Pistachio Milkshake: employees at the McDonald’s in Gaziantep, a city in Turkey about 45 kilometers from the Syrian border. Also members of the Scottish Rite, an occult conspiracy of fast food workers fighting for the magickal revolution. They help people with their problems, make the world more accepting of magick through ostentatious supernatural demonstrations, and argue a lot on a secret imageboard of fellow burger warriors.
So when an archaeological dig at the ancient neolithic temple of Göbekli Tepe uncovers a living MILF Statue, only a two hour drive from your store, it’s clear what needs to be done. Everyone calls in a sick day and climbs into the group's battered Westfalia. Next stop: the oldest megalithic site in the world.
In attendance:
- Hurrem - Wannabe Femme Fatale, Occasional Dipsomancer
- Mehmet - Closeted Defender of Gay Turks (And Armenians… and Kurds)
- Suliman - Expert Fencer, Martial Arts Master, Total Coward
- Yusuf - Old Man With Empathic Powers
- Zuhal - Precocious Technology Expert
About a half hour out, Suliman pulled the van into an Akpet filling station off the O-52. Mainly to get snacks and allow the crew an opportunity to piss before heading into a potential confrontation. Hurrem had been pregaming the whole way over and practically leaped out of the van.
It was October 29th, Republic Day, so the museum and interpretive center was closed and empty. Suliman drove past it and up to the dig site itself at the top of the hill. Normally it would have been guarded, but everyone was gone for the holiday, except for a vanload of University of Istanbul researchers. A couple of them were loitering in the parking lot, smoking and staring at their phones. One of them came over and asked if Suliman was from the Culture Ministry. He said yes, and she asked him to go calm Dr Soomer down, because he was real pissed. Then she went back to her cigarette.
Most of the dig team was on the railing around the pit, watching Dr Burseg Soomer argue with a black suited man in impractically large disco heels. Dr Soomer was adamant that the billionaire client who the suited man represented was not getting the statue, which was the greatest archaeological discovery ever. The suited man said otherwise. The right people had signed off on the transfer, and movers would arrive shortly to remove the statue. Dr Soomer invited the player characters to intervene, assuming they were his contacts from the Turkish government. The players asked to see the statue before deciding.
The group spotted two weirdos worthy of their attention. One was a seventeen year old Syrian kid, filling up gas cans at the pump. The other was a white guy in a fiberglass mask emblazoned with a hand of mysteries, carrying bottled water and calorie dense snacks out of the store. Hurrem tried to make conversation with the masked man. He was totally silent, but she received cryptic messages on her phone that seemed to be from him. Yusef went up the hill to see if there were any cars parked in the vicinity of the gas station. He lit a cigarette and spotted a strange car hidden in a gulley off the highway: a pickup truck with a strange logo on the hood and a ZU anti air gun in the bed, tended by three men in keffiyeh. He strongly suspected it was one of those American pickup trucks that ended up sold to ISIS.
Zuhal noticed that the silent man's fiberglass mask had an infrared camera. She snapped a picture and uploaded it to the Scottish Rite's anon list, asking if anyone had seen something similar. She got an immediate response: the mask was similar to those worn by an "internet death cult" in America that received commands through their cellphones. It wasn't clear what they were doing in Turkey, but it probably had something to do with the discovery of the magick statue. Zuhal broke out her radio and IMSI catcher and tried to isolate any signals going to or from the mask.
Yusuf returned without being spotted by the crew of the technical and the group weighed their options. The masked man wandered off into the hills, while the teenager with the gas cans walked along the highway in the direction of the hidden pickup. With the aid of his Solid Citizen avatar powers, Mehmet suspected that the kid was in deep denial about his sexuality. More importantly, he was mixed up with what was probably a group of ISIS fighters on a ghastly chevauchee in the Turkish outback. The team decided to intervene before something horrible happened to him. By appealing to his adolescent angst, his desire to belong, and by letting him try alcohol for the first time, Hurrem, Mehmet and Yusuf were able to persuade this kid, Rasheed, to accompany them on their trip to Göbekli Tepe instead of taking the gas cans back to the technical where the rest of the crew was lying in wait.
