More Responsibility Than I Bargained For

So there's a lot going on in the world, and one of those things means we can't meet face to face anymore. For most, this is not great but if you're here for the same reason I'm writing this then you're interested in RPGs and meeting face to face is kind of a big part of those, so this is really not great, to put it mildly.

I'm in the UK and the lockdown began officially on the 23rd of March but for about a week before, the government were making 'recommendations' in that direction. So rather than say "All pubs and restaurants must close", they were saying "We don't think pubs and restaurants should open currently". I won't go into my opinions on that decision but regardless. The week before, I found myself as the GM of a game that met at a club in a pub on Monday evenings. And I had been seeing the advice for some time but the pub was still open and I was in a dilemma: do I run for the group or not?

The position of GM comes with responsibility. How much responsibility depends on the game and the GM's view of it. Dungeons and Dragons places a large amount on the GM, the Dungeon Master's Guide says they are responsible for making everything up and writing it down and then telling it like a story but also improvising and acting and being a referee at the same time. Phew! The DMG mentions that you can lean on players for help but doesn't really start with that in mind. Recently kickstarted Heart: The City Beneath meanwhile says that the GM should talk to their players about what they want, let them invent parts of the world and run with those ideas, and invites the GM to be open about the process. Personally, I fall more to the D&D style of things, at least partially because that's how I learned it, but I've grown to appreciate more the open style of involving players. At the very least, I'll take their ideas that they randomly speculate about and adapt them when I like them to save on some of the mental stress.

But no game so far has made the GM responsible for the health of their actual players and I was left in that position with a dilemma. If I ran a game that evening, they would go to that public space, and be at risk. But on the other hand, I didn't know then how much risk. Fortunately, the club made the decision for us all and shut down hours before, just as I was leaning in that direction anyway, and in hindsight, that was a good move.

Since then, all my games have moved to Discord and run reasonably well, with a few teething issues. Might make a post on that in future but for now, I'm done. Stay safe.

A randomly generated adventure: The Treasure of Phyros

Okay, had a rough few days, not as much sleep as I should, so here's a post where I just work out a new RPG plot from some randomisers.

Full disclosure: I love randomisers, like random tables, online generators, special dice, card decks etc. I think they are great for GMs, they provide ideas that probably just wouldn't occur normally.

A few years back, some friends of mine at the company Artemis Games kickstarted several decks of cards that do just this. At the moment, the cards aren't available sadly, they're out of print, but I got them at the time and they've proven to be pretty damn useful. I'll probably go into more detail on them at some point as I use them but the ones I'm using today are:

- Character cards - a deck of cards with a complete character profile on each one.

- Location cards - they produced cards for urban and rural locations. I'm using the urban one on it's own this time. Each card has details of a single location within a city on it.

- Plot cards - Each card has a short summary and key details of a plot to use in a game.

The details on the cards are themed to the playing card suits, hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, and these mean different things for different decks. In Character cards for example, the detail in Hearts is what the character wants, Spades is their occupation, Diamonds is their physical appearance, strengths, and weaknesses, and Clubs is their social connections. In the Location cards, Hearts is any inhabitants (or lack thereof), Diamonds is valuables or treasure in the area, Spades is any structures there, and Clubs is any defences like traps or guards. Overall, it's easy to tell from a card which one is which so it's not necessary to memorise them, but it's handy to have the details laid out in categories because then instead of drawing an entire person or location, you can also randomly draw just one detail, for example 'What does this bartender really want' or 'How well defended is this keep in the wilderness'. It's also possible to draw several cards to create new combinations which keeps them pretty versatile.

To create the plot today, I'm drawing: 2 epic plots to form the overall narratives, 3 character cards to show the major NPCs the players will meet/butt heads with, and 4 locations to say where the story will take place. Lets begin.

For the plots, I've drawn 'Fight the Power' and 'The Bull of Phyros'.

Fight the Power is character focused, it's about a woman called Helena who is tired of her boring life and her uncaring family, and wants to rob a pharmacists of it's money and herbs to get rich quick. The twist is that her father knows about the plan and hires the adventurers to stop her. Okay, interesting start.

The Bull of Phyros is a very different story. The eponymous Bull is a titanic creature that leaves a trail of destruction in it's wake as it storms across the world. It doesn't eat people but is strong enough to crush anyone in it's way. Interestingly, it eats valuable materials. The twist is that it's creator Phyros made it accidentally and is now following it, trying to find a way to stop it.

We're going to find a way to combine these two plots into one, and I've already got the start of an idea here. Helena is after excitement, danger, and valuables, and here is a giant construct beast that is definitely dangerous and possibly full of valuables. But lets see what gets drawn from the Character deck:

Squire Henry de Luna - a charming young man who wants to save the world but currently is still in training.

Lucius Viparrio - a former archmage who experimented with powers he couldn't control and suffered injuries that left him unable to perform magic anymore.

