HMS Apollyon Recent Play Reports

Below are smaller play reports from the last several sessions of the HMS Apollyon game, mostly concerned with the party's efforts to explore and loot an ancient industrial node on the Port side of the vessel.  It's always nice to open up a new area, and this one is basically just a dungeon crawl with minimal relation to any overarching setting concerns.

THE GREAT SIMIAN MASSACRE

Starring:
Flashy – (passenger)
Rabut the Frogling – (battlemage)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Lady Pillar – (officer)
Vonlumpwig – (necromancer)

A huge hatch blocks the way Port from the vault beyond the Rust Gate, the vault where far too many lives were recently lost in both infighting between Sterntown’s factions and the battle against the War Dead Minions of the still unaccounted for “Brown Surgeon”.  The area presents a great deal of resources for whatever faction controls in, and currently the undisciplined bands of the Scavenger’s Union lounge about, still ebullient from the the success of their double cross and mass murder of Thief Taker and Bevard Family forces.  Only time will tell if the Union can hold the vault (also known as “The Buried Vault”, “The New Lands” and “The Mushroom Farm”) or the hamlet in the vault beyond.  Currently the area bustles with scavenger activity as riotous drunken bands strip the former undead stronghold in the hamlet down to its deck plating, carting out huge loads of useful items and a wealth in decorative stone.

The hatch leading Port is an unknown, opening and closing on some strange schedule known only to the ship itself, it is a giant wheel of 4’ thick orichalcum, designed to stop flooding and locking into place with massive hydraulic driven bars.  The hatch has remained unlatched for several month however and was opened briefly a year or more before by a band of scavengers who reported the area beyond was some sort of storehouse or forge.  Deeming the chance of the hatch sealing again to be small, the band of scavengers once called “The Black Cloaks” seeks to explore the area beyond, expecting it to be full of plunder and rich in industrial supplies. 

With a laudable caution the scavenger gang moves beyond the great hatch and discovers only a small bare room, a few smashed crates, shredded bit of thin metal, scattered about and a large peeling mural of some sort of wrench carrying and hardhat wearing rodent painted on the Port wall.  Close examination and light dusting reveals that the mural welcomes the scavengers to “Port 5S Supply and Fabrication”.  Sternward from the entrance room is a great multi level chamber that stinks of coal and smoke.  A massive forge stands at its center, and a cautious, candle aided exploration reveals hulking industrial machines, lathes, cannon molds and workbenches fill the space.  The forge at the center still glows, but the room is simply too big and too strange to investigate thoroughly and the scavengers decide to retreat and open the door leading fore from the entrance. 

As the door creaks open to reveal a narrow hallway the party is startled to meet a band of four spear and crossbow armed flying monkeys.  The magically transformed simians are clad in red rags instead of uniforms and wear poorly enameled brass buttons and copper electrical wire as decoration.  Almost immediately the monkeys start to demand money and threaten the scavengers and combat quickly commences.  Soon only once monkey survives and he is captured, but the fight has drawn additional flying monkey reinforcements and a true battle begins to rage, with the monkey flank attack blocked by a prophetic use of hold portal and several waves of crossbow and spear armed simians knocked unconscious by magic.  The monkeys pepper the scavengers with bolts and bombard them with firebombs until a new threat emerges – a hulking monkey in a welding mask carrying a flame thrower. The scavengers, out of sleep spells, target this new danger with a variety of weapons, but it is Price’s use a fire magic that saves the day, causing the monkey’s flame weapon to explode.  The detonation kills most of the monkey front line and scorches the scavengers as well, but in the rain of flaming debris and seared fur the battle ends with the surrender of several monkeys.  A truce is worked out between scavenger and monkey allowing the party to explore any area not marked with a red flame symbol and exchanging peace for information about the dangerous “clawed ones” to the Fore, God of Fire aft, and Haunted Offices Port. 

DOGS OF DECAY

Starring:
Mario the Exile - (elementalist/passenger)
Rabut the Frogling – (battlemage)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Mr. Snyle – (necromancer)
Mr. Groob – (engineer)

A lean scouting party returned to the Port Consumer Warehouses and investigated several previously suspected mysteries.  Groob the Engineer Mario the Elementalist, Furre Snyle, Price, Rabut the dashing Frogling and  a few henchmen first discovered that a letter had been left for them, gummed to the bulkhead in the Warehouse's first chamber.  The letter (badly torn due to over cautious spear usage) indicates that the leader of the red painted flying monkey band the party battled last session wishes for a truce, if the adventurers steer clear of the doors marked with red flame images.

