Considerata

Another city for deus ex parabola's superhero/cyberpunk GLOG.

Considerata is an unincorporated community, welded inescapably to Las Vegas, the real city worth mentioning. At night, it is empty - its population drained into Vegas for work. During the day, it sleeps, and suffers through the unending drought. 

Before it was a city, it was a testing range. In the northern half, closest to the Air Force base, people still live in 1950s facade-houses, meant to be torn down by atomic force.

Major Factions

Consolidated Guild of Actors, Stage Performers, and Magicians

A Martial-specced superhuman throws a knife over his head, and a second through the first, and on and on and on. Then he steps to the side, and down falls a statue of him, made of merged steel. It's a job, if you can't find anything better to do. 

Along with the rest of their work, the Guild picked up the contract for citywide defense in Vegas - and they abhor a scab. In Vegas, independent heroic-types are liable to get their house burned down in an hour or less; in Considerata, you're still under their jurisdiction, but further from their eyes. Keep your head down.

They hold on to some dozen low-level superheroes - primarily "perigons", Brawn/Durable/Martial splits with powers like "fights good" and "doesn't die when you shoot them, probably".

Kangaroo Rats

I Re takes half the water - Las Vegas takes the rest. Everyone else dies. Lake Mead is empty. The Colorado River has a cement bed and a reflective cover to minimize losses to the earth and the air. 

New branches sprout from the Colorado - some for collection, into dusty plastic buckets. Some for spite, draining into cracked ground. If we have to suffer, they can too.

Red Ring (Martial I, Weird - projects circular forcefields in front of his hands and whacks them around like a paddleball) is a known member (according to the FBI, who are insistent that this is a regimented group with "members" and "leadership") - in hiding somewhere after crashing stolen construction equipment through the Colorado's roof.

Hermes Trismegistus

1700 years old. Within his line of sight, he can turn any material into any other. Lead to gold, air to chlorine. He ruled Vegas, for a while - Magister Ludi, king of games. The last remnants of the Mob are still out for his head; they shoved him out of Vegas a decade ago, and now they wait for him to step out of his platinum-iridium palace, down in one of the old test site craters.

He'll rule again, come hell or high water.

[redacted]

SUVs with tinted windows and no license plates go down to the river in the dark, full of masked men and LED-studded equipment. 

Independent Freaks

The Vampire

Survivor of a plane crash in the Yukon. Lived for months on meltwater and force of will. Unusually fast (30 MPH, short sprints at 60) flight, though it requires her to take a particular rigid pose. Perfect control of body temperature - provides utility benefits (immunity to hypothermia, invisibility to thermal sensors), and both negative and positive peaks cause her to deal 1d6 damage on contact (via frostbite or burns, respectively). 

Spider Eater II

A superhero from the future, who came back to kill the past version of himself. He did, and, somehow, still exists. Flies, radiates cones of invisible grinding force that turn things to dust, has useless knowledge of the future corrupted by the death of Spider Eater I. Really wishes people would call him something else.

Dead Zone

10 foot radius of complete silence. Increased speed and agility. 12.7mm anti-materiel rifle.

Oasis-Cities of the Megastructure (Lanthanide Horizon)

You walk the path to Vyeku Proxy Tekha, member of the nomenklatura, the contending-class. You walk it first in trepidation, then in terror, then in resolve - your tin fingertip-covers click against the handle of your knife. He deserves it.

First, into the city, over the red-and-violet mosaic that marks its border (for the city has a border, and the men of the city say they need no wall to protect it), then into the favored-district, where the houses are tiled and plastered instead of painted metal, and the street glows with a calming light, then through Vyeku's gate, past the brass statues of his father, his grandmother, his brother (taken far too early), still clothed and fed as well as he.

When you see him - running a hand across the cheek of the statue of his wife - and he sees you, you feel that telltale click in your hindbrain and watch that telltale symbol (who could say what it means, except for the presence of your patron) flash before your eyes as your heart leaps with joy.

You pull out your knife - and then hand it to him by the hilt. You could never do anything else.

