HeySeuss

Carry a Tome to a Gunfight [Shadowrun RP]

@HeySeuss@Dark Eternity@The Survivor@boomlover Oh, and while I remember, everyone has 6 essence to spend on cyberware if they so choose, with a limit of one implant per area (one for arms, one for eyes, legs, etc). Just make sure you can explain how you got it in your backstory.

@Hjalti

Physad, no implants. It dilutes essence. ;)

I posted the sheet up, but I reckoned the use of Essence and physad abilities based on the pen and paper rules rather than the PC game version. They changed the mechanics around for the game. In the RPG, physads are a lighter touch than a Street Sam.

Staring Back With Chrome Eyes [Vanq x HeySeuss]

Alexei Voronin was there too, to meet Paul and Nima. He had access to the reports. Bald, creased eyes, wiry build. He'd been Soviet-era KGB officer, taken after perestroika. A useful pawn among the Eternal and one of the rare ones made for his abilities rather than his beauty or amusement value. His sire was one of the great Ladies among the Eternal, the Lady Klotho. She used Voronin as an advisor, which was unusual. Most Eternal preferred older vampires as their advisors, but Lady Klotho made talented mortals into her entourage, and they provided insight into the modern world. He was one of several, but his presence meant that she was interested.

Their meeting was in a motel in Dukewater. The room was nondescript, but there was a computer and printouts all around. There were no thralls.

"It's good to see that you brought her, Paul," his English accented. "Because this is highly unusual. The killing methods...well, look at them. There are bullets, but also blunt force trauma and a sign of bladed weaponry in use. Most unusually, there is no useful surveillance footage."

His fingers were steepled, he was sitting with the chair facing backwards, straddling it. But he watched Nima as he asked the next question, "You are an interesting case, you come from the hunter community. Tell me about this community. I want to know anything you might have not told us before. Are any of them blood-drinkers? Do you know of any vaults of Eternal blood being stored?" Thralls, he thought, it could be thralls.

"They were gut-shot, the forensic report says that. Hunter trick, as you know. But that doesn't account for how the force that was used. Giorgio's leg was broken and then he was beaten to death. Someone put a blade through Richard's skull. There are inconsistencies. Have you ever heard rumors of vampires turning hunters into thralls?" That was the other thought, that one of the Eternal was betraying them. He watched both of the others intently. Paul was older, but Alexei's patron was ancient and had a terrible reputation. She wanted answers.

@vanq

Pandora's Inheritance: The Coven [carsgovroom x HeySeuss]

Brian took a look out the window. Ford panthers, cruisers. Sheriff Mark was on the scene, so were some deputies and an ambulance. Brian shook his head at Macy, "Let's not risk it right now. Let's leave Tim to sleep it off."

He stepped out the door, and into the front lawn area of the apartment, along with other crowd types. He could hear the muttered prayers and rumormongering discussion among the others, but didn't join in. Sheriff Mark picked him out of a crowd.

"Brian, thought I saw the truck." Mark Luntz was a big man with a fairly large belly, but also muscle. As a small town Sheriff, his humdrum job became that much harder with Emergence. He looked like he hadn't slept well, but that wasn't unusual. Lots of people had nightmares these days.

"Yeah, was giving a friend a ride home from the bar. Wound up shuttering in place when I heard whatever that was last night."

Mark had a grim look on his face.

"It's not pretty." He gestured him toward the cruiser, away from the others. Brian followed along in silence, rubbing his head. He knew that look on a law enforcement officer.

"Truth is, Brian," Mark shuffled from one foot to the other a bit before steadying himself, "It's ugly. You sure you don't want to deputize? Guy with your experience, I could make you senior deputy, reporting to me only."

"No thanks, I just don't want to get into it again." He made it sound like he'd seen something so traumatic that he resigned from the Marshals. It was his usual story that he told friends and family.

"Yeah, I kind of figured."

"So what was it, you think?"

"No idea, but there's a body," Mark's voice was lowered, "And it looks like it's been eaten. But what's worse is that there's signs that the body was methodically butchered."

"Fuck," Brian breathed, "A cannibal?"

"Who knows these days? But keep that to yourself. There's going to be hell to pay with the locals already without knowing the details. EMT's and deputies know to keep their mouth shut. I'm just telling you as a professional courtesy. Start carrying a gun."

"Yeah, I get that." It was hard to say what Brian felt around him, except there was a sense of dread around the place and no real reason why he'd feel that. But there'd been impressions since Emergence started. He'd hear things that weren't there, or see symbols here and there. And where the body was covered, there were symbols painted over it, as if in blood red. He knew that it wasn't something others were seeing. He couldn't tell what the hell that all meant, because he had no idea how to read any of it.

