[actual play] A|State: Eye of the Needle

[DaveB]

So I got A|State.

It's very shiny.

So I presented it to my group. Five fell in love with it immediately and two were carried along by my pitch despite initially not knowing what to make of it. Which is about right for a game this dark, I think.

This is to be my first Actual Play thread, so go easy on me. I just think that a game this good needs the exposure.

If you are going "buh?" and don't know what A|State is, may I suggest Contested Ground Studios (http://www.contestedground.co.uk) - the game's designers, which includes a very nice free "lite" version as a pdf.

So.

Reading through, I have plumped for a complex tale of community leadership, conspiracies, hidden cults, steampunk technology and urban decay in a World Gone Mad.

So, my tweaks and tucks, setting-wise, are...

1) "Down" the tech level for the streets, and keep it the same for the Corps. Although the book makes the point in a couple of places, the idea that The Macrocorps should fall into the catagory of "sufficiently advanced technology" gets a little lost in a corebook which has to describe all 8 MCs, their bases and give stats for power armour and gauss rifles. So I'm choosing to place much emphasis on the idea that "normal" folks live in a state somewhere around Victorian England, technology-wise - if that. I am going to go overboard on my descriptions for high-tech, if and when it manifests. Conversely, one of my PCs is *from* a corp, so I'll spend much of the first session hammering home to her the Culture Shock of leaving the sealed, air-conditioned, clean, capteted world and going outside.

2) Similarly, the Corps (outside their central domains) are much more mysterious entities than in the game as written.

3) Although I love all of the presented Burghs to bits, I suffer as a GM from "I like that better" syndrome - no matter what I've done with an area, it will seem insufficent when put against any future supplement on that area. So I'm placing my campaign in one of the unused bits of the map. I'll do corebook-style writeups of burghs I invent on this thread, on the off-chance that anyone gives a shit. Hey - if this thread doesn't sink like a stone, I might write things up for the A|State newsletter/doodahd.

4) The Crypt aren't a myth (they might not be in the corebook, even, but it's a nebulous setting point left up to the GM to decide. I've decided.) - I'm a gonna use them.

5) One of my players is "playing" a Simil. So sue me. He doesn't have his own character sheet, will never earn any EPs, will occassionally recieve notes from me telling him what to do...

Actually, think of it as "I have an assistant GM who's job it is to do the actions/voice for a Simil, and any other NPCs that end up spending too much time with the party". Keeps things from going down the "pet npc" route.

6) Me not care what "Iron Ring" says is the truth behind the city's condition next year. I've already decided. Won't elaborate because my players *will* read this thread (and I have no hope of stopping them), but it will come out over the course of the campaign.

RULES TWEAKS

1) Allow melee fighters to NOT called-shot if they don't want to.

2) Have had to invent stats for a gas-powered harpoon gun. Long story.

3) Didn't really have to fudge in character generation. One PC didn't quite fit into the various Upbringing categories, so we applied one that gave her the right skills and happily forgot about it.

4) The Vehicle combat system gives me nightmares. I will probably junk it in favour of something else. When I can be bothered.

NEXT UP: ROUGH PC OUTLINES

[Delirium]

... not least because I would broadly opt for the same kind of tweaks and adjustments you have instituted.

Interesting decision regarding allowing a simil PC. If you could give a little treatment as to how that works in-game, particularly task resolution, I'll be grateful.

I am 60% through an Adventure! series at present, so it'll be at least some months before I have the time to run an a|state game, but I am in "early-stage mulling over one-shots mode", so I'm keen to hear of your group's experiences.

[DaveB]

ROUGH PC OUTLINES

(these are the broad-sketch type PC designs, that have yet to be "rooted" into the setting - they say things like "a Macrocorp" or "The Burgh", because I do Campaign design PCs-first: I decide the rough themes and such, the players decide what they want to play, I design the setting, Characters are tweaked, folded and melded into that setting, setting is papered over the characters again, characters are adjusted *again* and *then* we start playing. It takes much longer, but it results in a group that feels like they're part of the Burgh they live in.

So, many of these don't even have names yet. That'll come later.

1) Andrea is a player who likes intrigue, fishes-out-of-water, unearthly and ethereal women as characters and usually makes herself reliant in some way on the rest of the group as a means of integrating the party. She was born to play Vampire: The Masquerade, but as I won't run it has managed to work her particular schtick into whatever game I *do* run. She's also a talented character artist, and has already done portraits of half the party despite them not having things like names yet. Which I will scan / cartoonise in Flash and post in the near future. Her character concept is of a personal servant from the upper-middle echelons of a Macrocorp that has been witness to some kind of internal skullduggery and has fled/been booted/been booted for her own safety out into the wider city. She also requested that her character be a mute. Because she doesn't have a low enough survival chance, perhaps.

So, the Macrocorp becomes Arclight (who I was going to use as antagonists anyway), the skullduggery becomes the murder-for-internal politics of her boss, her reason for being on the outside becomes her rescue by an NPC of shady motives who will show up later and who specifically sends her to another PC as a means of bonding the party, and the whole mute thing (after reading some of Malcolm's descriptions) becomes the fact that in A|State the Leet speak in above-human frequencies, so it appears that they're silent when they're actually chatting away to one another. Being bred for her job and not needing to leave her level in the Tower, she lacks the ability to speak normally. As a means of cutting costs. ;)

2) Jemma likes snarky down-to-earth characters with a slight edge of "mad lady that lives with cats" about them - they're always slightly *cracked* in some way. She has plumped for an Antiquities Hunter, rooting around in disused tunnels for whatever's going, living in shabby apartments full to the rafters of oddities and odments and occassionally finding other things for people - the Burgh has no Lostfinder, so she's one of the people the locals go to instead.

3) Emma usually makes unsympathetic-on-the-surface with a heart of gold characters. And usually has a big social conscience thing going on which is refreshing in a roleplayer and fits right in with A|State. She wanted to explore the setting a little more than the local Burghs, and so has gone for a courier / message carrier - The City has no post to speak of, so when someone *has* to deliver a physical document, they turn to people like her character. Lots of geographical and sociological knowledge, lots of contacts spread all over the city, the potential for "the transporter" type moral crises and so on.

4) Renaud flipped back and forth between character concepts. He was *going* to play a Clockwork maker / Dinginsmith, but ended up running a similar character in another game and didn't want to be typecast. He has gone for a character who's the self-appointed guardian of the burgh (getting it back to the Hope level that's all-important in A|State) - sneaking around, finding dirt on disruptions to the local's lives, solving disputes and so on. Kind of like a cross between a Lostfinder - which he doesn't call himself - and a reporter.

5) Chris was the last to get "in" and has ended up as a Ghostfighter - something close to the duellist, flashy melee fighter characters he loves so much. He'll be the bodyguard of one of the other PCs.

6) Andy is a freak, and likes freakish characters that are always deeply unusual. He is promoted, for this campaign, to "assistant GM in charge of running Shifted and mutants".

[DaveB]

THE BURGH

I fell in love with one of the gallery images on A|State's website - the one with all the chimneys poking out from the roofs of some district. That District - when I read the corebook - turned out to be BurningFell, which wasn't *quite* what i wanted. There WAS a similar concept to my Burgh in the shape of Fogwarren, but it lacked the whole chimney thing and is frankly too central. Plus, my inner fear of using an established setting locale kicked in.

Find Burningfell on the map. It's near Luminosity Tower, on the northern edge of the Black Canal. Hangside is another "Burgh" which is actually comprised of the bridges between BurningFell and another Burgh named in the corebook (but never described - I assume it will be in Alleys and Avenues) as Sleeping Vale. From it's name, placement, mention in Burningfell's writeup and so forth, I deduce this to be some sort of entertaintment district. If it isn't meant to be, it is now.

So. Follow the second ring of the city down from the Black Canal and Hangside, towards the Serpentine. About halfway, the Victory line train track runs through it.

Welcome to Dogswarren.

Sandwiched between the 2nd Canal to it's west (and, over that Canal, the industrial Burgh of "Hammertongue" which I'll detail when I need to expand a little) and Sleeping Vale to it's North and East, Dogswarren is a little centre of production and sale - Dogswarren food market is supplier to many of the industrial zones in the centre-west of The City.

Situated on a rise in ground level (that forms, along with BurningFell's Fell, the "Vale" of Sleeping Vale), Dogswarren hill is punctuated by the chimney stacks of the mysterious Foundry that lies underneath the Burgh - the residents can hear the machinary late at night, the chimneys that poke up from the ground through the Burgh (and which many homes are built onto as a cheap means of providing heating) spew ash into the air and areostats occassionally land on a landing-pad that sinks into the ground to provide access, but noone actually knows what The Foundry produces, and noone has ever seen the workers. The public wisdom is that the workers live down there and never leave, making it the subject of many an urban myth and cautionary tale - "be good, or the Foundry'll take you".

In response to the ash being dumped all over them from their downstairs neighbour, the good citizens of Dogswarren have, neccesity being the mother of invention, enclosed their Burgh under a variety of roofs, metal sheets and enclosures. The Burgh is completely under cover, it's "streets" are more properly wide tunnels and the roof level is almost never visited - being by now ridiculously polluted.

In the northern edge of the Burgh, as it turns into Sleeping Vale, Dogswarren is all on one level, dominated by a Food Market that sells the consumables and resources Sleeping Vale swallows up daily. To the south of the Burgh, the chimneys become more prevalent, and the Burgh's buildings begin to form termite-mound like piles of homes around the warm metal tubes. Eventually, Dogswarren becomes a multi-storied pile, 3 distinct levels thick in most places, with the Victory Line running through it's middle level and then - by means of a Viaduct over the canal - onwards through Hammertongue. The ground level of this southern expanse is called "The Warren", and gives the Burgh it's name - it's dominated by a vast battery farm for dog-meat, thousands of near-immobile canines crammed into tiny cages and fed by creaking machinery. The middle level - with the twin noise problems of 5000 dogs and the train track and the overpowering smell of dog piss - houses Dogswarren's poorest families. Their slightly more affluent neighbours take up the third level, which is dotted with small shops.

The citizenry long ago realised the oppertunities that being seen as Sleeping Vale's rougher younger sister afforded, and so there is no police to speak of. Instead, the local protection gang is actually on the verge of going respectible - The Doggers, as they're known, even have a semi-uniform. In addition, the Warren is quite heavily guarded - private guards paid for by the microcorps it supplies with food.

The Foundry has one chimney stack that even the residents of the Burgh haven't built all over - The Big One, a wide fat-bellied beast of an ash-tube, that stands like a sentinal next to the aerostat landing platform. Instead, the Doggers use The Big One to dispose of unwanted elements - criminals that refuse to sign up, pederasts, that sort of thing. Down into the Foundry they go. The hard way. :D

[Malcolm Craig]

Firstly, it's great to see what individual GMs are making of the setting. I like your take on the game and its good to be able to see what bits of the setting are attractive, what bits aren't and what bits get changed to fit in with a particular campaign.

Dogswarren sounds an interesting locale. I particularly like the idea of the homes clustered around the chimmneys for warmth. An arresting image. The description of the 'security' for the burgh is also interesting, particularly the method of disposing of the more 'undesireable' elements.

The PCs are an intriguing mix as well, with the antiquities hunter, former macrocorp 'body servant', pseudo-lostfinder, courier and allied Simil. The Simil part is doubly interesting and I'd been keen to see how this actually plays out.

Anyway, thanks for posting this and it'll be great to see how it develops.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Originally posted by Delirium
... not least because I would broadly opt for the same kind of tweaks and adjustments you have instituted.

Interesting decision regarding allowing a simil PC. If you could give a little treatment as to how that works in-game, particularly task resolution, I'll be grateful.

I am 60% through an Adventure! series at present, so it'll be at least some months before I have the time to run an a|state game, but I am in "early-stage mulling over one-shots mode", so I'm keen to hear of your group's experiences.

On Simils...

Stat-wise, I don't see a problem. After asking malcolm (A|state's author)'s opinion on the game's introductary thread on this forum, I'm going with my instinct of "like a human, with skewed stats and skills".

So, a Simil ends up with (subject to change due to the fact that I've not tried this "live" in play yet)

Str 90
Agl 20
Dex 50
Hlt 60
Awr 80
Int 10
Wil 10
Per 2

to represent their big, slow, suprisingly good at fine manipulation (see the corebook fiction), nigh-on-indestructible, aware of almost everything around them but intelligence of a particularly alien dog description.

Skill-wise, it will have Heavy, Vehicular, Launcher, Longarm, Armed Combat and Unarmed combat at 60 each, All of the spoken languages at 70 (though it'll only *speak* Common aloud, I reckon to understand anyone. Crucially, I want it to understand Corp-girl, because translation-via-Simil is a comedy of errors that must be done if only once), Demolition, Navigation, Tracking, Orienteering, Mechanical Systems and Gas systems at 40 each.

It will count as having AV 45 all over it's body except for it's head. Malcolm kindly gave the tidbit that taking a Simil's head off "deactivates" it. (Kind of like a human!), so rather than figure out some fancy mechanic for it's mechanical body I'm just using the normal rules and treating it as armour.


As for in play, as I say, lots of note-passing to give it it's Simil-like "over there" senses ("mortar"), and a player who's willing to never have his character advance, to never really know his character's background, to play what is essentially a big walking robot and to have about a line every half hour. By agreement, If it gets out of hand, or starts to feel like it's becoming a proper character rather than a part of the setting the PCs exploit, I'll kill it.

And every adventure, they'll have to "pay" it again.

[DaveB]

So that's where we're at today. The first session is tommorow night, so I'll do the final character designs and the first session's writeup on monday night.

Actually - Malcolm, I have a question. What IS Sleeping Vale supposed to be like? I'm curious now, and as you're here...

[Malcolm Craig]

Well, here's a wee bit on Sleeping Vale:

A modest, comfortable area, Sleeping Vale is slowly being nibbled away at the edges by some of the less salubrious neighbourhoods on its borders. Sleeping Vale is primarily home to those working in service industries, mainly for the macrocorps. The burgh also has a high proportion of shops and leisure facilities per head of population when compared with the surrounding, poorer areas. It is this concentration of amenities which indirectly causes the residents most concerns. Neighbouring areas such as industrial Burningfell just across the Black Canal are poor in terms of the leisure facilities they offer to the citizenry. Consequently, many residents of the poorer areas come to Sleeping Vale for shopping, drinking or a night out. Needless to say, the good people of Sleeping Vale are often somewhat concerned over the large numbers of ‘undesirables’ (as they see it) flooding into their area."

So it fits in quite nicely with your setting ideas.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

That's perfect, thanks. :)

Well, wish me luck everyone. Back on monday!

[Delirium]

DaveB wrote:

The first session is tommorow night, so I'll do the final character designs and the first session's writeup on monday night.

Thanks for the details on the Simil, have a good sesh. Looking forward to reading an account.

[Ryan L.]

I just got sold on a|state. Holy cow this looks awesome and the art gallery is cool too.

I'll go searching for it now.

Ryan

[DaveB]

Originally posted by Ryan L.
I just got sold on a|state. Holy cow this looks awesome and the art gallery is cool too.

I'll go searching for it now.

Ryan

Score!

[DaveB]

Not much time (on my lunch break at work), but...

:D

Really, really good session. Will go over in detail tonight, but the gang are in love with the game.

[Dan Davenport]

Originally posted by DaveB
Str 90
Agl 20
Dex 50
Hlt 60
Awr 80
Int 10
Wil 10
Per 2

to represent their big, slow, suprisingly good at fine manipulation (see the corebook fiction), nigh-on-indestructible, aware of almost everything around them but intelligence of a particularly alien dog description.

This is coming from only loose knowledge of the setting on my part at the moment, but shouldn't something like a Simil have superhuman strength, rather than just maximum human strength?

[Sammael99]

Hey Dave !

Can't wait for your first write-up. I know how much work goes in an actual play, and I thank you for intending to do one for a/state !

[Schatten]

Originally posted by Ryan L.
I just got sold on a|state. Holy cow this looks awesome and the art gallery is cool too.

I'll go searching for it now.

Ryan

Ditto. Which in my case will entail a great deal of searching. How I long for even an unfriendly but at least semi-local gaming store. Oh well I'm moving in a couple weeks so there may be hope there.

Besides it's written by Scots, that makes me grin, like this. :D

[DaveB]

2nd-stage (pre-first session) character design:

The characters by now had names, character sheets, backgrounds.. the whole enchilada. I don't declare a final lock-off on a character background until *after* the first game session, though, as sometimes unexpected things come out of the roleplaying - ya know? And sometimes things that sounded great on paper just don't work live.

But, here they are.

SYNDIL JUSTICARNO

Is the ex-body servant. Whose background actually changed the least (ie, not at all). Probably because andrea was further through char gen when I left off last week than anyone else. The actual escape, etc, I left off until the game session itself, thinking that - hey, it's as good a place to start the campaign as any.

(apologies for these stats. I can't quite decypher what Andrea's done to her character sheet - I can't tell if she'ss applied the modifiers to her skills in the numbers she's written down.)

Origin: Nomenclature (although she isn't actually, it gave the right skillset and seemed about the right thing)
Upbringing: Sheltered Life
AGL 60, DEX 40, HLT 40, STR 40, AWR 50, INT 50, PER 70, WILL 50
Act 60, Diplomacy 60, History 12, Politics 24, Economics 14, First Aid 50, Musical Instrument 5, Psychology 50, Sociology 50, Thrown Weapons 40 (Knife 10), Running 30, Hide 30, Pharmacology 40, Sign Language (new skill I added by popular demand, cause, well - hey) 50, Speak Common 90, Read Common 45, Speak Culture 30, Read Culture 25
ADV: Minor Contact, "Perceptive" mental trait, "Charming" mental trait, "Stunning" physical trait.
DISADV: Moderate Enemy, Nightmares, Major Physical Disadvantage (mute)
BIOMODS: Disease defience, Anti Toxin, Night Eyes


ALEXIS LOCKE

Who is the "courier" character. Alexis has been fleshed out quite a bit - she's the oldest female character. Daughter of two mechanics and a born explorer, she's spent the last 15 years running errands for people, gradually working her way up in importance (and monies), until now - the proud owner of a spare-parts-built Powerbik - she's a respected message-carier. Only trouble is, she's now at the level where she's starting to make enemies, and more and more burghs are unsafe for her after she gets into "incidents" with local gangs, incidents which have lost her an eye and with it most of her self-confidence, image-wise. She's retreated into her shell, and has become quite unsociable.

Origin: Lower middle class
Upbringing: Independently minded
AGL 65, DEX 45, HLT 50, STR 50, AWR 50, INT 60, PER 25, WILL 30
Pistol 55, Armed Combat 57 (knife 10), Unarmed combat 57 (punch 10), Speak Common 96, Read Common 71, Speak Commerce 46, Read Commerce 36, mechanics 56, Negotiation 33, Persuasion 53 (intimidation 15), Ground Vehicles 55 (powerbike 15), Criminal Culture 35, Navigation 75, Engineering 36
ADV: 2 minor contacts, mental adv: sense of direction. moderate Wealth
DIS: Moderate Enemy, Minor Enemy (both various gangs), Mental disadvs: Bad Sleper, Impatient. Physical disadv: One eye.

CONRAD HONEST

Is the rather improbable name of the party Ghostfighter, who long ago realised that while being a Ghostfighter is exciting, honourable and what he wants to do, it isn't exacly lucrative in the shallow end of the market, especially once one cleared the magic age of 35 and could no longer be considered a young man. So he went Corp. Using contacts gleaned from his upbringing (his family are among the hundreds of writers that crank out the trashy scripts for Sideband's TV shows), he proposed and succeeded in selling the televisual rights to his life story to sideband. And now, for only 4 schillings a week subscription to the channel it's on, the inhabitants of the city can thrill to the exciting adventures of Conrad Honest - a trashed-up,sexed-up exaggeration of his early career, with his younger self being played by a far more handsome actor. This has backfired ever-so-slightly, in that everyone who learns his name now thinks that he has named himself after the TV show for effect.

origin: low corporate
upbringing: dangerous

AGL 55, DEX 20, HLT 45, STR 50, AWR 40, INT 40, PER 40, WILL 45
Mech. Computing 20, Blacksmith 50, Persuasion 20, Armed Combat 60 (sword 30), Unarmed Combat 60, Speak Common 60 Read Common 40, Speak Commerce 20, Read Commerce 20, Thrown Weapon 50 (Knives 24), History 40, Shift Studies 14, Climbing 20, Running 20, Swimming 25, Negotiation 20, Bribery 20, hide 34, Shadow 30, Sneak 30
ADV Major Fame (name only), Pain tolerance, mental adv: Patience, Moderate wealth
DISADV Moderate enemy, minor fear of commitment, Moderate cruelty

JACQUELINE "JACQUE" SWIFT

Is our Antiquities Hunter. Jacque (pronounced "jack"), is slightly cracked, slightly addicted to Edge (an addiction that is growing, and hooking her onto harder stuff), moderately eccentric and known throughout Dogswarren as a finder of rare antiquities. She's also, on the quiet, the sponsor of Dogswarren's orphanage. Which explains where all her money goes - Jacque is perpetually broke, and takes on her commissions as a means of survival rather than out of any academic interest.

Origin: Dispossessed
Upbringing: Transient
AGL 60, DEX 60, HLT 40, STR 35, AWR 60, INT 60, PER 60, WILL 40
Archaeology 66, History 56, Folklore 58, Investigation 56, Foraging 56, Armed Combat 46, Unarmed Combat 46, Fast-talk 36, Sneak 36, First-Aid 36, Negotiation 36, Persuasion 36, Speak Common 96, Read Common 66, Sign Lang 26
ADV moderate contact, moderate Fame, Eidetic Memory, Amidex
DISADV minor Enemy, mod Physchosis Mod Addict (edge), minor Poverty

JEREMY "JEMMY" THACKERY

Jemmy is the Burgh of Dogswarren's closest equivalent to a lostfinder. He's albino, or nearly so, short, is never without a roll-up in his mouth, knows everyone in the Burgh and their business as a matter of course and is only 18. The artful dodger transposed into the City, slowly but steadily growing a consience. It started with the Doggers realising that, as Jemmy was small and excellent at climbing around those hard-to-reach vantage points, not to mention being naturally curious and often to be found snooping on conversations, he made a perfect information-gatherer. From there he branched out into primitive photography as a means of gathering "info". As time wears on, the number of times he recieves favours instead of money are steadily increasing, his civic pride in "his" burgh is growing and he becomes more and more a proper Lostfinder.

origin: Dispossessed
Upbringing: Minority Group
AGL 60, DEX 50, HLT 40, STR 30, AWR 70, INT 55, PER 65, WILL 50
Pistol 30, Sneak 60, Folklore 30, Foraging 20, Fast Talk 50, Diplomacy 30, Running 30, Hide 50, Climbing 50, Running 50, Photography 30, Criminal Culture 30, Lockpick 30, Shadow 30, Speak Common 82, Speak Commerce 30
ADV: 3 Minor Contacts, 2 Major Contacts, minor Fame, Charming, editic Memory, Perceptive, Patient, balance, Major Wealth
DIS: infamous, Arrogance, disfigured, Sunlight allergy

[DaveB]

THE FIRST SESSION (drumroll, please)

Precredits Sequence:

In the air-conditioned, brightly-lit depths of Luminosity Tower, Syndil walks in on her boss in the middle of a phone conversation. He abruptly cuts off the connection and quickly closes all his files. We are given the impression that this is not the first time. Syndil goes into another room while he phones whoever it is back, and contemplates the really quite ugly piece of corportate art he has in his bedroom.

Later (we can tell it's later, see, 'cause the lights are dimmed), Syndil wakes up to find him gone. Pushing open the door to the main room, she finds him - quite dead, blood pooling into the carpet, with 4 Brigade of Light troopers pointing weapons at the corpse. They quickly swap to pointing them at her. She runs back into the room and briefly has time to consider that there aren't any other exits before they kick the door in and drag her off.

Actual session:

In the murky, oil-lit depths of Dogswarren lies the Piper tavern (the badly-painted sign shows a man leading a herd of Scurts with a flute), the establishment of Silas Hatchett and the local of Alexis, Conrad, Jacque and Jemmy. Alexis has just returned from a big trip (almost two whole days) and is unwinding. Jacque is freshly destitute once again and has been made an offer of a job. Conrad has been offered pay for going along with Jacque as security. Jemmy is lurking, considering both the tales he's been hearing of strangers wandering through town from the train station up to Sleeping Vale in the north, and the disappearance of Honest Pete, the town bookie, after he made it unexpectedly big on Cripplecut down at the Nose.

In the very far distance, a rocket launches from Luminosity Tower. It arcs up into the dawn light, hits the upper boundary of the City and vanishes in a flash of light. Given the smog, and the fact that Dogswarren is entirely indoors, none of our characters notice.

Someone notices, though.

A lone Simil is standing out on the roof of Dogswarren, quite unconcerned by the ash raining down onto it. It is quite intent on staring out into the distance - in the direction of the Tower - and doesn't even turn around when the small aerostat lands behind it. A Man in a Suit (tm) and the pilot get out, and between them manhandle out the unconcious body of Syndil. The MiaS attracts the Simil's attention by shouting at it, and asks it if it knows who Alexis Locke is. It does. He then hires it to take the girl to Locke, and "protect her until the end of your contract". The Simil demands a finger as payment. The pilot protests to his boss that he needs all of his to fly the aerostat, and the MiaS - grimacing - cuts his own index finger off with a knife and gives it to the Simil. They all go their seperate directions.

Downstairs, a party is in full swing - Ethel, the present barmaid of the Piper, is getting married and moving to Sleeping Vale. In amongst muttered coments about buns in ovens, there is much revelry as the hearty menfolk try to get one last end away with her - the mood only being punctured by Silas' rotten mood at having to actually tend the bar himself. In all of this, Conrad is having the Job explained to him by Jacqueline, with jemmy listening intently from not far away. Her employer is after a music box - of great sentimental value, apparantly - that was stolen and traded and traded again and stolen again and so forth. Upshot is, it is presently reckoned to be (or says her employer) within a sub-basement of a factory in Burningfell. Which is not so far away from Dogswarren, as luck would have it. The money isn't great, but it's better than starvation.

At which point the Simil, holding Syndil in it's arms, walks through the door. Literally *through* the door.

This causes some panic, and Ethel's party takes a turn for the worse.

(cont)

[Delirium]

Thanks DaveB - excellent. Altogether interesting.

I'll be saving this thread; the small details like the Piper Tavern are rad.

Out of interest - do you think the A|State PC creation dynamic has 'worked', in the sense that it facilitated the creation of PCs who 'fit' your sense of where you want to take the game, or was the gritty tone of PC creation primarily informed by your own conversatios with the players or their familiarity with the setting?

[DaveB]

The Simil marches up to Alexis' table and unceremoniously - though still gently - puts Syndil down on it.

Many of the partygoers leave at speed, Ethel among them.

Alexis (with Jacques "helpfully" pitching in in the background) manages to tease out of the Simil that it is under contract, and is supposed to guard. They infer that it means it's meant to guard the still-unconcious girl. Who Alexis makes sure isn't dead, and tries to bring round. Syndil wakes up, sees Alexis and the Simil and - shrieking soundlessly - faints.

Silas offers the use of the back room, and Alexis moves Syndil before trying again. The Simil crunches along behind them and helpfully blocks the door while they're in there. Out back in the bar, Jemmy is spotted by one of the many who lost big to Pete before his disappearance. They want Pete - who they think fixed the game and did a runner - and want Jemmy to find him for them. They're willing to all chip in to pay.

Syndil comes around again and panics again. Alexis manages to get it across that she's safe, and Syndil soundlessly mouths questions at Alexis and Silas. Out in the bar, the remaining revellers start to take from the bar by themselves until Jacques shames them. A pair of Doggers enter, having heard the reports from the fleeing majority of bar-goers of a Shifted attack. Conrad manages to calm *them* down.

In the back room, Syndil and Alexis have resorted to the written word as a means of communication, while Silas frets. The basics of Syndil's background are gone over, and the consensus between the barman and the courier is "you're screwed".

back in the now-cleared bar, the entire gang (as the only ones left) consider the mystery woman's predicament. The prevailing attitude is that they're ok with helping as long as it doesn't get in the way of anything they'e doing - Jacques and Conrad, for instance, are still off to Burningfell despite Jacques figuring out that Syndil can "speak" with hand-signs. And can actually talk, it's just that they can't hear her. Noting that her clothes make her stand out like a sore thumb, Silas donates what remains in the building of Ethel's wardrobe. He also offers her the back room, if she fancies being a barmaid. because he's lacking one, see. The others tell him where to stick it.

All split off on their individual vectors - Syndil will go with Alexis (and the Simil, they presume, will go with them whether they like it or not), while the others do their business for the day. Once everyone has calmed down a bit and Syndil has had a chance to get grounded, *then* they'll decide what to do.

Jacques and Conrad start out on their expedition - down to Undertrain Square, Dogswarren's tiny quayside, where they hire a skiff-pilot named Rodriguez to take them to Burningfell the quick way. It may only be 12 miles away, but Jacques doesn't fancy walking through Hangside when the Circular Canal will do just as well.

Jemmy sets off on his nosing around. First to The Nose - an apartment building built around a tiny quadrangle of yellowing grass that is used for Fight Clubs. There he meets Toby, one of those who *won* on the match, who informs him that Pete was seen leaving with Elias, a respected ex-Cripplecut champion who still lives locally. Off to Elias' he goes, but not before Toby asks him if he's interested in a spot of public justice - a Scrape dealer has moved into the Nose, and he is shortly to be forcibly run out of town. Jemmy agrees to rustle up an angry mob and heads off to Long Street, where Elias lives.

Alexis and Syndil retreat to Alexis' tiny apartment (with it's much larger garage), where Alexis helplessly tries to make small talk (giving up after three minutes), the Simil looms in the background and Syndil tries not to touch anything.

[DaveB]

The Music-Box Hunters reach the Black Canal locks, and - once through the queue of water-traffic trying to get onto or off the hideously polluted Western Canal of the City - pull up at Burningfell Dock. Taking the cablecar (and nearly being crushed by the shift-change) they reach the factory, which is still in use. Deciding to go for a nose around, they get over the wall and try to find the outbuilding Jacques reckons the subbasement is beneath. Sneaking successfully from cover to cover (bar a minor incident where Conrad trips over) they get to the outbuilding and get inside, finding the trapdoor they're after and - considering the rotten wooden ladder inside - decide to use a rope.

jemmy is chatting with Elias - a crusty old ex-gladiator who walks with a cane due to the extensive damage to his ligaments over the years. He *was* with Pete last night, but left him at the Tassele Bar in Sleeping Vale - Pete recieved an invitation to some kind of private club called "The Cellar", or something like that, earlier in their two-man bar crawl in celebration of Pete's good fortune, and Elias isn't as young as he used to be; he had reached his limit and didn't begrudge Pete ditching him. The man who gave Pete the invitation wore a ong rubberdised black coat, liek a Fulgurator's uniform - the description of the mysterious strangers Jemmy has been hearing about for a while now. Elias also reckons that the fight wasn't fixed, in his professional opinion.

Alexis and Syndil have tried and discarded Alexis' barely-used TV as a means of occupying their time, and Alexis has started to try to learn the finger-alphabet as a means of communicating with her unintended house-guest. Alexis is paid a vsit by the Doggers, who kindly inform her that her Protection has gone up as a result of having "The Woman That Fell From The Sky" living with her. And that anything the Simil breaks in the Burgh is coming out of her. Fun.

Back in burningfell, Jacques and Conrad make their way into the Factory steam-tunnels, and from there find a staircase. *something* is coming up the stairs, though, carryign a light source. Tey both hide, and as the hideous misshapen shadow muttering to itself in barely-understandable Common about how "they" don't listen and how there's not supposed to be anyone down there, they jump...

... the janitor. Who cracked long ago and is now positivly shattered. They let the poor wretch run off, and head the way he came from, emerging into the subbasement. As Jacques loots anything she can carry - including the music box - Conrad notes worridly that the place looks in use - the junk is al cleared away into a corner, and someone has painted a big odd symbol on the wall. Having got what they came for, they head back the way they came. Only to run into the Janitor. And the guards he fetched. See what being nice gets you?

Jemmy is retracing Pete and Elias' barcrawl through Sleeping Vale, hitting brickwall after brickwall as the natives unite in their hostility towards the industrial scum like him that muck up their streets. He does, however, run into one of the Men in Coats, who stonewalls him until he goes away. A helpful off-duty stripper, however, informs him that the MiC offered pete an invitation to the private club, and that she knows about it by reputation - is a men-only club that meets underneath a house somewhere in the Burgh. Jemmy tips her handsomely and returns to Dogswarren, fuming - he was okay when it seemed like he was hunting down a crooked bookie for his mates, but now it seems that not only was the bookie not crooked, but he was kidnapped by persons from Outside The Burgh. Jemmy's Civic Duty instinct is activated, and he is spurred on in his quest.

