[WoD] Puma Initiation

[ImpInTraining]

Hello once again, ladies and gents...

As luck would have it, many of the would-be players who were going to join opted out leaving me only two players. If anyone is looking to play a magick-dealing teenaged high school student teaming up with other like-minded schoolmates to thwart the Big Bad ... please feel free to let me know. I'll help you through the creation process in your own private thread and we can introduce you once you're done.

[Dandelion]

Hiya!

I just wanted to drop in and say I'd be interested in taking part in this wonderful idea. However, I will readily admit I have never played any of the various games making up WoD though I have always been interested in giving one a go. Not to mention, might as well put the book to use since I have it right? That said if you aren't opposed to complete and utter newbie concerning WoD then I'd certainly be interested in joining.

[Ursinorum]

If I can give my two pennies..

In WoD (more about in PbP) it's about your character and the narration of the story, the dots are there just for the drama (in fact they can be moderately manipulated..)

Just don't do a "the best guy at X" because the dice are bastards

[ImpInTraining]

Hi Dandelion. I have no problems introducing a player to the World of Darkness. Give me some time to hook up a sub folder for you, have to run to the flea market first. In the meantime, give some thought about what type of magic-casting type you have interest in and I will introduce you to some if the various flavors available.

[Dandelion]

Ursinorum; Good to know, and thanks for the advice. With so many skills I had assumed hyper fixation was a good thing. Though your advice and skimming through the book itself does suggest otherwise which I will need to keep in mind. Nevertheless, that honestly makes it more fun in my opinion so go skill diversity and actually building mechanics around a character rather than a character around mechanics!

ImpInTraining; Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to join! I truly do appreciate it, and I will definitely give magic-casting type some thought.

[ImpInTraining]

Heh, sorry... got sidetracked by the weekend.... getting that section built for you right now.

[ImpInTraining]

@Dandelion, we can continue this conversation here:

https://www.rpgcrossing.com/showthread.php?t=221535

[Avner]

Hi ImpinTraining are you still looking for one more?

[FatherDondo]

I'm interested in trying Mage; I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of the bits to write a character sheet though

[Optional Reality]

I don't know if this is still a thing looking for people to get into, but I love Mage, and I'd be thrilled to take part. If so, what would your thoughts be about a Hem-Ka Sobk? I know they're presented as an adversarial group, and I think they might be canonically mostly dead in M20, but I'm envisioning something like Shekhar Kapur's Snake Woman here.

If you need peeps but don't want weird crocodile cultists, I can probably also do a Hippolytan or something.

[ImpInTraining]

Definitely not too late to show interest.

Just gonna put this out now, in the event I misrepresented myself earlier. I am not holding our posting rate to more than 1x/week. If that is too slow, I apologize. I would like to move it along quicker, but I can't promise anything. It depends on my RL activity.

That being said, if you are still interested, I am willing to throw you into the story as we go along. We really haven't even scratched the surface. There is plenty of time to add more players... and the more the merrier.

[ImpInTraining]

Originally Posted by Optional Reality

I don't know if this is still a thing looking for people to get into, but I love Mage, and I'd be thrilled to take part. If so, what would your thoughts be about a Hem-Ka Sobk? I know they're presented as an adversarial group, and I think they might be canonically mostly dead in M20, but I'm envisioning something like Shekhar Kapur's Snake Woman here.

If you need peeps but don't want weird crocodile cultists, I can probably also do a Hippolytan or something.

I love the motivation to portray Salma Hayek in Dusk til Dawn. Look, if you can pull that off in a high school setting, I'm interested.

[ImpInTraining]

For those who are still interested, the game is already started. Tell me you are definitely interested, and I'll add a place for us to discuss in private your character creation. Upon completion, you will be able to jump right into the story thread.

[Optional Reality]

Originally Posted by ImpInTraining

For those who are still interested, the game is already started. Tell me you are definitely interested, and I'll add a place for us to discuss in private your character creation. Upon completion, you will be able to jump right into the story thread.

I am definitely interested, with most of the legwork for character creation already ready except actually putting dots in bubbles.

