Justice Inc - the Campaign Continues (and an autistic player freaks out during an encounter)

 (note: halfway through this session I would have an interesting, and kind of troubling situation with one of the players. Most of the first half of the session was a meeting where a new players character was introduced. A mutant college girl with electrical abilities. The group doing the usual role play razzle dazzle. It was great. But the last hour or so of the night was not. Stay tuned.)  

So leaving off from last week, the characters had taken part in "auditions" for an unknown potential employer and met all kinds of weirdos (or at least maybe weirder than them). They passed the audition, informed by "Wilmington" of such, and piled into a couple of self-driving luxury limo vans to head to a meeting point. 

Meanwhile, some of the runners up of the auditions event had met in the parking lot and suggested to group together for their mutual benefit (they would eventually call themselves "The Redeemers"). I would be using them soon enough, but not in this session. But the sooner I start doing up challenges for the characters the better.

So they go to the venerable old Winston Bldg downtown. As I mentioned I used this building for the old Justice Incorporated games. In it were the JI offices (on a floor number and suite I never write down so probably different every time I mention it over the years).

There they meet Japanese Irish corporate CEO industrialist (and one of the richest people on the planet) Patricia Elizabeth Kyono in person. 

So they are informed of the history of her side thing Justice Incorporated. Once a street level organization, helping the downtrodden and higher-level people alike who find themselves victims of some unjust situation. With the organization in limbo for almost 10 years (in the setting), she wants to bring it back, this time with a group that has more power to it, similar to a typical superhero team situation. With an offer to maintain secret identity's if necessary, a place to stay if needed, and a few grand a month, she gets them to agree and gives them a special debit card, that can be used to withdraw cash, use as a bank card (Kyono owned bank of course), and even as a communication device and keycard to use the buildings private elevator and roof access. 

With the characters agreeing for now, they get introduced to Rachel, the offices receptionist and assistant. 

While permanent, off site accommodations are being looked into for the characters who need it, most of them crash at the offices which has three small bed chambers (not made for permanent stays) and a reception couch. Even with them staying there, and Rachel always being available, nobody has realized yet that she is a Life Model Replicant assistant model, produced by Kyono International. 

I am not exactly sure where Paladin came from 
(the Middle East maybe, the player said he came 
to have on a plane to attend the auditions, so he 
had no place to stay).

Seraph is a being from another dimension who had
been living in an abandoned warehouse, so she 
crashed at the office as well.

Igneous is a descendant of Titans who just wanders
the Earth. So he crashed there. 

Living in a professional workspace can be...
problematic to a certain degree

So not everybody had to live there. But the space is all appointed, with a main office, conference room, kitchenette and gym with small sauna. 

So yeah, most of the characters did go ahead and just start living there. And with the characters having got to know each other a bit, they went about their week. Seraph, the winged girl, actually trained a bit; some combat basics with paladin in the office, and with Igneous. He took her to an abandoned part of the railyard in town and had her fly around dodging big rocks he would throw. 

OK, so during that week of in game downtime I wanted to try something out. In my old campaigns, I would sometimes like to throw a quick encounter at a character solo. Like something designed to be quick, like 20 minutes max. Stop some muggers or something. 

I will call the player I did this with "C." He is a young dude in his late 20's I think, and I was fairly jazzed to get him on board originally because he has streamed probably at least 100 hours of running the Marvel Multiverse RPG online. Sessions with 4 or 5 players that went over four hours in some cases. I will admit I had only watched a few minutes of it here and there. Most of the videos have less than 5 views. I do not want to point him or his streams out, because as it turns out he clearly has some form of emotional issues and out of at least some compassion for it I do not want to identify him. 

But you don't have to look too deeply to find multiple instances of him identifying as neurodivergent in his videos. Like, totally embracing it. To me, using that term, is kind of broad. Forrest Gump and his chocolate box level of variety is what I think is under that umbrella. OK, cool. I always like to say "we are rpg players...we are all autistic." 

