cloud spiders and lightning hearts

Last Sunday the players decided that despite all the weird shit that happened during the night, they had little choice but to play along with the elves for now and accompany their champions out on their daily battle with the creatures spawned by the purple blight.  The party was surprised to learn that they were expected to go off on their own instead of accompanying one of the elf champions.  They headed out over the fleshy purple landscape, at one point stopping to cut a section of the purple flesh out.  While at first there seemed to be no response to this action, soon some purple cat-like beasts with tentacles coming out of their shoulders emerged from the ground and attacked the party.  Hello, displacer beasts!  Realizing very quickly that ranged fire was not the way to deal with these critters, the party fell to dispatching them in hand to hand combat and shortly emerged  victorious.

They tramped on further, and soon the sky began to darken as great clouds coalesced overhead.  Flashes of lightning arced from cloud to cloud, and soon the the party found themselves directly underneath an enormous cloud, with eight smaller clouds arranged in a circle below and around it.  Lightning strikes next began to target individual PCs.

My memory at this point gets a little hazy - I am not sure exactly what they used to do this, but somehow the party managed to shoot something into one of the clouds (a missile maybe?  An energy ray?  Who can keep all the high-tech shenanigans straight?) which caused a momentary dissipation of the mist and revealed that the party was underneath an immense floating spider, the body of which was concealed in the large cloud.  Each of its eight legs ended in a strange disc like foot, around which the smaller clouds formed.  Realizing that they should focus their attacks on the main body of the cloud spider, the party started unloading into the central cloud.

The cloud spider reacted by drawing its legs together beneath it, shielding its body with the large discs that tipped each leg.  It then began to spin rapidly, and the clouds began to stream out and form a whirling layer around it.  The party was unable to damage its main body while it was in this position, and soon a tornado began forming underneath the spinning spider which began flinging party members into the air like matchsticks.

At this point the party began calling for help from Dr. Hops, the wererabbit who had stayed behind in the castle because he was pretending to be the party's servant.  He had been trying to get information out of the short hairy servitor race referred to by the party has "dwobbits" (an amalgamation of dwarf and hobbit) and called "gnomen" by the elves.  Dr. Hops had been unable to get any of the gnomen to respond to him as they silently and efficiently went about their business.  The previous evening at dinner he had been able to talk to one who identified himself as "Grosso", so he began wandering about the various areas that the gnomen worked loudly inquiring if Grosso was present.  He found him in a metal workshop (which, incidentally, contained a furnace that burned the boxed wood shavings accumulated in the wood workshop - this is where Pliskins would have ended up last session when he became trapped in sugar glider form in a box full of wood shavings if Stang had not saved his unconscious ass) and soon learned that apparently Grosso was the only gnomen who had an individual personality.  Grosso revealed that he knew from the moment he emerged from the birthing vats that he was different than his fellows, who found all the satisfaction they needed from mindlessly performing the tasks that they were created knowing how to do.  Dr. Hops soon managed to shatter Grosso's world and convince him that there was more to life than doing what the elves wanted him to do.  It had apparently never occurred to him that he could stop working - when Dr. Hops pointed out that he had not been performing his job the entire time he was conversing, Grosso freaked out but quickly realized that nothing bad seemed to have happened.  Around this time is when the party called for Dr. Hops help.

Dr. Hops, you see, can teleport.  He rapidly rounded up all the grenades that the party still had (they go through those things like candy!) and joined the crowd of elves on the castle walls that were watching the progress of the various fights going on (between their champions and the manifestations of the purple blight and between the party and the cloud spider).  He got a good bead on the party's location, then teleported into the sky high above the cloud spider.  As he was free falling down towards its main body from above, he pulled the pins on the grenades and tossed them down at the spider, then teleported back to the castle.

He also used his once a session roll of the d30 for this attack and got above a 20, which (according to my houserules) meant that he did double damage!  He pretty much blasted the spider to little pieces which rained down on the party.  Go team mutant!

The party searched among the grisly debris and found two strange organs - one appeared to be its heart and the other was attached to its spinnerets.  Both were translucent and seemed to contain bottled lightning...

A Night of Terror, Confusion and Love in an Elven Castle

(also known as Mutant Future sessions 30&31 Recap)

Yes, this is what it has come to in my Mutant Future campaign.  My group of lecherous characters (lecherous players?), upon finding themselves invited to stay the night with a bunch of beautiful, tall elven folk in a castle on a lake, immediately set about none-too-delicately feeling out the likelihood of a midnight rendezvous with one of the Queen's three lovely daughters.  Or one of the daughters of the Elven Nobility who joined them at dinner.  Or one of the mothers of one of the daughters of the Elven Nobility!  Of course, this last proposition was broached by the mother in question, one Yarro, to James Bomb (self appointed "faceman" of the party and ladies' man of interdimensional repute), while she responded to the latter's questions about the sexual practices of her people.  Yarro explained that according to the laws of her people, both sexes had to remain chaste until marriage, but once married sexual dalliances were permitted and common.

While this was not originally what Mr. Bomb had been hoping for, he is ever one to adjust to a new scenario on the fly and he smoothly segued into making an appointment with Yarro for the wee hours of the morning.  She was to come to his room, as the party had been rather strongly "asked" to remain in their chambers after nightfall while staying as guests in the castle.

Some backstory may be in order (and a fair warning may be in order as well - I feel a long post coming on...) before I proceed with relating the events of the evening (which occurred during Sunday's Mutant Future session).

You may recall that the party was contemplating travelling through a dimensional portal to a land covered in purple goo where elves fight dragons.  Apparently, catching a glimpse of a possible future that included swords emitting beams of light and dragon loot was enough to persuade our stalwart band of mutant heroes (troublemakers?) to abandon their swampy home for some new digs.  While the party currently has two members who possess the Plane Shift mutation, one of them had already used their mutation this game week so the party was guaranteed a stay of at least five days in the other dimension until he could open another portal back to the Mutant Future we all know and love.

So off they go.  The party that stepped through the portal consisted of James Bomb, Bozko (giant shapeshifting nettle plant; possesses an "iron man" suit), Stang (21' long Wasp with four extra malfunctioning brains exhibiting the personalities of the Beetles), Bob (the mutant human incapable of feeling pain), Dr. Hops (the "were-rabbit" as his player likes to call him; capable of teleportation),  Rok (mutant human apparently made out of obsidian; one of the plane-shifters), Shazaam Alottapus (precog and the other plane-shifter), Pliskins (the man who can turn himself into a sugar glider - the myth, the truth, the legend!; precog with gamma-ray eyes), and Saurus (the empath who can turn himself into a velociraptor.  A Jurassic Park velociraptor, thank you for much, and keep the turkey-sized dinosaurs for yourselves).

Pliskins in Sugar Glider form

This is a pretty normal amount of players for one of my Mutant Future sessions.  Seven to nine is the norm, more than the three or four that I often hear bandied about as the "ideal" size of group for D&D.

When the party first entered the strange land, events proceeded more or less how Shazaam had foreseen them.  They found a tall elf clad in shining platemail, wielding a glowing sword that shot beams of light at a great green-scaled dragon.  With one well placed shot, Shazaam distracted the dragon and the elf lopped its head off in one clean motion.  Despite the language barrier, the party and the elf made their introductions.  When some party members began trying to remove scales from the downed dragon, the elf vigorously stopped them, gesturing at a castle that gleamed in the middle of a lake.  A large raft bearing two sturdy wagons was making its way across the lake to the near shore of a thickly wooded forest.  The forest ran up almost to where the party and elf stood, and beyond this point the world appeared to be covered in a fleshy purple substance that formed faces in the hills and seemed to slowly stretch and breath.

Not wanting to offend the knight (and possibly more than a little bit afraid of the lethal sword that hung casually in his hand), the party waited calmly while the wagons trundled through the woods up to them.  A crew of hairy, 3 1/2' tall beings quickly and silently dismounted from the wagons and began efficiently dissecting the dragon.  They unfurled coils of a nearly invisible wire fitted with handles on either end.  These they used to slice the dragon into rounds as easily as you might push a butter knife through warm water.  When the wagons were loaded with the remains of the dragon, the elf gestured for the party to climb aboard and they all retired to the castle.

Along the way, they noticed that the trees ran in perfectly straight rows, as if they had been planted.  When they crossed the lake on their way to the castle, they saw a huge, serpent like form swimming deep in the lakes depths.

Stang, who had been acting like an unintelligent beast, had chosen not to accompany the party and started to fly around the area.  She saw that the purple mass covered everywhere she could see except the small one mile radius patch of forest surrounding the lake and castle.  She tried to fly higher to get a better idea of exactly how far this purple substance extended, but her terrible eyesight and the quarreling voices of the Beetles in her head made this mission impossible and she rejoined her companions.  As she was flying toward the castle she did see something the rest of the party had missed - on top of one of the two highest towers in the castle was a rooftop garden that appeared to be constructed in concentric circles around a tree on a pedestal.

In the meantime, the elf had taken the rest of the party through the gates of the castle, across a courtyard and into a large hall where they were introduced to a regal elf wearing an ornate dress and a crown of silver.  She appeared to understand the party when they spoke, and responded in their own tongue.  When the party inquired if there was any way for them to communicate with the other elves, the queen apologized for her rudeness and procured a set of necklaces from an extra-dimensional place.  Placing a necklace over the neck of each character, she told them that as long as they wore the necklaces, they would be be understood and would understand any spoken language.

