburg, by taking a boat down the river. And Konstanze has started to have visions in which she takes the form of a raven, one of the many who report back to the Baron. She has no idea where this is going, but the visions are real and she can even make the raven do things. Some rapids destroyed the boat and now the characters are in a dark forest, with the Baron closing in on them. At least he is on the wrong side of the river.

I'm still flying by the seat of my pants here as a GM. I have a rough idea where this is going to end and I have figured out why the Baron needs to have Konstanze back by midnight, but everything else is improvised. Luckily, I have players who do a lot of the heavy lifting by coming up with idea and scenes for themselves. Now I just need to get over the panicky feeling that people are bored when they are really not. I am incredibly bad at judging my own stories and if people are having fun playing in them. I think every GM is probably too critical of themselves (every good GM anyway), but part of this is really reading cues wrong, even from people I have played with for more than a decade. I'm not sure how to deal with this, but being told that oh yes, they want a third session helps a lot.