An Odd Little Town - Session Log

playthrough

#1

The%20Meteor @JDStirling, Told you I’d get around to posting these!

Top Level Info:
Running a weekly-ish investigative game for 3 friends. The vibe is maybe Twin Peaks/Millennium with a dash of Tarantino here and there. Building slowwwly toward a Wayward Pines twist, but how we get there and how fast is going to be a function of the dice, player decisions, and how all that affects certain fronts advancing.

Deviations from ICRPG Standard:

  • Starting characters were made with p 4-9 of the awesome First Responders.
  • Ablative DEFENSE in lieu of Armor. Stat Points in Defense can be restored with a Recover roll. For Items with Armor points, using First Responder rules.
  • No accounting AMMO rules from Black Light.
  • Adding DISTANT RANGE from First Responder
  • Adrenaline Surge (aka 2 Surge d10s per session, used a la Altered State)
  • Tenacity homebrew: Two Hearts each, which represent Health and Sanity all mixed up together. The characters can take a lot–they think.
  • Using the 3e Effort dice previewed on Runehammer Patreon.
  • Isn’t it just so unfair that PCs get to add Ultimate when they roll a Nat 20, but GM doesn’t usually roll one when they roll Nat. 1? (Evil, evil laugh.) Natural 1s almost always do big environmental or other damage. d4 or d6 PLUS d12. So there’s a lot of swing in that 2 Hearts the PCs have.
  • Another homebrew to fit the tone/theme of a long investigative campaign, my Three Strikes Death Rule for Pulpy Investigations. The first two times their Death dice clicks down, as long as Tenacity not more than -10 HP (triggers Permadeath), they will only be out for the rest of the SESSION. The Third Strike will be a DRAMATIC LAST STAND. They will not go unconscious while Death die ticks down, but they know they have received a permadeath wound and will die the instant the Death die clicks down (or -10 HP whichever comes first.) There may be other narrative realities that limit their options case by case.

So with that ground work in place for my fellow hack-minded GMs, I’m going to post the first few weeks of session logs below, and keep posting to this thread as I go.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!


Longevity of a campaign inquiry
Suitable for one shots, not so much for campaigns?
#2

The PCs:
Mikhaila MIKHAILA: Russian mail order bride/Surgeon. Drives a sparkly bubblegum pink lifted Hummer.

Edgar EDGAR: Maintenance Man for the Town of Fairview. Has a good dog that’s getting too old and a pickup doing the same.

Zee ZELDA “ZEE”: Came to town for a job at the Munson Lab doing microbe/neuro research, has held access to some classified stuff at NIH.

6/26 Career Day at Fairview High School Interrupted by a meteor strike in town, just when Edgar was making friends with the Principle Lewicki by spilling coffee all over him with a stray basketball. Mikhaila slams kids face in locker and drives her big pink bubblegum sparkly Hummer across the school lawn to get to town. She picks up Zee along the way, who begins a lifelong habit of hurting herself when she runs. Edgar follows in his rusty pickup.


#3

7/3 Damage Control at Meteor Impact Site Mikhaila and Edgar do Damage Control at Meteor Impact Site, while Zee tries to find something nefarious at the Munson Lab. Edgar fiixes some natural gas problems at the site, but gets skin rashes and eye problems from being too close to the meteor. Mikhaila saves the life of Big Jack the used car magnate with small man syndrome, finds a cat and names it Comrade Poops. Zee helps a man trapped under a dumpster until someone else comes along to handle it, then gets stuck in an elevator.


#4

7/17/20 A Couple Nights Later, Weirdness in Fairview

Zee had got out of the elevator that night and caught up to her boss Hugo as the Crisis Control meeting was breaking up. He thought her microbiology background could be helpful and so tasked her to get a meteor sample and check it for microbes when the site was secure. When she got there, a firefighter told her that they had found stacks of human bodies under Hall’s Hardware, and those bodies were being bagged and removed from the site. Torn between getting meteor sample, snooping more on bodies, when her phone blows up with barely comprehensible voice to text messages from niece Heather that had something to do with her dad and running. She leaves her car near the meteor site and runs toward her twin sister’s home nearby. On the way she finds Heather but had obviously missed her brother in law (and lab partner) Hanz in the darkness. She and Heather run back to her car, notice the car battery is dying more than it should, and drive toward the Munson Lab following Hanz, other runners, and the cops.

Edgar recovers from his eye and skin burns with no issues, but many have developed a kind of rainbow oily eye sheen that doesn’t seem to be harmful. He catches up with Rodger and watches VCR tapes from security camera videos of the meteor strike. They notice a black motorcycle with a slim driver arrive on scene just before impact, but can’t make out much more. Edgar recommends that Rodger find a way to put those videos online. He heads out, but commotion on the Big Gorge Bridge (already one way traffic due to safety concerns after the meteor’s siesmic impact wave) makes him turn around. There’s a lot of people running toward the Munson Lab, Cops too. He notices Big Jack’s Bodyguard, pistol in hand, crossing Route 3 toward Mezger farm, intently focused on something. He gets Rodger (who lives in the industrial area near Munson Lab) to let him crash on the couch due to the bridge problems. Rodger’s been listening to his police scanner and tells him something’s up at the Lab. Edgar drives over to see what’s up.

Mikhaila 's work at the hospital and interest in the weird eye sheen gave her a lead on a local opthamologist, but he lost someone in the meteor strike and wasn’t willing to help her. Her husband Huxley wants to blather on about PTSD from the survivors of the impact while stepson Beau, with a bit of an oily eye sheen is playing a console game on the bigscreen TV. When the TV shorts out, Beau flips out and starts running, knocking Mikhaila over as he rushes out the door. Leaving Huxley dumbfounded, Mikhaila drives out to the lab, late though it is, noticing a few runners out in odd clothes and that the parking lot has a lot more people in it than usual. She used Comrade Poops the Three-Legged Cat to get into the building and tries to get information on the Special Projects section. She has an unsettling conversation about comas and putting animals to sleep with a man smoking clove cigarettes who she dubs Rasputin. He takes her business card and promises to get back to her about consulting work. She watches the loading dock from a second story window as body bags are stacked into a semi. A crowd is forming around the semi, moving in a weird wavelike rhythm as if trying to topple the semi. She takes advantage of past work in the Cryo Lab adjacent to Special Projects and finds documents indicating Cryo is supporting Special Projects in some kind of suspended animation research, possibly to do with longterm space travel.

