#i find a character i like and put them in the chambers of wrath/silly

[diinotrains]

I need D10 and Lady to have a crazy ass fight ok. I need violence between them I need them to be and unfair and I need them to BOTH be in the wrong and suffer the consequences of what they have reaped upon themselves after hiding it for years and years and years and the reasons why they did it are so fucked up and yet you can see why they did what they did you know.

"She deserved it" D-10 <- extremely insecure and takes out his bottled up anger on those who have better lives than him or those who he thinks are lesser than him due to undressed mental problems and does not confront what he has done because he fully believes he has the right even though he really doesn't because none cared and they never ever cared about his class they never did. To have your name stripped and everything you know taken away from you is an anger that cannot be fathomed. And while she may have done irreparable things she never held violence upon you. Your anger is justified but you took it to far and now you're fearful and it only makes it worse for everyone of class type. You have failed your brothers and your sisters and you know it is your fault but they don't know that. They don't know anything. As long as you don't get caught your fine. Your safe and your fine. If you get caught you are dead.

"I was defending myself I didn't mean to get out of hand" Lady <- not lying about but you almost killed him when he begged you to stop and found some sick twisted enjoyment in it and the guilt is eating away at you so heavily that you hide like a coward and do not confront what you have done because you know it will make you look bad and your saving face so you don't get thrown in the scrapyard with the rest of them you couldn't save because you were to busy relishing in the attention that came with being worshipped like a god. and now all you feel is regret and you know nothing will make this right and so you try to wipe away anyone and anything to uphold your reputation and if it means putting fear into those so they stay silent you will do it even if you have to bear the guilt because anything is better than getting caught. Anything is better than not being worshipped anymore.

And in the end all both you have is each other because you both dug your shared grave without realizing it and now that the tarp has been revealed there is no going back to once was and nothing can justify what you have done in the name of your own reputations survival

Anyways the make me CRAZZY!!! literally mental you should follow me for more crazy posting

[zippdementia]

Part 83 Alignment May Vary: Mirrors of the Abyss (To Sea What They Could Sea)

The next part of our adventure is taken from Mirrors of the Abyss, by Ryan Durney. I highly recommend it as a rare high level adventure. Very much worth a purchase. I will be covering huge aspects of it and it will not be spoiler-free, though it is a random enough adventure that there is PLENTY we won’t see on this playthrough and some additional material for our own story. Much of the art in this section of the blog is taken directly from the module and is illustrated by Ryan Durney. The purpose in using it here is to show off how beautiful and professional the product is, not to claim such images as our own. I sincerely hope it inspires you to purchase the product!

Vulpine Encounter

Much has happened in a short amount of time. Carrick has fallen. The Prophecy has been revealed to MIlosh (we will share it later this post). Hecate has joined the party. But they all have little time to contemplate any of this: the moment they arrive on the cold wet beach through the latest portal, they are spotted by a strange creature standing on a cliff’s edge, arms outstretched, looking for all the world like a creature about to throw himself into the raging sea.

I say “creature,” because this thing is no man. It is humanoid to be sure, but its vulpine features and furry body speak to some kind of demon or mixed race, dressed in ruined finery from an era long gone. As the thing spots them, it lets out a strange cry and charges down the cliff side, swiftly scaling it with little care to its own safety, only to pull up short by them, hands (paws?) raised in surrender.

“I do not come to hurt you!” the creature chortles, its voice caught somewhere between in the uncomfortable space between hysterical excitement and anxious calm.

In actuality, this is Carrick’s new character, now that Carrick is dead... or at least, no longer with the party in any playable sense. His name is Ruz, pronounced “ruse”, and he was the previous winner of Esheballa’s game, though that was a century ago. The winning came at a great cost, as he tells the party: in the end, Ruz had to murder the rest of his companions in order to “win” the game. For a time after, he was favored by Esheballa and spent much of his time reveling in her passionate embrace. But time passes and Esheballa is fickle. Cast aside by his mistress once she became bored with him, he has wandered her courts and challenge rooms with no purpose for decades, not aging much, rarely being targeted by the demons and things that lurk in her rooms (for fear of awakening her wrath for killing one of her “collected” playthings). Finally, he had given up hope of ever there being a change in his fate and was determined to settle things himself when he spotted the party.

