Thug Muggers in the City 1/5/24

Table Talk:

Just wanted to throw out there that my doc where i keep all my notes on Nibiru with all the different places and descriptions, is now at around 40 pages.

A bit of random trivia about the underground city, Eka, that we are slowly working towards. You may recall that i chose the city name Nibiru because it was a placeholder. Literally. In astronomical calculations when scientists were unsure of something and needed a figure to stand in for an undefined gravitational force they called it Nibiru after the fictional 10th planet. Following that need i have chosen to name the second city Eka, after the chemical placeholder eka-francium, another name for Ununennium.

The main part of the table talk for this session is actually a player discussion. I decided to have the players talk amongst themselves to figure out a sort of quest list. A list of everything they currently have on the table that they need or want to do and have become aware of. I thought it best to make them talk it out and list it out themselves, rather than just telling them, so that they remember it all a bit better. So, after talking and sharing memes, and talking and consuming 2 whole pizzas, and talking and joking, and talking, here was the final list.

· Speak with Mateo

· Find Pulgrok

· DON’T DIE - this is a general one by the players

· Search the mechanical rooms and find Belgruse

· Find Zaanth

· Explore more of the Thug tunnels and where they connect to the sewer tunnels

· Swapping out the Gibbering Mouthers per the note the players found

· Investigate the “oracle”

· Locate the other merchant in the sewers

· Get the sewers up and working again!

“I’ll tempt them with my ass, while you guys hit ‘em”

-Wade, “BEGINNING OF THE END | The Forest"

🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿

Chapter 4: Back to the Adventure

🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿 Chapter 4: Back to the Adventure

As the sun falls, a small time trader leans her back up against the wall and rolls a smoke with her hands shaking. She lights it from her lantern and puffs. As her nerves catch up she starts picking up the little glass buttons on the ground.

At least the muggers left her her book and most of the painted buttons. Still, she’s going to have to spend most of tomorrow sewing the ones that are left back onto their cardboard pages. Not to mention, figuring out which ones the muggers took because the glass looked like gemstones…

It's late evening at the Pub of The Traveler, the patrons all hush each other and turn to face the stage. A bard reads about a couple of noted sponsorships and then a near total silence descends over the crowd.

The violin sits and holds the violin to her cheek, then pinches its neck and drags her bow, making the instrument wail a discordant ominous peal of rising and falling horror. The audience shrivers in their chairs as the light psychic damage drips up their spine.

A man concealed by shadow takes the stage and after the audience claps and cheers for his band of bards dies away he begins. In a deep sonorous boom he intones, “Moldy Pen presents: … The Jonas Collection!”

The violin shrieks as the crowd cheers and man begins to read a prepared statement…

Ari, Rae and Cypress lay out their drawn portions of the city and Sorin pulls out the upper and lower levers of the sewer maps. As we zoom into the action it's time for everyone to make some Intelligence rolls.

Cypress: 11, Sorin: 23, Ari: 13, Rae: 17.

Okay, that’s a collective average over 15, plus Sorin’s knowledge of the city, so when you want to ‘zoom in’ on a potential spot i will tell you some more detailed information about that area.

Sorin helps the others line up their drawings with the sewer grates notated on the map of the sewers we have. “Okay, so those two… those would be the ones Cypress found in Potion Alley. The one by the bank and at the end in the flask corner…” Sorin points to the two arrow symbols on the sewer map and fingers a line between them and the drawing of the city. “Then the one above that would be the one you found at the top of Jar street by the elf bank.” Sorin makes another line. “Then this one Ari found in between the printers, that’d be the one we were at before where we met with Devin, the one with the workbench.” He draws another line in the air. “Then this far one over the Thug camp room thing would be the one Rae found by the East Gate, and the one on the Main Way you saw together would be the one we used before on the first level (back in Thug Muggers in the City 9/3/22) so that’s this one on the second level,” He points to an unknown arrow in roughly the middle of the map. “And the last one on top is the one I knew about in one of the Clerkstreet parks.

Ari is first up, “So what about that one I found near the printers? At least we know where that one lets out in the sewers. And there weren’t too many people around.”

