Probable Scenes: San Francisco

San Francisco: Deanna

Deanna will arrive about ten minutes after they come through the door. She brings four team members who will fade out of the narrative after the characters enter it.

Summit Soldier: (Warrior: 2; Survival: 6, 11, 14, 14; Move: 10; Attack: pistol; Damage: d6/2d6;Range: 18; Defense: +2)

The summit soldiers each have ballistic shirts and a 7-shot pistol. Usually they’ll take the penalty of 1 to attack in order to do 2d6 damage (and use two shots).

When they meet (and the fight’s over), Deanna will reach out her fingers to touch one of them on the chest, in an “are you really here” gesture. Expect the player characters to be suspicious of anyone at this point, so be careful.

A woman in brightly-colored clothing and a low-slung round burgundy cap waves at you as an old friend might, a wide smile on her face. She walks up to you with her hands flat in front of her, a long wand like the one that your attackers had hangs, unheld, on her back. “Hi,” she says. “Um… Do you mind?” She reaches out tentatively with her fingers to touch [character] on the chest, as if checking to see if they’re real. Then she pulls her hand back.

“I’m Deanna… Welcome to San Francisco. Sorry we’re late. The directions were a little confusing.”

She’ll help them clean up after the battle, and ask them to move quickly so that they can leave before the police arrive.

Deanna is the only person among her soldiers that knows the characters and what they look like. She has told her soldiers that the characters are likely to be confused and disoriented from a trip beyond time. If something happens to Deanna, the soldiers will reasonably give the characters the benefit of the doubt, but if it looks like the characters are attacking or have attacked her, they will defend her and try to get her to safety, and they’ll use their weapons against the characters to the best of their ability.

Memorabilia

Deanna will, at some point, light a cigarette. The matchbook she’s using is from the Moulin Rouge.

“Hold on a second,” she says. She takes out a piece of paper and tears something from it, and a small flame leaps from her hand. She holds it in front of her face and lights a small stick on fire, breathes in, and the end of the stick glows dull red in the morning twilight.

She may also ask one of her team members to take their picture using her Land Camera. She’ll ask them if they’d like a picture of to remember this. If they agree:

Deanna hands a box of some sort to one of the men she’s with. She steps towards your side and turns to face back where she came. The man with the device lifts it to his face; it appears as if he has one big eye. The device opens, and its front extends like an accordion. There is a bright light. You hear the device whir as your sight returns, and the thing slowly spits a piece of glossy paper from its mouth.

“Here you go,” he says.

The photo is theirs to keep. While instant cameras won’t work in Highland, the photograph will last.

San Francisco: Revolution

Deanna will drive them downtown in her green 1965 F100 Ranger longbed pickup. They’ll have to sit in the back. She’ll park nine blocks away down Market Street, and then they’ll walk the rest of the way.

Deanna introduces you to her “truck”, a long, green building-like structure with wheels as if it were a huge cart. There are flowers and stripes painted on the sides in many colors. The front of the structure has a fine glass on all four sides, like some magical crow’s nest. The back of the structure is open and flat, with short walls on three sides. Deanna folds the back wall down.

She leads you onto the back of the “truck” and pushes aside some wooden boxes and a pail of apple blossoms, and spreads out a wide blanket on the floor of the thing’s back room. She asks you to sit on the blanket or the boxes. You’re joined by two of the men who accompanied her.

There is a short, cyclic whine that vibrates the entire frame of this thing. A dull roar leaps from the front nose of this “truck”. It jerks forward, and you can see Deanna turning a wheel inside. The truck turns according to how she moves the wheel as the truck glides forward upon the smooth roadway.

You exit the trees and meadows and enter an area dense with houses. Magical lights shine through the windows of many of the houses. You hear snippets of strange melodies, and people in strange costumes walking along the sides of the road. Some wave at you.

The kinds of buildings change from houses to flat, square buildings, and there are lights hanging regularly from large poles on the sides of the streets. Here and there brightly-colored lights hang from the buildings, some spelling out words such as “Beer and Wine”, “Breakfast All Day”, and some you don’t understand: “Mandarin” and “Sushi”. Soon these signs hang from every building, and larger ones loom above the buildings. There are huge crowds of people by the side of the roads, and many on the roads. Deanna turns her wheel and the truck glides through them.

On Market Street, they’ll go through a relatively minor demonstration. Marching, yelling, cursing, chanting slogans in unison, voices augmented by some magic bullhorns. Opposed by men in blue with shields and clubs.

“Ah, shit. We’re gonna have to get rid of these weapons. The pigs’ll freak if they see your big-ass swords.”

“Pigs. Fuzz. Cops. Police? Law enforcement?”

“You wearing anything underneath there? No, the armor. The rest of you fit right in. Here, put some flowers in your hair.”

Magic boxes

The people on the sidewalks and in the storefronts are dressed in clothing as strange as Deanna’s. Like Highland, you see many colors of hair and skin, but there are some body types you don’t recognize. You even see a few people whose faces remind you of Joe Lakono.

The San Francisco Chronicle currently contains the crossroads symbol, with a news story about the Zodiac.

There’s a box on the side of the roadway, and inside of it is some sort of broadsheet with the scrawled crossroads symbol on it. Amidst news about water bills, broken taxes, and Wey in Washington large text reads “This is the Zodiac speaking”.

If they ask about it, Deanna can tell them about the cipher from August 2. The cipher’s solution will be printed on the morning of Saturday August 9. (If they develop contacts in the San Francisco Chronicle or police department, they can get the solution after noon on Friday.)

“It looks a lot like the scars that the insects leave on their hosts,” says Deanna.

The headline “Wey in Washington” leads an article about black activist August Wey, in Washington to “fight for” funding for schools in “slums” and laws to “end discrimination”. Mr. Wey will return to San Francisco on Saturday and speak about his efforts “to the people”.

If you have any sixties dimes or nickels, you can use them as props by having Deanna show them how to use the newspaper box, or a telephone booth, and she’ll then give them some coins so that they’ll be able to read the news and call her loft. Or have her toss them a handful of change to grab a cup of coffee and some donuts. There’s a coffeehouse across the street from her pad, the People’s Lounge.

Newspapers cost 10 cents. Telephone calls on a public telephone also cost 10 cents for the first three minutes (and usually have separate slots for nickels, dimes, and quarters). Being down to your last dime is a pretty important thing in 1969. Other magic boxes include refrigerated soda machines (cola and various flavored sodas for fifteen cents a bottle) and cigarette machines (for a quarter a pack).

Deanna’s pad

Deanna lives five miles from the Palace of Fine Arts, in a large industrial loft near the Tenderloin district, just south of Mission on Third. They’ll ride an industrial elevator from the first floor to the second floor. There are pipes everywhere along the walls and across the ceilings, and hard concrete floors.

Her loft is decorated with sixties-era posters: a poster of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles), Dean Martin in The Wrecking Crew, The Grateful Dead, Happy Trails (Quicksilver Messenger Service), After Bathing at Baxter’s (Jefferson Airplane), the hurdy gurdy man (Donovan), and Boots (Nancy Sinatra), for example.

From her loft, the neon lights they saw when they came down Market Street blink incessantly. She’s used to it, they will likely find it annoying.

San Francisco: Party line

If you want to draw this adventure out, they can be invited to a party by someone while walking through the march.

One of the things people do at parties is take drugs. This party will have alcohol, cigars, cigarettes, LSD, cocaine, heroine, marijuana, and probably a few others. If they ask Deanna about all the things people are smoking, drinking, and otherwise imbibing in the way of drugs, she’ll say:

“When it comes to drugs, you can get whatever you want in San Francisco. My rule of thumb is, if you have to inject it, snort it, or draw it from a mirror then it’s probably more danger than it’s worth.”

