A Temporal Titan Termination (UVP - Campaign 1 - Sessions 5-6)

 PCs:

Bron - Goetic; wielder of a Pale iron dagger

Naiya - Weaver; wielder of Lust, Alleyways, and The Tower

Adella - Maker; expert in gyroscopes

Balenor Castafiel - Vance; brooker of no frivolous haircuts

Gallin - Vance; editor of open source spells, class of 485AW

A time trap! As the vislae touched the threshold of the titan R8-By, the resonant titan energies sprung a trap laid by another titan long ago. Chronos, titan of time. This part gets a bit confusing.

During the Second War, a strike team of vislae infiltrated the titan Chronos while it was still miles off the coast of Satyrine, in hopes of preventing it from making landfall and inflicting mass destruction upon the city. They found that a crazed apostate named "Doctor Hog" had already boarded the titan and was attempting to hijack it for his own ends. The vislae failed to prevent Dr. Hog from absconding with the titan, and while the city was spared significant damage, citizens do not sleep well knowing there is at least one madman on the loose with a titan at his command. Strangely none of the vislae were left with even the merest scrap of memory regarding what actually happened on board.

What happened was that Doctor Hog manipulated the energies of Chronos to spring a temporal trap. Basically right after the vislae strike team entered the titan he shunted their present moment a few seconds into the future so that it could not be resolved. The actions they were to take on board were always a few seconds away from taking place but never actually occurring. Meanwhile the present moment for everyone else continued as if the vislae had spent it doing nothing. Dr. Hog was able to escape with the titan uncontested. The vislae were left with the impression that they had tried to stop him and failed, when in reality the moment of their intervention attempt was deferred and still had not happened. Years later, when some of the same vislae came in contact with another titan, the resonant titan energies disrupted the lingering temporal effect from Chronos and they were all instantly back in that moment, living out the encounter reality had skipped over. They finally had a chance to stop Dr. Hog right at the start and end the existential threat.

So, not another flashback exactly. More like being transported back in time to live through a deferred encounter that was skipped over the first time. Like cutting and pasting a section of time into the future. Imagine a movie where a length of film near the beginning is cut out and inserted near the end. When you watch the beginning there's a weird skip where you know something's missing but you don't know what. Later on there's a sudden insertion where a bunch of extra footage intrudes on a scene it doesn't belong to. This is like that but with causality and free will enabled. Yes, it is absolutely an affront to logic.

Anyway! Aaaaaall that is the justification for "I know we were about to play R8-By but let's play Chronos instead for two sessions".

[There is a LOT going on with the description of Chronos and I will doubtless not do it full justice in this post. It's meant to be a confusing dungeon you're thrown into in medias res, and I encourage you to read the original text in Silent Titans to fully understand what's going on here.]

Reality swirls into chaotic shape around the party. They are clinging to a silver staircase snaking around the sides of a very tall chamber that seems to have a tornado made of... time at the center? Everything is shaking. Arc and Adna, with them moments before, are nowhere to be see, but there is a Vance here who they don't recognize. There is an ebony door to their left and an ivory door to their right. On a platform above them, standing in front of a massive golden door, is what appears to be an anthropomorphic hog in a top hat and waistcoat.

"FOOLS! I, DOCTOR HOG, HAVE WRECKED YOUR VERY TIMELINES! NOW YOU WILL BE UNABLE TO ACT WHILE I-- wait, shit I think they're moving. SHOOT THEM!"

The vislae pressed themselves against the walls as two lumbering apes in bowler hats leaned over the ledge and began laying down suppressing fire with Tommy guns. Gallin glanced left and right with vision enhanced by The Lock of Orabavon sitting in his brain. The ebony door was locked. The ivory door had a lock but it had been forced.

"To the right! Through the ivory door! Go, go!"

The vislae clambered through the door to find themselves on a tiny ledge facing outwards from what looked to be the titan's exterior. An ocean swirled around them, and to their right, in the far distance, they could just barely make out a floating spire above the horizon. The Skytower, Satyrine's tallest building. The titan was walking through the sea towards the city's West coast. Just like in the Second War... wait, when was this?

A few feet below them bobbed the deck of a large ship linked to the side of the titan with what looked like tendons and veins. Lashed to the far side of that ship bobbed what looked like a small motorboat, riddled with bullet holes. The vislae hopped onto the near ship deck and began looking around. There were no masts, but the almost featureless deck was dominated by a crazed, 100' tower of bog-blackened planks. At the top they could glimpse (and hear) a massive bell clanging wildly in the storm. Corpses in monastic (or perhaps cultist) looking robes lay strewn about the deck, clutching a mismatch of muskets, crossbows, and automatic weapons. Their faces looked "low-resolution", featureless, hairless, washed out. Some of them had visible cybernetic implants, an especially distasteful sight for the vislae if they were indeed back in the Second War. Closer examination of their wounds revealed that they seemed to be caused by the party's weapons. Bron noted the sickly, bleached scar on one body that was assuredly caused by his consecrated Pale dagger. Naiya noted lacerations caused by her steel battle fans. Adella found a corpe whose head had been pierced by a drill... Adella's signature weapon. They had killed these people. The motorboat must have been how they got here, and this ship was where they boarded. Violently it seemed.

