[UA] I love it when a non-plan comes together!

[Rich Ranallo]

Today was the last session of a fairly long-running UA game I played 
in.  The story resolved itself in a very neat and unexpected way.

First, the backstory...

I'm playing Roscoe "Howie," "Roscoe the Fiasco" Howard, a washed-up 
ex-boxer and Epideromancer.  After losing everything as a result of a bad 
bet on one of his own fights, Howie was kicked out of the circuit and 
eventually hooked up with Linus "Louie" Feldman, a rare book dealer and 
authentic thaumaturgist.  Louie paid the bills and kept Roscoe from killing 
himself, and Roscoe provided muscle for the times Louie found someone who 
was getting dicked over by the occult.  Louie is a man of words, Howie is a 
man of action.

One such person was John Walker, whose sister had run off with an abusive 
boyfriend who had a nasty habit of sucking out young girls' souls.  Walker 
also happened to be an unwitting avatar of the Masterless Man.  After some 
digging, the three find out where the soul-sucker lived, and went to 
persuade him to let the girl go.  Dude put up too much of a fight, and 
Howie ended up killing him at Louie's suggestion.  In the aftermath, 
though, the whole group is arrested by the local cops who were planning to 
bust the soul-sucker on unrelated charges.

Once in jail, everyone was visited by a high-priced attorney who offered 
free representation in exchange for a small favor.  Of course, we all agreed.

Five years later, we all wake up in a McDonald's bathroom, wearing yellow 
raincoats and surgical masks, carrying weird, silenced pistols.  We have no 
memory of the years between 1998-2003, nor any knowledge of who The New 
Inquisition is.  We soon find out that we're on the trail of the 
Oscar-Mayer-Weinermobile Murderer, and that he is likely responsible for 
our memory loss.  Long story short (too late), we find out that he's a 
Cliomancer who stole the Weinermobile and goes around committing serial 
murders in order to turn the vehicle itself into a magnet for significant 
charges.  He ends up dead after one too many blasts from Howie, and we have 
to skip town with only a lead to Opa Locka Florida, where a crippled 
ex-Rabbi supposedly has the ability to restore lost memories.

Once there, we get heavy into the seedy Underground of the Miami 
suburbs.  An avatar of the Merchant runs a secret bar with no name, and 
makes deals with everyone and everything.  Louie insults Dirk Allen's 
knowledge of basketball, tried to pop his eardrums and learns the hard way 
what a long-distance, time-delayed blast can mean from a boozehound who 
owns the last flask Hemingway drank from.  We met a scuba diver who thought 
he'd found Atlantis, dug up the Comte Saint-Germain's hidden graveyard, 
tangled with the swamp-dwelling True Order, found and watched a copy of the 
Naked Goddess video, hospitalized a drunken, pit fighting Iconomancer, 
contracted several astral parasites and got mauled by a tiger.

Basically, the ex-Rabbi said he couldn't help us until he got a special 
ritual video tape back.  After running around Miami for two weeks, we 
discovered that the True Order nabbed the tape while sacking a TNI 
safehouse in 2000.  In true TNI style (which we picked up along the way), 
we kidnapped a TOSG member and made a trade for the tape.  After watching 
it, our unwitting avatar became a witting avatar, which neatly coincided 
with the character being taken over by another player.  But, since the 
Merchant facilitated the hostage deal, both the TOSG and our cabal owed him 
a favor.

Opa Locka's Chief of Police was a friend of his, and needed to have The 
Miami Kid, a local Cuban ganglord (and True King), taken out, by any means 
necessary.  He'd already tried to hire Walker for the job, but got turned 
down.  Now he had us by the balls and wouldn't take no for an answer.  So 
it was that we teamed up with the TOSG, whose leader we'd nearly 
killed.  The power of the Merchant would keep us safe from a double-cross, 
but only until the deed was done.  Once that happened, all bets would be 
off, and we'd have to high-tail out of town.  Our plan was sound.  The TOSG 
would keep the Miami Kid's gang busy, while our three-man cabal would sneak 
into his apartment building, and Walker would gun him down in a man-to-man 
shootout (Masterless Man style).  Once the King died, we'd be far enough 
away from the TOSG to make our getaway.

Of course, it didn't work out that way.  We were spotted running up the 
fire escape into the building, and the gang was alerted by the time we got 
in.  A firefight ensued, with Howie and Louie taking blind shots down a 
hallway.  Walker did manage to get into the Miami Kid's room, but he had 
some goons waiting, so Walker was in deep.  Howie made a last desperate 
charge into a rain of gunfire, armed only with his weapons of choice for 
the mission: a bright red fire axe.

Quick note: Howie never really relied on a hand-to-hand weapon before, 
preferring a stiff uppercut and Blast combo.  But in this case, I felt it 
especially important to have a sharp stick, since things were going to get 
hairy.  Seemingly at random, I insisted that my weapon be a fire axe, and 
the group had to go around to two or three stores before finding one.  This 
becomes important soon.

Howie took out the two gunmen in the hallway easily, but a BOHICA roll 
caused him to accidentally lop off his left ring finger.  A failed Violence 
check sends Walker screaming out of the Miami Kid's room.  Howie steps  in 
front of the door, drops his axe and decks the Kid with a body blow (but 
fails his magick roll to lay a significant blast alongside the punch).

So there I was, having been commanded to kill for most of my career, 
standing over the immobilized body of a True King, condemned to death by my 
hand, with a giant fucking axe in easy arm's reach.  It all clicked in my 
mind at the same time it did in my GM's.  I grabbed my axe, he grabbed my 
character sheet.  As I lopped the Kid's head clean off his shoulders, the 
GM wrote down a new Soul skill...Avatar: The Executioner.

It's weird, because not a single event that led up to Howie getting on that 
path was intentional, or had much thought put into it at all.  I used an 
axe because it was a mean-looking weapon.  It was unlikely that my punch 
would connect, but my magick roll would fail; otherwise, the king would've 
died from internal hemorrhaging. I wasn't even supposed to kill the King; 
it was only due to a freak roll that Walker didn't nail him 
personally.  Being a thug was written into my background as an excuse for 
me to hang with the rest of the PCs.  I certainly never intended to play an 
avatar in the first place, but the dice (not even the GM's story) led me 
straight into it.

It's a damn shame this was the last session of the campaign, because it 
really got me wanting to continue playing.

 From Whom It May Concern,
Rich Ranallo

"Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: 'Matters of 
great concern should be treated lightly.'  Master Ittei commented, 'Matters 
of small concern should be treated seriously.'"
-Hakagure


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