Session 03 - Imposter Investigators

Jalan: Would you be honest about murder?

Fritz: If it was self defense.

Jalan: He didn't get a chance to be threatening!

Drant: It was preemptive self defense.

Plot points/Scenes

One Year Later - Knock Knock It’s The IRS

• We’re pretty well-known around town but not in a good way (we made free power not free)
• One day (inciting incident) a courier with the normal payment from the government comes with an extremely well-armored escort (Obsidian Guard-looking dudes in extremely tech-y armor from the mainland)
• We let them in and they demand to see the control room, present a warrant signed both by local government and with the royal seal (from the mainland so maybe Ragnar himself signed off on this which makes us feel a little safer because Ragnar’s moral lines are way more skewed than ours he’s just greedy)
  • They tell us a whole bunch of bullshit about legal code which Fritz detects as bullshit and throws it back with some real legal words baBAM
  • Turns out they’re a group of Ragnar’s Inquisitors stationed on the island who are in charge of enforcing local legal policy
• Inspecting the control room
  • We reluctantly take them downstairs, setting their status to Visitors
  • Checking the sound panels - they want to know what they are, why we added them, we make up some lie and Fritz manages to pull one off that’s not too integral to the panels’ functionality to let them inspect and they don’t notice anything very suspicious
    • Jalan makes up some story of how there must be some broken mechanical thing deep in the bowels of the machine and that’s why the sound is so eerie and irregular, and Fritz pipes in that we would have fixed it already but that would’ve called for shutting off all the power to the city until it was fixed and we decided it wasn’t worth it
  • Asking questions: “how much of this was original and how much was modified?”
    • We basically say everything is the original mechanics except the soundproofing and some efficiency module or whatever
  • Head honcho says something suspicious as they begin to leave: “It’s such a shame...you almost passed”
  • Drant gets suspicious and senses HP of the head honcho, he’s got 100(?!) HP

Combat With the Obsidian Guard?!

• Head honcho notices that Drant did something sketchy/magic, makes a comment, and shoots a net at Jalan, misses and gets Jarvis instead
• Drant gets triggered and initiates combat (head honcho wasn’t violent perse but hell if he wasn’t aggressive)
• Head honcho drags Jarvis out of the room and all but one dude go with him
• The one dude runs into the cryo-storage room and disappears
• The other group runs out into the hallway, Fritz activates the pitfall trap in the hallway from the control panel in the control room and they fall in, she closes the trap on top of them
• Jalan goes into the cryo room, can’t see the dude, Drant goes into the cryo room “detects life” and senses the dude being invisible behind Jalan, who ducks for cover behind Drant
• Dude shoots a net at them, hits Drant, Jalan tries to make a run for it but the dude crits and choke slams him to the ground, then electrifies the net attached to Drant
• The group in the hallway blows the lid off the pit trap and crawls out the other side with Jarvis, Fritz decides to go back to the control panel and close the front vault door to buy some time, also activates all traps, closes all doors, sets Security Threat Level (“...uh...level RED. level ELEVEN.”) and upon some advice from Jarvis sets the group of officials from Visitor status to Intruder
• Varis runs back to find Drant/Jarvis, notices Drant being electrified in the net and tries to cut him free
  • Rolls a Luck check and CRIT FAILS
  • Good news: the net is gone but the attack hit Drant directly (he’s fiiiiiine probably)
• All of a sudden, hear “CLEAR BLAST ZONE”
  • Varis runs into the corner of the room, Jalan (still stunned from being choke-holded to the ground) is too busy whining about being hurt to move but he’s got the magic elven armor so takes none of the 600 damage that shoots out of the giant spider defender in the center of the control room which incinerates the dude but he just absorbs it all into his power-fist bullshit glove of electricity
• Fritz gets an idea and goes back to the control panel and types in an inquiry into the nature of the three statues lining the wall of the control room, doesn’t get a reference ID but does get the properties string “alert tier 11”, she types in “/set alert level 11”, hears some crazy mechanical stuff happening (don’t know what actually happened since after this nothing happened regarding those statues)
• Jalan rounds the corner, orders the spiders currently in melee with the intruders out of the way, and chain-lightnings down the hall with his electric gauntlet, knocks them all unconscious instantly

