“Corbin, Inc.”, Session #20

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:

• Alric Redbeard, the Spine-Breaker (PC)
• Gabby the Cabin Girl, the Pirate Without Fear (PC)
• Needles, Climber Of Trees (PC)
• Posy, the Cat-folk Who Goes For The Eyes (PC)
• Rolf, Wolf-Wooer (PC)
• The Knight of the Blood Oath, aka TKotBO, aka Corbin, acting leader and header Presser Of Buttons (PC)
• Pai, cat-folk cleric who only comes out to take credit (NPC henchman)
• Dean, Roman, Jack, and John, shieldbearers, laborers, goat-keepers (NPC hirelings)
• One surviving cave goat, terrified entirely out of its wits

Not appearing in this session:

• D’arth Loathing, in hiding (PC)
• Mississippi Jedadiah Walker, retired (PC)
• Tantric McSwayze, dicing with demons (PC)

What Happened:

When we last saw our heroes, they were a couple of spirals down a huge staircase, standing in front of a pair of double doors. They had discovered a group of wolves set out as watchdogs, and Rolf was attempting to communicate with them in their own language, loosely speaking. The resulting ruckus had drawn the attention of a dwarf on the other side of the doors, who had poked his head out and introduced himself as Dag Stoneminer. The party had recognized this as a name from one of their long-standing quests — something about recovering a dragon statue. Just as Rolf gathered himself for a pounce and tackle — the preferred diplomacy method employed by dog-folk — several distractions occurred all at once.

First, McSwayze’s bound demon, “Etrigan”, shouted something amounting to “Finally, my chance!” It tackled McSwayze, and the two vanished in a burst of hellfire. (GM note: Missing player. Best thing about Dungeon Fantasy is the abrupt entrances and exits the characters go through.) For all the party knew, this was just something that happens to demonologists, leprechaun or not. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it, so they gave a collective group shrug and returned to the matter at hand.

Second, almost simultaneously, there was the familiar sound of someone getting shivved from above and behind the group. “You guys didn’t need this lizard-man, did you?” Needles called, opening his hand to reveal himself in the light of his enchanted glow-stone. While catching up to the group, he had noticed the one surviving lizard-man archer from the earlier encounter, lurking and waiting for a good shot. The party hadn’t noticed in the earlier trip down the stairs, but there was a gigantic chain draped across the center of the spiral. Its purpose was never determined, but it was wide enough for a nimble person to walk on. The archer had avoided the party by crawling out into the darkness over the abyss, only to lose the game of stealth to Needles.

Third, there was a reaction to all the hubbub, from what appeared to be the bottom of the huge stairwell. Needles, from his excellent vantage point, and Alric, with his barbarian-trained senses, both noticed dozens of pairs of eyes suddenly open and reflecting light from far below. It’s hard to tell if the whatever-they-were were reacting to the falling lizard-man corpse, or the howling of the guard wolves, or the clattering reaction of the shield-wall to McSwayze’s uncanny disappearance, but whatever the reason, they knew they had visitors.

Finally, in response to all of this, Stoneminer pulled his door shut. Even from an extreme distance, Needles heard the telltale sound of traps being engaged, and called out to the others to A) don’t touch the door! and B) wait for me!

The warriors formed a line facing in the downstairs direction, while Needles hurried to inspect the door, finding and disabling a trap. In their hurry, they applied a siege stone to the door, which Alric activated with the hammer side of his over-sized weapon. The doors blew open with their latching mechanisms destroyed. The party hustled inside, closing the freely-swinging doors and instructing the hirelings to hold them shut.

The room inside was unremarkable but for two things. They found a dwarf-sized bedroll and other signs that Stoneminer had been camping there, and they found a weird stone door. A rapid search of Stoneminer’s belongings turned up little of interest and nothing of value. The door was more interesting.

It was made of stone, with no obvious hardware. There was a seam down the center, vertically, which seemed to indicate that it should slide back into the wall on either side to open. It displayed two runes, both stylized arrows, with one pointing up, and the other pointing down. The “down” arrow-rune was glowing red, and emitting a quiet, periodic bell noise: “ding… ding… ding…” As they watched, the series of rings ended, and the glow faded away.

Accordingly, the party declared that this mystery was an elevator. TKotBO pressed the “up” rune, which lit up green. After a short wait, the doors slid open, revealing a smaller room. The walls and floor seemed to be made of the same stone as the location dungeon, though there was a thin brass line on the floor across the doorway.

The mutiny started when TKotBO started to lead the party into the room. “No way,” Jack and John, the hireling laborers, declared. “That thing’s a disintegrator! We’re not going in there! It scares the goat!” It took some amount of talking to convince them of the necessity, but in the end, everybody crowded inside.

The door closed. There were no bell sounds, though there was some quiet instrumental music with no visible source. Everyone got a sick feeling in their stomachs, prompting the cave goat to voice a protest. No one disintegrated. The doors opened onto darkness.

The party reacted with caution. Jack and John changed their tune; now, they refused to leave the “elevator” chamber. TKotBO stationed Dean and Roman to hold the door, both in a tactical sense, and literally: nobody wanted to see their only available exit close and lock itself behind them. The party peered into the darkness, able to see nothing, until Gabby reported that she thought she could see some kind of tiny, multi-colored reflections, hanging at about head-height, several dozen yards away.

Rolf flung a lit torch ahead of them. The cavern they were looking at turned out to be extremely large, much larger than they could see. While the floor appeared to be natural stone, like any other cave floor, it supported unexpected life. They could just see, at the edge of the light, the beginnings of an underground forest of sturdy, low-growing trees. The “fruit” on the trees was faceted gemstones, which were reflecting the torchlight.

“The forest that bears gems as fruit!” The party had heard about this legend some time ago, and they were ready to check it out. Motivated by a burning need for negotiable assets, Gabby took off at a sprint, not even bothering to draw her weapons. Alric hung back, keeping an eye out for danger. Every other party member went ninja-mode, slipping stealthily into the shadows.

At Gabby’s approach, the other occupants of the cavern showed their faces. A pair of bipedal dinosaurs stepped out of the darkness at the edge of the woods, hissing and showing impressive teeth. They drew the attention of the stealthy party members, who moved to attack them.

That’s when the other ‘raptor came running out from the side, using its incredible speed to move from full cover to close combat with Gabby in a single second!

Do you have any idea how satisfying it is, as a GM, to “clever girl” the party with an actual velociraptor? Even for a second?

It looked good on paper, but the plan wasn’t good enough. Up close, it because clear that the dinosaurs were undead. Needles chopped the head off one, and Rolf bashed in the skull of the other. This left the one chasing Gabby, but it made the mistake of turning its back on Alric, who sprang from his position at the door and gave it the axe. For her part, Gabby put a little zig into her sprint, evaded the velociraptor’s claws, and continued on.

At that point, Needles discovered that the velociraptors weren’t the real threat, as the undead Tyrannosaurus Rex roared and picked itself up from its resting place. He quickly ascended a nearby tree to assess the value of the jewel-fruit, while its charge led it harmlessly under him… and right into the middle of the rest of the party.

The T. Rex was surprisingly quick and agile for such a large zombie-beast. Alric used his animal magnetism to mostly keep the beast’s attention, while the others used wolf-pack tactics on it. It would charge Alric, get distracted by attacks to its rear, circle around, and then get distracted by Alric once more.

Posy put several arrows into its eye-sockets, but, lacking eyes, it didn’t suffer too badly from it. (When she switched to fire arrows later in the fight, though…) As it became clear that they were facing undead dinosaurs, she called upon Pai, a cleric and her not-so-loyal follower, to come out and use his holy powers on them, but he declined, staying under cover inside the elevator room.

Gabby jumped onto the dinosaur’s leg as it rushed past. Over the course of the fight, she struggled to a position at its neck, where she clung while dropping a rope. By this time, Needles had come out of his tree (pockets filled with gemstones, naturally) to attack the T. Rex from behind. Seeing the rope and understanding her purpose, Needles dropped his weapon, grabbed the rope, and climbed up the dinosaur’s other side. This put one swashbuckler on either one of the dinosaur’s shoulder blades, each holding one end of a rope that was looped around the front of its neck.

Kinda like that, but with better fashion sense. And swords.

(GM Note: This fulfills the requirements of the standard “Ride A Dinosaur” quest that’s offered once per campaign.)

They used this leverage to force the creature to turn, giving Alric a window of opportunity. He rushed to take advantage of it, hacking repeatedly into the dinosaur’s spine, killing it. Or, at least, given its undead status, making it lie down for a while.

Pai, the cat-folk cleric and Posy’s not-so-loyal follower, finally decided that he could come out and bring the holiness to the undead at this point.

During the fight, both Rolf and Alric were injured to the point of rolling for unconsciousness. They both crushed a healing gem and kept on going. Pai deigned to help patch up the other minor bumps and bruises.

Then, it was time for the harvest. Needles had already discovered, while up the tree, that the largest fruits seemed to be quartz. Rather than worry about the details, they just set to shaking the trees and putting whatever fell into sacks. Everyone was loaded to capacity, even the reluctant cave goat.

Being early to the feast, Gabby had her pockets filled and started getting bored before the others were finished. She went back to examine the elevator, asking why they hadn’t seen any sign of the dwarf. Discussion among the players, if not the characters, turned up a point of interest: they had seen one arrow-rune glowing in Stoneminer’s wake, and then they had pressed the other one.

With this point in mind, Gabby pressed the “down” rune, the one that had originally seen glowing, and entered the elevator room alone. Again, the doors closed and she fell mildly ill. Then, the doors opened to show a large, finely-built lobby, decorated in rich marble. There was a good-sized decorative statue in the middle of the room, and there, huddled behind it as if to hide from something further in, was Dag Stoneminer, clutching a cubit-long carved dragon statuette. Hearing the doors, he turned to look at Gabby, with terror obvious in his eyes.

“Shhh!” he whispered, “you’ll wake the dragon!

---

End of “Season One”.

---

GM Note: And that’s where we left it: on a cliffhanger. I joked that when we come back to DF, we’ll start with a fade-in saying “Six months later…”

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“Corbin, Inc.”, Session #18

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:

• Alric Redbeard, Northern barbarian and handler of nature (PC)
• Gabby the Cabin Girl, the pirate-swashbuckler who still will not DIE! (PC)
• Needles, thief-swashbuckler and wooer of witches (PC)
• Posy, cat-folk scout and archer, poker of eyes (PC)
• Rolf, all-singin’, all-cuddlin’, all-bushwhackin’ dog-folk knight — no, seriously, did I ever tell you about the time… (PC)
• Pai, cat-folk cleric who follows Posy around, making snide comments, and occasionally healing someone in exchange for tuna (NPC henchman)
• Höss, strong, silent brute (NPC hireling)

Not appearing in this session:

• D’arth Loathing, home nursing a headache (PC)
• Mississippi Jedadiah Walker, polishing the bar (PC)
• Tantric McSwayze, reading the names of demons (PC)
• The Knight of the Blood Oath, aka TKotBO, aka Corbin, holy warrior off observing the taking of vows (PC)

Rumors Gathered:

Alric heard some stories in the inn:

• The dwarf prince Theoden was famous for his wealth, even among dwarves. They say his crypt is somewhere in the ruins around Tembladera. His greatest treasure was his golden crown, which they say was buried with him.
• Someone claims she tried to walk up to the monastery of the guys in black pajamas, but ended up losing a fight with a monkey. She says it must have been rabid, or possessed, since monkeys don’t usually attack humans. (Halflings, maybe, if food is scare.)

Needles, too:

• Some zombies are just dead guys walking, but some of them can be contagious. When they bite your buddy, you’ve only got seconds before your buddy turns in to one of them and starts clawing at your throat. Keep a sharp eye out!

And Gabby, as well:

• You hear a story about a fae witch who lives in the mountains, searching for a warrior fit to be her husband. She’ll only tell the details to one sworn to secrecy. They say she’s both rich and beautiful, but even so, few will take up the challenge once they hear the details.

After hours, Needles hung out on the shady side of the street:

• Sergeant Zim has made it understood that anyone with information concerning the Fiddlers Three needs to share that information. He offers a reward of 50 copper to those who come forth, and a noose for those who do not.

What Happened:

Alric and Rolf managed to avoid falling ill after their trip through the bowels of some kind of huge abomination last session. Rolf found out about the “Inspired Creation” spell, and spent the week stripped to the waist, slaving over a hot forge. When he was done, he had created himself a new, better morningstar. Alric and the others, for their part, spent the week in the inn, drinking. There was much grumbling about the way D’arth Loathing had made off with the party’s maps of the dungeons.

With TKotBO and Jed out of the picture, the party had a lot of ideas and little direction. After discussing the merits of such plans as “hunt giant apes” and “hang around outside the gate and mug everybody who comes out”, they fell to talking about the rumor Gabby had heard, something about a rich witch looking for a husband. As it happens, most of the party was seeking matrimony (with a rich witch). Finally, they decided they would skip the dungeon this week, and instead head into the mountains to search for the witch.

After gathering up supplies for the journey, the party headed out the gate on the morning of the ninth day of the month of Augustine. About a quarter-mile beyond the gate, they observed a cloaked and hooded figure, standing ominously by the road. Aside from loosening their weapons in their scabbards, the party took no particular notice. When they came within hailing distance, the creature called out to “Sir Alric” (causing the barbarian to look around, wondering who the new guy with the cool name was) and tossed a packet of maps at the feel of Freya, Alric’s battle-cat.

