Seraphic Resonance on CD 6

[Padre]

How do you cope with this in your games, particularly if your game centres around a mystery of some kind?

I ask because my upcoming one-shot has a Seraph of Judgement in it, and what I have planned involves a murder investigation.

I suppose one can be quite miserly when dispensing "what the truth really is", depending n the questions asked....

[DarkSeraph]

Oh, you're in for a tricky one...

One of my sharpest players plays a Seraph of Fire, and I can tell you right away that the Seraphim Resonance has given me a lot of headache along the way. And seeing how Seraphim of Judgement get to add their Corporeal forces to their Resonance rolls, this could get sticky. However, there are ways to deal with it.

The most obvious is to keep the Seraph away from the murderer. But remember, if he gets a 6 on the check digit when the subject is lying, the gig is up. Seriously. He'll know everything, and there's not much you can do about it.

Another thing is to be very, very careful about how you, playing the NPCs, reply to the Seraph player. If you dance around the direct lies using opinion, conjecture and supposition, there's not much the Seraph Resonance can do. Just be extremely wary of direct, straightforward questions. When asked the question, "Did you kill Mr. X" it is sometimes entirely appropriate to reply along the lines of, "I refuse to even dignify that with an answer!" or something similar.

On that note: are the suspect(s) aware of the War and of the nature of angels? Because anyone in the know is quite likely to clam up when confronted with a Seraph. Remember, everyone has something to hide; that doesn't necessarily make them a murderer. And Balseraphs can sometimes deceive even a Seraph.

Of course, you can always plot your murder mystery along the lines of finding and following clues rather than interviewing suspects.

However it turns out, I'd love to hear how it went. Please keep us informed, and good luck to you.

[William]

Originally Posted by Padre

How do you cope with this in your games, particularly if your game centres around a mystery of some kind?

I ask because my upcoming one-shot has a Seraph of Judgement in it, and what I have planned involves a murder investigation.

I suppose one can be quite miserly when dispensing "what the truth really is", depending n the questions asked....

It can be very hard to hide the truth from perceptive Seraphim, especially of Judgment. My top recommendation would be to employ -- at least if this is the only game for the foreseeable future where you'll be doing this -- ineffability. One way is have a Superior involved at some level, which gives you an excuse to fuzz resonances. David's "Silent Angel" attunement and several powers from Alaemon (or Gebbeleth, should you have "Feast of Blades," will permit secrets to be hidden effectively in many cases. Involving a Remnant will also give the Seraph someone he can't resonate. In most of those cases, he'll know why, too.

One can also directly mess with the Seraph's head -- when he starts getting close to the truth, have a demon with an interest in keeping the matter under wraps subject the Seraph to a mindwarp to keep him from taking advantage of the information somehow. I can't quite recall, but I think there are also some relics from the Liber Reliquarum that can fuzz memory.

[milliken]

This is a classical problem, it's been in the SF literature for ages, since telepaths pose the same issue.

There are basically three main answers:

1) Don't let the perceptive individual near the killer. If they don't know who to suspect, or none of the obvious suspects turns out to be the killer, they're back to square one.

2) Give the killer a block against the power. This is tricky with Seraphim, though, and more tricky if the killer isn't involved with celestials. One dirty GM trick is to wait until the Seraph has a resonance burn-out, and then give them access to the killer while their resonance is fried.

3) Make the fact of knowing who the killer is not be the real problem. Knowing who the killer is, and being able to use that information to accomplish justice (or whatever), can be two different things. Consider the typical Columbo episode....

---Walter

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by Padre

How do you cope with this in your games, particularly if your game centres around a mystery of some kind?

I ask because my upcoming one-shot has a Seraph of Judgement in it, and what I have planned involves a murder investigation.

I suppose one can be quite miserly when dispensing "what the truth really is", depending n the questions asked....

Whoooboy.

Essentially, it is almost impossible to run a mystery with a perceptive Seraph. I strongly suggest checking out The Rats' Revenge and the Dominic chapter of Superiors 1. Both of those touch on the issues involved with Seraphim and the TRUTH.

(The Dominic chapter alludes to the inability of a Seraph to grab some stray guy off the street, ask a question, and get the TRUTH when he says, "Geeze, I dunno!" The target has to be at least vaguely connected with the TRUTH for it to show up; otherwise, the TRUTH is he doesn't know!)

I strongly suggest that there be complications so that even when the characters finger the murderer with a lucky roll, they still have to gather (or manufacture) proof that they can take to the cops. "I'm an angel of truth and the truth is he did it" just doesn't fly to the juries...

Good luck. Seraphim of Judgment are wonderfully munchkin in that regard, held in check only by their stern Archangel.

[alexondria]

I know the way've I've always dealt w/ the sereph resonance (I had 2 in my last game and still managed mysteries) is if they don't know what questions to ask who the resonance doesn't help a lot. A lot of the mysteries I've run have involved tracking down who to question- person a drops such and such clue or they find something that leads them to someone and then that person has a little more information until the bread crumbs eventualy take them to the person that the sereph needs to resonate on (as for the who evidence thing- my players had a tendance to dispence their own evidence). I usualy try to set it up so that the resonce will help them go from person to person w/ in the clues faster but it's possible w/ the sereph failing his resonance as well to get the solution

[sir_pudding]

GURPS Mysteries (and to a lesser extent GURPS Powers) discusses the effect of Truth detecting powers on mystery games.

[BillionSix]

The Seraphim aren't the only problem.

Elohite: "What's he feeling?"
GM: "He's feeling (guilty, smug, scared) because he killed that guy."

Malakite: "What's the most recent dishonorable thing he did?"
GM: "He killed that guy."

Mercurian: "What's his relationship with the deceased?"
GM: "He killed him."
(Some might argue that, but if "murderer/victim" isn't considered a close relationship, I don't know what is.)

Brian

[Archangel Beth]

There are reasons why I don't consider Kyriotates to be "difficult" in the same ways as "generate an NPC from scratch" is "difficult." O:>

(Happily, I actually generate personalities pretty quickly on the fly. But still! I'd rather have them possessed...)

[Glamourweaver]

Another possibility is what I did in a mystery game I ran that involved Seraphim... have Balseraphs and/or other well-learned-Song-wise Demons of Secrets (other Gebbelite or Alaemonian) be directly involved in keeping the answer obscured.