Songs for the Dusk: Mission 2 Recap
Nov. 6th, 2025 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dismallyorientedWe continue on to Mission 2, a really straightforward and fun romp of a mission and an immediate favorite. dO, you may say, isn't 2 missions into a campaign a bit early to pick a favorite? And you'd be correct, because mission 3 is also already a fucking banger. But you have to understand. This was pulpy science fantasy adventure bullshit par excellence.
NPCs List:
- The Stranger (they/them) - secretive, dangerous, impulsive - Mysterious vagabond who arrived at The Crashpad for undisclosed reasons. Seems to possess dangerous levels of magical power, not unlike the dragon we rescued from Mission 1
- Cetacea Hardin (she/her) - wary, stubborn, outgoing - New Haven's militia commander and chief of security. Mid-50s, knows everyone in town and a friendly face. Does not do internal police work, mostly she keeps tabs on Dragon's Rest, the pump station, and other external threats. A bit of a homebody, somewhat suspicious of Radiant technology (including DIONE), and collector of rumors.
- The Scrappers Union - local scrap and machinist worker organization. On slightly bad terms with the Crashers, as we ended up taking a town resource they wanted, and DIONE likes us better.
- Lily Constant (she/it) - sturdy, motherly, steady - Isaiah Constant's spouse; community scout, very scarred; MILF
---
Mission 2: Nebula Collapse
Some days after the stranger arrives, New Haven begins experiencing a spate of intermittent earthquakes. They started out small at first, but have escalated in duration and intensity, to the point that townsfolk have started taking things down from shelves, and doing routine checks on outdoor equipment and electronics after each quake. Eventually the commander of the town militia, Cetacea Hardin, comes to pay us a visit and request our help.
As you may recall from our Quiet Year game, there is a large sinkhole in the valley, where the underground lake and Radiant Era apocalypse bunker are. New Haven sent the Scrappers Union down there to try and investigate the tremors, and they discovered the source - "a transcendent spirit of Frankly Worrying size." Some described it as "a mole the size of the Library," while others claim it was "like a colony of ants" or a flood of undifferentiated transcendent energy. Neither the Scrappers Union nor the militia are experienced with handling spirits, so when Cetacea asked DIONE for advice on what to do next, DIONE recommended our crew.[1] If we can take care of the spirit, the tremors will stop. She gives us a map annotated by the Scrappers Union from their expedition, and we start preparing.
Gail and Momo go to interview the Scrappers Union to try and get more detail on what they saw. Three of them insist that it was a Library-sized mole, which could tunnel through stone like it was nothing, and seemed to move like a ghost, in the sense of digging through seemingly empty space. The other two scrappers are dead set on it actually being a swarm of tiny spirits moving as one, like a carpet of ants, tunneling as a gestalt and collapsing the ground behind them as they went. One thing all five of them can agree on, however, is that the spirit(s) are Not Happy.
Yara and Momo head to the Library - Yara looks for records of previous Sinkhole expeditions, trying to learn about navigational hazards and previous events that might have been related. She finds a detailed map of the tunnel system, with a smaller specific cavern that overlaps roughly with the spirit sightings on the Scrapper map. Meanwhile, Momo hits the books to figure out more about the potential spirit and clear up the mixed eyewitness reports. The information she gets is also mixed - there are stories about both spirits with multiple forms and shapeshifters. Per Momo's best guess, either there are two different sets of spirits down there (odd, but not unheard of), or this spirit is a shapeshifter - which is rarer and Very Dangerous.
Quentim tries to assemble caving kits for the crew, so they're better equipped to traverse in the Sinkhole. He goes around town calling in favors and borrowing things to cobble together into a workable equipment kit. Unfortunately, I roll like shit, so we get Poor quality kits, which must be returned in good condition back to the people I borrowed them from.[2] Whoops.
Marl goes to do some threat assessment research, working the local rumor mill to talk to folks who've been down there in the past. She finds Lily Constant, Isaiah's spouse and the town scout. Lily warns it that the cave system is unstable - don't fuck with the caves, don't dig around in there, and don't do anything big or destructive. She describes The Atrium, the smaller cavern described on Yara's map (it's implied that she's the one who made it). The cavern is held up by a series of large columns, all of which must be treated as load-bearing. Especially don't follow the spirit into any burrows it makes, to avoid getting lost or trapped by a cave-in. And if any of us get trapped, sit tight, send a message out, and Lily will come find us. But if we absolutely have to leave the area we're stuck in, we can try one of the arterial side passages to find a way back to the surface.
