Living 4 Crits: Cypher System

Showing posts with label Cypher System. Show all posts

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Numenera - The Devil's Spine - Session 12

Once Upon a Time in the Ninth World

Welcome to our group's campaign log for The Devil's Spine, a mega-adventure by +Monte Cook for the Numenera campaign setting.

Originally this was going to be a pure and simple campaign log. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a record for me and my friends to keep track of what was going on in the game. But I've decided that, as we progress through the adventure, I'd do some commentary and/or reviews on different parts of the adventure. So... SPOILERS!

Oh, and if you are expecting this adventure series to look anything like how The Devil's Spine is supposed to look, I apologize now.

Seriously, all we do is go off the rails.

#ScrewTheRails

Characters

Belmodan, a Resourceful Seeker who Wields a Whip, played by +andrew lyon
Keane, a Rebellious Glaive who Likes to Break Things, played by +Craig McCullough

PL4T0, an Artificially Intelligent Jack who Resides in Silicon, played by +Marc Plourde
Nero, a Mad Nano who Travels Through Time, played by +David Howard
Rooster Bladesmyth, a Slick Jack who Collects Bounties, played by +Reece Carter

Previously on The Devil's Spine

Session 12: Happy Anniversary!

Dude, it's been a year since we started this campaign? Holy crap!

You know, the downside to our games where there is a lot of talky-talky, and not might fighty-fighty is that writing these things out is typically a big, long ordeal. So I'm not writing it all out here. Sorry! We have festive holiday things to do tonight (I think a Disney special is on ABC?) and +Jennifer Walls will be super pissed at me if I'm still down here blogging at 9pm. So I've got thirty-eight minutes to get this all done.

Ready?

Okay, here goes:

I think it's fair to say that some serious party dynamics changed when Rooster Bladesmyth, the bounty hunter from the 1870's, joined the rest of the party during the last session. Fast forward a billion years, and Rooster pretty much started calling the shots in the party... and interestingly enough, the rest of the group was cool with it. Sure, there was some friction with PL4T0, but I really think that "Rooster's Tales of the Ninth World" should be some kind of series.

Maybe on Netflix.

Anyway, the last part of The Devil's Spine, the portion of the adventure where the party would need to find the Gharolan that would help get those blasted parasites off their backs, is called "The Other Side of the Maelstrom." The party needed to cross the Cloudcrystal Skyfields and make their way to the coastal village of Harmuth, where they would find Cagyn. Way back at the beginning of this quest Devola told the party that Cagyn would know how to find some Gharolan.

Boo yah.

En route to the village, the party came across a small blue-skinned family of former nobles who now bought and traded seskii puppies. Rooster wanted a new dog, so he traded some silver dollars for a seskii puppy that he named Buddy. The party then found out that the family had in their possession the tiny sailor they had sold back when they were last in Uxphon. The dude was not a fan of PL4T0, and after purchase the little guy did his best to get away from the group.

During one of their many spats, PL4T0 slapped Rooster with the little action-figure sized sailor, breaking his back. The party then went into surgery mode, using the Impossible Blade and Nero's medical expertise. The tiny sailor was healed!

The little guy eventually ended up with Rooster, and the two were partners. He said his name was Squinty Miles.

Because this game is crazy, I made Squinty Miles into an artifact:

Level 4, whenever Squinty whistles, the person carrying him gains a +1 bonus to recovery rolls. No depletion, but Squinty Miles needs to be fed regularly.

Like I said... crazy.

When the party entered Harmuth, they found all kinds of happenings going on. News of storms, complaints of robberies, missing children, and an upcoming Festival of the Fish. The team made their way to a small eatery called The Jewel Box, where they dined on super-fresh fish and shellfish, and partook in some strong beverages. The bartender gave them some info about Cagyn, and offered to let them tag along with her delivery lad who would be taking the eccentric scientist food later.

Cagyn was naked when the party found him, standing in the middle of the Bion Bay holding a box in the water. Some weird ear tentacles on either side of his head were connected to the box. After some introductions, Cagyn told the party that he'd love to help them with their parasites, but the Gharolan they sought was out in the middle of the sea, and his Tracker Ring artifact would be needed to find it. Unfortunately, that ring was missing!

There had been news of a ring thief earlier at the Jewel Box.

This sounded like work for an experienced bounty hunter! Rooster led the party over to Constable Eltre's place and offered to take on the Case of the Missing Rings. The party learned some important clues:

The thief liked rings.
The thief was able to snatch up to five rings at once without disturbing the victim.
The thief was invisible (or practically so).
The thief left behind some mucous on the victim.
The thief was striking from below.