Meanwhile, Zuhal went back into the gas station and picked up some household chemicals to put together an improvised explosive device. It seemed like a good idea given the potential need to destroy a stone statue.
The group piled into the Westfalia. Rasheed explained that his group was on mission from God, to destroy the pagan idol at Göbekli Tepe. Suliman suggested that hindering the ISIS goons in their quest was probably a bad thing, since by destroying the statue the salafists would probably prevent the malign conception from occurring. The others allowed that this was possible. They pulled out of the gas station and hit the road.
On the drive over, Zuhal managed to tap the satellite uplink from the mask with her backpack full of radio gear. The mask was sending a stream of its camera feed, and receiving a low baud drip of what were probably text commands. The only thing she was able to decode was a URL. It took her to a basic HTML site with a personality quiz, which gradually grew more and more invasive until she suspected whoever designed it had been stalking her. She slammed her laptop shut and her phone buzzed. An unknown number had sent her a blueprint of the fiberglass mask worn by the silent man.
It was October 29th, Republic Day, so the museum and interpretive center was closed and empty. Suliman drove past it and up to the dig site itself at the top of the hill. Normally it would have been guarded, but everyone was gone for the holiday, except for a vanload of University of Istanbul researchers. A couple of them were loitering in the parking lot, smoking and staring at their phones. One of them came over and asked if Suliman was from the Culture Ministry. He said yes, and she asked him to go calm Dr Soomer down, because he was real pissed. Then she went back to her cigarette.
Most of the dig team was on the railing around the pit, watching Dr Burseg Soomer argue with a black suited man in impractically large disco heels. Dr Soomer was adamant that the billionaire client who the suited man represented was not getting the statue, which was the greatest archaeological discovery ever. The suited man said otherwise. The right people had signed off on the transfer, and movers would arrive shortly to remove the statue. Dr Soomer invited the player characters to intervene, assuming they were his contacts from the Turkish government. The players asked to see the statue before deciding.
The cause of all this consternation was discovered in a tomb behind a wall in one of the pits. A grad student carefully scraped away some sediment from the wall to see if there was red ochre paint underneath, and the entire wall gave way to reveal a hidden chamber. It was this chamber that the Pistachio Milkshake crew now entered.
The statue was seated in the tomb, surrounded by animal bones. The graduate student Hakan was clearly trying to communicate with it in Turkish sign language, but stopped immediately when he noticed the group enter. The statue looked at them with its featureless face. Rasheed and Suliman both freaked out and ran out of the room. Hakan denied trying to teach the statue sign language, claiming it only knew how to draw on the wall. The giant statute tried to stand up, but Hakan quickly ushered it back to its chair. It was over ten tons of limestone and he was worried it would fall over and damage itself. The statue turned to paint on the wall next to it.
The players interpreted this as the statue requesting sex and human sacrifices. They couldn't see if it had functioning genitals, but either way this was a real problem given that they had heard a prophecy about an evil child being conceived in the region.
Outside the crypt, the suited man was gone. Nobody saw him leave. Rasheed and Suliman sat on the balcony above the excavation pit. The Syrian kid shouted in alarm and pointed down the hill. A group of women with rifles were working their way up the slope, rushing forward and protecting each other with bounding overwatches. The pair went back into the pit to warn the group.
The cabal quickly hatched a plan. Yusef would go out and talk to the approaching guerrillas, and hopefully mollify or at least delay them. Zuhal would hide her computer and radio so they wouldn't get taken away. Hurrem took a pull of raki from her flask, cast "Harmless Drunk" on herself, and staggered out to get the backpack with Zuhal's IED from the Westfalia.
