Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Hunted by the Yakuza

Or something like that...

We had our second session of Vampire today (I'm in a short tabletop Vampire campaign, for those who haven't heard), and it was really the first full session because we spent the bulk of the time creating characters in the first meeting. The game is set in contemporary Oxford, except with the twist of supernatural things in the air. (Our next session is on Halloween. Spoooooooky....) All of us are humans but have psychic powers (from the book Second Sight) that have just been awakened via a psychological experiment. (We're currently trying to pin down how this happened.) I am playing Billy McLatte, a mild-mannered employee of the Starbucks that is attached to the location of Border's a bit down the road from where I live in real life. Billy has always been interested in the occult, especially the spirit world, and I chose his various skills and specialties (before we picked psychic powers) to give him very good roles in that. His three psychic powers use those good rolls and are actually pretty powerful. He can see and speak to dead people (death sight, ghost calling) and can also do ghost channelling (call either a specific ghost or some random ghost with specific desired abilities --- say, a ghost that's buffer than he is --- into his body). He finds his new powers really cool and always wanted to do the seance thing anyway.

So, why is our party (not just me) now being hunted by the Yakuza (or, more technically, this campaign's version of it). Simple... I called and conversed with the wrong ghost (though I'm pretty sure that conversing with him was an intended part of the plot), who (along with his allies) has basically told us that we should all be killed for breaking the natural balance of things. Hence, because of my character's actions (oops), we are now effectively hunted by the Yakuza. Billy ended up getting chased through the streets of Oxford by a 12-foot tall spectral Hell Hound that started stalking him near St. John's College. Ugh, he can talk to ghosts and do other cool stuff but his physical attributes are craptacular and he can't even come close to defending himself from that. (It's great when the party splits up, huh?)

You know, this isn't the first character I've played that has created party enemies. None of you actually played with Famish, who was my very kenderish sorceror. Sawtooth caused some trouble as well, but his enemies didn't typically leave battles alive and the DM in that game didn't do nasty things like sending assassins to kill us the way my DM at Georgia Tech did. That said, the GT DM was an awesome DM, but the action definitely sometimes came very directly to us. He warned us that people would remember our actions and things like that could happen if we pissed people off. And Famish definitely picked up the 'hunted by the Yakuza' trait --- though I can't remember at the moment what the organization was actually called in that game.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, good thing about the timing of next session. Sounds like the party can use some down time.

Will there be any actual vampires in this Vampire campaign? ;-)

Zifnab said...

Hunted by the Yakuza is good! It offers many wonderful play choices! :)

I was wondering the same thing as Justin actually, is it supposed to be one where yall are vampires, or is it just a WoD game with the characters mostly being psychics? Cause that's cool too. :)

Mason said...

It's funny you should ask about whether or not there will be vampires. I've been wondering exactly the same thing.

There haven't been any signs of them yet.