I’ve been running a modern day horror/crime campaign with GURPS 4e. This campaign will be realistic in rules, but NOT “gritty realistic”. It won’t use combat maps. It might use simplified combat rules (simplified range, most likely) just to speed up combat.
A little rules change; as per Powers page 108, certain abilities like Luck and Serendipity that operate on real time will instead use game-time cooldowns. For Luck advantage, each use per real-time hour instead equals uses per in-game day (i.e. Ridiculous Luck has six uses per day). Advantages that have uses per session are uses per in-game week instead.
Character Creation: 150-point characters, limited to -50 points in Disadvantages, up to 5 quirks. Nothing cinematic, exotic or magical without GM permission. You’re generally all criminals or soon-to-be-criminals, your background may be former military, former law enforcement, former intelligence or whatever. TL 8 Earth – more or less the same Languages and Cultures as Real Life. No Magery, but Alchemy is allowed. 80% of your starting cash is tied in your living standard, the remaining 20% buys your personal gear.
It is set in the fictional city of Goodberry, Florida, a hot spot of unnatural activity, a hive of amatuer urban warfare, and your home. A major economic collapse has caused the American federal government to dissolve, and now the state governemnts and whatever remains of the national agencies are left to contain the chaos. The world is left high and dry, the poor are abandoned, the rich have gotten ever more depraved, and crime in every strata of society is up. The authentically unnatural exists in a dangerous black market, where organised criminals traffic in alchemical formularies and relics alongside narcotics and weapons. Hidden from the public eye, various gangs, cults and covens struggle for influence and resources in the dark tunnels beneath every city. And beneath that, stranger things lurk; inhuman creatures turn their cold gaze on the mortals who intrude on their subterranean realm. The current situation with the underground is shaky but profitable. The public is not aware of the Underground. The news only reports on it in the vaguest terms, if at all. They may be aware that a bunch of bizarre criminal conspiracies are afoot, but their true nature is virtually unknown. The state government occasionally interferes in the underground. Like the Eye of Sauron, it’s extremely deadly once it spots you but can be evaded with effort.
The first session had the gang take their first job; another criminal organisation burned down a building, and there were three witnesses. The party was tasked with shutting them up. One of the witnesses was a gas station cashier. The party faceman simply came in as a customer, started chatting him up with small talk, steered to the conversation to the arson, and subtly convinced him not to go to the cops. The second witness, an accountant, was similiarly dealt with – the faceman approached at a nightclub and charmed her into silence. The third witness, a delivery van driver, didn’t get off so lucky – the party’s thief snuck a bomb into his van. They blew him up on the highway. Mission complete, the gang gets paid.
But that was only half the session. As the gang were going home through the streets, a sudden blackout hit the town. Riots and looting soon followed – some of the party joined in, stealing stuff from a jewelry store and smashing open a car to make off with the stereo. They then cheesed it before the cops showed up. The lights came on as the gang walked through the park. The gang ran into a bunch of weirdos in robes beating men with baseball bats.
They escaped back to the subway and rode away. The first session thus ended.
The second session began with the gang picking up another job for union organisers; the construction foreman wants guns smuggled to the homes of certain union members, hidden caches in worksites, and personal gear for his own squads of protectors/activists – all of which are going to be watched by mercenary strikebreakers. Rifles and shotguns needed, discrete handguns and SMGs are also welcome.
The party’s faceman and leader both worked the streets to make contact with a weapon dealer. They eventually find what they’re looking for with a mobster and a smuggler – they arrange the order, but they have to deliver the loads to the right spots themselves.
The party manages to get into the worksite with the weapons, and hide the weapons in the break room away from the security. The party must then supply union members being watched with personal weapons without getting seen by private detectives…The party disguised themselves as delivery men and handed over the goods without suspicion. The foremen takes the rest fo the guns himself and distributes them to his trusted henchmen personally. Mission accomplished. The gang gets paid.
While driving away from the completed job and towards the Harrowed Hearts Club, the party hears news on the radio that a police standoff with an armed gunman and a high-stakes bank robbery is happening – and then a bunch of kids chased by a monster run out in front of them!
The gang leader fires at the monster, but only chips a little off it! The faceman driving the car slams right into it, hoping to run it over. The thing climbs onto the hood of the car, trying to smash through the windshield and claw at them.
“This is no ordinary crackhead”
She continues to shoot at it as the driver forces the monster off the hood and smashes it onto the road, seemingly killing it…But then it stands up!
The gangleader grabs the driver’s pistol and shoots it another 5 times, causing it to fall over!
Another hit-and-run by the faceman seems to finish it off, and the leader unloads the rest of the pistol into it. They examine the dead creature, but have no idea what it is. The driver considers looking into the abandoned house where it came from, but the leader is very much against the idea.
The driver ignore her and checks out the place, and finds dead bodies and a strange jet black skull statue covered in blood. He picks it up…and shows it to his fellow ganger outside.
Session 2 over.
