Tag Archives: mage: the awakening

A lack of game

I don’t know why but I don’t do LARPs very well. I don’t seem to be able to hook into them or get involved in things. Plot passes me by and I never know how to get into the game.

It’s not just an IoD thing, but I feel it more there. At Empire, event plot pretty much passes me by but I’m so busy doing other thinBluträchergs that I don’t notice that I didn’t get involved in it. This is likely part of the problem I had in LT as well – I couldn’t get involved in things, so I didn’t like playing.

I can recognise this in IoD games as well – in Requiem, where I’m Harpy, I don’t notice as much that I’m not involved in the plot that everyone else seems to be pulling out of the woodwork somehow. In the other games, I can’t find my way in, and I feel lost as a consequence and don’t enjoy the games. I find myself asking if anyone would even notice my absence.

My lack of ability to hook myself into the games has led to me abandoning playing Forsaken to NPC, and abandoning playing Awakening to aST/NPC. I don’t really know why I haven’t given up on Lost yet. The thing is that I know I can enjoy these games, but typically the times I enjoy playing these games is when I have things to do that aren’t relevant to the plots of the game. My last Forsaken character was a lot of fun because he just wanted to punch things, talk about punching things, and intimidate people – and I enjoyed that game as one-dimensional as it was.

I find I always feel that there are groups of people who find the plot and run off with it and become epic in the game, and I drift along at the sidelines with no idea how to do that. The only reason that I’m where I am in Empire now is because Rob offered me some work and after a year of doing it, I’ve managed to make myself known to the point of being recognised by most of the Conclave.

It feels like there’s some trick I’m missing – something that I’m doing wrong or not doing at all that leads to people having fun at games and getting involved in epic plots. It feels like I’m failing at my hobby, and like there’s no point in my trying because I’ll never manage that.

Part of all this is that I’m terrible at setting character goals for myself. When I write an NPC for myself, it’s not an issue to find goals because they’re related to making the plot work right, but when I write a character I just can’t do it right. It’s sheer luck that I’ve managed to both get a character goal and (potentially) achieve it at Empire, and it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been handed a job by someone else.

Perhaps I should just stick to crewing and storytelling as it seems to be where my abilities are stronger.

[Awakening] All My Life

All my life, I’ve been searching for something.

Something never came, never led to nothing.

Nothing satisfies but I’m getting close, closer to the prize at the end of the rope.

That’s when I found her. She wasn’t the nebulous truth I’d been searching for, she was real and she became my world. I put aside the quest I’d never been able to explain and entered a new life with her. I’d found something real and I wasn’t letting go.

All night long, I dream of the day. When it comes around, then it’s taken away.

Until the accident. Highlands back road, middle of the night, all blind summits and sharp corners on thin country tracks. We were looking at wedding venues that weekend and we were on our way back to the hotel. I still don’t know what hit us or where it came from – there wasn’t anything there when I woke up again. But somehow I survived and she was… I couldn’t let it happen, wouldn’t let it happen, and something broke that night. I found what I’d been searching for, the nebulous truth, and it didn’t help. I made a working that night by instinct, desperately trying to bring her back, to make her whole. All I succeeded in doing was binding her soul here, connected to my own.

Leaves me with the feeling that I feel the most, feel I come to life when I see your ghost.

Ever since that night all I’ve done, all I’ve cared about was finding a way to restore her to life. No matter what it takes, no matter what secrets I must learn, I will find a way.

And I’m done, done, onto the next one.

Done, I’m done and I’m onto the next…

Summarising World of Darkness

A friend of mine was looking for summaries of the core new World of Darkness games that he could share with someone he was persuading to play in the Isles of Darkness. There was a dearth of responses, so I wrote something for him to use. They’re not brilliant – they’re written from one person’s perspective and my memory for exactly how everything works isn’t best when I have the books in front of me, but they do the job I think. Continue reading Summarising World of Darkness

[Awakening] Siriche

Siriche (Seeker in Gaelic) is a man driven by the urge to restore his dead fiancée to life. In his Awakening, he bound her soul to his and now he seeks a way to make her whole once more.

After he Awoke, he was found by local Brilu who taught him the ways of magic and of their traditions. A foreigner to their traditions, he never quite felt at home there, though he couldn’t doubt the presence of Badb Catha over his Awakening – the crows that watched him have never left his memory.

He has adopted their traditions as his own, even becoming passably proficient in Gaelic (though his pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired). Even they couldn’t help him forever, and he returned to the city he left long ago. The mages of the cities are quite different and their traditions are alien to the ones Siriche learned in the highlands. Their lore is no less useful for that though. He has learned their ways as well – becoming a scion of two very different Awakened worlds.

Now a Silver Ladder, he pursues the paths of power wherever they may lead him in order to accomplish his impossible goal. As a Crow (Moros), he has skill in the arcana of Death and Matter which allows him to produce sufficient means that a mundane career is not an issue, leaving him free to seek arcane matters.


Regarding costume (as I didn’t have a clear enough idea of the character when I did my costuming post), Siriche is a Silver Ladder and a Moros, but importantly he’s also Brilu which means he adopts other arcane symbology than the norm. What I’m thinking is a sharp shirt, possibly a suit jacket, with quality trousers (but not necessarily suit trousers). Accessories include a silver crow’s skull pendant[1].

Inspirations include:

Footnotes   [ + ]

1. Thanks to Bobbie for helping me pick out the right pendant

IoD National

So it turns out I’m really bad at updating this regularly. Who’d have thought that? Oh wait, I did.

So let’s try this again. This last weekend, I went down to Buckden for the IoD National. Having found out a few days beforehand that I wasn’t playing any of the games like I thought I had been, I was in a surprisingly good mood.

On the Friday, I co-ST’d/NPC’d Geist, then NPC’d/ST’d Awakening before spending the evening playing board games and drinking cocktails (thank you Matt Sanderson). The games were fun and I met some new people through the process of NPC’ing with them and ST’ing for them. Then there was the Mage soft RP session late at night which had both some surprising IC and OOC results…

Saturday morning, I was back to NPC’ing/ST’ing Awakening which was interesting, followed by the AGM. After that, I had a bit of a breakdown. I’m not entirely sure what caused it. A perceived exclusion, a lot of noise… I just ran out of cope. I held myself together enough to get to the NPC brief for Forsaken and I took longer than I should have to get in character – it was just a lot of effort to get into costume. I’m glad I did though, as I had quite a lot of fun ranting about the unnatural abomination that was my alpha (all in fun, no real-world views given). After that, I didn’t feel like doing much but I got caught by Reb as I went to go get some of my stuff and he convinced me to NPC for him. So glad I did – I haven’t had that much fun with a character in years… Apologies to any Lost players I may have creeped out.

Sunday brought about packing and some vague NPC’ing, but I was mostly just providing some continuity as I didn’t have much I could connect to and I couldn’t bring myself to stay in character for an extended period.

Then the long journey home.

Still, I had more fun that I expected, and I met some lovely people I hadn’t met before and reconnected with some lovely people I hadn’t seen properly in a while. All-in-all, an excellent weekend.