MRD2 Campaign PR 2: This Time With Golem

Second session, first in the Golem! I was a bit worried about this one because we're still getting in the groove and I didn't have much time to prep, but once again I felt really good about it.

MRD2 Campaign Setup

First Session PR

Also for whatever reason Blogger HTML is all screwed up in this post and despite my best efforts the formatting is a mess. Or maybe it's just on my device? I dunno, such is life.

RECAP

The Team are Nazarites, individuals contracted by The Corporation to serve various needs across Earth, the Space Settlements, and the metaphysical depths of Tehom. They are empowered by a Wyrm Shamir symbiont provided by The Corporation granting them metaphysical abilities, as well as a Golem, a mecha, or a magnification of something more abstract.

In this Campaign, they chose the following for the respective roles:

The Corporation

RegeXperience: “Live for the RegeXperience”. Childishly edgy experimental entertainment and defense company that doesn’t want the world to know what’s really behind their algorithm. EXPERIENCE, ALGORITHM, ENTERTAINMENT

The Manager

Baz Beetz: Infectiously enthusiastic “artiste” and true believer in the company mission who is as profound as nonsensical.

The Cyblessed Liaison

“Tastes like eating out the ass-end of human progress.”: Like a cheap flaccid little candle dripping wax down an otherwise glorious cake wearing a tacky suit reminiscent of a 1980’s faux-wood-paneled station wagon.

And of the two Issues available to them on their job board, they chose:

The Issue

The Quarterly earnings report is coming up soon, and The Corporation is anomalously underperforming.

• Several brand launches this Quarter were undercut by a previously unknown startup in San Francisco. The Corporation wants The Team to investigate The Startup on the pretense of a buyout.
• The Startup somehow acquired the licensing rights to the old Jingo Jangles cartoon, undercutting The Corporation’s upcoming Tempeh Toons licensed products line, just as the Jingo Jangles Museum is reopening.
• Several other corporations, including The Rival Corporation, have been hit by a similarly bad Quarter. The Cyblessed Liaisons intend to arrange a meeting in neutral territory, Venus City of Tehom.

In the meantime, events unfold in the Issue they did not choose, so expect to see an intersection of events at some point!

The Team

Ben as Larry

Nazarite Contract: Fast Lane Fintechnomancer

Golem: Lycaon Strain

Larry's past life was one of public mission in conscious contrarianism to his peers partying with the money of their employers. The brief accolades received from new acquaintances never quite made up for the lack of money and freedom. When he'd ask what others were doing to make the world a better place, they'd stare as if they had never considered the question before. What's the point of caring if no one else does?

Lukas as Icarus

Nazarite Contract: Infrared Ranger

Golem: Chemysterious Cascader

Was an heir to a crime family but betrayed them when his conscience caught up to him. In need of structure and a sense of justice, but without any good frame of reference and few other options, he shortly thereafter accepted the Nazarite Contract with The Corporation.

Huffa as Ernst

Nazarite Contract: Psychonautical Sub-Mariner

Golem: Forgetting Pile - An oozey amorphous Golem collective made of empowered trash and detritus.

An old man who trawls through the unconscious sea gathering the things people forget from their dreams. Sometimes its material that The Corporation deems useful.

Altchester (still unavailable :( )

Where we left off...

After playing Monty the Python's game, they successfully opened the door to the private office in the Jingo Jangles Museum, only to find themselves in a strange place bathed in red light...

Vessel of Tehom: Virtual Zoetrope Superhighway

• Three glistening ruby red rings, each the size of a five-lane kaiju-scaled superhighway, each lane separated by grooves, spinning around a spherical city-sized core like a record.
  
• A force like intense gravity would crush any normal human, and even Golem can barely jump in place. The atmosphere is also unsafe for humans.
  
• The core is an inky black, wet and slimy sac in a near-frozen state of mid-rupture.
  
• From a slit in space, an expressive eye watches, weeping with furious ambiguity.

Immediately The Team must summon their Golem or else be crushed! They were each asked to describe the process:

Larry: Pulls out a pocket knife and pricks his finger. The stream of blood flows, blood vessels expand to massive proportions, forming the Lycaon Strain.

Icarus: Ices himself, pouring out the last drops, and in an alcoholic psychedelic haze forms the Chemysterious Cascader.

Ernst: Whistles to the high winds, calling forth the trash from all across the Earth and space and the metaphysical depths of Tehom, merging into the magnificently malodorous Forgetting Pile.

