In attendance, same as last time:
- Elizabeth "Scythe" Forscythe, scavenger from the ruins of Two Sun
- Professor Delores, high powered scientist and Amazon
- Dr Emily Ridgeway, surly drugrunner
- Chews on Fat, smooth talking tribal and "honorable cannibal"
The Seekers woke up early at Establishing Shots, woke up Sean the Researcher, and went to the Gun Runners' outlet store on the South side of the Sound. Chewie picked up a Ripper, while Delores grabbed a set of Security Armor to boost her substantial natural defenses (she grabbed a perk to boost her damage resistance after last session).
Before dropping Sean off on Capitol Island, the team decided to check out the neat mansion they saw on Beacon Island.
The Turner-Koepf House
They passed a solitary buoy on the canoe ride over - a ghoul in a life vest, which tried its best to thrash toward them and didn't achieve much of anything. The hike up the hill to the house didn't reveal anything of interest. The house itself had a rickety wooden fence around it, written in English and simplified Chinese, warning visitors to go around and use the front gate. The front gate had a sign instructing visitors to deposit their weapons in a green plastic recycling bin - which had a tarp and drainage holes in the bottom to protect its contents from water. The players dropped their gear off and followed the path to the house, where a sign on the front door instructed them to knock and then step well back of the door.
An ancient Chinese American ghoul in a heavy coat answered the door, carrying a sniper rifle in her hands and plasma grenades on her belt. She peered at the Seekers and, satisfied that they weren't about to attack her, invited them in for tea. They had to take off their jackets so they wouldn't drip on the furniture. Which also reassured her that they weren't cyborgs in disguise. She explained that the humanoid robots of the Zymogenetics corporation had been pestering her for two hundred years to give them her brain. She had been forced out of her house once, right before the war, and she wasn't going to let anyone else imprison her ever again
The tea was delicious, the sesame cakes rock hard and barely edible. Shumeng (that was her name) explained that the cyborgs were weak to pulse grenades and water - that's why they wore heavy raincoats and tarpaulins. Something about it fucked up their neural interfaces and stunned them. The players asked if they could buy some of her pulse grenades (which she hand-refilled using microfusion cells and copper wire to charge the EMP coils), and she sold them a couple for 100 caps each. Chews on Fat guessed that Shumeng had been interned before the Great War, same as his ancestors. He told her he was going to fight the Enclave - descended from the slaver empire that ruled the American Continent before the bombs fell. Shumeng gave him an extra pulse grenade for free, and told him it would immobilize power armor as well as robotics. The Seekers also bought a holotape player from her, so that they wouldn't have to scrounge one later. They had a plan from last session that needed one. Then they got in the boat and sailed North to Capitol Island.
By Jeffrey Lin
Sean told the group they should approach Capitol Island from the East side, to minimize the likelihood of meeting an orclaw or cyborg. He told them the cyborgs could be distracted with intelligent conversation and curiosity. They hadn't abducted him or his fellow researcher Olga after learning they were PhD students. They told them to come back after getting their degrees. Avoiding the Orclaws was a matter of staying quiet. They had poor eyesight and hearing on land, unable to use their sonar to detect prey. The Seekers made landfall in a blackberry thicket and hiked up the island.
Capitol Island was quiet. The Seekers snuck up muddy side streets and between 200 year old evergreen trees bursting through the pavement. They stopped at Cal Anderson park and waited before crossing, to ensure nothing was lurking there.
They saw an orclaw.
Orclaw by Max von Behr
The creature sniffed the air and made some shrieking noises, whalesong that sounded horrifying on land. Then it stomped down the street and disappeared from view. The Seekers waited five minutes or so to make sure it wasn't coming back, then ran across to the apartments behind the Dick's Old Fashioned Hamburgers. Sean led them up the stairs to the hideout, where Olga was working on a word processor, noise cancelling headphones. He tossed a ball of paper at her, which surprised her. She was happy to see him. She didn't expect him to come back alive. Especially not with the data they needed to complete their research.
The researchers were studying Orclaws and their relationship to the White Spots tribe. Or they tried to. The White Spots had been enslaved by the Krakens at the dig site run by the Deserters. Sean had gone looking for them and been enslaved by the Kraken Chief. But he managed to find a couple surviving White Spot singers, and learn the chords that served as a Rosetta Stone for communication with the Orclaws. With his songs, and the holotape player the Seekers bought from Shumeng, he could use the word processor brought by Olga to communicate with the Orclaws in their own whale language.
