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.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 1

Session one opened with the Bao Down truck selling dumplings at the Bread and Roses festival in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a Labor Day event commemorating the 1912 Textile Worker's Strike. The truck was doing great business, slinging delicious kosher dumplings at the edge of the live music venue. Cannon Song, the post-post punk made up of the New Maks crew, was playing a set. Rachel's unspeakable servant, Scooby the Shoggos Boy, was disguised in a dumpling based mascot costume with disturbingly dexterous hands. The monster was more than capable of running the food truck himself, freeing up the characters to wander around doing RPG character stuff without constantly being tethered to the steamer and the register.

 

 

Reba and Rachel got out of the truck and walked to the edge of the park where the festivities were set up. At the edge of the quad, a small crowd was gathered around an unmarked white van. The crew knew this was Forty Winks, a friendly Brethren of the Curb cabal who made their living with illegal alcohol sales. They were set up a deniable distance from the event, and doing a brisk trade - reselling malt liquor is profitable if you don't pay excise taxes on the transaction. The crowd of college students, teens pretending to be college students, and middle aged men didn't seem to mind being fleeced.

Tanya Summers, leader of the truck, introduced the rest of the gang to Reba, who was a personal friend of hers, and to Rachel, who looked like a square but was instantly identifiable as a Brother of the Curb thanks to the mystical identity they both shared. Tanya offered Reba a couple bottles of colt 45 for the truck, and Reba went to get her some dumplings in return. Rachel noticed that Corbin, the youngest member of the Forty Winks crew, was a telekinetic, when he stopped a dropped bottle from smashing on the street using only his mind. Corbin and Matt (the third member of the crew) weren't interested in selling Rachel their eyes, but had some other information to offer: a Mak Attax crew from India arrived in Salem recently, and were staying in a two million dollar cottage owned by the Brahman Occult Society. Rachel put the word out that she was working on a ritual involving human eyeballs and animal corpses. Corbin surprised Rachel by knowing exactly what she was talking about, and telling her he didn't want to hear anything more about it. The Forty Winks crew clearly knew a lot more about magick shit than they let on, considering none of them were even full casters.

 

Back at the festival, Cannon Song finished their set. DBD was due on stage, but he was too nervous to go up without chemical assistance. He ducked into a portajohn, inhaled one of Reba's blunts, and was about to wash it down with a bottle of hot sauce purchased from a nearby Dominican market, when he was interrupted by a gremlin with the face of William Shatner. The gremlin, name of Jim, offered DBD a mysterious package, which he had been told contained "the good shit" by a mysterious benefactor. Inside was a little pepper, so squat and flat it looked like a peyote button. DBD put the hot sauce back in his pocket and scarfed the chili. It blasted his mouth, throat and sinuses, but also upped his adept score by one point, as he saw a brief flash of light in his nonexistent third eye. It was agony, but he managed to keep it together... Sort of. The gremlin warned him to duck after he finished singing, then ran away before Tal could get a good look at it.

DBD went up on stage with his guitar, and began to sing his self-written version of John Lennon's Imagine, in honor of his friend Tal. 

imagine there's no gender
we all share a human soul
no cocks or pudenda
between our legs, just a…

He vomited on stage. Choked a little, but then kept singing. It was difficult for Tal to watch. It was difficult for everyone to watch. Nobody threw a bottle at the stage or anything, it was more uncomfortable than just straight up bad. At the end, Tal forgot the gremlin's advice, and was thrown off the stage in mid stage-dive by the blast wave from the KFC a couple blocks away exploding.

Unknown Armies - DO WHAT YOU WANT 'CAUSE A PIRATE IS FREE - SESSION 0

I played a superb twelve session campaign of Unknown Armies featuring ¥0, a Japanese successor conspiracy to Mak Attax from David Tormsen's upcoming Special Orders splatbook. I really enjoyed the game, and after the playtest game wrapped I felt comfortable enough with the game to run it myself, featuring my own fan organization: The Brethren of the Curb, food truck pirates with their own vision of the magickal revolution.

 

Unknown Armies 3E begins with "corkboarding", a world creation exercise where the group chooses an objective for the campaign, based on the premise set by the GM and whatever the players are interested in doing. Then the players and GM go around the table and take turns developing their characters and adding plot elements and connections to a relationship map, which then forms the basis of the action in future sessions.

We finished corkboarding in a single four hour session We had one new player (to UA, not to RPGs) and several experienced players. Everyone had spend the week running up to the game discussing their plans in the discord, and they all arrived with basic concepts for their characters, food truck, and objective, which definitely sped things up. Most of the players were also contributors to the Special Orders book, and had been marinating in the setting for several months, so they had a good feel for what the tone and setting of the game should be like.

THE TRUCK

The group pretty quickly zeroed in on the idea of a Kaifeng/Ashkenazi fusion truck. They came up with a rotating list of dumplings to serve:

• Hoshin Duck Bao
• Brisket Bao
• Spicy Chicken Bao
• Chive Bao
• Soup Bao
• Pastrami Bao with mustard sauce
• The Scorcher

They decided to call the truck BAO DOWN, PEASANTS, which according to Tormsen can be rendered pictographically in Chinese as 包下农民. They also decided that since the cuisine they were shooting for barely used milk anyway, they could shoot for a Kosher certification and just not have dairy products anywhere in the vehicle.

