Keep What You Steal [Judgement Night]
Feb. 10th, 2013 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daidoji_giseiThis is the summary of the second session (1/29/13) of the Judgement Night game. The music for the evening was the Halo 3 soundtrack, which I have fallen completely in love with, and I was gratifed when Howard's player identified it almost right away.
******************
I started out the session by telling the players it was now the next morning; after meeting with Eli Weaver they had gone back to the chapterhouse, filed their reports, and spent the night doing whatever.
Upon waking, Gianni had found a message from Michael Scott, the chief wardwight of the Star City chapterhouse, waiting for him. Scott wanted to see Gianni "at his earliest convenience", and Gianni took the hint that this meant "first thing in the morning". Arriving at the chapterhouse he was immediately shown into Scott's office. The chief wardmaster was cordial but blunt: He was not happy about Gianni's performance the previous day, and he wanted the younger man to know about it. Scott spent some time explaining that Gianni should have warded the house right after they had found the body in the basement; such an action would have slowed down the ninja, if it were demonic in nature, or given them clear proof if it wasn't.
Scott also emphasized that since the team was light on experience, Gianni would have to take it upon himself to be the cool head of the group and keep the investigators from charging into situations without having wards in place to help back them up. "It is unusual to have a team composed only of newly-professed Fire Saints, but Gunny insisted and none of the other Elders wanted to argue with her. You have the making of a fine wardwight, one of the finest I have ever taught, but you will have to keep your teammates from getting you all killed."
Meanwhile, Howard and Bobby had gotten messages from the Demonology curators. As as part of their standard report (I told them) they had included drawings of the demon-summoning ward in the basement. Demonology wanted them to know that the team had found a ward that was not currently in the database, which meant they had probably found a new one. This was not totally unknown, I told them, but it was very unusual. And a little disquieting.
(One of the players asked if demon hunters share knowledge of demon-summoning wards, and the answer to that is yes. Within the Fire Saints warrior society information like that gets passed on to the other chapterhouses very quickly. The rate of transmission between other warrior societies is slower, but it still happens. This is because, I explained, all the warrior societies recognized that cooperative action was the only advantage they had over the demons, and in the long run their survival depends on things like this. {It might be more accurate to say that the ones that don't recognize this don't survive long enough for them to matter. But it works out the same either way.} )
The other issue for follow-up was that Gianni and Howard's players wanted to know how good of a look their characters had gotten of the ninja. After having them make dice rolls for noticing stuff, I told them that Gianni had just gotten a impression of pale skin (European-pale, not deathly pale) but that Howard was sure that the person had Caucasian features, pale skin, relatively slender build, and long brown hair. Howard wasn't sure of the ninja's gender because, as I pointed out, "slender build and long brown hair describes half the male cashiers at the Star City Food Conspiracy".
With the chapterhouse business taken care of, the team continued on their investigation of Curtis Mayfair. Bobby called the contact number for the Flames of Hope that Eli Weaver had provided them with and got an answering machine message for Patillo Printing Services. He left a message identifying himself as a Fire Saint and requesting some help on an investigation. A little while later a man named Wade Patillo called back, saying that he was the current president of the Flames of Hope and that he would be happy to help in a Fire Saint investigation. He and Bobby set up a time for him to come to Wade's business for a talk.
As a tactic, Bobby decided to to to Wade's shop an hour ahead of the scheduled time. The team decided that Howard would go in with him, Gianni would go in separately and act like a customer shopping for velum for music composition, and Ray would hang out outside. (I thought Gianni's player had a good idea for giving his character an innocent reason to be in the shop that was based on the character's background, but alas I know nothing of velum, music, or paper prices, so I was unable to role-play out his talking to the clerk there. Sorry, Gianni.)
Wade was surprised by Bobby's early arrival, but he was cordial about it. Handing over the job he was doing in the print shop over to one of his employees, he took the two investigators back to his office. As far as Bobby and Howard could tell, Wade did his best to answer all of their questions, but he didn't have most of the information they were looking for. The FoH organization, he explained, had as its purpose connecting ex-cons with business owners willing to employ them, to aid in establishing a job history for them and helping them to reintegrate back into society. Wade had last spoken with Mayfair when he had put him into contact with Weaver, and from what Weaver had remarked in the meantime Mayfair had been doing satisfactorily. He didn't know of any friends or social contacts Mayfair may have had.
When one of the investigators asked if Wade had an address for Mayfair, he hesitated. Then he got up and pulled a file from a file cabinet and sat back down. Wade then explained that by the policies of the FoH, Mayfair's address was confidential and should not be released to the investigators. But Wade believed that the Fire Saints would be more likely to find Mayfair's killer than the police were, so he was going to do it anyway. "But if you could forget where you found this information, I'd be grateful." The investigators promised to quickly develop a case of absent-mindedness and wrote down the address.
