Campaign ArcAdventures Page
One of the PCs leaps downstairs with a katana to fight the zombies who have torn the iron door of the windmill off its hinges and are coming up the stairs. He does not return. Frantically the other players turn on the Ion Collector!! Electricity sparks everywhere and after a feeling of dissociation they notice the air is smoggy and smoky.
The players try to figure out where they are. Their cellular phones do not work. Suddenly they spot a car they recognize from the real world -- the car of the person who hired them to go to the island -- driving away. They yell and wave but it is too far. One of the PCs with Enhanced Awareness picks up a newspaper and finds the headline is something like "Adventurers Missing, Presumed Dead" accompanied by a picture of them. Before he can show it to the others it has become an ordinary piece of paper. After walking awhile they notice that the sun has neither risen nor set perceptibly. It is windy and cold.
They search through some of the abandoned skyscrapers before spotting a light in one, high up in perhaps the 20th floor. They find it is a hotel where water drips damply down into the cement floor and the elevators are in operational. They creep up the dark stairs, and avoid a trap which, they find, would have released a sledgehammer to smash them several times in the faces. They get out on the proper floor and knock on the door where they saw the light. The floor is creaking; they other rooms like decayed.
The door opens slightly and a relatively normal-looking man peers out from behind a chain. They introduce themselves and he proves unable to speak English, instead answering in Swedish. He has a crossbow with a wooden bolt leveled at them, but when they act nonaggressive he opens the door, first unbolting six or seven locks, chains, and bars, and lets them in. Inside is a worn-looking apartment with dusty couches and the constant ticking of a clock. A woman, somewhat older-looking than the man and dressed in Edwardian clothes, appears from the other room. The couple appears to be hospitable and sits them down to dinner, where the PCs are served rice and a yellow, greasy soup containing some kind of meat or mushrooms. After dinner they ask the man where they are, and what time it is. They have a disagreement over whether it is 1943 or 1995. While looking around the apartment one of the PCs uncovers some stained, aged-looking portraits of the young man as a boy. The woman is with him, but does not look any younger than she is now.
In answer to the PCs' questions the man guides two of them up to the roof of the skyscraper. He points off in the distance, where they can see, far off, six tall buildings that seem to rise like dark tree trunks into the smog and out of vision--buildings too huge and mighty for any details to be seen. The man makes sign language to the effect of stating "six." For a second the two PCs, however, think they see four other buildings on the horizon. "Ten?" they ask their host. "Six," he responds, confused. (And indeed there are six, although for their host, born before the disappearance of four of the Archons, their ghosts remain over the city.)
They return downstairs to find the woman's behavior becoming somewhat strange. When looking at her, one of the PCs is struck by the feeling that he is a child again; looking in a mirror, he sees himself young, and the woman seven feet tall, her face turned away, but with enormous hands. The vision fades. Another PC looks in the pane of the clock -- now ticking louder than ever -- and thinks he sees two faces wrapped together in cobwebs or gauze, their mouths open, screaming. The third PC, who is suffering from a medical impairment (to be described shortly), has been drugged by the tea the couple served, and is incapable of acting coherently. However, their hosts are still totally considerate. Then the woman, smiling in a maternal manner, walks into one of the other rooms of the house with the man, motioning for the PCs to wait. Before they close the door one of the PCs sees through the crack, and sees that their male host has shrunken, his clothes now hanging off him, down to the size of a boy...the door locks and they begin to hear noises they cannot describe from inside that room.
Running, they see a sign reading SUBWAY. Each sees it in his own native language, including the Child of the Night whose native language is a far-future version of Egyptian hieroglyphs. They vault down the dark steps, escaping the mob they have barely seen. The subway is 100' down a flight of cracked tile stairs, in a long New York-style room. An indecipherable map showing peculiar symbols (other Archons' symbols) is on one wall. They hear disturbing sounds inside one of the station's restrooms, and do not go in. Closer and equally worrisome is the hunched figure in rags sleeping on the bench, who, they see as they look too long, has the disfigured claws of a beast of prey. It emits snores and hungry snuffles.
