Breakout

 Continuing the NSC mini-campaign.

EPISODE 2: BREAKOUT

CAST

Busy, a 13 year old child and the only friend of Mongo the megaraptor.

Paragon the Laser Swordfighter from another planet, who is renting a room from Busy's oblivious parents.

After the team's other members stopped a handful of super-apes from hurting too many innocent bystanders at the art museum, they tracked a baboon with laser eyes back to its origin point: a hidden lab complex deep in the wetland preserve.

Busy and Paragon rode to the lab on Mongo’s back and scouted out the complex from the safety of the treeline. The whole area was surrounded by a 12” fence capped with razorwire. The tallest structure was a guard tower crewed by two security guards equipped with AR-15 rifles and a radio. The next tallest looked similar to a factory or warehouse from the outside, followed by a motorpool building with four wide bay doors, and finally an L-shaped one-story building like the ones in strip malls.

They both agreed that they should try to sneak in rather than going in hot, but with no clear plan on how to do that, Paragon boldly approached the guard tower trying to knock it down with a telekinetic blast, but was immediately spotted and shot. Shrugging off the injury for now, he attempted a telekinetically assisted leap to the guard platform, but was shot again in midair and ended up clinging to structural beams halfway up the tower.

Meanwhile, Busy and Mongo were circling the complex to smash through both the fence and the west wall of the factory building to find themselves in some sort of testing lab with gym equipment and target dummies. A thick glass wall separated them from a hallway running the width of the building. A door swung open across the way and more armed guards started streaming out, so Mongo smashed his way through the glass wall and bit one of the guards in half at the waist as he fired ineffectually into the ceiling. Mongo then tail-whipped another guard that was moving to flank him.

Outside, Paragon got shot again. Climbing out of the guards’ arc of fire, he took a second to get his second wind, then swung up onto the platform and cut one of the guards down with his laser sword, then telekinetically threw the other off the tower to his death. Alone at the top of the tower, Paragon watched the farthest bay door open and a giant robot walk out with thunderous pneumatic steps—Artillery MK I.

Artillery Illustration by Boson Au

Thinking quickly, Paragon leapt down while half-dragging and half-swinging his laser sword behind him to cut down the tower while also slowing his descent to avoid injury. With a final slice to a load-bearing steel beam, he brought the tower down on Artillery’s processing unit. The broken robot collapsed, smoking and sparking, unfired crew-served weapons sticking up at awkward angles.

In the testing lab hallway, Mongo killed another armed guard and ran back out the hole he’d created in the wall when he entered, employing a stick and move strategy. The guards followed. He ran across the complex under fire and Paragon joined Busy on his back before they turned to charge past the guards and smash through the east wall of the warehouse to find rows upon rows of stacked cages, each containing a super-powered primate and equipped with a device to suppress the animal’s power.

The heroes immediately set to work freeing the primates, slicing through cages and ripping off doors. The newly freed test subjects were smashing their way out of the warehouse and into the swamp as the guards caught up with the team, but Paragon telekinetically threw a mandrill with ice-breath at them, turning one of them into an ice sculpture. The two remaining guards decided they’d had enough and got the fuck out of there.

Having dealt with all immediate threats, Busy and Mongo went to investigate the L shaped building while Paragon checked out the unexplored office in the warehouse. There was a nameplate on the office door: Dr. Sarah Tonin. And on the second line: Director of Operations. The desk was locked, but not laser-sword proof, so Paragon had no trouble finding her research notes. Apparently an experimental drug called FantoMax III had been injected into the subjects as embryos. Every subject that survived gained a seemingly random superpower, which was then carefully measured over time.

Busy and Mongo found themselves in an embryonic lab, where they grabbed a gorilla embryo and a tray full of FantoMax samples, one of which Busy slipped into his own pocket for later experimentation. An interior door was labelled “Growth Acceleration,” and Busy went in. A dizzying mess of cables fed into a 10’ wide pod at the center of the room, shaped something like an upside down pinecone or beehive. With no hesitation whatsoever, he stepped into the pod and had Paragon activate it from a terminal at the other side of the room. A few seconds later, a 23 year old Busy stepped out, still wearing clothes that he'd suddenly outgrown. With no idea how they’d explain this (or the caged gorilla they were bringing home with them) to Busy’s parents, they grabbed Sarah Tonin’s computer and left.

THE END FOR NOW. 

Barrel Of Monkeys

The Longshot City campaign I'd been posting about until I fell off a couple months ago is still going, but I had to step back and cut it down to one session per week instead of the three I'd been running. The accumulated campaign lore that I haven't posted anything about here has gotten to be way too much to give anything proper context.

HOWEVER. I have recently started running a separate mini-campaign every other week on the New Save Collective server, and I've been writing session reports for it. Here's the first one:

EPISODE 1: BARREL OF MONKEYS

CAST:

Jebediah the Powersuit. Jeb built himself a suit of armor that flies and shoots rockets in his basement workshop. 

Gideon the 45th the Brute Cannon. Gideon tampered with his own DNA to give him increased strength, durability, and the ability to produce kinetic blasts. This also happened in Jebediah's basement.

