Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - Masterpost

DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE was an eleven session playtest for the Brethren of the Curb, a Mak Attax successor conspiracy from the upcoming Special Orders book on Statosphere. The players were food truck pirates with a recipe for dumplings and a quest to make Salem the new Tortuga.

 

Photo by me, for once

 

I really overloaded the corkboard and the campaign took about twice as many sessions as I expected, but I enjoyed every one. Unknown armies takes a lot of work compared to something more pick up and play like Delta Green, but offers a much richer menu of options, both narratively and mechanically.

 

Here are the play reports for each session.

• Corkboarding
• Session 1
• Session 2
• Session 3
• Session 4
• Session 5
• Session 6
• Session 7
• Session 8
• Interlude
• Session 9
• Session 10
• Session 11
• Bonus: Music 

Writeups of game content (NPCs, factions, otherspaces, magic items et al) will either appear in the final Special Orders book, a separate book, or on this blog, depending on how well they fit into each one.

 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - Music Post

Music used in DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE, an eleven session playtest for the Brethren of the Curb, a Mak Attax successor conspiracy from the upcoming Special Orders book on Statosphere.

 

Bao Down mascot costume - rejected concept

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 11

Rachel's unspeakable servants were born. The eruv was set up, granting Tal Safdie control over Salem's minor magicks. Endemic Spice retired to their rented cottage, while the Bao Down gang met up to discuss their next move. They still needed to guarantee the New Maks' independence. Rachel could allocate an unspeakable servant to protect the McDonald's where they worked, but that would still leave Dandy vulnerable to demonic possession. DBD had a plan for this, worked out with Endemic Spice. He would teach Dandy Hirsh capsacinaturgy, so she could make herself too spicy for demons to infest.

 

Dandy was a teenager, and lived with her parents in Peabody, adjacent to Salem. She was grounded after being caught underage drinking at the site of an attempted mass shooting at the Blood For Sex Club a couple nights ago. Rachel bought her "grounded" Status and assigned it to one of her unspeakable servants, confining the beast to the Bao Down truck. Dandy accompanied the crew to Mack Park, where DBD made the offer: he'd make her an adept in a spicy spell school, which would keep the demons away. Dandy was a little suspicious, she knew from the anon list that being an adept was no laughing matter. But the crew was able to persuade her that it was worth the cost. She sealed the deal by eating an extremely spicy dumpling and gaining a few percentages of DBD's power.

 

Rachel asked if Dandy was ok with Bao Down putting an unspeakable servant in the Ronald McDonald statue outside the McDonald's where the New Maks worked. Dandy asked what an unspeakable servant was. Rachel showed her the one in the truck. Dandy freaked the fuck out. Rachel and DBD calmed her down. Dandy also mentioned that a guy from the Court had offered them all great scholarships if they'd sell out the Rite - the two cabals had a truce, but that didn't preclude economic warfare. Rachel confirmed that this man was Sin Woo-Jin, and he was not to be trusted.

Now it was time to load an unspeakable servant into the Ronald McDonald statue outside the Salem McDonalds. The statue was solid plastic and they needed a way to hollow it out. There were a number of ways they could do this, but they'd just observed the cigar smoking mage Alice use her powers to delete an engine out from inside a vehicle. And she had given them her cell number, in hopes that Reba would call her. And Reba was kind of into the whole "butch cigar smoking Jaws" thing.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 10

While the rest of the Bao Down group was driving around Massachusetts setting up the unspeakable servants and fighting the Court of the Burger Queen, Reba was setting up the artifact eruv around Salem, to symbolically enclose it so that Tal could extend their magick exclusion ability over the whole town. Reba was joined by the Indian mages of Endemic Spice:

• Ramachandran the Videomancer
• Ardhanari the Mancymancer
• Leatherface the Reverse Vigilante

The eruv, a fishing line charged with several decades of geomantic energy from Boston, needed to be strung up around the borders of Salem.