“I am D’arth Guffin,” he explained, revealing the face of a corpse-eater under his hood, “cousin to the one you know as D’arth Loathing. I carry his greetings, I return your valuable property, and I would take a place among your number, if you go seeking adventure.” He opened his cloak a bit, revealing a broadsword on his hip. The party shrugged, and Alric pointed the newcomer towards the end of the caravan.

They headed into the mountains, seeking the steep roads. On the first night, Alric found a secure, if not especially comfortable, campsite. The mounts and hirelings were set up in a concealed location, while the main party members bedded down in a small cave. The roof of the cave was low, forcing the larger party members to crawl, and the humans to crouch. In its favor, there was a source of water, and a convenient shaft in the rock to carry smoke away, and they had excellent visibility on the path in both directions.

Even so, during Rolf’s watch, the party found themselves under attack. Guffin had put his bed in a chamber apart from the others, to avoid complaints about the stench. While Rolf was distracted with a bit of dog-folk grooming, a group of halfling zombies walked out of Guffin’s chamber. Three tackled the dog-folk knight, while another three moved to silence the sleeping others.

Rolf’s howl quickly brought the others awake, and battle was joined. While the wrestlers rolled around on the floor, Gabby and Posy punctured the heads of the loose zombies. The keener-eared party members heard a sharp “pop!” from Guffin’s room. With some assistance from Needles and Alric, Rolf shook the zombies off just in time to come face-to-face with a howling demon, also coming from Guffin’s area. The howl was calculated to freeze the marrow of mortal men, but made no impression on the hard hearts of our heroes. Finally making it off the floor, Rolf struck the demon twice with his morningstar, destroying its assumed material form.

Guffin shouted out a battle-cry and came staggering out of his room, claiming he had been surprised by the attackers. Needles gave him a close look, detecting the hint of a lie, but couldn’t tell if the corpse-eater was just covering for cowardice or had deeper motives. They returned to sleep, uninterrupted until morning.

The next day’s travel was uneventful, with one exception. A turn in the path brought some rotten rock into view. Alric turned to warn the others to be quiet, lest they bring down an avalanche. “What is it?” Gabby called out to him.

Everyone besides Gabby noticed the house-sized boulder her voice had set to falling. Alric knocked Gabby down, to her outrage, saving her from near certain doom, while the others dove for safety. No one was hurt, but the rock slide destroyed the path behind them. Now, like it or not, they were dedicated to the trip.

After a couple of days of travel, Alric noticed that they had reached the summit of their path. In the distance, he could see signs of jungle at the foot of the mountains. He also saw a good-sized hut, walking on three chicken-like legs, up a cliff-face on the far side of a huge chasm. The witch!

The bad news was, it would take at least a day to climb down into the chasm and back up the other side. There was no way they could catch the obviously-magical hut.

No way, that is, until Needles started rummaging around in his pack. As the party’s only arcane spell-caster, he had inherited Jed’s pack of contingency plans, including a scroll of Flight, good for just ten minutes. Encouraged by the others, he quickly read the scroll and flew off to catch the hut.

After an acrobatic landing, Needles met the owner of the hut, a tiny, wizened old lady wrapped in a wool blanket. When questioned, she explained that she was the rick, powerful, and beautiful witch of the rumor, but she labored under a curse. Until it was lifted, she was forced to wander in this form. The curse could be lifted, but she could only give the details to one sworn to secrecy. Needles immediately gave his oath to remain silent. She asked if he would accept a geas to keep him silent. Not so immediately, he agreed.

After laying the curse on him, the witch explained: a demon named Rabiel had stolen a chess set, of a unique make, long ago. The curse could only be lifted if all the pieces were recovered.

Needles announced that he was the man for the job, and flew back to the party. When questioned, he struggled against the witch’s geas… and easily slipped through its restrictions. He told them everything.

Clearly, it would take research to solve this problem. Darn shame they didn’t have a demonologist or something handy. Shelving that quest for the moment, the party returned to “Plan A”:  hunting the wily giant ape.

Moving at a forced march, the party quickly descended to the valley floor and set up a base camp. Posy took to the jungle, searching for spore, assisted by Alric. After a couple of days, she located a small band of giant apes:  one huge silverback and his three smaller mates.

“Rolf has a plan,” the dog-folk knight announced, as the party peered at the giant ape band from a place of concealment behind a nearby ridge-line. He stood up, set his shield, started his morningstar spinning, and started trotting down the slope, heading straight for the lead ape, barking at the top of his lungs. His plan was to walk up to the leader and hit him in the groin with a mace-head on a chain until all the apes acknowledged that Rolf was the new leader.

Gabby didn’t see ape-hunting as a good fight for her, so she initially hung back, along with D’arth Guffin. Posy pelted the apes with broad-head arrows, aiming for skulls and eyes by preference. Rolf, followed shortly by Alric, engaged the big silverback. Needles would have, as well, but after being the first to wound the silverback he found himself suddenly overcome with remorse and depression, unable to gather the will to act.

While the leader met the heavy fighters, the females moved to flank the party. One grabbed Gabby and crushed her, delivering tremendous damage but finding herself unable to kill the cabin girl. The giant ape didn’t get a second chance, as Posy immediately blinded her and rendered her unconscious with a pair of arrows to the eyes.

In the end, the party was victorious. Pai was persuaded to leave off cleaning himself long enough to heal Gabby, saving her from a lingering death. Alric skinned the dead silverback, coming away with a 250 pound pelt to preserve. As for the females, they had all been blinded and/or knocked out, so the party applied chains and healing, in that order, to come away with three more-or-less healthy captives to sell.

Alric led the party back into the mountains, blazing a new trail back to town. This went quite smoothly, until nearly the last day on the road. While on the march, Rolf and Needles confided their misgivings about D’arth Guffin to each other. When Needles (the senior, full-fledged party member) mentioned that it might be best, all around, if Guffin never made it back to the Tembladera sewers, Rolf approached the corpse-eater and attacked!

The rest of the party stood about in confusion. Somewhat surprised, but not caught entirely unawares, Guffin defended himself and retreated, summoning the demon Rolf had destroyed once before. It again tried its terrifying scream, again to no real effect. This was evidence enough to convict him in the eyes of the party. Outnumbered and surrounded, the corpse-eater and his infernal lackey were quickly dispatched.

The party stripped the traitor and kicked his corpse into the ditch, as is their way. Comparing notes, they concluded that the attack at the camp had been organized by Guffin. Furthermore, Needles’ sudden and quickly-passing attack of depression was attributed to Guffin as well; clearly, considering the demon, he had supernatural powers of some sort. When they searched his belongings, they found poisons, and speculated that he would likely have used them on the party before returning to town empty-handed.

Once they returned to town, the party checked up on D’arth Loathing, and found him still nursing a headache. While Guffin had been a cousin, he hadn’t been a good one. He had played upon their familial relationship to get the drop on Loathing, attacking him from behind and stealing the maps.

Interpretation, pt 2: “We must consult the bones…”

“Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit” – “Man proposes, but God disposes” — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Players don’t tell the GM what their PC does, they say what their PC tries.  The dice say what the PC actually does.

You can see this clearly demonstrated in the combat rules. Alric might set out to plant his axe in the forehead of some overwrought ogre, but if Alric’s player rolls an 18, it’s the Critical Miss Table that says where that axe really ends up. It happens outside of combat, too. Will rolls, especially, get to take the controls away from the player from time to time. If someone’s interrogating Needles, and he crit fails his Will roll, he’s going to let something spill, no matter what his player claims.

The dice also take care of everything that’s below the game’s level of detail. An example from the Space Cowboys game:  Dr Nanika had just completed an examination of an unconscious patient, and hadn’t been able to determine a diagnosis. (I can’t say for certain, but I believe this was during the part of the story when they were trying to understand all the strange things that were happening due to the Zombie Plague, before they figured out there was such a thing.) In the real world, of course, this was no more than the player saying “I’ll examine him and try to figure out what’s up”, then rolling Diagnosis. In-game, Dr Nanika did her thing; just like an episode of any medical drama you care to name, she did tests and performed procedures and consulted references. After all was said and done, she came out of sickbay and announced that she was stumped. Bubba asks, “Did you check him for head wounds?”

The players turned to look at me expectantly. Nanika’s player half-reached for her dice. I pointed out that if Dr Nanika had forgotten to check for the possibility that the patient had been bopped on the head and knocked out, until the ship’s mechanic brought it up, she needed to go back to Mars University and demand a refund.

There’s a lot of games that my group could never play. We’re just not equipped. No matter how much we might enjoy watching the antics of TV doctors through the ages, we can’t talk that talk. Anything medical in our games is always going to come down to dice-rolling and hand-waving. I’m more likely to give a re-roll for the player chewing the scenery than I am for someone remembering an obscure medical factoid. (Doc throws her stethoscope to the side, rips Bubba’s shirt open, and starts beating him with a lead pipe while screaming, “Live, damn you, live! I won’t have another brother’s blood on my hands!”… yeah, that’s worth another throw of the dice.) I don’t have the knowledge to talk details, so the dice handle all that for me. Did the doc stitch the patient up correctly?  Must have, since the roll for the procedure was a success…

What I do, as the GM, is, I’ll look at the dice, and base actions and outcomes on margin of success or failure. If the roll fails by just a tiny bit, one or two, then I’ll often describe it as a bit of bad luck, or something unexpected. The wind shifts, or a cloud goes across the sun. The sneaky person suddenly has to sneeze. If it’s an extravagant failure, by 8 or 9, I’ll aim more for incompetence, as the task is just beyond the character’s skills. Instead of cutting the red wire, the character slips and nicks the blue wire. The sneaky person trips over their own feet and falls out from behind the curtain. In the same way, if someone rolls really well, I’ll try to describe the action so as to make them look that much better, cooler, more skillful. That’s how we get things like Needles knowing how to disable the trap by grabbing it’s trigger just as it’s going off.

 

Why no mandatory Sense of Duty?

At one point, early on, when I was seeing the amount of treachery and back-stabbing going on, I speculated about the possibility of making “Sense of Duty (Adventuring Companions)” a required trait. I had done such things in the past.  The “Supers 1200” game had a package of required traits just for being on the team, and a recommendation for Injury Tolerance: Damage Reduction that was so strong as to be a requirement. (“If you do not have this, you will die in the first two seconds of your first real superhuman combat.”) The “Space Cowboys” game had the loose arrangement that all PCs were either family members, or hired hands, which had consequences for what traits one could purchase. I didn’t enforce a rule that any family member had to be dedicated to the family’s well-being, but that’s how it worked out. The players enforced their own rule, there.

When it came to Dungeon Fantasy, though, all I did was speculate, the one time. I never actually instituted the requirement. I felt it went against the sandbox nature of the experiment. The idea is to give the players as much power to decide — as much agency, as they say — as possible. In the words of Uncle Al, “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”  My goal is to set up an interesting series of environments and inhabitants of those environments; how the PCs interact with those environments is entirely up to them.

So it follows that if the PCs want to find comical ways to step into the grave, they should have that freedom. If the party is fighting itself, as well as the monsters, I expect an overall drop in treasure extracted, as well as life expectancy. If the party is working well together, covering each other’s weaknesses and reinforcing each other’s strengths, using sound tactics, they’ll walk right over any monster I throw at them, and get rich doing it. I don’t need to wave the all-powerful wand of the GM to make that happen, it just emerges from the variables naturally.

One example came up, this past session, when the seasoned pros told the new recruit the tale of how Needles gave up a fortune by trying to keep the treasure to himself.  Acting alone, he was able to score 25cp, all for himself. Tax-free, you might say. If he had shared the loot, the gem likely would have been identified as magical, sold for ten thousand copper, with a share coming to 2,000cp each.

There’s a reason Jed’s new mantra is “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

In the meantime, since they can’t count on the Immutable Word Of Ghod* to say that every applicant is trustworthy, the party has again started enforcing its own rules. They’ve hammered out something resembling a charter, with the ground rules that the party operates by. Rather than hoping that every party member has uncharacteristically warm feelings for one another, they’re going to spell out expectations and police themselves. You can bet, if PC X is caught stealing from a fallen comrade, rather than honoring that comrade’s will (“I leave all my stuff to my next character…”), PC X will shortly wind up dead at the bottom of a pit, and PC X+1 will get the story of how PC X was swallowed whole by a purple worm, instead of any inheritance.

* * *

* This should go without saying, but:  They really shouldn’t trust everything I say, just ’cause I’m the GM. I’m an unreliable narrator, at best. I’m just reporting the evidence of their character’s senses. I try to shove off as many rolls as I can to the players, but I always try to roll the “what do I know” and “what do I see” rolls in secret, so I can give them false information if they crit fail. My NPCs lie. My truthful NPCs are often wrong. I just promise not to lie about the meta-game stuff, like “town is safe” and “stick to the templates”.

“Corbin, Inc.”, Session #16

 200!

This is the 200th post on the blog, and a record-breaking 16th session in the same campaign, and we not only had a full house, we also added a new player!  Big doin’s all around…

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:

• Alric Redbeard, axe-master barbarian whose hate for technology outweighed his fear of it (PC)
• D’arth Loathing, surprisingly likable corpse-eater unholy knight (PC)
• Gabby the Cabin Girl, 15-year-old ex-pirate and rapier prodigy (PC)
• Mississippi Jedadiah Walker, bard-wizard thinking deep thoughts due to his recent death and resurrection (PC)
• Needles, thief-swashbuckler and hero of songs (PC)
• Posy, cat-folk scout raining watery death for a change (PC)
• Tantric McSwayze, grumpy leprechaun demonologist, fresh off the boat from the Old World, where they stole his lucky charms… (PC)
• “Dobby”, loyal goblin who thirsts for the blood of Alric’s enemies… still in the rear with the gear (NPC henchman)
• Trevor, Jed’s loyal apprentice, lookout, and hat-passer (NPC henchman)
• Pai, cat-folk cleric who tags along with Posy (NPC henchman)
• Poutine, misen chef, shortest-lived ally ever (NPC henchman)
• Jack, son of John, the only laborer looking for work on a summer Saturn’s-Day (NPC hireling)

Rumors Gathered:

Needles was out drinking one night. In the wee hours of the morning, when the party got really merry, a dwarf got up on a table and declared that he would sing a song of his people, one that he learned from his grandfather. The song was in a particularly poetic form of Dwarven, but he explained it tells the story of how the first Kings-Under-The-Mountains took control of underground caverns from demons, binding the most powerful to do no more evil, but serve the empire until the end of days.

