Summary 7/2/22
Table Talk:
I handed out a custom Spell Card to Ashley(Sorin) for Minor Alchemy since it is a spell he knows from his subclass, but does not have a spell card in the standard pack. (thank you TimboJohnson on Etsy for the card layout click the image or this link for info).
As promised, we got Rae and Cypress’s thoughts on death, killing and the undead. Cypress established that he doesn’t really worry about killing, because these things were attacking him so basically it’s fair game. With the undead, he takes a more PC approach. Looking more at how the cultures and customs of the body view it. So if the “host” body would’ve been upset, then it is in fact upsetting, but if they are pragmatic about it, then it’s just another thing to deal with. Rae establishes that the undead are kind of gross to her, but really no more than another type of creature. There are snakes, there are dogs, there are zombies, and there are fish, you know, creature classifications.
Mechanic talk
After a brief reminder that party members will not be the only ones in the world to ever use Magic Missile, and that it very well could be used on them, the group decides to go with the D&D 5e stock rule that the missile always hit the target, no matter what, and do not need attack rolls.
Magic Missile (Players Handbook pg 257)
“You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.”
"I once joked to a colleague that a true horror film would begin with a world overrun by the zombies, who find themselves having to fend off a sudden outbreak of the living. Imagine these poor groaning shufflers attempting to wage war against faster, healthier creatures capable of organization and strategy, able to build tools that would appear to be nothing short of magic to their simple, moldering brains"
-Dr. Albert Marconni –David Wong (Jason Pargin), “What The Hell Did I Just Read”
🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿Chapter 6: Frog O’clock
🎲🗡️🔔✨🌿Chapter 6: Frog O’clock
We open right where we left off. We are panicking a little bit here. Ari is hurt and sitting legs spread, with her back to a wall. All the sudden the crypt full of loot is feeling maybe just a bit too much like a tomb.
“It’s fine, lets just go back to that mechanical room, and eat lunch, we can rest up. I’m sure Ari will feel better after some Jerky!”
So back in our friendly old mechanical room, we sit down again to munch, chat, meditate, and heal. In crunchy terms, Ari uses both hit dice for the day, Cypress uses his one hit dice for the day, and the spell casters each decide to recover a spell slot, so later we’ll have to resolve the fun homebrew mechanic for that.
After eating we decide to head back into the crypt and see what there is to steal.
I guess that's why? To be honest with you, reader, i don’t know why they went back into the room that almost killed them either, but i only control the world, not the players.
Once back in the room, everyone immediately starts second guessing and debating what to do. Cypress wants to take the spiral staircase up to the surface and go shopping without Devin (rude). Ari wants to take the spiral staircase down to the deep catacombs and try to find a pith helmet and some jodhpurs to go play explorer. Rae kinda wants to go back through the first pipe towards Bostra and maybe see Devin (thank you) or the new pipe and see where it leads. Sorin wants to go anywhere, anywhere, anywhere else but here. It turns out that churches, even church basements, make him uncomfortable. He is a man of science! He makes glittery lights and sparks in his hands at will, none of this religious mumbo jumbo. Oh and the Shadow climbing over the wall wants to feast on the flesh of the innocent.
Oh yeah, there is a Shadow climbing over the wall. It’s doing it in that disturbing horror movie jerky spider wall crawl thing that Brooke especially hates.
“Could we run away, or is it like pursuing us?” Sorin does a quick Knowledge Check.
It is in fact, staring with cold precision and Sorin with dark hollow eye sockets that they seem to shout ‘locked on target.’ I will however point out that you are right by the grate to this room, and you know that the chain pull is right across the hall, so you could run out and close it in here.
“Wait, it’s a Shadow, won’t it just slip through”
Well…
Four faces turn up to the ceiling. “Oh what, you really thought we were gonna be that dumb? huh? oH yEaH gUyS lEts WaLk OuT hErE wHeRe It’S sAfe. Whhaaaa… oh yeah you had it all lined up! Think you’re so clever huh!?” Pfft
Cypress turns away from yelling at me through the fourth wall, and casts Sacred Flame, but this Shadow is clever and was watching before. It dodges fast to the side, the faint outline of its teeth in a predatory grin.
