Cranking this out while I have a minute
Jan. 3rd, 2007 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mythicfoxI probably should be heading out to do a few things, but I'm gonna try and squeeze out this gaming post kinda quickly to get it out of the way. That way I don't have to put it off until, like, 6am tomorrow.
Okay, where we left off, the Throng was waking up after some rest and getting ready to try and find the map. They took a taxi (no longer risking anything on busses) to a college campus with an open computer lab and spent about an hour and a half digging through atlases online and off to find the location depicted in the map (a couple of the players couldn't make it because of the scheduling wasteland between Christmas and New Year's, so we just said that they were researching elsewhere). Thanks to some landmarks visible in it, they were able to figure out that the map depicted a chunk of Waco, Texas. Specifically, there was an area in the center of the area called Odell Auto Parts. Nothing about it seemed to involve the number 126, though.
But it was obvious that whatever was to happen next, something was awaiting the group in Waco.
The trick was how to get there. They might have had just enough cash to maybe get Greyhound tickets for the group. Traveling via plane was discussed, but there was a general resistance to the notion. At one point, the quote from my previous post was shared with the group...
Steve Rogers: "The last time I was on a plane, I fell out."
Of course, they might have been able to make it just fine, because Ander has something of a saved up source of cash available... but his player was one of the ones who couldn't make it. Whoops.
Steve was all for just mugging people for enough money to travel by bus, while Rudolf refused to go that route. At one point they talked about demanding some sort of compensation from the vampires they'd previously met. The argument about how to get the money went around in circles until Rudolf pretty much threw his hands up and they decided to split up, get the cash, and meet up later at the house.
Steve tried picking pockets, but that wound up turning more into a couple of muggings-- including one where his target pulled a knife on him and wound up with some holes in him. Jack just lifted a guy's wallet in the French Quarter with no problems. Rudolf went scavenging through the still-ruined areas of the city for stuff he could fix up and sell pretty quickly, like copper plumbing and the like. He managed to make a few bucks off of it.
They went ahead and spent some of their money on supplies... Rudolf bought enough cheap canned food to keep them all fed comfortably for what I think was a week and a half or so, but I'll have to check with Sean on that as I seem to have forgotten to write down the exact amounts. He also picked up some shovel handles to make into large, spear-like stakes in order to deal with the vampires later. Jack took it upon himself to get some clean clothes, and Steve managed to track down a very inexpensive used vehicle that might be able to get them to Waco without exploding... a VW Bus.
They gathered back together at Gino's house. When Steve pulled up in the Bus, it was pretty obvious that they wouldn't need Greyhound tickets any longer to get where they needed to go. Before they left, though, they still wanted to settle things with the vampires.
They went to the house where they'd encountered the Baron before, and pounded on the door for a bit. One of those little sliding-door things opened in the door, and someone on the other side (as near as they could tell, one of the flunkies that brought them to the building earlier) asked them what they wanted. They told him what they were after, and he shut the door. He returned a few moments later and told them in so many words to piss off.
Now, this was getting to be a bit much for them... Rudolf and Steve both had to make checks for Torment... Rudolf managed to hold it off, but Steve lost it. He began pounding incessantly on the door until the sliding hatch opened up and a shotgun barrel poked through it. He grabbed the barrel and shoved hard enough that he was apparently able to hit the guy in the head. Steve then ripped the door off to find the guy waiting with the shotgun.
Rudolf and Jack waited outside the door with the spears just in case the guy ran out. There was a battle in the hallway just inside the building, and both Rudolf and Jack both stood by and watched as although he took a few point-blank shotgun blasts Steve was able to thoroughly kill the 'vampire,' (actually a ghoul) and gratuitously cut out his eyes. Jack, for just standing by and watching this, achieved a major milestone for himself in the process... "Allow someone to befall a terrible fate, refusing to interfere rather than help." (I'll put up a definitive list of these somewhere in a filtered post)
The session left off with Rudolf taking the dead guy's stuff and insisting on charging in to give the Baron a piece of his mind once and for all, and discovering some strange instincts concerning the 'preservation' of dead bodies in the process...
The Hunter LARP was another one focused pretty heavily on research and social interaction. During the week, a few folks had checked out some other sites by the construction company to see if any of the others had had any associated zombie outbreaks. They found bodies that had been disposed and buried, but none of them were rising again. Carolyn (a Redeemer), while volunteering at the local soup kitchen, spotted what she was pretty sure was one of the people who'd disappeared years ago. Specifically, it was the mobster's accountant, a guy by the name of Walter Ford.
Zipping forward to the proper day, Carolyn, Adam (a local politician who's a Judge), and Diane (a Visionary) and went to the soup kitchen to find the undead man sitting there staring into a cup of coffee. They identified him, indicated they knew about him, and decided to have a chat with him. The group's Avenger (Jack) and two Martyrs (Matt and Ricky) tried to catch up to them to put the zombie out of its misery, but the first three were a little too quick at first. They drove him to a cheap motel to put him up for a while in exchange for a little discussion about how he came to be and how to do something about the guy that led to his apparent resurrection-- Tolino. The rest managed to catch up with them after they found out how he'd been killed and that he was trying to track down his family.
There was a confrontation outside the motel room where it was made very clear that Ricky wanted the zombie destroyed before anyone got hurt. Adam quietly turned on his cell phone and dialed 911 and tried to catch enough of the conversation (and throwing in leading comments of his own to indicate a location) to get the police there. Ricky, realizing that the cops weren't going to just let them back off, started acting as if drunk and a little out of it and gave himself up so try and get everyone else out of being dragged down to the station. Before leaving, he wrote the Martyr symbol on his palm with a pen and put it up against the window.
Adam got Walter to change motels, giving him something of a head start. He and the others went back to the university, to do some digging around (research-wise) to find Ford's family and some more digging (literal) to check for any more of those bodies.
They found out that his wife lives in Clarksburg now and that his son is a Business major at Fairmont State University. They also found some more remains in one of the spots where they're supposedly replacing some gas lines.
At one point Matt managed to contact the guy from the radio before, Josh, and they had a talk about the incident to which Josh was referring when he said that he got someone killed. In a nutshell, he explained that a rumor he started led a girl he went to college with to drive in a panic to her boyfriend's house. On the way, though, she lost control of her car and was killed in a subsequent wreck. While he'd been acquitted of being responsible in criminal court, a civil trial pretty much wiped out most of the money that his family had set aside for his education. There weren't any obvious connections, and Matt asked Josh about his 'calling.'
Josh described the event for him again and was shown some photographs of people who disappeared... he distinctly identified one, a secretary named Carla Jenkins, as being the woman who put two security guards in traction. He very nearly had a breakdown at the sight of the photo, being greatly disturbed by the reminder of the encounter.
While all this was going on, Ricky was sitting in a holding cell for a few hours, not sure who to contact as he didn't have anyone's number. While he was there, though, he happened to see Carla Jenkins walk in and hand an envelope of money to one of the policemen guarding the holding cells. He tried to get her attention, at least getting her to pause briefly when he called her by her real name (while a guard commented that as far as he knew her name was 'Willie' Seward).
While he was in there, Adam showed up to press charges of attempted assault against Ricky (as Ricky had an axe with him when picked up, which the police confiscated). Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen.
Back at the university later as they were wrapping up some research, a small series of explosions rocked the campus. Someone, it seemed, had set off some devices in the engineering building (which was being renovated). The group saw two people on the roof fighting, and one fell off and crumbled to dust like the zombies they'd seen before. He had with him, a backpack filled with what seemed to be a scorched, homemade bible and a number of switchblades.
They went back to Matt's nearby apartment to figure out what was going on, when gunshots could be heard outside. They went back outside to find out that someone had carjacked a car and put a brick on the accelerator with it aimed up the hill towards the engineering building. The guy then put a few bullets into the back of it as it went, although it didn't quite make it up the hill on its own. The guy had taken off, and Jack chased after him. Jack managed to catch up and had a short discussion with him, but told everyone else had gotten back that he wasn't able to find him.
Also, Adam (I think it was Adam) found a symbol stitched into the backpack...