Next session, the party decided to hunt a bounty – a stick-up man and his crew have been robbing stash houses. The party goes to the Harrowed Hearts Club to do some legwork.
The stick-up man is named George Wainwright.
The party is informed by gossip that a fellow involved in the drug trade who might know where they can find Wainwright is, can be found gambling in a back room of the club. The faceman pays $100 to get in, sticks up another $1000 to join the poker game. Andrew the drug fence reveals Wainwright has gone into hiding, the faceman loses the poker hand hard. Then another hand, losing another $1000. Andrew takes pity on him, and just offers $1000 for the info. He accepts.
Andrew tells the faceman that Wainwright has set up a gang stronghold in the depths of the undercity. He fully expects the party will die in the attempt to claim the bounty.
The party goes to Samuel Luke Station and enters the undercity via unconstructed sections. The party goes west to a buried ruin. The party then went north…but almost got stopped by strange small monsters! The monsters don’t immediately attack, so the party flees north to another buried ruin. The party then travels east to a huge underground club.
The gang meets a new member in the club, but the new member (a Japanese alchemist) spots some Enemy gangsters in the crowd. She tries to blend in and avoid attention. The gangsters seem suspicious of her, but not immediately hostile. The faceman manages to intimidate them into backing off, saving her the trouble of a fight.
The party’s heavy weapons guy buys some drugs off the bartender.
The alchemist scans the crowd for any faces matching Wainwright’s crew and finds none. The faceman gossips at the bar and learns Wainwright’s men haven’t been here – they’ll have to go deeper into the underground to find their hideout.
He asks around more, and learns the hideout is to the south-west.
The gang heads north a difficult path to an entrance chamber. From there, they travel down a half-flooded tunnel west…and encounter an albino alligator. Lucky for them, the gator ignores them as they pass, and they make it to another part of the undercity. There, they are confronted by a man who asks them to state their business. The chambers are his home and where his extended family lives. He seems very strange, and confrontational, wanting them to leave ASAP.
The party decides to leave via the west passageway, a cramped and dirty tunnel that they occasionally have to crawl through. They eventually arrive at a plague pit. The exit very quickly through the south-east exit to the underground frontier. The room they arrive in has two sets of corpses, dead from violence. Searching the bodies, they find some stuff – a bag of mysterious white powder, 3 smartphones, sock full of quarters and sticking plasters. They explore the frontier further and go to another chamber, an empty boring room. They notice some loose bricks. Behind them is a stash of treasure; 5 gemstones, marble statue, stolen computers, $700 in counterfeit cash, a scroll of very vague prophecies, and diaries of historical occultists.
The next place they go to is a room that has been sealed by heavy hatches. The alchemist realizes that the warning signs around it warn of dangerous chemicals. The party’s heavy weapons guy takes a peek but sees only sickly yellow gas (probably Chlorine) seeping in from cracks in the floor.
The party checks out another area of the labyrinth, where corpses are impaled on spikes carved from living rock, and exits abound. The party goes south-west.
The gang arrives at an abandoned mine flooded with some kind of water hazard. They continue south-west.
They find another underground dance nightclub. They then go east to an entrance to the surface, and they travel back to the club to ask around…The party learns that the hideout is to the east and has many dubious entrances to it.
They eventually decide to go back to the frontier and take the dangerous passage there. It is completely pitch black, so the gang has to light their own way. They encounter two men standing guard in the dark, the gang spots them first.
The alchemist shoots one with a Sleep Potion paintball and he drops. The other bad guy doesn’t immediately notice that his buddy is KO’d, so combat doesn’t start immediately. The alchemist gets off another shot, but the guard resists the potion. He shrugs it off and avoids noticing his fainted buddy. The second shot by the alchemist does not faze him either, and it alerts him. Heavy wepaons giuy rips a clip on him, and the bad guy drops instantly as 6 bullets ventilate him. The gang recognises the sentries as members of Wainwright’s crew.
On the other end of the passageway is a shanty house constructed in the middle of a chamber, with a makeshift doctor’s station facing their entrance. Four guards are milling around here.
Heavy weapons guy ambushes a thug, but fails to kill him instantly. He slashes him again across the torso, injuring him brutally. The thug reliatates by shooting him, but does no damage.
Combat starts as steath fails.
The leader throws out a smoke grenade and stuns some guards, heavy weapons guy drops his knife and draws his pistol, the leader provides covering fire from an elevated position, the alchemist tries to help by shooting, the bad guys shoot at whoever they can but miss (except for one hit on heavy weapons guy), and the combat ends with the alchemist using a stun baton on the last ganger before heavy wepaons guy finishes him with a grapple-to-neckbreaker.
The party restructures their members as new ones catch up. The leader heals heavy weapons guy with the medical supplies. HWG takes a fully loaded .40 pistol and a spare full magazine off a dead robber. The leader looks around the hideout and finds a computer, a generator room, a “cigarettes” room with a heavy metal door, rafters above, large water pipes below and improvised living spaces.
