The Seven Mysteries of St. Fiachra's - Session 1

As this: https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-seven-mysteries-of-st-fiachras.html

The session was run using a cut-down version of the esteemed deus ex parabola's G24 system. Modifications may be made as the need arises. 

The party - the private investigation firm: the Private EyeNTJs - were strapped for cash, fishing for crumbs lost between the cushions of their office's couch for sustenance, when they received one final mission that could save their financials. The immortality-seeking multi-millionaire Johnson Bronson was missing, and his mistress Olga Russkihunnipottz wanted him found. His last known location? A sleepy little town on the coast of Newfoundland called St. Fiachra's.

Comprising the elite ranks of the Private EyeNTJs are:
-Walter Watts, a good ol' Southern boy who lost his fortune on horse gambling and whiskey.
-Sheriff Shorty, whose parents operated an underground freakshow in New York which he snitched on & thereby escaped.
-Billy "Big Rig" Riggus, the son of a roofer who died in the line of duty. Mocked in the roofing company locker room, Billy decided to follow his dream of doing good.

They rolled into town on a dark & stormy night in their trusty 1993 Ford Aspire, bantering about Big Rig's grandma's lamb marrow bunt cake.

They came up on an inn, the only lights on in town at this hour - the Bannock & Boobrie. Frightened by the inn's mascot's resemblance to Toucan Sam, and assured that in an rpg one can do anything, Big Rig smooched the other two members of the EyeNTJs 200 times on the lips (if you're too woke for lines & veils this could happen to you).

The inn's owner, a gracefully-aged woman who went by Miss Marble, welcomed the party (they, being gentlemen, tipped their hats in return) and seeing their sorry state offered them a free round of beers and a spare room. Watts recognized Miss Marble as the heiress of the Marble shipping fortune, and realized that she's aged very gracefully indeed for a woman who should be in her 90s. Being a Southern gentleman, he makes a pass at her. Big Rig shakes her hand in gratitude, and even through his rained-on chill notices Miss Marble's hand is cool to the touch.

The party leaves for the bar-room & collect their pints. A few local figures are hanging about. A big bearded teddy bear of a man comes up and introduces himself as Finnigan O'Flannagan. He says he hopes they enjoy their stay and don't cause any trouble in the peaceful & prosperous St. Fiachra's. A blue-afro'd man with a Star Trek visor calls over and tells them to stop letting the lame-o locals bother them. The party decides to split up and talk a bit to everybody.

Sheriff goes to sit with O'Flannagan and Trudy Knowles (the actual sheriff). While initially hostile, she and Sheriff bond over their dislike for the big city. While asking about Johnson, Sheriff intuits that Trudy is lying about never having met the guy.

Meanwhile, Big Rig sits with the blue afro'd Quasar Mike & his companion Pepto-talk. Pepto, a radical beatbox poet, regales them with the following lines:

What we supposed to do when the rich take our shit,
When I go to my grandma's my cap gets knit!
Capitalism? More like crapitalism!
Maaan FUCK Donald Trump

before excusing themself to go to the bathroom, as speaking truth to power triggers their IBS. After they go, Mike rants to Big Rig about the Procyonians - psycho-electrical beings from a remote solar system who come in two types: blue, who are good, feed on the plasma of interstellar space, and want to enlighten humanity so we can join them in fully-automated luxury gay space communism, and red, who are evil and feed on the plasma in human blood. He goes on to accuse auteur director Michael Bay of stealing his notes on the Procyonians to write his blockbuster Transformers film franchise. In a moment of clumsiness Mike knocks over Big Rig's pint, but while leaning over to clean it up whispers that the party should meet his group, the Blue Giant Crew, at their flophouse on the edge of town the next day to discuss Johnson's disappearance.

A crash of glass resounds outside and the party rushes out to find that the windshield of their trusty 1993 Ford Aspire has been smashed in. They see small figures scampering away into the storm but decide not to pursue, suspecting these figures to be gremlins. They find a tarp to cover the hole in their windshield, and find it was smashed by a large stone with a hole worn through it.

Returning to their drinks (and a refill for Big Rig), Watts goes to talk to the local priest, Father Donnchad. Watts finds Donnchad's hand to be as cool as Miss Marble's. They discuss theology and Johnson Bronson - Donnchad claims not to remember Johnson in particular, as rich people were always coming into town to try and buy out the secret to the town-folk's longevity - some, such as Miss Marble, even deciding to stay. When asked about the windshield, Donnchad says that local children have become prone to mischief and vandalism ever since a sickness starting spreading through St. Fiachra's, as the community is psychologically unused to infirmity.

