Session 22 - Scene 2 (of

Outside, Yulian and Father Mulroney watch as the explosion tears a large hole in the side of the lake house. It instantly erupts into flames and begins collapsing.

A humanoid figure comes out of the front door, covered in fire and screaming; his arms flailing wildly. After a moment, he drops to the ground, dead.

Back inside, Chaos screams for help as the basement begins filling with smoke. But outside, Yulian heard nothing over the sounds of the building burning up.

Chaos looks for anything to help him escape. Luckily, one of the chains is loose and he is able to break it out of the wall. That is enough to allow him to reach a nearby gardening spade. He begins to chip away at the mortar on the other chain.

Outside, Yulian looks around for a car or other vehicle next to the house. He starts heading around towards the back. Father Mulroney slings his rifle and runs up to the house to investigate.

Inside, Chaos continues to try and free himself. A small chunk of ceiling falls on his head, giving him a bump. He yells out in pain.

At the back of the house, Yulian notices an open cellar door to the house. Still, he fails to hear the cries of Chaos trapped inside.

Chaos, for his part, is working fervently to free himself as the house collapses around him. A support beam falls on him, injuring and trapping him. Outside, Father Mulroney hears the scream Chaos makes.

Father Mulroney gets excited – he tells Yulian that it sounds like Chaos. He surmises the boy must be trapped inside. Yulian shrugs, simply telling the priest that he should go save his friend.

The priest heads down the cellar door. Through the smoke and falling debris, he spots the trapped boy. He yells up to Yulian for help, but the anarchist feels the more important thing is to look for a way to escape the island. Chaos, Yulian feels, has already served his purpose.

Mulroney, however, cannot abandon his charge so easily. Against his better judgment, he heads in to rescue the lad. Using his monstrous strength, he lifts up the beam, rips the chain out of the wall, and throws Chaos over his shoulder. He comes charging out of the basement just in time, as the house collapses in on itself in a pyre of flames.

Chaos lies on the ground, staring up at the stars as he recovers. Yulian gives Mulroney a sullen look, thinking the rescue was a waste of time.

Session 22 - Scene 3 (of

After everyone has a minute to catch their breath, Father Mulroney asks Chaos what happened. He explains about waking up in the basement and the people he encountered.

Mulroney realizes that the man Yulian shot must have been the older Mr. Pritchett, David Thomas Morgan's gardener. And the flaming man was likely Pritchett's son. The middle-aged couple sound like David and his wife themselves, from the boy's descriptions.

When Chaos comments on how the monster was called Niven, Mulroney realizes that it is Morgan's son Niven, who was supposed to be recovering from polio at a sanitarium in Europe. He explains the horrifying situation to Yulian and reiterating the cabal must be stopped.

The father wonders about Pritchett's involvement. He finds the idea of a gardener coming out shooting with a gun to be odd, though Yulian notes it is quite common for gardeners to carry such weapons in Bulgaria.

Mulroney is more concerned that the Morgans escaped the blast, and went off to meet "the others", suggesting he may have only succeeding in killing some of the cult's laborers and not the key members of the cabal. The priest tells Yulian they need to find them; the anarchist agrees, but only after making a comment that Mulroney's plan to bomb the lake house was foolish.

The priest decides to let the comment go. Instead, he looks around for a path and sees one leading up to the back of the house. He wonders how Yulian and Chaos, who spent more time looking around the area, could have missed it.

Yulian isn't so sure about heading into the woods with a monster around, but Mulroney assures him he killed the beast when he blasted it with the shotgun.

Session 22 - Scene 4 (of

Mulroney gives his flashlight and rifle to Chaos and tells him to take the leads as they head down the path leading into the dark forest.

Chaos activates the flashlight and takes off down the path in a quick trot. Mulroney and Yulian allow him to get some distance before they follow.

A short distance from the house, a small break in the path leads off to an old stone storage shed. The heavy wooden doors appear to be secured by a new chain and padlock.

Father Mulroney believes something valuable must be inside the shed for it to be locked. He tells Chaos to bash open the lock using his rifle.

The youth furiously attacks the lock with the rifle. One thrust is a bit too strong, causing the gun to misfire and bend the firing pin. The boy narrowly avoids shooting himself in the face.

He continues smashing with the now useless gun, Father Mulroney encouraging him. Yulian is nervous about all the noise, looking around carefully. He doesn't see anything, but the hairs on the back of his neck stand up; almost as if he is being watched.