HWG climbs up onto the rafters. The leader falls while climbing but takes no injury. The three party members on the ground get ready to breach the generator room door, while HWG takes up position above. HWG spies men in the room ready to attack. He readies his SMG to shoot one of the men. The three PCs stack up on the door, preparing to breach…
Combat starts as HWG opens fire upon the man with the pistol, killing him. The rest of the gang burst into the room, opening fire. A few more seconds of shooting later, all the bad guys are dead or KO’d by being shot. No injuries are taken by the party.
They finish off the survivors. (BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!) They examine the generator. They look at the computer in the room, and find useful data on the underground (and secret bank accounts and connections) to copy onto a disk to study later, they find details about the power system, they find notes about the machinery – it somehow (magically?) converts raw meat (including human flesh) into stacks of fresh cigarettes. It also details the hideout set-up including entries and exits.
They figure out Wainwright is in the machinery room. They plan to attack him multiple ways. They had two of their three climb the rafters and sneak up above the machinery room, while the third entered a large water pipe and swam through it to a quiet and dark corner of the machinery room where he wouldn’t be spotted. So far, so sneaky, the crew were expecting them to come through the door and were all ready to shoot them as they came through. Instead, one of the climbers dropped a smoke grenade on all their asses from above…
…and then the Partial Surprise rules screwed them over! Despite being the ambushers! The enemy crew boss was just that good, so the PCs lost the initiative roll and were stunned!
Uh-oh. Fortunately, the enemies were all coughing from the smoke, had no Aim bonus, didn’t spot the swimmer, the climbers were in darkness and above them…
So the grunts were shooting real crappy thanks to big negative modifiers. Even had critical misses now and then.
The fight still took 11 seconds/turns of mayhem.
The crew boss was the first to get hit bad enough to fall unconscious, ironically enough (he was wearing the best armour of the bad guys). The smoke grenade made the difference, as the flunkies and the bounty couldn’t fight back effectively despite the numbers and firepower advantage. They had a full auto AK and a Shotgunner, but didn’t notice the swimmer until it was too late – he was already in the shadows and they weren’t. Meanwhile, the climbers simply drew fire which was a waste of ammo from the bad guys because they were taking such massive penalties.
“It’s over, crackheads! We have the high ground!”
“Die, you fucking ceiling rats!”
— Negotiations in the nutshell
AK-47 guy lasted longer than I expected, as all the PCs concreted fire on him once the crew boss was out of the fight. The rest got slowly picked off. The PCs never took a single injury.
At the end of the fight, both sides had shot huge amounts of bullets – spent brass and holes everywhere. Bonuses for high rate of fire are very tempting. Lucky they didn’t hit any flammable fuel spilt on the ground or nothing.
The party leader then coup-de-grace’d the KO’d and cut off the head and hands of the bounty. Mission accomplished.
The party must deliver proof of their bounty to their fixer to claim the reward. First, they must make their way to an exit from the undercity. They discuss the cigarette machinery they discovered. The party’s alchemist examines it and takes note of its weird alchemical mechanisms. She takes the alchemical power supply from the machinery and a whiff of the fumes gives her some slightly mind-breaking…hallucinations…? She shrugs it off, though, and takes it for herself. HWG grabs 10 packs of the cigs and the 44M revolver Wainwright had. They douse the place in the flammable fuel and pile up the bodies for burning to cover their tracks. The leader takes the AK-47 off a dead thug. Finally, they lit it up and exited as the place burned down.
The gang decides to exit through a dark tunnel to the underground maze, where they can then go to an underground car park. Nothing bothers them on the way back. They leave the undercity peacefully.
+$200,000 for the whole gang when they hand in the head and hands of Wainwright.
The gang’s leader plans to start an organisation – she proposes the name “Queen’s Gambit”. HWG proposes “Gray Hand”. The leader spends $750 to pay a hacker to decrypt the stolen files. The players discuss starting an organisation for a long time. The alchemist analyses the alchemical fuel she got from the cigarette machine, and discovers it is a very rare and high quality alchemical ingredient – it counts as $2000 worth of ingredients for the whole tank. She also brews 6 Healing ointment elixirs.
As time passes during downtime:
The Union uses the smuggled weapons to resist strike breakers, killing all the mercenaries and plenty of corporate higher-ups, causing riots, the company’s downfall and then a police crackdown – the cops are decimated in the process, further ruining Goodberry’s law and order.
At the start of the next session (the 7th), the party, after establishing their org, decides to go after the cocaine stash they learned about from the stolen files for more money. They pinpoint the location as an abandoned amusement park on the outskirts of the city. Rumors say the decaying park is now host to gangs, hobos and monsters. However, the stash should be worth at least $350,000 (25 to 30 packages, weighing 25 lbs. in all) – if they can claim it.
When they arrive at the park, they find it in terrible shape. The ground at the entrance is soaked in huge puddles of blood. The party examines the blood, but can’t really pinpoint much detail about it other than it was a messy serial murder.