There's more, but I actually have to head out for a bit. So I'll wrap things up with a second gaming post about the Forsaken tabletop game from this past weekend a little later.
Okay, where we left off, the Throng was waking up after some rest and getting ready to try and find the map. They took a taxi (no longer risking anything on busses) to a college campus with an open computer lab and spent about an hour and a half digging through atlases online and off to find the location depicted in the map (a couple of the players couldn't make it because of the scheduling wasteland between Christmas and New Year's, so we just said that they were researching elsewhere). Thanks to some landmarks visible in it, they were able to figure out that the map depicted a chunk of Waco, Texas. Specifically, there was an area in the center of the area called Odell Auto Parts. Nothing about it seemed to involve the number 126, though.
But it was obvious that whatever was to happen next, something was awaiting the group in Waco.
The trick was how to get there. They might have had just enough cash to maybe get Greyhound tickets for the group. Traveling via plane was discussed, but there was a general resistance to the notion. At one point, the quote from my previous post was shared with the group...
Steve Rogers: "The last time I was on a plane, I fell out."
Of course, they might have been able to make it just fine, because Ander has something of a saved up source of cash available... but his player was one of the ones who couldn't make it. Whoops.
Steve was all for just mugging people for enough money to travel by bus, while Rudolf refused to go that route. At one point they talked about demanding some sort of compensation from the vampires they'd previously met. The argument about how to get the money went around in circles until Rudolf pretty much threw his hands up and they decided to split up, get the cash, and meet up later at the house.
Steve tried picking pockets, but that wound up turning more into a couple of muggings-- including one where his target pulled a knife on him and wound up with some holes in him. Jack just lifted a guy's wallet in the French Quarter with no problems. Rudolf went scavenging through the still-ruined areas of the city for stuff he could fix up and sell pretty quickly, like copper plumbing and the like. He managed to make a few bucks off of it.
They went ahead and spent some of their money on supplies... Rudolf bought enough cheap canned food to keep them all fed comfortably for what I think was a week and a half or so, but I'll have to check with Sean on that as I seem to have forgotten to write down the exact amounts. He also picked up some shovel handles to make into large, spear-like stakes in order to deal with the vampires later. Jack took it upon himself to get some clean clothes, and Steve managed to track down a very inexpensive used vehicle that might be able to get them to Waco without exploding... a VW Bus.
They gathered back together at Gino's house. When Steve pulled up in the Bus, it was pretty obvious that they wouldn't need Greyhound tickets any longer to get where they needed to go. Before they left, though, they still wanted to settle things with the vampires.
They went to the house where they'd encountered the Baron before, and pounded on the door for a bit. One of those little sliding-door things opened in the door, and someone on the other side (as near as they could tell, one of the flunkies that brought them to the building earlier) asked them what they wanted. They told him what they were after, and he shut the door. He returned a few moments later and told them in so many words to piss off.
Now, this was getting to be a bit much for them... Rudolf and Steve both had to make checks for Torment... Rudolf managed to hold it off, but Steve lost it. He began pounding incessantly on the door until the sliding hatch opened up and a shotgun barrel poked through it. He grabbed the barrel and shoved hard enough that he was apparently able to hit the guy in the head. Steve then ripped the door off to find the guy waiting with the shotgun.
Rudolf and Jack waited outside the door with the spears just in case the guy ran out. There was a battle in the hallway just inside the building, and both Rudolf and Jack both stood by and watched as although he took a few point-blank shotgun blasts Steve was able to thoroughly kill the 'vampire,' (actually a ghoul) and gratuitously cut out his eyes. Jack, for just standing by and watching this, achieved a major milestone for himself in the process... "Allow someone to befall a terrible fate, refusing to interfere rather than help." (I'll put up a definitive list of these somewhere in a filtered post)
The session left off with Rudolf taking the dead guy's stuff and insisting on charging in to give the Baron a piece of his mind once and for all, and discovering some strange instincts concerning the 'preservation' of dead bodies in the process...
