AWAKENED: GAME FIVE
WCMaRtSOL (Saturday, March 13, 2010)

In campaign one (dreamers) was a game session entitled “Mark Can’t Make A Roll to Save His Life”.  This would be the flipside, as Mark was rolling fine.  Why was Nathan constantly low on willpower this week?... Fear, for all around him botches prospered.  While he only botched once (and it wasn’t all that big of a deal when he did), I’m fairly certain I was saved by throwing copious extra amounts of dice at the problem.  Or as they call it, the Democrat gaming plan.  Many folks this week were botch magnets.  Veni Vidi Botchi.

2 FAIL Crew:

·         Hank (Alan)

·         Gabriel (Joe)

·         Simon (Robert)

·         Jack (Paul)

·         Nathan (Darren)

With a plethora of leads, we road trip to New Orleans.

·         Twilight Club – Once a prime target for us due to a clue that someone named “Dutch” there owns a party member’s loved one simply referred to as “The Cute One”, the fate of this place seems to be waning, says Fate Boy Gabriel.

·         Jax Brewery – Hub of depraved blood-letting, it lacks that fate-ish element as well.  So where does one go to find fate?

·         New Orleans Cemetery – Apparently they’ve been losing bodies.  Well, not losing so much as being robbed of.  Fate is stronger here.

·         Storyville – A once popular club reputed to be haunted.  Fate is strong in this one, young padwan.

Now Storyville came into this when during our attempts to track down various bits of vampiric information in N.O., one of the sources referenced a club where vampires feared to tread.  Seems the place was shut down and even has made the local ghost-tour maps, though no one is allowed in (it’s closed up).  But I think I’m getting ahead of events.

Contacts:

·         Sullivan Dane put us on to a preacher who operates locally in N.O., Father Gary.

·         Father Gary thumps the pulpit at a Baptist church where anyone who attends can see that the good feelings and positive message create a sort of energy battery for the place.  Don’t know if that can or is being tapped, but there’s a resonance that can be witnessed as the sermon goes on.  Simon makes contact with Father Gary and (eventually) lets him know that we’re vampire hunters seeking our relatives who are captured.  He blesses those present, but not surprisingly it doesn’t take, likely due to a lack of faith.

·         Durocher, the local mage who we met last time in the big easy, seems to think the graveyards are a big deal.

A lot of book learnin’ is done by the crew (mostly Simon).  Punkass college boys.  As this game goes on I’m starting to picture my character more and more as Phillip J. Frye from Futurama.  (Yes, Robert, you can be Zoidberg.)  A bunch of research is done too, which gives us very little information about the bodies stolen or time frame, or much about Storyville.  I mean, aside from the James Spader film of the same name (which I think was about hookers and blow).

Our first bit of true footwork in the dangerous areas involves some day trip by the graveyard (where certain empty graves that, as mentioned, seem to have no connection to one another, have strands of fate from them), the front of Storyville, and past the brewery.  As for the Twilight Club, while some folks are studying and such, Gabriel and Nathan go to check out the club.  Unable to tell much at a distance, Gabriel gets out of the car and walks a block past the club, on the opposite side of the street with his dog.  Good thing he’s super perceptive, because he spots a vampire watching from the doorway, and as he aborts the look around and turns the corner, he gets into the car driven by Gabriel and gets away just as a vampire emerges from the shadows looking to take him out.  It’s unknown if this was because we were who we were, or if he was to be a snack of convenience.

Eventually we decide to hit Storyville in the fading daylight, to look around while there still sun.  The dog refuses to come in, not even for a Scooby snack.  Once inside the place closes up on us and when Nathan goes to cast a rote, he is hoisted up by an unseen (by the others) spirit, who threatens to kill him.  Nathan immediately spills that they were enemies of the vampires and came there seeking help.  After some charm by Simon, the angry spirit relents enough to back off.  When Nathan tells him about the club where a vampire lives, he says he will go there, after dark this evening and recommend that if we have anyone there we care about that they be gone.  We bolt and go to check things out.

(Footnote:  He mentions also that we should leave Storyville before the lady upstairs becomes more active at night.  Hmm.  Guess he’s got company.  He, by the way, is a grieving father whose child was drained in front of him and now exists only to vanquish bloodsuckers.)

So without much preparation we head to the twilight club.  Settling on an approach quickly, we drive up the alley and use the Mystery Machine as a boost to help get in the window.  Now if I understand the botch correctly, (I was in the bathroom when it happened) Hank’s mystical senses mistook something inside for being more significant than it actually was.  We select this entrance because it’s near by a room where a child seems to be hanging from the ceiling.  About now, missing some stealth on the B&E, Gabriel breaks the window and alerts someone upstairs to check the room out.  When they enter, with a gun, they are surprised to find us.  Nathan creates an area of silence around him to muffle gunshots, which is  nice except it probably only helps with the surprise a little bit; as the guy made enough noise before the silence to draw the attention of a guy downstairs.  The silence guy shoots at team members, often hitting, but not quite enough to take us out, as we eventually bring him down with manly axe shots from old man Hank and some minor tiger-clawing as well as point-blank shooting from Gabriel.

