Unknown Armies: A Bed of Roses Playtest 3

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. 

Emmanuel Leutze

In a Pochteca Guild Hall, three 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.

• Jumping Spider, Merchant and luxury goods trader 
• Two Legs, Merchant and spy
• 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.

The beautiful feather coats and dyed fabrics which adorned the walls had been torn down by the Conquistadors in search of gold, the only treasure they had any interest in. The Spaniards who retained their metal armor this far into the campaign had stripped out of it in the choking heat. They wore fat-bladed arming swords or long rapiers in belts and baldricks. None carried firearms, keeping their matchlock long guns ready to fire would have been an unnecessary hassle.

In the center of the room, the Spaniards had kindled a fire, using the guild’s records, furniture, and art from the walls as fuel. A burly White man in a brightly colored surcoat and a one armed Tlaxcaltec interpreter clad in a beautiful blue mantle and Spanish sword belt waited impatiently by the blaze.
The Spaniard pointed to Two Legs.

The Captain's Spanish goons (the translator was the only Red man in the room) hustled their first victim over to the fire pit. They tied his feet, sit him on the lip of the fire pit, and position his soles within searing distance of the blaze.

The Spaniard said something. The Tlaxcaltec interpreter Wooden Spear asked Two Legs where the gold was hidden.

Two Legs said he was more afraid of the Revered Speaker Falling Eagle's tortures than the Spaniards, and couldn't give up the info. The interpreter translated but the Spaniard wasn't impressed. The Emperor had been captured by Cortes and was no threat to anyone. Yellow Thorn tried to impress the Spanish Captain with his limited command of the White man' language and the Christian religion, but Captain Domingo wasn't impressed. He was here for the Indians' gold, not their souls. Jumping Spider told Wooden Spear that the Spaniards were burning a huge amount of wealth by tossing humming bird and parrot feather tapestries into the blaze, those alone would make them rich for life. Wooden Spear laughed and said it could all burn.

Two Legs' feet were seriously starting to crispify and he decided to give the Spanish what they wanted, sort of. He realized that Wooden Spear was not translating everything accurately and he had to win over the translator first. The Tlaxcaltec was motivated by vanity and revenge and Two Legs offered his daughter as a prize, granting him wealth and entry to the hereditary merchant class. Wooden Spear agreed and Two Legs told him he knew the spot where the treasure was shoved off the bridge during Cortes' first retreat from Tenochtitlan. It should still be at the bottom of the lake. The Spaniards pulled the fire-roasted Mexica out of the blaze. They pulled on their breastplates and capacetes and lit the matchcords on their muskets. The Captain told Two Legs to lead the way and the White men clouted the three Pochteca out of the Guild Hall.

At its height, Tenochtitlan was supplied with fresh water by aqueducts, and food by canoes or causeways connecting it to the mainland. When the religious authorities sacrificed captives en-masse following a successful military campaign, the corpses were eaten and the inedible parts publicly displayed or hauled away on municipal garbage barges poled along the fractal branches of its canals.

The Conquistadores destroyed the aqueducts. The municipal garbage barges sank under the weight of Spanish cannon fire and the rams of their enormous warships. The Tenochtitlan the merchants and their Spanish captors emerged into was a reeking flat expanse of rubble, choked by billowing clouds of dust and droning clouds of flies. The lake was thick with excrement and rotting bodies. The Guild Hall was in the Sacred Precinct, in the center of Tenochtitlan. As they exited, the players could see the Spaniards at the summit of the Templo Mayor, pushing rubble down the slope of the one remaining pyramid to make room for a cross.

Rubble and corpses blocked the main street to the southern causeway where Two Legs said the sunken treasure was located. The Pochteca led the Spaniards west through the Moyotlan district, in the shadow of the Yopico. The cave-like temple had been set on fire by Cortes' men prior to his initial ejection from the city, burning the caked layers of viscera and cracking the limestone cladding beneath. It looked like a rotten tooth amid the ruined white buildings of the city. Concerned that the Spaniards were destroying the cultural treasures of his civilization, Yellow Thorn made up an excuse to go into the cavernous entrance at the base of the pyramid and salvage the cultic artifacts of Xipe Totec. He told Captain Domingo that there was gold inside, sewn into the preserved skins of sacrificial victims. The Captain told him to go in there by himself, and if he didn't come back his friends would die. The Merchant crept forward into the cave.

