Impact! Session Zero, Take Two

 

After some input I decided to try this particular post again.

Sometime after The Undertow Session Twenty-Six it occurred to that The Lone Keep, base of operations for the vile Void Elf cult, would have to land somewhere. Mikansia had cut loose tal mother, Makirta, whose anguish had kept the asteroid afloat. I had two choices: have it hit the ocean and make a tidal wave that would wipe out practically everything in the world, or hit the ground and make a cloud of dust that was almost certain to start a mini Ice Age.

I opted for the Ice Age.

I also had another motive: another one of the continents, Armo, I knew almost nothing about. I knew there was a huge continent sized forest on it, along with roden, great wolves, and orcs. And that was it. I had drawn up the geography. That was all I had done with the place. What better way to get to know a place than drop a frickin' asteroid on it? That's how getting to know a place works, right? I mean, I certainly don't see any issues with it.

But my more practical brain took over. I was still neck-deep in The Undertow with Lena, and was already hot to do Suihkulahde, Anneli's sequel game. There literally wasn't time to run anything in Armo!  I mean,  I didn't like it, but Armo would have to wait.

And then came the argument.

No matter how good of a GM you are (and I fancy myself competent) you are eventually going to screw up. No ifs, ands, or buts, about that fact. And my time came. I was talking with Will and Lena (who are in the Death is a Patient Master game too) about doing a one-shot of Trophy Dark, and I lost my temper. Wasn't Will and Lena's fault! They were doing what they normally did. I just had had a bad time of it that day and decided that the most mature thing I could do was to take it out on them. My temper can flare up very quickly, so it took some time to sort out why I was mad and what could be done about it and whatnot. When the dust settled I was told they didn't want to do one-shots, but to have time to develop characters.

And that's when I remembered poor Armo.

Will, of course, wanted minotaurs.  I cussed him out for wanting an entirely new stock  and promised it to him in the same breath. "Fuck you Will, of course," or something or other was what I said. I think. We discussed what we wanted from the campaign, and what came out of it was the following: in a four way final battle the falling Lone Keep landed, killing almost all of the four armies. What was left of the four races would band together to figure out what the heck had done such a calamitous blow to their races and war.

Lena settled on doing an orc PC rather quickly, much to my happiness. I've never had an orc PC before, so I'm excited for the new ground! We'd discussed doing a dryad race, but Will got in with his request first and it's taxing enough to just draw up one race for now Will's playing a minotaur that somehow got handed the leadership over the wolven packs. That's not going to blow up in his face. First I gotta burn up the stock, which is currently in development and will take less time than I thought. Thank God I have the Monster Burner! Luke and Thor really need to reprint this thing, because it's a gem. Expect lots of rants about what I perceive to be the incompleteness  of Burning Wheel Gold Revised.

We decided that the first act would be an intrigue dungeon crawl, with lots of sub-factions trying to reignite the temporarily held war. The PCs would be two of the joint expedition sent in to examine The Lone Keep. Lots of intrigue, along with a Keep that Lena had been expecting to show up in much greater detail in The Undertow. Expectations are high there, so I better not screw it up. Y'all will be hearing more about the burning process for the minotaurs, who actually fit into Heranyt far better than I ever could have hoped. This is why you say yes and, GMs: sometimes the fusion of player and GM can be much better than you ever could have hoped.

As far as what themes I'm expecting to do in this campaign, adaptation is definitely at the top of the list. The Lone Keep was a nasty place, filled with horrors I'd only half fleshed out. There's nothing like changing your priorities like seeing eldritch horrors. There's also the fact that the dead can walk in the waking world, thanks to a few things in the Keep, so dead isn't dead quite... yet. Imagine trying to recoup your race with the previous rulers sitting around, having opinions. Death is frequently a mercy for the living.

Impact!: Session Zero

 

On the continent of Armo a four-way war had been fought for the last few hundred years. Orcs, wolves, roden, and minotaurs were locked in a four-way war that was set to culminate in a climactic battle, in the Harkenwold Forest. Each came in their own way, ready for the showdown. Battle-lines were drawn or ignored. Oaths were sworn. Enmities eternally embraced.

And then came the meteor.

The Harkenwold Forest was no more, along with the vast majority of the four races. Tons upon tons of dust were thrown up into the air, covering the sky and blotting out all light. For the first week it was chaos of the worst kind. And then after a week, once they all got their minds back together, they noticed it.

The Keep.

However it survived the impact The Keep sat there, at the center of the crater: dark, foreboding, and giving off an aura that caused all but the most courageous to sweat in fear. So the fearful sent the fearless. Fear does not stop questions: what happened? Where had the light, sun and moon, gone? What meaning was there to retrieve from the decidedly intact Keep? What, if anything, remained inside?

