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

The last Cow Town game. This scenario was a run of The Wizard by Donovan Caldwell. I don't usually run published modules, but this one was pretty good, though definitely flawed. I refluffed the Wizard's origin story to fit him into the campaign as an NPC the players had heard about several times previously, but never encountered.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)

Sax was accompanied by the mobster Silas the Sledgehammer, while Cassie was attended by Leon the Chthonicist.

It had been a few months, maybe more than a few months, since the Meat Cult's defeat. The town had changed, though not always for the better. Cassie and Sax met the Illusionists John and Jo at Saturn Gyros, one of the last few spots in town that still served beef. They sat down at a table in the back, under a painting of Kronos biting the head off a child, who was wrapped in an enormous pita. The wizards, disguised as the elderly Jewish couple from the coffee shop in the vault, explained the problem:

Boney the Lich traded something with the Meat Cult and the Vampires. We hoped it just got rid of him, by sending him to a higher plane of existence or something. But now there's a tower, out on the old ranchland. A grain silo, but it's something else now. All the plant life the Druids seeded within a mile is dead. It's covered in a carpet of blue... substance, and it's spreading. And people have gone missing.

So Jo and I, we did a little investigating. Got our notes here, maybe they'll help.

eyewitness accounts
locals preyed on by "wizard" - not one of ours
difficulty talking about/remembering incidents - fugue state suggests trauma or memory modification
cattle mutilation - animals "randomized" with cross sections removed

missing persons - disappeared from ranches/squatters
Thinus (Unknown Surname)
Sam (Unknown Surname)
Stephen Forge
Josh (Unknown Surname)
Collin (Unknown Surname)
Claus (Unknown Surname)

tower
converted grain silo
coated in blue organic material which blocks scanning
gravity distortion inside structure

working hypothesis
powerful magical being (probably boney) experimenting with newfound powers
rift to borderworld somewhere in tower - like black barn but worse(?)
strong possibility of spread/contamination

(The module includes a brief description of the town at the base of the Wizard's tower. Very atmospheric, but a little thin on detail that's actually useful to the players. I decided to elide the investigation phase, where the players ruthlessly interrogate NPCs about information they don't have and doesn't matter, and just skipped straight to the tower. Made it much easier to fit in a four hour slot)

Whatever Boney turned himself into, it wasn't good. The mission: enter the tower, disable whatever was holding the portal to the borderworld open, and re-kill the lich. Cassie and Sax still had some of Darla's antimagic stickers left over from the Occult Gallery raid, which would nullify whatever machine held the portal open. Beyond that, they had guns, grenades, a flamethrower, and the remaining fireballs on the necklace.

The illusionists warned that if the team was unsuccessful, they'd have two options:

1. Call up the Men in Black, who were still looking for an excuse to level the town, and tell them to erase the entire West Side
2. Tell the other Seekers of the Path there was a new source of unstable magic in town, and watch them all flock to the tower to experiment with its strange energies and disturbing biology.

Neither of which were good.

The team climbed into their surviving Toyota and drove into the wilderness. As promised, the old grain silo stood in a clearing of its own making, devoid of the tree cover and wild plant growth the Druids seeded in the former farmland. There was a thin carpet of tacky blue fibers on the ground around the spire, like a carpet of fungal hyphae. The growths were thicker on the tower itself, bulging out from the sides of the cylinder to form new wings and balustrades.

The front door slid open when they approached.

The interior was dimly lit by pale blue growths on the walls and ceiling. The whole place smelled sweet. The floor was just sticky enough to make a squelching sound as the characters entered. Cassie realized that being sneaky was going to be an issue, since the doors were automatic, and wouldn't open unless she deliberately let them detect her.

The team found a room filled with blue robes dangling from fronds growing out of the ground, a locked door, and a room with a climbable wall leading up to floor 2. The wall was strung with sticky strands, one of which grabbed Sax when he tried to scale it. The strand yanked him upwards, toward a vent in the ceiling. Cassie hit the wall fast and grabbed Sax before the vent slurped him up. The whole group piled him on and got him back on the ground safely. He burned the rest of the strands with his flamethrower. Cassie climbed up to investigate the second floor.

The door slid open. Cassie could see a single, blue robed figure, drooling caustic slime on himself and bubbling incoherently. It didn't react to the door opening, so she readied a throwing knife and motioned for Sax to come up after her. The second he entered the room (being much less discreet than her) the robed apprentice rushed them. Cassie tossed a knife, which ruptured the man like a burst condom, sending acid in all directions. The only thing left untouched was the man's blue robe, which appeared resistant to the acid. Sax put it on, hoping to take advantage of this property.

