Thug Muggers in the Sewers 1/27/24
Table Talk:
I ordered and finally received my latest batch of maps this week. After testing out a similar option on the last Nibiru town map, i decided to print these as scrim vinyl. This is about the same price as the medium weight paper and laminate i’ve been doing, but these will be easier to work with since they can be rolled up without becoming permanently bent or deformed. Also, i’m hoping that these will have less glare for pictures and the webcam when Nymbus is teleconferencing in to play. I gave the option to the players, and they asked to know the financial cost i’ve put into these. For context, I usually only get ~4 maps printed at a time, based on where i think the players will go. However, this time i ordered 20 maps so i have the whole area/level printed and don’t really have to worry about it for a while. This batch was a little under $400 USD.
Along with maps, i finally got back into painting minis this week, and i’m pretty happy with the results. I have no idea if the ones i did will be used any time soon since i got them months ago when the game was in a different place, but i’m glad to be getting back into it.
I have also been working the last two weeks on going back and editing the early summaries from the very beginning when i wasn’t really sure about this blog thing and didn’t even glance over my work before hitting ‘publish’. Now i have certain formatting rules i try and adhere to (like using Italics for my remarks, intending table comments, etc.). And now i have a two part editing system thanks to Brooke graciously agreeing to be my final copy editor before i post anything. She’s been generous enough to proof for me for about a year now, and was kind enough to go back and look over the old summaries, after i did my own first round of edits. So, i now have 4/30/22, 5/7/22, and 5/22/22 redone and put up for any new people who find and decide to read this little thing i’ve been doing.
A quick correction. Nymbus, please mark 1 more point of bond with tZulèe on the card. In truth you should have had to roll last session for the two actions (staying out of the fight, and melding with the wall during the rest), but i forgot about making you roll. So as a compromise, take one point instead of two, but don’t worry about rolling and messing up the timeline.
Okay now for the difficult one… I actually postponed our game last week because i was having so much anxiety about this. I want to address a little bit about attitudes and cheating.
I don’t have a DM screen. And the reason is i don’t feel like i need one. In fact, it’s easier for me to look over the table and stay engaged without being locked behind one.
But if i catch players monitoring my dice, or checking over my notes, or mouthing the math of my damage counter as i’m noting it down… Well i just don’t want that kind of game. I don’t want a game where there is one dice tower in the middle of the table that everyone has to use so we all see the results. I don't want to need copies of character sheets to verify stats and bonuses after every roll. I want a game where i can trust my players and they can trust me, not one where someone at the table never gets checks lower than 13 or min-maxes at every opportunity.
So let me build the trust for my end and tell everyone how i cheated in the last fight.
I decided when i was setting it up that encounter that the Wereboar (WB in my notes) would get ½ their health back when they transformed as part of their religious fervor, and for cult reasons we’ll learn later. When i rolled their HP (87) i marked this half (43) on my notes to remember. BUT, when they turned, the fight was going badly for the players, so i decided to only give them 10 HP back. It was only when the tide turned again that i gave back the full 43 (33 on top of the 10 mentioned), and actually gave them a health potion to keep the fight going.
So yes, i cheated in that fight. And then i used that as a deciding factor of the loot the players would get. I had a few possible items and ideas in my notes. If they’d barely won the fight, they wouldn’t have gotten as much, but since i made the fight harder (giving the WB a Health Potion that wasn’t in the original encounter notes), they’ll get more and/or better loot as a result.
This is a thing most DM’s do, minor adjustment to keep the game adaptive, reactive, organic, and fun.
BUT, if i have to by buckling down on rules and monitoring everything all the time, then i can’t adapt and react that way, and the fun will suffer. This isn’t meant to be a rant, or to single out a player and scold them. This is just a bit of etiquette talk to help all of us remember to keep having fun, and keep the game fun for everyone.
