Author: Aaron Griffin

Throw your ad lib moves at me:

The Aware is a first generation immigrant, and we just learned that his babushka was a sort of witch/shaman back in her village. They found some artifacts in a box after she died. One of these was a fist sized black cube, wrapped in cloth.

So a player throws some psychometry at it, looking for the items secrets. My mind wasn’t sure what this thing was, so I show him a vivid but utterly silent impression of an old shaman chanting and holding the cube aloft as it rips a pale mist from a group of five men, absorbing it while they drop dead to the ground.

So I’m assuming there’s a chant or ritual to use this thing, but let’s say they figure that out…. What sort of move should this device have?

I’d like some advice on faction handling – involving factions in order to advance is starting to feel artificial to me. We have a lot of little running threads which each player interested in different things. If you have one player over here dealing with a vamp gun runner who’s trying to push a local pack of thug wolves out of town, it’s fine to have to go to someone else for help, but to have to involve Mortality, Power, AND Wild in some way in order to chase advancement – it’s a little strained.

Some of this could be in how the underlying conflicts are setup (vamps vs wolves could easily have been vamps vs fae), but I don’t really think it’s fair to require that underlying conflicts always cross factions.

So I guess my concern is – if you’re in a situation where sessions focus on 1-2 factions at a time instead of the spectrum, how do you keep the players advancing without shoehorning in other factions in nearly non-sensical ways?

I’m looking for advice on bringing the game to some logical conclusion. With the Beginning of Session move, players can author their own kickers each session, which is super cool. The problem is that they don’t always tie together cleanly.

We’re getting to the end of some of the corruption tracks, and I think the stories for each character are coming to an end. So I’d like to try to bring things in more tightly, but don’t want to remove the Beginning of Session move for the players.

Anything special you guys do to start pointing towards that 3-4 episode season finale arc?

Is it sensible to make a custom move using Faction stats to indicate familiarity with a group? We’re setting up for a religious thing, where holy folk (Mortality) and Night don’t mix. I am considering something like:

When you enter the sanctuary of Rockefeller Chapel, roll with Night.

On a 10+, you are too close to the darkness, and the protective magics cause great discomfort (take -1 ongoing while within the sanctuary, but you may take 1 harm to shake free from the enchantment).

On a 7-9, you are merely disoriented for a few moments (take -1 forward).

On a 6-, the darkness does not hold sway over you; you are unaffected.

Refusing a Debt question. I had the following scenario happen:

Vamp goes to meet Libby, apologizes for treating her poorly, and asks here to accompany him on a thing (get rid of some ghosts, collect the ectoplasm they leave behind as they exit our plane for oblivion), so he could make use of her budding necromancy skills. She says sure, but I’ve done so much for you in the past, so I’m gonna take 80% of what we get (she’s calling in a debt here). In inform the Vamp that what remains will probably not be as much as he needs, so he goes to refuse the debt and succeeds on a 10+.

Here’s where the problem comes in. He presses the matter. Nothing in the situation changed, but he keeps asking. The player is expecting to try to persuade her with promises and sweet talk.

But this confuses me. He knows what it will take (the debt) but doesn’t want to give up 80%. He thinks he could talk her down to an equal share, but it doesn’t feel right to me on the rules side because the debt was already part of this.

We ended up rolling to persuade and he botched it, so it ended poorly anyway. But what would you have done?