Man, I'm behind...

I'm just letting folks know I'm still alive. I've just been busy and/or tired and/or distracted to get around to punching up my write-up of how Origins went. I should be able to do that tomorrow, as well as transcribing those crappy phone posts I called in from Columbus.

Origins, part 1

Well, I got back from Origins on Sunday and I'm just now writing it up.

I had a pretty good time, for the most part. I went up with my friends Josh, Eben, and Jeff. Eben isn't a big RPG or CCG player, and I was worried that he'd be bored. He managed for the most part. Jeff had fun, but Josh was in a real shitty mood the whole weekend. We honestly have no clue why (when we got back, I ran the current theories by his mother when he wasn't around but she said it couldn't have been any of them).

Thursday, I got to play in a Vampire: The Requiem preview game. It was a short adventure, and the first round of three (I didn't make it past the first round, as I'd picked a pre-chen character who didn't have much in the way of ability to distinguish himself when combat broke out). My character and the others woke up in a mental hospital with no memories of the last month and faces that didn't match how they were supposed to look. We were all supposedly in therapy due to being 'criminally' insane.

A couple of the folks there decided to try and bust out. We had to deal with guards (a couple carrying guns, all carrying tasers), a rottweiler in the room for some reason, and a nurse who was stronger and faster than she should have been. My character made it out (although that was more or less decided at random to wrap up the session), with possible others, while a couple of the other players were voted to head up to the next round.

Matt McFarland (innocent_man), developer of the Dark Ages line and writer of such fine books as Red Talons Rev., was the guy running the game. He ran a fantastic session and is an overall cool guy. I talked to him for a few minutes before and after the game, and I dare say he's probably one of the best GM's I've played under. Also, he gave free t-shirts to the players, which is always a bonus. ;) Yeah, I know, those were official promos.

In case anyone's curious, there isn't too much about the system that hasn't been seen in the previews at worldofdarkness.com so far. Although it never came up in the game, it's implied that the changes in one's 'Morality' rating (equivalent of Humanity/Path) seem to be tied to your Virtue rather than a specific code of behavior. Also, on top of the target number being 8, ten's are re-rolled and botching is next to impossible. The only way to 'botch' is to have your dice pool reduced below 1 by modifiers. In that case, you roll a 'chance die.' If that die comes up a 10, you succeed at the roll. If it comes up a 1, you more or less botch (I think the official term is 'dramatic failure'). Also, the number of successes generally doesn't matter outside of combat. Anywhere between 1 and 4 successes succeeds. Period. 5 or more successes, though, does produce a 'dramatic success,' which wasn't really explored during the game. If there are any other questions, feel free to ask.

Also, that night, I participated in an Orpheus game run by a guy calling himself 'Evil Ernie.' A lot of the plot mirrored, admittedly, the 'Dia De Los Muertos' story from the 'Haunting the Dead' anthology. I'd considered asking if he'd read it, but I didn't want to offend him by suggesting he'd ripped it off. Much of the basic premise was the same, but some of the supernatural aspects were toned down-- no weird, bizarre version of Mexico's 'spooklands' (to swipe a term from a friend of mine), although we did deal with someone who was supposedly a reincarnated god (who was trying to hook up with a Crucible member who was the reincarnation of that god's wife). I played Frank Baxter, a psychically-sensitive detective who works with what is otherwise an all-Skimmer Crucible. Ernie included a little question-and-answer bit on the back of the character sheet where I had to come up with little personality traits for the character (stuff like 'what are his bad habits,' 'what keeps him from projecting,' 'how does he deal with the fact that he's the only non-projector in the Crucible') that he read while we introduced ourselves.

My character got killed off over the course of the story, but as Orpheus fans know, death is not the end. He rose again as a Haunter (even though his Nature would have made him a Marrow, we were using only the core book) of the Spirit Lament, and we managed to shut down the pigment cult we were brought in to investigate. I got to keep the character sheet, and I'm planning on writing the guy up 'properly,' as Ernie had admittedly fudged ratings like Vitality, Willpower, and Spite, as the book doesn't list how to do it for normal humans.

And I just now realized what time it is... I have to go out and do some stuff, and then tonight I'm attending the midnight premiere of Spider-Man 2. I'll fill everyone in on the rest of Origins later.