Esoteric Enterprises - Session Four, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

The sounds of roaring bears and shouting Unseelie Knights echoed down the tunnel as the gang entered the door to the bomb shelter. This was familiar territory. The gang had crawled it a couple weeks ago while looking for the Serpent Man ruins to the Northwest on a job for the mercenaries. They never made it there, but they did figure out the way through.

There was something new in the canned food room. A flashing light ahead. Zeke recognized the blinking as morse code, and translated for the group. It was the cousin of the living lamp from the library, talking about the group of vandals who had stolen a book. Whoever it was talking to didn't speak in flashing lights, so Zeke wasn't able to get the other side of the conversation until Kaldron loaned him his night vision goggles. The other creature was hideous. Eyeless, with baggy, hairless skin like a naked mole rat, and a necklace of human eyeballs, ingeniously preserved.

Thinking quickly, the group walked right up to these horrible creatures and introduced themselves. The lamp immediately flashed them, stunning Johan. The collector of eyeballs pounced on the mystic, swiping away his precious grit, but missing his vulnerable flesh, failing to take an eye. Kaldron hacked the collector to pieces, and the collector ran away as fast as its spindly legs could carry it.

(I made a mistake here. The living lamp is supposed to blind everyone for a round on a successful save versus stunning, and an entire turn on a failed one. The fight could have gone very differently - they probably would have killed the monsters the same, but the collector might have made off with an eyeball before dying. Then again, Johan was the only one not wearing his gas mask, and the rules text explicitly says the eyeball taking mechanic is blocked by protective goggles)

The old prayer room was as they left it two weeks ago, with ark and scrolls untouched. They took a break there and recovered some grit for the journey ahead. They'd need it.

The tunnel to the Serpent Ruins was long. The group had been ambushed there before by Morlocks, and everyone was wary. Because they were moving so carefully, they spotted the first hazard before it spotted them: the hypnotist from the Library a week ago, along with her four ensorceled thugs. Everyone who recognized her masked up and kept their mouths shut, while the people who she hadn't met did the talking.

The deception worked, sort of. The hypnotist told the group she was going to lurk in the old Serpent Ruins to the North, where she'd heard the assholes who robbed the Library were hiding. The occultists told her they were there to place a sensor device for the Men in Black, so that they could hunt down the Paradox Beasts haunting the underworld.

That was the wrong answer. The hypnotist did not like the Men in Black, and did not like them having a powerful magic sensor array in the underworld. She explained patiently that the device would let the MIBs track everyone in the dungeon. That they couldn't be trusted. Up ahead, a huge patch of grey mold seethed and writhed on the walls, floors and ceiling, clearly alive and hungry. The hypnotist consciously slowed, to let the gang move forward. In between the blob and her. She demanded that they drop the sensors on the ground. They attacked her.

(The players narrowly won a tied D6+DEX contest with a tiebreaker D2 roll)

Tristan got the hypnotist down with a lucky taser shot before she could start casting. The rest of the group attacked the four thugs before they could open fire with their pistols, killing two in rapid succession. The grey mold slowly oozed forward and slapped Kaldron and Zeke with its pseudopods, sapping a substantial amount of CON. They tried to finish off the hypnotist, who raised her hands in surrender, shouting "I'm not your enemy". Everyone lowered their guns. The thugs dragged the injured hypnotist away from the mold, and the gang followed. With their knowledge of spellcraft, Zeke and Kaldron knew she'd ensorceled them too, with a "suggestion" that they shouldn't attack her. Despite realizing this, they were powerful to raise a hand against her. Attacking them would have broken the spell, and she wasn't confident she could take them all with a single sleep spell, so the hypnotist retreated to fight another day.

With their goal in sight, the battered explorers debated how to deal with the gray mold. Walking back to get more mazut from the generators in the bomb shelter would take hours and hours. Eventually they realized they could just shoot the goo, and it had no recourse other than slowly crawling around. A couple magazines later and they'd cleared the path. On to the Serpent ruins!

The ruins lived up to the hype, filled with murals, horrible sacrificial altars and piles of treasure. The gang juked a shadow man that appeared while they were looting by fleeing in a circle through a series of rooms, planting the MIB device in the process. With one device planted, and their other two targets across the river, they decided to retreat to the surface instead of finding a crossing underground.

The hike back to the bomb shelter was long. The group stopped when they heard a series of explosions further down the tunnel, accompanied by flashes of light. Tristan borrowed Kaldron's night vision goggles and snuck forward for a look at the source. The tunnel was obscured by a thick membrane. A group of human figures were dimly visible through the membrane. The lead figure was shooting fireballs at the membrane, sending gooey chunks of it splattering around the tunnel. With a final blast, he broke through.

Tristan ran back to the group and warned them. They debated setting an ambush, but decided to hide in an alcove in the tunnel wall and see if the strangers would pass them by without a fight. Crammed into the tiny dugout in the wall, they watched as the other party passed by. A man, statuesque, like someone had dropped a generic 3D model of a muscular human being into the real world. Following him: two women, who glided like octopuses do along the sea floor. Finally, a normal guy in a corduroy jacket.

As the strange group vanished from view around a bend in the tunnel, the jacket guy turned around to address the gang.

"You were right to hide"

Then he left.