After taking their leave of Wade Patillo the team reassembled out at their car (still checked out from the Fire Saints motor pool) and mapped out their next move. Having learned that the house on Rigel Street was not the first of Weaver's properties that Mayfair had worked on, Howard called Weaver's office to ask for a list of addresses of the other properties. He got Andrea, the receptionist, who told him that Weaver was out showing a property to a client. After hearing what they needed, she told him that she would find Weaver right away and ask him for the addresses.
And then this happened:
Howard's player: "I tell her I've been having trouble with my phone and give her Ray's cell phone, asking her to call him instead."
Bobby's player: "I can't tell if you are the greatest wingman ever or a damned friend-fucker."
Howard's player: "A little of column A, a little of column B."
With that out of the way, they decided to check out the address they had for Mayfair, which was an apartment building not to far from downtown. I described it to the players as being, "in what is considered to be in a bad part of Star City, though Ray is from Miami and he denies that Star City has any bad parts." (Memo to self: being a writer has made you a terrible god-modder. Knock it off.) It was an older four-story brick structure with metal fire escapes on the north and south sides, entrance on the west side, and parking lot and trash dumpsters on the east side. Going into to the entry and looking at the mailboxes there they saw that apartment #8, Mayfair's, had two names: MAYFAIR and SVOBODA.
Remembering his earlier talk with Wardwight Scott, Gianni decided to ward the building before they did anything more. Going around to the east side of the building he put up a temporary ward that inhibits on the building, adding the ward that allows humans and normal animals to go in and out of the building without destroying the ward. Then Bobby and Howard went up to apartment #8, while Gianni and Ray stayed outside and covered the fire escape.
Bobby knocked on the door of the apartment door and the player commented, "if the person who opens the door looks anything like that ninja I'm just going to kick the door in." As it happened, the door was open by a six-foot tall blonde body-builder. Who, upon hearing Bobby introduce himself as a Fire Saint, immediately slammed the door shut and locked it.
Not one to stand on ceremony, Bobby hauled out one of his guns and shot open the door. He and Howard then rushed in and found themselves in a small, squalid living room. There was a kitchenette area off to the right, and two closed doors in the wall opposite them. Bobby rushed over to the door on the right, and the dice told me that was the bathroom, also in desperate need of cleaning. He and Howard then checked out the other door, and found it led to the bedroom. (Bedroom also needed cleaning.) The window of the bedroom was open on to the fire escape, and they could hear noise as if someone was climbing down the escape.
Meanwhile, back on the ground, Gianni and Ray saw someone carrying what appeared to be a sword climbing out of a window and on to the fire escape. Gianni checked his ward and discovered that it had been triggered by a demon, confirming that Svoboda was an Eaten. They pulled out their guns and prepared to start shooting, at which point I let them know there were now three peach-and-white frog-shaped demons (with CLAWS!) heading towards them across the parking lot and the closest was near enough to get an attack in.
What followed was an extended gun battle with the two on the ground being hard-pressed by the three frog-shaped demons and Svoboda trying to kill and/or escape from Bobby. Howard displayed excellent team cohesion at one point by leaving Svoboda to Bobby and shooting at the demons on the ground, which helped Gianni and Ray quite a bit.
For me as GM the most significant issue in the fight was that early on I thought I might have made it too much for the PCs to handle and some of them might get killed. I don't have anything particular against PCs dying in a game, but I think it should generally be the result of them being awesome--awesomely heroic or awesomely stupid, their pick. It shouldn't happen because I didn't pitch the scenario at the right level of strength. I'd thought about this a lot while prepping for the game, because this system is new to me and there isn't a lot of information about it on the internet. I had a solution to it: If necessary I would stop the game, explain to the players that I had miscalculated the strength of the opposition, and restart it with fewer or weaker enemies. That would keep the characters alive but it would mess up the flow of the game, and so I was relieved when the player's skills and teamwork turned the fight around and they finished off the demons with no Fire Saint fatalities.
The team regrouped on the ground and Bobby was giving first aid to Gianni (who was really badly off) and Ray (who was hurt, but not in danger) when...the cops showed up. Because you can't really have a gun fight in the middle of Star City and not expect someone to call the police. The players did the right thing and politely and non-threateningly explained to the police that they were Fire Saints and they had been killing demons. Star City's finest looked over their IDs, looked at the smelly piles of sludge that had been frog-shaped demons, and put their guns away. They also called for an ambulance so that Gianni and Ray could get some medical treatment. Meanwhile one of the investigators called the chapterhouse to report on what was happening and request a back-up, as they team was temporarily without a Wardwight or a Gunslinger, and Svoboda's apartment still needed to be investigated.