Alric heard some gossip around the inn.  Several people around town have seen a shadowy figure playing a flute and dancing, in and near the cemetery, near the time of sunset. Sergeant Zim is investigating, but the old folks say it’s no use: you just have to get used to that sort of goings-on when you live in Tembladera.

Gabby, too, hung around the bar listening to folks telling stories. She heard that:

• Valda Dije was a bandit and rogue in the early days of Tembladera’s settlement. He went into the dungeons, found powerful magic and vast wealth, bribed his way from the noose to a noble title, and died in his bed as an old man.
• The sages say that some dragons are as intelligent as men and know how to talk, but there’s fighting men around Tembladera that know, most of ’em are just beasts. Giant, flying, cunning devil-beasts that spit fire, or acid, or bloody lightning bolts… but, still, just beasts.

Jed and Trevor spent their mornings in the city library, chasing down references in the lore, and discovered:

• Many have reported the existence of moving rooms built by the dwarves. No one knows how they are powered.
• It is a common tactic, among the worshippers of demons, to curse an area such that creatures of hell are summoned regularly. Even if all of the demons are destroyed, if the source is not cleansed, they will soon return.
• Six-armed demons known as “peshkali” are summoned to act as immortal guardians. They exist only to defend their lairs and practice with their weapons, so only the mightiest of mortal warriors can stand against them.
  • “Hey, look at this picture. Isn’t that the thing that killed FuBar?”  
• They read an account from a generation ago, telling how a gang of madmen started robbing graves and performing unholy experiments in the laboratories of the dwarves. In time, they came to the attention of the people of Tembladera, who sent a party against them. They were caught red-handed, and wiped out at their workbenches. Interestingly, a member of the party was paid extra to make up for the loss of a ring during the melee, claiming that it was “enchanted for the sight of mine eyes where the sun shineth not”.
  • Jed:  “It’s a ring of dark vision!”  (visibly salivates)
  • Alric:  “That’s not how it sounds to me…”
• The sages of old say that a dragon has no weakness nor vulnerable point, aside possibly from vanity and greed. The only way to deal with a dragon, they said, was to bargain shrewdly.

Jed then took to the streets in the early afternoon to keep abreast of the latest news. He gathered that:

• The goblinoid tribes to the west are awful restless this season. There’s rumors that a great leader has risen to weld all the little tribes into a great horde, just like every year, but this year the rumors are different. Usually the great leader from the stories is just another orc that’s a little bigger and badder than his buddies, but this time, they say it’s a talking lion…
• Anne Page has heard of a dwarven artifact known as the Council Stone, a rock carved with runes and mounted on a shaft wall in the ruins. She would be quite generous to any who could recover it.
• The Company of the Thunder-Raven went into the dungeons and found an area lit up as bright as day. They camped out there for a couple of days, taking advantage of the situation and plundering a rich set of rooms.
  • All the PCs give voice to angry protests at how those claim-jumping mercenaries were horning in on their monster and taking away their treasure.
• A party went in to the ruins last year to search for a lost child, and they ran into a creature who they initially thought was a man, who called himself Zosar, the Worm Who Walks. Most of them didn’t survive the encounter. Since that time, some of those who didn’t survive have turned up, as particularly worm-eaten zombies.
  • D’arth expressed regret at the waste of all that perfectly good food.

Needles kept his ear to the ground on the bad side of town and got the word on the street:

• Zarcoff the Grifter has got himself a new con, calling himself Zarcoff the Magnificent and claiming he’s an alchemist. Don’t be taken in by him.
• They say there’s a merchant that you can sometimes find near the docks, goes by the name of “Fishy”. They say he’ll pay top dollar for slaves, all kinds, no questions asked.
• If you ever recover any artwork or such with fish as its subject matter, you want to bring it to Lady Abergavenny. She’s wild about that sort of thing.
• Be careful where you try to fence any orichalcum you might find, down in the ruins. Friend of mine was trying to sell a handful of bolts, had a couple of good offers, then one day, he just stops coming around. Turns up two days later on the beach, drowned. Looked like it had been two weeks, not two days. Still had his pouch on him, full of copper… but not a single scrap of orichalcum.

Finally, Tantric the leprechaun did some reading on the boat from the Old World, and learned that in the old days, the king of the dwarves would appoint princes over a particular mountain range, and those princes would appoint governors for each section of their mines. The governors each wore silver crowns. The princes wore gold crowns. They would carry these crowns to the grave.

What Happened:

The party took a couple of weeks off to recuperate and re-equip. During this time, D’arth met a new leprechaun in town, Tantric McSwayze, fresh off the boat from the Old World, and introduced him to the party. He’s a pot-bellied, grouchy demonologist who happens to stand only about one foot high. He explained that he was the kind of demonologist who studies demons so as to better defeat them, and there was absolutely no truth to any rumors that he was driven out of the Old World on that account. He went on to explain that he had left after some shadowy “they” had stolen from him. Exactly what they had stolen from him varied, ranging from his pot of gold, to his lucky charms, to the jewels of his family, but he was consistent that “they” had stolen it from him, and he was here to seek a new fortune.

The party also clarified the rules of the party charter, setting several questions. The charter provides for those lost on delves, detailed the way treasure is handled and shares calculated, and determines that until a member has made two trips, they’re on probation and get half-shares. D’arth and Tantric are thus junior members.

The party’s sometime patron, Strang, sent a message, which Alric, being the early riser of the group, picked up and passed along to Jed for doin’ the readin’ magic. The messages read:

Friends,
Surely you have noticed that you have come close to something very great in your recent delve. I have come to the knowledge that you had indeed stumbled upon one of the chambers that I asked you to search for. I urgently request that you return there as soon as you feel you are able. Truly, you must be fit and well before you attempt to gain entrance to that room. The “dwarves” that you encountered are, in fact, mechanized automatons and are not to be approached lightly. Another band of adventurers met a very grim end in that very room, with very little progress to show for it. I do not wish you to meet such an end.
To that end, Mamu will provide you with something that I have crafted. I think this addition to your arsenal might gain you some advantage against your most dangerous foes. The tips are enchanted to erupt with water upon sinking into an enemy. I recommend making every attempt to slip them between armor plates. The javelins carry a greater charge than the arrows and the shaft must be broken off for the charge to activate. Use them well.
Again, I request that you leave the room as untouched as possible. There is very powerful magic at work there, and I cannot guarantee your safety if you choose to ignore my advice. Indeed, I would feel very generous if I were to have access to that chamber, undisturbed.
Proceed cautiously, but quickly!

D.S.

The parchment of the letter was wrapped around a claim ticket at the inn front desk, which led them to a long crate. The party took the crate up to Jed’s room and crowded in. Wielding a crowbar, Alric popped the lid to reveal and bundle of half-a-dozen arrows and four javelins, all obviously magical to those who can see such things. Jed tried to figure out the specifics of the enchantment, but aside from seeing it was water-related (not unexpected for an item created by a Fluidist), he could discern nothing.

Gabby finally admitted that she hadn’t been feeling herself for some time, and went to see the clerics. They determined that she was suffering under a curse, which they traced back to the ring of invisibility she’s been carrying around, the one she took off the halfling, Doughal, in session #8. Apparently, it’s got a couple of quirks in its makeup. Aside from being made of unusually dense gold, which they already knew, the ring is also cursed to bring the wearer bad fortune. Furthermore, it weighs on the bearer’s soul, which is why Gabby had been feeling so tired and run-down. The priest didn’t think they had anything to remove the ring’s curse, so it was put in storage where it couldn’t hurt anyone. Gabby left the cathedral with a renewed spring in her step.

Through the week, aside from chasing goblin squatters away from his corner of the sewers, D’arth was pursing a deeper game. He sent Poutine, his misen servant, to clean up the old goblin kitchens, with instructions to scatter a thick layer of flour in the halls outside when he arrived, before locking himself in. When his day of labor was done, the chef was to observe the flour for signs of traffic. (This arrangement was given a name, something like “an Arkansas flour trap”, but I didn’t catch it for certain.) For the first six days, things went as planned. Poutine reported finding various tracks, the most interesting being those of many booted feet and something on wheels.

D’arth passed this information on to the rest of the party. There was much speculation as to the wheel tracks. They knew it was impossible to get a cart up the path they had been taking; it was far too steep, with too many sections of stairs. They though of the possibility of wheelbarrows, but couldn’t do more than speculate, in the end. Poutine cooks the animals, he does not track them.

On the seventh day, though, Poutine didn’t show. Conveniently, though, that was the morning of Saturn’s-Day, so D’arth didn’t have to gather a rescue party, he just had to add “check for Poutine” to the party’s agenda for their regular trip to the dungeon.

They were able to scare up Jack, son of John, but none of the other usual hirelings were available. The hike to the dungeons was uneventful, aside from the comedy relief of constants complaints from Tantric’s devilkin.

At the dungeon entrance, they distributed healing potions, ice potions, and torches enchanted with Continual Light around the party. Jack was given a special torch, with Continual Mage Light cast upon it. Of course, he couldn’t see the mage light, so he constantly questioned the need for it. When assured that it was an important detail, he pointedly asked if they wouldn’t rather have a professional torchbearer handle it, then, since it was so important?

The experienced hands went through all their usual practices for entering the dungeon, pointing out the sights to Tantric as they went. Needles ducked through the entrance and pivoted to check the niche just inside the doors, then sounded the all-clear. The new members admired the large bronze plaque installed inside the alcove. Wondering if the gargoyles holding the sign were gargoyles or, y’know, Gargoyles, D’arth gave one a smart rap with his sword, cracking off one of its arms.

With that long-standing mystery solved, the party turned towards the rest of the dungeon. They followed their usual path, up the main hallway to the second big stone head. They took a moment to admire it, and to tell Tantric a bit of the story of how they met Jim Kadabra. Thinking of the animated goblin statue further in, Jed asked the head for directions, but it persisted in remaining silent.

Right turn, into the broken ground set up so long ago by ambushing goblins. Most of the party picked their way through slowly. As is her way, Gabby jumped atop the barriers and jogged to the far side. For their part, Tantric and his devilkin were largely unhampered by the broken ground, since the narrow paths were wide avenues to them. In due course, the party made their way to the area of the old goblin kitchens.

At D’arth’s signal, the party stopped to investigate. They found Poutine’s flour trap, or, rather, the remains of it. Someone had swept the middle of the hall clean. Only a narrow band remained on either side. Alric bent down to look for tracks, then stood with a satisfied nod, saying, “Straw brooms.”

Unanimously, the party took this bit of dungeon housekeeping as a threatening sign. Needles checked the doors to the kitchens, finding them to be without traps, but sealed from the inside. After a little B&E, he was able to shove the door open.

Inside, they found the corpse of poor Poutine, dead of multiple stab wounds. They closed the door and checked over the scene, recreating what had gone on. They concluded that several goblins had descended from the surface above through the chimney and taken the chef by surprise. After easily overpowering the misen henchman, they had ransacked the place, taking anything of value and destroying everything else. Flour all over the place.

D’arth collected the useful bits of Poutine’s remains with all due dignity and ceremony, then the party sealed the kitchens behind them and proceeded on.

When Needles, the party’s traditional point man, came to the location of the notorious pit trap, he discovered that it had been re-covered with a fresh illusion of the floor. Alric had already retrieved their plank bridge from the former “dungeon convenience store” closet. While he positioned it, the others pointed out items of interest to Tantric, like the places where TKotBo had chipped the walls and pit edge to mark its boundaries, and told him tales of previous encounters with it, like the time it killed the party’s very first cleric.

After safely crossing the pit, the party regrouped on the far side. Posy detected faint squishing sounds coming from up ahead. Thus forewarned, and guessing that they had against run into the gelatinous cube known to lurk in the area, the party members armed themselves and made ready for ambush. It didn’t take long before the cube turned the corner and came into view. At that point, several thrown vials of alchemist’s fire and one extra-large bolt of explosive lightning did it in, messily. In fact, the lightning bolt was so enthusiastic, Jed took some amused ribbing on the next leg of the trip: the others asked if he had some kind of history with the gelatinous cube, like maybe he owed it money, or perhaps they had had a whirlwind romance on his last trip through the dungeon.

The hike continued, still pointing out items of interest. The party hurried past the entrance to the lair of the flame lords, past the broken barrel at the foot of the stairs, and up the stairs to the Great Bridge. The old-timers paused, explaining for Tantric and D’arth the dual threats at this point: the sniper in the tower, and the angry ghost.

Noting that the bridge had a low rail sufficient to entirely conceal him and his devilkin, Tantric dismissed the sniper out of hand, but found the information about the ghost to be interesting. He went out on to the bridge and went to work. Using a combination of luck, his natural abilities with spirits, and a Materialize spell, he located the ghost and forced it to take physical form. A naked, screaming halfling appeared halfway across the span, still shouting about “The ring!  The ring!  My precious ring!”  Posy made a face at the unpleasant noise, then quicker than the eye could see, sent an arrow into the halfling’s brain.

