Turtle Island: The Living Loa, Part II

The story continues—sort of! More-or-less new characters across the board, but we’re moving on with the thing because I had already prepped this shit and didn’t want to do another fucking thing. Unfortunate as it was to recount events up until then to provide some semblance of context, it also felt like a good exercise that solidified my approach to this campaign: fuck time records. Redo sessions. Retcon whoever was there up until the one about to start. Individual characters may follow their own arcs, but the basic unit of the campaign is the crew and whoever’s in the crew can change as needed. I think that’ll keep me from going insane more than imposing bullshit like “You have to go home at the end of an adventure” or “You need to schedule for everyone last time to come back” or “Someone needs to substitue for so-and-so to play their character.” Anyway. Characters! My stuff is put away so I don’t have their names on me, but a rose smells sweet even if you don’t know what it’s called.

• A dwarf designed to be maximally attractive to all classes: two pairs of ears, one elf and one human; and two halves of their body and face, one seme and one uke. This is actually the same dwarf as before but, the way my friend put it, evolved.
• A watcher who came down from heaven and took the form of a chunky kitty cat for the sole reason of bothering people. His drawing has a Chad face but I don’t know if that’s artistic license or a real representation. Love it either way!
• An amnesiac hoblin who lost or perhaps was even abandoned by his family. All he has left is a muscle memory of cooking and a cosmopolitan love for other cultures’ culinary traditions.

I had prepared an adaptation of the Red Queen’s Catacombs from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, but we didn’t get that far because we spend a couple hours drawing new characters with their items, drinking cocktails and lattes, and watching the cat who had suddenly decided to be sociable after a couple years of being super skittish. When we finally picked up from where we had left off, I decided to play out the evening after the crew had proved themselves to the maroon village by surviving a sublime encounter with the loa. There were three key figures in the village: Yemaya, the world-weary matriarch who sleeps with a rifle; Nijah, a young apothecary-in-training who hungers for a world beyond the walls of her village; and Amadi, the teenage (19!) guardian of the loa’s temple who didn’t expect to have a real job all of a sudden.

The watcher-kitty (most kitties are watchers, aren’t they? they love to watch) spent the night trying to get in Yemaya’s good graces. She wouldn’t let anyone other than a sweet baby kitty into her quarters; once she fell asleep, the kitty sifted through her drawers and found a fragment of what seemed like an artifact out of this world. The hoblin spent the night with Nijah, both equally excited to learn about the other’s life (although the hoblin, being amnesiac, had nothing to share but tortillas—which Nijah was still head over heels to have tried for the first time). The dwarf tried to have a yaoi moment with Amadi to go past him and into the loa’s temple, but the further they progressed the more he realized there was more to Amadi than had he seemed: he began to grow scales and wiry hairs all over his body, which itself began to contort and hunch over.

The dwarf screamed and ran back towards the village. The watcher-kitty, sneaking out of Yenaya’s hut and seeing the situation, realized the temple was unguarded and slipped into the entrance (kitties can see in the dark, obviously, so no worries!). The hoblin also heard the commotion and excused himself from Nijah to help out the dwarf, almost immediately casting a spell to cause Amadi the chupacabra to shit his pants—making him drag his ass across the ground and eventually tear his pants off. The dwarf for a couple turns was able to soothe Amadi by putting his magical magician gloves around his head and making him think calm thoughts about his mother, though the effect wasn’t strong enough to totally un-chupacabra him. The kitty-watcher meanwhile managed to open the sleeping pod of what seemed like a loa, and had to do cute kitty things like rolling around and showing his tummy to convince the loa not to do anything harsh. The hoblin was eventually able to call over Nijah who apparently was prepared for this sort of situation, and had prepared a very rudimentary syringe to un-chupacabra Amadi. Everything was well, until the other villagers happened upon the unfortunate scene. “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS?!” It was… Yemaya! The hoblin and the watcher-kitty agreed to put the dwarf in the village idiot cage to attone for his behavior; they’ll all probably be forced to leave the next day, unless something terrible and unanticipated happens which calls for a bunch of lovely idiots to figure out.