The Tragic Tale of Julius Corple, part two

After the players discovered the still living but unresponsive body of Julius Corple, naked and attached to a room sized mass of glowing tissue, they took his keycard and left him to his fate.  Using his keycard to open the door marked "Alien Weapons Division", they found a a short hallway, a locked door and a computer screen prompting them to enter a password.  They still had not discovered what the password was, but my players rarely let little details like that stop them.  Logan teleported to the other side of the door, only to find himself in another long hallway.  An alarm started blaring and a deathbot (look for this fiendish robot in an upcoming Bestiary post) emerged from a hatch in the ceiling.  The player of Logan's character had not two sessions earlier lost his previous character to a different deathbot, and indeed, the entire party very nearly died in that encounter.  Finding himself alone and facing the four armed, grenade spewing monstrosity he teleported back out of there, and fast.

Fast Forward to the next session:

This time, Millard Filmore was in attendance, and he decided to use his telepathic abilities to make contact with the catatonic Julius Corple.  With the curious party clustered around watching, Millard worked his magic.  He instantly realized that he was in a little over his head (out of his head?).  He found that he was actually making contact with two intelligences, that of Julius Corple and that of an immensely powerful alien intellect.  Corple's mind had been nearly totally subsumed by the alien thought processes, and at first Millard could get hardly more than fragmentary thoughts.  Millard reported to the rest of the party that the organic tissue behind the glass walls of the room was apparently a vast brain or organic computer.  The party had learned about the existence of organic computers (essentially disembodied, artificially created alien brains that served the Oozyxphg for all their computing needs) earlier in their explorations, but they had never heard of one this large.  Millard was concerned, because the alien thought processes being generated by the huge mass of tissues seemed to be "waking up", and he felt the alien mind begin to reach out and tentatively explore his own thoughts.  Pulses of energy began to run through the massive alien brain in great, rhythmic waves.  However, Millard bravely continued his efforts and began to establish a rapport with the mind of Julius Corple.  Corple seemed confused and defensive, and a mental barrier, something that was causing Corple feelings of intense shame, was preventing Millard from making further headway.  The rest of the party began to be alarmed as the intensity and frequency of the energy pulses running through the organic tissues surrounding them continued to pick up.

Meanwhile, Millard had finally made a breakthrough with Julius Corple.  He had penetrated the wall of guilt and shame and discovered that Corple had caused the downfall of the military complex by secretly constructing this massive organic computer.  He learned that at first, Corple had been able to control the alien intellect and used it make quick strides in understanding and reverse engineering Oozyxphg technology.  Corple was the rising star of the resistance movement, and his breakthroughs seemed to signal a shift in the tide of battle against the Oozies.  Unfortunately, Corple eventually lost control of his creation.  The last time he connected himself to it, it overpowered his brain and left his body an empty shell.  The room-sized brain reached out telepathically and made contact with the nearest Oozyxphgian organic computers.  It coordinated an assault with the Oozies; first, it used its incredible mental powers to seize control of the men stationed in the main security control chamber in the hangar level.  It had these possessed pawns release a deadly nerve gas throughout the complex, then disabled the nuclear power generators and physically cut the cables connecting the control chamber to the rest of the facility.  Then, when most of the men in the facility were dead from the nerve toxin and the security systems were disabled, the Oozies opened a wormhole from their planet directly into the hangar level using the coordinates that the brain had given them.  A massive alien cannon strafed the military vehicles, melting them into piles of twisted metal.  Oozies in their robotic suits poured through the wormhole and within minutes the complex was abandoned by the resistance.

During this entire ordeal, Corple was conscious of everything the brain was doing but was powerless to stop it.  The Oozies did not take the brain or any of the other Oozy technology sequestered in the base - they may have reasoned that it might have been trapped, or they might simply not have cared enough to bother.  In any case, both the brain and Corple lay undisturbed for hundreds of years, sustained by the energy generated by the brain's "batteries" (small areas of wormhole generating tissue that linked up with a massive mat of tissue soaking in a nutrient rich solution on a far off alien world).  Corple's body was kept alive by the brain, which needed to be connected to something to function (a safeguard that Corple had built in when he constructed it).  Centuries trapped inside an alien mind with the weight of hundreds of deaths on his conscience had driven Corple quite mad, but the contact with Millard seemed to be doing him good as his thoughts had become more coherent and more distinct from the alien thought processes of the giant brain.