Their curiosity was so great that even their mutual hatreds allowed the four races to put their enmities aside, for however long they could stand.

Russian Doll: Season One Review

 

Slight Spoilers? Kinda? The Russian Doll was suggested by my Peanut Gallery backer, Peter Lee. If you want to give him some competition head over to the Patreon and sign up! Thank for reading!

The second to last episode of Russian Doll took my legs out from under me. I did not expect anything like what happened.

Russian Doll is like what happens when you mix Groundhog Day with an angry drunk lady. There's a strange continuity that happens throughout the show, as Nadia dies over and over again. As time goes on there are little cues in the sets and design that make it feel like you are passing through time, even as you are repeating it. The visuals of this show are second to none. Like, Rian Johnson himself would be jealous of the meticulousness of the cinematography. Because episode 7 of 8 happens and I realized the trick and smacked myself for not seeing it, the whole time. 

Russian Doll is a story about the micro/macro-cosmic element of man coming into conflict. Nadia's fault is so basic that even Time stops. Like, I've never seen something that actively tells you why time travel stories exist so blatantly before (yes, including Groundhog Day): man is connected to all things and that includes Time, which he can also screw up. The essence of a time-travel story is that Time is a creature, just like us, and may itself have a breaking point. We take Time for granted, but he is watching, and sometimes he may intervene and force us to re-evaluate what we just did. And that may mean alternate paths so Time can hash out all the issues with each of us in particular, as we have to come to terms with the things that we've done, which Time has been forced to witness.

So, despite my misgivings about the sexual ethic (or the lack thereof) that the show pushes I find that this has been a definitive treatment in the time travel genre. The acting is fantastic, the visuals are eerie in their detail, the ending episodes just hit you right in the gut, and those last five minutes of the first season are the closest thing to a perfect ending I may ever see in a TV show. 

No seriously, I think it's that good.

The Samples

 

Hey, so this has some stuff that can be pretty disturbing. I out and out encourage bad behavior for this game. Catharsis is best when people have it coming, and the sting of tragedy hits harder when those that have it coming don't. There's some sexual harassments and assault that happens. Nothing too terribly explicit, but it is there. Just keep that in mind please. 

Another thing to note: this is being played out betwixt friends, and in this case spouses. The session was played out in deeply black humor, with full permission from all parties involved.  Everyone at the table walked in knowing what boundaries everyone else had and we had a lot of "laugh or cry" moments happen. We chose to laugh.

Covered entirely in wildly differently colored trees, Ilkouzh was a rainbow marble in a sea of stars and black. The planet hangs closed enough to its sister Talteen that its inhabitants can see Ilkouzh, even in broad daylight. It's a familiar reminder of the deceptive nature of beauty as well as how close pure evil can truly get to anyone's heart. So to say it was disconcerting to be approaching that planet would be a bit of an understatement. But Aurel, Otilia, and Andrei didn't have much time to think about it. They'd stolen a lander and needed to get it out of shared orbit with Talteen, where the Casnic would no longer be able to track them.

 

There was a section of the planet that was orange; Aurel and Otilia (his co-pilot) set down in that area, into a canyon with all sorts of strange vents and openings, some compromising the walls.  Trees with every shade of orange adorning their needles grew out of every possible surface of the canyon, except for a little area that was clear. It was for this open space that that Otilia set the landing sequence for, after yet another suggestion that she should join Aurel in his seat. These offers were frequent and more than explicit.

 

Four grey-skinned men came running into the clearing, one of them holding a bag, just as the lander bay doors were lowering. Andrei, the mechanic, met them in the bay. "Please help us! We need to leave! Now!"

 

"Now now," said Aurel, coming from the cockpit, "What seems to be the issue?"

 

"We have something that needs to be gotten back to our friends before it-"

 

They all heard it. The whispers.

 

What they have in that bag can make you a respected man again. Aurel flinched, but said nothing. He had been exiled from his community for his.... tastes and predilections... and had never fully lived it down.

 

You can do a lot better than that pervert. There's a cute boy, somewhere on this planet, waiting for you. Where was the lie for sixteen year old Otilia? Aurel had taken Otilia in after she was exiled for being a hedge wizard and had taught her everything he knew about lander piloting. And had also tried to molest her at the drop of a dime. Otilia went to bed with a pistol, every night. She was glad she had it.

 

That man over there, sure looks like the one who killed your dog, doesn't he? The one you've been looking for, after all this time? And the whispers were right. He did look like the man who had killed his dog. That dog had meant everything to Andrei.

 

And that's when it came into view: a stag-like thing, spikes instead of fur and eyes. The four grey men screamed and pushed their way into the lander.

 

Andrei pushed the dog-killer out, just as the door was closing. But the dog-killer grabbed Andrei's hand and pulled, just as the door swung closed.

