Time Travelers
Part 1: The Awakening
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In Game |
Out of Character |
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The party steps into the pool and comes out the other side into a chamber whose mix of piety, poverty, and ostentatiousness can only come from a house of worship. Prayer mats line the walls, and a clean oak altar stand at the front of the room. Above the altar is a stained glass window depicting the crucifixion, and other scenes of the Christ’s life gleam with the fading rays of the sun through windows on the two flanking walls. Two out of place statues in full samurai armor stand on either side of the altar, their swords held high. As the group enters the statues begin to move, protecting their charge from the intruders. As they walk towards the party, their arms fly out and the stone of the building rolls inward to cover the windows and doors. Artesano moves away from them and draws a magical bead on the one closest to him, setting it up for future shots. Arik swings his axe, which has transformed into a more primitive tool, festooned with a Native American chain of fetishes. Naxis steps back and launches a thunderbolt at the one on the right, but the magic bounces harmlessly off it. Adran looks around and feels the flow of Fate in this new world. He reaches out to it and wraps himself in it. Chaugnar opens a portal to this realm’s Far Realms and familiar tentacles come through to grab and tug at the guardians. The samurai statue nearest to Arik slams him with the pommel of its blade. The other is too caught up by the tentacles to move, and instead he buckles his legs under him as if preparing for a mighty leap. At the last moment, before he goes into the air, the stone floor flows up like water and hardens over his feet. The resulting pull and push shakes the room, knocking over all but Adran, and even knocking the sword and gun out of Naxis and Artesano’s hands. Artesano stands and reaches to his side for his second hand crossbow to find it has become a shiny chrome Hekler & Koch MP7 Machine pistol. Arik stands and feels his anger swelling through him. In a flicker he grows two feet taller and much heavier. Now swinging his heavy axe easier, the werewolf slams it into a statue. Naxis grabs his sword and stands as well. Adran calls forth divine fire, but it washes almost harmlessly over the two guardians. Chaugnar’s tendrils continue their assault and he attempts to wrap one of the statues in a cloak of frigid darkness, but it is ignored. Gain the creatures attack Arik and shake the building, this time knocking over the fighter, artificer, and sword mage. Nobody loses their grip on their blades this time. Artesano stands again and takes out one guardian’s eye with a short burst. Arik in Gauru form smashes one soundly with his axe and his rage, while Naxis tries to bend the forces of gravity around himself in a protective shield, but he accidentally reverses his intentions. Adran keeps the fires burning and uses his Life magic to heal the werewolf’s bruises, though the massive creature is healing itself at a phenomenal rate. Again Chaugnar tries to wrap one in frozen night, putting every ounce of his will into the casting, but again the creature sloughs it off. One of the statues breaks free of the tentacles, and the other responds to Arik’s rage with a righteous shout of its own, slamming its sword deep into the lupine flesh. Artesano takes out the other eye of the statue still held, and Arik responds with a crushing blow of his own, sending marble fragments spraying through the room and armor clattering to the floor. Naxis tries to drop the last one but his magic washes harmlessly off, and Adran stretches his newfound arcane muscles to telekinetically hurl a piece of the destroyed guardian at the other. Chaugnar wraps himself in arcane armor, pulling mana from the Hallow to make sure it lasts all day. |
The PCs have been converted to Mage: The Awakening stats except for the fighter, who became a Werewolf. They are: Adran, Arik, Artesano, Chaugnar, and Naxis. I also emailed out a quick reference sheet during the week so we weren’t coming back to the system cold. There turned out to be some omissions and errors in the sheet, but it was close enough for a two-shot game.
Sharpshooter’s Eye lowers the artificer’s penalties for called shots by 6, making aiming for the eyes as easy as aiming at the chest. The two statues are The earth control was a nasty power, made nastier by my misue of the botch rules. Only a 1 on a chance die should be a botch in World of Darkness, but I was under the impression that it worked like Scion: no successes and at least a single 1 is a botch. The misunderstanding caused the artificer and swordmage to both lose their grip on their weapons. Later it caused Naxis’s armor spell to lower his defenses instead of increasing them. If you’re prone, standing takes your action for the turn in nWoD. We later changed this to only take up your movement instead. Another time when their massive counterspells were a bad idea. I’ll stop mentioning them now, but this wasn’t the last time. I’ve definitely been spoiled by Exalted / Scion multiple actions and D&D Standard / Move / Minor setup. Having only two actions per round really seemed to hamper the game, especially since one of which is usually meaningless because everyone’s movement is huge and there are no opportunity attacks. I would have loved to describe how the spirit animating the statue was partially blinded by the burst to its face, but with everything being an Instant action there was little chance that someone would take a turn activating Mage Sight. At this point the Warlock basically said screw it, and I don’t blame him. Even when he got +3 dice for spending Willpower, the swingy nature of the d10 system made him whiff. |
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New Faces In the back corner a shimmering portal opens. A man in a pin striped suit, Bluetooth in his ear, steps through. Behind him come four monks in Friar Tuck-like frocks. The monks and Suit walk carefully towards the altar. Suit is focused on the goal, and his acolytes eye the battle warily. The guardian slams Arik, trying to push him back so it can get to the altar, and Artesano shoots the thing in the leg, knocking it off balance where it falls to Arik’s axe. They take a moment to catch their breaths, and speak to the suited man. After they have told their names, he inquires as to whether they have been awakened long? He warns them that names have power, and bids them call him Suit. He has come for a relic, and thanks them for destroying the guardians. As he gives a massive heave and rolls the altar over, he tells them that they may have the Hallow in exchange for their assistance. From beneath the altar he pulls out a weathered and ancient tome, its cover stitched together from many strips of leather. They inquire about it, mostly looking to find their way home, but he assures them they would not want to walk through the portals this tome can open. He gives them his card in case they should wish to talk farther, and then leaves. Before he goes, the Talisman of Orcus tells Artesano that it “needs to learn to do that, because that’s cool.” The Suit and his fellows leave back the way they came, and the group surveys their surroundings. The area around where the altar stood pours forth invisible mana, tangible to their Awakened senses. Where the tome was is a ragged hole of torn ground and torn reality, whispy fragments of both slowly swirling to the bottom where they stop. The battle and aftermath have given the sun time to disappear, and Artesano hears muffled talking on the other side of the stone-covered door, and moments after a fist smashes it to rubble Arik’s nostrils are assailed with a stench of the unnatural, a foul mixture of life and death. Three people walk in: two mean and one woman, all in trench coats. The woman gives her name as Alyssa demands to know where the tome is, and when told demands to know where the man in the suit went. Naxis has the feeling he has seen the woman before, but he can’t put his finger on it. The group explains they are here by accident, and are accused of wandering away from “a Ren Fair” (whatever that might be). Alyssa explains to them that the tome has the power to open a portal to a world that should never be allowed near this one, and Chaugnar intimidates her into giving more information with a litany of the names of the Stars from the Far Realms in their time. When he reaches that of Gibbeth, who should be spoken of in whispers if at all, she shows recognition in her eyes and allows that the tome is aspected to that Ancient One. They agree to each go their separate ways to try to find Suit, and meet back up the next evening to compare notes. |
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Let’s Get This Party Started When asked about “an inn, where we might get a room and
listen to rumors” Alyssa directs them to the small town of At the Scallywag, which is both bar and motel, they get two rooms. Upstairs they marvel at how clean and tasty the water is in the porcelain never-empty well. They discuss perhaps tearing it from its moorings to take back with them, but decide not to do so yet. Back downstairs Chaugnar buys a round for the house and
banters with the locals. He learns that this sleepy village was recently
blessed by a second monastery, albeit a more modern one. It is on the far
side of the cove from that of The Order, the odd Adran reaches out and tugs at the strings of Fate, hoping to make sure that someone who can help them will arrive, and moments later Sheriff Knox, the towns’ only lawman, walks through the door. Though the uniform is unfamiliar, the word “sheriff” appears to be related to “sharif” the title of the middle ranked lawmen in Calimshan. The priest talks to him some, and learns that a man named Jason Statham (no relation) has opened up a monastery of his own outside of town. He appears to be a good guy, always paying his bills on time, even the exorbitant one the butcher charges for several hundred pounds of meat a week. The meat is used to feed the order’s dogs, big and scary mastiffs like nothing Knox has ever seen. Chaugnar nods, believing the dogs could be from a ritual he knows of, which summons massive guardian terrors from the Far Realms. Naxis finally remembers where he’s seen Alyssa’s face. She looks incredibly like his wife, who was turned to a vampire long ago. It isn’t her, but could pass for a sister. Arik drinks, and not much else. Artesano stays with him, getting drunk on the knowledge he gleans from his own devices and those scattered about the bar. As the party winds down, all but Adran head upstairs to sleep. Adran sleeps at the Hallow. In the middle of the night Arik sees Chaugnar’s eyes talking to one another with mouths for pupils. They’ve pulled themselves out of his head so they can talk “face to face.” One of them slithers all the way out and into the bathroom. Arik rolls over and ignores it. The next day they ask where to buy some clothes, and with their coin purses turned to plastic cards, they head out to rent a car and buy some local duds. Arik’s stay in the future gave him a little driving skill, and enough economic knowledge to get through a purchase with little trouble. At the Hallow Chaugnar studies the hole under the altar
more, and attempts to scry through it. He sees the familiar chaos of the Far
Realms on the other side, and a cacophony of minds try
to pry into his. Inside his head four voices chant “Gibbeth.”
