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I posted about my first experience with Unknown Armies in the previous thread which turned out to be the best game I've ever played. Since my group is currently playing through a follow-up game with the same GM which is turning out to be just as awesome, I thought I'd dredge this up and repost it in all its glory. I expect the summary of the current game will go in here along with this. Let me tell you about my first Unknown Armies experience. It was a streets level campaign called Lullaby. There were three other players other than me, and all of us had never played UA before. Our GM, Mani, had run this particular campaign twice before on an actual table, but this time we were playing over AIM chat, which turned out to be a huge boon once things started going off the rails. The characters and their players (I'll use their actual names because there's nothing bad or embarassing about any of this): Fuse: played by Dylan. Fuse is an ex-Yakuza hiding out in America after basically fleeing Japan to escape some supernatural forces that were haunting him, J-horror style. He had the highest struggle level in the party, and his primary skill is Obayun, which is his ability to make people listen to him through sheer force of personality. Gary: played by Chris. Gary is a private investigator. I don't think he ever told us what his character's trigger was, but he stuck by Fuse's side for most of the game because he was on his payroll, and because they were the two old guys in contrast to the other two characters, who were much younger and more impulsive. He's the only character with any sort of firearm skill, though he wound up shooting like a stormtrooper for most of the game. Mark: played by Ben. Mark is an academic, and the only character in the party with any kind of major supernatural skill, in that he can see auras around people and objects. I actually don't have much to say about Mark because Ben wound up being absent for large stretches of the game. Lynch: my character. Lynch is sort of an odd duck in the party. He was a DJ and a signals intelligence expert-- his day job was doing tech support for major broadcasting corporations, and he also worked the graveyard shift at a Top 40 radio station, a job he hated. He is also an insomniac and an alcoholic, and started with the most failed sanity points of the entire party. His trigger moment involved a traumatic experience with a number station, and every since he's been obsessed with finding strange and arcane radio signals. The party is formed with Fuse as the leader and financier, Gary as his enforcer and Mark and Lynch as consultants, basically. Lynch was brought in by Gary to make and plant listening devices. The setting and story of the game is an island town called Vinalhaven, where there have been reports of strange happenings going on involving vandalism, nightmares and a strange, troubled girl named Elsie. I'll post Mani's info dump on it actually: quote:Vinalhaven, a small Maine island town not far from Rockland, is a storybook community of around 1,200. Their biggest claim to fame is probably that the author of Goodnight, Moon once lived there. There's a small Historical Society which sells her books, and displays a few relics from the ancient Red Paint civilization that once inhabited the island. There is only one K-12 public school, only one library, only one nature preserve, only one lighthouse - and only one way to get on or off the island (a ferry ride of about 1hr 15mins to/from Rockland). There's a small swell of tourism in the summer, but above all Vinalhaven's community prides itself on its friendliness and its people. It's worth noting that the previous two times that Mani ran this campaign, the PCs had been religious types: once a squad of catholic exorcists, and the other was a televangelist and his entourage. We didn't have any kind of religious connections, it was more based on Fuse's interested in the occult due to his activities in Japan. So we arrive in town in the rain and set-up shop at the hotel. Things are immediately off to a weird start when Fuse's assistant and chaffeur, Ise, is acting very paranoid and jittery. He's found in possession of a strange novel called This Cold Black. Before we can grill him to figure out what's going on, a window is smashed and a small girl is making off with Mark's luggage. We give chase into the storm but she's gone. Lynch, however, picks up a strange giggling sound in the air thanks to how his Notice skill is augmented by a skilled called Ears Like a Safe Cracker. We stay the night at the hotel. I have Lynch begin setting up his radio equipment and cruise the airwaves for signals. Meanwhile Fuse, Gary and Mark all sit down for storytime as Mark begins