The only people we know Alma follows are blood relations or people who she wants to jump.
And quite frankly, the former is a safer option.
Like, when I say she's probably recovering from a nuke, I wasn't kidding. In canon, they cut her life support. It took days for her to actually die, and they had to seal her up in the entire facility, and even then, she was making the entire district around the place leave, along with corrosive chemical leaks.
Then 20 years later, some idiot opens up the facility, she finds her kid, and all hell breaks loose.
A dozen questions dangled on the tip of your tongue.
"Oh, fuck you," you snarl.
Then you bring your palm up and smash it down towards the ground. The power channels through you faster now, easier. The bolt of energy is invisible, until it strikes the vampire's chest. His robes explode off him. His clothing beneath shimmers and then frays apart as blood hazes in the air around him, sweeping outwards in every direction. He trembles, and you can see his skin beginning to peel off him...but then his eyes flash and his body snaps back together, as if he has simply tightened a notch on his belt. Air sweeps and billows around him, and he chuckles, his eyes gleaming as he clenched his teeth together.
"We'll see about that," he snarls.
His palm thrusts out, and the zombies all turn. They start to shamble forward, moving faster than you'd like, slower than you'd worried. Some come stomping up the narrow ramps that lead out of the divot that leads down to the alter. Others come shambling up over the edge, their arms dragging themselves up. You bring your SMG up - but then something vice-hard and ice cold crashes around your throat. You're held and then lifted. Your lungs scream and you scrabble at your throat with one hand - but can't feel anything touching you. Just...the dimples in your skin from the force closed around your throat.
You can see the vampire has lazily lifted his hand. He smirks, then makes a throwing gesture. Your back smashes into the wall with a crunch as he sweeps his arm up and shimmering shadows cloak him. You have no idea where he is, and while you're no longer strangling, you are pinned to the wall, grunting as the zombies around you shamble forward. Their hands grab at you, and you struggle, kick, snarling as one of them rips at your chest. Another grabs at your arm, tugging. One even tries to bite you. You feel the telekinesis pinning you to the wall fading slightly, and drop down, panting slightly. You're completely hemmed in - but the door behind you is right there, and you can just dart back and to the side-
The door slams shut. Wham.
The vampire's voice echoes from nowhere. "You cannot hide from me, child. I will have your power. And with it, I will complete my life's work."
"Yeah, fuck you too," you snarl, glaring around yourself as the room plunges into blackness - dimming to almost nothing as you see nothing but the zombies around you, scrabbling towards you, palms outreached. You back up into the door, but it refuses to buge.
Fuck.
Fuck.
--- DANGER: 19 (Extremely Hazardous)
SHOCK: 12/19
Turn breakdown: Vented 4 heat to do 1 psychokinetic blast to the Vampire. He escalates and is now invisible and cannot be targeted by conventional attacks unless you can place an oomph that renders him visible or unable to move on his person. Then each zombie acted, then three more zombies acted because of you going into cooldown for your action and the round ended. The zombies spent their time moving up, and two did 2 damage to you, which became 2 Heat (meaning your armor still applies if you take a big damage dump later.)
The vampire also got an action in there, and he used a power to hit you with Lifted and Arcane Charge.
I, the capricious GM, spent 7 Shock to create 4 "Closed and Locked" oomphs on the door and 3 Unaware Oomphs on yourself. So, you can't target the zombies directly until those oomphs are cleared! The round ends, your Lifted oomph decays, 1 Closed and Locked Decays, and 1 Unaware Decays, so, you've got Arcane Charge and 2 unaware on yourself with 3 Closed And Locked on the door!
Heat calculations for the actions we might want to do:
Removing the 2 Unaware oomphs on us: Awareness skill check at Diff 1, needing 1 extra success: 0 Heat. Basically mandatory before we shoot the zombies.
Removing the Arcane Charge oomph: Diff 1 skill check, although I don't know what skill you use for countering psychic powers. Empathy? Stealth? Tech? 0 Heat if any of our skills are relevant, but is a separate action from removing Unaware.
Moving: We can move 6 hexes for free without a skill check (3 + 3 for Finesse), any more and we have to make a skill check (so, multiple action penalty) and take heat as applicable. We're probably a good bit faster than the zombies.
