Monsterhearts - The Blood of Misty Harbour!
On Sunday morning, GenCon 2010, I made what is probably my best-ever GenCon "find." Wandering around the Con for some reason, I walked past the indie RPG area and noticed a game called Apocalypse World, by Vincent Baker. I knew Baker had designed some really highly acclaimed games in the past, including Dogs in the Vineyard, so I stopped and demoed the game, and it was really great. I wound up reaching into the Void to gain some information on the system, a mechanism by which you can add details to the world and ask setting-related questions of the MC, but in exchange the MC gets to ask personal questions about your character. Vincent Baker, running the demo, asked me the last time my character was truly happy, suggesting the potential to go really dark with it. Instead, I said the last moment of true happiness I'd had was the last time I drank a can of Coke. His reply: "Awesome." I picked it up and read through it, it sat on my shelf, something I wanted to run but was a little intimidated by because of the design.
Fast forward two years. One of my biggest purchases at GenCon 2012 was Monsterhearts, an implementation of the Apocalypse World system about supernatural teen angst, with inspiration material including Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and even Twilight. The system looked amazing based on a read through (I read it the next day, which is incredibly uncommon for me, a person who likes to save the stuff he's most excited about for last) - only the players roll dice. When the players roll well, they get what they want. When they roll okay, they get what they want at a price. When they fail, the GM gets to do things to them. So, that's awesome. Plus, there are rules built into the game for turning people on, manipulating them, and otherwise acting like solipsistic teenagers with superpowers. Again, I constantly talked about wanting to try it out, and several members of my gaming group were really enthusiastic about playing it, but I feared that I would crash and burn when it came to running it.
Last night, we finally gave it a try, using a quasi-adventure module for it written by the game's designer called The Blood of Misty Harbour. We used pre-generated characters, but re-named them: Jenni played Annie Martin, a Mortal, the daughter of the town mayor in a relationship with Damien Chime, a local Witch. Greg played Damien, a member of an ancient line of Witches keeping his powers secret from Annie. Chris played Brittany, a Queen, the leader of the Cult of Cold Fingers, a group of demon-worshippers trying to raise their patron, Soren, to earth. Two years prior to the beginning of the game, Annie's mother had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Also, at some point prior to the beginning of Annie's relationship with Damien, Annie and Brittany had dated, but Brittany ended the relationship.
We opened with a scene of Annie coming downstairs for breakfast, only to be cornered by her father, Harvey. Harvey told her that he knew about her relationship with Damien and demanded that she end it immediately. She assumed his objections related to the fact that Damien's family was poor and said as much, but her father simply said that dating Damien wasn't safe, and that his family wasn't "like normal people." Annie stormed off in a huff, annoyed at her father.
Next we introduced Damien, who remembered that he'd left his History homework in his room and returned to his house to find his mother, Isabella, gorging herself on the flesh of a dead postal worker in the middle of their kitchen floor. Damien had known that his mother was a Witch, but nothing more, and was shocked to see this grisly display. Damien freaked out, and his mother was appalled and guilt-ridden that her son had discovered her secret. She tearfully confessed that about a year earlier, she had died somehow, though she couldn’t remember who had killed her, how, or why, and her magic had restored her to life…but with an overwhelming Hunger for flesh that would overcome her given the opportunity. She promised Damien that he had no need to worry about such a Hunger himself while weeping in his arms. Stunned, Damien cleaned the mailman’s blood from his clothes and went to school, realizing on the way that his loyalty to his mother was more powerful than his revulsion at his discovery.
That morning in History class, the PCs met up for the first time. Neither Damien nor Annie told the other about what had happened that morning. Annie sarcastically smiled at Brittany, and Brittany sarcastically smiled at Damien.
During lunch that day, a meeting of the Cult of Cold Fingers was called to order. The cult’s prophet / school guidance counselor, Mira Winters, told Brittany that she’d had a vision - the Cult would be able to summon Soren to earth the following night, and all that would be required would be the human sacrifice of Annie Martin. Mira had previously had another vision about a sacrifice that could raise Soren to earth prior to Brittany joining the cult, but was much more confident that this one would work. Brittany vowed to obtain Annie for the sacrifice and the meeting broke up, with one cultist looking particularly troubled as he departed.
