Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 9

Session nine began in Salem Hospital. DBD was kept overnight after the club shootout in case he had another seizure (which he got from the poolwine) or a concussion (from the ceiling tile that hit him on the head). Rachel was kept because her arm was missing. The news had a story about the attempted mass shooting at the cub, which injured two but thankfully didn't kill anyone. The burger war news blotter CHEAP MEAT had a video taken outside the club, of Bobby Smiles being led out by police. In the video, he comes outside, melts into a pool of the same blue ooze as the poolmen were made of, and slithers down a storm drain.

Tal came to the hospital the next day to visit DBD and Rachel. They went over what happened at the New Maks show and subsequent assassination attempt. Dr Vrolick, the same doctor the cabal met when they cured the terminally ill kids, came into the ward. He explained the path forward for Rachel: she'd be evaluated for a prosthetic, possibly the injured arm would need to be "trimmed" further surgically to ensure a good fit. Followed by a long course of physical therapy. But he knew Rachel wasn't going to do that, because she was magick and could just buy another arm or something. So he wasn't surprised when she asked to be discharged.

Reba was busy with Endemic Spice, setting up the eruv that the group got during the Boston trip, in order to give Tal veto power over magick in Salem. So it was up to DBD, Reba and Tal to load the eyeballs into the unspeakable servants before the deadline.

The way it worked was, Rachel had spent the last few months setting up the required corpses in rural areas outside Salem. Animals stuffed inside animals stuffed inside animals. The only thing missing were the eyes, which needed to be installed into the bodies on a moonless night. She had five of these gross things prepared in different barns she'd rented from farmers across the State, and it was time to finally put all the eyes she bartered into them. A force of five servitors would be a potent defense force for Salem.

 

The insertion had to be done after sundown. The first one went fine. The team took Rachel's pickup out to the barn she left the horrible thing in, unwrapped the tarp they put around it to keep the rats out, and put the eye inside. Rachel needed help since she was still missing an arm. 

It was on the way to barn number two that things went wrong.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - INTERLUDE: THE BOSTON TRIP

THE BLACK HATS
You meet Ruth, Sam and Abe in Olmstead Park, by the pond. Rachel sells the increased memory storage to Abe. In exchange:

You receive a big spool of black fishing line. The Hebrews explain that this eruv was strung atop the geomantic heart of Boston for half a century, and is marinated in occult energy. Imbued with the proper magick, it can be used to create a barrier, enclose the area of effect of a large scale spell, or permanently mark out a path for safe travel.

Abe blinks. He doesn’t notice any change, at first. It’ll be a while before the true effects become apparent, when he doesn’t forget the things happening to him right now.

Ruth and Sam also thank you for your work getting Maria and Harlan (the two shotgunners from the club) out of trouble. Judith was wondering what happened to them. You know how Mom is addicted to taking in strays? Maria was a killer nun, Harlan was a “raincoat” in some secret army. Both were refugees from the burger wars. Judith gave them new identities, a place to live. Buried a guy who came looking for them a couple years later. Everyone thought they were out of trouble.

The child following them around for the last couple weeks was a little suspect, since Maria couldn’t actually have kids, and also he basically appeared out of nowhere. They all disappeared a few days ago, before anyone could investigate. Now they're back, mostly in one piece. Maria can't raise her left arm above head level thanks to the shotgun wound.

For bringing them back alive, Mom wanted you to have this special cheesecake. She juiced it up so it’ll cure anything. Possession, curses, debuffs, magickal diseases, doesn’t matter.

VINCULUM
VINCULUM used to be an upmarket opium den, frequented on the sly by Boston’s WASP intelligentsia. A century later, it’s now a tea house and club, popular with the city’s financial elites. It’s not the kind of place the Bao Down crew would normally be welcome, even Rachel might have trouble getting inside. Thankfully, the owner is also Reba’s mom.

Yawen Rebkin welcomes the cabal. She absolutely refuses to discuss any occult business, feigning ignorance until the cabal realizes she’s afraid someone is observing her. In the back room, after pouring drinks for the crew, she opens a cabinet and removes an ancient record player. She throws on a twelve inch LP of MUSIC IN THE WALLS (composer unknown) and speaks quickly over the sound of horns and musical saws, so that she can get her whole message out before the music ends.

Rachel’s mom, Lucretia “Lucky” Tudor, is back in the game. She’s up to something in the Salem area. Yawen doesn’t know more than that. There’s a fog around Lucky that blocks scrying, the kind a cliomancer puts up when they don’t want to be observed.

When the record ends after four minutes, Yawen goes back to discussing something completely mundane. The rest of the visit is pleasant.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 8

DBD, Rachel and Reba (accompanied by Scooby the Unspeakable Servant) got to the No Blood For Sex at about 8:30, half an hour before the New Maks' band Cannon Song went on.

Arthanari and Ramachandran were outside the venue, talking with the metal toothed woman the Bao Down crew had seen following Sin Woo-Jin around a day or two ago. That was Alice the ustrinaturge. She offered Reba a cigar, biting the end off with her steel dentures and lighting it with a minor charge.

No Blood For Sex was a basement club decked out with jeweled, gilded skeletons. There was a metal cage enclosing the stage, probably to shield the teenage band from thrown objects (less likely) and underage drinking (likely). Rachel and DBD sneaked backstage to parlay with the band. In attendance were Dandy Hirsch the Empty Vessel on bass guitar, Scrawny Davy the Vestimancer on guitar/vocals, and Brent on drums. Also the drug dealer and sound guy Bobby Smiles, helping them set up their amp. Rachel had some harsh words for Smiles, warning him not to sell any mystery stones to the New Maks. He assured her that he had no interest in messing up his meal ticket, but that if she wanted to tangle he'd back his family over her shoggoth any day of the week. DBD tried to persuade Dandy that she should become a capsicinaturge. The pitch was too conceptual and abstract for her. She thought he was talking about drugs. Which she was into, but which didn't communicate what he actually wanted.

Outside on the club floor, Ramachandran bought drinks for Reba and Ardhanari. He congratulated Reba for skillfully playing the other factions against each other. One of the CSC shooters was dead at the hands of the police, and now the Coterie was sending their top hitter to strike back at the cop who did it. He showed Reba a couple videos on CHEAP MEAT - Dispatches From the Burger Wars: tightly edited daredevil assassinations by a woman in rollerskates, who used drive by magick to set up her targets for gruesome fatal accidents.

