Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S2|35: Captive Wonders.

Last week I was a little frustrated because the “have fun storming the castle” episode turned into making sure all our paperwork was properly filled out. I get that I’s had to be dotted and T’s had to be crossed, but it felt like a letdown.

But this week we actually head on over to the Celestial Menagerie to collect Mistress Dusklight – either in her entirety, or just her head if she wants to be feisty about it. NOW we’re talking.

And talking.

And talking some more.

Look, I recognize our team has a goal to do this with minimal bloodshed. It’s probably tactically smart to lead with a conciliatory approach because some of Dusklight’s crew may be unenthusiastic about getting killed to protect her. Taking that a step further, I even recognize that there’s an opportunity to siphon off the leavings of the Celestial Menagerie to improve the Circus of Wayward Wonders. Nobody ever said you couldn’t take advantage of a business opportunity while saving the world. So on some level, yes, I understand while they’re proceeding with caution and giving everyone a chance to surrender.

And OK, at a gaming level, every fight you avoid along the way is resources you don’t have to consume. There’s that too.

But at the same time… come on. If this was Edgewatch, those guards would’ve been thumped on the head, and that satyr would’ve been doing something anatomically improbable with that flute faster than Steve could get the “ROLL… FOR… COMBAT” sound effect queued up. Just Sayin’, as the Young People say.

But that’s OK because, at the end of the day, their approach seems to be working. The guards at the front gate decide that dealing with a pissed-off Hap isn’t in their contract and walk away. Probably a smart move, challenge #1 avoided. The satyr is kinda-sorta helping Mistress Dusklight, but still wants to avoid a straight-up fight, so he mostly resigns himself to being an annoying asshat. So basically he’s the Gibzip of the Celestial Menagerie. DO NOT give this guy a job if there’s a circus merge at the end of this mess.

As an aside, I have to give Rob P. a virtual pat on the back for his command of French, as pertains to the concept of an oubliette. Strictly speaking, it’s ANY dungeon with an opening only at the top, but I think Steve was right that the classic oubliette is a small one that restricts the victim’s movements. You leave someone in there to be forgotten… get it, get it? (Sorry… I took all this French in high school; I get giddy when it actually comes in handy.)

So yeah, the Passive-Aggressive Seder Satyr tries to sow discord and lead our team into a trap by promising a secret back entrance, but after indulging him at first, our heroes decide against buying what he’s selling and return to the frontal assault. But I’m still keeping one eye on that dude; I think at some point when things get REALLY hairy, maybe he jumps in as an active combatant and they’re gonna have to fight him anyway.

After a little more reconnaissance, we finally get a small scrap but it’s nothing special… just a manticore that someone set loose. However, it’s severely under-leveled and represents nothing more than an amuse-bouche. I will say I’d mostly been thinking about this confrontation in terms of the sentient humanoids working for Dusklight, so if nothing else, this was a good reminder that “menagerie” does imply the potential of wild animals as well.

Speaking of which, the creature tent where the manticore was stored also contained a dryad and a (caged) pegasus. The lesson of this encounter is that it’s not just a binary choice between “people who will run away” and “people to fight”. There will also be people (and sentient critters) who need to be convinced our heroes are the good guys. After all, I’m sure Dusklight has been filling their heads with all sorts of nonsense… which, OK, I thought it was funny that Hap leaned into it at first and hinted at a proclivity for cannibalism. So you have this dynamic of people who need to be convinced to be rescued (or at least get out of Dodge before the shooting starts). In this case, the dryad is borderline catatonic, but fortunately, Mistdancer harbors dreams of being a social media influencer and as long as our team can give it a stage to perform on, it’ll go wherever the winds are blowing. Once Mistdancer is convinced, he/she/it convinces the dryad to leave as well, so… two more friendlies moved out of the line of fire.

And OK… I don’t want to piss off Loren by saying this, but even if the only thing that comes out of this encounter is that we upgrade from a smelly old bear to a freakin’ PEGASUS… I mean, that’s an absolute win right there. What… I’m the bad guy for pointing out the obvious? (And we haven’t even gotten into the possibility that someone could take feats to bond with it and eventually have it as a mount.)

