“The Power of Gold”
The event was named “The Power of Gold”, taken from the Dan Fogelberg song. A friend got me a copy of the lyrics, which I included on the cover of the player packets: I only wish any of the players had actually heard the song. The song was the initial scenario seed: a new drug on the streets named Gold. Of course, this has been done before, but I remembered a filk song by Val Housden mentioning a drug named Gold, which was of alien origin, producing hallucinations of flight and apparently staying in the body to produce flashbacks. I incorporated those elements into the scenario, but I needed something else. Then I remembered Jack Chalker’s Well World novels, and an intelligent parasitic virus, and finalized the concept. Gold was an alien lifeform that consisted of a central mass and units in host creatures: humans (and other Terran animals) in this case. People would take Gold until a critical mass developed within them, at which point it would connect with the central mass and take over. All fully-converted Gold users were mind-linked together. In order to spread their influence, the mysterious suppliers of Gold sold it very cheaply. However, the supply method was unknown (they were using animals under the influence of Gold to deliver it.) There was one known distinguishing feature of Gold users, contracted pupils.
The characters involved were six from my Hero Games supplement proposal, in an ad hoc group named the Shadow Knights: Blackwolf, martial artist with enhanced reflexes; Mystery, stage magician turned superheroine; Nightshade, a PI with an invisibility suit; the Persuader, a hunted vigilante with a code versus killing; Shadow, a martial artist with an animated shadow; and Stormbird, with power over winds and clouds. They were involved with Gold in that most everyone knew someone involved with the drug.
The team tracked one known Gold user (a friend of Stormbird’s) and generally followed (and harassed) him until he got some Gold. That in itself made up for most of the roleplaying, especially Stormbird in her secret ID meeting the guy in his loft apartment (and for a walk afterwards) while everyone else spied on the encounter.
The next day they discovered the entrance to site of the central core, after the Stormbird, Mystery, and the Persuader followed Stormbird’s friend out into the alley where he was getting a dose of Gold. This dose proved to be the one to make the critical mass, so they discovered him during the takeover. When he awoke, it was as a member of the Gold collective mind, yet knowing everything that had happened to him previously. When the Persuader and Stormbird tried to help him, security guards from the collective used their sonic stunners on everyone in the area. When the Persuader and Stormbird awoke he was gone, yet he couldn’t have gone far. Upon investigation they discovered a secret entrance in the back of the alley. and they called in the rest of the team.
Actually, since no one really knew each other’s identity, they called the phone mail system that Blackwolf had established. Blackwolf, however, knew everyone else’s secret IDs and contacted everyone who wasn’t already at the scene, and they were able to band together quickly.
Descending into the ground through the concealed entrance into a long, dimly-lit tunnel (which looked like a scene from Alien, with organic components and piping on the walls) they were being watched by cats who had been taken over by the Gold collective mind. When they reached the bottom they could see a large container of Gold (the central core) in a glass cylinder about 10 feet high and six feet in diameter, with hoses and pipes leading into it. A group of security guards, with the same sonic stunners, were in a line between them and the central core. Unbeknownst to the guards, the Persuader had obtained a set of shooter’s earplugs for everyone, which shielded them from the sonic attack. (The guards eventually went to their pistols, which used a light attack; those that were still conscious by that time, that is.)
The guards were taken care of fairly easily, and the Persuader instead attacked the central core, shooting an electrical charge through it from his taser. It wasn’t doing any real damage, but if he rolled well or switched to his other attack he could damage it severely. The core itself was getting desperate at this point, and Blackwolf offered the core a deal; the Shadow Knights would let it survive (it had said it was stranded on the Earth and only wanted to survive and grow as any living organism would; even more so, since it could possibly be the only such core left) if it would release all of the humans it had controlled. (Note that the deal doesn’t mention animals: there will be a series of thefts from the Detroit Zoo and outlying zoos soon.) It didn’t know whether it could, but it tried and was mostly successful.
The best player was Blackwolf, who picked up on and used the specialties I wrote into the character better than the other players with their own specialties, as well as leading the others. Stormbird did a good job interacting with her friend, especially convincing him that she wanted to try Gold. Mystery had fun, appearing at Stormbird’s friend’s door (in one of a series of disguises that night), using her magician’s skill to hypnotise him and get further information, as well as get him depressed enough to want another dose of Gold as soon as possible.
I was free after this until the following morning: I wandered the dealer’s room, making my last purchases (two color prints and an original color piece of one of the characters from the Dream Park RP game), helped Rex start his last Street Scum 2 1⁄2 (“The Smell of Police Squad”) event until I had to get some dinner. By happenstance, Mike Stackpole and two friends were eating nearby and he invited me over to join them. We talked for over an hour about the gaming industry again, talking about the convention and such, and I finally had my steak fajitas, since I wasn’t under any time constraints.
When dinner was over I wandered the convention some more and watched some Japanese animation in a makeshift theater on the crosswalk between MECCA and the stadium. The program was very fitting: Lodoss Wars, which has a very strong D&D flavor with knights, clerics, magicians, elves, and dwarves. The story line concerned a young warrior and his elven love, against an evil sorcerer who plotted to sacrifice her life force to revive an evil goddess; the warrior defeats the sorcerer and his spell at the last moment, but it takes two episodes to do it. People should find it interesting, especially the parallels to D&D.
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