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View Full Version : Jerusalem Falls, a Monsterhearts Campaign Journal



Benthesquid
2016-04-24, 12:28 PM
Had the first session of Monsterhearts yesterday. Partially because I think you guys might enjoy it, and partially to keep a record because we'll have an irregular rotating group, I thought I'd record the events here.

Cassius- an ages old vampire, ancient predator with the face of a teenager.

Crow- a Feyborn boy, born manipulator.

Cassandra- an Infernal, tied in ways she doesn't fully understand to a mysterious Dark Power she knows only as the Fallen.

Anita- a lovelorn mortal, pining after Cassius


It’s move-in day at Armstrong College, located on the edge of the town of Jerusalem Falls, and a certain segment of the college population has decided, as they do for most events, to celebrate with booze and pounding base.

A particularly clumsy student named Hank is avoiding Cassius’s gaze- nervous around the gorgeous alpha predator, though it’s not clear whether the gorgeous or alpha predator aspect unnerves him more. In any case, he’s so busy not looking at Cassius that he walks straight into Cassandra, spilling half a solo cup of beer on her. She snaps at him, trying to Shut Him Down. It works- kind of, he stalks off, humiliated, but snaps back at her as he goes, and they both get a tag (Ashamed, and Bitch, respectively).

Anita avoids dealing with a student who approaches her, looking for directions to the weed-smoking part of the party, in favor of gazing longingly at Cassius.

Meanwhile, a girl named Grace, having seen Hank’s run-in with Cassandra, draws completely the wrong message, and with a cry of “Beer shower,” dumps her beer over the guy next to her. The guy starts to get mad, but Crow steers the two away from each other, before wandering off to hit on Cassandra.

It doesn’t go well, and Cassius steps in, sending Crow on his way. This starts a minor feud between Cassius and Crow- Crow winds up tagged with Creep, while Cassius picks up White Knight as a condition. Crow also attempts to meddle with Anita and Cassius, and convinces Hank to go hit on Cassandra.

This doesn’t go well, and Cassandra slaps Hank, who shoves her against a wall and stalks off to commiserate with Crow. Crow’s having his own problems- Cassius told a lacrosse player named Jackson that Crow’s been talking **** about the team, and Jackson roughs Crow up a little, netting him the Marked Man tag. Anita retrieves her ugliest shirt for Cassandra, both helping and attempting to ensure that Cassius shows no further interest in her- and Cassandra uses it as a towel to sop up some of the beer before handing it back.

After a run in with Crow, Anita finds an excuse to cuddle up to Cassius, asking him to defend her against the indecent advances of Crow, but, after a brief conversation with Grace, who has decided that Anita should be her best friend, she excuses herself, as she has work early the next morning. Before she goes, Cassius bites her finger, drawing enough blood for her to smear her phone number on a sheet of paper for him.

Crow Cassius collects another phone number from Grace after he and Cassandra prevent her from pulling her shirt off to give it to as Crow wonders where Hank has got to. Cassandra follows Grace outside for a cigarette and Crow tags along as Cassius continues to prowl the party.

Their various pursuits are cut short by a blood-curling scream. As it turns out, where Hank has got off to is being gruesomely murdered, his heart ripped out. Overcoming the to him overwhelming smell of blood, Cassius remembers seeing something similar- the death of a Franciscan monk in Mexico, during the Spanish conquest. Calling on her connection to her infernal patron, Cassandra gets a vision of the murderer- a figure whose appearance seems to flicker between a leggy blonde, a shadowy form, and Cassandra’s own ideal mate.

Grace calls 911, and the party begins to break up, as those not panicking about the murder panic about disposing of all the booze before the cops arrive.

Benthesquid
2016-05-08, 12:22 PM
Cassius
Anita
Cassandra

Crow's player is unfortunately out of town for the foreseeable future


Hearing the commotion in the hallway, Anita comes back out. Cassius tells her that Hank is dead, and Anita, exhausted and assuming that he’s just OD’ed or some such, is unable to work up much emotion. Cassius, well aware of the double meanings, shuts her down and gives her the condition ‘Heartless,’

The party breaks up. The next morning, Cassius realizes that Eliza, one of the girls’ whose cell phone number he got last night, lived in the room where the body was found. He calls her, and learns that her roommate had asked her to clear out to let her have the room for the night, and that she hasn’t heard from said roommate since.

