[After Sundown] Campaign Chronicle: Personaverse AS

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[After Sundown] Campaign Chronicle: Personaverse AS

Post by Archmage »

The time has come to recount the tale of the After Sundown game I ran for a group of friends. Because why not? Spoiler blocks will be used to separate out detailed information about NPCs and Personaverse background.

A bit of background. I'd been thinking about using a modified version of the Shadowrun 4e system to run a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona game for a while. However, when time came to actually run the game, I figured I'd give After Sundown a shot. Characters were created as for an Origin Story, but by the end of the first game session everybody had picked up a supernatural type template, so I actually had the players create their character + persona before the game ever started--they just didn't get to use any of the "supernatural" bonuses to their stats or powers until they acquired them in-game.

For those who have played the Persona games, I picked up the continuity of the game shortly after the events of P4 Arena, but set the game on Iwatodai so that the students could attend the school from Persona 3, Gekkoukan High. Events from the Persona 2 duology were dubiously canon, but (spoilers!) Nyarlathotep was a major villain for the game, and Philemon made an appearance as well. You can skip down if you don't care about an explanation of the Personaverse.

Essential Background:
It is 2015. Approximately five years ago, a rash of mysterious deaths and disappearances accompanied the increasing prevalence of sufferers from a disease known only as "apathy syndrome," which reduced its sufferers to near-catatonic states. At the peak of the nightmare, doomsday cults were all the rage, with demonstrators on every street corner waving signs and proclaiming the end of the world, sure to come by the end of the first month of the new year.

But then...nothing happened. January 31st came and went, and the fog lifted. The doomsayers disappeared. Life went on as normal. No one really remembers why the end seemed so certain, so imminent; most people have forgotten all about the disappearances and the paralytic sufferers of the mysterious illness. Maybe you remember some things. Maybe you don't. You were, after all, just a child at the time, and odds are you only remember if someone who disappeared was important to you.

It's April. The new school year started only a week ago, and students are all finding new extracurriculars or settling back into their old ones. And at the end of the school day, you found a note in your locker—an invitation to join a new club.

You have the opportunity to make a difference.
The fate of our world lies in the hands of those with the potential.
S.E.E.S
Please consider joining our club—dedicated to a future where light chases away the shadows.
FIRST MEETING WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8TH @ 6 P.M.
AT THE SHINSHOUDOU ANTIQUE STORE

Surely this will look good on your college applications, right?

The Personaverse:
Having played a Persona game, or any Shin Megami Tensei series game (hereafter abbreivated as "SMT"), is totally unnecessary for participation. The short version is that the SMT universe is much like our own, but with the addition that magic is unambiguously real and creatures generally referred to as "demons" exist—not that the average person is aware of either of those things. Note that the SMT universe refers to literally all supernatural and mythological creatures save Judeo-Christian angels generically as "demons," whether they're classical fiends, Lovecraftian horrors, mischevious fey, vengeful ghosts, or even divine figures in other religions (Odin, Izanagi, Vishnu, et cetera). However, some games in the series also divide "demons" up into families based on their type, so for the most part After Sundown's classifications as mentioned in the section on playable and non-playable types are going to accurately describe whatever you are or encounter.

Persona users, the protagonists of the series, are essentially spirit-channelers, like possession mages in Shadowrun; their bodies are supernaturally strong and resistant to injury in part due to the presence of the Persona, and they can call upon the Persona to use magic or perform other feats of strength. Your characters do not initially have access to any of their supernatural powers, nor do they have any certain knowledge of supernatural "stuff" (while you can certainly play a character whose hobbies include the occult, some or all of what they've read in books may not be true).

Aesthetically, you are creating not one, but two characters. One of these is a high school student; the other is a mythological figure or creature that serves as your character's Persona. If you want an idea of what sort of concept is suitable for your character's Persona, you can check out various internet resources (Google "list of personas" and you'll get some listings for personae that have appeared in Persona 3 and 4). Note that a Persona, even if it shares the name of some mythic figure, might take a form that is inspired by that figure as opposed to literally being that figure. Check out the design of Persona 3's Orpheus for an example—he's a lot more than just a Greek dude with a lyre.
In addition to the standard character stats for After Sundown, each character for the Personaverse AS game was given an arcana affinity, aligning them with one of the major arcana of a standard Rider-Waite tarot card set. Players could choose their arcana, but since only one of them was well-versed in tarot interpretation and symbolism I wound up offering to assign them with explanations of my choices; if they player disagreed they were free to pick something else.

I made some other changes to the AS rules. PCs created as an Origin Story and were then given some bonus skills and backgrounds, but not as many as an In Media Res character would get because I wanted high school students to have fewer overall points distributed than established supernatural entities. (Ultimately, I think everybody had more than enough points anyway.)

