Session 6: “The Hole is all I got, baby.”
Ran on August 12th, 2020 | Week 6, Year 1
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GOBLIN BAZAAR
Among all the board games with missing pieces, eraserless pencils worn down to nubs, and empty cereal boxes, there is a great heavy book. 2 feet by 2 feet, bound in iron, which contains the complex mystery script which describes the third level spell “Dispel Magic,” and is being sold as a sturdy building material for 600r. There’s also a revolver on display in a glass case. A colt single-action army, covered with ivoery inlays and fancy engravings which add no tactical advantage whatsoever. The goblin selling it refers to it as a “Fidget Spinner,” and wants 80r in exchange.
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After visiting the goblin bazaar and scraping the bottom of their purses for enough coin to buy the “Fidget Spinner,” the party decided to visit the only level they had not yet been to: five. The first room they encountered there was filled with a nasty looking liquid they wanted to avoid. They shimmied around the walls to access the two most accessible doors. They waffled between which to take, but it wound up being a bit of a false choice as both doors led to the same room. In that room was a table heaped high with batteries, bullets, good food, and rations. Fearing the obvious trap the party checked around: the table was not on pressure plates, but there were slowly-spinning fans beneath it. They attempted to move around the sides to fill their packs with food–and in so doing blocked the flow of air from vents on the walls. The fans beneath the table stopped spinning, which caused sheets of that strange dark liquid to pour from the ceiling in front of all the room’s exits. An alarm also started going off down one of the hallways. Moving quickly they shoved all they could into their bags, propped the table beneath the flowing liquid to clear a path to one of the doors, and fled back to the first room.
As they did, a great paper-skinned man-beast with melty-looking meat cam barreling towards them from the direction of the alarm. The party had to climb along the walls of the liquid-filled room to reach the exit, and had to do so very quickly. Pearl went first, and made it, but Dexadrine Malarky fell right into the battery acid, and her clothes, treasures, and body began to melt. Pearl helped her out quickly enough to save her life, and the rest of the party managed to magically compell / trip their attacker into the acid. Everyone sealed up the doors, forcing the creature to escape down a different path. That gave the party plenty of time to calmly and safely make their way back to the elevator. They dropped their supplies off in town, Dex used the baby-hole to restore her skin, and the goblin market to buy clothes in the style of an ancient Akkadian. With plenty of time in the session, the party ventured into level 1.
After socializing with some Bovines, the party tried to head off into unheld dungeon territory. Unfortunately, they immediately ran into a robot who stabbed Dexadrine Malarky. After the injuries she’d sustained earlier, this was too much for her. She died. The rest of the party avenged her death by destroying the robot, and dragged both her and the robot’s metal carcass back to the Bovines. They were mightily impressed that the party appeared to have taken on their cause against the robots, and suffered so dearly for it. Dexadrine has become sort of a martyr for the Bovines, and the party’s bond with that faction is now considerable.
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HOOKS:
There’s something down on level 5 that’s looking for captives. Also, Muscles is incredibly depressed upon learning his lover is gone.
RELATIONSHIPS:
Boastful Bovines +5
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LOOT:
-Revolver
-3rd level spell “Dispel Magic” in a great big book.
-Various treasure snagged from the torture beast’s baited trap, totalling 3900 returned to the surface.
-Robot husk looted for three batteries, 60r
TOTAL: 3960r, split 5 ways for 792r each. (Influencer, Varza, Samno, Pearl, and Idoru)
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CASUALTIES: Dexadrine Malarkey was felled by a robut. She died with 99xp
Session 7: “Everyone! Start doing cowboy shit!”
Run on August 26, 2020 | Week 7, Year 1
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Goblin Bazaar:
Beneath branded calendars, self help books, and crates of plastic Easter eggs, you find a silenced pistol in good condition. When the goblin realizes what you found she insists you pay 700g for it. You also find the 2nd level spell “Audible Glamor” written on a napkin for 160g.
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After deciding not to buy anything in the Goblin Bazaar, the party went back to the first level of the dungeon to hopefully continue exploring in the same direction they’d been going when Dex died at the end of last session. They chatted briefly with some Boastful Bovines, then went on their way.
