Thug Muggers Under Nibiru 11/16/24

Table Talk:

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I finally remembered to go back and find the price of Rae’s ten bottles/vials from Devin: 2 Silver.

In answer to the mechanical question from last session; yes, it looks like a monk can use their weapon in their second attack.

Also from last session, that last fight was a Medium CR and will grant 2,750 XP.

Lastly, and i know i’ll go into more details about this in the closing table talk, but this session is special. Not just because Nymbus is here in person, but also because i built a whole thing for this room. Speakers, lights, sound cues, motors, and a 3d printed room that took 80.5 hours of printing to make (not including the gluing, soldiering, or painting). I’ll try to get a couple of nice images mixed in here, but it was a big effort on my end, and i think it turned out great!

The one thing you are forbidden from as an immortal is puns!

-Count Donut –Justin McElroy, “MBMBaM 675: A Great Lay But a Real Wet Hug”

𓆙𓆙ℤ👹🛡️🎲🗡️📿✨🌿Chapter 27: Oracle of the Damned

We each pass through the sliced conical form and the then back spinal wall of the mimic, wading through dangling viscera and shredded abnormal organs, holding up our hands to lift aside strings of rapidly cooling and slowly hardening fleshy ligaments twisted in unnatural shapes.

Once we cross the bloody threshold of the singed skin curtain that Ari burned through, we can see the chamber beyond. After the close confines of the sewers and the tight walls of the caves, this room feels like a cathedral.

First we see the fire creating a single harsh point of light in the darkness. The shockingly crisp white flames seem nearly blue after all this time with torches and fire interspersed with the unlit darkness. They cast an unnaturally steady light out without a flicker. Alongside the bright rays of the light, are the shadows… cast by pillars all around the room, the shadows are stark and naked vails of the blankness wherein anything may lurk and hide.

The room itself is a stair-stepped diamond, with square walls opening at right angles before closing again on the other side. All of the walls are made from tightly fitted ancient green bricks covered in slimy dust with large unevenly cut stone slabs lining the floor. There are four central pillars in the center – grayish blue stone banded with mossy dust and bronze metal rings at the top and bottom – the brazier of white fire hangs hanging between them, suspended by massive chains with each link as big as a fist. The shadows of each of the four great pillars casts an ever widening shade around them and midway between them and the walls are eight lesser pillars constructed in brick circles and arranged in pairs at each point of the compass.

Directly under the glowing white flames a figure lifts his head, and for the first time, we see surprise cross Zaanth’s face.

“Okay, let’s think about this before we-” Sorin tries to keep everyone calm, looking back at the group.

Ari has one hand on her hilt and the other on Rae’s arm.

Cypress moves to stand in front of Bostra, but in a flash he’s past the halfling’s grasp and charging in.

His fingers fly up, pulling cords to undo a series of hidden buttons in the arms of his great cloak, freeing his arms so it now more resembles a paludamenta than a monastic habit. His hands raise and he dives, punching swiftly out at Zaanth, who dances back in shock as his blow rockets past her to collide with one of the four great pillars – shaking it with a rumble.

Zaanth is no longer her calm and collected self, but neither does she seem panicked. Instead, she looks like a hare in a brushfire, poised and ready, waiting for the moment to leap!

Cypress casts out, summoning the vines and roots of Seela’s Holy Garden to Entangle their foe, but Zaanth dances back from foot to foot staying aware and upright.

While she focuses downward at the oncoming vines, she fails to deflect Sorin's frosty ire as his Ray of Enfeeblement hits her, leaving her feeling weak and heady.

As Zaanth clutches her head, Rae rushes forward – leaping from the ground and kicking off one of the pillars to avoid Cypress’s ethereal vines. Her jump kick comes to a point with her staff, driving it into Zaanth’s sternum at the cross of her padded chestplate. The blow knocks her back a step, and Rae swings again. Zaanth’s arm goes up, but her block is mis-timed and we hear the crack of the hardwood against the bones of her forearm as Rae lets out a fearsome battlecry to unleash her Rage!

Moving closer, Ari casts Blur on herself. Her ancient demon genes let the pigment in her skin shimmer and seem to vibrate, the cells rapidly shifting planes in self defense; a demonic camouflage from an evolution where blending in wasn’t enough, but the need to unfocused oneself from reality itself thrived.

