Hey, guess what, it's time for another Promethean write-up! I know I've been scooting along with these for the most part (or at least it seems that way), which seems odd to me given that the process isn't that much different from what I've done for any other game given that I'm writing these posts from my old posts as reference rather than my notes. I dunno. Maybe it's the lack of pressure since I'm not actively running this? I dunno.
Either way, here we are again. If it matters, this is the point where Amanda officially informed me she was dropping out of the game, so the players I've got at this point -- Sean, Brendan, Zac, Greg, and Shomo -- are going to be the group we've got for the rest of the chronicle. (And if you've been paying attention, I still run games for Sean and Zac today whether they like it or not) Of course, that's not counting sessions where one or more players can't make it and we handwave their character into the background, etc. But I just wanted to lay that out there in case it matters.
Now, I'm not going to do this often to keep from throwing off my own numbers or anything, but this write-up is going to cover two sessions, mostly because one of them is really sparse on details and kinda glossed over (on account of being really combat-heavy), so I'd rather attach it to this post than have a separate post for what's only going to be a couple of paragraphs.
So here we go, for this game's first two-fer.
So where we left off, the newly-branded throng is waking up after some rest and getting ready to figure out the map. No longer risking any bus incidents, they take a taxi to a college campus with an open computer lab and spend about an hour and a half digging through atlases both online and off to find the location in the map.[0] But in that time they find that the map depicts a chunk of Waco, Texas. The center of the map seems to emphasize a junkyard called Odell Auto Parts. No sign of the number 126, however.
But regardless, Waco is obviously where they need to be. The tricky part is getting there. Between them, they might have just enough cash to get Greyhound tickets for everyone. There's a brief discussion about traveling by plane, but for a variety of reasons (namely, Prometheans in an enclosed space with Disquiet-vulnerable humans), there's some resistance to that notion. Steve, in particular, points out "The last time I was on a plane, I fell out."[1]
Steve suggests just mugging people for enough cash to make sure they've got enough for bus tickets, but Rudolf refuses to go that route. There's some discussion about demanding some compensation from the vampires, but the larger argument of money goes in circles until Rudolf throws his hands up and suggests they split up, get cash however they feel is appropriate, and meet up later at the house.
Steve tries picking pockets, but that goes badly enough that it goes from pickpocketing to mugging to stabbing, especially when one of his targets pulls a knife on him. Jack's pickpocketing efforts are much more successful, but then he's pretty much the archetypal street urchin. Rudolf scavenges through some of the still-ruined parts of New Orleans for copper plumbing and stuff he can quickly sell.
They also go ahead and use some of that money on extra supplies they might need. Rudolf gets some cheap canned fruits and vegetables that they can comfortably live off of for a while, as well as some shovel handles to make into stake-spears for dealing with the vampires. Jack gets some clean clothes for everyone, and Steve manages to find a cheap VW Bus that would probably get them to Waco without exploding.
So when the throng regroups at Gino's house around sundown and Steve pulls up in the Bus, everyone's pretty comfortable with the idea of not having to worry about things going wrong on a Greyhound. But before they leave, they still want to settle things with the vampires.
They go back to the house where they'd encountered the Baron before, and pound on the door a bit. A little window slides open and someone on the other side (whom they're pretty sure is one of the flunkies that brought them here earlier) asks what they want. They inform him they want some compensation for all the hoops they've been jumping through, and the guy tells them to wait a moment. After said moment, he comes back and tells them to piss off.
So Rudolf and Steve both make checks for Torment[2], where Rudolf manages to keep it together... but Steve doesn't. He incessantly pounds on the door until the hatch opens and a shotgun barrel pokes through. Without missing a beat, Steve grabs the barrel and shoves it hard enough to hit the guy on the other side in the head. He then rips the door off the hinges and goes in after the guy with the shotgun.
Rudolf and Jack wait outside with the spears while Steve fights the shotgun guy in the hallway just inside the building, taking a few point-blank shotgun blasts without giving a crap. But he thoroughly kills the guy (whom he assumes is a vampire but is actually a ghoul) and gratuitously cuts out his eyes. Jack, being on the Refinement of Copper which is all about maintaining one's distance, achieves a Major Milestone from this, for "allowing someone to befall a terrible fate, refusing to interfere rather than help."
Rudolf insists on going in to give the Baron a piece of his mind once and for all, but first he goes through the dead guy's stuff and starts discovering some strange instincts concerning the 'preservation' of the dead body as he does so.
(And here's the break between the two sessions.)
So the Throng does indeed go in to try and give the Baron a piece of his mind, but he's not there. It's simply a safe house with some vampires, some ghouls, and a nonhuman monster called a homunculus. My original post write-up doesn't have a lot of detail on this and I don't really feel like digging up my old notes to flesh out a session that was mostly taken up by a single long combat scene.
But I do have some highlights here, though, like a vampire with Nightmare driving Steve from the building because he was so dangerous. But then someone used the Suggestion Transmutation to chase the homunculus out of the building and Steve was able to kill it out there. At one point the group was surprised by a ghoul hiding with Obfuscate, wielding a shotgun loaded with Dragonsbreath incendiary rounds.[3] And over the course of the fight, Ander satisfies one of his Milestones, which is "Watch a mortal die,"[4] and the group goes out of their way to stabilizing one of the dying ghouls.
As the dust settles, the group stakes the vampires for good measure. Then they heal up with the help of the wall sockets and a little something Rudolf rigged out of a toaster's power cable. They toss the staked vampires in the van in case they could get some use out of them in the future.
And finally, apparently deciding they haven't thoroughly salted the Earth enough, Rudolf goes into a building in the bathroom and writes on the mirror in blood "You don't know what dead means." So it's a good thing for the throng they're headed for Waco anyhow.
And we left off there.
[0]-- Brendan and Greg couldn't make it because this session was played between Christmas and New Year's, and that's always been kind of a scheduling wasteland, so we just said they were researching elsewhere.
[1]-- Unfortunately, Brendan's absence meant the group couldn't tap into a cache of gold (IIRC) that Ander had hidden away, which could have solved a lot of their problems. Oh well.
[2]-- Torment is part of the Promethean condition, a state where their imbalanced humours get the better of them and they decide they're done with this shit. It's not quite like werewolf or vampire frenzy, though at times it can resemble such.
[3]-- The incendiary rounds were, of course, intended for other vampires. It's just stupid luck that fire also really messages up Prometheans.
[4]-- There's arguably some room to nitpick whether vampiric ghouls count as 'mortal,' but in my notes I didn't really mean 'mortal' literally. I mostly meant it as 'sentient person who isn't some completely inhuman monster.' I'd probably have counted, say, a mage under this.
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