Weighing their options, the vislae decided to check below deck for any additional weapons or supplies before finding a way up to stop Doctor Hog from hijacking this massive war-being. In the hold were hundreds of ticking clocks, all slightly out of sync. There were hammocks, stores of food, and Gallin managed to find a spellbook that must have belonged to a chrono-cultist mage. Towards the stern, a large, hand-cranked desalination engine rested askew on top of a trap door in the floor. That was a bit puzzling, as there should only be ocean below that. Working together, they heaved the desalination engine aside and risked a peek through the trapdoor. It opened into airy blackness below, a tattered rope swing dangling down into darkness. That was definitely not how space was supposed to work. One of the vislae cast a torchlight cantrip and floated their Testament down into the dark. The light played across a disturbing sight. A sprawling web of rope, tattered bags, extruded plastic, and elastic ties spanned the space below, and caught up in the middle of it was another Vance, gagged and wide eyed. It was Balenor! An old companion of Naiya and Bron's.

[Note: we had a player show up mid session so this was the insertion point for their PC.]

The vislae managed to free Balenor, but not before drawing the attention of the web's owner: a rhino-sized spider assembled from composite trash and capped by a leering Kabuki mask the size of a buckler shield on in place of a face. Below the mask a pseudo-organic maw opened grotesquely wide to reveal twin automatic rifle barrels dripping clear coolant fluid.

Some frantic action and perilous rope ladder maneuvers ensued, but Bron fairly quickly attempted to talk to it, and found that it spoke a Nightside dialect of Green and was fairly lonely. It was also not that smart, apparently only having coalesced from trash, stray energies, and a magic mask a few weeks ago. Someone, perhaps Naiya, had the idea to ask it if it wanted to be made of something other than trash. If it let them remove the mask, they could perhaps place it on some other assemblage of objects and give it a new body? Surprisingly, Bron was able to talk the creature into allowing this, and it held still as Naiya pried the large mask off the front of it. This immediately caused the rest of the piecemeal body to dis-corporate into a bunch of inert trash and fall into the chasm below. The mask lay warmly and quietly in her arms. Was the creature's mind still in there? Had they just killed it? Unclear. The party climbed back up to the ship.

Wanting to waste no more time in stopping Doctor Hog, the party took the most direct route to the head that wouldn't expose them to much machine gun fire. That is, they ascended the inside of the tower on the ship's deck and tried to swing across to the golden door platform on the giant bell. They were largely successful in this, but found that there was only one of the bowler hat apes still on the platform. Balenor swiftly hurled it into the sea with a Pull spell. Also, touching the bell had given each vislae who did so a random time-based power as they aligned to a different frequency of the titan's energies. These would likely only function within the titan, but they might give them an edge in the final encounter.

Before them, the golden doors stood ajar. Dr. Hog had gone within. He was meddling with the mind of Chronos! The vislae checked themselves and their gear, and prepared for the most surreal SWAT raid ever.

[Note: We cut the session here, with the understanding that the boss fight could be left unresolved or played out depending on the group we had the following week. We ended up having the same players, so we picked up right where we left off.]

Peeking inside, they could see it was a real horror show. The interior of the skull was like a pearlescent cathedral pierced through the ceiling by a massive sword. It tilted and swayed like a penthouse in an earthquake. Through a row of clenched teeth on the far "wall", grey-white water sloshed across the floor in ankle high waves. Above that, where a rose window might be in a cathedral, were the huge, dead eyes of Chronos: windows out into unrealized futures of potential destruction. Satyrine laid to waste, cities across Indigo burning in a boiling night and winking out like bath-candles circling a drain.

Silhouetted in the light of such apocalyptic futures was... Dr. Hog! He perched at the center of a web/tumor/machine like some sort of horrible parasite, which itself was suspended in the center of the room with cables that seemed to be a mixture of piano wire, fungal hyphae, and linked chains of silver ants. The machine was a hideous, archaically-mechanical amalgam of clavichord, Babbage engine, brass syringe-typewriter, silver ant hive, cordyceps fungal reactor, and theremin. It had four anchor points on the floor, each guarded by a bowler hat ape goon with a Tommy gun.  It was also anchored to the wall, where its tendrils wrapped around bone fumaroles capped with shining diamond shards shot through with gold lattices. Those were the titan gems, combination hard drive and quantum processor, the real "brain" of the titan, or at least the physical component of it. That was what Dr. Hog's horrible machine was drawing power from.

"AHHAHAHAHAHA! REALITY WILL DANCE TO THE TUNE OF MY FUNGAL CLAVICHORD!" screamed Dr. Hog at nobody in particular.

Clearly an apostate, thought the vislae. They kicked in the doors and the fight was on.