Rooster set up a sting operation, that revealed the culprit to be a furry toad creature, that quickly snatched up Squinty Miles! After cutting Squinty from the inside of the toad, Rooster sent the tiny sailor into the small tunnel that the toad-thief struck from. At the end of the tunnel, Squinty discovered all the rings, and the party used Lockjaw McGraw's beard cypher to retrieve them (dangled on the end of Belmodan's whip).

Once back at Cagyn's place, the party traded their gravity belt for the Tracker Ring, and made plans to set off into the sea.

Quotes

Reece - "I don't know why Rooster wants to follow you."
Marc - "Because we're awesome."
Reece - "That's definitely not it."

"Is that a sailor in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" - Marc

"Ya'll dip?" - Rooster to the rest of the party.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Numenera - The Devil's Spine - Session 11

All the Numenera!

We interrupt your regularly scheduled campaign update for our gonzo jaunt through The Devil's Spine to let you know that, as of this blog post, there are less than 24 hours left in the Numenera 2: Discovery and Destiny Kickstarter Campaign. So if you want to jump in on this madness (and admit it... you DEFINITELY WANT IN!) take a quick break from reading and follow the link and go check out the campaign. Then lock in your backer level and get yourself some weird.

You're still here? What? Didn't you hear me?

I SAID GET YOURSELF SOME WEIRD!

Once Upon a Time in the Ninth World

Characters

Belmodan, a Resourceful Seeker who Wields a Whip, played by +andrew lyon

New Focus: Collects Bounties

Keane, a Rebellious Glaive who Likes to Break Things, played by +Craig McCullough

New Focus: Needs No Weapon

PL4T0, an Artificially Intelligent Jack who Resides in Silicon, played by +Marc Plourde

New Focus: No Change

Ruun, an Exiled Glaive who Gazes into the Abyss, played by +William Keller

New Focus: Wears Spurs

Rooster Bladesmyth, a Slick Jack who Collects Bounties, played by +Reece Carter

Previously on The Devil's Spine

Session 11: It's Been a While

Dude, how long has it been?

Five months. Five damn months since we last sat down and journeyed with Belmodan, Keane, PL4T0, Ruun, and Nero. Not that we haven't tried getting together to play. I think there were three occasions this summer when we tried to get this game back off the ground. Maybe even four times. But schedules just weren't meant to be. We were short players a couple of the events, and short a GM (by far the most important part) for another couple.

I figure the campaign was cursed and just wrote it off. This would've been my second failed attempt at running The Devil's Spine. Seriously, I knew I was letting Monte down at this point.

But then something happened... the Numenera 2 Kickstarter. I was like "damn, we need to get back to that game!" Then it happened. I put out the call, and scheduled a date.

And what do you know? Everyone showed up!

Well, everyone except, +David Howard... so his character got used as a plot hook. Again.

We even got another player for the event, the one-and-only +Reece Carter! I put a call out over on Facebook for another player, an Reece jumped in. And since he's from Australia, I may now have regular players on THREE different continents, when I count +Jonata Sodre from over in the DCC Purple Planet campaign.

Great stuff!

Anyway, I know a lot of you come here to read the adventure recaps, and I'm just about to get there. But I'm telling you now: you need to bear with me. I read the last recap from May about four times and then went back and read sessions eight and nine as well. Even after all of this reading, I had no idea where I was going with this campaign back in the fall.

I mean, who the hell had the bright idea to try to do a quasi-Deadlands crossover campaign in the middle of a published Numenera module?

Dammit, it was a good idea at the time!

But it's all good, I think I remembered enough to at least the the game flowing... sort of. I just needed to make a couple of quick adjustments to the adventure to make things work. Here I'll share them with you:

[GM's Note: Want to shorten the length of The Mechanized Tomb section from The Devil's Spine? Just rip out areas 7 through 17, keep 18, and cut out 19 to 26.]

Look, it's not like these areas weren't full of great stuff, but I just didn't have time to dig through it all. At the rate this party was going, we'd be stuck down in that pit for the next six months.

Did I mention that this campaign is monthly again?

I promise, this will help make more sense. It'll also give me a chance to undo some of the Deadlands madness that I was starting to throw in. We had a nice and tidy wrap up of The Mechanized Tomb and next game we start in on Beyond the Maelstrom.

I also promise to run part three of The Devil's Spine a bit closer to how it was originally written by Monte.

