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mythicfoxYeah, I know. I'm lazy. So to make up for it, I'm starting off with a damn-funny (or at least amusing) meme.
The Network:
You are the Voice of World Control.
Fnord.
Which Illuminati are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Well, Freddie didn't get killed. I talked with Crystal (Bishop Natalie's player) before the game. She mentioned that yes, Freddie was going to get in trouble once she started laying out some political smackdown on Krimson and another ductus named Shane (who was part of the initial plot against Phillipe), but she was going to try and lessen the damage against folks who were just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Basically, she was going to nail a few of the city's troublemakers on various violations of the Code of Milan.
If she pulled it off, there was a definite chance of Legion being formally dissolved. Then Krimson would be stripped of all Status and made the target of a blood hunt. The rest of Legion would be stripped of all Status except Intiated and left to go about their business. The way Freddie's been doubting his place in the pack, such a development wouldn't be entirely unwelcome.
Krimson and Shane were both challenging Natalie to Monomacy, a form of ritualized dueling used among members of the Sabbat. Shane got in a legitimate challenge first. Basically, both of them felt that Natalie didn't deserve to be Bishop and were trying to depose her. So before she'd get to pull off all of her major political unleashings, she had that to deal with.
Before I get to that, though, I'd like to point out that I finally got to have a bit of fun with Freddie's derangement in-game. I'm sure that nobody actually reads the in-character posts that I link to on the ToD message board, so I'll get you up to speed... I did a post recently where Freddie had gone to visit Woodburn Hall between Sabbat meetings and had been attacked by the phantom creature that 'haunts' him. During this hallucination, Freddie saw part of the property become damaged and destroyed. Well, I spent a bit of time wandering around as Freddie, taking a close look at everything, trying to ICly reconcile the fact that he saw a fair bit of property damage happen yet there wasn't any sign of it.
Things were just kind of slowly building up to the Monomacy challenge between Shane and Natalie. Being the challenged, Natalie set the terms. It would be a combat challenge to unconsciousness, and each of the participants would be able to choose a champion to fight for them. Shane elected to fight on his own, and Natalie was able to convince Delta, one of the city's most powerful and influential Tzimisce, to fight for her (while she wasn't allowed to bribe him, she did offer some incentive/compensation-- if he won, he'd get to be her Templar). If Delta won, then Shane would show nothing but unquestioning loyalty to Natalie from then on out. If Shane won, then Natalie would step down from her position.
It was a hell of a fight. Delta's one of those Tzimisce who casually walks around with more Vicissitude alterations than most folks can comprehend, but it hadn't occurred to me that Shane was more than capable of fending for himself. The battle was to incapacitation with only in-clan Disciplines allowed. But these are, naturally, two powerful Tzimisce we're talking about here. That meant that as soon as possible, Delta shifted to Horrid Form. Shane's from the Zantosa family, so his first instinct was to use Dread Gaze to make it harder for Delta to fight. Delta resisted. So now we had Horrid Form vs. Horrid Form. As I said a couple of times, in-character: "I may not miss my mortal life much, but there are times I do miss popcorn."
Delta's player, Mike, was kicking ass on tests. He brought Shane down to one blow away from the fight being over, but things turned. Shane's player, Doug, started winning tests. They were drawing blood from each other and spending it. Both went into Frenzy at one point but they were capable of coming out of it before the battle went too far. Towards the end it became a battle of attrition and Shane had gained a slight upper hand. It was extremely close, but Shane won the fight.
As agreed, Natalie stepped down from her position, and the city's Cainites started putting their names down to challenge for the now-vacant spot. I think about half the city's trying for it. Fortunately, Freddie isn't in that half. Because of his clan, I can count on one hand how many folks in the city take him seriously.
Actually, I'm contemplating ways that Freddie could earn himself a little bit of extra respect. *evil, wicked grin*
Most of the rest of the night was a mix of IC and OOC chatting with the others while things just wound down. So except for the Delta-Shane fight, things were pretty slow. Actually, the session started with a meeting of the players to vote on some changes to ToD's rules and regulations and that took up some time. One of the things being voted on was a change in the amount of time between nights showing up before a member can be downgraded to a visitor (when it was once one game every six months, it's now one game every two). And one of the folks who almost never shows up held things up with these constant paranoid reactions of his (insisting repeatedly that the ST's shouldn't have the right to revoke membership in extreme cases and that sort of thing). The main difference between Members and Visitors is that Members can vote on these things and Visitors can't, and Members have access to certain types of characters. This one player, Matt, was being a real pain in the ass-- and trust me, he hasn't been there in the past two months. Oh well. It got settled. That's the important thing.
