Friday, October 23, 2020

Actual Play Index

It's occurred to me that rather than just throwing people at the Actual Play tag, I could put together a detailed description of the games listed by system, setting, etc. It also allows me to basically have ratings, content warnings, and so on if need be. For the record, however, the vast majority of my game sessions run in the range of 'you could show this on network television before 11pm.' Also, this allows me to point out which games are running, which games are on hiatus, etc. If there are any questions, just ask.

Each entry lists the number of posts you'd have to wade through to read it, as well as the current status. For ease of quick browsing, anything current or complete has its status bolded, while anything on hiatus is underlined.

For the most part this is just going to be stuff I've run, though some of the linked posts related to conventions may include stuff I played in as well.

Ongoing:

Exalted

Welcome to Creation, the world of Exalted. Exalted's an epic fantasy setting reflecting a broad array of cultural storytelling tropes and devices. Here's a setting primer if you need one.

Also, as the Exalted game is being handled as kind of an 'episodic' thing story-wise, I'm also providing a little guide to the individual story arcs, grouped by series.

The Road Between Light and Dark

A Solar, an Infernal, and an Exigent walk into a bar patrol the Traveler's Road between the Northern cities of Whitewall and Gethamane, protecting travelers and assisting the villages along the route. Character intros here. Ongoing.


Episode 1: Off the Beaten Path -- So far, just a typical trip from Whitewall to Gethamane. Road, near-spring weather, ghost attack... pretty normal. What isn't normal are those strange lights out in the woods... (3 posts)
Episode 2: A Bandit By Any Other Name -- A group of Realm soldiers from House Ragara are raiding the countryside like common bandits. Some wandering heroes should probably find out why and put a stop to it. (2 posts)
Episode 3: The Territory is Not the Map -- When Lecht is uniquely suited to decipher a 'wrong' treasure map, the Circle finds themselves off on a classic treasure hunt! (2 posts)
Episode 4: Burning Daylight -- The group's brief stopover in Fella is interrupted by people and animals turned into monsters by liquid sunshine! (2 posts)
Episode 5: The Snare -- The town of Larmik is under attack by raiders from the Broken Antler tribe. Despite the raiders' seemingly-fearless nature, this seems like a relatively mundane problem, except for the fact that the town's protective god is mysteriously missing. (Ongoing)



Tales of the Moonlight Maiden

A Circle of Lunar Exalted wandering up and down the Southwestern coast and islands, fighting evil and saving people and so on.  Story arc complete!

Episode 1: The Grim Vortex -- The small fishing village of Beacon has been press-ganged into helping a crew of pirates led by a necromancer recover an important treasure from a shipwreck. What could be so important as to enslave an entire village? (3 posts)

Episode 2: Fedan's Puzzle Box -- The Circle takes the artifact from the shipwreck to An-Teng, where it was intended to go. But only by saving the shipping company can they find out who's receiving one of the most precious treasures in all of Creation. (3 posts, covering 4 sessions)

Episode 3: Hunt for the Admiral -- A Wyld Hunt has come to chase an Anathema... but they're not here for our intrepid heroes! Can the Circle catch up to them in time to save a potential ally? (3 posts)

Episode 4: The Slain Scion -- An abandoned island, a forlorn manor, a dark secret... what mysterious tragedy befell the Dutan family? (3 posts)

Episode 5: The Buried Past -- A lost age collides with the present when a group of adventurers uncovers a forgotten danger to Creation. (2 posts)

Episode 6: Port in a Storm -- What should have been a normal stop to meet a Lunar contact has put the group into the middle of a conflict between two Dynastic houses! Can they do something about this without putting the island in danger? (3 posts, covering 4 sessions, and an associated mini-fiction)

Episode 7: Ill Omens -- A ship of the dead leads the Lunar trio to an island under the 'protection' of a rogue disease god, and have a rare opportunity to fight an outbreak with their fists. (2 posts)

Episode 8: The Lost Pages -- Lathe, at last! But wait, why is someone taking books out of the city's occult libraries, and why have a bunch of those books wound up in Xương's clinic? (5 posts)