The band played their first song. DBD went to look for some drugs. In the bathroom he scored a water bottle spiked with X, but noticed that a gateway to the pool rooms had opened in the end bathroom stall. Out on the dance floor, Reba noticed the Orthodox Jewish couple from the McDonald's parking lot earlier that day. The man was carrying the creepy child like a ventriloquist dummy. Rachel approached the lady and apologized for Tal magicking the child's head off during their initial encounter. The woman didn't know what she was talking about. Rachel suspected she was drugged or something. The couple was clearly armed, short shotguns under their heavy clothing. DBD cannoned out of the restroom, stumbling into the man as he made a beeline for the stage with the kid. He dropped the child and pulled out his scattergun, as did his wife. 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 7

The cabal still had some time to kill before catching the show at Blood For Sex. That meant they had time to visit Granny Ethel at her herb shop in Salem.  Since the police were still hunting them, DBD took the food truck out of town, while the group rolled up in Rachel's pickup.

 

Trinity Herbs faced Salem Common, just down the street from the Witch Museum. The gang parked a good distance away and walked right into the store.

 

One of the guerrilla gardeners from the Marblehead apartment break in was working the counter. He recognized the sentai-suited unspeakable servant, and shouted for the attendant up on the shelving ladder to go in back and get GE. Rachel's unspeakable servant immediately told her that he was burning. She sent him back outside and the burning stopped. The guy at the front desk told them that GE would be out in a minute, and offered them some tea from a samovar behind the desk. Rachel asked him why he broke into the apartment, he declined to answer. While the group waited, Reba perused the shelves for interesting items. They noticed that the store was conspicuously out of "mandrake root", and based on the sign had apparently been so for some time.

 

Granny Ethel emerged from the backroom, accompanied by Nadia, the Fulminaturge from the Karst Following Cavers - the local Colone's Secret Cadre cell trying to take over the pool rooms. Nadia kept her cool, and the Bao Down cabal kept theirs. Rachel offered help in future caving adventures, Nadia didn't say anything. She skirted around the group and left, then almost shot the unspeakable servant when it got too close to her, before fleeing. Granny Ethel congratulated the cabal on not flying off the handle and invited them through the employees only door.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 6

Tal had business to attend to, and the cabal didn't want to visit Granny Ethel without them, so they decided to collect more eyeballs for Rachel's unspeakable servants. They had two days left before the ritual took place, and wanted to get it out of the way. 

Rachel and co had arranged for three eyeballs - two from Lindsey the Sin Eater in prison and one (hypothetically) from Jason the heroin addict in Lynn. Three was enough for her hypothetical Unspeakable Servant security force to protect the town, but she had a total of five animal corpse piles she'd been ritually preparing over the last few months, meaning that she could use another pair of eyes.

The team decided to do some arbitrage at the local hospital. If they could get an already terminally ill guy to agree to being loaded up with diseases, Rachel could buy the diseases off a bunch of terminally ill kids, curing them and taking a payment of eyeballs from their parents in exchange. The gang parked the food truck outside Salem Hospital and headed inside.

Rachel dressed up as a visiting specialist, and the others pretended to be the family of a patient. With that disguise they were able to get into the palliative care ward without being hassled by the front desk people. Rachel looked at the charts of the patients, and identified the cancer victim Edric as a likely mark for negotiating a terminal disease based deal. They offered Edric a wish of his choice if he would accept a few diseases from other people that would kill him faster. Edric wanted to know what happened when he died. 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 5

After an eventful night at Nash Dino Center, picking up Shoggos from the apartment in Marblehead, and delivering everyone to their respective residences, the Bao Down crew reconvened the next day to execute on the schemes they'd cued up. They wanted to find the people who had cast the surveillance magick on David Ben David. He tried to use random magick to reverse the connection and spy on them instead, but wasn't able to get a clear picture. Reba recalled that one of the men DBD had seen spying on him in his vision was the same one Rachel spotted leaving the Brahman Occult Society Clubhouse, wearing a jacket covered in Sanskrit and Arabic patches. That suggested an occultist from the Indian Subcontinent.

 

The group new from Rachel's conversation with the BOS that there were some checkers from the Indian branch of the old Mak Attax conspiracy in town. They decided to check in with their contacts at the Golden Arches and see if anyone knew anything about the Indian mages. It was Saturday, which meant the New Maks would be out of school and working at the McDonalds in Salem.

Rachel went into the store to talk to the kid working the front desk, Dandy Hirsch. She was happy to see her friend in the Brethren, and immediately invited her to the set the band was playing later that night at No Blood For Sex. Rachel wanted to know if the New Maks had encountered any strange gremlins lately. They hadn't, but Dandy told them all about Endemic Spice, the Indian crew who recently arrived to help with a problem she had.

 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 4

Rachel and Tal left Yulia's apartment after freeing her from the thrall of the mysterious blue stones, which she got from the drug dealer Bobby Smiles. Rachel left her unspeakable servant behind in case anyone else showed up to come after Yulia, and the two occultists left to rejoin the rest of the cabal. They had a meeting to get to.

 

The meet was in South Hadley, at a tourist stop called Nash Dinosaur Tracks. The small shop and museum was full of stone slabs with fossilized dinosaur footprints. It was owned by a Brethren friendly and had some kind of magical defense that would hopefully keep the meet safe.

As the Bao Down truck rolled onto the property, DBD's head started to hurt. Not a headache, but a pain in his third eye, like something was stuck in it. The Forty Winks van was already there. Tanya, Corbin and Matt had made a ring of stones and started a small bonfire in the parking lot. The Courier Yancy Smoke was around back doing something or other. There were two other trucks expected: Milk and Honey the Jewish cheesecake truck, and Ice Man the ice cream truck.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 3

After escaping the deal gone bad with the Kentucky Fed Cops and the Karst Following Cavers, the Bao Down cabal had some time to kill before the meeting with the other food trucks at Nash Dino Tracks. Reba took the truck and got it out of the city, worried that local police might be looking for it. That left Rachel, Tal, DBD, and the unspeakable servant to take care of business until the meeting.

Rachel wanted to make more unspeakable servants in order to keep the peace after liberating Salem. That meant she needed people to voluntarily sell her their eyeballs. Tal didn't hold out high hopes for anyone in Salem being desperate enough, but they figured they could find someone in nearby Lynn who would part with an eye cheap.

