LWaSH player character tokens

I think I've actually found a solution to that whole customizable token thing I was musing about a while back. I got the idea from a bunch of magnets Brigid had on her refrigerator. She sent me a link to the instructions she'd used to make them, and I basically just did the same thing minus the magnet part.


Basically, I just bought a pile of these things, and all I've gotta do print out my character portraits and paste 'em on. The really remarkable bit? If I run out of glass bits, I can just scrub off the portraits and reuse them.

Anyway, we've been using these things in Lost Worlds and Secret Histories to represent the PCs on my simple little hand-drawn maps. Range and positioning in Spirit of the Century is handled in a really fuzzy way, using general "zones" instead of any kind of exact measurements, so playing it fast-and-loose totally works. I think I might get a magnetic whiteboard to draw maps on, and maybe actually add magnets to the character tokens. That could be pretty convenient.

Oh, one other thing: SotC frequently features hordes of minor antagonists ("minions") who really don't rate their own tokens, and would really start to crowd the map if they got 'em. So, instead of inch-and-a-half glass bits with pictures, we've been using those little "glass stones" people use to keep track of point pools in other games.

LWaSH session 6: Loose ends resolved

Okay, so in last night's session of Lost Worlds and Secret Histories (5/27/2008), we finally finished up the big fight from the previous session, and also played out that phonecall that called Myrna away from the main action back in session 4. Herr Wolf pretty much stayed preoccupied throughout this session, since his player had other commitments, and Arthur Chamberlain remained absent, since his player was sick. Also, this was Abraham Hale's last session (unless I end up NPCing him or something), since his player is moving.


Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, England

Myrna, called away from the rest of the team's investigation by a phone call, finds herself on the receiving end of aggressive questions and legal threats from Sergeant Alphonse Pendergast of the police. He demands to know just what she and her associate (Marko) said to Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby when they questioned him just about an hour before, and also warns her to drop her own investigation into the Swillby affair and let the police handle things.

Myrna, being very socially capable, manages to defuse his anger, and gets him to admit the reason for his sudden attention: Sir Felix left his hotel quite abruptly after talking to Myrna and Marko, leaving the police no way to contact him, and little clue as to his state of mind. The Sergeant is suspicious of the Van Helsing Society's mysterious nature--it's not exactly public knowledge that they investigate the supernatural, after all--but Myrna's mildly coquettish demeanor flusters him badly, and she manages to put him off the scent. However, she, in turn, is cowed by his legal authority, and disengages from the conversation before he can extract any promises of noninterference from her, but also before she can get much information out of him.

Meanwhile, back at Bad Bob's warehouse headquarters, Abraham Hale, Marko Kraljević, Robin Stormchaser, and Herr Wolf are mopping up the remains of their fight against the blackshirts and Nazi agents.

Behind the warehouse, Blackshirt leader Robert "Bad Bob" Roberts flees his one-time ally, the knife-wielding Nazi madman known as Herr Zahn, through the rainy night, hoping to escape in a truck with his surviving henchmen. Robin, fearless as ever, chases after Zahn, and Marko races out of the warehouse after her. Abraham, all the way on the other side of the warehouse and suffering from a minor leg wound, decides to get back in the car and simply drive to the action. Wolf is still inside the warehouse, bandaging the grievous wounds Abe inflicted on Herr Blitz, the Nazi turncoat.

Robin shoves Herr Zahn, and the berserk German slips on the wet cobblestones, falling into a puddle. Instead of picking himself up, however, he tears open his shirt, revealing a metal plate covered in arcane designs. He turns his knife on himself, hacking and sawing at the light-gague chains the hold the plate onto his body. Robin and Marko aren't occult experts on Herr Wolf's level, but they do recognize that whatever that plate is supposed to do, breaking the chains that fasten it to Zahn will stop its effects, not activate them.

Happy that Herr Zahn is distracting the Van Helsing team, Bad Bob and his five remaining blokes pile into the lorry and start up the engine.

It's about then that Abraham comes around the corner, turning hard so that his car fishtails on the wet street, skidding towards the blackshirts' truck sideways. Abe leans out the window, and--with typical flawless accuracy--fires a round into the lorry's gas tank. The truck explodes, blasting Bad Bob and four surviving--but somewhat concussed and scorched--blackshirts into the street. Part of the car flies off and hits another nearby truck, this one a flatbed stacked with petrol barrels. The steel drums come loose . . . falling in a heap on top of the prone Herr Zahn, crushing one of his arms completely and knocking him unconscious.

The blackshirts, deprived of their escape, stand and fight, until exploding fuel barrels and sheer terror of Marko's inhuman resilience whittle their numbers down. Eventually, Bad Bob stands alone, shot in the shoulder by Abe and unable to handle his shotgun. Robin, taking advantage of his injury, simply manhandles him into the trunk of the Van Helsing Society car.

Police whistles begin to sound in the distance. Abraham delivers a dire--and entirely honest--warning to the two blackshirts who surrendered during the fight, forever cementing a very healthy terror of the Van Helsing Society into the English far-right community. They run like hell when told to do so.