Chaos continues to have trouble. Mulroney grabs the gun in frustration, smashing at the lock. He breaks open the lock and breaks off the stock of the rifle. He hands the barrel back to Chaos to use as a club.

The priest then tells Chaos to open the door as he steps back. It creaks open loudly, revealing a dark room beyond.

Yulian's unease grows. He tells the others they should not linger there and starts to continue off down the main path. Mulroney barely notices, having Chaos grab his flashlight and shine it into the shed.

He is rewarded with a face full of angry bats. The effect is terrifying on him, reducing his already fragile sanity.

After the bats clear, they see the old shed is full of old, rusted gardening equipment. Mulroney is convinced there must be something else in the shed. Looking around, he notices a strange tarp on the ground.

Mulroney tells Chaos to pull up the tarp. Underneath, they find a trap door in the dirt floor. He calls out to Yulian down the path, but the anarchist doesn't hear him. He also doesn't hear whatever sneaks up behind him and smacks him over the head.

Back at the shed, Mulroney has Chaos open the trap door. It appears to cover an old well. Hand-holds are carved into the sides of the well, leading down.

The father tells Chaos to go get Yulian. The youth runs down the path, carrying his flashlight and gun club.

After a moment, he realizes he doesn't see Yulian anywhere. He looks around for any signs of the Bulgarian. And then everything goes black as something hits him in the back of the head as well.

Minutes later, Father Mulroney starts to get concerned that no one is coming back...

Session 22 - Scene 5 (of

Mulroney realizes that Yulian and Chaos are the only ones with flashlights. He doesn't see any sources of light around.

Taking a moment, he tries to decide whether to head down the dark path into the forest or head down the dark well.

Looking around the shed, he finds a piece of wood and some kerosene. Together with a piece of the tarp, he makes a makeshift torch.

Very carefully, Mulroney manages to climb down the well while carrying his torch. At the bottom, he finds a small cave to one side. The cave contains bedding material and some toys. Some crude drawings and the name "Niven" are carved on the cave wall.

Father Mulroney looks around for another way out of the cave. He finds a narrow tunnel in the back, leading further into the darkness. Mulroney heads in, with a torch in one hand and the shotgun in the other.

Session 22 - Scene 6 (of

For the second time that night, Chaos opens his eyes to find himself in a strange new location. He finds he and Yulian are tied up with a heavy amount of rope to some sort of upright wooden pillars.

Chaos scans the area. He sees they are somewhere outside on the island, near the shore. There are several other wooden erections around in a circle. Inside the circle, seven figures in black robes surround a fire, chanting.

Yulian remarks that he does not like the situation, stating it does not look good. Neither of the men have much leverage and can't determine a way to escape.

He tries to understand what the people are chanting. The language does not resemble either English or Bulgarian.

One of the figures approaches the two prisoners and removes his hood. Chaos recognizes him as David Thomas Morgan, calling out "You!"

Morgan looks over Yulian. He tells him he does not recognize him, and asks his name. He points out that Yulian does not look like one of Mulroney's orphan boys.

Yulian responds that he is definitely not one of the silly priest's charges. Hearing Yulian's accent, Morgan identifies him as a "Slav".

Morgan then launches into a rant about what the world is coming to and how "this is what all this is about". He explains that people like Yulian are invading his country and causing the destruction of the great bloodlines of the nation with their inferior genes.

David continues to discuss how disgusted he is by the waves of Irish, Italian, and Slavic immigrants. He tells Yulian they are polluting America.

He then looks very crossly at both Yulian and Chaos, asking which one wounded Niven. Yulian, not paying much attention to Mulroney's conversation earlier, responds that if Niven was the gardener, then it was him.

Morgan dismisses the comment, explaining that Niven is his son. Waxing sentimentally, he explains that it was all for his son at first. When his polio got bad, Morgan decided it wasn't right for his son to be bedridden while "filth" like the two of them were able to walk around.

He continues on with his racist rant, explaining how everyone (in the cabal) noticed the same thing in their businesses and factories. The American working class had become lazy, stupid, and weak-blooded.

Yulian angrily decries that he cannot call Bulgaria weak, but Morgan ignores him. Instead, he continues to explain that at first they all supported eugenics, but immigrants and simpletons were breeding too fast for them to sterilize them all quick enough to stop the threat.

