Libra, Session 12 - The Finale

Well, here we are. Last time, the players shattered the ontological balance of the universe. 

This session starts with nearly all the PCs booking it - bursting from the door to the Contact Room just in time to see one OSIRIS office worker make a dropped-metal-pipe sound and shoot the guy next to him. The PCs agree that this only confirmed their choice to run. 

Back in the Astral Plane, Joe Normal gets a lecture: 

Your [assassination attempt/reunion] was [appreciated/unsuccessful]. Condolences, OSIRIS employment is not available at this time. Please take [this] pill. [This] will protect you from Office Politics. [They/I/We] will know where [you/we] are. Please dispense of the [child/third law/contraband] as quickly as possible. We are now closed for the winter.

And then gets thrown out to a riot - flaming skeletons escaped from the Thermodynamics incinerators fill the halls, the tiny moon is out of its cell, and CATERPILLAR's guards are too busy shooting each other and dissolving to do a thing about it. He throws himself to the PA, using the voice of the Pyramid to drag the Site Director, a couple psychic liquidators, and the warden of CATERPILLAR's cells to come to him - unfortunately, the Director is dead, and the rest maddened. 

So, he flees, meeting up with the rest of the PCs to navigate around Bad Weather (square zones of perfectly-flat blue sky ruled by the Other Law, surrounded by halos of lightning and inverse gravity where the incompatible physics rubbed up against each other), the Kanopy office building (now site of a dogfight between Thermodynamics fighter-bombers and the Kanopy Loss Prevention Phoenix), and the retreating members of 131 Halley's Comet, Kanopy's private guards.

As the city collapses, they call Templar - surely he'd have a safe place to st... nevermind, he's in a fistfight with a tank. Great. After the party helps with that problem, Satan takes his five minutes of Valrel's soul - using her vampiric hypnosis to drag Templar away and force him to consign his soul to Hell.

Or, at least, that was the plan - Joe Normal said "OK. Valrel just said she was going to apologize to Templar for all the bombings and murder and so forth. However, she's straight-up evil and power-hungry, so this is clearly some kind of scheme. I want in on the scheme." and sent his demon-fractal to eavesdrop. 

This, technically, if you squint, violated the "private conversation" part of the vampire's hypnosis - so Satan made a remarkably short-sighted decision, pulled out a gun, and shot the demon in the forehead. When the wizard freaks heard a gunshot from the alley with no one in it except for the evil vampire and the perfect paladin, they went "hm!" and arrived just in time to wrench the soul-selling contract out of Templar's hands.

Satan considered for a second, then shrugged "welp!" and ended his tenancy. There'll always be another chance.  

A couple more ducked gunfights and the PCs made it back home - ready to awaken the Philosopher's Stone both for its own benefit, and also because they expected the chunk of Black Metal to be the [child/third law/contraband] warned of by the Pyramid. They had already figured out "boil a thing that cannot be heated or cooled" (vacuum chamber), and within a few minutes have bloomed the stone in vaporized Black Metal, fueled its inner light with surrendered MD, and made homunculi out of suits of armor, OSIRIS combat aides, and mannequins.  

Outside, the city crumbles - but nothing lasts forever. OSIRIS quiets in a few weeks - running out of ammunition and targets, then being suppressed by non-Lawful sections of the American military. When the Pyramid resolidifies, OSIRIS remains shattered into regional testing sites, militias, and wandering Theurges. 99% of its membership is dead. It's strange days ahead for the occult underground.  

Epilogues

• Joe Normal wanders America as the Pyramid's messenger, patching OSIRIS back together from the ruins. Someday, when the other Lawful organizations are merged with his, he plans to inaugurate the Statistical Topography division; a new section of OSIRIS focused on finding and fusing more lost Pyramids. 
• Moon Dan reaches the end of the indestructible hamster subplot I never mentioned, and begins mass production of such things.  
• Toka remains at the right hand of Templar as monsters swarm the law-struck earth. 
• Valrel runs for Senate - vampire politics is pretty rough these days, let's try some human politics instead.
• The Finance Optimizer really tries some human politics - having already succeeded in accumulating the wealth of the world, he institutes a conspiracy to manipulate world governments to increase long-term economic growth. The chance of this descending into paperclip-maximization is... worryingly high.
• The psychic, who showed up at the 11th hour for a couple sessions, was also here. They never got a name, to my memory, let alone a backstory. I bet they'll turn out fine. 

Analysis 

Ough. 