He seemed like a cool guy and I like him. It seemed a big surprise to him that I was calling for unique characters to be created. Like most others it seems who play this system, he prefers existing Marvel characters. Everybody is playing an X -Man character.  I was like, no, we get to be creative in my space. He came up with a character who was a Daredevil legacy character. His mentor was Matt Murdock in his 70's. The character was blind as well, but had Daredevil-like senses, but even more advanced. To the point he sort of had powers that gave him visions of possible future outcomes, and he could "see" down to the molecular level. Interesting. 

He was the one character in the group invested in crime fighting. That and C's experience running the game seemed a no brainer to try this.

OK, so back in the day I had this vigilante NPC I used for some Justice Incorporated stuff. Her name was "Sister Mary Alice," or "Malice." She was a revenant, a young nun who decades ago had been assaulted and killed and returned for vengeance. She would appear every few years for a time, having possessed the body of a young woman to use for her activities. 

Sister Mary could imbue her vessel with enhanced strength and resistance, and she could levitate, phase through matter, and teleport. She could also produce most any archaic weapon she wanted; swords, axes, spears, etc. Back in my old Justice Inc. campaigns she would commit murders that the characters would try to stop. I have her as Rank 4 in this system, which for sure made her a strong foe for any Rank 3 character. It's the strongest I ever had her in the history of my games. 

So, I would introduce her with this quick solo encounter. 

Also for this I created another female vigilante, "Devota," a young Latina woman in Day of the Dead makeup who was on a similar quest for vengeance as Mary's, but since she was mortal was using the pistols of her late Green Beret grandfather to take out men of violence. 

I actually had a T shirt long ago with a day of the dead lady on it, and back then I thought she might make a nice gritty vigilante character who was wronged by men and was taking her vengeance on them. I thought she would make an interesting indie comic book character. A wronged Catholic girl who brought justice to the hood. 

I was always fascinated by these. Growing up 
in Los Angeles I saw plenty of this over the decades.

You see the Dead Girl imagery a lot
on slot machines 

For this I would have Mary Alice raising from the grave once more and possessing some random young woman, in order to assist and protect this new, unpowered killer who was on a similar quest as hers. Local news reports spoke of dead gang members being found with both bullet and sword wounds. 

I had even had characters who moved around the city notice graphitti of Devota in rough parts of town, where she was already becoming an urban legend much like Malice was. 

So I had C's character on patrol in the bad part of town encounter her on the hunt. Actually, it was her disguised in trench coat and blond wig, luring several gang members to an alleyway then up on to a rooftop, before she revealed herself and started blasting. 

For the gang I used Baseball Furies from The Warriors

C's character showed up on the roof to confront it all. He seemed OK, until Devota started blasting on the gang members. This is where he started to have his apparent doubts. Sister Mary Alice rose up out of the rooftop as an apparition, created a sword, and ran it through one of the gangsters, at the same time telling Ghost not to interfere. At this point C was getting flustered, muttering "I don't know what to do!" and then "my neurodivergence!"

C was kind of paralyzed it seemed. Continuing to state things like "what should I do?"  I was all like "what do you want to do? What would this character do?"  I mean, this was a character based on Daredevil. And we know what he would do. Start punching faces maybe. 

It turned into a surreal situation. This guy ran over a hundred hours of this system online for a handful of people. I thought if anybody could help me make this a quick 15 minute encounter, it would be him. But I was I guess putting him on the spot. But it surprised me. I did stuff like this in all the genres I ever ran, something happen to a character while alone. Champions. Call of Cthulhu. Even Runequest. I think just a few minutes of that really gives a character some personal agency. Not all the time, but especially for a comic book thing. All the Avengers etc do some things alone. I have probably had people hesitate now and again. My past players were often friends of mine I had outside DnD. But this sort of gob smacked me. And I have the other players just hanging out while 10 minutes turned into 45. 

