Thug Muggers Under the City 12/20/24
Table Talk:
Okay, so it’s been five weeks, but let's try and think back to the last big fight. As i was typing up that summary, i noticed that i forgot some things in the fight like resistances and advantages. I gave a reminder to the players to please help me keep track, and most importantly to keep track of their own stuff. Don’t be afraid to say “Wait, don’t I have advantage?” or “What about the resistance to fire?”, that also means taking the responsible action to say, “Oh dang, that’s right I have disadvantage,” to keep things fair. I’m doing my best over here, but there's a lot to keep track of, and it only increases as we level up.
Speaking of the passage of time and forgetting things, I have the phrase, “Snake with doll heads” highlighted in my notes. Does anyone know why? ‘Cause i sure don’t.
Then lastly, in our time off, i’ve been working on my World Notes for the world outside of the city. Compiling all the little things like the village where Rae punched a kid, and the village where Ari robbed a kid; also the holy temple where Cypress studied, the village where Cypress healed a kid, as well as the village where Ari used Rae’s punching as a distraction to rob a kid. I wanted to share with everyone some key names i came up with. We already knew some country names of the areas around Nibiru, like CenWes and the Karibon Desert. Well those are part of the main (for the story) continent, Tuan (pronounced like the name Juan, but with a T). The continent joined to the south of Tuan – like South America to North America– is tEtü (pronounced like “Tee-Two”). And Teh’trii (pronounced “teh-tree”) is the continent to the east across the sea. Any long time reader is now just waiting for the punchline, so here it is. When i do any sort of trial and error work – especially in programming – i always try to tally my attempts so i can look back on each of the tests (or T s) to see what changes worked or failed, “T1, T2, T3, T4, etc,” so there’s the placeholder-y joke for the world continent masses, because i literally just put them at T1, T2, and T3 in my notes at first as i was formatting and layout out the things i’d already written. But, Kai, have you figured out a name for the WORLD, the actual globe, yet? Yes, Kai, i finally have. It took a while, and i have some small variances that different cultures might use like Terra, or Gaia instead of the more universal EARTH; and i had to find a joky-joke placeholder worthy of encapsulating all the others (one place holder to bind them!). So here it is, the name of our world is “Lidśa” or “Lidśa-cæ” to be formal – this is of course short for the longer scientific name (like Sol 3), “Lidśa-cæ sDétiul-edmå”. I’m quite happy with Lidśa for our Earth. I even spent some time being happy and gloating to myself before rewarding myself with a treat (a new fancy Beholder Mini) for coming up with it. If you're waiting for the punchline again, you’ll have to wait longer. This one is a bit more complex so i’m leaving it open for people to solve on their own, and i will handsomely reward anyone who figures it out. Even you, reader, if you think you have it, contact me and i’ll reward you (or your character in your own campaign if i can talk to your DM) if you get it right.
The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is sponsored by Glando's Sultry Nights edition, the new summer edition of the gland-based energy drink from Mitchell's. If it's not Mitchell's, get back in the truck.Stuck at work at the milking parlor or on some godforsaken mosquito-filled pasture? Let a single glass of Glando Sultry Nights transport you to a hot-blooded evening under the Tuscan sunset. You sit on a scented terrace, eating handfuls of finely cured meats, your companion for the evening, a sturdily built farmhand called Dante. When the cured meats are eaten, you dance the night away before he takes you to his simple rustic home in the mountains, and you eat more exquisite ham, and you make love late into the night on the hay bales.His sun-kissed skin covers his entire body. His eyes are kind, like a nice horse. His thighs are taut and muscular, like a prized racehorse. His face is framed by dark ringlets cascading around his ears and down his horse-like chest. His fetlocks shine in the candlelight. He takes off his saddle, straps on a nose bag, and you fall into a blissful sleep. The next morning, you wake, excited to brush him down, but he's gone, and he's stolen your passport and your wallet and your hair straighteners.In the unforgiving morning sun, what looked last night like a charming shepherd's hut is in fact an abandoned caravan in the car park of an abandoned supermarket. You walk in the sweltering heat to the nearby town where you have to beg on the streets for enough money to use a payphone to call for help. You think you see Dante drinking from a stream and claw at his muscular rump but to your misfortune it's an angry donkey who kicks your unconscious. Sometime later you come round and you're inside a hot, striped tent. You drift in and out of consciousness, barely able to make out the other figures in the gloom.Dante? Are you there? Dante! A splash of warm liquid awakens you from your stupor. You don't know how, but you know the taste of horse piss. Dante stands over you, now in a top hat and tails, brandishing a whip. His eyes, once the kind eyes of a nice horse, are now the dark, unfeeling eyes of a really horrible horse. It starts to be unclear whether this person is someone who reminds you of a horse, or a horse that reminds you of a person, but you don't have time to think about that. He's forcing you to put on a clown costume and telling you that from now on you're to answer to the name Bongo. It's happened again. Not for the first time in your life you've been press-ganged into a circus. Every night you perform with a huge smile painted onto your face. You long to call out to the audience, please this sexy Italian man who I now think might be a horse has forced me to be a clown. But you know that no one would ever believe you. Dance, bongo, dance. For 10% off your first taste of Glando, use the code BUTDOCTORIAMPONGO.
