SESSION 86: GET THE HELL OUTTA MUNCIE
General Summary
Previous Session: SESSION 85: THE BATTLE OF MUNCIE
Next Session: SESSION 87: TANKS FOR THAT, TANK
Players: The Fellowship of the Doing the Things
September 9th, 2317
(Adventure Day 138)
In Muncie, deep within the borders of The Rustlands, the Party found themselves leading the defence of the village against a company of Synth invaders. Muncie's leader, a Gen 3 Synth named Carrigan, had sent out a signal to The General. This signal meant that the Munsonians were to be harvested, controlled by their Institute Radio Command Frequencies and condemned to perpetual servitude.
But the Party had mounted a sensible defence. They had demolished the two bridges spanning the radioactive White River and gunned down the advancing platoons of Gen 2 Synths while they were mired in the river. Patch and his Mudskippers had kept up a constant barrage of mortar fire. A flight of three of the General's vertibirds had deployed enemy units in two different directions, but the maneuvers hadn't been successful.
Morag, in command of the Celtics sharpshooters, saw that there were only two more Synth platoons making their way across the river. She ordered her team to take up defensive positions and wait for the enemy to advance. Both Lex and Scipio noticed that Patch and the artillery, up on the factory roof, were taking fire from a group of Synths. They turned and moved to their friend's defence. The flight of three vertibirds, landed in the village's crop fields, saw the incoming units and flew away, using all of their considerable acceleration. Moments later, Master Scribe Okonkwo radioed-in to the Party to inform them that the vertibirds had left the airspace at full speed.
Scipio's Sox unit rushed to Patch's aid, sending a volley of automatic fire into the invading Synths. With the attackers being dealt with, Patch was free to launch another volley of mortar fire into the units crossing the river. Bombarded and disorganized, the crossing Synths were easy pickings for Linda and her Bruins, who smashed them hand-to-hand. After that, there was only the unit attacking Patch. The synthetic attackers showed no hesitation or fear, they continued their desperate assault, even as it was obviously failing. Scipio ordered the Sox to fire on the invaders. Fremont, the village's head of security, and his fellow combat veterans let loose with their assault rifles, destroying the final group of attackers. The Battle of Muncie was won.
The Munsonians gathered after the fight to discuss and coordinate their next actions. Over two hundred Synths had marched into the village, advancing carelessly until they were destroyed. Of the defenders, only twelve had died. The people of Muncie thanked the Party for their leadership and assistance. There was debate, but ultimately the people of Muncie decided to stay. They had demonstrated to The General that they would not go easily, and maybe that was enough.
The Party asked the group about Harkness the Synth. A mercenary named Franco was in town to deliver a message and a stuffed animal to this Harkness, to shame him for horrible actions he took in a place called Rivet City. The community were adamant that Muncie represented a new start for all of its citizens. If this Harkness had done bad things, those were crimes, but they were The Institute's crimes. Whoever Harkness had been, they no longer existed. These Synths had their memories wiped by The Railroad, they were functionally new people.
Back at the Electric Friends Saloon, Franco the merc had been waiting through the whole battle. Unpaid for the job of defence, he took shelter instead of risking himself for no profit. The Party approached him and informed him that Harkness no longer existed. Franco claimed that his employer was not to be trifled with, and that they would want him to deliver the note and toy to whatever entity was in Harkness's old body. They told the merc that it was important for his safety that he immediately give up on this job and leave the village. Franco was upset by the loss of income and the unfinished job, and asked if they had any work for an experienced bounty hunter. Out of patience with him, they urged Franco to leave immediately. Which he did.
The Party decided to talk to Risk the super mutant. The odd character seemed to have knowledge of The General and his operations. Risk was packing his things to leave, claiming he was headed into Caesar's Legion, as he thought that it would be the last place touched by this war. He asked if the Party really wanted information about these things, as ignorance might be preferable. They insisted that they needed to know.
Risk told of how he was forcibly turned into a super mutant by a group called Unity back in California, a hundred years earlier. He had retained his intellect more than other mutants and was ostracized by both changed and unchanged wastelanders. After the Calculator War, he heard news that the Midwest was granting full citizenship to super mutants, so he travelled there, eager to belong to a community. Risk met up with a group of super mutant veterans of the Calculator War who began the Anheiser Booch Brewing Company in St. Louis. These mutants turned out to be in a cult, worshipping a being they called who could purportedly see the future.