Episode 9: Depths of the Past -- From Beacon, to Dutan Island, to Lathe, the Circle has been stumbling over pieces of what's turning out to be a larger mystery. Research in Lathe has pointed them towards a sunken island deep in the Southwest, where hopefully they'll get some answers about the Eternal Wave, the Captain of the Ashen Umbra, and who was really after that Exigence. (3 posts, and an associated mini-fiction)

Episode 10: The Mirage Kingdom -- The trio venture inland, in search of a mythical kingdom run by a trio of powerful Lunars. Can they cross the harsh, forbidding land of the far Southwest? And if so, will they find the Three Devil Princes or a story taken too far? (4 posts)

Episode 11: The Empty Palace -- From one First Age relic to another! The crew has crossed the dangerous desert to find a possible obstacle to resolving Xương's vision of an underwater fortress. But has someone gotten to it first? (3 posts)

Episode 12: Burn Scars -- Blackened Bone Whispers' sanctum has been located, and now it's time to put an end to the rogue volcano god. But doing so means Haifeng must face the ghosts of their past. Can they pass through the flames, or will they get burned? (5 posts)

Episode 13: Crossroads -- With a little bit of room to breathe, the crew returns to Lathe to unwind. But strangeness surrounds a Gateway tournament that has brought pirates, monsters, and even a luminary of the Realm to this corner of Creation. What has drawn such attention, and what does it have to do with the mysterious Game of Scribes? (10 posts)

Episode 14: The Arena -- Calibration has arrived, and a mysterious invitation to an exclusive martial arts tournament means that the crew of the Moonlight Maiden is spending the five weirdest days of the year... in Heaven? (17 posts)

Episode 15: Embers -- New year, familiar places! The crew, headed back east, has stopped off in Smolder. How has the place fared since their last visit, and what fires are about to flare up? (7 posts)

Episode 16: Pulling Strings -- The group travels to Goldenseal in Zhaojūn to help out Hǎifēng's associate and friend Copper Orchid, but in the process find themselves tangled in a web of intrigue. Who's pulling the strings on this particular puppet show? (8 posts)

Episode 17: Matching Set -- The second puzzle box has arrived in Creation with a bang, ending the Circle's vacation in Goldenseal. Can they retrieve it before it winds up in the wrong hands, and what does it portend for the future of An-Teng? (3 posts and a minific)

Episode 18: Dark Clouds on the Horizon (The Battle of An-Teng, Part 1) -- Captain Ash has attacked Smolder on their way to An-Teng with a fleet! The crew of the Moonlight Maiden rush to Salt-Founded Glory, seeking allies and delivering warnings in the hopes that they won't be standing alone against the impending attack. (3 posts)

Episode 19: The Ashen Fleet (The Battle of An-Teng, Part 2) -- The season finale! The Ashen Fleet has arrived, and the Circle faces their greatest test yet, as they take on a Deathlord's forces with An-Teng's future on the line! (2 posts covering a total of 5 sessions, as well as an additional post with some behind-the-scenes details)


Promethean

I am also doing updated write-ups of my old Promethean game (albeit very slowly). I mean, you can read more about what it's about just slightly further down the page, so here I'll just point towards a handy link for the current write-ups. 12 posts, covering 13 sessions. Ongoing posts, though the game itself is long-over.




Past Games, Completed and Otherwise:

These are games that've been finished or abandoned or on hiatus. 

Chronicles of Darkness
These games are all part of a continuous setting I've referred to as the 'Woodburn Chronicles.' (The link not only takes you to the games listed below but a good bit of fiction not directly tied to said games.) Most of them take place in the modern-ish day (usually around the time the first sessions were run and posted and diverging from there), in and around northern West Virginia. The Chronicles of Darkness setting (originally called New World of Darkness, a label that may persist in some of the older entries) is a horror setting so expect death and murder to be semi-regular occurrences - enough that I'll only put warnings on specific stuff, and some specific posts will have their own warnings. But, as pointed out above, nothing you couldn't show in most episodes of the X-Files or Millennium.


From earliest to most recent:
Burning Footsteps (Promethean: The Created 1st Edition) -- A group of Prometheans, monsters made from the parts of dead people and learning how to be human, come together in 2006 and get drawn into the wake of destiny. This was originally written up on my LiveJournal and has since been archived on Dreamwidth, and the above link just goes there rather than any other posts on this blog. But this means that some of these posts are going to have write-ups of other games not included here, a lot of broken links and images, and just a lot of bullshit that seemed clever on LiveJournal back in the mid-late 00's. You've been warned. 29 sessions if I've counted right. Unfinished on-screen ('finished' off-screen via player discussion), though it got an epilogue story a decade later.

