Chasing the Sunset & the inventor

Chasing the Sunset is a West Marches-style exploration game using Fellowship 2nd Edition‘s Horizon rules.

The party: Buckle the Beast/Heart of Earth, Stella the Halfling/Hunter

Last time, the Fellowship wandered around looking at cool things instead of disarming the orbital superweapon they just learned about. Now, they actually get on track.

As the Fellowship exits the Civic Center, they see another party of adventurers. A Halfling Wizard, some kind of boar monster, and a Rain remove a panel on the side of the Civic Center and sneak inside. After a few minutes, they sneak back out the same way.

GM note: Buckle has an ability that protects him from Thaumatown’s crowded stat, so he can have a conversation with Stella without being overheard.

Stella: What do you think of the rumor that Allan a Zham didn’t actually abdicate?

Buckle: If it’s true, he probably deserved it. I’m sick and tired of these despots running these towns. Probably yet another vampire.

Stella: Do you wanna take down a robot?

Buckle: We can at least get the museum open so they can turn it into a museum. That’s culture.

They head for Allan a Zham’s tower to force Restone to let the workers in, but Redstone passes them on the way. He mutters something about not wasting his time anymore.

• Redstone he/him Construct. A unique robot with his own personality
  • The Robot: The construct does not eat, sleep, or breathe. It is tireless in pursuit of its current goal, and nothing in its way will stall it for long.
  • Just Like You: The rogue has all the Gear of the Construct player, if one is in the game. They are also made of the same stuff, taking the same What Are You Made Of? Move the Construct has.
    • Wrist-mounted blades (Melee, Piercing)
    • Gliding
    • Riding Pod
    • Single-Use Teleporter
  • Iron Heart: The rogue has no mercy. They deal damage as Hard Cuts.

Stella: Oh, Mr. Redstone! You said something about not spending your personal time?

Redstone: Yes, my time is important to me. What do you want?

• What can you tell us about the supposed crime?
  • Redstone: Allan a Zham wouldn’t have stepped down suddenly. Either he was forced to do it, or it was an illusion. Maybe kidnapping, maybe murder.
• What are you doing to secure the site? What will you do next?
  • Redstone: I have just secured the site with Enforcer Droids upgraded into Warrior Drones. I’m going back to oversee the refit of the rest of the Droids.
• What do you want? How can we help you get it?
  • Redstone is very confident in his abilities and doesn’t think the Fellowship would be useful.

Buckle: So you didn’t put any defenses INSIDE the tower? What were you thinking? We know your time is limited, so just tell us the password to get past the Droids and we’ll protect the tower for you.

Redstone: Other adventurers said that and they left as soon as I turned my back. How do I know you aren’t just as flightly and untrustworthy?

Stella: Let’s time-box this. You get a certain time away from the tower. We’ll stay at the tower. That’ll demonstrate you can trust us.

Redstone agrees and gives them a keycard with a picture of a cube. Putting the keycard in a certain slot on the Warrior Drone will allow them to pass.

They go to the Wizard’s Tower while Redstone heads for the Civic Center. It’s a magical structure, not boring and functional like so many buildings in Thaumatown. The entrance at the bottom of the tower is surrounded by Warrior Drones, boxy robots with simple arms. Armor plates have been bolted on and one hand on each has been replaced with a melee weapon. Construction workers with paint, tools, and supplies are trying to talk their way in, showing a Notice of Proposed Land Use. They don’t want to argue with an axe, so they aren’t arguing too hard. Stella uses the keycard and the Drone lets the pass.

Consruction worker: Hey, wait!

They go up to the Wizard’s chambers at the top of the tower. There’s a balcony that overlooks the city, and papers are strewn about as if the place has been searched or ransacked?

• Tell me about Redstone. What was he doing her? What will he do next?
  • Some papers have been spread out on a desk. These are dossiers on people with magical abilities. Allan a Zham created the dossiers because he was always worried that another wizard would come to get him. These are the people that Redstone suspects of kidnapping or murdering Allan a Zham. Dossiers include:
    • Samantha the Swamp Witch
    • Cassandra. Illusion?
    • Mer-Lynn. Transmutation
    • Robin. Lantern in Vieport.

Stella takes the dossiers. Redstone will notice their absence!

