House of Ainsley: Out-of-Character Discussion

Also, we're getting some visual aids for the Equipment thread. Behold, charts and pics scanned from the D&D books themselves!

Spoiler:

There...just a sample of what's on its way. I hope it helps.

Also, the Table of Contents in the Building Your Character thread is finally complete. I figured out a simple way to get a post's number for a hyperlink: just mouse over the Edit key for that post and check the URL bar (that little bar at the bottom which shows what link you're about to go to...useful for ruining phishers' incessant attempts to steal your bank account number, among other things). The last four digits are the post's post number.

You can get the topic's URL just by doing an empty edit: click Edit, click Send and wait to be redirected back to the post that you may or may not have just edited. Its URL should look something like this:

https://illusionvale.rpg-board.net/the-fall-and-rise-of-the-house-of-ainsley-f54/building-your-character-t327.htm#4449

https://illusionvale.rpg-board.net/(forum name with no capitals and dashes instead of spaces)-(forum number)/(thread name)-(thread number).htm#(post number)

Then use the above method to get the post number for any post within the topic, and plug its post number into the end of that URL. And you're done.

I'll keep trying to find an easier way to do that, though; someone who's not as computer savvy as I am could use a shorter (and less potentially frustrating) approach to that outcome, I'm sure.

I'm sure that would definitely come in handy. Keep working on it,

Also, about the time dial thingies. I agree with Seamus. Take out the text - usually right means sunrise and left means sunset - that's the way it usually goes in many games. But for newer players you might want to keep it in.

Also, make the actual sun and moon much bigger. That why you can see which position it actually is in a lot faster and clearer. Also, you might want to change the colours to the sky and ground for the Daylight pictures. They detract from the sun - they're too bright. Muting them would be an advantage. The Night piccies are perfect, though maybe lose a few stars to lose confusion. And take out the Dial thingy in the middle. Or at least its shadow if you're meaning to mark the middle of the bar. The shadow detracts and confuses.

With the pictures, I know they're just samples but perhaps adjusting the brightness will make them better to see. Considering the darkness of the backgrounds here, that might be a good go.

Hey everyone,

Ainsley wanted me to pass on a message; Postings will be delayed somewhat as he is having computer troubles at home. He will do what he can at his work, but times are busy so his opportunities will be limited. Bear with him and he'll do updates as soon as possible.

Thank you.

Awww... tell Ainsley that we'll be here waiting for him

And good luck with his computer!

Thank you, GD.

Yeah, after a bit of troubleshooting and coordinating with my cable company (who told me that the cable modem servie to my house was just fine before putting me on hold for 20-something minutes before I hung up), the problem seems to be that the lightning storm from yesterday afternoon came up through the coaxial cable--not the power supply, as my surge protector has a high joule rating and is pretty hardcore--and fried my Motorola SURFboard. So I got a new SURFboard from Walmart for $64, and its software was still installing when I went to work.

I hope it's done when I get home.

Also, the storm revealed that our house has two leaks in the roof. Dad thinks he can get homeowner's insurance to take care of that, though. We'll see.

Hope to be back in action soon.

Okay, I just got my internet back (after I had to call my cable company and give them the MAC# for my new modem). I have to get my sleep now, but I think I'll have time to play catch-up with everyone as soon as I get up.

Also, Jaz, I got your PMs with Keitha's picks. I'll give everything a once-over and let you know what I think as soon as I wake up too. Thank you.

Also, the storm and the sudden shut-down of Paint Shop Pro scuttled the work I was doing on a heap of Gametable pogs, including a number of dragons. I also lost my originals for those Party time pics. Gotta love setbacks, huh?

Ah, but you're a bouncer Ainsley

Bounce away my friend, bounce away.

Yeah, this is true.

But I just had to take a few days off from the compooter, with a few pockets of activity involving me and a Neverwinter Nights server (by the way, the Dwarven Defender prestige class rocks; too bad GD won't ever sample its majesty because he thinks that dwarves aren't good for anything but tossing... ).

But I've had enough AFK time. Let's see...Karnoz was trying to get an innocent gnome jailed, right? I'll get on that in a bit.

Corwin and Sylvea too, of course. And I think I've come up with a good spot for Keitha to begin. I still haven't come up with a good forum blurb for this forum, but I'll try to think of something good.

