Unknown Armies Play Report: The Cage Cup Playtest Two

Lucilla was holding a Bacchanal at her villa rustica in the countryside outside Rome. The Domina Fabia, an initiated member of the mysteries, graciously volunteered to provide the sacrificial bull for the night’s illegal festivities. That's why two of her slaves found themselves leading the stupid thing down the dirt road at the eleventh hour of the night, with the cicadas buzzing in the vines and the road of milk pointing down like a lightning bolt in the night sky to the bright shining house on the hill in the dark in the middle of the field.

 

Brennus the Butcher and Gyges the Greek yanked the beast's halter as it bellowed and stomped the earth. Their instructions were to deliver the sacrificial bull and do whatever else the Domina required of them that night. None of them were looking forward to it, either. They had never been to one of these events but they had a nasty reputation.

 

Torches of sulfur and charcoal lit the crescent-shaped porch in blue and yellow. A handful of revelers leaned against walls, dozed beneath the columned portico, or vomited in the alcoves. The Slaves cajoled the sacrificial bull up the stairs to the entrance. A drunken Patrician laughed and staggered toward the animal, then fell backward when it mock-charged him. 

 

Announced by the rattle of chainmail and the leather strop-sound of straight swords leaving scabbards, a cohort of soldiers in armor emerged from the vineyards in the dark beyond the villa. The wall of shields closed on the columned porch. The Patrician shouted indignantly at them and got a gladius through the heart, his purple magisterial stripe not enough to save him from the Legionaries' killing intent.

Brennus slapped the bull with his ox-goad, pissing it off and sending it charging into the soldiers. The Slaves rushed inside before the mail-clad killers got their act together.

 

Inside, an androgynous man in a bearded Bacchus mask hastily barred the door behind the Slaves. In his haste he toppled a nearby tripod, scattering burning coals and raising a cloud of tyrian purple smoke. He didn't expect the barricade to hold forever, but encouraged the group to take a drink before heading further into the villa. Gyges knew that drinking unmixed wine was a barbarian custom that even the savage Latins of Italy didn't normally stoop to, but he also knew that Bacchus (Dionysus to him) was the known to the faithful as the Giver of Unmixed Wine, and it was Bacchus' party. Brennus didn't give a shit, he was a wild man and he liked to drink.

 

Bacchus touch them both on the forehead, opening their third eye and granting them magick powers every time they drank alcohol. 

The next room was a rectangular courtyard full of heaped rose petals, pink and red and white. Throngs of revelers, all men, stood or lay around in various states of undress and intoxication. A decorative fountain dribbled wine into a stone basin. In the center of the chamber, a throng of drunken patricians watched a burly freedman vigorously sodomize an elderly senator on a low couch. Gyges immediately freaked out at the public and violent debauchery. He ran for the nearest door, cutting his feet badly on the shattered cups and potshards beneath the flower petals.

 

 

Brennus tried to follow his friend, but was accosted by a pair of drunken Patricians who demanded he service them sexually. He scared one off with threats of violence, but the other guy called his bluff and  pinned him against a column. The freshly-minted Dipsomancer decided to try magick, and toppled the would-be rapist with a minor blast, giving him a straight shot to the door. The broken ceramics did a number on his feet too, but he made it out.

The changing room of the bath complex was empty, but filled with discarded clothing and valuables. Gyges and Brennus put on sandals to protect their feet from further damage. They could hear faint singing coming from the next room. The chamber beyond had a large swimming pool filled with cold water and corpses. The dead men were shackled to a bench with fetters that could easily be removed by the wearer, were he in his right mind to do so. Half were drowned and half were dead by violence, beaten and clawed to death by the hands of the men bound next to them. Gyges was getting serious Odyssey vibes from the whole situation, especially because of the big curtain at the end of the room, from which the muffled singing was audible.

 

The sounds of revelry from the previous room had been replaced by the sounds of battle. There weren't any other ways out of the frigidarium. They went through the curtain into the next room.

 

An enormous jellyfish floated in a pool of cold water, slowly absorbing a corpse. The beast was chained to prevent it crawling out of the pool like an octopus, but it reached out of the water with questing tentacles, running them along the ostentatious mosaic tiling. Atop the bell was a transparent effigy of a woman, from which came the singing the Slaves heard through the curtain. Hearing the song full blast was too much for Brennus. He stepped forward to fling himself into the water and be devoured. Gyges kicked him in the back of the knee, knocking him down just in time and bringing him back to his senses. 

 

The Slaves needed a plan to get past the thing, there was a door on the other side of the room but its tentacles let it reach the entire circumference of the chamber. It clearly liked corpses and there were lots of corpses in the previous room, so they dragged one of the waterlogged bodies and used it to distract the beast while they fled.

The next room was a large dining space has a high ceiling, and an enormous window overlooking the vineyards below. The couches were trashed and the tables piled with wine bowls, half-eaten food and fresh human remains, bodies messily torn apart. Unkempt, blood soaked women danced ecstatically and devoured chunks of raw meat. The wall was painted with a scene of Bacchus holding a cup covered in vines, dancing on the prone body of a king. 

