d&d field report

From Parker Gaiman, a loyal servant of King Jacobus, whose good pleasure has seen fit to send him far from Wendyg to learn the ways of the land and to discover the nature of recent changes in the city of Nuyork, to Sir Alain Moor, chief intelligencer of Wendyg and adviser to the king, greetings!

 

It has now been two weeks, by my reckoning, since my last report. Events that beggar description have transpired since last I wrote to you, and indeed I fear that should I describe them to you in full detail that you would think me mad.

When I last wrote, Sir Alain, I told you of the comrades I had taken up with here in Nuyork, and how we had attempted to enter the castle which seems to be at the heart of the cancer that afflicts the city and is working its way toward Wendyg, Drusillus, and the other kingdoms, counties and lesser baronies of the plains. In the chambers beneath the castle we met such creatures as it seems are of the stuff nightmares are made from; yet still we managed to escape with our lives (though not all of us, as I shall relate shortly).

Upon our escape from the castle, we took the remains of one of our companions -- one Rowena of name, who, being mortal as all flesh, was slain by a creature of truly gigantic stature -- to see a supposed wonder-worker called Noisivel Buod. I have writ in the past of his name, but until this occasion had never met him or learned more of him than rumor. In truth, he is a fellow with a nervous constitution, and given over to conjecture about events yet to come as though they were as certain as events past. During the time I was with him, he did not proclaim himself an acolyte of any god, yet he does seem to regard himself as a prophet of sorts; an easy enough thing to do these days, as many a charlatan has demonstrated, and as doubtless he himself shall prove, once his prophecies fail.

In fact, I must confess myself at a loss to explain how exactly it was that this same Noisivel perpetrated the fraud that was to follow. Through some effort of pyrotechnics or mesmerism, Noisivel was able to transport myself, Galin and Inquill -- of them I have written in the past -- either to an unfamiliar section of Nuyork or to a location beyond the borders of the city entirely. It may be in fact an elaborate hoax -- though on this scale how such a hoax could be managed is beyond my ability to imagine, as I have by my best reckoning been in this place for several days, though I have yet to see the sun rise or set.

Inquill is gone. "Back to Nuyork," the others say, though they conspire to keep me from following him and I have no memory of leaving Nuyork myself, whether by train, boat, horse or other conveyance. I suspect that whatever perfidy is presently at work, Inquill is involved with, given the abrupt manner with which he sundered our fellowship. (He is a most unnatural fellow -- though, I must note, with a definite moral compass of his own.)

Newly of my companionship are three fellows: one by name of S'Blackstunn, another by name of Lorinarth, and a third by name of Tovar. Lorinarth and Tovar are at opposite poles, while S'Blackstunn seems to prefer the middle road between them. Lorinarth is by far the most incendiary fellow I have seen in all my days. Though when I first met him, he was unaccountably morose and kept his own counsel, that soon changed and by means I have been unable to discover, he has taken to committing arson with regular abandon. Tovar, by contrast, is unnaturally calm and meditative and has a tranquilizing effect on all he speaks with. To be honest, I am not sure which of the two is more dangerous.

More puzzling is Rowena. Noisivel claimed to be a resurrectionist, and at first it seemed that his claims were true, as when we found ourselves in this strange place -- the locals call it Sigil, though I am unable to recall any dealings by the crown with any such city in the Eastern provinces -- we found Rowena herself, alive and apparently no worse the wear for her rather painful and recent death. Yet if this is Rowena, I fear she is most certainly insane. She claims to have no memory of myself or Galin despite many evidences to the contrary, and appears to be as absolutely xenophobic about creatures she calls "aberrations" as she previously had been about other creatures she claimed were undead. The other possibility I must consider is that this is not Rowena but something impersonating her for some fell purpose, something that is unaware of my recent dealings with Rowena -- or, conversely, that this is the true Rowena, and the one I fought alongside before was an impostor. Either way, I judge it unwise to trust her.

