R.I.P. Bad Ray

Bad Ray (Layth) is dead. A mage who thought he was a ninja has met his untimely end been stabbed through the fucking brain by his dear friend Kevin Bacon (Kelly).

Grant wanted to DM a couple days ago, which was cool because A)I never get to play and B)he was running my weird patched-together ruleset and I was curious how it would turn out. I explained the game in as few words as possible to Keiran (Grant’s boss, who was cool enough to let us play in his store) while Grant mapped out a cave complex. “Everyone around knows the legend of this pirate lord that died with his treasure at the bottom of a cave system somewhere in the area. There’s also something in the legend about zombies or vampires or something. You guys met some old drunk at the bar the other night with a map showing the cave’s location.” Fuck it, let’s do this.

I've never seen a more trustworthy face.

Nikolai Stroganoff the bow-toting mage (me) accompanied Bad Ray and John Doe (Keiran) into the cave, where we almost immediately stumbled upon a time worn and dust covered message engraved in the rock wall. It was a riddle, something along the lines of “I’m round but not always around, sometimes light and sometimes dark…” and then something else but it was obviously the moon at that point. Saying this out loud opened a secret room with loot, armor, and a nifty anti-magic shield. The next passage we took was a gradually narrowing incline spiralling downward.

Grant: “Okay, at this point you guys are pretty much crawling…”

Me: “Fuck that, we’re turning around.”

Layth: “What? No, we gotta keep going.”

Me: “Well we can find another way, I’m not crawling down there.”

Keiran: “Oh you don’t wanna crawl around? Ha! Weren’t you in the army?”

Me: “Yeah, I was. That’s how I know not to go in there. Have fun, guys.”

They triggered a pressure plate that released four spiders the size of cats from a hydraulic cage,* which added to my smugness from the moon riddle treasure. Hubris will probably be Nikolai’s downfall in the end. Bad Ray was prepared, though, with a glue spell that made the critters helpless while he shis kabobed them with his signature katana. Nothing else was down there, but Bad Ray made the most of it, filling an empty jar with venom glands.

The next large cave chamber we explored had a stream running through it, at the bottom of a steep and magically slippery incline, which we fell down, dropping our weapons. Then we almost drowned in the stream, which let out into a huge cave with an underground lake, beach, jungle, and even something that looked very much like the sun. John Doe and Bad Ray pulled Nikolai’s unconscious body onto the beach. J.D. opted to rest on the beach with Nikolai while Bad Ray wandered into the jungle, where he stumbled into a clearing with a deer.

Not one to be discouraged by the fact that he’d gone hunting without any weapons, Bad Ray quickly made a molotov cocktail and threw it at the deer, which disintegrated into glowing pixie dust or something as the jar passed through it. Ray caught a glimpse of some sort of bipedal lizard monster hiding in the bushes. Realizing that he was basically defenseless, our intrepid adventurer cast a fear spell at the thing and it ran away in terror. Reality kind of flickered when the creature panicked, in a way that confirmed our suspicions that everything in this cavern was an illusion. Bad Ray made it back to the beach without any further distractions.

At this point Ashley picked me up so we could go eat. We started the game back up an hour later without Keiran, when Grant, Kelly and Layth came over. There are some D&D groups that would be bothered by that sort of incoherence but they don’t seem to have any problem with nonsensical combat mechanics so I feel like we’re basically even.

As Nikolai and Bad Ray finished resting, Molly (Ashley) and Kevin Bacon came running out of the woodline, with four jaguars hot on their tail. We beat them, but used like four of our spells to do it, so we elected to rest again to increase our chances of survival. Of course, this led to us being attacked by yet another group of jaguars, and this time we started combat with hardly any spells left. At this point the odds were that there wouldn’t be another random encounter, so we risked resting again, this time uneventfully.

This is when I guess Grant got tired of us just hanging out there doing nothing, and decided that whatever was behind all this should take action. We all had to save against fear or run away from the water in terror, into the jungle. Bad Ray made his save, but he was the only one. He glued Molly’s and Kevin Bacon’s feet to the spot, and tripped Nikolai up with his grappling hook & rope. Grant then informed us that the fear effect was likely to last longer than the glue spell, so Ray tried to tie up Kevin and Molly with what was left of the rope. That’s when Kelly decided that Kevin Bacon had fucking had it and killed off the party’s first ever level 3 character.** I seem to remember her rolling a critical hit.

"Don't Fuck With Kevin Bacon"

The best part about being one of two mages in a party is inheriting the other one’s spellbook when he dies (I’ll probably give Layth’s new character the magic cloak I found on B.R.’s corpse because I’m such a nice guy, though). There’s a couple spells in there that Nikolai can’t even cast yet, but if I can get him back to town, he’s already got enough loot to level up, and I’m pretty sure everyone else does too. Now I just need to get him & his pals out of this cave system alive, preferably in one piece.

So it looks like there’s some mind-control aliens or something hiding out down here and spreading rumors about pirate ghosts Scooby-Doo style, unless the pirates are still alive and acting as cultists or co-conspirators. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. The anti-magic shield should come in handy, unless Grant decides that psionics and magic are two distinctly separate things.