A couple hours of feverish work later, and the researchers had a prototype ready to test. The team decided to test it somewhere where the Orclaws couldn't get them if they fucked up the translation. They decided the old light rail tunnel was a fine place to start. They could duck into a maintenance corridor, whose doors were too small for the Orclaw to fit through. If it tried to corner them, they could juke it and come out one of the other entrances. They got cozy in the tunnel and tapped out the greeting command. The tape player made a horrible shrieking whale sound. About five minutes later, the call was answered from the tunnel entrance. The Orclaw from earlier came down the escalator, walking gingerly on its enormous claws, too big for the steps.
The researchers were able to have a conversation with the orclaw. It asked where its pod had gone. The White Spots told the Orclaws to wait, and they had waited for so long. The researchers told them the White Spots had been taken away. The Orclaw asked where they were. This provoked a debate between the Seekers about how they should use the Orclaws to attack the Krakens and Deserters. They eventually agreed on taking the Orclaws with them and concentrating all their forces on Northgate. The Orclaws had trouble telling friend from foe, so rather than try to explain the difference between the (helpful) Pirates and the (enemy) Krakens, they just told them it was the men in metal shells that took the White Spots. Thus, the Seekers enlisted the Orclaws in their assault. If they could rescue the White Spots from the slave barracks in the mall, they could direct the Orclaws further.
The plan, arranged with the Seafair Pirates last session, was this:
- The Seekers would call the Deserters up and tell them that they'd completed one of the tasks given them by the Sergeant: the Mercer Island arcology dig site was free of robots, so they could fly the vertibird over and pick up the boring machine.
- The Pirates and Seekers would land at Thornton Bay and march overland to raid the Deserters' base, steal their treasure and escape.
The only addition the Seekers made, besides getting the Orclaws on board, was the decision to jam the Deserters' communications, so they couldn't radio the vertibird to return and put the hurt on the attacking force. To do this, the Seekers needed radio components. So they went looking for an electronics store. Which they found, but not before a huge cyborg warform draped in a blue tarp found them. It was one of the Zymogenetics.
Dr Ridgeway distracted it by engaging the monstrosity in conversation, while Scythe went into the store and got the radio parts necessary to make the jammer. The Zymogenetic explained that she was the survivor of a science team contracted by General Atomics to design neural interfaces for the robobrain project. And when the bombs fell, the team decided there was no sense letting the criminals and dissidents have fun with totally bitchin' robot bodies. So they cyborged themselves up, and have been hunting for spare parts ever since.
Dr Ridgeway told them that was super cool, then used her medical knowledge to make up a convincing lie: She had a retrovirus that made every cell in her body poison to any other cell that touched it. The whole group had the retrovirus from fucking each other non stop. If the cyborg harvested any of their body parts, the whole Zymogenetic operation would be infected too. The cyborg left them alone after that.
With all the pieces in place, we fast forwarded to the assault. The team did it during the day, concerned that the Deserters might have night vision that would give them advantage if they attacked later. The pirates brought two rowboats, knowing that a steam launch would give away their position from miles away. The warparty had two handmade 14.7mm rifles, a grenade launcher, lots of laser rifles, and was led by Captain Kurt, democratically elected leader of the Seafair Pirates.
Seafair Pirate Kurt
The Seekers radioed to the Deserter Sergeant that they had cleared out the Mercy Arcology, and she could send the vertibird in any time. The pirates, Seekers and Orclaws hid their boats and themselves in the undergrowth, waiting until the vertibird was well away. Then they launched the attack.
The base at Northgate had two main hardpoints: the Deserters' base inside the fortified Thornton Place Apartments, and the slave pens inside the old Northgate Mall. The Pirates and Orclaws attacked the Deserters at the apartments, while the Seekers went straight for the Northgate Mall. The plan was to free the slaves, including the remaining White Spots, so they could take charge and lead the Orclaws on the final drive against the Deserters.
The pirates were spotted almost immediately by the Deserters and a firefight broke out, trading green bolts of plasma with red laser blasts. The Seekers ran for the slave pens. They got across the parking lot, to the doors of the mall before the Krakens guarding it spotted them. The Seekers threw one of the exploding spears they got from the barback at Establishing Shots. It missed. The three tribals got off one shot before being overwhelmed - gunned down and hacked to pieces by the Seekers. Dr Ridgeway and Professor Delores shared a flask of the liquors they bought yesterday, boosting their natural defenses, health and melee striking power. Ridgeway also popped the buffout she'd been saving all adventure. Then they went into the mall.