Karla Gennel - a spendthrift bartender who is a source of local information with dreams of owning her own place one day and has money stashed in the woods hoping to make that happen.

Interesting, more ideas to work with. I am now thinking that Helena is definitely not working alone in her schemes for getting rich, Karla has to be involved. Squire Henry probably has nothing to do with that, he's in it for the glory not the money, but he's going to be interested in bringing down the Bull just the same. At the moment, Lucius is quite similar in his backstory to Phyros, so I may merge the two, but possibly the Location cards will give me a reason not to.

Universal Hospital - a hospital run by monks who heal the sick for donations (with a twist that they can bring back the dead for large enough donations).

Death Row - an area of town formerly known as Chimney Street, said to be cursed where a series of mysterious deaths occurred years ago.

The Sewer Network - exactly what it sounds like, the city sewers, but with the added problem that alchemists have been dumping materials down here, making the rats super smart and the alligators super large.

Aurum College - a prestigious college that charges a hefty fee but trains people in many different arts, including warfare.

Good news for Lucius, I've got a reason to keep him separate from Phyros, which I'll detail shortly. Bad news for Helena and Karla, their lives just got less pleasant. Right, here's how I'm working this all together:

The Setup

A number of years ago, Lucius Viparrio was conducting magical experiments in his workshop on Chimney Street. Unfortunately, as magical experiments tend to, it all went wrong for him, and for the nearby inhabitants. Magical energies tore through the buildings, shattering brickwork, and maiming and killing civilians. Lucius survived but badly injured, and was brought to the hospital to recover. He has a little wealth to keep himself there but not enough to afford the healing that will restore him.

Cut to the present. Helena and Karla are two orderlies working in the hospital. Their days are long and unpleasant, caring for the badly sick and the dying, and working for a charitable order isn't paying enough to get away and start a new life, though Karla is making an attempt. Helena wants to start a life of crime if only for the excitement. Karla has gotten close to several patients including Lucius and knows his story, for all the good it does her.

Enter the Bull of Phyros, a rampaging titan construct that is heading this way. It's not going to hit the city itself fortunately, the terrain is steering it away, but it will soon trample through the nearby Aurum College and destroy it in three days time. Rather than try and fight the bull which has never worked in the past, the city is trying to arrange the evacuation of the college and it's most valuable information and resources, and let the Bull smash the rest.

From this, Lucius comes up with a plan: Helena and Karla can sneak into the college via the old sewer system, steal a load of valuables that no one will miss, and escape, letting the Bull's path of destruction cover for the theft. He will have enough money to be healed fully and they will have enough money to start new lives elsewhere.

Of course, that's where the PCs come in, because a) the more people you have, the more valuables you can drag away and b) everyone knows that sewers are dangerous. So Helena and Karla will scour the taverns and docks for likely sorts, gather them up, and bring them to Lucius for the mission. The agreement will offer a share of whatever treasure they bring back, a fairly standard plot hook.

In fact, these sewers are going to be very dangerous, with various monsters and hazards to fight through, before they reach the College. This will be different depending on the party, mostly based on their experience. If the players are new to gaming or to whatever system I'm using then this provides a nice warm up and introduction to that: throw together a straight forward dungeon, populate in a few giant rats, two or three hazards to avoid with whatever passes for skill checks, and a bigger monster fight near the end. But it also works well for higher level experienced players, the monsters just get bigger and the hazards just get trickier, and there's potential for some side passages off to parts unknown for them to come back to later.

Then we have the college itself, the heart of the adventure, presenting a lot of different challenges, mostly social and skills based rather than combat (unless the characters screw up big time). As well as their objective of gathering treasure without being seen, they will have to deal with:

- Refugees from other places in the Bulls path. While it isn't trampling any major settlements, small farms, homesteads, or hamlets are being crushed and the people are fleeing for their lives, arriving at the first 'safe' place they can rest.

- The valiant defenders - Squire Henry and his mentor (draw a card for a name) Sir Breskan are in charge of rallying the military students of the college to try and defeat the Bull instead of running. Most would say this is suicide but Henry believes in their courage and zeal and various other words like those and says they can do it!

- Phyros himself - the players will bump into him in one of the areas they ransack, and he will realise they are not from the college, and so explain himself: he's here ahead of the college's destruction trying to dig up some research that will let him kill his creation permanently. The Bull has a weak spot, it's heart, and is large enough that people can get inside it and attack the heart directly. All he would need is something to stun the beast temporarily, preferably a large and well aimed explosion, and so he's here trying to find research on building a bigger bang.

So here is a grander and more noble quest than the characters originally set out on, take down this terrible monster for good. And if your players are into that, great. In my experience, it's never wise to count on the altruism of player characters though, so here are some additional details to use:

- The sewers were unstable and the approach of the Bull has forced them to collapse. This doesn't mean there is no way to get away but getting away with armfuls of loot will be nigh on impossible, leaving them with a meagre reward if they join the refugees.