The girls, meanwhile, have gone shopping, as Alexis has no food and no clothes that would fit Syndil - to the Dogswarren Market! Whilst buying, someone tries to pick Alexis' pocket. The Simil - who has plodded along behind the ladies all day - casually reaches out and snaps the would-be-thief's arm. When the Doggers descend upon the scene, they find out what the man was trying to do, establish that he isn't a member of their exclusive crime club and break his other arm.

From that bit of violence to another bit of violence, as Jacques climbs the rope while Conrad does what he does best. Leaving the guards and the janitor in a bleeding heap (the Janitor dying a few minutes later, as it happens) A spot of rope climbing, a bit of wall shimmying and a bit of flat-out running later, and they're home free, speeding along towards the 2nd Circular South Lock on Rodriguez' skiff.

All meet up back at the Piper, where Syndil recieves her very first bowl of Dog Stew. Mmmm. Dog. Jemmy relates his findings, and makes a public announcement - he will waive the fee for finding Pete if all Pete's creditees will take part in the lynching of the drug-dealer that evening. Silas tries to get Syndil to take up the offer of employment again, and gets shot down by Alexis again. Conrad shres the tale of the mysterious subbasement, and sketching the symbol on the wall, Syndil excitedly gestures. Eventually, they calm her down enough to spell it out to Alexis and jacques - the symbol on the basement wall is the same symbol her employer/owner had in his bedroom back in the Tower.

Hmmm.

(end of session one)

[DaveB]

RANDOM GUBBINS

quotes

"Alexis, dear, why are Shifted bringing you unconscious young ladies?" - Jacques

"Do you know how to pick a lock?" - Conrad. Notable only for Jacques' wordless reply, in which she produced a hefty pair of bolt-cutters. And grinned.

"It's Cults, I tell you" - Jemmy

"Told you it was Cults" - Jemmy, right at the end.

bits n pieces

Every time a train goes through Dogswarren, there's a precise 5 second (IC and OOC) pause before all the dogs in the kennels start howling. To the point that the native characters provide a verbal countdown. "Five.. four..three...two..."

Alexis noted, but didn't quite "get", that the Simil acted to protect her, not Syndil. And that while it's followed Syndil everywhere, it could concievably have been following *her* everywhere.

Jacques and Conrad passed a Hirplakker industrial area on their way to burningfell, and a dock on the edgeward side of the canal that had Simils working as porters

The Factory was the Happy Dog Packaging Factory from the corebook.

Jemmy has also heard that kids are playing chicken with the train-track - he thinks they might have noticed the Men In Coats arriving.

DEVELOPMENT, THE CAMPAIGN & PLAYER IMPRESSIONS

Andrea *is* intending to have Syndil take the job at the Piper, eventually.

The session, including his character's rising ire at those damned *outsiders*, convinced Renaud that Lostfinding is the way to go, but in the way of a development of his character into one rather than rewriting him to already be one. If that makes sense.

Andy professes much satisfaction at the Simil, despite having a line (I figured it out) every 37 minutes. Weird.

The general impression of A|State that the gang have come away with is "community" - the Burgh has turned out to be like a tribe, which is free to do what it likes to it's own members but woe betide anyone else that tries anything. Renaud noticed himself doing two things - Jemmy got really involved when it transpired that a fellow Dosgwarrener was in trouble ratehr than being the villain, and the plan for the lynching was - in Jemmy's words "run him out of the Burgh. <i>he only has 60 yards or so to go before he's someone else's problem</i>, so he should make it alive." (emphasis mine). Andrea also felt it - the reaction to Syndil dropping (literally) in on them from the good citizens was "what can you do to make yourself useful?" and she looks forward to playing out Syndil becoming part of the extended family that is the Burgh. Even the Doggers, in play, start to look like a Police Force that is trying to call themselves a gang rather than the other way around - as though they think they're scarier as a gang. But they're not taxes, oh no. It's protection. Honest. Dogswarren versus the City. And also Sleeping Vale versus the City. And, one presumes, Hammertongue versus the City.

The corebook has definite shades of this sort of thing, but it's interesting that it's the facet of A|State that gets amplified by my GM style. And gratifying - I have *always* wanted to run a "community leader" game, something which has led to disasterous experiements in Blue Planet and Mage - causing the collapse of both campaigns, incidentally - yet something about A|State makes it come naturally.

Anyway, for those keeping score...

DOGSWARREN FEATURED LOCATIONS

The Nose

On Dogswarren's north-west tip, right on the Canal, the Nose is a great concrete apartment complex that houses some 50 families in thee blocks arranged into a U-shape, the open end being the waterfront and the central area made up of yellowing, sickly grass. The Nose is covered to avoid the ash-fall from the Foundry's chimneys, though the grass stil gets a tiny amount of sunlight from the open fourth wall. This area - the closest the under cover burgh gets to a park - is the staging area for local Cripplecut matches.

The Market
A large rectangular construction built on the flat roofs of several smaller buildings, The Market makes up the part of Dogswarren outsiders visit the most, if at all - the central hall (packed with stalls) is ringed by a "street" (tunnel) called The Quadrangle, which is lined with the most successful shops in the Burgh. The stench of Dog-meat is ever-present, and permeates everything, tinged in the south-west corner by the acrid smoke from The Big One - which is right next to that part of the building.

The Piper Tavern
A modest bar on the third level of Dogswarren's southern termite-pile expanse, the Piper is low-ceilinged, stinks of the oil lamps used to light it and the home-brewed-in-metal-tubs drink on sale. At busy times, a barrel-organ is used to provide musical accompniment to drinking songs. There are two tiny back rooms and a large storage room, other than the bar.

Undertrain Square
The Victory line explodes out from Dogswarren's great heap of masonry and concrete on it's middle level, sailing over the canal and into Hammertongue by means of the Hammertongue Viaduct - a red-brick construction of vaulted arches. By cunning design, the area where the viaduct's supports meet the water is Dogswarren's tiny quayside - the Viaduct shelters the skiffs and small boats from the ash-fall.

[DaveB]

Out of interest - do you think the A|State PC creation dynamic has 'worked', in the sense that it facilitated the creation of PCs who 'fit' your sense of where you want to take the game, or was the gritty tone of PC creation primarily informed by your own conversatios with the players or their familiarity with the setting?

Character Generation was an unusually chaotic process, actually - we were all learning it as we went along and I have the horrible feeling that some of those characters don't add up exactly. meh. Mistakes happen. I fail to care.

My gang are old hands - this is the third rpg with this exact gaming group (Everway and a game of my own design being the other two), and individual players and me go much further back. We've learnt how to design a pc group that compliments one another, but leaves niches for individual characters. Through long, hard, bloody experience.

As for the grittiness, I think that in Syndil, Jemmy and Conrad's cases it was mostly down to the setting material (which includes both the corebook and my raving about the game), while in the other character's cases it comes from the mechanics first. But everyone is a mixture, ya know?

Speaking of A|State's mechanics, I had nightmares about them before play, I *hate* game mechanics, and rely on my players to remember things like complicated combat rules. I was very pleasantly surprised at how fluid the whole thing is. A bitch to stat things beforehand, but in play it moves like a dream and combat is over in minutes if not seconds. I will be taking the time to add to the game's selection of stock NPCs for my own use.

[Malcolm Craig]

Well, firstly Dave, thanks for taking the time to write up such an extensive set of actual play notes. Secondly: bravo!

It's absolutely fascinating to see what elements of the setting actually appeal to GMs and players, rather than what I think will appeal to GMs and players. The use of the Simil, the ex-macrocorp character, the community of Dogswarren (which is great, by the way) and quite a number of other bits and pieces.

scribbles frantic notes
Hmmm...must starting running another campaign of my own.....
scribbles more frantic notes
Must come up with an idea....
lightbulb appears above head
Eureka!

Cheers
Malcolm

[Ryan L.]

Fantastic actual play Dave. I spent a good 30 minutes reading it at work. I had to copy it all to a word document first and send it to my work email, but it was worth it. I ordered my copy of a|state about two hours ago. I can't wait to have a real clue about what you speak of.

Please do more actualy plays as your group plays all this out.

Ryan

[DaveB]

SESSION 2

After carefully considering the news that there's a pan-city network up to No Good (tm), the gang collectively decide that there's nothing they can do about it and what they need right now is sleep. (see the locations and gubbins bit in a few post's time for their various homes) - Alexis considers, and offers Syndil the use of her apartment.

Syndil has a nightmare. Waking up to the Simil looming over her doesn't help. Fortunately, only the Dogs can hear her.

The appointed time for the lynching comes around, and Jemmy makes his way to Trickle Cavern to await his horde of "concerned citizens". In ones and twos, they arrive, the other characters bringing up the rear. Jemmy takes a photograph of the 19-strong (+1 Simil) group for posterity, and makes sure that everyone knows the drill - Owen (the alleged Scrape Dealer) is not to be killed, but instead run out of the Burgh. Lucky for him he lives 60 yards from the Sleeping Vale line.

The throng make their not-so-very-quiet way up the street to The Nose, and reach Owen's door. When Alexis' attempt to do this peacefully by calling for Owen to come out quietly meets with no response, Syndil orders the Simil to remove the door to Owen's apartment from it's frame, which the Shifted does. The crowd pour into Owen's utter tip of an apartment - the man appears to have eaten Dog and Troot-Chips from the local chippie every day for months, and has never thrown any of the greasy paper away.

The lights are out of gas, Scurts dart across the floor from the noise and - from the tiny and reeking kitchen - there is the distinct sound of a window breaking. Owen is trying to climb out the back of his flat, and appears to have considered neither the fact that he lives on the third floor, nor that his escape route consists of a twenty-foot drop right into the Circular Canal, nor indeed that his bulk has no chance of getting through the tiny gap. He is grabbed and carried back into the living room.

Between wheazes and paniccing, Owen protests his innocence - crucially before anyone accuses him of anything, but again when they demand to know where the scrape is. Syndil notices he's specifically *not* looking at a particular part of the room and - soon giving up trying to attract anyone's attention, starts prodding around there. Jaques, being somewhat more experienced in looking for hidden things, goes to help and between them they turn up a small bag of waxy blue pills hidden down the very distressed sofa.

At the sight of it, one of the mob gets overexcited and strikes Owen in the paunch with a crowbar. Another gives him a swift kick in the face while he's doubled up wheezing and crying on the floor, which knocks him right out.

Alexis and three likely lads carry Owen down the street and unceremoniously dump him on the Sleeping Vale side of the border. The characters then return to check the flat, which is busily being looted for all it's worth by Owen's neighbours, all of whom had the good sense to stay in their hovels and keep their mouths shut during the attack.

Jemmy considers carefully, and throws the bag of pills into the Canal.

And that's the end of that.

No one really feels like sleeping now, so all troop to Conrad's, where Jacques "ooh"s at his Dingin-powered answerphone and the characters get steadily drunk in victory. The conversation, surrounded as they are by trophies of Conrad's career, turns to the TV show, and Conrad manages to find a repeat of an old episode on one of the more obscure Sideband channels. It features the heavily-distorted "Conrad" fighting heavily distorted Brigade of Light troopers, which doesn't make Syndil feel any better about sleeping.

Alexis agrees to take the music box to Jacques' employer (who Jacques has never actually met in person). After finding out he lives in Fogwarren, and is therefore easier to get to via the train (a mere four stations away) than the roads or canals, she asks Syndil if she wants to come along. Anything to distract her from her situation sounds good to Syndil, so Jacques agrees to drop the merchandise and expenses claim off in the morning. Eventually, the party disperses, in the pre-dawn.

In the morning, Silas opens the Piper (the door the Simil smashed in last session now replaced with the door from Owen's flat) to find Jemmy has been sitting in the tunnel outside all night. Jemmy tells Silas what he found out about Petie's disappearance, and gladly takes breakfast before heading off to The Jump, in the hope of gaining intelligence about the mysterious night-time visitors.

The Jump is a particularly notorious tunnel on Dogswarren's middle level, that is cut right through by the train track. Though a footbridge has been provided by the Dogswarren Burgess so that people can cross safely, it's still effectivly a train platform that no trains ever stop at. It's called The Jump for the pasttime of Dogswarren's bored, dispossessed children - they play chicken with the trains, swinging across the train track on a rope swing as trains approach for dares. Complex Graffiti notes both particularly narrow escapes (much prestige) and remembers those that didn't quite get out of the way in time.

Jemmy learns that yes, the kids *did* see the Men in Coats the other night, and that said MiC were carrying a large metal case. Umming over this, he decides to head north into Sleeping Vale, to scout out the address the woman gave him yesterday.

Conrad is wandering by the Piper, where a worried-looking Silas hails him - Luther, the head of the Doggers, is looking for Jemmy. Concerning the last night's adventure. Conrad finds out which way Jemmy went, and hurries to the Jump, learning (in amongst the abuse from the guttersnipes) that Jemmy went up towards the Market.

Jacques, meanwhile, has dropped the goods off and gone to settle some paperwork, while Alexis and Syndil (with IT in tow) experience the joy of the train system. Especially as the Transit Militiaman insists that they ride freight - at full price - if they want to bring the mechanical monster. Still, it's less crowded than the passenger carriages.

Conrad catches up with Jemmy (who isn't very big, after all, and nowhere near as fit as the Ghostfighter) and decides to go with the lad. They head up to the address - a huge (to them) house in a more residential area of the Vale. Lurking around, they see a gentleman enter the building and manage to overhear both the knock-code and the password. They also get a good look at the Simil that's guarding the door on the inside.

Alexis and Syndil reach the base of the towerblock in Fogwarren that mr. Janus Voronetz (the buyer) lives at the top of. They all get into the elevator, trying to ignore the smell of urine, but the Simil tips it's maximum weight. They all get out again, Syndil offers to stay below and Alexis makes to use the elevator again - but the Simil reaches out and stops her. Faced by the Simil's implacable and inexplicable refusal to allow the two women to split up, they all reluctantly face the 11 flights of stairs.

Conrad and Jemmy have discounted frontal assault or breaking and entering, and have decided to go for "act as if you own the place". They stroll up to the front door, give the correct codes and walk on in. The butler does not suprised that they are new, and just leads them downstairs, through a celler (dominated by *that* symbol again) and into a private bar, inhabited only by a bartender and an aged man constantly inhaling some noxious compound. They manage to get out of the drug abuser that petie is just down through the door over yonder, and go to have a look. Through the door over yonder is a short corridor lined on one side with jail cells. In one of which is Petie's very dead body.

Jemmy - feeling the icy grip of rage - examines the body, finding broken fingernails and bruises indicating Petie put up a fight, a blunt wound to the head and a needle-mark on the arm. Petie has overdosed. And it looks like he was made to.

Over in Fogwarren, the girls drop off the box (which to no-one's suprise turns out to have something hidden inside) and get the money for Conrad, Alexis and Jacques. Then they scarper, the obviously criminally-connected Mr Voronetz promising to remember Alexis in the future. Getting off the train on the way back, they note a Fulgurator hosing down the front of the engine - one of the kids was just a little too slow.

They head to the pub, meeting Jacques to hand over the spoils, and are told by Silas that the Doggers are *still* looking for Jemmy, and getting increasingly irate. The women (plus Simil) head off to try to find the menfolk.

Back in Sleeping Vale, Conrad and Jemmy are trying to make a fast getaway, but find rather a lot of people packed into the celler between them and the stairs. The men seem quite unconcerned with their presence, but demand that they participate in the club they have just joined. It's a duelling club, for those bored of Cripplecut. Winner takes everything the loser has. Conrad volunteers to go into the ring - knowing full well that Jemmy wouldn't survive - and faces up to a brash young thing, emerging victorious. Satisified now that the duo have been "blooded", the club members simply let them go. They even give them the prize money.

Conrad and Jemmy walk, not run, back to Dosgwarren, meeting the belated rescue party on the way. Jemmy finally learns that Luther is looking for him, and goes to face the music, insisting he doesn't need anyone to go with him. The others briefly stop at the home for disadvantaged children Jacques funds (so she can give them the funds), learning that the girl that didn't make it at the Jump was one of her charges. Jacques angrily gives the survivors a good talking to.

Luther is calmly annoyed - Owen was no Scrape dealer that he was aware of, and paid more than his fair share of protection money. It just doesn't do to have unsanctioned beatings going on. The Dogger threatens to make Alexis pay the next few month's of Owen's projected protection as per his threat the day before about "anything the Simil damages", but Jemmy throws the fact that he saved Owen's life in Luther's face - to Jemmy's argument, if he hadn't been there the inhabitants of the Nose would have just killed the man. At least this way he's alive. Luther laughs, tells Jemmy he has balls, and tells him to get out while he still has them. Jemmy legs it.

All once again spend the evening down the pub - Alexis and Syndil figure out (with much one-word answers from the Simil and a bit of guesswork) that it is considering itself hired to protect both of them. Alexis has a horrible realisation of what this means for her job, making Syndil feel even more guilty about imposing on her. To cap it all, Silas finally plucks up the courage to point out that their bodyguard is scaring the crap out the other customers, and that this cannot go on.

All go back to their relevant homes, soberly reflecting on the events of the day. Syndil digs through her few possessions and retrieves what she palmed right at the start of the session - one of Owen's Blue Pills. As she contemplates it, we END. Till next time.

[DaveB]

QUOTES

(Syndil makes a stabbing gesture while looking at Jemmy - describing what she thinks the Doggers will do to him)
Simil: "Understood"
(Syndil makes frantic "no!" gestures. The Simil stops moving toward Jemmy)
Conrad: "Syndil! From now on, no more hand signals!"
(Syndil buries her head in her hands and considers the unfairness of life)

Jemmy : "Doors, ya know, they're becoming unfashionable" (after the Simil breaks it's third one)

Jacques : "I could afford to live better, but I'm tight" (explaining why her flat isn't big enough for all of them)

Jemmy : "Ah, he's a big softie at heart" (re: Luther)

Jacques : "Ok, if it were possible, it wouldn't be on Television" (when Syndil complains that the porn is unrealistic)

Alexis : "They're a pair, it's like buy one, get one free" (re: both of her house guests)

Jemmy : "Sure, you can take on a Simil, right? You're a *hero*" (said to Conrad outside the fight club, with a heavy quirk of the eyebrow)

FEATURED LOCATIONS

The Jump - The Jump is a particularly notorious tunnel on Dogswarren's middle level, that is cut right through by the train track. Though a footbridge has been provided by the Dogswarren Burgess so that people can cross safely, it's still effectivly a train platform that no trains ever stop at. It's called The Jump for the pasttime of Dogswarren's bored, dispossessed children - they play chicken with the trains, swinging across the train track on a rope swing as trains approach for dares. Complex Graffiti notes both particularly narrow escapes (much prestige) and remembers those that didn't quite get out of the way in time.

The characters' homes were explored this time around;

JACQUES lives in a home which appears obsessivly neat but is actually the result of her never actually being there except to sleep. It's piled high with cases of oddments she's acquirred, and she uses her Sideband TV as a coffee-table. She has a bad case of damp in her bedroom, the walls of which face onto a major water pipe and grow various funghi like nobody's business.

ALEXIS' home was seen briefly last time - it's a ground-level flat attached to a garage and machine shop as big as it is. At the moment, Syndil has the tiny, single bed, the Simil looms in the door between that and the main room and Alexis has the sofa, which is so old it collapses beneath you when you sit on it. Alexis actually has quite a music collection, on vinel.

CONRAD's apartment is far larger than the others, and reflects his status with Sideband - he has the only colour TV in the group, and the only telephone. His phone has a highly elaborate answering machine, consisting of a wax cylinder-recording of a plummy actor asking for the caller's number attached to a Dingin which records the number the caller enters. It takes up an entire wall of his living room and he's very proud of it.

JEMMY lives in one of the Chimney-shanties, a Foundry Chimney that has become disused for whatever reason (as noone ever visits the foundry, noone knows - maybe it'll start up again one day and kill all the people living in it without warning) and had "floors" added by way of metal sheeting. His "home" is a cramped section of pipe, accessed by a crawlspace, and is dominated by his photography equipment and a lonely hammock. He tries to spend as little time as possible there.

RANDOM GUBBINS

* Syndil starts to ask Silas about the possibility of a job, but gets interrupted.

* The session ended before I had the chance to introduce the Burgess of Dogswarren (though he got mentioned) - Myron Marchmont will turn up next time, hopefully.

* The girl that got squashed was the one who told Jemmy about the Men in Coats. The coats being the ones that the Guild train-drivers wear. Hmm.

* Them pills aint Scrape.

RULES TYPE THINGS

* After some reconsideration, we're rebuilding the IP system to give points for the amount of sacrifice a character is willing to make in persuit of hope, not the amount of hope their actions cause.

* My, but combat in this game is QUICK. And very, very brutal. In our experience so far, melee fights are a question of "who hits first" - the combatants parry one another for about 6 combat rounds, then one of them invariably gets lucky. If that doesn't kill the opponent right out, the penalties will mean they almost always fail in the next round, and then they *will* die. Or at best be left a bleeding heap.

[Malcolm Craig]

They are getting themselves right into a whole mess of stuff there, aren't they!

Good stuff as usual, great to see how things are progressing. I like the 'Simil-as-mobile-battering-ram' theme and the dingin powered answerphone. I've got visions of a Dickensian Jim Rockford at work! The Jump is a nice, macabre little feature.

After some reconsideration, we're rebuilding the IP system to give points for the amount of sacrifice a character is willing to make in persuit of hope, not the amount of hope their actions cause.

That's a fair assumption and one that will probably work rather well given the set-up that you have going on in your campaign. Will be good to hear how this works out for you.

Cheers
Malcolm

[Syndil04]

Hi,
Syndil here

*flirtatious smile*

One of the worst things about being mute is that people assume that you're deaf, blind and stupid as well. On the other hand they tend not to watch what they're saying either which is always nice.
*rests her chin on her hands*

So I'm stuck here in this shit-hole of a city with a creature from a nightmare following my every move, fortunately for me I've fallen on my feet and been found by a group of hard bitten mercenaries with heart of gold.
So first there's Alexis, she's got a few rough edges but is taking a lot of shit for me and still hasn't kicked me out. She's not a talker but she has one of those auras, you know? Like she's an anchor in a storm. A survivor and if she likes you, your own survival rate leaps up. I would have been a very attractive corpse if not for her.
Then there's Jaque, she a bit weird but nice in her own way, I guess. She gives me the oddest stuff, just randomly like she thinks it'll make me feel better. Last time it was a bright yellow teddy and a fridge magnet, go figure. But she's all right, she wants something better to come of the kids she looks after, it's like she wants to leave some light in this dark, dank hole they call home.
*mischief twinkles in her eyes*
Conrad, what can I say, He was probably a looker when he was younger but he's aging disgracefully and it's a nice thing to see.
*winks*
He's an amazing fighter, haven't seen him yet but I've got ears. Sometimes I think he's kinda sad about the TV show like it's taken over and left him behind. There's such a sensation of power in his most casual movement it's almost frightening, but his voice is so soft.
*wide smile*
Now for my favourite, Jemmy, he's, oh what's the word? ...local, such a character. And so cute in a street urchin way, a little on the scrawny side, but I like the way he looks at me. He refuses point blank to even try to understand what I'm saying but he agrees with every movement I make, loudly in that funny accent of his. If only he didn't smoke those horrible ratty little dog-ends. He's sooo young!
Last but definitely not least is the monstrosity, for want of a better word we're calling it steel. It's like a very large ugly guard dog, it's irritating in a way I cannot describe but at the same time it's a large lump of metal that I can hide behind. It's taken up a new hobby, scrap metal percussion.
*Wrinkles her nose*
When I ask what it's doing all it says is "changing", you see this is what I have to put up with, of all the monosyllabic monsters I get the one that makes the most noise!Still he's a useful nightmare sometimes.

*glances at her watch*
hmmm, sorry but I have to go I wish I could stay but I can see that Steel's disturbing you.

*blows a kiss*

[DaveB]

Hi, Andrea.

And yeah, the Simil has picked up an odd habit - it performs modifications on itself in idle moments, panel-beating it's body with it's own hands. This makes a lot of noise, and is starting to play hell with people's nerves.


Thanks Malcolm and yeah, it's in response to the IPs working out rather... oddly in the two sessions so far (wherin Jemmy, who does all the work for the community, ends up with noticably less than he should). I'm very fuzzy with XP systems anyway, hell - I'm fuzzy with any and all game mechanics, but with this campaign I'm making the effort to actually use the rules.


And a location I've been mentioning but have forgotten to "do"

Trickle Cavern - No one's quite sure what Trickle Cavern used to be - some sort of giant Kiln is a popular theory, but most put it down to a particularly twisted architect a few hundred years ago. It's a big dome, like walking through an inverted bowl, uniformely lined with grey tiles. Something in it's construction makes it's walls waterproof. Unfortunately, 134 years ago one of the Burgh's tributory canals (a trench of water three meters across and two deep) was diverted through it, running in and out through holes cut into the walls, and something (probably the Foundry) below it generates a fair amount of heat. The end result is that the entire Cavern is slick with condensation and steams up like a bathroom after a long, hot shower. During Dogswarren's "day" (it's on the ground level, so never sees any daylight) it's used by plant-growers as a handy greenhouse-equivalent (especially for people growing various fungi in pots), while at night it makes a good meeting place for shady goings on.

[DaveB]

Session Three

It's a full three weeks after the events of the first two sessions, and the daily grind (and grime) is beginning to feel normal to Syndil. Dogswarren does not stand still when not "on camera", though, and the following has happened in the interval:

* Jemmy went to the dock in Northern Hammertongue that Jacques and COnrad saw Simils working as dockhands at - the Shifted have been hired for the strength, lack of amenities and most importantly silence by the dockmaster of a new machining factory that is being set up in that Burgh. Jemmy fails to get a look in the crates of "machine parts" that the Simils are lugging around, but does note Hirplakker logos on both the crates and the barge.

* Syndil has been visiting Ms Constance Bowers, Dogswarren's apothecary, hoping to find something to do to make herself useful before the inevitable backlash against her freeloading happens.

* Conrad - after much threats, bribes and pleading - has managed to trace the telephone number he an Jemmy found scrawled on a beer-mat in Honest Peatie's jacket when they searched said man's corpse last session. It is an address in Sleeping Vale, oddly enough, but is NOT the fight-club.

* Jacques' remonstrations seem to have paid off, and her lovable urchin charges have stopped visiting The Jump. They've taken to going into Sleeping Vale and Crouchside instead, and have started mugging people for extra cash. But at least they're not being run over by trains any more.

* The Burgh's church of God the Architect has reopened after a closure of some 6 months (the previous reverand brother found the Burgh too claustrophobic by far, and the citizenry took against him for his somewhat patronising attitude). The new preacher is Reverand Rembrandt Barnside, who has already distinguished himself by - when his church was invaded by graffiti-daubing urchins - holding the children at gunpoint, delivering a stern lecture on moral terpitude and giving them each a boiled sweet before sending them on their way. Casual observers note that he displays the flair his predeccesor lacked, and will probably be one of the extended family that is the Burgh before very long.

* Elias, (the ex-Cripplecut champion) however, has been making a lot of noise after Jemmy reported his and Conrad's discovery in Sleeping Vale last time. He's lodged a petition with Mycroft Marchmont - Dogswarren's rarely-seen Burgess and the owner of 80% of the Burgh's buildings including the Market and the Warren itself - to raise the matter of a club in Sleeping Vale murdering Dosgwarren citizens in the City Council. Everyone has signed it - some people more than once - though not many think it'll do any good.

* The Television news channels (Alexis has been adding to her package in a vain attempt to give her and Syndil something to watch rather than sit around and stare at one another all day) have been gleefully reporting that a faction of the 3rd Church has been involved in religious protests outside the Luminosity Tower against Arclight's obvious (to them) Shifted-worship. Even looking past Sideband's blatent bias, Arclight do seem to have just killed all of the priests - a case of sledgehammering an ant.

Anyways. The preamble over, we fade up on the characters who...

...are in the pub again.

The conversation among the patrons is a fluid thing, shifting focus between different people's individual rants based on tenuous links (we've all had pub-conversations like that). The annual Hammertongue-vs-Dogswarren football match is coming up in a fortnight - an all-day event in which the teams (no size limit) must get the ball by any means neccessary as long as no vehicles are used to the opposing Burgh's church. The menfolk of Dogswarren are signing up, lists of first-aiders are being taken and Reverand Barnside is enthusiastically recruiting people to stand at the base of the ziplines across the canal between the two Burghs with bolt-cutters ready to dissuade any strikers. The subject of Hammertongue starts Jemmy off on the tale of the Shifted dockworkers, which gets Syndil wondering if "her" Simil would make a good addition to the team, which gets the Reverand's opinion on Shifted solicited, which leads on to the riot outside Luminosity Tower, and so on. Mid-conversation, the Simil reaches whatever arcane internal conclusion it needs, and declairs it's contract to be over. It wants a "symbol" (or, given it's voice, possibly a "cymble". But proves frustratingly closed-mouthed as ever about what.

At that point, the distant, muffled by the Dogswarren "hive" effect but still faintly audible sound of a large explosion in the North is heard by the more perceptive characters. The Simil immediately sets off North, on some agenda of it's own, and the characters give chase.

The fight club in Sleeping Vale has been blown up. As have the dozen or so houses immediately around it. The inhabitants of Sleeping Vale are pouring over the crater trying to dig out the bodies of loved ones, and for a brief time the two Burghs come together in a gesture of harmony (the Dogswarren crowd pitch in and help). The Simil, meanwhile, stomps up to the dead body of the club's Simil, rips it's arm off, puts it into it's backpack and stomps off again.

Jemmy manages to get someone to tell him what happened - three Mikefighters flew over the Burgh, emerging out of the cover of Dogswarren's ash-plumes, dropping a rather large bomb and flying off to the North. Someone draws him a shaky sketch of the 'fighters, but they needn't bother - the distinctive whine of a Mikefighter engine is heard, and the crowd scatters in panic.

There's only one of them, but it's of the same design. It does a flyby of the bomb-site (Jemmy photos it) and then vanishes into the clouds of smoke and ash produced by Dogswarren's chimneys. The Sleeping Vale citizens start to look accusingly at the Dogswarren citizens. The gang bite back their demands that the Valers grow up out of sympathy for the bereaved, and Dogswarren's inhabitants go home.

Back in the pub, a careful half-hour with the back of one of the football posters and a pencil going over the logo of every macrocorp and religion Alexis and Jacques can think of provides the answer - the Simil wants a particular engineering logo, which Alexis goes and retrieves on the form of a Powerbike part. Satisfied, the Shifted accepts it's new contract - which Alexis and Syndil have spent a while figuring out the very precise wording of - and Alexis is suddenly free to do her job again.

The happy dance is interrupted by last orders, and it turns out to be Jacques' turn to host the usual until-their-own-lonely-beds-no-longer-seem-repellent gathering. Jacques' flat is a... surprise... to the uninitiated, being as hermetically tidy as it is, but the gang soon settle into their by now engrained habit of getting drunk, watching reruns of Conrad's show (singing tunelessly along to the theme tune and demanding to know which bits were real) until they can stand it no longer and leave. As part of their wanderings through the late-night TV schedules, they catch the fact that the Sleeping Vale Burgess is making not-very-veiled accusations that the Mikefighters came from Dosgwarren, and that Mycroft is making not-veiled-at-all invitations for the honourable councilman from Sleeping Vale to wrap his lips around a part of Mycroft's own anatomy.

And so to bed.

In the morning, Jemmy is woken by two rather sharply (for this hive of scum, anyway) dressed gentlemen who introduce themselves as Mr Morning and Mr Gentle. They don't look as friendly as their names. They tell Jemmy that Mycroft desires Jemmy's presence for a private consultation, and as Mycroft owns both the chimney Jemmy lives in and the means of production for the food Jemmy eats, Jemmy had best get dressed.

The others, meanwhile, have trundled - like the helpless cases that they are - to the Piper, where Silas has started to get up just to let them in before opening. Silas does his usual grumbling about the Simil, and Syndil finally gets around to asking about a job.

Jemmy is taken to Mycroft's carefully soundproofed apartment in the bowls of the Warren, by the most harrowing route possible. After witnessing the mincing machines and the bolt-through-the-head slaughtering method, a shaken Jemmy is shown into the blissful silence of Mycroft's domain. Mycroft is a giant of a man - hugely-built, shaven-headed and heavy to the point of creaking the furniture. He asks Jemmy for anything he knows is going on, seems particularly interested in Syndil, and tells Jemmy that the Mikefighters were no doing of his - even as rich as Mycroft is, that's way, way out of his league. The 'fighters have been identified as being a design used by Arclight. Mycroft repeats his request for information about Syndil, and lets Jemmy go, offering the friendly advice that Jemmy should always remember who his friends are.

Alexis pops home to fetch something and finds a gentleman caller waiting outside her door. He is a representitive of Janos Voronetz - the man Jacques sold the music box to last week, and who promised to remember Alexis should he need a courier. He needs a courier. For a very lengthly and (in City terms) far-travelling job. The pitch is simple - go to point A, pick up a package, take it to point B then go home. Problem is, point A is The Forest, point B is a man known only as "Prisoner 54892" in the Inferno insane asylum and both points are about as far from Dosgwarren as you can go without vanishing in a flash of light.

Back at the Piper, the Simil deflects an attempted robbery and Jemmy and Alexis return. Alexis finds out just who Voronetz IS - he's in the 3rd Syndicate. The job suddenly looks even dodgier than it was already, and Alexis ums and ahs about it while Jemmy bemoans his fate as Mycroft's pawn.

Hmm.

---

Quiet night this - we had less time to play than usual, and it ended up as an evening of metaplot advancement and blatant set-up for next week. See the plots advance. Advance, plots, advance!

The football match, played like they still do in the Cumbrian towns Andrea/Syndil is from OOC (only with the violence upped to City standards), will be in a few sessions time.

The last two of the "big fish" in the Burgh - the laconic, slightly odd 3rd Church Priest and the corpulent Burgess. My players, they all say "Kingpin" but no! For Mycroft is plainly Sabbath from Doctor Who crossed with Mycroft Holmes (hence the name), and fills the position of Victorian slum-owning factory boss. He intimidates the hell out of Jemmy.

Odds and Ends -

An amusing character interaction - Jemmy is now the only PC who can't understand even the basics of Syndil's gesticulation, and he can't be arsed to learn. Whenever she tries to "speak" to him, he just replies with nonsequiteurs.

The Simil is not long for this world. Andy took less time than I thought to crack, but was seen leaving the game clutching A|State's rulebook and muttering about character generation.

This is the start of something. Tensions are rising between the three Burghs, and there's a flashpoint a comin'.

Quotes -

"So Mycroft tells me 'that girl, that angel with no voice - what do you know about her?' and I say 'nuthin' sir' and he says 'when you do find something out, you tell me' and I say 'sure, oh yeah, definately'. I'm FUCKED." - Jemmy

"What? Can't I have a bachelor pad?"
"The technical term is 'Spinster'" - Jacques and Conrad

"That is an ESTABLISHMENT of a man. He's the sort of man that's built, not born" - Jemmy on Mycroft

(signing) I owe you some pain
"That's okay. You can have a puppy" (to the others) "What'd she say?" - Syndil and Jemmy

"Sure. We make em out of dog-meat. Watch those puppies fly." - Jacques on the laughable accusation that the Mikefighters came from the Warren

[Rhyme]

'K I'm bumping this thread 'cause it's been doing well so far and the game's bloody fantastic (I play Jemmy btw).
We've played a fourth session which hasn't gone up yet but will
- we walk between neatly stacked rows of naked corpses in the middle of the canal.
I've got work to do, but I'll try to post something constructive later on.
Take care people,
Rhyme

[Caudex]

Okay, I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to buy a|state, but this thread has convinced me.

So much for my "go easy on the book-buying" resolution.

[Malcolm Craig]

Great to see the campaign going so well. Nice to see the development of both the characters and the plot, particularly the interaction of the various burghs and the PCs involvement in this. Puts my own "I've got the plot on a Post-It note somewhere" campaigns to shame!

Caudex wrote:
Okay, I was umming and ahhing about whether or not to buy a|state, but this thread has convinced me.

Great! Hope the game meets your expectations.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Well, I'm still writing the long version of session 4, but in brief, it continues the Burgh tensions, has our first gunfight, sees Andy get a real character, plays up the flora and fauna of the City and has Jemmy and Marius (new character) try to decide what to do with a barge full of shaven corpses that someone has left next to the Burgh. And the campaign overplot leaps forward.

All this and the infestation of Alexis, Syndil and Jacques' apartment block with Scurts - They're coming out of the goddamn walls!

[Malcolm Craig]

Great, I look forward to reading how session 4 turns out.

Are you intending to do anything with all this stuff once you've concluded the campaign? I remember you saying that you might put the burgh stuff up on the net as a PDF or something, but I think you've got some great ideas, situations and characters here and it would be worth consolidating it all! That being said, that kind of thing always requires a lot of work, but you certainly seem to have put a whole bunch of that in already!

Cheers
Malcolm

[Chris M]

Hey man you've inspired me with this game..so much so that I want to write up a campaign detailing my PC's adventures in the City in the Canals..starting up a business running a water taxi service and courier job runs for the right amount of money. And finding that their jobs take them places that the price might be too high. I just need a cool ass title like yours.:D

I just thought of a name SplashDown Zombies coming soon.;)

[DaveB]

Session Four

'Ere we go once again...

It's Syndil's first night off for over a week, but inertia is a hard thing to overcome and she finds herself sitting in the same damn bar she spends every night in, as her friends instinctively resist change. But eventually the threat of sharp implements and the writing down of ultimatums shifts the character party from the Piper.

And where is a group of five disparate souls going to go of an evening? Why, to Sleeping Vale, where Alex leads them to a nightclub. They try to relax, but the sense of tension in the air is palpable - the trouble between the two Burghs is getting worse, and everyone knows it. On their way to the club they are pelted with pebbles by Vale children, much to Jacques' disgust.

Across the club, a gentleman who - though dressed fairly normally - screams "outsider" in everyone's carefully honed cultural radars is finding out that there is no room at the inn, and Sleeping vale is proving resistant to his attempts to find somewhere to stay. The bartender sarcastically remarks that maybe he'd have better luck with *them* (scowling at the characters) and so over he comes.

His name, he says, is Marius, and he's in this neighbourhood on a mission of science. He's a naturalist with Longshore University, and is studying the many thousands of varients of the ubiquitous bleeders and scurts that bedevil the City. Conrad and Jacques both offer their spare beds at very reasonable rates, and Syndil discovers - to her horror - that Marius can hear what she's saying when she mutters commentary about the unfairness of her existence. Horror because it identifies both him and her as being Corp-born, something she's not keen to advertise to strangers.

Over at the door, the bouncer is proving resistant to an undesirable trying to get in. Jacques recognises him as Jed - a Dogger - and goes money in hand to his rescue. One bribed bouncer later, and jed is soaking up the local spirits, complaining bitterly of Sleeping Vale's cold shoulder. Between Marius' ethusiastic recounting of his hunt for a red-backed Scurt and Jed's "night on the town" enthusiasm, the conversation gets a little cluttered.

Jed does eventually tell Jacques that Marion - one of the girls at Jacques' orphanage - is looking for her, and after a while manages to remember that it's because Marion has got a job and wants to move out. Across the table, Marius is trying to figure out what Corp Syndil is from without saying which one he's from while she does the opposite, and Jemmy pointedly asks Conrad if he - as a "bona fide hero" has ever fought any of the beasts Marius is describing. He hasn't, but as Jacques says Conrad's name a shady-looking fellow sitting a few tables back abruptly gets up and leaves. The gang notice, and start to figure that maybe they ought to leave *before* closing time.

[DaveB]

Marius broaches the subject of just why everyone around here seems to hate them, and is told of the bombing and Dogswarren's farcical blame for it. Jemmy - realising he's sitting with a Corp-born - gets his photo of the Mikefighter out, and Marius apologetically says its a design made by Trilhoven and used by at least three other Macrocorps.

Jed wanders off "looking for a good time" while the characters hurry on their way through the post-thirteen O'Clock night. Walking along Sleeping Vale's Quayside, they spot a large black barge sitting in the middle of the canal, unanchored and apparantly unpowered. Jacques idly speculates as to it's salvage value, but as they decide that the night is too old already, a shot rings out - narrowly missing Jemmy. Everyone dives for cover - some more successfully than others - and a frantic game of "spot the sniper in the middle of the night before he gets a clean shot at us" begins, culminating in Marius producing a handgun and firing at the sniper - who he, Conrad and Jemmy have spotted on top of a building. Everything goes quiet. Jemmy carefully makes his way to a fire escape and gets up on the roof. When the sniper doesn't turn at his approach, he decides to take no chances and unloads his own sparklock into the sniper's head.

Marius' shot turns out to have been the killer, but Jemmy goes through the sniper's pockets (not turning up anything) and heartily claims the sparklock rifle he was using as booty.

Not wanting to stand around in the open any more than is neccessary, the characters then hoof it back to Dogswarren. Piling into Alexis and Syndil's flat (it's the nearest to Sleeping Vale's border) they go over what just happened - and realise that the guy they just killed was teh guy who took great interest in Conrad at the club. But he shot at Jemmy, which leads to the obvious conclusion - the guy must have been a survivor of the fight club, and his reaction was because of the fake name Conrad gave when he and Jemmy went there being contradicted. Conrad soberly wonders if the would-be-assassin told any other survivors what his true identity was *before* deciding to go after them, while the others have gone for some light relief - watching yet more reruns of bad episodes of Conrad's show.

The distinctive mettallic footfalls can be heard approaching the flat, and Syndil remembers she left the Simil at the Piper before going clubbing. It has apparantly decided to come and find her, and takes up it's usual place - in the corner of the room, facing the wall, making as little noise as possible. Marius is fascinated, revealing that he has seen a few dozen Simils before but has always harboured ambitions of documenting one of the legendary rarer Shifted races.

One of the gang finally has enough of fake-Conrad's exploits and turns the TV off. In the cathode-tube silence that follows, a clear scratching sound can be heard coming from the walls, and a scurt darts across the floor. Syndil shrieks (Marius winces, noone else notices) and the Simil stomps on it, while Alexis seeks out the hole. Plugging it up, they are disturbed to hear more scurts inside the wallspaces and running along the inside of the ceiling. There's a pop, and Alexis' electric lights all go out.

Breaking the dog-fat candles and wind-up electric torches out, the sound of scurts in the walls becomes much eerier in flickering light. Another scurt breaks through into the actual flat and Marius excitedly notes it's a sub-species he hasn't yet encountered just before Alexis kills it to death. Jacques realises that her flat - which is almost directly above Alexis' - may be in danger of infestation, and goes to check on it. Her tidy sanctum of junk proves secure, though the walls sound just as scurt-filled on one side. Knocking at the door of that neighbouring flat has no response, shouting has no response, crowbarring the door open and taking a look inside has no response.

The flat next door - which is the one above Alexis - is *filled* with Scurts. Hundreds of the insectoid buggers. And it stinks of rotting meat. Jacques makes a small yelping noise (her essential core of dignity would be damaged by screaming), pulls the door shut and runs to tell the others. Marius produces protective gear - a pair of big, heavy rubber gauntlets and headgear resembling a cross between a beekeeper's hat and a riot helmet - and goes up to take a look. The scurts are swarming around a large lump in the middle of the room which turns out to be a bloated human corpse with slashed wrists.

Finding a brown paper bag full of tiny white spheres in it, Marius navigates the room while Bleeders buzz around him and the more agressive varities of scurt try to attack him with chemical spit and mandibles. Marius carefully catches the choicer specimens and returns to offer his professional opinion - the neighbour was breeding scurts, killed himself and they've been using his body as something to lay their eggs in. The packet turns out - to everyone's disgust - to be Scurt eggs. Ewww. A letter that Marius found on the body turns out to be a "dear john" - the neighbour's wife recently left him because of his obsession with breeding fighting scurts. And the whole sorry picture becomes clear.

[DaveB]

Jacques marches off to drag the landlord out of bed while Syndil orders the Simil to go upstairs and cleanse the flat. Which it does with considerable aplomb - the parts it retrieved from the Simil destroyed at the Fight Club have been added to it's own design while no-one was looking, and include a flamethrower. The neighbour's body goes into the canal, his possessions go into Jacques' hoard o artefacts, the landlord is informed of his new free tenancy (and of Jacques' and Alexis' annoyance) and everyone goes home - the menfolk to the considerably less scurt-filled climes of Conrad's flat (which Marius sleeps at) and Jemmy's chimney-shack, while Jacques spends the rest of the night all hopped up on Edge shoring up her vermin defenses, Alex grumbles about fixing the wiring and Syndil spends a terrified night listening to the scurts running inches away from her head on the other side of her bedroom wall.

Morning breaks across the Chimneys of Dogswarren and Syndil - who has barely slept - goes through the familiar ritual of wash-eat-dress-trudge to the Piper-let jemmy in and make him breakfast while Silas slowly wakes up-clean the bar. A little mind-numbing routine is good for the soul, or so the 3rd Church of God the architect says. But this morning, Silas emerges from his curtained-off bedroom sporting a massive black eye and a missing tooth. Jemmy repeatedly asks who dun it while Syndil doctors Silas, but the barkeep refuses to say. Once the bar opens for the lunchtime trade, Conrad and Marius turn up along with the tricle of regulars. To Syndil and Jemmy's increasing bemusement, Jed, Elias and Reverand Barnside all turn up sporting signs of having been in a fight.

The Reverand is the one to crack under the combo of "silent pointed stare" and "endless jabbering of questions", and says that he and Elias came to Jed and Silas' rescue late last night. As Syndil turns the evil eye onto those two, Jed says that he came to Silas' aid when - walking home from Sleeping Vale - he spotted Silas being beaten up by five strange men. Turning the evil eye onto *Silas*, he says (through the muffle-factor of holding his tooth in while Syndil's milk-n-pressure technqiue does it's work) that they were asking purient questions about Syndil, and turned out to be harder than they looked when he defended her honour. They smelt strongly of damp, and wore long coats in the Fogwarren style - which leads Jemmy to suspect the Men in Coats that have been mysteriously showing up, and Conrad to suspect it has something to do with the crime lord Syndil and Alexis visited last session.

In any case, Marius has things to do. He intends to ask Alexis to put in a good word for him about the empty apartment, and he and Jemmy set off in that direction, noting as they reach a more heavily used tunnel that everyone seems to be heading for Undertrain square. Marion Cartwright - the girl jed mentioned the night before - literally runs into them and tells them that someone's abandoned a barge just outside the burgh.

The penny drops.

Marius, Jemmy and Marion reach Dogswarren's tiny quayside to see the black barge from last night - it must have drifted with the canal's current - and to see Rodriguez the boatman (from session 1, thread-watchers) cheerfully holding an auction for the use of his skiff to get to the barge and see what's inside for the taking. Jemmy plays the lostfinder card and Rodriguez agrees to take the three of them over if he gets a share of the proceeds. One thirty-second skiff ride and one climb of a rope later, and the foursome open the hatch to the barge's hold.

It aint pretty.

Meanwhile, Jacques is scrubbing any last taint of scurt off her ex-neighbours possessions. She's particularly pleased with a large, porcelean free-standing bathtub with only one crack in it. She notes, however, that after being up all night she's now run out of Edge, and decides to go meet her usual supplier to get more.

Alexis and the Simil, meanwhile, are engaged in the great Scurt-Purge as Alexis repairs her light circuit and reinforces Syndil's bedroom walls with metal plates. For an encore, Alexis finally tackles the public telephone near her flat, managing to get it working enough to call the number she got last session and turn *down* the job she was offered. That done, Alexis goes to remonstrate with her landlord and demand a rent-break for her work as an electrician. She also tells him that Marius - who she describes as a pest exterminator - is wanting to move in, and Marius gets himself put at the top of the waiting list for housing.

Cut back to Marius, Jemmy, Marion and Rodriguez, who have found the barge's hold to be filled with neatly-stacked, naked and shaven human corpses. Jemmy inspects a few of them and reports that the cause of death is different in all cases, while Marion loses her lunch and Rodriguez voices his opinion - the barge is carrying wares to the cannibal food factories that supply the most destitute Burghs. Jemmy is more worried about why it's been left abandoned outside Dogswarren until a horrible suspicion crosses his mind - if it's publically known to be found here, the suspicion will be that *Dogswarren* (a burgh that makes it's living from food production) secretly uses human meat in it's wares. Checking the cabin out proves that this is no accident - the pilot has been killed.

So, the question is asked: What shall we do with the murdered sailor? And with the 75 corpses he was transporting?

[DaveB]

Alexis turns up at the bar, remarking that she hears the Barge of Mystery from last night has turned up in the Burgh. Conrad and she decide to go check it out and Syndil takes her break to go with them. They arrive just in time to see the barge's engine start up with a roar of diesel, and to see Jemmy waving at them while Rodriguz pilots the Barge anticlockwise down the canal towards the Serpentine. Noting that they seem to be missing out on an adventure, Conrad is somewhat surprised to be shot in the leg.

The sniper had mates.

Jacques, meanwhile, is taking afternoon tea and scones at Ms Penelope's tea shop, a quaint little business in Dogswarren's northernmost building - known only as the Tower. Penelope herself is a kindly old lady of some 70 years with blue-rinse hair and half-moon spectacles. She's also Dogswarren's drug lord, who complains to Jacques that her supplier of Escape has recently been run out of town, so she's had to reconnect with a new producer. But in order to do that, she's had to agree to stop selling the Escape that the old supplier had already sold to her, so while she gets it in the profits she's having to literally give the stuff away. Jacques gets some of the hallucinogenic freebie along with her Edge, and - recognising the pills Owen had when Dogswarrens' rent-a-lynch-mob ran him out of town, considers the similarity between the sounds of "scrape" and "'scape" when overheard casually.

Oops.

Back at the canalside, Alexis returns fire - blazing away until their attacker (who is on the other side of the canal in Hammertongue) falls off the building he's standing on. If the bullets didn't get him, the fall onto the hammertongue quay's railings did. Conrad, thankfully, has only been lightly wounded and Syndil applies yet more first aid while they retreat deeper inside Dogswarren. Back at the bar, they conclude that there is definatly someone out there that they've pissed off.

Jemmy and his fellow privateers, meanwhile, have parked the Barge in a deserted industrial area south of the Serpentine, and are awaiting nightfall so that they can dump the bodies. He produces a deck of cards, and proceeds to teach Marion and Marius how to play Railwayman's Bluff.

Freshly drugged, Jacques goes to remonstrate with her landlord (it just isn't his day) and to ask that he put Marion on the housing list. Hearing that her ex-charge has been gazumped by the Fighting Naturalist, she goes to the bar to try to find the others.

Jemmy, Marius, Rodriguez and Marion, meanwhile, have dumped the bodies in the Canal and are puttering their way back up to Dogswarren. Jemmy, you see, has had an idea. The barge was clearly some kind of attack on Dogswarren, so it shall be used to futher the cause it was set against.

He's going to sell it to Mycroft.

Arriving back at the ash-stacks of home, Jemmy makes his way to the Warren, and is suprised to find Mycroft going for a walk in the tunnels, flanked by bodyguards as he may be the sight of Mycroft outside his lair makes Jemmy pause for a few seconds, before he puts his proposition to Dogswarren's de facto ruler. Mycroft likes the idea of a new cargo barge, and sends a flunkie back to the Barge with Jemmy to assess it.

Conrad and Alexis tell jacques about the second shooting as Jemmy, Marius, Marion and Rodriguez walk in as if they own the place. Each of them is now vastly better off, Marion can afford a flat, Rodriguez a new boat and Marius his rent in Jacques and Alexis' building for the forseeable future. Jemmy tries to give his share to Alexis so that Syndil can be set up with her own place, but Alexis refuses to take it - he's earnt it, and besides, she's gotten used to having Syndil around. Hearing that the fight club have taken another pot-shot at his new friends, Marius asks for more details. Conrad describes the symbol of oddness from the first two sessions and Marius stops him - he knows it. It's the symbol of a subdepartment of Shift Studies at the University, that studies the Boundary Effect that vanishes all those trying to leave.

Later.

Conrad types up the days escapades for a future meeting with the scriptwriters.
Jacques looks over her new possessions.
Alexis and Syndil relax in their now scurtless apartment, watching the TV together.
Jemmy considers his riches as he lies in his hammock, listening to the snoring of the man in the shack above him.
Marius moves into the vacant flat.

End.

[DaveB]

Stuff.

Ahh, that's *better*. I was unthrilled with last session but this was on a par with the first one. Everything just clicked. Our theme of "community" was thick on this occasion - from the rising tensions between Burghs to Jemmy doing his pseudo-lostfinder routine. And I remembered that A|State is meant to be a horror game as well.

A Note about repetition & oppressive routine - yes, it's deliberate. The player characters are more free than the countless wage-slaves of the City, but they are still stuck in their rut. Starting and finishing every single session in the bar isn't laziness, it's meant to show that these people Have No Lives. Jemmy spends every morning sitting on the cold concrete of the tunnel outside the Piper waiting for Silas (previous sessions) or Syndil (this one) to let him in because he has nowhere else to go. Even when change comes - like Syndil arriving - it just hops them into a different track.

I was most pleased with the consequences of character actions this week - yes, Conrad HAD been avoiding the attacks because they thought he was called something else and couldnt' find out who he was. Marius moving in stopped someone else from getting the flat (though that got happily sorted out in Marion's case by the windfall, the waiting list was longer than just her), gang-jumping Owen turned out to have been a mistake.

In case it hasn't been clear, both Syndil and Marius are lying like dogs (heh). Syndil has been claiming to not know which Corp she's from and Marius claims to be from Longshore University. They're both lying. They're both from Arclight (though they haven't figured that out yet), and Marius' immediate boss has recently lost one of his fingers in an "accident". And while the symbol IS of a Boundary-Effect study, it's one internal to Arclight, not at the University. The players all know this, but while Syndil and Marius suspect each other of being spies for a rival Corp (or in Syndil's case, suspect Marius of being from Arclight and being sent to capture her) they won't ever tell IC.

Quotes

(Afer Marius jabbers a lot) "You know, Syndil, I've only just realised how much I appreciate you" - Jemmy

"Clearly, this gentleman comes form an elevated state of being" - Jemmy again.

"It's him! It's Conrad Honest! If you look closely, he has an aura!" - Jacques, taking the piss and accidentally siccing gun-happy revenge types on the party.

"And this one is technically a Furie."
"You mean?"
"Someone deliberatly made it this way."
"Who would DO that? They cause enough trouble without the spit" - Marius and Alexis discuss the acid-spitting Black-spotted Scurt

"I just figured you could use the space" - Jemmy tires to give Alexis over a hundred pounds.

And now, two questions for the A|State-savvy amongst the readers of this thread:

1) Road Armour has no stats given in the book that we can find. What armour value does anyone think it should be?

2) A question of movement rates. A combat round is a second. How far do you think a human can run in that time? Three metres?

[Epoch]

Originally posted by DaveB
2) A question of movement rates. A combat round is a second. How far do you think a human can run in that time? Three metres?

At that kind of scale, I think it's unavoidable that you have to take a certain amount of acceleration into effect. You can move a lot farther in one second if you're already sprinting than if you're starting from a standstill.

It looks like the world record from the 100 meter dash is in the general vicinity of 10 seconds. Thus, at the average rate of speed, those people were moving 10 meters per second. Even if you figure that they're twice as fast as a PC (which is probably high), that would imply a PC could move 5 meters in a second at full-out speed. But I think that it's evident from simple tests on yourself that five meters per second from a standing start is totally outside of my capacity, at least.

Three meters per second doesn't seem totall off-base to me, for a combat situation, wherein I presume that straight run-ups will be rare.

[DaveB]

Originally posted by MalcolmCGS
Great, I look forward to reading how session 4 turns out.

Are you intending to do anything with all this stuff once you've concluded the campaign? I remember you saying that you might put the burgh stuff up on the net as a PDF or something, but I think you've got some great ideas, situations and characters here and it would be worth consolidating it all! That being said, that kind of thing always requires a lot of work, but you certainly seem to have put a whole bunch of that in already!

Cheers
Malcolm

Yeah. Depending on two factors - getting the computer with my copy of Adobe Acrobat writer working again and having enough time. Time-wise, I'm running my first weekend-long boffer LARP in 9 week's time and am run slightly ragged. But I'll work on it.

There's a fair bit of material already done that hasn't reached the thread, actually. Every week I intend to put NPC descriptions up, and the characters all have portraits done by Andrea. There's also the maps of Dogswarren, Sleeping Vale and Hammertongue.

[Syndil04]

:D
There's only one problem with having someone else from the corps (other than Syndil's abject terror over discovery) and that's I keep forgetting who can hear me speak and who cant.
And so does everyone else.

But the games great and have produce a fantastic us-against-them vibe with the inhabitants of the burgh

[Mantisking]

This sounds like a great campaign, and a great game. I downloaded the lite-rules pdf and hopefully I'll get a chance to read it this weekend.

[Malcolm Craig]

Originally posted by Mantisking
This sounds like a great campaign, and a great game. I downloaded the lite-rules pdf and hopefully I'll get a chance to read it this weekend.

Well, I think this is all down to Dave for writing up such a cracking actual play thread and bringing the game alive.

One thing that has impressed me about this thread is the quality of ideas and the willingness to go beyond what is presented in the book and take the game world further. It's actually quite thrilling to see this campaign progress and, to be truthful, it's given me many ideas for running a new a/state campaign of my own.

I hope you find a/stateLite enjoyable and, even if you don't decide to purchase the full game, you'll find plenty of free stuff to download on our website.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Session 5

It is now 7 days later. Marion has moved into the flat that Owen was forcibly ejected from in the Nose, Rodriguez has bought a big shiny new boat (complete with mounted gatling-sparklock of which he is very proud) and Jemmy has done nothing with his money. A very handsome man named Sean has moved into the flat next to Alexis, and Jacques (whose heart is stirred from it's spinster-dom by the sight of him) has sold him numerous nick-nacks as a means of seeing him, if only briefly. Love is not just in the air for her, though, as Marion has displayed a habit of asking about Jemmy rather too much to be normal. Jemmy responds to the teasing from his friends with his usual deer-in-headlights routine. Burgh-wise, the Sleeping Vale militia have been attacking Doggers and Constance - the Burgh's apothecary - has become engaged in a battle-of-the-old-ladies with Penelope. Jacques n=knows better than to get involved in a grannymatch, and is staying well out of it.

The camera-of-the-tv-series-of-the-campaign does a repeat of the pan across the City that it did right back at the start, taking in the launch of another rocket by Luminosity Tower and the Simils unloading at the Hammertongue Docks before swooping down into Dogswarren...

...Where the characters are in the pub.

Well, most of them anyway. Alexis is off delivering a package and Conrad is at the Cathedral for a script meeting. Those who remain, however, have business this night. Jemmy has decided to become pro-active in his young age, and wants to go check out the Hammertongue operation that's using Simils as labour (see previous sessions) under cover of darkness. Over in the corner, the patron known only as "Mad Jacob", who seems to live at the bar (he sleeps in the barroom) and is tolerated as the crazy old guy by the other customers, is telling his tale of being trapped in a Lost Place to a newcomer. The characters - who have all heard it many, many times - are toasting the newcomer's bravery, though Marius notes that Crouchside - the Burgh Jacob claims to have been in when he got stuck - is also rumored to have a colony of Furies beneath it, and he'd quite like to go have a look. The others agree (with varying degrees of reluctance) to go along with both Jemmy and Marius' planned day trips. Elias and Reverand Barnside - who seem to have become friends - come in, and Elias gives Syndil a poster they saw at the nightclub the characters were at in Sleeping Vale the week before. It's a missing persons notice, offering a £50 reward. And it's about Syndil.

At which point, Mycroft walks into the bar. Flanked by his heavies, the Burgess patiently waits while Silas and Syndil go into "aristocracy drill" - Silas kicks several patrons off the table they're using, puts a tablecloth he got from somewhere on it and provides a real lamp and his own prized chair to create a slightly more upmarket effect while Syndil changes - protesting - into one of Ethel's "nicer" (ie, more revealing) outfits in the back. Most patrons go awfully quiet, Jacques in particular hiding her face, while Jemmy grimaces as Mycroft gives him a nod.

Mycroft, on the other hand, is openly observing Syndil - which worries her. Ordered by Silas to go and give the Burgess whatever he wants, she approaches the man-mountain. Mycroft is as cooly civil as ever, but tells her that he would appreciate her company at her earliest convinience. She says she's busy (with Jemmy's mission of snooping) that night, but when Mycroft reassures her that he just wants to talk - and displays a piece of technology akin to a large brick-sized amp connected to a hearing aid that allows him to hear her - she agrees to tommorow night.

The Burgess leaves, the piano goes back into major key and everyone lets out the breaths they were holding.

Later on, and night falls. The fearsome four head down to Undertrain Square, where Jemmy persuades Rodriguez to stop polishing his boat and to take them upcanal a short ways on a mission of industrial espionage.

[DaveB]

I just wrote this bit out. And the server lost it. So if this seems brief it's because I just lost half an hour's work and am impatient to finish tonight.

Coasting up to the barge, they climb on board and find that the Simils don't stop unloading when night falls. Fortunately, they don't seem to be hired to *protect* the crates, and trhe characters prise a few open to find various vehicle parts - including, to Jemmy's horror, warcrawl tracks. Finding one particularly large crate contains an engine for a mid-to-large sized ground vehicle, they declare it spoils of war (or at least, Marius does) and lower it onto Rodriguez' boat. Or try to, anyway - it proves ever-so-slightly too heavy, and one by one they let go of the rope (Jemmy getting bad rope-burns) until it crashes the final few feet onto Rodriguez' brand new boat. Which springs a leak.

High-tailing it before Rodriguez' boat sinks entirely, they are met at the quay by *their* Simil, which is covered in ash for no good reason. It obediantly takes the engine to Alexis and Syndil's house with them, and Rodriguez is left to patch up his boat alone.

Alexis comes home to find everyone in her flat - including Conrad, who has gotten back from a meeting in which his show was threatened with cancellation. Barely able to take her eyes of the very big engine (which Jemmy proudly gives her as a present), she listens to their theories about warcrawls and Hirplakker up to No Good, meets the new neighbour when he comes to complain about the noise, agrees in principle to go on the jaunt to Crouchside and then kicks everyone out so she can go to bed.

Syndil wakes up to find the Simil gone. Vanished. Absent. Fucked off. Heading to the Piper to let Jemmy in as per usual, her routine is broken yet again - it is her special privalege to change Mad Jacob's bucket in the morning, but Mad Jacob... has left the bar.

Such is her shock that she barely registers the sound of bells in the background, but Jemmy recognises the Market's alarm bell when he hears it.

Down in the Runnings, Alexis gets up to smell slightly more smoke than usual in the air. Jacques looks out of her tiny window to see flickering light down the tributary canal she lives over.

The Market is on fire.

[DaveB]

The fire is at the storerooms beneath the Market proper, on DOgswarren's ground level. Though currently confined to one large storage space, that space happens to contain all the packed-up market stalls, so it has plenty of fuel. And the room it's spreading towards has the gas-tanks for the Market's lighting in. If the flames reach the tanks, there will be an almighty explosion.

*Everyone* pitches in to help out - Conrad gets a bucket-chain going from the nearest Tributory canal, Marius and Jacques start hauling stalls out of the way to try to create a firebreak between the flames and the gas. Alexis has a brainwave and rushes off, running into the Laundrette staff - including Marion - coming the other way from their business next to Trickle Cavern, bearing massive washing tubs between them. While most of the laundrette staff join Conrad's bucket-gang, increasing the volume of water passed, Alexis grabs Marion and heads back to the laundrette, where Marion retrieves a tumble-drier hose for her. Alexis then runs to Undertrain Square where Rodriguez is sadly pumping water out of his boat.

She borrows his bilge pump, runs back to the fire, duck-tapes the hose to it and presto! One fire hose.

Between her inventiveness and some hard physical labour from the others both pumping and pulling extinguished stalls out of the way, the fire is put out. The Market is safe. And Jemmy finds both a signalling flare on the floor and a nice piece of anti-Dogswarren graffiti.

Somebody DID this.

The crowd begins to disperse, most people soaked through to the skin. Jemmy absently gives the very wet Marion his coat, Alexis returns Rodriguez' pump and the characters begin poking about for clues. Just as Mycroft turns up to find out what's going on.

Mycroft is furious, demanding that Jemmy find whoever did this for him - the Burgess wants to HURT someone over this. He also asks Alexis to come see him for a job, on a seemingly-related matter.Once he's gone, Jemmy, Syndil and Alexis decide to all go to the Warren together that evening. Safety in numbers, ya know?

Later on, and everyone is doing their own thing. There's a knock on Jacques' door. It's Billy - one of the younger of "her" kids. Apparantly, there is some trouble afoot. Jacques manages to tease out of the scared child that Thomas - one of the older'uns - has been taking drugs. Specifically, he took five wierd blue pills that he got off a fat man he mugged in Sleeping Vale. Recognising both Owen and his Escape, she charges off, Billy in tow, before Thomas hurts himself or someone else.

Meanwhile, there's a knock on *Conrad's* door. It's Elias, who lays out a problem brought to him by Luther. It seems that the head of the Sleeping Vale militia has been inciting his locals against Dogswarren - the likly cause of all the trouble up to and including this morning's arson. Mycroft has banned the Doggers from taking him out themselves - it would look bad in the City council - so Luther has asked Elias to find someone to scratch this bloke's card. And, well... Conrad IS a ghostfighter.

Conrad, weighing it up, agrees.

