LOST ANGELS
Matt Houston (Jim), Henry Wilcox (Paul), Randoph Carter (Mark), Laney Chase (Joe), Judge Mayall (Darren)
We are in the west coast town of Lost Angels. Laney is in town collecting bounties. Judge Mayall is finishing up with his judge work before moving on. Matt Houston is a reporter looking for a story. Not sure why Henry is here. And into the middle of this comes Randolph Carter, fresh off the train from Baltimore, looking for his uncle, the judge, whom Randoph's mother insisted he see. During the first meeting (in the saloon), a fight breaks out. Henry shows his worth by using his powers to wrap up one of them into a lasso. The judge commands them to go outside but they take umbrage. The fight escalates, with most of us making our dodges, when the Marshall shows up and breaks it up. He then checks to see how many of us are here for the posse that is forming related to a murder. We adjourn with him outside and the posse is formed. He denies one well-meaning and possibly even skilled individual in favor of the Judge's nephew because nepotism.
The scene of the crime is a ranch of rich people who were murdered. A witness saw about 7 people riding off before he found the bodies. His story seems to check out. We set out and on the way we are diverted by a kid pleading for our help, which it turns out is just that... a diversion! Seems his family farm is beset by criminals purely as a means of delaying us, and it does work. We go to the farm, gun down some bad guys, and after catching at least one we interrogate and find out the truth of things.
On the road we find a farm where they are happy to put us up if we use the barn because it's bigger than the building. We set up shifts, which is something new to most of us and it pays off (?) when the young boy who lives on the farm is spotted going out beyond our barn. Laney follows and finds the boy is gone to another burnt out barn and is greeting a ginormous robot! The automaton spots/hears Laney and a chase ensues as she runs back to warn us and leads it to us. Fortunately it was out of bullets or it would have mowed down the judge (as it ignored the boy's pleads for it to stop). One piece of information Laney picked up was the boy calling it "daddy". The woman in the farm had thought her husban had gone off and gotten himself killed, which it seems he had, but a company called the Hellstrom corporation put his brain into a machine.
It tries to murder us as we are now trapped in the barn, but Laney's ability to blind it with a flash of light works well enough for us to get around it. It isn't until the "widow" is brought from the house that it ceases killing us, but not before it takes out the Marshall, nearly killing him. Fortunately Henry has healin' powers. We find out the bot's story and settle back in only to have its creators show up the next day at the farm. A group of "company men" for hellstrom show up and proceed to cut down the newly healed Marshall again. We try to pick them off from the barn, but these guys have a gatling gun leading us to have to target the gun's operator (and also a guy in an orange hat because... hey....orange hat.). We win this and cut them all down, including two that gunned down with their own gatling gun as they try to escape. The badly injured marshall and the few surviving hellstrom guys are hauled back to town before we set out again, now well behind the person we are pursuing. The most notable casualty of this fight was the robot man, who had massive armor, but took an NPC's blast to the chest and was ended.
The robot almost takes out some of us post-mortem when Randolph and Henry are near him trying to figure out if there's a way to save him when he goes nuclear and does heavy damage to them!
Back on the road we have to deal with wolves who are hungry and some of whom are imbued with ghost rock. That wasn't too bad. It helps that we took to sleeping in shifts now. Also on the way back past the earlier farm we help bury the remains of the robot man.
Oh yeh. The criminal we seek is a beautiful and merciless leader of a gang, named MERCY.
We reach Perdition, and while a couple people check out the facility nearby for processing ghost rock, the others in town get rooms, and the judge determines that the local sheriff is lying when he says Mercy has never been there. We set up shifts even while sleeping in the hotel.
I can't recall if there was another encounter after this or if this is where we ended. I think there was more, but I didn't keep notes.