Trust, in fact, seems to be unwise with virtually any of my new companions. In the time that I have been here in "Sigil," they have made such ludicrous claims as the world hangs from a giant ash tree, that the city we are now in is shaped like a doughnut and is encircles the top of the tree, that "Sigil" is separate and unrelated from the world, and that travel from one world (they call them "planes") to another is made possible by something as pedestrian as scratching a wall with a piece of glass. We tried this and, of course, nothing happened, which to a man they effected to be surprised by and alarmed at.

What can I say? I fear I have fallen in with such a crew of cutthroats and madmen that I may not find my way out of whatever trap I am in. Worse still, I wonder if their madness is beginning to infect ... but perhaps I go too far. At the moment we are encamped at an inn owned by a man named Allerazzom, and I am passing the hours of the night by writing this report to you in my own hand, as I wait for a plot of burglars to arrive, as there is some reason to believe the inn has been targeted by whatever agents are "closing" the portals that supposedly provide transit from one world to the next. If my current companions are to be believed, these same principals are connected to the menace in Nuyork, which is why I mention it to you.

See what large letters I write with my own hand. Tomorrow I shall seek out a temple of the Weaver, if any are to be found in this place, find the answers that I seek to the many mysteries that trouble me, and I shall arrange for this letter to be sent to you. When next you see the king, remind him of the loyal service I have rendered the crown in this far-off land, and see if he will consent to be moved on my behalf. It has been nigh unto three years since I looked upon the green hills of Wendyg, and I anxiously await the king's leave to return once more.

 

Long live King Jacobus.

 

In service to the crown,

 

Parker Gaiman

 

P.S. I hope that the altercation with the thieves at the inn may be resolved, if not March 30, then one of the Saturdays in April. March 31 is not possible, as I will be in Philadelphia at the funeral of my aunt. All Friday evenings in April remain available, with the exception of Good Friday.

D&D in Branchburg: The story so far

Note to self for future reference: If you're going to get together with friends every couple weeks to play Dungeons & Dragons, make sure it's a simple enough campaign to keep track of things from session to session, especially if you can get together to game only one every three or four weeks. A 12-part epic is probably not "simple enough."


I've been playing D&D with a group of friends in Branchburg for about two years now. It started out with just the DM and three of us players, but as time has gone on, we've added two more players, and what appeared to be a fairly straightforward campaign has become far more complex than I had imagined. Credit for that surely goes to the two players who have traded off DM duties from time to time. It's the first time I've played D&D since I was in high school, meaning it has far more advanced rules, and it's a much more involved game than the sort of random encounters Chris Adomshick and I used to settle for when we played.

My character is a spymaster named Parker Gaiman, more or less based on the classic Lee-Ditko Spider-man, with a dash of the recent innovations by J. Michael Straczynski, and a twist of Peter Parqaugh from Neil Gaiman's "1602," from which I got some of the particulars. Parker is a from a fairly small kingdom called Wendyg, where he worked for the crown in matters of intelligence. When his mentor failed to avert an assassination attempt on the queen, he and his proteges fell from favor with her successor.

In Parker's case, that meant a form of exile similar to what Garak experienced on "Deep Space 9." Although he is no longer officially on the payroll of the crown, he remains in service to the king and reports things that he has learned the past two years while he has been in the premiere city-state on the continent.

It's a win-win for everyone -- Parker is hoping to earn his restoration to royal favor by his continued loyalty, while the crown not only benefits from the information he provides, it also enjoys plausible deniability if he is caught.

When I wrote Parker's backstory, I decided on a lark to incorporate some of the banter we'd been having about the world we would be operating in. The city was a big one, like New York. It was an important cultural center, like New York. It was probably one of the most significant cities in the continent, if not the world, again, like New York. So I decided to refer to the big city where Parker was laboring in exile as a carpenter, as "Nuyork."

The name stuck, and in time, we revealed that Nuyork had five boroughs. We only identified a few of them, but we still crack up whenever we cite their names: Quins, Brucklinne and Haarlam.

The game started one night in Nuyork when Parker met up with the other two PCs, a human named Galin and an extraplanar fellow named Inquill. Magic in this world has been suppressed and disbelieved in for hundreds of years, owing to cataclysmic "Magic Wars" that happened centuries earlier, but each of us was drawn to Nuyork because of something unearthly that was happening there to raise the city's profile steadily higher at the expense of its lowerclass and of neighboring cities, counties and nation-states.

Eventually we learned that the author of the evil was a fellow named Vorden, a councilor to the king. Parker, although he had learned a great deal about the city under his cover as a carpenter, had been unable to find any secret ways into the castle, and no one was allowed through the front door anymore. Part of Vorden's ways involved turning the lower-borns into stew and using the black magic from their murder to drug the remaining population.

Our ally at getting in was a fellow named Fromm, part of a resistance to Vorden and his ilk. Fromm knew of a secret entrance through a chapel behind the castle. We made it in, nearly got killed by hordes of undead creatures, and finally located a magical key deep in the chambers under the chapel, with the help of another PC called Rowena. Rowena, like Inquill, was extraplanar; she also had a serious fixation on the undead.

As I say, our characters finally got the key and escaped the dungeon, but not all of us. Rowena literally was torn in two by an undead giant, and we took the treasure we found, along with her remains, to Fromm and used it to hire a cleric who could resurrect Rowena.

That was the first arc of the campaign story. One of the highlights of the campaign was when Inquill, a lawful evil ur-priest, in response to what he considered our untrustworthy behavior, insisted we all sign a contract that spelled out our obligations to share information, treasure, discoveries and such things.

This is no joke, by the way -- Anthony, the player behind Inquill, actually drafted a contract that we bickered over for the better part of half an hour, defining such things as the death of a party member and our legal obligations to that person's remains and soul, and so on.

A point of lesser interest but greater relevance was the discovery of Parker's gift, one of true sight. Periodically, for reasons he can't explain as yet, he will see things exactly as they are. Magical illusions are cast aside, magical natures are revealed, and so on.

At that point in the story, the entire party experienced a disconnect in our memories, and we found ourselves with Rowena, and two other fellows, without Inquill in sight, at the Inn of Glad Tidings in the midst of a party in our honor. We never did figure out what we were being honored for, though, as  werewolves attacked, killed one of the local dignitaries and ran amok all over the grounds.

The werewolves were only the start of our problems, though. We soon realized our memories had been tampered with in more ways than we realized. Galin and Parker had no idea who S'Blackstunn and Lorinarth were, and although they recognized Rowena, she had no idea who they were. Neither did S'Blackstunn and Lorinarth.

And then it turned out that Lorinarth is an impulsive pyromaniac with some fire elemental ancestry. Once we were outside, someone complained that it was too dark, and he promptly lit a tree on fire, during the dry season, starting an out-of-control fire that devastated the countryside.

Oh, and Galin was bitten by a werewolf, on whose person he found a note that seemed to described Parker as the chosen one of prophecy, before whom gods would fall.

Most of our next few sessions was spent running around a hive of caves, trying to figure out where we were, what was going on, and being attacked by werewolves. This last item in particular led to the most memorable moment I've ever had in role-playing games. In these tunnels, which were barely five feet high, meaning our characters had to crouch the entire time they moved through them, Rowena used her clerical spells to summon a Celestial Lion to help with the fight.

This proved to be impractical for a few reasons, the biggest of which is that a Celestial Lion, when it stands erect, is far more than five feet high. The poor beast was able to take out the werewolf in front of it, but then it was unable to move, or to turn around when another group of werewolves attacked it from behind. Rowena returned it to its plane of origin, but not before it was savaged from the rear. Somewhere out there in the multiverse is a Celestial Lion with a severe grudge.

The group dynamics at this point became increasingly interesting. Parker and Galin still worked together, owing to their history together; and S'Blackstunn and Lorinarth also worked together, for the same reason; but Rowena was the only person in the party whom everyone would trust to work with them.