The GM, having thoroughly set up the arena puzzle boss fight, asks the players how they want to engage, and what location. Unfortunately she sold the structural danger a little too hard, because one player immediately veto'd going to the Atrium and suggested luring the mole spirit(s) to the underground lake instead. Thankfully this was not actually a problem, such are GM plans and player improvisation. But it was an incredibly funny turn of events.
The final plan we come up with is this: we take the Patient approach, sending our various recon drones to locate where the spirit(s) are before laying a trap with the Witch's spirit beacon to lure it over. A reasonably solid plan for trying to direct the behavior of unpredictable wild creature(s). Unfortunately. We fail the engagement roll. So while we do find a massive Library-sized mole, it vanishes from everyone's sight after we turn on the beacon - just in time to tunnel back up and out directly underneath us. Marl hollers at everyone to move just as it breaks ground, and as we scramble for cover, she sees the Stranger clinging to the mole's back for dear life.
---
We start the mission at a Desperate position - the giant enraged mole slams onto the ground, releasing a shockwave of force *and* transcendental energy, which knocks out the lights. The cave is plunged into darkness with nothing but faint luminescence from the cavern walls and reflecting off the perfectly windless lake. Yara springs into action, using her owl-person eyesight to try and navigate to the lights and find out what's wrong. Closer investigation shows that all of our lights have popped a fuse from the shockwave. Gail, having leveled up in between missions, uses her new ability Charmhack to magically repair the lights all at once - it races over to one of the lights, eyes glowing bright green before a trail of green lights sparks its way down the wires, and all the lights come back to life.
Momo grabs her charmwave suppressor - a small device that can suppress transcendent effects in a limited radius. It's not powerful enough to do anything to the mole, but it does release a somewhat violent shockwave when it's deactivated. Quentim uses Not a Problem to gin up a supply of mole pheromones to briefly distract the spirit while Momo gets close enough to attach the suppressor. The mole "lets out a loud, bassy squeak" before trying to dive back into the ground and tunnel away, but Momo resists this consequence, having built her suppressor in a way that hampers the mole's tunneling ability. Marl lines up a shot with her sparkrifle - a small arcing bolt of lightning spears through the air to the suppressor, knocking it out and triggering the shockwave. The mole explodes into a flood of smaller moles that blanket the cave "like a carpet of ants". Marl sees the Stranger get physically launched ("gently smoking") into the darkness outside the ring of lights.
The mole flood is still agitated as hell by the sound of the spirit beacon, so we *gotta* turn that shit off. Unfortunately now we have to navigate our way through the aforementioned mole flood. Gail hands Quentim a container of somnic smoke from her toolkit, with a terse admonishment not to screw this up. He ties the container to his ankle in an attempt to get the smoke down at mole level and keep it out of his face, but he still ends up breathing too much smoke and takes the Level 1 harm "Drowsy," collapsing before he reaches the beacon. The moles recover from the suppressor shockwave and begin angrily swarming the people who have given them misophonia.
Momo modifies her repulsor sigil to create a Mole Repulsion Forcefield, leaving her familiars unable to find purchase. Gail nabs her slipwater to slide all the way over to the spirit beacon, surfing through the moleswarm and charmhacking the beacon to reverse the polarity and turn it to a calming frequency instead. In response, the moles burrow all at once back into the ground, pockmarking it full of holes.
Quentim finally climbs back to his feet and does a team role call. Once everyone is confirmed to be upright and okay, Momo recalls the stranger. We see them fleeing into the tunnels, and decide to give chase. Marl reminds us that we need some people to also track down the moles and figure out what was upsetting them, so Quentim and Momo stay behind to use the familiars and a beetle drone to track them remotely.
Tunnelgang give chase, with Yara and Gail utilizing their drones while Marl draws on its tracking skills. A Lotus Gambit brings the tunnel caving in behind them, but the stranger turns out to very trackable, moving slowly and not hiding their passage. Yara shouts to get their attention and it startles them so badly they eat shit on the tunnel floor. They're pretty banged up from the mole encounter.