Zaanth jumps and rolls. One of her long khopesh digs into the morat of the stone tiles on the ground as she kicks and spins – pirouetteing atop it as she flicks the other hooked sword out. The barb catches in the ring of a grated sewer pipe in the wall, swinging it open. Our heroes leap forward to stop her, but it's too late, the orcling goblin ranger pounces into the pipe with one khopesh in front of her and the other trailing behind. The second trailing hook slams the lid behind her hard enough to dent the locking latch, leaving only a metallic clang to echo around the room in her absence.

“Luteus dianthus caryophyllus!” Cypress spits, and the swear curls their tongue as he waves away the Entangled roots on the floor.

Meanwhile Rae is shaking the closed and bent lid of the horizontal sewer pipe and screaming (i guess Rae, stands for Really-Andre,Eric… okay that one was a stretch).

“Wait.” Bostra’s one simple word, comes from behind us, and halts us in our tracks. The ex-royal is kneeling in the middle of the four main pillars beneath the white fire brazier. His hand is running over a plaque there. The letters of the ancient cast metal are clear – where they’ve not been burned or broken by a red magic circle of crude forked letters and the sigil we’ve come to know as ToTKoA’s mark.

Ari joins the gnome under the light, sliding her sword back into its sheath with a foreboding slowness as she looks around the room.

Gazing out with her now, we can finally get a good look at the room. Nothing has changed from our initial view, but now the fuzzy and blurred images of the noisy backdrop that we barely gleamed in our fight – our eyes darting too fast in battle to see clearly – these things become clearer, coming into focus in the strange zebra light and shadow of the room.

Around us in various corners are some piles of bones. Femers, ribs, and dry skulls tossed in uncaring heaps. Concerning on its own, granted, but not as concerning as the larger bones. Long spines with curved near-circular ribs are strewn around the floor in a rough line, the connecting joints at the same height as most of our knees, and at the halfling’s waist. Between them are thick lines of blood, like drag trails where their strange contoured body was torn apart. And at the ends of these lines… massive skulls big enough to work into breastplates, with horns like thick swords and fangs like spearpoints.

With the swearing out of his system now, Cypress guides tZulèe over to the others in the central square between the main pillars and looks at the ruined plaque with Bostra. Through the acid marring and pock marked broken letters, they can just make out these lines:

The light protects us

Ask your question

Each head of the great hydraga will answer

Choose the question carefully

Some heads will lie

All heads will answer

Feed the Naga and leave

Do not let the blue fire go out!

The blue flames keep us safe.

As Rae continues to shake and rattle the unyielding sewer pipe with the remains of her rage, Sorin looks up at the unfamiliar white fire hanging overhead.

The light of the strange fire pours down on us from the gaps in the bottom of the hanging brazier, and here, for a moment, we feel the sense of urgency wane in us, as a healing glow radiates inside us. If we poke our hands out of the invisible box around the central pillars we feel the difference in our fingers where the healing glow does not reach, and we see our fingers outside this strange magic wall, moving much more slowly. It seems that here under the strangely lit brazier, time has changed for us.

Eventually, Ari and Cypress call Rae back, waving the exhausted and weary monk to join the rest of us.

From her perspective, she sees her friend's arms moving much too fast, but writes it off as the exhaustion of her Rage until she joins them under the light. Then with the strange feeling of the time shift, she can feel the exhaustion leave her.

We spend an hour or two – that feels like mere minutes – resting under the glow of the white flame, with Cypress and Ari tending wounds with herbs and bandages, while the two elves tend their wounds with meditation.

As soon as one of us steps foot outside the invisible line between the central pillars, the healing feeling leaves us, falling away suddenly.

Then… there is a rumbling.

In a hasty breath, Bostra whispers, “Be ready!” And then mouths with a harsh ferocity, “and be silent!”

We look up and can no longer see the ceiling above, just the carved stone walls and pillars slowly disappearing into blackness. We hear shifting stones and form a defensive circle, looking around the room.

An ominous mist, a malicious fog of some mystery, is rising from the ground and the massive bones we saw before, begin to move, the blood trails between them shifting to follow. They pick up speed and we hear them crunching together now mixed with rushing air around as they pick up speed.