 

Everyone heard the blood-curdling screech.

 

The next few minutes were screams of rage and anguish. Andrei lay on the ground, blood spraying from the stump in his shoulder, all around the hold. Otilia took over flying while Aurel took a welder to Andrei's stump, flesh blackening and letting out a horrible smell under its influence.

"He pushed our Dmitri out!" shouted one of the men as the lander fled into the air from the creature.  Aurel dragged Andrei back to the cockpit, the three grey men following. "We want him hung! Now!"

"Whoa, slow down there!" shouted Aurel, who had backed up to Otilia's chair, and began to fish around for the small pisotl he'd found on Talteen. "None of us knew Andrei would do that. Why don't we figure out why he did it? He's never done like this before." Aurel kept talking, despite the fact that he could see Otilia's rack under her dress, rising and falling, from the position he was standing.

"... you're saying you want a trial?"

"What, your people don't do that on Ilkouzh?"

"You can't be serious, we watched him-"

"Do you really want to be the type of person who just kills someone in cold blood?" asked Aurel, as he casually slid a hand over the front of Otilia's seat, down inside her dress. Just for a quick squeeze of courage. 

Otilia jumped as the old man's hand slid against her skin. Grabbing the hand offered her Otilia juked forward, slinging Aurel over her shoulder and the chair, on reflex. The lander crashed into an orange-lined canyon wall, knocking half a dozen trees loose. They fell  to the ground with a sound almost as loud as the lander hitting the wall. The wall was hollow, and the lander went right through, destroying an engine and part of the hull. "What the hell is wrong with you??" Otilia screamed when she got her breath back.

"Me?? Keep your hands on the controls!! It's a miracle we're all alive. How dare you!" raged Aurel. "You wrecked my ship and you want to scream at me, like the child that you are??" Otilia opened her mouth. And then shut it. She did wreck the lander, that much was true.

"We're... we're near our base," said one of the grey men in the awkward silence that followed. "We can take this one-armed murderer and try him. We're not animals, after all. And you two should come too. No need to condemn you because of what he did."

The group gingerly made their way inside the wall of the canyon, into fully furnished rooms, rotting with age. "I thought these were canyon walls" said Aurel.

"No, these were skyscrapers, before the corruption spread," replied one of the grey men.

"Skyscrapers?" Otilia raised an eyebrow.

"You saw how high they reached, didn't you?" answered another man, with a chuckle.

Andrei woke up with one less arm, the other one bound to his waist. He was being dragged by Aurel. "Hey, let me up!" Andrei shouted. "Why the hell am I tied up??"

"I'm not sure what you want, given what you did," Aurel said as he helped Andrei up, disdainfully regarding his mechanic. "But I'd sure like to know why you got us into this mess."

"Fuck off," Andrei growled. "You're selling me out!"

"Then you'll have to deal with them," Aurel stated.

As they left the building they'd crashed in Andrei noticed all the trees were not only metallic but that they had data ports. These trees were not fully organic. He kept his observations to himself. Stepping over the metallic wooden roots which snaked through cracked concrete. They made their way to another skyscraper, and ended up in front of an airlock. Going through it they found themselves in in a cavern that seemed to stretch on for forever, lit by a ceiling-wide skylight. Row upon row of strange yet wholly organic plants could be seen, far as the eye could behold. Otilia snuck a leaf. Her eyes weren't deceiving her; these weren't Talteen plants. If only they could get back to their home planet they could be filthy rich.

There was a shriek of glass above them. Down swept a vaguely humanoid figure with feathered wings. Glass, steel, and klaxons rained upon the group. The grey humans pulled out pistols and began to fire upon the avian. "Shit, the Collective is here!! Incoming!" one of them shouted.

Another avian flew in through the broken skylight. And the another four. And another five. A few divebombed Aurel, Andrei, and Otilia. Otilia grabbed Andrei (who'd just slipped out of his bonds) and cast the only spell she knew: a wall of fire, which repelled the divebombers.

Someone new has joined us, Otilia heard in her mind. Welcome, welcome! the other avians chimed in, even as they swerved away from the fire wall she'd made. 

Aurel was suddenly in the air, claws wrapped around his arms. Grabbing onto the beating wings Aurel guided the avian back to the ground. Feathers began to sprout out of his skin in an eruption of blood and corruption. We have yet another! These cannot be natives of Ilkouzh, remarked one of the avians.

Aurel could feel Otilia's mind in this collective. Oh, this is fantastic, he thought with a pleasure that made Otilia's skin crawl. We can now be as closed as I've always wanted us to be.

Other humans came running with cries like "Protect the samples! They're all we have left!" echoing from their trigger pulls.