"Thanks for the heads up, Sheriff. I'm going to get out of your way."

He made his way back to Macy, while the crowd murmured and muttered. A couple locals that knew him asked him what was up, and he didn't say much. But then, Brian Parr was known as the closemouthed middle child. His brother and sisters had the gift of gab, but Brian was more taciturn. But once he and Macy were more alone, he told her, "Something killed, butchered and ate a person. That's what we heard last night. Maybe you should take a look from a distance, see if you get something out of it when the crime scene unit clears out..."

@carsgovroom

Staring Back With Chrome Eyes [Vanq x HeySeuss]

"Think of them as a bunch of lone wolf spree shooters if we let them go. They'll go delusional, then they'll go violent." What Marco didn't say, because it was irrelevant to the mission, was that they'd have to come up with better ways to handle these guys when they started sticking it to the Eternal on a mass level.

He was already tapped into their comm nets, and it was ugly; they were already starting to frenzy, especially the ones that were on Giorgio's blood. The others were picking up on it as if they were attuned to each other, like a pack of hunting dogs, baying for blood because the alpha is riled. That was new and unknown stuff.

He already had a plan. Morgen pulled up to the warehouse.

_{Deploy for an ambush. Prep vehicles for extraction, south side of the warehouse. We're going to use the north parking lot as our killzone. We have to get them all, use everything you have on them. Leave no survivors.}

The others started their deployment, but he held Saria back with another set of instructions.

_{When I give the signal, off Smith. I've got Mullen. The death of their masters ought to send the thralls into a much greater frenzy.}

The sirens were already coming closer, along with the growl of engines. The deputies were running those cars at top speed, screeching tires and all. When they started to pull into the business park where the warehouse was, Marco gave the signal. As he was doing so, he put his foot down, with the blade, on Richard's head, crushing it. There were a few seconds of resistance and then the skull gave way. He twisted the foot with the blade, creating even more of a mess, in conjunction with Mullen's convulsions.

_{Anna Smith and Richard Mullen are dead.}

The gunfire roared as the rest of the hunt-kill team opened up on the deputies. It was ugly, but it was for the best.

***

CHICAGO - A local couple, their adopted son and five deputies were found dead in Dukewater, Illinois yesterday morning. The killer or killers were thought to be at large, law enforcement officials said. Another local resident, Christine Haney, is missing.

The burned body of George Smith was found near Dukewater High School, where a senior prom was held the night before. Anna Smith and Richard Mullen, the couple's adoptive son, were identified in the wreckage of a van near an empty warehouse facility belonging to FTG Logistics, a bankrupt company. Five deputies were also found dead in the parking lot of FTG Logistics. Mullen and Haney were confirmed to be attending the prom at Dukewater High School together.

Officials said at a late-afternoon news conference that they could not rule out the possibility that other members of the community may be in danger and that officers were checking on them throughout the region.

“We are advising the community to be very careful, and take particular precaution,” the FBI Special Agent In Charge Jill McMullen, of the Chicago Field Office, said.

“The individual or individuals who committed this crime obviously are dangerous,” McMullen said. “We believe they are still at large.”

The dead included seven adults and a 16-year-old boy; officials had said earlier that two of the victims were juveniles.

“Three of the victims appear to have been executed,” McMullen said.

Asked if investigators had any indication of a motive, she said, “none.” Officials said it was also unclear when the killings took place.

“We are trying to assess precisely what was going on. Our field office is currently going over the communications of the Sheriffs department.”

At first, officials said they could not rule out the possibility that the killer was among the dead, “the preliminary determination has been made that none of the eight individuals committed suicide.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco are part of a task force investigating the crimes, according to Agent McMullen. No comment was given as to any persons of interest in the kidnapping and killings.

The killings and kidnapping took place in a suburb of Chicago, about 24 miles south of the City. There is an Amber Alert out for Christine Haney.

***

Extraction was routine, but the debrief wasn't. It was the first time that hunters ever took several vampires at once and there were new lessons learned in Eternal physiology. It was also when the six people of the hunt-kill team compared notes with each other. The news was all over the place, but the mortal authorities didn't seem to have any real clue what was going on, and there may well have been Eternal pressure to keep the inquiry from producing too much information.