I'm about 85% sure that I won't be able to keep that promise.

"Hey James! Stop ranting and just tell us what happened last night!"

Okay, okay, here we go.

We started the adventure with the tale of Rooster Bladesmythe. I gave Reece the option of having a character native to the 1870's or the Ninth World. He went with a western-style bounty hunter. Rooster had tracked the no good, cold-hearted Lock Jaw McGraw all the way to The Tomb of Queen Starloscet. Lock Jaw McGraw, also known as the "Strangler of Laredo," was a well known murderer of prostitutes, who would choke them to death with his own beard.

The party met up when they moved beyond a trap laden room into another chamber, discovering Rooster and Lock Jaw. The former had captured the latter, tying him up before realizing that there was no way out of this bizarrely adorned series of tombs and crypts. He couldn't climb out of the pit on his own, at least not with his mark, so he decided to wait.

But he wasn't expecting Belmodan, Keane, and Ruun. Oh, and he REALLY wasn't expecting PL4T0, who was a floating bot with a cowboy hat. Did I mention yet that Nero was missing?

Nero was missing. No one seemed bothered by this.

You know, the next series of scenes is such a hot mess that it'd be easier for me to break it out piece by piece in bullet points:

Rooster uses Lock Jaw as a human shield while negotiating with the rest of the party.
PL4T0 tries to scan Lock Jaw.
Lock Jaw breaks free from Rooster and starts to crush PL4T0 with his beard.
Rooster knocks out Lock Jaw.
Belmodan pulls his whip on Rooster an Rooster pull's his gun on Belmodan.
Just before there could be any real PVP, the ceramic tiles on the walls start to attack everyone.

No, this was not something that was in the original adventure. Instead, this was the only way I could get the entire scene from completely devolving into a player vs. player scenario. I was like "what the hell could I throw into the adventure that would band everyone together..."

"How about the walls themselves!?!"

Yeah, that's the best I could come up with. Was actually inspired by "The Floors" from Ultima III Exodus. I did some quick stats on the fly:

The Walls: Living ceramic tiles that are comprised of colonies of mineral deposits with insect-like intelligence. Level 4, 5 health per tile, 5 damage with a successful hit as they burrow into skin.

I thought the tile encounter was a lot of fun, actually. We had some great GM Intrusions, and when Ruun decided to eat some of the tiles, they burrowed into his mouth and replaced two of his teeth. That'll be fun to play with later. Marc was pretty ticked off with me that I would let him scan the tiles to see if they were organic or not. I figured that as minerals they weren't really "organic" but also weren't "machines." Oh well.

After the battle with the walls, Rooster teamed up with the party and introduced them to some of the chambers that he had already explored. One of which held a sarcophagus bearing a woman's image. The party popped the lid and traveled down a long vertical tunnel.

[GM's Note: here's where I skipped everything from chamber 7 through 17. Sorry. Oh, and in the next room I totally made up everything except for the "show 'em" that was given to us by the author.]

At the bottom of the tube the party found themselves in a room with three glowing green pods, a floor covered in green ooze, and a bunch of creepy mutant-things just bounding around. One was a cross between a rat and a grasshopper, one was a penguin with thin human legs and tentacles coming out of its back, one was a ball of moving human arms, and the last one was a six legged, dog sized rat with a human face.

That last one would eventually say his name was Mr. Sanderson, and he and Ruun would become pals.

PL4T0 got to work investigating the pods, and came to the conclusion that they were powering the entirety of the facility. One contained a brain and nervous system floating in stasis, another was a dead woman's corpse clutching a blade (a fairly "impossible" blade) and a scepter. The last was Nero.

[GM's Note: It was Nero's connection to time travel this entire time that caused this tomb from the Ninth World to exist back in a prior world. Because Nero is my giant, walking plot hook. Because time travel let's a crappy GM do whatever they want, whenever they want. How did he get connected to the device? How the hell should I know?]

There was a lot of button pushing (with goo shooting out, causing mutations) and lever pulling, and the party got a hold of the queen's body, the Impossible Blade that they needed, and Nero. But once the Mad Nano was disconnected the entire facility started to collapse, Aliens style. The party did a mad dash to get out of the chambers and back to the pit.

Once at the edge of the great pit, the party looked up and saw that the sky was moving. Quickly they scaled the wall, with PL4T0 far stepping to the next platform so that he could lower some rope down. This would've gone a lot easier for everyone if Ruun wasn't trying to bring Mr. Sanderson along and if Rooster wasn't dragging Lock Jaw McGraw by rope.

