Thug Muggers in the Sewers 3/15/24
Table Talk:
Oh yeah! I forgot about the Puppeteer Parasite on Cypress and Rae. Rae you need to take *checking notes* and additional 1 damage, and Cypress an additional 2. Also technically, i should have worked out how having a Puppeteer Parasite on you would affect Wild Shaping, but that would mean a whole lot of retconning. So instead, we’ll just say that as a snake, you were wrapped in an extra layer like a fried burrito, and as a bear you have a big gray patch on one shoulder like a muddy bandage. Then, as a compromise, later i’m gonna have you half to make a Wisdom Save for me.
That last fight was a Challenge Rating: Hard. We got 4,200 XP from it, (about a third of the daily amount).
I actually made up a note from Guruuuuhckck and gave it to Sarah to decipher using the alphabet to the side here, because i know she enjoys puzzles like that. I put some thought into deciding on this alphabet for the bullywug people (grung, slaad, etc.), after finding nothing official online. I figure that early on, they would use their finger pads to make letters, inking the edges and then stamping/rotating them. In my head then, they made and still use reed/bamboo pens to mimic this (like how our computer fonts and letters mimic medieval scribe calligraphy today). The pen is a simple hollow straw, cut and tapered on one end for the smaller circles, then it’s dipped in ink and stamped/rotated to print the circular letters. I imagine the lines are usually not necessary, (like with us today), but are often found on their paper – always with the green lines pointing up like the grass and reeds. You may notice, if you translate it yourself, that plurals are done numerically. I have been depicting the bullywug peoples as all very detail oriented and i thought this was a neat touch. Some tribal cultures use a number system of 1 – singular [my plant], 2 – a couple or a few [the plants i harvested today], Many – plenty/a handful [the plants in my garden], and Lots – too many to count or bother quantifying [all the plants around the village]. This idea is the opposite of that, where in order to pluralize the word it has to be specific, with the pluralizer (we use s/es) being the exact number. So ‘a couple pens’ becomes ‘pen2’ and ‘a handful of nails’ becomes ‘nail11’ each as a single word.
So while Sarah is deciphering that note, let’s get into it.
“Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backward. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front. And this is a very interesting idea, considering it was invented by a race who spend most of their time hitting one another on the head with rocks.”
—Terry Pratchett, “Reaperman”
🛡️🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿Chapter 11: A Mound of Terror (cont.)
🛡️🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿Chapter 11: A Mound of Terror (cont.)
“I think,” Bostra says looking back down the hallway, “that we ought to give Sorin a break.” He picks up his back and starts walking towards the room. “I’m guessing Cypress will make him rest for a bit, and I think you guys should too.”
There is an anxious flapping.
“Akris?” Ari asks.
“I sssshould go ssssee to him…”
“But?” Rae prompts.
“He ssssaid to keep sssan eye on Bosssstra…”
The two remaining Thug Muggerers look at each other then turn back to the nervous Flying Snake. “Well if you think that it’s besssst – sorry, best – to follow hissss – his insst-instructions, Then come with us. I’m sure he’ll be okay, Cypress is watching him.”
With a bobbing nod, Akriss follows Rae into the room. Ari pauses outside the entrance, “Hey, tZulèe you wanna come with us?”
The gargoyle stutter-shakes its head. “Cypress said, ‘wait here’.” It points to its feet. “I will wait. Here.” Then it goes back to being near motionless.
Ari stares at the gargoyle for another minute, unsure what to do, then shrugs and walks into the room behind Akris, Bostra and Rae. Behind her, tZulèe starts melding into the wall.
Inside the room she looks at Rae and Bostra. Ari pulls out the two ribs. “These really seemed to upset him, huh…” Then she looks back and forth between her friend, the cop, and the dead body. “Do you think I should put them back?”
Rae just stares at her friend wondering how something can be so smart and so dumb at the same time.
Bostra bursts out laughing.
Short Rest time! Ari uses 1 Hit Dice, Cypress uses 2 (and the healthpot we forgot to roll for earlier), Rae uses 3, and Sorin doesn’t need any Hit Dice this time, because he cowered behind a wall the entire fight.
Before we get to the drama i just want to clarify some rolls. Cypress, give me Wisdom Save – DC 13 again, and Sorin, give me an Intelligence Che- well an Intelligence Save actually.
Nymbus: “God dammit, 10.”
Ashley: “It’s… a nat’ 1.”