As Zee and Heather pull up in her car, and Edgar in his truck, and dozens of cops in their cruisers as well , the semi starts up and blares its horn. The oily eyed people surrounding it do not react. Zee and Heather pull Hanz partially free, but he’s in a daze. The semi blares its horn again, then pulls out crunching over several of the oily-eyed townspeople. Most of the townspeople run after it. Half the cops leave with it, escorting it. The other half start subduing the townspeople. Zee sees that the people who were run over and are in pain seem to be themselves again. She punches Hanz hard enough to snap him out of it. The mysterious black motorcycle and its slim driver zoom past Zee and Edgar. It takes point in front of the cop escorted semi. Mikhaila is caught reading things she’s not supposed to late at night in Cryo lab and the tech is calling security.


#5

7/24 A Few Days Later, Things Take a Dark Turn

MIKHAILA: - Goes looking for information about the bodies and semi in the Red Saddle Saloon. - The EMTs Zip and Marni aren’t much help, drinking heavily to cope with trauma. But they do indicate that in more recent calls, the rainbow eye sheens are all but nonexistent since the night of the semi. - A reporter makes it clear that there’s a lot of pressure from network shareholders to keep certain details about all the bodies under Hall’s Hardware. Mikhaila shares info about the mysterious Motorcyclist with the reporter.

  • Big Jack’s ambitious young assistant tells her that Big Jack is grateful for her saving his life the night of the meteor strike and would like to thank her by repairing the damage to her HUMMER. When she drops it off, notes his bodyguard (Amos) desk area by Big Jack’s office door looks like it has been emptied out.
  • When picked up by Edgar tries to sneak with him into the Meteor cleanup zone. Kind of a bust, the forklift Edgar was going to use has a dead battery, as other vehicles which have remained close to the meteor have also developed.

EDGAR: - At some point, it is established that Edgar used to ride motorcycles till laid it down bad enough to get a plate in his head. Likely that this plate may explain why he was not affected same as others who succumbed to the oily eye sheen effect.

  • Hunting with local guide Nedry DuMonde, hears about the Mezgers gone missing, invited to go with Nedry to check on some of the rural folks who haven’t been coming in to town since meteor.
  • At Hank Furnall’s Iron Eagle Bike Shop, learns that the mystery Motorcycle plate number is B612, also that Rodger’s uploaded VHS security cam videos of the meteor striking have been “deleted from the internet.”
  • He breaks off when he gets a couple distressed sounding texts from Nedry about problems at the old Eroll Place. Takes Mikhaila with him to the geotagged location.

    ZEE: - Establishes her field as neuro and microbe research. She doesn’t find any microbes on meteor samples when finally accesses some. Hugo, her boss, lets her in on some of his misgivings with Munson Lab.
  • Coworker, brother in law Hanz been acting stranger. Heather terrified. Alda silent on it all.
  • During research, determines a connection between screens of devices and meteor affects on some lab rats. (this mirrors some of what was noted in Beau and others on night of the semi.
  • She has a major mental break of some type, seeing Hanz in the mirror and then being compelled to seek out a Strange High House in the … Woods off Rt. 3.

THE OLD EROLL PLACE OFF ROUTE 3: - Zee leaves her car by the side of the road and her compulsive state rushes her through some game trails to a clearing by a Strange High House in the Woods. She climbs a tree then falls from near the attic window when Mother Mezger scares her with some nutty ramble about the “Little Prince is coming!”

  • Edgar leaves Mikhaila alone in the long abandoned street-front home. She finds an odd symbol in one of the bedrooms’ floors. It’s like the dust just won’t fall there, because the dusty floor around it was undisturbed. She has to fight for her life against a deranged acting Amos (Big Jack’s frightening, all but mute bodyguard). She escapes through a window, losing track of him, but surviving.
  • Edgar and Zee enter the Strange High House—covered inside in old blood glyphs on every wall—alertly heading up the stairs toward the attic. Zee is still seeing lots of strange scary stuff—Edgar, just a little spooked and jumpy.)
  • When they get to attic, Farmer and Mother Mezger are chained up, emaciated and delirious as if hadn’t eaten or had water for days on end, though they’ve only been missing for a couple days at the most, since Edgar had seen Amos headed to their property with his pistol out the night of the semi.
  • The investigators get the Mezgers to safety, and some blood samples. Edgar’s friend Nedry has not been seen or heard from.

#6

8/7 That Friday, "You had me at Impromptu Autopsy"
OUT ON ROUTE 3:
Looking for Nedry Dumonde at one of his hunting blinds in the woods behind THE ABANDONED EROLL PLACE on Rt. 3, Edgar and Mikhaila find the corpse of Amos (Big Jack’s bodyguard). His hair and nails have grown out to creepy lengths since his attack on Mikhaila the other night. They make a makeshift sledge from the blind’s blackout curtains and begin lugging the body to the old Eroll Place for an impromptu autopsy, since that building at least has some useful counterspace in it, unlike the THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE WOODS.

Which is where Zee has been collecting scrapings from the blood glyphs on the walls and making notes of some of the glyphs in her journal. She wraps up at the Strange High House and joins them heading to the old eroll PLace

The impromptu Autopsy reveals:

  • No obvious wound that cause death, most likely natural causes.
  • The internal organs are not as aged as the hair and skin would have lead them to expect
  • Amos had an unusual tattoo that doesn’t exactly match any of the other glyphs, but does seem to have some kind of similarity.
  • They need more science equipment to check the eyes for signs of that oily rainbow eye sheen. (so they take those with them.)