I finally coerced him to attack Mary Alice, and he did, but found his attack only did minimal damage. I told him she had great "Sturdy" and was a Rank 4 foe and he freaked out more. Again with the "but my neurodivergence!"  C had clearly decided at some point in his life that he would declare his neurodivergence at any opportunity. I had never encountered this before. If this was somebody new to rpg's you could expect some not knowing what to do. But I thought he would be perfect for this. Was meant to be the short showcase of the session but to me was a disaster. A failed experiment. 

I had the gang members scatter, and Devota took off down a fire escape, and Malice vanished as well.  I had the other players sitting there all that time just watching this play out. Not good. The teenager playing Ra-Ta the alien had checked out for the night. But I carried on for a bit to try and finish up the session.

C's character had called in the other characters Ghost to help search the area, but all the foes were long gone. 

I followed up with Kyono calling a meeting the next day to talk about a friend of hers, a goddaughter, who was running a night club and was having some trouble with the other nightclub across the street. We would get into the in the next session. But the waste of the better part of an hour and the seeming failure or doing little solo missions, left a bad taste in my mouth. 

We did not hear from C for several sessions, though he was still a member of the Discord. I think he was not there for the last 20 minutes or so of that session with the quiet freak out. At some point later, he messaged the group, just the other week "sorry guys, have been having some health issues." He did not mention neurodivergence there, but I am guessing yeah, he is dealing with issues. 

 It has been several sessions since that night, and I maybe should have tried to reach out. But I just gave him space. I hope it had nothing to do with a fairly gritty encounter. Guns and vengeance girls out of a Tarentiono movie. But shit, Quenten is one of my inspiration muses for style in my games (yes, even DnD) along with Sam Raimi and James Cameron. And Haven is, as I constantly stress, a kitchen sink. A pastiche world. Inspired by standard comics, cyberpunk, superhero deconstruction, gritty supernatural, future noir, anime, and 80's action movies. And I'm running for adults here.  Its going to be PG and sometimes its going to be rated R.

What're you gonna do. I could have handled it differently. I guess? I mean I was calm and kind during the encounter he was having a bad time with. Nobody else had much to say, maybe some being miffed by the wasted time.  Safe to say I am unlikely to try the "solo 20 minutes" things again. But maybe will have some split the party moments in the future that would be kind of like that. Anyway, as of today we are several sessions past that night, and I worked hard to present some fun stuff to make up for it, and it seems to be paying offing. Campaign is at the moment going well. 

Next I post on this, I will cover the following session that I based on two old movies, Roadhouse and Urban Cowboy. I called it "A night at Club Future." Cheers. 

Up from the OSR - Venger Satanis and the C'orny C'ult of C'thulhu

 (as always mostly going on a decade or so old parcel of memories, so please feel free to correct or expand on anything)

Like a lot of OSR personages I found out about in the latter half of the OSR, well after I first stopped blogging for a long while, I heard about Vengir Satanis on a blog I am ashamed to admit I looked at from time to time: "Yourdungeonissuck," a trollsite that targeted many in the OSR (including my humble self). 

The very first thing that stuck right out to me was the name. Satanis? Cool. Could be the name of the wizard character of a metalhead from back in jr. high. Good enough. But Venger? As far as I can tell, he took this name from a cartoon character. 

A demon that threatens school children. 
So, cool, I guess. 

What little I saw at the time was that he was a Wisconsin native (what is with that place? It's all satanists and serial killers). He was involved in, or even founded, a Cthulhu cult of some kind. Heavy on the Anton Levay as well. 

Anton in the 80's working on his
5th level fighter. Or maybe doing
a dark incantation of some sort. 

And Venger from a few years
ago. Shave yer head and grow
a bitchin goatee and you got
yerself some Anton in the mirror

LeVay was sort of a bargain basement Allister Crowley. A San Francisco suburb resident who in the 70's started his own little Church of Satan by hanging black drapes and Baphomet symbols in his garage, and inviting heavy metal dudes and C list celebs to pray before an alter with a naked chick on it. But Anton seemed more Forrest J. Ackerman than Crowley.