PERDITION
Matt Houston (Jim), Henry J "Stumbles" Wilcox (Paul), Randoph Carter (Mark), Laney Chase (Joe), Judge Cyrus "Judge Cane" Mayall (Darren)
Disclaimer: Due to the short memory of players and the occasional item the GM needed to interject, at a couple points we had to do "go-backsies", but I'm just going to do this in narrative order as best I can. Also, I should be taking notes because my memory be less.
We are in the town of Perdition where last game we discovered that Mercy had been there. Well, we do discover that she not only was there, but is there now! We encounter her at one point in the streets, accompanied by a man and with an array of locals from the nearby brothel between us and her. She engages us in a discussion about how she doesn't want to kill anyone and that she's only there to guide her gang and steer them away from trouble, and she admits to having killed but only in defense. The lie-detecting judge believes what she has to say but she brings up the valid point that male judges tend to treat female defendants as guilty until proven innocent and there's no way he can convince her she'll be treated fairly. Some of the PC's are itching to just take her down but the judge persists in trying to get information right up until the moment she drops a ninja smokebomb and jets away. Seems not only is she a fast shooter and accurae, but she can run at blur speed! When she's gone the locals, who had been willing to defend her go back to being normal. The judge questsions the five who had been armed and ready to shoot and finds that at this point there's no benefit to charging them with anything due to local facilities and a lack of a marshal who would actually enforce any ruling (so we'd have to lug them around until we get them somewhere). Also, while trying to sneak up on her from behind, Henry falls on his face (fumbles) causing Laney to name him "stumbles".
One of the things we find out from the local madame is that when locals die, sometimes but not always, an effigy of them appears in a cavern up in the hills. The caverns came up becuase Mercy had let us know that her boss (someone known as "ghost") was seeking something in that cave. She also indicated that she had nothing to do with the murders we had been investigating (no lies detected). She suggests we go see the marshall who has some wanted posters, he just doesn't keep them out because if he did he'd have to contend with the local criminals who would take umbrage at this, which as a one-man shop, makes a certain amount of sense. We end up nagging him into showing us them and there is indeed a guy in a plague mask.
We can't trail mercy unfortunately. Our investigation of the cavern does show some cave drawings and each one does have a certain amount of uniqueness that could possibly be tied to distinct traits of the person they embody, but we don't know what they have in common and why other locals don't end up here. There is even an attempt at research. But while at the caves, Randoph uses his power to squeeze through a narrow opening in astral form and his magic detection to look at a hole that had been dug and that once had magic in it. We end up going to the next town to try and find her and find a whole other problem.
COFFIN NAIL
The town of coffin nail has a nearby 80' tall/40' wide at the base, CONE at the edge of town resembling an ant hill. Locals say it just showed up suddenly 10 days ago. Also, kids have been disappering for about a week. There's a local meeting that we attend on the subject where we introduce ourselves and are enlisted to get rid of the cone for the not inconsiderably sum of $1k each, courtesy of the mining company who doesn't want their people leaving because their kids are disappearing. We investigate the cone mostly by use of Matt's n-ray vision looking right through the sides to locate two bodies, and Randolph using his astral projection to find the place is filled with snakes including two big ones (a constrictor and a rattler), and supplemental help from the local super-hot school marm who can fly and give some area support. 5 of the locals are convinced to assist in defending the town from a little more distance by shooting at escaping snakes while we blow the joint up. There's a battle that ensues in which we shoot at incoming snakes, Henry uses his tunneling to get dynamite inside the cone, and we blow the shit out of it before dealing with the last two big snakes. The judge pays the 5 locals who assisted an we bail the next day.
We encounter a couple of (essentially) "blink dogs" who pop into camp and try to feast on us before we defeat them. We avoid a stampede through the senses and quick action of one of the team (Matt, I think?), and we finish off the evening fighting with The Taunting Dead. While we are in camp, a handful of skeletons approach, who are pretty fast (we find they run faster than us) and eventually another handful of zombie types. The skels ignore bullets, but are harmed by shotgun blasts, and double-harmed by blunt attacks. This is a long and nasty fight that sees Laney go down with injuries but revive due to regeneration, and the judge hits the dirt too after taking a number of wounds. Ultimately the skeletons are missing enough limbs that they can't pursue (or are entangled by Henry's magic lasso) and the zombies are just mostly too slow to catch up. But the whole time this is happening they are trading off communicating with us in a way that seems to imply that they are being directed by someone who is speaking through them. It's mostly stuff about how if we survive we should just flee! (Then the skeletons keep the judge from trying to flee! Just saying...)