(They haven't named their team yet but a theme is clearly emerging)

The Longshot City Art Museum. Opening day of a traveling exhibition called "Occult Americana." Our heroes are there simply because that sort of thing is cool. Little did they know they wouldn't have time to check out the installation.

Shortly after they arrived, a group of six workers in matching overalls pushed through the crowd to deliver a comically oversized wooden barrel in front of the reception desk and left. Gideon immediately walked up to the barrel and examined it. When he realized no one else seemed to have noticed the barrel, he tried knocking on it. Something inside knocked back.

The barrel exploded in gideon's face as a speedster gorilla, a baboon with heat vision, and stretchy capuchin leapt out.

First the capuchin reached up and pulled himself onto the top of a massive glass tornado sculpture made up of thousands of tiny shards of mirrored glass. It looked like it was going to fall onto a crowd of civilians, but Jebediah flew over in time and used the strength granted by his suit to right it.

Meanwhile a brawl was breaking out between Gideon and the gorilla, and Gideon was not doing well.

At this point the baboon was charging up for a blast of heat vision aimed at a pair of little girls. A man jumped in front of them to shield them from the blast. He surely would have been doomed if Jebediah hadn't intercepted the heat vision blast with a rocket-propelled grenade, throwing the monkey tumbling over the reception desk.

Having pummeled Gideon nearly to death, the gorilla caught sight of an extensive display of medieval weaponry up on the second floor interior balcony, particularly a 17th century halberd, and went running up the stairs for it. Jebediah managed to hit him with a well-timed energy blast, knocking the ape off the stairs. Then the gorilla tried to escape, but jebediah knocked him out with a an armored flying punch to the jaw.

All this happened within one in-game minute of the barrel exploding. The crowd was finally starting to thin out at this point, but the man and two girls were unmoving, frozen in place by the unfolding trauma.

The unmistakeable sound of shattering glass rang out from the direction of the traveling exhibit accompanied by what sounded like a miniature jet engine.

Jebediah and the baboon got into an energy blast duel, with both attacks meeting in the middle like a reverse tug of war. Jebediah gained the upper hand and tackled the monkey, beating on him while mounted on his chest like an MMA fighter, but the beast caught Jebediah by surprise with an energy blast that sent our hero flying.

The baboon got away while Gideon was getting his second wind, preparing to rejoin the fray. Meanwhile the capuchin had climbed up into the orrery hanging well above the reception hall, and was causing havok up there. A blue-green stone sphere, larger than a man and depicting Uranus, fell. It was positioned directly above the man and what the players were by now assuming must be his daughters. Gideon shot it out of the air with a massive blast of kinetic force before it could hurt them.

Another minute passed. Our heroes could now hear the sound of gunfire, at least two different calibers, from the direction of the Occult Americana exhibition, accompanied by the same jet engine sound as before.

Curious, our heroes poked their heads into the traveling exhibit hall. They saw one security guard bleeding but alive on the ground and another crouched down and shooting upward at Rocketman, a notorious art thief and prominent socialite. He was wielding a gold-plated L
uger in one hand and carrying his prize, a hand mirror with a very particular history, in the other.

Rocketman Illustration by JeCorey Holder

Gideon and Jebediah gave each other a look, instantly agreeing without words that this guy looks fucking cool and probably deserves the mirror. They simply let him get away.

They did manage to kill the stretchy capuchin, but not before it pulled down a massive bronze relief directly onto the head of the man who'd been protecting his daughters.

As the police sirens started to get closer, our heroes made their escape in jebediah's geo metro. When they got to their hideout, the girls popped out of their hiding place in the back seat and yelled "surprise!" so it looks like the team has a pair of adopted daughters now.

THE END FOR NOW

Return to Leviathan Island

In which the Bloody Monkeys continue to fuck around and some of them find out.

Gonna be lots of flashbacks today. This campaign’s been going since August and I only just started writing play reports for it.

Cast:
Leo Highwind—a FantoMax-powered paragon with a signature spear.

Vardené Pavardené—a biohacked dracula with a science background.

Daisy Leper—a super-strong zombie cheerleader who vomits death and chaos.

Beaver Babe—born with a mutation that makes her more at home in the water than on dry land.

The gang started the session aboard Leo’s hidden sanctum, an armored zeppelin above the clouds, debating their next move.

Vardené had spent the past week synthesizing a few doses of FantoMax for Leo. This is the superserum Dr. Sarah Tonin has been refining. It was a particularly violent encounter with her super-powered primates that originally inspired the Bloody Monkeys’ team name. Judging from Leo, who escaped Tonin’s new lab (the old one was torched by the Legion of the Inhabited many Mondays ago) she’s made a lot of progress since then.

The vampire also had time to analyze the two blood samples that had been delivered to him by the Legion of the Inhabited and the Murder Patrol. The Legion’s sample, labelled plague, was infected with Dr. Hanna Risto’s Mayfly Virus. The Murder Patrol’s sample came from their own Zero Fighter, an irradiated Japanese supersoldier with enhanced healing abilities. When the Patrol heard there was a frat house infected with the Mayfly Virus (because the Legion brought it there), Zero Fighter decided to infiltrate the house and lick everyone he could find. Vardené’s analysis revealed that Zero’s plan to contract the disease so that his immune system would defeat it succeeded, but he hasn’t been able to isolate and synthesize a cure from it yet.

