ZEITGEIST [ZEITGEIST] The Continuing Adventures of Korrigan & Co.

[gideonpepys]

Reboot...?

• Three years ago, Marshal Baldrey Korrigan vanished. He was on the road from Slate when contact was lost. Rumours ran rife: his son had been abducted by the fey; the Obscurati had assassinated him; he had defected to join them.
• Despite the fact that Korrigan had resigned from the RHC months before, in the wake of his disappearance, the unit he once led fell apart.
• No one knows the whereabouts of any of its members, save one: ‘Rumdoom’ Kagan who now resides in the Drakran city of Trekhom, where his Doom Cult is rumoured to flourish.
• Malthusius is dead; Leon Veilleux is a wanted war criminal; and the warrior known as Matunaaga gone from Rainbow Falls along with his wife and family. (No one even bothered to try to look for Uru Scaithaig Ciotog. What would be the point?)
• The Obscurati trail has gone stone cold. Nothing but dead ends and frustration. In Flint the fires of industry burn brightly and the preparations for war with Danor mount without surcease. Any day now. Any day.
• Danor has been squarely blamed for the terrible tragedy of the colossus from which the city has never fully recovered. Buildings have been rebuilt, but memorials to the dead – placed wherever the colossus set foot – are evidence of a deep psychological wound, as is the great hole that was ripped into the side of Cauldron Hill: a constantly shifting, bleeding portal into the Bleak Gate.
• Chief Inspector Stover Delft has struggled to marshal his remaining resources, in the face of multiple threats: Despite an initial surge of patriotism in the wake of the tragedy, the failure of peace talks with Danor was a disaster for King Aodhan’s foreign policy; radical Dockers circulate pamphlets criticising his rule; political violence is on the increase and Governor Stanfield has been forced to crack down. RHC officers are required in the city, and cannot pursue as many leads as they might like. Funds have dried up since the withdrawal of Pemberton Industries and a recent recruitment drive has led only to the dilution of security. Paranoia has set in like dry rot.
• Then out of the blue, on 1st of Summer of the year 504 AOV, a young RHC Ensign named Gupta Porras brings Stover Delft the lead he’s been waiting for…

 

[RangerWickett]

 

[gideonpepys]

In August 2014 I was on holiday in the US visiting my sister and her family when it suddenly struck me that my life would be a lot simpler if I wasn't DMing every week. I'd been running two games since 2009, and only recently dropped the second, but I was just 9 months into being a dad, two of my players were leaving the group, and the Zeitgeist AP was taking such a long time getting itself released that 50% of my play-time was made up with buffer adventures I was having to invent with my trademark levels of absurd complexity (caused by my tendency to make them up as I went along before retrofitting a storyline). Something had to give. I was investing a lot of time and effort into Zeitgeist, but was running out of steam.

So I asked my players to volunteer for DMing duty, with me filling in as and when and spent the best part of the year playing a monk in a 5e campaign which remains the only campaign we have ever actually finished! While doing so, I got the urge to try to run a Skyrealms of Jorune campaign using the Savage Worlds rules, and so we spent another year or so doing that. We also ran an old school megadungeon using modified 5e rules and began to experiment with the Cypher System (Numenera and the Strange).

I had already begun to run fantasy-themed (Ptolus-themed, specifically) Cypher System games for the club I run at the school where I teach some months ago and was impressed at the ease with which I could run an old campaign, and use 4e stat-blocks to improvise encouners. And so it was with this experience in mind that I touted the idea of a return to Zeitgeist to my group, using the Cypher System to streamline play. Korrigan's player had returned (yay) and Malthusius' had never really left as it turned out. But we were now missing Rumdoom, and he'd left to raise three daughters and refit a house. Everyone agreed that Zeitgeist wouldn't be the same without Rumdoom. So I gave him a call and he's returning in March. So far so good...

I really have no idea how many people who once read our adventures on this forum will still be interested in how they go after all this time. Particularly after we vanished without so much as a by-your-leave (just after the appearance of Baga Yaga's hut, though, so that's got to be a pretty big hint that things had jumped the shark, right?). Anyway, who knows how things will pan out, or if they'll even hold together for more than a couple of months, but it is our intention to begin 'paragon tier' next week, and I intend to post our reports again because I write them anyway, so why not? Hope there might be at least a few people who'd like to find out how the Continiung Adventures of Korrigan and Co... well, continue.

Sorry we vanished last time without saying goodbye.

