Demon: Lore of Celestials

Faith Sight

You can see faith reserves, or signatures, in humans, Fallen, relics and certain magical tools or locations that rely on Faith.  This would include most powers which require the expenditure of a willpower point (i.e. Benedictions and Castigations as well as Psychic Powers and Ritual Magic from Second Sight).  This sight works within a radius of Faith + successes in yards and is irrespective of any barrier between you.  This lasts for one scene.
Action: Instant.
Cost: None.

Dice Pool: Wits + Occult + Celestials. 

High Torment: Your thirst for Faith sharpens your senses and allows you to see more detail in these Faith signatures, such as the shapes of objects or a person's physical movements.  Thus you could see if two people standing on the other side of the wall were talking animatedly (via their gestures) or flanking a door with their arms in a position which indicates they are holding machine guns.

Shroud Faith

You can reduce the psychic visibility of your rituals, revelatory forms and other magic performed within a radius of yards equal to Faith which is centred on you.  In other words, those attempting to notice such magic using Mage Sight, Fallen Awareness, etc. have their dice rolls penalised by your successes for the rest of the scene.  Alternatively you can entirely shroud a lore use / relic activation by spending one Faith as you activate that lore.  You cannot entirely shroud the use of a revelatory form or a ritual and can only penalise those looking for it.
Dice Pool: Wits + Stealth + Celestials.
Cost: None (1 Faith to utterly shroud a lore use).

Action: Instant / Reflexive with one Faith.

High Torment: Your subtlety is warped in favour of an outright lie as you change your lore / ritual signature to make it appear to be an entirely different lore / ritual or trick those who fail to detect your revelatory form by making them sense a different House in your stead.  This version of the power only affects your own lore uses, rituals and revelatory form -- no one else's.

Visionary Link

You can forge a telepathic link between Fallen and / or mortals allowing you to impart images at whim, though you cannot transmit sound.  This link must be forged through skin contact when cast and it may affect up to Faith in individuals.  It lasts for one scene.  This link allows those so connected to use the Fallen's mind as a hub, projecting images back to the Fallen - who may then share them on - just as the central Fallen may project the images they please as well.  These images do not prevent other actions nor penalise other actions during the turns those images occur.
Action: Instant to cast and reflexive for later uses.
Cost: None.

Dice Pool: Presence + Expression + Celestials vs Resolve + Power Stat (if resisted). 

High Torment: These images are of such emotive complexity due to the raw force of the Fallen's passions that they can cloud the mind.  It requires one roll to "set" the power upon an individual and, once set, the Fallen may spend a turn to send a flood of emotive images to provide the target with a -2 penalty and change their emotion with a subsequent Presence + Expression roll.  This version of the lore is always an instant action.

Deny / Bolster Faith

You can deny an opponent's power through a clash of wills as you work your Faith against their source of power (whether vitae-driven, arcana-based or equally Faithful).  You may even pre-cast this clash so that it is activated the next time a power is directed at you within the next 24 hours.  Alternatively activation successes on this roll can be added to another creature's dice pools which can again be pre-cast on them.  You must be within Faith in yards x 10 of the caster whose power you intend to counter or within Faith in yards of the caster whose power you intend to bolster.
Action: Instant.
Cost: 1 Faith.
Dice Pool: Presence + Expression + Celestials vs their power's dice pool.
High Torment: Your pride lashes out at those who cast their spells in your presence.  Regardless of whether they are successful or not, they take your successes in bashing damage alongside the normal effects of the power.

Pillar of Redirection

You can specify a single target whose powers you may reflexively attempt to deny each turn for rounds equal to your Faith, regardless of whether that target's powers are used against you or simply someone within a radius of Faith in yards from you.
Action: Instant.
Cost: 1 Faith.
Dice Pool: Wits + Expression + Celestials vs their power's dice pool.
High Torment: Your pride lashes out at those who cast their spells in your presence.  Regardless of whether they are successful or not, they take half your successes in lethal damage.

Musing on Masks: The Great Hard Drive Fail

Well, I installed Elder Scrolls Online and everything else on the hard drive is utterly destroyed.  Or rather, missing.  All of the files.  Luckily I still have copies of all of the audio files on the voice recorder but it will take me a bit of time to clean up the silences.  Sorry about that.  Should have one up for you next week.

Also, I don't think that Elder Scrolls Online gobbled up everything else but it is suspicious that it happened at around the same time....

Or maybe the hard drive's periodic fails wiped it before we did the install.

Who knows?

Computers are sometimes magical.

Demon: the Fallen Rules Modification

I love this game...

