City of Cities Actual Play

    Locheil's City of Cities, Iskadar. Built of five lesser settlements bent and stacked atop each other. Temples built atop train tracks atop temples, the homes of the rich looming, bent, above fields of unused fortresses. And pinned under its immeasurable weight, the Guts, where the sun - and the law - barely reach. And inside the Guts, the Hawthorne Autocar Works, staffed now by the Red Tooth mob. And inside the Autocar Works, our PCs:

• Serafim Victorovich, who definitely isn’t a ghoul, no matter what anyone says and how many of his parts fall off.
• Gerome Castaigne, a bundle of star-stolen knowledge somewhere under a pile of matted hair and tacky robes.
• Corvette, a gargoyle “paladin” whose constant meditations let her move things with her mind.
• Ana, veteran of the wars of Hell. Don’t ask which side.
• Zipporah Viterbo, a city-speaking harpy with a knack for doors.
• An armored car, which may not be “alive”, or “a player character”, but really did more to help than anyone else, and deserves a place on the list.
• And, unfortunately, “Pigshit”, some kind of goblin who lives in the vents no matter what anyone tries to do about it.

    This set of walking disasters is under contract to steal a box - though they don’t know what’s inside, the fact that the cops confiscated it when it was imported means it must be worth something, and they’re driving it through the Guts on their way to lock it up.

    The first session is, of course, spent plotting - the cops are taking their car through “Ropewalk Lane” - a winding, tight, generally horrid little road perfect for, as an example, blocking with an armored car on one side, a gargoyle on the other, and every other available goon shooting from the balconies.
    Zipporah’s in with the Dockworker’s Union gets them to happily say exactly what’s in that box (a probably Quite Cursed combination of tome, glass sphere, and golden death mask) and who it’s for - sent from the Duly Elected People’s Government (oligarchic dictatorship) of Haracaa to one “Ialanna Merce”. They also have a record of what the box looks like, so the PCs soon split up even further to go get a copy or twelve made.
    Corvette wanders around bars on the Lane, going on about the wonders of punching cops (which isn’t very hard to persuade people of, with the Great Strike only ending a couple years ago), as step one of inciting a riot when the time comes.
    And then the time comes.
    The van holding the box and its police car escort are blocked by the armored truck - and when the first cop gets out, complete pandemonium. They get Pigshit’s patented bag full of rats over their head as Ana starts shooting from the armored car’s window… once, before taking a round right through the seam and into her ribs.
    As Zipporah’s gun jams, and then jams again, Corvette tears open the back of the van to come face-to-face with a cop in powered armor, whose gun also jams, turning it into a fistfight that Corvette, backed up by a dozen rioters, slowly starts to win.
    Rain freezes on the barrel of Ana’s gun as the cops scatter into doorways and alleys - half of them carrying a surreptitiously tossed rat or two with them, thanks to Pigshit, who then crawls between the power armor’s legs to start searching the van.
    Soon, one cop makes their way to a third-floor balcony, giving Zipporah the chance to jam her gun again, then stumble through an attempted flying tackle, and then get hit on the head with a vase. Fortunately, just then Pigshit finds the box, and Corvette snaps one of the power armor’s legs - but as the players pile into the armored car, one of the cops peeks out of a doorway and asks them if they’re with the Pulps, a local wizard-gang.
    And Zipporah says yes, so the plant hops into the back seat of the armored car as it peels away - and is then, promptly, tied up. The police don’t follow, thanks to a set of spike strips, Corvette tossing the power armor in front of the van, and Ana taking a couple shots at the tires. Unfortunately, when the PCs creep into an alleyway to open up the box (in case it shoots poison darts or something - better to know before the boss gets his hands on it), they’re interrupted by the Pulps’ agent, in a giant kookaburra mask and filthy coat, falling directly onto the car’s roof and demanding his loot.

    Instead, Pigshit gives him a rat, and then a rat, and then when Kookaburra reaches down to grab what is, in fact, a third rat, Gerome tries to shoot him in the hand with a pocket crossbow. Kookaburra does some kind of Wizard Business to cover himself in acidic slime - which protects from the crossbow bolt, but very much does not save him from Ana driving the car under a low bridge and scraping him off.
    Unfortunately, the rest of the Pulps take this as their signal to start chasing with a car of their own, driven by a steel Daedalus war-construct (in a fetching scarf) and followed by a flying harpy, who tries to glue the armored car’s back wheels to the ground using magic before taking a crossbow bolt from Gerome right to the wing joint.
    And then, Corvette leaps from a rooftop to land right in front of the Pulps, takes the hit from the car with only a light… 10… damage, and completely totals it. Then, as the Daedalus and their passenger get out, Ana reverses the armored car right into them.
    Unfortunately, the Daedalus is completely immune to small arms fire - so Gerome ducks into an alleyway to use some Thief Metagame Story Altering Nonsense™: having “already” gotten a smuggler friend of his to hide him a little tool in a nearby alley, in case of some kind of car chase or giant robot - a hand grenade.
    A paper airplane drifts down into the alleyway as Corvette uses her telekinesis to hit the Daedalus with their own car, and then drop it right on top of them, pinning them to the road. Gerome stumbles out of the alleyway (thankful he can keep his grenade for something else) and, for just a moment, reaches out to the paper airplane before running over to steal the Daedalus’s scarf. Which is good, because after he turns to pull the scarf out of the pile of scrap car parts, the airplane unfolds, glows a bright red, and explodes - thankfully damaging no one.
    The second paper airplane, however, airbursts, blowing Corvette’s hand off. And that’s enough to convince the PCs that discretion is the better part of valor.
    Back at the Autocar Works, the PCs are patched up (with the wonderful medicine of “a bunch of old rags” and “grain alcohol”) just in time for the box’s buyer, Ialanna Merce herself, to arrive. Fortunately, she gladly pays extra hazard pay for injuries - and even better, since Gerome has his face covered with his new scarf, and hasn’t yet spoken to her, he can pry an extra 50 crowns from her by simply pretending his jaw’s broken.
    And with that, the job is complete.