OOC Chicanery Continued

[Agita]

Maybe a distraction is in order? With "construction" guys all over, sneaking in may be impossible otherwise.

Pfft. You've got a fox girl here.

[VennDygrem]

Veekie, by my understanding Awareness is mostly a passive skill, something the GM would ask you to roll. For searching/examining/assessing, you'd more likely roll Investigation.

[Agita]

Veekie, by my understanding Awareness is mostly a passive skill, something the GM would ask you to roll. For searching/examining/assessing, you'd more likely roll Investigation.

Aye. Same applies to using lore as a perception skill unless you have the Sight.

[Bozwevial]

Veekie, by my understanding Awareness is mostly a passive skill, something the GM would ask you to roll. For searching/examining/assessing, you'd more likely roll Investigation.

Aye. Same applies to using lore as a perception skill unless you have the Sight.

You can roll Lore as Awareness to pick up very vague supernatural details, which is what I figured was going on. Still not something you'd roll actively, but I figure this is a case where it would be appropriate.

Agita, if you want to roll passive Lore as well, a result of Good or better will get you the same thing veekie got, but at this point it's probably redundant.

[Agita]

Agita, if you want to roll passive Lore as well, a result of Good or better will get you the same thing veekie got, but at this point it's probably redundant.

And what if I roll better than that? :<
Passive Lore (4d3-8+4=6)

[Bozwevial]

Then I point out that it's also exactly the same result veekie got. The extra shifts gave him a little extra information beyond "this is not super happy fun time."

Tailoring it to your case, though, there's a faint metaphorical whiff of something at once familiar and unsavory, magic-wise.

[veekie]

Yeah, I got that, just figured a little more activity would be good.

[Bozwevial]

Venn, do you need a tad more elaboration or is that good?

[VennDygrem]

Hmm, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, which I'm sure is intended. I assume there's some strong magic in place here, but since there isn't anyone else down here, from what I can tell, the only other thing the slumped-over person could be is, perhaps, a spirit? Or else a person or other creature under the effect of a veil... I'm not sure.

Mostly, I'm not sure what to do from here.

[Bozwevial]

Are you shutting off the Sight or going in for another cycle of information gathering?

[VennDygrem]

Edited in some rolls to keep the sight up and figure out more. Not quite as good rolls, but let's see if I can stay sane/conscious enough to get more information.

[Agita]

Going to do a quick look-over to see if I can find something linked to the subway station, such as a dropped ticket or train token. In a pinch, standard leavings or refuse might do. I don't know what Austrian subway stations are like, but if there are any discarded cardboard signs from a vagrant (Something along the lines of "Homeless, Need Food" or some such thing), that would do well too.

Well... you have the station. You don't really need a link to the subject when you have it right in front of you.
I figure one or both (should there be three, since Venn rolled three times?) of the aspects you gathered with the Sight would help with the ritual too, since you have a good idea of what you're looking for.

(Also, Boz, you reminded me that I need to be more vague with the Sight when dealing with my players - I've gotten into the habit of providing interpretations.)

As for what Subway stations look like... depends on where you are, but in the inner city, generally something like this. There's beggars occasionally, but rarely in the station proper, and I've almost never seen one with a sign.

[VennDygrem]

Mostly I was looking for something I could take back to Ziggy's so I could perform a ritual. I can't really do thaumaturgy right here, because it would take too long and one of the "construction workers" would eventually notice. Finding something linked to the area would allow me to do the magic remotely.

[Bozwevial]

Well... you have the station. You don't really need a link to the subject when you have it right in front of you.
I figure one or both (should there be three, since Venn rolled three times?) of the aspects you gathered with the Sight would help with the ritual too, since you have a good idea of what you're looking for.

(Also, Boz, you reminded me that I need to be more vague with the Sight when dealing with my players - I've gotten into the habit of providing interpretations.)

I was aiming for helpfully vague. And yes, there should be and are three aspects. Listing only two of them was entirely intentional.

[veekie]

Hmm, should Phil go physically exploring this subway for now...he doesn't really need to stay under the Veil if he uses his speed.

[Agita]

Well, Kitty can probably set up enough of a cover for Leo to work some magic with what he has and Phil to do some exploration, I think.

[VennDygrem]

Do you think you can shield us enough to cover some hours of preparation, as well as covering any needed sound? If this takes too long, workers or whoever they're working for might come down here, and thaumaturgy is pretty stationary stuff. If we get interrupted, we probably A) Have to start over, and B) will have the interlopers to deal with. And potentially legal/police complications.

I don't know how complex this sort of spell is, or how long it will take. We might even need more than one for our purposes.

First, let's figure out what we want to achieve. We want to know what happened here, how/why/when magic was involved, and who was involved. So, maybe a visual representation of what happened in the immediate area of the subway platform within the last few hours? Sort of like localized "rewinding" the events until we see what happened? Seems like a form of psychometry.

[Agita]

Yeah, psychometry was pretty much what I was thinking of. If Leo ducks into some maintenance cabinet or similar easily-concealed space, I think I can cover us for a long enough time, given that Kitty can herself use thaumaturgy-level illusions and veils on an evocation timescale.

As for complexity, it's really up to Boz, but for a quick and dirty estimate, we're looking for one or more scene aspect assessments here and want to go back a few hours in time. The time chart on page 315 is a fairly good guideline for thaumaturgical spells that work over X timescale, starting wherever the GM deems appropriate. So assuming we start somewhere between "instant" and "a few minutes", the shifts from time would be somewhere between 8 and 4. Add to that the difficulty of the scene assessment times however many aspects we want, and I'd estimate the thing as anywhere between 7 to 16 shifts.

As preparation goes, we do have three aspects from Leo's use of the Sight, all of which should be applicable to this ritual, since they're directly related to the nature of what happened. So building on Leo's Lore of 5, we could get off a ritual at up to 11 shifts fairly quickly. Given that they heal supernaturally inhumanly fast, Phil and/or Kitty could also donate a minor consequence towards it. How long the actual casting takes is fairly blurry and largely up to Boz.

Alternatively, we could go to one of the PCs' places, which would likely be closer than Ziggy's, to do the ritual.

[VennDygrem]

Still fuzzy on how things work, but Leo's got a +1 to complexity on Divination from his specializations. If that helps. >_>

[Agita]

Still fuzzy on how things work, but Leo's got a +1 to complexity on Divination from his specializations. If that helps. >_>

It does. That would put us at 12 shifts base if tagging all the aspects from the Sight, or 16 if both Kitty and Phil donate a consequence..