-Ad Narrator —Benjamin Partridge, “Beef And Dairy Network Podcast: Episode 111 – Shaving”
🛡️🎲🗡️📿✨🌿Chapter 28: Torture, and the Smell of Insanity
🛡️🎲🗡️📿✨🌿Chapter 28: Torture, and the Smell of Insanity
After arranging the bones, and a prayer from Cypress, we clutch our aching wounds and limp away, trying in vain to leave behind the voices of niggling doubt from our heads. We shuffle through the open hole the Thugs used to breach the sanctuary one at a time, and – with Ari helping her look out for traps – Rae leads us down the next tunnel, waiting to see what fresh torment is in store for us next.
We turn the corner and when the tight hallway opens to a room, we hear a click and a candle inside a lantern flares to life, the center of it burning bright red. To one side of us, along the wall, stands a bank of crude tables or maybe poorly done shelves, piled over with mostly empty boxes. In the corner directly ahead of us, is a table with parchment and pens and a large map surrounded by tipped mugs and chairs with some bits of broken crockery on the floor. The wall to our right, past the boxes and across from the map are two sets of large heavy canvas and felt drapes like the travelers of a theatre stage, blocking any view of sense of what’s beyond.
Loosely fanning out, Ari investigates for any more traps (23), Cypress readies his staff, Rae prepares to dodge, and Sorin casts Blade War- makes a history check.
“Phew- it's okay,” Sorin – who was caught up in the moment with the others thanks to his dizzy aching head – sighs and relaxes, “It’s just an automnapyretic candle.”
The others look at him with raised silent eyebrows.
“Rich people have them sometimes.” He explains, then after a glance back at Bostra, he continues a bit flustered, “And of course some inns and shops and all.” After a swallow he waves everyone aside and walks into the room, “They light themselves whenever someone comes within some distance of feet, usually like a couple yards.”
“Wasteful nobles,” Bostra adds, with surprising disgust, “put them all over their mansions so they don’t have to strike a light on the way to the privy.”
With that, we enter the room in full.
Sorin sets a simple Alarm spell in the archway behind us as Ari and Rae peek behind the current to the next room. He’s about to sit down, when they both stagger back and vomit (Failed Con Saves) into the corner over the stack of boxes. He makes quick eye contact with Cypress, and together the Wizard and the Cleric move the curtain aside.
When Cypress and Sorin push their hands into the folds of the curtains to pull them apart we see a bright orange light peel through the crack in the cloth. Lifting back the curtain to pass through, we all instantly have to cover our noses and mouths against the fumes. A man lies broken on a simple torturers table positioned in a tangled and brutalized mess of broken twisted bones. Literally bolted down with screws and nails holding the exposed bones of their arms at zigzagging lightning bolt angles. Fortunately for us, and the victim, they are positioned face down; but unfortunately, it is only because their spine has been twisted and reversed. When we look away and up towards the ceiling to protect our eyes from taking in any more, we see strings of gore – blood vessels like decorative yarn – strung out to bits of organs dangling on cordage and threads from the ceiling, slips of paper covered in scribbles nailed into each of them.
With a high Perception Check, they can see that along the skin and on the exposed bone are carved transmutation runes. The mad torturer had been trying to reverse the properties of this poor person to force them to have a hard exoskeleton with only mushy gooey bits inside.