Shooting stuff with the SMG: Difficulty of 1 + zombies' evasion (probably 0 or 1), TV 1 (3 Guns skill, -2 for the SMG): 0 or 1 Heat. We can do this three times before we start incurring any extra-action penalties, and each shot does 1 Damage oomph in a small AoE (1 hex radius), although we can take additional heat if we want to do more oomphs.
(I'm confused on how AoEs work in the new rules - the rules say everyone in the given area gets hit with the given oomph, but it also says that the oomphs are applied to weaker NPCs before hitting stronger ones. So can we gun down a bunch of zombies with a one-damage SMG burst, or do we need to add one Damage for each zombie we want to kill?)
Blowing stuff up with our grenade: The rules on our character sheet don't seem to have been updated for hexes yet (they still mention "range bands"), but if we go by the rules in the rulebook this is an AoE attack with Athletics, which is a skill we don't have. So it'll probably cost at least 1 Heat, and do a lot of damage in a small area. Save it for the boss?
(I'm confused on how AoEs work in the new rules - the rules say everyone in the given area gets hit with the given oomph, but it also says that the oomphs are applied to weaker NPCs before hitting stronger ones. So can we gun down a bunch of zombies with a one-damage SMG burst, or do we need to add one Damage for each zombie we want to kill?)
I'm currently working on the idea that AOEs work thusly
You put them on the map, then at the end of the round, they're applied to all the critters in that area, with the weakest soaking it up first. However, since the damage cap on weapons is 1, that seems generally worse than just...shooting it regularly.
For this combat, I am going to say that AOE removes the damage cap on your gun (so you can pump as much damage in the area as you want) but also, that means goons are soaking it up first, and bad guys can just...move out of it, so that should keep it from being too overpowered!
Okay, so we can't just drop 3 AoEs on the horde and wipe it out, but we can basically kill 1 extra zombie for 1 extra difficulty instead of needing a whole extra action, which is more efficient if we have a big attack bonus and would otherwise have oomphs left over. So, with Overkill, I guess.
[X] Plan Circle Strafe
-[X] Remove Unaware oomphs with our Awareness (0 Heat)
-[X] Shoot Z7, Z2, Z5 (3 heat? If it costs more, just shoot Z7.)
-[X] Run 6 hexes to the left (free movement)
-[X] Use Overkill, -3 Heat for 2 Oomphs
Should leave us at 2 Heat and at a mostly safe distance (the Vamp can hit us with his powers, and any zombies who get a bonus action from Cooldown can, but the rest of the horde is too far). We might have to spend our armor, but next turn, we have two shots of buffed SMG and we'll shred the horde.
So Overkill doesn't do anything at -4 vent for us when we're solo, because the one oomph fades before we use it and we can't give anyone else an oomph because they're not there.
Kinda questioning this balancing decision, because most other powers can both vent four heat and have an effect, while Overkill demands -3 at minimum for solo use. But what's essentially a +4 add is pretty big and I suppose you can hand off the single oomph to other people.
Maybe change overkill to give 2 oomphs at base, but one oomph is always assigned to the caster?
That way using overkill and giving oomphs to team members gives the same number of usable oomphs as using overkill and immediately using all the oomphs on the next turn yourself.
Fuck this. Fuck that. You clench your jaw and glare and feel the strange darkness tearing as a hand reaches towards you and the blackness snaps apart like someone has put their palm through stretchy saran wrap and the whole thing has torn apart. There, lurching towards you like puppet on a set of marionette strings, is a poor son of a bitch that had, once, been a Park Ranger. He still had the hat, bobbing around on his desiccating head, and his fingers end in snarling bones.
You snap your RPL up and open up. Bullets stitch from the poor Park Ranger's belly to their head and somewhere in the spray, the zombie begins to sprawl to the ground - but you're already running forward and leaping over the corpse before it has quite hit the floor. You hit the ground, skid, and then turn back. Zombies. More of them, scrambling out of the pit in the center of the room, reaching towards you as you back along the wall, firing a few shots quickly as you move backwards. You're about halfway between the cover and the zombie crowd.
"Kill her! Kill her, my minions!"
He fucking called them minions? Jesus Christ, you think.