 

[RangerWickett]

 

[gideonpepys]

Reboot 'Prologue' (or Session 123): Uru's Garden

One of the major player-driven side-plots we explored during our three-year 'heroic tier' Zeitgeist campaign was that of Uru's Garden. Uru is a sinister deep faen, native to the Yerasol archipelago, and he has a child-like fascination with death and technology. Always closely aligned with shadow magic and the Bleak Gate, he was drawn to the ghostly inhabitants of Cauldron Hill and the Nettles, and following the events of the Dying Skyseer, determined to do something to provide succor for the lost spirits of children killed in industrial accidents, and through poverty and disease. So he began to plant an underground garden, filled with fungi and plants that grow only in those rare places where the Bleak Gate and the Dreaming coexist. The garden is fertilized by limbs lopped off in the unsafe factories throughout the city. He also brought bizarre insects (flux wasps and chaos bees) from the Malice Lands to live in the garden, built little mechanised gardeners to keep it tended when he was away, and allowed some local children to help, and maintain the upper reaches of the garden (where an abandoned wellshaft surfaced in the tumbledown yard of an abandoned building).

This subplot came to a head when Uru brought Tokoloshe, a bottled quasit, back from the Isle of Odiem, and followed its advice to create a Grim Candle that would enable him to cross over into the Bleak Gate and draw all the spirit children to his garden now that it was complete. This was a trick, and Uru was abandoned, dying, in the Bleak Gate (having stumbled upon the Cauldron Hill facility beforehand). He was rescued by his ghostly familiars - Little Jack and Winkin, Blinkin & Nod and , once nursed back to health by Malthusius (the party's loremaster and spirit medium) he determined to exact revenge. He learned Tokoloshe's truename, forged a Vendetta Bullet, brought the evil little demon to heel, and imprisoned him in a clock-like 'liturgical calendar' in the centre of the fungal garden. On holy days, Tokoloshe is ejected like a screaming cuckoo through a fine mist of holy water.

Uru's player once said that he would love it if his garden could one day be a 'dungeon for first-level characters'. Searching for a way to segue from our Cypher System one-shots into our Zeitgeist reboot, I created this dungeon from our notes, and for our reboot 'prologue' ran a deadly one-shot (never once revealing the setting, in fact Uru's player was kept unawares of our plan for a reboot so this would all be a lovely surprise).

And so it was that five criminal ne'er-do-wells were hired by a mysterious benefactor to retrieve some rare plants and fungi (such as lesser edgemoan, and baby-in-the-pond) from an underground network of tunnels. They were warned that the tunnels might be haunted, but that this day in the church calendar was the 'nadir' of ghostly visitations and therefore the safest time to undertake the task. I won't go in to huge detail on the adventure, and simply say that it was designed to be deadly in the extreme. As a matter of fact, there was almost no way the party could win. Each of the characters had a hideous secret involving child murder, pederasty, child trafficking or some such, and each would - at the climax of the dungeon, when the liturgical clock struck 'midnight' and plunged the area into the Bleak Gate - be assailed by the vengeful ghosts of their victims. As they did so, Uru began to tease and taunt them from the shadows, confronting them with their terrible crimes. One by one they perished.

I have never run such an evil, one-sided, impossible dungeon before. It was my own twisted version of the Tomb of Horrors, and I had great fun coming up with horrible ways to despatch the hapless characters. (One died shitting fish, thanks to the sting of a chaos bee; another's eyes were burned out by the dark woad supplied by his employer (yes, it granted darkvision, but it also burst into flames on command...))

But my favourite moment was of course when it finally dawned on Uru's player what was going on. I think he had his suspicions for a while - as things got steadily creepier - but confirmation came with the demonic screams from the Liturgical Clock. Then I handed him his new Cypher System character sheet and told him our campaign reboot would begin next week.

(Sadly, it didn't, as I got the worst bout of flu I have ever had in my life, and from which I am still recovering almost a fortnight later, but I digress.)

So that was out 'first' session. (Actually, our 123rd, I still haven't decided how best to keep count from now on.) Hopefully, I'll be able to write up our first real session of the reboot some time next week.

 

[gideonpepys]

Couple of questions, please, @RangerWickett, if you don't mind:

1) I plan on having an almost three-year gap between adventures 5 & 6 (to explain foggy memories without huge amounts of exposition at the start). I'm not just saying this, but I always felt the turn-around following Cauldron Born was a bit quick, so I quite like the idea that Tinker has been in the wind for a while and the Ob have been struggling to bring their plans to fruition following the massive setback of the release of their golem. My question is, is there anything terribly obvious I have overlooked that makes the three-year gap impossible rather than just a a bit odd and awkward?

2) Who are the Obscurati skulks, Shadow Mages, and so on? What level in the conspiracy are they, where are the recruited and trained, etc? Do they wear Ob rings? Sooner or later my players are going to catch one and give him a grilling, so I thought I'd best be prepared...