Sunday night saw the culmination of a plot that Sean's been running over the last couple of months. It's something he worked out a long time ago and has always wanted to run-- the return of the Camazotz. The Kinfolk I rescued in Mexico a few weeks back was, in fact, one of the last living homid Kinfolk of the Camazotz. He'd been chosen by Gaia to be the one to perform a ritual that would bring the Changing Breed back from extinction.
There was an interesting moment once the pack got things together. Y'see, we were having trouble sorting how all of the Changing Breeds were supposed to get to Mexico within a reasonable LARP timeframe. Namely, we didn't have access to any fast travel methods and none of the Mages were good enough to teleport us there.
You know that old saying "If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."? Well, a comment made by one of the other ST's gave Sean an idea.
The temple we had to visit in Mexico? It burst out of the earth a block away from the Mountainlair. That made travel a lot easier. The Aztec temple was filled with traps and such that were obviously illusionary (although we didn't have a way of finding that out or disabling it that way, but I figured it out OOCly). We were originally going to go through this huge gauntlet of traps, but one of the folks there was a twinked-out Bubasti (who'd managed to get to play a Bubasti by explaining to the ST's that as long as not all of them left Egypt, it'd be just fine) who had a Gift who'd let him detect the traps. So Sean toned it down a bit just so he wouldn't have to throw a test with this guy every three seconds.
I feel it's worthwhile to note that the Bubasti is the jerkwad running the revenge game on Saturdays.
Somehow he got left behind in dealing with all of the traps before. I think it may have had something to do with a character being run by one of the problem vampire players. Just so she can now have other folks around while she goofs off like a fucking moron, she's playing a Baster version of Ed from Cowboy Bebop... not even bothering to change the name or anything. And I'm sorry-- I like Ed on the show. I'm a huge Cowboy Bebop fan. That doesn't mean I want to put up with someone playing Ed just so she can act like a total fucktard.
The PC's that had gotten this far into the temple (two Glass Walkers, one Simba Bastet, one Mokole, a Gurahl, two Mages, and a Mokole NPC who was along for the ride) came across a series of rooms. Each room had a test to pass, consisting of a riddle of sorts that had to be desired. The first was the Test of Screams. Everyone had to dredge up a time when their character was truly afraid and horrified (and, naturally, we had to describe these memories to Sean) and then we were transported to the next room-- which looked exactly like the room we were in (remember when I mentioned the illusionary traps?). I'm pretty sure that each one of the shapeshifters used the memory of their First Change. I can't remember the name of the next test. But we had to dredge up a memory of sadness and despair before passing on. The third test required invoking someone we had a close tie to and drawing on their strength (The clue was "No one shall pass."). However, my character and Andy's new character, his Dies Ultimae Glass Walker, just couldn't figure it out. I came really close to figuring out what the trick to it was, but not close enough. We wound up losing a point of temporary Rage and just got pushed through the gate, as Sean decided that we were united in our misery enough to count.
The next room more or less dropped us into a huge cavern. The cavern was filled with bats. Two wounded BSD's huddled in the corner, clutching an idol we'd been looking for. The NPC Mokole destroyed them, and we all approached an altar. There was a skeleton on the altar that had slowly been turning to dust over the last few hundred years with a klaive plunged through its body into the stone.
As we approached the altar, we were hit with one last illusionary trap... but I'm the only one that knows OOCly that it's illusionary. We threw a test... only myself and another PC passed it, and the losers were all infected with Mummy Rot. Or so they think. The PC's think they have Mummy Rot, and until something's done about it they have no choice but to fall for it. Anyhow, back to the adventure.
The Gurahl tried to take the klaive, but a nasty shock and a vision told him that the klaive had to be taken by a Garou. At this point, Andy goes nuts. He lunges forward and his character pulls the klaive out of the altar. It's obviously a grand klaive, judging by its size, and he was bouncing around all excited about having just gotten ahold of a klaive.
It never occurred to him that it might not have been a Gaian klaive. It was the klaive of Dark-Claws-of-Vengeance, the Shadow Lord who slew the last Camazotz. Over the centuries, it had become an extremely powerful Bane Klaive.