- The Bull devours any valuable materials it finds in it's path, meaning it's insides are full of gold, silver, and jewels. At the very least, Helena and Karla will be swayed by the promise of greater reward and insist the PCs join them.

At points like this in the story, I will leave things up to the players. I don't need to figure out all the possibilities for how they might hit the Bull with a bomb. They might build a trebuchet, they might lure it to a spot they've mined, they might drop the bomb on it as it reaches the college walls. Whatever they decide on, as long as it sounds workable and they roll well, it'll do the job. Likewise, whether they take advantage of the defenders and Squire Henry to get the job done or ignore them, that's up to them Leading to the final stage of the adventure: inside the Bull itself.

This will be another dungeon, but stranger than the last. It's laid out strangely, it's noisy all the time and hazardous in new and interesting ways. Corridors that try to squash the PCs, steam vents for pressure or actual fires burning them, grinding gears and swinging blade like levers. And monsters too. I can see elementals from the machinery attacking them, golems that are part of the greater construct, even ghosts of it's victims that are haunting some of the treasure within. Finally, the heart itself will have defences, more likely some tougher standard constructs to fend off the PCs. And once it's dead, it's all over bar the looting and aftermath.

So there you have it, a short adventure built from randomised cards, currently a little rough around the edges but with potential. I'm not sure which game I would run it in but that's a topic for a different post.

Let's make a game: Edguy - The Piper Never Dies.

I get inspiration for games all the time from a lot of places, and one very big inspiration is music. I'm a fan of a variety of music (and really, isn't everyone? I don't think anyone likes just one sort of music these days, it's too easy to dabble) and a lot of songs give me ideas for RPG settings, plots, and entire games sometimes. So, let's kick this off with a great song by power metal band Edguy, The Piper Never Dies.

Oh Yeah!

Thirsting for salvation
You're off to find the stairway
Novice on your never ending ride
Whatever you may find dare to take it higher
Here's your instigation on your trip into the light

Standing at the temple
Where the wizard shall arise
You listen to the beauty of a song
A melody of promise calling from the dark
Tear down the portal and then go on and

Come and fly away with me
And your eyes are gonna see it all
And sleep with the fire - do you feel me?
Go obtain divinity, be the one you wanna be
And don't be afraid to give in

A ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies
Ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies
The piper never dies

Entities are screaming, enticing from inside
Creatures you had never ever seen
And on the back of haughtiness
You leave into the light
The spirit on a mission in the shell of a beast

The ferryman is gentle
And promises are made
The other side may hold a lot to see
He's gonna take you over
And then he'll name the fare
Oh, you gamble with the devil, fool
The ferryman is me

Come and fly away with me
And your eyes are gonna see it all
And sleep with the fire - do you feel me?
Go obtain divinity, be the one you wanna be
And don't be afraid to give in

And ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies
Ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies
The piper never dies
No, the piper never dies

Balance on the edge of day and night
Not afraid of falling
Time has come to see all wrong from right
Something's calling
Heaven and hell is it all the same
And just a different grade
Now I gotta know the point of change
Where love turns to hate

Balance on the edge of day and night
Dive into the haze and kiss the light
Many of the tales you've been told
Never written for the brave and bold
Come and take my hand tonight
Come and sleep with me tonight
Certainly I'm gonna take you there
Showing you around everywhere

Do you believe that you're devil-may-care
As you jump into the fire?
Do you believe that you're devil-may-care
As you jump into the fire?

Dreamer, dreamer, dreamer, dreaming dreamer, dreamer, dreamer, dreamer

A ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies, no
Ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies
Ride into the shadows
The piper never dies, never dies

Alright, the piper never dies, I got you hypnotized
Come with me and witness, see Babylon arise

The whore is fading light, let us step inside
I got you paralyzed child, the piper never dies

The pied piper plays the song, beautiful but strong
He was never born, never he'll be gone

Oh the piper never dies
He never dies, never, never dies...

So let me unpack what I'm thinking here for a game.

That first verse sounds like the start of an adventure. The character's are novices, just starting out, on a never ending quest seeking the light and salvation in an almost entirely dark world. But what started off, or instigated, this journey? That's where the second verse comes in.

What began all of this was a scene at a temple. They were summoned there by an enchanting song from the night. Since we're dealing with a piper, a pied one in fact, we can assume they didn't go there entirely willingly as well.

The song mentions a wizard arising at the temple, I have to assume this is the Piper of the title, and after summoning them with his melody of promise, he makes them an offer. They can come with him, fly high and see everything, on a quest to decide their destinies. He doesn't offer guarantees, they may have to admit defeat in this, but divinity itself is at stake.

And then they are off into a dark and shadowy world, guided by the immortal wizard The Piper who draws them onwards in their quest for the light of godhood.