Ari has to make a roll to see if she is Frightened by seeing one of these Shadows again. Ari is not afraid. Ari is pissed. Her bowstring THWANGs as she sends an arrow out, pinning the shadow to the wall. Its body separates, pulling its dark flesh out of the wall and around the arrow that pierced it. The Shadow will not be pinned down and stopped from tasting wizard flesh.
Sorin casts Firebolt and it flies true. The bolt strikes in the main body of the Shadow, the flames begin to dance and expand burning outwards. The Shadow is torn in half as the Shadow rips itself apart, straining its arms and preparing to lunge at the wizard.
Rae runs underneath as it jumps, hitting it in the chest with an uppercut of her staff. The Shadow looks faint, barely there at all, but it uses Rae’s hit to carry it through on its leap.
The Shadow lands on Sorin with 1HP left, and sinks its sharp needle-like fangs into his shoulder, sucking his strength into itself.
Cypress reaches to his belt to try out his new short sword. He swings, but the tip of the blade catches in the unfamiliar scabbard and the swing goes wide as the Shadow ducks around Sorin’s neck keeping its teeth buried in his flesh. Ari readies a dagger, and pauses to look Sorin in the eye “Hold. Very Still." She punches out with the dagger to slice this undead leach of her companion.
“Waitwaitwait!” Sorin’s eyes fill with panic as he involuntarily jerks away from the knife, “I’ve got this, really!” Sorin takes a deep breath and stands up straight, flinching as the Shadow’s dark teeth reposition in his muscles. Sorin concentrates on the air. Focusing on its different parts, he moves his hand palm-up next to his face. He reaches out his mind and shifts reality, casting Firebolt right by his ear, and directly in the Shadow’s face. The Shadow erupts in a howl, as the flames do 1 damage to Sorin causing a minor burn around his neck. “I vote we get out of this room. I don’t know about anyone else, but it just seems like this room is just a lot right now.”
Cypress still wants to go upstairs to get supplies.
“You do know you’ll get arrested and just sent back here right?”
“No, remember I’m only unofficially arrested, officially I’m fine,” Cypress points out.
“Try explaining that to the Constable as they arrest you,” someone points out.
“I have my official paperwork of being unofficial though,” Cypress points out.
“What about us? We can’t go up there, and I for one don’t want to just sit here fighting Zombies and waiting for you to come back and heal me.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna want to go back to getting Thugs,” Sorin pipes in, “the sooner I’m done here the sooner I can get back to class, so…”
Cypress considers for a minute and realizes just how hard it will be to find this party in the maze of sewer tunnels once he separates from them. After a moment of contemplating how bad that would actually be, he remembers that his goddess did specifically want him to be joined with them, “Okay, yeah, let’s go.”
As the group walks back into the tunnels, Sorin takes a moment to dismantle the Alarm spell in the entrance to the crypt. It doesn’t get his spell slot back, but it's worth it to keep some components. As the party starts to head north up the hall someone points out that they left the grate to the Crypt open.
“So?”
“Well… didn’t that one that attacked Sorin try to escape out into the tunnels? Shouldn’t we maybe not let the tunnels we’re working in get, ya know, flooded with Zombies?”
Everyone agrees this is actually pretty sensible logic and Rae goes back into the mechanical room to lower the Grate back to the floor. With that out of the way, we all head north with Ari taking point as usual, and everyone actually deciding to move quietly for a change.
Ari stops and shushes everyone. She motions and they all flatten along the wall. She creeps forward, away from the group to the opening of a large room, and stealthily peers in. Inside is a large dark room. The ceiling raises here in a pyramid-like step pattern. The room has several small nooks and corners, many of which have chests and barrels. In the middle of the floor is a large puddle that seems to be coming from a large leaking cask in one corner. and in the puddle there is something…
Giant Frogs are medium sized beasts with an average height of around five feet, and an average width of about four feet. They have a twenty foot standing jump with no running start and a flat footed vertical leap of ten feet. They have an armor class of 11, and can bite hard with an average damage of 4, and they’ve been known to attempt to swallow any creatures smaller than themselves.
There are two Giant Frogs in this room, and they are humping each other.
Ari creeps back to the team and describes this beast with two backs.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Pfft, are they even going to notice us?”
“I really don’t want to fight frogs. I like frogs.” Rae interjects. “I mean they've gotta be distracted yeah? We can just sneak around them, right?”
Reader, i don't want to recap this entire discussion for you. It was way too much in person, and i’ve already been accused of making these summaries too long. The very short version is that no one could decide what to do for like 10 minutes, and someone kept looking up videos of frogs having sex. Then Sorin decided to use the Command spell to try to get them to go away. Someone else asked what we’d been talking about the whole time and i got frustrated. Sorin went to use the Command spell to get them to go away down the hall, and then was told to get them to fight each other, and wait no, just make one leave and the other one will follow, and no wait make them- and the whole thing started up again.
The entire team is now bickering in the tunnel, and as they debated about what to do an interesting social phenomena happens, It’s one we’ve all been in before. One person starts off patiently whispering, then another whispers a bit louder to cut them off, then the first has to stop whispering and just talk, drown them out and go back to their point. Then a third person talks a bit louder to add a new point. Soon we’re talking at a normal volume, and then at a higher volume. And now, Team Rocket over here is shouting in the bushes as the DM and the giant polliwogs here are staring at them, and looking back and forth at each other.
The Frogs have stopped their rutting, and are now looking at Team Rocket over here very intensely. In fact one looks angry, swollen, and red.
If you are wondering to yourself “is that the male or the female that is getting horny-denial-sex-rage” well i have some disconcerting news for you. They are both males! That’s right these are the mythical creatures you heard so much about in 2017! I never thought i'd say this, but Alex Jones was right. There is something in the sewers, the city of Nibiru added something to the water and it turned the firggin’ frogs gay!
Fed up with all of this bickering, Raelle dashes into the room and Swings full force at the angry red Frog. The Frog jumps back and ribbits out a challenging war cry, the kind of cry only made by a vulnerable and hurt Frog, who is so sexually frustrated that he practically has tadpoles bursting out of his ears. Yeah ok, that’s a good enough sentence to go with, Roll Initiative!
Ari draws her bow and gives Rae ye-olde-covereing-firee-pew-pew-pew, hitting the red Frog in the leg and the arrow sinks deep enough to stop it from jumping away.
Sorin gives up on any clever ideas, and with a dejected sigh lets out a Firebolt, sizzling the skin on the back of the green Frog.
The green Frog opens its wide squishy maw and wraps it around Rae’s bicep, clearly trying to break it down into swallow-able bits. As Rae turns to deal with this pain, the red Frog latches on to her other arm and the two frogs play a truly terrifying game of tug-of-elf.
Cypress runs into the room swinging for the fences. He knocks the red Frog back, smashing in the forehead and forcing its jaw off the monk with a SPLAT.
Rae swings her staff at the green Frog. The Giant Frog lets go to dodge, but at least now she is free to really go at it. Rae Rea-leases (teehee) some of her stored Ki, and lets out a Flurry of Blows… and misses. Rae you did say you didn’t really want to fight frogs, um, are you even tr- The second blow lands hard in the face of the green frog, popping it’s eye in a gusher-burst of bloody-nightmare-fuel. Ok, sorry to have doubted you Rae.
Ari lets loose another arrow and Rae hears a slippery squishy SPLOOSH as the arrow sinks through the already damaged forehead of the red Frog into his brain as it tries to move in for another elf-snack. It THUDs to the floor. Sorin raises his hand and sights down his arm-barrel. His Firebolt flies out and lands in the belly of the green Frog. The smell of French cuisine fills the chamber as a sizzling crater slowly consumes the frog. Turning healthy wet skin into slimy drippy charred—yeah actually i’m good for today on describing nasty stuff, imagine it had cotton candy stuffing, that’s easier on the eyes then sizzling wound-pus.
Well, the Giant Frogs are dead. How's everyone feeling?
Rae lays down on the floor emotionally exhausted.
That good, huh?
As Rae lays there contemplating her friendships, her companions loot the room.
Ari finds a plain brown leather glove, a plain brown leather glove, oh and a plain brown leather glove, all for the left hand.
Sorin cracks open a crate to reveal (and take) a couple arrows, and a lucky four leaf clover.
Cypress opens a barrel and finds it mostly empty except for two small painted figures of rabbits, each are some kind of metal casting on a 1 inch base (that’s 30 liters in metric) and are hand painted in natural colors.