“Yeah, that could work… We’d just have to wait around until the evening again. The print shops usually run small shifts all night either stamping left overs or processing boards and paper. (Movable type print is still a rarity at this point, so most printing is done by chiseling, etching, and engraving negative versions on cheap wood and then inking and pressing them. Hence why the wanted posters we found were well inked in some spots but were hand written on some details and stamped on other details. Basically think of a medieval form letter.) Then in the morning and day, all the engravers are there and it’s pretty busy, it's the evening where they’re mostly empty while they do the carrying out and wait for supply deliveries.” Kai Sorin explains.

Cypress rubs their chin, “So the question is, is going to a known spot worth waiting around?”

“Or trying to sneak between the night shifts.” Ari points out.

“Or that, too.”

“The one I found by the Gate?” Rae asks.

“It looks pretty detached from everything we have on the map, especially since we don’t know where all the caves are yet. The gate is always busiest in the morning with people leaving on an early start, or the evening with people just getting here. I know they patrol it at night, so we’d have to go around midday… and even then I don’t know how much the guards will be looking around.” Kai Sorin explains.

“Okay, fine, you suggest something then!” Rae huffs and throws up her hands.

“We could do the ones by the banks?” Sorin suggests.

There is a silent judgy pause.

“Oh yeah.. They probably have some guards on watch after what happened, then huh?” Sorin sighs.

“Cypress pats him on the shoulder (they’re standing on the table), “Yeah probably. What about the one in, what’d you call it? Flask corner?”

“Yeah… it's a possibility. I assume you saw all the broken glass there. Well, the good news is it would put us right in the middle of everything in the sewers. But up here… well let’s just say it’s a popular spot for people who can afford the bottle, but not the seat at the bar, ya know?” Kai Sorin explains. “So if we get lucky it’ll just be one or two and we can convince them we’re aliens or something, and no one will believe them. But… if we’re unlucky it might be some violent types just waking up with a hangover and looking for people to be mad at…”

“What about using the well?” Cypress asks.

Rae’s firm voice, “No wells.”

“The one we used before?”

Kai Sorin explains, “It’s by the perfumers, so we could go in the middle of the night. But, it’s on the Main way, so we’d have to be on the lookout for people.”

“You said you know another one?”

“Yeah,” Kai Sorin explains, “Here in Clerkstreet. There are some little, well I don’t know if you could call them parks, but little green spaces with trees and bushes and stuff. The good part is that there's hardly anybody around there at night, except a few late night lovers on romantic moonlit walks,” Sorin blushes,”or trying to be unseen in the bushes themselves.” Sorin coughs, “But the bad part is that that lets out here,” he points to the top of the map of the sewers, “It’s an area we haven’t been in yet, so we don’t really know what to expect there.”

“So the question,” Raelle-the-Tactician ponders with her chin in her hand, “is, do we want to leave in the dead of night, and go somewhere we don’t know at all; or try a harder daytime-sneak, that will get us back to where we were.”

After a thought’s silence Ari’s rogue brain speaks up, “I could cast Darkness. Make a small area where no one could see what we were up to.”

With medium rolls from Ari and Cypress, they do learn something about that.

“Maybe at night,” Cypress shakes their head, “but not during the day, everyone would notice a giant cloud of darkness.”

They do not roll high enough to realize that Bostra would not go along with this plan at all. With the state of the city around the increased fear and crime, it would cause panic, and Bostra would put his foot down if they tried it.

Sorin chimes in, “So it sounds like we need to choose between the flask corner grate, or the one in Clerkstreet.”

“If it comes down to it between those too, I’d rather do Clerks Street. The Darkness thought is a good idea, but I'd rather not have to beat someone up, just because they're in a low spot in life and clinging to a bottle… as a holy man I mean.” Cypress says, scratching tZulèe’s rough wooden neck.

“Clerkstreet it is then.”

Then we are decided? Then we are Decided!

“We should all get some rest before we go,” camp-mom Cypress says as we all funnel out from the table. “We can leave around four in the morning so we all can get a nap in and be fresh heading down there. Like Sorin said, we don’t know what will be down there waiting for us and we'll have to be thinking about protecting Bostra too.”

Rest time.

