Esoteric Enterprises Political Compass

 

Based on the Cow Town and Coal City campaigns.

ANGUISHEDWIRES - Session Two

I ran a second game of the legendary fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES using my system Begone, FOE. In real life, a couple months have passed since the first game, but I set the game a day after the last run.

Two parties of adventurers and a maniple of the Brazenkragg City Watch have disappeared into the excavation at the base of the old tower. Rumor says that a single survivor returned alive, carrying fabulous riches and telling stories of the treasure that awaits in the legendary dwarven fortress ANGUISHEDWIRES.

I had two returning players, both of whom brought new characters since their previous ones had died. In attendance:

• Jack Fatherd, Neutral Thief and brother of the deceased Thomas Fatherd
• Olga Benedek, Lawful Cleric of the Grain Goddess

I decided they had been briefed by the only survivor from the previous expedition, so that the players wouldn't have to pretend to "discover" a bunch of stuff they already knew out-of-character, and could proceed to exploring the areas that hadn't already been mapped and looted.

Like last game, I elided the trip across the river, and let the players begin outside the dungeon entrance.

The players knew that Level 1 had already been looted, and didn't spend much time there. They descended the stairs down to Level 2 right away. They paused in the checkpoint, Olga listening at the door to the staircase while Jack searched the room for hidden compartments. Their caution was rewarded by the patter of tiny feet, coming up from the staircase to Level 3. They hid in the space behind the door, and waited quietly as three ratmen came into the checkpoint. They decided an ambush was in order, and sprang into action.

They quickly killed the first two rat-people before they could draw their hand-crossbows. The third fired, missed, and ran out of the room. Jack felled him with a sling bullet, but didn't kill him. Olga moved to finish the job, but the rat man spoke intelligibly in common, asking them what they were doing and why they were killing him. Olga insisted that rat people ate crops, which he vehemently denied. He broke his hand-crossbow into useless pieces as they argued. The rat offered to lead the adventurers to a map of the fortress, in exchange for being left alive. The players agreed. He took them down the stairs to the Fortress Planning office on Level 3, and true to his word, there was a wax tablet there with maps of Levels 1 through 4.

They let the rat guy go, with a stern warning from Olga not to eat any more crops. She was really convinced the guy was after the crops.

ANGUISHEDWIRES - Session One, Part Two

 (Continued from part one)

THE SECOND DAY
The next day, Monty caught the morning ferry across the river, and hiked out to the tower again. He moved carefully enough to get the drop on a trio of thugs going in the same direction. The three goons were obviously hung over, and obviously headed for the tower. Monty followed them stealthily. The bandits rolled up on Kamilla and Thomas. They were looking for the same group of adventurers as the militia were, but for a different reason: they owed Trade Warden Jan Estoc a cut of whatever they found on the expedition, and the goons were here to remind them of the obligation.

Thomas and Kamilla hadn’t seen any adventurers around. They were just here to pick up a few silver pieces themselves. That was alright with the thugs, but since the whole place belonged to the Trade Wardens, there was the little matter of the tax they owed. Just hand over whatever they were carrying, and the debt would be paid.

Monty struck from surprise with his rapier, but flubbed the attack. The bandits sprang into action, with one striking back with his falchion while the other two pelted Thomas and Kamilla with arrows. Kamilla cast her freshly prepared Sleep spell, but all three thugs made their saves. One of the thugs took Monty’s arm off with a lucky swing, before Thomas got stuck in with his two handed maul. Monty and Thomas killed two of the bandits in retaliation. The third ran away as fast as possible, vocally rescinding his request for their hard earned treasure. Thomas caught up with him and bludgeoned him to death, to ensure he couldn’t tell anyone the party had killed two of the Trade Warden’s goons. The team took a few silver pieces off the bodies, stripped and dumped them in the woods for the owlbears to scavenge.

ANGUISHEDWIRES - Session One, Part One

A couple months ago, I ran a session of ANGUISHEDWIRES, a dungeon I created while doing a FATAL and Friends readthrough of How to Host a Dungeon. Dungeon is a solo game by Tony Dowler. ANGUISHEDWIRES was an experiment, to see how much work it took to convert a map from that game into something playable in an RPG. The answer was “a lot!”

I used my own system for the playtest. It’s my attempt to preserve the stuff I like about old school dungeon crawling, while stripping out the parts I find tedious. In addition to playtesting the dungeon, this was also an opportunity to playtest the rules.

The playtest game had three players

• Thomas Fatherd the Mercenary
• Monty the Loveable Thief
• Kamilla the Witch

The setting was the colony city of Brazenkragg, on the frontier of the Commonwealth.

The job was simple:

Sam Sump, one of the Trade Wardens of Brazenkragg, meets you on the balcony of his cafe in the upper shambles. Sam is an old school criminal, utterly ruthless but honest. He is considered a safe person to take jobs from, provided you plan on completing them.

“Look, it’s simple. Some people went digging on the West side of the river, by the old tower. Southwest of the logger camp. Then a couple days later I get a courier with a shopping list and a down payment on some items. So I need you to take the stuff back across the river and deliver it to them, then bring back the rest of the payment. Delivery goes in, 1,000 silver pieces come out. Then I give you 100 of those pieces and we’re square. Maybe more work waiting when you come back.”

I elided the journey through the wilderness, other than telling the players a little about the route they took (a ferry to the logger camp, then a two hour hike through the forest to the tower). The game began as they reached the adventurer camp by the base of the tower.

The camp was abandoned. All the valuables were gone, but the tents were still up, and there weren’t any signs of violence. The biggest tent had a six foot diameter hole in the ground, perfectly circular, which descended into a smooth tunnel. Monty and Kamilla recognized this as the work of a shamir - a magic worm that burrowed on command. The adventurers had obviously dug this. With no other prospect of finding their meal ticket, the players descended into the dungeon.

Esoteric Enterprises - Angels

Have you ever taken something that didn't belong to you? Have you eaten while someone else starved? Have you broken your word? Have you killed another person? The Angels know what you did. They’re going to hurt you as an example to other people.

Bayonetta by Platinum Games

In a world of occult criminals, Angels are the ultimate cops. Except they can’t be bought off, or convinced to let you off with a warning. The only way out is to pay what you owe. And everyone owes something.

August Delta Green Scenario Triple Threat

Three Delta Green scenarios from August, recently added to my Delta Green master list.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s A chance encounter in the lobby of a fast food restaurant 

The Devil in a Forest - A Nazi anti-partisan unit heads into the woods to burn Belarusian villages

The Eleventh Cup - Agents hunt a mystery guest at an exclusive wine tasting

Gencon Online - Delta Green - Who Killed the Case Officer

My final Gencon Online game was a run of Who Killed the Case Officer. The Agents were summoned to investigate the ritual murder of a Delta Green Case Officer: Norbert Hammerstroem, former AFSOC. Hammerstroem was found dead in his home by police after failing to respond to several communications sent to his Delta Green smartphone.

Briefing thus issued, I opened up character selection. I had four players (my only full house during Gencon Online) and they selected the following characters:

• Agent STUART, USPIS, forger, accountant and computer scientist
• Agent SHALIMAR, FBI, master of disguise
• Agent EASTER, National Parks Service, archaeologist and occultist
• Agent EISENHOWER, Green Berets, killing machine with a talent for languages

According to Delta Green's dossier, Colonel Hammerstroem was a real hardass - active duty AFSOC before DG moved him to a desk job at the DIA. He had no family outside a sister, who’s in Berlin and won’t arrive to identify the body for at least a day.

Norbert took an ultraconservative approach to casework. Wiping out anyone who knew even a single spell, ordering just-in-case killings of witnesses, turning agents over to the Security Director or Research wing if they behaved strangely or cracked under pressure.

Norbert’s main working group was RAIN WHISPER - comprised of agents RENE, RICARDO and ROBERTA.

• RICARDO: Deputy Lon Fujimoto, US Marshal.
• ROBERTA: Elaine Eck, nurse practitioner
• RENE: Lieutenant Tam “Grit” Robinson, MARSOC. Recently dead of heroin overdose (presumed unrelated to current case)

The house in Portsmouth, Maine where Hammerstroem's body was found had been cordoned off by local police, who handed the scene over to the Agents. The players stepped through the door and entered the crime scene.

Gencon Online - Delta Green - Blood, Pus and Vinegar

This was my second Gencon Online game. A run of Blood, Pus and Vinegar. The original scenario is a meatgrinder of tactical combat, whereby the Nationalists hold off a Republican assault on a mysterious nunnery where all is not as it seems. I ran the fast play version, which flips the script and gives the players the role of Republican fighters headed to purge the church of Fascist resistance.

I gave the group a little context on the Spanish Civil War, the makeup of the popular forces (who they'd be playing as), and the mission they'd be undertaking. Then I gave them the list of pregens. We had three players, and they selected the following characters for the mission:

• Pvt Tommy O’Connelly, International Brigades (Northern Ireland)
• Miguel Zapata, Photojournalist for Spain and the World.
• Jose Esquella, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo

The squad (all of three men in size) had a vague idea of what to expect at their destination: The Chapterhouse of the Zelatrices of the Algedonic Devotion, a nunnery famed for its delicious wine, rumored to now be a staging ground for Nationalist fifth columnists.

The popular forces had a vague idea of what to expect.

With their objective clear, they shouldered their rifles and headed into the mountains.

Gencon Online - Delta Green - Home Fires

The first of my three games for Gencon Online was Home Fires, a Delta Green scenario about kidnapping a traitorous Office of Naval Intelligence Colonel from a cruise ship off the coast of Venezuela.

I had four players sign up. One had to leave shortly before the game began, one never showed up, and two arrived ready to play. Both had enough experience with Delta Green that we were able to jump right into the briefing and character selection.

• Agent SHALIMAR, FBI, master of disguise
• Agent SELLERS, mob doctor and grifter

The Agents settled on a preliminary plan to locate Colonel Valentine Robard, inject him with chemicals to incapacitate him, then fake a medical emergency and call in a helicopter disguised as a medivac from the nearby U.S.S. Frobisher, a USN Littoral Combat Ship loaned to Delta Green for the operation. They boarded the cruise ship at Port of Spain in Trinidad, and the adventure was afoot.

After depositing their luggage (filled with guns and other trinkets) in their berth, the pair of Agents went looking for Valentine.

My Characters

Inspired by a post on Throne of Salt, here are (most of) the characters I've played as over the last eight years in RPGs.

• 3.5
• Hildegrin the Human Fighter - absolutely vanilla bastard sword and shield guy for a 3.5 game I guested in for one session.

• ECLIPSE PHASE 1E
• Esme Parkreiner, the Async Janissary - My first Eclipse Phase character. An indentured mercenary, kept obedient with psychosurgery and drug addiction. Straightforward combat monster with psychic buffs. Esme later became the "test character" I would make in other systems to learn character creation.
• Piter Ataturk, the Psychic Psychosurgeon - An often forked Lost Generation psychic who loved editing people's minds. Different versions of him worked for Cognite, Nine Lives, Firewall, and probably every other faction in the Solar System. Focus on social engineering and hacking via spoofing identities and editing memories.
• Josef "Hairy Jo" McCoy, the Uplift Weaponsmith - A sentient orangutan who shot people with dual wielded pistols, and was obsessed with weapons of mass destruction.
• Pelagius Rawlin Brueghel, the Swashbuckling Merchant - Son of an ultrawealthy Lunar banking family. Left home to start his own shipping company aboard the Summer of George, his high speed courier ship. Fought with a laser rapier, which was cool but not very effective in the Eclipse Phase rules.

Eclipse Phase was the first RPG I really sank deep into. I even got to run and play it a few times!

• PATHFINDER 1E
• Edmund Skinner, Cleric of Abadar - my first Pathfinder Society character. Built entirely using the corebook. Poorly optimized but lots of fun, and occasionally even helpful at a table of min/maxed badasses. Law and Travel domains gave him good movement options and some helpful buffs.
• Broca, Dwarven Barbarian of Cayden Cailean - my second Pathfinder Society character. More straightforward than Skinner.

I didn't love the Pathfinder system, but I had a great time with Pathfinder Society anyways. The guys at the store where I played were super patient and helpful, and always a joy to play with.

• DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 5E
• Typhon, Dwarven Cleric of Umberlee - evil aligned pirate in a Temple of Elemental Evil campaign for 5E. Knew how to play nice with all the other factions, and take what he wanted when nobody was looking. Storm domain let him cast cool lightning spells in addition to healing.

Our 5E Campaign fell apart when the couple whose house we played at got divorced.

• DELTA GREEN
• Special Agent Esme Parkreiner, ATF - Recycled Eclipse Phase character in Delta Green. Dirty cop with pre-existing cultist killing, gun planting experience. Fun, but one dimensional. Retired and converted to an NPC.
• Bo "Robert" Bextiyar, RAND Corporation - Turkic-Chinese computer scientist. The reason I don't play computer scientists (or any other "defenseless characters") in Delta Green. Absorbed by an Azathoth blob after falling asleep due to low WP.
• Special Agent Douglas Thurmond, DEA - Hotshot pilot with an itty bitty DEA prop plane. Saw too much during an operation and had to be inducted as an Agent. Eventually killed by teleportation into another dimension.
• Henry Columbus, Self Employed - A criminal. Killed by another player misusing explosives.
• Reagan the Raider - A gun shooting guy with the Marine Raider Regiment. Retired after he was instantly reduced to 4 SAN by looking at a fucked up statue.
• Erebus the Firefighter - A bomb throwing, axe wielding beefcake. Built to explore options for "combat characters" who had useful investigative skills and fought with something other than guns. Found a magic ritual to make his axe ignore supernatural forms of damage resistance, spent most of his SAN to cast it, then hacked through many supernatural beings he wasn't supposed to kill.
• Special Agent Matt Gomez, FBI - Undercover expert. Backstory vaguely inspired by what happened to the private investigator from An Evil Guest. Retired after he accumulated so many disorders that he became unplayable.
• Dr James Geller, Private Practice - Doctor with a high Psychotherapy score. Not a very interesting character, only played a couple sessions. Recycled as an NPC later.
• Josef McCoy - Recycled Eclipse Phase character. Scientist with RAND corporation during the Vietnam War. Joined MAJESTIC after Delta Green was dismantled, became an NPC working on secret bioweapons.
• Francis Derosier - Former RCMP officer, now M EPIC, Canada's anti mythos agency. Got stuck in a parallel universe after a trip to the Magdalene Islands
• Major Sin - Intelligence Case Officer with Office 44, a secret North Korean operation to harness and weaponize mythos magic. The most evil character I ever created for Delta Green, and also the most fun.
• Corporal Jung-hak - A North Korean special forces guy from an alternate dimension where North Korea was invaded by the United States. Rescued from certain death by Major Sin during a whirlwind tour of several parallel earths. Kind of a boring character to actually play, though.
• Moses Micombero - A Burundian police officer. Part of Ikigongwe, a secret conspiracy dedicated to combating satanism, demons and witches. Partners with a Hutu officer. Together they solved mysteries.
• Moses Landsmen - Jewish Gangster from the 1940s. Operation Underworld collaborator during WW2, inducted into wartime Delta Green organization to combat Karotechia sabotage.
• Lem Landsmen, RN - Moses' grandson. Gunslinging registered nurse with assorted medical and social skills. The Nurse/Paramedic background provides a more interesting skill base than the Physician.
• Steven - Created for 1990s era Delta Green games. A violent shootman who became so disruptive I had to stop playing him.
• Special Agent Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand, JD, DOJ OIG - A Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General Special Agent. The Federal Agents who police the Federal Agents. A lawyer with a gun, skilled at getting away with things. Later became an NPC at the center of a web of conspiracies.
• Sellers, Self Employed - A mob doctor. Built using the the Criminal profession with some medical skills slapped on. Another attempt to make a more interesting version of the Physician.

I've played a lot of Delta Green, but I like running the game more.

• STAR WARS FANTASY FLIGHT 
• Loy Olrenshaw - Twilek con artist. Sold into slavery by his spice-addict parents, grew up to be a lowlife, and even do a little spice trading (and slave trading) of his own. Overall piece of garbage, lots of fun to play. Except that I built him using the Diplomat package because it had the best spread of social skills, when I really should have rolled scoundrel. I wanted to challenge myself to play something besides a killing machine by making a guy without combat skills, and boy does that not pay off in FFG Star Wars.
• Arlo Shive - Muun doctor, son of an insurance adjustor and a Confederate artillery fire coordinator. Went into medicine instead of choosing a good mathematical profession. Ended up having the same problems as Loy.

Despite the issues, I enjoyed both Edge of Empire campaigns I played in. The books are worth checking out, though you should definitely pirate them. No reason to give Disney your money, now that all the FFG RPG staff got laid off.

• WARHAMMER FANTASY
• Douglas the Herbalist - Randomly rolled character for a couple Warhammer Fantasy games. Surprisingly fun, despite lacking almost any useful skills for the situations he typically got into.

• WARHAMMER 40K
• Esme Parkreiner, AKA Woman From Volta - Recycled Eclipse Phase character in Rogue Trader. Enslaved when the Imperium conquered the feral world Volta (based on the Brigador planet of the same name). An uncomplicated Archmilitant (the firearms-rolling character class) who worshipped the Emperor as "The God of the Guns".

The 40K game is actually a lot of fun. Rogue Trader had the best concept of all the FFG Warhammer games, but some of the worst rules. The system is pretty janky but we've got several experts in the group who have made life much easier for the rest of us. And the setting is a lot more fun when you're a badass space pirate exploring the galaxy, rather than a peasant groveling before an idol of the Space Pope.

I like Clerics, even though they're not super effective (multi-ability score dependent, healing fails to keep up with damage once you get past the lowest levels).

But I also like characters that deal damage. In a heavily combat based game, dealing damage is a much easier way to judge whether I'm contributing than things like buffs, battlefield control, etc. Even if the classes that do that tend to be much more powerful in the long run. And in a gritty realism based game like Delta Green, being a combat character means I'm never defenseless if the other players turn on me. This is a very real concern in Delta Green, though I probably exaggerate how often it actually happens.

I don't like classes which require planning out synergies ahead of time. Any class in Pathfinder where you have to get prerequisites for Feats, Sorcerers in 5E, I don't like 'em.

I like evil aligned characters. Being a bastard is one of the reasons RPGs are fun.

I run a lot more games than I play. Running games is usually more fun. I get to share something I created and be constantly engaged, instead of spending 4/5 of the time listening to other people talk. It's hard to find people running the stuff I want to try, like Base Raiders or Unknown Armies.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Twelve, Part Two

(Continue from part one)

Having slain a wizardling and survived the curse, the players went back to the locked door guarded by the two apprentices. Sax decided to spend his entire necklace of fireballs to open the door - nothing else would do it. The blast melted it like a candle, opening a space to the room beyond. The next chamber had a statue of Cassie, making an obscene hand gesture. She decapitated it with a burst of gunfire, slicing through the pulpy material and dispelling its mesmerizing magic properties before it could ensorcell anyone.

The hallway beyond the statue room led to a chamber filled with eggs. The players could hear someone breathing heavily inside the vent on the opposite wall, watching them. They tried to communicate by shouting at it. The Wizard in the wall - who had once been Boney the Ancient Lich - responded that they had slain one of his children already, and they would not slay another and live. They offered to leave his kids alone if he told them where the power source holding the bridge to the abyss was. He gave them directions to a room on the fifth floor, past the unformed void of the fourth.

(The module text doesn't give the players any opportunity to speak to the Wizard. He's supposed to be a cosmic being so utterly beyond humanity that he can't even communicate except for horrible transformations and hastily scribbled notes. But the players had proven more dangerous than he anticipated, and this looked like a good opportunity to trick them. He gave them directions to the room of floating doors)

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Twelve, Part One

The last Cow Town game. This scenario was a run of The Wizard by Donovan Caldwell. I don't usually run published modules, but this one was pretty good, though definitely flawed. I refluffed the Wizard's origin story to fit him into the campaign as an NPC the players had heard about several times previously, but never encountered.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)

Sax was accompanied by the mobster Silas the Sledgehammer, while Cassie was attended by Leon the Chthonicist.

It had been a few months, maybe more than a few months, since the Meat Cult's defeat. The town had changed, though not always for the better. Cassie and Sax met the Illusionists John and Jo at Saturn Gyros, one of the last few spots in town that still served beef. They sat down at a table in the back, under a painting of Kronos biting the head off a child, who was wrapped in an enormous pita. The wizards, disguised as the elderly Jewish couple from the coffee shop in the vault, explained the problem:

Boney the Lich traded something with the Meat Cult and the Vampires. We hoped it just got rid of him, by sending him to a higher plane of existence or something. But now there's a tower, out on the old ranchland. A grain silo, but it's something else now. All the plant life the Druids seeded within a mile is dead. It's covered in a carpet of blue... substance, and it's spreading. And people have gone missing.

So Jo and I, we did a little investigating. Got our notes here, maybe they'll help.

eyewitness accounts
locals preyed on by "wizard" - not one of ours
difficulty talking about/remembering incidents - fugue state suggests trauma or memory modification
cattle mutilation - animals "randomized" with cross sections removed

missing persons - disappeared from ranches/squatters
Thinus (Unknown Surname)
Sam (Unknown Surname)
Stephen Forge
Josh (Unknown Surname)
Collin (Unknown Surname)
Claus (Unknown Surname)

tower
converted grain silo
coated in blue organic material which blocks scanning
gravity distortion inside structure

working hypothesis
powerful magical being (probably boney) experimenting with newfound powers
rift to borderworld somewhere in tower - like black barn but worse(?)
strong possibility of spread/contamination

(The module includes a brief description of the town at the base of the Wizard's tower. Very atmospheric, but a little thin on detail that's actually useful to the players. I decided to elide the investigation phase, where the players ruthlessly interrogate NPCs about information they don't have and doesn't matter, and just skipped straight to the tower. Made it much easier to fit in a four hour slot)

Whatever Boney turned himself into, it wasn't good. The mission: enter the tower, disable whatever was holding the portal to the borderworld open, and re-kill the lich. Cassie and Sax still had some of Darla's antimagic stickers left over from the Occult Gallery raid, which would nullify whatever machine held the portal open. Beyond that, they had guns, grenades, a flamethrower, and the remaining fireballs on the necklace.

The illusionists warned that if the team was unsuccessful, they'd have two options:

1. Call up the Men in Black, who were still looking for an excuse to level the town, and tell them to erase the entire West Side
2. Tell the other Seekers of the Path there was a new source of unstable magic in town, and watch them all flock to the tower to experiment with its strange energies and disturbing biology.

Neither of which were good.

The team climbed into their surviving Toyota and drove into the wilderness. As promised, the old grain silo stood in a clearing of its own making, devoid of the tree cover and wild plant growth the Druids seeded in the former farmland. There was a thin carpet of tacky blue fibers on the ground around the spire, like a carpet of fungal hyphae. The growths were thicker on the tower itself, bulging out from the sides of the cylinder to form new wings and balustrades.

The front door slid open when they approached.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Epilogue

The Servants of the Great Lord of Embers joined their master in a blaze that annihilated the Meat God's physical presence on earth. The survivors left Cow Town, in search of fresh kindling to regenerate their clergy.

With United Meat Train decapitated and the Grange annihilated, Cow Town was no longer a hub of agribusiness. The population dwindled, as stores closed and migrant farmhands went elsewhere for work. Beef prices across the country ticked upward, until new agreements with suppliers overseas could be negotiated.

In the absence of their corporate overlords at United Meat Train, Cow Town struggled to govern itself. Declining tax revenues and population brought an increase in lawlessness, with many homes and businesses converted to meth labs or other, less savory uses.

With no further use from United Meat Train, and a twenty year lawsuit still pending, the Sink finally closed. Enterprising sorcerers still make pilgrimages to the cordoned ecological disaster, hoping to fish out magic trinkets, or bottle fragments of the former Meat God's power.

With falling enrollment and endless litigation eating away at its budget, the K-12 school finally closed. The remaining students are now bussed to Coal City schools, an hour away on the King's Road.

With the Grange annihilated in its battle with the Dungeon Druids, large stretches of ranchland lay abandoned. The Druids stole out from the Botanic Gardens to replant the desolation, sowing seeds that grew into wondrous and terrifying parks and forests.

The survivors of the Exploration Project eked out a precarious existence in the shadow of the Seekers of the Path, traumatized by the horrors of the war with the Meat Cult, yet addicted to the seductive mysteries of the underworld. Adrian the Exploring Kid took up the study of magic and himself became a powerful and widely feared sorcerer. 

Absent the containing influence of the Shoggoth Pit, the Meat Cult and the Ancient Lich, the undercity was nearly swallowed by a Mycelid outbreak. The killer fungi were contained at great cost by the Seekers of the Path, and the Chthonicists of the Exploration Project.

With the collapse of the Cow Town Police Department, the case against the Megachurch was taken over by the National Police. Thanks to the addled Meat Cops' inconsistent record keeping and borderline incomprehensible case notes, the Nats were only able to prosecute a handful of the Servants of Christ the King for the slaying of several Cow Town Police officers during the siege of the church. Father Bacon was not among those charged.

Without the protection of the Meat Cult, the Tattoos were hunted down and put to the sword by the remaining Servants of the King of the Universe. The surviving vampires fled into the exurbs, creating nests in abandoned farmhouses and beneath ponds and lakes.

The two surviving artists from the Collective were adopted by the Light Market. The smugglers always had commissions for skilled painters.

With nobody to oppose them, the Seekers of the Path now rule what's left of Cow Town. The illusionists John and Jo do their best to restrain the wizards and witches, who view the town as a playground for occult science, its people as raw material for their experiments. Even with the meat cult destroyed, the Men in Black haven't let their finger off the button...

And when the Seekers' power armored mages broke into Old Boney's crypt, they found no sign of the ancient lich. Perhaps his old bones had undergone a transformation to another state of existence. Whatever bargain he'd struck with the Tattoos and the Meat Cult, it no longer concerned Cow Town. Or so everyone hoped...

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eleven, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

A meat collar worker, slaughterhouse worker and tallow titan on the offensive

Working their way down to the server farm was easier than going up. The offices were in disarray, the workers more interested in escaping than fighting the attackers.

(Without the meat signal broadcasting, the wandering monster table could no longer spit out "meat collar workers")

The server farm was defended by a single altered medic, who killed the two IT workers once they become unreliable. He ambushed McCaffrey coming in, but was unable to do any significant damage before being filleted by the squad. They noticed the chrome crab was no longer tending the brains. A couple squirts of flamethrower fuel sent the server farm up in greasy smoke. Outside, a meat executive called in their location on a cell phone. Cassie dispatched him with a sneak attack, but trouble was clearly on the way. It was time to move.

They heard the group coming up the stairs before it heard them. A suit, a flesh hulk, and a crowed of cultists and ghouls, here for the free meat. A couple fireballs tossed into the stairwell dispatched the threat, but also started a fire that made the stairs impassible. The players decided to use Hatchet Hands Harry's climbing gear to rappel down the side of the building. They were on the fourth floor, so with fifty feet of rope, they could make it.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eleven, Part One

Was session eleven the end of Cow Town? I don't know. I think it would make a good ending. Maybe I'll think of an epilogue for session twelve.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 4)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 3)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 3)
• Troy Giovanni, Hood in Over His Head (Criminal, Level 1)

Troy Giovanni was a new player who joined right at the end. The Occultists needed everyone they could get, even Level 1 Crooks with little chance of surviving the Meat Cult's damage output.

Sax the Knife was Level 3, enough to adopt a Fire Cult Fanatic as part of his Crew. Ignacio the Burned Man joined the team for the mission.

The illusionists John and Jo created a three dimensional projection of the target building: the United Meat Train headquarters.

They explained the team's objectives:

Esoteric Enterprises - Welcome to Salt Bay - Jackscon Elias Special

I ran a game of Esoteric Enterprises for the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.

Salt Bay - once a mining town, now a coastal tourist village. Sit your cliffside resort with a glass of wine and watch container ships fight their way across the whirling bay to Coal City down the coast. Quiet, scenic and expensive.

That ain’t you. You drifted into town with the wrong crowd. The kind that hangs around the Love Shack behind the dive shop at one in the morning, sweating gin and eying the staircase in the back. The one that leads into the undercity.

You’ve heard stories about what’s down there. Buried gardens of killer kudzu, infested with urban druids. Old rotting houses full of giant spiders. Gutters of meat that squirms like it’s still alive. Moving sculptures that really stretch the definition of “art”. It all looks like dollar signs when you’re an occult criminal with a pistol in your hand and ten dollars in your pocket.

I had three players, all new to the game. I made a simplified version of the character creation rules that incorporated my houserules and removed the need to laboriously copy down skills and saving throws from the book. After about fifteen minutes, we emerged with the following characters:

• Sploon, Devoted Slave of the Parasite God (Mystic, Lvl 1)
• Frank "The Wall" Turner (Bodyguard, Lvl 1)
• Dweezil the Clever (Criminal, Lvl 1)

They started off at the Love Shack, an old brothel converted to a low rent gin joint (and shamelessly recycled from the Cow Town campaign). The management had torn up the floor in the back after an... accident had messed up the boards, and found an old staircase leading into the undercity. A few hoodlums had explored it and already there were stories about treasure and danger to be found:

• I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
• Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
• Couple guys went exploring on the East side, past the fairy enclave. Ones that came back said there's a buried mansion, full of spiders and treasure.
• Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
• Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down 

The gang decided to investigate the spider nest in the buried mansion. Dweezil asked around with his contacts, and found a rumor that might help: The employees at the Coal City Power substation on the East side of town had a hatch down into the basement, that they wouldn't enter without a HAZMAT suit and flamethrower. It sounded like the hatch led right on top of the dungeon area they were interested in.

(Finding out about the hatch let the hoodlums skip slogging through the undercity and enter directly on top of the spider nest).

It was the middle of the night when they rolled up on the power station. The gate was open and nobody was watching it. There was a single quonset hut with a single line worker, staring at a computer screen with headphones on, and a concrete structure that led underground. Dweezil got the lock off the bunker without making a fuss, and the gang snuck inside. There were a lot of technological looking rooms that nobody understood, probably related to providing power to the city. There was also a locker room with a bunch of padlocked containers and a very secure floor hatch.

The footpads realized the cabinets were probably full of HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers. Neither Sploon nor Dweezil could open them. The group opened the hatch and descended into the unknown depths below.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Eleven

Embers are going to handle the Sink. They've got everything set up for a controlled burn.

Here's the issue, though: Meat God isn't intelligent. It's a big dumb ball of fear and violence. It knows how to puppet people and make them feed it, but it doesn't know the first thing about strategy or logistics. That's what UMT does for it. They think it'll make them a whole lot of money, so they've got the whole branch office dedicated to babysitting it.

We're sending you in to the region headquarters to do a little cleanup. Think of it as a failure-to-stop drill. Fire Cult's going to torch the body, and you're going to shoot the head.

Your mission objectives:

• There's a communications relay broadcasting the Meat Signal, keeping the cube jockeys on-message. Take it out and the drones will "wake up".
• Destroy their server farm. They're not going to have backups because the OS they run now isn't compatible with any normal computer system. It's too... fleshy.
• Killing the suits isn't going to do anything unless we shut down their management fast track program. They're doing this thing with all the biomass from the sacrifices where they "upgrade" their executives. Put a stop to it.
• We think they picked up a self-repairing machine from the Serpent Ruins - the same one we were trying to grab. If you find it, steal it back or smash it to pieces. Otherwise, it might just undo all your work killing people and breaking things.

You've got two options for insertion:

• Undercover, with as much concealed carry stuff we can fit, in a disguise of your choice
• Loud, with the best equipment we can give you, inserted kinetically at a location of your choice

You've done great work with us, and we know you aren't doing it all out of the goodness of your heart. We're offering you a thousand dollars each for the job.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Ten

Session ten was another meat grinder (no pun intended) through an area the players had already mapped. It slowed to a crawl during one combat sequence, but finished strong. I got to reuse an area that didn't get quite the level of development I wanted last time, and it paid off.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

(Sax's player hadn't read the advancement rules, and spent the entire session believing he was still Level 1)

Elizabeth West was advanced enough in her necromantic training that she felt comfortable choosing an undead companion: the Dame Lacey the Death Knight, a fearless, plate armored skeleton descended from necromantic nobility. The team decided to arm her with the magic billhook they'd found in the reliquary several weeks ago, to increase her damage output.

(The player had reached Level 3 and was entitled to a Crew, but didn't know what NPC henchmen to choose. I recommended my favorite monster in the game)

The surface was too dangerous to travel, with meat cops everywhere by day and vampires by night. The players met in the Occultist's guest rooms, same as last mission, to discuss their options. They decided that the logistics situation with the gallery was the most dire and immediate problem. John and Jo explained the situation:

The Occult Gallery entrance painting in the Underworld Vault had been bought by United Meat Train, whose corporate office in Cow Town served the Meat God brewing in the sink. The Gallery was now full of meat cultists and monsters, the status of the Artist Collective unknown. This was bad, because the painting network in the Gallery was an important supply line for the Light Market and Seekerso f the Path. The players' mission was to go in and shut down the painting that UMT was using to bring in cultists.

To this end, the Occultists provide the team with

• A page of four antimagic stickers, a single one of which would be sufficient to disable a painting if applied to its surface
• A device that detected conscious thought, to locate any surviving artists still in the Gallery
• A few thermoses of Moe's Special Blend, a greasy, protein rich tomato soup that cured bleeding
• A map of the Gallery

They would enter in the painting gallery to the Northwest. Their objective was the "entrance" to the Southeast, where the painting the meat cult had coopted was located.

The survivors of the Exploration Project defacto recognized the players as their leaders, having lost most of their other important NPCs. To this end, Leon the Chthonicist enlisted in the expedition. His stone shaping abilities could seal or collapse passages in the gallery, allowing the team to control movement and block avenues of approach.

Darla the Technomancer peeled the protective wards off the Occultist's painting that led into the gallery. A coterie of Fire Cultists threw fireballs through the painting, to clear the LZ for the team's arrival. The players waited for oxygen to refill the room on the other side, then leapt through, accompanied by Leon the Chthonicist and Lacey the Death Knight.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Masterpost

Francis Bacon

Cow Town started as an overflow Esoteric Enterprises game, after the Coal City Campaign regularly filled up with players. It also let me playtest some houserules for domain level play after I found them lacking in the base game. 

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Music

I'm using (almost) all new music to give Cow Town a distinct feel from Coal City. Each dungeon area gets its own theme. So far the players have responded positively.

Esoteric Enterprises - Botanic Gardens

This dungeon area includes a small custom faction which inhabits it.

Google Docs version here.

GENERATING BOTANIC GARDENS

Throw down a few D6s onto your map page. Draw a line through them from one end of the page to the other. That line is your river. It enters as a waterfall from above, and exits as a waterfall into the unknown depths below.

Roll the rest of your dice (mostly D20s) on the page and connect them as normal, both to the D4s and to each other.

Make sure you drop an “other” die on the board (a coin or something) as well. This will be the Druids’ den.

The color of a die determines how a chamber is lit

• Warm colors (red, yellow, orange) have stone faces in the walls, whose eyes radiate magical sunlight
• Cool colors (blue, purple, green) have patches of lichen on the ceiling, that glow like moonlight
• Neutral colors (brown, black, white) are lit in a wavelength not visible to the human eye. The plants there are an underground species that photosynthesizes just the same

Ceilings in Botanic Gardens are twenty feet high. Hallways between rooms are ten feet wide.

The river is five feet deep and has six inches of air above it where it travels between rooms.

Where passages between chambers numbered 7 to 20 cross over the river, they bridge it with logs or wood planks.

Esoteric Enterprises - Occult Gallery

This node is made to house the Occult Artists Collective result from the Social Underworld table. It can be placed on the surface in a building, or underground.

Google docs version here.

Michael Hutter

GENERATING AN OCCULT GALLERY

Use D20s to generate the Gallery. Record the color of the dice as well as the number showing. The color determines the architectural style of the room and the art displayed within it. It also determines the special properties of any guardians spawned in that room.

• Red: Classical/Neoclassical. Giant Guardians with double hit dice and damage dice, but -2 to hit versus human size targets
• Blue: Cubist. Guardians ignore successful attacks that roll an odd-number to hit, except area attacks
• Yellow: Art Deco. Guardians armed with Thompsons and Browning Automatic Rifles, dealing D10 damage and using the Covering Fire rules
• Orange: Surrealist. Guardians deal damage directly to flesh, but make a reaction roll each round to see if they even attack
• Green: Anti Art/Post Modernist. Guardians deconstruct one of the target’s items on a successful hit.
• Purple: Realist. Guardians have the same abilities as the players
• Brown: Medieval/Gothic. Guardians cast Bleeding Curse, Cure Wounds and Darkness at will
• White: High Modernist/Brutalist. Guardians get +4 AC, no Grit but double Flesh
• Black: Futurist. Guardians incredibly fast, always attack first

After you’ve connected the D20s, drop a few coins on the map. Connect each to one or two of the D20s.

The entrances where the Gallery connects to the rest of the Underworld, or the surface, have donation boxes where patrons can drop money or items of value. They also have little pamphlets with cryptic descriptions of the exhibits inside, and vague suggestions about where they can be found.

Unless otherwise stated, passages between rooms are ten feet wide, well lit, with double doors that are unlocked and open.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Ten

Good work with the Dungeon Druids yesterday. Grange won't be a problem from now on. I was never a huge fan of them, but they deserved better than the meat cult. At least their troubles are over.

Raid on the vampire hideout was a fuckin' ambush. Seekers lost Wayne, which is kind of a big deal since he was their pyromancer. Hope the fire cult knows what they're doing.

Oh yeah, fire cult has a mission planned for the Sink. Most of them are busy working on a project, so they'll take anyone they can get.

Megachurch is under siege. That means they aren't guarding the Serpent Ruins anymore. Seekers want someone to sneak in and bring out some tech that'll help the team later.

The Gallery Route is compromised, full of meat cultists. If someone could go in and seal up the Vault Painting UMT is using as a portal, we could move things again.

Tattoos are still hashing it out with Boney. Liches don't make decisions quickly.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Nine

Session nine was great. Both players were running first level characters and had basically no context for what was happening in Cow Town, but by giving them an abbreviated version of the situation and some mission parameters, I was able to get them into the game with (relatively) little pain. They still stumbled a couple times due to lacking crucial information from previous games, but once they decided what they were doing the game was fast and decisive.

In attendance:

• Bruce Bellows, Pyromaniac Bogan (Mercenary, Lvl 1)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

Since neither had any idea what the hell was happening, I decided they were a couple of hoodlums fresh out of Coal City. They'd heard there was a brawl brewing in Cow Town, and were hoping to pick up some riches from the ensuing factional conflict. The Light Market was ferrying people through the portrait route if they were willing to fight, so they climbed through the painting into the Seekers' underground lair.

The pair of goons wandered into the guest room, where a goat man and a lizard man were directing traffic. John and Jo were happy to give the duo a mission, after Geasing them to ensure they couldn't reveal the Occultists' plans. They needed someone to deliver a package to the Dungeon Druids, then return with a package that the Fire Cult needed. They had to hurry though, because the Grangers were planning an attack on the Druids' grove. The hoods were happy to help, and the Illusionists handed them a thermos of soup each and sent them on their way.

Esoteric Enterprises - Underworld Vault

I really liked the Vaults from the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The enemies have cool abilities that disrupt the usual player tactics and force them to prioritize threats in novel ways. I had a scrapped post about adapting some of them to tabletop games, and that became this custom area for Esoteric Enterprises.

The biggest flaw with this adaptation is that it's not very interesting unless the players deliberately break the rules, and then it might be too dangerous to be worthwhile. Too scary for low power characters, not worth the effort for tougher ones.

Google docs version here

GENERATING AN UNDERWORLD VAULT

Separate your dice out, with D4s and D6s in one pile, and everything else in the other pile.

Toss a couple D4s or D6s at the edge of the map for each connection to the rest of the underworld. These are the public facing rooms

Toss the rest of your dice inside the perimeter formed by the public rooms. These are the inner vaults.

CONNECTIONS
Doors between rooms whose value is 6 or lower are ordinary wooden doors, which can be easily opened or battered down.

Doors between rooms 7 and up are reinforced steel. Vault inhabitants can move between them freely, but they’re locked to the players. If it matters, roll a D4 to see what a vault door is secured by.

1. Retinal Scanner
2. Fingerprint Scanner
3. Voice Print Scanner
4. Keypad Lock

With a dungeon turn’s worth of work, vault doors can be hacked with a Technology roll, or forced with Vandalism. The latter sets off an alarm.

VAULT VISITORS
Rooms numbered 1 through 6 are often visited by inhabitants of the occult underworld. Choose a random faction or roll on the Weirdos (page 184), Mundane Explorers (184), Religious Sorts (184), Petty Criminals (185) or Inhabitants of the Undercity (187) table to see who’s doing their banking.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Nine

RUMORS

Tattoos made it through the shoggoth pit. They've arranged a sit-down with Boney. This is seriously bad, if you couldn't already tell.

Fire cult's back. Got a plan to burn the sink, but they need some stuff from the druids to make it happen. They'd better hustle, UMT's planning a raid on the grove. Got tired of asking.

Talk about raids, I think the cops are about to Waco the shit out of the Megachurch.

Worms of the Earth tore through the Hooker Slashers. Probably an accident, but don't look a gift rock in the mouth, unless you want to get augured. Seekers are going to hit Vampire HQ, keep up the pressure.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eight, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

On the other side of the painting, the explorers walked past the donation box into a cafe, where a group of art students were drinking ouzo from a bottle with a pickled mandrake inside. They didn't know where the Fire Cult was, but they knew that Clarissa had dealt with them. Her apartment was on the West side of the gallery, past the livingroom.

The first exhibit the explorers had to get through was completely dark. Something whistled and clicked as it slid around in the dark room. Sax couldn't see it, but Cassie had darkvision. The enormous olm scurried around the walls, floors and ceiling. When they entered, it rubbed against their legs, brushing them with its electrical sensors and smearing them with slime.