"Merc! LOOK OUT!" Gloria shouts from the alter. She's tugging at herself, trying to get herself free, but you can see what it is she's looking for.
The vampire has become visible. He's floating above the pit, his body crackling with reddish light, misting the air around him. Thick glops of red something flow around his body, intermingling, twitching. You feel your blood thunder and shiver through your veins. Your heart pulses a bit faster, a bit slower, a bit faster again. The air around you trembles and twists and you clench your jaw, readying yourself.
Then...stillness.
The zombies seem to pause.
The redness around the vampire snaps into a spear of ruby red light.
The vampire vanishes.
The spear shoots straight at you, faster than you could have imagined. The point slammed into your chest, fetching you against the chest. Ancient magic...came right up against modern body armor.
And the body armor won.
The unmistakable crunch of your replacable impact plate shattering fills your ears as the spear shatters into a thousand pieces. Fragments go whipping past your ears and you stumble, shaking yourself as your ribs ache slightly and you breathe out a quick sigh, trying to get your ability to breathe in properly working again.
Whump.
The sound actually draws the zombie's attention. Several of them in the mass near the door stumble backwards, and the door itself has exploded inwards...and for a moment, your heart sings with excitement, burning through you as you feel the eager rush of hope. Tracy?
The hideous screeching sound makes you kick that hope away like you're standing beside a frag grenade.
Two zombies collapse to the ground as the wheels of the Death Mannequin squeal and squeak into the chamber. The three torsos of the hideous thing are all screeching - and their .50 caliber machine guns aren't even hesitating. They begin to open fire with a chattering whump whump whump whump sound and the ground ahead of you begins to explode upwards, catching one of the zombies in the spray of bullets.
You don't got another impact plate.
Time seems...to slow.
--- DANGER: 19 (Extremely Hazardous)
SHOCK: 6/19
Breakdown!
It took 2 heat per shoot thanks to it being the second action in your turn (the first being removing the Unaware oomphs) so you only blew away one zamble as per your vote! Then you retreat, vent 3 heat (down to 1) and got your 3 oomphs. Then the vampos got his four actions. He took one to tell the zombies to all act (a thing that most commander type characters get), then spent 2 to add his Hits in oomphs to you! He added 8 Arcane Charge oomphs, for a total of 9, then used his last action to trigger it, doing 27 damage, which you beat with your body armor. FHEW!
Then I, as the capricious GM, have spent 6 Shock to bring in the DEATH MANNEQUIN. As his arrival action, he will be placing an AOE damage token as marked on the map - so, if you end your round in that circle, you take 6 damage. Don't do that!!!
...yes, any zombies in that circle will get blown to bits! Actually, the way damage oomphs are removed means if there are 6 zombies in there with you, then you'll take zero damage!
Anywho, sorry for the delay, I got distracted by a butterfly
That means that the zombies have 1 Evasion. Good to know.
Also, the vamp can apparently build up enough charge to one-hit kill us if we go on cooldown, so we should probably not do that. And maybe throw some Oomphs his way to slow him down. Has he become visible again, or do we still need to deal with his escalation before we can target him?
Our impending death aside, we have 2 Overkill oomphs burning a hole in our pocket, so our first action should definitely be to drop two AoEs on the horde. Z12 and the hex below Z2 would maximize the number we hit, I think.
Okay, now that I've had more time to mull it over, I see two good options.
Option 1: Continue kiting. Use our Overkills on the zombies, run for the cover on the left, and switch to our rifle to start suppressing/unbalancing the vampire next turn. Keeps us safe, won't cost much heat, kills a lot of zombies, but leaves the vamp free to act for a turn, which is scary.
Option 2: @coyote16able 's plan: Use our Overkills to stack suppression on the vampire to stop him from acting, run for Gloria and untie her. Gets a second character into the fight, neutralizes the biggest threat temporarily, but leaves us kinda exposed. Might cost a significant amount of heat, since we need three stacks of Suppression to disable the vampire for a round.
(I think Suppression should count for dealing with the vampire's escalation, as it stops him from moving. Basically we're spraying so many bullets that he can't hide.)
I'm leaning towards option 2, since a second character is a game changer, but if we get Overheated while doing it then we're in a lot of trouble. But I'd like to hear other thoughts before I write up a plan vote.