Soon the bones are flying around as two voices echo around us, coming from the swirling lines of blood and bones that are moving in a ring between the main and the outside pillars.

“Who dares?”

“Who has killed us?”

“Now comes to us.”

“Never speak.”

“Ask your questions.”

“Be ready!”

“Two questions of an uncertain future.”

“Two answers.”

“One true–”

“–one a lie!”

“We are broken.”

“We are divided.”

“Slain.”

“Defeated.”

“But, we live on.”

“We live again!”

“Undying!”

“Unliving…”

“Speak!”

“Ask!”

“Feed our hollow eyes!”

“Give us vision!”

“We must see!”

“See the future!”

“Feed us!”

“Feed us questions!”

“Feed us lies!”

“Always two…”

“Only two now…”

“One is false,”

“And one is true.”

“Know your destiny!”

“Know your fate.”

“Let us guide you.”

“-guide your wealth.”

“-guide your death-”

“-guide your life.”

“Help you live.”

“Help you die…”

“ASK!”

“Never speak!”

“Only ASK!”

“We will answer all.”

“You will know it all.”

“Then-”

“We will feed.”

“We will know it all.”

“Feed on it all.”

“Consume all…”

“Join your bones”

“Heal.”

“and live again!”

In the silence of the rushing wind and clattering bones, Cypress closes his eyes and prays for holy guidance.

Trying and failing to gulp down their anxieties, Sorin, Rae and Ari all start pantomiming to each other when they hear a dry boney laugh.

“Hechecheche…”

“Do you not speak?”

“Have you forgotten how?”

“Shall we take you dumbry,”

“Your silent pageant”

“-for your question?”

The hands of the Thug Muggers go still, suddenly realizing that with one wrong move, they might ask the wrong thing, burning their chance and this knowledge.

Bostra is looking at everyone, then with the tiniest motion, he lifts his chin, first at Ari, then at Cypress. Sorin and Rae pause, then slowly nod once.

Ari can feel the slick oily sweat pooling in her palms, she looks up at the light. “What is TOTKoA to Zaanth?”

The swirling bones hum with delight and we notice a red line in the mist. Is it their blood trail from before, or a line of some future portense as the bones coo to us and look beyond the veil of mortal reality?

“One question asked.”

“One remains.”

“Ask.”

“Be true,”

“and so will we.”

“Hechecheche…”

All four central pillars are shuddering now as Cypress lifts their head. “How do we best protect the people and lives of the cities?”

The bones continue to swirl, but a ghostly shade of a pointed skull appears between two pillars. The jaw opens and closes, but the voice that we hear is still spinning in the mist around us.

“TOTKoA… one among you has known this name before… He is her king of course!”

Suddenly, Sorin shrieks as a humanoid horned skull rolls out from the swirling mass behind him, but it's just one of the little ones from the assorted piles of bones. He sighs and his shoulders slump. Then the young wizard goes rigid with terror as a much larger skull rests its jaw on his shoulder. The movement of its opening mouth – unnatural as the head lifts up and the chin stays in place – takes up the whole of his peripheral view with a mouth bigger than his head.

“Find the Red Stones… Go to Eka… Find TOTKoA… Submit to the King… Find the Red Stones under the mountain… only then can you keep them safe…”

The wind stops. And the bones slow. The twin voices let out a hum of delight. Now we can see them more clearly – glimpsing segments as they pass between the shadows of the columns. Dry bone skeletons of some massive serpents, slinking in spirals around the room, their curved spines and rib bones showing up in the light, then disappearing completely in the shadow only to emerge again in the light of the other side.

They laugh and with a nod from Bostra, we nervously draw out our weapons – Sorin unconsciously raising his new hideous Arcane Focus and Cypress deliberately wrapping his Divine totem between his knuckles.

The two skeletons slowly come to a stop. On either side of us, two boney heads like dragon skulls coil between the pillars, cackling and hissing with the ghosts of their long dead tongues as their huge segmented mandibles – big enough to be a staff for the halfling – clack together with a laughter that chills even the demon soul of Akris.

“Go!”