Removing the Flux-Suits

• All seems calm
• Jalan attempts to remove a suit from one of the dudes, the crystal in the center of the chestplate goes dark red and both the dude and the suit dissolve into mush
• Fritz decides she can probably get one of these off safely, we string up the remaining guys on the magic-suppressant conveyor belt just in case and so they’re restrained
• Fritz investigates the armor, determines it’s flux armor (which she’s been studying the past year!)
  • She having studied history knows that the Obsidian Guard is not known to have any troops in Obsidian armor, she’s like “ooh must be a prototype, shiny” but Jalan makes the astute observation that these people are not real Obsidian Guard
    • F: “...yeah alright that’s way smarter”
  • There’s a few different ways to go about getting the armor off, it is physically linked to the wearer and can either be disconnected at some mechanical joint (more risk to the suit, less to the wearer) or at the base of the neck where it connects to the spine (more risk to the wearer, less to the suit)
  • thinks she’s got an okay chance of getting it off, and prioritizing getting the suit off safely over the health of person, and trying it out on one of the grunts, gets super lucky and she disarms it
• There’s a security box on the back that she opens to try to get an idea of how to more safely disable the rest, she takes plasma(?!) damage and Jalan thieves’ tools it open
• The inside of the circuit box is basically some super complicated programmable mechanical logic gates
  • Super fun to play with later but nothing immediately useful
  • Decides she’s not going to glean anything useful to disable the other suits from this one, so takes the dude out of the suit, places the suit in a cryo-chamber and the dude in another for later questioning
• Disabling the other suits
  • Crit fails disabling the next suit, accidentally sets off the suit’s autopilot, Varis jumps into action and kills the dude in the suit but the suit’s still running, Fritz orders the giant spider in the middle of the room to EMP-electrocute him, fries the suit but it’s intact, although the (dead) dude in it is stuck in it for now
  • Successfully removes another suit, and fails to remove the suit from the head honcho dude and both the dude and the suit dissolve (dang flabbit)

Interrogation Tactics

• Jalan starts blubbering about being taught how to interrogate but not being good at it because he was always too scared that they’d get out and kill him
• Wake one guy up, he looks like hatred incarnate and makes a swift motion with his tongue and starts foaming at the mouth (damn cyanide teeth)
  • J: “....oh yeaaahhh they did teach us about that I sort of forgot”
• Varis goes over to the other guy and checks for a similar pill, finds one pretty obvious but also does a very good check and finds a more well-hidden pill of unknown nature
• Varis suggests loading a crossbow and wedging the bolt under his fingernail and asking him questions
• Wake the dude up….time for some questions
  • “What’s your name?” “Classified…” “Even soldiers of the Obsidian Guard can give their name and rank.” “Robin Stormcaller” “No rank? So you’re not part of the Obsidian Guard.”
  • Basically tells that he was placed in this suit and it told him what to do and he had no say in it.
    • Insight check says he’s partially honest, Jalan shoves the bolt up his fingernail, Varis tells him to keep talking
  • Joined a mercenary cult and this was just a job
  • Head honcho was “Boar”
  • Mission to come in here, steal AI (Jarvis), discover enough about system through Jarvis’ memory to hack into it, come in by night and kill us then take our place, technologically/magically disguised to look like us
  • Says their group intercepted the official group that was supposed to legitimately investigate us so there’s still an official group missing that could get us in trouble
  • Something about not being a citizen and how blah blah treason and blah blah reported to government and blah blah “I just wanted to fight for freedom and ended up in a new pair of shackles” (my words but bet you wish you thought of them now huh ba-BAM)
  • Varis asks him why he would have tried to lie to us then, if he wasn’t actually with these guys
    • “How would you feel if you were knocked out by electricity and woke up to one of your comrades poisoned, and the rest dead or dissolved, and a crossbow bolt shoved up your fingernail?”
    • Jalan: “Scared.”
    • Fritz (from the other room): “Yeah but that’s just a state of being with you.”
  • Accidentally clues us into that the courier is still here, he wasn’t in the pile of bodies and he definitely came into the basement with us