"Ooga booga!"

Anton's most famous tidbit was he was in love with Church member Jayne Mansfield back in the day, and when rejected told her he will curse her to die in a car wreck, which she did. 

"Ooga Booga!"

Anton capering around in satan cosplay reminds me
of this MST3K classic..

I actually first encounter LeVay in my first teenage job at Waldenbooks. There on the shelf either in the occult or the comedy section was The Satanic Bible. 

reading it at the mall foodcourt
will get you some looks. Maybe
a loogie in your Chick Fil A
chicken sammich

Yeah, I read it. I fuckin' stole it like a lot of books I owned at the time. Fuck you Walden! As a DnD kid of the 80's I had to have a look. I was also s slowly falling Catholic so it was perfect. It was chock full of "fuck you, Jesus" sort of stuff.

Yer mother sucks in hell, Karras...

Though a bargain basement Allister Crowley, it was more approachable Satanism. No esoteric number crunching or Prater Parado crap. But it was full of some corny shit. One bit of life advice I remember was not washing so you don't remove your smelly body oils and smells, which he somehow thought chicks were into. As a matter of fact, he talked about a guy who wanted to get busy with a fishermans daughter that he was in love with, so he wiped himself down with fish to get a nice crusty seaman odor to attract the lass. I put the book down and never looked back. Outside of the Mansfield thing, and naked chicks on basement altars, it was fairly cheese. 

I don't know about casting spells on C level celebs or what not, but early on Venger was high priesting it up in The Cult of Cthulhu. VS discovered DnD around 10 years old an Cthulhu stuff a few years later, which is in line with my experience. Though I never considered it as a religious path (HP Lovecraft was plainly fiction, you see). Venger did, whether serious or not. Here is a snippet from an old interview (undated).

 Since foundation, the Cult has been both wildly successful and devoid of meaningful manifestations, depending on the day.  It’s a struggle to keep busy in the right direction when there are so many false paths open to us.  I’ve written two official books, CoC bibles, if you will; and enough essays and articles to fill a third.

  The organization was meant to live and spread the Fourth Way teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky within a Left Hand Path context.  Self-deification is our chief aim, always has been, always will be.  Of course, the slimy green tentacles of cosmic horror only add to the eldritch mélange.  The Mythos gives us visual aid, a different kind of structure.  The Left Hand Path is like a code of conduct, whereas Lovecraft’s shambling alienage is more a code of aesthetics.

His cult name? "Venger As' Nas Satanis." It was an early indication of his love for apostrophe. 

I cannot find current citation, but I do remember all those years ago when I first heard of him, he had talked somewhere about hostile shakeups or something among the cult membership. He left the group, maybe? I dunno. 

Maybe it did not meet expectations?

Maybe it got harder and harder to take seriously. I mean, not long into the 2000's you started seeing Cthulhu plushes and the great old one's precense showing up in popular media, more often in a comedic context. 

I think the DnD setting Veng created, Cha'alt, kind of took the place of the Lovecraft focus. 

He describes the setting thus:

Cha'alt is an eldritch, gonzo, science-fantasy, post-apocalyptic campaign setting + megadungeon for old school and 5e D&D. It's 216 pages of places, people, races, monsters, spells, magic items, and weirdness for your roleplaying game of choice (including my own Crimson Dragon Slayer D20, which is included in the appendix). Suitable for levels 0-10. Amazing, full-color layout and artwork the likes of which you have never seen, nor will you ever see again!

Gonzo it seemed. With influences that seemed to run the gamut, from cheesy 70's Sci Fi, 80's tits and ass low budget sorcery, some Lovecraft shit still, and Saturday morning fantasy cartoons on acid. 

 

Manos Hand of Fate? I
get that reference!

???

