The Fabulous Unknown City - Session 2
Apr. 19th, 2014 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kingtycoonThe players, having journeyed up the strange cable-car into the mists, have spent a single night in the Fabulous Unknown City, meeting a few members of some strange gangs - the bird-masked surgeons of the Sanguine Execution Gang, the brachiating brutes of the Yellow Hexagon Line & the Fox-Masked Summertime Fire Degenerates. Mostly though, they spent their first session getting to the City and camping out overnight - expending all the stores and supplies of trade-goods that they'd been sent with..
They'd arrived at the Yellow-Hexagon terminal - though they'd never come to find that out themselves. They'd never call it by that name in their time there - they'd simply understand it to be a strange & terrifying new place to meet strange and terrifying new people.
The Fabulous Unknown City serves most often as a gulag in the empire, a prison for the most dangerous and undesirable people. Sometimes a deposed noble or an extra bastard of a high-house gets sent there, and sometimes there are explorers and surveyors - but the party all chose to be criminals and mercenaries.
Eyonon - fresh faced and boyish! A naive sort without much experience or sense. A sorcerer of the Flower Court
Barnaby - a stone killer, a hardcore prisoner that no jail yet has held. Rogue of the highest degree.
Wincey - the Nervous, Mad Alchemist & Inventor
Edard - the lunatic sent away by a hostile world - a sorcerer of the Dreamer Coven
Vulcanus - the half-trulk mercenary, the steel-toothed marauder who was asked to go and not sent, and who went, for the sake of going.
Vulcanus, wandering off in the night binging on the drugs sent along as trade materials - vanishes by the light of dawn. Fortunately he is replaced by another refugee from the cable-car - Diodenne - the bravest woman of all - who went to the prison out of love and duty. Together they explore the suddenly desolate region outside these grand abandoned structures.
(I should point out that I kept using 'Tower City' & 'Pubic Square' & 'Windermere Station' as size references for them, but none of them got it - suburbanite car-drivers! They've no sense of the scale of things - and so, the mat and the tiles were brought out.)
Inside the yellow-glass 'barn' the great Yellow Hexagon terminal is the spare, but pleasing and airy open structure - of a multi-story building composed of steel and glass and open within like a vast atrium - or, Birdcage- as named by Wincey - who spotted one of the surgeon crows going in and who wanted to pursue.
It had seats like these all over, but with yellow hexagon patterns
Once inside they could not but overhear the loud carnival barking and the rising cheering mutter of a crowd gathered at the farther end. A great large building - twisted and filled with soft furnishings and disturbed kiosks - the terminal is by a far margin the largest building any of them have seen. Without too much hesitation they approach the raucous scene.
There is a tall circular desk, high, so that the tallest among them cannot touch the top - and mounted on the desk is a spinning wheel with numbers marked upon it, colors and an arrow - it is some kind of a game. On the chalkboard surface that covers the outside of the desk there are names and wagers noted - being noted by a Large & Boisterous man, walking with a limp and a heavy spear as a cane, he calls all to the wheel to gamble. "Chance! And Fate! Chance & Fate! Will you, dear guest in this borrowed house, will you? Will Chance favor you, will you be beloved by luck? Or does fate have a quest for you to fulfill? Will you be governed by fate and destined to win or lose? How can you know if you do not play? How can you know if you don't test your mettle against Chance & Fate!?" He's pretty persuasive this Lucien Yellowhay Arcingspray (one of the Sons of the Kannyltine, dressed in a military uniform, like finding a soldier dressed in confederate grays). The other players, of the game-within-the-game are present and ready, they've put in their secret stakes ("Your stake is secret but you can't stake a secret, here we game according to the rules of the pentacle - we only wager what you can carry in your pocket, and what've you got, what's you gots in your pockets?") The players are so:
Profligate Spender – AKA Pro Spender (Spring-Frog Gangster Leftennant) In his huge green velvet suit and huge green frog mask, accompanied by his huge gang of enforcers and bodyguards.
Numis Aurr (Cable-Car Warlord of the Red-Triangle Line) A big man, and a hard one, he's got the teardrop tattoos in the red-triangle pattern. Does he fear to tread on the Yellow-Hex line? No he does not, he carries his railroad-mace and swaggers with his thigh-sized brachiating forearms flexed prominently. His 5 member gang all the same, but meaner and quieter, they growl less and mutter barely audible curses, eyes on the windows.
Fabulyo Drunkletes (Homesteader, an old lady, wiry & with a wheat-sprig dangling from her mouth) She's been around for a long time, in the game for to take her chances and should chance decree - take home a new pig or goat.
