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The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: admiralducksauce on October 18, 2010, 07:18:31 PM

Title: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG/Core campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on October 18, 2010, 07:18:31 PM
I ran DFRPG for my group last weekend.  It was our first time with the system.  We'd had about a month to bandy about High Concepts and the general idea of the game - a roving biker gang of monster hunters, like Supernatural meets Sons of Anarchy.  As such, I decided to skip city creation for now and we just did characters.  I did explain setting Themes and Threats, and we'll add them in as they jump out at us.

Without further ado, here's the characters and the events (HC = high concept; T = trouble):

Bill Stockburn
Supernatural Scholar on the Prowl (HC)
Former Host of Pantagruel (T)
Sweet Ride
Living Occult Encyclopedia
Knows a Guy Who Can Get That
Denarians on My Trail
Bad Eyes, Good Shotgun

Carter Mews
Arcane Acquisitions Expert (HC)
Why Buy When You Can Steal (T)
Rodger’s Ring of Remarkable Recall
Cain and Abel
Good, Bad, I’m the Guy With the Goods
It Wasn’t Me, It Was the One-Armed Man
I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

Scott Specter
Mean Motherbleeping Servant of God (HC)
On a Mission From God (T)
Outlaws to the End
Path of the Righteous Ex-Con
Driven By Redemption
Occult of Personality
By the Skin of My Teeth

Clayton Haycock James
Marine Recon Biker (HC)
Wrecked as a Soldier (T)
Fights Like an Engine
Been Through the Wringer
Knock Me Down But Never Out
Where Did You Come By That?
Renegade

---

Bobby Mackey’s Music World - Wilder, KY

Bill and the gang heard about a horrific murder at Music World in Kentucky: one of the Ghost Hunter Academy cadets heard a voice interact directly with her, left her partner and the cameraman at a dead sprint, and was decapitated by something that then stole her head, all before the other TAPS crew could get to the scene.  Bill’s friend Walton (played by Patrick Swayze) was running the road house while the Mackeys were on vacation in Europe, so Bill had a personal linterest in getting to the bottom of things, despite the fact that the incident was going to be a media circus.  Scott couldn’t ignore the call either; he knew at a deep level that there was Wrong in that place that needed to be put Right.  I compelled both PCs, both to illustrate how compels work as well as showing them how their backgrounds could tie directly into adventures.  Sure, on a metagame level they would go along anyway, but that’s technically a self-compel too.  They also didn’t have a whole lot of FATE to start with, and I wanted them to see early on how useful FP could be, and wanted to get them enough in hand so they wouldn’t hoard them.

When the gang reached Music World just before dawn, the place was crawling with press vans, TAPS trucks, a couple sherriff’s department cars, and a smattering of diehard TAPS fans who were holding a little vigil.  Bill found an opening to talk to Walton; the bemulleted master bouncer was glad Bill was there and mentioned that maybe there is something weird going on.  He warned Bill to step lightly; the sherriff, JR Keamey (played by R Lee Ermey), doesn't take kindly to strangers poking around in his town's business, and he was already on edge from the TAPS people and all their hangers-on.  This was a group-wide compel of my only setting Aspect thus far, and made it clear that running things up the flagpole wouldn't pan out.  My game is a road trip game.  We don't have a city, and because of time constraints and tainted pizza, we were lucky to have gotten through character creation the previous session.  The one Aspect we have as a setting Theme so far is "You're On Your Own", and refers to the biker gang being on the fringes of society.  Authorities will be suspicious, unhelpful, unbelieving, or sometimes outright hostile.  Furthermore, the various supernatural powers aren't as organized in my game as the default Dresdenverse.  It's more like Supernatural, with little terror cells of hunters and one-off or small groups of monsters.

Meanwhile, Clay stuck with Bill and assessed that Walton was clearly the pin holding the road house staff together (discovered Walton's Natural Leader aspect).  Carter snuck around back and declared an Open 2nd Story Window with Burglary; he then snuck in with ease.  Because it's a crime scene, the TAPS equipment was still set up, and Carter made off with the DV tapes.  He covered his tracks with a Deceit block, leaving some empty beer bottles around the equipment and shuffling some stuff around to deflect suspicion.  He DID however accept a Compel on his Why Buy When You Can Steal trouble, and nicked some petty cash and a smartphone someone left out to charge.  Scott, on the other hand, started Rapporting with the vigil crowd.  He was looking for the background on the place, why the Ghost Hunters were there, and then silently pieced valuable bits together.

Oh, and he had a smartphone, so he looked it up on the Internet as well.  There's a bunch of hauntings and activity at Bobby Mackey's Music World, but the one I was keying in on this adventure was the decapitation of Pearl Bryan by Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling in 1896.  Scott put together some clues and the gang rendezvoused at their bikes.  Bill and Clay headed to the coroners.  Bill invoked his I Know a Guy Who Can Get That on top of an insane Contacts roll, and I agree that Walton has a good friend who's a medical examiner - she's patched Walton up in the past a few times when he couldn't go to the hospital proper.  The coroner let Bill and Clay in to see the dead woman, but I compelled Clay's Been Through the Wringer.  The corpse reminded him too much of his rising conflict, where he saw the terrible remains of his unit in Afghanistan, so he left the building (and thus couldn't place a maneuver to assist Bill's Lore roll).  It doesn't matter in the end, because Bill knocked Lore out of the park and picked up a faint whiff of evaporating ectoplasm from the neck stump.  The medical examiner told them it was a sharp instrument with incredible force behind it - taking someone's head off in a single stroke is NOT easy.

Clay helped Carter break into a Radio Shack - Carter stole the DV tapes but they still need stuff to watch them on.  He bought out of a Compel on his Why Buy When You Can Steal trouble Aspect (they didn't want a police chase or other involvement right now), and the group met back at a motel room they rented.  I explained that ghosts typically act like echoes in this game; there's always something that interferes with the spirit or gives it a reason to be more dangerous or manifest.  It could be ritual, or some astronomical conjunction, or a summoning, or it might not even be a ghost.  It could be a demon even, or a tulpa.  The group put their heads together, assessed Aspects and made manuevers using the various stuff they already stole and learned, and Bill knocked a Lore roll into orbit with an 8-shift success.  They figured out that Pearl Bryan - the victim - is the famous ghost, not so much her killers.  The killer wasn't a tulpa, then, due to lack of public belief.  And it wasn't Pearl herself, it didn't fit the clues or the history of the establishment.  The method of death - decapitation with a surgically sharp instrument - matched up nicely with Scott Jackson, who killed Pearl Bryan with a dissecting knife.  Someone could have made a deal with that spirit, that could explain the activity, but who?  Bill had a terrible revelation.  Bill's player asked me how Music World was doing before Walton showed up way back when.  I explain that it wasn't much to look at, the location is poor, and it was on the verge of going under.  It's exactly the kind of place that would hire Walton, given his reputation.  Walton turned the place around, and the hauntings and tourism that brought in were what helped keep the place on an even keel through some rough times.  Walton made a deal with a spirit; the spirit haunts the road house, brings in tourism, and in return Walton helps smooth over anything the spirit might do.  For reward, Walton could finally stop drifting and settle down.  He'd get a home out of the arrangement, a community, friends.  He hadn't had the chance to clean up after the spook this time, because there was a camera crew there and it ballooned out of his hands.

The gang started gearing up to ask Walton some questions when there was a knock at the motel door.  It was the sherriff and at least 2 deputies.  The complications from Carter stealing that smartphone (with a GPS, naturally) were coming home to roost, and the local cops suspected the gang of the DV tapes' theft as well as possibly the Radio Shack burglary.  Carter, Bill, and Scott started out the bathroom window while Clay stalled the cops.  I handed out a bunch of compels in short order; Scott urged them out the window but left the stolen merch, which prompted Sherriff Keamey to bear down on Clay; Clay didn't respond well to overbearing authority figures, burst out the door, and started punching cops; Bill's a used-up Denarian host and couldn't wriggle out the narrow bathroom window.  He'd have to come out the front with Clay and the police.

This scene was our first FATE fight, and it went pretty well.  The cops all had Fair fighting skills, Average Athletics and Driving, and Mediocre everything else.  Clay hit Sherriff Keamey off the bat with a mild consequence "Got My Bell Rung" while Bill blasted deputy Cletus with rock salt, taking him directly out and leaving him gasping for breath on the parking lot asphalt.  Carter and Scott beat feet around the back, thinking they might have to steal a police car, but Clay's was handling Keamey and Deputy Enos all by himself.  Clay had a ton of Endurance stunts and was basically Elliot from Leverage.  Since there was only Deputy Roscoe left, Carter and Scott double-teamed him.  Carter took some stress but they took the cop down with his own baton and knocked him out.  Figuring this was a sizable percentage of the area's police, the gang slashed the squad car tires and sped back to Music World before word of their shenanigans spread too far.

I figured that they would either look for Scott Jackson's burial place and go directly for the spirit's remains, or accost Walton first.  If they went for the grave, I would have Walton and some muscle show up and try to stop the gang directly, and the spook would be drawn there to protect itself.  The gang went to Walton first, though.  The police presence was gone - after all, they were unconscious and handcuffed at the motel.  The press had gotten their early fill and had cleared out for the time being (a smart declaration by someone, Carter I think, with his I Love It When A Plan Comes Together).

Walton was there, waiting for them with two of his biggest bouncers.  Walton didn't bother denying anything, but I compelled Scott's "Driven By Dedemption" and the ex-con preacher stopped Bill before he could gun down his old friend.  Scott took over and we entered a brief social combat, Scott vs. Walton.  Scott brough the terrible weight of the evil pact Walton had made down on him with a massive Intimidation roll.  Walton ended up with a moderate "Lost My Nerve in Front of My Staff" consequence.  He shot back, trying to act like he didn't know the spirit was THAT bloodthirsty, but Scott wasn't convinced.  Scott dealt a mild consequence to Walton again - "Hounded by the Law" - convincing Walton that he would go down for the Ghost Hunter's murder in the end.  I then compelled that aspect, ruling that Walton's two goons didn't want to be part of whatever was going down.  They ran for it while Walton escalated to violence, drawing a silver knife across his palm and drawing the attention of the murderous spirit below.  Carter won physical initiative after that, and went in with his stolen police baton but Walton, juiced up with a bunch of Fists stunts, sacrificed his next action to turn Carter's strike into a Wrist Locked maneuver that would set up a grapple.  My plan was for Walton to use Carter as a human shield and run for it.  I did NOT expect Scott to Soulgaze Walton.

Bobby Mackey's Music World's manager's office melted away and Scott stood looking at Walton.  Bill's friend stood alone in a long, narrow dojo that went on forever to either side but still felt claustrophobic.  The floors were black lacqured wood; cobwebs traced silken lines in the corners.  The blank dojo walls were lit up like ephemeral projection TVs and showed glimpses of Walton's life.  He was a born fighter.  Flashes of Vietnamese jungle, countless scrapes in bars, formal training in Japan, the military, and elsewhere all flicker on the screen.  Somewhere outside the dojo, Scott could hear echoing laughter, drinking songs, and clinking glass - the celebratory sounds Walton always heard but never was a part of.  Inside it was all shouting and smashing bottles and flashing red and blue lights.  Walton himself stood stock-still.  Scars and welts and cuts crisscrossed his body, lit beneath by a firey light.  Despite all Walton had seen and done, he was still a fighter.  He would not give up, and he wanted desperately to belong.  He wanted - needed - a place to call home, and once he found it he would do anything to keep it.  Even call up evil ghosts to bring tourists to his road house.

As it turned out, however, Scott dealt way more mental stress than Walton could take.  Walton could take a Severe consequence, which would take him out, or he could take the stress, which would take him out.  Therefore, he just took the stress.  Back in the real world, before Walton can finish his aikido magic on Carter and hold that silver knife to his throat, Walton pissed himself, dropped the knife, and fell over, catatonic.  THEN the angry spirit of Scott Jackson rose through the basement up into the bar.  It held a wickedly sharp dissecting knife and showed the gang exactly what it could do with it.  Walton's two bouncer mooks who ran for the door met the evil spirit head on.  Jackson showed it had the Wall of Death stunt, killing both mooks with a flurry of slashes.  One bouncer's head bounced across the dance floor and the gang sprung into action.

Clay, Scott, and Carter engaged Jackson's ghost around the bar while Bill ran for the basement.  He had a good idea about where Jackson's remains actually were - in a shallow well in Music World's basement, right around where the TAPS member was killed.  The ghost doesn't last that long, but the fear of conaequences had been impressed upon my players enough that they liberally spent FATE to avoid being tagged for more than simple stress.  Clay rubbed his hands in margarita salt and dealt a vicious Severe consequence to the ghost, "I Got My Face Punched Off".  Scott used Holy Touch, a little motel Bible, and lots of applicable Aspects and dealt a Moderate, "Barely Holding Together".  Carter, sad to say, mostly just got slashed up some.  Clay came around with a salt shaker in each hand, tagged the ghosts, new consequence, and shattered the shakers inside the ghost's torso!  The spirit went up with a ghastly howl... for now.  Meanwhile, I was compelling Bill's age-related Aspect, slowing him down and keeping him from reaching the well too quickly, but with Jackson temporarily dispered, nothing could stop the gang from salting and burning the remains, which were indeed buried in that evil well underneath the road house.

In the end, Walton's dark pact would protect Music World for a while longer.  The place's infamy would shoot through the roof in the near term - after all, a TV show person was killed there - but eventually without Jackson's spirit there to "goose" the place every now and then, the hauntings would stop and Music World would fade.  As for Walton himself, we don't know.  Nobody but him knows what he saw when he looked into Scott's soul, or whether it would help heal him or harm him further.  Would Scott come to regret stopping Bill from killing his friend?

All in all, my group really liked the FATE system.  We liked the compels, actually - getting a FATE point takes the edge off the complication, and we all trust each other not to be dicks.  I tried to look out for them, and look harder for compels when I noticed their FATE stock running low.  I know that from now on, I can play a little harder as GM.  No PC took any consequences, and nobody ran out of FATE, but it was a great learning experience and it went as smooth as could be expected for a brand new system.  They all liked the tactical options, especially how those options are consistent, not very numerous, yet applicable to a wide range of situations.  Clay's player was an aspect-tagging machine, and Carter's player I think latched onto assessing and declaring.  There weren't many declarations this time, but I think it'll happen as we play more.  For next time, I'll work up some tougher bad guys and use multiples, so they can maneuver for each other and use spin and whatnot.  I think since lethality is optional for the most part, I feel okay with playing hardball in conflicts and really make my players work together.  I give DFRPG 4 / 4 epic wins.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Mattastic on October 18, 2010, 07:57:09 PM
This is rad! Thanks for posting.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: deathwombat on October 19, 2010, 01:25:06 AM
I like it!!
All pure mortals?
More o r less?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on October 19, 2010, 02:19:11 AM
Thanks!  Clayton and Bill are pure mortals.  Carter has the Item of Power power - one ring with the accumulated memories of his family tree, and another that can detect the presence of the supernatural (it works best on items, as it acts magnetic around them).  Scott has Holy Touch, Righteousness, and the Sight, which works really well for uncontrollable and possibly horrific visions from God.  Bill went the "no stunts, all FATE points" approach while Clay's the "all stunts, 1 FATE" type of character. 
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Kaldra on October 19, 2010, 06:10:47 AM
verry nice, i enjoyed taking a look at what a session felt like
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on January 18, 2011, 10:49:45 PM
After FAR too long, I got to run a second DFRPG session for my Supernatural-inspired monster-hunting biker gang.

Session 2
Scott, Carter, and Jimmy

Scott and Carter are listed above.  Jimmy's stats are like so:

Jimmy Pale Wolf
Shaman Vigilante
I Bite Off More Than I Can Chew
Ancestral Tomahawks of the Cherokee
Crusader
More Than One Way to Stake a Vampire
Liquid Courage
Literally Marked by Power

---

Dewayo Falls, WI
Scott gots a call out of the blue from a member of his old gang, Frankie “Spider” Nixon.  Considering they set Scott up to take the fall for their shenanigans in Scott’s backstory, it’s odd that Spider would have Scott’s phone number or even consider him someone who would help him out.   With a Compel on “Outlaws to the End”, however, Scott decided he couldn’t let his old acquaintance hang out to dry and so twelve hours later Scott, Carter, and Jimmy reached the outskirts of Dewayo Falls, Wisconsin. It was a shade past midnight in the medium-sized industrial town when a Daewoo with no headlights caught up to Scott’s bike and he recognized Spider behind the wheel.  They couldn’t hear each other over the engine noise but the entire group was coming to an intersection where they’d be able to figure something out.  Spider didn’t seem to understand what the red light meant; in fact, he turned around to look at the braking bikers with a look of “why are you slowing down?” as the Daewoo flew through the intersection and shredded against a GMC van.

Cue “Metal Health (Bang Your Head)” by Quiet Riot.  I shouted “CREDITS!” at the players and we continued.

Scott called 911 while Jimmy checked on the van’s driver.  I was going to simply declare the innocent driver dead but realized this was a great situation to showcase declarations.  I told Jimmy’s player that he could roll Lore (he has a stunt that lets him use Lore for medicinal trappings) against a difficulty to determine the man was still alive, or he could simply pay a Fate Point to make it so.  Jimmy paid the FP and amusingly used his “Liquid Courage” Aspect, declaring that the van’s driver was drunk enough to be loose and relaxed.  Spider was not so lucky.  Carter noted that addition to forgetting how to roll down a car window or what red lights meant, Spider also forgot to wear his seatbelt.  Carter investigated the scene with a cold detachment (“Good, Bad, I’m the Guy With the Goods”) and finds a bag with an unscathed magic 8-ball wrapped in dirty laundry and little else besides the meat-splatter from Spider’s cooling corpse.

Jimmy turned his attention to Spider now.  He asked if he could just summon Spider’s spirit and ask him what happened.  I explained about needing a link to your subject, and I compelled Scott’s “Outlaws To The End” such that he wouldn’t allow Jimmy to take... pieces... of his dead friend for some ritual nonsense.  Jimmy had to content himself with hair and nails.  Basically, we negotiated that while Jimmy had a link strong enough to attempt a summoning ritual, he could not declare any aspects relating to having a strong link to Spider through “fresh” (ew) material components.

Carter, Scott, and Jimmy rode to Dewayo’s mall and holed up in the construction site of an up-and-coming Boscov’s.  They quickly figured the magic 8-ball was important, and Carter had enough background in arcane artifacts to know that an unbreakable object like the 8-Ball was some kind of Item of Power.  Also, his magic-detecting ring (one of Carter’s own Items of Power and linked to his “Family Jewels” Aspect)  was glowing terribly brightly.  A moratorium was declared on asking the 8-Ball anything, and Carter held onto it.  It was clear that the ball had something to do with Spider’s death, but they’d have to ask Spider how and why he’d come across it.

The gang got a room at the local Holiday Inn Express and began preparing the summoning ritual.  This was our first foray into thaumaturgy (or really any DFRPG magic), and I wanted it to be flavorful enough that the guys would want to come back to it.  The trickiest part was picking the shifts required for the spell.  I told Jimmy that he’d need enough shifts to reliably trounce Spider’s Conviction roll, and then throw 2 more shifts on top for duration.  Jimmy wouldn’t want Spider dissipating too soon.  We decided 10 shifts seemed all right, and after that I told Jimmy he’d need a circle to contain Spider, but other than that, go nuts and place some Aspects on the scene that Jimmy can tag for his Lore roll.
1.  Jimmy drew the circle with soap from the motel bathroom spiked with Spider’s powdered nail clippings and set a small bowl with his hair and other flammables in the center.  Because of the previous Compel, we agreed these preparations were cool but wouldn’t be taggable.
2.  Scott knew Spider in life and could get very close to his Name.  Scott would be the one actually calling Spider (invoking “Outlaws to the End”).
3.  Carter rolled Burglary to shut off the power and sprinklers to the room, declaring a “No Interference” Aspect.  They were, after all, going to be burning things indoors.

Jimmy rolled his Lore, tagged the Aspects, and missed the difficulty by 2, which he made up for by invoking “Literally Marked By Power”.  His eldritch tattoos glowed with energy and pushed the last bit of power into the circle needed to manifest the newly-deceased Spider Nixon.  He was clearly free of whatever influence drove him to his death, and explained very clearly that he had fallen under the saliva-induced addictive thrall of a vampiress named Amanda Knox out of Detroit. (“What does she look like?” -”Well, hot, but trashy hot.”  -”So... Megan Fox?”)  Knox told Spider to retrieve the 8-ball.  He didn’t know how she knew of it, but he stole it from two hired goons from Crowley-Lampkin, the firm that Carter used to acquire items for.  The two goons were Mr. Tannhauser (Vinnie Jones) and Mr. Warfield (Terry Crews), and they were bad news (and a Compel for Carter’s “Cain and Abel” Aspect).  They found Spider soon after and he ran.  He asked the 8-Ball for Scott’s phone number and had been relying on it more and more ever since to evade pursuit.  He coincidentally forgot about returning it to Amanda Knox, so there’s no doubt that the vampire is on the artifact’s trail as well (A Compel on Jimmy’s “More Than One Way to Stake a Vampire”).  Spider explains that the 8-Ball answered any question he asked it, and wondered where he’d be going after Jimmy released him.  At this point, Scott self-compelled his own “On a Mission From God” Aspect and we agreed that for the rest of the spell’s duration, Scott would be saying last rites and taking Spider’s confession and generally trying to help him into the best possible fate once he moved on.  Spider would be too occupied to answer any more questions.

CUTSCENE: Tannhauser and Warfield arrived at the scene of the crash.  Tannhauser did a passable impression of a Winchester Brothers FBI gag to get the basics from the cops on the scene while Warfield noted burnout markings from three motorcycles.

Eventually Spider faded away.  The gang left via the motel room’s window and drove across town to the Super 8.  They rented two adjacent rooms, then used a Resouces maneuver and Rapport roll to bribe the clerk, which set the difficulty for anyone tracking the group to discern which room was the “decoy” room.

Scott Looked upon the artifact with his Sight (being more squicked out by the metaphysical representation of the motel room than the 8-Ball itself).  He explained what he saw and the group determined that the 8-Ball was some kind of Intellectus.  It was pretty much an academic point, but Carter’s player was the one who got me hooked on the Dresden Files, so I think he appreciated me tying something obscure like that into the game.  Then I compelled... well, I didn’t have an official Aspect, but I offered them each a FP to sleep.  It was late, they’d been on a 12-hour road trip, and they just saw some hairy shit.  The complication was of course that Tannhauser and Warfield, Crowley-Lampkin’s two enforcers, would track them down to the Super 8.

What transpired next was why I am seriously considering adding a campaign Aspect about trashed motel rooms.  Warfield’s Intimidation beat the preset difficulty to get the gang’s real room number from the clerk.  Both men’s Stealth beat Scott and Jimmy’s Alertness but not Carter.  Carter’s Stealth, however, beat both enforcers.  Carter woke up his friends and they made ready to skedaddle out the second motel room window that night but Jimmy had other ideas.  With a Compel to “Bite Off More Than He Could Chew”, Jimmy kicked the door out into Warfield before the big man could do the same!  Both thugs had tranquilizer pistols - a surprisingly genteel move that I believe created a slight atmosphere of mutual respect (“They’re not here to kill us, so we don’t reeeeally need to kill them either”).  Carter escaped out the window, slashed the tires on the thugs’ SUV, and drove off (A Compel on “Good, Bad, I’m the Guy With the Goods” to look out for Numba One, and a Compel to Scott’s “Outlaws To The End” to stick with Jimmy as he bit off more than he could chew).  Tannhauser lost his weapon to Jimmy’s tomahawks, however, and after some stress on both sides Tannhauser and Warfield conceded the battle before Jimmy could plant his tomahawks in more than just Warfield’s forearm (“Bloody Defensive Wounds”, a minor consequence).  Jimmy in turn did eat a dart (a minor “Gettin’ Sleepy” consequence) but he and Scott cleared out and met back up with Carter at a Waffle House on Dewayo Falls’ ubiquitous “strip”.

CUTSCENE: A Subaru WRX pulled off onto a well-hidden side road as dawn threatened to break over Dewayo Falls.  The driver, a slender, shadowed figure, retrieved a black tarp from the rear of the vehicle and draped it over her ride before climbing back into the car.  The sun rose soon after.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on January 18, 2011, 10:50:29 PM
Meanwhile, the gang discusses their options over waffles (and a lot of coffee for Jimmy).  Carter asks if he knows of any groups or anything that they could take the 8-Ball to that could keep it safe, like a Warehouse 13 or Area 51.  I compel Jimmy’s “Crusader” and Scott’s “Path of the Righteous Ex-Con” Aspects, saying that the 8-Ball is somewhat like the One Ring.  It wants to get loose, and whoever ended up with it would be in danger just like Spider was.  They didn’t want more innocent lives on their conscience so both of them accepted the Compels and the group decided to try to destroy it.  Carter knew that every Item of Power has some ritual or process or weapon that can destroy them; the Magic 8-Ball would be no different.

With the tenative go-ahead from the other two, Carter asked the 8-Ball “How can we destroy you?”  He shook the 8-Ball and the little die appeared in the window with the words, “Drop me into the River Lethe.”

“Where is the River Lethe?” Carter asked, shaking it again.  He had to squint to read the answer, the words were so bunched together.

”It flows through the NeverNever near the River Styx.  ‘Ways’ to the river exist in Portugal and Alaska,” the 8-Ball displayed.

“Uh...” the group generally murmured.  I explained (for while Jimmy would know, his player did not) that while a Way could get you to where you needed to go, they could still get to the Lethe as long as they crossed over in a place at least somewhat similar thematically.  Even a family-owned Greek restaurant with a lot of history or museum with ancient Greek sculpture would be better than trying to open a rift out in the Waffle House parking lot.  They decided to plan their heavy metal pilgrimage later.  Right now, they needed to get Tannhauser and Warfield off their trail.  Scott and Carter figure that the best way to do that is to use the Crowley-Lampkin goons’ tracking skills against them; it was time to set a trap.  An odd Compel happened next - I compelled Jimmy’s “Literally Marked by Power” Aspect, his distinctive ritual tattoos, and said that when Tannhauser and Warfield come looking for you it’ll be easy to just follow the Native American biker with facial ink.  The complication would come from, well, Tannhauser and Warfield being rather dangerous dudes.  It was very nearly a self-compel.  The PCs wanted the goons to find them, but it was all with the intention of making things complicated.  I figured it was better to err on the side of giving Fate Points to players.

Meanwhile, I compelled Mr. Warfield’s consequence of “Bloody Defensive Wounds” behind to scenes so Amanda Knox could catch their scent, so to speak.  I just needed a flimsy excuse for her to show up for the final encounter and that was it.

The gang staked (heh) out an abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of town.  Jimmy set up a fairly easy detection ritual around the premises while Carter and Scott made rolls and declared Aspects on the scene to help their ambush.  I divided the slaughterhouse itself into 3 “catwalk” zones with varying borders adjoining a “conveyor belt” zone, a “meat hooks” zone, and an “office” zone.  There was an additional “basement” zone off the office zone and one of the catwalk zones with a higher border value to represent the stairs.
1.  For the detection ritual, I figured it would be the Resources equivalent to setting up a small network of video cameras.  Scott’s player had done this before and we worked out a ballpark figure that turned out to be less than Jimmy’s Lore, so he had the materials on hand.  He had pairs of feathers from various birds.  One feather from each pair would be scattered through the slaughterhouse grounds, while the other feathers were attached to a dreamcatcher type rattle.  The appropriate feather would rattle the dreamcatcher when someone drew near.
2.  The 8-Ball tried to Compel Carter a few times to make him forget what he was doing (essentially being unable to place the Aspects he wanted before Tannhauser and Warfield found them), but Carter bought off the influence.
3.  The slaughterhouse/ambush area ended up with several Aspects:
    a. Blessed Ammo (non-sticky), as the PCs figured Knox or someone from her camp would be on their trail as well.
    b. Plenty of Cover
    c. Weak Floorboards
    d. There’s a Way Out
    e.  Lots of Decoy Magic 8-Balls

Jimmy’s spell alerted the gang and the PCs rolled Stealth to hide on the catwalks ringing the slaughterhouse floor.  Either naturally or by tagging “Plenty of Cover”, everyone remained hidden until Tannhauser and Warfield entered the “conveyor belt” zone at the main entrance.  They came heavy this time, with body armor, ballistic face shields, and M4 rifles with C-MAGs.  Carter revealed his position, cradling a decoy 8-Ball and aiming a .410 Judge at the two goons.

Amanda Knox tripped Jimmy’s spell next; the vampiress had crept into the “meat hooks” section of the slaughterhouse unnoticed by everyone but Jimmy.  Carter told the goons the 8-Ball was more trouble than they wanted and tossed it down to them.  Amanda made a beeline for the decoy artifact but Warfield noticed her!  Combat started, and as was to be expected, Knox acted first.  Luckily for Warfield, his combination of body armor and fairly impressive array of Endurance stunts got him off with simple stress from Amanda’s opening strikes.  Her iron-hard claws tore Warfield’s vest down to the strike plate as the big man frantically backpedaled.  Then everyone else shot at the vampire.  Her Red Court toughness powers served her well but she still came out with a minor consequence (“Burning holy buckshot in my back”) and a moderate consequence (“Bleeding out”).  Jimmy “Bit Off More Than He Could Chew” once more and left his cover to go toe-to-toe with both Crowley-Lampkin enforcers and the desperate, wounded Knox.  Tannhauser blocked Jimmy’s advance with some superb suppressive fire while Warfield lost his face shield to another stressful hit from the vampire.  He dealt his own stress in return and moved out into the “meat hooks” zone.  Amanda set her sights on a quick escape, picked up the decoy 8-Ball... and Carter compelled “Weak Floorboards” to have the bullet-riddled floor give way and dump the bitch into the basement.  Jimmy disarmed Tannhauser with a forceful Spirit evocation maneuver, throwing a phantasmal tomahawk into the thug’s arm and sending the rifle sliding across the floor.

At this point, Warfield had almost reached his stress limit and Tannhauser was unarmed.  Their presumed objective was in the hands of a pissed-off vampire whose exact position was unknown, and a crazy tomahawk-wielding maniac was bearing down on them.  Tannhauser and Warfield ran for the door.

Carter covered the scene from the catwalk while Scott grabbed Tannhauser’s rifle.  Jimmy made his way through the slaughterhouse to the basement steps and when he didn’t spot Amanda, started drawing a magic circle at the top of the stairs.  I figured it was either for intimidation purposes or to use Amanda’s blood (her “Bleeding Out” consequence) to actually nuke her if she stayed hidden.  There was a brief exchange of wordplay where Amanda recognized Jimmy (a compel on “There’s More Than One Way to Stake A Vampire”) and tried to bait him downstairs, knowing he was hot-headed and prone to charging in.  Jimmy paid off the compel and Amanda figured out she had a decoy 8-Ball.  Now she was really pissed, but I compelled her “Bleeding Out” to both give her a FP as well as keep her downstairs and unable to use the distraction of Tannhauser and Warfield returning to their SUV, rearming, and opening up on the outside of the slaughterhouse with more automatic fire!

Both gunmen applied Aspects (“Flying Lead” and “Hail of Bullets”).  Scott opened up with his pilfered weapon to apply “Friendly Fire... Isn’t” as well.  The next round everyone rolled attacks.*(1)  Carter had to tag “There’s a Way Out” to avoid the desperate blind fire and Tannhauser soaked some hits between his stress track and his armor.  Then I compelled everyone with “Out of Ammo” due to my bungled handling of the blind-fire.  Carter snuck out of the slaughterhouse and spotted the two gunmen hunkered down behind their vehicle, discussing their miserable options.  Smirking, Carter applied two maneuvers (“Flanked” and “Keys in the Ignition”) against Tannhauser and Warfield’s Alertness.  He tagged them both on a wildly successful Drive roll and ran both men down with their own SUV!  They conceded immediately after that and limped away in Knox’s Subaru. Tannhauser got off lightly with a “Crushed Foot” but Warfield was left with “Severe Internal Bleeding”.

Speaking of Knox, she cashed in that Fate Point for missing her ambush opportunity during the mad minute and tagged “Weak Floorboards”.  Amanda’s blood-spattered hands punched up through the floor and dragged Scott into the basement!  Jimmy abandoned any thought of magic use and charged downstairs (a Compel on “Crusader” to help his friend).  As it turns out, Amanda Knox was the one biting off more than she could chew.  Scott had Holy Touch and used it to invoke a single stress on Amanda.  She only had one stress box open, however, and had to use her Severe Consequence slot to soak it down to nothing!  Scott got both hands around the Red Courtier’s face and pressed his thumbs into her eye sockets.  The beast’s flesh mask fell away under the blue-white flare of Scott’s power and her face bubbled and burnt (“Holy Thumbs in My Eyes!”).  Jimmy Pale Wolf got the kill a moment later, neatly separating the vampire’s head from her body.

Carter rejoined his comrades and we stopped the adventure there with a compel from the Magic 8-Ball: that Carter would forget which one was the real one amidst the toy ones they bought.  He bought it off.

The next adventure will hopefully see the gang traveling into the NeverNever on a heavy metal pilgrimage to destroy the Magick 8-Ball before those who seek it can recover it - and before the temptation to use it overcomes them!

*(1) The blind-fire scenario I bungled I got straightened out over here. http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,23670.0.html
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Nybor_USMC on January 19, 2011, 08:13:33 AM
Wow, Just Amazing. Keep it coming  ;D
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Smith on January 19, 2011, 09:50:15 AM
I'm glad I marked this "Un-read" after the first time I stumbled across it. Great Story, I'm kind of jealous I'm not playing in it. ^_^
Can't wait for the next installment.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 01, 2011, 01:49:25 AM
Session 3
Bill (http://www.zombiepark.com/images/gramps/sam1.jpg), Clay (http://images.buddytv.com/battleimages/usr3524622/3524622_5bf8b2cc-d599-4fbf-8d8e-719a4d589807-eliot-spencer-s1-leverage-8045832-400-300.jpg), Scott (http://www.beyondhollywood.com/uploads/2010/11/ben-foster-mechanic.jpg), and Carter (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg)
Reward: Significant Milestone

THEN
With a shout of “THEN!” (the time-honored Supernatural method), I recapped the previous session and explained how Bill and Clay met back up with Scott, Carter, and Jimmy (he’s there but only as a means to get from point A to point N - you’ll see).  Their mission?  Find a way into the NeverNever, make their way to the River Lethe, the ancient Greek underworld waterway of forgetfulness, and drop the cursed Magick 8-Ball into the river before it makes Carter forget something that’ll get him killed.

NOW
We talked about how the gang was going to get from their rendezvous point in Wyoming into the NeverNever.

Option 1: Road trip to Alaska, where there’s a direct link to the River Lethe.  The disadvantage to this is that Crowley-Lampkin’s retrieval specialists would be out looking for the 8-Ball, and after what happened to Tannhauser and Warfield in Dewayo Falls, they’re not gonna be opening with tranquilizer guns this time.  Furthermore, it’s a long way to drive, and Carter would need constant supervision lest he forget who he was traveling with or what red lights meant.

Option 2: Figure out somewhere close in the mortal realm that would get them close to the Lethe in the NeverNever, then trek across whatever fairyland they dropped into.  The upside was that they wouldn’t have to deal with police, wrecked hotel rooms, or enemies who knew who they were and what they carried.  The cons were generally that the NeverNever was going to try to eat them.  They chose the NeverNever.

After that, we had a “gearing up” montage.  Crowbars!   Chains!  Pipes!  Fireplace pokers!  Tire irons!  Iron knuckle dusters!  Iron filings!  Steel buckshot!  5.56mm full metal jacket!  Finally, Carter opted for some chainmail freshly stolen from a local Ren Faire (I called it Armor:2, only applicable to attacks it would reasonably stop, and it could eat one Mild consequence, after which it’s ruined).  The other guys eschewed modern or medieval armor and mocked Carter for looking like the villain from Commando.

Scott, with what proves to be a wise decision, also opted to bring beer.  Carter glued iron filings all over the 8-Ball and dropped it into a sack.  Items of Power are unbreakable, and Carter vowed to brain something with his improvised blackjack before the night is through.  Thusly girded for battle, our heroes picked a place that should end up close to the Greek underworld once they crossed over: Elmwood Cemetery, in Detroit’s Greektown Historical District, right off the Detroit River.

The gang was enroute to Motor City in the middle of the night (“Clear Sky, Lonely Roads” scene aspect) when I started compelling Carter via the 8-Ball to forget who these people are he’s driving next to.  He bought it off but it was clear that he’d have to give ground eventually.  Oh, and also there was a Denarian tailing them in a big black pickup.  This was Pantagruel, Bill’s former landlord, and he had been on Bill’s trail since that snallygaster incident in Pennsylvania (“Denarians on My Trail” compel!).  Here’s what the PCs knew about him:

Pantagruel
Denarian Loremaster (HC)
Starscream Syndrome (T)
Powers: Superhuman Toughness, Superhuman Recovery, Wings, Evocation, Hellfire

I was very proud of my players for what they did next.  Everyone but Scott set up maneuvers (most against Pantagruel’s not-so-hot Driving skill) like “He’s Taken the Bait”, “Distracted”, and so on, then Scott blew out the Denarian’s tires and the truck did an A-Team death spiral off an overpass.  It hit the secondary road underneath, rolled into the concrete overpass supports, and exploded!  The gang continued on into Detroit as (a little while later) Pantagruel took to the sky trailing ash behind him, now in his natural state of lanky demonic owlbear thingy.

The PCs arrived at Elmwood Cemetery without further interruption and Jimmy opened a portal into the NeverNever.  As for Jimmy, he stayed in the real world because Jimmy’s player wasn’t there.  He uh... I dunno, Pantagruel ran him off or something.  The gang also forgot to bring the assault rifles they took from Tannhauser and Warfield last session, so we decided that Jimmy was also keeping those while he did... whatever he was doing.

Brütal
Right, so the gang landed about midway up Mount Erebus.  Not the one in Antarctica, the one in the Greek underworld.  The sky was gray and red and the mountain itself was made of bones and it was all very, very metal album.  They could hear the roar of a river flowing down the mountain but more importantly, they could see across the expanse of pallid wasteland stretching before them.  The great marsh of Acheron would be a major hurdle, and beyond that, the fields of Asphodel where the mediocre dead toiled their afterlives away in limbo.  Near the horizon, the glittering waters of the River Lethe separated Asphodel from the bladehenges and majestic memorials of Elysium.

Despite their best efforts to kill themselves with shitty Survival checks, the gang made their way to the foothills of Mt. Erebus without going near the river I alluded heavily to (which was the Styx).  They now stood facing an overgrown, mossy graveyard of monolithic eroded statues and temples half-buried in the soil.  Shades and spectres drifted overhead while small satyrs and other dionysian creatures scampered away from the iron-toting, weapon-draped, still-living newcomers.  That made it all the more surprising when a beautiful young woman called out to them from the river they had been avoiding thus far.  She keyed in on Carter, who carried the 8-Ball, but with a good Deceit roll he convinced the siren that she was only picking up on his two magic rings.  Nonplussed, the woman offered to lead the party as far as Asphodel in exchange for Carter’s baubles.  When that offer was rejected, she upped the ante to “pleasure everlasting”.  Carter took a Mild consequence, “Ain’t been laid in a long time”, and the siren went after Clay next.  She had no use for Bill (“tainted by the Fallen!” she accused) or Scott (“claimed by the White God!”). Bill decided the woman would have them killing each other for her amusement before too long and simply shot her in the face.

The first will love you, the second will deceive you, and the third will show you the way.
    -The Sword, “Tres Brujas”

The gang skulked into the graveyard of colossi, pausing here and there to Stealth around some centaur hunting parties.  The monoliths began to thin out when the baying of hounds drew the gang’s interest.  Bill rolled well on a Lore check and identified them as Black Shucks, Hellhounds, Barghests... not in any way native to this part of the NeverNever.  Someone was following them and they brought beasties with them.  Bill and Carter clambered up a giant statue’s head while Scott and Clay prepared to defend Carter from ground level.  Five hellhounds crept out of the shadows around the ruins and Pantagruel landed on a sunken temple roof just out of buckshot range.  He was in full demon form again, and his denarian owl-eyes blazed like green searchlights.

Caught You Monologuing
Pantagruel made the typical villainous offers.  “You don’t realize the power you’re throwing away.  Think of the good you could do.  Think of all the questions you could ask the artifact.  ‘How can I kill Nicodemus?’  ‘How can a denarius be destroyed?’  ‘Where is the nearest vampire lair?’”  The PCs’ responses were slightly more succinct, and combat was joined.  Pantagruel told his demon dogs to retrieve the 8-Ball and flew off, confident everything would go to plan.  Five dead hellhounds later, the gang reached the edge of the marshy Acheron just in time for... centaurs!  The centaur hunting party, drawn by the sounds of battle, finally found this group of iron-toting outsiders and gave chase!  The PCs ran, and then they waded into the muck, and then they splashed and swam.  Scott spotted a ferry on its way, but the centaurs were gaining on them.  Centaurs have better Athletics than humans, as it turns out, and Bill was an old man.  Also, Carter forgot why he was running.  So the centaurs (armed with bows and spears) caught up to the group of humans (armed with motherfucking shotguns).  Centaurs are dumb, dumb creatures, and that is why when Charon’s ferry reached the shore and the old, beared boatman demanded payment for passage, Carter happily rolled the dead centaurs for cash and handed it over to Charon.  This was a compel on “Why Buy When You Can Steal?”, and the complication is that Carter is now going to be hunted by ghost centaurs who were never able to pass onto their eternal rewards.

Booze Cruise
Remember that beer Scott brought?  Well, Charon turned out to be an okay guy.  He didn’t care about their 8-Ball.  He hadn’t gotten any living people on his boat for millenia, so he was happy to shoot the shit and down some beers on the way to Asphodel.  It was raucous enough that we placed the scene aspect “Booze Cruise” on Charon’s ferry.

And that is why I love FATE.

The gang reached the opposite shoreline: the Asphodel Meadows.  This was an idyllic but plain land of gray vineyards, modest homes, dusty roads, and prairies upon prairies of pallid asphodel flowers, the primary food source of the locals.  Speaking of the locals, the smattering of dead bystanders were all looking at the living men like in Inception when the crowds start all... noticing the intruders.  This was interrupted by a compel on that Booze Cruise.  A group of satyrs and fauns (yes, one had a goddamn knit scarf) had heard these mortals had beer and the little goat-men were sick and tired of having nothing to drink but asphodel wine.  They all had cudgels, and there was quite the mob of them.

The First Rule of Gruff Fight Club
Clay took the situation from an impending riot down to a more civilized trial by combat.  He’d fist-fight the satyrs’ best guy.  If Clay won, the satyrs would lead the group across Asphodel to the River Lethe.  If the satyr champion won, they’d get the beer.  Mr. Tumnus came back with an eight-foot-tall Gruff.  A circle of power was drawn in the sand and the brawl began!  Clay spent a lot of Fate avoiding Gruff’s meaty fists, and both fighters used maneuvers and tagged aspects like “sandy ground” and “unstable footing”.  Gruff had a load of stress, but Clay was actually wearing him down, while Clay’s ridiculous Stunts kept his own damage to just stress, even with Gruff’s Inhuman Strength.

The second will deceive you...
-The Sword, “Tres Brujas”

As the fight raged on, another beautiful woman sidled up to Carter, although this one was older, like a cougar-MILF.  She got as far as an introduction before Scott stepped between them, offering his hand in greeting.  The woman failed her Empathy roll to see through Scott’s Deceit, so when they joined hands Scott lit the bitch up like a road flare with Holy Touch.  True to his word, Carter brained her with the 8-Ball-in-a-bag while she jerked and twitched and screamed and burned.  Wonderful Intimidation rolls from Bill and Scott kept the satyrs back, and since nobody actually interfered with the fight between Clay and Gruff, no harm, no foul.

Meanwhile, Clay managed to knock off all but one of Gruff’s stress as well as kick in one of his little goat legs.  The big bastard conceded with honor, Clay accepted, and Scott gave Gruff (and Gruff alone) the beer.  Between the smouldering corpse of the siren-witch, the beating Clay doled out to Gruff, and the respect Gruff had for the mortals, the satyrs agreed to the spirit of their agreement this time.  Their original plan was to call out the PCs on the agreement, saying they never agreed to lead them along a path they could follow nor at a speed they could maintain, but when the alternatives range from buckshot to cracked skulls to being lit on fire, Mr. Tumnus and his friends found it safer to keep their word.

I Don’t Need to See Clear to Fracture Your Rear
The satyrs skipped and danced around the gang as they hiked across the rolling hills and tall asphodel prairies.  Elysium’s sunshine and monoliths were close now, but before their quest could end, Pantagruel returned with some local muscle: three goddamn Gorgons!

Scott dealt a ridiculous amount of Intimidation social stress to the Gorgons based on the party’s rampage-to-date through the underworld, and they all took a “Scared Shitless” consequence.