[Note: This was a big set-piece encounter which we spent pretty much the entire second session of this dungeon resolving, so I am going to just bullet point some highlights instead of trying to remember a blow by blow of the whole fight.]

• Adella barreled into the closest ape goon and used the resonance she had picked up from touching the bell to shove the ape five rounds into the future.
• Naiya wove together The Tower and Thunder, got "height" and "power", and attempted to catapult Dr. Hog into the ceiling. He was able to resist the weave enough to slow himself down such that his top hat could cushion the impact. Regardless, he was now away from the fungal clavichord's controls.
• Deducing that the fungal clavichord was possibly the means by which Dr. Hog was controlling the obviously enchanted ape goons, Gallin cast The Lock of Orabavon on the machine itself, causing it to seize up with a horrible grating noise. One of the apes looked around in a daze, suddenly free of mind control, and another collapsed convulsing. The last one winced but continued to fire.
• Bron had summoned a Pale wraith in the form of a sapient bone scythe that could raise those slain by it as skeleton minions. He rushed the ape but had to take cover from suppressing fire.
• Balenor fired his derringer with Vancian precision, damaging Doctor Hog and inviting a stream of maniacal invective.
• Adella was downed by Tommy gun fire from across the room and slumped down into the frothing water at their feet.
• Dr Hog shot his ray gun and turned Naiya's bones to jelly. Suddenly spineless, she flopped over and looked like a car dealership wind sock person trying to stand up.
• Balenor cast Levin's Blessing to give Adella just enough vigor to get back on their feet.
• Naiya, still managing to weave in jelly form, got "shaking" and "strength" (I think) which they used to vibrate them self into a form solid enough to walk and attack. She fluxed the weave though, and the whole room rolled to the left as gravity shifted to a new direction around them.
• Gallin cast a Haste spell on himself and Naiya, giving them a few extra actions which they used to soften up Dr. Hog with some more gunfire and a blistering steel fan attack. He fluxed it though, which caused his and Naiya's speech to be enciphered such that they couldn't even understand what they were saying.
• More gunfire from both sides and running around on the part of one scared and panicked ape. Gallin is downed.
• Adella tried to sever one of the machine's anchor points with her drill but couldn't output quite enough damage.
• Sliding down the wall to the new "floor", Dr. Hog nailed Naiya with another shot of jellification and overwhelmed the hasty weave she was holding herself together with, causing her to collapse into a vaguely person shaped puddle.
• Bron moved in and finished off Dr. Hog with a slash from his wraith-scythe, blasting the flesh off his frame and leaving only the obedient skeleton behind.
• The remaining apes fled in dissaray.
• There was moment of stillness, as the party collected themselves and helped Gallin back to his feet, and then the ape Adella had shoved 5 rounds into the future right at the start reappeared looking quite surprised. The whole party unloaded on it and it went down quickly.

And with that, Dr. Hog was defeated, and his plans to steal the titan away for his own use were foiled. Since Dr. Hog had already disabled much of the titan's built in defenses to set up his parasitic operation, it was trivial for Bron to go over to the titan gems and remove them from both the bone fumarole where they were ensconced, and the now inert fungal clavichord tendrils which wrapped around them. As soon as they were removed Chronos shuddered and began to sink into the sea. Additionally, the time bubble the party was in was now disrupted since Chronos was inactive, so all the vislae were violently returned to their present in a burst of magic.

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And that was the session! Two sessions actually. I'm writing this a few weeks late; this was a hard entry to get started for some reason. There was a lot of action across both sessions that was intimidating to try and capture in writing.

Lots of useful stuff for playtesting happened. We got to see a big combat encounter with lots of moving parts, and I was impressed by how easy everything was to adjudicate. Creative maneuvers were resolved with saves, attacks were resolved with damage rolls, and spell flux was resolved in whatever way seemed like it would shake up the action. Hopefully this sets the stage for what future boss fights can be like.

Several of my design intentions were validated in play and that felt good. I was hoping combat would feel lethal, with characters struggling to stay on their feet if things lasted longer than two or three rounds and that proved true. Two PCs suffered critical damage, and things could have snowballed very quickly if not for a few well timed decisions by the party. I was a bit worried it would be too easy since we had a full five PCs loaded for bear with magic going against the same number of enemies, only one of whom was using magic, but it didn't feel weighted too strongly in the PC's favor. The vislae tend to burn through their magic very quickly, and I think nearly everyone had exhausted their MD by the end of the encounter. The vislae who were already 2nd degree, or who had a few extra spells by virtue of being a Vance, tangibly felt like they had more stamina/tricks up their sleeves than the others. I like that pretty much all the PCs feel like glass cannons, and that magic feels like a very potent yet painfully limited resource.

I'm pretty sure Naiya was voted MVP the first session and Bron was voted MVP the second.

Edit: I had it backwards. Bron was MVP for 5 (for convincing over the spider) and Naiya was MVP for 6 (for fighting well despite being jellied).