Esoteric Enterprises Political Compass

 

Based on the Cow Town and Coal City campaigns.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Twelve, Part Two

(Continue from part one)

Having slain a wizardling and survived the curse, the players went back to the locked door guarded by the two apprentices. Sax decided to spend his entire necklace of fireballs to open the door - nothing else would do it. The blast melted it like a candle, opening a space to the room beyond. The next chamber had a statue of Cassie, making an obscene hand gesture. She decapitated it with a burst of gunfire, slicing through the pulpy material and dispelling its mesmerizing magic properties before it could ensorcell anyone.

The hallway beyond the statue room led to a chamber filled with eggs. The players could hear someone breathing heavily inside the vent on the opposite wall, watching them. They tried to communicate by shouting at it. The Wizard in the wall - who had once been Boney the Ancient Lich - responded that they had slain one of his children already, and they would not slay another and live. They offered to leave his kids alone if he told them where the power source holding the bridge to the abyss was. He gave them directions to a room on the fifth floor, past the unformed void of the fourth.

(The module text doesn't give the players any opportunity to speak to the Wizard. He's supposed to be a cosmic being so utterly beyond humanity that he can't even communicate except for horrible transformations and hastily scribbled notes. But the players had proven more dangerous than he anticipated, and this looked like a good opportunity to trick them. He gave them directions to the room of floating doors)

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Twelve, Part One

The last Cow Town game. This scenario was a run of The Wizard by Donovan Caldwell. I don't usually run published modules, but this one was pretty good, though definitely flawed. I refluffed the Wizard's origin story to fit him into the campaign as an NPC the players had heard about several times previously, but never encountered.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)

Sax was accompanied by the mobster Silas the Sledgehammer, while Cassie was attended by Leon the Chthonicist.

It had been a few months, maybe more than a few months, since the Meat Cult's defeat. The town had changed, though not always for the better. Cassie and Sax met the Illusionists John and Jo at Saturn Gyros, one of the last few spots in town that still served beef. They sat down at a table in the back, under a painting of Kronos biting the head off a child, who was wrapped in an enormous pita. The wizards, disguised as the elderly Jewish couple from the coffee shop in the vault, explained the problem:

Boney the Lich traded something with the Meat Cult and the Vampires. We hoped it just got rid of him, by sending him to a higher plane of existence or something. But now there's a tower, out on the old ranchland. A grain silo, but it's something else now. All the plant life the Druids seeded within a mile is dead. It's covered in a carpet of blue... substance, and it's spreading. And people have gone missing.

So Jo and I, we did a little investigating. Got our notes here, maybe they'll help.

eyewitness accounts
locals preyed on by "wizard" - not one of ours
difficulty talking about/remembering incidents - fugue state suggests trauma or memory modification
cattle mutilation - animals "randomized" with cross sections removed

missing persons - disappeared from ranches/squatters
Thinus (Unknown Surname)
Sam (Unknown Surname)
Stephen Forge
Josh (Unknown Surname)
Collin (Unknown Surname)
Claus (Unknown Surname)

tower
converted grain silo
coated in blue organic material which blocks scanning
gravity distortion inside structure

working hypothesis
powerful magical being (probably boney) experimenting with newfound powers
rift to borderworld somewhere in tower - like black barn but worse(?)
strong possibility of spread/contamination

(The module includes a brief description of the town at the base of the Wizard's tower. Very atmospheric, but a little thin on detail that's actually useful to the players. I decided to elide the investigation phase, where the players ruthlessly interrogate NPCs about information they don't have and doesn't matter, and just skipped straight to the tower. Made it much easier to fit in a four hour slot)

Whatever Boney turned himself into, it wasn't good. The mission: enter the tower, disable whatever was holding the portal to the borderworld open, and re-kill the lich. Cassie and Sax still had some of Darla's antimagic stickers left over from the Occult Gallery raid, which would nullify whatever machine held the portal open. Beyond that, they had guns, grenades, a flamethrower, and the remaining fireballs on the necklace.

The illusionists warned that if the team was unsuccessful, they'd have two options:

1. Call up the Men in Black, who were still looking for an excuse to level the town, and tell them to erase the entire West Side
2. Tell the other Seekers of the Path there was a new source of unstable magic in town, and watch them all flock to the tower to experiment with its strange energies and disturbing biology.