This Bane Klaive had just possessed a Glass Walker Ahroun. It unleashed a powerful Wyrm-spirit on us that we all had to kill. It didn't help that Alex had to leave early, and it was ruled that his Gurahl was pulled out by the NPC Mokole so the ST could focus on running the combat. The remaining Mokole, run by the fucktard known as John (The guy's like Jeremy-- anyone who's read this Journal for a good long while remembers Jeremy. Note: Unless you're on my Friends list, that link won't take you to an entry you can see.) wound up killing Andy's character in an attempt to see if he could make the spirit go away. No such luck, though.
So we wound up killing this Wyrm-spirit. At the same time, Ruiz and a Wyrm-tained counterpart were fighting off to the side, in Camazotz-Crinos form. We managed to slay the beast, though, and destroyed the corrupt portion of the Bat incarna.
So now the Camazotz are back. There's only 6 of them, including Ruiz, but it counts. Of course, the moment it was mentioned that the Camazotz were back, John wanted to play one. I watched as the ST's either strained to keep themselves from laughing or giving him a big, loud "Fuck you." There's been a little bit of discussion of possibly letting Andy play one of the new Camazotz to make up for the fact that he more or less sacrificed his PC for the plot. I doubt anything's going to come of it, though. Andy's a decent roleplayer (and by 'decent,' I mean 'he's not a walking reason for why LARPs suck'), but other than Ruiz there are no homid Camazotz. And I'm not sure if he's got what it takes to play a bat-breed shapeshifter. I figure that Sean could do it, for obvious reasons. I think I could manage with a little bit of coaching. But I'm really not sure anyone else could pull it off without half-assing it.
In other news, Sean's pleased that the plot's finally over and he's going to be coming back as a player. He's got this great backstory and concept worked up for a Red Talon Ragabash. I've loaned him my copy of the Revised Red Talons book (signed by Black Hat Matt himself at Origins this year), and I think he'll do it right. I know he was thinking of running an Uktena at some point, but he isn't confident that he can pull it off without messing it up. He's one of those folks who gets really nervous at the idea of playing characters with particularly-different ethnicity or gender from his own.
It's a good thing he's running a Garou of some sort, anyhow, as next week's game will feature an attempt to build a caern in Morgantown.
And that's it. I have a big meeting with the family later today (I'm not sure what about, to be honest with you), and I'll just try and keep in touch with you folks later.
The Network:
You are the Voice of World Control.
Fnord.
Which Illuminati are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Well, Freddie didn't get killed. I talked with Crystal (Bishop Natalie's player) before the game. She mentioned that yes, Freddie was going to get in trouble once she started laying out some political smackdown on Krimson and another ductus named Shane (who was part of the initial plot against Phillipe), but she was going to try and lessen the damage against folks who were just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Basically, she was going to nail a few of the city's troublemakers on various violations of the Code of Milan.
If she pulled it off, there was a definite chance of Legion being formally dissolved. Then Krimson would be stripped of all Status and made the target of a blood hunt. The rest of Legion would be stripped of all Status except Intiated and left to go about their business. The way Freddie's been doubting his place in the pack, such a development wouldn't be entirely unwelcome.
Krimson and Shane were both challenging Natalie to Monomacy, a form of ritualized dueling used among members of the Sabbat. Shane got in a legitimate challenge first. Basically, both of them felt that Natalie didn't deserve to be Bishop and were trying to depose her. So before she'd get to pull off all of her major political unleashings, she had that to deal with.
Before I get to that, though, I'd like to point out that I finally got to have a bit of fun with Freddie's derangement in-game. I'm sure that nobody actually reads the in-character posts that I link to on the ToD message board, so I'll get you up to speed... I did a post recently where Freddie had gone to visit Woodburn Hall between Sabbat meetings and had been attacked by the phantom creature that 'haunts' him. During this hallucination, Freddie saw part of the property become damaged and destroyed. Well, I spent a bit of time wandering around as Freddie, taking a close look at everything, trying to ICly reconcile the fact that he saw a fair bit of property damage happen yet there wasn't any sign of it.
Things were just kind of slowly building up to the Monomacy challenge between Shane and Natalie. Being the challenged, Natalie set the terms. It would be a combat challenge to unconsciousness, and each of the participants would be able to choose a champion to fight for them. Shane elected to fight on his own, and Natalie was able to convince Delta, one of the city's most powerful and influential Tzimisce, to fight for her (while she wasn't allowed to bribe him, she did offer some incentive/compensation-- if he won, he'd get to be her Templar). If Delta won, then Shane would show nothing but unquestioning loyalty to Natalie from then on out. If Shane won, then Natalie would step down from her position.