Sunday Pentacles (a Zero - when they ask where she stays she points at her boots - long and lean, strong and clean, to her there is no in-between). Maybe she's got a heroic streak, and maybe she just behaves like any woman who grew up in a prison. Immediately she likes Eyonon and takes him for herself, there's a good deal of inappropriate touching and groping as a man born in the forest courting a woman raised in a prison are bound to have ludicrous misunderstandings and farcical fumblings. She slaps a bracelet on him and declares him her prize. They are together now.
Morts Vigrous (Sanguine Crow - they followed him in, he plays barely at all, and is not spoken to or engaged at all, just the way he likes it.)
The game has some rules is determined by the roll of the 20 sided - there are more chances for the house to win than the players - and desperate and without much goods to wager (my error, but theirs too - they never did try to gather loot) they only wager for the first round and never do quite win. Wincey starts a feud with Pro-Spender and it's only kept from bloodshed by the intervention of the many, many guards and heavies in the room. Edard - the only player in the second round manages to lose his stake - the party's supply of water - and finally recalls his mage-hand spell when he tries with his last secret wealth to participate in the 3rd round of the game. Foolish, foolish players... Indeed, when Sunday & Eyonon together win what is behind door #1 (a giant's corpse, 12 feet tall at least and decked out in martial finery - a huge sword and axe & all - and more than that, mummified in honey & wax (they find it to be full of bees - a giant armored beehive)) and Edard is given the choice of Doors #2 and #3 - he utterly spaces on the Monty Haul problem and summarily wins a goat!
Of course, in the City, wherever 10 or more are gathered, So To are the Priests of Below, the Basement Torturers, The Pontiffs of Pain! Up from the basement they come - and the assembled gamblers groan in dismay - "There they come, to break up our fun, let's scatter and go." This idea is a winning one, or would be - but for the sudden reappearance of the Yellow-Hex monorail gang! They arrive on the cables hand over hand and their cable-car comes screeching up the line, bristling with warriors, the way out is no way out now!
A melee ensues- the players have a good deal of trouble with the whipping, muttering priests from the basement. They're entangled and harassed and poor Wincey ends up retreating to behind one of the prize-doors to rock and mutter, fingers in his ears, hopeful of not being called to the darkness. For the unutterable muttering of the priests from the platforms below, from th winding marble stairs has in it a terrible compulsion - "come into the dark and take your beating." It says - and the vicious brutality of institutional authority prevails over Dodenne and Barnaby and Sunday - who all choose to descend and all choose to be whipped and harmed - this despite their valiant efforts at fighting off the priests - indeed Barnaby is a stone-cold slayer of men cutting them apart with his prison-shiv swords - and yet, he knows his place is in the prison, so down the stairs he goes.
In the end they are absconded off - body-surfed to the electric canal. The lower platforms house canals, watery through-ways that are charged in some fashion with an electrical force. The priests take the players and NPCs in turn - giving them the DC baptisms. They're held to the water by the current and bend hideously and twist in agony - Fabuluyo, Sunday and Edard take their time on the Electrification Penance - The Railroad Trinity of 3 in the 1 watery rail. The others snap out of it and fleeing, along with poor, solitary Numis - the Red-Line-Rampager - they overcome the last of the priests (all dressed in tight gossamer robes of red and wrapped in chains and filled up in their guts with barbed wire) leap onto the canal - which somehow, miraculously holds them aloft and spirits them down the tunnel-road. Numis, taking his railroad mace with him, does likewise, vanishing in another direction.
Wincey - fleeing the upstairs, hoping to at least die in company rather than alone in a closet - finds a metallic sled, steel on the bottom, vinyl cushion on top. It's hard to manage, but Dodenne is good at riding, she steadies it nice and they all ride the magic carpet of the electric canal to the place where it ends - at a tunnel collapse. There, they find a way up and out - a broken wall which leads to another chamber of different stone and different color, a basement broken into.
Sunday and Fabulyo - both electrocuted and whipped, but remaining with the party know about this - a little. They lay out some exposition, at last, and the party is given some knowledge to keep. Fabulyo is a farmer and part of a farming league - it's hard work traveling by foot - because somehow the surface roads switch and change in the city - the lines and the canals all stay the same, but they're owned by violent, insane gangs, so she doesn't lightly leave home. Meanwhile she recognizes Sunday - "You used to stay at my farm, when you was a little'un." "I think I did, maybe more than once." They play a little game (NPC on NPC being a conversation I do tend to avoid) about who they know in common - turning out to be a large number of people- the City is big, but not well populated. They together claim that the basement and the realm above looks like it belongs to the Dusty Sisters - the Queens of the Boneyards. "Not too mean, but they're a lot nicer if you bring 'em a body to et." Says Fabulyo, knowingly.