to read This Cold Black. Now I wasn't actually around for this part because the way the game worked was that when different parts of the group would receive exclusive information, we'd split off into our own chats with the GM. This would factor heavily into later parts of the game. From what I understand, they got sucked into a nightmare where, like, water and giant squids started exploding out from the book and prompting sanity checks that I think Fuse at least failed. From that point on, Fuse (and Dylan) became extremely paranoid around any and all books, and basically forbade Mark from even touching one. It's worth mentioning at this point that there was sort of a meta game going on here. Dylan said at the start that he was obsessed with Fuse surviving this campaign. Now Ben and I, we saw things differently, so we made it our duty to complicate things as much as possible to increase the odds that someone would die horribly. Ben accomplished this by giving Mark almost no sense of self-preservation and leaping headfirst into whatever supernatural challenge popped up. With Lynch, I contributed to our cause by steadily increasing his paranoia and erratic behavior as the game went on, fueled by booze, lack of sleep and weird radio messages. So while they're having their reading rainbow adventure, Lynch is in his room scanning for radio signals when he comes across a weird, carousel tune playing on a channel without any discernible source. Mani actually sent me an MP3 of the tune; I think it was from Silent Hill but it was creepy as hell. If I can dig it up I'll play it here. It's so sudden and alarming that Lynch spazzes out and breaks his nose against a piece of furniture. The next day we do some investigating, splitting up into two parties. Lynch and Gary go to speak with Elsie's former elementary school teacher, Helen, while Fuse, Ise and Mark go to the library to see what they can find out about This Cold Black. Lynch plants a bug in Helen's office while she explains to the two of them about how distressed Elsie's mother Lisa is, and about Castro, the old mulatto guy who lives in the Lighthouse who was found with Elsie after she went missing. It's about this time that Dylan begins his pattern of improbably good dice rolls. He must have passed more than 80% of his checks, and rolled more single digit successes than the rest of the group combined. It was unreal and basically allowed Fuse to do practically whatever he wanted. His obayun skill practically became a jedi mind trick. After Gary and Lynch finish with Helen the party regroups in the town center in time to find a crazy guy screaming at the top of his lungs while hanging from a flagpole in the town square. Before much else happens he's struck by lightning and falls to the hard ground below; and yet comes up fine. This is JJJ (I forget his full name), an exorcist whose come to town to expel the demons possessing Elsie. Lynch later discovered that JJJ had a radio show that he picked up some broadcasts on. JJJ gets carted off to the hospital, since he just got struck by lightning and all. Our party heads to the hospital to speak to Dr. Latham, Elsie's child psychologist, but to our chagrin it turns out that JJJ was a step ahead of us; be broke loose from his restraints in the emergency ward, beat the hell out of some nurses and disappeared. We run into him in the hall. We try to talk him down at first but he's full of zeal and god's love, so we have to do it by force. Here, ironically, in spite of Dylan's boss rolls he sorta doesn't do that well in the struggle, and it's dragging pretty bad until I manage to roll well enough to have Lynch grapple JJJ while Gary and Fuse beat the tar out of him. The whole time, Mani is openly rolling dice and randomly telling us that JJJ is evading our attacks through increasingly improbably coincidences. After we finished the game, Mani revealed that JJJ was an entropomancer, although he didn't know about the true nature of his powers and just assumed that god loved him so much that he protected him from harm. We manage to subdue JJJ and the cops take him away. We come out of it with minor injuries, but luckily we're in a hospital. Afterwards we recoup from our heroics, and Gary and Lynch head up to talk to Latham while Fuse and Mark talk to the authorities. Turns out he's not in, but his office is unlocked, so I sneak in and plant a bug in his office. We bolt as he approaches, splitting up. And here is where things start to go nuts. Gary gets out of the hospital but Lynch ends up going deeper in, and there finds Elsie. In the only lit cell in an otherwise totally dark hallway. Oh and it's soundproof. And her neck is wrapped in bandages. I put two and two together and realize that they gave the girl a tracheotomy to