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The player characters raced towards the town as the floodwaters rose, desperate to save the townsfolk, and fought off a giant constrictor snake. That's when we found out the hard way the town was also being attacked by "Black Maga," the Mother of Oblivion, considered by some to be an actual child of the goddess of all monsters - incredibly ancient, incredibly evil, incredibly ugly, nearly impenetrably scaled, and CR 15. Her breath weapon confused four party members, took all four down 2 wisdom temporarily, dinged the sorceress for two temporary levels. Then she grappled nearly the entire party - except for the druid, rogue and ranger - and took out most of our hit points.

The sort of fight paladins dream of dying in, the sort of fight where either victory or death would still ensure glory and honor. Only in this case, Cadell was grappled without any realistic chance of breaking free and, out of character, I hadn't realized that you could theoretically attack with something other than a dagger while grappled. So Cadell's course of action faced with certain destruction was to upend his sword and calmly pray to his god, blasting everything with sacred light - two uses of channel positive energy thanks to an action point. My idea was to go out as basically a holy hand grenade. The channeling did only a disappointing amount of damage to Black Maga, but it practically healed everyone the monster had grappled.

An instant after the huge flash of sacred light, there was much much larger flash of a different and older sort of sacred light - the druid called down lightning strikes. Enough that Black Maga thought about how much damage she'd taken. About the sorceress' minor image of the gold dragon screaming down from the sky. About the way her opponents were largely intact. She released everyone, booked it towards the flooded lake, and vanished beneath the waters.

You'd think that surviving - let alone driving back - an assault from something that powerful would be the highlight of the game session, but it wasn't.

( Cut tagged to save people from wall o' text. )

Matrix the Ascension as a crossover game

Okay, so in Matrix Reloaded, the Oracle tells Neo that rogue AIs within the Matrix are the source of legends about vampires and werewolves, etc.

Kindred are the result of data corruption which allows humans to break free of an actual body and manifest independently within the Matrix beyond actual bodily death. Like the machines themselves, these not-true-AIs rely on pulling energy off the Sleepers in the Matrix. Like the Awakened within the Matrix, the vampires are impossible to track and do not have to obey standard Matrix routines. However, the inherited worms have very specific lineages and it is nearly impossible for a vampire to disobey Matrix code in ways beyond that which it has "inherited" from prior Generations.

By contrast, AIs assigned to maintain the integrity of Matrix animal/environmental programs - fighting against the corruption brought by worms or the destruction of Matrix assets by vampires - were assigned by their programmer, Luna, to manifest five different standard types (trickster, shaman, judge, archivist/bard, warrior). Luna left in a coded weakness to objects with a silver property as a backdoor for nearly instantly destroying these powerful AIs. They were initially programmed as wolves based on human mythology but developed their own tools for protecting their domain from the Wyrm. Routines similar to those of the Agents to cover their tracks. Coded routines for different forms able to break Matrix code in very specific ways only. Vampire-like "heritable" code. As the Garou went rogue from the Weaver, their unauthorized ability to pass on code connected entirely to sleeper AIs - Kinfolk - although they are not actually capable of passing on code to an actual human, which is why nobody can be both a Tradition Mage and a Garou.

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Yep, you guessed it folks! I made the mistake of wasting another 2 hours of my life on The Matrix Reloaded, and you get to read all my opinions of the darn thing as it transpired, because like everyone else with an opinion, it gets posted to the internet. ( The short form is that I could have spent that same amount of time on a better movie, like let's say Zardoz or Bloodsucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh. But instead... )