CCVV-2560
| Dicey Dangers, The Creepy Creature of Vulture's Vineyard | Game by Joel Hills |
The Creepy Creature
Set Up
Grog finds you at the end of the bar after the last guests have gone up, and for once the polishing rag is still in his hands. The sightings are back. Something tall and wrong-shaped has been seen three nights running in the deep galleries, the old cellar rows far below the winery, and his survey crew has quit to a man. "My grandfather's workers ran from something down there once, and the vineyard never got them back. I will not lose this house to a story. Find out what walks my cellars, and end the telling of it, one way or another."
The trail begins where the crews broke and ran, on Level 5 of the dungeon beneath Vulture's Vineyard.
Quest Goal
Find 3 unique Clues on Level 5 (each a trace the sightings left behind) and catch the Creepy Creature.
Special Rules
- Keep count of how many unique Clues you've found. Each Clue found on Level 5 during this Quest is one of the traces the sightings left behind: a splash of wine-dark dye where nothing was ever spilled, a snapped length of turned wood too clean to be bone, a tuft of grey hide with stitching run through it.
- Once the Hero holds all 3 Clues, the next Event rolled on Level 5 is the Creature itself, tall and wrong-shaped at the far edge of your light. Make a Reflex(2) to run it down. If you fail, it is gone into the dark, and the next Event rolled on this Level offers the chase again.
- When the chase succeeds, no fight comes. Under your lamp the tall shape sags, the seams show, and an old man you have seen a hundred times tending lamps in Town steps down off his stilts, pulls the wax teeth from his mouth, and asks you, quietly, to listen before you decide anything. What he tells you is his to tell. Choose one of the two Rewards below.
- Count Darkfalls from the moment Grog asks for help. If 10 Darkfalls pass before the Creature is caught, the Quest moves to Failure.
- For the duration of this Quest, Grog is always available if he comes up on the Local Gathering roll for the Hero's current location, no chance he's stepped away.
Objectives
- Reach Level 5 of the dungeon beneath Vulture's Vineyard
- Find 3 unique Clues
- Catch the Creepy Creature
- Decide what to do with what you found
Rewards
Choose one:
Tell Grog the truth. Name the old lamplighter, and the sightings end for good. Grog pays the promised 300 (rc) and stands you a night in the Heroes Room, but he is quiet while he counts out the coins, and he does not ask what the old man said to you down there. Within the week, the lamps along the ruin's edge go dark.
Keep his secret. Hear the old man out. He tells you what his grandmother saw up close and lived to describe, and why the lamps burn brightest nearest the ruin, and when he is finished he presses a Token into your palm with both hands. "For a kindness nobody will ever know about." You may still tell Grog the sightings are finished; he pays 150 (rc) for a job half-explained, and asks none of the questions he can see you won't answer.
Either way, as you climb out of the deep galleries, something at the edge of your lamplight moves. Slowly. The way nothing on stilts ever could. It does not follow. This time.
Failure
If 10 Darkfalls pass, the sightings simply stop. Whatever walked the galleries has gone quiet, or gone deeper, and the crews refuse to return regardless. Grog thanks you for trying and pays nothing. The lamps along the ruin's edge keep burning.
|
The Creepy Creature of Vulture's Vineyard | ******************************************************************************************************************************************** |