Risk described The Puppetmaster followers who took an active role in her achieving her ends as members of a group called the Vanishing Point. These Vanishing Point agents did bizarre things, claiming that they would change the future for the better. Anheiser the brew master once kept a molerat in the brewery for months, training it to push a green button when a whistle blew. Booch left the brewery, having some kind of argument with Anheiser about how to enact The Puppetmaster's vision. Anheiser of complained that Wiggsly and his cell were too hesitant and conservative, while Booch's cell were too reckless and active.
Strangest of all was that there was one Gen 3 Synth who lived in the brewery with the super mutants. A young man named Fynn who did menial tasks for them. Anheiser had a remote-control device which would put Fynn into a catatonic state where he would enact any orders he would receive. Fynn would go out and accomplish the task in a kind of hypnotic state, and then return, having no memory of what he had done. That Fynn had grown old quickly, his hair turning grey and his features going waxy. Fynn had become angry at his creator, The General with his Vanishing Point compound in Michigan. The Synth had left for Michigan on a mission of revenge and never returned.
That had happened three times in fifteen years. Three Fynns had arrived, believing themselves to be the original Fynn Wolf, lived five years of service to Anheiser, and then left for Michigan never to return. The super mutants at the brewery treated each Fynn as something between a device and pet. Risk didn't know any details, but The General, the original human Fynn Wolf clearly had enormous resources. He was able to generate new Synths and had the equipment to send a small army to take Muncie. The super mutant was going to flee and recommended that the Party do the same.
The Party talked to some of the other Munsonians, but the reset Synths knew little about their past or the plans of the powerful factions of the wasteland. Tankersly, the Gen 2 Synth who ran the trade stop, had not been reset and remembered more. He recalled how Nate DiNovo, known as the Sole Survivor, had led the Boston Minutemen to destroy The Institute. After the victory, the Commonwealth had repelled the East Coast Brotherhood from their lands, with DiNovo going on a brutal crusade to purge the Brotherhood from his lands. The humiliating defeat of the East Coast Brotherhood had contributed to them reforming as The Capitol. The Sole Survivor reigned supreme over his region for a year, assigning important posts to his close friends.
But one day DiNovo was approached by a Boston family whose daughter had run away from home. The young woman had decided that she was secretly a Synth and went off to place called Far Harbor, where it was said there was a refuge for Synths called Avalon. Nate DiNovo, ever the hero, left his partner the journalist Piper Wright and their infant daughter Qarla behind and went to Far Harbor. He had died there, under strange circumstances that Tankersly had never gotten the details of.
The people of the Commonwealth were panicked. Without DiNovo, their leader and protector, they were vulnerable to counterstrike from The Capitol, or from the many raider clans which surrounded them. The Minutemen assembled every able body to stabilize the area and bolster their defence. An army of Minutemen, bent of revenge, sieged Far Harbor. The island was purged.
Tankersly didn't know the specifics of what happened to DiNovo or what happened at Far Harbor, but he knew that the Sole Survivors old cadre would know more. General McCready, son of Robert McCready now lead the Minutemen and had files on the matter. Strong the super mutant and a doctor named Curie worked for the Minutemen as well, training soldiers. DiNovo's friend Cait was now a senator in Commonwealth government. And Piper Wright, Nate's romantic partner and the mother of his child, was editor-in-chief of the Publick Occurences newspaper in Boston.
[Earlier in 2317, Nate DiNovo's daughter Qarla DiNovo had told the party that her mother Piper Wright had gone missing some time in 2316. Qarla had also spoken to a Minutemen veteran of the Far Harbor campaign who claimed that the Minutemen had never gone inside Avalon. The Railroad had secured the area by the time they arrived, and no one was allowed near. No explanation was ever given.]
Beyond that, Tankersly didn't seem to know anything about The Puppetmaster, The Capitol, or the goings-on in The Rustlands. The Party were eager to leave Muncie and continue toward their mission in Holy Toledo. They boarded Ms. Man and headed northeast to the old Taylor University campus.