Neither of which were good.

The team climbed into their surviving Toyota and drove into the wilderness. As promised, the old grain silo stood in a clearing of its own making, devoid of the tree cover and wild plant growth the Druids seeded in the former farmland. There was a thin carpet of tacky blue fibers on the ground around the spire, like a carpet of fungal hyphae. The growths were thicker on the tower itself, bulging out from the sides of the cylinder to form new wings and balustrades.

The front door slid open when they approached.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Epilogue

The Servants of the Great Lord of Embers joined their master in a blaze that annihilated the Meat God's physical presence on earth. The survivors left Cow Town, in search of fresh kindling to regenerate their clergy.

With United Meat Train decapitated and the Grange annihilated, Cow Town was no longer a hub of agribusiness. The population dwindled, as stores closed and migrant farmhands went elsewhere for work. Beef prices across the country ticked upward, until new agreements with suppliers overseas could be negotiated.

In the absence of their corporate overlords at United Meat Train, Cow Town struggled to govern itself. Declining tax revenues and population brought an increase in lawlessness, with many homes and businesses converted to meth labs or other, less savory uses.

With no further use from United Meat Train, and a twenty year lawsuit still pending, the Sink finally closed. Enterprising sorcerers still make pilgrimages to the cordoned ecological disaster, hoping to fish out magic trinkets, or bottle fragments of the former Meat God's power.

With falling enrollment and endless litigation eating away at its budget, the K-12 school finally closed. The remaining students are now bussed to Coal City schools, an hour away on the King's Road.

With the Grange annihilated in its battle with the Dungeon Druids, large stretches of ranchland lay abandoned. The Druids stole out from the Botanic Gardens to replant the desolation, sowing seeds that grew into wondrous and terrifying parks and forests.

The survivors of the Exploration Project eked out a precarious existence in the shadow of the Seekers of the Path, traumatized by the horrors of the war with the Meat Cult, yet addicted to the seductive mysteries of the underworld. Adrian the Exploring Kid took up the study of magic and himself became a powerful and widely feared sorcerer. 

Absent the containing influence of the Shoggoth Pit, the Meat Cult and the Ancient Lich, the undercity was nearly swallowed by a Mycelid outbreak. The killer fungi were contained at great cost by the Seekers of the Path, and the Chthonicists of the Exploration Project.

With the collapse of the Cow Town Police Department, the case against the Megachurch was taken over by the National Police. Thanks to the addled Meat Cops' inconsistent record keeping and borderline incomprehensible case notes, the Nats were only able to prosecute a handful of the Servants of Christ the King for the slaying of several Cow Town Police officers during the siege of the church. Father Bacon was not among those charged.

Without the protection of the Meat Cult, the Tattoos were hunted down and put to the sword by the remaining Servants of the King of the Universe. The surviving vampires fled into the exurbs, creating nests in abandoned farmhouses and beneath ponds and lakes.

The two surviving artists from the Collective were adopted by the Light Market. The smugglers always had commissions for skilled painters.

With nobody to oppose them, the Seekers of the Path now rule what's left of Cow Town. The illusionists John and Jo do their best to restrain the wizards and witches, who view the town as a playground for occult science, its people as raw material for their experiments. Even with the meat cult destroyed, the Men in Black haven't let their finger off the button...

And when the Seekers' power armored mages broke into Old Boney's crypt, they found no sign of the ancient lich. Perhaps his old bones had undergone a transformation to another state of existence. Whatever bargain he'd struck with the Tattoos and the Meat Cult, it no longer concerned Cow Town. Or so everyone hoped...

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eleven, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

A meat collar worker, slaughterhouse worker and tallow titan on the offensive

Working their way down to the server farm was easier than going up. The offices were in disarray, the workers more interested in escaping than fighting the attackers.

(Without the meat signal broadcasting, the wandering monster table could no longer spit out "meat collar workers")

The server farm was defended by a single altered medic, who killed the two IT workers once they become unreliable. He ambushed McCaffrey coming in, but was unable to do any significant damage before being filleted by the squad. They noticed the chrome crab was no longer tending the brains. A couple squirts of flamethrower fuel sent the server farm up in greasy smoke. Outside, a meat executive called in their location on a cell phone. Cassie dispatched him with a sneak attack, but trouble was clearly on the way. It was time to move.