As we continue to explore, we get our last reminder of the challenges to be faced… we’re gonna have traps too!  In this case, it takes the form of a giant prize wheel that’s been beefed up to lethal levels, casting random spells each time it spins. (And continuing to spin regardless of whether anyone touched it or not.) So there’s one more toy to be dealt with, though that one is where we’ll pick it up next time.

So, OK, on the downside, it’s a bit of a short episode. On the other hand, this episode did manage to give us a good cross-section of the things we’re going to be dealing with on the way to the final encounter. It’s almost like a tutorial episode for the main assault. We’ve got friendlies, hostiles, cowards who can be convinced to run away, skeptics who need to be convinced to let our team help, environmental hazards… there are a lot of moving parts, but we now have a feel for most of them.

And then at the end of all of it, a boss, potentially with multiple subordinates. I think the real success or failure of this mission will depend on whether you have to fight them all at once, or whether you can separate some of them off… MAYBE even turn them without fighting.

The other question mark I find myself thinking about as this starts to unfold: where is Marcel and what role might he play in all of this? On one hand, he’s probably known this day of reckoning was coming, so you’d hope he’d have been working on some plan to turn some people against Dusklight when the time was right. On the other hand, Dusklight would ALSO see Marcel as leverage over the Varus siblings and a wildcard she couldn’t control, so might she have already done something nefarious to Marcel as part of the attack she launched?

I guess we’ll find all of that out in the next week or two. While you’re waiting, 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 Three Ring Adventure S2|34: A Time for Justice.

BAIT AND SWITCH!

Given how angry Hap was at the end of last week’s episode, and given the episode synopsis that it was time to “confront Mistress Dusklight”, I figured our heroes were going to roll right over to the Celestial Menagerie and start stomping some people. So the episode we got… it wasn’t BAD exactly, but it wasn’t what I thought we were going to get.

I suppose my first clue should’ve been the episode length. You almost can’t fight ANYTHING in an hour, much less a book-ending boss fight. If they’re taking on the entire enemy circus, that’s the sort of thing that ends up stretching over multiple episodes with a cliffhanger in the middle. I think we had a boss fight in Dead Suns that stretched over THREE episodes once.

I did enjoy the chaos of Hap trying to roleplay a solemn, dignified funeral service for Bardolph while everyone else was cracking jokes about the situation. OK to be fair, Rob T. seemed like he was straddling both sides of the fence, at times genuinely having Darius try to help out Hap, and at other times lobbing jokes with the rest of the crew. But it was a fun little interlude. NO, YOU CAN’T ARULA VOLDIK AN ENTIRE BEAR, ATERAN.

We also get an interesting bit of damage assessment – it turns out the attack was fairly specific about damaging the workings of a circus operation, rather than just being random violence (as it first appeared). As a result, the circus is going to be out of action for a few weeks, regardless of however the confrontation might shake out. At a meta-level, I suspect this drives the story action toward some combination of confronting Dusklight and finding the next aeon tower – if you can’t hold a show anyway, the party can go running off on an excursion. (Of course, knowing this group, they’re equally likely to spend half of it at Hamlin’s Hots instead, but we’ll jump off that cliff when we come to it.)

After cleaning up the aftermath of the attack and getting a bit of a rest, the team takes their evidence of Mistress Dusklight’s wrongdoing to the authorities. And now we get into territorial infringement issues, as the constable agrees their evidence is compelling, and… deputizes the gang to go arrest Mistress Dusklight themselves. OH GREAT, NOW THEY’RE COPS TOO. Because when a member of the business community of your town breaks the law, you really want to leave enforcement to the people who run a competing business. I don’t know how much due process is a Thing in Golarion, but they’d probably better kill Mistress Dusklight because this case is SO getting overturned on appeal. “As the Court first established in Gronnog v. Triumvirate Peacebringers…”

Along those lines, this also probably rules out bringing Kalkek to the final altercation. I don’t know my Inner Sea legal code, but siccing a barghest on bad guys is PROBABLY not proper law enforcement technique. (Did you know that was ALSO Gronnog v. Triumvirate Peacebringers? Bit of a landmark case, that one…)

Also, no you don’t get a Lawbringer Badge. THAT’S OUR THING. Then again, what the hell. My birthday’s coming up, maybe I’ll commission Sheppi for some artwork of Basil swinging around on a trapeze because TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME. Extra sequins on the wings, please.

