Prometheus == teh pwn0rrxd

Posted by Neel Krishnaswami on May 8, 2006 at 12:08 PM

Saturday, we played Nine Worlds again. The highlight of the session is probably when Hypatia pit her magic against Prometheus's, and beat him, on live television broadcast across the Nine Worlds. She resolved her Muse to humiliate Prometheus, and now has the muse "Escape from Earth before Prometheus kills her." :) An archon with all of his or her muses active is crazy powerful -- Prometheus drew 22 cards in that conflict, and used trump, and Hypatia still won.

Nick posted recently about underdog stories, where the PCs suffer reversals before prevailing. I think the GMing lesson for me is to be unafraid of making grossly powerful NPCs in 9W, because the players can 1) lose, 2) pick up Muses and then 3) win. A really sneaky trick is to make the NPC's Muses goals that are shorter-term than the PCs', so that after step 1 the NPCs hand sizes shrink.

Another neat mechanical trick I learned Saturday is that you can use Stasis locks to stretch out conflicts. Our engineer was ambushed by Tisiphone, an archon working for Hades, and infected with a  scarab that would keep him alive and report his location back to  her. I decided that this would be a stasis lock on his Arete, and when the other PCs tried to remove it, it turned out that destroying the lock took several rounds of conflict.

One story technique I've started to adopt all-out is to find a Greek myth that I like, take the characters and their relationships more or less unchanged, and put them into the game with their names intact. This way, I can signal the players about who's doing what and why without stopping the game.