Changeling: The Dreaming - The Battle's Lost and Won

So, the Kickstarter is almost over, but the playtest has barely begun. We made characters a couple of weeks ago, but I just hadn't gotten around to doing a post about it. Now's a good time, though. My players, if you're reading this, stop reading when you see the picture of Leo.

First, the characters:

• Thaia (childling/Autumn sidhe): Thaia is a lady of House Scathach. She was an orphan who wound up living an Oliver Twist like story; her grandparents saw her on TV on a "look how good these foster kids turned out!" show. She's lived in relative comfort ever since. She has friends in the theater biz. 
• Krysa (wilder/pooka): Krysa is a political rabble-rouser. She writes political polls for her day job, and she's got a bunch of friends into counterculture and activism. She's also got a Retinue made up of a huge swarm of rats. 
• Ambrose (wilder/sluagh): Ambrose, otherwise known as the Ashen Knight, is a member of House Scathach and takes on the nobility by sneaking into their holdings and exposing their secrets. He was an orphan, too, and grew up in a group home, but wasn't so lucky as Thaia, I suppose. 
• Zulkis (grump/troll): Zulkis is a fallen noble. He escaped an oath to a nastier sidhe through his superior oathcrafting skills, and is the protege of Duke Kelodin. 
• Sander (childling/satyr): Sander is a club kid and artist, but I don't know much about him because his player hasn't answered his email, so we'll all learn about Sander together. 

The players decided to pool some Background points and have a freehold. Their freehold is in an old subway station in New York (and I apologize in advance to any New Yorkers that read this who might be horrified to see me fuck up geography or whatever, but I'm a Clevelander and I've only been to NY once). They're all Unseelie, and most of them have some tie-in to the existing power structure.

Said power structure is thus: New York is the Duchy of the Golden Sigil, overseen by Duke Kelodin, a troll. He shows up in War in Concordia, but his House isn't specified. He must have one, though, if he's a duke. Or maybe not, since supposedly you can have Title without belong to a house. OK, so we'll let that be for the time being.

Now, the characters in general have a somewhat antagonistic relationship with nobility, but Kelodin seems to be more or less OK. Krysa is actively a rabble-rouser, Ambrose has had run-ins with nobility (though in his backstory it's Kelodin, which doesn't really work; I'll have to talk with Toasty about that), and Zulkis, of course, is a fallen noble. Thaia and Sander are the ones that are mostly removed from the political scene, but Thaia is House Scathach, as is Ambrose, so that's gonna come back on her at some point.

Themes: Political secrets, theater, rats, underground, revolution, battle cries, fighting oppression, idle rich, entertainment vs. art.

So what's going on? There's a Seelie count called Maldiset (House Dougal) who wants Kelodin out of power. There's a Nocker Underground under Manhattan called Goblin Town that I'd love to have the PCs visit at some point. There's their freehold, the Cavern of Ivory and Horn. And War in Concordia mentions roving gangs of changelings that fight each other; Kelodin has his hands full trying to keep everything in the state (not just NYC - his ducal manse is actually in Buffalo) running smoothly.

Likewise, this city was the site of 9/11, which in Changeling was accompanied by a big flood of Glamour - fear, dread, xenophobia, and so on. So I think that, in keeping with the themes of this game and with the tone of this edition (that is, powerful nobles hiding in freeholds and staying young while the changelings outside freeze), we'll say that the game takes place in winter. Kelodin is in the city at his winter home, but High King David hasn't come down to Homefires, preferring to stay in Tara-Nar. In fact, no one's seen the High King in years.

OK, players, time to stop. 

Night's Black Agents: A Vacation in Switzerland

Well, not really. Last time, you might remember, the agents stalked and killed Dr. Radovan Macan, who turned out to be one of those things with the tentacles in his mouth. The agents fell back, wounded but victorious, and laid low in London for a while, healing up. Then they got to work.

They figured that the were dealing with two different kinds of vampires: the slower, dumber, but much stronger versions (which they called "brutes"), and the physically weaker (though still badass) ones with tentacles (dubbed "masters"). They knew of one way to spot a master: A slight distortion in their speech. Since they had access to recordings of Simon Thibault, the CEO of Tasse Medical and Renate Bauer, the now-deceased BSI agent, they checked...and sure enough, both of them exhibited this distortion. They were even able to roughly pinpoint when Simon might have been "turned" based on when that distortion crept in.