Three he knows, and brought with him to this world, but one is new. As he
pushes away the scrying sensor, the chanting subsides. The oldest of his
voices says “The man of truth has learned that illusion is the one reality,
and that substance is the great imposter.” Then they are silent again. |
A little Streetwise goes a long way. In Mage, Fate is the uber Acrcana. You can find out anything you want to know, protect yourself, get the ability to reroll 8’s, and more. Most of the time it’s even covert. There was some joking about eating a can of alphabet soup, sticking your finger down your throat, and then reading the sentences the vomit writes. With Fate, that’s not a joke.
I keep forgetting to put it in, because when I hand the warlock’s player notes of what his three voices are saying, it’s spur of the moment and I don’t write the quote down. Most of them were pulled from Lovecraft, but the 4th voice is from a new source. |
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Attack At Dawn Shortly before the next dawn the questers
crest the One of the beats runs up and wraps its jaws around Arik’s axe, pulling it out of the man’s hands. Three surround Naxis and claw, bite, and slam him but the one who tries a similar disarm maneuver fails, drawing back a mouth full of blood as it bites the great sword. Adran and Artesano are also bitten. Up in the trees two more beats reveal themselves as one fire shards of bone and blood while the other screams gibbering madness into Arik’s mind. Arik picks up his axe and shifts to Gauru form. The “dogs” follow up their first assault with much more carnage, dragging the artificer to the ground and biting on the rest. Adran heals Artesano’s most grievous wounds, and a little on himself. Naxis opens a portal behind one of the creatures and telekinetically shove it through, following and pulling some of the heat off of the artificer. Chaugnar’s tentacles rip another hole in the sky and grab two of the creatures, while Arik takes a mighty swing at one of the creatures in front of him. Again Arik’s axe is pulled away, and this time the rest of the pack knocks the warlock and artificer to the ground. Adran channels his will into a pair of spells, healing both of his fallen comrades at once. Naxis blasts the dog he teleported and moves out of its reach, while Chaugnar puts pain into the mind of the creature shrieking in the trees. The werewolf hones his rage into a fiery point and bites the “dog” in front of him. Again the beasts’ attacks put people on the brink of death, this time Naxis and Adran. The two creatures battling the tentacles break free, while Artesano summons a healing elixir over the still form of the warlock, and Chaugnar stands again. The tentacles pick the beasts up again and the warlock’s psychic assault almost kills one of them in a single burst of agony. Arik kills the one whose teeth keep stealing his axe. One of the creatures drags Naxis’s still form into the trees, and the rest lay about themselves with tentacles, teeth, and bone. The screamer in the trees burrows deep into Arik’s mind, distracting him from the carnage he is causing. Artesano rushes into the trees but can’t get to Naxis, so he heals Adran instead. The priest stands and heals himself some more. Chaugnar’s tentacles tear one of the creatures to bits, and he mind blasts another beast. Arik kills another. The beast with Naxis nudges him into a hole at the base of a tree, and the one Chaugnar just blasted flees to attack the werewolf instead. Artesano creates a huge cloud of tiny cybernetic scorpions which draw tight together and swarm one of the creatures. Adran summons more fire, this time in the tree with the mind screamer, but does no damage at all. Chaugnar finishes off the one that fled his mental wrath. Arik continues to rage in the face of the closest monster to him. The one that dragged Naxis away gives a strange mixture of a hiss and a growl, warning Artesano away from its food. When the artificer does not comply, it charges him. The one in the trees flays Adran’s flesh with shotgun blasts of bone and blood. Artesano directs his attention to healing Naxis and Arik, but that draws it away from his summoned verminous swarm. They charge the nearest meat, which turns out to be Adran, but a branch broken loose by a stray shot earlier falls and bars their path. Concerned by this new foe, Adran’s will sharpens and he heals himself almost completely with a single spell. Naxis, now awake again, stands and uses a Thunderbolt to blast the creature trying to store him for winter. The screamer fends off a psychic assault from the warlock. A beast leaps at Chaugnar and he dodges aside, while Adran’s newfound health is stripped away again