Stranger asks what they're doing here, and Yara flips the question back at them. They reply, "It's complicated, so's the reason I'm here, don't worry about it." This fails to convince anyone not to worry about it. Tunnelgang eventually wheedle enough information out of them to confirm that everyone is here to stop the tremors. When the Stranger insists that they leave, Gail points back at the cave-in. She tries to convince the Stranger to accept help, as, "[She's] learned recently it's not good to rush into things alone when there are people to help." Marl backs her up, bluntly pointing out how badly beat-up they are. The Stranger acquiesces, but not before leaving Gail with the Level 1 harm "Chastised"
Molegang goes to scout down the recently-made mole holes, but got distracted by the cave-in. When we can't get back in contact with Tunnelgang, we start trying to clear the blockage with the crew's antigraviton engines and some demolition kits. Thankfully, they're able to contact us through the team comms packs.[3] We get jumpscared by the ringing. Yara updates us on the situation, lets us know about the demo tools she packed so she can lay charges on the other side of the blockage. I fire off Long Thought so that the graviton engines were already set up in anticipation of a cave-in, so they're quickly fired up and ready to go. We crit the roll and manage to move the rubble in such a way that the mouth of that tunnel is reinforced, and we have a guaranteed way back out. This does disturb the moles again somewhat, as the explosion reverberates.
Quentim gets a ping on his smart slate- a notification that his messenger beetle was destroyed. Momo's familiar, however, sees the mole coalescing in the large central chamber of the Atrium. There's lots of chittering and scrabbling through the feed, but also a low, mechanical, repetitive noise and the hum of machinery. This is probably what's been pissing it off.
---
Session 3 begins with Momo and Quentim conferring on how to approach the Atrium. We're able to construct a way there from the surveying we did as part of the engagement roll, and notify Tunnelgang that we're on the way over.
While walking, Yara and Gail talk about the Charmhack stunt. Yara asks Gail if she could do it again, and offers to help it practice the skill back at the Crashpad. She takes her up on the offer. They also spend some time conversing with the Stranger. Gail asks the Stranger if they can fill everyone in on what the plan is. The Stranger considers this, before replying, “Not yet.” The group are able to get a couple of answers from them - the tremors are definitely caused by the mole, their plan for taking care of it was...highly improvisational, until we arrived, and the Stranger is a traveler who hasn't been in this area for a long time. As the GM puts it, "They're a bit reticent, partially because you blew them up. It's very much an Oh, these idiots are going to get themselves or someone else hurt." Suppose I can't blame them.
Gail notices that the Stranger is faintly glowing, and dims its flashlight to try and get a better look (this gets some weird looks from the Stranger and Yara). The glow is reminiscent of faint noonday sunlight, complete with radiating heat. There's also a shape to it, bright and dim areas that form a silhouette around them - the neck, the ears, their hands when exerting force. It's vaguely animalistic, adding points to their ears and claws to their hands. Gail asks them very directly about the glowing and the Stranger suggests that everyone stay quiet to avoid alerting the mole. Yeah, I'd play the quiet game too.
Yara then asks Gail how she's feeling about the dinner argument. Gail tries to dodge the question, playing things off. Yara agrees to leave it alone, but is fully Aware that it's not actually fine, leaving Gail to feel like it's earned a 2-for-1 social flub.
Quentim and Momo reach the Atrium, the mechanical sounds getting louder as they get close. We spy the mole as it's reforming, "a slime toy coalescing into a single ball." The Atrium is a huge cavern, with four massive central pillars glistening with water, each about half as thick as the mole. The mole-glow lights the space, but we cannot triangulate the source of the noise.
Quentim asks Momo if she can talk to the mole like she did with the dragon last mission. Momo says yes, theoretically, but the mole could still get aggressive. It'd be better to locate the source of the noise first to reduce the risk of it lashing out. I use Not A Problem to provide a noise-tracking device, and we sneak around the mole to locate the source - a steel blast door framed in concrete. Whatever's making it is behind there. The mole finally spots us, but we disrupt its reformation with a jury-rigged spirit repellent stinkbomb.
A Lotus Gambit means that the Stranger notices Momo's dragon-containing backpack. Tunnelgang catches up with us as the mole notices us, and the Stranger is immediately furious to see a "trapped" dragon wisp. They sprint toward Momo, and Yara and Gail join in assuming this is part of their plan. Marl sighs and follows, getting ready to intervene. Unfortunately there is a half-formed megamole between us, and because this half-formed mole is still dripping smaller moles off of it, it still counts as a small gang.
Momo's immediate reaction is to dive at the dripping mole, hoping that her repulsor sigil will repel a Kool-Aid Man hole around her. She shouts, "Mole! Hole! Leg!" as she charges, giving Marl just enough warning to square up and shoot its sparkrifle to help clear the way. She nearly clips Momo with the shot, but her automatic aiming system alerts her and the bolt only ends up singing Momo's hair. Momo barrels through the mole, getting crushed and overwhelmed by the sheer mass and weight but making it to the other side. Yara swoops in with a medkit to help set their bones and stabilize the injuries. The mole's leg sheers off cleanly, collapsing into a rapidly dissipating mass of small moles.