The police whistles are getting closer, and now the bobbies can be heard running on the cobblestones. Marko dashes back into the warehouse to ransack its office and retrieve Sir Felix's stolen parcel, and also collects Herr Wolf and Herr Blitz, exiting at the front of the building. Robin and Abe--with Bad Bob still in their trunk--drive the length of the warehouse to meet them there, and see the remaining petrol cans atop Herr Zahn explode in their rear-view mirror. Marko, Wolf, and Blitz pile in, and the whole group speeds back to the Society clubhouse.

There, Abraham interrogates Bad Bob, who sings like a bird after a little persuasion. Bob reveals that the Nazi party has been supplying his gang and other blackshirt groups with money and weapons for a little less than a year, now. Just days ago, these three German agents--Blitz, Zahn, and Stahl--showed up and demanded a favor in return: They were to procure a postage parcel from Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby's flat. All they were told was that the Nazis were interested in something a scientist named Bagsnip had found in Africa, and they needed information in that parcel to pinpoint his location.

The blackshirts stole the package for them (not knowing they'd left behind a couple items that fell out of the box: the photo and Magnetophone recording which were later found at the scene of the crime), and Herr Blitz managed to radio the vital information to some unknown party shortly before the Van Helsing team tore into their headquarters.


So now the team knows that Bagsnip has indeed found some dangerous artifact, and that the Nazis don't have it yet, but do know where to find him. With any luck, our next session will feature a trip to Africa!

I was really surprised that Myrna didn't completely destroy the Sergeant in her social conflict with him. She really outclassed him in every way, but somehow the dice were just not on her side, that night. Marko had a really awesome moment when he actually got to invoke his own complication ("Full of Holes", or something like that) to improve his Intimidation role (with much success, too). Abraham was definitely the star of this session (appropriate--since it's his last--but totally unintentional), managing to do lots of great trick shots and scaring the hell out of people. He totally shut down Herr Zahn right before the Nazi bastard was about to become a real problem for the party. It was beautiful.

LWaSH session 5: War in a warehouse!

Man, it's taken me forever to get around to writing this one up. This session was played Tuesday, 5/13/2008 (not 5/20/2008, because people just didn't feel up to gaming that night), and while it was probably our longest session to date, it should be simple enough to summarize as it was basically just one big fight scene.


Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, England

Following directions they extracted from the blackshirts they roughed up last session, Abraham, Marko, Robin, and Herr Wolf come to a dockside warehouse where the alleged perpetrators of the Swillby burglary--another blackshirt gang run by a man called "Bad Bob"--are reputed to have their headquarters.

Abe hears German and English voices inside raised in agitated debate. Robin, uninterested in making plans of attack or investigating quietly, simply knocks on the front personnel door. Abe waits for the footsteps to approach the door, and then kicks it open, knocking unconscious the blackshirt behind it. Not to be outdone, Marko grabs the giant cargo doors, and tears them open as well.

Inside the cluttered, smoky warehouse, Bad Bob and his gang of blackshirts--a much tougher, more criminal, less political bunch than the ones the PCs beat so badly last session--are rushing to investigate the commotion, and all of them are armed with guns. To make matters worse, there are also three Nazi agents there, all wearing long, dark-gray coats and hats in an attempt to be inconspicuous. They are...

• Herr Blitz: lightning-wielding war sorcerer!

• Herr Zahn: knife-wielding bersker with unnatural speed and ferocity!

• Herr Stahl: hulking, steel-reinforced, man-machine abomination!

The fight that follows is long, full of awesome stunts, and increasingly complicated. Abraham fights with a tommygun in just one hand and a pistol in the other, shooting chains and pipes from the warehouse ceiling to come crashing down on his foes. Robin dashes in fearlessly, using her homespun charm to convince some blackshirts to surrender, and her mysterious connection with the thunderbird to harness Herr Blitz's own lightning against them. Marko wades into hordes of lessed men like a titan among dolls, fighting with both his fists and mace. Herr Wolf uses his arcane knowledge and sinister charisma to much greater effect than his gun.

A major turning point in the conflict comes when Wolf frees the bound lightning elementals that gave Blitz his powers, causing the sorcerer's book of magic to be burned away in the process. Wolf soon manages to convince Blitz to turn his coat, but no sooner does the Nazi sorcerer defect than Abraham shoots, blinds, and nearly kills him! Wolf made his pitch in German, of course, and Abe distrusts foreign talk almost as much as he hates Nazis.

Seeing the inevitable defeat of his side, Bad Bob flees the scene, taking a few of his blackshirts with him. But Herr Zahn, incensed at this betrayal, chases after him. Robin, in turn, chases both of them out into the rainy London night.

Meanwhile, back in the warehouse, Marko defeats Her Stahl, and puts the self-loathing proto-cyborg out of his misery by crushing his head. The remaining blackshirts surrender. But Robin is chasing after the maniac Zahn his equally-loathesome prey all alone!


We left off on that cliffhanger. Assuming we can get the right people together for tonight's session, we should be resolving it in just a few hours! And, hopefully, I won't take two whole weeks to do the writeup for it.

