Unknown Armies Play Report: You're Not Alexander, Playtest Two

The time: the fourth century BC. The place: the ruins of Troy, in the shadow of the Temple of Athena. The cast:

• Jocasta, the last virgin sacrifice offered by the Locrians in a thousand year ritual to cleanse the sins of Ajax the Lesser at the end of the Trojan War. Survived the bloodrites and was allowed to live as a slave at the Temple of Athena. Champion boxer, serves as the town's police force.
• Kancharmonetes, busker who makes a living re-enacting battles from the epics of old. Also by hooking on the side. Avatar of the Sacred Androgyne with the ability to physically change his sex, which helps sell both types of performance.
  
• Pseudanor, bastard son of a drug dealing maenad and snake priestess. Incapable of casting his mother's snake based magick, but blessed with innate snake abilities. A teenage hellion who loves pranks and mischief. 

Pseudanor's mother, India, was out collecting snakes in the foothills of Mount Ida, and wouldn't be back for a couple days. It was up to the trio of hospitality workers to deal with what happened next.

It started with Kancharmonetes. It was the middle of the night and he was swapped to female, looking for customers at the Fawn's Heart - the only hotel in the ruined city. She was approached by a pair of Dorians interested in taking the roles of Achiles and Patroclus in her infamous Briseis act. They offered her a single gold Alexander for her trouble, which was an insane amount of money. Enough to allay her suspicions that something was up with the pair.

 

 

The pair of Dorians revealed what was up with them when they got upstairs to one of the tavern's private rooms. They pulled out iron-bound clubs and demanded that Kancharmon come with them, by order of the Hipparch of Hellespontine Phrygia. They didn't wait for her to respond. She took a blow to the head before she could get a word in edgewise.

The snake boy Pseudanor was lurking outside the tavern in the dark, using his superb night vision to watch Kancharmon get naked. Or so he hoped. Instead he saw two soldiers assaulting his lady love. He slithered in through the window of the room and bit the soldier trying to wrestle the injured prostitute into compliance. The pain and terror of being bitten by a snake-person freaked the soldier out and he fled the scene.

Jocasta was sweeping up the temple when she heard the commotion from the hotel. Anticipating a brawl in need of manual correction, she dropped what she was doing and ran down the terraced slopes of the ruined city, out of the temple and the ancient citadel it was sited atop. She arrived at the combat just in time to be jumped by the two soldiers waiting outside the bar. The fight was now a three on three, and the trained soldiers pressed the attack. The two additional hypaspists wore helmets and armor vests, and all three goons attacked Jocasta specifically. She juked their swinging bludgeons and laid one out with a punch to the throat. An Athenian and a Spartan came storming up the tavern stairs, spoiling for the fight they heard from the first floor. The Macedonian soldiers grabbed their injured comrade and fled the scene.

 

Kancharmon was bleeding from the head. Aristogon of Athens and Agathon of Sparta asked if she was alright, and if she was working that night. She picked up the gold coin the soldiers dropped, and decided to take the rest of the night off. The pair of adventurers went downstairs to finish their order of Achaemenid chicken. India would normally be Kancharmon's first resort for healing, but she was out collecting snakes in the foothills of Mt Ida. Jocasta and Pseudanor took the injured performer to the temple of Athena for healing.

 

 

It was the middle of the night, so Jocasta was the only one awake at the temple. She decided to wake up the priestess Tritogeneia to help Kancharmon. Tritogeneia hated Jocasta and would have sold her if it wasn't for the high priestess Atrytone keeping the Locrian slave around as a personal mobility aid. But Atrytone was old and needed rest, which Jocasta respected more than she respected the lesser priestess' opinion of her. So she woke up Tritogeneia, who cursed her but got up to bandage Kancharmon's cut scalp and salve her bruised skull. The injured prostitute offered a few obols as a donation to the temple, keeping the big gold coin for emergency use.

 

That night, Kancharmon dreamed of a featureless black plain, with featureless black mountains in the distance silhouetted against a featureless black sky. There was a massive bonfire on the horizon, and as she approached she saw it was a burning building. A man in a suit of living wax danced around the building in a wordless prayer to the flame eternal. She woke with the certain knowledge that a pyromancer was near, and had just burned a building to gain a magickal charge.

 

Christos Giannopoulos

 

The sound of horns announced the arrival of an important person. Both Kancharmon and Pseudanor went to investigate. A couple chariots were parked outside the Fawn's Heart, along with a group of ten soldiers. Clad in a flat cap and plain tunic, the Hipparch of Hellespontine Phrygia led half of the troopers up the hill toward the temple, leaving the rest to negotiate stabling of the horses with Garshasp the inkeeper. Pseudanor ran up the hill to warn Jocasta that the soldiers from yesterday were coming to the temple. Kancharmon ran to get her weapons and armor.

