Categories
long Science Fiction and Fantasy

One of The Great Bull Loons

Every book I read is about breakups. Or maybe that’s just life.

I finished Years of Rice and Salt sometime in January, on the first week of Suzie’s current visit. It does drag down the further along it goes, a relentless march of set-pieces and lectures and characters bubbling up through each other’s lives on their myriard reincarnations. The final movement is awash in lectures and echoes, including even an alternate-reality version of the book itself, written by “old red ink” from Samarkand, rather than Kim Stanley Robinson (there must be a pun there, but it eludes me). But it caught me, with its intense reflection on the life of a revolutionary-turned-history teacher that had time to see all his life’s achievements – politics, family, personal goals – grow hollow and without efect. And suddenly, reading of him and thinking of me, I felt myself being washed away into oblivion in the torrent of history, but yet somehow embedded in it. Life is meaningless only if you’re the one living it.

This Saturday I finished E.R. Eddison The Worm Ouroboros (apparently you can read the whole thing online at Sacred Texts, but I think it’s worth getting the book). This is one of those great antecedants of modern fantasy, a pre-Tolkien work by one of the writers Walter John Williams calls The Great Bull Loons, writers who were pursuing mad, beautiful ideas long before fantasy was anything you’d call a genre.
Eddison writes prose the likes of which has not been seen since the Seventeenth century (as the introduction puts it). I’d call his language “Shakespearean”, but actually it would be more correct to point to John Webster as his influence (according to this review at Wizards of the Coast, of all places, which does contain a big spoiler). I first read examples of his text in Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays The Language of the Night, in particular in a great essay where she talks about how “proper” high fantasy needs to use suitably high language; the Lords of Elfland do not speak like politicians in Washington DC, she says. Her examples of “how it’s done” were Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien, and Eddison is probably the least inimmitable of the three: his descriptions, dialogue, and written texts (complete with authentic-style irregular spelling!) don’t contain a single false note, and his gorgeous, tangled sentences just urge you to read on. Near the end, I was seized, as when I read Dunsany, with the desire to read this text aloud: this is prose that should be declaimed, not read in silence.
The actual story, once we dispense with an awkward framing device, is about the struggles and mighty deeds of the lords of two great kingdoms, Demonland and Witchland. While the lords of Demonland are clearly the heroes, they are too perfect to really be interesting. However, Eddison’s villains, the king of Witchland and his lords, are delightful, mixing nobility and venality, tragic heroism with basest treachery. The Demons, as they themselves realize, are only really interesting when fighting the Witches.
I found this a surprising and delightful book, despite some flaws (the plot seems to meander a bit, and Eddison loves his descriptions, of landscapes, weather and ornately decorated palaces, as well as long, long rosters of names, far more than any reader would).

And then I put down that book, and picked up Valis.
I’m still adjusting to the cluture shock.

Categories
Blather long Roleplaying Software and Programming

The graveyard of stillborn blog entries

Yep, it’s another one of those Fridays where I wake up at noon, spend an entire day reading the web, and generally mess up my inner clock by not even looking out the window or talking to a human. Then, at 2AM, I am seized with the need to do something so that the day won’t be a total write-off, and… post something to my blog.
Because that would make it a worthy day.
And since I can’t be bothered doing something worthwhile (like a recap, or a review of all good/bad media consumed this year), I am just going to clean away my “drafts” – unpublished weblog posts that I entered but never finished or published. This is going to be short.
Geek stuff:

  • Perl best practices, an article by Damien Conway that is probably worth reading even if program in a different language.
  • Becoming familiar with a too-big codebase? – I ran across this discussion in PerlMonks which touched a nerve. I shudder to recall the hairy code I was handed, and how long it was before I learned to use the perl debugger, which is pretty easy (compared to some of the C++ debuggers I’ve had to use) and very useful.
  • One day I should read this online book, called Text Processing in Python. God knows I’ve had to process some text in my time…
  • I meant to link to an utility called SlickRun. Well, now I did.
  • The Open JavaScript Archive Network is an attempt to do for Javascript what CPAN does for Perl. CPAN is probably the most amazing thing about Perl (beyond the language itself); a single, central repository for libraries and extensions, filled with wonderous stuff, that seems to have just the right thing you need for, well, anything. Almost.
  • The Internet keeps taking to me about AJAX, which is the technique of using Javascript to load stuff from the server without reloading the whole page. A couple of months ago, I helped upload and debug a trivial web form that someone (Guy Weiner, I think) managed to write using AJAX (and XSL!) instead of simple CGI. I shuddered at the wrong-headedness of this. That’s probably why I thought this was really keen: AJFORM, a simple javascript library that lets you make normal web forms “AJAX-enabled”, while still let them work normally as a fallback. I thought this could be a good way to try and gradually convert a regular CGI application to a more responsive AJAXish interface.
  • A list of CSS tips. You can never have enough CSS tips.

