I ran a game of Esoteric Enterprises for the
Good Friends of Jackson Elias Virtual Convention.
Salt Bay - once a mining town, now a coastal tourist village. Sit your cliffside resort with a glass of wine and watch container ships fight their way across the whirling bay to Coal City down the coast. Quiet, scenic and expensive.
That ain’t you. You drifted into town with the wrong crowd. The kind that hangs around the Love Shack behind the dive shop at one in the morning, sweating gin and eying the staircase in the back. The one that leads into the undercity.
You’ve heard stories about what’s down there. Buried gardens of killer kudzu, infested with urban druids. Old rotting houses full of giant spiders. Gutters of meat that squirms like it’s still alive. Moving sculptures that really stretch the definition of “art”. It all looks like dollar signs when you’re an occult criminal with a pistol in your hand and ten dollars in your pocket.
I had three players, all new to the game. I made a
simplified version of the character creation rules that incorporated my houserules and removed the need to laboriously copy down skills and saving throws from the book. After about fifteen minutes, we emerged with the following characters:
- Sploon, Devoted Slave of the Parasite God (Mystic, Lvl 1)
- Frank "The Wall" Turner (Bodyguard, Lvl 1)
- Dweezil the Clever (Criminal, Lvl 1)
They started off at the Love Shack, an old brothel converted to a low rent gin joint (and shamelessly recycled from the Cow Town campaign). The management had torn up the floor in the back after an... accident had messed up the boards, and found an old staircase leading into the undercity. A few hoodlums had explored it and already there were stories about treasure and danger to be found:
- I've got a line to a collector who wants art from the underground gallery to the North.
- Druid drugs are always a hot commodity. They've got a secret grove somewhere under the West side.
- Couple guys went exploring on the East side, past the fairy enclave. Ones that came back said there's a buried mansion, full of spiders and treasure.
- Guy in the underground frontier pays good money for "dungeon meat". What's dungeon meat? Anything, once you kill it.
- Neighborhood Association isn't too happy about the abattoir re-opening. They'd pay big money to shut it down
The gang decided to investigate the spider nest in the buried mansion. Dweezil asked around with his contacts, and found a rumor that might help: The employees at the Coal City Power substation on the East side of town had a hatch down into the basement, that they wouldn't enter without a HAZMAT suit and flamethrower. It sounded like the hatch led right on top of the dungeon area they were interested in.
(Finding out about the hatch let the hoodlums skip slogging through the undercity and enter directly on top of the spider nest).
It was the middle of the night when they rolled up on the power station.
The gate was open and nobody was watching it. There was a single
quonset hut with a single line worker, staring at a computer screen with
headphones on, and a concrete structure that led underground. Dweezil
got the lock off the bunker without making a fuss, and the gang snuck
inside. There were a lot of technological looking rooms that nobody
understood, probably related to providing power to the city. There was
also a locker room with a bunch of padlocked containers and a
very secure floor hatch.
The footpads realized the cabinets were probably full of HAZMAT suits and flamethrowers. Neither Sploon nor Dweezil could open them. The group opened the hatch and descended into the unknown depths below.