Ruz’s excitement quickly turns to trepidation, however, as he notices a thick fog settling on to the beach. He has seen something like this in his own game, ages ago, and he knows that it marks this place as the next arena, the next battleground.

Ruz decides to take the group under his, uh, paw and guides them to a safe haven, or so he thinks: an old temple that was dedicated to Esheballa, or at least one of her older, kinder, aspects, before she became dark and twisted.

“This coast is where Esheballa forgets things to die. Including me... this temple has been left untouched by her games for years, but there’s no telling what’s changed now that you are here. Be careful!”

The warning turns out to be a good one. Almost immediately in fact, as Milosh decides to try and swim out into the ocean a ways and his key, the one that lets him travel through these realms, that he found back at the beginning of Esheballa’s game, activates a hidden curse and turns him into a merman.

This is a little bit of silliness as Milosh comes back to shore and has to flop around on land a bit before he transforms back. A small consequence for a small misdirection. But maybe also a warning of worse things to come.

Sudden Shift in the Plan

A lot happens in the next scene. Ryan Durney set up a ton of threats in this area of the Abyss. The biggest threat is a huge collection of monsters he designed called “sea monkeys.” They are the height of a dangerous swarm, vicious and persistant and come in ungodly numbers. There are a number of hordes equal to the number of players, and each horde has 240 life and they can automatically prone and grapple a player with hundreds of their little sea lice pets and they can attach to players and deal 5 damage per attached monkey and they come with priests who attack using dark energy.

It’s actually a really well designed and balanced fight, though it may not seem like it from the above description. The DCs to break the effects they cast are 18, which is not super high for a party of this level. And they don’t actually deal a ton of damage in their attacks. They are just persistent!

But a DM has to be able to read their party, and after last session, I read a few things in my party, without them having to say anything about it to me. And what I read was, they were feeling burnt out by this dungeon. Now, that’s not a criticism of Mirrors or Ryan at all. Allow me to explain.

Alignment May Vary, the name our group has come up with to describe our overall adventures, is now heading towards its fourth full year of gaming (October 2020 will mark the occasion). We are in the ninth chapter of a game spanning over a dozen player characters. This is post 83 you’re reading! We have so much material and story that I’ve started building an encyclopedia to track names and personas, and a timeline to track events that stretch back to the dawn of time.

What I’m trying to say is that AMV has a ton of history and story behind it and built into it. That narrative now drives the game forward and my long term players are looking for that story now. There’s been a few sessions without a real narrative as they have been stuck in Esheballa’s game, and I can feel them starting to drift. This is a dungeon crawl and as such, focused heavily on survival and the gameplay. The story is taking a back seat, and that’s not what my players want right now, especially in such a late chapter of the story. I have story prepared for them, but I was planning on holding it back for a few more chambers. Now I’m seeing I need to push that forward.

Along those same lines, my players are very dedicated to their characters. Morgan is playing Imoaza, a Yuan Ti who’s own daughter has been trying to kill her this entire time and now just joined the party as her dedicated follower; Tyler’s got Milosh, with this deep backstory tied into the Surveyors and a prophecy that’s being built up for the end of the game; even Carrick, who just died to a Lich, has built up so much history with the game that he doesn’t even die, he ends up back on Faerun in the clone body left for him there! The point is that the players are invested, invested in the characters and in the game. And part of that is good on me: I’ve made sure that every little hook and interest they’ve put out there has somehow been worked into the story. Because of that, if these characters die, it is going to have an impact. The players want it to be meaningful if they die. And it is one thing to die in service to the story, to the narrative; to die fighting for a cause that is integral to that plot. That’s dying in the line of duty. But to die in the madhouse dungeon of a Chaotic Demon Lord, in a dungeon that is clearly designed as a death trap? That kind of death is meant for quickly built on the fly characters intended to be put through such a run. Much as we did years ago with Tomb of Horrors. And to be fair, Ryan even says that in the into to Mirrors. That his warning didn’t stop me is testament to how much I felt his campaign was the perfect, best, simulation of the Abyss I would ever find. My players were going to the Abyss, so I was going to run Mirrors. It was that simple. But now we’re deep enough in it that I have to ask myself, do we need to finish all of it? Or have we done enough to get across the point and feel of the Abyss?