Oh, and there were snipers. Can't remember where they were in the order of encounters. Four men behind big rocks try to get us but they are spotted by a party member and when we pause to discuss what to do they notice this and start shouting for us to surrender. When the fight happens it takes the form of a very splintered and varied attack pattern with at least one of us fleeing, another charging then getting off his horse before he's close, a second one full-on charging, and another shooting from righ there. The judge has a rare useful set of attacks (obliterating the head of one of them while firing from horseback as he closes the distance), and Laney counter-snipes one of them. When they've taken enough damage whatever is left flees.
Oh, and also we found a man standing by the road. Well, not a man. More like a former man. He wasn't a zombie, just a corpse standing there. Footprints indicate he had just wandered up there and stood there and died. (THEORY: We know from metagaming/gm out-of-game informing us that Stalker is the name of the guy animating and controling the dead. Sounds like maybe he animated this guy up to the road and then left him there? Maybe to use his eyes to watch the road or something?)
LIONS ROAR
Henry Wilcox (Paul), Randoph Carter (Mark), Laney Chase (Joe), Judge Cyrus Mayall (Darren)
A little bit of go-backsies since Mark was not at the end of last game with the defeat of snake-mound. Randolph goes back to visit Ms Applewood, the local teacher who assisted us. He learns that she was instrumental in what happened. She summoned a manitou which brought the snakes. He consoles her as best he can and we bolt.
There were a lot of things that happened, but I failed to make an notes, so (as usual) this will be very slapdash.
Our first encounter is random, and a big side-mission, which we pursue. A man on the road is in poor shape and is seeking help for his village of farmers who are dealing with a group of annual raiders who come and take a lot of their crops. Being law abiding people with a spine we do volunteer to help. This involves going to their village and setting up a trap for them when they arrive. The trap works perfectly as we gun most of them down without a scratch and capture a few others. Interrogration yields information about the rest of the group...and there are a LOT of them. Their leader can fire bullets around corners. We get a location, and in return the squealer's sentence from the judge is commuted to life in prison, and he is left behind to be held by the locals until we return from raiding the raiders. (Turns out while being watched by them he tries to escape and gets gunned down.)
We rushed to the caves where we learned their leader was holed up. Supposedly there are 50 or so of them but we know that most of them are out collecting their food from varioous places. Randolph went ethereal and checked the place out, fidning there was one room of 5 guys, one room of 3 guys, and a third room with 1 guy, plus a storage room. We decide the leader is the lone guy and head there. Laney sneaks in with us behind her in the distance, and she knocks him out without too much trouble, but there is sufficient noise that we have to rush the other 3 guys. The judge takes one out quickly and a second one puts up a force wall cutting us off from them. Henry let's go with a shotgun blast that blows through the force wall and takes out a second guy but the one who put up the forcewall is still up. In the distance the third room is stirring but we've got a few rounds.
Unable to run through the forecall (we think) we get back while Henry tries to spoon his way through the wall with his digging spoon, but it's too hard for that. He tries to instead blast his way through and now we change "Stumbles" Wilcox into "Fumbles" Wilcox when he somehow manages to shoot the nearest ally, which is the Judge who is literally about 15 feet behind him! (TALENT!) He managest to do more than the judge's entire hitpoints which also means more than he has HP in his abdomen and while he should be declared dead on the spot, the GM did not want someone on the team to die on a fumble and so he got one round to bring the judge back, which he did.
