John Wick #3 and #4

Having escaped from The Provincial with Yulian, our party decided to take him to New Windsor in Jersey, where he claimed he had a safe house. They drove north, switch cars (stole a car) to mask their trail, but were still pursued by the Russian mob. After a gunfight in the suburbs, they barely made it to the safe house, where the gangsters ceased their pursuit.

Here they were taken in by Dmitri Pavlov, Yulian's uncle, who was formerly in the Tarasov crime family. Although retired, he still commanded a measure of respect from the Tarasov family, but he knew it would only gain his nephew a respite and not escape from Viggo's wrath. They informed Bruce of their location, and the fugitive policeman joined them (see PC profiles here). Soon afterwards, John Wick arrived at the door to politely inform Dmitri that Viggo had given Dmitri 24 hours to surrender his nephew.

Yulian made a desperate attempt to save himself and called Viggo to beg for mercy, but it was useless. Viggo then spoke to the party, offering to help Joseph and Mori pardoned by the High Table, and to use his political influence to exonerate Bruce, and to give Jason a job in the Tarasov family if they could find the person buying information from Yulian, and to eliminate him in a way that would leave a clear message that Viggo was the one who gave the order.

Realising there was no escape, Yulian beseeched our party to help get his girlfriend Charlie to safety, promising that they will find clues to who was really responsible for the murder of Roger Zelany through her. He explained that someone had approached his girlfriend at the exotic dance club where she worked to offer to buy information regarding the activities of the Tarasov family at a generous price. The money and information would be transferred through Charlie, so Yulian did not know whom he was selling the information to, except that they were from the Calabrian mafia. Charlie would hand part of the money to Yulian, while she deposited the rest in a number of bank accounts. When Roger Zelany, an associate with the Calabrian mafia was murdered, Yulian feared the worst, and decided to seek the protection of the FBI. He now feared that Charlie would be implicated, and asked the party to get her to safety, beyond the reach of both the Tarasov family and the Calabrian mafia. He handed the party a pendant he wore as a proof they were from him, together with a safety deposit key, and left a message on Charlie's phone, and awaited his fate

The party armed themselves from Dmitri's weapon cache, and took his car to the dance club. At the carpark they noticed that someone else was watching the club. They entered the club and waited for Charlie to come on stage. Soon afterwards two suspicious men also entered the club. When Charlie finally came on, Bruce moved to the stage and flashed Yulian's pendant at her, and the party left, hoping to enter through the back door and link up with Charlie. However, they found two men waiting in ambush at the alley behind the club. A firefight broke out, followed by sounds of gunshots from the front of the club. The party broke in through the back door to find dancers fleeing. They rushed to the floor of the club to find Charlie being held by two armed men.

Joseph quickly took down one of the gunmen, as well as two more who came through the front door, while Bruce knocked the other one out with a flying kick. They then grabbed Charlie and left, just when the sounds of police sirens were heard.

They explained the situation with Yulian to Charlie, and then drove her to a bus station, where she could take a bus out of town. Charlie told them that she too did not know who in the Calabrian mafia was buying the information from Yulian, but that the two people who contacted her each time were Ricardo, who Joseph shot, and Gabriel, who was knocked out by Bruce.

The party now realised that they had to get to Gabriel to learn who their boss was. Fortunately, Bruce had knew which hospital the police would bring Gabriel to for treatment of his wounds. Driving to the hospital, they stole a couple of orderly uniforms, put Bruce on a gurney, and wheeled him right up to the cop guarding Gabriel at the emergency room, where Bruce knocked him out. They then uncuffed Gabriel from his bed and placed him on the gurney, while Bruce put on the cop's uniform and placed him on Gabriel's bed, and fled the place.

Once they were in the car, the party gave Gabriel the choice of either telling them what he knew for some money and a ride to the train station, or be turned over to either the cops or his boss, who would no doubt punish him for his failed mission. Gabriel considered his options, and decided to spill the beans.