The queen then introduced her three daughters, pale skinned and black-haired like their mother (and in marked contrast to the blonde haired gent with the platemale and light-sword), who showed the party to their guest chambers and told them that a dinner would be held in their honor in one hours time.  Mr. Bomb, Shazaam and Pliskins were all trying to make a move on one princess or another, but none seemed affected by the strangers' charms.  Around this point is when Stang returned, still pretending to be a dumb beast of burden for the party, and Dr. Hops "put her" in the stable for the night.

At dinner, much was learned about the elven people.  Apparently, this little patch of forest was the last bit of this world not covered by the purple blight, which spawned the dragons and other monsters that sought to destroy the elves.  Only the bravery of the three Champions, each wielding a mythic weapon and wearing plate-mail handed down through generations of Champions, prevented this last bastion from succumbing.  The party seemed to buy this explanation, but some members asked probing questions about how this came to be, and what happened to all the rest of the elves people.  These and all other questions about the past were met with a smile from the queen, a slight tilt of her head, and the sudden loss of the train of thought in the questioner's mind.

The dinner was attended by a number of couples identified as "nobles", who shared the generally tall, lanky and blonde haired appearance of the champions.  Indeed, only the queen and her three daughters had black hair and dark eyes.  The guards stationed through the castle grounds ate separately.  Acting as waiters during the meal were more of the short, hairy individuals who had butchered the dragon.  They moved just as silently and efficiently in the delicate ballet of table service as they had while field dressing a dragon.  In fact, only one of these creatures was heard to talk all night, an individual who self-identified as "Grosso", who got into a conversation with Dr. Hops about a servant's role.  Grosso did not appear to be unhappy with his lot as a servant to the elves, and Dr. Hops pretended to be the party's servant in a plan to possibly gain access to the servants' quarters of the castle later on.  One highlight of the meal was Pliskins' ill-advised use of his precog ability.  He decided to foresee the consequences of asking the queen f he could "hook-up" with her daughters (or some such crude and not very courtly at all language).  He died too quickly in his precog to be able to tell what happened, which meant that in real life his body slumped unconscious over the table for ten minutes!

As the last courses were being served, a petulant elven youth strode down the main stairs into the dining hall and took his seat at the end of the table opposite the queen.  She introduced him to the party as Prince Coriander, and he immediately started grilling the party about their presence in his castle.  Sensing a bit of hostility from the prince, James Bomb attempted to smooth things over but ended up saying exactly the wrong thing and really setting Prince Coriander on edge.  Soon, Coriander challenged Mr. Bomb to a friendly duel after dinner, a practice fencing match "to first blood".

(read this blog post to find out what mechanics I use to simulate a master fencer)

Rok, Shazaam and Pliskins all instantly volunteered to take Mr. Bomb's place in the practice ring against the prince, and it was agreed that they should all retire to the practice chamber after dinner.  The rest of the guests socialized while the servants cleared the hall in preparation for a dance.  An orchestra of the hairy shortlings assembled and began to play otherworldly waltzes.

Meanwhile, Prince Coriander had handily defeated Rok, who is easily the parties most impressive physical combatant.  The Prince's triumph was short-lived, however.  Amazingly, Shazaam managed to score a hit and win his match (I had some epically bad rolls for the prince), and the Prince seemed to warm up to them after that.  More importantly (in Shazaam's mind), the princess that he had is eye on seemed quite impressed with his swordsmanship.

The evening concluded with a tour of the castle grounds and an admonition to be back in their rooms before dark.  They were warned that once the two moons came out, terrible creatures would emerge from the night. The characters learned that the elven guards had orders to kill anything that moved inside or outside the castle at night, as the monsters could take many forms.  Basically, the PCs were told to remain in their rooms OR ELSE...


So of course a good portion of the party decides to go exploring around the castle in the middle of the night.  A new character suddenly materialized in Dr. Hops bedroom (IG-88, the Haiku Magician robot) and it took a little while for the tensions to simmer down and the party to accept that IG-88 meant them no harm and was merely an interdimensional traveler like themselves who had become stranded at this particular spot and moment through sheer happenstance.

Bob opened his shuttered windows and began surveying the night landscape.  He noticed that in the reddish light of the first moon, the forest around the castle had assumed a radically different appearance.  What he had seen as trees in the daylight now appeared to be machinery of some sort, injecting a needle-like device into the ground and plunging it in and out repeatedly.  He notified the rest of the party of this over their com-links.

Pliskins used his precog ability to imagine assuming sugar glider form, gliding down and around the castle to the boats, and attempting to take a boat across the lake.  Just as the raft had done when the laden wagons had pulled onto it earlier in the day, the boat took off apparently under its own propulsion as soon as Pliskins turned back to his normal form and sat in the boat.  Pliskins ended the precog when he foresaw the large serpent-like creature in the lake rear up and reveal itself to be Zombie Nessie!

Stang discovered a secret passageway in the wall of the stable, and after determining that she would have a difficult time navigating the corridor beyond it, she asked if anyone else in the party would like to come down and explore it.  Bozko had opted to stay the night outside in the castles courtyard, hidden in tree form among the trees of the garden.  He reported that all seemed clear.  The only life to be seen was the castle guards at their posts.  Pliskins glided down to join Stang and ventured down the hallway beyond the secret door.  Sliding open the panel at the end of the hall, he found himself peering into a workshop filled with what appeared to be the servants busily splitting beams of wood off of strangely uniform, 12' blocks of perfectly straight grained wood.  The servants seemed to have undergone some kind of transformation and were now completely covered in long black hair, to the point that no skin was visible at all and their suddenly red, glowing eyes gleamed from the backs of hairy pits.  

Despite their spooky appearance, the servants did not seem to notice as Pliskins cautiously entered the room in sugar glider form.  Nor did they notice when he hurled a small chip of wood at one of them.  Looking around for some place to hide, he scurried over to a large pile of wood chips that a small robotic bulldozer seemed to be forming as it traversed the room, pushing the debris created by the busy servants in front of it.

Pliskins buried himself in the pile of wood chips and used his precognition mutation to see what would happen if he just walked up to the large double doors that seemed to be the only exit from the room and pushed them open.  Just as he opened the doors, something jarred his body in the present and he came out of his precog to find himself enclosed in some kind of box, jammed tightly in with all the woodchips.  Unable to escape, he asked for help over the com-link then foresaw what would happen if he simply assumed his human form while trapped in what seemed to be a 2' cube.  He died instantly in his vision of the future, again causing him to pass out in real life for 10 minutes.

Some pretty good hilarity ensued when Pliskins' player realized what he had done.  "I think I just put myself in a wood chipper!"  he announced to the group at large.  Everyone laughed when they realized he had hidden himself in the waste pile which was probably bound for a compressor, or furnace, or chipper, or any number of other horrible places which everyone was bandying about.

Stang, realizing she was the only one near enough to be able to help Pliskins if he were to be in immediate danger, squeezed her bulk through the hallway and calmly entered the room of woodworking servants as if she belonged to be there.  They payed her no attention at all, silently sidestepping to avoid her 21' long body as it filled the side of the chamber, then resuming their work.  She surveyed the room and saw the little bulldozer robot carrying a 2' metal box in its scoop.  It set the box on top of a stack of 7 other boxes so that it now formed a cubic load, and the wagon began trundling itself toward the double door.  Stang swiftly reached out and grabbed the last box from the top of the wagon, hoping that it contained Pliskins.  The wagon proceeded through the doors which quietly opened in front of it.  A gruff voice in the hall commented on the missing box,

"Oi.  Looks like the line is messing up again.  Short one box."

Stang did not wait around, clutching her purloined box to her abdomen as she rapidly made her way back through the secret passageway to the stable.  She was completely unable to open the box, which was made of an unidentifiable metal and had no obvious seams.  In the end, Dr. Hops had to borrow Saurus' vibro-knife (in my campaign a vibro-knife or sword is basically a light saber) and teleport down to the stable to cut Pliskins free.

Meanwhile, Bozko had grown weary of waiting to see if anything happened in the courtyard.  He turned himself into root form and began traveling through the dirt toward the wall underneath the window in his room.  He learned two things during this journey: the dirt in the courtyard was synthetic in origin, completely lacking the normal compounds that he associated with the breakdown of organic matter into dirt; and there was a rhythmic pulsing noise coming from deep underneath the castle.  He decided to investigate the noise and ended up breaking into a natural cave with a steel door set in one wall and a ladder down a chute in the floor.  Hiding on the ceiling, he knocked on the door and observed the first Champion they had met come out and survey the cave.  Bozko's camoflage worked, as the champion did not notice him even when the champion held up his sword and illuminated the cavern with a blinding light.  Bozko noticed that the features of the champion seemed more bestial than he had remembered, even through the obstructions of his ornate helmet.

After trying and failing to sneak into the hallway beyond and nearly getting killed when a guard saw a strange moving patch of fungus on the ceiling and slashed it with his energy sword, Bozko beat a hasty retreat for the surface and returned to his room.  Before this occurred, he saw the Champion return with a hideous figure wearing the clothing of the queen; this figure was green skinned and totally bald, with desiccated facial features and bright yellow eyes.

After Bozko got back to his chambers only Pliskins was not in his designated room, as he had decided that he was not finished exploring the room full of hairy servants.  He once again used his precognition ability to foresee re-entering the woodshop, and saw that a figure wearing the robes of one of the elf nobles was working on the bulldozer robot with his back to the secret panel.  Pliskins (in his vision of the future) walked boldly into the room and strode up far enough to get a good look at the noble.  He saw a werewolf in elvish clothing.