The Stranger is still intent on their revenge rampage, but Yara derails them by commanding them to hold Momo's torniquet so she can get over to the blast door and figure out how to open it. The blast door control panel is a very chunky intercom panel with 7 lights - very analog, like the tech in the dragon room. Yara tries to guess the passcode, but fails, activating the extremely bright and loud alarms and angering the mole. It flails its way into some of the columns, destabilizing the structure. Gail runs to the door, intending to short it out with a zap token. Meanwhile Yara is trying to crack open the console. The player starts out using repair tools, until the GM points out that Yara has Fine Climbing Tools, including an axe, which would have greater effect. GM gives the lotus bargain that, "Whatever genie you open behind these doors cannot be sealed again." Yara crits, completely wrecking the box and putting Gail in much better position and effect for her next move.
We have a brief aside when Gail's player asks if her social harm "Chastised" applies here, as this reckless charging ahead was exactly what Quentim and the Stranger criticized her for. This knocks her back down to standard effect as she second-guesses herself. Quentim notices this moment of hesitation and shouts encouragement at it to go, do it now! She charges the console at max speed, then takes a flying leap to slam the zap token into the heart of the console, landing hard on the ground. (Lotus Gambit consequence, New level 1 harm, "Limping")
Several things happen at once. As the blast doors slide open, a safety feature shuts down the entire facility. An impossible cacophony sounds from behind the blast doors, as all the machinery inside stumbles to a halt. The doors grind open just enough to let people slip through. The mole, realizing that its months-long headache is finally coming to an end, slams to a halt against a pillar. It looks at us almost apologetically before exploding into a moleswarm and tunneling away into the walls, embarrassed by the trouble it caused now that it can think clearly enough to realize what it's done.
The Stranger finally snaps out of their emergency mode daze, re-notices the backpack, and then physically grabs Momo, pulling a knife to cut the backpack away. Momo starts shouting, and by the time the rest of the crew notices, the Stranger has already sawn through the straps and is trying to wrestle the bag away. They accuse Momo of trapping the wisp, and the whole team comes to her defense. Gail explains the purpose of the backpack, Yara snaps at them for jumping to conclusions instead of talking to us, and Marl throws its weight around, looming imposingly at them. The GM suggests a Lotus Bargain where the wisp would get released from the backpack - this spooked some of the players badly, over fears that the wisp would get hurt or that this felt too much like a failure state. Thankfully we were able to pull back and negotiate a version of this idea that people felt okay with.
We succeed at talking the Stranger down, as they finally pause for long enough to see the backpack and realize it's a fish tank, not a trap. We had *specifically* made it a comfortable place for it to be in. They've still opened it enough for the wisp to leave, but Momo will be able to repair it without spending Downtime actions. The wisp emerges, illuminating the space with its borealis light before lightly resting on the Stranger's head, "like someone settling into a comfortable chair." This startles the Stranger, before they transfer the wisp into their cupped hands.
Quentim, who just spoke to Dragonkid's mom last downtime, asks, "So should I tell Annalise that her child is doing well?" The Stranger glances at the open door, their glow enhanced by the wisp's presence and solidified into visible shape - pointed ears, light patches of scales, lizard-slit pupils. They pause and say, "I'll tell her myself soon, I promise."
We end the session with a view behind the blast doors - the interior of a hydroelectric dam, similar to this area from the Long Dark. It’s more pristine and intact, opening into a catwalk overlooking a huge room with cylindrical tanks and turbines embedded in the ground at regular intervals. On the far side there are offices. Everything is dusty, bare metal and girders and concrete, the same brutalist style as the pump station from the lake. Along one wall in big painted block letters, “Pump Station β.”
---
Takeaways
- Loved how consistently we managed to weave the Quentim/Gail conflict throughout this mission and how it set up that perfect moment where Quentim could encourage Gail past a moment of doubt. I've very rarely been able to pay off inter-party conflict this quickly and so well, and it gave me a good framework to help characterize him around
- Also loved the way GM incorporated the social harm and prompted that character moment in the first place. She's been really interested in social harm and playing around with how it can feature
- We are two-for-two on good meta-conversations for each mission. Future missions end up going more smoothly but this foundation I think helps make the table a good place for leaning into dicier narrative space
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[1] As the GM put it, ours is the crew with both "a witch and...a heavily armed crab". [return]
[2] Mechanically, this would have flagged the caving kits as something the GM could threaten to break/destroy as a potential consequence. The player who modified our digital character sheets to add them as a piece of equipment also flagged them with a "Thanks Quentim" comment. [return]
[3] These were a collaborative effort between Yara, Gail, and Momo. Lil lunchbox-looking machine hand-cranked with antennae, and transcendent sigils soldered on the internals. [return]
NPCs List:
- The Stranger (they/them) - secretive, dangerous, impulsive - Mysterious vagabond who arrived at The Crashpad for undisclosed reasons. Seems to possess dangerous levels of magical power, not unlike the dragon we rescued from Mission 1
- Cetacea Hardin (she/her) - wary, stubborn, outgoing - New Haven's militia commander and chief of security. Mid-50s, knows everyone in town and a friendly face. Does not do internal police work, mostly she keeps tabs on Dragon's Rest, the pump station, and other external threats. A bit of a homebody, somewhat suspicious of Radiant technology (including DIONE), and collector of rumors.