Randolph drops one enemy to the ground, alive but missing a leg. Laney decides to leap out and take some of the remaining 5 down (who are blocking our exit) and guns one down but gets blasted as well and drops untl her Regeneration kicks in. There's a slow process of killing them one-by-one to make them retreat. We do win and everyone is alive (on our side) but we have one down (the Judge) and a couple prisoners--including their boss, and we need to get out of there before everyone else comes back. A scheme is born: Leave the remaining/returning gang members with the impression that these guys were taken out by the Spectres (the gang we've been chasing). And without their boss, whom we've taken with us, we hope they will be without guidance and disband, but we don't have the resources to take them all on like we hoped. So we get back on the road.
As mentioned the man we left behind the in the village in their care has been executed. We also take the time to execute the men we captured. The group waited until the judge was up, an interrogation was held, and then they were summarily executed, but not before their leader tried to buy us off with rumors about where Spectre gang are in exchange for his freedom. He wouldn't accept anything short of freedom we couldn't let that happen so...death!
Back on the road we find a man hanging in tree. Concerned with the other dead that have been moving about, we aim to cut him down and burn him, but it turns out on his person were wanted posters for the Spectre gang. Seems this is the judge that had been traveling ahead of us and that they'd finally caught up with him as they intended. The wanted posters had all sorts of details on them about the Spectres. From memory (and boy is that a big risk): Sundown (speedster?), Ache (diseases), Stalker (undead animator), Mercy (teleporter?), Ghost (desolidification?), and at least two others. In the next town we turn over his goods to the Marshal to send off to his family. Seems the Marshal is not the "real" law in this town as the locals go see the Confederates when they have an issue, who are beloved by the locals for protecting them. We see them as well and meet their leader, who seems amiable enough (though we all get paranoid).
Seems there's a story about screams coming from the local doctor's house. The authorities will check it out next day. Us being who we are, we go snoop and astral-boy goes in and witnesses some severed hands wandering the hall, a body on the floor, and something horrible and knitted together in Frankensteinian fashion in the basement. We go with the cops and discover that inside are indeed severed hands lurking about and those scare off all the deputies, leaving the PCs and the marshal on them. Also... emerging from below now that one of the hands got blown away by a blast, is the creature we expected. It takes a solid blast to the abdomen from Randolph and we are left to deal with the hands, who are plenty tough on their own. One of them murders the Marshal, and after a few successful dodges by the judge one finally gets ahold of him (allowing me to try out my 1" teleport to get out of his grasp). Laney is getting pretty bruised and has to try and shoot the one on her in even at the risk of shooting herself. Before the last hand is down, Frankenpatient is stirring. We finaly put all the hands down (but not after a half dozen hand puns).
I can't remember if there was more after this.
Addendum: OH! And there WAS more. During town research, Randolph finds some interesting news stories involving 3 women who are able to give information for a price, and their ties to a local store that sells magical things. We go there of course.
The proprietor tells us the three women each has a purview: They can answer a question about the PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE (depending which one you ask). Each person can only ask ONE question, there is a cost for asking the questions, and if they don't have an answer then they don't respond, your payment is forfeited to them, and you can't ask any further questions.
Matt (Jim), Henry (Paul), Laney (Joe), Judge Mayall (Darren), and both Randolph and Ciquala (Mark)
We have a lead on 3 of the gang and head toward that place. Since we are allowed hirelings, the Judge bring in a few people and Laney gets a scout, but said scout may possibly have tipped off the badges—but really I think their precog saw us coming.
