My Gaming Sessions This Past Weekend
First game: Shadowrun
Feldspar got the call while he was out for his evening walk, looking for any shiny rocks he might like to add to his collection, a very dwarven hobby if he might say so himself. On the other end was the physicist of a group he’d joined once before for a job, and he had a problem.
“Hey,” he said, “there’s an earth elemental carrying away a couple of our associates. Can you help us out?”
“Where are you?” Feldspar responded quickly.
“Traveling away from my home, towards the woods.” He gave Feldspar the coordinates through their communicators.
Feldspar began running toward the nearby woods, hoping to meet up with everyone there. He got another call soon after.
“I’ve lost it,” the physicist told him. “He was way too fast, and I crashed the motorcycle I was on in the woods.”
“Stay where you are, and I’ll find you. I have an idea,” Feldspar responded.
Soon after, Feldspar arrived at the crash site.
“I need you to stand guard over my body,” he told the physicist. “If anything dangerous comes this way, just give me a good solid punch. That should wake me up.”
Feldspar’s body then went limp as he separated his astral body from his physical. After looking around quickly, he found the shining trail left by spirits in the astral plane. Following the elemental, he found himself soon at the professor’s home, where the chase had started according to what he’d been told by the professor. The elemental stopped here, and Feldspar took a minute to size this one up. He’d recently saved a friend of his by banishing a fairly powerful water elemental, and figured he could do the same with this one. However, this earth elemental, upon closer examination, was at least twice as powerful as the water elemental he’d banished before. That wasn’t going to work this time. So he looked around a bit more, and found the presence of a wizard on the property. Perhaps this wizard was controlling the elemental. It was his only shot, so he zipped across the yard to cut the wizard off from reaching the elemental.
The wizard, coming around the corner of the house, was quite shocked to see Feldspar, and it was a simple matter for the dwarf to get the jump on him and blast him with raw magical power. The wizard quickly shifted into the astral plane to better deal with this upstart, and called his elemental over to help out as well. The elemental dropped his prisoners and shambled over. He then proceeded to level slow but very solid blows on our intrepid dwarf hero, who, with aid from his magic, shrugged off the brunt of them, but still found himself quite injured. The wizard’s blasts were nothing to him though, however, his control of the elemental was a big problem.
Feldspar knew he couldn’t take on the elemental, and that left him with one chance. He must take out the wizard quickly. Calling upon all his reserves, he let loose with a blast of magical force on the wizard’s unresponsive body. Not only did this cripple the wizard, it also dragged the wizard’s astral body back into his physical body, forcing him back into the normal time stream where his actions would be slower compared to those of Feldspar and the elemental, still operating on the Astral Plane. The wizard still lay there, crippled but alive. The elemental, still under the power of the wizard, landed another solid blow on Feldspar, and the dwarf knew that one more hit could well spell his end.
He leaped aside as the elemental attacked with his powerful stone fists again, and extended his arms toward the wizard. Calling upon his reserves one last time, he blasted the wizard into oblivion just as the elemental landed his last strike upon him. Feldspar fell to the ground, bleeding, and died alongside the wizard he had just taken down.
Obviously, other things happened this session as well, but this was the part I was involved in, as the player of Feldspar, and I thought it went very well. For those who want to know how everything else turned out, the elemental stopped doing anything once the wizard was taken down, and then the physics professor went and picked up his injured and dying comrades that the elemental had captured and found someone to provide medical treatment so they could survive.
Also, I actually had the option to not die when I did. Our storyteller uses a house rule that lets you burn all of your edge (set your permanent edge score to zero until you buy it back up with karma) in order to barely survive once per character. I decided not to do this for a couple reasons. First, the end of the battle was simply awesome, and made for a very good heroic death scenario. The second is simply that I’ve only played a couple of sessions with that particular character, since I can’t make that game on a reliable basis, so it wasn’t a huge loss to lose the character, and coupled with the awesome heroic death, the decision was pretty easy to make.
Second Game: World of Darkness Mortals
Eric was still getting used to his new identity as Roger Hertzweil. After exposing plans of a new military weapon, a giant railgun mounted on a satellite that could be used to level a city if deemed necessary, he was forced into hiding by the company looking to produce the weapon. He abandoned his old web business of reporting political news, and using his new identity, set up a new business involving computer hardware in Seattle, a good couple of states away from California, his last known residence.
There was a small problem though. His computer had been infected by a very cleverly designed virus. It could change itself rapidly enough that standard removal procedures wouldn’t work, and even if the virus were removed, it would just slip right back in through any firewalls that were put up. Clearly, this would require a custom solution, so, after failing to remove the virus a couple times, he unplugged his computer from the internet, reformatted, and began coding a complex program that might be able to deal with the virus. His intent was to get this custom virus removal tool to local authorities first, so all emergency personnel could have their systems protected, then continue distributing it through the internet after.
After working on this program for the evening, he took a break for some dinner and headed to bed, figuring he could finish the program in the morning. He was wrong.
The next morning, he awoke to the sound of his apartment windows shattering. Looking out the shattered window, he saw a crater where Seattle used to be, and was suddenly very happy he was poor enough to need to live in the suburbs rather than in the city proper. Naturally, there was no electricity or any sort of communication infrastructure after the blast. At first, he snatched his laptop and ran to the basement with the other apartment tenants. Thinking about it for a minute, he decided he needed to figure out what was going on. So, he would get in contact with Jeff, his old news contact for technology related issues. He put on his snow chains to prepare for needing to drive off road as best he could, then hopped in his car and started driving. At first, the going was slow, but once he got to back roads, it picked up quite quickly.
He made a couple of stops on the way. First, the first supermarket he saw that wasn’t completely swarmed with looters to grab whatever canned foods he could fit in two baskets, boxed foods that he could still cook over a fire, and some of the very little fresh fruit and vegetables that were left in the store. Next, a gas station, where he rigged a way to syphon gas from the pumps without electricity in order to fill up his gas tank, as well as an empty gas can he found at the station.
As he drove, he made plans to pick up some car batteries as a source of electricity he could rewire later, chemicals he could use to recharge the batteries for awhile, and computers he could use to set up a cluster that might be able to start a local internet with the help of Jeff when he made it back to Los Angeles. This last was his hope to get communications networks reestablished using the wireless networking capabilities of any laptops he picked up, first at a local level, and then as word spread, he hoped other people would take his idea and run with it so national communications could be picked up again.
While driving, he would occasionally feel strong vibrations that almost felt like minor earthquakes, and would pick up speed until the vibrations calmed down or went away completely. The fourth time he felt them, he found the cause: odd looking ships the size of commercial jetliners flying overhead. At that point, figuring they could have been the source of the attacks, he shut off anything he had, like his cell phone, that might put out a signal they could use to find him, with the exception of his car, since he needed it to get where he was going. He continued his drive with a renewed urgency, hoping he could make it to L.A. in time to find out why his world was suddenly going mad.
The session ended here, and we actually haven’t decided if this campaign will continue next year once everyone gets back from their college breaks or not. Hopefully it will at least long enough for a conclusion, though if it doesn’t you can bet I’ll be asking the storyteller what plot he had planned for the rest of the campaign.
And that covers my characters’ stories in my gaming sessions this past weekend.
