The Slaying Stone (D&D 4e): Review + Alterations

I realize this module has gotten a lot of attention online as D&D 4e has been having a bit of a (much deserved) renaissance. I don't necessarily think I have anything revelatory to say about it, but I will be running my own adaptation of it at a local game store starting in about 2 weeks, and I see no reason not to put my thoughts in writing.

Adventure Summary 

This is an adventure that came out in the middle-to-late days of 4e's run (which was roughly '08-'13; not as short relative to most prior editions as the haters would have you believe, despite their best efforts at the time.) It's designed for level 1 characters, although by my math a 5-player party would hit level 2 about 2/3 of the way through. The increasing levels of the last few encounters would support this.

The setup is that the PCs are hired to retrieve the eponymous MacGuffin from a fallen human city that has been overrun by goblins. The Slaying Stone is supposed to be some big-time scary magic weapon that can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, or whatever. I have some thoughts on this conceit and its execution that I'll get to later.

This is a faction-driven adventure. The biggest and most frequently encountered faction are the goblins. There's also a smaller group of kobolds that have beef with the goblins and an orc mercenary group that are also looking for the Stone.

I have seen this described as a sandbox, which I don't think is accurate, although I also object to false dichotomies and I don't think any two D&D players will ever agree what "sandbox" and "railroad" mean. The encounter structure is linear at the beginning and the end. You're supposed to run encounters 1-3 first, no matter what, and then wrap up with encounters 10-13. The middle chunk is flexible.

 

Check it out, I made a whole diagram and everything!

What I Like

Faction Play Done Right: Not that it's rocket science to pull off, in my opinion, but I think the factions are well-executed in this adventure.

The three factions are designed to be easy to play off each other. They're fairly distinct in motivation and the resources available to them, although I have ideas about how they could have gone further with this, specifically with the kobolds. Narratively, the goblins are the bread-and-butter enemies, the kobolds are underdogs who can be swayed to the PCs' side, and the orcs are the Big Bads and don't directly show up until near the end. 

I anticipate this element working well with minimal changes, and it's a core part of the adventure, so I'm happy about that.

 

Creative Use of Skill Challenges: Skill challenges are a divisive element of 4e, even amongst its own designers. This shows through in how much the chapters on them evolve between the DMG1 and DMG2. 

In my opinion, the first two skill challenges in this adventure (Encounter 2 and Encounter 3) are excellent. They showcase the strength of skill challenges as a piece of design: mechanizing non-combat parts of the game that still need to have stakes, in a way that integrates well with the combat mechanics that make up 95% of the game system. 

Encounter 2 provides the players three options on how to sneak into the city. The options' pros and cons are immediately obvious and mechanized in ways that make sense with the narrative details. Straightforward, but not to its detriment!

Encounter 3 is the one that really has me itching to design weird storygame inspired skill challenges, though. It progresses between fights throughout the entire rest of the adventure. A sidebar suggests it may be better not to even announce it as a skill challenge to the players, which kind of reminds me of the whole debate in the OSR about how much of hexcrawl mechanics should be made visible to players. 

I could see this encounter forcing a GM to improvise if the players fuck up a lot near the start of the adventure, but I will withhold judgment on that until I run it myself. 

The one other skill challenge, Encounter 10, is kind of boring; a bog-standard negotiation with a dragon too powerful just to fight head-on. It feels likely to chafe at players if you keep it firmly within the skill challenge framework, but whatever. There's nothing stopping me from replacing it or sprucing it up so that players have more meaningful choices to make.

  

Narrative Flexibility: This is pretty minor, but I like that the adventure explicitly advises the GM to alter the overarching questgiver framework according to what will be fun and interesting. For example, if the players start to suspect their employer and that of the orcs are in cahoots, it says that you should feel free to make that true. 

I don't think the questgivers and their motives are likely to cross the players' minds during the adventure, because it's very much a narrative bookend thing, and as written they are highly unlikely to compare notes with the orcs, rather than just fighting to the death. But I appreciate the sentiment.

 

What I Don't Like 

Linearity: As stated above, I don't care about debating "railroads vs. sandboxes." But I do care about giving my players meaningful choices, even in games as prep-heavy as modern D&D, where respecting those choices can mean throwing out a whole session-long fight I spent time designing, bought minis for, etc etc. 

