Ghost Gang Random Tables for Esoteric Enterprises or whatever modern urban fantasy you got

In anticipation of Cavegirl's AWESOME Esoteric Enterprises coming out bigger and badder, here are my thoughts on Ghost Gangs. Because people die all the time, there's almost always a few ghosts in a rough collective, if not an outright organized body of the disembodied.

They're a fantastic organization to hire out freelancers, because they need a literal pair of hands (or 4) to lift up a priceless painting from one subterranean hidey-hole and carry it safely to theirs. 

(Also here's a link to the player's handbook for Esoteric Enterprises, with which one can create ghosts.)

From Wikipedia

WHAT DOES THIS GHOST GANG WANT ANYWAY

1. Enchanted fresh food to actually eat. 
2. Ancient vinyl pressing of ritual music.
3. Large (4' x 6') oil painting, frame optional.
4. Unenchanted stone idol.
5. Large pile of enemy's wealth to be destroyed dramatically.
6. DVDs and DVD player. Holy oil to anoint such that they can push the buttons.
7. Hookah, brick of undergrown-cultivated herb. 
8. Blessed salt to keep out uninvited spirits.
9. Silver-coated sword that they can wield.
10. Rune-carved zippo lighter shipment. They don't run out of fuel.
11. Ectoplasm-filled jar, the remains of one of their own.
12. Liber Noctis, a book of binding ghosts. A furnace to destroy it in.
13. Soul trapper's scalp or forefinger.

WHO HAS IT WHO IS TERRIBLE

1. A thief-lich (HD6) and her disciples.
2. Null soul zone-dwelling scavengers. 
3. Overly large cryptid.
4. Nearby police precinct. 
5. Bank vault, front for some undead businessfolk.
6. Devotee of the Void and their flock.
7. Rival ghost gang.
8. Urban explorers, last seen diving the depths.

WHERE DO THEY HOLE UP

1. Underground, an abandoned subway stop
2. Aboveground, in an unknown safehouse
3. Underground, beneath a small settlement of worshippers / traders
4. Underground, in an automatic sewer processing system
5. Underground, in an ancient building that was built over hundreds (?) of years ago but looks like it's from the 1980s
6. Aboveground, a squat atop an abandoned (?) building

Oh yeah, obviously if you get a location or WHO HAS IT from the What they want table, don't bother rolling on the later tables unless you want.

Notes on running Mothership tonight

HELLO - if I am running Mothership for you, please leave now. 

You're delivering a Box to Lyons. You have a Grizzly ATV, driving up 11B, surrounded by grass and desert and the wrecks of Crashland. 

Art by Rust Shake

What's In The Box

1 - 5) Viral nanohive. 1-2. Inactive 3-5. Active (Body save or replaces lungs, disadvantage running, can spit viral nanomachines)
6-10) Atlas of Hell - smoking skull surrounded by a black mold. Sanity save or 1d10 stress and 1d10 damage from self-harm, per round of exposure. Can ask it questions when exposed. Mysticism to figure out this is in the box without opening it. (stolen from Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud) (Edit: Once a day you can ask it for stuff but there's always a delivery person and they may be or become something from Hell)

Art by Joshua Cotter

What's On The Radio / Fear Save Static Hiss

1) "God is here"
2) "You are already in Heaven"
3) "God will save you next"
4) "Save... us..."
5) :Latin shouting, mysticism or theology / Int roll to decode, hint about monster:
6) "God is a black duststorm"
7) "God will strip our flesh and show the truth"
8) "God is hungry"
9) "God is suffering"
10) "We are with you and God is with us"

God of Route 11D

10' tall, bone-white, whippet-thin, face is like a distorted honeycomb that winks and screams and emits corrosive dust which it controls. Some of what it kills are animated corpses when within 200 meters of it. They may or may not fall under its control (instinct save to resist). They understand that it is close. They want to worship the God whether they succeed or fail the instinct save. 

It can run slightly faster than the average ATV or Grizzly delivery vehicle. 

