it has been suggested that I could spend some of my character points on a secondary domain. I've given it some cursory thought, and trying to keep the domains in a theme, such as Bill has, I am considering the domain of Vehicles, or the Domain of Injuries.
Vehicles can certainly be useful... need to get to the dock, well here's a car just waiting for us. damn shame we can't drive, though.
Injuries has other obvious uses, though potentially munchkin. being chased, broken leg. however, we haven't had any explicitly combat scenes, so maybe it wouldn't be so abused.
an alternate thought I had was that I've gotten just as much usefulness out of the Chancel, so perhaps simply cranking up my Realm, or getting Realm oriented gifts.
thoughts?
Tom Bender was minding his own business in a bar with his good friend Tim Hague, waiting to start up a conversation with Lana Lang, when he heard the irresistable call of Epsilon Eridani IV!
Epsilon Eridani IV! Home of the most intoxicatingly (literally) delightful spirit in all of creation, the fabled Uisge Bās, the water of death. A spirit so rare it appears on only one world, and exists as the perfect opposite and counterpart to our own Uisge Beatha.
Bender found himself standing in the Last Known Pub on Epsilon Eridani IV, surrounded by the Monkey People. Their High Priest had just ordered a round for the bar, an event which hasn't taken place since the 1920s of our own world. The Publican solemnly handed Bender his glass of Uisge Bās and said "Finn be praised." The Monkey People all joined in with a chorus of "Finn be praised, all hail Mickey Finn."
Sure, Bender was confused, but then, he had yet to visit Epsilon Eridani IV and he did seem to remember that one of the Nobles that preceded him in his current office was the swashbuckling Mickey Finn. Mickey Finn had been a bartender at the most exclusive speakeasy of the Prohibition Age, and when he came into the service of Alcohol, he became a dashing hero for all those who wished hard drink. Perhaps it was he who the Monkey People expected to appear.
The High Priest spoke. "Finn, we are humbled by your presence. We are in dire straits as the evil Slug Monkeys have taken over our beautiful isle and are covering it in..."
"Slime?" guessed Bender, as he savored his Uisge Bās.
"Exactly, oh wise one. You must save us from the evil Slug Monkeys. They have taken the last known copy of the recipe for Uisge Bās and are threatening to destroy it at midnight!" Bender spat out his drink (for he hadn't been paying much attention tot he plight of the Monkey People until he found out about the recipe thing, and was quite upset at the prospect of the recipe being lost forever). Fortunately, Bender was able to keep the Uisge Bās from hitting the ground, and it looped back into his mouth for him to savor a second time.
"Holy crap!" exclaimed Bender, while the Monkey People oohed and aahed at his drinking prowess.
"Yes, oh great Finn. The situation is dire indeed," chimed in the Publican. "The Slug Monkeys hold the fort of Erinn Drogh, a mighty fortress which has only been breached once in all of our history." The Monkey People all bowed their heads in despair.
"Wow. So who broke in? Sounds like we need that guy."
"Err, it was you, oh great Finn that broke into the Erinn Drogh. You remember. The chandeliers? The Cat-Women? You rescued all of the slave girls?"
"Oh yeah," lied Bender, who suddenly wished that he had been there for that. He also suddenly wished that he were even a tenth the swashbuckler that Mickey Finn had been. Still, the recipe needed saving.
The Assault on Erinn Drogh
The assault went badly. The Monkey People's plan relied on someone a little more physical than Bender, and they were all either captured or killed.
The Next Morning
Against all probability, Bender did not wake up in the dungeon cells beneath Erinn Drogh as he thought he would. Rather, he woke up with a splitting headache in bed with the first wife of the Slug Monkey Kahn. Fortunately, one of the advantages of being in bed with a Slug Monkey is that one can slip out of bed quite easily, covered in slime from head to toe as one tends to be. The main disadvantage, of course, are the pictures that go through one's head of the previous night, but Bender just sent some Jack Daniels into his head to kill those particular brain cells and forgot all the grisly details.
Escape from Erinn Drogh
Bender managed to escape from Erinn Drogh by getting the Slug Monkey guards drunk and then tricking them into drinking Margaritas in salt-rimmed glasses. Bender found the few surviving Monkey People warriors and taught them about salt.
Bender returned to the village to find the Last Known Pub a smoking ruin.
"Well, that were crap," opined the Publican.
"Come on, I bet there's an upside somewhere," suggested the ever-optimistic Bender, who was searching the ruin for some more Uisge Bās. "I think that salt thing is going to do wondeers for the war effort, for instance."
