Unknown Armies Play Report: A Dungeon Too Many, Playtest Three

You call it A Dungeon Too Many, yet this is the third one. Curious...

 

The Monarchy ruled the known world. The Old King ruled the Monarchy. His depredations grew unbearable, slave raids and secret police and torture gardens and the magickal experiments that would go on forever if nobody did anything. That's why the Three Adventurers came to the dungeon at Heart-Of-The-World, to claim the ancient power that would let them kill the old ghoul and create something better.

• Dacian, Failed Monk and Adept of the Tower of Pain
• Marrow Bone, Green Man and Avatar of the Knacker
  
• Rope Trick, Former Registered Wizard, Current Avatar of The Enlightenment
  

As you'd expect, the story began with the Adventurers descending into Heart-Of-The-World. They didn't know how long they had before the veins and arteries of the underground place collapsed.

 

Phil Tippet's Mad God

 

The descent into the vestibule went as it always did. Marrow Bone used darkvision to peer into the chamber and spot Whalefall the Roach feeding on the dead adventurer. He grabbed her and snatched the magick misericorde Nocticola's Mercy from her hand before she could stab him. He got her to give up the Iron Flask of demon containment and the location of the hidden garbage chute below the big platform, then scuttled away down the pit when he released her.

The Three Adventurers started with the garbage chute. It was underneath the landing platform on the giant staircase, so Rope Trick commanded her magick rope to extend all the way out and slither down to act as a guideline. The disposal shaft was fifteen feet high and filled with skeletal arms and legs, gnawed clean by some kind of giant insect. Climbing the shaft was easy, and the adventurers found themselves in the crypt with Sanctification the sarcophagus. 

 

Marrow Bone tried to pass into the next chamber. The living coffin rose to swipe at him with surgical implements. Marrow Bone took off the limbs on one side of his body with a swing of his godendag, and Rope Trick snared him with her magick rope. The strange automaton fell over and the adventurers rolled it on its side, so Dacian could lever the lid off the sarcophagus with his staff. A strange gray ooze spilled out, along with a limbless man with all the sense organs cut out of his head. The adventurers collected some of the ooze and Marrow Bone dispatched the helpless telekinetic, who lost his powers when his concentration was broken.

The next room had rows and rows of stone sarcophaguses. Some open and filled with gray ooze, some sealed. Predictably, one of the coffins came shooting out of the wall at the adventurers as they crossed the room. Marrow Bone deftly stepped aside and swept the lid off with an outstretched hand. The coffin slid to a halt, the telekinetic inside similarly disabled when his sensory deprivation was interrupted.

The descending stairway beyond was filled with a white haze, that grew blinding until the characters extinguished their light sources. Marrow Bone spotted a pit trap that they could have easily fallen into in complete darkness, and tossed his friends over it before hopping himself. The last room in the procession was empty save for a giant sarcophagus, hanging open. The adventurers knew someone had to get inside it, but weren't ready to take that step just yet. They returned the way they had come. Rather than climb down the disposal shaft and back over the abyss to get to the vestibule, they left the mausoleum through the front entrance. A stone wall had slid shut to block the path, but Marrow Bone lifted it up and the others shoved the sarcophagus remains of Sanctification into the gap to prop it open.

 

The next passage they explored was the entrance to the Temple. Idols of O Sun and Great Moon greeted them, along with a shaft obscured by shifting mist and scribed instructions to Take a leap of faith. They decided not to take a leap of faith, and went to explore the colosseum instead.

 

The arena room held nothing of interest for the Three Adventurers. The iron maiden in the torture room stabbed Marrow Bone with the spikes in its eyes when he went to rescue the "victim" trapped inside. They ran into four horned men in the armory, who shrieked and attacked them. Marrow Bone held them off with his spiked club while the others pushed the iron maiden to block the door. The bleeding wounds on the horned men attracted the rusty weapons, which flew up off the floor and skewered two of them. The trio went around through the arena to the blood room, where they avoided setting off any bear traps and dispatched the two remaining horned men.

The meat room almost made Rope Trick vomit, with its huge piles of squirming meat that slowly restored the corpses dipped in them to life. Marrow Bone steadied her, and together the Three Adventurers yanked the dead horned men out of the piles so they wouldn't grow back.

The last room in the procession was a trophy room, full of weapons and banners. A seven foot tall woman ground the corpse of a monster into the floor with her heel, endlessly stomping it like she couldn't remember what she was supposed to be doing. The characters avoided antagonizing her, and reminded her that there was a world outside the dungeon she could explore. They convinced her to come with them, recruiting The Violence to their cause. Dacian dropped some magickal healing on his injured teammates, and on they went.

Duncan Fegredo

With a fourth musketeer added to their group, they went to the reflecting pond next. The Violence attacked her reflection in the pond, thinking it was a scary monster covered in blood and weapons. It took everyone working together and Rope Trick's magick rope to pull her out. They checked out the statue room and realized they didn't have the necessary info to fill in for the two missing statues. The slime boudoir proved unproductive when The Violence smashed the slime man who came out of the pipe to pieces, along with two replacements that slithered out before the adventurers got the hint and ushered her out of the room. They figured out the deal with the paintings and put Marrow Bone and Dacian on the empty podiums to imitate the missing pieces, swapping their Green Man and Failed Monk identities respectively. Dacian dealt with the internal conflict the way he always did, flagellating hismself while Marrow Bone and Rope Trick solved the mirror puzzle and fought the two Vanities that spawned.