They spotted a single salvager living in the ruins. The woman, named Leigh, noticed Linda and Lex's Capo sashes and treated them with suspicious respect. Leigh explained that there was an urgent situation and was shocked that the Party wanted to help without requiring pay. The salvager claimed that the local group of Responders, led by Capo Ysidro, were growing some kind of pestilence weapon at the old Adams Hospital. Patch, employing his medical expertise, knew that she was describing anthrax. Leigh claimed she had overheard Responders say they were going to use it against Fort Wayne. The Party knew that there was a Hellcats job drive happening in Fort Wayne, a large festival of mercenaries. The huge crowd of people would be a devastating target for the aerosol bioweapon. They did some scavenging in the university ruins and left Leigh alone.
The next stop was Gas City. Grinner the ghoul who lived in the Castle Prison had said his friend Fernada lived here but hadn't visited him in three months. The Party found Fernada at her house, working primitive pumps to draw oil-rich tar out of the surrounding pits. Fernada said that the roads weren't safe with the Responders around, even though she had a business relationship with them. Ysidro's lair at Huff Track was an enormous oil refinery where they took her tar and turned it into gasoline for their war bikes. The Responders were terrible customers and were terrorizing the entire region. The Party returned a pot that Grinner had borrowed from her, and reassured Fernada that they would do something about Ysidro.
By then Lancer Wieck was ready with dinner and they sat down to eat with the Ms. Man crew, the Lindavist Inquisitors and Dwayne from Vancouver. Soon after, they turned eastward, flying the airship towards the Adams Hospital.
They had been ultimately victorious in The Rails and victorious in Muncie. But their list of problems was still long. There was the local threat of Ysidro's Responders, the suspicious gathering of Hellcats mercenaries at Fort Wayne, the mission in Holy Toledo, the continuing threat of The General in Michigan and the raging New American War. And as if that wasn't enough, somewhere out there Wyatt was trying her hardest to gather the Thirteen Scepters...
Next Session: SESSION 87: TANKS FOR THAT, TANK
Next Session: SESSION 87: TANKS FOR THAT, TANK
Players: The Fellowship of the Doing the Things
September 9th, 2317
(Adventure Day 138)
In Muncie, deep within the borders of The Rustlands, the Party found themselves leading the defence of the village against a company of Synth invaders. Muncie's leader, a Gen 3 Synth named Carrigan, had sent out a signal to The General. This signal meant that the Munsonians were to be harvested, controlled by their Institute Radio Command Frequencies and condemned to perpetual servitude.
But the Party had mounted a sensible defence. They had demolished the two bridges spanning the radioactive White River and gunned down the advancing platoons of Gen 2 Synths while they were mired in the river. Patch and his Mudskippers had kept up a constant barrage of mortar fire. A flight of three of the General's vertibirds had deployed enemy units in two different directions, but the maneuvers hadn't been successful.
Morag, in command of the Celtics sharpshooters, saw that there were only two more Synth platoons making their way across the river. She ordered her team to take up defensive positions and wait for the enemy to advance. Both Lex and Scipio noticed that Patch and the artillery, up on the factory roof, were taking fire from a group of Synths. They turned and moved to their friend's defence. The flight of three vertibirds, landed in the village's crop fields, saw the incoming units and flew away, using all of their considerable acceleration. Moments later, Master Scribe Okonkwo radioed-in to the Party to inform them that the vertibirds had left the airspace at full speed.
Scipio's Sox unit rushed to Patch's aid, sending a volley of automatic fire into the invading Synths. With the attackers being dealt with, Patch was free to launch another volley of mortar fire into the units crossing the river. Bombarded and disorganized, the crossing Synths were easy pickings for Linda and her Bruins, who smashed them hand-to-hand. After that, there was only the unit attacking Patch. The synthetic attackers showed no hesitation or fear, they continued their desperate assault, even as it was obviously failing. Scipio ordered the Sox to fire on the invaders. Fremont, the village's head of security, and his fellow combat veterans let loose with their assault rifles, destroying the final group of attackers. The Battle of Muncie was won.
