Cthulhudrew
First Post
Bumping this because I'm curious to know how things are playing out with this storyline.
How can we possibly get out of this one? (Updated with recent events)
- Thread starter SWAT
- Start date
(Psi)SeveredHead
Adventurer
NPCs threaten loved ones.
Sheesh. No wonder so few PCs have spouses or girlfriends/boyfriends.
Sheesh. No wonder so few PCs have spouses or girlfriends/boyfriends.
Cthulhudrew
First Post
(Psi)SeveredHead said:
Like the saying goes, "With great power..."
You said that Ishimura was a lawyer? This side of the border all practicing lawyers have to register with the state bar association. I would assume the canadians would have a similar practice. If thats his real name, you can likely find him this way. If it isn't you need to get your police detective who owes a favor to track this guy down.
Cthulhudrew
First Post
Nadaka said:
Not a bad idea, but it isn't Ishimura that's the lawyer- Ishimura sent his lawyer to contact the PCs.
(Of course, that raises a notion I hadn't thought of before- why not raid Ishimura's lawyers offices and get the information on his clientele? That should help track down Ishimura.)
Hey everyone, I can now update you on what happened, and let me tell you, it isn't at all what I expected. First, though, a little necessary exposition:
There are these 3 lycanthropes my character met early on in the campaign at a poetry recital: a werecat, a wereraven, and a werespider. All 3 seem to be ok individuals, though the werecat doesn't really like me because the poem I recited was vastly superior to his own. So, 6 to 8 months ago in real time, the werecat shows up and asks for help because the other 2 have been kidnapped by one or more werewolves. The details are a little fuzzy at this point, but in the end, the warehouse containing the werewolves, the two kidnapped lycanthropes, and a PC named Catherine who's player is no longer with us, blew up. We're talking massive explosion here.
Catherine, unarmed, wakes up in some sort of medical-like facility. The people there are very nice to her, but they have weapons and she doesn't, so they make it very clear that she doesn't have much choice in what comes next. The people from the facility, through the sewers, one would imagine, saved her and the 2 lycanthropes. She even gets to see them, and they're much worse off than her, so they'll be kept until they're fully healed. The person from the facility that tells her all this does not reveal what the facility's purpose is, but claims that they're there to help, and the lycanthropes will be let go as good as new when they've healed. Catherine will be released immediately, but in a way that does not tell her where the facility is or how to get back there. More importantly, though, Catherine sees that multiple people working in the facility have the same snake tattoo.
She eventually gets back to us. We of course have no idea where the facility is, and neither do our contacts, so we can't do anything, but because of the snake tattoos we suspect the facility is operated by the Yuan-Ti cult trying to take over the world. The werecat is glad his friends are alive, but has no choice but to wait for their return, if ever. Little did we know that shortly thereafter, the werecat went missing, but we were never in close contact, so we never knew about it. A month later in game time, though, all 3 lycanthropes are back, in perfect health, but neither one remembers anything about the past month. We have Department 47 check them out, and nothing comes up: no implants, tracers, magical influence, etc.
And finally, some time later, we're at some big ball being thrown by Lawson Industries when terrorists show up and take everyone hostage. I'm the only PC that's any good in combat without an actual weapon, so we definitely can't make a move without hostages being killed. One thing leads to another, we use brain instead of brawn, and the terrorists find themselves fleeing. For whatever reason, we can't really give chase, but at some point, from far away and in the dark, I think I see a bunch of anthropomorphic cats in commando gear intervening. Later on, when asked, the werecat says they couldn't possibly be other werecats, because if there were others in the city besides himself, he'd know about it.
And now to the topic at hand. First, thanks to the advice given in this thread, we try to use the finger as a focus to locate our secretary (named Lizzie, by the way). Not surprisingly to the players, this fails. While we explore other possibilities, though, Mr. Ishimura's lawyer calls and tells us we've been played. Ishimura didn't really want the armor, he wanted security troops to be moved from one location to where the armor is, which is exactly what we caused when we went to see Lawson. This also implies Ishimura has another mole in Lawson's organization, one that handles security deployment. He tells us all we have to do to get Lizzie back is to go to this now lightly defended location and check it out.