Leatherface knew how to operate a cherrypicker, and Ramachandran had the money to rent one. It would take all night and then some, but they had the technology and the expertise to hang it on the power lines. Yellow vests and hard hats ensured that nobody would ask them questions while they "worked the lines" at night.

They were in the Harmony Grove Cemetery when they ran into trouble.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 9

Session nine began in Salem Hospital. DBD was kept overnight after the club shootout in case he had another seizure (which he got from the poolwine) or a concussion (from the ceiling tile that hit him on the head). Rachel was kept because her arm was missing. The news had a story about the attempted mass shooting at the cub, which injured two but thankfully didn't kill anyone. The burger war news blotter CHEAP MEAT had a video taken outside the club, of Bobby Smiles being led out by police. In the video, he comes outside, melts into a pool of the same blue ooze as the poolmen were made of, and slithers down a storm drain.

Tal came to the hospital the next day to visit DBD and Rachel. They went over what happened at the New Maks show and subsequent assassination attempt. Dr Vrolick, the same doctor the cabal met when they cured the terminally ill kids, came into the ward. He explained the path forward for Rachel: she'd be evaluated for a prosthetic, possibly the injured arm would need to be "trimmed" further surgically to ensure a good fit. Followed by a long course of physical therapy. But he knew Rachel wasn't going to do that, because she was magick and could just buy another arm or something. So he wasn't surprised when she asked to be discharged.

Reba was busy with Endemic Spice, setting up the eruv that the group got during the Boston trip, in order to give Tal veto power over magick in Salem. So it was up to DBD, Reba and Tal to load the eyeballs into the unspeakable servants before the deadline.

The way it worked was, Rachel had spent the last few months setting up the required corpses in rural areas outside Salem. Animals stuffed inside animals stuffed inside animals. The only thing missing were the eyes, which needed to be installed into the bodies on a moonless night. She had five of these gross things prepared in different barns she'd rented from farmers across the State, and it was time to finally put all the eyes she bartered into them. A force of five servitors would be a potent defense force for Salem.

 

The insertion had to be done after sundown. The first one went fine. The team took Rachel's pickup out to the barn she left the horrible thing in, unwrapped the tarp they put around it to keep the rats out, and put the eye inside. Rachel needed help since she was still missing an arm. 

It was on the way to barn number two that things went wrong.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - INTERLUDE: THE BOSTON TRIP

THE BLACK HATS
You meet Ruth, Sam and Abe in Olmstead Park, by the pond. Rachel sells the increased memory storage to Abe. In exchange:

You receive a big spool of black fishing line. The Hebrews explain that this eruv was strung atop the geomantic heart of Boston for half a century, and is marinated in occult energy. Imbued with the proper magick, it can be used to create a barrier, enclose the area of effect of a large scale spell, or permanently mark out a path for safe travel.

Abe blinks. He doesn’t notice any change, at first. It’ll be a while before the true effects become apparent, when he doesn’t forget the things happening to him right now.

Ruth and Sam also thank you for your work getting Maria and Harlan (the two shotgunners from the club) out of trouble. Judith was wondering what happened to them. You know how Mom is addicted to taking in strays? Maria was a killer nun, Harlan was a “raincoat” in some secret army. Both were refugees from the burger wars. Judith gave them new identities, a place to live. Buried a guy who came looking for them a couple years later. Everyone thought they were out of trouble.

The child following them around for the last couple weeks was a little suspect, since Maria couldn’t actually have kids, and also he basically appeared out of nowhere. They all disappeared a few days ago, before anyone could investigate. Now they're back, mostly in one piece. Maria can't raise her left arm above head level thanks to the shotgun wound.

For bringing them back alive, Mom wanted you to have this special cheesecake. She juiced it up so it’ll cure anything. Possession, curses, debuffs, magickal diseases, doesn’t matter.

VINCULUM
VINCULUM used to be an upmarket opium den, frequented on the sly by Boston’s WASP intelligentsia. A century later, it’s now a tea house and club, popular with the city’s financial elites. It’s not the kind of place the Bao Down crew would normally be welcome, even Rachel might have trouble getting inside. Thankfully, the owner is also Reba’s mom.

