So I’ll be continuing my score from yesterday at lunch in a couple hours. They currently trying to kill a vampire and retrieve an artifact. I haven’t decided exactly what the artifact does yet, though I have some ideas. Anybody wanna offer their own?
Some backstory.
– They were hired to retrieve the artifact by an occult trader named Sethsereth. He is clad from head to toe in silk scarves and speaks with a snakelike voice.
– The vampire’s real name is unknown, but he’s referred to as Needle because he always carries dozens of hypodermic needles with him wherever he goes.
– He has a workshop were he’s doing something with corpses, but the group doesn’t know what it is.
– He’s probably employed by the Forgotten Gods faction.
– Needle is skilled at using ghost doors to travel about the city unseen.
Make it weird.
The artifact is a torso-sized mass of basalt stone carved into the impossible twisted shape of a many-hunched moray with a single, dead, milky pearl for an eye. That which sleeps in the statue is dormant until blood is smeared over it while its name is whispered into a dying person’s ear. Then the blood wakes the thing, and it effortlessly slides through the darkness Behind the Mirror, knifing through the Ghost Field, and snuggles into the blood donor’s dreams. When the blood donor next sleeps, the moray god is waiting, and devours the hapless donor.
Needles has a pedal-operated centrifuge, and he is putting glands from various corpses into a sieve barrel cage. Repeated applications create what he has named “nerve leather” with the proper additives (including vampire blood and canal ooze) and heat included in the process.
It is like a fruit roll-up in texture, and when a bit is ingested, the target must struggle against a wave of conflicting feelings that crash in.
Strong-willed individuals blanch and struggle visibly with the feeling. Normal people are incapacitated. The weak-minded are driven insane.
Regardless, the flavors that rush into the blood make the painstaking effort worthwhile. Needles is planning to keep the nerve leather to enhance his own feeding pleasure, but some drug dealers want the process and its results to refine into a recreational money-maker.
Needles has a peculiar catalyst device embedded in his sinuses. It was stolen from a dusty temple across the Ink Sea centuries ago. It allows him to feed on ghosts as well as people, drawing the energy out of electroplasm and blood alike.
Smash his face and take it. There are many uses for a device that can process electroplasmic energy into life force.
It is shaped like a lumpy pebble. A scholar or cultist might recognize the stone as a fertility goddess, sans head and limbs.
Andrew Shields You certainly know how to make it weird, Andrew.
I like the pebble that allows him to feed on ghosts, since it ties into the random twist that I rolled. This score is supposed to indirectly help one of their rivals, and their biggest rival is Lord Scurlock. Perhaps the occult trader procured this item for Scurlock, and the PCs are indirectly finding it for him. I probably won’t make it a pebble though, I want it to be something you can see, so they’ll recognize it when they see Scurlock wearing it.
Thanks Andrew
Glad you like it. =) If it was to be visible, my recommendations include:
A face mask with a rune-and-gem crusted grill.
A gauntlet that extends needles into the bearer’s flesh when it is clamped on, that turns the blood into zero-gravity strings that wrap up the energy and suck it into the body.
A vest with complex ties across the front, that must be tied up in a proper pattern to make a glyph that tears the pattern of a ghost apart and guzzles in the wreckage.
A choker with the stone at the back, and when active it snaps a “ghost helmet” over the bearer’s head, and that ghost face elongates and bites electroplasm, like a shark unhinging its jaw.
So… how did it go? =)
Andrew Shields For the players? Surprisingly well. Usually these guys can’t roll a 6 to save their lives, but success can’t fast and easy today. Even their resistances rolls were coming up 6s. All in all it was a fun score, but I was a little sad I didn’t get to unleash a few nasty consequences on them.
Quick Recap:
They made sure the vampire acquired the corpse they prepared with an ectoplasmic bomb. They detonated the bomb right before charging in, and I informed them that detonating an ectoplasmic charge of this size could rip a temporary hole into the ghost realm. The leech flashed back to when he tinkered up special breathing masks the would prevent infestation of stray ghost essence (free flashback of course since he knew he was setting off this bomb). The crew delved into the workshop and found a wrecked surgical theatre completely covered in corpses in various degrees of blown up. While looking for the artifact the vampire attacked them by exiting a ghost door to surprise attack them. He employed this strategy numerous times, but he was no match for the PC’s martial prowess tonight. Eventually he was badly injured and stabbed his rune covered stone gauntlet into a mostly intact corpse and began to draw out the ghost and feed to heal himself. At this point the leech cut off his arm using a blow torch cutter and the vampire escaped sans artifact through a ghost door. This fight took place with a ticking clock of something manifesting through the hole the bomb created, but they managed to escape before that happened.
I had plans to have the vampire try and draw the ghost out of one of the living PCs to feed on it, causing some sort of sickness by missing part of your soul. I also wanted to break one of their masks and have them infected with random ghost stuff. I didn’t plan on what would come out of that portal, but it would have been fun to see that too. But the PCs were happy, and I was happy for their success after a rough couple of missions previously. Anyway, the gauntlet has been sold to their enemy Lord Scurlock (unbeknownst to them), so there is still time to turn the weapon on them later.
Thanks for your help Andrew, I dig the ghost feeding, and this gauntlet will be a source of much drama going forward.