Welcome back to Shadowrun Sundays!
Playing games is fun. So is writing for them. I’m of the mind that if you want to write for RPGs, or games in general, you should actually play the games. Taking a page from my own advice, I have a weekly gaming group. Right now we’re playing Earthdawn, with the GM mixing up the best of second and third editions. My character, Akane, is a Sword Dancer from the Cathay book. We’ve all reached third circle at this point (the lower the circle, the easier it is to advance levels) and are working on fourth.
A few weeks ago, some cultists dropped some Shards (elemental monsters like golems) into the middle of Vivane and we had to fight them. We learned that Shards are vulnerable to wood, but my character refused to switch over to a staff because, you know, that’s peasant weaponry. Swords are the way to go even if all I did was make the Shards mad.
Despite gamemaster hints that we should really go on this different other quest, the other party members decided to chase down the cultists and put an end to them. So this session we spent running around after an eighth circle illusionist and his cronies. I ended up in jail after thwacking a troll city guardsman who was quite the bully and so the team went on their way until the archer shot a city guardsman’s horse and got herself thrown in jail with me. We got sprung by a navy captain who wants our help on the quest we were supposed to be following, but the other two party members insisted on chasing up the cultists.
Finally we found the cultists in a bar down in an orcish area of town, and that’s when it happened. Willpower check! And me, I am betrayed by my 12-sided die as I roll a 1. Of course that’s the only low roll I get for the rest of the night. Instantly I see my teammates joining the cult, turning into monsters themselves. The windling (think pixie) grows almost seven feet tall, everyone starts chanting and threatening to drop Shard “eggs” all over the place.
I have no choice. I can’t let my friends destroy the city. So I try to take them down with the wooden sword someone carved up for me in the meantime. Instead I pull out my Dew of the Lotus sword (D8 + D6 damage) and start thwacking away. I don’t know why none of them go down easily, but I keep trying. I even spend Karma on the attack (it gives me an extra die) and hit every single time.
Honestly, if I’d been playing fair, I would have been Air Dancing and Blade Dancing and using my second weapon, but I thought I was using my wooden sword and trying not to actually hurt anyone. Regardless, every damage roll ended up being over 20 points of damage each and every time.
My poor confused teammates heard me screaming like a blood-thirsty lunatic and saw me attacking thin air. The only reason the rest of the cultists didn’t attack them was because the illusionist was having such a fun time pulling my strings and all of them were doubled over laughing at my antics.
At the end of it all, poor me is exhausted and panting while the illusionist is laughing so hard he has to drop the spell. At which point an anime-style bar brawl breaks out when (as he leaves the bar) he tells his cronies not to hurt us “too much.” And so we have an role-played fight (no dice are rolled) where many tables, chairs, bottles and windows are broken. Bruised in both body and pride, we limp out of the bar for our meeting with our real client.
And this is how a gamemaster gets the team back on track without railroading the party. Thing is, he told us later that it would have been a TPK if we’d succeeded on our Willpower checks. The cultists didn’t have high skills, but there were over forty of them and only four of us. Their numbers would have taken us down in a real fight. But because I failed my saving throw, I inadvertently saved the party.
Yay, me! (I think.)
So what are your recent game session stories?
