At the Blood For Sex, the lights were on and the music was off. The staff used the storm as an excuse to close the place, and were doing all the cleaning they couldn't do by blacklight. The Kimeras asked if they could wait out the storm in the club. The employees said that was fine, they felt safer with the gang around. They did warn the Kimeras that the basement might flood if the storm drains to the harbor overflowed. The Kimeras barred all the doors to the dungeon from the club floor.
This was a wise decision. The sound of rushing water was soon audible from the tunnels beyond. Water trickled in under the doors, then spurted as the pressure on the other side increased. Johan cast Hold Portal on the largest door to keep it sealed, and the Kimeras hauled the armored, gold plated skeletons up the stairs to the surface. Like the demon with his hand stuck in the pickle jar, their greed proved their undoing. The other doors burst open and the basement flooded. Only Cobb, who had advised against recovering the statues, was able to escape. The rest had to swim for it.
Tristan, Zeke and Devin swam to the stairs without incident. Johan put on his bear skin to improve his swimming prowess. This delay left him vulnerable to an attack from underwater. An enormous chimera with crab, goat, shark and toad features broke the surface and attacked him with tooth and claw. He responded with tooth and claw, pinning the beast. Cultists beneath the surface of the water ineffectually attacked the bear with a sleep spell, and used healing magic to knit the chimera's wounds. Devin leapt down the stairs and struck the chimera, but fell in the water as a result. He saw the electrical signature something very large underwater, trapped on the other side of the large door that Johan sealed.
The cultists attacked Devin and Bear-Johan with harpoons. One of the iron points glanced off Devin's oft abused skull, knocking him unconscious. Johan squeezed the Chimera to death and it polymorphed back into a dead person. The swimming cultists speared Johan en masse and destroyed his magic bearskin. Cobb leapt into the raging waters and stopped a cultist from dragging the unconscious Devin underwater. Tristan and Zeke laid down cover fire as the doctor and mystic struggled to drag Devin back to shore.
(Was I "rolling to failure" by making the players roll Athletics when they wanted to move in the water? Maybe, but that's the entire reason the cultists flooded the basement. They could move freely in the water, and the Kimeras couldn't)
Zeke and Johan passed out as a sleep spell washed over them, but Cobb resisted. He shook his comrades awake and kept swimming. Johan, Cobb and Devin reached the shore, pierced by a dozen harpoon wounds. They hauled the unconscious Devin up the stairs as fast as they could go. The cultists didn't chase them. They were busy unlocking the sealed door in the flooded basement.
(Each instance of the sleep spell affects a maximum of 2D8 hit dice. I thought players had Level*2 HD because of how flesh and grit work, but they actually have Level+1 HD. This means that a single sleep spell can affect even more PCs than I thought. The other side is, it's easier to wake up a slept player than I thought, and should probably just have been automatic. The spell description says a sudden change of temperature is enough to do it, which the raging water definitely counts as)
The Kimeras got a single round to prepare. Cobb stopped Devin from bleeding out. Zeke and Tristan took up defensive positions.
The surviving cultists came charging up the stairs. An aboleth burst through the floor of the club.
Zeke unleashed a volley of covering fire. Between that and Tristan's shotgun, they finished off the remaining novice cultists, leaving only the more experienced fish worshippers. The Leviathan screamed obscenities and lashed out with its tentacles, slapping everyone with mysterious ooze and tearing Tristan's leg off with a flay spell.
(The aboleth has a complicated action economy. It gets four tentacle attacks per turn, and can substitute any of those attacks for a spell from its first spell list. It can also substitute from a second, more dangerous spell list, but only once per turn. The spell lists are small and focused enough that it doesn't cause the Pathfinder problem you usually get with casters, but extremely dangerous nonetheless. A good design overall)
Cobb and the injured Tristan dragged the unconscious Devin into the street. Zeke tossed a fireball at the aboleth, filling the air with slimy steam as its outer layer of protective mucous burned off. He used a lower level spell slot to do so, casting dangerously. The miscast gave him a permanent halo of fire above his head, like the Crown of the Apocalypse set on the brow of the Destroyer Anung Un Rama. by Johan stepped forward and struck the aboleth with his flail of mutilation. The blow gave it brain damage, but didn't incapacitate it.
(The flail of mutilation inflicts a Horrible Wounds Table result on every hit. Some of the results knock you out but don't cripple you. Some of the results cripple you but don't knock you out. The former is great when fighting NPCs. The latter is unhelpful, because permanent injuries don't stop someone from trying to kill you right now. Brain damage gives a -3 to D20 rolls and -1 to D6 rolls, neither of which put down an angry spellcaster!)
The aboleth used another flay spell to tear Zeke to shreds, killing him instantly. It cast three command spells and ordered Johan to:
- Toss his weapon
- Drop to his knees
- Raise his hands
Johan tossed the flail out the door, but didn't drop. He wouldn't kneel for a fucking squid.
Then the surviving cultists cast sleep again and he blacked out.
Devin regained consciousness. He unfolded his wings and flew up to the roof of a nearby building. He cast Levitate on Cobb and Tristan. Cobb stopped all their various bleeding. The rain let up a little. A brace of police vehicles and a black Ford Taurus pulled up to the Blood For Sex. Armed and armored officers rushed into the club, followed by Agent Karla and the Masked Man of the Men in Black. They heard shots inside.
