The players today:
- Larry Lippman, One-half of a man on the run. (Explorer Lvl 3)
- Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 2)
Carl met them in the basement. There were more people with guns than usual. He said the vampires had been creeping around outside at night. Scouting them, making people nervous. He was sick of it, and now he was going to set an ambush. They would help, right?
The gang decided to help. The Love Shack and the explorers were their best friends in Cow Town. And the vampires were real assholes. They had until nightfall to plan it out. The other jobs could wait.
Carl had identified where the vampires were coming from. They were leaving their vehicles at the drive-in theater and running across the highway to the West of the Love Shack, before sneaking up outside the building. So the thing to do was, set an ambush for them tonight.
Larry met up with the new member of his crew: Hatchet Hands Fred, a retired mobster from Coal City who discovered he couldn't cut it in civilian life. Fred had been working for Larry on some loan sharking in the East side. Now, Larry handed the old man Elsa's M16, loaded with silver 5.56.
(Fred was generated using the new crew rules I'm working on)
They decided to open up on the vampires once they came across the highway, pinning them with the speeding cars cutting off their retreat. Larry placed a claymore he had taken from the survivalist camp in the underworld frontier. Cassie worked with Carl and Raban (the Explorers' quartermaster) to prepare cover and camouflage.
They killed some time before sundown by asking Carl about the dungeon butcher they heard about. Carl said he lived in the ruins South of the Cthugha Cult's fortress, but they needed to steer clear. The guy was a cannibal.
Night fell. Ten figures and a pair of dogs dashed across the highway from the drive-in theater, illuminated briefly by the sodium lights. The ambush was set up so that the light from the highway would silhouette the hostiles, even in the darkness. The vampires didn't detect the mine in the dark, and the dogs didn't detect the men with guns.
The bomb tore through the vampires. Carl turned the soil beneath them into a quagmire and the gang opened up. Cassie tossed a grenade into the muck. Fred mulched the opposition with well aimed bursts of automatic fire. The thugs almost hit Carl with panicked blind fire into the night, but were soon driven back across the highway, where a couple were hit by cars.
Satisfied that the snooping vampires had been driven off, the team rushed forward to loot the corpses. They discovered that most of the dead bodies were humans, members of the Renfield gang that served the Vampires.
(I decided that bringing one of your Crew meant giving them part of your share of the loot/XP after the job was done, in order to establish a cost for the enormous force multiplier they provide)
One of the cars that hit a gangster was pulled over on the shoulder. The driver was probably calling the cops. Carl summoned up his power and melted a hole in the stone under the mud pit, sucking all the ooze and corpses underground before covering it up with a layer of earth. Like none of it ever happened. Except for the bodies in the road. Nothing anyone could do about those except run for it.
So they got in the van and drove away. Back to the hotel downtown for the night.
The next day, they decided to pay the occultists a visit. The Love Shack was a little too hot for another visit - the police hadn't found ALL the bodies, but they'd found a couple. Instead, they went to the abandoned rail yard, to try and find the mysterious grate to the abandoned rail tunnel they'd been exploring for the past few weeks.
The old train yard was fenced off, still patrolled by a few railway bulls to prevent kids from running wild vandalizing the place. Cassie and Larry slipped past them without being detected, and broke through the padlocked grate without incident. Down into the tunnel they went.
Someone had a light on in the old archives, off the abandoned storage siding. A guy in a welder's mask and heavy coveralls, sweating glowing embers into the air, looking through the drawers for papers to burn. Larry stepped forward to introduce himself, and the pyromancer panicked and summoned a wall of fire to cover his escape. Cassie and Larry went the long way around, through the abandoned HAZMAT siding, and followed the trail of open doors where the pyromancer had fled, to the Occultists' lair.
The Occultists' lair was blocked by a wall with a mural on it. A hand of mysteries, surrounded by iridescent spheres. After verifying that the wall wasn't an illusion, Larry tried a variety of passwords to make the wall reveal its secrets, and eventually settled for shouting at it to open.
Two people appeared in the mural. Larry recognized them as the illusionists he met in the tunnels two weeks ago. They admonished him for startling Wayne. He could have thrown a fire ball instead of a fire wall, and then where would they be? They explained the job: go to the cistern on the West side, get some water, bring it back, get paid $1,500. They left the way they'd came.
On the way back, a train pulled up to the abandoned storage siding. A passenger train, with its lights on and its hull covered in rust, and mildew and mold spilling out the open windows. A small corpse in a conductor's uniform got out and lit a cigarette. A small woman and a large man with a big knife got out after him and disappeared into the tunnel toward the surface.
The corpse conductor told Larry this was the ghost train from Coal City. They had one more stop to make in Cow Town before returning - at the sanctum on the West Side. Larry and Cassie debated paying him two bits and seeing where the train went, but decided not to risk it. They followed in the footsteps of the mysterious figures and returned to the abandoned rail yard the way they had come.
Something had riled up the guards. They were spotted leaving, and had to hop the fence and run for it. Larry made it to the car, but Cassie lagged behind. He pulled the van around to pick her up. As she got in, they saw one of the security guard radioing their license plate in. Not good.
The Art Gallery Downtown charged them $50 a head to get into the basement, up from $20 last week. The front desk lady warned them not to go East - the Renfields were pissed at them. They didn't stick around to view the new exhibits. Went straight through the arch with the melted face, to the fire cult's lair.
A man with obvious grafted skin was scraping ash off the big mural of Chthugha. He told the team to sacrifice their items, stay on the path, etc, same story as before. Cassie and Larry tossed some of the worthless crap they'd taken from the dead thugs into the blaze. Not a sacrifice of value, except through the blood (and vampiric saline) they shed to acquire it. The chamber that once held a plasma elemental now held a sickly looking brown dwarf elemental. It begged for food like a dog until Cassie tossed it a throwing knife to incinerate - which brought a little color back into its corona and turned it into a red dwarf. The scorched, eyeless cultist in the next room asked them not to feed the elemental any more, for the same reason you wouldn't feed a stranger's dog. The fume hood/altar was locked up while a cultist crawled around inside its internals, repairing some defect. The sign to the south said RUINS ACCESS.
RUINS ACCESS led into a ruined bedroom, with furniture tossed everywhere. The only item of interest was a pair of glowing blue gloves, hanging out of a chest of drawers.
Larry reached for the gloves. The Angler Turtle bit his arm off.
(The monster manual entry for the angler turtle says you don't get a save to see through its illusion until AFTER it attacks you, making it hypothetically one of the deadliest monsters in the game)
Bleeding and panicked, Larry ran into the room to the South. The floor was silty and wet like quicksand, and it was only Cassie's quick intervention with her climbing gear that stopped him from sinking. Neither of them had the medical expertise to stop the bleeding, and Larry bled to death. Cassie stripped him of his items and fled back to the fire cult's crypt.
The maintenance cultist was taking a break from fiddling with the fume hood. He asked where the other guy had gone. Cassie said he was dead. He pulled out his lighter and summoned two magma children from the melted room. They were going to get his body back and feed it to the all consuming flame, to blaze forever in the mind of the Great Lord of Embers.
In the trashed bedroom, the magma children tried to set a desk on fire. The magma turtle tried to bite them, but broke its teeth on their stony hides. They clubbed it to death with their flaming fists. Then they found Larry's body. Cassie took the legs and Paul the Fire Cultist took the head, and they carried him back under cover of the magma children. The funeral pyre accepted Larry's body, like it had Clem's last week. The flames licked the cultists, further crispifying them.
Cassie went back to the surface alone. The end.
This is the second Cow Town character who's bled to death in as many sessions. Most of the Death and Dismemberment table results include "also, you're bleeding out" as a corollary to whatever permanent injury they inflict. Without a Doctor, the other stuff might as well not be there, it's just fatal.
More next week.
So to keep track: Cow Town has killed as many players in four sessions as Coal City did in eleven sessions. And in Coal City, we were actively picking fights and making enemies.
ReplyDeleteI think we're facing two big problems. First, we've just been facing meaner random encounters here than in Coal City, which we can't really do anything about. But the other thing is that by the end of Coal City, we could always get five players together for a session. In Cow Town, it's usually two or three players, and we just don't have the flexibility or the raw manpower to keep going after taking hits to Flesh.