Unexplained Phenomena Unit, session 3: Secrets of Whistlepine Town

Played 9/7/22. This mystery was heavily inspired by the actual play podcast 'The Adventure Zone: Amnesty'.

Player characters:

Ghost, the Crooked Assassin (Aaron) - a quiet, stoic assassin, he's with the unit as long as they keep paying him. Wears a black leather jacket, tank top, tribal wolf tattoo on his right arm, sniper rifle in an inconspicuous case that he has slung over his shoulder.

John Moore, the Expert (Kye) - the teams man with the van, and the van has everything an organised monster hunter could ever need. He's a rough middled-aged guy with greying brown hair and a scruffy short beard, wears fairly smart clothes.

Mike "the sensorite" Jones, the Flake (Paul) - the least jaded and most caring of the team, an excitable young nerdy guy obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy, occultism and conspiracy theories. Wears a long red coat, jeans, illuminati T-shirt, John Lennon style round sunglasses, serpent pendant, rings on every finger.

Salem, the Crooked Charlatan (Harvey) - a meticulous, sly and bitter con-man, born from a life of crime, looking for ways to manipulate the supernatural to his advantage. He looks imposing, with sharp black hair and goatee, tight grey suit with black shirt and tie.

“Mission briefing - at 6:37am this morning, a social media influencer called Jasmine Dallas made an instagram post from the Whistlepine nature reserve in West Virginia. In the post, she talked about wanting to visit a stone archway, reminiscent of stonehenge, that was a treasured landmark of the forest, but when she got to it she found what she concluded to be the aftermath of a bear attack. Attached was a picture of the archway, surrounded by three horribly mutilated bodies, a van flipped on its side in the foreground, the scene splattered with strange black ichor, runes carved into the archway that aren't usually there. The post was up for 30 minutes before being taken down by the local law enforcement. Attempts to call ahead to let local law enforcement know to work with you have been met with resistance.”

The crew from the previous adventure (minus Alexander) rolls into Whistlepine town at 3pm, and decides to head straight for the crime scene. They’re stopped by a very aggressive Sheriff who seems intent on not involving outsiders in this case. He eventually lets them through on the condition that they help catch the creature that killed these people, and don’t snoop too much into anything else. The crime scene looks mostly the same as the instagram post, except cordoned off, with taped out silhouettes of where the bodies were found.

Clues found at the crime scene…

- Tracks of a massive four-legged lizard-like beast, trailing the black ichor, heading off further into the wilderness (not towards town, luckily)

- Samples of the black ichor indicate it is corrosive to flesh and spreads out (reflexively, not sentiently) to engulf surfaces that it touches

- Mike recognises the runes carved into the stone archway from the spellbook discovered in the previous adventure as having to do with opening portals and amplifying magic already present in a place

- The flipped over van has a leaking tank of water in the back that smells of sulphur, probably water from the hot springs at the local lodge

The party head back to town and split up. John Moore hits the books and the internet in his vans mobile lore library to find out if this creature has ever been seen before, or if anything else has happened with that stone archway. He discovers there was an incident with the archway that was covered up 50 years ago, and after that incident the population of the town seemed to double.

Thinking that he could interview Jasmine Dallas, Salem tries to sweet-talk the receptionist at the Roamers Rest lodge into telling him where her room is, but a rather conflicted receptionist confesses to him that Jasmine has been taken into police custody for finding out too much about the town and they don’t know what to do with her.

Mike investigates the water at the lodges hot springs. Taking samples, watching its effects on the other patrons, and eventually getting in himself, he concludes the water to be a magical substance, capable of supernatural healing and rejuvenation when used with the intention of relaxation, but is potentially capable of other magical effects, within reason, if a different intention is applied.

Ghost slips into the morgue at the hospital unnoticed, to see what more he can find out about the creature from the bodies of the victims. He finds the victims brutally torn apart, torsos and limbs detached, but more than that, he discovers the victims were satyrs, elves and dragonborn using prosthetics and human skin suits to pose as humans.

Everyone regroups to share what they’ve found. They deduce that 50 years ago, the archway was a portal to another world, a large group of alien beings came through and made their home in this town. Then last night, three of these beings went to the archway and, using the hot spring water as magical fuel, focused through the runes, conducted some kind of ritual to reopen the portal, and were immediately killed by something that came through.

They decide their next move is to go to the police station and confront the police about the situation and about Jasmine. However, when they get there, the police are running to their cars, shouting that they’ve got a location on the creature. The sheriff tosses John a radio and they follow the police cars to the nature reserve.

Once they catch up to the creatures trail of destruction, fallen trees, pieces of deer, bears, coyotes laying about, the sheriff suggests that everyone splits into two groups - a tail group to chase the creature and an ambush group to cut the creature off at the pass.

John, Salem and two officers form the tail group, and catch up to the creature having just killed a few camping tourists. As expected, the creature is a massive, four-legged lizard-like entity made of black sludge, not quite as expected was the fact it had formed a patchwork shell of limbs, heads, and body parts of other creatures it had engulfed and was now puppeteering. The tail group started firing on it, John discovered it was especially vulnerable to his silver sword, but they sustained several injuries fighting it as well.

Mike, Ghost, the sheriff and two officers found a cliff side where Ghost could set up his sniper rifle and they could start firing on it from a distance. One of Ghosts shots caused the creature to split into two smaller creatures. He spotted a smoke stack from another campsite further ahead. The sheriff decided there was no point keeping secrets at this point, and tore off his own skinsuit to reveal himself to be an aarakocra, and he took flight to warn the other campers about the creature. Mike followed after him to help convince the very ordinary campers from out of town to trust the strange bird-man.

John struck the killing blow to one of the creatures with his silver sword, and started helping the wounded police officers, barely realising he was starting to bleed out from his own wounds. Mike found the Sheriff defending the campers from the second creature, shooting small fireballs from a wand that seemed to be powered by a vial of hot spring water at its core. When the creature leapt onto the sheriff, he tossed the wand to Mike. Knowing that the creature was vulnerable to silver, Mike dealt a significant blow to it by conjuring a bullet of liquid silver, but the wand exploded in his hand as he did so. Salem, catching up to Mike, dealt the final blow with his gun, before practically collapsing with 1 hitpoint remaining.

Everyone returned to the hot springs to heal up. The sheriff explained at last that most of the townsfolk were people from another world who had decided they liked it better here, and couldn’t get back to their own world anyway. They had brought the magic hot spring water here from their world, but it was beginning to get used up, so some people must have taken it upon themselves to reopen the portal and restock, but they must have opened the door to the wrong world, and something dangerous that they didn’t understand came through.

Salem negotiated for a large sample of the hot spring water, and in exchange the story they reported back to the organisation omitted the details of the inhuman townsfolk who were living peacefully.