remove her ability to speak normally, and put her in a soundproofed cell for good measure. So this is all pretty terrible. She can only communicate through drawings, and the first thing she asks is "Can I Go Now?" I actually have a long conversation with her, discovering, among other things, that the spooky carousel that Lynch heard on the radio was some kind of lullaby that Lisa sang to Elsie, and that more importantly Lynch has a weakness for little kids in peril. I left promising her that I'd be back to get her out and bring her to her mother. I should note, also, that all of this took place in a private chat away from the rest of the party. None of them knew that I had personally met Elsie. while this is going on, Mark, Gary and Fuse are having their own little adventures. Gary and Fuse go to talk to Castro while Mark stumbles into some kind of weird other space where he meets a boy calling himself Ego, who talks about the Mother and the Devourer and the Victim and the Host and a bunch of other weird stuff. This is actually the last full session that Ben plays with us for several weeks. A combination of technical issues and real life concerns kept knocking him out of the game. All of these occurred as solo sessions with their respective party members, so none of us know what the other is really up to. Gary and Fuse's experiences with Castro are equally uncanny, and in the end he does something to Fuse that scrambles his speaking abilities before kicking them out of his lighthouse. He also reveals that he is the author of This Cold Black. As is revealed in the post game, Castro is a Bibliomancer, and also an Avatar of the Outsider or something. When the party regroups at the hotel after all of this happens, Gary and Fuse are shaken. Especially Fuse. Especially. He's talking about going back to Castro and putting the boots to him, medium style. He's extremely agitated. He's talking about him being a crazy sorcerer and stuff. It's at this point that Lynch's paranoia is getting really ratcheted up from a combination of more booze, less sleep and another creepy radio message, this time a rock song that dissolves into a gutteral chanting of "I'm always watching you", and I decide not to tell the rest of the party that Lynch met Elsie. Gary and Fuse retrieve a bunch of tapes that Latham made of his sessions with Elsie, and they have Lynch analyze them, which I do in another solo session. The tapes reveal a few things-- the first one is actually the doctor talking to Lisa and Leland. Lisa is a total wreck and Leland is becoming increasingly distressed with the whole situation. Another tape has Latham speaking to Elsie directly; however, Elsie is speaking gibberish. And then Latham starts speaking gibberish, unconciously. After listening to the tapes over and over and over again and dissecting every bit of dialog, begins to understand a few words in Elsie's strange language. Understand them like he's known it all his life. For the rest of the game, this language continues to creep up into his speech at random. Okay so now Lynch is in a really weird mood. He's got a constant buzz going, hasn't slept in days, is being hounded by mysterious radio signals and now his brain is being rewritten. He begins to see Fuse's threats of violence as his very real intentions instead of just venting. This leads to the turning point in the game, where everything goes haywire. Lynch is taking a break from his analysis to get food and while he's at the diner, Mark walks in. Ben managed to get himself in order enough to try out a game, but no sooner does he enter the chat than does his connection die on us. Then he's back. Then he's gone again. This goes on for about a half an hour, during which the game is at a complete standstill. Finally Mani gets sick of it, and when Ben disconnects for the last time he has Mark simply pass out on the table. I take his phone and call Fuse and tell him what happened. Then I decide to leave before they arrive. Through the emergency exit in the back. Which sets off the alarms in the diner. I figure, why does it matter? The ambulance is coming anyway. My objective here is to visit Castro before Gary and Fuse decide to go over there and put the screws to him, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity while I still can. Fuse and Gary arrive soon after, and realize that Lynch left through the emergency exit. Gary goes out the back and sees Lynch just barely in view, and they give chase. And now I'm running to because, hey, I'm being chased! This leads to an hour long chase scene of Lynch trying to outmaneuver Gary and Fuse. As it proceeds, each side is becoming increasingly sure that the other side is up to something, and the paranoia of the characters becomes the paranoia of the players since