PROVENDER: False Retreat

Dune predicted that any genuine discovery of the New Age would be co opted by The Man. Psychedelic drugs, tantric sex, yoga, the human potential movement, it would all serve the interests of billion dollar corporations and government conspiracies. 

 

Today instead of maintaining adequate staffing levels, companies use "mindfulness" to fight burnout. Programmers microdose LSD to make themselves more productive. And Movement Medicine instructor Edwina "Ed" Christ holds ecstatic dance retreats to help employees of billion dollar firms open their third eye.

1: THE VENUE

A handsome alpine lodge, interior mutilated with modern decor that gives it the feel of a hotel conference room. In the mountains, up a forest service road and a long gravel driveway. Miles and miles from police and hospitals and anyone who could interrupt the proceedings.

 

In the Great Room where most hotels would display pieces by local artists, a row of cases holding archaeological finds from American prehistory.

• The preserved skin of an enormous bear, retrieved from a cave in Upstate New York circa 1949. Suspended on wires in a pantomime of life alongside a stack of knapped flint spearheads. 
• A Mississippian copper plate, partially covered with green rust. An eagle headed woman holds up the heart of a sacrificial victim as dancers wheel around her.
• A stone slab recovered by a Works Progress Administration archaeological dig. A twisted fossil caveman screams silently, trapped forever in the rock.

The rooms are nice, if you make it that far.

 

ED CHRIST

She's cute but yellow isn't her color, especially those little opera gloves. She doesn't sound like someone from HR and she doesn't demand the audience greet her with a "good morning" call and response, which helps her establish rapport with cube jockeys and CEOs alike. When she's not performing she snaps at people easily but keeps her cool around Unnatural phenomena. She carries a compact 9mm and a tiny "hushpuppy" suppressed .45 with a manual action.

GUESTS

A couple hundred people from Fortune 500 companies and overvalued startups aspiring to that status. No C level talent. Just sacrificial lambs who management could spare for a couple days.

• Vikram, government relations clerk at Yum Brands, imperious but perceptive.
• Chambers, markets police bodycams at Axon, all business all the time.
• Esmerelda, transportation planner with Deloitte, having trouble staying optimistic.
• Ziggy, grants administrator with Koch family foundations, religious but embarrassed about it.
• Coburg, safety auditor at Rio Tinto Borax, a strong man with a weak core.

People who could say no to their families but not to their boss "volunteering" them.

FACILITATORS

Ed's assistants. Clad in yellow robes that resemble raincoats. Blandly friendly when working with clients, like someone smiling while you take too long in line ahead of them. 

 

Privately these are low level TNI hoods given the psych salad treatment. They talk like everyday working slobs, complaining about carrying heavy shit or the challenge of hacking through bone at the joint with nothing but a hunting knife. Their speech is stilted like they can't remember certain words scrubbed from their vocabulary. Ed knows a series of "killphrases" that let her control them. They carry big knives because she doesn't trust them with guns.

 

2: THE PROGRAM

Attendees arrive after sundown by private shuttle from the airport. They gather in the Great Room and surrender their cellphones (and any cameras they carry) to the conference facilitators. Ed goes over the program while her servitors serve lightweight snacks of fresh bread with butter and a good fruit salad without filler. Pineapple and nectarine and strawberry. Not a cantaloupe in sight. there is no coffee or alcohol but guests are assured that neither will be in short supply after the first event. They are no doubt exhausted which makes this the perfect opportunity to tap the boundless reserves of energy that lies inside everyone who knows the right steps. Dance steps. Pause for laughter.

 

DANCE

In the Lodge's windowless ballroom the festivities begin. The lights dim. Nobody sees where Ed went, her voice comes out of the sound system. It's time for everyone to close their two eyes and open their third. The music comes on. A thumping sound, then pipes and something with strings. She tells her victims to start slow. Walk in a circle. Stomp in time to the percussion. Claustrophobic attendees who have kept their cool up to this point get agitated. Rightfully so. They have to keep moving or be crushed by the crowd and there's no way to call a halt. The whole room could agree to stop but with two hundred people in the dark.