During the last sequence, while Rooster was pulling Lock Jaw up fifteen meters, the rope snapped and the Strangler of Laredo started to fall. But after getting exposed to lots of radioactive goo, Lock Jaw was able to shoot his beard up and at Rooster, in an attempt to drag him along for a ride to certain doom. But that's when PL4T0 swooped in with the Impossible Blade, cutting Rooster free.

Once at the top of the pit, the party looked around and realized that they were back in the Ninth World...

... and Rooster realized that he wasn't in the Old West anymore.

Quotes

"This is gonna sound dumb... in Australia they spell 'Rooster' with one one 'o'?" - Andy to Reece, just cementing international relations.

"Have you not been to Thailand?" - Reece brought this up, but then again, so did everyone by the end of the night.

"It's just splitting hairs." - PL4T0 cutting Lock Jaw McGraw's beard.

Saturday, September 30, 2017

Family Game Knights - Numenera Kickoff in Muullis

Returning to the Ninth World

Last night I went home... at least that's what it felt like to return to the Ninth World of Numenera. Ever since the Numenera 2 Kickstarter launched last week, I've been kicking myself for spending so much time away from the system. Not counting the booth demos that I ran at the Monte Cook Games booth at Gen Con 50, I haven't had a chance to play Numenera since our last episode of The Devil's Spine in May. Not only do I plan to rectify the lapse of our Devil's Spine campaign, I also wanted to do a little reboot of Numenera and the Cypher System at home.

So I gathered the Family Game Knights for an evening of exploration, discovery, and lots and lots of weirdness! This would be an interesting change for our group. While six of our seven regular players were all Numenera and Cypher System veterans, this group originally banded together to smash and die in Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Cyphers of Choice

So, what adventure to choose for this reentry into Numenera...

... how about Muullis: The Wayward Hamlet written by my good friend and blogger +Marc Plourde!?!

Muullis: The Wayward Hamlet is featured in the CypherCaster Magazine, Issue #003, so go make sure you get yourself a copy on DriveThruRPG. Before we get into some potential spoilers, let me share quickly some of the best reasons for why you should consider running Muullis: The Wayward Hamlet your own group:

It's a great introductory adventure into the weird of Numenera.
It's easily adaptable into any existing campaign as a side-quest adventure.
It can be set just about anywhere on the Ninth World, or even beyond the Ninth World Into the Night (with a few modifications, of course).
There is a great balance of exploration and combat.
There is a lot of room in the module for GM's to add their own flavors, or as I did, crank the weirdness factor up to 1000%!

My way to do that cranking was to grab Injecting the Weird by Monte Cook, and then throw in a bunch of crazy modifications to areas, NPC's, and situations. This is how the village elder of Perrun ended up having the physical form of a three month old baby, despite being over eighty years old.

Ready for some SPOILERS? If you are a GM looking to run Muullis: The Wayward Hamlet, you are allowed to keep reading. Otherwise, just skip down the fan art and don't read anything else.

Remember the musical Brigadoon? Take the time travel issues of that musical, toss in some dimensionally warped people, a few dashes of dimensional monsters, and some rogue Aeon Priests and you have Muullis: The Wayward Hamlet. During the course of the adventure, the player characters discover that there is a legendary village that appears and disappears in a region of the Ninth World. The PC's eventually gain access to the village, and then find out that time is traveling much slower for the trapped occupants. Any of the village natives who leave the village are transformed into a horrific Abykos-like monstrosity.

The village's dilemma was the result of a trio early Aeon Priests. These members of the Synod of Perfection performed an experiment sending Muullis into a temporal whirlpool. For the PC's to be successful, they need to restore the movement of time in Muullis, and return it to it's original location in the Ninth World.

As I mentioned before, I really like how this adventure is so adaptable. We ran it as a three-hour introductory session by trimming off a few mid-story encounters, but add in those encounters and this could fill a four-hour convention slot. Actually, we probably could've run the adventure as written, with all mid-story encounters, if I hadn't come up with the Sgrentipillar.

Sgrentipillar

I did not mean for these things to become such an integral part of the adventure, but they did. For our session, I used the "Herder in Trouble" scene as the introduction to the adventure. The party came across the herder, who was written to have a pack of gallen, creatures native to the Ninth World. But I wanted to turn up the weird, so I said that she had a pack of "sgrentipillars."