All of this is lit by a fiery brazier in front of the table with many wrought iron tools buried and glowing red inside its smoldering heart. On the other side of the torture table is another victim. Ari, trying for a moment to look back in, thinks back to our last torture-scene-ambush, but we can see clearly that this other victim, this roasted and burnt skeleton, isn’t going anywhere - not with the broken chair still chained to its wrist. The only identifying feature is a miraculously unsinged hat with a wide brim that Bostra picks up before walking out of the room. In the far left corner, we can see a wrapped canvas tarp, tied up tightly, and we force our eyes to look away. It’s then that we finally notice the body on the slab is not an ordinary human, but one of the snake peoples. We can make out that the bottom half, which we first mistook for brutally broken legs covered in snake leather trousers, is actually a singular serpentine tail, sliced apart in uneven halves. We turn our heads away again.
To the right is a table half covered in a blanket, with small scrolls scattered on top of it, and a shelf full of mostly empty bottles in between lumpy red viscera in bowls and jars.
After a second, Ari takes the opportunity to leave the room again, placing a hand on Bostra’s shoulder to ask, “Are you okay? What is it?”
Rae follows her out and plops down in a seat at the table before trying to look over the papers there for anything useful.
Ashley, mocking: “Pfft, do you even know how to read?”
Sarah: “Hey!”
The papers are covered in scribbly jagged letters that are a mystery to Rae… not because she doesn’t know how to read, but because it looks like the writer didn’t know how to read. The only thing she can make out is some scribbling about ‘get afncwer to teh w vason camp’.
Before anything else, Cypress makes a Religion Check (17), looking around for any smeared runes or carven glyphs of symbols to angry gods, not wanting to unleash anything ritualistic into the room.
After getting a slow cautious nod from the halfling, Sorin steps up to the desk and rummages through the papers there. They’re all burnt or used up spell scrolls, “Summon Familiar”, “Mage Hand”, “Transmute to Stone”, “Cure Wounds”, “Insectine Curse”. He finds one each of “Inflict Wounds” and “Create or Destroy Water” that seem to be unused, and pockets them.
Bostra has the hat tightly gripped in his hands, and his eyes – refusing to look up at Ari – seem to be covered in a grey brown haze, “I first met Renny a long time before all this, before he even came to the city… way back in a struggle in some Mu’danian border Jungle…” His voice trails off with the last few words, “our company was sent to he–...”
Mu’dania – Land of Swamps, home to the Bullywog, Slaad, Yuan-ti, Kuo-toa, Gruung and more – is one of the countries i put on the map. The name is literally just ‘Mud + something-to-make-it-sound-like-a-country-name and throw-in-a-fantasy-apostrophe-so-it’s-less-obvious’.
With a 14 on a history check, Ari can remember hearing that nickname before, and can remember the proper name: “RhenDū”, the ranger who worked in the sewers with Polgruk and Beelgruuse. Beelgruuse had said he was usually the one to wrangle the Gelatinous Cubes, hadn’t she? … was he missing then? Was he here? … … Had he still been alive? She swallows back an acidic angry grief, “I’m sorry we couldn’t do… that we didn’t get here in time.”
Done, trying to read handwriting that basically just looks like cross hatched engineering schematics, Rae decides to look over the map… when it bites her.
The needly nib-like teeth of the flat map mimic dig into her hand for 2 damage as the shaded compass and key turn into eyes! It’s forked tongue wra-
–Rae has already had enough. She pushes down her left fist to the Map pinning it in place, then her right hand grabs a dart and stabs it into the paper (7)!
The mimic –
–Rae punches it again with her flat left fist (3).
The mimic –
–With a critical twenty, Rae uses the last shreds of her Ki to let out a Flurry of Blows, holding the Map Mimic with her left hand and repeatedly dragging the tip of the dart down it over and over until she’s left just holding a sheet of tattered shredded paper that she rips to dust between her fingers.
“Uh…” Bostra and Ari look over at Rae, huffing and puffing, fuming with rage in the middle of a snowglobe-shower of tiny shredded paper, “You uh, you good over there?”
On the other side of the curtain, Sorin and Cypress are working carefully.