At this point we called it quit for the night. I'm not sure at this point what the top questions in the player's minds are, but I suspect they are looking forward to searching the apartment. I was thinking this weekend of coming up with appropriate props, but who has dot-matrix printers anymore? So we will just have to use our imaginations.
******************
I started out the session by telling the players it was now the next morning; after meeting with Eli Weaver they had gone back to the chapterhouse, filed their reports, and spent the night doing whatever.
Upon waking, Gianni had found a message from Michael Scott, the chief wardwight of the Star City chapterhouse, waiting for him. Scott wanted to see Gianni "at his earliest convenience", and Gianni took the hint that this meant "first thing in the morning". Arriving at the chapterhouse he was immediately shown into Scott's office. The chief wardmaster was cordial but blunt: He was not happy about Gianni's performance the previous day, and he wanted the younger man to know about it. Scott spent some time explaining that Gianni should have warded the house right after they had found the body in the basement; such an action would have slowed down the ninja, if it were demonic in nature, or given them clear proof if it wasn't.
Scott also emphasized that since the team was light on experience, Gianni would have to take it upon himself to be the cool head of the group and keep the investigators from charging into situations without having wards in place to help back them up. "It is unusual to have a team composed only of newly-professed Fire Saints, but Gunny insisted and none of the other Elders wanted to argue with her. You have the making of a fine wardwight, one of the finest I have ever taught, but you will have to keep your teammates from getting you all killed."
Meanwhile, Howard and Bobby had gotten messages from the Demonology curators. As as part of their standard report (I told them) they had included drawings of the demon-summoning ward in the basement. Demonology wanted them to know that the team had found a ward that was not currently in the database, which meant they had probably found a new one. This was not totally unknown, I told them, but it was very unusual. And a little disquieting.
(One of the players asked if demon hunters share knowledge of demon-summoning wards, and the answer to that is yes. Within the Fire Saints warrior society information like that gets passed on to the other chapterhouses very quickly. The rate of transmission between other warrior societies is slower, but it still happens. This is because, I explained, all the warrior societies recognized that cooperative action was the only advantage they had over the demons, and in the long run their survival depends on things like this. {It might be more accurate to say that the ones that don't recognize this don't survive long enough for them to matter. But it works out the same either way.} )
The other issue for follow-up was that Gianni and Howard's players wanted to know how good of a look their characters had gotten of the ninja. After having them make dice rolls for noticing stuff, I told them that Gianni had just gotten a impression of pale skin (European-pale, not deathly pale) but that Howard was sure that the person had Caucasian features, pale skin, relatively slender build, and long brown hair. Howard wasn't sure of the ninja's gender because, as I pointed out, "slender build and long brown hair describes half the male cashiers at the Star City Food Conspiracy".
With the chapterhouse business taken care of, the team continued on their investigation of Curtis Mayfair. Bobby called the contact number for the Flames of Hope that Eli Weaver had provided them with and got an answering machine message for Patillo Printing Services. He left a message identifying himself as a Fire Saint and requesting some help on an investigation. A little while later a man named Wade Patillo called back, saying that he was the current president of the Flames of Hope and that he would be happy to help in a Fire Saint investigation. He and Bobby set up a time for him to come to Wade's business for a talk.
As a tactic, Bobby decided to to to Wade's shop an hour ahead of the scheduled time. The team decided that Howard would go in with him, Gianni would go in separately and act like a customer shopping for velum for music composition, and Ray would hang out outside. (I thought Gianni's player had a good idea for giving his character an innocent reason to be in the shop that was based on the character's background, but alas I know nothing of velum, music, or paper prices, so I was unable to role-play out his talking to the clerk there. Sorry, Gianni.)
Wade was surprised by Bobby's early arrival, but he was cordial about it. Handing over the job he was doing in the print shop over to one of his employees, he took the two investigators back to his office. As far as Bobby and Howard could tell, Wade did his best to answer all of their questions, but he didn't have most of the information they were looking for. The FoH organization, he explained, had as its purpose connecting ex-cons with business owners willing to employ them, to aid in establishing a job history for them and helping them to reintegrate back into society. Wade had last spoken with Mayfair when he had put him into contact with Weaver, and from what Weaver had remarked in the meantime Mayfair had been doing satisfactorily. He didn't know of any friends or social contacts Mayfair may have had.
When one of the investigators asked if Wade had an address for Mayfair, he hesitated. Then he got up and pulled a file from a file cabinet and sat back down. Wade then explained that by the policies of the FoH, Mayfair's address was confidential and should not be released to the investigators. But Wade believed that the Fire Saints would be more likely to find Mayfair's killer than the police were, so he was going to do it anyway. "But if you could forget where you found this information, I'd be grateful." The investigators promised to quickly develop a case of absent-mindedness and wrote down the address.