“The basic concept was that if a playwright got himself into a corner he could send down the god, who arrived in a flower-decked bucka wagon from overhead and rescued the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more religious playgoers, who believed that God—not the special-effects version who came down from some overhead platform the audience couldn’t see but the One who wert in heaven—really did save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly gone out of fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular novelists—of the sort sai King seemed on his way to becoming—probably still used the technique, only disguising it better. Little escape hatches. Cards that read GET OUT OF JAIL FREE or ESCAPE THE PIRATES or FREAK STORM CUTS ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION POSTPONED. The god from the machine (who was actually the writer), patiently working to keep the characters safe so his tale wouldn’t end with an unsatisfying line like “And so the ka-tet was wiped out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won”
-Eddie Dean —Stephen King: “The Dark Tower (the 7th book in the Dark Tower Series): Book 2, Chapter 1
🐗🕷️☠️🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿🫐Chapter 5: Losing Friends and Making New Ones (cont.)
🐗🕷️☠️🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿🫐Chapter 5: Losing Friends and Making New Ones (cont.)
Since Ari and Cypress are in terror under a Giant Wolf Spider, let’s start with Rae and Sorin. It’s the 12th of Kythorn, and we are in another mechanical room- You know what, give me some Perception checks, let’s do this right.
The mechanical room we’re in is well lit by steady torch light, reminding us a bit of the first room we found here way back on the 26th of Mirtul when this all began almost two weeks ago. There are small tilted shelf boards showing tunes that blink back and forth. There are numbered gears with chains or coils of rope tied to their sprockets. There are small tools, wrenches, tongs, compasses and hammers, hanging by bits of string tied around some of the pipes. As we look, you see one of the slanted shelf’s runes changing. The yellow Ipthong blinks out before the red Crubas lights up next to it blinking. We hear a click and a plink as a rivet somewhere in the tunnels lets go and bounces off a pipe. As we look around for the noise, it occurs to us that many of the pipes look swollen. It’s tough to say for sure, but they seem to be bowed out a bit against their mounting brackets, and the sounds are a steady thrum, instead of a gentle rippling.
Yeah, not bad, i feel good about that description. So, what-
Ashley: “Can I take the Thug’s camouflage cloak.”
Yeah, that tracks.
Rae and Sorin lean over the body of the Thug, checking for valuables. Sorin unlinks the brick painted cloak from the assassin and pulls it away. Holding it up to the light, he can see that it’s still in decent shape but shorter now where it was ripped and torn at the bottom. Still, it will give +1 stealth to the wearer.
“You already have a cloak.” Rae says.
“I’m gonna give it to ♥Ari♥.” Sorin erplies, somehow actually managing to pronounce the hearts around her name.
Groaning, Rae almost has to take damage from how hard her eyes roll back before she finishes checking the body. In one of the Thug’s hands she finds a Pistol Crossbow in good condition. Then a second one that was crushed underneath her as she fell. Checking her belt, Rae finds a small vial like a test tube, just big enough to dip an arrow or a bolt, half full of poison. She pockets this quickly before Sorin has a chance to see it.
Ari looks down at the somewhat ornate chest on the far side of the room, very aware that there is a more-than-giant-spider-sized distance between her and the exit here. She kneels down to examine the chest for traps (10 Perception), but all she can focus on is the 7 foot long spider that just moved a leg down the wall so it can stay closer to her.
“Can you,” there's a hitch in her throat but she powers through and tries again. “Can you tell it that I’m checking this for traps?”
Cypress’s mandibles click as he explains to the Spider, “Friend check for tricks, make sure box safe for spider babies.”
The Spider shifts to one side and then slowly backs away from Ari, giving her more space and showing just an ounce more trust.
With an 18 this time, Ari can see that the obvious main catch on the front of the chest is a trap. If someone sticks their fingers in there to open it, the catch will release a weight and trigger a spring inside; a band of thin wire, shaper enough to cut through flesh, will fall over the hand and be pulled back into the box. But, on the left she can see one of the flat riveting pins is turned horizontal instead of vertical like all the rest. She twists it to match the others and the chest lid clicks up, opening in front of her.
Ari can see the silver bar laying there and picks it up. With a good history check she can remember Tank teaching her and the rest of the Ivory Thorns about these. A Chime of Opening. This one seems to be worn though and starting to crack (only 5 uses left instead of 10). Then she lifts out the other three broken and used up chimes from the bottom of the box thinking, ‘Hey, the silver is still probably good to sell’. Lastly, she carefully unhooks the spring from the inside wall of the chest to disable the mechanism from hurting the Spider later on. (Brooke actually forgot this, but i am a kind soul to Giant Wolf Spiders.)
