Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Dead City Radio

It's a pretty satisfying feeling when one of your regular players requests that you run a game and setting that you wrote yourself. So, we played PLANET MOTHERFUCKER last week. It's also very satisfying when one of the players remarks afterward that it was one of the most fun games they've played in recent memory. At this point, I'm just bragging, so on with the actual play recap of what went down.

The Characters

Runa Ravensbane, heavily tattooed metal babe (Church Burner)

Dr. MK Ultra, rogue physician prone to experimenting on himself (Doctor Feelbad)

Aleister, occultist with a ferret-shaped familiar spirit (Satanic Witch)

Events

The motherfuckers rolled into Buttrock, New Jersey after getting into trouble elsewhere. It was early morning, so they were looking for a place to get some grub. And then they saw the neon-and-chrome paradise that is Cholula's Tex-Mex Diner, a joint where every entree was accompanied with a side of refried beans. The sign out front showed a man with a sombrero running with his hands clapped over the back of his pants; beneath it, it said "Our huevos rancheros will have you on the run!" 

The only other customer in there was a literal lounge lizard--Franky Naugahyde, a lizardman who was moonlighting as a lounge singer. When Diabolita, the waitress, took their order through to the cooks, the two-ways doors to the kitchen banged open and shut; the motherfuckers could hear the sound of a radio tuned to WHOR, 66.6 on the FM dial, which was playing a morning zoo show apparently hosted by "Norman Necrosis," who was apparently playing voodoo drumming as part of the programing. Their food came, and then...

...zombies attacked. From two directions, no less. The line cooks came shambling out of kitchen and a bunch of zombies came shuffling in through the front door. With parlay off the table as an option, the motherfuckers sprang into action. Dr. MK Ultra injected himself with a experimental serum of his own creation; he began to hallucinate, but was imbued with the ability to bend the whims of the universe in his favor. Runa let out a high-pitched metal screech that exploded the heads of several zombies. The rest were finished off by Aleister, who summoned his own zombies to match the ones creeping toward them. 

As Aleister's zombies munched on their fallen undead peers, Mr. Cholula, the diner's owner, appeared. He told everyone that he had been watching the news and it was reported that zombies were attacking all over Buttrock. He noticed that the motherfuckers were capable (read: violent and skeevy), and being a civic-minded man made them an offer: clean up the zombie menace in return for a payment of some kind. The motherfuckers insisted on a load of drugs as their reward, to which he agreed. Not a problem, he knows a guy.

The motherfucker put two-and-two together and had realized that Norman Necrosis's radio broadcast was responsible for turning people into zombies. The next step seemed to be locating the radio station itself to bring Norman Necrosis to justice. Diabolita threw in that she remembered the Norman Necrosis show having two big sponsors: Big Chan's Unpossessed Autos Emporium and the Butterface Exotica Lounge. 

Predictably, they opted to visit the Butterface Exotica Lounge. The motherfuckers got into their vehicles (a motorcycle with blood-splatter decals for Runa, a coffin on wheels for Dr. MK, and an old Buick with a pentagram on the hood for Aleister) and made their way over to the strip club. The sign out front showed a cartoonishly buxom woman in lingerie, but she had a stick of butter for a head. Even though it was still morning, the strip club was surrounded by Mormon protestors. Inside, the place lived up to its name. The two girls on the clock had rockin' bodies, but also had faces as rough as sandpaper. 

The motherfuckers asked to see the manager, who proved to be a scarred-up John Waters lookalike. While speaking to the motherfuckers, he unwrapped a stick of butter and began eating it like a Snickers bar. He clearly didn't like Norman Necrosis, even though his business bought airtime on his commercial block. He told them that Norman was a particularly pathetic specimen who had tried to make it as a voodoo-themed shock rocker, but failed to excite the youths or even piss off their parents. As he went to fetch the radio station's address from his office, zombie Mormons began spilling into the club. A stripper had her throat bitten through, but the group again engaged the undead and turned them into mincemeat. 

Address in hand, the group left the Butterface Exotica Lounge and immediately saw what had turned some of the Mormons into zombies: a pickup truck was parked nearby with its radio pumping out the Norman Necrosis show. The group peeled out, leaving the living Mormons to fend off the dead ones.

The radio station was deep in Crippletown, an apocalyptically bad neighborhood in Buttrock. The motherfuckers spotted what must have been Norman Necrosis's car parked in the lot; the tell-tale sign was that it was a black station wagon trying to look like a hearse--it had Halloween decorations glued to it and it had a Norman Necrosis and the Necropolitans bumper sticker. The motherfuckers smashed the window with a lead pipe and searched Norman's car. In the back they found boxes of unsold Norman Necrosis and the Necropolitans merch and a rolled up blacklight poster of a wizard pondering an orb.

Rather than launching a frontal assault on the radio station, the motherfuckers decided to smoke Norman out of the building. They piled up his band's merch around the perimeter of the building, siphoned gasoline out of his car, and lit it on fire. The fire alarm went off and two people exited the building with a quickness. The woman who left through the front door was a purple-haired lady dressed in a business casual blazer. She spotted Dr. MK Ultra, who was serving as the group's lookout, and promptly ripped her blazer off, revealing a blue leotard and a chain whip. She came at the Dr., but he managed to talk her out of a confrontation. That's the power of de-escalation, folks.

Dr. MK Ultra ran behind the building, where he found Aleister and Runa battling Norman Necrosis, who had his face painted up like Baron Samedi and who was wielding a skull-topped cane, who was trying to make his way down the fire escape. Norman Necrosis used his dark magic to summon zombies, light the motherfuckers on fire, and turn momentarily invisible, but he was taking a hell of a beating. Runa stabbed him with a ritual dagger and he got brained with a lead pipe. At one point he was being gnawed upon by both of Aleister's zombies and his ferret familiar. The necromancer shock jock was ultimate put down with a brick that caved his head in.

With the mouthpiece of the damned killed, the zombie epidemic was ended. The motherfuckers made their way back to Cholula's Tex-Mex Diner and found a suitcase full of pills awaiting them. The suitcase even had a big red bow on top.


Inspiration for the adventure: