Foolish Villains

I've been watching early X-Files episodes after having been put in an alien frame of mind by Incident At Owl Lake. They're pretty good. The writing is taut, and the performances - especially Gillian Andersen, who, by the way, I must admit is much hotter than I realized when I was seven - do a good job of completing the fairly sketchy characters.

I just watched the episode "E.B.E.," where Mulder and Scully track a truck they think the conspiracy is using to ship alien technology. There's a scene in the beginning where the truck driver is being held by local law enforcement. They think they have him right where they want him, but then the sheriff walks in, releases the prisoner, and basically chases them off. He (the sheriff) is terrified of something and desperate for them to leave; as Mulder remarks in the next scene, "someone got to him." I.e., the conspiracy came and threatened him in some awful way - we'll kill your family, you'll lose your job, we'll release these incriminating photos, whatever - and coerced him into releasing the truck driver and being discourteous to our heroes.

Ok, think about it for a second: what kind of way is that to run a conspiracy?

We're talking about a sheriff. He's probably a democratically-elected, meaning he's a prominent man in his community, good reputation, knows lots of people. He has powers of arrest and investigation, more than a passing familiarity with the law, experience investigating crimes. He's been trained to fire a gun and probably has some slight expertise with hand-to-hand fighting as well. He has a staff that is probably, unless he's a notably bad boss, pretty loyal. All in all, while he may be tiddlywinks in the global scheme of things, he's not somebody you want to mess with on his own turf. Is it really worth picking a fight with him, if you're a conspiracy that operates under conditions of absolute secrecy?

Yes, absolutely, with sufficient resources you could bring this man down. You could blackmail his staff, smear him in the press, bring down official trouble from some oversight committee, whatever. I'm sure these are things that the global conspiracy is capable of. But really, is it worth anybody's time? Do they want to pay some highly skilled individual a hefty sum to do all of this delicate work (which must all be done, remember, in such a way that it's impossible to prove that somebody set out to do it)? It just doesn't seem like a good use of resources, even given relatively vast resources.

Besides which, if you threaten the sheriff, haven't you already blown it? Best case scenario, he folds, your truck full of alien technology moves on, Mulder and Scully are frustrated, great. But now the sheriff knows there's some kind of conspiracy. You just turned a skeptic into the believer. He doesn't know the details, he doesn't know what was in a truck, but he knows, and he believes. He now distrusts all of the organs of control you're trying to rule the world with - the military, the government, etc., - and to one degree or another, he's going to pass that on to the people around him.

So what an incompetent conspiracy! They don't know how to go about their business! What were they thinking?

Well, the thing is, that apparent incompetence does two things: it drives the plot, obviously, but it also informs the world. Because this is a world where this is a big conspiracy and Scully and Mulder have a chance of finding out about it.

This is a subtle point about the Masquerade. I'm used to media that take the inviolability of the Masquerade for granted, like Vampire. This becomes a bit of a joke in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in fact, the idea that no matter what insane thing happens the general populace bumbles around and either fails to notice or makes up lame excuses (my favorite moment of this is in the first episode, when Cordelia says about a horde of attacking vampires, "they were an ugly way of looking. And Buffy, like, knew them!") But in the X Files, the masquerade is not inviolable. There's a conspiracy, and they're creepy and they have vast resources, but they screw up, and Scully and Mulder could expose them.

Basically, in the X Files, the Masquerade is an antagonist, rather than an aspect of the setting - and as antagonists, they desperately to be fallible. They need to do dumb stuff like pressure the sheriff. As a setting element, the masquerade should be absolute, because it allows the story to function, but as a "character," not so much.

Vampire Music

There's a certain set of songs that have become a part of how I visualize and understand the world of my Vampire game. Having gotten to know the players a little, I started thinking of themes for them. I came up with the below list and then, like you do, found the tracks on youtube and sent my players the playlist, and I thought I'd share that here as well.





Quick liner notes:

1. Kiss Kiss Kiss - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Cal + Viv's theme)
2. Can You See The Light - Butterfly Boucher (Beckett's Theme, disregard weird AMV)
3. Little Mouth - Sleater-Kinney (Little's Theme) (Seriously, that's the name of the song)
4. Adventure - Be Your Own Pet (Brain's Theme)
5. Rock 'N' Roll - The Sounds (Viv's Theme)
6. Date With the Night - Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Cal's Theme)
7. Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong, But... - Arctic Monkeys (Credits Theme)

I'm not by nature a very musical person, but with the help of Pandora I've started using music to help me feel and conceptualize the world of a game. Pandora has some very sharp limitations - any playlist eventually settles into a rut and you hear your own personal top 40 playing over and over again, for one thing - but I love it as a tool for discovering new songs and artists.

For instance, I'd heard this song by Butterfly Boucher years ago, and when something reminded me of it I made a Pandora station off of it. That led me to this band called Magneta Lane, who are a fair amount louder and fiercer than Butterfly Boucher. Magneta Lane had exactly the sort of feel I wanted for the mythical Vampire: the Requiem game that was always in my head: rocking but emotional, loud but melodic. So I built a whole Pandora station off of them and honed it over the course of about six months. It provided me with most of the tracks above. Check it out.

Vampire session!

We played our second session – first “mainstage” session – of Vampire: the Requiem last night. On the whole it was definitely a big success, and everybody had a lot of fun. I still think I made some mistakes that I can improve upon, but the overall objective of having a good night with my friends was met.

Long long accounting of what went down below. My big notes for myself are to remember to use the atrocity rules to full effect - I was good about polling the group for if they thought new atrocity dice were warranted, but I don't think I ever asked anyone to throw in atrocity dice in place of their regular dice pool. Also, most of the combat that took place was not important enough to merit a full blow-by-blow, so I think I'll read up on the simplified combat rules in Danse Macabre for a more "indy feel.".

A quick note about Danse Macabre: it's probably my favorite "crunchy" Vampire supplement ever. I love the clanbooks as an experience, but Danse Macabre has done the most to change the way I approach Vampire. The idea of tiers inspired my current game in certain ways; even though the players are at the "default" antediluvian tier, the tiers section of Danse unpacked some of the basic concepts of Vampire for me in a very useful way. I also love the atrocity system as a replacement for humanity and the hierarchy of sins, and the simplified combat rules saved my bacon when one ultimately unimportant scuffle threatened to drag out indefinitely with most of the players just looking on.

Danse Macabre is nominated for an Enny at the moment; I think I may just navigate right over and vote for it, in fact.

Long actual play follows:

Vampire: the Requiem game - first session

So I effing love effing Vampire: the Requiem to pieces. Someday I'll have to get into why - which will involve figuring out why, probably - but for now I'll just tell you I've loved this game for a long time and never really played it. I'm writing about Vampire now because I'm playing it again. We had our first session two weekends ago! We're playing again tomorrow night!

I'm playing with what I guess you could call my role-playing group. They're all close friends with varying degrees and types of role-playing experience. I had wanted to role-play and to run a game for a while, and through various circumstances it emerged they each had an interest in playing one. Our first game was an amazing run of Lady Blackbird. I will always be grateful to John Harper, designer of Lady Blackbird, for that wonderful experience, so thank you, John.  I'll talk about it sometime.

Everyone was so kind to humor my desire to run a Requiem game as well. Two things about Lady Blackbird: it uses pregenerated character, and setting creation is a part of the game (as the politically-correct goblin Snargle or the gigantic gems known as heartstones needed to navigate the Remnant from our game attest). So, playing Requiem provided two challenges for my players they hadn't needed to tackle before: creating their own characters and dealing with an existing setting. 

Read more after the break.