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View Full Version : Broken Sky: The Fall of Acadiana [NWoD Campaign Log]



Agent_0042
2013-01-04, 10:47 PM
This is a campaign log from an IRL NWoD crossover game. The premise is that we play as ourselves, recently transformed after an exposure with the supernatural, as we try to save our home and family from the apocalypse. We're part of a fairly tight-knit group of friends, all of us going or having gone to the same college, and have a decent range of RP experience - WoD, D&D, Shadowrun, what have you.

The prompt from our GM:
Strange things are afoot, and you’re smack dab in the middle of it.

One day, something happened to you. Something you probably didn’t want. Something you couldn’t explain. Something that was really unfortunate in pretty much every way.

You changed.

Maybe you changed for the better, but now you know things. Things that tear at your brain at night. Things that haunt you constantly.

Maybe you changed for the worse, your body and soul obliterated, the only thing left is a shadow of your former self, escaped from masters omnipotent.

Maybe you realized that you weren’t so normal after all.

Whatever happened, it changed you forever. And you’re not the only one.

Lafayette, Louisiana has become a burning hotspot for unusual activity and gatherings of not-things. The Prince is confused. The Elder is concerned. The Queen is lost. The Master is distracted. The Doctor is dying. The General is inquisitive. The Scientist is mystified.

And here you are in the middle of it all. Your life before the change is gone, unless you try to hold onto it. Your new life demands time and effort from your newfound “friends” and support team. You were thrust into a much larger, scarier world – but from your change, you have people like you. You are not alone.

In fact, you never really were. You had friends before it happened. You still do, and you have held onto them fiercely, though your superiors may disagree with them being who they are. You were united under a common banner, a common name, a common place.

Your parents and loved ones don’t, and can’t, understand what happened to you. Most of your colleagues don’t get it. The only ones that do are those who changed as well – and they need you as much as you need them.

Your lives will never be the same again, but your friends are still with you, and they have their own allies and abilities. A force of such diverse people has never been seen before. Together, with a little luck, you are unstoppable.

And maybe, just maybe, you can save creation.
Our core cast of characters (names changed to protect the guilty):


Me (Steven), a computer science senior who's taking a break for a semester to build up the finances. I live with two of our other friends, but in the same apartment complex as Lucian, Wallace, and Surge. My recent dreams have been filled with weird devices and schematics, and it's quite unnerving.
Lucian, the oldest of the group, is an English super-senior who is a semester away from graduation. He hangs out on these boards and is pretty damn creative, spending most of his free time writing fictional cultures, settings, and RPG premises. He suffers from insomnia that (seriously) seems to fluctuate with the moon, but it seems to be getting worse.
Wallace is a recent business graduate with acting talent and a flair for the dramatic. He can't really qualify it, but he gets the feeling that reality isn't quite what it seems.
Lorelei is an on-and-off (mostly on) student and self-professed female nerd. She's always been a bubbly person, but she's felt strangely optimistic as of late.
Phoebe is the newcomer to our group, a quiet girl hailing from the faraway land of New Zealand. Aside from vaguely foreboding feelings of her impending death, she seems to be perfectly normal.

Our GM (referred to as Surge) is also playing himself as a supporting character, and the rest of our friends will make occasional guest appearances.

The game takes place in our current home city of Lafayette (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette,_Louisiana), a college town that's home to strong business and petroleum interests and is the heart of Cajun culture. The world is identical to our own, except (obviously) for the presence of the supernatural, and the fact that the original World of Darkness was not popular enough to warrant a sequel.

We're currently two sessions in, so expect those logs to be posted soon.

Agent_0042
2013-01-06, 07:43 PM
In retrospect, a lot more happened in our first session than I thought. I'll be breaking it into two chunks.

Episode 101: Save Our City! (Extended Pilot)

The story begins on a late Friday afternoon with the party wrapping up a Rock Band session at Surge/Wallace/Lucian's place. Surge starts to drive Phoebe home, Lorelei and Wallace continue to hang out, and Lucian and I migrate to the back room as other friends start to show for Lucian's WtA game that evening.

As everyone in the apartment starts to settle down, a faint but noticeable noise catches our attention. People quiet down for a bit, and after a few seconds we hear it again, this time loud enough to make out; it's basically akin to Reaper noises (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd3sD17Ovyk). Naturally, we peek outside, and we discover that rifts are opening up in the night sky. Dark shapes can be seen falling/flying/emerging from them, but they aren't close enough (and it's too dark) for us to identify them. We hastily hammer out a few courses of action, adapting the zombie apocalypse plans we already have, but decide to stay put for the moment, at least until we can figure out more about what's going on. People start making their phone calls, That lasts for about five minutes, at which point we hear the noise again, and it's really close.