"No, the evil Slug Monkeys have destroyed the recipe. The Uisge Bās we drank last night was the last Uisge Bās that will ever be drunk."
"Damn." said Bender, who was now feeling depressed himself.
The Publican began to cry. "My family has served Uisge Bās since the day it was handed down to us by the Creator himself. We have always had a copy of the recipe. Now..." The Publican broke down crying.
Bender pulled a flask of Bushmill's out of his slimy, ragged old coat. "Here," he said, while encouraging the Bushmills to be a little better at drowning sorrows than normal.
The Publican took a sip, but continued crying, "if only there were some way to retrieve the lost original stone tablets that the creator gave us the recipe on!"
Bender tried to comfort the Publican.
The Publican took another sip. "Oh, why didn't we summon you earlier?" Bender thought that would have been a good idea. "Now everything is ruined!" Bender sort of agreed with that too. "Oh, if only there were some way to retrieve the stone tablets from the bottom of the Great Martini Lake!"
"Now, now, no use crying over... what? What was that about a lake?"
"Hmm? Oh, the original recipe was lost at the bottom of the Great Martini Lake two centuries ago. No one can dive that far down, though, not even you when you tried in 1926, remember?"
"Take me to the lake."
Bender Saves the Day
Bender drank the Great Martini Lake. He was drunk for quite some time afterward, but the day was saved, the recipe returned to the Monkey People, and frankly, Bender would have been drunk all that time anyway.
I didn't have my notes with me last time, so I couldn't actually remember how many MP's it takes to travel through time. Finding them, it takes me 2 MP. The problem is, that if I want to use any of my other gifts, except the gatemaker ones, they are all under my Domain and draw on the same MP pool if I want to add any penetration. So if I want my Sovereign's Gift to overcome any Auctoritas, I need to spend my possible time travel points on it..so I run out of them quickly...
This is a test of the MovableType 2.11 system. I am sitting in Unqualified Headquarters with my friend Dave Saia, who has been helping with the upgrade. In truth, the upgrade has been painless in the extreme. Good job, MovableType! If you can read this, it worked.
It's the slightly more complete Bender Beats the Crap Out of Frank Miller!!!
Jim, I like the layout and style of this Blog better than that of Unqualified Offerings.
One last unresolved question continues to nag at me: Of all possible comic book supporting characters, why Lana Lang?
1) Well, there was that bit where she was working with the Excrucians to manipulate us into destroying the concept of comic books. And "villain" fits the metaphor I was using better than "dupe". Besides, if "villain" is perhaps unduely harsh, "dupe" gives her too much credit. She knew what she was doing was wrong. Otherwise she wouldn't have gotten so defensive when I brought up Clark...
2) Largely because she didn't. At that point, while we were certainly aware of the possibility that she was working for the Excrucians, we were also considering the possibility that she wasn't. More to the point, we had no good ideas as to how to figure it out. Even with our suspicions, she still had a 50-50 shot that her plan would succeed. Or, at least, she would have if she hadn't admitted her villainy and stalked off in a huff. I guess it's true what they say. You can take the girl out of the comic book universe, but you can't take the comic book universe out of the girl.
Greg, your message inspires two immediate questions:
1) Why do you refer to Lana as a "villain?"
2) Why do you say she had no real reason to tell everyone about her plans?
I don't seem able to use the "comments" feature, thanks to MT's poorly implemented java. So, here are my comments:
My point wasn't that we hadn't realized that Lana was from the superhero universe. My point was that we failed to appreciate that since A) she was from the superhero universe and B) she was a villain, therefore C) she was compelled to reveal her evil plans to us for no real reason. Because that's just how things work where she comes from.
As for abuse of Tony's power, this appears to be a concern in theory, but not in practice, so far. We've talked a lot about using Tony's power in abusive ways, but it's never ended up working out that way. In the Lana adventure, for example, all we ended up doing was retroactively creating a comic book convention. And then the plot was resolved before the convention took place, anyway (although Bender will be pleased to learn that we invited Frank Miller). Hardly pivotal to our success.
Plus, it's my understanding that it takes all of Tony's miracle points to do a single time jump. At worst, then, that gives us one "do over" per story. That doesn't strike me as too much for the GM to plan for.
Bruce Baugh has posted writer's guidelines to the Nobilis mailing list.
We've now had four sessions, and everyone has made at least three. If you don't feel your character is working for you, this would be the time to change it. Most of you seem pretty happy with your PCs, but I want to put the option out there just in case.
