Session 73 – Oh, Hey, Mogmurch Has 18 Cha, and Always Has

Dramatis Personae

+Ronnie Whelan as Ronnina
+Adventures of the Mind as Don Harper of Mars
+Moreven Brushwood as The Four Gobbos

Loot

The Gobbos grabbed some Keyboards from Ash Vicker’s apartment. The Gobbos have 3 keyboards now.

NPC Interactions

Albert the Great – Went on vacation back to his home town. Will be back in awhile, Don left him with 5000cc. (Loyalty 11)
Sheniqua – Just sorta tagged along on this one. (Loyalty 11)
Lord Bautil – Free of Voxdaughter, and on his way back to Fighting Mongoose territory.
The Fallen Lords – All celebrating the return of Albert, and very happy to have some time to spend with him.
Dave – Is glad you all saw his butthole.
The Survivalist – Is not happy to have been seen by surface mutants.
The Creepy Child – Is currently being dragged along by the Gobbos, because they want him to live in their orphanage.
The three hooded devil men – Chased Mogmurch

Highlights Recap

The session began with a bit of time spent reviewing recent sessions, since this is the first time the group has been able to get together in about 5 weeks, which is absolutely insane. The longest single gap I think we’ve ever had in almost 2 years of continuous play.

Anyway, once everyone got settled back into the scenario, they set off to the West, hoping to reach the quarters of Ash Vickers the Magshield Operator, find the software they needed, and get back out before being discovered by the devils who had ejected them earlier. Unfortunately, the players had phenomenally poor rolls, and almost immediately did encounter those exact same devils.

Mogmurch, one of the four Gobbos, leaped forward to run past the devils, attempting to distract them from the rest of the party. It was determined that this should be treated as a reaction roll, requiring a roll of 9 or better to accomplish. It was then that the party discovered that Mogmurch has 18 charisma, a fact which has not come up before in the dozens upon dozens of sessions Mogmurch has been in. So that was neat.

Mogmurch easily succeeds at this roll, and the devils go off after him, initiating a chase which lasts for several rounds. The referee randomly determined a path the group took through the complex, until finally Mogmurch was able to duck into a side room, which the devils ran past in their attempt to catch him.

At this point, action switched back to the rest of the party, who were told they had that same number of rounds to act with impunity, confident that it was veritably impossible for them to encounter that specific group of devils.

In this time, they managed to find the Vicker’s apartment (since they did have a map indicating its location), find the computer by the whirring sounds of its fans (since, the only reason they knew it was here is that it responded to ping, and thus must be active), found & downloaded the magshield software onto a floppy disk (accomplished with a successful tech roll by Don Harper on the very first try), and begin their run back out of the complex.

As it so happened, though, Mogmurch had led the devils around in a loop. So, just as the party was passing through a doorway out of the main hallway, the devils were coming around the corner of that hallway. A stealth check was allowed to determine if the party were able to duck into the room quickly enough to avoid detection, and the roll was successful. The party escaped the building, and Mogmurch was able to follow soon after.

They’d accomplished their mission, and if everything went well, the only thing they’d have to do from here would be. to visit each of their questgivers in turn, collecting rewards from each one.

The party met up with Lord Bautil, drinking from a steel pail full of blood that Bric Shelic had left him, to help him recuperate. He expressed some remorse at leaving his palace and his harem behind, but was glad to be experiencing reality again. He and the rest of the party set off back up through the dungeon.

When they passed through Fallen Lords territory, Albert was greeted as a returning hero. He’d been Faded when they came through on the way down, and so this is the first time Albert’s community had seen him since he’d gone off to become a grand adventurer on the surface. Albert was somewhat overwhelmed by all the adulation, and Don told him to take some time off to spend with his people, and gave him 5,000 credits to really live it up for awhile.

Further along, the party encountered a small amount of trouble getting back over the wall, as one young guard thought they were monsters coming up from the depths. The misunderstanding was easily resolved, though, and she was ordered to allow them passage up through the building.

Once the party reached the surface, they contracted LiveMail to send Bautil directly back to Fighting Mongoose territory, while they headed south into Outsider territory, to meet up with Firing Squad.

The party had a series of encounters during their travels, all of which they quickly skirted past, hoping to make the trip to Firing Squad’s HQ with a minimum of hassle. There was the ghostly light and mechanical clanking coming from some nearby bushes that they ran right past, there was the guy in the garbage ghillie suit who ran off when they approached him, and the “Dave’s Doughnut” shop which turned out to be a strip club where a guy named Dave just shows off his butthole.

While walking through a somewhat nicer area of Outsiders territory, the party came across a little boy sitting on a park bench. He was meticulously groomed, were a very nice, tailor-fitted suit, and holding as dog’s leash. The dog itself was laying on the ground, clearly dead. Not recently dead, either. It was stiff, stinking, and filled with maggots. The child did not seem terribly phased by this, just staring at the dog with a blank expression, swinging his feet back and forth beneath the bench. The party realized this was the same child they’d released from Zessler Vox’ experimentation rooms over 2 years previously, which they hand’t seen since their encounter with Mongrel the Magician.

The gobbos ran forward shouting “poor orphan boy! You come live in gobbophanage now!” The boy did not seem interested in coming, but followed without complaint when the gobbos started to push and drag him along with them.

Ronnina also used all of the hit dice of her “Animate Dead” spell to reanimate the dog into the nearest approximation of a living dog that she could, though it still stinks and rots and is covered in maggots.

For the final encounter roll, the party rolled a 2, which is a fucking Dragon. Since we were already 12 minutes past our usual end time for the session, we gave up all hope of reaching Firing Squad tonight, and decided to start the next session with a gosh dang dragon encounter.

Which, of course, means the session ended In Media Res.