Stuff I learned: Real fights in Spirit of the Century--as opposed to the cakewalk I handed them last time--are even more fun . . . but it's possible to go overboard. SotC PCs are tough enough that they're really tough to threaten, but it's very possible to hand them a fight that'll just take retardedly long. Also, the Fate ladder is kind of a pain in the ass. I hate being told that somebody got a result of "Fantastic" and then trying to remember if that's actually a +6 or +7 in real money. (Absurdly, I still remember the descriptiors-to-numbers conversions for the freaking Marvel Super Heroes RPG. Now that is some wasted brain space.)

LWaSH session 4: Things are definitely getting pulpy, now.

Well, it's taken me forever to write this up, but I didn't have any trouble remember what happened last Tuesday, since Jim was good enough to provide me with a remarkably high-quality recording of the session. And wow does my voice sound terrible. My own wife couldn't even recognize it. But it's all extremely clear, and totally got the job done. It also did a great job of showing me exactly how much time we spend chatting on various tangents, so that's something we clearly still need to work on.

However, everybody gets the system, now, so things are going a lot quicker than the previous session. Also, we finally got some properly pulpy elements into the mix, including our first fight scene!


Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, England

It's the day after the events of the previous session, and PCs are at the London headquarters of the Van Helsing Society, discussing the burglary at Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby's apartment and the leads they currently have on the case. Arthur Chamberlain isn't present, as he was called away on Vatican business in the early morning.


Marko Kraljevic--who has lately been hitting the books in an attempt to catch up with a world six hundred years ahead of his own time--manages to recognize the landscape in the photograph recovered from the crime scene as possibly being somewhere in north-eastern Africa (although not quite as far north as Egypt).

The metal canister discovered along with the photo is finally opened, and is revealed to contain a Magnetophon tape. Only Robin--the most technically-minded of the bunch--is able to recognize the cutting-edge audio recording technology.

It's about then that they are approached, somewhat abruptly, by a fellow Society member who they've seen around the clubhouse but never really spoken with. He introduces himself as Howard Lovecraft, one of the Society's experts on pre-Holocene civilizations. (He is, in fact, H.P. Lovecraft. Sadly, his work and name aren't famous enough in 1937 for any of the PCs to know that was publicly believed to have died a few months before this meeting.) He expresses great concern over the possibility that any artifacts in the possession of Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby might have been stolen, as the man is known to be in correspondence with a number of rogue academics who have been prying into dangerous secrets of forgotten epochs. Chief among these is Professor Horace Bagsnip, an archaeologist who is searching for evidence of Lemurian influence on the early peoples of India and eastern Africa. As Bagsnip has resisted all proposals of cooperation from the Society, and the Lemurians are believed to have created terrible living weapons, Bagsnip--and, by extension, Sir Felix--could be dealing in some very dangerous things.

While Marko discusses what little is known--or suspected, anyway--about the Lemurian people with Howard, Myrna begins looking into contacting Sir Felix. Robin, knowing a Magnetophon player would be difficult to find and expensive to purchase in England, gets to work building one herself.

Myrna manages to get ahold of John Hastings, the same police constable she charmed at the scene of the burglary the day before. Very eager to help the glamorous girl reporter, he provides her not only with the name of the hotel Sir Felix is now staying at--the Hotel McGuffin--but his specific room number. Myrna Heads out with Marko to speak to Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby about the break-in.

Sir Felix turns out to be quite cooperative, and explains that he was robbed by, of all people, a gang of blackshirts! They battered down his front door with a fasces, and demanded to know where "the package" was. The only package he could think of was the most recent shipment of notes and such sent to him for safe-keeping by his good friend Professor Horace Bagsnip. Sir Felix had only just had a chance to unpack the contents of the box and lock it in his roll-top desk, and never got to see exactly what the professor sent him before the fascist thugs knocked him out (or, more accurately, pushed him into a wall, jarring loose an authentic Zulu spear mounted there, which fell on Sir Felix's skull, rendering him unconscious).

Sure enough, Sir Felix later heard from the police that the roll-top desk (along with his cash box) had been broken into and looted. He's not very confident that the police will retrieve Professor Bagsnip's stolen materials, however, as he suspects their own far-right tendencies prevent them from leaning very hard on the blackshirts.

Meanwhile, back at Society headquarters, Robin has completed her jury-rigged Magnetophon player. Wolf and Abraham enter the workshop just as she starts the mysterious recording. At first, only static is distinguishable, but the sound of chanting soon becomes apparent. In fact, it's a style of chanting that Abraham recognizes: It's the Nubian Snake People, an eerie and possibly inhuman race he has encountered in the past (although only briefly).

The next sound, however, is something wholly new to all present: A monstrous, piercing wail rises over the chanting, sounding something like an air raid siren, but perhaps a living one. The sound is literally mind-numbing, and both Robin and Abraham are stunned and stupefied by it. Herr Wolf, however, manages to maintain his focus and observe how his comrades simply blank out and stand mute throughout the remainder of the sound. Then they tape ends, and the two regain their faculties.