- The Scrappers Union - local scrap and machinist worker organization. On slightly bad terms with the Crashers, as we ended up taking a town resource they wanted, and DIONE likes us better.
- Lily Constant (she/it) - sturdy, motherly, steady - Isaiah Constant's spouse; community scout, very scarred; MILF
---
Mission 2: Nebula Collapse
Some days after the stranger arrives, New Haven begins experiencing a spate of intermittent earthquakes. They started out small at first, but have escalated in duration and intensity, to the point that townsfolk have started taking things down from shelves, and doing routine checks on outdoor equipment and electronics after each quake. Eventually the commander of the town militia, Cetacea Hardin, comes to pay us a visit and request our help.
As you may recall from our Quiet Year game, there is a large sinkhole in the valley, where the underground lake and Radiant Era apocalypse bunker are. New Haven sent the Scrappers Union down there to try and investigate the tremors, and they discovered the source - "a transcendent spirit of Frankly Worrying size." Some described it as "a mole the size of the Library," while others claim it was "like a colony of ants" or a flood of undifferentiated transcendent energy. Neither the Scrappers Union nor the militia are experienced with handling spirits, so when Cetacea asked DIONE for advice on what to do next, DIONE recommended our crew.[1] If we can take care of the spirit, the tremors will stop. She gives us a map annotated by the Scrappers Union from their expedition, and we start preparing.
Gail and Momo go to interview the Scrappers Union to try and get more detail on what they saw. Three of them insist that it was a Library-sized mole, which could tunnel through stone like it was nothing, and seemed to move like a ghost, in the sense of digging through seemingly empty space. The other two scrappers are dead set on it actually being a swarm of tiny spirits moving as one, like a carpet of ants, tunneling as a gestalt and collapsing the ground behind them as they went. One thing all five of them can agree on, however, is that the spirit(s) are Not Happy.
Yara and Momo head to the Library - Yara looks for records of previous Sinkhole expeditions, trying to learn about navigational hazards and previous events that might have been related. She finds a detailed map of the tunnel system, with a smaller specific cavern that overlaps roughly with the spirit sightings on the Scrapper map. Meanwhile, Momo hits the books to figure out more about the potential spirit and clear up the mixed eyewitness reports. The information she gets is also mixed - there are stories about both spirits with multiple forms and shapeshifters. Per Momo's best guess, either there are two different sets of spirits down there (odd, but not unheard of), or this spirit is a shapeshifter - which is rarer and Very Dangerous.
Quentim tries to assemble caving kits for the crew, so they're better equipped to traverse in the Sinkhole. He goes around town calling in favors and borrowing things to cobble together into a workable equipment kit. Unfortunately, I roll like shit, so we get Poor quality kits, which must be returned in good condition back to the people I borrowed them from.[2] Whoops.
Marl goes to do some threat assessment research, working the local rumor mill to talk to folks who've been down there in the past. She finds Lily Constant, Isaiah's spouse and the town scout. Lily warns it that the cave system is unstable - don't fuck with the caves, don't dig around in there, and don't do anything big or destructive. She describes The Atrium, the smaller cavern described on Yara's map (it's implied that she's the one who made it). The cavern is held up by a series of large columns, all of which must be treated as load-bearing. Especially don't follow the spirit into any burrows it makes, to avoid getting lost or trapped by a cave-in. And if any of us get trapped, sit tight, send a message out, and Lily will come find us. But if we absolutely have to leave the area we're stuck in, we can try one of the arterial side passages to find a way back to the surface.
The GM, having thoroughly set up the arena puzzle boss fight, asks the players how they want to engage, and what location. Unfortunately she sold the structural danger a little too hard, because one player immediately veto'd going to the Atrium and suggested luring the mole spirit(s) to the underground lake instead. Thankfully this was not actually a problem, such are GM plans and player improvisation. But it was an incredibly funny turn of events.
