In attendance,
- Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
- Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
- Thurston East, Fragile Cyberneticist (Doctor Lvl 1)
She met the two new recruits at the Pound of Flesh, to explain the mission and hand out equipment from the pool. But before they could leave, a pair of enormous police officers showed up to shake down the truck for free BBQ, and immediately recognized Cassie. She'd been spotted leaving the abandoned rail yard yesterday, and was a suspect in a couple other cases. But they were happy to let her off with a warning, and a 200 dollar donation to the Cow Town Police Foundation.
The Gallery desk was manned by a bored artist with enormous headphones and a graphics tablet. She told the players to toss whatever they felt like in the donation jar, and went back to working on her porno commissions. Cassie didn't remember how to open the secret entrance to the basement, so they had to bother her again to open it. She said maybe they could deal with whatever was making so much noise downstairs.
Downstairs, someone was yelling and throwing furniture and sculptures. They caught fragments of the argument. The Hooker Slashers weren't happy about paying the gallery for use of their ROW. In fact, they were going to start charging the artists protection. The artists weren't having it. Someone fired a gun. The players ran for the dungeon entrance, before they could get caught in the fighting.
A pair of fire cultists were tossing cards into the big bonfire. The players warned them about the encroaching Renfields in the gallery. The cultists reminded them that THEY were the ones who needed to worry, since they had to leave the underworld somehow. The players debated going back and helping the artists chase the gangsters out. They decided not to handicap themselves with a combat encounter before completing their mission. Thurston was interested in the Cthugha Cult's religion, and resolved to browse their literature on the way back out of the underworld. They followed the marked path into the buried ruins.
On entering the wrecked bedroom that once held the angler turtle, the players got into a lengthy discussion about the map. This endless circular argument was interrupted by a man crawling from one of the passages, bleeding from a dozen knife injuries. "They're trying to kill me!" he shouted, fleeing into the fire cult's fortress. The sound of inane, childish giggling was audible from the narrow tunnel. A knife armed child poked her head in through another door, but was chased off by a hail of gunfire.
This prompted the group to continue their argument about where they were and what they were doing. Eventually they decided to take the initiative, and squeezed through the narrow tunnel the man had come from. The room was filled with dangling electrical wires, freshly severed, some of them still live. On the other side of the room, music played from a door marked LESTER'S CAFETERIA. A child ran out, laughing. A fat man in a hairnet and a butcher's apron waddled out after him, scowling, and assessed the damage to his electrical cables.
Thurston crossed the minefield of live wires and entered the cafeteria. Lester was happy to see a "normal person" in the underworld. The kids' hearts were in the right place, but they thought the best way to impress him was to fuck up the wiring to his restaurant. Not great! Thurston fixed the wires with his toolbox, and Lester rewarded him with a bag of meat stew, on the house!
The rest of the players entered the cafeteria and bombarded Lester with questions about the map. He explained the underworld regions surrounding the ruins. There was the reliquary to the West, the Fire Cult to the North, the Botanic Gardens to the Northeast, something horrible and inedible behind the blocked tunnel to the Southwest, and a Cistern to the Southeast. He also showed them his bounty board. He'd pay big money for the corpse of a Conger Eel, a Venomous Snake, or a Morlock.
With a better idea of where they were headed, the team thanked Lester and left to explore the next room. Scouting ahead, Cassie spotted a large vampire bat, amid a swarm of regular bats roosting in the room. The team quickly dispatched the large bat, but was stymied by the swarm of smaller bats, which eluded their attempts to swat it to death. This prompted a lengthy argument about what to do next. The argument was interrupted by a commotion coming from the cafeteria, back where they had just been.
(Pretty much every random encounter this session was rolled because the players were standing around arguing for so long)
It was the Servants of the King of the Universe again. A warparty, armed with flails. One stood guard outside the cafeteria, while the others confronted Lester inside. They shouted that his abominable cannibal ways had caught up with him. He shouted to get the fuck out of his restaurant. The players debated intervening. Elizabeth and Thurston weren't interested in making enemies. Cassie wanted to help Lester, but snuck into the room too late to stop what happened next: Lester bisected a zealot with his meat cleaver. The cultists' swift retaliation caught him in the head with a lucky blow, killing him instantly. Cassie backed off, rather than die defending someone who was already dead.
While his faithful fanatics upended Lester's grease traps and set fire to the shop, the Deacon explained to the players that Lester was a cannibal, who cut up humans and fed them to people. The only person human beings were allowed to eat was Christ, not each other. Thurston thought about the "imitation pork" stew Lester had given him, sloshing around inside his toolbox. The players asked how the Servants had found their way to Lester's Cafeteria, given their unfriendly relationship with the Fire Cult. The Servants described the path they'd taken from the Church Crypt on the East Side, passing the Cistern on the way. The players asked to accompany them as far as the Cistern, and the cultists agreed to shepherd them.
The Servants led the players through a series of looted, vandalized rooms they had cleared out. The players held up the expedition repeatedly to argue over the map. The Servants patiently waited for their wayward children to finish endlessly kibitzing.
