Tim is in charge today for the first session of Unknown Armies. The players include Bruce (Cyrus Billings), Dan (Tiang Lu), Nick (Ezekiel Dane), Chris (William Sangaree) and Sean (James).
The campaign begins with all the characters on a plane, flying towards Savannah, GA. As the plane takes off, none of them actually know each other. The excitement begins when the plane develops some kind of trouble and ditches in the backwoods of Georgia. Everyone loses consciousness in the crash, only to come to in one of a series of crude pens made of pig-iron bars in a complex surrounded by walls of unfinished wood. The characters are in two adjacent pens, and can see seven other pens holding other survivors. From what they can see, they're in some sort of farm compound; a dilapidated barn is visible in the distance. Though several of the other crash victims are showing signs of frantic panic, the characters remain at least more or less calm, doubtless due to the high resistance to adrenaline they've gained through their prior lives.
William Sangaree, Ezekiel Dane and James are sharing their pen with a woman and her child, and a spooky man with vacant eyes (as if he had just spent too much time watching City of Industry). The woman isn't too sure where her husband has gone, and is quite concerned over this problem. The characters tend to characterize the man as more part of the problem.
Cyrus Billings and Tiang Lu are sharing their pen with a flight attendant, an unconscious man in a suit, and a badly-wounded man in Western wear who appears to have lost his hand. They feel minor pangs of jealousy towards their cohorts, who appear to have much more interesting cellmates. Even so, Tiang Lu applies acupuncture to the unconscious businessman to bring him around.
The compound is guarded by a single man armed with a shotgun. He stands on a catwalk running about 15' above the pens. As the characters watch, the guard heads off to take a leak behind a bush (or, in the language of the archaic, to "lant" the bush). William and James manage to boost their way out of the cage up onto the catwalk, where they come face to face with the guard, who orders them to get back in their cage, explaining that, "Grandma B says you need to stay in yer cages." The characters look at him with worried expressions. James elects to take this moment to give himself a significant charge by taking a bite out of his arm against the catwalk. The hillbilly notices this behaviour and backs away out of sight.
Meanwhile, Tiang Lu uses his martial arts skills to break his way through the wall. By the time he shatters enough wood to step through, two other guards with shotguns have arrived to intercept him. Tiang Lu makes an incredibly acrobatic maneuver to bring himself face to face with one of the guards. Cyrus rips a sharp wooden splinter and quickly joins him. The situation swiftly disintegrates into a brutal melee that ends with the two hillbillies downed to Tiang's skill and Cyrus' rage.
With no immediately evident opposition, everyone gathers outside the pen. William and Tiang gather up the shotguns dropped by the fallen hillbillies. Both of them are double-barreled, and have two shells. Each hillbilly is carrying six more shells with the characteristic appearance of hand-loads in his pockets. Tiang was badly injured in the fight, so James uses his magical powers to heal him. Ezekiel notices this and starts taking notes, doubtless for ominous purposes.
One of the surviving hillbillies sneaks up to the edge of the barn and starts talking to the characters. He is particularly impressed by the fact that James is a "Pure One", someone who has ascended from the flesh of the banal. He notes that he isn't going to shoot at a Pure One, and makes the rather obvious guess that the characters aren't about to willingly get back into their cages. The characters generally agree with this sentiment, and refuse to change their opinions even when he explains that they're being held until Grandma B can either convince them to join the Family, or until they get consumed. He also mentions that the Family numbers about forty people.
The conversation is interrupted by William, who loses patience with the ongoing lack of action and simply shoots the guy. The wounded hillbilly limps away, only to be run down by Tiang and Cyrus. The characters drag him back to the pen where William loots him for his four shotgun shells.
James sees another man heading over to the pen and intercepts him midway. He uses his epideromancy to close over the man's nose and mouth. James starts dragging the man back towards the pen. While he's dragging, the man's feet and legs melt through his fingers. James spins around to realize that the fellow is running back towards the house. He also realizes that the fellow has managed to unseal his nose and mouth. James elects to put a stop to this and hits the guy in the back with an axe. This isn't nearly as successful as he'd hoped, so he escalates to sorcery and hits the guy with a significant blast, turning him into a puddle of goo.
By this time, the psychological effects of the characters' last few actions start to make themselves made. Practically everyone needs to make stress checks for Rank-5 Unnatural and either Rank-2 or Rank-4 Violence. Cyrus isn't bothered by the Unnatural, but he does need to take some Time Out because he just slaughtered a man. Meanwhile, Tiang just can't get the image of a man falling apart out of his mind. James, William and Ezekiel simply become hardened. William works to try and calm both Cyrus and Tiang down, with some measure of success.
William starts interviewing the other passengers, looking for anyone with wilderness skills. He manages to come up with a couple of fishermen and a group of people who went through a wilderness paintball team-building exercise for their company a couple of years ago. William puts them in charge of getting everyone else through the forests should a run for it become necessary.
William then looks over to check on Randy, the hillbilly the characters captured, and finds that he has stopped breathing. He investigates a bit, and finds that the man's throat has been blocked off, apparently by James' magick. He isn't too pleased by this development, but isn't so disturbed to take much action on it.