Pleased with their poor man’s exorcism, the party crossed the bridge, with the less-stealthy members opting for the combat crawl to keep themselves out of sight of the sniper.  As is their way, they stopped inside the far entrance for a short rest and a light snack.  “Smoked rat,” Alric said, pulling some from his pouch, “come and get it!”  As they rested, they discussed the tower sniper, and how they were going to have to do something about him, one of these days.

Rested and ready, they continued on up the hall to the turn. They paused at the foot of the stairs, there, to discuss the fact that they’ve never checked any further down the main hallway than this point. Jed cast Light on one of Posy’s arrows, which she sent flying down the hall. It vanished in the distance. Long hallway.

Curiosity satisfied for the moment, they went up the broad stairway, around the landing, and up to the intersection with the goblin statue. Jed demonstrated his command of the Dwarven language by putting the animated statue through its direction-giving routine for Tantric’s entertainment. They then went around the hall to the big room with the Pit of Darkness.

The big sunlight spell had worn off, of course. They gathered around the edge, peering into the dark. As they did so, Jack announced, in a satisfied tone of voice:  “Oops”.  He had dropped his Mage Light torch into the pit.

The falling stick was enough to set off the shriekers at the bottom of the pit, invisible light or no. Having thus dealt with the advantage of surprise, they fiddled around for a while dropping flaming oil and rocks with Light spells cast on them. Something at the bottom kept putting out dropped lights, but since nothing climbed out of the hole to kill them all, they soon got on with business.

Posy landed a Continual Light arrow on the second balcony from the top.  Jed sent a Wizard Eye into the hole, keeping far away from the ledges. He observed movement in the shadows on the first tier, but couldn’t make out any details. The second balcony was better lit, and seemed abandoned… aside from the large human corpse, right in front of the door they were after.

They had blown that door open with a siege stone on a previous visit, but it had since been repaired with stout, fresh, cedar boards. And, of course, equipped with a dead barbarian.

“A corpse, you say?” D’arth commented, listening to Jed describe what he was seeing. The corpse-eater started stepping over towards the hanging chain with a thoughtful look on his face.

It didn’t take long to get the entire party down on the second balcony. Most climbed the chain. Jed levitated. They set up Jack and Trevor as lookouts, then stood back while D’arth checked out the dead guy. Barbarian, for certain: bare chest, furry hat with horns, fur loincloth. After getting a closer look, D’arth realized that the young barbarian was lying atop another corpse, a halfling. When he went to roll the man off the halfling, a leaping leech was disturbed from its feeding and launched itself at his face, but he was able to avoid it and pin it to the ground with his sword.

Now able to see the barbarian’s face, Alric dimly recognized him. The dead man had been a member of the Company of the Thunder-Raven. Corbin, Inc., bristled at this evidence of poachers. Still, it didn’t seem like they had taken the room.

The party organized themselves for a hard fight. They arrayed their forced with care, making sure Posy had a clear line of sight into the room. They had a cascading series of Wait maneuvers set up. The plan was, Needles would pull open the door and duck behind it. Posy would land a Glue arrow a few yards inside the door, with the goal of restricting the inhabitant’s movements and forcing them to pile up for convenient killing, and then avert her gaze. Jed would throw a Flash spell inside the room, aiming to blind and disorient the defenders, and then sound the all-clear. The others would then uncover their eyes, and take the fight from there.

When it came down to it, though, it seemed like the plan would be derailed before it ever really got started. When Needles pulled the door open, he found one of the defending clockwork-armored dwarves waiting for him!  He was barely able to avoid a sword to the back, but he did avoid it. From that point, things were back on track. Posy, of course, put her arrow on target, fortuitously sticking one defender to the floor immediately, and Jed’s spell did disorient nearly all of the dwarves — even blinding one outright.

Alric and D’arth stepped up to hold the door, ready to hold it. They engaged the two defenders standing on either side of the entrance hall. The puddle of glue restricted free movement to one clear hex on Alric’s side, and a narrow avenue along the wall and around a corner on D’arth’s, which kept the fight two-on-two.

Then Posy started raining doom on the clockwork dwarves, in the form of Strang’s gift arrows. She aimed for the gaps in the golden clockwork armor. When an arrow would get to a few feet of its target, it would transform into a concentrated stream of water. Then, once inside the armor, it would convert into an explosive burst of steam. Between that, and heavy blows from the front line, the two defenders quickly fell.

GM interjection:  It should be noted that along about here, Jed’s player let slip that he knew these guys would come back from the dead, but they would only do it once, so they just had to kill everybody inside twice. How did he know this?  He had been reading monsters one day, you see…

The party wasn’t surprised when the first fallen clockwork dwarf stood back up. They were surprised when they knocked it down again, and it got up a second time. And a third…

The battle got desperate. It also got crowded, as everybody pushed in to the narrow gap, trying to deliver more damage, faster. Tantric jumped off his devilkin’s shoulders — he had been riding piggyback — and sent it into battle, clawing and scratching… where it was immediately mashed flat by a single hit from the maul of the defender’s leader. Gabby and Needles slipped inside the room itself, along the wall to the right of the entrance passage. That moved them away from the Glue puddle, exposing their right flank. They found themselves brutally assaulted by up to four and five of the clockwork dwarves at a time, with the fallen being replaced with new troops from further in the room, and their fallen being replaced by the resurrection of the first wave of fallen. D’arth found himself dueling with one defender, trading blows around a corner. Alric kept a lid on the door, which let Jed and Posy work without fear of counterattack. Both, but particularly Posy, were doing tremendous damage, but they couldn’t get a clear shot on most of the enemy forces.

The warriors were able to avoid major damage, for the most part, but they were starting to wear down, a bit at a time. One Fatigue point spent, here. A couple of points of injury, there.

Finally, Needles made a break for open ground inside the room. (GM note: I suspect he was angling to get behind them all, anyway.) This finally gave him a clear view of the parts of the room that they hadn’t seen before, being on the wall that the entrance was in. He saw that there were two big wall hangings on either side of the door. Both bore dwarven writing, and he could see both were magical. Being genre-savvy, he dashed to the nearer of the two and slashed it in two, top to bottom, with his magic short sword. Immediately, all the clockwork dwarves dropped, like marionettes with their strings cut!

While Needles checked for traps, Jed took charge of the party to organize the search of the room. They carried out the fallen clockwork dwarves, lining them up on the balcony outside. Alric bashed one apart, as the party investigated the question of whether the dwarves’ innards were worth money. They weren’t. It turns out, they weren’t dwarves at all, just constructs. What appeared to be armor was actually their bodies. They were clockwork all the way through. The eerily impassive “faces” had actually been porcelain masks.

Back in the room, Jed cataloged the contents of the room. They reasoned that since this room wasn’t octagonal, but square, it must not the be room that Strang wanted. Thus, they could loot the place. Strang’s room must be nearby, though.

They found an alchemist’s notebook, talking about “Wonderous Project Number 3, the Apparatus of Argha-hal”. They found several big bottles of elfbane and lesser amounts of demonbane. The clockwork dwarves’ leader had carried a magical maul with an amusing message carved into it in Dwarven runes. Tantric found three orichalcum pins that had rolled under a table, but no other orichalcum was apparent.

Jed translated the runes on the wall-hangings. One read “Defend the room.” The other, the one Needles destroyed, had read “Live forever.”

While Jed, Trevor, and Jack packed up the equipment of the alchemy lab, D’arth and Tantric scavenged. D’arth claimed the “Defend the room” hanging, figuring it would make a good decoration for his own crypt. After confirming that nobody else wanted to claim the clockwork dwarves’ bodies to sell for scrap, Tantric summoned a demon and gave it the task of hauling all the broken metal out of the dungeon to a hidden location near town, where it could be recovered later.

After the looting, Jed cast See Secrets to make sure they weren’t missing anything. It revealed the outline of a secret door. Needles was able to use his never-fail formula for secret doors — “Third brick in, second down” — to get it open. Inside, they found a small room, barely five feet square, with a pentagram on the floor and eight walls. Strang’s octagon!

They sealed the doors behind them, and headed home.

After selling off the loot, including the clockwork dwarves’ weapons and shields, the full members took home a share of 3,750 copper each, with the junior members each getting a half-share that was still ample pay for a day’s work. They passed the orichalcum pins on to Strang for the usual inflated price, and retired to the inn.

* * *

Hours later, Needles pulls a merry Jed aside from the party. “Hey,” he said, holding out a globe of orichalcum wire tracery the size of a basketball.  “I traded for this at the pub. Think it’s worth anything?”

Then, as they watched, many of the places where the wires met started to glow and blink like fireflies…

 

By The Numbers: Combat Effectiveness Ratings

In case you hadn’t heard, Pyramid #3/77: Combat includes an article by Christopher R. Rice (of Ravens N’ Pennies), “It’s a Threat!”, which lays out the concept of a Combat Effectiveness Rating (or CER) for GURPS characters. The idea is, you examine different traits of the characters, adding up a score in various areas. Those scores add up to an Offensive Rating (OR) and a Protective Rating (PR), which combine to give an overall CER score. Furthermore, you can calculate a specialized Protective Rating for use against traps. (Since you don’t usually fight a trap, you don’t get the benefit of your OR, but you do get bonuses depending on your ability to deal with traps.) So I’ve been working out the party members’ scores.

There’s a long history for this kind of classification, going all the way back to Gygax and the various levels of monsters. It’s always difficult, because so much depends on the circumstances. The article talks about this is more detail, but the point I want to make clear is, nobody’s character can be summed up in a single number.

Furthermore, I’ve probably goofed up the calculations somewhere along the line. I know I had to go back a couple of times and recalculate things where I had earlier overlooked a detail. I’m sure there are more details I’m still overlooking. If the ratings look wonky, it’s likely because I’ve wonked them.

Basically, my players shouldn’t pay all that much attention to anything more in this post. 🙂

…

Ok, now that we’ve got them out of the way, here’s the scoop.

The final scores:

• Alric: OR 57, PR 37, PR (Traps) 37, CER 94
• D’arth: OR 31, PR 29, PR (Traps) 32, CER 60
• Gabby: OR 41, PR 17, PR (Traps) 18, CER 58
• Mississippi Jed: OR 61, PR 12, PR (Traps) 20, CER 73
• Needles: OR 47, PR 17, PR (Traps) 28, CER 64
• Posy: OR 51, PR 12, PR (Traps) 24, CER 63

I’m not going to break down all the numbers, but I will offer some observations.

Gabby and Posy are pretty much tied for first in the “Attack Skill” ratings, as you would expect, while D’arth and Jed are similarly tied for last place. Alric managed to take the top spot for “Damage”, even edging out Jed’s Explosive Lightning spell. Gabby lost more points in the damage category than any other, relative to the rest of the group, which dragged down her overall rating. When it comes to overall Offensive Rating, Jed’s got a bit of an edge, thanks to Explosive Lightning and the stunning effects of his Concussion spell, but everybody’s clearly bringing the hurt.

It really says something, that their least offensive member is a cannibalistic nihilist carrying a two-handed sword.

On the defensive front, the overall scores are pretty lop-sided. Gabby is by far the most outstanding member in the area of “Active Defenses”, thanks to her Weapon Mastery and extra Parry from her main-gauche. Jed is equally outstanding as the worst member for “Active Defenses”, which might explain why he so often goes for the blocking spells. D’arth has three times the score of his closest competitor in the “Will” category.

In all the other defensive sub-categories, though, there was one clear winner. Alric took the lead, by far, in “Damage Resistance”, “Health”, and especially “Hit Points”.

Jed’s a glass cannon, as befits a member of the Order of the Sun.

The bonus scores for traps came out… surprising.  Jed, Needles, and Posy all came out with excellent scores for detecting traps, thanks to their high Perception scores and skills — Thaumatology, for detecting magical traps, in the case of Jed, and regular ol’ Traps for the other two. Needles and Posy were tied for being the best trap-disarmers, leaving the others in the dust.

Even so, according to the scores, the party’s best person for dealing with traps is Alric, followed by D’arth, and then Needles!

… because the first two can theoretically take the trap on the chin and walk away from it. Alric was the only member who didn’t pick up any trap bonus points, and he still managed to get the highest PR (Traps), just through being a big pile of rough-cut Hit Points. A trap drops a log on Alric, he shrugs it off and tells everybody else the way is clear. D’arth isn’t as rugged physically, but his mental and emotional stability are unmatched. Some demonic gizmo starts blasting gut-busting terror, he smiles and says it just isn’t like the supernatural fear that Momma D’arth used to make. Still, if you don’t know what kind of trap you’re dealing with, or if there’s a trap at all, I still think I would lean on Needles harder than either one of them.

Overall, when it comes to combined CER, Alric’s just a beast. The average CER across the party is around 68 or 69, and everybody’s pretty close to that average, except for Jed the artillery bard who can throw lightning from his bare hands… and Alric, with his big 94. I guess everybody else only comes up to his chest in more ways than one.

 

Arguments and Alignments

I was thinking about the big argument at the end of last session. Well, “argument” probably isn’t the right word. It’s just a new phase of the same old bickering. This leg of the journey had to do with the execution of FuBar’s last will and testament, and the appropriate reward for someone who just happened along during the second half of the delve.

But, either way, it got me thinking.

First off, I think I owe all four party members another experience point. I try to toss one out whenever anybody does themselves a disservice through displaying their “role-played” disadvantages. I say “try”, because I regularly forget it… and I think I did so, here.