Cypress steps past their rogue friend, and climbs on top of the two taller barrels to open and loot the smaller one laying atop them.
So, i forgot what they found in the box, and all i can make out from my notes is x2df92 and i have no idea what that means, but i’m sure it was something good and useful…
After Rae backs away from the corpse, Bostra very pointedly looks at them both. He steps forward, maintaining eye contact, and places one of the Constabulary Tokens around her neck.
Sorin and Rae cough and shuffle their feet.
Perhaps attempting to make up for their embarrassment with a good deed, the two Thug Muggers look around the room at the swelling pipes. Rae asks, “Can you figure out what we need to do to get this place in a little bit better shape?”
I’ll need a strength roll from Rae, and a mechanism roll (d20 + proficiency) from Sorin.
Sarah: “Nat’ 20!”
Ashley: “Boom! Another Nat’ 20!”
“I can try,” Sorin replies and rolls up his sleeves, “but I think you’d have to be a level 8 plumber class to really get it running smoothly again.”
He goes over one of the tilted boards of wood and looks over the glyphs there, tracing little lines in the air. “Let’s see, Kasha: 5, Bitso:13, Plont: 2,” Then looking up at the pipes and numbered wheels on the wall, “So that make 8: Vense, and 4 Ccinsera.” He points to one of the wheels there. Turn that one to the Ig, uh, the forth symbol written there.”
Rae goes over and tugs. She slowly forces the valve to turn until the small arrow indicator is pointing to a letter that looks like an eyeball inside a mouth. The thrumming stops for a second. And then, the whole room starts to shake. “SORIN!?”
“No, no, we want that, now go to that one there with the clicking brown rune!” He points. “Turn it all the way to the Smegan mark, the uh, the open circle like a frog's mouth!”
Grunting, Rae heaves the valve open.
Silence.
Clattering pipes.
Banging.
Hissing.
The sound of rushing water.
A faint groan.
A sigil on one of the boards blinks and then fizzles out, and Sorin relaxes. We can see that the pipes seem to be a bit better now with none of them shaking or swelling in their frames.
With two critical successes, i’ll also give you this. We hear a hiss and look down the hall toward the ladder pipe we came down not long ago. There in the distance we see a plume of steam and know that the water from the relieved pipes is putting out the fire from Sorin’s - er sorry - the Thug’s trap’s explosion and washing away any poison she left behind.
In the first of the big barrels, Cypress finds two small quivers with 11 arrows left in one, and 13 crossbow bolts in the other.
After determining it’s not trapped, Ari wedges her dagger into the lid of the first box. She makes a fist and hammers it down on the hilt, popping the nails like a crowbar (Oh yeah, wait, doesn’t she still have a bright yellow 40 inch DWHT55293 Multifunctional Utility Bar?). Inside is just an empty crate with 2 gold rings, and 2 silver rings hanging on nails inside. She pockets them and then sets the lid to the side, leaning it against the wall with the box still open for the Spider.
As we stand there looking down the hallway toward the steam, Bostra smiles, “Good, we need to go back there to get my bag anyways.”
“I can get it, dad!” Sorin blurts out and runs blindly off, charging down the hallway.
“Did he just…” Bostra sighs and then turns to Rae. With a stern look he holds out a second Constabulary Token.
“What?”
Bostra raises an eyebrow.
“Oh the Wereboar, right…” Rae sighs and slumps down the hallway after the wizard. “Fine…”
Rae walks into the room to see Sorin rolling a 3 on a Strength Check to pick up Bostra’s bag.
She laughs and pushes him aside.
Even with a 14, Rae only barrel gets the bag to lift off the ground. “Jiminemy Christ! What does he have in here!?”
“See!” Sorin taunts, “It’s not so easy is it, muscles.”
“At least I didn’t call him ‘Dad’.”
Sorin’s face goes red, “Wait, that was out loud?”
“Yup.”
“Oh gods!”
Rae groans. “Ugh, fine I’ll drag this back in a minute,” she says walking away to the south.
“Where're you going?”
Rae holds up the Constabulary token, “Bostra wants me to go put a necklace on a pig.”
Ashley: “Ooo the big strong man that carried him away!”
