The Black Campbell

Memorial Day started with a gaming session to preface our cookout. When last we’d left the characters, they were jailed by the chua te or pirate “lord” Van Trihn in his citadel outside of the trading port of San Antonio. They’d figured out Dr. Gould was of Atlantean blood and planned to sell him to the Vril-ya. The boys were in one cell, the girls in another, and Captain Santiago — a pirate they’d had a run in was in the third.

As the pirates didn’t look to speak English, the characters had been plotting in that language how they were going to effect an escape before they could be sold into slavery or worse… Gus was still badly injured from his run in with the formidable major domo of the chua te, a 7’2″ monster named Tongo from darkest Africa. Hunter was still dressed, and even had his stiletto, and assured the others he could get the lock open with it. Santiago, it turned out, spoke English, and pointed out the only way they were getting out of here was with his help — his crew would surely be waiting for him, to aid his escape; if they release him, he will aid their plans.

Zara had formulated a way to keep the pirates’ minds off of the boys. She and Olga distracted them (and Gould) in fine “scandalous” fashion (one of Zara’s flaws.) While the pirates were ogling their affections, Hunter got the door open in a flash with his Larcency skill and he and Gus were on the guards. Gus’ injuries hampered his efforts, but he wound up pinning the one to the cell door, where Olga promptly ran the guard through with his own dragon sword. Hunter continued to impress with his combat skills, taking on a pirate with his stiletto.

Freed, the group armed up and stealthily reconnoitered the ground floor of the fortification Trihn castle sat on. They came on some of the guards and subdued them for more firearms, but through the rife port, they noted ships maneuvering out to sea…then a sudden barrage of smoke from the broadside of one. Moments later, the rescue plan Santiago’s people had put in motion was cause chaos in the citadel, as the two ships fired on the castle and Trihn’s flagship Sea Snake, a 6-mast war junk.

Through smoke and falling masonry, the character rush to the main courtyard, dropping a few bad guys in the process, and find themselves face-to-face with a half dozen pirates. An exchange of fire left most of them downed, and Olga and Hunter quickly did for the others…then the main event started: Tongo arrived, throwing his mongwanga, which would have taken Hunter’s arm off but for a judicious use of style points. Gus put a 4 gauge round through his pecs, but that only served to bring the monstrous giant down on him.

Lady Zara bravely took the man on, and was thrown across the courtyard. Gus used that moment to knock the man back through a cannon hole behind him. (The player is another writer, and understands the importance of villains that can come back to pursue you…) Cannon shots tore through the castle and forced the characters to flee to the main gate, just as it was blown open with a keg of powder by men from Santiago’s Hercules, and Curiosity, commanded by Captain Tomas Franco (or as he calls himself, Professor Franco of the Academie des Sciences) who was determined to rescue his acquaintance’s niece.

Into a longboat and rowing for their lives, they catch up to Curiosity and make good their escape. Behind them, the Sea Snake is getting ready to pursue. With 20 16 lbs and 16 32 lb broadsides, she’s more than a match for Franco’s 16 gun sloop of war, which is already shot up by their exchange. The characters aid in repairs and Gould in seeing to the injured, and soon they are pulling away from the junk.

In this place, however, there is no horizon, and the white and red sails of the junk fall further behind, obscured by distance, but always visible in the spyglass or binoculars. After discussing the man’s arrival in “the World” — in this case through some kind of portal in an Olmec temple in the Yucatan in 1924 — he has been exploring the place, first as a hand on a ship, now as a “pirate” captain.

After some rest and thinking on the matter, they convince him to put themashore with letters for home, and copies of notes and other materials for the Academie, and they arrange a meeting with him in a few months, after they’ve had a chance to resupply and come back for a real expedition.

They make their way with an incredible Survival test to orient themselves and after three weeks of trudging through the interior of the mountains, find their way back to Argatha — the city of the devi and asuras, and now home to the apemen. The rules for working together (badly positioned in the core rulebook just before the skills chapters — seriously, these need to be back with the other rules for die rolling!) gave the party an incredible Survival dice pool of 13! Trapping, fishing, knowing the botany well enough to fake it, etc. was assumed to be skills that one or the other character had an expertise in, and they easily arrived.

Finding the German, Dr. Heiser, still in the town, working with the ape’s natural philosopher Kordas on the manuscripts and other inscriptions on the buildings, he’s been compiling evidence to take back to the Surface World. This includes the skeletons of the devi that were entombed under the temple floor. After a few days of recovery, the characters finally drag all their discoveries to the cave with the Eye of Shambala, or whatever it is called, and go back through to Tibet.

They are surprised to find monks waiting sentinel over the device. Quickly, they call for the Dalai Lama and Billy Fish, their Ghurka guide. It turns out that although they’ve been, by Hunter’s watch and estimation, gone for 42 days, they have only been gone three days since the firefight with the Soviets!

At that point, we broke for the week, to celebrate those that gave all to their country.

Hooah.

The campaign picked up after a week off with the characters in the mythic city of Argatha, a place where the sun never moves from its place high over head. The characters had gone through the Eye of Shambala to this place, expecting…well, Shangri-La, and instead finding a deserted and damaged city with a Hindu-Annamese vibe to the architecture, and strange plants and animals that were “almost prehistoric” in the words of Dr. David Gould, the member of the group with “Atlantean blood.”