When first encountered, sgrentipillars appeared to be six-foot long wooly inch-worms, kept for their soft fur. But when the PC's flipped one over to see its face, they were horrified to see a twisted human visage obviously in pain! The villagers of Perrun admitted that the sgrentipillars were strange creatures with a bizarre life cycle:

Egg Stages: No one claimed to know how sgrentipillars first formed, what their eggs looked like, or where they came from.
Larva Stage: The current state of all known sgrentipillars, partially controlled by devices called "clickers."
Cocoon Stage: Achieved when the sgrentipillars are allowed to completely grow out their fur, but this never happens because of the rumored Post Cocoon Stage.
Post Cocoon Stage: Unknown, but believed to be terrible!

Sgrentipillar (Larva): Level 2 creature, 6 health, no attacks, produces 10 square feet of wool per week.

The players eventually learned the horrifying truth of the sgrentipillars! That they were ensnared villagers from Muullis, captured by the man-baby village elder Belcer before the Wayward Hamlet became trapped in time. The "clicker" devices allowed the villagers to be transformed into weird butterfly hybrids, and also controlled their minds.

If allowed to emerge from a cocoon (which requires breaking the clickers) a full-grown sgrentipillar becomes a beautiful sgrentifly!

Sgrentifly: Level 3 creature, 9 health, no attacks, flight, looks like a butterfly with the face of acclaimed actor Greg Kinnear.

Fan Art from the Ninth World

Before drawing this blog post to a close, I need to share the awesome fan-art created by one of our players: Ella. This drawing is her depiction of Kalain, the Strong Glaive who Wears a Sheen of Ice (a pre-gen character from The Spire of the Hunting Sound Quickstart Adventure). During the course of the adventure, Kalain befriended a sgrentipillar who she named Billy. But Billy's companionship was cut short, as he was slain by the party after being allowed to cocoon.

To check out more of Ella's art, go to her DeviantArt page!

Closing Thoughts of Weirdness

We had so much fun diving back into Numenera last night, and if you've never had the opportunity to try this game you owe it to yourself to dive in head first. The timing couldn't be better with the Numenera 2 Discovery and Destiny Kickstarter in full swing. So if you enjoyed this post, and want to learn more, go over to the Kickstarter page, and give it a go. Numenera completely changed the way I ran my games, and this month is my fourth anniversary in the Ninth World.

Here's to the next evolution of a wonderful game!

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Numenera - The Devil's Spine - Session 10

Once Upon a Time in the Ninth World

Welcome to our group's campaign log for The Devil's Spine, a mega-adventure by +Monte Cook for the Numenera campaign setting.

Originally this was going to be a pure and simple campaign log. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a record for me and my friends to keep track of what was going on in the game. But I've decided that, as we progress through the adventure, I'd do some commentary and/or reviews on different parts of the adventure. So... SPOILERS!

Characters

Belmodan, a Resourceful Seeker who Wields a Whip, played by +andrew lyon

New Focus: Collects Bounties

Keane, a Rebellious Glaive who Likes to Break Things, played by +Craig McCullough

New Focus: Needs No Weapon

Nero, a Mad Nano who Travels Through Time, played by +David Howard

New Focus: Would Rather Be Reading

PL4T0, an Artificially Intelligent Jack who Resides in Silicon, played by +Marc Plourde

New Focus: No Change

Ruun, an Exiled Glaive who Gazes into the Abyss, played by +William Keller

New Focus: Wears Spurs

Previously on The Devil's Spine

Session 10: Peril in the Pit

On Monday night we celebrated our second session of this "Ninth World meets Weird West" mashup by doing absolutely nothing that had to do with the Weird West. If you remember, during our last session I expected my players to visit a nearby town for some old-timey, nineteenth century high jinks. Well that didn't happen. The party skipped an investigation of their new timestream, and just went right up the mountain in search of the Impossible Blade.

What the heck? I want some Weird West action, and I want it now!

The team still had some odds and ends to clean up:

Following the last encounter with the cypherids, the party had to distribute the fifteen cyphers that they recovered.
The party changed the name of Ruun's new rifle-artifact. Suzanne, the lever-action, numenera-infused gun, would now be known as 5UZ4NNE. Perhaps I should make that canon, and rule that it's PL4T0's cousin?
It was clearly a time for recovery rolls.
Nero used an esotery to assemble "Babbage," a construct minion.
PL4T0 used a cypher to duplicate Ruun so that the team would have an entity to use as "trap bait."

It was during this rest that some members of the party investigated the nearby area. Although the party's initial reaction to this young land was that it seemed pristine and untouched, the area surrounding the pit was straight out of the Ninth World. The dirt was not soil but common drit found in the Steadfast and Beyond. The nearby tower structures were not built, but seemed to have grown out of the ground like nails from a finger. The area raised a lot of questions, so many of which could've led the party back down the mountain to the nearby town where maybe they could get some answers.

But instead, the party decided to go down into the pit.

Again... what the heck?

The duplicate of Ruun was the first down a long, wooden spiral staircase. He made it nearly three-hundred feet until coming to an archway. Just before reaching the entrance to that level, one of the steps gave way, and duplicate run fell to his duplicate death. Figuring that the duplicate proved that the steps were relatively safe (save for the last one) the rest of the team traveled down to the first chamber.

The room was full of bas-reliefs, each carved from a strange kind of stone. On the fair end of the wall, one of the bas-reliefs depicted an insectoid terror with two crystalline eyes. Between searching, scanning, and knowledge of the numenera, the team came to the conclusion that this entire was built out of a type of stone that had an effect on temporal energy. Time worked very differently here.

Using his interface ability, PL4T0 was able to connect with a nearby piece of technology: the two button eyes in the insect bas-relief that controlled a door. PL4T0 and the door became close friends. To the semi-self-aware door, PL4T0 was a new deity. To PL4T0, the door was a door.

"Door" led to a long hallway and another chamber. It was dark, so Nero sent Babbage...

... and then the poor automaton got skewered by a great scorpion's stinger. Babbage could've survived if not for the flurry of detonations that were flung at the Auturi - a terrible, 3D printed mecha-organic fly/crab/scorpion thing.

Oh, for those of you running The Devil's Spine for higher tier characters, I made the Auturi a bit hardier. Level 6 with 32 health and 2 attacks did the trick.

The scorpion robot fly flew into combat, injected Keane with a bunch of poison that changed his arm's genetic code and turned it permanently purple, and wrecked the hell out of PL4T0's silicon body. This was a pretty tough fight in general, but the party pulled through. I don't even think Ruun was hit, and he proved that 5UZ4NNE was a pretty powerful piece of equipment.

After the fight, the party entered the next chamber revealing an Auturi creating, 3D printing device. The team slowed the process down, and went back to the archway. The only other place of interest in the pit was a landing about two-hundred feet below the archway. Ruun was the first to climb down, and I was all ready to throw a GM Intrusion at Will, when something crazy happened...

... Will declined the GM Intrusion!

This was a first for Will. I guess the idea of getting GMI'd while climbing down rope, with a potential of falling down an impossibly deep well, was too risky.

Once everyone was down we moved on to the next portion of The Devil's Spine... or should I say "we DIDN'T move on."

SPOILER ALERT

The next part of this adventure was supposed to be the alphabet puzzle found on page 50 of The Devil's Spine. This is the one where there are a series of five doors, and the party has to open and close them in a particular order, but the only hint is a series of letters found earlier in the adventure. In my version, it was the old fishing dude who handed this over.

ABACBBAABDCDE

From that sequence of letters the party was supposed to figure out that they needed to open the first door, open the second door, close the first door, open the third door, etc. Personally, I thought it was a rather vague clue, and could see our group mulling this over repeatedly. I think I was lucky that I got them to skip out of the Auturi chamber above without spending a full hour looking for an exit from that chamber other than going back out the way then came. And it wasn't like there was an alternate way around the "alternating door opening puzzle", because the doors were all Level 10. Pretty much just one way to move the entire adventure along.

So we skipped the entire scene.

The next part of the adventure was a bit of a blur... a trap-filled, seemingly "Tomb of Horror" inspired blur. Arrow traps, pit traps, failing ceilings. It was pretty clear that this next entire sequence of the "Quest for the Impossible Blade" was going to require some pretty-typical dungeon crawling.

Which we'll save for next week.

Quotes

"Sometimes you're like 'I don't want ice cream at all, I want sorbet.'" - Marc, before the game.

Ruun - "I don't know where this Kansas is, but I don't want to go."
Door - "I am a door."

"Now you know what the door feels like!" - Will to Marc, who had just been interfaced with by the Auturi.

Marc - "Dr. Nero... Medicine Woman."
David - "Medicinal Person!"

"Is this Tomb of Horrors?" - David was right on the money.

"Could you form some crude stilts?" - Marc to David, trying to help his pal get out of a pit trap.

