Another day, another playtest of ICONODULES. Another year, another Jackson Elias Convention. If you want to read up on the premise and the basics of the adventure, check the first playtest.
This time, we had
- Ecrin - Experienced Occultist and Wage Slave
- Mehmet - Closeted Defender of Gay Turks (And Armenians… and Kurds)
- Suliman - Expert Fencer, Martial Arts Master, Total Coward
- Zuhal - Precocious Technology Expert
After character selection and a rules tutorial, play began with the burger warriors pulling into the Akpet off the highway to take a piss and grab some snacks before the final drive to Göbekli Tepe. They spotted three weirdos who seemed worth investigating.
- A seventeen year old Syrian kid, filling up gas cans at the pump.
- An American guy in a fiberglass mask emblazoned with a hand of mysteries, carrying bottled water and calorie dense snacks out of the store.
- A Kurdish lady in a blue headscarf smoking a safe distance away from the pumps, who Zuhal recognized from Kurdish_Professionals, a weirdly ritualistic lesbian XVIDEOS channel that got taken down after people mass reported it.
The group offered to help the Syrian kid, but he wasn't interested in strangers pestering him, especially a girl his own age. Mehmet tried to forge a connection with the Kurdish lady, using his Solid Citizen powers to connect with a member of his tribe. The lady misinterpreted his "how do you do, fellow gay?" overture, but not in the way he expected. Rather than a fellow member of the homosexual underground, she assumed he was a fellow worshiper of the Goddess.
This lady, Deeyah, was a follower of the Naked Goddess. Her cabal was on its way to Göbekli Tepe because they thought the living statue was an image of their deity. She was a little worried that Mehmet was from a rival sect and would try to upstream her, but he reassured her he wasn't about that, and she offered to join forces with him instead. The rest of the group debated what to do. A sex cult doing some kind of rite in the tomb of an ancient fertility statue seemed like the kind of thing that would lead to a supernatural pregnancy. But posing as fellow cultists would let them influence the cult's decision making, or outright sabotage them.
So the gang let Deeyah hop in the Westfalia with them and took off down the highway. Ecrin decided to game the system and badger Deeyah into "hiring" her for a job as a local guide, despite having never been to the temple. Deeyah wasn't convinced, but as a Pornomancer she understood that sometimes you had to do weird shit to make your powers worked. So she gave Ecrin a break and handed over a few lira. Zuhal looked up the cult that wore the weird masks. The most likely explanation was an offshoot of the "NSA Death Cult" that people on the Anon List had spotted operating in the United States - giving up their bodies to a machine in exchange for supernatural powers.
Deeyah told Suleiman to pull off the highway onto a dirt road past a few pistachio farms. She directed him through a series of backroads and mountain paths just wide enough for the van. She told him to park, hopped out, and made a sound like a fox. A dozen women stood up from concealed positions and lowered their weapons. Their leader, Zoya Zal, came down the hill to parlay with the Rite crew. The masked lady explained what the Kurdish_Professionals were planning. In so many words, they were going to get a Pornomancy major charge by filming a sex ritual with the newly discovered MILF statue, which they believed was the oldest incarnation of the Naked Goddess in existence.
The players debated whether this would actually work. Normally Pornomancers could only get a major by staging a scene with the original cast from a Naked Goddess video. But ever since the 03 war there were a lot of rival Pornomancy sects with their own charging methods. Neolithic fertility idols probably fit into at least one of them. Mehmet tried to come up with a good pitch for why Zoya shouldn't try to do the ritual, but she wasn't receptive to his religious counseling.
Zuhal was bored of all this arguing. How could adults make a sex cult creating a monster baby sound so boring? She chose that moment to stare at her phone. She had it hooked up to the radio set in her backpack via a raspberry pi, letting her spy on radio communications. And when she unlocked her phone she immediately picked up a huge amount of encrypted radio traffic coming from several points in the surrounding hills, rapidly converging on her location. She alerted the others, and Zoya gave a shout. The PKK fighters scrambled for cover, and after a second the Scottish Rite crew did the same.
