[UA] Campaign Map (Don't read this if you're in my upcoming game)

[Rich Ranallo]

Since I've already gotten some great advice on the kicker for my campaign, I
figured I should lay out where I plan to go with it all.

>From that starting scenario, my next big plan is to get the group all fired
from the Scotsman. Probably, this will be a result of Mak activity. It's a
busy weekend, and half the crew called in sick, all for the same
reason...I'm not sure exactly why, but virtually everyone else who works
there--including the managers--will be involved in some weird little group,
and will go out of town for a big convention or something. I'm tempted to
say that they're all some breed of larper, but they might just as well be
Seventh Day Adventists or Amway salespeople. Regardless, the group is left
as the only crew at the franchise. This is a rough spot for Attaxers, who
like to stagger their schedules so that one person can give out the Orders
and others can follow the target.  But something big happens to their
target, and the crew has to lock up early to head out. While they're out,
they not only get arrested for stalking and trespassing, but the store gets
robbed (possibly just a normal robbery, otherwise it's a cabal looking for
ritual materials). The end result is that the PCs' pictures are all over the
papers, they've got no good excuse for leaving in the middle of the night,
they're out of a job and have to find out a new way to get on with The
Project. And, on top of it, the scandal is so great that they can't even get
a job at one of the other fast food joints nearby.

After a bit of unorthodox attempts to pass on charges to the populace at
large, someone mails to the list saying that they manage a franchise in West
Virginia, and that they could use some extra hands, with guaranteed
employment and sympathetic management thrown in. Thus begins the road trip
portion of our game, as the group tries to get from Chicago to WV on very
little money with no wheels to call their own. Along the way, they'll have a
few choice encounters with a Sleeper squad that's shadowing them the whole
way.

The little town in West Virginia gives everyone a serious case of the
heebie-jeebies. It's one of those nearly-abandoned towns, built on a coal
mine that's been burning for over 50 years. There are streets in town that
you can't walk on without asbestos-lined boots. The Daily Show did a report
on one such town once. And yet, some people still hang on, though just
barely. The crew gets to work, having been told that the former crew there
just left to go on the road (they'd be the mythical Mobile Crew). That
infamous Sleeper crew is in town, too, but doesn't initiate any contact with
the group.

What's really going on is that the town was, in fact, abandoned until a few
years ago. The first people to re-settle the area were actually demons who'd
taken up long-term possession of human bodies. The town is a kind of magnet
for them now. We already know that demons who take people over tend to run
away from their old lives, but no one ever bothered to ask where they were
running to. Now the demons all settled in this one town, and try to get on
with their obsessions and whatnot; it turns out that once they've gotten the
bodies they wanted, they aren't all bad, as long as their obsessions aren't
too destructive. Since many of the demons are former adepts, they fixed up
the old Mickey Dee's to attract the PCs there as a source of free charges.
They aren't out to hurt the group, but they'll make sure that they can never
leave.

But it's never that simple. It turns out that the characters weren't
actually being followed by the Sleepers all along. They were actually being
followed by a cabal of fanatic demon-hunters who picked up about half of
Summone Ye Furies, and were clued into the demons' game all along. Their
plan is to get into the middle of town, snag the rest of the ritual from the
PCs, and use it to destroy the bastards' little haven. The Sleepers were
actually following these guys, not the PCs, and are out to simultaneously
stop the ritual from happening and deal with a village full of demons in the
most subtle and final way possible. Once they see what the group is up to,
they might decide that Mak Attax is in league with the demons, the hunters,
or just clueless and lost (which will be the truth).

As for the final wrap-up, it could end in a lot of different ways, most of
them extremely ugly.

>From Whom It May Concern,
Rich Ranallo

"Then again, some of our fiction has millennia-old white-leather,
lipstick-lesbian, Barbie-twin Assamite hit-bitches, too."
-Justin Achilli