David then says the group had a breakthrough when they met a man who had new ideas on how to deal with the decline of the American worker. He identifies the man as Dr. Stefan Krasnik, whom he believes Father Mulroney was responsible for the disappearance of.

According to Morgan, Dr. Krasnik had an idea on how to make workers strong again; to make them more useful members of society instead of the parasites they had become.

Through Krasnik, Morgan explains, they met a man named Prendergast. Prendergast was able to heal Morgan's son with some sort of compound he developed.

Yulian responds that he's heard about Prendergast, calling the man crazy. Morgan argues that he is not crazy, but a man with a vision to rid the world of Yulian's "blood polluting filth".

Morgan does make an off-hand comment that he isn't so sure about Prendergast's "rituals". He says that since the doctor likes them, he's fine with playing along.

He then tells Yulian and Chaos that Prendergast will change them like the others, making them useful again. He tells them not to worry, they'll be better than ever once they are done.

Yulian says to Morgan that he knows a problem with his plan. He tells the man that although he believes his new order will save his world, but it is chaos that will rule. Chaos points out that is his name. Morgan dismisses his warning, putting back on his hood and heading back to the others to continue chanting.

Session 22 - Scene 7 (of

After some tight squeezes, Father Mulroney manages to make his way through the tunnel and finally finds a cave exiting the tunnel. Outside, he sees he is near the edge of the lake.

Off in the distance, Mulroney spots a flame and hears chanting. He can see several figures around the fire, apparently performing some sort of dark ritual.

The father carefully examines his surroundings. He notices the circle of wooden structures; it makes him recall the pictures he's seen of the Stonehenge area in England. He sees that Chaos and Yulian are tied up to parts of it.

He also notices the same circle of cultists, the fire, the treeline leading up to the area, and the child monster Niven crouched back in some shadows at the edge of "Woodhenge".

Mulroney forms a plan. He notices the radius of Woodhenge is wide enough that he can use the small, hand-held bomb to kill them without too much risk to Yulian or Chaos. Niven, naturally, would also be unharmed but he still has his shotgun, pistol, and knife.

The priest makes his way carefully along the tree line in darkness. When he gets into position, he runs out quickly, passing right between the pillars Chaos and Yulian are tied to.

He hurls the bomb straight into the fire between the cultists. They turn to look, and he has a split second to recognize their faces – David Thomas Morgan, Rebecca Lynn Morgan, Richard Colcord, Countess Janne Mari Ahlfeldt, Reverend Jacob Greene, Phelan Fitzroy, and Jonathan Allen Hill – before the bomb goes off, blowing them all to pieces.

Mulroney's victory is short-lived as Niven leaps out at him from behind. Mulroney yells out Niven's name, trying to get him to stop, as he unslings his shotgun. The creature, having already been wounded by the priest and just seeing him kill his parents, ignores his attempt and attacks.

Niven uses one of his tentacles to grab Mulroney's arm and begin crushing it. Mulroney tries to resist and move his arm enough to fire the shotgun. He manages, but the shot goes wide, nearly hitting Chaos in the face.

The tentacles pull Mulroney towards the creature, and his sharp teeth bite into the priest's shoulder. Mulroney attempts another shot, but it also misses and nearly hit Chaos again.

Niven continues to bite at the priest. With both barrels of the shotgun fired, Mulroney changes tactics. He maneuvers his way towards Yulian and begins cutting the ropes while fending off another of Niven's attacks.

Mulroney hands over his gun to Yulian and pulls out his pistol. He fires a shot into the beast. It screams but doesn't go down. Yulian tries to assist with the knife, but doesn't get a chance.

The creature uses the opportunity to bite down hard into Mulroney's neck. He collapses to the ground in a pool of blood.

Yulian runs over to cut Chaos free. Niven charges towards Yulian. Chaos tries to grab Mulroney's gun, but Yulian shoves him straight into Niven and makes a run for it.

Niven bites into Chaos. He responds by punching the creature hard in his wound. Niven collapses.

Session 22 - Scene 8 (of

The two begin heading back up the path towards the house. Chaos mumbles something about getting Mulroney help when they get back to shore, but Yulian believes he has served his purpose.

Chaos tries to check Mulroney's pulse. As far as the youth can tell, the priest is dead. He grabs his pistol.

