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. 

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 

Campaign Two, session 1

First a little background: The Metal Earth has been cooking for years under a variety of names. I finally settled on this name because I was reading a lot of old Richard Corben (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Corben) comics in Heavy Metal (which lead to me watching the movie again- especially the Den and Taarna sequences) when I started to work on this version in 2006. Also I liked the pun.
So anyway, the world has seen some use with at least three different sets of rules: in it's earliest form I used a homebrew, later we tried to adapt Earthdawn to it, but I can't look at those rules without thinking of the setting that is built into them (maybe because it's mentioned about once every five words). The longest game, which took place in the setting pretty much as it stands now, used True20. We'll call that Campaign 1. What we're doing now is Campaign 2 and I'm using Swords and Wizardry, white box.
I'm playing with my two sons who are six and eight years of age. Kids, as it turns out, have no trouble with settings like this one (obviously I'm toning down the Corben influence a little- no weird giant penis bugs, or over-endowed nude pseudo-Aztec princesses, which kind of hurts, really).
The two pc's are an "Army Man" named Sergent Jack, and an amphibian mutant guy known as "The Unknown Warrior" (TUW). They both work for the 21st century US government, and TUW is a product of government experiments. The two of them have been sent into the future to capture something known as the Sonic Cyborg Arm.
By the way, I'm doing a couple of things that are new to me here , I'm playing with kids- which means no chemical enhancement and not so much description of the splatter, obviously; I'm using S&W; and we're playing Jeff Rient's megadungeon Under Xylarthen's Tower- marking the first time I've ever (in 30+ years of gaming) used an adventure I didn't write myself.

So here we go.

After leaving their time machine, Jack and TUW find themselves on a bleak and blasted plain under a darkening sky. A ruin-covered low hilltop looms in the near distance and the black line of a mountain range can be seen on the eastern horizon. Reports from other Temporal agents have placed the Sonic Cyborg Arm in an underground complex beneath a ruined tower. The adventures decide to climb the hill and check out the ruins.
Searching around in the ruins they find a staircase leading down. The stair ends in a dusty old corridor. Turning on their flashlights they set out to explore the place. walking down the corridor they pass through a t- intersection, but keep on in their original direction.
The corridor ends in a door; TUW opens it, and together, the warriors enter a half collapsed room. Suddenly a giant snake rears up from the rubble- and strikes! A fierce battle takes ensues. Sgt. Jack is caught up in the snakes coils, but TUW draws his vibroblade (which does, 1d6 damage just like everything else, btw) and hacks at the snake. Jack draws a pocket knife and attacks it as well. In no time at all the snake is defeated.
The victors search the rubble.
They find some gold and silver pieces which TUW puts into his bag
The room has several doors, but they pass these up to go back out the way they came in. Once back out in the corridor, they return to the t- intersection. This time they go left and come to another door. TUW pushes this one open. Entering into the room the pair is confronted by a huge ogre. He shouts something unintelligible at them, and- they attack! They both get banged up this time, but are ultimately victorious. The room has two doors besides the one which they came in, one to the north and another to the south. They select the southern door. It has staircase leading down, and that's where we'll leave them for now.