Only one player isn’t dedicated to his character in this way, and that’s the player who has come on to take over Daymos, the only time we’ve had a fourth player in this game. But we’ll come back to that.

Noticing these things, I decide we need to move back towards the planned narrative and away from doing any more of Esheballa’s chambers. I also realize my players won’t appreciate having the Sea Monkey fight thrown at them. It is a nice tactical fight, but it asks for players to (a) meta-game a bit in order to take the best tactical actions to win and (b) to be willing to risk dying to win. Neither of those things are going to appeal to my players, for the reasons stated above. So I decide to skip this fight and instead use the Sea Monkeys to drive us into the next bit of the plot. My players know from the book they found in the Library that there is a secret path along the fossil wall at the beach that leads to... something. I know they plan on taking this, so I do some quick moving of things around and get ready to give them a heck of a session, one that will launch them right back into the story in a big way.

I don’t count on Daymos having his own plans.

Lending a Hand

The temple is an odd space, even for her. The left, right and front walls are merely tightly spaced columns, with the gaps open to the outside. The space between these 50 ft. tall columns is tight (about 9 inches) and curtained in slimy seaweed. The rear wall backs to the coastal dam and has been relief-carved into a terraced balustrade, with a tunnel in the middle for ocean water to gush in and touch the back side of a central dais. This side that the water kisses is encrusted in barnacles and draped in dripping sea weed. The light is a dank gloom.

There is a statue of Eshebala’s comely maiden form splayed over the back wall that is a little more reminiscent of what you’d expect. The expression on it is more “come hither” than beseechment, and at 40 ft., it truly looms over the space. While her right hand cups herself lewdly, her left hand is outstretched for some kind of offering.

This is where things start to go wrong, in a way that will delay us in moving on this session and will increase frustrations of the players.

The purpose of the Temple in Mirrors is to serve as a battleground for the Sea Monkey fight. The Statue of Esheballa comes to life during the fight and also attacks the players. And there is a strange seaweed all over the temple as well that tries to envelop players.

I’ve made the last minute decision to cut most of this from this session, in an attempt to keep us moving forward and avoid a long, possibly deadly fight. But there are some things I keep. The Statue can bless players if they give it a proper offering (it “eats” them, or at least teleports the offerings through its mouth to a secret treasure hoard underneath the temple). The seaweed they end up fighting when Milosh goes exploring around the temple, in a brief but fun fight where Daymos gets inventive with Fire Wall and uses it to cut the seaweed monster in half.

But Daymos’ player also has a tendency to like to touch everything in an adventure, to see what everything does. And he likes to push the boundaries of the game. This is how they ended up fighting the lich last time: without his prodding, the rest of the group, far more cautious than him, would never have made the decision to awaken the Lich.

So Daymos tries to figure out what to do with this Statue. He caresses it. He rubs against it. He cups its breast. He wants it to do something! Finally he starts to figure out that it wants an offering. And so he encourages Milosh’s player, who is normally extremely cautious, to offer the Statue his gun arm. The Mega-Man inspired arm that is his huge magical weapon that grows with him as he levels and I keep upgrading for him.

The book is pretty clear about what happens to anything offered. The Gun Arm is taken. The Statue CRUSHES it in her hands and then eats it. It disappears. It goes away. It is gone forever. Milosh is left without the weapon that defines his character. Furthermore, I had told him at the start of Mirrors that I would hide little secret upgrades for the Gunarm all around the chambers and if he could find them, I’d give him big power boosts for the arm. He was very excited and interested in this and now, in one move, his arm is gone. Daymos’ player thinks it’s hilarious. I can see the look on Milosh’s player’s face, though, and it is not a jovial one. This crushes him. It pisses him off. It isn’t fun for him.

And honestly, it’s not a choice he would have made without being pushed into it by Daymos’ player. This is when I start to realize that this player is playing a different game than the others. Most of the team is here to play a story, to play characters they care about. He is here to play around in the world, test the boundaries of that world, and do crazy shit and who cares if Daymos gets killed in the process? This is actually confirmed a few minutes later when, while carelessly trying to see if he can get underneath the temple through a secret water passage, Daymos is dragged out to sea and eaten by a Kraken.