As the party journeys into the park, they notice graffiti on the buildings – symbols associated with the alchemical underground and gangs that mysteriously disappeared or were presumably wiped out. The party goes to search location 60 on the park’s map, it is a very overcast day, with dark gray clouds above. It is a very stormy season, so it would not surprise you if rain was on the way.
“Location 60” is what used to be a lunch bar with marble counters that served typical fast food and soft drinks. The party discovers a string of dead people lying around the place where the patrons sat at tables to eat. The corpses are days old, and look rather savaged and even…eaten…The party checks out the freezer in the back of the lunch bar. Inside, they find a half-eaten freshly dead man with the gore spread all across the freezer.
As they head out to the ballroom, a shot rings out and the gang’s shooter is hit in the torso for 30 injury! He survives but is severely hurt. He manages to stay conscious, too. Almost everyone else manages to stay calm despite the fright of seeing their ally get shot unexpectedly. The party thief is stunned by the sudden violence, but everyone else gets into cover. They then hear three more shots ring out – but none of them seem to hit anywhere near them. HWG is healed by 2 when the alchemist rubs elixir ointment on him.
The HWG takes out his sniper rifle and Aims it at the ferris wheel. He sees a man with a gun climbing down, out of the topmost carriage. He takes a shot and hits him – the target falls two or three stories out of sight, presumably dead.
The alchemist pops a greater healing potion into the gang’s shooter and heals him for 9 HP. The party continues to walk over to the ballroom. They notice more and more decay as they approach. Inside the ballroom, the party finds some sort of broken down jury-rigged alchemy lab with dirty lab tech and vats of deformed corpses inside – leftovers from depraved human experiments. Alchemist finds another potion of greater healing in the lab.
The party searches the lockers in the changing room at the back. After a minute of searching, they find drug paraphernalia, a jar of blood, spray paint and other junk. The party leaves and heads over to the ferris wheel. One of them spots landmines spread around the base of the ferris wheel. HWG shoots at the land mines, but passes out before he can squeeze off his first shot. The party applies first aid and heals him 2 HP, waking him up. Alchemist feeds him another healing potion for another +3 HP. The party then gets back to shooting the mines, blowing them all up….The explosions wreck up the nearby area pretty good. It starts to rain a little. The party then checks the ferris wheel for the dead sniper, and finds a bloody mess at the bottom, where the man fell off the ladder and was then ripped apart post-mortem by the landmines detonating.
As the party turns back, they spot a bunch of grossly mutanted men coming out of shadowy back alleys to creep up on them. The party leader threatens them with death to back off, but they seem reluctant to let them live.
Combat time starts as the mutants decide to attack – only one of them has a gun, but the rest are moving in with weird bone spikes jutting out of their palms, ready to stab them.
The newbie player was ironically MVP this battle as the other PCs couldn’t roll well enough to hit – even a critical hit by another PC with max damage roll failed to actually deal INJURY as the mutant had enough unnatural DR to completely soak the pellet blast. Even up close, good armour can withstand shotguns pretty damn well…
The injured PC, sensing that he may not stay awake with his pain, decides to pull the pin on one of his toxic gas grenades still attached to his vest – he and the rest of the party is wearing gas masks, so no big deal if they’re in the poison gas. Two turns later, the grenade goes off and disables the surviving melee mutants with agonising paralysis and vomiting (not to mention toxins melting their internal organs). The mutant gunman is out of the gas, but he dies anyway when a PC fires off his SMG and airholes him.
The party finished off the surviving disabled mutants with cold-blooded certainty and reloaded their guns, as the rain started falling faster and harder…
The session ended there.
A rainstorm is picking up around the park – heading indoors might be a good idea. The party seeks higher ground for lookout and a lay of the land – location 60. The alchemist heals the shooter with a healing ointment for +5HP, he’s still reeling but not falling unconscious. The shooter scrambles up the side of the fast food joint and gets on the roof. The wind picks up and the rain gets heavier. The shooter throws down the rope to his teammates, who climb up after him. They spot a bunch of corpses – some of them fresh – lying around locations 28, 42, 43 and 27. Looking around further, the alchemist finds a ladder and hatch down into underground tunnels below the park. They leave the hatch open.
Down in the maintenance tunnels, the party finds the lights on. They head down the tunnels towards the main office. They notice signs that people have been squatting in these tunnels, and there are a whole bunch of weird cut holes – big enough for a human – in walls, floors and welded-shut doors. The tunnels themselves have been modified in various ways, adding inclines, murder-holes, and barricades. The situation worsens as the lights go out – the power has been cut (total darkness -10). Fortunately, they all have light sources and/or NVGs.
A few seconds later after the lights go out, someone throws a molotov cocktail at the leader. She gets hit for 0 injury and is still on fire. She douses it with a successful DX roll. None of the party spots the attacker. HWG plants a claymore behind him. The party continues forward towards the main office. However, the alchemist is shot by an unknown attacker shortly afterward, gets hit for 0 injury! The leader spots the man who shot at them with a small revolver, who quickly starts running to his left. HWG tries to shoot him with an 11-round burst – but the worm just barely manages to avoid the bullets coming his way. HWG sees the escaping enemy slip through a hole in a wall with unnatural grace and out of sight.