There’s a long discussion of how to roll up on the bad guys who are asleep in a clearing around a fire. We are rightfully cautious and eventually Matt sees with his x-ray vision that they are not as vulnerable as they appear with at least two of them hiding in the trees waiting to ambush us. We try to sneak up on them with DYNAMITE! They try to exit toward one of our circling groups (one with Randolph and two red-shirts in it) and the fight is joined. Eventually Matt catches up to them enough to hurl a couple of sticks of dynamite at them, injuring one and taking out the other. The female (Sundown) takes down an redshirt. I can’t remember the exact sequence but essentially they wind up with only one standing man who tries to run off. We pursue but only the seers in the dark can follow at speed, and this continues for a while until their quarry finally stops to do a precognition to get an advantage and to a degree it works as an series of events happen that I don’t think I can describe properly happen:
Randolph tries to blow up the enemy and fails as he bounces the stick of dynamite off a tree. Then the bad guy (Hollow) moves up and his radiation takes out Randolph with a blast through the abdomen that more than doubles the HP in that area. He’s dead. And he flees.
We set out in pursuit and finally track him to a hotel where he senses he’s screwed and shouts out that he surrenders and gives up his lantern and gun. Rather than gun him down in the street we take him into custody, take him out of town, and when he smugly tries to offer information in order to keep himself alive, the Judge has enough and kills him for killing his nephew, Randolph. Now we are down a man and we have no leads. Fortunately, Mark makes his new character, a Native American Tracker named Ciquala, who comes our way because he’s seeking the same people. Seems the thugs have desecrated holy grounds of his tribe and he is the last survivor of his group of Lakota. We make an uneasy alliance, as he calls us white devils and we call him a savage.
We set out east, where we think Ghost and his gang are headed. This means hoping a train. We know of course this means a train robbery sequence and one indeed does happen. Once the judge convinces them we should have our own car and they accommodate us, they allow the savage on board and we pass through a few places including Shan Fran (San Francisco) and a town called 37th Chamber, which is not far from a Shaolin monastery (I don’t think the names are a coincidence;The writer was probably a Wu Tang Clan fan, as the group were big Wuxia fans, and “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” was the first album and “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” was their final album—and that’s probably about 25% of the extent of my knowledge of rap music. I love a good easter egg.).
The robbers are on horses and ride up both sides, at which point we take some shots at them and most ride on ahead while two board up at the engine and take the crew captive. Henry, Laney, Matt and Ciquala make their way up to the front after leaping across the car gaps and climbing out onto the roof. Soon the bad guys are threatening to kill the two crew members and Ciquala doesn’t give a shit about white devils so he fires and the men are injured but live, while the bad guys are killed by our side and we continue east on the train. There will likely be more railroad shenanigans next game.
Matt (Jim), Henry (Paul), Laney (Joe), Ciquala (Mark), Judge Mayall (Darren)
Train stops in one of the towns and a letter makes its way to Laney from her cousin. Seems he's having all sorts of problems at his mine in Virginia City where the mine bosses and the workers are at odds with one another. They've lost a man as a result of the violence and now he (Chris) fears he could be next. So we take a sideline and stop off in VC. Not long after meeting Chris we find ourselves already in the thick of things as a fight breaks out between the strikers and the guards at the Comstock mine. It's mostly hand-to-hand, which is good since there are two men with gatling guns up on the walls, and it remains that way right up until Henry tries to lasso a guy up on the tower who has a gatling gun and misses and the guy takes offense and lets off a few rounds. Judge had been holding action and alters his aim some using telekinesis; Henry ends up taking a leg wound but can continue. After that there's no gun fire and the beatdown of the citizens by the guards continues punctuated by one of our guys putting down a guard. In the end the guards retreat into the grounds behind the gate, everyone collects their injured and withdraws. Before this end, Ciquala climbs one of the towers and takes down the gunner (the one who had fired) and narrowly gets away without the other one gunning him down, thanks to his hide-in-shadows invisibility.
We meet Sister Betsy, a local nun who is aiding the strikers. She's nice enough but might have a screw loose as she insists that the mine is employing a woman named Dorcus (yes.... Dork Us) who is after some crystal skulls. Our native, Ciquala, tells us that it would be out-of-place for such a thing to be here as there's no ghost rock being mined. However, while we're having dinner we are beseiged by an army of skeletons! They break into the guild hall and there's a fight where the nun and Henry both have to keep healing people to bring them back up. These guys are NASTY! They do a serious amount of damage with their claws and do so pretty regularly. The normals all make their morale checks and stay to fight, so we take easily two hours real-time to eliminate the threat, but not after multiple people on our team drop a few times. The big problem: Shotguns have no effect on these guys, it's gotta be the bashing.