Pantagruel tried a direct compel on Carter’s “Good, Bad, I’m the Guy with the Goods” aspect.  He even offered the poor guy a denarius, power to go with the ultimate knowledge he already carried.  Carter bought off the compel with his next-to-last Fate Point so Pantagruel shot him with a lightning bolt.  Carter took the hit like a man, although it cost him his last Fate Point and his chainmail armor, which welded into a single mass and fell to the ground.  Even after all that, Carter was still left with a Mild consequence “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!”.

The Gorgons attacked, but I compelled them to start with the poor satyrs (“See?!  We’re helping!” one shouted up at her master).  One of the vile medusas ate shotgun right off the bat, taking almost enough stress to put her down.  Bill made a Lore maneuver to place “Blind-Fighting” (sticky) on the scene, which I compelled to great effect to have the heroes miss their targets.  It didn’t stop Clay from going to melee with a Gorgon.  The monster made a successful maneuver to start a grapple and realized that now Clay knew where she was.  Clay headbutted the snakebitch to the ground and kicked her skull in over the next few exchanges, all while keeping his eyes wide shut.

Carter brought out his shiny ghost knife from the first session and tried to angle it so the second Gorgon saw her own reflection.  He accepted some FP to miss a few times, then spent a FP to compel the Gorgon’s High Concept to get her to look at the mirrored knife.  I thought that was badass, and she was just a mook, so hell yes she looked at her own reflection and petrified.

The last Gorgon tried to skedaddle but Scott shot her in the back.

Caw!  Caw!  Bang! Fuck! I’m Dead!
That left Bill to face off against Pantagruel.  Bill raised his .410 Judge, aimed, and... I compelled his “Bad Eyes, Good Shotgun” to miss his nemesis.  I learned that generally my villains come to regret me handing FP to Bill.  For his part, Pantagruel failed to explode Scott and Carter with hellfire.  Bill retorted by dumping three FP into a shot that left Pantagruel with “Tattered Wings” even after his Supernatural Toughness.  Pantagruel healed that Minor consequence up and once again failed to explode anyone of consequence.  Pantagruel’s dice hated him.

At this point, Bill had somewhere around 9-10 FP sitting in front of him.  He used one on a declaration.  Much like Jack Sparrow, Bill’s kept a second gun on him loaded expressly for Pantagruel.  Blessed bullets, relic powder-filled hollow-points, the whole nine yards.  I allowed it of course, because that 1) made sense and 2) was awesome.  Bill drew Owlfucker from his shoulder rig and dumped three more FP into a shot.

Ouch.  I should have seen that one coming.  Now Pantagruel was sporting a Moderate consequence called “This one ain’t healing up!!!”.  He tried to blow Bill up with more hellfire but the old bastard knew Pantagruel’s style (invoking “Former Host of Pantagruel” to get out of the way).  It didn’t help that Pantagruel couldn’t roll positive numbers either.

Bill didn’t look back at the explosion behind him.  He just walked away in slow motion, dumped more FP into another attack, and tagged Pantagruel’s consequence to boot.  Pantagruel had just enough stress left to survive it with just a Mild slot (“Riddled with Buckshot”), and on his turn tried to concede.  We agreed that Pantagruel would fly away, but it’d be known he broke some Accord somewhere by being down here and he wouldn’t return this session.

Get Thee Behind the 8-Ball
The only thing between the gang and the River Lethe was a Survival check to navigate through the asphodel without running afoul of someone or something else (because all their satyrs were statues now), but the Magick 8-Ball knew it was going to die.  Carter was out of FP so I compelled him to forget who these scary, armed people were who were with him.  He’d better run for it.

And so they dragged Carter to the banks of the Lethe.  Carter used the one FP he got from running to resist the final compel and toss the artifact into the river.  It disappeared with a plop, but it didn’t just disappear from sight - it disappeared in the most absolute sense of the word.  It was erased from memory - everyone’s memory.

And the third will show you the way.
-The Sword, “Tres Brujas”

The gang stood on the banks of the Lethe, less battered than I expected but with perhaps only 3 Fate Points between the four of them.  They couldn’t figure out why the hell they were in the NeverNever in the first place.  They of course remembered leaving a trail of dead fucking fairies through the underworld, they remembered Pantagruel, they just didn’t remember the... what was it again?

They watched an old woman approach them.  The crone pushed a wooden cart filled with all manner of trinkets and magical fetishes, and when she got close she bowed her head to the “heroes” and beseeched:

“I’ve been talking with the pantheon and they’d all like you to please, please leave now.  Please.  I would be happy to show you the way home.”

And so it was that our four mighty mortals traveled to the underworld in search of no treasure, undertook a quest forgotten as soon as it was completed, and returned to a public records cube farm in a plain government building overlooking the Detroit River.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Smith on February 01, 2011, 09:34:54 AM
Absolutely bad-assed. I had to laugh at one point, because I've put the consequence "Don't Taze me, Bro" on an NPC in my game. I have to say, your Highway Hellions have some rather epic adventures and again... I can't wait for the next installment!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 01, 2011, 12:54:41 PM
Thanks!  It was a perfect combination of planning but not TOO much planning on my part and running the game in the "sleepy time slot" after a pretty long Mutants & Masterminds game.

Lessons learned!
1.  There is no Supernatural Toughness for social combat!  The two hostile encounters with the triple goddesses/sirens/witches were more brutal mechanically than any of the physical fights.
2.  There was way more social rolls/maneuvering/trickery than I expected in the session, which is awesome, and they all served to further the (unspoken but apparently implicitly agreed on) goal of killing every son of a bitch in the NeverNever.  Even more awesome.  Except for Charon.  He was cool.
3.  It's hard to compel Aspects about kleptomania when it's all going to turn into ectoplasm when you leave.
4.  I think I judged the opposition better this time around.  I'm not looking to murder anyone, but considering the low numbers of FP they left with, I think I did a pretty good job.  Bill ended up with so many FP because he's a pure mortal with NO stunts at all, and his nemesis was the recurring villain this time so it was easy to compel Bill.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: devonapple on February 01, 2011, 05:27:27 PM
I'm loving the Metalocalypse/Brutal Legend vibe.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Nybor_USMC on February 01, 2011, 05:56:13 PM
HOLY COW!
Loved it. I like the blend of Supernatural and Dresden you got going.
And Everyone seems to be doing there job. Fantastic!
Can't wait till next episode. oh oh maybe there will be a seductive Demon, Like Ruby.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on March 14, 2011, 09:39:50 PM
Session 4
Bill, Clay, Scott, and Carter
Reward: Minor Milestone

NOW
A battered orange sedan cruised through the Southwest desert.  Its driver's eyes were red with fatigue, but the loaded briefcase, fashionable but worn suit, and small luggage marked him as a hard-working salesperson with a client to get to, the time of night be damned.  Dregs of coffee swished around in the near-empty cup as the man's head nodded-

BRAAAAAAAAAHHH!  A semi truck car carrier's horn blared, the orange car jerked back onto the right lane, and the steel behemoth narrowly missed the little sedan.  A few miles later, the salesman stopped at the first gas station he found.  He exited the all-night shop with a fresh coffee in his still-shaking hands only to spy the car carrier lurking at the top of the hill leading down to the little gas station.

The man got a bad feeling.  A real bad feeling.  He rushed to his car, his coffee forgotten.  His shaking hands can't put the gas pump away right; it clattered to the ground.

The truck accelerated down the hill.  The horn blared again, a battle cry in the desert night.  The salesman's car wouldn't turn over.  Of course it wouldn't.  Why would it?  He knew he shouldn't have skipped his inspection before he started on his business road trip and now this insane trucker was going to ram hi-

The fireball was visible for miles.

OPENING TITLE!
They weren't omens so much as oddities, strange vehicular homicides linked by the common thread of Route 66 and the complete lack of any debris from the other vehicle.  The gang was putting asphalt between them and Detroit, and this... whatever it was was along their way to greener pastures out west.  It was sunset on a lonely stretch of desert road when they spotted 2 Arizona highway patrol cars and an ambulance hailing from the town of Blankenship crowded around a grisly scene.  Someone had wrapped - or something had wrapped - a minivan around a cellphone tower.  The cops eyed the approaching bikers with some suspicion but Carter and Bill distracted them by acting like they're having some ill-timed bike trouble.  Clayton just plain intimidated the police into leaving them be.  Meanwhile, Scott approached the meatwagon and discovered that while one of the men ("Reed") was amiable and chatty, the other man ("Otis") was... not human.  This was a Compel on "On a Mission From God" in the style of Frailty.  Scott saw a fanged, hungry demon wearing an Otis-suit, and the gang backed off to tail the ambulance to the medical examiner's office on outskirts of Blankenship, AZ.  With a zero-shift success, they only barely kept from alerting Otis to their intentions, but they did arrive at the coroner's in time to see Reed and Otis roll a mangled dead woman in a bag into the side door.

Grisly Fates Befall People Wearing Name Tags
Carter stole a paramedic's uniform and styrofoam cooler from an ambulance and walked in the front door.  He managed to bluff his way past Phil, the desk guard, with a story about Otis and Reed "forgetting bits of the dead woman" while brandishing his cooler.  Scott's the next one in.  He wore a (his?) priest's collar and was much better at the various social skills than Phil was at seeing through deception.  After all, what harm could a priest do?

Scott figured he'd have Carter for backup, but the thief was already rummaging through the employees' lockers, so Scott (again, on a mission from god and not about to stop to wait for his larcenous friends) kicked open the morgue door in time to see Reed typing up a report on the corner computer terminal.  He was oblivious (either intentionally or not) to Otis ripping huge chunks out of the corpse and eating them.  Otis was fast, and dodged away from Scott's initial attempt at a Holy Touch WWF move.  Otis maneuvered himself so Scott wouldn't be able to watch both him and Reed at the same time, so Scott decided to remove Reed from the situation.  Otis called for Reed's help but Scott made eye contact first and initiated a soulgaze.  He saw barbed wire binding Reed's mouth, throat, and limbs.  His eyes were puppeteered by similar more subtle barbs.  His ears were muffled with great metal plates bolted to his skull.  Chains that went overhead and out of Scott's view moved Reed like a marionette.  Scott resisted the urge to look at anything else (the Sight?  In a morgue?  With a demon in there?  Good idea, Scott!) and closed his God-given holy sight.  Reed's poor mind had had enough, though, and the poor guy fell over and drooled.

Carter finally joined the fray in time to get tangled up with a fleeing Otis-demon.  That slowed the creature down long enough for Scott to grab him, and then he and Carter beat the shit out of Otis and stuck him in the morgue cooler that was meant for the half-eaten corpse.  They opened the side door for Bill and Clay and the gang set about properly containing Otis for an interrogation.  My favorite detail here was Bill declaring he had dirt from the grave of an man executed for a crime he didn't commit, which he spread out on the ground underneath Otis.  Otis wasn't too bright and wasn't too proud; the gang learned that Otis was eating the people that this evil truck killed and somehow converting them into fuel.  He was, as far as he knew, the only one who did this.  He called the truck a "runaway horse" but not even Bill could figure out exactly WHAT it was.  It was something new, even for Bill.  Scott burned Otis with holy flame and the gang headed outside-

BRAAAAAH-BRAAAAAAAAH!  The Bad Truck's horn sounded, and the semi car carrier smashed through the morgue's little entrance foyer on its way to crush our heroes!

Bad Truck
The Peterbilt of Sin
Hulking Size
Inhuman Strength
Living Dead
Supernatural Toughness (Catch: Holy Stuff and High Explosives)

Bad Truck's initial attack was a two-part Drive against Athletics test.  Failing the first check meant that the hunter in question couldn't reach his bike in time and had to somehow avoid a direct attack from Bad Truck.  I compelled Bill and Carter to fail the first roll.  Scott failed outright, but Clay reached his bike.  Bad Truck tried to crush the puny humans in front of it but this time the PCs, through luck or FATE, got out of the way.  Scott rolled to the side, Bill threw himself flat, and Carter leapt onto Bad Truck's cab!  Bill followed suit as the trailer passed over him and boarded the rear with all the junked sedans and light trucks rattling around.

Carter weaseled his way into the cab to find that Bad Truck was indeed driving itself.  He tried the brakes - the brakes were out.  He tried to steer the truck, but against Bad Truck's Inhuman Strength, Carter's Mediocre muscles were useless.  Bad Truck didn't want Carter inside, though, and decided that it was harder than the squishy human.  Bad Truck crashed through the morgue's guard station and out the other side, splattering poor Phil in the process.  Scott and Clay took off after Bad Truck as the mean machine motored towards Blankenship's busy evening "strip".  Families getting fast food, lines of cars leaving grocery stores, and teens going to the movies formed a maelstrom of potential victims that Bad Truck couldn't ignore.  I ruled that Bad Truck would reach the intersection ahead in 3 turns.

Road Warriors
Unfortunately for Bad Truck, Carter survived the attempt to kill him.  Unfortunately for Carter, leaning out of the driver's side door and trying to hit the gas tank proved just as useless.  Clay, however, did manage to tag the gas tank, which spouted dark red, sticky fluid - dead mens' blood.  Bad Truck released one of the cars from the trailer, trying to block Scott and Clay from getting alongside it, but the two bikers swerved around the spinning, crumpling Taurus.  Bill tried to make his way up to the front, but his Denarian-wracked body gave out and it was all Bill could do to just hold on.

Clay invoked "Where Did You Come By That?" for effect and produced a hand grenade, then Maneuvered into "Bad Truck's Blind Spot".  Bill burned some FP and made it up to the front of the truck and squeezed holy water from a sports bottle into the holed gas tank.  Blue-white flame geysered from the truck and it made that horrible roaring downshifting noise that trucks make on the highway, especially when you're almost asleep after a long day.  Scott pulled up in close opposite from Clay and tried (and failed) to hit the gas tank again.  Bad Truck ran over everything it could to jostle Carter inside and keep its vulnerable parts from being too easy to hit.

Bad Truck was real close to racking up four tens' worth of Gourangas.  The guys had to go balls out and hit the thing hard or not only would innocent blood be on their hands, Carter (at least) would end up getting photographed as the apparent driver of the big rig as it ran the red light!  Bill clambered inside one of the cars on Bad Truck's trailer as Clay, "In Bad Truck's Blind Spot", shoved the grenade between the gas tank and the wheel well.  Carter snagged the grinning skull shifter knob from Bad Truck's gearshift and leapt out of the cab! Luckily, Carter landed in a freshly-mulched line of trees along the strip mall entrance.  Scott waited for the explosive to go off.

East Bound and (Going) Down
The frag grenade blew out Bad Truck's right tank in a great gout of gore.  The truck shuddered, twisting metal almost making a screaming noise.  Bill took minimal stress, protected as he was by one of the cars.  With Bad Truck distracted by the grevious damage ("Holed and Shredded" consequence), Scott leapt from his bike and climbed into the cab.  He invoked "On a Mission From God" (for effect), reached blindly behind the driver's seat, and came out with a bigass monkey wrench.  He tagged the ragged, damaged floor and started ripping and smashing his way through to the engine.

Despite the damage they'd dealt, Bad Truck was still heading for the innocents.  Carter held up Bad Truck's stolen shifter knob and whistled.

The truck downshifted, slowed, and turned.  Bill started making the biggest, oiliest mess he could out of the cars on the back of the carrier.  As Bad Truck turned Bill managed to get a good-sized slick over the entire area.  When Bad Truck gunned it for Carter, Carter burned his last FP and rolled out of the way.  Bad Truck tried to turn, jackknifed, and slid to a momentary halt ("Jackknifed" consequence).  It was just enough time for Scott to offer a quick prayer to the White God and jam that monkey wrench into Bad Truck's shaking, roaring diesel engine of destruction.  The gang got the hell out of the way as Bad Truck's cab shook itself to pieces like a brick in a washing machine.  They then got the hell out of Blankenship - yet another town they couldn't return to, a town whose inhabitants never knew that for one night, their sleepy suburb was a truck stop on the Highway to Hell.

Safe inside Carter’s pocket, the shifter knob’s little eye sockets glowed.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: finarvyn on March 20, 2011, 08:55:05 PM
I love the concept. I also saw the parallels with Supernatural and DF but I haven't had a chance to develop anything. Yours looks pretty darned cool!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on March 20, 2011, 09:22:50 PM
@admiralducksauce: Would you be willing to post your players' characters to the Spare Character Concepts thread?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on March 22, 2011, 02:57:26 AM
Done and done!  Well, I posted what I remembered anyway.  They're all pretty standard on paper; the crazy time comes from the bizarre combination of running late at night, my awesome players, and my personal feelings on how underestimated "mortals" (blech, what a condescending fucking term) typically are in the genre and my desire to WANT the PCs to kick the shit out of everything in their path.  It's escapist, it's balls out, and it's 3000 miles from anything approaching canon.  :)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Smith on April 11, 2011, 09:10:30 AM
I eagerly await the next installment of Bad Assery.
Seriously, your campaign is pretty much the only reason I keep coming back to these forums. ^_^
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on April 11, 2011, 11:28:03 AM
Thank you!  Although it looks like it'll be a while.  Carter's player has a month of family-forced funtime for the rest of April, and May sees birthday weekends for my wife, daughter, and dad.  I'm not quite getting the gaming shakes, but I doubt it will be long before withdrawal symptoms kick in...
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Katarn on May 06, 2011, 02:32:55 PM
Thank you!  Although it looks like it'll be a while.  Carter's player has a month of family-forced funtime for the rest of April, and May sees birthday weekends for my wife, daughter, and dad.  I'm not quite getting the gaming shakes, but I doubt it will be long before withdrawal symptoms kick in...

I've been very impressed, keep up the excellent work.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 03, 2011, 08:38:14 PM
It’s been a long time coming, but I finally got to run my Dresdenatural game again this past Saturday.  Clay got a measure of closure for the events from his “What Shaped You?” phase, I actually Took Out a PC, and everyone got to yell “BIIIIEEEEEELLLLL!!!” like Anna Paquin on multiple occasions.

Warning!  This writeup features blatant ripoff-er, homages to various characters from the first season of True Blood, Police Academy, Supernatural, and From a Buick 8.

Session 5

Bill Stockburn (http://www.zombiepark.com/images/gramps/sam1.jpg), Clayton Haycock James (http://images.buddytv.com/battleimages/usr3524622/3524622_5bf8b2cc-d599-4fbf-8d8e-719a4d589807-eliot-spencer-s1-leverage-8045832-400-300.jpg), and Carter Mews (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg)
Reward: Significant Milestone

NOW

Clay knew he was dreaming because he was walking, not riding, but the green sign that read “Stackhouse, LA” seemed real enough.  It was early morning, and the swampy fog just added to the town’s dreamlike quality.  His blurry reverie was cut short when a local police cruiser pulled up beside him.  Clay recognied the Look on the chunky cop who got out and prepared for the worst.  To put it delicately, the Look led to the sort of things that Stallone had to put up with in First Blood.  The word “boy” was used.  “Not from around here”.  “Give you a ride outta town.”  Clay knew the drill.  He put his hands on the cruiser’s hood and looked down at his reflected face.

It wasn’t his face.  Clay’s mind whirled as he recognized the face from his nightmares, the face that changed his life, that had introduced him to the supernatural.  He had no name for that face.  His company back in Afghanistan just called the teenager “that Hajji kid” when they found him lost in a cave during a patrol and brought him back to their base.  The morning after that, Clay was the last living member of his company.

The shock made the dream start to fall apart.  Time blurred, details went fuzzy, but the next thing Clay saw was that he-as-the-kid was in a police holding area.  A handful of drunks circled him like hungry sharks.  Everything blurred again, and Clay saw the drunks lying dead on the floor before he woke up with a start.

OPENING TITLE! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=AWhX3lfAoHw#t=68s)

Bill pressed Clay about the dream and the boys headed east to Louisiana.  Scott had left the gang after Arizona in search of Jimmy Pale Wolf, whom they hadn’t heard from since their sojourn into the NeverNever, so they were riding light but all night when they passed the exact same “Stackhouse, LA” sign from Clay’s dream.  Save for Carter, who bought off his Compel, the guys were too tired after their cross-Texas drive to bother dealing with a motel.  Bill (with a Declaration) realized this wasn’t his first time in Stackhouse (True Blood fans, get your minds out of the gutter).  He had staked a vampire who was stalking this waitress, and he remembered where the undead bastard had been nesting.  Bill and Clay rolled up near the old Civil-War-era house to find signs that it wasn’t abandoned.  They aborted and laid out their sleeping rolls in the trees nearby while Carter headed off to steal some Red Bull and beer.  Everywhere was closed this late at night, so he burgled the local bar, “Bordeaux’s”, and narrowly escaped being spotted by the owner after waking him during his thefting.  Part of this was a Compel, but I think part of it was Carter thinking how useful it was when they had beer down in the Underworld.  Coors Light and Red Bull in hand, Carter sped back and hid in the woods with his comrades.

Morning Woods
The next morning, the homeowner made her Alertness roll against Clay’s bungled Stealth and accosted him with a frying pan held in shaking hands.  Bill recognized her as the same waitress he saved from the vampire stalker.  Bill’s player caught on right away after I told him her name was “Suzie (not Sookie, not by any means, oh no) Bontemps”.

“Suh-zeh?” Bill asked, in his best Stephen Moyer voice.

“BIIIEEEEEELLLLLL!” I screeched in my best Anna Paquin impression.

The above should make sense to anyone who’s seen True Blood and heard Vampire Bill say “Sookie”.  Now back to the story!

All was well!  Suzie, still a waitress at Bordeaux’s, invited the gang inside and they swapped stories.  Suzie wasn’t aware of anything odd going on, although she did catch on that whenever Bill Stockburn and his gang were around, odd things did tend to happen.  Unfortunately, their breakfast was broken up by a police cruiser rolling up on the old house.  Deputy Curtis Wilcox (http://images.wikia.com/supernatural/images/0/00/Sam_winchester_season_6.jpg), a tall, handsome, bull-necked local cop with an eye on Suzie (and an instant dislike for Clay in particular), had come by to tell her some bad news.  Suzie’s brother, Jason, had been found dead last night, beaten to death along with everyone in the drunk tank down at the station.  Again, exactly like Clay’s dream.  Clay used the commotion from Wilcox and Bill comforting Suzie to sneak upstairs and check Jason’s room.  He didn’t find anything eerie, but he did surmise that Jason 1) liked to drink, 2) worked construction, and 3) was a man-slut.

The team split up after that - Suzie let Bill come with her down to the station to sign the papers, while Clay and Carter took the beer out to the old bridge where Jason’s construction site was.

Your Tax Dollars At Work
Clay and Carter found the construction site quiet save for two befuddled workers being questioned by Detective Andy Flowers (Stackhouse’s only detective).  Clay recognized Andy from his dream too!  He was the pig who had accosted him on the road, and here he was, questioning the construction workers about the events of last night.  Unfortunately for “Detective Andy”, the two guys didn’t have anything for him.  Clay and Carter rolled up after the detective left.  After some Deceit from Carter and some beer-based bribery (stolen beer is always a good investment!), they convinced Rene and Lafayette they were delivery people stymied by the lack of a bridge.  Rene and Lafayette were really, really bad at defense rolls, and let on that the rest of their crew might be dead, but they’d be damned if they’re not eking out as much pay as they can without actual work before people caught on.  They learned all the dead men from the drunk tank allegedly beat each other to death, and they were all in the holding cell to begin with for drunk and disorderly charges the night before.  Why weren’t Rene and Lafayette there?  Well, Rene didn’t hang out with Jason ever since Jason fucked Rene’s wife, Renee, and Lafayette was in Shreveport all weekend trying to score drugs.

The presence of Detective Andy sealed the deal for Clay at this point.  He was sure something  hinky was going on, but everything leading up to the deaths so far seemed pretty mundane.  Hopefully Bill was having better luck.

Bad Boys Bad Boys
Against his better judgement, Bill walked into the Stackhouse police station and was immediately called out by Sheriff Sandy “Bud” Dearborne, who recognized him from the vampire stalker fiasco.  He eyed Bill with suspicion, but Suzie and Bill convinced the small-town lawman that the quicker Bill could get to the bottom of things, the quicker he could leave town.  Bud grudgingly agreed to let Bill see the drunk tank and follow Suzie to see her brother.

The holding cell and morgue weren’t hiding any supernatural secrets for Bill, although given his high Lore roll and the increasing lack of evidence, Bill figured that some sort of compulsion or mentalism might be at work.  He’d need to get a look at the security footage from the murders - which in itself was messed up.  The police should have had someone there to respond to 5 men beating each other to death.  It is not easy to kill someone with your bare hands, and the evidence Bill had seen pointed to the victims acting with berserk animal savagery.  It was beyond animal - they must have punched each other until every finger was broken and kept fighting past the point when their eyes and jaws were smashed.

Carol Hooks, the sweet little dispatcher, started playing the footage for Bill when the first sign of an active hand in all this occurred.  The video showed an empty drunk tank.  Carol skipped ahead.  Here was Deputy Wilcox, escorting Jason Bontemps and some other guys whose identities weren’t important to the story into the holding area.  Here were these 5 drunks, sitting around in a somewhat reconciliatory mood, since they had gotten their licks in during the punch-up that brought them to the station and they were now all in the same boat.  Here was Jason and one other man getting up to see who was walking back to the cell... Carol’s movement was subtle, natural, and almost unconscious.  Bill couldn’t stop Carol before the diminutive woman’s finger moved smoothly to the “erase” button.  He had only barely spotted her doing it, but the damage was done.  There was no use making a scene in the center of this increasingly strange police station, so Bill let Carol off the hook (ahem) and left.

Bill started putting it together.  Suzie started her shift at Bordeaux’s and Bill met back up with Clay and Carter.  They figured Carol was either the Big Bad or she was a victim of whatever or whoever was messing with Stackhouse.  Since PCO Hooks was on duty, now was as good a time as ever to get her address from Suzie and go burgle her domicile.

The Feds Who Stared At Goats
We cut back to the Stackhouse, LA sign, where a black Crown Vic was pulled off the road.  Major Jeffrey Flynn (http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_W_hPHI-p3O8/SpdgizgnZaI/AAAAAAAAArI/PHupgZZxId4/s400/jeff-bridges.jpg) was packing up his tracking spell components while his two minders, Agents Dana Fox and Patrick Roberts, continued lamenting their shit detail, the stupidity of using Flynn (because his Cassandra’s Tears predictions were full of shit), how screwed they were if they didn’t retrieve Project BLACKBOX’s pet warlock, and if they could get away with just shooting their target and explaining that it was an unavoidable situation.

The only thing that could possibly interrupt their excessive complaining were the kinds of needs that accompany hours and hours on the road, and so the three feds stopped at Bordeaux’s to “gather intelligence”.

To the Mead Hall!
The first thing the PCs noticed when they entered the bar was that Bordeaux’s was out of Red Bull.  The second thing was Detective Andy, who was getting 11:30 drunk despite it only being 5:30.  The third thing was the feds.  Bill got Carol’s address from Suzie as quickly as he could, but Andy had already started grumbling about all the nosy no-good strangers in town just loud enough for it to be intentional.  What Andy didn’t know was that it was really, really easy to get Clay to fight cops.  Clay, Bill, and Carter all blasted Andy with their scathing wit.  It started off as just good fun, but when Clay asked Andy how in the hell could 5 people beat each other to death inside a police station and nobody see anything, well, something in Andy snapped.  This wasn’t the normal kind of “let’s fight!” snappage.  No, this was a supersized “timeline X and timeline Y are missing chunk Z and nothing I can think of connects them” snappage.  Detective Andy Flowers threw a spinning drunken rage-punch at Carter!

Carter: “Wait, why me!?”
Me: “Andy’s seen Way of the Gun.  He knows you always punch the girlfriend first.”
Carter: “Hey!”
*laughter*

Luckily, Carter not only dodged the wild blow, he made it look like Andy actually knocked him to the floor!  Agent Fox was out of her seat in an instant, but Agent Roberts stopped her from joining battle.  Clay actually got Andy to back down with an insane Intimidation roll right after that, and Andy took off out the door so he could cry in his car.  Fox stooped to help Carter to his feet, quietly advising him that he should press charges.  She almost slipped one of Flynn’s tracking spell links past Carter’s excellent Alertness roll, too.  Carter let her plant the hex bag but shrugged off her advice.  The boys left, since they had Carol’s address now and the feds were making them uneasy.

If I See Any Starfighter Coin-Op Games I’m Shooting Them
On their way to the Starlite trailer park where Carol lived, Carter planted the tracking link on a big rig headed to Shreveport.  That would slow the feds down.  Grinning with mischief, they easily broke into Carol’s double wide and found that things were “off”.  Out of place.  It was as if Carol’s brain wasn’t firing correctly.  Newly-washed dishes had been put back in completely different cabinets than their older brethren.  The fruit basket held hot dog rolls, the toothpaste was in the bedroom nightstand, and so on.  Carol wasn’t the Big Bad, but she was definitely a victim.  From the way Andy was acting, he was probably a victim too.  Hell, all the cops in Stackhouse were likely mindraped by this faceless warlock (yes, they figured a warlock was the most likely option).  If they could nab one, they could break the enchantment and get some answers.

(continued!)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 03, 2011, 08:41:34 PM
The Gang Kidnaps a Police Officer
Bill and Carter hid in the treeline near the Stackhouse police station while Clay just waited in the parking lot.  He trusted in the weird “not supposed to be here” vibe that most of the psychomancy victims got from him and soon enough, Deputy Wilcox spotted Clay out his way out the door.  The normal part of Wilcox’s brain already didn’t like Clay because 1) he ain’t from around Stackhouse, 2) he looked like a hoodlum, and 3) he saw him with Suzie that morning.  That was enough for Wilcox to get snippy with Clay, but when Clay asked him about the drunk tank and how that could have happened, he got a similar reaction to Andy.  Wilcox snapped and attacked Clay!  Thing is, Deputy Wilcox was a beefy dude, and when a bull-necked giant who doesn’t feel pain throws all caution to the wind, even someone as well-trained as Clay can run into trouble.  Wilcox actually got Clay into a grapple for 1 round.  Nobody had ever done that before.  It was a good fight, and Wilcox was staying up despite the ass-kickings Clay was handing out until Carter whacked him on the head from behind with his ASP baton and Clay elbowed him in the throat.  Wilcox went down, Carter took his jacket and hat, and they stuffed the deputy into his own cruiser.

The Gang Tries Their Hand At Home Invasion
They had captured one thrall!  Carter noted Carol’s personal vehicle wasn’t parked in the station’s lot, so they figured if they beelined for Carol’s trailer they might be able to subdue her too.  The plan was that Carter would use Wilcox’s jacket, hat, and car to get Carol off guard and then Clay and Bill would take her down.  Unfortunately, whatever was controlling the police had planned ahead and integrated some sort of scrying/alarm spell into his minions.  Carol knew they were coming and was waiting for them with a shotgun!

The gang had faced shotguns before.

One wrecked trailer later, Carter did get to use his makeshift police disguise to tell the trailer park residents to go back inside.  It only worked because the bystanders could go back inside and watch from their windows.  Inside the damaged trailer, Bill identified the warlock’s link - Carol and Wilcox’s badges had spellwork scratched into them.  Clay recognized the dialect as local to the region of Afghanistan where he had encounted the “Hajji” warlock.  Carter’s Ring of Recall slammed his ancestor’s memories into his brain, showing him that the spell itself did indeed allow for the caster to use the link for communication.

Captured Thralls: 2!  That meant they had an extra to experiment on.  Bill and Carter figured out how to “unsubscribe” Carol’s badge/focus/link from the warlock’s Psychic Friends Network without causing undue damage, and the dispatcher (after the usual questions like “Why is my home trashed?” and “How did you manage to deal a Severe consequence to me with rubber bullets?”) told them about Clay’s friend from Afghanistan.  Andy brought the scrawny 18-year-old in and tossed him into holding, but after that Carol’s memory was fuzzy.

Can You Hear Me Now?
“I know you can hear me, you son of a bitch!  Where are you!?” Clay growled into Wilcox’s lolling face.  The deputy, now just a conduit for the warlock’s mind, told Clay he hadn’t gone anywhere.  He also told them they should say their goodbyes to Deputy Wilcox.  Bill was fast - he snatched up Wilcox’s badge and frantically tried to recreate the unbinding ritual he had performed on Carol’s shield.  It was Bill’s Lore 4 against the warlock’s Discipline (6 with his ritual foci), and it was the first sign the players had that spellcasters were big trouble.  Bill rolled well enough to stop the warlock from killing Wilcox, although it did saddle the poor kid with epilepsy.  They left him in Carol’s care and beelined for the police station.  It made sense - if the warlock had Stackhouse’s cops under his sway, he was pretty much in control of the town.  He had access to weapons, trained minions, and the added benefit of being able to call in the state police or Guard.  The unwitting backup units could be enthralled en masse and before long the Afghan warlock would be a warlord.

Accept ALL the Compels!
The thing is, the warlock knew he didn’t have time to pull that off before a bunch of pissed-off hunters made him eat his teeth.  Our heroes executed a blitzkreig assault on the precinct, sabotaging their communication tower and demolishing the entire front lobby with Clay’s Tomahawk motorcycle, only to find it empty.  The gang armored up with the dregs of the station’s nearly-empty armory and tried to outthink this Voldemort-wannabe motherfucker.

Clay looked back on his experiences hunting monsters.  Usually at this point in the story, the creature runs off to endamsel someone close to the hero.  Clay figured the warlock was at Suzie’s house and took off before Bill or Carter could tell him about cellphones.  They could just call Suzie!

Bill took charge, swiped Carter’s smartphone from him, put on his reading glasses, and stabbed at the tiny touchscreen with his biker-gloved manimal hands.  He’d be damned if he let somebody else work a goddamn telephone for him!  He wasn’t that old!  If he just kept looking he was certain he’d find the phone dial sooner or later!

Clay discovered that Suzie wasn’t at her house and was probably late into her shift at Bordeaux’s by the time Bill got her on the line.

“Suh-zeh?” he asked, hoping she was still all right.

“BIIIEEEEEELLLL!” she cried.

The warlock had come down to Bordeaux’s not too long ago, accompanied by Sheriff Bud, Andy, and Jasper, the janitor/groundskeeper/coroner.  It was Monday Night Football at Bordeaux’s and the place was packed.  The warlock had done something that hurt her brain to watch and everyone just kind of quieted down.  Then the police started handing out police-issue firearms and anything dangerous they might have had in weapons evidence.  Suzie had been on the fringes and hid in the bathroom.  She was still in the bathroom, frightened out of her mind.  She didn’t know why she wasn’t enthralled, but she was too scared to leave because Andy was watching the parking lot.

Monday Night Combat
Bill and Carter spotted Clay a little ahead of them on their way to Bordeaux’s, but the former Marine wasn’t waiting.  He powerslid his Tomahawk across Bordeaux’s parking lot right into Detective Andy, leapt free of the bike, and continued kicking his ass while Bill drove his own chopper through the window!  The old hunter landed on an enthralled Rene amidst showering glass and exhaust fumes.  He was alone against over a dozen enthralled townsfolk.  The scrawny warlock himself, barely an adult, stood behind the bar.  He had wisely put on too-big-for-him SWAT body armor and had both Jasper and Bud with him as a sort of honor guard.  The warlock’s eyes blazed with forbidden knowledge and burned away Bill’s significant store of FP with a massive mental blast evocation.

Right then, the players knew shit just got real.  Nobody had ever come that close to one-shotting anyone in this game yet.  My thought process was something akin to:

“Holy shit!  Wizards are fucking ridiculous!  Time to strip off this guy’s Resilient Self-Image stunt so he’s only got 2 blasts left before eating consequences (he used one to enthrall the bar with a zone-wide Aspect and one just now on Bill).  And better take a page from Mutants and Masterminds and say directing his thralls takes his action so he can’t mindrape AND swarm the guys at the same time.  Man, I thought Scott was gonna be here so he could tank some of this with his crazy Discipline stat...”

Back to Bill!  He shrugged off the warlock’s compulsion and shot him with rubber slugs from his shotgun.  The warlock was nimble, and between his fugitive-honed athletic ability and the kevlar, Bill only did stress.

Meanwhile, Carter snuck through the window into the women’s bathroom and got Suzie out.  Then he snuck into the bar with a pistol in one hand and a taser in the other.  He was gonna put that Mediocre Guns skill to the test tonight, baby!

Clay got Andy in a grapple and shoved him through the front door ahead of him as the warlock’s thralls opened fire.  Andy went down and Clay started thrashing thralls as tenderly as possible - they weren’t themselves and the gang wasn’t about to kill normal folks without a good reason.

Instant Thralls, Just Add Psychomancy
Ingredients:
1 warlock
2 zones of bargoers
1 GM who’s making it up as he goes

Instructions: Add 3 shifts to apply an Aspect “Enthralled” or “Do My Bidding, Slaves!” to the targets.  Add 2 shifts to affect 1 zone.  If your GM is kind, add 2 shifts to apply that aspect to the second zone (7 total shifts).  If your GM is a harsh and evil man who laughs at you from the depths of his black soul, simply double the initial 5 shifts (10 total shifts).  Roll Discipline, spending most if not all of the warlock’s FATE Points to gain a bar full of people who, with no FP for themselves, cannot buy off the compel you initiate with your free tag for effect.  Boom!  Instant thralls!

Each serving of thralls makes a single attack for the group.  This attack skill starts at the average skill for the thrall type (Medicore in this case), +1 for each thrall, to a max of +4 or +5.  This limit represents diminishing returns; ranged attackers won’t get clear shots, and melee attackers get in each other’s way.  A large number of thralls can remain at high skill levels for long periods of time, or they can be split up into less-persistent groups but make more overall attacks by virtue of being split into multiple groups.  Thralls defend at their base defense score (again, Mediocre here).  Attacks that deal more than a single thrall’s stress track “roll up” to injure or take down additional thralls.

The warlock did this while the PCs were wasting their time accepting Compels, driving to Suzie’s house, and muddling with cell phones.  Unfortunately, the thralls were no threat to Bill or Clay.  They were more a threat to Carter, but he had worn armor and dropped his share of mooks without taking much damage.  They did serve as distraction enough for the warlock to escape into the bar’s kitchen.  The PCs cornered him in there amongst all manner of interesting and dangerous scene Aspects (“Heavy-Duty Appliances”, “Pots and Pans”, “Stoves”, and so on).  They shot him a few more times and wiped out more of his precious stress track before he was able to drop a zone-wide mental blast on the kitchen!  The wave of devastating psionic force dropped Jasper, Bud, and the rest of the thralls who were in the kitchen.  They had served their purpose but were nigh-useless with so few of them.  Escape was the warlock’s only hope now.  Clay and Carter burned their FP to mitigate the blast, but Bill was Taken Out.

Kill Bill
Me: “Bill, change your High Concept to ‘Enthralled by the Warlock’.  You’re on his team now.”
Bill: “Okay.  I start loading real shells into my shotgun.”  He looked pointedly at Clay.
Clay: “You’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t you?”

Bill was buying Clay time, playing the compulsion to his advantage in a way.  Completely changing out his ammo would take Bill’s action, leaving Clay free to dropkick the warlock out the back door and into a dumpster!

Moderate: “Cracked Ribs”

Glass Joe
The 3 thralls who were still outside the kitchen went for Carter, but he handled Renee, Lafayette, and Guy Not Appearing In This Film with style and grace.  Okay, actually, he barely squeaked by with his Mediocre combat skills, relying on his Weapon values to drop people once he tied their equally low defense rolls.

The warlock tried to run for it, but a Compel on Cracked Ribs slowed him to a single zone.  Clay punished him for his feeble escape attempt with a vicious flying tackle.

Mild: “Knocked Out of My Shoes”

The warlock only had 1 mental stress left (and zero shoes!).  He squinched up his face and tried to pop Clay’s head like Scanners.  It wasn’t pretty, and it cost Clay a Severe consequence “Rolling Blackouts”, but the Marine took the hit and stayed himself.  Just like back in Afghanistan, when he was the only one out of his entire company to fight off the warlock’s power.  It had wrecked part of his mind.  It had led to his discharge and subsequent months of wasting away in VA hospitals and asylums.  It had knocked Clay out back then as his mind refused to cope, but he never turned on his men.  The warlock couldn’t stop him then and he couldn’t stop him now.

But maybe Bill could.

“BIIIEEEEEELLLL!!!” The warlock screamed for aid, and Bill’s shotgun answered.  Clay’s armor stopped most of the buckshot but it still left him “Riddled with Holes”.  Clay ignored Bill - he figured if he killed the mage, he’d break the spell.  He saw an opening and slammed his cowboy boots down on the warlock’s bare foot.  The warlock screamed as Clay pulped his foot, and he fell back onto the parking lot’s rough gravel.

Severe: “Shattered Foot”

BOOM!  Bill’s shotgun roared again but met Kevlar.  Clay ignored the hit, leapt into the air, and dropped knees-first onto the warlock’s neck!  Tony Jaa wept tears of joy.

Extreme: “Quadraplegic”

The problem with fighting a psychomancer is that they’re still dangerous even after you’ve broken their body.  The warlock commanded Bill to pick him up and get him out of there.  Bill tried, he really did, but Bill was old and used up, and only managed the “pick up” part of the escape plan.  We had to amend that psychomancer saying to include “unless they’ve chosen an old man to do their heavy lifting.  Then they’re not really that tough.”  Honestly, at this point I was out of options for the bad guy.  He could only really tell Bill to get him to safety, and Bill is the last person on whom you want to bet in a footrace.  The warlock was done for, but I didn’t expect him to go out how he did.

Flawless Victory
Just then, Carter emerged into Bordeaux’s parking lot to see Bill straining to tote this skinny kid with his head at an odd angle.  Now, Carter was never one for kill-stealing, but this warlock had to be put down by any means and as soon as possible.  Clay was about to do it himself, sure, but it was Carter’s turn and Carter was the one with the gun in his hand and the self-placed Aspect “Roger Murtaugh Neck Roll”.  He sighted in, rolled his head around, and put a bullet between the warlock’s eyes.

There was a brief moment where I considered “What if his thralls stayed that way?  At least the ones who were Taken Out?”  Then I thought, “Meh.  That was a rough goddamn fight and I’m not going to piss on their victory.”  Bill shrugged off the still-warm corpse and Clay set about leaving the feds a message.

We’re Gonna Need More FBI Guys
Bill, Clay, and Carter were gone by the time Agents Fox and Roberts followed Major Flynn’s tracking spell back to Stackhouse.  They found most of the warlock’s body in brutal disarray in Bordeaux’s kitchen.  Deep fryers were used.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Major Flynn’s spellwork, they likely wouldn’t have been able to determine that the meat was the warlock they were supposed to bring back to Project BLACKBOX.  Additionally, Clay left a message for BLACKBOX with the more conscious of the townsfolk.

He told them trying to capture the warlock - or trying to study/recruit any supernatural entity - was doomed to failure, and shifted a great deal of the blame for the situation Stackhouse was in onto them and their masters.  They had the warlock in captivity for four years like some lab rat.  They placed more value on that monster’s black magic than on the lives of Clay’s entire company and if he saw them again they would fuckin’ rue it.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 03, 2011, 08:45:31 PM
Autopsy
Stackhouse was definitely a longer, more meandering session than the Bad Truck or the NeverNever.  Bad Truck was an off-the-cuff late-night “let’s fight a weird-ass monster” game, and the NeverNever game was more of a travelogue.  You ride an interesting railroad and blow up everything you see.  Stackhouse was an investigation, I suppose, and we don’t do a lot of investigation games.  We had more time for this session and there was a lot of fun roleplaying going on that I simply couldn’t get across here.  Bill prefers his dingy diner/motel breakfast pie blended and in a travel mug to go, for example.  For some reason, me “casting” Jeff Bridges as Major Flynn led to a bunch of Big Lebowski quotes.  Agents Roberts and Fox took turns being Walter and Donny.  Ripping off all the NPCs from other places made for a fun table and gave me easy hooks so I could concentrate on keeping the story straight.

I kick myself for not having copies of my group’s PCs on hand before the game, though.  I felt it was the right decision to throttle back the warlock but it detracted from what I like as a GM, and that’s the freedom to play hard.  It did help me figure out that I actually like running opposition that’s equal to or maybe a little less powerful than the PCs.  It lets me really go balls out to fight them, and that means I’m usually making the most of the FATE system and providing good examples that my group can learn from.

It seems kind of obvious in hindsight that an easy way to tip the balance back would have been to have the BLACKBOX guys show up for the barfight.  There are two reasons they didn’t:

1.  At the start of the battle, I had just plain forgotten about them.
2.  Once it was clear the warlock was that dangerous, having the agents appear would have felt like a deus ex machina cop-out, probably more so than spot-nerfing the warlock.  Especially since Carter had already gone to the trouble of sending them on such a good wild goose chase.

Anyways, everyone said they had fun.  Bill’s Taken Out result wasn’t too bad, as he changed his Aspect back to normal with the milestone reward.  I pretty much told them that the next time I’ve got everyone there for a game it’ll be a Major Milestone, so they are saving their skill points.

