Unknown Armies Playtest - Black Coffee

After a grueling multi-day trip, four East German farmers peered out the windows of a Soviet made Mi-4 transport helicopter as it descended toward an old coffee plantation in the wilderness of Vietnam's central highlands.

• Arnold Lindwurm, 19, unemployed since finishing conscription. Malcontent with a knack for evading surveillance. Raised chickens illegally in his apartment.
• Kasper Pfennig, Volkssturm child soldier, raised in a Free German Youth camp after the war. 50 years old, loved working outdoors and with kids.
• Melissa Preisner, apolitical hog farmer from a collective farm outside Berlin. 25 years old, liked animals and heavy physical labor.
• Sandro Griebel, Russian war bastard fathered during the rape of Berlin. 35 years old, worked in a slaughterhouse, raised sheep on his one acre “personal housekeeping” plot.

The year was 1980.  Skyrocketing coffee prices induced the German Democratic Republic to send engineers and help the Vietnamese establish first rate coffee plantations. In exchange the GDR would receive half of Vietnam’s coffee harvest for the next twenty years. Coffee was to Teutons like tea to the English. Its absence was apocalyptic. It would take years for the Vietnamese coffee operation to bear fruit. The way things were going, there wouldn't be an East Germany by then.

That's why the four mages had been rounded up by Kramer, a Stasi transvestite who somehow knew they were all Agrimancers. Their mission: use their magic to accelerate coffee production at the plantation by any means necessary.

The helicopter touched down on a tennis court and dusted off the second the four mages got out with their luggage. The plantation was an old French manor at the base of a mountain range, down whose slope cascaded a water fall. The foothills around the manor were barren, patchy with old craters. Prefab structures and dirt roads indicated resurgent industrial activity.

A smartly dressed Vietnamese guy waiting on the improvised helipad introduced himself as their interpreter Phan Hoàng Phát. Phát spoke excellent German and the way he talked (with aphorisms inserted in place of his natural speech) he was clearly a party official. He explained the basics of the situation as they walked from the helipad toward the crumbling mansion: a group of German engineers had already visited the plantation and built a first rate mechanized coffee harvesting operation. But the pedantic Huns (he didn't say this but he clearly thought it) didn't do anything about a couple serious problems that were outside their scope of work. He gestured vaguely with a gloved hand at the fields. They were covered with bomb craters and all the vegetation was dead. A tough woman covered in teardrop shaped scars crouched at the edge of the growing area, cordoning off the area with tape and little skull-signs labeled "MINES."

The Agrimages didn't hear a word he said. They were all staring at the herd of elephants. The beasts grazed at the edge of the river by an old shipping dock under the watchful eye of a lazy mahout. Melissa tried to strike up a conversation with the elephant handler but he didn't speak German. Phát hastily explained that the pachyderms were there to do agricultural and construction work until the new tractors arrived. He shooed the Germans toward the mansion and argued with the slovenly mahout in Vietnamese.

The furniture in the old guest rooms was in bad shape, except for a writing desk whose varnish survived eighty years of neglect. Melissa found the waterlogged journal of the former plantation owner, written in French. Most of the pages were melted together by water damage, but she was able to extract a couple interesting anecdotes about the indigenous people of the area. The Vietnamese laborers from the majority ethnicity were even more contemptuous of the mountain tribes than their French overseers were of them. The hill people were supposedly led by a shaman called the King of Fire, a sorcerer-priest with the power to make the land bloom.

Melissa instinctively sided with the settled agricultural laborers against the nomadic tribes, who she viewed as lumpen capitalist roaders trying to expropriate things created by the workers. Arnold admired the hill people for resisting the imperial domination of a modern centralized nation state. Their incipient struggle session was interrupted by a commotion outside the room. The door flew open and a stocky Vietnamese guy with a blue and red star eyepatch angrily shoved Phát down the hallway. The party man had been listening at the door, and this other guy wasn't having any of it. He introduced himself in broken German as Vinh, foreman of the agricultural workers. If they needed to get any actual work done they could talk to him, forget that [unintelligible] from Hanoi and his [untranslatable]. Kasper asked if he had anything to drink. Vinh grinned.

The sun went down over the mountains. The German farmers sat around the fire on the porch, burning incense to keep mosquitos away and sipping bia hơi, a light lager in the North Vietnamese style. The plantation ran on a generator and was only powered part of the day to save fuel, pending full electrification of the region. Vinh shouted to his workers. A one armed man, a surly woman with a face full of shrapnel scars, and a deaf guy with an SKS slung at his shoulder brought out a buffet of rice and canned foods, supplemented with crustaceans and fish caught in the river. In the dark, a fire was visible in the mountains. The Germans asked who lit it and Vinh said it was one of the moi, the hill barbarians who infested the region. Most of them died during the American war, blown up by imperialist bombs or chased down and shot by the National Liberation Front. But there were a few left, still standing in the way of progress.