I tend to run games on a short timeline - I made the first post for Rota Fortunae on May 20th and started running it on the 28th, for instance. I did the same for Libra, but unlike Rota Fortunae or Go Away, Libra required classes, patrons, equipment kits, and so on. The time I would have used building prep was used hammering away at the player's document (unsuccessfully! I never finished the planned-for new Wizard!). 

This, along with being overall busy (a strange and unnatural state) meant running Libra was kind of stressful - most of my prep decayed into blindly hammering tiny evil labs together the hour before a session. Faction moves fell away, I had no useful prep tools or generators, et cetera. 

I consider this (along with having no Go Away-like central goal) to be the root of all the other problems I've been complaining about - or at least, as one of the reasons I failed to solve them.

Libra, as presented here, is honestly uninteresting to me as a setting. I don't plan to run it again - if I wanted this kind of high-action freak comedy I'd've been better off with one of my superhero games, and if I wanted a stolid conspiracy-and-evil-psychics campaign I'd be better off slowing down with some Delta Green. This is pinned, tonelessly, in the middle. 

Play report posting will return with Not My Destination sometime in May (Libra's finally gotten me to slow down and do some prep beforehand, else I'd be doing it sooner), and with a less doomed vibe. 

gaming :) 

Libra, Sessions 10 & 11

Last time, the players continued their reign of terror, then went to Washington D.C. to buy a corpse. 

After derailing a tour of the White House to personally warn the President about how they sold a sympathetic-magic token that could potentially kill him, the PCs decide they've had quite enough of D.C., and the city agrees.

Back in Philadelphia, they notice one of the Zontamancer's ragdolls hovering around their house - so, obviously, Toka leaps from a moving car and instantly slices it in half. And then the rest of the party goes "hm. we could've interrogated it, or something, maybe". Oh well. 

Fortunately, on their way back they had slammed the bottle of comet wine they bought at the Auction, and among all the negative Ynnian effects this gave them from failed saves, one of them did manage to become able to speak to birds. Obviously they decided to threaten the birds in question until they said where the ragdoll had come from. 

Then they heedlessly sprinted into the Zontanamancer's lair, opening the door to a vast room filled with:

• one dozen vampires, out for revenge against the killers of their sire
• the last six city bug infectees
• the Zontanamancer, his "son" in the guise of the Idol of Apollo, and an animated car
• and a scout UFO from the alien Empire.

The players absolutely pasted them. No problem at all. I'll be talking about this later.

Then, with their downtime, they put their nose to the grindstone on analysis - they knew the Black Metal of ibn Yazid appeared on Earth at certain times and places, and between the reanimated ibn Yazid and a few pressganged OSIRIS researchers, they managed to predict the next appearance and identify what these manifestations were. 

Portals. To... somewhere, deep in the Astral Plane, far from the view of the Pyramid. 

Before diving in, the party decided to wind up some other projects. OSIRIS Thermodynamics offered a flash-training image for the psychic techniques Transparentize (does what it sounds like) and Uncrossable Distance (makes [dice] people count as [dice] miles from you) in exchange for the "Protean", an indestructible walking cell that escaped their liquidation campaign. No problem - it was chilling in the partially-exploded (but still in use - gotta make those sales) Walmart looking at Legos until the PCs stuffed it into a cooler, slapped a padlock on it, and sent it off to CATERPILLAR. 

This was after deciding against their first plan, which was using their military-surplus helicopter (they bought a military-surplus helicopter) to death ray the ceiling open (they put a death ray on it) and then harpoon the Protean (they put a harpoon gun on it) up into the air. Because I guess it was too much collateral damage. Somehow.

Then, of course, it was time to finally handle Kanopy - especially because Thermodynamics promised a "demon fractal" that "[unfolds/zooms in/extrudes] into an antimatter-shadow" if they would close down the door to Ynn in the Kanopy basement. They considered a few options - death ray! Plane crash! Death ray plane crash! - before realizing they had all the money in the world, and the Finance Optimizer had been spending a long while buying controlling shares in... uh, "the stock market", generally. They were already majority shareholders in Kanopy's pharmaceutical business. 

So, with a bit of arm twisting, they persuaded the Kanopy board that it would be much, much more profitable to move their headquarters to Albuquerque, with its favorable corporate law (I guess) and (comparative) lack of vampires. Then, while the building was being closed down, they just walked in and smashed the door. Life easy. 