With no risk of anything evil coming out, Cypress is doing his best to treat and tend the bodies, giving them a more dignified eternal rest. As Sorin unhooks, unpins, unties, and – in the worst cases – pries the wedge-shaped nails from the various organs where they hang on the walls and ceiling, he hands them down to the cleric. First each chunk of gore gets a loose inspection and a small blessing before the paper spell scrolls are removed. Then, with the solemn respectful face of a doctor closing an unsuccessful surgery, the little halfling coils the stretched and elongated tubed or veins around the organs – spooling them up like yarn – before carefully reinserting them loosely in the empty central cavity of the victim’s corpse.
There’s a lot going into this, so give me Strength for pulling things down and out, Dex for doing everything carefully so as not to break anything, Constitution because well… I’m sure some people are skipping the descriptions here – we’ll just leave it at that, and last, a Religion Check to see how well you do at getting the body sanctified. All with Advantage from Sorin helping.
Nymbus, counting off: “21 For strength, Dex is 19, 15 Con, and a Nat’ 20 for the religion check. Honestly, that feels pretty accurate.”
So you’ll do everything well, but you get left feeling dirty and unclean-
Nymbus: “Uh, yeah.”
-and with the crit’ you bless the bodies, and find out who it is.
After some time working, Cypress has more or less re-assembled the insides of the torture victim. He grabs some of the loose cloth in the room and pulls it into shreds, “Sorin, I’ll need you to lift him for a moment.” They can see the wizard’s discomforture and nods, “Thank you. I really appreciate your help.”
Once the strips of cloth are placed in spread out lines, under the torso of the corpse, Cypress looks at Sorin again. “Can you help me with one last thing?”
Sorin nods, surprisingly less uncomfortable than he thought he would be.
Cypress loops the makeshift bandage in loose slip knots then nods to Sorin, “A hand on each side now, and gently pull, squeeze him back together.” As Sorin holds the body closed like a Saw Movie version of a DWHT83831 24 in. Parallel Bar Clamp, Cypress slips the knots down like corpse-securing DXBC18004 Light Duty Ratchet Tie Down Straps, cinching them tight (is that wildly inappropriate? Tossing those cheap tool jokes in for a brutalized torture corpse burial service? … nah… it needed some humor to keep from going dark, right? … right?)
Letting Cypress do the final burial shrouding, Sorin takes a moment to investigate shelves. The top few racks are empty bottles of spell concoctions and potions with drippings of leftover residue leaking down the sides. He does see two unused Potions of Healing, and checks them over before nestling them in his satchel. On the next few shelves he finds bottles and glass jars with bits of brain as well as goos of various colors. Then at the bottle he sees some spent bottles that seem to have contained irregular mixtures. Picking on of these up, she reads the nail-scratched notes on the side:
“Equal parts Potion of Fireball and Potion of Greater Healing – to be stirred unshaken and swallowed before allowed to settle.”
Sorin shudders thinking of how ingesting an artificer’s Potion of Fireball would send the spell coursing outward through your body, literally setting your veins aflame like chimney fire, or like one of those lightning wood burning projects happening along your spine and nerve endings. And that before the healing potion caught up and repaired them. He sets the bottle on the desk, nearly dropping it as he considers the final detail of the instruction. Stirring and not shaking the potions together would create a loosely layered emulsification. Not a stable solution, but a mixture with floating granules of each component potion. That would mean the torturous concoction would be irregularly metabolized in clumps. Sparking wave after wave of erratic effects all throughout the body like a Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction!
With his spine shivering, he turns to Cypress, “Are we ready?”
The bodies are shrouded and blessed now, and Cypress moves with the young wizard to leave. He thinks back to his prayer over the larger victim. When he’d blessed them to grow in the fields beyond file, some of the blood on the table had moved. A few still-liquid drops fell and shifted into the rough shape of four letters, “Yoas”. On a hunch, he used this as a name for the final lines of the blessing, and it had clicked in. Sheela had clearly meant for him to know the victim’s name, but why? “Yeah,” they say, shaking their head to shift the thoughts down for later pondering, “let’s go.”
Back through the curtain into the main room, unable to quell his restless mind, Cypress closes his eyes to let the others bicker and thinks back. Eventually he does remember.
