Keeper: Eric Fattig
Hunters: Karen Twelves, Adrienne Mueller, Sean Nittner
System: Monster of the Week
Supplement: Tome of Mysteries
Campaign Overview
Overview of the entire campaign here: Agents of Cisra
Adventure Log
Hollow Lake
At the office…
Malik is called into the director’s office—Jean MacCleod re: forest fire. Very unhappy with covering for that, also the sample from the fungus we’d captured is inert. This next assignment seems almost like a punishment, “back to the basics”—Hollow Lake.
Stasia has a dream, standing on the edge of a lake, coming down from the skies is a great and terrible beak.
Fish stocks have declined rapidly in Hollow Lake, VT, which is bad for the economy. Suspected invasive species, such as lamprey.
At Hollow Lake
Samuel Redfern, on the town council, is our contact. Says fish have been down in number, those they’re catching have been a bit smaller. Just started in the past year.
Jessica looks at fishing records: decline in fish started in the southeast of the lake, started sharply and then has seen a linear decrease.
Stasia and Malik talk to some fisherfolk. Stasia asks for their wildest stories. Marty says he’s fishing, gets a call that a kid is drowning on the other side of the lake. When he gets over there, there’s nobody there, and no signs of distress. His theory is that 30 years back, one of the McNealy twins drowned so that was their ghost calling for help.
Staying with Peter Mikleson and wife Em (short for Emiko). Have a kid Takahiro. Em’s mom passed away in April, in her 80s. Died sitting out by the lake. Katsuko Tanagawa
Stasia wakes up, has the urge to go to the lake, wakes up Jessica in the process, who comes with. At the edge of the lake, there’s a bench and a shrine. Scruffy-looking dude approaches, Takahiro. He says it’s a shrine to Suitengu, the god of the sea, belonged to his grandmother. She built it as soon as she arrived from Japan.
Jim & Irene McNealy, twins. Takahiro says Jim moved away, didn’t drown.
Malik calls head office for research…
There was a series of drownings in the 70s in Okinawa, Navy Seals in a military operation. (These weren’t the type of people who would drown easily.) In most cases, after the autopsy, the liver and large intestines were gone.
At the mortician’s office…
Jessica does the talking to see if there’s anything odd about the grandmother’s autopsy, but it’s going to take some time. We decide to go to find Takahiro.
At the campsite…
Malik and Stasia talk more to Takahiro, Malik says he suspects there’s an angry spirit. Takahiro thinks maybe the spirit killed his grandmother. He says that sometimes she’d look at him like she wasn’t telling him everything. She taught him the prayers to say to the shrine, he does them every time he visits home.
Back at the morticians…everything was fine with grandma, died of heart failure.
Stasia gets a hunch she should go see Sam, she arrives just in time to join him on his boat—he said he heard someone was drowning. We get to it, throw a rope, a clawed hand grabs it and pulls violently. Sam gets rope-burns. Stasia says it was a lamprey-squid crossbreed.
Google search for Kappa—turtle monster with a big beaked face, horrible claws, impenetrable shell, pretends to be a drowning kid to lure victims. If you could surprise it and attack its head before it retracts into its shell, you could potentially harm it. Magic might also help.
Jessica grabs a tranquilizer gun and scuba gear.
At the Mikelson’s…
Malik fails to get more info out of Em. Takahiro calls and leaves a message, has taken the boat out on the water, believes that grandma was murdered. The gang grabs a neighbor’s boat. Malik gives a quick prayer at the shrine to protect Takahiro. We catch up to his boat, it’s moored with an anchor, but he’s not on the boat.
Underwater…
We dive in and find a cavern. Takahiro is wrapped up in kelp, but unharmed. Malik and Jessica take on the kappa, who has trapped us in.
Malik shoots it in the roof of its mouth but gets entangled. Stasia’s Big Whammy means the kappa drives its mouth into another tranq dart while attacking Malik, but Stasia slips and falls. Jessica cuts out Takahiro and frees him. Malik tries to convince Takahiro to take his grandmother’s place in praying daily and keeping the creature under control, but Takahiro says that the only way to defeat it is by tricking it. Malik goes limp so it thinks it’s dead, as it gloats he stabs another tranq into its tongue. It’s down! Jessica applies first aid to Malik, we haul the kappa up, load it into the van, and make a hasty trip back to the office.