Rae hears Bostra’s shout and swings. Her staff connects with the Bone Naga, knocking some of its ribs loose. Without hesitating, she uses the recoil to circle the spinning staff around her back and swing it again from the other side before belting out another cry of Rage.

Sorin sees Rae’s second blow hit the Bone Naga’s head as he backs up to one of the main pillars, casting Chill Touch and watching the magical ghost hand sink into the monster’s spine.

The hollow eye sockets of the ancient skeletal snake begin to glow as the wizard stare. In a flash the Lightning Bolt inside the beast hollow eyes emerges, lashing out towards the mage. For a heartbeat he thinks he’s safe as the lightning makes a jagged curve up to the metal band of the pillar at his back – only for him to feel the cool metal of the second band around the pillar at his waist. He tries to jerk forward, but it’s too late. The lightning arcs and jerks down to the lower band, through the wizard's body as he screams. (I feel pretty good about that, some more decent fantasy nonsense writing).

When Rae turns to see Sorin screaming, she feels a weight drop on and into her. For a second, she thinks it’s a crown of iron on her head, but slowly the burning Iokharic ruins of the Yuan-Ti curse seep into her, and she feels her muscles loosening – a Curse Bestowed to not flex entirely and weaken her trained dexterity.

In the darkness, something strange whisks past, as Cypress dips his fingers in his holy water to Bless the party.

Once again, Ari Blurs herself and then pulls back into the shadows; just barely stifling a scream to remain hidden as something unseen takes the Opportunity to Attack her. The pain is intense, but the Psychic damage is worse, feeling like a black fire in her brain sucking away her will to go on.

Refusing to give up, Rae takes a different stance, her back leg straight for more strength than speed, and thrusts her staff out in two strong lunges like a spear at a hunted boar. The first strike knocks away part of the long spine, halving the Bone Naga, but it swishes and dodges the second. Summoning her Ki, the elf drops her staff and pushes the energy out of her hands in a Stunning palm Strike. The open balls of her hands strike the top of the snake skull as it bends to bite her. With great luck and force, Rae’s blow knocks the head back and up, severing the connection between it and the body, sending the skull flying up into the darkness above as the remainder of the spine collapses at her feet.

Seeing the second Bone Naga curse his friend has given Sorin an idea (that’s a worrying sentence actually…). He reaches deep inside his Arcane focus and finds the death and decay inside its rotted sunken shell, bringing it out in a wave and casting its Blight upon the bones of the creature. He watches the wave wrap around the ribs of his foe… and disappear as the Naga shakes it off like a dog after a bath. “Bubububububut-” Sorin stammers.

As Rae takes a second to catch her breath, the true malice of these creatures is revealed as the dead head of the Naga falls back down. Its final act of angry sabotage is to clutch onto Rae’s staff and, holding it tight in its death throws and weighing it down, unusable as she gasps.

When Rae begins to heave at the staff, the spell of the second Bone Naga misses her… only to have something unseen in the dark, reach out and tear into her. The damage isn’t as bad as it seems, but the pain in her psyche makes her reel and clutch at her head.

“Hechecheche…” the tall bones snake snickers again, recoiling out of the way of Cypress’s staff.

Taking Advantage of her cover, Ari leaps out and slices. Her sneak attack ends the Naga’s hissing taunts as her blade cuts through a gap in the bones where one of its ghostly blood trails holds it together. After the sword passes through, the back half of the fiend falls limp to the stone floor tiles.

“There’s something… in… the dark…” Rae grunts, trying and failing to pry the skull from her staff.

“Akris,” Sorin points to his familiar, then to the shadows in the room, “find what’s out there and shout when you know what it is.” Then Sorin strikes his hands together and flings the left one out with a Firebolt. The blow to the Bone Naga is critical, hitting it in the jaw, and burning away whatever sinew and magic still held it in place, silencing the taunting words of the monster and stopping its spells.

Furious at the turning tide, the Boney serpent lashes out at Cypress, but this time it’s the halfling’s turn to recoil and avoid the blow.

Sorin’s smug smile is knocked from his face as something unseen in the darkness tears into him. The teeth or claws hurt his skin… but the crushing feeling of despair, the revival of the painful memories in his past… he clutches at the pillar to stay standing.

