Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Epilogue

The Servants of the Great Lord of Embers joined their master in a blaze that annihilated the Meat God's physical presence on earth. The survivors left Cow Town, in search of fresh kindling to regenerate their clergy.

With United Meat Train decapitated and the Grange annihilated, Cow Town was no longer a hub of agribusiness. The population dwindled, as stores closed and migrant farmhands went elsewhere for work. Beef prices across the country ticked upward, until new agreements with suppliers overseas could be negotiated.

In the absence of their corporate overlords at United Meat Train, Cow Town struggled to govern itself. Declining tax revenues and population brought an increase in lawlessness, with many homes and businesses converted to meth labs or other, less savory uses.

With no further use from United Meat Train, and a twenty year lawsuit still pending, the Sink finally closed. Enterprising sorcerers still make pilgrimages to the cordoned ecological disaster, hoping to fish out magic trinkets, or bottle fragments of the former Meat God's power.

With falling enrollment and endless litigation eating away at its budget, the K-12 school finally closed. The remaining students are now bussed to Coal City schools, an hour away on the King's Road.

With the Grange annihilated in its battle with the Dungeon Druids, large stretches of ranchland lay abandoned. The Druids stole out from the Botanic Gardens to replant the desolation, sowing seeds that grew into wondrous and terrifying parks and forests.

The survivors of the Exploration Project eked out a precarious existence in the shadow of the Seekers of the Path, traumatized by the horrors of the war with the Meat Cult, yet addicted to the seductive mysteries of the underworld. Adrian the Exploring Kid took up the study of magic and himself became a powerful and widely feared sorcerer. 

Absent the containing influence of the Shoggoth Pit, the Meat Cult and the Ancient Lich, the undercity was nearly swallowed by a Mycelid outbreak. The killer fungi were contained at great cost by the Seekers of the Path, and the Chthonicists of the Exploration Project.

With the collapse of the Cow Town Police Department, the case against the Megachurch was taken over by the National Police. Thanks to the addled Meat Cops' inconsistent record keeping and borderline incomprehensible case notes, the Nats were only able to prosecute a handful of the Servants of Christ the King for the slaying of several Cow Town Police officers during the siege of the church. Father Bacon was not among those charged.

Without the protection of the Meat Cult, the Tattoos were hunted down and put to the sword by the remaining Servants of the King of the Universe. The surviving vampires fled into the exurbs, creating nests in abandoned farmhouses and beneath ponds and lakes.

The two surviving artists from the Collective were adopted by the Light Market. The smugglers always had commissions for skilled painters.

With nobody to oppose them, the Seekers of the Path now rule what's left of Cow Town. The illusionists John and Jo do their best to restrain the wizards and witches, who view the town as a playground for occult science, its people as raw material for their experiments. Even with the meat cult destroyed, the Men in Black haven't let their finger off the button...

And when the Seekers' power armored mages broke into Old Boney's crypt, they found no sign of the ancient lich. Perhaps his old bones had undergone a transformation to another state of existence. Whatever bargain he'd struck with the Tattoos and the Meat Cult, it no longer concerned Cow Town. Or so everyone hoped...

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eleven, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

A meat collar worker, slaughterhouse worker and tallow titan on the offensive

Working their way down to the server farm was easier than going up. The offices were in disarray, the workers more interested in escaping than fighting the attackers.

(Without the meat signal broadcasting, the wandering monster table could no longer spit out "meat collar workers")

The server farm was defended by a single altered medic, who killed the two IT workers once they become unreliable. He ambushed McCaffrey coming in, but was unable to do any significant damage before being filleted by the squad. They noticed the chrome crab was no longer tending the brains. A couple squirts of flamethrower fuel sent the server farm up in greasy smoke. Outside, a meat executive called in their location on a cell phone. Cassie dispatched him with a sneak attack, but trouble was clearly on the way. It was time to move.

They heard the group coming up the stairs before it heard them. A suit, a flesh hulk, and a crowed of cultists and ghouls, here for the free meat. A couple fireballs tossed into the stairwell dispatched the threat, but also started a fire that made the stairs impassible. The players decided to use Hatchet Hands Harry's climbing gear to rappel down the side of the building. They were on the fourth floor, so with fifty feet of rope, they could make it.