The party thinks this is a fine proposal and heads back into a machine room they briefly investigated the prior session.  Groob is able to identify it as a cannon workshop, powered by crude steam technology and centered around a huge smelter.  As the scavengers start to investigate the smelting pool comes alive to reveal a truculent Forge Elemental claiming to be a fire god.  Mario offers it a throwing axe as a sacrifice and the party gifts it several other metal items, tossed into its forge pool, and retreats.

REalizing that most doors on the other side of the entrance hall are marked as Monkey territory the scavengers investigate a room at the far end of a glamorously tiled hall with signage claiming to lead to "Consumer Fabrication".  The door is trapped, but Rabut triggers the attached deadfall remotely and Groob pries off the door. Beyond is a shambles of dung and shredded shelving.  Voices call from several places in the darkness beyond, and the floor proves to be a network of tripwire.

As the party investigates a massive elevator door, four Craydogs, monstrous half crayfish, half wolf-hound beasts with diamond sharp claws rush from the darkness.  The party triumphs, using the dog's own traps to injure them, but the dogs serious injure Me. Groob.

In the room beyond the trapped ambush site is a magnificent fabricator.  Groob is able to identify the device, ancient technology that could create items out of raw materials at a touch.  The huge machine is broken, but its sleek case may contain valuable treasures in the form of gold circuits and arcanoalchemical thinking crystals.

While Groob sweats and tinkers, trying to carefully dissemble the machine and recover the best components, the Cray Dogs are gathering.  A trio of the beasts watches the party from the trap room and their huge matriarch (a 7' tall, multi-ton beast) watches from a balcony above.  In the ensuing fight the party suffers badly as the dogs attack from multiple sides and use their tearing claws to great advantage.  Several Scavengers are wounded, but Mario turns the tide of battle by climbing to the balcony above and with a magnificent burst of power uses his spell obsidian eruption to grab the Cray Dog matriarch and fill it's flesh with jagged crystals.  The massive beast is badly injured and flees, causing it's allies below to flee just as they were about to triumph over the rest of the party.

Groob nimbly disassembles the machine and recovers a number of golden filigreed boards, but is stymied by the device's central thinking crystal - cracking it as he removes it.

TROPHY HUNT

Starring:
Mario the Exile - (Elementalist/Passenger)
Rabut the Frogling – (battlemage)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Mr. Snyle – (necromancer)
Mr. Groob – (engineer)

An incredible haul! Blood Splattered Adventurers Return! Tales of Horror Slain! Astonishing Trophies!

The Scavenger gang returned to the hull, to seek out more bits of the ancient fabricator machine they discovered last session and to hunt the Craydog matriarch whose pack lairs nearby.

The expedition started poorly with a brief verbal conflict with Gregory "Beardo" Van Schlaf - a minor Scavenger's Union functionary guarding the hatch from the New Lands to the Port Warehouses that the Scavengers wished to explore. Schlaf was papering up posters advertising the "Cray Horror" (the very same beast the party was hunting) and when the crippled inebriate Rabut tore one down, started to demand cash from the party to proceed.  Paying the starchy old fellow the party entered the warehouse and fabrication center and was immediately set upon by a pack of elemental wyrds.  In the tense fighting that followed the scavengers managed to dispatch four rust wyrds, and anember wyrd. Price and Mr. Snayle also captured a ash wyrd in a sack where the horror now waits to be dealt with.

Before the band could enter the cray lair and machine rooms they were again assailed, this time by a flock of strange radiantly symmetrical red crystal sparrows, which proved an easier fight.  Finally entering the cray dog lair in the old fabrication machine's chambers the band managed to smash some display cabinets and loot some crumpled cardboard boxes before they ran straight into the fierce pack of predatory craydogs.  The chitinous beasts fought hard but were no match for several critical hits with spears and polearms.  In the end the craydog matriarch fell, along with much of the pack, and only manged to tear about Gizma the goth bandit henchman - who was the first to challenge the matriarch's fury.

FIRE UNLEAHSED

Starring:
Mario the Exile - (elementalist/Passenger)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Mr. Snyle – (necromancer)
Hudson Drain – (fighter)
Lepidor – (fighter)

In an unexpected foray into the hull, a core group of scavengers consisting of the morbid Mr. Price, the dubious Mr. Snyle) and Mario the Exile were joined by a pair of young impressionable fighters an ugly hulking teenage fop by the name of Hudson Drain and an sinewy old murderer named Lepidor.

The group resolved to make a quick dash into the fabrication chambers to the port and boward of the New Lands, and managed to pass into the untamed reaches of the hull without incident.  Then things got weird.