They also did a little experimentation. Hanover had told them that wild roses were apparently involved - a weakness or repellent? So the agents got some and extracted the unique chemicals and tried it against a sample from Macan. The result was a slight allergic reaction; nothing major. They also tried an anti-coagulent, which didn't do anything dramatic. Then Parker had the idea to go the other way, and try to turn the fluid to sludge - maybe that would slow them down? The chemical treatment seemed to have more of an effect, but now they'd exhausted their supply of sample material. They made up some dart guns containing a blood thickener, though.

They looked at their options again. They knew that blood bags had arrived at Macan's lab from Paris (Tasse), Budapest (the prison, making them suspect Dr. Janos Sas, the prison doctor), and Geneva (the Reineger Clinic). They decided to investigate this clinic some more (no one was keen to go to prison). They learned that one of the head docs there, a nephrologist named Anna Sedillo, co-published a few things with Dr. Macan. They decided that was enough to warrant investigation.

They got a house in the suburbs of Geneva, not far from the Clinic (and, as it happened, a funeral home/crematorium, which hasn't become relevant yet). Esse and Parker attended one of Sedillo's lectures, but were unable to determine if her speech carried the same distortion - she's a native speak of Spanish, and her dialect already carries something similar to the lateral lisp that the agents were looking for, plus she was speaking accented French (this is what happens when your GM is an SLP).

While they were at the lecture, Gambone and Hanover broke into her house and looked around. It all looked normal - she lived alone, there was food in the fridge and a cat on the chair. She had her computer with her, but she'd left an external hard drive, which Hanover copied.

After the lecture, Parker, dusting off her Helene Renault cover, introduced herself as a journalist and asked for an interview. Sedillo cheerfully agreed, and they set a dinner date for the next night.

The agents regrouped and looked at her hard drive. The results were...enlightening. Sedillo and Macan did correspond, but their business emails were professional and cool. And then there were a few emails from Macan about "needing the room." One of them, she responded and said that it was impossible, there was too much booked at the clinic, but Macan responded and said, "that's not my problem. You know the arrangement."

The agents did a little digging and figured out which "room" they meant - one of the surgical rooms was in the middle of the building, yet accessible via one long hallway from a door, so it was easy to get to without being noticed. There was also a big walk-in freezer adjacent, which rang a few bells.

Digging a little more, they discovered that someone Hanover knew - the war criminal named Anton Dedopovic - had been a patient here for his kidney disease. In fact, he had been a patient here during one of the very early uses of the "the room."

Since there was nothing scheduled for "the room" tonight, the agents broke into the clinic. Parker used her Filch MOS to nab a keycard off an employee, they snuck past the guards (Hanover in the van providing intel), and broke into the room. It looked, for the most part, like a standard OR - no cameras, though (but Parker planted one). They searched the freezer, too, and came up with an unlabeled box with a single vial of a milky-looking liquid. They took it and replaced it with a vial of their blood weapon and headed out.

A little analysis showed that this stuff was a mixture of blood, lymph, and CSF - the so-called "Cocktail." But it wasn't Macan's, so who's was it?

Figuring they had enough information to get Sedillo to talk, Parker and Esse went to dinner. Using their Interpersonal Skills, they got her talking about the clinic and her work with Macan. She said she'd met him at a conference in Budapest some years back; the International Free Energy Association conference. They'd both been presenting (you might recall that the IFEA was in Bonn, Germany, when the original team of agents came to town and wound up beheading a brute). She'd worked with him a few times, but of late, she said, he'd grown stuck in his ways and not as receptive to collaboration.

They brought up Anton Dedopovic, and her eyes widened a bit. She asked if he was still alive; they feigned ignorance (but he's very dead; Hanover confirmed that). She said he'd been there for treatment for a very rare kidney disorder; it was killing him, and she'd be surprised if he'd lived this long. But she did recall that one morning, he'd started acting demented. There had been wild roses on his table, which he demanded be replaced every morning. She wasn't sure what the catalyst for that had been...

Dinner concluded, the agents decided that Sedillo wasn't a master or even directly in the know. Obviously Macan had been holding something over her, but Macan's death hadn't been reported, so she didn't know he was dead. The agents also didn't know what she was in fear of, or how the "room" was involved.

