Oh, let’s start with a barrage of follow-ups from yesterday;
Imagine Kinect; a tool you can hook into essentially any PC hardware with the applicable software to register it. Now couple it with windows 8 and as the user interface for a separate monitor – or even working in conjunction with your mouse and keyboard as a secondary means of input on your main monitor. Now imagine Microsoft decides to make the new colour for windows 8 a semi-see through blue. You are now effectively imagining yourself using one of the hands-free floating consoles from crappy sci-fi movies. Doable now, could be publicly available with windows 8. The future might now quite be now, but it’s definitely soon.
Gym stuff went swimmingly. Or it did insofar as it could to this point. They’re willing to give us a room to practice whatever martial arty thing we want, we just can’t bring official trainers in. It still remains to be seen whether they’re all going to have a collective heart attack when we start punching one another, but if I recall the room was fairly secluded, so maybe that problem won’t arise for a while yet.
My world is covered in snow still. It appears the melt-off hasn’t been as severe as I originally hoped, so there’s no chance of a war out in the bushes. I may still be able to get enough people together to run one tomorrow at a secondary location, but the temperature is still hanging well below the -10 C mark at night, so enthusiasm might be running a touch low. We’ll just have to see.
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Now I’d like to smash my face against a campaign I’m trying to set up for what’s effectively DnD in World of Warcraft. I’m literally trying to make this up as I type it, so expecting a distinct lack of coherency. Onwards!
The story is set in a medieval forest with a bit of werewolf problem. Despite how much that setting begs for the plot to revolve around some one becoming a werewolf, that isn’t the case here. Some one else actually ran a story that went somewhat along those lines a while ago, so I'm not keen to rehash stuff. Sufficient to say there’s a forest with a couple of towns inside of it, they’re sparsely populated by suspicious and worried people (as werewolves are often known to make you be).
The plot is going to revolve around a mage by the name Ramklin Lanter who happens to be trying to fix the werewolf issue. Theoretically he’s meant to fall into the well-intentioned extremist category, but we’ll see how much of his motivations the characters figure out before the almost inevitable fight breaks out. Ol’ Ramklin’s idea is to unearth an arcane ley-line, which is vague magical thing that blizzard introduced an expansion ago and promptly told us nothing more about. They functioned as big magical conduits where mages of sufficient strength could direct their flow of power into whatever mad scheme they have in mind.
The scheme in question is a highly dubious way of instilling magical talent in people who would otherwise be incompetent, followed up by trying to create the equivalent of a new Sunwell (read; magical power up place) to support whatever new breed of mage comes out of this. The bonus he’s hoping for on the side is to get the well to increase his power enormously and thus allow him to be the head honcho of the new coven of wizards. Even if the tests kill nine out of every ten, he’ll still have a significant group of suddenly powerful people who’ll listen to him – and if the Sunwell ploy works they should have enough oomph at their disposal to eradicate the werewolf threat at their leisure.
The connection the players have to all this comes from a second mage by the name of Vhanis. He’s fairly weak in terms of wrecking magical mayhem, but he was stationed in a nearby city when the head collection of mages – way off on the far side of the world in Dalaran – noticed all of the magical buggery going on. They told Vhanis to saunter into the horrible little forest and report back if anything was up and crazy-like. Since ‘saunter’ in this context means ‘get past dozens of werewolves to the tiny bastions of terrified citizens’ he opted to take a few bodyguards. This is our cast and crew. Vhanis won’t be having much success at uncovering anything on his own, primarily because he feels no major motivation to go outside the biggest of the towns in the forest to ask questions. Enter players.
I’ve whipped up several land marks that could work as areas the players should interact with and name dropped them in the least subtle way possible. They should act a little one-off runs about a couple hours a piece.
First is a nearby broken down guard tower. Inhabiting the tower is an old man who’s well into Alzheimer’s. He won’t provide much helpful information due to that, but his un-mauled presence in this forest might work as a hint that there’s something guarding the tower. There are enough alchemy bottles around the man to store a small ocean in and he’ll know how to make a variety of potions should the conversation ever steer that way. Inside the tower itself there’s burn marks all around, not much of the explosion variety, but more active fires. The bottom level of the tower will have several stones that aren’t set in the ground properly and removing them would reveal a basement level. In said basement would be several live but very weak worgen (name of the werewolves), who’ll promptly try and escape if our merry band of heroes uncover them. There will be a few broken wooden stocks in there and a bunch of bones – just animal, no human.
The point of this area is meant to be where Ramklin conducted his various experiments on worgen. Primarily the effectiveness of the magical talent he’s trying to imbue in people. The upper levels would be his test subjects practicing against static objects before he, ah, threw them to the wolves, so to say. It’s also where he made certain that the imbuing process would kill worgen if the spell nicked one. The last thing he needs is a bunch of worgen wizards. Alliterate enemies are just the worst. This is the main reason all the worgen aim to escape instead of fight – they’re part of a group that tried many times with only one outcome.
Second place will be the smaller town in the region. It’s a town dedicated to the capture of worgen in an attempt to restore the individuals to sanity once again. Yeah, warcraft has sane worgen too. They’re even playable. It’s that group of people that taught Ramklin the tricks needed to net a few worgen, and they’ll fill our group in on all this if they bother to talk to anyone. Noteworthy amongst the details is that Ramklin never stayed and caught worgen with them, opting to go back to the eastern side of the forest on his own. On the way back to the main town they’ll see flashes of light in the distance – over the third objective. It’s a abandoned church and graveyard, and shortly following the flashes we’ll have a pack of worgen come running for our little troupe of people. A brief fight later and we’ll have a location to check out; or at least a direction.
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Anyways, this is more or less just the start I can think up now. I have a bunch of isolated ideas on what’s going to happen in the rest, but frankly I’m a bit tired to hammer it all out just now. I’ll try and cobble something together after Sunday.
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