And, as the other bonus, the first installment of my fairly long running now Don't Rest Your Head Adventure. I'll try to keep installments updating fairly regularly (I'm aiming for once a week) until I get caught up to where we are in campaign.Note that character sheets are currently missing, this is because I have something special planned for them, they will, however, be coming soon, and should help make sense of the characters here involved.
I am also intentionally refining the story a bit for the sake of the narrative, but will include GM notes at the end.
Maddening the City
The Search for Love Part I:
The Love Train
Professor Richard Horwitz sat on a cold stone bench in the underground. The bench was worn down with the impression of his backside from his devoted vigil. He waited, patience and impatience forgotten, left somewhere far behind, with sleep perhaps. His bleary eyes stared at the tracks before him. Whenever a train would come to a stop he would stand, eyes wide, a smile on his face, and his heart brimming with the absolute confidence that she would walk out.
She never did.
Now, the last train of the night had long ago left the station behind. The tracks lay empty, bare metal waiting in the darkness. Eventually the lights went out. No one ever bothered to check to make sure no one was down there, and by now they surely realized that the strange tweed suited bum was as immovable a feature of the station as the tracks themselves. Horwitz almost fancied he could see in the darkness, absolute around him. Surely the rails were no different in this darkness than in the light, and his mind's eye made them plain as day.
And then he could see them for real. A light was coming from the tunnel, but it wasn't the proper light of a train. It didn't have that blue-white quality of electric lights, but instead was shades of orange and yellow. He squinted down the tunnel, to see what appeared to be a fireball hurtling down the tracks.
As the object approached it became clear that it was indeed a train, but its front car was smashed in, the metal bent and twisted, the glass windows shattered and jagged, and the whole ablaze with fire. The rest of the train was far stranger. The angles of it were... off. Sometimes it tapered, or the shape twisted round, and sometimes the angles did things so strange that Horwitz could only rub his eyes and wait for the train to move on to more comfortable sections. The train kept screeching past, car after car, far longer than any normal metro car. Eventually, however, it stopped, the many doors sliding open. No one stepped out, but from the open doors in front of Horwitz a scent drifted out. Horwitz knew the smell the moment it sidled up to his nostrils: it was her scent. Her perfume.
Without a moment's hesitation, Horwitz picked up his trusty umbrella and walked through the doors. His feet, unused to walking and heavy with weariness, tripped as he entered, but he caught himself on a hand bar. After reestablishing his balance, he looked around the small car.
A few people sat spread across the seats. A woman cradled a baby near the door, rocking the baby with a lifeless irregular motion, like an imperfect metronome. A man in front of Horwitz had his arms held out before him. He occasionally made a motion, as though flipping through an invisible newspaper. His eyes did not move in any semblance of reading, but his mechanical newspaper charade persisted.
The few other passengers were dull eyed and expressionless.
The doors let out a metallic whine as they shut behind Horwitz. The train lurched forward in a jarring motion, the wheels screeching against the tracks all the while.
He turned to the man with the invisible paper, "Where is she?"
The man made no answer, no indication he had even heard Horwitz.
Horwitz stood staring at the man, watching his senseless motion, and then demanded, louder, "Where is she?"
The man repeated his motion, his eyes still staring ahead, unblinking.
Horwitz made a quick motion with his hand, as though tearing away the imaginary paper, "Where is she?"
The man blinked. Then he looked at his bare wrist, "About three thirty." He turned back to his nonexistent paper.
Horwitz backed away from the man, confusion written neatly upon his features.
But her scent was still in his nose, so he followed it. The smell grew stronger and stronger, and led him with great ease to a pile of rags shoved under a seat in the far corner of the car. He bent down and reached out to grab the rags, but in that instant they quivered, and lept forward with remarkable speed.
The shock of this unexpected motion startled Horwitz, but he did not shy away from it. He would find her no matter the obstacle. He hefted his umbrella, and struck it at the pile of rags with all his might, over and over again, falling into a wretched frenzy. The rags squirmed and shuddered under his blows, but he did not stop till whatever was under them stopped twitching and lay still.
He stood up, breathing heavily, calming himself. The other passengers seemed not to notice anything had happened. He lifts the rags. Underneath the small pile he finds nothing. He shook them, searched them, looking for whatever small animal had moved them, but all he found was a lock of hair. He lifted up the hair, gingerly, carefully. He held it up to the light. It was just the right shade of brown. He sniffed it. Sure enough, it smelled exactly like her.
He ran to the woman with her baby in the car.
"Excuse me," he cried out, "Excuse me me, but have you seen a woman with—" but the sentence froze inside him when a deathly chill passed through him. He could see the baby now. Not an infant at all, just a skeleton, its soft skull malformed, and pressed tight to the woman's breast.
The woman smiled and looked up, but her gaze seemed to focus somewhere behind Horwitz, "Don't worry, she'll come back. Love conquers all, you know." She bowed her head to talk to the cadaver in her arms, shaking it gently, "Isn't that right, dear?" She smiled again, and looked back up, but her focus was still elsewhere, "It will all work out."