 

The spiral dance picks up speed. The drums get faster. The lights flash once, twice, like something at a rave. The genius of the trap is everyone has to keep moving to avoid being crushed by everyone else, but that movement is what creates the crush in the first place. What starts as a vicious cycle rapidly becomes a whirlwind. Dancers must pass Fitness saves every ten minutes or take unarmed damage. Anyone who falls takes damage as the target of a riot.

 

The doors are locked from the outside. Ed is already down below with her lovely assistants.

 

DOLMEN

Beneath the lodge is a high ceilinged chamber with a sloped dirt floor. It has no windows but a lighting system that illuminates it brighter than day. In the center is the dolmen. Two boulders set in the hillside with a flat rock laid on top to create an underground room. Yellow robed goons from upstairs film with an analog camera (computers don't work down here) while Ed wipes the blood from her hand on the primitive columns. The charges flow out of her into the rock. She doesn't go inside.

 

The space under the rock is larger than it looks from the outside. Without sunlight there's no greenery leaving only a residue of ugly fungus on the rocks. At the bottom is a stone basin filled with filthy water. A single servitor stands ready to greet the thing that rises out.

 

BELPHEGOR

It's not his Christian name. A large, flabby thing, pale like a grub. Enormous limbs, long talons at the end of the digits. Not capable of speech except gurgling laughter. The charges from the sacrifice upstairs are merely an appetizer. A smell that wakes it up to feed.

  

It slides out of the pool and practically falls on top of the terrified raincoat holding the light on it, who only holds still thanks to Ed's shouted command. Belphegor feeds, tearing and chewing but at the same time sucking with his manyfold proboscises. Then he hunches over, stupefied by the cocktail of enchanted fluids his victim swallowed prior to exsanguination. A pair of goons ram a comically oversized syringe into the monster's flabby body. It belonged to a Surgeon and it cuts right through the gristle to taste the juice inside. They draw out a full load of blood.

 

Any interruption here frees the entity to rampage. 

THE PLAN

Alex Abel is desperate to live forever. There are lots of Adept spells that extend your life but he's not capable of magick and he's learned not to force the issue after decades of frustration. He doesn't want to end up like the Immortal Secretaries even if they could remember their longevity spell. He can't use the Immortal Science technique because despite losing most of his money in the '03 war he still counts as an enemy of the people.

Belphegor is immortal. It spends most of its time in cryptobiosis but it's not going to die unless someone hits it with major level destruction magick. Whatever's squirting around in its flabby body is another shot at eternal life. Lead the dance with the Danse Macabre ritual, use the charges to wake the beast, stupefy it, extract the essence, escape.

 

Ed gets in a van with a cooler full of monster blood and her surviving henchmen. There aren't any photos or fingerprints, aside from recognizing her face in person nobody could tie her to the scene. The plastic tub holding everyone's phones is tossed off the road to tumble down a ravine. If by this point she's being pursued, Ed leaves two raincoat clad goons to sabotage the other vehicles and ambush anyone trying to leave on foot. 

 

Trevor Henderson

 

3: WHO ARE YOU?

Any of the anti-Unnatural conspiracies from the first crop of pregens will fit. Insert the talky, investigative characters undercover and let the killers burst in at the worst possible moment once the plainclothes team goes dark. Or bring two sets of characters. Expendable ICONOCLASTS style victims who don't know anything about the Unnatural and and a followup team of Checkers once the first team enters the ballroom.

 

Delta Green has a lot of introductory operations where mundane characters are introduced to the destructive power of the supernatural. I know a guy who recently ran The Treasure of Beaver Island for UA3 and then did full-meal corkboarding using the same pregenerated characters for a full Court of the Burger Queen campaign. In Unknown Armies the "trigger event" is supposed to be a pivotal moment in a character's Unnatural career but is often just something the player makes up on the spot to keep the ball rolling rather than forcing everyone at the table to wait until they pick something they like. I wonder if you could do it in reverse. Start with mundane characters with a single normal identity, run them through an intro adventure, then let them tack on a second identity if they survive. Potentially a supernatural one, potentially draining points from their mundane identity if they want to get their Avatar score above the 51 or 71 breakpoint. Then build the objective and web of social relationships and unnatural phenomena and milestones around those completed characters.