There is a balance to be struck, and I realize prewritten adventures are going to skew toward forcing their setpiece encounters, but I wish some of that advice to be flexible applied here as well. 

The most egregious case of this is that the final battle with the orcs is set up such that they ambush the PCs after they acquire the Slaying Stone, and there is nothing players can do to prevent this from happening.

I have a few ideas on how to fix this. One is to have two versions of the final fight: a harder one where the players fail to prevent the ambush, and an easier one where they come prepared. Or, I could have the orcs discover the stone at the same time as they do, and either have a three-way fight with the dragon as its own side, or ditch the dragon altogether. Or combine the two: maybe the default is they fight at the location of the Stone, but clever planning could mean they beat the orcs there. There's a lot of options I prefer to the prewritten version. 

Not Enough Magitech!: One of the things I really fuck with in this module is the whole "lost magical weaponry" aspect... Except there's almost nothing to it. One fight with the cool-ass robot dogs from the cover, and the Slaying Stone itself, which... See the next section for why that's not enough for me.

I plan to run this in a way that really emphasizes the Roadside Picnic Zone-iness of the city. It's dangerous, it's full of hostile factions, but there's also uniquely cool magitech weirdness to harvest, even if some of it will try to kill you for your trouble. One change will be to have more construct fights. 

The MagGuffin is Boring: So yeah, all the Slaying Stone does is kill one creature within the city, AFTER it gets a full turn of combat. And there's just one stone and it can only be used once. Even if, as GM, you BS some implications it could be turned into something more powerful, that's lame. And the adventure explicitly tells you to hype this thing up whenever possible.

My fix? It's basically a one-use Death Note. It can kill any one person as long as you have a decent Arcana bonus and know their true name. That's strong enough they're unlikely to waste it on this encounter. It also makes the Stone, and by extension the party, focal to future adventures rather than just getting destroyed by the questgiver upon retrieval. What will the PCs do with it? Surely they don't trust some old wizard guy who paid them 100 gold with this kind of power, right? These are more interesting questions to me. And I'm never afraid to upset the status quo of a campaign this way. Many of my favorite moments in RPGs result from giving the PCs this kind of dilemma, and power.

The Kobolds Don't Actually Use Traps: This is pretty minor, but one of the things the module says makes the kobolds distinct from other factions is that their territory is full of traps. But there are no encounters where this get used (nor any trap stats for during exploration.) They do have a secret passage in one fight, at least. 

Anyway, this is dead easy to fix. I'll poach some of the low-level traps from the DMG and slot them into one or two of the kobold fights.

Racist Fantasy Game is Racist: This is by no means unique to this module, but damn, it's always jarring to see everyone that's not a "civilized" (playable) race get described as if they're barely smart enough to speak. And of course they're ontologically evil and thus OK to kill. I dunno. It's just weird and boring and gross. 

One change I plan to make around this, besides roleplaying people as people with survival instinct, real motivations, not monocultures, etc. is to replace the orcs with a mercenary faction that aren't all one race, and that have more sophisticated methods than "torture goblins until we ambush the PCs as scripted." I'm thinking probably having a tiefling spellcaster in charge, since they're supposed to have been the ones to create the Slaying Stone (and presumably the Iron Defenders and other, undescribed magitech weirdness).

Some of the Fights are Kind of Boring: I do feel like I should spend more time on this, because it's really the important part, and the main reason to buy a module rather than run your own story off-the-cuff. But here's the gist of my thoughts.

Overall I think most of the fights are fine. I really like Encounter 6, which is not only the one with the iron defenders, but also a kobold that summons an ankheg halfway through the fight. The only ones that really strike me as underwhelming are Encounters 11 and 12. This is kind of a shame, since Encounter 12 is the boss fight with the leader of the goblins. His only gimmick is that he has a mount and he can deflect damage to it. 

I'll probably redesign that one, and just scrap Encounter 11 altogether. That one has a lycanthropic noble NPC who gets ambushed by a bunch of goblins. I find his whole subplot half-baked and uninspiring, so I will be cutting him altogether. I'm not really big on the whole "reclaim the city for humans" thing they set up in general, between the fantasy racism as mentioned above, and the fact it detracts from the Stalker-y "overrun magitech city" vibes that I think are a lot of fun.

