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 :)