Now the guild is just afraid for their lives and willing to go back to work or flee town entirely. Either work for an evil mine who are the only employers in town, or run off to another town where they already have miners, and apparently there are guys waiting in line to take these guys jobs. So the judge goes to the mine, talks with the foreman, who is a reasonable guy, and gets them their jobs back but with no gain from their striking, they just have to work under new names so as to not be noticed by Mr. Comstock. We also stop by the Comstock estate and Matt Houston scans the grounds with his x-ray vision for signs of the malignant Ms. Dorcus, and finds her there. But what crime has she committed at this point? We can assume she's created the skeletons but there's nothing that points to that so the judge is reticent to do anything about it and eventually everyone follows his lead and we leave town without finishing the effort, but a least the miners have their jobs and no one is killing anyone else right now. We consider coming back later after we've finished tracking down the gang... but it's hard to picture that happening.
We stop at another train stop and find that the town is shrouded in mist, which is odd for Nevada. Seems it has been that way for about a month. Talking with the local sheriff, the town thinks it's the native Paiute indians who've done this and raided two local homesteads as a matter of revenge for having been driven out. We investigate and Matt Houston uses his retrocognition to look into the past and view the events of a few weeks ago when an enormous (12') person and two gigantic wolves showed up and abducted one of the locals and carried them off. We don't think that has specifically to do wtih th Paiute's but maybe they have an answer, and we take our "red man" to meet them, and he manages to discuss the matter, finding out that these are cannibalistic giants that the Paiutes destroyed many years ago. From the vision Matt had they are now gostly. The tribe think the only way to dispose of them is with the native weapons and so we are gifted ghost-busting Bows and Tomahawks.
Matt (Jim), Henry and Zoho (Paul), Laney and Boom (Joe), Judge Mayall and Skeeter (Darren)
Our heroes stake out the caves in which the GIANTS dwell, wondering how the hell they do this, when a clatter arises. A group of badly stealth-ing PCs come over the rise and Matt describes them, as he can see them. He runs up to greet them, since though one of them looks giant-ish, the other two seem normal... sorta.
Zoho is an enormous offspring of giant native humanoid and irish human, a mass of muscle and red hair. Boom is a human sportin' dynamite (not a metaphor). Skeeter is a 12 year old boy with a pistol. Somehow the groups don't shoot each other, and it turns out the second group was sent by the natives we met last game to come assist the first group. So we pair up, put our heads together, and pretty much initiate the most straightforward and insane plan possible! Matt's recon tells us there are 5 Giants and 6 Giant Wolves. Two wolves guard the entrance. So we begin with a failed entangle and I believe some other attack (sling attack, I think) to not much effect. The wolves rush us and their barking alerts the others to come to the entrance. We do pulp the two wolves, largely through the efforts of the newcomers while pretty much everyone gets in shots on the assembled nasty mass as they approach. Zoho has reach because he can stretch his limbs, causing a problem for any of the opponents who rush him. Boom hurls dynamite, some of which he made; A tactic Matt also attempts, being the other explodiphile. Skeeter shrinks down, moves up to enemies, then punches using his accelerated momentum and his powered gloves for excessive damage. The judge shotguns wolves but doesn't have much for the giants since they need to be fough with hand created weapons and his arm is disabled by an early blow so the bow is out. Everyone does their typical shtick. I actually remember a lot of this and could go into great detail but I'm not certain anyone would care. Suffice it to say that we won, then notified the native tribe that the deed is done, and they came back to the cave and sanctified it to keep them from returning from wherever dead giant natives return from. We also tell the town, return anything we found in the way of personal effects for the abducted individuals, and hop the train onward.