The party continues forward, only to not notice a pit trap and have the gang’s leader fall in, for 2 crushing injury! The party fishes her out and keeps going. They come to a fork in the road, and take the right. Unfortunately, none of them notice the traps in the tunnels and the leader steps on a pressure plate and gets a chemical sprayed on her – good thing she were wearing that mask. The alchemist realises the chemical is cyanide.
As the party comes to the paths reconverging, somebody shoots at them again. The leader is shot in the face, for 2 injury (thank the lord for face DR)! She fires back, but the enemy dodges it and gets away again. The party continues on, scared of the dark and the dangers within…
They eventually come to a room full of electrical machinery and obvious tripwires set to fire bolt-action rifles at anyone who breaks them. They examine the machinery and find it to be a generator for the park – fixing it would turn the lights on in the tunnels! (They don’t, however.)
1 minute later, the party comes to the ladder upward to the main office. The party finds it well-secured – heavy locked doors all around the ground entrance installed by someone who was not the park’s original owners. One part of the office has been secured with multiple locks, even!
Searching the place for clues, they find a written note from someone named Joey, addressed to someone named Andrew. Reading through it, the note describes that they’ve hidden a huge stash of cocaine behind the multi-locked doors. While Andrew would, of course, know the keycodes for the main office ground floor door, only Joey has the locations of the keys to the cocaine stash. They also find a map with notes scribbled on it in Joey’s handwriting, giving hints about where to find the keys hidden around the park.
The gang’s leader tries to solve a number puzzle foudn in the office to gain the keycode to the vault’s keypad. She fumbles with it for a few tries, but eventually gets it and unlocks a part of the vault. One key has been hidden on the ferry (location 95). Another has been hidden in the ballroom (location 85). Another has been hidden in the ruined hall of mirrors (location 104). The last key is hidden atop the roller coaster (location 20).
The aclhemist washes the cyanide off the leader, much to everyone’s relief. The party tries the ballroom first. Alchemist locates a barrel there which has been marked with specific symbols. Inside, she finds toxic waste and a key at the bottom – she neutralises the waste with spare chemicals lying around and grabs the key safely.
Next, the party goes to the rollercoaster. The rainstorm is now harsh and heavy. (-4 penalty to some rolls.)
The party finds the rollercoaster has had new beams and ladders welded to its highest point by someone who was not a professional engineer. Figuring that is where the key is, they climb the structure to the top. The gang’s leader rubs her healing ointment on HWG for +2 HP. At the top, they notice there is a metal beam sticking out from the structure and at the end of that beam is a hook stand. There is a key on a metal chain attached to that hook stand by a strong clasp.
The party thief goes out onto the beam, balancing as best as he can, to retrieve the key…He succeeds, takes the key and comes back. That’s one more key. They work to secure the main office from any possibility of ambush. They move up the van up to the entrance for easy transport of the cocaine.
The party heads for the hall of mirrors next. It looks like a whole lot of people have used and abandoned this place as a shelter over a few years. Cycles of looting and setting up troves have left it a mess from one wall to another. It looks clear. They make their way through the ruins of the mirror maze…They find a hermit’s living camp in the center of the maze, with fresh graffiti. They find a key hidden in a lockbox under the bed roll.
They check out the ferry. It is a wreck that is partially under water. They search the place, and find a metal lockbox under water. Getting to it will require a swim. The gang’s shooter dives in and grabs the last key out of the lockbox. He makes it to the surface with plenty of air.
The party unlocks the vault and discovers the treasure trove of cocaine parcels. Working quickly and safely, the team gets to work loading up the packages of drugs onto their van. Over the course of 20 minutes, the team transports all the parcels of drugs and loads them into the van’s boot. As the gang finishes up, a strangely large humanoid figure with wings crashes upward and out of a building, into the sky.
HWG takes a shot at the thing from the moving van. He hits. However, the thing survives…It doesn’t even go unconscious. The chase begins in proper. The driver burns rubber as the super mutant flies after them. The leader and HWG fire from the back. Eventually, the super mutant fails to stay conscious under the strain of his injuries and falls out of the sky. The party turns back and finishes it off with gasoline, grenades and fire. The alchemist, knowing her spooky crap, identifies it as some sort of “super mutant” as it dies with extreme prejudice.
The mission is complete. +$350,000 from the cocaine stash.
A few days later, a man calling himself “Agent Kincaid” calls the gang with a job offer. He reveals himself to be one of the people who have a dossier on the gang. He offers the gang the chance to erase the original dossiers if they are done a favour. He explains “Agent Thomas” has been assigned to clear out what you might call a nest of vampires. Accompany him and help wipe out the bloodsucking undead threat.
The gang accepts the mission. Next session, The gang purchases specialty gear to help hunt the vampires. They sharpen their minds and bodies as they prepare, hoping it will be enough to slay the undead.
