We kicked off a new campaign under Christopher Rice’s GMing hand. We are doing all sorts of interesting things with rules for this game. It’s still GURPS at the core, but we’ve got all sort of modular add-ons on trial. A card deck system, foibles and flaws from Pointless Looting and Slaying and/or Pointless Monster Hunting in play instead of quantified disadvantages, and a bunch of other stuff, including a lot of home-built magic.
The basic genre of the game is modern-day monster hunting. The quirk is that we’re going to game through our character development, starting as 12-14yo kids, and then doing some flash-forward stuff and time skips. So we’ll play through a bunch of sessions as teens, then flash forward to likely college-age stuff, then maybe once or twice more.
The soft premise is that we are chosen, for good or ill, by the great powers of the world – and by “great powers” we’re basically talking God, and specifically the God of the Bible. There’s a lot more nuance to it than this, and some very, very promising campaign themes and concepts and backstory that we all had some hand in nudging. But there’s a lot of depth to the cosmology here, and it’s very exciting.
Due to technical difficulties getting the transcript done, this is the summary of the first two sessions.
Meet Gabriel MacAlister
Gabriel (Gabe) MacAlister was born in December 1980. His father was a hard-charging Delta forces type; his mother was a practicing nurse and missionary. He bounced all over the hottest spots in the world, and both his parents took service to others as the highest calling. Gabe spent his early years in North Carolina, but then went with his family to Beirut in 1982, departing from there having picked up a good deal of Arabic in 1984.
From there his mother and he went as missionaries to Ethiopia, for the horrible famines there, and Gabe accompanied her on life-saving and comfort-giving missions as best he could. More Arabic, and also picked up French when he had to live in Djibouti for a while, as Ethiopia had just gotten too horrible.
They rotated back to the USA in 1987, then redeployed to South America on anti-drug and pro-democracy actions for his father. This strengthened his Spanish. Then back to North Carolina for a year, and then back to Saudi Arabia for the run-up to Desert Shield. By this time, Gabe was 10, strongly multilingual, and had been running around in pretty rough places in the world for most of his life, learning confidence, wrestling and some brutal fighting, and survival, medical skills, and all sorts of things along the way from two very capable and hands-on parents. His mother had kept him humble and taught him urban survival and rural living, as well as his acting as her assistant in situations no child should ever have to see. His father kept him strong and taught him independence, self-reliance, and a savagely direct fighting style that meant that any bullying by local toughs only happened once.
The father saw fighting – lots of it – in Saudi Arabia: SCUD hunting, and other action, up until he and his unit ran into something horrible in the Iraqi desert. Only three people of an entire unit came out of that mission. Their debrief noted they’d been attacked and ambushed at night in close-in fighting by a foe that the never saw.
He suffered a seemingly-minor injury during that conflict that led him to decide that while fit to be a regular soldier, he could no longer keep up as a true member of SFOD-D; he and Maria elected to stop wandering, and bring their almost-teen-age son home, and start a new life.
They moved back to North Carolina only briefly, packed their meager possessions, and decided on Boston. They had only been in their new apartment, and Gabriel in his new school, for perhaps three months when tragedy struck, and both of Gabe’s parents were killed in a horrible mass murder in 1993. This mass-murder is the tie that binds all of the PCs together – all of us lost our family that night, as sole survivors, like the Angel of Death passing over Egypt.
Dramatis Personae
Kamali Blackshear (12): Kamali is a young boy in his early teens. He is healthy and is of mixed ethnicity of Caucasian South African and native South African. He is a determined youth who believes in a justice of his own, likening himself to the knight of the round whom he has read deeply into. Just asthey stood against the darkness of their age so too does Kamali seek to do the same. For his sister, for his friends, and for the world.
Tag: “A knight without sword carrying faith nobody believes.”
Lorenzo DeModouco (13):
Amos M. Humiston (13) – A comfortable existence turned upside down, he’s still shell-shocked from what happened to his parents and has switched from a small and chatty boy to a small and quiet boy. Amos tends to quietly slip along after the group leaving a trail of books read behind him. And though he doesn’t volunteer himself quite yet, he’s always happy to help the best he can without showing off his intelligence, though that doesn’t stop him from being happy to do so when it’s possible.
Gabriel MacAlister (12) – Built like the natural athlete he is, he shows signs of growing even larger and stronger. A fairly quiet and hard working lad, always ready to lend a hand with any work, which he will do without complaint or obligating the other person to respond. Emphatically not a pushover or weak personality, but also not one to purposefully show off. Has been in many horrible places and seen many horrible things; he’s a bit of a compulsive planner as a result, as well as always feeling that most folks don’t really know how lucky they are.
Tag: “To serve others is the highest calling; to protect the meek the noblest endeavor.”
Timothy I Mitchell (14): Timothy possess an honest if forgettable face. He tends towards comfortable, though inexpensive clothing and durable running shoes, rounding off his typical attire is a deep pocketed jacket and a backpack slung over one shoulder. Timothy appears to be a poster-boy for bad kids, often finding himself in trouble with any and all forms of authority. A victim of neglect, driven to never become a victim again he often acts seemingly on impulse, taking any dare or challenge in his stride. Timothy doesn’t have friends, not in any real sense. Too few of the people who enter his orbit can deal with him in anything more than bite sized pieces, a fact which only further frustrates the young teenager.
Tag: “Darkness is within all of us, it’s how you use that darkness that matters”
Continue reading “The Chronicles of Ceteri (B-Team): Prelude and Ep2” →
When Shawn Fisher emailed me that the US Army was looking at adopting a new medium machinegun, this one capable of accurate automatic fire at a range of over a mile, where the M-2 in .50BMG can only deliver single shots, I was intrigued. When I heard it was being considered in .338 Norma Magnum, I knew it was time for a reloading press.
In the