And there we prepare for round #3.
They'd arrived at the Yellow-Hexagon terminal - though they'd never come to find that out themselves. They'd never call it by that name in their time there - they'd simply understand it to be a strange & terrifying new place to meet strange and terrifying new people.
The Fabulous Unknown City serves most often as a gulag in the empire, a prison for the most dangerous and undesirable people. Sometimes a deposed noble or an extra bastard of a high-house gets sent there, and sometimes there are explorers and surveyors - but the party all chose to be criminals and mercenaries.
Eyonon - fresh faced and boyish! A naive sort without much experience or sense. A sorcerer of the Flower Court
Barnaby - a stone killer, a hardcore prisoner that no jail yet has held. Rogue of the highest degree.
Wincey - the Nervous, Mad Alchemist & Inventor
Edard - the lunatic sent away by a hostile world - a sorcerer of the Dreamer Coven
Vulcanus - the half-trulk mercenary, the steel-toothed marauder who was asked to go and not sent, and who went, for the sake of going.
Vulcanus, wandering off in the night binging on the drugs sent along as trade materials - vanishes by the light of dawn. Fortunately he is replaced by another refugee from the cable-car - Diodenne - the bravest woman of all - who went to the prison out of love and duty. Together they explore the suddenly desolate region outside these grand abandoned structures.
(I should point out that I kept using 'Tower City' & 'Pubic Square' & 'Windermere Station' as size references for them, but none of them got it - suburbanite car-drivers! They've no sense of the scale of things - and so, the mat and the tiles were brought out.)
Inside the yellow-glass 'barn' the great Yellow Hexagon terminal is the spare, but pleasing and airy open structure - of a multi-story building composed of steel and glass and open within like a vast atrium - or, Birdcage- as named by Wincey - who spotted one of the surgeon crows going in and who wanted to pursue.
It had seats like these all over, but with yellow hexagon patterns
Once inside they could not but overhear the loud carnival barking and the rising cheering mutter of a crowd gathered at the farther end. A great large building - twisted and filled with soft furnishings and disturbed kiosks - the terminal is by a far margin the largest building any of them have seen. Without too much hesitation they approach the raucous scene.
There is a tall circular desk, high, so that the tallest among them cannot touch the top - and mounted on the desk is a spinning wheel with numbers marked upon it, colors and an arrow - it is some kind of a game. On the chalkboard surface that covers the outside of the desk there are names and wagers noted - being noted by a Large & Boisterous man, walking with a limp and a heavy spear as a cane, he calls all to the wheel to gamble. "Chance! And Fate! Chance & Fate! Will you, dear guest in this borrowed house, will you? Will Chance favor you, will you be beloved by luck? Or does fate have a quest for you to fulfill? Will you be governed by fate and destined to win or lose? How can you know if you do not play? How can you know if you don't test your mettle against Chance & Fate!?" He's pretty persuasive this Lucien Yellowhay Arcingspray (one of the Sons of the Kannyltine, dressed in a military uniform, like finding a soldier dressed in confederate grays). The other players, of the game-within-the-game are present and ready, they've put in their secret stakes ("Your stake is secret but you can't stake a secret, here we game according to the rules of the pentacle - we only wager what you can carry in your pocket, and what've you got, what's you gots in your pockets?") The players are so:
Profligate Spender – AKA Pro Spender (Spring-Frog Gangster Leftennant) In his huge green velvet suit and huge green frog mask, accompanied by his huge gang of enforcers and bodyguards.
Numis Aurr (Cable-Car Warlord of the Red-Triangle Line) A big man, and a hard one, he's got the teardrop tattoos in the red-triangle pattern. Does he fear to tread on the Yellow-Hex line? No he does not, he carries his railroad-mace and swaggers with his thigh-sized brachiating forearms flexed prominently. His 5 member gang all the same, but meaner and quieter, they growl less and mutter barely audible curses, eyes on the windows.
Fabulyo Drunkletes (Homesteader, an old lady, wiry & with a wheat-sprig dangling from her mouth) She's been around for a long time, in the game for to take her chances and should chance decree - take home a new pig or goat.
Sunday Pentacles (a Zero - when they ask where she stays she points at her boots - long and lean, strong and clean, to her there is no in-between). Maybe she's got a heroic streak, and maybe she just behaves like any woman who grew up in a prison. Immediately she likes Eyonon and takes him for herself, there's a good deal of inappropriate touching and groping as a man born in the forest courting a woman raised in a prison are bound to have ludicrous misunderstandings and farcical fumblings. She slaps a bracelet on him and declares him her prize. They are together now.
Morts Vigrous (Sanguine Crow - they followed him in, he plays barely at all, and is not spoken to or engaged at all, just the way he likes it.)
The game has some rules is determined by the roll of the 20 sided - there are more chances for the house to win than the players - and desperate and without much goods to wager (my error, but theirs too - they never did try to gather loot) they only wager for the first round and never do quite win. Wincey starts a feud with Pro-Spender and it's only kept from bloodshed by the intervention of the many, many guards and heavies in the room. Edard - the only player in the second round manages to lose his stake - the party's supply of water - and finally recalls his mage-hand spell when he tries with his last secret wealth to participate in the 3rd round of the game. Foolish, foolish players... Indeed, when Sunday & Eyonon together win what is behind door #1 (a giant's corpse, 12 feet tall at least and decked out in martial finery - a huge sword and axe & all - and more than that, mummified in honey & wax (they find it to be full of bees - a giant armored beehive)) and Edard is given the choice of Doors #2 and #3 - he utterly spaces on the Monty Haul problem and summarily wins a goat!
Of course, in the City, wherever 10 or more are gathered, So To are the Priests of Below, the Basement Torturers, The Pontiffs of Pain! Up from the basement they come - and the assembled gamblers groan in dismay - "There they come, to break up our fun, let's scatter and go." This idea is a winning one, or would be - but for the sudden reappearance of the Yellow-Hex monorail gang! They arrive on the cables hand over hand and their cable-car comes screeching up the line, bristling with warriors, the way out is no way out now!
A melee ensues- the players have a good deal of trouble with the whipping, muttering priests from the basement. They're entangled and harassed and poor Wincey ends up retreating to behind one of the prize-doors to rock and mutter, fingers in his ears, hopeful of not being called to the darkness. For the unutterable muttering of the priests from the platforms below, from th winding marble stairs has in it a terrible compulsion - "come into the dark and take your beating." It says - and the vicious brutality of institutional authority prevails over Dodenne and Barnaby and Sunday - who all choose to descend and all choose to be whipped and harmed - this despite their valiant efforts at fighting off the priests - indeed Barnaby is a stone-cold slayer of men cutting them apart with his prison-shiv swords - and yet, he knows his place is in the prison, so down the stairs he goes.
In the end they are absconded off - body-surfed to the electric canal. The lower platforms house canals, watery through-ways that are charged in some fashion with an electrical force. The priests take the players and NPCs in turn - giving them the DC baptisms. They're held to the water by the current and bend hideously and twist in agony - Fabuluyo, Sunday and Edard take their time on the Electrification Penance - The Railroad Trinity of 3 in the 1 watery rail. The others snap out of it and fleeing, along with poor, solitary Numis - the Red-Line-Rampager - they overcome the last of the priests (all dressed in tight gossamer robes of red and wrapped in chains and filled up in their guts with barbed wire) leap onto the canal - which somehow, miraculously holds them aloft and spirits them down the tunnel-road. Numis, taking his railroad mace with him, does likewise, vanishing in another direction.
Wincey - fleeing the upstairs, hoping to at least die in company rather than alone in a closet - finds a metallic sled, steel on the bottom, vinyl cushion on top. It's hard to manage, but Dodenne is good at riding, she steadies it nice and they all ride the magic carpet of the electric canal to the place where it ends - at a tunnel collapse. There, they find a way up and out - a broken wall which leads to another chamber of different stone and different color, a basement broken into.
Sunday and Fabulyo - both electrocuted and whipped, but remaining with the party know about this - a little. They lay out some exposition, at last, and the party is given some knowledge to keep. Fabulyo is a farmer and part of a farming league - it's hard work traveling by foot - because somehow the surface roads switch and change in the city - the lines and the canals all stay the same, but they're owned by violent, insane gangs, so she doesn't lightly leave home. Meanwhile she recognizes Sunday - "You used to stay at my farm, when you was a little'un." "I think I did, maybe more than once." They play a little game (NPC on NPC being a conversation I do tend to avoid) about who they know in common - turning out to be a large number of people- the City is big, but not well populated. They together claim that the basement and the realm above looks like it belongs to the Dusty Sisters - the Queens of the Boneyards. "Not too mean, but they're a lot nicer if you bring 'em a body to et." Says Fabulyo, knowingly.
And there we prepare for round #3.
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Date: 2014-04-19 08:38 pm (UTC)