Pacting is hard
This is a scenario dreamed up by Arthur, there are no spoilers here, so listen away as you please. As always, be aware that the podcast is not really family-friendly, if that sort of thing bothers you. Thankfully, this one is largely free of background noise, though there is some eating.
Episode 4The Episode
As you can see, working out how to do pacts was hard. This is, I think, partly because it should really be something you build up to over time, or offer a fairly blatant deal to somebody desperate. My choice to find someone with a bit of a problem and then try to get them to agree to an unspecified offer was... suboptimal. Attempts to be subtle just produced, well, the results you hear.
On reflection, the best thing would have been to take a proper Alpha Male route from the start: waffle a bit about how some people have their finger on the pulse of life, are full of energy and animal magnetism, live by instinct, and they tend to have personalities that fill the room and toned muscles and date the girl he fancies - whereas our dude here is the classic 90-pound weakling who can't read the vibes his girl is putting out, tries to logic his way through life, is full of uncertainty, unfit and right now is sitting in a library in the small hours drinking alone. And hey, his girl is probably also one of those people who ride the primal current, because I bet she wouldn't be a quiet mousy type who sat around worrying and being socially awkward. See the contrast? Want to know how to tap into that rhythm? Well, promise to keep the secret, shake, I'll tell you answers, and within seven days you too can turn heads when you enter a room.
But that would, admittedly, have been less funny.
In longer-term play, Chad here would probably be a bit of a liability, because a) I haven't ordered him to keep this a secret, and b) because the approach to the pact was awkward and poorly-explained, so he doesn't really get a clear idea of what's going on (even a false clear idea). Technically, I also didn't tell him he'd be following my orders (although I'd probably phrase it more like "respect me" because that's the vibe.
The security-lockdown problem was an interesting choice, which follows logically from how I chose to use the keycard. On the one hand, having the card would have let us sneak in and search around; on the other, this choice presented us with a new obstacle to have fun with, while it wasn't simply Arthur blocking us arbitrarily, because we'd got good use out of the card already. Pulling the same trick if we hadn't used it would have been annoying, but this just felt like fair play and a setback we should really have anticipated.
Copyright and suchlike
Demon: The Fallen is copyright and/or trademark White Wolf Publishing, who I think now belong to some other corporation but I can't be bothered to check right now; Arthur will be cross with me already for my vagueness. The podcast theme music is Vltava from Smetana's Má Vlast as taken from Wikimedia Commons under the CC0 licence. The episode intro and outro are, respectively, an extract from Black Vortex and all of The Descent, both by Kevin MacLeod () Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
The hilariously portentous opening passage is read directly from the blurb from Demon: the Fallen, and any mockery should be directed to White Wolf.
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