    Edgar can’t take the gore and vomits all over the floor before heading out front to wait in the fresh air. The ladies are just fine with it all, but have the bright idea that maybe they should burn the whole house down in case the GM decides to blow this teensy-tiny autopsy thing all out of proportion. Zee gets some kind of accellerant from her car and in her excitement, the God of Natural 1s smiles upon her. She catches herself on fire. destroying the protective armor of her Utility Pants and still burning her for a LOT of Damage. It takes 2 more rounds of both her and Mikhaila trying before she has extinguished all the flames and quit taking damage.

While all of this is happening inside the Eroll Place, Rt. 3, usually quiet, is backing up with traffic heading into town; news vans and such. Edgar chats with Roberto, the cameraman for that reporter Mikhaila had talked to in the Red Saddle and finds out that there’s word the bridge over the Big Gorge River is going to be closed down for a few days for repairs, so lots of news crews are swapping in and out.

Moments later, one of the town cops, Rusty, rolls up into the front yard of the Eroll Place. While Zee and MIkhaila are trying to shove an enormous, leaky dead body into a cabinet and rethinking the whole fire idea, the cop talks to Edgar, who smoothly convinces him that there’s some perfectly logical, non-autopsy related reason for him to be here with the Russian Lady doctor and whoever drives that other car. He rolls off thinking more positively of Edgar than before.

BACK AT THE MUNSON LAB:
Zee and Mikhaila put their heads together in Zee’a lab analyzing all the samples and correlating their information. While they are working, Zee’s boss Hugo enters with the secretive Special Projects person Mikhaila refers to as “Rasputin.” They silently observe and listen to their findings—The eye sheen seems to be dissipating in all who had it, there is some kind of connection between Blood Type of those infected, time and proximity to meteor, and the frequency of light emitted by certain screens. Mikhaila holds back a realization about the connection with certain metabolic triggers she gathered from when she was rifling through the Cryo lab’s Suspended Animation Project data.

Mikhaila follows “Rasputin” when he leaves. He hands her a business card already printed with her information on it. The position is listed as “Liaison to B612 Society.” In Zee’s Lab, Hugo presses her to get her co-worker/brother-in-law back to work.

PINE BLUFF SUBSTATION: Trying to make up some hours at work, Edgar is out welding some stuff at a remote substation near the trails at Pine Bluffs. He finishes up in time to be outside when a motorcycle buzzes out of the woodsy trail. It’s not the slim B612 motorcyclist as he suspected. It’s Hank Furnall from the Iron Eagle Bike shop with a panicked looking girlfriend on back. Out of breath, they tell him they found a dismembered body out at the end of the trail by the base of the cliff.


#7

Glad you found some use of my material, and your game is looking great!!


#8

Holy wowza, dude! That’s a hell of a recap! :astonished::exploding_head::raised_hands:
I’m feeling so much FOMO right now, off the frickin’ charts.
Great looking boards too. :heart: :herocoin:


#9

Oh the part I didn’t write in above about the Three Strike Pulpy investigative Campaign Deaths Rule: when they come back, they have a consequence of some sort that can only be overcome by putting in a heart of basic effort per cumulative death.

Example: character’s death timer clicks down for first time after taking damage from a nasty fall. Next session, Until they or someone devotes 1 heart of effort, that character moves slow as a Torton. Later, they get jump scared by A Shoggoth and their death clock ticks down for second time. When they come back next session, they are so shaken that now all INT and WIS attempts are HARD until 2 Hearts of effort have been applied. (Friendly encouragement, prayer and meditation, therapy)

This captures a bit more cinematic flavor and keeps consequence in the mix in A fun way that adds to the story.

ETA: For sake of completeness, when I am playing w 1 heart standard builds, and decide to use this hack, the first “death” is just for the rest of Scene; Then come back next scene with an explanation of your Pulpy Good Luck and 1 heart consequence. Second death is knocked out for Session/2 heart Consequence, 3rd death is Dramatic Last Stand. (Anyone who thinks they see some Fate Accellerated DNA there is right…)


#10

8/21 More Questions than Answers

The Big Gorge Bridge is closed today, with a lot of cops guarding it while inspectors and maintenance people stand by to do their work. As such, Edgar is pretty much stuck alone in the woods east of town while Mikhaila and Zee are in town.

EDGAR

Edgar opts to take the Thomson Woods trails on foot, a more direct route than he would have to take with the truck along fire roads and such. He discovers a meticulous campsite in the woods that sems to have been a very efficiently trained small military unit of some type. He also finds a scrap of body bag material similar to what had been used on the bodies under Hall’s Hardware.

Something heavy drops on him from the sky. A hibernating hawk? Hibernating animals pelt and litter the ground all around him as he progresses through the woods. He’s having a hard time finding his way but at least he is making progress. It’s getting darker though, the closer he gets to the cliff wall.

MIKHAILA

MIkhaila is in the Town Library, reading and researching The Little Prince as well as the pictures of Amos’ tattoo and the various markings she and Zee photographed that night out at the Old Eroll Place on Route 3. She discovers Amos’ tattoo was a representation of Chetro Ketl, a sort of village plan for a long dead tribe of the American Southwest. The marking that had been in the dust of the Eroll Place is a Sacred Geometry symbol for “Receive.”

One of the more friendly librarians, Cherise begins acting oddly after helping her, wandering out of the library into BEARCAT PLAZA. She’s trying to see what all the fuss is about, several groups of people surround others throughout the large parking lot. She’s distracted by her phone first: Her husband Huxley calling to tell her he is rushing stepson Beau to the hospital, acting strangely again. Mikhaila tries to help Cherise, but fails. Big Jack pulls her aside wanting to bring her into his organization as a “Mafia Doc” and she agrees. With nothing else to do, she heads to the hospital to check on Beau. Whe she arrives, she finds him levitating in the air, vibrating and collecting static energy like some Soviet-era dynamo.

