[Mortal Coil][Origins] A Pound of Flesh

[Brennan Taylor]

A bit belated, but I thought I should post an Actual Play report of the Origins Mortal Coil game I ran this year. It was an after-hours pickup game, mostly because I was too freaked about planning for the booth to submit any events. I had six players: Clinton, Jason, Caz, Clarence, Naiomi, and Jenna. Jenna was brand-new to role-playing, having only ever played one or two games before mine (at this Origins to boot). Clarence and Naiomi were a married couple, and Jenna was a friend of theirs. The rest of the group apart from Jenna had lots of RPG experience.

The session I decided to run was a con scenario I worked up for a previous convention called A Pound of Flesh. The basic premise is as follows: There is some powerful supernatural entity to whom all of the player characters owe their life of their soul. They bartered with this entity to get something, and the first thing the players will decide about their characters is what they wanted so badly they were willing to make this deal.

At a convention, the seed for the game world is all I supply. The players and I then build the theme document and make characters before starting play. The first step is to establish tone, and the group settled on "dark and gritty." As always, what the players decide for tone is what they get. We moved on to the rest of setting creation and found ourselves in a supernatural criminal underworld, where demons gain power by cutting deals with mortals. The main villain was Nicholas Darien, a demonic crime boss to whom the characters all owed something big.

We ended up with: a dying man who had bartered for 20 more years that were now just about up, and who made a deal with another demon to make a hit in order to get out of the end of his contract (Jason); a boxer who couldn't be knocked out, but who had to use his fists in Darien's service (Clinton); a lawyer who owed his courtroom success to Darien (Caz); a seductress who could make anyone desire her (Jenna); a man who had brought back his dead wife, but ended up with a demon double instead, but was pretending it was actually his wife (Clarence); and a master manipulator who could convince anyone of nearly anything (Naiomi).

Some of the table was a little shy about diving in there, and as the GM I tried to rotate spotlight in a way that would help these players engage. We ended up with two parallel plots:

In the first, Jason's character turned out to have been tasked with murdering Jenna's character in order to get out of his contract, and he really didn't want to do it. She knew he was gunning for her and used her powers to confront him. In the end, this all came to a head and Jason had his character gun Jenna's down, his girlfriend ending up taking the rap and going to prison for it (through no intent of his own). Jenna's character was dead, and Jason's a broken man, now in debt to a different demon.

The other plot involved Clarence's character and his wife, and Caz's character's attempt to convince the other characters to move against Darien. Clinton's character turned out to be having an affair with the demonic wife, and Naiomi's character wanted to get in with Clarence's character. The conflicting loyalties, the demonic nature of the wife, and all came to a head with a big fistfight in the hallway, with Caz's character taking the brunt of it.

This game ran pretty hot throughout, and all I needed to do was stir the pot. The NPCs I used really only goaded the players to action, and we had quite a pack of sad, desperate people. Mortal Coil in the convention setting really pushes people to self-destruct in a scenario like this one. The players set up the setting and characters to conflict against one another and have some seriously competing desires. There was no way for all of the characters to get what they wanted.

[ubergeek2012]

The feature that really grabbed me in Mortal Coil was the ability to define how the supernatural works in play using the magic tokens.  Do you remember any examples from this AP where players used these rules?  Did it have a big impact on the story in this game, or was it generally a lower magic setting?

[Brennan Taylor]

The feature that really grabbed me in Mortal Coil was the ability to define how the supernatural works in play using the magic tokens.  Do you remember any examples from this AP where players used these rules?  Did it have a big impact on the story in this game, or was it generally a lower magic setting?

Oh, yes, people definitely did this, mostly to define the powers they had been granted. They also defined some characteristics of demons, specifically I remember that they could take human form, but if they suffered enough damage, they would be forced to revert to their natural form.

This game didn't have a lot of magic tokens flying around, for some reason. I think because it turned out very interpersonal.

[ubergeek2012]

What magic level was it set at, and how many magic tokens were available to spend?

[Brennan Taylor]

It was set at high moderate, and I gave everyone five magic tokens. I always give out a lower number for a convention game, because we only play for a few hours, and I want the players to look at the tokens as a valuable resource.