Yusuf went outside and walked downhill, hands held open. A woman in a stone mask pointed a PK machine gun at him and told him he was now a captive of the Kurdistan Worker's Party. He voided immediately getting shot and convinced her to tell him what she was doing there: her cadre of guerrillas were liberating an ancient image of the Goddess from the clutches of the rapacious Turks. She marched him back into the dig site at gunpoint, along with the stumbling Hurrem (who drunkenly clutched the backpack of explosives to her chest, a fact the insurgents ignored).
The masked woman, Zoya Zal, rounded up everyone and herded them into one of the excavation pits. She had no plans to hurt them, but as hostages they would stop an immediate Turkish military counterstrike. Zuhal actually recognized the masked woman, along with some of the ladies with her. They were the cast of Kurdish_Professionals, a weirdly ritualistic XVIDEOS porno channel that got taken down after people mass reported it.
Dr Soomer really took issue with Zoya's proclamations about the ancient neolithic matriarchy that once worshiped the Goddess at Göbekli Tepe. She was fifty years behind the anthropology curve, and if she thought she was going to muscle onto HIS dig site with that Merlin Stone bullshit, she might as well shoot him right there. Zoya wasn't having any of that, and a screaming argument ensued. The back and forth was only interrupted by one of the militia fighters, an elderly Iraqi Kurd, dragging Hakan out of the tomb and informing her that the Goddess was inside as expected. Zoya took her and another guerrilla who spoke with a German accent down into the crypt to commune with the Goddess, leaving a Syrian lady and the one male member of the militia to watch over the hostages, while the rest of the partisans patrolled the perimeter.
Hurrem said she was going to vomit and climbed out of the pit, leaving the backpack of explosives. The militia wrote her off as a harmless drunk and allowed her to wander the site. She stripped down to the waist and entered the crypt, where the three women were bowed in front of the MILF statue. Hurrem cried out ecstatically that the Spirit had moved her, and stumbled forward to embrace the statue. The Goddess cultists allowed her to kneel before it as it stood, where she came face to face with its fully modeled stone labia. Undeterred, the dispomancer pressed her lips to the limestone and cast Soul Sipping. The memories of the neolithic shamaness whose remnant psyche possessed the statue came flooding into Hurrem's mind, along with the life force animating it. Then it fell over and almost crushed her.
Hurrem got up and began stripping her remaining clothes off, claiming that the Goddess had left the statue and entered her body. The two acolytes bought it, but Zoya was more skeptical. Hurrem couldn't convince her that she was the Goddess reborn, or to take a drink from her flask. So she hit Zoya with a Significant Blast and ran out of the room, not waiting to see if the chunk of flying masonry actually killed her.
While all that was happening, Suliman said he also had to vomit. The guards didnt' believe him until he actually did it. One of the guerrillas, a former child soldier, took him outside the dig site so he could rinse himself off using water from an irrigation pipe in a nearby pistachio grove (Göbekli Tepe is right next to a farm). Suliman used his martial arts mastery to grab her rifle in an unguarded moment, which impressed her enough that she escalated to Pornomantic magick in order to get it back, flashing him twice and retrieving her weapon while he was stunned. He waited until she lifted the hose to rinse the cut on her face where he grazed it with the rifle stock taking it from her, and then disarmed her again, firing off a round in the process. He removed the magazine and the round in the chamber while she turned and ran, having realized she couldn't beat him in a hand to hand fight.
Meanwhile, the remaining players engaged one of their guards in discussion. Suliman was the only man among the Kurdish_Professionals, which was a little odd. He readily explained that he lost his genitals in a mortar attack, but was able to achieve orgasm by participating in sex rites with the Proessionals. He knew a miracle when he saw one. Yusef convinced him to let them speak to Zoya in the crypt. He let them climb out of the hole and escorted them to the tomb.