Yawen Rebkin welcomes the cabal. She absolutely refuses to discuss any occult business, feigning ignorance until the cabal realizes she’s afraid someone is observing her. In the back room, after pouring drinks for the crew, she opens a cabinet and removes an ancient record player. She throws on a twelve inch LP of MUSIC IN THE WALLS (composer unknown) and speaks quickly over the sound of horns and musical saws, so that she can get her whole message out before the music ends.

Rachel’s mom, Lucretia “Lucky” Tudor, is back in the game. She’s up to something in the Salem area. Yawen doesn’t know more than that. There’s a fog around Lucky that blocks scrying, the kind a cliomancer puts up when they don’t want to be observed.

When the record ends after four minutes, Yawen goes back to discussing something completely mundane. The rest of the visit is pleasant.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 8

DBD, Rachel and Reba (accompanied by Scooby the Unspeakable Servant) got to the No Blood For Sex at about 8:30, half an hour before the New Maks' band Cannon Song went on.

Arthanari and Ramachandran were outside the venue, talking with the metal toothed woman the Bao Down crew had seen following Sin Woo-Jin around a day or two ago. That was Alice the ustrinaturge. She offered Reba a cigar, biting the end off with her steel dentures and lighting it with a minor charge.

No Blood For Sex was a basement club decked out with jeweled, gilded skeletons. There was a metal cage enclosing the stage, probably to shield the teenage band from thrown objects (less likely) and underage drinking (likely). Rachel and DBD sneaked backstage to parlay with the band. In attendance were Dandy Hirsch the Empty Vessel on bass guitar, Scrawny Davy the Vestimancer on guitar/vocals, and Brent on drums. Also the drug dealer and sound guy Bobby Smiles, helping them set up their amp. Rachel had some harsh words for Smiles, warning him not to sell any mystery stones to the New Maks. He assured her that he had no interest in messing up his meal ticket, but that if she wanted to tangle he'd back his family over her shoggoth any day of the week. DBD tried to persuade Dandy that she should become a capsicinaturge. The pitch was too conceptual and abstract for her. She thought he was talking about drugs. Which she was into, but which didn't communicate what he actually wanted.

Outside on the club floor, Ramachandran bought drinks for Reba and Ardhanari. He congratulated Reba for skillfully playing the other factions against each other. One of the CSC shooters was dead at the hands of the police, and now the Coterie was sending their top hitter to strike back at the cop who did it. He showed Reba a couple videos on CHEAP MEAT - Dispatches From the Burger Wars: tightly edited daredevil assassinations by a woman in rollerskates, who used drive by magick to set up her targets for gruesome fatal accidents.

The band played their first song. DBD went to look for some drugs. In the bathroom he scored a water bottle spiked with X, but noticed that a gateway to the pool rooms had opened in the end bathroom stall. Out on the dance floor, Reba noticed the Orthodox Jewish couple from the McDonald's parking lot earlier that day. The man was carrying the creepy child like a ventriloquist dummy. Rachel approached the lady and apologized for Tal magicking the child's head off during their initial encounter. The woman didn't know what she was talking about. Rachel suspected she was drugged or something. The couple was clearly armed, short shotguns under their heavy clothing. DBD cannoned out of the restroom, stumbling into the man as he made a beeline for the stage with the kid. He dropped the child and pulled out his scattergun, as did his wife. 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 7

The cabal still had some time to kill before catching the show at Blood For Sex. That meant they had time to visit Granny Ethel at her herb shop in Salem.  Since the police were still hunting them, DBD took the food truck out of town, while the group rolled up in Rachel's pickup.

 

Trinity Herbs faced Salem Common, just down the street from the Witch Museum. The gang parked a good distance away and walked right into the store.