6(30) hits, Combat 66%, Instinct 35%, Run Fast 55%

It can swing its rubbery limbs at you for 1d10[-] damage (ie you roll 2d10 and take the worse result). On a 5+ body save or get knocked over or tossed around. 

At range it emits a corrosive black dust that can cause up to 4d10 damage - it can target multiple opponents if it doesn't move. Armor save at disadvantage unless you're in a sealed env suit of some kind, which it will eat through given a few rounds. 

It can also blast a bright light from its honeycomb face, a hellish glow that causes a fear save or take 1d10 stress.

Wants: to absorb cyberbrain prosthetics and nanohives, gaining more Black Dust. To be worshiped by its victims.

Landscape Features d66 table for hiding on a Semi-Arid Planet

One
1. Bouldering-sized scree / stones tightly packed
2. Reedy pool of salty water
3. Dry riverbed / rocky trench
4. Low walls of an old ship bulkheads, strewn about
5. Stripped ship generator and large (1' tall) power conduits
6. Unpowered airlock door, closed, explosive bolts, opens to a 40' drop into a derelict

Two
1. Wrecked, flipped buggy
2. Tall grasses
3. Ridge top
4. 40' tall stone outcropping shapped like a talon
5. 4' 'cliff'
6. Copse of hardy bush-trees

Three
1. Fallen-in concrete hut
2. Still-smoking crater
3. Cliff Racer nest, 50/50 empty. Large hole-riddled mounds
4. Geiser outgrowth / stalagmite
5. Low (crawl-height) gas. 1) methane 2) sulfur 3-6) fog
6. Dunetop plateau of sand stone

Four
1. Concrete pipes, 8' tall, 1d10 in a cluster. Stood so they're open at the top
2. Mummified corpses in vaccsuits, 1d10
3. Scruffy shrubs surround a tiny saltwater spring
4. Flat-top stone with a narrow (2') deep (8') crack running its length
5. Rusting dumpsters in a pile as though dropped from on high
6. Tall dry grasses (dead, very flammable)

Five
1. Blacktop cracked road with ditches on either shoulder
2. Thick mass of creepers and vines over rotting soft ground
3. Waist-high fungal growths
4. 20' stone arch
5. Throny shrub with exposed roots at crawling-level
6. 8' x 8' x 2' steaming animal turds / bones / shed skin

Six
1. Manhole cover to small dry sewer
2. Power line pylones, 60' tall
3. Fallen-over Company billboard
4. Crashed lifepod
5. Narrow crooked valley
6. Mining sump, hastily abandoned

Mothership setting notes: CRASHLAND

A LOT of this was cribbed from Throne of Salt's Great Screaming Hell and Unnamed Mothership Setting.

War in Heaven

We don't know why they fight. We fight for the castoffs, or we fight the castoffs. Our posthuman Angels rarely notice us. Their machinations are abstract and distant. Or close, next to us, inside us, destroying our worlds, our minds, our reality. We don't even know if it's a war. We just know it is destructive.

Their leavings, in part:

• Exowombs
• Warframe armor
• MTHR computer cores
• Automated nanofactories
• Infested radio waves hacking and repurposing machines and minds
• Origins of cyber brains and backups and uploading
• Jump drives - we can't create them
• Some androids

CRASHLAND

Y03D, or 'Yonder,' was meant to be a number of things. A depository of debtors working down their sentences. A mining colony. A shipbreaker facility. An out-of-the-way part of the galactic economy where exiled researchers could be parked. 

In time, the workers re-dubbed it Crashland.

The place was a ball of scree and comet-impacts orbiting a star. The Company shellacked atmosphere on it as fast as they could, leaving a few mild gaps in the high desert where there's essentially none - the ideal place to drop ancient ships to be broken and recycled, after orbital stations removed delicate parts. 

Salty seas were made from ice comets crashing into the planet. Desalination stations were set up, settlements sprouted in various places. Grasslands grew.