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

Was session eleven the end of Cow Town? I don't know. I think it would make a good ending. Maybe I'll think of an epilogue for session twelve.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 4)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 3)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 3)
• Troy Giovanni, Hood in Over His Head (Criminal, Level 1)

Troy Giovanni was a new player who joined right at the end. The Occultists needed everyone they could get, even Level 1 Crooks with little chance of surviving the Meat Cult's damage output.

Sax the Knife was Level 3, enough to adopt a Fire Cult Fanatic as part of his Crew. Ignacio the Burned Man joined the team for the mission.

The illusionists John and Jo created a three dimensional projection of the target building: the United Meat Train headquarters.

They explained the team's objectives:

Esoteric Enterprises - Welcome to Salt Bay - Jackscon Elias Special

I ran a game of Esoteric Enterprises for the Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.

Salt Bay - once a mining town, now a coastal tourist village. Sit your cliffside resort with a glass of wine and watch container ships fight their way across the whirling bay to Coal City down the coast. Quiet, scenic and expensive.

That ain’t you. You drifted into town with the wrong crowd. The kind that hangs around the Love Shack behind the dive shop at one in the morning, sweating gin and eying the staircase in the back. The one that leads into the undercity.

You’ve heard stories about what’s down there. Buried gardens of killer kudzu, infested with urban druids. Old rotting houses full of giant spiders. Gutters of meat that squirms like it’s still alive. Moving sculptures that really stretch the definition of “art”. It all looks like dollar signs when you’re an occult criminal with a pistol in your hand and ten dollars in your pocket.

I had three players, all new to the game. I made a simplified version of the character creation rules that incorporated my houserules and removed the need to laboriously copy down skills and saving throws from the book. After about fifteen minutes, we emerged with the following characters:

• Sploon, Devoted Slave of the Parasite God (Mystic, Lvl 1)
• Frank "The Wall" Turner (Bodyguard, Lvl 1)
• Dweezil the Clever (Criminal, Lvl 1)

They started off at the Love Shack, an old brothel converted to a low rent gin joint (and shamelessly recycled from the Cow Town campaign). The management had torn up the floor in the back after an... accident had messed up the boards, and found an old staircase leading into the undercity. A few hoodlums had explored it and already there were stories about treasure and danger to be found:

• I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
• Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
• Couple guys went exploring on the East side, past the fairy enclave. Ones that came back said there's a buried mansion, full of spiders and treasure.
• Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
• Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down 

The gang decided to investigate the spider nest in the buried mansion. Dweezil asked around with his contacts, and found a rumor that might help: The employees at the Coal City Power substation on the East side of town had a hatch down into the basement, that they wouldn't enter without a HAZMAT suit and flamethrower. It sounded like the hatch led right on top of the dungeon area they were interested in.

(Finding out about the hatch let the hoodlums skip slogging through the undercity and enter directly on top of the spider nest).

It was the middle of the night when they rolled up on the power station. The gate was open and nobody was watching it. There was a single quonset hut with a single line worker, staring at a computer screen with headphones on, and a concrete structure that led underground. Dweezil got the lock off the bunker without making a fuss, and the gang snuck inside. There were a lot of technological looking rooms that nobody understood, probably related to providing power to the city. There was also a locker room with a bunch of padlocked containers and a very secure floor hatch.

The footpads realized the cabinets were probably full of HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers. Neither Sploon nor Dweezil could open them. The group opened the hatch and descended into the unknown depths below.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Eleven

Embers are going to handle the Sink. They've got everything set up for a controlled burn.

Here's the issue, though: Meat God isn't intelligent. It's a big dumb ball of fear and violence. It knows how to puppet people and make them feed it, but it doesn't know the first thing about strategy or logistics. That's what UMT does for it. They think it'll make them a whole lot of money, so they've got the whole branch office dedicated to babysitting it.

We're sending you in to the region headquarters to do a little cleanup. Think of it as a failure-to-stop drill. Fire Cult's going to torch the body, and you're going to shoot the head.

