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.



Around the time the last player reached the street level, a fleshy hum sounded in the back of everyone's brain. The meat signal was back online. The Serpent-Man repair crab had scuttled upstairs to reactivate the transmitter. The team formed a new plan. McCaffrey and Harry would go back up the rope, disable the repair bot and destroy the meat signal again. The rest of the team would go into the basement and take out the tallow kiln.

McCaffrey and Harry were halfway up the building when a gigantic man made of human fat came around the side of the building and tried to grab them. McCaffrey swatted at the tallow titan with his blessed blade, severing a couple fingers and chasing him off.

(I wasn't sure if the tallow titan should have the undead weakness to blessed weapons, but decided it should, since it was based on the flesh hulk statblock but upgraded).

By this time, the rest of the group had breached and cleared the loading dock with a volley of fireballs. Cassie snuck ahead to scout the fat forge. There were now two tallow titans, along with the cultists. They didn't spot her, but they did spot the rest of the team, sneaking up to deliver a barrage of fireballs. A meat lawyer dropped a gag order on Leon, preventing him from casting. Then the titans attacked, one rushing down the hallway and bodily enveloping Troy in its fatty matrix. Cassie tossed a fireball and cleared out most of the workshop, but the other titan battered her with its fleshy fists, slurping her up too. The hallway titan snatched up Leon, but was driven back by Sax's blessed messer, which he used to slash its body open and rescue the Chthonicist. The titan's morale broke and it spat Troy out with an audible splat, before squirming down the tunnel to the stairs. The other titan tried to make a more orderly exit, pausing to repair itself using the machinery in the workshop before climbing up the tunnel to the cages. It got stuck in the hallway, and was destroyed by a volley of shotshells and napalm.

Upstairs, McCaffrey and Harry made it into the server room without further incident, and decided to wait for the repair bot there. It would be coming down the stairs to fix the wrecked control brains momentarily. Their patience paid off, and McCaffrey was able to grapple and disable it quickly, stuffing it in his bag for transport. On the way out, they ran into trouble with a pair of executives and their white collar hangers-on. Before the cultists could start casting, Leon the Chthonicist peeled one of the support pillars out from under the basement with a well-timed stone shape. Because he alerted McCaffrey to this over the tacnet, the mercenary was able to brace himself when the shift came. The office drones went tumbling to the ground, while McCaffrey and Harry ran for the elevator up to the next floor. They juked another group of suits using a smoke bomb, and ran until they ran into a fire cultist, lost and wandering the offices.

(The random encounter table included representatives of a random faction, escaped and wandering)

The loose Fire Cultist recognized McCaffrey as a bearer of the flame, and joined him in his quest to put the hurt on United Meat Train. Together with Harry, they torched the transmitter on the sixth floor. With their objectives accomplished, they returned to the office that McCaffrey had thrown the suit out the window of, and dropped Harry's climbing rope down the side. At six floors up, there was a ten foot drop at the end. Harmful, but ultimately survivable.

With the meat collar workers "freed" again, there was little resistance at street level. Both teams reached vehicles they'd stashed. The basement team fought off a loose group of slaughterhouse workers exiting a kebab shop and piled into a truck, while McCaffrey, Harry and their new friend the Fire Worshipper climbed into a sedan they'd left for just such an occasion.

Both teams hit the King's Road, intending to exit the city. Their intent was to drive East to Coal City, and return to the Occultists' lair using the smugglers' painting route. They were interrupted by a white flash, a shockwave that nearly forced them from the road, and a mushroom cloud rising above the Sink. The Servants of the Great Lord of Embers had succeeded in their mission as well.


This was an intense conclusion to the Cow Town saga. It combined exploration of a dangerous area with savage fighting using powerful weapons against a deadly foe. I went too easy on the players in some sections and too hard in others, in both cases because I forgot rules that would have helped or hurt them.

Takeaways from Cow Town:

• It's difficult to provide a sense of increased threat and stakes without just resorting to bigger and bigger combats. The Cow Town game shifted away from exploration of dangerous areas, and toward set-piece battles for territory. The players liked it, but it's not what I enjoyed most about Esoteric Enterprises. As much fun as I had with it, I'm glad it's over.
• In "high level" combat, group initiative means that whoever wins the roll will alpha strike the other side out of existence. When the players won initiative, they deleted most of the enemies in the first round. When they lost, they almost died in the first round.
• The house rules for Hustles ended up not mattering because by the time we had Level 3 characters, the nature of the game had shifted away from criminal enterprises and toward an all out war.
• The house rules for Crews were popular with the players. it's fun to choose an NPC from the book with a crazy power and give them a personality. The onus has to be on the players to remember the NPC exists during combat or other dangerous situations, since the DM isn't going to remember. I also need to fine tune the XP costs of taking an NPC on an adventure with you. I don't want to punish the whole group because someone dragged a follower along, but I also don't want to put the whole cost on a single player if they bring someone that helps the whole team.
• A 6 in 6 Stealth skill turns Stealth from an extremely risky proposition that can easily get the lone scout killed into an almost guaranteed source of extra damage and ambush prevention. I think this is the reason so many of the monster stat blocks have heat vision, tremorsense and other enhanced perception that makes player stealth less effective.
• Open tables mean significant player turnover, enough that you can never count on players having a specific piece of knowledge, relationship with an NPC, map of an area, etc. That means sometimes you have to toss all the plot hooks that tie into the last several sessions of play, and  throw in a couple of simple missions that don't require any context.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. I'll see if I've got one last epilogue game in me. If not, I'll write up a final rumors post for what happens to Cow Town.