So the group I'm GM'ing for a play by post game is finishing up its first scenario. Read the whole thing here:
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,17729.0.html)
For those of you who don't have the time to read through 20~ pages, here is what happened:
The Player Characters: Faraday Church is a member of the Venatori Umbrorum with a serious grudge against Red Court and Black Court vampires. He is as powerful as a White Council wizard, but he was denied membership when he was younger and less powerful, and doesn't have a high opinion of them.
Tubal Cain is a pious Catholic and a White Council Warden with an amulet that grants him use of Soulfire. His attitude for dealing with monsters is righteous wrath first, ask questions later.
Mallory Janus is a changeling in the court of Autumn. Autumn is a well kept secret in this game world. Mallory sided with them when they helped him deal with a Summer Sidhe giving his family problems.
Detective Paul Mitchell is a focused practitioner (refers to himself as a 'findomancer') who works for the Seattle police department. He occupies a precarious position of being clued in about monsters, and still having to deal with bureaucracy.
Joseph Smith is a werewolf that looks out for the little guy. His player ended up leaving the game, so he was replaced by...
Lilith Aleza is a White Court vampire who inherited a lot of money after her father's "accidental" death. She is a savvy business woman with no opposition to doing work that is less than legal, but she still finds herself acting as the unlikely champion of King County.
The Story:
Faraday and Joseph encounter a couple of toughs trying to kidnap a woman. The two of deal with the toughs pretty quickly (Faraday performed an awesome maneuver where he used his magic to turn their kidnapping van into a giant electromagnet, disarming the entire group) and manage to capture one of them. Faraday soulgazes the man, and what he sees leads him to believe that this is a vampires thrall. Joseph deals with the captive (at this point, his player has left the game) while Faraday goes to check one of his Venatori sources. He learns that Summer is up to something, but the details are vague. After making a few calls, he goes to the police station to inform Detective Mitchell of the situation.
Mallory Janus is enjoying the day at the mall when an over muscled thug comes up to him and makes not so vague threats. Mallory picks up on the aura of Summer coming from the thug. He is able to use the guys less than stellar intelligence against him and get away without much trouble. Then Mallory goes to meet Biggs, a goblin that is a decent source of information. Biggs informs him that someone in Summer is stirring up trouble against Mallory upon finding that he has sided with Autumn. This is bad news, because Autumn is supposed to be a well kept enough secret that even Biggs shouldn't know about it, let alone agents of the Summer court. Mallory decides that he should go find some help from some people he knew. First, he would go see Detective Mitchell at the police station...
Detective Mitchell has been called to a crime scene on the docks, and Tubal Cain is given a message from a priest that he should go to the docks for some vague reason. The cop at the scene explains that the current theory of how the guy died was an animal attack, but she admits its not a very good theory. Mitchell is able to figure out rather quickly that this wasn't an animal attack, but probably a vampire snack. Cain figures out that he was probably sent to the docks for the murder that he finds happened there, but he is kept out of the scene by the police. A man named Joshua Fontaine approaches him purporting to offer information about what happened. He leads Cain off to the side and makes a poor attempt at subtlety while suggesting he'd pay Cain to go vigilante on the killer of the murdered guy. Cain soulgazes Fontaine to get the measure of the man, and does not like what he sees. Fontaine makes a few futile attempts to lie his ass off about his intentions, while Cain tries to threaten him into spilling the beans. Detective Mitchell managed to see Cain at the edge of the police tape earlier, and shows up at this war of words, hears Cains story of what happened, and arrests Fontaine. After sending Fontaine away in a squad car, Mitchell goes back to the crime scene to perform a quick ritual to dust for supernatural 'fingerprints'. What he finds indicates not only a vampire, but one that practices magic.
Detective Mitchell shows up at the police station to interrogate Fontaine. Fontaine, of course, already had a lawyer waiting for him. After some difficult negotiation, he finally gets Fontaine to give up some information, as long as he gets the charges against Fontaine dropped. Around this point in time, everyone starts trickling into the station to meet up with the detective. When he gets out of interrogation, the group discusses what has been happening this day. They decide to all head out to the port to check out the information Mitchell had just got from interrogation.
At the port, they hardly get anything done when the Summer thug that had threatened Mallory earlier shows up. He loses the glamour that had been on him and appears as the full sized ogre he is. After a few spells bounce harmlessly off of him, the group switch to mundane weapons and start doing some good damage to him. Just as the ogre is taking his last few hits, two Black Court Vampires come at the group from the other direction. Two of the high points of the fight involved Cain disappearing in a puff of feathers as he teleports right next to a vampire and slices it up, and Faraday shooting a gun with special ammunition that blows off a vampires head in a single shot.