Yoas the Wizard, the Yuan-ti man they were told worked with the crystals and the magic, keeping all the spells and enchanted devices working through the sewers.
Rae’s Ring
When Sorin walks in and starts fighting with Ari about sleeping here, Rae is about to lay into him on Ari’s behalf – when something shiny catches her eye. She picks up the simple golden ring with its plain white jewel. After a good investigation check, she learns that “The gold of this ring is not quite gold, the jewel is not refracting light as it should,” and that's because it’s a magic ring that lets her cast Disguise Self. She slips it on, and turns to yell at Sorin.
Sarah, really quick, i just need to see your character sheet.
Sarah, confused: “uh… okay…”
*makes an adjustment and hands it back*
Sarah, mistrustful: “Why is my max HP lower?”
Don’t worry about it.
Sarah, outraged: “What do you mean d-”
Sorin, you telling us all why we should totally sleep here in this horrifying torture cell even though you just found health potions?
“Hello, I have 0 HP, that’s zero Health and Patience! I need to rest. Now. Here.”
“My guy,” Ari wave her arms around, “the vibe. in here. is so. unbelieeeeevably bad.”
“The vibe everywhere down under this city is bad!”
After a toxic silence, we turn to see Bostra red in the face. With the hand holding the hat curled in a tight fist and not leaving his side, he shoulders his bag, and starts walking. “Let's go find a place to rest.”
With a how-could-you glare back at Sorin, Rae and Ari jump in the lead for us to keep heading down the thug tunnel.
Unfortunately, Rae pushes to the front and is only able to warn the others about the hammer-stone-trap AFTER it comes down on her foot for 7 damage.
When Rae cracks the hidden door of the Thug tunnel, our nostrils are filled with a pungent and unsettling sweet smell, the smell of vegetables gone to damprot or the smell of soured wound pus leaking through soft linen bandages, and Cypress can smell a familiar note of insanity. We step carefully from the lightless tunnel, into a dark room, familiar to Cypress, but strange to the rest and foreboding to everyone.
A few feet away from us is a banked wall made from wooden bricks. Along with the wooden bricks, this wall feels out of place here for another reason; in this place of straight North-South-East-West walls and hard right angles, this wall is curved. The quarter circle is about four feet tall, like a small retaining or accent wall. Cypress can remember it casting a long shadow on the room, when the runes still poured light over it to the far wall. We arrange ourselves in a diamond with Rae in the forward point, and Bostra in the middle as Cypress explains where we are, “All these square rooms are all basically the same, just rotated around a central point in the middle.” Looking forwards, Rae can see what looks like a broken Wing Chun training dummy. It’s a large wooden structure, a pillar running from the ground to the ceiling. Arranged in some unknown pattern around the pillar were several thin shelves and sticks poking out at various heights, now broken and torn in rough jagged ends. Cypress points to it, “Around that, were the bright eccd8b yellow runes hovering in the air, arranged in three glowing rings.” And when she looks down, Rae can see the piles of slightly golden ashes on the ground. “When I was first here, they were rotating counter clockwise in the air around the pillar, posts coming out of it as the wooden bits turned clockwise against them.” Cypress says, nodding at the piles. Sorin looks back, and around the pipe we came through, he can see banks of wood and clay controls. Clay wheels, knobs and levers poke out from an array of wooden dials and devices, these panels each control and on either other side of each mechanical panel is a small pond or little fountain of fresh water at ground level.
“One-by-one,” Cypress continues, “the glowing runes blinked out, turning from bright luminous glyphs to ash dark lines in their air, each symbol falling in a straight line crashing to the floor in a puff of gritty black soot. And, as each rune falls, the room dimmed further.”
And with that, Cypress steps forward, breaking the formation, I goes around the short wooden wall and picks up the torn remains of a cloak.
Thank you, Kai, for conveniently having all these descriptions already written out in “Chapter 9a: Old Gods and New Fears” so i could just rejigger them to fit here. Awe shucks Kai, it's no problem, happy to help.
Sorin stays behind with Bostra to inspect and try to understand the sewer workings as the others go with Cypress to try and find Beelgruuse.
“The square rooms on the second under-layer of the eastern division of the Nibiru Sewer Company are where the magic sources of the operation are divided, focused and ‘made good’.” Bostra quotes flatly, as Sorin the curious boy wizard looks over the room.