Brittany sought Annie out in gym class and proposed that the two of them get together to hang out the following night. Brittany attempted to rekindle some of the feelings Annie had previously had for her. Annie was not swayed, but did let slip that her father had demanded that she break up with Damien. Ultimately, Annie agreed to meet Brittany at the mall the following afternoon to hang out. When Annie returned to her locker, she found a single rose along with a note indicating that she needed to be careful, because someone wanted her dead (the presence of the note was due to a failed roll on Chris’ part during the previous scene).
Damien, meanwhile, found an unused room in the basement of the school (which was itself a renovated mental hospital), where he conducted a ritual to Gaze into the Abyss in an attempt to learn about how his mother died. The visions were confusing and disturbing: Damien found himself looking through his mother’s eyes, staring down at the old carpet in his own living room. He could feel that his/her arm was broken, and there was searing pain in his/her leg. Isabella crawled across the carpet, listening to a group of people talking in rough voices and laughing, and a pair of shoes walked up beside her head. She started to look up, her eyes clouded with tunnel vision, and there was a bright light just before everything went black. She awoke with a purple flash of light, lying in a pool of blood in the same room, and staggered out of the house. She made her way down toward the docks, and when she spied a vagrant sleeping on a bench she found herself consumed with Hunger and began eating the man’s face. Damien came back to himself weeping due to the potency of the vision.
Brittany and her clique then confronted Damien in the hallway. The two traded barbs relating to their respective relationships with Annie, and Brittany jumped on the chance to be the first to tell Damien that Annie’s father wanted her to break up with him. Damien was upset, but Brittany offered him one of her followers, a girl named Alicia, as a kind of consolation prize. Alicia draped herself all over Damien and planted a kiss on him just as Annie happened by. Annie confronted Damien, who blamed Alicia for the whole thing. Annie admitted that she was having a terrible day, as her father had demanded that she dump him and someone had left a note indicating that she was in danger in her locker. Damien told her he would investigate the note and get back to her later that night, taking the rose as a sympathetic token.
Damien returned home and prepared to cast a spell that would let him see through the eyes of the person that had left the rose for Annie. As he made his preparations, his mother came home, though she didn’t attempt to discuss the morning’s revelations with him. Damien went downstairs and simply embraced her from behind as she did some cooking, then went back upstairs. Back in his room, Damien cast the ritual and found himself looking into Annie’s bedroom from the vantage point of a tree outside her window. He noted that the person whose eyes he was looking through was wearing a silver ring with Celtic designs on his index finger, but couldn’t get more information than that.
Not long after the ritual ended, Damien heard a knock at his window, opening it to find Poe Proctor, a member of Brittany’s cult. Poe told Damien that he knew, somehow, what Damien had done (a side effect of the ritual), but that he was on Damien’s side and wanted to protect Annie. He confessed that someone was planning to kill Annie at the docks the following night, but refused to give more information than that. Poe left as Damien warned him not to make any moves on his girlfriend.
As Annie got ready for bed, her father came in to tell her he understood how difficult it must be to have to break up with her boyfriend. Annie essentially refused to break up with him without an explanation, and so her father confessed that Isabella Chime had murdered Annie’s mother two years earlier. Harvey fixed himself a stiff drink, unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt, and explained that the sheriff had called him to come to the docks in the middle of the day, where he had discovered his wife’s body. He dedicated his life to determining who had killed her, and ultimately discovered that Isabella was the culprit. When he learned that she was the killer, Harvey said that he “took decisive measures” to punish her, but he subsequently realized that she was far more powerful than he, or anyone else in Misty Harbour, could handle. He cautioned Annie to stay as far away from the Chime family as possible for her own protection. Shocked that Damien’s mother could have killed her own mother, Annie agreed to terminate her relationship with Damien (because of the results of a roll - Annie had to agree to break up with Damien in order to get the information about her mother).
After her father went to bed, Annie snuck out and went to Damien’s house. She told him what her father had said about Isabella, but Damien was skeptical of the claim (knowing that his mother wasn’t yet a Ghoul when Annie’s mother died). The two argued, and Annie fulfilled her promise to her father by dumping Damien.
Meanwhile, Brittany snuck into the woods on her family’s property to pray to Soren, asking him why Annie was the only proper target for the sacrifice. He received a vision of Annie along with a powerful, yet alien, feeling of love for her. The feeling of love was then completely snuffed out all at once, but a small core of love began to grow back within the vision. Later that night, she received a similar vision of Annie’s mother, along with the surge of love and sudden termination of that feeling, though no small core began to grow that time.