At that moment, Myrna and Marko return, and the five all share what they have learned. Myrna is called away by a phone call, but Robin, Abraham, Wolf, and Marko begin to make plans to follow up the blackshirt lead. Robin, having spent more time exploring the streets of London than the others, knows the part of town where blackshirts are likely to be found, and immediately resolves to head out looking for them. The rest, naturally, realize they must follow for the sake of her safety.

Abraham borrows a car from the Society motor pool, and takes the other three out into the foggy London evening. Guided by Robin's directions, they eventually find a group of five blackshirts loitering on a street corner. Robin immediately approaches their leader--a man named Nigel--who promptly tells her to go back to America. Abraham pulls a gun and threatens to start shooting kneecaps if he isn't given information about the burglary of Sir Felix's flat. Nigel and company are duly frightened, but claim to know nothing of the crime. It's obvious to all present that they're lying.

Alerted by the commotion, another 12 blackshirts begin to approach quietly, hidden by the fog. Abraham hears them, however, and fires into the mist at leg height, managing to kneecap one man without even seeing him. This makes his point to Nigel very clear, and the terrorized blackshirt wails that the break-in was done by "Bad Bob and his blokes!"

The remaining 11 ambushers immediately rush out of the fog at Abraham, but he neatly fires off five rounds in quick succession, shooting a kneecap with each one. Wolf shouts something to the effect of "This is what happens to those who oppose the Führer!", trying to give the impression that this incident is the work of German agents (and Adolf Hitler himself!). Marko then picks up two of the attackers, and propels them into the remaining four, knocking all six unconscious. Robin kicks one of the prone blackshirts.

Abraham rifles the pockets of the downed men, checks the ID cards for names and addresses, and warns them "We were never here." Now completely terrified of Abraham and Marko, they agree wholeheartedly.

With no remaining opposition, the group gets the details of Bad Bob from the now-eagerly-helpful Nigel. They're told that he's the head of a different, more dangerous blackshirt splinter group, less political party and more organized criminal gang. Also, they've got ties to the fascist governments of other nations. Nigel supplies information on where they can be found.


So, lessons learned: Fights in Spirit of the Century are fun as all hell, and we need more of them. However, the PCs are seriously badass, so they need much better opposition than a bunch of lame Nazi-wannabes. Furthermore, conflicts can be really, really quick, so I should be less hesitant about resolving social interactions as full-fledged social conflicts.

Finally, while we've gotten much better at just getting down to play instead of chatting for a half hour first, I do need to keep a tighter rein on our focus throughout the session. I need to herd these fucking cats. Should be easier tomorrow night, actually, since most of this bunch just saw each other on Saturday at our monthly Amber game.

LWaSH session 3: Actual play at last!

Okay, as of last Tuesday, we are finally playing Spirit of the Century at last! We finished up character creation (man, the process of choosing stunts is fraught with dilemmas), and then had a good couple hours of actual play. We didn't really get a lot story progress done--really, I'd just call that session a prologue--but we're all getting acquainted with the mechanics of the game, and there was some really fun roleplay and aspect use going on.

Anyway, I'm going to type up the events of the session here. This is primarily for reference purposes, so I can't promise it'll be entertaining.


Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, England

Myrna--international socialite, intrepid reporter, and member in good standing of the monster-fighting Van Helsing Society--gets a phone call from her friend and sometime informant Agatha Worbley, a rich old widow with a passion for gossip and a scatterbrained manner that may or may not be a facade. Agatha reports that Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby--a minor baronet and amateur anthropologist of their mutual acquaintance--was robbed the night before.

Myrna, knowing that Sir Felix is a person of some minor interest to the Van Helsing Society, contacts a couple other Society members: Marko Kraljevic, the giant Serbian folk hero, and Arthur Chamberlain, the Vatican-trained artifact thief. Together, they drop by Sir Felix's burglarized apartment, and discover that the crime scene is still secured by the police, and that Sir Felix himself is now giving his statement at the police station after a short hospital stay. Myrna charms the police officer guarding the door--leaving him seriously smitten with her--and gives him a calling card to deliver to Sir Felix.

Myrna returns to her London residence to make some calls and chase down more information on Sir Felix, Arthur stays behind to watch the crime scene, and Marko returns to the Van Helsing Society's London headquarters. There he finds the cultist-fighting gunslinger Abraham Hale, recently returned from Africa, thoroughly enjoying a whiskey, and very much looking forward to returning to his home in Arizona. Herr Wolf--the mysterious mystic who was once Adolf Hitler--is just returning to the London clubhouse after a trip to the Louvre, and seethes with jealousy towards the French artists because of his own failure in art. The brilliant young pilot Robin Stormchaser is also at the clubhouse, having a smoke atop the observatory as usual.

Hale has brought back an obscene--and apparently indestructible--monkey idol from his trip to Africa, and is asking Marko about a way to dispose of the thing. Wolf, still in a foul mood, interrupts and informs them that the idol obviously has the power to summon the great apes of Africa to fulfill a single request of the wielder, and denigrates both the workmanship of the idol and Marko's intelligence. This, in turn, provokes Marko's anger, but Abraham defuses the situation.