After another failed swing of his staff, Cypress tries to read the signs of magic in the room, Checking them against all his Arcane knowledge, only to come up empty. “Guys, whatever is going on here, is some truly strange and unhinged magic!”

Once again, Ari dashes forward, her blade slipping between two spinal discs of the beast, then twisting to separate then. She moves back, to dodge – just as the head of the Serpent dives at her. Its dripping fangs tear up her arms, chest and face, splashing its skull in rivulets of her blood. Without hesitating, Ari speaks her own curse of Infernal instead of Yuan-Ti. Her Hellish Rebuke sets fire to her own blood as it leaves her wounds. The lava hot drops of rage now covering the creature crack and sizzle. Slowly, staggering, the Bone Naga falls to the floor, its skull pitted with holes and cracked in half where the largest line of Ari’s flaming blood splatter burned it apart.

Even as the second foe falls, we look around to hear a switching of claws in the darkness.

Rae finally pries her staff from the dead Bone Naga’s mouth - just in time to be knocked back as the freshly freed staff fends off fiendish fire from the veiled foe.

“Akris, what’s out there?”

There’s no response. No witty barb, sarcasm, or hissing laugh.

“Akris?” Sorin reaches out to feel his own magic in the companion… only to feel … nothing.

“Can you-” Cypress starts, but is cut off with the same hurt the others have felt as something hideous rips at him and casts a shadow inside his mind. Operating on pure and raw instinct, Cypress Thorn Whips the air where he felt the claws, but the glowing whip only barely shows up in the dark veil, finding nothing to hit.

Ari is the first to see the thing lurking around the edges of the light. Her hot demon blood is on alert and sees the reddish tinge. “There!” she points at the Shadow Demon.

Rae swings where Ari pointed, just barely seeing the faint red outline of the lurking legless creature in the black shadow. Her first blow hits something, but it slips through like mud, half touching and half passing through the fiend. The second swing passes through the wing of the creature, and she releases her staff to punch out, using her Ki in a Flurry of Blows. On the second hit, she can feel the solid thwump of a connecting hit, but feeling comes through the magic of her Ki, and not the skin of her bare fist.

After seeing Rae’s staff slip through the mist of the creature, Sorin decides not to chance it. He opens his arms wide and brings forth a barrage of Magic Missiles, sending the arcane sparks flying at the Demon in the Shadows.

Enraged, the beast flies into the light for the first time, clawing at Sorin and ripping at his throat with its barbed teeth. As Sorin goes down, his final thoughts are fully mired in the pain of a lonely abandoned childhood.

Enraged himself at this foul winged mist with its dangling claws and red dripping maw, Cypress evokes Sheela’s name, summoning the righteous justice of her Sacred burning fire! The holy Flame ignites inside the demon's chest and it screams as it backs away, her holy might burning away at the lingering evil that gives it its very life.

Ari’s +1 Arrow flies out, and forces the Shadow Demon to jerk backwards in dodge, stopping it in its tracks as it lunges for Cypress.

Even without her true Rage, Rae is furious and her aim is true. The critical strike with her staff lands the tied-on spikes of a long dead monster in the neck of the Shadow man. She rips the barbs back, sending gussets of dark mist spraying out. With a second Flurry of Blows, she strikes at it with her Ki, punching a hole in the wing it uses in a futile attempt to cover itself against her wrath.

Cyprus breathes in deep, then lifts up a hand with dangling fingers that become taught and rigid as he speaks. “Sporophyte! In the name of the growing seed, Demon of evil Shadow, I cast you out! Die without mercy and without the grace you stole from the hearts of the living!” The Sacred Flame of Sheela’s hearth burns bright within the dusty walls of the ancient temple, and the dark red Shadow Demon burns away, its misty ashes floating up with a shrieking curse in the name of an evil fanged god. (again, feel good about this one – can you tell i’ve been reading J. R. R. Tolkien lately?).

After Cypress waves a pouch of acrid smelly salts under his nose and he blinks back awake, Rae and Ari help Sorin to sit and then to his feet.

“Hurry!” Bostra waves everyone over, and starts picking up bones, “Help me lay them out.”