The group struck paydirt with the hophead Jason, outside a boarded up Italian restaurant. He would happily give up his eye for a pathetically small amount of heroin. The cabal wasn't sure about that. It would be easy to find enough H to pay the guy off, but it didn't feel good taking advantage of a drug addict. DBD wanted to help the man with his addiction, perhaps by giving him some adept percentages in order to displace his obsession with illegal drugs via a new obsession with casting wizard spells based on spicy peppers. Jason agreed to sell DBD his heroin addiction for a day, and only a day, prior to transacting any real business. Rachel facilitated the transaction using her Merchant powers. 

 

DBD, overcome with the shakes, immediately shit himself and attacked Jason in order to take his nonexistent stash, punching him unconscious. As the cabal tended to the injured ex addict, DBD fled the scene, looking for a hit. He had the presence of mind to guzzle some hot sauce, in an attempt to generate a significant charge, and tried to use his existing obsession to achieve self mastery, looking for a Jew to explain his thesis on peace in the Holy Land to.

 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 2

Reba woke up the morning after the pool room adventure, to the sound of oddly repetitive wingbeats outside her apartment window. They looked out and found a taxidermized African Gray Parrot, mindlessly beating its wings to hover right outside their window. They let it in, and it dropped a message on the floor.

NASH DINO TRACKS

MIDNIGHT

YOUR PAL YANCY

This was the meeting of food trucks in the region that Reba had asked the Courier Yancy Smoke for. The moment Reba put the scroll down, the mecha parrot devoured it, taking a chunk out of the table with its razor sharp beak. Reba penned an acknowledgement letter and handed it to the bird, which flew away immediately.

The group met up and went over the plan for the meeting with the police which Rachel had arranged the previous day. She needed to clear the truck's name with law enforcement, who might believe they were involved with the KFC fire. She also needed to gather information about what actually happened. Any transactions she could arrange would be a bonus.

The meeting was at Salem's Bewitched Park at 1:00 PM. DBD arrived early in the morning to scout out the site, climbing up on a nearby rooftop that overlooked the park. He brought his rifle, a trash bag to hide inside, and a second trash bag to conceal Scooby, Rachel's unspeakable servant. The park was empty at 6:00 AM. DBD lurked in the trash bag, using his military experience to sit quietly and observe rather than becoming distracted and blowing his cover. Things heated up when a woman came out the door to the building's roof access staircase. She was obviously a plainclothes cop. She walked right past the pile of suspicious trashbags without investigating, pulled up a box to the edge of the roof, and sat down with a pair of binoculars. She was obviously there for the same reason as DBD.

Reba and Tal parked the food truck a safe distance away from the meeting site. Rachel walked to the park and sat down on a bench. Officer Walker's arrival was presaged by the rain cloud that followed him everywhere he went. He wore his civilian raincoat rather than his police hi vis. He sat down next to Rachel, soaking her with rain. They went across the park to the pizza place and unfolded one of those table umbrellas at the outdoor seating.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 1

Session one opened with the Bao Down truck selling dumplings at the Bread and Roses festival in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a Labor Day event commemorating the 1912 Textile Worker's Strike. The truck was doing great business, slinging delicious kosher dumplings at the edge of the live music venue. Cannon Song, the post-post punk made up of the New Maks crew, was playing a set. Rachel's unspeakable servant, Scooby the Shoggos Boy, was disguised in a dumpling based mascot costume with disturbingly dexterous hands. The monster was more than capable of running the food truck himself, freeing up the characters to wander around doing RPG character stuff without constantly being tethered to the steamer and the register.

 

 

Reba and Rachel got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the park where the festivities were set up. At the edge of the quad, a small crowd was gathered around an unmarked white van. The crew knew this was Forty Winks, a friendly Brethren of the Curb cabal who made their living with illegal alcohol sales. They were set up a deniable distance from the event, and doing a brisk trade - reselling malt liquor is profitable if you don't pay excise taxes on the transaction. The crowd of college students, teens pretending to be college students, and middle aged men didn't seem to mind being fleeced.

Tanya Summers, leader of the truck, introduced the rest of the gang to Reba, who was a personal friend of hers, and to Rachel, who looked like a square but was instantly identifiable as a Brother of the Curb thanks to the mystical identity they both shared. Tanya offered Reba a couple bottles of colt 45 for the truck, and Reba went to get her some dumplings in return. Rachel noticed that Corbin, the youngest member of the Forty Winks crew, was a telekinetic, when he stopped a dropped bottle from smashing on the street using only his mind. Corbin and Matt (the third member of the crew) weren't interested in selling Rachel their eyes, but had some other information to offer: a Mak Attax crew from India arrived in Salem recently, and were staying in a two million dollar cottage owned by the Brahman Occult Society. Rachel put the word out that she was working on a ritual involving human eyeballs and animal corpses. Corbin surprised Rachel by knowing exactly what she was talking about, and telling her he didn't want to hear anything more about it. The Forty Winks crew clearly knew a lot more about magick shit than they let on, considering none of them were even full casters.

 

Back at the festival, Cannon Song finished their set. DBD was due on stage, but he was too nervous to go up without chemical assistance. He ducked into a portajohn, inhaled one of Reba's blunts, and was about to wash it down with a bottle of hot sauce purchased from a nearby Dominican market, when he was interrupted by a gremlin with the face of William Shatner. The gremlin, name of Jim, offered DBD a mysterious package, which he had been told contained "the good shit" by a mysterious benefactor. Inside was a little pepper, so squat and flat it looked like a peyote button. DBD put the hot sauce back in his pocket and scarfed the chili. It blasted his mouth, throat and sinuses, but also upped his adept score by one point, as he saw a brief flash of light in his nonexistent third eye. It was agony, but he managed to keep it together... Sort of. The gremlin warned him to duck after he finished singing, then ran away before Tal could get a good look at it.

DBD went up on stage with his guitar, and began to sing his self-written version of John Lennon's Imagine, in honor of his friend Tal. 

imagine there's no gender
we all share a human soul
no cocks or pudenda
between our legs, just a…

He vomited on stage. Choked a little, but then kept singing. It was difficult for Tal to watch. It was difficult for everyone to watch. Nobody threw a bottle at the stage or anything, it was more uncomfortable than just straight up bad. At the end, Tal forgot the gremlin's advice, and was thrown off the stage in mid stage-dive by the blast wave from the KFC a couple blocks away exploding.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 0

I played a superb twelve session campaign of Unknown Armies featuring ¥0, a Japanese successor conspiracy to Mak Attax from David Tormsen's upcoming Special Orders splatbook. I really enjoyed the game, and after the playtest game wrapped I felt comfortable enough with the game to run it myself, featuring my own fan organization: The Brethren of the Curb, food truck pirates with their own vision of the magickal revolution.