 Pliskins instantly blasted the werewolf in the face with his gamma eyes, rolling a natural 20 and doing a ton of damage.  The werewolf responded by biting his head off, killing him for the third time this session in a precog and yes, causing him to pass out in real life for 10 minutes.  This time, he was also near death from the accumulated damage he had taken in his precogs (every time you die in a precog, you take 2d6 HP real damage).

Two more notable things happened this session.

When Stang finally fell asleep, she had a vivid dream.  She saw the planet from above, completely covered with the purple substance.  Then she saw an egg-shaped spaceship descend from above and land in one of the many small lakes that dotted the surface of the purple expanse.  Soon, elves emerged from the lake and began destroying the purple substance, laying out strange oil-derrick like structures where they had cleared the purple flesh from the ground.  She awoke with the profound conviction that the elves were invaders on this planet, intruders set on destroying the natural life of the world.

And James Bomb slept with a werewolf.

Yarro showed up at his room just as they had planned, and Mr. Bomb decided that while he had not expected such a rough and furry lover, it was in his own best interests to get as close to this valuable informant as he could...

Party Plans a Planeshift (Possibly)

Last Sunday's session included two firsts:  it was the first time we gamed with a player who was not present (via the PS3 Eye, a hi-def TV, a sound system and an online dice roller), and it marked the first use of the Precognition mutation to imagine using the Plane Shift mutation.  I have had mixed feelings about this combination of mutations, as part of the joy of Plane Shift is that it opens a portal to a random place (unless you are using it to travel someplace that you have already visited with the mutation).  Using Precognition to circumvent this at first had me considering simply saying that it did not work.

Then I thought about it, and I decided that there were really two options if I allowed it to happen.  I could either have the player foresee a place so terrible that the party would never willingly go there, or reveal an intriguing location that would strongly tempt the party to open a portal and travel there. 

 As for option 1, I want to keep all the truly horrifying locations (we have arrived at the 666th layer of the Abyss, local time is 6:66, temperature outside the portal is 451 degrees Fahrenheit, thanks for flying Plane Shift...) in reserve for the time the party decides that whatever lies on the other side of a random portal has to be better than the current situation they are in.  So that is a no go.  What good does describing a wicked awesome and dangerous place do if the party would never, ever, willingly go there?

As for option 2, this sounded good to me.  As it is, the Plane Shift mutation has only been used once in play and the party has never actually gone through a portal.  So why not encourage a little planar hopping with a tempting vision of the future? 

This is exactly what happened last session.  This is what awaited on the other side of the precogged planeshift:

As I mentioned in a post over at my other blog, this is a crappy, low-res pic I took with my old cell phone of one of my drawings.

I described the ground and landscape as some kind of fleshy purple substance, I told the group that the eyes of the faces in the hillsides were slowly blinking, and I described the fight between the shiny knight and the dragon.  After assisting the knight defeat the dragon (in the vision of the future), the knight lifted his visor and revealed himself to be some sort of faerie or elf.  He spoke in a melodic and silvery tongue that was, of course, incomprensible, but then he pointed behind him to a castle in the middle of a lake, surrounded by a normal forest.  

The party is very excited to go on a dragon slaying expedition and are dreaming big about bringing back piles of dragon parts to assist the Mice of Camelot in making some mech suits for the party.  Dragon-scale mechs, anyone?

Campaign Catch Up

A lot has happened since my last session recap.  Lets see, for starters, how about four character deaths, one character kidnapping, the campaign wiki getting up and running and the NEAR TOTAL ANNIHILATION of the local chapter of the Knights of Genetic Purity at the hands of my wicked awesome players!  Too much has happened to allow me to recap everything, so let me hit a few highlights.

After sending the tentacle armed monster back to the Mutant Past, the party poked around the top of the military complex and realized that the monster had left behind dozens of babies, gestating in sacks of entrails and insides that the monster had sucked out of its victims with its tongue-arm.  They set about destroying these, and the embryos inside starting screaming, drawing the attention of some adolescent tentacle monsters.  The ensuing fight also drew the attention of some huge worms that apparently have taken up quarters in the second level down (a lot has changed in the complex since Julius Corple has been in charge...).

Blue the Kangaroo was unconscious for much of this fight as a result of dying in a vision of the future he had while using his Precognition mutation.  He woke up just in time to see a bunch of Dog Boys coming across the swamp, and rather than running like a sensible Kangaroo he used his ability to see into the future to see what the dog boys were going to do.  He didn't like what he saw, tried to run when it was too late and got netted by the Dog Boys, who hauled him off into the swamp despite the best efforts of his comrades to save him whilst simultaneously fighting off junior tentacle monsters and 300' worms.

Yeah, that was a pretty epic combat.  One of the great moments involved Stang (an angry 30' long mutant wasp with 4 extra brains, 3 of them defective, that have the personalities of the Beatles and occasionally attempt to possess her) and one of the worms.  Stang, flush with the hundreds of temporary HP she had gained from using her Vampiric Field mutation to destroy dozens of monster embryos, swooped down at a worm that had just crashed through the roof from below.  She was promptly swallowed whole but blasted her way out from the inside, emerging relatively unscathed despite taking 5d20 acid damage a round!

After things quieted down, the party learned that Skinny Butt (their home base) had been obliterated.  The Knights of Genetic Purity had managed to form an alliance with the Radiant Order of the Oh and had successfully trapped the Secret Order of the Ooh in the underground portions of the Ooh-Oh Monk's neck of the woods. This meant that the Knights now had access to the missile silo the monks had formerly used to fend off all comers, and the (huge, bunker-busting) conventional explosives packed into the missiles had been used to pound Skinny Butt until it was a hole in the ground.

Reasoning that if they helped the Secret Order of the Ooh escape they would have yet another ally against the Knights, the party contacted his magnificence the Dean Doco Proffus Flipsham Egwar using the special ear piece he had given them in an earlier meeting.  They were perturbed to find out that something or someone was preventing the powerful mutant from using his mental abilities to teleport in his shining egg vehicle, and indeed, was preventing all of the mutants in the order from using their mutations to fight their way out.  The party resolved to clear a path up from the mouse kingdom through the abandoned levels that were frequented by Dragons (giant, winged, scaly, fire-breathing cats) and an assortment of carnivorous plants so that the Secret Order of the Oohs could escape down without having to fight their way out.

This turned out to be a bad idea, as the party ignored all my (very clear, I thought) warnings that the dragons were nothing to be trifled with - Ryan had just rolled up a new character to replace the recently abducted Blue, coming up with an Obese Were-Panda in a business suit, and this unfortunate mutant died within a half hour of his creation.  Natas, who had recently acquired the Increased Caloric Needs defective mutation, carved up the roasted (courtesy of the dragons) body of the panda to eat later on.

The party then tried a different strategy, returning to the surface and making a direct assault on the missile silo with the help of some of the Mice in Mech Suits.

The battle was ferocious and bloody, and when a chainsaw wielding robot of doom joined the fray on the side of the Knights of Genetic Purity, it looked like the party was facing another inglorious defeat.  Thats when George (a new character played by Mike) floored his ATV at the robot and used his Disentegration mutation, rolling a success to disentegrate 140 pounds of its head and shoulders.  As it teetered and then fell over, decapitated, it became apparent that there had been a man inside it - blood began to pour out and George collapsed unconscious on his ATV, drained by his mutation, and rolled off into the woods.

The Robot of Doom:

The tide of the battle turned at this point, and when it became clear that the party and their allies were going to win through into the silo, the two silo coverings opened up and the knights inside began preparations to launch two missiles simultaneously on Lard Jeebus knows what target.  Dataan and Bozko saw this, and both took actions to prevent the missile launches.  Bozko in his Iron Man suit flew by and loosed a mini-missile into one silo while Dataan ran down the hillside from where he had been hiding after nearly being killed in the first moments of the combat and began chucking grenades into the other silo.  They both managed to ignite the booster fuel in the lower stages of the missiles, and as the silos were consumed with a fiery explosion, one of the warheads was detonated in the conflagration.

Most of the party had cleared out as soon as the impending missile launch had been discovered, Rock hauling away the unconscious George and Bozko flying off after loosing his missile.  Bark had already been slain in the melee, and Natas was inexplicably carving holes in a helmet he had pilfered from a KoGP commando so that he could put the helmet on over his horns.

When the missile exploded, Dataan and Natas died instantly and several more missiles stowed below in the silo also exploded, collapsing the entire complex and leaving a smoldering crater in the side of Hendrix Hill.  I should mention that I gave Natas plenty of opportunity to say he was fleeing the scene (Dataan unfortunately was right next to the silo, having just tossed the grenades in that caused the missile to detonate) - but he was very clear that he was stopping to pick up a helmet and cut holes in it for his horns to fit through.  Rock's player (the older brother of Natas' player in real life) said, "You mean you are doing that after you run away, right?"

But Natas again reiterated that he was picking up a helmet and carving holes in it.  So that is how he died, in the middle of a crafting project!

Still, this had to be counted as a glorious success for the party despite three character deaths - in the battle and subsequent missile detonations, 50 regular Knights of Genetic Purity, 16 commandos, 1 special operative wearing an Iron Man suit and one chain-saw wielding Robot of Doom had been destroyed, representing nearly the entire force that the knights had in the area.  Some of the top ranking officers and one special operative in an Iron Man suit escaped in a vehicle, but other than that, it was a clean sweep.

Look out Mutant Past!