Ari heads to her room and shuts the door. Behind the closed door she takes a moment to look over her gear, then begins laying everything out. Armor, main bag, sleeping roll, side bag, boots, rapier, lockpicks, and so on. Knolling everything out on the bed and floor, and when she comes to her new bow she hesitates, then sets it to one side. She spends a few minutes in her small clothes, arranging everything the way it should be, to be ready for the days to come. Lockpicks: long back slit in the pouch on her left thigh. Sleeping roll: tied to the bottom of the main bag. Rope: tied to the sides of the main bag, silk on the left, hemp on the right. Rapier: in the top of the three frogs on her right side. Daggers: -1 dagger in the left boot, Lifesteal dagger in the middle frog, and last dagger in the cross strap on the left pouch.

She continues like this until her armor, clothes and bag are all arranged and the only thing left is the bow. She sits down on the bed and lays it across her lap really getting a feel for it. After admiring the workmanship, she stands and draws it back. Her posture is textbook, straight but flexible. She can still feel Yofess’ stick prodding her back straighter. She lifts the bow and draws in a single swift movement, one arm firm, and one pulled back to her cheek.

She told the artificer goblin the truth, she never did learn to take care of a bow, but she does know quite a lot about using one. She can still remember practicing in the royal yard, straining to pull the heavy line back, trying to impress her father. Ari never did get to join the hunt before - before the world turned down side up. Those times when her father and the court would go out to the Wild Hells and chase down Xorn, Nothic, and Quasit. But she had impressed him, and she was sure she could’ve gone on the next one…

The thing was, that maintaining the weapons had never been a thing anyone had expected of her. There was always a servant, or an orderly, or a keeper, or a batman, or someone around that mended and tended and fixed and cleaned all of the equipment. She just used it.

As Ari holds the draw to her cheek, all of these memories flow out. The flow from her horns to her fingertips and into the waiting empty magic of the bow. Somewhere in its riser, carved just on the inside of the wood making up the grip, a rune begins to fill up with knowledge of her. The memory of her first draw when Yofess tried not to laugh. The memory of the first burning stings on her arm before she learned how to release. The first time she’d hit zero on the target. It all flows into the bow as she stands there holding it taut.

A thought comes to Ari from outside her head, ‘What should this bow do to alert her if something hostile is nearby?’ She thinks it over, looking at the possibilities in her head; it could vibrate a pulse to warn her silently, it could make a tune or a noise, it could twitch and move to draw a letter of infernal in the air.

Brooke: “Could it make like a noise or something in our sending stones? So that only we hear it?

I think that would be doable, but i’d say you have to buy a fifth sending stone and have the artificer bind it. Basically, you’d need to pay to add it to your network.

Ari decided that for now she’ll leave it as a simple sting, a short sharp note, like a fast pull over a violin. (Brooke chose the alert sound from Metal Gear Solid as a basic alert sound.)

And with the bow now Attuned to her, Ari hangs it with her gear, and slides into the sheets to get a few hours of sleep before things begin.

Sorin decides he’s too wired to sleep with two new spells ready to learn in his bag. Looking them both over carefully he decides that tonight he’ll work on learning Haste. That seems like the best one in case something happens to them right away. He sits in his chair by the fireplace and pulls the book up to him.

He turns the book over in his hand and finds the wax seals on the top, the bottom, and the opening side of the book. The small metal lines placed in the wax form a strange pattern that he recognizes. He memorizes the layout of the lines and closes his eyes. In the blackness behind his eyelids, Sorin draws the lines as if they were on the wax. Then he turns them, changing the perspective. Looking from the side now and rotating them like a pile of Pick-up Sticks. He moves and turns them slowly in his mind, arranging each one until they form a strange shape like a three dimensional letter C, an open rune made of many small lines just touching. Then he nods and places his hand over the first seal.

Watch the wax now.

Watch as the heat from Sorin’s hand begins to warm it just a little.

Watch the wax begin to run; too much heat and the wax will melt completely, falling into the book and covering the pages, making it unreadable.

Watch him pull his hand back as the wax turns plastic and then he pushes out with his mind.

Watch his eyes move.

Watch the small lines of metal move with them.

Watch each of the metal slivers dance; tilting and rotating to meat with each other, sinking or rising in the wax.

Watch Sorin’s eyes snap open when all of the lines form the same open rune.