Almost immediately they were accosted once again by Xogthax the Terrible, mighty dragon. The party managed to convince Xogthax that it would be much more pleasant to go back and eat some Bovines, and so were able to pass without incident. They then figured they might follow the dragon’s trail back to its lair and loot its many treasures.
They reached the boundary of robot territory, guarded by Steve-O, a robot marked out by their metal cowboy hat and their gatling gun arms. The party chatted with Steve-O for a bit, and entertained the possibility of fighting him, but decided against it. Regretfully, they turned away from Xogthax’ trail.
They found some janky old VR setups with a bit of power, which seemed to be connected to some kind of lame, buggy VR training program for what a soldier ought to do if they encountered extra-terrestrial monsters. The party looted the machines for their batteries.
While this was going on, Varza was out in the hall when a wall collapsed, and a massive stinky trash creature fell out. It attempted to eat Varza’s head, but the party managed to kill it and lots its flabby, cthulhu-ripoff corpse.
Further on the party found a grotesque battlefield where the rusting hulks of robots were tangled with the rotting corpses of bovines. Samno briefly spoke with a Bovine ghost, but after deciding it had nothing useful to tell the party, he just raised a bunch of Bovine skeletons, and marched them back to Steve-O to overwhelm him with violence. Varza took his metal cowboy hat, and the party resumed following the dragon’s trail: first through one room of robots they could sneak past, then through another room of robots they could sneak past, then into a third room of robots who all noticed them, and were very upset to see humans wearing Steve-O’s signature hat.
The party fled for dear life. They managed to escape the robots without any great harm, but as they ran a mysterious voice attempted to extort Samno for infringing on its “intellectual property” by raising skeletons, and insisted on an 880r fee. Samno “agreed,” without any intention of paying. He was told to take the money to a certain crevasse outside town and throw it in. No one ever saw what was speaking, but Samno did feel its hand on his shoulder.
The party also passed Muscles the Goblin, still distraught at the loss of Dex, annoyed that the party replaced her so fast, and on his way to the Bovine v. Robot front, to kill as many Robots as he could.
As the party passed through Bovine territory on their way out of the dungeon they wittnessed the great devestation wrought by Xogthax, but the Bovines did not know the party had instigated the attack.(edited)[6:32 PM]
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LOOT:
-250 Bullets from Steve-O’s robo corpse (1250r)
-2 junk gatling gun arms bought by goblins (400r)
-21 Batteries taken from VR room, and Trashulthu Corpse (420r)
-Sleep spell, sold because no one can use it (100r)(SAMNO ONLY)
-Greater Invisibility spell, sold for the same reason (800r)(SAMNO ONLY)
The party loot totals to 2070r, or 518r each!
Session 8: “Sure wish I had a bow right now…”
Run on September 9th, 2020 | Week 8, Year 1
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Goblin Bazaar:
Pushing aside hangars filled with miniskirts that smell mysteriously like banana, a variety of tupperware lids without containers to go with them, and raggedy valentine’s day teddy bears, the party discovers a functional segway being sold for the absolute steal of 200r. You also bump into Kydd the Goblin Stuff-Knower. She wears a trench coat, and a five knives on a chain around her neck. She knows things, and will tell you the things she knows…for a price. Each question she answers to her own satisfaction will cost 220r today. (The players bought the segway, they didn’t get anything from the Stuff-Knower)
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The session began with Varza selling his bow.
This week, most of the party was hung over in town. Presumably from imbibing too much Goblin Sauce and getting hung over. So it was just Samno and Varza today, which is an opportunity Samno had been waiting for! He laid out a treasure map he’d been sitting on, and suggested that if he and Varza could locate the treasure when no one else was around, the loot would be all theirs! The map depicted a path from the elevator shaft to the treasure, but didn’t indicate which level it was on, so they headed down one by one.
The Bovines looked to be in rough shape from fighting the Dragon, but were glad to have good friends like the party. This wasn’t the right floor, so Varza and Samno moved on.
The goblins all said they knew exactly where the treasure was, and pointed off in different directions. It clearly wasn’t here. This is also where Varza sold his bow. After all, with his gun it is unlikely the bow will be that useful, right?
The purple robed nerds of the third level still look downtrodden and emaciated. Samno does not pity them.
The fourth floor appeared to be the right one! The robots were happy to see them return, and eager to get them back to the safety of the human holding room. Pointing at his metal hat, Varza managed to convince them he was himself a robot, and Samno was obviously never human at all. They claimed to be working in service of humans, bantered a bit about how hard it is to take care of the stinky little bastards, then moved on. They went right past a mysterious blue light, into a room filled with regimented, uniformed undead who claimed to be in the service of one “Adolphus the Hateful.” After some back and forth, the party agreed to pay 34 rations for a day-pass through the two rooms the undead were guarding.(edited)[6:11 PM]
The party snuck past some crystals who seemed to be examining the walls, and encountered the room of a budgy fellow with a bunch of goofy swords who talked a lot about honor and skill, and insisted on some kind of hodge-podge ritual combat. Samno ended him in a single round, then raised him and one of the rats he’d been eating as skeletons. They also took his sticky magazines.
The party was just getting near the treasure when a massive horde of skeletons poured out of a side corridor to attack them. Samno sacrificed his two newly raised minions to flee back to the room with Adolphus in it, shouting something about being neighborly to the crystals as they ran past. The undead stormtroopers weren’t too happy about having a bunch of skeletons knocking on their door, and arranged a defense with the party. Varza’s gun jammed up on the first shot, leaving him in a bit of a lurch, but the cyrstals helped out a bit, and undead the party had allied themselves with were pretty efficient at killing the undead that wanted to kill the party. Once a good amount of damage had been done, Samno really turned the tide by raising a bunch of the destroyed skeletons as his own minions.
Adolphus minions handed the party brooms and mops so they could clean up the mess, which they did, after which they continued on the way they’d been going. They had a brief encounter with a malevolent painting who was easily distracted by the sticky magazines, and finally the treasure: boxes and boxes of comic books. Samno slapped his forhead, realizing now why the map had said “SELL TO PORPL DRESS GUYS.”
Using the skeletons, the party quickly got all the boxes of comics out of the room. When the malevolent painting realized what they had, it demanded that all the comics be left behind for it to peruse…but the sneaky sneaky party distracted it with just a few issues, got the rest out of the room, and even recovered their sticky magazines to boot!
Getting the treasure back out proved a challenge, as Samno’s skeletons crumbled to dust shortly therafter. They rigged up a slow moving travois out of junk from the sword-nerds room, and fortunately none of their encounters on the way out were interested in theft. Samno’s mysterious Skeleton-IP-owning-voice threatened him again, but after surviving the skeletal wave Samno seemed if anything more confident in refusing to deal with him. The party encountered Magdor the Malcontent for the first time, but he seemed more interested in yelling at Adolphus minions regarding a schedueling mishap. There was a weird creature next to the blue light, but the party snuck right on by.
The Nerds were overjoyed to see this bounty of comics, but did not have enough funds with which to pay them. Several of the nerds offered to sell themselves to the party in exchange for the comics being given to the Nerd community. The party wanted none of that, and so some of the nerds sold themselves to the Goblins instead, and their community used the money from that sale to buy the comics from the party.
Varza bought a segway.
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LOOT
9076r (4538r each)
Sticky Magazines
Flash Grenade
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HOOKS: Painting hates party. Samno sent a letter to Adolphus sayin “‘sup.”
Session 9: Pearl Jam
Run on September 23, 2020 | Week 9, Year 1
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Goblin Bazaar:
Amidst all the jewelry made from missing board game pieces, the board games with missing pieces, and boxes of of blank Form 37B-183-Alpha-Revised: petition for renewal of Jaywalking permit, the party finds two guns: a fast-firing Uzi being sold for 500r, and a bolt action .22 rifle being sold for 200r.
(The players bought both of these things. They also got two water guns from the Goblins)
(Water guns: http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/2018/nerf_super_soaker_splashmouth.php & http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/2019/water-warriors-saturator.php)
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Having explored the first level more than any other, the party determined that this might be a good time to try and explore the whole thing. On their way in they met a Guardbovine named Ogle, and learned a little about the Bovine’s reduced circumstances after the dragon’s attack. She also told them where they could go to fight some Robots, and Varza gave her the Splashmouth pistol to aid her in any robot encounters she may have.
The party moved South through The Long Corridor, which has become increasingly familiar to them over time as a place where encounters like to happen. Tonight was no different as they were halted by a great burly humanoid with glowing green eyes. Clearly a corpse, clearly intent on violence. Specifically violence against Sammo. This creature, Rugard, had been hired by the Bone Boss (presumably the one who has been hassling Sammo about raising skeletons), and was being paid in children’s screams. Through some absolutely phenomenal fast talk, the party managed to convince him to switch sides. They went back to get the segway for him to ride to ease his aching feet, and were just on their way to confront the Bone Boss when they were confronted by a mass of 40 skeletons. The ones in front were holding a banner that said “Good thing I installed those snoopers!,” which enraged Rugard, who had not consented to the spy device.
The battle was fearsome. The Bone Boss had equipped his skeletons with spears that were blessed by Holy Water, which gave them a significant advantage in killing Rugard. Fortunately for the party, the spears were still blessed when Sammo started resurrecting destroyed skeletons and sending them back at their attackers. Somewhere in here Pearl tried to fire the .22 and it jammed, leading to the excellent “Pearl Jam” pun in the title. Near the end of the battle the Bone Boss himself appeared–a massive skull sliding along the ground. He fled when most of his skeletons were defeated, and Varza was able to catch up to him swiftly using the Segway. The Bone Boss tried to parley, but Varza was having none of it. Unfortunately, the Bone Boss was able to unleash a mighty blast of fire from each eye which set Varza on fire just before the rest of the party arrived and destroyed the Bone Boss once and for all.
Eager to get Varza back to safety, the party quickly tracked down the Bone Boss’ lair, looted it, and fled the dungeon.
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INJURIES: Varza was reduced to 0hp by the Bone Boss’ fire eyes, and as a result his max hp was reduced by 5.
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LOOT:
Bone Boss’s stash contained 300 rations, 50 bullets, and 3 batteries (860r total / 215r each)
There was also the 4th level Greyhawk spell “Remove Curse,” 6 fire bombs, and a mysterious Blue Key
The Bone Boss’ skull contained a polished ovoid of white stone.
Session 10: Bee Teeth
Run on October 7, 2020 | Week 10, Year 1
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Goblin Bazaar:
Under some branded frisbees, lidless tupperware, and heaps upon heaps of tacky plastic halloween decorations, the party found a Tazer for 600r, and the spell “Corpselight” (https://files.itmebot.com/CDD%232-SpellsReference.pdf) for 100r. They purchased both of these.
The goblins had also scrounged up another water gun: the Speed Loader Double Cross 3000. (http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1999/w3_speed_loader_3000.php) Varza handed it right back to them, along with a compressor taken from a refrigerator, and 80r, to rig up some kind of backpack water tank for it. It will be ready next session.
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The party once again set out to complete their exploration of the first level. They bumped into a goblin selling tacky halloween decorations as if they were high fashion, but didn’t see anything they liked. They walked passed the skeleton pinned to the wall with the “Meat things stay out!,” and returned to the great garbage heap room where The Bone Boss had made its lair.
The party spent a great deal of time digging through the trash, crawling through garbage tunnels and up garbage mountains. They clambered around in the rafters, and discovered a number of valuable objects that were perfectly usable, despite alternately sticky, slimey, and always stinky goos which are better left uncontemplated. As they were doing this the party was surprised by a number of robots having moved up to surround them, weapons drawn. Varza repeated his trick from session 8, pointing to his metal robot cowboy hat and claiming to be a robot himself, and said that the Sammo and Pearl were his captive slaves.
Unfortunately, these were not the human-hating robots whose territory the party was currently sneaking through. These were the human-loving robots from level 4! They believed Varza’s claims of being a robot, and attacked him as a “Defective.” Some quick thinking on the party’s part was able to convince these robots that it was actually the hat that was a robot, controling Varza’s body. The roborts knocked it off him, and no great harm was done. The party even managed to convince this group of robots to act as guards under the pretense of setting an ambush for the real defective robots.
Rather than being accosted by the nearest dungeon faction, however, the next encounter into the room was a group of massive bees looking for sugar they could collect on their legs. The party were able to hide within the garbage tunnels before the bees entered the room, and heard the robots argue with one another about whether it was okay to kill one living creature to save another. It was one thing to destroy defective robots, but harming the bees was another. Particularly since they were not directly threatening humans…
The party decided to circumvent the issue entirely. Varza had discovered a tunnel dug into the floor of the room, and they climbed down into it. After about 45 minutes of crawling/stoop walking (at least for Varza, Sammo and Pearl could both walk upright), they emerged into a canyon on the surface. Varza had hoped to find a store of unclaimed treasure, or perhaps a mass grave of skeleton supplies, but it seemed to just be a canyon. The walls were very steep, and it was probably about 4 miles away from the village.
Disappointed, the party went back down the tunnel again, and were doubly disappointed to discover the bees and robots were both still present.
Sammo poked his head out to see if the bees would be hostile…and they were indeed very hostile. They seemed to want to pin Sammo to the ground for some reason. It was a near thing, but Sammo managed to use a torch to fight off the two bees that moved to pin him, and the whole party retreated into the garbage tunnels. The large bees couldn’t fit in down there, but they were accompanied by swarms of normal sized bees that would surely follow the party shortly. Using her ability to throw her voice, Pearl made it sound as though the bees were directly threatening the her life. Faced with a direct threat to a human child’s life, the robot’s were roused out of their ethical uncertainty, and engaged in an absolutely brutal battle to the death with the bees.
The two sides completely wiped one another out, with the final robot punching a hand directly through the final bees skull, even as a stinger protruded from its chest.
The party set about looting the bodies from both sides, while Varza nailed up one of the robot corpses next to the skeleton in the hall, and changed the “Meat things stay out!” message to instead read “MeatLESS things stay out!” They also made a point of pulling apart the bee corpses for various potentially useful guts. One of the bees turned out to be riddled with tumors. Reaching for some appropriate detail to toss out, the referee said the tumors had a bunch of teeth in them, because tumors do that sometimes. He then recalled that bees do not have teeth, so this would be really weird, but it was too late. The party now had tumors filled with bee teeth–a no doubt potent magical focus.
On their way to the Goblin Market to sell their wares, the party ran into some bovines who had lain a trap for robots. They gave the Bovines a ton of advice on how to more effectively fight the robots.
In the Goblin Market, the party sold some stuff, bought some stuff, comissioned a compressor-powered water pack for their squirt guns, and learned that the wizard Bogdar Beefriend had likely been behind those bees. Until recently he had been a friend to the Goblins, but he’d turned on them, taken control of the giant babies, and forced them out of a lot of their territory on level 2.
Also, Sammo drank some mutagen they’d found. The first die result determined that Sammo was an anthropomorhic rat person. Since that’s literally alread what Sammo is, he rolled again, and gained the ability to generate a zone of surpressed sound.
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MUTATION:
Sammo consumed mutagenic goo, and rolled 1000/5/4/1 on the Metamorphica. He is now able to generate a sphere of Sound Surpression up to 20′ radius around him buy concentrating. Base sounds are still audible within the field.
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LOOT:
3 canisters of Freeon
3 refrigerator compressors
1 frag grenade
1 smoke grenade
1 dose of mutagen (used)
A parachute (Actively pops out when ripcord pulled. Takes 10 minutes to repack)
Nail Gun (requires batteries)
Pearl-sized blue jeans
Giant Bee Wings
Giant Bee Stingers
Giant Bee Poison Glands
Giant Bee Tumor Teeth
11 Batteries harvested from dead robots (220r)
12 Bee Legs w/ Sweet Goop on them,
sold like cotton candy to the Goblins: (84r)
TOTAL: 306r / 102r each for Pearl/Varza/Sammo.