Edward the storekeeper
played by Canadian John
Blaze Riviera the servant
Sweet Nell the innkeeper
played by Todd
Eldon the dentist
Ethel the servant
Louis the politician
played by Petra
Summary
The town of Brimstone had been closed for business for sometime, shut down by a miner's strike and cut off by a railroad worker's strike, but both labor disputes were recently settled, and the town was celebrating its grand re-opening, welcoming a whole passel of new greenhorns from back East into their midst. The wildest party of all was at The Gallows, the saloon with the only public entrance to the Brimstone Mine. Edward, Henry, Sweet Nell, and Rusty all won free "return trip" lift tickets and free drinks at the bar in a raffle. The others ponied up for tickets down, and those who could afford it bought return tickets so they could get back up again. It seems like before they knew it, they were all being hustled into the elevator lift, and were descending down into the Maw, the giant borehole at the center of Brimstone Mine.
The group got off at level 1, and Henry suggested that the area right off the elevator was likely to be pretty well picked over, and that the group ought to head around to another side of the Maw if they sought to find their fortune. The others agreed, and they spent the next hour walking the lip of the Maw, a 20-30' wide pathway with no guardrail, overhanging the great borehole. Arriving at the southwestern side of the mine, they decided to look for a way in.
The first entrance they found led them into narrow natural tunnels which they traversed on hands and knees. Jed quickly realized that they were actually crawling on the ceiling of the tunnels. " 'taint natural!" he declared. They crossed and recrossed a natural stream that was also flowing on the ceiling. At one point, washed up on shore, they found a tooth that had been made into a dagger. Harry inspected it, but he was used to dealing with herbivores, so all he could tell was that this was the tooth of a predator, and since it was larger than his hand, a big predator at that. The handle of the dagger looked like maybe Aztec design. Henry looked around very shiftily, opened his suitcase just a crack (careful to not let anyone see inside) and pulled out some chalk to help mark their path. He also helped himself to the dagger which disappeared into his suitcase. The group decided to follow the little river downstream.
The stream made a little waterfall at the boundary where gravity returned to normal, and everyone got soaked passing through, but on the other side, they entered large man-made corridors, tiled with dressed stone. In the open air, they heard what they couldn't make out over the sound of running water in an enclosed space before, the sound of insects, like cicadas on a hot summer day. Following the winding creek as it crossed and recrossed the perfectly straight corridors, the group ended up in a natural cavern with a hint of gold glittering in the walls. They all rushed in to inspect their find, and inadvertently got the drop on a trio of insects: an ant, a grasshopper, and a centipede, each the size of a pony!
Welp, I tell you a fearsome combat ensued. The friends got an early lead on the insects.. Bill tried to ride the ant, wailing at its flank with his riding crop, but got bucked off. Jed and Lilly killed it with a one-two of mining pick and letter opener. Nell shot the grasshopper, but then the dumb beast retaliated, chewing on her like she was a blade of sweet summer grass The centipede slithered on up to Blaze, injecting him with a poison that made him feel all weak in the arms, though Blaze did manage to bop the darn critter on the snout with his candlestick in revenge. Nell shot at the grasshopper again, but accidentally shot poor Rusty, ending his life. Henry ran to Rusty's side, making like to help the poor man, but really he was just helping himself to the contents of the auctioneers pockets. Harry got distracted and pratfalled right in front of the grasshopper, which munched away, ending him too. Finishing what others had started, Bill killed the centipede the same way he'd accidentally killed so many poor horses back East before they run him out of town - by beating on it with his riding crop until the critter didn't arise no more. Nell managed to shoot the cricket again, and Blaze finished it off with another stout blow from his candlestick. Blaze and Jed helped themselves to the dead butcher's accouterments, while Louis took up the auctioneer's gavel, fancying himself a bit judge-like now that he had it.
After the fight, Blaze tidied up like the good servant he is while Jed and the others inspected the shimmer of gold they saw in the walls. Jed was able to determine that it was a good, probably thousand-dollar vein. They took a sample of gold dust, and Lilly helped draw up a map to their stake. They figured they could sell it to a mining company back in town for a finder's fee. Henry made another big show of looking suspiciously at his colleagues while getting his chalk out again, marking the route back to the narrow tunnels while wearing Harry's suit coat right over his own.
They followed the stream further into some large mining tunnels, but came to realize there was no other way out of this section than the way they'd come in. They also found a chasm, but fortunately smelled that it was full of explosive natural gas before they got too close. Nearby they found hundreds of feet of tubing, and a barrel-sized machine with a pair of o-rings the tubes could be affixed to. It seemed to be some kind of bellows apparatus, and the group decided it was mining equipment for evacuating the bad gas from the pit. Rather than mess with any of that though, they doubled back into the dressed-stone halls, and located a new exit on the southeast side.
The next section they entered had huge natural tunnels, 20' wide and 30' high overhead. Unfortunately, the gravity in this area was powerful strong. Felt just like walking on the surface of Jupiter! It plum wore the whole group out. Even more unfortunate-like, a couple more of them ants came to attack them, and the buggers didn't seem to be bothered none by the gravity.