One had to get a cyberbrain prosthesis to move to Crashland, and modern medical facilities are still set up to convert people to such. Nanite injections can painlessly convert brain flesh to silicone, grow in the ports needed for work, entertainment, registration, anesthesia. Rumors of the company editing memories were not to be repeated; they were prosecutable examples of subversion. 

Then the Company foresaw a tiny thread of the War in Heaven drifting towards Crashland. They drew straws - or rather, the local executive board handed out straws to their lessers, and a general evacuation was sounded for 'non-essential personnel.' 

Now, a skeleton crew squats around a space elevator, nominally ruling the world. Factions vie for legitimacy, land, water. Ship remnants rain down every night. In the depths of the wilds, in the depths of the planet, from the depths of the void, old machinery left by the angels of Heaven sometimes stir. 

We pray we are not noticed by them.

The Trickle Down

Orbital decay causes old shipbroken vessels to crash down and spill their rotten guts. Often they're dropped into parts of the Crashland with little or no atmosphere. Some make a living scavenging. Others worship artifacts gleaned from the old ships.

Edited Memories

Cyberbrains installed via a technovirus, and the Company covered it up? Remote backdoors utilized by ghoulish operatives left behind to catalogue and safeguard Company secrets? Cyberbrain architecture derived from posthuman technologies? Random blackouts in some locations? Puppeteering? Mind viruses uploaded to the local internet? Brain-thief factions setting up neural networks from prisoners / captives and leasing out processing time? Hermits living isolated and alone developing cyberbrains spontaneously? Edited memories a hoax to hide breakdown in reality? Company never left and will never leave and walks among us in secret at night and we cannot see them? 

None of this is true or worth repeating.

What hath God wrought? Planetbound Mothership and Plagiarism

Mothership is a fantastic scifi horror RPG. It's a fantastic scifi RPG. I love NPCs having Combat and Instinct as their two catch-all stats. I love hirelings also having a Loyalty save to see if they help the PCs or act like Total Cads. And Dead Planet is strong.

Bixby and Lyon, and Route 11D

 I also love that Throne Of Salt put together a planetbound setting on their blog for it with lots of callouts to space opera, and a conversion guide for Eclipse Phase monsters, and also all the uplifts from EP converted to PC classes. Though I got into running RPGs because of Numenera, I started obsessively buying and reading RPGs again because of Eclipse Phase. I have all their 1e books up to Rimward. So it's nice to see someone dust them off and combine transhumanism / fancy technology with The Company running roughshod over all our necks, and a more grounded, planetbound game.

I am basically ripping off their first Mothership Actual Play as an intro scenario. The PC(s) are taking a strange box from the water-desalinization town of Bixby (in the bottom of that map) to the walled city of Lyon. FRIEND has asked them to do this and can pay 45,000 credits. The crew only owes 88k on their Grizzly, so they take the job even if it is on short notice, an all-night drive after a long day of work. That's what amphetamine gum dispensers are for. 

A6 Grizzly, 8 wheels of vacc-sealed low-agility

On the way up Route 11D, the PCs will hear some strange static whispering on the radio, see the destruction that came to Roland's Bait Shop - it's auto-sentries having ignored whatever bored a hole into the slab of the building. They'll hear Roland's kids pleading that they stop and help them get out of the sealed emergency bunker beneath the rest stop.

They'll see what the Eyes Church called down from the orbital heavens. The God of Route 11D. 

DOOM Oracle, Passages style

I got a decent bit of gonzo post apocalyptic play from my other Passages style Oracle, so here is one for DOOM.

Passages oracles work by rolling on this 3 times to construct a scene, but the Doomslayer wouldn't care for my petty rules and neither should you.

1. Flesh
2. Metal
3. Demon
4. Mortal
5. Distant
6. Close
7. Walls
8. Portal
9. Rage
10. Corporate
11. Military
12. Civilian
13. Blood
14. Sterile
15. Ravaged
16. Untouched
17. Hell
18. Earth
19. Treasure
20. Tear (as in Rip and Tear)