I've been watching The Vampire Diaries lately, and it may be the most perfect Monster Hearts show I've ever seen. The pacing is crazy ridiculous, with huge things happening and resolving in nearly every episode. It's also a great guide for how you can have really fucking evil characters that are still likable protagonists.

Damon is like Spike with the Evil and Charming dials up to 11 and any sense of camp or tongue-in-cheek removed. He's awesome.

I aced my love letter roll, which actually made me a little sad. I wanted to start the session with someone shooting at me!

Huh. I just googled "irradiated seeds", and it actually seems like it's a pretty common process for producing new strains of a given plant. Interesting!

Of course, that's under controlled laboratory conditions...

The first session was rad! Lots of interesting things came up immediately because both our Quarantine and our Skinner-with-Followers (we all started with one advance) tanked their start-of-session rolls!

Playing the Faceless is way fun; mine is a quietly crazy hybrid of Sam from Moon and a Big Daddy from BioShock.

I'm excited for this.

I'm strongly leaning towards playing a Faceless who perpetually wears a pressure suit with a one-way visor, though I'll wait until we sit down with the group for the session tomorrow to make a final decision about that.

Love that movie.

Doubly so now, since it helped introduce me to roller derby when one of the local teams sponsored a screening a couple years back.

I haven't gotten to this point in AW yet, but I played a five year game of Ars Magica in which all the players controlled at least three, if not more, characters on a regular basis.  Generally, while they might sometimes have to appear in scenes together because of fictional circumstances, we tried to avoid having long or important scenes between PCs controlled by the same player.

On the few occasions we failed to abide by this, the scenes quickly devolved into what we called "sock puppet theater" where all the other players sat around while one player talked to him/herself for 10 minutes.  I recommend avoiding it if at all possible.

I like it.  Tricks seems a little weak for a core Move, but it may just be because of how I'm interpreting the words "basic trick".  I feel like it should be more like...

Well Trained

When you tell your dog to perform a task or trick you've trained it to do, roll +Sharp.  On a 10+ it does it perfectly.  On a 7-9 it does it, but it might be slow, distracted, or half-assed about it.