 

Unknown Armies 3E begins with "corkboarding", a world creation exercise where the group chooses an objective for the campaign, based on the premise set by the GM and whatever the players are interested in doing. Then the players and GM go around the table and take turns developing their characters and adding plot elements and connections to a relationship map, which then forms the basis of the action in future sessions.

We finished corkboarding in a single four hour session We had one new player (to UA, not to RPGs) and several experienced players. Everyone had spend the week running up to the game discussing their plans in the discord, and they all arrived with basic concepts for their characters, food truck, and objective, which definitely sped things up. Most of the players were also contributors to the Special Orders book, and had been marinating in the setting for several months, so they had a good feel for what the tone and setting of the game should be like.

THE TRUCK

The group pretty quickly zeroed in on the idea of a Kaifeng/Ashkenazi fusion truck. They came up with a rotating list of dumplings to serve:

• Hoshin Duck Bao
• Brisket Bao
• Spicy Chicken Bao
• Chive Bao
• Soup Bao
• Pastrami Bao with mustard sauce
• The Scorcher

They decided to call the truck BAO DOWN, PEASANTS, which according to Tormsen can be rendered pictographically in Chinese as 包下农民. They also decided that since the cuisine they were shooting for barely used milk anyway, they could shoot for a Kosher certification and just not have dairy products anywhere in the vehicle.

THE CHARACTERS

In the players' own words:

• DBD aka Deebeedee aka David ben David aka Daoud bin Daoud. Born in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank to a secular Zionist family, DBD was so ostracized and bullied by his peers he ended up hanging out with the local Palestinians who beat him up much less because they liked having him as gangly Jewish mascot. Ended up abandoning his post during his IDF service and traveling the world to find himself until he ate a spicy burger in Goa that caused a religious experience in the bathroom and made him the world's first Capsaicinurge. Having run out of his grandparents’ money, he has joined the Brethren to build up experience so he can return to Israel, avoid a prison sentence for desertion, and create peace.
• Rachel — WASP redhead with a ponytail, grew up in the house of a Boston Brahmin clan that fell into disrepair, early 20s. Part Unspeakable Servant, lived in and around New England her whole life. Wants to acquire the resources to fix American society, permanently. Wears an eyepatch over the glass eye that resulted from making her first Unspeakable Servant.
• Reba - Hong Kong Kaifeng/American Ashkenazi, nonbinary, age 35. Culinary school dropout and former Mak. They grew up in Hong Kong, but are now unable to return there after the Whisper Wars ran them out of the underground and participating in the recent protests saw them labeled as an American provocateur by the PRC. Sincerely believes that magick is a source of beauty and wonder that is neither good nor evil on its own, and that it should be spread and brought into the light to make the world a more interesting and open place.
• Tal Safdie they/them - Lebanese American, crustpunk, merman hair with a bushy beard (well, for a teen), 19. Estranged from their parents. Disillusioned by the lack of direction and goals of their fellow crust punks, so glommed onto the first group of people that seemed motivated, ideological, and vaguely lefty. Trigger Event: A female crust punk detritomancer tried to feed Tal to the pile. This probably accelerated my leaving crust punk culture

After a short discussion, the players elected Reba the captain. 

THE OBJECTIVE

The Brethren of the Curb are opposed to the tyranny of several other Mak Attax splinter conspiracies, chiefly the Court of the Burger Queen and the Colonel's Secret Coterie, both of whom have a history of forcibly annexing or destroying anyone who gets in their path. The players were interested in this type of inter-faction intrigue, but wanted a motivation that was positive and constructive in nature, rather than laser focused on destroying someone else.

 

After some deliberation, they found a mission statement that encapsulated what they were interested in:

MAKE SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS THE NEW TORTUGA

 

They further broke the objective down into several milestones - concrete goals they'll work towards over the course of the game.

1. Make unspeakable servants to keep the peace (Intense)
2. Figure out who burned down the KFC (Petty)
3. Guarantee the local Mak's independence (Intense)
4. Change local fast food ordinance (Intense)
5. Build solidarity among local food trucks (Petty)
6. Keep cataphracts out (Intense)
7. Create a local occult pirate council (Petty)

 

THE CORKBOARD

Rather than give a blow by blow, I'll just describe the final result. Here's a screencap of the finished board (the software doesn't have an option for a high resolution export).

Esoteric Enterprises - Dungeon Entrances

Meant to write this one up a year ago, forgot about it until now.

Dungeon entrances for Esoteric Enterprises. The core rules text gives various entrances. Sewer tunnel, crypt, housing project, nightclub, etc. Besides these locations, there's very little flavor or gameplay given to the surface city. More types of entrance means more flavor for the surface city.

Photo by JJ Harrison

GALLERY

Not a full on Occult Gallery, but a surface structure that could have a painting or two linked to one. It also has a hidden staircase or hatch that leads into the underworld.

They charge a fixed fee per use of the dungeon entrance. Say $50 per person, or $40 per head for a group of four or more people. This is framed as a "suggested donation" but they aren't unlocking the door unless you pay. This one-time fee includes entry and exit, they aren't going to toll you twice. If you enter somewhere else and exit through the gallery they don't charge you.

MAFIA CONTROLLED BUSINESS

A bar, bathhouse, restaurant, or other legitimate front. The backroom or basement has the stairs down to the dungeon, watched over by armed wise guys.

Entry into the undercity is free (for anyone not known to be a police informer or enemy of the family). Anyone exiting to the surface through this entrance is taxed 10% of the value of the loot recovered. Safe from exit campers, at least.

Obviously the guards on the stairs are gun toting Mobsters, with a Lieutenant somewhere on the premises in case they need backup.

MUSEUM

A museum in an old building. It's closed at night, patrolled by security guards. There's a closed wing in the back, under renovation or used for storage. In that room is a staircase going down to the underworld below.

If the stairs go down to a dungeon node populated by a faction, the room is guarded by a couple NPCs or creatures from that faction.

NECROPOLIS

The dungeon entrance is in an old mausoleum. The necropolis is guarded by a militia drawn from the wealthy families whose ancestors are entombed there. They assume anyone entering at night is here to pillage graves. They politely escort trespassers out on the first offense, and shoot on subsequent violations.

The militia are Thugs with rifles, pistols and shotguns, plus a couple leaders who use the Mobster stat block.