• Is something hidden or out of place?
  • Rugs have been shifted around during the search. Stella looks under the rugs and finds a hidden bloodstain. It’s old and dry, but could be human blood. Stella finds an empty vial among the alchemy supplies and scrapes some of the blood into the vial with the edge of her sword.
• Tell me about this book. How could it hurt or help me?
  • The book about anti-magic techniques explains how to build basically a Faraday Cage for magic powers. It looks like a tea strainer with a collar at the bottom. Put it over a magic user’s head and they can’t use their magic power. They look around and find one of these anti-magic collars.
• What will happen if we de-activate the guards and let the workers in?
  • They’ll find out the hard way when they do it.

Buckle: Stella, let’s frame this robot for murder. We go down and de-activate the defenses. He’ll get mad and try to kill me. I’ll scream to get everyone’s attention. You say this collar came off him and he’s the murderer.

Stella: Remember those other adventurers going into a secret passage? Maybe the other end is near this tower and we can leave instead of fighting Redstone.

The hour is almost up. They go downstairs and use the keycard to tell the Warrior Drones to let the workers pass. Redstone returns, leading a new kind of robot. It has four legs and a hemispherical body, like a turtle. The shell is transparent and its inner workings are visible. A smaller robots rides on top of it.  Redstone sees another group of adventurers breaking their promise to him and gets mad!

Redstone: Can’t trust adventurers! Warrior Drones, stop them!

• Group Of Warrior Drones: Steward Bots armed with a variety of Melee
  weaponry. They will easily overpower anyone one-on-one.
  • Overpowering: Anyone trying to act alone against the warriors must pay a price. If they are a Gang or Army, the warriors are Piercing and Giant.
  • Group: This enemy can act against two people at once. When this enemy is destroyed, this stat is damaged, or this is their only stat left, replace the Group with two normal enemies.
• Shield Commander: This powerful protector grants invincibility to the Horde. They must be take out first, or else the Horde cannot be stopped.
  • Diamond Command: All nearby Horde threats, NOT including this one, are Dwarf-Made. They cannot be damaged by anything short of dragonfire or by secrets known only to the Dwarves.
• Phalanx Drone: These spider-like robots protect other machines with their lives, using an energy shield canopy to negate damage entirely. Phalanx Drones almost always appear in Groups or Gangs to provide multiple layers of protection for a more destructive Machine, allowing it to do its job safely.
  • Energy Shield: The Phalanx drone clings onto and protects its allies. When an ally a Phalanx Drone is riding on takes damage or is destroyed, destroy the Phalanx Drone instead.

Buckle puts the keycard into one of the Warrior Drones, marking him as a friend. The Warrior Drones are confused by conflicting orders. Redstone flips his metal arms around so they end in sharp spikes instead of hands and attacks Buckle. Stella slides in front of Buckle and blocks Redstone’s strike with her sword.

GM note: I forgot about Redstone’s Iron Heart stat.

The construction workers don’t want to get involved, so they go inside the Wizard’s Tower and start barricading the door to keep themselves safe.

Buckle: Are we going to go through with our plan? He’s trying to kill us. We have evidence that he….

Redstone stabs Buckle while he’s distracted. Buckle squeals like a pig.

Buckle: Murderer! Murderer! Redstone murdered Allan a Zham and now he’s trying to murder me!

GM note: This is Finishing Them with Grace. Buckle is outsmarting Redstone and forcing him to admit defeat so the crowds don’t think he’s a murderer. Buckle has fictional positioning that gives him an advantage despite losing the fight.

Thaumatown is crowded, so many people hear Buckle and gather around. Redstone is taken aback and realizes he can’t attack with his usual ruthlessness. It’s a social battle to win over the crowd.

Redstone: It’s not true! These interlopers are trespassing and trying to defile Allan a Zham’s tower!

Stella interrupts and holds up the vial of dried blood.

Stella: Look! We have the blood! We just have to test it.

Redstone is intimidating, so he’s not used to being talked over. He’s temporarily speechless. Buckle rolls around on the ground in pain.

Buckle: Save me!

Someone in the crowd yells, “He took a dive! Redstone didn’t hit him that hard!” Buckle flops around and splashes blood on the shoes of the front row of spectators. That’s convincing! The crowd surrounds Buckle to defend him. Redstone has no trouble ordering his Warrior Drones to eliminate specific threats for the good of Thaumatown, but he can’t just attack a crowd. Those are the people he wants to protect. He teleports away!

