Esoteric Enterprises - Session Five, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

We were joined by a fifth player, who had a character ready from a previous game.

• Luchetti Bruschetti, Gay Italian Dentist, Masked Urban Explorer and Breakdancing Tomb Raider (Explorer, Level 2)

In addition to better Athletics and Stealth than the rest of the gang, Luchetti had a car. He picked Devin and Cobb up on the West side and ferried them back to Cobb's house in the suburbs, where he'd set up his lab. The mad doctor dropped the Ferret Hydra's spine in a vat of preservatives, then dropped some impromptu brain surgery on Devin, restoring some of his faculties. His hands still shook and he had trouble focusing, but he could walk, run, translate and charm people good as new.

(The bludgeoning result of 6 on the Horrible Wounds table give a penalty to both D20 rolls and skill rolls. The text says recovery requires brain surgery and physical therapy, and Devin only got one of those things. So I gave him a choice of whether he wanted to remove the penalty to rolls or the penalty to skills. He chose skills)

Luschetti hadn't found anything to drink in Cobb's fridge (just severed body parts and biological samples) so he was good to drive Devin and Cobb back across the river to meet with the group. Zeke and Johan piled into the car. Luschetti parked and they opened their map to plan the placement of the final sensor. They decided to head Southwest from the Blood for Sex basement and see where they ended up.

It was 9:00 PM when they got to the club. This was the first time they'd seen the top floor filled with people - office workers slumming it in the dangerous part of the city. The underground club was similarly packed. There were a pair of fairies at the VIP booth, surrounded by Red Caps. One was three feet tall, face hidden by a mask. The other wore a supple leather cloak that covered her moth wings. She waved the gang over, excited to see them. They hesitated, aware that they weren't popular with the Fairy Enclave. But they also didn't want to upset the Red Caps, who clearly held the pair in high regard.

They needn't have worried. The fairies were the leaders of the Red Caps, an Unseelie Lord and Lady. They were big fans of the players, and congratulated them on their acumen at spreading terror and violence. They offered them a drink on-the-house, and Devin asked for something to prove his courage. They served him a highball filled with strange Lotus flowers, which he pounded. It knocked him on his ass, but permanently rerolled his shitty Wisdom score to a more respectable value. The Lord gently suggested that he had business to conduct, and the gang should stop by another time. They set off to the Southwest.

The tunnel took them into a historic tomb. Amid several ossuaries of stacked bones, the gang found a domesday book full of the names of the honored dead. The gang declined to disturb the piled skulls and ribs, thereby avoiding several nasty curses in their search for loot and a way forward. They traveled South and encountered a chained coffin, which rattled with evil intent. They debated opening it, but the appearance of a whip cracking ghost scared them out of the room. The hallway they ran into was blocked - not with piled bones, but with masonry and nailed boards. Someone did not want anyone going South.

The flagellant spirit "cornered" the party in the blocked passage and warned them against proceeding any further. It didn't want them breaking down the wall and spreading plague all over the hallowed tombs of the honored dead.

The spirit told them that the tombs were infested with criminals, defiling the sacred place. They went back to the chained coffin, to examine a door to the Northwest they'd passed over. It was locked, made with modern materials, and even warded to prevent angry spirits from passing through it.

Luchetti picked the lock (the game doesn't have a lockpick skill, I assume you can use Technology or Stealth for it). He peered through the door. Inside was a fat, muscular, well groomed man with a single earing, sitting at a desk, typing on a modern computer. The stone floor was covered with a lavish rug and the bone walls decorated with liquor cabinets and paintings. The group decided to walk right in and hope the guy didn't notice. The mobster yelled and pulled a gun, shouting for Lenny to back him up.

 

The group raised their hands and told him they were lost, and just looking for a way through. Lenny the Mob Lieutenant appeared in the door with a shotgun. He told the players they were upsetting the Don, and they needed to leave. They asked how to get to the tunnels under the harbor. He told them they were going the wrong way. They needed to go North around the mob offices and head West, then Northwest through the sewer cluster, then Southwest to the ruins. The players left.

Zeke realized that "Ponda Ray" is a phonetic spelling of "pend oreille", crude French for "hangs from the ear". This was the hideout for the Ponda Ray family.

With few prospects for fighting through the mob hideout, the group skirted around the lair by going North. They stumbled through a few more rooms piled with bones, triggered the wrath of a spooky gestalt spirit that chased them down a passage through a room staked out with the dessicated remains of occult criminals, and ended up in a room filled with grave goods. Looting this chamber proved fruitful: they discovered a valuable bolt of ancient cloth, and a magic hammer that did bonus damage to outlaws.

The next room had a glass barrow, with the body of a perfectly preserved chatelaine inside. Her hands were clasped around a flail - clearly an object of great power. Luchetti boldly smashed the case open and grasped the magic cudgel. The flail of mutilation inflicted a horrible wound with every hit, in addition to its damage (which was itself modest). The crackling of broken glass as he hauled the club out almost covered the sound of silent feet, approaching from all entrances to the room.