Well, there's no more delaying. Time to enter the Astral Plane. As they stepped through the portal, Philadelphia disappeared, replaced not with the white stone and looming Pyramid of their last visit, but with a floor of fine white dust. The Pyramid hovered on the horizon, a barely-visible speck - and before them was another, half-sunk in the silt. Dead and decomposing, its corners and edges blunted, its surface turned to eroding chalk - a forgotten Pyramid. (The players had, in fact, suspected this for a while - Law is consolidation. Once there was not just one OSIRIS, but all manner of Deltas Green and SCPs Foundation - perhaps there were once more Pyramids.) 

Joe Normal looked at the dead Pyramid and pondered with the other players. "Hey. I have like. 5 MD, and a pile of Necromancer levels." 

"Ah. Huh. Well. Uh. Hm."

The forgotten Pyramid, living again (or perhaps never dead in the first place - or perhaps never alive), rose from the silt to hover just as its partner did. Its corners sharpen, its chalk exterior turns back to the solid Black Metal, its hollow interior of carefully-prepared dungeon rooms spits out Then the two rushed towards each other. Law is consolidation. There cannot be an overlap - to have two Laws invites Chaos. 

The two Pyramids met and [merged/warred] as the Astral Plane flashed fuligin and ultraviolet. In a blind panic, Joe cast Uncrossable Distance on the other PCs to put them a mile away (as space cannot bend on the Astral Plane, this was true teleportation instead of its standard effect), right next to the door to the Contact Room in CATERPILLAR.

Then he looked up at the Pyramid(s) and waited - and he'll have to wait a while because all I could say was "👁️👁️. Interesting. I have no idea what happens now. See you all next week!"

Analysis

Firstly, a little change - the OSIRIS Theurge should, probably, be mandated to be a rogue Theurge. As it is, their access to institutional power makes them wildly out of scale with other classes.

Secondly, combat has gotten completely out of hand. Low, GLOG-standard HP levels combined with modern weaponry (and infinite money, and forgetting to check state laws against buying missile launchers) have turned fights into rocket-tag nightmares where the players are nigh-guaranteed to win any fight they win initiative for. 

This means fights are player-favored - they tend to be the proactive ones, and if I started a fight by dropping two missiles through their front window they'd complain. They win! Pretty much always! That huge pileup fight in session 10 was resolved with a few grenades followed by some anti-tank rockets for the Idol and the UFO. 

At the same time, any fight that doesn't end with a player alpha strike that levels a building leaves them open to an equally exaggerated retaliatory attack, making it even more pressing for them to never, ever, take any fight except for "we kill all of them instantly, turn 1." There's no room for mistakes, and any decision other than "pick the option that does the most damage to the most guys Now" becomes a mistake. 

Obviously, the easiest solution to this is "don't let the players turn lead to gold, you idiot", but there are a couple others. 

For one thing, we've been creeping upwards in damage output. We're past "handgun" or even "rifle" into the lands of "alien death ray" and "I think I can just hold antimateriel rifles in each hand", with the commensurate outrageous damage values. (Sure! +4 to-hit, 2d8, crit on 16-20! Why not!) The leap in numbers here should be way, way smaller. As a contrast, I was talking to Maple and she mentioned that in her science-fantasy games "heat rays are +1, electric beams are +2, laser is +3". 

Of course, crimping the scaling like that removes some of the fun of "heehee, death ray" - but this problem didn't haunt me as much in games like Rota Fortunae, even when I still handed out cannons and C4. The difference is, I think, due to a lack of defensive ability. Rota Fortunae (and the earlier Go Away) were superhero games! Enemies had DR, or ignored dice, or flat-out took half damage from attacks, et cetera, et cetera - these were people who could just eat a couple rounds from a .50 cal. 

At the very least, some setpiece enemies should have had more defensive layering than "AC and some amount of HP" - you shoot a missile at the scout UFO and the point-defense laser fries it. You pelt the Idol of Apollo with machine gun rounds and it just wades through them with its 6 DR. Silver-fearing where's wolves and vams pire and so on. 

(I did eventually figure this out - the dungeon inside the decayed pyramid was full of Lawful "demons", angular living ideas whose orderly aura shut down fire (including guns) and electricity in a radius around them - this would've really messed the players up (they've heard this fact a few times, but forgot to prepare for it on their Astral expedition) had they actually had to enter the dungeon.) 

Also yes, obviously a necromancer should not be able to affect a dead Pyramid - it isn't a living thing, it's a manifestation of particular laws of entropy, etc, etc, etc. Shut up. It's rad.