So we go and find a rundown office building with a secret entrance to a very modern underground lab. A magic ID card spell even makes the people there believe we're special security assessment agents. It also helps that Ishimura's lawyer had given us the lab access code. So we look around, and what to we find? In this lab, volunteers are being injected with 3 different strains of the lycanthropy virus (guess which ones?) in order to become the ultimate in security personnel. So they're basically using the lycanthropy virus as a super soldier serum. We also see a few snake tattoos, but also some in the process of being removed (I hear tattoo removal is a long process) and some that are completely removed, based on scarring on the arm.
Afterwards, we get Lizzie back, now missing a finger, from a bunch of Japanese guys with big shiny and seemingly never used guns, who appear more to be acting like thugs instead of being thugs. Unfortunately, I missed the session that started with using the finger as a focus and all of the above was told to me. Otherwise, I think the session would have had much more violence in it. The other players just aren't bloodthirsty enough... sigh...
So next session, last Friday, and I'm there. We put the facts together and confront Lawson with them. He denies nothing. He believes the wars of the future will not be fought with normal weapons but with the shadow world. It's in the interest of his company and the government to get ahead of the game and be able to protect people with shadow (general Urban Arcana term for fantasy stuff), and thus his development of lycanthrope security forces. To be able to properly extract the lycanthropy virus in the form he wanted, though, he needed access to a lycanthrope for an extended period of time. When the 2 lycanthropes were obtained along with Catherine, he didn't know they were friends of ours, but he did know Catherine, which is why he let her go as he did. But not before putting snake tattoos on all the employees there to make us believe the Yuan-Ti were involved, as he didn't want this to strain our relationship. He argues that taking away a month of the life of 3 people was worth the benefits, in part because they aren't doing much with their lives anyway. Also, they were released in better health than when they were taken (even if you ignore the explosion damage).
He also reminds us that we don't necessarily have the moral high ground. Sam, for example, is knowingly in a relationship with the head of the mob, and during a rather psychotic phase (from being mentally terrorized by an arcanaloth named Mr. Tweedy), my character was responsible for the greatest act of terrorism on Canadian soil: I blew up a van full of C4 in front of a vampire club, but didn't care about any innocent civilians in the adjoining buildings. Unfortunately, Lawson appears to be an exceptional liar, and even Kurtis, our gnoll lie detector, couldn't completely figure out what was truth and what wasn't. We figure he was generally truthful, but something obviously stinks.
But anyway, what could we do but calmly walk away? He can probably buy most of the city and have us killed at any time if he wanted to. Time will tell how this plays out, but it seems that for now, Ishimura went to all that trouble just to make us realize the sorts of things Lawson has his hands in. And before we leave, Lawson says he'll send some business our way later this afternoon.
And for the rest of the session, well we deal with other cases our agency is currently involved in. For one thing, there's a man put into a coma a (game time) year ago by some foreign diplomat on a motorcycle. Diplomatic immunity made the story go away and prevented any charges, but every night around 2 AM at the location of the crime, a psychic manifestation of a green ghost rider-like biker shows up and kills anyone in the area. We've defeated this creature twice already, and know it will come back until we do something about the man in a coma. But we can't even get access to him because he's in an apartment nearby being watched over by his sister. Trying an unexpected approach, I knock on her door and tell her the truth. She slams the door in my face...
We come up with a multi-faceted plan to try that night when the biker shows up. In a moment of "easier than you think it'd be", this involves going to see an illegal weapons dealer known as the Mad Russian and getting a set of masterwork lock picking tools. It suddenly occurs to me (as I write this), that maybe we should do something about such a source of illegal weapons in our city... meh, or not...
While in our office in the afternoon, still a long way from 2 AM, a woman knocks on our door. Sent to us by Lawson, she's an associate of a woman Sam recently met in Lawson's waiting room who was studying modern mythology in Montreal. This woman has gone missing, and she hires us to investigate. We get the address and key to her apartment, and are about to leave to check it out when Kurtis says, and I'm not kidding you: "Just a second, I need to do something in my office. If I'm not back in 5 minutes, come and help me because I'll most likely be possessed."
