In line with UVG's design intentions, the session started with a bit of teambrewing in which the players and I determined that:
1) A Porcelain Prince comes into being when a group of people subsume their individualities under a common personality, forsaking originality for power. Kind of like working for a big corporation, but more magitechinical.
2) Everyone thinks that Redland vampires can shapeshift. In fact, they are just excellent at cosplaying. Also, they may live in the Redlands because it has the ideal amount of infrared light, which gives them their power; if they went any further east, the infrared light would be so great as to turn them into overpowered hulks.
Some of the party partied in the Porcelain Citadel for a few weeks, turning a couple thousand in narcoffee sale profits into an equal amount of precious, level-raising XP. Alroy wound up hungover and naked in a ditch next to a strange out-of-commission vome with a clock in its chest (“Hey it’s Flava Flav!”). Loyalty attended a weird polybody intrigue-mingle, then left to join a secret meeting of revolutionaries, then ended up with Chekov’s cherry pie and a €1,400 debt to the Porcelain Prince in charge of polybody maintenance. Peptid von Hemoglobin actually did end up joining revolutionary group and got a cool nickname (“Gelato Guise”) and a mysterious box to be delivered to a location near to the Black City in the far west of the Steppe.
Hathak, the “professional Bluelander citizen” (dark ritual fodder) coughed up some extra dough to stay in the upper class “colored houses.” Here he befriended Celadon 10-body, celebrated cult leader, who invited Hathak to join the church of the Mollusk Appreciation Denomination at their next biannual pilgrimage to the coral ruins of the High Road and the Low. Hathak gained some insight into the ways of the Princes, namely: they violently quash even the minorest deviation from the status quo within their domain. He also learned that pleasure drone bodies have retractable tentacles.
Meanwhile, Miela crafted Alroy a black gold monocle that can reveal others’ innermost fears (and temporarily burden Alroy with these fears). Hathak’s “magic butler” (his keeper, a nameless cultist of the Rotting God) worked with a capricious lich, Porcelain Prince to place the soul of Loyalty’s evil grandmother—Diligence Death Mary—into a dwarf-sized gunner mech. After two weeks, all hell broke loose as a prismatic walker returned from a trade trip crawling with murderous, gun-toting, vome-infected passengers. The party nobly fled the scene.
Aaaand also: Hathak caught a contagious curse from an eccentric stranger, and now trees and plants uproot themselves to follow in his wake; Loyalty bought porcelain armor and gun to match his pre-cognitively reflexive ceramic leg; and, on the rumor front, the party learned 1) The Spectrum Satraps are building something in the Bone Chaos with the aim of colonizing their arch foes, the Marmotfolk of the Ribs of the Father, 2) The Black City has extended a subterranean “tendril“ east into some light-dark canyon, 3) A strange white-suited Satrap has appeared and started a cult, claiming to be the fabled Messiah “The First,” and 4) the Great Folk of the Behemoth Shell are bringing a house-sized mollusk fossil to the Marmots to entice one of their master bone mages to help them with…something.
Next the party set to escorting the fabulously rich and insanely cavalier Rouge Lombardo and his entourage to Lombardo’s newly inherited ancient tower. En route, the party came upon a mesh tent surrounded by a growing swarm of angry bees. Naturally, they entered, and joined the Lime Nomad clan of the Unbroken Patrimony in a holy drinking ceremony. They traded tales of heroism for bottles of healing liquor, and Alroy the folk-historian, hoping a good story might earn him a pair of pants and allow him to release his pet crab Castor from loincloth duty, gave a particularly riveting account.
Alroy told of the history of the Unbroken Patrimony and their allies-turned-enemies, the Bee Druids. Alroy’s account blamed the fall of these allied nomads’ Ruby Honey Empire on a common enemy: the vampire king of the Redlands (this affronted the half-vampire Peptid von Hemoglobin). This story stirred the deeply inebriated chiefteness of the Unbroken Patrimony, who set out to make peace with the approaching Bee Druids. Their 250-year feud was miraculously and suddenly mended thanks to the sage diplomacy Alroy. Quoth Alroy: “What you’re looking at here is the most powerful entity in the Ultraviolet Grasslands, you just don’t know it yet. It’s time to put away your petty differences and come together as one again—let’s make these fields bloom, people! Also, please give me some pants.”
Peace was made, honey was mixed with ritual liquor to make sweet sweet ambrosia, and the insect netting of old was torn down and formed a new, twice-blessed pair of pants adorned with symbols of bees, flowers, and camels—a ceremonial garb that will mark Alroy as peacemaker to the Citrus Clans. The day was spent in revelry and the party left newly-enriched with a net full of clay flasks of rare ambrosia. All that lay between them and Rouge’s tower was…A 15-ton megapede with corrundum brain nodules!
Peptid’s mind probe into the megapede backfired (the beast had a bad mind rash), so Loyalty and Ramba Tam (Rouge’s bodyguard and girlfriend) lead a mounted strike against the giant arthropod. The party were battered in the melee as Peptid kept up a steady stream of rifle fire. After enduring a spray of green gooey bug gore to the face, Miela coated a lasso in limb-removing magic honey (a token of apology given her by a Bee Druid who tactlessly compared their apiaritstic experimentation to the black gold cave-in that nearly killed Miela and left her with a mysterious control gem in her skull). Miela roped the head off of the megapede. Shorn of its mind-burnt brain, the 30-foot-long body turned docile, and the party came away with a valuable giant metal brain.
Loyalty carefully calculated the potentially disastrous ritual Underwriting the Blue God to append a normal-sized camel head to the giant worm body, thus ensuring its continued sustenance and viability as a new beast of burden. Of course, the camel head is obsessively preoccupied with constant grazing to meet its gargantuan caloric needs, but hey, it’s a living.
Also, the party now has a headless camel.
Just another couple of weeks on the grasslands!
Video
I also recorded the session for your viewing pleasure:
No comments:
Post a Comment