bruceb

Whoof.

+ Had a very satisfying Spirit of the Century session. I've nailed down some things that were making my sessions not so much fun and applied fixes, and it sounds like it worked for the players as well as me.

. Had an excellent morning walk, as noticed in previous post and photo.

+ Had a fine Mother's Day visit with Mom.

+ I'm not yet actually signed up for Weight Watchers (I'll be doing that as soon as the next check comes, sometime this month), but I've started tracking the point cost of what I'm now eating, to establish a baseline sense and sharpen my awareness of what in particular needs to change. And I ended up very much closer to Weight Watcher's recommended total for my weight range than I'd have guessed.

- Took part, probably too much part, in a very, very long, often grueling exchange over at Tor about the handling of Native Americans in Pat Wrede's new novel. (This is not an invitation to have that debate here, and if you post comments about how I'm all silly and wrong, I'll nuke them and snarl as I do it. The subject is not open for discussion here at this time.) I feel worn and discouraged from it, even with the revitalizing jolt of good gaming. Hope that rest will sort it out.

It is interesting to see just how far my views on a lot of prejudice-related topics has come. I think I just plain know a lot more than I did, and that New Horizons will benefit from it. I know it won't be the book some folks insist it should be, but I'll deal with that in due season.

Now to kick back and rest some.

Tonight's Spirit of the Century game was a funky one. One of the players ended up effectively GMing it for an hour or so - he invented a villain from whom the PCs might get the transport they needed, then ran much of their meeting with him, and was altogether glorious at it. Things got done, fun was had. :) (And this generous assistance reduced the neuro load on me, and let play go on an extra hour.)

Afterward, I knew, I would need to do my daily exercise. And suddenly I realized I felt like a walk. So instead of using my pedal machine for 15 minutes, I went walking for 20, listening to an audiobook and enjoying the cold early spring night. It felt good. I have the distinctive mentally drained feeling I always do after intense concentration, but it's coupled with a physical relaxation and well-balanced energy.

Ahhh.

From tonight's game:

=-=-=-=-=

Evelyn: "Doorman, fetch me a taxi. What? Why, the Chrysler building, on the double!"

Me: The driver's off like a flash, waiting just long enough to see if the Penitent is getting in too.

Penitent: ((Wait, what? I mean, I can leap dramatically onto the roof?))

Me: Sure, if you'd like. :)

Jerri: Jerri and the Penitent also double-time it to the Chrysler building, stopping only to drop the officer off at the local FBI office. ;)

Jerri: Penitent can ride on the roof if he really wants to... ;)

Penitent: "I think I saw the trumpeter, my fury...be a dear and drop me on the taxi so I can say...hello."

Jerri: Or, y'know, I can do that. ;)

Me: Sometimes it's best if I just let you sort it out. :)

Jerri: Jerri swoops low, to a chorus of honks and cries from traffic and passersby, and drops the Penitent right on the roof of 'Skeleton's taxi!

Penitent: The Penitent plunges from the sky with a roar of flame, riding the wake of Jerri's jetpack! He falls, like a black rain from Hell itself, like a cold storm in the dark of night, a shadow in the concrete canyons of the City That Never Sleeps, a bad dream indeed. It's a small matter to make it to the running board, chuckling with bleak amusement.

Me: And that right there is why I do this.

Jerri: ((Show-off!))

A few minutes later:

Penitent: "Penitent will do, until we are better acquainted," he intones, somberly. "Have you brought your instrument? I'm in the mood for a dirge."

Evelyn: "If you wish to be better acquainted, you could at least buy me a drink first. No, I'm afraid I missed the piano-sized taxi by mere seconds. That hag on the thirty-second floor snapped it up for that pack of wild dogs she dotes on."

=-=-=-=-=

And that's what it's all about.

I really like the ambience of D&D 4th edition, as I've mentioned previously. And of course I very much like the FATE system. So it's Reese's time.

At-will powers can be aspects, and per-encounter and daily powers can be stunts.

I think that a suitably tinkered skill list would pretty well cover the rest.

What I don't have is a really good sense of what level equivalent a stock SotC character would likely be. Anyone with more experience want to weigh in?

