Austin TX: An Awakened Perspective Downtime Session

Here's The extended downtime scene I wrote up to explain my characters absence from the game for 7 weeks. It's kinda long but hopefully enjoyable.

Austin TX: An Awakened Perspective Session 6

Session 6 of the world of darkness game involved the majority of the players passing through the hedge and trying to rescue Eile. This happened outside of my characters realm of knowledge and can be read about here. To be honest I'm quite glad my character wasn't involved as I had reservations about taking him into the hedge and playing the character he would have had reservations about it as well. Add in the fact that I had to leave the game early due to working the next day and you can tell it wouldn't have ended well. So, Calin was totally absent from the actual game that night. What I did do is sit down with one of the assistant ST's and hash out some character details and background stuff. This was a pretty good talk for me as it led me to change my character concept around. I originally had Calin as a defender of the weak and poor kind of a Robin Hood without the theft type character, but after answering some questions I began to get a different view of him. My revised concept is that he functions as part of the Internal Affairs Department of the Adamantine Arrows. He is a "fixer" of sorts. Finding the problems in cabals and setting them right again. This view explains away some of the things I was having difficulty with such as why he didn't really have any close companions and why he wasn't in a formal cabal himself. He IS in a cabal but it is more of a loose affialation of the "lone wolves" of the Arrows called the "Arrows Fletching" for those of you who don't know, the fletching of an arrow is the feathers at the back of an arrow that give it stability and make it fly straight. In other words the guides for the arrows. Which is exactly what I imagine my character doing. He's there to correct the mistakes by whatever means and set the cabal flying straight again.

Character profile: Calin

Well, this is it. This is my most current character. Calin is my second World of Darkness character. He's a mage like my previous character, so not much has changed there, but the personalities are totally different. Where as Dan was brash, vulgar and a drunk, Calin is very composed, sure and also sober. I've already posted one short story on Calin here but haven't done more since he wasn't properly introduced. Since he's an ongoing character I don't have a whole lot on him yet. In game he hasn't done a whole lot yet. His main contribution has been trying to decipher a journal found alongside a very much dead TK. He's also been involved with the local P.I. (who just happens to be a vampire) in trying to solve who this guy is and where he might be. Due to recent developments (the building over the chamber mysteriously burning down) however, they are back to square one. He's also finally given in to allowing an outside source to help with the translation of the book from Latin as his feeble language skills were just not enough to crack it. His most current situation is getting a little interesting and I'll be writing it up soon, as well as trying to give updates after each session.

Character Profile: Daniel Amsden

Ok, getting close to running out of characters, well at least the important ones, for you guys. Dan (aka Pence, aka Mr. Book) was my first World of Darkness character. I made him after much, much pressure from a couple of my friends ( you know who you are). I was really hesitant about joining the game, it's a LARP/table top hybrid and looked totally foreign to me. I'm used to a hard and fast tabletop game where everything is laid out for ya and all you need to do is sling some dice. This was nothing like that. Characters interacted with one another with and sometimes without GM presence, and it was a tremendous amount of actually thinking on your feet and actual role playing. An apt description given to me was "improv street theater with dice rolls" and that's really what it was. So, with all my previous characters I've played a spell caster of some sort with usually disastrous results (burned down a bar, almost killed an entire party, etc. etc.) so naturally I chose to play a Mage character.

Kai 'Al Sun Origins

Found Kai's backstory on an old thumb drive. It's a little rough but here it is for your viewing pleasure. Oh, yeah, and it's kinda long. Enjoy.

Character Profile: Kai 'Al Sun

The Man. The Myth. The Legend. The Character with the most death threats made against Him. Kai 'Al Sun. What else can I say about him. Kai was the character I made after a very long hiatus from RPGing (11 years to be exact) for the Dark Heresy campaign I was going to be in. He's a character that almost didn't get off the ground. I knew I wanted to create an Imperial Psyker so I didn't roll for that aspect of him, everything else I did and that's where the weirdness started. I almost started him all over again when I rolled his homeworld as being a feral world. Basically an Imperial backwater world with no or very limited technology. Generally associated with warriors and the like. Not a good start for someone whose supposed to be good with his mind. Then I made the stat rolls. High toughness, high strength, on and on his stats were becoming extreme with the exception of his ballistic (shooting) skill, and his fellowship (how likely people are to follow him) score. I now had something I had never seen before. The way things usually go is that a mage, psyker, caster, whatever they're called in the particular game are always good at range but once you get them in close they die. Now I had someone that could say "I'm going to kill you with the power of my mind, and if that doesn't work I've got an axe!" I set out to make him a close combat monster and by the time the campaign had to break up due to the GM leaving, he was doing around 25 points of damage per hit and he got 3 hits per turn!

I have a lot of material on this guy, his backstory is around 4 pages long and I'm working on writing up the missions we were on for my "Tales of the Imperium" series I'm doing. All of that will wind up on these pages eventually.

With this Ring........

  Calin closed his eyes and began to meditate. He thought back to his days at the temple training, he remembered his old master having objects with power directly in them. How they had been made was never directly revealed to him, only that he would learn them at a later time when the order felt he was ready. That time had yet to come and because he was still in the field he couldn’t go back and petition for the rote. He didn’t have a choice though, since coming to Austin he had seen a couple of things that already had him thinking this was a rough neighborhood. It seemed to be some sort of supernatural nexus. Which was all the more reason he needed to have his defenses up at all times.  “I know I can place this on me, I just have to figure out how to get it from me to the ring” he thought to himself. Opening himself up to the Aether he began channeling pure prime energy. The warmth of it always overwhelmed him when he first held on, but what else do you expect when you are pulling down the power of Heaven into the earth?

