Buffy rpg
Fall – Episode 20 “Reaching my Limits, Part 1″
This weeks episode was another mostly character driven affair. We were all also pretty tired and/or sick so things moved kind of slowly, but not in a bad way. We had some great character development and I started Alex down a path that I’ve recently realised is totally in keeping with her character. So with out further ado…
Fall – Episode 19 “Losing Ground, Part 2 “
We picked up exactly where we left off, with Darius in front of his locker contemplating the blue jelly goo that has soldified into a gelatinous cube and ruined all of the books, nic nacs and photos that he’d stored in there (including a collar from when his dog Nebby was a puppy, awwww).
Taking time cleaning it up Darius gets to home room a little late, where he is promptly sent to the principle’s office. Once there he’s accused of destroying the practice field, on his own, in a single night. His accusers? A bunch of jocks, the same ones that recently egged his house and filled his locker with blue goo. Despite (or perhaps because of) his rather terrible attempts at proving his innocence he too gets sent to guidance councillor, for the rest of the day.
Fall – Episode 18 “Losing Ground, Part 1″
Alex, Calvin, Megan and Darius have had some pretty exciting times since my last actual play report but luckily Jenni has been dutifully recording our adventures, so go to her blog to catch up.
In an effort to get better at recording the games I’m in I too am going to get back into the habit, but this one got a little long. I’ll see what I can do about making them more succinct. However with no further ado, Fall: Episode 18!
KapCon 2010 – Day 1
KapCon is over again for another year, and it’s proving a hard task to process back into the real world. I had another great Con with more fantastic moments than I can fit in here. › Continue reading
Previously on Fall
Even though we’ve been playing in my Buffy RPG game pretty regularly I’ve been shocking at writting up the actual play reports. Luckily however, my co-player Jenni has been very good at keeping everything up and running on that front. So if you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to head on over to her blog to read up on the last 3 episodes. Expect an actual play report of episode 10 “Full House” later today.
Episode 7: Change the Channel
Episode 8: This is your brain on drugs
Episode 9: You can’t make an Omelette
Fall – Episode 6: “Worst day ever”
I think it would be fair to say that this episode of Fall was one of the more emotionally charged sessions of roleplaying I’ve ever done. There was a fantastic amount of character development and interaction and I really felt that as a group of players we were really meshing. At one point I was really getting pushed to the edges of my gaming comfort zone and I loved every second. But enough of this waxing lyrical about the game, here is what happened. This is a long one, so I’ve hidden it behind a cut.
Fall – Episode 5: “Watch your Back”
This episode doesn’t have an official, GM title yet but I’ve dubbed it Watch your Back for reasons that will hopefully become evident.
This episode was very much a Calvin-centric episode which was a great change in pacing. It has of course already been written up, as always, by Jenni. So I’m going to summarise the episode and go into detail on the bits that were most relevant for Alex.
The episode starts up the day after our trip to the woods last time, at school. Someone tries to curse Calvin, by sticking a piece of paper on his back, but is only successful in cursing his lab partner Melinda who picks it off only to have the weird symbol drawn on it dissolve into her hand and then a few minutes later collapse with a high fever. Calvin, in an unusual display of heroics, takes her to the nurse before setting out to hunt down the person who tried to do it to him. He attempts to physically intimidate William Ham into admitting it was him, but only gets a bunch of bruises for his trouble.
The rest of the episode very much revolves around Darius and Megan researching while Calvin and Alex go in hunt for the other likely perpetrator, Xavier (another guy Calvin beat up for information, seeing a pattern?). The research goes something like this:
- Darius and Megan do research (their players, as always due to the very high intelligence and the really good occult library, rolling in the high teens which equals high successes)
- Megan finds the curse, and draws out the symbol
- Said symbol then disappears into Megan’s hand (as it did into Melinda’s earlier at school)
- Megan then throws drama points around to find a cure, before passing out in Darius’s door way.
Darius then quickly calls Calvin and Alex with the indrediants they need to find in order to make a pultice that will draw the curse out. The duo on their way to do this when Alex realises she’s late for her date with Mason (which was arranged earlier at school). She calls and tries to brush him off (so she can continue driving around in cars with his best friend helping to save someone’s life) by saying her mum wants her home. He replies to this new rejection by replying,
“I’m at your house now.” Dead silence…
Alex quickly jumps out of the Kermit and runs home, through the rain of angst, only to get there just as Mason’s car pulls out of the drive way. She then walks aimlessly in the rain until she stubbles upon the slightly restless ghost of Lissie Borden, who is Fall River’s previous Slayer. Apparently her parent’s were possessed and she had to kill them, which lead to the famous ditty (though the Lissie Borden in this world died young, after 6 months as a Slayer, this was quite a shock to Alex). The talk for some time about Slayers, Watchers and such like. She also tells Alex that as a Slayer she needs to separate herself from others in order to keep them safe. The risks are too high otherwise.
Meanwhile Calvin has managed to find the ingredients for the sure thanks to a new-agey health food shop and saved both Melinda and Megan from the curse.The episode’s hero for sure.
Will this week find Alex cutting ties with all of those she calls friend? Will Calvin beat the snot out of Xavier again? Tune in to find out!
Fall – episode 4: “Never look a gift horse in the eye.”
Never look a gift horse in the eye, episode 4 of Fall started with a dream. Alex, it seems, has that unfortunate Slayer habit of having random dreams that appear to have an element of prophecy in them. In this particular dream the monstrous horse headed demon thing that she and Calvin had seen summoned was in the forest somewhere ripping into a park ranger. She awakens with a scream just after she sees said park ranger have his head removed. Not the nicest way to wake up on Sunday morning.
After calming down, but before pancakes made by her mum, Alex contact the rest of her “crew” telling them to meet at Darius’ (I’m thinking Alex is going to make it a habit to keep turning up at his house unexpectedly as pay back for the glowing green spell from last week) so they can look into this creature and stop it before it hurts any one else.
After an impressive research montage which included breaking into the Police system (thanks to Megan, just a cheerleader? Yeah right!), reading a bunch of books and looking into spells we discovered a few useful things:
- That some trampers had recently gone missing in the forest.
- That Darius had found a spell which would lead us to the book. .
- We were pretty sure that the big leather book we couldn’t find last week was still in the Casa du Ham.
There was then an impressive display of crime, once again showing that the Slayer and her pals are rather morally ambigous when it comes to other people’s property. For a full blow by blow of the break in go check out Jenni’s description, but to summarise:
- Alex gets Gwynth Ham (William’s mum) and William out of the house by pretending to be “The Club”.
- Papa Ham (Harry) didn’t leave so had to be distracted by Calvin putting the small rodent dog into a rubbish bin.
- Alex and Darius sneak in, find the book (thanks to Drama Points) and jump out a second storey window to escape notice.
- Harry Ham gets so sick of the obvious pranks that he grabs his shot gun and acts in a way that convinces Calvin and Megan to call the cops.
So there you go. We got back to Darius’ and he decided that another spell was in order, seeing how well the last ones had gone. He found one that would allow him to read the book (as it was in some ancient language) which, not overly suprisingly, back fired. There was bleeding from the eyes and he almost read out the summoning spell before someone (I can’t remember who) quickly closed it. However the team found out enough that they headed into the forest to track down Hurini, the horse-headed demon thing, and stop him ripping anyone else to shreds.
Once there they managed to find the body of the park ranger, which was unpleasant. However there was a twist. It seemed that there was some sort of parasite that had infested the poor guy. Darius had way more fun poking around than Alex thought very healthy, but eventually they carried on and found a very dark and menacing cave.
This was when twist two of the evening occured. After entering the cave the booming voice speaking in some demon tonuge confronted us. It turns out however that rather than Hurini being this evil beast in need of smiting he was actually a nice guy trying to get some peace and quiet. We gave him his book back so that pople couldn’t keep ripping him out of his home dimmension and chatted about a bunch of things. Including the park ranger, who it appears was infected by a Bon Sh’kar demon. He told us to come back and chat any time so we left him to it.
It was a great session, and I loved that the big bad demon was certainly big, but not at all bad.
Fall episode 3 – “How the Mighty…”
It’s been a little while since I’ve written about the Buffy game I’m in, Fall. Since my last post we’ve had two more sessions. You can read about Episode 2: Legends of the Fallen over on Jenni’s blog, but as I had to leave early I don’t have a lot more to add.
Last weeks episode was How the Mighty and our intrepid heroes continued to blunder their way through the occult, crime and homework. After being caught up on what happened the session before we leapt right into breaking into the leader of the school’s secret society’s house, through a bait and switch. Unfortunately despite really effectively we only managed to find a slightly cryptic journal and not the big leather bound book we were after.
We had some really great character development with Alex finally acknowledging that she might be the Slayer. Though it took being confronted about leaping from a tree branch to the roof of a house (and then pulling open a locked window), throwing Darius across a car when he wouldn’t let it go and finally being targeted by a Slayer finding spell (cast, not surprisingly by Darius) before she started to accept it, well that and a bit more research. The other characters are also making some nice niches for themselves though the reasons we’re all hanging out are still a bit slender. Darius is leaping into his role as the utterly clueless wanna-be-Watcher and Megan as the closet geek is a fantastic.
In terms of the plot we seem to be a bit stuck. It seems like we’ve stumbled across a couple different issues. First is the dead guy from episode 1 who worked at an old folks home and the fact that old folks from said home seem to disappear quite a bit. The other issue is the horse headed demon guy who was summoned by the school’s secret society called The Fallen. But due to getting distracted as a group very easily we’ve not really made much progress. So next week I’m going to suggest that we go after the horse head thing more, to try and tie one of this threads up.
Tune in next week!
My Perfect life – Episode 1 of Fall
Last week brought the first proper episode of Fall, my new Buffy game.
This episode introduced our clueless heroes to the dangers that actually appear in the world as well as answered some questions. Luckily there were more questions that popped up. Questions like:
- Will Mason (Alex’s clueless but sweet boyfriend) make it through the second episode?
- Will Calvin remain a thrill seeking bad boy? Or will cracks appear in that solid shell?
- Is Megan really that much of a witch bitch? Or was it just plastic surgery?
- Talking of Megan, what’s with that lock of hair wrapped in the name of the former head cheerleader?
- What other secrets does Darius’s house (inherited after his Watcher parents gruesome deaths) hold?
- How will Alex deal with this new found strength and ability to kill things?
All in all a good set up episode. We had a fight, it was a tad slow which is to be expected in the first fight with a new system and some good characterisation for everyone. I’m not great at getting quotes from games, but check out jennitalula’s write up for some great moments and a more detailed write up of the action.
Looking forward to next week!