DCC Campaign Update: The Dark Ones Revealed (also, Sky-Nazis!)

We had left off with the PCs (along with the young Ancient girl, Alice) just about to enter an Ancient Emergency Shelter which apparently had been refurbished some time in the past 100000 years into a kind of Victorian Mansion (by what would turn out to be yet another new race of elves, the Posh Elves). They arrived just in time for a dinner party, and for a massive thunderstorm. It turns out that at the high altitudes of the floating islands at this level, such storms were so powerful that survival itself would be nearly impossible, meaning they were trapped inside the creepy mansion full of weirdos.

Then all this happened:

-The human weaver became a wizard. He also had turned out to be something of a 'social justice warrior'. Making him a Social Justice Warrior Wizard Weaver.

-The human butler's name is Jeeves; of course.

-There is a sudden surprise as a beam of light descends, and takes away the Cleric Ack'basha, "Ropework" the Wizard, and the other newb that didn't become a lv.1 character.  Before they were teleported, a voice rang out calling to Ack'basha, saying something like "The Supreme Council of the Presbyterian Church requires your presence!"  And just like that, the characters belonging to players not available to show up this session were gone.

-The remaining PCs were introduced to Lady Norrington, who is basically an elven version of this:

-which means that they're in a gonzo fantasy ancient high-tech version of this:

-They met quite the ensemble of Posh Elves besides: Lady Norrington's nephew Freddy, niece Lucy, her friends the Colonel and Sir Anthony Dashwood (who works for 'the ministry'), local respectables The Doctor (no, not THAT doctor) and The Vicar, the seeress Madame Theodora, and the famous elderly detective-elf named Mrs. Maplebury.  There are also a few other humans besides Jeeves: Lucy the maid, Jack the weird keeper of the botany lab, Pierre the cook, and Ted, a gunslinger from a nearby floating island called Cimmaron (with a six-shooter and ten gallon hat). The latter is apparently dating Lucy, the social gall of which has set Lady Norrington into conniptions of shock.

(posting this here because it's true, awesome, and vaguely topical in a way that probably won't come up on this blog anytime again soon)


-When inquiring to just what a 'vicar' is, the PCs learn that it's like a posh elven version of a cleric; except that they can't actually cast spells and don't really believe in god.
 "Oh, so its pretty much like the Church of England; gotcha".

-The Brahmin quickly decides he doesn't like Ted the gunslinger, and while the rest are exchanging pleasantries, he's exchanging death threats.

-Madame Theodora claims that "someone will die tonight, it is foretold"! The Brahmin answers "I just said I'm going to kill this guy."  "Exactly! It is foretold!"

-The Social Justice Warrior Weaver Wizard doesn't much care for the gruff, handlebar-mustache-wearing Colonel:
"You're discriminating!"
"Why thank you!"
"Is that mustache even real?!"
"Why of course it is you rapscallion! I won it in the last war!"

-The Dwarf Wizard: "The Brahmin is a holy man"
Alice: "HE'S a holy man?!"
Dwarf Wizard: "Yes; well, Ack'basha is more of a holy man"
Alice: "ACK'BASHA IS A HOLY MAN?!"

-The Social Justice Warrior Wizard Weaver goes to the bathroom hoping to go ethereal to snoop around; he discovers that there's an old magical teleportation pentagram there.  For some reason, in this campaign, most teleportation spells happen in bathrooms.
When he goes ethereal, he sees that the pentagram, which appeared to be inert, was actually radiating a strange dark light. Of course, he steps into the circle, and gets sucked down into the circle by shadowy tentacles!

-When the Social Justice Warrior Wizard Weaver appears to have vanished, Mrs. Maplebury claims to deduce that the Weaver was a spy for something called the "Sky-Nazis".

-The Colonel happens to think that Mr.Sky-Hitler has some fairly good ideas.

-The PCs learn that the posh elves are the ruinous distant descendants of the once mighty empire of the Pythian Knights.  Once they governed half the World of the Last Sun from the skies, but now they've retreated into their floating islands and their dusty towers.

-Alice reveals that she's an Ancient.  After some initial disbelief, Lady Norrington is convinced. She explains that long before the time of the Pythian Knights the elves were the servants of the ancients, charged with keeping this island and others like it maintained, as emergency safe-spaces for the Ancients. But the Ancients vanished, presumably destroyed by the Dark Ones.  Even so, Lady Norrington insists, this manor and all the lands of the Posh Elves actually belong to the Ancients, and if this child is the last of the Ancients then she would be the rightful owner of all of Lady Norrington's wealth and estates.  This does not go over well with Freddy, Lucy, or just about anyone else.