                Slowly Calin began to try and maneuver the shield woven of pure force onto the ring. He first slid it wholly on, but that just seemed to protect the ring and not himself. Recasting the shield again he began to chant using the high speech he had learned. As he did the world around him began to flicker and change. He could see the waves of heat coming from the vents feel the pulsing of the electrical wires in the wall, hear the winds blowing outside. It made the shield around him become more defined and have sharper edges. “There has to be a way” he thought “Maybe if I could join them together that will work" Using his hands Calin began forming a tube impossibly thin by material world standards. He stretched and thinned it out even more, then placing one end in the shield he "welded" it in place with Prime. Doing the same for the other end he could feel the force of the shield flow into the ring. Elation filled him as he believed it to have worked, however it was short lived as the ring was now tethered to him and he couldn't move his hand without pulling on the thread of Prime. Frustrated and starting to lose concentration Calin dug deeper into himself and drew deeper on the power of the Aether. "What am I missing?" Looking around himself he could see everything now. He could hear the chourus of the angels singing around him and he could see the energy going from his body into the shield. "I got it! It's not the shield, but the source of the shield that must be moved. No wonder they keep this from you. I have to give up a part of my self to sustain the energy in the shield. I understand now" Summoning all the will he could Calin reached into his essence and took the tiny bit that was powering the shield and placed it in the center stone of the ring. The smallish brown stone that was once plain now clearly had a star of light in the middle of it shining with the power placed in it. As Calin released the flow of Prime he nearly fainted as his body slumped over. A quick glance at the clock showed the reason why. He had spent 15 straight hours chanting and channeling, but it worked, the shield was still up.

Character Profile: Mr. X

This is the last of my 3rd ed. D&D characters I'm going to do. There were others but they were just new guys generated for one certain scenario or another.

Character Profile's: Kira and Pence

Gonna set the way back machine again for around 1998-1999 when I was playing a lot of D&D 3rd ed. Our group was kinda small and sometimes it would just be the DM, my friend and me playing so we would have to double up on characters in order to run a game. That's were these two polar opposites come in.

Kira, the shining paladin of Heironeous fresh out of training at the tender age of 16. Her training did not go as she had hoped however. A prodigy she might have been, but ready to take the field of battle she was not. Which was why her first assignment was to watch over -

Pence. What would you get if you put Quagmire from "Family Guy" in the body of Frodo? You'd get Pence. Pretty much the loudest, most obnoxious character I've ever played. He was your typical Halfling Rogue. Though he had learned you can distract just as many people being loud as you could sneak up on being silent. His latest exploits had put him in the bad graces of the local defense force. The only thing that saved his tiny little neck, was that his "skills" were needed by the king to retrieve something of the highest value. In order to assure his co-operation, he was assigned a watcher, protector and defender.

Sadly we never finished the story arc these two are in. It's a shame too, I had some of the most epics in-character fights I've ever had. Ever felt crazy for having a conversation in your head about whether or not to do something? If you have, now try and imagine doing that out loud and with imaginary people who only exist on paper. It's enough to make a shrink see little cartoon $$$$ in his eyes. But it was sooooo much fun. Pence would run off and try to do something, Kira would yell at him. Sometimes he would feed her bad info, make her a distraction for a group of people, just to steal money pouches. I used these two for all kinds of crazy things. Once I made the DM pissed because I kept looting with Pence instead of Kira to avoid having her give any gold away. I just explained to him that since she was so young that she was a bit naive and trusted where he was telling her to look while he went and got the real goods. Like Bakish though, I haven't had the opportunity to ever play them again and they only progressed to lvl 3. Pitty, I think if we'd continued I could have driven everyone nuts arguing with myself.

Character Profile: Bakish of Ravenwinter

This was one of my favorite characters from D&D 3rd ed. Only the second one I ever had (the first being a 2nd ed character played once). I leveled him from 1-12 and would have went further but my group fell apart and I haven't been able to use him since. So, he wound up being a lvl 6 sorcerer lvl 6 dragon desciple and that's it. Seeing how I was a lot younger and less into the role play aspect of the games, I never got around to writing a backstory for him. I would just make up small details here and there to explain away some of the "quirks" in his personality (like his drinking). I played him as a very loud, very agitated drunk. The main problem with that being he was half-elvish and a sorcerer, not the best combo for being a drunk. That is what led to what I consider one of my more humorous moments, though the party didn't think so.

We had just slogged through a long dungeon (the reason for being there is lost to time) the session before and we started the new one off in a tavern (of course, where else are you going to start a new run). Bakish was being his usual cheery self when he noticed a dwarf at the bar. Having just survived quite a bit (our DM could be a very harsh dude) he considered himself ready to take on just about anything. So, much to the dismay of the rest of the group, he goes up and challenges the dwarf to a drinking contest. Some of you can see where this is going. He starts off well, then as usual, the dice start to let me down and I fail a couple of stamina tests which leads to an exchange something like this.

DM: Ok, you are totally drunk out of your mind now.
Me: Sure, not like I haven't been here before. In character: "Hey everyone, look what I can do!" (my intent was to cast a couple lvl 0 spells and make a light show of sorts. I succeded.........kinda)
DM: Well, if you're going to start trying to cast something while drunk, Let's see if you miss cast.
(Dice roll: 1) Oh, that's not good. (DM smirks, never a good sign) You just learned Fireball didn't you?
Me: Yeah, why?
DM: Ok then, you miss cast fireball inside the tavern. You hit the kegs behind the bar.
Me: (no words just a grim expression as I realize the entire bar is about to go up in smoke)
To make a long story short, the entire bar caught fire and we were ran out of town without rest and without food. I was not very popular after that.

I am still working on the backstory for this character so maybe I'll have it up someday.