Zuhal got a text message from an unknown number, telling her to stand up. She did it, and the armed men in fiberglass masks coming up the hill immediately aimed their weapons at her. They spoke to her through her radio in American English, telling her not to move as two of them approached her. The masked drones exposed themselves as they approached, and Zoya opened up with the PKM. The remaining masks dropped prone as the PKK fighters caught them in a decent if hastily improvised v shaped ambush. Zuhal dropped prone fast, and the rest of the group wasn't equipped for ranged battle - except Mehmet, who had his double barrel shotgun. In the interest of fighting alongside "his people", he sighted his Stoeger and let off one round, putting a fist-sized group of double-ought buck into one of the attackers in an unguarded moment. The masked man caught the majority of the pellets with his plate carrier and dropped to the ground, ribs broken but vital organs unpunctured.
The drones broke contact and fell back down the hill, leaving two of their number dead and retiring with an unknown number wounded. Zuhal got a text from the same unknown number with a frowning emoji. The sex cultists advanced down the hill to loot the bodies and discovered that one was still alive. He lay completely silent until they pulled off his fiberglass mask, then - as though he had woken up to find his intestines scrambled by machine gun fire - he thrashed and screamed until one of the Kurdish_Professionals shot him through the head. They looted the bodies, taking weapons, armor, ammunition, medical supplies, communications gear... Two of the partisans traded their old AKMs for the ARs the dead men were sporting, handing off their old Kalashnikovs to Suleiman and Mehmet.
They gave Zuhal one of the masks. Behind the fiberglass plate was a high bandwidth satellite radio and a small screen for displaying text commands. There was a camera on the exterior connected to the radio, but no way the person wearing the mask could actually see out.
The team came up with a plan to stop the ritual from producing any monster babies. Ever the precocious teen, Zuhal had a regimen of birth control pills in her bag. Clandestinely introduced into Zoya's food, a crushed up pill would probably stop her from conceiving anything. Ecrin took the pills and resolved to sneak them into Zoya's water bottle at the earliest opportunity.
The Kurdish_Professionals packed up. Zoya was concerned that the strange Westerners they just killed might respond with an air strike. It was imperative that they seize the dig site fast. Zoya and her top guerrillas (Deeyah, Qadam, Meral and Saladin) hopped in the Westfalia with the players as an advance guard. She told the Rite cabal they were in charge of managing the hostages taken from the dig team - essential insurance against a counter strike by the Turkish military.
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Like in the last playtest, the museum was closed and deserted for Republic Day. At the dig site, the PKK guerrillas stayed hidden in the van while the Rite cabal investigated. And like in last playtest, they were able to bluff their way into the pit by pretending to be with the Culture Ministry. This time, they intervened in the argument between Dr Soomer and Alan Blursuit by demanding that Blursuit provide them with a hefty bribe and a signed letter from the Provincial Gendarmerie command authorizing the removal. Alan gave them a phone number for the corrupt Village Guard commander Bey Beyzade who brokered the deal, and the wily paramilitary promised them a signature in two hours.
With two hours to hatch a plan, or potentially less if the gunfight in the foothills drew attention, the players decided to steal the statue. They got Dr Soomer onboard by explaining the technical wording of the deal Blursuit had made with the law enforcement people. His shadowy billionaire client had paid for the contents of the dig site, and if the statue wasn't on the dig site...
(Whether this was actually how the deal was worded was irrelevant, because of what happened later).
Like last time, the group went into the hidden chamber to take a look at the statue, which Hakan the grad student was teaching sign language. The statue did the same sex and death paintings, which worried the team. Mehmet used his Solid Citizen sense and didn't get the impression that the statue was queer at all - but the fact that he got any kind of signal at all from it indicated there was a human or near human intelligence in it. Either way, there was no way the nine ton limestone thing would fit in the van, or the researchers' pickup in the parking lot.