The Munsonians gathered after the fight to discuss and coordinate their next actions. Over two hundred Synths had marched into the village, advancing carelessly until they were destroyed. Of the defenders, only twelve had died. The people of Muncie thanked the Party for their leadership and assistance. There was debate, but ultimately the people of Muncie decided to stay. They had demonstrated to The General that they would not go easily, and maybe that was enough.
The Party asked the group about Harkness the Synth. A mercenary named Franco was in town to deliver a message and a stuffed animal to this Harkness, to shame him for horrible actions he took in a place called Rivet City. The community were adamant that Muncie represented a new start for all of its citizens. If this Harkness had done bad things, those were crimes, but they were The Institute's crimes. Whoever Harkness had been, they no longer existed. These Synths had their memories wiped by The Railroad, they were functionally new people.
Back at the Electric Friends Saloon, Franco the merc had been waiting through the whole battle. Unpaid for the job of defence, he took shelter instead of risking himself for no profit. The Party approached him and informed him that Harkness no longer existed. Franco claimed that his employer was not to be trifled with, and that they would want him to deliver the note and toy to whatever entity was in Harkness's old body. They told the merc that it was important for his safety that he immediately give up on this job and leave the village. Franco was upset by the loss of income and the unfinished job, and asked if they had any work for an experienced bounty hunter. Out of patience with him, they urged Franco to leave immediately. Which he did.
The Party decided to talk to Risk the super mutant. The odd character seemed to have knowledge of The General and his operations. Risk was packing his things to leave, claiming he was headed into Caesar's Legion, as he thought that it would be the last place touched by this war. He asked if the Party really wanted information about these things, as ignorance might be preferable. They insisted that they needed to know.
Risk told of how he was forcibly turned into a super mutant by a group called Unity back in California, a hundred years earlier. He had retained his intellect more than other mutants and was ostracized by both changed and unchanged wastelanders. After the Calculator War, he heard news that the Midwest was granting full citizenship to super mutants, so he travelled there, eager to belong to a community. Risk met up with a group of super mutant veterans of the Calculator War who began the Anheiser Booch Brewing Company in St. Louis. These mutants turned out to be in a cult, worshipping a being they called who could purportedly see the future.
Risk described The Puppetmaster followers who took an active role in her achieving her ends as members of a group called the Vanishing Point. These Vanishing Point agents did bizarre things, claiming that they would change the future for the better. Anheiser the brew master once kept a molerat in the brewery for months, training it to push a green button when a whistle blew. Booch left the brewery, having some kind of argument with Anheiser about how to enact The Puppetmaster's vision. Anheiser of complained that Wiggsly and his cell were too hesitant and conservative, while Booch's cell were too reckless and active.
Strangest of all was that there was one Gen 3 Synth who lived in the brewery with the super mutants. A young man named Fynn who did menial tasks for them. Anheiser had a remote-control device which would put Fynn into a catatonic state where he would enact any orders he would receive. Fynn would go out and accomplish the task in a kind of hypnotic state, and then return, having no memory of what he had done. That Fynn had grown old quickly, his hair turning grey and his features going waxy. Fynn had become angry at his creator, The General with his Vanishing Point compound in Michigan. The Synth had left for Michigan on a mission of revenge and never returned.
That had happened three times in fifteen years. Three Fynns had arrived, believing themselves to be the original Fynn Wolf, lived five years of service to Anheiser, and then left for Michigan never to return. The super mutants at the brewery treated each Fynn as something between a device and pet. Risk didn't know any details, but The General, the original human Fynn Wolf clearly had enormous resources. He was able to generate new Synths and had the equipment to send a small army to take Muncie. The super mutant was going to flee and recommended that the Party do the same.
The Party talked to some of the other Munsonians, but the reset Synths knew little about their past or the plans of the powerful factions of the wasteland. Tankersly, the Gen 2 Synth who ran the trade stop, had not been reset and remembered more. He recalled how Nate DiNovo, known as the Sole Survivor, had led the Boston Minutemen to destroy The Institute. After the victory, the Commonwealth had repelled the East Coast Brotherhood from their lands, with DiNovo going on a brutal crusade to purge the Brotherhood from his lands. The humiliating defeat of the East Coast Brotherhood had contributed to them reforming as The Capitol. The Sole Survivor reigned supreme over his region for a year, assigning important posts to his close friends.