Together, the party all work to move the bones into the line of a single loooong curving snake with two heads, the entire skeleton line forming a gigantic letter C laid between the inner and outer pillars with the heads a few feet from the tail. Then, at Bostra’s prompting, we all gather up bones from the piles of dead victims, carrying them out in bundles like firewood though the messy mimic door corpse into the cave. We have only a moment’s pause before Bostra is kneeling on the floor and directing Sorin.

“No, not that.”

Cypress is confused, but slowly lowers his hands away from the bones that he was about to attempt to heal.

With his instruction, the confused wizard transmutes the bronze of the plague into a plague of simple wood. Then Bostra and Rae scrub at the wood, and Sorin finally understands. Transmutation can only work on one substance at a time. By transmuting the metal, Bostra made him push all the blood and paint and whatever else Zaanth had done to it, out of the plaque itself. After a while when the transmutation fades and the wood becomes bronze again, it will still have the carvings and broken letters, but it won’t have any other remains from whatever spell was put there.

Once the plaque is clean, the bones are arranged, the corpse tossed outside, and Bostra’s haste is all gone, everyone stands around looking at the gnome as he readjusts his cloak.

Finally Cypress has the courage to cross their arms and pronounce the thought on everyone’s lips, “What do you know about all this, Bostra?”

“I know something about this place,” Bostra says, lightly brushing one of the smaller round pillars, “but I did not know it was here. I thought it was much further to the south underneath–but I digress.” He nods at Sorin, “As I'm sure any university student could tell you, the lands of Nibiru weren't always the way they are now. Long long before the ancient gnomes of my ancestors found this place, before the world shifted and broke the great river into the smaller ones we know now, there was an Underdark mountain here. A peak where a deep cavern met a stoney sky.” He pauses then shrugs and reaches up to light a cigar off the underside of the burning brazier. “That was when the proto Yuan-Ti tribes had recently come of age – or evolved as some learned noble mage told me.”

He looks up at the bottom of the half-spherical brazier and for a moment it looks like the Berry Palace up above. “Nastucheka, their great god who they say created the world as an egg, and left the shell as the border between the world (what we call the Underdark) and the above world they call The Colden. Nastucheka left a spirit behind, or maybe it was an invading spirit like an egg eating bird, I forget. Either Way it was before Zehir came and Merrshaulk summoned them to the deserts. But it was a great angel called the Nagarine. The Yuan-Ti built this temple as a home to the Nagarine.” He shakes his head and looks at us, getting back on track, “As the centuries went by, the Yuan-ti tribes moved west and lost the shrine during Merrshaulk’s change. The Nagrine became a Hydraga – a Hydra Naga spirit with changing faces of all the people who had come to the temple through the ages.”

Bostra sighs and looks down at the plague. “That’s what I know for sure, that the Hydraga lurked in this temple hidden away somewhere underground between us, between Nibiru and the Underdark. An oracle in between worlds that could answer questions for a price.” He taps some ash off his cigar into his hand, then shrugs again and drops it. “I have no idea what that price was… and now.” Bostra looks around the room, “Zaanth, or TOTKoA or whoever, has killed its body, then summoned that demon of red shadow and infected its soul with some kind of malicious evil. Who knows how long it’s been festering down here, tormented and-”

He cuts himself off then straightens his back with a pop, buttoning his sleeves back up. “The best we can pray for is that cleaning it will help the Nagarine spirit come back in some form, maybe a Hydraga of bone, scarred but no longer possessed of whatever evil the red shadow demon carried.” He points his chin at Cypress, “That's why I told you not to heal anything. I know your power comes from Sheela, and I don’t know what it would do to the high angel’s ghost to have another god’s power used on it now… But at the very least, we can take heart in knowing that we put an end to its shame. For I doubt any creature that started as an angel of a loving creator god would relish knowing that it became a monster, eating everyone that sought out its counsel.”

That is absolutely Heartbreaking. Let's move on.

-The Task Masker –Greg Davies, “Taskmaster: Series 13, Episode 9 - 'It Might be Wind.'”

Table talk:

I pulled a section out from Cypress praying before they asked the questions, because i decided i wanted to try and keep this summary as a full narrative. I’ve done mostly narrative with (game mechanics) in parentheses, and mixed narrative with a lot of both before, but thought i’d try full narrative this time. So, please let me know what you think of this one. Personally i feel that it was lacking some D&D flavor and that putting things like (resistant to bludgeoning damage) in after Rae’s staff passing through the Shadow Demon helped keep it grounded in the game. But anyways here's the part i took out:

Nymbus, give me a Religion and a Performance Check to see what happens.

