Burning Down Mesopotamia

ActualPlay and game notes from a game I ran in September, 2005.

Wushu is my game of choice for pick-up games when we're missing a bunch of people and don't want to run the regular game. On this particular saturday, only three of us could make it. One had played my previous Wushu game. The great thing about Wushu is that you can understand enough to play from watching a single round of combat, so learning the system wasn't a speedbump for the guy who hadn't played before.

Setup

I had literally nothing planned, so I asked the other guys what kind of game they wanted to play. The Matrix, Star Wars, sword and sorcery? They picked sword and sorcery. I described a bit of setting to them (bronze age mesopotamia/conan movies), and we made characters.

CreatingCharacters is always a snap. You come up with a concept and a name, you write down primary, secondary, and tertiary traits at 5/4/3 respectively, and pick a weakness and assign it a 1.

We ended up with Gom, the nomadic horseman with a rage-control problem, and Arak the Red, a blood mage who likes the booze a little too much. I wasn't sure what he meant by "blood mage", but allowed it as a trait on the theory that we'd work it out in details. The player turned out to have a pretty good, if gory and occasionally silly, idea what he meant, and it worked fine.

Game

The players decided they were in the city, Uruk, to sell some gems they had "obtained" in their latest escapades. They bargained with Omar the gem merchant for a fair price for their ill-gotten goods, though neither of them knew what they were worth. The merchant said these were genie stones, and he offered them a pile of treasure for them. They still suspected they had been cheated, but went off to find a bar to lighten this heavy burden of gold they now carried. I believe Arak bought some chickens for later sacrifice.

Preparation is overrated. The game literally began when one of the players said, "How much will you give us for these gems?" I had nothing planned, so quite a bit of this was me reacting to them. The next scene began as they went to find a bar, and Arak said to Gom, "try not to burn this one down until after we've drunk, eh?"

The Cup

A bar is marked by a carved sign displaying a cup of ale. Gom and Arak swagger in.

"Oy, you there, you burned down my last bar, whaddar you thinking about, coming in here?" The bartender points and shouts, and lots of large, angry patrons are glowering at our heroes.

"I'm just here to drink. You fight them." Arak takes a seat and swipes a pot of beer. Arak's weakness in action- drinking. If there's an opportunity to drink, and he doesn't, all his actions use a trait of 1. So most of his yin and yang dice for the rest of the scene involved mugs, drinking, and punching people for spilling his booze.

Battle is joined. Gom holds his own, beating on the rowdy patrons with his fists, elbows, a stool, a serving tray, logs from the firepit, and various hapless passers-by.

Don't be afraid to veto details for not fitting in. Gom originally declared that he hurled the serving tray and cut someone in half with it, which I vetoed as silly.

Arak occasionally heaved an empty at a target, but really got involved when one of Gom's details involved tossing a patron down a table where his head smashed Arak's drink.

Arak rose, grabbed a chicken, called out a prayer to his bloodthirsty god, and decapitated the fowl, spraying its blood at the patrons. They were first disgusted, and then horrified, as the blood began to smolder and then burst into flame.

Arak then went into the back room to find the good booze.

Gom surveyed the carnage. As the coup de grace, he tossed the rude bartender out his own window. Between the logs from the fire and the chicken-blood napalm, they had well and truly burnt down another tavern. He hadn't even had anything to eat yet.

Fire

Gom realized he hadn't seen Arak come out of the building, which was blazing merrily. He wrapped his cape around his face and pushed back in.

Arak had found the good stuff in the back room, and was napping soundly. (His player narrated this, I didn't inflict it on them, I swear.)

This was a minor challenge for Gom, an 8 or 10 threat rating, with escalating danger, 1 the first round, 2 the second, 3 the third, and so on. I think he accomplished it in three rounds. It's a nice change of pace to have an environmental challenge or two. An all-combat game can be hard to maintain, for both players and GM, without becoming repetitive.

Gom ducked falling roof and ceiling, kicked away furniture, coughed in the black smoke, and rumbled around the bar until he tripped over his friend and hauled him out.

Outside, a bucket brigade had formed to fight the fire. An arrow whistled down from a far-off rooftop, with a message tied to it. Gom couldn't read, so Arak unrolled it.

"The gems you sold so cheaply are more valuable than you can imagine. Retrieve them for us and we will reward you well, ignore us and you will die horribly."

It was signed: the Cult of the Djinn.

The Merchant

Not knowing what to make of this, Gom and Arak went off to find their merchant friend, Omar. The day had turned to evening, so the market was nearly deserted. They went to his home in the nearby neighborhood. The front door was ajar, and the house was quiet, not bustling with evening activity like other homes.