I'm one of those people who loves Demon: the Fallen and the complicated, sometimes lovable, sometimes terribly evil, player characters you can build from it.  How many games make you create three characters to make one?  You need to design your Fallen Angel and the Human Host and then figure out how the merging of the angel's selfhood with the human's mind, memories and meatsack would combine to create a brand new creature.  Then if your host body gets wrecked, you then get to take your Fallen Angel, design a new Human Host, see how those two would merge, and then see how that plays havoc on all of your existing relationships.

There's a lot there in just "being" someone, and I absolutely adore that.

The only trouble is that the lores were a bit, well, rushed.  And they have some of that old World of Darkness need of house rules.  Don't get me wrong.  I loved the old World of Darkness.  But it did so often need house ruling.

So I've house ruled it and house ruled it and house ruled it, until recently, when my husband and I decided to go back to basics and give it a great big re-design from the bottom up using the core principles of each lore and some of the best powers as a guiding point.  And yes, this version of house rules does give each lore a bit of a power boost, similar to the new vampire rules in God Machine.  Also, these rules are compatible with New World of Darkness rather than oWoD but it shouldn't be too hard to change the stat lines if you so choose.

So on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays each week I will release one of the rule sets:

Defiler: Storms, Longing, Transfiguration.
Devil: Flame, Radiance, Celestials.
Devourer: Beasts, Flesh, Wilds.
Fiends: Light, Patterns, Portals.
Malefactor: Earth, Forge, Path.
Scourge: Awakening, Firmament, Wind.
Slayer: Death, Ghosts*, Realms.

Common: Frequency, Humanity, Fundament

*I've renamed Spirits as Ghosts because the Hisil is such a core part of the nWoD gameworld, even if the creature types don't necessarily know it, and so I've changed the name for clarity's sake.

Elder Scrolls Online

So that's where I've been.  Tamriel.  I'm part of the Alliance of Bosmer, Altmer and Khajit because, well, their queen sounded like the best kind of royal to get behind from the brief summaries you can get outside of the game.  I'm a little disappointed by how much information needs to be gleaned from websites before heading in but otherwise it's a lot of fun and full of exciting inspirations.

Regrettably I'm currently running a dark fantasy / personal horror campaign in my homebrew world revolving around a place somewhat similar to a haunted mansion possessed by an eldritch abomination ... and then there's Masks of Nyarlathotep.  So there's not a lot I can do with all of this inspiration I keep receiving.

Except for pouring it onto this blog for later use.

Oh, and I've also started working with my husband to create some nifty house rules for the Demon: the Fallen lores.  The original sets are just a little unbalanced and awkward to use, in my opinion.

When is a player less / more than a single player?

Every game style has an ideal number of players.  Just like a "buddy cop" movie is best with two players, so are games which involve a lot of witness interviewing, clue hunting and suspect timetabling.  Three is doable, sure, though sometimes one player may need to be quiet so that the other two can grill a suspect with greater precision and, yes, a single player could certainly be up to the task though they'll need a little more verbal guidance and hinting from the GM since they won't have any other mental assistance in the game.

Naturally a game of high adventure and wacky hi-jinx works well with the usual D&D group of four so that each niche can be filled and each player has opportunities to bounce off the other characters during the long stints without others in the group.  A dungeon crawl can cope well with 5 - 6 players, at most, though only if they know the rules well and won't make each round last a terribly long time.

So with all these facts in mind, on top of the GM's own needs and skill, each game will have an ideal number of players.  Having said that, some players take up more, or less, of the spotlight, time and energy within the game.  Therefore, in terms of seats at the game table, some players are worth more, or less, than a single player.

The half a players are the quiet ones.  They may have stellar moments occasionally but generally they're content to watch.  You could put eight of these around a table intended for four and so long as they know the rules well enough you wouldn't have much trouble running the game.

The three-quarter players make excellent sidekicks.  Even when they're in the spotlight, they tend to be in it to transfer it to someone else.  Rather than engaging much with NPCs or decision making, they instead serve to reinforce another player's decisions and reflect the other characters in a way that serves to gift them more limelight.

The single players are your usual run-of-the-mill player.  They like the spotlight but are happy to share.  They draw attention but not too much.  They're happy to roleplay but they generally won't slow things down to do it and when they make decisions it's generally in the best interests of the group. 

While a dedicated roleplayer whose quieter than most could be worth only one seat at the table, generally more roleplayers take up more than one.  Why is this?  Because those who are eagerly playing their character will want more time to talk, more opportunities to engage with plot, more chances to grow and develop their character, and more descriptions that emphasise who they're playing.  Don't get me wrong.  A hearty roleplayer isn't the only sort who can take up more than one seat but they tend to be mostly from this side.