I also feel like there are slightly too many fights with all or mostly Skirmisher enemies. I get that they're kind of the "default" monster role, but variety is the spice of life.

 

Okay, that was a lot of words! I'm curious to see how many of them I take back and/or eat after actually running this. Stay tuned on that, and also maybe on some posts about the DIY mini substitute I'm thinking of trying since I gave away all my miniatures a couple years ago. 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5 - "Evil, Vile" Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Here is the last entry in this subseries. Levi was originally going to be my PC in an All-Mart campaign that never got past the dreaded scheduling phase.

As mentioned a couple weeks ago, I will be shelving weekly StatSat entries for the time being. I have a 4e D&D campaign starting soon and want to focus my RPG writing time on prepping for that. There will probably be more posts relating to that soon. And even if I'm not writing it down weekly, the UA brainworms will never leave me in peace, you can rest assured.

 
 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 5

Levi Oster, known in occult circles by his own tongue-in-cheek title, “Evil, Vile Levi,” has a relationship to his heritage that lies between “complicated” and “tortured.”

He was born into a Brooklyn Ashkenazi Jewish community, assigned female, and raised to become a loyal housewife and faithful mother. He always chafed at the strictures of his orthodox upbringing, wanting to be given the respect shown to his brothers and male cousins: a modicum of freedom, a listening ear to his ideas, a future that he might make his own. His father was a respected gematriast – not of the anagram variety, mind you, but of the ancient Jewish tradition. Premodern mysticism, the kabbalah and the like, held a dignified place in his community. Levi always hovered as close to the edges of those mysteries as a “girl” could get.

By his early teens, Levi knew he was actually a boy. He also had the wherewithal to keep that fact to himself if he wanted to continue to have a roof over his head. Sometimes, in the wee hours, he would stay up to complain with the neighborhood girls about the unfairness of their lot in comparison to the boys. But he always had to hold back what he really wanted to say. In the end, he had to repress it as a survival instinct.

A stranger attended his Bat Mitzvah. He was an old man with a long, white beard, the very image of a sagacious elder, and the sort of man Levi had been raised to listen to carefully, and with great respect. The stranger kept his distance, not just from Levi, but apparently everyone else there, to some degree. And nobody seemed to know him either.

As things wound down, with the other kids and the women released to play, study, or clean, and the men talking in clusters, Levi approached him. The man’s name, he said, was Moshe, and he knew Levi’s name. This seemed pretty in keeping with expectation until he said that name. He called him Levi, not his deadname. For that one instant, everything fell away around them, as Levi accessed mystic truth unfettered for the first time.

Until he turned eighteen, Levi and Moshe – whose surname was never revealed – met regularly under the guise that the latter was a rabbi from Israel whose son he might wish to marry off to Levi (which delighted his parents). Moshe was every bit as erudite, pious, and wealthy as he needed to be to support this claim. When Levi left home, Moshe told him that he had convinced his parents it was to plan the wedding. Levi continues to feel conflicted about his disappearance from their lives, but has never considered going back.

Moshe had known Levi’s name through means he never explained, and because of that, had known Levi was male, even when he had all but forgotten that fact himself. But as he started to build himself a new life, he questioned everything. And in the end, he turned his back on Moshe, too. Partly, it was out of spite at his restrictive upbringing - at having his identity denied, and at the fate of all the girls and women he’d known. Partly, he saw the contradictions within Jewish traditions, and between Judaism and other religions. He had a lot of questions and unresolved frustration, and Moshe expected him to be a Nice Jewish Boy. Years later, he’d mature to the point that he wanted to try and make up with the old man, but by then Moshe had faded away, whether succumbing to age or illness, or something more primordial, Levi never found out.

What was left to Levi of their bond was, in truth, not particularly Jewish. But it was magick: the magick of names. True names are something that the trans community Levi has found as an adult tends to balk at, and understandably so. Who decides what is “true” about them? Why does one person only get the one name? Levi doesn’t know. He doesn’t make the rules. But he can do magick with them.

In essence, he practices anagram gematria (Break Today, p. 91), but only with people’s names. He believes it only works with a person’s true name, and that those are granted from some ineffable force on high. It’s quite likely he’s mistaken there, and that if he had his horizons broadened he could do the full gamut of anagram gematria, with any word or phrase.

