Iron Rev: Eating Raw - Ewwwll.
There's a bit of a problem going on in [Insert
campaign city here].
No, it's not that a Stoneskin Gang and one of Baal's
crack urban insurgency teams have decided to move into the same
neighborhood. That's fine.
No, it's not that the two groups have quickly ironed
out any pesky little dissonance conditions that would prevent them from cutting
each other into ribbons. That's fine,
too.
No, it's certainly not that the neighborhood in
question has become a war zone that generates a few used-up vessels a
night. Well, that is a bit of a
problem, but not the one that's a concern.
No, it's not even that the vessels aren't making it
to the morgue. [Insert head of faction
here] knows that nobody wants the [insert colloquial term for homo sapiens
sapiens here] to start examining them, after all.
The problem is that nobody knows where the vessels
are going.
This seed is suitable for either angelic or
demonic parties; they've been tasked with tracking down where the vessels are going
and presumably putting a stop to the disappearances. Not many entities on either side are particularly interested in
stopping the rumble, by the way: bitter gang fighting is what Servitors of
Stone and the War do. In fact,
it's made clear that the PCs are supposed to interfere with their compatriots'
amusement as little as possible (although joining in is fine, just as long as
the important mystery is solved).
We'll pass over trying to stake out a war zone while
there's gunfire and chainsaws going on; this is, after all, just a seed and I
don't need to tell you how to make your players' lives interesting. What's important is that, eventually, after
one particularly bloody battle the party will see two figures dragging off a
corpse from either side. Presumably,
they'll investigate.
When they do, they'll discover that the figures soon
separate, each bringing his prize to one of two local restaurants: a fried
chicken place and a sushi bar.
Investigating that will lead to the entirely unpleasant discovery
that angelic and demonic corpses have been slated to be the secret ingredients
in (respectively) Special Sweet Glaze and Super-Duper California Rolls. By the way, if anybody in the party had
earlier showed any interest in getting some food for the stakeout... well, I
explicitly give you permission to do what you're thinking of doing to them.
Backgrounds for these two guys is, well,
interesting: they're both five Force normal humans who happen to own fast food
restaurants, if the phrase 'normal' can include the concept of 'barking mad,
paranoiac conspiracy theorists'. One of
them came across a 'space alien' 'scanning the area' right after the gang war
started; he called in his not-precisely-friend and set up an ambush. As the 'space alien' was actually an
Impudite of Technology too engrossed in field-testing his shiny new Disturbance
sensor goggles to pay attention to the two humans sneaking up behind them, the
fact that they succeeded may not be too surprising. When the Impudite of Technology gets out of Trauma, I'm sure that
he'll have a different story, but right now he's too busy whimpering.
Just why the two decided to take a bite of
the corpse is thankfully a bit of a mystery; sometimes you just don't want to
know, and, no, there are no Servitors of Gluttony in the area, no doubt to
their eventual dismay. Sometimes you
just get some freaky humans, OK? We're
talking about the species that invented clown porn, after all. So, the humans took a bite, found it good,
checked out the goggles, found that they were good - as well as somewhat
mutagenic, which actually probably does explain why the guys suddenly got a
hankering for fillet of celestial - and
now are in the business of taking advantage of the sudden supply of 'space
aliens' to augment their cuisine. The
customers certainly seem to approve; so much so that one of the, well, not
cannibals. Celestivores? - anyway, if
it looks like a slow night one of the humans will go out with a sniper rifle
and drum up some carnage. Not often
necessary, though.
It really would be useful if at least one
player-character found out that he had been eating long bird / snake /
whatever, especially if the involuntary donor owed him money, or something -
because the boring option is to let the cops handle this one, and even if it
wasn't futile (for reasons which will obvious shortly) it's still just not as
much fun as letting the PCs storm one or the other fast food joints, Fiery
Swords blazing. Of course, 'fun' is a
slippery concept, as anybody who does is going to discover that the humans have
the other items that the 'space alien' had on him. Such as the 'blaster rifle', the 'fusion
grenades' and the 'particle beam shotgun'.
Actually, upon reflection I'm not entirely sure why
those last three are in scare quotes.