Given that the Bloody Monkeys now had a new lead on a cure for the Mayfly Virus, and that Hanna Risto was now protected by magic shadow armor (see last play report), they chose to leave bad enough alone at PenalCorp Island for now. I can’t say I blame them.

Instead, they decided to follow a different lead. The relevant entry on hero.net (a secure forum set up and maintained by Singularity and Tara Byte) reads:

Leviathan Island—Dr. Rona Shanti
This is the project the murder patrol first encountered. They were kidnapping homeless people and releasing them on an island full of monsters while billionaires gambled on their survival.
Goal: Genetically engineer monstrous species and elevate individual specimen to kaiju status. Primary Laboratory: Leviathan Island (-23°, 8°)

So, partly because PenalCorp Island had become too dangerous, they chose to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to investigate an island full of monsters.

Normally this would have taken weeks, but Leo Highwind is very strong and can fly very fast so he got out and pushed. 

They were in visual range of Leviathan Island by sunset the next day, when the airship was attacked by six large humanoid bat creatures, which fled after the heroes killed two of them. After a quick aerial survey of the island from above the clouds, they decided to launch an all-out assault on the what appeared to be some kind of control tower. 

Vardené transformed into his alternate form, a foot-long centipede with paralytic venom, and crawled into one of Leo’s coat pockets. Then Leo slung his spear across his back and picked up Beaver Babe and Daisy Leper, one in each arm, and flew down to the roof. He smashed through the roof into a control room packed with terminals and terrified operators dressed in identical lab coats. Beaver Babe grabbed the technician who failed to run away quickly enough and asked her where to find Rona Shanti. The tech said Shanti’s office was on the first floor, and B.B. let her go. 

Leo decided to skip the stairs and start smashing through floors until reaching ground level. Beaver and Daisy started out following him, but stopped at the armory, where they got into a fight with three heavily armed and armored guards. On the ground floor, Leo was confronted by a group of five more of the goons, so he flung Vardené at one. Vardené tried to shift back to his humanoid form in midair, hoping to drain one of the thugs of blood, but took several bullets instead and scampered off having reverted to millipede form.

Beaver took one of the guards out with a fire axe she’d found on the airship, and Daisy killed another with her projectile vomit. The better organized squad on the ground floor managed to give Leo significantly more trouble. He managed to skewer one of them and badly injure another before passing out.

Having donned a set of body armor, Beaver Babe jumped down the hole, got shot, got shot again, tried to run away, and got shot in the back. When she went down her body broke apart; she’d been a robot planted for unknown reasons. Meanwhile the real Beaver Babe woke up hungover on the airship under a pile of empty beer cans, wondering where the fuck everyone was.

Daisy Leper found a grenade bandolier, pulled the pin on one of the grenades, and dropped it from the armory on the fourth floor all the way down to the first floor, where it predictably killed all the guards but through a very lucky dice roll did not also kill Leo. Daisy then used what she had available in the armory vault to set up a machine gun nest and hunker down until next session.

Risto's Ascension

 IF YOU ARE PLAYING IN EITHER MY MONDAY OR TUESDAY GROUP THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS PLEASE GO AWAY THANK YOU

Cast:

Strange Angel (powersuit made of nightmares and shadows)

John Tempest (badass supersoldier with a big sword and a gravelly voice)

Megalodon (has Animal Man or Vixen style powers but kinda decided to just be Killer Croc instead)

Replacement Cast:

Beaver Babe (real fuckin good at swimming basically, has a big tail like Squirrel Girl)

Leo Highwind (basically like superman without the laser eyes but with a big fuckin spear)

Sooooooo it’s been awhile since I posted anything about the Longshot City campaign I’ve been running. It's still going strong, I’ve just been stupid busy.

This campaign has three weekly groups. There was a three week gap where everyone had holiday stuff happening, but other than that it’s mostly been real time, as in one week passes in the game when one week passes in meatspace.

This week, my Wednesday group (the Bloody Monkeys—don’t blame me, I’m not naming my players’ teams for them) decided to go back to PenalCorp Island and acquire some experimental cultures in Hanna Risto’s safe.

I should explain Hanna Risto. There are several mad science plots (as in schemes not as in storyarcs, the story is whatever the players do) unfolding at the same time. The PCs worked out awhile ago that these experiments were all being conducted by clones of Dr. Sarah Tonin, whose names are all anagrams of hers. Hanna Risto was, as the warden of PenalCorp, using prisoners as test subjects in researching a bioweapon called the Mayfly Virus.

Last time the Bloody Monkeys met, they raided PenalCorp Island and kidnapped Hanna Risto. They interrogated her this session, and learned that she was working on a cure for the Mayfly Virus, called the Dragonfly Bacterium. So they decided to go back and retrieve the cultures she’d been working on from the refrigerated safe in her office. Crucially, they also decided to take Risto with them, carried by Strange Angel in a sort of womb formed by Angel’s shapeshifting armor.

