Scottish Play

Session I

Playing the Loch Ness adventure took two three-hour sessions. Between the first and the second, I decided to stop worrying about the fact that we had never once made our goal to fit each story into a single session. (As every GM learns and relearns, it takes a lot less action to fill out a game session of a given length than you think it will. Ironically, the story after the Loch Ness adventure was the first one we fit into a single evening.)

The adventure began with a very pleasant Cammoran fellow asking the players to help the boy, Barnom, fulfill his dream of catching the Loch Ness monster on rod and reel. He allowed that Loch Ness was indeed another "familia's" chancel. He hinted that the PCs owed the Cammora a favor, and their Imperatrix, Claudine, confirmed this.

They agreed to his request. The terms of the request came up over and over again during the course of play. As the players considered various, well, dodges, they ended up rejecting them as not fulfilling their end of the bargain.

o Evolve a copycat Nessie for the boy to catch instead? Does not, by definition, fulfill the boy's desire to catch the Loch Ness Monster.

o Fish in some other loch for some other monster and just tell the boy it was the Loch Ness Monster? See above.

o Have Tom Bender drink the entire Loch and pluck Nessie wriggling from the mud? Again, that ain't fishing.

o Just cure the boy so there was no dying wish to fulfill? They considered and rejected this as well. Firstly, they learned that there was a spiritual component of the boy's illness. Second, they had absorbed enough of the ethos of Nobilis to sense that not everyone who could be saved should be saved, even from an apparently blameless fate.

In the first session, two anchors went to pick up the twins in Norway. A Power of Cold anchor, Analiese Grejbko, did duty as the make-a-wish "celebrity." This drew a peevish comment from the boy, since, while she's an Olympic skier, she's a low-ranked Olympic skier.

The boy was bitter, and his sister resentful.

The Powers did advance work at the Loch. Their goal was to convince the "familia" to cooperate in the fishing trip. They wanted to be allowed to "catch" Nessie, with the proviso that they throw it right back. The anchor they spoke to - I believe they thought her a Noble - refused the request and suggested they leave.

Much of the rest of the first session was filled out with divinations and IC discussions of possible plans. I initially described Barnom and Norma as looking very similar, except that Barnom looked a lot thinner than Norma. I was thinking "wasting disease." One of our players, though, the Power of Time, expressed a hunch that perhaps the boy's illness was that the girl was somehow draining his essence away. The player seemed to like the idea, so I rolled with it: his divination showed him that the "twins" were making do with a single soul, a condition that the boy's "death" would rectify.

I overcomplicated somewhat on the Cammora end. The Power of Evolution did a major divination - causing ferns to evolve in the shape of the Players and arrange themselves appropriately. He wanted to know what happened when the boy and Nessie meet. What I showed him was the boy sneezing. The players decided that this meant that if the boy and Nessie came together that Nessie would somehow catch the boy's wasting disease, which was true. I also decided - and this to was an in-play improvisation - that this was what the Cammora wanted, and silently ginned up a motive for their wanting to discreetly use the PCs to bump off Nessie, the baby Aaron's Serpent. This would enable them to draw off Nessie's power into the girl, Norma, and hopefully tap it.

All this happened in the first session, and it was between the first and second that I began to regret both the specific plot point and the idea of reliance on the Cammora and Lord Entropy generally. On the specific issue, I felt that adding the extra level of Cammoran treachery was not just superfluous, but actually diminished the rest of the story. A dying boy trying to catch the Loch Ness monster. His resentful sister just wishing the stupid trip and the stupid dying would get over with so she could get on with her life. Nessie's guardians trying to preotect the monster at all costs while keeping their secrets from getting out. That's a story. The Cammora plot reduced it to a conspiracy. On the larger issue, I've long sympathized with an early RPG.Net reviewer

However. Where would I be without a complaint? I have really only one: Lord Entropy. Entropy is the Big Bad Imperator in charge of our Earth. He makes the laws, he enforces the laws, and he's mean and tough and has a serious attitude problem. He's also a game mechanic. He's a deus ex machina for gamemasters who need a crutch to keep unruly players in line. Much like the various arbitrary and annoying rules of Immortal, Vampire's "Masquerade", and the Quaesitoris in Ars Magica, Lord Entropy is arbitrary authority to check the vast powers of the players; a beat-em-up stick for GMs who need to say to their players "Don't disrupt my plot by killing off NPCs or 'll sic Lord Entropy on you!

My intention is to use a lot less of the Cammora and Lord Entropy in future play.

By the end of the first session, the players had decided on a general approach to the task of catching the Monster, whose nature they still didn't know for certain. Bill, who plays Tom Bender and has read more of the rulebook than any of the other players, took the lead in organizing an approach based on the Group Miracle rules. This was not an approach I had considered, but it seemed valid.

