Esoteric Enterprises - Session Two, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

Annoyed by the roadblock from the Vinculum entrance, the Occultists hopped in Bruschetti's car and drove to the West side of town, to try their luck at the old museum.

The Red Cap bartender mentioned that the entrance was in the closed wing of the museum, the one facing a sheer cliff over the ocean. The museum was closed for the night, and nobody wanted to pick a fight with security and get the police called on them again. Thankfully, Bruschetti's athletic acumen and Kaldron's climbing gear let the gang rig up a set of pitons and safety ropes along the cliff side. They peered in through the window, down into the off-limits gallery.

In the gallery, a troll and an ogre argued over a game of petanque. The ogre's enormous feet slipped slipped out of the ring every time he threw the boule, and the troll was growing weary of his cheating. Johan climbed down into the gallery to intervene in the dispute, and immediately established a rapport with the pair of fey creatures. Kaldron observed that, even though the ogre was a cheating bastard, the circle was clearly too small for either of them to fit in. They had to deviate a little from the official rules of boules if they wanted to have a clean game.

Satisfied that the Occultists were an alright group, the pair of fey sentinels had zero problem with the group descending the stairs to the fairy enclave. As long as Kaldron left his cold iron bat behind. The players looked in the crates around the gallery, which were full of marble statues. Valuable, but also far too heavy and bulky to be hauled out through the window and down the sheer cliff. Rather than fuss over stealing the sculptures, they descended into the fairy enclave.

The clean, pleasant, well lit room at the bottom of the stairs had exits in all four cardinal directions. The group went North and found themselves in a bustling market, filled with goblins and dwarves. A goblin merchant immediately accosted them with a hard sell, offering magical treasures in exchange for unsettling biological payments. Kaldron bought a powerful magic axe in exchange for five years off his life, while Johan and Bruschetti paid a point of CON each for a fireproof leather jacket and a talking flail respectively.

They peeked down the tunnel to the West, and immediately turned around rather than disturb the Unseelie Queen, distracted in the process of cuckolding the Seelie King with one of the Unseelie Lords. The passage East of the Goblin Market was filled with fungi and spooky glittering spores, and the group only had one gas mask. They improvised a solution, using a length of rope from the climbing kit to yank the mask back after each member of the group crossed, disinfecting it each time with gasoline from the molotovs.

(The fumes from smearing mazut on the inside of the mask should have made them sick, but I forgot the bottles were full of low grade fuel, since in my head "molotov" just means regular gasoline)

Before Kaldron could go through, a bearded Slavic sprite snagged his sleeve. The little domovoi asked if he could follow the explorers home. He offered to help them with his medical knowledge and telekinesis, in exchange for occasional payments of bread and milk. Kaldron was an anarchist, unable to accept even the willing servitude of the magical being, but through some mental gymnastics he rationalized a relationship of mutual voluntary cooperation with the sprite. The domovoi was immune to poison, and strolled right through the spores. Before they left, the Occultists bottled some of the spores, after the domovoi warned them that they caused powerful hallucinations.

The next room had a fountain, gushing water that crackled with magic power. The domovoi told them it was a necromantic pond, which would grant magic users knowledge of assorted death spells. Johan considered taking a dip, but decided against it. North of that, a banshee oracle and a pair of Unseelie Knights, argued over the proper way to invest a huge pile of treasure. The banshee expected the market to tank, while the Knights advocated a bold strategy. The group continued North rather than intervene in the debate.

In the tunnel, the cautious explorers halted when they heard insane babbling coming from the cavern ahead. The domovoi warned them that it was a black goat, a mad monster which commanded powers of wild mutation. If they wanted to fight it, they needed to kill it fast.

So Bruschetti snuck up and killed it with one swipe of his magic flail.

(The base rules for surprise mean that the players, who have miserable perception scores, and the monsters, who rarely have a perception score listed, usually detect each other at the same time as they run into each other. The descriptive text for the Black Goat says it gibbers audibly and wanders around mindlessly, so I gave the players the drop on it for free. Then Bruschetti had a great stealth skill, so sneak attacking it and hitting it right in the Flesh was a non issue.)

The next monster they ran into gave them more trouble, despite being much less threatening. The tunnel was "blocked" by a blind cave tortoise the size of a washing machine, eating fungus off the wall. It clicked its hyoid bone in a threat display when it heard them coming. Bruschetti just climbed over it no problem, and Kaldron followed suit, but Johan lacked their athleticism. Bruschetti kicked the tortoise to get its attention and was bitten for his trouble. He ran down the passage and the angry reptile dutifully ambled after him.

The cavern opened into a doctor's office, where a man and woman argued over how to dispose of old bottles of formaldehyde. Bruschetti hid behind an operating table until the tortoise ambled into the room. One of the surgeons jabbed it with a syringe of paralytic poison, so he could harvest its parts for experimental uses. Bruschetti and Kaldron sprung out of hiding, killing one mad doctor and chasing the other into the next room, filled with computers and improvised living arrangements. Bruschetti took a needle of poison from another doctor before Kaldron swatted him down, and the breakdancing Italian fell to the ground, bleeding from his lungs. Kaldron and the domovoi quickly stabilized him and dragged him back to the office. Nobody liked the sounds they heard coming from the next room over.

