Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S2|05: Ooze Your Own Adventure.

Well, that’s a surprise. I didn’t expect my writing style and schedule to come under such scrutiny in this week’s show notes, but here we are.

First, I’ll state for the record that I absolutely do half-ass it sometimes. You can usually correlate those blog entries to when there are new video game releases, or when the Pittsburgh Penguins are playing. Occasionally, it’ll be because nothing in the episode particularly grabs me (not singling this crew out, happens for the Edgewatch show too) and I just chase my own tail for a thousand words.

It is true I tried to make it my New Year’s resolution to get my columns in a little earlier. I moved my writing days to Sunday and Wednesday, but you may have noticed we’ve been having weekly Meltdown Of Democracy events on Wednesdays and I spend the rest of the day doom-scrolling, so… it hasn’t quite taken hold yet. Maybe see about democracy moving its shit to Tuesdays going forward?

This week, I guess the main topic to address is Steve putting all us listeners on the spot about the Alhara-Ateran romance. So I guess it would be a dereliction of duty if I didn’t wade in.

I’m not going to lie: part of me wants to duck the question. As someone who also does one of these shows and has felt that pressure to come up with the “right” interaction for 3 hours, it feels shitty even wading in and telling anyone what they “should” have done. So I’d start by acknowledging that this is THEIR gaming table and they can do what the hell they want. It feels a little pretentious to discuss playing a roleplaying game with the same language of Serious Art, but they as the players/actors/artists ultimately get to develop their characters as they wish, and they choose what they do with those moments. On some level, they have to go with what feels right to them, and we as listeners can just deal with it.

But that’s still a bit of a dodge, I suppose. So let me answer the (implied) question: what do I think of the relationship? I think my overall “top of a PowerPoint slide” answer would be that I like where they’re going with it, but there are some specific episodes where the “will they or won’t they?” has felt like it was spinning its wheels a little bit.

First, I do appreciate that Rob and Vanessa are both playing it with an honesty that’s admirable: the relationship between their characters certainly feels very authentic. Heck, maybe that’s part of the “problem” is that it’s TOO real. It takes steps forwards and backwards, and even sideways where nothing “major” happens because neither person is ready to put themselves out there and take that next step. Romance in the real world is like that too.

Also, I feel like I’d be a dick if I didn’t concede that improvising DRAMA is challenging. Comedy is comparatively easy: it’s easy to come up with a one-liner to say off the top of your head. (Especially if you just steal from pop culture references most of the time as I do.) It’s a little harder to come up with something that will resonate with the audience while being both sincere to your vision of your character and giving your scene partner something that will ring true to theirs. It’s almost like Pacific Rim where you have two parties who have to sync their brains in real-time to pilot the mech. I wouldn’t pretend for one minute that’s easy.

That said, as a listener, I think Steve’s comment hits it on the head: romance plots are most interesting when they come into conflict with other elements of the story and one or both characters have to decide what that relationship means to them in comparison to something else. And there have been moments where they get there. For a GREAT example, I’d point at Alhara and Ateran having a fight about Ateran killing the hostage back at the druid hermitage. That was compelling… not just on the ethics of the argument, but whether it would change the direction of the relationship and whether Alhara would re-evaluate her interest in them. I think if this road leads to more moments like that… cool, let’s see where it goes.

(Or, skipping to the end of the episode. I’m also ALL for more conflict with Csillagos as Grumpy Relationship Chaperone.)

So OK… onto this week’s episode. (I know, I know… finally.)

This week’s challenge is another fight with a black pudding! Specifically, another member of the ooze family, which is a little ironic, because over on our Edgewatch show, we have intel that we might have to fight an ochre jelly at some future point. (Our investigations revealed its existence, but we haven’t found it yet.) So in some ways, this is a fun little sneak preview.

Now, of course, with any member of the ooze family, you get the typical resistances to criticals, precision damage, flatfooted, and so on… coupled with the fact that they’re fairly easy to hit. Same drill as the fight against the two gelatinous cubes, right? But now we add in a new wrinkle… division. When you do slashing damage to (some) oozes, they split in half. The good news is that the remaining hit points are split between the two creatures, so what’s left is easier to kill. The bad news is that all of their combat effectiveness stats – to hit, armor class, damage – stay the same, so you’re facing two creatures that were as lethal as the original creature. (Personally, I’m mentally walking this out to its logical conclusion, envisioning a bunch of AoE slashing attacks and ending up with dozens of oozes that all have 3 or 4 hit points.). Fortunately for our group, they learn the lesson on the first split and don’t repeat their mistake, and are able to recover fairly quickly and defeat the oozes.