Francesco Cortone, a rogue capo of the Calabrian mafia, had taken advantage of their weak head of the family to plan a hostile takeover of the Tarasov family's territories. He did so in collaboration with certain corrupt persons in law enforcement, aiming to use police powers to help him take down the Russians. To this end he bought information about the Tarasov family's businesses, so he could send his men to attack them. These were small skirmishes that did not really affect the Tarasov family's bottomline, but calculated to give the sense that the Russian mob presence in the city was a problem, which would make it harder for the High Table to shield them when the police decided to move against them. Gabriel informed the party that Francesco would be meeting the contact person from law enforcement at a chemical warehouse in Jersey before dawn that day.

Our party planned their attack. After stopping and breaking into a sports goods store for rope, Joseph and Bruce rappelled down the roof of the warehouse and crashed through the second floor windows to reach the catwalk, yelling: Viggo says hello! as they landed. They surprised the thugs guarding the place, who were quickly felled by Bruce's shotgun and Joseph's assault rifle. Through the ground floor windows Jason could see more gunmen rushing to the stairs to get to the catwalk, so he drove the car through the shutter door of the warehouse and joined the fight.

Joseph took down the thugs who swarmed out of the corner office to repel them in a fashion that would make John Wick proud, but the party were stopped in their tracks by a gunman shooting from inside the office, whom Bruce recognised to be Frank Krothers, the District Attorney's bodyguard.

From inside the office, Francesco called out to the party, offering to match and exceed whatever deal Viggo was offering them, but the party was not in a mood to deal. Jason dashed back into the car, and drove it into the steel columns holding up the mezzaine office, causing the office to tilt and Franceso to tumble through the window. Frank Krothers managed to grab him and begin to haul him back, but the brief exposure was enough for Joseph to shoot and kill Francesco. With Francesco dead, Frank saw no reason to stay, and made his escape.

Their job completed, the party called Viggo, and were picked up. Viggo then informed them that he would soon give them an "impossible task" to perform as he completes his revenge against the Calabrian mafia...

Prepping and Running the Game

I compiled the last two sessions in this post as I am way behind my blogging schedule.

The third session of the campaign was based on the modules Badabing Badaboom! and Fuhgeddabouti!. Both provide a central plot, but are valuable for the vignettes, which I picked for my purpose. 

The final session was based on the module Burning Crosses, which is a short investigative scenario that provided me with some idea to link Yulian back to the Calabrian mafia without making it too direct.

The scene at the hospital however was improvised. When the players realise they should have taken Gabriel away for questioning instead of letting the police take him, the needed to get to him. I initially said that Bruce knew which station he would be brought to, but immediately realised that it would be more appropriate for him to be brought to a hospital for treatment first; the players agreed, and we moved the action to the hospital. Once the action moved there it was easy to set the scene and orientate ourselves, since the hospital Emergency Room is so widely depicted in media we all had a common understanding of how things look like without me spending too much time describing things.

This was also the case for Dmitri's home, where we all knew what everything looked like, down to how the front door looked. This is one advantage of playing in a modern campaign, which I hadn't really appreciated until now.

The rules were quite apt for our purpose, allowing the characters to do some really cinematic stuff like doing double double-taps in a single round, or running and gunning down four thugs in one round. If we ever do another modern campaign again, I may use the same rules.

For the next campaign we will be returning to Savage Gamma World, when I plan to have one or two guest players join us for each session. More on that in a future post.

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.

John Wick #1

When Bruce entered the shrine at the Japanese Garden in Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, he saw the body of a man on the tatami floor, a bullet hole through his forehead. Standing over the body was a tall man. Bruce drew his weapon, as did the man, and the two got into a tussle. Bruce was able to take the man down and choke him out and disarm him, but while he went to search the body of the dead man, he heard footsteps approaching from outside.

Several armed men were advancing towards the shrine, and when they noticed Bruce they began to fire indiscriminately into the building. By now the tall man had regained consciousness, and together the two men broken through the rear wall of the shrine and fled out of the garden and across the avenue.

The two men found shelter inside a bar, where the tall man introduced himself as Joseph. He explained that he was at the shrine to repay a Blood Oath to Roger Delany, but arrived to find him dead. Bruce on the other hand had turned up at the shrine to help exfiltrate the same man, who was undercover in the Calabrian mafia under the assumed name of Giovanni Marrone.