So now the team has the authority of the law and a warrant on their side; now they need to come up with a plan. There’s an initial mumble about trying to infiltrate the camp quietly, but it feels like Steve uses his GM magic wand to dissuade that a bit, with promises of guards and magic wards and stuff. Steve’s got that mode where he won’t just come out and SAY you can’t do it – and if you come up with something REALLY crazy he might even let you try it – but he’s broadly hinting it will ultimately be futile, so maybe just come up with something else.

So it sounds like more of a frontal assault is going to be the plan; it really boils down to infiltrating during a show, or just showing up at the front gate with a warrant and seeing what happens.

Our team dithers for a little bit on a decision and then decides they need more information since it appears the Celestial Menagerie has moved and reconfigured their camp recently. (Almost like they’re… you know… expecting retaliation and bracing for a counter-attack.) First up is Ateran, who summons Csillagos to do some aerial recon – we haven’t seen this ability used much, but a caster’s familiar can share their senses with their bonded person, so Ateran can see whatever the bird sees. That gives them a high-level map of the area, but not the finer details, so they also decide to send a couple of the minor circus-folk in as show attendees to get some ground-level recon of the area and report back. However, the situation gets a little more dire as those workers don’t report back at what should be the end of the show.

As the show winds down, we end up where we thought we were last week; it’s pretty much time to go confront them, isn’t it? I’m still a little worried because we’re not too far removed from the “party crashers” episode where the Celestial Menagerie’s B-team messed with their performance, and they could barely lay a finger on the second-in-command guy. It’s true they’ve leveled since then (maybe twice?) but still… add in Mistress Dusklight and her tin-can boy-toy and it’s gonna be a knock-down-drag-out.

So I guess we’ll see you back here next week for the big fight. Though listen closely Steve… if we get another episode of prep-work, I’m leading the listener riot myself. 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 Three Ring Adventure S2|33: Chicken Fried Alhara.

This week’s episode was a bit of a ride.

First, we had the run-in with the fake xulgaths, and OK… I thought it was low-key hilarious that they (Hap in particular) moved right to “how are we going to incorporate these guys into the circus act?” and skipped right over asking them what the hell was going on in the Moonstone Temple. PRIORITIES, PEOPLE. I actually thought they might have been members of the opposing faction that had been abandoned as traitors. If you remember, I think Mistress Dusklight’s letter mentioned that there was a xulgath faction that opposed Sarvel Ever-Hunger’s plan; I thought maybe these guys were them.

But no, the truth was more interesting… they were face-changers who planned to kill the party and replace them. Well, it was more interesting for, like, five seconds until Hap nuked them all from orbit. And I’m torn about that.

On one hand, there’s a visceral GLEE in watching stuff just blow up and get one-shotted. Not gonna lie. Both the initial fireball and then the Hapdouken that took out the final enemy. Casters doing ‘splodey things are well worth the price of admission. It’s got the same sort of vibe one used to get from David Letterman dropping random objects off the five-story tower.

On the other hand, this had the potential to be a much more interesting battle, and it feels like a bit of an opportunity missed. Imagine a flowing multi-round battle where people would actually have to keep things straight and make sure they were attacking the right people each round. Imagine if our heroes had to make Perception checks as people moved around the room to see if they kept up with the changes. THAT would’ve been a cool fight, one I haven’t really seen before.

Heck, if Steve wanted to get nasty, he could’ve waited until Ateran and Darius left, until the party truly WAS split, and then have them attack Hap and Alhara four-on-two. Of course, if Hap had deployed the fireball and rolled similar damage, even THAT wouldn’t have made the fight last longer than two rounds, but it does feel like a fight that had some possibilities that we missed out on.