Yulian, a bit further up the path, suddenly has his way blocked by a pair of creatures that emerge from the woods. They have no tentacles, but have yellow eyes, scaly skin, and long black claws.

Behind the creatures, an old-fashioned voice calls out, "restrain him". Yulian turns to run the other direction.

As he runs back towards the lake, he bumps into Chaos. The two of them look around, and discover they are surrounded by six of the creatures; several recently emerged from the lake.

Chaos just barely manages to hang on to his sanity, though Yulian takes it in stride.

A man in old fashioned clothes walks up, whom the two assume is Prendergast. He says that he can see their priestly friend has expired. He also says the priest has rid him of his "functionaries", which he finds most inconvenient. Yulian dryly remarks the priest has brought inconvenience to many people's lives.

Prendergast tells Yulian that it matters little, as the hour is upon them. He goes on to say that it is time again; the stars are in alignment, the moon is full, and it is time again. Yulian tells him his plans of order are meaningless.

The man agrees that the plan of Morgan and his friends was meaningless. He cares very little for Morgan's racist rantings and crazy theories about bloodlines and purity. The cult, he says, had no understanding of the true picture of what was going on.

Prendergast asks Yulian if he knows what this place is. He says it is a very special island, discovered by a clan of Hopwell Indians centuries ago. It was here they found a connection to the lake god, which they named Chahok.

It is time, Prendergast explains, for Chahok to rise again. Yulian dismisses the man as crazy, saying of course it is.

The doctor tells Yulian and Chaos they will stay where they are while he completes the ritual. Chahok will then be free to emerge from the lake, and devour the Earth as it was meant to be.

Prendergast goes on to explain how he has lived a long time for this moment. Yulian tells him he is crazy. He responds that he, too, thought it was crazy once.

Many years ago, Prendergast explains, his shipping company captured a group of Barbary pirates. Among them was a man who had a most amazing story about an ancient civilization of serpent men that he had discovered evidence of out in the deserts of Arabia.

Prendergast goes on to say the evidence was real. And through his discoveries of the serpent people, he found something that men might call magic; though he believes it more than the serpent men were too advanced in science to be understood by humans.

Yulian, still skeptical, says he will wait for the rise of the serpent god. Prendergast says he is pleased, for Chahok will be hungry from his slumber and souls like Yulian's will provide good sustenance.

Chaos, however, can think of nothing but trying to escape. He finds no opportunity.

Prendergast begins speaking in a strange language, giving some kind of chant with hissing-like sounds.

Yulian doesn't like the sound of it. He quickly throws his knife, but the blade misses the man. Prendergast gets angry, calling for the creatures to seize Yulian for daring to interrupt him.

When the monsters move to attack Yulian, Chaos makes his own move with the pistol. He fires three shots at Prendergast, but they all miss.

The lake creatures turn and attack Chaos instead. They quickly begin ripping him limb from limb.

As Chaos is being torn apart, Yulian leaps over to grab Mulroney's shotgun. Grabbing two shells off of the bandolier around the priest's body, he quickly fires both barrels into Prendergast.

The force of the blast nearly tears the man in half. As his body collapses to the ground, his flesh quickly rots away, leaving only a blackened skeleton on the beach. After a moment, it, too, collapses into ashes and blows away on the cold lake wind.

The lake monsters stop devouring the remains of Chaos and appear to be in a state of confusion. They slowly amble back into the water, disappearing beneath the dark surface.

Yulian takes a moment to go through Mulroney's pockets to get anything valuable. While he is doing so, he can tell the priest is still breathing shallowly, holding on to life. Yulian takes his knife and draws it across the priest's throat, ending it.

Now that he is the sole survivor, he follows the shore back to the docks where he finds the yacht. After tossing over the remains of Captain Frank, he sails off into the moonlight, heading for Gary to return to his love, Karina.

The End

Session 22 - Session Notes

Well, that's the end of the campaign. It didn't actually take more than an hour, hour and a half of game time.

All in all, everyone was pleased with the result. We particularly enjoyed the irony of the pseudo-romantic ending of Yulian sailing off into the moonlight.

The biggest lesson learned was that I think we need a less swingy ruleset next time. Characters were often wildly ineffective and it was very hard with a small group to have enough broad skills. The PCs also felt they needed someone with a more investigative-heavy focus to make the cult plot work easier; though I liked the fact they were a fish out of water for that.