I also made a list of books I read more-or-less over the past year. Actually, from sometime in May to about a month or two ago. Somehow it looks too short. I think there are gaps. Or maybe I don’t read much.

The king of Elfland’s Daughter (Lord Dunsany)
Ash (Mary Gentle)
In Search of Zarathustra (Paul Kriwaczek, non-fiction)
Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis (Walter Jon Williams)
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctrow)
Singularity Sky (Charlie Stross)
Atrocity Archives (Charlie Stross)
Once on a Time (AA Milne)
Rapture of the Nerds (Charlie Stross and Cory Doctrow)
The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman)
Anubis Gates (Tim Powers)
Darwin’s Children (Greg Bear)
A scattering of Jades (Alexander C. Irvine)
Lucas Kasha (Lloyd Alexander, Hebrew translation)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince (JK Rowling)
A Fine and Private Place (Peter Beagle)
The Gate of Worlds (Robert Silverberg)

And look, here’s a free soundtrack from a Conan computer game! Great if you need moody music and have over-used the Basil Poledouris masterpiece.

Other stuff, random passing fragments embedded in blog like woodchips in amber: I wanted to lament about losing the iGo Juice universal power supply I had for my laptop when I moved, and having to buy a new power supply for my weird Dell laptop. But since then, the laptop with its newly-bought power supply have been stolen. I wanted to rave that my brother was one of the winners of a big animation contest; I wanted to rant about assorted roleplaying theory posts I read, and what they make me think about my gaming in general and Il Nostro Gioco in particular. I wanted to write about going to see Suzie at the end of a kind-of bumming day back in July, and being overcome with emotion and beauty – that entry had just this opening line: Candyfloss clouds grazing in a watercolor sky, sunset shadows cutting across golden fields, waves of greenery breaking by the side of the road. Such a beautiful day, I drove to see Suzie.)
And finally, I once wanted to blog this funny quote from Nick Locking’s LJ:

I just made [[his girlfriend – DD]] watch The Empire Strikes Back, the undeniably best Star Wars film (seeing as it doesn’t contain ANY dodgy bits at all and has some of the best action scenes in film history, and I was expecting a bit of her trademark charming inability to understand nerd things as a result of being extremely Italian, but nothing really prepared me for her pointing at the AT-ATs majestically stomping over the snowfields of Hoth in puzzlement and asking “what animal are they supposed to be?” I can’t even begin to understand how her mind works. It’s like she’s from an anti-matter universe or something.

Categories
long Supes 2006

Metaphorical Landscape, with Indians

And hot cold on the heels of one, two, three and four, comes session five, below the cut.

… But before we get back to our heroes, a few points about administrative things:

  • We started playing with Bo (soon knocked out by my coffee, after being knocked out by KFC last session; we are starting to detect a pattern) and Israel, and were joined by Miller later – obviously, when the action picks up.
  • System-wise, since last session we’ve sort-of twisted the Anti-Pool variant we’re using so much it’s now a pretzel. Briefly, you can’t spend any dice from your pool to augment your rolls; only other players can give you more dice for a roll. Also, I’m not sure if we keep the dice on a win or a lose, or if donating dice is “gambling” on someone’s actions and you get dice back, or a bonus. But if you can only gamble dice, not use them, what’s the point of hoarding them?
    I think we need to work on the reward mechanic – what is the incentive, what is the behaviour we are trying to promote in ourselves? Cool stunt descriptions, I think, isn’t a motivation Bo wants to get behind.I think we got the hang of the system by next session

So, the session.

They’re in a car, on a dirt track, when from the morning mist comes the wife of one of Slade’s buddies, let’s call him Jimmy Brown Fox (and let’s call her, oh, Ellen?), saying They’re all dead. As Slade rolls down the window to ask what happened, they smell the smoke.

Turns out the shack out back, where Brown Fox kept Davreux, has burnt down. Ellen (I’m not going to keep calling her “his wife”) tells Slade that Davreux and both his guards were asleep in the shack at the time.

They dig through the rubble, where some neighbours are trying to help out, but find no signs of any person – they find Davreux belt buckle, and the remains of Brown Fox’s shoe, but no bones or human remains. Slade consoles Ellen, tells her that her husband and his friend probably survived, and takes her indoors.

