Session 5 Retrospective

White Wolf don't write very good adventures.

I know that sounds rather condemning, but frankly it's true. Their writers tend not to consider a lot of things when they put together their modules, such as the fact that players tend to think outside the box and tackle things in the most direct, easiest and least life-threatening way.

For instance, this week's session was run as-is from the White Wolf adventure module 'The Ressurectionists'. I added scenes at the start and the end to bookend them, and by the end of the session, everyone in the group was confident that those bits worked best. Maybe that's because I've got the best vampire group ever.

The adventure as it comes starts in a graveyard, and hops to a flashback. And it really is a hunt-and-seek type of an adventure, going from region of the map to next region, figuring out some pretty simple clues as to where to go next. The clues aren't especially hard; "2am at the rabbi's grave" tends to be rendered insultingly obvious when you realise that the rabbi's grave has a clock-face on it, for instance.

The adventure also comes with some encounters we never even got to. For instance, a group of homeless had set up home in the cemetery, and our group never got to meet them, simply due to the fact that they were placed outside the map region we'd been near. Why they couldn't have been placed at the same region is a total mystery; in fact, why the map had quite so many regions when the point of exploring them was rendered so pointless by the simplicity of the puzzles is another real problem.

Which brings us to the ghouls; sent by a rival faction, they were complete pushovers in terms of statistics, and had utterly no method to help them against Jude's use of Domination. I mean, each of these minions had a walkie-talkie with them; all that my players needed to do was dominate one of these ghouls into telling the entire team that our party had cleared out, and that was the entire obstacle rendered mute. Which is exactly what happened.

Anyway, the good points.

Dan made a few very good points today, that nWoD vampires are pretty squishy. They don't take damage without flinching anywhere near as well as they did in oWoD. That's true, and it applies to all characters in nWoD, regardless of their supernatural leanings. So when it came down to blasting away at Rafael Pope before he could draw blood from the sacrificial Andre, I had no problem asking for no dice rolls. Who's going to win anyway, a dried corpse or a vampire wielding a hunting rifle? nWoD is much more narrative-structured; if it helps the story and the plot is cool and dramatic, it's best to go with it. So when Dan's Gangrel wants to pop Resiliance and march through a hail of gunfire, I'm going to be opting for the cool factor, rather than micro-managing the combat dicepools.

The adventure worked pretty smoothly in terms of offsetting the power balance in the game. The best reaction in the entire game was when I revealed that the victim in the box was in fact Andre, and the look on Jane's face when I did that was genuine shock. This game simply wouldn't have worked without that impact; it established that the Sanctum are monsters (of course, so are the Circle; but the characters don't know that yet) and ushers in the oncoming storm. Big things are now ready to happen in Santa Monica, and this adventure filled the atmospheric gap between them; especially at the end, where both Druid Samael and Bishop Blackwell came across as deeply suspicious, fiercely powerful and relentlessly merciless.

This chapter in the campaign is all about our four heroes growing to become rulers of Santa Monica. They will accomplish that, I've no doubt of that. But they will need the power of one or more of the covenants to do that. I'm just really keen to see which one - especially after they finish next session's twist ending.