Fall
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!
Fall – The teaser
As mentioned in this post I have recently started playing in a Buffy: the Vampire Slayer inspired game called Fall. It is set in Fall River, Massachusetts not long after the end of Buffy Season 7 and will follow the lives of 4 B.M.C. Durfee High School students as they become aware of the supernatural.
The cast is:
Alexandra “Alex” Pedersen – Played by me, Ales has recently become a slayer and has no idea yet.
Calvin Grant – A bad boy with lots of money, uncaring parents and a bit of a chip off his shoulder.
Megan – A former victim of the popular set she now rules the school and the cheerleading team with an iron fist.
Darius – A quiet, bookish type who is working his way through the death of his parents with surfing.
As this was just the teaser session after making our characters we didn’t make any major plot advances or character realisations. There was some great set up moments with Megan establishing herself as Queen Bee, Calvin bunking off school to go surfing and Darius having some poignant moments with envelopes and his dog.
A favorite of mine is when Alex, who until a few months ago she had the perfect life, is called into the head coach’s office and given an intervention regarding her drug use (his assumption considering her recent peaks in performance on the lacrosse field).
It wasn’t too hard to get all the characters in the same place, The Limit (Fall River’s version of The Bronze) which is when we stopped the session. Who knows what crazy antics will ensue from this seemingly innocent location!
Things to look forward to in ’09
With January almost done 2009 is well under way so I thought I’d jot down a list of the things I’m looking forward to this year.
- Receiving, reading and playing Mouse Guard. An RPG of the graphic novels by David Petersen it has had a number of great reviews and as a gaming friend said to me:
“It is one of the most playable RPGs I have come across.”
- Pulling off Day of Games on May 16th. A small one day event here in Wellington with games being offered on the day and people voting for an choosing the game they feel like playing most. More info once I re-do the blog.
- As Nick mentioned in a previous post Green Ronin have announced that A Song of Ice and Fire rpg has been approved and is on it’s way to the printers. I ran through the quick-start adventure back in July’08 and really liked what they had done. The core book is due out in March so I’ll be doing a write up once I get my hands on it.
- Writing my Buffy: the Vampire Slayer RPG scenario series, The Slayer Chronicals.
- Playing in my new Buffy game (there seems to be a theme), Fall. It’s a great group of people and I think will be heaps of fun. I’ll do a write up on our first mini-session soon.
- Dollhouse starting on TV in the US.
I think that’s it for now. I’ll be back at certain points to see how these things all pan out.