The Private EyeNTJs took a huddle, to theorize & discuss their next moves. They agreed that the town was full of heretics, but couldn't decide whether they were good heretics or bad heretics. They decided that the local beer was bad news, and luckily Watts had a full canteen of water to sate their thirst. Their going theory as to what caused the strange sickness afflicting the town was that Johnson Bronson was using a Chinese weather sickness machine on it. They reiterated their company goal of bringing an analytical, logical mindset to Southern congeniality and manners, though it's revealed that the "NTJ" of the company's name has nothing to do with Myers-Briggs, but rather that the "J" stands for the initial of Watts' Aunt Jemima.

Not wanting to risk going out into the storm with a busted windshield and potential gremlins about, the party went to their room for bed. 

Checking their room, the party found it had been meticulously cleaned. The only objects of interest (besides the two beds, more comfortable than any they had slept in for weeks) were a cross hung up on the wall, which had branches arrayed along its top, and the bible in the bedside table, which had unusual revisions mostly to Genesis and Revelation which emphasized the garden of Eden.

They cycled watch throughout the night, with a duck call as their signal if trouble came a'knocking. Fortunately, nothing happened and they were able to rest up.

Come morning, the party sought to figure out their breakfast. They didn't have a penny to their name, and being factual & logical Southern gentlemen refused to resort to thievery. Big Rig remembered he left a banana under the driver's seat of their 1993 Ford Aspire, and he and Watts went to grab it. Miss Marble notices Watts carrying the big rock that had smashed in their windshield and recognizes it as a hag-stone, something used to ward away fairies.

They find the banana had partially rotted, and squeeze out the banana bits but keep the peel. They consider going to the Blue Giant Crew for food, but debate whether Pepto-talk had slipped out of the washroom and been the one to wreck their car.

Growing hungrier, and without a dime to their name, the party headed to the Blue Giant Crew flophouse on the edge of town. The cold autumn wind blew in through the hole in their windshield, but any bugs that might've slipped in were kept at bay by Watts' bug repellent candle. They found Quasar Mike ripping a bong atop a moldy beanbag chair on the porch of a dilapidated manor. Ushering them inside, they found the interior of the manor as wretched as the outside, and suspiciously leftist. Quasar provided the party with a family-size pack of blue Vegan Puffs™. He said that Pepto-Talk was around, but had engaged in another session of political beat poetry and was therefore evacuating their bowels through a hole in the basement.

He also regaled them with further confusing details on his Procyonian theory, and although he confirmed that Johnson Bronson had made it into town before disappearing insisted that the man had been converted into a red Procyonian and was responsible for the disappearances in the area, having fed on people for their plasma. After Quasar Mike showed the party his terrible artwork, the session drew to a close. 

The last ~1/3rd of this session went beyond what I prepped. Got a better feel for prep material => playtime now.

D20x5 Derelict Spaceships; Or: Space Hulks

Click the button below to get your derelict spaceship:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: https://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D20	This derelict spaceship was
1	a shipping vessel with a belly of modular compartments stuffed with rare elements and alloys.
2	a swift courier carrying information too dangerous to broadcast, on cubes of imperishable adamant.
3	a pilgrim-vessel bringing the faithful to a place of cosmic importance.
4	a once-unconquerable dreadnought outfitted with the cutting edge of its past time.
5	a terraforming vessel bubbled with microbiomes.
6	a pleasure craft which sequestered the ultra-rich in unimaginable splendour.
7	a scientific vessel measuring galactic anomalies.
8	a veteran warship bearing scars from many battles.
9	a nomadic habitat for lifelong spacers.
10	a prototype propelled by an experimental drive.
11	a cyclopean asteroid-miner, half-digested hillocks of ore still borne in its gut.
12	a cryopod carrier with a hold full of frozen colonists.
13	an explorer charting unseen frontiers.
14	a historical artifact preserved for its legacy.
15	a key minister's extravagant personal transport.
16	a troop-carrier used for planetary invasions, loaded up with drop-pods.
17	a medical vessel bringing miraculous treatments to colonies without the infrastructure for them.
18	a cycler making regular transport-rounds within one system.
19	a tug for stellar megastructures.
20	once the flagship of a now-thoroughly-discredited ideology.

