Emprint
10-03-2003, 12:41 PM
About a month ago, my player Jeff and I sat down for our first Demon session. We've been trying to get this game going for a while (since Demon came out, actually), and one thing or another keeps coming up. We didn't have a lot of time to play- about four hours, dinner included. We played using my Unisystem conversion of Demon. This was, without a doubt, one of the most intense and satisfying roleplaying sessions I've ever run. I present it here, for your amusement.
Demon: Strange As Angels
Episode 1- "Another Day in Paradise"
The Detective
"To protect and serve? I dare say I've done a little of that."
Xariel is an angel of the Seventh House. Xariel always viewed death as a merciful gift, walking silently, reverently through crowded battlefields to release the dead and the dying.
Max Harris was a police detective, a child of the forties who served through some of the most turbulent events of the last century. He saw buildings burn when King died, he saw the Church turn away from austere majesty to earthy populism, he saw some of his closest friends die in Vietnam.
Max was a good cop, and his younger partner, Mitch Robinson, was sorry when the old man had to retire. There was no doubt, though, that Max's mind was starting to go.
As Max drank alone in his apartment each night, with only the voice of the radio and the crackle of old records to keep him company, he felt the holes in his mind grow larger and larger.
And one night, Max just wasn't there anymore, and Xariel returned to the world.
Setting Notes
I've changed the setting and mechanics slightly. You'll see a few bits here that don't match the Demon core book. Also, Devil's Night hasn't happened yet (it will probably happen in the next adventure or two).
The series is set in Chicago, the Second City. The first hints of the Time of Judgement are beginning to arrive, but Xariel, at the start of this episode, has had no encounters with the supernatural since returning to the world of Man.
Scene 1- Max's Apartment
The Abyss. There is nothing here, except for the howls of the damned, so many, so long, so steady they sound like the wind.
Chicago. The wind here sounds like the howls of the damned.
Xariel wakes up in his apartment. Max's apartment. He went to sleep wearing Max's shirt, and there's a stain on the front. Xariel's having trouble getting used to waking up. He's never experienced anything like sleep before. Except for Hell.
He goes to the door and picks up the paper. Another homeless runaway found dead. There've been a lot of them, lately, mostly around the Tombs. The cops say cardiac arrest. Some of the press are saying super-drug. The paper quotes Mitch Robinson, the detective in charge of the investigation. He says there's nothing to be afraid of. Max knew Mitch, and so Xariel knows Mitch is lying. He decides to pay his old protege a visit.
Scene 2- The Police Station
Detective Mitch Robinson is not a happy copper. Brightens his day a little to see Max again, though. Max is looking better today, he thinks. More like he used to, less like the broken old man he was turning into.
Mitch tells Xariel about the latest victim-question-mark, Kelly Frost. They don't have much on her.
"What have you got on her?" Xariel asks.
"She was from Toronto. Parents say she was a good kid."
"They always are."
Mitch takes Xariel down to the morgue. He's been fighting to keep the body. Mitch comments, "Rigor's come and gone, but when we got her in here... I'll tell you, Max, she died afraid of something."
Xariel feigns a headache and tells Mitch he needs a cup of coffee. As Mitch heads off to get one, Xariel probes Kelly's last moments....
Running through the city not the real one but the endless mazey one you dream about when you're out of happy things to dream about and you have nightmares about being chased by something that you can't see but you know it's there oh my God it's got me!
She died in her dreams, Xariel surmises. Mitch comes back with the coffee, then shows Xariel Kelly's personal effects. He also gives Xariel a file with some of the case material in it, and a few pointers. He won't ask Max for help outright, but he's giving some hints.
Mitch tells Xariel about a shelter Kelly spent a lot of time at. He also mentions an informant named Quint Whiteman, a counter-culture remnant and minor drug offender who runs a conspiracy rag called "The Devil's Own Truth."
And now Mitch has to go. The mayor wants answers.
Scene 3- The Alley
Xariel decides to check out the place Kelly died. There are police at either end of the alley, so he walks softly through the Second World. The spot is easy to find- it's as if someone ripped through the substance of the netherworld and forced Kelly kicking and screaming into the true afterlife.