Nymbus: “13 and 14.”

Okay, so let's say the DC is an average higher than 20 minus your level. You’re level 7 so the DC is 13, and your combined rolls are 13.5, you succeed. I’ll text you the guidance you get, since the others can’t hear it.

I will tell you, reader, that Cypress knows which answer was true, and which was a lie.

For the same reason, i left out the big chunk of table talk around that moment, but there was a lot of chatter around the question asking. I explained the rules to the group roughly like this: “You will get a chance here to ask two questions about anything in the campaign or world with no restrictions, but you only get two questions. You’ll get two answers, one is true and one is a lie. I’ll give you guys a little bit to talk and discuss things, then, when i say ‘character voices only’, anything you say can and will be heard by the oracle. So if after that someone asks, ‘wait how many questions?’ the oracle will register that as your first of the two questions. Similarly, they may use anything you say, like ‘we should ask about The Crown’ as part of their deception.” As you can imagine, this led to very frantic discussion – which amounted to 4 people repeating “I don’t know” over and over (good fun for Kai). Then after a few minutes i dropped the vail and made them ask… leading to pantomiming and hand gestures, and me having to drop in a line basically saying ‘nuh uh uh, you had your chance to talk’. Eventually it was just Sarah and Ashley pointing wide eyed at Brooke and Nymbus, while I tried to keep a straight face.

Before i talk about the ‘set’, this fight was a Hard Challenge Rating for 6,660. That puts the group XP at 136,227 – which is 227 over the line to level 8! So the party is now a band of level 8 adventures! … or rather, they will be the next time we all get together in person again. This in person session took 3 weeks to schedule, because i really wanted Nymbus in person for all the cool stuff, but we don’t want to wait that long again, so we’ll keep playing at level 7 for now, and level up as soon as we can, then i’ll find some half clever excuse to crowbar the leveling up into the narrative like usual.

Below is a long description of the whole set up i made for this session with all the details and links to anything i used for anyone who wants to recreate any part of it, anyone who is just curious, anyone who needs something to read to them them fall asleep, or anyone who hates their eyeballs and/or life minutes and masochistically enjoys punishing themselves via timewasting. I also included an image carousel below for anyone that wants to see the pictures of things slowly coming together through the weeks of the build.

The following section contains some adult material not suitable for all audiences (because it’s very boring unless you are like me and want to know the point by point minutia of everything that catches your eye), if you are too young to pay taxes or make documented expenditure sheets, please be advised.