Hunting the Courier

• System scan
  • Quick intelligence check stands to reason that since we initiated system lockdown so fast, he must be somewhere on our side of the keypad door
  • 25 spiders left, set to sweep the facility in like lines so that anybody invisible would have a hard time getting past them
  • Drant Detects Life but doesn’t find anybody and neither do the spiders
  • Drant crits an intelligence check and notices all of the spiders are walking strangely
  • Run a check through the system that confirms all 25 spiders are functional, Fritz doesn’t believe it and takes a piece of chalk and does a manual headcount, there’s only 20 spiders present
    • He hacked our system, the motherfucker
  • Decide that if we were an invisible tech-savvy intruder stuck in an enemy facility whose only escape is blocked by a hackable tech door, we would be at that door trying to hack into it, so we start to move to investigate it
  • Before we can, hear Jarvis say out loud “confirm administrator override” to which one of the suits mimics Fritz’s voice “confirm” and we hear the FRONT door (not the coded door) start opening
• The Chase Is On
  • Varis and Jalan make a break for the door, Fritz gets into a brief verbal battle with the suit impersonating her in an attempt to confuse the system before Jarvis has the bright idea to disable remote commands, shuts down the system, stops opening the door and now can only communicate with the system at the physical control panel
  • Varis and Jalan sneak to the door, see some beefy cyborg dude trying to get through the door and sneak attack
  • Jalan dips a crossbow bolt in poison and fires
  • Varis double-crits the dude and deals 50 damage in one turn and absolutely ANNIHILATES him, cuts him straight down his cyborg/human seam and the two halves fall to the ground
  • Jalan, who was reloading his crossbow and not paying attention, looks up and sees the carnage
    • “.....what the fuck did you DO?? You cut him in ha- how did you even DO that?”
  • According to DM this dude was supposed to be our big lead into our next mission and Varis just massacred him soooo
  • Jalan and Varis empty the dudes pockets, get some fun stuff, Varis crits for the THIRD TIME IN A ROW and realizes that one of the tech devices he had was used to communicate over long distances
  • Jalan pokes the body and it twitches, he gets freaked out and squeamish, Varis sees an opportunity and pokes around in his brain trying to get a reaction, nothing happens so he gets bored
  • The courier’s also got some weird metal trinkets which Jalan double-crit fails on determining the nature of, he believes they’re just kitchen utensils and kicks them into a corner
    • (Fritz in the background): “Jalan I swear to God”
    • *he giggles*
  • They return to the main room with their prize

Clean-Up

• Boy is this a mess
• So to recap...some REAL governmental officials were sent to investigate our company, those officials were ambushed and replaced by these fakers, these fakers tried to take over our company, we killed these fakers
• So now we’ve got a bunch of bodies and some missing governmental officials to deal with
  • Jalan suggests we just fucking RUN
  • Fritz suggests we take advantage of the situation, and that these fakers gave us advance warning that the government was suspicious or at least curious and that we should use that to our advantage to get our story straight and be as upfront and cooperative as possible with their investigation while using this opportunity to hide contraband and morally ambiguous operations
    • F: “So we’re all in agreement? We go straight to the government and be as honest as possible without implicating ourselves.”
    • J: “No.”
    • V: “Honesty is the best policy.”
    • J: “What if you murdered someone? Would you be honest about that?”
    • F: “If it was self defense.”
    • J: “He didn’t get a chance to be threatening!”
    • D: “It was preemptive self defense.”

Plot type

Session

Parent Plot

Act 1: Just Your Normal, Everday, Morally Ambiguous Power Company