 

[RangerWickett]

1) Let's see. Tinker goes into hiding, makes some gizmos for . . . wait, do your players read this thread? Asrabey runs off with Kasvarina. Ob conclave is in no rush, triggered by them figuring out how to get the colossus back. Fey stuff isn't time sensitive either.

Yeah, I think you're good. I'd gladly have put in a couple years' gap after adventure 5, but most times I've tried to suggest 'time jumps' in games my players have said, "Wait, but I want to pursue this, that, and this other thing." They work faster than a . . . {political reference} . . . in his first four weeks in office.

2) I have no idea. I figure they're mercenaries, scoundrels, soldiers who are willing to work for whoever pays, or maybe who are enticed by the idea of helping rich philosophers. They come from the same mook school that The Monarch(!) gets his butterfly-clad henchmen. Most of them stay 'on reservation,' as it were, and wouldn't leave and wear Ob rings. They're paid well and told to stay out of trouble by whoever hires them.

Not much to them, I'd say.

 

[gideonpepys]

Thanks for that. Both answers are more or less exactly as I'd hoped. I don't get the reference to the Monarch, though, despite Googling it! (Just got the actual butterfly...)

I'm going to let the players do some thinking about what they would have achieved in their long period of downtime, but it will be fairly low-key stuff in most respects. Shoring up old plotlines, etc.

 

[RangerWickett]

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=O1fXWFF42O0

 

[gideonpepys]

Reboot Session 1 (or Session 124) - SCENE ONE

A young RHC Ensign enters Stover Delft's offices and places a document in front of him. "A translation from the original Beran, sir" she says.

Stover reads the article, wincing, not at its contents, but distracted by Officer Dima’s persistent tap-tap-tapping at the machine behind him. Unable to focus on the paper in front of him, he turns in his seat and gives the machine a sharp whack with his cane. It shudders into life and then spews sheaf after sheaf of paper into the air, in an eruption that goes on for almost a minute. When it subsides, there is a moment’s silence, before Dima – frowning, but saying nothing – begins to pick the papers up sheaf by sheaf.

“Leave it,” says Stover. “Leave us, for that matter.” Dima shuffles out, muttering under his breath. It can now be seen that the machine is covered in nicotine stains. All the while the young Ensign has stood silently to attention, barely reacting to what has gone on around her, but as if her passive, professional mein was a question, Stover gestures at the machine and explains, “Some new-fangled thing from Drakr. A ‘Kopiergerat’ they call it. Dima said it would streamline our paperwork. Bloody thing hasn’t worked since it got here. I never get a moment’s peace.” He spits on it again.

From outside the door, the dwarf adds, “Then you shouldn’t have insisted it went in your office. It was supposed to be in mine.”

“Close the door!” says Stover.

“Blasted thing weighs half a tonne, but we can move it whenever you like. Of course we’d have to shift that desk of yours again, which takes half the morning in itself, and…”

“Close the door!!!” says Stover. The door duly closes. Stover goes back to the article.

Porras: Tinker Oddcog is in Ber, sir.

Delft’s eyes widen. He stands up. He sits down again. He looks back up at the impassive Ensign and appraises her anew.

Delft: This article is dated only yesterday. Where did you get this?

Porras: I’d rather not say.

Delft: Your source is trustworthy?

Porras: Impeccably so. To the extent that he thinks perhaps you aren’t. I vouched for you, sir.

Delft: Very kind of you. One thing I’m confused by: There’s no free press in Ber. Bruse Shantus is a tyrant, he won’t countenance it.

Porras: That’s an over-simplification, sir. In any case, this is an underground Panoply newspaper, with a fairly broad international reach. The radicals are gaining ground in Seobriga, perhaps more so than anywhere else.

Delft: You have connections in Ber?

Porras: My family is… my family was… my father was Beran, sir. I am fluent in the language, have travelled to Seobriga on many occasions, and have numerous contacts throughout the region.

Delft: You know who Oddcog is, I assume?

Porras: (Reciting from memory) Tinker Oddcog, otherwise known as the Gearbuilder. One of a trio of individuals working for the Ob who designed and built the colossus. It is reported that Oddcog enabled Marshal Korrigan’s Alpha Unit to bypass the final security measures within the Bleak Gate facility and subsequently fled. As his loyalty to the Ob is certainly in question, it is hoped he may be able to provide some insight into how to control the creature he created.

Delft: So that’s a ‘yes’, then? All right, Ensign… Porras, isn’t it? You’ve convinced me. (He locks the article in his desk drawer). Let’s keep this discovery of yours to ourselves for the time being. Now we need to move quickly. Come with me.

The pair leave Delft’s office. A moment later, we hear a click from the desk, and a slight scraping as the drawer slides open. Moments later, the Kopiergerat springs into life…