Next time... well, I have some ideas.  I want to make a bloody homage to Scooby Doo.  I want to have other hunters.  Crowley-Lampkin’s treasure hunters are one thing and BLACKBOX is another source for human opposition, but I think it’d be interesting to explore people that are more like the PCs than not.  Maybe hunters that have gone a little farther down the “whatever it takes” path.  Maybe with a bigass Black Shuck as their Scooby Doo.  And ghosts!  I want to have another ghost baddie, but then I can’t stop thinking of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” commercials and how awesome that guy would be as a Red Court vampire.

Stay thirsty, my friends! (http://automatedman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/most-interesting-man.jpg)

Resources
Just as I shamelessly stole from True Blood and others for this session, I have no problem throwing some stats and background out there for you guys to swipe or edit for your own games.

Project BLACKBOX: MKULTRA was a CIA program for mind control and brainwashing -  interrogation techniques, Manchurian Candidate type stuff, and more.  In my game, MKULTRA actually caught wind of psychomancy, black magic, and other such methods for dominating wills.  The non-supernatural portions of the program were declassified but the hinky shit continued on in secret under the name BLACKBOX.  Now, I’m not big on conspiracies.  My vision of BLACKBOX is this underfunded red-headed stepchild of a crackpot program where they shove the vicious-but-useful “problem” agents.  There’s a soulless, amoral core to it, though, despite what its field agents might look like.  Its goal is to understand the supernatural and use it for its own ends, which is in marked contrast to the PCs’ “kill it with fire” philosophy.

Project STARGATE: Research into remote viewing, clairvoyance, and scrying got placed under the CIA’s purview in 1995.  Like BLACKBOX, STARGATE found some real success, since in this world there ARE people with Cassandra’s Tears or know how to perform tracking spells.  The problem is one of repeatability.  Most of the time, these talents can’t be trained or passed on to other, more psychologically stable personnel, and of those who possess them, very few actually want to spend their lives as a living crystal ball for the government.  That said, STARGATE is more of a “white hat” program than BLACKBOX.

Fugitive Afghan Warlock
Aspects:
Escaped Afghan Warlock
Out of Place
Keeper of Forbidden Wisdom
BLACKBOX Wants Me For Their Own
I Can Kill You With My Brain
Lesser Men's Minds Are My Plaything
Must Destroy What I Cannot Control
Skills:
Discipline, Conviction    Great
Lore, Athletics, Endurance    Good
Guns, Deceit, Empathy, Rapport    Fair
Survival, Presence, Alertness, Intimidation, Stealth    Average
Stunts/Powers:
Channeling (spirit)    -2
Foci: +1 offensive power, +1 offensive control
Ritual (spirit)    -2
Foci: +2 Discipline control
Lawbreaker (1st)    -1
Lawbreaker (3rd)    -1
Lawbreaker (4th)    -1
Refresh: -7

Major Jeffrey Flynn
Aspects:
Man Who Stares At Goats
Crackpot "Jedi"
Thought Stargate Project Was Reputable
Unerring Predictions That Nobody Believes
Grand Unified Theory of the Supernatural
The Dude Abides
Nothing to Lose
Skills:
Discipline, Lore    Great
Investigation, Alertness, Scholarship    Good
Rapport, Contacts, Athletics    Fair
Conviction, Presence, Driving, Guns, Endurance    Average
Stunts/Powers:
Twitchy 3rd Eye: +2 Lore for Arcane Senses
Cassandra's Tears    0
Psychometry    -1
Ritual (spirit)    -2
Ritual Foci: +2 no-prep Lore
Refresh: -4

Agent Dana Fox
Aspects:
BLACKBOX Field Agent
Perpetual Shit Detail
GI Jane
Too Honest For Black Ops
Occam's - or Bauer's - Razor
Seen Shit That'd Turn You White
Skills:
Guns, Weapons    Great
Conviction, Empathy    Good
Driving, Discipline, Alertness    Fair
Endurance, Contacts, Athletics, Investigation, Lore    Average
Stunts/Powers:
Anything Goes: Never suffer complications from lack of proper weaponry
That Ain't a Knife: Use Weapons instead of Intimidation; must be armed obviously
Shot On The Run: Use Guns to defend against physical attacks
Occultist: Wizards (Mentalists):  Choose one type of supernatural (vampires or demons or wizards); gain +1 Lore when dealing with that subset.  Choose a more specialized focus within that category for an additional +1 (Red Court, Denarians, Wardens)
Resilient Self-Image: You may take 2 additional mild mental consequences (this might be OP, maybe just one.  YMMV)
Tower of Faith: Armor:1 against mental or social stress
Refresh: -6

Agent Patrick Roberts
Aspects:
BLACKBOX Field Agent
In the Basement
Former Marine
Both Sides of the Conspiracy
Knowledge is Power
He Who Fights Monsters
The System Isn't Perfect But It Works
Skills:
Fists, Deceit    Great
Might, Discipline    Good
Driving, Investigation, Alertness    Fair
Endurance, Presence, Conviction, Guns, Burglary    Average
Stunts/Powers:
Wrestler:  +1 Might when maintaining a grapple
Footwork: Use Fists to dodge instead of Athletics
Takes One to Know One: Use Deceit instead of Empathy to catch someone in a lie
Martial Artist:  +1 to Fists knowledge rolls to asses or declare Aspects
Lethal Weapon: Unarmed attacks are Weapon:2, Weapon:1 against Armor:1.  No bonus against heavier Armor
Refresh: -5

EDIT: Explained stunts!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Smith on August 04, 2011, 07:17:57 AM
Man... if they showed this on HBO, I'd actually make it a point to watch TV!

I'm gearing up to try and run my first DFRPG game and I only hope it turns out to be a fraction of the awesomeness of this your games. Awesome read, can't wait for the next episode!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Masurao on August 04, 2011, 01:36:41 PM
I am wondering about the PCs' skills, stunts, etc. Are they posted somewhere, did I miss them?

Awesome session though, sounds really, really cool!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 04, 2011, 05:37:25 PM
Thanks, Smith!  There's a real small chance I might get to run again as early as next weekend, but it is a REAL small chance.

Masurao: As stupid as I felt for not having copies of the PCs' skills for last game, I still didn't actually get them.  So no, I don't have their skills and stunts, but I've emailed the guys about it.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on August 05, 2011, 06:46:11 PM
You know what's awesome?

This game is awesome.

You know what else is awesome?

The Spare Character Concepts thread!

It would appreciate your BLACKBOX guys. Especially if they had fully explained stunts.

PS: Why does the warlock only have Lawbreaker -1 for each Law?
PPS: Pretty sure that that mass enthrallment spell is unfair. But it was aimed at NPCs, so who cares?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 05, 2011, 08:06:10 PM
Posted the NPCs to Spare Character Concepts, and edited my "Autopsy" post above to include the stunt explanations I included with the post to spare character concepts.

The Warlock only has Lawbreakers at -1 because I didn't want him to have even more bonuses.  I figured the Rule of Three bonus along with his foci and the basic Lawbreakers would be dangerous enough, and I was WAY more than right.  :)

In fact, the more I think about it the more I don't like how Lawbreakers are handled mechanically.  I think I understand the rationale behind the RAW, but based on my admittedly slight experience with creating warlocks here and then sinker's thread about government warlocks, I'm percolating some alternate ideas for Lawbreaker.

Quote
PPS: Pretty sure that that mass enthrallment spell is unfair. But it was aimed at NPCs, so who cares?

Oh, it probably was pretty unfair, and you're right, it was done by an NPC on NPCs in a short but still-nebulous timeframe so it wasn't a huge deal.  I remember way back I posted a thread about evocation mentalism and enthralling folks, and the general consensus tended towards "take the cheater way out with sponsored magic" or "you can't enthrall with evocation".  So... yeah, I ignored all that stuff.  :)  Besides, enthralling a PC on a Taken Out is WAY more interesting than simply blowing his head off.

I wouldn't mind feedback on my half-assed minion rules, though.  I feel like they're pretty similar to SotC, but I didn't have that book with me during the game.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 08, 2011, 07:07:09 PM
Well, my group is ass-slow when it comes to any sort of work done off the gaming table, so I just have Clay's stats right now.  I will post the others if I ever get them.

Clayton Haycock James
Aspects:
Marine Recon Biker
Wrecked as a Soldier
Fights Like an Engine
Been Through the Wringer
Knock Me Down But Never Out
Where Did You Come By That?
Renegade
Skills:
4: Endurance,Fists
3: Might, Alertness
2: Guns, Driving, Presence
1: Discipline, Athletics, Craftsmanship, Stealth, Investigation
Stunts:
No pain, no gain (+1 mild phys consequence)
No guts, no glory (+1 moderate phys consequence)
Thick Skinned (+1 phys stress)
Spell Resistant (+1 armor .vs. magic)
Tough as Nails (+1 armor .vs. physical blunt dmg)
Foot Work (fists for dodging)
Demoralizing stance (fists for Intimidate)
Refresh: -7

Cross-posted to the Spare Character Concepts.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 17, 2011, 12:50:51 AM
My brother got back to me with Scott's stats:

Scott Specter (http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/18400000/Ben-in-The-Mechanic-2011-trailer-ben-foster-18414508-900-375.jpg)
ASPECTS
High Concept: Mean Motherfucking Servant of God
Trouble: On a Mission from God
Driven by Redemption
Outlaws to the End
Path of the Righteous Ex-Con
Occult of Personality
By the Skin of My Teeth
SKILLS
Great (+4) Conviction, Discipline
Good (+3) Intimidation, Rapport
Fair (+2) Presence, Empathy, Driving
Average (+1) Lore, Weapons, Fists, Endurance, Guns, Athletics
STUNTS & POWERS
-1 The Sight (+ Soulgaze)
-2 Righteousness
-1 Holy Touch
-1 Devout Words
Refresh: -5

(crossposted to Spare Character Concepts)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 01:51:51 AM
At long last!

Apologies if some of this seems a little jumbled.  The session ran just about double the expected time, plus I’m writing this up 2 weeks later so some of the details of how the gang got from point A to point B are fuzzy.

Session 6

Bill Stockburn (http://www.zombiepark.com/images/gramps/sam1.jpg), Clayton Haycock James (http://images.buddytv.com/battleimages/usr3524622/3524622_5bf8b2cc-d599-4fbf-8d8e-719a4d589807-eliot-spencer-s1-leverage-8045832-400-300.jpg),  Carter Mews (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg), Scott Specter (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/Images/stories/2011/jan/fosterintlede.jpg), and Kathryn Bryant (http://s11.allstarpics.net/images/orig/0/t/0tuc3ejveofn3cj0.jpg)
Reward: Major Milestone

NOW
Welker College
Kansas City, MO

The two men burst into the college junior's dorm room a split-second after she cracked her door.  The struggle that ensued was longer and louder than the girl’s attackers had planned, but the Alpha Sigma Sigma sorority was used to not knocking when one of their dorm rooms was rocking.

“Hold her down!”
“I’m trying, man!”

Alpha Sigma Sigma was not used to terrified death-screams, nor was it accustomed to the heavy thud of hammers driving stakes through ribcages.

Silence.

“Um... isn’t she supposed to burn up or something?”
“I don’t know, man!  Maybe sunlight?”
“Sunlight!  Yeah! Get her over to the window!”

The freshly-staked, still-bleeding corpse of Buffy Covington, age 20, crashed through her dorm window to land heavily and messily on the sunny sidewalk below.

“Shit!  Still no fire, man!  I thought you said they burn up in the-”
“Like I’ve ever done this before!?  Let’s get the fuck outta here!”

OPENING TITLE!
“Rolling Blackouts” is a hell of a Severe consequence to have when you’re trying to drive a motorcycle across state lines.

That’s why our intrepid heroes were currently shacked up at a Section 8 motel just outside Kansas City limits.  Clay was sleeping off his latest tumble and Chip Wakizashi, anchor for Action News 7’s “News of the Weird” segment, was talking about a stripper who had been staked and decapitated at the gentleman’s club PURE in downtown Kansas City.  The gang perked up as the news broadcast went on to say that Amy DeLuca, age 20, was murdered only a few days after an earlier murder-by-stake at Welker College, where junior Buffy Covington was staked and thrown from her 5th story dorm window.

I went around the table with Compels as best I could.  It seemed maybe the wrong people were getting staked, or the girls WERE monsters but not vampires, or any host of explanations.  Either way, the gang’s reasons for getting involved ranged from “saving college girls” to “killing possible vampires” to “teaching whoever IS doing the killing how to do it RIGHT”.

Fresh Meat
NOTE: This was Kathryn Bryant’s player’s second time at our gaming group.  He found us through Carter’s player’s wife, and took to roleplaying very quickly.  With RPG elements pervading video games now, it makes it really easy to transition over to tabletop.  Kathryn’s player was familiar with Fallout 3, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and so on, and he fit right in.  This was also his first time with the FATE system, which was neat to see someone without RPG preconceptions play it.  His High Concept for Kathryn was amazing (“Hot Slice of P.I.”; it’s clever, accurate, and connotates Warrant all at the same time), and his aspect “Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone” was practically printing FP for him.

I forgot to get her full sheet (again!!!), but here's her Aspects:
Kathryn Bryant
Hot Slice of P.I. (HC)
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (T)
Bookworm
Shoot Your Way Out
Not Safe Anywhere
Friends in Low Places
Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone

Never Been Kissed Starring Sam Elliott
The gang motored their way up to Welker College.  Most of my group attended the same college, so I provided easily-recognizable analogues and the jokes starting flying, especially since most of us are a decade or more out of school.  Clay kept on lookout, while Scott and Kathryn hit up campus security individually.  Scott covered up his prison spiderweb tats with his clerical collar and offered psychological counseling to Buffy’s friends (and got a list of names to check out).  Kathryn, disguised as a college student, distracted campus police for Scott’s next move, which was an entirely unsuccessful attempt to glean any information on Buffy’s attackers from surveillance recordings.

Carter went dressed as a professor, and bluffed his way into the registrar’s office to get the class schedules for the girls on Scott’s list*.  A quick readthrough put all the girls in the same American History night class, “A Changing America: 1860-1960”, taught by one Professor Patrick Rogers (http://www.nickkyme.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/lance-reddick.jpg).

*Scott’s List:
1.  Buffy Covington, dead, not a stripper
2.  Amy DeLuca, dead stripper
3.  Ginny Hamilton, stripper, not dead
4.  Patty Blake, Buffy’s roommate, currently missing
5.  Jessie Summers, the Dumbest of Blondes (her High Concept)
6.  Angela Tucker, the token black friend

At this point, somebody said, “Ohhh, he’s a vampire and he’s teaching from personal experience!”  Sure, they were right, but their characters didn’t know that yet, and besides, if Rogers was a vampire, why would he be staking his students?

Bill snagged coveralls and went up to the crime scene in full “don’t mind me, I’m an old janitor” mode.  We had discussed this while Kathryn’s player was choosing stunts and skills, but Kathryn has a stunt that lets her use Scholarship for the “research” trappings of Lore.  This impeded somewhat on Bill’s chosen niche and his high Lore, so I decided to open up more of the “arcane senses” trappings of Lore to those characters who did invest in that skill.  Gut feelings, sniffing corpses, sixth sense, these were all things Bill could now do that Kathryn wouldn’t be able to without upping her Lore skill.  Bill didn’t need any of that stuff, though - even in a crime scene picked over by police, Bill could tell that Buffy possessed superhuman strength (there was a man-sized dent in the drywall, the carpet was ripped up by main force, and there was more junk food lying around than Buffy’s bikini-ready physique would indicate).  The peanut gallery threw out some ideas (ghoul, red court infected, white court, fairy knight, scion), but “strong creature that looks human” is, like, the baseline for the Dresden bestiary.  Bottom line is, their investigation at Welker turned up leads but wasn’t enough on its own.  They drove to PURE.

Stripping Your Way Through College
The gang hit PURE early in the afternoon, after some employees would be there but before it opened its doors.  Kathryn went “undercover” as a prospective hire using her “Hot Slice of P.I.” Aspect, Carter simply cased the joint with some Burglary maneuvers and snuck in the back, and the rest of the gang put on their “angry Italian family members from back east looking for answers about what happened to their cousin/granddaughter/niece Amy” faces and Intimidated the lone bouncer-in-training at the door.  Unfortunately, Kathryn’s ruse worked a little too well - she accepted a Compel on her “Hot Slice of P.I.” and the manager invited her back to his office for an “audition”.  With this Compel, I felt we might be skirting the line just a bit, especially with a new player, but I think I made it clear that the Compel was not for Kathryn to give the slob of a manager a blowjob or anything, the Compel was that the manager made the advances in the first place, and that Kathryn could respond as she liked.  What Kathryn did was pretty clever, and with the single sultry question “Do you like it tied up?” she had the manager restrained, gagged, and blindfolded and was rifling through his office with Carter a moment later.  Carter accepted a Compel to simply rob the place (knowing when the manager called the cops, it’d be Kathryn he’d be telling them about). 

Meanwhile, the guys out front got some choice intel from the poor beleaguered bouncer.  1) Amy wasn’t the only stripper out of their list of friends; Ginny Hamilton was also stripping her way through college at PURE.  2) Bobby Sutherland was the bouncer on duty the night Amy was killed (Kathryn got his address from the manager’s office).  3) They snagged a ton of dressing room photos so they had pictures of the entire group, plus Bobby, and plus Patty’s boyfriend, Fred.  4) There was more evidence that Amy and Ginny were eating way more than normal, like they were trying to satiate a ravenous hunger.

Splitting the Party For Fun and Profit
The group was tied up in figuring out what the girls actually were and how Professor Rogers fit into it, not who was killing these girls.  They were pretty sure Rogers was a Red Court vampire based on what they knew about various vampires’ enthralling abilities, and Carter struck out on his own to check out Rogers’ townhouse while the suspected vampire had office hours at the college.

Those Hot Pockets Were Expired
Bill and Clay decided to pay the bouncer, Bobby Sutherland, a visit, and went on up to the guy’s apartment high-rise.  Once again, Intimidation proved a valuable skill as Bobby backed down from an armed confrontation.  The bouncer was suspicious but offered what information he had, if the two armed men in his apartment would just leave.  Bobby confessed to banging Amy and Ginny, he corroborated the list of girls’ identities and addresses but only knew Buffy’s boyfriend Fred in passing, and he told them he was tased and held down by a huge dog the night of Amy’s murder, after which he gave chase but lost the two culprits.  He gave enough of a description that the pair of hunters figured one of the murderers was Patty’s boyfriend, Fred.  While Bill could tell Bobby was hiding something, they couldn’t tell if they had gotten the whole truth from him (they had some bad dice luck and decided it wasn’t worth the FP).  For our studio audience, however, Bobby was totally a RCV.  It’s just that when you work a night shift and live alone, subtle clues like thick drapery blocking the sun and a fridge stocked with naught but frozen entrees and beer are reasonable accoutrements.

Fangbanger
Kathryn and Scott paid Ginny Hamilton a visit.  Her fairly classy apartment close to Welker spoke to a wealthy family, and the gang breathed a sigh of relief that Carter and his kleptomania were elsewhere.  Ginny was more evasive than Bobby had managed to be, but Scott and Kathryn had pretty good rolls on top of high social skills and cajoled the truth out of her.

Ginny was part of what she affectionately termed “the vampire club” (“And we all had vampire names picked out!  MY vampire name is ‘Nyteblade’!”*).

*Updated Scott’s List, Now With Vampire Names
1.  Buffy “Buffy, tee hee” Covington
2.  Amy “Dracula” DeLuca
3.  Ginny “Nyteblade” Hamilton
4.  Patty “This is stupid, guys” Blake
5.  Jessie “Bella *groan*” Summers
6.  Angela “Angela” Tucker

Professor Rogers was totally a vampire, and although his class was legitmately interesting, it was also a sort of recruitment test for a burgeoning Kansas City vampire nest.  Now, Ginny didn’t know all that - the players pieced it together - but what Ginny did know was that Bobby at PURE was also a vampire, and Buffy and Ginny and Amy and their friends wanted to all be sparkly awesome sexy vampires together.  Buffy, Ginny, and Amy had managed to “convince” Bobby to infect them when Fred started noticing Patty acting strangely (narcotic saliva in the classroom watercooler makes ANY class highly entertaining) and told her to transfer out of Rogers’ class.  The Alpha Sigma Sigma girls didn’t want their group broken up, so they got Bobby to infect Patty too, and that’s when the “vampire murders” started.

Carter: “Fred told Patty, or asked Patty?”
Me: “A guy like Fred doesn’t know the difference.”

Clay: “When we are done with this, we are going to fucking murder Stephanie Meyer.”
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on November 27, 2011, 04:46:55 AM
Huh, sounds like a pretty cool session.

Hope there's a part 2 to this story.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 06:18:23 AM
There's several more parts - I just got interrupted while posting.  :)

She’s Not a Monster... Yet
Since the Ginny exposition was taking a fairly long time, and the encounter with Bobby was over very quickly, I let Bill and Clay meet up at Ginny’s apartment, where I was astounded and pleased to watch my players start arguing about what should be done with Ginny.  When I planned the adventure, I was hoping to spark some moral quandaries revolving around the group doing the killings, not the victims themselves, but what happened in Ginny’s apartment was just balls out awesome roleplaying.

Bill immediately argued for killing Ginny.  She was Red Court Infected.  There was no cure, no hope, and judging from her college career so far it didn’t look like she had the willpower to refrain from killing for a week, let alone forever.  She was practically a vampire already, she was just easier to kill now.  Bill got a FP for his “Former Host of Pantagruel” aspect as he argued what it was like to be a monster and how he would not willingly let someone else follow the same path he did.

Clay knew what it was like to be broken by something beyond his control (and got a FP for “Wrecked as a Soldier”), and argued that Ginny COULD hold out.  Clay was proof - out of his platoon he might have been the only survivor but he DID survive.  To deny Ginny that chance would be wrong.  Clay wanted to just keep tabs on her, and if she did change, they’d come back at that point and finish the job.

Scott was “Driven By Redemption” (another FP), and sided with Clay.  Ginny was still human, despite the curse in her blood, and it was their job to protect humans-

Bill: “It is our job to hunt monsters, and she is a monster.  Goddammit, boys, I ain’t gonna be around forever!  I’m tryin’ ta teach you what ya’ll need to know before it’s too late!  If you cain’t do what needs ta be done ya’ll end up dead or worse!  Let her live if ya want, but when you get yer balls back give me a call!”

With that, Bill thundered off into the sunset to the opening chords of “Blaze of Glory.”

Scott wanted to help Ginny see what she was up against, and soulgazed her.  Scott stood beside Ginny as she admired herself in a full-length mirror.  Her reflection was perfect, immortal, powerful, and yes, even a little bit sparkly.  Her real self, however, was embraced and entwined by the horrific visage of a Red Court vampire.  Scott drew up his will, smashed the mirror, and with it, smashed Ginny’s preconceptions about life as a bloodsucking abomination.  It was just a free tag on a single Aspect “Knows What She’s Up Against”, but it was more than Ginny had before.  Clay gave her the number to his burner phone as well, in case the other hunters caught up with her.

Home Alone
We all forgot Carter was still patiently waiting his turn in the spotlight after that intense intraparty scene, but I set the scene outside Rogers’ well-aged flagstone townhouse for Carter and he staked out the location for a while, placing helpful Aspects for his impending burglary.  Some distant gang gunfire, some barking dogs, a few passers-by, and Rogers’ neighbor leaving for work were the only highlights.  Carter narrowly avoided tripping a series of heat sensors but made his way in through the window unperturbed.

In contrast to Bobby Sutherland’s spartan arrangements, Rogers’ home was filled with over a century of valuable academia and antique furnishings.  His fridge looked well-stocked but it was mostly for show.  The majority of the food had long shelf lives and sat untouched; Carter surmised Rogers, as a tenured professor, simply made more money than Bobby did and so could afford to “dress up” his home on occasions where he would have had to meet people there or bring back a promising student for some personal tutelage.

Unfortunately for Carter, Rogers’ townhouse was slathered in bookshelves full to bursting with rare occult volumes.  Carter happily accepted a Compel on “Arcane Acquisitions Expert” and loaded “as many books as would reliably encumber him” onto his person and then into more satchels for his bike.  Had Carter escaped unnoticed, Rogers would still be tipped off that someone who knew occult valuables had been in his house.  But Rogers wasn’t home; he was at Welker College in his office, the sun had set not long before, and Carter figured he had a couple hours to poke around.

Carter didn’t find a single thing out of place.  There were no vampiric attack dogs, no Saw-style torture pens, no coffins.  The bedroom windows were tinted opaque, however, and the drapes were the heaviest he’s seen.  I’m afraid I don’t remember if Carter found anything on Rogers’ computer; I think he just stole the hard drive out of it and figured Scott or Kathryn could make use of it.

In the basement (which looked like a completely normal bar / den), Carter discovered a cleverly-hidden passageway behind (of all things) a bookcase.  He also discovered that there was no trick to the secret passage - it was just a damn heavy bookcase.  It would take multiple people to move it, or some time with some tools Carter didn’t have, or, say, a creature with Inhuman Strength to move the case.  It looked like it led into the neighbor’s basement.

Carter knew he was running short on time and called in Kathryn; her previous life as a private investigator might turn up something that Carter missed, and he wanted the backup.  Carter’s best combat skill was Weapons +1, whereas Kathryn rocked a Guns +4.

Maybe You're The Bum
Carter broke into the neighboring unit and he and Kathryn found a nearly-empty townhouse.  There were just enough furnishings to pass casual inspection, but this was clearly a bolt-hole or diversionary dwelling.  The basement door was retrofitted steel and was padlocked.  Carter had his way with Sargent’s finest and the duo headed down the stairs into a vampire larder.

The basement walls were lined with soundproofing, and padded cages had been set into the floor.  There were five hobos and a single hospital patient, still in his gown.  All were restrained with fuzzy handcuffs that looked like castoffs from PURE.  I immediately compelled Carter on “Good, Bad, I’m the Guy with the Goods”.  He had his loot, he had the intel, it was time to get out.  He was no hero.  At the same time, I compelled Kathryn’s “Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone” Aspect.  She couldn’t leave these victims behind, not after she’d come this far.  Luckily, Carter refused his Compel and the pair set about freeing the saliva-addicted-but-not-infected victims.  The more cognizant of the hobos recounted how they were regulars at a soup kitchen in midtown-

Carter: “Eww, they’re spiking the soup?!”
Kathryn: “How many of them are there?”

The sole hospital victim couldn’t remember much, but he did remember the same nurse always changed his IVs over at Truman Medical Center.

Carter and Kathryn called the rest of the gang and quickly agreed it was time to leave.  No sooner had they reached the top of the basement stairs than they heard the neighbor’s SUV pull into her parking spot.

Catch and Release
They wisely decided not to hide in the basement-that-locked-from-outside, and instead set up a hasty ambush.  The freed victims rushed for the townhouse’s backyard while Carter and Kathryn laid in wait just inside the basement doorway.  Sure enough, a vampire CCH Pounder-alike sprinted into the townhouse, dropping her latest victim on the kitchen floor.  She passed the basement stairs and was nailed by a barrage of gunfire!

(I was using the option where any hit of 3 shifts or more over the target qualifies as a gutshot on a RCV.)

Cecilia Potts (the soup kitchen vampire), now “Gutshot”, easily won initiative-

Me: “Okay, surprise round’s over.  Roll Alertness for initiative.  ...And... Cecilia goes first with a 6.
Kathryn: “What?!
Me, smiling: “Vampires are fast.  Don’t worry, you’ve got that stunt that lets you defend with Guns.  Carter, however, does not.”

And indeed, Carter did not.  The unbelievably fast grandmotherly vampire punched a hole in her drywall right where Carter had been a second ago.  The thief took a Mild consequence “Fell Down the Stairs” as he poorly dodged the vampire’s attack.  He landed on his back at the base of the steps, handgun pointed up at the melee between Kathryn and Cecilia.  I offered Carter a FP because he “Had No Shot”, which he accepted.  He then took a round to aim.  That was a fine way to think his way around that complication.

Meanwhile, Kathryn showed Cecilia that having a +1 to Athletics dodges doesn’t mean shit when you can’t roll above a -3 on the dice.  Kathryn blew half Cecilia’s head off with her next attack, Carter plugged the vampire with an aimed shot, then Kathryn finished splattering cherry pie across the stairwell.  Cecilia tumbled down the stairs, her neck stump oozing what blood hadn’t already leaked from her belly wounds.

Clay burst through the sliding glass door (with Scott and even Bill, lured back into the action at the promise of killing real vampires, just blocks away)  just as Carter and Kathryn pronounced the house clear.  Clay was disappointed.  His victorious teammates returned from the basement with Cecilia’s phone and scoured it for clues.

Holy crap, there were more vampires in Kansas City than they thought.

There Are Many Vampires... and They Have a Plan
The gang pieced together Rogers’ cadre of vampires from Cecilia’s phone and the hobo intel:

Bobby Sutherland, bouncer.  Turned because Rogers needed some muscle and a seedy guy with a different kind of contacts.  Nothing the gang had seen thus far indicated the vamps were feeding on strip club patrons but they might have been simply rotating their food source.

Cecilia Potts: Cecilia was a social worker who volunteered at the soup kitchen in midtown.  She supplied the RCVs a diet of homeless unfortunates whose disappearances would be missed by few and investigated by fewer.

Linda Holloway: Linda was a late-shift nurse at Truman Medical Center.  She also supplied victims and her job allowed her some measure of access to spoof medical records and incident reports.

There was no time to keep up their vampire-slaying momentum, however - the police would be on their way (over a dozen shots fired in a few seconds tends to draw them out) and to top it off, Clay got a call from Ginny on his burner!

Ginny, panting with exhaustion: “Those killers are after me!”
Clay: “Where are you?”
Ginny: “Wabash and Lake- oh God!  They have a dog! Help me!”
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 06:19:41 AM
The Scooby Gang
Bill and Kathryn, both being more scholarly types, were happy to load their bikes down with portions of Carter’s big occult score.  A few moments later, the gang roared out of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood and beelined for Ginny’s last known position.  I had the gang roll Driving; they would arrive in that order across a number of rounds, and at differing positions in the chase.

Kathryn found Ginny first.  The college student was sprinting inhumanly fast down the street, but it was clear she was tiring.  A massive black dog snapped and growled a few car lengths behind her.  Its eyes were big as saucers and shone with a baleful light.  Kathryn aced an impromptu Lore roll and identified the beast as a Black Shuck.

Bill: “Hell yeah!” (Bill’s player loves random weird monsters)
Scott: “Is it like a demon, or what?  Can I hurt it?” (referring to his Holy Touch power)
Me: “Well, it burned down a church during the Renaissance, so yeah, I’d say it generally tends towards evil.”

Behind the Shuck, an old green GMC van swerved and juked to avoid the sudden onslaught of bikers in its path.  The shaggy-haired driver looked completely stoned out of his mind (http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20090401/293.ad.PineappleExpress.Franco.040109.jpg), but it didn’t stop the polo-shirt-wearing frat boy douchebag (http://media.thestar.topscms.com/images/cf/66/9466225b41b28693c69ea67b8204.jpeg) in the passenger seat from leaning out the window with a crossbow!

We paused here for a moment while I was simultaneously berated and complimented on working Scooby Doo into the game.

I Can See Through My Leg Hole
Kathryn kicked off the chase proper by scooping up Ginny onto the back of her crotch rocket.  I had explained the rules about Feeding Dependency and the Hunger stress track at this point, and Kathryn was feeling pretty vulnerable driving three times the posted limit with a Red Court Infected sitting behind her fighting off hunger pangs.

The rest of the gang tried to head off the Black Shuck, but the demon dog was just too fast.  They swarmed in around the green van, powersliding out from side streets and alleys, and... well, they kind of had another conflict of interest.  Do they kill these two morons in the van?  Do they help them?  How did they end up with a Black Shuck?  Do they go Old Yeller on the thing?  Can you kill a Black Shuck if you’re not Scott?

They took the mature route and decided to talk things over with the guys in the van.  One flat tire and a skidding, sideswiping stop up against a line of parked cars later, they escorted the wounded van into a nearby alley and surrounded the green and teal GMC.

“Call off your dog!” the PCs shouted at the duo.  The driver shrugged and, not entirely believing it would work, called out, “Hey, Shaggy, come ‘ere!”

The Shuck slid to a stop, leaving Kathryn and Ginny speeding away on the bike, and trotted back to the alley.

Bill: “How did you do that?  And... how did you get a Black Shuck?”
“I can answer that,” called a voice from the back of the van.
Scott: “Oh, right.  Velma (http://media.desura.com/images/members/1/323/322886/cdca4f4475b2953bc64013d31cdcdda8.jpg).”
Me: “Well, this one’s Valerie, but yeah.”

Valerie (no, not Velma, not at all) Dinkley explained the situation while Fred (Bundy, Patty’s boyfriend) sulked and Sonny (Falco, Fred’s dealer) took a handful of dubious pills to calm his nerves.  Patty told Fred about the vampire club after she was infected at PURE, and Fred went berserk.  He didn’t go to the cops because if vampires were real, they would definitely have influence over the police (“Just like in Blade!”).  He roped Sonny into his scheme during a smokeathon and the pair of morons approached Valerie, the mousy emo girl whom they figured would appreciate the attention.  Little did they know Valerie spent 2 Refresh on Ritual (Summoning), had a real book of magic, and was just itching to try out some real spells.  The summoning spell was supposed to bind “Shaggy” the Black Shuck to Val’s will, but for some reason it bonded to Sonny, who was there trying to help the casting by placing drug-fueled maneuvers on the ritual.  It didn’t quite work, and Sonny ended up with a big black hellhound that talked to him.  Val’s book apparently only had information about killing Black Court vamps, judging from Fred and Sonny’s previous efforts.

This Scooby gang took it upon themselves to do whatever it took to rid Kansas City of vampires, and it struck a chord with the PCs.  Scott saw it as a chance to start building something larger than a lone motorcycle gang.  Bill and Fred saw eye to eye on the subject of wiping out the nest, and besides, Bill’s player wasn’t going to miss the chance to team up with a Black Shuck.  He’s easy like that.

Meanwhile, Kathryn had Ginny at a McDonald’s and the girl was tearing into the dollar menu.  They had actually drawn a small crowd as the tally hit $20 and kept going.  Ginny had used 4 points of powers in her escape, and if she failed that Discipline roll, it would be in a crowded public establishment.  Ginny was rolling with a Discipline of Fair; I rolled the dice and Kathryn held her breath... +2 on the dice!  Ginny just made her roll!

It’s Not Really a Brains Kind of Operation
Now that everyone was teamed up and sharing information, the gang started scheming.  First, they called up the rest of the vampire club - this wasn’t so much a call for backup as a tactic to have the infected all in one place just in case things went to shit.  Fred picked up Patty from his dorm and they added Jessie Summers, dumbest of blondes, to their party as well, but Angie Tucker wasn’t picking up.

They decided a single decapitating strike on the vampires was worth the increased personal risk compared to tracking them down individually and risking them tipping each other off.  The one place they knew there wouldn’t be a vampire that night?  Cecilia Potts’ soup kitchen.  They had phone numbers for Rogers, Bobby, and this other nurse vamp, Laura Holloway, from Cecilia’s phone.  Bill and Scott scouted out the soup kitchen and then ran the homeless off.

From there, the plan was simple.
1.  Text the RCVs something worrying and vague.  “Problem with tonight’s acquisition.  Meet at soup kitchen.  Radio silence” or similar.  Anything to bring the vamps out and hopefully keep them from calling back.
2.  Rig the soup kitchen to create a killbox; use Sonny’s van to block the rear door and rig the security grates to close quickly and easily lock.
3.  Trap the vamps inside with the gang and, in the immortal words of Axe Cop, chop their heads off!
4.  Not only would this plan result in dead vampires, it would act as an impromptu pass/fail class on monster hunting for Fred, Valerie, and the others.

To my surprise, and despite my counter-scheming (It’s easy to shut down players’ plans by fiat but it’s an order of magnitude harder to think like the villain and limit yourself to reasonable precautions based on character knowledge), the actual events didn’t stray too far from the plan.

No Soup For You
Carter might not have been the best combatant, but tonight his Deceit skill paid off for every nasty hit he took during the campaign.  All 3 RCVs fell for his texting ruse, and his disguises (through direct rolls or maneuvers) were tough to see through.  The rest of the gang wasn’t sitting around, either; I let every PC make a roll to establish a helpful Aspect, and then I tossed in some obvious scene aspects.  The players chose to have the soup kitchen “Brightly Lit” as opposed to “Dim Lighting”, for example.

Bill, Clay, Kathryn, and Fred were out in the soup kitchen main area.  Kathryn spent her pre-fight rolls failing to acquire heavier weaponry from Kansas City’s lowlifes, so she was making do with a one-shot potato silencer*.

*We already shot down the coke bottle silencer idea.  I wasn’t going to piss in her Cheerios over a single-use item, despite the dubious effectiveness.  She had Guns +4, she could make it work.

Scott, Val, and Patty were behind the serving line, which was stocked with all manner of dangerous aspects like “Boiling Soup”, “Gleaming Kitchen Implements”, and so on.  Scott and Bill had teamed up for their pre-fight rolls and blessed the building’s sprinklers ala Constantine.  I dithered over the effects, but decided that the sprinklers would make it so ANY attack satisfied the vampires’ Catch.

Carter and Jessie were in the back kitchen, making soup and putting on a good show.

Jessie: “I’m cutting carrots!  I’m a Hufflepuff!”

Shaggy was hiding in the restroom and Sonny was out back waiting in his van, keeping watch.  The gang had wisely kept him away from both HIS drugs as well as the hot college girls’ narcotic spittle.

While the gang prepared for vampire beatdowns, Professor Rogers gathered his own troops and met a few blocks from the soup kitchen.  Angie Tucker was with him; she had been a promising enough recruit that Rogers went ahead and infected her, he needed the backup / fodder, what with people running around killing people and asking questions.  He had a few other infected minions as well; his TA, Martin; Susan, an older Alpha Sigma Sigma student who had gotten the ASS girls interested in Rogers’ class in the first place; and Tom, another student from his current class.  Bobby and Laura showed up and were none too pleased to learn that someone had freed their dinners.

Can You Fly, Bobby?
Rogers also hinted at something greater going on in his cutscene with Bobby.
Bobby: “It might be a trap, boss.”
Rogers: “I know.  That’s why you’re going down there to check it out.”
Bobby: “Yeah, I’ll- what? Why me?”
Rogers: “Because you handed out immortality for a couple of blowjobs, Bobby.  I have a selection process for a reason and you have threatened everything I’m trying to build here.  Now Cecilia is dead, our food is gone-”
Laura: “Hisssssss!”
Rogers: “- and someone has been killing my students.  All this attention is going to ruin our relationship with Mr. Santos.  He is flying in for a meeting to see our operation here, so sending you down there, Bobby?  It is going to prove one of two things to Mr. Santos.  Either one, you go down there and it’s a trap; you kill everyone and we show Mr. Santos we can take care of business... or two, you go down there and it’s a trap, they kill you, and then the rest of us kill them and Mr. Santos sees that we can clean up our own messes.  Now walk the fuck down there and check it out.”

Achievement Unlocked
One of the fun things I am trying in my game now is the idea of Xbox-like Achievements.  Instead of just calling a chunk of advancement a milestone, I want to give it some flavor based on what the group actually did to earn that advancement.  The idea needs some refinement still, but the one I came up for this game was:

Problem Solved, Problem Staying Solved: Take Out a non-minion enemy with a single attack (+1 Skill Point)

Bobby walked into the back of the soup kitchen and completely blew his Alertness roll to see through Carter’s various ruses.  Now that vampires were on site, and seeing how useless Jessie had been during food prep, Carter sent her out back to Sonny’s van after Bobby entered the main dining floor.

Bill had been using his newfound Arcane Senses trappings pretty frequently throughout the session, and I figured what was good for the goose was good for the Red Court.  While Bobby might not have seen through the disguises, there were enough supernatural beings in the soup kitchen that maybe his Echoes of the Beast could pick up on the Black Shuck or Scott’s holy aura.  I wasn’t holding out much hope for Bobby, but called for a roll anyway: Bobby’s Lore+Echoes of the Beast vs. Scott and Shaggy’s Discipline.

Bobby rolled a +4 on the dice.

The jig was up.  We rolled initiative.

Kathryn beat the vampire on initiative, raised her potato-suppressed .45, and blew a hole straight through his blood sack.  Bobby ragdolled to the floor and bled out in seconds.  It was amazing.  Bobby was still considered under ambush until his action (I figured it was like being flat-footed in D&D), Kathryn rolled ridiculously well, and Bobby’s roll was well in the negatives.  Kathryn added a heaping helping of scene aspect tags and FP and blew the vamp to hell.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 06:22:10 AM
They Check In But They Don’t Check Out
Kathryn’s silent takedown gave the gang a few minutes to clean up Bobby’s mess before Rogers called the dead bouncer’s cellphone.  Confident in their superiority and assured that they’d outnumber what they assumed was a small band of hunters, Rogers, Holloway, and their infected minions strode through the soup kitchen’s front door (accepting Compels for their pride).

Rogers (to his infected): “You are all promoted.  Kill and feed as you desire.”

Scott tripped the sprinklers (DC4 Craftsmanship to bypass the PCs’ trickery) and Clay dropped the security grates (DC5 Might to break through).  Out back, Sonny rolled his van up against the back door.  The vampires didn’t seem that perturbed until 1) the blessed sprinkler system started burning away their flesh masks and 2) Patty Blake leapt over the serving line with a chainsaw!

Rogers’ infecteds split up - Tom moved to block Clay from getting to his masters, Martin tried to make it past Scott and shut off the sprinklers, Angela went for Fred, screaming “You killed my friends, you popped-collar frat-boy fuck!”, and Susan just flat-out charged Patty, chainsaw be damned.  Rogers himself turned and started beating the security grates, but they held up to his inhuman tantrums.  Holloway sprinted for the back door and made it into the kitchen hallway in time to see Shaggy blast out of the men’s room like Zuul from Ghostbusters!  Carter wisely stayed out of the vampire-Shuck brawl.

In the main floor, Bill and Patty ganged up on Susan.  Patty didn’t have the Weapons skill, but Bill ably inflicted a consequence on Susan right off the bat and Patty tagged it to land a vicious hit straight out of Gears of War.  Susan used her one Recovery boost and cracked Patty’s ribs with a kick.

Fred was in trouble, however - literally.  His trouble aspect was “Has No Idea What He’s Doing”, and he was just not prepared for all-out warfare.  Fred froze up but Kathryn came to his aid.  Her handgun blossomed gory flowers across Angela’s torso before the infected coed could maul Fred. (GM note: What really happened was there were so many people on the map that I forgot to have Fred take an action.  After that point, it became a sort of retroactive Compel.)  The same thing happened with Ginny, who I decided was in shock at seeing what vampires were really like combined with a refusal to attack and kill her friends.

Kathryn and Bill had no such qualms.  They shot Susan and Angela to death respectively, then turned their lethal minstrations towards Martin, who had reached the sprinkler controls only to find that they were rigged!  Not only were they rigged, but Valerie was hiding behind the counter with a pot of boiling stew (nobody expects the witch to simply hit you with her bubbling cauldron)!  Martin’s screams were cut short by a fusillade of gunfire from Kathryn and Bill.  Valerie picked up a second pot of soup and returned to her hiding spot.

Boots of Escaping
Rogers managed to beat his way through the security grating and ran outside with Clay, Kathryn, and Scott hot on his heels.  Tom tried to stop Clay with a grapple and got two consequences for his trouble (“Ouch, my fangs!” and “Ouch, my knee!”).  Once he was out in the open, Rogers bolted for the alley beside the soup kitchen and leapfrogged up the fire escape.  Clay managed to stop the cardigan-wearing vampire professor with a string of taunts before Rogers could disappear onto the rooftop.  Clay’s provocation mixed with Rogers’ own predilection towards monologuing, and he paused on the roof ledge just long enough for Scott to aim and plug the ugly bastard.  Rogers ran for it then, but now he was leaving a blood trail.

Clay took off up the fire escape while Tom, seemingly forgotten during the struggle to catch Rogers, limped to a parked car.  He almost wrestled the door open before Kathryn shot him in his other knee (“Ouch, My Most of Me!”) and finished him off with a brutal axe kick to the skull (http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/931/mikexjd.gif).

You Just Got Killed By a Daewoo Lanos
Bill and Patty were closing in on Holloway, who was holding her own against Shaggy in the backroom kitchen brawl.  Both creatures had identical stress tracks and were dinging each other for about the same damage, so the additional hunters would really tip the scales.  Like Rogers’ success against the security grates, Linda Holloway managed to shove Sonny’s van back far enough to escape the soup kitchen.  Sonny and Jessie started screaming as the inhuman monster broke free.  Linda tossed Sonny from his own GMC and climbed in next to Jessie.

Sonny: “Get out, Jessie!”
Jessie: “I can’t!  My seat belt’s stuck!”
Sonny: “Why were you wearing your seat belt, man!?”
Jessie: “I DON’T KNOW!!!”