When they got to the island, the death robot Artillery MK 5 (every time it dies it rebuilds itself and comes back stronger) was waiting for them on the roof of the prison itself. Megalodon managed to get into the prison and eventually the warden’s office. Artillery managed to kill both Strange Angel and John Tempest.

When Strange Angel died, her armor dissipated, releasing Hanna Risto. Risto immediately put on the necklace that had previously given Strange Angel her powers, and became a sort of nightmare Iron Man, who then attacked and K.O.’d Megalodon (whose result on the K.O. table was “resolve a familial conflict” so that should be weird).

Beaver Babe and Leo Highwind just sort of randomly showed up because that’s how replacement characters work sometimes, managed to kill Artillery MK 5, and retrieved a comatose Megalodon while the newly empowered Hanna Risto escaped into the clouds.

So next week I need to run some sort of familial conflict coma dream, and also Hanna Risto has Strange Angel’s powers now. 

Longshot Low-Down #2

What follows is the second installment of the Longshot Low-Down, a local news radio show trying to keep track of events in Longshot City. (It's actually written by Cade Crites who is playing as an Ace Reporter):

Welcome to the Longshot Low-Down here at 109.5 FM the Caltrop and wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Arden Merle.

Today's broadcast features more chaos taking place in the harbor district, a series of unsettling discoveries regarding Trisha Nano, and a deadly fight between man and monster in the waters off the Atlantic South African coast.

With further investigation into Trisha Nano after the last broadcast, there are no records of Nano's existence, from birth to education to scientific pursuits. Nano has allegedly employed Cleaners, a company with no qualms against burning civilians alive, to aid in her apparent escape from the public eye. Her last known location was the city zoo, giving her a possible tie-in to the primates used as a distraction in the museum heist. Investigation into the superpowered primates is still ongoing.

The follow-up to the museum theft itself has yielded little in regards to finding and capturing the culprits. Jack Towers, a.k.a. Rocketman, has been lying low since the sightings of him fleeing the art museum, presumably at the nightclub he owns downtown. I will continue to provide reports as accurate information comes in.

 

Moving on to the harbor district, chaos has struck once again. An NQA truck was found bombed in a building in the harbor district. Witnesses claim a number of our city's unhoused citizens were within the building, which now bears a hole in the roof and the following ominous message graffitied on one of the walls: "ECHO IS COMING FOR YOU"

NQA Trucking is known to have been making large deliveries of lab equipment to a location deep in the wetland preserve. Investigations into this are underway.

Finally, in news from outside the city: a group going by "Murder Patrol" discovered a deadly human-versus-chimeric monsters spectacle at a wealthy resort on an island far off the Atlantic South African coast. Witnesses report the resort's clientele engaged in orgiastic debauchery while watching the people dying in these fights.

Murder Patrol sent in images regarding this, attached beneath this episode's transcript.

If anyone knows more about these events and is able to share anything—or if you have questions or topics you'd like covered on the next broadcast, contact me at lsclowdowntips@proton.mail. Thoughts and comments are welcome under the episode.

As always, transcripts for today's show can be found under "episode transcripts," wherever you get your podcasts, updated after each Saturday show. Till then, this has been Longshot Low-down and I hope to greet you all again soon.

Stay safe out there.

Longshot Low-Down #1

from this page where you can learn all about molecular geometry

I've started running a Longshot City megacampaign over on discord. That is, I'm running a big complicated sandbox with lots of evil schemes progressing at the same time, with three separate superteams all trying to sort through the mess in parallel. So I'm running three games per week for groups who aren't in direct contact with each other. We're 5 sessions in.

I'm also running a solo play-by-post game for my fried Cade Crites (you can and should check out their itch page here, they do good work and you may have seen some of it) who is playing as a local investigative journalist for the community radio station 109.5 The Caltrop. They're only in direct contact with one of the teams so far, but I fully expect that to change sooner rather than later. 

The part that's cool for you the reader is they're planning on writing news updates in character semi-regularly, and they agreed to let me post them here! Realistically, this is the only way you were going to get any kind of play reports out of this—between the game schedule I've set up for myself, and the fact that I'm turning this adventure into a book at the same time, means there's no way on this wet rock in space that I was going to make time to keep up with play reports too. 

Welcome to Longshot Low-Down here at 109.5 FM The Caltrop and wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Arden Merle.

Now, things are always a little unpredictable here in Longshot City, but one of the topics I'm covering today is certainly in a league of its own. Experiments turning people into human-sized bugs, murders in the harbor district causing panic, and a daring heist in the middle of our art museum— today's episode will shed some light on these recent events.

A missing persons case led to the shocking discovery of known scientist, Dr. Trisha Nano at Krieger U, allegedly having conducted experiments on citizens. These experiments were disguised as a sleep study, and the one known and confirmed victim so far had gone through a type of metamorphosis to become a man-sized mantis posing as a human. 

After some exploration upon this discovery, cocoons were found in the sewers containing four people that had gone missing over the last few weeks. Upon opening these cocoons, the missing persons were found having various stages of chemical burns from the fluid inside. Two of the victims are currently receiving treatment under quarantine at Breckenridge General Hospital.