"What are you doing here?"
There's a ghost staring challengingly at Xariel. There's only the vaguest impression of human features on its face, as if the rest has been worn away over time. Xariel, however, has years of experience with the dead. He asks why the ghost hasn't moved on; it tells him that it "missed the bus" when it died, and now it can't find its way along. Xariel promises it release if it will tell him what happened to Kelly.
The ghost says Kelly was chased, in and out of dreams, in and out of the underworld, until she ran right back to this spot where her body lay sleeping, where the thing chasing her ripped her soul apart and sent it in shreds to the next life.
"What was chasing her?" Xariel asks.
The ghost chokes back tears. "The most beautiful thing I ever saw."
Xariel sighs with resignation and muted rage. One of us, he thinks.
Xariel hasn't yet regained enough of his strength to help the ghost, but he improvises, re-weaving the tear Kelly's soul went through into a softly glowing path leading to... well, to whatever that bastard God created for humanity.
Scene 4- The Shelter
Xariel arrives at the shelter and soup kitchen Mitch told him about. It's called "Angel Sanctuary." Figures. He looks at the depressingly long line out front, and sees pain, loneliness, abandonment. He reaches out, looking for signs of the supernatural here, but he's overwhelmed by Tormented visions of the war, of a sky choked so thick with angels that you couldn't breathe without inhaling bloody feathers.
Xariel becomes lucid again and finds himself stumbling back to his feet with several homeless people looking at him, their eyes perhaps a little bleaker than before.
Suddenly, impossibly, he hears a phone ringing inside the building. He tries to ignore it, but it keeps ringing. He goes in a back way, finds a cramped, dusty office. The ringing phone is on the desk. He picks it up....
Xariel.
"Yes?"
I see you're on his trail. Good.
"Who is this?"
Come see me.
And with that, the phone is silent. Well, not quite- Xariel realizes he's been talking to a dial tone.
"Can I help you?" a voice asks from behind him. There's a woman there, perhaps thirty, blonde and pale and worn. It's the fate of everything that's human to waste away and die, but this woman is more sharply aware of it than most, and she welcomes the promised rest.
Xariel introduces himself as Max, and says he's working on the Frost case. The woman is Jill Thompson, the coordinator at the shelter. She knew Kelly, and talks a little about her. She'd run away months ago, but had remained determined to find a better life than the one at home, even though she hadn't found it yet. She hadn't let go of her dreams, Jill says. Turns out Jill was trying to help Kelly- she'd managed to get her into the public schools under a forged identity.
Monday would have been her first day.
Idly, Jill asks Max if he thinks there's anything after life. Xariel says there is, and he knows it. Jill asks how; Xariel looks at her with Max's deep, sincere old-man-blue eyes and tells her he was there when God made it. He feels the momentary warmth of her faith.
Scene 5- Max's Apartment
Xariel doesn't trust the Tombs after dark, so he spreads his wings, yards of gauzy cloth that drape over unseen pinions, and flies back to his apartment. Max's apartment.
Under a dying lightbulb, he looks over the file. One word catches his eye in a dense page of typed text. Xariel. He looks again, but it's gone. Xariel. He squints and looks again... still not there. Abruptly, he realizes which page he's looking at- the profile of Quint Whiteman, the informant.
Xariel does not appreciate being led along by breadcrumbs. His wings of flowing cloth billow out again, he stands to his full height, and a soft radiance emanates from within his waxy white skin. He takes flight, wings beating rapidly as he flies through the netherworld...
Scene 6- Whiteman's Apartment
...the underworld ripples as Xariel takes, flowing by first like water and then like wind, and he can feel the eyes of the dead and the things that should be dead as he flies past.
He rides into Whiteman's apartment as a breath of wind through an open window, wings folding back into Max's coat as he sets down.
Whiteman is on the couch watching American Idol. With one hand, Xariel pulls out a cigarette. With the other, he lights it. And with the third, he points a gun at Whiteman's head.