Marko then seeks out Robin to deliver a gift from Myrna--a package of French cigarettes--and also tells her about the situation with Sir Felix. Robin, certain that Arthur can't possibly manage his surveillance assignment alone, decides to head over to the flat to help him out (or show him up). When she comes downstairs, however, Wolf recognizes the national origin of Robin's cigarettes, and--in a fury of anti-French sentiment--shouts at her and tries to take them away. She's far too quick for him, however.

Unswayed in her resolve to go help Arthur out, Robin continues on her way to the crime scene, allowing Abraham--rather drunk, by now--to escort her through the London night.

Meanwhile, Arthur has decided to disguise himself as a police officer and infiltrate Sir Felix's flat. He manages to trick the officer at the door, and has a look around inside, finding that the front door was battered in, both a cashbox and a roll-top desk were broken into, and Sir Felix's many exotic souvenirs seem to be untouched.

Just then, Robin and Abraham show up. Abraham, too intoxicated to fully understand the situation, is simply starts shouting for Arthur. This immediately draws the attention of the cops inside the flat, and forces Arthur to hide to avoid scrutiny. One police officer tells Abraham to go home, and might be on the verge of trying to take him in, when Marko and Wolf show up. Wolf shakes hands with the officer, and discovers that he's a Freemason. Wolf, himself an Inducted Illuminatus, uses this to manipulate the cop into allowing him a look inside the flat, while Marko babysits Abraham and Robin.

Inside, Arthur approaches Wolf, and points out his findings. Wolf has a closer look at the desk, and discovers two interesting things: a small, disk-shaped metal canister, and a photograph of a great stone in a desert, encircled by lightning. Taking these objects--entirely with the consent of the Freemason police officer--the Society members headed back to their headquarters.


...And that's where we left it! Typed up, it really looks like a hell of a lot of stuff happened, but really, things were going pretty slowly. I had to stop and check the game book more often than I'd like, and there was much looking for places to roll dice or store poker chips (our "fate point" tokens). Next time, we'll hopefully have our shit a little more sorted out. Also, I hope to get to use SotC's conflict rules, whether it's for physical combat or some social conflict. Also, now that everyone's finally got their character sorted out, I can enter them into the custom character sheets I made! I'll probably show those off here soon.

LWaSH session 2: More character creation

The Tuesday Night crew continued--but didn't quite complete--development of their Van Helsing Society operatives last night, and it was loads of fun.

The players finally got to do the "guest star" phases of character-building, meaning that they all picked names out of a hat and then had to figure out ways to work their characters into guest roles into each others' pulp novels. This lead to some weird and difficult chronology questions, and one character only got a single guest star in his book, since it took place too early in history for most of the group to logically participate in it (which, of course, lead to another book getting three guest stars instead of two).

I think if I had to do it all over again, I'd hack the standard SotC character generation so that Phase Three was the character's solo novel (and, probably, canonical first adventure), while Phases Four and Five are for team-up novels with only two stars each. I think that'd be a lot easier to manage.

Anyway, we didn't quite complete everybody's guest star roles, but we did manage to get a whole lot of skills-and-stunts stuff done. I'm hoping to help people finish up via email.

Highlights of the session include:

• One player deciding that the aspect she got out of a guest-starring role was a competitive, anything-he-can-do-I-can-do-better relationship with the main character . . . which is the character's way of expressing a crush that's obvious to everyone but her


• That same player deciding that her plane, "Blaze of Glory", is less a specific aircraft than a title and role that's bestowed upon any plane she flies . . . as long as the previous Blaze has been destroyed (That is so freaking brilliant!)


• Much discussion--and even a drawing!--of Marko Kraljevic's arch enemy, a steam-powered war robot built by the Ottoman Empire called The Mechanical Turk


• Lots of moments where people's various novel plots and the specialties of their guest stars clicked together perfectly


• Cool decisions about where to get photos to illustrate the character sheets: Marko the Slavic folk hero is likely to be played by Rade Serbedzija, Arthur the gentleman thief will be David Tennant, and Abraham the cultist-fighting gunslinger will be Lance freaking Henriksen.


• The Hitler character's "Unausprechlichen Namen" aspect, describing his state of metaphysical namelessness after his identity was stolen by the demon who went on to become der Fuhrer (people have trouble even remembering him, and could never possibly believe he's actually Adolf Hitler, even in the face of evidence)


• Outside of the game, the near-unanimity of our Chinese orders, leading several of us to become General Tso's Army

So, all in all, a lot of good fun, and we're not even playing, yet. The hypothetical pulp novels this session produced are so cool I wish I could commission an artist to do a nice color piece for each, which I could then Photoshop into a set of book covers.

LWaSH session 1: Character creation

Okay, the Tuesday Night crew got together last night for our first Lost Worlds and Secret Histories session. Six players showed up for this one instead of the four which I'd originally been expecting. I kind of worry about the difficulties inherent in getting a total of seven adults with jobs and lives together for a few hours every week, but the two new players are awesome folks, and I'm really excited about having them involved.