The whole table: “Oh no, please don’t start that again.”
Interesting… very good… very helpful. You guys won’t see what that is, because it’s behind the scenes, but great.
So Sorin and Cypress, you guys are talking things out over this short rest, what does that look like?
Sorin cuddles the bear close, pushing his face into its furry neck, and trying to use its fur to push his own tears back into his eyes.
After a few minutes of silence and hiccups, the bear makes a little noise. Sorin remembers that this is Cypress Witchhazel, his companion that he travels and eats with, who has tended his wounds and who he has seen eat like three full quiches in one sitting. He nervously lets go and backs up from the bear, stuttering out a socially anxious apology.
“Aaar ooot ckragg iggle ming-fine.” Cypress coughs after the transformation finishes and tries again, “It’s fine. Really.”
Sorin sits down with his back to the door and sighs.
“Can I use your brazier?”
“What? Oh. Yeah, sure.” He rummages and hands it over.
Cypress lights it with the spark wheel and then gets out their beaten up camp kettle. They pour in some water from their supplies, then get out two tin camp mugs. He gets out a little roll of leather and opens it. It unrolls up away from him, revealing several tiny pouches. Then at the top, two sides flop down in the shape of a letter T to reveal a mini bandelier of vials. (It’s his Tea Bag… get it!?) Cypress dips into one of the pouches and takes out some leaves, dropping them into two cups.
While the water boils he motions to Sorin. “So, tell me about it. I pieced together what happened, but why don’t you tell me what’s eating you.”
Sorin flops up from his slouch, into an almost-upright sitting position, “Everyone thinks that I'm the problem, that I'm the worst person! But like… all I ever wanted to do was poison someone. I didn’t want to mutilate them!”
“I don’t think Ari wants to mutilate anyone either.” Cypress puts an emphasis on ‘wants’ thinking about their chat with Ari after the horn goring incident.
Sorin is silent for a moment and then, “It’s getting worse you know. Whatever it is with her, it’s getting more intense, like, everyday.”
“Hmm… I too, would have preferred to keep them alive, yes,” they reply, neatly side stepping the comment, and then handing over a cup of the tea as a distraction.
The two of them sip at the tea in silence for a minute.
Sorin stares out along the dark halfway. “Do you think Akris is alright?”
“I told everyone back there to stay put,” Cypress pauses and tilts his head, slotting the memory into position, “and your last command was that he should keep an eye on Bostra.”
“Oh yeah.”
More silence, then Sorin adds, “I should probably apologize to Bostra when we get back.”
“No.” Cypress’s voice is a flat and ominous deadpan, “The cop needs to apologize for tackling you.”
The only sound in the hallway is some faint tick behind the door and slurping.
Cypress adds more water and sets the kettle back on the brasier.
After a long pause Sorin seems closer to his old self, “And, that was just tasteless, too. I mean, taking the ribs gar flable granchen gimmen flov.” His last words are unintelligible as he upends his cup for the last of the tea.
Trying hard to keep the sigh out of his voice, Cypress asks, “What do you think that was for, when she took the ribs?”
“A trophy.” Sorin responds in an instant with zero hesitation.
“Really?” The little cleric looks genuinely perplexed, “Ari’s not really the sentimental sort.”
Sorin makes a ‘pfft’ sound, “I mean, I’m a necromancer, and even I can’t think of a reason, so like, yeah.”
‘Necromancer? Putting that one on the shelf for later…’ Cypress thinks as they sip their tea. He lets the young wizard talk for a while, giving him a chance to tire out his brain and mouth, and just vent out all his angst like an emotional heat exchanger. They politely nod from time to time and give the appropriate, ‘Uh huh’s from time to time.
When Sorin’s steam is finally running down, the halfling meaningfully refills only Sorin’s tea and hands it up to the boy’s mouth. He mentally dusts off his sermon skills, and begins:
“Years ago, when I was traveling the coastlands, I met someone. I was coming into a small town in the southern gulfs, the wet desert salts of Karibon if I remember right. He was defiling a corpse and being stoned by the people of the town. I intervened as he was dragging the corpse through the town towards the gate. When he asked for my help and that he’d explain after, I helped him to the palisade. There he gouged out the dead man's eyes, and stirred inside of his head with a skinny boot knife. Then he pried the jaw open until the skull cracked and the brains began to congeal in the opening to the throat of his dead friend. The smell was horrendous and the human people of the town began to throw stones over the walls at us.