Alexis is fixing the engine that the gang stole from Hirplakker's barge, drawing up plans for a wheeled housing for it.

Meanwhile, Jacques races to where Thomas is raving and ranting about Ubels coming to get him. Thomas has a gun. Some careful timing and a bull-charge later, and Thomas is being carried back to the Piper by Jacques, where Syndil gives the lad a purgative. Much vomit ensues, and then it's time to see Mycroft.

Marius, mulling over the Syndil question and Hirplakker's movements in the area, comes to a descision. He goes to the quay and hires Rodriguez-the-long-suffering to take him North to Luminosity Tower. Time to visit the 9-fingered man.

Conrad hears the Simil go past his door, and decides on a whim to follow the beast. It stomps out to the hatches leading to Dogswarren's ash-covered rooftops, and Conrad realises that it's heading towards the stack of crates and lean-to metal plating that serves as "home" to the Hermit of the Smokestacks. The Simil stands careful watch and Conrad picks his way through the blizzard of ash-flakes towardss the hermit.

It's Mad Jacob. Or at least, it looks just like him. The Hermit explains that he's Jacob's brother, not actually Jacob, and when told that Jacob has vanished offers a message that Jacob gave to the Simil for him. The note says that Jacob has met someone who has offered to help him go back to the Lost Place in Crouchside, so that Jacob can retrieve his own soul from "the place he left it" years before. Conrad mulls that over, realises that the Simil works for the Hermit, gets told that the Simil always worked for the hermit up until some smart-ass in a suit came out of a Aerostat and hired it to protect Syndil when the Hermit wasn't looking.

The three peeps at Mycroft's, however, say and hear their pieces. Jemmy reports his findings in Hammertongue and Alexis both accepts a commission to take a briefcase for Mycroft to a colleague of his in Calculus Tor and outlines an idea she's had - the engine that was pilfered shall have wheels fitted to it, and be converted to run a pump. Dogswarren now has a fire engine. Mycroft is extremely pleased, and sends them both away, leaving Syndil alone with him.

He lays another of the "missing" posters on his desk, tells her that a Lostfinder has been snooping around asking about her, notes that she is Corp-born... And calmly asks her if there's anything she, Syndil, would like to tell him.

Rumbled.

Fin.

[DaveB]

We seem to be going for 2-session mini-arcs here: Like session 3, this is almost nowt but setup, but for a different reason - while I HAD a couple of pages of plans, my characters became suddenly proactive all of a sudden - the planned trip to Crouchside is none of my doing, nor was the raid on the Hirplakker shipment. I think I did okay at rolling with it, though.

Love is in the air in Dogswarren - Rodgriguez has an eye or two for Syndil (they met for the first time this session), while Jacques fancies her new downstairs neighbour and Marion has a blatent - to Jacques and Alexis - crush on Jemmy. Awww.

The campaign metaplot keeps on rollin', what with Syndil rapidly running out of options, the revelation of just what the Simil was doing on the roof in the first place back in session 1, Marius going off to meet his boss - who was the man who hired the Simil - and so on and so forth.

Mad Jacob has actually been in most of the previous sessions. I just haven't mentioned him here because until tonight even *I* thought he was just an odd background character.

And mad props to Emma for coming up with the fire engine idea.

Anyways. I'm tired now. That's it for now.

[DaveB]

EXCEPT to say, in response to another thread, that the title "Eye of the Needle" *does* mean something, that it's really obvious when you think about it and will probably make the players go "ah-hah!" when they DO get it.

So there.

[Rhyme]

And there you have it, I rest my case.
Thank you maestro.

Rhyme

[DaveB]

SESSION SIX (aka "The One Where Everything Smells Of Piss"

For the first time, we do not start in the pub. Instead, we pick up right where we left off.

Syndil tells the truth. Mostly. She says that she is corp-born, and that her master was murdered, and that she woke up in Dogswarren and doesn't know how she got there. She doesn't name Arclight, though. She is particularly anxious to impress upon Mycroft how grateful she is to the Burgh for taking her in. Mycroft assures her that he will find out who's sending the Lostfinders, and calls Jemmy back in.

This interview is.. harsher.. Jemmy is forced to admit that yes, when he said he knew nothing last time he was leaving out a few things. But it won't happen again. Honest.

All three walk, then run, home.

Meanwhile, Conrad is meeting Elias and Rembrant for what he euphemistically calls an "inhumation". The gentlemen are packing Sparklocks, which Conrad eschews with the typical Ghostfighter's distrust of firearms. Instead, the plan is made wherin Elias and the Reverand will take up position to cover the target's likely escape routes while Conrad goes in to do it his own way. The target is one Alexander Pope, the head of Sleeping Vale's tiny militia and the chief agitator against Dogswarren. Pope is in the same nightclub the characters were in two sessions ago, holding court with his cronies.

So, naturally, Conrad decides to go right in and kill him there.

It's slightly more tactical than that - after intimidating his way past the bouncer (who's even less friendly to outsiders than he was when he wouldn't let Jed in in session four), Conrad listens to the thumping wah-wah music and waits for Pope to visit the men's room. Following, Conrad discovers Alexander at the trough. Waiting for the target to finish, as it were, Conrad announces his presence and draws his llive.

Pope draws his revolver and shoots him.

Thank the Great Architect for armour, huh?

The men slam one another around the room a bit, revolver shots going wild (also thank the Great Architect for thumping bass lines in the club), smashing the facilities and generally getting soaked, until Conrad finally manages to get a good swipe in at Pope's neck.

Bloody, hurting from the cracked rib his armour turned a gunshot into and soaked through from the smashed urinals, Conrad scrambles out of a window and makes his escape, grousing to the other two that they had the easy job.

Meanwhile, Jacques is trying to concentrate on some conservation while Thomas goes through withdrawal locked in her bedroom. The handsome downstairs neighbour comes calling, and actually attempts the "borrowing some drinking beans" routine. Which gets him points for bravery. He tries to ask about the others, manages to put his foot in it asking about Syndil , gets flustered when Thomas starts screaming and decides to go. Five minutes later he returns, starting from scratch and asking to borrow a cup of drinking beans.

Marius, meanwhile (lots of meanwhiles here, huh?) is fifteen degrees clockwise around the city, high in Luminosity Tower. He's reporting his intention to check out the rumours of Shifted in Crouchside to his boss - who, he notes, has lost his index finger in an accident recently. Marius also passes on the tidbit about Hirplakker's activities in Hammertongue, and asks if his boss knows why their departmental symbol (!) is being used as the logo of an underground cult. His boss (who is never named in play, by the way) claims no knowledge, and approves Marius' reconnescence plan.

Later on, and the gang all give in to inevitability and meet in the pub, where Alexis finally has enough of the Barrel-organ and promises to go halves with Silas on a Gramaphone. Jacques tells the story of the downstairs neigbour's attempt at seducing her - which gets laughs, while she looks like it might have worked, but she becomes suddenly serious and tells Syndil that Sean (the neighbour) asked far, far too many questions about her to be genuine. He's fishing for information, and may well be another Lostfinder.

On that note, Marius decides to fight fire with fire and conduct a full-scale fumugation of the Runnings (the apartment block half the party live in). The ladies are less than thrilled by the green clouds pouring out of their homes, nor by the overpowering smell of ammonia and chlorine. Alexis remonstrates with Marius about how she wanted to get up early to carry out Mycroft's courier commission, and how she's now going to have to sit up all night guarding her open garage door to let the fumes vent. Jacques takes one look at the plume of green gas coming out of her flat's window onto the tributory canal and goes to stay the night at Marion's flat - hearing about how great Jemmy is all night is preferable to smelling like an old lady.

And we fade to the following morning, where Alexis sets off for the train station, Jemmy makes a flying visit to Syndil at the piper to collect his breakfast before heading to Sleeping Vale and Conrad takes another bath. Getting onto the packed rush-hour train, Alexis is disturbed to see Luther (the head of the Doggers, remember) sharing her carraige. And watching her. She gets off at Hammertongue and waits for the next train just in case.

Alexis isn't the only one to be thinking about Luther, though - Jed is regaling the customers at the Piper about how someone tried to kill Luther in the small hours of the night, and how said personage is being Thrown to the Foundry (ie, walking the plank over the Big One) in a few hours. The characters present all decline to go and watch.

Marius is wandering around the Runnings, disposing of Scurt corpses and filling out questionaires for the R&D techs who brewed up that particular batch of pesticide. Jacques has an angry exchange with him about the fact that his fumugation has killed her prized pot-plants. Syndil spends most of her morning beak at the Piper trying to think of some sort of air freshner.

Alexis, meanwhile, gets off at the end of the line - Calculus Tor. In the shadow of the great mountain that protrudes into the city on it's Western edge, she heads to the address Mycroft has given her - an ammonia factory right on the very edge of the City. As she's inching her way along the promenade at the City's boundary, trying to control her vertigo (all... that... empty... space...) some local toughs try to mug her. Beating them off, she watches them try to limp away and - remembering Conrad's troubles after he left the bad guys alive - she shoots them in the back. Leaving the corpses there, she makes it to the factory, drops Mycroft's briefcase off, she gets her moneys and heads back - noting that the bodies have vanished. All in all, she's glad to get on the train home.

Mid-afternoon, and Jemmy has made it back to Dogswarren after a morning spent making enquiries. He's got ten suspects for "person most likely to have started the market fire" - all buddies of Alexander Pope the now inhumed. Alexis returns and - noting that they're all there and Syndil is about to finish her shift - Marius declares the Crouchside expedition open. Jacques takes the zipline from the upper level of Dogswarren they're in. The others walk - Conrad stopping to give the Simil that used to be "theirs" but is now again under contract to the Hermit a note saying that they're about to go look for his brother.

Crouchside itself proves as boring as it's repuation (see locations, later) and the characters have little luck finding anything to go on - except for a cafe owner who says she saw Jacob and his friend (who, it turns out, is the man who was taking an interest in Jacob's stories last time) yesterday. A full day, Jemmy notes, after he disappeared.

They're getting frustrated and night is falling when a Simil - not the one they're used to - clanks past on an inscrutable mission of it's own. Conrad feels he's gotten the hang of Simils, and asks it if it knows where Jacob went. It says "Yes" and the now-familiar game of trying to hire the mechanical monster ensues. The Simil wants "colours", and is satisfied after the characters rustle up some 27 different hues in fabrics, spray cans and small objects. Syndil is less than pleased when the Simil leads them to a manhole cover, pulls it open and clambers down into Crouchside's sewers.

Underground, ankle-deep in human waste and following the Simil (which has produced a fearsome looking weapon and can barely fit into the tunnel), the characters slog along and try to breath through their mouths. *something* moves under the waste, snaking towards them, and the Simil fires it's gauss rifle, killing the thing. Marius retrieves the body and excitedly notes it to be some kind of eel-based Furie. Continuing into a larger pipe (which, thank the Great Architect, actually has a thin walkway) the Simil dispatches more furies and leads them into a forgotten stairwell leading down. Syndil (who isn't coping well with the environmental conditions) throws up after Marius decides it's funny to use a dead bat-furie as a puppet.

At the bottom of the stair, the Simil stops outside a door - from which can be heard faint chanting. Alexis bets Conrad it's the cult they've been running into. The Simil crashes through the door and mows the cultists down. It IS the cult they've been running into. Seeing the devestation (and all the blood) inside, Conrad warns Syndil to stay out while he, Jacques, Jemmy and Marius go over the bodies. Under their robes, the cultists are a surprising cross-section of society. One is wearing a suit, one has a Hirplakker tattoo and one - to Marius' horror - is apparantly a priest of the 3rd Church.

The Simil, though, isn't finished. It pushes the plain altar aside - it turns out to be on wheels - and opens the trapdoor so revealed. Then, as it can't fit *down* the trapdoor, it declares it's contract over and clanks off.

Jacques climbs down to have a look while the others go over the cult room - apparantly some sort of forgotten storeroom, lined with junk. Jacques finds a door leading to a long, candle-lit passageway. She goes in and, after wandering along for a while, realises that the candles are all identical down to the wax-drip. She turns around.

The door she came through isn't there.

This would be the Lost Place, then.

The rest of the characters, back in what we like to call the real world, notice that she's gone and - seeing the door - realise what she's gotten herself into. Conrad orders Syndil to stay behind (he's being a hero, see) and Alexis volunteers to stay with her while the menfolk attempt to get into the Lost Place, find Jacques and get them all out again alive and sane.

Jacques, meanwhile, has found that the passageway leads to a large circular chamber with 20 identical passageways arranged around it's circumferance, a spiral pattern etched into the floor and ceiling and what seem to be drains at the centre of both floor and ceiling. Remembering Mad Jacob's stories - about how the only way out is to walk a spiral anticlockwise and retrace your steps, ducking at the exit point because the door in the real world is smaller than the door in the Lost Place - she proceeds to carefully walk the spiral, trying to not let the occassional sound of horrific screaming get to her. As she walks out, she discovers Jacob's body - entrails laid out on the floor and the heart missing. She swears blind it wasn't there on her way in.

She is successful, and reemerges back at the ladder. Just after the boys enter the Lost Place to look for her. Ignoring Alexis' pleas to just let them get out by themselves as well, she walks *back* into the Lost Place, where the lads are reaching the circular chamber and watching a small pool of blood emerge from . As they wander around looking for her, she emerges out of a different passage to the one they came out of, and enthusastically tells them the trick to getting out.

It doesn't work (there's no Jacob, either), and when they get back to the central chamber, Jacques has somehow managed to end up on the ceiling, walking around as if gravity has been reversed. She, of course, sees *them* on the ceiling. She marches off to try to get out again, again unsuccessfully.

Back in the City, the girls hear footsteps coming, and hide behind the junk. They are dismayed to see more cult members turn up, exclaim loudly at the sight of their dead brethren and - crucially - move the altar back.

Marius has a brainwave regarding "retrace your steps" and the gang all try to copy their movements since their individual last escape attempts. Jemmy emerges back into the City while the others stay there, having gotten one or two movements wrong. More careful the next time, they come across Jacob's corpse on the way out again - this time, the head is missing.

After that grisly sight the fact that the trapdoor is closed, there are voices that aren't Alexis above them and the altar is blocking the trapdoor comes almost as a anticlimax.

Above them, Syndil watches in terror - unable to call out and warn Alexis as one of the cultists sneak up on her and club her in the back of the head. Alexis drops like a rock and Syndil suddenly realises that there is one less cultist in view than came in.

Then she feels the gun barrel at the back of her neck.

Rumbled, again.

[DaveB]

Part two of what will probably turn out to be a three-parter, this, and the first session in the campaign to "deal" properly with the Shifted, as the characters get embroiled in a Lost Place.

The campaign plot does continue to grind ever-onwards. I estimate we're a quarter to a third of the way through Eye of the Needle now.

I know that the conspiracy over-plot seems ridiculously complicated at the moment. It really isn't, but it looks it at the moment. Always the way.

Anyways. Crouchside.

Yeah.

Crouchside is the Burgh that is on the opposite side of Dogswarren to Sleeping Vale, and fills in the rest of the wedge formed by the Canals. It's almost uniformly dull - endless low tenement buildings, packed with low-rent housing for the industrial Burghs all around it. There is nothing of note there whatsoever.

Unless you count the Lost Place, of course.

Random Observations -

Sleeping Vale doesn't have a militia in the main rulebook, it's instead where Iron Hand Security has it's base. The situation between the Burghs in our campaign is set to *create* that situation.

The dynamics in the character party are becoming much clearer as my players settle into their roles. It's the little things that these writeups miss that make it - Jemmy's ironic "hero-worship" of Conrad, Jacques' worries that she's doomed to be a mad old single woman even though she's only actually 23. (Which is where all the "spinster" jokes from the quotes come from), Syndil's constant complaining to herself and Marius' constant complaints about being the only one who can hear her constant complaints.

Anyways, some quotes:

"I do NOT want to smell like a incontinent grandmother"
"It adds to your spinster image" - Jacques and Conrad

"Yeah, I didn't want to sit here all night."
"...Ok, I'll just put another tick next to 'doesn't diffuse fast enough" - Alexis helps Marius with his feedback form.

"I'm going to smell like a restroom for weeks" - Conrad

"I don't want to get personal with people trying to kill me. I want to get away" - Marius explains guns to Conrad.

"You say clean, but you don't *mean* clean, do you? Because when you slash someone with it they leak." - Marius counters Conrad's appreciation of Llives.

"Yeah. Take this down - 'I am a murdering bastard who needs to learn proper extermination techniques rather than 'nuke them, nuke them all''"
"Should I put your name down or leave it anonemous?" - Jacques helps Marius with his feedback form.

"I never realised how much you guys miss out on with just the hand gestures to go by. There were *paragraphs* of meaning in the word 'sewer', there." - Marius conveys Syndil's disgust at where the route of adventure takes them.

"Oh that's not natural! *Fantastic*!" - Marius finds a mutant eel that lives in shit.

[Rhyme]

Wow,well it's been a pretty eventful few days; what with the green gas and the killings etc., etc.
You know, I'm not entirely sure how we're going to get out of that trapdoor
- it's the big stone block, I always have problems with big stone blocks.
I'm sure we'll be okay. Damned if I'm dying out of the Burgh.
Ta-taa folks,
Jemmy

[Marius]

Hmmmm, it occurs to me that I haven't yet taken the time to make some introductions and justifications and our current situation entombed deep underground in the armpit of this bloody city may be the perfect opportunity.

My name is Marius Sephori, and if pressed I'd probably describe my profession as a fighting naturalist. The reason I'm down here in the slums rather than swanning around topside drinking cocktails with all the pretty boy corps is this is where all the interesting species can be found. The combination of a hostile environment, bad sanitation and a complete lack of basic pest control means that the slums are a perfect breeding ground for a multitude of highly adapted species. Of course, evolving in such an environment has supplied them with no end of natural defences as well as a universally bad temper, which is where the fighting bit of 'fighting naturalist' comes in. It doesn't exactly go amiss in everyday survival down here either. As for Dogswarren itself, its a good place to look for these species being a poor area with no strong macrocrop ties, whilst also being with spitting distance of Luma if the excrement were to begin impacting the rotor.

Now, despite what some of others might say, I'm not obsessed with Scurts. They just happen to be omnipresent and possessed of nigh-infinite variety, meaning that there's always a new species to catalogue. Think of them as my default job, from which I am extracted from time to time by something of more interest, like a particularly interesting Fury. Furies, as I'm sure you'll know, are genetically altered species ranging from the benign to the undeniably lethal. When science moves on, their creators grow tired of them or they simply escape, they end up down here breeding in the dark. This is the proverbial toilet that the unwanted species get flushed down. A new Fury is always interesting, there's nothing our scalpel-boys like better than a little slice-and-dice reverse engineering to find out what makes them tick. All well and good, but even Furies aren't really the true goal. What I'm actually looking for are the Shifted. Just a rumour you say? You wouldn't be saying that if you could see the amount the corps put into research into the phenomenon and its bastard children. The Shifted represent an uncontrollable force in a world in which the corps control everything, and that scares them. In the eyes of many, the Shifted represent the weapons of the future, while others believe a deal of such nature would damn us all. Me, I'm prepared to keep an open mind and leave the melodrama aside. This does bring me nicely to our current predicament however.

The continued presence of the identification symbol of Arclight's Shifted Studies Department, which is the department I work for by the way, in the presence of deranged cultists is a little worrying to say the least. Now I'm a loyal Arca but I'm not naive enough to believe that we are beyond reproach when it comes to skullduggery and similar. I'd just never believed it would extend to Shift worship. To be fair, the symbol could have been seized on by another group, or it could be a deliberate attempt to discredit us but that doesn't seem to sit quite right. The fact that one of the Herpes is down here is gold dust, the photos will be winging their way to Sideband as soon as I'm clear. We might be being screwed, but making the Herpes suffer just makes the world a sweeter place. Anyway, I'm planning to make some enquiries topside but I'll have to be very careful, I don't fancy stepping on the toes of anyone bigger and ending up downsized. I think while I'm there I might look into that Syndil girl, there are some coincidences which I think need investigating.

This is of course assuming we can get out of this hole before whatever monstrosity lives downstairs finishes with Jacob and comes out looking for takeaway. Actually, that gives me an idea...

Slang Translation:

Luma - Luminosity Tower, home of Arclight
Arca - Employee of Arclight
Herpes - Employee of Hirplakker (derogatory)

[Marius]

Observations on combat

As the unofficial combat consultant for the game so far (which basically means that I learnt the combat system and therefore act as a aid for the smooth running of combat. Or, to put it another way, Dave's too slack to learn the rules himself so he just asks us) I've been in a position to see how most of the fights have gone so far. We haven't had a great deal of fights, but I have made a few observations.

Observation One - Don't hold you breath

Combat is quick and brutal, especially so if there are firearms involved which are frankly quite terrifying despite the formidable list of situational penalties. One of the most brutal aspects is the fact that quite often after one or two good hits an enemy will suffer so many penalties that they are practically harmless, making finishing them off a formality akin to just placing the gun to their head and pulling the trigger. So far we've come out of every fight victorious but the very real threat of death is a good disincentive to needless battle.

Observation Two - Trauma kills

Rather sensibly, the majority of the charcter party invested in decent armour early on being justifiably concerned for their own skins. Also understandably, a number foes we have fought so far have also invested in a modicum of protection. Leaving aside high-calibre firearms and the fearsome Llive, armour is very good at stopping damage and will quite often stop all the damage from a blow. However, you still take blunt force trauma equal to 1/5 of the stopped damage. Now bearing in mind that any amount damage less than a character resistance causes a light wound, and that light wounds on most locations inflict shock points, this means that even in the case of armoured opponents, a single initial hit generally decide the battle rounds before one guy falls. This is basically because of the frankly quite unpleasant penalties you start suffering when you acquire shock points. The conclusion would be having armour is better than no armour, but ultimately getting in the first hit is vitally important.

Observation Three - Pack some heat

Guns are nasty, really really nasty. Anyone packing heat is a deadly threat, even the smallest of sparklock pistols. The fact that melee combat is resisted but shooting isn't means that the most highly skilled Ghostfighter can be capped by some lucky punk with a saturday night special and an attitude. Guns are expensive, but not vastly so for a Sparklock pistol or similar, meaning that almost anyone could be packing. And when the guns get drawn you most definately want one of your own to respond with. Just as a little side note, if guns are scary, then anything with automatic fire is pant-wettingly terrifying. The fact that each bullet in a salvo hits the same location means you can a kiss a location, and most likely your life, goodbye. Treat with respect.

Observation Four - Specialise, and don't neglect melee!

Specialities are vastly useful in combat allowing significantly higher effective skill levels at a big discount. Of course, you can't use the same variety of weapons at your full skill if you are specialised but that is a small price to pay given the amount of penalties that can stack up for ranged attacks. On the subject of skills, it should be noted that everyone, even gun slingers, needs a degree of melee skill. Remember that melee is resisted so unless you want to be murdered by angry kids with broken bottles taking some skill is essential. It's a harsh world out there.

Conclusion

What I have seen of combat so far has impressed me. It's quick and nasty, which go hand in hand with the brutal and uncaring nature of the game world. It's generally pretty fluid, working out degrees of success for melee can be a little time-consuming but generally combat flows along at a pace. Allowing us to get back the important task of wasting our lives away at the Piper.

[Malcolm Craig]

Sorry for not posting some sort of response sooner. The campaign seems to be building very well, as I've said before, it's fascinating to see the evolution of setting, character and plot as time goes one. The player input is great as well, gives a good flipside to the GM point of view.

Marius wrote:
What I have seen of combat so far has impressed me. It's quick and nasty

Which was pretty much our intention from the beginning. It's kind of intended to make players thinks twice about using combat as a first resort for resolving disputes. Thanks for your comments on combat within the game, it's really useful to get that kind of constructive feedback.

Very much looking forward to the next installment of Eye Of The Needle. If nothing else, it makes me want to get off my lazy arse and start a big a/state campaign of my own again (in between actually writing stuff!).


Corporate Shill Mode On

Oh, and if you're interested (and apologies for the plug here), we're currently running an adventure nugget competition on our website. I won't bore you with the details here, but if you go to the News page of www.contestedground.co.uk you'll find all the info you need.

Some of the ideas and situations contained in this thread would make great adventure nuggets. You should have a go!

Corporate Shill Mode Off


Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Originally posted by MalcolmCGS

Very much looking forward to the next installment of Eye Of The Needle. If nothing else, it makes me want to get off my lazy arse and start a big a/state campaign of my own again (in between actually writing stuff!).


The next session will, sadly, not be for quite some time - Jemmy, Jacques and Syndil are all played by Students and it's Finals season here in Durham. And then after THAT the next two weekends are taken up with the 45-and-rising person weekend-long LARP that I'm running in Cumbria.

So, well, there won't actually be another Actual Play until the end of June. Making that cliffhanger especially harsh.

This is not goodbye, though. When I get a spare moment, I'll start posting some of the vast amounts of random crap and notes that I've accumulated so far. And, hopefully, I will mine out adventure nuggets to flood your competition with.

We will return. Oh yes.

[DaveB]

We're back, baby!

Next Session is on Sunday. We have a cliffhanger to resolve, the character of a departing player to write out and that sodding football match to finally show.

And maybe - just *maybe* - we'll get some of that background material onto the thread, as I'm no longer involved in that LARP thing.

Watch this space.

[DaveB]

NPCs

First off, apologies for the lack of surnames in most of these cases. It's been a good month since I last ran EotN, and my written NPC list notes have gone walkabout. Everyone HAS a surname. I just can't remember what they are.

And this is in no way my own attempt to get who everyone is straight before I pick the campaign back up.

Honest.


:D


MYCROFT MARCHMONT
- Corpulent, wheezing-voiced (players have noted he sounds like Baron Silas Von Greenback), surprisingly active Burgess of Dogswarren. Mycroft likes to subvert expectations people have of him, just to keep them off-base. Plus, he has a tendency to feed those who displease him into the mincing machines. Has decided, for reasons only known to himself, to become Jemmy's Patron. This is not good news for Jemmy.

LUTHER
- Chief Dogger (being the naiive youth I am I didn't know what "Dogging" meant until after I started the campaign. Tsh.) and keeper of the Big One, Luther has been acting all shady recently. Has a big rivalry (from his side at least) with Mycroft. In reality, a provost who's in denial.

RODRIGUEZ SANCHEZ
- Boatman, prince of the waterways and user of unfeasibly long-barelled weapons. Rodriguez is a man of flair, of style, of romance. One of the characters' principle friends and allies, he is up for almost any shady mission. Especially if he gets to ogle Syndil.

SILAS HATCHETT
- Bartender with a mean left hook and a slightly ornery right hook, Silas runs the Piper Tavern (Mycroft owns it, as he owns almost everything) and therefore the Character's pathetic social lives lie in the palm of his large sweaty hand. Sports a neat line in muttonchops and stained aprons. Is technically Syndil's boss, though she tends to just do her own thing.

ELIAS
- Ex-Cripplecut champion and local hero, another good mate of the PCs and a means of feeding plot. Creaks his way around the Warren due to extensive ligament damage from his former profession. Now organises sporting events, including Cripplecut matches, from his apartment near the Nose.

REMBRANDT BARNSIDE
- The avuncular, down-to-earth priest of the Dogswarren parish Church of God the Architect. Hard-drinking, good at arm-wrestling. Best friends with Elias, through which he tolerates the godless bunch that are the PCs.

THE NINE-FINGERED MAN
- Marius' boss (the character does have a name in character, and Marius knows it, but he doesn't have a name out of character. Does that make any sense? It's like The Bride in Kill Bill - we cut away whenever anyone's about to say his name), a middle manager in Arclight's R&D department. Somehow, he's the one who took Syndil to Dogswarren. Noone has yet figured out why.

MAD JACOB
- Barfly and comedy local drunk, who as it turns out DID know where a Lost Place was. Last seen with his organs scattered across said Lost Place by what the characters are assuming was an Ubel.

THE HERMIT
- Jacob's brother and the person who the Simil usually works for. The Hermit lives on Dogswarren's ash-choked rooftops, within a structure made of metal sheeting and crates. He sees.. not much of anything, actually, thanks to all the ash, but he hears a lot.

MARION
- An ex-inmate of Jacques' orphanage, Marion has an unpleasent job (at Dogswarren's laundry, near Trickle Cavern) but a above-her-expectations home (at The Nose, after first Owen was removed from it and then she came into lots of money thanks to the characters). She is in love with Jemmy. Jemmy is oblivious. This is funny.

OWEN LEWIS
- (named after a friend of ours OOC), the Drugdealer who got lynch-mobbed early in the campaign and whose flat Marion now occupies. Owen is now apparantly living in Sleeping Vale - Jacques' kids claim to have mugged him recently.

CHARLOTTE
- Dogswarren's apothacary. never actually shown "on-screen" so far, but she's a friend of Syndil's. Is in a fued with Penelope.

PENELOPE
- Dogswarren's drug lord (lady?), a kindly old lady that runs a Tea-room on the upper level of The Tower and has a neat sideline in providing hard substances to discerning clientele. Is in a grannywar fued with Charlotte

SEAN
- The very dodgy man who lives below Jacques and next door to Alexis and Syndil. Is obviously a spy.

[DaveB]

Marion's Surname, I have now discovered in an old notebook, is "Cartwright". Constance's is "Bower". I *think* Penelope's is "Gale". Sean - the neighbour of Alexis and Syndil's who keeps coming around at odd hours to ask to borrow cups of coffee - has the surname of "Cooper".

I also forgot Jed - the character's contact in the Doggers - and Janus Voronetz - the Fogwarren-based Third Syndicate Crime Lord that Alexis occassionally works for. Andrea (Syndil) also reliably informs me that Syndil's old employer, whose murder mystery drives the "metaplot" of the campaign, was called Dominic. And Renaud (Jemmy) tells me that I gave the names of Mycroft's two identically-suited heavies as "Mr Morning" and "Mr Tuesday".

I gave Jed and Luther surnames, but honestly can't remember them. they'll come back to me - right now I want to say Luther's is "Vandross", but I think that's just my 80s-pop-cuture saturated brain at work again.

Anyway, back to that cliffhanger.

SESSION SEVEN - OF CULTS AND COFFEE

Down the ladder, the boys and girl try to open the trapdoor, fail, realise that the cultists have gained reinforcements and come up with a plan. They begin shrieking in an otherworldy fashion and slapping the trapdoor with their soaked-through sleeves, making unpleasent squelching sounds in the process.

The cultists hear those noises and mutter about "The Angel", while gesturing for Syndil to get up. She does so, feigning fear.

Then, down the ladder, the gang hear a sound like a large metal blade being scraped along stone. Coming from the Lost Place.

Like fingernails on blackboards, the sound penetrates the altar and is audible upstairs. the cultists go white and *really* start talking about Angels. Syndil chooses her moment while they're all distracted and knifes the one behind her in the face, making a break for the altar-block, trying to push it out of the trapdoor's way. The other two cultists grab at her, get kicked away, grapple her, get kicked again and so on. The one she knifed dies in excruciating pain as the toxins she's been making with all that pharmacutical knowledge kick in.

Syndil is eventually clubbed into unconciousness, but she's moved the block enough that the guys on the ladder can put their backs into it. Jemmy - not exactly suited for weightlifting - is at the bottom, and makes the mistake of looking into the Lost Place.

Jemmy sees the Ubel.

Screaming to the others to hurry up, they renew their efforts as - above them - Alexis wakes up. Grogilly noting that Syndil and the cultists have gone, she hears the gang below her in time to push the block out of the way. they scramble up and slam the trapdoor just as the Ubel reaches the edge of the Lost Place, and seal the hatch up again. The gang pause for breath, realise Syndil is gone and jump near out of their skins as the Ubel starts to batter away at the underside of the trapdoor, gibbering in it's high-pitched voice. The choice is a very simple one - the direction to run in order to rescue their friend is the direction that the Shifted Being isn't.

So off they go, pausing to close the big metal door to the temple in the hope that it will dissuade the Ubel. They chase the Cultists - who are carrying Syndil between them - through the sewers and up a disused stairwell. Breaking out into a steam tunnel somewhere under the Dogswarren-Crouchside boundary, they finally have clear shots at the bad guys. Well, clear-ish anyway. But enough. One is dropped by Alexis (causing Syndil to be dropped) and the other by Marius just as he's trying to open a door.

While Syndil is checked for wounds and the cultists' corpses are frisked (Marius adding the Transit Militia to the list of infiltrated organisations), Jacques heads the way the cultist was trying to head and discovers a ladder leading to street level. Popping out of it, she finds herself in a Crouchside street next to a big, black car. With three large men pointing guns at her.

She surrenders. Loudly. Very loudly. So the guys down the ladder can hear her. Marius and Jemmy ponder the situation, and pop up out of the manhole guns a blazin. All three cultists drop, their own shots richocheting off into the evening (and, screams indicate, going into nearby buildings).