Whatever. We got the fight we got, which was Hap just nuking everything. And that serves to officially clear the Moonstone Temple, which means Ulthadar coughs up the diadem and instructions for using it in the waters.

(And here’s where I had the unhealthy fixation with the circus. I found myself wondering if the pool could somehow be incorporated with the circus act. Have the entire audience hold hands, link telepathically to whoever was using the diadem, and show the entire audience the end of the world as part of the show!)

So the pool (aka the security cameras of the Moonstone Temple) finally gives us some of the answers we seek, though some of it is what we already suspected. MONTAGE TIME! The biggest revelation here is that Sarvel Ever-Hunger basically got his plan FROM the Moonstone Temple itself. He learned of the existence of the aeon orbs and the Seat of Aroden from the pool. So that’s a bit of an “oopsie”. More importantly, we learn that there’s a way to recharge the stones and prevent doom from befalling the land. Our heroes have to visit all five towers (one of which, of course, is already done), interface with all five orbs and claim their vestiges, and then go perform SOME sort of ceremony at the Seat of Aroden to re-charge the protective link.

Speaking of which, I know one of the last images they saw was of someone performing the recharge. The gang took that to mean someone else is working on the same project. I thought that was either a) showing Aroden initially charging them in the past so they could see how it was supposed to work or b) MAYBE that it was showing a predictive future of THEM doing it – that they couldn’t see who was doing it because it was them, in the future.

So we know what’s what, the Moonstone Temple is clean and can maybe even be rehabilitated – though maybe walling off the place where the xulgaths dug their way in would be a good idea – and we’re JUST about to retreat to Hamlin’s Hots for a victory meal when battle sounds and smoke spoil the victory.

The Circus of Wayward Wonders has been attacked by Mistress Dusklight’s thugs! Damage to the circus, performers injured. Worse yet, Bardolph the Bear is DEAD! (Or is he? Will we get a Red Mantis version of Bardolph next week?) Frustratingly, Jellico and Gibzip are completely unharmed and free to annoy the shit out of Vanessa… but Hap’s first real friend is gone, and she’s on the damn WARPATH. Like… character-arc changes levels of anger. I really felt her anger, and I can’t wait to see where she goes with this.

I mean… one obvious choice is for Hap to go have a talk with Kalkek and cash that chip in. Hap spent all this time trying to get on the good side of that barghest, leaving it plates of food… “we’re gonna go over there to that other circus and kill everyone who wronged you; you in?” seems like a sales pitch it might go for.

(Of course with Dark Darius, and now Kill ‘Em All Hap, I am starting to worry that by the end of Book Six, our party will actually be the bad guys and someone will have to stop them. Maybe their travels will lead them to Absalom and the Edgewatch will deal with them. I dunno though; we’re already neck-deep in murderhobos as it is.)

I assume the logical place this leads is to a final confrontation with Mistress Dusklight and her tin-can bodyguard next week, right? (Plus whatever members of her crew are left over from the dance-fight when they first arrived in Escadar.) It seems like Dusklight wouldn’t do something this overt unless her mission had changed and she’s decided she has to stop our heroes for good. (Also, narratively, it just seems like maybe she’s run her course, and “rival circus” doesn’t really matter much when the end of the world is on the table.)

So my sense of things is we’ll be doing a circus-vs.-circus showdown next week but for keeps rather than show this time. Our party had a tough time with them the first time, and that was even before Dusklight joined the fray directly… how will they fare in the rematch? 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 Three Ring Adventure S2|32: How I Met Your Mother.

It’s weird. I’m having a little trouble thinking of something to say about this week’s episode because compared to the last couple of weeks, it’s so… ordinary. We’re back to making up new restaurants (Livestock In Linens!) and engaging in scatological speculation about the mechanics of aeon stones: I certainly look forward to the official Paizo errata that explains whether you still have to poop when using an aeon stone.

I mean, yes, the shadow of what happened to Darius still hangs over everything, but at least for this week, it kinda receded into the background a little bit and felt like a more “normal” episode.