Anyway, since we only meet for very short sessions (and have a fairly dire pre-game chatting problem), we only managed to make it through the first three phases of character creation, but it was loads of fun, and the characters that they're creating are cool as all hell. I'll have to see if I have everybody's permission to actually talk about my players by name (and hopefully link to their websites, too), but I figure it's okay to discuss their character concepts. So get a load of this:

• Scottish street urchin raised by nuns and trained by the Vatican as a thief to retrieve sacred or dangerous artifacts


• Intrepid girl reporter, socialite, and gay divorcee; sort of a character from the pulp subgenre of "thrilling romance", and also very Brenda Starr


• Religious, gun-toting, supernatural-evil-fighting cowboy; sort of a latter-day Solomon Kane with a little Charlton Heston thrown in


• Immortal, superhumanly-strong Serbian folk hero Kraljevic Marko, a legend searching for a place in the modern world


• Tomboyish, chainsmoking daredevil pilot with a plane called "Blaze of Glory" and a mysterious connection to a Native American thunderbird spirit


• ADOLF FREAKING HITLER. The idea here being that this guy, the real Hitler, was supplanted by a demon who then went on to lead the Nazi party and Germany itself. So this ought to be interesting.

Can you see why I'm all excited? This is going to rock hard.

Anyway, we're setting this game in 1937 instead of Spirit of the Century's default of 1922 or thereabouts. Also, instead of the Century Club, the PCs are going to be members of the Van Helsing Society, a group dedicated thwarting supernatural evils. We'll figure out the details together as we go along.

Next Tuesday, we'll do the remaining phases of character generation, in which they'll all figure out how they guest-starred in each other's adventures--giving them all some amount of shared history--and then we'll get to the mechanical stuff, choosing skills and stunts. Skills should go pretty quickly, but I should probably put together some stunt suggestions to speed that part along.

When they're done with everything, I'll be able to give them all their custom character sheets. I've almost got the design done already, actually, but I wanna type in all their info for them instead of having them actually write it all down all over again.

Tuesday Night campaign chosen!

Ohhh, awesomeness. Last night, my weekly gaming crew came to the end of our latest World of Darkness arc, and decided what they want to play now that my turn in the GM's chair is coming up again. They voted, there was a tie between Lost Worlds and Secret Histories (a Spirit of the Century campaign) and Professor Bennick's Class (which I'd run with either Dungeons & Dragons or True20). A coin was flipped, and LWaSH won!

Barring catastrophe, we'll be doing the famed SotC character generation next Tuesday, and--since I'm not using the Century Club of the game's default setting--figuring out what kind of group the characters will all be part of, or else how they'll know each other and why they would work together (because I ain't doing a "you all meet by chance" kind of deal). I'm not even going to come up with a plot until I know what kinds of people the PCs are (although, naturally, I've got a pile of ideas already).

Motley: Setting details

I don't know if this is the one we'll end up playing, but I felt like fleshing out the Motley campaign setting a bit, here. Not really going into campaign plot or system stuff, though, just the setting.


The campaign concept I'm calling "Motley" has one of the weirder settings out of the big campaign idea list. The basic idea behind the whole thing is to let the my group play weird gothic horror creatures and fight other gothic horror creatures, as well as to play up the idea of the wilderness the way humanity used to see it: as a vast darkness full of dangerous things, crowding in on the fragile lights of civilization. So, of course, I went with a pseudo-Eastern-European setting with a pre-20th-century tech level.

Zerfaule
The country of Zerfaule (zair-FOWL) is a temperate, low-lying, land-locked nation of thick forests and the occasional swamp, bordered on almost all sides by mountains. Its government was, until recently, a weakly constitutional monarchy sharing power (unwillingly) with a cunning and semi-corrupt religious hierarchy. It's a largely rural nation, supported primarily by farming, along with some light hunting and logging. Technologically, most of the country is nearly medieval--with some of the more isolated farming communities still using crossbows--but its towns have gaslight and plumbing. Electric lights, crude radio telegraphy, and combustion engines are cutting-edge technologies that have only begun to develop. Zerfaule has very little trade or contact with other countries, but has had a bitter rivalry with neighboring Eisen for so long that the roots of their enmity have passed into myth.

Eisen
Zerfaule's neighbor to the north-east, Eisen (EYE-zen) is a cooler, rockier nation, with slightly more advanced technology. Its mountains are rich in metal ore, and mining is its primary industry. While it's as landlocked as Zerfaule, it managed (until recently) to trade with the wide world through its neighbor, the small, coastal nation of Olin. Its government is an oligarchy that supplanted Eisen's monarchy through popular revolution, and then promptly became nearly as closed and repressive as the system it replaced.