Meanwhile, over by the others…
A short way past the turn it finds a T intersection, where a light used to glow from another square room to the right the first corner, where the hallway turns. Along the wall we see a cartoonishly large wrench stuck in an iron dial, knocked out pieces of brick and plaster, and dented pipe with rings and washers scattered round. Further down we can see clawed finger marks on the walls and pipes where bare bloody fingers ripped and tore bits of metal free from the bricks.
On the floor is a busted shovel handle, still half wrapped in torn and bloody rags, where Cypress set the leg of their bound and unconscious friend. He can see the worn spots on the rock where she must’ve used the stone of the cart, and splintered wood of the wheel to fray the ropes that held her spread armed, and spread eagled.
A small chunk of coal is all that remains on the floor from where it was dropping after scrolling a message on the dark brick wall, the letters crowded but harsh against the background of jagged scratching from bloodied hands and tools and ripping pipes. Where it once read, “If you are yourself when you wake, go to the Church of Glorious Gods. Together, we can fix it, fix it, fix it all.“, now there is just a giant red eye painted in hard and long dried blood, with drops frozen in time from dripping down the bricks. Its ominous malice peers into us with more defiance than any simple written denial ever could, but the “No” is clear enough.
Back in the main room, Sorin is testing the air and poking around at the symbols and runes for a better understanding of the magic here. Let’s see that Arcana Check. This is a place of arcane divisions, if you know the fundamental correlations inside Weskmell’s Water Hammer or how to harness the Tidal Principle of Arcane Magnetism as a driver by dividing five natural faults against a crossways elemental interlacing through an established link to the realms of earth and air, then you’d have a good idea of what is going on here, and how it's being done.
Back at the remains of Cypress’s message, he and tZulèe easily pass their Con Saves, But Ari and Rae…
Rae swings at Cypress, feeling the now familiar Rage well up inside here, and not caring how exhausted it will leave her. She swings hard, hitting Cypress for a solid 12 points of damage. (Rae won’t be able to make another save yet, because she rolled a nat’ 1, also the Rage and the full exhaustion causing disadvantage on all rolls when it ends, is because of her choice to make the bargain and regain a Rage slot on a short rest.)
After staring at the red eye, Ari feels like she finally understands. She looks down in a daze and sees the horrible little wooden gargoyle on the floor eating the remains of a bit of coal. Filled with a lusty hatred for the tiny infernal nuisance, she kicks out her boot… and misses. Looking away from the eye now, Ari has another chance to save, and successfully pulls her mind back from the edge of the red cliff. She shakes her head and sees tZulèe looking up at her suspiciously.
Okay, we’ll do a contested Perception/Stealth roll to see if tZulèe notices that you tried to attack it.
Nymbus: “tZulèe got a 14 Perception.”
Brooke, in despair: “I got a nat’ 1…”
Ooof, well it defini-
Brooke: “WAIT! I have an inspiration! I’m using it!”
It looks up at Ari, and at the last second, she shifts her boot and crunches down on a tiny coal pebble, “Sorry, I thought it was a bug.” She lies, saving face, smiling at the loved little companion.
TZulèe nods.
Jumping past them, Cypress swings their staff at the red eye painted in blood on the wall. With 6 damage, it cracks one of the stone, but isn’t enough too–
With a furious elven battle cry of hate, Rae bodies the halfling. How dare this snotty cleric defile the eye! She slams Cypress to the ground, wrestling him and trying to smash his head to the cobbles.
“tz-tZulèe,” Cypress croaks in a hurried panic, “attack-ck wipe … out… the eye,” he chokes.
The gargoyle looks round, not knowing what on Lidśa to do! It can only think of one thing, and starts to quickly meld into the wall.
The Taming of Sméagol by Alan Lee
Ari dashes over to Cypress’s aid, unconsciously recreating the “Taming of Sméagol” scene from Return of the King, as the gargoyle within the walls works to push the bricks from their mortar. Then without warning, and apparently without any good ideas, she moves to bite Rae in an attempt to snap her out of it, and pull her friend’s mind from the falling red cliff.
Brooke, in despair (again): “That’s another nat’ 1…”
Hmmm…. Okay i’m going to give you both a choice… This can work to immediately snap Rae out of it, but there will be … a cost.