Jocasta was asleep on the porch of the temple. She woke up to Pseudanor tossing pebbles at her from a safe distance, afraid she'd kick him if he got closer to wake her up. He warned her of the approaching soldiers. Atrytone yelled for Jocasta from her dwelling in the shadow of the temple's perimeter wall, and the slave dutifully ran to the priestess' aid. She quickly washed and dressed the old woman, and helped her out of the hut to receive the visitors.

Outside the temple, Kancharmon swapped to male using his Sacred Androgyne powers, donned his armor, and arrived in time to see the five Macedonian hypaspists stop outside the temple entrance, while the Hipparch Promachos went in alone and unarmed.

 

The Hipparch bowed and scraped and made the requisite gestures of submission to the Goddess' representatives on earth, before explaining the reason for his visit. He just received news from Babylon that the Great King Alexander was dying. Promachos said Athena gave Alexander the disease because he stopped the sacrifice of the Locrian virgins, depriving the Goddess of her due. The only way to save Alexander was to restart the sacrifices by killing the nearest Locrian maiden: the slave Jocasta.

 

Atrytone swore and cursed at the presumptuous Macedonian apparatchik. Jocasta already belonged to the Goddess, he couldn't give Athena what she already owned and any attempt to do so was an act of selfishness, not piety. Jocasta noticed the man was armed. He had a bronze ax concealed under his cloak. Not only was carrying this weapon into the sacred precinct a violation of religious custom, it also identified him as one of the Trojan men who tried to kill her when she was a child, on her mad dash to the sanctuary of the temple. She tried to control her fear.

Jocasta leaped forward and struck the Hipparch. Her leather boxing handguards cut his skin and crushed his bones, and his bronze ax was no help when she got inside his guard. She struck him in the jaw and the blow forced the broken bone up into his brain, killing him. The Hipparch's soldiers retreated. They were willing to offend the Goddess with him at the head of the procession, soaking up any divine retribution. Without him to act as a lightning rod, they didn't have the nerve to retaliate against Jocasta on sacred ground.

Tritogeneia didn't have any such misgivings about hitting Jocasta. She laid into the temple slave with a treebranch, beating her and shouting curses. Her career as a priestess depended on good relations with local government, and a slave killing the most important man in the satrapy really fucked that up. Atrytone demanded she stop. The wizened high priestess told Jocasta that killing a man who came into the precinct armed and demanding the Goddess' property was an act pleasing to Athena. But the temple wouldn't shelter her from the consequences, she could no longer claim sanctuary there. She had to leave and never come back. 

 

Down the secret tunnel behind the statue of the Goddess. Across the Trojan countryside to the beach, where a merchant ship was currently beached. A reverse of the journey Jocasta made as a child, all those years ago.

Pseudanor debated stealing the armor of Alexander the Great from its display rack in the temple's inner sanctum, but decided against it. He hoped his mom would be okay.

 

The burial mound of Achilles gave the trio a good view of the beach. There was a Carthaginian merchant ship beached on the sandy shore. Six Macedonian soldiers and a Persian guy in a suit of living wax - the fire mage Cicafarnah. The group debated what to do. If they could just get to the boat, the gold coin would be enough to bribe the captain to take them beyond the Macedonians' grasp. The challenge was getting past the soldiers. 

 

Pseudanor searched the undergrowth and found a poisonous snake willing to listen to his entreaties. He told it to bite the fire mage. The snake slithered down the beach to carry out his request, while the rest of the gang got ready to run. The pyromancer got bit and fell over, and the soldiers were distracted chasing the snake around with the lizard-killing spikes on the butt ends of their spears.

Everyone ran for the boat. Pseudanor and Kancharmonetes made it with minor wounds from the soldiers' tossed javelins. Jocasta tripped and fell. The pyromancer tried to frighten her with a fire spell, setting his skull ablaze. She wasn't fazed, and his religion prohibited actually damaging her with a fire spell. The soldiers had no such reservations about inflicting harm. The escaped slave slipped and fell on the slick sand. The soldiers stabbed her in the back. 

 

She grabbed a trailing rope off the side of the ship as the crew shoved off. They hauled her up with half a dozen spears protruding from her back, still alive. The Phonecians struck the pursuing soldiers with oars and boarding pikes when they tried to follow.

 

Face down on the deck, Jocasta tried to speak. There was too much blood in her throat. The last thing she saw before passing out was a little owl, perched on the railing.

A day later, news arrived Alexander was dead. Pursuit of the fugitives was quickly abandoned as the Great King's generals divided the spoils of his empire.