B/X Mars, Weird Canyon, Session 3, Part One

Mars: Weird Canyon Session 3. 

We rejoin our heroes, mere minutes after the close of our previous episode- still trapped within the lair of doctor Stitch. 

The cast: 

Leopold the Terran- currently missing.

Quas Joktar, thark! of the Grax horde. 

Cyno Drox, Menton.

Xeibrixia Nelvo Menton.

The hours grind past. The poor wretch on the table twitches and moans. Dr. Stitch and the Whip enter the room, stare at the prisoners and talk in giggling whispers between themselves. 

As they depart, Nelvo uses his cloud-mind power to confuse Doctor Stitch. The doctor opens Nelvo’s cell door and departs. 

Nelvo  exits his cell, grabs his gear from the pile in the corner and lets the others out. 

Once everyone is geared up, they concoct a plan. Drox climbs up into the pipe-works and hangs a noose over the threshold. The others lie in wait. 

Dr Stitch enters.

The noose closes around his windpipe- and yanks him upward!

A flurry of stabbing and psionc attacks follow.  

Dr Stitch’s Skull flares and a wave of warp energy explodes outward,  but it is a feeble attempt and does no damage.

Doctor Stitch expires; his corpse begins to seep a stinking and viscous, boiling yellow ichor; gummy and hot it drips, smoking, onto the floor

The party exits the cell block and comes once more (see the session 2 AP) into the huge cavern full of vats. They see some creepy half formed monstrosities and vat-goons floating in the vats. 

The party wanders in a vain attempt to find a way out and stumbles into the the vat-goon kennel. Oriented now, they flee towards Dr Stitch’s office, goons and their master hot on their heels. 

They make their way over the floating bridge; past the giant sslarg; and into the office- which they quickly loot. The acquire a sun beam pistol and ray gun tubes. 

After exiting by the only remaining door, the party runs down a long flight of eroded steps, and finds themselves in a magna rail station, like the one they visited under the rocket tower in session one- except in good repair. 

Before them a train floats at the platform’s edge.

The noise of pursuit comes from behind. 

Someone places a mystery triangle with a green center into an identically shaped depression alongside the train door. The door opens. The party piles in, stumbling over one another. 

Vat-Men and stitchlings swarm the platform.

The door whisks closed and train shoots away from the station.

End part one. 

B/X MARS PREVIEW: THE DREAMERS

Another Atlas entry:

I’m finishing up this product now and getting the last little bit of writing and the final details squared away. I still have about 1k words and a few random tables to write.

On the topic of G+:
I probably will not be joining all of you on any of the new sites or old sites. I am going to move back in here and at my webcomic site.
The blogroll is a work in progress. You have to import everything one by one. i’m still working it. i want to put your blog up.
You may speak:

B/X Mars: The Black Hand

G+ hurtles towards destruction as B/X Mars nears completion.
Anway, I have slowly been moving back over here, anyway. The big hold up was reconciling the different technolgical eras of all the hardware and software invovled.
I’ll be restructuring and turning back on comments over the next few days.
Here’s the thing:

It took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to move a photo from one google ap to another. It’s like 2004 up in here.

BX Mars session two AP

Mars play report

Session one: two mentons and thark find a map, a weird triangle thing; explore a tower and kill an albino ape. 

Not so Brief AP from session two. 

Lured in by the scent of bbq Ape, Leopold from Terra joins the boys. Together they set off over the desert for the Pyramid. 

The pyramid is a day and half walk away. Twice along the way the group is accosted by ant-men. Drox and Quas are able to scare them off with crazy lucky energy weapon shots each time. Many ant-men die, cooked meat and red shell fragments rain from the sky; it’s like a bomb went off in a lobster tank. 

Death comes easy on the Red Planet- or so one would think. 

Upon arriving at the Pyramid they find a huge pool next to the monument. Water pours into the pool from an eroded fountainhead half way up the pyramid’s side. 

They slake their thirsts, fill their water bottles and see a giant tattooed croc in the bottom of the pool. As they begin to discuss killing the croc and breaching the Pyramid, like common vagabonds, the ground begins to shake. The tripod strides over the dunes. And looks down on them from its single eye. It is twenty feet tall. Eventually, although it harms no one,  the tripod drives them away from the pyramid. 

From there the group heads east towards an Airship wreckage. A strange atonal melody lures them off track however and they find themselves standing in front of a battered bell like structure topped by strange metal tines- which coupled with the wind account for the desert music. 

After entering the structure and descending a ruined escalator, they find a small facility of technological design, but ruined beyond use or understanding. 

A huge cybernetic arachnid  attacks from a pit in the floor; a few savage blows from the fellas sends it back into its hole. 

Nelvo discovers a tunnel in the wall of the larger of the place’s room. Stooping, the party enters the tunnel and finds a monorail, with a handcart. Mounting the hand cart, they set off down the track. 

Things are pretty swell really. 

The track and tunnel end. A rough hewn set of stairs leads upward to a door. The door opens on a wide natural cavern with several pits cut into the floor. Huge one-eyed shark-toothed THINGS begin to climb out of the pits. Laughing and midnight hued, a boneless seeming and obscenely thin humanoid with a head of flashing lights and impossibly long fingers snapping like whips, begins to moonwalk towards the characters whispering “Morsels for the Master; morsels for the master” 

Everybody runs, not back the way they came, but through an archway to the left. 