Then the subway arrives. It seems to be missing the station -- but it keeps coming, and coming, and coming. The old steel train is hundreds of feet long, and as it passes the investigators see one car containing a scene out of the '50s -- a placid, well-lit train where men in brown overcoats and women in clean dresses sit reading the evening paper. It rushes by too fast to see details. When the train stops they get on only to find a dark, empty car, with holes in the walls and floor through which the subway wheels can be seen turning. From the rear cars, they smell an incense-like odor and see flickering lights behind a thick curtain. They decide to head towards the front of the train instead, to find the car with people in it.
Passing down the car, bats flap in their faces and the stuffing of a seat bursts to reveal hairless pig-like things like swollen sausages. When they get to the car where they saw people, they see only an overturned chair and the skeleton of a woman, wearing clothes from the '50s or '60s. They take her gun and keep going. After passing through dangerously dilapidated cars, they arrive in the front, where the driver turns out to be a perfectly ordinary man who has the impression he is driving the line from Harlem to Queens in New York. He warns the investigators in a vague manner, and then when the train stops they get off. They find themselves in a Romanesque underground chamber with six entrances leading up, down, and in different directions. Moss and fungus grow on the stone, and behind one grate they hear foot-long cockroaches rustling. As the train they left rushes by, they spot, in the curtained car they did not enter, an Arabian-looking scene of dark, sinister-looking men and scantily-clad women, who tote guns and knives and are dividing up the spoils of the city, artifacts of brass and gold.
They are now abandoned in a dark station with no certain way to get aboveground. After an interminable wait another car comes by, but for some reason they do not enter. As it resumes its course they see a cold, icy-looking car in which bodies are hanging from the rafters, bodies stripped down to the white fat and blue sinew. A hunched, powerfully built figure with a mask or face resembling a bird's is clutching a glinting chainsaw. They congratulate themselves on not taking that car (the Zeloths' Meat Train, fellow DMs).
They pick one of the exits, at random, heading up. They find themselves in a dry-smelling, increasingly hot area of steam tunnels, with crumpled aluminum and insulation hanging from pipes in claustrophobic cement tunnels. One of the PCs starts to have bad feeling (Sixth Sense). They start hearing motion in the side tunnels. As they turn back, they hear a crowd begin to follow them, padding along making sticky sounds with each footstep. Perhaps it had something to do with the bloody footprints they found before. As they race back down the spiral stairs, one of the PCs empties a clip around the corner, and the noise stops. They hastily pick a different exit.
This time they pick an upward-sloping tunnel which proves to be made of crumbling stone and brick, and leads to a series of dungeon-like corridors where plants and moss have found root in the light circles of driftwood torches. From behind an iron door, they hear a weak voice pleading help. Looking in, they see an incredibly old, white-haired man chained to the wall. They rescue him.
The man explains that he is a Scottish student of theology, and that in the year 1926 he and his friend performed an experiment--he has forgotten the details--around Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin. They found themselves in a city with dark mosques and towering churches, and then they were set upon by what the old man refers to as "demons." The demons beat them severely, separated him from his friend, and locked him in this chamber underground. He describes the demons as looking somewhat like giant knights in armor. The players bring the man with them, grudgingly.
They gradually climb until they come to the bottom of an oubliette where a rusted manhole offers escape from the maze of stone. The Child of the Night summons the strength to break through and they emerge in the hearth room of a Medieval-looking, almost bare stone house. Coming to the next room they find a variety of stuffed trophies, including enormous-horned beasts, wolves, and a human woman's head. They go down and push open the enormous front door, finding themselves in a place where great manor houses and rich-looking structures of dark wood stretch infinitely off in all directions. They hear a noise, and take cover in an alley while 10-foot-tall metal things, dressed like knights in armor with motorcycle helmets for faces, drive by on great motorcycle-like machines. The old man shudders. They notice that in this part of the city, the sky is dark blue as if just before night falls, and night actually _does_ fall, for no reason they can fathom.