by the monster spraying bones. Artesano reaches out with the power of Life and takes control of the base instincts of the insects that comprise the cybernetic swarm, and he directs their rage at the screamer in the trees. They scurry up the oak and swarm over the thing. Adran heals himself again, and Naxis opens a portal behind the one trying to eat him, but his follow-up telekinetic strike misses. The portal hangs in the air. Chaugnar finally stabs deep into the brain of the shrieker in the trees, and it falls to the ground in a lifeless heap. Arik rages continuously. The remaining four beasts mount a furious counteroffensive, and drag both Naxis and Adran down. Chaugnar and Arik are also injured. Artesano tries to shove the creature through the portal and into the range of Arik’s deadly axe, but it is too large for him. The warlock wishes he could wrap his foe in darkness and death, but is too focused on defense to do anything else. Arik’s rage ends and he drops back into his human form, picks up his axe, and heads towards another fiend to kill. Two of the creatures drag Arik down, and Artesano heals himself. He tries to heal Naxis as well, but fails. Arik kills one of the creatures nearest him. The one still in the trees spits two cracked leg bones at the man, and one drives itself through each lung. Before he can fall to the ground the monster inside him takes over. He grows back into Gauru form and runs off into the morning light, seeking the only shelter he knows: the Pool and its path home. The verminous swarm gnaw on their target, who reacts but can’t kill enough of the things to matter. Artesano heals Naxis and then Chaugnar. Thunderbolts and Frigid Darkness finish off the remaining two as Artesano heals Adran enough that he can heal himself. The party heads to the Hallow to heal and hopefully find Arik. |
It looks just like that, but there are no mountains in the background. The surprise round plus high initiative plus big rolls was nasty. I don’t know if the nightmare beasts were tougher than I intended them to be (they were SWAT officers with different merits), or if the swing of the system made them seem so. I dig the Mage system, but the dice under it are too funky. They seemed to consistently refuse to come anywhere near the expected 1/3 successes, with it usually being my dice that got many more and the players’ that got many less. The mind-screamer is the only one with an ability a SWAT member couldn’t have. Instead of a ranged attack with two shots I gave it a mental assault that uses the same pool as Psychic Assault, but applies a 1-die penalty per success instead of dealing bashing damage. Another way I’m spoiled by Fourth Edition: the healers in this game couldn’t do anything but heal most of the time, whereas in 4th they’d have healed as a minor action and still been able to be aggressive.
All mages with 2 dots in an Arcana can use it to cover themselves in armor. The mechanics are mostly the same, but how it happens is different. We mostly just treated it as the points of armor it gives, but I added this to the description of how Adran’s armor stops damage through coincidence. If I can remember it in the heat of battle, I want to include more descriptions like this. There’s a lot of “stand up – fall down – stand up” going on in this fight, and it makes things seem to drag forever. It’s about on par with D&D’s rules for standing up when you’re healed, but because healing takes your only action and standing prevents you from moving (because we house ruled it), it’s a far cry from D&D’s minor action to heal. The games have a different focus, and this works for the gritty super-powers mage wants to be, but it was a big shock translating a Heroic Destiny game to this system. I’ve been contemplating rules that could help. This is another thing that bugged me. Doubling your defense or adding your weaponry/brawl to it is definitely nice, and could go a long way towards keeping people alive, but it takes your action for your next turn. If you do it you are less likely to drop, but you’ve possibly only dug your hole deeper. Several of the nightmare beats had brawling dodge, so they could have upped their defense by 4. But I never even contemplated using it. Arik’s damage forces a roll to avoid death rage, and he flees the fight in a fear frenzy. I say “x bothered me” a lot, but I did have fun. Unfamiliarity played a role in some of the issues, and I would definitely play Mage again, but preferably with some house rules to avoid action paralysis and pogo-sticking health bars. I like the magic system and the way they’ve laid out hundreds of preplanned options for spells but left it open for you to create effects on the fly as well. |