They heard the group coming up the stairs before it heard them. A suit, a flesh hulk, and a crowed of cultists and ghouls, here for the free meat. A couple fireballs tossed into the stairwell dispatched the threat, but also started a fire that made the stairs impassible. The players decided to use Hatchet Hands Harry's climbing gear to rappel down the side of the building. They were on the fourth floor, so with fifty feet of rope, they could make it.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eleven, Part One

Was session eleven the end of Cow Town? I don't know. I think it would make a good ending. Maybe I'll think of an epilogue for session twelve.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 4)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 3)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 3)
• Troy Giovanni, Hood in Over His Head (Criminal, Level 1)

Troy Giovanni was a new player who joined right at the end. The Occultists needed everyone they could get, even Level 1 Crooks with little chance of surviving the Meat Cult's damage output.

Sax the Knife was Level 3, enough to adopt a Fire Cult Fanatic as part of his Crew. Ignacio the Burned Man joined the team for the mission.

The illusionists John and Jo created a three dimensional projection of the target building: the United Meat Train headquarters.

They explained the team's objectives:

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Eleven

Embers are going to handle the Sink. They've got everything set up for a controlled burn.

Here's the issue, though: Meat God isn't intelligent. It's a big dumb ball of fear and violence. It knows how to puppet people and make them feed it, but it doesn't know the first thing about strategy or logistics. That's what UMT does for it. They think it'll make them a whole lot of money, so they've got the whole branch office dedicated to babysitting it.

We're sending you in to the region headquarters to do a little cleanup. Think of it as a failure-to-stop drill. Fire Cult's going to torch the body, and you're going to shoot the head.

Your mission objectives:

• There's a communications relay broadcasting the Meat Signal, keeping the cube jockeys on-message. Take it out and the drones will "wake up".
• Destroy their server farm. They're not going to have backups because the OS they run now isn't compatible with any normal computer system. It's too... fleshy.
• Killing the suits isn't going to do anything unless we shut down their management fast track program. They're doing this thing with all the biomass from the sacrifices where they "upgrade" their executives. Put a stop to it.
• We think they picked up a self-repairing machine from the Serpent Ruins - the same one we were trying to grab. If you find it, steal it back or smash it to pieces. Otherwise, it might just undo all your work killing people and breaking things.

You've got two options for insertion:

• Undercover, with as much concealed carry stuff we can fit, in a disguise of your choice
• Loud, with the best equipment we can give you, inserted kinetically at a location of your choice

You've done great work with us, and we know you aren't doing it all out of the goodness of your heart. We're offering you a thousand dollars each for the job.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Ten

Session ten was another meat grinder (no pun intended) through an area the players had already mapped. It slowed to a crawl during one combat sequence, but finished strong. I got to reuse an area that didn't get quite the level of development I wanted last time, and it paid off.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 2)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

(Sax's player hadn't read the advancement rules, and spent the entire session believing he was still Level 1)

Elizabeth West was advanced enough in her necromantic training that she felt comfortable choosing an undead companion: the Dame Lacey the Death Knight, a fearless, plate armored skeleton descended from necromantic nobility. The team decided to arm her with the magic billhook they'd found in the reliquary several weeks ago, to increase her damage output.

(The player had reached Level 3 and was entitled to a Crew, but didn't know what NPC henchmen to choose. I recommended my favorite monster in the game)

The surface was too dangerous to travel, with meat cops everywhere by day and vampires by night. The players met in the Occultist's guest rooms, same as last mission, to discuss their options. They decided that the logistics situation with the gallery was the most dire and immediate problem. John and Jo explained the situation:

The Occult Gallery entrance painting in the Underworld Vault had been bought by United Meat Train, whose corporate office in Cow Town served the Meat God brewing in the sink. The Gallery was now full of meat cultists and monsters, the status of the Artist Collective unknown. This was bad, because the painting network in the Gallery was an important supply line for the Light Market and Seekerso f the Path. The players' mission was to go in and shut down the painting that UMT was using to bring in cultists.

To this end, the Occultists provide the team with

• A page of four antimagic stickers, a single one of which would be sufficient to disable a painting if applied to its surface
• A device that detected conscious thought, to locate any surviving artists still in the Gallery
• A few thermoses of Moe's Special Blend, a greasy, protein rich tomato soup that cured bleeding
• A map of the Gallery

They would enter in the painting gallery to the Northwest. Their objective was the "entrance" to the Southeast, where the painting the meat cult had coopted was located.