 

That just left the slime boudoir. The adventurers kept The Violence back and listened to the blob man's pitch. He wanted sex in exchange for lowering the water the rest of the way. Rope Trick volunteered to take one for the team, and the blob man transformed into her most annoying classmate from the College of Wands. The witch tried to take control of the encounter by using her magick rope to tie up and dominate her partner, but the blob man used his gelatinous form to ooze out of the trap. Rather than powering through it, Rope Trick stormed out and let Dacian handle it. The blob assumed the form of one of Dacian's disciples, who he had intrusive thoughts about. Normally this would have made him anxious, but with the green man's stolen confidence from the identity swap he had zero qualms about fucking a facsimile of an attractive worshiper. The slime lowered the last of the water, revealing the prize: a clay statue in a pile of polished bones.

 

Dacian touched the statue. The Self tried to possess him. Rather than use the iron flask to bottle the demon, Dacian simply ripped the offending arm off, trapping the spirit in it. He claimed the power of The Self, and got a Tower of Pain major charge in the bargain.

 

The gang went back down through the mausoleum to the giant sarcophagus. Rope Trick climbed into the coffin. The others closed the lid on her. For a moment, everything was dark. She got the impression of an island of black sand, in a black ocean under a black sky. Then The Isolation was upon her, shrieking its psychic scream and assaulting her for disturbing its solitude. Rope Trick waited until it laid a hand on her, then broke one of her own fingers to activate her teleport ring and warp both of them out of the sarcophagus. 

Back in the crypt, the other adventurers and The Violence were surprised by Rope Trick reappearing, along with the armless, legless, facial-featureless corpse of a dwarf. Bringing The Isolation back into the real world instantly killed him. Rope Trick's broken finger really hurt, and she couldn't see. The Isolation's touch blinded her. The other adventurers splinted her broken finger, and she killed a starfish from the bottle on her belt to activate her spellbreaker ritual and restore her eyesight. Then she absorbed the Soul of the Isolation from the dead dwarf.

The adventurers went back to the temple. Dacian jumped down the hole to test whether the advice on the wall could be trusted. He fell twenty feet and broke his leg. The rest of the group climbed down, and Marrow Bone used the medical knowledge from Dacian's swapped monk identity to splint the broken bone. The next room was a statue garden, filled with cultists. The men and women, orcs and halflings, elves and humans were dressed in robes and veils, but many were stripped to the waist or naked in the intense heat. They carried chisels and used them to make statues. They ignored the adventurers.

 

The statues depicted all kinds of creatures and people. The Three Adventurers were startled when The Violence started smashing them, startled by a statue out of the corner of her eye and convinced she was under attack. They noticed that one of the statues was a statue of The Violence smashing a statue. They looked for statues of themselves that might give a clue about their future. They found one of themselves, drowning in a confined space.

 

The path out of the chamber led across a bridge over a vast chasm, and a void above that went up as far as the eye could see. Giant shapes sped past in the dark, flying over and under the causeway. The adventurers hurried across before one of the beasts noticed the tiny prey animals scuttling around.

 

After that was a temple. Cultists like the ones in the statue garden lay prostrate on the ground before an idol with an enormous cloth veil drawn across its face. The adventurers pulled the veil aside, revealing a crawlspace where the face should be. With no other options for progress, they crawled into the tunnel.

 

 

The tunnel led into a chamber with a low ceiling and intricately carved wall frescoes. As soon as everyone got inside, the crawlspace slid shut behind them and water poured out of the wall carvings. The drowning chamber filled to the ceiling. Rope Trick knew it was all a part of the plan, and sat meditating. The Violence freaked out and tried to smash her way out. Right before everyone drowned, the ceiling slid open. They gasped for air as the water level rose further, carrying them up to a pool above.

The pool led to a beehive shaped room, lit red and gold through the transparent floor. They looked down and saw the temple below them. They looked ahead and saw a woman in a robe, sitting at a table. Behind her were a voluptuous orc and a priapic gnome, asleep on a well used bed. The woman sipped the last dregs of a glass of whiskey and introduced herself. She was The Helplessness and she just finished the last bottle of IRONWEED in existence, so if anyone wanted any dwarf whiskey they were out of luck. The Three Adventurers interrogated her about her scheme, but it was pretty simple: this was the end for her, and she wanted to enjoy herself before it happened. The adventurers asked her what was going to happen.

 

A giant hand burst through the ceiling, killing The Helplessness and sending the adventurers tumbling through the floor and into the temple below.

Bachan

The Three Adventurers ran out of the room, uninterested in fighting a giant hand. The Violence attacked the hand and was swept up in its grasp. She bit into it and it squeezed her as hard as it could. The adventurers rushed back in to help and chopped the Hand to bits before it could use any of its Helplessness powers on them. Soul of The Helplessness in hand, it was time to leave.

 

The Three Adventurers departed Heart-of-the-World with three Souls and a new friend carrying the fourth. Whether they would destroy the Monarchy, or be destroyed by it, or replace it with something worse as the power of the Souls of Heart-of-the-World gnawed away at their sanity, who could say?