"I guess you're wondering what's going on," Whiteman asks. He doesn't sound imposing at all.
"Who are you?", Xariel asks. Whiteman introduces himself, with a trace of pride, that he is Labazar, angel of the Wilds. He tells Xariel that he needs his help, that a more powerful angel is destroying human lives by ravaging their dreams.
Xariel asks why he should trust Labazar, who responds by giving out a syllable of his true name. "Not that it does either of us any good," he adds.
Labazar shifts to his revelatory form- or tries to, anyway. There's a slight ripple, but nothing happens. "See?" he says, "I've been declawed." Turns out the angel that he's been warning Xariel about knew his True Name from back in the war, and altered it to bind him. Labazar wants Xariel to free him.
Labazar explains that the angel who bound him was once the Throne of Woven Prayers. In the early days of the war, the Throne was a loyalist, taking the prayers of Abel's tribe and weaving them into a crown that he laid upon the brow of God. But he grew weary of merely passing on the faith of human beings and so joined the rebellion. It was the Throne of Woven Prayers who devised the plan to kill Vejovis.
In battle, the Archangel Vejovis was a terrible sight- a fire, a sword, a man, a mountain. By drawing on the prayers of the children of Eve, the rebels cut away Vejovis's layers one by one, like peeling an onion. Finally, the archangel was only a mountain, and he crashed to Earth. The rebels had won, but few of the humans who offered their faith survived Vejovis's impact.
The Weaver of Faith was one of the first unsummoned escapees from the Abyss, returning to creation twelve years ago. Certain that Lucifer conspired with the Father, he was determined to find them both- and now he thinks he has a way.
The Archangel Gabriel also went missing during the war, and the Weaver suspects he was of God and the Devil's party, as well. The Weaver discovered the human legend that Gabriel tells each child a secret as they are born. All the secrets that have never been told are hidden in the souls of humans, and by unraveling human dreams, the Weaver can learn the secret.
One day, he will find the child that knows where God is hiding.
Xariel realizes that he's in no condition to take on the Throne of Woven. He tells Labazar he'll need a weapon.
"I can help you," Labazar says. "But he's not the Throne of Woven Prayers anymore."
"He's the Dominion of Dreams Devoured."
Demon: Strange As Angels
Episode 1- "Another Day in Paradise"
The Detective
"To protect and serve? I dare say I've done a little of that."
Xariel is an angel of the Seventh House. Xariel always viewed death as a merciful gift, walking silently, reverently through crowded battlefields to release the dead and the dying.
Max Harris was a police detective, a child of the forties who served through some of the most turbulent events of the last century. He saw buildings burn when King died, he saw the Church turn away from austere majesty to earthy populism, he saw some of his closest friends die in Vietnam.
Max was a good cop, and his younger partner, Mitch Robinson, was sorry when the old man had to retire. There was no doubt, though, that Max's mind was starting to go.
As Max drank alone in his apartment each night, with only the voice of the radio and the crackle of old records to keep him company, he felt the holes in his mind grow larger and larger.
And one night, Max just wasn't there anymore, and Xariel returned to the world.
Setting Notes
I've changed the setting and mechanics slightly. You'll see a few bits here that don't match the Demon core book. Also, Devil's Night hasn't happened yet (it will probably happen in the next adventure or two).
The series is set in Chicago, the Second City. The first hints of the Time of Judgement are beginning to arrive, but Xariel, at the start of this episode, has had no encounters with the supernatural since returning to the world of Man.
Scene 1- Max's Apartment
The Abyss. There is nothing here, except for the howls of the damned, so many, so long, so steady they sound like the wind.
Chicago. The wind here sounds like the howls of the damned.
Xariel wakes up in his apartment. Max's apartment. He went to sleep wearing Max's shirt, and there's a stain on the front. Xariel's having trouble getting used to waking up. He's never experienced anything like sleep before. Except for Hell.