What do I get when it's time for players to do the guest starring appearances in others' adventures? I get this:

In an intimate gathering of the German upper-crust, Evelyn Keyes uses his musical talents to seduce the winsome bride of the evil German scientist so that he can listen from their bedroom to the Morse code tappings from the secret basement below. Later, he seduces the scientist himself, then blackmails them both into silence lest they warn their superiors about Daz Dillinger's recent escape from their secret prison.

I feel like I'm blessed and cursed sometimes.

This is what I get for re-reading Morgoth's Ring and re-watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon pretty close together. Caution: This does strange things to Tolkien's canon. Please, feel free to skip it.

=-=-=-=-=

Morgoth is banished forever. Sauron lives on within the walls of Arda. It is seventeen hundred years since the Valar came in their supernatural wrath to destroy Morgoth and all his works, and seventeen hundred years since they withdraw from Middle-Earth, and now Sauron's power is greater than ever before. A handful of the First Children of Ilúvatar resist the dark lord in their strongholds, but the great continent at the heart of the world is captive to the Shadow. The last hope of resistance, unless the Valar choose to act again, lies with humanity, and specifically with the people of Númenor.

And the Second Children of Ilúvatar will come! They are assembling a fleet to match the darkness, embodying in wood, steel, and crystal all that they learned about making from the elder race and all that they've discovered on their own, and training the armies to fill the vessels and wield the weapons almost ready for them. But nobody sets forth on a venture like that at a moment's notice. It took centuries for the Dark Lord to prepare his stroke; humanity needs its years, too. But in the meantime, the Shadow must not be allowed peace and quiet within which to consolidate its hold.

That's where you come in.

The world is round, after all: the uttermost east is the uttermost west. Your band of brave warriors and wise scholars and cunning masters of the world's secret ways will set forth in the fastest ships the shipwrights of Eldadondë can provide. equipped with the lightest and most durable gear from the forges and mills of Armenelos. You will sail the western seas until you come to the eastern lands, and then you will make your way across lands known and unknown, until at last you come to the wasteland that Sauron comes home. Along the way, you will make what bonds of friendship you can, liberate all those you can from Shadow's thrall, fight all you must against those sunk too deep in darkness or otherwise unable or unwilling to trust the light you carry. In the end, you and your allies will fall upon the Dark Lord from behind as the mass of Númenor falls upon him from in front.

The fate of all the struggle doesn't rest on your shoulders, any more than a battle depends entirely on just one shoulder. But you matter. You are young to have been given this responsibility, but the oracles confirm the choice, and we have learned at great cost that it's better to heed the whispering of the wind's first breath than to wait and need the hurricane to slap us into waking attention. Gather your forces, and go with the light of eternity in your eyes and in your hearts. Remember always that above and beyond the Shadow, the light endures, and our calling is not to invent the light but simply to pierce the darkness to let what was there before shine again.

=-=-=-=-=

I'm thinking this might work nicely with True20, of all things. The characters can start off at level 3 or so and then build up experience as they go, mostly exiting the frame of known Middle-Earth for most of the campaign, and then rejoining the mapped and chronicled area as epic heroes leading an army against Mordor from the east. Note that this is Numenor in its full power, and that the heroes' cause is very much one of understanding, healing, and making as well as of smacking.

I'm going to take a stab at play-by-post on RPG Net. [url=http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=8724735]This is my recruitment post[/url], for a Spirit of the Century campaign riffing on some of the ideas y'all and I have been tossing around here. Feel free to make me a pitch, or just watch.

I recognize a failure mode of mine: I get tired, and wander-y, and dabble, and then my attention is so dispersed that either nothing gets done or whatever does get done is basically random and not what I really wanted to do in the first place. So: time to nail myself down and stick to True20 and Spirit of the Century for a bit.

I have also been thinking more about the zombies-versus-samurai setting and came up with an idea for a small but (I think) useful tweak to SotC character creation. It would work well for other settings where inheritance plays a big part.

Revised chargen step 1a: What did your great-grandparents do during the Mongol invasion and its aftermath? The description justifies one aspect, a thing your family is still famous for.

Revised chargen step 1b: What did your father or mother do during the collapse of the old shogunate and the rise of the new one? This also provides an aspect.

Revised chargen step N (haven't decided where to slot this in, probably at the end): Who have you most recently served? One aspect for this, too.