Once indoors, Slade contacts the local Shaman (Weissefedder, a German expatriate whom the tribe has adopted, and who was reachable online via Jabber), and he comes over and together they try to cook up some ritual that will allow them to contact or locate Davreux and the two missing Indians. OK, actually Weissefedder brings over the drugs, and Slade guides Ellen in an act of automatic drawing, trying to picture where her husband ended up.
She draws an angle, like the corner of a box, but this quickly becomes a hillside studded with fir trees, and the coulds above become airships, and there is a trail of smoke rising from the hillside…
Slade wakes up Jack, who has fallen asleep on the sofa, and Alex, who is still sleeping in the car, and he tells Jack Say your magic word.
They appear on the hillside and the air smells like the Metaphor (Israel came up with this term for the book-reality; it rocks). Soon they find Jimmy Brown Fox and Hank Gray Owl, Slade’s friends, who just recently managed to loosen their bonds and start a small fire. Jimmy tells Slade that they were in the shack, guarding Davreux, when all of a sudden there was someone else in the room with them, and they got hit on the head, tied up and came to on the hill. Apparently their assailants included a woman (or two), and they somehow flagged down a passing airship and left.
Slade leads them in constructing a big X on the hillside, and pretty soon they flag down another of these airships. The airships are very similar to the one they encountered in the desert of Daath, right down to the flying-carpet platform rafts they send down, and the red robes of the crewmen. They also speak telepathically. However, these crewmen are human, not birdlike aliens.
The locals take them up in their airship, a cigar-shaped thing made out of delicate metal fretwork, an open frame that is still somehow pressurized despite having no visible skin, and which is propelled with no visible power source or engine. The crew offer them refreshment, tell them that they’ve contacted another ship, which reports that it has indeed passengers matching the description of Dominique and co. The crew say they will meet this ship just as soon as they do some delivery along their route.

[ Here we break and pick up Miller ]

The airship approaches one of the Gates (like the Sapphire gate and the stonehenge thing we had last session). Below, they can see a group of people waiting, with a heap of crates to be loaded onboard the airship. But as the airship descends, another airship emerges from the clouds above, where it has been lurking unnoticed. It doesn’t respond to signals, and is getting dangerously close, so that it will ram the airship they are on. The crew members begin evacuating, and signal Slade, Jack, Alex and the Indians to join them. They clamber onto the last lifeboat (well, flying-carpet like platform), which is dangerously overloaded. Jack contemplates staying onboard and experiencing the crash first hand, but Slade convinces him he isn’t that invulnerable.

As the escape-raft totters away to the ground (or maybe before, not sure about this), Alex spots another of these flying rafts descend next to the gate and a couple of folks get off it and run into the gate while everyone is trying to get away. The two airships collide, horrifyingly slow. They don’t explode, just crash into each other and sink down. The escape raft lands, everyone takes cover, and the two entangled airships smash down onto the gate, sending giant shards of splintered metal flying everywhere.

Slade, Alex and Jack rush to the gate; there’s a giant dust cloud blocking the way, and when it clears they are confronted with a huge heap of giant metal pick-up sticks (dookim). They start digging and moving. Eventually, a rescue team arrives and starts clearing things out using giant floating discs (like Tenser‘s). In the meantime, there is some exposition by the crew of the other airship – apparently, their communications personel and pilots were disabled by their newly-acquired passengers, and the ship was sabotaged.

Eventually, the gate is cleared; Slade talks to the door and ascertains that Dominique passed through it; they step through.

It is dark, wet, raining. They are in a strange town, still in the metaphor; Alex’s super-senses pick up the smell of strange chickens, and also Dominique’s scent (he never smelled her before, but what-the-hell, if Slade can talk to doors, Alex can sniff them). They follow the scent to a pub. The people inside aren’t human, but those blue birdlike aliens. Except that to Alex they smell human, which is clearly wrong to him. They ask about Dominique, and are told she can through there, and asked directions to the Doctor’s tower.

They head to the Doctor’s tower, a 4-story building towering over the other buildings in this rustic village. They enter, hear voices coming from the top of the stairs. Leaving Jimmy and Hank below, they climb up.

The top room is the doctor’s study, filled with shelves, scrolls, a fancy desk, statuettes, a big telescope poking out of the window, and a tied-up and bruised birdlike Doctor in one corner; Davreux is arguing with Dominique, who is ignoring him and rifling through the shelves; her personal assistant is huddled in the corner, crying and in shock; Wang is facing the stairway and sees them coming in.

Slade, his white suit now as filthy as it could possibly get (ash, dust and rain all over it) walks past Wang and demands that Dominique explain herself; Jack hurried to untie the Doctor. Alex smiles at Wang. Dominique tries to ignore Slade, denies she was trying to destory the world, and eventually gets so exasperated when Slade actually tries to grab her arm that she stares at him and says: Die!

Slade’s face bursts into flame. Well, not really, because he dodges, perhaps repelling the wave of heat with a facial chi-shield. In a smooth continued motion, he throws Dominique against the wall. Wang reacts to the onset of hostilities by exploding; in a flash, there’s a giant metallic lizard standing where he did before, with a vicious tail swinging. Alex whips out his Cornice and slices at the tail, which is lopped off and thrashes about. Slade calls up the cannon-fodder Jimmy and Hank, and they rush up the stairs, allowing him to use Chi to bring down the floor beneath the Wang/Monster’s feet.

Except that Wangzilla does a split and stays standing. So Jack leaps on his back and twists and snaps his neck. But just as he does, the lizard explodes again, and becomes this viscious and vicious jelly that tries to engulf him. So Jack, enveloped by Jelly, leaps out the window into the rain, hitting the ground four stories down.