ZEE

Zee is visiting family in a row of qiet townhomes near West End Park. Her boss had not-so-subtly told her to do what she could to get Hanz back to work. She’s there doing just that, at the moment researching via Google while niece Heather tries to calm Zee’s twin sister Alda in the other room. She doesn’t find out much about the bizarre stasis Hanz seems to be in, but she becomes even more aware of the Coverup—much of the outside world news about the meteor is completely gone from the internet. She also finds in Hanz cache some info about the schedule for several heavy duty helicopters to be removing the meteor from the site today. She also finds a copy of The Little Prince, this one with an inscription “All your efforts appreciated and rewarded. Your family will be safe.” It’s unsigned. The book naturally opens to Page 28 though she cannot figure out a reason for this.

Hanz, who had so far been completely unresponsive, suddenly begins shaking as he gets up and walks somewhat stiltedly out of his home and into the street wearing only a boxers and a bathrobe. The whole family tries to stop him, but he is beyond their control, forcefully making his way toward the Meteor site. Zee’s phone breaks in the scuffle and will need to be replaced. Hanz consents to ride with Zee in her car, but only because its going the right direction. He jumps out of the vehicle as they approach the Meteor site.

JUST NORTH OF METEOR SITE

4 Heavy duty helos have tied off to metal clamps drilled into the meteor. A ring of armed military and police surround the perimeter of the crash site, looking like they are expecting a fight. And that’s what it looks like they are going to get. Hanz, Cherise, and many others of the Affected have begun vibrating in sync, as they face the departing meteor transfixed. It looks like the Affected are somehow using psychic energy to pull the meteor back, and the helos are straingin at their task. The military are definitely about to start shooting at the Affected and anyone else who gets too close to the meteor site. All of this unsettles Zee and she rushes to Hanz, trying to pull him to the earth.

FAIRVIEW HOSPITAL

Michaela tries to help Beau and receives a decent zap for her efforts. She notes he is facing downtown. She’s also put some things together about the B612 Society at this point, understanding that the organization is focused on mitigating the risk of a Meteor causing an Extinction Event.

THOMSON WOODS

At the cliffside clearing, EDGAR finds some odd vehicle tracks he can’t gather much info from and more hunks of body bag… these with several severed limbs and such still stuck to them. A malformed large cat or panther, more cancerous tumors growing out of control than any other flesh pounces on his back. He manages to survive its attacks long enough to get a few shots off. It takes more shots than he would have expected.

JUST NORTH OF THE METEOR SITE

Zee takes a nearly fatal shock from Hanz and is on the ground unconscious and probably Dying. As is he. But the disruption of the network of Affected is enough to allow the helicopters to make off with the meteor.

THOMSON WOODS

It heads East over Thomson Woods and beyond the cliff, for just a moment as it passes overhead, Edgar is in a darker place than he already was.


#11

9/4 The Turn of the Page
IN THE ENSUING TWO MONTHS…

MIKHAILA waits for a drop or secret meeting with “Rasputin” the shadowy B612 Operative. Comrade Poops, the three legged cat she rescued from near the meteor impact site, gets tangled up in some thick stickerbushes and she has to help him get out. In the process, she removes his chip, which might give some information about past owner. When she looks up, the slim mototcyclist, clad all in black with a dark visored helmet leaves another copy of The Little Prince for her. This one in English. She has moved out, exhausted with Huxley’s Meteor PTSD money-grab book efforts and her douchelord stepson Beau.

She’s now living in an upstairs apartment near the Library. Mikhaila follows a couple leads to catch up with Gus Varney at his family’s farm. He is on house arrest and can’t work at his tattoo shop, but tells her some stuff about Amos and his tattoo. There’s some experimental weed in play somewhere too. Gus wants to get on Big Jack’s good side, so tells Mikhaila the address where Jimmy 2 Shoes is hiding out at in Lewistin, and hour or two outside of the three walled canyon that almost fully encloses Fairview.

EDGAR has a weekend gig at Harmon Steel and is on his shift when he sees his old nemesis Principle Lewicki trying to get some parts for the school’s faulty sprinkler system. He does nothing to help, and there’s a lot of tension there as Lewicki blames Edgar for the oblems the school is having with the sprinklers randomly turning on and off. He’s also heard that his friend Rodger has gone missing and spends some time checking into that. Rodger’s home and VCR Repair shop have been ransacked. There’s no sign of him. He finds some kind of invitation from the optometrist Jeff Niederman. He has a second encounter with a no-neck beefy guy, one of them inside Rodger’s shop.

ZEE spends some time moping downtown, feels watched. She sees the B612 Motorcyclist and does some creeping around to no avail. She also spends some time down by the quarry, where the frogs croaking give her an epiphany about the metabolism and genetic on/off switches. She goes looking for a research article she read once by Nicolai Parvo on how atrazine from weedkillers can make frogs hibernate, and in extreme cases, change sex. She can’t find the article anywhere, but does find a connection between Munson Lab and a large quantity of atrazine being purchased by the Lab from Hall’s Hardware and kept there on site. Her niece Heather is wandeing around town taking geotagged pictures for a summer job organized by Principle Lewicki… All the high schoolers are taking ons of pictures all over town and getting paid for them.
AN ABANDONED MALL IN LEWISTON

Mikhaila grabs Zee and Edgar for backup and goes to check out the lead on Jimmy 2 Shoes. It turns into a Battle in the Abandoned Mall for Zee and Edgar as they face a pair of beefy no-neck guys that can jump way better than they should be able to.