Major rules changes: Persona-users were treated as normal humans in possession of superpowers--not actually a vampire or other inhuman monster, regardless of the supernatural type of their persona. This meant that they were not affected by AS's monster weaknesses, so someone with a "vampire" persona still functioned in sunlight and nobody had a weakness to particular materials. Also, I stuck everybody on the Lunar power cycle, regardless of persona type. If I were to run the campaign again, I'd probably still eliminate the "your powers are disabled" weaknesses, but I would've kept the material weaknesses, because it's in-theme for the games that PCs become supernaturally vulnerable to certain things because of the nature of their persona. It also would probably have made the PCs feel less...invincible.

Also, I let people pick different master passions if they really wanted to.

Dramatis Personae:

Momoko Hirata//Lotis (Dryad): Cute, popular, well-adjusted high school girl, at least on the surface. Joined a cult with her father during the latter part of Persona 3's timeline. He and his friends successfully committed suicide...while she and some others held off the cops with sniper rifles. But she got mental health treatment and they released her and she's perfectly normal and fine, okay? Her Persona, Lotis, "manifests as a delicate pink lotus with a myriad of tiny perfect pink hands, clasped together with their fingers intertwined to mimic the shapes of petals. The hands in the center are vivid yellow, and those ones sway a little as they reach upward. Lotis opens and closes with a gentle breathing rhythm when she's pleased but when she isn't pleased she tightens up and oozes." Momo started the game with some Song of Swarms powers as her bonus abilities and consequently was full of wasps. Master passion: Loneliness. Arcana: The Moon.

Mitsuru Tayama//The Great Bambino (Fallen): Star baseball player and recent transfer student. Charismatic and popular, but modest about it. Excruciatingly polite. Nicknamed "Tobasuko" (Tobasco) for the "heat of his pitches." Ultimately kind of unhinged; Tayama-kun had some...interesting life priorities. His Persona is a baseball player dressed in pristine white, armed with an enormous bat. Master passion: Greed. Arcana: The Chariot.

Kuroki Sumeragi//The Dark Wizard (Khaibit): Amateur "ghost-hunter" in the school newspaper club. Conspiracy nut with an eidetic memory. Extremely socially-awkward (he had a background called "I Don't Know How to Handle This" which became sort of a running joke--it was the "what is the most socially-awkward thing I can do in this situation" background). Nevertheless, he was desperately searching for friends...he just didn't really seem to know how to make them. Lots of science-type skills and a contact in the police force (uncle, homicide squad). His Persona was described as "a tall spindly figure in dark black robes, his face is constantly obscured in in the shadow of his wide wizards hat. When he uses his powers his eyes glow, revealing he has golden irises with hourglass pupils. In his hands he wields a black staff, appearing to be made of shadows." Master passion: Despair. Arcana: The Hermit.

Koki Tsutsui//Anturo Vipunen (Frankenstein): Freakishly tall and gangly--6'7", but distressingly thin, to the point where he looks rather unhealthy, just skin stretched over bones. Koki's dream is to become a champion sumo wrestler, and he actually comes from a ninja family. Soft-spoken in that way that everybody pays attention when you do have something to say, because it's probably important--no wasted words. Bound by solidarity ethics, Koki was dependable and trustworthy to the end, and, unlike some other PCs, could be counted on to have a moral compass that didn't point off in some whacked out direction. Master passion: Loneliness. Arcana: Strength.

--------------------------------------------------------

Session one was basically getting the gang together. The four PCs found notes in their locker inviting them to join "S.E.E.S.," some kind of school club run by the guidance counselor, a persona-user named Chris Hayes.

Chris Hayes:
Chris Hayes//The Illithid (Deep One). Hayes is distinctly not Japanese, at least, not if you ask Japanese people. His father was U.S. military, his mother was a scientist of some sort. The blonde hair and blue eyes really made him stick out as a kid, to say the least, and he had kind of a rough childhood, not that much of that came up for a while. One of Hayes's major defining traits, being treated like a "gaijin" because he didn't "look Japanese" despite being born and raised in Japan was blatantly borrowed from the character of Lisa Silverman from the Persona 2 duology. Master passion: Hunger. Arcana: The Star.
Anyway, Hayes gathered the kids and begged them to hear him out--they had the potential to be superheroes, if they wanted to! What high school student doesn't want to be a superhero, or at least think about it? Hayes pitched S.E.E.S. (the "Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad") as a kind of detective club that solved mysteries and hunted monsters. Momo had been involved in weird, cultish activities before, so she was no stranger to the idea of the supernatural; Sumeragi leapt at the chance to do some "ghost hunting"; and the other two kind of got dragged into it by their enthusiastic classmates and the promise that this club would look very good on their college applications someday. The other major hook was the promise to unravel the events of five years ago--everybody remembered that something really weird happened in Iwatodai when they were younger, but the details were incredibly fuzzy. The PCs agreed to go looking for a shady character known only as Shinshiro--allegedly he'd been involved in some break-ins in the area, and the police had been unable to track him down.