Brooke: “No! Bad!”
Sarah: “Sorin canNOT be attracted to a corpse.”
Ashley and Nymbus in unison: “He is.”
Cypress moves to the next barrel, and rolls a 17 Perception to check for traps. He can see the false bottom about a foot down from the top and he calls over to Ari, “This have trap! … um sorry, still thinking in spider. This one is trapped, can you take a look?”
Still very conscious of the Spider lurking overhead, Ari stays bent over and works her way to the cleric. Looking down into the barrel, she can see where the staves have all been cut and notched above the false bottom. She pushes down lightly and feels the springy resistance. Very carefully, she pushes down and slides it. She can feel the click as the bottom moves out from the notches and slowly let up.
Ari allows the spring to slowly push up until it stops, then she pulls the false bottom out of the barrel. With a clatter, it bangs against the side of the barrel, and Ari can see the bit of string tying it to the back. “So that when it shoots up, it lets out whatevers underneath,” she whispers.
What’s underneath, turns out to be about 2 bags worth of evenly spaced poison caltrops.
Ashley: “Ooo poisoned ones!”
Brooke: “No! Bad!”
Nymbus, exasperated: “I was literally just thinking ‘I have to make sure Sorin doesn't find out about these’.”
Rae comes out at the other end of the Mario-style pipe, right above the dead Wereboar.
Give me an easy Dex Save just not to step on his tusks as you come out of the tube.
As she slides out the mouth of the tube, Rae remembers the positioning of the corpse in the tiny confined hallway and reaches up. She grips the lip of the tube and pulls, flipping up as she slides out and somersaulting to a rest on the other side of the Wereboar.
Rae sighs from looking so badass with no one around to see and moves over to the Thug to place the Constabulary Token.
When she looks down at the boar head of the giant half orc, she recoils in disgust. The thing’s mouth and face are decaying at an alarming rate. The tusks that were healthy boar teeth a little while ago are now hollow. They’re yellow, even browning, jagged and broken at sharp angles. The thick hyde of his snouty face looks as if it was burned with acid, with gaping necrotic holes blooming open like white pus plague sores.
Trying not to gag, Rae quickly leans over and puts the Constabulary Token on the decaying Wereboar, tossing the cord over his head. Then she moves to his belt to see if there's anything valuable. She finds a letter marked with a monogram of two bloody Z’s atop each other and crossed with a line down the center. Next to it, she also pulls off a little pouch hanging there. It’s a tiny leather thing, only big enough for a couple fingers and has three red lightning bolts on it. Rae takes it to examine later after squeezing it and feeling something like sand inside.
Thinking about what Cypress said, she moves to take the thing’s pulse and then stops for a second time. She can see that it’s heart is still beating. Upsettingly, she can see the up and down wave flowing back and forth in his veins as the body thins, but worse… she can see it in his broken tusks. The broken right tusk has no end point and she can see a level of blood in the hollow gap pulsing up and down like the level bars on some of the sewer pipes. The blood within is slowly losing its deep rusty red color and turning a sickly yellowy dark greenish brown.
Covering her mouth, Rae steps over this abomination and goes back through the pipe.
In the corner now, Cypress opens a large worn out sack. The two small lumps inside tumble out. The first is an ordinary looking bag made of gray leather with a red drawstring, and the other is a yellowish tan teddy bear with fabric so old and worn that its once soft fur is now stiff and crusty.
Ari goes to the middle of the three boxes and kneels down to take a look. After determining it has no traps, she sees that it’s just an open crate turned upside down. She pushes it right ways up and reveals the spell scroll underneath. Its magic runes seem beyond her for now (higher level than she can cast), but maybe Sorin can make some sense of them later.
Outside the room, Bostra looks at Akris and sighs at the flying snake. “I know you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me, but those two have been gone for a while now. Why don’t you go check on them to make sure they haven’t fallen in a hole or something. Then just come back here and let me know?”
Rae walks back to the room with the ladder pipe and chuckles as she watches Sorin still trying to lift Bostra’s bag.
“Stop laughing, I can do this.” He heaves and his voice strains, “I can… this … time!” He rolls a natural one critical failure. “Aha! See, I got it! Oh no no no no no NO!”