And we let him do it, haha. You see, I once again don't remember the exact details, but not long ago some sort of celestial being gave us an all-too-real vision of some bad/weird things that may happen in the future. But it was more altered reality than vision, and all the things were happening at the same time. This included a contact being stabbed almost to death by lawn gnomes, a dragon inside the Lawson Industries building, another contact having a pleasant conversation with his late wife, and giant asteroid (or is it meteor?) hurtling towards Earth. The vision almost backfired when the celestial being, ever so sorry, wasn't certain if it would end before the asteroid hit (and yet he resented me calling him an idiot, go figure). Needless to say, all hell was breaking loose worldwide, and we're the only ones who remember it. Everything thankfully went back to normal before the end of the world.
Now, one of those unfortunate events was also Kurtis' girlfriend, an NPC named Tanya, being possessed by some book written in Sumerian. Most of the events we witnessed in the vision have yet to happen, but we did stop our occult bookstore friend from ordering lawn gnomes, and Kurtis found out Tanya had the book. He convinced her to let him have it, and before we left for the apartment of the missing woman, wanted to use Comprehend Languages (or some similar spell) to see he if could make sense of the book. What followed was a dissociation of mind and body. We found his comatose-like drooling body in his office, while he was off in some astral reproduction of our office going through some Groundhogs Day-like events. Tanya would walk into his office dressed as a doctor, mention something about an annual check-up and a leap of faith, step out the 2nd story window and start walking on air, and urge him to do the same. He'd try, walk on air a bit, fall, go splat, open his eyes and be in his office, Tanya would walk in, rinse and repeat. He tried a variety of things but never figured out what he had to do.
He did notice, though, blurred areas, exactly where we were in the real world. When he touched one, he found himself back to reality, but in the body of the person he touched (rolled randomly), another NPC employee, a female drow named Dinah. Dinah found herself in Kurtis' body. Lots of chaos and hilarity (well, I was laughing) ensued as Dinah got hysterical about suddenly being so hairy (Kurtis is a gnoll). Furthermore, spellcasting being a mind/body sort of thing, neither mind and body pairing could cast another Comprehend Languages to try to reverse the effect. So we were in the process of trying to resolve this when the session ended.
Wow, that was longer than I expected when I started writing... Thanks for reading!
There are these 3 lycanthropes my character met early on in the campaign at a poetry recital: a werecat, a wereraven, and a werespider. All 3 seem to be ok individuals, though the werecat doesn't really like me because the poem I recited was vastly superior to his own. So, 6 to 8 months ago in real time, the werecat shows up and asks for help because the other 2 have been kidnapped by one or more werewolves. The details are a little fuzzy at this point, but in the end, the warehouse containing the werewolves, the two kidnapped lycanthropes, and a PC named Catherine who's player is no longer with us, blew up. We're talking massive explosion here.
Catherine, unarmed, wakes up in some sort of medical-like facility. The people there are very nice to her, but they have weapons and she doesn't, so they make it very clear that she doesn't have much choice in what comes next. The people from the facility, through the sewers, one would imagine, saved her and the 2 lycanthropes. She even gets to see them, and they're much worse off than her, so they'll be kept until they're fully healed. The person from the facility that tells her all this does not reveal what the facility's purpose is, but claims that they're there to help, and the lycanthropes will be let go as good as new when they've healed. Catherine will be released immediately, but in a way that does not tell her where the facility is or how to get back there. More importantly, though, Catherine sees that multiple people working in the facility have the same snake tattoo.
She eventually gets back to us. We of course have no idea where the facility is, and neither do our contacts, so we can't do anything, but because of the snake tattoos we suspect the facility is operated by the Yuan-Ti cult trying to take over the world. The werecat is glad his friends are alive, but has no choice but to wait for their return, if ever. Little did we know that shortly thereafter, the werecat went missing, but we were never in close contact, so we never knew about it. A month later in game time, though, all 3 lycanthropes are back, in perfect health, but neither one remembers anything about the past month. We have Department 47 check them out, and nothing comes up: no implants, tracers, magical influence, etc.
And finally, some time later, we're at some big ball being thrown by Lawson Industries when terrorists show up and take everyone hostage. I'm the only PC that's any good in combat without an actual weapon, so we definitely can't make a move without hostages being killed. One thing leads to another, we use brain instead of brawn, and the terrorists find themselves fleeing. For whatever reason, we can't really give chase, but at some point, from far away and in the dark, I think I see a bunch of anthropomorphic cats in commando gear intervening. Later on, when asked, the werecat says they couldn't possibly be other werecats, because if there were others in the city besides himself, he'd know about it.
