Sunday, February 9, 2014

Serendipity and Roleplaying

Had a great session in my Sunday IRC game today! The group are occult detectives in Victorian England. For rules, we are mashing up Blood Games II, OHMAS, and Sweet Chariot. The group has a detective; a human changeling returned from Faerie; a Savant, able to create pockets of space time using higher geometries, and the sister of the Changeling; a perpetually nine-year-old immortal; and a Doctor who occasionally and inexplicably heals people magically.

The Association had been hired by Sir Houslett Mews to clear his garden in Piccadilly of a group of pixies. They had met with the Fairies, and had begun negotiations to move them. We started off today's session with a spirited argument between the sisters, culminating in the Changeling taking on the form of a hound and running away into the night.

She decided to poke in at Sir Houslett's house. There she saw a group of men looking into the garden from the roof, and Sir Houslett talking to another man. In hound form, she meandered closer, to overhear their conversation. Sir Houslett was talking to a Professor Moriarty about sealing up the Pxie's sidhe. The Professor guaranteed that his team could do so, mentioning that they had sealed hundreds of sidhs.

Now a Fairy Sidhe is an extra-dimensional pocket - the same thing her sister created. Alarmed, she ran back to her sister. To make a long story short, the Detective and the Doctor managed to delay things long enough for the immortal to enter the Sidhe with an extra dimensional tunnel on a piece of cloth. Moriarty and his crew sealed the Sidhe, but they had a way out. There it ended.

Now here's the cool bit. The Sidhe was to be sealed by Moriarty this night. There was no reason for the group to go there - they had been there that very day. They *should* have gone there the next day or so, finding a garden with no Pixies. Because there was an argument in character between the sisters, the changeling left, angry. For no particular reason, she chose to go to Sir Houslett's. She went an hour after dinner, in time to overhear things, and in time to get the group into position fast enough to stop it.

Serendipity strikes again!

2 comments:

  1. I've a friend who absolutely loathes serendipity in fiction. Me? I'm alright with it.

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  2. I'm alright with some serendipity in fiction, but too much serendipity makes things go flat - mainly because it's planned, set-up to go that way. OTOH, in this game, the only thing that was planned was that the sidhe was going to be sealed this night. The assumption on my part was that the PCs would find out about it later, too late to do anything. What happened instead is the kind of serendipity I love.

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