By the time we returned to the Inn of Glad Tidings to keep an appointment with a Count Drusillus, we were viewing each other with paranoia and suspicion, following and spying on one another, and generally not getting along or willingly sharing information with the whole party. At one point, Parker even split off from the rest of the group and went his own way.

It turned out that we actually were not far from Parker's home country of Wendyg. The next step of our journey led us to County Drusillus, which borders Wendyg. There we discovered that the count's daughter recently had converted from whatever the prevailing local cult was to a newly revived cult of a wolf deity named Fenron. Parker, although he was from the area, had never heard of this cult, but he did recognize that Fenron was likely a corruption of the name Fenrok, a wolf deity who had been worshiped in the area hundreds of years earlier, but whose cult had died out.

The count's mission for us at this point was to rescue his daughter, who he was concerned had been seduced and led astray by Tarron, the charismatic founder of this cult, and who had broken off her betrothal to the son of a prominent nobleman, whose marriage would have helped boost the county's standing.

It was at this point, incidentally, that we discovered that in our missing period, Inquill had taken over Nuyork and now was ruling as its sovereign. There was also a war afoot, with pretty much everyone else fighting Nuyork and things now at a stalemate.

Anyway, more stuff happened. Exploring the shrine of Fenron, we discovered Abyssal creatures in the sewer, as someone had seen in a dream; eventually we found the count's daughter, and we once again split the party as three of us went through a portal into another plane and Lorinarth and Parker stayed behind. They eventually went through as well, after getting some of the count's best soldiers to come with us.

The portal led to the Beast Plains, where Tarron had set up his armies and was pretending to Fenrok's place. We also discovered that Galin had contracted lycanthropy, and Fenrok was now using him to thwart Tarron's ambitions, which he did, at least for the time being.

Tarron it turned out was a lich; through a clever manuver, his corporeal form was destroyed. Parker freed a woman bound to Tarron's service through a stone of dark magic -- necromantic, actually -- and was given the chance of tremendous necromantic ability if he would only sacrifice one of his companions. (He refused.)

This stage of their journey complete, our characters walked through another portal and emerged in the Astral Plane of all places, where far below they saw the titanic body of a dead god, chained in the Abyss. This is important, since two of the characters had dreams connected to a god who had died and now was returning to life, to the great dismay of his former worshipers.

And then Anubis appeared in the Astral Plane, sent everyone to Sigil -- a ring city built around the World Tree -- and there we recalled the events from the missing period of our journey, which we are roleplaying now.



I don't expect anyone to care about this, really. I'm just writing it down so I have it committed to memory in some format. (My favorite memory from this leg actually is a joke I had made about rescuing a princess from the werewolf king. It was a joke I made before discovering that we were essentially going to be called upon to do just that, except that Tarron is not really a king or a werewolf, just the leader of a cult of them.)



On this new (old) leg of our journey, Galin, Parker and Inquill arrivied at Sigil, where Inquill dumped his companions for perceived breach of contract and  they discovered someone who appears in all ways to be Rowena, except that she has no recollection of them and instead of the undead is obsessed with aberrations as the ultimate evil. Also joining us for the first time were S'Blackstunn and Lorinarth. For kicks and for contrast, since Parker and S'Blackstunn hadn't got along at all in our post-amnesia stage -- they had been the most mutually suspicious of the entire groip -- I decided that they should hit it off right from the start, and in fact Parker has been more than willing to follow S'Blackstunn's lead many times.



Parker's been having a bit of a hard time getting used to the idea that he has left his native plane of existence, that he is now in a city built in the shape of a giant doughnut around an ash tree that provides structural support for the entire multiverse, and that tree is somehow being threatened. In short, he's a little out of his league.



To make it more complicated, he's started seeing bizarre things with his True Sight, and something appears to be moving him around at key moments without his consent. This happened once in a fight with monsters, so that he was able to kill a fairly nasty beast from behind; and it happened another time in his quest to find a portal that would take him back home. I suspect he's going to experience a total collapse of his paradigm, at which point he's going to need to find a way to incorporate all these new experiences he's been having.