Originally, two of the players were going to be around last week, so I split the party, and this evening started with Lady Zara, Gus, Olga, and Dr. Heiser, the Thule Society philologist and historian a “guests” of the apemen that inhabit Argatha. They had learned of an ancient war that was fought between the devi and the asura, and the following destruction of these “gods” by an advanced civilization that Heiser assumes is the Thule, and John Hunter — our Terra Arcanum overseer — thinks is Atlantis.

After having earned the trust of the apes, who have no real animosity toward the party, but also don’t much care what happens to them, they were able to trade the firearms that they had (they were almost out of ammunition) for swords, spears, and bows. Heading out with an apeman guide, Uth, into the wilds of “the World”, intent on finding Hunter and Gould, who had been washed downriver and over a waterfall, Zara resolved to go to San Antonio — a trading post the apes claim is at the mouth of the river, three days hard travel from Argatha.

Meanwhile, those two men had found each other, rested in the boughs of a tree, and were busily trying to find food and make weapons. Gould’s compass showed that the magnetic field was small, irregular and most likely highly localized. It is useless for navigation. Hunter has a working wristwatch and a stiletto; Gould a pocketknife. They are, in a word, screwed. They start marking the river-facing trees and rocks to let people know where they are, and after a few hours stumble onto a clearing where something has been hunting: there are animal remains of creatures that had been cleaned for food, and a tapir-like creature was in a snare trap, hanging from the tree overehead.

At that point, they are aggressed by a trio of velociraptors and find themselves in desperate straits, with Hunter bitten on the ass, and Gould driven up into a tree. Before things get too hot (and with a judicious use of style points) suddenly they find themselves watching a fight between the raptors and a trio of…cat people. A mother and her young male cubs has been hunting the area and assault the raptors. In the middle of the fight, Gus and Uth burst out of the bushes to save their friends (they had gotten excellent tracking rolls), followed by Zara (armed with a bow) and Olga (armed with a bullwhip one of the apes had traded.)

The fight quickly showed a problem with the velociraptor write-up. The 3 body and 5 dexterity meant that the characters had, in essence, no chance of killing these beasts. Even the fast and effective team of panthermen were having issues. (GM, say “oops!” Read the write-ups frst, Scott!) I quickly scaled their dexterities down to a reasonable 3 — still making them incredibly dangerous, but making them animals…not some super-monster.

With the raptors dispatched, the panthermen and Uth are suddenly at each other’s throats — the apemen and the more solitary cat people appear to have some kind of animosity. Gould and Gus attempt, and fail, to cool things off, but surrounded by a larger number of opposition, and not understanding each other, the panthermen decamp.

The characters carve up the raptors for dinner, and they turn out to be delicious. Uth points them in the direction of San Antonio, but he will go no further; the people of that town and the apemen do not get on.

They travel to the town — a smudge of dirt, stink, and activity surrounded by a wide alluvial delta. From a high vantage point, they see the horizon curves…up! disappearing into the haze of humidity.

Surrounding the town, there are farms where men are growing crops (using slaves in some instances) and husbanding dinosaurs and other strange creatures. The town is surrounded by a wooden wall, protected by a wood fort with cannon. The place has a wooden plaque over the gates: San Antonio Founded 1653. 

Inside they find a town with muddy streets, loads of poor and homeless, brothels, trading warehouses, and a wide beach with tents for the crews of the ships berthed in the sea — which they later find out are the Straits of Varuna — Chinese junks, caravels, other styles of ship from the 1400s to 1800s. The people of the town are universally human, mostly Asian (they hear Chinese, but also Annamese), the others are a collection of folks from everywhere.

At the church, a Franciscan friar named Julian takes them in and explains the place. It is a port of call for many in the area, run by the chua te, Captain Van Trihn and his crew. They keep the place safe from the other monsters out there. They find out that, though Julian was born here in the World, Father Ricardo — who once ran the place — was from what he called the “outer world.” The father was pulled into “the World” through a whirlpool in a place called the South China Sea — a story others have also related. Others have come by different means. The characters start positing the hollow Earth theory is correct, and even try to guess as to how gravity works here, and why the sun remains so constant in the sky.

Without money, they cobble together their belongings and are lucky enough to realize that Lady Zara’s silver flask and cigarette case will aid them. Soon they have supplies for the trip back to Argatha, including booze for the DT-addled Gould, and a flintlock rifle for Gus. As they are preparing to head out of town, they run into a crew of men who want to buy Zara and Olga (the dangers of having a character who is “attractive” in a pirate haven), and after some issues with language and Zara’s being a haughty English lady (How dare she know her own worth!?!), they find themselves in a fight…

At which point we broke for the night.

I needed a signature weapon for a possibly upcoming privileged henchman, and I settled on the mongwanga — a weapon that I’d only seen in the Q Manual for the old James Bond: 007 game.

The mongwanga is an Africa throwing “knife” that has multiple blades, angled to prove weight and spin for a throw. They are heavy, and with training are highly effective for parry maneuvers in melee combat. Here are a few examples of a mongwanga…

Mongwanga     Damage: 2L   STR: 2   Spd: A   Special: Thrown range: 10 feet