Generally, when Levi meets someone, he tries to come up with spells for their name. For example, his boss at the All-Mart where he works is named Oliver Anderson, and he has found success casting “I Order Venal Son” on him to manipulate him with bribery, even in ways that don’t make sense, like giving him a raise. For about one in ten people, Levis’ magick doesn’t work, in which case he assumes their true name is not their legal name, or the name they go by. Usually, this means he just can’t affect them, but once in a while he digs up a childhood nickname or occult underground moniker, and then he can ensorcell them just fine.

Try as he might to move on, he keeps being drawn back to Orthodox Judaism. He always studies the Torah and kabbalah in his free time, and he’s gone as far as to try and join a couple synagogues in recent years, now he can reliably pass. There’s inevitable friction when he does, and he ends up burnt out on his faith and resentful for months at a time, but he can never quite shake the belief that was instilled in him so young. Worst of all, the misogyny he internalized as a child has only festered in him as he’s purged himself of femininity. Sometimes, it comes out in ugly ways.

Someday, he wants to use anagram gematria to commune with Yahweh. He’s sunk a lot of hours and taken many risks to try and figure out the name he would need to use, having tried Hebrew, English, Spanish, and a half-dozen other languages he’s barely familiar with. To be sure, he’s arrogant to even try, and it will probably burn him eventually, even though his choice of higher power to believe in is misguided in the World of Our Desires.

In the meantime, he works nights stocking at All-Mart, occasionally smuggling out a piece of exostock, always carrying on his person a notebook or two of true names and associated spells.

“Evil, Vile” Levi Oster, Anagram Gematriast Heretic

Obsession: True names. They are the essence of a person, and they hold great power.

Rage passion: The adulteration of faith by the institutions of orthodox religion.

Fear passion: (Helplessness) Being reduced back to womanhood.

Noble passion: I’m going to learn the true name of God someday, and finally get some answers.

Helplessness: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Isolation: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Self: Hardened: 4 / Failed: 0

Unnatural: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 1

Violence: Hardened: 1 / Failed:

Anagram Gematriast 60%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Night Shift Stock Boy 20%: Substitutes for Fitness, Protects Isolation, Evaluates Helplessness

Conflicted Agnostic 40%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Evaluates Unnatural, Evaluates Self

 

As a bonus, here are some of Levi's spells using his own "true name":

LEVI OSTER = RESOLVE IT: All-purpose minor boost to actions taken to proactively resolve a problem.

LEVI OSTER = EVER TOILS: +20% to Fitness checks that take place over at least a half hour.

LEVI OSTER = IS REVOLT: +10% to Struggle against authority figures and systemic power.

LEVI OSTER = ISLE TROVE: +20% to Status when referencing his "off-shore accounts" and/or playing into "Jew Gold" stereotypes. 

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4 - Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Here is the penultimate entry in this little subseries. Getting a bit spooky with this one; UA is a horror game, after all. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 4

Many serial killers have been called soulless, sociopathic, heartless. Often there’s an element of metaphor, or at least exaggeration to these accusations. But for Steven Smith, it’s literal.

Smith had no upbringing. He wasn’t born. A glitch in the universe shat him out, fully formed, fourteen years ago. Well, fully formed, sans any kind of blood, bone, internal organs, or soul. If you haven’t already inferred, he is a nonentity (see UA2 Core Book, p. 304). Of the roughly decade and a half he’s existed, he has spent very little doing anything of note, which is typical of his kind, and necessary for his survival. He wore sweater vests and khakis, walked into a cubicle at a struggling temp firm and stared at its wall eight hours a day. After clocking out, he found a secluded alley, 24-hour diner booth, or the like to spend the night doing nothing.

This changed one night, nearly a year ago now, in the darkened Hot Topic of an isolated shopping mall. Smith sat motionless in the changing room he’d selected to spend the night, the college-age employee either having forgotten he’d gone inside or failing to give a shit when they locked up. The floor-to-ceiling grate outside the store rattled up, and a thanatomancer (see Postmodern Magick, p. 111) by the name of Florence Simon walked inside, pushing her sacrifice ahead of her.

As she explained, in brutal detail, her plans for the poor homeless woman she had chosen to harvest a sig from, the aura of terror wafted to Smith like a macabre apple pie on a windowsill. Silently, he unlatched the door to the changing room and watched the proceedings from the shadows.