Sumeragi hit up one of his contacts, his homicide detective uncle, and learned that there had been some "mysterious deaths" in the area--10 or 20 people. The only consistent detail is that every victim owned an electric window fan. Some of the neighbors had reported robberies where the only things stolen...were electric window fans. The PCs picked up Shinshiro's trail and tracked him to a warehouse supposedly owned by the Kirijo Group...full of window fans. Which Shinshiro had been stealing to save their owners from fan death. Shinshiro, as it turned out, was a paranoid conspiracy freak. Of course, the real reason people had been mysteriously dying was because shadows were creeping around the city again...and there were some in the area, to boot. The PCs fought their first combat against Cowardly Mayas before they'd even gained their persona powers; everyone manifest a persona for the first time fighting a bigger shadow that showed up after the Mayas had been defeated.

Shadows:
The major adversaries of Persona 3 and 4, shadows are fragments of the human psyche--specifically, they're personae that have gone berserk and killed their "people." I put together stats for shadow adversaries from scratch by mixing and matching appropriate AS powers, although their primary discipline was--you guessed it--Play of Shadows. All Shadows had an Orphic power source and were vulnerable to wood and sunlight.
Shinshiro:
Kyo "Shinshiro" Matsuda//Deathscythe Gundam (Android) actually held down a day job as an appliance repairman. What he really liked to do, however, as poke around in dangerous places and try to uncover "the truth" about mysterious happenings in Japan. Stuff like the cults from five years ago, sure, but also things like fan death. Shinshiro was nicknamed "Ghost-kun" by the PCs because a) he introduced himself by making a bunch of spooky noises at them from the rafters of a warehouse where he'd stashed his stolen fans and b) because he wore a white trenchcoat all the time. He wound up becoming a somewhat useful NPC contact in the sense that he knew or at least claimed to know about a lot of weird stuff that was going on, but he was about as likely to blame Nazi occultists as he was to provide real answers. Double spoiler: There really are Nazi occultists running around.
With the PCs established as "superheroes," session two set the tone for future sessions by having Hayes dangle rumors in front of the PCs and letting them decide what to investigate. Also, Momo and Tobasuko argued vehemently that the club needed to be renamed, because they really didn't want to be part of an "execution squad." Thus, S.E.I.S. -- the Specialized Extracurricular Investigation Squad -- was formed.

"If you take a hot bath in a totally dark room, the spirits will grant you one wish."
"A strange man has been hanging around the Paulownia Mall at night. He has been seen speaking to small audiences and entertaining people by playing the saxophone."
"Shadows and the Kirijo Group are somehow linked. Kirijo has reportedly created a number of anti-Shadow weapons. The whereabouts and nature of these weapons is unknown at this time."

So the players/PCs were left to debate what major mysteries to solve...and which obvious rumors were worth further investigation.
Last edited by Archmage on Thu Jan 16, 2014 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Post by OgreBattle »

So in your game do they turn into their Personas, or do the personas come out and punch things?
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Post by Archmage »

Come out and punch things. That's pretty much how P4: The Animation and P4 Arena established it working, so I went with that. However, Persona manifestation only happens as part of using "obvious magic," so anything that is described in AS's rules as "covert" doesn't come with a visible Persona manifestation.

Additionally, any of AS's various ways for detecting non-obvious magic would give you a mental or visible flash of the Persona responsible for the effect, if it was a Persona-user that was responsible.
Last edited by Archmage on Thu Jan 16, 2014 8:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

This is a really cool idea. I've wanted to run a Persona-based game for a while, but I never thought of using AS for it. Looking forward to hearing more about how the game went.
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Post by Archmage »

In case you were wondering, session one's "powers without combat" was resolved largely with improvised weapons. Tobasuko hurled a fastball at a shadow, edged the roll, and inflicted some hilarious amount of damage. The rest fought with whatever was at hand in the warehouse, but the first time a PC took a suitably "courageous" action against the big shadow (not the Mayas) and faced real danger, their persona manifest immediately. If I remember correctly, the boss monster was dispatched by a Repel followed by vicious beatings from super-strong Koki.

My plan for the game's structure was to borrow the Persona 3/4 "daily life" model, inasmuch as such a thing can be applied to a roleplaying game where the players have freedom to do whatever suits them. The assumption was that PCs were going to continue going to school like good Japanese kids their age and not be delinquents. If the PCs didn't have any major plans on a particular day, I was more than happy to gloss it over with "you go to school [or skip it, in which case, what're you doing instead?], [insert school things description here]. School's out, anyone have club activities today? [Either have eventful things happen at club activity x or move on.] What's everyone do with their evening?" And so forth until the PCs either made plans to do something interesting or I decided things were too quiet and had to throw them a curve to keep the action moving. I figured days or even weeks could conceivably go by with everybody just going through the motions of student life unless something particularly interesting was going on.