Zuhal took a handful of guerrillas down the hill into the nearby farming village to steal a bigger vehicle. A couple guys were unloading crates from a flatbed truck. Zuhal had the guerrillas fire off a few shots into the air and stage an attack, giving her a distraction so she could hotwire it. She took it back up the hill, and Zoya burst out of the Westfalia to take the dig team hostage. She explained to the players that this was necessary to stop a military counterstrike - or air strike. Dr Soomer got pissed, not because she was kidnapping him, but because she was raving about the "Goddess". He got in a big argument about what recent archaeological discoveries implied about the religion of Neolithic Anatolian peoples, which continued as the Kurdish_Professionals herded him and the archaeologists into the van at gunpoint.
The breakdown was:
- Player characters, Zoya and Deeyah in the Westfalia
- PKK Guerrillas in the stolen truck carrying the MILF statue
- PKK Guerrillas and dig team hostages in the dig team's van
- PKK Guerrillas and dig team hostages in the dig team's pickup
The convoy hit the road. Zoya recommended a run for the border, into the Kurdish controlled Syria. Zuhal picked up comms chatter on her radio. The nearest military unit able to intercept them was Bey Beyzade's gang of Village Guards, the same one that they had negotiated with earlier. To avoid a potential roadblock, Suleiman recommended an alternate route, merging with ordinary traffic headed for the border. Zuhal had a high powered radio in her backpack that could jam signals and prevent law enforcement and military from communicating over the airwaves - at the cost of making it obvious where the jamming signal was coming from. The convoy pulled over on the highway shoulder and got everyone out of the stolen pickup, except one Kurdish Pornomancer and Zuhal's jammer. By driving off with it in a different direction, she'd not only prevent the opposition from coordinating over the radio, but also lure anyone tracking the signal away from the convoy.
Deeyah was flirting with Ecrin in the cramped backseat of the Westfalia when black suited Alan Blursuit appeared amidst the group. He didn't have anything to say, other than gloating that he knew where they were now. Everyone was sick of his avatar bullshit, but he disappeared again before they could wring some answers out of him.
The truck in the rear view mirror was a real concern.
They saw the anti-air gun in the back first, as the thing advanced through traffic behind the convoy. It drew closer, revealing the City of Detroit logo on the hood. There were five men in the whip. Most of them looked Syrian or Iraqi, except for one guy who might have been Chechen or something. The gunner was the teenage kid they spotted at the gas station.
Said gunner traversed the AA mount around and tried to fire a burst at the Westfalia. Shooting on the move over the cab of the pickup, his fire was high and he missed every round in the belt. As he scrambled to reload, Mehmet, Zoya and Deeyah returned fire with automatic weapons. The barrage killed the driver and navigator, and took out one of the truck's tires. It surged forward anyway, as if animated by some malign intelligence. Fearing a VBIED inside, Suleiman put as much distance between himself and the ISIS pickup as he could. The truck forced its way through the gap, and the assistant gunners refilled the ammo boxes. Zoya and Deeyah opened the sliding door of the Westfalia and trained their weapons on the pickup. The Kurdish_Professionals in the flatbed carrying the statue tried the old Pornomancer's standby: a guaranteed stun with Flash Bang. The child soldier manning the AA gun fired first, shredding the flatbed.
The flatbed jackknifed. Suleiman tried to swerve the Westfalia out of the way and ran right into it.
Zuhal, Suleiman and Ecrin were wearing their seatbelts and got away with only scrapes and bruises. Mehmet took his off to fire out the back window of the van, but managed to avoid being flung from the van. He was knocked unconscious but still alive. Zoya and Deeyah were flung from the vehicle and pulped.
Suleiman popped the airbag with his sword and freed himself. Zuhal sat stunned, unprepared for the level of violence she had just experienced. Somewhere up the road, the suicide bomb in the ISIS pickup went off, breaking all the glass that the collision hadn't already shattered.