If too many gunfights break out in the Necropolis, the police kick the militia out and establish a permanent presence there, making it even harder to enter and exit.

 

NIGHTCLUB
The top level is a normal nightclub. The bottom has underworld creatures and doorways leading into the dungeon. Entry and exit are free, but the tables are occupied by a random faction every time the players visit, which can result in awkwardness or violence.

WAREHOUSE

Or other abandoned building in a violent or abandoned part of town. No faction controls it, but there's always a random encounter when you enter or exit. It's highly likely that intelligent humans camping the exit are waiting for adventurers to emerge so they can rob them.

Drinks Post - Runoff

For all the recipes that were either too simple or not good enough to make it into the main drinks post series.

Dutch Russian

This is a stock photo from Wikipedia.

Availability: Tricky. I had to go to a megastore to find genever, and they only had one kind.

This is a White Russian with genever instead of vodka. It tastes like a malted milkshake. Delicious, but nothing to run home about.

Manor of the Giant Arminius at A Weekend With Good Friends 2021

Another Jackson Elias Server Virtual Convention, another run of the Manor of the Giant Arminius using the latest revision of Begone, FOE, my personal D20 dungeon crawler.

 

 

By Arthur Rackham

 

We had four players.

• Gideon the Rogue
• Elbekh the Cleric
• Douglas the Fighter/Mechanical Engineer
• Aric the Magic User

The players left their mule and cart in the forest and marched up the wedge shaped hill, on which the Manor of the Giant Arminius was sat. The hill was 100 feet high, and the manor stood a preposterous 100 feet higher. The area was patrolled by rebels, but by staying off the path and keeping to the brush, they were able to avoid being spotted - even with most of the trees chopped down. They noticed corpses of soldiers hanging from a couple of the giant statues on the way up, the ones the rebels hadn't toppled.

The group stopped before they got too close to the structure, and sent Gideon the Rogue to scout ahead.

Manor of the Giant Arminius - Music Post

I've been diverted from work on new dungeons (Oops, All Hags! and The Salt Pan) by Tormsen's superb upcoming UA3 splat Special Orders. But I did a rerun of The Manor of the Giant Arminius the other day for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias virtual convention, and came up with this updated music list.

There's some overlap with the Fallin' Down music posts, because I recycled a lot of the same ideas for that.

 

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 2

Building on the wild success of the first drinks post, let's have another!

APEROL SOUR

Availability: Easy. Aperol isn't hard to find, though I don't actually like it for anything besides this drink.

I doubt I invented this drink, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere else. I find the Aperol Spritz is too sweet for my taste. This recipe tames the sweetness and lets the rest of the flavors express themselves better.

• 2 oz Aperol
• 4 oz Prosecco (can use a drier sparkling wine if you want the drink to be even less sweet)
• Juice of one lemon
• Carbonated water

Shake the Aperol and lemon juice with ice, strain into glass with ice, add prosecco and top with carbonated water to taste. Garnish with lemon wheel and cocktail cherry of choice.

Consider also: just a splash of absinthe or Pernod to turn it into a Death in the Aperol Sour.

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 1

Mixing drinks is not difficult. Getting all the ingredients and utensils together can be an expensive chore. But once you have them, making the drinks is rarely more difficult than squeezing, stirring, shaking and pouring.

 

These are my favorite drinks - mostly small variations on established recipes. I'm going to list how I make them, which isn't always going to be the proper recipe. Sometimes I substitute things. I'll list the overall level of availability so you can gauge how difficult it might be for you to find the ingredients.

ACID SPIT 

Availability: Easy. If your grocery store has liquor you can pick up everything you need in one trip.

 

This is the first real cocktail I ever made, a simple gin and tonic variation. It's sweet, sour, boozy, and you can customize as you drink it until it's exactly the way you like it.

• 2 oz of a gin with a strong flavor. Delicate, artisinal gins will get lost against the background. Something cheap or mid shelf is ideal.
• Juice of half a lemon
• Juice of half a lime
• Cracked ice
• Tonic water to taste (I use Fever Tree. I know the pros prefer Q, but I find the sweetness of the tree offsets the harshness of the gin and sourness of the citrus perfectly)

Combine in a glass and take a sip. If it's too sweet, add more citrus. If it's too sour, add more tonic. If you can't taste the gin, add more gin. 

Unknown Armies NPC - Yoshida

An Unknown Armies NPC, based on my character from David Tormsen's playtest game for ¥0, a Japanese Mak Attax successor conspiracy from his upcoming Special Orders sourcebook.

Portable version here.

In uniform.

Yoshida (just Yoshida) is a cleaner from a long line of cleaners. From the Tokyo Subway all the way back to the Koreans speared to death in the ruins of the Great Kanto Quake, Yoshida’s family has bagged the bodies and mopped up the blood, piss and liquified fat. Today, he cleans up after people who kill themselves using trains. Japan averages one a day, so he travels a lot.

You might have guessed that Yoshida is one of the burakumin, the village people. Yes, he also wears a hard hat at work, and has been known to hang out at the YMCA. His brother Yoshioka went into the trash business with a local chivalrous organization. One of the outfits that settles their disputes with grenades. That isn’t Yoshida’s scene.

Yoshida was cleaning up after a jumper when her hand followed him home. Climbed into his pocket and hid. He didn’t find it until he was back at Rose’s, the tachinomi outside the Nagoya station. Crawled up onto the counter and tried to climb into his little bowl of pickled things. Everyone else freaked out. Only he could see the person attached to it. She seemed sad.

Yoshida takes care of dead people. He sorts their bones and scoops their skulls into plastic bags. It doesn’t get more intimate than that, so he wasn’t surprised when they started to talk back to him. The head lost in the storm drain, yelling at him to pull it out. The salaryman wedged under the bogey, who forgot to let his cat out before he stepped off the platform.

¥0 was the logical next step for Yoshida. He can’t serve food - nobody would willingly eat anything his hands had touched. But he can clean up a crime scene, speak to dead people, and go unnoticed where a cabal of twitchy mages would make a scene. He pledged himself to the memory of Betty Kimura because he wanted to help people. Maybe if things weren’t so fucked up, he wouldn’t meet so many of them on the other side.

Unknown Armies NPC - Joel

Another character from LISA the Pointless, this time adapted for Unknown Armies. Portable version here.

