The Gangsters Campaign/Session 22

* Our boy Hieranthotat isn’t resurrected – his will is here; his power is not.
	+ The last step is reanimating him out from the folds of space where he is hidden
	+ Do it in a summoning place – maybe resurrect his priest first as an intermediary
	+ Also somewhere buried in the mud, currently being uncovered, is a sepulcher of Hieranthotat
	+ Slim Frank (and agents) are made entirely of medallions: walking, talking collections of power
	+ The Will is a facsimile of Hieranthotat’s personality and desires
		- Probably has some sense / instinct of what is needed to bring about the full resurrection.
		- But, something is currently missing: maybe the ritual, the location, or the medallions
* Where is the cult’s home base?
	+ Cross-reference Randolph’s diary with when he met with the cult – new info
	1. when he goes to Reddick’s courthouse
	2. when he visits Prektanos’s casino (which has been taken over by the Trenchies) – lieutenants. The casino is semi-operational
	+ “Will know more when I finally go to the boardwalk” (in East Fens)
* Rich Craw – saw the little Clive boy sacrificed to one of the Trenchies
	+ ...and he believes in the occult stuff
	+ But has to stay to protect the neighborhood from the Trenchies who are now after him because Griphook turned the siege (they’d just been trying to contain him) into a battle
	+ Gives Lenny the option for dad to call in a favor or go do battle with cultists
	+ Lenny asks for the ride off-planet but not until a week from now
	+ Turns out Rich’s owed favor is from the Governor, fun
	+ The party leaves presuming Rich is about to go down fighting
* Meanwhile, the rest of the squad tries to GTFO
	+ … a short detour to snag Griphook, before which Joe gets us t-boned by a cop car
	+ Griphook tries to kill a couple cops, doesn’t manage it immediately
	+ Cops surround the vehicle (Joe, Vec, Cilla, Lenny) on all sides
	+ Lenny jumps out, punches thru one car’s windshield and tries to pull a copper out thru it, but fails and gets stuck
	+ Cilla shoots at the cops in the car, some cops shoot at Cilla, some other cops shoot at Vec and Lenny. Vec gets a little stupider and less charming. Lenny gets a charley horse.
	+ Rich Craw machine guns down some of the cops and they back off enough to let the party escape
	+ Grippy gets briefly threatened by a partially-undead cultist who comes up from the carpet in the back of the car…
		- …. And then pulls a dumb & daring manuveur to throw the cultist out through the unlocked back door, and doesn’t even have to crash the car to do it. Griphook is very lucky.
* Everyone reunites at Madeline Tark’s to plot next moves. Icheb wonders whether blowing up the dam would fix things.
	+ Criss vetoes talking to Judge Reddick or going to the courthouse because the party leaves a trail of destruction behind it
		- Criss is not happy and is v v v v intimidating
		- Criss also very rudely (but accurately) calls the party “not subtle”
		- They concede & decide to go to hire some Pontooner muscle
* Hiring trip: pick up Slimy Bill’s Pontooners
	+ He notes privately that several of them are secret cultists
	+ Rather than publicly massacre them, someone has the brilliant idea to run a math test as an entrance exam to this mission
		- One cultist points out that this seems less designed to detect talent than to perpetuate class hierarchies
		- Icheb (or was it Criss) notes that that sounds like something a loser would say
	+ Party identifies and confirms six suspected cultists (they do still have neck medallions, but their surgeries were less recent and more carefully executed)
	+ Griphook is, of course, super convincing and they (5 cultists and a rando) all think they were just victims of the system. They leave calculating the cumulative probability that they all would’ve randomly failed. (“within acceptable parameters”)