Religion
The primary religion of both Zerfaule and Eisen (generally referred to simply as "The Church" in both nations) venerates a pantheon of virtuous and heroic human beings who are believed to have ascended to sainthood. These saints are humanity's connection to the vague, distant angels who created the world. There are some differences between the churches of the two countries: Most notably, Zerfaule's branch is ruled by the Supreme Hierophant--considered to be the voice of the saints in the mortal world--and does not recognize the newer saints claimed by Eiesen. Other than the two churches, countless tiny, illegal cults hide in isolated rural communities, worshipping demons and other things from the wilderness.

Dr. Morgolak
The history of the entire region was changed forever when an Eisener scientist named Staum Morgolak (STOWM MOR-go-lak) obtained copied of books thought lost hundreds of years ago in the destruction of the Great Library of Katatz (ka-TATS). With these, he rediscovered the forgotten art of alchemy, and improved upon it greatly through his own genius and the modern scientific method. Among other miracles, he invented a treatment to restore a semblance of life to the dead, and found that purpose-built creatures--surgically assembled from varied components--could be given not only life, but terrifying power. Morgolak's first successful creation--named Arku (AHR-koo), after the mythical first man--so impressed the Eisen government that they immediately employed him to create alchemically-animated soldiers for use against Zerfaule.

The elixir
Morgolak's greatest achievement is a thin, dark green, foul-smelling fluid which restores a kind of life--at least activity and utility--to dead tissue which is properly saturated and electrically stimulated. Human beings reanimated by this process retain fuzzy memories of their previous lives at best, and greatly diminished sensory faculties. If the process is applied improperly or the subject isn't sufficiently fresh, mental capacity and motor control are also impacted. However, the reanimated do possess great strength and resilience, as well as a near insensitivity to pain. They do not heal normally, but are easily repaired by a trained surgeon, and it's theorized that they will never age.

Patchworks
The poster children of Morgolak's new science are a motley breed, composed of cunningly-assembled human parts with a variety of animal and inorganic components as well. A typical patchwork soldier will have two or more mortal men's weight in human skin, bone, and organs, augmented with the muscles of bears or horses, the eyes of a wolf, and some amount of internal or external metal reinforcement. Some of its organs will be wholly artificial devices, particularly filters built to mitigate the problems of a metabolism sustained by Morgolak's alchemical elixir. Additional weapons or other war-worthy components might be added to the patchwork as required, and modifications after the initial animation are entirely possible.

Dr. Harko
Eisen's patchwork army quickly made it the unquestioned dominant power in the region, able to extort goods, political concessions, and even land from Zerfaule and Olin with very little actual violence. That all changed the day Dr. Morgolak's young protégé, Lupor Harko (LOO-por HAHR-ko), defected to Zerfaule. Exactly why he did it remains a secret, but he brought with him all of Morgolak's discoveries and his own brilliant mind as well. Zerfaule began a secret and frenzied military buildup, emptying its graves and slaughterhouses and prisons for raw materials. Harko's first batch of patchworks were imperfect things, but they were the first patchworks made with real war in mind, as well as the first made to fight other patchworks.

The War of Monsters
When Zerfaule finally struck back against Eisen, the greater power was caught entirely off guard. But it was far from enough to break Eisen's stranglehold on the region, and the War of the Monsters dragged on for six years. In that time, unspeakable numbers died on both sides. Great and terrifying new technological leaps were made, both in the fields of alchemy and mundane engineering. A new kind of inhuman soldier was deployed by both sides almost simultaneously: the homunculi, living creatures created from scratch through alchemy. Towards the end of the conflict, Dr. Morgolak disappeared while travelling (and is presumed dead), and the commander of Zerfaule's forces, General Orku Gorskovoi (OR-koo GOR-sko-voi), maneuvered himself into ever greater power while the aristocracy hid in their fortified mansions.

Homunculi
The newest creatures in the world, and alchemy's greatest achievement, the homunculi are a technology that has yet to come into its own, or even truly be formalized. Eisen and Zerfaule each developed a variety of ways to produce the creatures--including such bizarre methods as simmering vats of chemicals, man-shaped molds, huge eggs buried in the earth, and skeletons constructed out of tree roots--and the incredible variety of shapes and powers these creatures can take is still being explored. Essentially, however, a homunculus is a living creature--usually humanoid in form to one degree or another--created from a complicated bath of alchemical substances and some small amount of biological material, usually human blood. They be created with various chemical and physical abilities--some of them quite bizarre--and range in appearance from unspeakably hideous to weirdly beautiful to almost perfectly human. Their main disadvantage as weapons of war in comparison to patchwork soldiers is that they know nothing at all at birth, lacking even the hazy memories that allow a newly-animated patchwork to walk and speak.

The war's end
After six years, Zerfaule extracted a conditional surrender from Eisen. Both nations are at peace largely because they can no longer wage war, and Eisen is nominally the loser because of its dangerous position between Zerfaule and Olin. Effectively, however, both Zerfaule and Eisen are a shambles: their infrastructures are shattered, a whole generation of young soldiers is devastated, alchemical poisons blight the land, bandits and would-be warlords emerge to take advantage of the chaos, and the ancient, inhuman powers of the wilderness are closing in. Zerfaule's king and church hold power only in name, while General Gorskovoi wields the only real power left in the nation, and the old guard of Eisen's oligarchy have been executed or exiled.