(At a rate of 120 feet per 10 minute turn, checking for random encounters every 30 minutes, hiking down a 1.5 kilometer long tunnel. I rolled for all the encounters they'd face, rather than narrating each 30 minute block and rolling one at a time. I rolled four encounters, and decided that enough was enough - while the tunnel encounters sometimes lead to interesting emergent gameplay, they just as often lead to a boring set-piece encounter, fighting monsters in a tube with only the option of advance or retreat.

Logically, if even of the four encounters rolled was motile, it would necessarily encounter the other three in the tunnel on its way. Just assume the toughest monster beats whatever else appears, and the players encounter that. The toughest monster rolled was a Promethean, two Posthumans and a Psychic. This same tunnel is where the players met the top level Morlocks a couple week ago. It's a dangerous place to explore!)

The trip through the bomb shelter to the chamber beneath the mausoleum was uneventful (except for an opportunity to correct the map Johan had been working on). The group was nervous about the necropolis, since the Sunflowers had taken over protection duty there. But nobody was interested in fighting their way back through angry bears and furious fairies to get out through the museum. So Tristan hoisted himself up to peer through the gap above the coffin, like the gang had done in week one. The mausoleum was empty, and he pushed the coffin aside. The group crawled through the hole.

The sound of swordplay was audible outside the crypt. Several tombs down, a skeleton in a suit of plates was fencing with a militiaman, teaching him the basics of longsword combat versus an armored opponent. The group headed in the opposite direction to look for a way out, evading the Sunflowers' attention. They found a likely section of fence to climb over, and tossed the grappling hook to aid their escape. Kaldron, Tristan and Zeke made it over on the first try. Johan and Cobb got stuck. The sound of whispered prayers grew louder from a nearby copse of graves.

Johan made it up over the wall. A damascened, jeweled corpse emerged from the mist, accompanied by two armed volunteers. Cobb tried and failed to scale the obstruction again, raising the suspicions of the mummified saint and her acolytes. Tristan tossed a smoke bomb to buy Cobb more time, but the mummy's true sight led her out of the cloud and into combat with Cobb. He struck at her with the blessed bat Kaldron had given him, wounding her. The militia followed the saint out of the cloud, and Johan summoned the phantom sound of machine gun fire ricocheting around them, sending them tumbling for cover. Cobb's fight with the saint went nowhere. He couldn't do enough damage to outrace her healing abilities, and she didn't have any offensive magic to hit him with. Johan fled the scene, his psychic parasites increasing the toll he would pay for future rituals.

Kaldron turned his magic axe on the fence, and cut through one of the bars. If he could just strike it again, or bend the metal back, the gap would be large enough for Cobb to fit through. The two Sunflowers recovered from the suppression and opened fire. They missed Cobb with a volley of pistol fire but struck Kaldron in the head with a handful of buckshot, killing him instantly.

(The developer said in an interview that the purpose of the "Horrible Wounds" section of the game is to provide more interesting consequences for falling to zero HP than instant death. It doesn't always work that way, because if an attack takes you to zero HP, you don't roll on the table based on how far "negative" you are, you just look at the attack's damage value. If you take 11 damage from a shotgun blast, and you don't have 11 total of Flesh and Grit, you look at the value for 11 on the ballistic weapons table, which is instant death.)

Cobb made one last escape attempt, and the time that Kaldron, Tristan and Johan bought him was finally enough. He landed on the other side of the fence. Thinking quickly, he grabbed Kaldron's axe,  hacked off a leg for Tristan, and fled into the night with the others. That bonus point of Athletics had finally paid off. And the haul from the fairy treasury and the snake ruins would be split four ways instead of five.


The next session will take place a day after this one in game time, rather than a week. The players are in the middle of the sensor placement job, and a bunch of other exciting stuff might happen in the next day. The players recognized their time was running out this session, and got to a good stopping place so they wouldn't risk ending the game in the dungeon.

Tristan got Kaldron's leg to replace his missing one, courtesy of Cobb attaching it. Normally, there's a 1 in 6 chance a random corpse will be biologically compatible with a new host body, but I waived that given the donor. Cobb's Medicine skill is 6 in 6, meaning he gets to do mundane operations essentially for free. He could get away with a lot more, grafting magical organs and giving people special powers, but then he'd have to roll saving throws to avoid mistakes that inflicted horrible status conditions on his patients.

Kaldron died fighting the bourgeoisie. His possessions, and his body parts, will help his comrades carry on the fight after his death. And the Sunflowers got to explain why, on the day the police withdrew the extra patrols from the Necropolis, they immediately shot a guy in the head and cut off his leg. I'm fine with the way it turned out, but it did expose a potential flaw in the death and dismemberment rules: they don't actually protect you from being oneshot by a powerful attacker. They only protect against being whittled down by chip damage from lesser threats.

The houserules I implemented after session three were well received. I still think the game is overly punishing for characters with low Athletics, who get left behind and pummeled while the rest of the group escapes. There are other ways out besides just running, but pursuit rules that don't depend on rolling a skill would be nice. What's interesting is that Lamentations (the game EE is based on) didn't use skill rolls, pursuit was based on movement speed and dropping items to distract the guy chasing you.

The next big change: I'm going to expand the size of the dungeons on the map (make the circles bigger), and reduce the length of the tunnels between, to something that can be traversed in a couple turns. In order to keep the same density of encounters, I'll roll more often while the players are exploring the actual dungeon rooms, rather than the boring liminal spaces between.