Once Millard had learned this history from Corple's disembodied mind, he asked Corple for the password to the Alien Weapon Division, telling him that it would help in the fight against the Oozies.  Just then, the alien brain flexed its figurative muscles and attempted to possess Millard - I needed to roll a 3 or higher to succeed on the mental attack roll, but luckily for the party, I came up with a 2!  Corple told Millard the password and the party yanked Corple's body free from the brain, ran up the ladder and dropped a bunch of grenades down to blow the brain to kingdom come.

Unfortunately for the party, around that time is when they began to run into the Warangutans and ended up fleeing the complex before they ever actually got into the Alien Weapons Division, so that tempting chestnut remains uncracked.  The party took Corple's body (which seemed to be just as catatonic as ever and Millard was unable to establish any contact with his mind) to Skinny Butt and left it in the care of a skilled mutant healer.

Under the care of the healer, Corple eventually regained consciousness just as he began to show the symptoms of the FDF7 virus.  He survived the virus but manifested quite a few mutations, including a second brain that grew out of the side of his head.  He was last seen, after grabbing the deathly sick body of Laura Hazelton (a soldier from the complex who had survived to the present in cryostasis only to be revived by the party and succumb to the FDF7 virus), flying over the swamp in the direction of the military complex.

Once the party learns more about his present goals and activities, I will post more!

The Tragic Tale of Julius Corple part one

A while back my players spent a couple of sessions searching for keycards and passwords to give them access to various places in the ancient military complex/megadungeon that they were exploring.  They knew, from some snooping around through personnel records on a computer, that the two head scientists in the facility were Julius Corple (in charge of the Alien Weapons division) and Hodges Craigslist (in charge of the Biological Weapons division).  Earlier, they had found a door labelled "Alien Weapons Research" that they had been unable to open.  Reasoning that the head of the Alien Weapons division must hold the key to this tempting area, they made their way to Julius Corple's quarters.  

Right away they realized that something was different with Corple's chambers - they could not access any interior cameras through the buildings computer network, and in fact, it seemed that the suite of rooms was not connected in any way to the power and computer networks of the rest of the facility.  They could not cut the power to the door and the normal spiderbot access shafts that connected almost every other part of the facility had been sealed off.  

Undeterred, a party member capable of teleportation bravely transported his body blindly through the closed door and luckily did not end up materializing in a space already occupied by a solid object!  He was greeted by an enthusiastic robot dog (named "Woody" according to the engraving on its water bowl) and a rather spartan set of apartments.  Corple apparently took his work home with him, as his bed, chairs and couch were low disks that utilized the alien repulsor field technology to suspend a body in mid-air above them.  The door opened easily enough from the inside, and the rest of the party entered.  Woody seemed overjoyed to have company after centuries alone, and instantly took to following the party around.  They found very little in the way of information on Corple's computers, which actually seemed to have been unused at all.  Likewise, they found no books or journals that might contain a clue or a scribbled pass phrase.

On Corple's bare desk sat a holo-portrait, the only furnishing in the entire suite that spoke of human warmth, depicting a woman with long brown hair and a pleasant smile.  The holo-projector was engraved with the words "Darling Alyssa".  Saying those words aloud resulted in the large repulsor disc that served for a bed rotating to the side and revealing a shaft opening up into a chamber below.  Descending down the short ladder, the party entered a room that unnerved them greatly.  The chamber that they found themselves in was glass-walled and circular.  Behind the glass walls pink and blue organic tissues throbbed and pulsed with visible electrical energy.  A confusing tangle of cables and what seemed to be umbilical chords passed through portals in the glass and connected with the naked body of a man lying in the middle of the floor.  This body was apparently Julius Corple, as the pile of synthetic military issue clothing next to the man contained his keycard.  Interestingly, and this is what really creeped out the party, they soon realized that Corple was still alive. His hair and fingernails had evidently been growing for centuries, and he did not respond to any stimulus, but his heart was beating and he was breathing.  They grabbed his keycard and beat a hasty retreat.

Part Two reveals how Julius Corple brought about the downfall of the military facility.

Mutants vs. Monkeys

As promised, here is the sordid tale of what my PCs have resorted to while trying to pit one faction against another in my Mutant Future campaign.

The first thing they came up with was to somehow turn the Knights of Genetic Purity against the two bands of apes.  There was talk of killing three birds in one bush, or something like that.  The Knights are the mother of all factions in my campaign world, a continent spanning organization dedicated to the complete eradication of all mutants and the restoration of pure humans to their former position of unchallenged supremacy.  The party captured two members of the Knights way back at the beginning of the campaign, and the two unfortunate bastards have been languishing in a dark hole in Skinny Butt, their only contact with anyone being the occasional visits from Chab the rattlesnake, one of the village elders and the self appointed "interrogator" (read as "torturer").  So the party takes their prized camcorder and their only tape and brings one of the captured Knights out into the swamp.