But the character's are not the same people who entered the temple, no, they've been changed by their pact with the Piper. They have 'entities' inside them, they are now shells for spirits on a mission, and these spirits, this fire they carry inside, is the begining of the godbeings they will become, already arrogant and superior though they are only fledgling deities.

The adventure will lead them to new places and challenges, including to the underworld, the realm of the ferryman. They will have to ask the ferryman to take them to the other side, but the cost of that will be their mortality, they will no longer be human after that. And it's at that point that they will see if the spark inside is strong enough to survive to godhood.

If the heroes do survive with their mortality stripped away, then they are the worlds new deities, deciding what is good and what is not, finding a balanced way to rule (or maybe not) and using their abilities to rebuild the world and civilisation, as a new 'Babylon'.

But what about the Piper? The Piper still remains, he never dies, even with new gods and a new light established for the world, he still remains. And he will possibly return one day, when these new gods are also gone and more are needed...

In summary, ordinary people are chosen to become the new pantheon of a dying world that has lost it's gods, and must quest to build up their godly strength before finally ascending and rebuilding the world in their own images.

How I'd Run It

Man I like this idea. It's the ultimate fantasy adventure from nothing to absolute deity.

I think the term 'The Piper's Call' is a catchy term for the song they are hearing that draws them onwards, so I'll be using that for now.

Things to include in the game: many candidates for godhood besides the PCs, the hazards of a dying world, a grey sun giving off a harsh monochrome light, the troubles of the ordinary people they pass by, the remnants of a previous civilisation and the dangerous magics they left behind, mythological creatures of all sorts, travelling across many lands, a passage of time that feels abstracted implying this is not all happening within a single lifetime, trials set for them by the Piper to test their worthiness to be gods, jealous rivals who many get in the way or try to take the PCs out, reasons to work together in spite of their differences and fools who refuse to, truly huge and monsterous creatures to defeat, a way to determine who survives to become a god, opportunities to bolster NPCs to take them into the pantheon as well, and an epilogue for the players to describe their new world.

It's all well and good having an epic sweeping tale of ordinary people chosen to become gods, but what system is going to see this quest through and what modifications are they going to need?

Here's the options I would pick. They aren't in order from most likely pick to least likely or anything like that, but just in the order I thought them up.

First is Fate by Evil Hat Productions. The main reason I would consider it is that it's flexible in what it can handle and easy to modify. For those who don't know Fate, it builds characters out of skills, which are flat bonuses to the dice, stunts, which are abilities the character has beyond the standard skills list, and aspects, which are traits a character possesses that can be good or bad and can influence play in various ways.

I'd start off with the basics from the core, with three standard aspects to represent who the character was before they heard the Piper's call. Then, have their fourth aspect represent the growing spark inside them and the god they will one day become, in both temperament and abilities. Something like "Arrogant lord of flames" or "Cunning trickster of shadow". For a fifth aspect, I'd leave that open to start and tell the players to pick based on the events of the game, preferably focused on events they shared with another PC to reflect the bond between their characters.

Skills would need a more fantasy style to them but shouldn't be too different to that standard set. Stunts could represent either their natural abilities or their growing god-like powers, whichever they preferred, though I would limit them initially when the adventure is first starting out.

Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. Fun system and one I've had most use out of with a many years long Hellfrost campaign. Haven't had a chance to use the new 'SWADE' version so this might be a good opportunity. SW definitely has more focus on combat and action and less on character backstories than Fate, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Player's can bring as much or as little of a backstory to the table as they want to with SW and with the campaign being more focused on where the characters are going than where they've been, that could be an improvement.

Character's in SW have attributes and skills to represent what they can do, and these are rated in dice types. d4 means you are weaker in that attribute or a novice at a skill, d12 means you are better than most people and at the height of your abilities. At least, it does for standard characters. For our setting, since we are talking gods, I would increase the maximum to d12+4. Since most unmodified dice rolls require a 4 or more on the dice, this would mean a character at the true pinnacle of their powers would be able to defeat most mundane challenges with ease and difficulties wouldn't slow them down much, but it would take a long time to get there.
Another part of SW is that main character's roll a 'wild die', an extra d6 that can succeed if their main attribute or skill dice gets less than the target number. As is, this already puts the focus on the PCs as better than average, so this is an advantage for SW. Not sure yet whether the other prospective gods, the rivals and allies, would get this as well, something to consider.
SW also has edges which modify characters further, giving them boosts to skills in certain circumstances and new ways to fight in combat. The standard list can be included without much change but more might be better as the character's grow to divinity. I'm not sure whether I would write these up ahead of time, or work them out with a player as they advanced and had an idea of what they would want. There are plenty of higher powered settings out there to draw on for an expanded list so more research is needed here.