That night the Germans were woken by gunshots from one of the outbuildings. The distinctive report of an SKS. They peered out the windows and saw lights come on at the perimeter, where the edge of the farm disappeared into the rainforest. Flashlights and kerosene lamps. Then the lights went out, like they were afraid of taking return fire. Sandro got his lighter and went out into the dark to see what was happening. He made no attempt at stealth, afraid of being shot in the dark by a farmhand. The woman with the teardrop scars appeared out of the dark, clad only in shorts and carrying a chopped down PPSh. She snapped his lighter shut, made a shushing gesture and disappeared into the foliage. He went back inside rather than follow her unarmed into a dangerous night operation.

The next morning, over a breakfast of Soviet food aid tushonka soup, Phát told the Germans that the farm workers had been attacked by a tiger in the night, but chased it off with gunfire. This was an obvious lie, especially when the one handed farmer came in and told him that whoever was sneaking around the outbuildings had stolen one of the Vietnamese/German phrasebooks. The Party Man shooed him away and reassured the Agrimancers that the beast wouldn't come back. The boat with everyone's animals arrived at the dock, beasts shipped from East Germany after the Agrimancers insisted to Kramer that it was important. Arnold had eleven hens: Ulrike, Odetta, Carline, Fanny, Viviane, Angela, Jennifer, Kristina, Natalie, Helga and Gabi. Kasper got Harry, his oldest horse Melissa got her hand raised hog Ian. Sandro got his lame ewe Laura. The Agrimancers made sure all their beasts were ok after the long trip, got everyone fed and watered and brushed and reassured and put away, then went out into the fields to assess the damage.

Vinh was waiting for them, and he had a plan to get rid of the Party Man following the Germans. He led the Agrimancers past the warning tape into the minefield, instructing them to walk where he walked. The scarred woman from the night before was waiting, he introduced her as the chief agronomist Trang and translated for her as she explained the problem. The area had been cluster bombed and there were still unexploded bomblets in the soft dirt, which would explode when handled. The whole area was also saturated with Agent Orange, a poison that would stop crops growing there (or bioaccumulate in anything that did grow).

Trang tossed a ridged metal sphere the size of a tennis ball to Melissa. She caught it instinctively, realized what it was and dropped it shrieking. The unexploded bomblet fell to the earth and did nothing, an inert dud. Trang laughed. The Germans debated how to clean up the coffee fields. An elephant calf came gamboling out toward them. They watched apprehensively as the little pachyderm stopped, carefully avoided a suspect patch of dirt and continued toward them. The elephants could smell the unexploded bombs and instinctively avoided them. The curious calf grunted and explored the strange smelling farmers with his trunk. He blew air on their faces and tried to pull their hands into his mouth so he could lick them, smelling the residue of their breakfast. An older elephant came out into the field to retrieve him, following the same careful path charted by the baby. The Agrimancers stepped back to avoid antagonizing her as she prodded the calf back to the herd, tapping him with her trunk when he strayed.

The plan came together quickly after that. Arnold killed a handful of chickens and gave them to the farmhands to prepare and cook. This gave him a bunch of Agrimancy charges and got the farmers out of the way so they wouldn't see what happened next. Melissa slashed Ian's throat, adding the hog to the buffet and gaining a Significant charge. She went to the elephant herd and picked out the oldest female to ensorcel, casting Domesticate on the Matriarch so she would lead the rest of the herd into action. The hog farmer told the elderly dam to identify the position of all the bomblets, marking them with stakes for later disposal. The old elephant grumbled and signed with her ears and trunk, giving orders to the others. The mahout woke up from his nap in the howdah and panicked. His beasts were walking into a minefield and wouldn't acknowledge his orders to stop. The Agrimancers pulled in Vinh to calm him down, and the blood-soaked foreman gently explained to the elephant handler that his monsters were smarter than him, and the only way any bombs go off is if he stepped on them himself like an [untranslatable].

The elephants marked the mines and vacated the field. Arnold spent some minor charges to summon a handful of servitors. The little rock people rose from the earth and trundled out into the field, picking up tree branches and long sticks as they went. One by one they detonated the marked mines, trying to stay as far away as possible when they struck them. Sandro and the Vietnamese farmhands watched the fireworks go off in the fields as they plucked chickens and simmered broth and salted pork for later consumption.