Everyone selects one character to retain for now, and we all settle on our first team.
Our train breaks down and we are forced to unload our horses and ride them to the next stop and line up the continuation of our journey, but his is sidetracked when we hear tale of a "great treasure" in one of the many warehouses on this land. Seems there are locals who want to break into the warehouses and track the item down. We alert the locals but since no crime is committed yet, we have to wait for the thugs to do their thing. When we see something happening and follow, another fellow follows us. Later on we find out he's sort of a professional vampire killer. So you know what we're going to find, right? Well, one of the warehouses has a body in a box, says captain x-ray vision. Said box does produce the head vampire who only comes into consciousness after the thieves break into the warehouse and are met by four lesser vamps. We catch up and do battle, doing a LOT of damage since these guys seem to have no real special resistance to normal weapons, just some regen that is neutralized by silver weapons (like the spike our vampirehunter friend has) or holy-garlic-water (which he also had). We take out the bad guys, do minor investigation, but ultimately leave the backtracking of the shipping to the guy who runs the place, whom we are relatively certain did not know what he had stored.
We decide to head out on horseback. During our travels we are accosted in the night by two invisible creatures which attack first Laney (who is on watch) and then the first waker-up, who I think was Matt. They're only visible with close proximity, and once the first one is down the other flees into the night, injured.
Our next encounter is when we hear someone callling for help, who turns out to be a man buried up to his neck in the sand by the local commanche. He's a photographer who "trapped the souls" of local natives with this camera. Somehow this superstition has been made real and the indians have become immortal! We unbury him and leave with haste, only to have four of the natives pursue. These guys are likely impervious to standard weapons. We can hurt them with our powers if we get close enough, but we opt to take our ther vulnerable horses. We attempt to flee immediately but must spend a lot of time, getting shot, fallling off horrses, pushing each other back on, and then eventually getting the hell out of there to leave the horseless indians behind.
We again catch the train and relax some, but wind up with a strange incident in which a man suddenly gets up and rushes and tries to strangle his wife. We have no idea how or why this happened, but he seemed to enter some kind of berserk state, and once subdued we drop him off in the next town.
In Laramie we are at the end of the train line and try to do our best to research where we think Ghost is going and we have some possibilities but there are many, and we are weeks behind. Settling on a plan we head to Craven Canyon, where among the pictograms is one that Matt senses is special. It is that of a buffalo with wings (no, not those kind of buffalo wings. I think.) Laney invests a few POW in it and the spirit of a winged buffalo arrives from beyond and he's the spirit of travel and endurance (or soemthing like that). He gives is some information about various places (Devil's Tower, Inyan Kara Mountain, Medicine Wheel, etc.). Inyan Kara I believe had something to do with being a waiting area for the spirits, sacred but generally in a good way, while Medicine Wheel wasn't even a sacred place last time the Buff was in our world, so something may have happened due to the reckoning to make it sacred and thus maybe it has what Ghost is looking for? We still don't know what that is.
Matt (Jim), Henry (Paul), Laney (Joe), Ciquala (Mark), Judge Mayall (Darren)
The spirit buffalo travels with us and during that time there are not native attacks. Once he breaks off we continue on to Medicine Wheel, which he abstains from becuase it's someone else's realm and it's beyond his reach. Our biggest encounter on the way is one scary werewolf dude...who we make short work of with silver weapons since he ignores 'splosions and guns.
Medicine Wheel itself is a sacred site with a ring of worn ground and some ground level stones inset. We determine (somehow) that in order to complete the coyote spirit's granted quest (which honestly I can't even remember... I think it was granted to Randolph before his untimely death), we must wait for the full moon. But showing up during this time are the actual natives whose place this is. They want to use the facility at the same time as us. They need people healed. During discussion (which the Judge failed) we are about to yield the way when we offer to lend our "healer" (Henry) to them to see if he can assist. He makes two of them feel better right away, though they still need someone healed more permanently. They agree to let us do our thing and they will come back in a month. We perform a ritual (with a puzzle) causes the stone to vanish leaving a pile of goods which we will need for our fight. Actual magic items! Among these are some small clay pots that we think are likely healing salves, which we give to the tribe and they use to heal their people. Everyone is happy and we run off to the next place, which is Devil's tower, but that's a long way.