Tonight's Mutant Future session, something a long time coming finally happened; a character with the Plane Shift mutation finally used it!  The text of this mutation states that "This mutation grants the power to visit realities in other dimensions... The mutant can only choose to open doors to worlds he has visited before. Otherwise, the doorway leads to a random world of the ML’s choice and design."  I have had a fun plan ready for this since the very beginning of the campaign, because one of the starting characters had the mutation.  Of course, he was only able to attend a few sessions and never ended up using the ability.  But with the deadly sessions of the last few weeks, we had several new characters and two of them have this ability!

My plan was that the first time someone used the Plane Shift ability, it would open a gateway to an alternate past in the same physical location on earth that the portal was opened.  The gate would lead to today's date in the present (the real present, Monday, January 11th 2010).  I figured that the only time the group would want to hop through a portal to a random destination was when they were running from something truly horrid and had no other chance to survive; I envisioned a group of wounded mutants suddenly appearing on Eugene's streets, and thought it would make a fun diversion for the week they were stranded in the Mutant Past before the ability could be used again.

As often happens in RPGs, the way things went down was far from how I had planned it.  After a lengthy meeting with the Mice of the Round Table, where King Arthur and his knights promised to assist in a campaign against Julius Corple and the Knights of Genetic Purity and Merlin told the interested members of the party that he would get a list of materials needed for the robot manufacturing plant to create powered armor for the characters, the party decided that the most pressing threat was Julius Corple.  This decision was aided by two things; the mice had just been invaded by Corple's dog boys and terminator bots, and Dataan's player was not in attendance (he has a serious grudge against the Knights of Genetic Purity and probably would have lobbied hard to make them the top priority).

The group piled into the jeep (all except Natas and his melted face, who rode on the back of Samantha, or "Stang" as she is nicknamed, a 22' long giant mutant wasp who is new to the party) and rolled over to the military complex.  They investigated the building where the formerly aggressive war chimps appeared to be holed up, and discovered that most of their number had succumbed to the FDF7 virus.  The mutated survivors were tending to the diseased and dying, and were patrolling the perimeter of the building as if they expected an imminent attack.  Blue, another new party member, has a special sense that allows him to smell emotional states by the pheromones that are emitted by a body in different mood which he used to detect that they were afraid of something.  He is also a precog, and used this ability to imagine himself hopping (he is a mutant kangaroo) into the building unarmed and attempting to parlay with them.  When he foresaw that they would not react violently, he did this in real time and discovered that their will had been largely broken by the devestating virus and a mysterious creature that had emerged from the military complex and had been slaughtering them one by one.  Now that the rest of the survivors and diseased members of the war chimps had clustered in this one building, the creature had been unable to pick off any more of them, but they were too terrified to leave.  Blue also learned that several of the first war chimps to survive the virus and gain mutations had cracked under the strain of the transformation and had fled off into the swamp never to be seen again.

Blue offered the party's assistance in killing the creature, recognizing that the war chimps could make valuable allies.  He picked their brains for as much information regarding the killer creature as they could give him, then got their permission to invite the rest of the party in.  The war chimps parted with some weaponry to assist the party (good thing to, because the group was out of grenades!  Lard Jeebus knows they love blowing stuff up, so I am sure the ten grenades and the couple of missile launchers that they got will get put to good use) and then sent them on their way with sincere wishes of good luck in their endeavor.  The war chimps had revealed that the creature had an iron will and had proven almost impossible to effect with mental mutations.  It moved with incredible speed and could leap a hundred feet in a single bound.  One of its arms ended in a deadly metal claw, and a tentacle-tongue emerged from this and entered the wound made by the claw to suck out the insides of its victim.  Its other arm was a long tentacle that it used to grapple its opponents.  An energy cannon mounted on its tentacle arm and poisoned quills that covered its head rounded out its formidable arsenal.

The creature only emerged from the complex at night, so the party hoped that by searching for it in the complex during daylight hours they might catch it napping.  Stang shuttled everyone up to the roof, and just as they were discussing strategy and how to best go about finding the beast, it burst through the roof and hurtled itself at Stang (who has the Prey Scent mutation which draws predators to her like sharks to blood in the water).  The following fight was brutal, and several party members (including Stang) were reduced to single digit HP in the first couple of rounds.  Only some lucky shots with the guns looted from the Dog Boys using the alien web ammunition kept it from completely annihilating the entire group.

This is what they were up against:  The 16' tall Xiticix Killer from the Rifts Lone Star World Book.

A few rounds in to the combat, the monstrosity had shredded the rest of the party's alien web ammo like so many spiderwebs and was about to commence with the devouring of the party from the inside out with its claw and tentacle-tongue.  Desperate, one member of the group emerged from behind the air vent where he had been hiding and knelt directly behind the killer, enlarging himself so that he came up to its knees.  Rok used his Plane Shift ability to open a gate directly behind the kneeling party member, and the rest of the group rushed the creature and pushed it over the kneeling party member and into the gate.  As it tumbled in, I told the party that they could see through the gate to what appeared to be the same location, but the rooftop was not in the middle of a swamp, instead being surrounded by dry ground, paved roads, cars driving and generally not a ruined post-apocalyptic landscape.  The beast attempted to drag Rok through the portal with it, but he managed to shut the portal on it, severing its tentacle and trapping the beast in an alternate reality.

Everyone realized that they had just unleashed a terrible killer into the present/Mutant Past.  A debate ensued as to whether or not the portal led to the actual past of the timeline that they presently inhabited, or if it led to an alternate past.  Some party members felt like they might have unwittingly caused the apocalypse that led to the Mutant Future and the world they knew today!  Blue used his precog ability to imagine Du Pont (the other mutant with the Plane Shift ability) opening up a portal to the same place (I ruled that now that Rok and Du Pont had seen through the portal, they could reliably open up a portal to that particular reality if they so desired) and himself looking through it.  He saw a scene of devastation, cars wrecked on the road and people fleeing as the creature slaughtered everyone within reach.

Session 24 recap - Dog Boys and a near TPK

This session started with the group desperately trying to get the hovercraft back up and running after the beating it took last time, to no avail.  In the middle of this, the Knights of Genetic Purity started shelling the party from Spanky Butt with the howitzer that they just got air-lifted in.  As the knights started dialing in the aim, aided by an iron man flying high above, the party got pretty panicked but just managed to push the hovercraft into the Badder caves before they were sealed in by a howitzer shell.

With only one functioning fan, Bozko in his iron man suit and Jonathan in his mech suit lifted the other side of the hovercraft and pushed it like a floating wheelbarrow.  The party trundled in this manner all the way down the tunnels to the halls of Glargorion that link the military complex with the sub-basement levels of the Ooh-Oh Monks.  Hoping that a jeep that they had previously found was still where they had left it near the entrance to the Ooh-Oh Monks sub-basements (where Jonathan the mutant mouse had come from, and where a whole kingdom of Mice in Mech Suits awaits), the party set off down the long tunnel.  They found the jeep where they hoped it would be and managed to position the hovercraft on the troop-transport flatbed that the jeep was towing, after stripping off the walls and canvas roof from the flatbed.  Noticing that the blast door leading to the mouse kingdom had been forced open, Jonathan took his leave from the party to investigate while the rest of the group set off in the jeep up a twisting tunnel that they hoped led to the surface.  They passed the wrecked jeep that Dataan had hi-jacked from the Warangutans in an earlier session, and were ambushed by a group of Dog Boys (see my review of the Lone Star Rifts Worldbook) that were hiding in the wrecked jeep.

This led to probably the single most epic combat I have ever ran.  I don't want to fill pages with all the ins and outs, but I want to at least hit on a few highlights - the Dog Boys were wielding a strange alien gun that the party had never seen before.

This gun apparently had five settings - one shot a goo-ball that expanded into a sheet of alien tissue, which then contracted as an electrical pulse ran through it and wrapped around whatever it hit.  Several party members ended up wrapped in a netting of alien tissue, which proved strong enough to contain the incredible strength of an iron man suit as Bozko found out first hand.

A second setting shot a cone of flame out, and this flamethrower option proved quite useful against a new member of the party, Rok, when he attempted to use his light manipulation mutation to turn invisible.  The flamethrowers also very nearly killed Bark even though he had 160 temporary hitpoints from his vampiric field mutation - he is susceptible to flame damage, and when he got nailed by two Dog Boys with flamethrowers he went from 168 HP to 5 HP in one round!

A third setting shot a glass dart containing an alien worm which attempts to burrow into the wound left by the dart.  The dart itself does minimal damage, but the worm is truly terrifying as Kunta Kinte found out first hand.  Low on HP and looking down at an alien worm disappearing into his chest, he made the fateful decision to ignore it and shoot the double M-2 machine guns that he was manning on the back of the jeep.  While he died a terrible death as the worm swam through his insides, splitting into two worms every time it consumed 10 HP, each of which also split into more worms as they feasted, he did manage to kill a dog boy with that last attack which may have been the difference between the entire party ending up captured and in one of Julius Corple's experiments.

The other two settings were a barbed homing dart that aided subsequent shots and an energy blast, your garden variety high-damage plasma beam.  The combat came down to one dog boy vs. Beyonce as everyone else was either dead (two character deaths this session!) or trapped in a net (Rok and Bozko) or reduced to 1 HP and fleeing in the form of a dandelion seed tuft (Bark).  Beyonce had 96 HP left as the dog boy burst through the back door of the hovercraft.  She had been manning the hovercraft's guns but had been rolling terribly all session.  As the dog boy entered the hovercraft, flamethrower a flaming, Beyonce finally rolled some good rolls as she pulled out her laser pistols and unloaded.  Still, she did not kill the canine assassin and it in turn shot two bursts of flame at her - of course I rolled a hit and a critical hit, and everyone clustered around as I tossed the damage die.

