Aeon D-Team S01E03 – Winds of Change

Dramatis Personae

  • Alexander (played by +Daniel Dover ): 6’ 4’’, 225 lbs. Tall and muscular with a gleaming smile. He has almost iridescent white hair and faintly golden skin. Exudes a calm, quiet confidence, and moves with the grace of a dancer. Literally inhumanly attractive. He’s strong, fast, durable, indefatigable, and has some matter control powers. Cares about everybody and everything.
  • Eddie (played by +Ignus Pyre): 6’, 180 lbs. Outwardly disheveled looking, but his scruffy furs hide high quality gear underneath. Fairly average looking with reddish brown hair and a bit of stubble. Carries an enormous backpack but doesn’t seem too slowed by it, despite a slight limp, a pulls a trailer behind him made from the rear end of an old ford mustang. Honest, forthright and reliable, but won’t speak too much about his past. He seems to have a sixth sense for monsters and the dark fog.
  • Jacob “Doc” (played by +Asta Kask): 6’, 150 lbs. Kinda lanky with leathery, weathered skin and greying hair, offset by piercing blue eyes. He’s compassionate, responsible, and very careful with his words. Dreams of building a place where metahumans can live unprosecuted. Has some healing powers. Followed by a 45 pound cat, that flies and leaves a rainbow trail behind it. Yes, really.
  • Kurst “Kurt” Vetrson (played by +Antoni Ten Monrós): 6’ 4’’, 110 lbs. Wears layers and layers of clothing, but underneath them he’s anorexically thin and very pale. He always feels slightly cold to the touch, but despite the layers isn’t actually bothered by the cold. Young and usually speaks fairly coarsely. Absolutely hates wendigo. Has ice powers that he doesn’t like to use because they’re not fully under his control. Good with a bow.
  • Dr. Nicodemus “Nick” Faust (played by +Hal Batty): 6’ 4’’, 180 lbs. Tall and lean. Flaming red hair, chalk white skin, and coal black eyes. Also literally inhumanly attractive, and his charms work on men and women alike. Wears a dark charcoal suit with crimson waistcoat and cravat, with a long black overcoat, even in the midst of a blizzard. Has an arrogant smile on his lips, only offset by an intensity to his eyes. Master of magic
  • King the Maine Coon (NPC Ally): a huge Maine Coon cat (almost 50 lbs. and 4.5 ft long) that can fly/hover (leaving a trail of rainbow colored light), go “boneless,” shoot lazers from its eyes, ignore a structure’s ceilings and floors (but not its walls), and other more interesting abilities. He can haz cheezburger.

A Fight From The Rooftop
All Player Characters
Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, 11° F light snow and heavy winds
January 28th, 37 AB, 3:05 pm
Poole’s Palace

We make our way up to the roof of Poole’s Palace, the smell of blood hitting us as we do. Everyone rolls HT to avoid nausea, Alexander rolls an 18 but spends Karma to make it disappear. Once on the battlements we look out onto a sea of Wendigo, there must be around 30 of the creatures. Quickly we begin to formulate a plan, Eddie makes a roll for precognition, and relays that information to me, while Kurst and Alexander roll Observation as complementary skills to my Tactics. I roll a 13, but spend two Wildcard points to turn it into a three, that’s a success by 30. I beat my opponent’s margin of success by one… Well okay then, it seems my father is actively coordinating the Wendigo, and to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me that he can succeed by 29 on a run of the mill Tactics roll.

The round begins with Kurst, who draws a silver arrow and puts it through the skull of a Wendigo, dropping it. Alexander takes a Wait manoeuvre, for when a Wendigo comes within smashing range. Faust hardcore improvises Great Haste, and casts it on himself, then uses the second action it grants to Wait until a Wendigo gets within 10 yards of him. Eddie takes a shot with his bolt-action rifle, but his target dodges. They begin scaling the walls of the keep, with terrifying speed.

One comes within range of Alexander, triggering his Wait and he makes an All-Out swing, but it dodges out the way. My own Wait triggers next, and a sword materialises in Nick’s hand, I teleport behind the nearest Wendigo and ram my sword through it’s brain, channelling fire down the sword and incinerating it. 

Three creatures get close to Mitchell Poole himself and he spins, putting a bullet into each of their heads, critting twice, and they drop like stones. Jacob fires off his shotgun into a chest, but the Wendigo doesn’t drop. Meanwhile King just looks adorable, apparently this can hypnotise anything that comes close, have I mentioned I hate this cat? Kurst fires off another shot, dispatching another of them with a silver arrow to the skull.

Alexander performs and All-Out Double to grab a Wendigo by the skull, and ram his fist into it, making a splat. It’s at this point I begin to implement my plan, I use Extra Effort to teleport 20 yards out, away from the castle, into the middle of a group of four Wendigo, and without pause, whip around, doing a Whirlwind Attack to their skulls with my sword. I roll three critical successes, and one normal success, and hit each time, again channelling flame through my sword, obliterating them.

Eddie uses a Power Stunt to add Targeting to his Clairvoyance and projects it out closer to the Wendigo, giving himself a bonus to hit when he shoots for it’s skull, hitting this time but failing to kill it, the critters are damn tough, most of us just pump out an obscene amount of damage, and Kurst uses silver, something all Wendigo are weak to.

Two Wendigo charge Alexander, now defenceless after his All-Out attack last turn, and do… nothing, their claws can’t even scratch his nigh-invulnerable skin. Then they turn on me, also defenceless after my Whirlwind Attack, but considerably less durable than Alexander, and now surrounded by Wendigo, I’m seemingly in trouble. One bites onto my neck and begins to worry at it, while three more grapple me. All is going according to plan.

