Events so far, campaign log Options

[Weaver95]

the cast of characters:

Team Lead: Irish troll, ex-lone star detective. has a grudge against KE for not picking up his contract.
security expert: shifter. coyote who follows....coyote. his totem told him to help the team leader 'walk the path'. fascinated by the concept of indoor plumbing.
magical firepower: human combat mage who follows the Norse pantheon
melee/brawler: dwarf physical adept. also sometimes drug smuggler/(ab)user
face: vampire hermetic mage.

Location: seattle.
Year: 2072

So the first job was easy. The team is hired by a Lone Star executive to track down whomever murdered an undercover cop. LS didn't find the cop's body until AFTER Knight Errant had taken over the contract for city law enforcement. KE got the file, but wasn't too interested in tracking down the murderer. Lone Star paid out death benefits to the undercover cop's family..but the fact that someone killed an undercover LS officer and was going to get away with it didn't sit right with the middle management. So one of the higher ups (a friend of the cops family) arranged to hire the team.

After poking around the file a bit, the team decides to track the undercover cop's cover identity. Which leads them to a (recently closed) shop in the crime mall. turns out the store was fronting for a talislegging biz run by a woman using the handle 'Red Legs'. searching the shop turns up very little...but they did find an old shipping box with an RFID tag/addressing information for Red Legs house near Tarislar.

so off to the elven exile community they go. But along the way, they trip across the local go gang. the gangers decide to 'teach them a lesson'...only to find out that the doggie sitting in the car window has a wizzer spell called 'orgy'. the gangers find it difficult to control their bikes afterwards and everyone involved decides that it's best not to discuss the situation any further.

Tracking the address down, they find Red Legs apartment is a former stuffer shack converted into a house/place of business. the basement is warded and the door is locked...but the vampire finds it easy to slip inside and unlock the door from within. Investigation finds that Red Legs has let her talislegging biz slip. she's become involved with someone named 'Topo', and is obsessed with a recently acquired item she bought of a Tir Tangire expat. It's an idol, covered with weird glyphs, and it looks vaguely demonic. Red Legs believes that the item was once an object of great power and that if she could find the right ritual, it could be used as a power foci of incredible strength. Searching the apartment, the team finds reference material and other evidence that indicates that Red Legs is now living at an abandoned public library in the Redmond barrens.

At this point, the team decides to head home to prep. gearing up for a recon in force, they regroup with full magazines and GPS maps of the area in question to assault the place after dark. The barrens lives up to it's reputation....

the library is in a largely deserted area of the barrens. scouting astrally, the team discovers a mana barrier shielding the basement. The entire building also has a background out. Moving silently, the vampire ghosts into the building in mist form. the shifter assumes his coyote form and heads into the place. There is a single guard making rounds of the top floor, off to the right is a 'break room' of sorts where a trideo is playing loudly (Azzie blood sports/arena combat shows). there is a room to the left where 2 more cultists are sleeping. the guard experiences a short period of extreme beat down as the vampire and coyote discuss proper security procedures with him. Then the vampire has lunch. the rest of the team makes short work of the trideo watching cultists while the vampire feeds on the sleeping people in the barracks. The team finds out that the cultists have an odd sort of persona fix chip locked into one of their chip slots, and that they can (and do) go berserk.

after neutralizing the upstairs lookouts, the team proceeds into the basement. they smell incense, hear chanting and the coyote and vampire immediately smell fresh blood. sneaking down the stairwell, the find the basement of the library has been...remodeled. a large area to the side has been cleared, and a large circle inscribed in the floor. A human knife wielding mage (Topo) is apparently sacrificing another human (held in place by a large troll bodyguard) while Red Legs (their target) assists in the ritual. In the center of the circle, is the idol. the astral flares with power, and a spirit of unknown type guards the ritual space.