Mikhaila is searching for Jimmy 2 Shoes but finds a makeshift military camp instead in the upstairs mall break area. She also finds a book full of pictures of faces and realizes that some of them are annotated as captured, like Nedry and now Beau, and some have been found dead like Amos. Others appear to be targets in process, like Cherise and the kid whose face she put into a locker the day the meteor hit.

Someone (Jimmy 2 Shoes) makes a run for it, and ends up being chased by one of the beefy guys. (While the other one pops a cyanide cap and fizzes out. Mikhaila takes out the other beefy guy and rescues Jimmy 2 Shoes from the trunk of a Crown Vic.

They are on their way back to Fairview, trying to puzzle al of this out when Mikhaila loses contraol of the Hummer and they crash hard. Strangely, an ambulance is on the scene immediately, and the “helpful” paramedics knock them out.

They awaken in Fairview’s Big Bend Hospital…


#12

10/9 Awakenings
Been a gap in gaming stuff due to life in the Coronaverse. Let me catch ya’ll up.

BIG BEND HOSPITAL

They awaken in lots of pain some time after that clearly staged HUMMER accident on the road back from that abandoned mall in Lewiston. Sharing a clean but old fashioned hospital room. Sunlight streaming in. Pull loose leads and dress quickly.

All their possessions are available, except for firearms. There is a red stub of thick paper says they may claim their firearms at the Sheriff’s Office. Mikhaila is worried, upset that she doesn’t know where Comrade Poops the three legged cat is, though she is surprised to find the chip she had pulled out of him is still among her possessions. Edgar looks out the window at the town and can’t quite tell what is wrong about the view. Zee notices that Munson Labs now only has one floor.

Making their way out of the hospital, they realize they are the only patients within. Someone somewhere is whistling “Put on a Happy Face” and it can be heard through the old style ventilation ducts. There’s a loud squeaking sound that approaches then fades.

Things they notice as they navigate a mostly empty hospital hall to the outside:

  • Calendar on the wall at deserted nurses station shows October as the month, but no indication of year.
  • Zee’s money has a picture of President Obama and a date of 2032.
  • Their charts were created 2 hours ago, and don’t really pass Mikhaila’s standards of acceptable medical documentation.
  • The wing they are in was an older version of the building that Edgar thinks was torn down years ago.
  • The squeaking noise is an overworked hospital dryer.

HOSPITAL PARKING LOT

Mikhaila’s sparkly Pink Hummer is almost only car. There is no sign it has ever been in a rollover accident. A woman, Dr. Martinez by her badge, chases them out, tries to make them stay.

Strange sign beside stranger antique Payphone with extremely slim printed phone book.

Mikhaila tries to call her B612 contact (known only by the nickname she has given him of "Rasputin" so far). A woman answers and gives a lot of runaround. The same woman answers and does the same when Edgar tries to get in touch with Rodger. The VCR Repair Shop (& Training Course) are not listed in the slim phone book.

Minor altercation with Dr. Martinez ends when a bully of a Deputy rolls up on them. Points out the sign by an antique looking payphone. Tells them Rule 5 “Don’t go making trouble bringing up the past.” The group follows him to Sheriff’s Office in the Hummer.

APOPHIS CENTER - SHERIFF’S OFFICE

New buildings where there used to be a meteor crater. Edgar’s old nemesis Principal Lewicki is now Sheriff Lewicki. He gives them all keys to apartments by Bearcat Plaza overlooking Library on one side, and Munson Lab on the other. Returns their firearms, but no ammo. Edgar’s room doesn’t overlook anything but the dumpsters.

OVER A FEW DAYS AROUND TOWN

  • Mikhaila can’t find Comrade Poops, but notices she has not seen ANY cats, dogs, or even birds.
  • Edgar notices the same delivery truck dropping off generic packaged goods to stores around town.
  • Rodger’s VCR Shop is no longer there. Other businesses. People in general seem to be fearful of connecting too much with them, and strictly observe Rule 5 especially.
  • Every radio plays old Rat Pack era tunes, but Tony Bennett’s “Put on a Happy Face” is repeated A LOT.
  • Gus Varney now runs Munson Labs, and still has a job for Zee… but the place is now mostly just a designer pot farm. He calls her “Megan” and that’s what her badge says, too.
  • Same woman as before answers all calls from their cell phones placed to numbers outside of town.
  • Cell Phone internet is laughable. Super slow, and the results are mostly google links to Wikipedia pages or Project Gutenburg. Most other links are just bot-generated garbage.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER

The radios all over town come on, an announcer directs all citizens to Zee’s old neighborhood Briar Bluff out by Fairview High School. They make it across Big Gorge Bridge, now rusty as hell and overgrown, with no problems besides dodging pedestrians. Someone is being hunted by most of the other towns folk. A makeshift stage has been constructed. The Bully Deputy presiding.

Nedry Dumonde, the hunting guide who had gone missing a long time back, is there, now shaven and tells Edgar "Later" before blending back into the dangerous, bloodthirsty crowd.

The person who was being hunted is Zee’s old boss Hugo, who she couldn’t locate earlier. The three of them do nothing to avert Hugo being beheaded by the Bully Deputy with an enormous Axe.

"Put on a Happy Face" plays loudly from every radio. Townspeople refuse to make eye contact with Mikhaila, Edgar, and Zee.


#13

That “meteor” looks a lot like Columbia…


#14

If it is, somebody should have tagged their image better! :slight_smile:


#15

10/16 People Go Missing Every Day

A FEW DAYS LATER

Mikhaila and her pink Hummer have gone missing. Inexplicably, someone has broken into Edgar and Zee’s apartments and left the keys to their vehicles (Edgar’s bondoed pick-um-up and Zelda’s sensible sedan), which are both now parked outside.

EDGAR

Edgar goes looking for Nedry in Thomson Woods and gets lost on trails that aren’t quite the same as they had been a couple weeks ago. He triangulates off the cliff face (Fairview is surrounded on three sides by metal rich mountains) to get himself unlost. On the Fire Road, someone is messing with his truck. They make a run for it, but Edgar tackles Roberto (a news cameraman he had talked to on the day of the cabin autopsy out at the old Errol Place on Route 3).

