Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - Assorted Hexes

Florencia Molina Campos

This plains hex looks east to a valley of grass, in places growing taller than a person. Rough trails interpenetrate the densely packed blades.

This field is also a meeting point for Morwenna’s goons and a party of gauchos, mounted herders from the fringes of civilization. These rough and ready cattlemen hunt game and rustle livestock from poorly defended frontier farms. They sell the animals to Morwenna’s operation, feeding the majority of her forces who don’t subsist on human flesh.

The group has 24 mounted Nomads, led by the 3rd level Ranger Facon. He has no interest in politics or respect for the law, but is bound by a rough code of frontier hospitality. He is hospitable but takes offense at any sleight by a man of equal social standing to himself (anyone who rides a horse).

The gauchos have a few muskets and pistols, but they mostly fight with lances while mounted and enormous knives on foot. Each one carries a pair of heavy wooden balls connected by a length of rope, which they throw to entangle foes. On a failed Save vs Paralysis, the target cannot move without tripping until they spend an action hacking through the cord with a heavy blade such as an ax.

The nomads have 6 spare horses, and typically bring 4D6 cows, 6D6 sheep, meat from various game animals like deer and wild hens, and the pelts of more exotic creatures like mountain lions and giant snakes.

If attacked by a superior force, the horsemen simply mount up and leave, scattering any animals they brought with them. They are superb riders and difficult to catch without a cunning plan or superhuman speed.

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - Hex 2, 6

Brightly colored tents and temporary structures dot this hilly terrain, populated by visitors excited for the tournament or hoping to make a quick buck off the attendees.

The biggest tent is an Iron Cup outlet, a trading company with a writ from the Genius Loci to market luxury goods plundered from the furthest realms. They sell coffee, chocolate, tobacco, potions and other treats. The rest of the hex’s inhabitants tend to gather here.

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Seven

Hairy Joe the one armed secretary introduced John Benson, Eddie and Pepper to their two new colleagues: Hank Dredger and Vinny. Kurta the one legged supervisor wasn't available to brief them, he was dealing with some suits from Central Central Services - weirdos with face masks and eye-dagger cufflinks. That made the three veteran members of the maintenance team pretty nervous. Either way, the crew had a job to do: the detectors placed by the maintenance team on a previous delve had pinpointed the source of the seismic disturbances causing the earthquakes. Central Services knew how to get down there, but the path was blocked. The mission was simple: go to the geothermal caves on level two of the undercity, find a path to the hatch east of the old research base, and mark it with signal flags. That would set the stage for subsequent operations to clear the path downward and solve the problem.

Hank wasn't comfortable going into the undercity with just a wrench. He wanted some real firepower. Thanks to the contacts made by the team on previous digs, Loyd the Bartender at the BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD club hooked him up. The barkeep passed him a .380 pocket gun in exchange for a nip of blood, sucked out of Hank's arm and into the massive neon cylinder above the bar counter. Pepper gave Vinny her shotgun because she wasn't interested in hauling it around, and he similarly gave up a little blood for a fistful of shotshells.

Thus equipped, the group went to the old railyard to use the derelict subway entrance. It was the closest one to their objective and the workers wouldn't bother them on the way down.

Special Orders Preview: Amarna Boundary Stela C

POWER: Major

DESCRIPTION: Nestled in the Northern cliffs of the ancient Egyptian ritual city of Amarna, Stela C is unique among the Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten. Unlike the other Stelae, C was concealed from public view by its location in a gorge not easily visible from the city itself. Stela C is six meters tall and ten wide, carven from the native stone of the cliff. Most of the face is occupied by a bas relief depicting an androgynous human figure on their knees below the sun disc Aten. The figure is holding their stomach, intestines, lungs and liver in their open palms. The majority of the accompanying Hieroglyphic script is effaced, either by deliberate vandalism or weathering (though neither explain why the image is still visible). The only decipherable text reads “ATEN…HIS THRONE…GATHER POWER…VESSEL”.

Below the relief, at ground level, is an arched indentation in which rests a carven alabaster throne. Like the relief, the throne is suspiciously unweathered. The seat of the throne is stained with a black, pitch like substance and a dusting of unknown pinkish residue. On each side of the throne are two indentations sized for urns or jars, for a total of four.

EFFECT: Sit on the throne while the four indentations are occupied by canopic jars containing your preserved stomach, intestines, lungs, and liver. Recite the full text of the Stela (not just the surviving fragment). You can then combine ten minor charges you’re carrying into a significant charge, or ten sigs into a major.

Unknown Armies Artifact: The Panoply of Thug Babur

By "unknown Indian artist"

This suite of items is traditionally attributed to Thug Babur, a legendary cult leader and serial killer from the waning years of the Mughal Empire.

The Thuggee were a secret society or social movement that operated in the Indian subcontinent from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries. They murdered travelers for personal gain and as a bloodrite to Kali, she who destroys evil to protect the innocent. The exact reach and prevalence of the Thuggee movement is debatable. The earliest textual references to Thug activity far predate European incursions into India, but The East India Company and later British Raj undoubtedly exaggerated the threat posed by the cult as an excuse to institute repressive social policies against the subcontinent’s poor and rural peoples.

Thug Babur himself first appears in 18th century sources, most of which are retellings of earlier stories. He is typically a boogeyman who induces potential recruits to join the Thugs by engineering great misfortune in their lives, appearing to them when they are at their weakest to offer a way out. He had the power to torment people in their dreams, destroying them psychologically before the final confrontation in the waking world.

The panoply of items are signature weapons of the Thuggee, who according to the various sources were required to kill without shedding blood, to kill with a ritual dagger, or to personally bury their victims.

Cyberpunk RED Easy Mode - Play Report

A trio of edgerunners drove their stolen van away from their latest act of super-crime, traveling at a speed slow enough not to be pulled over, but fast enough not to be immediately suspicious for obeying the speed limit. In the car:

• Mover the Solo
• Redtail the Medic
• Torch the Tech

They had just dropped off the goods from their latest heist and were on the way to pick up their payout from the fixer. Said fixer, name of Lazlo, gave the Solo a call on his disposal burner phone - a violation of protocol that ran against the very purpose of a burner phone. The Solo, buffoon that he was, answered the call. Lazlo told him that the location of the pickup had changed - they'd be picking up their payout in the industrial side of Heywood. The group immediately suspected a double-cross, but wanted the money more than they wanted to spend the night in complete safety.

 

Large sections of the industrial district were still "under construction", caught between Night City's successive waves of deindustrialization and reclamation as the real estate keiretsu waited out a more favorable economic climate to rebuild. The pickup was set for an alleyway in the shadow of a skeletal building, whose rebar was laid so long ago it was already starting to rust. The group parked the van a block away and approached on foot. Mover peered into the alley with his cybernetic eye and spotted several armed figures waiting in ambush, one of whom wore a Night City Police badge under a hoodie. He casually strolled around the block and set up behind them without attracting their attention.

Redtail and Torch pretended they hadn't noticed anything amiss, and went down the alley to collect their paycheck. One of the goons came down the alley in response, clad in a hoodie and carrying a briefcase cuffed to his wrist. He stopped and fussed over the key, unlocking it and inadvertently dropping it on the ground after about half a minute of fiddling.

Torch took the case. Two more plainclothes cops stepped into the alley, blocking his egress.

"He's got a gun!" one of them shouted.

 

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Six

The earthquakes were getting worse. Something under Clearmountain was causing them. Central Services needed to pinpoint the source of the disturbance before they could do something about it.

Pepper and John Benson had a job to do: place three sensors in the southeast region of the underground. One in the old church crypt, one in the cult stronghold and one in a complex of buried ruins. With only two people to do the job, Pepper decided to call for backup. She called up the Explorers of the Furthest Realms and asked if anyone wanted to go on a delve into the undercity. 

 

The Explorer Gunnie met them at the central services building. She had the Death Knight Hildegrin's armor on, stripped of the gold damascening that adorned the matte black plates. She didn't make any clanking sounds stomping around, and the explorers noted a yellow scarf around her neck, the only adornment on the dark armor. Benson asked where she got the suit of plates, and she explained it came off a dead body in the underworld. She was excited to get into the undercity, and suggested the group use the entrance at the club downtown, under the old textile mill, which would put them within walking distance of their objectives.

 

A Bed of Roses - Favorite Foods

POCHTECA

Bleeding Scorpion - Roast bicep w chilies

Jumping Spider - Turkey tamale

Stone Hammer - Tlaxcalli (tortilla) w guacamole

Two Legs - Snow w honey

Yellow Thorn - Quail egg

 

ADVANCED PREGENS

Consecrated to He Who Lowers His Head - Pozole w manflesh

Pepper Knight - Spicy chocolate

Pierced By Thorns - Roasted pumpkin seeds

Smoking Lilly - Fresh pineapple

Toppled Cactus - Stewed tomato

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest One

The year was 1521. The place was Tenochtitlan, head of the Triple Alliance of the Aztec Empire. The island-city had just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadors and their Nahua-speaking allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica were at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold. 

 

William de Leftwich Dodge

 

In a Pochteca Guild Hall, four Aztecs were confined to a storeroom amid sacks of cocoa beans and bolts of cotton cloth - the majority of the Guild’s liquid wealth, which the Spaniards had no interest in.

• Consecrated to Father Death, Warrior and elderly Eagle Knight
  
• Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader
  
• Pepper Knight, Capsaicinurge and mighty warrior prone to ignominious pratfalls
• Toppled Cactus, Fool and sideshow dwarf from the city's menagerie
  

Their hands were tied and they only had a moment to contemplate what they would do next, before a group of hairy men from the other side of the world hustled them out into the banquet hall.

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Five

A surly middle aged man in a track suit stormed into the Clearmountain Central Services building. He cornered a pair of maintenance workers in the lobby and read them the riot act. His name was John "Johnny Boy" Benson, and they were responsible for the death of his nephew John Benson. Maintenance workers Pepper and Eddie patiently explained that Benson's soul was just fine in the jar where they stored it, and they had a plan to bring him back. Johnny Boy wasn't having it, but the one legged supervisor interrupted him before the situation turned violent.

 

Johnny Boy tried to flex his authority as a Costa Nostra hood, but Kurta wasn't intimidated. If John Benson was under the protection of a Sicilian family, it was that family's responsibility to protect him from the depredations of a rival crime syndicate. And Johnny Boy was far from home, if he wanted to cause trouble in Clearmountain then the Ponda Ray family would be happy to take care of him.

 

Fortunately cooler heads prevailed, and the maintenance workers explained their plan: they would take John Benson's body and the jar containing his soul down to the crypt beneath the Serpent Ruins and resurrect him. Johnny Boy insisted on coming with them, to make sure they didn't fuck it up.