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Super Evil User
2014-07-29, 11:27 PM
This requires a bit of backstory. Early on in my group's World of Darkness days, we decided it would be a good idea to run a Mage the Awakening game based on the anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. We cut out a lot of content or alter it altogether: for instance, we started at what would be analogous to the Lab 5 arc, skipped parts of the Greed arc, skipped the Briggs arc entirely and ended up beating the BBEG (basically a ripoff of Father) before he could put into motion the last stage of his evil plan. In the end, we ended up agreeing that it was a horrible experience. I was the Storyteller for this, so I was responsible for most of the things that went awry here.

This time, we're getting back together and trying this again.

One big reason why the entire endeavor fell apart was because we didn't have a good grasp on the major themes we wanted and ended up playing like we would play a D&D dungeon crawl. Both Mage and FMA:B have hubris as their major theme, but that wasn't expressed well in the game and that isn't what we want to emulate now. We want to do something different.

I decided that the theme I liked in FMA that was shared by World of Darkness was discovery of a secret hostile world. This lent itself well to a Hunter the Vigil game, so we went with that. My friend (the Storyteller this time, and a more experienced one than me) decided that he liked FMA's secondary theme of loss. This theme of loss was expressed more in the first anime (2003) than it was in Brotherhood. Out of a desire to keep things "fresh" so as not to dredge up unpleasant memories, we decided to base our new campaign on that.

From 2003 sprung a third theme, one of loneliness and isolation. One big problem that all of us were to blame for was that we failed to tie in our characters with our campaign's central theme of hubris. We're trying to rectify that by making most of our characters lonely in some way, united during their secret studies of the occult.

We're currently torn between fighting Prometheans and Changelings. Prometheans are the more blatantly obvious ones given their deep thematic connections to FMA's homunculi, but Changelings also have to deal with loss and would serve well to distinguish this from the source material. Currently, this is what we have:


The PCs confront various mortal antagonists separately, tied together by their connections to a mysterious organization
The PCs all meet up in an abandoned building (think Lab 5), where they confront said supernaturals and lose
Knowledge of the supernaturals in hand, they decide to fight them some more - only to find that they're in charge of the government or similarly powerful organization (maybe a church conspiracy a la Church of Glabados?)
The story ends when the supernaturals' control is wrested from them, perhaps involving the sacrifice of one or two PCs.