-Sir Anthony asks to use the communication room to contact the Ministry about this new development. The Brahmin decides that's a bad idea, and plans to kill him; but when they get to the comm room they find that the storm has cut out communications. The tower is completely cut off!

-"I say, why are you here?"
"I was going to um.. do something."
"that something wasn't going to be killing Sir Anthony, was it?"
"...maybe..."

-"Why couldn't we have crashed on a floating island full of drunks?"
"Oh, you mean Sky-Dublin?"

-"Pierre", the "french" chef, turns out to speak in a very thick German accent.

-Suddenly, the maid's bloodcurdling scream alerts everyone to the fact that Lady Norrington has been murdered! With a wrench, in the library.

-Mrs. Maplebury takes charge of the murder investigation; she starts off by interviewing everyone, one at a time. It is at this point that the Brahmin realizes the elderly elf-woman has the hots for him.

-"Hey, where's the Ancient girl?"
"I thought she was with you?"
"Goddamnit, we had ONE job..!!"

-As it turns out, Alice was in the drawing room with the ladies, but when the PCs go to find them, they discover the ladies unconscious, and Alice missing!  The Brahmin kicks Theodora the Seeress awake, to which she quickly states "ah! I knew you were going to do that!"

-The PCs figure out that Pierre, the fake chef and Sky-Nazi spy, had kidnapped Alice; they manage to catch him in the tower's hangar bay, capturing him and saving the girl.

-They tie up Pierre and ask Freddy to keep an eye on him, but Freddy freely admits that, being 'a bit of a thickie', he'd probably just end up having Pierre escape on him. So the Brahmin just decapitates Pierre.

-the Social Justice Warrior Wizard Weaver shows up again, with a strange black hole in the middle of his body!

-Jack, the crazy groundskeeper, insists that the Dark Ones are here.  He also reveals that he was a former adventurer much like the PCs, until he was left a ruin of a man, with broken hands barely useful for gardening.

-"Why do we have a pirate now?"
"Ar, I'm not a pirate, I be from the North"
"I think a lot of pirates must be from the north..."

-"I tell ye, it was the Dark Ones what took him! They changed him! They touched him in ways no man should know!"
"well, that part sounds about right."

-The Brahmin finally can't stand Madame Theodora claiming that totally obvious statements are accurate prophecies on her part, and runs her through with a vibro-sword. With her last words, she calls on her 'masters' to avenge her.

-Meanwhile, the Dwarf Wizard (who was off on his own) gets suddenly kidnapped by a group of small hideous creatures with little red hats, that look a bit like dwarves, but all wrong, and give off an aura that in every way feels like they Should Not Be.

-They introduce themselves to the Dwarf Wizard as the Dark Ones, the beings who destroyed his civilization, were responsible for the loss of the Ancients, drove G.O.D. mad, and generally fucked up the whole planet.  Though he, being a dwarf, knows them by their dwarvish term: "Gnome".

(learn the dark terrible truth about gnomes here).

-Their leader introduces himself as "Ooglesnuffler Poundmangler, Dark Lord of the Black Emptiness".
(this name generated courtesy of the random Gnome leader name chart, in Gnomemurdered)

-(Cue one of my players totally losing his shit with amazement at realizing that the Dark Ones, which he'd been assuming would turn out to be Cthulhu-esque entities all this time, actually turn out to be Gnomes)

-"All of your friends' goals will come to naught"
"To be fair, my friends are really just making it up as they go along"

-The Dwarf Wizard finds out that the only reason he's still alive is because there is something deeply wrong with him, and this intrigues the Gnomes.

-"He is like us, and yet not like us.. we shall have to discover the source of this... bring out The Probe!"

-"you all hear a third bloodcurdling scream in the distance..."

-"When, when will we finally reach the limits of what can be discovered by Probing in this campaign??!"

-The probing reveals that Dwarf Wizard had an ancestor that at some point had been mutated by the Dark Ones/Gnomes, and the mutation had lain dormant through his lineage until it was activated by the massive radiation in the reactor of the Ancient's living complex.  The Dwarf Wizard is not happy to hear that now he's as highly explosive as any other gnome, and will blow up if he falls or runs into a hard surface at sufficiently high speed.
(this and other Gnome Lore available in Gnomemurdered)

-As expected, Gnomes show up, and start to Murder everyone.

-The SJW Wizard Weaver realizes his torso is a Gate to the Gnomish void-realm. It snaps his mind.

-The majority of the Posh Elves are as useless as most other elves in this setting, and die very quickly.  A couple of the less useless ones, plus the cowboy and the Brahmin fight very bravely, but in the end they're all slain. The Brahmin finally found something he couldn't manage to kill.

