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Monday 10 July 2017

DCC Campaign Update: Do you Think He'd Want to be Buried With my Pants?



In the last adventure, the PCs had found their way into an Ancients' Complex (ruined, of course) in the hopes of somehow discovering a living ancient somewhere within. Thus far they'd had no luck at that, only running into some dark elves and some very creepy orcs who were missing large parts of their brains. They had holed up in a room to rest for the night.

Now:

-Morris, Mu, and Publio all go out to keep watch at the entrance, and promptly disappear (on account of all three of their players not being able to make it this session).




-"Lots of us are still injured from that last battle."
"Ok, let the healing begin!"

-In the night, the PCs are ambushed by a small squad of feral halflings!
"Heidi, your turn."
"Ok. I'm going to use one halfling as a weapon to hit another halfling with."

-"Oh, damn, I forgot I was a pacifist!"
"You went on a violent rampage as a reflex, Heidi. You were still half-asleep."
"Yeah, Heidi gets very pissy when he's woken up."
"I thought I was having a nightmare!"
"Maybe his dream is not to be a pacifist."
"We knew you were a psycho like the rest of us!"



-"We burn the halfling corpses."
"Yeah. In a dungeon it's important to be environmentally conscious and clean up your mess."

-"My map of this dungeon is all fucked up."
"That's just what we want to hear when we're deep in the bowels of an ancients complex..."

-The PCs figure out their direction, and promptly run into a Servant of the Dark Ones... a Brain-Eater!



-Fighting with their usual level of ability, the PCs don't manage to stop the Brain-Eater before it launches its terrible psychic blast. Tonut the Cleric's brain explodes.

-Roman manages to get into some kind of psychic battle with the Brain-Eater; and while he's not able to destroy it, he manages to scare it away, complete with strange glowing multicolored lights coming out of Roman's eyes.
Kumar very bravely or very stupidly (or both) chases after the Brain-Eater, but it turns ethereal and walks away from him.

-"I can't believe Tonut died."
"Yes, it's a tragedy."
"So sad."
"We loot the fuck out of the body."




-"Say, friends, do you think I can take his pants? My own pants have been soiled for over a day."
"Sure, why not?"
"Do you think he'd want to be buried with my pants?"
"No, let's leave him some dignity."



-Heidi takes Tonut's super Power-Armor.  Chris, in addition to taking Tonut's pants, inherits Heidi's old plate mail.
"I'll always remember our stalwart friend Tonut when I wear these pants. Hopefully I won't dishonor them like I did my last pair!"

-"Man, that brain-eater sure got us a lot of loot!"

-"Tonut also had this bag of unlabeled white powder.."
"I'll take that!"

-Around that time, a trio of zero-level newbs arrive. It turns out they were all slaves or employees of one of the bands of dark elves, who left them behind when they deserted the complex.  The trio include a human prostitute, a Cold Mutant butcher, and a Fishman Fisherman (again).

-"You're all my friends."
"I'm not your friend."
"You're my friend, pal!"
"I'm not your pal."
"You're my pal, buddy!"
"I'm not your buddy."
"You're my buddy, chum!"



-"You guys have no absolute proof, but yet somehow you know that dark elves mostly like pegging."
"The hooker left her strap-on behind."

-"Are these people even worth keeping?"

-"Why does that dead cleric not have any pants?"
"Because I'm wearing his pants now, friend!"
"Why don't you give him your old pants, then?"
"We don't want to desecrate his corpse."
"Yes, especially after his sacrifice. Tonut died so that I might have pants!"

-"Do you have any food?"
"We have peanuts."
"She can't have any of my peanuts!"

-"Get your mind out of the gutter, Roman."
"You're mistaken, madam. I'm not interested. I know where you've been."

-The PCs decide to retreat, for rest and healing, to the ruined tower complex, negotiating a truce with the three Dark Elves still hiding out there. Sammi the hooker mentions to Heidi that the elves have a chest that she strongly suspects (from her prior experiences with them) holds the Dark Elves' treasure. Heidi, however, feels bound by the truce. So she tells Roman instead, and he immediately agrees to murder the Dark Elves in the night.

-"So, I'll take the 2nd watch tonight, with the hooker."
"I prefer 'Lady of the Night'."
"And Hillbilly Giants prefer to be called 'Tall Sons of the Soil', but that's not happening either."

-Roman and Sammi's plan is that they'll pump Heidi full of healing sedative, and then she'll seduce the one elf that's on guard, leading him away, while Roman murders the two who are sleeping. Unfortunately, they run into a problem.
"Sorry miss, I'm asexual."

-They wait until the third watch, getting the other two newbies in on the action. And while they dispatch the two sleeping dark elves, the guard who had been led away by Sammi comes back too soon, and manages to murder both the Cold Mutant and the Fishman before they can finish him off.

-The elven loot turns out to be mostly magic items!  An endless waterskin, some unlabeled potions, a scroll of levitation, and a +1 sword.
"If Morris' ASS was here, it could probably identify those potions."

-Since Heidi still needs more of the medi-drugs to get close to his full HP, the party rests for another day.  For security purposes, Kumar props up the corpses of the elves and the dead party members to appear to be lookouts.