Take your time dude, it's all good.

Also, ZOMG!!!!!!! (my new thing *sigh*) I've got this sunday off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

lols.... Gametable?

when is that us time?

The same time as we usually play. You'll have to ask Ainsley or GD because they'll know the exact info.

S.E.A.M.U.S wrote:

when is that us time?

Late afternoon on Saturday for us Stateside folks.

Give or take anyway. I'll be looking for everyone then.

I had to take a few days off there, just on account of things going down over here. Sorry about that.

First off, about two or three days ago the president of our company (the Mill Creek Ranch Resort) got fired by the investor board who own this company and a boatload of others. And when the president of your company gets his pink slip, all of a sudden nobody feels safe.

We normally have Jo, one of the board's bigwigs stay with us a few days out of every month so she can be there for the monthly employee conference, but this time she forewent her return to Fort Worth and stuck around to move into President Alan's office and sift through whatever unmentioned mess led to his termination in the first place. And with her still around, everyone else is worried that she might be looking for more employees to send to the chopping block. So we're all ducking our heads, working our little hearts out and trying to make ourselves look perfectly fit for continued employment. I myself have left a very good personal impression with Jo when I carted her to and from her cabin--and she has taken a shine to me over me sticking around to clean up after those conferences and whatnot--but I work Third Shift. We don't get a lot of check-ins during Third Shift, and the job's very easy. What if she decides that my job is no longer necessary?

To make things suck a bit more, I heard from my friend Cat a few days ago, too. After I had to leave the Air Force back in '96, I came home and went back to work for the local McDonald's until I could find something better. While working at McDonald's I met and befriended Ben, he introduced me to Cat and a bunch of his other friends, and they all became my next tabletop gaming troupe...which helped me bounce back after getting the boot from the Air Force, seeing as I couldn't belly up to that ugly, old yet strangely awesome pool table with GD and the rest of our old troupe anymore.

So after we suffered under some lame-assed bottom-feeding mutt who couldn't run a good game if his life depended on it (hint for future GMs: showering in-game protection, goodies and favoritism all over your girlfriend's character while routinely turning everyone else's characters into sad sacks and making them watch as the GM's girlfriend's character saves the day time and time again is not the mark of a good Game Master), some of us--me, Ben, Cat and a few others--broke away and formed our own troupe. We took turns running various games for each other, mostly one-shots and short-lived campaigns. Then we came around to my turn behind the GM's screen. It was around that time that Lame-Assed GM and Lame-Assed GM's Girlfriend came crawling to us, since the remnants of their troupe dissolved completely after we had walked out; apparently the other eight or so people couldn't stomach their antics any longer, either. "Okay," I said, "I'll run a pan-World of Darkness campaign for y'all."

So Ben rolled up a werewolf...a Wendigo Ahroun, to be exact. Cat rolled up a Son Daughter of Ether, the "mad scientist" technomancers from Mage: The Ascension. Some goofball named Mike rolled up a Swara (a werecheetah), Mike's brother Max rolled up a Troll, Lame GM rolled up a Gangrel and Lame GM's Girlfriend rolled up a Toreador.

So how the heck do you get such a motley together in the first place? I had seen that problem coming from the moment of the campaign's conception, and I planned accordingly: you pit them against a common enemy. But which Big Bad in the World of Darkness would suit the bill?

The Society of Leopold? Too weak, not much of a threat.

The Imbued? Too scattered, very little unity.

The Black Spiral Dancers? Couldn't care less about vampires, and they're too insane to provide a unified menace anyway...especially if you're not an enemy werewolf.

The Sabbat? Too small and isolated into little pockets of chaos, thanks largely to the Camarilla's efforts. And they usually don't have the stones to mess with werewolves anyway.

Pentex? Getting there, but no. If you're not threatening their corporate interests (and the strides they take on the Wyrm's behalf), they couldn't care less about you.

The Technocracy?

...

Hmmmmm....

So each character got their own brief prologue, ending in getting their butts captured by the Technocracy. For those not in the know, the Technocracy (c/o Mage: The Ascension) is a worldwide (...and beyond...) organization of technomancers whose magick takes the form of hypertechnology advanced decades, centuries or even millenia beyond the current technology level. They strive towards completing the establishment of a perfectly ordered, orderly and efficient global Orwellian civilization, and oodles of today's conspiracy theories could be laid at their feet. Area 51? Heh...the Technocrats made places like Area 51 as distractions to lure the masses and their attentions away from the real Technocracy facilities where they're cloning humans, developing portable death rays and mind control devices, perfecting FTL travel and vivisecting extraterrestrials, vampires, werewolves and all the other paranormals they can track down and catch....