The Seekers recognized the mall's main concourse as a trap - they'd be exposed walking down the long tunnel, and bogged down in the first gunfight they got into. Scythe used her knowledge of pre war buildings to juke into a maintenance corridor, which let the team get to the other end of the building without exposing themselves. The door at the end was blocked by stacked furniture, but Delores shoved it out of the way with such aplomb that the Krakens on the other side didn't even notice the team approaching. The tribals had clearly not been ready for battle, and were scrambling to get their weapons together. The Seekers waited until the Krakens left to investigate the explosion they heard earlier, then stepped out onto the concourse to free the slaves. The captives were held in the storefronts behind metal shutters, and none of the Seekers had a key. Instead, they used their superior strength, a sledgehammer, Chewie's ripper, and their bare hands to open the metal gates. They were interrupted by a police protectron, which had clearly been reprogrammed by the Deserters to act as an early warning system. Thankfully, the Seekers had already activated the radio jammer, and they smashed the robot to pieces before it could sound the alarm. That bought them time to get the rest of the slave pens open, before a whopping eight Krakens returned to pick a fight.
Scythe popped a benny and fired a burst from her AR, cutting down two of the slavers with a bullet to the kneecap and a glancing shot to the head. Chews Fat leapfrogged up from store to store to get into melee range without being shot. Delores threw a spear and dropped a Kraken with a punctured lung. Dr Ridgeway, still high on buffout, closed the distance in seconds and dropped one of the raiders with a well placed blow to the throat, grabbing another to use as a human shield. The Krakens fired back, the slaves rushed in, and the melee became general. Scythe's benzedrene high let her sight and shoot her rifle with superhuman speed, Chewie's ripper tore through the Krakens, and the Doctor and the Professor mulched fighter after fighter with their fists and sledgehammer respectively. One of the Krakens caught Chews Fat with his fishhook glove, and another tripped him with a boathook, but both of the slavers were chopped to pieces by Delores and Dr Ridgeway before they could press their advantage. The three surviving Krakens broke and ran. The slaves picked up the dropped gear from the five dead raiders. And among those slaves: the surviving White Spots.
With the slaves freed and the White Spots ready and willing to lead the Orclaws, the team pushed back toward the apartment complex. The pirates and Orclaws were crammed inside the lobby, trying to get past the reinforced airlock door the Deserters had installed on the stairs to the upper levels. The streets around the building were littered with dead pirates, indicating a clear field of fire. The Seekers needed a way to get up to the building without exposing themselves. One of the White Spots knew about a secret entrance in the back of a brewery on the opposite side of the block. He led the Seekers on a long flank, avoiding the deadly killzone of the street.
Inside the brewery, the back door was welded shut. The team blew it with one of the satchel charges they'd been carrying around since chargen (the Technician package gets explosives) and rushed in - to find themselves in an alternate stairwell that connected to the main lobby. The Orclaws rushed forward and scooped up the White Spots, making happy orca noises at finally rejoining their pod. The Seekers used another satchel charge to blast open the main airlock on the stairs, exposing two fronts of attack on the floors above. The pirates and Orclaws took the main staircase, while the Seekers headed up the back stair.
The assault team barely avoided a plasma bolt from a Deserter holding a keyhole position on the back stair - presumably alerted by the explosion of the satchel charge. Delores stepped out into his line of fire and tossed an explosive harpoon. He fired his plasma rifle. The HEAT round struck him center mass, shaped charge sending a jet of superheated metal through his cuirass and spalling inside his torso, killing him instantly. The plasma bolt struck Delores and melted most of her armor, leaving her seriously burned but alive. (Delores took a trait after last session that gave her natural damage resistance, which she got a LOT of value out of). Dr Ridgeway took the dead soldier's plasma rifle, and the fusion core from his power armor. The Seekers had found what they were after. They could leave right now, if they wanted. But they were afraid of what the Deserters would do in retaliation. They decided to finish the job.
The Seekers rushed up the stairs, weapons at the ready, to find the Deserters had already abandoned the floor for the next one up. There were beds, posters, personal items and other signs of habitation scattered everywhere. And a bottlecap press, with a sack of over a thousand freshly minted bottlecaps. The Deserters smashed the press to pieces, right as Captain Kurt burst in, laser rifle at the ready, followed by an Orclaw. The pirate wanted to take the treasure and leave, but the Seekers convinced him to press the attack - just think of how handsome he'd look in power armor and a tricorne hat!