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At the peak, the hedrarchs, fountains of food and water, who take all goods into the bureaucracy of the palace economy to be distributed to those below. 

Below them, the nomenklatura, those who have passed their civil service examinations and become eligible for election to the hedrarchy. Subjects of the system of names - their ration set individually by the hedrarchs, to reward and punish. (Among the nomenklatura, the Proxies, legally identical to those they represent.)

At the base (apart from foreigners), the citizenry, who give fealty to their favored nomen in votes, in corvee labor, and in military service in exchange for patronage in goods - for the tribute to the citizen class is thin - and favors. (Among the citizens, the Sworn, prosthetic armigers given new limbs and strange weapons stolen from the machines of the world in exchange for lifelong service.)

These chains of patronage radiate downwards - hedrarchs summon individual supporters in the nomenklatura to rouse their subordinate nomen, and them to raise their citizen-levies. 

Source

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To foreigners, it is your modifications that make you recognizable. Augmentation - lacquered steel limbs and glittering golden eyes - is not ubiquitous, but is common enough to mark you. One alteration, however, is universal, or near enough - a click in the hindbrain. Complete conscious control of emotion.

Firstly, control of your own - it takes a second too long for your face to contort in rage as you seek the dial and tune it to what you desire.

Secondly, for the nomenklatura, control of your clients'. A scale to weigh their hearts.

Among the Navigators (who the northern Oases, like the vast city Lightning-in-Amber, see on their yearly pilgrimages, or when they come to collect their salt-and-electrical-component payment for mercenary service) this power is called "telepathy" - and their modernizing factions dream of it. 

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Sworn (generic): 5 HD, AC 18, 2 DR, two attacks with bare hands at +4 2d8 + superhuman combat maneuver. Their arms and legs are too long, cast in gold and aluminum, engraved and lacquered.

Sworn armor/prosthetic complexes are unique (coming with not only the generic statblock, but with heart-seeking javelins, irradiating curselights, and so forth), named, and inherited - their nerve hasps have felt the touch of innumerable forebears. Recovery of Sworn bodies is paramount, and often features as the inciting incident of their wars and war-stories.

Swarms of prosthetists surround them, pulling off limbs to tune and retune, replace motors, solder wires, apply unguents and oils. Without constant maintenance, nerves delaminate and contacts rot.

Best Case Scenario Mission - INTERSECT BINARY WAVES [O-E]

Player Intro

A dozen unstable psychics, recovered from the ruins of the Center for Coordination [see archival documents SECOND HAND CLOCK/PIKES GATHER SUNFLOWERS/SYNTHETIC TOMORROWS AWAIT] must be delivered, alive, to a holding/burial facility in Denver, Colorado, operating beneath HealthOne Mountain Ridge.

Two armored vans have been provided - van 1 holds 4 telekinetic, 2 intrusively-telepathic, and 2 energetic/pyrokinetic subjects. These eight are sedated - however, due to the increased metabolism of psychic subjects, they are expected to awaken immediately if sedative injection is interrupted. IV glucose has also been provided, to ensure none of them starve during delivery. Foil helmet-inserts have also been provided, to dampen telepathic interference.

Van 2 contains four biofeedback-specialized psychics. These subjects cannot be sedated due to their immunity to medicines and poisons, and are thus only physically restrained.

Your drive goes just fine, up until you notice the garbage truck flying down a side road at 60 miles an hour…

The Ambush

    Garbage truck “A” - stops side-on in the middle of Pearl St. in an attempt to block the frontmost of the agents’ vans. Assuming all goes well, 2 occupants (soft-armored and rifle-armed driver and front-seat passenger) throw smoke grenades over van 1, then approach while a pair of hard-armored LMG soldiers hop out the back and keep the vans under suppression. The riflemen then cut through the back door with torches and start pulling out psychics’ sedative IVs. Early warning or really sick driving may let van 1 avoid this trap - thus its superposition on the map.

    Garbage truck “B” - flies up the street at 60 and gladly impacts van 2, assuming the biofeedback-specialists will survive. Another team of 4, all soft-armored shotgunners, move to open it. 