-The party finally starts to move deeper into the complex again. There, they get to a large flooded area, that's been made crossable by some rickety wooden bridges, in the middle of which is a small island of dry ground with huge piles of garbage on it. In that Island the PCs spot a group of degenerated feral dwarves who appear to have gone insane. Heidi flies over them, and sets fire to the nearest garbage pile.

-In the distance, at the entrance of a flooded room, the PCs hear a dark elf screaming for help.
"I'm terribly injured but alive! Please someone help me! Both my legs are broken!"
They ignore him.

-Flying over the flaming garbage island, the PCs move over to another area, a huge promenade with signs that there were successive periods of habitation with a variety of architecture. The original Ancients construction was built over with brick, then with wood, then with scraps of metal or any garbage that could be found. The place seems mostly abandoned. But the dwarves who fled the flaming garbage were waiting there in ambush and they rush forward to attack!

-After a couple of rounds of combat, the Dwarves run like hell, scattering in various directions. One of the dwarves fled through some kind of sewer grate that was hidden behind a pile of junk.
"We should go down this man-hole."
"And here I thought my days of going down man-holes was over."

-The Party makes their way down into a sewer area, which is mostly dry though it has several inches of a greenish-black gunk on most of the ground.
"I expected this man-hole would be deeper."



-"There's two possibilities: Either the Brain-Eaters don't come down here, or they might all be down here!"

-The party doesn't run into a brain-eater, but they do run into a giant sewer snake! Sammi attacks it with her dark elf scimitar but it snaps.
"Piece of shit dark elven scimitars! They're just made to look cool."



-Chris hits the snake!
"I think I'm doing well, chums!"
One round later, the snake bites his head clean off.

-"Oh shit! Well, can we heal him?"
"He's been decapitated!"
"So, no?"



-After slaying the snake, the PCs continue on along the empty sewer.
"In the distance, you hear the sound of a dwarf dying horribly."
"That sounds promising."

-They proceed forward and find a large chamber, containing ten cryo-stasis tubes! It also contains a very dead dwarf, who seemed to have the very  life sucked out of him and a frozen look of terror on his face.
"Let's go in!"
"Wait, don't you think it might be dangerous?"

-All the tubes are flashing some kind of alert in Ancient.  As it happens, Kumar reads ancient.
"I'll fly you in through the man-hole"
"You've been in too many man-holes, bro."

-The alert indicates that all ten tubes have been 'corrupted'. Heidi flies Roman in to activate the auto-destruct on the tubes. As the countdown begins, spectral beings float out of the tube, causing damage to everyone from sheer horror.
"Cheese it!"
"What the fuck are they?"
"Ghosts."
"Ghosts? Who are we going to call??"



-The party runs like hell down the sewer, as the self-destruct blows the entire chamber to bits.

-They keep going, and make their way to the armory!
"It looks like it was raided at some point, but there's still a bunch of stuff in there."
"It could also still have defenses."
"I could cast Cantrip to see if anything reacts.."
"Don't do that."
"Why not, sir?"
"Isn't Cantrip the spell that makes you open a bridge to the Outer Void as a mercurial effect?"
"Yes, that is right.."
"We're in a complex full of servants of the Dark Ones. What do you think that will do?"
"Oh. Yes on second thought I had better not cast Cantrip."

-Kuman casts force-manipulation instead, which causes a pair of defense drones to activate and start firing.

-"What do we do now?"
"We charge at the drones, on the count of three!"
"..sure."
"You won't just all stay here and leave me to charge in alone, will you?"
"..."

-"If you let me go in there alone, I swear you guys are all screwed!"
"You nearly punched me to death!"
"That was an accident!"

-"I dive in and get behind cover."
"You'd have to be prone for that."
"Given her former profession..."
"Yeah, I don't mind."

-"I continue to stay under cover."
"So you mean she's lying there like a dead hooker."

-Roman uses his sonic tool to destroy the drones.



-They find the armory has a number of quite useful items.  There's carbon-fiber armor, which is very light.
"You should wear that, Kumar!"
"Will it have a spellcasting penalty?"
"A small one. But hey, it's not like you've been casting anything useful anyways."

-This exchange triggers a moderately lengthy conversation on whether clerics or wizards are more useless.

-"Hey, we found a medi-bot!"
"Oh, does it have more of those drugs?"
"Great, now Heidi's a healing-sedative junkie."



That's it for today. The party decides to hole up in the armory, deep within the dungeon of brain-eaters.  Will they actually find an Ancient that's not turned into an undead that wants to kill them? Or will they all just end up getting their brains eaten? 

Stay tuned to find out!


RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Horn + Argento Latakia 

1 comment:

  1. This reminds me of Deadlands: The Flood when Zachariah saw a Chinese Ogre for the first time on a train which triggered a fear roll which caused a heart attack and triggered his ibs, ruining his pants. Zachariah had to take the pants off one of the martial artists who had ambushed us with the ogre to replace his soiled jeans. They were not of the right length or width, so Zach lost 1 Pace while wearing the pants and his Charisma was +1 or -1 depending on how the person felt about his "skinny jeans" until he finally got some new pants tailored to his dimensions later on in town.

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