They decided to stay in Geneva for the time being and figure out what the Clinic's connection is to all this.

New Game: Feng Shui!

Last Monday, we assembled to start up a new game...is this sounding familiar? I had a couple (three, actually) games end within a week of each other, so we've been doing a lot of chargen.

Anyway, last week the group that had been playing Beast met up, and we did our "let's all name a piece of media and pick a game based on that" thing.

• Fredrick chose Edge of Midnight, which is a kickass noir RPG that I've run pretty extensively (he actually played in that game briefly). He likes the supernatural/horror aspect. 
• Amanda chose Agents of SHIELD, because she likes the spy vs. spy aspects. 
• Karafa chose Wild Wild West - the series, not the movie - for the steampunk/western mashup. 
• Toasty chose Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the different superheroes coming together ("mashup" was a big thing with this group). 
• Michelle chose The Man with the Iron Fists for the mashup (see?) of cultures - East and West, China and England, hip hop and wuxia, etc. 
• I chose Predator 2 mostly for this scene. I like the idea of spirituality trying to interpret something horrific but ultimately technological, and failing utterly, but I also do think that King Willie's dying words ("His foundation lies on the holy mountain. Selah.") are pretty badass. 

So with all that, where do we go? With so much talk of "mashup," I pulled out a few potential RPGs. 

• Rotted Capes is this nifty RPG from Paradigm Concepts; it's basically Marvel Zombies the RPG. We decided against it because the players weren't up for so dense a system (I've played it and I like it, but it's not simple). 
• Whispering Vault was discussed, but ultimately failed to interest the players too much. 
• Deadlands Noir was a runner-up, but ultimately it lost out to...

Feng Shui 2nd Edition! 

So, I've played this game, but I haven't ever run it, and having played it I was surprised that the book is as huge as it is. I mean, the game is pretty simple, or it seemed to be, but the book is huge. But in any case, chargen is dirt simple - you pick an archetype and give it a name, some customization and story hook. There's nothing mechanical involved in chargen, so most of the time for chargen was spent choosing archetypes. Here's what we wound up with: 

• Leon Cameron Abroise (played by Fredrick), a Sorcerer. He wants to right the wrongs caused by magic, but he was trained by the Eaters of the Lotus (meaning that's probably a fake name he's using), who perpetrate a lot of those wrongs. 
• Toasty's Nameless Yutz Wu Tang (played by Toasty, real name pending), the Gene Freak. He was a kind of freelance vigilante/cop in the Future Juncture, tooling around with his cyborg partner...until said partner was killed. Now he's out for revenge. EDIT: Put in his name.
• Bai Lin (played by Amanda), the Exorcist Monk. He's an orphan and a sworn enemy of the evil spirits, and wants to cleanse them from the world. They possessed his sister and forced her to kill herself. 
• Chong Do (played by Karafa), the Sword Master. He has no memory of his past, and he is seeking out who he truly is. 
• Celeste Park (played by Michelle), the Two-Fisted Archaeologist. She's a roving academic adventurer seeking the rogues who kidnapped her sister. 

And those are our characters. Now I've just over a week to read this book and figure out how to run this game. :)

Movie #344: Ant-Man

Ant-Man is a comedy/superhero/heist movie starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Corey Stoll, Michael Peña, Bobby Cannavale, and Abby Ryder Forston. It is, of course, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Hank Pym (Douglas) used to be a superhero called "Ant-Man," using his Pym Particle to shrink down to ant size (by, like, mucking with space between atoms or something, it's not important). But over the years, he's been forced out of his company by his protege Darren Cross (Stoll) and his estranged daughter Hope (Lilly). But now Cross has figured out the whole "how to shrink shit" thing, and is ready to release the tech to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, Scott Lang (Rudd) is released from prison for stealing from a big corporation and giving the money back to the people they fucked over, and is trying to go straight. His ex (Judy Greer) is now married to a cop (Cannavale) and has custody of Lang's daughter Cassie (Forston), and all Scott wants is to get back into her life.