Mitchell takes another shot, dropping another Wendigo. Jacob takes a Wait for a creature to come in range. Two Wendigo are charging towards Kurst, who draws two arrows, places them in his bow, draws, and fires, dropping both with an arrow each, right between the eyes. Alexander punches one, activating his Super-ST and hitting it for 70 damage, sending it flying off the top of the keep and into a tree with a sickening crunch.

Time for step 2 of the plan. Nicodemus is surrounded by Wendigo latched on from all directions after his reckless attack the previous round. Now he lashes out, Hardcore Improvising an omni-directional wave of fire that sweeps out, burning all the nearby Wendigo… and himself. Almost simultaneously thanks to the earlier casting of Great Haste, he Hardcore Improvises a spell to stop time for everyone but himself and the rest of the team.

I then begin to explain the plan. If Nicodemus was to survive long enough to kill Marlowe before he himself is killed, he’d need to convince Marlowe that he’s already dead. He acted progressively more reckless throughout the course of the battle, letting his rage shine through, until it seemingly overwhelms him, losing control of his magic, and incinerating himself along with any Wendigo nearby. In reality, masked by flame he cast his time stop spell. By the time the spell runs out he’ll be by Eddie’s side, who he reveals projects an aura that precognition or clairvoyance cannot pierce, and area in which he’d be invisible to his father’s scrying.

There’s one slight problem, Eddie is a terrible liar, and this plan hinges on subterfuge. So I make Eddie an offer, I’ll cast a spell on him that’ll subtly change his personality, not turn him into a liar, just make him better at it, should he have to. This is understandably a problem for Eddie, and he, Nick and Alexander debate it backwards and forwards for a while, until we all see a figure approaching. Nicodemus and Alexander both succeed their Expert Skill (Metahuman) rolls and learn that this is Zephyr, a member of the Cavalry, a superhero team from before the Black Swan. He’s a speedster, who’s somehow managing to beat out my time stop by moving extremely quickly (don’t ask me how that works).

I ignore Zephyr’s approach and continue to argue with Eddie, until suddenly my spell ends, everything goes dark for a moment, and we find ourselves sitting down inside the keep, looking at Zephyr. Who explains that he’s not in fact Zephyr, he’s Phaeton, Zephyr’s “good” clone. He talks to Alexander, and says that Alexander’s friend Maria needs his help, she’s trapped in a school surrounded by Wendigo, and needs us to get her out. Meanwhile, Faust is sitting and fuming in a corner, he doesn’t like people interfering in his plans.

His mood isn’t helped by the fact that for some time he’ll have to stick close to Eddie, within his divination-disrupting aura. Eddie is happy about this, Faust is not. Things get even worse when we realise that if I just walk normally I’ll leave a set of footprints, which will be entirely visible, the solution is for King (yes, the flying rainbow cat) to lift me off the ground using the power of sparkles. Time for me to once again express my hatred of this cat.

Vampires in the Gym
All Player Characters
Sentinel Butte, North Dakota, 11° F light snow and heavy winds
January 28th, 37 AB, 5:00pm
North of Poole’s Palace

We eventually reach the school, and it is swarming with Wendigo. Phaeton points out the wall to the room Maria is in. Alexander transmutes a whole load of dirt into silver for use as arrows, then plunges his hands into the ground, and transmutes a thin layer of silver around them, just in case. Then Kurst lays down covering fire, with a hail of silver arrows, killing far more Wendigo than is in any way reasonable, and Alexander goes charging in. He smashes through the wall, Kool-Aid man style, and finds Maria lying there. Carefully he scoops her up, along with a box she points out, and runs back out of the building.

Kurst’s arrows have succeeded in driving the Wendigo away, so we then head back into the school and retrieve a generator to take back to Poole’s palace. While the real battle has been taking place, Nicodemus and Phaeton have been having something of a verbal battle, which Phaeton definitely wins. Look, Nick’s just found out his mother is dead, he’s not at his best. He’s also severely injured, after being attacked by Wendigo, and then intentionally trying to incinerate himself, so after I complain profusely, Jacob heals him.

We head back towards Poole’s Palace, while Phaeton boasts about how he not only beat my time stop, he boosted my fire spell to make it more convincing (destroying all the remaining Wendigo, and blackening the outside of the building), got us all back inside, and improved the illusion I had up around the building, so it now included divination and psychic powers. The session ends there.

After Action Report (Hal)
I didn’t enjoy this session. It wasn’t fun having my plan interrupted for no reason (seriously, I’d stopped time), and it was equally unfun having all my magic completely outshone ten time over by Phaeton’s, who is mainly a speedster just dabbling in magic, and then being taunted for a while only hours after learning of my mother’s death. But then I didn’t a great job either, Christopher let me know after the session that I’d been talking over the other players a lot. Which is partly due to communications lag, it’s hard to tell when someone’s finished talking, but it’s also to do with me getting carried away. It’s an awful trait in a fellow player, so I’d like to apologise to the other players, it won’t happen again!

After Action Report (Christopher)
There was so much during this game session. Too much really. While I know that Phaeton annoyed the other player characters to the point of daggers being cast in my direction – that was entirely the point. Phaeton is essentially a Mary Sue. He’s annoying and he’s almost always right. That’s basically why he’s annoying. It’s also why he’s a recurring character versus a constant one. There’s always that one guy you just want to punch in the face. That’s Phaeton. Overall, this was a session where I had to referee a lot because folks were talking over each other. I didn’t like that. It was still fun and quite good.

Session Soundtrack
Fight Test” by the Flaming Lips (opening song)
Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton
Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + the Machine
Stand by Me” by Ben E. King
Winds of Change” by Scorpions (closing song)
Posted in Session Recap and tagged , , , .

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