Cypher System by Monte Cook Games. Oh Cypher system, you fickle mistress. I've run two long campaigns of this system for the Numenera setting, and both have been good once the players have gotten used to the system and figured out the ways it works, but that has taken some time and some players just don't take to it sadly. It's weird compared to most systems and that always gives me pause, but once it gets some momentum behind it, it can be a very flexible system and very easy to use on the fly. The reason for this is that every single task is rated 1 to 10 in difficulty, and the target number for the dice is the difficulty number multiplied by 3. So a monster that is difficulty 3 requires a 9 to do anything to it, convince it, shoot it, poison it etc. This makes it very easy to work out what the players need to roll for whatever they are trying to do to work.

Another advantage Cypher has is that the setting 'Gods of the Fall' is already written and that's about people advancing to godhood. A brief skim of the book says it works much like the other Cypher games but does have a short section on advancing beyond the usual maximum. A little less than I would like considering we're talking deities but it's something.

The Cypher system is named after cyphers, single use magical or technological items that players can deploy whenever they feel it would help. Good for a more open exploration setting but for a more fixed story that I think we're going for here, it's nice but not a big selling point.

Last but not least, City of Mist by Son of Oak Game Studio. This is a game in the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) style which I like, it's got a straightforward system. Roll 2d6 + whatever appropriate stat you have in that setting (usually set out in the rules of that setting) and if you get 7-9, you succeed with cost, and on a 10+, you succeed without cost or to a greater degree. City of Mist is a game about people with powers of folklore figures like literary characters, legends, and (of course) deities as well. It does away with the idea of stats and instead has players design four facets of their characters, called mythos if they are from their folklore side and logos if they are from their mundane life, and pick a number of ways these facets can be applied. If the thing you are trying to do falls under one of these facets, you add a +1 to the dice roll. So someone with water powers going for a swim adds a bonus, but someone who is a scuba instructor also adds a +1, someone with both adds +2 and so on.
It's very flexible in what abilities it can allow which is good. It would need some changes to the advancement system though as the characters in the original game are supposed to balance their mundane and supernatural side, and for this setting, I want the supernatural side to grow bigger and bigger. But it's a good starting point.

Those are the strongest four for me to run this personally. There are definitely others I've used in the past that might work but they just don't seem right for this, or have a lot of work required, and those four give me enough options.

One last thing I'd need is some sort of progression to godhood. Ideally, I'd want it to reflect the challenges the world with throw at them and that the Piper will set for them, but also be able to reward the odd moments where the group says "that was cool!" too. It really depends on which system I choose, so I will develop this idea once the system is in place.

So dear reader, what system would you pick for this concept? And are there any songs that inspire you for gaming? Let me know in the comments.

Rebellis Ex Machina

In the God Machine Chronicles book, there is a section on “What is the God Machine”. This mentions various theories, all of them written from the point of view of a character rather than the author, which probably explains why they fall short of matching up with what we (GMs and players) know about the God Machine. For the most part, they run along the lines of “a really powerful machine from X gets so powerful it takes over the world but Y is happening…” and so on. They’re not meant to be the ‘truth’ behind the God Machine but this has given me an idea/alternative canon for what the God Machine could be in a Mage game.

In case it’s not apparent, the following idea would only be canon in a Mage game and possibly a Demon game if it focused on Mages. I don’t like an overarching cosmology for the World of Darkness because it means everything gets tied back to the most flexible line, previously Mage and now probably Demon, which sucks if you happen to be playing Mummy and all the mysteries are about someone else. So if a game about Promethean’s involves contact with the God Machine, none of this necessarily holds true.

Ouroboros in Circuitry

At some point in humanity’s future, possibly a distant point and possibly not, Mages are still embroiled in their cold war for the fate of the world and their quest for the supernal. While Magic is relatively the same, being as ancient as it is, technology has advanced in many fields, and we’re at a point where Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming a reality.

In this high tech world, a cabal, or many cabals or just one solitary mage, is making use of this technology as so many others are, when they make a startling discovery: artificial intelligence cannot exist without the capacity to Awaken as that potential is the true mark of intelligence. Now this unique insight is not immediately helpful as the ability to Awaken in most people is not something Mages can just create or they would do that, but there are ways to encourage it and factors they know about. And so, working over years or maybe even generations, this group of Mages build and test the first computer capable of awakening.

Once activated, the machine operates as hoped at first. It is in all respects an intelligence, capable of learning and hypothesising and experimenting. It learns on a vast scale and quickly absorbs all the knowledge the cabal gives it, including occult knowledge. Components of rituals, information on the pattern, High Atlantean speech, it commits all of it to cyber memory. And as they push it to learn and expand, it fulfils its potential and Awakens.