Carter and Shaggy burst out of the back door before Linda could take advantage of the 8 pints of blood wriggling in the captain’s chair next to her.  The black dog leapt into the van as Linda floored it in reverse, trying and failing to run over Sonny! (Sonny had 2 skills worth a damn: Athletics and Alertness).  Carter snagged a beater of an Oldsmobile someone left in the backstreet courtyard and set to hotwiring the thing.

Set Facebook Statuses To “Single”
Inside, the battle was pretty much over, so it was time for the surviving infected to make hunger rolls.  More specifically, the best time for an infected to make hunger rolls is when they’re surrounding by endearing but tasty NPCs and the party is scattered to hell and back and unable to respond.  Ginny actually didn’t have to roll - we forgot about her during the combat, so she didn’t use any powers.  Patty had used 4 points of powers, but she also had the highest Discipline, at Great.  I’m thinking, “Patty’ll have no problem with this.  She’s set up to be the Final Girl and be Daphne to Fred’s, well, Fred.”

-2 on the dice.  Patty turned on Bill, hunger branded across her every movement, only to find that Bill already had his Judge aimed at her head.  Bill blew Patty’s brains out and hobbled out to ride shotgun in Carter’s stolen car.

You Just Shot Marvin In The Face
Linda Holloway was in a tight spot.  She was wrestling with Shaggy while driving down the street in reverse, pursued by two gunmen in a stolen Olds.  Fighting Shaggy was forcing Linda to use her primary actions for combat; if she could get rid of the damn dog she could at least roll Driving and get the van turned around.  Despite taking more damage from Shaggy’s claws, she managed to Maneuver Shaggy out of the van along with the driver’s side door.  Shaggy hit hard and rolled, but shook it off in time to leap into the Olds with Carter and Bill.  He stuck his head out the window (of course) and just glared at Linda with those baleful saucer eyes.

Linda looked over at Jessie, who was still wearing her seat belt.  She could feed on Jessie, heal up, and then take down these hunters - and their little dog too!

Carter set Bill up with a Driving maneuver: “Holding Her Steady”.

Linda’s fangs snapped towards Jessie but buckshot travels faster than vampires.  Now Jessie was 1) wearing her seat belt, 2) drenched in vampire blood, and 3) hurtling backwards in a driverless van!  The players braced for the worst, given Jessie’s past history with, well, everything, but Jessie’s previous pratfalls had been earning her FATE Points.  Bill and Carter were surprised as hell when the mean green GMC machine skidded to a perfect stop and Jessie got out.

“I’ll just make my own way home,” she said, and walked off into the night, clearly finished with the whole situation.

It’s Pretty Much a Pass/Fail Class
Clay half-tracked, half-chased Rogers over the Kansas City rooftops and through cluttered backyards and alleys.  Rogers was fast and agile, but Clay’s Endurance was the kind of Endurance you get from humping half your body weight through the desert.  He pressed on, utilizing his own variation on Daniel Craig demolition-parkour to counteract Rogers’ inhuman abilities, and phoned the rest of the gang once he determined Rogers was heading back to Welker College.

As great as Inhuman Speed is, it can’t outrun cellphones and motorcycles.  Thinking he had handily lost his pursuers, Rogers strolled into his campus office, talking on his cellphone.  He retrieved his emergency go-bag from under a pile of books while assuring a “Mr. Santos” on the other end of the line that there were “a few minor setbacks” and that perhaps they should “meet at a later date”.

Then he noticed Scott waiting in his nice leather chair.

I Don’t Always Drink Blood, But When I Do...
Rogers: “I’m sorry, sir.  I’ll have to call you back.”
Mr. Santos, the Most Interesting Vampire in the World: “Of course.  Stay thirsty, my friend.

I wish I could remember more of Rogers’ and Scott’s dueling monologues.  Rogers accepted a Compel on his “Caught Me Monologuing” Trouble Aspect, so Scott would be able to stall for time, baiting Rogers into the classic trap of explaining his evil plans while the gang caught up.

Rogers: “...And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for you pesky motherfu-”

It is a standing rule at my table that Clay doesn’t need to roll to kick down doors.  The PCs swarmed into Rogers’ office but Rogers’ initiative bonus finally worked as expected, and the vampire laid down a zone-wide attack using “Storm of Punches” right off our very own Custom Stunts List!  Rogers was a destructive blur as he shredded his office in his attempts to kill his would-be slayers.  Sadly, although the attack forced the gang to burn FP to dodge, Rogers only struck Carter, slamming him into and through the drywall into the main hallway.  I figured that was the only attack Rogers was going to pull off, so I savored my one hit and braced for impact.

There is a reason monsters fear the torches and pitchforks of the common man.  Common men often have stockpiles of FP and are more than willing to burn them if it means killing the shit out of a vampire in a single round.  When it was over, Scott laid hands on the mangled thing that had masqueraded as Professor Rogers and asked God if He would please wipe that fucking abomination off the face of His earth.

God obliged, and Scott’s Holy Touch burned the vampire corpse down to unrecognizable charred lumps.

The gang snagged Rogers’ phone, but refused Compels to stick around and comb through his office (thus giving campus security time to investigate the half-dozen motorcycles on the Humanities building lawn and the reports of a few dozen shots fired).  They took off just as the campus golf cart trundled into view.  The stunned security guard stared after the rapidly retreating bikers before uttering, “Mother of God.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=k8tRa_yX7M0#t=35s)

4.0 GPAs For Everybody
The green van sped down the dark stretch of interstate.  The bikers didn’t stick around for fond farewells, but Fred, Sonny, Valerie, and Ginny had seen the news about Rogers’ “abrupt disappearance amidst signs of a struggle” as well as other reports surrounding the “Soup Kitchen Massacre” from the dingy Kansas motel room the night they put several hundred miles between them and the multiple homicides in Kansas City.  Their new life on the road would be hard, but they knew they weren’t alone out there.  There were other people fighting the things in the dark.

Shaggy perked up as a lone deer approached the highway.  The ancient omen of doom fixed the animal with his stare, then the van was gone.  The deer, unsure of just what it saw but sure it never wanted to see those eyes again, bolted across the roa-

It never saw the semi truck.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 06:23:27 AM
Epilogue

The PCs made it out of KC with a Major Milestone under their belts and hints of a Mexican vampire cartel trying to get a foothold in the US.  They also, for good or ill, set a ragtag bunch of college kids on a warpath against creatures of the night.  It was a hasty parting, and likely the last time the two groups would meet as allies.  After all, it wouldn’t take Fred long to figure it was Bill that killed his girlfriend.

Jessie Summers was picked up by police for trying to catch a bus while looking like Carrie.  Between her dubious accounts of the previous few days, the boatload of corpses, the surveillance cameras that caught the Scoobies and the PCs, and the PURE manager’s claims of robbery, it is guaranteed that the gang will never set foot in Kansas City again.  In fact, Project BLACKBOX might take another look at the gang, now that it’s been confirmed they’ve been slaying monsters across state lines.

Welker College renames its Humanities building in honor of the well-loved but eccentric Professor Rogers.  The scorch marks never come out of the office floor where Rogers died.

Autopsy

All right, let me break down the session a little bit, then I’ll post stats for the things I had stats for.

The Good

This was the longest session of DFRPG I’ve run yet, but it didn’t feel as meandering as my last session (Stackhouse, LA).  I had a few days off before the game, so I had time to really buckle down and work up a lot of details about how Rogers’ cadre worked, how they got their food, why they were doing this, and so on.  It all didn’t come out during the game, but having those details planned out helped me improvise in a consistent fashion.

The players really earned that Major Milestone, man.  They remained engaged even as the session ran longer and longer, their roleplaying around some of the tougher issues (the solicitation at PURE or the debate about the infected) was fantastic and nothing degenerated into too much immaturity or real argument.

On a selfish note, I am pleased that my Scooby Doo references were subtle enough that it wasn’t until the car/Shuck/van/bike/Ginny chase that it clicked for them.  I use references everywhere, but I know it’s a good session when the references take a back seat to what’s actually going on with the PCs and the story.

We hit just about every skill on the list during the session, too.  With 5 PCs and increasing advancement options, niche protection could be a problem but we all work together as a group to make sure that most of time everyone’s got something to contribute.

Finally, we hit a home run with the moral choices and nature of monsters this session.  One of my silent rules for this game is that I never want to have a sympathetic monster.  The PCs are there to hunt and kill things that eat people.  That said, within that framework there’s room to explore the ramifications of holding to those tenets, and Red Court Infected are the perfect foil for that.  I mean, the infected are simply tragic.  The Alpha Sigs were lured into something between rape, human trafficking, and a drug cartel.  Being addicted to the “vamper juice” is bad enough, but once you’re infected you’re absolutely fucked.  Ginny is looking at a life of constant struggle - if she slips up once, she vamps out and that’s it.  It’s less vampire and more zombie movie, except it’s worse because when you screw up and vamp out, it’ll be because you yourself lost control.  Looking at it like that, Bill was probably right.  On the other hand, until they slip up, they’re human, and Scott and Clay were right to give them a chance.

Last session I wanted to incorporate NPC hunters that operated on a “study and learn” mentality.  This time, I wanted to do it with NPCs who were less experienced but more bloodthirsty hunters.  My idea was that maybe Fred would take Bill’s “kill ‘em all” stance, but when the PCs got into it without NPC involvement, I shifted the NPCs more to the “less experienced” side of things and just let the players handle the morality of it all.

The Bad

When I was setting up this session, I wanted a city setting and I wanted to involve the police more, to contrast big-city monster hunting with the small towns the gang usually finds themselves in.  It just never happened, though.  Police involvement would have only served to sidetrack the plot and waste time.  With better planning, I could have figured out a way to work cops into the story a little better and have it drive events to their conclusion rather than threatening to be a giant “instant GTA rampage” time sink.  Maybe have one of the vampire club girls be taken in by the cops for protection or something.  Of course I think of that NOW.  :P

I missed another opportunity when Bill left the party after their argument.  Typically on Supernatural, when one brother goes off on his own, he gets “endamseled” as my wife and I put it, and it’s up to the other brother to rescue them.  Bill could have totally been captured (for FP, naturally) by soup kitchen vamper juice addicts or something and then the gang would rescue him, and they would all learn the value of teamwork or some shit.  On the other hand, writing that out sounds kind of lame.  It sounded better in my head.  :)

I should have pushed the party towards encountering the Scoobies a little earlier I think.  The investigation was fun, but I think I could have dropped more obvious clues earlier on.  After all, Fred and Sonny were not exactly masterminds.  I reflexively get vague with clues, thinking “ZOMG what if they figure it out too early?!” and only later do I realize that not only do I want the guys to figure out the culprits, it’s fun as a player to figure out the mystery.  I don’t need to pad out the session like that.  Now I just need to remember that when I’m actually running the game.

The danger level was never very high this game, save for the Cecilia Potts townhouse brawl.  Shit got real once Carter and Kathryn realized just how strong and fast a RCV was, and it felt really good to get a little “oh shit” moment from my players.  The soup kitchen was mostly against just punching bags with fangs.  I’m going to have to jack up my average minion to Good to compensate or start rolling better, which brings us to...

The Ugly

The goddamn dice rolls were truly abysmal this session.  I have never seen that many -3s from anyone.  I mean, I threw more infected into the soup kitchen fight because I wasn’t confident in the dice - and I was right!

I’ve already mentioned how long the session ran.  I don’t like to run over that much, and I’m beginning to think session overflow is proportional to how much investigation I have in any given session.  Stackhouse had a lot of investigation and it ran long too.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 27, 2011, 06:25:52 AM
The Scoobies

For most of the Scoobies, I took Scooby Doo and looped it around through the “Dia De Los Muertos” Venture Brothers episode, then ran it through this picture (http://media.desura.com/images/members/1/323/322886/cdca4f4475b2953bc64013d31cdcdda8.jpg).  The day of, I was thinking of actors to “cast” and I knew I didn’t want Matt Lillard for Sonny, because that would have been too obvious.  After I thought of Pineapple Express, the idea of Sonny being Fred’s dealer really pushed the final pieces together.

Shaggy the Black Shuck
For Shaggy’s stats, I glanced at the Hellhound entry in OW but mostly just tried to make him a dog-like monster.  The other Scoobies?  I kinda half-assed it.  I statted out a few Aspects and some meager skills, but I wasn’t looking to make people who could stand toe-to-toe with the PCs.
ASPECTS
Black Shuck
Man's Best Friend
Easily Distracted
Omen of Death
SKILLS
Good (+3) Alertness, Fists
Fair (+2) Stealth, Endurance, Athletics
Average (+1) Lore, Conviction, Discipline, Empathy
STUNTS & POWERS
-2 Inhuman Speed
-1 Claws
-2 Inhuman Toughness
+1 Catch: Holy stuff
-2 Inhuman Recovery
+1 Catch: Holy stuff
-1 Supernatural Sense (Smell)
-1 Echoes of the Beast
Refresh: -7

Sonny Falco (http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20090401/293.ad.PineappleExpress.Franco.040109.jpg)
Sonny was a conglomeration of James Franco from Pineapple Express, Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and the Son of Sam killer.
ASPECTS
Cowardly Slacker
Under the Influence
Bottomless Pit, Bottomless Pockets
Scooby Doo, What Are You?
SKILLS
Good (+3) Athletics, Alertness
Fair (+2) Driving, Empathy, Stealth
Average (+1) Endurance, Contacts, Craftsmanship, Burglary
STUNTS & POWERS
-1 Marked By Power
Refresh: -1

Fred Bundy (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a9/FreddyPrinzeJrinScoobyDoo.png/220px-FreddyPrinzeJrinScoobyDoo.png)
Fred was a mashup of Fred from Scooby Doo, the stereotypical popped collar douchebag frat boy, and Ted Bundy.
ASPECTS
Vengeance-Obsessed Frat Boy
Has No Idea What He's Doing
My Dad Owns a Dealership
Whatever It Takes to Save Patty (changed to “Whatever it Takes to Avenge Patty” after the soup kitchen)
SKILLS
Good (+3) Athletics, Endurance
Fair (+2) Guns, Weapons, Resources
Average (+1) Intimidation, Driving, Presence, Lore
STUNTS & POWERS
Anything Goes (ability to find impromptu weapons means Fred never has to use Fists)
Refresh: -1

Valerie Dinkley (http://media.desura.com/images/members/1/323/322886/cdca4f4475b2953bc64013d31cdcdda8.jpg)
Valerie was pretty much Velma run through a grimdark filter and given the powers of witchcraft.  She was going to be more Linda Cardellini-like until Kathryn’s player chose her.  Val took a back seat for the most part, since two PCs had Scholarship and Lore covered.  She was there because I needed a way to get a suitable Scooby Doo-alike, and with Val on their side, the Scoobies might actually have half a chance of surviving their future crusades against evil.
ASPECTS
Know-It-All Amateur Detective
Knows Too Much For Her Own Good
The Brains of the Operation
Stolen Grimoires of Forbidden Knowledge
SKILLS
Good (+3) Scholarship, Lore
Fair (+2) Investigation, Discipline, Conviction
Average (+1) Athletics, Endurance, Craftsmanship, Alertness
STUNTS & POWERS
-2 Ritual (Summoning)
Refresh: -2

Patty Blake (http://images.allmoviephoto.com/2003_Scooby-Doo_2:_Monsters_Unleashed/2004_scooby_doo_2_009.jpg)
I statted up Patty Blake thinking she’d play a larger role than she did.  She was completely Sarah Michelle Gellar, although “Buffy” and “Daphne” were used equally.  Finally, the name Patty was for Patty Hearst, which was both Venture Bros reference and a possible thematic link if Patty ended up vamping out, which is... I guess... kinda similar to Stockholm Syndrome in a way.  :)
ASPECTS
Infected Party Girl
The Vampire's Curse
Danger-Prone
Patty the Vampire Slayer
SKILLS
Good (+3) Discipline, Fists
Fair (+2) Presence, Rapport, Empathy
Average (+1) Deceit, Contacts, Resources, Endurance
STUNTS & POWERS
-1 Addictive Saliva
-1 Blood Drinker
+1 Feeding Dependency
-2 Inhuman Strength
-2 Inhuman Recovery
Refresh: -5

Team Edward

The only vamp I had stats for was Patrick Rogers.  For the other RCVs, I used the OW stats.  His Infecteds had Fair Athletics, Weapons (where applicable), and Fists, and were running Inhuman Strength and Recovery (Susan also had Inhuman Speed through a clerical error on my part).

Professor Patrick Rogers, RCV (http://www.nickkyme.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/lance-reddick.jpg)
ASPECTS
Vampire College Professor
Caught Me Monologuing
Intriguing Eccentric
Teacher's Pets
Creature Of The Night
Nesting Instincts
SKILLS
Great (+4) Fists, Presence
Good (+3) Scholarship, Athletics, Deceit
Fair (+2) Empathy, Lore, Stealth, Discipline, Might
Average (+1) Contacts, Resources, Alertness, Rapport, Conviction
STUNTS & POWERS
-1 Addictive Saliva
-1 Blood Drinker
-1 Claws
-1 Echoes of the Beast
-1 Flesh Mask
-1 Feeding Dependency
-1 Cloak of Shadows
-2 Inhuman Strength
-2 Inhuman Speed
-2 Inhuman Toughness
-2 Inhuman Recovery
+2 Catch: holy stuff, sunlight, gutshots
Heavy Rep (Presence for Intimidation when referencing rep)
Authority Figure (+2 Presence on students and spawn)
Personal Magnetism (+2 for charisma)
Footwork (Fists to dodge)
Storm of Punches (-2 to make zone Fists attacks)
Refresh: -16

Next Time

We don’t get to play that often, and I’m realizing that I have more ideas for this game than I can probably realistically run... but I’m gonna try anyway.  :)

From the various PCs’ backstories and other plot ideas they’ve stirred up:
Pantagruel
Ghost Centaurs
Houdini’s Keys and what Crowley-Lampkin needs them for
BLACKBOX Shenanigans

And then I’ve got my own bucket of ideas:
Ghost Rider, Denarian of Vengeance
Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner
The Orks of Hazzard
The Most Interesting Vampire in the World
Atomic Fire is the Antithesis of Magic
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on November 27, 2011, 11:47:21 PM
Wow.

I should keep this session log around in case someone asks for an example of how this game is supposed to work.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on November 29, 2011, 04:30:44 PM
Thank you, that's high praise man.  :)

With the recent Lost Room thread, I'm really leaning towards the Houdini's Keys idea for next time.  I feel like I could probably combine some villains into a massive treasure hunt/chase/fight, like Carter's nemesis, Crowley-Lampkin, is after Houdini's Keys because they open something or other, and then Pantagruel can get involved because I see him as almost a cartoon mastermind but with an apocalyptic mindset - "Once I have acquired the WOSSNAME I'll be able to destroy the world once and for all!"

Oooh.  Maybe Houdini's Keys can unlock wherever a cache of denarii are stored, and he's cut a deal with the CEO of Crowley-Lampkin.  He gets a coin and unlimited power as an "equal partner" and Pantagruel gets enough minions to finally start his apocalyptic conquest of Earth.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on November 30, 2011, 03:34:53 AM
Sounds cool.

Keep us posted.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 25, 2012, 07:50:41 PM
Session 7

Bill Stockburn (http://www.zombiepark.com/images/gramps/sam1.jpg),  Carter Mews (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg), Scott Specter (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/Images/stories/2011/jan/fosterintlede.jpg), and Kathryn Bryant (http://s11.allstarpics.net/images/orig/0/t/0tuc3ejveofn3cj0.jpg)
Reward: Significant Milestone

THEN

Crowley-Lampkin Enterprises Home Office
Chicago, IL

Alex Abel (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_BC26hreB8QA/TS39PQrXwxI/AAAAAAAACFE/Adcdql_BBOs/s1600/5x10_033.jpg), CEO of Crowley-Lampkin Enterprises, entered his luxurious high-tech penthouse office.  The office was dimly lit by a combination of Chicago night sky and sickly green owllike eyes.  Abel let his scotch fall from his hands as he flattened against the armored glass wall of his office.  Two orange eyes, below and in between the lantern-sized owl eyes, held the CEO’s gaze while Pantagruel, the loremaster of the Denarians, emerged from the shadows.

“How did you get in here?!” Abel demanded.

“Wasn’t easy,” Pantagruel hissed.  He grasped for the Crowley-Lampkin CEO without further preamble, only to stagger back as Abel slashed his feathered arm with a jagged glass knife.  Pantagruel’s face twisted in surprise and pain, then he swatted Abel’s curious shiv across the room and wrapped him in the time-honored “human shield” position just as two of Abel’s top men, Tannhauser (http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0cLx99D16OezV/340x.jpg) and Warfield (http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/08/340x_crews.jpg), burst into the office.  The goons pulled up short, but the chunky AA-12 shotguns in their hands didn’t waver from the demon.

“Hold your fire,” Abel choked out.  “What do you want?” he asked the Denarian.

“Ahh, there’s that famous business acumen I was hoping for,” Pantagruel cooed.  “You have access to certain magical artifacts.  I need a handful of those items.  I’m willing to make it worth your while.”  A silver denarius flicked out from behind Abel’s ear, like Pantagruel was a simple stage magician.  Abel flinched away from it.

“What?” Abel retorted.  “You wanna recruit me?”  His men looked at each other nervously.

“Alex, I know why you hoard your trinkets.  You’re grasping for power, true power.  You’re railing against the limitations of your pathetic mortality.  All the trinitite knives and ruby slippers in the world won’t compare to my offer.”  Pantagruel wiggled the coin for emphasis.  “Immortality!  Unlimited power!  A place among the chosen few in the aftermath of this world!”

Abel grimaced.  “Boys,” he commanded.  Tannhauser and Warfield nodded their assent.

“Shotguns?  Really?” Pantagruel taunted.  “Hardly the right choice for a hostage situation.”

“You’ll like these,” Abel replied.  “We call ‘em ‘mutts’, ‘cause they’re a little mix of everything.  Silver, rock salt, steel, even gold for those pesky horsemen.  And blessed by Crowley-Lampkin’s on-site clergy, of course.”  Abel nodded and his men opened fire!  Pantagruel went a little fuzzy around the edges as the parts of him not covered by Abel’s body shredded and blew away in great bloody swaths.  Abel’s desk blew to flinders and the armored glass bucked and spiderwebbed under the sustained onslaught.

Nothing hit Abel.  Not a single pellet.  He ducked lower now that the Denarian’s arms were blasted off its torso and the automatic shotguns emptied the rest of their 20-round drums into Pantagruel’s center mass.  Alex Abel absentmindedly patted his breast pocket and watched the feathered, hairy, bloody thing transform back into the gory rags of what once was a man.

A charred and scratched denarius rolled innocently across the crimson-spattered marble floor.

“You fink I’d be content to spend eternity as your fookin’ stooge?” Abel shouted at the denarius.  “Oh no no no.  We are going to renegotiate.” He reached for the coin.

NOW (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWkhCxCcWSE&ob=av3e)

Las Vegas, NV

Bill, Carter, Scott, and Kathryn were fast asleep in the dingy hotel room off of Fremont Street.  Something’s hairy corpse was soaking in the room’s bathtub, slowly dissolving in the last of their whole milk.  It was the kind of hotel that started off CSI episodes, sporting sanity-blasting carpet patterns, an old TV flickering through Tony Little infomercials and dating services, and a pervasive feeling of grime despite the spartan accoutrements.  The room was on the first floor and the guy at the front desk was a cheap bribe, though, so it was as good as most of the places the hunters stayed.

At least it was until Warfield kicked in the door.  “Carter! Carter Mews!” he shouted, staggering into the hotel room.  The big black retrieval expert pulled up short as several guns appeared from underneath pillows.  Warfield clutched one hand to a bloody wound in his side but held his Uzi above his head.

Bill continued to snore.

I Sleep In the Nude

After a brief but tense staredown, the gang and Warfield decided that a gunfight was not on the menu, and after rousing a sleepy Bill “I sleep in the nude” Stockburn, Warfield explained that he needed Carter’s help.  He needed all of their help.  Warfield was unapologetically in it for the money, but when Alex Abel took up the coin, Warfield knew things had gotten out of hand.  It wasn’t about the money for Abel anymore; the hired thug didn’t even know if that thing was Abel anymore.  Warfield thought his partner, Tannhauser, would see things his way and would abandon ship with him, but Tannhauser was perfectly fine with a denarian for a boss.  Their argument turned into a brawl which degenerated into an elevator gunfight.  Tannhauser lost, but not by much.

Bill looked Warfield’s wounds over.  He’d live, but the dressings were sloppy and needed to be changed.  While he did that, Warfield produced a grimy old compass. Yep, somebody with insider information probably stole the idea for those pirate movies.  Warfield stole the compass on his way out of Crowley-Lampkin for two reasons.  The first and most important reason was to deny its use to PantagrAbel.  Oh, the demonic CEO had other means of finding the Key, especially now that its arcane knowledge was combined with Abel’s resources and contacts, but now Carter and the gang had a fighting chance of finding Houdini’s Key first.

The second reason was that Warfield needed to find Carter.  “I ain’t apologizin’ for any of the shit I did,” Warfield monologued.  “And even though you ran my ass over last time we met, I know you’ve got a better shot at this than I do.  I use the compass to find the Key and what?  I’m just one motherfucker with a gun, and Abel’s got Bonney’s Bane on ‘im.  Ya’ll can stop this thing, whatever the hell it is.  But ya’ll ain’t got much time.  See, after Carter left they made sure to get samples from everyone... hair, blood, whatever.  No doubt they got a trackin’ spell on me right now, so you gotta move. Right now.”

It was dark in the hotel room, but now the gang could see Warfield was completely shaved, right down to his eyebrows.  With that realization came the whup-whup of helicopter blades.  Abel’s men had found them!

He Got You With Those Stupid Beanbags, Didn’t He?

Warfield tossed Carter the compass, checked his Uzi, and prepared himself for a last stand as the gang ran for their bikes.  They burst out onto the parking lot asphalt just as four men in paramilitary gear and balaclavas fast-roped from a hovering Bell Jetranger, painted up to pass as a news chopper.  The four-man team hit the ground not 20 feet away from the four hunters.

There was an awful, awkward pause, then the tactical team rushed into the hotel.  They were after Warfield, not the compass, and not the PCs!

That’s when the Compels hit the table.  Bill would go back inside anyway, because Bill’s player just loved a good tussle.  Scott was easy, too - “Driven By Redemption” covered Warfield’s situation quite nicely.  Kathryn “Can’t Leave Well Enough Alone”, and while Carter’s player was somewhat recalcitrant, Warfield was basically doing exactly what Carter himself had done to Alex Abel years ago.  I was glad they chose to accept the Compels - I liked the name “Warfield” and I liked the idea of a potential recurring “frenemy”.  First, however, the gang would have to take down a team of trained mercenaries.  Here’s how that went:

Me: “Okay, you’re not going to be able to ambush them so just roll Alertness for initiative and... wow, that’s a shitty Alertness roll.  Everyone acts before the tac-team.”
Cut to: Scott snaking his arms around the tailgunner’s neck and pistol-whipping the dude in the side of the head
Cut to: Bill putting a beanbag round right into the back of the pointman’s skull.
Cut to: Freeze-frame!  Carter, one ASP baton raised in terrified fury as he delivers a savage beatdown on the shotgunner.
Cut to: The fourth man’s kneecap explodes in crimson gore!  Kathryn’s short-barreled carbine leaves everyone’s ears ringing.

In the time between the one-round takedown and the helicopter figuring out what went wrong, the gang managed to get their bikes and motor to a rendezvous point in the scrublands outside Vegas.

Phat Lewt

The sun stained the pre-dawn sky as the gang regrouped and compared notes (and Lore rolls).  There were at least three magical artifacts mentioned, and everyone knew a bit about each. The bikers felt they had Houdini’s Key pretty well figured out.  It would unlock anything, and it was academic whether its power extended only to locks or to metaphysical concepts because an apocalypse-minded Pantagruel with access to any locked room or vehicle or nuclear football was a terrifying proposition.

Next up was the as-yet-unnamed compass Warfield had given them.  After what they had seen at the hotel, Warfield’s story seemed to hold water, and as their Lore rolls weren’t as incredible as their rolls for the Key, I explained how the compass worked mechanically but offered no additional backstory.  To be honest, I didn’t really have any backstory for it other than some vague notions about pirates, because I sure as hell did rip off the idea from Jack Sparrow.

The third Lore check was for Bonney’s Bane, an artifact Warfield warned them about. Carter knew the most about this little item (and thanks to you guys for the feedback when I posted it in the Items of Power thread).  The bullet that killed Billy the Kid was rumored to protect its wielder from gunfire.  It was a smart move on Pantagruel’s part; most of what the gang had that would get past his denarian Toughness was firearm-based, and that was useless now unless they could figure out another way around his defenses.

Carter was the “Arcane Acquisitions Expert”, so he spent the Fate Point required to activate the Compass.  It pointed east by southeast.

Meanwhile, Back at the Evil Ranch

Deprived of his “Easy Button”, Pantagruel / Abel spent the next few days scouring the country via mundane and magical means for any sign of Houdini’s Key or anyone who might have even seen it.  With Tannhauser dead and Warfield missing, Abel put Mr. Ransom and Mr. Bale on Carter’s trail.  They had put two and two together once they looked over the fiasco at the hotel.  Mr. Rowsdower and Mr. Troy were standing by at O’Hare, ready to intercept the Key as soon as it was found.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 25, 2012, 07:55:15 PM
Austin City Limits

The hunters followed the Compass southeast for days.  They passed through Phoenix and followed the Mexican border into Texas.  The Compass’ needle started moving slightly as they neared Austin.  Carter led the gang into a maze of developments predominated by single-story southwestern-styled homes, and I made my first major logic blunder of the night.

Basically, I wanted a scene that would give the players a little bit of info about the Key’s current owner, and I wanted to show that Abel’s men were only a step or two ahead.  The Compass should have led them straight to Houdini’s Key.  Somehow that little bit of continuity slipped past me and the gang pulled up to one of the houses.  Carter spotted signs of forced entry and the hunters burst into the house from multiple directions.  Professionals had given the home a tossing to make it look like a simple robbery, but they were clearly after the Key.  The house was well-appointed but kept to the basics, and to Kathryn’s investigator’s eye, it looked more like a comfortable safe house than an actual home.  The garage told the story of a man (“Are we sure it’s a man?”  -”Go look in the bathroom.”) who really cared for his car.  Bill could appreciate that; after all, he loved his “Custom Ride”.  And then it hit them.

“This guy is a car thief.”
“He uses Houdini’s Key to steal... whatever car he wants?”

That kind of shortsighted use of ultimate power was enough for the gang to form a pretty good picture of their Keymaster (http://content6.flixster.com/photo/89/25/98/8925984_gal.jpg).

Me: “I need a name for this guy, a name for a dude Nicolas Cage would play.”
Scott: “Just pick a name of a city.  Vegas, Amsterdam, Fresno, Dallas-”
Carter: “Intercourse.”
Kathryn: “Bird-in-Hand’s on the way to Intercourse!”
Me: “Dallas.  That’s good, since you’re in Austin.”
Scott: “Or you could use his name from one of his movies, like Junior.”
Me: “When was he Junior?”
Scott: “That one movie he was in with David Caruso?  Mom and dad had it on VHS, Kiss of Death or something.”
Me: “Oh right!”
I’ll do us all a favor and skip the tangent that followed.
Scott: “Dallas Brown, Junior!”
Me: “Dallas ‘Junior’ Brown!  It’s more Ricky Bobby if the ‘Junior’ is in the middle.”
Scott: “So, where’s the Key?”

And thus I realized that I had blundered.  Dallas wasn’t home - he was driving like a maniac through Round Rock with Abel’s agents hot on his heels!  I couldn’t figure out a rational explanation for why they possibly could or would have stopped at Dallas’ hideout, so we agreed to just handwave the GMing gaffe. At any rate, it was my intention to have the Compass needle visibly moving now, so it was clear that the hunters were close to their quarry. They tore out of the development, using Driving-as-navigation checks to take side streets and access roads to approach Dallas (whatever he was doing, he was doing it quickly) without drawing too much attention to themselves.

We’ve Got a Great Big Convoy

The gang found Dallas Junior Brown tearing through the Austin burbs in a midnight blue Chevelle (http://www.oldtownautomobile.com/files/Chevelle%20SS%201970%20Blue_495_3.jpg).  Two men in a black Crown “We’re cops or something, honest!” Vic trailed the wheelman, while the bikers converged from several side streets or followed the chase from a distance, looking for the right time to make their move.

It was time for a car chase! Ever since Spycraft I’ve been entranced by the idea of simulating car chases in RPGs. I’ve worked up homebrew chase mechanics for everything from Savage Worlds to ORE, but hadn’t tackled FATE yet. This scene was pivotal, and I wanted to emphasize the monster-hunting bikers aspect of the campaign by having a chase. But because I didn’t have anything concrete mechanically ready to go, I asked the table. We felt the “default” suggestion of “best X of Y” rolls wasn’t going to be satisfying. The SOTC idea of “follow the leader’s roll” was too simple - again, not varied or satisfying enough. Each party in the chase had a stress track?  Too fiddly, and how would you handle this three-way chase if there was only 1 stress track? I felt going back to the FATE fractal was the right idea, though, and Diaspora’s social combat popped into my mind. My ORE chase rules involve participants shifting in between abstract states or range bands, and this idea mapped well to a zone map! I hastily scribbled out the following zones on our map:

Lost
Trailing
Sight
Shoot
Ram
Cornered

Abel’s men and Dallas started in “Sight”. The gang all started in “Trailing”. The idea here was if you and another character were in the same zone, you could do that action to them. I ruled that opposed Driving checks would let you move yourself OR another character, and if you beat the DC by 3 you could move an additional zone. Abel’s goons, Rowsdower (http://oneguyrambling.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/jasonstatham.jpg) and Troy (http://cdn.shockya.com/news/wp-content/uploads/the_expendables_jet_li.jpg), wanted to get themselves and Dallas Junior Brown into the Shoot, Ram, or Cornered zones. Dallas wanted everyone “off the map”, and tried to keep himself down towards the “Lost” zone. The PCs mostly went after Abel’s men but worked to hinder Dallas and keep him from giving them the slip. I saw a few potentially weird conditions in this thrown-together map but the problems were specific to the map I’d designed and not the basic idea.  I’ll get into that after the session writeup.

Engines roared and tires squealed as Dallas and his pursuers ripped through the strips and suburbs of Austin. It was a close thing - Dallas had a Driving +4 compared to everyone else’s +2, but the bikers used Maneuvers and teamwork to even the odds.  Rowsdower and Troy got Dallas into “Shoot” - Dallas threw the Chevelle into reverse down a narrow alley and the Crown Vic followed, headlights to headlights.  Troy carved up Dallas’ hood with a Micro-Uzi but Dallas blanketed the mercs’ windshield with buckshot. Rowsdower and Troy didn’t see Bill roaring up alongside them until it was too late. The former denarian host unloaded his Judge into both the Crown Vic’s left tires (it could’ve been damage, but Bill wanted to name the nature of the Aspect himself and so rolled it as a Maneuver). The black sedan trailed sparks as it slid into the main throughfare, unable to follow Dallas as he executed a perfect J-turn and headed for the highway. In zone terms, both Dallas and the PCs conspired to move the Crown Vic into the “Lost” zone.

Scott was ahead of the chase nearly the entire time. He saw Dallas trying to escape and swerved in front of a semi making for the onramp.  The truck blocked the freeway exit and forced Dallas back into the rat’s nest of strip malls and Whataburgers. Dallas knew he had to get these bikers off of him one way or the other.  He chanced moving Scott into the “Ram” zone (it’s like the friend zone but more violent), but it backfired.  Scott’s store of FP prevented him from falling back and clever use of saved free tags led to Dallas being forced into the loading dock at the local Home Depot.  The wheelman, a showoff until the end, put his blue Chevelle up on two wheels to fit through the loading door. Tires squealed, the car slid sideways, and Dallas parked his muscle car - hard - into the lumber aisles.

Oh, You Mean This Gate Key?

Dallas tried to bolt, but Scott penned him in between plumbing and lumber, using his motorcycle as a Driving-based Block on Dallas’ Athletics. The rest of the gang arrived soon after and Kathryn fired a short burst into the air to send the onlookers rushing for cover.

Dallas didn’t immediately cop to having Houdini’s Key. He thought the PCs were Detroit Mafia at first, but when that didn’t pan out he admitted to having the Key. He had stolen a car and the previous owner had left the Key inside. Nothing more complicated than the intersection of happenstance and absentmindedness. After that, well... Dallas was a car thief already but he became a great car thief. What he really wanted now, though, was to remain a breathing car thief.  Satisfied with his answers, the hunters let Dallas go and maneuvered their bikes back to the loading dock just as an ominous black Suburban skidded to a halt outside.

Kathryn: “Cops?”
Me: “Well, that’s a good question.”

We decided that Abel’s thugs arriving would be more fun than the police, and it was definitely a Compel-worthy complication for them to show up.  We decided that Abel had enough clout to hold off the police response for just long enough for he and his men to swoop in and grab Houdini’s Key.

Me: “Carter knows these guys.  That’s Mr. Ransom (http://www.worstpreviews.com/images/16blocks.gif) and Mr. Bale (http://blogs.whatsontv.co.uk/tvspy/files/2008/11/heroes-free1.jpg). One looks like Bruce Willis and the other one looks like Robert Forster.”
Bill: “It’s Bruce Willis!  We’re fucked!”

The gang rushed back inside and checked the front. Shit! Rowsdower and Troy were pulling up through the crowds of people trying to escape the chaos inside the Home Depot. To top things off, a goddamn helicopter was already circling the area! The guys put together a quick plan: First, Scott and Kathryn Intimidated the terrified crowds into a panic. Then they tagged those Aspects to get a headstart as they peeled out through the garden center. Abel’s men on the ground got tied up with fleeing bystanders, but the chopper banked around to give (another) chase. The side door slid open and Alex Abel simply fell out of the helicopter. A sigil blazed on his forehead and his human form twisted and reshaped into the feathered owlbear-demon form of Pantagruel!

On a slightly less impressive but no less dangerous note, the chopper’s door also revealed a Crowley-Lampkin merc manning an M60 machine gun.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 25, 2012, 07:57:04 PM
On the Road Again

We set up the chase map again - this time everyone started in the “Sight” zone. The group’s initial strategy of splitting up was foiled with a Compel on Carter’s “Cain and Abel” Aspect. The bad guys knew Carter and they knew that if there was a magic item floating around down there, he’d be carrying it. The chopper would be focused on Carter, but Pantagruel accepted a Compel for his own Aspect - the demon really wanted Bill taken out first, but the Abel side of the monster wanted Carter. The complication here was that if Pantagruel didn’t attack Carter, the Key had a better-than-average chance of slipping through Pantagruel’s paws. Bill received a FP as well, because his nemesis would shortly be trying to hellfire him.

Carter swallowed Houdini’s Key (which looked like a handcuff key, of course).
Pantagruel: “Fool! Nothing will stop me from opening the gates of Hell, least of all your pathetic entrails!”

Kathryn: “Can he open that?  Is that a thing?”
Bill: “Oh sure. We went to the Greek Hell before.”
Me: “He certainly thinks so. That’s pretty much his entire plan.”

Pantagruel’s Trouble Aspect was known to the players: “Starscream Syndrome”. He’s ambitious, treacherous, and somewhat of a coward. By unlocking the gates of Hell, wherever and whatever those are, he’d be breaking that ancient covenant that restricts the number of fallen angels on Earth to thirty. Pantagruel was looking to either make a power play for Hell itself or curry favor with Lucifer. The fact that Mark A. Sheppard plays Crowley, the current “King of Hell”, on Supernatural was just meta-icing on the meta-cake..

A Plan is Just a List of Things That Don’t Happen

Back to the chase! Right away the guys used Maneuvers to force the helicopter into downtown Austin, where taller buildings and ample cover made it difficult for the M60 gunner to draw a bead on Carter. Kathryn wasn’t in the “Shoot” zone with the chopper, but she quickly used Guns to place “Suppressing Fire” on the helicopter (and refused a Compel to run out of ammo). With the helo handled temporarily, the gang turned their attention to Pantagruel. The players started bandying about complicated plans where one PC would drive this way and get Pantagruel to turn his back on someone else, and I realized they had misunderstood my explanation of Bonney’s Bane’s Catch. I didn’t want their machinations to simply be foiled by miscommunication, so I explained that it wasn’t simply shooting Pantagruel in the back that would do the trick. He had to be caught unawares. Furthermore, any attack that would satisfy the Catch on Bonney’s Bane would also have to contend with his Denarian-given Toughness. They still came up with a pretty good plan - Carter and Bill would lure Pantagruel into the “Ram” zone, then they would Maneuver to put the him between them and the M60 gunner. I said that friendly fire would satisfy the Catch, and a machine gun was definitely beefy enough to punch through most of his supernatural protection on raw damage alone.

Maybe They Can Blame It On The Gas Main

Pantagruel started conjuring up great gouts of hellfire - asphalt geysered up and Munchian faces screamed in the eldritch blazes. Bill was not impressed with Pantagruel’s poorly-aimed sorcery. The Austinites gawking at the chaos, however, were incredibly impressed and ran for their miserable, misbegotten, youtube-video-taking lives.

Meanwhile, the helicopter tried for Carter despite Kathryn’s bullets cracking around it. The M60 chugged away but Carter dipped his bike into a sharp turn just in time (tagging the “Downtown” Aspect placed early on in the conflict) and the machine gun chewed into high-rise apartments.

At this point, Carter and Bill were in the “Ram” zone. Pantagruel was in “Shoot” along with the chopper and Kathryn, while Scott hung back in the “Sight” zone. For their plan to work, they needed to lure or otherwise move Pantagruel into the “Ram” zone. Bill drew Owlfucker, his special Pantagruel-only magnum, loaded with blessed custom rounds (see Session 3). Despite having a magic bullet that protected him from gunfire, Pantagruel still flinched when Bill fired. The bullet did nothing to the Denarian but raise his ire. “Allow me to retort,” Pantagruel said (or would have said, if I were that clever during the game). He gathered his will and called hellfire once more. A pentagram flashed on the road ahead of Bill for a brief second, then a volcanic torrent of hellfire ripped skyward, buckling the street and sending rubble smashing into parked cars and buildings. Bill hit the buckling asphalt like a makeshift ramp and went airborne just as the conflagration enveloped him (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF0JCB24Ld8&feature=player_detailpage#t=11s).

Bill was impressed with his nemesis’ sorcery this time. Three FP later, however, Bill sailed out of the blast with mere Stress damage. Pantagruel had thrown his biggest evocation and it had failed! He’d have to kill Bill up close. Pantagruel swooped lower, heading into the “Ram” zone to melee his former host.

Bill’s player was rightly nervous. Bill wasn’t much in a melee, and I figured with Pantagruel’s Inhuman Strength, the Denarian could pluck Bill off his bike and drop him or do something equally sadistic. And then I checked Pantagruel’s sheet.

Guns, sure, he had Guns because Alex Abel would have had Guns. Weapons, too, because Pantagruel took another artifact from Abel’s artifact vault - General Custer’s Saber. Weapons wasn’t very high, however, and I knew Pantagruel would have a better chance with his Fists skill...

Where was his Fists skill?

Me: “Guys, I completely forgot to give Pantagruel the Fists skill.”
Bill (after the jeers died down): “It kind of makes sense. He’s a Denarian librarian. He’s a geek.”
Me: “And he’s like Starscream - he wouldn’t want to get too close... heh, ok, I like that. He’s got no Fists, then! It’s my mistake and I’ll let it stand. But that means he’s gonna hellfire you again, Bill.”
Bill: “Uh-oh.”

Bill’s worries were unfounded, however. Pantagruel stopped cursing his rotten dice luck and looked around. He realized Carter had just Maneuvered him between Carter, Bill, and the helicopter!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 25, 2012, 07:58:30 PM
Chopper vs. Chopper

As the chase progressed, another plan began to take hold. Scott couldn’t directly affect much but he could beat the helo with a Driving check, forcing it into the “Ram” zone along with... well, everyone else but Kathryn.  Kathryn had an assault rile and was still in the “Shoot” zone. She leveled her rifle at the chopper and unloaded on it. Bullets punched though the fuselage and painted the canopy with the pilot’s skull. The chopper, already barely skimming the ground, began to spiral out of control, barrelling straight for Bill, Carter, and Pantagruel!

Pantagruel tried one more time with the hellfire, this time at Carter. The thief’s last few FP reduced the hit to Stress and used the newly-geysered street to launch his motorcycle straight at his demonic former boss! Carter leapt free as the bike plowed into Pantagruel, sandwiching the fallen angel between a flying motorcycle and a berserk helicopter!

It was glorious (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=eE4Snh-XKcE#t=33s).

The burning wreckage finally rolled to a halt in front of the Capitol Complex. Carter, now merely a pedestrian, used one of his magical rings to locate Bonney’s Bane, which had somehow flown free of its former owner. It was fortuitous news indeed, because the debris shifted and a mangled Pantagruel forced his way out of the flaming wreck!