And now to the topic at hand. First, thanks to the advice given in this thread, we try to use the finger as a focus to locate our secretary (named Lizzie, by the way). Not surprisingly to the players, this fails. While we explore other possibilities, though, Mr. Ishimura's lawyer calls and tells us we've been played. Ishimura didn't really want the armor, he wanted security troops to be moved from one location to where the armor is, which is exactly what we caused when we went to see Lawson. This also implies Ishimura has another mole in Lawson's organization, one that handles security deployment. He tells us all we have to do to get Lizzie back is to go to this now lightly defended location and check it out.
So we go and find a rundown office building with a secret entrance to a very modern underground lab. A magic ID card spell even makes the people there believe we're special security assessment agents. It also helps that Ishimura's lawyer had given us the lab access code. So we look around, and what to we find? In this lab, volunteers are being injected with 3 different strains of the lycanthropy virus (guess which ones?) in order to become the ultimate in security personnel. So they're basically using the lycanthropy virus as a super soldier serum. We also see a few snake tattoos, but also some in the process of being removed (I hear tattoo removal is a long process) and some that are completely removed, based on scarring on the arm.
Afterwards, we get Lizzie back, now missing a finger, from a bunch of Japanese guys with big shiny and seemingly never used guns, who appear more to be acting like thugs instead of being thugs. Unfortunately, I missed the session that started with using the finger as a focus and all of the above was told to me. Otherwise, I think the session would have had much more violence in it. The other players just aren't bloodthirsty enough... sigh...
So next session, last Friday, and I'm there. We put the facts together and confront Lawson with them. He denies nothing. He believes the wars of the future will not be fought with normal weapons but with the shadow world. It's in the interest of his company and the government to get ahead of the game and be able to protect people with shadow (general Urban Arcana term for fantasy stuff), and thus his development of lycanthrope security forces. To be able to properly extract the lycanthropy virus in the form he wanted, though, he needed access to a lycanthrope for an extended period of time. When the 2 lycanthropes were obtained along with Catherine, he didn't know they were friends of ours, but he did know Catherine, which is why he let her go as he did. But not before putting snake tattoos on all the employees there to make us believe the Yuan-Ti were involved, as he didn't want this to strain our relationship. He argues that taking away a month of the life of 3 people was worth the benefits, in part because they aren't doing much with their lives anyway. Also, they were released in better health than when they were taken (even if you ignore the explosion damage).
He also reminds us that we don't necessarily have the moral high ground. Sam, for example, is knowingly in a relationship with the head of the mob, and during a rather psychotic phase (from being mentally terrorized by an arcanaloth named Mr. Tweedy), my character was responsible for the greatest act of terrorism on Canadian soil: I blew up a van full of C4 in front of a vampire club, but didn't care about any innocent civilians in the adjoining buildings. Unfortunately, Lawson appears to be an exceptional liar, and even Kurtis, our gnoll lie detector, couldn't completely figure out what was truth and what wasn't. We figure he was generally truthful, but something obviously stinks.
But anyway, what could we do but calmly walk away? He can probably buy most of the city and have us killed at any time if he wanted to. Time will tell how this plays out, but it seems that for now, Ishimura went to all that trouble just to make us realize the sorts of things Lawson has his hands in. And before we leave, Lawson says he'll send some business our way later this afternoon.
And for the rest of the session, well we deal with other cases our agency is currently involved in. For one thing, there's a man put into a coma a (game time) year ago by some foreign diplomat on a motorcycle. Diplomatic immunity made the story go away and prevented any charges, but every night around 2 AM at the location of the crime, a psychic manifestation of a green ghost rider-like biker shows up and kills anyone in the area. We've defeated this creature twice already, and know it will come back until we do something about the man in a coma. But we can't even get access to him because he's in an apartment nearby being watched over by his sister. Trying an unexpected approach, I knock on her door and tell her the truth. She slams the door in my face...
We come up with a multi-faceted plan to try that night when the biker shows up. In a moment of "easier than you think it'd be", this involves going to see an illegal weapons dealer known as the Mad Russian and getting a set of masterwork lock picking tools. It suddenly occurs to me (as I write this), that maybe we should do something about such a source of illegal weapons in our city... meh, or not...