Psychic Statistics

All are as average humans except otherwise stated. Psychic Potential rolls are on 1d6 - the result is both the [sum] of the psychic ability (as GLOG spells) and treated as an Attack against the psychic using it. Effects of wounds and death from these attacks occur after the psychic ability is resolved.

Telekinetics can make a Psychic Potential roll to throw [sum]*200 pounds of matter at 30 miles an hour. Assume agents weigh 200 pounds, and cars 3000. Telekinetics can cooperate to lift weights equal to the total of their rolls. Throwing an agent is an attack, as is throwing an agent-sized object at an agent. Dropping a car on someone kills them instantly.

Telepaths take over [sum] people for a [sum] minute duration. As long as they’re wearing helmets, pawns are only assaulted with whispers and shifting shadows in the corners of their eyes. Civilians have no such protections.

Pyrokinetics set [sum] people or objects On Fire. Agents who are On Fire are attacked every turn until they do something about it. When an agent dies of being on fire, if they had any grenades in their inventory they detonate from overheating.

Biofeedback turns psychic potential inside-out, into the body. For [sum/2] rounds their speed and jump distance is tripled, they can run on walls, and they can make two attacks a round (even unarmed, biofeedback specialists can attack without penalty). For this duration, the specialist is immune to injury and death - on a 6, their head may explode, but they won’t stop moving until time runs out. If you miss, it’s because they caught the bullet.

Freak People (Gateway GLOG)

Now that I'm headed down the road of "running" "a campaign" again, I returned to Gateway, my scheme for a pick-up game to play with the one or two people who are guaranteed to show up when the rest of my players flake. 

While poking at it I realized - what's the point of an overly-colorful, largely non-serious Fantasy Setting™ without the opportunity to play as some variety of nonhuman weirdo? I normally lean towards all-human settings, but Gateway is, as much as it's anything, a winking revival of the way I wrote in 2017; powered purely by half-memories of 3.5e homebrew websites.

And thus - freak people.

1. Human
They sure are.

Reroll nothing.

Benefit: keep a 2nd item between sessions.

that's it. i don't know what to tell you. go get a job.

2. Ogre
Some say every ogre is the reincarnation of a saint from ages past.

Reroll STR and take the higher.

Benefit: put a * next to your STR score. Roll checks with it only for superhuman tasks (picking a guy up and hucking him like a catapult, benchpressing a car, crashing through a stone wall).

Drawback: you must fail a STR check to not immediately destroy pathetic human items (doors, levers, tools, pets) when interacting with them. Your soul is immense - you glow like the sun to anyone who can see them.

3. Millisecond Dragon
Each of the 23 hours of the day has a grand dragon for a living avatar - and it continues downward, with dragons of half-hours and minutes and seconds and tenths-of-a-second and so forth becoming more humanoid as their domains shorten.

Reroll DEX and take the higher.

Benefit: once a session, shoot a 3d6 damage cone of either ice (for the pinkish-orange brood of the dragons of the Dawn), fire (for the sky-blue brood of the dragons of Noon) or lightning (for the purple brood of the Dusk). Probably best used to melt through steel, make ice platforms, or do some other OSR puzzle gibberish.

Drawback: save or pick up shiny objects.

4. Cultivator
Bug-men of the prismatic wastelands to the west of Gateway, emerging from their holes to see what all the fuss is about.

Reroll CON and take the higher.

Benefit: burrow through soil as fast as a person walks, climb walls at running speed.

Drawback: bright light provokes a save vs. fear.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1d9X - yes this is the same picture i used for cultivators in 2018 we already agreed that i get to be lazy with gateway

5. Elf
Immortal(?), meditative wanderers of the desert of ice.

Reroll INT and take the higher.

Benefit: around your neck is an amulet, holding the soul of a parent, a favored aunt, a friend from the army, or so on. As long as you wear it, you can speak with the dead. If you shatter it, the soul within possesses a target of your choice, then escapes to the afterlife. You could still speak with the dead - but all they would do is howl.

Drawback: dogs and other domesticated animals attack you on sight.

