I ran a game yesterday for my best friends. Hopefully the start of a casual campaign?
The pitch was dead simple:
“moebius jodorowsky tangerine nightmare oranssi mutant pazuzu heavy metal barsoom carcosa acid police surf”
 |
| Moebius, duhh |
I asked them in advance to create a 3rd level LotFP character each: just the stats, class, skills and hp. No name or concept. They rolled up a Magic-User and a Halfling.
At the start of the session, the characters were woken up from a long formless darkness by a distant, glitchy voice. The voice told them that “there has been an accident… but your personality, memories and body will soon be re-integrated… please watch these short promotional videos and signal if you see anything you recognize as your own memory…”
In the memory fragments, the Magic-User saw themselves:
- Hurriedly grabbing everything from a library with crystal books, storing all the treasure in a vault (and remembering how to open it again!); then emerging to the surface only to see the ideal city swallowed by the ocean
- Putting on a mask and conducting human sacrifice on top of a black pyramid; only for the gift of the dark gods to be stolen by an interloper
- Performing elaborate magic tricks on a stage in a 1920s theater, feeding off of the adoration of the audience; getting sawn into two halves, but emerging again from behind the curtains, while the mutilated body was carted off-stage.
The
Halfling saw themselves:
- Riding through an ice age wasteland atop a woolly mammoth, controlling the beast with their mind; then a small flying lizard landed (hunting hawk style) on their outstretched left hand
- Piloting a spaceship, exiting hyperspace, crashlanding on a blue planet (remembering the place of the crash!); only to be taken captive, probed, interrogated by men in white coats; then blowing up their brains with psionic powers
- Crawling through underground tunnels, in total darkness, but seeing everything perfectly, breaking through to a large hall of the sewers, and knowing that the dwellers of the depth will rise again and they are to be their leader.
The
Magic-User picked the sacrificial priest option and became KETEUS, a mummified
sorcerer. With spells from Space Age Sorcery. The Halfling picked the Roswell
option and became PSAMTEK, the psionic pilot. With psi powers cobbled together
from various sources (Carcosa, LotFP, Realms of Crawling Chaos).
Thus Keteus and Psamtek emerged from their cryo-pods and found themselves in a depressing concrete room. There were old decorations hanging from the ceilings and walls, little festive flags, and a sign that read “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!”, with a couple of letters already faded.
One other
cyro-pod contained a dead body… And a fourth cryo-pod’s glass top was broken,
with clawmarks on the inside of the pod.
They explored the adjacent room, that housed a large cylindrical machine, which they identified as some sort of a cloning or artificial human creating device. They started it, it displayed a 100-minute work cycle, so they took off to explore some more while their “clone” is ready.
The
cryo-chambers opened into a larger room, with a bunch of overturned and broken
metal lockers.
At this
point, they were attacked, to nobody’s surprise, by a large clawed feral mutant.
They had no weapons, only a shard of glass Keteus picked up from the broken cryo-pod.
Psamtek hid behind a locker. Keteus hit the mutant with the Spasm of Horror
spell, sending it into uncontrolled convulsions.
Psamtek ran
to the other side of this room, found a corridor blocked off by a glowing force
field, and an air duct. They checked the force field and found it to be
dangerous to the touch.
Keteus
tried to stab the convulsing creature, but to no great effect, so he joined
Psamtek.
The mutant
got up and charged them, but they managed to jump away and get the mutant to
run into the force field instead! It nearly fried, so it was easy to finish it
off. Its body dissolved into black goo.
The smaller
character, Psamtek, crawled into the air vent and soon found an exit from the
ventilation system on the other side of the force field. Keteus crawled through
too (with great effort) and they got into a large hall with computer servers
and a deep, empty pool with a bridge over it.
They found
a switch to turn the force field off/on. And saw that the puddle of black goo
from the mutant was no longer there… So they switched the force field back on.
They also
found a spiral staircase leading up.
On the
higher level, they encountered something truly mindbending:
A floating
sphere of undulating prismatic light!
The light introduced itself as
ETERNAL-6000
their God and Savior, the Rightful Lord of
the World of Tomorrow!!
ETERNAL-6000
called them its children and champions and sent them on a holy quest to kill its
rival and bring back its heart… In exchange for great powers.
The
characters agreed, but were of course a bit suspicious of the bombastic god-voice.
They asked for holy weapons and were sent back down to the armory over the
bridge. They found some cool hi-tec rifles, a dagger with arcane hieroglyphs, a
map to the secret entrance to a building, and assorted survivor gear.
Armed with
these, they headed back to the force field to see if their “clone” was ready.
They found
their artificial servant, a completely white-colored synthetic humanoid, being
torn apart by the mutant, who reconstituted itself from black goo… Keteus fired
his rifle, which turned out to have a conical area of effect, so both the
mutant and the synthetic servant were caught in it… The servant was
disintegrated. The mutant was killed by Psamtek’s rifle shot.
They went
back up to ETERNAL-6000, who, sensing their suspicion, granted them a spell
each with a 10-day limit.
They exited
the complex and found themselves on a tall mountain, overlooking a planet with
two suns! There was an ocean to one side, and a valley with a large city with
black spires and pyramids…
Hopefully,
to be continued!
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