First of all, this quest will contain mature themes and content (mostly gross and scary stuff, as well as naughty words and people being awfull to each other). While not explicit (both due to SV rules and me not being good enough at writing to avoid sounding like a 13 year old edgelord), I'd still not recomend this quest for young or sensetive people.
I've been reading a couple of those "first supers in the 20s" quests that have been showing up lately and decided to jump on the bandwagon with a slightly different spin, namely the good old Trenchcoat Brigade with their blend of Horror, Urban Fantasy and Noire.
This quest uses Mutents and Masterminds 3rd Edition with the Lethal Damage and Corruption optional rulesets, as well as a houserule for the Fearless advantage.
Fearless: Every time the character has to resist a fear effect, the character rolls one aditional dieand picks the highest result. This advantage also provides immunity to fear effects with a level lower than half the character's PL and reduces the character's madness gains from fear by one.
Fair warning: I'm not an expert on American history or life in the 20s or the Occult, so expect a couple of inaccuracies and handwaves. Just roll with the comicbook logic. Also real life has been a bit erratic lately, so updates might not be as regular as desired. I'll try to post something at least once a week, but I can't promise anything.
Ah, the roaring twenties. It's not that long ago that all of Europe was on fucking fire with everyone killing each other in the trenches on the Great War. And that there was that flu epidemic that killed some more. But all in all, humanity managed to pull though, and now it's a nonstop Party fuled by Jazz and bootleg Giggle Juice here in the US of A. The Mob is certainly happy about the new buisness.
Unfortunatly, all this hasn't exactly stoped things from going bumb in the night, and even if mere mortals now have machine guns and poison gas, there is still plenty of nasties out there just waiting to do something unpleasant to an unsuspecting soul. Of course, whenever something like that happens, the fallout tends to inevitably ending up falling on your shoulders in this fine city. At least it pays the bills, most of the time.
What city it that?
[] Boston, MA
A nice looking city with a buisy harbour that just so happens to be smack in the middle of New England with it's whacko Bluebloods in spooky mansions and strange villages that totaly aren't worshiping eldritch horrors or inhabited by evil fish people. And don't forget about Salem, or as people like you call it, "America's Witchcraft Central." (focus on gothic and lovecraftisn horror)
[] New York, NY
The citty that never sleeps, the biggest city in the whole fucking world. A metropolis bustling with activity day and night. Unfortunatly, this also extends to the other side of the cutain. (A little bit of everything, although some things don't work in big cities. Also a bit more mundane Noire stuff)
[] New Orleans, LA
Jazz, Swamps and the secrets of Voodoo. The crecent city is a city of manny mysteries. (Voodoo and Creepy Swamps, also a little bit lovecraft)
[] San Francisco, CA
The city by the Bay. One of the most "cosmopolitan" cities in America. Unless you happen to be chinees, since from the poverty and squalor in it's Chinatown grows a wretched hive of scum and villany. A fertile ground for wicked forces and a monument to the city's hypocricy. (Oriental Mysticism focus)
You Are
[] A Mac
[] A Dame
What is it that got you into the buisness of Occult problem solving?
[] Your Inhuman Nature (PL 10)
-[] Demon
-[] Vampire
-[] Werewolf
-[] Wendigo
-[] Write-in
[] Your Bloodline (PL 10)
-[] Demonic
-[] Divine (specify which god, e.g. Zeus, Loki, Coyote)
-[] Famous Hero (specify e.g. King Arthur, Sigfried)
-[] Powerfull Shamans
-[] Write-in
[] Your studies of the mystical arts (PL 8)
-[] Hermetics
-[] Alchemy
-[] Voodoo
-[] Demonology
-[] Eldritch lore
-[] Oriental Mysticism
-[] The Old Ways of your People
-[] Write-in
[] A strange artifact you aquired(PL 8)
-[] Write-in
[] Your luck being a finicky bitch (PL 6, no supernatural abilites at the start other that your bipolar luck, HARD MODE)
What's your background? (Pick up to 2, Only human characters)
[]Veteran
[]Cop
[]Mobster
[]Academic
[]Martial Artist
[]Drifter
[]Write-in
All write-ins, as well as combinations that don't make sense are subject to QM veto.