The critical hit did 62 damage (I rolled 31 damage on 8d6, and all natural 20's are double damage in my game).  If I rolled a 34 or higher on the next damage roll, she would die and the party would have been in serous trouble.  I let the dice fly and everyone gasped at the number of 6's that popped up - but I also got a lot of 1's and 2's to balance them out.  30 more damage, and Beyonce was left with 4 HP.  She killed the dog boy with her next attack, and what was left of the party collected their breath, collected the alien weaponry and got the hell out of there!

Requiem for the Swamp Orca

Last night's Mutant Future session probably spelled the end of the road for the trusty Swamp Orca, the refurbished military hovercraft that has been propelling the party around so faithfully for over a dozen sessions now.  After fleeing the scene of their latest escapades (and managing to avoid being hit by the boulders hurled after them by the angry treants and their Coy-Pu masters), the party sent Beyonce's remote controlled dragonfly spybot up to make sure the way ahead was clear.  With three paralyzed party members, their immediate goal was to return to the Badder warrens in the hope that Dae-Brak the shaman could work some of his herbal magic and return their comrades to the ranks of the responsive. 

Beyonce, looking at the feed coming in from the dragonfly, saw five men riding mechanical gliders, circling in a formation to the west, heading in the direction the party had just come from.  Luckily the hovercraft was behind a small hill, known as Hendricks Park in the ancient times, and the gliders did not appear to have noticed them.  Zooming in, Beyonce identified the men as Knights of Genetic Purity by the red square and unbalanced scales of justice that were emblazoned on their armor.  The party pulled the hovercraft up in the shelter of some trees on top of the hill and Irons used his telepathic ability to create a camoflage pattern on the glarg-ore armor covering the hovercraft.  Carefully maneuvering the dragonfly closer, they saw that the gliders were flying in a circle over a large, armored wheeled vehicle flanked by a squadron of men in wetsuits (promptly dubbed frog soldiers by the party).  Attached by a chain to the vehicle, and leading the whole procession, was an obviously mutated naked human with a huge head.  This mutant was covered with scars and fresh whip marks, and he was casting back and forth as if scenting something.

The party assumed that the mutant was somehow following the scent trail they had left earlier in the morning when they travelled from the Badder warrens to the ruins of Riverbend, and realized it was only a matter of time till the knights found their current trail as well.  After much debate about the proper course of action, the party came up with a devious plan that would make insurgents everywhere proud.  They constructed an IED (improvised explosive device, for anyone who has had their head in the sand for the last few years) out of a pipe, some scrap metal and a pound of their precious C4 plastic explosive.  They proceeded down the hill to a stretch of the old road that runs along a sheer basalt outcropping, with a cliff to the side.  Reasoning that their pursuers would have to pass along this road, which was wide enough for the vehicle but not much more, they buried the IED in the middle of the road and set off down the road into the swamp.  The party split up, with the hovercraft heading toward the Badder warrens (the dragonfly had also observed ominous clouds of smoke rising up from that general vicinity) while Bozko and Jonathan the Mutant Mouse in the Lancelot Mech set off to lead a scent trail into the heart of War Chimp territory.  Bozko spilled odiferous pollen behind him as he went, hoping to lure the knights (if they made it past the IED) into the teeth of the vicious War Chimps. 

They did not have to wait long to set off the explosive - the mutant sniffer caught their newer scent as the knights passed about a mile away from the path the party had taken from Riverbend to Hendricks Hill, and he angled over and started following the new path straight up the hill.  Sure enough, they passed directly over the IED and the party, watching intently on the laptop that was displaying the feed from Beyonce's dragonfly, waited until the mutant sniffer was a full chain's length past the IED and the front wheels of the armored vehicle were just about to roll over it before they detonated the C4.  Beyonce and Irons had really done an excellent job of constructing the IED, and it amplified the force of the C4 and sent an armor piercing charge up through the front of the vehicle, severing the right axle and surely deafening and stunning if not killing its occupants outright.  Four of the frog soldiers died on the spot, flung like ragdolls over the cliff, and the vehicle settled nose first into a small crater that now smouldered in the road bed.  The chain holding the mutant sniffer had been severed in the explosion and the poor creature had been hurled forward.  Shaking the cobwebs clear, he turned and ran straight down the nearly vertical cliff surface and hurled himself into the swamp and freedom.

Meanwhile, the hovercraft arrived at the entrance to the warrens and they witnessed a scene of devastation.  Despite the rainy and generally wet conditions prevailing in the Willing Mate valley in early fall, the hillside had been burned to scorched earth.  Beyonce, with her military experience from her previous life with the human resistance all those centuries earlier before her extended stretch of cryostasis, recognized the effects of napalm.  A large crater marred the side of the hill, where the four entrance tunnels that the party knew about would have been.  One of the tunnels was still uncollapsed, and a spiderbot was sent inside to investigate.  There was evidence of an intense firefight, spent shell casings and the bodies of a few of the knights.  Further under the hill when the tunnel opened into the first large chamber, a shallow grave had been dug and filled with perhaps two or three dozen corpses of Badder warriors, carefully laid to rest.  The party surmised that these were members of the Badder rearguard, and had fought the Knights off while the rest of the Badders escaped deeper into the labyrinth of winding tunnels that honeycomb the south hills.  Also around this time, the paralyzed party members regained control of their bodies.  Natas' face was horribly disfigured, but he was a goatman satan-look-a-like to begin with, so having his face melted away by acid really just added to the whole look he had going on!  I rolled to see if he had lost vision in either eye, and he got lucky and remained fully sighted!

The spiderbot's thermal sensors detected a watching Badder, concealed under a thin layer of dirt.  When the party communicated with the warrior he was none to happy with them, as the knights had made it clear they were looking for the party when they invaded the Badder warren.  This was actually the second time that the party had indirectly caused a catostraphe for the Badders, and the warrior politely asked the party to stay away from the Badders for the time being until things cooled down.  The party did manage to patch up some of the hard feelings and left a spiderbot with the warrior to bring to the war chiefs so that they could be in communication should the party learn more about the knights next move. 

Bozko and Jonathan had made it into War Chimp territory in the swamp, but found it eerily quite. The corpses hanging on the ring of cut trees that marked their territory looked like they had not been replenished for at least a week, as they were mostly picked clean.  No sentries fired from the blinds watching the outer perimeter, and indeed, as they forged deeper they found no sign of life at all until they came to the military complex itself in the center of the territory.  There, they saw several small smoke trails that looked they might come from a cooking fire rising up from the broken windows of two smaller warehouses that border the complex. 

Monkey Boy had flown away from the hovercraft as it approached the Badder warrens and, travelling at 1/8th his already small size, approached the contingent of Knights on the hill that were hauling the wounded out of the armored vehicle and digging emergency fortifications in preperation of further attacks.  He attempted to fly inside the mask of one of the glider pilots circling over head, but was smacked aside with a tremendous blow of the pilots gloved hand.  He realized that the glider pilots wore a light powered armor, seemingly less powerful than the Iron Man suits, but still plenty strong enough to nearly kill him with one blow (I rolled a critical hit, one of many that I rolled that session - the dice gods seem to smile upon me when I put on my DM hat).  Undaunted, and hoping that he had been mistaken for one of the many annoying insects that buzz around the swamp, he descended on a different pilot and this time managed to crawl inside his helmet before he could be knocked away.  He took possession of the pilots body, just as one of the iron men emerged from the armored vehicle and, joined by three of the glider pilots, jetted off across the swamp in the direction of the Badders and the hovercraft. 

Monkey Boy made to follow them but a voice cracled in over the com link in his helmet,
"Hold your position!  You have your orders, soldier, follow them!"

He resumed flying in circles over the knights with one other pilot while the other three and the iron man rapidly closed in on his comrades.  The dragonfly was still perched in the trees overlooking the scene and the party members back in the hovercraft guessed that they must have been observed showing up at the Badder warrens.  Their suspicions were confirmed when two knights emerged from their concealed positions behind a boulder higher up the hill and began lobbing grenades and gas bombs at the hovercraft!  I rolled a critical with the first grenade and the hovercraft took some serious damage, rendering it almost undrivable as a huge section of the skirt was ripped and one of the fans was damaged.  As a thick, noxious looking gas emerged from the canisters, Beyonce accelerated the hovercraft and drove it straight at the knights, somehow managing to avoid crashing the vehicle despite its severely damaged condition (it was already pretty beat up going in to this encounter) and sending the knights scattering.  She spun the hovercraft around and parked it in the shadow of one of the few remaining trees on the hill, a massive cedar that had survived the raging inferno.  Natas, Bark and Kunta Kinte manned the hovercrafts guns while Beyonce and Irons ran to the back of the hovercraft with their laser sniper rifles and threw open the back hatch and prepared to fire on the incoming gliders.

Bozko and Jonathan had beat a hasty retreat back to the hovercraft when they heard what was going on, and Bozko (in his iron man suit) engaged the other iron man in mid air while Jonathan hurried on to the hovercraft.  Back at the hillside where the other knights remained, Monkey Boy flew above the other glider pilot and dropped a grenade on top of him (he had discovered that the gliders contained frag grenades, tear gas grenades and mustard gas canisters) and then dropped a mustard gas cannister onto the knights on the ground.  He scored a solid hit on the other pilot, forcing a crash landing, but the mustard gas cannister rolled harmlessly off the cliff.  He then veered off in an attempt to join the fight going on over by the warrens, but the body he was commandeering was torn to shreds by machine gun fire from the knights on the ground.  He managed to survive (still around 2" tall and tucked inside the helmet of his erstwhile possessee) the fall to the ground and, after realizing that he was shielded from the view of the knights on the cliff above him by a copse of trees, he returned to his normal size, looted the grenades and flew off.