But one day DiNovo was approached by a Boston family whose daughter had run away from home. The young woman had decided that she was secretly a Synth and went off to place called Far Harbor, where it was said there was a refuge for Synths called Avalon. Nate DiNovo, ever the hero, left his partner the journalist Piper Wright and their infant daughter Qarla behind and went to Far Harbor. He had died there, under strange circumstances that Tankersly had never gotten the details of.
The people of the Commonwealth were panicked. Without DiNovo, their leader and protector, they were vulnerable to counterstrike from The Capitol, or from the many raider clans which surrounded them. The Minutemen assembled every able body to stabilize the area and bolster their defence. An army of Minutemen, bent of revenge, sieged Far Harbor. The island was purged.
Tankersly didn't know the specifics of what happened to DiNovo or what happened at Far Harbor, but he knew that the Sole Survivors old cadre would know more. General McCready, son of Robert McCready now lead the Minutemen and had files on the matter. Strong the super mutant and a doctor named Curie worked for the Minutemen as well, training soldiers. DiNovo's friend Cait was now a senator in Commonwealth government. And Piper Wright, Nate's romantic partner and the mother of his child, was editor-in-chief of the Publick Occurences newspaper in Boston.
[Earlier in 2317, Nate DiNovo's daughter Qarla DiNovo had told the party that her mother Piper Wright had gone missing some time in 2316. Qarla had also spoken to a Minutemen veteran of the Far Harbor campaign who claimed that the Minutemen had never gone inside Avalon. The Railroad had secured the area by the time they arrived, and no one was allowed near. No explanation was ever given.]
Beyond that, Tankersly didn't seem to know anything about The Puppetmaster, The Capitol, or the goings-on in The Rustlands. The Party were eager to leave Muncie and continue toward their mission in Holy Toledo. They boarded Ms. Man and headed northeast to the old Taylor University campus.
They spotted a single salvager living in the ruins. The woman, named Leigh, noticed Linda and Lex's Capo sashes and treated them with suspicious respect. Leigh explained that there was an urgent situation and was shocked that the Party wanted to help without requiring pay. The salvager claimed that the local group of Responders, led by Capo Ysidro, were growing some kind of pestilence weapon at the old Adams Hospital. Patch, employing his medical expertise, knew that she was describing anthrax. Leigh claimed she had overheard Responders say they were going to use it against Fort Wayne. The Party knew that there was a Hellcats job drive happening in Fort Wayne, a large festival of mercenaries. The huge crowd of people would be a devastating target for the aerosol bioweapon. They did some scavenging in the university ruins and left Leigh alone.
The next stop was Gas City. Grinner the ghoul who lived in the Castle Prison had said his friend Fernada lived here but hadn't visited him in three months. The Party found Fernada at her house, working primitive pumps to draw oil-rich tar out of the surrounding pits. Fernada said that the roads weren't safe with the Responders around, even though she had a business relationship with them. Ysidro's lair at Huff Track was an enormous oil refinery where they took her tar and turned it into gasoline for their war bikes. The Responders were terrible customers and were terrorizing the entire region. The Party returned a pot that Grinner had borrowed from her, and reassured Fernada that they would do something about Ysidro.
By then Lancer Wieck was ready with dinner and they sat down to eat with the Ms. Man crew, the Lindavist Inquisitors and Dwayne from Vancouver. Soon after, they turned eastward, flying the airship towards the Adams Hospital.
They had been ultimately victorious in The Rails and victorious in Muncie. But their list of problems was still long. There was the local threat of Ysidro's Responders, the suspicious gathering of Hellcats mercenaries at Fort Wayne, the mission in Holy Toledo, the continuing threat of The General in Michigan and the raging New American War. And as if that wasn't enough, somewhere out there Wyatt was trying her hardest to gather the Thirteen Scepters...
Next Session: SESSION 87: TANKS FOR THAT, TANK
Report Date
23 Sep 2023
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