Also feel free to throw ideas for names and complications into the room. If something fits, I'll use it.
Advantages
Accurate Attack: Sacrifice damage for attack bonus
Agile Feint: Use Acrobatics or Speed to trick or feint
Defensive Attack: Sacrifice attack bonus for better defence
Defensive Roll 4: Adds rank to toughness when not vulnerable
Fast Grab: Free grab after successfull hit
Improved Critical (unarmed, 19-20): better crit chance
Improved Defense: Better active defence
Improved Disarm: Disarm with no penalty
Improved Grab: Can grab with one hand and not vulnerable while grabing
Improved Initiative: +4 to initiative (already factored in)
Improved Trip: Trip with no penalty
Instant Up: Get up as a free action
Move-by-Action: Move after attacking
Redirect: Can make tricked opponent hit someone else
Takedown: Free attack after KOing minion
Weapon Bind: Free disarm attempt after active defence
Artificer: Create one-use magical stuff
Assessment: Use Insight skill to learn about enemy
Contacts: Make an initial Investigation check in one minute. (Will only reveal what could be feasibly be overheared as rumours or general ideas who to ask)
Equipment (1, HQ, Camera)
Fearless: See above
Languages (2; Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Latin)
Trance: Pause poison and disease and use higher of WIll and Fortitude to resist suffocation. Look dead to casual observer. DC 15 Awareness roll to enter.
Complications
Motivation: Responsibility: As a practitioner of the ancient arts you are honor-bound to get involved against supernatural threats.
Prejudice: You are a Chinese woman in 1920s USA. You are almost guaranteed to be mistaken for a prostitute wherever you go.
Enemy: Your Uncle had an ongoing feud with Shin Fei, a local crime boss involved with the supernatural. He's definatly going to be trouble.
Hero Points
Communal: 2
Allies
Other Known Heroes
Your late Uncle. He left you his shop and taught you most of what you know today about the ancient arts. He died in late 1921 from tuberculosis.
Civillians
Your wayward cousin who left to fight in the Russian Civil War in 1919. You haven't heard from him ever since.
Known Villains
Shin Fei "The Golden Scorpion" is local crime boss that had a feud with your uncle. He has his fingers in several pies all over chinatown and is known to dabble in the supernatural. The man claims to be several centuries old, having discovered an elixir of immortality.
Mystical Realms
The Void: A plane between the worlds filled with nothing but dangerous chaotic energy.
Dieties
General Information: Most gods exist. Some are dormant, severly weakend by a lack of worshipers or other causes, while others are active and constantly attempting to spread their infulence throughout the globe. Most pantheons are at best indfferent to each other.
[X] San Francisco, CA
[X] A Dame
[X] Your studies of the mystical arts (PL 8)
-[X] Oriental Mysticism
[X]Academic
[X]Martial Artist
It ain't easy living in San Francisco, especially if noone wants to hire you despite having a degree in Pharmacology, all they see is a chinese woman. So now you're stuck here in Chinatown, running your late Uncle's old Apothecary and Curio shop (You still have trouble refering to it as your shop) after your cousin Shu ran off to Russia to play revolutionary and was never heared from again. You feel sorry for the youngster, he just wasn't the same after getting half his face melted off by mustard gas. Still not a good reason to abandon his legacy and dump all of this onto you.
Your Uncle wasn't just an old man selling medicines, you see. He kept the people round here safe from otherworldy threats and did his best to prepare you to carry on his work. Of course, that's easier said than done, you bearly know where to start other than keeping Shin Fei's thugs out of the shop.
What are you going to do first?
[]Work in the shop
[]Patroll the streets of chinatown.
[]Something strange is happening during the festival of hungry ghosts!
[]Try to reach out to potential allies
[]Make a move against Shin Fei
-[]what exactly?
[]Write-in.
Picture?
[]feel free to suggest
Name?