D20	This derelict spaceship might be found
1	by its distress beacon’s message, garbled to an inhuman pitch.
2	by overhearing rumours in a scavengers’ den.
3	on a swiftly decaying orbit around a stormy gas giant.
4	by investigating mission logs that ended abruptly.
5	in a prodigious leak of government cover-ups.
6	in a neglected corner of space where there shouldn’t have been any traffic.
7	halfway embedded in an icy comet that should have mutually vapourized it on impact.
8	parked on the severed, skeletal arm of a spaceport.
9	based on hints in an old shipman's song.
10	by its minute occlusion of a solar system's star.
11	stuck in a Lagrange point among other interplanetary detritus.
12	by buying a drink for its deranged last survivor.
13	by the bizarre digital censor-shadow it casts on star-maps.
14	by following notes on a discarded cocktail napkin in a station's recycler-pile.
15	with a preserved, genetically-programmed blood sample drawn from a navigator-caste who was onboard it.
16	landed on a volatile-rich moonlet.
17	by stumbling into the warp-sinkhole it left behind.
18	based on the testimony of the last band of survivors to escape it.
19	based on the guilty confession of someone responsible for its disappearance.
20	by folllowing coordinates that insert themselves like a memetic virus into innocuous statements and computer code.

D20	A deadly threat present on this derelict spaceship is
1	its onboard artificial intelligence, glitched to violent paranoia with sporadic control over the ship’s systems.
2	the xenospore-infested corpses of its original crew, driven by coopted intellect to spread and fester.
3	a mercenary kill-team dispatched to cover up an oligarch’s scandal the ship is implicated in.
4	an opportunistic predator native to the void between worlds, extracting minerals and organics.
5	magnetic mines placed by a paranoid crewmember.
6	a killer robotic skeleton able to steal and wear other's flesh as a half-living disguise.
7	a deranged cannibal who's survived eating the rest of its crew.
8	a swarm of technorganic nanomachines fusing flesh and machinery like a hell-cancer across it.
9	the semi-incorporeal, ultra-terrestrial entity summoned by a cult which hid among its passengers.
10	the experimental automated spacesuits it was outfit with - now wandering husks rattling with the bones of their once-occupants.
11	an extraterrestrial knight who practices a bizarre (from a human perspective at least) form of chivalry, using the ship as a trial-ground.
12	a poltergeist which haunts it - the maddened gestalt of its crews' minds torn from their flesh by some obscure electro-magnetic phenomenon.
13	its surgery-bot, whose programming was damaged by radiation, making it obsessed with turning living creatures into art.
14	a tribe of degenerate mutant clones, meant to be emergency back-ups for dead crewmembers - gone horribly wrong.
15	a self-mummified psychic who survived the ship's general failure via mentally-imposed torpor, seeking to lure people in and break their will so they can take a new, healthy body.
16	that the genetically-modified plants used as a supplementary food/oxygen source aboard it networked & gained sentience as well as a hatred for animal life.
17	the alien from Alien, but like a bit different - maybe it's got tentacles instead of claws and the stabby-tail, and lays eggs in your brain that make you hallucinate, for example.
18	a great amoebic slime, hiding in the ducts and the interstitial spaces aboard the ship - an ambush predator waiting for the right moment to emerge and absorb.
19	a hungry gang of rival salvagers.
20	a cabal of vacuum-adapted post-humans who view the presence of their less-evolved kin as an insult.

D20	What makes this derelict spaceship difficult to navigate
1	its own brittle, decayed structure, which any solid shock risks breaking.
2	is its malfunctioning artificial gravity generator, which changes its direction unpredictably.
3	are the bulkheads separating and sealing off its various sections, which can only be safely opened with keycards scattered about.
4	is its fuel leaking into various sections, creating pockets of poisonous & explosive gas.
5	is that its automatic locks between pressurized and depressurized sections aren't working properly, meaning opening the wrong door could get you sucked out into space.
6	is its warped hyper-geometry, tesselated out by a flaw in its drive.
7	are the pools of acid which dripped out of its batteries.
8	is its unintuitive layout.
9	is that its spectrum-opaque chassis makes it impossible to scan from the outside.
10	is the disruptive radiation emanating from its reactor.
11	is the web of silk-steel alloy disaster-webbing unleashed across the ship to hold together fractured sections.
12	is that attempting to connect to its internal mapping will glitch out your system and feed you nonsense.
13	is that some immense force has bent it out of shape.
14	is that all the signs are in some language there's no publicly-available translation for.
15	is that its lighting is glitched-out, and blindingly-strobbing.
16	is that its wiring has become fucked-up, and parts that shouldn't be electrified have become electrified.
17	is the plasmatic fog which has gathered in its passages, restricting line of sight.
18	is its misleading signage, likely mistranslated.
19	are the big holes punctured through it by meteorites.
20	are the tangles of dangling wires, tubing, and flex-ducts lining its hallways.