Before his death, Randy happened to mention that some of the passengers had been taken to the slave quarters, the Old Wooden Shack north of the plantation house. William organizes the characters into an expedition to attack the place. Meanwhile, the outdoor-oriented folks among the passengers arrange to head everyone out into the forest.
William is the first to arrive, as he is one of the few characters with stealth skills. He peers into one of the rooms very cautiously, pointing his newly-acquired shotgun at everything in sight. He hears sobbing coming from an upstairs room. He and James creep into the building and start exploring. They enter a second room and find the badly fleshcrafted wreckage of a man attached to the wall by loops of his own flesh. No shred of sanity is visible in his eyes. William sees this horror and breaks. He shouts, shoots the victim until he runs out of ammunition, then starts beating the corpse with his shotgun butt. James, unaffected by the horrors inside, watches dispassionately from the door. William, attracted by the sounds, looks inside and clucks.
Cyrus looks at the building and makes some amazing deductions about the layout of the interior based on the positions of the doors and windows. He identifies which window to crawl through to reach the sobbing woman, then scales the wall to reach the room. Tiang Lu follows him up. Cyrus looks into the room to see first a form disappear through the door, and then to see two horrifically-mutilated people. Both are almost recognizable as former passengers on the crashed plane. One man is attached to the ceiling by his own flesh, with extra pairs of vestigial arms and legs. The sobbing woman no longer has recognizable arms; they have been replaced with flailing chicken-foot-like claws. Cyrus fails his Unnatural check, concludes that the one who did this atrocity just ran down the stairs, and follows him screaming at the top of his lungs. Tiang Lu does a lot better, and manages to keep control of himself.
Cyrus arrives at the bottom of the stairs to find James and one of the hillbillies fighting. The fight is deeply horrible to watch, as both James and the hillbillies are fleshcrafters and are using magick hand over fist, including such disturbing effects as Body Like a Still Pond and Warping. By the end of it, Cyrus and James are victorious. Cyrus, still in the throes of his failed Unnatural check, continues to beat the corpse for over a minute.
After Cyrus breaks and heads down the stairs, Tiang Lu heads out into the corridor and happens to look up at the ceiling. To his horror, he finds that it is covered in flesh, with two eyes visible. They stare at him. They stare right through him. Tiang Lu shatters and attacks it. He finds that it is about three inches thick, and full of blood and organs. Within moments, he has converted the corridor into a charnel house.
As one of the few characters still in possession of their faculties, James heads up to investigate the upper floor after having found nothing else worth seeing on the ground floor. William follows him, noticing on the way that one of the six doors leading off the hall has bloodstains creeping from underneath it. James gravitates straight for that door, kicking it open. He finds nobody present, but something obviously happened here recently: there are harnesses on the walls, bloodstains on the walls and floors, and a severed human foot on the floor.
James continues on to another room, finding a man tied to a chair. The man's face is no longer even marginally human: it has been warped into something horrible and demonic. A 30ish woman stands over him, working his flesh with her fingers. James quickly notices that she is missing her left hand. She asks him, "Have you come to seek truth?" She then peers out into the hallway, notices Tiang Lu slaying the ceiling-creature, and comments, "I see you've killed Wilbur. That's quite a pity: he was coming along quite well." She introduces herself as Cici. When she finally realizes that James is one of the passengers, and shouldn't be running around free, she turns towards him and strikes at him with an arm that elongates beyond reason. James sidesteps and cuts her arm off with an axe. She slumps to the ground, trying to control the bleeding. He steps towards her, baring the axe. She bites her tongue off and spits it towards James. As it falls it starts to flap about and elongate into a multi-tentacular independent entity. James backs out of the room after failing to pull the bound man in the chair to safety.
Hearing the commotion, Ezekiel pushes in to the door and sets off his shotgun at the tongue-monster. He uses his last shell to blow it out the window, to unclear effect. In the meantime, Cici appears to have stopped moving, and is probably dead of blood loss.
James and William manage to locate another passenger, probably unharmed, tied to a bed. They release him and send him downstairs and continue searching the building. They finally manage to discover two more passengers, melded together in a horrific parody of pregnancy. One of them appears to have been pushed into the other's bloated stomach. James' blood runs just a little colder as he is confronted with this sight.
Tiang finds a hillbilly trying to escape by scaling the wall. He dives after him, and hurts himself badly. The hillbilly (and a friend of his who made it down earlier) run away. Tiang notices that one of them has a strange, ropy gait that allows him to move about twice as fast as a normal man. Tiang tries stopping him with a thrown pitchfork, but is unable to hurt him badly enough. However, he does manage to bring a conclusion to the saga of the tongue-monster, as he finds the creature lying on the ground apparently stone dead.
The session ends with the characters largely in control of both the Pens and the Slave Quarters. The plan for the next session is to organize an attack upon the plantation house. They generally agree that the best strategy is to set the building on fire and shoot the Family members as they try to escape.