The world on fire

If you’re using the suggested soundtrack, you might bring this encounter up when Manson’s songs and dialogue comes on. You may want to adjust the location of Manson’s tracks according to how fast your games usually go; we have a lot of talking in our games, so I moved it towards the middle, since it was going to take an hour to go from the ambush to downtown San Francisco. If your game usually moves more quickly, you’ll want to move those tracks up, or queue them separately and play them manually when appropriate.

You see a young man playing the guitar, accompanied by several young women on vocals and tambourine. One of the young women stops you; “thou art god”, she says, giggles, and returns to her friends.

If they’re from Highland, they’ll notice something odd about Manson’s entourage. On a perception roll, they’ll realize that all of his entourage are white. On the other hand, these folks are more normal to characters from a semi-medieval world like Highland compared to Deanna. Deanna is clean—scrubbed clean. Charly and his girls are much more medieval in their hygiene (as are many other hippies on the street).

Manson is in San Francisco to receive more instructions on how to bring about the race wars that he thinks will leave him in power. He may be in the park when they arrive, or near Deanna’s pad later. If you’re using the soundtrack, then when his music comes on you should mention that a guy nearby is playing the guitar, surrounded by girls, etc. He can (if they track him, interrogate him, fool him, or use telepathy or other extra-normal means at their disposal) lead them to the swarm hive in Alcatraz. One of the girls might also be able to provide similar clues to August Wey’s assassin and to the headquarters of the Autumnal Swarm. Manson understands that his new friends are trying to start a massive, violent race war, and he believes that they’ll be successful. He also believes that if he builds up enough of a following he’ll be able to come out on top.

He will be driven back to Spahn Movie Ranch on August 7, where, on August 8, he will order his followers to go to Roman Polanski’s house and murder everyone there. They will kill Sharon Tate and her friends that night (or early the next morning) and leave markings (such as “pig”) that they think will implicate the Black Panthers. Manson will, the next night (August 9) take part in the LaBianca murders in the same area.

Manson has a “hit list” of people who should be killed. Besides Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr., it includes the note “Hollywood whites… blame on Panthers.” It also includes “August Wey—Jesse”, referring to assassin Jesse Hill. The note is titled rain harsh sin. (An anagram, or perhaps the solution, of Sirhan Sirhan.)

Some of the Manson family taking part in the August 9 and 10 killings are Susan Atkins, Charles “Tex” Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten. You might choose one of those names to be with Manson in San Francisco. Former song-and-dance girl Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme is likely to be with him too.

If the players decide to track down Manson (whether they know his name or just remember his songs) it won’t be hard to find one of the girls who hangs out with him. She’ll know his name (Charly), know his philosophy (that he’s preparing for the final conflagration between blacks and whites, during which they’ll live in an underground city), and that he lives in the desert near Los Angeles and hangs out with the Beach Boys (not true at this point). He’s also chauffeured occasionally by important-looking men in a new black Cadillac.

At the Red Mill

A music gig for Deanna. An optional scene. A murder in the night? A sense of Red Jack? Ebeorie on the walls? The Red Mill can (sans Zodiac) also be used at the end of the adventure to provide a nice party for the characters.

A dark and lonely crowd

“Those days are closing fast.”

Another option is to see a movie. Chances are pretty good the characters have never seen anything like a movie. But they might sense a bit of déjà vu when they see the slow-motion effects of The Wild Bunch, because it will remind them of fighting the swarm beneath the Palace. If they’ve seen a swarm insect, the opening scene of children playing a game of watching scorpions on an ant hill may also be disconcerting.

This is one hell of a movie, and you should make sure all of your players have seen it before reading the second paragraph.

A play of light is projected from high above and behind onto a great white wall. Words on the wall describe the actors in the play. Men on horses, with those strange weapons you’ve already seen, ride into a town, but they pass smiling children poking at an ant hill, and watching pale scorpions attacked by hundreds of large ants. You get the impression that the children have placed the scorpions on the ant hill as a game.