The survivors of the Exploration Project defacto recognized the players as their leaders, having lost most of their other important NPCs. To this end, Leon the Chthonicist enlisted in the expedition. His stone shaping abilities could seal or collapse passages in the gallery, allowing the team to control movement and block avenues of approach.

Darla the Technomancer peeled the protective wards off the Occultist's painting that led into the gallery. A coterie of Fire Cultists threw fireballs through the painting, to clear the LZ for the team's arrival. The players waited for oxygen to refill the room on the other side, then leapt through, accompanied by Leon the Chthonicist and Lacey the Death Knight.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Masterpost

Francis Bacon

Cow Town started as an overflow Esoteric Enterprises game, after the Coal City Campaign regularly filled up with players. It also let me playtest some houserules for domain level play after I found them lacking in the base game. 

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Music

I'm using (almost) all new music to give Cow Town a distinct feel from Coal City. Each dungeon area gets its own theme. So far the players have responded positively.

Esoteric Enterprises - Botanic Gardens

This dungeon area includes a small custom faction which inhabits it.

Google Docs version here.

GENERATING BOTANIC GARDENS

Throw down a few D6s onto your map page. Draw a line through them from one end of the page to the other. That line is your river. It enters as a waterfall from above, and exits as a waterfall into the unknown depths below.

Roll the rest of your dice (mostly D20s) on the page and connect them as normal, both to the D4s and to each other.

Make sure you drop an “other” die on the board (a coin or something) as well. This will be the Druids’ den.

The color of a die determines how a chamber is lit

• Warm colors (red, yellow, orange) have stone faces in the walls, whose eyes radiate magical sunlight
• Cool colors (blue, purple, green) have patches of lichen on the ceiling, that glow like moonlight
• Neutral colors (brown, black, white) are lit in a wavelength not visible to the human eye. The plants there are an underground species that photosynthesizes just the same

Ceilings in Botanic Gardens are twenty feet high. Hallways between rooms are ten feet wide.

The river is five feet deep and has six inches of air above it where it travels between rooms.

Where passages between chambers numbered 7 to 20 cross over the river, they bridge it with logs or wood planks.

Esoteric Enterprises - Occult Gallery

This node is made to house the Occult Artists Collective result from the Social Underworld table. It can be placed on the surface in a building, or underground.

Google docs version here.

Michael Hutter

GENERATING AN OCCULT GALLERY

Use D20s to generate the Gallery. Record the color of the dice as well as the number showing. The color determines the architectural style of the room and the art displayed within it. It also determines the special properties of any guardians spawned in that room.

• Red: Classical/Neoclassical. Giant Guardians with double hit dice and damage dice, but -2 to hit versus human size targets
• Blue: Cubist. Guardians ignore successful attacks that roll an odd-number to hit, except area attacks
• Yellow: Art Deco. Guardians armed with Thompsons and Browning Automatic Rifles, dealing D10 damage and using the Covering Fire rules
• Orange: Surrealist. Guardians deal damage directly to flesh, but make a reaction roll each round to see if they even attack
• Green: Anti Art/Post Modernist. Guardians deconstruct one of the target’s items on a successful hit.
• Purple: Realist. Guardians have the same abilities as the players
• Brown: Medieval/Gothic. Guardians cast Bleeding Curse, Cure Wounds and Darkness at will
• White: High Modernist/Brutalist. Guardians get +4 AC, no Grit but double Flesh
• Black: Futurist. Guardians incredibly fast, always attack first

After you’ve connected the D20s, drop a few coins on the map. Connect each to one or two of the D20s.

The entrances where the Gallery connects to the rest of the Underworld, or the surface, have donation boxes where patrons can drop money or items of value. They also have little pamphlets with cryptic descriptions of the exhibits inside, and vague suggestions about where they can be found.

Unless otherwise stated, passages between rooms are ten feet wide, well lit, with double doors that are unlocked and open.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Ten

Good work with the Dungeon Druids yesterday. Grange won't be a problem from now on. I was never a huge fan of them, but they deserved better than the meat cult. At least their troubles are over.

