Okay, so I thought I'd have more of these up by now, but I've been distracted, and my energy for physically writing has been largely taken up by notes and prep for my group's next game, for which I might do an official announcement post or not, I haven't decided yet. I mean, we know what we're playing, I'm just trying to figure out if I want to do a thing for it before session write-ups happen.
Either way, here we are for another flashback post to my Promethean game. And, um, I can't think of anything else to add. So let's get to it.
So a few players couldn't make it to this session, and normally in my groups when a player can't make it to a session we just find a way to have their character fade into the background or something. But given where the first session left off we had a pretty good way to split up the group. Not to railroad folks, but we just declared that the three missing players' characters (Lafayette[0], Father John, and Ander) were off chasing who or whatever it was that escaped from the basement. The remaining characters (Jane[1], Steve, Rudolf, and Jack) take it upon themselves to try and find the home of Dr. Matthew Gino.
They can't find a "Matthew Gino" in the phone book, though there are a couple of "M. Gino" entries. They call them and get no answer from one and contact a "Miranda Gino" at the second. Time for legwork! They hop a bus across town, their presence causing a wave of disturbance among the passengers. They reach the apartment building where the other "M. Gino" lives and break into his mailbox to find that it was a "Michael Gino" living there. So no luck there.[2]
They decide to try the local universities next, as he might be a professor at one of them and even if he isn't the public computer terminals on-campus would facilitate a search. So they start at Louisiana Tech, splitting further into two groups. Rudolf and Steve go to the computer lab to try and find Gino, while Jane and Jack ask around to try and see if he works at the school. Despite the latter's best efforts (or because Jane started asking the student working the information desk if he knew anyone who was into suspension), they only learn that nobody by that name works on campus. But with some effort, Rudolf is able to find some public records with Gino's home address.
So another trip across town later, they find Dr. Gino's house about the middle of the night. Or, more accurately, they find what's left of his house. Apparently Gino lived in one of the parts of New Orleans that hadn't yet recovered from Katrina[3], and the whole neighborhood is pretty much a ruin. They make their way through what's left of it, noting the rats scurrying through the garbage and homeless people living in the wreckage.
While they're there, they sense an Azothic radiance, indicating another Promethean is nearby, and they decide to check it out before they go into Gino's place. They find a small clearing in the wreckage where an emaciated Osiran who looks like a heroin junkie is clinging to the shadows downwind from a garbage can fire. He's close enough to enjoy the heat but far enough he doesn't have to worry about stray sparks. They get his attention and have a bit of a chat, during which he introduces himself as Sicky.[4] They ask if he knows anything about Gino or his house, but he doesn't seem to know anything useful and Rudolf gives him a twenty-dollar bill out of some cash he found at the lab.
While they search through the ruin of Gino's house, Jack uses his Ulgan abilities to try and talk to the spirits there. He finds a spirit of wreckage watching the living room, and it tells him that Gino hasn't been there in a while, but a "man with burning footprints" told it to watch the place. Apparently Gino and his guests are expected to come back, and the spirit needs to keep an eye on the house. They break a few still-intact things in the house to 'feed' the spirit, though they can't get it to leave the rug in the living room.
However, they are able to find a journal that appears to belong to Gino while combing the house. But they don't have a good opportunity to open it before they hear Sicky outside calling out "Guys, I think we got trouble..."
And we left off there. I'll try to get these up a little more regularly when I get the chance.
[0]-- It wouldn't be official until the next session or possibly after, but I think this is where Andy/Lafayette dropped out. Yes, that's right, we only had him for one actual session. There was a whole kerfluffle at a LARP he was co-running around this time, but I can't remember if he was legitimately out of town for this session (as a couple of my players were) and the LARP incident happened after, or if the incident happened first, but either way he got butthurt and bailed. IIRC, he didn't even tell me he bailed, either, I had to hear it through someone else a couple of weeks later that he wasn't coming back (even if I'd already figured it out).
[1]-- Actually, checking my notes, as near as I can tell this is the only session where we have Jane, though it was a couple more sessions before I learned Amanda had quit because, like Andy, she didn't bother letting me know. Officially, her work schedule conflicted with the game (though not enough to stop her from showing up at the coffee house mid-game and bothering us at least once after she left). It may have been a factor that she was dating someone else in the group and mostly just wanted to spend game time sitting in his lap and soaking up attention and took it personally that he wanted to play the game.
[2]-- I dug up some of my old notes trying to find what inspired this little runaround. It looks like at the time I had a specific avenue of inquiry in mind (checking lists of people believed missing/dead and disaster reports and such) and thought it would be clever to pre-emptively thwart the obvious solution (checking the phone book). Of course, my players weren't as psychic as I likely expected and I had to figure something out. But pretty much anyone who's run a game has been there.
[3]-- Just a reminder, this game took place in the fall of 2006, just a little over a year after the hurricane.
[4]-- If you've got the first edition supplement Pandora's Book, this is the same Sicky who appears in the adventure in the back.
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