As Simon rushes out into the hall to check the other door and get the kid, he discovers it’s locked, just as thug #3 shows up and fires.  He gets across the hall into another room.  Now we’re probably going to have a minor standoff here for a while, except that Gabriel decides to cut loose with a grenade, which lays waste to most of the end of the hall and sends the guy falling down the stairs.

The “hanging child” upstairs was actually a mannequin covered in human flesh.  Someone was making a man suit?  How 1991.  Looking straight down we can see that there is probably a vampire in the basement.  We tend to think that taking the vamp out ourselves would, aside from being tough to accomplish as usual, have the unwanted side effect of pissing off the Revenant that is coming for vamp flash by ruining his good time.

So we vacate as we hear sirens.  The media would report that unknown culprits had a shoot-out at the Twilight club.

An attempt to stake out the graveyard at night is aborted.  Why?  Because BOTCHES.  Big flaming smelly soul-searing life imperiling botches.  Here’s the minor chain of them that I recall While putting up shielding spells—Simon botches, and his botch kills Hank’s successfully cast shield.  Jack botches and that kills one of Simon’s enchantments.  Hank re-casts his shield and botches, killing Nathan’s shield.  I think Gabriel might have lost an enchantment too.  Low on willpower and such wrestle with whether to try anyway and ultimately wind up not.

Simon had a dream (not involving shaving cream, a walrus, and fifty pounds of hot-dogs).  No, the other dream, about being alone on a long dark road and worms rising from the ground.  We now have a running theory about zombies being raised by the vamps in order to come after all living things.  A discussion with Durocher, the mage, about the graveyards and beliefs in voodoo gets us a meeting with a local voodoun priest.  Papa Batiste Lucien.  Well, it gets us to his door, where folks present refuse to use anything more than their first name.  Fortunately for us the priest puts some pieces together and invites us (via his flunkies) to come back that evening.

So when re meet with him he treats us to a ceremony and a scolding about bringing on vampire hate crime against his people or some such.  Anyway, he does let us know about a warehouse that may be significant.

We go there for surveillance (?) but with a couple gifts from Papa ooh mau mau.  A stick of killing dead stuff and dust of drawing lines to keep them back.  Shama lama ding dong.

Upon breaking into the warehouse we discover the walking dead.  The ensuing fight is of keystone-coppian proportions.  First, shots don’t hurt them much.  They’re to some degree, abalative, wearing down a little at a time.  Hank is tackled by one and is engaged in an epic struggle of life and death as one tries to chew on him.  His choice tactic of escape is to try and use his primal power to draw moisture from the air and make Nathan damp.  Sounds silly (and were I wearing a t-shirt, kind of perverted) but is part of a clever but lengthy plan to then use his power again to convert the moisture to oil so that Nathan could get loose of the zombie who eventually assailed him.  Thing is, Nathan is in far less danger; his shield is strong.  But with our botchariffic evening, he keeps just barely covering the spread on the soak vs. damage.  Meanwhile Jack has hit upon a very clever idea as well.  His is to alter the appearance of the dead thing, his natural aura, to appear to be a live thing.  It works well enough that it causes some zombie-on-zombie violence.  That ties up two.  Then he repeats this elsewhere, tying up two more.  That lets us collectively focus on the 5th zombie.  Seems the only thing that REALLY hurts the zombies is the stick that was gifted us, which eventually takes out the one unengaged zombie.

We then check out the rest of the place while the zombie hate crime continues unabated.  (That shall be my new band:  Zombie Hate Crime.  ZHC shall r0xx0rz your s0xx0rz.)  A manifest reveals that in the crates in the warehouse are:  30 corpses, 1,000 rounds of silver ammo, a metric ton of salt, and something else.  It seems they’ve got a warehouse full of stuff for making war with all the other mystical factions.  Well, vampires, we’re in U R Base Stealing U R Stuff.  We make off with the silver bullets and burn that mother to the ground, zombies included.

A call to Ryan (which is greek for Whiney prophet of doom) to see what his visions of the future show.  He thinks we’ve forestalled the end of the world another two months when we took out the blood factory in LA.

We’re headed to, to paraphrase the other prophet, Carl Sandburg: Chicago, human-butcher to the world, city of the vamp shoulders.  We shall be attending the succbus club.  To suck all the bus we can, naturally.