Burning Footsteps: A Dark and Stormy Night (Promethean)

Alrighty, folks, in case you missed it I'm trying something a little new. The gaming group has been on hiatus, and we're on the verge of getting things up and running again. But something that's kind of stuck in my craw ever since I put together my 'list of AP blog posts' is that my old Promethean chronicle is on another site altogether. I've decided to fix that, if for no other reason than to strip out all of the unrelated gaming stuff in addition to the things I thought were clever on LiveJournal 15 years ago. 

This is a game that's always stuck with me, and it helped build a foundation for what I've called my "Woodburn Chronicles" setting. Characters from this chronicle appear in my "Child of the Machine" and "Prodigals of the Machine" stories, as well as a few other games I've run over the years. About four and a half years ago (wait, that long? holy shit), as you may recall, I wrote "Goodbyes," which was intended as something of a tenth anniversary revisit of some of the characters from this game (so, um, spoiler alert, you might know how some of them end up already). And one of the NPCs who shows up in this chronicle has a bit of a 'cameo' in Night Horrors: The Tormented.

So I'm gonna repost those old write-ups here. As I've mentioned elsewhere, these aren't going to be copy-pastes; there'll certainly be a bit of editing here and there and the occasional footnote. That said, remember that this is stuff I ran and wrote down a long-ass time ago, so there will be details I failed to write down at the time (either because I forgot or because I didn't deem them important back then) and will not be able to recall in the rewrite (though that said, I did find some of my old notes while typing this up so that might help in the logn run). I'm not going to do them all at once, but will try to get these out over time and hope I get through them all before the Second Coming.

Two more notes before I get into this: 

First, a reminder that this was run with the first edition Promethean rules -- in fact it was while the supplements were still coming out. Big chunks of the adventure are taken from the story material in the backs of those books (I'd actually have to reread them to know exactly what I used) and some of it is just blatantly lifted and adapted from other supplements, particularly Mysterious Places. But there's gonna be stuff that doesn't quite work the same or I would have done much differently in 2e. I think in terms of the narrative enough of it fits without issue but either way I'm not going to make any special effort to reconcile any of it. Though I'm sure I'm going to have to resist the urge to update certain background details to better fit in with 2e.

Second, one of the characters has some Nazi mad science in his backstory. There shouldn't be anything directly or overtly gross, but just warning you nonetheless.

And as always, if you have questions, just ask. Here we go.

So first off, the group. We began the game with a group of 7 players -- I can't remember how I wound up with so many when I don't try to run for such a big group. Maybe I just didn't want to say 'no' to a couple of folks, or I just wanted to hedge my bets for sessions where individual players couldn't make it, as in general I'm willing to attempt to run a session as long as I have at least 3 players present.

But here's a rundown of the group:

• Ander, Mercurius Frankenstein, played by Brendan. Ander was created in the 1930's in a castle on an isolated island in the North Sea. The castle was the home of a Nazi scientist named Harold Zettler[0], and in this castle he hosted a Promethean scientist that I don't think we ever actually properly named at the time (aside from Ander knowing him as "Father"), but for simplicity's sake I later established that the name he was probably going by at the time was Romson. Romson had no interest in the Nazis' ideology but was willing to work with them if it meant advancing his own experiments. Ander was intended to be something of an Aryan ideal, made up of mixed-and-matched pieces of unwilling test subjects. One day the remaining prisoners revolted, during which Zettler exposed himself to the equipment and came out changed just in time for the equipment to be destroyed. Zettler and the Romson fought and both vanished while everyone else either died or fled. Ander then spent the next 60 years alone on the island until a man named Hans wrecked a boat on the shore. Ander took care of him until he succumbed to his injuries, after which Ander took his boat and went out to explore the world.
• Steve Rogers, Ferrum Frankenstein, played by the late Nick Shomo. Steve, who was blatantly named after the comics, was created in a WWII government program called Project Diodati[1], where they worked with Prometheans to create super-soldiers.[2] He and other Prometheans like him got airdropped into Germany with maps of special installations they were meant to destroy. He was able to get most but not all of them, but once the war was over he wandered off to try and find more about where his original parts came from.
• Jack Turner, Cuprum Ulgan, played by Zac. Jack was a teenager killed by a cult in New Orleans, and his body vanished somewhere between his death and the police getting to the ritual site. He spent his first couple of weeks as a Promethean locked in a closet until the food stopped coming and he escaped. He named himself after a character from a movie, and wanted to one day go to a high school like normal teenagers, like he saw in movies and TV.
• Father John, Aurum Ulgan, played by Greg. Abandoned by his creator, Father John had this schtick of masquerading as a priest as a way of studying humanity through the lens of religion, which he found one of the most fascinating aspects of humanity. So he'd wander around, move into a new area, give sermons, and help people for as long as the Disquiet would let him.
• Rudolf, Stannum Tammuz, played by Sean. He used to be a sleazy photographer who took advantage of naive prospective models, until he wound up being killed after bringing a mark back to his place. Later he'd wake up in the Louisiana Bayou bog just outside of New Orleans as a Promethean. He'd had very little experience as a Promethean, and had never met his creator, but was the source of local legends of a 'Bog Man.'[3]
• Lafayette, Aurum Galatea, played by Andy. He was created to be a 'perfect goth boytoy' by the one who made him. He's motivated by an extreme hatred for his creator to move past the state of his creation and become a complete being. 
• Jane, Ferrum Tammuz, played by Amanda. All we ever really got on her was that she was a wandering adrenaline junkie. Her player missed the big character creation session and there wasn't a lot of opportunity to get into the character's head.

(I'm gonna tell you now, don't get too attached to Lafayette and Jane, because Andy and Amanda flaked out on me pretty early for different reasons. As tempting as it is to get into why, I'm going to spare the dirty laundry for now. Either way, their characters are just going to kind of vanish from the narrative at one point.)

The story starts on November 9, 2006, a dark and stormy night in New Orleans. A number of Prometheans scattered around the area are drawn by a powerful Azothic radiance to an abandoned old house on the edge of the Bayou. The house's roof is lined with lightning rods and weathervanes. They're strangers, but recognize they've been called. They step inside to find what appears to be a pile of cremated human remains in the living room, surrounded by melted candles.

They follow a staircase upstairs to find the second floor ceiling had been knocked out to combine the second floor with the attic above, making room for what appears to be a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein's lab. A beacon appears to be giving off the Azothic burst.[4] They poke at the equipment and try to understand the notes as the storm goes on outside, the occasional flash of lightning causing the beacon to briefly intensify. They find a ventilation shaft big enough to fit a person that seems to extend down past the first floor to a basement, and there's equipment connecting to something down there.

Jane, Steve, Ander, and Jack head down to said basement, just in time for something to burst up through the ceiling onto the ground floor. In the dim light they see five large aquariums, three of which have shattered. A pair of Pandorans, apparently in said aquariums, attack the group and Lafayette joins the battle while they team up to put the monsters down.

After that the group goes back to investigating the house. Ander and Steve go over the equipment and take advantage of the lightning rod array and equipment to take in some electricity from the storm and recover from the fight. Rudolf has a 'well, this was fun' moment and starts to leave, but falls through the weakened ground floor into the basement lab where he finds a thick notebook with the five Refinement symbols on the cover.[5] He stashes it in his messenger bag and make his way back upstairs and takes the collapsing floor as a sign he's not supposed to leave yet. After swiping some old food from the fridge he finds some blueprints of the equipment in a study. Father John speaks to some electricity spirits lingering in the living room, and learns that the spirits were summoned by someone who couldn't conduct them properly (hence the piles of dust and ash).

By now it's pretty obvious that the equipment was meant to attract Prometheans and Pandorans to the house and trap them in the aquariums. A signature on the blueprints identifies the creator as a Dr. Matthew Gino. They find a note suggesting he left and was planning to return, but the date of his anticipated return had long passed. The blueprints also indicate a specific panel up against a wall. Ander finds the panel in question, and a message is burned into the back of it:

To whomever is reading this,

I feel there are many of you.

I do not understand why you are here.

I hope you can help me understand what

I could not understand for myself.

I hope you find me at my home before I leave.

Dr. Matthew Gino

Beneath the message is an alchemical symbol the group can't identify. (I may or may not have drawn or produced said symbol, and if I do I'll go back and edit it in.) But that's where the first session left off, with a house to find and a missing Pandoran to track down.

[0]-- Harold Zettler is the name of a Classic World of Darkness character, a vampire who sits on the board of directors for Pentex. Perhaps not suspecting this would become such a prominent character in the story, Brendan decided to use the character as a vehicle for an easter egg and it wound up sticking.

[1]-- Incidentally, the Project Diodati name doesn't appear in this chronicle at all. I came up with it after the fact when I referenced this particular super-soldier program in my Hunter: The Vigil LARP some years later. But it's worth mentioning here.

[2]-- For the record, it's pure coincidence that Shomo and Brendan's characters had these parallels. The players didn't coordinate or anything.

[3]-- If we'd had rules for them when we started the game, Rudolf would have been a good example of an Extempore, as Sean's intent was this was someone who was killed and just came back and doesn't know why. At the time I worked something out, though, as you'll see eventually.

[4]-- I feel the need to point out that even before cribbing a lot of stuff from the story in the backs of the books, I had the idea to draw the characters together with the beacon.

[5]-- One of those 'edition artifacts,' in that in first edition there were five known Refinements, not counting Flux (for Centimani) until a supplement introduced four more. Second edition has taken that up to an even ten for non-Flux stuff, and if this had been a 2e story they'd all have been there.