*That’s a pretty technologically advanced trap for what’s supposed to be a dead pirate’s final resting place. I wonder who or what put it there.

**I have zero problems with high mortality rates in my games. Most of my house rules are pretty player friendly, but the game world is not. Your character is not a beautiful snowflake and is not destined for glory, at least not without struggling to barely scrape by as a murderhobo first. If you make it to third level, you’re beating the odds. That’s why it’s crucial for me that character creation take a drunk person no more than fifteen minutes.

Also my players die a lot because we get pretty wasted sometimes and they make silly decisions. Which might be my favorite part of the game.

Philosopher's Castle

This post is mostly for Grant, Kelly, and Scott. Layth showed up last night and we soloed for a little while before Ashley got home and joined in. This is what happened.

So Bad Ray the katana wielding mage was wandering through a village on his way to Mistfall. He walks strait past the wailing woman in the town square and the creepy looking castle on the hill, but stops to help when he sees a little red headed kid being carried up the hill by a tentacle faced crocodile man. Ray climbed a tree and dive-bomb stabbed the thing in the head. Then he freed the kid and reverted to his initial strategy of ignoring the dungeon, continuing on his way to the big city.

Night was falling as he arrived in Mistfall, so Bad Ray naturally decided to wander around looking for a bank to rob. He glued (spell on page 8 of the 52 Pages RPG) the guard’s feet to the spot and murdered him from behind, but the victim was screaming for help as he died. People were coming, so Ray grabbed the dead man’s armor and ran to a tavern on the shady side of town, where he engaged in mutually consensual intercourse with an overweight young woman, whose name he forgot to ask. I guess that’s just what you do after you fail to rob a bank? After that he suddenly remembered the creepy castle and decided to go back.

That’s when Ashley got home so from here on in it makes a little more sense. Molly and Bad Ray found the secret back entrance and got in through the basement, where they found body parts everywhere in one room and a creature with one leg and four arms in the next, imprisoned in a giant glass ball with a magic circle around the base exactly like the Sandman.

Ray immediately befriended it, and it telepathically communicated to him and Molly that:

-it had followed a giant tentacled brain creature called a grell across the multiverse because it had taken its “other”

-that its other and therefore the grell were in this castle

-that the grell and its followers had known the friendly creature was on its way and tricked it

-that its supernaturally hard glass prison has a “molecular structure that should be vulnerable to the correct vibrational frequency” (whatever that means).

Molly tried to pick the lockpick her way into the treasury but that was a bust. They did, however, find a shrine to a tentacled brain creature (which matched the idol in the pocket of the thing Ray killed). Then they found the secret door that led to a pool of water with brain stems swimming around like sperm, and a re-statted mind flayer on a throne. After a short argument they killed the shit out of it, took its robe (which puts out all nearby light sources whenever its wearer sings the chorus to this) and staff, and headed upstairs. After a couple lobotomy-style-zombies almost killed Bad Ray, they headed back to town to stock up on healing potions and rest at the inn.

The next morning, they wake up to an armored man, accompanied by two robed figures like the thing Bad Ray ninja assassinated a few days ago, ringing the bell in the town square and demanding to know who had killed his father. Ray, being quite Bad, poked his head out the window and responded “I killed your daddy, beeyotch!” even though he legitimately hadn’t figured out who the guy’s dad was yet.

Molly dropped some burning oil onto one of the reptilian things as they approached the inn and sort of freestyle rappelled down to stab it in the neck when it stop-drop-rolled, while Ray set up a magic mouth + fear trap and hid in the closet (hurr hurr). The other monster failed its save and ran as the armored dude was climbing the steps, Molly close behind. Ray glued his feet to the spot and Molly tied him up from behind, then they tied him to a chair and tortured the hell out of him.

They learned that:

-the mind flayer was the dude’s dad…

-…who was in a transitional stage on his way to becoming a “higher power”

before they fucked up and told each other out loud that they weren’t gonna let him live anyway and he clammed up and got himself executed.

Then the a tavern worker, who (because I felt like it) was the mother of the little red headed kid Ray had heroically saved, came upstairs to assess the situation. From her, they learned that:

-the man they’d just tortured and killed was one Lord Highrock.

-everyone knows his father died years ago.

-she doesn’t know exactly how or when he died, and she doesn’t know anyone who was at the funeral.

-there aren’t as many people in Highrock Village as there used to be, but as far as the woman knows no one has died in years. She thinks they must have all moved or something.

-it sounds to her like those dead people Molly and Ray found were probably all from out of town, and therefore not her problem.

-no one goes up to the castle ever.

-she has no recollection of the bell ringing or the robed crocodilians. In fact, she doesn’t see the charred corpse of the one Molly killed even when she’s looking right at it.

-(I swear I rolled this one randomly on my rumors table) old man Highrock was once gifted a sword that, when struck against a hard surface, emits a single perfect and terrible note, unlike any sound heard in music or nature.

And that’s where we ended the session. They haven’t gone shopping for supplies yet, so think about what you want to stock up on if you’re showing up next time. It’s not a big town but there’s an apothecary that sells a few simple potions, ingredients, and alchemy equipment, a general store that sells basic equipment (we’ll say that includes matchlock muskets, powder and shot), and a few of the basic village services like a blacksmith and tanner.