Venger was producing all kinds of product related to his game. Time was marching on. You see him pop up in forums like Dragonfoot, and even Your Dungeon is Suck. He liked to call people "Hoss." Along with him liking to throw up a devil sign and exclaim "What's up, Motherfuckers!" as his call sign. Nothing wrong with that I guess. Kind of cringy, but fuck, we are gamers so we are kind of cringy. "Hoss."

In his earlier images, Venger is a fit and buff dude who spent a lot of time in the gym. He showed up in pictures in a tank top more than he did in black robes.

Bu the years passed. There was a transformation, like with most of us I guess. The guy has a wife and two kids, and though I don't, my older brothers did. And when you have kids it's hard not to eat like a kid. The good priest of evil softened up a bit. Some grey getting into the bitchin' Anton LaVey goatee. 

Not sure the gawds of Cha'alt would approve
of the hippy dippy Tie Dye tee..

Apparently, his stuff had some popularity and a following.  A nice addition I guess to his real estate professional earnings. He became a regular on a vlog along with The RPG Pundit, that very often degraded into political talking points (the left these days seems to embrace satanism, but he is a staunch conservative). 

I think they ended the stream last August. 

I also remember some time ago he posted about offering a year of DM experience and running weekly games for the tidy sum of 50 grand. I think I spit out my beer when I read that. I am not sure it happened. Who would pay for that? That much? But then, maybe he is more popular than I imagined. Or maybe it was a psi op. 

In recent years Venger started his own little convention in Wisconsin. Capped at 50 people, I think it started at maybe a little more than a dozen people attending, and in the sequel cons it get up to a whopping couple dozen. 

OK, look. I can fucking joke. Plenty of corny shit about me to be joked about. So I spread the love. But you know what? I can joke, but I can't hate. The guy does what he loves. He gets a little over a dozen dudes to attend his con? Instead of worrying, he is jazzed about it. He gets a handful more at the next one, and he is over the moon. I mean, its an OSR thing. I would sit there worried that nobody will show up. He does the thing, he games in person including with fans of his setting. And he doesn't have to have them in his house where he has to worry about what they are doing in his bathroom. 

I think it was early last year that he announced he would no longer be publishing. He had gone from a few hundred in sales a month to less than a hundred. I remember feeling kind of bad for the guy. But I actually thought I read somewhere that no, he still will publish some stuff. I dunno, maybe it will be a flexible thing? 

But you can't get too heartbroken. He is in the zeitgeist of the OSR. He has gotten talked about for years in forums. He had been targeted by Your Dungeon is Suck plenty, and I was told long ago that is high praise.

Whatever it is, keep plugging away with the corn and cheese, good priest of d'ar'k'ness. There can never be too much cheese in the world. 

Find his blog at https://vengersatanis.blogspot.com/

Cheers

A True Relation of the Great Disastrum of Virginia

Since starting to work mostly from my home office the other year I watch a hell of a lot of YouTube. I have to be honest. I find it fairly distracting. All these 10 to 20 minute bits on all kinds of subjects I like or have interest in.

So every now and again a short, James Raggy video will pop up. So kind of more in touch with his stuff than i've ever been really. I had moments of fascination about some lotfp stuff such as years ago, hearing about the module, Death Frost Doom being a rip off of one of my old favorites, the Lichway from White dwarf magazine (as it turns out, only the ending gimmick was, but otherwise the Lichway was a far more approachable and gameable adventure module in general).

So, the other year he had a giant PDF sale with rock-bottom prices and I picked up a handful just to finally satisfy my curiosity about some things I didn’t want to spend more than a couple of bucks on. I still haven’t brought myself to read even the barest fraction of the stuff. There might be some tiny bits to steal, but overall a lot of the stuff just doesn’t fit with how I do things for my old school game world but I do believe that old style DND in itself is generally fairly weird unless you really try to make it not so. Back in the 80s I remember us playing albums with our games like John Michael Jarre’s strange Zoolook which is pretty weird and inspired lots of creep. But certainly not “your characters penis turns into a live eel” kind of creep. 