Veiled Threats

I had no idea how to gauge a chopper crash, damage-wise, but I did know none of what Pantagruel suffered satisfied his Catch. Supernatural Toughness makes you pretty tough, and without any real guidelines beyond “yeah, this feels right”, I marked off all but the stress afforded by Pantagruel’s Toughness. Then I decided that he would have used his regeneration from Supernatural Recovery as well, which left the Denarian without any consequences but in such a state that any damage that satisfied his Catch would inflict them.

The pathetic creature that stumbled into the street didn’t even try for the Key. It ran for it, hobbling along until its wings finished regenerating. The gang knew it had lost its protection from gunfire, and they unloaded on Pantagruel. Most of the shots either filled in Toughness-based stress or were stopped by Pantagruel’s Armor:2, but Bill’s Owlfucker thundered and tore through the demon’s knee. Pantagruel toppled onto one bent leg, wailed in pain, and brought the last of his rapidly-dwindling power into a veil. Pantagruel was swallowed by the black smoke pouring from the chopper and the next moment he was gone.

Carter and Kathryn decided they didn’t give a fuck if they could see him or not. They blazed away, hoping for a lucky hit, but their shots went wide. That’s when Scott decided it was worth risking a little insanity for the chance to put down Pantagruel and opened his Sight.

Super Run Away

I honestly had no idea what Scott saw. I told him as much, and tried to describe Harry’s experience with Shagnasty without spoiling it too badly for Kathryn’s player, who had not read that far in the books (Scott’s player only knows the TV series). I’m normally a quick hand at coming up with suitable if not terribly inspired visions for the Sight, but I was at a loss for how a fallen angel would look. Hey, even Jim copped out on that one. The one thing I did say for certain was that despite all its terribly glory and power, the thing was casting about frantically for an exit like a cornered animal. Its wings were living arcs of energy, grasping at the buildings around it, trying to hurl it aloft.

Scott took some mental stress and shot the thing in the back but the bullet thunked harmlessly into the Denarian’s hide. Pantagruel turned and Scott rolled his Discipline a second time. This time Pantagruel saw Scott more than Scott saw him. The fallen angel felt the power that hummed around the ex-con, and he was afraid. He felt rage that such an animal could receive one single iota of God’s love, and he was alone. He felt God’s will, and he was ashamed.

With an animal screech, Pantagruel took to the sky, clumsily banking out of sight. This was a Concession - Pantagruel got to live but he’d also lose the third and final magical item he brought to the fight - General Custer’s Cavalry Saber. Carter used his ring again to locate the sword near the crash site, then hopped on Bill’s custom ride. The police were playing their song and it was time to leave.

I placed the PCs on the chase map for the third time that evening along with a police helicopter and cop cars, but the bikers weren’t in danger very long. They split up and each of them focused on the police cars. My rolls were for shit and in a single exchange the police cars were firmly in the “Lost” zone.

The lead cruiser fishtailed around the last intersection before the Capitol Complex just in time to see the gaping crater blown in the street by Pantagruel’s hellfire. Unable to stop, the police car slid into the maw with a sad little “bloop” from its siren. The cruiser directly behind it couldn’t stop either and it slammed into its comrade. The third car swerved right and ramped off the ever-growing wreck, A-Team style. After that miraculously poor showing, losing the helicopter was almost an afterthought. I mean, it shouldn’t have been, but it was. That helicopter sucked.

Epilogue

“Ew, don’t you have something better to wash this off with than bottled water?”

“Gross!  Boil it or something! God!”

Bill, Scott, Carter, and Kathryn regrouped and left Austin and the setting sun behind them. Carter... recovered... Houdini’s Key, and the gang planned their next move. They knew that this was only a setback for Pantagruel, and now the Denarian had access to Crowley-Lampkin through Alex Abel. The creature had gotten his diabolical chocolate in Abel’s sociopathic peanut butter. The next morning, Carter stole a new BMW motorcycle and the gang vowed never to return to Austin, Texas.

The countless eyewitness accounts and reports about the events in Austin that day only served to further muddy the truth of what really happened. There were the usual youtube videos shouted down as fakes or CGI test reels. A lot of cryptid enthusiasts attributed Pantagruel’s antics to the Mothman (and let me tell you, Mothmen do not like being mentioned in the same sentence with Denarians). The hellfire spouts and gunfire were passed off to a worried public as domestic terrorism, and although there was enough evidence to prove otherwise, what possible explanation would be palatable to the public?

Warfield and Dallas ‘Junior’ Brown both survived their encounters with Crowley-Lampkin and the PCs. Brown remains at large and is wanted for questioning in connection with that day’s events. Warfield’s current whereabouts remain unknown.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 25, 2012, 08:00:00 PM
Autopsy

Unlike the previous session, where I had time to plan out a lot more NPCs and a more complex situation, this time I had the opening scenes and a general idea of what Pantagruel wanted to do with the Key, but that was it. Everything else flowed naturally (more or less) from there. I did manage to keep it within the planned time frame, which was a major improvement in my book.

It’s pretty obvious that the entire adventure ended up being a car chase, so I’ll tackle that in more detail first. I really liked the idea of using a zone map for relative positioning during a chase scene, and for the most part I think it worked out well. I’m not sure how much I liked the simplification where you moved 1 zone on any success and an additional zone if you rolled 3 over the difficulty. That could be fixed by having a series of intermediate zones or obstacle ratings, then you could simply use your Driving effort-as zones moved. I do know I liked the ability to move other participants, and that’s a key feature towards making this rules variant work. That part’s taken straight from Diaspora’s social combat, though, so I probably just need to locate their SRD and reread it a bit.

Another bugbear with the system occurs when you have A chasing B who is chasing C, like the Dallas Junior Brown chase (I can’t not write his full name). You can end up with a situation where Alice rolls against Bob but manages to end up in a zone more suited for tackling Charlie, effectively using Bob’s lower skill to bootstrap her way into an advantage. Another hiccup is that when Bob is “Trailing” Charlie, he’s automatically also trailing Alice.  Maybe a Venn diagram-style zone map would fix multiparty chases, I don’t know yet. I think the idea is sound, the maps just need some thought.

Shooting the car vs. shooting the driver: I ruled Kathryn’s attack on the helicopter pilot as a “RCV blood sack” situation. First, she has to be using a weapon that can penetrate the vehicle - no headshotting tank drivers with a rifle unless they’ve stuck their head out. Second, she needs to hit by 3 over the difficulty or have an appropriate Aspect to tag for effect, much like starting a grapple requires an Aspect placed first.

My car stats were basically just stress tracks (Armor:1, 3 stress boxes), but you could easily use the FATE Fractal to give them Aspects (“Supercharged”, “Last of the V8s”), Stunts/Powers (“Turbo Boost”), and Skills (“Maneuverability”, “Durability”, “Speed”). IMO car “skills” would work best as modifiers to the driver’s own skill. The stress tracks I kept low because it was fairly difficult to line up shots, so a successful shooting attempt should have significant impact.

I feel like I didn’t Compel enough, but everyone was hovering in the 0-3 FP range throughout the session and that feels right to me.  Low enough that you want more, but not so low that you hoard them and bring the FP economy to a halt. Except for Bill - Bill is a Pure Mortal with absolutely no stunts, so he starts each game with 10 FP.  Even he was down to 3 FP, though, mostly because of Pantagruel’s hellfire and maneuvering during the chases.

Combat-wise, there’s not much to write home about. There wasn’t a lot of straight-up combat, but the chase rolls were fairly tense as Dallas ‘Junior’ Brown had a Driving skill 2 ranks above the PCs. Clay’s player couldn’t make it, so it was a nice change of pace to have an action-oriented game that wasn’t explicitly about face-punching.

Big warm fuzzies when the players said they didn’t mind Pantagruel escaping; they said he was a good villain. We talked about that some, actually, since several of his Aspects were public knowledge at this point. Bill’s player reiterated how he was dangerous, yet he was simply the Denarian’s librarian, basically. We talked about other Denarians from the series, mostly contrasting Pantagruel against the truly hideous guys like Tessa and Nicodemus and comparing the “partnership” demons (although I refer to him as Pantagruel mostly, his relationship with Alex Abel for this game is intended to be a partnership) to the Magogs and Ursiels who completely subsume the human hosts. I think that Pantagruel works as a villain because 1) he IS a threat, 2) he is also a coward, and 3) his goals are never simply “kill the heroes”. My players get to unquestioningly beat him and ruin his plans yet because the true conflict is about something other than completely annihilating the other side, they’re okay with his escapes. That’s a lesson I learned from Burning Empires, which explicitly prevents objectives in combat scenes to be “I want to kill the other guys”.  That’s implicit in the term “combat”. The villain’s personality flaws and fears help keep the players feeling superior. When you feel superiority over a character, you’re more inclined to accept last-minute escapes and whatnot. If Pantagruel had made the PCs look like punks, there was no way the players would have accepted such a light Concession. They would have been out for blood.

Alex Abel’s Artifact Vault

I don’t have that many character writeups compared to last session, but several magical items were referenced or introduced. I’ll put the stats here and copy them to appropriate Resources threads after any necessary discussion and tweaks.

Pantagruel/Alex Abel

Aspects:
Denarian Loremaster
Starscream Syndrome
Cain and Abel, Together Again
Crowley-Lampkin CEO
Apocalypse Is a Frame of Mind
Older Than the Stars and Cockier Than a Thing That's Really Cocky
Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?
Skills:
Superb +5: Deceit, Lore
Great +4: Athletics, Conviction, Discipline, Empathy
Good +3: Resources, Contacts, Alertness, Endurance, Presence
Fair +2: Scholarship, Intimidation, Rapport, Guns, Stealth
Average +1: Driving, Weapons, Survival, Craftsmanship, Might
Stunts/Powers:
Superhuman Toughness    -4
Superhuman Recovery    -4
Wings    -1
Evocation    -3
Thaumaturgy    -3
Hellfire    -2
Inhuman Strength    -2
The Catch (Holy Stuff)    +2
Marked by Power    -1
Human Form (affecting Wings, Inhuman Strength, Supernatural Toughness)    +1
{b]Refresh: -17[/b]

I’ve already posted this in the Items of Power thread (and thanks for Vargo Teras, Sanctaphrax, and others for helping clarify some issues with it), but I’m reposting it here for completion’s sake:

BONNEY'S BANE [-2]
Description: The bullet that killed Billy the Kid.
Musts: None.
Skills Affected: None
Effects:
[-0] It Is What It Is. It's a bullet recovered from a corpse, just a misshapen lump of lead.
[-0] Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, this item cannot be broken except with a magical ritual predicated upon perverting its purpose.
[+1] One-Time Discount. Bonney's Bane is a tiny item and is easily concealed on one's person.
[-8] Physical Immunity: Those who hold Bonney's Bane are immune to gunfire.
[+5] The Catch: +2 only protects against specific thing, +2 for prevalence of non-firearm attacks, +1 for it not being common knowledge.

Upgrades:
[-3] You Ever Shoot a Man in the Back? This effectively upgrades the IoP to protect against all attacks except ambushes.  A typical Ambush situation or at the very least spotting the ambush but losing initiative should allow the attack to bypass the Immunity.

*NOTE: I ran this item with both suggested Catches; the “ambush” catch was subsumed by the “any non-firearm attack” catch. Kathryn ended up paying Refresh (yes, she dropped her Pure Mortal bonus too) to permanently acquire this item.

THE COVETOUS COMPASS
Description: A grimy, tarnished metal compass stained by centuries of use.
Effects: The Covetous Compass has no Refresh cost, as it can only be used once by any given person. To use the artifact, the wielder must spend a FP to invoke one of their Aspects. In essence, the Compass acts as a very specific, powerful implementation of invoking for effect. Because it requires a suitable Aspect, the Compass is limited to searching for things that are somehow important to the wielder. Upon activation, the Compass will point unerringly to the desired object, person, or place. It will point to its target until the wielder finds what they are looking for, at which point the Compass behaves like a normal compass. The Compass will always point to its current owner’s target, even if the Compass changes owners or is activated multiple times. If it is returned to a previous owner, it will point to that owner’s desire. If the wielder makes a truly impossible request, the GM should refund the FATE Point.

Carter’s the only one in the group who has used the Compass so far. It’s a powerful item but it’s inherently limited, much like how Supernatural’s Colt originally only had 13 bullets.

HOUDINI’S KEY
Description: A metal handcuff key.
Effects: Houdini’s Key allows the wielder to unlock anything. I don’t know how to price that power.

I might come to regret this item, but luckily, Carter didn’t have the Refresh to buy it (as if I could price it). We’re keeping it around as a plot device MacGuffin as well as a handy conduit for Burglary-related Declarations.

CUSTER’S CAVALRY SABER [-1]
Description: This 19th century cavalry sword is poorly kept, its blade pitted and stained as if the blood it has spilled has eaten into the metal.  It has killed innocent women and children, and the sword gives off a greasy, dark feeling to arcane senses.
Musts: None.
Skills Affected: Weapons.
Effects:
[-0] It Is What It Is. It's a Weapon:2 cavalry saber.
[-0] Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, this item cannot be broken except with a magical ritual predicated upon perverting its purpose.
[+2] One-Time Discount. It’s a sword. It’s only concealable if you’re into Civil War reenactment.
[-2] Army of One. Custer’s Saber grants a +1 to Weapons when the wielder is personally outnumbered in melee; that is, when more than 1 person attacks them in close combat in any given exchange. This bonus increases to +2 if three or more people are attacking the wielder, and increases to a maximum of +3 when four or more people engage the wielder.

Feel free to adjust the bonus tiers as you see fit, or change the conditions under which they apply. You may feel it appropriate for the saber to count enemies who are directly attacking the wielder, or expand the concept of “outnumbered” to include anyone who the wielder considers hostile in that scene. If you do, I highly recommend raising the number of enemies needed to increase the sword’s bonus.

Nobody has bought this item yet with Refresh. I would allow its use for a scene with a Declaration (since they do possess the sword), but if it gets abused I’ll insist someone pay for it.

RUBY SLIPPERS [-1]
Description: These sparkly red slippers adjust their size to fit anyone and are comfortable during long walks.
Musts: None.
Skills Affected: None
Effects:
[-0] It Is What It Is. They’re slippers, just like Dorothy wore.
[-0] Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, this item cannot be broken except with a magical ritual predicated upon perverting its purpose.
[+1] One-Time Discount. The slippers, while rather gaudy, aren’t an obvious weapon.
[-2] Worldwalker. The Ruby Slippers grant the Worldwalker power to the wearer.

This one’s pretty simple, and was only mentioned off-hand in the prologue. Worldwalker can be pretty useful in the right campaign or in the right character’s hands, though, it’s just a matter of how embarrassing it is to go around in sparkly red slippers.

TRINITITE KNIFE [-3]
Description: A piece of greenish-hued desert glass, roughly fashioned into a short blade. Tape is wrapped around one end to make a workmanlike grip. It’s more a shiv than a knife, really. The glass is radioactive but is generally safe to handle.
Musts: None.
Skills Affected: Weapons.
Effects:
[-0] It Is What It Is. It’s a Weapon:1 shiv knapped from the glass from the Trinity atomic test site.
[-0] Unbreakable. As an Item of Power, this item cannot be broken except with a magical ritual predicated upon perverting its purpose.
[+1] One-Time Discount. The Trinitite Knife is easy to conceal, even through metal detectors.
[-4] If You Encounter God, God Will Be Cut. The radioactive glass that forms the blade is imbued with some sort of power. It’s not explicitly magical, it’s not powered by faith, but it is extremely potent against inhuman victims. Spend a FP and for the rest of the scene, the Knife ignores the target’s supernatural defensive abilities and powers (generally acting as the Catch for Toughness and Recovery powers). Mundane armor applies normally.

Upgrades:
[-1] It’s The Only Way to be Sure. The Knife no longer requires a FP to be spent in order to activate “If You Encounter God, God Will Be Cut”.

In my campaign, I’m toying with the idea of radioactivity having an effect on magic similar to what magic does to technology. The atom bomb is a significant thing, and to me nukes have always been the purview of humanity in genre fiction. Even the unfortunately-canceled HBO series Carnivale attributed great importance to the atomic bomb (if you read up on what they planned for future seasons), Trinity in particular.

Also, I love the Colt from Supernatural and I wanted something that could fill that role without being a complete ripoff.

For Next Time

It’s not even a question. The PCs go up against the Orks of Hazzard!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on February 25, 2012, 10:50:45 PM
Sounds pretty excellent.

I have some vehicle combat rules that might interest you here (http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,24744.msg1053776.html#msg1053776).

The IoP list could use some more contributions.

If You Encounter God... is probably overpriced, though.

PS: Is Alex Abel an Unknown Armies reference?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Harboe on February 25, 2012, 11:37:51 PM
If You Encounter God... is probably overpriced, though.
It's All Creatures Are Equal Before God, except on a knife, so less discount.
The upgrade for it makes me drool, though :P

Thank you for posting this excellent AP for me to stea- get inspired from. :)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on February 26, 2012, 12:06:48 AM
ACAEBG ignores mundane armour and might only cost 3.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 26, 2012, 01:50:13 AM
Quote
It's All Creatures Are Equal Before God, except on a knife, so less discount.

Quote
ACAEBG ignores mundane armour and might only cost 3.

Yeah, I didn't want to make it TOO cheap, but I also didn't go searching out any detailed breakdowns of how Swords of the Cross' powers are priced. The Swords are -5 when added to an existing suite of IoP (YS168). I figure "Holy" is -1, like Holy Touch. I was costing "True Aim" as -1 as well, as it's very Stunt-like (gain a +1 to attack under certain circumstances). That leaves Divine Purpose and ACAEBG. To me, Divine Purpose is a restriction, and I was figuring it added a +1 discount, which would have made ACAEBG a -4 power.

That's how I priced "If You Encounter God, God Will Be Cut". That said, Sanctaphrax's point is valid about it not penetrating mundane armor. Is that enough to knock the cost from -4 to -3? Maybe.  Is Divine Purpose really just more of an Aspect on the sword than a true Power? Maybe. Either way, I didn't want to underestimate the Trinitite Knife, but if ya'll are okay with it, I'd reduce it to -3 for the "post to IoP thread" version.

Quote
The IoP list could use some more contributions.

Absolutely.  I wanted to get any major quibbles out of the way here first, though.

Quote
PS: Is Alex Abel an Unknown Armies reference?

He totally is. He's not a straight copy, but the characters are aligned enough that when we were making Carter Mews, and he asked for an evil CEO name involved in magic thievery, my mind jumped to him first. And Carter's player loves Mark A. Sheppard whenever he shows up in anything.

I would've picked Dennis Haysbert in the absence of outside influences. He just seems so trustworthy!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 11, 2012, 05:44:03 PM
Turns out I had to fly to Texa$ to run my next session!

Session 8

Carter Mews (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg), Scott Specter (http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/Images/stories/2011/jan/fosterintlede.jpg), and Josey Wales (http://cf.drafthouse.com/_uploads/galleries/17818/biehn__full.jpg)
Reward: Significant Milestone

THEN
Crowder, KY

Coal dust filled the cramped, dark mines. The drilling machine roared and crunched, making it hard for the grimy miners to see their coworker approaching from the shaft entrance. When they did notice the road flares the miner held in each hand, it was too late.

“Bob!” They yelled. “Bob! What the hell are you doing? The coal dust! You’ll touch it off!”

Bob Murray held each as-yet-unlit flare in outstretched arms. His soot-streaked face was beatific. “God spoke to me, brothers!” Bob shouted. “The Lord ordained this! Come with me and be saved!”

Bob ignited the flares and vanished in the ensuing explosion.

NOW (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VufilzHKTqk#t=50s)
A Few Miles West of Crowder, KY
One Month Later

Scott, Carter, and Josey stood over the woman’s corpse while the cloudy sky blanketed the roadway with diffuse, humid, late-summer heat. Her possessions proclaimed her to be Rachel Lipsum, a geology grad student at Georgetown. Josey said her tracks came from the small mining town of Crowder, and she still had her car keys on her. Carter’s magic rings picked up a sort of residual magic from the unfortunate girl.

Me: “All right, everyone roll Investigation. Or... hell, even Scholarship. Okay, you can roll untrained, just roll the dice and tell me what you get.”
Carter: “Zero is our highest.”
Me: “Great! She was obviously killed by a ghost strangler.”
Scott: “Is that like a ghost pirate, where you don’t know if it’s a ghost of a pirate or a ghost that’s currently engaged in piracy?”

They took a closer look (spent Fate Points), and noticed that while Rachel’s picture on her ID was maybe a 6 or 7, she was definitely a 3 or less now. Her brows were too pronounced, her jaw too jutting, and her arms were... extended, somehow, more beast-like. It was enough for Scott to tempt fate (heh) and open his Sight.

The ex-con was immediately standing over two different corpses. One was Rachel as she appeared in her student ID, tragically dead but free of the subtle variations the group had noticed. The other corpse was something between man and ape, with bony protrusions along its skull and arms. Its hands were long, deadly claws, and its legs were knotted cords of muscle. Scott glanced up at Crowder and saw a conflagration of screaming hellfire roiling up from the town in the distance. He took it as a sign from God (and a Compel to investigate).

Secondhand Smoke

The three bikers wiped down the scene as best they could and cruised towards Crowder. The town lay nestled in a small valley under the shadow of a hillside coal mine - a coal mine that was quite clearly on fire. Thick coalsmoke blanketed Crowder and wafted skyward to mix with the increasingly gray clouds until everything was obscured by a sulfur-tinged miasma. Scott and Carter ran a quick smartphone check only to discover news reports claiming the “Bob Murray Fire” (coal seam fires are named after the people who find them) was extinguished just under a month ago, with related stories about this Bob fellow miraculously surviving the blaze that claimed the lives of several other miners. Someone - or something -  wanted this fire covered up.

The bikers slowed as they approached roadwork on the main road. A sheriff’s deputy and three indolent construction workers had the entire road blocked off and were waving the PCs down. Another Compel involuntarily forced open Scott’s Sight again as he accelerated to handle the talking, and he saw the deputy’s face twist into a horrible caricature, all spiny teeth and fangs. The construction workers’ faces changed as well, their bestial countenances in sharp contrast to their perceived laziness. Scott couldn’t handle the things - he certainly couldn’t talk to them - and it fell to Carter and Josey to suss out the situation while Scott gulped down some Maalox. The demon deputy had everyone detouring through Crowder because of the coal fire and roadwork. Not a problem - the PCs were planning on investigating the town anyway, but it was another clue. Clearly whatever was going on here involved getting people into the town itself.

Scott, Carter, and Josey took the exit ramp down into the soot-soaked fog and I asked for Discipline rolls as the demonic coalsmoke tried to take control of them as it had nearly everyone in Crowder. Scott had the highest Discipline of the group, so I placed the DC two higher than his - DC6. Josey spent Fate Points but only took mental stress, while Carter played ball. His Discipline wasn’t bad, but he failed by enough that the evil influence began mutating him. I wrote down “Echoes of the Beast” and “Claws” on an index card and handed it to Carter’s player, explaining that this was his Consequence. The coalsmoke worked like a Sponsor, and would offer any PC a FP in exchange for Debt if they wanted it. Every scene, the PCs would make another Discipline roll (well, Conviction for Scott) and any Consequences inflicted would be in the form of various bestial mutations, all covered up by the same Human Guise like the deputy and the construction workers. My intention here was to create a sense of impending dread, to create this “timer” of sorts to get the PCs focused on what was causing the evil. It also worked as a way to keep them in town, since they put two and two together and guessed that poor Rachel died when she got too far away from the coalsmoke’s influence. As it turned out, I didn’t need the extra push - the group was already laser-focused on finding the root of Crowder’s problems and slaying the shit out of it. Furthermore, they were willing to accept Compels elsewhere to ensure they had enough FP to stave off any mutation rolls. With that sorted, the gang quickly decided that the coal mine was the best place to start. They’d need equipment, though, so first they headed to a Tractor Supply in sleepy downtown Crowder.

Set Your Ruger Blackhawk to Stun

They couldn’t be sure, what with the thick smoke everywhere, but there was definitely a sense of isolation to Crowder. Did most of the people simply evacuate when the coal fire started? Were they eaten? Were they lying in ambush? There weren’t any answers at the Tractor Supply, although there was rope and headlamps and respirators. There wasn’t anyone working the counter that they could see either, so why pay for anything? God, I love Carter’s “Why Buy When You Can Steal?” Aspect, and Josey had “Aimin’ to Misbehave” to boot. So when the lone employee sauntered back to the door from wherever he had been, he saw three bikers looting his store. Unfortunately for him, Josey was faster. The drifter slammed the butt of his Ruger Blackhawk into the old guy’s face and dropped him. Scott confirmed the old man was possessed by the evil presence too - smoke curled up from the unconscious man’s nostrils, ears, and mouth, like he was smoldering on the inside - so they tied him up and meandered their way up the switchbacks to the coal mine.

I Used to Be a Smoker Demon, Then I Took an Arrow in the Knee

The drive to the mine was eerie. The coal seam fire had cooked the trees and grass from below, and the gang motored past toppled trunks, brown patches of sickly grass, and plumes of noxious gas rising up from the apocalyptic hillside. They abandoned their motorcycles about halfway up the mountain and went in on foot. Carter and Josey were both sneaky types and helped Scott keep quiet with maneuvers. They crested the ridge to the coal mine to find a smattering of administrative trailers, piles of slag, huge dump trucks, and unrecognizable mining equipment around the gaping mine entrance. The smoke was thicker up here and I started upping the DCs for the coalsmoke Dicipline rolls (to little effect).

Carter and Josey saw about a dozen miners and townsfolk setting up three big fire pits in the gravel outside the mine. Scott, as always, confirmed that these people were possessed just like everyone else they’d met so far. Almost half of them were twisted beast-forms, a few were hulking, muscled brutes, and a couple trailed thick smoke as they breathed. Hunters, Tanks, and Smokers, to use Left 4 Dead terminology (although they definitely were not undead). As they watched, two tank-demons entered one of the trailers and brought out two weakly struggling female grad students - probably Rachel’s fellow researchers, sent to gather data on the coal fire. The tank-demons walked them bodily into the cave entrance and were soon lost in the thick, dark smoke.

Carter focused on the fire pits, trying to discern their possible purpose, and he invoked “Family Jewels” to do it. This represented one of his magic items, a ring that stored various memories from Carter’s ancestors. He’d often tap it for sudden knowledge on how to shoot things or to boost Lore rolls or anything, really. Right now, his magic ring flashed back farther than Carter had ever been before, and it gave the players an idea of what they were up against. Carter was sitting in a cave with a small group of... cavemen? Crude paintings marked the cave walls, and shamans wearing animal headdresses danced in the firelight. They twirled and sang, celebrating the mock hunt that brought food and the fire’s light that drove back the darkness. Carter snapped back and saw that the firepits the demons were building were similar to his vision. They were up against some sort of animistic Ice Age demon that had been trapped in the mountain since paleolithic times.

Just then, their planning was interrupted by three demons in a pickup making their way up the switchbacks. The demons didn’t spot the bikers, but they did spot their motorcycles. The PCs rushed downhill and set up an ambush just as the lead demon (a Smoker) pulled out his cellphone to report the intrusion.

Josey Wales didn’t just carry around matched Ruger Blackhawks. He had a crossbow as well, something Josey’s player had blatantly ripped off from Darryl Motherfucking Dixon on the Walking Dead. The crossbow bolt slammed into the smoker’s knee, sending it to the dusty ground, the phone skittering from its grasp. Carter popped the Tank with his taser as the coal miner got out of the truck, but the demon suddenly (and very visibly) grew a foot taller and wider, ripping out of its shirt even as the electricity coursed through its body. Scott landed a few blows on the Tank and luckily his Holy Touch left gaping ectoplasmic wounds in the demon’s added mass. Josey pinned the Smoker to the truck fender with another bolt before the Hunter jumped him. It was a relatively quiet scuffle; nobody was firing guns and the demons at the coal mine kept blowing their Alertness rolls. Carter kept tagging the “Tased” aspects he was placing to keep one step ahead of the Tank, even as the big brute swung the truck’s driver door at Carter like a giant cleaver again and again. The taser finally worked, and the Tank dropped. Josey fended off the Hunter, and the Smoker ate it soon after. They tied up the mauled demons and rolled their possessed asses down the hill. Scott took the Smoker’s phone, noting that the thing was trying to call this Bob Murray fellow. They had a name and an address for the guy, but they were at the mine now. Bob could wait.

Fire Extinguishers Ain’t Gonna Cut It

As the group returned to their vantage point, the two grad students (now fully controlled by the paleolithic evil) exited the mine to a chorus of howls and joyous screams from the assembled demons. Carter noted it wasn’t just random howls, it was a chant. A name, from before things had names. To top it off, Carter made a connection between Eastern Kentucky Mining Corp and his nemesis, Crowley-Lampkin. Was this “Howl” entity part of Pantagruel’s plans? Was it an unfortunate side effect of Alex Abel’s search for items of power? Was it just accidentally released by some unlucky coal miners? The gang intended to enter the cave and find out.

After another (generally futile) coalsmoke roll, the PCs decided to sneak past the demons. They approached it like their recon of the mine, with Carter and Josey creating taggable aspects for Scott to use, then sneaking in on their own, trusting their high Stealth skills. Once inside, they donned their respirators to help mitigate Howl’s strengthening influence. They found enough dynamite to collapse the mine, too (an excellent Declaration on Josey’s part), but unfortunately none of them had the expertise required to guarantee the mine fire would be extinguished by collapsing this particular shaft. There could be other air pockets and sources of oxygen that would keep the coal seam burning and make dealing with it even harder since the main shaft would be collapsed. They couldn’t stop the evil by destroying the mine, at least not with the data they had. But there was a research team in Crowder studying the mine fire for a month now - surely they’d have data Josey could use to plant the explosives correctly. Going further into the mine wasn’t a good idea, either. The smoke was too thick and the heat quickly became too dangerous. They’d have to go out, raid the demons at the mine entrance, and hope they could capture and exorcise one of the grad students or somehow get their hands on the team’s data.

The First Annual Crowder Van Rodeo

Apparently, the Georgetown research team had come in a barely-functional campus van, and now that all the grad students were under Howl’s control, they didn’t need to remain imprisoned at the mine anymore. This was a Compel on Scott’s “By the Skin of My Teeth” Aspect - the data and grad students were in the van, but that van was pulling out right now! There was no time for stealth! The PCs sprang into action, with Carter and Josey sprinting after the van and Scott firing his .45 at the newly-possessed driver. He shot her in the shoulder, and demonic possession or not, you can’t steer a van if your arm doesn’t work. That grad student was Taken Out and slid to the floor of the van in shock.

Carter dodged a Hunter and leapt onto the back of the out-of-control van. Josey managed to keep pace long enough to shoot the second grad student in the face, then another Hunter tackled him from behind while a Tank bore down on him. A third Hunter started up one of the immense dump trucks, intending to give chase, while the two Smokers split up. One went for the foreman’s trailer to call for help, while the second coughed up a stream of firey slag and spewed the burning flux at Scott!

Carter made it to the top of the van just as a Hunter jumped onto the rear doors. Thinking quickly, Carter tasered the Hunter in the face but his weapon was pulled from his hand as the demon toppled off the vehicle, flailing in agony.

Then the van went down the hill. It slammed through dry, dying brush and bounced over the switchbacks as it took the short way down the mountain. Carter managed to squirm inside and steer the big vehicle through the worst of it. Back up at the mine, Scott closed on the Smoker and shoved him into the fire pits they had been stoking. Josey put down both a Hunter and the Tank with measured headshots before the giant dump truck rolled over him!

No, it literally rolled over him. Those big dump trucks aren’t that great at sneaking up on pedestrians. Plus, the sluggish acceleration gave Scott time to sprint up a slag pile and leap onto the side ladder! Josey tried to follow, but the Smoker in the foreman’s office was taking aim with a bolt-action rifle. Josey took cover behind a self-propelled drill and blew the Smoker’s head off. Then he got on the drill and steered it towards the dump truck.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 11, 2012, 05:45:57 PM
Hell Comes to the Piggly Wiggly

All three vehicles were now in a half-controlled breakneck descent down a slope far too steep for comfort. Scott and the Hunter were trading Holy Touch punches and razor claws in the dump truck’s cab, Josey could barely get the drill angled correctly, and Carter literally jumped the van off one of the switchbacks, right over the demons that went down the mountain to find their missing coworkers. They piled into the abandoned, doorless pickup and peeled out after Carter.

Josey finally got the drill on target and slammed it into the dump truck, the linear drill making short work of the massive truck’s tires. Josey leapt clear as the drill and truck got mangled up together. Scott followed soon after, leaving a battered Hunter on the highway to hell.

Carter’s van was riding on rims now, and he had a pickup truck full of demons bearing down on him. He tried a few times to sideswipe the pickup off the hillside, but it wasn’t in the cards. Then he saw the massive dump truck barreling pellmell down the hill. Carter changed tactics, luring the demons into the dump truck’s path with a Deceit Maneuver, “‘I Have You Now”.

The demons didn’t see the truck come out of the coalsmoke until it was too late. The wounded dump truck T-boned the pickup like a freight train, sending the entire twisted metal mess down the mountain where it hammered a gas station and exploded.

Fire In the Hole

The gang babied the van back up to the mine and ransacked the Georgetown team’s research notes for anything that could help them stop the coal seam fire without causing more damage. Carter hit the mine offices too, arranging things so Crowley-Lampkin would be implicated in the coal mine fire’s coverup.

Now that Josey knew where to plant the dynamite, collapsing the mine and snuffing the blaze wasn’t a problem. Scott and Carter called in the Kentucky Division of Mine Reclamation and Enforcement, then the trio of bikers mounted up and headed into town to find Bob Murray.

I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too If It Weren’t For You Meddling Motherfu-

A brief note on metaphysics: Howl wanted the coal mine fire, but the entity wasn’t necessarily the fire itself or even inside the coal mine fire. As you’ll see soon enough, Howl wasn’t even at the mine. Howl needed the fire and caves and the toxic smoke and the town depopulated and the citizens twisted into beasts in order to create a stronger sympathetic link between its realm in the NeverNever and Earth. As the fire spread, so did Howl’s influence. Collapsing the mine exponentially decreased Howl’s influence on Crowder, cut him off from the spirit world, and gave the PCs a chance to truly destroy the Neanderthal demon.

You’re Just a Thursday For Us

Bob Murray lived in an old farmhouse a little ways out from Crowder. Like the mine, Carter and Josey decided to leave their bikes and sneak up on the house, using the outbuildings and various vehicles for cover. Scott provided a distraction Maneuver as he simply gunned his chopper’s engine and rolled up the driveway.

Josey failed his Stealth roll; I ruled that instead of being spotted, Josey only got as far as an old Caprice but had a good view of the front porch. Carter made it to the farmhouse’s kitchen windows in time to see a little old lady with an oxygen mask and a walker toddle into the kitchen to make some tea. The farmhouse’s interior was absolutely free from coalsmoke, probably due to the threshold the family home possessed. Still, something had been invited inside; a fossilized Neanderthal skull (presumably Howl itself) sat prominently displayed on a bookshelf. Bob Murray (http://img.poptower.com/pic-39982/walton-goggins.jpg?d=600) stomped downstairs next, shotgun in hand, and grabbed the skull off the shelf before heading outside to confront Scott.

“Bobby, ask if your friends want to stay awhile and listen!” his (presumably) mother wheezed after him. “Nobody ever listens,” she muttered as the screen door banged shut.

Josey and Carter let Scott try first, since he was “Driven By Redemption”. Maybe he figured he could talk Bob into giving up the skull, as if it were similar to a denarius. Bob wasn’t here to argue with the fellas what done in his boys, he was there to Compel them to join his new demonic cult or kill them, but Scott did rattle him with self-doubt (the beautiful Raul Julia-inspired line “You’re just a thursday for us”)  long enough for Josey to blow the pinky off the hand holding the skull. Bob let the shotgun drop and snatched up the skull with his good hand. These bikers had him dead to rights. He couldn’t just charge them, even with the skull’s power. Bob spun and darted back into his house, using Inhuman Speed to tear through the living room and explode out the back window. He crashed through the doors to his toolshed and the gang heard an ATV roar to life. It maybe wasn’t the best tactical decision, but Speed powers or not, Bob wasn’t going to outrun a chopper on foot. He figured he could take the ATV off-road to lose the bikes, ditch it in the woods, and circle back on the PCs, stalking them one by one. First, however, he had to get out of there. Scott roared towards the toolshed while Carter and Josey took cover at the corner of the house. Bob’s ATV tore the shed doors to flinders and Bob dropped his Human Guise, revealing a monstrosity I could only describe as “a Neanderthal Satan riding an ATV, demon skull held aloft like an Olympic torch.”

Josey: “Just like a Dio album cover.”

Sweet Titties, It’s Diorblo!

Despite an impressive Intimidation roll to scatter the PCs, Bob didn’t get very far on his lawnmower-engined-chariot. Josey and Scott shot him full of holes, then Scott leapt from his bike onto the ATV! He yanked Bob clean off the machine, which went careening off Bob’s mother’s Caprice in classic A-Team fashion to land messily in the farmhouse’s living room.

Bob’s mom: “Fiddlesticks! Not the ATV again...”

Howl’s skull rolled to a stop directly between Scott and Bob, who were both still groggy from the tumble off the ATV. Carter snapped open his baton, Josey took aim with his .44, and Bob completely blew the most important initiative roll in his entire life. Josey shot Bob in the knee before he could reach the skull (again with the knees), slowing him down for Scott. Scott wasn’t going for the skull - he left the skull to Carter while he went for Bob. Carter sprinted in, kicked the skull away from Bob’s outstretched fingers, then shattered it with a mighty blow from his baton. Sunlight broke through the clouds of smoke as Scott tagged everything he could, then punched Bob’s demonic face off with a Holy Touch haymaker. The trio felt Howl’s insidious psychic tendrils wither and fade. The prehistoric demon was destroyed. The coal fire could be quelled permanently by the authorities. The mutations that afflicted the surviving townsfolk (and Carter) evaporated into harmless ectoplasmic mist.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 11, 2012, 05:46:50 PM
After The Catch

I know, there weren’t any Orks of Hazzard this time. This session was an odd duck. Carter and Scott’s players and I were in Austin visiting a college friend (Josey’s player), so I knew I wouldn’t have Bill or Clay around. I wanted to spotlight chances for stealth and burglary, an enemy with a definite unholy vibe, and potential battles of wills. I needed something different, so of course I started ripping off random things until they fit together. The coalsmoke was probably mostly inspired by the Silent Hill movie’s visuals (if nothing else). I’m on book three of Mistborn, too, so that matched up nicely. The location was of course inspired by the show Justified. I made the bad guys demons mostly so Scott could have a great big spotlight this session, but their specific variants were definitely ripped off from Left 4 Dead zombie types. Bob Murray’s name came from the first two talking skulls that came to mind - Bob the Skull (of course) and Murray from the Monkey Island games.

I wanted the PCs to be imperiled personally, but not to have the possession really threaten them immediately. I thought it was a bit like the setup for Escape From New York, but in play the various Discipline rolls just weren’t threatening enough. The players’ willingness to spend FP to stave off the possession told me that for the most part, that plotline didn’t resonate with them. I think what I should have done was let them know the smoke was bad, then Compel them to save Crowder while trying to keep from breathing the coalsmoke. Ransack fire stations for SCBA tanks, that sort of thing. Worry about demons ripping their face masks or running out of clean air. That would’ve worked better, in retrospect.

It also wasn’t too much of a mystery as to what was going on. The coal fire seems to be possessing people? Let’s go to the coal mine and try to stop it. I had to switch gears and make the coal mine an important part of the problem but not the exact focal point for the evil plaguing Crowder. I did have some NPCs fleshed out that weren’t completely possessed yet, but those encounters fell by the wayside due to the players’ focus on the coal mine. I thought the lead-in and encounters at the mine worked fairly well, although at the table, at the time, it was a little more jumbled than my writeup indicated. There was a lot of back and forth with different plans, whether to bluff their way in as mine inspectors, try to use Carter’s mutations to blend in, just blitzkrieg the place, etc. Otherwise, it was a smooth infiltration and a snappy combat.

I waffled when it came to Bob Murray, unfortunately. I had actually planned on him being just a normal guy. A manipulated, possessed cult leader, but a normal guy nonetheless. He was going to take the skull and run for it, and probably last all of three seconds. But then the players blew through the mine demons so deftly that I thought maybe I should beef Bob up and make him a true Big Bad. Problem was, time was running short at that point, so I ended up going middle of the road, and when you take the middle of the road, you get run over. I gave him powers (but not enough) and he still tried to run (but not effectively). The end result was this crazy A-Team mishmash that, while fun, didn’t feel quite right to me.

To sum up, we all had fun, I think the session was successful, but it never reached that level of personal peril that I wanted to portray. Next time we’ll all be back in PA and it’ll definitely be Orks of Hazzard.

Hunter

Aspects:
Hunter Demon
Was Once a Man
Red of Tooth and Claw
Skills:
Great +4: Fists, Stealth
Good +3: Alertness, Athletics
Fair +2: Survival, Intimidation
Average +1: Endurance, Might
Baseline Powers:
Echoes of the Beast -1
Claws -1
Additional Powers
Cloak of Shadows -1
Spider Walk -1
Recovery -2
Speed -2
The Catch (Holy Stuff)    +2
Human Guise +0
Refresh: -2 or more

Smoker

Aspects:
Smoker Demon
Was Once a Man
High Priest of Howl
Skills:
Good +3: Alertness, Athletics, Weapons
Fair +2: Stealth, Guns, Presence
Average +1: Endurance, Discipline, Craftsmanship, Empathy, Lore
Baseline Powers:
Addictive Saliva -1
Recovery -2
The Catch (Holy Stuff)    +2
Breath Weapon -2
Additional Powers
Super Sense: can tell positioning and movement of things enveloped by coalsmoke -1
Recovery -2
Gaseous Form -3
Human Guise +0
Refresh: -4 or more

Tank

Aspects:
Tank Demon
Was Once a Man
Unstoppable Juggernaut
Skills:
Great +4: Fists, Might
Good +3: Endurance, Intimidation
Fair +2: Athletics, Weapons
Average +1: Alertness, Presence
Baseline Powers:
Strength -2
Toughness -2
Recovery -2
The Catch (Holy Stuff)    +2
Additional Powers
Strength -2
Recovery -2
Hulking Size -2 (must have a Supernatural-level physical ability)
Human Guise +0
Refresh: -4 or more
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on June 11, 2012, 11:18:27 PM
Why would they want to resist the smoke? It's free Powers!

That aside, sounds like a good session.

How do the "Additional Powers" of the demons work?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 12, 2012, 02:23:25 AM
Why would they want to resist the smoke? It's free Powers!

That aside, sounds like a good session.

How do the "Additional Powers" of the demons work?

I think it's an instinctual reaction to free stuff handed out by a known evil power.  :)  I know why Scott's player resisted; after all, he was probably worried about losing access to his Holy powers under the demonic influence (and I totally would have played those Compels hard, too), but he also had the skills to back up his defiance. I think Josey's player mostly wasn't cool with having that much alteration done to "his guy" all of a sudden. Carter's player was okay with it, but I think by that point he was following the other guys' lead and resisting, even if cost him FP.

The "Additional Powers" listed for each demonform were just options I picked out ahead of time to boost individual enemies from "mook" to "miniboss" on the fly, or to represent a more fully possessed and mutated demon. So every Hunter has Claws and Echoes of the Beast, but some might also have Spider Walk, or Cloak of Shadows, or Inhuman Speed, etc. You could totally mix and match too - I never ended up doing that, I didn't feel the need to during play, but that was one of my earlier ideas. A Tank that breathed burning coal slag at you before charging, or a Hunter that went more bear than wolf, all muscle and claws and toughness.

One other thing I forgot to note: I found it interesting that there wasn't any moral dilemmas this session, despite the players knowing that the townsfolk were 1) possessed and 2) the PCs were ALSO possessed, thereby indicating that some townsfolk might still be able to be saved. The three of them kind of fell into a "knock them out if we can, but don't get all weepy over some casualties" mode that surprised me, given the discussions the group had during the Kansas City game with the Red Court. Maybe that was just the mix of players this time, having Josey instead of Bill and Clay (because I bet Bill's player would have brought it up, no matter what Bill the character might decide is best).
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on July 11, 2012, 03:21:25 AM
Session 9

Carter Mews (http://www.contactmusic.com/pics/ld/colin_fitz_lives_060810/clark_gregg_2952899.jpg), Bill Stockburn (http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sam-elliot.jpg), Kathryn Bryant (http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/2005_Brokeback_Mountain/005BBM_Linda_Cardellini_011.jpg), and Lucy Collins (http://i2.listal.com/image/1102669/600full-kim-director.jpg)
Reward: Minor Milestone

NOW (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmXWkMlKFkI&feature=player_detailpage#t=29s)
On the Road
Near Devil’s Fork State Park, South Carolina

A hunter’s moon lit the lonely forested road as the four bikers wound their way through the South Carolina wilderness. Bill, Kathryn, and Carter were traveling towards some rumors of hidebehinds in West Virginia and had met up with Lucy Collins, formerly of Kansas City. As part of her character creation, we had retconned Lucy into the “Velma” role in the Kansas City Vampire Soup Kitchen fiasco. She was a witch of no small power and was convinced her parents had conceived her to be the Antichrist. It was a plot hook I could work into what was already going on with Pantagruel, Bill’s (and now also Carter’s) Denarian nemesis, but at the moment there were more pressing matters than Lucy’s ancestry.

