Alice Maybe

Alice is a young high school student who really is more talented than anyone gives her credit for. The talent is hidden underneath angsty teenage werewolf anger. She is the newest change in my new Werewolf: The Forsaken campaign. I wanted to introduce them to a Cahalith since all the players do not know what it is a Cahalith does exactly. So this post is just a small tidbit into the life of the NPC with the unfortunate name Alice Maybe.

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The teacher was droning on but Alice couldn't care less, her attention was on the texting between a group a few rows away from her. Her former friend Ashley was in that group of smirking texters and eventually a look would be thrown her direction with more smiling and tick tacking for fingers hitting the touch screens with long perfectly manicured fingernails. Alice held out her thin fingers, her nails weren't perfect but they weren't pretty like their nails were. Alice went more with the fierce black that stood boldly against her pale skin.

*Alice* There was a whisper, it wasn't human. Was that a weird thing to think? She looked over to the window beside her. Her reflection looked back at her but something else, something within the reflection. Was it Portia or something sinister? Portia was the ghost of a young woman who was trapped in the high school, like Alice. Unlike Alice, Portia was at least a hundred years old at this point and still stuck within these walls. That wasn't true, she's left before, Alice had let Portia possess her before, for research they both had decided.

Portia had the ability was much too sweet of a person to take them unwillingly, Alice had come to learn. Now it was much too dangerous to let Portia possess her as often as she had let her. She was something else now, she wasn't human. She had been assured it was a blessing from the moon goddess... no, mother.... Luna.

*Alice* she heard again, the voice gave her chills. Was this one of her dreams. She looked up to the sky, clearly day with no sign of the moon. This couldn't be another message from Luna. *Look at me!* the voice growled menacingly. Alice looked around the room, nobody else heard it. Was she going crazy? Had she already gone nuts and and am imagining all of this as she sits in a padded room somewhere? She did it on instinct, wasn't even aware that she knew how to do it but looked across. There was a flash of the spirit world but she couldn't see much. There was a menacing face taking up her entire view. She swallowed back a scream as the image disappeared. Laughter filled her ears as she was visibly shaken. That laughter was something she couldn't find the words to describe.

"Alice?" a different voice asked and she shivered, slowly turning her head in the direction of the voice. It was the teacher, the lecture had paused. "Are you alright? Do you need to go to the nurse?" he asked.

"Y-Yes," she said stumbling over her backpack as she got out of her desk. There was a chorus of laughter from the group of girls who tormented her. She felt a sort of relief with that laughter. That was normal. Then the unnatural laughing started again as she snatched up her bag and tried to calmly walk out of the room. When she cleared the room she bolted down the hall. She could go to Morrigan... or, what about those werewolves that helped her change? They helped her with that, the Ian guy was trying to help her with her dreams, what about this Spirit problem?

Long Time No See

So it's been awhile since I've updated this. November was the last time I posted anything. The last several months have been a whirlwind adventure of job searching, role-playing, family time, crafting, and organizing.

I was a part of a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire campaign that finished last week and in that game I got to alternate weeks playing 2 different characters (1 per week) in the same universe and working for the same employer. It was a blast, but that's not to say that there were some hiccups. There were a few people who seemed to have taken player knowledge and used it as character knowledge which caused a large enough issue that made somebody leave the game (or at least that is the reason I gathered he left). Overall though, I really enjoyed it. The GM is one who encourages role-playing as opposed to just stating what your character is doing and rolling the dice as was my experience with a few games at Armored Gopher Games. What was great was that the system really encourages role-playing in which the dice have triumphs, successes, advantages, despairs, failures, and disadvantages to gauge how an action gets accomplished. Depending on what you roll something could fail but if you get enough advantages, something good comes out of that failure. I also got to create Dia (pictured below) a Twi'lek Assassin who was trained by a slave master but was mysteriously freed and spent some time trying to change herself into a scholar. That is until she got herself arrested for protesting alien slaving and was freed and employed by Honest Cid who knew about her special skills. It was fun playing a Twi'lek who is not very typical even though by end game she had lost almost everyone she had come to love.

I have joined a few other games to take up the time that this game after ending, left open. So I will be giving 13th Age another try as well as a Star Wars: Age of Rebellion (I will be playing without the book until the finished copy comes out as the game is still in Beta, with the finished copy coming out some time this quarter). I have also joined a Shadowrun game which is a very complex game with a lot more strategy than I am used to, but based on my older character concepts, I have had some practice in. Basically I will be playing a B&E expert with a bit of a Catwoman fetish. She grew up in a Russian immigrant household and fell in love with the character Selena. So when she turned criminal and became a Shadowrunner she took the name Selena with her secret identities being named for actresses who had played the femme-fatale on screen.

