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In the 'Other RPGs' thread, I posted looking for some help on spirits and a few people there were interested in hearing how things went. Well, we played the game this last Sunday night and, while several of the players were late and we didn't get through but half of what I had planned, we did get a chance to adequately toy with the system.
Since this game was designed as a playtest to familiarize myself and everyone else with the new World of Darkness, the characters are all different kinds of things: we ended up with 2 mages, 2 werewolves, and a vampire. I gave each character 200 experience points to build up abilities and powers so that we would have an adequate repertoire of special abilities to draw on (it is a playtest, afterall). I also created an admittedly contrived plot to tie the characters together and make them work together, all for the sake of testing. The details follow:
Character Roster:
Etienne Vignolles - Daeva Vampire, Toreador Bloodline.
"Rosie" - Rahu Werewolf, Iron Masters tribe.
Reggie - Irraka Werewolf, Blood Talons tribe.
"Morgana" - Moros Mage, Silver Ladder order.
"Eve" - Acanthus Mage, Free Council order.
The characters were all drawn to the grounds of an abandoned asylum by mysterious forces beyond their control. They were initially suspicious of one another but, eventually, everyone agreed that it was clearly something else drawing them in. A powerful compulsion washed over the group, preventing them from leaving the premises and, with no other option, the group entered, led by Reggie and Rosie.
The front door was standing wide open, admitting them into the reception area. Dozens of weathered and sun-bleached papers were lying around. Upon inspection, Reggie discovered a flier that had a map of the asylum on it. Miraculously, it seemed to be in fair condition. From behind the reception area, they heard the sound of something heavy being dropped on the ground as well as the sound of dragging chains upstairs.
Reggie activated one of his Stealth gifts, literally vanishing in front of everyone and sneaked into the library that sat behind the reception area. In there, he discovered hundreds of books, all in various states of disrepair, strewn about the room. Etienne and Morgana followed closely behind, waiting inside the doorway while Reggie invisibly surveyed the room. Morgana enacted a quick spell to view the spirit world and discovered a writhing mass of black, barbed tentacles hovering around the room. Her spell caused it's attention to fall on her and, using one of it's eldritch powers, caused Morgana's hackles to rise in panic. This was a Madness spirit, and everyone else was oblivious to its presence.
The group hastily withdrew from the library and was not pursued by the spirit. Back in the main reception area, the characters investigated the remaining rooms in the front before daring to venture into the Wards. Etienne found a medical supply room that featured some bloody handprints and the signs of someone who had recently dug through the supply boxes. The door that led from the supply room had been locked and barred from the other side and the group could hear panicked breathing on the other side.
Rosie, producing a simple pine knothole from her pocket, placed it against the doorway and peeked through (this knothole was a Fetish). Inside was an injured youth carrying a shotgun. Through the doorway (and despite considerable penalties), Morgana managed to talk the panicked young man into leaving the room. She immediately administered rudimentary first aid with the supplies at hand, hoping to staunch the bleeding from his deep gut wound.
Meanwhile, outside, Etienne and Reggie had gone to secure a means of egress for the boy. Reggie shifted into his Dalu (near-man) form to boost his strength and activated a Gift called 'Iron Rending' to bend the wrought-iron bars apart and form an escape route for the boy. The compulsion continued, however, and would not let any of the group escape.
Back inside, the boy (who revealed his name was Davis) told the others that his younger brother had wandered in here a few hours ago and that he was simply coming to his rescue. Towards the northern wing, a knife had taken to the air of it's own volition and inflicted the wound that Morgana had treated. It was after this that he had fled into the office and barricaded himself in. The group helped the boy out through the bend in the gate and, as soon as he passed beyond the threshold of the gate, he seemed to be incapable of perceiving the group anymore, depite their calls to him and a small rock thrown at him by Etienne. He ran away quickly and Eve used a spell to boost her cell phone signal, allowing her to get a few words in with the dispatcher before some unknown force squashed the signal again.
The group returned to the central rooms, discovering an office that contained a vault and desk that had been smashed apart. Morgana searched the destroyed desk, locating a key for a few of the other rooms, and also enacted a spell that rendered the vault door transparent. Now that the tumblers within were plainly visible to the naked eye, discovering the combination was child's play and the shotgun with ammunition inside was theirs.
In the room across the hall that Davis said he was attacked in, Reggie approched quietly but the unseen ghost within spotted him in the doorway, hurling a chair at him and smashing it all over the doorframe. Morgana stepped in quickly, commanding the ghost with her necromancy, and forced it to materialize. Held fast by Morgana's spell, the ghost could not resist as Reggie simply stepped forward and savaged the spirit into oblivion.