Coming out of hiding, one of the PCs decides at random to knock on one of the buildings' doors. A servant answers and, entering, they find themselves in an English country house circa sometime in the 19th century. The inhabitants do not seem at all surprised to meet the PCs, and offer them baths and food. They promise that, "when the Master comes home", they can tell him his story. The servants are true to their word, and one of the PCs even seduces one of the maids. She leads him outside, by a back door, but when the PC goes out he sees no sign of the maid, just a dim-lit alley in Metropolis. The inhabitants of the house and the PCs are in parallel worlds, only partially able to meet.
Then while the PCs are washing there is another ringing on the doorbell and, after it is answered, a sound of gunfire. Going out they see the things in armor, their very bodies made of steel with red visors for faces, lifting a gun from the smoking body of the butler. The azghouls have trailed these humans here and are going to teach them a lesson. A fight ensues. The PCs flee, barely able to penetrate the azghouls' armor. Two of the PCs manage to kill an azghoul, but run down a blind alley, where they wait for a suicidal last stand. Soon they hear the motorcycles of multiple azghouls entering the area. The azghouls set the house on fire and march the 19th century people out of the house where the slaughter them firing-squad-style with their Gatling guns. However (due to incredibly bad die rolls) they do not notice the PCs. The PCs, trembling, enter a building to hide during the night, and find that it's an abandoned marionette factory. There they sleep, licking their wounds, having dreams about the marionettes waking during the night, disassembling them and putting them back together.
But now he's undead.
He eats his first victim less than a week later.
Cut back to the other survivors: the two PCs (including the Child of the Night) and the old man. Sharing their food, they trek off, the old man pointing them in the direction of Christchurch Cathedral. They pass through an area similar to Las Vegas, with tall empty casinos rotting in the heat, and parking lots filled with trashed cars. They again see the car they recognize from Earth -- the car of the person who hired them -- driving away, and they shoot at it, but to no avail. They pass a single man standing on the street corner in the middle of the emptiness, passing out flyers for a rave to people they cannot see. When they talk to him he seems to believe he is in Las Vegas. Frustrated and confused, they leave. Night falls and the black moon rises. They pass through an area like a Western ghost town, with creaking roofs and gibbering pueries running between the glass less windows.
When they stop that night, the old man (who now seems somewhat incoherent) reveals his full story. In Scotland in 1926, he was searching for a castle he had seen in his dreams -- a White Citadel. He tries to describe the holy palace, but the other PCs do not listen. However, he is betraying them, leading them in its direction rather than towards an exit from Metropolis.
They resume traveling through an area where the tottering houses lean almost down to the street like lichenous Medieval cottages; where red lights glow from windows inscribed with evil runes, and Psyphagi creep over piles of books with black pages inside the storefronts of occult buildings. Half-human pilgrims shuffle in and out of view, claiming to be searching for a sacrifice to the Living Gods. The buildings rise tall and alien, like the paintings of the French artist, Druillet; giant baroque towers. They find themselves climbing up an increasingly steep hill. The old man wheezes and leads them, claiming the Palace is just beyond the hill. It is night. They come to the top of the hill and look down, seeing the city spread out in all directions...
...And look into the Abyss. In place of the Demiurge's Palace (the White Citadel of the Theologian's dream) is the endless black hole. The old man shrieks and panics, but then his voice turns to stupefaction. Turning to him, they see that the old man is now a 20-year-old man with light brown hair -- just as he was in 1926. The newly young man goes mad, and laughs, looking at his hands. A noise comes from the pit. The PCs begin to run. Then thousands of Crustacz rise up from the pit and advance upon the surviving PCs, rushing upon them and injecting poison with their jaws before chewing off mouthfuls of blood-soaked flesh...