Session 1 Going Below

Emancipation
by Veniamin Kushnir

So not only was this the first session of Esoteric Enterprises I’ve ever run, or even just the first dungeon crawler I’ve ever run, but also the first of either that any of my players have ever played. It was a little rough, but it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. First mistake I made was not instructing the players that they would need to actually MAP the interior of the dungeons they explored, but that was rectified by the time they reached the second dungeon, the Silo.

The session began with the assembling of the PCs into a coherent group. Spartak had already met Dr. Jurgen Galidikas while being treated at the free City Sanitarium No. 1 after getting hit by a bus shortly after arriving in Arkheologorodok (the bus came away the poorer). Because he has no money, Spartak has been staying at the hostel near the Gunig Marsh, where he shares the room with a friendly back backing Israeli hippie named Abram Bunin. Jurgen arrives after getting off work (having just performed a live saving surgery on a young girl plus a free sterilization) to find with great dismay that his ape man subject of study has been convinced to attend a meeting of the Excavators of the Underground Earth in the basement of the Central State Library at 5:30 pm. He reluctantly joins.

Spartak's Youth Hostel

City Sanitarium No. 1

Tenure review is quickly approaching at Stepnoy Universitet and Professor Luka Semenov decides he must take proactive steps to find the ancient Slavonic city now or he never will. He has seen flyers for a group of urban explorers called the Excavators of the Underground Earth around the university. He sets off to the Central State Library with cash in hand hoping to put together an expedition to plumb the depths for ancient Slavonic Wisdom.

Stepnoy Universitet 

Aleksandr has been in in Arkheologorodok for a few days, waiting for a sign form Santa Muerte. One night he’s drinking in the bar of the Hotel Cosima when he locks eyes with a young woman named Mara Tsiolkovskaya and there is an immediate mutual understanding that they are both closer to the dead than the living. She tells him to meet her and her friends the next day in the basement of the library on Ramon Merkador Prospekt. Aleksandr has gotten his sign.

Hotel Cosima
source: modernism.art

Gavril rolled into town the other day in his BMW 525i and checked into the nicest hotel he could find, the Hotel Cosima in the now downtown, just off Elektricheskaya Prospekt. By some uncanny coincidence, his bags are delivered to the wrong room. When they finally arrive at Gavril’s room, they are in the hands of a strange one eyed man named Aleksandr, who apparently regards it as some kind of sign. Gavril can recognize another mobster when he sees one, and he’s already starting to run out of money, so when Aleksandr offers to hire him as a bodyguard, he agrees. Apparently, he wants to go to some meeting of Urban Explorers in the library basement for some reason. Whatever, Gavril thinks, money still spends, even when it is given to you by a mad man.

Gavril's Whip

By hook or crook, the disparate individuals find themselves in a spare storage room in the library basement where head of maintenance Gennadiy Chupov and geological research librarian Tatiana Zhutova are leading a discussion with a motley assortment of individuals about potential routes to the rumored Polis Station to the South East. Abram cheerfully introduces Spartak and Mara switches from her normally cool and somber demeanor to welcome Aleksandr. Professor Semenov shows great interest in the Ruins while Mara tells Aleksandr about her great interest in the recently found Church Crypt, though bemoans the difficult routes there, either through the Plague Pit or up the underground river leading from Leninskaya Station. Only one of their number has managed to get there, but he's currently in the hospital with a truly horrific case of herpes. The statuesque Finn, Aarno Harkonnen,  mentions some rumors he’s heard about a new passageway leading from the Silo to some unknown chamber. Seeing that there are new faces and knowing the bulk of the group either have their own projects or are devoted to the Polis Project, Gennadiy and Tatiana offer $500 dollars to group who can find and map the passage in question. Soon after an Exploring Kid in the metro worker’s uniform and is introduced as Artyom. He is the one who discovered the Gastev Station entrance to the Underground, and he will be happy to show it to the newbies.

While crossing the plaza a man in a white leisure suit, pink shirt, and Rayban wayfarers struts towards them with a clear intent to speak, a prospect that causes Artyom a great deal of worry. The man introduces himself as Slava and makes it clear to Artyom he’s not looking for trouble, just some people who might want some work. He offers to put theme names on the free entry list to the Hanger where his outfit, Mayami Import, runs a black market. He tells them to meet him there for work, and if they want to arm up they should find Comrade Cowboy. Slava tells them to play up any leftist political tendencies they might have if they buy from him and says that he thinks Comrade Cowboy and Spartak will get along, to which Dr Galidikas says something about genetic predispositions and vectors for communist contagion. This makes Slava laugh and ask if he’s a Gay Nazi, which also makes Artyom laugh. Now curious as to whether there are any Strasserists around, Slava and Artyom explain the Gay Nazis are a universally maligned street gang operating in the Underground near the Shkola Granat club. After niceties are exchanged, Slava leaves and the party make their way into Gastev Station.

Welcome to Arkheologorodok
 [Добро пожаловать в Aрхеологородok]

"50th Anniversary of the USSR" cover of "Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technology for Youth) Soviet magazine, 1972
sourced from Soviet Visuals 

Resting along the G'am River on the Steppe, Arkheologorodok was founded as a Soviet science city shortly after the Great Patriotic War. Built atop the burnt ruins of some nameless town destroyed by a plague in 1904, the academicians and military men were much more interested in vastly older ruins far below that. Arkheologorodok (literally Archaeology Town) was devoted to excavation of the ruins below, and then the study and exploitation of the technologies found within. It became home to institutes of every stripe dedicated to boldly advancing Soviet science into every direction of the unknown. Factories were established to create any materials the scientists needed, and entire populations were moved in and housed to work those factories. It had every amenity a Soviet citizen could dream of. And then, the money ran out.