Tristan's phone rang.
It was Red Cap mama. She didn't have long to talk. She apologized for not accepting the Kimeras' help. It was stupid, and now she was going to leave her babies all alone because of it. Now it was up to the Kimeras to lead the family. The engagement was still on, she was going to make the calls. Tell her kids that mom loved them. Then she hung up.
The cops came back out of the club. The CSI dicks showed up to take custody of the scene. The EMTs showed up to cart away the bodies. Johan wasn't among them. The MIBs came out, completely soaked from playing in the flooded basement. The three remaining Kimeras waited on the roof in the freezing rain until the heat died down. They couldn't go home, Cobb's lab would be crawling with cops. So they called Eileen and begged to stay at her place.
A day later, Johan woke up. He was underwater, in a cistern. The aboleth spoke to him in a psychic voice. It had calmed down a lot in the intervening period. It told him he was going to work for it.
He used the magical crab claw grafted to his third arm to cast Time Stop before it could gease him.
(The spell is spelled "Gease" everywhere in the book EXCEPT the spell list, where it's "Geas", yet another typo that makes ctrl-fing through the book a pain)
He climbed out of the cistern as fast as possible, before time started up again. He was naked and alone in a sewer chamber he didn't recognize. He had a vague idea of where he was. He ran west, hoping he was correct.
He hopped, swam and crawled through a few rooms full of pale white weeds, growing in the corpse light of cave fungus. He floundered through a swarm of giant leeches, which left him covered in giant bite marks. He ran West into a well-lit bomb shelter. He recognized this area. The Kimeras had turned the power on months ago. He knew he'd left a gun in one of the fuel drums and went to find it.
There was a morlock snuffling around the fuel room. He decided against grabbing the gun and tossed an empty jerrycan to distract it. He ran for the exit. Just a few rooms to the stairs that led up to Vinculum...
The chamber beneath the jazz club was dark. Something snuffled and shuffled in the darkness around him. A morlock pressed the point of a knapped blade to the back of his neck. It recognized him as a Kimera. It demanded to know what he was doing in the dungeon. It smelled the stink of aboleth slime, and was ready to slash his throat if he worked for the fish. Johan convinced it that he had escaped before the aboleth could enslave him. The morlock laughed. Then he was alone again.
Johan climbed the stairs to the abandoned club. There was just enough light coming through the windows to see the exit. He crept out of the backroom and cut his foot on the broken glass littering the floor. He heard something in the bar area. A creature muttering to itself over the bottles.
It was Sudayev, the Domovoi the Kimeras found a home for two months ago.
He hugged Johan. The feds had taken Ezzy away when they shut the place down, leaving him all alone in the dark. He was happy to see a friend again. Johan asked him if he could get a phone. Sudayev nodded and disappeared out the window.
Johan waited in the dark. A pair of police officers came in. He hid behind the bar counter. They went in the back and rummaged around with the kegs. Came out with a pistol in a plastic bag, dripping with spoiled beer. Left the way they'd came.
Sudayev brought Johan a cell phone. He called Liza, the kid he'd sent to watch over the MIB safehouses. She didn't have any updates for him, nobody in or out. He asked her to bring clothes and a pair of shoes to the alley behind Vinculum. He couldn't pay her on delivery because he'd lost his wallet. She agreed and hung up.
After another hour in the dark, she showed up with a brand new Adidas track suit that would have made any gopnik weep tears of pure vodka. He reached out and took it through the backdoor. He tried to change inside, but she pushed her way past and went straight to the bar before he could get the pants on.
Johan went outside in his 200 dollar tracksuit and new sneakers and phoned the Kimeras. In the sunlight, he noticed his skin was transparent. And starting to peel off in sheets. He'd been infected with aboleth mucous. He dove into a puddle and submerged himself before it sloughed off completely. The Domovoi picked up the phone and told the Kimeras to bring a wheelbarrow of water.
They opted to fill up a wetsuit for him instead.
Since the first RPG I ever ran, six years ago, the same thing has held true: the players will side with the faction that first showed kindness to them, no matter how ill advised. But this is the most invested I've ever seen them get in their choice of horse. The players knew siding with the Red Caps against the police was stupid. They didn't care. Chaotic Evil trumps Lawful Good when Chaotic Evil is your friend and Lawful Good is indifferent or hostile.
This adventure went long enough for the Mystic to become competitive with Occultist. If the pressure is always on, so that the Occultist uses all their spell slots and doesn't have the ten minutes to spend casting spells for free, the Mystic has a real advantage.
This was the third character death I've had in this game. I rolled up the detailed stats for the Leviathan cult a month ago and they had aboleths as their "associated NPC". The players tore through the other factions through a mixture of superior firepower and smart alliances, but the Leviathan cult held back until the hotel fight a couple weeks ago. The Kimeras impressed them, and unlike the Ursus cult, they didn't hold back on the counterattack.
I asked the players if they wanted to cut their losses and end it here. The verdict was unanimous: One more session in Coal City.
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