Just then Bruce's face flashed across the TV screen as the news announced that he was being wanted for the killing of undercover police officer Delany, while Joseph received a message on his phone that he had been declared "excommunicado" for killing Marrone on consecrated ground, and that a price of $500,000 had been placed on his head.

Bruce called his captain on the payphone in the bar to protest his innocence, but was told to turn himself in.

It was not long before four men entered the bar looking for them. Bruce and Joseph made their way through the service door into the kitchen, and then to the back door, where they laid an ambush for their pursuers - when the men came through the door they were taken down, and Joseph put a bullet in each one of them.

The two men realised that to save their own lives they had to find the real killer and prove their innocence. With no place to turn to, they decided to follow the only clue they had: a library card found inside Delany's wallet.

They made their way to the public library and accessed Delany's borrowing records and found that there was a single book on the record: The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham. Tracking the book down, they found a piece of paper sandwiched inside its pages, and on it was an address.

They followed the address to third storey unit in an apartment, and attempted to enter it from the roof, but was discovered and held at gun-point by a woman. Bruce surrendered himself, as did Joseph soon afterwards, and the two explained how they arrived at her apartment.

The woman, named Alice (see PC profiles here), revealed that she was working undercover at the FBI in the Calabrian mafia too, and had known about Delany, although the two had little contact. Worried that her own identify might have been compromised, Alice decided to leave her apartment.

At the entrance to the apartment, the trio were attacked by gunmen who arrived in three black SUVs. A quick exchange of gunfire saw eight of the gunmen lying dead on the road, and the three SUVs fleeing the scene; through the tinted window of the lead car, Alice saw the face of Saiko Biichi, a assassin.

The trio sought refuge in Chinatown where, through one of Bruce's contact, they were given a hiding place in a laundromat. There, they decided that their next move should be to try to find more information at Dänk Püssy, a lesbian club ran by the Upsallamaffian. Before they could actualise their plan, however, the laundromat came under a Molotov attack, and the trio had to escape from the burning building and into a gunfight with more gunmen led by Saiko Biichi. Things were looking grim, but the arrival of armed triad gangsters caused the gunmen to flee, allowing our fugitives to disappear into the darkness too...

Prepping and Running the Game

When I started planning for this campaign, I was hoping to find a ready-made campaign that suit the the John Wick vibe, but an extensive search on Drivethru did not find any suitable product. Most of the modules had the premise that the PCs were all members of a law-enforcement or some security agency, or belonged to the same criminal organisation, and my players' choices of character backgrounds made it difficult to fit them into any of those.

I did find a one-shot module which had the PCs find a dead double-agent as the opening scene, and I decided to try to use that as a start for our campaign.

I re-watched the movies to try to get some inspiration, and realised that for the most part the plot involved John Wick moving from location to location, fighting different groups of opponents. I decided to lean into that and found a list of 1000 modern urban locations and 100 modern urban encounters off the internet, and when we started the session I had each player roll once on each table, and noted the results.

One of the locations rolled was a library, and one of the encounters had a few teenagers breaking into a library - I rolled the two together and decided to plant a clue in the library, and had an encounter with the youths help break up the monotony of the session.

Two other rolls gave rise to an abandoned coal-processing plant overlooking a waterfront, which led to the location of a Swedish-themed lesbian club, which was something that came to me watching John Wick 4.

I am still not 100% sure about the whole story behind Delany's killing, but I have another week to come up with something.

John Wick #0

We needed a 'filler' campaign between our Dwarrowdeep campaign and our next fantasy campaign, and with John Wick Chapter 4 being released last month, I decided to run a short campaign based in the John Wick universe.

The rules I chose was Covert Ops, which is based on the same engine as the Art of Wuxia rules, which we used for our wuxia campaign last year. Covert Ops has the same kind of rules for different martial arts moves, and even rules for gun-fu, which I thought would be great for recreating the movies' feel.

We held a session zero, and the characters my players created were:

Bruce - An NYPD detective and martial artist.

Alice - An FBI agent working undercover in the Calabrian mafia in New York.

Yusof (Joseph) Farhad - A Persian-American veteran who works as a freelance hitman.

Jason - A wheelman and 'transporter'.

Mori - A Shinto priest and caretaker of the Japanese Garden in Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, a High Table sanctioned site.