Esoteric Enterprises - Session Eight, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

The Kimeras were joined by a fifth musketeer before they descended into the underworld again.

• Tristan Vedhart, Babyfaced "Artist" & Fast Talking Runner (Explorer, Level 3)

Tristan drank too much and slept through all the messages. Then it took him an hour to get to the Vinculum from Cobb's house on the West Side. This gave the rest of the Kimeras time to recover from their injuries.

(Esoteric Enterprises lets Occultists cast spells without spending slots if they take a 10 minute dungeon turn to do so, meaning they can heal Flesh for free if they've got Cure Wounds. Sort of like ritual casting in 5e)

United, the five dungeoneers descended into the underworld again using the Vinculum stairs. Their target: the Lithic Courts and the Limestone Caves they'd visited the previous week. With the rock people and mercenaries gone, there could be all kinds of treasure and equipment left behind to salvage.

The Lithic Embassy was cold and silent. The volcanic activity had ceased and all the magma was solidified into lumpy stone structures. The treasury was empty, the rock people took all the precious metals home when they left. The deep pit with the elevator was sealed by a cap of black marble, smeared and pressed like a wax seal on an envelope. The hand truck marks went through the abandoned embassy and to the West, into the Limestone caves. There was a big tarp over the entrance, with the MIB logo on it. There was a tear in the tarp, human sized, through which the hand truck marks led.

Tristan put on his night vision goggles and scouted ahead in the dark tunnel, past the big bridge the Lithics had carved across the melted caverns to the mercenary camp. The big barricade the mercenaries had guarded last week was knocked over, the tunnel bored out by a large, worm shaped object. Tristan heard the sound of clattering weapons, at the same time as the guy on the other side of the piled sandbags heard him. He shouted a greeting, and the guy on the other side shouted in response. Both parties used shouted greetings to alert their comrades that they'd made contact with an unknown visitor.

Tristan and the Kimeras rushed over the barricade. The man on the other side wore a long knife, a bulletproof vest and a pair of strange goggles. Tristan tried to taze him, but he disappeared into the tunnels. The gang realized that the clattering weapons were the piled up leftovers of the mercenary operations, which the strangers had been so helpfully gathering. Long guns, a pistol and a heavy machine gun.

Devin tried to cast False Sound down the hallway where the unknown man had fled. Looking down the tunnel was a bad idea. The text scrawled on the wall seared his mind, and for a moment he felt his consciousness slipping away, replaced by an urge to ask the Kimeras whether they had seen/heard about this. The urge passed. Also, he flubbed the spell. The Muses demanded that he construct an offering to them before he be allowed to cast again.

The Kimeras heard someone moving through the caves to the Southeast. They waited too long to rush in, and barged into an empty chamber. The footprints led to the Northeast, back into the tunnels toward the Lithic Embassy. The Kimeras followed cautiously. But not cautiously enough.

Five assailants opened up on the group as they crossed the big bridge over the melted chasm. Four with long guns, one with a Bleeding Curse. The Kimeras flicked off their lights and retreated back across the bridge before another volley could eviscerate them. The second ambush they'd walked into tonight, and this one really hurt. They made it back to the barricade and holed up to wait for the counterattack.

Devin took inspiration from the Mercenaries' left over trench art and whittled some used 12.7mm brass into a little effigy of the Muse Euterpe. Magic restored, he cast False Sound and simulated a gunfight, to make the hostiles think the Kimeras had run into the brainwashed mercenaries and been wiped out. Instead, the gunfire attracted a pair of curious cave orangutans, which the Kimeras promptly gunned down and harvested for spare parts.

After waiting for a good half hour, the Kimeras sent Tristan to scout ahead across the bridge. The unknown antagonists had retreated into the Lithic Embassy. The Kimeras gathered the weapons they stole from the other explorers and headed for home. They didn't encounter any resistance. The ambush had been a one off, buying time for the unknown combatants to get away.

They briefly explored a couple new rooms in the Lithic Courts, and climbed the stairs back to Vinculum. The Earring at the top of the stairs thought this was pretty funny. He chastised them for attacking the "new guys" drinking at the bar. The explorers the Kimeras interrupted had used the same dungeon exit. The mafia greaseball warned the group against starting a fight in the bar, took his 20 percent vig, and turned them loose.

