Unknown Armies - The Full Boot

Corrupt Chicago PD beat cop Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand had a problem. One of his informants, one Adrian Lebarge, was nowhere to be found. She was his source of information on the city's occult underworld and if something happened to her he'd have to cultivate a new source, which his ego and laziness would not allow.

He started his search downtown, to pester some detectives who owed him a favor. He swaggered into the cube farm where the homicide dicks flew their desks, and was immediately intercepted by Sergeant Gold. The old guy looked terrible, way worse than Arch remembered, and immediately told him to get the fuck out. There was something wrong with his voice and he was much surlier than normal. Like he was covering something up. Arch acted like he was leaving, then doubled back to rifle through Gold's desk. The last month of notes he had taken were borderline incomprehensible, but Arch picked out two things:

• A list of names and addresses, including Adrian's.
• Scribbled drawings of a boot, with foam overflowing the top like a novelty beer glass

He hit the streets before Gold caught him snooping around.

 

 

Adrian was a source of information on Chicago's supernatural underworld. That made her disappearance a problem for Blue Line, a circle of bent cops like Arch who investigated occult crimes. A pair of Cohles answered his summons to the hot dog shop to go over the facts of the case:

• Special Agent Manny Mordiggian, Disgraced Psychoanalyst and Hypnotist
• Robin Goodfellow "Rob" Dogma, Sheriff's Deputy and Super-Strongwoman

Maintenance and Preservation Masterpost

Maintenance and Preservation was a nine session Esoteric Enterprises open table I ran for a local RPG group. It was my first in-person game in years and was a lot of fun. The players were maintenance workers and had to go spelunking in the undercity to solve problems, dodging monsters and traps and getting chased around by different factions. Thank you to everyone who showed up to play, both the regular players and people who just tried out one session.

Maintenance and Preservation - Lessons Learned

Juan de Valdés Leal

 

Simplification is great. The lack of classes and class subsystems meant character creation only took a few minutes. This let new players quickly join tables of experienced players without the need to prepare before the session. This is a fantasy offered by other Basic clones like OSE and Lamentations, but in my experience chargen in those games takes substantially longer and requires more paperwork at the table, because you've got to pick a class and then copy a bunch of class features, saving throws and additional items (particularly rolled spells) to your sheet. Every player missed something on their first go (skills, starting items, the ability to "invert" ability scores which I admit is unintuitive) but since there weren't a lot of interdependencies on the sheet it was easy to fix.

 

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Nine (The End)

 

John Benson and Pepper woke up after a long fall. They were in a domed cave, on an island of fine grained white sand in a chalky blue underground lake. An Aelf fussed over them, face a photonegative of the unseelie fairies from the undercity they knew. He brushed a feather duster over John Benson's face, a stick with slimy tendrils cut off an underworld creature. The tendrils had no effect. Benson realized his hands were "bound" by a long glass spike, inserted through his wrists like a syringe. On a normal living human it would have made freeing his hands painful and debilitating. For an undead revenant it was easy.

 

Benson sat up and asked the fairy what was going on. The Aelf was disconcerted by his ability to move and talk. Pepper sat up, similarly unaffected by the paralytic poison from the cave crawler stick. The Aelf hadn't bound her hands yet, the glass spike lay on the sand ready for use. The Aelf shot Benson with a magic spell, which spattered harmlessly against his dessicated flesh. Pepper asked what was going on. The Aelf ran back into his hut, a structure of stone and leather. He turned out a bag onto the sand, containing their possessions.

Pepper realized that the weird underworld guy was trying to ensorcel/enslave them, and was trying to get rid of them now that he realized it wouldn't work. She thought about jumping him and stealing whatever he owned in retaliation, but Benson convinced her to focus on escaping the unknown cave before exacting revenge. He established a pidgin with the cave elf and learned that the way out was to the south, across a series of stepping stones sticking out of the beautiful blue water and through a passage in the rock. As for an explanation of his behavior, the Aelf told the humans that there was a vast wall of impenetrable glass, as high as the eye could see. There was a world on the other side, and he would kill every man in existence to get there.

 

The maintenance workers left. The Aelf was happy to see them go.

 

Maintenance and Preservation Music Post

This was an in-person game, played in a public place where I didn't have control over the sound system, so all these tracks are for my personal benefit.

 

Hex24 Bonus - The Winged Hobelars

Sergeant Baldwin was astride his flying mount Pneumatophore, leading a squadron of four troopers in a reconnaissance flight over the broken lands beyond the frontier, when he heard the voice in his head. Smoother than any voice could be if it spoke out loud.

Reprobates. Northeast. Two and a half leagues. Eleven hundred fathoms. Two flyers. Six Elves. Eleven Captives.

Reprobates being a pet name for an enemy formation, more dangerous than Poltroons, less so than Brigands. Leagues being the distance from his position. Fathoms the altitude. The two flyers would be the pteranodons the squadron was tracking. They were fierce reptiles but they couldn't take prey in the air. Couldn't fight an attack from above. The Elves on board would have Sleep memorized, a powerful disabler in ground combat but useless in a high altitude duel, where the wind and the shock of high-G turns would quickly wake a man who dozed off.

But how to rescue the captives? That was the real question, and probably why the slavers felt safe operating in the area when they must have known the Hobelars were near. They smugly assumed the presence of hostages would dissuade the squadron from engaging them in the air.