The melee was raging in the skys and on the ground back at the Badder warrens, with Bozko getting the worst of his conflict with the knight in the other iron man suit (I of course rolled another critical hit on the knights first missile volley!) and the hovercraft taking several direct hits from grenades dropped by the gliders.  The knights on the ground had been dispatched by the gunners in the hovercraft, but not before one had gotten perilously close to attaching what looked to be a large chunk of plastic explosives on the hovercraft - he died only feet away, and the presence of the explosives that close was quite unnerving, but more mustard gas had been dropped from above and no one felt like opening up the hovercraft's hatches to deal with the explosives.

Eventually, after Jonathan and the Lancelot Mech had destroyed one of the gliders and the sharp shooting Beyonce and Irons had nearly killed another (before shutting the hatch due to encroaching mustard gas), the tide of battle turned against the surviving knights and they fled, two gliders and an iron man flying across the swamp back toward the hill.

When the gas had been dispersed by the wind that carried in a thick bank of fog that Natas had summoned, the party collected their breath and we ended the session.  I did not reveal to them at the time (because they had not yet looked), but the hovercraft is totally undriveable.  Not only is the skirt that contains the cushion of air almost totally blasted away, but both fans and some major engine components are damaged beyond repair.  Short of replacing these parts, the Swamp Orca will ride no more.

Session 22 - Zombies, Skeletons and the Dark Mother!

Looking for a safe place to incubate their newly acquired giant eagle eggs, the party headed for the ruins of Riverbend and had one hell of an adventure.  When they approached the huge brick buildings that used to be a hospital complex before the fall, they noticed that they were in remarkably intact condition.  Monkey Boy, flying overhead attached to the giant eagle he had taken control of last session, noticed some movement below; several small shapes rapidly swimming through the swamp to the two smaller buildings outside of the hospital proper, and four huge trees that seemed to be slowly walking around between the hospital and the deeper channel carved by the Mike Zee River.  Swooping lower while the hovercraft circled around to the side of the buildings, Monkey Boy saw that the shapes in the swamp were Coy-Pu, mutant nutrias that the party had encountered on one other ill-fated occasion.

 The Coy-Pu are ancestral enemies of the Badders, and the last time the party had ran into them in the pass between the Willing Mate Valley and the eastern desert, Dataan had greeted the curious water-rat men in the name of Glargorion, the terrible worm-god of the Badders.  This had angered the plant-worshiping Coy-Pu who unleashed their huge animated tree allies on the party.  The huge trees proved to be dangerous adversaries, and the hovercraft was very nearly crashed on the banks of the Mike Zee river high in the pass that day.
     Banking back over the moving trees, Monkey Boy saw that the trees were shambling along, a fishing net stretched between each pair as they slowly moved through the swamp.  A robed Coy Pu rode in the branches of each tree.  At this point Natas the goat-man used his power over weather to cause a thick fog to rise up out of the swamp.  Not wanting to drive straight into danger, the hovercraft slowed down while Bark changed his form into a large patch of algae and slipped into the water to do a little scouting.  Bark soon realized that a large patch of the swamp bottom had been meticulously cleaned out in a circle around the two smaller buildings that the Coy-Pu in the swamp had retreated to at the sight of the giant eagle circling overhead.  This cleared area was marked by a tangled border of a strange yellow vine like plant that the party had not encountered before.  As the hovercraft moved away from Bark's position, he realized that the plants seemed to be emitting an exact duplicate of the vibrating noise the hovercraft made underwater.  He cautiously approached, stopping about thirty feet away to form a small section of his body into a torpedo shaped piece of wood, which he then detached and propelled at the plants to observe their reaction.  The reaction was swift and unexpected, as they ramped up the volume of the noise they were emitting to the point that Bark's body was nearly ripped apart on the spot.  This was followed by the yellow vines lashing out at him; stunned by the sonic attack, Bark was too slow to evade the vines and they ripped through his body, unable to grasp his algae form but coating him with a slimy poison.

At this point I casually reminded Bark's player that he could use his d30 roll on the poison save, which he did, getting a natural 30.  Bark retreated as I gave his player the meta-game information that he avoided near certain death, as the poison did 8d6 damage while his current HP total was 15!

The party now decided to take the hovercraft to the large parking structure to the west of the complex, driving straight into the second level from the swamp and circling up through the rusted hulks of ancient vehicles.  They stopped below the roof and sent Kunta Kinte up to investigate.  He emerged in the middle of a rooftop garden.  Two robed and ancient looking Coy-Pu tended the raised beds that contained vegetables and herbs of all descriptions.  They looked at him without apparent concern, and said something that the deaf giant could not hear.  Kunta Kinte tapped on his com-link, signalling for back up, and Natas joined him on the roof as Monkey-Boy swooped down and landed the giant eagle.  The Coy-Pu's composure was shaken by the appearance of the giant eagle, and they blew on a piercing whistle and sought cover until Monkey-Boy spoke through the speakers he had dangled over the neck of the eagle, telling them not to fear.  Two of the huge trees loomed through the mist, apparently approaching at the signal of the whistle.  The Coy-Pu introduced themselves as Jix and Treego and inquired what business the party had in the area.  After listening to the party's response, Jix told them that it was unlikely that the community of Coy-Pu that lived in the two smaller buildings would allow them to incubate the eggs of the giant eagle there.  The party's questions about the larger, apparently unoccupied buildings afforded cryptic responses about the Kingdom of the Dead and the Dark Mother that apparently resided within the old brick hospital.  When asked how they controlled the animated trees, Treego responded that it was a gift of the Dark Mother.  This got the party curious, and they began asking if other people could receive such a gift.  Visions of animating and controlling plants danced through their heads.  Jix seemed to want to tell them something, but he was cut off by Treego.  After a little more conversation, the party sought and received permission to park the hovercraft on the roof while they entered the Kingdom of the Dead and sought the Dark Mother's gifts.  Treego encouraged them to do this, while Jix again seemed on the verge of telling them something before Treego interrupted him.  Bark, severely injured in his previous encounter with the plants, remained behind, while Bozko also stayed back with the Iron Man suit as back up in case the party ran into trouble and needed to be rescued.  Natas shrunk the giant eagle to 1/8th its size and the party tied it up and stashed it in the hovercraft so Monkey Boy could disconnect from it and accompany the party inside.  Bark used his mental abilities to create the illusion inside the giant eagle's mind that it was sitting on its eggs back in its nest, then rooted himself in one of the garden beds and began to soak up the sunlight (Natas had dispelled the fog and cleared the clouds to allow sunlight to stream down) in hopes of restoring some of his energy.

Entering the main lobby through an open window above the level of the swamp, the party was astounded to see it free of water and immaculately clean as if it was carefully swept and dusted regularly.

Everyone in the party besides Monkey Boy (who has a ridiculously high Willpower due to a mutation that increases that attribute) felt a comforting feeling of security.  They felt that they were in a safe place and began to relax their guard a little.  They first sought the pharmacy and loaded up on antibiotics, painkillers, antivenoms and possibly poisonous chemotherapy medications.  Then they began exploring the rooms opening off the lobby, starting with a room that evidently was a physical therapy area.  Medicine balls, giant rubber bands, and mats lined the floor and walls, and a host of skeletons lay around as if they had been struck down in the middle of their therapy.  Examining the skeletons carefully with a spiderbot turned up several peculiar features.  The bones seemed to be coated with a layer of some sort of black lacquer, and nearly invisible thin threads connected the feet of the skeletons with the ventilation shafts in the walls.  Irons, who had recently downloaded a huge library of books into his internal hard drive, used his newly acquired knowledge of anatomy and diagnostic medicine to determine that the skeletons did not show any kind of injuries that would require the sort of physical therapy that evidently went on in this room in the ancient days.  Some debate ensued about whether or not to sever the threads that connected the skeletons to the ventilation system; some members of the party felt that this would alert whatever was connected to those threads, so they were left alone.  The party left that room and returned to the lobby, this time with the intention of activating the ancient computer system and possibly turning on the security cameras.  They discovered that there was no power in the complex, but using their backpack mini-fusion cell they powered up the computer at the front desk and realized that its hard drive was corrupted beyond repair.

They next decided that they needed to find the basement, where they assumed the emergency power generators would be located.  Prying open the door of one of the elevator shafts, they lowered a spiderbot down into the maintenance access hallway below.  Irons, wireless connected to the spiderbot's video feed, saw that around a dozen strange clusters of volleyball sized black spheres had burst through the concrete. The spheres were grouped like clusters of grapes and were covered in a slimy black liquid.  Poking one with the spiderbot caused it to explode in a shower of yellow spores.  Leaving the mysterious spheres alone for the moment, Irons instructed the spiderbot to investigate the door at the end of the maintenance hallway.  The door was warm, nearly 80 degrees according to the spiderbot's sensory equipment.  Irons had the spiderbot drill a small peephole in the door and a nightmarish scene was revealed.

Beyond the door was a large room, possibly the boiler room although it was hard to tell because the large machinery inside was completely covered with a slimy black substance.  The entire room was coated with the material, and a huge formless blob of it towered in the center.  Dozens of skeletons of all types and sizes dotted the room, connected to the central blob by more of the thin threads.  Even worse, partially decomposing corpses surrounded the mass.  The corpses all stood erect and had their arms plunged into the slimy black thing, and the black liquid that covered the mass was traveling up the arms of the corpses, leaving clean bone behind covered in the black lacquer-like residue left by the liquid.