I would advise caution around sewer entrances for safety. A team of new heroes, the Legion of the Inhabited, is currently working to find and stop Nano's efforts.

In a separate incident, machine gun fire was heard at the Harborview Café in the harbor district, causing panic among the patrons. Investigations into the cause are underway, though two bodies were found at Pier 13-B. Possibly related to this, an unknown mid-sized barge had docked at the pier earlier that day. I will keep you updated as events develop.

Some of you may have seen social media posts recently about a heist at the art museum. A mask was stolen from the traveling Mesoamerican exhibit, and the presumed suspect is Jack Towers, a.k.a. Rocketman. There were four superpowered primates causing chaos as a distraction for the theft, mauling one of the museum's security guards to death before all four primates were killed by two new metahumans that promptly left the scene. The reason for the theft is still unknown, though investigations are taking place.

If anyone knows more about these events and is able to share anything—or if you have questions or topics you'd like covered on the next broadcast, contact me at lsclowdowntips@protonmail.com. Thoughts and comments are welcome under the episode.

As always, transcripts for today's show can be found under "episode transcripts," wherever you get your podcasts, updated after each Saturday show. Till then, this has been Longshot Low-Down and I hope to greet you all again soon.

Stay safe out there.

Enterprise Justice Solutions #15: He Who Lives by the Deathgun...

click to zoom

This week's crew:
Letter of the Law (impossibly wealthy masked vigilante, owns the team's HQ)
Deathgun (supersoldier from a future dystopia) 
Mr. Fox (superspy from a more distant future in which humans are extinct)

NPC Allies:
Singularity (the first and only true general AI)
Tara Byte (the world's greatest computer scientist and Singularity's mother)

Mr. Fox and Deathgun had just learned that PenalCorp's warden was another clone of Dr. Sarah Tonin, and were in serious trouble by the time their most hated ally, Letter of the Law, showed up to the scene in his L-icopter.

Deathgun moves the boat closer to the cellhouse where Singularity had located Tara Byte's cell, thinking this would be an easier extraction point. The guard in the nearby tower immediately starts spraying the boat with machine gun fire, heavily damaging it.

On the other side of the island, Mr. Fox was trying to reach the cellhouse on foot, while zigging and zagging to avoid being shot by guards in two more towers. He somehow made it up the hill and around the corner without dying, though he did lose some fur when a bullet grazed his tail. Letter of the Law flew straight past the towers, drawing fire but no hits, to land on the roof of the cellhouse.

The fishing boat Deathgun was piloting fared less well. Approaching shore under heavy fire, it exploded as Deathgun leapt from the bow, propelled to shore by the explosion in an epic splash page-worthy scene. Hell, maybe even a two-page spread.

At this point the End of Round token came up, and Artillery was activated. Artillery is a giant combat robot (the one pictured near the bottom of the conspiracy board) that, when destroyed, rebuilds itself stronger than it was. The team has already destroyed it once.

Deathgun tries shooting it, but his gun does little damage against the robot's thick armor. He switches to a harpoon from the fishing boat, hoping to leverage his Superstrength to do more damage. He scores a pretty substantial hit, but Artillery releases tear gas, temporarily disabling the future warrior. It then deployed a trio of combat drones, released from a compartment in its back, before trying to catch Deathgun in an electrified net of steel cables.

Meanwhile, Mr. Fox made contact with Singularity, who has just figured out to reactivate the drones that tried to kill Mr. Fox last session. These drones were sent to engage the ones controlled by Artillery, while Singularity accessed the electronic lock system and cleared a path to Tara Byte's cell block on the top floor.

On the verge of death and unable to breathe, Deathgun tries to escape the tear gas and fight, but Artillery finishes him off with its flamethrower. Leaving the charred skeleton where it lay, the robot sprinted up the hill and leapt to the roof of the 4-story cellhouse, where Letter of the Law was still trying to get in through a maintenance door. He put his tools away and drew his twin laser tonfas.

A squad of armed guards entered the cellhouse with Mr. Fox halfway up the stairwell. Taking fire, Fox asked Singularity to release all the prisoners on the lower levels, and the guards were overrun before they got to do much else.

On the roof, Artillery fired a rocket propelled grenade at Letter, but missed. Letter struck at a key point on the already-damaged robot, which collapsed into a sparking heap.

After a fairly awkward introduction, Mr. Fox convinces Tara Byte to follow him up to the roof, where Letter is still beating on the broken robot, screaming "I! HATE! YOU! DAD!". Apparently he's got some things he needs to work through. Leaving the ashy remains of their fallen companion behind, Mr. Fox, Letter, and Tara Byte escaped the island and the ensuing prison riot in the L-icopter. 

Enterprise Justice Solutions #14

click to embiggen

This session's crew:

Mr. Fox (a superspy from a distant future in which humans are extinct)

Deathgun (a supersoldier from a different future in which A.I. has enslaved humanity)

Zachary Tooth (a size-changing test pilot who hates Chance Ryder for fucking up his family fortune)

I'm skipping a play report for #13 because the first half of the session was planning a prison break and the second half was "acquiring" a fishing boat. The less said about how that part went down the better honestly.