Exploring at first, the scavengers noticed evidence of other scavenger gangs, but pushed on into a computer room, where the ancient alchemical fabricator's production column still stood.  The fantastical machine was still very broken, but crawling about in it's guys Lepidor and Mr. Snyle managed to find an emergency power core that was still active.   Meanwhile Drain and Price broke open the locked column to discover several rotten boxes of cookies, a pair of ancient socks and a wedding ring, all apparently produced by the fabricator before it was destroyed.

The socks and ring were collected and the power toggle flipped, just as the sounds of craydogs attracted the party's attention to a door in the control room's port wall.  Luckily the scavengers were old hands at the tricks of craydogs and expecting the flanking attack charged into the storeroom behind them to find four large crustacean canine hybrids using their diamond hard claws to climb over a balcony.  The party charged and knocked one craydog from the edge, killed another and wounded the third.  Snyle's pair of awful undead bird thralls and Lepidor's sword providing the most impressive kills.  While Mario and his elemental companion finished off the remaining craydog, Price braced for another flanking attack, just as a pair of dogs burst from the control room.  Lepidor charged into the dogs, spearing one with his sword and then butchering it as it tried to stand, while Price's spear caught the other in the vulnerable flesh between its shell plates and killed it instantly.

With the fight over the scavenger's discovered how to operate the one powered console in the control room and managed to play with it's lock function (locking and unlocking all the doors in the area), it's lighting functions, and to turn off the elemental forge on the stern side of the level, enraging the "Forge God" that lived within.

While the sounds of the enraged forge elemental rumbled through the hull, the adventurers continued to explore, finding a rubble choked cargo tram line heading boward and the living quarters for the fabricator's technicians.  While exploring one of the ancient bedrooms, Price became possessed by the confused and anxious spirit of an ancient technician, which is currently happy to wait, as long as figures out chess problems with it's prized chess set and he remembers to pick up groceries.  Like all spirits however this spectral intruder will only become increasingly erratic and domineering.

Laden with craydog claws and sundry loot the scavengers proceeded to return to civilized spaces, and witnessed a battle between what was left of the Flame Troupe flying monkeys and the enraged Forge God.  Dead monkeys littered the simian barracks and the few remaining monkey soldiers seemed outclassed and demoralized faced with their own deity and its 'cindermen' underlings.  The huge vault like hatch to "Port 5s Supply" closes behind the party blotting out the sound of screaming monkeys and roaring elementals - who knows what will be left when scavengers return to the region?

CRYSTAL AND ASH

Starring:
Flashy – (passenger)
Mario the Exile - (elementalist/passenger)
Rabut the Frogling – (battlemage)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Mr. Snyle – (necromancer)
Lady Pillar – (officer)
Mr. Groob – (engineer)
Dirk McReady – (wizard)

Tonight's adventure returned to the Fabrication chambers, and the scavengers bore witness to sad fate of the Flame Troupe of flying monkeys.  Perhaps they felt some sadness that their actions had caused the death of the monkeys, perhaps they were simply relieved that they had escaped the same fate. With the scavenger it's never simple and gazing into the abyss of the hull for too long will often allow it to gaze back into you (or possess you with ancient spirits, transform you into a sinister wooden mannikin or straight up murder you when you least expect it - really substance dependency issues are the least of a scavengers problems).  The "Forge God" a fire elemental of some power has been released from his forge and now wanders the halls of the fabricator, apparently having created any army of 'cindermen' to do his bidding and seek the fat of sentients to stoke his flames.

Exploring the remains of the monkey lair the scavengers found only room after room of ashes and death, discovering the remains of the monkey's master and his defunct panzerfaust staff. Mario also found a magic dagger in the troupes' former altar.  With little, not even a tear, to show for their exploration the scavengers moved on into the fabrication chambers itself, which had apparently so far escaped the Forge God's depredations.  While they explored a Green Crystal Spider slide around or through a door and attack them, but was quickly smashed before exploding into a shower of glasses shards.  Luckily the scavengers avoided the blast without injury.  Further exploration discovered the last vestiges of the cray-dog pack that the scavengers had been slowly depleting over the past few session, and the cray dog nursery, was plundered and the spawn slain.

A very robust door stood up to the party's attentions for almost forty minutes and the endless banging attracted a squad of Cindermen who proved rather inept combatants.

Further exploration caused Lady Pillar to become possessed by a boxing obsessed spirit named Matilda Rex, revealed a hermit's cache of books and  allowed the recovery of a "Thinking Crystal" which promised power and "a place of total safety and order" to the party in exchange for transporting it to "it's people - the returned".