He goes to the door and picks up the paper. Another homeless runaway found dead. There've been a lot of them, lately, mostly around the Tombs. The cops say cardiac arrest. Some of the press are saying super-drug. The paper quotes Mitch Robinson, the detective in charge of the investigation. He says there's nothing to be afraid of. Max knew Mitch, and so Xariel knows Mitch is lying. He decides to pay his old protege a visit.
Scene 2- The Police Station
Detective Mitch Robinson is not a happy copper. Brightens his day a little to see Max again, though. Max is looking better today, he thinks. More like he used to, less like the broken old man he was turning into.
Mitch tells Xariel about the latest victim-question-mark, Kelly Frost. They don't have much on her.
"What have you got on her?" Xariel asks.
"She was from Toronto. Parents say she was a good kid."
"They always are."
Mitch takes Xariel down to the morgue. He's been fighting to keep the body. Mitch comments, "Rigor's come and gone, but when we got her in here... I'll tell you, Max, she died afraid of something."
Xariel feigns a headache and tells Mitch he needs a cup of coffee. As Mitch heads off to get one, Xariel probes Kelly's last moments....
Running through the city not the real one but the endless mazey one you dream about when you're out of happy things to dream about and you have nightmares about being chased by something that you can't see but you know it's there oh my God it's got me!
She died in her dreams, Xariel surmises. Mitch comes back with the coffee, then shows Xariel Kelly's personal effects. He also gives Xariel a file with some of the case material in it, and a few pointers. He won't ask Max for help outright, but he's giving some hints.
Mitch tells Xariel about a shelter Kelly spent a lot of time at. He also mentions an informant named Quint Whiteman, a counter-culture remnant and minor drug offender who runs a conspiracy rag called "The Devil's Own Truth."
And now Mitch has to go. The mayor wants answers.
Scene 3- The Alley
Xariel decides to check out the place Kelly died. There are police at either end of the alley, so he walks softly through the Second World. The spot is easy to find- it's as if someone ripped through the substance of the netherworld and forced Kelly kicking and screaming into the true afterlife.
"What are you doing here?"
There's a ghost staring challengingly at Xariel. There's only the vaguest impression of human features on its face, as if the rest has been worn away over time. Xariel, however, has years of experience with the dead. He asks why the ghost hasn't moved on; it tells him that it "missed the bus" when it died, and now it can't find its way along. Xariel promises it release if it will tell him what happened to Kelly.
The ghost says Kelly was chased, in and out of dreams, in and out of the underworld, until she ran right back to this spot where her body lay sleeping, where the thing chasing her ripped her soul apart and sent it in shreds to the next life.
"What was chasing her?" Xariel asks.
The ghost chokes back tears. "The most beautiful thing I ever saw."
Xariel sighs with resignation and muted rage. One of us, he thinks.
Xariel hasn't yet regained enough of his strength to help the ghost, but he improvises, re-weaving the tear Kelly's soul went through into a softly glowing path leading to... well, to whatever that bastard God created for humanity.
Scene 4- The Shelter
Xariel arrives at the shelter and soup kitchen Mitch told him about. It's called "Angel Sanctuary." Figures. He looks at the depressingly long line out front, and sees pain, loneliness, abandonment. He reaches out, looking for signs of the supernatural here, but he's overwhelmed by Tormented visions of the war, of a sky choked so thick with angels that you couldn't breathe without inhaling bloody feathers.
Xariel becomes lucid again and finds himself stumbling back to his feet with several homeless people looking at him, their eyes perhaps a little bleaker than before.
Suddenly, impossibly, he hears a phone ringing inside the building. He tries to ignore it, but it keeps ringing. He goes in a back way, finds a cramped, dusty office. The ringing phone is on the desk. He picks it up....
Xariel.
"Yes?"
I see you're on his trail. Good.
"Who is this?"
Come see me.
And with that, the phone is silent. Well, not quite- Xariel realizes he's been talking to a dial tone.
"Can I help you?" a voice asks from behind him. There's a woman there, perhaps thirty, blonde and pale and worn. It's the fate of everything that's human to waste away and die, but this woman is more sharply aware of it than most, and she welcomes the promised rest.