The following morning, Damien approached Isabella to ask her about Annie’s allegations from the previous night. She confessed that she hated Harvey Martin for forcing her to say this to her son, but that for a time after Damien’s father (what happened to him wasn’t clear…), she was very lost, and was looking for meaning in her life. That search led her to a group called the Cult of Cold Fingers, a group that tried to commune with a demon named Soren - though Isabella expressed skepticism that Soren even existed at any point. Isabella explained that the cult’s prophet told them that in order to raise Soren to earth, they would have to murder Annie’s mother, a woman with whom Isabella had been having an affair. Breaking down, Isabella admits that, in the worst moment of her life, she went through with the human sacrifice, though nothing happened. Isabella stated that after that, she left the cult and realized that the way to true meaning in her life was through raising Damien. Damien remembered that his mother had always been there for him and forgave her for the murder.
At school, Brittany and the cultists met up on the baseball field before the first bell. Poe confronted Brittany and told her that she was being reckless for agreeing to murder Annie with only Mira’s unreliable visions as evidence. Brittany was wroth with anger, accusing Poe of insufficient belief and declaring that any possibility that he would be raised was good enough excuse to kill Annie. She punctuated her argument by backhanding Poe in the face, sending him scurrying away and reinforcing her cult’s belief in her as their leader.
Between classes, Damien approached Alicia, one of the cultists, at her locker and expressed interest in physical intimacy with her. Alicia merely grinned and led him to the lunchroom, where they had sex before any of the lunch ladies arrived. Both of them had ulterior motives behind the sex - Damien was able to obtain a sympathetic token of Alicia’s which allowed him to work magic on her from afar, and Alicia was acting under orders from Brittany…orders which allowed Soren to begin whispering to Damien.
Reeling from all of the recent developments in her life, Annie decided to skip school and do some digging into family history. First, she went to the docks, where her father claimed he had found her mother’s body. Walking out to the edge of the dock, she looked down into the gray waves and had a vision. She saw her mother lying on the planks of the dock, Isabella Chime standing over her. A semi-circle of people dressed in black and chanting stood nearby. At Isabella’s order, two men grabbed Annie’s mother and plunged her head into the waters of the Atlantic. They held her under for a long time, and Annie’s mother slowly stopped struggling. When they released her, she fell back onto the dock and began coughing, but instead of coughing water, she began to cough blood…pints and pints of it, far more than could have been contained in her lungs. Eventually she stopped coughing and stopped moving altogether, the chanting of the cultists growing ever louder…but nothing happened. The cultists began to argue with one another, and the vision faded away. Annie vomited into the ocean and went home.
Once home, Annie began searching through her father’s office to see how he had known that Isabella had murdered her own mother. On his computer, she discovered a video clip of a man (that she recognized as one of the cultists from her vision), strapped to a chair, blood covering the lower half of his face. Harvey stood offscreen, demanding to know who had killed his wife. The man laughed, saying “what they can do to me is so much worse.” At that point a ripping, popping sound was heard offscreen, and the cultist began screaming in terror, trying to escape. He frantically confessed that Isabella Chime was the leader of the cult, at which point Harvey was heard saying “do it.” A creature larger than the camera frame, covered with fur, moved toward the helpless man and almost casually tore his throat out.
At school, Brittany once again prayed to Soren, hoping for guidance as to how to ensure the ritual’s success. She received a vision of the cult sacrificing Annie’s mother, along with two words: “Love her.”
After school, Brittany and Annie met up at the mall. Brittany again tried to rekindle the old feelings that Annie had formerly had for her, but was again unsuccessful as all Annie could talk about was Damien. Brittany convinced Annie to buy a cute dress for “homecoming,” though whose homecoming she was talking about wasn’t entirely clear (it was Soren’s).
In a side hallway near the bathrooms, the Cult of Cold Fingers attacked, grabbing hold of Annie. Before they could escape with her, Damien appeared and cast a hex on one of the female cultists, causing her to menstruate immediately and disgustingly. Annie used the distraction to flee out the nearest exit - right into the waiting arms of some additional cultists, who knocked her unconscious and threw her into the back of a waiting van. Brittany casually ordered her minions to take care of Damien. The pack - including Alicia - fell upon him and kicked the crap out of him with distressingly evil grins on their faces.
