So, this Wedensday was the last session of Cape & Caul, my shamanistic superheroes campaign. The only text I have about it is this briefing I wrote for Greif so he could come and play an NPC, the main villain. I’ll put it here behind a cut. If you read it, I’ll just summarize that following what is described in the briefing, the PCs kicked Aubrey’s ass, freed the ghost he was tormenting, freed a young girl from a sinister mob-backed kidnapping ring, ran into a resurfaced mysterious NPC, discovered the Batcave (well, my setting’s equivalent), and buggered off to Italy, where they took on the Benandanti and prevented Firenze from being taken over by emotion-sucking jellyfish.
Also, we spent a lot of sessions messing about and not playing.
Now, I’m going to have to come up with a new game. Unlike some, I don’t start a new group every time I start a new campaign. I keep playing with the same folks every Wedensday, except we change game. However, Goula is taking the opprtunity to back out, so I’m left with Bo and Israel, and we’re going to play something with superpowers or something (Bo has a firm idea of the sort of game I am supposed to run to him, and have been running continously, more or less, for over 10 years…)
I am toying with the idea now of trying to play GMless, because I miss playing, and I’m wondering how I can play without the world falling into the hands of someone else. Maybe some system or cunning campaign frame (switching narration?) could be tried…
Anyway, here’s
Cape and Caul – Aubrey’s brief
Cosmology
There is only man. No gods, demons, extra-dimensional Cthulhus. There are an awful lot of spirits. Ghosts, totems, animal spirits, all around in the spirit world. But they are fairly passive, driven by simple instincts and desires; it is men who move things.
There is a spirit world, an extension of the physical one, which reflects it and extends down into the underworld (which is dark, underground, filled with lost ghosts, monsters and hidden places, and only partially coexisting with the subways and sewers of the real world) and the heavens (which can be reached from skyscrapers and other high places, and are, well, pretty much up in the air, occupied by bird spirits and sunlight and portents and a lot of empty air.
Magicians
There are shamans and there are sorcerers, and by all account both of them are mad. They both experience a higher, deeper and broader reality than mundane men, which one might label schizophrenia, or delusional psychosis. They both walk in dreams, talk to spirits, and can make the world bend to their dream. Other than that, they are completely different, and natural enemies.
Shamans are born; whether it is a caul about their face at birth, or a trauma that is destined to tear loose reality’s hold on their mind, they have a nature that seeks to be born. Sorcerers are made; they choose their path, tear away their sanity with their own bloodied hands.
Shamans are natural, Sorcerers unnatural. Shamans are a human community’s defense, an intermediary to the spirit world, healers, bringers of knowledge. They preserve the status quo. Sorcerers are self-made monsters, who seek knowledge and power for themselves, bringers of curses and chaos, who seek to overthrow the constraints and balances of society.
A shaman is stronger than a sorcerer because he works from intuition, in harmony. A sorcerer is stronger than a shaman because he has learned his art the hard way, through study and practice.
Powers
Common to both sorcerers and shamans is the ability to travel the spirit world in dreams. Both can see and talk to spirits, persuade them and perhaps bind them. The power of a spirit is limited mostly to the spirit world, but if a human’s soul is weakened, a spirit may enter it. A sorcerer can take a part of a person’s soul and hide it away, causing the person to become weak and ill; there is much dark power in messing with pieces of people’s souls. Also, pain and shock are simple ways of weakening and getting power over a soul.
Both a shaman and a sorcerer can enter a trance state (through rhythmic music, drugs, breathing, exercise or just sheer concentration) that allows them to transcend physical limitations, being not only stronger, faster and more durable than would seem possible, but also to act in the physical world as freely as in a lucid dream – powers such as invisibility and flight have been demonstrated. Disguise is another possibility.
Props and Costumes
Both Shaman and sorcerers work better with props, music, drugs, runes, tools, costumes. Stuff with strong personal significance. Best is something with strong significance to the practitioner him or herself. In particular, they wear costumes. These are part of creating their identity as a magician, their “stage persona”, separate from their mundane identity. They make their costumes themselves, and mix as many personal touches into it as they can. The costume usually includes a mask, jacket, gloves, boots and other coverings (hats, aprons, wigs, etc). It provides both protection (a form of spirit armor) and an amplifier for boosting their power. Magic without a costume is possible, but needs to be more subtle.
The “persona” is more subtle, but in many ways just as important – and useful – as a costume.
New York
The king is dead.
He died this autumn, mysteriously, possibly at the hand of some enemy. For many years, Doctor Joshua King was the premiere shaman of New York City, and he crushed any sorcerer or lesser practitioner who dared oppose him. Before King, they say, Manhattan was in the hands of a ring of sorcerers, who made its inhabitants their playthings until King crushed their power and scattered them like chaff.
Until now, the few magicians of the city kept low, but now the chance is coming to rise and seize power. And the secrets that King held are much sought after.
James Aubrey
James Aubrey has an apartment in a prestigious building in upper west Manhattan, on the same floor as cellist Atlanta Reinhardt (a PC). He apparently works on Wall Street, and is a lawyer, or at least so he appears to most people he has business dealings with. He’s a handsome man in his late thirties, but there’s something cold about him.