Despite Rob P.’s attempt to sneak items from the First Edition economy into a Second Edition game, the treasure is mostly consumables, and not that exciting. As a fan of aeon stones, I actually like a magic item that lets you slot more than one at a time, and the one that takes care of food and drink is useful indeed. (I had the Starfinder equivalent on Tuttle.) There’s also a journal that WOULD have served as a handy survival guide for the area if they had read it first but now serves mostly as plot exposition. We do learn that the protagonist of this area is a thief named Juniper Wynsell (remember the “JW” marked on the tree?) who used this area as a hideout, but her ultimate fate is unknown – was she caught, did she die, is this likely to become a future plot point? It also suggests that if they can find a permanent resolution to the Kalkek situation, there’s more of her treasure deeper in that cave.

But that – as well as the staircase Alhara thinks she saw -– will at least be for another day as they decide to make camp for the night and tackle the rest tomorrow. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|17: Dead And Breakfast.

I don’t think it’s really giving anything away to let you know we’re entering a major part of the story arc that’s going to last several episodes. I mean… the name of the first book of the Adventure Path is Devil At The Dreaming Palace, and… well, this is the Dreaming Palace. So consider it the very mildest of spoilers that you should strap in for the next several episodes because it’s going to be a wild ride.

As far as whether it’s too gory… I think Steve did a pretty good job of threading that needle. It’s sanitized enough that MOST people aren’t going to lose sleep or anything. I’d argue that a couple of the worst moments to come are more implied rather than said: Steve lays out “2 and 2”, and your brain fills in the awfulness of what “4” would have to mean. So the worst of it, your own brain does to itself.

This week, we start fairly light with a mostly roleplay-centric episode, doing the actual detective work and beginning the search of the hotel. Now, I’ve kinda mentioned this before, but to reiterate, I generally don’t mind Gomez taking the lead as the “face” of the party just because he has the highest Charisma score. Basil has good knowledge-type skills, but Gomez is the better people person. More generally, there are two different Investigator builds that cover these two roles: there’s an Interrogator build that specifically emphasizes getting information out of people in one-on-one interactions, and there’s the Empiricist, who analyzes data and (at higher levels) makes predictions based off the data. Basil is the latter.

Out of game, Steve presents us with a list of known missing persons. There are seven entries encompassing 15 distinct people. Of those, three of the entries and eight of the people represent cases we’ve already bumped into in our travels; the missing mage; the zoo owner and his girlfriend; and the stonemasons. I think we’re pretty locked into the stonemasons being here; does that imply the others will be as well? The zoo owner certainly would’ve had the money for a place like this. Guess we’ll find out. (I mean, if you want to get cynical and meta-game, probably… this feels like a place where loose ends get tied up… but let’s not spoil the party just yet.)

So Gomez takes the lead talking to the innkeeper while Basil leads the analysis of the ledger itself, and we quickly zero in on the probability that our stonemasons (and others) have likely been here. Yeah, we get a lame excuse about making the books neater (why wouldn’t Pratchett just HIRE someone with good penmanship to work the desk?) but it’s pretty clear that they’re erasing the evidence of some – but clearly not all – of their guests having been here.

Then we catch a break by interacting with one of the guests they HAVEN’T killed yet, which provides us with an invitation to ditch the clerk, go upstairs, and take a look around. I’m simultaneously amused how thirsty the old lady was, but grateful Steve never turned her gaze on Basil. Just as happy to be undesirable in this particular circumstance.

Once we’re upstairs, Gomez continues to entertain the old lady while we sneak off and look around, and we eventually find the first concrete proof we need. The old Trap Door In The Hotel Room ploy! So we discover a disposal chute that goes down to somewhere down below, to – filling in the blanks with another rumor from the afterlife party – what’s PROBABLY going to turn out to be the ochre jelly Azmit Neen smuggled into the city. “Garbage disposal”, after all. We’ll need to get down to the lower levels (basement, I assume) and verify, but logically it fits.