Unable to hold down a normal job, even a fast food gig, Lang agrees to his roomie Luis' (Pena) suggestion to burgle old rich guy. He winds up stealing the Ant-Man costume, and therefore getting roped into Pym's scheme to take down Cross. Along the way, he has to do battle with Falcon (Anthony Mackie) in order to grab a piece of tech Pym needs and therefore comes to the attention of the larger superhero universe.

I think this movie was a gamble for Marvel, if only because most of the buzz I heard ahead of the first trailers was "seriously?" Edgar Wright was initially attached to direct, but left the project, I can only assume because he wants such tight control over his movies that Disney said, "yeah, no." (Which is good, really, because the MCU only works with some oversight, and you can't have maverick directors going and screwing with things too much - that's what happened with Age of Ultron.)

Rudd is nicely goofy and out of his depth as Lang, and Douglas is fun and crotchety as Pym. I really like Lilly in this movie, though, because she so obviously wants to follow in her father's (and her mother's, as she learns) footsteps and do some actual heroics. And, we do kinda get a payoff for that - at the end, she gets the new Wasp suit, and has the appropriate response: "It's about damn time."

Personally, if that had happened during the middle of the movie and we'd have seen Scott and Hope kicking ass as Ant-Man and the Wasp, that'd be fine. But apparently we get that in the next movie, so that's good.

I also really love Michael Peña in this movie. He's fun and excitable and kind of badass when necessary and y'know, I like enthusiasm.

My Grade: A-
Rewatch value: High

Next up: Black Swan

Movie #343: Dr. Strangelove

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a classic satire/black comedy directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers, Slim Pickens, George C. Scott, James Earl Jones, Sterling Hayden, and Peter Bull.

Mid Cold War, and nukes are on everyone's mind. General Jack D. Ripper (Hayden) of the Air Force goes nuts and, trying to protect his "precious bodily fluids", initiates an attack plan designed to be unstoppable once in motion. His RAF assistant, Mandrake (Sellers) tries to talk him down, while the President (also Sellers) deals with the Russian Premier by way of his ambassador (Bull), and takes advice from his German ex-Nazi lead scientist (also Sellers). Meanwhile, General Turgidson (Scott) is mostly OK with nuking the Russians, because hey, if we're gonna do it anyway...

The planes do wind up getting called back...except one. Under the command of Major "King" Kong (Pickens), the bomber is damaged and can't received the stand down order, and doesn't have enough fuel to hit its primary target, so rather than doing the smart thing and heading for safety they just pick another one. This, in turn, activates the Russian Doomsday Device, destroying all life on Earth, as the President and Dr. Strangelove make arrangements to relocate people to mineshafts, and "We'll Meet Again" plays over the closing credits.

Dr. Strangelove has been analyzed to hell and back, so I'm not really sure what I can add to the proceedings, except to say that, as Fallout points out, war never changes. Even in the face of Armageddon, Turgidson is insisting that they have to outpace the Russians. The Russian Ambassador is taking pictures of American "secrets." And riding a nuclear bomb is somehow the ultimate expression of glory. And it's all because we were so paranoid about not being able to kill our enemies should the need arise that we wound up killing everyone because one dude went off his head.

You could draw all kinds of parallels to things going on now, but I think the takeaway is that when we see other people as these faceless monsters who just want to destroy us "because they're the enemy!", then we become those faceless monsters.

My grade: A
Rewatch value: Medium, which is higher than I'd have thought

Next up: Ant-Man

Atomic Robo: Island Paradise, or, An Octopus, Two Dinosaurs, and Effy

Saturday the smoking wreckage of the group that was playing Monsterhearts gathered, with a couple of new faces, to play a new game. We didn't have any real idea what to play, so taking a cue from +Jason Pitre's Spark RPG, we all went around and named a piece of media we liked, and then tried to find an RPG on my shelves that hit as many of those notes as possible. Here's our media list:

• Hamilton: Sarah likes hip hop, and the notion of the "language of revolution."
• Dr. Who: Megan likes time travel plots, but also the emotional content. 
• Eclipse Phase: Travis likes the wacky transhumanism. 
• Mad Max: Fury Road: Michelle likes the world-building and the established sense of history. 
• eVolve: I like the exploratory sci-fi, but also the "you fight as a team or you die" aspect. 