Damien, realizing that he was up against an entire cult, returned home for assistance. He rolled and succeeded at a price, which I decided would be that afterward, he would explain to Isabella that Harvey had ordered her death (which Annie had essentially confessed to him earlier) and would agree to help her get revenge on him. When Damien entered his house, his mother looked up and saw his bruises from the fight, and Damien felt a sudden shift in the atmospheric pressure in his kitchen, as his mother said simply: “Who did this to you?”
At the docks, Annie came to in almost the exact position her mother had been in during her vision that morning. Annie told Brittany that she was insane, but Brittany simply explained that everything would be better once Soren arrived. Annie attempted to escape by hurling herself into the ocean, but Brittany jumped in as well and started trying to drown Annie. During the struggle, Annie felt a hand reach up and try to pull her down into the depths.
The cultists managed to drag Annie back onto the docks, with Brittany furious at her clique at their failure to keep control of a single girl - in her anger, she stabbed one of them in the stomach, sickening grin still on his face as he bled out on the dock. Brittany began trying to drown Annie over the edge of the docks again…
Just as the sky darkened with clouds to herald Isabella and Damien’s arrival. As Isabella walked onto the dock, the sea began to surge, and the entire dock collapsed into the water and began to drift, Isabella never breaking her stride. Damien fought his way to Annie, knocking Alicia off the dock and into the water in the process, but when he arrived at her side she lashed out at him and told him that he and his mother belonged in hell with the cultists. Full of conflicting emotions, Damien in turn lashed out at Mira with all of his magical might, causing her to double over and vomit herself to death on the docks, expelling the same amounts of blood that Annie’s mother had several years earlier. Isabella, meanwhile, began hurling cultists from the dock with telekinetic force, then simply tearing into them with her teeth.
Annie and Brittany again tumbled into the ocean together, struggling for their lives. Brittany still held her ritual knife but wanted to drown Annie, which allowed Annie to wrench the blade from her grip and stab her in the chest. Filled with religious fervor, Brittany pulled the knife from her own breast and stabbed Annie in the back with it as she tried to swim away. Annie screamed and tried to pull in air, but got only seawater…
The seas raged, the parties all separated from one another by the ocean. Annie sank from sight. Brittany cried out with joy at the coming of Soren, but nothing happened. She remained there, treading water, until sunrise nearly eight hours later, then dragged herself to shore, weeping. As she sat on the shore, staring into the ocean, a naked boy with black hair, the purest black eyes, and pale white skin emerged from the waves and stood before her. Soren.
So yeah. It was an amazing session. Essentially, the book gave me the opening scenes for each character, a couple of potential ideas for some secret background information, and the idea for the dockside climax. The rest was all us during play. The system is great for creating drama - every time the characters fail a roll, you introduce something to make their lives more interesting or screwed up. In many cases, I’d give them what they wanted in the roll and then just introduce a problem somewhere else. I was afraid I’d have a hard time making hard moves against them when they failed the rolls, and I can see some GMs having difficulty with it, but I thought I did a really good job with it overall.
The game also required very little prep time. I simply had a couple of pieces of background information decided - namely what had happened to Annie’s mother and the circumstances surrounding Isabella’s death - though I didn’t even really have ideas on how those pieces of information would come into play.
The actual play itself was also awesome. We did a lot more in-character discussion than we normally do in our group, for one (it’s a little thing, but the book encourages you to call the players by their character names, which I did, and which helped). In the scene where Annie’s father described coming to identify his wife’s body, I actually started feeling some genuine emotion on the guy’s behalf, which was funny because I viewed him mostly as a foil for Annie when I was prepping the game, not someone to be identified with. Some of the other cool things that came up spur of the moment were Soren’s reply of “Love her” in response to the question of what Brittany would have to do to ensure the ritual worked and Damien winding up looking into Annie’s window after casting the spell to let him look through Poe’s eyes.
I was also really impressed with how much character detail we were able to do within a 2-3 hour session like that. The relationships between Damien & Annie, Annie & Harvey, and Damien & Isabella were all really interesting and complex, and both Harvey and Isabella became really interesting characters in their own right by the end of the story. I had no idea going in that Isabella was going to become this badass demigoddess, but it totally worked, and her striding onto the dock and causing the whole thing to come unmoored is a gaming image that’s going to stick with me (proposed by Greg on the spot).
Amazing first session, and there are two more still to come! We’re hoping to do the second one this weekend. The PCs there are a new female werewolf character, Soren himself, and…Annie’s Ghost. I can’t wait!