I’m still not exactly sure why I helped him, but I did. We hauled the body to the nearby woods and the man spent almost an hour looking for a toppled tree with a deep hole under it. Then I helped him drag the body over to it, and we hung the corpse upside down, the broken base of the skull slowly dripping into the hole. As he cried, the man took his camp ax and chopped. He left the limbs attached, but barely hanging on by threads of muscles. He did it all in silence and then we walked away. We went out about twenty yards to a small rise and he made a small campfire, feeding it with his dead friend's possessions. Then he told me a story. A story he said this friend had once told to him during the long nights on the road.
Ages past, when the High Drow race came up to the dark forests above ground and began to tame them, they carried with them a burial tradition similar to the Svirfneblin. The Holy Ones, the Lords and Ladies when they died were taken to the wild deep woods by a procession carrying sulfur torches that kept the creatures away. They laid out the body on a stone slab, resting over an archway above a tall stone cone reinforced with sharp spiked metal rods on nine sides. The mourners would crack the skull of their dead friend and turn the brains to a mushy paste. You see, Drow have always been protective of their brains, like many of the peoples of the underdark lands. And destroying them is vital, to ensure the safety of the village. Then they would cover the torches, and fan the aromas of the congealing gray meats into the woods. A priest would speak some words about the dead drow’s life; their value to their people and to the world. Then, two honored family members would lift the body off the slab and drop it. They’d break the body on the cone, he was told, shattering the back on the point, and opening the body around the cone with the barbed metal. Then the people retreat, up the spiral stairs to the safety of some very tall pillars, and halfway uncover the torches.
The true burial rites wouldn’t begin until they heard the rustling and hissing. Then the spiders would come. Come from the untamed trees and deep holes of the dead volcano of Xarakku. They came and dismantled the body. The smell of the brains is a powerful lure to the spiders of the deep north woods. And in the old stories of the High Drow it was the spiders and the Neogi that brought them to the surface trees when the volcano grew cold and its lights went out. Those spiders that walk between the dark ancient trees and the empty rinds of the volcanic tunnels are holy. They carry the body back away to be buried as part of their spider silk webs in the deep. It is said that if a Drow is truly worthy, they carry them all the way back to ancient cities under the belly of Xarakku, and use their bodies to build their great nest. It was the webs of these Neogi and spiders that the old people said were their ladders into the forest and so to be consumed and made into the webs is to return that gift.
I should hope one day to make it to the far north, to the green jungles beyond the snow lands and see those ancient ruins. To touch the cones licked free by the Neogi.
You see, this man's friend, the corpse I had just helped him hang, draining over a hole at the stump of a tree, was an old old Drow, one how believed she was descended from the Drow clans that did this and, who had talked about the old burials. The people of the village sun-mummified their dead, and thought he was doing the most unholy thing by moving the body at all and carrying it to the woods. But to him, he was honoring his friends wishes, right down to finding a hole where some giant spiders – perhaps long evolutionary offspring of the ancient ones – might live, and trying to seduce them out with the smell of swirled brains.
After a moment to let this all sink in, Cypress begins to pack up his mugs, Dumping the kettle and slotting them inside. He rolls up his tea bag again and packs it away, then hands the brazier to Sorin. “We should head back, but I want you to remember, Coriander 13, verse 4-8. I know you’ve heard it before.
“Nature is patient, Nature is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. Nature does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not angerable, it keeps no record of wrongs. Nature does not delight in evil but rejoices with life. It always protects itself, always trusts itself, always hopes, always perseveres. Nature never fails. But where there are people, they will act where there are acts, they will be natural; where there is nature, it will pass understandable.”
Cypress nods, “We all may be different and do things differently, but it is rarely out of true malice, just something we don’t understand yet. Now let's head back to the others”.
On the other side of the door, Zaanth rolls her eyes and lifts her ear trumpet from the door. She lets out a sigh that doesn;t make a sound and then writes a few lines in the padded journal tied at her waist. Licking a finger, she marks a tab on the edge and then curls the book back up to its locked position, folding it back onto her belt.
She gets up and stretches, then turns. There’s a whiny muling sound in her head and she glares at the bloated Intellect Devourer. It’s extra large for the species, with a saddle across the parietal lobe. It has a ring pierced through each of its feet and two of the rings are pinned to the wall by Zannths two long khopesh.