Bill, Carter, and Kathryn (thanks to Compels) didn’t see the barbed wire strung across the road. All three of them shredded their tires and went down while Lucy managed to stop in time. There wasn’t much time to inspect the damage, though - they heard rustling from the brush on both sides of the road!

Wrong Turn

Kathryn and Bill headed off the road to investigate the noises. Lucy drew blood from her hand, preparing to fuel a spell if necessary (a Lore maneuver). Finally, Carter started tossing road flares, angling them to create a web of light and shadow he could use to get off the road and remain unseen while still getting a glimpse of the gang’s mysterious assailants (he also rolled for a maneuver). Bill and Kathryn spotted a small group of bestial greenish humanoids lurking in the brush, dressed in filthy overalls and flannel and brandishing bows, axes, and clubs. One of them was aiming its bow at Lucy’s bike (as it was the only one still running). Stealth rolls were failed and initiative was rolled. The orks fell upon Kathryn and Bill - one tried to grab Kathryn but her cursed stunt that let her defend with Guns proved more than a match for the ork’s kidnapping attempt. Bill’s dice were on fire and he deftly avoided his assailants as well. The ork bowman loosed his arrow. Lucy felt the solid thunk as the arrow pierced her bike’s gas tank. That was more than enough to send her into a foul-mouthed tirade, but when she saw the quarter-stick of dynamite tied to the shaft, she shut up and dove for cover. Lucy’s bike exploded, the orange fireball highlighting four more orks on the other side of the road who were waiting for the explosion before they moved in. Carter used his maneuver to boost a Stealth roll and he flanked these newcomers. Meanwhile, Lucy slammed the bowman with a lightning bolt, nearly taking him out with one shot even through the ork’s Inhuman Toughness.

This was only the group’s second or third real encounter with evocation and they were duly impressed. Bill and Kathryn were no slouches, however, and each managed to wedge gun barrels under ork chins and geyser brains into the night sky. The remaining ork still fighting Bill lucked out after that; he hit the old man by six or something insane like that. Bill figured they weren’t gonna kill him outright - they wanted to grab him and Kathryn for a reason, and his dubious “plan” involved getting taken back to the ork lair. Bill let me Taken (heh) him Out - the ork chopped Bill’s gun from his hands, clubbed him unconscious, and hoisted his wrinkly ass over one shoulder. Prisoner in tow and with several of their kin dead in seconds, the orks turned to flee.

Lucy would have none of it. She flat-out vaporized the bowman with a white-hot stream of fire before he could run for cover. Carter ambushed the slowest ork from the other group as they, too, scampered back into the woods. Cooter the ork, in what would become his defining characteristic for the night, rolled negative number after negative number and quickly ended up tased.

The gang’s inventory:
-4 bikes
-1 Bill
+1 ork named Cooter

Cooter didn’t have a chance. Lucy intimidates like Clay punches, and the ork’s luck dropped below “Wile E. Coyote” and into “Star Trek Redshirt” territory. Cooter readily agreed to lead Carter, Kathryn, and Lucy to his kin (and Bill, they hoped) in exchange for his life. By taking an ork captive in the first encounter and subsequently Taking him Out mentally, thus gaining his cooperation, the party bypassed a potential series of harrying skirmishes, wilderness adventure, and booby traps. That was okay by me - Bill had pretty much done the same thing except HE was the one captured.

If You Kill Me You Won’t Find the Treasure

Bill came to amidst the smell of wood smoke, salt, motor oil, and a range of meat-stench from “freshly butchered” to “rancid”. He was in the orks’ smokehouse, his hands tied to a meathook, dangling with a dozen other carcasses including deer, boar, and human.

“He’s awake!” cried a skinny little goblin from behind Bill. The gobbo scampered up out of the smokehouse only to be replaced by a massive seven-foot tall ork. The bearded beast hunched into the outbuilding and squatted down in front of Bill. He took a swig from a dark bottle, took off his red trucker’s hat, and ran a meaty hand through bristly hair so pallid it was almost white.

“Enos, git yer writin’ bitz,” the large ork stated. More scampering from behind Bill, then the rustling of paper on a police-issue clipboard. With the “stenografur” ready, Uncle Jesse began interrogating Bill. Bill pretty much kept to the truth: He was a monster hunter, and now his friends were gonna kill Jesse and his kin for what they were doing to people. Uncle Jesse alluded to humans trespassing on their rightful land and let slip a long-standing feud with the elves living in the Enchanted Forest trailer park to the north. Bill perked up at this; he started angling to maybe offer to take on the elves, but he wasn’t the most sociable of characters and couldn’t talk his out of his predicament. Jesse told him “We’ll talk latur, after Coy n’ Vance work yer over fer whut you did ta our kin.” And that’s how Bill ended up with the Moderate consequence “Tenderized” while the rest of the party was on their nature hike.

The Hills Have Orks

True to his word, Cooter led Lucy, Kathryn, and Carter through the early morning darkness towards the ork lair. Dawn was breaking as they arrived at a clearing filled with rusting car wrecks spanning decades - all previously owned by the orks’ victims. A ramshackle farmhouse slouched at the far end of the clearing, surrounded by wood-and-tin outbuildings. Carter Cased the Joint and rolled off the ladder - with a 9, I decided he could name three Aspects, and he chose “Precarious Junkpiles”, “Architectural Failure”, and “Rabbit Warrens”.

Their recon complete, Carter and Kathryn flanked opposite ends of the junkyard, searching for Bill. Once her comrades were safely concealed, Lucy simply walked into the clearing with Cooter as a human shield, called out the orks, and the orks answered! A dozen of the creatures emerged from the farmhouse, the garage, from the backyard, and from the smokehouse (at this point Kathryn and Carter noted this pair’s bloodstained knuckles and the glimmer of motion from within the smokehouse, correctly deducing Bill was still alive and inside). Most of them brandished rough melee weapons, while some preferred bows and others still wore tattered deputy hats and held shotguns. One of these even had a sherriff’s star and rode atop some sort of mutant dire boar. Finally, a brute of an ork, easily nine feet tall and dressed in a haphazard homespun version of a gentleman’s suit, stomped out the front door of the farmhouse. If nothing else, it would have been obvious this ork was the leader due to his fancy gold pocketwatch and dandy white hat.

“So dere yer are,” Boss Hogg spat. “You gotta lotta nerv walkin’ in heah by yerrsef. We gonna kill, eat, an’ rape ya - okay, maybe not in dat orda. We ain’t anamulz, heh heh. Not like dem sumbitch elves.”

Lucy wasn’t impressed, but then it was her schtick to hate everyone and be the most sarcastic, jaded bitch in the room. “Ask your dead friends about my nerves - oh wait, you can’t, I fucking vaporized them because I am a witch. The realms of wind and spirits are mine to command, pigsy. I propose a trade: You let my guy go, I let Cooter here go, and we all just walk away.”

Lucy rolled a 5 on her Intimidate check. Boss Hogg rolled a 4, but then spent a FP, invoking “Hog Boss” (it was late, all right?) and boosting his result to a 6. I asked Lucy’s player if he wanted to spend a FP as well (he had a ton of aspects he could have invoked for this), but it was his last FP and he was going to hang onto it.

“No deal,” Hogg growled. “Go git her, boyz!”

’Bout This Time, the Ork Boyz Figgered They Was In a Speck of Trouble

Lucy’s sponsor (the literal Dark Powers) spoke up at this point. They wanted her to take out the farmhouse. They said it would break the orks’ morale. They didn’t tell Lucy that Daisy, the ork matriarch, and some half-dozen ork children were waiting inside, protected by Uncle Jesse, and that this was my little deconstruction of the stereotypical “do you kill the orc babies too?” arguments that pop up here and there on the internet. Lucy had her own plans, however, and refused the Compel. Instead, Lucy did some evothaum and summoned a junkyard golem. This creaking, rusty monstrosity tore into the front rank of hard-charging orks. The greenskins gave it a good fight, but the primary purpose was to provide a distraction so Carter and Kathryn could rescue Bill. Coy and Vance peppered the machine with dynamite-tipped arrows while Roscoe and Flash the dire boar ripped into the thing with tusks and pickaxes. A bunch of orks ran for the garage, figuring they could ram the thing to bits with their vehicles. Lucy watched her construct explode as the dynamite detonated (killing Flash in the resulting blast), then lit Coy’s remaining dynamite on fire (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jxElle8wbA4#t=17s).

The garage burst open! First, a battered old tow truck fishtailed into the junkyard and headed for Lucy. The orange 1969 Charger that followed was in pristine condition, its big block engine tuned to a powerful roar, its custom horn blaring “Dixie” across the battlefield. Bo and Luuk Ork let out a hearty “Yeeehaawwww!” as they too drove their General Lee straight at Lucy!

At the same time, Carter and Kathryn freed Bill and the trio of hunters came out of the smokehouse shooting. Kathryn gunned Vance down over a few very hairy rounds, as the big brute came at her again and again with a club. Bill put down Cletus and Roscoe, while Carter took Coltrane with a clean headshot. Boss Hogg clambered onto the rear of the two truck and was grinning madly, relishing the idea of running down this puny hoomie who was killin’ his boyz.

Lucy called upon the land of wind and spirits, taking control of the General Lee’s wheel and putting a Block on Bo and Luuk’s attempt to run her over. Luuk fired a dynamite arrow but it hit Cooter, shredding his left arm, shoulder, and face. Cooter howled in misery and Lucy was thrown backwards. She gritted her teeth and burned FP, steering the General Lee just long enough to slam it into the tow truck. She tagged the aspects Carter had placed at the start of the conflict, and Boss Hogg was pinned to the ground, pierced by rusty steel and broken glass. Enos and his two truck managed to peel out, leaving his leader behind. Then Lucy got nasty. She was running low on mental stress, but she lasted long enough to send the Charger careening into piles of junk again and again, treating the orks inside like they were in Death Proof, finally ejecting them violently through their windshield. Bo was hurt bad, but Luuk managed to roll well enough to avoid the broken glass and metal debris that had severely wounded his brother.

“Boss!” Luuk shouted. “Dese hoomies got us on da ropez! Call fer da Hunt!”

Boss Hogg’s blood frothed on his giant maw. “I ain’t doin’ it. We can take ‘em. Ain’t callin’ no got-damned elves fer help.”

Kathryn sprayed the orange Charger with bullets, causing both orks to flinch.

“Got-damned sumbitch elves,” Hogg growled. He raised an old Civil War bugle to his lips and blew. The sound that issued forth was an ancient thing, welling up from the earth. What happened next did not involve elves.

Two Dollars

Hooves thundered across the clearing and I offered Carter’s player a FP as a mob of angry ghost centaurs charged out of the forest. They were coming straight for Carter, vengeful grimaces on their faces. One of them had even acquired a luchador mask and Ultimate Warrior arm tassles from somewhere. They were here because Carter had taken the coins they needed for passage across the Styx, waaaay, way back when the gang traveled into the NeverNever. Carter’s day of reckoning was finally here.

...And Carter’s player bought off the Compel. The thief frantically fished around in his pockets before finally throwing out a handful of gold coins to the angry centaurs. There was a brief pause, followed by a gunshot as Bill capped Boss Hogg while he struggled underneath the junkpile. The bugle fell in limp fingers and the centaurs started gathering up the coins.

“He who hath called this Hunt is dead!” one centaur said. “And look! Brothers! Elysium awaits us at last!” The centaurs turned and rode off. The luchador pointed to Carter and muttered “This ain’t over, hombre,” but he, too, turned to follow his fellow spirits.

Loot, Then Burn

“Dat wuz... weird,” Bo coughed weakly before Kathryn machinegunned him and Luuk like they were Bonnie and Clyde. Luuk slumped dead onto the General Lee’s horn, sending repeating choruses of “Dixie” skyward.

Oh, and Bill shot Enos after Lucy wrecked the tow truck. I think that was everyone at that point, so the gang cautiously entered the farmhouse. The rickety building had been untouched by the hell that had scoured the ork encampment, and the hunters were nervous about any final surprises. They didn’t find any, just a tunnel in the basement where a few orks must have escaped. They found crude maps of the area denoting park ranger fire towers, areas for game, and an ever-changing border between ork land and elf land to the north. Carter found the orks’ stash of wallets, cellphones, jewelry, and other personal effects from previous victims. Meanwhile, Lucy checked out the still. A Lore check revealed that the contents of the various bottles faintly hummed with magical energy. Lucy decided to see if the ork moonshine would give her any obvious abilities.

What Lucy got was really drunk.

The gang looked through the orks’ garage and junkyard, and eventually dredged up enough tires and parts to get their bikes running again. Well, all except for Lucy, but she had her unsteady gaze fixed on the General Lee.

“I can fix this,” she slurred, accepting a Compel from the Dark Powers to fix her new car. The Charger started shifting and groaning as its fenders bent back into shape and bullet holes filled back in. Its Christine-like metamorphosis complete, the entire car painted itself black.

With his quick-thinking solution to the ghost centaurs, we’d determined that Carter never threw anything away, and in an inspired bit of continuity, Carter noticed the skull-headed gearshift he took from Bad Truck was gone, transported somehow to the shifter on Lucy’s black Charger. We mocked Lucy’s player about picking a car instead of a motorcycle when the idea behind the game was that everyone would be playing a monster-hunting biker, but in the end we relented because it wasn’t just any car, it was Bad Car. It channeled Christine and Death Proof and was made from an orky General Lee. Besides, Lucy’s player usually doesn’t show up that often, thus lessening the impact said car will have on future sessions. Plus, it’s a car built by a Compel from the Dark Powers. It’s practically my car. Muahaha.

And that is why, as the gang babied their bikes back onto the road, the ork blood spattering the ground trickled slowly up the Charger’s quarter panel and into its gas tank.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on July 11, 2012, 03:22:25 AM
Yee Haw

My foremost thought after this session ended was “Man, I am going to finally have to learn the magic system.” It’s ironic - we’re 9 sessions into our campaign and I’ve only ever really used a few evocations here and there, backed by some minor rituals. I’ve been completely nerfing magic as it is - no refinements or focus items, just basic “pick the spell power with Conviction and roll Discipline”. Honestly, where my campaign is set power-level-wise, that doesn’t come off as too nerfed to me. In return I’m pretty sure I’m not being very strict with thaumaturgy difficulties. I’m going to have to pay attention to some of the older threads now, especially some of the reworkings of things like summoning.

I was really happy with how the session started. I wasn’t expecting ¾ of the group to accept the initial compel to crash their bikes, and I was able to legitimately take out Lucy’s bike as well. The orks were built with +4 in their primary attack, +3 Endurance (for 4 stress boxes), Athletics +2, and Inhuman Strength and Toughness. They were pretty threatening in melee combat for people whose names aren’t Kathryn, but they were still dropping fast enough to where I couldn’t really coordinate them with maneuvers. Too spread out, too many things going on. But that’s okay - they’re the bad guys. They’re supposed to be slaughtered.

There was no real mystery to this session. A basic-level Lore roll let the players know they were dealing with orks and that orks were somehow related to goblins, which in turn were a type of fairy, so yes, your steel buckshot, combat knives, and crowbars would work just fine on them. Knowing what they were dealing with wasn’t going to make the adventure all that much easier. Capturing an ork, however, and Taking it Out mentally so it would cooperate? Yeah, Cooter really provided a shortcut through a lot of what I thought the adventure was going to be about; Survival checks, tracking, stealth, quick, furious ambushes, and hunters hunted. The good thing about that was that it did cut down the session time. Any orks I had planned for wilderness ambushes, I just moved them to the main ork farm since the session shaped up to be a huge set-piece battle.

Again, despite the amount of orks, the threat seemed fairly light. I had a lot of enemies on the field, but only a few were going to be taking significant consequences. Everyone but Lucy ended the game with more FP than their refresh, and that’s the barometer I usually go by for “how hard was the adventure?” I think I was okay with that this time, unlike my desire to have dealt more damage to the PCs from the Crowder coal fire adventure. This session was a fun romp, the pop culture references were right there on the surface, and at the end of it I got to tie in a bunch of old plot threads and get inspired for a couple of ways the gang could go from here.

1. The orks themselves: I thought about it, and I think these orks work pretty well as Changelings rather than straight-up fae. They’re on our side of the NeverNever, for one. They’re using metal tools, weapons, and vehicles, but still take increased damage when injured by iron. That speaks to a Catch that’s maybe 1 point less effective - they won’t take damage from simple contact with iron, but injuries will still bypass their Toughness.
2. The elves I mentioned offhand: The Enchanted Forest Trailer Park is shamelessly ripped from Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International books. The elves and orks in the area have this Hatfelf / McCork style war that’s been going on for a looong time. The elves are Changelings too, but where the orks were Dukes of Hazzard rolled up with your typical Wrong Turn / Hills Have Eyes mutants, I’m thinking the elves will be more meth lab white trash.
3. Lucy the Antichrist: Well, technically, she’s an Antichrist. Next time Lucy’s player can make it, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t rip off season 2 of Supernatural and have an Antichrist Deathmatch. Pantagruel would court her to his side; hell, Crowley-Lampkin might have an Antichrist on the payroll. I’m going to retroactively say that the Hadji warlock from the Stackhouse adventure was some sort of similarly vague Antichrist too (mysterious sources of evocation, little regard for others), so maybe Project BLACKBOX will rear their ugly heads once more. Plus, since Lucy was tied into the Kansas City adventure in hindsight, Fred and the not-Scoobies might show up for a little vengeance against Bill.
4. Two words: Pastafarian Antichrist.
5. The Luchador Ghost Centaur: I’m still working on some sort of semi-coherent backstory for this guy. I’ve decided he was trained by the ghosts of the Hermanos Numeros (from Angel) and he might be a frenemy type should the party go up against the Mexican Vampire Cartels.
6. Scott vs. Lucy: I’m not betting on both these players showing up at the same time. I feel a little silly having so readily agreed to part of a character’s backstory that reads like it would really conflict with another. Like, if Scott were there this weekend I likely wouldn’t have agreed to Lucy’s Antichrist thing. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. We’ll figure something out, we’re all adults.
7. Bad Car: The motherfucking Bad Car is back, baby! I was so happy when all that came together at the end of the session. Bad Car: It is your friend when you are alone!
8. The Moonshine: It’s magic, sure, but Lucy was getting hammered during the daytime (and before noon, to boot). It’ll do something at night, but even I have no idea what yet.
9. The Wild Hunt: That was something I had planned for the “wilderness trek” portion of the game, but it fell through till the end, and then it was mostly too late. And Carter refused the compel anyway.

Finally, Lucy’s player revamped the following song. I only helped a little bit here and there. Lucy’s starting next game with a few more bonus FP for this.

Apologies to Waylon Jennings

Just some good Ork Boyz
Always meanin’ some harm
Beats all you ever saw
Abominations of the law
Since the day they wuz born

Linin’ the roads
Barbed wirin’ the hills
Someday the hunters might get ‘em
But the law never will

Orkin’ their way
The only way they know how
That’s just a little bit more
Than nature will allow

Just some good Ork Boyz
Booby trappin’ the woods
Eatin’ the hoomies
‘Cause that long pig sure does taste good
(WAAAAAAAGH!)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on July 11, 2012, 04:15:46 AM
Heh.

Sounds like a fun session to me.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 06, 2012, 02:37:17 AM
This session crept up on me by surprise. We were playing a FASERIP game and we finished with time to spare, so I got thrown under the gaming bus. I had no Fate dice (we used normal d6s and just did 1-2 minus / 3-4 blank / 5-6 plus), no Fate Point tokens (we ended up using .22 rounds), and only one returning player from last session (Bill’s player was there, but because of scheduling conflicts we swapped Lucy, Kathryn, and Carter for Scott and Clay). At least I had some ideas put together after last session’s comments about the orks being at war with some neighboring elves. I taxied the seat of my pants down the runway and prepared to take off.

Session 10: The Beverly Elfbillies

Bill Stockburn (http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sam-elliot.jpg), Clayton Haycock James (http://images.buddytv.com/battleimages/usr3524622/3524622_5bf8b2cc-d599-4fbf-8d8e-719a4d589807-eliot-spencer-s1-leverage-8045832-400-300.jpg),  and Scott Specter (http://www.lahiguera.net/cinemania/actores/ben_foster/fotos/13526/ben_foster.jpg)
Reward: Significant Milestone (Because I had about half the group for this session and the last, everyone gets the Significant milestone)

NOW (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpvDZu-GFSY)

On the Road Again
Near Devil’s Fork State Park, South Carolina

I didn’t spend much time trying to explain why Bill was the only common PC between this session and the last. He met up with Scott and Clay and they drove north, trying to find this elf community that the orks kept feuding with. It’s hard to find elves in the woods, but Bill knew (thanks to impressive Lore rolls and helping maneuvers from his friends) enough old tricks to navigate his way down disused gravel roads and overgrown trails to the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park.

Enchanté

The entrance to the park was a rough-hewn log archway wrapped in Christmas lights. The wooden sign proclaiming it to be the Enchanted Forest creaked slowly on old chains. The PCs entered slowly, rolling their bikes up to a skinny old man. I didn’t beat around the bush here; the gang was looking for elves and there was no other way to describe this guy. Pointed ears jutted out from a NASCAR cap, which aside from dirty overalls were the only clothes this old elf was wearing. At least half a dozen old hounds lounged around his perch on a rusted-out 1960s pickup that was in turn perched up on blocks. He plucked at a handmade banjo and hummed along to an unknown song, an honest-to-God wheat straw clenched in his teeth. In fact, he wasn’t the only person playing music. Hauntingly familiar tunes trickled through the tall trees around the party, and I called for Discipline rolls.

In what would become the norm for the night, Bill failed. More accurately, he chose to fail, since he routinely sits on more FP than God.

The elves’ “Enchanting Music” aspect duly applied, the elf frontman introduced himself as Arlo and invited the gang to sit down for some BBQ. “The night’s jest gettin’ started, boys, n’ my auntie-momma cooks up some mighty fine pit beef.”

The PCs were suspicious, especially after dealing with the orks, who liked to kill, rape, and eat people (and to quote Firefly, if you’re lucky they’ll do it in that order). Clay was the most skittish, but it was either go deeper into the trailer park with Arlo for some BBQ or start the murder right off the bat. Bill chose to follow Arlo thanks to the enchanting music, and since Scott and Clay weren’t going to start a fight with Bill at cross purposes, they followed as well.

The PCs lost track of time as Arlo led them deeper into the trailer park, which was unsettling but expected, since it matched fae mythology. They eventually broke out into a natural clearing. There were trailers up in the trees as well as scattered through the forest - massive trees supported double-wides festooned with Christmas lights, connected to each other by rickety bridges and walkways made from lumber, deer stands, and sheet metal. I remember describing the sight as “Ewoks crossed with Fallout”.

“Don’t eat nothin’,” Bill warned his friends. “Goddamn fairy food. Who knows what that’ll do to ya.”

“Why don’t ya’ll git sommin’ teat, n’ I’ll see if Queen Tanya’ll grant ya’ll an audience,” Arlo said as the delicious smell of smoked meat wafted across the clearing. It was time for another Discipline roll!

Bill failed. “Sounds good!” he accepted, grabbing a plate and sitting down at one of the many picnic tables scattered around the grove. Scott, in what became the norm for the night, rolled his eyes. Bill simply ate the BBQ, pronouncing it perfectly fine to eat despite his earlier advice to “Don’t eat nothin’.” He got the “Enchanting BBQ” aspect. Scott rolled Rapport and coaxed one of the many, many dogs into eating his meal for him on the sly. While Scott made a lifelong friend, Clay avoided both food and fellowship with Intimidation. In fact, it was important enough for Clay to know what the meat actually was that he invoked his “Been Through the Wringer” aspect. Clay had seen war and knew what people’s insides looked like. This food, enchanted or not, wasn’t made of people.

Clay: “Pigs don’t have wrists!”
Me: “The meat is what they say it is, and Bill, it’s wonderful. Especially that sauce...”
*Everyone shoots me dirty looks, thinking the sauce is what’s made of people*
Bill: “Fuck it.” *spoons more onto a plate*

Tanya, Queen of the Elves

So I got the PC with Lore 4 to eat fairy food. For my next trick, I managed to take their guns away. Arlo started up a generator and used it to run a winch that in turn pulled him up to the largest of the treebound aluminum trailers. He returned a little bit later and told the gang that they may enter Queen Tanya’s presence. The three hunters headed up with Arlo, where two elves and a large razorback boar stood guard outside the Queen’s trailer. Dawn and Meadow asked the gang to disarm themselves and, after some FP (except for Clay, because disarming him isn’t really a disadvantage), the PCs agreed.

Bill: “Is she like Jaime Pressly from My Name is Earl?”
Me: “eeeeh, no. More like Jabba the Hutt dolled up like Mimi from the Drew Carey show.”

Her hands, which the bikers reluctantly kissed as they introduced themselves, smelled like a grease trap.

Scott’s player was smiling as he took his turn taking the Queen’s hands, and I knew what he was up to. This wasn’t the first time he’d used Holy Touch to firebomb a monster under the guise of etiquette, but nothing happened when he took Tanya’s meaty royal paw. Ten sessions into the campaign, and this was the first time Scott had been present for a creature that didn’t have Holy Stuff as part of its Catch. He grimaced and kissed the Queen’s hand.

I Compelled Bill as he introduced himself - the Queen had heard of Bill Stockburn, and while she kept that realization to herself Scott noticed that she knew who Bill was. Scott promptly rolled his eyes again and wished he hadn’t given Dawn his gun. Tanya thanked the gang for their help against them vile orks to the south and offered them each an elven gift, tokens of their small community’s appreciation. She screeched at her husband, who had been sitting in a threadbare recliner the entire time, eyes deep in a Field & Stream magazine from 1987. “Prince Sweetwater” slowly got up and shuffled off to organize the impromptu celebration. In the meantime, Bill used the opportunity to make small talk and ask about the large lake inside Devil’s Fork State Park. He had seen it on a map inside the orks’ house, marked with an ominous red X. Was it a portal to the NeverNever? How did one operate it?

“Dat’s jest Grandmomma Gator,” Queen Tanya replied matter-of-factly. “And I ain’t ‘bout ta rile up the old folk by tellin’ you ‘bout how the lake works. You wanna use it, ya’ll need ta figure it out on ‘chown.”

With that, everyone headed down the ground level for the Official Presentation of Fairie Boons.

What Kind of a Favor Are You Talking About?

Right off the bat, Bill wanted to negotiate whatever his gift was to be away in exchange for a favor from the elves. Queen Tanya was a tad insulted, but Bill countered with some subtle Intimidation, insinuating that they had just come from slaughtering a tribe of orks that had been giving the elves problems for who knows how long. Tanya harumphed but agreed to the exchange. Scott and Clay, however, opted to receive the elven gifts.

Prince Sweetwater presented Scott with his own compound bow and quiver of arrows. I understood Scott wasn’t exactly an archer, but at least he had some skill with his gift, unlike what was about to happen to Clay. Clay received Arlo’s handmade banjo, thanked the elf profusely, and secretly calculated its potential use as a bludgeoning weapon.

The PCs noticed the gathered elves acting a little more anxious now, like they were waiting for something else. Sure enough, Queen Tanya waved her hands and settled her subjects.

“Now we’re even,” she decreed. I feel like the group lost some tension at this point - now
 was where the inevitable betrayal happened! “If ya’ll can make it off our land before sunrise, ya’ll can go free.”

Hunting horns blared from the wooded darkness beyond the clearing, and the hunters ran.

We Don’t Have the Skillset for First Blood

Bill was naturally slow, and he was addled by the elves’ music and food to boot. Neither Scott nor Clay had Survival or Stealth in any capacity, so they decided to stick together and try to circle back to their bikes as best they could. They didn’t have any guns, as Dawn and Meadow never gave them back after their audience with Tanya. They had a bow, a banjo, and Clay’s mitts. It would have to do, because it didn’t take long for the hounds to catch up with the gang. Half a dozen bloodhounds swarmed out of the trees at the party!

Clay ran a few off with an insane Intimidation roll right off the bat. Scott threw down a FP and declared that the dog coming for his face was the same one he had been feeding BBQ to earlier. The hound leapt for Scott, knocked him over, and starting vigorously licking his face! Meanwhile, two dogs were harrying Bill something fierce. The problem was that while Bill can invoke nearly all his aspects whenever he goes up against a supernatural threat, these were just dogs. They were just dogs and they were mauling poor Bill! Clay, on the other hand, was doing just fine. He grabbed one of the dogs off Bill and threw it into a tree, where it cracked against branch after branch. Somewhere during its deadly pachinko plummet it metamorphosed into a naked dead guy. See, the elves didn’t eat people, not like the orks did. If they caught you, they turned you into one of their hounds (thanks, Leanansidhe!). And while that might be cool, it really didn’t change much about the gang’s current situation.

Clay and Scott rescued Bill before the dogs bit into his Consequences, dispatching the last hostile dog (who also turned into a dead human) and continuing their escape into the forest. They needed an edge, and in the few minutes of semi-lucid planning it seemed like their best bet was to head for the lake. Perhaps they could close the portal to the NeverNever Tanya alluded to, or escape through it, or maybe the elves wouldn’t get too close. At any rate, they could follow the lake out of the Enchanted Forest as opposed to wandering aimlessly through the woods. Scott handed his bow to Bill, who had a much better shot (heh) at using it, and Clay passed the banjo to Scott. Clay then declared that the dirty elves didn’t find his iron knucks, and slipped the crude weapons over his fingers. The trio might not have had Survival, but Clay called up his Marine training and took point, navigating the party to the banks of the lake. They broke from the underbrush just as they heard the baying of hounds.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 06, 2012, 02:38:16 AM
Grandmomma Gator

The full moon’s twin winked up from the glassy surface of the lake. There was precious little cover out on the banks, but it was too late to rush back into the woods. Coon hounds burst from the treeline, followed closely by their two elven handlers. Behind them, a posse of elven archers took firing positions in and around the trees closest to the lake. The hound-handlers brandished Bill and Scott’s pistols, seeing as how their other hands were full of leashes.

The guys had seen how effective Intimidation had been against the dogs earlier; they might have been trained dogs, but they were trackers first and foremost, not K-9 units. Scott and Clay both scared off a dog each, then Clay set to work punching the remainder. Bill shot one elf right out of a tree. It was going really well considering the odds stacked against them, but then I remembered my failure with the orks. The fight against the orks was easier than it should have been because none of the orks worked together. This time would be different. A handful of elves tried to bracket Scott with arrows, holding him steady for the third elf’s killshot, but rolling Maneuvers against your target’s best defense isn’t as effective as figuring out a way to navel-gaze unopposed. The elf only dealt stress to Scott.

Bill was another story. All of his assailants took aim. While they set up their Maneuvers, Clay flat-out Road House’d one of the dog handlers. He dropped the gory remains of the elf’s throat and tossed Bill his gun just as an arrow slammed into Bill’s leg! It was actually two separate hits, but Bill narrated it like it was just one bad one, which was fine. He had a Mild “Arrow in the Leg” consequence now as well as a Moderate one, “Bleeding Badly”.

Scott wasn’t doing much offensively, but his Conviction-based Blocks were so good he was serving to soak up arrows that could have been hitting his friends. Clay dashed over and hip-chucked the second dog handler into the lake!

The elf never hit the water. A Lake Placid-sized alligator erupted from the surface and snapped the elf out of the air like a dog playing frisbee. Grandmomma Gator’s eyes blazed with malevolent cunning as it dragged its bulk free from the lake.

Scott grabbed at his banjo and started playing the first thing that came to him. He gave himself over to God and prayed the big guy wasn’t going to let him or his friends get eaten by a SyFy Original. In game terms, Scott activated Righteousness. He might not have had the Performance skill, but with the Righteousness bonus and a great roll, he was able to Maneuver “Enchanting Music” onto Grandmomma Gator. The PCs tagged that for effect - they wanted Grandmomma to ignore them and go after the elves. I agreed readily, because... so many reasons. It was an awesome last-ditch idea. The dice were with Scott, and he hadn’t had many chances to really stick it to the elves yet. Plus, I am a sucker for rock-offs of any sort, and Banjo vs. Demon Alligator is awesome.

I admit, it was entertaining to see my group’s reactions when I explained how much damage Supernatural Strength combined with Claws dishes out.

Of Course Grandmomma Can Tag It!

The rest of the battle went something like this:
1. An elf tries to run away.
2. Bill shoots that elf in the leg.
3. Bill passes the free tag to Grandmomma Gator, who eats the elf.

Two elves scampered up a tree. “We got ya’ll now, you stupid sombitches! Gator’s cain’t climb trees!” While their shots on the party were solid hits, the guys bought them down to just stress damage. Then Scott shouted back, “Gator’s don’t NEED to climb trees, assholes!”

With a thundering, splintering crash, Grandmomma knocked the remaining elves’ tree over. One of them was pinned underneath and was quickly eaten. The other elf ran for it as before, but the PCs herded him towards the lake with gunfire Blocks. They weren’t sure how the gator was going to react once the elves were gone, so they wanted it pointed towards its home first. With no other options, the wounded elf almost made it to the water before the alligator’s jaws snapped home. The PCs slowly backed up to the treeline, Scott still picking away at the banjo. Luckily, Grandmomma Gator sank beneath the water with nary a ripple.

Only You Can Prevent Enchanted Forest Fires

The gang’s plans changed after the lakeside battle. They weren’t going to push their luck with trying to close whatever kind of portal that lake was, not with the gator so riled up. Bill was hurt bad and besides, their bikes were still back near the trailer park. They needed to get back to their bikes and they wanted revenge, and right now most of the elves were out looking for them. They figured that the trailer park itself would be fairly lightly guarded. Besides, they didn’t see any cellphones or walkie-talkies on the dead elves. Chances were good that they didn’t even know what had happened here at the lake.

Scott and Clay were fairly low on FP. Bill, as usual, had the most but even he was running low. Thing is, he still had enough to Invoke his way back to the elves’ camp even without the Survival skill. I decided to try to take Bill out of the navigation equation and Compelled his “Bleeding Badly” consequence. He’d be losing focus and passing in and out of consciousness, so he wouldn’t be able to help find their way back to the trailer park. It was a calculated move, and it was part of my plan for the future to try to make Compels and Consequences hurt a little more than they had in past sessions. That left Scott and Clay to try a Survival roll, which failed. Then they asked if they could use Lore for a second attempt, explaining it as trying to sense the elven glamour of the enchanted forest and see through it. I thought that was pretty cool, so I let them try again and, with the last of Clay’s FP, they eventually found their way back to familiar ground near the central clearing just as predawn light bruised its way through the eastern darkness.

Sneaking up to the massive tree that cradled Queen Tanya’s trailer was made easier by the elves’ incompetent dice rolls. The guys used the gas from the generator, some of the picnic tables, and some old mattresses that had been lying around to make a suitable pyre out of the base of the Elf Queen’s abode. They lit that sucker on fire and ran, hoping the blaze would distract the elves long enough for the gang to reach their bikes.

Queen Tanya’s frenzied howl echoed through the trees behind them. “Beeeeiiilll Stockburn!!! You ain’t herd the last o’ me! You hear me?! You ain’t herd the last of-

The tree cracked and shifted, finally toppling under the trailer’s weight and sending a mushroom cloud of embers and sparks skyward to light the boughs of nearby trees.

NOW What!?

Bill, Scott, and Clay found their bikes just where they left them - but the last time they had seen their rides, the tires weren’t slashed. This was a Compel to Clay, who was deliciously out of FP. Scott and Bill could have refused the Compels and one could have carried Clay on their ride, but they all accepted FP and all three bikes were sabotaged. Cursing, they ran (or hobbled, in Bill’s case) down the gravel trail to the “main road”, as it were.

They reached the Enchanted Forest Trailer Park sign just in time to see a park ranger Bronco slide to the halt on the gravel. Behind it, two unmarked black Suburbans followed suit. Their red and blue lights cascaded off the forest like dueling will o’ wisps.

Cliffhanger

We ended with that cliffhanger. I don’t know who’s in the Suburbans, although it’ll partially depend on which players can make it next time. If Carter’s there, it could be Crowley-Lampkin thugs. If Clay’s there, it might be Project BLACKBOX agents. It could always simply be feds who aren’t in the know, tipped off by the party’s enemies.

Everyone agreed that the elves were far worse than the orks, which is as it should be. You get what you see with orks, but elves have to have some guile to them to be believable (heh). I also remembered to have the elves use teamwork where I could, which made a big difference. The PCs ended the session with very few FP left.

To that end, I need to work a little bit on making my Compels more significant. I figure if I plan about half a session (which is kind of what I did, being thrown under the gaming bus at the last minute), I can fill it out with Compel-based situations and not feel like I’m running long.

At any rate, it was a fun session. I’d actually like to try another investigation-based monster hunt, but I think the cliffhanger here isn’t going to match up well with that, so next time’ll probably be pure chaos.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 10, 2012, 01:58:56 PM
Your game sounds like great fun. Really makes me want to play DFRPG. Plus, you make it work without a City, which must be difficult.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 10, 2012, 04:01:41 PM
Your game sounds like great fun. Really makes me want to play DFRPG. Plus, you make it work without a City, which must be difficult.

Thanks! I can't honestly say that we wouldn't have benefitted from some kind of city creation (replace "city" with... whatever), because we've never tried it. I'm interested in seeing the Road Trip campaign setup in the Paranet book, but at this point it's probably more academic curiosity. We're a long way into the campaign and unless there's some staggeringly awesome things to steal, I'll probably keep to the more traditional style of worldbuilding we've got right now.

Also, a lot of times the running gag is that the gang CAN'T go back to whatever city they were in. Kansas City and Austin are big no-fly zones for them now.

Truth is, one of the benefits of city creation is that it gets you faces and threats, and my players incorporated plenty into their backstories and Aspects. Denarians, black ops, and artifact-hoarding corporations are all present because of my players. Nevermind the ideas that I want to incorporate for my own amusement. Ideas for this campaign just come so easily.

I've gotta do a Black Court vampire at some point. They're a classic. Take that and skew it some, because I can't NOT skew things. Plus, there's a BCV in Kathryn's backstory that I haven't even touched yet.

That Ghost Centaur-turned-luchador was a late-night idea borne of exhaustion-genius. Maybe it's not evil so much, but boy, will it have it in for Carter still. I've decided it was trained by the ghosts of los Hermanos Numeros.

The main conflict right now, though, is Pantagruel. It'd be his third appearance should he rear his ugly owlbeary head again. And a Denarian is fairly easy to keep as a recurring villain, what with being inside an evil nigh-indestructible coin and all. I think maybe I've gotta twist him around so he's behind more things rather than a guy who puts in his own work, regardless of how cowardly his actual tactics might be.

To answer your question, though, I guess not having a City makes some things easier. The PCs can employ certain tactics that wouldn't be feasible in a city where they had to live afterwards, and as most of them are Pure Mortal or close to it, it gives them an edge. I can change up locations too, which works well for keeping interest high. We went from Vegas to the suburbs to downtown Austin to the Carolina wilderness in a handful of sessions.

You lose some recurring flavor. The Contacts skill is harder to use/less tempting. You end up describing the places and they come off a little quickly sketched or generic, but here's the flipside to that: It fits the campaign's themes. The gang are outsiders everywhere they go.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 10, 2012, 04:22:25 PM
Interesting points. Are you keeping it to the South of the US generally, or will the bikers end up rampaging through D.C (I know very little about the general geography of the USA)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 10, 2012, 06:37:44 PM
I'd say mostly we'll keep to the southwest, south, and Appalachia. Although they did run into Detroit before. If the gang ends up in DC, it'll probably be based around Project BLACKBOX and Clay's background and it likely won't be pleasant. Outlaw bikers and DC just don't mix very well. Plus, I've lived there, Scott's player lives there now, and it's weird gaming where you live.

Part of it is that everyone else does a city. It's the urban in urban fantasy. :)  I guess deep down I wanted a Western.

Our locations are places that only barely existed in the real world. The places we visit in our gaming sessions are these weird slices of outlaw culture cinema mixed with movie Americana mixed with slasher movie tropes. Smokey and the Bandit, Walking Tall, Road House, Convoy, and Nightmare on Elm Street have more in common with our campaign than any place in our world.

Some cities would work. Vegas, for example. It's got the right kind of dirty greedy slutty magic to it. Most cities would just serve as obstacles to the hunt. Which isn't a bad thing, it's just something to use sparingly.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 10, 2012, 08:42:57 PM
I get your meaning. Plus, big cities means a lot of cops, which sounds like a big problem for some of your PCs!   ;)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 11, 2012, 02:27:47 AM
I get your meaning. Plus, big cities means a lot of cops, which sounds like a big problem for some of your PCs!   ;)

Only some? You're being pretty generous. :)

I think the trick to cops is use them like you would a Compel. I don't mean "hand out FP", although depending on campaign/PC Aspects that certainly could happen. I mean that the police shouldn't get trotted out unless they can make an interesting complication. And I haven't been using police much. When I have, it's been because the police have factored into the villains' plans at some level.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on August 11, 2012, 02:33:53 AM
Sounds like a fun session.

Your PCs are a bit of a walking disaster zone, aren't they?

PS: I really have to wonder why you had bullets on hand when gaming, especially since you didn't have FP tokens.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 11, 2012, 11:53:36 AM
PS: I really have to wonder why you had bullets on hand when gaming, especially since you didn't have FP tokens.

Yaeh. Are your players more like their PCs than usual...?  :P ;)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Silverblaze on August 11, 2012, 06:28:34 PM
I for one don't use fate chips.  We use an honor system; erasing and adding fate points to paper when they are :

A) handed out

or

B) spent

I can say I would far more likely have guns and/or bullets on hand than fate points.

(click to show/hide)
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 11, 2012, 06:33:45 PM
Then again; I live on a farm and hunt and am an active 2nd amendment fan/NRAmember/FOID card carrier/conceal and carry advocate

Ah. Don't have those in Belgium (where I live) AFAIK and definitely don't have them in UK (where I'm from). In fact, Handguns are almost completely illegal in UK: unless you're in the military or Police Trojan (think SWAT) units and are on duty, you can't have one.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Silverblaze on August 11, 2012, 06:36:53 PM
Ah. Don't have those in Belgium (where I live) AFAIK and definitely don't have them in UK (where I'm from). In fact, Handguns are almost completely illegal in UK: unless you're in the military or Police Trojan (think SWAT) units and are on duty, you can't have one.

Ah yeah, that makes a big difference.

Not a huge handgun fan anyhow.

I guess that explains where I'm from more than I had anticipated.  Meh. 

I was more or less wantign to drive home the point I'm not a fan of using fate chips, though i have no problem with people who like them.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: THE_ANGRY_GAMER on August 11, 2012, 07:26:43 PM
Keeping a running tally of how may you have on paper seems a good idea. Prevents the 'Oh-I've-dropped-one-and-I-can't-find-it' issue, but I like the idea of physical tokens in addition to this.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 11, 2012, 07:45:32 PM
Sounds like a fun session.

Your PCs are a bit of a walking disaster zone, aren't they?

PS: I really have to wonder why you had bullets on hand when gaming, especially since you didn't have FP tokens.

Yeah, the PCs are collectively a bit like the Punisher for supernatural creatures. And we normally game in Bill's player's basement, where his gun safes and assorted accoutrements are, so a box of .22s was at hand. If we gamed upstairs, we'd use... I dunno, Lego bricks or something for FP.

Just never use M&Ms. :D

Quote
I for one don't use fate chips.  We use an honor system;

That's cool. By contrast, I like the "clink" of physical tokens and being able to easily (emphasis easily) see how many FP my players have at any given time, so I can sneakily adjust the difficulty on the fly, think more about Compels so they can get more FP back, and so on.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Silverblaze on August 11, 2012, 10:49:16 PM

Yeah, the PCs are collectively a bit like the Punisher for supernatural creatures. And we normally game in Bill's player's basement, where his gun safes and assorted accoutrements are, so a box of .22s was at hand. If we gamed upstairs, we'd use... I dunno, Lego bricks or something for FP.

Just never use M&Ms. :D

That's cool. By contrast, I like the "clink" of physical tokens and being able to easily (emphasis easily) see how many FP my players have at any given time, so I can sneakily adjust the difficulty on the fly, think more about Compels so they can get more FP back, and so on.



 Ah.  Yeah I hadn't considered that.

Hmmm... I may have to bring that idea up.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on January 16, 2013, 10:44:04 PM
It's been a long time, I know, but babies will do that to your gaming plans.

I've decided to convert this campaign over to Fate Core, not that it was ever all that tightly tied to DFRPG in the first place, but given the tools we had at the time, Dresden was by far the best Fate implementation to tell our stories. I think we can put a tighter focus on the types of characters we're playing and tailor things to what we're doing here instead of going with straight DFRPG. Mostly, this means tweaking skills and refresh levels, then some custom powers for the few PCs who have them.