Now, when bad shit happens in my games, I always try to weave it back into the narrative. So for Milosh’s arm, I straight up tell the player, “do not worry, the arm is not gone forever. You will get it back. And what’s more (I invent this on the spot) you have found a big upgrade by doing this! You just have to find out where the arm went and find a way to reforge it.” With those words, that situation is saved. The player is back in the game and now has a new goal: locate the arm! He’s still a little frustrated, I can tell, but now he has a reason to keep playing and stay invested in this awesome character he’s created. Furthermore, he decides he needs a weapon until he gets his gunarm back, so he attunes to a demonic sword they took from the Marilith they killed last session and the sword turns out to house the very demon that ate Tyrion’s soul in Chapter 4. A bit of Tyrion is still in here, too, and the sword has the power to grant Milosh Bardic inspiration by singing him Tyrion’s old songs. It also is a +3 magic weapon with the power to steal critical hits from enemies, and is known as Illrastayne, the sword of Envy. Milosh’s player immediately latches onto the narrative threads and begins to think of ways for Milosh to be affected by this new demonic power he’s making use of.

I try to do the same thing for Daymos. I use some rules from Mirrors to have him come back as a poltergeist and he is able to possess Whisper, the Quasit that was following him around. I also use the opportunity to build on Daymos’ story. For the Kraken that swallows him turns out to be the very Kraken that he once controlled, back in Chapter 2 and 3 of our adventure. And also the Kraken that ate Reeves Sar Testain. And it turns out, a bit of Reeves Sar Testain is still here, and he follows Daymos into the Quasit, talking with him in his mind. But Daymos’ player isn’t really interested in any of that. He confesses to me later that he finds this whole bit boring because he wasn’t able to find the treasure. His favorite part, he says, was Milosh losing his arm.

This highlights the different levels of investment from the players. AMV can be a lot to delve into, I know that. With so much history behind it, it can feel intimidating. When Carrick joined the party, I was worried it would be hard for him to tap into the story, but he was so open to everything that pretty quickly I was able to throw him a couple curve balls (the whole surveyor plotline) and he ran with it, building a unique personality and working everything into a really interesting character. Now it’s tough to remember that we played for two years without him at the table!

For Daymos’ player, I know he enjoys clever thinking and winning combats. My hope was that Mirrors, with its emphasis on those two things, would excite and interest him and give him an in to feel like he was a part of the party and start building up Daymos (or a new character if he didn’t want to play Daymos) into his own creation and make him a part of the story. But this doesn’t happen.

It’s fine. Things aren’t always perfect at a table. But the discord is palpable during this session and it takes an effort not to be derailed. I’m flustered a bit myself, I have to admit! I didn’t expect any of this and I’m having to change big things on the fly to pull together the session. So my descriptions are a bit off, I forget to draw a map of the area, and I fudge some things, leading to some confusion that further frustrates everyone. It’s not as bad as I’m making it sound, really, but it is not our smoothest session and I decide that we need to cover some ground and end on a high note.

The latter part of the session is spent fixing the first half by giving the players hooks to get them back into the game. I hurry the players along, out of the temple, chased by Sea Monkeys, along the fossil wall where they are attacked by the Kraken and through a scene wherein Milosh falls into the ocean and escapes by swimming through a hidden passage to end up in the treasure hoard below the temple, where he reclaims his broken gunarm and befriends a lone Sea Monkey, who shows him a secret passage out of the treasure hoard. The party joins back together on the other side of the fossil wall, where they realize something is wrong. The world around them is... not right. Nothing quite looks right, the sky is frozen, the sea is moving at strange speeds, and a fog is settling in all around them, beyond which the only thing they can see is a lighthouse.

“We’ve broken out of bounds,” Ruz tells them all, wondering the whole time what madness he has gotten himself into. “We’ve left the game.”

“That’s all well and good,” Daymos chitters in his small Quasit voice. “But where have we ended up, if we’re not in the game anymore?”

Where, indeed? We’ll find out next time, in The City of Lies.