Noting this, Cassius goes to the library, hoping to gain some clues as to the identity of Hank’s killer. Unfortunately, digging into your memories for clues when you’re a thousands-year old vampire is a risky proposition, and he loses himself in the memories of a particularly bloody night in the Bavarian Alps.

When he snaps out of it, he finds what by all appearances is a twelve year old emo kid in front of him, leaning on a sledgehammer nearly as tall as he is. Cassius recognizes this twerp- Bastian, a vampire older even than Cassius, who has made it his death’s work to keep vampires and the supernatural comfortably hidden in the shadows.

He’s here because an extremely bloody, messy murder, coinciding with Cassius’s arrival at the college, got his attention. Cassius protests his innocence, and Bastian makes it clear that he doesn’t care. He’s exerted some sort of influence to hush up the murder, and he’s on his way to California. If Cassius doesn’t deal with the situation and Bastian has to come back, no one will be pleased with the results.

At about this time, Cassandra, who is in the library for similar reasons to Cassius, literally trips over Bastian, who displays roughly the physical properties of a marble statue- incredibly hard and immobile, and cold to the touch. He questions Cassandra about whether she comes from Schuyler Dorm, where the party and murder happened, and then seems to sense something off about our Infernal, murmuring “Isn’t that just the damndest thing,” before making his departure.

Cassandra is freaked out by her encounter with Bastian, and asks Cassius what the hell his deal is. Cassius completely fails to reassure her by refusing to answer any of her questions and demonstrating that he’s also cold to the touch.

Meanwhile, Anita is at work at the off-campus coffee shop, Koffee Karl’s, when Grace and Eliza, walk in. Overhearing their conversation, Anita get roughly the same information about the roommate’s request and subsequent disappearance that Cassius did- and she hears the official version of the story, that Hank got excessively drunk, broke a window, and cut himself on the shattered glass. Grace isn’t buying this- pointing out that the window wasn’t broken when she got into the room and called the cops- but Eliza just doesn’t want to think about it.

Cassius and Cassandra arrive at the coffee shop as well. Anita flirts with Cassius and gives him a free coffee, and, displeased by Cassandra’s presence, all but spits in her coffee. The two Casses join Eliza and Grace at their table.

Cassandra continues trying to get Cassius to explain what the hell is up with him and Bastian, and Cassius continues glibly evading her while he comforts and flirts with Eliza. Finally, Cassandra heads to the bathroom while Cassius makes a date with Eliza for a party that night.

Koffee Karl himself, meanwhile, emerges from the office to ask whether Anita is serving cute customers free coffee, which Anita denies, fishing out the cost from the tip jar while Karl reminisces about his youth doing similar things. “If the walls in the break room could talk,” he muses, “Or that counter, for that matter.” He wanders back into the office as Anita begins scrubbing the countertop.

In the bathroom, Cassandra calls upon her demonic patron, asking what killed Hank. The mirror goes black, and then shows Cassius leading Eliza into a bedroom and the door ominously swinging shut. It returns to a normal reflection, only to fog over, an invisible finger writing an address, a time, and a specific room. As it turns out, that time is tonight, and that address is the same place that Cassius has just agreed to take Eliza.

The information comes with a warning from the fellow on the other end of Dial-a-Demon. If Cassandra continues to pursue this, she’ll find herself inescapably tangled in the threads of the supernatural. She agrees.

The meeting in the coffee shop begins to break up. Grace pulls Cassius, who also saw the body, aside to confirm that the official story about Hank’s death is bogus, and he agrees. Anita tries to warn Eliza off of Cassius, and when this fails, comforts herself with the thought that Cassius may use and discard Eliza, but it will be nothing compared to what Anita and Cassius will eventually have.

Back at home, Cassandra gazes into the abyss to try and find out what Cassius and Bastian are. Unable to pierce the veil, she has to go deeper, and offers her infernal sugar-daddy not only a deepening of her debt, but her own blood.

The result- a cascading series of visions of millennia of blood, slaughter and darkness, with Cassius and Bastian in starring roles that leaves her drained and frightened.