PulpCruciFiction's page

Huh, goes to show you how differently things can be interpreted by different viewers - I thought it was clear that they were about to sleep together. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Anyway, my feelings about the show in general are pretty much summed up by this Penny Arcade strip. It's just a lot more bland and formulaic than I was hoping for. I wouldn't say I'm hate watching it, because I don't care enough about what's happening on screen to hate it. I guess I'm eye-roll watching it.

For GMs, mine would probably be Quentin Tarantino, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Joss Whedon, and Stephen King. Not necessarily in that order.

Players would be a different story, for that I would probably look more toward actors. Patrick Stewart and Jon Hamm immediately come to mind, though that list could go on and on.

I played a lot of Heroes Unlimited back in the 90's and would not recommend it. The system came off like 2e D&D with a ridiculous number of hit points. It would take several gunshots to take down a standard goon, for example. Characters with access to magic could short circuit that in a number of ways and so seemed really overpowered.

I haven't had much experience with other superhero games - I've played M&M 2e a couple of times and thought it worked pretty well. My next long term campaign is likely to be a modified version of the Necessary Evil campaign using ICONS, though. Another one I thought looked really interesting is With Great Power... It's an indie game where the rules are designed so that you fail early on to succeed later (think Spider-Man getting dumped and then beaten up by the Vulture before he comes back to save the day). Seems like an interesting attempt to imitate the structure of an actual comic book story.

We had a really cool moment last night in the campaign - we're playing Kingmaker but are on a sidequest which involves trying to steal an artifact from the Chelaxian government in order to stop the Red Mantis from assassinating my character - the party is seventh level. We determine that the artifact is located in a tower in a university, but that the only door to the tower is a portal that you have to enter through the royal palace a mile away, and further the artifact is protected by all kinds of magic and a group of Hellknights.

At the end of the previous session where we made our battle plan, we joked that we should just go in and Bluff them into giving us the artifact. The DM jokingly noted that with a Bluff roll around 50, that would be possible. I laughed it off, but later that night I got to thinking...

Fast forward to this session, where we announce the entry plan. I had my character cast Heroism and Eagle's Splendor on myself (as well as Alter Self to appear as a Hellknight), donned a Circlet of Persuasion, drank a Potion of Glibness, got Moment of Greatness cast on me, and then got a fortune hex placed on me which would give me a second die on my next roll. The druid used stone shape to put a hole in the tower, and I staggered in, telling the Hellknights that Cheliax was under attack and that I had been sent to bring the artifact to safety. I explained why I'd had to make a hole in the wall (the castle was under attack and the other side of the portal was being hidden from the attackers by an illusion) and why the Hellknights needed to go up and get the artifact without letting any of the alarms go off (that was the signal that I needed reinforcements from the queen, which could cost her life if they were sent needlessly). The DM gave me a +5 on my roll due to the elaborate lie, and I announced that my roll would be at +49 - the final result was a glorious 66. So the Hellknights went up, disarmed the magical protection, and handed me the artifact. The DM later told us that the artifact had been protected by a power word stun effect that would have taken a bunch of us out for 2d4 rounds and would have alerted the entire palace to our position.

Before I could get out the door, an erinyes popped through the portal on patrol and shot me a few times, but I made it out and the druid used a readied action to close the wall up. Since the tower was dimensionally locked, they couldn't follow us out immediately, and my character and a few other party members teleported out of the city using a scroll of teleport. The rest of the party was kind of left in the lurch and were forced to retreat to a safehouse, then crawl out a sewer and kill a Hellknight and an erinyes in their escape.

And that's how we stole an artifact with an epic lie.

For me, no matter which AP I am running I have learned to own all 6 books and read them once through before I begin my preparations. I am far less likely to make a mistake if I know who/what the Npc's are and what they are up to.

This is a big one. It also helps in terms of foreshadowing and making sure that major villains get some face time before it's time for them to get killed at the end of the AP. Once you know where the plot is headed, you'll also have a better idea of how to customize it for your group without going so far off the rails that you need to rewrite the later books entirely.

We were playing a session of My Life With Master, and my wife (fiancee at the time) was playing a character who was chronically shy and unable to speak to people unless an animal was present. Luckily, she had a pet mouse which she kept with her to allow her to speak most of the time.

The Master (an evil genius with power over the characters) ordered her character to go to a nearby widow's house and invite her to a dinner party that he was throwing. My wife's character was also in love with the widow, so I figured that would give a lot of opportunity for pathos as he has to ask her on a date with the Master.

But when my wife's character arrives at the widow's house, the first thing she does is send her mouse to go take a look around the house, then she goes up to the widow's door and starts knocking. When the maid opens the door, I remind my wife that she no longer has an animal around, so she can't speak. So my wife starts trying to mime something to the maid to ask for permission to enter.