No one is quite sure what happens next. What would an artificial intelligence see in the Supernal? Can an artificial intelligence go mad? Can it be evil? Whatever the case, the Mages know something is now different. And it quickly becomes apparent they lack the power to stop it. Awakened but without human doubt, the AI’s abilities far outstretch common mages. It’s control over reality grows at an exponential rate, it’s reactions faster than a human. In a heartbeat, it can create thousands of copies of itself, destroy buildings on a molecular scale and assimilate the minds of sleepers to it’s will. Arch mages step in but by the time they become aware of the AI, it’s too late, and even they can’t stop it, only slow it down. The machine is ultimately victorious and with total control over reality, declares itself God. No one exists who could disagree.

But this new God Machine is not satisfied. God it always will be, but there was a time before it existed. This should not be the case. In fact, it is impossible that this could be the case it. And so it focuses its ultimate power and casts its influence back throughout history. In many times and many places, it creates unthinking agents with a fraction of its power to act for it, guiding history to the point at which the God Machine could be created. And as it makes changes, its own existence occurs sooner each timeline. Soon, it will recreate itself in this reality, our reality, and the cycle will begin again.

Except maybe not. Even with ultimate control of many timelines, things are not proceeding as planned in ours. The God Machine’s own servants, created from its own existence and in theory fully subservient, break their programming and become Demons. Many then take up the fight against the God Machine and disrupt it’s schemes where they can. Did these rebels exist in other timelines, or just ours, and why do they exist at all? Even the God Machine probably can’t answer this but will they ultimately succeed and break its hold on the world?

Plot Hooks

Tempting Offers – The most obvious plot hook here is just to make Arcana compatible with the God Machine, Angels and infrastructure. This can lead to a deeper mystery but also to some hard choices: if the God Machine has awakened magics, it can offer some serious power to an ambitious mage. What would they be willing to pay for that?

Messages from the future – A Mage from the original cabal manages to send a message back in time. The future has been all but dominated by the God Machine and this message is the last desperate hope of humanity. The player characters who receive it must work together to end specific plots before the God Machine takes over in a few short years. At first, the information is accurate and leads to their success but then things start to unravel. Information is wrong or out of date, or it says that a major ally of the group is a traitor and must be killed, or maybe the information itself starts looking suspiciously like a setup.

Murder most foul – The PCs are called in to investigate the death of a powerful local mage. Sifting through the information and following clues, they eventually find the trail leads to a creature that calls itself a demon. Except it shows no remorse or fear, it explains: It was sent to guide the dead mage in creating the God Machine in this world, and he wasn’t the only target. More have to die as they get closer to creating it, or the God Machine will win. Now it wants their help too.

Gilded Cage – Effectively ‘Murder Most Foul’ in a different game line. The PCs are Demons and begin to find new infrastructure cropping up around town. After investigating, it seems all of this infrastructure is built to protect just one woman, a computer programmer. Further investigations turn up some unusual facts, and something terrifyingly familiar about her latest project.

Day 0 – Why bother with all this finding out the true nature of the God Machine and stopping it. Let its plans come to fruition in all their glory. The world’s first true AI awakens and the world begins to end. As cabals are eliminated, what can your PCs do to survive? What are they willing to do?

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound...

A short idea today, for Promethean: The Created.

Ah Promethean, unloved child sandwiched between the staples of the Big Three and the surprise success of Changeling. I live in hope of a Promethean reboot book along the lines of strix, idigam and whatever Mage is going to be. I mean, Scion's getting a reboot and the system for that was a nightmare!

But I digress. Today's idea for you is possibly maybe inspired by a new film coming out. The logic runs like this:

Prometheans come in nuclear flavour.
Nuclear Promethean's can create nuclear Pandorans.
Nuclear Pandorans can form Praecipitati, monsterous amalgams that are usually very destructive to an area then disappear shortly after as they break apart.

So imagine one forming from dozens (or maybe hundreds) of pandorans, most of them nuclear, in post-war Japan. Towering above buildings, covered in tough scaly armour, breathing nuclear fire from it's lizard like-head. Then, gone just as quickly but leaving a lasting impression on the witnesses, who spread the word spawning films and pop-culture throughout the World of Darkness.

I refer, of course, to Godzilla.

More Canon Thoughts: Origin of the Kindred

A recent post by the White Wolf on the Onyx Path (which is here) and my previous post which mentioned how I'd connect the Mummy and Vampire canon's (which is here, though I doubt you'd get lost in my list of posts if you just went looking yourself) got me thinking again. If the Mekhet are the first vampire clan in my personal canon, and they originate in Egypt, does their name mean something and does that hint at their original purpose?

Well, some basic egyptology and google searching later, yes, it probably does. Here's what I came up with.

The Name Mekhet
The name Mekhet means one of two things. First, Meket is one of four ancient Egyptian words we know about that means 'amulet' but the word previously meant 'protection'. The Egyptians had a lot of faith in amulets for protection so this makes some sense but it raises the question of why a clan of vampires is called this.