It was a hell of a fight. Delta's one of those Tzimisce who casually walks around with more Vicissitude alterations than most folks can comprehend, but it hadn't occurred to me that Shane was more than capable of fending for himself. The battle was to incapacitation with only in-clan Disciplines allowed. But these are, naturally, two powerful Tzimisce we're talking about here. That meant that as soon as possible, Delta shifted to Horrid Form. Shane's from the Zantosa family, so his first instinct was to use Dread Gaze to make it harder for Delta to fight. Delta resisted. So now we had Horrid Form vs. Horrid Form. As I said a couple of times, in-character: "I may not miss my mortal life much, but there are times I do miss popcorn."
Delta's player, Mike, was kicking ass on tests. He brought Shane down to one blow away from the fight being over, but things turned. Shane's player, Doug, started winning tests. They were drawing blood from each other and spending it. Both went into Frenzy at one point but they were capable of coming out of it before the battle went too far. Towards the end it became a battle of attrition and Shane had gained a slight upper hand. It was extremely close, but Shane won the fight.
As agreed, Natalie stepped down from her position, and the city's Cainites started putting their names down to challenge for the now-vacant spot. I think about half the city's trying for it. Fortunately, Freddie isn't in that half. Because of his clan, I can count on one hand how many folks in the city take him seriously.
Actually, I'm contemplating ways that Freddie could earn himself a little bit of extra respect. *evil, wicked grin*
Most of the rest of the night was a mix of IC and OOC chatting with the others while things just wound down. So except for the Delta-Shane fight, things were pretty slow. Actually, the session started with a meeting of the players to vote on some changes to ToD's rules and regulations and that took up some time. One of the things being voted on was a change in the amount of time between nights showing up before a member can be downgraded to a visitor (when it was once one game every six months, it's now one game every two). And one of the folks who almost never shows up held things up with these constant paranoid reactions of his (insisting repeatedly that the ST's shouldn't have the right to revoke membership in extreme cases and that sort of thing). The main difference between Members and Visitors is that Members can vote on these things and Visitors can't, and Members have access to certain types of characters. This one player, Matt, was being a real pain in the ass-- and trust me, he hasn't been there in the past two months. Oh well. It got settled. That's the important thing.
Sunday night saw the culmination of a plot that Sean's been running over the last couple of months. It's something he worked out a long time ago and has always wanted to run-- the return of the Camazotz. The Kinfolk I rescued in Mexico a few weeks back was, in fact, one of the last living homid Kinfolk of the Camazotz. He'd been chosen by Gaia to be the one to perform a ritual that would bring the Changing Breed back from extinction.
There was an interesting moment once the pack got things together. Y'see, we were having trouble sorting how all of the Changing Breeds were supposed to get to Mexico within a reasonable LARP timeframe. Namely, we didn't have access to any fast travel methods and none of the Mages were good enough to teleport us there.
You know that old saying "If Mohammed won't come to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed."? Well, a comment made by one of the other ST's gave Sean an idea.
The temple we had to visit in Mexico? It burst out of the earth a block away from the Mountainlair. That made travel a lot easier. The Aztec temple was filled with traps and such that were obviously illusionary (although we didn't have a way of finding that out or disabling it that way, but I figured it out OOCly). We were originally going to go through this huge gauntlet of traps, but one of the folks there was a twinked-out Bubasti (who'd managed to get to play a Bubasti by explaining to the ST's that as long as not all of them left Egypt, it'd be just fine) who had a Gift who'd let him detect the traps. So Sean toned it down a bit just so he wouldn't have to throw a test with this guy every three seconds.
I feel it's worthwhile to note that the Bubasti is the jerkwad running the revenge game on Saturdays.
Somehow he got left behind in dealing with all of the traps before. I think it may have had something to do with a character being run by one of the problem vampire players. Just so she can now have other folks around while she goofs off like a fucking moron, she's playing a Baster version of Ed from Cowboy Bebop... not even bothering to change the name or anything. And I'm sorry-- I like Ed on the show. I'm a huge Cowboy Bebop fan. That doesn't mean I want to put up with someone playing Ed just so she can act like a total fucktard.