Your mission objectives:

• There's a communications relay broadcasting the Meat Signal, keeping the cube jockeys on-message. Take it out and the drones will "wake up".
• Destroy their server farm. They're not going to have backups because the OS they run now isn't compatible with any normal computer system. It's too... fleshy.
• Killing the suits isn't going to do anything unless we shut down their management fast track program. They're doing this thing with all the biomass from the sacrifices where they "upgrade" their executives. Put a stop to it.
• We think they picked up a self-repairing machine from the Serpent Ruins - the same one we were trying to grab. If you find it, steal it back or smash it to pieces. Otherwise, it might just undo all your work killing people and breaking things.

You've got two options for insertion:

• Undercover, with as much concealed carry stuff we can fit, in a disguise of your choice
• Loud, with the best equipment we can give you, inserted kinetically at a location of your choice

You've done great work with us, and we know you aren't doing it all out of the goodness of your heart. We're offering you a thousand dollars each for the job.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Ten

Session ten was another meat grinder (no pun intended) through an area the players had already mapped. It slowed to a crawl during one combat sequence, but finished strong. I got to reuse an area that didn't get quite the level of development I wanted last time, and it paid off.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

(Sax's player hadn't read the advancement rules, and spent the entire session believing he was still Level 1)

Elizabeth West was advanced enough in her necromantic training that she felt comfortable choosing an undead companion: the Dame Lacey the Death Knight, a fearless, plate armored skeleton descended from necromantic nobility. The team decided to arm her with the magic billhook they'd found in the reliquary several weeks ago, to increase her damage output.

(The player had reached Level 3 and was entitled to a Crew, but didn't know what NPC henchmen to choose. I recommended my favorite monster in the game)

The surface was too dangerous to travel, with meat cops everywhere by day and vampires by night. The players met in the Occultist's guest rooms, same as last mission, to discuss their options. They decided that the logistics situation with the gallery was the most dire and immediate problem. John and Jo explained the situation:

The Occult Gallery entrance painting in the Underworld Vault had been bought by United Meat Train, whose corporate office in Cow Town served the Meat God brewing in the sink. The Gallery was now full of meat cultists and monsters, the status of the Artist Collective unknown. This was bad, because the painting network in the Gallery was an important supply line for the Light Market and Seekerso f the Path. The players' mission was to go in and shut down the painting that UMT was using to bring in cultists.

To this end, the Occultists provide the team with

• A page of four antimagic stickers, a single one of which would be sufficient to disable a painting if applied to its surface
• A device that detected conscious thought, to locate any surviving artists still in the Gallery
• A few thermoses of Moe's Special Blend, a greasy, protein rich tomato soup that cured bleeding
• A map of the Gallery

They would enter in the painting gallery to the Northwest. Their objective was the "entrance" to the Southeast, where the painting the meat cult had coopted was located.

The survivors of the Exploration Project defacto recognized the players as their leaders, having lost most of their other important NPCs. To this end, Leon the Chthonicist enlisted in the expedition. His stone shaping abilities could seal or collapse passages in the gallery, allowing the team to control movement and block avenues of approach.

Darla the Technomancer peeled the protective wards off the Occultist's painting that led into the gallery. A coterie of Fire Cultists threw fireballs through the painting, to clear the LZ for the team's arrival. The players waited for oxygen to refill the room on the other side, then leapt through, accompanied by Leon the Chthonicist and Lacey the Death Knight.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Masterpost

Francis Bacon

Cow Town started as an overflow Esoteric Enterprises game, after the Coal City Campaign regularly filled up with players. It also let me playtest some houserules for domain level play after I found them lacking in the base game. 

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Music

I'm using (almost) all new music to give Cow Town a distinct feel from Coal City. Each dungeon area gets its own theme. So far the players have responded positively.

Esoteric Enterprises - Botanic Gardens

This dungeon area includes a small custom faction which inhabits it.

Google Docs version here.

GENERATING BOTANIC GARDENS

Throw down a few D6s onto your map page. Draw a line through them from one end of the page to the other. That line is your river. It enters as a waterfall from above, and exits as a waterfall into the unknown depths below.

Roll the rest of your dice (mostly D20s) on the page and connect them as normal, both to the D4s and to each other.

Make sure you drop an “other” die on the board (a coin or something) as well. This will be the Druids’ den.