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Numenera - The Devil's Spine - Session 9

Once Upon a Time in the Ninth World

Characters

Belmodan, a Resourceful Seeker who Wields a Whip, played by +andrew lyon

New Focus: Collects Bounties

Keane, a Rebellious Glaive who Likes to Break Things, played by +Craig McCullough

New Focus: Needs No Weapon

Nero, a Mad Nano who Travels Through Time, played by +David Howard

New Focus: Would Rather Be Reading

PL4T0, an Artificially Intelligent Jack who Resides in Silicon, played by +Marc Plourde

New Focus: No Change

Ruun, an Exiled Glaive who Gazes into the Abyss, played by +William Keller

New Focus: Wears Spurs

Previously on The Devil's Spine

Session 9: Attack of the Cypherids

So after all that work detailing a Weird Western mini-setting to throw smack dab into the middle of The Devil's Spine my players decide to skip all of the potentially fun 19th century/9th World crossover stuff and stick to the script. Sure, when they were in the middle of Uxphon, a city that's only briefly described in both the Numenera corebook and The Devil's Spine, they spend tons of time chatting it up with NPC's that I have to flesh out on the fly. That's why I did all that homework over the last week-and-a-half, creating a rich and vibrant Colorado town to explore while the players continue their quest for the Impossible Blade.

Nope. Not interested.

Here's how it played out last night...

The five heroes from the far, far future of the Ninth World needed to get their bearings. Through the wondrous weird science of Dr. Kell's Kairological Tether Translator, each member of the party had a new focus, along with some corresponding surface thoughts and memories about their new place in history: 1879 C.E. But there was still a lot of the weird of the Ninth World that lingered. For instance, each member of the team had their original gear with them, along with their cyphers, oddities, and artifacts. But it didn't take long to realize that some of these devices were not as unknown to the distant past as they would have expected.

As the party searched the belongings of the prospectors just recently scared off by Ruun, they found a few cyphers that had been panned out of the nearby stream. Somehow these futuristic items had become as common as gold nuggets in this world.

While searching through their gear, Nero noticed something unsettling: the Kairological Tether Translator was missing! So the Mad Nano went back into the fast moving stream to search for the device.

It was right about this time that I decided to throw not one, nor two, nor three, but four GM Intrusions at the party:

When Nero went in the water to search for the Kairological Tether Translator, the current knocked him over and dragged him towards the water fall.
Then Belmodan tried to use his energy whip to lasso Nero, but since he lost his focus and whipmaster-like ability, the Seeker got dragged into the water as well.
Nero was dangling over the falls, and Belmodan was barely holding onto him, clinging to a nearby rock, when Ruun tried to help. But the glaive, bolstered by a lot more oxygen in this time period, overshot his run and accidentally did a swan dive off of the cliff, splashing into the water below.
A friggin' grizzly bear appeared and attacked Keane.

Four GM Intrusions in under five minutes. Boo yah!

The Friggin' Grizzly encounter was a fun tussle. Want a friggin' grizzly in your game?

Level 6 creature, 40 health, 10 damage claw attacks. That'll get yer pals goin'.

Our party fought the beast off for several rounds before Marc had the bright idea to use PL4T0's Hedge Magic ability to distract the animal. PL4T0 created a smell of honey nearby, and the bear followed it into the woods. Bear encounter averted! Oh, and when Ruun emerged from the water he was carrying the Kairological Tether Translator.

It was about that time that I gave the party the view of a town at the base of the foothills. It was a cozy little town, with a few dusty roads and a comfy saloon. What a great place to explore! I mean, how much fun would be for your typical Numenera group to come across a Wild West town while carrying oddities and cyphers while wearing weird futuristic garb? I was really relishing this roleplaying experience!

But as I mentioned before, my players looked upstream, figured that the cyphers were coming from further in the mountains, and decided that they didn't need any clues, or hints, or NPC interaction before continuing on the main quest. The heck with side-quests, right? Well I wasn't expecting this. I figured that we'd get to the town, and they'd spend the rest of our session (about 90 minutes at this point) interacting with townsfolk. So I had to briefly stop the game to read on a bit and prep the next scene, something I was planning for next week.

It was an awkward pause.

Anyway, as I was saying the party headed up into the mountains along the path that followed the stream. About two or three miles up the trail they encountered a bizarre old man fishing. The guy said his name was Gus, and he was really interested in the party's floating Parisian clock (PL4T0). The man was a well-to-do native of the nearby town of Derry's Ford, and he talked a bit about the community. He even mentioned that they had an uplifting establishment called Nero's Saloon that the party should visit ...