 

One of the guerrilla gardeners from the Marblehead apartment break in was working the counter. He recognized the sentai-suited unspeakable servant, and shouted for the attendant up on the shelving ladder to go in back and get GE. Rachel's unspeakable servant immediately told her that he was burning. She sent him back outside and the burning stopped. The guy at the front desk told them that GE would be out in a minute, and offered them some tea from a samovar behind the desk. Rachel asked him why he broke into the apartment, he declined to answer. While the group waited, Reba perused the shelves for interesting items. They noticed that the store was conspicuously out of "mandrake root", and based on the sign had apparently been so for some time.

 

Granny Ethel emerged from the backroom, accompanied by Nadia, the Fulminaturge from the Karst Following Cavers - the local Colone's Secret Cadre cell trying to take over the pool rooms. Nadia kept her cool, and the Bao Down cabal kept theirs. Rachel offered help in future caving adventures, Nadia didn't say anything. She skirted around the group and left, then almost shot the unspeakable servant when it got too close to her, before fleeing. Granny Ethel congratulated the cabal on not flying off the handle and invited them through the employees only door.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 6

Tal had business to attend to, and the cabal didn't want to visit Granny Ethel without them, so they decided to collect more eyeballs for Rachel's unspeakable servants. They had two days left before the ritual took place, and wanted to get it out of the way. 

Rachel and co had arranged for three eyeballs - two from Lindsey the Sin Eater in prison and one (hypothetically) from Jason the heroin addict in Lynn. Three was enough for her hypothetical Unspeakable Servant security force to protect the town, but she had a total of five animal corpse piles she'd been ritually preparing over the last few months, meaning that she could use another pair of eyes.

The team decided to do some arbitrage at the local hospital. If they could get an already terminally ill guy to agree to being loaded up with diseases, Rachel could buy the diseases off a bunch of terminally ill kids, curing them and taking a payment of eyeballs from their parents in exchange. The gang parked the food truck outside Salem Hospital and headed inside.

Rachel dressed up as a visiting specialist, and the others pretended to be the family of a patient. With that disguise they were able to get into the palliative care ward without being hassled by the front desk people. Rachel looked at the charts of the patients, and identified the cancer victim Edric as a likely mark for negotiating a terminal disease based deal. They offered Edric a wish of his choice if he would accept a few diseases from other people that would kill him faster. Edric wanted to know what happened when he died. 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 5

After an eventful night at Nash Dino Center, picking up Shoggos from the apartment in Marblehead, and delivering everyone to their respective residences, the Bao Down crew reconvened the next day to execute on the schemes they'd cued up. They wanted to find the people who had cast the surveillance magick on David Ben David. He tried to use random magick to reverse the connection and spy on them instead, but wasn't able to get a clear picture. Reba recalled that one of the men DBD had seen spying on him in his vision was the same one Rachel spotted leaving the Brahman Occult Society Clubhouse, wearing a jacket covered in Sanskrit and Arabic patches. That suggested an occultist from the Indian Subcontinent.

 

The group new from Rachel's conversation with the BOS that there were some checkers from the Indian branch of the old Mak Attax conspiracy in town. They decided to check in with their contacts at the Golden Arches and see if anyone knew anything about the Indian mages. It was Saturday, which meant the New Maks would be out of school and working at the McDonalds in Salem.

Rachel went into the store to talk to the kid working the front desk, Dandy Hirsch. She was happy to see her friend in the Brethren, and immediately invited her to the set the band was playing later that night at No Blood For Sex. Rachel wanted to know if the New Maks had encountered any strange gremlins lately. They hadn't, but Dandy told them all about Endemic Spice, the Indian crew who recently arrived to help with a problem she had.

 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 4

Rachel and Tal left Yulia's apartment after freeing her from the thrall of the mysterious blue stones, which she got from the drug dealer Bobby Smiles. Rachel left her unspeakable servant behind in case anyone else showed up to come after Yulia, and the two occultists left to rejoin the rest of the cabal. They had a meeting to get to.

 

The meet was in South Hadley, at a tourist stop called Nash Dinosaur Tracks. The small shop and museum was full of stone slabs with fossilized dinosaur footprints. It was owned by a Brethren friendly and had some kind of magical defense that would hopefully keep the meet safe.