The next room was filled with floating motes of blue dust, emitted by a vent overhead. Leon pulled on his gas mask, and the rest of the squad followed suit. Cassie's darkvision let her see into the next corridor, where a heavily "pregnant" woman was sat against a wall, insensate. The word "KEYS" was inscribed over her head. Her gravid belly glowed blue. Leon the Chthonicist knew a bit about surgery. But not enough to save her. As Leon made an exploratory incision, she reached for the barrel of his discarded shotgun and pulled it toward her. Sax reacted instantly, blowing her away. This really annoyed Leon, who patiently explained the potential for buckshot to ricochet at close range. At any rate, the woman's intestines had been corroded into nonexistence by a pair of glowing blue key-bulbs, which the team retrieved.

(Leon's NPC statblock gave him 16 INT, meaning a +2 INT mod for a total of 3 in 6 Medicine. The module text makes it clear that Sam's injuries aren't meant to be survivable, but Esoteric Enterprises is full of bullshit super-science where Doctors can graft monster organs to replace missing parts. He failed anyway, but I had to at least give him the chance)

Sax suggested they return to the first floor, to use a key on the locked door, and to get more of the "acid proof" robes. He noticed that his own acid proof robe was starting to itch, and realized it was merging with his skin. He managed to get it off without cutting or ripping anything that couldn't be replaced, but it was a close thing. They decided against interacting with the robes, and went straight to the locked door.

The isolation cell held the melted remains of a human being, lying on the floor in his blue robe. Taking no chances, they shot him before he could get up. Sifting through the wreckage on the floor, they found a set of dogtags: Stephen Forge, one of the missing persons.

(Like Sam, Stephen's injuries were potentially treatable with Experimental Medicine. There were a lot of other setting elements that changed how the players interacted with the dungeon, such as the widespread availability of powerful ranged weapons, flamethrowers, grenades, gas masks, etc)

Back upstairs, the players investigated the other locked door they'd found, in the "KEYS" room. Leon the Chthonicist said he heard water sloshing around behind it. They decided against opening it just yet, and continued up to the next floor via a set of convenient handholds.

The foyer of floor three had strange patterns on the wall. Sax thought he saw them move, and sprayed a jet from his flamethrower. It seemed they were just an optical illusion, though the flickering napalm certainly helped keep the eye from being drawn in. The next room had a fleshy looking treasure chest under a dangling blue lightbulb, which the players all agreed was an obvious trap.

The room beyond had another pair of robed apprentices, guarding a locked door. Neither of them reacted as the players entered, though both were obviously trapped in a neverending state of hyperalertness. (The module text specifically says they ignore you until you approach the door). The team took advantage of their strange inattentiveness to fire a well aimed volley of shots. One of the robed men died instantly, the other lunged forward, skin bursting like a ripe nectarine to reveal a tangle of spidery limbs. He got a couple good hits on Silas before Sax and Cassie knifed him to death.

The door the apprentices were guarding was locked, and the key they had didn't fit. The rest of the floor was uneventful, with a staircase going up to floor four. Floor four was a featureless void, with a door about a hundred feet away, suspended in endless darkness. Strange shapes like limbs and faces floated past in the distance. The illusionists warned the players against playing in the abyss, so they went back to explore the rooms they'd missed.

(I warned the players against entering the abyss because it's an optional bonus area that can consume an entire session if you let it. Which is fine, if they deliberately ignore the NPCs' advice and jump in, but I didn't want it to happen accidentally without any warning)

The first stop was the living treasure chest, which Sax killed with his flamethrower. It didn't contain a key bulb, just the charred remains of a brain worm. They went back downstairs to open the door to the room with the sloshing water. The team stood on the ledge to the floor above and covered Sax while he opened it with the key bulb. Stinging liquid poured out and injured his feet, revealing the squirming, unformed corpus of a premature wizardling. Sax leveled his weapon and prepared to shoot it. Silas shouted that there was something moving in the vent above.

Sax killed the wizardling. Silas fired at the thing in the vent, but missed. The thing in the vent puked a shower of blue spores into the room. Sax fired his flamethrower at the cloud, keeping the spores away from him. Cassie and the two NPCs counted on their gas masks to protect them. Too bad the spores were also absorbed on skin contact.

Cassie began vomiting maggots. Leon doubled over in pain, as his stomach began to sizzle and glow. Thinking quickly, the Chthonicist cast Octopus Flesh. The spell was memorized dangerously, and for a moment it looked like he was headed for a deadly miscast effect. Instead, the magical energies merely attracted the attention of the vomited maggots, which crawled around him in a circle. The spell went off successfully, and Leon used his newfound malleability to temporarily turn his GI tract inside out, ejecting the burning bulb from his body.

(The module text says repeatedly that the wizard watches the players from the vents, and will punish anyone who harms his wizardlings. There's no explanation of how he does this, one of several places where the text unfortunately prioritizes evocative writing over solid playable descriptions. The Wizard's "curse" ability seemed like a natural choice, since it inflicts some seriously nasty fire-and-forget debuffs without exposing him to a counterattack)