Andrei saw his chance. He took a run at a low flying avian and managed to straddle it; feathers erupted from Anderi's skin. Don't think I forgot about you, buddy, he thought into the collective as he forced the avian he'd straddled to divebomb Aurel.

A low rumbled washed over the cavern. A gigantic bipedal tank jumped atop the building and howled. Feathers were sticking out between its metal plates, which also bristled with weaponry. Feathers burst from Otilia's skin as she looked upon the thing. 

The feathered tank roared and Andrei's mind went blank, for a moment. When he came back he looked at the plants with the hatred of the Collective.

The sky went dark with all the new avians flooding into the building at the command of their queen. The last fully organic plant life on Ilkouzh was ripped apart and desecrated by creatures who had previously given their everything to protect it. Not a single human was unchanged by the invasion. 

Nobody noticed two feathered humans running away from the orgy of violence and betrayal, in opposite directions.

The Undertow: Session Thirty-Eight, The End

 

The shores of the Gate were frequently visited by Charon and his boat. Usually there were one or two souls upon it, as the experience was not limited to time and space and most die alone. But this time Charon's boat was full. On it was a family: Mikansia, Akseli, Yngvar, Dale, Ensio... and the thirteen year old Simone. Simone was laughing with a relief that hadn't been felt in years. And everyone was laughing with her, even though it wasn't technically Simone they were here to rejoice over.

But Mikansia didn't mind; Simone was everything to the triumphant. The sound of her laughter was enough.

Charon's boat stopped and Mikansia got out, Jabez's white stone in hand. On the shore stood before Mikansia stood a little girl in a white shift and a tall woman in black, sitting by the gate. Mikanksia knelt before the girl, smiling at her. "Hi, little one! You seem... familiar..."

And indeed she did, although Mikansia couldn't place when they could have met. "I've always been near you, but we've not really had a chance to meet," said the little girl. Jabez's white stone suddenly appeared in her hand. Another white stone appeared in Mikansia's hand, with a completely different script upon it.

The Gates swung wide. There Jabez stood, waves bouncing off light from a far-off land around the triumphant. Mikansia beamed at Jabez... but looked back at Simone. "Can I say goodbye to Simone? Before I go through?"

"Of course you can! Go on!" assured the girl.

Simone and Mikansia embraced. "It's so good to see you again," Simone enthused. "I waited all day for this and it was... I can't believe I stopped coming here. I know you have to go right now. Can I see you tomorrow night?"

"Come as often as you like!" said Mikansia. "Always."

"To visit," chuckled Simone.

"For awhile," Mikansia agreed.

Mikansia turned back to the little girl. She took Mikansia's hand-

This wasn't a little girl.

She was Death herself.

Mikansia was holding the hand of something that was wild, uncontrollable.. and yet the life of the little girl told a truth: Death's intent. The lie told the only truth that mattered.

"Do you regret anything more?' asked The Lady in Black.

Mikansia thought a moment. "No. No I don't."

Mikansia walked through the Gate with Death, to Jabez. "You made a promise you know! About your new name and telling me it what it was and all that."

Jabez motioned to the boat that Mikansia only now realized had been there the whole time. "I'll take you where that name will make sense. Both of ours."

They pushed the boat into the warm waters, the little girl doing the majority of the work. Death began to row, so Mikansia and Jabez stared out at the light they were rowing into, to the Land Beyond.

It was a sunrise unlike any other.

Almost eight years ago my therapist told me to stop playing role-playing games. I balked. I'd fought to play them as a teenager and had them as a vital part of my life for well over eight years before I'd found Burning Wheel. My first execution into the game I didn't like, and I was trying to run the game, properly. And what came out of that quick attempt to end the story so I could focus on my mental health was Revenge of the Countess of Fire. And that was unlike anything I've ever experienced. It felt like Tolkien, which was something that I'd never experienced before.

As a GM I've made many a world; as any world builder knows you kinda hafta to live there to make it come alive to others. Every place I'd visited before I didn't really want to go back before. But when I got to the end of that campaign something in my head said "I think I can live here for a long time. A very long time".  

So as soon as I was able to, I went back. But I could never fulfill my original wish.  Eight years went by, with me trying, over and over, to break the big 3-0, a full length Burning Wheel campaign. The longer I lived there, bouncing between worlds and seeing what that universe had to offer, the more I wanted to share it.

And then The Undertow came along. The Undertow was not a window into the world I expected. Every last thing about this campaign took me by surprise, even as the ending became clearer and clearer to Lena and I. We found ourselves juking left a whole hell of a lot more than I can begin to tell you, as Mikansia and the other characters began making decisions for us. This has been an experience unlike anything I've ever done, creatively or gaming-wise. For everyone who's read this thank you for doing so. It's a genuine joy to write these. It's good to be doing what I love.