I plan on keeping up with this blog again now that I am not in school, having graduated in December with an Associates. A Bachelors is to follow but not for a little bit at least.

Torn Up Character Sheet

I get really into the characters that I create and the longer I've played them the more I let myself sink into the story. This is a post about the Irraka from my World of Darkness: Forsaken pack, the one that was taken.

We went searching for him but not before I made those that work go to work since they had been neglecting to do so. Delilah went off to a meeting at a gallery who had been interested in her paintings. She was given a run around and left frustrated. Were they buying her paintings or were they just displaying them until they sold? When she got home she had no idea where to start, the two who did not work (Jayden and Mickey) were off looking for Cote and I didn't know where they were. Leila, her twin had arrived home at the same time after the courthouse had been closed due to a bomb threat (Mickey's anonymous phone call). That was when the howl was heard, it was a nervous excited howl that he had been found buy help was needed. I heard the answering howl of my beta, Jayden that he was on his way and I shifted into wolf form and sprinted in the direction of Mickey's howl with Leila following suite.

There was another howl for anyone to help and I answered this time, telling them that I was on my way. When we arrived Jayden was digging, avoiding swinging branches of a tree. He informed me that Cote was down in the hole with Mickey who was trying to pull him out. Leila and Jayden took to grabbing a large root and managed to pull it back. I shifted into near human form and started to help Mickey pull Cote out. It took awhile and we finally did. It was terrible what Dark Reaches did to him and I immediately jumped into tending the wounds. Mickey ran off to hunt rabbits for Cote to eat. As I tended to him I realized that if Cote was going to get out of this, he was going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life. Then I finally understood what he had been trying to say through his pain. "End it."

My heart sank, Delilah started crying, I started crying for real. Delilah said that there was no other choice and that I was going to do what Cote asked. She said that Mickey cannot be here when this happens to protect him. Jayden went off to stop him from coming back until Delilah said it was okay. Cote smiled at me, "Challenge." She couldn't bring herself to do it, she didn't have the will power to do this. Leila stepped up, she could bring herself to do it. "1 Rule," he said. "Rabbit is awesome," Delilah sobbed as he closed his eyes and relaxed so that it would be quick. The "rule" of the pack had been in place since Cote, who was going by the name of Rabbit then, saved Delilah's life two times in one night. Leila killed him, Delilah started hugging him and crying as Jayden and Mickey came back.

Mickey saw the blood on Leila's hands, saw Delilah broken down. He shifted into full form and destroyed the tree that had helped Dark Reaches hide Cote. We all carried him home and laid him to rest there. "Number 1 Rule," Delilah reminded the pack as she sprinkled dirt over the body.

When we had finished Mickey ran inside and started turning all the lights on as it had grown quite dark. Then we saw headlights pull up and two people get out. Jayden moved to stand between the grave and the car, Delilah walked towards the car. We knew they were werewolves too, we could sense it. "What are you doing here?" Delilah demanded. They didn't answer the question, instead the old man asked what we had been doing. Mickey came out with his rifle telling them to get off of this land. The old man stood up straight and became intimidating, Delilah ordered Mickey to stand down and he did as he was told. "Again, why are you on our land?" Delilah asked.

"What are you guilty about?" the old man asked and that sparked anger in Delilah.

"This is not a good time for you guys to be here," she stated, eyes narrowing.

"Why?"

"We lost a pack mate tonight," Jayden told them. The old man turned to Mickey and put his hands on his shoulders.

"You're going to get the one who did this and you're going to make him pay, that's what you're going to do," the old man told him. Then we noticed it got unnaturally dark, Dark Reaches was coming. We were not in any shape to be facing him. Cote's death probably fed him so he would probably be stronger.

"If you want to be safe you will get in the trailer," Mickey said before turning and walking away. We followed inside and they did as well. Night had come and we had reached the end of game time so we called it a night. There was the tearing of Cote's character sheet that night upon his death, the player tears up the sheets instead of keeps them. I however am the type of person to keep mine for sentimental value.

Delilah has proven to be quite the medic, this is the second time she has had to make rolls tending to another's wounds and has done phenomenally. I think the dice are trying to tell me something, maybe Delilah should start training to be an EMT... she has the smarts for it, she just needs to medicine to back it up.