So one of those hidey holes was the (fictitious and homebrewed) Tetradyne Institute for Higher Technology, a tech school located somewhere in eastern Montana. The surface-level campus was an ordinary-looking tech school which somehow always kept abreast of the latest cutting-edge technology and taught it to all the "Muggles" who attended school there...and that probably had something to do with the secret three-level subterranean Technocracy base and paranormal holding facility directly underneath it.

So the players and their paranormal characters had to unite for the purposes of a jailbreak; fortunately, "Alpha Compound" (as the secret Technocracy base was codenamed) was far from being Technocracy Central, and the jailbreak wasn't exactly impossible for a party of supernatural refugees. To help their cause, I introduced Cat's character Tori Dyson late in the adventure, as the renegade daughter to the Executive Director who ran Alpha Compound. She basically betrayed "Daddy" and shut down the safeguards which kept the rest of the party out of the monitor womb where Executive Director Dyson ran things with a bunch of administrators (some of whom were cybernetically enhanced) and some cyborg guards. Ben's werewolf O'olish clobbered two of the cyborgs before leaping up and punching Mr. Dyson into a teleportation portal, and the rest of the paranormals grabbed Tori and made their escape...which involved the first-ever road chase I've ever run in a RPG, complete with little Matchbox cars and sections of road that I'd move around, add to and subtract from to represent Tori's Magical Go-Go Metro (a hyperteched-out Geo Metro) stuffed with paranormals and fleeing from five teched-out Technocracy chase cars--black Sedans, of course--and the Artificially Intelligent "RoboCar" (officially named the ARV-7; "RoboCar" was what my players dubbed it) right behind them all, all chasing and fleeing down a twisty mountainous road in the dead of night.

The five sedans and their recovery operatives were fair as enemies, but that RoboCar was a real nightmare for Our Heroes to fight...a borderline-sentient autopilot, no axles, four independently mobile wheels (allowing it to go up on any two paired wheels, spin in one place and more), a plasma-fueled engine capable of breaking a Mach 1 ground speed if you floored it, a gel-coated chassis and an electrified exterior that jolted the hell out of O'olish as he finally leaped onto the hood, tore into the RoboCar's cab and gutted the car from the inside. The RoboCar melted itself into unidentifiable slag at the moment of its "death", of course.

Yes, Mage: The Ascension actually has a supplement with rules for vehicle chases. Cool, huh?

Lame-Assed GM and his girlfriend decided that they hated my style and my campaign, so they made a few catty utterances and left. But the rest of the players were just smitten with me, my style and my campaign...which just goes to show what kind of people Lame-Assed GM and his girlfriend were, huh?

So my pan-WoD campaign became our regular campaign. Two adventures later, I had another surprise to drop on my players:

Me: "Thanks for coming, everyone. Did you all bring your character sheets?"
Ben, Cat and the rest: "Yes, yep, got O'olish right here, et all."
Me: "Well, put them away. You won't need them tonight." *starts passing out blank Technocracy character sheets*

So it turned out that, in the space of those two adventures, Executive Director Dyson--still pretty ticked-off over O'olish punching him in the back of his steel-plated head like that--had gathered and assembled a small crack team of Technocracy operatives tasked to track down, round up and bring back a party of fugitive party of paranormals who had recently escaped from Alpha Compound. That's right...I had my players roll up second characters whose ultimate objective was to hunt down and neutralize their first characters.

So greatness ensued, with our troupe alternating between their paranormal characters and their Technocrats every week or two. One week, the paranormals wound up in Austria and were welcomed as "guests" at the castle of an old Tzimisce lord because Tori held a stark resemblance to the old Tzimisce's long-dead wife. It ended with Tori using Matter magick to seal the Tzimisce inside his sarcophagus (so he couldn't escape with Blood Form), while O'olish went mano-y-mano with the Tzimisce's pet Vozhd and won (barely). The next week, the Technocrats--hot on the paranormals' heels--released the Tzimisce, contained him within a Tesla cage, took blood and tissue samples from him and burned the rest to ashes with laser and plasma weaponry. And they found "Mary Mincemeat", a limbless Malkavian whom the Tzimisce had been torturing and experimenting on in his dungeon. The Techies eventually brainwashed the Malkavian, Droned her and turned her into a Night Ops cyborg, but even the Technocracy couldn't completely eradicate her persistent neurosis or her severe sunlight allergy.