The base building took 46.5 hours – 2,790 minutes – of printing. There are twenty-one floor tiles plus four floor tiles with holes in the middle for wires, four outer walled corners, eight inner walled corners, and four unique capped ends (one with a hole in the wall for Thug Tunnel, one sealed door and one open door, and one with just a blank wall) with were compiled by overlaying the ends with a basic corridor. Then there are the four large main pillars, and the eight smaller outer pillars, plus the open mouth mimic door, which was a model i had to design by tweaking and adapting this original monster mouth since i couldn’t find any existing models that were similar. Then the Sewer bits took about 29 minutes with two sewer grates, and the opening/closing sewer pipe which i designed from scratch when i couldn’t find anything close. The lighting also took about 32 minutes: the brazier basket was my own design since the geometry was easy and the needs were specific, but the fire was modified from a separate brazier model to fit. And lastly the bones took about 6 hours to print with four small piles, and the four distinct Naga bone sections that i made by cutting up a standing design for a dragon skeleton marker. All the printing came out to around 4,829 minutes when i totted it all up (because of course i did, you know that if you’ve read these before, come on), so 80.5 hours, or 3.35 days. I will add here that that doesn’t include any failed prints, or any of the other pillars/bone piles i printed but decided didn’t work as well in the scene. All the building/room parts were printed with polymaker Matte Dark Green PLA (as a side note, this took up an entire 1KG spool), and the bones were Polymaker Prefoamed White, the brazier and sewer bits were Gizmo Dorks Bronze and Copper, and the flame in the brazier was Gizmo Dorks clear transparent PLA. As long as i’m listing everything, i will mention that i am using a Creality Ender 3 V3 FDM 3D printer – i won't list the full specs of each slice setting for the various pieces, but if you are someone looking to recreate any of this, feel free to email me, or check my Makes on my Thingiverse page. The electronics were all soldiers on a Adafruit Half-sized Breadboard PCB, driven from a micro USB breakout board on the main rail of the breadboard after the positive was passed through a simple breadboard switch and were powered by a portable power bank so old i can’t remember where i got it to provide a link (maybe the lost and found bin at work back in 2016?). The input power goes through a step down / buck board to regulate the 2.9 volts for the 3mm transparent flat white LEDs with are wire in parallel inside the brazier housing (sidenote: this was a major pain with lots of trial and error as i mistakenly thought i could wire them in series, so i had them all glued and cut, then had to unsolder them and add extra wire to make ring circuits that wouldn’t touch, all inside an enclosure the size of a bottle cap – very annoying). Those LEDs are attached to a set of 28 gauge wires just a little thicker than my beard hairs so that they can run through the links of the hanging 3mm jewelry chain (link is a guess, since the actual pieces came from the scrap cast offs of my jewelry chain box), and then down some holes made in the main pillars. The LED (-) is direct to the second power rail of the breadboard which i was using as an output, and the (+) ran through a switch to maintain being on, with a two lead button wired on the same ON peg circuits for rapid manual blinking – the (+) end of the LEDs also had a basic 1k Ω potentiometer to just barely control the brightness (i know, but it's what i had on hand). There were also two small button vibrating motors that were attached to the floor tiles to try and provide a rumble effect; those were driven on the same 2.9 volt output rail with a simple button (no solid ON switch) through a 500k Ω potentiometer to control their speed/strength a little bit (again, i know, but it’s what i had). Then lastly, the fog was added with a Atomizer Humidifier Control Module driven via a spliced power-only USB C cable from my scrap bin on the 5 volt input power rail of the breadboard, with the atomizers attaches to the bottom of the holed floor tiled underneath the sewer grates. As a final note to the circuitry i also added a 4.6v green LED from some old scrap to the main input power rail just to show me when the board was powered on. Everything was connected on the breadboard using lengths from just a basic jump wire set, and all the output leads were run off the board to connect to the actual components with some recycled telecommunications wire. For the sound cues (yeah, i warned you – we’re still not done), i used two old Altec Lansing Baby Boom XL bluetooth speakers hidden on either side of the room, specifically because they allow a stereo channel with each speaker dedicated to a side, and that helped to create an all surrounding atmosphere. Most of the time i was running the TableTone app on my phone – a new addition to my set up that i quite liked and will probably keep using in most games. I can’t find a way to to share the set up i made, and so i thought i’d just list the scene settings (ambient tack, global ambients, intensity, mood, location and situation, pyramid slider position, and the second page effects) for each of the 8 scenes… but i’m already feeling bad for Brooke having to read through and edit this, and sad for anyone other than myself who might actually enjoy reading that… so if you have the app and want to recreate it, just email me. The voice track i made was just in audacity (yeah i’m still going, i only have so much pity). I recorded the lines with the HyperX QuadCast S that i usually use for audio clips on the blog, and divided each line onto the two channel tracks, adding a redefined wah wah effect on the left channel track, and a redefined phaser effect on the right channel track. I took the main sample from a bone rattling track on youtube, then added a reversed version to it and cycled them into long loop before splitting the loop into the same section lengths as each spoken line, placing them on opposite channels, so that if RIGHT was playing a line, then LEFT had rattling bones and vice versa. Lastly, i added and reduced the first few minutes of a very good generic Spooky Horror Ambience track that i liked because of how the first crackle of thunder lined up with the lines, and just chopped and faded the ends to finish. While i was working on that, my lunch for the day was … just kidding, that’s enough – in fact i think we can all agree that it’s way to much, and that we all owe Brooke a coffee for editing that, and i owe everyone who read it a coffee just for having written it into being and punishing your eyeballs with it (after all, they say the more you read the more your eyes slowly deteriorate and i just made you waste precious eyeball-life-span-minutes describing the making of something you weren’t even there to see in the first place), but i did try to warn you.