The crowd rushes Buckle to a medical robot. Walter Grey is briefed on the situation and rushes to Buckle’s side. Redstone attacked someone in broad daylight and the construction crew are trapped in the tower. It’s a scandal!  The medical robot opens Buckle’s fireproof suit and fire bursts forth! It deploys a fire extinguisher, which is ineffective. The medical robot is unable to treat Buckle’s strange body.

The medical robot test the dried blood. It determines that the blood is human and months old, which is consistent with Redstone’s story that Allan a Zham was killed at the time of his disappearance. Allan a Zham was paranoid about other magicians learning his true name or getting any parts of him to cast spells against him, so he never let the medical robots draw blood. There’s not enough evidence to prove that the blood is Allan a Zham’s, but who else would be injured in his private tower?

Walter Grey: But we all saw him! He stood on the river and told us that we were competent to lead ourselves and he was very proud and moving on. Then he sank into the river and we never saw him again.

Stella: A Human sank into the river and you thought that was fine for him? He has gills?

Walter Grey: He was standing on the water before. We figured it was magic.

Buckle: Mer-Lynn has gills. She does have shape-shifter magic.

Stella: It seems like you saw a projection.

The crowd is in an uproar. They’re not sure what to do. Maybe Redstone was right about Allan a Zham, but he did just attack someone in broad daylight and he’s welding weapons onto the traffic robots. What a mess! Stella recalls that they only came to Thaumatown because that guy in the Plant Ark, Hank Holliday, wanted them to leave and opened a route to Thaumatown. Maybe Hank is Allan a Zham! They never saw him.

Since the medical robot can’t heal him, Buckle goes to the river and catches fish to eat. When he’s full and feeling better, he meets Stella at the Welcome Center.

Stella: Hello, we took care of your problem!

Walter Grey: We have different problems now! Our beloved Wizard may have been murdered. Maybe we believed a lie and we’re not actually god at democracy.

Stella: But those were all true before. You just didn’t know. You could make the tower a mystery museum. The first person to crack the case gets the museum named after them. Host murder mystery dinners.

Walter Grey: That seems in poor taste.

Buckle waddles in.

Buckle: We took care of your problem.

Walter Grey: As I was explaining to your colleague, the problems we have now are larger than when you arrived. She makes a good point that those problems existed before and we just didn’t know about them, so I GUESS it would be wrong to blame you for them. It would be nice if you didn’t reveal more problems.

Buckle: That would be nice, wouldn’t it? How can we help now?

Walter Grey: Find out what happened to Allan a Zham. If he died in the tower, the body’s gone. What did he look like? What kind of magic did he have?

There’s a standee of Allan a Zham nearby. He’s an old Human man with a long beard in fancy robes with a big hat. He looks very magical.

Walter Grey: He could conjure fireballs and shoot lasers.

Stella: So, NOT water magic? Uhhh, we’ll let you know if we find anything!

Stella leaves and steers Buckle towards the secret passage once they are out of the Civic Center. The secret passage leads to a vent in the ceiling of a wedge-shaped room.

It’s the Entrace Hall. While they watch, an Enforcer Droid comes in from the west (a normal hallway) and goes through the north door. The door to the south has a slot like the slot on the Warrior Drone. Probably for a keycard. Stella opens the vent cover and stands on the ceiling. She offers Buckle her hands and lowers him to the floor.

Stella: Do we follow the robot or find out where this hallway goes?

Buckle: What about this door that says “Employees Only”?

Buckle pushes on the door, but it’s locked. He knocks.

Muffled voice: Hello?

Stella: Sorry, we lost our card. Can you let us in?

Stella’s really good at telling convincing lies!

Muffled voice: Is that Stella?

The door opens and a ten-foot-tall metal humanoid creature with a single glowing eye bends down to look at them. It’s a scarecrow made from a lamp post, and it’s piloted by Professor Gummidge!

Buckle: Who are you?

Stella: Good to see you!  How did you get here?

Gummidge: I escaped Mira and her Lantern “peacekeepers”.

Gummidge is excited to show someone the latest mad science. He comes into the entrance hall and puts a keycard in the slot by the central doorway. His card bears the image of an icosahedron.

