Torg Eternity: Living Lands Game 1 Part 2

Scene 3: Manhattan Island

Welcome to the Second half of ACT 1.

Our hero’s are just starting their Adventure into the Living Lands, the jungles that have taken over New York.

After gaining the insights from Sasha’s use of Psychometry, the fore-warned party decides that there is a good possibility that one of the two Warlords in Manhattan might have taken the teams as slave labor.

In her visions, Sasha saw that one of the Warlords, located at the far north of the island, kept a large number of slaves for farming purposes while the other Warlord seemed to be a sadist who was overly interested in keeping the bodies of the dead. His territory was in the southern part of Manhattan, guessed to be somewhere around Washington Square Park.

Which Bridge?

Both the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridge still exist, though changed by the axiom of the Living Lands, the Manhattan Bridge is gone and the tunnels can’t be trusted. The Brooklyn bridge is still steel and concrete but the Williamsburg has become stone and felled trees as massive as Redwoods.

Guessing that the Brooklyn Bridge would lead them into the southern Warlord’s [name is later revealed to be Blunt, so he will be called thusly hence forth] territory and not wanting to go to him first, the PCs decide to head to Williamsburg Bridge and enter the East Village.

Entering the Isle:

They travel through wide “lanes” in the jungle, slightly comforted by their correspondence to the streets that once existed and the travel to the bridge is relatively fast. The jungle is alive with insects and life and strange plants and Carlisle would love to stop and inspect them all. But the mission is important.

Crossing the bridge, they finally get a chance to see long range, the entire coast along the East River looks like a swampy mess and the lack of skyscrapers is terrifying. The only impediments to their vision is the Crystal Tower, some dark buildings that might be Times Square, the neighborhood of Murray Hill has also become a massive flat-topped rock, and there is a massive black dome in central park.

Far to the north there appears to a massive aerial dog fight between scores of Lakten. The party has been informed that the creatures are large enough to carry the massive Edeinos on their backs. They soon overcome their AWE and decide that standing in the middle of a bridge without cover is silly, and they run the rest of the way across.

First Signs:

Kimiko immediately stops the party as she discovers the tracks of many bare feet, but mixed among them is the heavy tread of combat boots, and one pair of sneakers. Worryingly there are also massive tracks of what she guesses might be a Triceratops.  

Carlisle is the actual trained tracker in the group, he kneels down and reads that the tracks are more than 3 days old and that the ground has dried out quite a bit since then. He also discovers that a second set of prints is following, a woman’s bare feet and the pads of a cat the size of a horse, far larger than any tiger.

The party pushes on into the jungle. Again, aided in their movement by the wide spacing of the trees and the general feel that the streets are still laid out around them. They pause as the putrid stench of rot  makes them gag.

First Troubles:

Reacting to the scent almost seconds before the rest even notice it Kimiko tells the others to drop into the brush. Sasha taps her telepathic abilities to connect the party together so that they can communicate without speaking.

Kimiko also has psychic talents and she calls on her abilities to sense minds in the area. 30 meters north of them are 6 Edeinos, moving East to West, who would be crossing their path, but they have stopped in their movement.

The party crawls slowly through the brush until they reach a point a handful of meters away where they can see the Edeinos. The clearing before them is the scene of a blood bath. The wide-open space was once a basketball court and is now filled with churned earth and the bodies of a dozen Edeinos who have been torn limb from limb.

Sasha and Carlisle quickly realize that a mix of modern weapons, including a Kabar knife still thrust into one body, and primitive were involved in the carnage. The churned earth clearly marks the use of a triceratops at the least.

Six Edeinos warriors are looking through the bodies.

Know Your Enemy!

Kimiko decided to double down on her mind sense power, super charging it and expanding her range and the depth of her scan so that she can read the thoughts of the creatures. Doubling her range, she makes two discoveries.

First, there is a person, an Edeinos, twenty meters behind her and up in a tree who is observing BOTH groups and is generally amused and interested in the Storm Knights.

Secondly, the Edeinos before her are very similar to humans in that while several of them are awed by the destruction, they are also gleeful that these dead Edeinos are soldiers of Tusk, the northern Warlord. One of the other, far smarter, Edeinos is already thinking of ways that he could turn this into a story about how he and his men killed all the enemy and thus how he can garner favor with this discovery.

So very much like the worse traits of humanity.

After a few minutes of watching, the Edeinos start to confer in their own language trying to agree on a story about how this was their work. The Watcher in the trees, climbs down and moves out of Kimiko’s range. Kimiko uses the mental connection provided by Sasha to try and get the group moving to stay in contact with the Watcher. But Sasha falls over as she tries to get up.

The Edeinos in the clearing hear her but don’t see her. Spooked by the noise the Edeinos flee the clearing, fearing that the “Shokka” (triceratops) might be coming back. The party wisely lies still and lets the enemy get away.

In the Clearing:

Checking the carnage for themselves, the party quickly realize that booted prints are among those on the ground, but thankfully there are no human dead here. With the information gleaned from their enemies’ minds they now feel that the Storm Knights were taken by Tusk and marched to the north and that something attacked the large column of Edeinos and slaves, probably dinos looking for food.

With this information the party decides to head to the new version of Murray Hill, the massive up thrust of rock is the only way they can get above the trees and get a better view of the north half of Manhattan isle.

Scene 4: View from the Hill:

Hours of walking through the jungle and then climbing later the party finds itself on the top of the new hill. The view is lovely. But the sounds of screaming, both human and inhuman, and the roar of dinosaurs and other jungle animals, the sound of distant gunfire, are all off-putting.

Far off Queens and everything across the east river is lost to storm clouds, thankfully of the normal variety and the reality storm type.

The battle of the Laktens seems to have ended as the great reptilian fliers are gone from the sky. Save for a few doing lazy circles over Harlem, where the party assumes Tusk’s camp resides. To the west two sights draw their interest far more.

Central Park and the Dome:

Central Park and most of the land to the east and west of it has become a massive grass plain, with four-foot-tall grass moving in waves from the wind. The far north of the island is a massive rise of hills, almost mountainous. The south half of the Park is dominated by a large black Dome.

With the sun just starting to set, Carlisle, armed with a scope on his carbine, can see that the dome is covered in hexagonal patterns and might be made of a smoky glass. Within this mile-high dome, he can make out skyscrapers and other building that are alien to his Victorian [Carlisle was changed from a Core Earth Brit to the Orrosh Cosm Victorians] sensibilities, but are otherwise exciting to Sasha and Kimiko.

The Domes are quickly noted as an item of interest for future study, but daylight is dying.

 Fires and Lights

The second of thing of interest to the west of Murray Hill is an area which the party believes corresponds to Times Square. There are scattered fires starting to take light, little drops of humanity, or Edeinos, stoking their camp fires to light. But there is also the steady glow of street lights and electricity from the Times Square area.

The chance for the relative comfort of electric light and heat appeals to the group and the swiftly descend down Murray Hill and towards the welcoming lights.

AND Break, we will conclude ACT 1 next week. Just how welcoming are those lights and what about all the fires?