D20	Besides the usuals, salvaging this derelict spaceship
1	will get you a lot of money, like, a lot a lot of money.
2	will earn you a hell of a lot of rep with scavengers, which you can use to make them back off claims or work with you.
3	will get you an experimental weapon which can wreck just about anything without exotic defenses.
4	will get you blueprints which can be used to greatly upgrade your own ship.
5	will grant you an intact module which you can transplant whole onto your own ship.
6	will bring you to the attention of a corrupt space-sheriff looking to shake you down.
7	will net you a contract from a corporation impressed by your results, who want you to retrieve the important parts of one of their own lost vessels.
8	gains you some exotic materials that would be worth some serious favours to the right buyer.
9	will get you an anomalous power-core that keeps working regardless of interference or resource draw.
10	will get you the experience you need to become an expert in dismantling spaceships with minimal risk to yourself.
11	will get you some primo blackmail material on some powerful corporation, government, or NGO.
12	can get you a handy, tanky, crab-shaped cargo-loader robot.
13	can get you a lot of goodwill and favours from the friends and family of those lost on it.
14	will get you a signal-spoof which allows you to disguise your own spaceship as the wreck to remote detection methods.
15	gets you an alien artifact that does weird shit.
16	can net you a canister of bio-nanites that can heal just about any wound and replace limbs and organs by flowing into and merging with your flesh.
17	provides clues that make up a sort of map to an even bigger, juicier haul.
18	can get you some cool and expensive cybernetic implants.
19	can get you a smuggled crate of good-ass space drugs.
20	will get a self-righteous squad of space-police on your ass.

The Seven Mysteries of St. Fiachra's

My group's usual DM seems like he could use a break... been brainstorming something to run... which is this:

A sleepy little coastal town in Newfoundland - and yet:

1. St. Fiachra's elderly population (these days most of its population) exhibit remarkable health! Locals attribute this to its spring-water - and in fact a health spa fed by St. Fiachra's spring operated on the island until the '80s - but outside reporting tends to claim that their diet rich in fish and seaweed is to thank for this.

2. Befitting a town founded by Irish immigrants, St. Fiachra's is awash with fairy-lore. Big circles of mushrooms sprout across it, said to be portals to the otherworld. In a darker vein, the town is rumoured to be haunted by a fetch, a sort of doppelgänger who appears to people before dragging them to hell!

3. St. Fiachra's high incidence of reported strange phenomena like lost time, astral projection, lights over the ocean, and crabs doing un-crab-like things has attracted a stream of aficionados of the weird over the decades - spiritualists and Forteans a while back, nowadays more UFO-seekers. They congregate in a bohemian flop on the edge of town, and tend to get on the locals' nerves.

4. The people of St. Fiachra's practice their own peculiar sect of Christianity, which among other things rejects the book of Revelation, and instead teaches of an eighth day of creation when God will restore the garden of Eden and return humanity to our prelapsarian glory. The whole town has been under an interdict from the Catholic church for over a century!

5. Visitors to the town often report being frightened by noises that seemed to come from underground. Locals joke that these noises are made by the sluagh na marbh - the "host of the dead"!

6. The region around St. Fiachra's has had one of the highest disappearance rates in the province in 2025. The latest & highest-profile of these disappearances was immortality-seeking multimillionaire Johnson Bronson.

7. The sole exception to the town's otherwise-impeccable health - a disease of yet-unknown cause has been spreading in St. Fiachra's. Symptoms vary, but tend to include lethargy and confusion. The disease's spread has coincided with a spike in xenophobia in the once-tourist-friendly place, problematizing its study. The prevailing theory is that it is something like Minamata disease, caused by contamination of the town's fish supply by the nefarious communist Chinese.