The Ghost:Sessions/Tales1

What Has Come Before

The Miraculous Twilight Physician Golden Harmony was working on fixing a Genesis Lab with his circle mate Magnificent Bastard when they suddenly and accidentally turned on a damaged temporal accelerator field generator which exploded casting them into different time streams both from each other and their original location. Fortunately for golden he had his panoply with him at the time, so he is not without the tools of his trade. However the journy has altaterd him in some slight but profound ways: for 1 he finds that instead of Flametongue he now knows Riverspeak, and that the potent improved Satchel of Healing called The Nameless Physician's Satchel. Has lost it's special powers and that his hearthstones have gone dead and gray, no longer conferring essence or special powers.

Meanwhile, in another universe all together, Ami Chalot was walking out of Malfias over the dessert of Cyceline when a flash of light came streaking out of nowhere and slammed into her chest, she fell tumbling down the bank of sand wrapped in a glowing blue/white aura and was sucked under. The next thing she was aware of was being spat back out into the same rough spot she had left and falling down the side of another sand dune, largely unharmed. She continued her journey out into creation thinking that this was 'one of those things', only to find that things were not as she left them: she was not in Ann Arbor MI and in fact not on Earth, but rather in a place that everyone calls "Creation". Strangely she could no longer speak English, though she could remember it, but instead spoke a common root dialect called 'River-Speak'.

A few hours later the two lost travelers encounter each other at a crossroads round about which lies a small market town, of perhaps 2000 souls. They fall to talking, Ami recognizing Golden's Wrackstaff as being orichalcum and with her high wits deducting that like her companion in her world Brilliant Gears of Artifice he probably is another exalt. They have a short conversation and find that their morals are largely comparable, both have high compassion and both like to heal the sick and suffering, though Golden focuses more on physical ailments and Ami social ones. Reasoning that since they both are lost and alone in a strange area of the world they might as well be lost and alone together they begin forming an intimacy towards one another and set off in search of somewhere to spend the night, as Golden has several dozen dinars and two obols on his person and can probably rent them both rooms.

Down one of the town's two main streets they come upon a building marked in the Riverspeak Syllabary "Gonala's Tea and Coaching House" and Blazoned with a Sunburst containing the rune of the Maiden of Serenity. Thinking they have found their destination and can get a place to sleep they enter.

The First Scene

The Tea/Coaching house is a long, wide, low building divided into four main sections, to the right of it's front is a large walled open area behind which is a small stable for horses and other beasts. To the left of it's front entrance is a single level hotel area with 25 small rooms for renting by travelers. In the center of the the right front side of the building proper is a single long room of 20 feet wide and 20 yards long, which is divided into 3 roughly equal sections. The front and back sections are taken up by arrangements of tables and chairs, each table being set with a bottle of soysauce, a peeper grinder, and a jar of brown mustard. The back part also sports a bar with bar stools, behind which are a number of bottles of spirits and mixers. In the middle 20 feet there are booths divided from each other with Ricepaper partitions in the Japanese style. Overhead the roof is supported by beams and cross bracing, held together with mortice and tenon joints and stout wooden pegs. The room is lit by Chinese style lanterns with small tea light like candles in them strung on short ropes that allow them to be raised and lowered to replace the candles. Back behind the hotel and tea room there is an extensive kitchen, office, and laundry facility where the staff of the place do their work and store the supplies, It is two stories and built of wood and has many different rooms.

The tea house is completely empty, except for a group of 10 local men sitting in the front, they are all talking in low guarded tones as the two companions enter but stop dead when they notice the PCs.

"Kill them." The tallest member of the local group intones, and chairs scrape back... Roll Join Battle!

Round One, FIGHT!

Or not. I had rather forgotten that Golden, who was from my old game, has a charm that let's him attack BEFORE Join Battle is rolled, one sledgehammer punch later and one of the local hoods is on the floor suffering from a mild concussion and unconscious.

Then Ami, who got a good JB roll, suppresses her compassion* and uses her Complaint Umbral Panoply to form an AK47 from the shadows of the room and sprays down the thugs with two strafing actions. As these bravos are extras six of them go down in the space of six seconds. The remaining 3, having valor 1 and just having seen six people die actually do the smart thing and RUN... While Screaming their heads off about "Anathema!".

• (Gaining a point of limit...)

Round Two, FIGHT!

Because at this point this is still just a play test I have there have been a random patrol of ten town constables just outside when the villagers started screaming about 'Anathema' and they burst in swords drawn.

They smell the stench of death in the air and see the messily shot up bodies, so they assume that there is no reasoning with the two 'anathema' and surround Golden and Ami to attack with their short swords. Things go rather poorly for them. Only two of the constables manage to hit Golden, and he Iron Skin Conctntration's both of them to nothing.

Ami fairs slightly worse and takes one hit for 3L then uses a charm to ninja vanish into the rafters leaving the guards flat footed and clueless as to what happened.

Next round Ami Empties the clip into the massed guards bellow and kills seven of them outright, their boiled leather helms being no match for the stopping power of an AK.

The other 3 have the same sudden attack of sense as the townies who started the fight and run screaming about anathema, though unlike the townies they hold on to their swords.

Get Ready!

I have a brief pause in the fighting while the next wave arrives and Golden and Ami check each others' status and Ami crafts herself Armor from the shadows to keep her from going down with the next hit. This is the point where I decide that this is so much fun that I am going to make it a regular thing and it changes from play test to Chronicle. (I had only described the scene before because it could be important to stunts, as it was in the last round.)

Round 3: FIGHT!

The Next wave are using the stats of "Regular Troops" from the antagonists chapter. I have them arrive in 3 squads of 5 men, two armed with sword-and-board from the stable yard and out of the kitchen and 5 formed up in the street with bows. They roll join battle and score 0 successes, so they are going at six ticks in! However each squad is led by a heroic mortal, which I hope will make things a bit less one sided this time. They all also are wearing Circular pins on their Norman style cloaks with a design that looks like three interlocked horseshoes inside a circle on them in green on white. This will become important later in the chronicle.

Much as I had hoped that this round would be less one sided Omi pulls out his Wrackstaff, and suppressing his Compassion* lays into the archers outside killing one instantly from rolled over BASHING damage.

• (Ping, Limit.)

Meanwhile Ami activates some other charm for 3 motes, (Pushing her into the 'Caste Mark Glimmers' category.) and the shadows inside the tea house turn into liquid pain, attacking the guys with Sword-and-Board and killing most of them instantly with hideous screaming agony. The two heroic mortals however both survive, and are hellbent on avenging their comrades.

Back out front Golden Moves up into the gap in the archer's formation and lays the smack down onto their leader, who while he does not die from the massive smote does take a level of rollover lethal damage and go off to sleepybye time. His troops make their valor rolls to stay in the fight and not run away screaming like the others, so the fight will continue.

Calling the session.

As this game started at 12:45 in the morning we did not have more than an hour to play before everyone had to be in bed, so that was where we called things. Ami's player however was keeping notes so we could pick up right where we left off last time.