THE CHARACTERS

In the players' own words:

• DBD aka Deebeedee aka David ben David aka Daoud bin Daoud. Born in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank to a secular Zionist family, DBD was so ostracized and bullied by his peers he ended up hanging out with the local Palestinians who beat him up much less because they liked having him as gangly Jewish mascot. Ended up abandoning his post during his IDF service and traveling the world to find himself until he ate a spicy burger in Goa that caused a religious experience in the bathroom and made him the world's first Capsaicinurge. Having run out of his grandparents’ money, he has joined the Brethren to build up experience so he can return to Israel, avoid a prison sentence for desertion, and create peace.
• Rachel — WASP redhead with a ponytail, grew up in the house of a Boston Brahmin clan that fell into disrepair, early 20s. Part Unspeakable Servant, lived in and around New England her whole life. Wants to acquire the resources to fix American society, permanently. Wears an eyepatch over the glass eye that resulted from making her first Unspeakable Servant.
• Reba - Hong Kong Kaifeng/American Ashkenazi, nonbinary, age 35. Culinary school dropout and former Mak. They grew up in Hong Kong, but are now unable to return there after the Whisper Wars ran them out of the underground and participating in the recent protests saw them labeled as an American provocateur by the PRC. Sincerely believes that magick is a source of beauty and wonder that is neither good nor evil on its own, and that it should be spread and brought into the light to make the world a more interesting and open place.
• Tal Safdie they/them - Lebanese American, crustpunk, merman hair with a bushy beard (well, for a teen), 19. Estranged from their parents. Disillusioned by the lack of direction and goals of their fellow crust punks, so glommed onto the first group of people that seemed motivated, ideological, and vaguely lefty. Trigger Event: A female crust punk detritomancer tried to feed Tal to the pile. This probably accelerated my leaving crust punk culture

After a short discussion, the players elected Reba the captain. 

THE OBJECTIVE

The Brethren of the Curb are opposed to the tyranny of several other Mak Attax splinter conspiracies, chiefly the Court of the Burger Queen and the Colonel's Secret Coterie, both of whom have a history of forcibly annexing or destroying anyone who gets in their path. The players were interested in this type of inter-faction intrigue, but wanted a motivation that was positive and constructive in nature, rather than laser focused on destroying someone else.

 

After some deliberation, they found a mission statement that encapsulated what they were interested in:

MAKE SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS THE NEW TORTUGA

 

They further broke the objective down into several milestones - concrete goals they'll work towards over the course of the game.

1. Make unspeakable servants to keep the peace (Intense)
2. Figure out who burned down the KFC (Petty)
3. Guarantee the local Mak's independence (Intense)
4. Change local fast food ordinance (Intense)
5. Build solidarity among local food trucks (Petty)
6. Keep cataphracts out (Intense)
7. Create a local occult pirate council (Petty)

 

THE CORKBOARD

Rather than give a blow by blow, I'll just describe the final result. Here's a screencap of the finished board (the software doesn't have an option for a high resolution export).

Esoteric Enterprises - Dungeon Entrances

Meant to write this one up a year ago, forgot about it until now.

Dungeon entrances for Esoteric Enterprises. The core rules text gives various entrances. Sewer tunnel, crypt, housing project, nightclub, etc. Besides these locations, there's very little flavor or gameplay given to the surface city. More types of entrance means more flavor for the surface city.

Photo by JJ Harrison

GALLERY

Not a full on Occult Gallery, but a surface structure that could have a painting or two linked to one. It also has a hidden staircase or hatch that leads into the underworld.

They charge a fixed fee per use of the dungeon entrance. Say $50 per person, or $40 per head for a group of four or more people. This is framed as a "suggested donation" but they aren't unlocking the door unless you pay. This one-time fee includes entry and exit, they aren't going to toll you twice. If you enter somewhere else and exit through the gallery they don't charge you.

MAFIA CONTROLLED BUSINESS

A bar, bathhouse, restaurant, or other legitimate front. The backroom or basement has the stairs down to the dungeon, watched over by armed wise guys.

Entry into the undercity is free (for anyone not known to be a police informer or enemy of the family). Anyone exiting to the surface through this entrance is taxed 10% of the value of the loot recovered. Safe from exit campers, at least.

Obviously the guards on the stairs are gun toting Mobsters, with a Lieutenant somewhere on the premises in case they need backup.

MUSEUM

A museum in an old building. It's closed at night, patrolled by security guards. There's a closed wing in the back, under renovation or used for storage. In that room is a staircase going down to the underworld below.

If the stairs go down to a dungeon node populated by a faction, the room is guarded by a couple NPCs or creatures from that faction.

NECROPOLIS

The dungeon entrance is in an old mausoleum. The necropolis is guarded by a militia drawn from the wealthy families whose ancestors are entombed there. They assume anyone entering at night is here to pillage graves. They politely escort trespassers out on the first offense, and shoot on subsequent violations.

The militia are Thugs with rifles, pistols and shotguns, plus a couple leaders who use the Mobster stat block.

If too many gunfights break out in the Necropolis, the police kick the militia out and establish a permanent presence there, making it even harder to enter and exit.

 

NIGHTCLUB
The top level is a normal nightclub. The bottom has underworld creatures and doorways leading into the dungeon. Entry and exit are free, but the tables are occupied by a random faction every time the players visit, which can result in awkwardness or violence.

WAREHOUSE

Or other abandoned building in a violent or abandoned part of town. No faction controls it, but there's always a random encounter when you enter or exit. It's highly likely that intelligent humans camping the exit are waiting for adventurers to emerge so they can rob them.

Drinks Post - Runoff

For all the recipes that were either too simple or not good enough to make it into the main drinks post series.

Dutch Russian

This is a stock photo from Wikipedia.

Availability: Tricky. I had to go to a megastore to find genever, and they only had one kind.

This is a White Russian with genever instead of vodka. It tastes like a malted milkshake. Delicious, but nothing to run home about.