When Pigs Fly

If I ever play an oWoD game where there is a Grondr character, I will have to insist that the character learns the Gift: Spirit of the Bird.

Just sayin’.

Favorites, 40K Edition

In the GrimDarkness of the far future, there is only war, or so we are told. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is populated with a considerable array of different options for players, and probably half of those options consist of different paint jobs for these guys:

At least that's what Games Workshop wants you to think of them.

As nifty as the Marines are, I consider them overhyped, oversaturated and frankly much less interesting than one specific other faction. Let’s think about the various factions that exist in WH40K and see a little bit of why.

Awakening: The Battle of Cinder Cone

This sequence is a cutscene related to chapters 2-3 of The Enemy of My Enemy, the second story of the Awakening Chronicle.

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Joseph Chases-the-Dream rejoined his pack after consulting with the mixed task force of mages, Garou and Kinfolk that had volunteered to strike at the witches beneath Cinder Cone and found his pack alpha Mingan Leaps-Like-cougar, the Wyrmfoe of the Sept of the Boiling Earth, addressing the several gathered packs. Joseph noted that a ways off from the group stood a tall, ragged bespectacled white man with close-cropped hair: Marcus Falcon’s-Resolve, who had been Ostracized. The other Garou present were ignoring his existence, neither welcoming nor forbidding him: he did not exist in their eyes, and Joseph blinded himself to the disgraced Silver Fang as well.

Mingan spoke: “We of the Warpath shall be the head of the arrow aimed at their hearts. Spear Dancers, follow immediately behind us, and the rearguard shall be the Black Wings,” Leaps instructed them as he reviewed the plan of attack. He gave each pack their assignments of which portions of Cinder Cone’s peak each was to sweep clear.

“The Wyrmbringers have numbers. They have high ground, and distance, and they are armed with silver ammunition,” Leaps stated gravely, “We must advance up a steep slope to fight them, and we have no cover other than what we ourselves can create.

Awakening: Calling Down the Rain

This is a side scene detailing some of the off-camera action from the Awakening Chronicle. It is concurrent with chapters 2-3 of The Enemy of My Enemy.

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Bill and Marco watched through the window as Solomon Wright bani Bonisagus performed a ritual that instantly transported the cabal of outsider mages and consors across many miles’ distance to the northeastern portion of Lassen National Park, and once the wave of magical force passed they looked to one another dubiously. Marco was a dark, heavily tattooed young man of mixed Hispanic and Native American ancestry with spiked hair, a ripped t-shirt and jeans that might have come out of an aerosol can. Bill was close to the same age but considerably taller, and was a lanky but reasonably fit man wearing rugged work pants and a cabled turtleneck sweater. His long brown hair was swept behind his ear for the moment but it was prone to falling free and obscuring parts of his face.

Marco was the first to break the seemingly endless silence, “Doesn’t feel right letting that bunch of strangers go off and fight our battles while we’re just staring at the walls, man.”

I Am A Dork: Legend of the Archons Edition

A number of years ago, while working on Legend of the Archons, my FATE variant, I came up with a character who was supposed to appear in the setting, but I missed some very amusing correlations between him and a certain pop culture figure until very recently. It was pointed out to me when I was explaining him to Alesia, with whom I am working on the LoA story Agents of Change. She took one listen to my description of him and immediately spotted it, and even assumed that it was deliberate… I had to admit to her that it had not been, even though it’s so blindingly obvious. Yeah, I completely deserved the teasing that she gave me over it.

I needed a character who would be a master artificer, weaponsmith and armorer, cunning in clockwork and the crafting of sundry engines of destruction. He was to be physically strong and imposing, and both renowned and fairly wealthy due to his mastery.

He needed to have been taken captive by one of the story’s major antagonists and put to work making those lovely death dealing devices at his captor’s bidding, including a special suit of armor. The idea lay fallow for years because LoA got put on the backburner. Then Alesia and I revived the LoA idea and started working on a collaborative writing project on the subject and I took him out of mothballs.

Not long before I had the discussion with Alesia, I made a cheesy little avatar of him, below:

With all of the above in mind, I needed to name him. Since he’s resident in the Dachs region, which is analogous to the highly fragmented western portion of the Holy Roman Empire during the Renaissance, I wanted him to have a solid, strong sounding Germanic name. “Stark” is a German word for “strong,” so I named him Heinrich Stark.

You can stop laughing at me now.

Yeah, he looks like RD Jr. Yeah, he is in a cave with a box of scraps making weapons of mass destruction. No, I didn’t for a moment think of Iron Man when I made him up.

That said… if you’re going to do a thing, you might as well embrace it. As far as I am concerned, I am now under a moral imperative to have Tony Heinrich build himself a suit of clockwork power armor. Yeah baby, it’s going to be awesome.

Return of the Expanded Powers & Taints

This is yet another in my rather extensive series of expanded powers & taints for possessed characters in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. This time, I have converted a number of the Kami powers found in the first edition Werewolf Storyteller’s Handbook. Now that this series has come to this point, I am also in process of compiling all of my expanded powers & taints to a single document, which I will make available at this blog. Watch this space.

Awakening: Those Left Behind

(This post focuses on what’s happening to some of the various NPCs in the Awakening chronicle in the time around the end of The Enemy of My Enemy, Chapter I)

It had been a bit of a strange day for Joseph Chases-the-Dream, all told.

After putting together a Litany Q&A for Amrita and having to call that to a premature conclusion, he had been left alone with Linda, the attractive yet mousy Kin woman that had recently been adopted into the tribe even though she was a creepy white girl formerly associated with the Black Spiral Dancers.

Expanded Powers & Taints Strike Back: Charms II

Here’s the second in my series of taking existing Spirit Charms and turning them into Power for Possessed characters. This time I’m taking on a couple of the big, big Powers like Break Reality, Gateway and Warp Reality. I’ve added thsoe Spirit Charms from the Book of the Wyrm, 2nd edition and Umbra Revised that i felt were suitable for conversion, and I’m adding notes on using a couple more of the Charms found in the BotW2 but that may not really merit their own Power writeups.

Alternate Kami Powers Advancement

Here is a tweak to the system by which Kami can advance and gain Powers or improve the Powers that they already possess. I will use these rules for my Awakening chronicle. Note that they have not been thoroughly playtested, and I may tweak the multipliers up a bit if I decide that this is a bit too cheap.

Normally, All Kami are required to pay for all but their first five points of Powers with Taints (and their first five points are covered by their one default Geasa). Unlike Gorgons, Fomori and Drones, they lack any other means to pay for their Powers because they do not have the Autonomy characteristic. This tends to leave Kami weaker in both the long and short run than Fomori or Gorgons, because taking large numbers of Taints is crippling.

Awakening: You’re Family Now

This is a side scene/blue book focusing on one miss Linda Lee, who until a few minutes before this scene was Kinfolk to the Black Spiral Dancers, but now has renounced them and been adopted into the Uktena.

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Linda huddled in the ritual robe that Mapiya Sacred Hoop had been kind enough to drape over her thin, freezing shoulders and the moccasins that had been provided for her feet once the Rite of Adoption was completed. Sunset on a mountainside in springtime was no time to be standing around with nothing but some body paint between oneself and the elements. She took a few moments as the Garou cleaned up after their rite to rescue her abandoned overcoat and slip that across her shoulders like a cloak for a bit of extra warmth.