[] Go by your real name
[] Use a nom de guerre (This is not a secret identity)
-[] Write-in
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Faces in the Walls: Act one Scene one (15th of August 1923)
The celebrations for the Feast of Hungry Ghosts are in full swing. You already made a few offerings to the ancestors at the shrines yourself, you recall Uncle Long being particularly fond of ridiculously spicy mapo doufu. Making it wasn't pleasant, your eyes begin to water just from thinking about it! After making the offerings you decided to go out on a stroll through the neigborhood. That's when you first started to get the feeling that something was wrong, something was tampering with natural flow of Qi.
And then the it started. What used to be just a normal wall you just walked by suddenly morphed into a twisted parody of a screaming human face.
(Fear resits DC 15)
(pass, 2 DoS, reduce future DC by 1)
You were not the only one to suddenly get screamed at by a face in a wall, although you managed to keep your cool unlike most of the neigbours. Panicked screams in the distance reveal that whatever this is, it is happening all over chinatown, maybe even all over the city.
What are you going to do? (select up to two)
[] Rush back into the shop and start looking for information in your Uncle's collection
[] Try to calm the neigbours
[] Take a closer look at the faces
[] Write-in (please use! I often run out of ideas for options)
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Faces in the Walls: Act one Scene two (15th of August 1923)
[] Take a closer look at the faces
[] Rush back into the shop and start looking for information in your Uncle's collection
While everything around you decends into paniced chaos, you attempt a closer examination of the strange phenomenon.
The face in the wall looks heavilly deformed, one of it's eyes appears to be covered by some sort of grotesque growth, it's lips reseble two pieces of frayed rope made out of putrid flesh and all proportions are just wrong. The screams continue without interruption.
You can tell right away that it seems to be seamlessly growing out of the building. You are able to see and hear it, but it doesn't register as alive on your Qi senses, only that something is disrupring the normal flow of Qi where it appeared. After gathering some courage and trying to touch the face, you also realize that it is intangible, as if it's not really there.
While you're still examining the wall, more faces, some hands and other appendages start appearing, as if an entire crowd is tying to force itself through the bricks.
The limbs manage to stretch further into the street, taking on a ghostly apperance after a few inches of the wall. The screams keep fetting lowder, as more voices join the cacaphony. You beginn to feel as if some of the ovewhelming noise is comming from inside your skull, making you dizzy and notice a trickle of blood coming from your nose.
You decide to take this as a sign that it's time to head back to the shop and start looking though your uncle's scrolls, the screaams still painfully echoing in your head while you leave as fast as you can. You are now reasonably sure that these aren't just illusions.
Back at the shop you take a few minutes to recover before beginnig to rummage through everyting that looks helpful.
It takes an hour of looking, but you manage to locate an incomplete journal page warning about the dangers of the void that describes something resembling your experience with the screams and another loose piece of parcment shows a crude drawing of a deformed humanoid creature labled as a voidspawn. Is this what you're dealing with? An incusion of creatures from the void? But how would they cross over? Every question you answer creates two new riddles. Lastly you find a note in your uncle's handwring mentioning some of the local Tong elders doing something suspicious in the catacombs that involved alchemical tools.
Taking a closer look: Perception DC 10
4 DoS
The screams hurt!: Will vs Damage 5
2 DoF, Liu She is Dazed and has -1 Toughness Penalty
The screams still hurt!: Will vs Damage 5
2 DoF, Liu She is still Dazed and has -2 Toughness Penalty
Searching Uncle's Collection: Investigation DC 10, +2 Due to Library
4 DoS, only 2 imidiatly usable due to limited information in the library, found something usefull looking and a few leads for more
Adding your own Knowledge: Expertise:Chinese Mysticism DC ?? +5 due to Uncle's notes (25)
? DoS, you draw your conculsions
What next?
[] You hate the idea, but Shin Fei might be the best source of information regarding the Tong's involvement with the supernatural. Time to pay him a visit and hope that the price for his aid is not too high.
[] Maybe you shoud take a look into the catacombs?