Sorin does, in fact, manage to lift the bag… He lifts it with such speed that it goes over his head.
The physics of simple mechanisms shows that a dictionary force (up) limited by a linear force (an arm) anchored at a center point (a shoulder socket), must become a rotational force (around and back).
Bostra's bag rises over Sorins head flying back behind him.
Simple physics also shows that a larger mass (a very heavy bag) rotating at velocity around a small mass (a boy wizard) with inertia, will cause the lesser mass to move with it as the rotational force (around the arm socket) moves to become more linear (back towards the hole in the floor).
Sorin stumbles back, falling to the floor.
The unstable force of this spiraling linear and rotation movement will continue unless acted upon or stopped by a barrier (the floor). Even then, the inertia of the large mass (the bag) will mean it still attempts to continue in this pattern (spiraling down the hole), unless stopped.
The bag swings down behind Sorin’s back, pulling him down, and yanking his arm into the hole where it slams against the remaining wall. His fingers are slammed into the wall and pulled open. The bag falls.
…
What a great failure. It’s so rare that a DM gets to use a nat’ 1 as a tool like that. It really is a gift, thank you Sorin.
Sorin and Rae hear hissing laughter in the hallway and then the sound of flapping wings retreating back towards Bostra.
Ari goes to the last of the three boxes, it’s warped and cracked and looks like chunks of boards are completely missing. Still she hunkers down and checks it for traps. She freezes in place looking at the box. She very carefully touches one of the dark lines of a crack, then one of the black patches of missing broken off of board. Both are solid. The cracks and breaks have been painted on, and now Ari can feel the gritting texture of the paint. She pulls her finger back and smells it. Yup, explosive powder mixed into the paint. She gently pushes the box from the side, then pushes more firmly. The box barely shifts. ‘So,’ she thinks, ‘it’s full.’ She hesitates for a moment before slowly standing to her head-down crouch and motions to Cypress, “This box IS a trap. It’s rigged to explode if something tries to open it.
The cleric nods, “Can you disarm it?”
“I don’t think so, not in here in the dark at least.”
“So we need to take it with us?” Cypress asks.
“Yeah, I think so.”
Cypress nods and turns his head up to the Giant Wolf Spider still hovering menacingly over head. “This box bad. Big bad box, go boom. We take box so no spiders and no babies touch and get boom fire hurt.”
After a long moment the spider nods its head and abdomen, rocking up and down on its center legs, “You take bad boomy box.”
Ari goes to lift the box and hesitates, “I can’t lift it without fully standing up.”
“Here, grab one side and I'll take the other, until you’re around the corner.”
Together they lift the box and walk with it out of the room. As Ari turns the corner the Spider hisses at Cypress. “Wait…”
Cypress hesitates then nods to Ari. The rogue stands up with the box and leaves the room, but she waits in the tunnel, just out of sight beyond the turn for her friend.
Nymbus, roll a persuasion check. Not for anything specific, but just to see if something happens.
Nymbus: “‘Cause that doesn’t sound ominous.”
Overhead, the Spider shifts back and forth between its left and right sets of legs, until it seems to come to a decision.
“You small. Have small butt. Bad thorax. Bad for webs. Me feel bad for small butt. You friend. You help me. Me thank. Me help you make good web!” Then it spins and its back legs work like a loom. They weave thick gorgets of spider silk into a log strand that pools on the ground. You now have a regular length of adventuring rope made of braided spider silk.
Touched, Cypress picks up the Giant Wolf Spider butt-leavings and bows low in gratitude before turning to leave. A familiar voice echoes in his head using the clicks and hisses as his magical ghost spider fangs, “A gift for a gift, you must return my favors.” After a moment's hesitation, Cypress decides on the best, most precious and valuable gift a holyman can give… a blessing on this house.
“This is special happy gift,” Cypress clicks, slowly pulling out a moss ball. “Big nice nature God say I give to you,” He places it up against the corner of the wall and backs away, “Help make spider babies strong!”
As 10 eyes in the room watch, the moss luminecess and then grows. With startling speed the moss takes over a small part of the floor and wall. Its tinyroots strain and push apart the flimsy wooden beams. There is a nerve inducing crack. Then silence. And now a steady drip as the holy moss brings forth water from the rocks, forming a small pool in the corner of the wall.