It took a second for Suleiman to realize there was a helicopter overhead, blades barely audible over the ringing and the sound of thrumming blood in his ears. A Chinook transport chopper, blaring some classical song as the door gunner ineffectually sprayed something down the road (not visible from the Westfalia due to the flipped flatbed blocking the road) with the pintle mounted M240. A guy in a huge bomb suit came tumbling out the helicopter door, landing on the other side of the flipped truck hard enough to shake the ground. Moments later, two figures descended from the helicopter on ropes. The first made it to the ground before someone fired an RPG at the chopper. The rocket missed, but forced it to swerve and gain altitude before the second dude could make it to earth, leaving him dangling in the air.
Ecrin decided she had enough of this shit. She got out of the truck and went for a smoke. She observed the guy in the bomb suit hulk jump over a couple abandoned vehicles to engage the van holding the remaining Kurdish_Professionals. The suited man tore into the van, but was paralyzed when one of the Pornomancers flashed him, allowing the other to stuff a hand grenade into one of the suit joints. The remains of the MILF statue were lying inert on the highway shoulder. Only the lower half of it survived the exploding truck. Appearing completely uninvolved thanks to her Wage Slave avatar powers, Ecrin walked out to the statue and did her best to deface the statue, chiseling away the soft limestone labia of the disturbingly well modeled genitals. She hoped this would further reduce the odds of any fertility rituals the statue was used in.
Having prevented the Kurdish_Professionals' sex rite and mostly destroyed the statue, the cabal pretended they were merely hostages kidnapped by the PKK guerrillas, and waited for the paramedics to arrive. The Chinook carried the remains of the statue away with a heavy steel cable wrapped around one dainty ankle.
It was about a month of recovery and, for Mehmet, physical therapy before the group got any news of the statue. Someone on the Rite board posted a photo of the remains being unloaded from a truck behind a gallery in San Francisco, under the watchful eye of elderly cult leader Alex Abel. Whether he just wanted the statue to fuck with the Sect of the Naked Goddess, whether he wanted to fuck a baby into it and then transfer his consciousness to the child to achieve immortality, and whether either of those goals were successful, who could say?
This playtest, I put one of the Pornomancers at the gas station, so that there were three different factions represented there. Giving the players a chance to meet the factions before the fighting starts is the way to go, and it might even be worth finding a way to do the same for the Headmen and Incoming Rounds. The former haven't really shown up in either playtest, while the latter have only appeared at the very end after the fighting has already started.
I did a better job this time of engaging Mehmet's identity powers, but this playtest reinforced what I already expected about Suleiman. His martial arts mastery is kind of useless. Besides that, he's good at driving the car, but being relegated to wheelman while everyone else runs around having adventures is not ideal. In both playtests, the player running him was still able to contribute with smart play, but was mechanically overshadowed by the other players.
This game was a reminder that Unknown Armies 3e has lots of mechanics which aren't intuitive. Example: Your Obsession grants infinite dice flips on your obsession identity. Your Passions grant unlimited rerolls on stuff that involves them. BUT your Passions can also be used to flip dice ONCE per session. Fucking why? It's a needless fine grained detail that does nothing but disrupt and frustrate. Either make it function completely the same as your Obsession, or completely different, not this weird half overlap.
Another great example is identities that sub for abilities. If something subs for Fitness, that means you can only use it for ability score tests against Fitness. You can't use it for stress defense, even though the meter on your sheet says "defend with Fitness". This one is at least the way it is for a reason. If "subs for [ability]" could be used for stress offense/defense, there would be no reason to ever take a Coerces X or Protects X feature on an identity. But it's yet another foible that has to be explained again and again during play.
Fun playtest, some good feedback and stuff to change about the scenario. I'll post the other Jackson Elias game I ran this year soon.
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