And they missed encountering their paranormal targets by minutes.


(Uh oh...time to go to work now. I'll finish this tonight. See you then, if all goes well!)

*wanders through the wall of text*

Y'know Ainsley, while I may be wrong, I think that I am the most knowledgable person on the WoD on site, (except for you) and I only got about 2/3 of all that. I'm fairly sure that the others will end up with a headache after all that....

So did you invite Cat to come to the Vale or not?

FYI, mirrors edge is on steam for 4.99...


just letting you know

GoldenDrakon wrote:

*wanders through the wall of text*

Y'know Ainsley, while I may be wrong, I think that I am the most knowledgable person on the WoD on site, (except for you) and I only got about 2/3 of all that. I'm fairly sure that the others will end up with a headache after all that....

Oh, don't sell yourself short; you know plenty enough yourself.

I just chalk up my huge WoD book collection and knowledge to years of work as a security guard, with plenty of disposable income, no wife or kids, and plenty of time by myself at work, with nothing better to do most of the time. "Okay...I just finished reading Werewolf's Book of the Wyrm last night. I think I'll bring Wraith's Buried Secrets with me to work this evening...."

GoldenDrakon wrote:

So did you invite Cat to come to the Vale or not?

Last year, I did. But she never bit. Heck, she's even been taking time off from Gaia Online, which used to be her obsession. But she's married now, so I guess she has a good reason or three.

Hmm...I still have my old campaign notes for Unquiet Waters and The Cabal lying around somewhere. I wonder if it's too late to ever get those two campaigns running again.

But yeah, I just started missing that old pan-WoD campaign too, and I guess I've just been feeling glum about leaving St. Louis behind (even though plenty of that time in St. Louis sucked). The weirdest thing about that campaign was that, in a strange twist of probability, the Technocracy party ended up becoming the troupe's favorite, even though they were originally created to be the campaign's heavies. At some point we made that shades-of-gray shift and went from "Technocracy as bad guys" to "Technocracy as the bulwark protecting mankind from the Things That Should Not Be". The time where they had to contain and "sanitize" a Pentex chemical plant (and a nasty mutant (Fomori) outbreak) pretty much cinched their role--and, by extension, the Technocracy's role--more as humanity's shepherds and protectors, and less as humanity's oppressors. The Pentex outbreak never got anywhere near big enough for the Technocracy's Council to declare a Code: Ragnarok, but it did get pretty big.

I think another contributing factor was how our players' Technocrats seemed to evolve more visibly, while their paranormals didn't. Ben's Void Engineer (J.R. Hicks) started off her career as a mere Corporal fighting off extraterrestrial incursions, and after multiple missions completed with a 100% (and the rest completed at 90% success or higher) and no breaches in plausible deniability or whatnot, Hicks finally became one of the Technocracy's Cleaners...yes, like those last-resort Black Ops bad-asses in La Femme Nikita and Point of No Return...the guys you call in whenever a mission completely goes FUBAR and you need a highly skilled pro (or several) to come in and "sanitize" the mission site from top to bottom, even to the point of exterminating their fellow Technocrats if necessary. Hicks still retained leadership of the Last Resort team, and by that point she had the autonomy to declare a mission a Black Op without coordinating with the higher-ups first. After the team's long, successful and incidents-which-can-alert-the-Masses-to-the-existence-of-paranormals-and/or-the-Technocracy-free career, Hicks had pretty well earned that level of trust.