The PC's that had gotten this far into the temple (two Glass Walkers, one Simba Bastet, one Mokole, a Gurahl, two Mages, and a Mokole NPC who was along for the ride) came across a series of rooms. Each room had a test to pass, consisting of a riddle of sorts that had to be desired. The first was the Test of Screams. Everyone had to dredge up a time when their character was truly afraid and horrified (and, naturally, we had to describe these memories to Sean) and then we were transported to the next room-- which looked exactly like the room we were in (remember when I mentioned the illusionary traps?). I'm pretty sure that each one of the shapeshifters used the memory of their First Change. I can't remember the name of the next test. But we had to dredge up a memory of sadness and despair before passing on. The third test required invoking someone we had a close tie to and drawing on their strength (The clue was "No one shall pass."). However, my character and Andy's new character, his Dies Ultimae Glass Walker, just couldn't figure it out. I came really close to figuring out what the trick to it was, but not close enough. We wound up losing a point of temporary Rage and just got pushed through the gate, as Sean decided that we were united in our misery enough to count.
The next room more or less dropped us into a huge cavern. The cavern was filled with bats. Two wounded BSD's huddled in the corner, clutching an idol we'd been looking for. The NPC Mokole destroyed them, and we all approached an altar. There was a skeleton on the altar that had slowly been turning to dust over the last few hundred years with a klaive plunged through its body into the stone.
As we approached the altar, we were hit with one last illusionary trap... but I'm the only one that knows OOCly that it's illusionary. We threw a test... only myself and another PC passed it, and the losers were all infected with Mummy Rot. Or so they think. The PC's think they have Mummy Rot, and until something's done about it they have no choice but to fall for it. Anyhow, back to the adventure.
The Gurahl tried to take the klaive, but a nasty shock and a vision told him that the klaive had to be taken by a Garou. At this point, Andy goes nuts. He lunges forward and his character pulls the klaive out of the altar. It's obviously a grand klaive, judging by its size, and he was bouncing around all excited about having just gotten ahold of a klaive.
It never occurred to him that it might not have been a Gaian klaive. It was the klaive of Dark-Claws-of-Vengeance, the Shadow Lord who slew the last Camazotz. Over the centuries, it had become an extremely powerful Bane Klaive.
This Bane Klaive had just possessed a Glass Walker Ahroun. It unleashed a powerful Wyrm-spirit on us that we all had to kill. It didn't help that Alex had to leave early, and it was ruled that his Gurahl was pulled out by the NPC Mokole so the ST could focus on running the combat. The remaining Mokole, run by the fucktard known as John (The guy's like Jeremy-- anyone who's read this Journal for a good long while remembers Jeremy. Note: Unless you're on my Friends list, that link won't take you to an entry you can see.) wound up killing Andy's character in an attempt to see if he could make the spirit go away. No such luck, though.
So we wound up killing this Wyrm-spirit. At the same time, Ruiz and a Wyrm-tained counterpart were fighting off to the side, in Camazotz-Crinos form. We managed to slay the beast, though, and destroyed the corrupt portion of the Bat incarna.
So now the Camazotz are back. There's only 6 of them, including Ruiz, but it counts. Of course, the moment it was mentioned that the Camazotz were back, John wanted to play one. I watched as the ST's either strained to keep themselves from laughing or giving him a big, loud "Fuck you." There's been a little bit of discussion of possibly letting Andy play one of the new Camazotz to make up for the fact that he more or less sacrificed his PC for the plot. I doubt anything's going to come of it, though. Andy's a decent roleplayer (and by 'decent,' I mean 'he's not a walking reason for why LARPs suck'), but other than Ruiz there are no homid Camazotz. And I'm not sure if he's got what it takes to play a bat-breed shapeshifter. I figure that Sean could do it, for obvious reasons. I think I could manage with a little bit of coaching. But I'm really not sure anyone else could pull it off without half-assing it.
In other news, Sean's pleased that the plot's finally over and he's going to be coming back as a player. He's got this great backstory and concept worked up for a Red Talon Ragabash. I've loaned him my copy of the Revised Red Talons book (signed by Black Hat Matt himself at Origins this year), and I think he'll do it right. I know he was thinking of running an Uktena at some point, but he isn't confident that he can pull it off without messing it up. He's one of those folks who gets really nervous at the idea of playing characters with particularly-different ethnicity or gender from his own.
It's a good thing he's running a Garou of some sort, anyhow, as next week's game will feature an attempt to build a caern in Morgantown.
And that's it. I have a big meeting with the family later today (I'm not sure what about, to be honest with you), and I'll just try and keep in touch with you folks later.