And I realized I owed a roleplaying award because I was thinking about how the argument was a natural expression of the mental disads involved. D’arth Loathing isn’t a nice guy: he has Bad Temper, Selfish, and Stubbornness. Of course he was going to insist on clinging tight to anything owed to him. Of course he was going to hold a grudge against anyone who got in his way.

Jed, on the other hand, is a little more complex. He’s got a Quirk that amounts to a preference for fair play, but then he’s also got a Sense of Duty to his comrades. D’arth isn’t a comrade, not until he’s walked in the front door of the dungeon alongside the party a couple of times, at least. Jed likes to announce how honest he is (“Ask anyone, they’ll tell you I can be trusted!”), but, strictly speaking, that’s not true. Or, rather, it’s lower-case “honesty”, not the upper-case “Honesty” that means you’ll follow the law and give everybody a fair shake. It’s true that Jed wouldn’t (for example) outright steal from the party fund, but that’s not because he won’t steal.  It’s because he won’t steal from his comrades. 

Maybe Jed supports the idea of honoring wills, in the abstract. Perhaps he’s a fair dealer, in general. But, when it comes down to some corpse-eater making claims against the party’s living members, his SoD kicks in. He’s pretty much compelled to try to bargain D’arth down. Perhaps if FuBar had lived longer, Jed would have formed more of an attachment to him, and his SoD would compel him to see FuBar’s final wishes through. As it stands, his loyalty is to the party above either FuBar or D’arth.

The way it played out, when they got back to town, they discovered that they had hit the jackpot. Then, Jed’s quirks on fair-dealing and his Xenophilia came along, and D’arth ended up with a half share. Not bad, really, for the short while he was on the scene.

* * *

… and all of that got me thinking about honesty and morality in characters. What Saint Gygax would call “alignment”, in other words.

I see Alric as Chaotic Good, tending towards Neutral Good. He’s pretty easy-going, gets along with everybody, but has no problem going his own way. We know that he’s willing to drop everything — drop treasure! — and put himself through a rough cross-country ride to save a friend. We know he’s willing to go into battle to defend the weak (even if they did turn out to be disguised bad guys).

There’s actually a picture of Gabby in the dictionary under “Chaotic Neutral”. She’s motivated by greed, like all adventurers, but beyond that, there’s simply no telling what she’ll do next. She picked a fight with a mostly-peaceful ogre, once, on a whim. She discovered the hidden ledges on the outside of the Great Bridge when she went over the edge to avoid a fight, again, on a whim. I keep expecting her to light herself on fire… because when you’re on fire, the ninjas can’t catch you.

I would say the same about FuBar. Chaotic Neutral. He had a guiding goal in his life, but in the little time he had, he didn’t really get to show it. Ah, well. At least he died the way he lived: with a full stomach.

D’arth is pretty much evil by definition. Really no way around that, what with being a monster who worships something other than the pantheon of good gods. I would put him down as Lawful Evil, and probably closer to the Lawful side than the Evil. Of course, we haven’t seen much of him, so my first impressions could easily be wrong.

In my opinion, Mississippi Jed is Neutral Good, maybe with a tendency towards Chaotic. As already mentioned, he’s loyal to his friends, all the way to the bitter end.  (Literally.  When he died, he was trying to use a blocking spell to shut down a demon’s fiery breath, to protect the entire party. As it happened, the rest of the party are a bunch of stealthy, agile types, and they all jumped out of harm’s way on their own*, but it’s the thought that counts.) He’s got a couple of specific Quirks about slavery (against) and fair-play (for) that strike me as characteristic of CG. Jed’s also a something of a stickler for “the rules”: he’s the party accountant, quartermaster, and hammerer-out of contracts. If Corbin, Inc., ever wrote out a real charter, he’d do everything but the signatures.

Ah, Needles. As nice a guy as he is, I figure him as Chaotic Evil. He’s a liar, and a thief, and an all-around scumbag. His one redeeming quality, such as it is, is his Pirate’s Code of Honor. He’s loyal to whatever band of thieves and cutthroats he’s fallen in with, at any particular time. For all of that, though, he’s a pleasant enough guy to hang around with, and the party respects his skills, both with sword and lock-pick.

Posy is mildly Neutral Evil, I’d say, like most cats. She gives off a vibe of “eh, I can take you or leave you, I just happen to be headed in the same direction”. She rather enjoys the suffering of others, but not so much that she goes out of her way to inflict it. (Quirk-level Sadism.) She’s not much for taking prisoners. She doesn’t have any particular Sense of Duty, even to long-time comrades. Instead, she makes do with a Pirate’s Code of Honor… so at least she won’t stab anybody in the back while they’re on the job.

* * *

Time to do like the song says, and add it up. Looking only at the living members of the party, nobody shares an alignment. They’ve got everything covered except Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and plain vanilla True Neutral. As far as that goes, I would argue that Rho was Lawful Neutral and TKotBO was Lawful Good. Knock a Druid in the head and throw ‘im in the wagon, we’ll have a counter on every square of the classic alignment checkerboard.

Put that way, this party should have turned inside-out long ago. Back in the day, playing AD&D, I don’t believe any of my GM’s would have allowed it. Even if they had, the players wouldn’t have; there would have been a PC-on-PC murder within the first twenty minutes. (And it might not have been the so-called Evil ones that drew first, either!) These guys have been getting along reasonably well.

Well, once they got rid of the Lawful types. Hmm. That doesn’t bode well for D’arth…

– – – – –

* Even if Jed had pulled it off, it wouldn’t have worked out like he wanted. His thought was, use Command, cause the entire attack to go somewhere else — towards the other enemy, I believe — so nobody would need to give ground by diving for cover. But, even if he had been able to overcome the effects of range and the demon’s high Will and send the attack astray, everyone would have still gone for cover. Remember, everything’s happening at once. The others see an attack coming. They’ve got a split second to decide what they’re doing. (If I remember correctly, I emphasized that nobody really knows how big the area of effect is going to be, so it’s possible for one to decide to dive out of the way, and still end up inside the area, because it was bigger than one guessed.) Anybody who held their dice to see how the Command worked out would be essentially declaring that they weren’t jumping. When a grenade lands in one’s foxhole, one does not stand there looking around to see if anyone else is going to jump on top of it.

 

“Corbin, Inc.”, Session #15

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:

• D’arth Loathing, just a corpse-eater in the right place at the right time, being a good neighbor (PC)
• FuBar Bombad, sewer-troll who needed eyes in the back of his head (PC)
• Mississippi Jedadiah Walker, flinging spells like a ninja monkey throws… shuriken. (PC)
• Needles, thief-swashbuckler who might be getting another song after this trip (PC)
• Posy, long-distance artillery and a terror for eyes everywhere (PC)
• Trevor, making his money the old fashioned way: winning it off the new hires (NPC henchman)
• Pai, cat-folk cleric of Mielikki (the Finnish one, not the other one) who more-or-less follows Posy, when he’s not on the catnip (NPC henchman)
• Poutine, a humble misen chef, compelled to follow FuBar on a quest for really exotic cuisine (NPC henchman)
• Höss, Jack, son of John, and John, son of Jack: carriers of heavy things and losers at cards (NPC hirelings)

The entourage of Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Adventure:

• Alric Redbeard, stung by his new bee-cat in a training incident (PC)
• Gabby the Cabin Girl, likewise, stung. It’s a long story. It has penguins in it. (PC)
• “Dobby”, nursing the wounded and practicing his penguin-whisperer technique (NPC henchman)

Rumors Gathered:

Jed was mostly forced to keep his ear to the ground.

• A band of goblinoids was captured trying to sneak over the walls of Tembladera. When questioned before their execution, they claimed to serve something named “Shauldula”.
• Lady Abergavenny has been trying to hire shipbuilders who are willing to go into the mountains for a job, but she’s having trouble finding takers. They doubt her sanity: who would build a ship on top of a mountain, miles from the nearest ocean?
• Sir Hugh has returned from an expedition into the interior jungles, bringing many captured elves and crates of their treasure. If you ever wanted to buy a pair of elven boots, now would be the time!

Still, he got in a little time with the heavy books.

• The chronicles say that the last of the dwarven kings made a pact with “beautiful creatures from the edge of time” to protect the dwarves’ most precious secrets. There is little recorded detail about these creatures, aside from general agreement as to their invincibility in battle.

Needles picked up the word on the street.

• A dragon’s been sighted flying over the mountains near Tembladera.

What Happened:

As expected, Jed survived the resurrection process. His apprentice Trevor handled the arrangements, and Trevor’s getting a reputation for both diligence and luck. They stitched his bits back together and brought him back to life, if not health. That was taken care of by a healing potion and a couple of days’ light duty.

Even hampered by Jed’s illness (if that’s the right word for losing your head), and by Gabby and Alric being bedridden with bee-cat-stings, the party still got a lot done around town.

Needles piled up his coin and invested in one of the more expensive, 2 point blessed buttons. The others weren’t so extravagant, sticking with the cheaper, 1-point, bronze buttons… but those, they handed out like candy. All the henchmen got one. I’m pretty sure they’ve got some spares rattling around in the bottom of someone’s pouch.

Furthermore, Needles went over his load-out with a fine-toothed comb. He and Jed hit the armorers’ shops around Tembladera, replacing bits of his kit with new pieces of armor, specially tailored and enchanted to be as light as street clothes. By the time he was done, he had dropped his load enough to be unencumbered. (He’s been lightly encumbered for some time now, believe it or not.) He also picked up a spellbook and learned his first spell: Haste.

Needles wasn’t the only one making capital investments. Posy picked up a wide assortment of arrows, including some spell arrows. (She also picked up a Perk to let her choose her arrows accurately without searching through them, explained as carving coded notches into the shafts.)

Jed hit the books and picked up some new spells. He cast one of those new spells, Seeker, in an attempt to locate his once-friend and now-nemesis, Jim Kadabra. He was able to get a very detailed vision of the illusionist’s location:

Green felt. A table covered in green felt. Playing cards, really expensive hand-painted ones. On the other side of the table, a red-skinned humanoid with horns growing out of his head, wearing a fine silk vest. The other speaks some words, and passes a wooden box across the table towards the viewer.

From his recent studies in demonology (having put points into Hidden Lore: Demons), Jed was able to identify the red guy as a “demon of old”, similar to the ones the party met before, in the Pit of Darkness. Skinnier, though. More like the geekier younger brother of those guys.

FuBar dedicated a lot of time to meditation. Jed dropped a koan on him:  “What was in Kadabra’s box?”  After much pondering, FuBar’s harmony with the Cosmic All brought back the answer, “Cards, for gambling, which is just another dirty trap tying the unwary ego into the illusion of reality.”

It seems like everybody was making friends this week. Posy ran into another cat-folk, a cleric of Mielikki named Pai, who decided to tag along with Posy on her adventures. FuBar ran into a misen cook and saved his life. (“I won’t eat you until after you’re dead.”)  This was enough to gain the cowardly little beastie’s loyalty, and so now the trash ninja has an entourage.

Around mid-week, Mamu delivered a harshly-worded letter from Strang, the party’s sometime-patron:

Friends,
I must express some frustration with your recent activities. I have provided you ample information – at no small cost in time and money – and you continue to dawdle with this worthless pit. Now, you have seen one of your company fall victim to these unnecessary side-trips with nothing to show for it. Again, I feel it necessary to remind you that finding these orichalcum artifacts is of utmost importance!

Additionally, I must ask you to be on the lookout certain hexagonal rooms that I know to be present within the area near your search locations. I believe these rooms are key to my research and, as such, I must ask you to TOUCH NOTHING when you find them. Regardless of your own perceptions of value or relevance, I need these rooms to be pristine and whole. Kindly catalogue and map the rooms, but do not move any of the contents. I believe that these chambers will ultimately be mutually beneficial, and I will certainly share my good fortune should my requests be met. However, you risk my ire by proceeding recklessly.

Friends, we are close to unlocking something wondrous. Do not delay!

D.S.

Upon having the note read to him, FuBar remarked on how it was awful that “your guy’s‘ boss” was mad at them. He’s a free agent, don’t ya know. 😉

The question of payment for FuBar’s services on the last delve came up. Rash promises had been made, concerning the party obtaining a ninja-to and black ninja suit for the sewer troll.  (Well, actually, it was more like “some of those awesome black pajamas and one of those cool straight swords to go with it”.  FuBar had a dream to someday be accepted and trained as a ninja. He had admired them from afar. Nobody else know anything at all about how ninja operate — or even that they’re called “ninja”, really — and so nobody realized certain very important facts about them. Like, they don’t just sell that kind of stuff, to anybody….)

Jed asked around, and was given directions to the place where all the fancy black suits came from.  The foot of the stair is just outside of town, just at the edge of the rice paddies, and it travels steeply up to the top of a near peak. All the non-vertical space at the top of the mountain is taken up by an extraordinarily tall castle with multiple roofs. The stairway is carved out of the sheer cliff face, making several switchbacks along the way.

Like this, but more vertical. And on top of a mountain. And swarming with hidden ninja.

A peasant with an ox was standing near the foot of the stair, and passed a few words with Jed. The bard started up the stair and soon came to a wider area, high above the fields below. A section of the path was dug out about six feet, and the hole filled with cut bamboo stakes, forming a grid. A monkey was hanging upside-down from a small tree growing out of the cliff-side, gripping a small bamboo staff and wearing a vest. “What’s your business?” it asked.

Somewhat startled but willing to play along, Jed discussed things with the monkey, who introduced himself (unsurprisingly) as Monkey-san. It turned out that the ninja aren’t willing to let just anybody come up to the castle and do some shopping. Mr Monkey explained that there would be a series of challenges, and that he was the first of them. He asked if Jed cared to try his luck, but the bard declined. They parted respectfully, and Jed walked back to town.