Taking mental inventory of where we are on all of this… Hendrid Pratchett is clearly a Bad Dude, and the desk clerk is PROBABLY in it with him. Does she help with the murders, or is she just the legit front end of the hotel business? Are there other staff we haven’t met yet? And where does Jeremin Hoff fit in? Did he know he was sending the stonemasons to their likely deaths, or did he just roll some really unlucky dice and happen to choose a hotel that got them killed? And of course the big question at the end of ALL of it: WHY? Were they “just” killing people and stealing their belongings? The stonemasons’ tools did end up on the black market. Did racism play a role? I’d note that hatred of outsiders was a common theme at the party the previous evening, especially if Hoff himself is involved. Or are these people just nutjobs who kill for jollies?

Next, we have a bit of a flare-up of paralysis by analysis. We haven’t done it much in Edgewatch, but those of you who remember the Black Lodge show remember that sometimes this group gets a little TOO bogged down in planning out our next move and this is one of those times. Do we go right down to the basement and see where the chute goes? Do we now confront and arrest the desk attendant? Do we clear more of the upper floors? That debate goes around… well… not as long as some of our epic bouts of indecision, but longer than it needed to before we decide to do a little more searching for clues.

We then have a brief moment of levity as Dougie walks in on a couple having a little too much fun (good for them, I guess), and then we explore our last room of the session, which ends in… wait for it… A MIMIC! The classic RPG staple. Now… I’m a little mad Dougie and I didn’t notice the mimic, but now that I’m thinking about it, trap-sense probably made us a little overconfident. Personally, I’m kind of wondering if I’m getting a little too reliant on “That’s Odd” to bail me out and need to remember to still actively search sometimes as well. But that’s all 20/20 hindsight, and next week we’ve got a treasure chest to do battle with.

And that’s where we’ll leave it for next time. Trust me folks, the next several episodes are going to be a wild ride, and you’ll want to be back here next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S1|16: An Orc Named Sue.

Greetings and welcome to 2021! Overall, I’m far too cynical to believe flipping over a calendar page magically solves every problem in the world, but there’s been a LITTLE more of a spring in my step the past few days… not gonna lie.

I’m going to briefly start with a comment on Steve’s show notes, as it pertains to roleplaying and our character backstories. I think this is a case where I’m a bit different from the rest of the party, as I was guided by listening to both shows. Since I listen to Three Ring Adventure, I know what kind of things Steve wants to include in a backstory and how he might make use of it in a game. The story elements are ultimately my own – Steve didn’t tell me WHAT to write – but knowing HOW he’s folded the 3RA backstories into the main game made it easier for me to write some elements for Basil that he could use in a similar fashion. I think the other guys just took “backstory” as “biography” and left it at that; they may or may not have written open threads to include in the current story. But ultimately, we’ll see as the story progresses.

We pick up our story where we left off, rubbing elbows with Absalom’s criminal underworld at Jeremin Hoff’s afterlife-themed party. (Not to be confused with “Afterlife”, the bar that serves as a central quest hub in Cyberpunk 2077.) And in fact, this episode starts with our first solid break in the case, as Lo Mang comes face to face (or face to shoulder, since he’s really tall) with Jeremin Hoff himself.

Most of Lo Mang’s session is small talk mixed with uncomfortable anti-immigrant sentiment, but we do get our first solid lead out of the interaction, as Hoff openly admits to sending the stonemasons from the Dragonfly Pagoda to a place called the Dreaming Palace hotel. I still feel like my info about the ochre jelly fits into whatever’s going on here, but the Dreaming Palace gives us an actual place we can investigate next. So score one for the good guys.

Now, the logical question is: what strings might be attached to this lead? The stonemasons presumably went to this hotel, disappeared, and if their tools are on sale on the black market… probably means they’re dead, right? So it seems like there are two possibilities at opposite ends of the spectrum. Either Hoff just picked this hotel at random and something else happened to them there. Or Hoff is an active participant in whatever fate the stonemasons met, and is sending us there because he’s equally unconcerned with luring US to our doom.

From there (plus a Seth interlude that didn’t do much more than solve the logic puzzle he was given… but with flair), we have to make our decision about whether to continue. At this point, we’ve got SOMETHING to go on, but there are still a few more rooms to tackle. We decide to continue since it’s all house money at this point: if we get kicked out, we still have our good lead, and we might learn something else handy. On the other hand, we do decide to stay together and tackle it as a group and choose the challenge participant based on strengths rather than each picking a room at random.

Which turns out to be a good call because the first two challenges are things that would’ve probably killed me or Gomez… including an appearance by Old Woody’s cousin Mold Woody! The first two Lo Mang challenges don’t feel like they add anything concrete. The drunken thief hints at some unspecified reason to be afraid of the Dreaming Palace, but it’s all kind of entangled with the stuff about space aliens in the Undercity, so it’s hard to take it too seriously. Similarly, the gnome madame is good roleplay flavor but doesn’t really add anything to what we have so far.

