Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

Three Stakes Carved from a Stradivarius

No shit, not only there I was, but I set this up.

When I run LARPs, I always write pre-gens so I can set up plot hooks and conflicts. Most players ignore the packet and just run around playing supervillains with fangs, so when someone latches onto a story thread and runs with it, I appreciate them all the more.

This one is from ConCave 2000, back when that western Kentucky con was still hosted at the old Park Mammoth Hotel in all its creepy-ass glory. To set the stage, I need to give you the character histories from two particular PC packets…

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Definitions

It occurred to me recently that I’ve been recording some TTRPG and LARP anecdotes and labeling them “war stories” without actually saying what qualifies as one. I should note that on this blog, everything bearing that label does so in a purely metaphorical sense. But as related to me, long ago, by a co-worker who had war stories in the literal sense:

“A fairy tale begins, long, long ago in a magical land far far away… a war story begins, okay, this is no shit, there we were…”

Shank the Sith

I’m not sure where to use this one, but while thinking about Star Wars RPG characters the other day, something popped into my head and wouldn’t come out. Somewhere in the galaxy, someone has gotten their hands on a mostly-broken lightsaber. It rattles and crackles, and when turned on, it hisses and heats up alarmingly. It works… technically. But it only manifests two or three inches of blade.

So now I’m wondering how best to make use of a lightshiv.

You’d Think It Would Be Obvious

This is yet another one from a convention LARP in western Kentucky in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

I was playing in this one, not running. The game staff did not share my view of having a coherent plot, so they were allowing players to bring in their own characters rather than providing pre-gens. I chose to run an Assamite (Child of Haqim to you new kids) vizier. I honestly can’t remember if this was before or after I was tapped to do the revised Clanbook: Assamite, but I’d roughed out a lot of the work I wanted to do on the castes a couple of years before that contract, on a late-night drive with Little Sister, so this was definitely a time at which the viziers were front-of-mind for me.

Old man rambling. May yell at cloud next. Anyway…

This LARP’s plot was the predictable and painful “Camarilla and Sabbat vampires put aside their differences in a neutral city run by a ridiculously powerful neutral Methuselah to deal with an existential threat to all vampirekind and/or consensual reality and/or the world.” I’d attached my character to the Camarilla delegation because I figured they’d be less annoying, if also less competent, than the Sabbat. They were glad to have me, because this was still a time when the player base assumed “Assamite == murder machine,” and I certainly wasn’t going to correct them by stating that I was here to study their dumb-ass antics. But I wasn’t completely defenseless.

So we’re wandering down the hall of this hotel when we come face-to-face with the Sabbat bishop and her retinue. Thankfully, by this time, the LARP scene had evolved enough that it was accepted practice to use index cards as item representations, rather than hauling around prop Kalashnikovs and Molotovs and battleaxes and whatnot in public. The bishop is holding a sheaf of index cards in her hand, but doesn’t say anything about them. Okay, whatever, that outfit doesn’t have space for her assets, let alone her inventory.

Dialogue ensues, and things are not too incredibly tense when the bishop’s player suddenly remembers that one of her item cards should be evident to any observer. But how she expresses this… is by brandishing the card toward our faces and announcing, “oh, by the way, this is a five-foot broadsword.”

Okay, then. My hand comes out of my pocket, where I’ve been holding one of my own item cards, and points a 3×5 straight between her eyebrows. “Cool. This is a .357 Magnum.”

Shield Wall: Smart Meat Weapon Systems

Originally posted to the CGL Battletech forums in 2018.

SOLARIS CITY, Solaris VII, April 10, 3062 – Even though I know the attack is imminent, it’s a shock when it comes.  I have no warning.  One moment, I’m anonymous in a crowd of revelers on Montenegro’s Amethyst Strip; the next, the crowd is scattering as a wiry man in red leather lunges for me with a knife.  I’m paralyzed by shock, seeing only the glow of neon on the blade as it plunges toward my heart.

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Chapter V: Return to the Flooded Crypt of the Necromancer

This should have been subtitled Vengeance for Vraazox. Following their narrow escape, Tulk and Hazel swore vengeance on the ghostly necromancer who’d slain their friend. They went back with reinforcements:

  • Tulk: marked half-orc, ranger 3
  • Hazel Ravenvale: outcast halfling, thief 2
  • Nubbin Stump: drawn halfling, fighter 2
  • Ylva Fekyue: outcast halfling, bard 3
  • Mirena the Outcast: outcast human, priest of Freya 1 (reserve PC for Vraazox’s player)

… this crew sure does seem to attract a lot of halflings and outcasts for some reason.

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Launch the Alert-Five Hornets

I’ve been wanting to get Hornet Leader out again, having yet to finish a campaign of it. In lieu of actually, you know, playing the damn thing, I spent a few hours today coding some JQuery to generate a random squadron, as per the optional rule for doing just that sort of thing.

I have a few other thoughts on tools for DVG’s other solo wargames, so the new landing page (which links the aforementioned Hornet Leader generator) is here.

Beep Boop Click Click Boom

When The Girl and I can get down to Atlanta for a holiday weekend, I always try to put together a one-shot for her old gaming group, running a system and setting they haven’t experienced before. To minimize churn before we get into playing, I usually provide pre-gens. About ten years ago, the New Year’s game of choice was Fantasy Flight’s edition of Star Wars, and I gave one of the group’s aerospace engineers a character that I’ve always wanted to run myself. This was a droid – an astromech chassis, to be precise – built into this game engine’s Engineer career, Saboteur specialization. Some excerpts from the character sheet:

Motivation: Crime. Built to sabotage and undermine, this droid takes a particular glee in doing this to government and corporate institutions rather than machinery. It’s not malicious on a personal level but it likes to test complex systems to destruction.

Motivation: Betrayal. When this droid attained full sapience, its crime syndicate masters decided to wipe it. This threat overrode its loyalty programming and it now seeks revenge on the underworld culture that was ready to so casually discard it.

Weapons and Armor: ion blaster (built-in); fusion cutter (built-in); 9-slot internal rotary launcher with cold beer x3, fragmentation grenade x3, stun grenade x3; malicious sense of humor

Personal Gear: long-range comlink; macrobinoculars; surveillance tagger; com jammer; electronic lock breaker; tool kit; mini-refrigerator

The player in question looked at this toolbox and just started giggling. Then he proceeded to absolutely own a Hutt-backed casino.

The punchline, though?

Sabotage commando droid built on an astromech chassis. Model number: R2-C4.

Ur-Shulgi

I was recently reminded of this snippet of material that was cut from the revised edition of Clanbook: Assamite for lack of space. While not canonical World of Darkness setting material, it has a special spot in the cold, shriveled place where my heart should be.

Return-Path: localuser@sb50-a7.black-veil.il
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 01:11:34 +0200
From: Anonymous anonymous@black-veil.il
Reply-To: anonymous@black-veil.il
Organization: none
X-Accept-Language: en
To:
Subject: [BROKEN STONE] 308A

I had the right authentication and your PGP keys. Here is where I establish my bona fides as a daughter of Haqim, not as a piece of technology. My name is Sarah Schneier and I hold the Seat of Copper and Lightning in the Council of Scrolls, and yes, this is important enough to require me to expose myself.
Alpha passed the order down for me to get the word out to all cells. You have to know what’s on the Throne.

On 08 November, we opened the Vault of the Pillars. The records there confirmed our suspicions as to the identity and nature of the new Eldest.

You already know about the Baali Wars, and about the Second City, and the parables of how the Ancestor made the warriors to serve as the world’s first police, and how the sorcerers were made as demon hunters because the Ancestor did not trust Saulot.

The problem, at least before the sorcerers came along, was that the Baali and all their cultist followers were too disorganized for the warriors and the first sorcerers to strike at. It was like trying to fight a swarm of wasps. So the Ancestor gave them something to unify them. He found someone who was born with a soul already destined for corruption — a ten-year-old shepherd — and Embraced that child. Then Haqim took his childe to the pit that Saulot said had spawned the Baali and he threw that shepherd into it. And the blood of the Ancestor and the power of that soul turned that child into the leader that the Baali needed.

When the Baali assaulted the Second City en masse, the Ancestor was off on one of his mysterious disappearances. He made it back just in time to stop his childe and tear the demon out of the body that it rode, and when the battle was over he claimed that he had found the child dying on the battlefield and the Embrace was the only way to save that innocent victim. Then he watched the child to make sure that it was safe to have around.

I guess he did not watch long enough. Some sort of spiritual seed stayed in the child, and that soul was never truly clean anyway, no matter what the Ancestor did. And it woke up last year, and now it is the Eldest. It is not Baali, and it is not possessed, and we do not think it is not working with or for anything infernal, but it is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is not one of Haqim’s Children any more, not really. It is something more, and it is something less.

Every scroll and tablet we found in the Vault of the Pillars, every test we can perform without arousing its suspicion, everything we have points to ur-Shulgi as that child. It is close enough to 100% certainty that Alpha ord

Power out, generators are up. It knows already, and it’s moving. File attachments have all data that is in our hands as of tonight, and the mirror sites will contain it for download as long as they stay up. You have all that we have. Use it.

Go with God, and may He be mer^S^Csend^Cquit

Fireball Magnet

From 2017 to 2021, I was involved in a more-or-less-weekly D&D 5e campaign. It was the best pick-up group I’ve ever had – the GM put out a solicitation for players on the Roll20.net forums and all of us tagged in. One guy dropped after a half-dozen sessions but the rest stayed with it for the whole time, from 1st level all the way to 17th.

PC death was always on the table, but I somehow managed to have one of two original PCs who survived to the end of the campaign (and the other sacrificed himself in the final session to pull off a world-saving magical deed). This was because I was running Tiashash, a dragonborn barbarian/fighter who, by the end of the campaign, and with the help of “top half of the hit die” and “reroll level-up hit die with inspiration” house rules, was approaching 250 hit points.

One of the other long-running PCs – the other original-party survivor, in fact – was Rimble, a gnome wizard. We pretty quickly figured out that our DM also house-ruled that damage resistance would stack – half-damage from one effect and half-damage from a second effect equaled quarter-damage. This enabled some interesting tactics, like Tiashash raging, running hell-bent-for-leather into a group of enemies, getting their attention, and then standing there while Rimble dropped a max-level fireball on him. Invariably, between the rage and advantage on Reflex saves, Tiashash would be standing there, slightly smoking, at the center of a pile of smoldering corpses.

I think it took until 14th or 15th level for Tiashash to actually go down to zero hit points from anything, and that was the DM basically saying “enough of this shit” and hammering him with psychic damage.