The next exhibit was a living room, with walls of skin and chairs of bone. Eyes in the walls watched the players, and a mouth greeted them when they entered. Clarissa probably wasn't home, but they were welcome to bang on her apartment door. Their best bet was to find Ryan, he'd know what was going on.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eight, Part One

Session eight only had two players. That worked fine, since the areas they visited were relatively low-threat.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 1)

They began the game at the downtown Burger Head. They watched the police come in and hassle a table full of teenagers, eventually picking one to drag away to an unknown fate. There was something wrong with the police - they were all greasy, and drooling a little. They counted themselves lucky that the police hadn't clocked them as persons of interest, climbed in their van, and drove to Flowers Coffee. They climbed through the painting on the second story, leading to the Occultists' lair.

The Red Barn was guarded by Wayne the Pyromancer, who freaked out and almost incinerated them. Cooler heads prevailed, and they were allowed entrance to the guest rooms again. They found the surviving Explorers, who had abandoned the Love Shack to shack up with the occultists.

The stakes were this: The Occultists had a plan to deal with the Meat God, but they needed the Fire Cult. The Fire Cult was missing, only the Art Collective knew where they were. The Art Collective was also missing. The only clue was a weird painting on sale in the showroom at the Underworld Vault, East of the Cistern. And the underground was even more infested with Vampires than ever before, so they had to be careful.

Delta Green NPC: Dr Franz Farber

Dr Franz Farber

A Nazi rocket scientist obsessed with escaping the apocalypse through space travel

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow town - Prep For Session Eight

RUMORS

Cops are still fucked up... More than usual, I mean. They aren't kicking down doors anymore, they're  grabbing people off the streets now. And they don't come back.

Which is funny, because that suit still wants someone to buy her a boon from the Dungeon Druids. I think she's running her own con, on the side of... whatever the hell UMT is doing.

Tattoos still trying to get into Dry Bones' lair on the West side. Last I heard they ran into some trouble West of the cistern.

Seekers looking for the Fire Cult. Want to work together on the meat problem. Trouble is, nobody can find them. Rumor is the Artists had something to do with it. Not happy about the gallery, I guess.

Lester kept a bunch of shit in his box at the Underworld Bank. It just got out of probate and now they're selling it off. Take a look if you're down there, some of it's seriously weird.

Oh yeah, Explorers cleared out of the Love Shack. Said it was compromised. Probably wanted to tell you, but they didn't want to talk on the phone. Said it might be compromised too. You know how it is. Said to tell you they were "through the painting", like you'd know what that meant. Took the Light Market with them, if you can believe that.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Seven

Session seven was short and sweet. We had three players and they all kept their eye on the ball.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 1)

(Sax was a late arrival who didn't have a character sheet ready. Chargen in Esoteric Enterprises takes too long to do at the beginning of a session, but I had a spare ready to go from Coal City)

Sax met Cassie and Elizabeth at the public library, fresh off a job and looking for work. They decided to visit Radna, who had asked that they meet her at the old Pascal mansion. They were puzzled and disturbed by her insistence that they "bring bugspray" for the meet, and asked around town to see if anyone knew anything about the location. A repair technician from the Coal City Power substation next to the abandoned mansion agreed to talk to them.

The guy told them that none of his crew would go down into the basement of the substation without HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers, due to the spiders of unusual size that infested it. Some of them could talk and set traps. That was just the power station, he'd never gone inside the mansion because one room was bad enough. But there were sometimes cars parked outside the Pascal house, like people were there. He never bothered to investigate that either. The mansion wasn't CCP property, it's not like he could tell them to leave.

Esoteric Enterprises - Spider Nest

Another custom underworld area for Esoteric Enterprises. Also available as a Google Doc here

Vaguely inspired by the area of the same name from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and a little bit by the Deepnest and a couple other areas from Hollow Knight. 

And of course, the classic children's book Trouble in Bugland by Kotzwinkle and Servello.

Delta Green NPC Triple Threat

Thomas the Fat - Morbidly Obese Ghoul Crime Lord and Nazi Collaborator

Slobodan “SoCal Sal" Obradovic - Sassy Serbian Gangster

Lilly Dosik - Helpful Social Worker

Esoteric Enterprises - Abattoir

I developed a few custom dungeon areas for No Town Like Cow Town. I wanted to see if I could take the tools presented by the EE book and iterate on them to make something new. The main thing I wanted to improve is the guidance presented for using a specific mix of dice to achieve a desired result. I also gave page number references for all the monster manual entries to make referencing the book easier.

The abattoir is the first one I created, and also the first one the players visited, so now I can post it. It's based on the original Oddworld game, with a little inspiration from Pathologic.

Also available as a google doc here

The Crocodile Hunter - an ESPER Scenario

The Crocodile Hunter

ESPER investigates a locked room mystery after an outlaw biker is devoured in his home by a crocodile.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow town - Prep For Session Seven

RUMORS

Good job at the abattoir. Set 'em back a week, at least. UMT's not thrilled with your little caper. Cops are really looking for you now. And there's something fucked up about them... More than usual, I mean

Which is funny, because that suit still wants someone to buy her a boon from the Dungeon Druids

Speaking of buying stuff from the Druids, the Light Market got out of the underground okay. They're holed up somewhere safe, Radna might know where. RIP Carl, Swain and Darling

Tattoos aren't bothered though. They're trying to get into the lich lair on the West side. No idea what they want with old Dry Bones

Seekers looking for the Fire Cult. Want to work together on the meat problem. Trouble is, nobody can find them. Rumor is the Artists had something to do with it. Not happy about the gallery, I guess

Church had an accident at the K-12 school during one of their snake shows. Kid got bit. Don't worry, nobody you knew

Lester kept a bunch of shit in his box at the Underworld Bank. It just got out of probate and now they're selling it off. Take a look if you're down there, some of it's seriously weird

Oh, Radna wanted me to tell you she needs to talk. Said to swing by the old Pascal house on the West Side when it's convenient for you. And bring bugspray, whatever that means.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Six

Session six was harder on the players than it was on me. We had a full house, which is a rarity in Cow Town compared to Coal City. I got to use the first custom dungeon generator I made for Esoteric Enterprises.

The characters:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Acrasia, Dream of Hunger (Spook Lvl 3)
• Dwayne Brutananadilewski, Big Guy & Rock (Bodyguard, Lvl 2)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Thurston East, Fragile Cyberneticist (Doctor Lvl 1)

Cassie got word from the loan sharking operation that some dad in the suburbs was holding out on her. She sent Hatchet Hands Fred to deal with the problem, removing the need to resolve it herself. Acrasia kick started a bootlegging operation, recruiting a bunch of drug addicts from the K-12 school for her crew.

The job: meet up with the Seekers of the Path, and figure out what they want done about the Sink, which rumor has it is about to kill everyone.

Last time they talked with the Seekers, the Occultists told them a better way to get to the hideout: the ugly painting on the second floor of Flowers Coffee. The painting was ugly, all right. A couple barns in the middle of a field. They tried taking the painting off the wall, leaving notes behind it, and exploring the area for secret doors. Then they tried climbing through the painting, into the field on the other side.

They went around behind the two barns, one red and one black. The black barn was nailed closed, with a big DO NOT ENTER painted in letters ten feet high on the door. The red barn had an occult assistant brewing a strange potion in a still. He told them to go down the stairs to the guest rooms.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Six

RUMORS

Tattoos on a "recruitment drive". First in line for the draft? Leftover Hooker Slashers. Wonder who's next.

