Digging ourselves in Deeper
Nov. 13th, 2004 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothLast night we had a shortish session of the GURPS Neverwhere game. Shortish because Lazar's still recovering from surgery.
After falling down the well, the party found themselves in a well-travelled natural cavern, long 'dead' (no water). Since they weren't yet far enough down to be near Enochin's head, they decided to follow the path the water had once taken downwards. It quickly branched, and after a bit of argument they followed the left hand path.
After a narrow place it led to a dimly lit room. Hidden behind an illusionary lightbulb were a series of switches, which Don couldn't resist playing with. Somehow, after making humming noises in the distance, and then a shower of sparks, he managed to activate a quintet of statue-dogs, who rushed out of the darkness to devour the party, dodging bullets with great agility. Or at least, very good luck.
Between many shots of Charlie's rifle and John's pistol, neither of which was very effective, and a few shots from Don's laser-shotgun and the Marquis' shatter spell, the party was able to survive the assualt merely very wounded instead of completely dead. Charlie started applying first aid, to at least stop the bleeding.
Don was still pinned to the floor by the dog that had bit him on the leg, though, as John spotted a burrowing creature approaching him, under the rock. He kicked at it, and exposed a loop of living wire, which Charlie shot in two before it could reach the dog and do... whatever. Don would have escaped anyway, though -- he whacked the stone dog with his wrench in just the right place, shattering it. "I found its weak point."
They tried to follow the right passageway, out of which the dogs had come, but it was too small for them to fit through. Too small for the dogs to fit through, too, so they figured -- since the bits of them had melted into the floor -- that they must have just melted out of it.
So they took the left passage instead, and soon came to a steam-powered puzzle door. After some tentative experiments to determine how it worked (while avoiding making it explode with overpressure) they were able to open the right steam valves to power both hinges, and open it. It led to a long, curving corridor carved out of the rock, to the right and downwards -- just the direction they wanted to go. They were on the right track!
They stayed on the right track for a long, long time. Eventually, Charlie snapped out of the daze they were in and realized that they'd been walking for several hours, and the corridor was still curving right and down. He called a halt, and tried to explore back along the way they'd come, without losing sight of the party, later extending his range by dropping a marker that both groups could see... and ahead of him, he saw the party's light, dimly around a corner. They were in a big loop.
They started carefully searching the walls for secret doors -- there had to be a way out, since they'd somehow gotten in. Eventually, they found faint letters on the walls, in French, made up of patches of slightly differently colored lichen, which told them that there was a way out 'further down'.
Since Don had already tested the slope of the passage and determined it to be completely flat (even though they still felt like they were descending), they started searching for secret doors in the floor. The first one they found led outside, which wasn't where they wanted to go. So they marked it with a plant, kept searching, and found another that led to a hissing metal-walled corridor -- intermittent metal plating backed up by wires, with the hiss of steam behind it... some of it looking like doors, but not actually opening or anything. All faintly radioactive, Don discovered, pulling out his tracker.
That meant that, using the radiation-seeing goggles, one of the party at any given time was able to see much farther than the dim light of the moon -- and farther than the kits, apparently, which let them sneak up on one. John (the sneaker) went into a flurry of speed, but still got horribly mauled by the Kits before he managed to kill it -- and a second Kits had fled immediately as he attacked, meaning that they definately knew they were there.
The Kits they'd killed had been at an intersection, and one of the hallways was different from the others -- the metal plates down that direction were moving. Figuring that might be towards the center, they took off that way (to the left) and were soon trapped in a sort of church or audiotorium, benches surrounding a podium covered in metal hexagons that seemed to spin randomly, with the ceiling replaced by the bottom of a river.
Suddenly, John collapsed, unconscious, but soon awoke with another dream message from Charlie's shaman friend -- they were going the wrong way, and needed to find the source of the steam. He opened the door by walking up to it and feeding it a piece of his spirit -- this was dangerous, with him so near death, but he managed not to kill himself doing it. Figuring that the steam would be slightly hotter towards the source, Don combined his frequency-shifting lens with the radiation-seeing goggles to make heat-vision goggles, and they followed the minute temperature gradiant towards the true center of the maze.
And there was Enochin, attached to the top of the pyramid-like boiler -- the room looked just like the one they'd found at the bottom of the mine, way back when, except that instead of rocky cave it was the same metal plating over wires. Charlie could tell that this was a place of power, so he started prying off wall panels to look for guardian fetishes, and quickly located one -- only 99 or so to go...
But meanwhile, Don was poking at Enochin to wake him up, and managed to do so -- setting off the equivalent of an intruder alarm. Giant limbs reached out from the walls, flailing around and pinning the Marquis and John in their embrace, and forcing Charlie and Don to the very center, standing on the pyramid. "They're in the boiler room!" came the cry from outside... and the Kits that had fled earlier teleported into the room to menace them.
With their two combat-capable companions already out of the fight, and the ally they'd come to rescue turned against them, how could they hope to win?
last session | next session
...damned if I know how we're going to get out of this one, but there're things I can at least try. Assuming the Kits doesn't kill us both before we can move, which is definately a possibility.
