Roleplaying resumed

As you can see, it's been quiet for a while. But 1920s Cthulhu continued this week and we sailed to Chile and eventually Easter Island. Jack is in Crusade Mode now and was very disappointed when the Chilean occupying forces confiscated most of our firearms. A single revolver just doesn't cut it when the final confrontation is approaching! At least we weren't shot as spies or thrown in jail.

We are trying to finish Shadows of Yog-Sothoth in May, hopefully that works out as planned. It is currently my only steadily ongoing game, so I better get working on those summer gaming plans one of these days. I am not holding my breath while waiting for Buffy or Delta Green to resume.

Game Count: 27/52

More downs

Looks like this will be the first week this year without a single roleplaying session. It's a pity, but I had a pretty good run, I guess.

Delta Green is indeed going on a break until late spring or early summer because of scheduling conflicts. By that time who knows if all the players still want to continue. So that lasted for 4 sessions, if I'm not mistaken.

The Buffy game is going to lose a player. As her character was the slayer, we are now looking for a replacement player, which will cause a break of yet undetermined length. Hopefully it's not the end of the campaign.

Not a good week for roleplaying.

Ups and downs

Buffy continued this week. We laid the smack down on a few cultists, a byakhee and a smallish flying polyp - I'd like to see that happening in Call of Cthulhu! My character's social life got more complicated again, thanks to an unfortunately timed hug from a fellow student (a computer geek like him, and a cheerleader) which Will's girlfriend witnessed.

Delta Green's future is uncertain. It is really difficult to find a time that suits everyone, and I don't want to run a game where some player is missing almost every time. It might be summer before we can even finish up the current scenario.

On a tangent: the Most Impressive Game In A Good Long While award goes out to Company of Heroes, the PC wargame which came out in 2006 but which I tried only now. It looks surprisingly good on my dated machine, and the gameplay is captivating enough to have pushed me to buy another gigabyte of RAM and a new graphics card. This upgrade should take me past the Recommended hardware into the realm of Damn Pretty. I thought I wouldn't be updating this old warhorse anymore; shows what I know.

Game Count: 22/52

Another counter update

More Buffy this week. Also participated in a Paranoia one-shot scenario, which predictably ended in the whole troubleshooter team being executed for failing the mission.

Still cannot get a full night's sleep.

Game Count: 16/52

A slayer discovered

In the third episode of Buffy vs. Cthulhu the others finally learned what a slayer is, and that Selena was the slayer. We managed to work together with the mysterious Eva to prevent the mi-go and the janitor (apparently some sort of a cultist) from completing a ritual to do who knows what. Got to burn an old house, too.

Finally got around to continuing NWN as well. Level 6 looms near as well it should: we're going to need every trick in the book to defeat a certain necromancer and his bodak.

Game Count: 12/52

On slayer hunters and tiny space aliens

This week on The Roleplaying Channel:

The second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Cthulhu Crossover! In which our heroes discover a grisly corpse in the high school basement, run into a teacher who carries a first edition copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten in his bag, hunt for information on a yeti/fly/alien creature, and finally find an old church under the school, complete with a crazy caretaker and the abovementioned monster. Enter a mysterious German girl who claims that an apocalypse can only be averted by killing the slayer! TO BE CONTINUED

The final installment of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, our first Delta Green adventure! The agents organize a manhunt and finally track Master Sergeant Santana into an old mine, abandoned a century ago. Well-armed search parties enter, and six FBI and state police men die before Santana is literally shot to pieces and collapses. US Army INSCOM and CIC officers show up and take custody of the curious orb Santana was carrying. The forensics experts of the team perform an autopsy on his corpse at the FBI Phoenix laboratory, and finally meet the Traveler face to face. It paralyzes Winifred Dashner and Maxwell Blinn barely escapes a similar fate. He runs to get help and they arrive just in time: the alien has slit Winifred's belly open and is about to enter its new host when a hail of bullets cuts it down messily. I know I went kind of soft on the investigators, only hospitalizing one and traumatizing another, but this was the first adventure, after all.

Game Count: 9/52

Circus freaks and Scotch whisky

This week we got the Buffy campaign under way and continued the 1920s Cthulhu.

It was decided to change Buffy's location from New Orleans to Arkham, as Cthulhoid elements were slated to appear anyway, and we felt that a fictional small town would perhaps fit the game better than a large existing one. The starting date was 16 January 2008, the same as that of the game session, and the opening scene was set at Arkham High where every character was sitting in the English class. What follows is just a list of randomly selected events, as a blow-by-blow account belongs elsewhere.

A circus was in town and Selena Flores' (she's the slayer) watcher told her to investigate it as some star conjunctions indicated that something evil would happen in that park within days. She seemed to be more worried about missing cheerleader practice.

Will managed to inadvertently anger Elianor on the very first day (he's not very good at reading's ladies' intentions between the lines) but luckily they made up the day after. He was even invited for a dinner at her home before they went to see the circus. A nerve-wracking event for the young man, to be sure. Matthieu, Elianor's father had earlier visited the bookstore which Selena's watcher owned. Meanwhile, Vin had learned that one of his teammates was missing...

