Libra, Session 6 - The Special Parade of Mistakes Edition

Last week, a microsingularity consumed a city block of Philadelphia before winking out. Unsurprisingly, the powers that be are hopping mad. Over the week, OSIRIS Weights & Measures is sidelined for the far blunter OSIRIS Thermodynamics - the City Bug nest is bombed to ruin, the OSIRIS kill list is about to be whittled down, and Thermodynamics division liquidators stalk the halls of Containment Center CATERPILLAR with clipboards and 4 MD casts of Ignition. 

The PCs realize they're on the clock if they want to rescue the Vampire's Head's body, and then realize they don't want the body. Even Valrel, vampire descendant of the Head, has decided she's gotten all she will get from her Patron - except, perhaps, for his vorpal claws.

A call to друг later (Joe Normal plans to abandon друг and see if he can meditate his way closer to the Pyramid - he's happy to throw favors away) and one of the Head's hands is twitching and bleeding on Toka's couch as they pry off its fingernails. Then, they shrug and bury it in Toka's backyard, just in case it turns out to be important later. (It will, 1,000,000%, escape.)

The players then consider. What if we just asked друг to tell us about the Philosopher's Stone? They do, and Joe Normal is immediately struck in the back of the head by a tome, helpfully labeled "EXTREMELY CURSED // DO NOT OPEN // REALLY". Cursed, you say - wonder if the Zontanamancer could help, he seemed wizardly. 

Bad news! Four sessions ago, they stole the Zontanamancer's son and turned his hands to gold! When they call, he gladly picks up and says sure! Meet me at Delphi, the club those Apollo guys run. I'll be there soon. 

He never shows - instead, the PCs wander through an emptied-out club, stalked by the Zontanamancer's animate golden ragdoll and living car, while the idol of Apollo dances in slow circles, unconcerned with the death of his cult. The PCs take this as an opportunity to loot the place, collecting a book of Apollonian Ynnbringer spell components and Satan's golden fiddle before finding the cult's apparent last survivor, the chaos-magician and coryphaeus Alex Fuller.

Analysis

I had an epiphany on my way back from the session - the campaign's not built correctly. Neither was Rota Fortunae, and I didn't notice. My urban sandboxes are built off of Go Away, but Go Away had a clear end goal. Get $100,000,000. Get off-world. 

Neither Rota Fortunae nor Libra have had that. With no goal to direct the players, they become listless - to keep them moving I kept turning up the dial on faction moves, putting the PCs not in an "urban sandbox" but in a reactive spiral where every session is "pick one of the two adventures I wrote this week for the faction moves". 

More reactive PCs leaves me with a higher bar for prep: A, I can't use player desires as a gauge for what will happen next (the PCs ending the session by saying "next session let's go rob Len Abbatelli, maybe we can get some of that $100,000,000", etc), B, since all the factions are constantly moving all the prep is unstable (for instance, sites like Delphi or Containment Center CATERPILLAR look different now than they did last week), and C, if the players are stuck picking between adventure 1 and adventure 2 those had both better be pretty cool adventures... half of which aren't chosen, and evaporate.

This game should have focused more tightly on the Philosopher's Stone. You have it, it doesn't work, you want to make it work. Here is a pile of rumors about the Stone and a bunch of wizard-freak factions. Trail information backwards (person X references book Y, which is in the possession of this faction - go get the book, it leads to books Z and A) and piece together contradictory information to figure out how to use the funny rock. Instead, the Stone was a kind of funny inciting incident that then slid right into the background. 

Also a couple of more minor problems:

• the OSIRIS Theurge explicitly says you can just tell a target to kill themselves. I thought the common aversion to this was just due to power level concerns, and went "eeh, if they want to pour MD into a single-target damage spell, more power to them" - but no! It's an optimization concern - if mind control can be used as direct damage the player will always choose to use it as direct damage! 
• друг rewards their actors with nonspecific "favors", and my players seem to be of the belief that they can literally do anything - which seems to be true, given how I've played them! This is totally scuffed - that phone should've had a much more specific and much more sinister effect, closer to 6's skeleton key.

I think it's funny that my two sets of recent posts are a game with absolutely no prep ever and a long-winded series on rules, procedures, and tools for an upcoming campaign. I'm kind of looking forward to not running anything and getting some time to bolt stuff together without being under a deadline.