“Agent Thomas” is going to meet the gang at a predetermined meeting point; it’s a lower class cafe in an Italian neighbourhood. When the party gets there, they find their contact at the back, drinking his third cup of espresso and chatting with a couple of meaty regulars with pinky rings. As the gang approaches, Agent Thomas cuts his chatter in Italian and waves them away. The men he was speaking to give the party some disdainful looks but let them get on with it. Agent Thomas welcomes them to sit down. Agent Thomas is a 40-something and fit man with a square jaw and calloused hands. He wears thick clothing and a square government haircut. His eyes are unforgiving and dark.
The gang discusses the mission with Thomas. He located the nest by tagging a feral vampire with a tracking beacon – it revealed that it constantly returns to a spot in the swamp every day to sleep.
Agent Thomas leads the gang out to Tall Tallow Swamp, getting out of the car at the edges, rechecks the GPS tracker, and unloads his gear – including the rubber boat they’ll need to get to the nest. Once Agent Thomas has set up the boat, all of them get on and begin riding out through the trees and on the dark waters.
The party sniper spots something in the water coming towards the boat. He fires a shot at it, hits, and sees bloody chunks floating up to the top. The rest of the boat is shocked by this sudden violence and Agent Thomas is flabbergasted. “What the hell was that?!”
Continuing on, the boat pulls up to where the tracking beacon has revealed the general area of the nest to be…somewhere here, a semi-island where various cabins and wooden buildings used to stand before the local town was abandoned and left to be reclaimed by nature. It looks deserted – but the GPS insists that the nest is around here.
Agent Thomas instructs the gang to go check out the cabins while he stays with the boat and makes sure everything is alright here. The gang looks around, finding rotten wrecks of cabin and faint footprints all around the “island”. The gang sweeps the insides of the cabins with UV lamps, checking for anything unusual from the outside, before they enter anywhere. Entering a cabin trips a tripwire and sets off a trap where metal shrapnel and wooden stakes are launched at them. Luckily, their armour protects them completely. Looking under a rotting rug in the cabin, the gang discovers an unlocked trap door. They poke around with a big stick and discover another trap in another cabin. They cautiously open the trapdoor with a stick from afar, and find it trapped with a crossbow on a wire. The bolt hits nothing.
They tell Agent Thomas about all this. He sets up UV lamps and spills some gasoline around the place in case they need to bug out fast and leave behind flames. He gives the gang scent-masking sprays to hide from the vampiric noses. He warns them of what to expect.
The gang descends down the trapdoor and into some underground lair…Securing a sharp angle in the staircase, with another UV lamp, the gang finds, at the bottom of the stairs, a chamber carved from rock and stained extensively – at the back of the chamber, the air is filled with incense and smoke. Only the gang’s investigator lacks a gas mask. Unfortunately, the gas is dangerous – and the eyeball-er fails to hold her breath, and takes 3 toxic injury. With that, she decides to stay back, watching the entrance.
The gang travels further into the dark lair, and comes to a chamber – corpses of dead intruders, some old and some fresh, hung on hooks and impaled on spikes, with paintings on the wall depicting various medieval tortures and executions. The gang’s leader struggles to avoid puking, but struggles on. The gang searches the bodies and find some stuff – chalk, silver crucifix, glass eyeball, bottle of lighter fluid, engagement ring, bag of dried mushrooms, bell, container of salt, garlic, old coin, prayer beads, matches, and a bottle of rum.
The gang pushes on deeper, and comes to a fork in the road. The way to the right seems to be very wet, and large puddles pock-mark the way. The left fork is a bare stone tunnel. The party decides to set up two claymores on the right path and go down the left.
The left tunnel takes the party to a large stone chamber with a sudden large step down into a big pool of swamp water that mostly fills the chamber. It is bare stone and empty of furniture. They spot a steel bottle near the other exit of the chamber. They check the depths and the measurements of the pool, finding it deep and long. Not liking their chances, the party goes back to the fork, switches the claymores to the other path, and goes down the right tunnel.
The right tunnel leads to a belly-high water level, and then a chamber. It’s littered with random trash on top of a big stone slab – human remains can be found here. Also, dead rats, broken bottles, meat hooks, pair of boots, a gold pocket watch, gnawed bones and a newspaper. The leader freaks out at the horrible conditions (she’s got a Phobia of Dirt), and acquires a new mental quirk. The sniper notices that the big stone slab is actually a primitive coffin. Just as he realises that, the lid begins to slide off…
The party thief pulls out his pistol. The sniper Aims at the lid. Heavy weapons guy sprays the coffin with his flamethrower. The leader Readies her gun with the UV lamp, setting it to max.
The flame jet hoses down the coffin pretty good, which lights up two humanoid figures in terrible agony! They wail and scream in animalistic rage and terror!!