Sorin looks at the large barrel laying on its side atop two vertical barrels and leaking onto the floor. He decides that it is a good idea to open the barrel that is leaking onto the floor, just to open it right up and… A bunch of water rushes out as he pulls the planks off. Our little wizard now feels like a foot in a wet sock, only all over.
The pool of water splashes up Raelle’s sandals as she lays on the floor reminding her to get up. She walks over and scoops some of the Giant Frog eye ichor into her empty bottle (gross). Then she remembers she wanted to check out the red bricks she saw on top of one of the boxes. She walks over to find everyone examining the now-familiar red bricks, and taking a look at the wall there. She pokes her head into the crate and finds a DM Hint (a special item to be redeemed either at that moment, or at the start of the next session, a literal hint from the DM about something going on, something overlooked, a good idea, etc.). After this Rae helps take the bricks out of the wall here to reveal a Thug passageway.
Rough gravel floor? Check. Wooden-braced walls? Check. Running at an angle to the sewers? Check. Yup, this is one of the Thug gang’s.
Ari holds the group back and carefully checks the opening here for traps. Certainly there aren’t any here; she and her companions proceed quietly down the hall. After a moment they come to a T junction in the path. There is some small whispering as the group decides which way to go. North, or south? For reasons that i cannot remember, 6 days later, everyone agrees to head north.
Ari’s head is on a swivel. She looks up. She looks left. She looks right. She steps forward. She falls several feet into a pit.
If only she had looked down! She would’ve noticed that the gravel and pebbles in front of her were just painted on a canvas drop cloth.
I was gonna type ‘with her cheeks turning red with embarrassment’ but i realized, maybe Tieflings don’t do that…
With her horns turning red with embarrassment, Ari looks up the hole at her friends. “So um, look out, there’s a hole here.”
Sorin reaches a hand down to help the rogue, but Ari feels the need, the need for redemption. And, in a couple quick jumps, Ari parkours herself out of the hole. Sorin’s hand grazes against horn as Ari pinballs back and forth and out of the trap.
With that out of the way, everyone carefully hugs the wall, and steps corner-to-corner around the hole, helping Cypress with where to step as he is the only one who can’t see well in all this darkness. The party heads up the hallway, comes to a turn, and right beyond that, a brick wall.
Ari is cautious once more, and carefully checks for traps. Phew, none. Then she carefully tries to remove a single brick to peer into the room like a little half-demon glory hole.
Suddenly, a surprise nat’ one hits Ari in the back and she stumbles into the wall, and into this new room in a shower of red bricks.
Here we take a brief pause for bathroom breaks and a change of maps on the table.
Okay folks, these new maps are placed and we are all set to continue with Ari falling into a new brightly lit room.
We find ourselves in a new, and much bigger, mechanical room.
This new Mechanical room is almost four times the size of the others we’ve been in. The walls are covered in gears and charms. Levers point to complicated arcane symbols, and dials on pipes indicate letters and shapes instead of numbers. The room is well lit with torches in brackets high on the walls. The torches burn with a warm orange light and seem not to drip or sputter at all. As we look closer we see that the flames are burning inward. The tips of the flames curling down and back towards the middle. There are grates on the floor and there are three chain pulls, two in the corners and one against the far wall.
The room has one oddity. As if it has a large section in the middle that is just walls. The room forms a square letter O with these walls blocking off the middle as if some kind of large pillar. In various places around this room are chests, boxes and barrels all next to large wood and stone pieces of equipment. Some stacked like they were just dropped, and some seemingly organized as some type of storage.
As Ari gets up from her comfy little brick-bed, Cypress steps into the room and rolls a high perception check. He hears wet THWACKing footsteps echoing in the distance from down the tunnels. He quickly checks the surroundings and rushes off to the nearest archway. A quick check with his ears and he can hear the footsteps fading fast. He steps into the corridor and around the corner, checking again, but too late. The footsteps are too far away and the only sound left is faint echoes that could be going anywhere, to anywhere, or from anywhere.
Now that they are in the room, of course, everyone wants to loot all these crates, boxes, chests, and barrels.
As first into the room, Ari claims first rites and walks up to the first crate. She has a bit of a hard time getting the lid off this one, gawd if only she had something to get more leverage, these crates can be so hard to pry open. Inside is a crowbar. Ari lets out an audible “Hells yeah!”
Next to her Cypress opens up a chest on the floor next to a large stone countertop full of technical looking things. He cracks it open and finds a stash of 8 Scrolls of Mending (single use scrolls of the spell Mending, see the Table talk notes at the end). Sorin comes further into the room and this time finds a barrel that isn’t leaking. He cracks the lid off the top and his eyes glitter with steel. Inside is a bushel of 3 Short Swords.
“Hey Rae, you want a sword?”
“Sure! Wait.” Sarah checks the character sheet. “Yeah, I’m proficient, I’ll take one.” Rae comes over to the wizard taking the proffered sword and then uses it to pry the lid off the box next to her. She sees a wonderful bounty of 30 packed rations. Jerky, bread, cheese, oat bars, and even a pudding cup with a heart sharpied on it. She starts stuffing them into her pack with the greed of those who grew up often not knowing where the next meal was coming from.
Ari makes her way to the dark little alcove at the top of the room and looks at the heavy wooden chest there. No lock, must be free. With a casual knife flick, she opens it to find a beautiful necklace there. It has a pendant in the shape of a small ball of flames, and hanging from it are 3 faintly glowing beads. Ari has found a Necklace of Fireballs (You can use an action to detach a bead and throw it up to 60 feet away. When it reaches the end of its trajectory, the bead detonates as a 3rd-level fireball spell [save DC 15]).
Sorin is fascinated by the large barrel laying on its side atop two vertical barrels in the corner. This time he decides to play it safe and checks for a spigot. He turns it and slowly runs his hand in the stream. This time only splashing his toes, and not his all-of-him. He carefully licks his fingers tasting the mystery sewer liquid. . .
“Good news everyone!” He motions over to his friends, “it’s just water so we can fill our canteens and skins.”
After everyone gets all they’re water supplies full of fresh delicious sewer water, Cypress points to the walls in the middle of the room.
”Do those bricks look red to anyone else?”
And just like that, the looting turns to vandalism.
Cypress and Sorin start pulling bricks out of the wall, revealing a tiny store room in between these walls. Sitting in the middle of this darkness is a simple black chest. Waving Ari over, Sorin asks her to check it for traps.
“With a roll of two, I can definitely say there are no traps.”
As he opens it, the trap springs out, cutting Sorin’s hand. Ow. He looks down into… an empty black box.
Ari takes a closer look.. and pulls away the small bit of canvas drop cloth painted to look like the bottom of a black wooden chest.
Bellow is a small collection of ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕝𝕥𝕙 ℙ𝕠𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤. Fantastic, we’ve been needing these lately.
Sorin starts passing them out the party, and Ari grabs his hand as he passes the last one out. She looks closely at the “༺քօȶɨօռ օʄ ʟɛֆֆɛʀ ɦɛǟʟɨռɢ༻” and notices something different in this script. She takes a second deciphering the Thieves’ Cant mixed into the letters on the label. “Wait Sorin, this one is a poison.”
Correct Ari, this clever little bottle is a Potion of Poison (This concoction looks, smells, and tastes like a potion of healing or other beneficial potion. However, it is actually poison).
With that everyone takes a second to pull up a now-empty box or barrel and gather around to decide what comes next.
And so we end our session, midafternoon on the 29th of Mirtul, planning what the next steps are. Not as much action this time, not as much fighting, but we found some more Thug tunnels, discovered a lot of the map, and certainly got a lot of loot.
"It was a terrible idea. Juvenile. But, sometimes you need a cheap laugh”
-Techton –Wildbow [J. C. McCray], “Worm: Chapter 25.1”
Table talk:
Magic Scrolls how do they work?
Well, we are basically going to adapt the D&D 5e mechanic in a way that anyone can use them. So, if it is a spell you know already, you use the scroll and do not use a spell slot. If you are used to magic (a caster class), but it is not a spell you know, you will have a casting penalty. If you are not used to magic at all the penalty will be higher, but still cast-able. The more you use these scrolls, the less of a penalty there is, and if you use the same spell a high number of times, you can learn it outright.
I gave Sarah(Rae) the stats for their new short sword.
It came up in play that we haven’t done a lot of character work and character role building. So the next session will be light on action, and heavy on personal stuff. I’m cooking up some DM bs, so strap in.