Slade turns to Dominique and tries to appeal to reason. There’s no need to keep fighting, he tells her. If she’ll tell them what she’s looking for, they’ll try to help her. She just has to stop hurting people. What are you looking for?

Dominique considers this for a moment before responding.

I’m looking for my name, she says.

And cut.

Categories
long Supes 2006

The book city of Kandor

Another campaign session – number four, if you’re keeping score. It’s two weeks old, and I still have to summarize session five, because session six is upon us.

I really need a name for the campaign, so I can put it in a seperate blog category. I’m thinking “A Better World” or maybe just “Another World”. Because “Ozymandias” was taken…

Previously: One, Two, Three.

At the lighthouse

  • Baker examines the body of the lighthouse keeper, Trevor St. Cuthbert. He finds a small key on a curious piece of shell/fossil.
  • Checking up on St. Cuthbert in the ETIA database, he learns that the man was aboard a ship that encountered an Unidentified Marine Object at sea, shortly after WW2. The ship reported seeing strange lights at night while crossing the Atlantic; the source of the lights was an unidentified object, round, which drew close to the ship, and sharks or dolphins were spotted around it. Some of the crew members reported incidents of missing time.
  • Searching the house, they find in the bedroom a safe that can be unlocked by the key. The safe contains an old pistol and an old diary with 3 photographs: these were apparently taken during the very same ship voyage when St. Cuthbert’s crew-members saw the UMO. The first photo, taken in a British harbor, shows crew-members; the second, taken at sea and at night, is apparently (poor) photographic evidence of the UMO encounter; the third shows the crew-members and a young (14?) lad with an intense expression in a borrowed coat, which is perhaps referred to in the text of the diary as “our little stowaway”.
  • Meanwhile, Jack is leafing through the book, studying the text and pictures (which all look fantastical, of no clear historical period), trying to download the solve from the Matrix into his cranium by sheer Bo stubbornness. He notices that the Knights have re-appeared in the illustration, and Dominique and her party are gone.
  • By powerful concentration and a roll of the die, Jack stumbles upon some pronunciation, says a magic word (which I have written down at home) and WHAM (or some other suitable sound-effect; this is Bo’s department), they find themselves IN THE PICTURE IN THE BOOK.

In the city of Dis, and beyond.

  • They show up in the book, on a city street in front of a grand mansion, surrounded by the Knights. The air smells strange, dry and lemony, and their surroundings are quite exotic and odd. From the doorway of the mansion descends a beautiful woman in an archaic dress, commands the knights to stand back, and invites Slade, McDonald and Baker into the mansion. She speaks to the Knights in a different voice than she speaks to the visitors – they understand that she is speaking to them telepathically.
  • In the inner courtyard, by the fountain, introductions are made. The woman introduces herself as Carmilla of House Sapphire, and tells them they are in the city of Dis. When Jack asks what year it is, she tells him it is the year 30,425 to the reign of the first emperor. The people they are looking for (Dominique and co.)? Yes, they passed here before, they went through the Sapphire Gate.
  • Inside the mansion is a vast central hall, where the PCs are offered strange refreshments, and see many people. At the far end of the hall is a huge triangular door of solid crystal: the Sapphire Door (or gate, I forget). Many have gone into the Sapphire Door, Carmilla tells them, but none have returned.
  • Slade puts his hand on the door and tries to read its mind. Really. Israel will explain the Chi-ripple technobabble behind this. The door responds to touch with ripples of building heat, and Slade has visions of exotic and fantastic vistas. And then, the door pulses and he vanishes. Jack and Douglas touch the door and vanish too.

The desert of Daath

  • They find themselves on the slope of a dune in what looks like a Martian desert. The air still smells strange and dry. 10 meters behind them is another almost identical crystal gate; above is a giant airship, lit up with bright beams shining down through the dusty gloom, like a cigar of delicate metal fretwork.
  • From the airship descend two flat, diamond-shaped platforms, sort of flying carpets. Their crews greet them. They are not human, but rather gray-skinned, with bird-like faces and yellow eyes, and with 3 arms – a pair and a smaller arm nestled in the crock of the right one. However, they don’t appear to react to the newcomers’ being human – they just note that they wear strange clothes. The airshipmen tell them they are on another world, and that the planet is not inhabited – they live in orbit, or on a moon (not sure which it was). This place is called Daath, the aliens tell them.

The city that is Thaer

  • After some talk, they head towards the gate behind them, and find themselves back in the streets of Dis – or rather, on what looks like a different version of it, more alien in architecture and inhabited not by humans, but by the same birdlike beings they met in the desert. Again, asking about Dominique and her cohorts, they are directed to a large structure, an amphitheatre enclosing a large open space, with what appears to be a larger version of Stonehenge in the center – except that the megaliths are actually gates.
  • Questioning a beggar, they are directed to one of two possible doors (the beggar can’t direct them to a specific one). They pick one, and step through it.
  • They find themselves in a space that is all milky white, and they seem to move in slow motion. At the far end of this space, they see another doorway, and the condensation imprint of a woman’s hourglass figure still lingering on the gates’ surface. They move towards it, slowed down, as if swimming.