There, he explained the situation to the others. They agreed, the whole party would go up and give FuBar a hand. So, they made the walk to the edge of town. When they returned to Mr Monkey’s station, they found him (seemingly) asleep on his tree branch. FuBar started gathering himself for a sneak attack — the ninja way, after all — but Jed spoiled it by calling out, saying hello to the monkey. After some pleasantries, Mr Monkey offered to give FuBar a shot at the title.

Monkey-san jumped down from his perch to take up a position balancing atop a couple of the bamboo staves, and gave FuBar the classic “bring it” gesture. With the rest of the party cheering him on, FuBar raised his fists, jumped atop… well, ok, not so much “atop” anything. Actually, he missed his footing. Rather than his foot landing on a staff end, he slipped and took the end of the staff directly to the groin. Even the monkey cringed. FuBar slid slowly to the embrace of the soft sand below.

Figuring this was a sign that his mind and spirit were not in unity, FuBar pulled himself back together, bowed to the monkey, and started the long, slow march back to town. “These things take three tries anyway,” he observed. “That’s one.”

Saturn’s-Day came at last. The party hired Höss, their favorite brute, and two laborers: Jack, son of John, and John, son of Jack. The four PCs were also joined by their loyal henchmen: Trevor, Pai, and Poutine. Without the mounts usually provided by Alric and Gabby, the group only had one donkey between them, so the hike was longer and drier than usual. Still, they made it to their usual campsite near the entrance to the dungeon.

Needles took point, confirming that no ambush was lurking inside the door. The party formed up with Needles in the lead, followed by Posy, then the main group, with FuBar trailing, walking backwards, keeping an eye out behind. Between Posy’s nigh-superhuman tracking skills and FuBar’s frankly-superhuman sense of smell, they came to realize that another party had followed the same path not long ago. FuBar was able to identify the scent of Bjorn, one of the members of the Company of the Thunder-Raven, another party of adventurers.

Jed cast another one of his new spells, Seek Earth, to determine the nearest source of orichalcum. It was quite a distance away, in a sort of “over there and down some” direction, more-or-less consistent with the expectation that there was a find to be had in the Pit.

They made their way through the now-familiar halls, stopping briefly at the old goblin kitchens. Poutine was impressed with the room, pointing out how it would only take some cleaning to make it usable. FuBar noted how he had considered moving out of the sewers and into the dwarven dungeons on a permanent basis. The kitchen would make an excellent foothold. FuBar ordered Poutine to stay behind, clean up, and make the kitchen as operational as possible. They scrounged up a plank to prop the door shut, in lieu of a lock, and proceeded on.

As they traveled, they continued to notice signs of another party following the same path, without deviation.  This continued until they reached the Great Bridge.

Mindful of the sniper from the overlooking tower, they crossed the bridge cautiously. Posy took up a concealed post at the door and kept an eye on the tower. First, FuBar went out alone, crossing the entire span doing back-flips, backwards. He made it unscathed. Needles went out, displaying his full sneakiness. Then it came time for the hirelings. Given Trevor’s level of athletic ability, it was decided that John and Jack would just carry him across. The three linked arms, wheezing apprentice in the center, and hustled across the bridge.

They made it about halfway before one of the J’s stopped dead in his tracks, bringing them up short about halfway across. “The dead walk among us!” Trevor shouted, as the possessed laborer yanked him away from the other apprentice-bearer.

The possessed John, or possibly Jack, started dragging Trevor towards the edge, shouting “The ring! Return the ring!”

Everyone but Posy ran to help. As they were running, Posy saw a target appear at the tower window. Her arrow passed the incoming crossbow bolt, which took Höss in the chest. She was certain she had hit her target, which didn’t re-appear at the window. Considering her work here done, she shouldered her bow and strolled across the bridge.

Meanwhile, Trevor used his free arm to draw a bottle of holy water and smash it across the head of Jack-or-maybe-John. This, or the gang tackle, or possibly both, was enough to shake off the possessing spirit’s influence. Dragging their wounded with them, the party again set up camp just inside the door on the far side of the bridge, resting and healing. Pai deigned to share some of his healing prayers with the hairless apes.

After resting up, they continued up the hall. Again, they found signs that Bjorn had passed this way, and taken the right turn up the stairs to the overlook. They followed the same route. After playing with the animated goblin statue for a bit, they trailed Bjorn to the edge of the Pit of Darkness.

The last time they had been there, there had been several dead goblins scattered about. They were gone, now. Furthermore, the big chain down into the Pit had been augmented with the addition of several ropes around the Pit’s edge.

“I’m getting the idea that these guys might have gotten away with some of our treasure,” Needles observed. The others nodded agreement as they collected all the free rope. An adventurer can never have too much rope.

From way, way back in Session #2!

Consulting the map they had picked up from Strang weeks and weeks ago, they decided to go directly to the second balcony down. FuBar led the way, tossing around several pebbles previously enchanted with a candle-strength light spell. Once he had determined that the balcony itself seemed deserted, they others came down to join him.

There, there was some debate. They didn’t want to waste a lot of time searching the place. (Curiously, Jed didn’t think to cast Seek Earth again.) The map said to go west, but it also had a big “X” on the east side of the square representing the Pit. They chose to check out the east wall, sending FuBar through the big open doorway in the center of the wall.

As on the level above, this room turned out to be a dwarven restroom, with several curtained alcoves. Unlike the room above, this one smelled terrible. The source seemed to be the three curtained alcoves in the middle of the row of alcoves. FuBar figured they were dealing with some rotten zombies, and so he might as well take care of things himself. He tossed a bottle of alchemist’s fire into the middle stall.

It wasn’t zombies. Three clouds of disgusting green vapor came boiling out. They were some kind of toxic demon. Hearing his shouts, the party ran to give FuBar some backup. Jed threw down a Wall of Air, which initially threw the demons into disarray, but it turned out that they were fast enough to simply go around it. It also became clear that arrows and swords don’t work well against clouds of noxious gas. After taking a little damage, the party mostly withdrew. Jed blasted two of the three to bits with magical lightning. The third withdrew back into the darkness of the restroom, hoping to draw in victims to pick off one by one.

While this was going on, Needles and FuBar ended up wandering back to the room where they had previously fought the cat-demons. At one point, FuBar looked back at Needles, just entering the room, and said, “You know, you’re standing right where Jed died.”

Needles looked down, at a small bloodstain, then at the wall, at a somewhat larger one, then took a couple of quick strides to one side.

The two rogues looked over the exit on the far side of the room, deciding it didn’t seem to be trapped. Needles picked the lock while FuBar kept an eye out, then threw open the door. He was confronted by a big, beady-eyed, multiple-armed thing sporting enough swords to outfit a squad of infantry, atop a body like a snake. It boomed out a shout of defiance, something about no one disturbing its master.

Needles politely shut the door again.

The rest of the party was just trying strategies to draw out the toxic demon when the two rogues came scampering back. Informed of the news, the others dropped the subtlety. Jed popped into the room with cover from Posy, and blasted the entire right-hand side of the room with explosive lightning. They paused long enough for the bard to gather the remains with a whisk broom, then returned to the site of Jed’s demise.

The arm-thing hadn’t pursued, so the door remained shut. The party held a conference in whispers, then deployed their forces. The general idea was that Jed would make almost everyone else Invisible, while Needles tossed off a couple of Haste spells (easier said than done, as it turned out, but he managed to get himself sped up, at least), and then Jed, pushing himself to his limits, would charge up a gigantic Concussion spell.

The plan was, once Jed gave the sign, FuBar would throw open the door and Jed would unleash destruction. As soon as he started singing that one high note his Concussion spell requires (since he’s a bard-wizard, with song-based magic), though, the door was flung open from inside, and the snake-arm-thing came rushing out.

From its point of view, the only person immediately visible was a wizard in a top hat, in the corner on the far side of the room, clearly casting some kind of spell. Its headlong rush to crush this annoyance was interrupted when it barreled headlong into Posy, standing invisibly in front of Jed! Things got messy, as one by one, the party struck at the creature and became visible. Suddenly, it found itself surrounded and beset. FuBar jumped on its back, likely hoping to apply a choke. Posy hadn’t been knocked back by the impact, so she came up from a crouch and put two arrows into the thing’s eyes at point-blank range. Finally, Pai became visible, violently presenting his holy symbol and shouting “Back, accurséd thing!”

Disconcerted, the demon reeled backwards, seeking better ground. Of course, FuBar was carried along, still clinging to its neck. Unfortunately, that put him square in front of the second demon-thing, coming out the door to see what all the commotion was about. Even forewarned by his keen sense of smell and his uncanny danger sense, FuBar wasn’t able to parry six attacks coming from behind.

He was hit four times. Two of those were critical hits. Both came up “maximum normal damage”. The other two were just above-average damage rolls. FuBar went from “undamaged” to “below -5 x HP” in one second, and died without even a HT roll.

The party went into a frenzy of vengeance. Pai continued to apply the power of his faith and his goddess, stepping forward and forcing both demons back into their lair, even as the others wreaked bloody vengeance. Even with all the damage the party was handing out, though, they still weren’t falling.

At one point, Needles found himself facing the second demon, all alone. It turned all of its attention to him, striking six times at his vitals. Dodging like wild, Needles was able to evade all the attacks!

Posy planted a couple of arrows into the first one’s hands, pinning them both to the outside of the door, as it tried to pull the door shut behind it. Needles hacked at any parts he could reach, while Jed finally got to throw a spell through the door. Between Posy putting arrows through hands and Needles cutting at arms, it wasn’t long before the first demon was entirely (ahem) disarmed. It then fell apart into ectoplasmic goo, the way summoned beings tend to do.

Now that they knew the trick of it, dispatching the second one wasn’t too difficult, even inside its own lair. The only bit of a kerfuffle came when Needles found himself being attacked from surprise by a trio of undead, animated hands.

Like that, but more gnarly and evil.

The first took a wild leap and tried to gouge out his eyes, but he was too (Hasted!) quick and dodged. Another tried to land a foul blow, but as it turns out, Needles’ most heavily armored location is his groin. He’s a street-fightin’ man, after all. His parry impaled one, and the others scurried away to escape the burning power of Pai’s faith.

The party was in some disarray at this point, mourning their fallen comrade. Not so much that they forgot to loot the room, of course, but some.

They found that the demons’ master was long dead. They found a dwarf skeleton in repose on a fine couch, clutching a wand and an iron lockbox, wearing the traditional poncho-and-skirt combination of the dwarven empire. They found a quartz IOUN stone under his pillow. Furthermore, there was a small cabinet full of clothes and bronze jewelry.  (“What’s a nasal?”)  They packed it all up for later inventory. Without Alric along, they were forced to leave the fine couch.

While they were getting organized, they were hailed from the doorway. D’arth Loathing, who had previously tried out for the team and been turned down, was standing there, two-handed sword in hand. (GM: In-game substitution for the fallen FuBar, since the character sheet was on hand.) After some tense negotiations, it was established that both sides were in agreement that FuBar’s death was a bad thing.

In fact, it turned out that FuBar’s short will (“I, FuBar, bein’ only mildly chewed today…”) named D’arth as the recipient of all FuBar’s worldly goods, including Poutine. Being down a man, the party made a rough bargain with the corpse-eater: he would help them carry back all the treasure, he could have FuBar’s valuable, edible corpse and all his stuff, plus some pay to boot.

Getting re-oriented, the party went to the west side of the balcony, with the exception of Posy and Pai, who remained on the eastern edge, poised to act as snipers. (Well, sniper and hanger-on.) As on the floor above, there was a large open doorway, with two closed doors on either side of it. They could heard the sound of trickling water as they approached.

A fountain with a statue of leaping carp was inside, running with clear, clean water. This was an oddity. D’arth boldly stepped up and drank a palmful of water. “Mmm,” he remarked, smacking his lips, “tasted like roasted elf. I haven’t tasted that since…” (looks around at the humans) “…. I mean, wow, that was filling!”

Intrigued by the magic fountain, Needles also took a drink. In his case, all his little aches and pains went away, and he was restored to full Fatigue. Feeling as rested as if he had just risen from bed, he too praised the waters. Seeing this, Jed took a sip, and found himself as satiated as if he had just eaten a big dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and fine ale. Jed took a couple of samples in empty potion bottles.

Back to business. They went to the left door, where Jed did his see-through-doors trick. Empty, trash and ruined furniture. They didn’t even open the door.

On the right, though, they hit paydirt. Jed could dimly see the forms of several dwarves wearing bizarre armor, hanging around tables covered in glassware, apparently some kind of alchemical lab.

Spreading the word, they again set up for door-opening. This time, they applied a Glue spell just in front of the door, then put one of their siege stones on the door, and had Posy shoot it from across the room with a blunt arrow. BOOM!  The door fell in. Jed threw a full-power bolt of lightning at one, knocking it down and seemingly out. Posy shot another in the eye (!), doing only a little damage but driving it berserk. It moved ponderously forward, “rushing” towards her at the rate of a quick walk.

The other dwarves shuffled a bit to take cover, then maintained their positions. D’arth used his sword’s great reach to poke one through the open doorway, hoping to provoke it into stepping into the gluey area, to no avail. Needles decided to hang back, sensing that something was off in this whole scene.

He was proven right when the one that Jed had knocked down stood back up. “Ok, that’s no good,” he said, even as the berserk one stepped into the glue. “Time to go.”

Everyone else agreed, they didn’t want to mess with any self-resurrecting dwarves. Luckily, since the dwarves were so weighed down by all their armor, it was easy for the party to make an organized withdrawal.