Buckle: Our had a cube.

Gummidge: Ha, ha! That’s level one!

Two sets of doors, one right behind the other, slide to either side, revealing a small cylindrical room. Gallybagger, Gummidge’s Power Suit, has to bend down to fit in the human-sized chamber. He presses a green button twice and after a few moments, two sets of door on the other side of the cylinder open.  Gummidge leads Stella and Buckle into a control room full of levers, buttons, and guages. An armored window pierces a thick wall to provide a view of a large chamber with a large structure in the center. It looks like a kiln. There’s a small opening at the bottom and six metal tanks (for storing liquids) all around, all connected by pipes.

Gummidge: It’s very exciting! We have the furnace running again. It’s more efficient and burns hotter. We’re stil working on power transmission. We’ve only got it going to a few at a time. Limiting power to an appropriate amount isn’t going too well, but you should see them go for twenty seconds before they explode!

Buckle: Wow, wireless power.

Stella: Are we going to get a demonstration?

Gummidge: Redstone doesn’t like it. “Ooooh, the cost!”

Stella: He’s gone.

Buckle: Yeah, he tried to murder me then ran away.

Gummidge: Y’all must have been really annoying. That’s great though!  Come with me!

Gummidge leads them to the elevator, inserts his card, and presses red, then blue. The door opens to a room full of deactivated robots. Most are Warrior Drones. There’s another Shield Commander. Gummidge grabs a large robot that looks like several Warrior Drones combined into one. He pulls it into the elevator, presses red, presses blue, then pushes the Warrior Elite out of the entrance hall and down the hallway. It’s a long hallway and he’s impatient, so he activates rockets in Gallybagger’s feet. The Warrior Elite’s feet leave marks in the floor and make a terrible screech. Soon they are in the large atrium of the Civic Center.

Gummidge: Check it out! It’s multipurpose.

Gummidge opens a small tear in space, puts a hand through, and operates some controls on the other side. The Warrior Elite’s body hums with energy, and it starts running around, much too fast for something that big. The visitors in the Civic Center panic at the sight of a robot twice their height with axes for hands. The huge robot smashes a display, then explodes, spreading more destruction.

Gummidge: Woohoooo!

Buckle: This is why we rejected technology!

Baffle: Oh no, this is so bad! He’s making more of these?

Baffle and Gummidge argue about the appropriate use of technology. Enforcer Droids emerge to clean up debris and take injured bystanders to the Medical Droid.

Buckle: We can solve each other’s problems. Let’s go back to the lab.

Buckle pushes everyone back to the Robotics Facility. They return to the control room that overlooks the furnace. Buckle takes Baffle aside.

Buckle: Clearly we need to get this under control, but this weirdo’s got teleportation magic. I propose that we stabilize the power distribution in exchange for help reaching the Moon.

Baffle: I think we should disable the whole thing. Using robots to help with everyday tasks is terribly risky. People won’t be self-sufficient.

Buckle: True, but these people are on that path anyway. The best we can do with the influence we have, is to help them control it, and maybe build in some fail-safes.

Baffle: OK, let’s do it.

It’s easy to have a private conversation around Gummidge. He immediately starts tinkering with some technology. Buckle and Baffle talk to Gummidge now.

Buckle:  So, that was wild. It could be better contained. Have you been working on that?

Gummidge: It’s growing pains. Every version will be better.

Buckle: I think we can get you there faster, if you can provide teleportation technology we need for our current quest.

Gummidge agrees, and explains how the wireless power transmission works. Fuel from the furnace comes down from above into the six tanks, which inject it into the firing chamber. The furnace shoots very hot fire down to the level below. There used to be a ceramic collector dish down there that focused the furnace’s output into an Artifact of Power, which distributed the energy to all the robots. That Artifact was stolen, and Gummidge is trying to replice its effect. The artifact was like an infinite number of windows. Each robot had a tiny window inside it, but now they run on batteries!

The collector dish has been replaced by a lattice of lens pointed into a series of pipes that lead to a grid of little windows that takes up the entire floor of the chamber.

Gummidge: It’s hard to calibrate this thing to split the power to each window and assign different robots with different power demands to each window. If we turn all the robots on at once, can we handle peak demand? If only a few robots are on, will the excess energy burn up the facility? It’s a complicated problem. We have to tune a lot dials.