Over the next three hours, the butcher did her work and cleaned up afterwards. She never even noticed Smith staring. Her victim did, but by that point she had been overwhelmed with agony, her screams long grown indistinct, her tongue cut out. Simon left dragging two heavy black trash bags and a fleshy fetish in a pouch hanging from around her neck. Enthralled, Smith followed.

Simon was on the warpath with an enemy cabal. She had just started charging up nightly for the span of a week in anticipation of some supremely grisly workings. However, on the third night, she caught Smith, because he had become overwhelmed with bloodlust and wanted to join in. Startled and angry to have a carefully planned charging rite ruined, the death mage reflexively unleashed a significant blast on Smith. She expected him to fall to literal pieces, but he just kept kneeling over her gagged and flailing sacrifice, digging fistfuls of meat from his chest cavity.

Simon went from upset to frantic. She struck out with her flensing knife, severing three fingers from the philosophical zombie. Though they were coated in the sacrifice’s blood, the stumps did not bleed themselves. From this point, her rage and terror escalated to twisted reverence.

Nonentities are immune to magick, but, though it’s vanishingly rare, they can still practice it. Smith’s obsession with suffering and pain dovetailed beautifully with thanatomancy. He also had the benefit of a devoted tutor. Unaware of what Smith was, Simon had interpreted his immunity to, and fixation on torture as a sign he was some kind of cenobite-esque entity, perhaps one she had attracted after her storied career as a ritualistic killer.

Unfortunately for both, but mercifully for the local unhoused population, their morbid attraction had allowed Simon to forget her feud until it was too late. The cabal got the drop on her, and although Smith harvested four significant charges in the aftermath, she received a nasty stab wound. It wouldn’t have been fatal, though she was in and out of consciousness for most of a day. But once Smith had finished with her attackers, he took one last boon from his mentor.

Short-lived as his training was, Smith learned enough of Simon’s ideology to know how to cover his tracks. It had been important to Simon to conduct her sacrifices in public places, but to leave no trace behind. So became Smith’s practice. He disappeared from his job, causing a minor kerfuffle, but before anyone could decide if they wanted to check if he had any emergency contacts, his firm went under. No one who knew him before ever thought of him again.

Now, Smith spends his days stalking and planning his sacrifices, and carries them out at night. His body count is in the hundreds. He has evaded erasure by the universe only because no one has ever associated him with his actions. He takes teeth or knucklebones as fetishes, which now weigh down his pockets, but do not slow his pursuit. He is stealthy, steady, and perfectly forgettable. And no one who he chooses to cross paths with lives to tell the tale.

There is one other oddity about him: he never casts a spell. He never fully learned how from Simon, and moreover, he’s obsessed with the process of the sacrifice and its resultant emotions. He couldn’t care less about exercising mystic power. He is a hollow man suffused with the equivalent mojo of several dozen major charges. It’s unlikely mundane authorities will catch him, but unnatural phenomena have been dogging him for months now. Surely, when he’s discovered by the occult underground of one of the cities his trail of blood passes through, he will go out with a terrible bang.

Steven Smith, Soulless Thanatomancer

Obsession: Ritualistic murder and the resultant froth of pain, fear, and misery in the victim.

As a nonentity, Smith has no passions and does not face stress checks. He has a base rating of 15% in all abilities.

Thanatomancer 75%: Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Soulless Killer 75%: Substitutes for Pursuit, Substitutes for Struggle, Coerces Violence

Statospheric Saturdays: The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3 - Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

I still have the thanatomancer planned for this subseries, and I will be adding an anagram gematriast as well. After that, I think I might take a break from StatSat for a while so I have time to develop my non-UA posts a bit more. But that's a couple weeks out. We shall see.

Oh, and a disclaimer: I have not actually read any airport thrillers. I am willing to do research for these posts, but not a whole book I expect I will not enjoy. So take this post as the GMC in question's view of the genre (?) rather than my own. 

The Mad Leading the Mad, Part 3

Gwen Paylik hates “airport thrillers” – “ghostwritten, paint-by-numbers dreck with the literary merit and attitude toward women of a Republican politician’s drunken Twitter screed,” as she once described them. Unfortunately, she is under the (mistaken) impression that they have unique mystical potency, and she owns a minimum of two copies of every single one of them: a hardcover and a paperback.