Down the ladder (why is it always ladders?), Syndil wakes up to the sound of gunfire and has a brief panic.

The gang search the scene of their latest gunfight, Jacques raids the minibar built into the passenger compartment of the car (nice car) and pops Edge pills until collapsing from blood loss - Unfortunately, in the confusion, Jemmy managed to shoot her in the leg.

Deciding that - once again - the path of most efficiency happens to coincide with what they all really wanted to do anyway, the characters then steal the car - noting that it's registered to the Third Church of God the Architect at Colsetter Parish - and drive back to Dogswarren, going by a circtitious route by way of Sleeping Vale in order to find streets big enough to fit the car down. Tending to Jacques, Syndil finds her pill box and realises that her friend is an addict.

On the way back, it begins to rain. Sleeping Vale also seems deserted - and there are posters advertising a local "meeting" that very night.

Once ensconced back in Dogswarren, the group splits up to individually wash themselves, burn their sewer-tainted clothes, change (not in that order) and tend to wounds. Jacques is taken to Dogswarren's tiny medical clinic. Syndil discovers that her upper right arm is scratched to hell - the top few layers of skin have been scratched off by some sort of implement, presumably by the cultists. Freaks. Jemmy develops the photos he took, and notes with no particular surprise that the ones of inside the Lost Place refuse to develop, just turning dark red. He proceeds to Conrad's, where the Ghostfighter and Marius are going over the events of the night, trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

The Cult, notes Marius, have members in the Third Church, the Transit Milita AND Hirplakker - that they have proof of - and circumstantial evidence about the Men in Coats that were busying themselves with the Fight Club in Sleeping Vale has the Fulgurator's Guild being infiltrated too. Marius also finally reveals that he works for Arclight, and that the symbol the cult uses is the symbol of Arclight's R&D department.

There is a knock at the door. It is Rembrandt, who after being admitted asks the characters just what they're doing stealing Church property. There is much mutual suspicion - given that the cult leader was a Third Church priest, Rembrandt's loyalty seems dodgy - until the Reverand Barnside lays his cards on the table. He is a member of a heretic-seeking society - which he calls "The Inquisition" - combatting a Demolitionist Cult that has grown out of the Third Church. This cult calls itself "The Crypt", worships the Shift and has infiltrated almost every organisation of size in the City. Marius counters with the belief that it's all something to do with Arclight - based on the fact that the Crypt use the R&D symbol - until Rembrandt gives him a timeline. The Crypt has existed for some 250 years - much much longer than Arclight has even existed. It's Arclight's group that use the Crypt's symbol, not the other way around. Rembrandt was assigned to Dogswarren to keep a watch out for a mid-ranking member of the Shifted Cult - in "real life" an important churchman. Who the characters happen to have just killed and stolen the car of. The Crouchside cell has been wiped out, the Sleeping Vale cell was bombed (Rembrandt is disappointed to learn that the Mikefighters weren't sent by the characters. Because that means there is yet another player in this twisted mass of conspiracy) and the Burningfell temple (back in session one, thread-watchers!) was abandoned. The trail has just run utterly and absolutely dry - there is no-one left who might know what's going on.

Jump-cut to Alexis' flat, where Alexis is interrupted in her tinkering with the Fire Engine project by a knock at her door. It's Sean. He'd like to borrow a cup of coffee.

Jump-cut back to Conrad's, where Rembrandt leaves and the three blokes consider what he just told them.

Jump-cut back to Alexis' where Alexis thrusts a cup of - well.. processed caffine drink, at any rate - at Sean and slams the door. Ever so slightly freaked out. It IS, after all, something close to 3 A.M.

Morning finally breaks, and everyone falls back into old habits. Alexis catches up on the sleep she didn't get in the night and tinkers with engines, Syndil goes to work, Jemmy and Marius go to hang around at the bar with her and Conrad broods in his flat.

Syndil displays her odd injury, and Marius voices the idea that the Cultists kidnapped HER specifically, and there are people lurking around asking about HER. Maybe the cultists were retrieving something? She says she already thought of that, but she's checked herself and there weren't any lumps there. If Dominic hid anything on - or in - her, it was either so deep they didn't get it or shallow enough that they did. Alexis arrives, telling the tale of the pre-dawn stalker - and Syndil signs that she nearly kicked an undrunk cup of coffee someone had left on their doorstep when she left for work that morning. Hmmm.

They didn't *find* anything on the people they killed, but after checking the numbers of cultists who came ino the shrine and knocked Syndil out and the number of people the others shot, no Cultists got away. So if they did take anything from Syndil's body, it has to still be down there.

So they have to go back.

A heavily-armed Jemmy, Marius and Alexis climb back down into the steam-tunnel where the firefight happened, and Marius examines the rapidly-being-eaten-by-Scurts corpses. Nothing. Nada - although one of them has a pocket knife with traces of blood on it that he suspects may have been used to do the scratching. He half-heartedly suggests that they check out the Temple itself, but Alexis points out that the guy Syndil killed in there died before she was unconcious - it couldn't be him. And besides, do they *really* want to see if the Ubel has gone back into the Lost Place or if it's still roaming around with murder on it's eldritch mind?

They get the hell out of there.

Back at base camp (ie, "The Pub"), Conrad comes in looking for Alexis - he has just received a telephone call for her at his flat, asking for her to call someone named "Janus". He's slightly irked - he's the one with the phone, it's the first phone call he's had in a year and it isn't even for him.

The others are coming back into Dogswarren - it's still raining in vertical downpour outside, and the lower levels of Dogswarren are starting to become rather wet. There's a loud sound from the depths of the earth, which the natives recognise with alarm while Marius is cheerfully oblivious - it's the sound of one of the dormant Foundry chimneys starting up.

Many other people have recognised it, too, rushing to the upper levels to contain the damage. The characters are disturbed to see that it's the chimney next to the one Jemmy lives in that has restarted - those who were asleep inside it dying near-instantly in the blast of hot gas and ash, and the structures around it damaged similarly until the doors cut into the chimney's pipe could be sealed. The badly-burnt survivors are being cared for, and those who weren't at home but have now been made homeless and possession-less in an instant are being rallied by Rembrandt, who is loudly calling on the charity of Dogswarren's more conventionally housed inhabitants. There but for the grace of the Architect goes Jemmy, who seems understandably shaken. Marius quietly points out to Jemmy that he, Marius, has a sofa that he, Jemmy, could sleep on for the foreseeable future, and Jemmy nods in agreement. But first, Jemmy must go see the man who can lend official weight behind the rehousing effort.

Mycroft.

Mr Morning lets Jemmy into the Warren, and the teenager descends to Mycroft's lair, finding the Burgess writing correspondence like a man possessed and answering telephone calls. Mycroft says that he has heard about the Chimney and of course he will help in finding the homeless places to sleep - the Burgh looks after it's own. Mycroft pauses for a moment and then tells Jemmy that things are getting worse - someone, it seems, has assassinated the head of the Sleeping Vale milita. Sleeping Vale has responded to this and to the bombing by contracting Iron Hand Security to do their policing for them. Iron Hand have already attacked Hangside - on the other side of Sleeping Vale to Dogswarren - fire-bombing the home of two petty thieves that shoplifted from Vale stores. Mycroft wants to know who killed the old militia head and why. Jemmy offers to sell Mycroft the car, and Mycroft promises to think about when there isn't a crisis, but he likes jemmy's next idea - use the Barge Mycroft bought off him as temporary housing.

Back at the bar, Alexis has phoned Mr Voronetz the crime lord - for it was he who called for her - back. Mr Voronetz knows that she turned down his last job offer, but as a freelancer that's her right and he doesn't hold it against her. Would she like to discuss other employment oppertunities? She would, and has arranged to go to Fogwarren to see him the following day. So she's going to be out of the Burgh for a while. This seems like a good idea, until she realises that Syndil is being targetted for something nefarious, so she asks Conrad to keep an eye on her. Which Syndil resents. But reconsiders when Sean the Dodgy enters the bar and spends an afternoon staring at her. Conrad tries to put her at her ease by telling her about his own culture-shock many years ago - he grew up in The Forbidden City, and is corp-born himself.

Jemmy, meanwhile, warns Jacques' kids - who have taken her hospitalisation as licence to go back to The Jump - not to cause trouble in Sleeping Vale, and begins his search for the killer with Elias. Who calmly tells him that it was Conrad what done it, with himself and Rembrandt standing watch. Elias goes to face the music with Mycroft, and Jemmy returns to his friends - running into Marion on the way. She asks if he has anywhere safer to live, and seems disappointed when he responds in the positive, but covers by saying she's housing one of the refugees. Obligatory love-interest encounter over, Jemmy heads for the Piper.

After her shift, Syndil Alexis Jemmy and Marius return to the Runnings while Conrad grumpily goes home, promising to turn up for guard-duty when Alexis leaves in the morning. Jemmy - having heard about the coffee-cup incident - decides to grease the floor outside Sean's door and lie in wait in the Running's (broken again) phone booth with a camera, to try to catch Sean falling over on film. Jemmy, you see, thinks that Sean's omnipresent dressing gown is not just an attempt to look manfully dishevelled and attract the ladies. He theorises that it conceals weapons and - for want of a better term - wants to look up Sean's skirt.

Inside, Marius reveals a brainwave he's had - rolling up his sleeve, he shows the others the Arclight tattoo he has there, complete with barcode in the "bulb" of the symbol to allow Luminosity Tower's security system to recognise him. All inhabitants of the Tower have one, and it's in the same place that the cultists thought something was hidden on Syndil. Syndil - worried now - says that her tattoo is on the small of her back. Marius asks if anything was ever done to it. She says no - except for having the barcode changed on it when she was promoted to being Dominic's servant. Marius grimly tells her that he's had 7 different jobs in the company and has never had his code changed - it's much easier and more cost-effective to just alter the Dingin-kept database than mess about with laser treatment and such for the tattoos. Feeling very self-concious, Syndil pulls the back of her jumper up and lets him have a look at her symbol. After what seems like an age with Marius examining her with a magnifying glass, he reports that there's flakes of some kind of glue on the symbol - something was stuck onto her tattoo and has been removed. Syndil hopefully ventures that she might have washed whatever it was off, but he reckons no - it would have been waterproof. And as they didn't find anything like it on the cultists, it must have been removed BEFORE that - maybe even before she ever arrived in Dogswarren. That, she counters, means whoever gave his finger to the Simil to save her life probably has it. Hearing mention of fingers, Marius goes over her background - learning things like Dominic's name for the first time. He gets chills - Dominic worked in Shift Studies with him, was executed over a month ago for "financial corruption", and their mutual boss has recently lost a finger. Finding out that her beloved boss was hiding pretty much everything from her doesn't make Syndil very happy.

The girls go to bed, while Marius goes to join Jemmy in his Sean-watch, taking up position on the stairwell up to their own flat.

Very late at night, past 13 O'Clock, a noise like DIY starts coming from Sean's apartment - waking Syndil and Alexis up. Marius goes to get Jemmy, who has nodded off in the phone booth. When the noise starts to sound like a power saw, Alexis thinks that Sean is trying to cut his way into either her and Syndil's apartment. Jemmy and Marius prefer Jacques' as a target, and head up to have a prowl. Hearing someone moving around inside Jacques' flat, Jemmy Jimmies the lock and they go on in.

Jacques' obsessively-neat flat is as tidy and untouched as ever. Her strongroom remains sealed up - though Jemmy opens it to check the contents are all still there - but there are wet footprints on the floor. Marius follows them to the window, which is open. And appears to have been forced open.

The Runnings, as has been mentioned briefly, backs onto a tributory canal. Jacques' window view is of a three-meter gap between the Runnings and the brick wall of the Hump (the next apartment block over), the gap being entirely filled with water up to about a foot above Alexis and Syndil's floor level. The upper story flats like Marius' and Jacques' have windows. The lower ones don't for risk of flooding - the current high water level caused by the *still* pouring rain demonstrating why. The brick wall of the Runnings is sheer, slick with the vertical downpour and covered in nebelweed and less useful moulds. The gap is too wide to chimney up without doing the serious splits. There are no ropes, no handholds.

And yet Jacques' box of granulated coffee has gone.

Jemmy returns to tell the girls what's going on - an apparantly impossible feat of dexterity by a mean who really needed caffeine. Jemmy's professional opinion is that the guy's a freak.

Marius, meanwhile, gingerly closes Jacques' window and decides to go get Conrad. On his way, he passes the Train station, where three bald gentlemen in long black coats are gliding silently through Dogswarren. Having survived an Ubel attack earlier that day, he decides to not even take the chance that they might be a trio of Hager and hides until they go away.

Conrad has been resolutely not watching his show and trying not to think about the pointlessness of his life when Marius arrives with the call to action. Heading back to the Runnings, they convene in Alexis' and hear another bout of thumping sounds from Seans'. Hoping to catch him in the act, Marius goes to Jacques' again but finds nothing - and hears noises coming from his OWN apartment! Bursting in, he finds the place has been rifled through - especially the photos Jemmy had collected of the Cult's temple under Crouchside. Running to the (open) window, he sees Sean - clad in a form-fitting black number - crawling down the wall gollum-like, and disappearing into the hole he has evidently cut into his own canalside wall.

To makes things even odder, Marius' coffee has gone.

This cannot be allowed to rest, and so the three blokes (while the women guard their own flat) wait outside Sean's door, listening. When they hear the thumping and protracted silence again, they pick the lock and quietly slip inside.

The thumping noise is from the "hatch" - Sean has sawed a square into his outer wall, making a block he can pull out to use the hole as an enterance. Lying open on Sean's living room table is a file full of photos of Syndil. Out of curiosity, Jemmy opens the kitchen cupboards.

Coffee. Dozens of jars of coffee. Including Marius' and Jacques'.

The block starts to shift - Sean is returning - and the blokes dive for hiding places. Marius elects for the bedroom wardrobe, Conrad for the behind-the-sofa trick and Jemmy - stuck in the kitchen with no place to hide - draws his knees up and crams himself into the fridge.

As Marius realises that the wardrobe he's in has a false back and discovers hooks for equipment in the secret compartment, Conrad watches Sean walk into the kitchen carrying what looks suspiciously like a jar of coffee. Sean goes to make himself a nice hot beverage (well, it's cold climbing up and down walls late at night in a thunderstorm), and opens the fridge. To find Jemmy pointing a sparklock at him. Conrad comes out of hiding and after a few seconds struggling with the latch so does Marius. Jemmy offers Sean the bottle of dogs' milk he was after.

Everyone has a nice sit-down, with weapons still pointed at Sean (who does not speak or offer resistence). The secret of Sean's mountaineering is revealed to be technological - there are pads on his palms and soles. The menfolk demand to know who he is, to which Sean gives his name (as "Agent Sean Cooper") and serial number. Marius wants to know who Sean's working for. The answer - GRID - surprises the hell out of him, and he shuts up while Sean explains his mission. He was sent here by his Corp to track down Syndil, who his bosses think is a message courier for "The Splinter Cell", a nefarious shadowy organisation devoted to replacing GRID as the power source for the City. If guilty, she would be carrying messages on microfilm to other Cell members, but Sean has seen no signs of such activity - she appears to be a barmaid. The tension decreases, and the trio impress upon Sean the fact that if someone was running an effort to replace a macrocorp, they wouldn't do it from Dogswarren. Sean agrees, noting he thought the assignment kind of wierd himself.

Then the noise of an Aerostat - GRID having been alerted when the characters broke into Sean's apartment by the cameras they have set up - starts up. Sean asks if they're going to fight, and the others stand down - still mightily confused. He pulls the block out, grabs the rope ladder the aerostat has lowered down into the canal-gap and is pulled up, up and away.

Walking back next door to Alexis and Syndil, considering the strangeness of the night's events, the lads tell the lasses what happened. Just when they had a handle on what's going on, something like this comes along and messes up all their carefully pieced-together ideas. Marius offers the one lead they have remaining - he could (though he doesn't want to ) question the Nine-fingered man, who it is now almost certain has the microfilm. But he'd have to do so VERY carefully to avoid having what was done to Dominic done to him.

And so ends a very strange night.

The next morning, everyone rises. Conrad goes to Alexis and Syndil's, wishing Alexis safe journey and escorting Syndil to work against her silent grumbling. Marius mulls over the conspiracy. Jemmy heads to the pub for his breakfast. Silas seems agitated - as, in fact, do a lot of the passersby.

Last night. While the characters were dealing with Sean, a kid from Dogswarren was badly beaten by an Iron Hand guard. Luther and some other Doggers went to have a jurisdiction argument with them.

The Iron Hand have shot - and killed - two-thirds of the Doggers. Including Luther.

This means war.

NOTES

(I'm SURE I've gotten the precise order of some of that wrong - especially exactly when specific things were figured out in relation to Sean-catching. But it'll do.)

"What's The Demolisher?"
"I haven't seen you in church a lot, have I?" - Jemmy and Rembrandt

"I have to ask... did YOU send those Mikefighters?"
"Oh yeah. Made of Dog Meat you know... NO. I wish people'd stop asking that!" - Rembrandt and Conrad

"Why come to me? Why not Marius and his big tool?" - Conrad displays a Ghostfighter's disdain for gun culture.

"I know how you feel, coming down out of the towers... I was Corp-born too." - Conrad's background begins to emerge.

"Who are you working for? Hirplakker? Arclight?"
"Grid"
"Grid!? What the fuck do Grid have to do with all of this?" - Marius' carefully constructed theories about what's going on are shattered.

"Oh, and see if you can get your guys to take over here. We're still getting our power from the Guild." - Marius, bidding farewell to Agent Cooper, thinking of the utility bills.

This was the week of the campaign metaplot - the big reveal about the Crypt, which has been building for ages. We now proceed into act 2 of our storyline, and in deference to their being short-changed this week next session will focus on Conrad and Jemmy rather than the Corp-characters who are more tied up with the conspiracy. I'm not entirely happy with the way the plot is stratifiying into "Conspiracy" plot, featuring Syndil and Marius, and "Dogswarren" plot, featuring the other three. It's a natural reaction absed on character backgrounds, but truth is Syndil should be as involved in Dogswarren as the others and Conrad especially - who after all has Crypt assassins taking potshots at him - should be in the Crypt storyline. I shall have to apply my big blender to the campaign and mix it up a bit.

"The Crypt" was mentioned as the name of the cult in the second session. The characters apparantly just thought it was the specific name of the Fight Club.

Note the reaction to non-Simil Shifted Beings - the response from a heavily armed (dare I say it) "combat optimised" character party that includes people like Conrad and Marius when faced with an Ubel is to run like the fires of hell are right behind them. As it should be, really. Marius - with Shifted on the brain - mistakes the Men in Coats for a group of Hager and *hides* until they go away, just in case.

Sean needed caffeine due to his not-needing-to-sleep Biomods - he ate coffee granules raw in order to supplement his diet in the field. So there.

The rainstorm still hasn't stopped. It is a thing for next session.

Iron Hand Security makes it's - off-screen - appearance, the situation in Sleeping Vale becoming that from the A|State Corebook. See what we did there? And the Burgh conflict has gone to Def Con 1.

The positions of various things are important here. Think of the Runnings apartments as a 2 x 2 grid - Jacques and Marius are above Sean and Alexis, with Jacques above Sean and Marius above Alexis. Make sense?

Marius came up with an idea to boost Conrad's ratings and stick it to Hirplakker - in quiet moments, the two have been dicussing the idea of showing Sideband the eividence of Hirplakker being involved with the cult, or using what's going on as a plotline.

Renaud often mimes out Jemmy's actions, almost semi-LARPing sometimes. One facet of his characterisation I haven't mentioned before is his habit of putting a roll of cardboard (at least, I think it's a roll of cardboard. It might be a pen or something) in his mouth so that he speech is impeded in the way that Jemmy's - the character alway having a roll-up in his mouth - would be. For the "Sean gets surprised" sequence, Renaud drew his feet up onto the armchair to get himself into the same position as his character (really funny looking, given the player is... ganglier... than Jemmy is) and mimed pointing the gun up. The 45 degree drooping angle of the faux-rollup, the slightly unnerved yet challenging look in his eyes, everything - perfection. Sheer perfection. A|State isn't meant to be this funny.

Conrad is feeling increasingly useless - his midlife crisis, barely staved of by being caught up with the other characters, has come back in full swing thanks to Marius' kill-stealing. His show's about to be cancelled, he has not even the rudiments of a life and whenever he tries to be useful and goes to help out in a combat Marius shoots whoever he runs at. While good characterisation, this is on the verge of slipping into being less involved in the game itself and I'm getting annoyed with it. So it's on my "to do" list.

Jacques' player bowed out of this campaign (and most other campaigns she's in. Job commitments calling.) this session. So our cast is now slightly reduced. It will be even MORE reduced for the next three sessions, as Alexis' player is in the final stages of her Master's Degree and has a good grasp of priorities. Hence Alexis finding a courier mission that will take her away from the Burgh for a while. So next session will be just Conrad, Jemmy, Syndil and Marius. And we'll probably start Bond-style, half-way through the Football Match.

---
One last note. This campaign is maybe a 1/3rd of the way through. Being the incorrigable roleplayer I am, I'm already planning the next thing - a sequel to the Everway campaign that was, say my group, the finest thing I have ever run (there's a trailer for the original in the Campaign Trailers thread, and it gets mentioned in the How Do You Plan a campaign thread A2K started this time last year). But the Actual Play bug has bitten me now, and I'm going to do that future campaign like I'm doing this one. Sathere.
---

Anyways, see you next time!

[DaveB]

SESSION EIGHT - of Riots and Railwaymen.

One week later.

The Storm (as it is now being called) is showing no signs of stopping. A week and a bit of torrential rain is having a delibitating effect on the City - Flood-risk Burghs such as Bankside and Mire End are beginning to get into real trouble as Canals, full beyond capacity, burst their banks. On the plus side, the ever-present pollution is actually getting slightly better as the filth is washed out along the "outbound" Canals into the wasteland.

The annual Dogswarren vs Hammertongue full-contact inter-burgh football match is not going to stop for any pansy-ass rainstorm, though, and the good citizenry get some of their frustrations out. Despite a staggering injury rate there are no fatalities and after the finishing air-horn is sounded the Piper is packed way beyond standing-room only by celebrating football fans and players. The battered tin trophy is on it's way to Mycroft's desk for another consecutive year, the revellers are getting well and truly pissed, Syndil goes from being worked off her feet as a first-aider to being worked off her feet as a barmaid and even the Hermit descends from his perch (Simil in tow) to toast the "dogpack". Jemmy sits on his usual barstool, hemmed in by the crowd, and if he notices the burly gent Marion is "celebrating" with he doesn't show any sign of it.

On the roof of the Runnings, sheltered from both the downpour and the falling ash from the chimneys by a piece of corrugated iron which also hides him from sight, Conrad watches the Iron Hand guards on the other side of the Sleeping Vale border. They've set up a roadblock "in anticipation of trouble with drunken footballers", and Conrad has decided to keep an eye on them. The crunch of roof-ash alerts him that he's being joined, and Marius squeezes into the shadowy-spot.

The pair share some exposition - Syndil refuses to let Conrad bodyguard her despite Alexis still not being back (she phoned in to say she was alright, but that she couldn't say what she was doing, which they expected), Jacques is still recovering and the Doggers are still lacking leadership (Conrad gets a speculative look in his eye at that). There's a rumble from the street below, and a large half-tracked vehicle rumbles up to the roadblock from the Sleeping Vale side. Marius worriedly notes that it's an APC-type Warcrawl - a troop transport. On the plus side, it's too wide to actually fit into the tunnel into the Runnings that marks Dogswarren's enterance. Which is nice, unless they plan to start bulldozing. Noting some revellers being turned back into Dogswarren by the troops, Conrad notes that the hand are just *waiting* for someone to try something.

At which point somebody from the Quadrangle - the second-level street that rings the market - throws a bottle out of a window at the Roadblock. The troops (who now number ten) fire back. The revellers start to throw junk back at them.

The watchers recieve their signal when three of the Iron Hand troopers break their own line and march into Dogswarren, truncheoning a random reveller that happens to try to go to the nightspots of Sleeping vale at the wrong time. The Burgh is now being invaded.

Marius and Conrad split up to try to get down to the action, while the reveller runs off into Dogswarren. Marius takes the ladder and access tunnel option to try to get to the people throwing shit before the troopers do. Conrad considers carefully and dives off the roof into the tributory canal that runs behind the Runnings, having decided that Sean's secret exit (from last session) would make an excellent way to get ahead. He fails, however, to take into account the current, and is swept past the hatchway until he finally manages to climb out of the water-pipe further into Dogswarren.

At the Piper, Syndil notices that the place is suddenly emptying, and there's some commotion at the far end of the bar. The reveller the Guard hit has arrived bearing news of the invasion. four dozen angry football fans, plus Jemmy, plus Syndil, plus the Simil (who the Hermit tells to protect the fans) are on the march.

Marius and Conrad have met back up and are creeping up the marketplace stairwell, observign the Iron Hand kick in the door of the boiled sweet shop the incident is coming from. One Guard stays outside while the other two go in, and there are shouts from inside. And then the sound of an angry mob heading through the main market hall right for the now-lone Iron Hand guard starts. At the back of the mob, Syndi worridly notes the many crowbars, planks with nails in and other items of concussive force being picked up as they go. The Guard fires at the Simil (which is in the front of the crowd), and the Simil - apparantly enraged in it's Shifted mind by the damage - charges him.

Conrad and Marius use the distraction of the Simil pulling an Iron Hand guard's arms off while a large angry mob eggs it on to slip inside and get the jump on the two Guards that remain - who are caught in the act of handcuffing the teenagers that were throwing things at them. Pointing out the horrible death their compatriot is suffering, Conrad suggests that if they take off their armour and lay down their weapons, the mob won't recognise them as "The Enemy" and they'll be able to live. One guard agrees, the other disagrees, the other shoots the one and Conrad kills the other.

End of problem.

Or not, as the case may be - The mob is too drunk and too pissed off after a week of persecution by Iron Hand to let this lie here. They're off to Sleeping Vale, Simil in tow, to do some damage and induldge in some looting. The menfolk take to the rooftops again to try to get ahead of the mob, who are swarming over the troopers using superior numbers and dutch courage while the Simil reduces the APC to scrap metal. The crowd breaks past the roadblock and descends upon the innocent shops of Sleeping Vale, smashing windows and carrying off consumer goods. Marius and Jemmy find one another in the chaos and instruct the Simil to stop pounding on what was once the engine block and instead "crack it" (the apc) "open and kill anything inside". The Simil makes a hole in the side, sticks it's flamethrower in and makes fire, to the twosome's grimaces. And then they're off again.

Syndil, seeing all the wounded lying around (for weight-of-numbers still means the first five get shot) starts trying to get the injured back into Dogswarren, enlisting the support of less bloodthirsty types via the medium of interpetive dance and pointing. Once all the injured Dogswarren people are stabilised and out of the rain, she looks at the bleeding and dying Iron Hand. And goes home, leaving them to die.

Marius and Jemmy hear a sound Marius realy wishes he couldn't hear - an Aerostat is approaching.

Conrad gets in front of the crowd and asks the Simil how much it will be for it to return to it's master. The contract price - an Apfel - is obtained by smashing a grocer's to get a stunted "crab"-type Apfel, and the Simil holsters weapons and clanks it's way home. Bereft of their humanoid seige engine, the spring leaves the rioters step, and Conrad plants his feet in front of them and orders them back to their own Burgh.

As the Aerostat flies over, the People of Dogswarren make their way back into the dank tunnels of home. Conrad turns around and addresses the dozen Iron Hand guards he just prevented the rioters from walking into the ambush of - warning them not to come into Dogswarren again, he marches off home without a second glance. Marius and Jemmy pick their way back into their own Burgh, the Iron Hand triple their border-guards and the exit-tunnels from Dogswarren are closed for the first time in a decade - the big pig-iron gates are swung (with the help of some oil and a lot of enthusiasm) shut across the tunnel-mouths leading into Sleeping Vale. The border is now closed.

The next morning, and the TV news (for those that have paid for it) isn't good - the Storm is showing no sign of letting up, and - to Marius' mixed feelings - there has been a 500% increase in Shifted encounters in the last week. That, he notes, *has* to be significant in some way. One of the attacks was a horrific assault on a squad of hirplakker troops by an Ubel in the Contested Grounds, but Luger sightings are also up and there are even more Simils than usual clanking around. In other news, Arclight are being blamed by the usual religious groups for the Storm, the anti-corp protesters claiming that the Corp's rocket tests of the last two months have had an effect on the atmosphere or something.

Jemmy - after his usual breakfast at the Piper - has business this day. He goes to Alexis and Marius' landlord and explains to the man that he's going to rent the flat now vacated by Sean. The landlord laughs at the guttersnipe and names a moderately gouging price. Which Jemmy (who, if you'll remember, is secretly loaded after the Barge of the Dead incident) agrees to without blinking.

Conrad, too, has business. The events of the night before have got him thinking, and he seeks out Elias. The codger congratulates him on a bloodbath well averted, and explains the whole Mycroft-wants-to-know-who-offed-that-guy-in-Sleeping-Vale problem. Elias, as the one who hired Conrad in the first place, says that he'll take the rap for it - it was his idea, so if Mycroft wants to feed anyone to the dogs it should be him. Conrad wishes him luck, makes him promise to contact him once he knows what's going to happen about it, and heads to survey the border-guards.

Marius, after helping Jemmy move his stuff downstairs (Jemmy now has a TV. And more than one room. And a very leaky secret enterance. And a hidden compartment in his wardrobe. And more coffee than he can drink), drags him back to the Piper where he aks Syndil and Jemmy if they're up for a jaunt - Marius has been reading around, and has found that one of the Shifted sightings of the last week was in Crouchside. maybe the Ubel has escaped, maybe it hasn't, but it's Marius' job to find out and he wants to know if the others are up for some excitement. They - reluctantly - are, and so it's off to Crouchside at lunchtime for the trio.

Conrad meets with Jed, who has taken command of the Runnings gateway, and the Dogger fills Conrad in on the situation - with Luthor and most of the senior gang-members dead, there's a distinct absence of direction in the militia-gang. Four individuals (Jed includes himself there) are issuing orders - Jed and another bloke are running the border-watch and the guarding of the Market respectivly, while another two senior Doggers fight over the job of "keeper of the Big One", as that was Luthor's old position. So, as Conrad notes, there's two people who don't want the job of chief Dogger but are getting effective and needed jobs done, and two people that do want it but aren't doing anything for the Burgh. Jed agrees, noting that what with the Hand and the Dogger's laughably low state of funding and equipment compared to them (Jed indicates his own sparklock pistol and cloth armour then indicates the riot-suit and cartridge shotgun of his opposite number on the other side of the border), you'd have to be a crazy man to join the Doggers right now, and the gang simply don't have the numbers to police the Burgh any more.

Conrad, to Jed's surprise, asks how he can become a member of the gang.

The Crouchside Three, though, have arrived at a shop where the proprietor is being asked questions by Sideband reporters about his near-miss the night before. The gentleman tells the story of how the keeper of the neighbouring store was shot and killed by Three Hager the night before. Once the reporters clear out, Marius conducts a slightly more in depth interview - confirming the appearances of the Hager (tall man-shaped things in long black coats with bald heads) and that they *shot* the man. he also finds out that the corpse has already been sold to a "protein reclamation facility". Meeting the others outside, he notes that whatever those things were they weren't Hager - the Shifted Assassins don't look human as "up close" as the shopkeeper claims to have been, and definately don't use firearms. Jemmy notes that there are those guys that have been seen around the railway station wearing Fulgurator coats, and that they could also meet the description. Heading to the corpse-mongers, they are fortunate enough to find that the body's personal effects have not yet been sold off (though they are offered a nice pattie made of the man they're after by the proprietor), and slip the butcher enough coins to "distract" him while they retrieve a bunch of keys.

Jed has agreed to take Conrad's request to be "made" to the other three sort-of-bosses, and Conrad is met by Mr Tuesday, who tells him Mycroft would like a word. Shown through the Warren into Mycroft's lair, Conrad is first congratulated on stopping the riot and second told that Elias will not have punitive measures taken against him, Mycroft accepting the killing as a neccessay evil. Conrad doesn't go away at conversation's end, though, declaring that he intends to take over the Doggers and wants to know if Mycroft will obstruct him as he obstructed Luthor. Mycroft says - laughing dangerously - that his problems with Luthor were entirely personal, and that IF Conrad becomes head of the gang, he wold consider letting the Doggers keep their status as militia. Conrad then counters with a request for funding - the Burgh is rich enough for the Doggers to not be using blackpowder weapons, and a little outfitting would make people more willing to join. Mycroft - considering long and hard - says that if Conrad can find reliable equipment, he will help with the costs.

The keys open the man's flat, where no-one in particular is surprised to find a set of Crypt robes. Syndil and Jemmy search the place, turning up a well-thumbed copy of the Third Church bible and a note apparantly giving train times for something - four times are listed. Marius notes that if they ARE a secret code, it's impossible to break - there isn't enough data for it to be a straight cypher, so it would be a look-up reference to something. The three snoopers have a brainwave, and start looking up chapter/passage references in the book. Figuring out that the first three times correspond to the three testements of the Third Church bible, they piece the message together as being "In the time of Betrayal" / "The Heavens Open" / "The Righteous shall gather" / Victory Line 13:15. Jemmy notes that maybe the Crypt - as a heretical cult of the Church - has a fourth testement that the final line is a look-up for. Syndil, though, posits that maybe it's where the righteous are supposed to gather - the last line is where and when to go, not part of the code.

Conrad, released from the Warren, climbs up onto the high roofs of central Dogswarren and seeks out the Simil, which is clanking around on it's inscrutable errands. He asks it what it will accept in return for acting in a support role for the Doggers. The Simil stares into the distance for a bit, then replies "Stars".

The Trio have returned to Dogswarren, and enter the burgh's Train station. They umm and ahh, and finally ask the ticket seller for three tickets on the 13:15. (The Victory line is the one that runs through Dogswarren). They pays their moneys and gets their tickets, settling down to wait for the train.

Conrad reaches the final corner of his round-trip of the Burgh, down at undertrain square talking to Rodriguez. The boatman complains - half-jokingly - of taking Marius back and forth between Luminosity Tower and the Burgh, along with all the warning-shots, laser-sight dots tracking over uncomfortable places and other welcoming aspects of Macrocorp security that it entails. Conrad nods, sympathetically, and tells Rodriguez where he wants to go. The Cathedral - base of the Sideband Media macrocorp.

Rodriguez' wails can be heard clear across the Burgh.

The 13:15 pulls in, and Jemmy notes that the Transit Militia aren't letting people board the front carraige of the train. They speculatively move towards it, have their tickets checked, and are allowed to enter. It's very nice - much nicer than usual. it has seats and everything. And no other passengers. While Syndil does the "I was right, me" dance, the train leaves the station, heading centre-wards. After ten minutes, it stops. In a tunnel.

Rodriguez and Conrad stop off at a floating market halfway to the Cathedral, and Rodriguez catches up on the news of the waterways - the nomads are understandably concerned by the Storm, but worse is GRID - who have closed the waterways leadig to the Powerhouse to all but official business, and are willing to sink anyone who approaches unauthorised.

On the train, Jemmy estimates that they're somewhere in Iron Hills - the Burgh inbetween Crouchside and Fogwarren, on the other side of the Serpentine Canal. Which doesn't have a station. Syndil suggests that the train has stopped for them, and they open the doors to find a tiny platform lined up with their carraige and their carraige alone. Gingerly, they step off and the train starts up again, leaving them facing an access door of mystery (tm).

Conrad reaches the Cathedral, and goes to see his producers, pitching the idea of Sherrif Conrad Honest fighting the evil Cultists. They like it, and he leaves feeling slightly better about himself. On his way out, he swings by the gift shop of the "TV Tours" area, and picks up as many show-based action figures as he can carry. They're *stars*, ya see.

Through the access door, the gang have entered a small courtyard open to the pouring rain with two other exits, choosing door number one they find themselves in a long room lined with dingins, women dressed in the manner of typist-pools the City over tapping away at their clunky keyboards. Past there, there's a cafeteria area, a reception (Transit Milita logo showing proudly) and - in the distance - doors through which the Iron Hills street can be seen. They must be in some kind of Railway management building or something. Adopting the "act as though you run the place" attitude, the stroll back through the Dingin room, nodding at the work of the ladies, and try door number two. Through there, there's several branching corridors, a door with a guard and - in the distance - the distinct sound of someone being tortured. Strolling down past the guard towards the sound of screaming, they come across a room where three gentlemen wearing long black rubberised coats (hey...) are working a restrained man over with the old electrified-iron-wool and bucket of water maneuvere. The prisoner's Crypt robe is in a neat pile in the corner. Marius asks the Transit Militia Interrogators - for such is what the characters have twigged the Men in Coats to be - what they've gotten from the man. The MiC are confused - they were tol dto just torture him to death, not to actually find anything out - and the characters use that confusion to get the drop on them - Jemmy throws the bucket of water over them, and they fall over shrieking as they are electrocuted. Syndil carefully leaves the power line poking into one of the MiC's armpits while marius touches the other two to him flesh-to-flesh, making a circuit, and the three wonder what the hell to do now. Looking back round the corner, they see that the guarded door has opened - a Man in a fulgurator uniform is shaking hands with a departing businessman. Who has Nine Fingers. Waiting until the coast is clear, they heft the prisoner between them, head back to the courtyard and climb up onto the roof, making their escape across Iron Hills and along the rope bridge across the Serpentine Canal.

Conrad and Rodriguez reach Dogswarren again, and Conrad offers the Simil the toys, to be told in words of one syllable that they aren't what it was after. While he thinks that over at home, Jed arrives with his "uniform" (consisting of a rather ratty beret) - Conrad is now in the gang. He tells Jed aboput Mycroft offering to help pay for better proffessional equipment.

The Trio, meanwhile, have stopped in an alley near to the train track in Crouchside, where Jemmy reckons they are unlikely to be overheard. Waking the man they just rescued up, they learn that he was a very low-ranking member of the Crypt - he joined in order to get the discounts members give one another at their businesses, especially the free rail travel the Crypt enjoys as the Fulgurators leadership are members. Only lately, the Splinter Cell - a renegade split-off from the society - have been terrorising the Crypt. They bombed the fight club this cultist was a member of in Sleeping Vale (ah-haah!) and killed the local sub-deacon of the cult (that was actually the characters last session, but hey). Asked about the Fulgurators, he says that they've switched sides - the Splinter Cell have recruited the Railwaymen into their heretical branch of the heretical branch of the third church, and where the Fulgurators used to recruit for them (like, Jemmy notes, they recruited Honest Pete back in the very first session), they've started whacking known Crypt members on behalf of their new partners. He himself was picked up when he tried to use the secret handshake to get a free train ride.

Marius quietly asks him just what it is the Splinter Cell do. The cultist tells him that they run one of the Macrocorps - he isn't sure which one - and that the Storm is, according to the man the Fulgurators shot yesterday who was the only surviving cultist he knew of (due to the local cells being kinda wiped out), their fault. When pressed on specific beliefs, the cultist points out that he didn't so much see it as worshipping the Shift as "sounding out some mumbo-jumbo" in a basement every fifth day in return for a lot of financial benefits. But that the Splinter Cell are meant to have ditched even their pretense at worshipping the Shifted. According to the now-dead Subdeacon, he says, the SC "don't worship. They USE."

The trio let him go - he's essentially harmless, and they admonish him to never try to contact the Crypt or travel by train again - and Marius tiredly notes that now they know. People in Arclight R&D have joined this cult - who, while criminal, never wanted more than an easier life for themselves - sucked them of all they know about the Shift and then used that information in their experiments. Syndil's boss was involved in some way, the nine-fingered man is most certainly involved, and they're not just up against a collection of men that like to gather in basements and wear purple robes.

They're up against Luminosity Tower. And, if Marius' hunch about those attacks in the Contested Grounds is right, Arclight have some way to summon or control Shifted.

Reconvening in the Piper, Conrad shows off his new credentials and tells of his mission to find Guns. Lots of guns. He has heard that a good place to buy armaments is the Contested Grounds. Synchronity is a wonderful thing.

To the Contested Grounds!

--------------

A much-reduced character party in this case, and still we split up.

When I planned this session, I wrote a vast swath of notes headed by the comment "campaign overplot resting this week, unless they go out of their way to find it".

They went out of their way to find it. And I did absoultely *none* of the stuff I'd prepared for, improvising all the way. Maybe next week, huh? The plot of just what's going on with the Fulgurators/Transit Police/Men in Coats was meant to be next week, but players make fools of us all.

The revelations about the bad guys just keep on coming, and Marius is now in a bit of a binder - whereas before he suspected it, now he *knows* he works for the villains of the piece.

The Geography of Dogswarren (and this time I'll remember to get the maps from the house we game in so I can put them on the thread, I *promise*) is getting better defined: as the 3D nature of the opening situation shows, we're starting to get the hang of line-of-sight from multiple levels and such.

Conrad begins his campaign to take over Dogswarren's militia. Which will only bring good things to the plot, I reckon, and get him much more involved.

Syndil shows how much she's gone native (and how much the brutal life of the slums is beginning to affect her, despite her protestations - leaving the Iron Hand to die is a defining character moment).

Another Burgh is added to our fleshing-out of this corner of the City - we now know the route of the Victory Line:

Fogwarren - Iron Hills - (serpentine canal) - Crouchside - Dogswarren - Hammertongue

Props to Chris for Conrad's new lease of life, and especially the idea about the action figures. It's not what the Simil wants, but it was a good try.

[Delirium]

Another superb write-up, Dave.

Looking forward to seeing those maps.

[DaveB]

Another superb write-up, Dave.

Looking forward to seeing those maps.

Thankee!

Session 9 was last night. I shall attempt to write it up quicker than my present "6 days" speed.

[Malcolm Craig]

Thankee!

Session 9 was last night. I shall attempt to write it up quicker than my present "6 days" speed.

Yep, very good indeed. I giggled slightly at the mention of Session 9, as the film 'Session 9' influenced parts of a/state! If you haven't seen it, it's well worth catching.

Anyway, back on topic. Great stuff as usual Dave, excellently detailed and well rounded write ups of the sessions.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

I knew I forgot something - the cultist Marius, Jemmy and Syndil rescued last time told them of two other Cultists he knew about - the barman of the Sleeping Vale nightclub from a couple of previous sessions and an unnamed ginger-haired man who was probably a corper, judging by his Syndil-like entourage.

And, that minor error in recounting aside...

SESSION NINE (Not the Film)

The Storm continues, and the City is now starting to feel like a disaster area in it's less watertight areas. Our characters have hired Rodriguez to take them to the Contested Grounds, and are waiting while he modifies his boat.

Down in the Runnings, Alexis finally makes it home - having had a hard time of it what with the City-wide flooding and everything. She enters her flat to find no one there and Syndil's bed unslept-in. So, feeling kind of abandoned, she goes to the pub.

Where the rest of the character party (minus Conrad) are waiting and preparing themselves. By imbibing drinks and / or serving them. Jemmy is in an unusually thoughtful and quiet mood - although the fact that Marion and her new boyfriend are making a spectacle of themselves on the far side of the pub is favorite as a theorised reason among his friends, he honestly doesn't seem bothered. More confused, and slightly irked when Marion's boyfriend pushes past him on the way to the bar, calling him "little guy". So Jemmy taps rollup ash into the guy's drink.

The gang are distracted from Jemmy's stillborn love life by the return of the prodigal Alexis, and the catching-up that it allows. Alexis has been running packages all over the City for Voronetz - she can't say what, but she mentions being as far as The Forest, Folly Hills and Bankside. The others, meanwhile, tell her what's been going on with them, Fulgurators and all. Conrad makes his enterance (beret at jaunty angle), neatly illustrating *that* part of developments. When asked if she wants to spend her first day home going back out into the Storm and to the Contested Grounds, Alexis looks a little nonplussed. Rodriguez arrives, having fixed a tarp as a makeshift roof for his boat, and too-pointedly describes the horrors that doubtless await them. Marius describes the Contested Grounds... enthusiastically, telling of the Flak Towers and the Bastions. Conrad loudly tells those members of the group who are hesitant that it's too dangerous and that they don't have to come if they don't want to. Which, human nature being what it is, makes them go just to show him. I can't tell if he meant to do that or not.

In any case, the armoured-up gang wade through the partially-submerged Undertrain Square (the south-west corner of Dogswarren's lowest level has started to flood and is under a foot of water) to Rodriguez' boat. Jemmy steps off the submerged edge of the quay by accident and has to be fished out of the canal.

The trip North - through the pounding rain - is a miserable one. Not even the usual warnings about the Black Canal (don't touch the water. If you fall overboard, you're a lost cause) amuse, given that the Black Canal has burst it's locks and the rain is making disturbing fizzing and hissing noises when it hits the rainbow-coloured sheen of chemicals now spreading along the circular canals. And getting off the Black and heading further North doesn't lift the spirits - not only are the Burghs on the canalside the Contested Grounds periphary, with all the shelled-out and half-ruined appearance that implies, but now that they've rounded the Burningfell hill, they can see Luminosity Tower glowing in the middle distance.

They finally arrive - after a trio of Mikefighters scream far too low overhead - at the most southerly of the Grounds' Staging Areas - what was once a quayside reduced to a "beach" by bombardment. A collection of semi-permenant tents have sprung up in the shelter of a bisected tower block, and it to these that the gang turn their attention. The off-duty soldiers drinking and brawling and getting other forms of R&R make for an intimidating crowd, but Conrad and Marius lead them on to a beer tent, where they manage to find a weapons dealer. It isn't very hard - Marius as a slightly shady corper walks up to all the other shady corpers and asks "so who's selling surplus, then?"

The merchant of mayhem they find leads them to a tent filled with things designed for damaging other people, and over the course of a disturbingly frank conversation manages to hash out their order - it boils down to a crate of Submachineguns and army surplus flak jackets, with a couple of "extras" - Marius hopes that armour-piercing ammunition will help against the Iron Hand, while Conrad gets prices for LAWs. Just in case there were more APCs where the session before lasts' came from.

As the gang leave, Jemmy abruptly asks the man - who seems capable of getting his hands on things - if he has any way to get a Printing Press. He seems dumbfounded, but will try to source one before they return (the gang aren't here to buy. They're here to decide what they can afford). On the way back to the bar-tent, Jemmy tells the others he has decided to start a Dogswarren newspaper. Once back IN the bar-tent (or in Alexis and Syndil's case, hanging around outside and trying not to attract attention), Marius does what he came to the Grounds to do - conduct interviews regarding those Shifted attacks. His "Arclight are summoning the things as weapons" theory is blown out of the water by the first story he hears - an Arclight trooper drinking all by himself is pointed out as a recent survivor of Drache possession. Still, it's nice and depressing hearing tales of the Hell that is the Grounds, and Marius - after he tells one of the troopers that he's from the Tower - is accosted by a trooper who - he claims - was in the Brigade of Light until very recently, when he was sent on temporary assignment to the grounds. Where the Brigade appear to have "forgotten" about him. Marius takes the trooper's number and promises to look into it.

Dusk falls, and the daytime threat of snipers is replaced with the ever-popular nighttime shelling of one another's positions. The Dogswarren gang decide that while the Grounds are fun to visit, they don't want to stay there, and signal the waiting Rodriguez to come in and pick them up (he's moored off-shore, and they signal him with a torch).

On the ride home, the lightning starts. Great big bolts of electricity slash down from the sky into the City, thunderclaps can be heard every minute or so and the rain, if anything, gets worse. Jemmy remembers one of Marius' paranoid theories - that maybe Luminosity Tower was built with the use of Shifted technology - and, remembering how the photos of the Lost Place failed to develop, starts taking pictures of Luminosity Tower. So he's looking at it when it's repeatedly struck by lightning.

Once back in the tunnels of home, the gang go to get dry and - in some cases - try to relax. Jemmy develops his new photos (all of them successfully, including a nice one of a troop of Simils waiting to be hired at the Grounds), and thinks about his pet project some more. He considers, and heads to see Mycroft to ask permission to start a newspaper (he gets it).

As Jemmy leaves, Marius and Conrad turn up to talk weapons prices. Mycroft agrees to fund *some* of the bill, but the Doggers will have to find a good chunk of the cash their damn selves. On their way out, Marius expresses curiosity about the Dog Factory, so they take the long way out. And emerge vowing never to use it again.

Alexis and Syndil, on the other hand, are catching up - Syndil moving from Jacques' flat back into Alexis' after a brief negotiation. Alexis - on the others' earlier orders - phones Voronetz and asks him if he wants to buy a car (the one the Third Church is still looking for after the characters killed the heretic and took his stuff a while back). He considers for a few moments, and says that he can indeed think of a use for such a thing, and he'll get back to her.

Jemmy has gone to the pub - where no other characters are at the moment - to continue his rumination. Marion keeps trying to catch his eye while making out with the New Guy, but he steadfastly gazes at the barmaid-who-isn't-Syndil (who noone has yet bothered to find out the name of). When Silas finally has enough and offers to put purgative in New Guy's drink, Jemmy breaks out of his fugue state to ask if anything's going on lately. Silas indicates a gent on t' *other* other side of the bar and says he's new in town. The gentleman is indeed far too clean to be a local, and Jemmy engages "nosy" mode to go meet the new boy.

His name, it seems, is Daniel and he is a Dinginsmith who has just moved in. From where, he doesn't say, and he's kinda cagey on why, too, but he's friendly. When Jemmy asks if - as a man who knows kinda related things - Daniel could maybe provide a printing press, the newbie sucks air through his teeth and says he could give it a go.

That's better than a blanket "no", and Jemmy goes to bed satisfied.

The next day, and Conrad goes to give Jed the news about the armaments. The Iron Hand guards on the other side of the Runnings gate are looking as monolithic as ever, and Jed will be glad to make them a bit worried. Conrad also tells him that he's had a brainwave regarding the Simil and it's odd request...

Fresh from digging up an old photo for Conrad, Jemmy goes to take his brunch at the pub as usual. Daniel and Syndil have a one-way conversation about Marion, and the Diginsmith tells Jemmy he's figured out a way for it to work - the question is how much money jemmy has, has much room he has and just what he wants it do. Jemmy is insistent on being able to print photos, which is frankly going to drive the price up, but Daniel promises to figure out the best way to do it and leaves to go through his supplies of dingin parts.

Conrad, meanwhile (armed with the photo from Jemmy's archives) climbs up to the roof and manages to secure the Simil's services - the photo is of the night sky on an exceptionally clear night. Telling the Simil that it is to obey him and Jed but at all other times to act like a Dogger, he tells it to make a start guarding the Runnings Gate. And off it clanks.

Alexis, meanwhile, goes to pay Marius a visit - with a present. She got everyone bottles of various alchohols, but Marius is allergic to the stuff, so his present is a particularly interesting Scurt she met in Bankside. She pinned it to the inside of the box with a knife two days ago and it's still alive and fighting fit. Like a kid who has discovered father christmas does exist, he sets to dissecting it with enthusiasm while Alexis leaves to continue her occassional work on the fire engine-to-be, before quickly giving up and joining the others in the bar. Conrad seems happy with his growing status in the Doggers, Jemmy is pleased that he's making progress and and Alexis is pleased that she's unloaded the car.

At which point the Simil walks in and forces a teenager to leave, saying only "AGE". Huh.

Late that evening, Daniel meets up with Jemmy to discuss the options that present themselves - the best way Daniel can think of do to it is to meld a macroscale typewriter-style keyboard (for text input) to a microscale processer that's had all but the functions needed to process a single page taken out, connected to a rudimentary "scanner" made of a grid of photocells that will produce images that will be horribly pixillated but will still be recognisable. Top the thing off with a nice big printer, and Jemmy is looking at... a hell of a lot of money, actually. Pretty much all that remains of his fortunes, but - he reckons - worth it. Daniel gets the nod to go ahead and put the thing together, and in the post-business talk owns up to being a flowghost. Jemmy tells him to talk to Mycroft about the possibility of work, notes it for future reference and goes away happy.

Hey, at least he wasn't a spy for GRID.

Jed and Conrad, meanwhile, are getting concerned about the Simil's behaviour. Jed caught it demanding protection money from an old lady (an interpetation of "act like a Dogger" they hadn't considered), and conclude that - like something from nightmare - the Simil has decided to enforce the law. When the Simil starts threatening people who litter, enough is enough and they go to issue a very long string of instructions to it. Still, the Iron Hand don't look entirely pleased to be across the barricades from it.

The *next* morning, and the City wakes to find...

that the rain has stopped.

And the skies - washed clean by the last week and a half and not yet full of smog again - are clear. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the City has been spared.

Conrad wakes up with a brainwave, and goes to find Jed to talk it through. The Doggers need money to buy their new equipment, right? The Simil illustrated something in it's brief reign of terror yesterday - the Doggers *charge protection money* from Dogswarren's inhabitants. Where the hell has all the money gone? Luther used to keep the gang's accounts, and the pair now have a good idea why their two rivals are fighting so hard over Luther's old building.

Jemmy climbs to a high point and takes many photos of the clear sky - noting that, in the distance, another rocket is being launched from Luminosity Tower. The sunlight hurts his eyes, though, so he retreats to the shadowy environs of home to await Daniel and his new word processor.

Alexis asks Syndil to take the day off work, claiming that such an oppertunity may never come again and that they're going on a daytrip. The biker takes the corp refugee North on her powerbike, to The Forest. Because on a sunny day, you go to the park. The fact that it's right over the Red Canal from the Tower worries Syndil, but Alexis points out that if anyone tolerates no incursions into their Burgh, it's the Gardeners.

Conrad, meanwhile, has broken into Luther's apartment, a house built on the roof of the market (one of many that are collectvely called "the stacks") which connects to the gangplank over the Big One. The door has been chained up, but a llife deals with that. Inside, COnrad realises where Luther spent most of the Doggers' cash - on his ugly-ass living room set. The creaking floorboards, the loud background roar of the Big One, the bad cheescake fantasy artwork on the walls - all of this produces a tense atmosphere. COnrad thinks for a minute and then starts levering up those creaky floorboards, soon turning up a large metal case that contains not only what remains of the Doggers' funds but also a large folder of notes. On Mycroft. Flipping through it makes Conrad go "hmm" - Luther was building a case against Mycroft, trying to link the Burgess to another member of I-Lok that does major business with the Iron Hand.

Marius, however, has hired Rodriguez one more time - it's time to visit Luminosity Tower again. Making their way through the usual crowds of protesters and corp-worshippers around the Tower's enterance, Marius makes it to the R&D floor, where he meets with the 9-Fingered Man and presents his latest findings. Marius pushes the "cult" issue slightly too much, and the two have a very polite conversation about rescuing detainees from one's one employer - the 9FM warns Marius to always keep in mind who he works for, and to never forget which side he's on. Marius contends that - while he understands the 9FM can't tell him everything, he could at least do with knowing what, say, Syndil is doing in DOgswarren. The 9FM - seeming quite pleased with the arrangement - owns up. The Crypt is Arclight's enemy, you see, and although they don't do a lot other than maintain their own position, they're hard to root out. Syndil's boss (and Marius' fellow employee of the 9FM) was a spy for the Crypt who Arclight caught. Syndil has been released into the wild because the Crypt are bound to notice her wandering around. When the Crypt then come out of hiding to act against the characters, Arclight can spot them and - for example - air-strike their chapterhouses. Simple.

Thinking that over, contemplating what his boss didn't tell him and coming to the conclusion that although the 9FM wants to help them he can't - probably due to whoever's higher than him in the Splinter Cell - Marius uses the availability of the Tower's Dingin systems to do a little research. The Trooper he met in the Grounds turns out - to his not especial surprise - to be the one who arrested Syndil. The poor guy did his job diligently and well, and got sent to the equivalent of the Russian front when the 9FM decided that Syndil would be more useful as bait. Mulling over what that means for his own job prospects, the 9FM's polite threat to "promote" him to Dominic's job in his ears, Marius gets the hell out of there.

--------------

"Conrad, you may be right"
"I tend to be" - Marius and Conrad

"Cmon, Conrad, think of something - you're *always* right" - Jemmy

"They don't actually shoot you - they lose their no-discharge bonus if they waste ammunition" - Marius tries to reassure Rodriguez.

"You know, noone's shooting one another right now. Let's keep it that way" - Jemmy on the Sleeping Vale situation

(signing 'should I stay at Jacques'?')
"Well, it'd be quiet without you" - Syndil and Alexis

"Mr Honest. I really must install a revolving door" - Mycroft.

"Noone ever listens to me! It doesn't *matter* that you can hear me!" - Syndil to Marius

"Is it me, or is that girl trying very hard to make you jealous?"
"Marion? Oh, she's just someone I knew as a kid."
(Syndil holds up a notepad with 'Oblivious' written on it behind Jemmy's head) - Daniel, Jemmy and Syndil.




A quiet session for a change, with lots of thinking through things and making progress on individual character arcs. The PCs have determined that their next action if they want to root out the Crypt should be to go into Sleeping Vale to "interview" that barman, but with things as they are that may be difficult. Meanwhile the Nine-Fingered Man's motives are becoming clearer and Mycroft's are getting nicely murky.

On the local level, Conrad's making progress in his quest to worm his way into the Doggers. Jemmy's newspaper idea is taking fruit with Daniel's help, Syndil is thinking about trying to replace Sleeping Vale as a nightspot given that the locals can't go there any more - what Dogswarren needs is some kind of club, she reckons.

The reason for The Storm will become clear in time. Common consensus in the group is that it was something to do with whatever Arclight's doing.

Oh, and Andrea / Syndil figured out what "Needle" meant in the game's title. Good for her.

[DaveB]

SESSION TEN - MARION AND MORALITY

It's very late at night, and we pick up roughly where we left off - Jemmy is having the workings of his Dingin explained to him by Daniel, Rodriguez and Marius are on their way back from Luminosity Tower and Conrad is reading all about Mycroft's indiscretions - at least, Mycroft's indiscretions according to Luther.

Luther suspected that Mycroft was going to hire Iron Hand security to replace the Doggers - the file notes that many of Mycroft's closest partners in I-Lok use the security firm. Luther was also trying to find out what happened to Mycroft's predeccessor as owner of the Warren, trying to piece together an internal map of the Warren (which, despite the fact that 60% of Dogswarren's inhabitants work there, has some awfully big blank patches). Conrad closes the file and digs around in the cubbyhole some more - finally finding the bank book for an account with a bank in Folly Hills. He immediately aways to find Jed, telling him the news. Jed soberly reads the file, and notes that Mycroft and Luther hated one another - Luther was hopefully just trying to pin dirt on Mycroft. Both agree that Mycroft agreeing to fund the Doggers' new weaponry is a good sign. Conrad volunteers to phone the bank the following morning, and Jed goes to bed.

In the Piper, Daniel is celebrating the injection of several hundred pounds into his coffers by buying expensive drinks and flirting with Syndil. Jemmy introduces the two properly as Rodriguez - badly shaken - and Marius enter. It seems that Arclight's troops moved on from targetting the boat to firing warning shots, and Marius buys Rodriguez several very strong beverages for his nerves. Silas happily notes that between Daniel and Marius, this late-opening thing is turning out well (the Piper would have been shut by now, but as noone goes to Sleeping Vale's nightclubs anymore there's a captive audience) and calls last orders.

On the way back to the Runnings, Marius tells Syndil and Jemmy that there are urgent matters to discuss (his conversation with the Nine-Fingered Man last session), and so they wind up in Jemmy's new apartment after Marius phones Conrad to tell him to get out of bed and come over.

Marius explains the situation - the reason for Syndil being dumped in Dogswarren, what the 9FM told him about the splinter cell and so on. Syndil doesn't take it very well, Conrad sarcastically wonders if this means they're working for the Splinter Cell now and Jemmy types away on his new toy. The assembled group soberly note that they are running severely low on leads - the bartender in Sleeping Vale that they know to be a Crypt member is about the last one they have. Oh, except for the Crypt leader who they have the astoundingly detailed description of "fat and ginger" for.

After considering whether or not by hunting out the Crypt they are doing the devils (or Arclight's) work, they elect to go see what they can find out about Mr Bartender Man - deciding that breaking into his house and searching it tommorow night when he's at work would be the best course. Jemmy informs the gang that he knows several secret ways into and out of DOgswarren despite the gates being sealed.

And so to bed.

Syndil has a falling nightmare - plumetting out of a window right at the top of Luminosity Tower.

Conrad wakes up in the morning, phones the bank to get the balance of the account, learns that it's quite high but nowhere near everything the Doggers took as protection over the years, leaves a note for Jed to that effect and goes back to bed to brood.

Marius wanders the lower levels of Dogswarren, deciding to take a look at the Undercity beneath the Burgh. After tromping around in the Sewers for a while, and noting the steam vents from the Foundary - that he can find no way to get down to - he has a sudden brainwave and rushes to the Piper to find the others.

There, he finds Jemmy hocking the first issue of his newspaper to the good citizenry, and Marion once more attempting to attract the lad's attention by cunning means of making out with someone else. Syndil and Marius (and COnrad, when he walks in halfway through) try to explain matters to him, but Jemmy is wilfully ignorant once again.

Marius describes his brainwave - they DO have another lead! The Happy Dog Packaging Company in Burningfell has a Crypt meeting house beneath it, as Conrad and Jacques found out (way on back in session one, thread-fans). What say they go and snoop around?

Better than sitting in the bar, say they, and so our intrepid heroes go to find Rodriguez. Along the way, they meet Daniel, who proudly shows off the sign language phrases he's been learning. Unfortunately, he's been "learning" them from Jacques. He realises his mistake as Syndil punches him out.

Rodriguez flatly refuses to take them to another Macrocorp and/or the Contested Grounds, but Marius mollifies the boatman and says that they only want a one-way trip to Burningfell. What could possibly go wrong? Rodriguez - grumbling - agrees, and they set off. On the way, they note that those SImils and the Hirplakker barge have gone.

Reaching Happy Dog, Conrad shows them the back way in that he and Jacques discovered, and the gang gingerly make their way down into the Crypt meeting room. It looks different - the big piles of junk have been cleared away and the place is now half-filled with crates. Which the characters immediately start opening and pushing around. Confirming that the Crypt/Splinter Cell symbol is still on the wall, they go digging through some of the crates, where Conrad makes an unhappy find - the shaved, severed head of a woman. Inspecting it more closely, they note that it has a big hole on the underside - this is a SIMIL'S head, not a human's. More crates reveal an arm, bits of torso and a couple of blast-damaged legs, until Jemmy and Conrad recognise it - this is the Simil that was the doorman of the Crypt fightclub in Sleeping Vale. The cult must have retieved it's smashed-up remains and put them here for some reason.

Satisfied that they have proved the Burningfell site to still be in use, the gang decide to head for Sleeping Vale by way of Hangside - theorising that Sleeping Vale's northern border is better to walk across than the Dogswarren one.

Once in Sleeping Vale, Conrad is halfway through telling everyone to keep a low profile when they are accosted by a pregnant woman. It's Ethel - Syndil's predeccessor as the Piper's barmaid (who was last seen in Session one). She cheerfully greets Jemmy, and the two catch up, Ethel proudly noting how far up in the world she's come (her new house even has a yard) and being condescendingly happy for Jemmy about the launch of his newspaper. There is, however, one crucial thing related - Ethel says that once the baby is born, she's going to try to get a job at the nightclub. Where her brother-in-law is the bartender.

Jemmy feels the icy feeling of the Great Architect laughing at him, and tells the others. Marius argues that it changes nothing - but they will make damn sure he's a write-off before they kill him. The group pick their way through Sleeping Vale's streets to the offending Bartender's house, break in through the back door, knock out the guard dog (and put it in the fridge) and begin their search.

It's an eerie feeling, lurking in a man's house, going through his personal things when you know you might have to kill him later. Jemmy can't bring himself to look at the family pictures (which include his friend), and Syndil gets out her medicene kit. When the dog starts to wake up, she drugs it, and prepares a major dose of tranquiliser.

Marius and Conrad discover a sparklock rifle, and a photo of Conrad with the false name he gave at the fightclub crossed out and his real name written on. They have just found out who was orchestrating those snipers gunning for COnrad, and their desicion is made - they HAVE to interrogate Gareth - for such they have found out is the man's name - and unless it goes well and he cooperates they're going to have to kill him.

This causes much sober conversation, Jemmy worrying that they are fast losing what little moral high ground they have, Conrad giving him the advice of an old Ghostfinder on how best to cope with such things and Marius sharing the insights that come from having been in the Contested Grounds. It's a long and depressing talk, and the conclusion they reach is that once they kill Gareth, that's it - they are as deep in the shit as anyone else. But they have no choice. Gareth will send more snipers after Conrad, he will eventually twig that Ethel knows the characters. If he lives long enough, his belief that Conrad ordered the Mikefighter strike on the Crypt will spread to other Crypt cells. He HAS to be stopped, and he has to tell them what he knows. They consider the torture implements they liberated from the Fulgurators, but after Jemmy berates them for even thinking about it Marius promises that they will use no torture. That's something, at least.

Late at night, Gareth returns home, to find Conrad waiting for him. There's a brief struggle, and the Ghostfighter injects the cultist with Syndil's concoction. Jemmy leads them - carrying Gareth with them - to an abandoned building on Sleeping Vale's waterfront, where they chain Gareth up and wait for him to wake up.

The interrogation does not go well - Gareth mocks them for doing the Splinter Cell's job for them, accuses them of being too cowardly to torture him and says that the Crypt will get them. He refuses to tell them anything about the Crypt, but happily tells them as much as he knows about the Splinter Cell, with especial emphasis on how the Cell is going to destroy the City and how the characters are helping. He finishes by saying that the characters don't have the guts to kill him, and declares that he's through talking, daring them to either do something or let him go (after which, he has made clear, their lives won't be worth shit). Just as Marius starts to wish that he hadn't promised to not inflict any pain, Syndil gives Gareth a fatal overdose.

They dump the body in the Canal and make their way back into Dogswarren through a disused vent Jemmy knows. One by one, the characters go to their own homes without a word, silently going to reflect on their own.

Syndil cries herself to sleep.

End.

-----------------

"Oh, she's a mime!"
(Syndil writes down: 'I use sign language')
"Yeah, just make up her side of the conversation. it's what I do"
(Syndil offers her mid digit to Jemmy)
"See? Now she's swearing"
"Yeah, I get that" - Daniel, Syndil and Jemmy

"Why are you giving ME the number? What possible use could I have for the number? Morse code? Take the fucking number" - Syndil, venting after Marius absent-mindedly tries to get her to phone Conrad.

"Chat as in slay, or..?"
"Chat as in break into where he lives and search for information." - Conrad and Marius

"Conrad's proving he's a man of the world" - Syndil

"I don't live in the bar. I live on the open trail... in a sewer somewhere." - Marius

"We can have secret conversations too! beeblubbellbleee!" - Jemmy, reacting to Syndil speaking to Marius and signing to Conrad.

"This plan reads like a fucking logic diagram" - Marius

"Your job sucks, but it's better than being capped. You know, that's sort of my motto - I say it when I get up every morning." - Marius

"I wish I could revoke the privalage of speech that you two have" - Conrad to Marius and Jemmy

"We can't kill her brother in law"
"Oh, sure we can" - Jemmy and Marius

"Not being a hero is killing you. That beret is making you a bitter, bitter man." - Jemmy

"Where's that hero we knew?"
"He's on at 5 in the morning, and he has better hair than me" - Jemmy and Conrad

"We can't put the dog in the fridge!"
"Fridges are not that cold - trust me, I know of what I speak." - Conrad and Jemmy

"Plus, they might be good as surgical tools"
"Yeah, if they have a lung they don't need any more." - Syndil and Marius, regarding the sharp ouchy things they stole from the Fulgurators

"You ever notice how they're only in here when Jemmy is?"
"Who?"
"Marion and her boyfriend. It's a coincidence. Like Arclight doing something with Shifted and then Ubels attacking Hirplakker troops is a coincidence." - Marius

"It's the won't they / won't they conversation"
"What won't they?" - Syndil (through Marius) and Jemmy

"Alright. Syndil. What the hell is going on. Marius - translate"
"Jemmy, sweetheart..."
(Marius looks around at crowded bar) "She.. calls you something complimentary." - Jemmy, Syndil and Marius

"She wants to get to know you"
"She wants to get to know you"
"She already knows me"
"She wants to get to know you _intimately_"
"She.. uh..."
"What?"
"She wants to get in his pants!"
"She.. wants to be your friend"
"She IS my friend" - Syndil, Marius and Jemmy

"Back up.. Do we think there is a connection between Marion and the Splinter Cell?" - Jemmy

"Okay... I think she's been through some bad patches but I don't think she's in the Cult."
"FORGET THE CULT"
"Well, it's just that you brought the cult up - you said it was a coincidence..."
"It was an example. A BAD example. Forget the example. I never brought up the cult."
"Yeah, you did" - Jemmy and Marius

(signing) "Fuck all your horses. I shall away to percolate." - Daniel has been taught chat-up lines for Syndil by Jacques.

"No, no. I'll just lie here, gathering my shattered ego together. You go on." - Daniel after Syndil lamps him.

"What's a horse?"
"Like a dog only bigger, that you ride." (off Jemmy's horrified look) "Ride IN, not on"
"What is this? making up animals?"
"Horses are real."
"Giant riding dogs? I know I'm undereducated, but now you're all just taking the piss."
"Horses are _real_. They exist"
"This is Dogswarren. If there were giant riding dogs we'd have them."
"THEY'RE NOT DOGS!"
"You know guys, this Arclight thing isn't worrying me _that_ much. You don't have to make things up to take my mind off it. I mean, Marion's a great girl..."
"NO! That conversation never happened! We are now getting onto the boat"
"But.."
"It didn't happen!" - Jemmy and Marius

"You want to actually tell him modern Horses are two feet tall and live in cages?"
"NO." - Syndil and Marius

"Ya know, when Mycroft tells me 'Jemmy, my lad, who did this?' I go and take photos and then Mycoft has them killed. And then I'm worse than you, Conrad. At least you have the honesty to look them in the face. But you _can't_ think like that because it drags drags us all down. And even tonight, when we kill this guy, I'll remember that his sister-in-law is a friend of mine. And that's _sick_." - Jemmy

"We're no better. We just aren't. My job is basically ethical snitching."
"You have to draw the line"
"Yeah, but drawing the line is just lying to yourself - making yourself feel better. Fooling yourself into thinking that you're not as steeped in shit as the rest of humanity" - Jemmy and Conrad

"It feels worse when there's clean corridors and air-conditioning. When you get dragged out of your bed, or when your name-plate vanishes off your door. And noone ever talks about it."
"Noone talks about Owen either" - Marius and Jemmy

"I've gotten nastier since being down here."
"What were you like before?"
"...nicer, I guess." - Syndil and Marius

"I am now acknowledging the benefits of melee combat"
"The nonlethality?"
"The _quiet_." - Marius and Conrad, high-fiving.

-----------------------

Best. Session. Evar.

No, really. It reads shorter, but played longer - much less 'busy' than some of our sessions, something about being holed up in the bad guy's house waiting for him to come home brought the deeper aspects of the characters out. And in doing so brought us back to the grittiness of A|State's setting - when you're cult-busting, it's easy to see the enemy as Orcs in D&D, but Gareth... well, each of our characters just became full-fledged murderers. They did it because they felt they didn't have any choice, but they weren't kidding themselves about what they were doing.

And in the end it was Syndil - sweet, innocent, cute, anime-displacement-girl Syndil, who offed him.

The two huge run-on comedy conversations - the first of which had the various characters try to tell Jemmy that Marion loves him and turned into such a five-way confusion that it doesn't read like anything resembling a coherent dialogue (which is why only snippets of it are quoted), the second of which was the "horses" one - served to lull the pared-down group (no Emma/Alexis this week) into a false sense of comfort. Which the hour-long sobering talk on morality, violence, the ways of the warrior and the ethics of their situation smacked out of them.

Sometimes, a game session just 'clicks' - I've been waiting for the click with this campaign, coming awfully close on several occassions. This week, it clicked. Mad props to my peeps - all four players present on this one performed like troopers and the four characters actually started vocalising the inner struggles - COnrad in particular came out of his shell.

And so, the arcplot (so far) revealed:

There is a City-Wide Shifted cult called the Crypt, who were originally a heretical branch of the Third Church of God the Architect. Although the higher-ups are active Shift worshippers, many of the rank and file members are in it solely for the perks - kind of a twisted form of freemasonry. The Crypt like to be in what they call the "roots" of the City and their meeting houses are always underground. They regard Shifted Beings as "angels" and worship them from a safe distance, though some of their meeting houses abutt Lost Places. The Crypt "controls" the City in so much as almost every large organisation has Crypt members in it - the Fulgurators are especially compromised. The cult has a cell structure and a typical member only knows his local group.

However, a few decades ago the Crypt cell in the Arclight company (then a Microcorp) started studying the Shifted in a more scientific vein, and jettisoned more and more of the religious trappings. By the time Luminosity Tower was built, and Arclight blasted it's way into being a full Macrocorp, the Crypt was worried. When Arclight (who the Crypt refer to as "The Splinter Cell" started killing Crypt members wherever they could find them, the Crypt panicked.

Arclight (obviously, not everyone in the company is a conspirator, but it must go pretty high up) has plundered the Crypt for their knowledge of the Shifted and is now getting rid of their "parent" organisation. Several Crypt cells - the ones that are hidden in the Fulgurator's Guild, especially - have switched alleigences from the Crypt to Arclight, making the shadowy civil war even more confusing.

The Crypt have a handful of double agents in the Splinter Cell, and have learnt roughly what the company is up to - Luminosity Tower conceals a pylon, which can extend from the top of the building to the Boundary around the City. By constantly sending organic matter through the Pylon, Arclight will make the Boundary Effect a continous source of energy rather than an instantaneous flash. They will then use that energy to power something.

The Crypt haven't been able to figure out just *what* it's supposed to power, but do note that Arclight's tests - firing rockets with prisoners packed into them into the point the pylon will reach - have been causing the atmospheric upsets that resulted in the Storm. Activating the pylon, the Crypt reckon, will cause a natural disaster of hurricane proportions.

Dominic - Syndil's master and Marius' contemporary - was the Crypt's agent in the Splinter Cell. He was found out and executed, and the Nine-Fingered Man sent Syndil out into the City as bait. The Crypt saw Syndil wandering around and tried to figure out what was going on - maybe she had a message for them from him, maybe she betrayed him - and Arclight - watching and waiting for them to make a move - do things like sending Mikefighters to bomb their meeting houses once the characters identify where they are for them.

So - on the one hand you have the Crypt who ARE evil, DO use their influence to make life easier for themselves in the City at everyone else's expense, DO worship the Shifted and seek to rule the City from the shadows. On the other hand you have this faction within Arclight, who see the Shift as a scientific problem to be solved and are engaged in experiments of unknown purpose and motive that may end up ripping the city apart.

Whose side do you come down on?

[Syndil04]

ic:

"Have you ever lay awake at night wondering where your life is going? Then you might come close to what I feel. I'll be 21 in a few weeks and I have killed 2 men. Poisoned them. One in cold blood; to protect the only family I've ever had and to protect myself. The world is an ugly dark and cruel place and since I really came into it; a putrid birth in betrayal by everything I ever held dear; I have had to adapt.

Too fast, it all is happening far too fast. I don't sleep at night anymore, I almost like the shadows better. It hides the calculating looks, the terror and the truth. I wonder what it would have been like if I'd been given to someone else? I would hve gone through my life oblivious, maybe had a child with my master.

I wouldn't bring a child into this world, another pawn to be manipulated and used as I have; or another brate to starve on the streets maybe even killing to survive. It worries me the ease with which we killed... I killed...is it this place? Or are we just a doward spiral of intrigue and destruction, a race in which death is so deeply engrained that it comes naturally to us, in all it's forms. I find myself clinging to a veneer of normality; wake up , wash, dress, coffee, go to work, feed Jemmy, work.....is it an elaborate charade, keep smiling Syndil, while your framework crumbles and you die inside.

But at least I know I'm human, I cry and I remember and it hurts because I can't forget. Pain to let me know I'm still alive. And as long as the others are there, maybe I can push back the abyss for a little longer. People who, even though I can't wash the blood off, will hold me when I weep."

ooc:

" 'Where do you live simon?'
' I live in the weak and the wounded, _Doc_' "
Session 9, end dialogue

Ok so you've come from a sheltered background but you've been cast out into an urban wilderness to survive alone. You've managed to meet some friendly locals and not end up on a menu somewhere. You love your new friends, they're more real than anyone you've ever met, but they've lived here all their lives, they know how to cope, how to survive. One kills for a living, one used to be a soldier, one has killed thugs trying to waylay her bike, and the other knows they may have gotten people killed by info reporting. They have systems for dealing with it.

You don't.

And you haven't had to, they've done all the killing before and they were bad people weren't they? They we shooting at you and your friends, right?
You poisoned one when they tried to take you away to god knows where, but you were frightened and they had hurt one of your friends, they were probably going to torture you then kill you, so that's not so bad is it? It was self defense.

But that explaination is alot shakier to apply to the next one. Tied up, sure he was a cultist but he had family; but he was trying to kill your friends, the proof was there.
He was going to have a nephew soon, ; did he really need to die. Logically yes, he would have come after you if he'd been released; but it's a cold logic. You gave him a lethal dose of knock out drugs, he just went to sleep, it was humane, it was better. Or was it?

Where do you go from here?
How do you learn to cope with what you 'had' to do and get on with your existance?
how does everyone else cope?

These are the problems posed to us, in D&D you're the hero and the enemy is a clear force to be destroyed while you rescue the princess or whatever. More and more we see how these games are deeply thought provoking, because while your enemies do do things that you consider morally wrong the methods by which you deal with them are just as bad.

We are essentially anti-heros trying to save the world from the shadows and knee deep in the filth we seek to protect people from, specifically OUR people. In a dog-eat-dog world you look after your own and that is exactly what the 'bad guys' are doing. It just so happens that their aims threaten our survival where they once didn't and at this stage we're too far out in the shit to see the shore anymore. Like a runaway train we've chosen to interfere and there's no going back.

Dispite the fact that before we went after Gareth we could have pulled away from any association with the Archlight/ Crypt feud because word was getting around that Syndil knew bugger all. Once we went for Gareth we stepped over the line from pawns to active members of what is now a 3 way feud with fingers in everyone elses pies one way or another.

Sure we might be out to save the city from what ever the various factions may do to it accidentally or deliberatly, but really the choice to do it was because we wanted to protect the people we cared about with little thought to the anonymous masses inhabiting the rest of the vast city we call home.

This game fosters a very us-against-them attitude and it's amazing the lengths we will go to to protect our little patch of hell.

Andrea xx

[DaveB]

I *would* watch Session 9, but it has David Caruso in it, and he has soured me on one visual endeavour too many.

;)

Session 11 of A|State is tommorow night. The campaign is in it's final phase now - almost everything has been revealed in the central mystery. More to the point, the NEXT campaign me and my group will be playing (a game of Everway, which I will be Actual Play thread-ing here on Open) is in the middle stages of planning.

The wolves are howling at the door, the Ubels are chattering to themselves and our characters are not long for this world. We're now maybe 2/3rds of the way through - at the moment I reckon A|State will finish around session 17.

[Malcolm Craig]

Don't let Caruso put you off, it's a very good film and well worth watching. Would I lie to you?

I'm really looking forward to the denoument of this campaign, it's very exciting so far. I like the integration of character and setting, particularly the association of the characters with their environment and the people dwelling therein. To be honest, this has also been a very instructive thread was a writer/designer, as it highlights a lot of important points in setting & campaign planning. Again, kudos to Dave for all his work in writing this up. The level of detail is amazing and really is worthy of collation into a PDF or something similar.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Don't let Caruso put you off, it's a very good film and well worth watching. Would I lie to you?

I'm really looking forward to the denoument of this campaign, it's very exciting so far. I like the integration of character and setting, particularly the association of the characters with their environment and the people dwelling therein. To be honest, this has also been a very instructive thread was a writer/designer, as it highlights a lot of important points in setting & campaign planning. Again, kudos to Dave for all his work in writing this up. The level of detail is amazing and really is worthy of collation into a PDF or something similar.

Cheers
Malcolm

Flatterer. :D

Session 11 was, in fact, three weeks ago - a friend of half the group's birthday party and the Gathering gazumped us. I have the notes half-written up, and will *try* my very utmost to type them properly, but we'll all have to accept that my memory (iffy at the best of times) just isn't going to be up to handling the start of the session.

The end of the session, what with the Hirplakker factory in Burningfell being assaulted by Brigade of Light Commandos , the rescue of Marion and the final gambit of the Nine-Fingered Man, was more memorable. ;)

I've also been desperately trying to turn my scribbled half-assed maps of Dogswarren into proper, clean, understandable ones. It isn't working. I'm just going to scan the crappy ones instead and give notes on where they diverge from the game's reality as evolved in the campaign.

[DaveB]

Also, so it isn't lost to the mists, here's my mad wibbling about EotN on another thread...

"Eye of the Needle started as an A3 sheet of paper covered in doodles and mad scribblings (many of which had more exclamation marks than neccessary / were underlined several times). The idea was one of Levels, which came to me after ruminating on Luminosity Tower and it's pyramid shape.

Essentially, the Higher you go, the more Light there is. In both the physical and metaphorical (ie, Light of Rationality) senses.

That's why Dogswarren has multiple levels. Originally, one of the characters was going to be from a tiny community of Undertown dwellers living in the sewer tunnels between Dogswarren and the Foundary. We lost that character, but kept the one from the Macrocorp.

Foundary | Undercity | Poor Dogswarren | Mid Dogswarren | Rich Dogswarren | Luminosity Tower | ?

The Lower you go, the more primal the situation is and the more "connected" to the city you are - Shifted sightings go up, especially.

Note that the two bad guy groups live in the areas either side of the characters, and have to travel through the character's "zone" to fight one another.

Also note that by Descending, Marius and Syndil have become more Real.


As for Winging it... yeah. I just made it up on the hoof, based on what half-formed plans I had for future sessions involving what the characters were preemptivly doing."

In fact, it may be fun to scan that A3 sheet in. Nigh-on none of it got used, but I could go through it and recount where each idea got ditched and in favour of what.

[bobthepariah]

I've read this thread over the last two days while I was at work, and thusly not working.

Yesterday, I ordered the book. The a|state website is very cool and sparked my interest months ago. The continual praise for the game continued to spark my interest, but without a gaming group on hand, and a back log of other fine gaming products that I haven't read, oh yeah - and the fact that I should be spending more of my time writing than reading, and I have been able to keep myself from buying it. But this thread convinced me.

Damn you Dave B, for making me fritter away my money.

If someone posts an Actual Play on Wyrd is Bond, remind me not to read it.

[Malcolm Craig]

I've read this thread over the last two days while I was at work, and thusly not working.

Yesterday, I ordered the book. The a|state website is very cool and sparked my interest months ago. The continual praise for the game continued to spark my interest, but without a gaming group on hand, and a back log of other fine gaming products that I haven't read, oh yeah - and the fact that I should be spending more of my time writing than reading, and I have been able to keep myself from buying it. But this thread convinced me.

Damn you Dave B, for making me fritter away my money.

If someone posts an Actual Play on Wyrd is Bond, remind me not to read it.

Props to you, Dave B, for getting people interested in a|state. No, hang on. If this carries on, we'll need to start paying commission! Darn.

Anyhoo, thanks for ordering the book, it will be in your hands shortly. I hope it meets up to your expectations. Glad you like the website as well. We will have some new stuff up soon, such as the next issue of the Mire End Tribune and various other bits and pieces.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Chronicler's note. Some of the players have pointed out that these writeups are not 100% accurate, in that I fail to remember every detail, get the order of minor scenes wrong or misattribute quotes. In this case, I'm clear on what happened in the LAST half of the game session, but the precise events of the first half are a little fuzzy. The longer I leave the writeup, though, the more I'll forget, so I ask your patience.

SESSION ELEVEN - "Betrayal and Bombadiers"

The session opens with - for only the second time in the campaign - a "previously on A|State" bit. As this has quite a few old plotlines in it and the whole thing's getting kinda convuluted.

Morning rises above the smoke-stacks of Dogswarren, tries to penetrate into the gloomy, still-wet-in-places tunnels that our characters call home, gives up and slinks off to Lucient Heights where people appreciate a good sunrise. The characters that engaged in a little light-hearted murder last session are subconsciously avoiding one another and trying to focus on their "normal" lives. Alexis, though, knows nothing of such guilty feelings, arriving back home after her trip to dump the car that the characters appropriated from the Crypt leader in the Jemmy-Jacques "friendly fire" incident. Mr Voronetz (the disurbingly Russian mob-boss of Fogwarren) instructed her to leave the vehicle outside a certain Church of God the Architect in Long Pond, and it has been done - Alexis getting the niggling feeling that maybe it isn't going to be resprayed and sold on. Her paranoia doesn't get any better when she finds that things have been moved around in her flat - someone has searched the place.

Syndil is at the bar, trying to persuade Silas to buy the warehouse space on the level beneath the Piper so that they (read: she) can convert it into a dancehall. Marion and her omnipresent boyfriend aren't there for a change, and neither are any of Syndil's friends. Which gives Daniel the oppertunity to flirt with Syndil a second and more successful time. Syndil writes about her somewhat complicated home life, and Daniel makes the mistake of calling Alexis "butch". When Alexis has walked in and is standing right behind him. Muttering about going to see Mycroft (on Jemmy's suggestion last session), he flees. Alexis greets Syndil, noting the shadows beneath the eyes, and asks where the others are. Jemmy breezes in to sell his newspapers - a story about the Contested Grounds an lots of adverts, mostly - and breezes back out again.

Marius is in the shit again. Literally - he has decided to conduct an extensive survey of Dogswarren's drainage tunnels to see if there are any Crypt meeting houses. He is also trying to see if there's any way to get into the Foundary, as Dogswarren's underground neighbour has piqued his interest.

Conrad is making progress in his campaigning, having won over one of the competitors for Luther's old job. The Simil - still doing it's I am the Law routine - helps.

Jemmy is doing his "rounds", sniffing for goings-on to report in his new periodical. Jacque's kids - who have returned post-blocade to their old haunt at the Jump - report that some lady came by trying to recruit the littler ones for something, and was asking about people's parents. They give him a leaflet - it's Mikefighter Pilot recruitment. For arclight. Asking if anyone they know agreed, he finds the name of a child whose parents agreed to indenture their kid.

Conrad and Marius have made it to the bar, where they're filling Alexis in on everything that she's missed. There's rather a lot to cover, even leaving out last night's escapades, as it turns out ALexis managed to miss the whole explanation of who the Crypt and Splinter Cell are.

Jemmy's still poking after what he reckons may be a good story, and has learnt something potentially bad - one of the families who have given up their child has been informed of the boy's death in a training accident, and given the charred remains back. While asking around the market about the recruitment rep (for he has her description from the urchins), he is pointed to - of all places - the Meat the People office in Crouchside. Yeah, says the proprietor, she was in here. Asking for very specific favours and spending a lot of money. It seems she was in the market for as many dead children as possible.

Worried now, Jemmy overcomes his fear of facing Jacques and heads to the Orphanage. His one-time friend is there, still upset about the whole being accidentally kneecapped thing and making it quite plain that whatever they've gotten themselves into she wants no part of it. Nontheless, Jemmy endures her snark long enough to warn her about the recruitment agent. Jacques says that she *knows* - everyone knows that the woman is dodgy, ever since she first showed up five weeks ago. Shocked that it's gone so long without him hearing about it, Jacques makes further remarks about people being too busy cult-hunting to look out for their friends, and mutters that Marion hasn't been around lately either.

Mulling it over, he decides that yeah - it HAS been a while, and another pair of eyes would be good. Heading over to the Nose, he knocks on the door that now fills the doorframe that was once Owen's place. Marion's boyfriend peers out from behind the security chain, claiming that Marion is at work. From what he can see of the flat past the man's bulk, it doesn't look like she's been there for a while.

Jemmy brushes past Daniel - who is trying to ask him something - and into the Piper, where he asks the others when the last time they saw Marion was. Wracking their brains, they determine that no, she hasn't been around for a couple of days. Although the boyfriend - whose name turns out to be Geoff - has been in, making a nusiance of himself and leering at Syndil. His Lostfinder Senses tingling, Jemmy heads out again, asking the others to keep an eye out. He also tells them about the Mikefighter Mystery.

Rodriguez, King of the Canals, is performing minor repairs to his boat when Jemmy comes calling. He says that Marion got a new job (which Jemmy never heard about) at a factory in Hammertongue, and that she managed to get Geoff a job there too. Rodriguez *was* ferrying the two of them over the canal every day until five days ago, when they stopped needing his services.

Back at the bar, Marius has a nasty suspicion - the Splinter Cell are supposedly packing those rockets that are being fired from Luminosity Tower with "organic material" in order to ensure that they hit the boundary effect, right? He thinks he knows what the organic material is.

Jemmy finds himself back in the Nose, breaking into Marion's flat to have a look around. Geoff is conspicuous by his absence, and from the look of the place Marion hasn't been there for days. Rifling through things, Jemmy finds their payslips for their new jobs. geoff's has an extra couple of hundred pounds. Jemmy is now angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. Leaving, he runs into Toby (the man who hired him to get rid of Owen back in the first session), who tells him Geoff has a skiff of his own - and has had it for weeks.

Back at the Piper, the Reverend Barnside would like an urgent word with the gang. The Crypt-hunting organisation in the 3rd Church he's a member of has just had a major infiltration operation ruined, when the mid-ranking Crypt priest they were watching was arrested after a certain stolen car was found at his parish. The high-ranking Crypt member they hoped he would lead them to - a manager in Hirplakker - has now vanished, the hand played too soon. Apparantly, he's rather heavy-set and red haired. Alexis *knew* that there was something odd about that mission, but Marius is more concerned that Voronetz apparantly has it in for the Crypt. Where do the Third Syndicate fit into all of this?

Jemmy has thought hard while pounding the tunnels, and come up with a plan. Tracking the Simil down, he hires it for a trinket and instructs it to find Marion. And off it goes, leading him to the enterance to the Warren and stopping in it's tracks. Hoping that this means Mycroft has become involved, he enters and asks the Burgess' secretary if Marion has been in. She hasn't, and Mr Morning hasn't seen her either. Halfway out, he realises that Mari - whose proper name is Marion as well - works in the Warren's production line. Still, the trip isn't wasted - Mari is the friend he occassionally talks about who used to be a Mikefighter pilot for Trilhoeven. She hasn't seen her namesake ever since she got the Job in Hammertongue. Jemmy vents for a minute about how apparantly the entire Burgh knew except him, and Mari flat-out tells him that Marion was always weird about telling him things due to the big honking crush she has on him. Mari gets maybe a bit too wistful, and Jemmy makes a play for changing the subject by asking her to write a piece for his paper on being a Mikefighter pilot. She agrees, and - looking around at the squalor of her minimum-skills job - he asks her if she'd consider being his first member of staff.

Back at the Piper, Daniel interrupts the rampant theorising to ask the gang to tell Jemmy that he would like a word.

Jemmy himself has realised his mistake and corrected his instructions to the Simil to be to find Marion Cartwright. The shifted pauses, lifts a sewer grate, says "Down" and then wanders off. Jemmy climbs down and has a look around, but receives no joy. Time to consult Marius.

Marius' considered opinion is that if Geoff took Marion somewhere through the sewers then they'll never be tracked - Dogswarren's undertunnels connect to all the Burghs around it. Jemmy produces the payslips from Geoff's place and the others recognise them - it's the Hirplakker factory that uses Simil dockworkers. Conrad suggests starting there, the rest of the gang agree, Silas reconciles himself to the fact that Syndil is never going to finish a shift at the bar and they all roll out. On their way, Daniel finally crosses paths with Jemmy again, and manages to hold his attention for a minute - Daniel followed Jemmy's suggestion to ask Mycroft for jobs, and has been hired as a flowghost for a specific mission he hopes Jemmy can help him with - a spot of industrial espionage on a factory in Hammertongue that is owned by Hirplakker and has been causing trouble: trying to buy out the Warren, that sort of thing. Coincidence is a wonderful thing, and so the party has an extra member.

On the heroic march down to the quayside (somewhere, strident music is playin'), Conrad spots Jed and tells him and the other Doggers to find Geoff. Reaching the quay, Rodriguez and Daniel have a bit of a pissing contest before the boatman takes the gang up to the Hammertongue docks. Which are deserted. Breaking into the Factory, most of the gang head for the offices to see what files they can rifle though. Alexis, though, goes to investigate what they're building in this factory.

Warcrawls. Lots of Warcrawls.

A noise from the back of the factory draws the attention, and the gang hide as best they can. Torchbeams pearce the gloom, and several bulky figures enter the offices. The gang are rumbled.

But all is not lost! For these are *Arclight* troops, here to take out an enemy military installation. Which is nice. Marius soon establishes his own credentials with Lt Spoon and the lads, while Jemmy finds a trapdoor and Daniel steals storage units out of Dignins, for decoding back home. Having established that there is someone down in the basement (Jemmy gets a glimpse of an armoured figure before ducking back upstairs) the gang and the squaddies storm the place, killing the lone, solitary Hirplakker guardsman left behind.

Downstairs, more files are found, along with a holding area that seem recently vacated. Daniel can tell enough here wihout his tools to find references to Marion, and the books mark the payout to Geoff as "services rendered". The squaddies retreat to their camp deeper in Hammertongue, taking Marius with them and agreeing to wait until the gang find the girl before they blow the factory up. Bags full of Dingin cores and paper files, the gang retreat to Dogswarren to settle down for some urgent reading. Well, except for Marius - with the troops - and Conrad, who decides that his time is better spent finding Geoff.

Marius uses the troops' cable-link to an Arclight node to call Luminosity Tower, trying to gain authority over the squad so that they can be used to rescue Marion as soon as the others figure out where she is. The Nine-Fingered Man proves to not be in, and he is surprised to be instead connected to the 9FM's superior - the head of the R&D department, Ms Amelia Grey. Grey displays somewhat of a lack of knowing what Marius' job currently is, but gives him command to try to hunt down the Hirplakker agent running that munitions factory. The man has evidently been tipped off that ArcLight was about to move against him, taken his hostage and fled. She even gives Marius a description. He's heavyset, you see. And ginger.

Back at Daniel's, the gang are coming up with phrases to type into Daniel's Search Engine and reading more ledgers than they care to. On the bonus side, they know know just *why* the Big Ginger Man paid Geoff to betray Marion - she has been seen with the gang, and they think that she is working for Marius (who they have identified as an Arclight agent). As dawn breaks (they have worked through the night) they have learnt that BGM's safe house is in Iron Hills. Sadly, he wasn't dumb enough to leave the address. Jemmy sets off to pound the streets and ask folk, Alexis has a brainwave and goes to phone Voronetz (for he is an enemy of the Big Ginger Man). Jemmy runs into a triumphant COnrad and Jed on his way - they have found Geoff, and have detained him in Luther's old apartment. For Luther's old apartment has The Big One next to it, and the Doggers are... angry.

Geoff doesn't tell them anything they didn't already know, bar the irony of his situation - he used to live in one of the chimney-stacks that started up again, and was rehoused as Marion's flatmate based on the project that was Jemmy's idea. The Doggers look to Conrad for what to do (acknowledgng him as their leader), and he prononces judgement. Down into the chimney Geoff goes.

Feeling kinda righteous, Jemmy leaves for Iron Hills, as Voronetz promises Alexis to get his lads on the case. Between Jemmy and all the thugs, the people of Iron Hills are well covered in the interview stakes, and when both parties independently report of a house on Slake Street that has seen an unusual increase in activity Marius knows to call in the troops.

The beginning of the operation is heralded by the sound of the Hammertongue factory exploding on the horizon, as the Arclight bombs go off. The troopers meet up with the gang on Slake street and - rather than do this the long-winded way, follow the method of "smoke grenades and night vision" to clear the house. When the fighting's over, the Ginger Man is lying in a pool of his own blood, Marion is rescued and the house has been set on fire. The troops take their leave, giving Marius a message from Ms Grey - he is to report in if the Nine Fingered Man contacts him.

Home again, and Conrad goes to finally get some sleep - ebullent at having achieved his ambition of becoming the Chief Dogger. He and Marius make plans to go back to the Contested Grounds and buy all those armanents. Alexis is more worried about what scale of favour she now owes Voronetz - and just what his connection to the whole thing is. Marion is recovering in the tiny infirmary of Dogswarren, Jemmy is writing up his exploits and holding the first staff meeting of the "Newshound" with Mari. Just as Conrad is considering moving into Luther's old apartment, in order to make a complete break with his old life and acknowledge his new position, he recieves a phone call. For once, it's actually for him - and it's from Sideband. He has been invited to a media awards ceremony.

Syndil and Alexis wind their way home to find that someone has broken into their apartment again. This time, they've left a note on Syndil's bed. "We need to talk", and a time and address of a diner in Crouchside. Syndil knows who it's likely to be from, especially when Marius tells that their mutual ambiguous patron has gone missing from Luminosity Tower.

The entire gang, fully armed, go to the rendaevous. The Nine-Fingered Man sits alone, and nods as Syndil slides into the seat opposite. He has important things to discuss, he says. Arclight are going to kill some kids.

And we leave it there until next time.

--------

"I want to make sure everyone likes me before I give them weapons" - Conrad

"Our friend here is trying to take over the Burgh"
"Don't say that! Mycroft is always listening!" - Marius and Conrad

"He did say some rude things"
"Yeah, about Giant Dogs" - Conrad and Jemmy. Not letting it lie.

"Okay, you know we knew the barman was dodgy..."
"No"
".. Hm. Okay. You know the guy we stole from the fulgurators?"
"No."
"Okay. In the Beginning, the Great Architect created the..." - Marius explains the plot to Alexis.

"This is a really odd Burgh" - Marius voices what we've all been thinking

"Maybe we should watch for the next rocket?"
"What, and see if there are lots of little faces pressed up against the portholes?"

"Find anything on the Open Road?" - Conrad to Marius. Go read the quotes from last session.

"Friend of Scurtman"
"I refuse to be 'Friend of Scurtman'"
"Scurtman and Doggerboy!"
"Don't make me kill you" - Conrad is not impressed at Hirplakker pegging him as Marius' sidekick.

"Maybe he's feeling lonely?" - the best of several explanations for the Nine Fingered man seeking Syndil out.

--------

A couple of spare plot threads get pulled back into the main storyline here - the Marion plot (as you'll see if you cast your eye back over the last few sessions) has been lying in wait for a quiet moment in which to activate it.

Note to UK fans - Marion's ne'erdowell boyfriend was called Geoffrey. If you get the joke, you have a mind like me.

Lt Spoon is, of course, named for the soldier from Dog Soldiers

You may be wondering why I have chosen the odd tactic of naming *both* of Jemmy's female friends that are his age "Marion". So was I, until I did a little campaign notes archaeology - they were supposed to be the same character back in the day. When the Mikefighter strike happened, Jemmy briefly talked about his friend Marion who was an ex mikefighter pilot. Little bit of characterisation, there, and "Marion = Jemmy's friend" went into the notes. I needed a kidnapee character for the subplot tied up tonight to work, and decided to do some *long* foreshadowing, writing her in as a background character in every session since the Barge of the Dead. In the meantime, I clean forgot where I got the name from, right up until the Mikefighters buzzing the characters in the Contested Grounds, where Jemmy mentioned his mate who is an ex-mikefighter again. Renaud keeps his own notes on sessions, and remembered the name. The two characters have backgrounds so divergent that it's impossible to smush them back together as one person, and so Marion the second was born into actually being seen "on screen" this session. As it turns out, she's a much better fit for the *next* stage of what would have been one npc arc than the first Marion, who due to my inability to play teenaged hormones came across as far too wimpy.

Keep proper notes, you say? That'd be DULL.

On an entirely different issue, I was dreading the day that I would be obliged to play Jacques, but I think I did okay. Doubtless, it's nothing like what Jemma would have done if she were still playing the character, but it serves it's purpose.

Daniel's increased involvement lets me show of Dingin-tech, which I love. The Search Engine is a literal engine - it works on microscale dingins, spinning their gears rapidly using something like a power drill motor until it finds the combination of characters it's looking for.

[bobthepariah]

Anyhoo, thanks for ordering the book, it will be in your hands shortly. I hope it meets up to your expectations. Glad you like the website as well. We will have some new stuff up soon, such as the next issue of the Mire End Tribune and various other bits and pieces.

Cheers
Malcolm

I am actually making my way through the METs now. In fact, I notice that one of your reading lists includes Veniss Underground. I almost picked it up, but I had overshopped already, so it ended up getting culled from my Amazon.com cart. Is it any good?

I am looking also looking over the other .pdf's now, and re-reading the lite version. I really like the concept behind Carnelian Yet from the Lostfinder's Guide to Mire End.

[DaveB]

I am actually making my way through the METs now. In fact, I notice that one of your reading lists includes Veniss Underground. I almost picked it up, but I had overshopped already, so it ended up getting culled from my Amazon.com cart. Is it any good?


Veniss Underground is... odd. Kinda depressing. Very short.

Those were my three main impressions :D

[Malcolm Craig]

I am actually making my way through the METs now. In fact, I notice that one of your reading lists includes Veniss Underground. I almost picked it up, but I had overshopped already, so it ended up getting culled from my Amazon.com cart. Is it any good?

I am looking also looking over the other .pdf's now, and re-reading the lite version. I really like the concept behind Carnelian Yet from the Lostfinder's Guide to Mire End.

I enjoyed Veniss Underground a lot. Short, yes. But quite thought provoking at the same time. As Dave pointed out, it's not the most cheering read in the world.

Ah yes, Carnelian Yet: "Have loudhailer, will travel". One of my favourite NPCs from LGTME. Especially Paul's portrait of him with 'I was a roadie on Iron Maiden's 1984 tour' type moustache and haircut'.

Cheers
Malcolm

[DaveB]

Chronicler's NOte - Eye of the Needle has finished. Session 13 was the last one. Another Actual Play thread (for Everway) is coming soon, but for tonight I'm going to try to finish this one.

Morbid, huh?

[Marius]

Come on Dave you slacker...

Take some time out from Everway prep and wite the conclusion!

AndyJ

[DaveB]

Gah.

On the double-time then...

SESSION TWELVE - The one with lots of talking.

The 9-fingered man proclaims that Arclight are going to kill some children.

There is a long pause. Somewhere, a bell tolls. A tumbleweed rolls across the diner floor. Eventually, one of the party put him out of his misery by explaining that, yes, they already KNEW that, thank you.

So he gets specific.

He has read the Microfilm Dominic was attempting to get to the Crypt via Syndil, that he took off her before dumping her in Dogswarren.

There is a project - a very Special Project - headed by Annabelle Grey (his boss), which is under the codename "Eye of the Needle". Syndil's guess that Arclight's Executives are attempting to escape from the city is actually correct. The means of their escape, though, is a little.. involved.

First, launch a missile (the "Needle")into the sky. Not just any missile, nosiree - this one contains both an atom weapon (Marius goes pale here) and a small child - the child to trigger the Boundary effect and the nuke to tear the Boundary when it detonates mid-Shift, creating a rift (the "Eye"). Then launch a pod containing your escapees (the "Thread") up, made out of Shifted materials, that closes the rift behind it as it goes.

The problem is that it can't possibly work - he has a contact who reckons that either

a) the nuke will just detonate in the City - raining destruction down on everyone
b) the missile will have the same effect the test firings (to get the timing right) have had and cause atmospheric disturbences. Same end result, but a more literal rain.
c) the rift opens, but the pod doesn't escape. You have just triggered a second Bombardment and everyone will die.

It frankly doesn't look good for the city, and so after finding all this out he has broken away from the Splinter Cell, taking his most trusted colleagues with him. Unfortunately, he left the microfilm in his desk back at Luminosity Tower.

The gang press him for just who the members of the "Splinter Splinter Cell" are (turns out it's Mr Voronetz and his crime syndicate). Alexis asks why he left Syndil with her in Dogswarren, and he says that she's been couriering messages for him all across town for months. As for why Dogswarren, well.. it's right under Arclight's nose and had the advantage of having no Crypt group. The gang have done an excellent job of clearing out all of the cultists around Arclight's most sensitive base.

Marius, raising a finger, asks just what that base is. Turns out it's the Lost Place that Arclight use to get materials from - shift-tainted metals from it helped build Luminosity Tower, and are now being used to build the Thread pods.

It's the Foundary.

Someone asks why he's come to them now. What does he want from them? Simple really - the Shifted expert he mentioned earlier, who did the early designs for all this, has escaped. Arclight (specifically the Nine Fingered Man) had him locked away in Inferno when he had second thoughts, citing his habit of eating people and imitating the behaviour of Ubels. He DOES eat people and imitate the behaviour of Ubels, but they tolerated that as long as he was designing things for them. Alexis would have met him, if she hadn't turned down that job for Voronetz a while back. If they have any hope of stopping all this, then they have to stop the launch. Only they have no idea about how to do so.

And so some taking stock results. Alexis and Syndil go with the 9FM to Voronetz's place in Fogwarren, hoping to make contact with the crime lord and use his resources in whatever efforts they come up with.

[DaveB]

(cont.)

Jemmy, Marius and Conrad go to try to find a way into the Foundary that doesn't involve jumping down a chimney.

The girls (and the 9FM) reach Fogwarren via the train, and head through the crowds towards an apparantly-abandoned building. Alexis gets the horrible suspicion that they're being followed. They make it to the building okay, and the 9FM knocks in a complex pattern, gaining admittance. The waiting room they end up in has a battered sofa, a large men with a gun and a time-locked trapdoor to Voronetz's secure bunker set into the floor.

The boys walk through the deep tunnels beneath Crouchside, heading in Dogswarren's direction. They climb up a ladder and find themselves to be in Hammertongue. Some walking back and forth soon proves that space "stretches" beneath Dogswarren, covering up where the Foundary would be. Marius surmises that the Foundary is probably what was in this location pre-Shift, and it got turned into a Lost Place in the apocalypse.

Back with the girls, the knock-code is heard, and the guard goes to open the door. He falls back in again, having been stabbed through the heart by an umbrella, and a smartly-dressed elderly gentleman strolls in. the 9FM goes pale. This, then would be the infamous Dr Ivanovitch, formerly a guest of Inferno. He is polite and courteous, greeting the ladies, and says that he freed himself after Voronetz told him that the launch was immenant. His issues with Voronetz and the 9FM are strictly private and must take a back seat to the business of saving the City. They sit down to wait for the time-lock to open.

(side-note to any players reading this - the Doctor used the 9FM's real name, which was quite embarressing. But I've forgotton what it was. Any takers?)

[DaveB]

And that's the end of my lunch break. I'll leave it there for now.

[DaveB]

And now that I'm home and posting...

(cont)

At Voronetz's safe-house, The time-lock clicks, and the trapdoor swings open. Looking down, the girls (and associated morally-dubious hangers-on) can see a lot of blood, and hear the distinctive chittering sound of an Ubel. Alexis slams the door shut again (the Doctor noting that now it's locked in an area with noone observing it, it'll probably phase back to wherever it came from) and they all exit stage left at speed.

All meet up at Conrad's, the Doctor being introduced. WIthout Voronetz's syndicate, they're pretty much on their own.

And the longest planning session EVER kicks off. I mean it. Really, really long. The gist is that they don't have enough current information to go on given that the 9FM left the microfilm back at Luminosity Tower. So he and Marius are going to have to go and get it - Marius warning that Grey WAS kind of looking for him last session. Numerous plans for getting into the Foundary are raised and discarded until they settle on "abseil down from the big one execution plank onto the aerostat platform, hide and wait for an aerostat to land, then go down with it". They'll improvise from there, but agree that they need to go convince Daniel to come with them, in case they find any Dingins when they're down there. Syndil volunteers to go do that. Finally, Alexis has a suspicion that maybe Voronetz faked his own death (they never did see a body, and the noise could be faked), and considers going back to check.

[DaveB]

Come on Dave you slacker...

Take some time out from Everway prep and wite the conclusion!

AndyJ

You'd be the first to give me a hurt look if you didn't get your flashback, Andy. So shut yer yap.

Don't make me come over there.

(It'd cost me £4.10 on the train for a start) :D


Anyway, that's session twelve. It was short. Session Thirteen is the big finish.

Lost Places!

A hoard of Shifted!

A desperate fight on top of gantries, high above the city!

Missles!

The fall of Arclight!

The deaths of several people!

[Syndil04]

The nine finger man's embarassing name was Nigel.

I want to see the big finale written up!
Where we....sorry nearly gave away the plot then.

T'was a good ending. Write it up Dave!
*enthusiastic bounce* :D

[Rhyme]

I must at this point take a brief breath from my busy life to illustrate the cold hard truth of the moment. Some people out there (you know who you are) will have difficulties accepting it, but they must face the music: We won.
Thank you, thank you very much.

Jemmy

[Marius]

I must at this point take a brief breath from my busy life to illustrate the cold hard truth of the moment. Some people out there (you know who you are) will have difficulties accepting it, but they must face the music: We won.
Thank you, thank you very much.

Jemmy

We sure did. Go us!

And Dave, the longer you leave it the more sessions of Everway you'll have to write up in one go. Write the conclusion, you know it makes sense...

Marius/Andy

[DaveB]

And, because of various things like having a couple of days off work, I find myself with a wodge of free time and so...

SESSION THIRTEEN: THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

(Disclaimer: two small children, Luminosity Tower and a mass of faceless extras were harmed during the production of this game session. I knew it was the end, and so started blowing things up)

Spurred into action, Nine-Fingered Nigel and Marius depart for Luminosity Tower, persuading (after much haggling) a rather put-upon Rodriguez to give them a boat ride.

Jemmy, painfully aware that he's about to go to certain death, starts to write up all of his notes in an effort to leave a record behind.

Conrad pays Mycroft a visit (finding the Burgess carefully smashing his telephone with a hammer) to finally confirm his position. And to check if Mycroft knows who owns the Foundary. He claims not to.

Syndil goes to recruit Daniel, using her charms and then the offer of a substantial reward. She had him with the charms.

In Luminosity Tower, Nigel and Marius retrieve the microfilm. Then they run into Ms Grey, who would like a chat with Nigel over his recent dissappearance. Nigel goes, and Marius stays just long enough (trying to contact Sgt Spoon from a few sessions ago, and learning he's now in charge of landing tower 14) to hear the gunshot. Getting out of dodge, he's.. surprised.. when the power brown-outs briefly. Someone, somewhere in the Tower is using an awful lot of juice. The time is... well, now, really.

All congregate back at Dogswarren, Marius worridly stating that there's no way he should have been able to get out of there. Something is providing a major distraction for ArcLight. News of Nigel's death is celebrated by Syndil. He also shows teh Doctor the contents of the microfilm, and teh learned Scientists' opinion is that Arclight seem to have ironed out some of the bugs, though not enough to make it safe.

The Plan, then: Gain access to the Foundary, see what's going on and stop it. But first, they need to get down onto the Aerostat landing platform next to the Big One.

Cue the Simil, with it's harpoon-arm. Though they aren't exactly pleased when it decides to join them, falling down after them with a loud metallic crunch.

Much waiting ensues, until an Aerostat arrives and lands. The platform starts to sink into the earth (it's a big lift), and the characters - once far enough down - surprise and kill the pilot.

All are now on the large, descending lift. The Foundary awaits.

[DaveB]

(cont)

The Simil, which can't fit, simply continues down the lift.

Crawling through various dark, rusting, disturbingly echoey tunnels, the gang emerge into a vision of hell. The Foundary is a Lost Place - it's been warped ever since it went missing from the City during the Bombardment, and has been taken over by various Shifted races. The area in which the assembled troop find themselves resembles a steel works crossed with an abbatoir and features Simils working at the sparking production lines. There are signs of dried blood everywhere. And in the area they find themselves overlooking, two ArcLight troopers stand guard over a tunnel enterance.

As though signalled by something, the Simils down tools. The guards, surprised, order them to get back to work. The Simils advance upon the guards.

The characters, seeing their chance, clamber down onto the main floor. The Simils tear the guards limb from limb, and march off down the tunnel.

Following at a discreet distance, the characters work their way through increasing "normal" areas, including signage that looks like it's been put up by the ArcLight people using the Foundary as a base. There are screams in the distance, and the sounds of weapons fire. Something like a heat haze passes overhead, which Marius helpfully points out was probably a Drache.

Following the signs for R&D, they emerge into a large, open space with what the Doctor helpfully informs them (as though they hadn't guessed by it's pod-like appearance) is a prototype for a Thread. Daniel spots a Dingin and gets to it, while everyone else fans out and inspects the area. Marius is disturbed to find a pen that - he reckons - was used for observing the more... violent... Shifted races.

Daniel announces that the dingins aren't all networked together, but *this* one has the R&D manifest on it, along with a number of other tidbits. The "civilised" area of the Lost Place is actually really small - ArcLight have effectively fortified the area immediately around the enterance, while the depths of the Foundary are still "wild". The R&D area had also captured some 13 Shifted - 6 Hager, 2 Drache, 4 Lugners and an Ubel.

None of them are still in the pens.

TBC

[DaveB]

The Doctor volunteers to go through the records, while the gang decide that they need to find the Thread production line and stop it. Picking their way through the facility, they are treated to the sight of the ArcLight scientists being held hostage in the canteen by a group of Simils - one of which is "their" Simil.

Creeping their way around the tunnels, the gang eventually find the production line - several Threads in increasing degrees of completion, arranged in a series of bays above the main hanger. Looking down, all is quiet (though the floor is bloodstained), and the Areostat is still there. As the watch, two Ubels walk from an enterance below the character's vantage point, and appear to be escorting a human into the wild area of the Lost Place. As in bodyguarding him.

Jemmy spots the crane that's presumably intended to get the Threads down from their workshops into the Aerostats, and starts to retrace his steps to get down onto the Hanger floor. The others determine that there is indeed a finished Thread in the last bay, and get it ready to be hoisted.

Jemmy reaches the destination and - checking for Shifted - manages to figure out the crane's controls in order to get the Thread into the Aerostat.

Now what?

With the Shifted apparantly "rebelling" (maybe led by their Simil's example, maybe not), they're relatively free to move around the place. Someone suggests that if they're about to do what they've all been avoiding thinking about doing - using the Aerostat to get into Luminosity Tower and sabotage the whole thing - they're going to need weapons. The weapons are kept in the hostile border between the ArcLight base and the unsanitised Lost Place, so off into the depths they journey.

What transpires is hazy. There's blood, and molten metal, and the image of those two Ubels turning on their associate, ripping him apart, after a Drache leaves his body. And running. Lots of running. Then Jemmy starting to hear voices telling him that one of the party is a Drache.

Safely back in the "secure" areas, they decide that if they're going to do this they had better do it now. Heading back to R&D, they find the Doctor and tell him to get a wiggle on.

Heading back to the Aerostat, Alexis volunteers to give flying it a go. Or at least to give making the lift to the City work a go. The rest will have to fly in the cargo container. Sliding open the door, they are faced by a mass of Shifted, all pressed into the relatively small space. Most are Simils, sitting in neat rows, but there are six Hagers (who teh Doctor goes to try to make conversation with and fails) and - upon close inspection - a couple of Drache. Right at the front of the mob of Shifted is "their" Simil, who says only "Help".

Do the Shifted want to help the gang, or do they want the gang to help them?

[DaveB]

Jemmy (thinking of the column inches) takes a photo of all the Shifted, and a tight and uncomfortable squeeze ensues. In the pilot's cabin, Alexis stares blankly at the controls and manages to figure out which switch makes the platform gio up. Ten minutes later, and the Aerostat is sat next to the Big One in Dogswarren. One problem - Alexis has no idea how to pilot an Aerostat. Not one.

Jemmy has a brainwave - Mari used to be a Mikefighter Pilot. It's the same principle, surely. While the Doctor tries to engage the Hager in conversation (again), the urchin scurries off to the Runnings one last time. On the way, the voice in his head says that two of the humans in the ship are possessed by Drache. He finds Mari - who got his notebook, and thinks he's playing a prank on her - and manages to persuade her to come to the platform with him and take a look inside the Aerostat.

Convinced, Mari swaps with Alexis (asking if they just want to follow the flight plan that's in the Aerostat's dingins - they say yes), and takeoff is achieved.

Being sealed into a large metal box with several dozen inhuman killing machines, no light, no source of air and occassional turbulence is not fun. Not fun at all.

After a while, the Aerostat touches down somewhere and the cargo container detaches, being taken away (with everyone but Mari still inside it) on some kind of elevator, then sideways on something, then stomach-droppingly upwards.

There's a clunking sound, and the cargo pod peels apart, the Thread being lifted up and away by a mechanism. They're inside Luminosity Tower, near the base of the Thread launch tube (which, as they've discovered, is like a giant guass coil - the Threads are fired up like magnetic bullets)

The Shifted go on the hunt, the Hager softly repeating the name of Annabelle Grey, the Simils drawing weapons. The humans, however, decide to take the lift. They lack the proper security codes, but the Doctor does something to the control panel that does the trick (and emits a shower of sparks), and up they go again.

And up.

And up.

And then sunlight. The lift they're in is glass-sided - it was just in an enclosed tube.

(forgive me for my bad description of the setting for the denoument. It's hard to describe such a 3D environment)

The top seven levels of Luminosity Tower, as the building comes to a point, are empty - the building itself has a flat roof, but the glass outer surface continues, forming a stretched glass pyramid high above the City. The Gauss coil for the Thread pods stretches from deep in the building to almost the centre of the pyramid, with a system of gantries and walkways allowing access to it's end, the Thread that hangs there, a bank of controls and what looks like a modified missile emplacement, with five rather sinister-looking missles ready to go. The lift the characters have gone up in has a twin on the far side of the gantries - which is descending even as they ascend, apparantly called by someone down below.

There are several Tentenel troopers standing guard.

(And that, teasingly, is all I have time for. Nearly done now.)

[order99]

GRRRRRrrrrr....no teasing now.MORE! :mad:

[DaveB]

I have made one teeeeensy, but vastly important, omission.

At the end of session 12 and the beginning of session 13, the gang argued the pros and cons of telling one of the other Macrocorps about what ArcLight was doing - especially the whole "use of atomic weapons" thing. They rejected it as a bad plan, and left their account of the conspiracy with Mari for safekeeping instead.

And now, back to the action.

--------------------------------

The Power-armoured troopers, seeing the gang, open fire. The gang dives for cover and tries to return fire. With all the firepower being slung about, the gantries take a battering. The voice in Jemmy's head dies off with a shriek as one of the power troopers shoots the Lugner that was following him by accident (Lugners are normally invisible).

The other lift comes up, with Ms Grey inside. She makes her way casually to the Thread (well, she isn't being shot at) and climbs in by means of the hatch on the top.

One of the Power Troopers fires his jetpack, landing right next to the good guys. Jemmy sprays paint in his face-plate, and Marius shoots him several times, the body crashing backwards through the gantry (breaking it) and toppling to the floor far below.

A panel in the side of the pyramid opens. The very tip comes apart, opening up like a four-jawed mouth.

One of the Needle Missles fires.

Syndil and Jemmy make it across the now-collapsing Gantries, getting pinned down by the Power Trooper guarding the controls.

The Needle reaches the Boundary of the City and Shifts, detonating at the same time. A vortex of hurricane-strength winds rapidly forms around it, the sky seeming to twist upwards above Luminosity Tower and howling rain and hail whipping at the Tower's surface. Lightning flashes. Thunder rolls.

The Doctor runs across the lower gantries to the opposite, and begins to climb up towards the control panels (which have a dingin core hanging beneath them) by means of holding onto the underside of the gantry with his hands and monkey-barring.

The Thread drops like a stone, being drawn down the launch tube ready to fire.

The Thread launches, knocking everyone to their feet. Grey's pod is flung straight up into the Vortex. There's an almighty flash of light, and the sky goes back to being it's proper shape. Another Thread rises up the launch tube, as the mechanism reloads.

The Doctor is now climbing on the Dingin core, and goes limp as the Drache inside him swaps him for the computer. His body drops to join the first trooper's.

Sparks explode out of the Dingin core, and then from the trooper at the controls above as the Drache moves into his armour. He convulses, firing his weapon randomly. Including the grenade launcher.

The glass pyramid enclosing all this shatters.

Suddenly, they're not running around on funny platforms in a heated room any more. They're several hundred feet above the City directly exposed to the worst storm it's ever had - though the atmosphere IS going back to normal quickly, "normal" still means "feirce crosswinds". Large sections of the gantries get ripped off entirely.

Daniel and Marius head the way the Doctor went, crawlling along the upside of the gantries the doctor hung beneath.

Another Needle launches.

The strikken trooper's jetpack fires, flinging him off into the very long fall to the ground.

The second Needle detonates, and the Vortex forms again. Bigger, nastier, and now with extra added "no protection from the elements" The going is now extremely hard - progress is measured in inches. Still, at least noone is shooting any more.

Marius - now up top - shouts over the wind that the Vortex has to be sealed - someone has to go up in the Thread. He, Syndil and Jemmy are closest, and they climb in. Daniel is at the Computer core and is trying to figure out how to launch the thing. Alexis and Conrad are at the Needles, trashing launch equipment in an effort to stop yet another one going up.

Daniel, though, shoots at the controls and crawls towards the Thread. Conrad gives slow, painful chase - rightly deducing where the Drache has gone. Possessed-Daniel is trying to open the hatch on the Thread, and the people inside (with no clue as to what's going on) are helping to open the hatch. Conrad gets there and a horizontal, rain-soaked punchout results, both men sliding about on the rail-less gantries due to the wind, until Conrad succeeds in kicking possessed-Daniel's handhold off. The Shift-tainted flowghost goes sailing off into the void.

Shouting for the others to close the hatch again - which they do - Conrad gets to the controls, grabs a likely-looking bunch of wires and twists.

The Thread launches. The three characters inside get a sudden feeling of accelleration and the press of horrendous g-forces, and then nothing.

The Vortex closes successfully, and the wind dies back down to "gut-wrenching vertigo" levels. The lift the characters came up "ding"s and goes down, Alexis shouting to Conrad that they may have company soon.

Conrad joins her at the Needles, which she has succeeded in preventing from launching. She reminds him (at the top of her voice, over the wind) that these things have children inside. Hoping he's not misjudging the internal makeup of the missles, he starts opening one up with his Llive. Inside there's the engine, the warhead and a large metal cylinder. Manhandling it out, they start to cut the remaining two missles apart.

The lift comes up. It has "their" Simil in it. The Shifted marches over and - upon a brief exchange of orders from Conrad - carries the Cylinders back to the lift.

The entire Tower rocks with a series of explosions. Looking down, Conrad and Alexis are just in time to see another barrage of rockets hit the Tower. It's sentry aerostats destroyed by the Storm and it's guilt in the Storms well and truly proven to people's satisfaction by the show they've been putting on for everyone watching the sky down on ground level, ArcLight is apparantly under attack from another MacroCorp. Or, as it looks like, several other MacroCorps.

The Simil returns, points at the Warheads and says "Go". Conrad and Alexis get in the lift and press "down" for dear life, as the Tower is rocked by another palpable hit. Out of the extreme weather conditions, they manage to get the life-support cylinders open and pull the children out.

In the chaos of the mass evacuation and hand-in-hand surrender to the forces of Trilhoeven (as the attackers prove to be), Conrad and Alexis walk right on out into the sunshine. Their lack of ArcLight tattoos lets them into the "fleeing bystander" category, and they make it to the waterfront where a triumphant Rodriguez stands atop the gun emplacement that threatened him all those times.

High above the City, the Simil looks at the nuclear warheads in it's hands. Luminosity Tower was built so fast by ArcLight because it used a lot of materials from the Foundary - there are shifted materials built all through it's structure. They now follow the Simil, the warheads and the rest of the army of Simils in vanishing back to wherever they came from.

Luminosity Tower crumples like a deflated balloon, and the final barrage from Trilhoeven puts paid to it. It collapses, sending a dust cloud across a dozen Burghs.

Rodriguz fills Conrad and Alexis in on what happened - Mari (the ex-Mikefighter Pilot who used to work for Trilhoeven) gave Jemmy's notes to Trilhoeven and Sideband. She's safe - the landing platform they landed on (and she was almost immediately arrested on, while the characters were reaching the mechanism) was occupied by one of the first squads to surrender to the incoming armies. Their leader? Sgt Spoon.

Halfway home, something catches Conrad's eye. There's a gang of Simils, watching them from the shore of the Canal.

One of them has Marius' face.

END

[DaveB]

Coda one.

Conrad eventually became Burgess of Dogswarren, upon Mycroft's retirement ten years after the campaign. Jed took over as chief Dogger.

Alexis retired in peace, as did Rodriguez.

Mari took over the paper, as was Jemmy's wish, and he became posthumously famous. "Thackery Lives" is a popular graffito for the next hundred years.

The Chimneys of Dogswarren continue to spew ash, but the enterance to the Foundary is sealed with concrete. Eventually, Dogswarren grows to encompass Sleeping Vale and most of Crouchside.

Elias died in bed two years to the day after the campaign.

Marion never forgot Jemmy, and never married.

Silas - heartbroken at Syndil's death - closed the Piper and went to live with relatives in Long Pond.

[DaveB]

Coda Two.

There's a bone-shaking decelleration, and the three characters strapped into G-couches in the Thread feel their stomachs rise as the parachutes attached to the pod open. Then an impact, as they touch down.

Opening the hatch, Jemmy winces at the sunlight. Climbing out, they look across the odd place they're in now. The Thread has landed halfway up a grassy hill, overlooking a forest. There are no buildings in sight.

Across the hill from them is an impact crater. The parachutes of Grey's Thread failed to open, and her corpse can be seen poking out of the wreckage.

Wandering, in shock, they run across two small children - just as confused as they are.

From around the forest comes a man, riding on what Jemmy describes as a big dog (it's a horse). He stops ahead of them and asks who they are - and what was that THING he saw in the sky?

He has the same face as "their" Simil.

[DaveB]

And I'm spent. That's all folks.

Credit where credit is due. This thread would have been waaaaay harder without my madcap troupe of players. So, Renaud, Emma, Jemma, Andy, Chris and Andrea - Kudos to you guys.

Also Kudos to Contested Ground, for making a game that grabbed me by the balls when I passed by their site looking for a system for a Neverwhere-style urban fantasy game, and made me run it instead. Especially Malcolm, for turning up here, being insighftul, providing the info on Sleeping Vale early in the thread that helped shape the B plot and generally being cool.

And to everyone else who - whenever I'd go weeks without getting a reply on this thread and started to wonder if anyone was reading it - chipped in with a word of encouragement. Right up to order99. You lot are the fuel of my work ethic.

Questions?

[Malcolm Craig]

Well Dave, what can I say?

A thoroughly excellent campaign and a brilliantly written up actual play thread. It has given me a great insight into the game world itself, from the use of characters, the idea of hope, the macrocorps, the Shifted, indeed, almost all of the vital elements of the world.

There are only two things that disappoint me:

1) Its all over.
2) I wasn't playing in the campaign!

I shall be following your future actual play threads with great interest. I really look forward to seeing how your next campaign pans out.

Anyway, thanks again for the time you've taken to share your game experiences with us and to your players for pitching in.

Cheers
Malcolm

[Marius]

Yay! It's fantastic to see the epic conclusion of what was a really fun game up here at last.

And now some highlights:

Session ten. The deep conversations about where exactly the line is drawn between to and them were great, making people really think about what motivated their characters and grow as a result. The bloody horse argument that just wouldn't die. The attempt to subtlely point out to Jemmy that Marion really did like him quite a lot, which was so subtle that Jemmy thought we were trying to persuade him she was with the splinter cell. The dog in the fridge. Possibly best of all for me was loosing it during the planning bit after one too many questions and launching off into an epic rant which covered not only every permeatation plan but also contigency plans for practically everything that could happen during the plan.

The comedy element was very good, and also very in character. Jemmy's constant jibes at Conrad about the fact he was a 'hero' and Syndil's exasperation about her inability to get her point across. As the only one who could actually hear her I should have really been the medium for that but I tended to be distracted most of time and translated what I thought she said rather than what she actually did say. Add to this the fact that Jemmy just settled for making up her side of the conversation in his head and I lost track of the amount of times we got whacked during the game.

The bit underneath the crypt temple in crouchside when the second group of cultists turned up and pushed the slab back over the hole we had climbed down, trapping us in. Everyone looked at each other and thought 'how could this get any worse?' Cue the distinctive scrape of metal on concrete caused by an Ubel dragging it's huge blade and it's brown trousers time.

The whole Sean incident and our complete inability to explain why a teched-up corporate ninja was sneaking around in the dead of night and stealing people's coffee. Especially later on when we realised that information he gave us about a 'splinter cell', far from being the ramblings of a coffee-obsessed wierdo who'd had a very bad reaction to his last biological upgrade, was actually the missing piece of the greater mystery.

Confronting the Tentenal trooper on the gantry and the realisation dawning that we had nothing whatsoever that had any chance of hurting him. Oh, and we couldn't just try to slam him off because he had a jet pack.

At the very end, Marius Syndil and Jemmy are sitting in the pod. Daniel hammers on the lid and screams to be let in. We all mime turning the big rotating submarine-esque wheel on the lid to open it. Conrad screams out that Daniel is possessed. We all mime turning the big rotating submarine-esque wheel the other way, a good deal faster.

There's a whole lot more that doesn't instantly spring to mind, some great situations and some fantasic dialogue (in session 10 dave asked us to slow down because we were churning out quotable material faster than he could scribble it down)

All in all it was great fun, and thank you very much to CGS for writing it, Dave for running it and the other players for playing it.

Marius/AndyJ

PS - Best get started on the everway write-up Dave, you don't want us to get too far ahead :)

[DaveB]

But what are you going to do about your screenname Andy? Get it changed to "Soul"? Inquiring minds want to know.

<a href="http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?p=3051489#post3051489">Everway: Long Road Home</a> is commencing. All I needed was a title.

[Dakkareth]

Woah. There goes an afternoon. I found the link in the 'best actual plays of 2004' thread and from then, well ... :)

As I'm chronically bad at putting my feelings into (english) words, let me just say, that it's place there is well earned. Great story and telling, great characters and much fun in a cool setting.

-Dakkareth :)

[Rhyme]

Hmm... I've just lost an entire day's worth of work rereading this thread. It was an utterly amazing game, I keep forgetting quite how amazing it was. One day, we'll play that sequel... Marius and Syndil and I will try to find our way back.
It'll be awesome... in the literal sense of the word.
R.

[DaveB]

Awww.

Fine. You organise everyone to be in the same place, I'll run it.

[Mortality]

If you do run it, I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see an AP of the sequel.

"Eye of the Needle" is the reason I own A|State.
...well, that and it's innately awesome.

(Figured I'd take the opportunity of the thread being posted on again to mention that everyone involved rocks. Didn't really feel right doing that back in '06 when I read it.)