Nope, my players pretty much wanted to fill every single day with non-stop action as long as they could find it, so we went with that. The result of this is that despite the actual game lasting thirty-six sessions only like a month of in-universe time went by. This is kind of hilarious when you consider the fact that P3/P4 happen over the course of an entire school year. There was also the fact that somebody misread Patience of the Mountains and we were under the impression that it eliminated the need for sleep. Only half the party had Patience, but it was the party's star popular scholar-athlete and the quiet kid who's training to be a sumo wrestler, neither of whom wanted to "waste" time sleeping if they could avoid it. Off-camera, they got in a lot of extra study and workout hours...

I should mention that the S.E.I.S. base of operations was the Shinshodou Antique Store, which actually had a decent supply of books on the occult. While the information wasn't necessarily all reliable, it at least meant that if the PCs wanted to do research they had some reference materials on hand and therefore at least had a chance to get the data they wanted. Koki (who didn't sleep) and Sumeragi (who had no life) both had the Eidetic Memory advantage and spent a lot of time reading and memorizing every piece of occult literature they could get their hands on.

Anyway, the original plan was to try "the bath rumor." Lots of awkward discussion about the logistics of doing this without it being weird. Eventually the PCs decide to postpone bath planning and want to go check out the saxophone guy. Saxophone guy has gathered a huge crowd in the mall and is, well, playing his saxophone. He's foreign-looking, of unclear Middle Eastern descent -- deep olive skin, dark black hair, and golden eyes. White suit. Blood-red shirt. Gold paisley-print tie. Allegedly the man is some kind of traveling salesman. The crowd is positively transfixed. When he stops playing, he introduces himself as "Dr. N" and starts trying to hock his amazing new dietary supplement to the crowd. Each one of the PCs hears different claims about what "Doctor N's Pills for All Ills" are supposed to do--the jocks hear that it's an all-natural way to put on extra muscle and improve athletic performance, Momo hears that it will make her thin and beautiful, Sumeragi hears that it will make him intelligent and confident...and so forth.

Once they pitch is over and the crowd thins out a bit--the throng of mall-goers having stocked up on miracle drugs--Momo hits him with Aura Perception. Dr. N. himself looks perfectly normal (thanks to Dr. N's Mask of a Thousand Faces + Fictional Self). Everybody decides to buy magic pills, because Dr. N is a charming and persuasive salesman (Attract helps, too). Then the PCs leave, and once they get out of range of his various social magic fuckery the PCs conclude that under no circumstances are they going to put suave saxaphone man's magic drugs into their bodies. Everybody goes back to the antique store and plots for a bit before the kids go their separate ways and head home for the night.

Everybody else goes home! Sumeragi, on the other hand...

"I look for a homeless guy."
"Uhhh..."
"Or how about a stray animal?"
"There's a stray dog in the alley over there."

So Sumeragi grabs the dog, takes it home, and feeds it magic pills. Nothing of immediate interest happens, so Sumeragi shuts the dog in his bathroom and sets up a video camera to record it.

The next morning Sumeragi is reviewing the video footage before school and his camera has captured a few small insects crawling out of the dog's orifices. It also peed on his bathroom floor. SUmeragi excitedly demands that his classmates meet with him at lunch so he can show them the footage. Momo (Princess ethics!) is totally grossed out and everyone concludes that Sumeragi is some kind of weirdo who tapes dogs peeing so he can show them to girls, but they eventually get to the point and discover that, okay, yes, bugs are coming out of the dog now. The team does some research and comes to the conclusion that maybe the dog has been turned into a "Mi-go" or something similar.

That same night, they decide that the bath thing is honestly not that hard to test and everybody goes to Tobasuko's place because he has a large bathtub and no parents home. Japanese-style bathtubs are very large and very deep; as it turns out, when you are in a pitch-dark room, they make excellent impromptu portals to Mictlan. So the first kid (I believe it was Tobasuko himself) ends up plunging into the tub in the dark and popping out in a fountain on the "other side." His team follows quickly when he doesn't respond to their calls, and everybody winds up taking a trip to Mictlan together.

Totally unprepared to explore a hostile environment, they nevertheless poke around a bit. Sumeragi has the Haunted disadvantage, so eventually some wisps start harassing the group, but they shoo them away and head toward what looks like a Shinto shrine, where they are accosted by some yellow-robed cultists. Quick talking keeps the encounter from turning into a brawl, and the PCs start asking questions. The PCs learn that a) these cultists are Mi-Go (thanks, Aura Perception) and that b) they not only know who Dr. N is, but they work for him at "The Laughter Factory." Most of this information is gained through Momo's Aura Perception and Tobasuko's Learn the Heart's Pain abilities.
Learn the Heart's Pain (which I'm going to abbreviate as LtHP from here on out) is an amazing information-gathering ability if you can reliably roll at least 2 or 3 hits, which isn't hard. Even though it occasionally slowed down the game because Tobasuko's player would LtHP every character who seemed even remotely significant, I really didn't mind because it was an excellent way to feed plot to the PCs. Even if all it does is give you a good ground for starting a conversation (because you learn the target's career or driving passion), it's done its job in giving you a social foothold and allowing you to lead whoever you're talking to into discussing something useful, assuming they know anything at all. It also meant that I could have the PCs have conversations with completely unhelpful, shady NPCs and they would still be likely to get some useful data out of the encounter if the knowing target's goals/hopes/dreams would be valuable.
They assure the kids that there's nothing to worry about; when pressed about the dog leaking bugs, they only indicate that that must be part of "The Agenda." They don't actually know anything else about what's going on or any specifics, unfortunately, but it can't really be all that bad, because N's a good guy and takes good care of his followers. The Mi-Go indicate that the kids really ought to GTFO out of Mictlan, though, before anything actually dangerous shows up instead of a bunch of "friendly" cultists. The kids decide to leave for now, but plan to come back armed and prepared to fight off nasties.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Post by Archmage »