Roberto is telling him that he was leaving a message from Nedry on his dash, telling him to meet in the quarry at midnight. Says that Nedry has been keeping him fed while he is in hiding from the town, and reveals that Hugo had been executed the night he returned from a mysterious trip that Roberto was almost the one to go on.

Little red dot appears on Nedry and he takes a bad shot that could get worse. He runs to his truck, starts it up, gives Roberto a chance and even a yell of encouragement, but Roberto is too panicked. As gunfire puffs up forest earth all around Roberto, who is clearly too freaked out to run for the truck, Edgar’s truck makes a rooster tail of dirt and rubble. He knows a shortcut across the river toward the old Varney farm and he needs to get to a hospital.

ZELDA

Has been watching the old church by Harmon Steel works because she saw a familiar slim black motorcycle parked outside. She heads in and finds the church empty except for a radio playing "Put on a Happy Face" for the billionth time. Zelda swears she will get brave enough to turn off a radio someday, but not today.

Some pictures on the wall reveal that the photos that were being taken by all the high schoolers not so long ago are somehow responsible for the town being what it is today. She hears a door close somewhere deeper within the church, but doesn’t want to investigate it any further. Her niece Heather took some of those pictures and she is worried about her. So she heads across town to check on her, her twin sister Alda, and brother in law Hanz.

She notices that there are few cars in town, and she hasn’t noticed a gas station yet either.

When she gets to their cozy townhouse in West End Park, Hanz, now much older and frail, greets her with tears in his eyes. He thinks she is his wife Alda, who he hasn’t seen in probably 15 years or so. His daughter Heather has also gone missing, but this was just a couple days ago. She has also been living without Alda for around 15 years… but it’s hard to estimate because people aren’t supposed to talk about the Past (Rule 5). Heather had been the Editor of the Fairview Phone Book, working at the Telecommunications Building next door to the Sheriff’s Office in Apophis Center (Where the meteor had struck just a couple weeks ago, as far as they have experienced.) Zee only finds generic groceries in his cabinets and no alcohol at all. He doesn’t want to talk in the townhouse because “THEY’RE LISTENING.” So they walk to the Red Saddle Saloon, which is just about the only place in town to find alcohol.

Hanz is very upset about the reminder of Alda, and plans to drink himself silly. Zee wants to check out Heather’s office and desk.

EDGAR

The hospital parking lot is nearly empty. Edgar wanders in, looking for help, but finds not a soul as he wanders around, shouting and banging on things. He opens up his wound and finds a warm sheet in a dryer to stanch the flow better. When he finally finds Dr. Martinez, she is in the same room as he and the others awoke in recently.

The person she is tending to is the one Mikhaila has called “Rasputin” and he says he’s glad to be back. Dr. Martinez treats him very deferentially, but does have a tiny bit of Hippocratic Oath in her, so leaves off to help Edgar. Edgar thinks he recognizes the guy on the bed with a natural 1 though, so he thinks its the “Will it Blend” dude from Youtube. Dr. Martinez lets her guard down a little bit with Edgar once they are far enough away from “Rasputin” and breaks Rule 5 long enough to tell him “she was more of a TikTok girl herself.”

ZELDA

Meandering her way unstopped through the Apophis Center Telecommunications business offices, she finds Heather’s desk. No one stops her, or even makes eye contact with her, but they do whisper to each other and back away from the area she’s in. Zee can’t log on to Heather’s very out of date computer, but takes a heartbreaking memento picture (of Zee and Heather at the Fairview High School job fair, session 1 of this campaign).

Zee is quick enough to avoid the Bully Deputy and rush onto the street, but unfortunately runs right into good ol’ Sheriff (nee Principal) Lewicki. He’s about to say something obnoxious and threatening, but when he sees the picture of Heather in Zee’s hands, he relents and seems to sympathize. “Was a shame she had to go out like that.”

Bully Cop bursts out the door of the Telecom building and nearly has Zee in cuffs but a burst of adrenaline helps her avoid that fate. She flees. Sheriff Lewicki tells the Deputy now is not the time.

Zee goes to retrieve Hanz from the Red Saddle and finds him in a drunken argument about “missing wives” with Mikhaila’s husband Huxley, who has moved on in her very long absence from his life and now has another wife of many years. Zee is not able to stop the argument from turning into a fistfight, which Hanz loses badly after Huxley does a ju-jitsu type maneuver and leaves him on the floor with a cracked rib or two.

Zee gets Hanz home and in bed. She takes the job fair picture out of its frame and sees the date written on the back. She has a very strong hunch that it is the password to Heather’s work computer, and she plans to use it later.

MIDNIGHT AT THE WHITE ROCK QUARRY

Edgar and Zelda pull up in Edgar’s beat up truck, kill the lights and walk down into the quarry. See movement by a steam shovel. More than 1 shadow. There are many many dark shadowy areas where Zee could hide, but that also means there are many places things could be hiding in the dark too. They are not able to notice very much else in the poor midnight lighting, and are lucky they can keep their step on some of the steep and rubble strewn handrail-lacking walkways.

The quarry’s beach head area transitions to watery basin that connects out to the Big Gorge River. A hungry preternatural yowling is coming from somewhere out on the water. Zee steels her nerves and heads toward the shadow at the Steam shovel. Turns out it’s not Nedry, but a pack of pointy eared, black eyed, saw toothed humanoids feasting on the corpse of Jeff Niederman (opthamologist, some kind of shady B612 affiliation in his past).

Zelda tries singing "Put on a Happy Face" to the beasts, but they just attack her harder.

She and Edgar are very badly wounded, but a whole lot of cloned commandos (like those who had been tracking Jimmy Two Shoes at the Abandoned Mall in Lewiston) emerge from the shadows, laser sighted silenced submachine guns a-popping.