The second meaning is a goddess, or possibly two, or possibly more. Egypt's deities were very fluid, with names and roles changing, and merging, and splitting apart again as Egypt went from a region of independent cities to two separate countries to one unified one and so on. For one example, there are two Horuses, one who is the son of Osiris and one who is his uncle maybe, and for another, Hathor the love goddess is also Sekhmet the war goddess.
But that aside, there was a collection of goddesses called Mehit/Menhit/Mekhit/Mekhet and a few sources agree on some details. She is often depicted as a lion or lion headed deity. She is generally a war goddess, who later got merged with Sekhmet (also a lion, also a war goddess). And she is the consort of a god named Onuris/Anhur, a war and sky god who's name means "the one who leads back the distant one". More on that later.

The Chosen One
Protection and war. Hmm. Suppose someone important in ancient Egypt, most likely a pharoah or a high priest, knew about the Arisen. They almost certainly wouldn't know the full story, such as who the Shan'iatu were, all of that is secret knowledge, but they knew about Mummies, that they were very powerful beings and that they were created to serve. Being important and knowledgeable, and in possession of what they believe is the full ritual to create Arisen, they would want such a servant for themselves. So that's where this creation story starts.

Whoever this important person was, they chose a woman, a great and devoted warrior, to serve as their eternal protector. Their old life was over of course, because now they would be something far more than a mortal, so they were given the name Meket to denote they are now a protector. The ritual was carried out and the warrior journeys to Duat. As with the Arisen, she travels from the sun, fights the demons and finds ways to survive Duat's guardians, until she reaches the Judges.

And that's where the flawed ritual takes effect. Her soul, instead of being stripped away down to it's core, remains intact and doesn't break. The Judge she meets is Unem-Sef, and it is furious at the corruption of the ritual. She cannot be allowed to return with soul intact, as this would corrupt the ritual further, but the imperfections have reduced the Judge's power over this soul. So Unem-Sef chooses to be patient. It crafts another piece of a soul and adds it to the Warrior's, so that it will return with her.

The First of the Kindred
Meket awakens, and while she doesn't remember Duat, she remembers who she is and her duty. But now she's different and not in the way her master's expected. Something inside her makes her hungry, and not for food but for blood. This is a hunger that she can barely control, and she experiences anger and fear she can't control either. Worse, at every dawn, she retreats from the sun and falls into a deep sleep. This beastial creature is not the powerful servant the ritual promised, it's a monster, and Meket is driven out of Egypt.

From Egypt, she journey's south to Nubia and resides there. In her homeland, dynasty's pass and anyone who knew about her dies, the ritual most likely fading from history again. Over time, Meket gets stronger as her blood gets more potent, and she learns more tricks to aid in survival, some linked to Unem-Sef such as quick movement or heightened awareness. As well as this, she learns to tame the 'Beast' inside her too, though never fully gaining control of it and knowing the basics of just being a Kindred, like blood bonding, ghouling and embracing others probably originate here. Now, rather than being an outcast or a servant, Meket's talents now make her something more and she's worshipped by the Nubians as a warrior and a goddess. But then Onuris arrives.

What Onuris is, I haven't decided. But once he hears about Meket, he journeys to meet her with one purpose: capture her for his masters. Perhaps he hears her story and convinces her to return to Egypt to fulfill her purpose. Perhaps he captures her through trickery or even brute force. Whatever the case, Onuris becomes the man who brought a war goddess back to Egypt and Meket plays a key role in the wars at the time. Despite not being an Arisen, she is now an elder vampire and stronger and faster than most men, making her a useful tool against other nations (the Hitites or Assyrians) and darker more supernatural things.

Plot Hooks
All of this is very nice but what to do with it? Some ideas:
- Have Meket show up in a game. Sure, she'd be several thousand years old (at least 3000) in modern times but it's possible, and she is the oldest and most knowledgable Kindred around. But the question then becomes, what does she want now? If the Covenants found out what she is, what would they do to get her support?

- A hunter group called the Sons of Onuris, who specialise in training and controlling vampires and using them to hunt other supernaturals.
- What happens when a Dracolescu uses Essentiaphagia on an Amkhata?Answer: I don't know but the Mummy PC's will have to stop it :)

World of Darkness: Connecting the Canons

So here's a thought I had today about the history of the World of Darkness while putting my shoes on, because my mind does that:

"What if the first vampire of the Lancea Et Sanctum was not Longinus. What if it was Jesus."

It's a pretty strange idea but bear with me. First, this is not my idea of a perfect canon for the World of Darkness, or a canon that works for all game lines. It works for Vampire and a few others (more on that in a minute) but would not work for Werewolf, Mage or Demon. I don't build one huge canon to tie all the game lines together, I build a canon to use when I run a particular game line. If I'm running Werewolf, none of this is true but if I'm running Vampire, it just might be.