With the bombs disposed of it was time to clean up the poison. Arnold had enough charges left to bless every acre of land with a fertility spell. He went out with a dead chicken in one hand and a can of diesel fuel in the other, scattering blood and gasoline as he blessed the land. Agent Orange sweated out of the land, flowing downhill and pooling in a drainage ditch where one of Arnold's servitors swallowed the poisonous dioxins. The Party Official frowned at his superstitious peasant dance and scribbled in his notebook. Trang emerged from a furrow in the earth and pointed her little Makarov pistol at Arnold. She said something he couldn't understand. She gestured at the can, the dead chicken and at herself. Arnold told the servitors to protect him from this madwoman. The little rock people waddled out of hiding and reached for Trang. She emptied her magazine into the servitors, reloaded and emptied the backup. With the gremlins still coming she shoulder tackled Arnold, throwing him over her shoulder and running back toward the manor. Sandro tried to stop her, wading through the flowing poison, but was knocked over and fell into the drainage ditch.

Trang shouted to the farmhands that they were under attack. The former Vietcong guerillas tossed aside their carving knives and grabbed weapons, loading double barreled shotguns and battered carbines. The other Agrimancers tried to explain to Phát that the gross rock monsters were just agricultural advanced German machinery but he wasn't able to sell the NLF goons on it. Arnold shouted an order in German and the servitors burrowed into the earth, disappearing from view. The buckshot and bullets fell in the ditch where Sandro was backstopped, he dove prone and ended up completely coated in Agent Orange. Kasper made like a camp counselor and got all the armed farmers calmed down. They were wary of another charge by the tiny "rock apes", but went back to butchering the meat before the flies got it. Translating for Trang, Phát told Arnold that she demanded to be taught his magick. Melissa offered to stay in Vietnam and teach her. She loved animals and getting to stay with the elephants sounded like more fun than going back to the Worker's Paradise.

Sandro stripped and ordered the engorged servitor to slurp the dioxin off his soaked body. He wondered how much he'd already absorbed through his skin, how long he had before his nervous system failed and cancer ate him from the inside. He dismissed the fear. He knew every time he brained a cow that one day it would be him stumbling down the chute.

Bacon

The Agrimancers stuffed the engorged servitor full of Agent Orange into an empty fuel drum when nobody was looking.

That night, full of chicken and pork and beer, the Agrimancers saw another fire in the hills. Peering through an old surveying telescope, they saw that it was an old hut on stilts, blazing away merrily. Arnold, Sandro and Kasper decided to investigate the arson. Since they were unarmed, wandering into the jungle at night with no idea what they were up against, they invited Trang as a guide and bodyguard. Without any light the hike uphill was difficult, but there were old trails through the undergrowth  - some of which had been recently used. A snake fell out of a tree onto Kasper but he kept his cool, casually whipping it into a treetrunk and instantly killing it.

The burned hut was an old Montagnard dwelling, abandoned long ago. It stank of gasoline, incinerated with a modern accelerant. Trang searched for clues about where the culprit went, Arnold used one of his last charges to eat a mouthful of dirt and get a vision of the event: a small man with a rifle sloshing gasoline from a stolen can all over the building, then firing it with a lighter before retreating into the jungle. The German pointed into the jungle where he escaped and Trang shot off after him. There was a sheet ripping sound from somewhere up ahead, a burst of automatic fire. The Agrimancers ran toward it.

The spray of automatic fire from Trang's sub gun had torn a hole in the canopy, sending a shaft of moonlight down her target. A body lay on the forest floor, clutching a well-used M1 carbine until the former-NLF sapper kicked it away. The Germans examined the body. A boy, maybe 15 years old, clad in a ratty old Mad Magazine tee shirt. An American Zippo lighter and a coiled tree branch stuffed in his rope belt, supple and green. A Berlitz Vietnamese/German phrasebook. Two exit wounds in his torso.

Trang and Kasper had seen child soldiers die before. Had been on the other side of the gun. Sandro had killed lambs and calves and shoats. Arnold vomited. He had given the order and now a child was dead. Sandro picked up the living tree branch. The magic whip of the King of Water hummed in his hand, pregnant with agricultural power. He touched the boy's corpse in a vain hope he would be restored to life. Flowers bloomed in the blood soaking his chest. The slaughterhouse worker sensed the malevolent force animating the branch a moment before it struck him in the face. Incensed at his extermination of the last member of its tribe, the magic artifact took out his eye. This, too, he accepted. It was only meat.

Arnold's surviving servitors buried the last King of Fire with the whip. They piled themselves over the grave to form a cairn.

Meanwhile at the coffee plantation, Melissa fed the elephant calf a banana. She put her hand on the little monster's flank and felt its heart, already larger than hers. The sound of Trang's burst of gunfire came down the mountain. She looked up, wondering what had happened. The elephants, hearing this thing but perhaps accustomed by now to the sound, did not.