Okay, so, I've left this thread on a really weird note about bugs crawling out of dogs and whatnot for a while. It's time to pick things back up.


So the kids found a way to Mictlan and bailed after some preliminary exploring. The next day is Friday. Those attentive to local media note that a local hospital has apparently suffered a major fire. Momo gets a text from, of all people, Shinshiro--AKA "Ghost-kun":

Ghost-Kun: Hey!!! Did you hear about the hospital????

Momo: Just saw! OMG. D:

Ghost-Kun: It was Nazi occultists!!!!!!! I'm sure of it!!!!!!!!!

Momo: How do you know?

There is, of course, no answer.

Anyway, Team SEIS runs into a schoolmate, Hikaru Kitamura, who's a member of the school newspaper (so is Sumeragi, so they sort of know each other, or at least know of each other). Kitamura really wants to go check out the hospital--there's been foul play suspected, and despite the fact that it's kind of a bizarre story for a school paper to cover, Kitamura really wants to go learn the truth about the incident because the media is being cagey about details (Kitamura is rolling with Hacker Ethics). Kitamura essentially plans to drag Sumeragi to go check it out with him; Sumeragi kind of invites the rest of SEIS without telling Kitamura that he's going to bring the rest of his friends.

At the hospital, Tobasuko--who can see Shallow Limbo--is able to perceive that part of the hospital still exists across the divide between dimensions, and there are a lot of creatures moving around in the husk of the building. Not rescue workers, not firefighters, but...things. Tobasuko decides he wants to check it out and throws up Façade of Nonchalance so that the extras in the scene will ignore kids wandering into a disaster zone. (In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure that's the intended use of Façade, but it states that it makes extras ignore anything "unusual"--while I think the intent is that they won't notice you draining somebody's blood or whatever [unless it's them], we extrapolated it a bit farther than that and basically interpreted it as "extras will ignore you as long as you aren't directly interacting with them.")

Kitamura, however, is a Luminary. Specifically, Kitamura is a Persona-user; his Persona is a Baali type, so he's got Aura Perception running when they're at the site of the hospital fire. Which means he notices that Tobasuko is attempting to supernaturally pull the wool over everybody's eyes. Of course, Kitamura didn't say anything, and he followed the group, so...nothing's wrong, right?

Hikaru Kitamura:
Hikaru Kitamura//Faust (Baali). An expy of a character I've used as both a PC and an NPC over the years, Kitamura wants to study robotics and AI at Tokyo University and is generally very concerned with impressing the people around him. His father is an automotive engineer, which he finds very boring because the automotive industry is highly-conservative in its design principles; conversely, Hikaru's father thinks his son is impractical and wasting his talent dreaming about robots when he could be applying himself to something less fanciful. Hikaru likes computers, gadgets, books, cats, 2channel, and visual novels; he dislikes abuse of authority, injustice, and incuriosity, and actively fears isolation, public humiliation, and drowning. Faust manifests as a tall man in luxurious black and gold clothing; in one hand, he holds a staff constructed entirely from flames. Hikaru's Master Passion is Rage, and his High Arcana is The Magician.

Hikaru's stats were included in the document I sent everybody pitching the game as a "sample character," so nobody was surprised when he showed up in game.
Anyway, the group entered the hospital and began exploring. Eventually they stumbled across a very large mirror; Tobasuko deduced that the mirror might a a portal to Limbo, and thanks to Sumeragi's Thaumaturgical Forensics the group concluded that the source of the blaze that consumed the hospital was, more or less, the fires of hell (for...some reason). Deciding to explore the other side, Tobasuko led the way through the mirror into the Limboverse version of the hospital. The team discovered some horrible fetus monsters (signs indicated that the part of the hospital that had been consumed by the fire was the maternity ward) and opted to GTFO instead of tangling with the demonic manifestations of unborn children.

A lengthy conversation was then had about Kitamura, Persona users, and SEIS, and the group officially decided to recuit the NPC to be a member of the club. (I had actually intended for the PCs to be able to discover a number of other Persona users and forge connections with them, potentially convincing them to join SEIS or at least serve as allies. Over the course of the campaign, the group did a fair bit of this, albeit potentially somewhat less than I would've liked.)