[] This void thing seems dangerous, better make a few preparations first (can be taken multiple times)
-[] What kind of prepatarions? (e.g. use arttficer to create somthing usefull)
[]Write-in
Different kinds of Corruption represent the lasting effects of some of the nasty things that happened to your character. In the quest it comes in four forms: Madness, Mutation, Toxicity and Wickedness.
Madness is pretty self explanatory. You can gain it by particularly bad rolls to resist Fear (1 point for every DoF after the first) , by messing around with eldritch lore man was not supposed to know or other things that are bad for your mental health. It is resisted by Will.
Each point gives you a new complication related to it's source and shoud you ever accumulate more Madness than double your Awareness, your character goes permanently insane, resulting in a game over. Madness points can be removed by recieving treatment or picking a complication representing an unhelathy coping mechanism, such as excesive drinking.
Mutation represents anything that has the capability to permanently alter your body. It's resisted by fortitude and gained from sources such as prolonged void exposure, vampire bites, mutagenic chemicals, radiation etc. Each source is tracked speratly and has it's own effects (usually a complication or reduced stats while also allowing you to spec into previously unavailable powers) and cap. Once said cap is reached, the character fully tansforms into something other than human. Mutation is next to impossible to get rid of, other waiting it out in a few cases.
Toxicity represents the lasting health effects of poison, disease and certain power descriptors. It's also resisted by fortitude and always weakens your stamina Stat in addition to other potential effects. This results in a cap of STA+5 for Toxicity, since as soon as a character's STA sinks below -5, they die. Toxcicty is removed via getting medical attention.
Wickedness represents the taint that particulary heinous actions (e.g. murder of innocents) or messing around with the powers of Evil can cause to one's soul. It not resistable and has no cap. Having Wickedness points makes it harder to resist one's negative impulses to act like a prick and reduces the maximum level of any good aligned powers while also serving as a cap for evil alinged powers. You can get rid of it by seeking redemption.
The Fearless Advantage has been nerfed to:
Fearless: Every time the character has to resist a fear effect, the character rolls one aditional dieand picks the highest result. This advantage also provides immunity to fear effects with a level lower than half the character's PL and reduces the character's madness gains from fear by one.
To avoid confusion over a contradiction between two rulebooks I've implimented this houserule as a compromise:
In order to make routine checks for Inventing/Arifice/Rituals your character requires the Skill Mastery Advantage for the relevant skill.
Powers with the appropriate descriptor can inflict a point of the appropriate type of Corruption on the first failed resitance roll of the encounter as a 1 point Feature. (e.g. Poison Powers can give a point of Toxicity)
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Faces in the Walls: Act one Scene three (15th of August 1923)
[] This void thing seems dangerous, better make a few preparations first
Before heading out to try and solve the current issue, you need a way to protect yourself from those screams.
Unfortunatly, time is of the essence, you you can't spend the rest of the day on crafting a propper talisman, so some Qi-infused bandages with scribbled on blessing covering your ears should do the trick for now. Hopefully.
With that out of the way, it's time to start dealing with the issue at hand.
How?
[] Go straight to the catacombs
[] Ask for help or information first
-[] Shin Fei
-[] One of the local Elders
-[] Someone Else? (Write-in)
[] Write-in
Jurry-Rigging the Artifact DC21
Nat 1! 3DoF. The artifact won't work, but you don't know that yet.
Sorry for the short update. Writer's block sucks!
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Faces in the Walls: Act one Scene four (15th of August 1923)
Time is of the essence, so you decide to head directy to the catacombs as soon as you are finished with your preparations. Unfortunatly, you don't quite know how to get there and what little information you are able to find in your uncle's notes is woefully out of date. At least you are able to find out, that the alleyway where you first saw the face used to house one of the entrances into the undergrond that collapsed during the earthquake back in '06 and was later partially built over. It takes some more digging and puzzling out, but you are finally able to find an entrance that should still be accessible and not that far away.
With that, you head out to finally put an end to this mess.
<----TO-BE-CONTINUED----
Finding an entrance into the catcombs (Investigation DC 15)
1 DoS, entrance found.
I decided to split this one in two parts to better fit the Act X/Scene X structure on the threadmarks.