The interior surface of the corridor they enter is pulsating veiny pink flesh, milky misshapen eyes start to open all along the walls. 

Someone says- fuck this place! or something to that effect.

Creepy pursuit noise spurs them on into another room. A cavern again, but this time full of high tech gear.  A mist clings to the floor. Tubes and vats, vaguely humanoid shapes stirring within,  stand in rows, vanishing into the mist towards the back of the room. 

There is no time to linger and they run through a natural arch and into a another flesh hall. A series of twist and turns bring them to heavy door- they pass through into a circular room with a pit in place of a floor. A huge sslorg writhes at the pit’s bottom, reaching hungrily upward with its tentacles.   The controls for a retractable bridge can be seen on the pit’s far side. Leopold grabs Drox and leaps across the pit. The sslorg attacks grabbing Drox’s leg!

On the other side of the pit Nelvo and Quas Joktar look back they way they came only to see a score or more knife and cleaver wielding little humanoids apparently stitched together from spare parts, boil into the passageway crawling on the walls and ceiling like a swarm of roaches and screaming “Morsels for the Master!” Over and over again.

Quas closes the door. 

Leopold rips the tentacle clean off the sllorg. The bridge is extended, just as the outer door starts to cave in as if from some great force. The group opens the door on the far side of the pit and enters the room beyond.

They meet Dr Stitch.

He kills them all, except Nelvo who runs into a wall with a spearpoint against his chest.

Later, they wake up.

Each has been completely healed, and lies behind an energy field, alone in a cell, one of several lining the outside of an oval room.  In that room there is a large slab. Dr Stitch hovers over the slab as the horrible butchered thing upon it shudders and dies. 

The doctor takes a tarry looking black sphere about the size of grapefruit from his lab coat and holds it over the corpse. 

It flows away from his hand and covers the corpse in a thick black sheath. Minutes later, it contracts back into a ball, leaving a living and seeming healthy Red warrior strapped to the slab.

He wakes looks around him.

He  begins to scream.

Dr Stitch laughs long and hard and then leaves the room. 

End session. 

vat goon 

B/X Mars Preview Factions

I’m nearing completion. Some playtesting has been done. I’ll be doing a preview a week until I’m done. 

Zerzura, 

Under the Mad sun  

Ages past, the sun went bad. Now, Mars breaks beneath its scorching and  unclean  regard.  The Time of The Mad Sun endures, with no foreseeable surcease; the Red Planet’s last survivors gather now,  south of the Great Rift’s eastern edge- near the equator- in the land once called Zerzura.  The last cities writhe with intrigue and strife. Nomads rule the burned out wastelands. Monsters and worse stalk the eternally shifting sands. The night sky is strewn with burned out stars.  The desert dreams of war, cataclysm and extinction.  

The following section examines the region through the intertwined perspectives of biology, geography and politics. On Mars, these elements intertwine to a high degree;  ancient civilizations, long forgotten, altered many living creatures, and  constructed mysterious structures full of eldritch machines, all in order to ensure life’s long term survival. 

 Dance of sand and shadow

Powers, Factions, Cults and Secret Societies

Name: House of Zolo/ Great Stone Ark

Description : The individuals and organizations under the control of the Crimson Queen, ruler of the Great Stone Ark. 

House Zolo’s power is primarily represented by the Crimson Blade, the city’s force of warriors. 

Headquarters: The Red Tower,  aboard the Great Ark. 

The Shape of Things: : The incomparably lovely Crimson Queen, Zenia Zolo is the absolute ruler of the Ark and House Zolo- and has been for an impossibly long time. Everyone ultimately answers to her; 

Crimson Bladesmen, chief operatives of the House Zolo comport themselves with arrogance and aggression.  They rarely interact with outsiders, but when they do, it usually ends badly. 

The queen also commands an advanced network of spies and secret police. 

Goals: the Queen wishes to wrest the control of Xards from the Bleeding God. 

Demeanor:  Rapacious and somewhat out of control,  House Zolo threatens all who enter its sphere of influence. 

Mars Monster Gallery and drivel.

I'm not dead,  I just went dark a couple of months ago in order to focus all my efforts in one direction. BX Mars. I will attempt to keep you updated a little better as I draw closer to completion. Character Generation is just about done, and will be complete aside from art, later today if I don't slack off.  The Atlas is mostly done,  lots and lots of maps are already done, Monsters, aside from a Handful of illos are DONE.
basically I am yrying to clear the deck of old projects.  so if there is something you've liked and wanted to see more of. I'm going to get to them all- one at a time.

okay,  bitches,  here's the art:

The Madling Sea

           The water surrounding Madling Isle festers with life, most of it extremely dangerous, from a vast array of Earth’s earlier time periods. Megalodon, merfolk, giant sea scorpions, ichthyosaurs, orca and an impossible host of other creatures inhabit the waters below the perpetually rough waters. 

            The most feared of all these creatures is the giant possibly immortal liopleurodon,  Dreadfin. In B/X terms Dreadfin functions exactly as a 12 HD Sea Dragon (Expert book pg 39) with a Morale of 10. A natural 20 on the liopleurodon’s attack roll results in a medium sized creature being swallowed whole,  or alternately the utter destruction of all but the most fortified watercraft.

            I was tempted to do a bunch of new monsters,  but the Madling Sea provides ample opportunity to use a ton of very underused critters- whatever your preferred edition.