With bricks falling around them, Ari bites, and Rae twists at the wrong time. Bent over her friend's arm, Ari’s horn scrapes against the scar on Rae’s face, cutting into it and pushing up towards her eye.
Rae, your scar will grow to just under your eye causing stiffness and delay in those muscles making your eye harder to focus, open or close (honestly, like my Bell’s Palsy), and giving you a permanent -2 penalty to Perception.
Back in the mechanical room Sorin is making a … you know, i honestly forgot what the roll was, but basically a vibe check, to assess the feeling in the air.
The air smells like insanity.
Like a fever-sickness leaked from a dying brain, all hot and sweaty an overflow of rampaging thoughts that spilled over because they couldn’t be contained in a single head.
A feeling like if a sixteenth century asylum could become contagious.
“We need to keep moving.”
Sorin agrees with Bostra and they head out to collect the others.
Bostra and Sorin turn a corner to see bricks falling from a wall as Cypress crawls out from the tangle of limbs where Ari is biting Rae’s arm, and Rae clutching her bleeding face. They open their mouths but Cypress holds up a finger and then stomps on the brick he cracked earlier, shattering it so that the unholy jigsaw puzzle can’t be put back together. Then he helps Rae up and checks her face, as Sorin shouts, “What on Lidśa-cæ is going on!?”
With a sigh, Cypress just says, “At least you weren’t here to turn into a cloud and float out a window this time.”
Confused, Sorin blurts out, “You showed them the red paper?”
“No,” Cypress draws out the word, while they finish dabbing the blood from Rae’s eye and waves tZulèe out from the wall, “It was drawn on the wall – painted in blood in the shape of an eye this time.”
Tired and exhausted, everyone is looking around for a path to a good place to rest when tZulèe – now out of the wall – pulls an erratic jerky tug on Cypress’s elbow.
“In the wall, I found more tunnels.”
Ari and Rae are looking over the map when Cypress takes it and puts it on the floor near tZulèe.
It jerks and points to four spots making rough lines. “Here. Here. Here. All go this way.” It says to three marked lines all going away from the square rooms to the south west. “This one,” it points to a notch in one of the mechanical rooms, “very small.” Then, back to the others, “middle short.” It shrugs, “but side two go to open rooms, all empty. Those met. Go to big cave.”
After a brief discussion, the Thug Muggers go over to the smallest marking. They find the notches on the wall and ready their weapons.
Cypress pries open what turns out to be a small hatch.
Everyone lets out fearsome war cries, and he just shakes his head. He reaches into the tiny hidden cupboard to find a sack of cached cash, cashing it out , and snatching gold and gems, what a catch! (for this everyone rolled a percentile amounting to 254 in gold and 2 unknown gems.)
At about the twenty minute mark of the table talking in circles over a debate of which path to take and which room to go to, Ari/Brooke eventually decided to use one of the DM questions she has.
Brooke, tired: “Okay, which way should we go?”
So… i won’t answer that. Not because i won’t tell you what these are, but because of the word ‘should’. With those DM questions, i’ll gladly answer anything with information ‘who, what, when, where, why’, but not ‘should’. ‘Should’ implies too much railroading to me and making decisions about what you'll do and what you value, it feels too controlling.
The players, nodding: “Makes sense,” “yeah, I can respect that.”
Brooke: “How ‘bout this: ‘what are those two rooms?’”
Sure. The southernmost one here is an abandoned small thug camp, and the other is an abandoned thug meeting room. Both are empty.
With that, we head for the south most tunnel towards the abandoned Thug camp, this time with Ari leading the way.
And good thing she’s leading too, because Ari is able to spot the sliding clamp trap, and warn everyone to avoid it – WITHOUT stepping in it first… Rae.
In the room beyond… but that’s for next time. See y'all soon!
You know, just thinking about how happy I am to not have a lit match stuck in my dick.
- person in booth – Kris Wilson and Dave McElfatrick, “Explosm Short: SAW Triple X”
Table talk:
We’ve now used one DM question to find a place (that i’ll describe next time) to take a rest. Just a little tip here that i gave to the players, it might be worth using the other DM question somewhere around here to find out… well they’ll have to figure out how to word it.