 

The gory scene didn't break the Slaves' composure. Gyges cast a spell of drunken friendship on himself and passed through the chamber without incident, the dancing Maenads just ignored him. Brennus had more trouble, the women pressed around him, smearing him with blood and waving snakes in his face. Brennus kept his cool, though his heart told him he needed to either get the fuck out of there or kiss one of them. Nobody got torn to shreds.

The next room was the basilica, the throne room. The chamber had an arched ceiling and large windows, columns of exotic marble and a mosaic floor. A glass cup covered in sculpted vines lay discarded next to a stone throne. Dismembered pieces of a woman the Slaves recognized as their owner were strewn around the room. A woman clad only in a panther skin held the Domina’s still-living head in her hands, speaking softly to it. Behind all that, an open door looked out over the vineyards below.

The Slaves used magick to knock over a candelabra, distracting the panther-clad Matron while they ran for the door. The Domina's eyes tracked them as they left, still alive despite her dissection. They made it out without being detected and stole away into the vineyard. Unfortunately the soldiers had the whole estate surrounded. The Slaves ran into a wall of legionaries and were nearly skewered, saved only by the intervention of the cohort's commander: a magistrate in a purple striped toga, which impaired his movements not at all despite its elaborate drapery. The aristocrat told the Slaves that they had two choices:

1. Bring him the glass cup covered with vine and go free
   
2. Be tortured for information and crucified

The Slaves opted for the first option. They went back into the Basilica to get the goblet.

The cultist Matron had reattached the Domina's head to her body, and her body to her arm, and was tearing off the arm and reattaching it over and over to torture her. The Slaves ran for the cup, discarded on the ground by the stone throne. The Matron demanded they stop. Gyges fired off another blast and a candelabra fell on her. Brennus made it to the goblet and the Matron turned him into a goat.

 

Gyges was terrified by the display of overt supernatural power. He frantically attacked the Matron, who casually caught his fist and tore his arm off. With her head back on her body, the Domina yelled at her Slaves to drink from the special goblet. Gyges lost his other arm to another swipe of the Matron's claws. Brennus the Goat carefully picked up the goblet in his mouth and trotted over to the discarded wine bowl by the entrance. Licking wine out of the cup boosted his Dipsomantic power dramatically, and he fired a significant blast into the Matron. Nothing happened and she laughed at the goat's ineffectual bleating. Then a big stone fell from the arched ceiling of the basilica and crushed her.

 

The Domina used her single arm to drag herself around the room and pick up her other severed parts. Gyges knelt and used his teeth to lift the glass goblet and drink some wine. With his newfound power, the Greek cast Soul Sipping and pressed his lips to the dying cultist where she lay under the rock. He stole her power of sparagmos and used it to reattach his own arms. He did not learn how to reverse Brennus' transformation into a goat. He asked the dying cultist if she had any information on how to do it. The Matron begged for forgiveness from the Liberator, the Breaker of Chains, the God That Comes. Then she vomited pure red wine and died.

 

The Domina Fabia reattached her own severed limbs. She warned her Slaves that the raid on the bacchanal was a plot by the Magistrate Eugenius, for the purpose of acquiring the cage cup. If he told them he would spare their lives, he lied. He was ruthless and hated loose ends. Gyges and Brennus were confident they could take him.

 

The Magistrate Eugenius was waiting for them outside, along with six handpicked soldiers. He told the Slaves to hand over the goblet. Gyges stepped forward, cup in hand. Eugenius stepped back to give his soldiers room to stab the Slave, but accidentally stepped right into a legionary's readied gladius. Then Gyges hit the Magistrate with another one of the powers he stole from the dead cultist, turning the Patrician into a goat. Three legionaries fled in fear at the sorcerer's raucous display of divine power. Gyges used the last of the cultist's abilities, removing his "mask" and letting the remaining soldiers gaze on the face of Bacchus himself. Two of them fled, leaving only one soldier utterly unafraid of sorcerers and Gods alike. He readied his sword to skewer the bastard Greek sorcerer.

Brennus the Goat knocked him over. Everyone ran away before he could get up.

As they stole away through the fields, the Domina warned her Slaves against killing her. They were powerful mages, but without her to vouch for them they'd be outlaws fleeing the scene of their master's death. Leading to their eventual capture, torture and crucifixion.

Gyges was tired of listening to treacherous Latins. He got the Domina in a headlock and cast Soul Sipping again, siphoning her business acumen and her skill at negotiating Rome's cutthroat high society using her husband as a beard. He was forced to concur that blowing her away with a magick blast would be short sighted. Far better to threaten instant death so that she'd persuade her husband to manumit him, not only freeing him but gaining a wealthy aristocrat as a patron. Patricians of Senatorial rank always needed freedmen as an intermediary to run businesses and make money. And eventually they'd find a mage who could transform Brennus back into a human.

The goat which had once been the Magistrate followed behind, also hoping they would do that.