GM note: We, the players, had to invent a reason for the power distribution to fail, then figure out how much each character knew, and what moves to use to learn the rest or implement a solution. Challenging but fun!

Gummidge: The machine is essentially switching the output of the furnace to each of these windows, and I can’t get it to switch fast enough. It gets stuck on a few windows which get too much. That’s why the robots explode.

Baffle: If you had a switch of switches–why am I helping?

Buckle: Or a prism.  Some way to distribute evenly so it don’t have to go into individual windows. You had to make this quick switching mechanism because all the robots need power in parallel.

Gummidge: Yeah, yeah, parallelism. That could work.

Gummidge assembles the necessary materials from around the Robotics Facility. The Fellowship sees that retro-fitting Enforcer Droids into Warrior Drones wasn’t the only thing Redstone was doing. The Facility also manufactures purpose-built military robots: spiky Killbots and bulbous FIre Droids. Buckle wonders why Redstone needs such robots.

As Baffle, Buckle, and Gummidge work on the new power distribution network, Redstone returns.

Redstone: Gummidge, I need a squad of military robots operational. I’m going to go through Allan a Zham’s files on magic users and just visit them one by one until we find the one that killed him.

Buckle: Murderer! The murderer is here!

Redstone: You’re working with him? Forget it, I’ll just use batteries.

Redstone leaves.

Buckle: Gummidge, do you have safeguards on the robots to keep them from falling into the wrong hands?

Gummidge: The robots always obey people with authorized voiceprints. That’s me and Redstone of course. There’s an expansion slot to plug in chips with additional voiceprints. We have some chips for members of the town council.

Buckle: Oh, Gummidge! You’re unleashing murderbots on the society at large, and you’re handing them to a paranoid robot.

Gummidge: No, he’s leaving Thaumatown to visit the people in those files. Our society’s in no danger.

Far away in the Wizard’s Tower, Restone discovers that the files are gone. Buckle whispers to Stella:

Buckle: Stella, I need you to steal a bunch of these voice chips. Like, a bunch, please.

Stella points at various things around the room and asks rapid-fire questions about what they’re for and how they work. Gummidge is very excited to explain his inventions, so he doesn’t notice when Stella steals his icosahedron keycard.

GM note: The icosahedron is the most complex Platonic solid. Platonic solids are not opposed to romantic solids because Plato invented more than one thing: being friends, and rules for geometric shapes.

Baffle and Buckle finish parallelizing the remote power system. Gummidge needs his keycard to go down to the lowest level, but he doesn’t have it! Stella switches the keycard with a voice chip.

Stella: You must have dropped it. Here it is!

GM note: Just like in Ex Machina!

Gummidge goes to check something, so Buckle, Baffle, and Stella are alone for a moment. Stella gives Baffle the voice chip.

Buckle: Baffle, just make sure this gets replicated and handed out, so anybody can de-activate the robots.

Stella; Or NOT de-activate the robots. This is like giving everyone a weapon to make society safer. Maybe we should record something on the voice chip that matches multiple voices.

Baffle: Trust me and the underground network of anti-technologists.

Gummidge reports that the tests work! Now he can start on the next project: this Moon mission. The Fellowship convinces him to sleep first.  Redstone sneaks back in to the Robotics Facility after they leave, to assemble a squad of robots in peace. In the morning, both groups are ready to leave town at the same time.  Redstone is accompanied by a Shield Commander, a few Warrior Elites, a bunch of Warrior Drones, and some Killbots.

Redstone: Well, I definitely remember Samantha. We’ll go there first.

Stella: Bad news. She’s dead.

Redstone: I’m sure you’re trying to make trouble for me. Trying to make me skip an important suspect is about as likely as you doing reverse psychology on me, and actually telling the truth, because I won’t believe it.

Buckle: You got us there, buddy. She’s in the Cracktooth Wastes.

Redstone is frustrated and sets off in a direction without telling where he’s going.

END-OF-SESSION MOVE

• Did we thoroughly explore a new location?
  • NO
• Did anyone find what they were searching for?
  • YES, Buckle found his adopted daughter Fafnir.
• Did we learn something new about the world and its people?
  • YES, the Moon!
• 2 boons
  • heal
  • heal