In possession of new knowledge and (more importantly) interesting treasure, they decided to head home. The trip was uneventful, aside from the talk. The entire walk home was spent discussing exactly who owed who what. D’arth was of the opinion that, in accordance with FuBar’s will, he should get everything the sewer troll owned, including several expensive potions that the party had purchased for him just this morning. Jed disagreed, claiming that the potions had only been issued to him, not given to him. D’arth pointed out, correctly, that FuBar had considered them to be his own. Furthermore, D’arth claimed that the party still owed FuBar a fancy sword and suit of black clothes, but since he was a reasonable corpse-eater, he would accept their value in coin, instead. Jed pointed out that the ninja toys had turned out to be a dream, anyway, so nothing was owed on that count. Finally, as keeper of the party’s coin purse, Jed wanted to keep the payment for service rendered to a minimum, since D’arth had only participated in the one fight, and that hadn’t been much of anything, anyway. Of course, D’arth claimed that signing on at all entitled him to payment, even if the expected risk hadn’t turned up.

When they arrived at the gates, D’arth pulled his hood down low over his face and managed to make it past the gate guards without being ejected.

Back in town, Needles picked the lock on the dwarf wizard’s lockbox. He made an attempt at pulling some sleight of hand, but Jed’s sharp eye prevented it. Inside, they found a magic ring, some gems, and a pile of mixed coin! After identification, it turned out that the ring was a Ring Of Breath Holding, and the IOUN stone could cast Grace with its own dedicated power reserve. They were very impressed with the shininess of it all, but decided they could use the coin more, and sold both.

In the end, a full share worked out to over $18,500 each. As is the practice of Corbin, Inc., the party fund got one full share. Somewhat light-headed with the sudden influx of precious metals to his financial system, Jed agreed that D’arth could have half of FuBar’s expected share, with the other half going to the party fund.

* * *

Even if the monetary award was exceptional, experience points were relatively low, what with a dead party member, no completed quests, and comparatively little exploration. Needles was unanimously voted the Cool Point, for being the recipient of six highly-skilled attacks and coming away without so much as mussed hair. Of course, FuBar was awarded the Booby Point, for losing sight of the classic adventurer’s rule: “Always check your six.”

In accordance with FuBar’s will, D’arth took posession of the Booby Point, as well as all that savory sewer troll goodness… “Yum, yeah, no fear in this meat…”

 

Favorite Moves

Over time, most characters are going to develop a fondness for certain attacks. We’ve seen a lot of experimentation as people worked out what made sense for their character’s stats. The way the PCs fight has evolved as we (slowly, oh so very slowly) work out the parts of the combat system we didn’t understand before, as people have become aware of options, as experience points have been spent to improve discovered strengths and paper over unsuspected weaknesses. There are some actions that are becoming characteristic of certain PCs.

Even so, we’ve pretty much been grinding through the calculations and consequences every time. “Rapid Strike, which is -6 for each attack after the first, except you’re a Weapon Master, so it’s -3 for you, but you’re spending Fatigue for a Flurry Of Blows…”  There’s value in this, even though it slows things down. Folks get to hear about options that might be news to them:  we’ve got one player in particular who mines the combat option cheat sheet for tricks, then others see what he’s pulling, and they copy the parts that make sense for them. Familiarity comes with repetition, and familiarity with the options and modifiers speeds things up:  we’ve got so many folks making called shots for high-value targets, they’re starting to memorize the hit location penalties, and just about everybody’s gotten comfortable with Rapid Strikes.

This last session, the combats went really smoothly. It was remarked that we were moving the turns around the table at a speed that we hadn’t seen since the Old West game. In that campaign, all the fights were like the 10-12 second gunfight from Appaloosa: a bunch of guys standing around insulting each other, followed by a few seconds of a bunch of guys blazing away, followed by bleeding. (No, really, the first time a PC died, he took something like six bullets to the torso, won the fight, and then bled to death because he was the second in line to get first aid. Thirty minutes of bleeding is bad for the complexion, kids.)

“That was quick.”

“Yeah, everybody could shoot.”

Incidentally, in Pyramid #3-74, Hans-Christian Vortisch, the mind behind GURPS Tactical Shooting, breaks down that very gunfight in GURPS detail, along with several others. There’s a lot of All-Out Attack (Determined) in there. I recall that being the case with our Old West game, as well.

Anyhow, point is, when you cut down on the options you consider, you can make your decisions faster when it’s your turn. Too many options lead to analysis paralysis. As it happens, though, most characters are going to have a very small selection of “go-to” moves, that they’ll use over and over.

For example…

Alric: The party’s Big Man has been switching between maul and great axe a lot, as he goes between the roles of “damage-per-second” and “door-opener”.

• Cleave:  Used when two targets present themselves side-by-side, as they so often do. A Rapid Strike using the great axe against the torso. Effective skill 16 + 1 fine weapon +1 weapon bond -3 Rapid Strike with Weapon Master = 15; does 3d+13 cutting.
• Decapitation:  A popular move with the whole party, it seems. A normal attack, with the great axe, against the neck of a standing opponent. Effective skill 18 -5 neck = 13; does 3d+13 cutting, with a x2 wounding modifier.

From time to time, he’ll change things up with an AOA version of one of these, if he sees a good opportunity.

FuBar: The exception to the rule. He actually makes a point of not using the same attack twice if he can avoid it. He’s thrown shuriken. He’s grabbed weapons with his kusari to create an opening for a comrade. He’s thrown potions and scattered them behind himself while fleeing wildly. He’s knocked down a zombie with a thrown severed head. (He threatened to use Jed’s head as a weapon in the same way, but finally decided against it.)

If FuBar ever does develop an actual signature move, I fear it’ll be some sort of “Johnny Cage”-inspired horribleness.

Gabby:  Gabby fights exclusively with rapier and main-gauche. She’s got lots of things going on, on her character sheet, and we’ve probably screwed up the rules as they apply to her more than we have for any other subject, short of magic.

To be frank, I’ve been a little bothered by Gabby. (No, no, wait, hear me out, now!)  She’s got gobs and gobs of points dedicated to making her hell on wheels in melee combat. She’s got the highest weapon skill in the group. She’s got more effective options available to her than anybody else. And… I’ve gotten the feeling sometimes that that very plethora of options is a problem, that it’s such a huge bite to chew that it ends up with that paralysis of choice, and so in actual play, more often than not, Gabby’s actions amount to “I poke it a lot. I need to roll anything better than an 18.”  I worry about player frustration, honestly.

Lately, though, she’s started exploiting more of her potential, and it shows in the kinds of attacks she’s been throwing.

• Dual-weapon: A normal Attack maneuver, in which she strikes with both her rapier and her main-gauche. She can attack two targets, but if she uses both attacks on a single target, that target defends at -1. She cannot perform a Rapid Strike! (We’ve goofed this sooo many times…) If she takes the default torso hit location, her rapier is at an effective skill of 20, doing 1d+2 imp, and her main-gauche is at 18, doing 1d+1, either cutting or impaling.
  • Since an 18 always fails, there’s nothing to be gained by rolling against an effective 20. If there’s nothing else to soak up excess skill — see below — and if the default torso hit location is acceptable, there’s no reason not to go for a Deceptive Attack. At a minimum, taking -2 to the rapier would leave an effective 18 skill, meaning the same chance to hit, and the target of that attack would defend at -1. If she were ever to meet an enemy with great active defenses, like another fencing Weapon Master, she might make both attacks Deceptive. If she reduced both attacks to an effective 12 skill, the target would defend against the rapier at -4 and the main-gauche at -3…. or -5/-4 if aiming at the same target.
  • It doesn’t take much DR at all to hamper Gabby’s damage rolls. Therefore, if her opponents aren’t soft and squishy all over, she’ll likely want to go for high-value, lightly-armored locations. Lately, she’s been directing her dual attacks at enemies’ two eyes; at -9 to hit, that gives her effective skills of 11 and 9. Luckily (heh), she has Extraordinary Luck, so even if the dice aren’t cooperating, every half-hour, she can nudge ’em.
  • Another favorite is the vitals, for skill of 17/15… which could be made deceptive to 13/13 for -2/-1 to defense (or -3/-2, for a single target, remember).
• Rapid Strike: As a Weapon Master, Gabby only pays -3 for her extra attacks in a Rapid Strike. Less, if she burns Fatigue… but, then, there’s been some oddities about Gabby’s Fatigue and how it recovers, lately, so it seems like she’s being a bit more tight-fisted about spending it.
  • Two attacks with rapier at torso, both effective skill 17.
  • Two at the vitals would be at effective skill 14, or three at 11.

Jed: Being a Bard-Wizard, the first tool to come to Jed’s hand has always been a song. Since he picked up that awesome staff with the purple flames, though, he’s been more willing to mix it up, hand to hand. No word, as yet, if his recent post-death experience will change his ways.

At a skill of 12, Jed isn’t pulling any fancy tricks. Generally, he swings for 1d+5+2 burning, which is pretty darn good for a spell-caster. I believe he’s gone for an AOA (Strong) at least once, which would bump his damage to 1d+7+2 burn.  Probably fighting zombies. I could have sworn he whacked something in the face, but that would have dropped his effective skill to 7, which seems really unlikely.

Needles: Ah, Needles, the well-known engine of destruction. He’s all DPS. He’s not only a Weapon Master with his chosen weapon, he’s also gone to some trouble to spend experience elsewhere to improve his damage-dealing prowess. (I just noticed again that Needles has Lifting ST 1 and Striking ST 3, so he’s essentially bought a point of ST, hold the Hit Point. “Wiry”, I guess you’d call ‘im…)  In particular, he’s picked up Slayer Training for a shortsword swing to the neck, and the Run And Hit power-up. That last one gives him outstanding mobility on the battlefield, which he has used to line up multiple targets for his Rapid Strikes.

Needles carries two shortswords, but I don’t believe he’s ever held both at the same time. He didn’t invest in the dual-weapon traits like Gabby, so if he ever did use them both and try to attack with both of them, he would suffer penalties to both attacks — crippling penalties, in the case of the off-hand — and he wouldn’t get all his nice Weapon Master stuff for Rapid Strikes. Then again, if he just carried one in each hand, he would pick up an extra Parry. At any rate, he favors the fine, balance, Penetrating one. With it, he has an effective skill of 19, doing 2d+5(2) cut or 1d+3(2) imp. Ever since he got that extra die of damage with the swing, he’s favored it pretty much exclusively.

• Stand-Up Fight:  Needles likes to share the love, so he’s prone to performing Rapid Strikes for two attacks (-3) against the neck, at an effective skill of 14.
  • “I Ain’t Got Time For This”: Needles isn’t afraid to burn Fatigue when he’s in a hurry. He’s been known to spend 3 Fatigue to half his Rapid Strike penalties for a total of three attacks, at the neck, each at an effective skill of 15. (We’ve goofed on that, too, and counted it as just 1 Fatigue for the whole turn’s-worth of attacks, when it should be 1 per attack. When we finally realized our error, someone was just on the verge of trying to launch seven attacks…) It’s not something he can do very many times in one fight, but it’s been a win-maker. The fight that’s made him famous, when he was locked in a room with a bunch of goblinoids, he started his first action doing this. I think he might have done it again, on his second action, but couldn’t swear to it. I don’t remember there being much of a third action.
• Sneak Attack: Of course, Needles preference is to work from behind. He’ll usually perform an All-Out Attack (Double), then Rapid Strike one of those attacks into two (-3), using a Telegraphic Attack (+4) with a swing targeting the neck (-2, with slayer training). That would give him one attack at +2, then two more attacks at -1. And now that I see the math laid out, I think we’ve been doing it wrong, and applying the Rapid Strike penalties to all the attacks, when it should not apply to the other attack given by the AOA maneuver. Not that it matters, so much, since we’re still talking about effective skills of 21 and 18. Either way, he can absorb some darkness penalties.

Posy: All bow, all day long. I don’t think Posy’s ever readied a melee weapon, that I can remember. Once she used her natural claws on an unsuspecting target. There was some discussion once about the possibility of her using her bow as a club, but she decided to put two arrows into whatever-it-was in the end, anyway. She’s a Heroic Archer and has paid points to do the “two arrows at once” trick. Without bothering to aim, she’s got an effective 23 skill, before range and hit location penalties. She’s doing 1d+5 imp with each arrow, and the only reason not to fire two would be conservation of ammo.

As it is, she’s carrying two quivers, one divided into two compartments, so she can keep three kinds of arrows organized. Just wait until she finds out about the Cornucopia enchantment… In fact, it seems to me that even a small investment in enchantments could prove useful for Posy. Enchanted arrows can be astonishin’ cheap.

• “Heart.” (zip-thwap!):  The standard shot, two to the vitals.  Effective skill 20, minus range modifiers.
• “Head.” (zip-thump!):  Used on zombies and such. When heart shots aren’t enough, go for right between the eyes. Two shots at the skull. Effective 16, or 18 if they’re running away.
• “Eye.” (zip-squish!) “Other eye.” (zip-squish!): Once or twice, just for variety, there have been some eye shots. Effective skill of 14. Ends up about as damaging as a skull hit, but blinds ’em, too. So far, everything that she’s hit anywhere in the head region has immediately died, so she hasn’t gotten any benefit from taking that extra -2, but now they’re getting into territory where there’s monsters that won’t necessarily die just from a single arrow in their brain. Might also come in handy against anything with heavy DR that doesn’t cover its eyes, like folks in heavy armor, or giant man-eating armadillos.

