Esoteric Enterprises - Session Three, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

The next day, the occultists caught a union rep at You Have to Eat the Eggs and picked up their payout. Encouraged by their easy victory and overwhelmed by a lust for gold, they decided to go for a second payout. The Red Caps offered them a thousand dollar payout if they'd hit a restaurant owned by their rivals, the Fat Buddhas: The Pho King. The place was a stash house, surely full of riches. Easy pickings for an experienced cabal of dungeoneers. Encouraged by the barkeep's words of encouragement, the players decided to hit the place during the day, to REALLY make a statement. The barkeep gave them red hoods to conceal their identity, and make it obvious who was behind the hit.

The Pho King was a two story noodle joint in the transition zone between the still-surviving downtown and the disused mine district. Kaldron and Cobb took the front, while Lionel and Tristan went in the back entrance. Kaldron fired a gun in the lobby to clear the diners out, while Lionel and Tristan breached the back door. A swipe of Lionel's mace and a jolt from Tristan's taser took down the thug and drug pusher in the kitchen, and the squad commenced looting. They emptied the register and grabbed some loose cash from the kitchen. Then four hoodlums from upstairs burst in and opened fire. Tristan took a bullet in the leg and went down, bleeding out fast. Kaldron and Lionel hacked down the two toughest thugs in response, sending the other two packing. Cobb stabilized Tristan, Kaldron knocked over the grease trap. They ran out into the alley and tossed a molotov behind them, setting the building ablaze before more goons could filter down from upstairs.

(The death and dismemberment tables are full of unique and interesting results, but too many of them have "also, you're bleeding out" at the end. There's no point to having a cool result that inflicts long term damage if the same result also kills the victim anyway. They do make the Doctor a valuable addition to the party, but again, it takes us into "Cleric tax" territory. Most characters have a 1 in 6 chance to heal bleeding out, and failure accelerates it.)

Without a car, the group had to escape on foot. Kaldron knew an abandoned store nearby where they could hole up, but the police were approaching fast. Instead of trying to limp away, Tristan and Cobb unmasked, ditched their weapons, and posed as civilians caught in the shooting. Kaldron and Lionel ran into the warren of abandoned businesses and defunct housing, just ahead of a mysterious suited man who emerged from a police cruiser behind the two harness bulls.

The suited man followed Lionel, walking at a leisurely pace, yet keeping up with him. Lionel couldn't escape, and didn't want to fight a cop, so he struck up a conversation. The man in black introduced himself as Agent Kid of the bureau and flashed his badge at Lionel, who dropped his weapons in response. The man explained that he was in town to contain a dangerous situation in the underground, and he needed to speak with the party which released the chaos beasts. Lionel agreed to answer whatever questions the man had, but warned that he wasn't there on the expedition. Kid stuffed Lionel's mace and shield in an evidence bag and led him to a waiting black Ford, driven by the similarly suited Agent Karla. They got in and drove off.

At the MIB safehouse in the Tail, the Agents introduced Lionel to the third member of their trio: an enormous hunched man in a porcelain mask, sat quietly at the dining room table. They reassured the stooped giant that all was well, and sent him out to ensure they weren't followed.

The MIBs explained to Lionel that the release of paradox beasts into the underworld one week ago posed an existential threat to the safety of the city, and they'd been sent to deal with the situation. They'd negotiated passage to the underworld through the Museum with the Fairy Enclave, but when their "friend in the mask" entered the underground, he couldn't find any trace of the beasts. The lab had been picked clean of useful evidence. Documents, chemicals, everything. Lionel recalled Kaldron trying to sell a sheaf of wrinkled pages to the head librarian the previous day, claiming they were full of recipes for making chaos beasts. He informed the MIBs of this, and they decided to just pay Kaldron for the documents. They asked Lionel to set up the transaction.

Lionel realized he didn't have Kaldron's phone number, because Kaldron didn't have a phone. He called Tristan instead. He got Tristan's mom. Tristan's mom didn't know where he was, but she'd give him the message. Tristan was with Cobb, who offered to fix his leg up. Cobb could have easily done it if he had a compatible human leg to replace Cobb's mangled one with, but he didn't. There was an alligator carcass with its legs still twitching in the dumpster behind Club Vinculum from yesterday, but Tristan didn't want an alligator leg. How would he face his mother?

So Cobb took Tristan to a normal hospital and said he was one of the victims of the Pho King shooting. Then he went home and found the twenty messages Lionel had left. He put in a tip with the Red Caps at the Blood For Sex that someone was looking to buy the pages from Kaldron. Kaldron showed up at the club the next day to claim the payout for the job. The Red Caps were impressed with his talent for violence. They offered their help if he ever wanted a cadre of knife wielding crooks to accompany him on a job. When they told him about the meet in the park with a suited stranger to buy his paradox beast notes for 500 dollars, he almost asked them to come with. The whole thing seemed sketchy. But he knew that, if the job was legit, they would still try to gank the buyer. So he went alone.

In the park, across the pedestrian bridge, was a large man in a porcelain mask. It was pouring rain, but his suit was dry. He said he was happy to be in the park. Happy to be useful to Kid and Karla. He took the pages from Kaldron and gave him an envelope with the money. Kaldron smelled ozone and heard the sound of sizzling bacon when the guy got close to him. Then he walked away. When he turned to look, the masked man was standing in the rain, staring at nothing, like he was sad. Then he looked at the badge cradled in his hands and disappeared. The MIBs released Lionel, and everyone collected their earnings from the job.

At the end, the map of explored areas looked like this

Session three didn't surprise. All the problems that stood out were problems in sessions two and one, and all the fun parts were also fun here. The players all agreed that the setting was great. Three games in and the world has really come alive, practically writing itself. I still think the game could do more to support the generation of the above-ground world at the beginning. I haven't really been using the random event generators because each session sets in motion events that plant the seed for next week's game.

The group demonstrated that they could really clobber their foes if they got the initiative, but anyone left alive to counterattack was going to hurt them and hurt them bad. Nobody has rolled a Mercenary so far and few people have made magic users, the group preferring Criminals and Explorers for their high skills.

Lionel's player said the Bodyguard class felt a bit useless, getting loads of HP and decent saves but not much else - a purely reactive character. I know it's just a reskinned dwarf, but I think the class should have the ability to take hits for other players - diving in front of bullets or pushing them out of the way of traps. Missed opportunity. I realized as I was writing this that he had recreated the Man At Arms from Darkest Dungeon with his character.

Players have been averaging about one level per session, though most of that is 1 to 2 since every week has been mostly new players. I like this rate of progression and I think multiplying experience gained by 5 is a good idea. The world is full of dangerous shit that kills you no matter how high your level, but advancement gives people more options to tackle it in interesting ways.

More to come next week in Session Four.