Friday 24 July 2009

The High Hunt

The High Hunt is a secret organisation popular among the spoiled sons and daughters of the Yellow City's elite. It is organised into cells of between six and twelve; each cell has a leader who knows a member of another cell, and there is no central leadership.

The High Hunt was formed as a means of relieving the boredom of pampered upper-class living. As the common Yellow City saying goes, "A life of sex, opium-eating and feasting is a blessing for a year but a curse for a lifetime"; without edge, danger and excitement life loses its fascination.

The main activity of The High Hunt is catching crabmen in the ghettos by the quayside. Crabmen are the untouchable caste of the Yellow City and humans and slugmen are forbidden to enter the areas where they live, so members of The Hunt do so in secret. Once a month they steal down to the docks and attempt to track down the biggest specimen they can to kill and bring back to their home base for consumption. Needless to say the crabmen are well aware of the danger posed by The Hunt, and their vigilante groups practice ritual dismemberment of Hunt members who they catch - usually while the victim is still alive. This makes Hunts a frightening and thrilling event for their members, which is exactly what they crave.

A typical Hunt is composed of d6+2 men and d4+2 women. 75% will be fighters of level 1-3 and typically armed with spears and axes; the others will be magic-users. There is always one leader, a fighter of level 3.

If a Hunt encounters other human beings, or slugmen, in the ghetto they will attempt to kill them on sight, fearing that their presence might be reported to the authorities. There is a 10% chance on a given night that a Hunt is taking place.

4 comments:

  1. - spears and axes
    + nets, hammers and pliers

    Reminiscent of the Spyre Hunters of Necromunda (powersuited bright young things getting their jollies hunting and killing the poor), or the good old stand-by of bored young nobles on a violent jolly in WFRP, or of the aristocratic knifemen of Imperial Rome...

    I presume there are retaliatory attacks by packs of enraged low caste crabman (who, make no mistake, enjoy carnage!)

    *plays Deadliest Catch theme tune*

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  2. PS: is inter-caste predation actually forbidden as murder in the Yellow City, or is it culturally tolerated and only limited by taboos on entering low-caste areas?

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  3. Chris: The idea is that crabmen are too tough on the carapace, so you have to flip them over (with spears) and hack at them in the belly (with axes).

    Inter-caste predation isn't illegal and crabmen are so low in the pecking order that nobody would really care about their deaths. The illegality comes from entering an unclean area.

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  4. Amazing stuff, I want to play in this setting.

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