Welcome to the seventeenth instalment of the column "Winging It", a column discussing the promises and pitfalls of a more improvisational approach to GMing.
Once in a while, it is a good idea to have a game session just be about a single character rather than the entire group of player characters. This gives the player of that character a chance to explore the feelings and motivations of their character, to make them more 'real', much more so than in traditional group play. As this can lead to a group of bored players, however (as they all sit around watching someone else play), it is generally best to run these sessions as solo games.
Recently in my ongoing Hunter: the Reckoning campaign, I had an excellent opportunity to create just such a session for the character of Izzy. In a previous session, Daniella, one of the other player characters, had been critically wounded (during a confrontation between the group and a possessed cottage out in the Lake of the Woods near Kenora, Ontario), and would be unable to do much besides lying on the couch of their shared apartment for a couple of weeks of game time. Jason, the third member of the group, has still managed to hold onto his job as a paramedic, and thus would be easy to leave out of the session.
I began planning the session with the notion that Izzy would meet someone who knew 'what' she was, looking for her help. The tricky part here was that I wanted to step away from established H:tR canon in that it would be some sort of supernatural entity who could recognize the Imbued. See, except for a few references to some Vampires being able to see some sort of alteration in their aura at times, it is generally accepted that no supernatural beings can identify any of the Imbued (the characters in this game, as an example) as being anything other than normal humans (well, except when they are using some of their more obvious powers, that is).
However, I had wanted some sort of sympathetic supernatural being, someone who recognized the nature of Izzy, would need her help, but also not be trying to exploit her. This would give Victoria, Izzy's player, the chance to explore who Izzy is and why she is the type of person that she is.
Beyond that, I wasn't too sure what the session itself would involve. Perhaps something involving the Fomori (great evil-yet-victim style villians) and some of the Changing Breeds (which ones I hadn't yet decided on yet).
The session began with Izzy going to her job as a mechanic, after having taken care of some after-effects of the previous session (the aforementioned Lake of the Woods game). Nothing terribly exciting or dramatic, until she finished for the day and found a young guy sitting on the top of her car. It was clear through their conversation that this guy, Adam, knew a lot about her, and needed her help.
She did notice that he was supernatural, but something she had never seen before and therefore couldn't identify.
He told her about needing to help a little girl, someone who would be in a great deal of trouble from his own 'friends' if he didn't find some other way to help her with her problem. Intrigued (and also wanting to learn more about this Adam), she agreed to help.
This next part, the drive from Winnipeg to a trailer park in Lockport, ended up being the main focus of the story. Izzy and Adam talked a lot during that drive, with Adam asking her questions about who she was before being 'changed', about why it was that she did the things she did, things like that. This gave Victoria the opportunity to really think about who Izzy was, to really examine her motivations, even going so far to discover what Izzy had lost by becoming Imbued (such as lost goals, hopes, and dreams). I had Adam follow her reactions to his questions by getting deeper into her character, finding out why she wanted to help people more than just kill supernatural beasties, things of that nature.
It was also during this exchange that I finally determined what the rest of the game would be. Adam himself is a Corax, one of the were-crows. I like how they seem to all be about information, separate from the infighting between the other Changing Breeds and the Werewolves, and could easily be seen as the only beings (or some of the only ones, anyway) with the capacity to recognize the Imbued. Also, as the Corax tend to travel with other Changing Breeds rather than with other Corax, I determined that Adam stayed with a pack of Garou, or Werewolves. Specifically, he mostly stayed close to a group of kinfolk (human relatives of Garou who are not themselves Werewolves, but would have a slight taint of the supernatural to Imbued senses) afiliated with a pack of Garou.
One of these kinfolk, a small girl named Lucy, had been given a toy that was infested with a Bane (essentially a monstrous evil spirit), something that threatened to change Lucy into a Fomori (basically being possessed and changed by that spirit). As Lucy was the daughter of a Garou, if this were discovered by the pack, she would most likely be destroyed (yes, I do have a rather narrow view of the Garou and their genocidal habits – if this were an actual Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, the Garou involved might try to save the girl through other means first; however, for H:tR, I decided to take a more monstrous attitude toward them). Adam recognized this and sought out Izzy to try and help Lucy before her father could intervene.
This does introduce, at least obliquely, the notion of child abuse, another topic that tends to make this particular session more psychological and personal than simple monster-hunting, again a suitable subject for a solo game.
Now, how Adam came to discover Izzy was something we didn't need to pursue at the moment – perhaps he had seen her some weeks before and had been following her from time to time (it is easy to tail people in the summer in Winnipeg when you can transform into a crow), with no reason besides discovering who and what she was. That sort of story could be left for a future date.
The rest of the session proceeded in a fairly dramatic fashion – Izzy is introduced to Lucy, recognizes the harmful influence of the Bane-infested doll she has (as she has encountered Fomori before this), and attempts to use her Hunter Edges to sever the connection between the Bane and the girl. In the middle of this, Bob, Lucy's Garou father comes home. He flies into a Rage, attacking Izzy through Adam. Using multiple Edges (and fighting unconciousness from her wounds), Izzy manages to freeze Bob in place and free Lucy from the Bane.
Curiously enough, Izzy had never before seen a Garou in full Crinos (part-human, part-wolf) form. Not only did she see this, she also saw a Corax in its' own seldom-used Crinos form (smaller than that of a Garou, but far more disturbing looking), as Adam had to manifest that form to help deal with Bob. I bring this up because the Imbued are immune (at least when they have their Second Sight active) to the psychological effects that happen when most humans view any of the Changing Breeds in their most monstrous forms (generally, humans freeze up and then forget everything that happened at that time). This meant she got to experience the racial memories of the times when the Garou herded and culled the human population, or at least see and hear snippets of experiences from that time, with no real explanation as to what was happening. I threw this in as a last-second thing, realizing I had never done it with any other Imbued characters before, and thought her seeing other people being chased down and consumed by these monsters would add an interesting flavour to the game.
At the conclusion, after everybody had figured out exactly what had been going on, Bob was grateful to Izzy for helping Lucy, apologizing for attempting to rip her in half. Both Bob and Adam will definitely appear again in this campaign (fortunately as allies), as will the rest of Bob's pack and other kinfolk undoubtedly.
Most importantly, both I and Victoria got to learn more about Izzy, making the game that much more real for everyone involved.
