April loses an arm; Pren­tiss rather more.

Played

25^th August 2011.

Dramatis Personae

• Lady Ant­o­nia deVore – a Heav­ily-armed Aris­to­crat *.
• Cap­tain Ben­son Cur­ruth­ers – a Mil­it­ary Police­man.
• Miss April Sharpe – a Self-taught Invent­or.
• Jack Pren­tiss – a Dodgy Ped­es­tri­an.
• Pinky – a Low Youth.
• Agent Andrews – a Stal­wart Agent of the Min­istry.
• Jemadar Khan of the Bengal Lan­cers.
• 2 Tiger Demons.
• A Very Large Anim­ated Statue.

Plot

The demon keeled over and, when the play­ers took a closer look at the corpse, they real­ised it was the body of a nor­mal tiger, albeit on the small side. Cur­ruth­ers estim­ated it was only a year or so old. Leav­ing Ant­o­nia to exam­ine the body in more detail, the team bor­rowed some of her weapons and headed back to the road.

An hour or so later, they finally stumbled to the edge of the cent­ral clear­ing in the jungle, look­ing out across a large cleared area towards the temple. Pinky volun­teered to scout ahead and (get­ting about 4 raises) dis­ap­peared into the grass.

It was at this point that a pair of the tiger demons attacked the main group, wreak­ing hav­oc. The ini­tial attack took most of them by sur­prise; Khan took a minor injury, but April was much more badly injured, with a large por­tion of her right arm being ripped off. As she col­lapsed, Cur­ruth­ers was able to bring his exper­i­ence of jungle medi­cine to bear and pre­ven­ted her from dying from the shock and blood loss. Being left-handed, April was able to con­trib­ute her orgon­at­or to the ensu­ing fight as Cur­ruth­ers poured shots from Antonia’s LeMat into the creature and the oth­ers hacked at it relent­lessly. Pinky returned at a rush and hurled him­self into the fray. Khan found him­self hold­ing off the oth­er creature on his own but, as the first dropped, Pren­tiss turned his atten­tion, and his over­sized sabre, to the task in hand. Unfor­tu­nately, the tiger reacted quickly, and a single claw-swipe ripped open the sportsman’s abdo­men. It only took a few moments for the team to dis­patch the mon­ster, but it was already too late for Pren­tiss, who expired mut­ter­ing “bug­ger that!”

Battered and in shock, the group were unable to react for some time, then they decided that Pren­tiss would have wanted them to press on. Pinky once again headed towards the temple, sneak­ing inside the door without rais­ing any obvi­ous alarms. He found that it was a con­cent­ric struc­ture, with a second wall inside the first, punc­tu­ated by the same not-quite-towers. The out­er enclos­ure was dis­used so he pressed on to the inner gate. Here he found him­self con­fron­ted by the foot of a giant statue of a multi-armed and mul­ti­headed fig­ure. He crept around it, intend­ing to get a look at the source of the fire­light he could see reflec­ted on the walls, then became aware of a creak­ing noise above him. Look­ing up, he noticed the statue start­ing to move towards him and he bolted, head­ing straight out of the temple… 

Notes

I knew Antonia’s absence would have an effect, but I didn’t think it would be this bad… It maybe time to rethink my cur­rent “player’s absence equals character’s unavail­ab­il­ity” policy. Ant­o­nia would have prob­ably brought one of the tigers down almost imme­di­ately (and I prob­ably would have used three). On the oth­er hand, most of the dam­age was done in the ini­tial sur­prise: the big cat’s +4 to hit and dam­age is incred­ibly power­ful here.

Just for the record, April’s injury was the res­ult of a per­man­ent injury on the inca­pa­cit­a­tion table; Cur­ruth­ers’ inter­ven­tion (by adven­ture card) meant that she didn’t have to keep rolling vs Vigour to avoid expir­ing. Pren­tiss got a sim­il­ar res­ult (to the gut), but failed his first roll.

These are the first cas­u­al­ties I’ve had in this game, although it’s not for want of trying.

Sober­ing isn’t it?

(* – play­er not present.)