Warning:  the following paragraph may be a little disturbing, so if you are faint of heart, please skip it and go watch a family movie like Silence of the Lambs instead.

This campaign has been a campaign full of firsts for me.  First openly gay PC, first time running a session with 10 players, and... first time my players have shot a snuff film in game?  WTF?  They decided that they would stage the gruesome massacre of the captured Knight at the hands of a "warangutan" (really Bozko the shape-shifting plant assuming the general form of a great ape and covering his body with shaggy red moss).  They filmed this Blair Witch Project style, from the point of view of the other Knight who "got away" after capturing the horrible death of his comrade on film.  The party wanted to really get the Knights pissed off at the Warangutans, so they had Bozko actually rip the poor dude to shreds in front of the camera.  Interestingly, of the six players participating, only one (my girlfriend, playing Beyonce Chai) expressed any reservations about this plan and she still drove them out into the swamp so that they "didn't do anything even stupider".  The truly disturbing part is that Dataan the robot became aroused during the filming of this movie and there may or may not have been robot masturbation involved.  The party  arranged for the video to make its way into the hands of Chaplain Squaldorf, the true power behind the recent incursion of the Knights into the Willing Mate valley, and then they sat back to watch the fireworks.  However, the PCs soon grew bored waiting for a response from the regional headquarter of the Knights up in Porrit Land, so they decided to take a stab at stopping the apes themselves.

Their next plan was to ally with the War Chimps and attempt to wipe out the Warangutans once and for all.  However, when they flew an unmanned drone that they had just spent a week repairing from the parts of several nonfunctional drones they had secured many sessions earlier, they discovered that the War Chimps had posted a horrifying "keep out" message in the swamp; a roughly circular ring of cut trees marked their territory, and flayed corpses of swamp creatures and mutants alike adorned the tree trunks like bloody post-it notes.  Zooming in on one body with the drone, the party saw that it was flayed from the neck down, and its eyelids had been removed.  And thats when they realized that this poor mutant (a swamp trapper from Skinny Butt town) was still alive - it turned its bulging, dried out eyes at the drone as if it were silently begging to be put out of its considerable misery.  Dataan flew the drone in low, planning on ramming the flayed mutant in the head to put it out of its misery... and he flew the drone right into the War Chimps trap.  They had a ring of concealed blinds a ways in from the outer perimeter of stumps, and a War Chimp with a missile launcher blew the drone up with one well placed shot.

The PCs now decided that maybe they didn't want to ally with the War Chimps after all! Their next brilliant idea was to ally with the Warangutans and convince them to leave the complex and wipe out the War Chimps with the party's help.  They journeyed to the Badder warrens and made their way to the now filled in tunnels leading to the Hangar level of the military complex.  The two shapeshifting plants in the party burrowed through the dirt in root form, creating just enough of a pocket of air behind them to drag a pair of spiderbots down with them.  Once Swampy (one of the shapeshifting plants) got in to the long cross tunnel that leads from the hangar level all the way under the swamp to the sublevels of the Ooh Oh Monks (yet another faction in the swamp), he soon heard a vehicle rumbling down the tunnel at him.  He hid, and saw a jeep driven by a Warangutan pulling a covered troop transport, heading down the tunnel towards the Ooh Oh Monks.  Dataan, controlling a spiderbot, sent it down the tunnel towards the hangar while Swampy set off after the jeep.  Soon, a terrific explosion echoed down the tunnel, and the party surmised that the Warangutans were attempting to blast their way into the lowest levels of the old university complex that the Ooh Oh Monks inhabit.  Dataan's spiderbot reached the blast doors to the hangar, and attempted to use the door's control panel to access the complex's computer system - when to the parties considerable dismay, it became apparent that some true computer wizard had overridden the codes that Dataan had left in place in the complex and the party no longer had access to the still active security networks.  The door began to shut, and Dataan had his spiderbot scurry through and into a maintenance shaft in the wall (the facility is riddled with tiny shafts designed to let the spiderbots scurry around and do their job of maintaining and repairing the electrical, computer, ventilation and water systems of the base).  Peering through a small opening in the wall, Dataan saw through the spiderbot two large Warangutans wielding rocket launchers come up to the door, accompanied by a Terminator looking robot - picture the shiny metal terminators that don't have any skin covering their terrifying metal bodies.  The Warangutans covered the doorway with missile launchers while the Terminator opened it up - of course, they saw nothing.