By Edvinas Kandrotas

Joel is a fulminaturge with a Major Charge burning a hole in his pocket. He’s got a custom pistol and a single custom .476 caliber bullet, both of which he forged with his own hands from materials scavenged out of the trash. He doesn’t know what he’s going to spend it on, just that it needs to be something… big.

Joel could make good money with a square job as a machinist, or spend his Major Charge on something that would make him a powerful underworld figure. Truth is, he’s addicted to life as a vagabond. Rolling into town, getting stuck in the nightlife, making friends and enemies, then moving on to his next adventure. The unspent magick potential flowing through him makes him a magnet for weird shit.

Joel has never personally killed anyone, but has helped his friends do so. He has never fired a shot in anger, and a couple times he has paid the price for not doing so.

Fallin' Down Music Part 3

The Fallin' Down game has fallen down. According to Conscience, the players have hit a wall on level 5/6, with the Mind Flayers now controlling the entire floor, blocking access to the rest of the dungeon. 

Old, semi-related artwork by me

The most powerful characters died in a full-floor brawl with the squids, taking all their earned experience with them and leaving the survivors underleveled, with few opportunities to advance to the power level they need to get through (Conscience is using the 5E system, but with treasure as XP).

(One of the dead characters was basically the Robilar of the group, pulling in vast amounts of loot on solo adventures in timeslots where the rest of the group couldn't make it. It's cool to see a 5E game replicate the first D&D campaign ever run)

The remaining players are looking for a way forward that lets them skip the Illithids entirely, or somehow even the odds of success in combat.

I expected this to happen on Floor 2, with the hundreds of ghouls blocking the players and ripping them to shreds. Instead, the opposite happened. Floor 2 (and to a lesser extent Floor 3) has been a continued source of XP for the group, as they unlock hidden rooms filled with additional monsters and treasure.

Conscience suggested the following tracks

I introduced a new track for the illithid encounter, since Lakebed Temple didn't feel right - it has kind of become the ghost theme at this point (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r6Jv53y1Dw)

You might also mention this as a track I've been using as theme for the sphinx: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzi7RAUnLBI)
It's funny though, I started out using this for her: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKLfvt6CZCY)

zomner (author of the floor below the Illithid meatgrinder, which the players haven't reached yet) suggested the following

For the elf village (https://youtu.be/wjmkpUJljQI)
For the mill gnome (https://youtu.be/zq6KnILABy4) 

For trolls or other creepy magic (https://youtu.be/l8O9BNTl004)

Fallin' Down - Music - Submitter's Choice

After writing up the music post for Fallin' Down, I put a call out to the submitters of each floor, to see if they had music tracks in mind for their dungeon levels. I also asked Conscience what he'd been using so far.

A rune wizard amends signage in the Stone Town, courtesy of one of Conscience's players

I received the following replies:

Conscience (Dungeon Master)
General Combat Relaxed: Drumbeat of the Dunmer (https://youtu.be/Yookfajt3lg)

General Combat Intense: Stormclouds on the Horizom (https://youtu.be/QdKgNP0ygMw)

Stone Town Day: Journey's End (https://youtu.be/cph3BSQq1e0)

Stone Town Journey/Event: Wind Guide You (https://youtu.be/qBBwdOGDIKk)

Stone Town Dark: Masser (https://youtu.be/Va9GQkjrnII)

Broken Venus: Mirkwood Theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZMk7ZCOyw)

Ghouls Exploration: Flat of the Blade Instrumental (https://youtu.be/WfIP4DWGG28)

Ghouls at Work: Pray for Rain Instrumental (https://youtu.be/XdaJi0tdAwI)

Ghouls Attack: Babel Instrumental (https://youtu.be/rNWXDiqw-cc)

tophat (Floor 3)
"I'd put Machinarium's The Prison down for specifically visiting The Blood Pool"

Fallin' Down - Music

Friend of the blog Conscience is running Fallin' Down for his open table. He hasn't written a full play report or review yet, but he's been posting updates to the disky and it sounds amazing.

Screenshot from his roll20 of the abandoned inn in the Stone Town

So I decided to score all the Fallin' Down floors. Similar to what I did with Esoteric Enterprises. Here's the music I'd use for each area:

• Surface
• Exploration: By the Wall
• Combat: I'll Live Forever (Cormac Rex Version)
• Inn: Tiger King (Game Version)
• Inn After Players Repair It: Dream Serene
• Inn Fully Upgraded and Occupied: Vandereer

• Floor 1
• Exploration: Abyss
• Combat: Hailton

• Floor 2
• Exploration: Shifting Sands
• Combat: Machine in the Walls

• Floor 3
• Exploration: Drowning
• Combat: Innocence Mangled

• Floor 4
• Exploration: Elevator
• Combat: Party Hardy
• The Shop: Marble Forest

• Floor 5/6:
• Exploration: Lakebed Temple
• Combat: THE WOODS

• Floor 7
• Exploration: Muddy Waters
• Combat: Bellicose Ballet

• Floor 8
• Exploration Duergar: Warehouse
• Combat Duergar: Freemove
• Exploration Trolls: Rave On Waiting Entrance
• Combat Trolls: Forever Turbo Heat Dance
• Dragon Combat: Fancy Meat Computer

• Floor 9
• Exploration: Hallowed Ground
• Combat: Sewers of Dross

Clean Living - a Resident Evil Adventure

Resident Evil! It's not my favorite series - in fact the only one I've ever played is 4. The setting is kind of bloated with too many prequels and spinoffs and retcons that create a ridiculous Metal Gear style pileup of conspiracies.

But I saw a thread on the traditional games board that captured my imagination: what would it be like living in a world where anyone with a grudge could turn over a rock and find thirty new bio-organic weapons. And it reminded me of one of my favorite settings of all time: the B.P.R.D.

By Guy Davis, the best of the B.P.R.D. artists

So I wrote up a rules hack for Delta Green, along with an adventure and some pregens to play with it. You can read them here.

Here's a play report of how the playtest went.

THE UNITED STATES IN 2021

Since President Adams’ assassination in 2013, the United States has been in a permanent state of emergency - a police state in an endless struggle against yearly bioterror attacks. Wild mutants breeding in the woods for decades, filtering out into population centers. Cults and militias brewing new strains of viruses bought on the black market. Zombies staggering into crowded malls. Secret military tribunals. Bodies in sealed bags, tipped into an autoclave.