After this, we've decided on Traveller as our next ruleset. I'm planning to use a modified version of the 2300 AD setting. I don't know if we'll start right away next session, or maybe have something in between. Look for a new AP thread coming soon.

Various notes from this session:
* Morgan's quote of the line about Thomas a' Becket is something I wanted to work in for a while. Oddly, I'm not sure the players caught it.

* I always intended for Chaos to live another session, as the player wanted to come back and it would make no sense to give him another character.

* My original intent was to have Morgan give his exposition-heavy speech to Chaos then. But after thinking it over, I thought I was stretching plausibility with the timeline as it was.

* Starting with the first scene taking place before the end of last session confused the PCs at first.

* Chaos' rescue was a good mix of tension and hilarity.

* A lot of valuable clues burned up in that lake house. The original intent was to have the PCs a place to search.

* Though it wasn't made clear in the game, three other NPCs died in that explosion because they were assistants to the cult - Morgan's chauffeur, his cook, and his secretary.

* Mulroney insisting to Yulian the Niven monster was dead, when everyone knew OOC that it wasn't, was a lot of fun.

* The padlock on the shed was to keep people out, not really keep Niven in. I'm not sure that was understood.

* The bats were perhaps a bit much, but I'm claiming dramatic license.

* Many a joke about a donkey wheel being at the bottom of the island well was made.

* Yulian and Chaos disappearing was excellent (and the result of some truly terrible rolls).

* At one point, the Mulroney player thought it was all very Hardy Boys esque. I told him, unfortunately, his dad the cop wouldn't be coming to save him (though only if VanDamme would have been able to make it).

* We got quite the laugh out of realizing Mulroney was alone in the dark and left with the choice of the creepy well or the haunted forest.

* I planned Woodhenge as a set piece in my earlier planning days. It seemed just the right level of creepy / strange.

* I wanted Morgan to have a moment to explain the reasons behind the cabal. I had hinted (a lot) that eugenics was related. There were a lot of other clues the PCs never found that would have made some of the exposition less necessary.

* The other point was to make sure and establish that the cabal was a group of rich, old racists because that always makes for good villains.

* So why was Phelan Fitzroy (who is presumably Irish) and Krasnik (a Russian Jew) allowed to join the cabal of white supremacists? Well, that was meant to be a case of strange bedfellows for the greater good.

* At one point in my planning, Phelan Fitzroy's slot was actually taken by Nicholas Rumple, the owner of the local department store. There was also another subplot later about recruiting Rumple to fill the senator's slot, though I cut that as well.

* Krasnik was designed to be Prendergast's patsy. He thought he was creating the perfect human worker. In reality, Prendergast was usng a magical form of bioengineering to insert transmutagenic material from Chahok (a deep one on the same level of power as Dagon) into people, turning them into deep ones (or in the case of Niven, something more).

* In my original plot notes, Niven was never supposed to have left the island. Instead, the pre-Niven creature, one of the last prisoners - Arkady Rossovich, was the one running loose in the city.

* Also lost in the hustle of things was the clarification that none of the people injected were really dead. The injection produced a death-like state as part of the transformation period. Krasnik was experimenting on prisoners because they wouldn't be missed (and dock workers because Fitzroy thought the anarchists were interfering too much).

* During the session, Mulroney didn't actually identify the cultists. It was added into the write-up because I wanted to be clear who was / wasn't in the cabal.

* Yulian freeing Chaos to make him a diversion was excellent. And more foreshadowing about what he had in store for Mulroney.

* Prendergast finally coming forward was long planned. Naturally, he was ready for the island assault and had already built up an army of creatures.

* At one point in my plans, the amulet Mulroney found was going to be explained, but I ultimately cut that part out. In any event, it was part of what he found of the serpent people in the middle east.

* Prendergast's comments about it being "time again" was inspired by the villain from the (IMO, badly underrated) movie, Halloween III (as was woodhenge).

* In one early draft of my notes, Prendergast himself was intended to be a serpent man.

* I was hoping the knife would have hit; sort of a Big Trouble in Little China moment.

* I didn't describe Prendergast's body decomposing during the session, but should have.

* Yulian slitting Mulroney's throat was unexpected, though it shouldn't have been in retrospect. Great playing of the character.

* Again, I love the ending of sailing off to Gary.

FYI to anyone following this thread - the AP thread for my new Traveller 2300 AD campaign, "Rise of the Sathar" is now up.

You can find it here: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=28347