Meanwhile, Swampy was making decent time heading down the tunnel toward the Ooh Oh Monks, a distance of several miles, with the second spider bot accompanying him.  Soon, the party heard over their comlinks (stolen from the military complex a while back) the Warangutans back at the door to the hangar level warning the Warangutan party up ahead that there was something in the tunnel.  Swampy began traveling much more carefully, in long extended vine form taking cover behind all the heaps of scrap metal that line the tunnel.  The spiderbot went up ahead, under the control of Dataan the robot, who trusted in its small size to escape detection.  The spiderbot came to a juncture, where the the jeep and troop transport were parked, guarded by a single Warangutan standing behind the twin heavy machine guns mounted on the back of the jeep.  Dataan cautiously snuck the spiderbot past this point and came into a room that had evidently once held a large door which had since been blasted away.  A squadron of Warangutans was exploring the chamber beyond, which was filled with what seemed to be massive boilers and other strange rusted out hunks of motionless machinery.

Swampy, alternating between his normal vision and gamma ray vision, continued on slowly and carefully.  He spotted the tell-tale radiation leak from the fusion cell powering a plasma rifle up ahead, and realized that two Warangutans were concealed behind the cab of car that was leaning against the side of the tunnel ahead of him.  Deciding that he could take on two of them with the help of the hypnotic fragrances he could emit, he painstakingly inched a viny protrusion of his body towards the apes and released a cloud of mind-controlling goodness into their hidey hole.  He instantly realized that they were far too powerfully built to succumb to his tricks as they burst forth, plasma rifles blasting.  Luckily for Swampy, they had not spotted him as he was concealed behind the everpresent stacks of scrap metal.  Never known for his discretion, Swampy rolled the lone grenade that he was carrying directly between the two apes who frantically hurled themselves to the ground as it exploded.  Before the smoke even cleared the apes were laying down covering fire as they called for back up.  "We've been hit!  Taking fire from unknown assailant!  Alpha Squad leader, send back up!"

A squad of five Warangutans set out to assist the two fighting Swampy - only to be grenaded themselves by Bozko who had been waiting in the collapsed tunnel to the Badder warrens.  Bozko dropped four grenades from more or less directly above the squad, and killed three of them on the spot.  Now convinced that they were experiencing a serious assault, the Warangutan leaders  called the exploratory party that was moving under the Ooh Oh Monks back.  In the meantime, Dataan had stolen their jeep with his spiderbot, ramming it into a wall and breaking the neck of the Warangutan who was manning the machine gun in the process.  Then, the spiderbot turned the machine gun down the corridor and opened fire on the exploratory party.  With the enemy now apparently coming from all sides, and not even sure what was making the machine gun fire (as the spiderbot was completely concealed behind the gun), the Warangutans broke formation and ran.

 Swampy had continued his fight, and when the two Warangutans he was engaged with started retreating to join up with the larger contingent of the exploratory party (who were now getting into a second jeep that was parked in the large room by the Ooh Oh Monks), Swampy couldn't just let them go and he popped out of cover and took another pot shot at them with his trusty shotgun.  As he dropped back down, they let him have it and I rolled a natural 20 and killed him on the spot... When his player asked if he could roll a savings throw to survive since he was a shapeshifting plant and most of his body mass had never left cover to take the shot in the first place, I decided to be a merciful overlord that night and told him to roll a save vs. energy attacks.  Of course, he still had to get a 15 or higher on a d20, so I figured he was probably toast anyway... then he goes and rolls a 15 on the dot.  I ruled that Swampy was alive but unconscious, mostly blasted to smithereens, and clinging to life only as a small globular mass of unrecognizable plant matter.  The Warangutans all retreated in their Jeep back to the hangar level and shut the blast door, not at all sure what had been attacking them from three sides.    A spiderbot was sent to check on Swampy, as he had suddenly cut off communications.  His quivering remains were retrieved, and the party beat a retreat back to Badder Town to plan their next move!

One important thing has been missed so far; the role of Julius Corple in all this.  Corple, a brilliant roboticist and all around mad genius from the year 2135, had recently been released from centuries of confinement within a massive alien computer/brain.  Exposed to the surface air, he contracted the FDF7 virus and soon grew a second brain and began exhibiting strange powers.  He was last seen, after grabbing the body of Laura Hazelton (a footsoldier from 2135 who was dying of the virus), flying over the swamp in the direction of the military complex.

Many small clues in the last session led the players to speculate that Julius Corple had become the leader of the Warangutans and was directing them as well as the strange Terminator robot the party had seen.  Are they right?  Only time will tell....

I do intend to post the full tale of Julius Corple soon, he is a tragic figure and was directly responsible for the downfall of the military complex all those long years ago.