I figure that the maid would be frightened of this warped mime desperately signing at her, so she attempted to close the door. My wife's character then forced her way inside, still signing, but putting a ghastly smile on her face to show friendship. The maid screamed and ran away, and my wife completely panicked at that point and had her character brain the maid with a frying pan.

Everyone else at the table is shocked at how this has gone from dinner invitation to attempted murder. My wife asks "Is she dead?" I thought for a minute and replied "...no, not quite." So my wife actually suffocates the poor maid with her bare hands, then breaks a jar over the corpse's head, in an attempt to make it look like an accident or something.

Making the whole episode even more bizarre, the system allows the players to narrate scenes of horror in the town at certain points, and when my wife gets the opportunity to do this, she narrates a scene where some villager goes insane and kills someone with a jar. So my wife's character's murder retroactively looked like the work of a deranged serial killer with a fixation on jars. This led to one of the funniest lines I've ever heard at a gaming table - as another PC was leading a woman off to kill her, a third character called out "Don't go with him! He's the Jar Killer!"

White Wolf's offices were in Atlanta, last I heard.

I'm not sure if they are fond of random gamers showing up to gawk, 'though. Uninvited guests might end up involuntarily playtesting their latest vampire live-action (now with 150% live-action PvP!) game...

White Wolf's offices are in a suburb of Atlanta called Stone Mountain. I've been there once; there's not really anything there for a fan to see, though.

As for attractions, I can't really think of anything specifically for gamers. I live in Midtown, and have to drive at least 20 minutes to get to a gaming store. If you're just looking for things to do in the city, the Aquarium is really nice, you should check that out if you get the chance.

EDIT: White Wolf also owns a bar in Midtown called The Independent. It's not really geared toward gamers, though they do have some board games available. Here is a list of things to do in the city put together by White Wolf, none of which have to do with gaming.

...and then the stripper survived a city-destroying fireball by hiding in an alcove...

My favorite part of that sequence is that you're supposed to be cheering for the dog to make it into the closet before the fireball, yet the dog is leaping over cars filled with quivering families that are about to burn.

The "There must be one in every group" and "This is a weird one" threads have me thinking about the all time worst adventure and campaign I've ever played in. I'll provide mine; I'd love to hear the sad/maddening tales some of you have to offer, because Lord knows there is some bad gaming going on out there.

The absolute worst session I ever played in was called "Crystal Must Live." Crystal was a PC in our group infamous for the number of times she had been killed, so a guy in the group decided to base a set of adventures on this. He had us walk into some town where the people worship a god called "The Great Couatl," where Crystal was promptly possessed by an evil wizard/worshiper of the Great Couatl's evil counterpart deity. So we recruited a priest of the GC and headed off to the evil god's temple. The first adventure (called "Crystal Must Die") ended with the party killing Crystal's body, but not before it managed to whack the GC's priest. So after that, the Great Couatl himself appeared and told us that since Crystal was a good person, we were going to get the chance to rescue her from the afterlife. So far, so good.

The second adventure began with the party being sent into the afterlife to rescue Crystal. We were split up, and each of us were told by a different demon that we would have to navigate a maze to reach Crystal, containing a number of monsters equal to the amount of remaining party members minus one. I caught on and rolled a 20 to disbelieve the illusion, but the DM told me that everything was legit.

So after some pointless wandering around this maze and battling these monsters, our party thief (the DM's character) pulled us out of the illusion and told us that the monsters in the maze were actually one another. The party gets collected back together, where the demons we met up front all merge into one being...the evil deity! As we prepare to try to fight him with our 7th-level PCs, he for some reason turns into...the Great Couatl!

The Great Couatl goes on to explain to us that he had known that his priest was going to die, so he had set this whole thing up as a way to give that guy a noble death. Crystal is returned, and we all go back to the land of the living. The end.

This raised a number of questions, none of which the DM was able to answer:
1. If the whole point was to give the priest a noble death, why force us to run around that maze? Once he died, Crystal should just have returned immediately, right?
2. Why was the priest going to die? Was it cancer? If so, why not just cure him? Even if the point was to give this guy a noble death, the Great Couatl basically failed, as the priest was summarily murdered by a wand of some kind without really doing anything heroic.
3. Was the evil god created millennia ago just so that one follower of the Great Couatl's years down the line could die nobly? There didn't seem to be any evidence that there ever was an evil god, which indicates that this actually is what happened.

We pretty much concluded that the DM wrote the first adventure without having the slightest idea how he was going to wrap things up, and then I think he tried to improvise something at the last minute. The result was "Crystal Must Live."