They drop onto the Outer Ring where weird pixelated kaiju and transdimensional toons zoom along, and must describe how they navigate the traffic.

Larry (Lycaon Strain): The circulatory blood vessel mesh separates into congealed sub-masses and coalesces as it glides right through the traffic.

Icarus (Chemysterious Cascader): Uses his Disorientation Mirror (MIRAGE + ETHANOL) to induce drunkenness in those in his path, creating havoc and destruction in his wake.

Ernst (Forgetting Pile): Like with the Lycaon Strain, his trash piles separate and reconnect to pass right through traffic, leaving detritus and slick trash grease behind.

Design Notes

The purpose of having them suddenly dropped into this place, summoning their Golem, and describing how they navigate through this traffic, was intended to get them oriented with their Golem. Thinking about how they summon it and what that says about them and the Golem, how it moves, how it interacts with environments and objects, etc.

Outer Ring

• Doughboy and The Dreadnaughty
• Office Cube
• Drag-On Dragon
• Leaping Lorenzinos

I gave them a brief description of the events above, described in further detail below. Doughboy was in their immediate vicinity, the others got loose descriptions but they'd have to go closer (or wait for them to get closer) to get the full details.

Design Notes

This whole space is quite weird, and I was worried if they would be able to understand how to navigate the space. We discuss how the core has a gravity, but there's a competing centripetal force from the rings, so the Golem can move along the grooves or jump slightly, but can't fly between rings which have as much space between them as the size of each of the rings themselves.

I actually realized as we talked it out that I was thinking of the rings as laying horizontally, but that description didn't make sense given the competing forces.

That said, it required barely more than 30s conversing to get on the same page and collaboratively define the space. Yes it's weird, and ya it's likely we're all seeing it in our heads slightly differently. But if the Players define for themselves how they interact with the space and I confirm or disconfirm their assumptions and we continue to stick to our own rules reliably, it all goes smoothly enough.

Doughboy and The Dreadnaughty

The Transdimensional Toon Doughboy (from previous session) is piloting a precarious tower of WW1-era Dreadnoughts held together by a scaffold of oversized sexy mannequin legs in pantyhose and garterbelt.

Don’t worry, I’m here to help! (Save or take Td6 from a jumble of dreadnought guns set off prematurely). I swear that doesn’t usually happen!

Karmic Attachment Opportunity: Rather than leave Doughboy to fend for himself, accept his “help”, and be “grateful”, even as he bumbles his way into making more problems for you.

The Team chose to ignore Doughboy at the onset. However, because they're driving on a spinning ring, they were able to circle back to him, and Ernst ends up accepting the Karmic Attachment Opportunity with Doughboy before they leave the Outer Ring.

Design Notes

I like the mechanics of Karmic Attachments and how it affects encounter design and player agency. I have mixed feelings about continuing to use the Buddhist concept of Karma in MRD2, not for any philosophical reason but because it might be confusing since that's more the focus of MRD1 than MRD2, but for now I'm just going with that and I might later change it to something more rooted in Jewish philosophy but still mechanically the same or similar.

Office Cube

An office cube glides across the grooves of the ring, inside which are tacky low-res VR holograms. The cubes are human-scale on the inside, but The Team would need some kind of protection to safely exit their Golem to enter the cubes.

• The office workers are from The Startup, and seem as surprised by The Team’s presence as The Team are likely to be by theirs.
• The Founder is not in the office at the moment, and The Cofounder is on a business trip to Venus City.
• As far as the employees knew (or are willing to admit), this was just an AR/VR-space, not a Vessel of Tehom.

Ernst uses the Forgetting Pile to create a trash corridor connecting to the cube to enter inside. After some confusion, he is mistaken for an AI janitor created by The Cofounder. He gets some information as above, and learns that there are more Office Cubes on the other Rings, including Office Cubes for The Founder's and Cofounder's offices on the Inner Ring.

Meanwhile, Icarus and Larry encounter The Drag-On Dragon on a collision course right towards them!

Drag-On Dragon

Draconic DeLorean-esque drag racing Transdimensional Toon Kaiju. Claws press into the grooves of the rings, shearing spacetime in sparks and flames of entropy revealing a sterile white business conference room with a full audience, once per rotation (i.e. round). 