 The immediate years after the dissolution were hard, funding tried up and labs were abandoned. Overnight, most of the factories were churning out products that no longer had buyers. The town was quickly dying, until the old abattoir to the south-east was reopened by the Saburovs. This stabilized the town long enough for some former party officials to properly reinvent themselves as capitalists and find ways to make the Advanced Metallurgical Complex and the cement factory profitable. The town also had an ace up its sleeve in the form of the Stepnoy Universitet, for people all seem to learn Russian so very quickly in Arkheologorodok, and this fact was used to advertise Stepnoy as the best place to learn Russian for foreigners looking to loot the ruins of the Soviet Union. 

With republics spinning off in every direction during the collapse, Arkheologorodok found itself seemingly in none of them, and currently exists in a sort of Transnistria like state. As such, it has found itself for miscreants and weirdos from all over. Most recently, it has attracted the NOVOST Group, a holding company and owner of the energy company Stepneft, which has set about exploiting the gas fields in the marshlands to the south of the town and is rapidly becoming the largest employer in town. It is also clearly seeking to buy up the entirety of Arkheologorodok, and the Saburovs have not taken kindly to it. Lines are being drawn, and arms are being taken up. Enter the players...

Dramatis Personae
[драматические персонажи]

Gavril Bootur, Yakut Hitman 

Hailing from Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation, Gavril was raised to be a valuable member of the family business. The Bootur family business just happened to be contract killing, and business has long been good. Though comfortable with a gun in their hands, Gavril and his kin have long preferred the silence of blades, and are known across the Siberian underworld as consummate professionals. However, a recent job went sideways and Southern Siberia has gotten a little too hot for Gavril. Hoping to lie low for a while, Gavril has found himself in Arkheologorodok. We'll see how long that lasts.

Professor Luka Semenov, Eurasian Occultist 

A tenured anthropology professor at Stepnoy University, Semenov is a forthcoming, agreeable, and diligent professor, which is why the university administration is willing to tolerate his more...fringe viewpoints. 

 Semenov is a proponent of what he calls the "Homo Slavonic Hypothesis," which posits the Slavic peoples are the descendants of an ancient, technologically advanced, psychic human offshoot who once ruled over a globe spanning empire. During his time living and researching in Arkheologorodok, Semenov has come to believe that deep beneath the surface are the ruins of a suburb of the Homo Slavonic's great Arctic Mega-City. Hoping to uncover great Slavic wisdom before the review for tenure renewal comes up, Semenov now looks to brave the Underground to find the lost city.

Though a kind, almost grandfatherly figure, do NOT mention Dugin to him. Not after Omsk. 

Aleksandr "El Afortunado" Bogruv, Mobster and Devotee of Santa Muerte 

A long time member of the Solntsevskaya Bratva, Aleksandr is a skilled negotiator. This is why he was sent to Mexico in the mid-2000s to act as an in-between for the continued exchange of guns for drugs with the Sinaloa Cartel. This is also why he was marked for death by the Juarez Cartel. On one fine, dusky evening in Fuentes del Valle, Aleksandr found himself bleeding out, stumbling through back alleys as the Sicarios closed in, collapsing before a folk shrine to Santa Muerte. There, he experienced an apparition of the Dead Saint who revealed to him but a fragment of the true nature of death. Upon waking, Aleksandr found his wounds miraculously healed - a stroke of apparent luck that earned him the nickname El Afortunado.

From that moment on, Aleksandr became a disciple of Santa Muerte, seeking out her holy places and the blessing of her divine apparition. In the most recent and direct of these apparitions, Aleksandr has been commanded by his beloved Saint to travel to Arkheologorodok for reasons she has not yet seen fit to reveal. But El Afortunado is a man of faith, and he will seek to fulfill her will in this strange place. 

Dr Jurgen Galidikas, Experimental Eugenicist 

Originally from Boston, Dr. Galidikas is a talented surgeon who is more interested in the health of the body of society than he is in the health of the bodies of his patients. And there have been many bodies. Wanted in the United States for multiple unauthorized lobotomies, Jurgen now finds himself in Arkheologorodok, a town known for its scientific curiosity and its lack of extradition treaties. Helps that it's mostly white, well, at least a close approximation to white as far as Dr. Galidikas is concerned. He works at the Valerii V. Bunak Ward of City Sanitorium No. 1 because the administration at the D.I. Dankovksy Hospital googled his name. Ironically a well-regarded figure at the free Sanitorium and the community it serves due to actually having a degree and offering off the books procedures for only the price of mere sterilization. 

He now has begun to journey into the Underground so he can better observe and study our next contestant...

Spartak, Stalinist Apeman

A monument to the achievements of science under the Wise Guidance of Comrade Stalin, Spartak is one of the finest specimen's produced by Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov's research, continued long after his faked death. Sadly, success was achieved too late for Spartak and his kin to fight the German Fascists, and with Comrade Stalin's death in 1953, the collective farm deep within the Taiga where the hyrbids lived was forgotten. And forgotten it would have remained were it not for the logging companies of the Oligarchs. 

Chased from their collective farm, the hybrids were scattered to the four winds, and Spartak found himself alone in a world that had gone wrong. However, Spartak was raised in the fine tradition of Stalinist education, and would brook no idea of defeatism. Clearly the present moment called for primitive capitalist accumulation so he could purchase a tract of land from the capitalists and re-establish the commune. Having heard that Arkheologorodok offered opportunities for wealth and new technologies to wield against capitalists and traitors, Spartak quickly set out. 

Description

Special thanks to Tomas (Dr. Galidikas's player) for making the fantastic character portraits