The Morgantown Project (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition) -- A coterie of vampires from Charleston, WV investigate goings-on in Morgantown and become entangled in the machinations of one of the Strix. This game started as a LARP that became a tabletop game so I don't have any notes from before that, and between that and the fact that I started this blog while the game was going on it means that the entries kind of pick up at the start of the last act. 5 sessions posted, including a 'summary so far.' Completed.

Return of the Inquisitor (Hunter: The Vigil 1st Edition + Mortal Remains patch) -- A one-shot I ran at Gencon 2016, featuring a team-up of Task Force: VALKYRIE and the Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit teaming up to hunt down a supernatural serial killer. Also references an old Hunter LARP and an earlier one-shot that never got written up, but it should stand on its own well enough. One-shot. Completed, of course.

Digestif (Mixed game, all 2nd Edition) -- A follow-up to the Morgantown Project, building off of some Very Bad Choices made in the final session of that game. It features one of the vampires from Morgantown Project (and has cameos by another down the road), and also includes a mage, a beast, and a demon. 16 sessions. Completed.

Sin City (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition) -- In 1951 Las Vegas, a group of Sin-Eaters (people who've died and been brought back by entities called geists and now straddle the worlds of the living and dead) finds themselves wrapped up in mobster-related trouble that rapidly becomes less and less mundane the more they dig into it. Part of my Woodburn Chronicles setting (see below). 28 posts, a few of which comprise multiple sessions, and a wrap-up post. Completed, sort of.



Other Games:

Dead Suns (Starfinder) -- The Dead Suns adventure path from Paizo. A ragtag band of Starfinders investigate a strange rock and wind up on a quest taking them across the universe and stumbling into the remnants of a beyond-ancient war between two long-dead civilizations. Also organized by module: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six. 24 posts, some of which comprise multiple sessions; ended unfinished by the pandemic.

No Rest For the Wicked -- A fan-made Borderlands RPG. A group of mercenaries (not quite Vault Hunters, not yet) explore mysteries on a planet with its own non-Pandoran weirdness. 5 sessions (plus a preview post and a character intro post), ended unfinished by the pandemic.

Cave of Secrets (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition) -- A Classic World of Darkness game starting in summer of 2011, in which a group of werewolves rediscover a lost caern and build a new sept around the town of Marlinton, WV. (This one, moreso than the CofD games above, is pretty heavy on the murder and mayhem, so expect occasional gore and in one session some torture.) 36 sessions. Completed.

What Lies Buried and Space Brigade's Legacy (Trinity Continuum: Æon) -- A pair of one-shots I ran at Gencons 2018 and 2019, where the members of the Æon Trinity's disavowed covert-ops group Section Minerva investigate goings-on in the Lunar criminal underworld. 2 sessions. Technically the first two parts of a trilogy, but I haven't run the third one yet as Gencon 2020 was cancelled. But they still stand on their own, so consider them Completed.

Department of Homeworld Security and Old Fashioned Mummy Hunt (Monster of the Week) -- A pair of one-shots I ran at Gencons 2015 and 2016, featuring a government monster-hunter squad. The first one has the group investigating some weirdness in West Virginia, while the second, well... it follows up on the first, I don't want to spoil it. 2 one-shots. Completed.

Studio CrewUnnatural Method, and Unfilmable (Monster of the Week) -- A trio of one-shots I ran at Gencons 2015 and 2017 (the second and third sessions are both at the same post, I didn't screw up the link) about investigators of the supernatural operating in Hollywood. At some point after the first session of this I ran I came up with the name 'Supernatural Studios' for the mini-setting, but I haven't done anything with it in a few years for Reasons. 3 one-shots. Completed.

War Orphans (Doctor Who) -- A group of young Time Lords steal a TARDIS and go on an adventure, and find themselves flung into the period after the Last Great Time War. They have to find their way in a dangerous universe where the Time Lords are gone and they're hunting horrors of the Time War that have followed them... 10 sessions, Unfinished and left off on a cliffhanger.

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