If anyone is curious, my collected notes and conversion guidelines are over in google docs (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hmJQVhLsjZhat6TjJzABl9oEpeSSyCo6SZ3Uz7si1xw/edit).

I also have a character sheet I did up in HTML (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet). I couldn't find good consistent art to photoshop, so I had to do it myself. :)

We're playing again the weekend of the 26th. It's been pure torture waiting on that cliffhanger for 5 months.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on January 30, 2013, 08:08:35 PM
And we're back! Now with Fate Core!

Session 11

Who was there? Bill (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/6b1b66a9-4de6-45ea-4741-4f0449114af9), Scott (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/4ff0ee87-4ad5-4830-411d-49994f504b37), Carter (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/6aa68c7e-4a24-4635-43d6-45de42434fcf), Clay (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/738b7827-49c6-41ed-473e-44cc404b4d6f), Kathryn (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/60a7b0e7-48a0-485f-49df-4e514be24b23), and Lucy. It was a full house.
Reward: TBD. The tweaks I’ve made from DFRPG into Fate Core are sufficiently in flux that I don’t want to definitely say “oh, and then every session people get X”.

The Road So Far
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5RH9n_ADe8

It had been 5 months and a newborn daughter since I ran last (ending on a cliffhanger to boot), so I tried to spark the group’s memories with some good scenes from past sessions.


I ended with a (slightly retconned) summary of the cliffhanger: Clay, Bill, and Scott (with non-sabotaged motorcycles this time) roared out of the Enchanted Forest trailer park just in time to see a park ranger Bronco and 2 black Suburbans skid to a halt. Elsewhere, Carter, Lucy, and Kathryn had lost all contact with their friends (being trapped inside elven woods will do that) but picked out the police sirens easily enough.

Front-Loading the Ass-Whooping

A few compels were all it took to get Clay, Bill, and Scott to turn the prospective chase scene into a firefight once they recognized two of the agents getting out of the rear Suburban. It was none other than Agents Fox and Roberts, BLACKBOX agents from the Stackhouse adventure. They had 6 other ATF agents with them as well as Ranger Rick, and the exact mix of BLACKBOX agents to unsuspecting ATF pawns was unknown.

This was our first conflict in Fate Core - not just Core, but with some tweaks I had implemented based on our DFRPG experiences added on top.
1. I used MHR-style initiative. Whoever claims the first action goes first, then they choose who goes next, until everyone has taken an action. Fate points could be spent to interrupt. Overall, this worked well and the group keyed into the basic tactics of not letting the bad guys claim an alpha strike. We did have some confusion when it came to Boosts, which only last 1 round... with this system, on whose action do they expire?
2. I ditched stress tracks, opting instead of allow 2 mild, 1 moderate, and 1 severe consequence, plus granting 1 boost and 1 advantage per scene for -2 stress each. It sounds fiddly to explain it in one sentence like that, but it honestly wasn’t fiddly to grasp. Using it, however, did prove confusing because there were so many other boosts and advantages being created. This particular system is getting dropped in favor of something a little simpler as soon as I figure out what it should be. It could be as simple as shortening stress tracks but keeping them around, or even inventing a “Trivial Consequence” that subtracts 2 stress but only lasts till the end of the scene.
3. Otherwise, we played it fairly straight. We kept DFRPG weapon and armor values. The ATF agents were almost mooks: they acted in groups, had Fair skills, would take no consequences, but only one could be taken out per action barring special cases like area and spray attacks. Fox and Roberts had the full suite of consequences, and their relevant skills were at Great or Good for the most part.

Kathryn created a particularly clever advantage and brandished her assault rifle, causing the ATF agents to all shoot at her. Their shots did nothing, as she had Bonney’s Bane in her coat pocket, an artifact that granted immunity to gunfire. Lucy crushed the park ranger up against his Bronco with her black Charger, Bad Car. Clay leapt off his bike and tackled Fox to the ground, tangling her in her web gear before Roberts, himself compelled on “Former Marine”, bumrushed Clay off his partner in an attempt to see who was really the better man.

At the end of the round, Prince Sweetwater and a few surviving elves exploded out of the burning trailer park in a jacked-up Ford. They were out for vengeance, but Lucy got there first. She rammed Bad Car into the Ford, killing 2 elves and sending Sweetwater tumbling into the brush. Bad Car was wrecked for the scene (Lucy’s cost to turn her failure into a success).

The fight got pretty chaotic once the elves arrived.

Carter grabbed Roberts’ cellphone, but his roll wasn’t good enough so we decided that he could get useful intel off of it as long as he didn’t realize BLACKBOX had other means of tracking the phone. Kathryn, Clay, and Scott took ATF vests and were about to hit the road when Scott’s bike wouldn’t start.

Hard to Start, Hard to Stop

One of the tweaks I made to the default Core setup was that everyone got a free Aspect for their bike. It could be something character related, like Carter’s “One For Every Day of the Week”, or in Scott’s case, it was “Hard to Start, Hard to Stop”, and I compelled that now. Three more ATF Suburbans crested the hill, silhouetted by the dawn’s early light. Clay, Bill, and Kathryn all accepted compels to stick with Scott and turn an easy escape into a chase. Carter and Lucy each accepted compels (for different reasons) to scatter, leaving their erstwhile comrades to the mercy of the feds.

I ran the chase part of the scene as a conflict (mostly). The pursued could, as their action, choose a difficulty to overcome, then dare the pursuers to follow. It worked okay, I guess. Players noted that it didn’t seem balanced without some similar option for pursuers to take. At any rate, the three Suburbans were slowly and gradually Taken Out over the course of a breakneck chase through the South Carolina backwoods. I believe all of them ended up doing A-Team-style plunges through guardrails.

Get Carter

While all that was going on, the denarian Pantagruel (Bill’s nemesis, with a human host of Alex Abel, Carter’s nemesis) was circling overhead, biding his time. Abel’s company, Crowley-Lampkin, had enough government contracts that it could guide law enforcement towards the PCs every now and again. Pantagruel didn’t know BLACKBOX had caught wind of anything - he just wanted the PCs locked up so he could go get Houdini’s Key from the evidence room of whatever backwater sherriff’s office they ended up in, then use the Key to open the gates of Hell. Simple, really - all he needed to do was get the Key back from Carter, who had acquired it during the Austin adventure.

Christmas morning for Pantagruel looked like Carter driving alone through the woods.

Carter and Pantagruel rolled Notice against Stealth, and we both spent all our fate points to try to outbid each other. Pantagruel had the better dice this time, though, and plucked Carter right off his bike! “‘Ello, Carter,” Pantagruel hissed as he climbed skyward. “Give me the key and I’ll drop you in a field. If not, I’ll drop you on the asphalt and sift through your entrails.” That was enough to place “Terrified” on Carter, but it wasn’t enough to get him to give up Houdini’s Key. Carter mostly lied his ass off - the funny thing about knowing your opponent is a compulsive liar is that they can trick you by telling the truth. Carter’s rapid-fire verbal assault was enough to give Pantagruel “A Moment of Doubt”, which Carter used to draw his pistol and blast away.

Lucy heard the shots and saw the denarian fly overhead. She also remembered my pre-game breakdown of my custom skill list, and how Lore was now used to create wards, summonings, and exorcisms. She started creating a ritual circle with the intent of summoning Pantagruel to her, which was good, because Pantagruel’s response to 9mm slugs to the groin was simply to let go of Carter. Carter grabbed Pantagruel for dear life just as Lucy’s summons took effect and dragged the denarian spiraling towards the road. Carter shot his nemesis a few more times and then, since he was penned in by a ritual circle, Lucy hit him with Bad Car and slammed him down a wooded slope.

That Song By Asia

If I had taken 5 minutes to stop and think, I would have ended the session there. We had finished out the cliffhanger well enough, but it was early enough that I got caught up in the heat of the moment and wanted to keep going. Plus, Kathryn had a load of Black Court nastiness in her backstory that I never got to use and her player was headed to college. I didn’t know if I’d get another chance. This is where the adventure went downhill. Aside from the overall metaplot about multiple antichrists, I was totally winging it from here on in, quickly burning through my remaining time with a group of increasingly-tired players.

If You Kill Me You Won’t Find the Treasure

So... Bill saw Pantagruel roll to a bloody halt in the road in his rear view mirrors. The demon was quickly surrounded, but before he got a few parting shots from Bill’s custom handgun Owlfucker Pantagruel shouted “If you kill me the girl dies!” It was enough to stay Bill’s hand (and besides, his player’s good for going along with Obvious Roads to Plot Development). Pantagruel spun a tale about how Lucy Collins wasn’t the only friggin’ antichrist. He’d been keeping tabs on a couple and the gang had managed to slaughter most of them so far. The BLACKBOX escapee from Stackhouse was one. Howl, the Neanderthal demon, was another. Now Pantagruel had lost contact with surveillance teams in Tampa when one of the potential antichrists had been taken by a Black Court vampire - a certain Dmitri Romanovich, whom Kathryn had tried unsuccessfully to kill several years earlier.

Anyway, there was this girl who didn’t even know what she was who was about to be eaten by a vampire, or worse, the vampire knew exactly what she was and was going to be milking her for antichrist blood. Bill’s insane Lore rolls indicated that you’d either end up with a Dracula or a Lilith, so the gang decided that Pantagruel’s tip was too dangerous to ignore.

Hotline Tampa

Finding a kidnap victim and BCV could have been a session on its own. I knew I was pushing things as it was at this point, so I made the entire thing into a huge Challenge, even battling their way into Romanovich’s lair and taking down his Renfielded minions. The investigation, casing the old apartment block, and infiltrating the building all did work well done as a Challenge, but nothing felt like it had sufficient teeth. It felt appropriate to a young BCV maybe, not an Old World survivor like Romanovich was intended to be. It was weaksauce, except for three things:
1. The idea that Pantagruel was able to use the PCs as his proxy assassins rankled the group some I think (in a good way). Next time I don’t think anyone’s going to wait for that denarian to open his mouth before they fill him full of lead. Did he guess Lucy would kill Rosa? Why did he want Romanovich out of the picture? Did he have some sort of accord with the Red Court in Tampa? With this session, Pantagruel’s finally gone from “oh, he’s fun to beat up” to “I’m-a kill that sumbitch!”
2. Romanovich actually survived, albeit with the Extreme Consequence “Sunlight”.
3. Lucy “rescued” Rosa Salazar, the girl in question. It was just Lucy and Rosa, and Lucy was 2 points in sponsor debt and had no fate points. All I said was “You know, Lucy, Rosa’s competition,” and slid the fate point over. Lucy talked to Rosa, gained enough trust for the poor girl to come over to her, then stabbed her in the back of the neck with her ritual knife.

Thoughts on the Session

As I mentioned, I was generally pleased with the resolution of the cliffhanger portion but felt the vampire assault in Tampa was sloppy and tacked-on. What’s worse is that given the proper time and planning, it could have been really awesome. It definitely was a lesson in quitting while you’re ahead. I had Hollowpoint in my bag; we could’ve played a quick one-shot with that with the time we had left instead of charging forward heedless of the impending lackluster gaming. Honestly, a 5 minute break just to think things through would have helped.

Thoughts on the Conversion to Fate Core

This, I have to say, went much better than expected. We all cut down from 7 to 5 aspects, with 4 refresh and 2 free stunts. Everyone took the maximum of 5 stunts, which meant players were hungry for compels and it really worked well for the initial conflict and following chases. There were a few occasions where players paid a cost to turn failures into successes, and those choices definitely drove the story and opened up new conflict instead of being just disappointingly low rolls.

The conversion wasn’t just swapping DFRPG for Core, though. I had a custom skill list of 16 skills which all worked just fine. We ditched the pyramid although my replacement structure still reinforced the idea of more limited apex skills. Everyone got an aspect relating to their bike, and most importantly, we dumped stress tracks for tracking damage. Everyone could instead grant their opponent a boost, once per scene, for -2 damage, or grant an advantage for the same. I thought this would result in more visceral hits and possibly quicker resolution, but in practice several problems appeared:

In short:

Custom skill list worked fine. Potentially some hangups in how the skill prioritization structure was handled. I can go into more detail if people want, but honestly I felt it worked well enough for most cases.

I tempted Bill’s player into taking stunts. He traded his wall of fate points for overwhelming knowledge about every facet of the supernatural. In return, new Bill ended up being quite a bit more spry than old Bill. We all joked about hip replacement surgery.

Bike aspects were great. A free aspect is just enough detail to provide some flavor without going deeper into the fractal and trying to stat up differences in motorcycles.

The relative drop in refresh and aspects was fine as well. Everyone didn’t have a problem dropping aspects that just weren’t used much or combining them into single aspects, which was a good sign that 5 aspects IS a pretty good number.

Damage tweaks were a misstep. I don’t know whether introducing a “Trivial consequence” that lasts for a scene and subtracts 2 from incoming stress is a fix, or whether I should keep stress tracks, or keep stress tracks but start their default length at 0, or use 1 track for all damage types, or what. On top of that choice is how to model supernatural toughness and recovery. I was really against stress tracks when I was doing my conversion, but now that I’ve seen it in practice my position has been tempered significantly. Nevermind whole-hog revamps like “use Bulldogs’ damage model”, “use stress like HP”, and so on. It’s a case where there are too many options and I’m not familiar with enough of them to really know if one direction suits me and my group best.

For Next Time

I don’t want the seat of my pants to crash on takeoff again. I’ve done a lot with system over the course of the Fate Core kickstarter; I want to buckle down and prepare the setting more than I have been. Work up adventure seeds, cool opening scenes, plans for the bad guys, and so on.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on January 30, 2013, 10:50:44 PM
Sounds fun as always.

For Toughness Powers, why not just use DFRPG-style armour? Subtracting X from the weapon rating of every incoming attack seems easier than mucking around with consequences.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on January 30, 2013, 11:01:47 PM
Sounds fun as always.

For Toughness Powers, why not just use DFRPG-style armour? Subtracting X from the weapon rating of every incoming attack seems easier than mucking around with consequences.

I'm totally going to do that now. :)  My worries were founded on the potential math, where Armor:2 kind of sort of means you need to always roll 2 higher than the bad guy to damage him, and so I boosted consequences' effectiveness as a means to mitigate damage while still allowing resources (in the form of consequences) to be spent, and thus drive a conflict to conclusion even with a super-tough enemy.

As it turns out, that was NOT what my players wanted, so I'm definitely using Armor values again. They like finding the Catch for something, and until that point, they're okay with things being really hard to kill. It was an issue that never came up before because apparently the way I had been doing things was all right by them. It's a good example of why you should still discuss the game and do periodic sitreps even after city/campaign creation.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Nakana007 on February 02, 2013, 11:48:22 PM
Thanks for this thread so much! It's awesomely hilarious to read and as a new GM it's really helped me to get a feel for how the flow of running the game should go!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on February 03, 2013, 03:51:05 AM
Nominated you for a Borden Award, just so you know.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on February 03, 2013, 04:18:20 AM
Thanks to both of you!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 17, 2013, 08:07:32 PM
Apparently, I'm on a 6-month schedule between sessions. That sucks, but at least we played last week.

Session 12 - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

Who was there? Bill (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/6b1b66a9-4de6-45ea-4741-4f0449114af9), Scott (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/4ff0ee87-4ad5-4830-411d-49994f504b37), Carter (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/6aa68c7e-4a24-4635-43d6-45de42434fcf), and Clay (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/738b7827-49c6-41ed-473e-44cc404b4d6f).

Reward: TBD; I think a point of Refresh would be okay (or maybe after the next session), because I want to experiment with some of the new stunt structures in the Toolkit. I do wish there was more advice in the Toolkit about ways to handle advancement. OTOH, they got a lot of loot this game; perhaps that’s the advancement this time.

Apologies to the Lee Child book Killing Floor, Tarantino movies, and Warren Zevon.

Panic Room
Margrave, GA - We pan down to a renovated farmhouse under a dark sky, surrounded by suburban zoning. Through a window and inside, we see collections of exotic souvenirs, rugs, and gewgaws from across the world. The oven timer rings, and Nicholas Van Owen (http://"http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Christopher_Walken_at_the_2009_Tribeca_Film_Festival.jpg/220px-Christopher_Walken_at_the_2009_Tribeca_Film_Festival.jpg") takes a chicken out and places it on the immaculate kitchen island. He sees movement outside - a flash of terror on his face, then old reflexes long dormant take over and throw the old man to the floor. Bullets rip through the windows, shattering appliances, spraying glass. Van Owen painfully crawls on aged knees into his living room. The gunfire explodes towards him again like devil’s laughter, spitting drywall and hammering his TV. He fumbles his way down the basement stairs, falling in a heap at the bottom. He looks up, sees a shape silhouetted by the light behind, staggers up and into the panic room, slams the door button. Steel scrapes on steel and bolts punch their way home, sealing Van Owen inside his treasure vault-turned bunker.

We zoom out now, away from the house, away from Van Owen’s muffled shouts of “Noooo!”, then the angry mad chatter of automatic gunfire echoes up into the night.

OPENING TITLE! (http://"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSk7OosO8nY")
We started off the game proper with a Challenge. The gang had run badly afoul of the law last game, so I asked them for a series of 3 rolls, one of which had to be Streetwise (as that’s the primary “dodge the Man” skill). Carter rolled Streetwise and failed. I explained about succeeding at a cost, and so Carter ended up burning way more aliases to get out from under the FBI. Scott made his roll, and Plog spent a FP to make his Brawn roll, muscling the bikes offroad over old moonshine trails.

Rules Note: I’m using a custom list of 16 skills spread evenly across 4 modes - Badass, Outlaw, Hunter, and Civvie. Streetwise is an Outlaw skill.

The gang had been rewarded last session with information about their nemesis Pantagruel’s network of contacts and resources. One of those contacts was Nick Van Owen, who apparently used to have the same job Carter did, just a few decades earlier. He was an “Arcane Acquisitions Expert” - a magic item thief. He was still getting a trickle of payoffs, and the team was close to his fictional hometown of Margrave, Georgia. They decided (and got FP for going along with the adventure seed as always) to check him out.

CSI: Margrave
Margrave turned out to be a combination of Mayberry and Hazzard, an American Dream kind of Southern town from yesteryear made flesh. It was offputting in a Stepford Wives sort of way. As their bikes’ engines shattered the idyllic late fall ambience, the gang realized they were definitely not going to fit in.

They weren’t terribly surprised to see police cars (late-model Chargers, a sign that Margrave’s police force was well-funded despite the town appearing like it didn’t need cops at all) parked at Van Owen’s house. The guys ditched their bikes and crept closer through the wooded development. A body bag being loaded into an ambulance cemented it - Van Owen was dead.

Scott immediately opened his Sight. The town’s appearance had him spooked a little, and he was curious if there was an overarching presence or evil in the town itself. Margrave looked exactly the same on the other side. White picket fences, affluent developments, well-maintained roads-

Spak. Spak. Slurch. Scott’s footsteps were wet and squelchy, the ground sucking at his feet like soggy moss. He looked down and saw blood welling up from the ground. Puddles from recent rains shone glistening red. The soil was crimson, soaked through with blood. Dried brown tide marks marred car fenders and house siding. Scott closed his Sight and gulped down the last of his Maalox.

Rules Note: The Sight’s adapted from DFRPG, except instead of rolling to close the Sight, I just make it a Compel if I want something shitty to happen to Scott.

The guys decided to split up (groan). Clay and Scott would head to the library and try to dig up any information on Margrave’s history. They were manufacturing their own (completely reasonable) red herring here, jumping to the conclusion that Scott’s visions indicated some sort of event from Margrave’s past had come back to murder its residents. Meanwhile, Carter would try to sneak closer, overhear some details, and get a look at some of the evidence bags being loaded into the police cars - evidence bags that looked like they contained some interesting potentially magical artifacts! Game-wise, the artifacts were totally bait for Carter and Bill. Bill’s player loves magic shit, and Carter has compellable aspects from head to toe when dealing with artifacts like these.

To the Library
The Margrave Public Library was not used to leather-clad hooligans wandering in, but the wizened lady behind the front desk took it in icy stride... until Scott asked about Margrave’s history, at which point she sprang into animated life, all too happy to help. Despite smartphones, microfiche, and the Dewey Decimal System, Scott and Clay found little that would cause any sort of overarching evil to befall the town. It was farmland during the Civil War, and might have hosted a skirmish or two. It wasn’t incorporated until the 30s, and although moonshiners ran their wares in the area, crime was neither widespread nor organized. In the 90s, Margrave underwent an intensive restoration effort and transformed into the stereotypical small town it remained to this day. The restoration efforts began soon after Van Owen’s payoffs from Crowley-Lampkin dropped off considerably - like he retired here. The restoration was spearheaded by three men; Van Owen, Sheriff Earl McGraw, and Aldo Koons, pastor of the local Baptist church.

They turned their effort towards these principals. Van Owen didn’t have any sort of military record that they could find, but McGraw and Koons had both served in the same Marine unit in Vietnam. McGraw did two tours and was honorably discharged, but Koons had had a harrowing stint as a POW. By contrast, McGraw’s son Edgar was also a Marine and had won the Silver Star in Iraq before he returned home to (attempt to) take on his father’s mantle of sheriff.

So, not the answers they expected, but leads to follow nonetheless.

Agent Solo
Back at Van Owen’s residence, Earl McGraw and his son, Sheriff Edgar “Junior” McGraw (http://"http://nd01.jxs.cz/597/495/33f1c4aab2_5597406_o2.jpg"), arrived. One of the deputies called out “Sheriff!”, causing both men to turn and look. Then Junior glanced bitterly at his father. It was clear the son was the actual sheriff now and Margrave hadn’t yet gotten that memo.

Junior headed inside. That left his dad outside, and Carter easily timed the rate at which the crime scene guys were bringing out evidence bags. It was too hard to resist going for those artifacts. Carter grabbed an empty backpack and snuck forward while Bill kept a lookout. With Burglary advantages created while he cased the joint, Carter had no problem stuffing the backpack with items Bill had identified with Lore:
It wasn’t enough. Carter basically self-compelled on “Arcane Acquisitions Expert”. The cops didn’t know what they had. This Van Owen guy had decades of loot squirreled away that he didn’t even tell Crowley-Lampkin about. Carter tossed the backpack into the hedge so Bill could get to it should Carter be caught, then the magic thief stole (ahem) into the house.

Carter dodged the crime scene techs and deputies and made his way into the basement where the bullet-marred panic room was. His progress was blocked by a tech, however, so Carter put on his best “I’m totally seriously a law enforcement officer” face and tried to bluff his way into the panic room as “Agent Solo”. It was such a bad story with such a good roll. The tech, unsure what to do with this random dude who clearly was part of something fishy but nevertheless made it to the crime scene without anyone batting an eye, headed upstairs to confirm.

Carter had mere seconds - he cased the room, both for clues as to what happened as well as any more juicy loot he could escape with. Most of the items remaining were too large to be easily transported - a suit of Japanese armor, an eerie painting that showed Carter hanging from a scaffold, dressed in 1700s attire, an anvil, that sort of thing. Carter rolled a success with style to loot the room, and even discovered a secret panel behind the painting that concealed a knife knapped from green glass, an extremely rare item called a trinitite knife. Made from glass from the first atomic bomb test site, Trinity, it would harm any supernatural creature. Any creature. It was a pretty good find. Murder scene-wise, Carter noted that there were bullet holes but no bullets and no shell casings (and nothing came out in the evidence bags that he saw). Finally, there was a thick line of spilled salt and a frantically-opened Morton’s Salt cylinder on the floor.

More than likely Van Owen figured his killer was a ghost.

Then Junior came downstairs and called Carter on his bluff. He sent the thief outside with a deputy to call in Carter’s supposed credentials. Thinking quickly, Carter offered the gullible deputy a different number, a “direct line” to his “agent in charge”. The phone number was Clay’s, and he strung the deputy along long enough for Carter to slip away.

Cold Cuts
The gang regrouped at Rowena’s Diner on the outskirts of town to plan their next move... and get some pie. Clay and Scott would try to find Pastor Koons. Meanwhile, Bill and Carter would sneak into the county morgue to try to investigate Van Owen’s corpse, try to get a sense of what it was that killed him.

It wasn’t the first morgue they’d burgled. Getting inside was easy, but the coroner was still in the room with Van Owen’s body. One falsified fire alarm later, Carter and Bill were looking at a corpse shot so many times that it was literally headless. Bill inspected the body more closely, rolling his Lore, backed up by a bevy of stunts, and found traces of ectoplasm in the bullet wounds.

The killer was a ghost with a machine gun. But why did it kill Van Owen? Was it done killing?

Confessions
Scott and Clay rolled up to Margrave First Baptist just as Aldo Koons (http://"http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/_/29931807/David+Carradine.jpg") was locking up. Scott could talk the talk, claiming he and Clay were on some sort of “Ride for Jesus” thing (which, given Scott’s background, wasn’t really that far off). Long story short, they had to come clean on their initial subterfuge but Koons wasn’t all that saddened by Van Owen’s death. As far as the pastor figured, Van Owen used to be a CIA triggerman in the 60s and 70s. The man was a bastard, but his money kept Margrave on its Americana life support. Koons might have been trying to atone somehow for his years in ‘Nam, but he wasn’t about to give up his nice parsonage and his comfortable life just because some ex-spook decided to help fund a town with ill-gotten gains. When asked about Earl McGraw, Koons admitted they were in the same unit. The elder McGraw was a decent soldier, but he liked combat a little too much for Koons’ liking.

Pastor Koons gave them his number, wished them luck with their investigation, whoever they really were, and got into his old Ford Ranger.

He Killed Them and Took Their Stuff
Back at Van Owen’s place, Scott and Clay failed their roll to sneak into the house and had to beat the hell out of a deputy who was watching the crime scene. They left him in the back of his own car and headed inside to look for clues. Clay failed his Notice roll but opted to pay a cost - he’d resort to ransacking the place rather than leaving it as he found it.

They found a disused go-bag in the attic, along with a few more militaria mementos. Seems Van Owen might have really been the CIA assassin Koons made him out to be. Clay found an old black-and-white of Van Owen posing with a bunch of hard bastards in a mixture of US gear and VC pajamas. Clearly it was the kind of picture that never should’ve been taken. They had a bedraggled Aldo Koons with them - despite the intervening decades, in the photograph Koons looked about as haggard as he did when they met with the octogenarian that afternoon. It would seem that Koons had been less “released” than his official record indicated, and more “rescued by Van Owen and a bunch of MACVSOG guys”. Van Owen must’ve been a piece of work to owe the man your life and still call him a bastard.

Koons’ opinion of the man was cemented as fact when Scott hit the basement and opened his Sight. Scott was knee-deep in a thick soup of blood and spent brass. The angry buzz of giant mosquitos mixed with the whip-crack of incoming rounds. Far off the distance, he could hear artillery hitting, screams echoing, AK-47s chattering. He was in a muddy-walled pit. Above Scott, there was a jungle canopy formed from hundred-dollar bills, lit by hellish stormclouds and napalm. It was Vietnam. It was the Congo. It was the Amazon. Around him, dead faces and hands pushed out from the packed dirt walls, corpses from every race, nation, and tribe that had ever tried to stop Nick Van Owen from taking their ancestral treasures or ancient artifacts.

Scott hurried through the increasingly-grasping hands into the panic room, whereupon the slog of bloody brass changed, dreamscape-instant, into just a scattering a .45 ACP shells on the floor. The brass from Van Owen’s murder was here, on the other side. So were the mushroomed, fragmented bullets. Irrelevant to the case but interestingly enough, the area where Carter found that trinitite knife looked exactly the same as it did in the real world. The knife’s barely-noticeable radioactivity must have killed any supernatural afterimage.

They’d seen enough. Scott tried to shut down the Sight - and I offered a compel. The hands grabbed him, tried to pull him into the mud, tried to choke him. Scott barely fought them off and made it to the stairs before a lucky hand tripped him. Scott hit the stairs hard, except they weren’t stairs now. A dirt slope slick with blood and warm rain stretched up before him. A bulldozer pushed corpses down the hill on top of Scott. He struggled, the corpses animating as they got hear him, tearing at him, their drawn-back mouths leering, full of rotten teeth.

With a shout, Scott broke free of the Sight. Frantic, he reached for his Maalox - empty!

Rules Note: I have to say, I think Scott’s player and I both liked the changes we made where we’d simply have a compel if closing the Sight would be a problem. The specific compel here was that Scott would have to escape or beat a one-on-one conflict against the room rather than simply walking out unscathed.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 17, 2013, 08:08:16 PM
In Which the Evidence Room is Treated like a Wal-Mart
Carter and Bill probably didn’t need to break into the Margrave courthouse at this point, but they really wanted to make sure the local cops didn’t end up sitting on some ancient weapon or powerful artifact. You know, for their own safety. Plus, even though most ghosts cause electronic equipment to short out, Van Owen’s panic room might have had footage of who the ghost was. If they could positively ID the ghost, they could probably find the remains and ace the spectre once and for all. At the very least, there might be more clues as to what the shade wanted. Normally, vengeful spirits will move on once the person, people, task, or object keeping them in our realm is taken care of.

I didn’t have John Rogers’ Crimeworld supplement in front of me, but I remembered enough that I set the courthouse job up like a series of challenges. The objective was the evidence room. It had video cameras, physical locks, and was guarded. Moving around inside the courthouse itself would be restricted, as they had internal surveillance cameras. Getting inside would be easy as long as Carter didn’t try the main entrance.

Bill kept a lookout, ready to provide a distraction should Carter get in over his head. The first thing Carter did was sabotage the building’s air conditioning unit. A few minutes later, some of the courthouse staff and a few cops were outside scratching their heads. It was enough of an opening for Carter to climb inside an open window. His Stealth was high enough that he didn’t have trouble moving around inside the building, even with the cameras. Thing is, he needed to get the evidence room guard out of the cage, and he needed the officers watching the camera feeds gone. He thought back to the morgue and how easily a simple fire alarm cleared their path, so he took it one step further and luckily made his Tools roll to create a controllable but smoky fire in a wastebasket. Alarms raised, the evidence room cleared out and Carter had access.

Carter was still stymied by the video cameras watching the evidence room, however. He didn’t have an easy way past it and he didn’t have the tech skills to wipe footage if he snuck back out to the security office. He spent a FP and produced a tiger mask he kept from Van Owen’s house (basically an invoke for effect on Arcane Acquisitions Expert). This mask acted like a chameleon-esque veil, and with it Carter was able to enter the evidence room right under the camera’s nose. All the big items from Van Owen’s were here now, as well as the tapes from the panic room. Carter accepted a compel here - he was greedy enough that he’d take something big, big enough that the courthouse security cameras would see him leaving.

Outside, one of the deputies milling about spotted Bill loitering and walked over, tried to roust Bill with a tried-and-true mixture of condescension, good-ole-boy douchebaggery, and intimidation. Bill decided to self-compel his “Last of the Gunslingers” aspect and hip-fired his Judge into the deputy’s chest. Rock salt puffed from the cop in a gritty white cloud and he went down moaning. Bill hobbled to his bike and punched the throttle as more officers ran after the old man, then spun and raced for their cars. Looked like Carter was going to have an easy escape.

Carter exited the courthouse carrying a magic anvil, carefully strapped it down to his bike, and peeled out in the other direction.

Slow Ride
With his headstart, Bill was able to lose the cops but the PCs were definitely wanted men now. With their new information, they decided Pastor Koons might be able to help them ascertain the ghost’s identity, so they headed towards the parsonage. I had them make two rolls - one Drive roll to see how fast they could get there, and a Streetwise roll to see if they evaded the police. They aced the Streetwise roll, but failed the Drive and chose not to pay a cost to succeed.

The bikers were just a few blocks away from Koons’ parsonage when they heard the staccato bursts of a Thompson gun.

G-g-g-g-Ghost
Aldo Koons lay dead in his driveway, lit by his Ranger’s flickering headlights. His head had been machinegunned to pieces, his front lawn speckled with gore. Standing over the pastor’s corpse was a headless ghost dressed in 50-year-old fatigues raising an equally ghostly M1 Thompson submachinegun. The ghost used a spray attack but the multiple targets reduced its Shoot rolls to where the PCs easily dodged them. Clay leapt from his bike, trinitite knife in hand. The knife caught on the shade’s shoulder, leaving a long ectoplasmic gash. Carter fishtailed his bike, trying to slam the ghost with the magical anvil strapped to the back. Bill started laying down a hasty ritual circle, but the ghost tied his rolls. Bill could only corral the spectre, not entrap it entirely.

Scott’s bike was “Hard to Start, Hard to Stop”, and this time it spilled him painfully onto the driveway with a “Road Rash” consequence instead of driving straight for the ghost like he’d planned. Undeterred, Scott opened his Sight again and was dumped into another war-torn hell, facing a tall Norwegian mercenary (http://"http://tvrecappersanonymous.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/askarsgard_generationkill.jpg") across ten feet of mass grave. A bombed-out church burned happily roughly where Koons’ body was, his Ford Ranger corresponding to a bullet-ridden Jeep in the spirit realm. Much younger echoes of Koons, McGraw, and Van Owen were firing into the jungle, using the dead Jeep for cover from barrages of incoming rounds.

The ghost was outmatched. It already had a consequence from Clay’s new knife, and it had to contend with an ex-con who could kill it with his bare hands on its own turf as well as two more guys working to trap it inside a circle. The ghost survived another round but took a moderate consequence, then conceded before Bill could close the circle. In the real world, the spectre just flickered out. On the other side, however, Scott saw napalm scour his valley clean of life. He was thrown back against Koons’ Ranger, his jacket smoking with ectoplasm from his narrow escape.

Still no Maalox.

Funny Pictures
Now that the gang was standing around a bloody crime scene, they decided (okay, they accepted compels) to search Koons’ body, vehicle, and house for anything that might help them kill this ghost. Clay found the answer in a decades-old folded-up picture Koons had in his pocket. It was somewhere in Africa, maybe the Congo. Van Owen was there, shotgun over one shoulder, shit-eating grin on his face. Diamonds poured from his other hand. McGraw and Koons were there too, looking almost as pleased. Finally, the Norwegian merc was there, Thompson raised in triumph.

Suddenly Scott’s visions made sense. Margrave was built on blood diamonds, blood money Van Owen and the rest must have smuggled back with them. For whatever reason, they put their money into this town. Maybe they just wanted a nice place to retire.

Either way, Earl McGraw was the last person alive from that picture. Now that the headless ghost had shot Van Owen and Koons, McGraw’s life was probably measured on an egg timer. The gang, themselves wanted for burglary and assaulting police (at the very least), had to convince Margrave’s former sheriff of their good intentions and then protect the man against an assault by a pissed-off ghost with a machine gun and decades of combat experience.

Then the compels came home to roost. The guys decided to search instead of run for it, so Sheriff Edgar McGraw and the deputy they’d beat up back at Van Owen’s place rolled up on the red-handed PCs.

Shot in the Face and You’re To Blame
Honestly, I thought that maybe the PCs would have tried to reason with the younger McGraw, but Bill decided that rock salt makes an effective opener and ender to any conversation. Junior hadn’t even gotten out a “Freeze!” when Bill shot him in the face with a load of rock salt. The sheriff keeled over backwards into his squad car. Clay beat down the deputy for the second time that day, then the gang was off and running. Now they were in a race against the ghost and the cops.

In Which the Gang Tries Home Invasion
Retired Margrave sheriffs apparently only go out and make nuisances of themselves when the weather is nice or if they don’t have to do any real work. That’s why Earl McGraw was at home watching TV when the PCs rolled up. After learning that it seemed to just be him and his wife at home, the group dithered about whether they should sneak in the back door or knock and try to bluff their way in, or come at them right off with the truth, or what. Scott rang the doorbell, punched Mrs. McGraw in the mouth, and drew down on Earl before the old man could get out of his recliner.

He explained they were there to help.

Clay showed McGraw the pictures and that got the old sheriff talking. McGraw and Koons had been approached by Van Owen for some sort of CIA (“at least he said it was CIA”) op into the Congo. They had some mercenaries with them, foremost among them Roland Tembo, a Norwegian who was a surgeon with a submachinegun. Despite heavy losses, the unit stole a fortune in diamonds from the Congolese. Tembo got hit with a heavy case of conscience, so Van Owen blew his head off with his shotgun. Those diamonds, followed by Van Owen’s lucrative career pilfering magic shit for Crowley-Lampkin, led to Margrave’s restoration efforts and a retirement opportunity for all three men.

McGraw couldn’t deny the (lack of) evidence from the shootings. He was willing to give these crackpots a shot at marking up his garage with some sort of ritual, as long as they handed him his gun back. The group decided they could always just outbid him on initiative if he tried to shoot them. The unlikely allies headed to McGraw’s garage and set to work. Their plan: Perform a ritual to summon Roland Tembo’s murderous spirit, then hit with a combination of ghostknife (taken from a murdering ghost in the very first session), trinitite shiv, and old-fashioned exorcism.

Exorcism By Combat
Summonings are a multi-part process. First, if you’re smart, you need to set up a ritual circle to protect yourself from the summoned entity. This is a Create Advantage that acts as narrative permission to roll your Lore in defense against the spirit’s attempts to break free. Second, you need to know what material components will draw the spirit to your chosen site. For a quick and dirty summoning, I usually just call for a Lore roll, but this was the Big Bad for the session. I wanted something a little more flavorful, so I went to my random spell component chart I’d made months earlier. I had the PCs roll 3 times, and the probabilities turned out reasonably well.
These spell components act as a compel on the entity, forcing it to manifest in the desired location. After that, you do whatever you wanted to do; bargain, attack, whatever.

Roland appeared, still somewhat worse for wear after their fight at the parsonage (its Moderate consequence wasn’t healed yet). The ghost tried to seize initiative with a fate point but Scott outbid it (in what would be a recurring theme this conflict). This time, however, the PCs were low on FP and the ghost had nearly a full stock for the scene. It was a tough fight - Clay darting in and out with the trinitite knife while Scott and Bill tag-teamed an exorcism with create advantage and Lore attack actions (the only time you can use Lore to attack, pretty much). The ghost had primary skills 1-2 points higher than the PCs, and it started to get the upper hand, dealing consequences to Carter and Clay. Earl McGraw emptied his revolver into the thing, but his bullets spun straight through the ghost. Roland leveled his Thompson at the old man, but Carter pushed him out of the way! Carter was rewarded for his heroism with bullets, and took another consequence. Scott’s portion of the exorcism actually exorcised Roland’s gun - the Thompson went dry with an echoing “click”. Roland tried to break free with a Balls vs. Lore roll - no good! The circle of gasoline erupted into blue-white flame, blocking the spirit’s escape. The exorcism started to take hold now, and little by little Roland started looking more like he did in life. His head started to mist back into existence, his torn fatigues coalescing into clothing from a more peaceful time. Bill’s Lore was too high for him to break free, and Scott had effectively disarmed him. Clay waited until he could see Roland’s face, then slammed the trinitite knife through the top of the ghost’s ectoplasmic skull. Roland’s spirit went up in an orange conflagration, leaving the gasoline sputtering out and McGraw’s garage a smoky, bullet-riddled, blood-spattered mess.

McGraw decided that Carter taking a bullet for him canceled out Scott’s wife-punching. He couldn’t deny what he had seen, and told the gang he could stall his son and the other cops for a few minutes (he obviously didn’t know Bill had marred his kid’s good looks with some rock salt, else things might have gone differently). He went outside, pushed his hat high on his forehead, and spat into his front lawn as the bikers drove into the night.

ROLL CREDITS! (http://"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHWmxCoTV3Y")
This was the best investigative adventure I ever ran. I also managed to use a single villain and make him a credible threat despite the action economy. That was definitely a first for me - most of the time my single villains get completely curbstomped. The advice in Fate Core about setting major villains’ skills 2 points higher than the PCs is spot on.

I didn’t feel like I had too many weak compels, either. The guys had enough FP to last until the last conflict, and then everyone ran out. If they had picked either the exorcism or the stabbing as their ghostbusting focus, I think they would’ve had fared slightly better but I understand that they probably wanted to cover their bases. Besides, if you make one guy the obvious attacker he’s going to get Roland’s full attention. If you have a guy running an exorcism AND a guy with a ghost-knife trying to stab you, and you only have one action, well, it’s not so cut-and-dried anymore.

Mystery-wise, the plot wasn’t terribly convoluted in hindsight. Van Owen betrays Roland back in the 60s, uses the blood money to make his American Dream come true, ghost finds him and starts killing the people who were involved with his death. The players furnished their own red herrings as well as their own motivations for why all this was happening. All I had to do was listen and try to steer them to the plot. Remember, when you run a mystery game, you want the PCs to solve it. Make it a simple situation, allow room for PC speculation to pad it out, and let compels complicate it further. It’s easier said than done, though, which is why my typical investigation-based sessions either run really long or flounder somewhere in the middle.

I was also happy that I had something for everyone to do. Scott and Carter took the lead during the investigation, but Clay and Bill backed them up and each had a spotlight moment gathering clues. Carter’s not a combat monster, but he had his moments while thieving. Plus, he took a bullet for McGraw. Carter’s usually pretty mercenary - I wonder if he’s planning on an aspect change or if it just seemed like he was the right guy in the right place at the right time?

Finally, I think the level of police involvement was just about right. They weren’t really a challenge in a fight but they had control over so much of what the PCs needed that it forced conflict. Not shooting conflict (except for the shooting conflicts), but conflict in general. It made the session more than just “gather clues, speak to NPCs, kill a monster”.

For Next Time
I think I know better than to try to predict what I’ll run next time. I’ve got some ideas involving a Cryptid Fight Club, a certain infamous witch who lives in a walking hut, and a Sasquatch team-up with Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on June 18, 2013, 08:35:15 AM
So this is still on, eh? Awesome.

Rules Note: I have to say, I think Scott’s player and I both liked the changes we made where we’d simply have a compel if closing the Sight would be a problem.

Did you do anything to weaken The Sight? Because that sounds like a pretty sizeable upgrade.

He spent a FP and produced a tiger mask he kept from Van Owen’s house (basically an invoke for effect on Arcane Acquisitions Expert). This mask acted like a chameleon-esque veil, and with it Carter was able to enter the evidence room right under the camera’s nose. All the big items from Van Owen’s were here now, as well as the tapes from the panic room. Carter accepted a compel here - he was greedy enough that he’d take something big, big enough that the courthouse security cameras would see him leaving.

So he spends a Fate Point to not get caught, and then gets a Fate Point for getting caught. Much more interesting than just not getting caught.

The ghost was outmatched. It already had a consequence from Clay’s new knife, and it had to contend with an ex-con who could kill it with his bare hands on its own turf as well as two more guys working to trap it inside a circle. The ghost survived another round but took a moderate consequence, then conceded before Bill could close the circle. In the real world, the spectre just flickered out. On the other side, however, Scott saw napalm scour his valley clean of life. He was thrown back against Koons’ Ranger, his jacket smoking with ectoplasm from his narrow escape.

Surprised the group accepted that concession. I would have gone for the "kill", in their place.

Clay beat down the deputy for the second time that day, then the gang was off and running.

The second time?

I think I missed the first time. When was it?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 18, 2013, 11:01:20 AM
Scott's player never failed a roll to close the Sight before, even if I had a good idea for something to happen if he failed. Compels just get right down to business. I probably did beef up the Sight some with the rules hacks I'm using for my Core conversion:

Quote
The Sight is a sort of juiced-up stunt off of Notice. It’s a “third eye” or “true seeing” - it lets you see concepts, personalities, echoes of the past and possible futures. You can overcome veils and glamours, but the Sight can also be extremely cryptic and has the potential to leave lasting mental scars. The Sight is something that you choose to open (although sometimes choosing to do so can be the result of a compel, and come at a bad time).

You can also use the Sight to mentally attack someone. Wizards call it a soulgaze; Ghost Rider calls it a Penance Stare. Either way, you need an opportunity to look someone in their eyes. This normally requires an advantage or aspect in place like “Face to face” or “Distracting Eyes” for example. Then you roll an opposed Balls check. On a tie, each person learns 1 aspect they didn’t already know from the other. If there’s a clear winner, each person learns an aspect as on a tie, plus the winner either 1) learns all the other person’s aspects or 2) deals mental stress equal to the shifts generated on the roll. If the winner succeeded with style, they can do both.

WRT Carter's invocation for effect and the compel that basically undid his efforts to remain hidden, well, that's how he rolls sometimes. :) In hindsight it's completely obvious it was a zero-sum choice, but in play all you see is a dwindling number of fate points.

For the ghost's first concession, I think it's just my group. They play easy with concessions because 1) they might need to at some point and 2) they're okay with bad guys getting away if a reckoning's coming later. I waited until it was my turn before I conceded, so you could probably have phrased it as more of a withdrawal, but assuming the ghost dropped its manifestation and stayed in the NeverNever, Scott would've been possibly the only one who could have targeted it. I think at the time, the guys knew they were fighting in a crime scene as well. Not that that stopped them from accepting compels to stick around and search afterwards.

Quote
The second time?

I think I missed the first time. When was it?

