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

Cow Town, the "overflow" game of Esoteric Enterprises, was populated with the usual suspects from the regular game. I didn't get the cavalcade of new players I expected, but I did get one person who played some of the early Coal City games but dropped out.

I really enjoyed this session. There were a few moments where things dragged, because the procedural dungeon generator kept spitting out results the players had already seen in Coal City. But I feel good about running more sessions in Cow Town. I'm going to use it as a testbed for the crime and gang building mechanics I've been working on.

In attendance were a trio of Level 1 characters, created by a trio of regular players.

• Acrasia, Dream of Hunger (Spook Lvl 1)
• Larry Lippman, One-half of a man on the run. (Explorer Lvl 1)
• Elsa Vísendakona, Gun Toting Goth Chick & Idol to Children Everywhere (Occultist Lvl 1)

The gang met at the Silo, a bar in downtown Cow Town.

Larry was fresh off the train from Coal City, which he needed to get away from. Acrasia was a fairy, dreamed into existence fully formed only a day or two ago. Elsa had a car, and knew about a job: the explorers out in the Love Shack in the East Side were offering payment for some underworld explanation.

The Love Shack was an old brothel on the edge of town. It had been closed for years, ever since they put the K-12 school in down the road. Now it was home to a bunch of Underworld Explorers, who never seemed to be there when the cops arrived.

Elsa drove past the only accredited religious institution in town, the Megachurch, where live snakes were released into the pews every Sunday. Past the failing K-12 school, popularly known as the meat grinder by alumni.

The Love Shack was camouflaged to look abandoned, overgrown and boarded up. The group hid their car in a copse of trees and looked for a way in. There were no obvious points of ingress, but eventually a teenage kid hidden in the window well took pity on them and showed them how to get into the basement.

The window well led into an old bar and lounge. Some of the structure was original to the old brothel, with doors leading to the assorted sex and dressing rooms. Others were carved out of the living rock, melted into arches and vaults, with benches, tables and chairs of melted and reshaped stone. Adrian, the 16 year old kid who invited them inside, said this was the work of the "Thonists" who frequented the place. The Thonists were also the ones who kept the place hidden during police raids, by resculpting the stone of the dungeon.

The woman in the next room objected to Adrian sharing all the explorers' secrets. Her clothes were sticky with webs, spiders crawled in and out of her mouth when she spoke to the adventurers. Radna the Arachnophile explained that the explorers were interested in the Sink, the big meat pit in the South side of town. They couldn't get in through the surface, because United Meat Train had stepped up security. She'd pay 1,000 dollars for a map of an underground route. It was probably South, then Southwest, somewhere.

The gang thought this a fair price. Radna showed them the way into the underworld: the cement wall in one of the old brothel rooms tore open like a layer of rubbery skin at her touch, forming a portal to the space beyond. She explained that it would open for them on the way back in. If she wasn't there, give the map to Adrian and he'd give the money.

The chamber beyond the passwall was the generator room of a research facility. It was plugged into the wall of the Love Shack basement, suggesting the explorers used it for power. The door to the South was labeled ADRIAN'S DARKROOM - GO AROUND, so the adventurers went around. To the west was a chamber filled with odd canisters. The only door out of there was locked. Someone was moving around on the other side of the door. The gang yelled a greeting. The voice from the other side said they were lost and looking for a way out of the underground. The group went South, through the Darkroom and through a room filled with holding pens, meeting the strangers in an old archive filled with film, microfilm and audio tapes.

(I rolled a random encounter and got EIGHT fledgling vampires. I had a vampire nest keyed on the map, but I didn't think the players would encounter it until much later. So the session started with a bang)

There were eight of them, bloated and covered in tattoos, carrying pistols and big knives. They introduced themselves as helpless dungeon explorers, looking for a way to the surface. The players were happy to help them, and led them back to the cathouse basement. The passwall wouldn't admit them. It even burned one of the strangers when he tried to push through. The strangers asked where the players were going. The players told them they were scouting the Sink - the big meat pit on the South side. That got the strangers' attention. They said they knew the fastest way there. The gang happily followed them.