[Optional Reality]

Name: Lorelai "Lore" Corbyn (she/her ?)
Flavor: Hem-Ka Sobk (Correspondence)
Concept: Conflicted soul
Nature: Monster
Demeanor: Benefactor

Foci:

• Paradigm: A World of Gods and Monsters
• Practice: a blend of Faith and Dominion
• Instruments: food, blood and fluids, bones and remains (crocodilian), eye contact, invocations, sacred iconography (Sobk), sensuality

Background:

Lorelai's great-grandfather fought under Wolseley when the British seized Egypt in the late 19th century. Remaining afterward to help build the "Veiled Protectorate", he brought his wife from Bournemouth, but the foreign air disagreed with her and she passed of fever shortly after. A few years later, he took up with a local -- and considerably younger -- local woman who was sympathetic to the British presence. But after Denshawai, it was harder to disguise the Protectorate as anything but an occupation, and tensions starkly rose. The Corbyn patriarch moved his newly-established family back to Bournemouth, only to find that English society was rather less approving of the age and color of his second wife. Drawing upon money earned during the Egyptian campaign, they moved once more, following the dreams of equality that took so many others across the Atlantic to America.

The next generation of Corbyns would eventually head further west, seeking a warm, dry climate for Lorelai's grandmother's pleurisy, or so the family tales would have it. And there they... stayed. The frontier spirit of a British gentleman who had traveled the world for King and Country faded into a comfortable small-town life amidst the deserts and mountains of the American southwest.

As a little girl, Lorelai fit in well enough. She was always friendly and helpful, but reserved, without any really close friends. Still, she seemed happy enough, and loved the colorful culture that the little mining town had developed. But Lorelai's own development came late. All the way through her 10th grade year, she was still short and flat-chested. Her worried parents took her to doctors in Sierra Vista, and then to a specialist (who she hated!) all the way up in Tucson. Everything seemed normal. Give it time, they said. They were more right than they knew. When she returned to school for her junior year, she was scarcely recognizable to her classmates.

What no one knew -- what no one could have known -- was that she inherited more than just brown eyes and a hint of color to her skin from her Egyptian great-grandmother. Buried within her was a secret, a shard of something ancient and powerful. That summer, her body had awakened, but so too had her soul. To the quiet teenager, it all came as a waterfall of surprise, of unfamiliar feelings and thoughts and emotions. Dreams of a river so vast it couldn't be described, and scaled beasts who walked like men but tore out the throats of the unclean and unworthy. Dreams of sex -- masculine, penetrative sex -- and power. And somehow, somehow, all the dreams were all about her. More than once, Lorelai wondered if she was going crazy. But what could she do about it all? Tell her parents and wind up back at that doctor's office in Tucson, or worse? Obviously not. It wasn't long after that she began seeing the world differently, and her new world began to make a little bit more sense.

Three inches taller and perhaps that many cup sizes heavier than she was in her sophmore year, even those who barely knew Lorelai can tell that something has changed. She's still quiet and a little distant. But something in her eyes makes that feel less like shyness and more like... control. Like she's just barely holding back some dangerous, powerful part of herself. Which, of course, is exactly what she is doing. It's what she does every time she imagines Roger on the floor in a pool of his racist, bullying blood. It's what she does every time a classmate sparks in her these strange sensations of dominance and sexuality.

Meanwhile, Lorelai has come to realize that she's not alone in Bisbee in having awakened to a more magical world, although she hasn't had any contact with anyone quite like her. And that's likely to be the case for some time, because unbeknownst to her, a catastrophically failed ritual in Egypt led to the death of most of the Hem-Ka Sobk, leaving the girl alone with the crocodile god, at least for now. As she's struggled with that conflict, she's opted to take a new nickname, the shorter, somewhat androgynous "Lore". With all the other changes in her life, no one questioned it. She's not sure yet what all this means for her personal identity, much less any ideas of her eventual sexuality. In a lot of ways, she still wants to be the quiet little girl from 10th grade who wondered what she could be when she grew up that would let her help people. But her soul, her sekhem, her Avatar, is something primordial. It is one of the last, lingering fragments of a god (or something like one) who was ancient even in ancient Egypt. A god once known to his people as "pointed of teeth" and "he who eats while he also mates". It's... it's all a lot to deal with.