Last week, our favorite wizard criminals trashed a hotel, found the Philosopher's Stone, and shot their way out of a police raid. We start this week with our group hiking (having still failed to figure out how to fit the Finance Optimizer into a car without his aura shutting off the engine) to Walmart, where друг promised they'd find a certain car that the voice on the phone wanted them to sabotage.
While Valrel gets distracted by the commercial glories of Walmart and throws her money away on questionable improvised weapons, duct tape, and a bicycle for the Finance Optimizer, Joe Normal climbs under the car and snips one of the brake lines.
He is... somewhat taken aback when both ends of the brake line rear up like cobras, rather taken aback when they start injecting him with brake fluid, extremely taken aback when the car starts moving, and positively confounded when the Finance Optimizer hops on the hood and it doesn't stop.
Valrel finishes her shopping trip just in time to find Toka hacking at the car with a machete, Joe Normal's bike leathers barely stopping him from getting grated on the asphalt, and a 70-something year old man hobbling towards them shouting "Bro! My car!".
When he pulls a toddler-sized ragdoll out from under his coat and sends it skittering at the PCs, Valrel shrugs, takes out a handgun, and shoots him in the back.
Over on the far end of the parking lot, Toka notices a pickup truck barreling towards them, its driver surrounded by a 40-foot Crown marked out in pinkish light. She rolls off of the living car, draws up her anti-material rifle (I don't know where she keeps that thing, to tell you the truth), misses completely, puts a fist-sized hole in a parked car, and then gets run over.
The driver leans out and flashes a perfect smile while he helps Toka up - he and the half-dozen henchmen with baseball bats in the back of the truck are from the House of Musagetes, he says. Worshippers of Apollo in his guise as giver of music and poetry. What're you shooting at us for?
Toka shrugs vaguely and argues that maybe you shouldn't run people over - the cultist laughs it off and then turns to watch Joe, his work done, drop from the living car as it barrels into a streetlight. The House is here for the zôn, the life-energy of the car, so it can be added to their idol of Apollo. друг didn't mention it, so surely he doesn't care about it and you won't mind if we just...
The PCs consider if there's anything they pressingly need to bring to life, decide there isn't, really, and give the House a thumbs-up to pull the zôn, a ticking clockwork thing in a shoebox, out of the car's trunk.
While the cultists peel away in their truck, the PCs turn to the still-living zontanamancer. He sure looks like a wizard - maybe he knows the key to immortality through the Philosopher's Stone?
He doesn't know a thing, but the players have fallen fully into the wizard gangster mindset and decide to use the Stone to turn his hands to gold, in case that makes him a bit more forthcoming. When it doesn't, they go "uhhhhhh...", turn his freak ragdoll to gold to repay him, and then ditch him to go ask the Templar for work.
Fortunately, his magic allows him to shuttle life force into his now-golden hands, so it really didn't do him much harm, I guess.
Analysis
I'm getting closer to getting the thing really spinning - the players are meeting factions, and by the next session the game should just about be running itself as the faction tables get finished. The players seem a bit impatient to get work past the starting jobs from their Patrons - later sessions will start with a pair of faction moves delivered over the grapevine, but I'll probably make a minor job generator for extra Patron work in case I need it.
I also think I'll be stealing the light downtime procedures from Rota Fortunae - there's not much to say about them (70 hours a week, choose how many 10-hour shifts you take during character creation, gain [shifts]d10*10 dollars each week, spend the rest of your time tormenting NPCs and practicing skills and so on) but they're nice to have.
The zontanamancer was just a 4 HP guy with 4 MD and Primeumaton's variation of Animate Object - he was supposed to be a one-off joke character but I'm happy I get to keep using him (and, honestly, kind of amazed the PCs didn't kill anybody). I expect there to be more of these specialized caster NPCs, so (unlike the zontanamancer) I'll have to figure out how I'm doing mishaps and dooms for them. Probably just one of each, based around their spell.
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