That’s been the new normal for almost a decade. And it’s not all bad. The biological revolution that unleashed neverending horror on the world also opened a treasure trove of medical and pharmaceutical discoveries. When’s the last time you heard of someone dying of heart disease, or cancer? So people live around the shortages and empty shelves, the long lines, the endless checkpoints manned by guards in full MOPP gear, pointing flamethrowers and rocket launchers at families in sedans. You shop for groceries, pick up the kids from school, spray your groceries down with bleach, and hope to God the thing on the back of your hand is just a rash.

THE DIVISION OF SECURITY OPERATIONS
Empowered by the 2001 PROTECT America Federal Bioterrorism Commission Act, refreshed every year by Congress during the usual appropriation cycle, the Division of Security Operations is the cabinet level agency which assumed the duties of both the FBC and the National Counterterrorism Center. Unlike its predecessors, the DSO has broad authority to assemble Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a permanent basis, in effect skimming personnel from other law enforcement, military and intelligence three letter agencies.

BRIEFING
Yesterday, local police in Lubbock, Texas making a routine traffic stop found a hermetically sealed container filled with plagas spores. Thankfully the driver was apprehended without incident, and the container secured without releasing its contents.

We’ve got people checking out the trucking operation, and the source of the package. We need you to investigate the destination. According to the shipping records, the box hiding the spores was destined for a community in Central Washington called Squiddler’s Patch, up in the Okanogan National Forest. We’re sending you in undercover to sniff out the operation, with the option to go loud and neutralize any threat that can’t wait for a followup team.

Fallout: Yellowstone - Session One

Building on the success of my last two Fallout sandboxes, I recently ran my first session of Fallout: Yellowstone.

I had three players, one returning from a previous Fallout adventure.

• Professor Delores, high powered scientist
• Ethan Hollister, eagle eyed wasteland scout
• Dani Masterson, villager from Colorado

They entered Yellowstone under the following pretenses:

Your prairie village in Montana has been struck by plague. A burrowing creature with a glowing belly bit a child, who fell ill a few days later. By the time the town doctor noticed the swelling in the kid’s lymph nodes, the disease had already spread among the populace. It’s easy to treat with antibiotics, but the town doesn’t have nearly enough. The caravan was due a week ago, and hasn’t shown up yet.

You were spared the ravages of the disease. You’ve been sent South into the seething cauldron of Yellowstone, to search for enough medicine to save your town. You were given a healthy supply of bits (the silver tokens used as money in Montana) and the last of the stimpaks (a rare trade good from down South, since Broc Flower and Xander Root don’t grow in the tundra).

As you travel South from Gardiner along the 89, the air smells like pollen, flowers and sulfur. The peaks and valleys are covered with snow, but everywhere else you see evidence of Spring. You heard this place was spared the worst ravages of the nuclear dust storms that swept the region after the war, but you'd never seen it for yourself.

There's a fort up ahead.

 

Twelve Handmade Pregens for Delta Green

Twelve Handmade Pregens for Delta Green

Some explanatory text:

I made these characters because I wasn't happy with the pregens available for Delta Green.

• The ones in Need to Know are... okay. But they aren't how I would create a character, and my rule is that I never give out a pregen I wouldn't want to play myself
• The list of hundreds and hundreds of random Agents is great if you need a new character fast, but it's not something I'd hand a brand new player.
• I admittedly haven't read the Agent Dossiers that came out a year or two ago, so those could be great and I wouldn't know.

I built these characters the way I build my own - very competent at their jobs, but with a good spread of secondary skills high enough to be useful. I've found that new players to a system are happy to be blown up, shot, eaten by monsters and go insane. But if their first exposure to a game is failing at everything they try because their character "can't do anything", they're going to disengage early. In my experience, giving out characters that are just slightly min/maxed also makes the players more confident, which makes them more willing to make stupid/bold moves that make the game fun.

Language skills are all left unassigned, so that the pregens can be used in any setting and still be useful. I favor letting the players leave them blank, with the option to "lock in" what language(s) the character speaks in-game as needed, writing it permanently on the sheet. If you don't want to do this, remind them to assign languages at the beginning of the session, or write them in yourself before the game based on the scenario you're running.

Each pregen comes with a full load of equipment suitable for their profession and role on the team. This cuts away the need for endless gear shopping, and gives the players confidence that they have what they need to do their jobs.

The pregens all come with instructions in the notes section on the back of the sheet. This includes details about the character's personality, tips for playing them, and any special mechanics that the player should know about. These are helpful because even experienced players usually forget things like using a first aid kit to get +20% on a First Aid roll.

Finally, some of the pregens (EASTER, RANDOLPH and ROBERT) know a single ritual. I added this after I noticed that the knowledge/academic based characters were barely getting picked compared to the ones with badges and guns. Knowing a magic spell is more fun than just having 10% in Unnatural, especially in a oneshot where that percentage is unlikely to increase to a useful level. If you don't want the characters to have spells, you can remove them from the "developments which affect home and family" section on the back side of the sheet.

Fallin' Down, or: The Nine Floor Goodbye

Logo by Mechristopheles

Fallin' Down is a dungeon jam that I started on the Night at the Opera server, about a year ago. Users signed up to design floors of a dungeon, which would then be stacked atop one another to form one big map.

Submitters had to conform to some basic rules. All floors were 50 by 50 five foot squares, for a total size of 250 by 250 feet, or 62,500 feet squared. Entrances and exits were randomly rolled, with each downward passage corresponding to an upward passage on the floor below. They were also given an entry and exit point for a stream flowing through the dungeon. Each floor had one upward passage, one downward passage, a stream entrance and a stream exit, for a total of four predetermined points.

Beyond that, participants had broad latitude to design their dungeon how they pleased, as long as it was possible for the players to reach all four points by moving through the dungeon. Submitters were given basic directions on keying rooms, assigning treasure, and formatting their writeups.

Users were instructed to make their dungeons "system agnostic". Participants were likewise instructed to roughly "balance" their floor according the depth from the surface, with hazards and treasure appropriate to the depth.

We had nine participants, including myself. Eight participants eventually submitted their assigned floors (with considerable hectoring from me.) One participant had to drop out, requiring me to pinch-hit the fourth floor myself.

You can view all nine floors here, or go level by level. You can get the high resolution versions of the maps by looking in the respective folders.

Let's see how everyone did.

ANGUISHEDWIRES Political Compass

From the dungeon ANGUISHEDWIRES

Unknown Armies NPC - Adrian LeBarge

I played in an Unknown Armies actual play on 33.3FM, a UA discussion podcast. You can listen to the full series here. It's about a group of occultists in upstate New York, taking on the leader of a local sex cult responsible for the death of their friend.