After falling down the well, the party found themselves in a well-travelled natural cavern, long 'dead' (no water). Since they weren't yet far enough down to be near Enochin's head, they decided to follow the path the water had once taken downwards. It quickly branched, and after a bit of argument they followed the left hand path.
After a narrow place it led to a dimly lit room. Hidden behind an illusionary lightbulb were a series of switches, which Don couldn't resist playing with. Somehow, after making humming noises in the distance, and then a shower of sparks, he managed to activate a quintet of statue-dogs, who rushed out of the darkness to devour the party, dodging bullets with great agility. Or at least, very good luck.
Between many shots of Charlie's rifle and John's pistol, neither of which was very effective, and a few shots from Don's laser-shotgun and the Marquis' shatter spell, the party was able to survive the assualt merely very wounded instead of completely dead. Charlie started applying first aid, to at least stop the bleeding.
Don was still pinned to the floor by the dog that had bit him on the leg, though, as John spotted a burrowing creature approaching him, under the rock. He kicked at it, and exposed a loop of living wire, which Charlie shot in two before it could reach the dog and do... whatever. Don would have escaped anyway, though -- he whacked the stone dog with his wrench in just the right place, shattering it. "I found its weak point."
They tried to follow the right passageway, out of which the dogs had come, but it was too small for them to fit through. Too small for the dogs to fit through, too, so they figured -- since the bits of them had melted into the floor -- that they must have just melted out of it.
So they took the left passage instead, and soon came to a steam-powered puzzle door. After some tentative experiments to determine how it worked (while avoiding making it explode with overpressure) they were able to open the right steam valves to power both hinges, and open it. It led to a long, curving corridor carved out of the rock, to the right and downwards -- just the direction they wanted to go. They were on the right track!
They stayed on the right track for a long, long time. Eventually, Charlie snapped out of the daze they were in and realized that they'd been walking for several hours, and the corridor was still curving right and down. He called a halt, and tried to explore back along the way they'd come, without losing sight of the party, later extending his range by dropping a marker that both groups could see... and ahead of him, he saw the party's light, dimly around a corner. They were in a big loop.
They started carefully searching the walls for secret doors -- there had to be a way out, since they'd somehow gotten in. Eventually, they found faint letters on the walls, in French, made up of patches of slightly differently colored lichen, which told them that there was a way out 'further down'.
Since Don had already tested the slope of the passage and determined it to be completely flat (even though they still felt like they were descending), they started searching for secret doors in the floor. The first one they found led outside, which wasn't where they wanted to go. So they marked it with a plant, kept searching, and found another that led to a hissing metal-walled corridor -- intermittent metal plating backed up by wires, with the hiss of steam behind it... some of it looking like doors, but not actually opening or anything. All faintly radioactive, Don discovered, pulling out his tracker.
That meant that, using the radiation-seeing goggles, one of the party at any given time was able to see much farther than the dim light of the moon -- and farther than the kits, apparently, which let them sneak up on one. John (the sneaker) went into a flurry of speed, but still got horribly mauled by the Kits before he managed to kill it -- and a second Kits had fled immediately as he attacked, meaning that they definately knew they were there.
The Kits they'd killed had been at an intersection, and one of the hallways was different from the others -- the metal plates down that direction were moving. Figuring that might be towards the center, they took off that way (to the left) and were soon trapped in a sort of church or audiotorium, benches surrounding a podium covered in metal hexagons that seemed to spin randomly, with the ceiling replaced by the bottom of a river.
Suddenly, John collapsed, unconscious, but soon awoke with another dream message from Charlie's shaman friend -- they were going the wrong way, and needed to find the source of the steam. He opened the door by walking up to it and feeding it a piece of his spirit -- this was dangerous, with him so near death, but he managed not to kill himself doing it. Figuring that the steam would be slightly hotter towards the source, Don combined his frequency-shifting lens with the radiation-seeing goggles to make heat-vision goggles, and they followed the minute temperature gradiant towards the true center of the maze.
And there was Enochin, attached to the top of the pyramid-like boiler -- the room looked just like the one they'd found at the bottom of the mine, way back when, except that instead of rocky cave it was the same metal plating over wires. Charlie could tell that this was a place of power, so he started prying off wall panels to look for guardian fetishes, and quickly located one -- only 99 or so to go...
But meanwhile, Don was poking at Enochin to wake him up, and managed to do so -- setting off the equivalent of an intruder alarm. Giant limbs reached out from the walls, flailing around and pinning the Marquis and John in their embrace, and forcing Charlie and Don to the very center, standing on the pyramid. "They're in the boiler room!" came the cry from outside... and the Kits that had fled earlier teleported into the room to menace them.
With their two combat-capable companions already out of the fight, and the ally they'd come to rescue turned against them, how could they hope to win?
last session | next session
...damned if I know how we're going to get out of this one, but there're things I can at least try. Assuming the Kits doesn't kill us both before we can move, which is definately a possibility.