The circus opening night saw everyone but Vin in attendance; he was hanging out in the park, drinking beer (shocking, I know) with his buddies. Elianor experienced a psychic vision and worried Will in the process. She tried to investigate the main tent with Selena after the show, but they were chased off by circus workers. After Will drove Elianor home, she told her father - who is also a sorcerer, by the way - about her vision and they began a ritual to try and find out more about the park. It indicated that magical forces were converging on the location! Her dad grabbed a sword and left to investigate, telling Elianor to stay out of it.

She called Will immediately and asked for a ride to the circus. What, you thought we actually obeyed? Will was clueless but snuck out of the house anyway and drove to meet his girlfriend. While these events unfolded, Selena was again investigating the circus and ran smack into what looked like a ritual sacrifice of the missing student. She called her watcher for help and then went on the attack. Soon the main tent was really busy with magical clowns, the circus director, his female companion, the slayer, her watcher, Elianor, her father and poor Will all embroiled in a fight.

We won. The big boss got away. The student was saved. Will accidentally decapitated the mysterious woman with the watcher's sword. He really didn't mean to. Selena kicked ass and got hers kicked a little. Elianor used a crossbow instead of magicks. Vin? He scored on an entirely another front. As Will and Elianor drove the rescued guy to the hospital, they got into a meaningful discussion of the nature of courage and mysterious visions, each discovering that the other had also experienced them! The rest of the gang cleaned up at the scene and interrogated a weird height-challenged person. Cue credits.

Back in the 1920s, the team, reinforced by a friend of the deceased Thomas, traveled to Scotland to look for a missing big game hunter at the request of his nephew. No Prohibition, yay! We found the missing man's corpse and a piece of an artifact we'd only seen in a picture before. A ghost tried to eat Jack while Roy was happily cooking dinner in the next room. Sam picked a lock with a supposedly magical toothpick. We did not blow anyone's head off and were friends with the local police. Must be that genteel British air.

Game Count: 4/52

Teen drama goes to eleven

We had a character creation meeting for that upcoming Buffy game this Saturday. If it was any indication, the campaign is going to be a hoot and then some. It was so nice to focus on things that usually get a short shrift in the games I play or run, such as:

• What's my social status in high school?
• Am I seeing anyone and how serious it is?
• Are my parents and siblings cool or not?

I ended up with a 16-year-old son of black Haitian immigrants called Wilbert "Will" Price-Mars. He's a nerd, meaning he's smart and good at most school subjects but hasn't got that many friends. He's also a slightly paranoid conspiracy nut and a pretty good hacker. His dead grandmother was a famous Haitian Vodou Mambo from whom Will inherited "the sight" - the ability to see magic and supernatural things. He's got a big brother, Vincent (another PC), who is not so good with the bookish stuff, but who is the captain of the basketball team and who's done all kinds of juvenile crimes without getting caught yet. Will helps him to pass the grades and Vincent kicks the ass of any bully who messes with his brother. Naturally, Vincent is a handsome and popular guy.

Will has also got a girlfriend, a fellow good pupil who is an ambitious blond cheerleader and one of the more popular kids in school (also a PC). He's kind of baffled how they have ended up together, but he likes Elianor and vice versa and they are both interested in the occult. What Will does not know is that she is a beginner witch. Finally, we have a latina slayer PC, of whom I don't know much yet. But you can basically multiply Will's history by four to have an idea of how much social and emotional baggage the characters are packing before we run into a single monster. Sounds like Buffy to me!

This character creation session would not have been remotely as fun if we had all done our PCs separately. It would have been more difficult to come up with the connections between characters, and they are very important for a game like this. It also helped that the TV show was familiar to all, so we were on the same wavelength even though people have differing amounts of roleplaying experience (I think the guy playing my brother has only played computer RPGs previously, for example). Cinematic Unisystem is mercifully free of obscure terminology and number-crunching. Almost everything on the character sheet was immediately obvious to everyone.

We'll go live in January. I can only hope that the great atmosphere from the first meeting is carried over. I want to play something where it's more important to worry about calling my girlfriend than about whether it's best to load JHP or FMJ in the trusty old MP5, or about agonizing over the absolute best spell selection for the day (both of which can be fun, too).

Old dog, new tricks, and so forth

This is my first actual blog entry if one doesn't count some journal entries on Last.fm. So bear with me while I learn.

It recently occurred to me that I haven't done this much roleplaying since the glory days of high school when all the players lived very close to each other and were usually available whenever somebody wanted to GM. I am currently running Delta Green and playing in a 1920s Call of Cthulhu game and a D&D Ptolus campaign. Moreover, I'll be a player in a Buffy game slated to start some time after the New Year and I have a hankering to run another game myself. Too much of a good thing will possibly be a bad thing, but we shall see. Maybe it will be an extraordinarily good thing. :)

About the title: no big story there. I just thought that this, more so than ever before, is a time of gaming in my life. My groups include some old players, some new, and some in-between, which I guess is an ideal mix. And the same applies to the games we play. Call of Cthulhu is an old hat. 3rd edition D&D is quite familiar by now, but CoC has it beaten by more than a decade. Finally, Buffy I have yet to play, even though I have owned the books for several years. Again, the selection couldn't be much better.

Enough rambling for now; time to hit Publish Post and get this show on the road! A small step for me, and even smaller for mankind.