So this session began with Zachary turning on the news to see a high-speed nautical chase underway, with several police boats in pursuit of a fishing boat that looked exactly like the Orca from Jaws. 

The helicopter-borne news camera zoomed in on one of the suspects and pointed out that he appeared to be wearing a quite elaborate fursuit. Zachary didn't know who Mr. Fox was, but he did have reason to suspect that Fox was somehow involved with Dr. Sarah Tonin, an underling of Chance Ryder. His interest piqued, Tooth jumped into his helicopter (he's still rich, just not RICH rich anymore) and headed toward the harbor.

Meanwhile, rather than engage the police in a firefight, Fox and Deathgun decided to try to lie their way out of it. They allowed themselves to be boarded and told the cops that they were ATF agents tracking down a source of powerful and highly illegal energy weapons. When there turned out to be a laser pistol (Mr. Fox's) hidden below decks (where Mr. Fox had hidden it), the cops let the pair go but confiscated the weapon itself.

Once the cops had dispersed, Zachary Tooth approached in his helicopter, set it to hover a good distance above the fishing boat, and jumped down onto the deck. He grew to twice his size as he fell and landed ready to fight. Once Deathgun and Fox explained that they don't work with Sarah Tonin and in fact have been actively fucking up her operations (and those of her many clones), Tooth decided to help them with the prison break instead.

They approached PenalCorp Island from the direction of open ocean. The boat's CB radio crackled to life, warning them that they would be fired upon if they did not reverse course. The team claimed they had a life threatening medical emergency on board, and the only hospital they had any chance of getting the patient to in time was the prison hospital on the island. 

After a brief pause they were instructed to approach shore and drop anchor. There was a squad of armed guards covering them from the beach as a pair of drones carrying a stretcher picked up the "patient" (Mr. Fox, with a shrunken Zachary Tooth hiding in his clothes).

Fox ran off when the nurses started trying to take off his "fursuit" and realized there was nothing wrong with him. The guards on the beach tried to arrest Deathgun, who of course opened fire. Several airborne combat drones were launched to pursue Mr. Fox. Zachary, pretty much left to his own devices in the confusion, emerged from the pile of Mr. Fox's clothes with a thumbdrive which contained a copy of Singularity, the first true generalized A.I., on whose behalf the team was here trying to free his mother/creator Tara Byte.

Tooth quickly uploaded Singularity at the nearest terminal and the boy quickly spread throughout the island-wide network, deactivating combat drones and searching through records to find Tara's cell. He discovered that the prisoners were being shuffled around in a way consistent with some biological experiment, and revealed that the warden was none other than Dr. Sarah Tonin. (well one of her anyway)

To be continued…

Enterprise Justice Solutions #12

click me

(this is my current Longshot City campaign—that’s what the players named their team so don’t blame me)

This session’s crew:

The Greasy Devil—host to a superstrong shapeshifting symbiote

The Letter of the Law—wealthy masked vigilante who everyone hates

Deathgun—supersoldier from a dystopian future

Mr. Fox—superspy from a more distant future where humans are extinct

The session opened with the team entering a warehouse party near the docks, looking for dealers of a dangerous new street drug called fantomin. There was a large cage onstage next to the DJ, containing one of the superpowered chimpanzees they’d freed way back in session 2. The cage must have been grounded because this one had the ability to manipulate lightning, making for a pretty impressive light show. Everyone assumes Mr. Fox is simply a furry in a very expensive costume.

Letter immediately started roughing people up in the bathrooom (none of whom knew anything), while Fox and Devil sweet-talked their way backstage. They were close to getting a dealer’s number in the green room before they started radiating cop vibes and the other two DJs starting roasting them and high fiving each other.

Meanwhile Deathgun and Letter were having a dance-off, in which Letter of the Law embarrassed himself so thoroughly that someone got a photo and he became a meme. They didn’t notice the chimpanzee busting out of its cage until it was too late. One dead bystander and one dead ape later, they decided it was time to split and head back to their headquarters beneath the Militronics building (Letter of the Law’s drone A.I. research company). When they jumped in the van, the head of security’s voice came over the radio informing Letter that the entire building was locked down and no one could access the system.

When they got back they discovered that Singularity, the first true general A.I., had invaded and taken control of the building, activating all security doors and a variety of combat drones. After a brief standoff and negotiation, they allowed one of the corrupted drones to enter their lab to analyze the impossibly complex array of dozens of hard drives they’d found in one of Dr. Sarah Tonin’s labs (she maintains several, each run by one of her clones, apparently all doing Bad Things). 

Turns out she needed all that storage space to save a copy of her consciousness, or at least the version of her that ran the lab where EJS found it. It was in a sub-basement beneath a juvenile hall where Dr. Tonin was developing fantomin and studying its effects on the kids in her care. 

Now they have to plan a prison break. While negotiating with Singularity, they agreed to free his mother, the brilliant hacker Tara Byte, who is currently locked up on PenalCorp Island. The Letter of the Law is not at all pleased about this, but with his building locked down and all his employees held hostage he doesn’t have much choice but to go along with it.

R.I.P. Bad Ray

Bad Ray (Layth) is dead. A mage who thought he was a ninja has met his untimely end been stabbed through the fucking brain by his dear friend Kevin Bacon (Kelly).