no one really knows exactly what the others have been doing. I almost get away with it, but then Gary rolls and 01 on his Notice check and realizes that Lynch is heading for the lighthouse. Fuse calls Ise and they give chase in their car. Lynch beats them there just barely and races up the lighthouse to the top, where Castro has locked the door and covered it in police tape (later revealed to be a sealing spell), but Lynch is able to convince him to let him in by saying that he met Elsie and by repeating "The darkness is safer than the light", the key phrase that he was able to understand from her gibberish. Castro lets him in a few minutes before Fuse and Gary catch up. I get a really awesome scene in Castro's library where I get to monologue about Lynch's history with music and his own obsessions with radio, and solidifies in my mind that Castro is on our side. Meanwhile, the opposite is happening with Fuse and Gary, who are now convinced that Lynch is totally unhinged and that Castro is even more dangerous than they predicted. When they finally get to the top of the lighthouse, Dylan and I have an intense and awesome cellphone argument through the door, where it comes out that Lynch met Elsie. He asks Fuse if he wants to talk to Elsie, and then plays some of her gibberish which he recorded to a microcasette through the phone. Fuse practically throws the phone down. Finally Castro comes away with a book-- another copy of This Cold Black, which he uses in conjunction with the original copy to see that JJJ has escaped from police custody and is heading for the hospital. Then this exchange happens. I'm paraphrasing, but: quote:Lynch: You've got bigger problems than me right now. I didn't know this at the time, but a giant squid had just erupted from the ocean nearby and was approaching the shoreline. They flee, and now the party is not only split, but actively working against one another. I'm now determined to save Elsie not just from the doctors who want to take her off the island for more testing, but from Fuse and Gary who are obviously dangerous. This is exacerbated by the fact that Dylan/Fuse has come to believe that Elsie is also dangerous, so I genuinely think he may do something bad to her. I talk to Castro for a while and learn some things. He took in Elsie after she ran away, and through his research learned that her gibberish language is called Alter Tongue, and that it has the ability to spread to people who hear it. He used her language to write This Cold Black and attached a bunch of Bibliomancer spells to it. Castro gives Lynch his second copy of This Cold Black and I head for the hospital. On the way I call Elsie's mother Lisa to meet me behind the hospital. I head over, sneak in through the back, and reach Elsie's room just in time to see Fuse, Gary and Mark preparing to throw down with JJJ, who has just broken through the soundproof glass. When my turn comes up I aim the book at them and open it like it's a cannon. I honestly was expecting it to flood the room with water or summon a squid or suck them all up like a pokeball, but what it did was fill them with feelings of weakness and victimization and, in Fuse's case, make him even angrier because not only had Lynch betrayed them, but he had brought along the one thing on the island he was most afraid of. I get drawn into the brawl and its a free for all, and during the melee Elsie tries to break free. JJJ almost gets her but in his moment of victory, right when he has the upper hand...he just up and walks away. Mani explained it after the game. Because he didn't really know how his own powers worked, when JJJ thought he was exorcising spirits he was actually summoning demons. If he succeeded, the demon would have tried to possess one of us and we'd have to save against it. However, he did not succeed. He botched it, very badly. And as a result, he was possessed. And the demon, finding himself suddenly in a shiny new body, decided that he had better things to do than fight a bunch of humans. Lynch shouts to Elsie that her mother is outside and she bolts for the fire escape. Mark (Ben was finally able to rejoin us) made a snap decision and ran with her, trying to carry her outside to her mother while Lynch was determined to hold off Fuse and Gary. Unfortunately for him they had much higher struggle scores, and they had weapons. Lynch, however, had a complete lack of regard for his own safety. I get the crap beaten out of me. In the middle of the fight Gary pulls his gun intending to threaten me, but Chris somehow fails a roll so badly that the gun actually goes off. It misses Lynch by inches but deafens him, and since his hearing is so good he's really messed up. I actually have to make a sanity check, since Lynch's fear impulse is silence, which