Cypress stands up taller with righteous satisfaction and gives the spider a final bow as he leaves. The last thing we hear as he and Ari close the hidden door is a clacking spider hiss, “Pfft. Spiders have better God.”
Back in the mechanical room, Cypress and Ari close the door and turn to find Bostra and Akris arm-in-arm (er arm-in-wing i guess) and laughing hysterically.
After they get filled in, and laugh themselves, Ari and Cypress tap their earrings and talk to the Thug Muggers in the other room. The conversion runs pretty much like this:
Ari: “So I hear you dropped the ball.”
Cypress: “No, they dropped the bag.”
Ari: “Yeah. So I hear you dropped the bag.”
Sorin: Sigh.
Rae: “Well one of us did.”
Cypress: “Well Bostra wants it back. He says we can either just risk it and go down to the second level there-”
Sorin: “-Hey yeah we put the fire out!”
Ari: “There was a fire!?”
Cypress: “-or go down the other way and explore until we find the bag.
Cypress: “But he says if anything’s missing he’ll take it out on all four of us.”
Rae: “Hey what!? Sorin’s the one who did it!”
Ari: “Yeah but, that’s what he says.”
Sorin: “Um… maybe we should just do this one?”
Rae: “If Bostra takes it out on us, I’m taking it out on you.”
Cypress: “Rae?”
Rae: “What? Huh?”
Cypress: “Uh huh.”
Ari: “Hey, is there a mark for Devin in there?”
Rae: “Yeah I saw one on the wall.”
Ari: “Okay good, cause I do not want to drag this thing around, and I'm not leaving it where it can blow up.”
Sorin: “Ooo! Blow up!? What’re we-”
Cypress, Ari, and Rae: “No! Bad!”
I really wanna end the summary there… but we did play out a little bit more, so…
Back in the ladder pipe room where we first came back down to the sewers, everyone is examining their goods to see what it is they found. Ari is looking at the rings she found, Rae is looking at her little baggy of sand, Cypress is looking at the teddy bear, and Sorin gets nominated to look down the hole and keep an eye on Bostra’s bag.
Cypress set’s the teddy bear down and picks up the pouch he found. He’s able to see now that it’s a modified Bag of Tricks, but the symbols on it seem to be related to those of the cult…
“Cypress, what's with the teddy bear?”
“Huh? Oh I found it in a bag a little bit ago.”
“What’s with the giant tongue?”
“What?”
“Oh gods and it has teeth!”
Roll initiative.
“This is the eternal quandary of wise DND play: do you get the item that lets you communicate with each other no matter where you are in reality, or a bundle of dynamite to blow up Dracula's ass?”
-Griffin Mcelroy –The Mcelroy Family, “The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula – Episode 3”
Table talk:
The Teddy Bear Mimic was one of the ones i got painted this past week in a set of a few different minis that i orders some time ago and finally got around to painting. I’m not sure of the original design, but i bought the print from WitnessMeStudio on etsy, so go give them a look. Who knows, maybe you’ll spot one of the other creatures i got…
The table for the modified Bag of Tricks is:
Cult Bag of Tricks (D8; 1: Avatar of Death, 2: Cultist, 3: Acolyte, 4: Flying Sword, 5: Shadow, 6: Thug, 7: Ghoul,8: Cult Fanatic).
Sarah asked about Attacks of Opportunity, somewhat based around playing a lot of Baulder’s Gate 3 lately. I explained that that’s one of those features we just haven’t been using much. Because we started with people new to the game itself, we first started out on a bit of a reduced rule set to make things easier to learn and as we’ve progressed i’ve added in more and more of the advanced features and rules. Even so, Opportunity Attacks are something i likely won’t do much with because they are so dependent on positioning. The way we’ve been playing 5e our table maps and minis are mostly just to get a sense of the world and understand basic layout. This is unlike the rigorous style of D&D 4.0 where some sets were sole with rules to determine range and movement and was more of a tactician’s game like Warhammer 40k. Nothing against those styles, it’s just not what i’m going for in this game. So i won’t be doing much with that feature, but if anyone feels that they are open to an Opportunity Attack during combat, they can bring it up, and i’ll make the call in the moment.