Two death cult assassins entered and were promptly bludgeoned to death with magic weapons, their advantage of surprise lost. The squad took the death cultists' knives and candles, and squeezed into the passage. The two cultists who had successfully cast Invisibility attacked Cobb, the last man in line. They stabbed him twice from surprise, severing his arm. Their invisibility gone, they too were unceremoniously clubbed to death.

(The death cultists have a 3 in 6 chance to cast Silence, Invisibility and Bleeding Curse. Two of them succeeded in turning invisible before joining battle, and two failed. I wasn't sure if NPCs were allowed to keep rerolling a failed spell until they succeeded, so I erred on the side of them pressing the attack while still visible.

If they'd kept trying and waited until they were all invisible, the fight would have gone very differently. Two knives each for the two guys carrying magic weapons to cut through their flesh and down them fast, then go to work on the rest of the group. But that's not how things worked out. And if anyone's going to press a futile assault to get a hit in, it's death cult assassins)

The group sifted through the corpses for a compatible arm to replace Cobb's mangled one, but none of the dead cultists were a match. With their doctor maimed, the group decided to head back to the Blood For Sex and plant the third device the next day.

The booth held a group of nondescript criminals, who didn't recognize the players and the players didn't recognize. Cobb speculated they might be the smugglers. The gang decided to take a look down the West passage out of the club, before calling it a night. They found that it led to the same sewer chamber that the mobsters had told them the tombs connected to. They visited a couple chambers and turned back, not in the mood to deal with flooded chambers and pools of calcifying water.

They decided as long as they were in the underworld, they might as well check out the Eastern passage from the underground nightclub. It led to a chamber beneath the warehouse in the bad part of town. Luchetti went to search a pile of rubbish and was mobbed by a trash golem, which the team promptly hacked to death. They scraped a few dollars out of its corpus and went back to the club, and up to the surface.

(The players were respectful of the IRL time limit, recognizing that they weren't going to place the final sensor in time. They used their remaining time to explore other areas before returning to the surface. )

At the end of the night, their map of the underworld looked like this.

Finally, Cobb went home to get himself a new arm. The alligator legs in his fridge weren't going to cut it, lacking opposable thumbs. He decided to use the gray mold sample he harvested on the way to the serpent ruins. Slime molds form complex biological structures in times of food scarcity, so if he bred enough mold, kept it starved, and fed it the right chemical signals, he could cause it to form a facsimile of a human arm, that he could control. Attaching a starving flesh eating mold to his body turned out to be a bad idea. It worked, in the sense that the mold definitely formed a human arm that he could control. But he also discovered that if he didn't feed it regularly, it would devour him.

(This was suggested by one of the players. My initial decision was to just have the mold eat some of Cobb's CON and make the transplant better. I'm glad I changed my mind)

Having a Doctor as a player character makes a universe of difference. Without a Doctor around, character degeneration is almost inevitable, with players picking up disabling wounds and only recovering them in the very long-term, once they have the contacts and resources to buy medical treatment. With a Doctor in the party, relief is a Medicine roll away, plus a little time and a few harvested body parts if you got stuck with a bad wound.

I think permanent wounds are a neat idea, but they present the same problem as in Delta Green: get a malus slapped on the wrong thing, and your character might become useless at the one thing they were good at, leading to immediate retirement. The odds of this are even higher in Esoteric Enterprises, where most characters have pitiful or even nonexistent skills starting out.

One thing I didn't include in the writeup proper is how the players stopped almost every room to argue, debate and re-litigate their actions. After running Delta Green for years, this is a pattern I recognize. In a lethal and unpredictable world, players often respond with caution and careful planning. You can apply in-game pressure by having the NPCs act in the background or rolling for random encounters while the players debate, but I don't think that's a good solution - it just ratchets up the paranoia further and encourages even more scheming. Cutting off planning and asking the players pointedly what they're doing works up to a point, but can also cut off discussion unfairly and cede the floor to whoever shouts their idea first and loudest.

The other thing that delayed the group was arguments over the map. This is the cost of OSR style mapping, where the players are made responsible for tracking dungeon rooms, entrances, corridors etc on a map they make themselves. Like the Alexandrian said, mapping chews up a lot of game time when you make the players do it. The players fucking up the map and getting lost is fun the first time, but the tenth time it's just frustrating for everyone. And because the DM isn't even drawing the room they're currently in, you get a lot of "wait, what are the exits from this room again"? And if I, the DM, make a mistake in describing the layout of the dungeon, it's not obvious to me or the players until much later in the game. The big advantage of player mapping is that it saves me, the DM, from having to duplicate everything I draw on paper in the Roll20 (dungeon nodes in Esoteric Enterprises are generated by dropping dice on a physical piece of paper). I think if we were at a physical table, I'd just draw it for them.

I had a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to the next session. It'll be set an in-game day later, in a city where things are rapidly getting worse, as the group tries to place the final sensor.