Raid on the vampire hideout was a fuckin' ambush. Seekers lost Wayne, which is kind of a big deal since he was their pyromancer. Hope the fire cult knows what they're doing.

Oh yeah, fire cult has a mission planned for the Sink. Most of them are busy working on a project, so they'll take anyone they can get.

Megachurch is under siege. That means they aren't guarding the Serpent Ruins anymore. Seekers want someone to sneak in and bring out some tech that'll help the team later.

The Gallery Route is compromised, full of meat cultists. If someone could go in and seal up the Vault Painting UMT is using as a portal, we could move things again.

Tattoos are still hashing it out with Boney. Liches don't make decisions quickly.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Nine

Session nine was great. Both players were running first level characters and had basically no context for what was happening in Cow Town, but by giving them an abbreviated version of the situation and some mission parameters, I was able to get them into the game with (relatively) little pain. They still stumbled a couple times due to lacking crucial information from previous games, but once they decided what they were doing the game was fast and decisive.

In attendance:

• Bruce Bellows, Pyromaniac Bogan (Mercenary, Lvl 1)
• Beauregard McCaffery, the Thinking Man's Gangster (Mercenary, Lvl 1)

Since neither had any idea what the hell was happening, I decided they were a couple of hoodlums fresh out of Coal City. They'd heard there was a brawl brewing in Cow Town, and were hoping to pick up some riches from the ensuing factional conflict. The Light Market was ferrying people through the portrait route if they were willing to fight, so they climbed through the painting into the Seekers' underground lair.

The pair of goons wandered into the guest room, where a goat man and a lizard man were directing traffic. John and Jo were happy to give the duo a mission, after Geasing them to ensure they couldn't reveal the Occultists' plans. They needed someone to deliver a package to the Dungeon Druids, then return with a package that the Fire Cult needed. They had to hurry though, because the Grangers were planning an attack on the Druids' grove. The hoods were happy to help, and the Illusionists handed them a thermos of soup each and sent them on their way.

Esoteric Enterprises - Underworld Vault

I really liked the Vaults from the roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The enemies have cool abilities that disrupt the usual player tactics and force them to prioritize threats in novel ways. I had a scrapped post about adapting some of them to tabletop games, and that became this custom area for Esoteric Enterprises.

The biggest flaw with this adaptation is that it's not very interesting unless the players deliberately break the rules, and then it might be too dangerous to be worthwhile. Too scary for low power characters, not worth the effort for tougher ones.

Google docs version here

GENERATING AN UNDERWORLD VAULT

Separate your dice out, with D4s and D6s in one pile, and everything else in the other pile.

Toss a couple D4s or D6s at the edge of the map for each connection to the rest of the underworld. These are the public facing rooms

Toss the rest of your dice inside the perimeter formed by the public rooms. These are the inner vaults.

CONNECTIONS
Doors between rooms whose value is 6 or lower are ordinary wooden doors, which can be easily opened or battered down.

Doors between rooms 7 and up are reinforced steel. Vault inhabitants can move between them freely, but they’re locked to the players. If it matters, roll a D4 to see what a vault door is secured by.

1. Retinal Scanner
2. Fingerprint Scanner
3. Voice Print Scanner
4. Keypad Lock

With a dungeon turn’s worth of work, vault doors can be hacked with a Technology roll, or forced with Vandalism. The latter sets off an alarm.

VAULT VISITORS
Rooms numbered 1 through 6 are often visited by inhabitants of the occult underworld. Choose a random faction or roll on the Weirdos (page 184), Mundane Explorers (184), Religious Sorts (184), Petty Criminals (185) or Inhabitants of the Undercity (187) table to see who’s doing their banking.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Prep For Session Nine

RUMORS

Tattoos made it through the shoggoth pit. They've arranged a sit-down with Boney. This is seriously bad, if you couldn't already tell.

Fire cult's back. Got a plan to burn the sink, but they need some stuff from the druids to make it happen. They'd better hustle, UMT's planning a raid on the grove. Got tired of asking.

Talk about raids, I think the cops are about to Waco the shit out of the Megachurch.

Worms of the Earth tore through the Hooker Slashers. Probably an accident, but don't look a gift rock in the mouth, unless you want to get augured. Seekers are going to hit Vampire HQ, keep up the pressure.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eight, Part Two

(Continued from part one)

On the other side of the painting, the explorers walked past the donation box into a cafe, where a group of art students were drinking ouzo from a bottle with a pickled mandrake inside. They didn't know where the Fire Cult was, but they knew that Clarissa had dealt with them. Her apartment was on the West side of the gallery, past the livingroom.

The first exhibit the explorers had to get through was completely dark. Something whistled and clicked as it slid around in the dark room. Sax couldn't see it, but Cassie had darkvision. The enormous olm scurried around the walls, floors and ceiling. When they entered, it rubbed against their legs, brushing them with its electrical sensors and smearing them with slime.

The next exhibit was a living room, with walls of skin and chairs of bone. Eyes in the walls watched the players, and a mouth greeted them when they entered. Clarissa probably wasn't home, but they were welcome to bang on her apartment door. Their best bet was to find Ryan, he'd know what was going on.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Eight, Part One

Session eight only had two players. That worked fine, since the areas they visited were relatively low-threat.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 1)

They began the game at the downtown Burger Head. They watched the police come in and hassle a table full of teenagers, eventually picking one to drag away to an unknown fate. There was something wrong with the police - they were all greasy, and drooling a little. They counted themselves lucky that the police hadn't clocked them as persons of interest, climbed in their van, and drove to Flowers Coffee. They climbed through the painting on the second story, leading to the Occultists' lair.

The Red Barn was guarded by Wayne the Pyromancer, who freaked out and almost incinerated them. Cooler heads prevailed, and they were allowed entrance to the guest rooms again. They found the surviving Explorers, who had abandoned the Love Shack to shack up with the occultists.

The stakes were this: The Occultists had a plan to deal with the Meat God, but they needed the Fire Cult. The Fire Cult was missing, only the Art Collective knew where they were. The Art Collective was also missing. The only clue was a weird painting on sale in the showroom at the Underworld Vault, East of the Cistern. And the underground was even more infested with Vampires than ever before, so they had to be careful.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow town - Prep For Session Eight

RUMORS

Cops are still fucked up... More than usual, I mean. They aren't kicking down doors anymore, they're  grabbing people off the streets now. And they don't come back.

Which is funny, because that suit still wants someone to buy her a boon from the Dungeon Druids. I think she's running her own con, on the side of... whatever the hell UMT is doing.

Tattoos still trying to get into Dry Bones' lair on the West side. Last I heard they ran into some trouble West of the cistern.

Seekers looking for the Fire Cult. Want to work together on the meat problem. Trouble is, nobody can find them. Rumor is the Artists had something to do with it. Not happy about the gallery, I guess.

Lester kept a bunch of shit in his box at the Underworld Bank. It just got out of probate and now they're selling it off. Take a look if you're down there, some of it's seriously weird.

Oh yeah, Explorers cleared out of the Love Shack. Said it was compromised. Probably wanted to tell you, but they didn't want to talk on the phone. Said it might be compromised too. You know how it is. Said to tell you they were "through the painting", like you'd know what that meant. Took the Light Market with them, if you can believe that.

Esoteric Enterprises - No Town Like Cow Town - Session Seven

Session seven was short and sweet. We had three players and they all kept their eye on the ball.

In attendance:

• Cassiopeia Unseelie the Third Generation Red Cap (Spook Lvl 3)
• Elizabeth West the Necromancer (Occultist Lvl 1)
• Seaxneat "Sax the Knife" Saint Sebastian (Mercenary Lvl 1)

(Sax was a late arrival who didn't have a character sheet ready. Chargen in Esoteric Enterprises takes too long to do at the beginning of a session, but I had a spare ready to go from Coal City)

Sax met Cassie and Elizabeth at the public library, fresh off a job and looking for work. They decided to visit Radna, who had asked that they meet her at the old Pascal mansion. They were puzzled and disturbed by her insistence that they "bring bugspray" for the meet, and asked around town to see if anyone knew anything about the location. A repair technician from the Coal City Power substation next to the abandoned mansion agreed to talk to them.

The guy told them that none of his crew would go down into the basement of the substation without HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers, due to the spiders of unusual size that infested it. Some of them could talk and set traps. That was just the power station, he'd never gone inside the mansion because one room was bad enough. But there were sometimes cars parked outside the Pascal house, like people were there. He never bothered to investigate that either. The mansion wasn't CCP property, it's not like he could tell them to leave.