After the hospital excursion, the team decided to call it quits for the day.

Saturday brought the kids back to the mall in search of Dr. N, presumably to learn more about "The Agenda" and to try to uncover the mystery behind the weird dietary supplements he was hawking.

Of course, this time Momo rolls well enough on Aura Perception that she can pierce all of Dr. N's Veil fuckery and discern his supernatural creature type. So she sees...his true form. Yes, "Dr. N" is none other than Nyarlathotep. She determines that he's a demon, and manages to talk Tobasuko out of attempting to frag him right then and there in the middle of the mall (Tobasuko learned Rain of Glass during a level-up after the hospital adventure).

Team SEIS returns to the antique store to discuss the fact that Dr. N is a horrible monster. Koki decides to use Tracking Echoes of the Muse on the magic dietary supplements, hoping he can learn where they were created. As it turns out, they were made in Mictlan. Having done some research on mi-go, Sumeragi concludes that, based on the effect they had on the dog, perhaps the supplements are...made from mi-go. Which means that they're technically the remains of a living creature.

So Sumeragi takes one of the capsules, declares that he's holding up part of a dead person's body, and uses Summon Spirit to conjure up the ghost of a mi-go who was ground up and made into drugs.

Sure enough, the spirit of someone who used to be a mi-go--a poor bastard named Ryuuzaki Mishima--materializes. The kids interrogate him, and he tells them about Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. According to Ryuuzaki, Nyarlathotep fears two things--"The Butterfly" and the moon. (Here the game is briefly derailed by a hilarious discussion about going to Limbo and finding a hopefully usable version of the Challenger space shuttle, taking it to Limbo's moon, and gathering some moon material to create a weapon to fight Nyarlathotep. This is actually not an entirely unreasonable plan, but it goes one step further when Tobasuko's player questions whether all fuel that has literally ever been burned is in Limbo somewhere. Clearly OPEC just needs to conquer Limbo. Tobasuko's player starts plotting to find the inevitable oceans of oil in Limbo, drop a mirror in them, and use Deny the Gauntlet to permit passage through so that he can fill tankers.)
Last edited by Archmage on Sat Feb 22, 2014 8:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Post by Archmage »

Session seven more or less opens with the results of S.E.I.S.'s research from the previous week's clues about the moon and the Butterfly and all that jazz--there's a sort of summoning ritual that calls forth a magical sword that's super-effective against Nyarlathotep. The ritual calls for:
  • A white copper mirror
  • A silver object blessed by a Shinto priest
  • The blood of a virgin female mixed with sake
  • Ground root of the black lotus
The ritual, then, is to paint the mirror's surface with the blood/sake mixture, sprinkle ground black lotus root on the surface, and to drop the blessed object into the mirror to be swallowed whole. After three minutes, the caster can reach through the mirror and retrieve the sword from within. (This ritual actually pulls the sword from wherever it is to the caster; there's only one sword. Hopefully nobody's using it at the moment, right?)

The black lotus, of course, does not actually exist on Earth, at least not in the "real world." It must be grown from lotus seeds harvested in Maya and cultivated in dirt upon which innocent human blood has been spilled, i.e., the site of a murder. Also, you can sacrifice a full black lotus bloom for three mana of any color. (Not really.) Nobody wants to ask Momo if she's a virgin, and she's not volunteering her blood, so there's a lot of awkward conversation at the antique store. S.E.I.S. decides to call it a day and pick up again tomorrow.

Monday rolls around and Momo doesn't show up for school. Koki tells Sumeragi to look around for her. Sumeragi decides that obviously the best place to go looking for Momo is the girl's restroom. All of the girl's restrooms in the school, actually, sequentially. Some students wind up screaming and end up going to get a faculty member--for maximum hilarity, they end up finding Hayes. The following exchange occurs in the hallway:

"Sumeragi, what were you doing in the girl's restroom?"
"I was looking for someone!"
"Who?"
"You might know her. Her name is Momo? She's in this club that we're all in."
"...Sumeragi-kun are you on drugs?"

This time, the answer is no.

Anyway, there's a baseball game scheduled for that evening--I had schedules drawn up for club activities and other school responsibilities so that the players would have to plan their character's lives a bit around "real world" activities and achieve some kind of balance between being occult investigators and students, just like the characters in the Persona games do. Koki has joined the baseball team, so he and Tobasuko are getting ready for the game.

Sumeragi decides he wants to help, so he steals the school mascot costume (the school mascot for Gekkoukan High isn't defined in P3, so I decided they were the Ravens). When the game starts, Sumeragi goes out and does mascot things...and also wanders around using Curse of Failure on everyone on the other team to affect the game's outcome.