The final plan we come up with is this: we take the Patient approach, sending our various recon drones to locate where the spirit(s) are before laying a trap with the Witch's spirit beacon to lure it over. A reasonably solid plan for trying to direct the behavior of unpredictable wild creature(s). Unfortunately. We fail the engagement roll. So while we do find a massive Library-sized mole, it vanishes from everyone's sight after we turn on the beacon - just in time to tunnel back up and out directly underneath us. Marl hollers at everyone to move just as it breaks ground, and as we scramble for cover, she sees the Stranger clinging to the mole's back for dear life.
---
We start the mission at a Desperate position - the giant enraged mole slams onto the ground, releasing a shockwave of force *and* transcendental energy, which knocks out the lights. The cave is plunged into darkness with nothing but faint luminescence from the cavern walls and reflecting off the perfectly windless lake. Yara springs into action, using her owl-person eyesight to try and navigate to the lights and find out what's wrong. Closer investigation shows that all of our lights have popped a fuse from the shockwave. Gail, having leveled up in between missions, uses her new ability Charmhack to magically repair the lights all at once - it races over to one of the lights, eyes glowing bright green before a trail of green lights sparks its way down the wires, and all the lights come back to life.
Momo grabs her charmwave suppressor - a small device that can suppress transcendent effects in a limited radius. It's not powerful enough to do anything to the mole, but it does release a somewhat violent shockwave when it's deactivated. Quentim uses Not a Problem to gin up a supply of mole pheromones to briefly distract the spirit while Momo gets close enough to attach the suppressor. The mole "lets out a loud, bassy squeak" before trying to dive back into the ground and tunnel away, but Momo resists this consequence, having built her suppressor in a way that hampers the mole's tunneling ability. Marl lines up a shot with her sparkrifle - a small arcing bolt of lightning spears through the air to the suppressor, knocking it out and triggering the shockwave. The mole explodes into a flood of smaller moles that blanket the cave "like a carpet of ants". Marl sees the Stranger get physically launched ("gently smoking") into the darkness outside the ring of lights.
The mole flood is still agitated as hell by the sound of the spirit beacon, so we *gotta* turn that shit off. Unfortunately now we have to navigate our way through the aforementioned mole flood. Gail hands Quentim a container of somnic smoke from her toolkit, with a terse admonishment not to screw this up. He ties the container to his ankle in an attempt to get the smoke down at mole level and keep it out of his face, but he still ends up breathing too much smoke and takes the Level 1 harm "Drowsy," collapsing before he reaches the beacon. The moles recover from the suppressor shockwave and begin angrily swarming the people who have given them misophonia.
Momo modifies her repulsor sigil to create a Mole Repulsion Forcefield, leaving her familiars unable to find purchase. Gail nabs her slipwater to slide all the way over to the spirit beacon, surfing through the moleswarm and charmhacking the beacon to reverse the polarity and turn it to a calming frequency instead. In response, the moles burrow all at once back into the ground, pockmarking it full of holes.
Quentim finally climbs back to his feet and does a team role call. Once everyone is confirmed to be upright and okay, Momo recalls the stranger. We see them fleeing into the tunnels, and decide to give chase. Marl reminds us that we need some people to also track down the moles and figure out what was upsetting them, so Quentim and Momo stay behind to use the familiars and a beetle drone to track them remotely.
Tunnelgang give chase, with Yara and Gail utilizing their drones while Marl draws on its tracking skills. A Lotus Gambit brings the tunnel caving in behind them, but the stranger turns out to very trackable, moving slowly and not hiding their passage. Yara shouts to get their attention and it startles them so badly they eat shit on the tunnel floor. They're pretty banged up from the mole encounter.
Stranger asks what they're doing here, and Yara flips the question back at them. They reply, "It's complicated, so's the reason I'm here, don't worry about it." This fails to convince anyone not to worry about it. Tunnelgang eventually wheedle enough information out of them to confirm that everyone is here to stop the tremors. When the Stranger insists that they leave, Gail points back at the cave-in. She tries to convince the Stranger to accept help, as, "[She's] learned recently it's not good to rush into things alone when there are people to help." Marl backs her up, bluntly pointing out how badly beat-up they are. The Stranger acquiesces, but not before leaving Gail with the Level 1 harm "Chastised"
Molegang goes to scout down the recently-made mole holes, but got distracted by the cave-in. When we can't get back in contact with Tunnelgang, we start trying to clear the blockage with the crew's antigraviton engines and some demolition kits. Thankfully, they're able to contact us through the team comms packs.[3] We get jumpscared by the ringing. Yara updates us on the situation, lets us know about the demo tools she packed so she can lay charges on the other side of the blockage. I fire off Long Thought so that the graviton engines were already set up in anticipation of a cave-in, so they're quickly fired up and ready to go. We crit the roll and manage to move the rubble in such a way that the mouth of that tunnel is reinforced, and we have a guaranteed way back out. This does disturb the moles again somewhat, as the explosion reverberates.