In actuality, JA is a sorcerer. He ran across a sorcerer called Al Brodie back when he was a college freshman, and tried all he could to get Brodie to teach him. Brodie couldn’t be threatened or bribed, so Aubrey found himself paying in the only coin Brodie would accept: degradation. Brodie moved into Aubrey’s apartment (paid for by Aubrey’s well-off parents) and made him his slave for several years. However, the old man was lonely, and liked to talk, and Aubrey bought his trust, so one day he did Aubrey the boon of initiating him as a magician by flaying him alive and sewing on a different skin.
Eventually, Aubrey killed Brodie by cutting his heroin with rat poison. But it took him a while to get there, until he’d milked Brodie of as many secrets as he could.
Now, Aubrey is a pretender to the throne of New York. He is a jackal, a wolverine, a predator on the make in an ecosystem that has just lost its apex predator. His goals are simple: learn King’s secrets and powers, destroy all enemies and competition, and exercise his power free of restraint.
Aubrey learned about King’s death from dreams, omens and the papers (a divination perhaps allowed him to tie between the visions of an Eagle’s corpse crawling with snakes, a dead bear beset by wolverines, and the small obituary notice announcing the death of author and anthropologist Joshua King). He sought out King’s heirs, his sons Sean and Hector, and inquired about purchasing something from King’s extensive collection of ethnic artifacts. In particular, he noticed 4 statues of beasts, a wolf, a bear, a bird and a cougar, that he sensed held spirits locked within. Sean and Hector weren’t selling, but apparently the artifacts picked up some unwitting attention, that of three latent shaman who they have somehow awakened. More distressing, this awakening appears to be partially induced by Aubrey himself.
[ this is where I insert a summary of my campaign so far.]
PCS
There are three shamans, going through a rapid mutual initiation:
- Atlanta Reinhardt – Aubrey’s neighbor. She’s in her twenties, a beautiful redhead and a promising cellist. She lost her entire family not too long ago (they all died in a plane crash while flying to Aspen for a skiing vacation), and has been living alone in a big apartment with her cat Tiger and housekeeper, Alfred. She’s rich (a trust fund or something). A heavy drinker, possibly an alcoholic.
- Dave Lowenstein – an Israeli, no Green Card, worked as a mover , and ran across the spirit-statues while moving stuff out of King’s apartment. Rents a room in the Kuznatzovs’ apartment. Has aspirations of being a stand-up comedian, and hangs around a comedy club a lot. Big guy, in his twenties.
- Constantine (Costia) Kuznatzov – a 12-year-old child prodigy, a Russian kid whose now studying Physics in university and the violin in the city conservatory. Practices with Atlanta; his parents rent Dave a room. A small and ugly kid, but damn clever. Obsessed with video games.
Lowenstein appears to have been “awakened” (=aware of the spirit world) by exposure to King’s spirit-statues; Reinhardt and Costia apparently awakened by playing together and tuning into a spirit disturbance in Aubrey’s apartment (Caitlin – see below).
Worse, soon all three were communing with the spirits in the statues and lucid-dreaming together.
Aubrey needs to either eliminate them or enslave them, preferably before they become more powerful. However, this hasn’t worked out.
He worked a big curse to strike at them. However, they had been spirited away – literally, they vanished from the city just as he moved against them. So instead, he struck those close to them:
- A mover involved in transporting King’s belongings was stabbed. By someone who used his fingers rather than a knife.
- Costia’s mother, Ina Kuznatzov, was pushed off a subway platform, apparently by a crowd of ruffians, and died.
- Someone (wonder who…) broke into Atlanta’s apartment, brutalized Alfred, drove him to Philadelphia and dropped him off at his sister’s house, with explicit threats never to return. In addition, Atlanta’s cat was ritually disemboweled, and its head was pierced with an iron nail marked with a rune of enslavement. She’s been living in a hotel since discovering this.
Other things of note:
- Costia’s mother’s spirit is trapped somewhere, unable to move on. Something is blocking her, she says.
- In a bizarre incident in a NY art gallery, someone let a bull loose on the roof of the building, with catastrophic results (it fell over the edge). Gail Chambers, The artist whose exhibit was supposed to open there vanished, there are reports of witnesses who saw a woman fall with the bull to the street.
- Shortly after this incident, two armed thugs attacked Lowenstein, Reinhardt and Costia outside a Chinese restaurant. Lowenstein was stabbed and rushed to hospital, but has recovered.
- Very recently (like, yesterday), a university anthropologist was knocked into a coma and his assistant was assaulted and abused in a mysterious attack that took place in his office.
Tonight, the three PCs invaded Aubrey’s apartment, in their dreams / in the spirit world. There they tried to rescue the spirit of a girl with her lips sewn up and her throat cut.
Caitlin
Pain hurts. When you’ve been skinned alive, you develop intolerance to pain. Luckily, an evil sorcerer can do something about it.
Aubrey found a girl called Caitlin and put his pain in her. He didn’t stop, even when she killed herself. In fact, he bought her apartment from her parents, moved in and installed her ghost in her former bedroom. Coincidentally, he ended up as Atlanta Reinhardt’s neighbor.