Meanwhile, Momo has developed the Swarm Body power after a previous session's advancement, so her player decided (for maximum lulz) that this should be (temporarily) involuntary. Momo is absent from school because Momo is too busy being a swarm of wasps. She does go to the baseball game, though...albeit dispersed and high above the stands to avoid freaking people out. She and Hayes end up having a telepathic conversation when some of her swarm spot him watching the game. This conversation was actually held over Google Talk (as were many private conversations, since everybody brought laptops or tablets to game), so I have a record of it:

"Momo? Is that you?"
"............YES."
"Where are you?"
"WE CAME TO THE STADIUM. THERE IS A GAME."
"'We?'" (The quotation marks are audible.)
"...........YES. HELLO, HAYES-SAN."
"'We'?"
"I."
"Where are you?"
"WE PROMISED WE WOULD COME TO THE GAME."
"But...where are you?"
"IN THE STADIUM."
"What seat/row?"
"WE ARE NOT FAR. WE CAN SEE YOU."
"I don't see you anywhere. Where are you?"
"WE ARE TRYING NOT TO BE DISRUPTIVE. THEY ARE WINNING."
"Can you meet me at the concession stand?"
"BUT YOU ARE WATCHING THE GAME."
"Okay, after the game, meet me at the concession stand?"
"YOU SHOULD WATCH THE GAME. THEY ARE WINNING."
"...by a lot."
"WE SHOULD NOT ALL DO THAT."
"Okay. Where do you want to meet?"
"SOME OF US CAN MEET YOU ANYWHERE. ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING?"
"Yeah, I'm listening, I just...don't understand. Why are there so many of you?"
"DON'T BE WEIRD, OKAY? WE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING."
"Okay. I believe you."
"OKAY. WE DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. IT JUST HAPPENED."
"Okay."

And then:

"WE ARE SURE THERE IS A WAY TO FIX THIS, BUT WE DISAGREE AS TO HOW."

Later conversation, at the concession stand:

"DON'T FREAK OUT."
"I'm totally calm. You're just a lot of bees right now."

Anyway...Tobasuko, when he discovers that Sumeragi is running around in the Raven costume fucking with the other team's luck, gets super-pissed off and damn near has a Greed frenzy when he learns that his baseball victory may not have been due to his own talent--having been "robbed" of a real win, he and Sumeragi nearly come to blows, but the rest of the team mediates and they chill out.

Sumeragi at one point makes the Air Bud argument: "Show me a rule in the book that says I can't use Orphic Sorcery to curse the other team."

That pretty much concludes session seven, as the rest of it ends up getting spent debating whether to try to work toward getting the sword or to look for the reported Nazi occultists in the area (Ghost-kun sent Momo a picture he took of some guys in SS uniforms with his phone). Another potential plot hook presents itself when one of Kitamura's fellow mahjong club members gets hauled off to the hospital in the middle of the school day because he apparently busted open a vending machine and ingested all of the coins and bills inside--what the hell could've caused that?.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

This is getting pretty amazing. Looking forward to reading more.
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Archmage
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Post by Archmage »

Session nine is all about mahjong.

Team S.E.I.S. decides they want to investigate the kid who got hauled off to the hospital because his stomach was full of money after he broke open a vending machine to eat all of the change inside. That student is in mahjong club along with Kitamura. Legwork phase occurs, PCs interrogate some mahjong club members, et cetera. Turns out there's a new mahjong parlor that just opened in the Paulownia Mall--it's called Kokushi Musou, which is kind of the mahjong equivalent of a royal flush. It roughly translates to "a peerless person distinguished in a country," but I've also seen it translated as "Peerless Kingdom," which is what I was running with when I chose that name for the parlor.

Do you really care about Japanese mahjong?
I am actually kind of a huge fan of Japanese mahjong and used to play a lot on Tenhou.net, especially when I could play with friends and bullshit on Skype or whatever. Anyway, mahjong is sort of like Rummy; your goal is to make melds with either duplicate tiles (triples and quads) or sequences (like having 1-2-3 or 5-6-7 or whatever). The first person to form a 14-tile hand wins each round; you have 13 tiles in your hand at any given time, and you draw one every pass--if that 14th tile completes your hand, congrats, you win. Alternately, if someone else discards the 14th tile you need, you can claim it and win.

In order for a hand to win, much like in Poker, you have to actually have to meet certain criteria. The basic formula is that you have four trips/quads/sequences and then a pair. If you haven't called anyone else's discards to make any of your trips/quads/sequences (you can't call to make a pair unless it will win you the hand), that's actually enough--your hand is "closed," which is worth one "yaku" or score multiplier. The number of points/chips/whatever you are owed at the end of each hand is based on what tiles you actually used to make it (trips and quads are worth more than sequences, 1s, 9s, and special tiles are worth more than 2-8, etc.) and some other bullshit. Do you have all one suit? Are all of your triples the same number, but in different suits? Did you do something crazy like make a straight in all one suit consisting of 1-1-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-9-9, plus one extra tile for your pair? Stuff like that is worth more "yaku" and consequently your hand scores more points. If you won by self-drawing the tile you needed, the points owed to you are divided up between the other three players (if you aren't the dealer, the dealer pays extra; if you are the dealer, you just get extra, but it's still evenly divided). If you won by someone else discarding the tile, they pay the full amount.