Feelings of rage and betrayal began to flood the party members, including Monkey Boy.  They felt that the Coy-Pu had tried to lure them into a trap and they felt an intense hatred and dislike of the terrifying blob-thing the spiderbot had discovered.  The urge to descend into the basement and destroy it was strong and nearly overpowering.  Calling over the com-link to Bozko, the party had him fly over one of the biohazard suits that had been scavenged from the military complex in an earlier session.  Natas folded his prehensile tail around his waist and suited up, then waited at the open elevator shaft as the spiderbot continued its examination of the chamber.  Suddenly, a telekinetic force tried to push the party into the elevator shaft.  Monkey-boy resisted the mental attack and Irons and Kunta-Kinte were both too heavy to be forced over, but Natas tumbled forward.  Irons successfully grabbed him in an attempt to save him from the plunge, but the weight of Natas proved enough to enable the force pushing on Irons to send him into the shaft as well.  Luckily, Natas did not puncture the biohazard suit in the fall.  He was filled with a black rage focused on the entity beyond the hallway, and he set off with plasma rifle in hand.  The black globes exploded around him as he walked down the hallway, but his suit evidently protected him from any harmful effects.  The hallway did, however, become completely filled with the yellow spores.

Back up in the lobby, Kunta Kinte found himself alone as Monkey Boy had flown away as soon as he resisted the force that tried to push him into the elevator shaft.  Kunta Kinte, holding his four-barreled rocket launcher, nervously looked down the elevator shaft and waited for word from his companions.

Down below, Natas was unable to resist the urge to attack the monstrosity, and he flung the door open and blasted away with his plasma rifle.  Despite scoring several direct hits, he did little appreciable damage and found himself once again in the grasp of an invisible telekinetic force which began dragging him toward the blob.  Irons, still at the far end of the hallway, brought his laser sniper rifle to bear and carefully squeezed a shot off around the helpless body of Natas.  He scored a solid hit, and while it again seemed to do little damage to the massive mound, it did cause it to release its mental hold on Natas who now found himself in the middle of the chamber, with dozens of skeletons of all descriptions suddenly moving after him!

Kunta Kinte, the sunlight streaming in the windows of the lobby behind him and casting his shadow on the wall of the elevator shaft in front of him, felt a sinking feeling as several more shadows were cast on the wall as if a group of figures was approaching him from behind.  He whirled around and saw that the skeletons the party had left behind in the physical therapy room had emerged and were closing the ground on him fast.  Gambling that they might be controlled by the threads that attached to each skeleton, Kunta Kinte aimed at the doorway to the Physical Therapy room and let a missile fly with the hope that he would destroy the threads and stop all the skeletons at once.  He placed his shot perfectly, the missile exploding on the ground right in the doorway, and at first it seemed like his plan had failed.  The closest skeletons were already swinging at him, and he took some damage from their bony fists.  The rest of the skeletons continued their charge.  But as Kunta Kinte scrambled to the side to avoid being pushed into the open elevator shaft, he realized that the skeletons were mindlessly continuing doing exactly what they had been doing when the explosion severed the threads.  The ones nearest him continued to swing at the empty air where he had been, while the rest continued in a straight line and ran into the swinging skeletons, and the whole lot crashed into the shaft and dropped below.  When Kunta Kinte peered down at them, he saw that they continued to make the motions as if they were charging forward even though they were jumbled in a tangle of bones at the bottom of the shaft.

Meanwhile, Bozko had been rejoined at the hovercraft by Monkey Boy, and they decided to grab some of the party's C4 plastic explosives before flying back to aid their friends.  Back in the basement chamber, Natas was surrounded by a rapidly growing ring of skeletons, including the animated bones of a huge swamp bear that dug its great claws into him.  In addition to this, great tentacles were being exuded from the black mass in the center of the room, and they began writhing their way toward him.  Near death from the injuries he had sustained in the fall and the blows he had already taken from the skeletons, he wavered between taking a last few shots at the massive blob that he felt such uncontrollable rage against and trying to make a break back toward the doorway.  Irons and Bozko yelled over the com-link to run, Bozko adding that he was coming with explosives to deal with what they could only assume was the Dark Mother.

As Irons continued to lay down covering fire with his laser rifle to prevent the Dark Mother from using telekinesis, Natas shrunk down to 1/8th his size and made a break for the door directly between the legs of the swamp bear skeleton.  He pulled off his risky maneuver as the skeletons harmlessly swung over his head, and he restored his size to normal and pulled the door shut behind him, instructing the spiderbot to begin welding it shut.  Behind him in the hallway, the black pods began to extrude out of the ground and it became apparent that they were attached to the same kind of strange black tissue that covered the room beyond the door.  As this tissue squeezed up into the hallway, it began to form writhing tentacles that groped toward Irons and Natas, who was holding the door shut while the spiderbot welded.

At this point, first Bozko and then Monkey Boy flew into the lobby with the C-4, which Bozko took with him down the elevator shaft while Monkey Boy ran into the Physical Therapy room to enact a cunning plan.  He gathered up the severed ends of the threads that still dangled from the ventilation shaft, and began to use his parasitic control mutation that allows him to gain control over an organism after successfully maintaining physical contact with it for three rounds.  He activated another mutation before doing this that doubles one of his attributes; he doubled his willpower and rolled a 10 on a d10, so his willpower jumped from 21 to 42(!!!) for 10 rounds.  Bozko blasted straight past the tentacles in the tunnel, leaving Irons to deal with them while Bozko started packing the C4 onto the spiderbot.  Irons blasted the closest tentacle to him to bits, and the tentacles nearest Bozko seemed to be unable to penetrate the suit's force field when they attempted to grab him.

Kunta Kinte felt vibrations and realized that he was sensing many footsteps coming down the staircase that opened up from the lobby (as Kunta Kinte is deaf, I have been giving him some minor benefits like being particularly sensitive to vibrations that he can feel through his feet and hands, and this has seemed to work well in game).  He again shouldered his rocket launcher and aimed at the ceiling right where the staircase opened into the lobby, figuring that this was a load bearing point and he might be able to completely seal off the staircase if he caused the ceiling to collapse.  He missed and his missile shot up into the stairwell, exploding and partially blocking the stairs, but not completely sealing them off as he had hoped.

In the Physical Therapy room, Monkey Boy was extending his mental control up through the threads and down through the ventilation systems into the main body of the Dark Mother.  He realized with a start that in addition to the huge mass that he was trying to control, there were also four other "daughter" nodes in the upper floors of the hospital that seemed to be, although connected with the Mother through the threads, independent monsters in their own right.  Realizing that he could only control one of the five, he continued to try to bring the Dark Mother under his control.

Kunta Kinte launched a third missile up into the stairwell and this time did manage to completely clog it up, then, sensing vibrations behind him, spun around and loosed his last missile at the balcony above him where another small army of skeletons was emerging from the upper levels.  Down below, Bozko had shattered the concrete floor, removed his armored glove and was changing his arm into a root that burrowed down and over, hauling the C4-laden spiderbot with it as he tried to dig underneath the Dark Mother.  The tentacles in the hallway continued to lash at the iron man suit, failing to penetrate its force field again, and a few struck at Irons.

Then the turning moment of the conflict arrived as Monkey Boy took control of the Dark Mother.  His mind was flooded with an overload of sensory stimulation, as the Dark Mother was reading the thoughts of all life forms within 1000' feet.  He quickly realized that if he had not doubled his willpower, he would have been overwhelmed by the flood of thoughts that were entering the Dark Mother, so he had only 7 more rounds to do what needed to be done.  First, he sent a signal to the daughter nodes, pretending to be the Dark Mother, getting them to divert their controlled skeletons to a far corner of the hospital.  This occurred just in time; right as Kunta Kinte was about to be overran by dozens of the walking bones, they turned around and marched back the direction they came from.  Next, Monkey Boy had some of the root-like appendages that radiated out from the Dark Mother meet Bozko half way and grab the spiderbot with all the C-4, then he pulled it back up and inside the Dark Mother so that when it blew it would detonate from the middle of the blob-body.

Bozko went to grab Natas and carry him out of the basement, but Natas still wanted to gain the Dark Mother's gift and thought that if he touched the slimy body of the Dark Mother and escaped with his life he would have the ability to animate and control plants.  Natas blasted the door back open and ran up to the Dark Mother, pulling the head-piece off the biohazard suit and stuck his head into the slime.  He failed a save vs. poison and was paralyzed, covered with acidic ooze.  Monkey Boy used the Dark Mother's telekinetic abilities to grab the paralyzed body of Natas and fly him out of the hospital.  Bozko had flown back to the hovercraft and it arrived in front of the hospital one round before Monkey Boy was about to lose control over the Dark Mother; everyone except Monkey Boy piled in and took off, while Monkey Boy waited till the last possible second, then flew at top speed out the windows while Irons sent the signal to the spiderbot to shoot an electrical charge through the C4, detonating it and destroying the Dark Mother.

I gave a small chance of the building collapsing, because the charge was detonated in the basement and the boilers all superheated in the explosion and shot upwards through the building, causing even more structural damage than the initial C4 blast.  Bozko rolled the percentage chance and used his d30 roll, but he got a 20 and the building did not collapse.  Still, the Dark Mother was slain and a portion of the lobby collapsed into the basement.  The Coy-Pu were undoubtedly upset, but no one was waiting around to see their reaction. The hovercraft was heading off into the swamp as fast as it could.  Kunta Kinte and Bark could not resist the temptation to touch the slime that was dissolving Natas' face before Bozko scraped it into a vial for later analysis; Kunta Kinte made his save and was not paralyzed, but Bark rolled a natural 1, failing his save and also prompting me to call for him to make an additional save vs. poison to avoid death by heart stoppage.  He made that one, and lives on in a paralyzed condition.

