[Mortal Coil]Black Pegacorn
sirogit:
Ron: You know unicorns? And you know Pegasuses? Now imagine if a unicorn had wings but it was pitch black. That was pretty much the extent of the discussion, but it set the aesthetic mood (Exaggerated and 'dark', but we're not taking ourselves -too- seriously.)
I don't see the difficulty with establishing the idea ("Fact: Faries can make bargains with abstract concepts, Price: The concept demands service to itself. Fact: Johnny has a deal with Music so that he can serenade chicks hardcore. Price: He always must spend more attention to his guitar than his romantic partners") But sometimes I can underestimate these things.
We choose to take a mini-session without Chris to add a new player and have two tiny scenes (very much high-adversity and low-thematic content, you called it.) that mostly served to demo the conflict resolution system.
Madheretic:
This is Chris, here to report on the second session of our Mortal Coil game.
The new player who came in on the session I was absent from is my good friend Jacob. Jacob is new to role-playing and I have been trying to get him into a game for a year or so. Jacob is playing Mr. Book, an as of yet unmagical Lector-esque serial killer who lives in the same building as the rest of the characters. There has been some talk of him being one of those exceptional non-changeling people capable of perceiving and interacting with the fae and other magical beings, but it hasn't come up in play yet. Diane was absent from this session, but everyone else was there.
The game was picked up from where they left off last session with Morgan having charmed some poor passerby into thinking she was his daughter, causing him to both abandon his own daughter and offer her some gifts, including a pocket watch that had been determined to be somehow magical (Me, when I found out: "Oh! You are so grounded! No magic for a week!"). The matter was brought to Maj. Barnaby's attention when the man made a huge scene outside Morgan's window begging her to come home.
Mr. Book took the opportunity of the daughter (Lisa) being abandoned to offer her a ride home, with the explicit intention of, well, executing his character concept. I had Barnaby catch wind of the disappearance, and spent the remainder of the session tracking them down. I dragged Richard into it for back-up. In the meantime Morgan took the pocket watch to a fortune-telling NPC we'd established during the first session with hopes of deciphering its magical nature.
We switched back and forth through the scenes as Mr. Book poised to finish his deed, Barnaby and Richard raced after him, and Morgan was deprived of the watch on the grounds of it being too powerful for a little girl. After a couple scenes passed, Jacob narrated Mr. Book finally murdering Lisa. I objected to this, and opted to spend a power token to introduce an event to delay the execution until Barnaby and Richard could arrive. Sean offered to resolve the situation instead by having Lisa be revived after being killed by the power of the pocket watch (which, as you might recall, belonged to her father and is presumably bound to her in some way). The price for the magical fact that enabled this caused Lisa's memory to be erased, leaving Mr. Book off the hook for now.
All in all this was a very fast session with very little downtime or extraneous exposition. I went through about half of my magic tokens establishing facts both to overcome obstacles in my pursuit and to establish a more ubiquitous magical presence in the game. Significant among these facts are that changelings have special powers relating to the role they played as servants to the fae (Barnaby was a guardian, and is physically invulnerable, Richard was a hunter and has enhanced perceptions) and that there are little pagan spirit things everywhere that changelings are able to perceive and bargain with. I like to imagine them as muppets with a quirky awareness of the modern world; think a combination of Labyrinth and Neverwhere.
Overall I feel Mortal Coil serves our game very well and I am excited about continuing to explore the system. Its release is a great excuse to never play a WoD game again, one that I hope sees plenty of use. I suspect that Sorcerer might have made an even better fit, especially considering how a lot of the prices we have involving attracting the attention of the fae or being drawn out of reality into the fairy's world would work well as humanity loss events.
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