Back in New York City

  • And they find themselves in a bookstore, between two aisles, standing right above an open copy of The Black Book of the Silver City. Looking about, it seems a regular bookstore, with a bored girl with facial piercings manning the cash register. Outside, it’s night – around 4 AM – and they are back in New York (Manhattan; but is there any other part of New York City in our games?).
  • Jack takes the book to the register. They ask the attendant if she’s seen Dominique and her crew. The girl vaguely recalls a very beautiful woman matching the description and some others passing through a couple of hours ago. Jack asks to buy the book. When she enters its details into the inventory computer though, she says it should be in the restricted section, and that she has to consult the manager (owner) before she can sell it.
  • So they head out, Baker makes a call to the FBI/Police and puts out an APB on Dominique Davreux and her associates. Jack heads back to McDonalds, exchanges a few words with his old buddy Ivan, and then notices Alex sitting on the bar. Alex is tired, so they head back to Slade’s hotel – he gets another, (larger?) room there – and they crash, resting for the night.
  • Baker, less tired, checks surveillance cameras in the street near the bookstore, and discovers that a car (registered to one of Davreux’s companies) stopped outside the bookstore, and Dominique and Wang got out of it, went into the bookstore, and came back a few minutes later.
  • With this new information, they decide to head back to the bookstore, and check things out. Slade uses his chi-power for Psychometry, and sees ghost-images of Dominique and Wang walking into the store, finding a specific book in the aisle, taking it and replacing it with another, then leaving – once outside, their chi-traces mingle with the noise of the city and vanish.
  • Jack tries to get the shop owner to sell him the book once more. The shop owner, bemused, says that this isn’t even his book; his shop has the cheaper and less prestigious trade paperback edition of the Black Book of the Silver City, while this is a rare collector’s edition. Baker checks online databases and registries and discovers that this might be a copy of the book purchased by a Mr. Perry Niemand in an Edinburgh auction a few years ago. These are apparently the only known copies of the book in private hands in the Eastern United States. And the store’s copy was taken by Dominque.
  • Jack uses time-paradox-creating bullshit and player-fiat to invoke a fake ID, and tells the cashier that it’s his book, that he’s Perry Niemand. But Bo fails his roll, and behind him, someone says “I thought I was Perry Niemand”.
  • Mr. Niemand takes his book and takes Slade, McDonald and Baker out for breakfast (at a place where McDonald can get a steak to compensate for the one he had to abandon in Boca Raton).
  • OK, I tell a lie; I completely skipped the bit in the bookstore where, after brief introductions, the PCs (can I just call them the damn party?) try to find out if Niemand is aware of the book’s nature, and Jack says the magic word Yahaworakg! while in his presence, transporting himself, Slade, Baker and Niemand to the city of Dis – and making the black knights appear in the middle of the bookstore. I am ignoring it because he undid it as soon as he realized what this caused. So maybe if I pretend it never happened, everyone will agree with me.
  • ANYWAY, they go to eat breakfast with Niemand. And Niemand exposits about the Black Book of the Silver City. See, there were these aliens – what we’ve heard Malamud call The Blues – who had psionic technology, who could alter reality with thought. But they wandered and were stranded far away from home, on a backwater world called Earth. Nobody knows when this happened, or what the circumstances were, because the aliens soon found themselves using their powers to re-write reality, first as part of fighting with other aliens (“the Greens”), and second as a way to ensure the continuation of their race: they altered reality to make themselves human, so that they could interbreed with the inhabitants of the planet where they were trapped. For the survival of their race, they unmade it.
    But something survived: the Black Book, an attempt to preserve, or perhaps more truely to reconstruct, the reality of the “Silver City” that was lost.
  • Niemand exchanges cards with Slade (Mr. Business Card Man), and wanders off, leaving the PCs to digest. It is sort-of agreed that Baker will head back to Boca Raton, to retrieve the book from Trevor St. Cuthbert’s lighthouse, and in general handle the paperwork there. Slade wants to check on Davreux, who might know something about Dominique’s plan or whereabouts.

So, Slade, Jack and Alex (dozing in the back seat) drive back up country to the Indian settlement where Slade deposited Davreux in the hands of his two Earth-friend buddies. But as they get there, they see a figure stumble out of the mist; it’s the wife of one of Slade’s friends, she’s got a shocked expression on her face, and she mutters They’re all dead.
And we cut.


