Session 1: Betrayer Part 1

The NPC character Lisa, who's art was used for the post session write up of session 1

Introduction

So this is where I talk about the session and Kinda sort of give my input and I guess the GM's perspective on the game and kinda give a bit of a behind the scene's look at the process that went into writing it. I'll drop a transcript of the Roll20 room chat as a separate post, because it'll probably have to be in a drop box document, or a Google document.

I started writing this session, honestly before I had an idea who was going to be playing in my game. Well Except for Druby, the player of Alvin, as he talked me into running it, I honestly didn't even know what the characters were going to be, the only real "Requirements" I had at this time, was I wanted a UGN agent of some form, and I needed 1 player to play a high school student. I actually rewrote the session notes once I had an idea who going to play what.

Now originally, I was planing for about 5 players, but I only ended up with three, one player never showed up, and a second player had to miss the first two sessions of the game due to family problems, so I had to really do an on the spot rewrite, and some scenes were droped.

 So at this point, I originally was going to have, a Private Eye, a High school Student, his English teacher, and a UGN agent as my party (they fight crime), as well as a fifth player who didn't present me with a concept at that point, and he was the one who didn't make it. Furthermore the person who was going to play the private eye... Well never showed up to play, and thus was dropped after session 2, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Player Characters

So the party I was working with included the following, with there character art.

Alvin Shatter, our High School student. Now from the perspective of a GM, this character's background was rolled all to perfectly for the plans I had on the books, I didn't tell my players at the time, but they would of been tired to an NPC who dies as part of there back story by the name of Lisa, Now, Alvin's player Druby, rolled a character with all the back story elements needed for a character who had recently lost a girlfriend, so fitting this dead NPC into his history was actually quite easy. His back story also lead to the creation of two NPC's, one of them was his best friend, and secret crush Sarah, which we'll meet later. His Syndrome is Pure Breed Angel Halo.

John Wright was the second Player character in the game, He was the English teacher in the group, and in these early sessions played the support character, a funny incident happened when we were helping the player of this character Razorknight make his character, I had decided that the game was far enough from the "Default setting" that it was unlikely they would encounter anyone, the setting being a city in the Pacific Northwest of the united states. so everyone was rolling a second experience, and he had managed to turn his character, who had a very idealistic home life into, well, he rolled a secret lover.

The player himself was annoyed by this because he didn't want to play a character who cheated on his wife Alison, so Razor, Druby and I, all round tabled idea's, and after some deliberation came up with the, honestly far worse idea of the character being effectivly drugged and seduced by a false hearts Solaris user, solaris being a syndrome that lets you use chemical secretions for various effects, for the purpose of blackmailing him to spy on his wife, a UGN data clerk. This lead to the creation of the NPC character Katrina, who I'll introduce you all to later. His Syndrome is Pure Breed Morpheus.

The last character Kendall was kind of wild card in the sense that her player Yue, really fleshed out a back story for the character, playing on her surviving cancer by having what turned out to be a False Hearts Doctor, infect her with Renegade for the purpose of turning her into one of there solders. But later escaped to join the UGN, so we have our UGN agent, This player was kinda controversial as one of the players lois's was her drug addiction to Ambian. I to this day don't know if that lois would of been dropped at some point, because for reasons I won't go into right now, the character was removed from the game purring the second scenario. her Legacy in the game is the NPC Villian Dr. Burton, who as of now, much like the main villain of the game, is very much a behind the scene type.

The NPC's introduced this session

 Before I go into details about the NPC's listed here, I kinda want to explain how I like to handle NPC's, I Admit I borrowed a bit of the mindset I use for Lois NPC's comes from the RPG Bliss Stage, as well as a Nintendo DS title, Aliens: Infestation. 

I can already tell I need to explain that one, Bliss Stage in particular is an interesting RPG in the sense that it's completely built around relationships, as in your states are derived from the relationships you have with your NPC's. Alien's infestation also had the interesting mechanic, that your "Extra lives" were actually other playable characters, when you died in that game, you permanently lost the character. If you were as bad as I was, you eventually ended the game with none of the people you started with, and that was a sureal concept in of itself.

With those two idea's in mind, I wanted the Lois's to really be meaningfull in that there were less human shaped fate points, and more of actually NPC's that the players interact with on a day to day basis. Because of this and because I tend to be a bit of a softballer of a GM, I have only had one lois be turned to a titus so far in the game.

 Sarah is  one of Alvin's lois NPC's that was developed for the character Alvin, and in fact was his secret crush, I won't lie that I kinda am a bit of a romantic fool at heart beinh happily married, so I kinda tried to make her a well developed character, I'm not going to spoil what's going on in the current game, so you ca wait and read to see where this went.

Lisa is a posthumous character, in the respect that she has passed on as a part of Alvin's back story, the impact of this character, to my continued amazment, and with much credit to the player of Alvin, is still being felt even now in the game, we'll talk a bit more about her in the post about the second session.

Now we come to Katrina, written as one of the villains, she is the Solaris that effectively date-rapes John as part of his back story, and seems irredeemable, but she also is one of the NPC's that aids the party in this session, which makes here pretty interesting as I originally wrote her to be, in the villains camp, but to have ambiguous motives in the end.

Now although Alison did not show up in person for a few sessions, I felt like she should be mentioned, because a, reasonably long arc involving her starts this sessions, although she is a Data clerk, she actually is arrested for treason this episode for being married to John, the unwilling false hearts informant.

 The post session write up

((Okay so this write up is pretty bare bones than later write up's, and honestly in hindsight missed a couple things, but if you just want the cliff notes version of the session's events and not read around 100 pages of chat dialog, here you go, I cleaned it up only enough for it to be readable))

Druby(Alvin), Yue's(Kendall), and Razor's(John) intros went without a hitch

Alvin had a nightmare about his late girlfriend Lisa's death and was baited out by the FH to wake park by hinting that the accidental explosion was actually an act of terrorism.

Kendall was hired by the UGN to get to the park before the assassination attempt for the same reason, she was one of the targets of the train bombing.

John was told by his False Heart unwanted mistress to get to the park and stop the killing to much confusion all around. No reason was given as to what the FH was to gain from it.

The party met at Wake park, after a distrustful conversation, they were ambushed by the FH, Solders in unmarked vans attacked the party, and were defeated by the party.

Post battle Alvin found a PDA but kept it hidden from the others

Kendall and John found a laptop.

Johns's wife was arrested when Kendall checked in with her UGN handler, after John let slip he's an unwilling FH informant.

Everyone cracked the various devices they found, and learned that this was not a standard operation, and was directly targeting Alvin. Resources had been gathered by and large outside of known FH channels.

Around this time, Alvin had a brief conversation with his friend and crush Sarah.

When they went to Alvins place to get him, they were attacked by some kind of blood creature that sounded like Alvin's friend Sarah.

After killing it, revealing it to be a servant, of a powerful Bram Stroker syndrome Gjaum, the creature screamed out that it's master, will have revenge on Alvin.

the session closes as they take blood samples from the creature.

SCENARIO LOISSES GAINED
Alvin "Lisa: The friend I failed"
JOHN "Protect my student!"
Kendall "Foil the FH plot!"