And battle is joined. It takes only two seconds of fighting. The two feral vampires inside the coffin both quickly move out of the coffin and into the water, submerging themselves and putting out the fire. Heavy weapons guy continues to spray the surface of the water with flames, but the Bulk of the burner will cause him to miss when a feral vamp swims right to him. The sniper gets off a burst of explosive bullets right at a vamp’s head – too bad the blooming thing is still higher than -10xHP. The leader has explosive rounds loaded, but hitting the feral vamps for even massive injury just slows them down – the kill shots come from the thief’s revolver, loaded with incendiary bullets. Nothing is left of the monsters but ashes floating on the water.
There are two exits from the room: the corridor they came from and the corridor past the fire. The gang use the stone coffin’s lid to displace and splash the fire covered water out of their way so they may exit the chamber through the other corridor. They reapply the scent-masking spray and stay on-guard as they make their way deeper into the caves.
They come to a chamber full of corpses, floor to ceiling, blood everywhere, heavy cobwebs, huge amounts of cash in bills and coins scattered all around the ground. The party searches for traps and hiding vampires. They find nothing. Unfortunately, there were two feral vampires hiding in the pile that spring out and try to ambush the gang.
The feral vamps achieve surprise and combat starts. It is a bloody and brutal affair – the feral vampires manage to injure the HWG and the gang leader with bites to the neck. When the party recovers from the stun and fights back with fire and fury, incinerating them with special munitions.
The gang applies first aid – HWG is healed 6 HP! The leader regains 10 HP from healing elixirs! The gang searches the chamber, finds $500 in loose bills and coins, 2 smartphones, shoes, 2 lighters, some jewelry, cigarettes, 2 wedding rings, lipstick, pepper spray, and 2 small knives.
The party stays on guard as they march forward…and come to another chamber, the last in the lair. The chamber is partially underwater, with rubble, crumbling brickwork and upright iron coffins full of mutilated corpses pinned down by iron spikes.
They don’t see anything moving in here. Just a bunch of dead guys who died bad and painful. The leader shines her UV lamp around and catches a waiting vampire in the water with it, causing it to smolder, lose patience, and attack.
Combat again. This time, the gang is ready and blasts away at the undead fiends without fear. One of the vampires bites the party’s second shooter on the neck – but he survives, tough as nails. The fight ends with explosive slugs blowing the last vamp apart with massive damage.
The team reloads their guns, and loots the room for $700 in old coins, a few ornate daggers, banned books, a box of silver bullets and two alchemical formularies. On their way back, they toss a grenade into the deep pool of water to make sure nothing is in there.
They leave and report back to Agent Thomas. Agent Thomas congratulates them and sets a fire around the hatch as a parting gesture, then all of the team pile back into the boat to go home and receive the reward. None of the gang caught a disease from the horrid corpse pile.
On the boat ride back, Agent Thomas strikes up a conservation. He tells the gang the truth about his organisation, the ROSE GARDEN conspiracy. They agree to work with him again, if they need favours. Agent Thomas deletes the files and disables the spyware on the gang.
Mission accomplished. End of session 11.
Session 12, the gang takes another job; investigate some weird graffiti. The client provides the party with the location of the graffiti and photos of it. The party’s alchemist does not recognise the graffiti as any kind of alchemical symbol or notation. She does, however, know the imagery looks familiar to what she saw in her hallucinations back when she was exposed to that weird machine fuel. The leader recognises the site of the graffiti as infamous places – grisly murders have taken place there in years past. She researches the murders some more, and finds out that all of the murders were done by the same serial killer. He was caught just before he killed himself by cutting his own throat. The police searched his home and found he had kept a diary that chronicled his descent into madness. His diary excerpts remind them of the Daath lore they discovered during the Wainwright job, one of the files they downloaded in the Wianwright hideout. Some of the words and terms can be found in both. The shared idea is that the anti-reality breaking into our reality can be manipulated in order to work magic.
The gang decides to call up Agent Thomas for information. He informs them that the murders were very early and very botched attempts at working magic. The gang then access local police CCTV footage around the graffiti to see who has tagged up the paint. The gang analyses the footage, and discovers the taggers are three in number, all painting the graffiti at the same time, they all wear baggy and concealing clothing, they paint it at night, all male, early twenties, the taggers look deformed in their few face shots, somewhat unnaturally ugly, similar to the mutants they killed at the abandoned amusement park. The alchemist doesn’t understand why they’re doing this.
The gang relay their findings to their client, and prepare an ambush. At night, they lie in wait for the taggers to come along, after cleaning off the graffiti from the usual spot on the parking lot wall. Eventually, a group of three men in baggy and concealing clothing arrive and start re-tagging. The gang recognises them from the camera footage – they are the targets.
HWG shoots one of the taggers with the Sleep Elixir paintball gun, and the tagger passes out from the elixir he fails to resist. HWG fires at another, hits, and that tagger passes out as well. The remaining tagger attempts to flee, dropping his spraycan. The gang attempts to threaten the remainder, he surrenders immediately. He puts his hands up.
The leader asks him who he’s working for – the mutant responds he’s working for himself, and he’s trying to prevent the end of the world. The mutant goes off on a bit of a rambling rant – he says he and his comrades are clones of a man who has discovered that the horrid anti-reality of Daath is trying to dissolve our reality into entropic foam. The graffiti tags are a part of a magic ritual that wards against the corruption of our material plane.