I should mention – and this applies to ALL the encounters – I feel like any or all of these may come back if you consider the entire six-book, level 1-20 arc of the story. So to say the drunk guy or the female assassin didn’t add anything… please feel free to mentally add a big neon sign reading “FOR NOW”. Maybe we’ll need to know more about gnome hookers or Red Mantis wannabe assassins, or fenced goods down the road and have to renew acquaintances with these folks. But here and now, for THIS part of our investigation… they’re dead ends.

As I listened to the other two challenges, I’m a little more attuned to opportunities missed. With the newspaper guy, I feel like we could’ve pushed for a little more information on Hoff himself or the Dreaming Palace. It seems like a guy who’s plugged into all sorts of rumors might know why the drunk guy might have found the hotel scary. On the alchemists… I think they’re probably just local flavor, but I find myself wishing I had more explicitly asked about the black goo coming out of the animals’ mouths. Maybe it’s a substance they were familiar with, maybe it’s even something THEY created. But for the moment, nothing that helps us with the current investigation.

At first, I didn’t want to do the hookah challenge out of a notion that Basil wouldn’t partake of such substances while on duty. Might contaminate any leads we got out of the interaction. But after thinking about it, I came around – I hadn’t done a challenge in the second half of the party, and smoking-related activities ARE kind of Basil’s “thing”. So even if it was a Substance of Questionable Origin, I decided to go ahead and let Basil party with the twins. Too bad it didn’t really go anywhere more fruitful.

You’ll also note that I decided to have Basil sneak out of the room when we bumped into the newspaper editor. That was a specific roleplaying decision on my part. I’ve already mentioned that Basil comes from a pretty influential family (Political Scion background), so it probably wouldn’t be good for him to be recognized at THIS particular party by the owner of the local gossip rag. There’s a difference between Basil tossing his name around to get in the door and hoping people forget it five minutes later, vs. possibly having it splashed all over the newspaper the next day. There are other reasons aside from general family reputation, but I’ll leave those to possibly come out more naturally in-game.

So, we collect all of our leads and head back to base… and when we wake up the next morning, it’s time to formally level up and get our next set of orders.  If you remember, we’ve had enough experience to level for a while; we just didn’t have the time for a long rest to cash it in.

As far as Level 3 Basil, let’s start with a brief clarification on “Skillful Lessons”. The good news, as mentioned, is that it’s a free skill feat at every odd level, which makes Basil one heck of a skill monkey overall. HOWEVER, the one refinement to that is that it has to be from an INT, WIS, or CHA based skill. Granted, that’s MOST of them, but it does rule out Acrobatics, Athletics, Stealth, and Thievery feats. So if I do want a feat from one of those – note to self – I’ll have to make sure to take it at an even level.

In this case, Continual Recovery is the choice… Medicine is based on Wisdom, so we’re fine there. Continual Recovery the one that drops the refresh on Treat Wounds from an hour to 10 minutes. Combined with Ward Medic, that makes Basil a much more efficient after-combat healer but still does nothing for the in-combat situation. So that still leaves Seth as our main/only healer in battle, but I’ll probably add Battle Medicine at some future point just to take some of the load off him.

Read Lips was one of those things that I’ve been planning to take since Level 1; it was just a question of when I’d be able to fit it in. It’s a very investigator-flavored thing to have: if you see two ne’er-do-wells talking but can’t get close enough to hear them, you still have a chance to work out what they’re saying. If Sherlock Holmes didn’t know how to read lips, he certainly would’ve seen the value of it. As far as choosing Arcana as my skill to train… deep down I know doing my own crafting is probably a pipe dream (between magic items being easily available in stores, and the amount of TIME it takes to craft), but I figure training in Arcana will also make some of my wizard-y stuff a little easier. Among other things, I’m probably going to have to rely on learning spells by copying from scrolls, and a higher level in Arcana will make that process easier.

So we have level 3 characters, and we have our new mission… investigate the Dreaming Palace hotel. It’s the most tangible lead we have, and since Hoff openly admits the stonemasons went there, we don’t even need to engage in any subterfuge to rationalize our visit. We’re literally cops following up on the known whereabouts of missing persons… back on familiar ground.

But that’ll be next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.