Meet Horimono

So last night was game 2 of one of my friend's Marvel Heroic RPG. I spent the day before game putting the finishing touches on Horimono my super thief/super hero. (She's a bit of a klepto).

She is a shape-shifting mutant who found a horimono katana. She had to leave it behind, having almost been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She remembered the design, it was the reason she wanted the blade. She had it tattooed onto her person and then weird stuff started to happen. It didn't take her long to realize that it was dark magic, from the beautifully named oni (demon). The only thing she knew about it was the name and that it was a hannya, her Japanese background told her that much. She buried herself in books of the occult trying to find answers to who this hannya was and how she could increase these powers. "The more powerful you are the more stuff you can take, y'know?" Here's what she looks like:

The snow white hair doesn't make it easy to blend in to the shadows, but she is all about flash. She does things with style and she likes shiny things. (One of her distinctions is Ooo Shiny). While she is better at working alone, she loves the team play. She gets an audience and potential tools to get her what she wants, purely selfish reasons. This is a character that I did a complete 180 from my World of Darkness Werewolf, Delilah, so it's a little jarring. I haven't quite figured out the game system either so I'm hoping once I get that down I can submerge myself into the character. Hopefully I can start coming up with more creative things instead of listening to the other players. I do have to admit, I was more comfortable with my Hunter character which required a lot of detective work, but that could also be because the World of Darkness system is easier than Marvel Heroic RPG, which is more story-based. You define your powers then you have to explain how you do it. I'm not much of a combat thinker, I've learned that from playing Delilah.

I don't know, I felt like I was holding the rest of the team back with my uncertainty. I haven't heard any complaints but that could just be people being nice. I think some more work on Horimono needs to be done before I can jump into this character's personality by next game. Maybe some short stories are in order, that is highly likely now that classes are over and I can start using my free time for game prep and fun stuff.

Role-Play Games According to Caillous?

So I have been working on a paper for some time on table-top rpgs and it was suggested by the professor that I pick up and use Roger Caillous' "Man, Play, and Games." I am reading through it and I have reached a bit of a pickle.

Caillous divides games into 4 categories: Agon, Alea, Mimicry, and Ilinx and he goes on to explain what they mean.

Agon is always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality such as speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, and so on. This is exercised within defined limits and without outside assistance. There is a winner and a loser in which the winner is better than the loser (go figure). These types of games can be found in sports and board games such as checkers or chess, and can also be found in acts of courtly war such as a duel or tournament (yay jousting!). These presuppose sustained attention, appropriate training, assiduous application, and of course a desire to win.

Alea is a latin word for a game of dice. This is up to chance. This negates work, patience, experience, and qualifications. You either have total disgrace or absolute favor. Some games combine both agon and alea such as dominoes, backgammon, or cards.

Next is Mimicry in which you become an illusory character yourself. You make believe or make others believe that you are someone other than yourself. But then he goes on to say that this has hardly any relationship to alea and that a competitive mimicry is born in the public at a sporting even or such (agon).

Finally, is Ilinx, and it is based on the pursuit of vertigo and consists of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflicts a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. This can be found with rollercoasters and the like.

Now obviously ilinx has nothing to do with table-top role-playing games, but I believe that the other three do. You are pretending to be another person, a character of your own or someone's creation, it is agon in that you compete with others (a lot of the time non-player characters) using the skills of your character on your character sheet. The results of those actions are alea in that it is up to the rolling of dice.

There I think I've got that figured out for the paper, but I keep second guessing myself on this based on one thing Caillous said. "Mimicry has hardly any relationship to alea." Does mimicry play a part in the classification of role-playing games?

The book was first published in 1913, so there was no way that he could have known about role-playing games seeing as it wasn't until 61 years later that Dungeons and Dragons first came out. Lord of the Rings, arguably the inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons hadn't even been thought of, let alone the Hobbit. So it is dated, yet it is still highly regarded within the community of those who study games.

Many things have happened since 1913, many reprints of this book moving from publisher to publisher. While many things that I have read in this book hold true today, there is one small hiccup when it comes to role-playing games. It isn't the first time these games have been looked over by sociologists and anthropologists alike, most of the studies I have been able to find on the topic skip over the table and go straight for the computer. I have found many World of Warcraft studies, a few on role-playing games that I have had to adapt to work with my paper, and very few on the table games. I knew this paper was going to be a challenge, but I wasn't expecting it quite like this.