The downed ogre leaves cryptic threats against Mallory, and Cain takes several teeth from the dead vampires so they can be used as links to the master vampire. The group finds the shipping crate that smuggled the vampires into the city. Faraday calls his mentor, Jack Brink, to talk over the events so far. Faraday considers the possibility that the master vampire of this scourge could be the one responsible for killing his family. Mallory receives a visit from an a pixie with uncharacteristic reserve that tells him one of Autumn's top messenger pixies has gone missing. The group decide to go equip themselves for battle, and to meet up at Mitchell's house to perform the tracking spell on the master vampire.
Lilith Aleza meets with a man who promises her a lot of money, and future business opportunities, if she will deliver some blackmail material to a city councilman at a prearranged meeting. The blackmail goes smoothly enough, but the councilman put a tail on her to follow her to her mansion that she saw too late. Later that evening, someone manages to sneak into her large and well guarded estate and attacks her. A few convenient declarations later, the assailant is falling out of a fourth story window. Lilith doesn't get any useful information from him, and she feeds on him to satiate her hunger. The next visitor to the estate is more polite about it, and shows up at the front gate. Lilith lets in this woman who claims to be a researcher out of a sense of hospitality. Lilith decides its time to hire a mercenary, Seth, to help out with whatever trouble she had managed to stir up.
Faraday is surprised to see his mentor, Jack Brink, waiting at his house for him. Jack tags along as Faraday heads to the meeting at Mitchell's house. When meeting the group there, Jack tries to take charge, and demands the group run surveillance on the vampire master but not try to engage him until a Venatori strike team is prepped on the situation. No one thinks much of Jack's plan (too many innocents could be killed in the days it took to get a strike team ready) and a minor confrontation occurs between Cain and Faraday over whether the Venatori Umbrorum or the White Council are better able to handle supernatural threats. After everyone calms down, Detective Mitchell performs a tracking spell to locate the vampire master. He then performs a remote viewing spell to allow him and everyone else in the room to spy on the vampires activities. The remote viewing shows the vampire performing a complex ritual, and Cain makes an educated guess that it is a ritual to remove the traditional Black Court weaknesses from the vampire performing the ritual. The group mount up to track down the vampire and kill him before he can complete the ritual. Mallory, however, receives a warning that a group of Summer Fae have discovered a Way to one of Autumns strongholds, and he rushes off to defend it.
The remaining vampire hunters follow the tracking spell to the Space Needle. Faraday and Cain manage to handle a very long flight of stairs to the top without overexerting themselves, while the out of shape detective is having trouble breathing when he gets to the top. Jack Brink takes his chances with the elevator. At the top, there is an epic battle with spells flying all over the place and plenty of collateral damage. The vampire goes down faster than I had intended, but the good guys didn't come away completely unscathed. He reveals that he is indeed the one that was behind the deaths of Faraday's family, but when Faraday interrogates him at the end, he hints that he acted on the orders of someone else. He also got in the three words "Destroy your Allies" as his death curse on Faraday. A little after the fight ended, a strange short man showed up, talked about how much he enjoyed the entertaining fight, hinted at his connection to the days events, and promptly disappeared. The group parted ways and got out of the Space Needle before the cops showed.
Mallory is led to the location of the way the Summer is attacking. This way happens to be inside Lilith's property. When Mallory gets there, Lilith, Seth, and Lilith's security forces are engaged in battle with several things that look like grassy moving hills. Mallory crashes his car into one of them, and points out the gas tank, allowing Seth to use some tracer rounds to blow up the car and one of the hill monsters that was near it. After a lengthy battle (in which Lilith makes good use of a grenade and a halberd, and Mallory makes several distractions) that results in one of the security guards completely trampled, the hills are defeated. Mallory runs towards the closing Way, into which one last hill got away to. He and Lilith head into the Nevernever to face off with the final hill, and after winning, the Sidhe that led the attack gets away. The Sidhe, by the way, is the same 'researcher' that Lilith let onto her property earlier, and is the very "Evelynn" that forced Mallory to first seek Autumn's protection. The grateful Autumn Lord, Waylen, thanks Mallory, and offers Lilith a minor favor to be paid in the future.