A TUN OF TROUBLE

Starring:

Rabut the Frogling – (battlemage)
Price – (academic sorcerer)
Vonlumpwig – (necromancer)
Mr. Snyle – (necromancer)

Having just had a spectacular haul, the scavenger band, sometimes known as the Black Cloaks, has trouble organizing a full expedition to the Spinal Rail, a region with a reputation for danger emphasized by the menacing existence of the "Golden Boy - Chosen of Dispater".  Only four scavengers are sober, desperate or devoted enough to leave the fleshpots of the Rustgates, and Rabut the Frogling, Scholar Price, and a pair of necromancers - "Son" of VonLumpwig and Mr. Snyle - instead decide to make a quick dash into the familiar and theoretically safer Fetid Pit in search of some quick cash.  They take with them a 'skull' ganger named Bloodsworth Demon (an assumed name to be sure) and Rabut's batman, Navy Davy.

Climbing the massive chain from the Steward fortifications atop the pit, latched on with harnesses seems almost recreational to the hardened scavengers, and the damp insect mists, despite shadows and corpse lights lacks the skin tingling menace of the areas recently searched by the party.  The band passes several strange growths of lichen, and descends below the ruinous "Agricultural Station" - its deck  and doorway covered in clusters of oil drop like eggs or growths.  The most dangerous encounter during this descent is with a swarm of 4' long mottled white and brown lichen eating insects, which Price drives off by filling his lantern with wet rope ends and creating a cloud of noxious smoke.  Perturbed and fleeing the giant insects spray the lantern with nauseating brown juice, rendering it worthless.

After 160' Following the winding stair that hugs the edge of the gaping pit, the scavengers reach the black iron mass of the Bastion, a custom's house once built to levy tolls on trade up and down the shaft.  The old fortress is looking worse for the wear, rusty slime weeping from the walls and ominous creaking noises emanating from the stressed rivets that hold the building together.  Indeed it proves structurally unsafe, as Rabut and Davy plunge through the stairs about halfway through the fortress, Davy's fall lit by the lantern he carries until both him and the light explode on an outcropping 100' below. Even with his drug damaged reflexes Rabut manages to grab a support strut, wrenching his arm, but saving himself from certain death.

More cautiously the party decides to investigate the Fortress' great hexagonal tower, but within the find only a pink frothing mass of slime, which succeeds in wounding Price and Rabut with its whirling flagellums before the scavengers can retreat.

Continuing, down the leisurely winding stair, into the night forest of towering albino plants, bright fungus and clear of luminescent creatures the band stumbles across a small entrance in the pit wall.  A portal recently revealed by changes in the overabundant growth that promises intrigue.

Beyond the portal, whatever door that once protected it from the elements, is a crudely papered hall, overgrown with black mold and lichens.  Investigating the scavengers find a ruined suite of storerooms, and disturb a nest of venomous serpents (which prove to be rather salable meat once quickly dispatched) while rifling through a room of decayed carpets.  Further searches reveal a mass of decorative sequins and beads.  In the back of the hall, a door leads to what was once a hermit's repose and a padlocked door.  Mostly destroyed, a search of the sad rooms only offers up a tin trunk, protecting its contents from the damp and a weaponized bronze crowbar,  in need of new grip wrappings and green with age.  In the tin case are a set of musty, but sound, chef's clothes and a dusty bottle of wine.

Taking this pitiful loot the scavengers make quick work of the padlocked door and beyond find a sealed chamber with twelve casks of what appears to be brandy on a carefully built rack.  Debating over the potential value (huge) of such a find, Rabut tests the stuff, tapping a cask and slugging down some of the mellow golden brown liquid that pours out.  The frogling, despite his penchant for debauch, is almost overcome by the fiery spirit - not it's potency, but that is seems to be haunted, filling his mind with visions of a long lost battle between hungry bands of refugees over the stores of a 2nd class dining lounge.  Rabut is quick to recover though and even more excited to find that the cask is presumably filled with haunted brandy.

Mr. Snyle immediately begins drain as much of the brandy as he can into quickly emptied flasks and canteens.  While doing so however, the revenant entombed in the brandy barrel breaks free, sundering the barrel with the rage of unlife. The creature hollowing with the ranting cadence of an irredeemable drunk leaps onto Snyle and batters him with its fists. Snyle is overcome by reeling magical intoxication, transferred by the creature's touch, and barely able to act. A blast of twisting, sparking magic from Price throws the revenant back before it can do more harm, blasting it into jellied goblets of pickled flesh and bone.

Resolving to test the other barrels it soon becomes clear that they too are filled with revenants and after exhausting thier offensive spells on a second revenant of revelry the scavengers have collected only four flasks of the haunted brandy.  Deciding to test two more barrels, the scavengers run as soon as they hear the undead within breaking loose, as they pull the inebriated Mr. Snyle behind his drunken song (a lullaby, designed to put the wights back to rest) is echoed from within one of the barrels.  Slamming the doors of the cellar the scavenger band manages to make it back to the lip of the Pit without incident.