As the Swamp Orca cruised on into the swamp, Bozko had a realization.  "We were played for fools!  There was no gift of the Dark Mother!  The job of those Coy-Pu shamans was to feed people to that terrible monstrosity, and we fell for it!"  The players of everyone who touched the slime turned to me and asked if they had any new abilities, but I just smiled and said, "Not as far as you can tell."

And then I said,
"I sure hope that paralysis isn't permanent..."

... You gotta give 'em something to stew over till next session!

Giant Eagles (Improv Roleplaying 101)

Tonight's Mutant Future session went off in a totally unexpected direction.  I ended up having to improvise the entire time, and the players loved it.  I would not be surprised if it was one of their favorite sessions to date.  Last session, Bark, the smaller of the two shapeshifting plants, had managed to swipe an "iron man" suit (as they call the light powered armor suits used by the special operatives of the Knights of Genetic Purity) from under the noses of the knights in very dramatic fashion.

Near death by the time he had the suit, he hurriedly got inside it and had Dataan the robot walk him through the start up procedure (Dataan had been studying a mangled suit that the party took from Richard Tater in an earlier adventure, and had a pretty good idea of how they worked).  Bark took off and managed to fly for about a mile over the wooded south hills before losing control of the suit and spiraling into the ground for a high speed crash landing.  The rest of the party managed to get to him and salvage the suit before the knights caught up, and after replacing a few damaged components from the junked suit they already had, they ended up with a fully functioning suit.

This session, after a bunch of tech rolls to finish repairing the suit and to fully understand how it worked (aided by the fact that Irons, a synthetic robot party member, had downloaded the entire operating system of the suit into his hard drive and had been conducting flight simulations in his positronic brain), the party was looking for a good place to test drive the suit.  They asked Dae Brak,the wise Badder shaman, if there was someplace relatively flat, free of obstacles and safe nearby.  Drivers, start your improv engines!

He directed them to a series of open, grassy meadows in a valley just to the south in the hills overlooking the swamp (thanks, Google terrain maps!).  He said that while large predators avoided the meadows, he warned the party that this was because giant eagles often circled overhead looking for prey; lacking a better alternative, the party decided it was worth the risk.  Most of the group accompanied Bozko in the hovercraft to the meadows, while the deaf giant Kunta Kinte, Natas the goatman and Monkey Boy stayed with Dae Brak and learned more about the herbal healing arts that Dae Brak had used to treat some of Bark's serious injuries.

Bozko had designated himself as the suit operator and Natas had used his Density Alteration, Other mutation to shrink Bozko enough to fit in the powered armor before they left.  Irons had by this time fully assimilated the entirety of the suit's capabilities due to the extensive simulations he ran after downloading the suit's operating system, and directed Bozko through the basics of flight (Irons has four arms so he could not simply fly the suit himself).  After some trial and error, Bozko got the hang of it and started experimenting with the suit's offensive abilities.  Not wanting to waste any of its mini-missiles, he started with the repulsor beams that provided both propulsion and offense.  He was soon shooting rocks out of the air that his comrades were throwing up for him, and eventually he was dodging rocks hurled directly at him.  Finally, he worked up the courage to push the limits of the suit.  He flew about a mile away from the meadow, turned, and accelerated to top speed as he flew back.  He broke the sound barrier almost immediately and a massive sonic boom rolled behind him, frightening the party members on the ground.  This noise also apparently got the attention of the giant eagles, because Beyonce's robotic dragonfly (circling high above the meadow on lookout patrol) soon spotted two shapes soaring from the ridge to the southeast.  While the rest of the party all piled in the hovercraft and retreated into the heavily wooded slopes of the hills, Bozko flew up over the meadow and eagerly awaited the arrival of the eagles.  He wanted to test the suit in a real combat situation, despite the protests of Beyonce that he might lose the party's new toy.

The giant eagles turned out to be truly gigantic.  70 foot wingspan gigantic.  As one soared in the thermal rising up from the sunny meadow, the second broke into a dive straight at Bozko.  At the last second, Bozko raked it with his repulsors - simultaneously, the eagle shrieked, a shrill, fierce cry that nearly stunned Bozko (he made his save, lucky for him and the powered suit).  The two solid hits with the repulsor beams knocked the eagle backwards in air and necessitated an ungainly struggle to regain its equilibrium.  While it was flapping and tumbling down, Bozko decided to try out the on-board targeting and locked on with a mini-missile.  He scored a direct hit, and the eagle tumbled awkwardly to the meadow, taking more damage as it crashed to the grass.  Despite all that, the eagle seemed to be by and large okay, physically, but it was quite shaken.  The second eagle was diving at Bozko from behind, but he had been warned of this by the party as they monitored the feed from the spiderbot attached to his back.  For some reason he decided to wait as if he hadn't seen it, planning to rocket straight up at the last second to let it harmlessly screech past below him.  As he was waiting for the last second and the eagle had a relatively large reach with its talons, I had Bozko roll a dexterity check to pull this maneuver off.  He failed miserably, and was raked by a large and razor sharp talon which easily pierced the suits force field and damaged Bozko as it indented a section of the chest as easily as you can squeeze an aluminum can.  Again, he got lucky as the eagle failed to hit with both talons which would have locked the suit into its iron grasp and almost certainly would have spelled doom for the plant shapeshifter.  Bozko flew up as fast as he could, again leaving a sonic boom behind him which stunned the eagle.  Thoroughly confused and angered, the two eagles beat a hasty retreat from the meadow and flew back towards the ridge from whence they came.

This is when the session really took a twist.  Beyonce announced to the group at large that she was following the eagles with the hovercraft.  Everyone else was horrified at this suggestion, but Beyonce had made up her mind that she wanted to find a giant eagle egg.  As soon as everyone heard this idea, the whole group was excitedly talking about raising and riding giant eagles.  Bark suggested that Beyonce simply follow the eagles with her dragonfly, and she realized this was a better idea than risking the hovercraft and the lives of the party.  Her robotic spy had no trouble tracking the eagles to their nest in a section of mutated Douglas Firs that dwarfed the redwoods of today and towered nearly 1000' feet into the sky.  The eagles paid no more mind to the dragonfly than they would any other minuscule insect, and Beyonce piloted it inside the nest (itself 100' tall, the product of generation after generation of eagles adding on layer after layer).  To her great disappointment, she found no eggs.  Two young fledglings squawked in the bottom of the nest, but she knew birds of that age would have already imprinted on their parents and it would be of no use to try to abduct them.

Searching the towering trees for other nests, she soon located two more.  In the interest of a good dramatic moment, I gave her a 25% chance that she would find eggs in the nest... and she used her once a session roll on the d30 instead of the percentile dice - success!  She found two eggs.  I decided that there was only a 10% chance that the third nest would contain eggs, and rolled myself - 8%, two more eggs!

Now the group started talking strategy in earnest, plotting the best method to rob eggs out from underneath the massive momma bird that was dutifully sitting on them.  Many ideas were tossed back and forth, but they all seemed fraught with peril.  Those birds could kill any member of the party in a single round, and they knew it.  And that is when Monkey Boy chimed in.  Monkey Boy is a mutant spider monkey, already only a foot and a half tall to start with, who has the Density Alteration, Self mutation that allows him to shrink to a further 1/8th his starting size.  He can fly and possesses the Possession mutation - after three rounds of physical contact with another being, he can take control over their body for as long as he remains in contact with them.  His proposal was simple - shrink down to his smallest size, fly straight up to one of the nesting eagles, burrow up under her feathers until he reached her skin, wait three rounds and seize control of her.  Then he could simply grab the eggs and fly away with them!  He executed this plan without a hitch, twice, and the party soon had four giant eagle eggs in the hovercraft.  Monkey Boy decided that he was just going to stay attached to the giant eagle for the foreseeable future, essentially getting to play as a creature with 257 HP and two talon attacks that do 5d20 damage.  Goddamn.  I did not see that coming when I jotted down a few quick stats for the eagles on the fly as they descended on Bozko in the meadow!

The party has now completely abandoned the other things they were trying to accomplish and are scouring the swamp for a safe place to hole up while they incubate the eggs, raise the hatchlings and teach them to fly with a rider.  It is truly interesting to see how one bit of improvised detail (the meadows in the valley and the giant eagles) has suddenly taken the entire campaign in a radically new direction.  I do not know if I have seen the players so excited as when they finally got the eggs into the hovercraft - it was a very rewarding moment, and the kind of thing that makes roleplaying games unique.  The ability of a human game master to roll with the punches and improvise will never be matched by a video game.  What I am most happy about is that my girlfriend, who plays Beyonce Chai, is now 100% invested in the game.  I think she has had fun (at least she claims so) in previous sessions, but I definitely got the feeling that she was mostly playing just because she wanted to be involved with something that I spent so much time on, and not because she was genuinely interested in the game itself.  But now that she has a giant eagle egg to mother, she could not be more excited.  During the car ride home she threatened me with real life harm if I killed her egg in game!  I should mention that my girlfriend volunteers at the Cascades Raptor Center here in Eugene and loves birds.  I could not have planned a better plot hook to immerse her in the game if I tried!

Sometimes running a roleplaying game is a truly magical thing.

(bird rider sketch lifted from this thread at enworld, artwork used without permission)