Clanking Doom (and the baleful machinations) Playtest

My stalwart gaming group, fueled by Aldi brand chips in many varieties as well as several two liters of soda arrived at my house while I was trapped in an interview for a new position at my job that was running long (like two hours long).

I got the new job, which is more closely aligned with my background (teaching elementary school for the past five years in an urban school), and the guys all crowded into my basement and passed around the guitar I keep next to my computer desk to make the group listen to my acoustic renditions of eighties hits while visiting the bar/ tavern in The Downs from the previous adventure.  I missed the the jam session, but we did get through some of the adventure before everyone had to head home. Tomorrow night we should be able to conclude Clanking Doom, and then one more adventure (reclaiming the fallen fortress which is actually a refinery in Smitherine)  before they unlock vehicles!

Last time we played, The party members where enjoying the spoils from their previous adventure. They were given an apartment on the second level of The Downs (Silver), as well as the official titles of "Agents", but were soon tasked with investigating the claims of a heavily damaged robot (robot torso actually) about a madman seeking to overtake the world with an army of robots.  One of the characters had to wear the legless robot as a backpack, and they set out Northeast into the the Hex Zone known as "Bulwark" to find the lair of the maniac.  The party encounters soldiers that had run a group of Mutants (I always type orcs when I want to write "mutants", and have to backspace and correct it) into a small cavern.  The soldiers didn't want to go in after them, and were forced to wait long enough to ensure the Mutants starved or bled to death, but offered some credits to the characters if they would go in and finish them off.  The characters accepted, and slaughtered the Mutants in the end. They recovered an explosive grenade from a tripwire trap, and the Scavenger character Merle nicked two wedding bands off of skeletons found by crawling through the back window of a ruined car jutting out of one of the cavern walls (He kept these rings a secret, greedy bastard that he is).

The Party found the entrance to the Manufactory, and solved a puzzle to gain entry with help from the robot torso.  Once inside, they met Ors Keye, a cyborg scientist that had been preserved in cryogenic sleep since before the End Times War.  There were other scientists as well, but he claimed they did not survive the process.  Ors is a condescending jerk, and a lot of fun to roleplay, taunting the players/ characters and forcing them to jump through hoops to proceed through a training facility for robots.

Ors has near total control of the facility, but cannot access certain panels needed to assemble a large battle Mech that he can command, so he forced the characters to access the panels in order to gain access to the next area in the Manufactory. The party managed to survive several traps, overcame two fairly difficult logic puzzles, and defeated the first group of battle robots Ors sent to test against them.

So far they have sent both arms to a level below, which are being assembled to "Clanking Doom".

Ors will continue to send improved versions of his battle bots until the party reaches the end.

If they are successful, they will liberate a group of robots meant to aid humans in the reconstruction of the ruined world. These robots, known as Citiz3ns, will become a new playable character class at the end of the adventure, just as Lizard-Folk became a new class at the end of the last adventure (Bub's Diner).

In the coming adventure, the players will do battle with Clanking Doom, a multi-stage foe with hit points for each body part.  They will be able to trick the robot, being controlled by Ors, into destroying a wall that leads to Ors's isolation chamber.  I can reveal this in a blog post because I have kept this blog a secret from my players...

They will be forced with the decision to kill Ors, or keep him alive as he may have information about the past that is valuable, although he has already confessed that something when wrong with his cryogenic hibernation and is in fact, quite insane. The desire to kill him should be pretty strong, as I have really played him up to be quite a jerk...