When she glares, the beast tries to back away, but its feet only click against the rings and the hooked swords. The voice in her head shifts to a timid whimper. Zaanth takes out some vials, mixes them and then… well… i shouldn’t show you that just yet…
After several minutes, Zaanth puts everything back in her little bag and tosses the big shield on top of the Intellect Devourer. Then she yanks one of the khopesh out of the stone wall, and raises it up as if to strike, daring the creature to try and run before she mounts it. When the beast stays still, she tugs the other one free and then climbs up into the saddle. She grips the edges of her big shield, then reaches out and takes control of the beast's legs, first walking, then bounding out of the cave tunnel.
When Cypress and Sorin reach the turn out for the room, Cypress keeps walking south, completely sure that’s the way to go. After a few extra steps, Sorin reaches out a hand and stops the halfling, “Uh, the others are this way, um, right?”
Alright, Cypress this is the Wisdom Save you failed earlier. You can keep going south like you really want to for some reason, or turn aside and follow Sorin back to the others. But, if you don’t go south, you are going to take damage.
Nymbus, after a long internal debate: “Ugh yeah I think I have to just take the damage and go back to the others.”
Good choice. Take 10 damage.
Nymbus: “Oof.”
Back in the Boiler Room, Rae is investigating the area while Bostra apologizes to Sorin. She discovers that each of the pits in front of the furnaces is about four feet by two feet wide, and almost as deep enough for her to stand in, resting her chin on the floor. She also sees that the boxes next to the two furnaces have some firewood in them. While it could be enough for a comfortable campfire, it’s not nearly enough to fill the pits.
After she asks, Cypress hands the note from Guruuuuhckck over to Ari and she reads it out, trying to make sense of the instructions. “Get water in and get water out. Wave the arms and make sure the elbows have filters, then burn burn burn! It needs to be so hot hot for 10 minutes!” She looks over it a few more times, “Anyone have an idea of what it means?”
Bostra stands on the table and reads over her shoulder, “He wouldn’t have written in anything technical, he knows we don’t know any of that. So it's got to be written as things he thinks we’ll find easy. Something he thinks a child could figure out.”
“Well that makes me feel great…” Ari mutters as she scratches her head. Then she looks up at the giant main. The massive cauldron does look alot like a potbelly stove… a pot bellied man? With sticks on either side like a snow ma- “OH!” She blurts out, “The arms are the wooden pipes!”
Cypress walks back into the room with tZulèe in tow, “tZulèe said it can feel pipes around the walls over there. It says there’s one big one below that’s empty, and two smaller ones,” he points to the walls behind the furnaces, “full of water.”
“Below? Below where?”
“Under the cauldron and in front.”
Everyone turns to stare at the broken cask.
With a heavy push, Rae and Bostra shove the remains of the cask to one side and look down. It was balanced on a few boards, and when they move them out of the way we can see a large funnel in the ground leading to a pipe.
“Well that’s the water out, for sure.” Sorin says with approval.
Ari goes over the walls by the furnaces and finds a large cast iron valve wheel. She tries to turn it, but it only clicks as it’s pushed up against another mechanism.
Raelle-the-Inspired runs over to the other side as an idea lantern sputters on over her head. She finds the identical valve by that furnace and grips it, “Try now!”
With both the valves being turned in unison, we hear a small hiss and feel the thrum of moving water as the cast iron wheels turn.
“Okay, close it again,” Ari explains, “we probably want to wait until we have everything in place, but now we know where the ‘water in’ is. What’s next?”
“Elbows.”
“Well if those are the arms… then the weird mechanical spidery things in the middle would be the elbows, right?”
Rae climbs up for a better look. “All the ends are different, there’s a gear one, a shiny one, one that looks like a screen, one that looks like a furry middle finger, one with like needles all over it, one with a little gat-”
“The one like a screen!” Sorin bounces excitedly, “that’ll be the filter.”
After a minute of grunting Rae calls out, “It won’t move.”
“Hang on.” Ari pushes one of the wood boxes under the other ‘arm’ and climbs up, “Okay I found it, on three, Okay?”
“Wait, are we going ON three or three and THEN go?”
“I’m not doing this,” Bostra mutters. Then he shouts, “Three!” And both filters swing over, sliding into place.
Ari and Rae hop down, “Okay, what's left?”
“Burn Burn Burn, and make it hot!” Sorin says with a gleam in his eye.