You start with 27,000 points in standard Japanese mahjong. A solid winning hand is worth a few thousand points; the "limit" is 8000, and to get more than that you need a really special hand with a lot of yaku. Kokushi Musou is what's called a yakuman hand, which is worth approximately 48,000 points and the game is fucking over unless you won by self-draw, in which case the game is just basically over (because if one player runs out of points the game ends and whoever has the highest score wins the whole thing--that's going to be you, and somebody did just run out of points because they almost certainly do not have 48,000 points to give you).
The kids go to the mahjong parlor and, lo and behold, it's being run by a demon. An asura, to be precise. I cannot remember why that wasn't the end of the story--the adventure did not go, "hey, mahjong parlor dude is a demon, let's break his face!" Maybe they didn't make the Aura Perception roll. Anyway, Tobasuko, Sumeragi, Kitamura, and the Asura (whose given name was Akagi) sit down to play some mahjong. Because mahjong is heavily luck-based despite there being a skill component, I had Edge add to dicepools (so the asura rolled Intuition + Mahjong background, Kitamura rolled Intuition + Mahjong Club background + Edge, and everybody else was rolling Intuition + Edge). Sumeragi won.

So the problem here is actually not the asura himself; it's that he's got a magic item called Ishikawa's Tiles, a mahjong set made from the polished bones of a blind mahjong master. The winner of a game played with Ishikawa's Tiles gains dominion over the losers; he owns their souls, which turns them into mindless puppets who act more or less only on the command of their new master. Akagi is immune, because he's not human and doesn't have a human soul, but Kitamura and Tobasuko are very briefly under Sumeragi's complete command. The complication is that Ishikawa's Tiles is cursed, and the winner has to pay a price as well--he suffers from a greed-based compulsion to consume currency and objects of value. So Sumeragi has his thralls empty their wallets and starts cramming yen down his throat.

Koki and Momo, who have been chilling out upstairs--the parlor itself is in the basement of a building, so they decided to sit in the "lobby" area and keep an eye on the muscle guarding the door while they waited for their friends to finish goofing off playing mahjong. Sumeragi goes upstairs with his dominated slaves and starts acting totally fucking weird; Momo figures out that he's been cursed by Infernal Sorcery and hurls sand at him until the curse is dispelled. Sumeragi coughs up some bills. Rinse and repeat, sand the other kids until they're not mentally-dominated anymore. Tobasuko and Kitamura lay into Sumeragi with some harsh words about mind-controlling friends and shit.

Alright, so this place is bad, it's time to wreck it. They blow through the muscle upstairs and go back down as a group to confront Akagi. Akagi decides he would rather bolt into the back room and he sends his armed thugs (salarymen and yakuza henchfolk who have lost games to him and therefore become his slaves) to dispatch the kids. Koki takes the lead and blocks the doorway, then proceeds to roll extremely well on soak and facetanks a bunch of handgun fire without taking a single wound. Tobasuko uses Magnetism powers to disable people, Koki beats people up, and Kitamura cremates a dude with Fire Starter (and his Logic 6). This actually scares the everloving shit out of some of the other PCs and they resolve to talk to him about it later; nobody in the group is used to killing (only Momo can actually claim to have murdered people), even though Koki has ninja training and recognizes the necessity of violence to protect others. Kitamura isn't either, so it shakes him up a bit, but the alternative was to get shot, so...

The kids have a moment of in-character awe where they acknowledge that Koki seriously ate like four handgun attacks without a scratch. We have a moment of out-of-character awe at the fact that he took literally zero damage, because that was actually fairly improbable.

Akagi has been knocked unconcious during the fight, so they tie him up for later questioning, clean up the bodies, take the mahjong set, grab all the guns and ammo, and steal most of the liquor from the bar (they're high school kids, I mean, seriously, this is awesome).
Last edited by Archmage on Sat Mar 08, 2014 7:41 am, edited 10 times in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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OgreBattle
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Post by OgreBattle »

Did this game conclude?
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Archmage
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Post by Archmage »

In fact, it ran for like 32 sessions. I should resume my chronicling of it at some point.
Edit: 36, according to my earlier post. Highlights from later sessions, just off the top of my head, include Tobasuko threatening the Kirijo group to get better baseball equipment, Sumeragi becoming undead, a trip to the Library of Alexandria in Limbo, causing a war in the middle east, and writing slashfic in the margins of "The King in Yellow" to troll Hastur.
Last edited by Archmage on Wed Mar 18, 2015 6:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
P.C. Hodgell wrote:That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
shadzar wrote:i think the apostrophe is an outdated idea such as is hyphenation.
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