There were five adventurers drinking at the bar. The Speedfreaks Underground:

• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary, Level 1)
• Reed Reeve (Mercenary, Level 1)
• Alan Large (Criminal, Level 1)
• Helga Roentgen (Occultist, Level 1)
• Kay "The Doors" Geller (Mystic, Level 1)

They asked the Kimeras what the fuck they thought they were dong. Tristan told some bullshit story about self defense. He got an earful from Seaxneat, the guy he tried to shoot in the back.

Sax patiently explained that the scramble goggles he had worn in the caves protected him from viewing the dangerous writing scrawled on the wall. It was criminally irresponsible of the Kimeras not to do the same. Eileen tried on a pair and had to agree: they made it impossible to read anything. Johan and Tristan bought the Speedfreaks a round. The Speedfreaks realized that they were talking to the Kimeras. Their attitude shifted from indignation to barely suppressed fear. They were lucky to be alive after tangling with these murderhobos.

The two Speedfreak magic users had a book with them that they'd found among the dead mercenaries' personal effects. Johan recognized it as the package they delivered to the Fat Sun mercenaries in the very first expedition to the underground. He warned the two ladies that it was a source of dangerous power. Helga and Kay replied that the book held the spell Rock to Mud, which is probably what the mercenaries had used. Zeke saw an opportunity and tried to insinuate himself with the women, asking if they were interested in meeting some time to swap spellbooks. They were more interested in feigning politeness until they could get the hell away from the gang of violent murderhobos. Alan Large lamented the fate of the Unseelie Queen and her adopted children, who at the moment were besieged in their creche by angry fey creatures.

The Speedfreaks finished their drinks and left. The Kimeras took a walk in the rain to the Blood For Sex, to collect payment for the destruction of the Buddhas. A group of gangsters followed them, clearly hostile but unwilling to get within stabbing distance. Tristan slipped away and snuck up behind them for a closer look. They were the surviving Fat Buddhas, armed but obviously frightened. He tazed the meanest looking one from surprise. The rest of the Kimeras opened up with firearms but didn't hit anything in the dark. Losing their leader was enough for the Buddhas though. They grabbed the stunned gangster and retreated into an alley. The Kimeras decided not to press the attack, and continued to the club.

The Blood For Sex was a hive of activity. The barkeeps were delighted to see the Kimeras, who had cut a bloody swathe through the Fat Buddhas, and paid up accordingly. They were similarly delighted by the violence in the Fairy Enclave, and the imminent demise of the Queen and her adopted family. The Kimeras debated what kind of car they would buy with their earnings, hoping to remedy the transportation issues that had plagued the group for weeks.

At the end of the game, the underworld map looked like this

I learned a couple or three things today about the system. First of all, the Occultist character class is dramatically better than the Mystic. The Occultist can add new spells from spellbooks, cast stuff for free by waiting a dungeon turn, and generally deal with a lot less bullshit to get their spells out. Meanwhile, Mystics have a spell list limited by their patron, and have to make Charm rolls every time they cast, often with disastrous consequences. I can see what the tradeoff was supposed to be - something like the Wizard vs the Warlock in 5e, versatility versus consistency. But the way it worked out is, the Occultist has versatility AND consistency, while the Mystic has neither.

I went back through the player book to create the rival adventuring party using the chargen rules there, and noticed a couple or three things. First, it wasn't finished. I'd given the players one of the in-development PDFs from /osrg/ by mistake. Second, there was a lot of character creation stuff in the full book that wasn't in the one I'd given the players. Stuff like the list of premade cults the players can join. I went back to my drivethroughRPG library to grab the finished player book, and there wasn't one. Just an art-free version of the complete book. Very annoying!

I've had a lot of demand for Esoteric Enterprises, with more players than seats available. I'm either going to increase the number of sessions to two a week, or move from "first come, first serve" to allowing an infinite number of signups, then bumping the players with the highest number of sessions played until I have five remaining. Maybe I'll do both.