A plan is quickly formulated - the coyote and the combat mage attack the spirit and ritual on the astral plane. The Troll, the dwarf and the vampire deal with the physical plane of existence. the vampire drops Red Legs fairly quickly (having enhanced her physical attributes with essence stolen from the cultists upstairs), but the human mage actually shoots her (not yet realizing he's facing a vampire). she goes down. Red Legs and Topo turn to face the rest of the team while the troll goes charging into the group. the dwarf and the troll face off....bad things happen. troll bodyguard smacks down most of the party. Topo and Red Legs start casting bad mojo at the team....and then the vampire (fully regenerated) decides to bite Topo. The coyote and the combat mage dispose of the spirit guarding the ritual and they scramble the spell being built in the summoning circle. Spells disrupted (and having a goodly chunk torn out of his thigh from a vampire bite) he decides to run. The troll bodyguard (in the midst of a BTL induced frenzy) decides to finish smashing the team down. The vampire jumps on the troll, which gives the dwarf phys adept the opportunity to hit him really hard with her patented five point palm exploding heart technique.

Topo heals himself, and gets Red Legs moving. however...the dwarf hauls ass around the corner of the last library stack and tackles her. Topo realizes he can get laid anytime, abandons his girlfriend to the team. The dwarf (largely running on combat drugs at this point) collapses due to her injuries. the vampire feels much better about all this and checks on the nearly unconscious shaman team. Doc wagon choppers out the dwarf (gotta love that platinum doc wagon contract), the team lead secures their target and the vampire calls her Tamanous contact to see if they'd be interested in some cultists and a well cybered troll corpse.

clean up investigation reveals the following:

Topo is a blood mage. He and Red Legs were using custom personafix BTLs to create an 'instant cult' out of local chip heads, and then using them to try and devise a unique ritual that they hoped would reactivate the idol. As near as the team can tell, the ritual failed in it's intent, but the idol is defiantly magically active again(force 6 power focus). it gives even the vampire the creeps.

[Neraph]

Great, but how does a LS undercover cop fit into the mix?

[Weaver95]

Great, but how does a LS undercover cop fit into the mix?

you'd figure that the team would have asked that question....

the cop was working on tracking down illegal talislegging operations in redmond. He tracked it to a smuggling operation and found that cult. he figured it was something big, so he dumped his files to the Star, and started infiltrating the cult. good police work, bad move - they jam one of their personafix BTLs into his chip jack and before he knows what hit him, he's sacrifice #2 for the cult. LS cops found his RFID chipped body washed out of a sewer system drainage pipe a couple weeks later. the team was hired to find out who murdered him....but they never asked about WHY they were hired. just 'find this person, bring her in alive'.

sometimes I think I write all the background material just for my sole benefit.

[Neraph]

Heh, I figured that's what happened, and they did some good investigative work, but it seems like they went a little AWOL with the possibility of an evil cult, assuming that's where they were supposed to go.

[Weaver95]

Heh, I figured that's what happened, and they did some good investigative work, but it seems like they went a little AWOL with the possibility of an evil cult, assuming that's where they were supposed to go.

Yeah, my players surprised me with how much effort they DID put into following the investigation. However, they failed to properly gather intel on the target(s) and ran in there blind. The vampire and the shifter actually saved their bacon. the troll smacked 'em down hard (he was heavily cybered) and the blood mage was a surprise...but the bad guys weren't expecting to run into an oddball team like that, and quite simply underestimated them. lets face it, when you fill someone full of lead you don't expect them to get up again.

The physical adept was in a docwagon facility for about a week while she healed, the meet with Mr. Johnson went well and the target hand off was smooth. they got paid a bonus for bringing in the target alive (to a fate worse than death IMHO) and their rep score went up accordingly.

Lone star hired them to start running operations to make KE look bad and/or cover up some of their deeper/darker secrets during the transition.

[Neraph]

I've gone to DocWagon 3 times, and been released in 2 days every time. Of course, I also had the Heal spell...

Did they even ask for the file on the undercover agent? That's one of the first things I would have asked for at the start of the mission.

[Weaver95]

I've gone to DocWagon 3 times, and been released in 2 days every time. Of course, I also had the Heal spell...

Did they even ask for the file on the undercover agent? That's one of the first things I would have asked for at the start of the mission.

they DID ask for the file, yes. but other than referring to it once (right at the start) they didn't ever go back to revisit the details.