As a sidenote, here’s the fantasy casting my mind did for this episode as we played:
Annie - Alison Brie
Brittany - Hilary Duff
Damien - Didn’t really cast him mentally. Any ideas? Jenni proposes Jason Dohring from Veronica Mars, and I can totally see that.
Harvey - Jesse Ventura
Isabella - Robia La Morte (Jenny Calendar from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer)
Fast forward two years. One of my biggest purchases at GenCon 2012 was Monsterhearts, an implementation of the Apocalypse World system about supernatural teen angst, with inspiration material including Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and even Twilight. The system looked amazing based on a read through (I read it the next day, which is incredibly uncommon for me, a person who likes to save the stuff he's most excited about for last) - only the players roll dice. When the players roll well, they get what they want. When they roll okay, they get what they want at a price. When they fail, the GM gets to do things to them. So, that's awesome. Plus, there are rules built into the game for turning people on, manipulating them, and otherwise acting like solipsistic teenagers with superpowers. Again, I constantly talked about wanting to try it out, and several members of my gaming group were really enthusiastic about playing it, but I feared that I would crash and burn when it came to running it.
Last night, we finally gave it a try, using a quasi-adventure module for it written by the game's designer called The Blood of Misty Harbour. We used pre-generated characters, but re-named them: Jenni played Annie Martin, a Mortal, the daughter of the town mayor in a relationship with Damien Chime, a local Witch. Greg played Damien, a member of an ancient line of Witches keeping his powers secret from Annie. Chris played Brittany, a Queen, the leader of the Cult of Cold Fingers, a group of demon-worshippers trying to raise their patron, Soren, to earth. Two years prior to the beginning of the game, Annie's mother had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Also, at some point prior to the beginning of Annie's relationship with Damien, Annie and Brittany had dated, but Brittany ended the relationship.
We opened with a scene of Annie coming downstairs for breakfast, only to be cornered by her father, Harvey. Harvey told her that he knew about her relationship with Damien and demanded that she end it immediately. She assumed his objections related to the fact that Damien's family was poor and said as much, but her father simply said that dating Damien wasn't safe, and that his family wasn't "like normal people." Annie stormed off in a huff, annoyed at her father.
Next we introduced Damien, who remembered that he'd left his History homework in his room and returned to his house to find his mother, Isabella, gorging herself on the flesh of a dead postal worker in the middle of their kitchen floor. Damien had known that his mother was a Witch, but nothing more, and was shocked to see this grisly display. Damien freaked out, and his mother was appalled and guilt-ridden that her son had discovered her secret. She tearfully confessed that about a year earlier, she had died somehow, though she couldn’t remember who had killed her, how, or why, and her magic had restored her to life…but with an overwhelming Hunger for flesh that would overcome her given the opportunity. She promised Damien that he had no need to worry about such a Hunger himself while weeping in his arms. Stunned, Damien cleaned the mailman’s blood from his clothes and went to school, realizing on the way that his loyalty to his mother was more powerful than his revulsion at his discovery.
That morning in History class, the PCs met up for the first time. Neither Damien nor Annie told the other about what had happened that morning. Annie sarcastically smiled at Brittany, and Brittany sarcastically smiled at Damien.
During lunch that day, a meeting of the Cult of Cold Fingers was called to order. The cult’s prophet / school guidance counselor, Mira Winters, told Brittany that she’d had a vision - the Cult would be able to summon Soren to earth the following night, and all that would be required would be the human sacrifice of Annie Martin. Mira had previously had another vision about a sacrifice that could raise Soren to earth prior to Brittany joining the cult, but was much more confident that this one would work. Brittany vowed to obtain Annie for the sacrifice and the meeting broke up, with one cultist looking particularly troubled as he departed.
Brittany sought Annie out in gym class and proposed that the two of them get together to hang out the following night. Brittany attempted to rekindle some of the feelings Annie had previously had for her. Annie was not swayed, but did let slip that her father had demanded that she break up with Damien. Ultimately, Annie agreed to meet Brittany at the mall the following afternoon to hang out. When Annie returned to her locker, she found a single rose along with a note indicating that she needed to be careful, because someone wanted her dead (the presence of the note was due to a failed roll on Chris’ part during the previous scene).