Typically, bibliomancy revolves around the knowledge one derives from the written word. Not exactly so for Gwen, who can, and often does, earnestly attest she has learned nothing of value from any book in her collection. In her mind, the books are all completely interchangeable, except for the signed copies, which are the only ones valuable enough to be usable for a traveling library (which is essential in her line of work).

Something about the stream of capital revolving around these books, combined with her abject loathing of them, has drawn her along a path in which she embodies their stereotypical heroes, defying logic and expectation in perilous work just as they do. By day she’s a stay-at-home mom of two, by night a private investigator, burglar, and occasional assassin.

Gwen had no magickal mentor, just an ex-husband obsessed with these books and an inability to ever shut up. She rid herself of him eventually, but the brainworms had taken root. Though she has since crossed paths with other chargers and checkers a number of times, she still has an incomplete understanding of adept magick, hence her… Specialization.

She had the benefit of a sizeable starting collection, having finagled her ex’s hoard in the divorce. He thought it was purely out of spite, but in fairness he had rarely bothered to ask her what she wanted, let alone why she wanted it. And she wasn’t about to explain to him that she could become a real-life action-thriller badass from the books so polarizing in their relationship that they wound up being the final straw that got her to contact a lawyer. Plus, she gets decent alimony payments.

As of right now, her library contains about 5,000 total books across two adjacent storage units. This would make her something of a powerhouse if she understood she could derive significant and major charges from higher quantities. That said, she would also need to know more spells, or understand how to use random magick to its fullest.

She casts “Book Learning” (see UA2 core book, p. 119) about a dozen times for every other use of a minor charge. Those are usually random magick castings that have more to do with her hatred of her library’s contents than the specifics of the books. For example, she can amplify the misogynistic attitudes of men she encounters, getting them to mansplain for literal hours while she cases a joint or roots around for evidence. Another favorite is to prevent witnesses from remembering anything more distinct about her than her hair color or breast size to report to authorities.

The other bibliomancers in her area are (so far) intimidated by her ruthlessness, and to be honest, her physical fitness, to the point of refraining from stealing from her, even though she’s pretty careless with her library’s security. But they have arranged a conspiracy of silence to keep her in the dark about the full truth of their school.

Jaded Gwen might be, but not stupid. She is aware that other wizards exist, even being peripheral to the occult underground, and she correctly assumes there is more power she could learn to access. She’s encountered a few avatars, who she tends to view through the lens of stereotypical fiction character types, but sooner or later she’ll run across an avatar of the Naked Goddess, the Mother, or some other archetype that is impossible to square with a view that all magick is tied to her least favorite genre of fiction.

For the half-decade since her divorce and descent into bibliomantic wetwork, she has chosen to protect her tweenage boys by staying at arm’s length rather than diving into magick. She has some inkling of getting more involved once they’re both in college.

Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that engaging with bibliomancy is such an unpleasant experience for her. Nonetheless, she is obsessed like any other adept, and it’s probably only a matter of time before her curiosity wins out, or worse: a past target gets set on revenge, or decides she knows too much. It’s not really in keeping with convention for the woman to have her sons “fridged” as opposed to the other way around, but the contradiction of her femme fatale alter ego and her magick’s source (or at the very least, her view of it) is probably one of the mystical tensions that made her an adept in the first place.

Gwen Paylik, Bibliomancer of Action

Obsession: Airport thrillers are so popular, but so bad, (and remind her of her ex-husband so much) that they are uniquely deserving of her obsessive hatred.

Rage passion: The success and popularity of some of the worst writing ever penned by human hand.

Fear passion: (Isolation) Her sons preferring their washed-up bore of a father to her, and/or cutting her off after they leave for college.

Noble passion: Doing it all as a strong, independent woman – raising kids, hoarding objects of magick power, and stalking the streets with a paperback in one hand and a silenced pistol in the other.

Helplessness: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Isolation: Hardened: 5 / Failed: 2

Self: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 2

Unnatural: Hardened: 2 / Failed: 0

Violence: Hardened: 3 / Failed: 0

Bibliomancer 40%:* Casts Rituals, Casts Gutter Magick

Single Mom 55%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation

Secret Badass 35%: Substitutes for Secrecy, Substitutes for Dodge, Protects Violence