They hypodermic Edgar and Zee. Zee blacks out immediately, but Edgar overhears some of the commandos griping about them "barely out a week and already trying to join the Resistance" and referring to "Mountain Central" which seems to be a military codename of some type.

GM ONLY NOTES

What had happened was… (stuff I determined behind the scenes in the moment.)

Zee’s Player is a notorious character hopper, so she built into her side story a couple NPCs that she might want to change to later. Her niece Heather and twin sister Alda. Both have been declared missing as she has started to get itchy to change things up. After tonight’s session, Zee’s player said she was ready to come in as a new character and wanted to come onstage as Heather next session. Zelda will be basically chunked into cryosleep as a Very Cold NPC/Macguffin till she’s needed again.

STUFF WHAT HEATHER KNOWS:

She woke up in the town about 15 years ago when it was almost done being rebuilt from her and the others’ photos. (Some places weren’t well photographed and so no second floor of Munson Lab, and the old hospital wing was built in error due to using old blueprints.)

Her mom Alda was also there then, but went missing about a year later. Hanz has not taken it well at all. Heather has worked hard to keep herself with access to information and used it to help form and maintain a little Resistance against whoever or whatever is running this weird-ass town and setting these strange new rules.

The Resistance spent time trying to escape the town and couldn’t. But then Roberto and Hugo (who had sided with Resistance over B612 Society in the end) had found a way through an underground section of caves along the western end of the river. Hugo just returned from 6-7 months of travel outside, but was caught and executed before he could tell anyone what’s out there beyond the big wall at the mouth of the valley.

STUFF WHAT THE PCs (STILL) DON’T KNOW :shushing_face:

  • It’s been 10,000 years or so, not just the 20-30 they suspect/assume.
  • Hugo was followed back by some of the I AM LEGEND/ Wayward Pines style devolved humanity, who were then mostly put down by the commandos… a couple were captured and taken under the mountain, and a few got away.
  • The cloned commandos from under the mountain found out about Nedry’s midnight quarry meeting when they tortured Roberto after Edgar abandoned him in the woods.
  • When Mikhaila tried to call “Rasputin” she spoke to a very human-sounding AI. The AI used that call to adjust the algorithm and woke him sooner than he had expected. He plans to walk among the town as if he were a new arrival and figure out what’s going wrong in the town, because he doesn’t like all the ungrateful fearfulness and Resistance going around…
  • As we get our feet under us in the Second Big Arc of the Fairview Campaign, the hook has been set for three main options:
    • take a trip Outside of Fairview (visit the ruins of Lewiston Mall maybe?)
    • find a way Under the Mountain.
    • Continue trying to make sense of the Town itself, its Secrets and the Resistance
    • Whichever direction they go, the other two directions will be getting worse till they come back around!

#16

10/30 The Last Days of Humanity

MIKHAELA

Made headway decrypting some useful information about the B612 Society using The Little Prince book as a cipher key.

Found Roberto’s traveling pack he had hidden in Thomson Woods for his trip outside the wall.

Used Roberto’s map and set off alone across the eastern mountain pass.

Detained by 2 goons probably cloned from the goons at Lewiston Mall the day of their car crash, when she had found the book of face pictures that seemed to be some kind of victim list.

EDGAR

Staked out the delivery truck, and followed it down the fire road toward cliff’s edge.

They faked a flat tire, he got close and changed the tire for them as the Bully Cop showed up with…

HEATHER

A leader of the Fairview Resistance, who had been investigating disappearance of her aunt Zelda and trying to interpret Zelda’s lynched boss Hugo’s Notebook, presumed to detail what he experienced outside The Wall.

Causes a disturbance at a business establishment and is asked to leave. Hanz goes free, but she’s asked too much in violation of Rule 5, so Bully Cop takes her in.

INSIDE “THE ARK”

Nicolai Parvo (aka Rasputin) is running things from an office with lots of maps and computer screens showing things in the town, and some reading outside the town. He gives Mikhaela an opportunity to explain her effort to leave Fairview, but she can’t really.

Edgar and Heather are brought in past rows and rows of cryo tanks. Many still filled.

In a fit of anger, Nicolai orders them dropped off by helo far outside the safety of Fairview, somewhere east of the wall.

THE WOODS SURROUNDING WHAT USED TO BE LEWISTON

There are a lot of those feral beings pursuing the trio through the woods. They are unarmed, very little food or supplies. Find the ruins of Lewiston Mall escalators, now rusted and brittle, but a safe place to hide for a while.

Through a process of great rolls and scientific deduction, Mikhaela is able to estimate it’s been about 10,000 years since the day of their car crash. And that the creatures they’ve been running from are some kind of devolved humanity.

They press on into what’s left of Lewiston, not finding any living humans or traces of them. They realize the ominous double meaning of Rule 4: Be Grateful for the gift of life in Fairview, the happiest town in the whole wide world. Because it’s most likely the last bastion of humanity.

They explore a bit farther into town finding the remains of a water treatment plant and reservoir that might be a safer place to figure things out from.


#17

11/22 Dominant Species

WATER TREATMENT PLANT

!
MIKHAELA has gone missing the next morning as EDGAR and HEATHER start exploring the water treatment plant. They hatch a plan to try to follow water piping and sewer mains underground as much of the way back to Fairview as they can to avoid the pack hunters.

Edgar figures out a way to drain the moldy, goopy water from the main reservoir, but it’s slow going. Heather, meanwhile keeps watch and notices a lot of the Ferals traveling the nearby forest.

When the water gets to a certain level, a large tunnel opens up, but also some kind of large black egg sac has been exposed to the air. Whatever is inside it psychically invades Heather (and it takes a lot to get it back out of her head over the course of rest of session). There is another tunnel all the way at the bottom of the reservoir, but neither Edgar nor Heather are willing to wait around to see what’s in that egg sac.