The Seekers worked out a plan of attack. The remaining Deserters would have the stairs up to the next floor locked down - so they wouldn't take the stairs. They climbed up on the furniture to attach their remaining satchel charges to the ceiling, intent on collapsing it. Unfortunately, the Deserters had the same idea. They mouseholed through the floor above with a couple plasma bolts and dropped down a frag grenade, seriously injuring a couple of the player characters. Thinking quickly, Delores set off one of the pulse grenades they got from Shumeng. The EMP traveled through the ceiling above them and into the next floor, temporarily disabling the Deserters' power armor and stunning them. The team quickly attached the remaining satchels, reloaded their weapons, injected stimpaks and combat drugs, and prepared for the final fight. Then they blew the charges.
Four Enclave Deserters in power armor fell through the floor with a crash. Chews on Fat attacked one with a ripper, whose carbide teeth cut right through the ceramic-polymer composite shell of the powersuit. Dr Ridgeway fired her looted plasma rifle, but missed due to her inexperience with the weapon. Scythe fired her assault rifle, but the 5.56 rounds bounced right off the power armored soldiers. Dolores threw another pulse grenade, keeping the Deserters stunned. Ridgeway wrestled one of their plasma guns away and shot another, melting his armor off so the Orclaw could eat him. Chews on Fat hacked away with his ripper, too close for his victim to bring his plasma rifle to bear. So the Deserter set off a grenade on his belt, counting on his power armor to protect him. The blast horribly injured Chewie, who took the brunt of the fragments, but survived to behead the Deserter in revenge. Delores tossed the last pulse grenade and the Seekers finished off the Deserters - the last guy managed to collapse the floor with a well timed elbow drop, but not before Dr Ridgeway shot and killed him with the plasma gun.
The Seekers, battered but alive, and with their prize in hand, convinced the surviving pirates to set an ambush for the vertibird. Which would cover their escape, and make the Deserters think the pirates were the masterminds of the whole operation. The Seekers went back to Thornton and hid out until nightfall, before canoeing back to the Sea Needle. They ran into a handful of surviving Krakens in a canoe, who quickly paddled away.
The Seekers showed the Economic Stabilization Bureau the pieces of the wrecked bottlecap press. The Shi thanked them, and promised delivery of a fusion core inside the week. Which would be the second one the Seekers collected. They got back in their canoe and paddled South to the Admiral Theater. The Pearl Divers had also promised them a fusion core for helping them get the Orclaws out of downtown and get rid of the Krakens, and the Seekers had done both. Squid wasn't in the theater, busy with a night raid on the surviving Krakens. But her son Net was home. He was unhappy about the fate of the Krakens - they were his cousins, both literally and figuratively. But his tribe owed the Seekers a debt, which he intended to pay. They no longer needed a fusion core, so Net gave them some treasure his tribe found on the seabed: a Laser RCW, some fragmentation grenades, and assorted ammunition.
With their goal achieved, the Seekers got the hell out of the Drowned City, before the consequences of their actions could catch up with them.
Surf and Turf by Tim Winstrom
Ending Slides
Deserters
With half their squad annihilated, the surviving Deserters lashed out against the people of the Drowned City. They destroyed the Sea Needle and establishing shots bar with a barrage of aerial rockets, then strafed the pirates' hidden cove with gatling lasers until the entirety of Bainbridge Archipeligo caught fire. Guilt ridden over the death of her soldiers, Sergeant Maria gave up command to the Corporal. He led them East over the Cascades, to pursue their slice of the American dream elsewhere.
Economic Stabilization Bureau
Mission accomplished, the Agents of the NCR Economic Stabilization Bureau traveled South on a wood burning steam crawler, back to their masters in the Shi Banks. The injured guard Zhi took an interest in forensic accounting, after listening to Yeping's lectures on the long ride home, and found new employment with the Bureau in a safe profession.
Edison
Edison and his apprentice Cray survived the destruction of Establishing Shots, the bar they had spent years restoring. With little reason to remain in the Drowned City, they wandered South into Oregon. The distilling discoveries they made in Seattle made them wildly popular wherever they went, but Edison was never able to find the purpose and meaning he had hoped his pilgrimage would bring him.