Xariel introduces himself as Max, and says he's working on the Frost case. The woman is Jill Thompson, the coordinator at the shelter. She knew Kelly, and talks a little about her. She'd run away months ago, but had remained determined to find a better life than the one at home, even though she hadn't found it yet. She hadn't let go of her dreams, Jill says. Turns out Jill was trying to help Kelly- she'd managed to get her into the public schools under a forged identity.
Monday would have been her first day.
Idly, Jill asks Max if he thinks there's anything after life. Xariel says there is, and he knows it. Jill asks how; Xariel looks at her with Max's deep, sincere old-man-blue eyes and tells her he was there when God made it. He feels the momentary warmth of her faith.
Scene 5- Max's Apartment
Xariel doesn't trust the Tombs after dark, so he spreads his wings, yards of gauzy cloth that drape over unseen pinions, and flies back to his apartment. Max's apartment.
Under a dying lightbulb, he looks over the file. One word catches his eye in a dense page of typed text. Xariel. He looks again, but it's gone. Xariel. He squints and looks again... still not there. Abruptly, he realizes which page he's looking at- the profile of Quint Whiteman, the informant.
Xariel does not appreciate being led along by breadcrumbs. His wings of flowing cloth billow out again, he stands to his full height, and a soft radiance emanates from within his waxy white skin. He takes flight, wings beating rapidly as he flies through the netherworld...
Scene 6- Whiteman's Apartment
...the underworld ripples as Xariel takes, flowing by first like water and then like wind, and he can feel the eyes of the dead and the things that should be dead as he flies past.
He rides into Whiteman's apartment as a breath of wind through an open window, wings folding back into Max's coat as he sets down.
Whiteman is on the couch watching American Idol. With one hand, Xariel pulls out a cigarette. With the other, he lights it. And with the third, he points a gun at Whiteman's head.
"I guess you're wondering what's going on," Whiteman asks. He doesn't sound imposing at all.
"Who are you?", Xariel asks. Whiteman introduces himself, with a trace of pride, that he is Labazar, angel of the Wilds. He tells Xariel that he needs his help, that a more powerful angel is destroying human lives by ravaging their dreams.
Xariel asks why he should trust Labazar, who responds by giving out a syllable of his true name. "Not that it does either of us any good," he adds.
Labazar shifts to his revelatory form- or tries to, anyway. There's a slight ripple, but nothing happens. "See?" he says, "I've been declawed." Turns out the angel that he's been warning Xariel about knew his True Name from back in the war, and altered it to bind him. Labazar wants Xariel to free him.
Labazar explains that the angel who bound him was once the Throne of Woven Prayers. In the early days of the war, the Throne was a loyalist, taking the prayers of Abel's tribe and weaving them into a crown that he laid upon the brow of God. But he grew weary of merely passing on the faith of human beings and so joined the rebellion. It was the Throne of Woven Prayers who devised the plan to kill Vejovis.
In battle, the Archangel Vejovis was a terrible sight- a fire, a sword, a man, a mountain. By drawing on the prayers of the children of Eve, the rebels cut away Vejovis's layers one by one, like peeling an onion. Finally, the archangel was only a mountain, and he crashed to Earth. The rebels had won, but few of the humans who offered their faith survived Vejovis's impact.
The Weaver of Faith was one of the first unsummoned escapees from the Abyss, returning to creation twelve years ago. Certain that Lucifer conspired with the Father, he was determined to find them both- and now he thinks he has a way.
The Archangel Gabriel also went missing during the war, and the Weaver suspects he was of God and the Devil's party, as well. The Weaver discovered the human legend that Gabriel tells each child a secret as they are born. All the secrets that have never been told are hidden in the souls of humans, and by unraveling human dreams, the Weaver can learn the secret.
One day, he will find the child that knows where God is hiding.
Xariel realizes that he's in no condition to take on the Throne of Woven. He tells Labazar he'll need a weapon.
"I can help you," Labazar says. "But he's not the Throne of Woven Prayers anymore."
"He's the Dominion of Dreams Devoured."