And now for my favorite segment, character liknesses (aka, trolling the internet for hours to make my characters look bad). There are Winston Slade and Douglas Baker (from Planetary: Crossing Worlds), Tilda Swinton as Carmilla of House Sapphire (to get a better image, I probably need to resort to Photoshop; I pictured a long, loose dress, and a more elaborate hairdo. Use your imagination, it’s better.
And last is Dominique Davreux (this should probably go into next session’s summary): I didn’t find any good pictures to use from Doberman, but I like this one.

Elijah Snow IS Wilson Slade
Douglas Baker
Tilda Swinton as Ada Byron is sorta Carmilla of House Sapphire
Dominique

Categories
long Supes 2006

Our Buddy, Agent Baker

Third RPG session recap. Or braindump, whatever.
Here’s the first one and here’s the second.

This week we were joined by Oren Genkin as our special guest star, playing special agent Douglas Baker from the ETIA. Still no Gingi, he’s doing a play.

I’ll also mention the system we used in both last session and this one. In the first session we had the “roll high on precentile dice” or in fights “roll higher than the NPC”, with higher roll winning and a mix of player/GM narrating the effects. We decided to try a more structured system, and I guessed that with this party, something that is more “meta” would be most appropriate, so I picked a pool variant (specifically, the one labelled “Anti-Pool Variation by Mark Whithers” on this page). We don’t use traits and allow other players to donate dice, and we haven’t used it all that much so far, or so it seems. It does pretty much eliminate fight scenes from the game, as demonstrated below.

So, Jack McDonald and Winston Slade are driving back from the reservation where they left Jacques Davreux. On the way they reflect that Davreux was acting strangely, as if trying to tip them off to what he was doing. Perhaps he was under the influence of someone? Perhaps his wife? Perhaps aliens? Perhaps his wife is an alien?
On cue, Winston gets a call from Dominique Davreux, asking if he knows where her husband is – he isn’t answering his phone, and she heard about the explosion in the New Jersey plant. Winston tells her that her husband is safe, at an undisclosed location, and that he really can’t tell her more on the phone. When can they meet? Dominique tells him she’s out of town, down in Boca Raton, Florida (Bo came up with the exact location), and she can meet him in a couple of days. Winston is very eager to meet her, and she sounds like she’s delaying. Also, she doesn’t sound too worried, or too curious. Just a criticism of how I played her there.
Shortly after, there’s another call, this time from Bernice Malamud, who asks to meet them urgently, and asks about the New Jersey explosion: apparently investigators on the site discovered remains of an alien superconducting metal in the debris.
They head for New York, and go to an ETIA safehouse, with valet parking. Winston taunts the valet, who as a government employee can not accept tips. They go into the safehouse itself, which is a Chinese restaurant, empty except for a minimal staff. In the back room, with a teapot ready on a lazy susan, is Bernice, and agent Douglas Baker, a plain looking guy in a plain gray suit. Bernice, I inform them, is dressed a lot less formally, and looks more like a college girl than a government officer. This throws Bo and I, who have been picturing her until now in a power suit (not the Iron Man kind, the business suit kind). They asked me if this is a change, and I say no, this is her usual attire. Although when they met her last, in the first session, she was probably in an orange coverall like the rest of the clean-up team.
Bernice introduces Douglas Baker, and Winston describes their run-in with Davreux, and speculates that he might be under some influence. Bernice focuses her attention on Jack McDonald. According to her, McDonald’s (the bar) is a hotbed of alien activity; Jack has some alien connection, and specifically she thinks he’s connected to a faction of aliens that are enemies of the faction that might have been pressuring Davreux. Bernice suggests that Davreux might have been trying to appeal to this faction through Jack.
They discuss aliens, and Bernice says that these two factions, the aliens that crash-landed in New Jersey in 1974 (well, at least their “seed-pod bearing gender” did) and their enemies, the ones that hang around McDonalds, have been called The Greens and The Blues by FETA. The ETIA doesn’t consider this politically correct, so they have a committee trying to come up with better names. It comes out in the conversation that the Blues are Psionic, and at their most powerful, they can rewrite reality. The Greens, apparently, are able to detect when reality gets rewritten. And so can Douglas Baker, who Bernice describes as our Synchronicity Warfare Specialist [ here is omitted a long digression, in which Winston asks Jack to play around with his powers, to test Baker’s ability, and after rolling dice, Jack decides that revealing the full extent of his power would be dumb. So forget it, never happened.]
There’s also a digression in which Jack tells Bernice that they were thinking of setting up some kind of private venture to handle alien visitors that would be more friendly and hospitable than the ETIA, which Winston likens to the border police. We were thinking less bureaucracy, more room service.
ANYWAY, Bernice is annoyed about all this weird shit that is going down, filling her desk with paperwork, and probably asks them to go sort it out. Or something. Maybe she just needed to vent.
Meanwhile, Baker is nudging them about Dominique, which Winston and Jack are planning to meet as soon as possible. In fact, Winston has already booked a private jet for Boca Raton, due to take off in a few hours. They agree that Douglas can tag along.
Until the plane takes off, We sit in the hotel lobby and not drink martinis-I.
Me: You really have no idea how sober people spend their time, do you?