Grant wanted to DM a couple days ago, which was cool because A)I never get to play and B)he was running my weird patched-together ruleset and I was curious how it would turn out. I explained the game in as few words as possible to Keiran (Grant’s boss, who was cool enough to let us play in his store) while Grant mapped out a cave complex. “Everyone around knows the legend of this pirate lord that died with his treasure at the bottom of a cave system somewhere in the area. There’s also something in the legend about zombies or vampires or something. You guys met some old drunk at the bar the other night with a map showing the cave’s location.” Fuck it, let’s do this.

I've never seen a more trustworthy face.

Nikolai Stroganoff the bow-toting mage (me) accompanied Bad Ray and John Doe (Keiran) into the cave, where we almost immediately stumbled upon a time worn and dust covered message engraved in the rock wall. It was a riddle, something along the lines of “I’m round but not always around, sometimes light and sometimes dark…” and then something else but it was obviously the moon at that point. Saying this out loud opened a secret room with loot, armor, and a nifty anti-magic shield. The next passage we took was a gradually narrowing incline spiralling downward.

Grant: “Okay, at this point you guys are pretty much crawling…”

Me: “Fuck that, we’re turning around.”

Layth: “What? No, we gotta keep going.”

Me: “Well we can find another way, I’m not crawling down there.”

Keiran: “Oh you don’t wanna crawl around? Ha! Weren’t you in the army?”

Me: “Yeah, I was. That’s how I know not to go in there. Have fun, guys.”

They triggered a pressure plate that released four spiders the size of cats from a hydraulic cage,* which added to my smugness from the moon riddle treasure. Hubris will probably be Nikolai’s downfall in the end. Bad Ray was prepared, though, with a glue spell that made the critters helpless while he shis kabobed them with his signature katana. Nothing else was down there, but Bad Ray made the most of it, filling an empty jar with venom glands.

The next large cave chamber we explored had a stream running through it, at the bottom of a steep and magically slippery incline, which we fell down, dropping our weapons. Then we almost drowned in the stream, which let out into a huge cave with an underground lake, beach, jungle, and even something that looked very much like the sun. John Doe and Bad Ray pulled Nikolai’s unconscious body onto the beach. J.D. opted to rest on the beach with Nikolai while Bad Ray wandered into the jungle, where he stumbled into a clearing with a deer.

Not one to be discouraged by the fact that he’d gone hunting without any weapons, Bad Ray quickly made a molotov cocktail and threw it at the deer, which disintegrated into glowing pixie dust or something as the jar passed through it. Ray caught a glimpse of some sort of bipedal lizard monster hiding in the bushes. Realizing that he was basically defenseless, our intrepid adventurer cast a fear spell at the thing and it ran away in terror. Reality kind of flickered when the creature panicked, in a way that confirmed our suspicions that everything in this cavern was an illusion. Bad Ray made it back to the beach without any further distractions.

At this point Ashley picked me up so we could go eat. We started the game back up an hour later without Keiran, when Grant, Kelly and Layth came over. There are some D&D groups that would be bothered by that sort of incoherence but they don’t seem to have any problem with nonsensical combat mechanics so I feel like we’re basically even.

As Nikolai and Bad Ray finished resting, Molly (Ashley) and Kevin Bacon came running out of the woodline, with four jaguars hot on their tail. We beat them, but used like four of our spells to do it, so we elected to rest again to increase our chances of survival. Of course, this led to us being attacked by yet another group of jaguars, and this time we started combat with hardly any spells left. At this point the odds were that there wouldn’t be another random encounter, so we risked resting again, this time uneventfully.

This is when I guess Grant got tired of us just hanging out there doing nothing, and decided that whatever was behind all this should take action. We all had to save against fear or run away from the water in terror, into the jungle. Bad Ray made his save, but he was the only one. He glued Molly’s and Kevin Bacon’s feet to the spot, and tripped Nikolai up with his grappling hook & rope. Grant then informed us that the fear effect was likely to last longer than the glue spell, so Ray tried to tie up Kevin and Molly with what was left of the rope. That’s when Kelly decided that Kevin Bacon had fucking had it and killed off the party’s first ever level 3 character.** I seem to remember her rolling a critical hit.

"Don't Fuck With Kevin Bacon"

The best part about being one of two mages in a party is inheriting the other one’s spellbook when he dies (I’ll probably give Layth’s new character the magic cloak I found on B.R.’s corpse because I’m such a nice guy, though). There’s a couple spells in there that Nikolai can’t even cast yet, but if I can get him back to town, he’s already got enough loot to level up, and I’m pretty sure everyone else does too. Now I just need to get him & his pals out of this cave system alive, preferably in one piece.

So it looks like there’s some mind-control aliens or something hiding out down here and spreading rumors about pirate ghosts Scooby-Doo style, unless the pirates are still alive and acting as cultists or co-conspirators. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. The anti-magic shield should come in handy, unless Grant decides that psionics and magic are two distinctly separate things.

*That’s a pretty technologically advanced trap for what’s supposed to be a dead pirate’s final resting place. I wonder who or what put it there.