The Megadungeon in the Mutant Future part two

It may seem a little presumptuous to call my ancient military complex a megadungeon.  At the present, I think it only has about a hundred, maybe 150 rooms that the players know about- surely this is too small to qualify?  The key to that statement are the words "at the present".  There is plenty of room to expand, and I have already planted the seeds in the players' heads that will eventually lead to the exploration of three more large areas.  And as play continues, I am sure I will plant more seeds and more areas will be discovered.  As it is, the first time the players ran through the complex they spent several sessions searching for the gold key cards that would allow them to access some of the sealed off areas.  When they finally did find them, they ended up getting chased away by some Warangutans and haven't returned yet.  This means that after six straight four to six hour sessions, the players still have only scratched the surface of the complex.  The door temptingly labeled "Alien Weapons Division" is still unopened!  Likewise, the top secret area that they learned about in Julius Corple's papers is still virgin territory (an upcoming post will detail the tragic story of Julius Corple, brilliant roboticist and the unwitting cause of the downfall of the military complex at the hands of the Oozyxphg).  The players turned tail and ran from one of the largest levels of the complex before they had even really began to explore it, because they realized it was the home to two groups of warring, possibly partially robotic killer apes (think Planet of the Apes meets Vietnam with a little bit of Robocop thrown in and you have an idea of what that level was like).  There are several long tunnels leading from the lowest hanger level, one of which evidently leads up to the swamp because it was flooded and nearly drowned the players when they opened it; it took some pretty heroic and nearly self sacrificial actions from two players to save the rest of the party from a watery grave.  However, the other tunnel leads to the labyrinthine science complexes underneath the old university inhabited by the Ooh Oh Monks, and offshoots lead to places as yet unknown to the players.  Only a handful of the officers' and scientists' quarters have been explored, as the players mostly focused on those that they suspected might contain a gold key card.  All in all, the campaign could easily go on for a long long time in this one network of underground chambers, and that makes it a megadungeon in my book.

One of the things that James over at Grognardia identifies as a key feature of a classic megadungeon is that it is dynamic and changes in response to the players.  My little complex is an excellent example of this; play began with it flooded with poisonous gasses, so besides the odd alien critters that had come through the portal from the Oozyxphgian homeworld, it was mostly robots that the party had to deal with.  However, these robots were not sitting idly by waiting to be discovered.  The still active security cameras sweeping the corridors detected the party's movement despite some interesting efforts to circumvent them, and a team of robotic defenders was dispatched.

When the party eventually shut the gas off, the apes and other denizens who had been trapped in self-contained areas of the complex that the gas had not been able to reach soon emerged and this really changed the dynamic of the area.  As the party was trying to make it to the armory that they had seen on a building schematic in a computer they hacked into, they realized that they had been beaten there by the War Chimps.  They watched through a camera feed with a mixture of curiosity and horror as the War Chimps easily handled several Scorpions and took control of the coveted armory.

I have always been a big fan of moving monsters around the dungeon; it prevents complacency by the PCs and it makes the dungeon feel "alive".  The most recent example of this from my campaign occurred during the last session.  The party has been out in the eastern desert involved in some tricky diplomacy in an effort to prevent the Knights of Genetic Purity from gaining access to nuclear weapons controlled by three oft-times warring desert tribes.  During the last session, the Swamp Orca (the party's hovercraft, purloined from the hangar level of the megadungeon and outfitted with Glarg-ore armor courtesy of the Badder master smiths) took some serious damage and was on the verge of a total breakdown.  The skirt that contained the cushion of air had been badly ripped, so Logan the incredible teleporting shrinking man teleported back to the hangar level to scavenge sections from the skirts of the other ruined hovercrafts that they had left behind.  When he arrived, he noticed that the level was being patrolled by the Warangutans.  He also noticed that the massive blast door which sealed the hangar off from the tunnels leading to the Ooh Oh Monks and the Badders' tunnels was wide open, and a large pile of Badder corpses was stacked near the tunnel mouth.  The party correctly deduced that the Badders (who the party had given the code to open the door) had attempted to scavenge more of the ruined vehicles in the hangar to offer as scrap metal to their lord Glargorion and had run into the Warangutans.  As several of the party members were quite taken with the great worm god (Dataan has been spreading the gospel of Glargorion wherever he goes) and the entire party was quite grateful to the Badders for their assistance in crafting Glarg-ore weapons and armor for them, the last session ended with talk of returning to the military complex to deal with the Warangutans.  Having things occur in the absence of the party is a useful tool, and one that greatly adds to immersion in a game world.

Stay tuned for more lessons from the megadungeon, including the tragic tale of Julius Corple!