Lorica Plumata Americana

I wonder if it would be possible to make scale armor (scale mail, as incorrectly known among D&D players) out of military dog tags? I hope it wouldn't be disrespectful. Maybe you could use those fake fashion statement dog tags, as opposed to authentic ones actually issued to soldiers. In the fake ones, you could customize the text, so that each scale had a sentence of a short story, or a word in a song or poem, or maybe scripture, or the Gettysburg Address, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, of Bill of Rights. Or, you could simply have them be names, maybe names of soldiers in Iraq, or those killed in 9/11, or just names of random, everyday soldiers with no specific theme. In any case, as concept art, I think it'd make an interesting statement, though what it is, I don't know.

One possible interpretation, if you wanted to be cynical, is that it equates the American military with imperial Rome, since scale armor was used as ceremonial armor extensively among Roman officers. (It was too expensive for the everyday soldier.) Another, more patriotic, interpretation is that each serviceman is part of a greater, unified whole in the protection of our country. However, I think the latter statement would only work with ring mail, with the symbolism of interlocked links and such. I don't think the US military gives servicemen rings, do they? However, you could still make the dog tag scale armor, and have it backed by chain, hence becoming actual scale mail. That seems like a bit much.

On Friday, I STed for the first time for Exalted, in a one-shot with Doug, Andrew, and his brother James. We were all Solars, part of a traveling boyband of weaponcrafters called the ArrowSmiths. :P Name courtesy of Andrew.

Came up with the plot 10 minutes before, in the car.

Didn't get anything done plotwise, because we only had two hours. But apparently people had fun. I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with myself; obviously I could've done a longer session, and if I had more time I could've worked out more setting information, coordinated it to fit in better with the player characters, and other details, like NPCs. I didn't feel I got a chance to describe things very well; I have no sense of oral tradition. Example of me as an ST:

"You are in a city. It's pretty big and crowded. Um, yeah."

"I go to the merchant's district."

"After a little while of disorientation, you make your way in the general direction of the merchant's district, uphill. It looks like an open air market. There are stalls.. and people selling things on blankets.. and ... stuff. Yeah."

"I go to the local smith's."

"It's a smithy. Smoke rises up from it. Inside it is an anvil."

It's terrible. I can write much better than this, and I know more than this.

(The houses are made with clay and plaster washed white, with flat roofs accessible by external stairs. The city is built on a hill at the apex of which is a ziggurat with terraced gardens. As you make your winding way uphill, you notice that the streets become wider. Your honor guard leads you up a wide ramp through a pylon gate to the ziggurat's outer courtyard.)

I just can't narrate on the fly. After a certain point I gave up, and told the players, "You're in Messopotamia," to which Doug responded, "I've never been to Mesopotamia." Well, I haven't either, but I still have a rather specific atmosphere for my setting that I wish I could've conveyed. I may use the setting again though.. it's not bad.

I like my character also, a graciously classist aristocrat bastard: "Your retainers are quite skilled. Where did you buy them?" -regarding Doug's characters fellow party members. I'm also quite happy that the whole bell obsession made the cut: "By the time you are a few minutes into dinner, you've noticed that all the kitchen utensils have been tuned." (To E major, in case anyone was wondering.)

Doug and Andrew's characters were also great, doing the usual party bickering to comic effect, which really saved me a lot of effort since the game essentialy ran itself.

Andrew: "Yay, free food! What's for dinner?"
Me: "You're in the servant's quarters, right?"
Andrew: "Yeah.."
Me: "....Gruel."
Andrew: "Rolling... temperance..."

I noticed something that actually didn't come up in the session, but would've come up in a future session. I was talking to the group about what would've happened had the one-shot continued. My character will attempt to convince the party that he's following a set of tracks in order to lead the party in the wrong direction. There actually are no tracks.

Andrew's response: But you have no survival! Why would we believe you?

Which is annoying, because in character, I have high manipulation, so it's not as if Andrew's character would know I didn't have any survival. It's beside the point anyway, since Andrew's character has high survival, so in a contested roll he would probably have had a good chance at calling my bluff.* But if I'd made him do a contested roll, even if the character had failed, Andrew the player would begin to have out of character suspicions: after all, making someone roll a contested manipulation roll means that I have something to hide. It'd be annoying.

Note to self: Get ST screen. Hide ST character sheets. Roll manipulation checks, investigation checks, and other such sorts, behind screen.

Second note to self: Know what skills each character has before making a story. For example, stories that don't hinge on characters having low survival, and stories that hinge on people having investigate...

On Saturday, discovered a starter adventure on Kazaa. -_- Would've saved me some trouble.

But I would recycle the adventure, I really would. Make it a full, multi-session thing. Mostly regretable is that it just worked so well because of the specific chemistry between all the characters. I don't know if it would work as well for another set of chars.

*This is an example of my typical lack of system knowledge. Would that be Manipulation + Survival on my part vs. his Manipulation + Survival, or Intelligence + Survival? I would think that it would be Manipulation + Survival for him if he was using his skill in detecting bullshit, and Intelligence + Survival if he were using his vast tracts of knowledge to check for factual errors. Kind of like how if you were really gullible, but knew a lot about cows, you could still end up being skeptical of a guy's stories about growing up on a ranch. That kind of thing. In the end, I just kind of end up going, "Whatever," and let the players use whatever the hell die pools they want.