The eight strangers led the players West, out of the old labs and into an abandoned crypt. Through a tangled web of stacked bone corridors and chambers, into a study where a fat, bloated, tattooed, naked man scribbled in an enormous book. He removed his spectacles and angrily reprimanded the strangers for "bringing home strays". The strangers explained that the players were looking for a hidden route into the Sink. The fat man said that was no excuse for leading strangers right to the nest. He asked if the players were industrial spies working for DWC. They said no. He told the strangers to deal with the players, closed the book and left the room.

The players turned to negotiate with the strangers. The strangers gazed deeply into their eyes, paralyzing Acrasia and Elsa. Larry noticed his friends were insensate and shook them awake. Elsa immediately fled. The eight fledgling vampires attacked Larry and Acrasia, going for the throat. They tore a chunk out of Larry, leaving him critically wounded and bleeding. They did the same to Acrasia, but quickly discovered that fairies don't bleed - they got a mouth full of juniper and botanicals for their trouble. Nevertheless, the pair were seriously wounded, and both fled the vampire pack the way they'd came.

(I almost rolled an instant kill on Acrasia, but remembered just-in-time that the result on the horrible wounds table was based on the damage from the ATTACK that killed you, not all the damage you received that turn. So she went from an 11 (instant death) to a 4 (bleeding out, which she was immune to))

Larry's superior Athletics let him catch up to the fleeing Elsa, who magically healed him just just before he would have bled to death. Acrasia caught up to them soon after, and they fled the murderous night creatures. They ran back into the abandoned facility and sealed one of the doors behind them, but crucially neglected to seal the rest. Elsa pulled out her spellbook and applied magical healing to the group. The vampires caught up with them before they could pack up and get away, and battle was joined.

Elsa unleashed a hail of automatic fire and pinned two of the vampires. The remaining night creatures attacked with knives, guns and teeth. Stabbing, shooting and fighting defensively, the group slew six of the beasts and scared off the rest, but not before one of them put a lucky shot through Elsa's chest cavity, fatally wounding her. She went down guns blazing, firing her last bullet and collapsing foaming at the mouth. Acrasia took another bite that would have killed a human, but her fey origins protected her once again.

(The Fairy background package for the spook makes you immune to bleeding, negating one of the deadliest Horrible Wounds table results)

The two survivors took Acrasia's body, gear, and the vampires' credit cards, phones and guns (along with a single vampire corpse) back to the Love Shack. The passwall admitted them this time. The first person they met was Adrian, who stared at Elsa's body for a moment, then ran and hid. A big bald punk-rocker guy with a face full of black stone piercings asked them what the hell they were doing. He saw Elsa's body and "unzipped" a hole in the cement floor, offering a place to hide it until they could cover it up. The gang told him about the vampires and the nest to the West, which freaked him out. None of the facility doors to the West had ever opened before, they didn't know there was an entire hive of the fucking things a few rooms away.

Carl the Rock gave the group his phone and told them to call Doctor Klay and tell him they caught a live one, and he needed to bring everyone down. Then he took a stubby shotgun from behind a cabinet and went into the tunnels, intent on sealing the passage using his lithomantic abilities. Without first aid, the players were in no shape to help him. They called the number and summoned the doctor, and hoped that Carl made it back alive.

Adrian crept furtively back into the bar area. The players asked him if he knew anything about vampires. He said people told stories about them snooping around the meat processing plant on the South side. They asked him what DWC stood for, and he said it was the Delicious Weenie Corporation, primary rival to United Meat Train. DWC had unsuccessfully sued UMT for years to close down the Sink, the big hole where all the UMT cattle plants dumped their waste products.

The sound of heavy footsteps outside the window well interrupted the conversation.