The following happened the same time
- The sacred eunuch took Mehmet, Zuhal and Yusef to the tomb
- Mostly naked Hurrem came running out of the tomb, followed by two of the militia
- A gunshot rang out from outside as Suliman successfully disarmed his opponent
Suliman tackled the fleeing fighter to the ground, which prevented both of them from being decapitated by a burst of machine gun fire from a helicopter flying overhead - a Chinook strafing the pistachio grove with its door guns. The hill was under attack, and as they watched, a guy in a huge bomb suit leaped from the cargo bay and fell ten stories from the helicopter to wedge himself in the pavement of the parking lot, stuck but unharmed. Suliman ran for the van. The PKK fighters mobilized a response, and the Pistachio Milkshake crew inside the dig site decided now was a good time to run for it. Then the statue came crawling out of the tomb, not fully drained of life. Zuhal grabbed the backpack with her homemade bomb and ran forward to toss it in, and Zoya came out, battered but still alive. Her stone mask was missing and Zuhal could see where her face was scarred by an acid attack. There was no way to blast the statue without also blasting her. Zuhal heaved the bomb and ran for it, going the opposite direction from the rest of the group.
The rest of the cabal made it into the van and Suliman peeled the fuck out as more armed mercenaries fast roped down from the helicopter, engaging the Kurdish_Professionals in battle. He realized too late that Zuhal wasn't in the van. He picked up his phone and called her.
Zuhal ran downhill into a grove of pistachio trees. She tripped and fell into an irrigation ditch. Her phone buzzed. It was a text message.
"MOVE THREE METERS AND HIDE IN THE PIPE"
She crawled three meters and hid in the pipe. A group of people with rifles, machine guns and grenades came out of the trees and crossed the ditch. They were wearing fiberglass masks with cameras and hands of mysteries.
By me
The soldiers climbed up the hill toward the dig site. Zuhal got another text message:
"I LIKE YOU BETTER"
Then she got a call from Suliman, asking where the hell she was. She told him. Suliman took the van offroad and avoided hitting any rocks or rolling it, as the masked men engaged the mercenaries in a gunfight. He carefully parked the van by the ditch and Zuhal got in. The team debated going back and confirming that they'd destroyed the statue, but didn't feel like running back into a warzone filled with armed goons of indeterminate magickal power.
As they navigated the dirt roads out of the pistachio farm, they saw the top of the hill out the back of the van. The Chinook was hovering over the ruins, winching the mangled bottom half of the statue out of the wreckage. This was a concern until they noticed the pickup truck speeding up the hill toward the crest - the same Detroit made ISIS technical from before. The moving truck fired a full belt of 20mm ack ack from the gun in the bed, missing every shot. The surviving mercenaries opened up with small arms, and had the same effect on the truck - as if it had magickal protection. The pickup accelerated and rode the collapsed roof of the dig site like a ramp, getting serious air and detonating its explosive payload to destroy both the hovering helicopter and statue.
Hurrem leaned out the window and threw up.
The playtest went pretty well. The biggest problem was the character sheets I used. The PDF sheet I go from Armies Unknown didn't have space for a lot of the info, meaning the players had to flip back and forth between the PDF for the stress trackers/ability scores and the google doc for the rest. I've since since fixed this by consolidating everything into a one page format of my own creation.
Dipsomancy is completely overpowered, Hurrem's player recognized this about halfway through the game and pulled back rather than solo playing the scenario. I've switched the character to an Ustrinaturge in the next draft, which is still broken but not to the same degree.
I completely failed to engage Mehmet or the player playing him after about the first hour of the game. This was a GMing and table management fuckup on my part, rather than a problem with the pregen character (which the player said afterward was well put together and compelling).
The players dug further into the coercion minigame than I've ever seen in Unknown Armies. They really wanted to make people see things their way without resorting to a gunfight, and it paid off a couple times. Coercion is tough in Unknown Armies because it takes a lot of work to get above a level 3 or 4 stress test (if you engage every single one of your and your target's passions you get up to 7). The target can shrug it off with a successful saving throw, and if they fail they can choose to freak the fuck out rather than doing what you say. The "Evaluates Foo" feature lets you see how hardened an NPC is in a stress meter, but that's much less important than knowing what their passions are, so you can craft a threat that actually engages them.
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