When Scott and Clay broke into Van Owen's house to find the go-bag, the photo, and look upon the basement with the Sight.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: blackstaff67 on June 19, 2013, 12:24:26 PM
Good to know someone besides me is using Baba Yaga as an NPC walk-on....MWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on June 20, 2013, 07:18:46 AM
Scott's player never failed a roll to close the Sight before, even if I had a good idea for something to happen if he failed. Compels just get right down to business. I probably did beef up the Sight some with the rules hacks I'm using for my Core conversion...

Yeah, that looks like a pretty big upgrade.

Especially if the gaze-revealed Aspects are taggable.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on June 21, 2013, 02:04:36 AM
Yeah, that looks like a pretty big upgrade.

Especially if the gaze-revealed Aspects are taggable.

In my mind, they would not be taggable. To play it the other way, you could learn ONE taggable aspect instead of all of them. That'd be okay I think.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 20, 2013, 03:18:29 PM
Another day, another dollar. Another month, another monster. :)

Only two months between games this time! It's almost a regular occurrence!

Session 13 - Cryptid Fight Club
Who was there? Scott, Carter, Clay, Bill, and Ajaz.
Reward: +1 Refresh.

Apologies to Fight Club, Smokin’ Aces, My Name is Earl, Deliverance, Marked for Death, Dreams in the Witch-House, the Walking Dead, Predator 2, the Chucky movies, Trilogy of Terror, Gremlins, Commando, Django Unchained, Top Chef, Scooby Doo, and many more...

OPENING TITLE! (http://"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyXz6eMCj2k")
A cold open this time saw the gang (with new addition, the Nephilim-blooded Ajaz Gurt (http://"http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2006/features/magstories/060508/naveen_andrews.jpg"), pursued by Heaven’s agents for some transgression he’s not aware of) rolling towards-
-Terrabonne Parish, Louisiana, tracking down another one of the leads from Dmitri Romanov. This time it was supposed to be a safe house used by Pantagruel’s human agents, but the abandoned and overgrown rowhouse looked pretty desolate, the night noises broken up only by an idling pickup truck. Carter crept through the bushes and weeds while Bill and Clay walked up on three people (http://"http://static.tvgcdn.net/MediaBin/Galleries/Shows/M_R/Mq_Mz/MyNameIsEarl/season4/my-name-earl123.jpg") wrestling a burlap sack filled with a wriggling... something into the back of the truck.

A lot of Wits, a little bit of Menace, and some trust in both directions saw the gang introduced to Clarice, Eustace, and John Boy Aintry. John Boy let slip that they were in Terrabonne for the “fights”, and revealed the contents of the sack - a domovoi, a Russian house spirit. Kind of like a brownie, but a hairy little man-thing. Carter knew enough Russian from his travels to get the idea that the domovoi was pissed and had friends, but when Carter spoke to it it calmed down some and explained what it really wanted was to find another home. The safe house had been abandoned for a while now and the domovoi were growing angry and restless. Carter accepted a compel to enter a hastily-worded agreement with a fairy creature. He agreed to find them a new home.

The First Rule of Cryptid Fight Club
Back to the fights! Bill and Clay got a little more information out of the Aintrys. A “Poppa Capp” character was running a fight ring for supernatural critters. ‘Nuff said - Bill saw the domovoi as victims here and immediately determined to put a stop to it. This was not something I entirely expected - as monster hunters, I thought the group would be more okay with the idea of getting critters dealt with one way or another, but they seemed to key off the fact that this was basically a dog fighting circuit and it needed to stop. Which was fine too - it tied into the secondary theme this session of “this time, the people are the monsters”. Bill wouldn’t let the Aintrys take the domovoi, but he did offer to meet back up with them the next night and hand over a duppy, a trickster Jamaican spirit that he intended to summon that night with a ritual. The duppy wouldn’t really be able to be killed, so Bill felt okay about passing one off to fight in some mysterious contest. The Aintrys were bamboozled well enough by outfitting the duppy with a Tapout shirt and some brass knuckles (seriously, they rolled pretty bad. Thanks, Fred’s Stash dice!), the exchange took place, and the trio of rednecks gave up the location for the fights. It was at a rundown chicken farm not too far from Houma, LA. The fights would start at high noon the next day.

The gang got to work.

In Which Ajaz Gurt’s Player Learns About Compels
Somebody had to go check out the farm. They only had one night to prepare, and preparation was key to surviving some of the things that were out there. Ajaz volunteered, and before the group settled on who would go with him, I offered a compel. Ajaz was relentless and thought himself always prepared for anything, so he’d go alone.

The nephilite wouldn’t have found the farm had the Aintrys not told them where it was. This was actually a minor confusion charm placed on the land by Poppa Capp, to ward off run-ins with local law or passersby. Ajax dumped his bike as he neared the fence and heard the hum of a generator. Originally the chicken farm was going to be a meat packing plant but I knew Ajaz’s player had enjoyed the Walking Dead game from Telltale so I adjusted it to a chicken farm with some similarities to the farm from the game, right down to juiced-up generators overpowering an electric fence. The gate wasn’t shut, however, so Ajaz snuck in and crept up to the chicken house door before the farmhand working on the generator spotted him! Ajaz truly was prepared for anything, and with an invoke boosting his roll, he buried a throwing knife in the man’s neck. Ajaz dragged the corpse into the bushes, noting that the farmhand had been armed - a gunhand as well as a farmhand.

The chicken house was a long corrugated metal shed with sliding partitions roughly blocking the building into three areas. One wall was lined with cages and crates of all sizes. There was a crane, like the type you’d use to hoist an engine block, attached to a big plexiglass cage suspended over a metal ritual circle set into the sawdust-covered concrete floor. Clearly this was where the fights were to take place. Ajaz’s Lore rolls weren’t enough for him to decipher anything about the specific purpose of the circle, so he moved on to the barn at the back of the property. Ajaz unlocked the barn door with keys taken from the dead man and snuck inside. There were more empty cages here, but these seemed to serve specific purposes. Some were silver, some were covered with netting, some were cold-wrought iron, and so on. Ritual unguents sat on shelves alongside WD-40 and motor oil.

Another locked door in the back of the barn led to a slaughter room, a gory chamber where (Ajaz surmised) losing critters were carved up for useful parts. After all, you can’t buy cockatrice gizzards down at Safeway. A few minutes of careful searching revealed a trapdoor set into the floor. Yes, I remembered later that southern Louisiana isn’t generally conducive to basements. Whatever, this is a story about fairies and gnomes. Ajaz accepted a compel on “Relentless Nephilite” - there was no way he was going to leave without checking this out - but he heard the farmhouse door slam as he cracked the trapdoor open with a hatchet. He ducked out of the barn just as a tall, thin black man strode into the yard and settled a top hat over his pajama robe. A large rat with the face of a man (http://"http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YWNE0PmwQnM/UY1cZwE8xeI/AAAAAAAAFNA/yOISWDgZfSU/s640/brown.jpg") (and here Bill’s player shuddered - he hates that thing) skittered across the gravel lot to perch on the man’s shoulder. Ajaz skulked through the bushes, circling the yard, trying to reach his bike. He moved just as the man and the rat looked over where he had been a moment ago. Ajaz decided to run for it. Just charge for his bike and get out. The rat blocked his path; he leapt over the horrid thing and reached his bike. The tall man drew a revolver from one bathrobe pocket and took aim. Ajaz’s bike roared in time with the gun - the man missed by one point, and Ajaz was off into the night.

Poppa Capp knew his face now, and so did his familiar, Brown Jenkins. Infiltrating the fights the next day might be tricky.

We Need A Montage
Ajaz returned and told the gang what he had seen. They considered using the skinwalking knife to truly disguise Ajaz, but soon discarded that plan because 1) Carter was good at normal disguises and 2) it involved skinning people. They opted for a two-pronged assault; Carter and Ajaz would sneak back into the barn the next day and check out the trapdoor while everyone else tried to get entrance with the help of the domovoi, who was promised that yes, they’d be finding his people a new home soon and no, he wouldn’t really have to fight anything. He just had to look tough.

Scott worked out his barely-used Tools skill and crafted three holy water seltzer bombs, for lack of a better term. These proved to be incredibly useful. Bill loaded his guns with a truly random assortment of ammunition (creating an advantage “Grab Bag of Bullets”). Clay and Carter worked on the next part of their plan; enclosing the farm inside a ritual circle to prevent any evil critters from escaping, either overland or through the Nevernever. I turned to my trusty random chart of ritual components and we rolled the following three ingredients:
They mixed the components together into a thick slurry in a bucket, then soaked a long length of twine in it overnight. At dawn, Carter and Bill snuck out to the chicken farm and looped the twine around the property. They managed to remain unseen (setting an obstacle of 3 to discover the circle), but Bill invoked some aspects to boost the spell’s strength to an 8! It would take an escaping supernatural critter several rounds building advantages before it could even attempt to break through.

Spell in place, weapons loaded, and domovoi in tow, the gang headed up the long driveway.

Old Friends, New Problems
The farm’s gravel lot was packed with a bewildering array of vehicles, from a 1970 Challenger to a U-Haul van...
There was even an eerily familiar teal-and-green GMC van (http://"http://www.imcdb.org/i116388.jpg") the gang had encountered back in Kansas City. Outside the chicken house, two guards in coveralls and hats stood idly by a pickup truck with all manner of long guns and farm implements in the back. Bill showed them the domovoi and they nodded the group inside.

“Fight’s started,” one said. “Better git in there.” And I completely forgot to take the PCs’ weapons, which was the entire point of those two goons.

Inside the chicken coop, there was a mob of about two dozen people shouting at a jackalope fighting a shirtless, tattooed garden gnome (a gang-styled G-NOME across his chest) in the ritual circle Ajaz had sussed out the previous night. About half of them looked like they were only there to bet on the fights; presumably these were people who had lost previous bouts and didn’t have any other supernatural critters to hand. The remaining people were obviously all named NPCs of various importance.
G-Nome pummeled the jackalope mercilessly and managed to break the poor animal’s neck. Brookyn and London were pleased but reserved, while Clarice berated Eustace for his poor choice in combat-effective cryptids. Then I asked what everyone was doing, and the group came up with a bunch of ideas (some of which were compel-worthy).

Fred recognized Bill from Kansas City. Bill had shot Fred’s girlfriend once she was infected by a Red Court vampire, and Fred, inexperienced and over his head, didn’t have the balls to seek vengeance. Now he fancied himself a badass monster hunter, and he called Bill out. Fred wanted a mano y mano fight to the death in the ritual circle, but he wasn’t going to get it. Bill’s Menace roll was off the charts, and Fred immediately backed off. The red rage changed to scarlet shame, and he stormed out of the chicken house.

“Come on, Sonny!!!” he screamed.
“Man, we kinda need the money,” Sonny complained. Scooby nodded. Fred left, but Sonny and Scooby dithered long enough to still be inside when things went to hell.

At the same time, Brown Jenkins scurried up Clay’s back and whisperered in his ear (I decreed that Brown Jenkins can speak any language, but you can only understand him if he’s whispering in your ear, because it’s fucking creepy). He had seen Clay fight a Gruff in Hades, and he wanted Clay to fight. Right here. But Clay wasn’t about to agree to the horrific rat-thing’s request, at least not in the way it expected.

Outside, Ajaz and Carter snuck around to the barn. Ajaz still had the keys, and the two hunters peered down into the dank cellar under the shattered trapdoor. Carter lit a glowstick and they went down. In the sickly glow from the chemlight, Carter and Ajaz saw a gore-filled underground chamber writhing with countless tiny Jenkins-spawn. Their keening was part infant wail and part angry rodent screech. The swarm* skittered for the new meat on tiny legs.

*I had worked out swarm rules for this session, since a number of the creatures were only really a threat in great numbers. The Baby Jenkinses were the only thing I got to use those rules for.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 20, 2013, 03:19:17 PM
No, I’m Chaos, He’s Mayhem. We’re a Double Act
My memory of the ensuing combat’s timeline is pretty spotty. A lot of stuff happened and it was really late.

In the barn, Ajaz and Carter were frantically backpedaling for the ladder out of the cellar. Carter threw one of Scott’s holy seltzer bombs at the swarm to great effect - blue fire coursed over the cursed creatures, applying the condition “Dispersed” to the swarm. Ajaz brandished his flaming chain whip, keeping the things at bay long enough for the two hunters to get out of the chamber. The screaming, dying Baby Jenkinses alerted one of the guards, who trotted over and fired some 12 gauge slugs through the barn door.

Bill shot Poppa Capp in the face, but a compel on “Grab Bag of Ammo” resulted in simply rock salt, not slugs or buckshot. Still, the self-styled voodoo ringmaster toppled out of his chair onto the floor. Thurgood Marshall and Mr. Duke both went for Capp, knowing he had been handling the money. They saw each other and drew weapons - Duke yanked a Sig from a holster (since I forgot to take the PCs’ weapons, I made everyone else armed too) while Thurgood raised his cane, pulled the hidden trigger, and click! He rolled a -4 and his hidden cane-gun failed to fire. Not to be outdone in the incompetence department, Duke completely missed as well.

The gunshots from inside the fight club drew the second guard’s attention, but Fred was already outside. He dropped that guard with a collapsible baton and ransacked the pickup, coming up with a deer gun in each hand (there were more appropriate weapons; this was a compel on “Has No Idea What He’s Doing”). Fred hit nothing, and got a back full of cactus cat spines for his trouble. The little cryptid had zeroed in on the guards’ beer and turned out to be quite territorial.

The second guard died when he went to check out the damage he did to the barn’s occupants (which was none, actually). Ajaz sent his flaming whip through the barn door, the guard’s guts, and the ritual components on the shelf. Now the barn was on fire, thanks to flaming whip + motor oil. Carter took the guard’s Ithaca Roadblocker and snuck into the tall grass. Ajaz got to his bike and prepared to go Ghost Rider on everyone.

Back inside the chicken house? Chaos. Scott threw one of his holy seltzer bombs - the spraying water caught Scooby across his flank and burned the Black Shuck like acid. Scott wasn’t particulary fond of Scooby. He might have been a cute reference to a lovable cartoon but quite honestly, anything burned by holy water is not something you want to tolerate. Clarice sicced her chupacabra on the unholy dog, preventing Scott from immediate reprisal. It wasn’t teamwork, it was just how things turned out. In fact, Scott proved he had no love for the Aintrys either when he pistol-whipped Eustace to the floor when the greasy-haired redneck ran for the exit.

Poppa Capp got unsteadily to his feet and grabbed up a garden hose, then sprayed both Tinys and their bamboo box. The two Japanese men stared in horror as the contents - a gremlin - reacted poorly to being doused in water. Big Tiny dropped the cage and they both ran for the exit.

Scott pistol whipped both of them too.

Clay created an advantage to get Brown Jenkins in a grapple, then proceeded to systematically mangle the horrid creature. Jenkins broke free when John Boy tackled Clay, but it had already taken nearly all its consequences by then. Clay got in one last swipe with his trinitite knife, disemboweling the creature, then he and John Boy crashed through the chicken house wall out into daylight. Clay got the upper hand, bounced the largest Aintry’s skull off a trailer hitch, and that was that.

Bill cut the Chupacabra vs. Black Shuck (coming to SyFy next saturday!) short with a clean headshot on the goatsucker. Left uncontrolled, Scooby might have gone for Scott next, but it was bound to Sonny, and the stoner-turned-hunter was already running for the hole Clay and John Boy made. The remaining Scoobies ran for their van.

On the other side of the chicken house, Thurgood Marshall III and Duke continued shooting at each other. This time, Thurgood rolled a +4 and plowed a centerfire round right through Duke’s chest. The washed-up fed collapsed, but had enough life left in him to zap his killer with a lightning worm (from the Fate Toolkit) in a bottle. Thurgood fried (Weapon:7 attacks will do that) and dropped lifeless as Duke bled out next to him.

Brooklyn retrieved G-Nome while London went for the pair’s other fighting critter, a Zuni fetish doll (http://"http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ku6SPRq8054/TAXkTnbpr6I/AAAAAAAAAkc/5i8eFL0gP1k/s320/trilogy+of+terror+zuni+bath.jpg"). What they didn’t know, however, was that Brown Jenkins had passed the homicidal doll a knife before the fights started and it slashed London’s wrist wide open. She dropped the cage, the doll broke free, jungle drums played in the background. Brooklyn couldn’t save London and so she and G-Nome ran for the Challenger outside. The Zuni doll ran for another cage. This one was covered with a thick cloth, but whatever was inside it was giggling and shouting “Put me in, coach!”
Problem was, Bill was waiting for something to shoot. Chucky ate a load of 00 buck (enough to appear dead, at least). The Zuni doll ran for the tall grass outside. Bill let him go and started shooting anything in cages that wasn’t simply a hapless animal. Stirge? Bang. Headcrab? Bang. Wumpus cat? Bill held his fire. It was just a cougar with a funky tail.

Poppa Capp escaped out into the yard while the gremlin, now many gremlins and bursting through the cage as it multiplied, wriggled their way towards the garden hose. They would have been my second opportunity to use my swarm rules, but unfortunately Ajaz rode his motorcycle through the door, showering sunlight across the gremlins. They burst into flame while the nephilite brandished his firey chain, continuing his swath of destruction through to the other side of the chicken house.

On a side note, my original plan to cut the massive number of NPCs down to size and focus the battle against one swarm was all tied up with the Cottingley Fairy. The little tinker-hell thing was nowhere near a threat on its own, but the plan was for it to zap back to the Nevernever, then come back with a few hundred of its friends and act like the cloud of carnivorous airborne piranha they were. It would have been a little joke - the tiny fairy turning out to be the most lethal thing on the farm - but Ajaz’s player correctly pointed out, however, that the protective circle they put up would block crossing over to the spirit world. Instead, the fairy made a beeline for anywhere but the chicken house. It probably hit the circle barrier like a bug on a windshield.

No Man, G-Nome Got It Worse Than Anybody
Speaking of protective barriers, the group wondered if it’d work on Scooby too, since Sonny was peeling out of the farm and driving like a maniac down the dirt road. He made his Notice check against Carter’s earlier Stealth roll of 3, though, and the van skidded to a stop. Fred got out and started digging up the twine, looking to break the spell so they could escape with their dog intact. They hadn’t gotten the circle cracked before Brooklyn drove past them doing at least fifty on the gravel road. Her Challenger screamed over the circle and kept going. G-Nome, however, was stopped by the circle. The car’s rear window turned red, then the car skidded to a dusty halt, then Brooklyn, shaking and covered in gnome gristle, got out and vomited.

Poppa Capp made it to his U-Haul just in time to see that Carter had been waiting for him. The 10-gauge Roadblocker thundered and the U-Haul was the second vehicle to get a crimson paint job. Carter rolled the messy, messy corpse for any valuables.

It was mostly cleanup after that. Bill finished off the remaining hostile caged cryptids and then the gang hunted down that friggin’ Zuni doll with a riding lawnmower. Any attempts to stick around and properly loot the area were cut short with compels. Now that Brown Jenkins and Poppa Capp were dead, the police found the chicken farm. Amidst the red and blue lights and the orange glow from the dying fires, a tiny rat with the face of a child scrambled up into the open door of a squad car…

Autopsy
I’ve got very few complaints. Everything that caught me off guard was based around my expectations; how my players would react to the fights, the creatures I thought would be threats, the speedy escalation to violence, etc. The entire session was pretty much a study in barely-controlled chaos, and the group said they all liked it, so there you go. The session was really a present for Bill’s player. He loves cryptids and weird critters, and although I had a big list of beasties, most of them just weren’t powerful enough to threaten an entire group until I thought of the fight club idea. It was a session about conflict and discovery - conflict, for obvious reasons, and discovery, to see what kind of thing I would unleash next.

It was also Ajaz’s player’s first time gaming with us. He’d played two games of Hackmaster over Hangouts, and he got a weekend of Fate, Star Wars d6, and Savage Worlds with us. He hit the ground running and fit right in. I have another coworker who might be able to come next session, in which case maybe I’ll be able to speak at length on running Fate for larger groups. :)

For Next Time
We didn’t get into the specifics of what little they DID find, but I figure if the group wants to chain something directly from this session, they could decide to go deal with Scooby once and for all. I could add on to that and even have the Scoobies ask the PCs for help with an actual monster. Or, they could track down where some wannabe like Poppa Capp even got a Brown Jenkins. He must have learned what he learned from someone… or something.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: bobjob on August 20, 2013, 04:04:31 PM
Man, I only wish my game were as cool as this one. Well done.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on August 21, 2013, 06:19:01 AM
Pretty awesome story.

Your links are all broken, though. Some can be fixed by removing %22http// from the beginning of the URL, others can't.

I'm kinda surprised by the ruthlessness of your players. Running a magical creature fight club is unethical, to be sure, but did they really all have to die?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 22, 2013, 03:41:53 PM
Thanks for reading, guys! I'll run through the url tags - I was cross-posting the bbcode and foolishly assumed one bbcode format would rule them all.

Quote
I'm kinda surprised by the ruthlessness of your players. Running a magical creature fight club is unethical, to be sure, but did they really all have to die?

Heheh. I'm not sure if you're referring to the creatures or the animal handlers. :) I think for the most part, the people there got off easier than they deserved. 4 deaths, 2 of which were due to a crossfire over gambling winnings. Otherwise, just some face punches and pistol whips. Probably some arrests, although we didn't do a complete post-mortem of all the human participants.

The critters? Well, the PCs are monster hunters, and I did try to weight the creatures that were there towards the "monster" end of the spectrum:

Making the critters monsters for the most part helped diminish the darkness of the concept, helped distance us from the reality of actual dogfighting, which is some evil shit, and illustrated the differences between the truly victimized animals like the jackalope, cactus cat, and wumpus cat, the vicious monsters like the headcrab or stirge, and the willing participants like G-Nome or Chucky.

Out of curiosity, which ones (if any) would you guys have spared?
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on August 23, 2013, 02:44:19 AM
4 deaths, 2 of which were due to a crossfire over gambling winnings.

I count 5 deaths, actually. London, Poppa Capp, that farmhand that was working on the generator, Duke, and Marshall.

Out of curiosity, which ones (if any) would you guys have spared?

The farmhand that Ajaz got with the throwing knife, definitely. He didn't do anything except be vaguely associated with some nasty people. I don't think that having a job on the same piece of land as a dogfighting ring deserves the death penalty.

Might have spared Poppa Capp, or might not have. Depends on whether or not it was practical to punch him out. I mean, I'd rather not kill him, but I wouldn't feel too guilty if I did.

Probably wouldn't have gone through the cages shooting everything that looked nasty, either. Too much risk of misjudging an animal.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on August 23, 2013, 11:06:31 AM
I count 5 deaths, actually. London, Poppa Capp, that farmhand that was working on the generator, Duke, and Marshall.

The farmhand that Ajaz got with the throwing knife, definitely. He didn't do anything except be vaguely associated with some nasty people. I don't think that having a job on the same piece of land as a dogfighting ring deserves the death penalty.

Might have spared Poppa Capp, or might not have. Depends on whether or not it was practical to punch him out. I mean, I'd rather not kill him, but I wouldn't feel too guilty if I did.

Probably wouldn't have gone through the cages shooting everything that looked nasty, either. Too much risk of misjudging an animal.

Doh! 6 deaths. Poppa Capp, London, Marshall, Duke, the farmhand from the night before, and the guard killed by a flaming whip. So 3 dead by PC hands, 2 from Ajaz alone. I did talk about Taking Out and how you determine what happens to them, and he chose murder. :) Poppa Capp was potentially a victim of Brown Jenkins, not necessarily the mastermind, but I think Carter wasn't taking the chance. Magery of any sort has been pretty powerful so far and he's not a frontline guy.

I don't think there was a risk of misjudging the animals, though. Not with Bill rolling a Lore of 4 with a bevy of stunts for certain specializations (demons, cryptids, etc.).
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on September 26, 2013, 03:52:31 PM
We played 2 weeks ago and the gang went up against Magog in Scott and Clay's mental institution.

Session 14 - Welcome Home (Sanitarium)

Who was there? Scott, Carter, Clay, Bill, and Ajaz.
Reward: +1 skill point (max is still +4, must justify advance with relevant aspect).

Leonard State Hospital, Kansas
Raymond McKee opened his eyes. The thing wearing his face was still there.

“I’m still here, Ray,” the thing said. “The time for that is past. You can’t just wish me away anymore.”

McKee stared, his pupils dilated from scrunching up his eyes, from the meds, from the fear. “But look at what you’ve done! You’re insane!”

“Insane? Look at where we are, Ray!” the thing replied. “And you mean look at what we’ve done. Just think about all the good work still to come.”

“No,” Ray managed. “I won’t let you. I’ll stop you.”

The thing wearing his face was still smiling - Ray hadn’t seen his own smile for a while now. “You can try, but it won’t work. Not with the meds they’ve got you on.”

“I can stop you,” McKee answered. Steel was in his eyes now, and Ray knew he had hit upon the answer by the flash of panic in the thing’s face.

“Now hold on, Ray, uh, um, think of… think of all you have to live for!” the thing tried. “Don’t do anything we’ll both regret-”

Ray was up off his bed in an instant. He had the thing against the wall, surprised at how easy it was. He slammed his elbow into the thing’s face - his face. He dipped his hand into its pocket and came out with the boxcutter. The blade slid up his arm easily. Ray fell back, shocked at the spray, the red, the pain.

“No!!!” The thing fell to its knees in time with McKee’s slump. It reached for Ray, but it was too late. It stared until Ray stopped breathing. Then it got up, picked up the crimson boxcutter, and turned away.

“Sucker,” it said.

OPENING TITLE! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Dfo4zDduI)
48 hours earlier, the Hacienda Courts Motel, outside Stillwater, OK - The gang had put some distance between themselves and Louisiana since the incident with the cryptids, and were finishing up a nutritious brunch of beer, beef jerky, BBQ, and gas station sushi when the phrase “vampire-like slayings” from the background television caught their attention.

“...The three murders happened last night at Leonard State Hospital, the largest mental health facility here in Kansas,” the reporter carried on. What she said about bodies drained of blood would have been enough to get the hunters out of their motel room, but then Carter saw someone in the background of the cameraman’s field of view, someone who put Leonard State at the top of their to-do list. Tannhauser  (http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01201/vinnie-jones-460_1201893c.jpg)was one of Pantagruel’s henchmen, the only other denarian the Crowley-Lampkin CEO had under his thumb, and there he was, accidentally photobombing a newscast while wearing a rumpled detective’s coat with a shiny fake badge.

Welcome Home
The four-hour drive to Kansas passed all to quickly for Scott and Clay. See, Leonard State wasn’t just any asylum - they had been patients there, until they’d tossed a White Court orderly out of a third-story window and escaped. Speculation was rampant as to what could have killed the inmates the previous night, but the group quickly decided to prioritize Tannhauser. No, not just prioritize him, they decided they would capture him. He might know what was behind the killings, but beyond that, he was in tight with their nemesis, the denarian Pantagruel. All this cross-country driving, chasing down outdated intel that Black Court vampire sold them in exchange for his miserable char-broiled life (at the end of session 11)? It had gotten them no closer to Pantagruel. It was time they went out and got some fresh information.

Leonard State was a media circus (aspect!) and the site of an active investigation (also an aspect!). The campus was swarming with news vans and cops. The good news was that it was a huge campus, containing a correctional facility, a juvenile facility, a voluntary psychiatric hospital, and two buildings housing Leonard’s sexual predator treatment program, in addition to all the administrative buildings and housing needed to run the place (“Largest Asylum in Kansas” and “We Have All Kinds Here”, also aspects!). The gang parked their bikes on the outskirts and figured they should split up to case the joint.

Carter and Ajaz, disguised as feds, recruited April McBeal, a local news anchor, to hunt down Tannhauser, ironically claiming that he was impersonating a federal agent. Meanwhile, Bill downed a mixture of powdered Viagra, a vampire knucklebone, and NyQuil, set a dreamcatcher up on his handlebars, and laid down next to his bike for a nap. When he awoke, the ritual would fire and Bill would be able to see supernatural influences.

Scott and Clay marveled at Bill’s investigative acumen (“I think he just wants to take a nap”), then did some literal digging for info about the hospital since they’d been involuntary guests there. They discovered the aspect “Underfunded and Understaffed”, but most importantly they learned that the warden had been murdered just hours before! He probably died while they were driving north to Kansas. It explained the ridiculous level of active police officers and news cameras. A little bit of crackerjack-box badge work and some practiced Menace rolls found a talkative orderly on a smoke break who explained the warden wasn’t drained of blood like the first three vics. Nope, Warden Hallflower was skinned, then that skin was hung up in his closet, complete with a zipper sewn into the back. Okay, probably not a vampire then.

Bill woke up with a raging old man boner (we are the classiest gamers), a thick NyQuil fog, and the temporary ability to see lines and clouds of supernatural currents. He picked out Tannhauser’s footprints right away - the human shoes were completely enveloped by huge primate footprints, and Bill guessed right away that Tannhauser was carting the fallen angel Magog around in his head. Bill also discerned clouds and trails of some other entity’s travel about the campus. Tannhauser was definitely not the only beastie walking around here.

Just then, April McBeal (and her yellow jumpsuit) called Ajaz. “That guy you were looking for? He just went into the inpatient hospital,” she said. I immediately followed the info with a compel: “I’ll meet you there.” Potential hostage, collateral damage, and media attention all rolled into one!

Stone Cold Crazy
The gang - at this point comprised of 2 faux feds, 3 bikers, a reporter and her cameraman - headed into Leonard’s Psychiatric Services building (“More Hospital Than Prison”, “Voluntary Admittance”, “Aura of Fear”) and immediately came to a halt in front of a metal detector overseen by an orderly and one of the asylum guards.

Everyone was packing weaponry (maybe even April and her cameraman). It was at this point that Scott simply charged through the metal detector, taking a chance on the hospital’s aspect of “Underfunded and Understaffed”. Meanwhile, I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne: “Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.” Okay, not really. I did remember my John Rogers, more specifically Crimeworld, and how it speaks about failing forward, letting one player take on more trouble to get the rest of the team through the obstacle. This was a picture perfect example of that, and it wasn’t even a heist! So Scott led the orderly and the guard away while everyone else simply walked around the metal detector and into the building, following Tannhauser’s footprints.

Scott lost the foot chase contest but completely dominated the hand-to-hand contest that followed. He was just leaving the vacant room where he’d stashed his defeated foes when the last thing he wanted to have happen happened.

“Scott? Scott! What are you doing back here, man?!” Someone recognized him.

“Uh, hey, um.. Zach!” Scott replied. We ran with that, so a Zach Gallifanakis-alike in bathrobe and slippers led a group of eight pajama-clad patients down the hallway. There were awkward hugs. Zach knew Scott would stop whoever was killing the patients, just like before when he stopped the bad dreams (Zach’s final rationalization of the White Court attacks from years before). After the session, this would become something of an accidental emotional gut punch. In the here and now, however, Scott told Zach to keep his presence a secret, which Zach totally promised to do. He and the patients cut it short then; they wanted their meds and Scott wanted to get back to the group.

Off-screen, Zach totally forgot all about keeping Scott’s secret once he got to the pharmacy. The recognition was a compel, after all. That led to Tannhauser starting to look for the hunters on the hospital security cameras. He found them standing outside a patient’s room he had stopped by earlier - Raymond McKee.

"I’m Your Dream, Make You Real"
Tannhauser’s phantom footprints led the hunters into Ray’s room before the prints continued elsewhere down the corridor. McKee looked up as the motley entourage entered. Ray was in his mid-20s, but with sunken, haggard eyes. He tried to shove the old book he was reading under his pillow but Clay was too fast. He handed the tome to Bill, who recognized it. Bill didn’t just know the title, he recognized the actual specific copy of the book. Pantagruel had read it back when Bill was host to the denarian. This was Pantagruel’s book, and it was all about tulpas, thoughtforms brought to life from nothing more than the right kind of meditation and imagination.

Normally the gang doesn’t hold back with the truth about monsters, but this time Clay urged them to tread carefully. He figured that the tulpa had killed those 3 patients and the warden, and that if Ray believed in the tulpa, they could maybe get him to disbelieve in it. So Bill and Clay went at Ray with their best MiB-style rationales, while Carter and Ajaz lent an air of legitimacy via their stolen badges. They got Ray doubting himself (easy enough to do in a psych ward), then got the book from him. Clay hit the nail on the head one more time as he realized the tulpa’s murders were a bizarre form of self-preservation: the media circus and the sensational murders, coupled with the lack of rational thought you get at a mental hospital would all fuel the tulpa’s existence beyond Ray’s own belief. How do you kill something that exists because you believe in it? The simple fact that the gang believed in the tulpa enough to try to kill it was enough for it to survive their attempts.

Battery
Scott rejoined the group then, walking fast and furtively down the hallway. The gang was (mostly) glad he hadn’t been put back in a padded cell.

Then Tannhauser turned the corner, putting a stop to the chicken-egg problem posed by the tulpa. Scott’s compels had come home to roost, and as Tannhauser’s form ripped and stretched into the horned demon ape Magog, the players realized the tulpa was about to get a whole lot more belief. April McBeal pointed her slack-jawed cameraman at the denarian and shouted, “Are you getting that?!”

Here’s the stats I used for Magog/Tannhauser (http://dontrollaone.com/files/dresdenatural/charsheet/29c74a06-458e-4889-459a-444a497841fe). The gang had learned well the lessons that Roland Tembo’s ghost had taught them (in session 12); everyone opened with a barrage of Create Advantage actions, either to aid their impending defense or to pass to the PCs brave enough or dumb enough to take on the evil monkey. Scott was feeling a bit of both, but Magog defended with style and casually knocked the holy ex-con to the floor. He followed up with a massive attack that left Scott “Pummeled” and with half the gang’s accumulated free invocations burned already just to get Magog’s strike down to a Moderate consequence.

They hit back hard, but they didn’t want any gunfire because that would draw the police down on them. Bill barred the hallway doors just in case any hospital staff wandered towards the fight, then started chalking a circle around the melee. Clay just charged the damn dirty ape, trying to keep him off balance so Scott could get back in the battle and use his Holy Touch. Ajaz wrapped Magog with his whip, refusing a compel to set his whip - and the building - on fire. Carter tried some deceit; he drew his (perfectly normal, albeit suppressed) pistol and shouted “I’ve got something just for you!”, trying to trick Magog into thinking the thing was loaded with holy relic bullets or something.

It all worked out pretty well. They were keeping Magog to only a boost here or there, until he used one of his stunts to pull down the ceiling on them, then used two free invocations to grab Ajaz and slam him into the ceiling and floor, dislocating his shoulder. It was a good plan, but Ajaz was saved by a -3 on Magog’s dice, only taking 5 stress for his troubles. It could have been a lot worse.

And it got worse - for Magog. Scott reached up and blessed the broken water pipes, and suddenly Magog was howling in pain under a torrent of surprise holy water. They had used a similar trick in Kansas City on the Red Court, and I ruled it the same way here. Any attack would negate Magog’s supernatural defenses now, so Carter stopped threatening his former coworker and shot him in the head. It didn’t kill Magog, because most of the time you’d need more than a 9mm to stop even a mundane gorilla, but it put the fear of God and Glock into the demon. Clay added injury to insult with an uppercut that left a demonic canine tooth stuck in the drop ceiling.

Even a fallen angel can make mistakes. Magog ran, bursting through Bill’s circle with that charging bowshock thing of his, then tearing through the hospital wall out into twilight. So much for keeping the police out of it.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG campaign
Post by: admiralducksauce on September 26, 2013, 03:53:09 PM
Some Kind of Monster
The conflict turned into a chase as Magog rampaged through another wing of the hospital, trying to block the hunters’ pursuit with rubble. Clay pounded after the denarian, while everyone else got to their bikes. Bill climbed on Carter’s - he was done with this “not shooting people” nonsense and he wanted a stable firing platform.

Magog left patients, staff, news crews, and police staring in his wake. The gang roared after the denarian and the cops sprang into action a few desperate moments later. Leonard State Hospital was surrounded by miles upon miles of flat farmland broken up by right-angle roads as straight and even as graph paper. There was no place for him to hide out there, so he went for the maximum security SSP building. At the very least he could buy some time to recover by unleashing violent lunatics on the crowd and seeking asylum (ahem) within. He powered through the police barricades, shrugging off incoming fire and tossing squad cars and their occupants aside like a living avatar of Michael Bayesian mayhem.

It was the best plan the deranged monkey could manage, and he nearly got away with it, besting half the group early on in the contest and pulling a third victory against everyone else but Scott just as he reached the outer wall to the prison loading dock. Scott had one chance, and he burned fate points to put his “Hard to Start, Hard to Stop” bike down hard on the deck, powersliding it into Magog’s legs and sending the beast to the asphalt. Scott beat the demon in a Speed roll next, grabbed the opportunity, and punched the thing right in its ugly face. Magog pummeled the parking lot into craters but Scott was (just barely, thanks to a free tag on Magog’s “Holy Crap It’s a Concussion”) too fast for the ape. Then Bill and Carter rounded the retaining wall and Bill blew out Magog’s knee with a well-aimed pistol shot. Magog was Taken Out, and Clay, Scott, and Ajaz beat the beast until he shifted back into a bloodied and unconscious Tannhauser.

The Frayed Ends of Sanity
Only seconds had passed, but the police would be quick to regroup and then everyone would be going to jail. Clay hijacked a Hostess truck from the loading dock while Bill and Ajaz loaded Tannhauser into the back. Scott and Carter led the way on their bikes, and the rolling interrogation room charged forth into moonlit Kansas farmland, four squad cars right on their heels with the promise of more to come if they didn’t lose them quickly.

Carter and Scott split up, drawing off three of the police cruisers. We cut back and forth between Carter’s chase (a contest), Scott’s pursuit (also a contest), Clay’s contest against the lone remaining trooper, and the conflict between Tannhauser, Bill, and Ajaz in the back of the truck.

Scott got the upper hand early on, using his bike’s superior acceleration to simply outdistance the cruiser on the straight heartland roads. The cop car had the advantage in top speed, though, and with nowhere to go, Scott saw his lead eaten bit by bit by the cruiser’s relentless acceleration. It was neck and neck (both sides had 2 accumulated victories) until Scott saw a tractor’s lights up ahead. Scott rolled Balls, playing a deadly game of chicken. The startled farmer swerved, blocking the entire road. The trooper braked, skidded, turned, and caromed off the tractor, rolling to a wreckage-strewn halt in the cornfield.

Carter was a slightly better driver than Scott this time, and was able to simply outpace one of the police cars behind him. Then Carter got some distance, shut off his headlights, and turned down a side road while the cruiser was trying (and failing) to Create an Advantage around calling in backup. It was a bad time to lose a roll by more than 3 points, and the cruiser sped by Carter’s hiding place.

Meanwhile, Clay was having a weird stuttering chase with his own state trooper. With no hope of outrunning the cruiser, Clay tried time and again to lure the cop close enough to run him off the road. The trooper wasn’t falling for it, but in turn his backup had been drawn off by Scott and Carter. He was content simply following the Hostess truck and waiting for a helicopter and more cruisers. That’s when Clay broke the vehicular siege by slowing down again as the two vehicles drew close on a turn. Instead of gunning the diesel’s engine, Clay stopped entirely. The cruiser reacted too slowly, and stopped just short of the truck. Clay grinned and backed right into the police car before the trooper could move. The Hostess truck happily rumbled off, trailing bits of cruiser off its rusty black rear bumper.

Inside the truck, Ajaz had restrained Tannhauser and Bill had covered the interior with wards. The denarian came around and of course immediately tried to break free of his physical and metaphysical bonds. Bill had been host to Pantagruel once; his Lore was more than capable of containing Tannhauser. It was quickly apparent that Tannhauser’s best defense skill was Balls when Ajaz opened with your standard “choke the shit out ‘em with a chain” Menace attempt. His Princess Leia antics had little effect on the denarian; Tannhauser figured they wanted something from him, else they’d have chopped him up and been done with it. His own Menace rolls left something to be desired as well. A busted knee, head wound, and multiple lacerations and contusions doesn’t make for an intimidating figure, especially when you’re talking to the people who gave you those wounds.

Clay suggested (yelling from the cab) that they try targeting his Wits - they’d have to be lower. And they were, although only by a single point. The Balls was more Magog than Tannhauser, while the Wits was more Tannhauser than Magog, but it was still better than trying to torture or intimidate their way to victory, especially since everyone was more or less out of fate points.

Bill got the first hooks into Tannhauser by getting him to reconsider his loyalty to Pantagruel. Magog and Tannhauser would forever be simple stooges to Pantagruel’s ambition, ready to be tossed aside as soon as he got whatever he wanted from them. That dealt the first consequence, “Moment of Indecision”, to Tannhauser, which Ajaz kind of squandered by falling back into intimidation. I knew he was trying to target Wits, but everything Ajaz said just came out more appropriate for a Menace roll, and Tannhauser’s superior resistance in that arena cost Bill and Ajaz some good arguments shut down by beefy defenses. Still, they were averaging a boost every exchange to invoke for free, and eventually Bill widened Tannhauser’s mental cracks to where the Crowley-Lampkin employee fixated on screwing over Pantagruel before he met his fate. He knew he couldn’t realistically get Bill and Ajaz, not in his condition (although he tried breaking through the wards a few more times and came close), and he had no illusions about living through the Hostess truck road trip, but Tannhauser could still take Pantagruel down with him. As Carter and Scott rejoined their comrades at a busy gas station down the road, Tannhauser began to talk. Security codes for Crowley-Lampkin’s Chicago office, the company’s disposition of secretive treasure hunters, its private security contractors, everything the gang could use to take down Pantagruel and keep him down for a long time.

Crash Course in Brain Surgery
The final question was laid bare: What should they do with Tannhauser? He was a bastard even as a human and they didn’t want to leave him with his coin. Bill had done enough; he left the truck and the decision in his friends’ hands. It came down to Clay in favor of killing the host with the trinitite knife to retrieve the coin, and Scott, whose player I think wanted to kill Tannhauser but who accepted a compel on “Driven by Redemption”. Everyone deserves a second (or third) chance, even a nasty fucker like Tannhauser. Scott laid his holy touch upon the denarian. The demonic screams rocked the truck but Tannhauser relented, his denarius rolling gently to a stop next to a landslide of toppled Twinkies.

Nobody touched the coin, because Clay and Scott each had a fate point left to refuse the inevitable compel. That was an excellent bit of tactics. They scooped it up safely and we left the gang planning their biggest hunt yet: Crowley-Lampkin’s home offices in Chicago!

Fade to Black
What about the tulpa? Unfortunately, the session’s events resulted in too many people seeing too much weird shit with too many chances for it to be attributed to the tulpa. The malevolent thoughtform would kill three more people in increasingly impossible ways (removing hands and feet and hiding them in different locked rooms, or filling the victim with stillborn eight-eyed ectoplasmic crows), culminating in Ray McKee’s apparent suicide. With Ray gone, the tulpa’s power was reduced, but it had enough momentum from the rumors circulating the institution that it continued to exist beyond its creator. The gang surmised that they could potentially kill it once enough time had passed and everyone believed it was just a ghost. At that point, it would literally be a ghost, and the PCs could pass the case onto someone else to handle, lying about the entity’s true origins lest the knowledge it was a rogue tulpa taint the attempts to destroy it. So, not a complete victory, but early on in the session the players were clear about making Tannhauser their priority, and they definitely held to that.

The tulpa itself was a trap. Pantagruel simply had one of his employees read his old book. Poor Ray managed to actually make a tulpa, so of course he’s seeing things. Oh no! He needs help! So Pantagruel sticks him in the same asylum Scott and Clay had stayed in, the tulpa’s malevolent aspects take hold, and you have murders. Tannhauser’s there to scoop up the PCs when they inevitably show up. It’s a bit Cobra Commander in its complexity, I admit, and ultimately that whole rationale didn’t matter so I’m glad I didn’t have to hang more of the plot off of it.

We all felt Tannhauser/Magog was plenty tough. Good defensive skills all around, tough even with his vulnerability in play, and able to dish out pretty heinous damage. What Tannhauser should have done was call the real cops and tried to get the PCs arrested. But he’s a thug, and his denarian form is even more of a thug, so he just waded in. The chase contests were suitably light - I still am tinkering with some ideas for more involved chases, but for what the Magog chase and subsequent police chase were supposed to be, both in narrative importance as well as game time, the normal contest rules were fine.

The players were smart, exposing only those characters who had fate points left to the denarius. Once they had it safely away, they couldn’t agree on whether to keep it with them (so they knew where it was and thus would be dead before someone got to it), bury it ala Harry Dresden, or sink it off the Florida coast or something. I think I might be able to force them to keep it with them by making Tannhauser’s information very time-sensitive. Like, they’ve got to hit Chicago right now or Pantagruel’s going to figure out that his tulpa trap went south. He probably will arrive at that conclusion anyway because you have to assume he’d be checking in with his goons, but if the gang hits him fast maybe the codes they got from Tannhauser would still work. Or they could stop and plan and prepare and deal with a harder nut to crack. I think it’s an interesting choice.
Title: Re: Highway to Hell - A Cityless DFRPG/Core campaign
Post by: Sanctaphrax on September 27, 2013, 01:50:08 AM
Very nice.