And Kenneth's character (Agent Echoes) went from being a low-ranking psychologist and one of the New World Order's Men in Gray (the Psych Ops division of the Men in Black) to being a senior Man in Gray...and between his evolving Psychology knowledge, his evolving Mind magick and his evolving hypertech gadgetry he basically became a human Neuralizer. He was the guy responsible for the public relations side of clean-ups and cover-ups, and he got to where he could speak to an entire village at one standing, feed them the hallmark "marsh gas and weather balloons" explanation and make it seem so perfectly plausible that not one bystander would question the occurence any further. "A rampaging werewolf? No, ma'am, that's preposterous. Werewolves do not exist. What you saw and heard was a starved Alaskan brown bear infected with a rare form of tuberculosis, which produced a notable effect on the bear's voice and influenced its erratic behavior; the increased gravitational pull from tonight's full moon had an adverse effect on the bear's delicate neurology, causing its destructively aggressive behavior. Fortunately, we have successfully exterminated the bear, and its remains are being cremated to prevent the spread of the disease in this area. Please call this phone number and notify us immediately if you see any more bears in the area. Thank you."

Heck, the whole team was assembled from the Technocracy's last-chancers because Dyson didn't have the cred to land a team of more elite operatives...and yet, through Hicks' leadership and the team's true grit, Ben and Cat's Technocracy team went from being the Technocracy's "Dirty Dozen" to being the Technocracy's "Delta Force" in the course of that years-long campaign. The team was always named The Last Resort, and at first the name was fitting in a derogatory way, like they were the kids being picked last for softball teams. "Well, Zero Team's off dealing with that werewolf sighting, Team Omega-Phi is trying to divert that asteroid heading towards Earth, the Digital Knights are in Virtual Reality trying to contain the Prime-11 Virus and the Nowhere Men are at the bottom of the ocean quelling an uprising of fishmen. I guess we'll send the Last Resort to look into that zombie incident; it's not like we have anyone else to spare." *sigh*

Then over time, they went from being the team that got called in last because the Technocracy couldn't find anyone in better standing to the team that got called in last because the Technocracy had expended all available resources and couldn't afford to trust the problem to any lesser operatives. "Sir! Australia's entire Western seaboard is calling in with sightings of an alleged oceanic mutant of titanic size marching inland! Air strikes, warships, long-range bombardments, orbital strikes...none of these have stopped the Sea Titan! And the Sea Titan is now within twenty miles of the coastline!" "Great Scott, it's worse than I thought! It's time to send in...The Last Resort."

In fact, chasing their paranormal characters around went from being Objective #1 to a persistent side quest. And meanwhile, O'olish and Tori were evolving, but they were still running from the Technocrats. And the Last Resort was gaining assets and allies (and enemies both outside the Technocracy and within the Technocracy) all the while, which made for scads of interesting intrigue. The Last Resort cloned and hatched an oviraptor from their mission to Pangaea (and the trained oviraptor was nice to have on sneak-and-fetch missions), they wiped out a rival crack team after that crack team went rogue, then scooped up and "reprogrammed" some of that rival team's surviving operatives (including the half-chimpanzee woman who had almost succeeded in blowing one of the Last Resort's stealth missions), they acquired a dedicated Progenitors lab (after dealing with the Progenitor who had created Cat's character Dolph, only to join the renegade "Neo-Technocracy" with a small army of Dolph clones at his command...), they got their own voidcraft (which Hicks could pilot quite well, of course) for extraterrestrial and extradimensional missions, and one time they even got to commandeer a Black Helicopter and partake in cleaning up and covering up a crashed UFO (and dealing with its surviving inhabitants).

Yeah, that Technocracy team--and the campaign as a whole--were a blast. Cat's chat with me really brought me back, I guess. And yes, I still get that feeling when chatting with GD over the phone, too.

S.E.A.M.U.S wrote:

FYI, mirrors edge is on steam for 4.99...


just letting you know

...and as soon as I get home, MINE! Thank you.

Mirror's Edge doesn't have any co-op mode, does it? :?

Also, I didn't bring any of my books and dice to work, and I'm working with Dub tonight anyway. So I'll have to wait till I get home in the morning for updates. Sorries.

i don't think mirrors edge has co-op, but if ya wanna gift a copy to my broke ass I wouldn't say no

Eh, I'm online.

I'll actually be going out to get the paper in few and will probably take about half an hour.

So if I disappear and don't answer PM's just send me one anyway, I'll be back.

i'm here!!!!! ready to buckle some swashes and swallow souls

Yay! I wanna kill some harpies

me too, but i think we lost everyone

I'm here, but I don't think Ainsley will be. Last time he worked on Sat nights and didn't have access to Gametable.

Blah....