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)
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.
The painting gallery had the charred remains of a single dead meat cultist. More were coming from the dark room with the moon windows. A huge crowd of slaughterhouse workers, meat bosses and flesh hulks. A hand grenade killed most of the cultists, and the rest went down in a hail of gunfire and a few swats from the Death Knight's billhook. The surviving meat bosses fell back to regroup, and Leon sealed the entrance to their tunnel, giving the team a moment to plan their next move.
One of the doors from the moon room led to an apartment. The flesh hulks had obviously been trying to batter it down. The thought detector detected two independent minds on the other side. Elizabeth knocked and explained out loud that they were here to clear out the gallery and rescue any surviving artists. The frightened voice on the other side said they would add the players to the gallery whitelist, so that the guardians wouldn't attack them. The players told them to stay put, they'd be back to evacuate them.
The players hooked around south. The objects d'art were gone, and the apartment had been broken into. They investigated the trashed studio, and briefly contemplated sticking around to loot it, but decided to keep moving and come back for the goodies later.
(I rolled in secret to see if the meat cultists would counterattack while the players looted. The dice said "yes" but then the players immediately decided against looting the room, heading off disaster)
The players continued through the living room, which was now tallowy, grey and rotten. The voice in the walls groaned at the team to leave immediately, before it did something it regretted. They killed their lights and ran into the dark room where the Child of the Abyss lived. Cassie's darkvision let her see the giant olm on the ceiling, hiding from the scary monsters infesting the Gallery. It also let her see the five altered-medics approaching from the East, wearing surgical scrubs and carrying bandoleers full of syringes. The medics spoke intelligibly to one another, arguing over some obscure medical minutiae. In the dark room, they passed right by the team without seeing them (Lacey, used to playing dead, stood perfectly still to avoid her armor clattering around). When the medics were out of earshot, the group quickly hid in the adjacent apartment.
Cassie snuck ahead to investigate the cafe near the entrance. She found five Cow Town Police officers, drinking the fine liquors from behind the bar, straight from the bottle. The thought detector indicated that there was still a spark of intelligence in their minds, but they'd been "hijacked" and now recognized the Meat God as the boss they all kicked up to. She continued onward, the silken invisibility romper shielding her from detection, and found a pair of UMT executives arguing with a pair of meat bosses. The executives were clearly part of the cult, but spoke intelligibly. Then they issued some orders to the meat bosses in a language Cassie couldn't understand.
Back in the apartment, the team heard the medics return to the dark room with the child of the abyss. They were clearly searching for the players, tracking the footprints they'd left in the living room's fatty mass. They couldn't see anything in the dark room, so they turned a flashlight on. The Child of the Abyss pounced, but failed to deal any damage. It still scared the shit out of them, but one got a syringe into it and paralyzed it before it could hit them again. The police from the cafe ran into the dark room, guns drawn. The players juked them by running out of the apartment into the cafe. Right as the two meat bosses came into the cafe.
Cassie immediately killed one of the bosses with a knife in the back. Battle was joined, and the team killed the other meat boss as a crowd of cops, medics and flesh hulks rushed down the tunnel from the dark room, back into the cafe. Lacey waded into the fight, tying up the police officers in a big melee. Thanks to her Death Knight abilities, only the single officer who she was fighting could harm her, the rest ineffectually struck her with their batons. Sax ran into the Gallery entrance and slapped an antimagic sticker on the meat cult painting, closing it right as an enormous, fleshy arm was pulling itself through. Elizabeth cast web, bogging the onrushing enemies down in a sticky mess that slowed their movement to a crawl. McCaffrey pinned the attackers down with a withering fire. Leon cast Stone to Mud on the tunnel on the Flesh Hulks in the back - they were slow enough that they'd lagged behind the others, and he couldn't drop the tunnel on the medics without crushing Lacey.