I played Adrian LeBarge, the con artist who robs cults.

Fanart by Basil

Now that the series is wrapped up, here's Adrian written up like an NPC from Ben's superb Oddities and Endlings blog of UA fan content.

Generic Pursuit System for Dungeon Crawlers

This is Fallout. It's what popped into my head when I imagined a guy running away

If you want players to do something, you need to make it easy enough that it isn't overly punishing, and isn't dramatically harder than the alternative. If it's harder to run away from a combat encounter than fight, the players are going to fight to the death rather than run away. It isn't enough to tell the players "not all fights are designed to be won", you need to provide mechanical support for this concept.

But you also don't want getting away from a combat to be costless, otherwise there aren't any stakes. There has to be an element of risk, even if the odds are tilted in favor of players.

But I also don't want it to be completely up to a roll of the dice. Otherwise you get one of those cases where the players flub the perception test (or surprise roll, or whatever) to spot the monster, flub the reaction roll, lose initiative, get beaten to a pulp in the first round, and then on top of all of that, fuck up the roll to escape the fight and get mutilated.

So the way I handle it is

When player characters run away from combat, each rolls a D20 and adds the number of empty slots they have in their inventory. Their pursuers (if the NPCs chase them) each roll a D20 and add any bonuses they get from their movement speed (default +0, up to +5 for a speedy foe, +10 for a blazing fast one).

If a character is overencumbered, subtract the number of excess slots from their D20 roll.

Escapees who roll lower than their pursuers are forced back into combat for one round, before they have a chance to try and escape again. Escapees who beat their pursuers are able to get away.

If a player (or NPC) fails to escape pursuit, they may elect to drop encumbering items equal to the difference between their roll and that of the pursuer, in order to escape that round.

Get a bonus to your roll to escape for running through an uncharted area, but run the risk of triggering traps or running into other monsters. You can choose to do this after you roll and fail to escape.

A clever solution (I cut the rope bridge with my axe once everyone’s across!) might just succeed automatically.

When dragging an incapacitated character, the person doing the dragging rolls to escape pursuit as normal, but subtracts the number of items carried by the character being dragged from their total. They may improve their odds by leaving behind the victim’s backpack, weapon, etc.

If the players pursue fleeing enemies, it is the same, but roles are reversed.

I'm sure this has been done before in some format, but I'll talk about why I did it like this.

The key is that the players have the ability to make choices after a failed die roll to turn it into a success, at the cost of spending a resource or endangering themselves in some other way. Either throw away some items to move faster, or run into an uncharted area and potentially get in even more trouble.

We can imagine assigning other bonuses and penalties based on things like the player characters' movement speed, where a faster than average character gets a bonus to the roll and a slower than average one (dwarves for example get a malus to their speed in various editions) gets a penalty.

The rules for dragging an incapacitated character omit the weight of the character and only count the weight of their carried items. I erred on the side of making the rules less punishing here because I've seen players get endlessly tarpitted by creatures with stun or paralysis abilities - unable to stand and fight, unable to retreat if they have to haul a downed ally out of the fray, and unwilling to abandon a friend. While the dilemma of leaving a wounded comrade behind to escape yourself is a rich vein of drama to tap, it's not the kind of drama everyone always enjoys.

This isn't a perfectly generic system. It assumes a couple things about your dungeon crawling game:

• It uses a D20 roll over system
• It uses a slot based encumbrance system

If your game doesn't use a D20, you can modify the math so that the sizes of the bonuses and penalties isn't overwhelming. So if you use a D10, divide by two. If you use a D6, divide by three or four, depending on if you want to round up or down.

If your game doesn't use slot based encumbrance, things get trickier. I'm personally of the opinion that non slot based encumbrance (that actually tracks pounds and ounces) is mathematically annoying enough that in practice it's usually ignored where it appears in rules. But I know that some people play games with digital character sheets that might auto-calculate stuff like carry weight of items, making those rules more practical. So there might be people out there who do use pounds and ounces encumbrance, and this system isn't going to help them at all.

Esoteric Enterprises - Bathhouse

Developed with Grandini

This dungeon node is an underground bathhouse. It is connected to a surface building, and to the underworld below. It can be part of a Social Underworld faction, or independent.

Google docs version here.

 

Photo from South China Morning Post

GENERATING UNDERGROUND BATHHOUSES

Place a token at the center of the map. That’s the lobby, accessible through a door in the building above (John Wick style nightclub, old Roman structure, historic building, etc).

Roll your dice sized D8 and lower around the lobby. These are your mundane rooms. Roll your larger dice (D10 to D00) further out - those are the underworld baths, where stuff gets weird. You can connect the rooms at the edge of the page to tunnels leading to your other dungeon complexes.

Rooms numbered 1 through 8 are open to the public - though they may sometimes be reserved for private use by a faction. 9 through 00 are members or staff only.

Some rooms in a bathhouse may be sex segregated - in that case, use the color of the dice to determine which. Warm colors for women, cool colors for men. Or the entire bathhouse might be exclusive to one or the other.

In some parts of the world (particularly the United States) a “bathhouse” is a euphemism for a brothel or sex club. Decide if your underground baths fit that description.

CONNECTIONS
Halls in the Baths are 10 feet wide and softly lit. If they connect to a room with water, they have tile floors. Otherwise they’re soft carpet. Doors are made of varnished wood and swing both directions. Those between public and private areas are locked, but doors between rooms 11 to 00 are not locked.

Doors to the underworld beyond are sturdier than the wood doors used in the interior, and are all locked. The ones that lead to dangerous areas might also be guarded. Banging on the doors from outside will usually get an armed response, though the players might be able to talk their way past. Players who make a good impression on the bathhouse owners can get keys to these doors for free passage.

 

Fallout: Seattle Political Compass

 

From my Fallout: Seattle series

Fallout: Seattle Masterpost

This is a masterpost for my Fallout: Seattle mini campaign. It includes play reports of all the sessions, the rules I used, and the GM sandbox, in case you're interested in using it yourself.

Islands of Seattle By Jeffrey Lin

First, the Play Reports. I tested this with four Delta Green players, three of whom had also played in the previous Two Sun Campaign.

• Session One
• Session Two

Next, the system itself:

• Player Document - start here
• Player Map - what the players see at the beginning of the game
• GM Sandbox - the content that populates the world
• GM Map - the place where it all happens
• Character Sheet - auto calculates so you don't have to
• Folder, containing all of the above