So they fly down to Boca Raton in the private jet that Winston hired. After landing, Winston calls up Dominique, tells her he’s there and wants to meet her. She says she’s busy, but can meet them for Lunch at four.
They spend their time playing pool somewhere on the boardwalk (I assume there’s a boardwalk), not investigating or anything. At four, they show up at the restaurant Dominique suggested, which turns out to be a steakhouse, with a balcony out back that looks out onto the sea. Dominique, her bodyguard and her personal assistant are already seated and in the middle of eating their steaks. Dominique apologizes, says that they thought the meeting was at 15:00 [I. gave me a dirty look because he expected me as GM to make sure his character knew the precise time. But I as GM fancied having Dominique and her entourage chowing down on dead cows, in sharp contrast to the vegan place where they ate last ].
Winston uses his special power to try and detect if any of Dominique and her entourage are aliens, by sending a chi-ripple along the floor to resonate from their auras. We find that (1) we can’t really roll in secret using the system we chose, but we try: Israel invests so-and-so dice, I roll them plus one other without showing him the result. We also discover that (2) chi-ripples is a great name for a cereal.
The three seem normal to Slade, although he suspects that the fitted wooden floor might have thrown him off. Introductions are made, and then Slade asks to speak to Dominique in private, so they get up and head for the patio out back. The bodyguard (and the PCs) keep them in their sight, and Jack orders a steak.
Dominique asks Slade if she can see her husband or talk to him. Slade tells her she can’t, her husband is kept isolated for his own safety (or so I think she’s to assume). Slade asks her if she knows who might be in a position to influence Davreux to do what he did. Dominique names herself, Slade and a couple of others, and Slade arranges a bunch of coins on the railing of the balcony, and asks her to point to the one representing the person she thinks might have influenced Jacques to go nuts. Dominique refuses, and abruptly cuts the discussion off by saying my steak is getting cold.
Winston follows her back to the table, and the PCs take their leave. Jack gives his steak a last longing look, musing that there are other steaks elsewhere. Winston launches into a rant about the evils of cattle farming and how they are the agro-consumerist manifestation of the same evil as NASA. Or something. Perhaps he doesn’t.