• An ambiguous shadow of a person gives an autobiographical one-person show account of their first failed business while a laugh track mocks them. They had developed an algorithm for interpolating frames of animation that also incorporated style transfer (DWAI [Don't Worry About It] except that they work in animation), but a corporation lowballed them for a buyout and when they refused the corporation reverse engineered it for themselves.
• On a loop, the Drag-On Dragon drags and clings, fails, spins out in a roll, eventually to re-right itself and do it all again.
• 20 HP; Sd6 (transdimensional friction entropy), Phid6 (claws/body)
• If The Team engages the Drag-On Dragon, have some debris or something else escape across the dimensions, demonstrating how they can affect the show.
• Each round the one-person show loops. The facts can’t be changed, but the interpretation of them can. The Drag-On Dragon will dissipate if the outcome of the show is successfully altered.
• KAO: Help the shadow see the story from a new perspective, but know that there will be ramifications in the material world.

After about one round of physical Conflict with the Drag-On Dragon, The Team decide to engage with the one-person show instead. They hypothesize from Ernst's information that the shadow is likely The Cofounder.

Icarus chooses to accept the Karmic Attachment Opportunity, leading to the dissolution of the Drag-On Dragon. He alters the perception of the shadow using one of his mind-bending Gear of the Chemysterious Cascader (I don't remember which offhand anymore...) so that the shadow sees these events as more of a learning experience, and to be more careful with their intellectual property in the future.

Design Notes

I had been starting to have doubts about whether it made sense to give Golem their own Ability Scores as I had originally intended, and we discussed this in our debrief at the end of the session. As is, this would mean six Ability Scores to keep track of (three for the Nazarites and Golem each), with each acting as their own damage pools. The Gear already make the Golem interesting enough, and we also discussed maybe a stripped down version of a "tapping" system similar to Batteries Not Included to force PCs to engage more tactically with how they use their Gear. 

That said, at least in this session, there will be references to the Golem Ability Scores Physical (PHYS/Phi), Technical (TECH/T), and SPECIAL (SPEC/S).

Leaping Lorenzinos

Kaiju-sized pixelated chromatic creatures with petit dancers’ lower body, bodybuilders’ upper body, and UFO for heads, leap-dance from ring to ring, giggling “ho-ho!” with joy, perfectly coordinated and without regard for The Team.

• KAO: One Leaping Lorenzino has a broken(-off) leg, and is getting trampled, crying “oh-noh!”. Fix his leg, but also, help him bring joy through anachronistic art.
• “How can I bring joy to the audience when I’m ruining the choreography!?”
• A disembodied audience like a pre-recorded track can be heard booing.
• If his leg is fixed, he’ll carry The Team between rings whenever he revolves to their position.

The Team actually ignored the Leaping Lorenzinos on the Outer Ring, instead using Forgetting Pile's trash and Lycaon Strain's blood mesh to create a bridge. Doughboy in The Dreadnaughty runs up begging to come along, which is when Ernst makes the Karmic Attachment, which then leads to Dreadnaughty accidentally blowing up the bridge as Icarus in Chemysterious Cascader is crossing, leading to a desperate and daring leap, barely sealing the landing, and losing one of his Mods, but otherwise crossing unscathed.

That said, on the Middle Ring they end up doing something that incidentally breaks a Leaping Lorenzino's leg, giving me the opportunity to reintroduce the KAO, at which point Larry ends up accepting the Karmic Attachment.

Design Notes

While The PCs did use their Gear quite a bit, they did not use their Mods much. They only have I think one Mod each right now anyway, and there was one encounter in the Middle Ring where they may have gotten more but they mostly bypassed that encounter. I will try to be better in future sessions about giving them more Mods and creating circumstances which encourage their use.

My hope is that, like with Karmic Attachments, once a GM gets in the habit of supplying them, and Players get in the habit of engaging with the game in that way, that it'll be more seamless.

Middle Ring

• Office Cube
• Leaping Lorenzinos
• Transcending Descender

The Team are immediately confronted by The Transcending Descender.

Transcending Descender

Words scrolling left to right, down, left to right, down, like if a vector monitor were a typewriter. The words narrate themselves, this very statement. They also say, or rather, I say, that I know why you’re here. Perhaps, I know better than you do. Do you know why you are here? How did you end up in this place? What decisions led to this moment? Will it have been worth it, in the end, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, following the user generated content catered to your wants and interests, to sell you things. Did you enjoy the things they convinced you to want? Are you happy? How much has your “happiness” cost others? Was it worth it? My words descend and descend, and they have every intent to crush you, and if they fail, they will loop back to the beginning, and do it all over again, endlessly. There is no escape, only confrontation. You must confront this. You must confront me.