“For ten sustained minutes,” Cypress repeats sardonically, “So we need something other than magic, unless anyone knows a spell that lasts that long uninterrupted.”
Sorin sighs and deflates. “No… I don’t…”
Rae kicks one of the fire boxes. “There's only a few logs in each of these. They might burn for ten minutes, but not enough to fill those fire pits.”
Everyone stands around looking defeated.
After a few minutes staring at them, Bostra coughs, and breaks the lid off of a fire box. Then, as the others look on at him in shock, he steps on it, and pulls, breaking it in half and tossing both halves in the pit.
More shocked silence.
Rae is the first to speak. “That’s Nibiru Sewer Company property you just smashed…”
“Why do you lot all look as if you just watched me punch a baby?” he asks, crossing his arms.
Sorin explains, “And we’ll have to pay for it.”
Bostra pinches his nose, “Guys… if we don’t get the sewers limping along, if we don’t do this whole quest thing, then there will be no Nibiru Sewer Company at all.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah…”
“OH YEAH!”
Everyone starts smashing apart everything wooden in the room.
After several happy minutes in the new official Nibiru Sewer’s Rage Room, every single wooden or even wood-ish colored object has been smashed apart and thrown into the pits. Each of the two pits sits just over half full.
Panting, Rae asks what’s left.
“Nothing.” Bostra sighs, “You even smashed apart the alchemy table.”
Rae looks up at the machine, “Those pipes look wooden.”
“No!” Sorin, Ari, and Cypress all reach out a hand in unison.
“That’s a worse idea than usual.”
Sorin looks at the alchemy equipment that they neatly dumped in the corner. His own idea flash powder goes off over his head. “Alchemy!”
Everyone stares.
“I can transmute something into wood and it will last an hour, so by the time the fire gets to it, it will still be wood!”
Bostra pats the boy on the knee, “Good thinking. Ari, you still got that crowbar?”
Together everyone forms a de-assembly line. Ari and Bostra prying out a few loose bricks and bringing them to Sorin, Sorin transmuting them into wood, and then Rae taking the now-wooden bricks to one fire pit, and Cypress taking them to the other.
Now with the clock, ticking, Ari and Rae simultaneously turn the water valves.
Sorin and Cypress nod to each other. Sorin casts Firebolt into one pit, and Cypress casts Sacred Flame into the other. (Yes, yes i know, Scared Flame is radiant damage, not fire. And it can’t be used to light a fire, but let this one slide, okay?)
As the fire starts, the bricks in the pit begin to glow hotter and hotter. We see an air valve at the bottom expand in the heat of the glowing bricks, causing the fires to grow brighter and hotter. The smoke rises into the furnace and we hear a hiss. Deep inside, the water is boiling. At the middle of the furnace, the wooden pipes collect the contaminants that condense. Then with a whir mechanical arms pump while the mechanical middles spin moving different parts in and out of the tubes. Then the wooden pipes shift and in reverse, spill the drops into the bottom of the furnaces.
After a moment they shift again, the filters and screens whirring. Now the pipes face the tops of the furnace stacks and the water-steam from the furnaces slush into the massive cauldron. After a minute we can see a drop of clean clear water on the spout. The arms pump over and over slowly gaining speed.
We look down and panic when we see the empty fire pits, then we stop and look. The machine is still going.
Sorin pokes his head closer and he can see the tiny trickle of the off gassing sludge pour in and then ignite in the heat of the glowing red bricks. The machine is burning off the excess to keep itself going. It seems like it is balanced enough to go on for days, and now the sluice valve at the bottom of the cauldron is open and the water is tumbling out into the funnel and down the pipe.
Awesome job everybody, you solved the puzzle!
YAY!
So, where to next?
“I had an imaginary pet. I did, I had an imaginary dog. The fuck ran away.”
-Lewis Black, "Lewis Black's Rantcast Episode #80 - For Gilbert Gotfried"
Table talk:
So… the Drow Burial thing… I thought that i remembered that detail from an old D&D 3.5 campaign book, but i cannot find a single reference to it anywhere. I know i often get Drow as underdark dwellers crossed with dark/night forest elves (thanks early 2000’s WoW), which doesn’t help here. Maybe i have things mixed up there with another established Forgotten Realms culture? Maybe it was an idea my friends in highschool came up with at a late night D&D game? Maybe it was a common idea floating around Sci Fi conventions a while back? Maybe i just came up with it and my brain / memory got confused? I can’t say for sure, but i know there are some forum posts out there about similar ideas, so who knows? Once i was typing it up and couldn’t find any direct references, i decided to embellish it a bit and flush out more of my own world that i’ve been building here. The primary idea is an interpretation of the famous Tibetan Sky Burial, but i decided to include an homage to the idea of Duergar burials taking place inside an active volcano. And i also included a bit of a reference to the Hopi Sipapu story of creation, or at least the version my father would explain as a park ranger and historian at Mesa Verde.