Also problematic is Rowena. She's clearly the person he and Galin just paid to have resurrected, and yet she also claims to have no memory of him. Something weird is going on there, and it's definitely diminished the amount of trust he has in her.



And since we've been on Sigil, we've actually been through two portals. One took us to the Abyss -- making it the third time the campaign has connected with the Abyss -- and another took us to a damp subterranean chamber in Parker's native dimension, although we ended up going straight back to Sigil right afterward through another portal, and the way back home appears to be blocked once more.



Interesting stuff going on, at least to have played it. I doubt this is of much interest to anyone in its present format, but I'm hoping it will be of use to me as the campaign continues.

Weekend Vampires: larping in Central Jersey

"Why have you come here?" Osrich asked me. He was the third one so far to ask me that.

"I've come for the gathering," I said as smoothly as I could. It had worked so far.

Osrich regarded me closely for a moment, and then said, "Do you realize what sort of gathering this is, David? You are in great danger by being here."

Well, so much for going undetected, I thought, and proceeded with my scheme: As an ambitious member of the press, I was willing to cut a deal. In exchange for exclusive information about the political scene in New Jersey, I would help Osrich and his fellow vampires to keep their activities secret.

The offer seemed to appeal to Osrich, who assured me we would work something out that night and extended me his protection. The next vampire to notice I was a mortal was not so inclined to care for me, my offers or my well-being. (Nor, as I would shortly find, was Osrich.)

"Are you breathing?" were Dr. Roberts' exact words.

Before I knew what had happened, this local author and TV personality was talking to one person after another, and pointing at me in a decidedly unfriendly way.

By the end of the night, I was running for my life. No one ever saw me again.

At least, not as that character.

I wasn't taking part in a murder mystery dinner where I was the main course. Nor was I taking part in an innovative theatrical performance where audience and actors alike are swept up into a prewritten plot. Although each comes close, the truth is I was taking part in a live-action role-playing game, commonly know as a larp. This particular larp was put on by Cranford-based Nightmare Productions and was based on gaming company White Wolfs role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade.

The essential premise to the game is that vampires exist and live among us, disguised as ordinary human beings. (The night person you know and that woman who works third shin might actually be vampires.) And, unlike the vampires of movies, real vampires cast shadows and reflections, can cross moving water and can't be affected by holy objects unless they believe they can. (Tbe popular Hollywood image of vampires is one they themselves have perpetuated to make us disbelieve their existence.)

"[A larp is] perhaps the next evolution in role-playing," said Ken Cliffe, vice president of games, editing and developing for White Wolf. "If you're a traditional tabletop role-player and you feel you can't portray your character to the fullest, this allows you to go the extra step."

Daniel Ravipinto, a college student from Berkeley Heights, first became involved in larps in 1995 when he was reading a newsgroup on the Internet about Vampire: The Masquerade. After corresponding with a member of a New York City larp, Ravipinto agreed to give it a try.

Ravipinto says the furl began when his friend, whom he had never met in person before, stepped out of her car, greeted him by his character's name and began talking like they were old friends -which, of course, their characters were.

"At that moment, I realized I had stepped over into something I had never been a part of," he said. "We just slipped into the characters. There was a moment there when reality and fantasy blurred. You're given a character and a motivation, but beyond that, everything is left up to the individual."

Larp players get a variety of reactions to their hobby, ranging from interest and surprise to sometimes even concern.

"The reactions when I mention this to people or when it comes up in conversation [are] pretty interesting: 'I never thought you would do this.' It shows how odd people think this is," said Ravipinto.

And when nonplayers come upon the action, locale makes a big difference in shaping their reactions to the event, In New York, no one paid much attention to the pale-skinned, sharp-toothed players.

"In Colorado, they stare at you and they keep staring," said Ravipinto, who played there last summer.

Since his initiation into larps in 1995, Ravipinto has been to about 10 different gaming sessions in New York and Colorado, and expects to play again when his schedule allows him.

"It's definitely the fun of being what you're not," he said. "It's Halloween for adults."