In the open desert we have to deal with being pursued by one of the people we are after. It's Stalker, their dead animator and boy does he have something for us! In addition to riding a dead horse, he's brought with him a sort of undead cosntruct with is a random assemblage of freshly harvested body parts. It rolls up on us (sort of literally) and we have to take it out. Here's as much play-by-play as my brain can handle this moment: The bad guy gets toppled from his horse with a crippled abdomen, his horse continues on but gets knee-capped, Ciquala narrowly escapes being trampled but is down and has to crawl away from it as it flails away on the ground, and the giant monster flattens most of us at one moment or another but the quick healing of Henry gets us back up, which is fortunate, since Laney has to run in circles while we take pot shots at the pursuing monster until ultimately we do enough damage to split it into two, before taking out the weaker one and then the remains of the remains. Horrendous!
Devil's Tower sees Ciquala scale it's face and discover that he's safe up there because it's some kind of netural zone where nothing can attack anything else. Alan forgets to have him attacked by bears. We head to Inyan Kara and women are there waiting to give birth. We manage to find a disturbed/desanctified spot on the grounds which has some nasty spirits in it who rush us. We put them down and make sure they stay down and head to Deadwood, mostly becuase, hey, it's Deadwood. There we find the bad guys have not been in town, we re-supply with dynamite and medkits, and let out to the next sacred site.
There's more but I failed to make any notes and my memory fails me.
Matt (Jim), Henry & Zoho (Paul), Laney & Boomer (Joe), Ciquala (Mark), Judge Mayall & Skeeter (Darren)
This game was two big fights so I'm not sure a play-by-play (which I could not do justice to) is necessary. So the broad strokes are:
We begin pretty quicky out on our travels, all random encounters depleted, so all we have left are the main events. Waiting for us when we get closer to our next destination are three of the four remaining targets: Ghost, Scarecrow, and Old Bones. They are waiting for us and before Ghost can sililoquoy, Ciquala attacks because he's had enough of white people talking. Ghost teleports in and tries to take out healer Henry and fails, while Scarecrow leaps into the area cloaked in darkness that can't be penetrated by regular sight or nightivision-type senses, but Matt can see through it with his x-ray so we have that. There's a festival of people dropping and getting back up again on bothe sides, but once scarecrow is down the darkness is less of an issue. Old Bones takes lots of shots to lots of locations until he finally runs away. He compels the judge to leave him alone and go find Ghost, which works, but once Ghost is down we hunt him down anyway.
While Ghost had proclaimed that he was impervious to harm of men, apparently Ciquala, a native american, does not qualify in his mind and therefore he can be harmed by the "savage". He had made a deal with the big horrible demon who made him tougher before himself running off to sack some villages. So that's who we head after--the horrible demon who has burned his path in the countryside. We run into our allies (secondary characters) along the way, answering the same call of adventure. So the five of us head out.
Once we find him in a village that has fled, we do battle and discover he's covered in ablative armor, can do a flash attack (blinding people for several rounds), which impacts everyone in range except Skeeter who has newly purchased Spatial Awareness. Zoho the giant has a few opportunities but is in love with the fumble. It's a lot of blowing away armor and sustaining shots before we get to the gooey green middle. I forgot to mention his exploder minions! He can periodically create 4 minions who rush out next to someone and explode with great shrapnel to that individual. So those are temproary, but nasty, threats we had to deal with in two waves of four each. After the bastard goes down there is much rejoicing and talk of our next campaign.
Mercy, the one missing target, was in reserve in case were were absolutely getting our butts kicked. She has retired somewhere away from insane criminals and started raising a family.