Eviction Notice

Oh well, it went a lot easier than expected!

The physical move to my new Fortress of Crunch has been successful. Not perfect, but successful.

I will pull the plug on this here blog-iteration soon. I would appreciate you saunter on to my new HQ.... just be careful not to bump in Ogre Laborers while visiting the place.

Thanks for reading, this move to swankier quarters would not have happened if it wasn't for the interest you guys have shown.

I will eventually redirect links to here to the new place.

Peace out...

P.S. I posted Sunday Night's post at the new place... you can find it here.

(ChattyDM sighs and closes the light...)

The (annotated) case reports of Agent James (Kevin) Smith: Introduction

Decrypted from a junk post on alt.conspiracy.inconnu on November 8, 2007. Author: woKened_up_S75.

It's so easy to steal copies of classified reports when you happen to be the one who wrote them... well at least, technically speaking I did.

I finally made the classes and am just one day shy of being a fully licensed Intrusion Detection Agency agent (IDA for all those Cold-War nostalgics ). Yup, I in now. I actually get a paycheck from the Department of Homeland security... How's that for irony?

Keeping a low profile has been hard. I'm surrounded by so many idiots who still refuse to see things as they truly are that I often think about shooting them as a service. They even hired some of THEM, the very ones we few Awakened were put on this good earth to fight!

Sometimes when I hear James being all polite and comprehensive with those other IDA dweebs, especially the non-human ones , I have to spend inhuman (HA!) efforts to stay hidden and bide my time! Still, I must stay calm and see what is their game in all this... Are they double agents working for the Inconnu? Or are they truly "people" with enough remaining humanity to honestly want to fight the Inconnu to be freed of possession?

Don't even get me started on Mages and Demons... What is this, Dungeons and Dragons? They should all be lined up and shot before they come and bite a chunk out of our collective asses.

Anyway, I'm just posting this as a little primer for what I got cooking for you: Front row seats to the inner workings of Big Brother himself and his "conflict" against the "Inner Enemy"... It's an alien invasion you tax-money burning morons! Even James had this one right all those years ago... and look what's happened to him last year... Poor old James, what a naive, broken-up schmuck. He's lucky I'm around because he'd have been either a Vampire's Bitch or some trophy on a Werewolf's Necklace. How I hate these bastards

But I digress,... I have to go ... James will "wake up" soon and I don't want him to suspect anything... yet. I'm like his very own Big Brother now (double HA!) , looming over his shoulder, looking out for both of us.

What I meant to say was that I shall forward you our case report notes, using our newly implemented bio-encryption algorithm. While they'll be written in James' usual dry and, frankly, quite boring, style, I'll pepper it with any juicy bits (both literal and figurative) and insight my dear alter ego might have missed... fortunately, I gathered most of the marbles he lost...

Tomorrow is our last training mission. After that we'll be allowed to go out into the world without training wheels. We're luckier than most other agents since my teammates, Dunkin (Furry), Brooks (Sucky) and William (Awakened, barely) might actually turn out to be competent...

Don't worry dear James, I'll see you through this, when in doubt, just grab your gun...

Chatty DM: Sorry for the bit of fiction-inspired introduction... I know I can never bear to read those in RPG books. I'm banking real hard on the 'You Write it and I'll read it' demographics for this particular post. So yes, starting tomorrow, the McWod campaign log is going to take the form of my character's Case Reports being highjacked by, well... my character and posted on some freak Newsgroup. Hope you'll enjoy it.

The big Move starts today!

Sketch by Veronica Pare (She's awesome!!!!)

I just secured my very own domain name (Thanks Ve4!) and opened me an honest to God Web site!

I installed Wordpress on it... you can see it in all it's empty splendor at:

chattydm.net (simple, elegant, refined... so totally unlike me!)

It will have its own email (chattydm(at)chattydm(dot)(net).

Here's my planned to do list:

• Choose a cool theme (which will change... I have a new cool banner in the works, I am waiting for the artist to finish up and I'll fit a theme to it... so far the rough sketches look absolutely fantastic!!!).
• Move all the posts with a widget, hopefully the images will follow... if not I'll see what I can do.
• Activate a simpler Captcha widget, much like Shamus'.
  
• Start posting from there.
  
• Start creating PDFs of some of my post series and make them available for download.

I will need help. While I have had Web access since the mid 90's, I'm still a complete newbie in regards to all this Web hosting/Web Page thing. Ve4 and Dave the Game already graciously offered it and I appreciate!

Generating a PC's personality on the fly

A few days ago, my good friend Stupid Ranger posted on inspiration about playing the game and writing about it in the blog. In that post I added a comment about an interesting experience I had with my friend Math. I'm reposting an expanded version of the comment here... not very original I agree, but I'd like to keep a version open for discussion over here.

Some time between this game and that one, Math dropped in on Gtalk and mentioned that while he enjoyed his PC's crunch immensely, he found that his character was quite an empty shell story wise (an extremely deadly empty shell of stats mind you).

So we started brainstorming about our game world's history. Since Math's been playing with me for more than 20 years, he is basically one of the world's architects especially with the elves.

I mentioned the recent destructions of the Elven Homelands. Our game world was the theater of a huge alignment-based war in the last campaign, and the new one starts in the year following the end of the last one. All the Something-Neutral alignments allied themselves and won the war. Elves, being Chaotic Good were part of the Beaten and had had most of their homeland forests burned by the Yugoloth (Neutral Evil Fiends) that are my current campaign's bad guys.

I then discussed about how the apparent apathy of humans toward the Elven plight had created frustration and even anger in the otherwise good-natured elves.

Math then proposed to play his character as a militant & religious elf that got fed up with humanity's lethargy and unwillingness to accept the continuing threats of the Yugoloths. His character is willing to kick some serious butt (politically and physically) to protect his vulnerable race...

He since then added to his character by making him very impatient, a trait that's almost unheard of in elves... In fact I'd be willing to say that he's probably going to gain a reputation as being rather unstable and dangerous in the eyes of the race he strives so hard to save.

All this through back and forth between DM and player on a chat program. It even got to a point where Math started answering my Gtalk comment in character! So I gave him 10% of leveling up XPs for his RPing efforts... even out of game.

So building a character's backstory or key motivation does not have to be a chore nor does it have to be a written assignment... it can take the form of two people shooting the breeze and doing some good old brainstorming.

Chatty Player's Corner: Character Genesis

Well it was only a matter of time. Franky went completely bonkers over Monte's World of Darkness d20 game and he's bought d20 Modern, the Menace Manual and other books of the genre...

I can't say I blame him... I mean look at my library... and those are mostly 3.5 books!

Anyhoo, while we were supposed to have Franky's game as a filler for when we couldn't reach Quorum for mine, Franky really really really wanted to start. He drafted his brother Mike (Kem CPU in our comments), PM and Yan as well.

Of course, with such a great opportunity to play the last 3.5 game in a world I had never touched (I'm a WoD virgin) I signed on pronto, regardless of my own misgivings about being a player.

So the 1st game is tonight. Before I tell you all about my character (Readers run away!....) here's my understanding of McWoD's setting.

The game is set 20 minutes in the future. Normal life was shattered by an event, centered around Chicago, called the Intrusion (or Incursion, I forget). It's not quite known what it is, but Supernatural entities have started invading the world. Dead Spirits of the past possess normal people and turn them into Vampires. Alien entities possess other humans and makes them Werewolves. Other independent alien minds possess matter and become shape changing Demons, etc.

Our campaign is going to be a X-files-like series of episodes centered on a group of agents, both Humans (called Awakened, think Badass Normal) and Inconnu (Vampires, Werwolves, etc) hunting down whatever it is Franky want's to spring on us poor abused PCs... (Yes Franky, I'm going to use the blog to wage a psychological war on your frail DM's confidence... better grow a spine fast because I'M COMING FOR YOU, MWA HA HA HA!...)

Huh, sorry about that buddy...

Here's the character concept I made:

Class: Awakened
Level: 1

Role: Investigator/Gunner

Character Elevator Pitch: James Kevin Smith (JK to frie.. well collegues, Agent Smith for all others) is an introverted, socially clumsy, ex-FBI agent whose mind shattered in 2 distinct personalities when he Awakened. Usually, he's an agreeable, quiet little man of considerable investigative skills. However, when he puts his hands around a gun, he becomes a loud, Brash, obnoxious action-oriented extrovert with a serious case of the Darth Vader Syndrome

(No, not the "Whinny bitch to Badass" syndrome, the "babble all the time while beating the $#!t out of you" syndrome)

I hope I'm going to have fun with that one!

Now, should Franky read this post, and I know he will, eventually, here is what I expect from the game.

I expect sessions to have Investigations/Puzzle-solving in equal amounts with action scenes. I hope to explore a lot of cool consequences of the Intrusions and get involved in dark stories that force us to make difficult choices. I personally prefer a little bit of guiding by the DM than spending long periods looking for the clue that will lead us to the next scene... if we seem to hit the same wall for more than 15 minutes, please gently guide us to the next clue.... or have Ninjas attack! Fighting Ninjas is always cool.

Of course, those are expectations, not absolute requirements... I know we'll have fun regardless... I even plan on dying pretty often so I can switch characters and explore... :)

Thanks for GMing this buddy.

Expect a new campaign journal...!