The Bandage Brigade goes forth

In tonight’s game of Mummy: the Resurrection…

… ye gods almighty, I am running Mummy: the Resurrection. If you’re not familiar with it – and you’re not – it’s this weird kinda-sorta-but-not-really World of Darkness game that started out as a half-assed supplement to Vampire: the Masquerade but ill-advisedly got transformed into a weird sort of hybrid supplement that didn’t belong to any particular game line and wasn’t exactly its own game line either. The editing is a mess, the writing is hopeless, and there are a hundred and one problems that no one ever cared enough to address. So why have I been running it for the last year? I have no idea. Like most things involving my roleplaying campaigns, it just sort of happened…

… but anyway, in tonight’s game of Mummy: the Resurrection, our plucky band of currently-but-not-permanently-deceased immortals set out into the howling storm of the Underworld, on a quest to plunder an old Hierarchy cache and actually have something to hit spectres over the head with. They started out on an unfortunate note by botching the spells they tried to use to make themselves better suited to venture out, but they eventually got to the subway station where the cache is supposed to be hidden.

There, they milled about aimlessly for a bit before they were suddenly attacked by a weird dude with wings and a scythe who they resolutely managed to avoid fighting, to the point where I was starting to feel like he was mostly just swinging and missing. But apparently I managed to make him seem interesting enough that now they all want to get to know him, if they can just get him to stop trying to kill them first. I guess that’s a win.

I feel like I wasn’t entirely on the ball with this session. I was running on very little sleep, and as a result I kept defaulting to my preparations instead of improvising in ways that might make the game more interesting. In retrospect, I think I should have brought in a little more action, or at least some plot twists, the moment I saw that the players weren’t sure how to proceed. Oh well.

I’m also starting to wonder if I’m making magic too hard in this game. So much of it relies on lengthy rituals and boosting some spells by other spells, and by the rules players only have something like a 60-70% chance to pull them off at the first try. I feel like it might make things unnecessarily hard when they have to succeed at a long string of rolls before they can get the effect they want. I don’t know, maybe I should make some spells and rituals succeed automatically as long as you invest the time and resources in them? Something to consider, I guess.