Megachurch looking for a way into the Lich Sanctum on the West Side. Whole lotta bullshit in the way, but they say it pays well.

Light Market's trapped between a vampire and a burned place since the Gallery went up. Punk Rocks from the Love Shack looking for a way to bail them out.

Seekers worried about something in the Sink. Say it's why everyone's having all those horrible dreams. They got an idea to buy some time before it gets worse.

Some Karen from United Meat Train wants a boon from the Dungeon Druids. She'll pay real nice for it.

Esoteric Enterprises - Starting Equipment

Esoteric Enterprises Character Creation takes too long. In addition to painstakingly copying down their Saving Throws and Skills, then adjusting them based on their ability score modifiers, players are asked to fill out their character's equipment from a big list of gear.

But what if there was a list of recommended starting equipment for each class? Something like...

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Five

Session five was hard. The players really struggled with mapping, both retracing the path from last time (two of them were new and had never seen a dungeon before) and exploring new areas.

In attendance,

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Thurston East, Fragile Cyberneticist (Doctor Lvl 1)

The team had a job to finish from last session, which I decided took place just a day ago: locating the Cistern on the West Side and retrieving some of the water inside for the Occultists. The team lost a man on the previous attempt, and Cassie was going to try again with reinforcements.

She met the two new recruits at the Pound of Flesh, to explain the mission and hand out equipment from the pool. But before they could leave, a pair of enormous police officers showed up to shake down the truck for free BBQ, and immediately recognized Cassie. She'd been spotted leaving the abandoned rail yard yesterday, and was a suspect in a couple other cases. But they were happy to let her off with a warning, and a 200 dollar donation to the Cow Town Police Foundation.

The Gallery desk was manned by a bored artist with enormous headphones and a graphics tablet. She told the players to toss whatever they felt like in the donation jar, and went back to working on her porno commissions. Cassie didn't remember how to open the secret entrance to the basement, so they had to bother her again to open it. She said maybe they could deal with whatever was making so much noise downstairs.

Downstairs, someone was yelling and throwing furniture and sculptures. They caught fragments of the argument. The Hooker Slashers weren't happy about paying the gallery for use of their ROW. In fact, they were going to start charging the artists protection. The artists weren't having it. Someone fired a gun. The players ran for the dungeon entrance, before they could get caught in the fighting.

Delta Green - Special Abilities

Like it or not, combat is a big part of Delta Green. Bug hunts and gunfights are more interesting when the enemies do more than just deal damage. Special abilities make the enemies weirder, grosser, and more memorable than just claws and guns.

The following powers can be flavored as you please. Mutations bestowed on cultists by an alien God. Spells used by a sorcerer. Powers derived from a mysterious artifact. A couple of these mixed in among a group of adversaries adds excitement and encourages the players to prioritize targets. My favorite combination is a group of foes, most armed with mundane weapons, but a few armed with supernatural abilities.

The narrative justification you give for an ability can also give the Agents an idea of what to expect, if they observe the target before engaging.

• Science: Biology or Chemistry can identify the drool coming from the "dog"'s mouth as acidic.
• Occult recognizes the deformed instrument in the cultist's hand as an artifact of supreme power. 
• Medicine recognizes the flickering patterns on the target's skin as a seizure hazard.

And so on

Esoteric Enterprises - Coal City Blues - Masterpost

Esoteric Enterprises is an urban fantasy/grindhouse horror dungeon crawler by Emmy Allen of Dying Stylishly Games.

The setting is similar to RPGs like Unknown Armies and World of Darkness, or books like Kraken and... Gil's All Fright Diner, maybe? There's an occult underworld in the city that somehow stays hidden from mundane humanity, despite being jam packed with crazy magic and monsters.

The gameplay is a clone of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a clone of Basic/Expert D&D, or one of those other old school editions. You roll 3D6 in order to make a character, you roll D20s to attack things and make saving throws, you get the picture. It does a few genuinely cool things to improve the old system (which I ran for maybe a year in undergrad and didn't really care for), and also some annoying things that make it worse.

Coal City Blues was my first campaign of Esoteric Enterprises. I expected it to go for a couple sessions, and it ran for eleven. I can't actually recommend Esoteric Enterprises. It's an unfinished product, and that's not something I want to reward. But it surprised me. The mechanics range from incomplete, to frustrating, to straight up broken, but the world creation system really brings the game to life. It's the first RPG I've ever finished a campaign of. And I've got plenty of "finished" games sitting on my shelf that are much worse (I'm looking at you, Mothership).

Here are my writeups of the game

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Five

ACTIVE JOBS

Seekers are working on something big. They need water from the cistern on the West side, though. $1,500 for a sample.

RUMORS

The cops are looking for you. They just want to talk, honest.

Grange had to torch Lyman's farm. The cows, the people, the feed, they were all stuck together in one big fungus ball. Screamed all night as it burned.

There's a meat cult in one of the abattoirs. It's getting bigger. United Meat Train wants it dealt with, quiet like.

There's a guy in the buried ruins on the West side who pays for dungeon meat. What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.

Hooker Slashers upped the rent on the Light Market. Everything's more expensive until they find a new venue.

Suit in town looking for samples from the Sink. UMT won't let him near the hole, probably 'cause of the lawsuit.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Four

I moved this session three hours earlier, because I felt like playing earlier in the day. The result was a big drop in attendance, though I haven't established whether this was actually the cause.

The players today:

• Larry Lippman, One-half of a man on the run. (Explorer Lvl 3)
• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 2)

The goal: to do the Occultist Job they heard a rumor about. Get water from the cistern on the West side, and bring it back to the Seekers of the Path. In order to arrange the job, they needed to meet with the Seekers. They could look for them in the underworld, or they could look for someone who could get in contact with them. They decided to check in at the recently reopened Love Shack.

Carl met them in the basement. There were more people with guns than usual. He said the vampires had been creeping around outside at night. Scouting them, making people nervous. He was sick of it, and now he was going to set an ambush. They would help, right?

The gang decided to help. The Love Shack and the explorers were their best friends in Cow Town. And the vampires were real assholes. They had until nightfall to plan it out. The other jobs could wait.

Filipino Box Spring Hog - A Delta Green Scenario

Filipino Box Spring Hog

Los Angeles, April 30, 1992. Day 2 of the Rodney King Riots. A handful of Delta Green Agents decide this is the perfect cover to settle some scores. Blame the whole thing on “looters”.

Esoteric Enterprises - Coal City Maps

“You looked fearful of it, and tried… as it appeared to me — to keep your face from it when you carried it.” He threw back the cover as he spoke. The first page, thus revealed, was written in red in a character I did not know.

“This is a warning to the seekers of the path,” he said. “Shall I read it to you?”

I blurted, “It seemed to me that I saw a dead man in the leather, and that he was myself.”

He closed the cover again and ran his hand over it. “These pavonine dyeings are but the work of craftsmen long gone — the lines and swirls beneath them, only the scars of the suffering animals’ backs, the marks of ticks and whips. But if you are fearful, you need not go.”

“Open it,” I said. “Show me the map.”

“There is no map. This is the thing itself,” he said, and with that he threw back the cover and the first page as well.

-The Autarch Appian to Severian the Cruel