As the play progresses it becomes clear that these men are thieves; they’re swindled out of their first robbery after half of them die; they flee into another country chased by one of their own and sell more of those strange weapons for gold. One of those weapons sounds like the thunderous ones that attacked you in the long hallway beyond the door, but it’s bigger, and the thieves use it to kill an entire army before the thieves themselves are killed. Only the one who chased them survived, though he abandons his own friends to join another army. The play ends in laughter.

San Francisco: Earthquake

At 6:29 PM Thursday, August 7, if the characters have not made any headway stopping the swarm plot, there will be a minor earthquake in San Francisco, centered in the bay near Alcatraz Island. It will be felt throughout San Francisco, and the news of its location (sans the mention of Alcatraz) will be on the radio by around 7 PM.

If the characters are going to go see a movie on Thursday or if that’s the night that you’ve chosen for Deanna’s Red Mill gig, put the earthquake halfway through the show.

The hive strikes back

Before he leaves, Manson will order an attack on Deanna and the summit. Manson himself will not take part. He will send seven women (two of them swarm hosts): Lin, Abbie, Karen, JC, Dana, Dinah, and Mary. The latter two are swarm hosts.

Three of the women (Lin, Abbie, and Karen) will pound on the door several hours before the attack, asking for assistance (if they can run up to the group while the group is outside, even better). They’re being chased by a crazy man, maybe the Zodiac himself, they’ll say. They’ll want to stay with their protectors all night. (If your players have realized Charly’s identity, they can say that Charly himself is the Zodiac, and they’re scared of him.)

You hear a terrified scream, a woman in fear. A mousy girl, scared, comes running to the door and pounds on it. She is accompanied by two friends, both of them looking over their shoulders behind them in fright. “Hurry!” one of them cries. “Open the door!”

They’ll signal the best windows to break into at about 2 AM, opening them if possible, and their compatriots will arrive armed to the teeth; if possible, their compatriots will give the three scouts a handgun each. They use 1911 pistols with 7 round magazines.

Except for the two swarm hosts, the attackers do not know about Alcatraz, only about Manson. They won’t know where to find him. They will know some clue that leads to Alcatraz.

Distressed women (Lin, Abbie, Karen): (Human: 1, Survival: 5, 5, 3; Move: 10; Charisma: Low Average; Attack: knives; Damage: d4; Defense: 0)

Attacking women (Joline, Dana): (Human: 1, Survival: 4, 5; Move: 10; Charisma: High Average; Attack: 1911 pistols; Damage: d6/2d6; Range: 18; Defense: 0)

Swarm hosts (Dinah, Mary): (Autumnal Swarm: 5, Human: 1; Survival: 26+1, 21+3; Move: 11; Attack: 1911 pistols; Damage: d6/2d6; range: 18; Defense: +2; Special Defense: slo-time; Magic Resistance: 3)

Swarm insect form (Autumnal Swarm: 5; Survival: 26, 21; Move: 16; Attack: mandible; Damage: d8; Defense: +5; Special Defense: slo-time; Magic Resistance: 3)

The waxen assassin will also take part in the attack if it is still around. It doesn’t care about Deanna and will focus on the player characters. If it can take the shape of a woman, it will take the form of “JC” and replace Abbie as part of the initial distressed women. The waxen assassin can also use illusions to enhance the dangers that the women are claiming to face, perhaps even making an illusion of Charly chasing them stereotypically with a knife.

Waxen Assassin: (Demon: 6; Chaotic Evil; Survival: 43; Move: 12; Attacks: 1; Damage: d6; Defense: +8; Special attack: 6-yard illusions; Special defenses: immune to weapons, cold; resistant to elements; Magic Resistance: 6)

After the ambush, Deanna will move them all (and herself) into a nearby hotel, starting with the Franklin Arms. She will not stay in any hotel more than a day.