Gun Runners
The Gun Runners found what they were looking for: a case of prototype weapons, hauled from Denny Reef by the Pearl Divers after the White Spots calmed the Orclaws. Though the experimental firearms were corroded and unusable, the Gun Runners reverse engineered them, and used the schematics to build new copies. Their deadly flechette rifles became a hot commodity across the entire Gun Runner business empire, making Ada and Lem the rising stars of the co-op.
The Krakens
The Krakens were wiped out as a tribe, survivors chased out of the Sound or killed by the Pearl Divers. The victorious Pearl Divers forbade their children from ever mentioning the names of the people they had once called family. Future generations grew up never knowing of the wayward branch of the tribe, which had committed an unspeakable crime and been exterminated for it.
Odabashian and Osman
Odabashian and Osman continued refurbishing pre war boats and ferrying travelers around the Drowned City. Though the Seattle archipelago was safer after the destruction of the Pearl Divers and the departure of the Seafair Pirates, the Pearl Divers' newfound hostility to outsiders meant that travel and trade to the region steadily declined.
Pearl Divers
The victorious and militant Pearl Divers completed their extermination of the Krakens - the people they had once called their brothers. Well armed by the Gun Runners, they consolidated their control over the Drowned City and chased out the surviving Seafair Pirates. Wary of outsiders after the Deserters' corrupting influence, the Pearl Divers grew paranoid and mistrustful of travelers to the region - especially those from "civilized" lands.
Researchers
After completing their interviews with the White Spots, the Researchers traveled South on the same caravan as the Economic Stabilization Bureau, and eventually found their way back to Followers University Adytum. They carefully edited accounts of their research, disguising their role in the extermination of one of the region's tribes. This doctored version of their thesis earned them both their Doctorates.
Sean privately mourned the death of the Chief Kraken. Though the head slaver may have been a violent, inconsiderate, absurdly clingy man, Sean couldn't help wishing that things had turned out differently.
Seafair Pirates
The Seafair Pirates were bolstered by the weapons and technology they seized from the Deserters' hideout, but critically weakened by the Deserters' counterattack in the vertibird, which flew too fast and too high for them to hit with their weapons. When the dust settled and the fires died out, the Pearl Divers were in control of the Sound, and were now too tough to raid for fun. The surviving Pirates packed up and sailed West to Port Townsend, to try their luck in more friendly waters.
Shumeng
Shumeng lived in her house on Beacon Island, as she had for centuries. When a surviving Kraken came to her door, asking for sanctuary, she let him in out of a strong sense of hospitality. The Pearl Divers demanded she turn him over to them, and tried to take him by force when she wouldn't. Her land mines and sniper rifle ensured they thought twice before trying again.
White Spots
With so many of their tribe killed by the Deserters and the Krakens, the surviving White Spots were adopted into the Pearl Divers. They taught their new family how to speak with the Orclaws, and learned how to handle the Pearl Divers' Tree Octopuses. Their combined strength and knowledge made the new tribe a force to be reckoned with.
Zymogenetics
With the Pearl Divers in control of Seattle, the Zymogenetics found that the people of the Drowned City were no longer easy pickings for their war machines. Driven back and deprived of their source of spare parts, the cyborgs turned on each other, cannibalizing each other's morphs for life saving organs. The handful of survivors eked out a precarious existence, conserving power in the bowels of the Zymogenetics Headquarters.
This was a ton of fun. The combat was super visceral, with the limb crippling rules making the players' attacks hit hard and feel good. Everyone got to use the perks they picked out after the previous session, and the damage resistance and armor penetration abilities picked out by the melee fighters proved absolutely essential. Melee weapons, unarmed, guns, energy weapons and explosives all proved useful and fun.
The system isn't without its flaws. Like in Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, high enemy armor values make weapons with high per-shot damage much more useful than weapons with lower damage per-hit, but higher rate of fire.
I didn't realize until I wrote this post that I completely forgot about the Krakens' tree octopuses. That would have made both fights with them much more interesting - but also multiplied the number of NPCs I had to run, lengthening all the turns.
I had four players, and I think that was too many. I estimate about one quarter of the session was spent by the players arguing over plans, where to go next, and what the morally correct decision was. In the Fallout video games, this isn't a concern, because you've only got the one player character to make choices and accept faction quests.
I'll throw up a masterpost soon with the GM facing sandbox document.
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