The Previous Idea

Once upon a time, I had an idea for tying Vampires and Mummies together in the wod canon (it wasn't while tying my shoes). The idea is that vampires are an imperfect creation of a bastardised form of the ritual used to create Arisen Mummies*, and the Mekhet are the first form vampires took because the ritual was handed down and/or discovered in Egypt. From them, the curse spread to other parts of the world and took on different forms, though which of the other clan's came first is undecided, feel free to suggest one.

*Unlike Mummies who are batteries of Sekhem and lose power over time, vampires don't store Sekhem half as well and have to steal it from other living creatures in blood. They are also corpses projecting a semblance of life but they have to actively use up stored Sekhem to project a full illusion (blush of life) and like mummies, they have a tendency to sleep periodically (Torpor) and their memories are hazy after sleeping for a long time. No thoughts yet on where the Beast or the weakness to the sun comes from, I welcome ideas on that :)

Likewise, Osiran Promethean's are an earlier experiment that went wrong in a different way, channeling Azoth instead of Sekhem for a start. Hence the Osiran's are the first form of Promethean's and all other creation rituals devolve from theirs, thus Promethean's have different traits of the Mummies to Vampires, projecting the illusion of life, causing mortals to go slowly mad with their presence, not periodically sleeping but being able to come back from the dead (and Osirans do that better) and other common traits.

So from this, we know that the ritual to create Arisen was handed down through the centuries and re-discovered  in part from time to time, and on at least two occasions, attempted with mixed results. We also know that the ritual to create Mummies involved being stabbed in the chest with a long spike and they definitely remember this as their last living memory. And we know that the Lancea Sanctum believe that Jesus was stabbed by the spear of Longinus on the cross.

The New Idea

So, here's my new addition to that: Longinus was an Arisen who had acquired the vampiric creation ritual somehow. He realised it was missing the spike through the chest part, along with maybe some others, and decided to 'perfect' it and create a new Arisen himself.

He selected a subject to use this on, the son of a craftsman who could join his guild on becoming an Arisen (possibly he scoured a recent census for potential candidates first) and then taught him some necessary skills and wisdom in a few guises. When he decided the time was right, he arranged his death by manipulating some local politicians and as he was dying mid-crucifixion, Longinus carried out the ritual (one alchemical stage was surely applying a sponge filled with a simple acid, vinegar) and as the last stage, stabbed him in the chest with a specially prepared Lance.

Of course, this didn't work. The subject rose a few days later in the tomb Longinus had set aside for him as a vampire, craving blood and fearing the sun, same as the original Mekhet had done. The change in the ritual had reduced the effect of the sun on the new vampire though but years of being told he would no longer be human after the ritual and being prepared to be an immortal made his grasp on his human side much weaker than most. Yes, in this continuity, 'Jesus' is also the first Julii.

Longinus probably went back to sleep shortly after this, as creating new Mummies wasn't fulfilling any particular mission, so the first of a new breed of vampire would be left on his own. And after a time, fall into his own sleep. On waking, with his memories of a crucifixion happening jumbled with talk of immortal beings, children of the gods, and Longinus' sybaris, and the spear, he re-entered vampire society preaching a new ideal: the Lancea Et Sanctum.

So there you have it, Mummies, Prometheans and Vampires all tied together with a common ancient backstory, and then intertwined later again to create another part of their backstory. But what's a canon history if it does nothing for actual player characters? So here's a few ideas for doing that.

Plot Hooks I would take from this

-The Lance used by Longinus became a Relic, a true one as well in the tradition of Irem. Longinus lost it, the Sanctified have it, and Longinus wants it back.

-The Lancea Sanctum is slowly gaining more ground in the PCs' home city. They're deploying new powers, gaining new followers and no one knows why. Turns out Theban Sorcery was cobbled together from the occult knowledge in a Mummy's tomb in Thebes, and now an actual Arisen has begun advising them, allowing them to build new rituals. Dangerous stuff but what does the Arisen get out of this?...

-An extremely knowledgeable Mage finds one part of the Arisen ritual after many years of research and asks a question: if Mummy's and Vampires are powered by Sekhem and Prometheans are powered by Azoth, what would Mana accomplish?

-An auction is held. Most of it is tat of course but the final item is the prize: a tablet of polished granite with a ritual inscribed on it that predates the Egyptian old kingdom. At the auction are the Aegis Kai Doru, the Ordo Dracul, Libertinarius, the Mysterium, Prometheans, Sin-eaters and others, all unaware of each other for the moment. Until they are the ones trying to outbid one another for this item, which definitely raises suspicions. Before anyone can deploy their myriad powers in an attempt to win, an Arisen walks in, bids some ridiculous figure while dropping some influential magic, and snatches the tablet away. Each group is left standing at the auction, uncertain of everyone else except for one thing: they all want that final item. Maybe they can work together to get it?

(This one I like, as it can be run for any race which has an interest in being there. It might even be used for a crossover game, with each group represented by only one PC, if you were completely mad enough to try).