ANYWAY, the PCs head out, and back in the car decide to keep a discreet eye on Dominique and her crew. The best way to do this, Douglas suggests, is for him to make some calls and order satellite surveillance of Boca Raton. He does this, presenting himself as Thomas Mayhew of the CIA, is told that only the FBI or the meteorological service can order surveillance of a domestic target, makes some more calls, and it is done. The PCs drive back to their hotel, or the airport, but in midway, the satellite surveillance images being transmitted to Baker’s PDA show that Dominique and co. are heading out. The PCs hurry back, driving out of the urban area and finding the Davreux car heading up to a big lighthouse at the top of a cliff which forms a spur of land at the edge of a bay.
Parking the car at a safe distance, they decide that Jack and Winston will try to sneak up to the lighthouse, while Baker stays in the car where it’s safe, keeping track of the lighthouse using the satellite and keeping in touch with Slade through cellphone. Jack takes off his shirt and swims like a torpedo, while Winston skips and hops overt the surf like they do in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (or Hero). As they approach the lighthouse from the sea, Slade manages to see a ruckus on a mid-level balcony – someone bursts out of the building, hits the rail, and then is hit by something or someone, knocked off the railing, and falls to the rocks below.
Slade lands on the lighthouse wall, clinging to it like a spider. He notices no one on the balcony. He looks down and sees that the man that fell is dead, papers scattered around him. Jack pulls himself out of the water, and grabs one of these papers. It’s an old tract, printed in the 19th century, about American foreign relations. He tosses it and heads for the front door of the lighthouse, reasoning that he’ll create a diversion for Slade.
Meanwhile, Slade peers into the doors that open into the balcony. The interior is dark, filled with books and bookshelves, and the rich smell of old printed matter. Also, he can hear three people, searching the books frantically. He jumps in and hides in the shadows, listening as Dominique and her crew mess about. And then everyone hears Jack’s loud knock at the door.
Slade leaps out and spider-mans his way down at top speed, but not before hearing a last exchange from the folks in the library. What’s that? (in reaction to the knock) and Never mind, I’ve found it from Dominique.
Jack forces the locked door open, and takes a look around the front room of the lighthouse. It’s big and crowded with books, furniture and brick-a-brack such as model sailing boats in glass cases, tribal masks, etc. There’s a kitchen to the side and a big spiral staircase heading up.
Slade dashes in and commiserates Jack for completely missing the idea of “stealthy approach”. Jack grumbles that he was setting up a diversion. There is some hurried half-whispered shouting, followed by a sudden noise from above.
Slade dashes back out and climbs back up the outside of the building. I think Jack actually calls out, but there’s no answer – just loud crashing and banging about from above.
Slade gets up on the balcony and peers in. There’s a fallen bookcase, and big dark figures moving about – five very tall men in ornate black armor, all spiky and weird, crashing about and banging against bookcases. There’s no sign of Dominique or her crew anywhere. There’s also an odd smell in the room.
Winston takes a snapshot of these “knights” and SMSs it to Baker (remember him?) Baker runs a query on the design through the ETIA’s databases.
Jack hears some heavy footsteps and then one of the armored knights falls down the spiral staircase, crashing on top of some furniture and pulverizing it. Jack draws back (or steps forward, or does something, or not. I just need a break here) and the knight rises from the wreckage, unharmed, steps forward and, upon being greeted by Jack, lifts his hand – and a huge triangular sword appears in it, with a very broad base tapering to a point. The knight hacks at Jack, who grabs his hand, crushes it (or tears it off – perhaps that came later), and diverts the blow so that the knight cuts through his own armor – the blade cuts through the armor with ease, and the air is filled with an odd smell.
Jack takes the sword and cracks open the armor. It’s hollow, except for a cold and weird-smelling vapor; there’s apparently some power-source and a skeletal control network on the inside, but no actual occupant. Hefting the sword, Jack trudges up the spiral staircase.
Meanwhile, Winston observes a big book open on a reading desk, about where Dominique was earlier. He moves closer hoping to sneak in and snatch the book, but the four remaining armored figures array themselves around the table, forming a square. Slade chooses to remain unseen (I think. not clear exactly on what he was or wasn’t doing).
Douglas gets some answers on his query, finally. The ETIA’s outsourced research team in Bangalore found an image of a knight in nearly identical armor fighting a highly stylized dragon in a 14th century occult/symbolist text. A footnote says something about the ETIA suspecting this symbolism, of St. George vs. the Dragon or Serpent, is something planted by the Blues – apparently, the Blues and Greens have been on Earth for a long time, and their touch is evident in these symbols (knight = Blues, dragon = Greens).
Just then, Jack burst into the room, and the knights attack him, one with a sword and one with a morning star. Jack steps into the fray and wipes out all four knights with a few sketchily describes sword-strokes and a single roll. This does highlight some of the system peculiarities, with player fiat annulling the entire fight, really. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a bit different from what we’re used to: Bo kept expecting me to describe outcomes, and I was a bit lax in encouraging him to do that. Note that now Bo has had two successful rolls and is down to not too many dice in his pool. Israel is better off, with some bad luck keeping him well stocked with dice.
Baker drives up the driveway, blocking Dominique’s car, and joins the others in the library. They examine the book on the table, and see that it is written in some weird alphabet that looks a bit like Gothic, but has more characters than the standard Latin ABC. Stranger and more noticeable, the book is open on a page with a woodcut illustration showing a strange quasi-medieval city, a big gate and a staircase beyond it. The fleeing figures of Dominique and her crew can be seen in the picture, climbing the staircase. And in front of the gate, there are four shadows, without figures to cast them.
They look through the book and Douglas Baker runs some more database queries on it. Apparently, it is a mystical text, or an 18th century forgery of one, something called The Black Book of the Silver City, written in a cypher using an invented alphabet with 36 letters. Different versions of this book were written by unconnected authors, apparently channeling some spiritual author. The concept of memetic intrusion is mentioned somewhere.
Winston, Jack and Douglas suggest various ways of recreating the ritual or whatever that Dominique apparently used to get into the book. Jack suggests just going into the book, but can’t figure out how. Winston suggests taking positions to match those of the figures in the picture. Douglas downloads info on different ways of pronouncing the language the book is written in. He picks one intuitively, Oren decides to roll all the dice in his pool, and…gets no successes. Israel donates him a bunch of dice, but these too fail to bring up any success. So I guess they’re stuck. Stupid system, why doesn’t it work when needed and fail only when we need to create suspense?
Meanwhile, quietly and without fuss, the armored knights fade away, and the sword as well.
Winston suddenly remembers that he’s supposed to meet Alex in LA in 5 hours, and is confident that with Alex with them, they will be four and able to recreate the ritual and step into the book. And with that, the session closes.

Scenery note:

The lighthouse near Boca Raton looks like this (or, for an area shot, look at the third picture on this page). I was picturing something more like this (only higher up). The Cape Florida lighthouse (pictured here?) is better, and might just be close enough. Or we could pick something else.

NPC likeness:
Bernice Malamud is being played in my head by Sarah Silverman, because it’s more fun than the more obvious Janeane Garafolo:
Bernice Malamud
The Davreuxes

I have no idea what Dominique looks like yet (although I did find myself downloading pictures of assorted babes all Saturday instead of writing the recap), but Davreux is either Malcolm McDowell (specifically from Entourage), or the baddie from the third Indiana Jones movie. And Wang is obviously The Rock.
Update: I. says the Knights look like this:
Dressed for the hunt