The webbing bogged the baddies down long enough for the team to kill several of them with a hail of gunfire and sharp objects. Several of the medics tore themselves free with their modified claws to become a serious problem - they disabled Leon, Sax and Elizabeth with their paralytic syringes before finally being contained and eliminated. The meat police realized that Lacey was a decoy, and several of them also broke free, blazing away with their service pistols and inflicting significant damage. The players almost got overwhelmed, but they put out enough damage to break the cultists' morale, sending the remaining medic and pair of police officers fleeing into the tunnels.
The team caught their breath, healed up, looted some pistols, tazers and mystery syringes from the bodies, grabbed the neutralized painting from the entrance, and headed back into the dungeon. The plan was to pick up the two surviving artists from the apartment, and then get the hell out the way they'd come in.
Cassie scouted ahead, again. The room with the moon windows was blockaded by a big crowd of the remaining flesh hulks and meat bosses. They knew it was the team's only way out, and weren't planning on letting them leave. The players had other ideas. Their cell phones didn't have service in the Gallery, so they went back to the ruined apartment in the Southwest, and McCaffrey used his technological acumen to tap into the phone jack in the wall. That let them put a call through to the Seekers of the Path, back in the Cow Town underworld. They arranged for a group of Fire Cultists to toss some fireballs through and roast the shit out of the moon room where the baddies were stacked up.
The requested three minutes passed, and an explosion lit up the moon room. There was a rush of air, as oxygen refilled the chamber. The rush of air kept going, becoming a gale force wind. The players realized that, by asking for a strike on the moon window room instead of the painting room, they had accidentally blown out the windows. The Gallery was explosively decompressing into an airless void.
Fortunately, they had a Chthonicist with them, and he still had a copy of Stone Shape memorized. Elizabeth cast Spider Climb on him to improve his traction, so he wouldn't get sucked into space. He crawled into the room and peeled the stone walls of the room over the burst window, stopping the flow of air. There were three sets of bloody footprints leading into the big painting room in the Northwest. All of them led through the painting to Coal City. Sax slapped another antimagic sticker on that painting, just in case the meat cops had any ideas about coming back.
The door to the apartment from the moon room had been peeled open with enormous force. Cassie snuck in to investigate. A group of Flesh Hulks and Meat Bosses were lurking at the threshold of the slime room, where a pair of HAZMAT suited artists were standing in a pool of slime. The meat monsters couldn't advance without being devoured by the slime, and the suited artists couldn't leave without being hunted down by the cultists. Leon cast his final Stone to Mud and collapsed the apartment, trapping the remaining cultists between a caved in tunnel and the pool of hungry slimes. Then McCaffrey entered the slime exhibit through the Southwest entrance and escorted the two artists to the extraction point, with the cultists helpless to cross the slime filled room and pursue him. The squad climbed back through the painting into the Occultists' Lair, task complete.
The rest of their allies had been busy. The raid on the Serpent Man ruins had failed, caught in a gun battle between the vampires besieging the church and the Servants of Christ the King of the Universe defending it. On the other hand, the Servants of the Great Lord of Embers had succeeded in their mission to the sink. The head Fire Cultist wouldn't comment on what they'd done, saying only that "the match is struck". Cassie decided that Leon was a real asset, and recruited him on a permanent basis as part of her Crew. McCaffrey adopted Cassie's old henchman, Hatchet Hands Harry, into his gang instead.
It's tough to handle rewards in a treasure-for-XP game when the players are doing missions to keep the city from being destroyed. I know Esoteric Enterprises is at its core a game about amoral people doing bad stuff for money, and that doesn't really jive when the players align themselves with a socially positive cause like stopping the meat cult. The trinkets they did pick up, and the token payment from the Occultists for a job well done, were still enough for a couple players to level. I also could have also reminded them to loot the remaining artwork in the Gallery while they were whitelisted. I don't think the two surviving artists would have minded.
Cow Town has one or two good sessions left in it. I've got some ideas for a finale, but I need to do some legwork to make sure it isn't just a repetition of a previous mission, or a slog of boring fights.
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