One of the imagined purposes of this site is to be useful to other people who want to play and/or GM Nobilis. For that reason I want to put some of the discussion New Dave and I began about Tony Timespawn last night out where people can see it.
As Dave and I discussed, with others chipping in: I'm concerned that I'm having all the cliche problems of handling Power Over Time ItselfTM that one has been hearing about since RPGs were young and pimpled. I've been trying to work out to what extent it's Tony's abilities and to what extent I'm just chickenshit. The old, "let's go back before the story started and change things so we always knew/never had to worry/already dealt with" stuff.
I think the scope of the problem goes beyond just "It makes it too hard for me, the GM, to come up with challenges/plots/what have you." In principle, even if I come up with adventure seeds that are amenable to time travel you still have two big problems:
1) To the extent we can only come up with a limited set of "chronomobility-friendly" adventure types, we end up playing the same scenario over and over.
2) To the extent that every adventure seed is "designed around" one particular Noble's powers, it marginalizes the other player-characters. OR,
3) (There is a rule number three!) There's a big danger that I make adventure seeds chronomobility-manageable by making them time travel-proof, which is unfair to Dave.
Now in no way has Dave abused Tony's abilities. What was interesting about last night's discussion was realizing how often it was other players suggesting time-travel solutions to problems rather than Dave. That at least suggests that the problem of time travel taking over campaign mindshare is a real one, even with nothing but constructive play by the player who has that ability.
In fact, Tony is a carefully-conceived and well-constructed character. In no way would I want Dave to trade him for another. We talked about rejiggering his powers. I wonder if that's really necessary.
All of which is to say that I've got a problem, and it may be interesting to see how we end up dealing with it.
It was all very confusing. Tony got back from his tour through the ages to find the rest of his Familia embroiled in something sinister with one of Superman's girlfriends..
Much time was spent rehashing What-Went-Before to try and bring some of us up to speed on the whole matter. We skirted the issues and came up with several perfectly plausible (and mutually exclusive explanations) scenerios. In the end we talked to Lana trying to clarify matters and bumbled our way into frustrating her by our lack of action into exposing herself and revealing her whole plot.
Along the way we did do some investigation: talked to the spirit of a statue in Central Park who (sorta) witnessed a couple's arrival (he'd like a nice wishing well built), examined Lana's life history to see that there was something weird there (she did used to work for Perry with Lois and Clark), and did a history scan at Ground Zero to see where the Kryptonite came from (Lana placed it there months after the fact, just about when Evolution started having weirdness).
The Darius Sousa never appeared at all, but the conclusion we came to was that the Excrucians won in Lana's Realm..and Darius brought her along to use as a tool/anchor here. He convinced her that our Realm's Comicbook Superhero's were the reason her Realm's real Superhero's were undermined and her realm destroyed.
At the convention, we told Willy Wanka? about the whole thing so he can pursue the matter more if he chooses.
After much plotting and scheming (or blind fumbling, anyway) and a couple conversations with Lana, we learned the following:
Wally Wingo, Power of Comic Books, had been taken over by the Excrucians, destroyed Lana's universe and was going to destroy ours unless we could stop him.
Either that or Lana was a tool of the Excrucians and was trying to trick us into killing Wally Wingo for her.
The difficulty was that, although we were sure one of those things was true, we didn't have any idea which one was true. And, of course, the two possibilities would require diametrically opposite reactions on our part.
Fortunately, while we were in a New York bar trying to figure out how to tell if Lana was the hero or the villain of the piece, she walked in and invited herself over to join us.
And here we lucked out, because the one thing we had failed to consider was that Lana Lang was from the superhero universe. Stalling for time, we told her that she and Wally would both be at "the comic book convention we were holding next week" (with an under-the-table kick to Time Guy) and all would be revealed there.
At which point Lana, in true comic book super villain fashion, snorted "fine, you got me this time", revealed her evil plan, and stormed off in a huff. I love it when a non-plan comes together.
...Lana was willing to get drunk even without Bender there.
Tony(!) has no clue about the whole Lana thing as he's been bouncing around through time mastering ancient and modern (and future?) languages. Maybe it's about time he checked in...
Yes, drunkenness was a key element in our plan to get Lana to talk. If only that three-headed guy on Epsilon Eridani IV hadn't bought a round for the house!
Time Travel's an idea, but I'm not sure how it's going to help us here. Perhaps you could elaborate?
with Bender called away for some kind of emergency inter-dimensional octoberfest, we need a new idea for getting Lana Lang to spill her guts. perhaps a jaunt to the past would be in order?