Damien, meanwhile, found an unused room in the basement of the school (which was itself a renovated mental hospital), where he conducted a ritual to Gaze into the Abyss in an attempt to learn about how his mother died. The visions were confusing and disturbing: Damien found himself looking through his mother’s eyes, staring down at the old carpet in his own living room. He could feel that his/her arm was broken, and there was searing pain in his/her leg. Isabella crawled across the carpet, listening to a group of people talking in rough voices and laughing, and a pair of shoes walked up beside her head. She started to look up, her eyes clouded with tunnel vision, and there was a bright light just before everything went black. She awoke with a purple flash of light, lying in a pool of blood in the same room, and staggered out of the house. She made her way down toward the docks, and when she spied a vagrant sleeping on a bench she found herself consumed with Hunger and began eating the man’s face. Damien came back to himself weeping due to the potency of the vision.
Brittany and her clique then confronted Damien in the hallway. The two traded barbs relating to their respective relationships with Annie, and Brittany jumped on the chance to be the first to tell Damien that Annie’s father wanted her to break up with him. Damien was upset, but Brittany offered him one of her followers, a girl named Alicia, as a kind of consolation prize. Alicia draped herself all over Damien and planted a kiss on him just as Annie happened by. Annie confronted Damien, who blamed Alicia for the whole thing. Annie admitted that she was having a terrible day, as her father had demanded that she dump him and someone had left a note indicating that she was in danger in her locker. Damien told her he would investigate the note and get back to her later that night, taking the rose as a sympathetic token.
Damien returned home and prepared to cast a spell that would let him see through the eyes of the person that had left the rose for Annie. As he made his preparations, his mother came home, though she didn’t attempt to discuss the morning’s revelations with him. Damien went downstairs and simply embraced her from behind as she did some cooking, then went back upstairs. Back in his room, Damien cast the ritual and found himself looking into Annie’s bedroom from the vantage point of a tree outside her window. He noted that the person whose eyes he was looking through was wearing a silver ring with Celtic designs on his index finger, but couldn’t get more information than that.
Not long after the ritual ended, Damien heard a knock at his window, opening it to find Poe Proctor, a member of Brittany’s cult. Poe told Damien that he knew, somehow, what Damien had done (a side effect of the ritual), but that he was on Damien’s side and wanted to protect Annie. He confessed that someone was planning to kill Annie at the docks the following night, but refused to give more information than that. Poe left as Damien warned him not to make any moves on his girlfriend.
As Annie got ready for bed, her father came in to tell her he understood how difficult it must be to have to break up with her boyfriend. Annie essentially refused to break up with him without an explanation, and so her father confessed that Isabella Chime had murdered Annie’s mother two years earlier. Harvey fixed himself a stiff drink, unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt, and explained that the sheriff had called him to come to the docks in the middle of the day, where he had discovered his wife’s body. He dedicated his life to determining who had killed her, and ultimately discovered that Isabella was the culprit. When he learned that she was the killer, Harvey said that he “took decisive measures” to punish her, but he subsequently realized that she was far more powerful than he, or anyone else in Misty Harbour, could handle. He cautioned Annie to stay as far away from the Chime family as possible for her own protection. Shocked that Damien’s mother could have killed her own mother, Annie agreed to terminate her relationship with Damien (because of the results of a roll - Annie had to agree to break up with Damien in order to get the information about her mother).
After her father went to bed, Annie snuck out and went to Damien’s house. She told him what her father had said about Isabella, but Damien was skeptical of the claim (knowing that his mother wasn’t yet a Ghoul when Annie’s mother died). The two argued, and Annie fulfilled her promise to her father by dumping Damien.
Meanwhile, Brittany snuck into the woods on her family’s property to pray to Soren, asking him why Annie was the only proper target for the sacrifice. He received a vision of Annie along with a powerful, yet alien, feeling of love for her. The feeling of love was then completely snuffed out all at once, but a small core of love began to grow back within the vision. Later that night, she received a similar vision of Annie’s mother, along with the surge of love and sudden termination of that feeling, though no small core began to grow that time.
The following morning, Damien approached Isabella to ask her about Annie’s allegations from the previous night. She confessed that she hated Harvey Martin for forcing her to say this to her son, but that for a time after Damien’s father (what happened to him wasn’t clear…), she was very lost, and was looking for meaning in her life. That search led her to a group called the Cult of Cold Fingers, a group that tried to commune with a demon named Soren - though Isabella expressed skepticism that Soren even existed at any point. Isabella explained that the cult’s prophet told them that in order to raise Soren to earth, they would have to murder Annie’s mother, a woman with whom Isabella had been having an affair. Breaking down, Isabella admits that, in the worst moment of her life, she went through with the human sacrifice, though nothing happened. Isabella stated that after that, she left the cult and realized that the way to true meaning in her life was through raising Damien. Damien remembered that his mother had always been there for him and forgave her for the murder.
At school, Brittany and the cultists met up on the baseball field before the first bell. Poe confronted Brittany and told her that she was being reckless for agreeing to murder Annie with only Mira’s unreliable visions as evidence. Brittany was wroth with anger, accusing Poe of insufficient belief and declaring that any possibility that he would be raised was good enough excuse to kill Annie. She punctuated her argument by backhanding Poe in the face, sending him scurrying away and reinforcing her cult’s belief in her as their leader.
Between classes, Damien approached Alicia, one of the cultists, at her locker and expressed interest in physical intimacy with her. Alicia merely grinned and led him to the lunchroom, where they had sex before any of the lunch ladies arrived. Both of them had ulterior motives behind the sex - Damien was able to obtain a sympathetic token of Alicia’s which allowed him to work magic on her from afar, and Alicia was acting under orders from Brittany…orders which allowed Soren to begin whispering to Damien.
Reeling from all of the recent developments in her life, Annie decided to skip school and do some digging into family history. First, she went to the docks, where her father claimed he had found her mother’s body. Walking out to the edge of the dock, she looked down into the gray waves and had a vision. She saw her mother lying on the planks of the dock, Isabella Chime standing over her. A semi-circle of people dressed in black and chanting stood nearby. At Isabella’s order, two men grabbed Annie’s mother and plunged her head into the waters of the Atlantic. They held her under for a long time, and Annie’s mother slowly stopped struggling. When they released her, she fell back onto the dock and began coughing, but instead of coughing water, she began to cough blood…pints and pints of it, far more than could have been contained in her lungs. Eventually she stopped coughing and stopped moving altogether, the chanting of the cultists growing ever louder…but nothing happened. The cultists began to argue with one another, and the vision faded away. Annie vomited into the ocean and went home.
Once home, Annie began searching through her father’s office to see how he had known that Isabella had murdered her own mother. On his computer, she discovered a video clip of a man (that she recognized as one of the cultists from her vision), strapped to a chair, blood covering the lower half of his face. Harvey stood offscreen, demanding to know who had killed his wife. The man laughed, saying “what they can do to me is so much worse.” At that point a ripping, popping sound was heard offscreen, and the cultist began screaming in terror, trying to escape. He frantically confessed that Isabella Chime was the leader of the cult, at which point Harvey was heard saying “do it.” A creature larger than the camera frame, covered with fur, moved toward the helpless man and almost casually tore his throat out.
At school, Brittany once again prayed to Soren, hoping for guidance as to how to ensure the ritual’s success. She received a vision of the cult sacrificing Annie’s mother, along with two words: “Love her.”
After school, Brittany and Annie met up at the mall. Brittany again tried to rekindle the old feelings that Annie had formerly had for her, but was again unsuccessful as all Annie could talk about was Damien. Brittany convinced Annie to buy a cute dress for “homecoming,” though whose homecoming she was talking about wasn’t entirely clear (it was Soren’s).
In a side hallway near the bathrooms, the Cult of Cold Fingers attacked, grabbing hold of Annie. Before they could escape with her, Damien appeared and cast a hex on one of the female cultists, causing her to menstruate immediately and disgustingly. Annie used the distraction to flee out the nearest exit - right into the waiting arms of some additional cultists, who knocked her unconscious and threw her into the back of a waiting van. Brittany casually ordered her minions to take care of Damien. The pack - including Alicia - fell upon him and kicked the crap out of him with distressingly evil grins on their faces.
Damien, realizing that he was up against an entire cult, returned home for assistance. He rolled and succeeded at a price, which I decided would be that afterward, he would explain to Isabella that Harvey had ordered her death (which Annie had essentially confessed to him earlier) and would agree to help her get revenge on him. When Damien entered his house, his mother looked up and saw his bruises from the fight, and Damien felt a sudden shift in the atmospheric pressure in his kitchen, as his mother said simply: “Who did this to you?”
At the docks, Annie came to in almost the exact position her mother had been in during her vision that morning. Annie told Brittany that she was insane, but Brittany simply explained that everything would be better once Soren arrived. Annie attempted to escape by hurling herself into the ocean, but Brittany jumped in as well and started trying to drown Annie. During the struggle, Annie felt a hand reach up and try to pull her down into the depths.
The cultists managed to drag Annie back onto the docks, with Brittany furious at her clique at their failure to keep control of a single girl - in her anger, she stabbed one of them in the stomach, sickening grin still on his face as he bled out on the dock. Brittany began trying to drown Annie over the edge of the docks again…
Just as the sky darkened with clouds to herald Isabella and Damien’s arrival. As Isabella walked onto the dock, the sea began to surge, and the entire dock collapsed into the water and began to drift, Isabella never breaking her stride. Damien fought his way to Annie, knocking Alicia off the dock and into the water in the process, but when he arrived at her side she lashed out at him and told him that he and his mother belonged in hell with the cultists. Full of conflicting emotions, Damien in turn lashed out at Mira with all of his magical might, causing her to double over and vomit herself to death on the docks, expelling the same amounts of blood that Annie’s mother had several years earlier. Isabella, meanwhile, began hurling cultists from the dock with telekinetic force, then simply tearing into them with her teeth.
Annie and Brittany again tumbled into the ocean together, struggling for their lives. Brittany still held her ritual knife but wanted to drown Annie, which allowed Annie to wrench the blade from her grip and stab her in the chest. Filled with religious fervor, Brittany pulled the knife from her own breast and stabbed Annie in the back with it as she tried to swim away. Annie screamed and tried to pull in air, but got only seawater…
The seas raged, the parties all separated from one another by the ocean. Annie sank from sight. Brittany cried out with joy at the coming of Soren, but nothing happened. She remained there, treading water, until sunrise nearly eight hours later, then dragged herself to shore, weeping. As she sat on the shore, staring into the ocean, a naked boy with black hair, the purest black eyes, and pale white skin emerged from the waves and stood before her. Soren.
So yeah. It was an amazing session. Essentially, the book gave me the opening scenes for each character, a couple of potential ideas for some secret background information, and the idea for the dockside climax. The rest was all us during play. The system is great for creating drama - every time the characters fail a roll, you introduce something to make their lives more interesting or screwed up. In many cases, I’d give them what they wanted in the roll and then just introduce a problem somewhere else. I was afraid I’d have a hard time making hard moves against them when they failed the rolls, and I can see some GMs having difficulty with it, but I thought I did a really good job with it overall.
The game also required very little prep time. I simply had a couple of pieces of background information decided - namely what had happened to Annie’s mother and the circumstances surrounding Isabella’s death - though I didn’t even really have ideas on how those pieces of information would come into play.
The actual play itself was also awesome. We did a lot more in-character discussion than we normally do in our group, for one (it’s a little thing, but the book encourages you to call the players by their character names, which I did, and which helped). In the scene where Annie’s father described coming to identify his wife’s body, I actually started feeling some genuine emotion on the guy’s behalf, which was funny because I viewed him mostly as a foil for Annie when I was prepping the game, not someone to be identified with. Some of the other cool things that came up spur of the moment were Soren’s reply of “Love her” in response to the question of what Brittany would have to do to ensure the ritual worked and Damien winding up looking into Annie’s window after casting the spell to let him look through Poe’s eyes.
I was also really impressed with how much character detail we were able to do within a 2-3 hour session like that. The relationships between Damien & Annie, Annie & Harvey, and Damien & Isabella were all really interesting and complex, and both Harvey and Isabella became really interesting characters in their own right by the end of the story. I had no idea going in that Isabella was going to become this badass demigoddess, but it totally worked, and her striding onto the dock and causing the whole thing to come unmoored is a gaming image that’s going to stick with me (proposed by Greg on the spot).
Amazing first session, and there are two more still to come! We’re hoping to do the second one this weekend. The PCs there are a new female werewolf character, Soren himself, and…Annie’s Ghost. I can’t wait!
As a sidenote, here’s the fantasy casting my mind did for this episode as we played:
Annie - Alison Brie
Brittany - Hilary Duff
Damien - Didn’t really cast him mentally. Any ideas? Jenni proposes Jason Dohring from Veronica Mars, and I can totally see that.
Harvey - Jesse Ventura
Isabella - Robia La Morte (Jenny Calendar from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer)