Libra, Sessions 4 & 5

Last time, the wizard freaks went to a party and really harshed the vibe. 

This week, things got worse. The grey-market eigenpharmaceuticals company Kanopy had entered into open war with the children of the Vampire's Head, but the PCs have decided to ignore this for now. Instead, they split up - Joe Normal heads to the local OSIRIS station, CATERPILLAR to try and persuade them to stay hands-off as the city explodes, while Toka and the Finance Optimizer take a break to go hunt down the necromancer. 

In the ruins of the necromancer's house they find his mentor, the talking skull [Charles? Camouflage? Correction? literally any word starting with C - the PCs have studiously ignored his name], who laughs about his idiot student - I don't need anyone stupid enough to burn their own house down as an apprentice... which means I have a position open, especially if you bring me a body... 

Joe Normal sees the body of the Vampire's Head get loaded into OSIRIS storage, picks up the coordinates of the City Bug nest, and hears about an "anomaly" that happens to line up exactly where the Templar first awoke, then heads out from CATERPILLAR to meet up with the others, who have found enough clues in the trashed house to pinpoint the necromancer's car (with a little help from Joe Normal's tap into the traffic cameras) and guess at his harebrained scheme to kill the U.S. president, the immortal Abraham Lincoln (don't worry about it). 

A short car chase later, the necromancer and his one (1) skeleton are obliterated. Problem solvlem. The PCs shrug, decide they have free time (still not worrying about the active shootouts between the vampires and Kanopy) and run off to poke around in Templar's birthplace(?), a 5-story apartment building. 

A 5-story apartment building with only 3 different people inside, copied and copied to fill the rooms, and with a staircase up to the sixth... floor... above the roof... and a door that opens to a round room of brightly-polished steel and strangely-proportioned, inhuman spacesuits. 

 The PCs wandered through round rooms, past cylinders scrolling with text in unknown language, past wall-sized touchscreens with targeting reticles over Philadelphia buildings, and into a cryobay where they found a sleeping creature, 10 feet of fur and teeth and wild, burning eyes - just like Templar. 

Eventually they oopsed and poked enough buttons to turn on the ship and awakened the space marine, then immediately stole his armor while he stumbled, cryosick and deeply confused, to the ship's bridge. PCs scattered across the ship - Joe Normal learning how to walk in stolen power armor, Toka throwing herself into the UFO's augmentation bay to get her skeleton reinstalled, Valrel winding up stuck in the singularity core, and the other two locked in the ship's bridge asking stupid questions to the space marine and the newly-awakened Grey bridge crew. 

louie zong

 

Around the time Toka slid out of the augmentation bay, newly Templar-ized, the PCs realized that being separated by irising steel doors and increasingly frustrated aliens was, maybe, a bad thing. So, Joe Normal gave Templar a phone call, crammed his phone next to the power armor's microphone, shut the visor, and had Templar lie fast in the peeping alien language while Joe collected the other PCs (with some help from the Finance Optimizer locking doors and shutting off lights, when necessary). Then, all collected in the space marine drop pod bay, and with the floor enticingly open, they decided to suplex one of the aliens off the ship with them and run.

Between interrogating their new free alien and looking through Toka's new 500 years of spacewar experience, they learned some stuff about the alien colonizing empire (that they mostly ignored after "alien colonizing empire") and decided they didn't like the sound of "alien colonizing empire" - so, they had the Finance Optimizer shut off the whole ship, including the containment for its core.

Oh. Oops. The core.

A black hole bloomed over Pennsylvania. 

Analysis

New change to the Infraspatial - the 10-foot radius of no fire or electricity was a huge inconvenience and a pain in the neck to remember, so it's now an active ability: "You can focus on an electrical device or a fire to shut it down as long as your focus is maintained. Firing pins hit primers and do nothing, computers crash instantly, cars stall. The same effect radiates from Lawful demons - a stilling of the world." 

This is mostly an improvement, though "if you can see the whole thing you can focus on the whole thing" was probably not the best precedent to set (see: the UFO exploding), but eeeeeehhhhhh, this isn't a game intensely focused on balance. 

Necromancy from the skull, space marine-ness from the UFO, and the full vampirism are all unlocked as 2-template prestige classes - I don't currently plan to post them, because while they aren't direct rips of pre-existing classes, they're extremely derivative (of Locheil's Necromancer, deus ex parabola's Cloudskater, and Gokun's Vampire, respectively). 

I think, between the open war, the microsingularity, the City Bugs, and the assassination plot, the campaign's about to pivot a bit. The local OSIRIS presence in Pennsylvania has been "Weights & Measures", an investigation-focused division with a reliance on "Haruspex" psychics. This isn't really working out for them (especially since the head Haruspex died in a друг-orchestrated freak car accident) - they'll soon be replaced by Orbital Mechanics, or Thermodynamics, or some other, blunter, option. Next session will probably begin with the City Bug nest being destroyed by airstrikes.