Watch the flash under Sorin’s palm; the quick heat of the rune melting the wax, then freezing it solid before it has time to drip.

Watch the wax seal fall to the floor leaving the pages undamaged.

Once Sorin has all three seals off of the book, he pets Akris along his back and begins to read.

“Choose a willing creature that you can see within range…”

Sorin what’s your spell casting modifier?

6.

Ok, so roll a D6 for me. Odd numbers will be minus and even will be plus.

3.

So roll a spell casting D20 with -3 as the modifier.

Ashley: “14 minus 3 so, 11.”

As he pets his familiar Sorin begins to channel.

He decides to practice the spell, and once Akris agrees, he decides to give it a go, trying it out on his pet-ghost-flying-demon-snake. Like wizards do.

With a 11 Akris will get half the effects, since this is a practice and you’re not losing a spell slot or anything. When you guys start in the sewers, Akris will have double Speed and an extra action for the first little while.

Ashley: “Ooo, cool!”

Brooke and Nymbus together: “Ha, Akris gets the zoomies!”

Cypress and Rae both decide to work on decoding Zaanth’s note. Cypress hands it over to Rae and decides to go lay down on the chair. After a moment tZulèe lays down with him.

Rae looks at the note and focuses in on a part under the big black shape.

Five shapes really. The large green oblong diamond in the middle, with a missing part in the middle almost like a keyhole. Surrounded by four smaller shapes like tears. Three of the tears were crossed out in red and a crack was drawn in red inside the keyhole.

Rae stares at the shapes for 20 straight minutes, not moving except to breath and blink.

She tosses the paper back onto the table and slumps down in the chair, frustrated. This decoding stuff is hard thinking and she can’t even punch the paper until it tells her everything.

With a sigh she sits back up and looks at the paper on the table… the paperS… the maps they drew are still there too… Four tears, three crossed out… four tears… four… water drops?

She sits up slowly, afraid to scare away the idea, and pulls in her chair to look over the maps. Something she heard… it’s almost there, it’s right outside her brain. She can feel herself reaching and reaching and -

“Three of the four are gone now, wrecked almost completely. The section those four are in, if the only one left, and its limping b-”

Rae’s eyes flash open. That's it! She heard someone saying it right before they walked through the Cones of Silence and onto the palace balcony.

The sewers. That’s it!

They knew the Thugs were doing things in the sewers and trying to mess with stuff. And, they’d learned that the sewers are divided into four sections! Whatever Zaanth and her boss were up to, they'd managed to knock out three sections, but Ari, Rae, Cypress, fine and I guess Sorin too had stopped them. (Rae’s thoughts not mine)

That meant… That meant the middle bit was a lock! And that water was the key!

Rae leans back in her chair exhausted and smug with self satisfaction.

You know, sometimes i just love writing these because of the weird sentences that i get to write.

Have you ever tried to spoon with a gargoyle?

Cypress sputters as the twitching wooden wing flaps in his face. He groans awake. He didn’t remember cuddling the gargoyle as he laid down. It must have crawled up with him sometime during his nap. The halfling grunts, but when he sees the young thing all curled up and alone he frowns and covers it with a blanket. The blanket probably doesn’t do anything, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

They get down from the chair-nest and walk over to the table where Rae is dozing off. They lightly tap her hand and Rae bolts upright with clear I’m-not-asleep-you-are energy. “I cracked it!”

“Good. What’d you crack?” Cypress asks mildly.

Rae explains the part of the note she figured out as Cypress gently coaxes her to her room, then relents and says good night at the door.

Cypress puts on a cup of tea, gets out some paper and a non-rusty quill, then pours the tea and sits down to decode more of the note.

They work on the part we labeled ‘B’ just underneath the first part they decoded reading “[Symbol] He will rule!”. They look at the message and slowly start breaking it down into parts, eventually some parts start making a kind of sense if he views them as letters. He frowns and starts writing:

“g e/o p/b m/n _ a r/l i/e d/t

gepm_arid

gepm_arit

gepm_aret

gepm_alet

gepn_alet

gebn_alet

gobn_alet

Maybe:

go / leed ?”

