DCC Campaign: Snakogator!

We had left our heroes (and I use that term as loosely as imaginable, at this point) deep inside an Ancient Living Habitat under the world, where they had found possibly the most amazing thing in the history of their adventures: a living Ancient, albeit a child.  But do they get this incredible girl out of the complex and to try to get her somewhere as secure as possible? No, they're going to keep right on adventuring with her, as if she was another member of the party.

So now the PC are up to:

-Going down deeper into the ruined complex. All except BOLT-0 who is much too heavy for the rope or even manageably for Alice (the Ancient girl) to use her incredible nano-magic on. "BOLT-0 HAS A WEIGHT PROBLEM!"

-Ack'basha the cleric: "you'll go down first..."
Brahmin: "Yes, that's probably what's going to happen."

-two of the three newbs head up on the transmat to the surface, to see if the trolls have left. The third has graduated into a full-blown wizard. He is immediately nicknamed "Ropetrick".

-Brahmin: "You know, I kill people for fun and I'm still less evil than the rest of you assholes".

-"We probably shouldn't get too dependant on the little girl's powers".
"You ARE new at this, aren't you?"

-Brahmin: "I have no idea what you're trying to tell me, but I'm just going to break this thing anyway"

-Brahmin: "If violence doesn't solve something, it's because you aren't using enough of it".

-"Let's not leave the little girl alone up there, she's helpless and innocent"
"I bet you'll be eating those words before the end of the day".

-"You've been with us a couple of days now, how can you not get that we're a bunch of psychos?"

-The team finally leads the little Ancient girl to the central control, but it's as offline as everything else in the complex.  She comes up with the idea of trying to go down to the reactor to restart it.  But first, they find themselves encountering several dozen security drones, which look like metal volleyballs with rotating knives and blaster-eyes.  After an initial melee round where they realize how deadly these things are, the party decides to cheese it out of the area and find a safer path.

-Alice is amazed by the Cleric's use of healing; in the same way an anthropologist might be by a primitive tribe's folk healing practices.

-"we need to find a bag or something, for all this loot"
Alice: "What's a bag?"
"well, that doesn't fill me with confidence..."

-Ack'basha the cleric tries to mine information from Alice about whether the machines in the Control room could be used to get to Sezrekan's plane.

-The Dwarf Wizard, one of only two PCs who can actually speak the Ancient language, decides to fake Alice's answer to discourage Ack'basha.

-Ropework the newbie wizard, the only other PC who can speak Ancient, narcs on the Dwarf Wizard, revealing that something called the Ascension Machine can in fact be used to get the party one step closer to a probably fatal end-game to Ack'basha's mad quest to take down the Wizard-Daemon.  He's still clearly too new to get a decent self-preservation instinct. "He knows not what he does!"

-The team runs into a group of weird human-lizard mutants living in the lower levels of the complex, along with their pet snake-crocodile monster, immediately dubbed the Snakogator.

-It is peripherally noted that Dwarves can theoretically live for about 500 years, though they usually live far less on account of being dumbasses.

-the Brahmin, having been "blue balled" in the non-fight with the Security Drones, is now determined to 'enjoy himself' in slaughtering the lizard-mutants.

-The Dwarf Wizard points out that he speaks Lizard! No, not lizard-man, lizard.  Thus, he can actually communicate with the Snakogator, but not with the lizard-mutants.

-The Dwarf Wizard helpfully translates the Snakogator's hisses at the Brahmin; he's saying "I'm going to kill you, bitch!"

-The Cleric gets to use his Snake Charm spell to great effect; marking, in a single encounter, the first time in the campaign that either Snake Charm or speaking "lizard" proved even marginally useful.

-The Cleric tells the Brahmin that he's charmed the Snakogator, which the Brahmin interprets not as "you don't have to fight it anymore", but as "this is a great moment for an attack of opportunity".

-Having slaughtered the lizard-mutants, and taken the (injured) Snakogator as a charmed pet, the party makes their way to the Reactor Room, only to find it is flooded with radiation!  Brahmin: "Radiation? We can kill that, right?"

-Ropework the newbie wizard needs to spellburn to try to cast Mend on the reactor, and he's required to sacrifice "two of his most valued possessions"; conveniently since he was a beggar just 24 hours earlier, his most valued possessions are highly shitty replaceable stuff.

-"One of these days, Alice..."

-With Ropework's Mend spell having catastrophically failed, causing every metal weapon in the party's possession to rust, the plan is for the Dwarf Wizard to go in and try to fix the Reactor with his Dwarvish lore.  He agrees only if Ack'basha does a pre-emptive Neutralize Poison on him. The spell fails but Ack'basha, proving true to form, tells him it worked anyways.

-"I can try to fix this thing!" "Dude, you're calling it a thing! You don't even know what it is!"

-After the Dwarf fails, and develops an as yet unrevealed mutation that will eventually prove tragically hilarious, Alice recommends the party get out of the reactor core before they all get 40 types of cancer.

-Reduced to trying to crawl through the service tunnels, MC Untouchable saves Ack'basha from a deadly trap! Ack'basha promises he'll save MC Untouchable when the team meets their destiny... maybe.

-"Ack'basha, is that your Primo Staff, or are you just happy to see me?"

-The scouting party returns from the service tunnels: "we found the entrance to three rooms... one of which doesn't exist anymore."  They don't mention they also saw a horrific Tentacle Thing in the tunnels.

-The Brahmin warrior finally manages to force open the sealed gates on the other side of the reactor core, to the room that was full of water, flooding the core.  The good news is this dampens the radiation. The bad news is that it also shuts down all remaining power in the complex.  The party is now literally in the dark; they'd been there figuratively for much of the campaign.

-The party takes to using the last surviving Ancient largely for the her ability to create floating disks as impromptu elevator lifts.

-The party takes on another tribe of lizard-mutants and snakogators!  Tragically, MC Untouchable suffers a horrific death by Snakogator; "He was untouchable, but he touched all of our hearts!"

-The Brahmin finally gets a decent fight; one of the lizard-mutants bites him and clings hard to his shoulder, so he decapitates him and keeps the head for the rest of the battle as a shoulder-pad.

-The party agrees in the aftermath that the lizard-mutant loot was so shitty  it made them feel even better about committing genocide.

-Before camping down for the night, Ack'basha graffittis the walls in blood to frame Bill the Elf for the massacre.

That's the end of that session.  Will the PCs manage to get the last young Ancient out of the now-doomed Living Habitat #23? Or will they end up being responsible for the death of the last living Ancient?  Stay tuned next time to probably find out.

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