• KAO: Choose not to confront. Know that the Transcending Descender will follow. It’s not about denying the thing, as much as recognizing that confrontation per se solves nothing.
• HP: NA, Sd8. Each attack deletes a sentence. Sentences that have other sentences below them can’t be attacked. 
• When a sentence is destroyed, a Word representing its meaning falls (e.g. “You must confront this”: Confrontation; “Was it worth it?”: Retrospect).
• These Words can be used as Mods, or used to attempt to communicate with the Transcending Descender.
• The Transcending Descender can’t be defeated through Conflict alone; either it must be fled, ignored, or successfully communicated with.

I gave The Team basically one "free round" before the sentences would be in range, giving them essentially two turns each to confront it or escape to the Inner Ring. While they did not choose to confront it, they also didn't really engage with it at all in a way that would apply for the KAO.

On the one hand I was a little disappointed that they bypassed this encounter because I think it would have been fun, but ultimately the session didn't feel worse off for it so oh well. It is unfortunately ironic that this got disregarded, so I might try to do something devious with this in the future...

They also skipped the Office Cubes in this Ring (consisting of a cafeteria and lobby area, not The Founder and Cofounder Offices that they were interested in), so they basically just talked with the Leaping Lorenzinos as previously described, before arriving on the Inner Ring.

Inner Ring

• Office Cubes
• Leaping Lorenzinos
• ???

The Inner Ring is comparatively barren, with just the Office Cubes and Leaping Lorenzinos. Dreadnaughty accidentally destroys one of the cubes, and I offer The Team to make a Karma roll to decide which Cube is destroyed. They wanted to investigate The Cofounder's Office more, but failed the Karma roll, so they get The Founder's instead.

Inside the virtual space is a simulacrum of The Founder's actual office, and a bunch of free-floating encrypted files.

Icarus uses Infrared Immolation Nazarite Feature to apply a "brute force algorithm" approach to decrypting some of the files. They also investigate some objects in the office. They learn that The Founder, despite previously being described in the other Office Cube as being "dreamy", is also a big dork with Gundam action figures, Star Wars posters, Jingo Jangles memorabilia, etc. He also has a case for a high-tech helmet that he wears, seemingly for medical reasons. 

The files allude to some time off after “the illness”, and subsequently the big technical breakthrough leading to the Jingo Jangles deal. Additional references to the “transfer of power” on Tomino’s Array and what role The Startup will play in it.

Tomino's Array is one of the Space Settlements and was at the heart of the other Issue that they did not choose. They learned that Tomino's Array was dealing with a piracy problem, an outbreak of genetically engineered creatures gone rogue, and an encroaching fleet of Amalekites, a human civilization long-lost in Tehom which has come back to try to take Earth which they see as rightfully theirs.

They attempt to leave with the remaining encrypted files, and Larry uses his Nazarite Feature Transcranial Tachyonic Stimulator to cause the security wall to trigger prior to the action of attempting to cross the wall with the files, allowing them to escape with the rest of the files to decrypt later.

Design Notes

I think the Transcranial Tachyonic Stimulator is a really cool Feature, but one that is conceptually kind of difficult. I was prepared to play fast and loose with it, but I was genuinely concerned if it would be viable or not, so I'm glad to see it get used effectively already in session 2!

In general, the Players felt like they got to use a lot of their Features and Gear pretty freely and felt good about how they were able to interact with the game, so that's all very encouraging.

Entropy Elancer

The core ruptures, and the auto-erotic necro-rgasmic moan of an entire civilization whines at a jarring frequency like poking at a blister, before turning tinny, and abruptly and prematurely ceasing. Amid the destruction, a merely normal-sized Golem not unlike The Team’s elances onto the Inner Ring as if it were a stage. Strobing lights flutter like bugs in the sky and the Entropy Elancer dances in myoclonic jerks masquerading frames between moments of light like a kinesthetic zombie artform. Dead bodies and viscera in detailed Transdimensional Toon form slough off its sleek body apathetically.

Wrap-Up

The "Big Boss" of this Vessel of Tehom. We chose to leave this off as a cliffhanger for next session, so that should be a fun way to start things off!

I've been writing Design Notes throughout this post so I don't have too much wrap-up stuff to say, except that I'm really satisfied with how this is going.

Also, in addition to the aforementioned Design Notes, I tried to be more detail-oriented in this PR in terms of not just posting my GM Notes but also explaining how things actually played out (I drafted this only a couple days after the session this time which probably helped).

I also tried to make this post more fun to read, so I hope I was successful in that regard. If you think I was successful in making this PR more fun to read, please let me know.