While in our office in the afternoon, still a long way from 2 AM, a woman knocks on our door. Sent to us by Lawson, she's an associate of a woman Sam recently met in Lawson's waiting room who was studying modern mythology in Montreal. This woman has gone missing, and she hires us to investigate. We get the address and key to her apartment, and are about to leave to check it out when Kurtis says, and I'm not kidding you: "Just a second, I need to do something in my office. If I'm not back in 5 minutes, come and help me because I'll most likely be possessed."
And we let him do it, haha. You see, I once again don't remember the exact details, but not long ago some sort of celestial being gave us an all-too-real vision of some bad/weird things that may happen in the future. But it was more altered reality than vision, and all the things were happening at the same time. This included a contact being stabbed almost to death by lawn gnomes, a dragon inside the Lawson Industries building, another contact having a pleasant conversation with his late wife, and giant asteroid (or is it meteor?) hurtling towards Earth. The vision almost backfired when the celestial being, ever so sorry, wasn't certain if it would end before the asteroid hit (and yet he resented me calling him an idiot, go figure). Needless to say, all hell was breaking loose worldwide, and we're the only ones who remember it. Everything thankfully went back to normal before the end of the world.
Now, one of those unfortunate events was also Kurtis' girlfriend, an NPC named Tanya, being possessed by some book written in Sumerian. Most of the events we witnessed in the vision have yet to happen, but we did stop our occult bookstore friend from ordering lawn gnomes, and Kurtis found out Tanya had the book. He convinced her to let him have it, and before we left for the apartment of the missing woman, wanted to use Comprehend Languages (or some similar spell) to see he if could make sense of the book. What followed was a dissociation of mind and body. We found his comatose-like drooling body in his office, while he was off in some astral reproduction of our office going through some Groundhogs Day-like events. Tanya would walk into his office dressed as a doctor, mention something about an annual check-up and a leap of faith, step out the 2nd story window and start walking on air, and urge him to do the same. He'd try, walk on air a bit, fall, go splat, open his eyes and be in his office, Tanya would walk in, rinse and repeat. He tried a variety of things but never figured out what he had to do.
He did notice, though, blurred areas, exactly where we were in the real world. When he touched one, he found himself back to reality, but in the body of the person he touched (rolled randomly), another NPC employee, a female drow named Dinah. Dinah found herself in Kurtis' body. Lots of chaos and hilarity (well, I was laughing) ensued as Dinah got hysterical about suddenly being so hairy (Kurtis is a gnoll). Furthermore, spellcasting being a mind/body sort of thing, neither mind and body pairing could cast another Comprehend Languages to try to reverse the effect. So we were in the process of trying to resolve this when the session ended.
Wow, that was longer than I expected when I started writing... Thanks for reading!
Imagicka
Explorer
Greetings…
Ahh, a pity I was late to the party here... but since I already wrote the rest...
Well, as for the secretary, I wouldn’t let her die, or kill her remotely as Skippy suggested. After all, who’s going to do all the filing, typing and answer the phones? Considering you have the secretary’s finger, what’s from stopping you from Scrying or Remote-Viewing where she’s being held?
Oh, and of course… since they were trying to show you how serious they were by cutting off her finger, I would cut off Ishimura’s hand, with some witty banter such as: “Oh, and this is for messing with my secretary’s typing skills.” *CHOP*
Personally, I don’t like GMs who give you nothing for when you get a roll so high it rates as an ‘impossible’ success. He should have given you something. Or told you why you didn’t get anything. That kinda thing makes me think that the GM isn’t thinking things entirely through, or adjusts the situation after the fact.
I hate it when you try something and the GM stone-walls you because he’s now retroactively adjusting things. For me, its akin to cheating. If the GM overlooked something, that’s his fault; (s)he should have either prepared more, or given more thought to the situation. ”Well, the BBEG would have of course planned on the fact that you might try to Scry him. That’s why he has magickal protection. No, I don’t know what kinda protection that is, but I’m sure he would!” – Whenever I think the GM is trying to pull that crap, I start doing things like: Get the GM to make list of security measures that Ishimura and the BBEG have taken, and once he’s made his list, then you ask him. “Okay, do any of your security measures include protection from scrying? Because that’s what I’m doing; I’m going to see where the secretary is by scrying her location. Does having the finger give us any kind of bonus?”