Quentim gets a ping on his smart slate- a notification that his messenger beetle was destroyed. Momo's familiar, however, sees the mole coalescing in the large central chamber of the Atrium. There's lots of chittering and scrabbling through the feed, but also a low, mechanical, repetitive noise and the hum of machinery. This is probably what's been pissing it off.
---
Session 3 begins with Momo and Quentim conferring on how to approach the Atrium. We're able to construct a way there from the surveying we did as part of the engagement roll, and notify Tunnelgang that we're on the way over.
While walking, Yara and Gail talk about the Charmhack stunt. Yara asks Gail if she could do it again, and offers to help it practice the skill back at the Crashpad. She takes her up on the offer. They also spend some time conversing with the Stranger. Gail asks the Stranger if they can fill everyone in on what the plan is. The Stranger considers this, before replying, “Not yet.” The group are able to get a couple of answers from them - the tremors are definitely caused by the mole, their plan for taking care of it was...highly improvisational, until we arrived, and the Stranger is a traveler who hasn't been in this area for a long time. As the GM puts it, "They're a bit reticent, partially because you blew them up. It's very much an Oh, these idiots are going to get themselves or someone else hurt." Suppose I can't blame them.
Gail notices that the Stranger is faintly glowing, and dims its flashlight to try and get a better look (this gets some weird looks from the Stranger and Yara). The glow is reminiscent of faint noonday sunlight, complete with radiating heat. There's also a shape to it, bright and dim areas that form a silhouette around them - the neck, the ears, their hands when exerting force. It's vaguely animalistic, adding points to their ears and claws to their hands. Gail asks them very directly about the glowing and the Stranger suggests that everyone stay quiet to avoid alerting the mole. Yeah, I'd play the quiet game too.
Yara then asks Gail how she's feeling about the dinner argument. Gail tries to dodge the question, playing things off. Yara agrees to leave it alone, but is fully Aware that it's not actually fine, leaving Gail to feel like it's earned a 2-for-1 social flub.
Quentim and Momo reach the Atrium, the mechanical sounds getting louder as they get close. We spy the mole as it's reforming, "a slime toy coalescing into a single ball." The Atrium is a huge cavern, with four massive central pillars glistening with water, each about half as thick as the mole. The mole-glow lights the space, but we cannot triangulate the source of the noise.
Quentim asks Momo if she can talk to the mole like she did with the dragon last mission. Momo says yes, theoretically, but the mole could still get aggressive. It'd be better to locate the source of the noise first to reduce the risk of it lashing out. I use Not A Problem to provide a noise-tracking device, and we sneak around the mole to locate the source - a steel blast door framed in concrete. Whatever's making it is behind there. The mole finally spots us, but we disrupt its reformation with a jury-rigged spirit repellent stinkbomb.
A Lotus Gambit means that the Stranger notices Momo's dragon-containing backpack. Tunnelgang catches up with us as the mole notices us, and the Stranger is immediately furious to see a "trapped" dragon wisp. They sprint toward Momo, and Yara and Gail join in assuming this is part of their plan. Marl sighs and follows, getting ready to intervene. Unfortunately there is a half-formed megamole between us, and because this half-formed mole is still dripping smaller moles off of it, it still counts as a small gang.
Momo's immediate reaction is to dive at the dripping mole, hoping that her repulsor sigil will repel a Kool-Aid Man hole around her. She shouts, "Mole! Hole! Leg!" as she charges, giving Marl just enough warning to square up and shoot its sparkrifle to help clear the way. She nearly clips Momo with the shot, but her automatic aiming system alerts her and the bolt only ends up singing Momo's hair. Momo barrels through the mole, getting crushed and overwhelmed by the sheer mass and weight but making it to the other side. Yara swoops in with a medkit to help set their bones and stabilize the injuries. The mole's leg sheers off cleanly, collapsing into a rapidly dissipating mass of small moles.