By Jonah Criswell, drawn during the game
The cistern was a vast concrete chamber beneath a series of metal catwalks. The water at the bottom of the bowl was a ruddy brown and smelled like rusty iron and rare steak. The Servants said goodbye and continued on their way. Elizabeth wanted to come with them and use their underworld exit, but the priests weren't comfortable with her following them out just yet.
The players argued over who should descend into the pit. Thurston repeatedly refused to help, citing his fragile constitution. Elizabeth rolled her eyes, finished her Mountain Dew, and climbed the ladder down to the pit to fill the empty bottle. She knelt on the reeking shore of the pit and reached out to dip it.
She was in a cage, too small to stand up in. Her teeth were missing and there was a feeding tube down her throat. Her body was covered in sores where the metal pressed against it. Everything smelled like shit and blood. There were hundreds like her, in rows and racks all around her. Something moved outside on a walkway.
She was back on the shore of the cistern. She climbed out without filling the bottle. Thurston helpfully diagnosed it as a microseizure. The players decided to lore the bottle on a rope from their climbing gear to fill it. Easy.
It was easy to follow the route they came through back out. The sound of children giggling made them nervous, but not nervous enough to avoid crawling single file down a child sized tunnel. As the last player through, Elizabeth was totally defenseless when someone sank a knife into the back of her knee, mangling her leg. Thurston dragged her the rest of the way through and Cassie covered the tunnel with the shotgun. The giggling graduated to full-size laughter. Thurston stopped the bleeding and they fled back to the Fire Cult's lair.
Cassie scouted ahead from the Chthugha Cult's sacrificial pyre, to see what was going on in the art gallery. She found the place filled with hoodlums and vampires. Too many for three people to fight through. They were stuck, unless they came up with another way out. Thurston had an idea.
He was interested in the Great Lord of Embers, enough to join the fire cult if they would help clear the art gallery out in exchange. The cultists agreed, and initiated him into the first level of mysteries, burning his lungs severely and depositing a spark of Chthugha's wisdom in his mind.
The Servants of the Great Lord of Embers agreed to help their newest novice make it back to the surface. Paul the Initiate and Bao the Lay Cultist showed up with fireballs and flamethrower respectively, backed up by a Plasma Elemental and two Novices with firearms. Cassie snuck ahead to set up an ambush and fire the opening shots of the fight.
The first shot clipped a vampire, and the fire cultists rushed in. This time it was Elizabeth who held back (understandably, given her handicap) while the cultists opened up with a hail of napalm, fireballs, plasma and bullets. The gangsters were incinerated, along with a pair of bloodsuckers, and the rest fled immediately. Anticipating a counterattack, the plasma elemental quickly welded the door to the Hooker Slashers' den shut.
Unsurprisingly, the basement was on fire. Elizabeth and Cassie fled up the stairs to the surface, while Thurston stayed behind to continue his education with the fire cult. The artist was still at the front desk, holding down the fort until the rest of the collective arrived to retake the basement. The smoke billowing out of the staircase set off the sprinklers. The players told her the situation had changed, and the building was on fire. They ran away before fire, EMS and the police arrived. Cassie dropped Elizabeth off at the hospital and drove to Thurston's safe house in the suburbs.
Cassie had a strange dream that night. She was being led down a corridor that smelled like blood. At the end, a tattooed man put a tube against her forehead and pressed a button. Then she woke up.
The group reconvened next morning for a trip to the Love Shack. They still had to deliver the bottle of blood-water to the Seekers of the Path. Aside from a brief argument with Loy the Urban Shaman about the significance of hydroponic tulip bulbs, the trip through the abandoned facility and the underground rail tunnel were uneventful.
At the Occultists' wall, Joe the Illusionist accepted the bottle of cistern water and dispatched payment accordingly. He explained that the cistern of meat water was connected to something horrible that was happening in Cow Town. There was a reason everyone was having the same nightmares over and over, and the Seekers of the Path were going to find it. He wasn't thrilled when he learned the gallery burned to the ground.
The trip back to the surface was similarly uneventful. Thurston took Elizabeth back to his lab and laid out his options: he could either delay the operation until he found a suitable leg to attach to Elizabeth, or he could make her a bionic replacement. Elizabeth chose the robot parts, and Thurston got to work.
(I let the player forge the cybernetic limb using the Technology skill, which was high due to Thurston's ample intelligence)
Once again, having a doctor in the party makes a massive difference in player survivability. Bleeding out is a non-issue, and crippling injuries are temporary inconveniences rather than a reason to retire a character. It's nice that the class has something to do, but I don't know if I like the binary between "instant death" and "who cares".
Mapping has gone from annoying to absolute torture. The players stopped pretty much every room to re-litigate the map, bringing the game to a crawl over and over. It's gotten so bad that I don't know if I want to run Esoteric Enterprises anymore.
I could draw the maps myself for the players and reveal them in the roll20 as they explore. But this has two huge problems
- Mapping in roll20 is horrible
- This would more than double the amount of time it takes to generate a dungeon area, since I'd have to roll on the physical page, reference the book tables, then duplicate the map in roll20 using the clumsy and frustrating software interface
I really don't know what to do here.
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