Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Seven

Session seven was short and sweet. We had three players and they all kept their eye on the ball.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 1)

(Sax was a late arrival who didn't have a character sheet ready. Chargen in Esoteric Enterprises takes too long to do at the beginning of a session, but I had a spare ready to go from Coal City)

Sax met Cassie and Elizabeth at the public library, fresh off a job and looking for work. They decided to visit Radna, who had asked that they meet her at the old Pascal mansion. They were puzzled and disturbed by her insistence that they "bring bugspray" for the meet, and asked around town to see if anyone knew anything about the location. A repair technician from the Coal City Power substation next to the abandoned mansion agreed to talk to them.

The guy told them that none of his crew would go down into the basement of the substation without HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers, due to the spiders of unusual size that infested it. Some of them could talk and set traps. That was just the power station, he'd never gone inside the mansion because one room was bad enough. But there were sometimes cars parked outside the Pascal house, like people were there. He never bothered to investigate that either. The mansion wasn't CCP property, it's not like he could tell them to leave.


Sax drove the team to the mansion in his venerable Toyota hatchback - the only car they had that wasn't hot. There were indeed two vehicles parked outside the ruins of the manor, and a well traveled footpath through the old bottles and other trash into a staircase leading downward.

The stairs led down into an abandoned pool. There was a giant spiderweb in the deep end, with a desiccated corpse curled up in it. A human corpse with eight limbs. Sax descended into the pool to loot it while the rest of the team stood guard, and recovered a fine gold watch. Nothing even attacked him on the way out. There was a tunnel to the West, with a modern steel stepladder going up. Cassie snuck ahead for a look.

The room ahead was full of arachnophiles - sorceresses like Radna, devoted to the spider goddess Anassa Tleechy Neechy. The spider-women were entertaining a handful of men, plying them with sex and alcohol. The players decided to go straight in and announce that they were looking for Radna, counting on her friendship with the spider cult to win their friendship. The spider-cultists were happy to share a drink and point them in the right direction, as the oblivious johns licked and nibbled them. Radna was in the Northeast room of the manor, by the "Gate". And getting there would be easy.  Spiders are more afraid of you than you are of them.

The route the arachnophiles described took the players through an old game room filled with spider egg cases, which they carefully avoided disturbing. It took them into an abandoned gym, filled with nothing but old cobwebs. They peeked into a room filled with webs, corpses and treasure, but decided against looting it because of the giant black widows, funnel web spiders and jumping spiders on the ceiling. A pair of salticids followed them out, waiting for an opportune moment to strike. Sax kept a close eye on them, in case they got closer.

The group snuck through an abandoned dining room, where swarms of spiders wrapped in silk "skin" pretended to be human beings sitting down for a meal. The room after that was a flooded gallery, its waters thick with algae and home to a single diving bell spider. The team threw some objects to distract the creature, then hopped across the floating furniture one at a time. Then the jumping spider pounced on Sax. It knocked him off the table and into the water, but he stabbed it through the brain before it could do anymore damage. The swimming spider was distracted by the corpse of the jumping spider, allowing Sax to swim for safety.

The Gate was a tube of webbing, stretching out over an impossibly vast chasm like a bridge to a distant point of light. Radna scuttled across the web, fussing over the strands, an eight foot spider with a human face.

She asked the players to kill her. She was having intrusive thoughts about fucking Adrian and then eating him, and she would rather die than hurt him. Anassa was waiting for them on the other side of the web bridge. It would be up to them to finish her work. Elizabeth recorded her goodbyes, after a few false starts. Radna told them where she'd hidden her remaining possessions, if they wanted to loot what was left. Then Elizabeth shot her.

Elizabeth was the only one who crossed the Gate and walked into the web of Anassa Tleechy Natcha. The nest stretched off in all directions, strands forming bridges to other realities manipulated by the Mother of Spiders. The giant orb weaver coolly regarded the necromancer with the face on her abdomen. She gathered a skein of threads and cast a geas on Elizabeth. Like all the Weaver's orders, it was something her servant was already going to do.

KILL THE MEAT GOD

Then she sent Elizabeth back the way she'd come.

(As long as Elizabeth is under the influence of the geas, she's immune to other forms of mind altering magic)

Elizabeth returned, full of religious awe at what she'd seen. Everyone was ready to leave the disgusting spider hole. They went back the way they'd came, easily negotiating the flooded gallery. But they ran into trouble in the dining room. The walking swarms stood up and followed the players out, moving as fast as they could stagger. The players ran for it, but Elizabeth tripped and injured herself on the way down the steep tunnel. She dropped a Cure Wounds and kept moving through the old gym. Sax held the swarms off while the rest of the group climbed up the steep tunnel, then scrambled up after them. They even managed to avoid disturbing the spider eggs as they ran.

The spider-women in the boudoir looked sweaty, flushed and well fed. The three men were nowhere to be found. Cassie asked where Radna's room was, hoping to cash in on her stored items. The spiders didn't have private rooms. If Radna mentioned a "brothel" it was probably the love shack.

There was a tarantula with humanoid features in the abandoned pool, fussing over the eight limbed corpse. He was immediately entranced by Cassie, who he invited back to his den for a plowman's lunch and a splash of wine, neither of which he could eat himself with his clumsy chelicerae. Cassie demurred, and he didn't push the issue.

Outside, another spider woman was going through one of the cars, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down from the trunk and glove compartment. The players got back in Sax's car and left. A police car pulled onto the county road and began following them, but didn't turn on its lights or siren. They pulled into a Burger Head downtown for a rolling lunch, and waited until the cop car left before proceeding to the Love Shack.

The Love Shack was boarded up and abandoned - more so than usual. They pried the fresh planks off the window well and found that all the furniture and valuables had been stripped out. The rooms carved from living stone were sealed up, rock walls smeared closed around the entrances. The Explorers had packed up and moved without telling them. Thankfully, Radna's hiding spot was one of the old brothel rooms, original to the structure and not sealed up by the departing chthonicists. Elizabeth peeled open the secret compartment in the wall, and pulled out a silk garment. She assessed that Cassie was the only one who could properly "fill it out", and the red cap slipped it on. Once she pulled the hood over her head, she became invisible.


We called the session there after only two hours. Better to quit on a high note than pad it out with another dungeon run that might get cut for time. The players adopted roles related to mapping and tracking initiative, which made the game a lot smoother to run. The custom dungeon area was a lot of fun. I'm going to make more pregens so that more people can jump into the game in the future. Next session will be set an in-day after this one, rather than a week.