Saturday, June 23, 2012

Shadows Campaign: Destruction of the Status Quo

With this campaign, I intercut between the solo player's three characters which gave it a greater sense of everything happening, and changing, at once. It all dealt with a single night where Alder Torelli seized praxis from Prince Vinnie Celino. I'll tell you how it went down with the intercuts depicted with a ---.

Here we go:

Lord James Tyler awakens, checks on his current cases, and then receives a phone call from Lady Gloria Brown requesting that he head down to McLaren Vale to meet her at a particular cottage. James heads there only finds that he's just missed her. The woman who lives in the cottage reassured him that Gloria would be back shortly. He settles down to wait.

---

Prince Vinnie Celino is holding court in the S.A. Art Gallery which is the traditional elysium for Adelaide. Various court members are mentioned as being present and in conversation. The Invictus arrive en masse (except for James Tyler) with Alder Torelli in the lead. Even ex-Sheriff Richard Blackwolf, a vampire who was killed in the troupe campaign, is present though Vinnie killed him decades ago.

The Carthian, Amity Fine, left the room - likely to call in reinforcements or do something else helpful. No one stops her.

Alder Torelli says that if Prince Vinnie relinquishes his praxis and gives Torelli all of his resources, Vinnie would be allowed to live.

Vinnie simply said: "You know how this ends."

Then he popped Gangrel claws and launched himself at Alder Torelli. Smoky tentacles erupted from Alder Torelli, slamming Vinnie against the ceiling and tearing at him with tiny claws, though when he batted at it the tentacles had no form and his hands passed through them. The tentacle dropped him to the ground and he fled, attempting to grab Lady Gloria Brown on the way out.

His Carthians also fled. Checkers Pockets became a rat. Marianne and Leon Perelli used Celerity to get to the door. J.J., thankfully, wasn't present as he was a Ventrue wannabe Gangrel. Amity Fine had already left the room.

Leon paused at the door, firing at Torelli, to give his allies a chance to get out, and was slammed by a tentacle up and through the roof for his efforts.

Then begins a desperate race where Vinnie shoulder slams door after door to get out as the shadow tentacles wildly lash out, destroying walls and supportive pillars, causing the building to make horrible groans of imminent destruction. Vinnie paused only to warn a janitor to flee as well before swiping a key card at the back door and rushing out with Marianne. The janitor made it as well before the building collapsed on his feet.

Vinnie pulled him loose, ran around to the front of the building and found Leon lying smashed on the sidewalk surrounded by a small crowd of people. Vinnie put the janitor in a taxi, sent it to the hospital, and picked up Leon's body (no one got in his way though they commented on it) and he fled with Leon's torpored body and Marianne to his car.

They made their way back to the Vinnie's Blood Brother's bikie gang hideout - a big, fortified street - only to find it surrounded by cop cars. They kept driving and Marianne headed back under Obfuscate while Vinnie waited in the car.

---

James Tyler waits for fifteen minutes then tries Gloria's phone but find that she doesn't answer. He then tries his pseudo-sire, Peter Walsh's, phone (both his normal and his secret one) but both of them seem to be out of range or disconnected (in truth, destroyed). Nervous now, he calls Persephone Trent who's a Mekhet Lynx who would never be without her phone ... but she hangs up on him.

He calls his childe, an Ordo Dracul called Juliette Tyler, and learns that the art gallery has collapsed. Juliette offers to try to reach Persephone as they share a covenant and Persephone is more prone to answering the phone for her. James hangs up and calls Hassan, learning that with his Occult Vision he saw some shadowy miasma flash across the city and several in certain sections. Hassan is currently in the Adelaide Hills and offers to meet with James Tyler at the Eagle on the Hill, which is a known werewolf meeting point where the kindred have met with a particular pack on a few occasions.

James hears back from Persephone about what had happened at the Art Gallery and realises that the Invictus tried to keep him out of the way so as not to risk testing his loyalty to his Ordo Dracul sire, Peter Walsh. The Ordo Dracul and the Carthians are pretty tight in this city, after all. The Ordo Dracul had put Prince Vinnie Celino in power due to their fear of the previous Invictus Prince, Dimloch.

---

Seamus O'Baoill is the Ordo Dracul kogaian and he doesn't bother attending court lately. Instead, he'd gone down south to Aldinga Beach to examine a particular abandoned house that was growing an odd yellowish-green mold that they figured might be the corruptive fungus found in an earlier adventure a few decades ago. On closer inspection, it looks like an entirely different species.

He has Blood Tenebrous so when that shadowy miasma rolls across the city, he feels it itch along his spine as though something were watching him. Unfortunately, he's in a spot where the miasma has settled. At about this time, a man heads inside the building with a flashlight, perhaps the owner got tipped off that there might be a vandal inside.

Seamus sneaks outside and hides behind the window, using Witch's Cloak (a Vedma bloodline power) to be hard to spot as he peers inside. He can see that there's some bugs, somewhat like cockroaches, that are buzzing around a shadowy corner that is a deeper shadow than the rest. The man comes in and looks around before flashing his light upstairs.

Some of those bugs lift up into the air and then slam into the back of his neck, burrowing inside. His neck snaps left once the first bug burrows inside, then right after the second one does, then hangs limply to one side as the others infest him, before he finally turns in a shuddering motion toward Seamus who simply points his light at it (he's dealt with photo-sensitive beings before) but the corpse is unfazed and shambles toward him.

The corpse hits the window pane and falls through, landing on its face and twitching its limbs until it slowly starts getting in a position where it might be able to lift itself. Seamus doesn't stop to watch and see what happens. He just hops on his bicycle and starts heading back toward the city, calling Duchess Alicia Brown (a pseudo Invictus who was responsible for guiding the building of the city according to principles of sacred geometry).

She informed him as to the praxis seizure and asks to come in from the cold and become a known Ordo Dracul as Torelli is her rival and there was no telling what he might do. Besides which, she wants to focus on her Grand Experiment. She offers to come and pick him up on the highway and he hangs up but keeps cycling because, well, he's a lot slower than her.

Seamus notices that chunks of the road seem free of that itchy sensation and others are not. He also spots a car in one of the itchy zones which has pulled over to the side of the road, interior lights on, and passenger side door open. The car's speakers were loudly blaring classic rock songs. Fearing what he might find inside, or what the car might mean, he gave it a wide berth and kept going until Duchess Alicia Brown finds him.

They head over to the Torrens River and cross it to get to the Ordo Dracul haven deep inside Torrens Island. People are wary of Alicia Brown but Seamus claims that he'd known she was Ordo Dracul all along and that she'd had approval from the Sworn of Dying Light (back when they had some in this city).

---

Marianne returns to Vinnie with the blood bags out of his refrigerator and he feeds it to Leon so that he'll have enough blood to heal and, ideally, awaken when he automatically heals one lethal the following night. Marianne informs him that a few of his bikies shot up the rest - odds are Dominate was involved. Most of his bikies are injured or dead. Only a few are still alive.

Vinnie maintains his cool in the face of this frenzy risk, and they head over to his small, secret haven in the Maid & Magpie to wait out Leon's torpor and plan out his next move.

Wow, that was uber-long and it had been only a four hour session. Does anyone read these posts? If so, did you want them smaller? More detailed? No preference?

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