mood: determined

In the two games I run I've put curses & diseases on PCs or pushed them towards evil this past week.  This is not because I'm a mean guy or anything, but both games need a little jeopardy right now; the players in both have been getting complacent lately.  In both games the PCs are 'good guys' so their actions are thus considered to be good, even if the description of those actions involve the words "wholesale mass slaughter."  In an effort to shake things up I'm going after what makes the characters who they are.
In my steampunk game, at least one PC has been mutated by exposure to the stuff of raw chaos.  Any Malhavoc fans will probably guess (correctly) that I'm using this book in my game.  Raw chaos is the fundamental force of entropy given an unstable & highly corrosive form, and is used to power the pseudo-science of chaositech.  Exposure to raw chaos also causes mutations.  And as I stated earlier, at least one character is about to go through a kind of second puberty.  Why do this?  Because it leads to interesting plot hooks and character interactions, and also because it pushes the players themselves a little out of their comfort zones and gives them something new about their characters to work with.  I wouldn't have done this if I didn't feel confident that the players could handle it and even enjoy it a little too.  But  now someone in the party is now something other than what they began as, and might get worse over time.  Let's see how that turns out...  (I don't want to go into detail, because I just dropped this on them yesterday and want to see what develops from it.)
The Scion game I run with another group has one hero slowly moving over to the dark side.  A little background into the system: as the child of a god(dess) you have access to amazing powers but are bound by the principals of your patron deity.  These are represented in your stats and birthrights.  All characters have 4 virtues, 4 fixed stats that can define how you act in a given situation.  If you have a high value in a given virtue you must to act in accordance with that virtue, like if you have high Loyalty you can't leave a friend behind.  If you want to go against a virtue there's a set of rules for resisting your nature, but it will get costly if you fight your self too often, and the higher the value of the virtue the harder it gets.  The up side of virtues is that if you do something that harmonizes with that stat you can get bonus die to succeed.  There are also birthrights, creatures or artifacts handed to you by your god to help you fight the bad guys of the setting, the Titans.
Now, in my other game one of my players came into possession of a 5-dot (like a major artifact in D&D) relic dagger after defeating the first bad guy-du-jour in our opening session.  It's very powerful in the fact that it secretes a venom that's strong enough to melt metal, but only when someone of divine or titanic blood picks it up.  Very cool, no?  The problem with relics is that they can't just be handed off to just anybody, either the relic itself or the god who gave it will work against anyone to whom the relic doesn't belong.  In this case, the powerful dagger is very willful and has a predator's intelligence.  The player who has the dagger defeated it's previous owner, which the dagger respects, but the new owner isn't nearly violent enough for the dagger's taste.  A weapon wants to be used, after all.  So every time the character uses the dagger, especially in combat, it's poisoning his soul and giving him a Dark Virtue.  In this case it's Malice.  Remember what I said about virtues, you have to act according to them...all of them.  Now he has 2 virtues that conflict, Valor & Malice, and as he uses the dagger Malice will get stronger.
I wanted to challenge this player by giving him a conflict he's never really dealt with before.  All of his characters to date have been gruff and unfriendly but have been good people through and through; the badass with a heart of gold, basically.  The player himself is only 18 , and I'm trying to coax him out of his usual habits and try something new.  Every character he plays is just a variant on a dwarf, at least in style.  I think with the right motivation he could be an excellent and very versatile player.  I also wanted to challenge the group too, by giving them something that can't be overcome with dice and special abilities.  Most of the other players in this group patronize the 18 year old, treating him in many ways like he is still 9 years old (when he joined the group), so I'm trying to help him show the group how mature he can actually be.  Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
The moral of this story is: shake you players up every now and again.  Give them something they didn't expect in a way that makes them step outside of their normal routines.  And every now and then put the fear of GM in them.  Just recite my favorite mantra: I am the Game Master, evil is my job.

Quote of the day:  "This job would be great if it weren't for the customers" - Clerks

Neri Potsmasher – I must have been on a Spiderman kick when I came up with Neri, because I made him a miniature J. Jonah Jameson.  I built him on the idea of making a boss the party won’t rely on, someone fun to play, and was used to freelancers.  So Neri is gruff, loud, smokes like a chimney, and gives me a legitimate in-game reason to give the party a hard time.  I also seem to need a character that smokes in every game I run, so I decided to go over the top and have Neri enjoy cigars as big as he is.  Seriously, his cigars are too big to hold, if they weren’t propped on his desk he couldn’t smoke them.  I have to work a little more on his voice & mannerisms, as I plan on having him be a recurring NPC.  Maybe I’ll get a pic of JJ and doctor it to look like a Loresong. :)

As an aside, I’d like to explain why I make NPC’s based (sometimes loosely) on known characters, fictional or real.  For me, it lets me get right into the roleplaying and skip a lot of the introductory dialogue; if the players recognize the original character, then I can play off their preconceived notions. 

Blackwood – I don’t know what I’m going to do with this character, or even if he’ll survive the next session.  I just needed an abrupt NPC that the party can ask questions of.  And I though it would be cool to start inserting non-standard races early on, instead of having them be a distant detail that only matters later.  I’ve noticed that flavor details will be forgotten until later in the game when it becomes vital. As an example, in another game I played in a few years ago, the GM brought out battlemechs for us to fight in a low-technology world or so we thought.  It turns out that the campaign was going through an industrial revolution, and the GM failed to mention this until that point.  So the party is going to see aram, kobolds and a few other monstrous NPCs running around, so I can keep the flavor of Ptolus fresh in their mind’s eye.

Mr. Security “Expert” – He has one more part to play in this adventure, so I’ll hold off on his explanation until later…

My view on the first game is that it went really well, even though we lost a lot of time to finishing out the PCs.  That’s my fault more than anyone’s, put the group pulled through and got their characters together in good order.

I like the dynamic of the party so far.  We have a mix of strong, smart and quick characters, and everyone is developing a rhythm already.  Usually with a first game with new people there’s a lot of feeling each other out at first, which makes the first few sessions a little awkward as players simply don’t know enough about the person next to them.  I did help that no one was a stranger; we all met at GenCon, and had a chance to play & party together.  So I have a good feeling about this group and really want to get together more often.  Of course with 5 people across 2 states, with the possibility of another player coming from another state, it might be difficult.  Well, you know what they say: good things are worth working for. :)

Memorable moments:
- Any time Chron said “You’re a funny guy!” then proceed to smack someone down.
- The party sitting down a tavern after trying to squeeze Neri for more money.  “Do you think he’ll give us more money?”  “Let him sweat for a while.”
- Our 2 strong characters trying to lift the heavy door of the secret passage, then the Verrik rolling a natural 20 and flicking it aside.

And with that, we've officially begun Ptolus: green lights by the Spire.

mood: imaginative

I should have put some preamble in one of my previous posts, but I’m starting a new campaign with some new players and a lot of new material (new to me anyhow).  I’ve put a first session recap up, and I’ll post some notes on the session later.    For the new game, we’ve swapped 2 players out for some new blood.  This year’s models are Scott & Smitty, two guys I meet at GenCon this year (I say that like I go every year), and were a blast to hang out with.  They’re both really good players, and we had a blast at the first session.  See here for my recap.  I have to say, for having 4 days to rapid-write a game with house rules to cobble together the pieces, I don’t think I did too badly.