Horwitz stumbled back, horrified, and put as much distance as he could between himself and the woman, pressing up against the far door.
The train rattled by several stops, but didn't slow down once, always moving forward, never giving Horwitz a chance to leave. He shuffled his gaze through the various passengers, but mostly he looked out the windows. There was only darkness, and the occasional auxiliary light hurtling by in the distance.
Then, suddenly, the dark tunnel walls were gone. The view suddenly gave way to a whole cityscape, sprawling into the distance, and Horwitz's tired eyes were privy to a panorama of lights silhouetted in the darkness of the moonless, starless sky. The outlines of strange buildings could be seen in the yellow glow of electric lights, intermixed with a great many flickering lights, as though parts of the city were lit by lanterns and fireplaces.
The buildings had no sense of uniformity to them, indeed they were nothing like Horwitz had ever seen before, save perhaps in a few strange postmodern paintings. Some buildings had curved lines and odd flows, but most were sharp and angular, jutting out in odd places, having strange numbers of sides of irregular lengths, their sides angling asymmetrically, or shifting angles halfway through, and some buildings even twisted their edges round in helixes. Everything was uneven and out of place. Tall buildings and small ones were next to one another, all haphazardly thrown together. Two buildings, however, dominated the view. One towered high above the train, and above all the city as a whole. It started at a narrow point somewhere in the distance, but it tapered out more and more as it extended skywards, until at it's top it was a massively large and wide. The other was far smaller, large enough to show over many buildings, but miniscule to the skyscrapers. It was a clock tower, whose massive clock shone with an intense and mesmerizing yellow light. Even from this distance Horwitz could clearly read it, or at least he would if it had been shaped correctly. As it was it looked as though it had an extra hour in it.
But, before Horwitz could unravel this mystery, the train took a sudden plunge, like a roller coaster that had reached its zenith. Horwitz hung on desperately to a hand rail, and managed to stay upright, but within moments the train was again engulfed into the total darkness of a tunnel.
Horwitz stared into the blackness. He swallowed hard, and clutched her hair tight in his hand.
A burst of static startled him out of his thoughts. "Mr. Horwitz," said a voice that sounded as though it were coming from an intercom, though Horwitz could see no sign of speakers, "Please report to the front car. Mr. Horwitz, please report to the front car. She is waiting for you."
The promise lights Horwitz up immediately. Hope gave him the calfs of an elk, and he walked straight through the door into the next car, and then raced up through the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. But, as he ran he couldn't help but shake the feeling he was passing the same people over and over, hadn't he seen that man without the paper before?
Eventually, he had to stop, to bend over and catch his breath. He took the time then to look around, and found the same man without the paper, and the woman with the skeletal baby sitting there. He hadn't moved from the car he had started in.
"Mr. Horwitz, please report to the front car. She is waiting for you."
At the sound of the promise, Horwitz stood tall again, put her hair in his pocked and struck the window with all his force. The glass cracked. He swung again, and the window broke open. He reached out, glass scraping along his arm, and hooked the curved bottom end onto the roof of the subway. He crawled out, the glass cutting his clothes. He clung there, holding fast to his umbrella, his feet against the car, and the total darkness of the tunnel around him, as the train hurtled onwards. He closed his eyes and thought of her. He began sidling along the outside of the speeding train.
The way was long and arduous, and more than once he is almost thwarted by the strange angles and impossible curves of the train, but eventually he reached the first car, cut from glass and bruised by the walls he it while climbing along the side. He sidled carefully up to the back of the first car, where the fire hadn't yet reached, and, swinging himself out on his umbrella, crashes feet first through the back window.
GM NOTES
Here we see why you should never give someone an Exhaustion Talent as vague as "Umbrella."
I had two players this session, but I started with Horwitz because his character sheet sparked ideas far more quickly than the others (his soon).
This wasn't the whole session, of course, but merely a small fraction of it before I shifted over to the other player, on the suitable cliffhanger (a trick I use constantly).
There wasn't much to roll here, mostly an introduction to the Mad City both for the character and his player, who was fresh to this. There was a roll for trying to catch the rags, which Madness dominated, triggering his furious attack on the rags for keeping her away. I believe I had him roll as part of that Fight Response as well, and again when he tried to run up to the front car (which probably should have worked better, as he did succeed, but I chose to go the route of stranger things happening). There was also, of course, rolls for breaking the window and umbrella sidling along the moving train. As I said, umbrella is a silly and very useful Exhaustion Talent.
Items make bad Exhaustion Talents.
Amusingly, the other player (I need to ask them whether I can use their names before I dare) saw the dead baby trick coming a mile off. It's a bit cliche, but I still think it was a good bit of weirdness to throw in.
The train characters were actually a specific choice on my part to use locals. A lot of time when I run DRYH I get so caught up in the constant stream of deadly situations and bizarre Nightmares that I neglect the subtler, less immediate weirdness in the Mad City. Specifically, I often forget to include locals in adventures. This is what happens to people who get lost on the metro, they sit there in silence like metro goers will, mindlessly waiting for a stop that's never going to come.
Tune in next time to see the induction of Chuck "Rodriguez" Finely.