When you get four hearty roleplayers at one table, each needing as much time and having as many opinions as two regular players, you really have a table of eight.  The benefit is that having a group of "eight" drawn from four players often means that you can sit back and let them "have at it".  You'll have plenty of time to think up the next part of the plot as they interact with each other.  The trouble is that steering eight players is like herding cats, especially if each cat has its own opinions.

Of course, if you have several hearty roleplayers you're probably best off looking at running smaller groups anyway.  If it's Pathfinder, two to three players aren't going to fill every niche but that shouldn't be a problem because you can simply tailor the encounters around the group's failings.  Odds are the game will revolve around decisions, antics and character arcs anyhow with combats relegated to an amusing and strategic mini-game designed to up the ante.

GM Analysis: Frank!

Seeing as Frank Punch (not his real name) was so enthusiastic to read about my opinions on various GMs, I figured I may as well start with him.  Frank Punch is new to Game Mastery and his previous experience (as far as I understand it) involves occasional game running of munchkins where the GMs revolved their spots between playing and GMing as well as a more recent very casual family games where several parents come along to play while their children play together.

Since I dropped the Flashpoint game, he chose to take up the slot with some Pathfindering of his own and decided to run one of the published adventures he'd purchased.  It proved a pretty cool game, embroidered with his use of purchased miniatures and hastily drawn maps, with a high focus on combat and peril.  The enemies played cleverly and used their abilities to their full advantage which led to very long combats, with one boss battle taking up an entire session (2 hours, approximately).  Since the enemies were tactically clever, these long combats didn't grate and the players were energised still by the end of it.

To be honest, one of my main failings as a GM is that combat rules, in particular, tend to slip freely from my mind and so I don't play the feats and the sheet as well as I might.  This makes my combats remarkably fast but also generally easy.  (Somehow my players haven't clued into the general ease of such combats, though, so my descriptive ability must be somehow driving the fear of the Gods into them.)

Once we had finished this pre-generated adventure (which killed three PCs and sent the fourth one fleeing for help), we moved onto a dungeon that he partially randomly generated and partially painstakingly created.  I believe the maps and architecture were the main part of the random generation (completed by a computer generator) and the rest was done by himself.

He uses a house rule where "What you say is what you get".  This isn't to say that he takes OOC comments to be true.  This isn't that kind of super serious game.  It is a dungeon crawl, after all.  But if you say you walk down a corridor, you can't later complain that you were sneaking.  He drilled the point home by having a door resist being pushed open, since it opened the other way and had to be pulled.  A silly point, perhaps, and one that could have indicated a bit of anal retentiveness, but later exploits in the dungeon revealed  the inclusion of that piece of dungeonry was probably more of a cautionary point so that we would have to put a bit of thought into our word use.  In other words, he wasn't so anal at later points so I think it was more to drill the point home!

Other than this, he makes good use of traps.  He included a faux trap involving well-placed spears alongside some descriptive clues that there was no trap there (including the fact that I could find no trap).  He also included several other traps with neat descriptions for those who locate them.  He also includes faux treasure points, such as a Mimic hiding under rubble which looked like a treasure chest and a corridor into nowhere that would normally include treasure (as a reward for coming all that way) but instead contained a trap (as the In World dungeon architects would have suspected we'd assume a reward).

All in all, it was a lot of fun with an easygoing atmosphere, high importance placed on the scenery of words (pay attention to the verbal clues), and with roleplay encouraged to be mostly about asides rather than character arcs and conversations.  I don't know what he's like with other formats.  It may be that his preference is for dungeon crawls and combat-to-combat games.  It may be that he's just dipping his toes in that end of the pool.  I know, at least, his tastes will run towards action as they do as a player as well.  I also can't say what his NPCing talents are or if he has them because it hasn't really come up.  Since we've only been playing for about five sessions, they haven't really needed to.

So yes, there you go, Frank.  You have been analysed.  If I were to steal two of your talents, thus far, it would be your combat preparations / battle ability and your trap wizardry.  At least, thus far.

Musing on Masks: Episode 19

CAMPAIGN SUMMARY: James Paterson, Australian private investigator in New York, has been hired to investigate Sydney Silvers who went missing only a night or two ago but whose home was found ransacked by the receptionist. He's escaped Mogens home after discovering that the man had been doing some sort of chemical experiments on his enemies and is planning to attack his scarcely defended laboratory available to deal with at the same time.

EPISODE SUMMARY (Laboratory): Wherein James Paterson, Australian private investigator in New York, must infiltrate the research facility and rescue Jack Vander Klei so that he can finally get some answers.

CONSIDERATIONS: This was a bit of a tricky one as I hadn't reviewed my rules system prior to running it for quite some time so I was a little all over the place with those rules.  The combat did bring up some very important issues such as the importance of cover and concealment, adequate ammunition and superior numbers.  Lacking superior numbers, a good amount of ammunition is necessary.