... wouldn't that have been fun?

Gus kept mentioning how he'd love to create something as marvelous as the party's hovering jack PL4T0.

"I'm gonna build something just like you one day."

While interacting with Gus, PL4T0 decided to be mean and tell the man that he was going to die in one-hundred and forty-seven days. Marc thought that playing the twisted, prophetic clock would be fun. But when PL4T0 locked eyes with Gus, the bot had a crazy flashback. He remembered a voice during his creation, a voice and accent just like Gus'.

"Look! I've gone and built somethin' just like that thing I saw all those years ago!"

The weirdness factor on this interaction caused PL4T0 to reboot.

Of course, this was all a GM Intrusion, and I don't know how it'll play into the rest of the story (if at all), but hey, it was weird. What made it funny was that Gus asked to examine PL4T0, and Belmodan happily handed over his party's jack, in exchange for a very special artifact the fisherman kept nearby. While Gus examined all of PL4T0's inner workings, the rest of the team got a look at Suzanne.

Suzanne was a gleaming, numenera-infused lever-action rifle. The barrel was made of glassteel, and the stock from synth. This beast was a level 6 artifact, that functioned as a heavy weapon, did 6 damaged at long range with an additional 2 fire damage. Since it used ammo, it's depletion was a 1d6, however there was something special about this numenera-rifle. If the weapon ran out of ammo, the user just needed to bury it in some soil for 1d6 hours. While buried, the weapon could draw nutrients and minerals from the surrounding material and reload itself. Neato!

Gus also gave the party a small notebook with a bunch of weird writing inside including a string of letters written in The Truth: ABACBBAABDCDE. Gus didn't know what this meant and couldn't read The Truth, nor any of the other words in the book.

Eventually Gus handed PL4T0 back to the party, and told them to be careful as they traveled towards the massive Pit that awaited them deep in the mountains at the end of the trail. Gus said that the Pit was dangerous, surrounded by dead bodies, and most likely the source of all the weird items in the nearby streams.

So the party bid Gus adieu and continued to head up the path, now intent on visiting this place called the Pit. When they finally reached the bizarre scene, they came upon a discovery that they'd sooner expect in the Ninth World. A vast, two-hundred and fifty foot wide circular pit at the center of a seemingly ancient structure. The ledge of the pit was tapered, so Belmodan moved forward for a closer look...

... only to get attacked by eight Cypherids!

Oh Cypherids, how I love you so much already. Cypherids are straight out of the brand new Ninth World Bestiary 2 by +Bruce R Cordell of +Monte Cook Games. But even though these little buggers finally have stats, they are based on a game-concept that I've been enamored with since the dawn of the Numenera campaign setting. Back when I first read through that original corebook in 2013, I discovered that one of the drawbacks to carrying too many cyphers at once was how they could bond together and form some kind of dangerous entity.

Like a Cypherid.

+Marc Plourde compared Cypherids to the tiny robots in the classic movie Batteries Not Included. Especially when they started to procreate during the battle. As the party fought the eight Cypherids, I used the following strategy for these little beasties. Each round, the Cypherids would get to use a random cypher against the party, and then they'd all attack. On two of the rounds I targeted a PC and had their own cyphers bond together as a new Cypherid via GM Intrusion.

The party managed to kill off seven of the Cypherids: five of the originals and both new "Cypherid babies" created from the numenera of PL4T0 and Keane. Another Cypherid came under the control of PL4T0 mid-battle. Finally, a pair of Cypherids used a mount-summoning cypher to ride off into the sunset. The party never caught up to those metallic, futuristic, automaton cowpokes...

... they just kept ridin' and ridin' until they reached Carson City and settled down to raise a family.

Quotes

"You're no more than an artifact or discover, Marc. You're swag. You're floating swag." - Jim to Marc, commenting on PL4T0's reality.

"I'd just like to point out that the way you described the Ninth World reminds me of a landfill in New Jersey." - Marc commenting on Jim's description of Numenera.

"It's from Paris." - Nero discussing PL4T0 with Gus.

"You were turned off. We let him touch you for it." - Nero to PL4T0, after he was examined in exchange for Suzanne.

"Well, I'm not 'Crazy Ruun' anymore... I'm 'Cowboy Ruun.'" - Will discusses his change in focus.

"When Cyphers go bad!" - Marc after the Cypherids showed up.

"So the Cypherids ride off into the sunset?" - David was right.