But the Vigil knew what it had done and the Eternal were no doubt asking questions of their own. Anna Smith was one of their superstars, and her death was going to have consequences. And so it was Marco and Saria sitting in the cafeteria in their compound, all the way out in Tennessee, watching the news stories unfold. There was a lot on there that Marco could do without, such as the pictures of the deputies, their tearful families and all the condemnation by authority figures. It felt like he'd crossed a new threshold. Meanwhile, Christine Haynes was in a rubber room somewhere, being treated for PTSD and gently pumped for information on her relationship with Mullen. She hadn't gone insane from his death, so clearly she wasn't enthralled. It was unlikely she'd ever have a normal life again, but normal was all relative and incredibly fragile anyway.

"So, how did you think this would feel? I mean, I thought it'd feel great, but..."

But.

@Vanq

Carry a Tome to a Gunfight [Shadowrun RP]

Well, Japan is way more hostile to magic and metahumanity, so it's a different ball of wax. North America is more like Europe in that there's a border not too far away if you are in the Pacific Northwest.

@Hjalti

Edit: I re-read more carefully after work. Sure, a Tokyo run -might- work, but it's hard to use non-Japanese runners. An extract run to Yomi might be interesting.

Blood Debt (Medieval/Fantasy, Rangers)

Well, if we want to talk about the dialect of Vendish spoken in Barkstead/the Nightwood region, I'm not a language guy. I'm going with the idea that most of the characters speak it natively and probably grew up with it unless something in the bios indicates otherwise.

As to geography, incidentally, I think that we're patterning this a bit on England, but with a land-link to more southern lands. However, I think that south of Vendland, it's smaller kingdoms. Let's call them, collectively, the Free Kingdoms, similar to Italian city-states with their intrigues and mercenaries -- this would also explain how Bloody Harold raised a host of sellswords.

That means the Pilgrim road is something they fight to control south of the Vendish kingdom. I haven't thought of geography too much between Daramalsh and Vendland prior to now. As a result, we have lots of unknowns. What I just said above is what I think of it, so please give me feedback.

We should be thinking low fantasy on that; I like the idea of it being not nearly so organized as the high medieval period of Europe, except for Italy. The world at large is a place for characters to have had adventures before this RP started.

It allows us to create lore as we need it, as I did when I essentially did Masef's history. That's really the important part. If people want to flesh it a bit for their character histories as we move forward, that's a great thing. I like the idea of leaving room to grow and expand the story organically rather than spending lots of time being bogged down in lore development for its own sake.

@R31GN@Naril@Gunther@AirBender@HeySeuss@NickTrano@Flagg@Noxious

Edit: In any case, thanks to Naril's move, we can now shift to a different scene of making sure Brand gets buried properly before having the real war. But the confrontation in Bosfyrd gives Flagg the go-ahead to get things going on his side, which I think we all are looking forward to.

Carry a Tome to a Gunfight [Shadowrun RP]

@HeySeuss

Okay, I looked over your PM and I'm going to be frank (just don't call me Shirley), your CS holds me to a higher standard (you seem better versed than I in the lore and universe) and I appreciate that. Accepted.

@Hjalti

Awesome, thanks. I am pretty versed in SR but it's too extensive for one person to know it all. It's gotten revived with the games, which is really cool and it's awesome to see people getting into it again, since it was a speciality item in RP communities for some time.

Are we going to be set in Seattle?

Weird Roleplay Ideas You're Afraid To Pitch?

I had one really off the wall one:

Earthly rockband abducted by aliens, who have been watching Humanity since we started beaming out radio waves and are totally in love with Earth music (because Alien music just doesn't cut it.) They are put to touring all sorts of alien rock arenas where crowds wait with bics in tentacles. The Terrans are subjected to alien super-LSD and consent, while stoned, to probings with alien groupies.

The drummers die a lot but there's a cloning tank. It's not optimized for humanity, so no guarantees on the stability of the clone.

The RP didn't take off, but that was definitely one of my wilder ones. It was also a situation where the OOC was fun as hell to write.

The truth is that if you have a crazy idea, pitch it and see what goes.

Carry a Tome to a Gunfight [Shadowrun RP]

@Hjalti I have a character from another one that didn't take off. I will PM for your feedback.

Pandora's Inheritance: The Coven [carsgovroom x HeySeuss]

Hey, just a head's up that I'm leaving on a trip Sunday and will be back on Tuesday.

@HeySeuss

@carsgovroom

Okay. I am intending to get a post up in a bit here, but that takes the time pressure off. All the same, I'll get it in real soon because I don't like to let things slide. I want to get it to where they discover what happened during the night.