The wilderness
The land beyond the towns and farms of both nations is a wild, dangerous place haunted by mysterious and unfriendly beings. Dense and tangled forests, stinking black swamps, mountains of forbidding stone--all places beyond civilization's reach teem with supernatural terrors that are, at best, resentful of the upstart race of Man.

• Vampires — Any human corpse not properly sanctified (or mutilated) and exposed to the dark influence of the wild could potentially rise as a vampire. A newborn vampire is an animalistic thing, stinking and rotting, with no fangs or special abilities, and only the vaguest memories of human existence. Drawing on these, is makes its way to civilization, attacking on the first people it finds (frequently, of course, its memories lead it to its own family) and feeding on their blood and flesh. If it survives long enough, and feeds often enough, its decay reverses, it becomes frighteningly intelligent, and it gradually gains in supernatural power. Vampires burn in sunlight, but slowly. The quickest and surest way to kill one is to destroy the head or heart, or to separate the two through decapitation.


• Werewolves — Rumored to be mortals who either sold themselves to a demon for power or were simply exposed to unhealthy amounts of moonlight out in the wilderness, werewolves do not precisely turn into wolves, but into vague approximations of the most powerful and dangerous beasts the people of the region know of. These forms naturally contain much of the wolf and the bear in them, although stranger things also show up. Bull-like horns and even vast, useless wings have been seen on some werewolves. They are strongest and wildest in direct moonlight, but otherwise are uncontrolled by the time of month or day. They are cursed creatures who can sometimes will themselves to become beasts, but almost never have any control of themselves when transformed, and inexorably go mad even in their human forms.


• Fairies — Powerful, amoral spirits who create physical bodies for themselves from the stuff of the natural world. These bodies tend to be small as a matter of convenience, but can have any size or appearance. Fairies are capricious, immortal, genderless, self-centered, unstable, and possessed of terrifying powers of illusion and mental manipulation. They admire art, music, and fine clothing, but lack the intelligence and creativity to create anything of value for themselves, and so they steal from human beings and kidnap musicians and craftsmen. As they rely on the raw stuff of nature to grow new bodies for themselves, they bitterly resist human efforts to push back the wilderness. They do not reproduce naturally, and instead steal human children to instruct in the soul-bending powers of their kind.


• Goblins — These are simply fairies who, for whatever unfathomable reason, have been exiled from their people and cut off from the source of their powers. Without these, the are merely physical creatures. Their bodies become twisted and corrupted, still endowed with great strength and the potential for immortal existence, but no ability to restore themselves. This experience or the limited existence that follows drives the ostracized fairy even madder than it previously was. Lacking any means to avenge themselves upon their own kind, they instead tend to inflict their bottomless rage upon humanity.


• Demons — Demons are disembodied spirits, stranger, more solitary, and generally more powerful than fairies. They aren't necessarily malevolent--they don't need anything from mortals or from the wilderness that humanity threatens--but they are certainly amoral, unpredictable, and obscure in their motives. They might harm or even aid people on a whim or out of vanity. Many seek to be worshiped, to be given sacrifices, to have shrines built in their honor. What they demand of their cults and give in return depends on their tastes and moods. They are the greatest mysteries and powers of the wilderness, the most potentially dangerous, if the least actively threatening.

The big campaign idea list

My main RPG outlet these days is my Tuesday night game. Currently, we're doing a World of Darkness thing (old WoD, that is) where we playing mages who end up fighting vampires and stuff. We call this campaign Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Brigid is game master on that one (or "Storyteller", if you must). This is an awesome game, especially the latest story arc. But it's drawing to a close, and it's gonna be my turn to run a game next.

So what am I gonna run? The trouble is, I've got too many ideas.


Thinking about roleplaying games is seriously the main thing I use my brain for. There are few things I like more than coming up with (and sometimes even developing) vaguely sketched-out campaign settings and plots and gimmicks. I seriously cannot just use somebody else's campaign setting. And I've got a whole slew of game systems I want to try using with settings for which they were never intended.

So, while playing this arc of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I've been amassing the big campaign idea list. It is, as of this writing, a collection of twenty-nine campaign, storyline, and setting ideas that I would freaking love to run for my Tuesday Night crew. We've been discussing it, and it looks like people's interest is leaning towards these:

• In the Belly of the Beast — kind of a Blame! riff


• Lost Worlds and Secret Histories — 1930s pulp action with some paranormal stuff thrown in (Spirit of the Century for the win!)


• Motley — a weird bit about a fictional quasi-Victorian country recovering from a devastating war fought with Frankenstein-style monsters and alchemical science (the players, of course, would get to be patchwork soldiers and military alchemists)


• Night Tribes — about families who are hiding their semi-inhuman nature from the world


• Professor Bennick's Class — a fantasy thing where the whole party would play student wizards on a field trip gone wrong

God, I can't wait. I don't care which one we go with. I just wanna settle on one so I can start planning.

Anyway, anybody who strolls by here, please feel free to check out the list and leave comments here. I've love to hear what people think.