As the Bao Down truck rolled onto the property, DBD's head started to hurt. Not a headache, but a pain in his third eye, like something was stuck in it. The Forty Winks van was already there. Tanya, Corbin and Matt had made a ring of stones and started a small bonfire in the parking lot. The Courier Yancy Smoke was around back doing something or other. There were two other trucks expected: Milk and Honey the Jewish cheesecake truck, and Ice Man the ice cream truck.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 3

After escaping the deal gone bad with the Kentucky Fed Cops and the Karst Following Cavers, the Bao Down cabal had some time to kill before the meeting with the other food trucks at Nash Dino Tracks. Reba took the truck and got it out of the city, worried that local police might be looking for it. That left Rachel, Tal, DBD, and the unspeakable servant to take care of business until the meeting.

Rachel wanted to make more unspeakable servants in order to keep the peace after liberating Salem. That meant she needed people to voluntarily sell her their eyeballs. Tal didn't hold out high hopes for anyone in Salem being desperate enough, but they figured they could find someone in nearby Lynn who would part with an eye cheap.

The group struck paydirt with the hophead Jason, outside a boarded up Italian restaurant. He would happily give up his eye for a pathetically small amount of heroin. The cabal wasn't sure about that. It would be easy to find enough H to pay the guy off, but it didn't feel good taking advantage of a drug addict. DBD wanted to help the man with his addiction, perhaps by giving him some adept percentages in order to displace his obsession with illegal drugs via a new obsession with casting wizard spells based on spicy peppers. Jason agreed to sell DBD his heroin addiction for a day, and only a day, prior to transacting any real business. Rachel facilitated the transaction using her Merchant powers. 

 

DBD, overcome with the shakes, immediately shit himself and attacked Jason in order to take his nonexistent stash, punching him unconscious. As the cabal tended to the injured ex addict, DBD fled the scene, looking for a hit. He had the presence of mind to guzzle some hot sauce, in an attempt to generate a significant charge, and tried to use his existing obsession to achieve self mastery, looking for a Jew to explain his thesis on peace in the Holy Land to.

 

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 2

Reba woke up the morning after the pool room adventure, to the sound of oddly repetitive wingbeats outside her apartment window. They looked out and found a taxidermized African Gray Parrot, mindlessly beating its wings to hover right outside their window. They let it in, and it dropped a message on the floor.

NASH DINO TRACKS

MIDNIGHT

YOUR PAL YANCY

This was the meeting of food trucks in the region that Reba had asked the Courier Yancy Smoke for. The moment Reba put the scroll down, the mecha parrot devoured it, taking a chunk out of the table with its razor sharp beak. Reba penned an acknowledgement letter and handed it to the bird, which flew away immediately.

The group met up and went over the plan for the meeting with the police which Rachel had arranged the previous day. She needed to clear the truck's name with law enforcement, who might believe they were involved with the KFC fire. She also needed to gather information about what actually happened. Any transactions she could arrange would be a bonus.

The meeting was at Salem's Bewitched Park at 1:00 PM. DBD arrived early in the morning to scout out the site, climbing up on a nearby rooftop that overlooked the park. He brought his rifle, a trash bag to hide inside, and a second trash bag to conceal Scooby, Rachel's unspeakable servant. The park was empty at 6:00 AM. DBD lurked in the trash bag, using his military experience to sit quietly and observe rather than becoming distracted and blowing his cover. Things heated up when a woman came out the door to the building's roof access staircase. She was obviously a plainclothes cop. She walked right past the pile of suspicious trashbags without investigating, pulled up a box to the edge of the roof, and sat down with a pair of binoculars. She was obviously there for the same reason as DBD.

Reba and Tal parked the food truck a safe distance away from the meeting site. Rachel walked to the park and sat down on a bench. Officer Walker's arrival was presaged by the rain cloud that followed him everywhere he went. He wore his civilian raincoat rather than his police hi vis. He sat down next to Rachel, soaking her with rain. They went across the park to the pizza place and unfolded one of those table umbrellas at the outdoor seating.