In the doctor's office, Johan beseeched his brain worms for help and dropped a Hold Portal on the door to the living area, sealing whatever was inside for a good 70 minutes. This bought them time to properly treat Bruschetti's wounds, and to search the room for drugs. Johan dropped some magical healing, but the brain parasites demanded a rite of propitiation. Once a day, from then on, Johan would have to climb to the top of a tree or building, in case a bird wanted to eat him.

(When you get the "bleeding out" condition, you have rounds equal to your hit-dice, adjusted by your CON modifier, before you die. If someone uses the Medicine skill on you successfully, the rate of bleed is reduced to turns instead of rounds, giving you ten minutes per HD. In order to stop the bleeding completely, you need another Medicine check, and if you fail THAT roll, the victim goes back to bleeding out in a matter of rounds. It's a needless extra step)

The tunnel North of the mad surgeon's lab opened into a bomb shelter, quite similar to both the ones the group had explored earlier. So much so that the additional fuel containers, generators and food they discovered inside are not worth describing in detail.

(I rolled four bomb shelters total on the underworld map. After this game, I removed the two the players hadn't found yet and replaced them with something more interesting)

From there, North again, into unexplored territory. A smuggler tunnel, and the group was getting close to their goal. Then a voice from the darkness behind them.

Kaldron's night vision goggles showed a pair of troglodytes, covered in mysterious tattoos. One, a savant, mumbling numbers to itself. The other glaring at them with fiendish intelligence. It demanded to know what they were doing, and warned them against lying. The Occultists knew by now that the morlocks were opposed to the mercenaries, and concocted a lie. One moment, they were giving some innocuous reason for exploring the ruins. The next, they were lying on the ground, paralyzed, like someone had given them an electric shock. The tattooed caveman asked again. They answered truthfully. He warned them that they were interfering with powerful magic, and if they persisted to the ruins, something worse than morlocks would punish them.

(The random encounter table spat out toughest morlocks in the game, an elder and an eloi. The elder is an infallible lie detector. The eloi has a 5 in 6 chance to cast Time Stop)

The group weighed their options. They could push on to the completion of their goal, but they were in bad shape, and they didn't know how they were going to get out of the underground. They decided to find a way back to the surface, and worry about the ruins later.

(A player had to leave, and I didn't want to start the next game in the underworld, since I had no idea who would be playing next game)

Back at the bomb shelter, Johan opened a door and found the nuclear reactor control room from the week before. Thus oriented, he knew the way back to the mausoleum, where the group had entered the dungeon in session one. But the mausoleum was still under a police cordon. The players debated whether they wanted to fight the police, or whatever was lurking behind the door in the mad surgeon's lab, which must have escaped by now. They wanted to fight the monsters in the lab, but the domovoi warned them that this was a really bad idea.

(There were three paradox beasts behind the door. One of them ALSO randomly generated with the Time Stop ability. Fighting them would have been literal instant death)

There were two passages from the chamber below the mausoleum they hadn't explored yet. They tried the Southwest one. The ancient sewer tunnel was filled with water, which was filled with a river hag. The domovoi suggested they give her a nice gift, and she'd leave them alone. Desperate to escape the dungeon, they tearfully parted with a lovely statuette they found in the bomb shelter. The river hag swam around and spat water and let them past.

(I think the domovoi might have been too helpful, but he spent his entire life around fairies, it made sense that he'd know how to deal with this one)

The passage led back to the fairy enclave. The players ignored a heap of cursed treasure, and had a brief discussion with the Seelie King in the throne room. He thanked them for adopting the domovoi, and asked them what they were doing in the dungeon. Lacking the wherewithal for another confrontation, they answered truthfully. The king posited that the "punishment" the morlocks spoke of was a superstitious fear of the serpent men who once occupied the ruins. He told the Occultists they should leave immediately. A trio of paradox beasts were loose in the tunnels to the North, and the group really didn't want to be there when the counter strike came through. Dejected, the players climbed the stairs back to the surface, and left the museum the way they came in. By then it was about 8 in the morning, they'd spent the entire night underground.

By the end, the areas they'd explored looked like this

The players had some trouble with mapping, because I didn't make it clear enough that the passages between the discrete areas of the dungeon were kilometers long, as opposed to the passages between chambers within the areas. Still, the guy doing the mapping got pretty close to the genuine article.

One of the players pointed out that the tax assessed on dungeon profits by the Vinculum club is meaningless if it's not applied to the XP value of the items, since you can't actually buy things with money in the game system. I don't know if I want to fix this by taxing the XP value, or by coming up with a system to make money useful for buying things. If I had a price sheet for all the items in the game, I'd just use that and discard the resource system - except for the classes that get it as part of their advancement, who would receive cash payments instead.

I was annoyed with the player who had to leave, but only because he didn't say he had a hard stop until half an hour before he had to go. In the future, I have to make it clear that it's the players' responsibility to end the game outside the dungeon, and plan their delve accordingly. Better to leave without finishing the job, than get stuck underground at the end. There are a couple tables out there for randomly determining whether players stuck in the dungeon at the end of the game escape the underworld.

Overall I'm still having fun with Esoteric Enterprises. The fun stuff (exploring a procedurally generated dark urban fantasy world) is still enough to outweigh the unfun stuff (awkward or broken rules, procedural generation that sometimes produces uninteresting outcomes). Eventually the juice won't be worth the squeeze, but I plan on running a third session soon.