Just a quick side note about world building. That last section in the summary about the machine pumping and filtering the water, i came up with and wrote that the day before we played. If you scroll down and look at the maps, you can see the image i made, basically just throwing random elements together until i had something that felt interesting to me. In fact, i probably did it in one of my ‘oh shit i gotta hurry up and fill in this area’ moments before the last printing batch. The truth is i had no idea what it was, what it would be, what it would do, or how it would work. Right up until i need it to be SOMETHING, it was just some - thing. That’s just part of the process for me. Loosely, it goes like this:
Step 1: Throw some interesting shapes together. Step 2: forget about it. Step 3a: realize i need it. Step 4a: panic. Step 5a: create something that kinda fits.
Or alternately;
Step 3b: have a random idea i think is great and make some notes about. Step 4b: forget. Step 5b: tweak and twist the idea from six months ago to fit the new circumstances of the game/world.
Though, sometimes those steps just get completely mixed around and repeated (4b and 4a often recur quite a few times in this process…).
Ashley asked an interesting question about this campaign, “Did you expect the whole thing to be underground like this, when we started?” The short answer: no.
…
Okay fine, the longer answer. Nooooo- just kidding. Well, when we first started playing and long before these summaries and this blog were a thing, we were starting out with a fifth player. I spent a few months writing a level 1 to 5 custom campaign based on escorting an NPC – this was all while we were slowly talking about playing, where to meet, and very slowly rolling up characters.. It was called “A Western Wedding: The merchant’s daughter”, and at last check it was around 30 pages. It had six large 50 x 50 maps made with four completed (and vague notes for two more), including multi storied layers. It had three main plot buildings with marked areas and corresponding events. It had 23 pre-established side quests/tasks, and 10 pre-built NPC’s with stat blocks, mechanics, and mild to fully formed backstories. There was a lot ready to go – while still having plenty of room to grow and expand especially after the third chapter (including ideas for a follow up quest to level 8). While i didn’t have as many pre-written descriptions of things as i try to now, i did have some ready to go, and notes to come up with the rest. We actually did start this campaign. We actually had one session in the prologue of this campaign, opening at “The Outpost Tavern” where we met a young child and our Bard passed out drunk on a rock if i remember right. I even handed out a small packet of maps and notes to everyone from my Gaia Online Kiki and Coco strawberry roll up cat folder.
And then, well we had issues scheduling. But everyone was still very eager to play, so i created Nibiru. Remember that Nibiru means ‘placeholder’, well the original 2 pages of notes for it were titled, “A Playground City”. And that’s all it was. I sent maybe 30 minutes making a super basic map, I marked some letters on a few interesting building and made a small list of things like: “Clock tower: the Duke is imprisoned here” “Stables: allied with farmers” “farmers: allied with Stables and Caravans” and “Windmill: asdfgasdf”. The idea was to have a facade city – a playground – a loose scaffolding of barely there plots and vague ideas. That way when someone couldn’t make it to a weekly game, the rest of us could still play, using side characters, testing out new characters, or doing backstory stuff with our main characters.
We had three sessions like this, just goofing off until we lost our fifth member. These summaries actually started then, as just a couple sentences in our facebook group chat saying what had happened followed by a couple memes (3/19/22, 4/1/22, 4/17/22). Eventually i steered the group towards one of the more flushed out ideas i had written down in my notes, and got them to the sewers. Between growing up with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001), and Diablo (1997) (specifically The Butcher quest), i’ve always been inspired to start campaigns this way – maybe half of the games i’ve ever run, actually (though most return to the surface). I originally was just doing this to stall for time as i came up with something better and then around half way through the 9 Thugs the players had to collect, i started having bigger ideas and really flushing things out (see steps 3b and 5b above). And, well, here we are. I keep flushing things out more and more and have written over 500 pages in summaries. C'est la vie.