The Hunter LARP was another one focused pretty heavily on research and social interaction. During the week, a few folks had checked out some other sites by the construction company to see if any of the others had had any associated zombie outbreaks. They found bodies that had been disposed and buried, but none of them were rising again. Carolyn (a Redeemer), while volunteering at the local soup kitchen, spotted what she was pretty sure was one of the people who'd disappeared years ago. Specifically, it was the mobster's accountant, a guy by the name of Walter Ford.
Zipping forward to the proper day, Carolyn, Adam (a local politician who's a Judge), and Diane (a Visionary) and went to the soup kitchen to find the undead man sitting there staring into a cup of coffee. They identified him, indicated they knew about him, and decided to have a chat with him. The group's Avenger (Jack) and two Martyrs (Matt and Ricky) tried to catch up to them to put the zombie out of its misery, but the first three were a little too quick at first. They drove him to a cheap motel to put him up for a while in exchange for a little discussion about how he came to be and how to do something about the guy that led to his apparent resurrection-- Tolino. The rest managed to catch up with them after they found out how he'd been killed and that he was trying to track down his family.
There was a confrontation outside the motel room where it was made very clear that Ricky wanted the zombie destroyed before anyone got hurt. Adam quietly turned on his cell phone and dialed 911 and tried to catch enough of the conversation (and throwing in leading comments of his own to indicate a location) to get the police there. Ricky, realizing that the cops weren't going to just let them back off, started acting as if drunk and a little out of it and gave himself up so try and get everyone else out of being dragged down to the station. Before leaving, he wrote the Martyr symbol on his palm with a pen and put it up against the window.
Adam got Walter to change motels, giving him something of a head start. He and the others went back to the university, to do some digging around (research-wise) to find Ford's family and some more digging (literal) to check for any more of those bodies.
They found out that his wife lives in Clarksburg now and that his son is a Business major at Fairmont State University. They also found some more remains in one of the spots where they're supposedly replacing some gas lines.
At one point Matt managed to contact the guy from the radio before, Josh, and they had a talk about the incident to which Josh was referring when he said that he got someone killed. In a nutshell, he explained that a rumor he started led a girl he went to college with to drive in a panic to her boyfriend's house. On the way, though, she lost control of her car and was killed in a subsequent wreck. While he'd been acquitted of being responsible in criminal court, a civil trial pretty much wiped out most of the money that his family had set aside for his education. There weren't any obvious connections, and Matt asked Josh about his 'calling.'
Josh described the event for him again and was shown some photographs of people who disappeared... he distinctly identified one, a secretary named Carla Jenkins, as being the woman who put two security guards in traction. He very nearly had a breakdown at the sight of the photo, being greatly disturbed by the reminder of the encounter.
While all this was going on, Ricky was sitting in a holding cell for a few hours, not sure who to contact as he didn't have anyone's number. While he was there, though, he happened to see Carla Jenkins walk in and hand an envelope of money to one of the policemen guarding the holding cells. He tried to get her attention, at least getting her to pause briefly when he called her by her real name (while a guard commented that as far as he knew her name was 'Willie' Seward).
While he was in there, Adam showed up to press charges of attempted assault against Ricky (as Ricky had an axe with him when picked up, which the police confiscated). Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen.
Back at the university later as they were wrapping up some research, a small series of explosions rocked the campus. Someone, it seemed, had set off some devices in the engineering building (which was being renovated). The group saw two people on the roof fighting, and one fell off and crumbled to dust like the zombies they'd seen before. He had with him, a backpack filled with what seemed to be a scorched, homemade bible and a number of switchblades.
They went back to Matt's nearby apartment to figure out what was going on, when gunshots could be heard outside. They went back outside to find out that someone had carjacked a car and put a brick on the accelerator with it aimed up the hill towards the engineering building. The guy then put a few bullets into the back of it as it went, although it didn't quite make it up the hill on its own. The guy had taken off, and Jack chased after him. Jack managed to catch up and had a short discussion with him, but told everyone else had gotten back that he wasn't able to find him.
Also, Adam (I think it was Adam) found a symbol stitched into the backpack...
There's more, but I actually have to head out for a bit. So I'll wrap things up with a second gaming post about the Forsaken tabletop game from this past weekend a little later.
