John Wick #2

image from: http://wikimapia.org/1539581/IRT-Powerhouse

After escaping from the laundromat, our party decided to split up, with Alice going to meet her contacts, while Bruce and Joseph would proceed to visit a dance club runned by the Uppsala mafia housed in the IRT Powerhouse to gather more information from Alice's contact there. Along the way Bruce and Joseph were accosted by Mori, the erstwhile caretaker of the Japanese Garden where Delany was found murdered (see PC profiles here). Bruce and Joseph were able to convince Mori that they were framed, and Mori decided to follow the two on their mission to find the truth so he could be reinstated.

The trio arrived at the club and met its owner Gunther Eriksson, who revealed that the "person of interest" they need to find was one Yulian Pavlov, a member of the Tarasov family who was currently under the protection of the FBI in The Provincial Hotel in West New York. Gunther also informed the trio that he had tipped the High Table off on their arrival so as to not incur their wrath for assisting the trio, but would not hinder their escape, and would in fact lend them the help of a driver named Jason. Just then High Table enforcers entered the building, but our trio were able to elude them by smashing a window and misleading them into thinking they had fled through it, while they sneaked off and met up with Jason.

The party then proceeded towards West New York, but while in the Lincoln Tunnel they realised they were being pursued by the enforcers. Jason was able to put some distance between their car and that of the pursuers, and Joseph shot out a tyre of a car between them, which blocked the tunnel and allowed them to escape.

After they crossed the Hudson River, the party stopped by a motel and at Jason's suggestion they abandoned their car, and Bruce jacked a Volvo as their means of transport, and they drove to The Provincial Hotel.

Bruce knew from his work that the FBI used The Provincial Hotel as a place to house their witnesses, and that they rented the 7th and 8th floors of the 8-storey hotel for that purpose. The party managed to get a suite on the 5th floor, and proceeded to plan how to snatch Julian from the FBI.

Bruce put on an overall he found in the trunk of the car they jacked, and walked up to the 7th floor, where he was intercepted by an FBI agent. Bruce knocked out the FBI agent and took his key card and communications devices, but the commotion brought more FBI agents from the 8th floor. Joseph joined Bruce and kept the agrents at bay with warning shots, and in the confusion the rest of the party was able to reach the 8th floor via the lift.

The remaining agents on the 8th floor retreated into the suite and called for a SWAT team to be sent. Our party breached the room, and in an impressive display of shooting Joseph took out four agents in successive double-taps. Bruce and Joseph searched the room for Yulian, and when they went out onto the balcony they were shot by a sniper from the building across the street. Jason and Mori retrieved the two from the balcony, and Mori performed first-aid on them. Bruce had suffered a minor injury, but Joseph was severely wounded and would need medical aid soon or die.

The party was finally able to find Yulian hiding in the closet in an adjoining room. when he realised that the party were not there to kill him, Yulian agreed to go with them. The five then departed the suite, with Mori carrying Joseph on his shoulders. Just as they exited the door of the adjoining room, they caught a glimpse of a man entering the other door into the main suite itself. They made their way to the lift landing, with Jason covering the rear - just as they turned the corner, Jason caught a glimpse of the gunman exiting the door: it was a man of uncertain ethnicity, wearing a dark suit, and sporting shoulder-length black hair in a centre-parting, and a beard...

The party continued towards the lift landing, and passed the dead bodies of more FBI agents. Knowing that they would not be able to flee the gunman with one of them wounded, and that the SWAT team would arrive soon, they entered the utility room and barricaded themselves inside. Fortunately, there was a laundry chute in the utility room. One by one the party entered the chute even as the gunman tried to breach the room. Jason was the last one to leave, and caught a bullet through the door as he entered the chute. Before the gunman could follow them, however, the SWAT team arrived on the scene, and our gunman had to turn his attention to them...

Prepping and Running the Game

This session was based on the module Schroedinger's Box, which featured the task of getting to someone under the FBI's protection in a hotel.

Again, the session was mostly about the PCs moving from one locale to another, while being pursued by persons with hostile intent. Players being players, they did not respond to every threat with maximum force, but preferred to find a less risky way out each time. Until they didn't.

The high point of the session was when Joseph's player managed to make four successful shooting rolls - in Covert Ops you could perform multiple actions each round, but suffered a 20% penalty on each successive roll, so four successful rolls in one turn was rare indeed.

Despite that, the session ended with the party in dire straits, with one member near death, and them being pursued by John Wick himself. I was doubtful that they could survive being caught between John Wick on the one hand and a SWAT team on the other, but one player asked about a laundry chute, and I thought that was a reasonable thing to find in a hotel.