The Dead Setters fight a demon on a boat in The ‘Game Over, Man!’ Caper.

The Dead Setters fight a demon on a boat in The ‘Game Over, Man!’ Caper.

The crew and Ulf Ironborn headed out to sea, hiring the smuggling ship Insider Raiding to rendezvous with the Colossus (their stolen state-of-the-art leviathan-hunting prototype vessel) and retrieve Ulf’s family (his wife Arika, his sister Yan, and his son Alf) where they had been stashed while the Setters dealt with Lord Strangford. Captain Minos and the cohort of exhausted, terrified rovers clamored for help as soon as the PCs came aboard. Something was taking the crew and stalking the ship for victims. Minos estimated about a quarter of his men were missing or dead (2/8 on a clock), although Ulf’s family were still alive, kept under guard in his own quarters.

This situation came about due to a Demonic Notice entanglement on their way back from Skovland a few sessions ago. I rolled on the random demon table and got keywords like amorphous, gears, and savagery. I was also one of the few sad people who saw the Jamie Lee Curtis movie Virus in the theater.

An Assault plan went awry with double 1s on the engagement roll. A sudden storm enveloped the sky, capsizing the Insider Raiding! They couldn’t evacuate Ulf, his family, or their beleaguered cohort of rovers! They’d have to stick together to hunt this creature, but a poor Hunt roll meant the demon found them first! It tried to crush several crew by tearing a pressure door off its hinges and using it like a trash compactor in a narrow hallway, but Rook the Cutter took the hit and burned his armor. The demon opted to hit and run, tearing through to an upper deck and collapsing a stateroom down into the gap. The glimpses the PCs got were of a vaguely simian shape, all massive hydraulics connected with human meat and sinew, pumping oil, electroplasm, and blood through pipes and arteries.

Ulf saw the thing and immediately headed for his family. Rook tried to cajole the Skovlander into working together and destroying the entity first, but Ulf would have none of it. I asked Rook’s player if he’d be willing to go to a fight over it, because that’s what it would take to stop Ulf, but Raven compromised and went with Ulf. Party: split!

Each team found evidence of other creatures and remnants of hapless crew as they went. Spider-bobcats, fashioned from clockwork and meat, or headcrab-like vent-crawlers, all human hands with shaving razor fingers, clamped down over ruined skulls and corpses stripped of useful parts.

Rook and Deemo the Leech took the rovers on the hunt for the demon and critted! I decided that they would get the drop on the demon in the most advantageous location – the reactor room. With limited effect, Deemo surveyed the situation and couldn’t find any specific “silver bullet” weakness, but Rook, a Tier III monster with Brutal, a fine heavy weapon, and Not to Be Trifled With, waded in and started whooping ass with his railjack hammer. If you have the right stuff, sometimes you can knock over the stone tower with a hammer.

Meanwhile, Ulf and Raven made it to the captain’s quarters and found… corpses and the signs of a struggle, but nothing had been able to get through the sturdy door. Clearly the demon hadn’t constructed its behemoth body yet. The only snag was that Ulf’s family weren’t sure it was him! They said the creature was taking people and maybe it was trying to trick them. Raven managed to sway them, however, and Ulf was finally reunited with his family. The storm would destroy any lifeboats, though, so they weren’t out of the fire yet. No escape. They headed below decks to reunite with their comrades, deciding safety in numbers was better than going it alone.

The demon had a clock going for corrupting the Colossus’ reactor, plus a small group of its “helping hands”. I didn’t get cute with consequences or positioning, just doled out harm (which was absorbed by armor and then by masterful resistance rolls) and desperation. The Dead Setters had dealt with monstrous enemies before and they dealt with this one now, wrecking the construct with railjack hammer, alchemicals, and electroplasmic bullets. But – but! – it managed to deal actual harm to Rook before its corporeal form was trashed. I know Rook had taken harm before, but probably not in the last 9 months or so. Small victories. 🙂

Deemo used Alcahest to make stripping the body horror out of the ship’s engine easier, then got to work actually fixing the reactor. The rest of the group scoured the vessel for any leftovers, but soon found that the entity’s presence, while divested of its corporeal assets, was still haunting the ship.

We had to break there, but overall this was a success in terms of tone. I feel that while the actual combat felt a little light, I was able to provide some good complications in the storm, Ulf breaking ranks, his family’s initial mistrust, and the lingering danger still to come.

#heestcomplete