Yes, part 3…. looks like this is shaping up to be a four parter, which sounds about right for us. 3 hours of Con play? Oh yeah, that’s 12 hours of our play. Which is fine, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but as a GM it’s like having to do a currency exchange every time you pick up a scenario.
I thought I’d solved some of the problems with the scenario, which I’ll review when we’re all done (it’s still good, I still like it!) but ran into a few more in part 3. Not sure I resolved those, I guess we’ll see in part 4.
Room 808 was Dr Bronson’s room and so the cluster of newly-minted investigators made their way up to the quiet hotel hallway and entered.
Inside they found an extremely neat and ordered room so they began tossing it. Just kidding, they didn’t do that yet. Searching it found a bunch of Bronson’s personal effects and her papers. She had notes attached to photographs of certain objects that had stood out or warranted further investigation: these were the Red Jasper Shabti (with notes suggesting further protective ability beyond just keeping a teenage corpse company), the amulet (the symbols on the back were in no known language and she thought they may have predated heiroglyphs) and a ritual that apparently accompanied the black canopic jar involving honey and a prayer to Isis (this info was on the tablet that Ernst had translated… not the thing I actually gave Rolland).
Ernst also spotted a sparkle while he was down on the floor admiring the William Morris-inspired rug. He found a necklace under the bed, perhaps the only out-of-place thing in the room. It was a Tyet, a holy symbol of Isis, known as the Knot of Isis.
Signs of entrance and egress to the room were not found, but lots of stuff in the room wasn’t found because their search was interrupted by a big black goopy murder blob.
The protoplasmic mass of stinking translucent black matter was looking a lot less lumpy, scarred and granular and was forming eyes and sensory appendages along with flexible arms and mashing lamprey-mouth orifices. It had poured itself out of the vent at the entrance to the room and now functionally had them stuck in the room. It whipped its appendages around wildly, clubbing those closest to it: Leon and Terence.
Everyone was on their toes in an instant with the exception of Wilbur who was searching under the bed at this point and would, quite sensibly, stay under the bed for the remainder of the encounter.
Leon pulled out his Red Jasper Shabti and felt a kind of surge or release from it. Then he pulled out his jars of acid and poured them on the mass to satisfyingly sizzling effect.
Shea had less effect with her newly found bottles of rubbing alcohol, which she dumped on the thing. I mean, functionally no effect. The razor she had was a bit more effective, but the slice in it she made closed up pretty quickly.
Terence and Ernst suffered most of the brunt of the Thing’s aggression. It went out of its way to target Ernst with a big ropy mouth on a tentacle and Ernst returned the favour by stabbing it with a trench knife, which I have to assume he has named. Ernst then backed off and planned to pick up Wilbur’s protective mattress and bumrush the Thing out of the room.
Bradford, stepped up to show this blob what’s what, but succeeded only in breaking his cane in the process.
Terence whipped out his stolen gun and, uh, missed. But was then wracked by a searing pain as his body’s lifeforce and mojo seemed to be pulled out of him. The patches of sizzling acid-scorced flesh glazed over with smooth… protoplasm? Anyway, the Thing seemed to heal itself, very much at Terence’s expense.
I have been wracking my brain, as to the why for this next action, but Timely Tom picked up a table lamp and hurled it through the window. I mean, after bouncing it off the window pane, picking it up, cutting himself badly on the broken shards and then hurling it again. Was there maybe a thought to escape along a thin window ledge?
Anyway, now that there was a hole in the window and the Thing seemed to be targeting Ernst and his newly found Isis pendant, Ernst decided to put an end to that by hurling the pendant out the window.
Leon led the way out of the room, actually just darted out without being molested by any of the flapping arms. In the hallway, there came an agonized scream and he could see Larry Crosswell and Walt Reznick horror struck by something in one of the rooms. A few terrified hotel guests were peeking out their doors.
Others tried to leave the room but were blocked by the formless mass which had the same idea and was pouring itself back up into the vents. That didn’t take long which freed everyone else up to leave the room and Wilbur could emerge from his safe space.
They left Room 808, and checked out another desiccated corpse further down the hall. They told Larry and Walt to beat it and the two needed no further encouragement.
Returning to the first floor, they split to take care of a few things.
The Knot of Isis was retrieved from some street kids who leveraged a reward out of the out-of-towners.
Consulting with Prof Blevins down at the soon-to-wrap-up Geology Society meeting, they discovered that his radioactive chunk of Torbernite seemed to repel their jarred specimen antil it couldn’t retreat further and then it just disintegrated. After Bradford reminded Prof Blevins exactly whose uncle had funded that new wing at the University, Blevins released the big jagged green rock (and its protective lead case) to their custody. Reminding people how rich he is really is Bradford’s superpower and we can pretend that’s unrealistic or not as useful as Library Use or whatever, but it’s maybe the most realistic part of CoC.
Leon talked to Clarence, the world’s unluckiest hotel assistant manager, who explained the central ventilation system and that for maintenance purposes, each floor could be isolated mechanically. Leon heard whispers from the vents, but could not make out what was being said and, probably wisely, didn’t stick his head inside to find out.
Shea, meanwhile, went looking for one of those olde-timey spray-pumps, you know the ones. The ones Tom would try to fumigate Jerry’s mousehole with and Jerry would plug it up and Tom would pump harder until the thing exploded in his face? That. And she found one! And then accidentally locked herself in the janitorial supply closet in which she found it. One quick lock pick session later and she was out, but not not-embarrassed.
Clarence got to hear their plan to flood the hotel’s ventilation system with vaporized acid (?!) and politely declined to allow that sort of insanity. And no, they couldn’t go into every guest’s room. Instead they bargained him down to spraying vinegar through each floor’s ventilation system, from the central shaft, one floor at a time. Since vinegar was used as a cleaning solution and it could be done fairly discretely, he reluctantly agreed, as that could be explained as simply routine housekeeping.
So up they went, floor by floor, spraying vinegar into the main ventilation. Until they reached the top floor and the Ballroom again…