After a while, tZulèe’s eye winks open. It stares at Cypress’s back, then very, v e r y slowly it gets up.

In a flash the gargoyles scuttles up the chimney.

“No,” Cypress murmurs to himself, crossing things out, “No that must be an A and an L… or maybe…”

In the chimney, tZulèe licks away at the sooty bricks like a guilty kid spraying whipped cream directly into their mouth in the middle of the night, with the refrigerator door still hanging wide open.

“Ahha! Okay, so that must be a wuh sound…” Cypress mutters.

The gargoyle leaps back down the chimney, and looks at Cypress‘s back to make sure it got away with it.

It coughs, and a puff of back dust escapes.

Cypress thinks they hear something. They turn to look. No, there’s tZulèe, asleep on the chair with the blanket.. Is that something on its mouth? No, just a shadow.

Eventually Cypress is able to get a message out of the code, if not the exact words, “He will rule!” written above the note “Allowed by (or maybe underneath) [something]”

It’s confusing, but it’s progress.

Around four in the morning the Thug Muggers, now all geared up again for the first time in days, walk down the North Road. Sorin has sent Bostra a message using the message coin to meet them in the Clark Street park just off of Clerkstreet.

Just past the Berry Bush bathhouse and the steaming fountain of the gnome bathing with the winged serpent, Sorin points to a small signpost and we turn to head up Clark Street.

We pass the side of the bathhouse and walk the little street next to the minor court until we come to the park. Like most city parks, this is a small oasis of green nature against the gray wood and red brick backdrop of the city. There are no streams here, but the trees are tall and steady and the bushes are healthy and plump. There are some benches along the paths through the trees, and some open patches to look at the sky or toss a bone with your Yeth Hound. As we walk a ways into the park we see a figure emerging in a dark cloak from behind a tree, carrying something large at their side.

Ari and Cypress, give me Con saves.

With an 11 Cypress takes a stance and readies an attack, but with a 16, Ari steadies the cleric’s hand and waits as Bostra walks up to us.

It’s easy to understand just why Cypress might not have recognized Bostra. When you visualize him in your mind, the first thing that ‘renders’ in the mental image is his well worn breastplate, then the lit cigar end. And this gnome in front of us has no armor and certainly no cigar. Instead he is wearing a well fitting acai colored doublet with golden embroidery in leafy floral filigree. His cloak is also a fancy bit of finery and that makes Sorin salivate and Ari homesick. It’s a head to toe cloak with a single sleeve on one side. The lining is grayish-silver sheepskin which has been waxed and fitted to the tightly woven and pressed dark silk on the outside. With the heavy rawhyde hems basically forming a moving gasket around his feet, the thing is so waterproof Bostra could simply tie up the ends and use it as a canoe! He is also carrying a duffle, and while we can’t make it out too well in the dark, it does seem to have many layers… whatever that means.

“So,” he asks, “What’s the plan?”

The Thug Muggers look around at each other.

“Do you ever really have a plan?”

Bostra takes three different gods' names in vain.

Cypress smiles and holds up a hand. “But we do know where we’re going now, and what the next things are that we have to do.”

Bostra sighs, but looks a bit relieved.

“We’re just playing things by ear.” Sorin adds as what he assumed would be reassurance.

“-In the short term parts,” Ari interrupts, “We’ve found we work better if we know our goal but leave ourselves room for improvisation.” She recovers.

As we walk up the path through the Clark Street park, Cypress takes a moment to show Bostra the bit of Zaanth’s note that Rae decoded last night. They’re careful to cover up the angry red dot as they show it to Bostra though, leading Bostra to ask suspiciously, “Why are you covering up so much of this? What is it you don’t want me to see?”

“Last time I showed it to someone, a priest attacked me and tried to slit my throat with a pen.”

“You know what? Maybe we just keep that part covered up, then.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Cypress nods and puts away the note.

“So the part you did show me? You said you figured it out?” Bostra asks, moving to light a cigar, then frowning and putting it away.

Rae chimes in, “It’s to do with the sewers. There are four main sections right? And all of them but the one we were in got overrun by Thugs and turned off, right?”

