The Friday night/Saturday morning midnight to 4am slot I appropriately filled with Don’t Rest Your Head run by John Farish (He probably hangs out at There is No Screen, since he was handing out cards for it, but I’m don’t know who he’d be there.) I got lucky and picked the right pre-gen character for a late night game.

I choose Eric who was for all intents and purposes the embodiment of wrath. Despite being a PC he was in a lot of ways the villain of the story. He was a very compelling and elemental character, I’ll have to see if I can borrow him for something. Basically he has a dead friend who was killed or became a nightmare and Eric sees it as his duty to protect others from nightmares. Eric was a master swordsman and with madness he became pretty hard to hurt.

Names are only approximates… I’d really have to have written them down to get them right… and well I didn’t.

The other characters where Spicoli (spigoli, something like that) who could know where anyone was and alter the trajectory of anything moving in the air. He was an ex-mob private eye and reasonable but due to history with Eric and his ex-mob ethics supported Eric. There was also The Amazing Drago who was a magician who could actually pull stuff from hit. We lost Drago’s player about half way in due to sleep requirements.

The Hooks:

Spicoli is confronted by a Lost Boy telling him to stay out of the situation. He has a paper from the Paper Boys. Chaos… 30 deaths, etc. All that has to be done to avoid that is do nothing.

Someone was following Eric, when Eric confronted him it turns out he was Grandpa (I’m sure he had a real name). He used to live in the City but had returned home. A nightmare had come out of the closet and taken his granddaughter. He was to old to handle the situation and asked if Eric would look into it. Eric is a weapon, this is Grandpa aiming him and pulling the trigger.

Drago found himself confronted by a little girl asking for help. Apparently her bother had disappeared and wanted help looking for him. Drago, not knowing what to do with the kid, brought her to Nicole (the unused pregen) because you know she’s a woman, she’s got to have maternal instincts. Nicole did not have maternal instincts.

Investigation:

Spicoli goes looking for Drago to see what can be done about avoiding 30 or so deaths. Once they exchange information they decide to investigate where Drago’s little girl was crashing, to see if there was something that Spicoli could use to invoke his power to find people. They find a picture of the boy, but they also find some beasties. I think they were bears with scorpion tails, but I could easily be wrong about the base animal.

Eric hears shots fired and since he’s Eric goes to investigate. All the fighting is done by the time he gets there. He tells his part of the story and asks Spicoli to ind the Granddaughter. Spicoli tries to push the 30 dead issue, but Eric responds with ‘Stolen Kid’. So everyone goes to Tony’s (a bar) where the Grandfather is waiting.

A picture is acquired and the Granddaughter is with the Boy.

I’m missing a bit here somehow we end up talking to a lost boy but right at the moment I can’t recall the lead up to that.

The Lost Boy claims that the kids were taken for their own safety. Theres some back and forth and Spicoli barters a deal where person who took the kids will meet us at Tony’s and we’ll discuss things. When the kidnapper got there he was a nightmare.

Eric immediately attacks, because that’s what he does to nightmares. It turns out the nightmare is Grandpa’s Son. Spicoli managed to broker a temporary truce where we’ll all go see the kids, Significant underground travel later we find all the kids.First Conflict:

It seems like the nightmare is doing exactly as he claims, protecting the kids. Eric can’t accept this without ripping his personalty to a nub and rebuilding it from scratch, but he bides until the talking is done. It’s actually the Grandfather who looses patience and attacks the boy. Eric charges right in after, knowing this outcome was inevitable.

This is where we lost Drago to sleep. After a roll where madness dominated and he had to check off a flee box, he took the Grandpa and real children with him and fled from the nightmare. The Grandfather took the real kids with him to the world that isn’t the City.

Eric does what Eric does and kills the nightmare, Spicoli keeps the Lost Boys from interfering. There is suggestion that there is a mother somewhere who will seek vengeance.

Second Conflict:

Spicoli finds the Lost Boys and we go talk to them. Basically they say Moms going to get us. It’s about now we notice we are standing at the Paper Boys ground zero. We relocated to Central Park (fewer people) and wait for Mom.

We don’t have to wait long.

She’s willing to let us go and just kill grandpa, this doesn’t work for Eric and though Spicoli thinks Mom is probably in the right, she feels obligated to support Eric. And so battle is joined.

Mom suggests that she hand in building the original City and it certainly felt like fighting something godlike.

So by the end there were clockwork cops spraying bullets in the fray, mobile napalm that was Moms weapon of choice. I fire hydrant spewing water in the air, a tactical van that had crashed into the fight and exploded and stone columns that had grown out of the Earth. Spicoli was using everything flying in the air as weapons and defense.

Eric despite being nigh invulnerable was on his legs, but so was Mom. At the moment of Eric’s last attack (which I believe came from the top of one of the stone pillars) Mom’s time was up. She had suggested that she could only stay in the City so long.

The ground cracked and the Abyss began leaking through, sucking down central park.

This is when everyone began running.

We made it out of there, but there was an Abyss pit in central park. In all likelihood Grandpa died while passing too close to a closet, but the 30 deaths the New Boys predicted didn’t happen.

A very fun game.