Bill figured that one approach to the problem of a boy catching Nessie was simply to view it as a high-level aspect miracle, probably 7 or 8. Since we had five players, if everyone performed a contributing level 4 miracle, the group miracle level would be 8. (Group miracle rules: Take the level of the actual miracles performed and add the number of extra nobles performing miracles. We had five players, which is 4 "extra." Subtracting 4 from 8 gave 4 as the miracle level needed.)

The end of the first session and several e-mails between sessions were devoted to figuring out the component miracles of the group effort.

Session II

It's true enough that a roleplaying adventure that goes like this

GM: Your task is to catch the Loch Ness Monster.

PC: Okay, that's a level 8 miracle. We do five level four miracles in a group effort.

GM: Okay, you caught it.

would be a pretty dull game. But that's not actually how things went. What the group miracle rules did was allow the players to think about their efforts in a coherent way.

Then they only had to deal with the opposition.

But first, a wrinkle. New Dave, who plays the Power of Time, was not able to attend session 2. That meant the players had to recalculate their plans on the fly. New Dave's planned role was, frankly, suspect anyway. He had a spare anchor slot and was going to anchor the boy so as to do aspect miracles through him. The more I htought about it, the less plausible I considered his claims that his character hated the boy enought to do that. (Love was not in the picture.) We also have a hard and fast rule for the Nobilis campaign: Only those PCs whose players are present materially participate in the session. You can't use a PC as an NPC, even with the player's permission. The player can't give permission.

I had decided that the appropriate group miracle level was 7, not 8. Thor's catching the Midgard Serpent looked like an 8 to me, and Nessie was just a baby. Here were the miracles they settled on:

o Timothy Hague, the Power of Accidents, is also Realm Boy. He used a Level 4 realm miracle in the chancel to create a superb rod and reel for the boy to use. It would fade out of existence within a day, but that was more time than they needed.

o Evelyn used a Lesser Creation to evolve a minnow into the tastiest darn baitfish a seamonster ever saw. Now they had bait.

o Paul Grejbko, Power of Cold, messed with the water temperatures to narrow the depths in which Nessie would want to hang out. That made it easier to troll for her.

o And once Nessie took the luscious bait, Tom Bender made the monster falling-down drunk.

All PCs were working through anchors, for two reasons. One: Since Team Ness had already marked two of the nobles, they wanted to be discreet. Two: more cost-effective use of Spirit MPs. The players assumed they would have to penetrate fairly heavy auctorita to accomplish these things. In fact, unbeknownst to them, they ended up with a bit of a cushion. And to make it easier to reel Nessie in, Timothy had a Russian sub crash into her.

No, there are no Russian subs in Loch Ness. The Russian sub was in the North Sea. That's what made it a Major Creation of an accident.

Warning: It looks like "so-and-so gets hit by a Russian sub" is already well on its way to campaign tagline status.

The only remaining worries were a Cameroonian maid, a retired Cuban fisherman and a marine biologist - that is, the anchors of the dead Noble, Embla. This was our first big Miraculous Combat of the campaign. We had four PC nobles working through on-scene anchors versus a single noble switching among three anchors, albeit right on top of his chancel. (The chancel is the water and lake bottom itself, not the shoreline or the air above it.) In the terms of the old DC HEROES RPG, this constituted "inferior opposition." But especially with a new game, you don't need to overwhelm the players with raw power to provide an adequate challenge.

Many miracles got tossed back and forth. The players held their own nicely. There was an anxious moment when they, wrongly suspecting that their own guide was one of the anchors attacking them, began attacking him with miracles, and they pushed the fellow close to the point of dementia animus. But the Emblans were on the point of having to really dig into their MP slush fund and unleash some major realm miracles. Before it got to that point, though, the PCs accepted a cease-fire request from one of Embla's anchors. During the parley, the PCs grew to believe that

a) Nessie really would die if the boy managed to bring him to the boat.

b) If Nessie died the PCs would earn the enmity of All Serpentkind. Not Good.

c) If they could convince the boy that he didn't want to land Nessie after all, they could plausibly claim to have fulfilled their part of the bargain with the Cammora. Doing so would frustrate the Cammora's secret motivation for the fishing trip, but the players classed that as a feature rather than a bug.

Paul vouchsafed the boy a view of Nessie by raising an iceberg under her. Evelyn managed to convince the boy that Nessie was far to impressive to kill, and that that's what boating the monster would do. Embla and her anchors were satisfied with the resolution. The PCs went home. The Cammoran managed to be polite.

I've skipped some non-negligible stuff, like Bender's intervention in the life of a fisherman who lost his son many years ago, and some pre-dawn shenanigans at the hotel. (At one point, the two most unpleasant NPCs - Young Norma and Bender's anchor - fell into the Loch and Embla spent a miraculous action throwing them back.) But overall, that's how it went.

Posted by supplanter at June 23, 2002 11:13 AM