After taking their leave of Wade Patillo the team reassembled out at their car (still checked out from the Fire Saints motor pool) and mapped out their next move. Having learned that the house on Rigel Street was not the first of Weaver's properties that Mayfair had worked on, Howard called Weaver's office to ask for a list of addresses of the other properties. He got Andrea, the receptionist, who told him that Weaver was out showing a property to a client. After hearing what they needed, she told him that she would find Weaver right away and ask him for the addresses.
And then this happened:
Howard's player: "I tell her I've been having trouble with my phone and give her Ray's cell phone, asking her to call him instead."
Bobby's player: "I can't tell if you are the greatest wingman ever or a damned friend-fucker."
Howard's player: "A little of column A, a little of column B."
With that out of the way, they decided to check out the address they had for Mayfair, which was an apartment building not to far from downtown. I described it to the players as being, "in what is considered to be in a bad part of Star City, though Ray is from Miami and he denies that Star City has any bad parts." (Memo to self: being a writer has made you a terrible god-modder. Knock it off.) It was an older four-story brick structure with metal fire escapes on the north and south sides, entrance on the west side, and parking lot and trash dumpsters on the east side. Going into to the entry and looking at the mailboxes there they saw that apartment #8, Mayfair's, had two names: MAYFAIR and SVOBODA.
Remembering his earlier talk with Wardwight Scott, Gianni decided to ward the building before they did anything more. Going around to the east side of the building he put up a temporary ward that inhibits on the building, adding the ward that allows humans and normal animals to go in and out of the building without destroying the ward. Then Bobby and Howard went up to apartment #8, while Gianni and Ray stayed outside and covered the fire escape.
Bobby knocked on the door of the apartment door and the player commented, "if the person who opens the door looks anything like that ninja I'm just going to kick the door in." As it happened, the door was open by a six-foot tall blonde body-builder. Who, upon hearing Bobby introduce himself as a Fire Saint, immediately slammed the door shut and locked it.
Not one to stand on ceremony, Bobby hauled out one of his guns and shot open the door. He and Howard then rushed in and found themselves in a small, squalid living room. There was a kitchenette area off to the right, and two closed doors in the wall opposite them. Bobby rushed over to the door on the right, and the dice told me that was the bathroom, also in desperate need of cleaning. He and Howard then checked out the other door, and found it led to the bedroom. (Bedroom also needed cleaning.) The window of the bedroom was open on to the fire escape, and they could hear noise as if someone was climbing down the escape.
Meanwhile, back on the ground, Gianni and Ray saw someone carrying what appeared to be a sword climbing out of a window and on to the fire escape. Gianni checked his ward and discovered that it had been triggered by a demon, confirming that Svoboda was an Eaten. They pulled out their guns and prepared to start shooting, at which point I let them know there were now three peach-and-white frog-shaped demons (with CLAWS!) heading towards them across the parking lot and the closest was near enough to get an attack in.
What followed was an extended gun battle with the two on the ground being hard-pressed by the three frog-shaped demons and Svoboda trying to kill and/or escape from Bobby. Howard displayed excellent team cohesion at one point by leaving Svoboda to Bobby and shooting at the demons on the ground, which helped Gianni and Ray quite a bit.
For me as GM the most significant issue in the fight was that early on I thought I might have made it too much for the PCs to handle and some of them might get killed. I don't have anything particular against PCs dying in a game, but I think it should generally be the result of them being awesome--awesomely heroic or awesomely stupid, their pick. It shouldn't happen because I didn't pitch the scenario at the right level of strength. I'd thought about this a lot while prepping for the game, because this system is new to me and there isn't a lot of information about it on the internet. I had a solution to it: If necessary I would stop the game, explain to the players that I had miscalculated the strength of the opposition, and restart it with fewer or weaker enemies. That would keep the characters alive but it would mess up the flow of the game, and so I was relieved when the player's skills and teamwork turned the fight around and they finished off the demons with no Fire Saint fatalities.
The team regrouped on the ground and Bobby was giving first aid to Gianni (who was really badly off) and Ray (who was hurt, but not in danger) when...the cops showed up. Because you can't really have a gun fight in the middle of Star City and not expect someone to call the police. The players did the right thing and politely and non-threateningly explained to the police that they were Fire Saints and they had been killing demons. Star City's finest looked over their IDs, looked at the smelly piles of sludge that had been frog-shaped demons, and put their guns away. They also called for an ambulance so that Gianni and Ray could get some medical treatment. Meanwhile one of the investigators called the chapterhouse to report on what was happening and request a back-up, as they team was temporarily without a Wardwight or a Gunslinger, and Svoboda's apartment still needed to be investigated.
At this point we called it quit for the night. I'm not sure at this point what the top questions in the player's minds are, but I suspect they are looking forward to searching the apartment. I was thinking this weekend of coming up with appropriate props, but who has dot-matrix printers anymore? So we will just have to use our imaginations.