Behind our apartment complex, there's a concrete canal that seldom actually carries water, which we have affectionately named the River Derp. We peer through the back windows, and reality above the River Derp is slowly starting to tear itself apart. While Lorelei and I gather our things in preparation of a hasty exit, the others stay to examine the rift, common sense be damned. They expect to see something through it, but they don't - it just looks like an empty hole in reality, a patch of nothingness hanging in midair. Eventually the rift stops expanding, and what can best be described as hellhounds leap out and start trying to claw their way up the side of the canal. We finally decide it's time to bolt, and clamber into my jeep, which has a larger passenger capacity than the others' vehicles.

Back to the rest of the group, there's seven of us in the jeep right now - myself, Lucian, Wallace, Lorelei, and three friends. We're in decent shape as far as armaments go - Wallace has an honest-to-god katana, Lucian has a .22 pistol and an honest-to-god spear, I have a vehicle that's pretty durable. Our plan is to head to one of the dorms on campus, which was constructed over an old bomb/fallout shelter. The roads are a mess; in addition to the hellhounds, there's cazadors (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Cazador), and they're everywhere. Also, Lafayette has terrible drivers, even without people freaking out. After much defensive driving, which doubles the normally 10-minute trip, we manage to pull into the dorm.

Most of the residents are gone, since it's in between semesters, but once we enter the building there are a decent number of people there who apparently shared our idea. As we join the flow of people, Lucian has a realization. While we were on route, he noticed that, as new rifts opened around us, their locations seemed to correspond to places where lots of people would congregate. Maybe, then, an enclosed space with a swarm of people is not the best place to be. Right on cue, a scream echoes out from down the halls, and we do an abrupt about-face and exit, only to find a few hellhounds sniffing around the jeep. The people with weapons do their best to hold them off while the rest of us make it to the vehicle, at which point I pick up our fighters and ram our way out.

Our plan B is the education building on the opposite side of campus; it's easily defensible, with multiple stories and only a couple of ways up, and was a library once upon a time, meaning there's ample room should we choose to set up a base of operations. Disregard, read next post.

Wahrheit
2013-01-06, 10:51 PM
Hey guys, Lucian here. Just wanted to add that Agent (hereby referred to as Steven) missed a short chunk.

So, our original Plan B upon fleeing, er, making a tactical fallback in a strong and manly way, was to hole up in the psychology building near the dorm. It was close by, almost nobody is there even during the semester, and the third floor of it is easy to defend. So we tactically fall back in a strong and manly way with a small group of survivors, barricade ourselves in, and promptly spend the next half hour or so having various manifestations of nervous breakdown as we watch the city go to hell around us.

At this point, Wallace gets a phone call from Dr. Joy, a director who's been something like a university mom to us, saying that she and a bunch of students are taking shelter in her building but don't know how long they have until things break into her office.

Well, that simply won't do at all.

Properly galvanized, we decide we're going to be big damn heroes. Steven, Wallace, Lorelei, and I head out for a rescue mission, leaving the others to hold down the fort. Initial plan of action is as follows:


Take Steven's car
Go to Dr. Joy's
Kill hellhounds (sorry hellhounds)
Grab the students
Go to the psych building
Have some nice hot MRE's
Wait for all of this to blow over

How's that for a slice of fried gold? Anyway, we heroically go forth, by which I mean we run like madmen for the car before any hellhounds, ghouls, or cazadores could eat our faces off. As Steven engages in more defensive driving, we get a rather alarming call from Phoebe, and this is where I'll let Steven take over again.

Wahrheit
2013-02-26, 05:33 PM
Okay, it's been a while and I really need to get on Steven's back about posting more of this. In the meantime, I'll add a bit more.

So, while all this was going down, Surge had been bringing Phoebe back to her dorm from our apartment. THEN EVIL HAPPENED. His car broke down near campus, and when they got out they noticed that the treeline was a bit... thornier than usual. Plus there was the baying of hounds, which seemed bad. They take off running as something starts chasing them. It grabs Surge and vanishes, leaving a very confused Phoebe near the chemistry building. She calls us, so we decide to make a quick detour to grab her since the chemistry building is literally across the street from Dr. Joy's.

Of course, things don't go as planned. Before we get there, the chemistry building explodes. Phoebe feels burning, a wave of pressure, sudden pain, and then nothing.