I pass. I keep on fighting until I basically get KO'd, but by this time Mark is almost out the door. Fuse and Gary give chase, and they run right into a squad of police cars waiting outside. So we all get arrested. Everyone spends part of the night in the hospital, and the rest of the night in the slammer. Over night we get visited by weird dopplegangers of Elsie, each with weird distorted faces. The next day we make bail-- thanks to Ego, the weird kid that Mark met earlier. It's Mother's Day, and Elsie is scheduled to be shipped off the island. We leave the jail and the whole town is in chaos. Its being vandalized by an army of Elsie duplicates. In the middle of it all we find Mark's lost luggage, which happens to be soaked with urine for some reason, and inside we find pills. Antipsychotics. At the same time I get a phone call from Lisa, who is utterly unhinged, screaming about how Elsie is not a bad girl and how she needs her daughter back and on and on and on. She bellows something about the pills aren't working anymore and we figure that the meds we found in Mark's suitcase were hers. Just then, an ambulance pulls up to a stoplight, and Fuse has a revelation. He runs up to the driver and tells him he has a fuel leak, and when he gets out jumps him while Lynch gets in the driver's seat (I have the highest Drive skill in the party). We gag the guy with Mark's piss stained clothes and throw him in the back, then strip him of his EMT uniform. Our plan is simple: 1.) Pretend to be EMTs 2.) Go to hospital, pick up Elsie 3.) Uhhhhh I dress Lynch up in the EMT's outfit and we head for the hospital. We get there and Gary gives Lynch his stungun, in the event that I need it, but when I come in an orderly, partly speaking Alter Tongue, throws Elsie into my arms and says to get her out of here. So that was pretty easy. We take the ambulance (and the hogtied EMT) away from the hospital and plot our next move. In the process we have one of the best exchanges in the game, something like this: quote:Fuse: Castro is a psychopath and a sorcerer! He wrote that damned book! Afterwards Fuse spends some time talking to Elsie, who answers his questions with a combination of body language and writing. When asked if she's afraid of Castro she shakes her head, and then confirms that by writing "Kastrow" when Fuse asks if there's anyone on the island that was nice to her. During this time we get a call from Helen (Elsie's teacher), who's with Lisa at her home with Doctor Latham, saying that Lisa is calmed down and that we should bring Elsie back. Now we're starting to formulate a plan. By this time, incidently, we're all convinced that Latham is the villain, possibly the Devourer that Ego spoke about. Using a valuable book that we found at the hotel (a signed first edition of Player Piano), Lynch "calls" Castro, thinking that maybe he can hear him through one of his books. Afterwards Lynch says "I feel retarded." Our plan is to get everyone together at Lisa's house and settle things there. What amazed me about this final act is how our group dynamic had shifted. We were all on the same side, but instead of Lynch coming to his senses, they had all basically joined his side, kinda vindicating his craziness. I also discovered something about Lynch during this act. I was concerned that I was sort of acting out of character by having him behave more rationally and less impulsively given his prior actions, but then I realized that he hadn't had a drink in almost 48 hours. He's not schizophrenic; he's just a really bad drunk. So we drive the ambulance to Lisa's home (we still have the EMT in the back, by the way) so that everyone can air their grievances. Helen greets us and leads us through the house and up into Elsie's room. The whole while we're hearing the creepy carousel lullaby that I heard at the start of the game. When we reach Elsie's room we discover that we had vastly miscalculated things. Latham wasn't the devourer; he was dead on the floor with a pair of scizzors in his neck. Lisa seems Elsie, and all hell breaks loose. I wish I had Mani's description on hand, but in sort order: Elsie's old crib explodes into shards and forms a crucifix behind Lisa. Knobs from it impale her hands and feet and she's lifted off the ground. She transforms first into an image of the Virgin Mary Then her stomach bulges out and explodes into a dozen tentacles emerging from a fanged, ravenous uterus So it turns out the Devourer and the Mother were the same thing. Oopsie. Two of our party fail sanity checks but select Flight anyway so they bolt out. I grab Elsie and run, while Gary has the decency to haul Helen away from being horribly killed. We managed to break out of the house and make it to the ambulance and start driving away. Lisa crashes