Ravipinto also connected larps with the ancient customs of storytelling. In older times, a clan would sit and listen to a bard sing epics about their heroes and gods, . In our own society, parents still read children bedtime stories, but there is little family-centeredness surrounding reading or telling stories.

'Role-playing may be a way to recapture that. Whether it's a play or interactive fiction, it's storytelling on an interactive level," he said.

"There's a social aspect to it, certainly," he added. "It's sort of almost an excuse to get together and interact with other people, especially in a society like today where we're supposedly connecting with other people but we're really distant from one another."

While vampire larps are easily the most common, they are far from the only kind of larp played. An organization called NERO sponsors medieval larps, and a Montclair organization called Lyonesse Games holds larps based on White Wolf's role-playing game centered around changelings, the children of faeries.

"We tried it as an experiment, because it's not the most popular White Wolf game," said storyteller Eric Logan. "We thought we could offer people an alternative, something more fun. We decided that we wanted to run a chronicle where all the characters were playing childlings. That's what some people game for anyway ... It's a big game of' Let's pretend' with rules."

In Lyonesse Games' larp, the characters realize they are faeries when they undergo a "chrysalis." As the game progresses, the individual changelings remember more of who they were through occasional glimpses into Arcadia, where they came from. At this point in the larp's chronology, each game is assumed to take place a year after the previous one; once the characters become teenagers, however, game time will resemble real time more closely.

"The whole idea of the larp is so players can feel time slipping away on them," said Logan. "Childhood goes so quick, but then you're a teenager forever ...The whole idea of the chronicle will be eventually for the character [to] grow old and die."

Lyonesse runs the only changeling larp in New Jersey, and one of only two on the East Coast While that exclusivity does grant it some measure of success, the larp has run into some setbacks lately. Two of its most recent larps happened to fall on the same date as vampire larps, forcing the organization to find a new place to play. Although a player has offered the use of his house for the larp, Lyonesse now faces losing one of its members to the Peace Corps.

"It's always been our biggest rule this game will never interfere with our real lives," said Logan. "We feel our lives are much more important than any game. It's a hobby."

Despite these setbacks, Logan is confident the larp will take off because of what he perceives as a need for more creative entertainment than most people can find.

"For the price of dinner and a movie, where you go out and are passively entertained, you can go to a larp," he said. "We believe that larping stimulates your mind; you get a chance to roleplay."

Besides Nightmare Productions, Central Jersey is also host to Capitol Chronicles, a vampire larp set in Washington, D.C., complete with vampires portraying political figures.

"What better place for intrigue and subterfuge than the nation's capital?" asked Nick Stember, whose wife, Maritza, is the larp's founder. Although Capitol Chronicles has only met four times, its larp Saturday attracted 85 players, a success Maritza Stember attributes to the larp's three-tiered approach to role-playing. Events might have a citywide story, such as an invasion of garou (werewolves); a clan-oriented story, in which the clan as a whole has an objective to achieve; and the individual level, shaped by individual players.

Capitol Chronicles also encourages players to keep their characters' humanity rather than playing them as soulless blood-sucking monsters. Players have taken to this approach with gusto. At Saturday's event, two of the vampires were married, and a third, a jealous suitor, tried to disrupt the process.

"That was not a plot that we created. That was not a plot we had any control over. It was a player-driven plot, " said Maritza.

"I'd say that's another thing that makes us a little different from the rest of the larps," she said. "We permit our vampires to experience those emotions."

At my second larp, I played a Malkavian, a vampire suffering from a form of insanity. In my character's case, it was multiple personalities. At times, I was bullying and full of myself At others, I was paranoid, fearful of a vast worldwide conspiracy by "The Six-Fingered Hand" to destroy me. When neither of those was dominant, I was a 4-year-old boy looking for his mommy and throwing a temper tantrum when he couldn't get his way.

I was insane. I was Rhadamanthus, Binkley and Tommy. I was having a thrill.

"We believe there's a big future in larping," said Logan.

Count on it.