THE MIDWAY TUNNEL

They swim over to the mid-reservoir tunnel and proceed into the dark. With no food and no light, they realize this might not be the best idea, so decide to try to be a little better prepared before they head any farther.

But first, ALBINO SEWER GATOR needs to make things scary and life threatening. Edgar wrassles it and Heather whacks on it. They kill it and spend a while cutting off the tail to cook or cure back at the water treatment plant where it’s probably safer.


Edgar has a little bit of a sanity problem as they get close to the egg sac again, and doesn’t believe he is even himself. He feels like he is someone else pulling his strings like a puppet.

WATER TREATMENT PLANT

When they get back, the water level has dropped to the bottom of the reservoir. They have to jump to bottom, despite the psychic pressure of that egg sac about to rupture.

They are hurrying up a ladder inset into the concrete walls when the egg sac membrane bursts and a swarm of purple “eyestalk spiders” pour into the reservoir boiling toward them.

The Ferals are somehow aware of their presence, and start yipping and coming toward the plant.


Edgar and Heather barely make it to the safety of the maintenance room they had been hiding in before the Ferals arrive and devour the eyestalk spiders. They find a few things that can be burned and wait for the Ferals to leave so they can cook that albino gator tail.


#18

11/28 Remnants in the Rubble

MIKHAILA

When she had gone missing the other morning, MIKHAILA had gotten up very early and crept out after uncomfortable sleep. She thought to forage a bit as dawn broke. Got a bit turned around, and heard some Ferals nearby so she pushed up a hillside through dense woods. Top of the hill, she finds a makeshift campsite set up in the fuselage of a wrecked and scavenged small passenger plane. She discovers that someone had been trying to make the radio work with a portable solar panel, but can’t do much more with it. She heads back to the WATER TREATMENT PLANT to rejoin Edgar and Heather.

LEWISTON RUINS - WATER TREATMENT PLANT

Meanwhile, EDGAR ventures into the tunnel after the rest of that albino gator meat, only to find it gone. He hears something in the pipes and makes a hasty exit. MIKHAILA manages to find some bits of wire and such that she thinks could help get that radio going.

FROM HUGO’s JOURNAL

With Mikhaila’s information about the plane campsite HEATHER is able to connect it to things she read in Hugo’s decoded journal:

  • He’d spent several months at the site over winter, observing the Ferals (the devolution of humanity after the Apophis Meteor Extinction Event.
  • He also tried getting the radio to work, but planned to send the next Resistance scout here with proper repair kit.
  • He had not encountered any living human or even sign of, in the whole year he was away.
  • He intended to instigate a revolution against Nicolai Parvo and his B612 Society cronies, to tell the people of Fairview the truth about the outside world and what had been done to them, and to share the technology and supplies within the Ark fairly among the survivors.
  • He returned to town via a series of secret, narrow caves that sometimes required swimming. to emerge near the quarry on the western end of Big Gorge River. (The Ferals they encountered that night in the quarry had followed Hugo along this path.)

STRETCH OF OLD HIGHWAY

Mikhaila has a bit of trouble leading them back to crashed plane hillock without incident. Incident here meaning an ambush by two odd looking armored beasts with beady eyes and rending beaks. One tries to drag Mikhaila away, while another pins Edgar to the ground. They survive the encounter thanks to judicious use of hunting knives and such, but are worse for wear from it. They skedaddle just ahead of approaching pack of Ferals, who are probably so delighted to find fresh edible carcasses that they don’t think to track whoever killed them.

CRASHED PLANE CAMPSITE

Atop a dense woods protected hillock, MIKHAILA gets the crashed plane’s solar powered radio working. They hear a recorded message from Nicolai Parvo (formerly “Rasputin”) urging any remaining humans to come to Fairview, and then looping with a scratchy rendition of Tony Bennett singing “Put on a Happy Face”.

EDGAR gives the radio a shot and finds what he believes to be a numbers station operating on another frequency; they hear an electronic BUZZ BEEP BEEP every 30 seconds or so. HEATHER sees the approach of an intense looking incoming storm system, and starts looking for and preparing a safe place within the plane’s fuselage for them to ride it out. Mikhaila and Edgar quickly try to send out an SOS on that channel, and search for other frequencies, to no avail. But they do gain an important piece of information: they believe the timing of the storm’s interference with the BUZZ BEEP BEEP signal has given them a good idea (when combined with the maps Heather has from Roberto’s backpack) where to start looking for the source of that signal: a gray area on the old map marked GOVERNMENT at the edge of Gorrytown Nature Preserve (or what was left of it.)

By the time the big twister gets there, all are huddled in safety in a baggage compartment access, hanging on to the cover for dear life. Heather’s preparations are enough to protect them all from any harm, beyond a single point of muscle strain she takes upon herself. No one thought to secure the portable solar panel, and it’s long gone.


#19

Love your recaps, keep 'em coming. I am a fan :slight_smile:


#20

Thanks! I just realized the final section of that last section got dropped somehow. Forthwith:

GORRYTOWN NATURE PRESERVE - UNDERGROUND BUNKER

They spend some time looking for the source of the BUZZ BEEP BEEP numbers station signal, and eventually locate a weathered artificial tree. From here, it’s not much farther before they find access to an underground bunker. An alarm starts going off as they wander a large cargo area trying to get their bearings in the dim light emitted by floor level lamps inset to the steel walls.

They find the control room easily and get inside with a bit of hotwiring the pad. In the control room are maps with coded letters and numbers in strategic locations and (written in Russian Cyrillic grease pencil) something about how “At least Russia went first.” They get the alarm turned off eventually. Searching the control room, they find: some automatic rifles and ammo in a locker, A Fire Safety map of the bunker, an Airman’s identification badge.

They also realize the entrance to the control room, apparently the only way out as well, is locked, displaying “Awaiting Access Protocol.”