The Stranger is still intent on their revenge rampage, but Yara derails them by commanding them to hold Momo's torniquet so she can get over to the blast door and figure out how to open it. The blast door control panel is a very chunky intercom panel with 7 lights - very analog, like the tech in the dragon room. Yara tries to guess the passcode, but fails, activating the extremely bright and loud alarms and angering the mole. It flails its way into some of the columns, destabilizing the structure. Gail runs to the door, intending to short it out with a zap token. Meanwhile Yara is trying to crack open the console. The player starts out using repair tools, until the GM points out that Yara has Fine Climbing Tools, including an axe, which would have greater effect. GM gives the lotus bargain that, "Whatever genie you open behind these doors cannot be sealed again." Yara crits, completely wrecking the box and putting Gail in much better position and effect for her next move.
We have a brief aside when Gail's player asks if her social harm "Chastised" applies here, as this reckless charging ahead was exactly what Quentim and the Stranger criticized her for. This knocks her back down to standard effect as she second-guesses herself. Quentim notices this moment of hesitation and shouts encouragement at it to go, do it now! She charges the console at max speed, then takes a flying leap to slam the zap token into the heart of the console, landing hard on the ground. (Lotus Gambit consequence, New level 1 harm, "Limping")
Several things happen at once. As the blast doors slide open, a safety feature shuts down the entire facility. An impossible cacophony sounds from behind the blast doors, as all the machinery inside stumbles to a halt. The doors grind open just enough to let people slip through. The mole, realizing that its months-long headache is finally coming to an end, slams to a halt against a pillar. It looks at us almost apologetically before exploding into a moleswarm and tunneling away into the walls, embarrassed by the trouble it caused now that it can think clearly enough to realize what it's done.
The Stranger finally snaps out of their emergency mode daze, re-notices the backpack, and then physically grabs Momo, pulling a knife to cut the backpack away. Momo starts shouting, and by the time the rest of the crew notices, the Stranger has already sawn through the straps and is trying to wrestle the bag away. They accuse Momo of trapping the wisp, and the whole team comes to her defense. Gail explains the purpose of the backpack, Yara snaps at them for jumping to conclusions instead of talking to us, and Marl throws its weight around, looming imposingly at them. The GM suggests a Lotus Bargain where the wisp would get released from the backpack - this spooked some of the players badly, over fears that the wisp would get hurt or that this felt too much like a failure state. Thankfully we were able to pull back and negotiate a version of this idea that people felt okay with.
We succeed at talking the Stranger down, as they finally pause for long enough to see the backpack and realize it's a fish tank, not a trap. We had *specifically* made it a comfortable place for it to be in. They've still opened it enough for the wisp to leave, but Momo will be able to repair it without spending Downtime actions. The wisp emerges, illuminating the space with its borealis light before lightly resting on the Stranger's head, "like someone settling into a comfortable chair." This startles the Stranger, before they transfer the wisp into their cupped hands.
Quentim, who just spoke to Dragonkid's mom last downtime, asks, "So should I tell Annalise that her child is doing well?" The Stranger glances at the open door, their glow enhanced by the wisp's presence and solidified into visible shape - pointed ears, light patches of scales, lizard-slit pupils. They pause and say, "I'll tell her myself soon, I promise."
We end the session with a view behind the blast doors - the interior of a hydroelectric dam, similar to this area from the Long Dark. It’s more pristine and intact, opening into a catwalk overlooking a huge room with cylindrical tanks and turbines embedded in the ground at regular intervals. On the far side there are offices. Everything is dusty, bare metal and girders and concrete, the same brutalist style as the pump station from the lake. Along one wall in big painted block letters, “Pump Station β.”
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Takeaways
- Loved how consistently we managed to weave the Quentim/Gail conflict throughout this mission and how it set up that perfect moment where Quentim could encourage Gail past a moment of doubt. I've very rarely been able to pay off inter-party conflict this quickly and so well, and it gave me a good framework to help characterize him around
- Also loved the way GM incorporated the social harm and prompted that character moment in the first place. She's been really interested in social harm and playing around with how it can feature
- We are two-for-two on good meta-conversations for each mission. Future missions end up going more smoothly but this foundation I think helps make the table a good place for leaning into dicier narrative space
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[1] As the GM put it, ours is the crew with both "a witch and...a heavily armed crab". [return]
[2] Mechanically, this would have flagged the caving kits as something the GM could threaten to break/destroy as a potential consequence. The player who modified our digital character sheets to add them as a piece of equipment also flagged them with a "Thanks Quentim" comment. [return]
[3] These were a collaborative effort between Yara, Gail, and Momo. Lil lunchbox-looking machine hand-cranked with antennae, and transcendent sigils soldered on the internals. [return]