-The Dwarf Wizard wakes up; for reasons he doesn't understand (but that are no doubt not in any way good) the Gnomes spared him.  For reasons he doesn't understand, they also replaced his hands with lobster claws.
(this and other Gnome mutations available in Gnomemurdered!)

-The Dwarf Wizard comes down to the scene of the slaughter and finds Alice missing, the SJW wizard insane, and the Brahmin dead.  He starts to brutally kick the Brahmin's corpse, having apparently hated the vicious bully the whole time. Unfortunately, he hurts his foot. Even in death the Brahmin can cause damage.

-There were a few survivors among the Posh Elves: the vicar, the doctor, Sir Anthony, Freddy (who is now Lord Norrington), Betty the human maid, and Mrs. Maplebury.  Mrs. Maplebury immediately claims that it was Jack who had killed Lady Norrington, now that there's no way to confirm or deny it. She also claims that the SJW Weaver Wizard is a Sky-Nazi spy.

-But the SJW Weaver Wizard is no longer interested in social justice. Instead, driven insane by the truth of being a living portable hole into the Gnomish netherworld, he now only calls himself "The Weaver", and decides he's going to kill just about everyone he can.

-The Weaver corners the Vicar and tries to kill him with his chill touch, but the Vicar's Agnostic Hymns may or may not be responsible for his spells not being cast successfully.  Unfortunately for the Vicar, they don't work so well at protecting him from the Vibro-sword the Weaver took from the Brahmin's corpse.

-When asked why he killed the vicar, he claims the Vicar had molested him.

-As everyone hunkers down to get some sleep, the Weaver sneaks into Lord Freddy Norrington's master bedroom and murders him too, trying to use the ropework spell to make it look like Freddy had accidentally killed himself in an act of auto-erotic asphyxiation.

-Sir Anthony, seeing where things are going, sneaks away in the early morning as soon as the storm breaks.  He will turn out to be the only NPC survivor of Lady Norrington's Dinner Party.

-when day breaks, the survivors at Norrington Manor are surprised by the arrival of a trio of adventurers (though really they shouldn't be, since that always happen right after a PC dies).  Actually, it's two adventurers and a replacement butler.

-The Dwarf Wizard checks out the hangar bay of the tower, finding several hovercars and a pegasus (the latter probably belonging to the dead cowboy).

-While checking out his new Pegasus, the Dwarf Wizard sees something approaching in the distance. Something that looks like... zeppelins. It's the Sky-Nazis!!

-the Dwarf Wizard, very sensibly, wants to high-tail it out of there. But the Weaver, being completely insane at this point, and having just finished murdering Betty and Mrs. Maplebury, totally wants to stay and meet the Sky-Nazis. Again, because he's insane.

-"how do we even know they're Sky-Nazis?"
"Well, the Zeppelins have swastikas on them"
"Are they sky-swastikas?"
"No, that would just be silly!"

-The Sky-Nazis blow up the front entrance, and demand to know where Pierre is, and more importantly where the Ancient girl is. The Dwarf Wizard wisely hid himself, but when the Sky-Nazis find out that apparently Pierre is dead and the Gnomes kidnapped the Ancient girl, and especially when the Weaver just casually mentions that the Gnomes came and left (with Alice) through a gate that appears in his torso, they decide to take the Weaver to be interrogated (presumably via torture) by the "Sky-obergrupenfuhrer".

-"those Sky-Nazis are really rude!"
"dude, they're SKY-NAZIS, what the fuck did you expect?!"

-The Dwarf-Wizard now plans to get the fuck out while the getting is good, but the sound of hovercar-sirens makes it clear that the getting has just stopped being good.

-The Dwarf-wizard is presented with Chief Inspector Elephant, of "the Yard", who is here to arrest him on suspicion of having something to do with the murder of the entire main branch of the Norrington peerage.

-"Oh man.. is Ack'basha's player going to be pissed when he gets back and hears about all this..."

So, the session ends on a sort of triple-cliffhanger worthy of a season-ender: one of the PCs has been nicked by the Yard, another is a prisoner of the Sky-Nazis, the last surviving Ancient is now a prisoner of the Dark Ones (who turned out to be Gnomes) and we still don't know what the fuck the "Council of the Presbyterian Church" is.

Also, it was pointed out to me that the Sky-Nazis were only the second-worst villains in this adventure. Third-worst if you count the PCs themselves.

Stay tuned for more DCC fun in a couple of weeks, and happy new year!

RPGPundit

Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Solitario Egg + Brebbia no.8