So with that in mind, I looked through my shelves and looked for some possibilities. We discussed Psi-Punk (Fudge-based cyberpunk), TimeZero (Savage Worlds-based time-cops), Misspent Youth (about which I've written quite a bit), but settled on Atomic Robo. 

Now, I hadn't read the RPG or the comic, but I knew a little about it from Michelle's fangirling and it looks very readable (and it's a month until we play next). So here's what we've got so far.

The players wanted to work for TeslaDyne, but not the main office, as it were. They're on an outpost on a jungle island waaaaay in the middle of nowhere. We haven't detailed the office's resources much yet (I suspect we'll do it in play), but the boss is General H. P. Cavy, an Action Scientist who transplanted his consciousness into the body of a guinea pig and who jumps into a huge suit of power armor when shit gets real. 

Weep weep weep.

The PCs, then: 

• Jesse, the Dilophomedic. She's a dilophosaurus who can spit poison or medicine! She drives the Dinambulance, a modified jeep full of medical supplies. She washed up on an Arctic Beach and has been modified since.
• Crocodylomorph Marsha: She's a velociraptor, but like, a real one, with feathers n' shit. She's only chicken sized, but she's a badass chicken with foot razors and near-perfect jungle camouflage. 
• Iphegenia "Effy" Tsoukolos, the Combat Biologist. As the support, she can apply poison to other folks' claws, spray them with Bio-Flage to make them stealthy, or science the hell out of them. 
• Reginald "South Seas Southpaw" Armstrong, the Gentleman Octopus. Reginald is, in addition to a dapper eight-armed gentlemen, a master of bartitsu, which he learned from absorbing the brain of Sherlock Holmes. The Dauphin people of the seas are his nemeses. (Nemeseas?)

That's what we've got so far. Tune in next month!

Movie #342: Clerks

As an aside, I bought a bunch of new movies recently, so it's gonna take a few weeks to get back where we actually were in the lineup.

Clerks is a mid-90s comedy written and directed by Kevin Smith, starring a bunch of people he found in a convenience store. No, actually, Brian O'Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Marilyn Ghiglotti, Lisa Spoonauer, Jason Mewes, and a bunch of folks playing multiple roles.

Dante (O'Halloran) comes in to work at the Quik-Stop on his day off because someone called in sick and he's a bit of a pushover. He spends the movie dealing with customers and bitching about his life to his friend Randal (Anderson), and waffling between Veronica, the attentive, loving girlfriend he has (Ghiglotti) and Kaitlyn, the passionate but unfaithful girlfriend he broke up with but has been chatting up (Spoonaur).

There's really not much in the way of plot: Basically it's a bunch of monologues and little vignettes with the throughline of Dante whining. He finally decides to hook up with Kaitlyn, and then she winds up having sex with a dead man in the darkened bathroom of the place and riding off, traumatized, in the ambulance. Randal tells Veronica that Dante is getting back with Kaitlyn, Veronica storms off (quite justifiably), Dante and Randal get in a fight and close up shop.

This movie is up there with High Fidelity as a movie I had different reactions to when I saw it the first time than now. I still like it, I still find it funny (mostly), but although I think he's matured since, I think 90s Kevin Smith had some real issues with women and sexuality. I mean, sure, Michelle informs me that there really are guys who freak out when they discover that their girlfriends have sexual histories, but I think the point gets a little belabored with regards to Veronica and her propensity for blowjobs (look, someone who gives and enjoys giving blowjobs is a fucking treasure, and should be given cake, not abuse).

Also, I fucking hate Randal. I admit this is kinda my own issue; Randal reminds me of any number of smarmy "YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME" fuckers that I knew in the 90s, and that I keep seeing pop up online periodically. Mostly they're 20-somethings, but it's hard to tell nowadays because anonymity extends the smarm. But I really wish that Randal would have learned something during the movie, or connected to someone, or just gotten punched in his stupid face. My favorite moment in the whole movie (as far as he's concerned) is when he tells Kaitlyn that if she breaks Dante's heart, she's dead, because it's the only time we see his flannel ass care about anything. And you know, I'm big on the whole "caring" thing.

I do appreciate, though, that Smith ditched the original ending where Dante gets shot, because jesus. The movie is already somewhat bleak, but that's over the top.

My Grade: B
Rewatch value: Medium-high. It's quick and snappy.

Next up: Dr. Stranglove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb