Game Report - Operatives of CROSSBOW

Last night saw the opening session of my Fate Core not-Agents of SHIELD game, Operatives of CROSSBOW, in which an elite-ish team of agents for the Combined Reconnaissance, Operations and Security Service: Bureau of the Otherworldly fight crime and otherworldly shenanigans.

The team: Gordon 'Gordy' Winters, the man in the van; Georgina 'Georgie' Dimes, a mob princess made good; and Elliott 'Milt' Milton, an occult research prodigy.
The brief: Infiltrate a star-studded mob party and discretely plant a monitoring device in a consulting hacker's mainframe; optionally, study his 'unorthodox' security measures and photograph his client list for Interpol.

The Set-up: Georgie looked up an old acquaintance, a low-level fixer named Fred, and leaned on him to provide the invitations. With a reputation for being dangerous to know, this was easy enough.

Georgie: After all, they don't call you Drop Dead Fred for nothing.
Fred: They don't call me that.
Georgie: They will do.

In the requisition phase, a mechanic I added to the game as part of a reputation system, the team successfully requested a stylish handbag with a hidden pocket and a pair of camera glasses to assist them in their efforts. Georgie and Milt rented a dress, a tux and a car and headed for Corley Grange, majestic Berkshire home of Martin 'Hacker' Hayes, while Gordy parked up nearby in the van.

The Mission: At the party, Georgie presented a labradoodle puppy to the birthday girl, Tracey Hayes, and Milt spotted a set of Goetic carvings above the door which he reasoned might be the 'security measures' they'd been told to watch for.

Trouble then struck, as Georgie had a run in with a disgruntled ex, Three-Finger Harry, whom she Once Did Wrong. It emerged in the course of conversation that she once left him in the lurch, standing in a morning suit, in a bank vault, to serve five to ten years.

Harry: I'm only here now because I got out for good behaviour.
Georgie: Good behaviour was never your strong suit. I'm impressed.

This did not escalate into violence, but did make Georgie the Object of Scrutiny, so Milt slipped away to locate the server room, only later realising that he had no means to break in without Georgie, who was currently getting the tour from her host.

With difficulty - although she was the object of scrutiny, by now her host was eager to please, not realising that she had swiped his access card - Georgie made her way undetected to the server room. Milt chanted at the Goetic carvings while Georgie worked the locks with the aid of Hayes' card.

Gordy: You're talking to the doors? Is that really necessary?
Milt: Maybe not, but I don't want to skip it if it is. I could be, I don't know, dragged off to Hell or something.

The room is accessed and, with a lot of long-range assistance, the device planted.

Gordy: No, not that thing; the other thing!

Feeling pretty swish and with Gordy - just barely - now in control of the security systems, they decide to head for Hayes' office and the client list. En route, Milt gets distracted however, by a room full of boxes and urns and canopic jars. He opens one and feels a chill.

Milt: I think there's a problem with the air conditioning.

They don't call him Pandora for nothing.

The rest of the mission goes off without a hitch. They break into the office, search it like bosses, take pics of the client lists, opt not to try to open the safe, just in case they break their streak, and then leave with a certain swagger.

On the flight back, Gordy notices something huge and dark flitting across the moon, but the others see nothing and put it down to screen burn.

An ST did it and ran away

Prompted by a recent IC discussion on choices, in which it appeared that the other person had a vastly different conception of what actual choices another person's character had had available to them, I was forced to consider something.

I was told that character x (played by player X) had been tricked into joining a Legacy. This is in Mage: The Awakening, in which joining a Legacy involves reshaping your very soul to enable you to perform certain magical feats as though they were mundane voluntary or even autonomic functions of your own mind and body. Thus, the idea of being flat out tricked into doing it boggles the mind rather.

But I now have a quandary. Is the issue here that a) x is lying, b) X is lying, c) X is misinformed, or d) an ST did it and ran away?

Now, x might be lying; so might X. Or, X might have believed that he had no choice while the ST thought he was choosing. Alternatively, and I have seen this before, the ST may have presented it as a matter of no choice. Sometimes, in larger LARP games, the ST will present a player with the do or die shitty choice of becoming a villain or, well, dying a horrible pointless death, perform a loaded bait and switch, or simply present membership in the antagonistic group as a fait accompli.

The problem is that this always sucks, moreso if the ST bends the rules to do it, and if I, as player Y, start pushing that there had to have been a choice, it's just going to make it more miserable for them.

I understand why this gets done, and it's never from malice. It adds drama to the game for certain; it just tends to do it at the extreme expense of a particular player or group of players.

31 Short Stories - A post in which I try to briefly describe my current projects, largely to see if they make sense

31 Short Stories is my NaNo project from last year and for this year, its goal to produce a body of short fiction that I can try to polish, compile and sell as a Kindle or other ebook format. Currently, I am considering the possibility of running out a couple of stories as a free preview, and if that goes well pitching the full collection at the 70% price threshold, but honestly the tiny amount of money I'm likely to make is a secondary consideration to putting myself out there.

Of last year's 27 stories (I ran short), I have nine that I think are strong enough and five that are maybes, as well as two that I am going to rewrite completely this year. I have the stories out with three friends for reviewing, so we'll see if their expectations match up with mine.

For this year, I have 43 concepts to work on, although in all honesty I know already that some of them won't work out; that's why I've gone for 43 concepts for 31 stories. They range from fairytale retellings to time travel comedy, and a couple of shots at satire within the SF, fantasy and horror genres.

As ever, with NaNo, the initial target is 50,000 words in the month of November. After that, we shall see if I have something I can run with.

Poetry Please - The Mathematics of Maturity

A > B
Where A is the ability to
     provide food
                   shelter
                   toys
And B
     is job satisfaction.

X < Y
Where X is all the things I used to do
     for fun
And Y
      is the things that need to be done.

M=N
Where M is getting everything finished
And N is getting lucky
And M + N > T
     which is how much time there is in the day.

But L > Σ w
Where w
     is my trouble and my woe
And L
     is the love in my life.

Poetry Please - Nevermore

There were no cats on Noah's Ark,
When other beasts took flight,
The cats just purred and washed their fur,
And said: "We'll be alright."

Noah went to the oldest cat,
And said: "You'll all be killed!"
"Fear not for us," the cat replied,
"On the quantum wave function we shall ride,
"Out of sight, we're uncannily skilled."

"When floods are done and the water gone,
"And your Ark seeks a foreign shore,
"You may believe we all are dead,
"But you'll never be quite sure."

"Uncertainty's a powerful friend,
"If ever there's a doubt;
"The teeniest, tiniest, slightest hope,
"The cats will find it out."

Noah wept for what would be lost,
As he went back to his boat,
For though the waters would bear the Ark,
Cats, alas, do not float.

For forty days and forty nights,
All land was out of reach,
But when the world began to dry,
The eldest cat, with head held high,

Sat waiting on the beach.

So when this watery tale is told,
And they curse a blackbird craven,
Think to yourself, with all those cats,
What fate befell the raven?

Poetry Please - Impulse Shopping Blues

I couldn't, I shouldn't,
I wouldn't, I can't,
I won't and I shan't, but I might.
I'll do it, I've done it,
I did it I did,
Though it doesn't look right in this light.

Poetry Please - Rhapsody in Black

As my current webserver is closing down, I'm going to migrate some of my older writing and poetry to here, beginning with this piece, as it is apt to the date.

Rhapsody in Black

Two figures standing silent on the corner,
Sentinels of glass and steel,
Watching over their noirish dreamland,
Their home of the brave, land where nothing is free.

Lonely, mist-bound romantics,
Ghosts of the coffee-house and the opera house,
Burning a thousand warm candles in the night,
Echoes of Gershwin at the day's dawning.

Dark shapes at dusk,
Guardians of these mean streets,
Patron saints of cruelty and greed,
Paladins of cold, hard honour.

Twin pinnacles reaching for eternity,
The new mansions of millions of years,
Rooted in blood they rise in crescendo,
To dreams of highest art.

The silhouettes of an ideal,
Spectral custodians of a bygone age,
A fantasy of indomitable will,
Fallen into flame and dust.

Ivy-strewn skeletons, side-by-side,
All that remains of a once-great world,
In the cold shadow of the bomb,
Yet now they stand no more.

An empire of the mind,
Past, present,
Future,
And never was.
Gone.