Dramatis Personae:
Chet (Baali): my character. Likes fire and social domination. Thinks of himself as a judgment-dispensing vigilante hero, but lacks the wisdom or sanity to do it responsibly in practice. Order of Tremere, good with fire and explosives, and has contacts/backgrounds with both the cops and the bad guys.
Billy (Baali): Potato's character. Grew up in the Wild West, likes six shooters and animals. Has a high-ranked background or contact (both? not sure) in "ravens", representing his relationship with the local bird population and what they see. This is surprisingly awesome.
Chet gets a call from the Tremere--someone's stolen a book from one of their libraries and they want his help getting it back. Chet & Billy head down; no one was seen coming in or out, though a young Troglodyte named Luke had expressed interest in the book but, not being a Tremere, wasn't given access (a few weeks back.) Some interrogation suggested none of the guards were in on the raid, but the dogs had been acting weird.
Billy talks to the dogs, realizes they detected some necromancy going by ("a bad feeling") without seeing anything. Some experimentation with various magical artifacts (yay SCIENCE) tells us that the dogs do not like anything Orphic, and suggest the book (a text of necromancy) went by, in the presence of an invisible Orphic supernatural. Sounds like a Trog to us.
No one knows much about the guy, and Chet's police contacts aren't much help. The ravens, however, remember seeing someone of his description! That narrows it down to a small neighborhood, and Chet does some record searching and figures out what school the kid went to. A montage of the creepy pyromaniac sociopath barging into a school and getting student records later, and we have a home address. The kid is confronted, scared shitless, turned into the authorities, and returns the book. Also, Light of Ennui is more powerful than I thought! Billy deals simulataneously with Chet getting frenzy-level angry and Luke getting frenzy-level scared without much trouble.
Turns out an ifrit told young Luke to steal the book--which contains enough information to open a shadowgate somewhere in SF--which sounds like bad news for all involved...but that's the session break.
Rules concerns so far:
- * This stuff is really free? A lot of my powers don't take any power points and seem quite strong for something I can do all day. I roll ten dice on the Awe test, and while I have to pay a subtlety tax for being all "Hey, look at me,", rolling four extra dice on any social test I care about, no power points, seems pretty strong. As intended?
* Rules for contacts might be nice. Yes, you can work up the NPCs fully and directly interact with them, but it's nice when you're in a hurry and don't really care about who the detective is at the police station if it can just be converted to bonuses. We went with the temporary solution of:
but rules would be nice.Me: OK, I'll roll Intuition + my SF Police background. Oh, hey, I have a two point contact in the department, too! Can I just add the rating? That seems fair!
QB: Sure, that doesn't seem too broken.
* Big deal: are we missing something, or are Getting Information tests unopposed? As far as we can tell, it's exactly as hard to ask the Extra security guard "What are the launch codes?" as it is to ask the Joker "Where is the bomb?" so long as they both don't want to tell you to the same extent. This seems ludicrous.