 

“Corbin, Inc.”, Session #14

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ:

• Alric Redbeard, barbarian philanthropist (PC)
• FuBar Bombad, infamous trash ninja and swinging bait (PC)
• Gabby the Cabin Girl, catching up to the others just in time for all the really good violence (PC)
• Mississippi Jedadiah Walker, bard/wizard who gains a really unique perspective (PC)
• Needles, the famous monster-slayer — really, he’s got a song and everything (PC)
• Posy, cat-folk archer who’s so Woo she’s got her own doves (PC)
• “Dobby”, Alric’s goblin henchman, left outside the dungeon and thus not appearing in this episode (NPC henchman)
• Trevor, apprentice wizard who got to be the party’s chief wizard, for a while (NPC henchman)
• Brother Bob Pattson, Bruce the Brute, and Jack, son of John, flunkies who get put in a corner (NPC hirelings)

Rumors Gathered:

None, because we picked up with the party still in the dungeon.

What Happened:

(GM Note: This is the second half of the dungeon delve that started last session. We pick up only a moment later.)

“Hey, guy, what’re we looking for?” Gabby asked, joining the bulk of the party at the edge of the Pit of Darkness. She had missed the party leaving town, and only just now caught up. She had cut cross-country and left her rope hanging down the cliff face to the Great Bridge. (GM: If I caught the story correctly, that rope made the difference between encumbrance levels, so leaving it behind was a win.) The others quickly muttered out the story, over the screams of the shriekers, explaining that FuBar had gone down into the Pit of Darkness, and they were waiting for the screams or the mad dash for escape, whichever came first.

Like this, but with wrinkles, a snout, two big ears, and random tufts of orange hair.

Down on the first level of the pit, FuBar was reaching for the backpack, when he heard the creak of door hinges. The door in front of him was slowly opening. Thinking quickly, he acrobatically made his way up the wall and clung to the ceiling, “River Tam style”. Luckily, he was able to win the war of stealth. He saw that a humanoid figure was lurking just inside the door. Deciding to abandon the backpack, he dropped a flask of alchemist’s fire in front of the doorway and made a wild, leaping dash for the exit.

Hearing the ruckus, Needles and Gabby jumped to climb down the chain and provide support. Posy kept her overlook position, in case of bad guys exiting the pit, but became increasingly restless. Alric also maintained his position, axe at the ready to chop any climbing hands. Jed held a missile spell at the ready, splitting his attention between the pit and the surrounding area, directing the hirelings to watch in all directions.

Inside the pit, there was a bit of a standoff. The monster, whatever it was, was lurking inside the room; apparently the slick of fire on the ground hadn’t caused it much difficulty. The three PCs tried to draw it out, to no avail. Finally, they entered the room. The creature, a humanoid figure made entirely of  darkness, managed to pop up being FuBar. Its sneak attack was somewhat spoiled, thanks to FuBar’s finely-honed sense for danger and a desperate, behind-the-back parry. Still, it got one hand on him, and he could feel the icy fingers of death tearing at his very soul.

FuBar and Gabby moved to engage the creature, while Needles edged around the fight with his eye on the backpack. Just as he made it to his goal, Gabby launched a successful attack that put a rapier into both the creature’s eyes. Dead before it hit the ground. The backpack turned out to be full of less-than-epic loot. The most interesting items were a dungeon-camouflaged cloak — for some reason, the party is wild for cloaks — and a vial of Luminous Dust.

They checked the next room in, where the shadow-man had come from. There, they found the skeleton of a goblin, still clutching a mace in one hand, and a sack in the other. Obviously, a failed treasure hunter. Checking the sack, they found a couple of silver buttons and a wand-like object; when investigated outside, in the light, it turned out to be a unicorn’s horn, covered in scrimshaw, worth nearly $1,000. While they were investigating, a handful of zombies approached outside on the balcony. They made short work of them.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party was still on watch. Trevor drew the others’ attention to the far end of the room, saying he had seen movement. Investigation revealed nothing, which might have actually increased their level of paranoia. Reconsidering their position, they had Posy call the rest of the party up to the top of the pit. The whole group retreated to the far end of the room, to the old dwarven storeroom. The two groups compared notes. They decided that the high-powered members of the party could handle the level of hostilities in the pit, but the henchmen would be at risk. They posted the hirelings there, in the storeroom, behind barred doors, and returned to the pit.

Everybody climbed down the chain, except for Jed, who used his Wallwalker spell to avoid risking a fall. The experienced hands pointed out items of interest to the newcomers. There were two large open doorways, on walls opposite each other, each flanked by two doors. The other two walls each had three doors.

The party started working its way clockwise around the level, starting with the door to the right of the door that FuBar had originally entered. The first room was a small chamber with no exits. Next came one of the large doorways, which led to a tiled chamber with curtained alcoves, where FuBar discovered quite a prize: a fine chamber pot.  The next door was spiked shut, with a chalked message, saying, “Do not enter! Dead!”

After a quick conference, the party left that door alone for the moment. They backtracked to the first door, then proceeded to the left. The other big doorway led to a room with a dried fountain, with a layer of sticky green slime in the bottom. As is usual in these situations, there was a nervous conference to determine if this was just green slime or if it were Green Slime!, the bane of unwashed adventurers everywhere. Alric announced it was just common pond scum, and FuBar volunteered to give it a taste to make sure, surviving the experiment unharmed. In another room, they found a huge mess of shredded paper and broken shelves (sad Jed) around a lectern bearing a single, untouched, closed book (happy Jed!). Wary of curses, they swept it into a bag and packed it away for later examination.

By the time they made it make to the “Dead!” door, they had started to get an idea of the layout of the place. As they put it, “There’s the one suite, but it’s mostly studio apartments.” Most of the rooms had been looted already. While FuBar slowly accumulated a hobo’s stew of unspeakable components, nobody else was making any profit.

At the “Dead!” door, the party discussed whether they should mess with the door or leave it alone. Jed declared that he would do some reconnaissance. Now, through this part of the trip, Jed had been carrying around a missile spell. To free his hands for other casting, he tossed the spell over his shoulder.

The resulting lightning bolt and clap of thunder took everyone by surprise. The shriekers stopped screaming, which freaked everybody out even worse than the sudden thunder. Gabby bolted for the chain and didn’t stop until she was back at the top of the pit. Looking back over her shoulder, the only thing she saw was FuBar’s new chamber pot, spinning like a top. Everybody else had dove for a hiding place. Even Jed, surprised when everyone else vanished, found a place to hide. Slowly, over the course of several minutes, as nothing came screaming out of the bottom of the pit, the party came out of their hiding places and returned.

There was much whispered discussion about the virtues of stealth, in the dungeon environment, and the general lack of wisdom inherent in giving away their location to every bad guy with ears within a half-mile radius.

Back at the “Dead!” door, Jed did his see-through-doors trick, confirming that the room was, indeed, crowded with zombies. The party sorted out their battle line. Alric used his maul to trigger a siege stone, blowing the door to bits, and Jed blasted through the opening with a full-power breath of flame. This tore up the first rank, but there were plenty of zombies to fill the gaps. Battle was joined. Posy put arrows through eyes. Gabby did the same with her rapiers. Needles put his trademark head-lopping move to good use. Jed even rolled up his sleeves and went to work, bashing in zombie skulls with his purple-flaming quarterstaff. Alric was somewhat hampered by fighting with his maul, rather than his great axe, but he still caved in his share of undead. FuBar worked around the edges, with his most notable move being when he caught a flying zombie head, thrown from Needles’ last adversary, on the point of his sai and used it as an improvised throwing weapon against the next zombie in line.

Sadly, the only payout was a pile of badly-damaged corpses in dirty loincloths. Having cleared level one of the nigh-legendary Pit of Darkness, the party put their heads together. Pickings had been slim thus far. It was unlikely that they would show a profit from the trip, if they called it a day here. Unanimously, they declared that they would try the second level.

This called for some discretion and examination. They sent FuBar down the chain to take a look. He returned, declaring that the whole next level’s balcony was crowded with zombies. Furthermore, he reported, there were several gathered around some kind of object, in one corner, that he couldn’t get a good look at. Posy worked her way around to see if she could get a good shot, finally getting an angle on the lower body of one. She put an arrow into its groin, spurring it to action. It staggered forward in anger, arms outstretched… until it toppled over the edge of the balcony, falling to its doom.

Inspired by this, the party put together a plan. They tied FuBar on a rope and dangled him over the edge, so that he could “run” along the wall below the second level. He joyously teased zombies until the entire crowd had stumbled over the brink, chasing him. He signaled for the rest of the group to join him, then went to check out the previously-hidden object… which turned out to be a chest with a bear carved into the lid. Needles unlocked it after examining it for traps, opened it, and saw that it seemed, at a glance, to be full of fine clothing. Satisfied with that, the party closed the chest and strapped it onto Alric’s growing bundle of loot.

Getting their bearings, the party realized that the chest had been sitting in the same corner as the two-room suite on the level above. Based on the theory that the floors’ layouts would be similar, they opened the door that should — and did — lead to the big apartment on this level. Needles checked it over, then handed the door over to Alric, who gave it the boot.

Inside the room, they found two cat-headed humanoids, sitting on two benches, facing each other, with swords across their knees. They were obviously not cat-folk, despite the similarities: they were far bulkier, with fangs overhanging their lower lips, glowing red eyes, and licks of flames coming from their eyebrows, ear-tips, and so forth. They turned their heads and snarled. With no specialist on hand to identify them, they were classified as “demonic cat-folk”. Accordingly, the party rushed in the room to engage.

Before any of the heroes could actually reach them, though — it was a tight doorway — the cat-demons were in motion. Both stood. One brandished his sword and sidestepped in an effort to flank the incoming party. The other stepped to the center of the room, drew breath, and exhaled a tremendous cone of flame!

Nearly everybody dove for cover. Alric ducked to the side and used his heavy cloak for cover. FuBar had already stationed himself against the wall, outside the door, and hadn’t rushed in, so he was out of danger. Jed held his ground, trying to use a Command spell to cause the creature to aim its attack at its partner, rather than the party. Sadly, the demon resisted his bardic mind tricks, and Jed was blasted, full-force. Though badly wounded and swaying, he kept his feet.

… for about a half second. The cat-demon who hadn’t breathed fire jumped into the middle of the party. The nearest standing enemy on its side of the fray was Jed. Accordingly, the beast stepped up to the dazed wizard, swung its sword once, and lopped off his head!

(GM Note:  PC down!  PC down!  Here’s the funny thing:  Jed’s player had finally obtained an appropriate miniature, top hat and all, and even got it painted. The running joke, up to this point, was that by putting his money down, he had tempted fate, and now Jed’s days were numbered. As you see… the omens were right.)

As designated thrower- and catcher-of-things, FuBar recovered Jed’s severed head before it rolled too far, and popped it into his pouch, right next to his treasured chamber pot. Posy didn’t even bother getting to her feet, she just started raining arrows, two at a time, through the doorway. (In fact, she remained prone for the rest of the battle.) The others stood and tackled the demons, with Alric and Gabby double-teaming the fire-breather.

The sword-favoring demon had the misfortune of ending up with Needles to his back. The thief-swashbuckler went to work, lumberjack-style, on the demon’s neck, but couldn’t manage the trick of decapitating it. For that matter, he couldn’t get it to stop moving!  It kept backing up, as it fought, trying to get outside the room so it could get a good angle on the entire party for its own breath of fire. It just had to get a couple of yards outside the door to be able to hit nearly everyone. When it stepped outside the cover of the doorway, however, it came within sight of FuBar, who had been preparing for this moment. He flung an ice potion at it, dousing it in alchemical cold. It howled once and went down dead, and nearly headless.

Observing this, Needles turned and returned to the room, where Gabby and Alric were busy unloading damage into the other demon-cat, who also refused to die despite receiving many should-be-mortal wounds. Needles pulled his own ice potion and shoved it down the demon’s throat! It tried to roar, failed, and fell dead.

The party gathered up the rest of their dead companions’ remains and searched the room. They found that the demons had been sitting on either side of a locked chest, which was sitting on a fine run covered with geometric figures. They took both. (GM: And maybe the benches, too. They were iffy on them.)

No jokes about “just one more room” this time. The party didn’t even argue their next move. They left the Pit, returned to the storeroom to collect the henchmen, and left the dungeon using Gabby’s previously-prepared climbing line. They returned to town without further incident.

There, the party split into two teams. The first group took Jed’s corpse to The Church. It was determined that Jed’s spirit was willing to leave behind the afterlife to continue working in the mortal realm. It was further determined that between Jed’s stored-up goodwill with The Church (GM: cough-cough-DONATIONS-cough) and a few thousand copper from Alric’s personal fortune, they could afford to pay for a resurrection. The service was paid for and scheduled. (GM: … but I haven’t fully investigated all the ramifications of being brought back from the dead, so there might still be rolls to make and consequences to address. For the moment, we assumed that Jed was back in the land of living, free of any hair or trace of eyebrows from his flame-bath, pale and weak, but able to issue orders for Trevor to carry out.)

Loot inventory back in town revealed that the two cat-demons had been guarding a chest full of scrolls, written in the dwarven manner, on sheets of metal. The zombies’ chest was full of fine clothing — a cap, a poncho, a bright red skirt, a silver bracelet — which the party did not sell, suspecting it might be of ritual significance and would bear further investigation. It also had a quart bottle full of dwarvish peach brandy, which Needles took away from Trevor; the bottle was used to toast Jed’s death and return.

The delve was declared profitable for the party as a whole, though Jed and Alric might very well have walked away with less wealth than they walking in with. Jed received the Cool Point for dying dramatically while taking one for the team… though it was observed that we’re slowly turning the Cool Point into the Consolation Prize, “Here, Buddy, Walk It Off” Point.