No. They wouldn't get away this time. He had a plan for that too. 

He thought hard about the Gnome, telepathically calling out the ranges of the minds glowing at the edge of her perception. Hidden in a surface camp to minimize the odds of being spotted, suspended in the harness that kept the weight of her head from bending her spine and crushing her internal organs.

He thought a message for her.

Going forth.

The wind blew through the face of his wooden sallet, freezing the drool that leaked around his tusks at the thought of battle. He ran his enormous tongue over his lips and squinted, looking for the promised foe.

There.

Baldwin raised his fist and the Squadron ascended.

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - The Stadium

The stadium is already constructed: a concentric ring of elevated seating around a cone shaped plinth. Above the benches are a series of poles with retractable screens of wool, to keep rain and direct sun off the audience. Besides the general seating there are several boxes for distinguished guests, and a big throne for Morwenna herself (stuffed with 5,000 SP worth of cave spider silk).

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Eight

New hires Avery and Daniel joined old hands Parker, Benson and Eddie at Eddie's museum in downtown Clearmountain. Eddie had set up all the treasures he found in the underworld, along with paragraphs of factual and conjectural information about what they might be. The healing chair made by the famous Barzini was in the lounge area, where the

Or so they thought. The boss quickly apologized, he wasn't feeling his act. Then he shifted. It wasn't Kurta, it was another illusionist. Not the lizard/goat/old woman, the other one. He had a gift for the explorers: a sack of magic scrolls. They were going into a dangerous place to do a public service, and that reminded him of some people he knew back in Cow Town. People who deserved better than what they got. And they needed to be quick with their work this time, or they'd be lost forever beneath the earth. He left the museum without answering any more questions, and almost ran into the real Kurta as he slipped and fell down the alley stairs.

 

Fortunately for everyone, the one legged supervisor wasn't hurt. He had a big briefcase, containing two smaller cases. One was filled with hand grenades, one for each member of the team, courtesy of the marker he finally called in with the surviving Ponda Rays. The other was sealed, and it contained their mission. The team had to take the machine down to the third level of the undercity, below the now-opened hatch, and open the case in the room with "the machine". This would end the earthquakes and save the city. Then they needed to get the hell out as fast as possible. The things on level three might not recognize the maintenance team as a threat on the way in, but once they broke the device all bets would be off.

The explorers decided to spend some of the money they accumulated before delving back into the underworld. They bought ammunition, weapons, supplies, and a Scroll of Fireballs using money from the museum and the treasure they found over the last seven weeks.

 

Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Retinue

A couple or three people you might meet on a visit to House Tlaxxon's manor - a tiny keep that floats above the whalefields, roof planted with beautiful cacti and sootblack flowers, fastened to the earth by an anchorchain connected to an enormous boulder that predates the arrival of man on Giedi Prime.

 

Dune 2D20: Whalefall - Houses

House Harkonnen's adroit manipulation of the whalefur market required them to establish a handful of potemkin operations on Giedi Prime, importing Bjondax Whales from Lankiveil to rouse suspicion that they were planning on establishing a rival operation. These efforts had to appear credible to make it past CHOAM's audits of the House's financials, requiring them to gift extraction rights to a handful of Houses Minor so they could spin up something convincing.

Once they had the money, the Harks immediately lost interest in their sacrificial whale farms. But nobody ever gives up power on Giedi Prime. A handful of Houses resisted consolidation, extermination, and the market crash that immediately followed the Baron cashing out.

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - More Assorted Hexes

The cabbage farms in this hex are depopulated, with signs of violence. Posters for THE TOURNAMENT plastered everywhere.

In the absence of farmers to put down salt, the fields are overrun with Flail Snails eating the vegetables.

A Bed of Roses Masterpost

Roberto Cueva Del Río

 
The year is 1521. The place is Tenochtitlan, heart of the Aztec Empire. The island-city has just been conquered following a ninety day siege by a coalition of Spanish Conquistadores and their Nahua allies from neighboring city-states. Weakened by starvation and smallpox, the surviving Mexica are at the mercy of their conquerors’ insatiable lust for gold.

 

An Unknown Armies 3e scenario for up to four players.

 

A Bed of Roses: Music Post

Si Sheppard

City of the Inhumi is what convinced me to finish A Bed of Roses. It looked like a lot of hard work to write up tons of locations for the City of Tenochtitlan, but then I imagined the song playing as the players came out of the Guild Hall and saw the ruins, and decided to do it anyway.

Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest Two

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.

 

Jason Field

 

In a Pochteca Guild Hall, four merchants 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.

• Bleeding Scorpion, Merchant and veteran knight
  
• Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader
  
• Yellow Thorn, Merchant and far-traveler
  

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.

Unknown Armies: Clown Death March

 

After almost twenty four hours working the crowd at a sad little tiger show in the parking lot outside a Wal Mart in Davidson Illinois, a pair of clowns threw on their overcoats and set out into the snow.

• Andre Bones the Silent Clown
• Jesus Rinconsito the Sad Clown

The pair of ex-cons were only interested in one thing: the liquor store down the interstate, whose lights they could barely see through the blowing snow. They trudged forward across the field that separated the motel parking lot from their prize. Almost immediately their shoes got soaked. Andre toppled over and knocked Jesus down. The two fell to arguing and almost fought, but kept it together through the trek.