out of the house and gives chase and Lynch floors it down the street. At the end of the street he stops. For once, Dylan and I are 100% on the same page. I turn the van around, tell everyone to buckle up and say a prayer to the god of random number generators, and roll to run that bitch over with a van. Success. Mani said afterwards that that's the first time anyone's tried to hit the Devouring Mother with a car. I score a direct hit and smash right against and over her, but she's not quite dead yet. Gary opens the window and starts firing uselessly at Lisa, and I end up pulling away in the van to get away. Elsie now crawls into the front with the piece of paper reading "Kastrow" on it, so we drive to the lighthouse. When we arrive Lisa is catching up. We untie the EMT and have him drive away with Helen while we head into the Lighthouse. Now at this point Mani had an ending in mind. We were supposed to climb the Lighthouse, and then we fight Lisa in Castro's library alongside him. That's not what happens though. Instead, while we all run for safety, Gary hangs back and stands his ground. He draws his weapon and fires one last time before retreating with the rest of the party. And rolls a 01. At this point the chat explodes into hysterics as he adjusts his aim and fires right into Lisa's womb, which, in conjunction with me hitting her with the van, does enough damage to kill her outright. She goes down and is shriveling up and Gary goes over to her and delivers a coup de grace with his gun to her head while saying "Happy Mother's Day." So yeah. Unknown Armies owns.
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Feb 17, 2012 00:39
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So I feel like I need to share this to get some insight as to whether or not I'm a total monster. This is probably going to be lengthy and ridiculous so bear with me. So I play a fairly unique Wild Talents game with my wife. She and I trade-off GMing and we've spent like 3 years building up the world that we've been playing in and fleshing out the characters we meet. It's all very introspective and we can play for 3-4 hours without any real action, just exploring the characters. Her main character is Katya, a wealthy, russian socialite who is also a shape-shifter. Since the inception of the game, and I mean from the second "episode" onward, she's been entangled with the russian mafia. In that episode she was investigating the disappearance of a woman named Anya Udanov, the daughter of Dmitri Udanov, the city's most powerful mob boss. This eventually linked first to a human trafficking ring and then to an alien conspiracy, which itself spiraled out into its own thing (that's so far culminated with breaking into a military base to use an experimental wormhole generator to invade an asteroid serving as the Earth's second moon, and eventually exploding it). About...6 months later, one of her police contacts tips her off to a meeting between the biggest russian mobsters in the city, which she infiltrates, and in the process encounters Vasily Romanov, the son of the second most powerful russian gangster. Turns out Vasily is a total loose cannon and she and him get into a knife fight in the library of the mansion where the meeting is being held. Fast forward about another year and the russian gangs are on the verge of total warfare. Vasily's father, Spartak, is chronically ill and Katya has to break into the Romanov mansion to retrieve a doctor that the Romanovs have kidnapped to keep Spartak alive. It succeeds, but during the mission she witnesses Vasily killing his own father which leads into a sprawling fight across the entire property. Realizing that Vasily is too dangerous to be the leader of that chunk of the russian underground, she stages a video where she shape-shifts into Vasily and declares all-out war against the Udanovs. I used Reign's Company rules for this and it would up backfiring on her, where the Romanovs actually gain the upper-hand due to a mole they had in the Udanov organization. So new plan: Katya teams up with Dmitri Udanov, impersonates him, gets escorted right into Vasily's penthouse and fights him, which winds up with her having to kill him. This is the first person she's directly killed in the game, and in an awesome twist she failed her Stability check and couldn't watch him die. Now then. Fast forward again to about a month ago. I set up an arc where someone is trying to assassinate Dmitri Udanov. It starts with Katya intercepting a weapons sale intended for a sniper, whom she takes down on a rooftop across form a hotel where Dmitri is having a liaison. Next comes a failed carbombing. At this point, Anya, Dmitri's daughter whom my wife saved at the very start of the game, approaches Katya to ask for