Finally, the party decided it was time to move into one of the Wards. They headed into the Female Ward first, passing numerous empty cells that, to Morgana's attuned eyes, frequently contained ghosts who seemed utterly passive. They located the attendant's office for the wing and discovered a roster of patients with a list of their illnesses. Eve rifled through the papers and, at Morgana's request, found a patient who was "least likely to be hostile." It was a catatonic named Annabelle just a little ways down the hall. Back in the hallway, Reggie had become a point of interest for a wandering Madness spirit but was unaware of his situation until Morgana's vision revealed it to her. Once noticed, the spirit sent out a call, summoning others of its kind to the area. The group fled to the outdoors just beyond the front door and heard the sounds of numerous footsteps emerging from far down the ward as well as a shrill, disembodied scream.
The party set themselves up a few dozen yards from the doorway and, all at once, 5 pale and rotten-looking women emerged to attack - each of them bearing a weapon of some sort. One had a fire axe, another two held chains, and still two more bore daggers. During the first round of combat, Etienne decimated two of the creatures and wounded a third with a spray of his fully-automatic machine pistol. Morgana fired a single shot of her pistol into the one that Etienne had injured but failed to make any notable impact on the creature. Immediately after the bullets stopped, the two werewolves assumed Gauru form (full war form) and charged in. Eve, seeing the injured one bearing a fire axe, used a spell of Telekinesis to wrest control of the weapon from it and held the axe menacingly overheard while the werewolves charged in. Clawing and biting, Reggie ripped the first one he encountered to shreds and Rosie dealt a bit more damage to the wounded one, dodging it's feeble unarmed attack. Etienne activated his Celerity discipline to quickly close the distance and faced off against one of the creatures with daggers. His Celerity proved too much for it to handle though, the attacks it made were much too slow to connect with the elder Kindred. With a flash of steel, Etienne finished off the wounded one, allowing Rosie and Reggie to flank to remaining creature and tear it to shreds. Eve relaxed her spell and let the axe collapse to the ground.
After the battle, Morgana used a spell to call the ghost of Annabelle to her and questioned her about the creatures that lie within. Annabelle referred to a 'demon' that lived upstairs and suggested that it was the creature they could hear dragging the chains. She also referenced a powerful creature as 'the Thin Man' and indicated that the Thin Man was the same type of creature as Etienne. Annabelle agreed to lead them to the Thin Man if they could kill the demon. The ghost was clearly afraid of the creature it referred to as the demon and claimed that it feasted on ghosts.
Since the stairwells inside had been collapsed, Reggie decided to simply use his Mighty Bound Gift to leap through the second-story window. The other characters then used Rosie as a living ladder to climb through the window with Reggie's help and, finally, Rosie herself used the exact same Gift (with slightly less success) and managed to get through the window with Reggie's aid.
Hearing the 'demon' approaching from the southern wing of the second floor, the characters set up at the end of the long hallway and waited for the creature to emerge. Shortly after, the creature did, in fact, show itself. The 'demon' was a massive, humanoid mass covered in numerous layers of greasy, flabby tissue with organs and bone exposed in several places. It bore a massive cleaver in one hand and a meat hook in the other, connected by heavy chains that dragged behind it. Etienne took a few shots with his guns, the first having little effect and the second only barely wounding the monster. It barrelled down the hallway with an unholy roar, quickly closing the distance between them. Morgana used an advanced Matter spell to disintegrate the cleaver and, in the following round, attempted to do the same to the meat hook but with only partial success. The werewolves again stepped forward, activating their war forms and began to rake at the monster. The creature's first attack delivered a serious wound to Reggie, driving him into Kuruth, the Death Rage. Seeing this, Eve quickly responded by touching Morgana with a Time spell, sending her into the past to retry her disintegration spell on the meat hook in hopes that, if she garnered more successes the second time around, the weapon would be destroyed and Reggie's wound would be less severe (or non-existant). Morgana's retry was unsuccessful, however, even after an expenditure of Willpower, and Time reverted to the way things were before. Possessed by berzerker fury, Reggie assaulted the monster relentlessly and, with the aid of Rosie and Etienne, managed to slay the beast. Still gripped by the Death Rage, however, Reggie turned on Etienne. The mages erected a wall of force as well as a thin wall of solidified air between the enraged werewolf and his intended target, but it provided little resistance to the strength of the Uratha. The werewolf leapt forward, biting into Etienne's shoulder, and the others fled at Etienne's insistence. An instant later, Etienne activated his Celerity and fled at great speed, allowing the Uratha's Death Rage to burn itself out.
This was where we ran out of time. We got to try out plenty of systems, however, and everyone had a lot of fun. Next Sunday, the real World of Darkness game begins... except this time, all of the PCs are ordinary mortals with no idea what is waiting for them in the shadows...