6. Visitor
Honestly, nobody knows what your deal is. Worshipers of living iron stars, they say. 5 feet tall and stick-thin, covered in multicolored scale-petals and ridged patterns.

Reroll WIS and take the higher.

Benefit: once per session, release petal-dust that forces all nearby to Save versus murderous wrath.
 
Drawback: when startled, save versus doing the aforementioned. (doesn't count towards your limit, at least)

7. Myconid
A statuesque social form of the Motherland, sent to aid that vast fungus's geopolitical ambitions.

Reroll CHA and take the higher.

Benefit: your mycelial form is silent when walking or falling. You never make any sound you did not intend.

Drawback: once, when it is least convenient, your sleeper agent programming will switch on.

Vibechete! Play Report & (small) Review

Vibechete! is a Mothership adventure written by Joel Hines as part of Hull Breach. 

It's the 50th anniversary the accident that closed the orbital Hodder Forest Reserve - a favorite rave spot for plutocrat failscions and trust-fund drifters; and what better way to celebrate than to break in? All the CONDEMNED tape over the airlock doors is just for show, I'm certain.

Our PCs are:

Wavey Deshong, successful plum brandy mogul, with his retinue (tennis coach and tennis coach-bot B.B. Fingers and CS 38-874 [Casper], and clone-daughter/organ donor/erstwhile final girl Caitlin)

and the Dass Malangar twins, Mary the accelerationist and Andy the joyrider, with their pair of butlers, Sammy and Old Cynic. 

The eight of them (I may have gotten a bit overenthusiastic with Ian Yusem's funnel rules) have spent weeks on the yacht Scorpio Rising, bombarded with hideous dino synth in one ear and the endless chatter of NPCs (who I more or less immediately forget about, due to the... eight PCs) in the other.

Unsurprisingly, when the ship docks, they're more than happy to get away from the noise and spread out through the Reserve's habitat dome, engaging in a mixed itinerary of mild vandalism and corporate politics - B.B. wanders off to an abandoned cabin, arm-in-arm with a third son of some chemical company, while Wavey does his best to set his clone-daughter into a marriage with Yvette, soon to be inheritor of a printed-architecture firm... at least, until the lights go out, and Yvette disappears.

There are long minutes before the emergency lights switch on - and when they do, B.B. hears footsteps outside his cabin...

Oh, nevermind, it's just Casper.

Fortunately, androids have no fear of "blood loss", "shock", or other such biological foibles - as the vibechete slithers out of his chest, Casper turns and jabs the handle of his tennis racket into his attacker's face...plate. It bounces off the glass of an antique spacesuit's helmet just a second before B.B.'s own tennis racket cracks it, sending the killer fleeing.

On the other side of the habitat, Mary and Caitlin have a stuttering, blushing conversation about current events

 

 

until B.B., Jasper, and Whoever the NPC crash through the underbrush to complain about "being stabbed". 

Wavey declares that, clearly, a team should be sent out after the killer, and, clearly, he shouldn't be a part of it. After some spirited complaining, 5 of the PCs follow Casper's integrated bioscanner into the ominous woods, where a bloodied piece of Yvette's shirt dangles from an equally ominous branch, ominously.

The bioscanner pings movement - B.B. throws a rock into the canopy, and mildly annoys the killer before they fall out of a tree like a pile of bricks, burying the machete into B.B's shoulder. The PCs spend a turn ineffectually kicking at the slasher's armored suit as they drag their weapon through B.B.'s chest - and then the PCs decide, "welp, nothing we can do for him now" and flee. 

After picking up the other PCs, they swarm back into the docking bay; only to find it closed by the emergency lockdown. Jittering holographic signs demand CONTROL ROOM OVERRIDE and SIMULTANEOUSLY REACTIVATE BACKUP GENERATORS - and, somehow, Casper's scanner picks up two people already in the hangar bay with them; one hidden beneath the Scorpio Rising, the other inside.

The ping under the ship vanishes as the killer descends Scorpio Rising's ramp... and is immediately mobbed by seven PCs and beaten into surrender. Their shattered helmet is pulled off to reveal... woah, it's Yvette, the only NPC that the GM remembered to introduce into the game at all! Who could've guessed!

Yvette is made fun of, her machete is stolen, and while she is explicitly kept alive she immediately falls into the Memory Hole where every non-immediately-murderous NPC lives in perfect harmony.

(This marked the end of our first session - surprising, since text games tend to move rather slowly)

Dragging Yvette behind them, the crew descends into the Reserve's service tunnels, seeking backup generators. 

They are, in fact, literally right next to each other - the first generator's room is empty, apart from an envelope of "worker's demands", and the second is empty, apart from a machete-armed killer in a spacesuit. 

Hey, wait a minute.

The second slasher grabs poor Old Cynic and impales him on the generator's crank as thrown brandy bottles and lunchboxes rattle off their helmet - and then, once more, the PCs abandon one of their own... except for Wavey, who cowers in a corner under his fashionable, color-changing suit until the killer gets bored of watching Old Cynic die. 

Soon reunited and re-generatored, the crew shrugs and decides that fighting the first axe murderer went fine, so we can probably(?) just beat up this one too(?) - so they send Casper, bioscanner'd, to hunt for them. 

Casper is immediately caught by the killer, thrown into a cryopod, and ejected into space. Welp.

While Wavey starts an argument over nothing with most of the surviving PCs, Caitlin and Mary kick in the door to another room - one with an enormous hole into space barely covered up with plastic wrap and caution tape, a hundred hands hanging from the ceiling, and a big ol' "integrated jaunt pad" humming in the center.

They decide this is a perfect place for a cute romantic bit, and then Mary hops onto the jaunt pad and explodes, telefragged by the slasher. Such is life.

Caitlin throws Yvette's stolen machete through the plastic wrap, venting the room just in time for Andy to gormlessly open the door back to. the hallway. with all the PCs in it.

Everyone except for Wavey is dragged into the void by decompression - but a second from unconsciousness, Wavey manages to slam the door shut, then flee to air. Behind him, the killer teleports back to their jaunt pad and dusts themselves off. 

Wavey's panicked flight eventually leads to the control room - split between a hulking computer terminal and the twin ignition bolts for the Reserve's self-destruct system. The computer gladly overrides the lockdown, then alternates between depositing cookies, apologizing for the slasher's behavior, and demanding Wavey leave - something Wavey has no interest in arguing with. 

Or, well. A bit of interest in arguing with - when their conversation concludes, Wavey takes his cane to the monitor and sets the self-destruct, then crawls through the vents back to the hangar bay - just as the killer emerges from a side door.

Wavey throws everything in his inventory under the slasher's feet, slowing them down just long enough to close the Scorpio Rising's ramp - then the yacht drags itself out of the Reserve, leaving the habitat to die...

Review Bit(?)

Vibechete! was a lot of fun - I wouldn't've written this otherwise. There are places where the care of the designer is evident - each room comes with a couple "ambush tactics" for the killer(s) to jumpscare your PCs with, answering "how do I vary a single monster" and "how do I make sure the GM knows how aggressively to pilot the monster" simultaneously. 

Its bespoke backgrounds are wonderful little jokes (plum brandy mogul, tennis coach, and favorite child's backup clone are all directly from the book) with an (I think optimal) disregard for balance - only three of the 8 PCs were even truly "armed".

I do think it makes some questionable choices for its ending - the facility AI is written in the same section and the same style as the hostile NPCs, but it doesn't do anything until the PCs enter its room near the end of the module, and then it essentially wants the same thing the PCs do - the crew off the station and away from the slasher.

Using both slashers in sequence is the adventure's recommendation, but I think doing that makes the adventure more than a bit repetitive ("after you kill the slasher villain with a machete in a spacesuit, you're attacked by... a slasher villain! With a machete! In a spacesuit!"). The two of them are different - Yvette focuses on mystery, with Yvette appearing without her suit and a set of other NPCs around to spread the blame, while the nameless slasher creates the shameless meatgrinder I ran - but I think the GM should choose which of these they're aiming for, rather than stacking them.

It's an extremely runnable adventure, with a couple interesting twists and a nice fast pace.