No offense, but Skippy’s ideas really blow. Killing the secretary would be fine, if you’re evil, and you don’t care about the rest of your families. But killing the secretary is just going to cause more headaches than it’s worth. First, you’ll be responsible for her death, and then your just going to have to find someone else to make the coffee. Now do you really want to go through that hassle?
Attempting to break the neck of Ishimura is sounds much too difficult. I wouldn’t make that an ‘easy’ task, and if you do it wrong, well… you’ve just killed your only living lead. Now, killing him might be a good idea if you can then raise him from the dead and/or communicate with the dead. Just make sure that he doesn’t have some sort of arcane protection. But if your going to do something to intimidate the BBEG/lawyer. I think cutting off his hand would be good enough. Not to mention, make sure you make the GM understand that is what your intent is; to intimidate.
Destroy the armour? Are you kidding me? Now, making it look like you’ve destroyed the armour might be a good idea. But outright destroying it isn’t going to make you look ruthless. It’s just going to make you look stupid, because you’ve just gotten rid of your only bargaining chip, and probably get your families and secretary killed. But hey, look on the bright side. You can start your career as a criminal, and you won’t have to worry about your pesky relatives anymore. Nor will you have to worry about friends, because you probably won’t have any either!
Ahh, a pity I was late to the party here... but since I already wrote the rest...
Well, as for the secretary, I wouldn’t let her die, or kill her remotely as Skippy suggested. After all, who’s going to do all the filing, typing and answer the phones? Considering you have the secretary’s finger, what’s from stopping you from Scrying or Remote-Viewing where she’s being held?
Oh, and of course… since they were trying to show you how serious they were by cutting off her finger, I would cut off Ishimura’s hand, with some witty banter such as: “Oh, and this is for messing with my secretary’s typing skills.” *CHOP*
Personally, I don’t like GMs who give you nothing for when you get a roll so high it rates as an ‘impossible’ success. He should have given you something. Or told you why you didn’t get anything. That kinda thing makes me think that the GM isn’t thinking things entirely through, or adjusts the situation after the fact.
I hate it when you try something and the GM stone-walls you because he’s now retroactively adjusting things. For me, its akin to cheating. If the GM overlooked something, that’s his fault; (s)he should have either prepared more, or given more thought to the situation. ”Well, the BBEG would have of course planned on the fact that you might try to Scry him. That’s why he has magickal protection. No, I don’t know what kinda protection that is, but I’m sure he would!” – Whenever I think the GM is trying to pull that crap, I start doing things like: Get the GM to make list of security measures that Ishimura and the BBEG have taken, and once he’s made his list, then you ask him. “Okay, do any of your security measures include protection from scrying? Because that’s what I’m doing; I’m going to see where the secretary is by scrying her location. Does having the finger give us any kind of bonus?”
No offense, but Skippy’s ideas really blow. Killing the secretary would be fine, if you’re evil, and you don’t care about the rest of your families. But killing the secretary is just going to cause more headaches than it’s worth. First, you’ll be responsible for her death, and then your just going to have to find someone else to make the coffee. Now do you really want to go through that hassle?
Attempting to break the neck of Ishimura is sounds much too difficult. I wouldn’t make that an ‘easy’ task, and if you do it wrong, well… you’ve just killed your only living lead. Now, killing him might be a good idea if you can then raise him from the dead and/or communicate with the dead. Just make sure that he doesn’t have some sort of arcane protection. But if your going to do something to intimidate the BBEG/lawyer. I think cutting off his hand would be good enough. Not to mention, make sure you make the GM understand that is what your intent is; to intimidate.
Destroy the armour? Are you kidding me? Now, making it look like you’ve destroyed the armour might be a good idea. But outright destroying it isn’t going to make you look ruthless. It’s just going to make you look stupid, because you’ve just gotten rid of your only bargaining chip, and probably get your families and secretary killed. But hey, look on the bright side. You can start your career as a criminal, and you won’t have to worry about your pesky relatives anymore. Nor will you have to worry about friends, because you probably won’t have any either!
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