**I have zero problems with high mortality rates in my games. Most of my house rules are pretty player friendly, but the game world is not. Your character is not a beautiful snowflake and is not destined for glory, at least not without struggling to barely scrape by as a murderhobo first. If you make it to third level, you’re beating the odds. That’s why it’s crucial for me that character creation take a drunk person no more than fifteen minutes.

Also my players die a lot because we get pretty wasted sometimes and they make silly decisions. Which might be my favorite part of the game.

Philosopher's Castle

This post is mostly for Grant, Kelly, and Scott. Layth showed up last night and we soloed for a little while before Ashley got home and joined in. This is what happened.

So Bad Ray the katana wielding mage was wandering through a village on his way to Mistfall. He walks strait past the wailing woman in the town square and the creepy looking castle on the hill, but stops to help when he sees a little red headed kid being carried up the hill by a tentacle faced crocodile man. Ray climbed a tree and dive-bomb stabbed the thing in the head. Then he freed the kid and reverted to his initial strategy of ignoring the dungeon, continuing on his way to the big city.

Night was falling as he arrived in Mistfall, so Bad Ray naturally decided to wander around looking for a bank to rob. He glued (spell on page 8 of the 52 Pages RPG) the guard’s feet to the spot and murdered him from behind, but the victim was screaming for help as he died. People were coming, so Ray grabbed the dead man’s armor and ran to a tavern on the shady side of town, where he engaged in mutually consensual intercourse with an overweight young woman, whose name he forgot to ask. I guess that’s just what you do after you fail to rob a bank? After that he suddenly remembered the creepy castle and decided to go back.

That’s when Ashley got home so from here on in it makes a little more sense. Molly and Bad Ray found the secret back entrance and got in through the basement, where they found body parts everywhere in one room and a creature with one leg and four arms in the next, imprisoned in a giant glass ball with a magic circle around the base exactly like the Sandman.

Ray immediately befriended it, and it telepathically communicated to him and Molly that:

-it had followed a giant tentacled brain creature called a grell across the multiverse because it had taken its “other”

-that its other and therefore the grell were in this castle

-that the grell and its followers had known the friendly creature was on its way and tricked it

-that its supernaturally hard glass prison has a “molecular structure that should be vulnerable to the correct vibrational frequency” (whatever that means).

Molly tried to pick the lockpick her way into the treasury but that was a bust. They did, however, find a shrine to a tentacled brain creature (which matched the idol in the pocket of the thing Ray killed). Then they found the secret door that led to a pool of water with brain stems swimming around like sperm, and a re-statted mind flayer on a throne. After a short argument they killed the shit out of it, took its robe (which puts out all nearby light sources whenever its wearer sings the chorus to this) and staff, and headed upstairs. After a couple lobotomy-style-zombies almost killed Bad Ray, they headed back to town to stock up on healing potions and rest at the inn.

The next morning, they wake up to an armored man, accompanied by two robed figures like the thing Bad Ray ninja assassinated a few days ago, ringing the bell in the town square and demanding to know who had killed his father. Ray, being quite Bad, poked his head out the window and responded “I killed your daddy, beeyotch!” even though he legitimately hadn’t figured out who the guy’s dad was yet.

Molly dropped some burning oil onto one of the reptilian things as they approached the inn and sort of freestyle rappelled down to stab it in the neck when it stop-drop-rolled, while Ray set up a magic mouth + fear trap and hid in the closet (hurr hurr). The other monster failed its save and ran as the armored dude was climbing the steps, Molly close behind. Ray glued his feet to the spot and Molly tied him up from behind, then they tied him to a chair and tortured the hell out of him.

They learned that:

-the mind flayer was the dude’s dad…

-…who was in a transitional stage on his way to becoming a “higher power”

before they fucked up and told each other out loud that they weren’t gonna let him live anyway and he clammed up and got himself executed.

Then the a tavern worker, who (because I felt like it) was the mother of the little red headed kid Ray had heroically saved, came upstairs to assess the situation. From her, they learned that:

-the man they’d just tortured and killed was one Lord Highrock.

-everyone knows his father died years ago.

-she doesn’t know exactly how or when he died, and she doesn’t know anyone who was at the funeral.

-there aren’t as many people in Highrock Village as there used to be, but as far as the woman knows no one has died in years. She thinks they must have all moved or something.

-it sounds to her like those dead people Molly and Ray found were probably all from out of town, and therefore not her problem.

-no one goes up to the castle ever.

-she has no recollection of the bell ringing or the robed crocodilians. In fact, she doesn’t see the charred corpse of the one Molly killed even when she’s looking right at it.

-(I swear I rolled this one randomly on my rumors table) old man Highrock was once gifted a sword that, when struck against a hard surface, emits a single perfect and terrible note, unlike any sound heard in music or nature.

And that’s where we ended the session. They haven’t gone shopping for supplies yet, so think about what you want to stock up on if you’re showing up next time. It’s not a big town but there’s an apothecary that sells a few simple potions, ingredients, and alchemy equipment, a general store that sells basic equipment (we’ll say that includes matchlock muskets, powder and shot), and a few of the basic village services like a blacksmith and tanner.