Well sir, it was a vicious fight. Straight away, the ants put down Bill and Lilly. Lilly always felt like she had a guardian angel sitting on her shoulder, but the poor dear must've been pinned to the floor by that gravity when Lilly needed her most. Jed and Ethel both pressed their luck to hurt one of the ants, and then Louis came in and took all the credit after banging on its head with his gavel. "Case closed!" he said. "The prosecution rests!" The remaining ant commenced to galloping around like a wild bronco, narrowly missing trampling Sweet Nell. Blaze and Ethel fumbled around like fools trying to hit the critter, but luckily managed not to hut anything more than their own pride. The ant sent Henry on to his grave before Jed sent the ant to an afterlife of its own with his mining pick.
There followed a great re-distribution of wealth, from the dead to the living. The saddlebags Bill had been carrying around this whole time turned out to be empty, and that suitcase Henry acted so protective over turned out to have nothing inside it but chalk. Henry the much-vaunted huckster turned out to be nothing but a two-bit chalk salesman! No one was much surprised, considering how luckless and unlikable the poor bastard had been. Ethel also picked up that letter opener of Lilly's that she'd been coveting for so long. Somehow, amidst all the rifling and trading, Jed and Louis found a oilcloth tied tight around some parcel, which Jed offered to hold onto for safekeeping.
Low on numbers and feeling sore exhausted after their hard slog though high gravity, the group decided to pass through one more section of mine on their way back to the Maw. They ended up in more man-made corridors, but these ones were a tight squeeze, and the team walked single file down the narrow halls. They found a mine entrance with a cavern on the other side, and what looked like a big old pool of blood on the cavern floor. Well, the group didn't like the look of that one bit, so they headed right back out into the hall. On the way, Edward found him $100 someone dropped long before, but as they filed back into the hallway, Louis realized that the blood puddle had reared up and begun to give chase! It was an awfully slow monster, so the group was able to outdistance it by running. That poor Jed though, his old heart couldn't take the strain. After crawling, and fighting, watching his friends die, and feeling the earth tugging down on him like he was made of lead, the old ticker just didn't have anything left in it, and he expired, clutching his chest as he went down.
Louis took custody of the oil-cloth parcel, and the group dragged Jed back to the lift to the surface. When Nell realized it would cost one of their lift-tickets to get him back on the elevator though, she made a real pretty speech about how Jed was a miner through and through, and then pitched his body down into the Maw. "It's what he would've wanted." Much reduced in numbers, the new friends made it back to the surface, hocked their map to the White Fang Expeditions for a 10%, $100 finder's fee, and at Edward's suggested, decided to rent them a pretty two-room cabin just outside of town. Edward put two months down, and the group divvied up their remaining cash all fair-like, putting the toothy dagger, the mystery parcel, and Jed's extra gold dust into communal property, for anyone to take who needed it. Unwrapping, the parcel, they found two metal gauntlets shaped like cats that fair hummed like tuning forks when you touched them. Written in chalk on the inside of the oilcloth was the phrase "myow-myow".
Gains
$100 cash
map to a $1000 gold vein (sold to WFE for $100)
magic bat-tooth dagger
magic cat gauntlets
Losses
Rusty (shot by Nell)
Harry (eaten by grasshopper)
Bill (bitten by ant)
Lilly (bitten by ant)
Henry (bitten by ant)
Jed (exhaustion caused by forced march)
XP
flat 10XP each for a successful zero-level expedition
Running graveyard (and session of demise)
Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)
Postmortem
I used the hexploration rules from Stormlord Publishing's Black Powder Black Magic volume 4 to run this session. The hexagons are 1 mile wide and take 1 hour to cross quickly (with a chance of wandering monsters) or 2 hours to cross slowly (with monsters appearing only as a "complication.) Each time the characters entered a new hex, I had the players make a series of rolls. John rolled for a description of the tunnels, Todd rolled twice for "features" (things like the stream, the weird gravity, the dead end, and the chasm), Petra rolled for "complications" (things like a monster encounter or explosive gas), and I rolled for treasure.
Level 1 of the Brimstone Mine is "The Hive," every hex is supposed to be filled with the "chittering and clattering of insects" (although I often forgot to narrate that), and the "featured monster" complication for the level is giant ants and centipedes. I decided to add giant grasshoppers (as cave crickets) into the mix. The "puddle of blood" they found was a primeval slime straight from DCC.
The treasure table only gives a 5% chance to find magic items, so imagine my surprise when we found two in one short expedition! The first item found is "The Ragetooth," which I took from Stormlord Publishing's Camazotz The Death Bat patron write-up. If any of the characters decide to become a wizard, old Camazotz will certainly make them a pitch for the chance to become their first patron. The second item really caught me by surprise, so during the game itself, I said that only the character handling the oilcloth parcel had looked inside, and he wasn't telling anyone. After the game, I decided it was "the Gauntlets of the Wailing Mountain Lion," which were inspired by the cat-faced soundwave blasters Shuri wears at the end of the Black Panther movie (and by Lego Cat-Woman beginning and ending every sentence with "myow myow" in the Lego Batman movie.) Players who've seen Black Panther won't be too surprised when they find out what happens when you say the magic word written on the oilcloth while wearing the gauntlets!
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