help. She follows up on this which, tracking the bomber to an illegal underground card game, and from there to The Gulag, a sort of Russian Kowloon Walled City on the edge of the industrial district. After fighting a guy with a tiger she is tipped off to a third assassination attempt, this one being held at a charity gala that Dmitri Udanov is throwing. She works with Anya to make preparations and ends up fighting a gunslinging metahuman who can control sand an broke into the gala by driving a dump truck through the front of the building. The whole time this is happening, we're exploring the anxieties of Anya Udanov, as she's facing an illness her father is facing, her own insecurities about leading the mob if he dies, about not fitting in with the rest of the russian social scene and her own superhuman abilities that were discovered in the second episode. It really resonates with my wife and at the start of the most recent game she took Anya with a bunch of her other russian friends to a beach party weekend to help her unwind and (hopefully) get her laid. It's a great little bit of character exposition and we had a lot of fun. During this arc, Katya is tracking down a woman named Roza who is apparently behind the assassinations. She locates her in a rundown multipurpose building which turns out to be teeming with Romanov supporters. She confronts Roza at the top floor but she escapes via a helicoptor; my wife tries to pursue but receives a phone call from Anya saying there's been another attack and her father is in the hospital. I'm sure some of you reading this can see where this is going. After visiting and comforting Anya, Katya acts on intelligence she recovered from the Romanov building to infiltrate a club called Steppenwolfe where two things are revealed. 1. First, the mastermind behind the assassinations isn't this Roza person. It's Vasily Romanov, who has been brought back to life with cybernetics. This shocked and thrilled by wife, and I felt pretty great about this. For a long time she's been saying "man I wish I hadn't killed Vasily, he was great." Well there you go! Her jaw was on the floor during his reveal. 2. Even more shocking, though, it turns out that Roza is in-fact Anya Udanov in disguise, and is romantically involved with Vasily. Now her exact motivations and goals have NOT been made clear; the last session pretty much ended on that reveal. But here's the rub. My wife is devastated. She's apparently been rocked to her core. The way we play the game can be pretty emotionally hard-hitting, but I drastically miscalculated how brutal this was going to be. She feel betrayed, not just her character, and she's been talking about how it's going to send her character off the rails. Worse still, it's possibly setting back like two years of character development as she doesn't trust ANY of her character's friends now. So, yeah. That's my notable gaming experience.
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May 31, 2017 17:02
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BabyFur Denny posted:Depends if that reveal came out of nowhere or if there was a sufficient number of hints available before. These "Looks like I was the villain all along" reveals without warning are just dumb and annoying (and judging from the reaction it was exactly that). In that case, yes, you're a monster. 1.) The woman, Roza, had a very conspicuous disguise (dark red hair, dark sunglasses at all times, a giant, obvious facial burn covering half her face) 2.) When Katya met up with Anya after confronting and wounding Roza, her arm was in a sling which she credited to being injurred in the attack that hospitalized her father 3.) Katya called Anya while she had eyes on Roza on two occasions and her phone went right to voicemail, after having it been established that Anya is completely addicted to her phone. 4.) Each time they interacted, Anya's anxiety and stress was visibly worsening. We both agreed that these elements, taken in retrospect, justify the reveal. I don't think the reaction is due to it coming out of left field as much as it was this was the first time frankly any of our characters have been so utterly betrayed. My wife's current plan, after her character cools down a bit, is to cordially invite this character to get their nails done while this telepath character she's friends with reads her thoughts. Though that's contingent on her wanting to do ANYTHING with her friends ever again. She's "joked" that her other plan is to kill Dmitri herself and then fake her own death. Pro-tip: if you play roleplaying games with your significant other, maybe steer clear of the betrayal plot.
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May 31, 2017 19:27
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