Bostra pauses, and eyes Rae closely before giving in. “Not just Thugs, but Cultists too, and something… something else we’re not quite sure of. And, not just turned off either, destroyed. Machines smashed, hallways collapsed, everything. Once we get this figure out, it’s gonna be quite a while before we can get it all running again.”

Rae nods. “Well the note says that whatever Zaanth and her boss are up to, the sewers are crucial. ‘Water is the key.’ That was the hidden message.”

Bostra stops, clearly stunned. When we turn to look we see his open face truly hurt for the first time. “My city- This City,” he mumbles, then corrects himself louder. “It was founded on water.” We start walking again, but a little bit of panic creeps into his voice. “We’ve always known our position was vulnerable. Everyone has always just attacked the city with armies or spies… but poisoning the water…”

Rae opens her mouth to explain that that really is not the vibe she got. That whatever this is it really does not feel like a political move to her. But, she thinks about Bostra’s position and his upbringing in a paranoid family of royals, and she decides that maybe now isn’t the time.

A few steps later, Sorin points up to a sign, “Here, just down Clerk Street.”

“Wait what? I thought we were on Clerk Street.” Ari asks, confused.

“Wait what? I thought the whole area was Clerk Street.” Rae asks, confused.

“No, we were on Clark Street.” Sorin tries to explain, “and now that we’re past the park, we’re in Clerkstreet. But now we need to make a right onto the last end of Clerk Street.” He says, gesturing with his hands to try to break up the words.

Blank Stares in the darkness.

Sorin tries again, “Okay, look, you know how there's a part of town called Ironton, where all the metal workers are?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

“Duh.”

Sorin continues, “Well this district, starting at the edge of the park, where all the clerks and pencil pushers work,is called Clerkstreet - no space.”

“Okay…”

“Sure.”

“See I was right!”

Sorin continues, “And the main path running north and south is a street named Clerk space Street.”

“Ooh.”

“Makes sense, actually,”

“Okay, so that’s where they got the name.”

“Actually they named the street later, but that’s not the point.” Sorin barrels ahead, “And, the street we walked, that went through the park that intersects with Clerk space Street (with an E), is ClArks space Street (with an A).”

Blank stares in the darkness.

“That’s dumb.”

“Yeah, kinda stupid.”

“Needlessly complex.”

Bostra chuckles to himself and pushes on. “I’m told that it's a very good joke if you're a clerk… or a clark I guess, whichever. Personally I think prolonged exposure to ledgers and spreadsheets warps and distorts the brain. No wonder they giggle at things like that, their poor starving minds can’t help it.”

At the end of Clerk Street, we find the grate to the sewers. Ari lifts the large metal drain cover. Beneath it is the sloping funnel that leads the water into the big metal pipe. She feels around on the cold metal and finds the seam. She pushes down and pops the little catch, letting the metal side of the funnel swing away to reveal the cobble and brick shaft around the metal pipe, and the iron rungs affixed to it.

As you all look around and sneak into the sewer grate. Give me Stealth checks.

Bostra rolled a 15.

Nymbus: “16.”

Brooke: “23.”

Sarah: “A dirty 20.”

Ashley: “Also 16.”

And in the darkness, someone unknown rolls an 18, and a nat’ 20, then follows behind you…

“Burning flesh of my enemies, warm my soul!”

-Bob, “BEGINNING OF THE END | The Forest"

Table talk:

I wanted to cut off the narrative at that dramatic sting, but i will add this little addendum here. The players talked for a bit about where to stop on their descent; at the first level to see if they recognise the area, at the second level where they were, or all the way down to the underdark? After a bit of talking it out, they decided they would make a stop in the first level to take a breath and see if they recognized anything. And that’s when a Thug appeared and we ended the session on an initiative cliffhanger.

This session was pretty light and easy, but exactly what i wanted. This was shorter and all i wanted was for the players to take some time really thinking things through and making some decisions. What all do they need to do? Where all do they need to go? Etc. And importantly, for them to have these conversations in front of me, so that i can know their plans! MWAHAHAHA… and get maps and descriptions and things prepped so i’m not running around trying to do that at the last second.

Thug Muggers in the City 1/5/24

Full Up-to-date map of the city, please click to zoom in and look at smaller details.

Thug Muggers in the Sewers 1/14/24

A Winter Solstice Gift for any player that finds it….