The space beneath the pyramid was dark and smelled like blood. Yellow Thorn cast about for a torch and found a piece of wood in the scattered rubble on the floor. He lit it with a piece of flint and the torchlight illuminated a giant, eyeless face. The primordial giant was blind, eyes drooling blood, but it felt the heat of the torch. It exhaled a lungful of noxious gas, panicking Yellow Thorn and sending him running out of the cave. The giant crawled after him, howling thanks to the Flayed Lord for granting him the strength to kill and the courage to a flowery death.

The Giant burst forth into the ruined city and laid about with its grasping hands, looking for victims to shovel into its mouth. Wooden Spear, Yellow Thorn and Two Legs got clear but it snatched up Jumping Spider. The Spaniards intervened, given courage by the Captain's angry shouting. It was just another damned Indian, so what if he was twelve feet tall? They fired their readied muskets and hacked away with their side-swords and severed the pinky finger of the giant's hand, so when it squeezed Jumping Spider he squirted out of its grasp onto the ground and fled to join his friends. The giant praised God and begged for death until a musket ball shattered its windpipe, though by that point the Merchants and their Tlaxcaltec interpreter had fled beyond line of sight. They now outnumbered him but Two Legs had made a bargain with him and intended to honor the arrangement, though he was not aware of his daughter's exact location or if she was even still alive. Plus he could help them talk their way past any Spanish or Tlaxcaltecas they encountered. Though he warned that without the Spaniard acting as a beard it might be tricky to talk their way past roving treasure hunters. He could speak Spanish but he couldn't do anything about their insatiable greed.

The Merchants detoured into Cuepopan before exiting the city, so Two Legs could retrieve the hidden stash of treasure he kept under his house. The Aztecs shifted rubble while Wooden Spear stood guard, pretending he was overseeing a group of prisoners. Beneath the floor tiles of Two Legs' ruined house, they found the enormous feathers of Mayan parrots, “unbreakable” bronze knives made by the Purepecha, cocoa beans and several quills full of gold dust. They decided they had time for cocoa, laboriously mashing and frothing the beans with water. Two Legs' burned feet felt better and Yellow Thorn used the opportunity to sneak away from the group. The lone Merchant wandered south to the causeway leading out of the city, and there found what he was looking for.

At the south causeway, a group of Red men and women dressed in a mix of Nahua and Spanish clothing milled around a tzompantl, a rack of skulls. They had removed the severed heads and were using the rack to hang people. Several dead men dangled from the top rack, and a black robed priest sprinkled baptismal water on his latest victim with one hand, clasping a heavy book in the other. This was exactly the man Yellow Thorn wanted to see. He asked the priest to teach him the mysteries of the One God.

Father Corazon nodded approvingly. He could give the Indian last rites and teach him the words that would ensure his place in the kingdom of heaven, but before sending him to his final reward he wanted to know a couple or three things about Merchant life in the One World. He flipped open his big book and began questioning Yellow Thorn about Pochteca life. Yellow Thorn was happy to tell his life's story, but less interested in being hanged at the end. It was a form of public execution and therefore counted as a flowery death, but he had so many more adventures to go on before he went to the place where the sun rose. So he made a deal with the Priest. He'd teach the man the Nahuatl pictoral language in exchange for a Bible and his own survival. The Priest agreed and Yellow Thorn used his Merchant powers to transfer his literacy to Father Corazon. He departed illiterate with the word of the Lord under his arm.