Over a decade ago in the early and chaotic beef-filled days of my blogging I remember messaging James regarding how he found players for his game in the city he was not native to. I got a quick reply and he seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t explore his stuff over the years because I generally don’t really purchase a whole lot of game material, again, I really don’t know how much use I would’ve gotten out of any of it. I supposed at some point, I’ll take a closer look at some of those PDFs bought for a song. I think I got Red and Pleasant Land and I'd like to see what the fuss is about. Vornheim just kind of baffled me. I run a lot of city stuff and certainly not how that is presented. 

So some time ago a Raggi Youtube video popped up. I always tend to pay a bit of attention. I kind of like the guy. I knew a lot of metal heads back in the day in Venice Beach, but he seems fairly harmless and amiable compared to those sketchy chuckleheads. It was mostly the metal loving surfers I got in to scrapes with in the beach parking lots (the movie Point Break had a lot of true to life bits in it). I mean there is some ick there. I mentioned in a previous post some time ago about his comments about "why would you bother cleaning the inside of your toilet"(uh...maybe cuz it is in the house, and maybe a girl will come over?). But fair enough. I don't think he drinks, but I could see having a beer and a shot with him and talking some games. Since I've been of a mind to leave the country in recent years I would probably also ask his advice on being a stranger in a strange land. 

But anyway, he introduced this...

“Being an Account of the Rising of a new Star to the West of the Virginia Colony,
And its Derangements of Space,
The Engines of a Second Creation,
Rains of Fishes and burninge Coales,
The Mazement thus brought to Heathen and Christian,
And the Prodigies, Sports of Nature, and invasive Creatures from Spheres beyond,
Now disportinge upon the Earth

After years of raids and massacres, the Powhatan Confederacy and the Virginia Colony find themselves in an uneasy peace. The people of Jamestown and outlying plantations again trade with Powhatan neighbors, and English planters again ship tobacco to markets across the Atlantic.

Then the land to the west of Powhatan territory seems to rupture skyward, a new star rising into the sky. Down the James River soon come reports of strange happenings, strange beasts, and stranger people.

The English were not the only ones seeking a New World.

A True Relation of the Great Disastrum of Virginia, 1633 is a campaign for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing and other traditional role-playing games. This set comprises a sourcebook for the Virginia Colony, rules for exploring an altered wilderness, keyed encounters both in Virginia and far beyond, new Magic-User spells and miscast tables, and more than eighty new monsters”.

So, a high-quality campaign set, some kind of prestige format, and very different it seems from his usual modules with titles like "The Whores Bloody Guts" or "Honey, I fucked the kids."

Super interesting, I think. Colonizer days? Possibilities there (probably triggering in our current soy-boy society. Inspired by "Annihilation?" Cool. Super high quality and something like 300 bucks? Yow. Do you get a pdf with it so you can wrap the books in lead and put them in a safe?

My first thoughts though when I heard about it was "how the hell would I get players for this?" Is there a LOTFP forum with a player search thread? Because its getting hard enough to get players for DnD in the Roll20 forums. I want to do some Runequest and am mostly afraid of being to find enough players for it. Or at least a mixed gender group. I hate sausage fests. But not sure how the ladies, or even dudes I guess, would feel about running characters in buckle shoes and big stove pipe type hats (also with buckles). Stuff usually associated with Thanksgiving. Though The Witch (VVitch?) film was cool. I might use that as an example. 

It has struck me that this might work for Call of Cthulhu, and couched with that in mind may be the easiest ways to approach players. I do have a thing for different historical periods for CoC. I see Drive Thru has the PDF for 25 bucks, and I'm thinking of getting that just out of pure curiosity. 

I sure as hell would love to see some live play of this. It has been out awhile, but I see nothing. Not even a review. So maybe this is so far just being bought in the expensive form by the faithful and placed in protective plastic on shelves. But Raggi himself, with his odd, grotty charm, should be doing videos of him running this for some people.