Example: "Great-grandfather kept the lighthouse for Nakamura Castle, far from the invaders' main route, and caught a party of assassins who could have destroyed the daimyo of six provinces in short order." Aspect: Heir of the Wise Watcher. "While Father was away for the forest battles, Mother took charge of all the women of our village and organized the sharing that kept us alive and well after the terrible flooding that destroyed half our fields." Aspect: Heir of the Prudent Lady. "Until his death and the division of his holdings last spring, I served Lord Gorodu Bari, the famous scholar-daimyo and patron of the arts. In his service I learned more about our honorable culture than I ever dreamed possible." Aspect: Vassal of the Scholar-Daimyo.

Each of those can be invoked for connections and knowledge, and also for inspiration with relevant tasks. I'm thinking that compels mostly would take the form of appeals to duty to the legacy's memory and honor.

I'm having one of those "aw, man, I should have thought of that years ago" moments. But on the other hand, I'd rather have the thought now than not!

Wheel of Fate Exalted is a FATE-based light rules approach to playing Exalted's Dragon-Blooded; you can find it at the Evil Hat wiki. The thing it does that makes me curse myself for a novice is very simple. More below the cut.

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As usual with me in moments where I have ideas but limited opportunity to put them into practice, I tend to use a sort of anti-Occam's principle, where I multiple entities gratuitously and then whittle down. The Rising Suns concept confirms my sense that I'd really like to run something with a strong Japanese flavor, but I think I should simplify a bit. Hence this...

This one calls for RPG Objects' excellent Legends of the Samurai (do the gaming-interested among you know about RPG Objects? amazing folks, and I owe them a post of praise sometime soon) and Adamant's fine free d20 to FATE conversion guide.

A hundred years ago, the god of thunder sent the divine wind that destroyed the entire Mongol fleet. But the soldiers labored under the great khan's curse that they would know no true rest until victory. Each year, after typhoon season, some of the remaining undead drowned victims wash ashore, and wreak whatever havoc they can. Sometimes evil necromancers and other unscrupulous people of the Home Islands try to use them in their own nefarious schemes. The Greater Peace Sodality exists to deal with all of these threats. A semi-secret society founded by the shoguns of the invasion era, it's persisted, mostly secret, through dynastic change and all the other upheavals a century can bring. In the early years it was a very large and powerful organization, and it still retains its formal connections to many foci of power throughout Japan (and perhaps even beyond), but it's just not that big a deal anymore.

Being recruited for Greater Peace is a "we have some good news and some bad news" proposition. On the one hand, it means you've been recognized as a warrior of great prowess, significant master of a relevant craft or art, or someone else with real distinguished accomplishments. On the other hand, it also means that for whatever reason, you haven't been snapped up by someone else with better standing. You may have screwed up something important, or just never gotten the hang of a crucial part of typical duties for your class and position, or something else, but you're on the margin and both sides know it. Likewise if, somehow, you've heard of Greater Peace and sought them out on your own initiative.

So characters fight the undead and those who'd use them, and see about fixing the problems that have left them in their various fixes, and deal with unexpected complications as they learn what's going on behind the scenes on sundry fronts.

I realized while describing this to some friends that it amounts to a heavily armed pulp riff on the spirit of Planetes.

Following on the heels of a Spirit of the Century/drow crossover vignette, below the cut tag, a hero and a fiend from that scene.

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Summer 1925
Somewhere far beneath the earth, and perhaps farther than that

Major Roger Edwards Jr. (ret.) had seen plenty in his time, from the horrors of the Western Front to the damnable Spanish influenza to the tragically misconceived Allied intervention in the Russians' revolution. But the scene spread before him made them all pale by comparison. These were no mere dark-skinned savages, these "drow" and their heathen cavern-city of Erelhei-Cinlu. Tribal peoples could be cruel, of course, but this was the sort of well-planned monstrosity it took the advanced races to conceive. This was the insightful energy of potential peers turned to organized evil.

They'd loosened his shackles some, apparently finding his gestures amusing. So he turned to the dark woman in the elaborate spiderweave raiment who presided over the whole ghastly affair. He knew he might only have one last chance at persuasion. Gathering every scrap of moral force within him, he said to her:

"Madam, this is unseemly!"