The mutant explains that he is a clone made by alchemy – his creator was an alchemist who was dying of cancer, and cloned himself many times so that the rituals needed to save the world would be completed. He thinks the original murders were an attempt by a corrupted madman to “weaken the walls of the world”. The alchemist comes to the conclusion, after studying her notes, that the clone’s creator horribly mistranslated some lore about alchemy and basically came to the wrong conclusion. The problem and solution are non-existent. The other mutants are his fellow clones.
The gang reports in, the client takes it all in, chews it over, and decides to tell the party to kill all the mutants on the spot right now. “I hate clones. Murder them all.” HWG shoots him in the head, killing the mutant immediately. The other two clones get their throats slit, and all the dead get thrown in the back of the van. The clean up the other evidence and leave.
The gang reports back to the client and completes the mission. The criminals reward them with money (+$10,000), and inform them that they’ll be leaving the city within a week and they want to leave the gang with a safehouse.
The safehouse is a rundown solitary large cabin on the outskirts of the city. It has tunnels leading into an underground abandoned subway track.
The party decides that their next job will be helping escaped prisoners from a jailbreak out of the city. The 5 male inmates promise the gang to teach them 10 different elixir recipes as a reward. They analyse the situation, discuss tactics and routes out of the city. They rent a mini-sub and a pilot for $45,000. They arrange for getaway cars on the other end of the swamp, ready to be driven away – $2000 – they are very hot, though, even with clean plates.
They take the mini-sub through the deep swamp waters in the afternoon, between the shifts of the police patrols. The trip takes 40 minutes one way. They leave half their people at the stolen cars to escape, and take a return trip. They eventually make their way back to the stolen cars with the other escaped prisoners. The prisoners take the car and drive away to sweet freedom, rewarding the party with 10 alchemical formularies.
The gang returns to the minisub and heads back into Goodberry’s city limits.
As the gang returns to the dry land, they are cornered by 11 men in police uniforms and armed with AKs, commanding them to stop, “POLICE!”
It would have been a seriously bad firefight…except the party’s heavy weapons guy immediately fires a RPG behind them (too close and the blast would hit the party, too). Then, in the first proper turn, dropped the RPG, fast-drew his rifle with an under barrel grenade launcher and fired off a grenade at five of them. Crazy thing is, neither of the blasts were anything to care about in terms of injury. The rocket was too far away to actually inflict injury through the weak body armour even if the shockwave hits them. And the grenade rolled for moderate injury even for the bad guy right in the centre of the explosion. But two explosions is certainly worth a fright check, right? So I roll for the thugs…and they blow it. Fail the fright check, roll badly for the effects, they ALL get totally shell shocked for 11 whole minutes. So the combat is effectively over already, total shutout for the party as they gun down the broken thugs, who are frozen completely by the terror of getting blown the fuck up.
The gang finishes off the “survivors”. They clean up any evidence. Looking over the scene and cruisers, they release the bad guys weren’t really cops but impersonating them. Their tattoos signify their membership into the cult of The Perfected. They disfigure the dead to foil forensics. They get in their cars and check for bugs, and then bail.
Next session, the gang needs another job. They decide to investigate a solo operator offering a more popular version of their product. He is dealing in bigger, better and more types of guns. They do some legwork and realize he probably has some connections with a corrupt military official – his product is white-washed fully automatic NATO guns fresh from an first world armoury. They are told to try trawling the Harrowed Hearts Club for his minions.
The gang’s leader fails to work the joint when she looks for anyone connected to the dealer. She is eventually approached by someone, a fixer named Dexter, who claims he can hook her up if she does him a favour first. He wants her gang to go shake down a drug dealer, Shawn, who owes him $10,000 and deliver the cash to him. He gives the gang a name and an address.
The gang arrive at the address they were given, it’s a shoddy rundown crack house in a mostly dead neighbourhood. The lights are on inside. Coming in, they meet with the drug dealer/debtor. The debtor, Shawn, lies and says he doesn’t have the money for Dexter. Shawn is threatened into giving them the money.
As the gang bags the money and turns to leave, shots ring out and the font of the house is peppered with stray bullets. Some people are shooting at the house! Shawn is hit and killed!
Combat time starts as the street thugs open fire outside and the gang returns back!
The bad guys fire pistols and throw molotov cocktails for a bit as a group of six approach the front door of the house with a chainsaw. The gang responds with a flashbang, and then putting a burst through the door, KO-ing them. Combat ends as the attackers lose more than half their number and drive away. None of the party were hurt.
The gang leader slays the KO’d men at the door, checks the backpack, finds unlit molotov cocktails. She uses them to burn the house and the car and bodies. They check the bodies – they recognise them as street gangers active in the alchemical underground. Then the gang leaves with the money.
END OF THE CAMPAIGN EVENTS SO FAR. THE CAMPAIGN IS STILL ONGOING.
Three Hundred and Thirty-Three 