Gom choked up on his great axe, and crept into the building. Arak followed close behind.

The place had obviously been ransacked. They found the servants' bodies in the kitchen, and Omar was discovered upstairs on his bed, dead of many stab wounds.

Arak declared that he knew an antique ritual that would let him see the last thing the dead man saw, but he would require Omar's eyes. Gom went about the gruesome task.

Arak held the orbs in his hands and raised them up, once, twice, thrice, toward the sky, then closed his eyes and entered the trance.

The player originally wanted to resurrect the dead merchant, which I vetoed as out of genre. He came up with this instead. I let him use his blood magic trait for this innovative investigation technique. It was danger 1 and challenge rating 6 or so, so it took a couple of rounds at a 6-die cap for him to pull it off, but he did.

Arak saw nothing at first, only darkness. Then his mind's eye snapped open and he saw cowled and masked figures standing above him as he lay on Omar's bed. The grabbed him by his nightshirt, shook him, shouted at him silently- all he had were eyes, not ears. Apparently unsatisfied with Omar's answers, the last thing Arak saw before losing the vision was when Omar looked down at his own chest and saw the knife sticking out.

They poked around the rest of the house and found the merchant's ledger, indicating he had sold the gems to a warlock who lived outside of town. Apparently the cultists had not discovered this.

The Warlock's Tower

As everyone knows, warlocks are eunuchs, and traffic with demons for power. What he wanted with those gems was unknown, but they struck out for his dwelling, a day's ride north of the city. Arak stocked up on chickens before they left town. They noticed men on horseback shadowing them on the road, keeping a half-mile or so back, but deliberately ignored them.

The warlock's dwelling was a squat, mud-brick citadel surrounded by a low wall. The garden within promised to hide unwholesome things. Gom strolled up and kicked open the gate, casting about for something to hit.

The garden certainly did not lack for that. A number of dwarf beasts milled about, some upright and some on all fours, shaggy and horned but with an intelligent look in their eyes.

"What are these?" Gom called back to Arak. Arak nodded sagely. "The eunuch's children by his infernal concubines." "Those must be their big brothers!" From around the tower came more, bigger, more unholy abombinations, 8 and 9 feet tall, with the heads of goats and bulls and lizards.

Gom fought the beasts blow for blow. They came at him with stones and trees from the garden; he fought back with fist and axe and forehead. Arak slaughtered another chicken to spray the smaller beasts with blood that caused boils and swift death.

They burst into the citadel and found the entry floor deserted. The floorboards above creaked with movement, so they rushed up the ladder to the warlock's refuge.

The old man awaited them there, surrounded by his beasts. "Why have you attacked me?" he whined. "I've done nothing to you."

Gom and Arak demanded that he give them the gems he bought yesterday in the market. He agreed, which surprised them, but then his creatures attacked them while the warlock himself shuddered and screamed and grew into a scaly, clawed, fanged monster, fairly 10 feet tall.

The eunuch's workshop was filled with breakable things, bronzework, powders, potions, and concoctions, and all of these things were hurled about in the battle. Arak slit one creature's throat to invoke the blood fire again, but luckily the mud-brick of the tower didn't go up as fast as the wood and reed bar.

Finally the warlock, desperate to escape, clawed open the ceiling and flew out on great bat wings. Gom hurled his axe at the man-beast and felled him to the garden below. Both fled from the smokey, crumbling workshop.

Gom, remembering their mission, had to go back in to find the gems.

Cultists

The cowled men awaited them in the light of the roaring inferno. "Give us the Djinn! They were stolen from us, and must be ours again!"

Gom and Arak had technically already profited from the gems once, so they were actually okay with this. They gave the cultists the gems. The cult leader was shocked. He hadn't expected it to be nearly this easy. Surely his master would reward him for his service.

He cast the largest gem down onto the rocks and stomped on it, breaking it and releasing its prisoner with flash, flame, and a whirl of wind. The freed demon promptly thanked him for his service by allowing him to be its first victim, as it bit off his head and began catching up on a thousand years of hunger.

Most of the cultists panicked and fled, though some tried to fight the demon, and some tried to fight Gom and Arak.

Gom grabbed the other djinn stones and used them to pelt the creature, which hissed and flinched and retreated from their touch.

Arak was all out of chickens, and though there was a lot of blood around, it had to be released by his knife to work for him. He finally ended up opening his own arm to fight this devil, drawing a circle around himself in his own blood and invoking the ritual to cast it back to the abyss.

In the end, they were victorious, and the battered genie was sucked back into a void it was too weak to escape, hopefully banishing it forever. Gom and Arak had several more of the gems still unbroken, and figured they could probably sell them to a different merchant in a different town, if they played their cards right.

BurningDownMesopotamia