The color of a die determines how a chamber is lit

• Warm colors (red, yellow, orange) have stone faces in the walls, whose eyes radiate magical sunlight
• Cool colors (blue, purple, green) have patches of lichen on the ceiling, that glow like moonlight
• Neutral colors (brown, black, white) are lit in a wavelength not visible to the human eye. The plants there are an underground species that photosynthesizes just the same

Ceilings in Botanic Gardens are twenty feet high. Hallways between rooms are ten feet wide.

The river is five feet deep and has six inches of air above it where it travels between rooms.

Where passages between chambers numbered 7 to 20 cross over the river, they bridge it with logs or wood planks.

Esoteric Enterprises - Occult Gallery

This node is made to house the Occult Artists Collective result from the Social Underworld table. It can be placed on the surface in a building, or underground.

Google docs version here.

Michael Hutter

GENERATING AN OCCULT GALLERY

Use D20s to generate the Gallery. Record the color of the dice as well as the number showing. The color determines the architectural style of the room and the art displayed within it. It also determines the special properties of any guardians spawned in that room.

• Red: Classical/Neoclassical. Giant Guardians with double hit dice and damage dice, but -2 to hit versus human size targets
• Blue: Cubist. Guardians ignore successful attacks that roll an odd-number to hit, except area attacks
• Yellow: Art Deco. Guardians armed with Thompsons and Browning Automatic Rifles, dealing D10 damage and using the Covering Fire rules
• Orange: Surrealist. Guardians deal damage directly to flesh, but make a reaction roll each round to see if they even attack
• Green: Anti Art/Post Modernist. Guardians deconstruct one of the target’s items on a successful hit.
• Purple: Realist. Guardians have the same abilities as the players
• Brown: Medieval/Gothic. Guardians cast Bleeding Curse, Cure Wounds and Darkness at will
• White: High Modernist/Brutalist. Guardians get +4 AC, no Grit but double Flesh
• Black: Futurist. Guardians incredibly fast, always attack first

After you’ve connected the D20s, drop a few coins on the map. Connect each to one or two of the D20s.

The entrances where the Gallery connects to the rest of the Underworld, or the surface, have donation boxes where patrons can drop money or items of value. They also have little pamphlets with cryptic descriptions of the exhibits inside, and vague suggestions about where they can be found.

Unless otherwise stated, passages between rooms are ten feet wide, well lit, with double doors that are unlocked and open.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Ten

Good work with the Dungeon Druids yesterday. Grange won't be a problem from now on. I was never a huge fan of them, but they deserved better than the meat cult. At least their troubles are over.

Raid on the vampire hideout was a fuckin' ambush. Seekers lost Wayne, which is kind of a big deal since he was their pyromancer. Hope the fire cult knows what they're doing.

Oh yeah, fire cult has a mission planned for the Sink. Most of them are busy working on a project, so they'll take anyone they can get.

Megachurch is under siege. That means they aren't guarding the Serpent Ruins anymore. Seekers want someone to sneak in and bring out some tech that'll help the team later.

The Gallery Route is compromised, full of meat cultists. If someone could go in and seal up the Vault Painting UMT is using as a portal, we could move things again.

Tattoos are still hashing it out with Boney. Liches don't make decisions quickly.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Nine

Session nine was great. Both players were running first level characters and had basically no context for what was happening in Cow Town, but by giving them an abbreviated version of the situation and some mission parameters, I was able to get them into the game with (relatively) little pain. They still stumbled a couple times due to lacking crucial information from previous games, but once they decided what they were doing the game was fast and decisive.

In attendance:

• Bruce Bellows, Pyromaniac Bogan (Mercenary, Lvl 1)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

Since neither had any idea what the hell was happening, I decided they were a couple of hoodlums fresh out of Coal City. They'd heard there was a brawl brewing in Cow Town, and were hoping to pick up some riches from the ensuing factional conflict. The Light Market was ferrying people through the portrait route if they were willing to fight, so they climbed through the painting into the Seekers' underground lair.

The pair of goons wandered into the guest room, where a goat man and a lizard man were directing traffic. John and Jo were happy to give the duo a mission, after Geasing them to ensure they couldn't reveal the Occultists' plans. They needed someone to deliver a package to the Dungeon Druids, then return with a package that the Fire Cult needed. They had to hurry though, because the Grangers were planning an attack on the Druids' grove. The hoods were happy to help, and the Illusionists handed them a thermos of soup each and sent them on their way.