With a Bible secured, the next phase of the Merchants' plan was simple: escape the city and tell any Spaniard who interrupted them that they were converts carrying the word of the Lord into the desolate lands north of the Triple Alliance, the savage deserts of the Chichimeca. The Pochteca had been to the desert before and while it wasn't exactly paradise the Guild had spent generations building a reputation as honest traders with the local tribes, who would shelter them. More importantly the harsh desert would not support the armies of the Spaniards and their Indian allies, sheltering them from pursuit.

Leaving the city to the north took the Merchants through the Cuepopan district and the ruins of the Great Menagerie. This complex of buildings had once held beasts from the furthest reaches of the Known World, along with an attached "human zoo" holding people with exotic deformities. The quickest way took them across a stone bridge over a flooded enclosure. A fin broke the surface of the water as they crossed. The bull shark Xook, given as a gift by a Maya prince to Ahuizotl as a pun on his namesake, was alive and well. It could survive in brackish water and there were no shortage of corpses falling into the city's waterways. The Merchants crossed quickly, staying away from the edges of the platform.

A dwarf in a red skirt capered out onto the landing at the opposite end of the enclosure. She turned and coaxed a monster out onto the walkway. An enormous hump-backed cow with a beautiful curly mane and giant horns. The Merchants recognized the dwarf as Toppled Cactus, a survivor from the human zoo, and the monster as a captive animal from the distant lands north of the One World. Toppled Cactus struggled to climb aboard the beast. If the Merchants would just wait a moment she'd charge them and knock them off the causeway. It would be hilarious. 

Jumping Spider begged Toppled Cactus not to do it. It wasn't right, the Revered Speaker keeping her as a slave in the menagerie, but she was free now and she was welcome to come adventuring with the Merchants. Toppled Cactus dismounted the buffalo and told him it was off. Go home. The bison turned around and shouldered the little Fool into the shark tank. The Merchants looked over the side, unable to look away from the inevitable massacre. Toppled Cactus looked with them and asked if there was supposed to be a splash.

To escape the city via the north causeway, the Pochteca, Wooden Spear and Toppled Cactus would have to pass through Tlatelolco market on the north end of the city. It was the largest bazaar in Tenochtitlan and although everything edible had been eaten during the siege there was still enough wealth there to attract a lot of Tlaxcaltec looters. They ignored the Mexica Merchants and their Tlaxcalan "captor" Wooden Spear until a red-mantled warrior with a matchlock pistol in a maguey fiber thigh holster commanded them to halt. 

Diego Rivera

This warrior, Fights With His Elbows, rallied a number of bravos to back him up and demanded that Wooden Spear hand over one prisoner to be killed by the mob. Yellow Thorn noticed the pistol wasn't ready to fire and boldly stepped forward, encouraging the pistolero to shoot him if he could. Fights With His Elbows thumbed back the hammer and squeezed off a shot into Yellow Thorn's head. There was flash and no report, no sound at all except the snap of the action. Nobody saw anything come out of the barrel but the Merchant fell to the ground, insensate and convinced he had been shot in the head. 

The Aztecs negotiated for passage out of the city and possession of Yellow Thorn's "corpse". Fights With His Elbows said he could have the body after he had taken a trophy or two, and stooped to mutilate the stunned Pochteca. Having his ear cut off broke Yellow Thorn out of his stupor and he lashed out with his bronze knife, narrowly missing his attacker's genitals. Two Legs threw himself forward and stabbed the pistoleer in the thigh, opening the femoral artery. He sat down in the street and bled and asked if the rest of the crowd might take over for him. The Tlaxcaltecas hacked both the Mexica Merchants to pieces using a mix of Spanish steel and traditional obsidian blades. Wooden Spear joined in the butchery, frankly dubious that Two Legs would hold up his end of the bargain anyway.

Jumping Spider ran. He wanted to stay and fight but as the last surviving member of his Guild his tonalli was to survive and bear witness. He reached what was left of the northern causeway as the sun came down, catching the sails of the Spanish ships as they plied lake Texcoco and turning the white cloth orange and red. Toppled Cactus handed him the red mantled man's matchlock pistol and asked if he knew how to work this stupid thing.