This week’s show notes amused me a little because Steve’s GM thoughts and my player thoughts (from last week) about cheating death were basically the same, from opposite sides of the GM screen. I swear we didn’t cheat off each other’s papers… though maybe when you play in the same group long enough, I suppose it’s possible you developed a shared sensibility about how the game “should” work.

I think if there’s one takeaway from all of this, it’s this: if you’re a player, always put something a little bit supernatural into your backstory, just to give your GM something to play around with if your character should happen to die. It doesn’t even have to be a big obvious glowing birthmark; even if it’s just something subtle like “well, there was an ancestor on my father’s side who was rumored to have become a lich”… just SOMETHING that gives your GM some wiggle room.

Confession time: in our Edgewatch game, I actually created something like this for Basil. I won’t tell you what it is, but I’ll just say there IS a supernatural hook in his backstory that Steve could use if he needs to save my life at some point down the road. The only minor problem is that Steve hasn’t really been able to introduce it in-story yet, so if Basil were to happen to die before that happens, it’ll lack the ample setup that Darius had with the mark and Steve will have to do some serious dancing to keep it from feeling too deus ex machina. But we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.

As far as to whether to come back from the dead or not… I can see both sides of that coin. On one hand, being able to go on this journey with a character and watch them change and sometimes become something you didn’t even expect is one of the best things about this game. You tend to remember the journey more than you remember any one particular roll of the dice. So you hate to walk away from a character you’ve put a lot into.

On the other hand… for a full adventure path, at the pace we play, that’s a 2-3 year commitment to playing the same character every week, and sometimes you get into a bit of a rut. Trying something new can be a bit tempting. I will say that Steve’s path forward, in this case, seems like a “best of both worlds” solution – Rob’s character will still be Mostly Darius but will do enough new things to give him a bit of a fresh coat of paint.

Back in the show, Darius naturally has questions when he returns to the land of the living, and Papa Varus is the most likely source of answers, so the gang sets up a meeting at Louder’s Chowder. We learn a few interesting things from this meeting. The first was not that unexpected – it turns out that Darius and Alhara’s mom wasn’t just “hanging around with pirates” or whatever story they were told last time; it turns out she was a full-fledged member of the Red Mantis Assassins, and when she was away from the family, she was off killing people. It’s interesting… in our group chat, the Circus Folk thought this was some big revelation; I just ASSUMED that was the case once Achakaek was in play. Second – and this might be the biggest revelation – the nature of the connection to Darius’ mark suggests that their mom might not actually be dead. And whether she is or not, Papa Varus just told the kids that to avoid uncomfortable questions. Lastly, there was a bit of a self-serving info dump about how their dad knew Mistress Dusklight was bad news and tried to rein her in a little bit over the years.

And here’s where I have to give Vanessa a lot of credit for her roleplaying choices. It’s tempting to play our characters as heroic, emotionally stoic people who kinda rise above it all and be the bigger person in all circumstances. “I’m a HERO, therefore nothing should phase me, even the betrayal of a parent.” But you know what… Vanessa played it REAL and I give her credit for that. She allowed Alhara to be mad at her father and call him on his bullshit. Because lying to your kids about their mother being dead is kinda crappy, and given what Mistress Dusklight has done JUST since they got to Escadar, his “reining her in” doesn’t seem like it accomplished anything, did it? (If this was him reining her in, how awful would she have been WITHOUT his influence?) It would’ve been so easy to just shove that all under the rug in the name of “family togetherness” and “let’s all rally around Darius in his hour of need”, and I applaud Vanessa for taking it to a place that’s a little rougher, but also a little more authentic.

For that matter, give I should give Rob T. a cap tip as well. It’s hard to put a finger on, but he’s playing “the same but different” really well so far. There are moments where he seems like Business As Usual Darius, and then he’ll throw in a moment where he’s cold and distant and he really conveys this sense that he’s not all the way there. I really felt it in his interactions with Hap, in particular.

So as we approach the end of the episode, it’s time to go back into the temple and clear out those last few rooms. (Loved Loren’s joke about punching the time clock. Sometimes it does feel that way, doesn’t it?) I guess next week we’ll get to see what the New and Improved(?) Darius can do in combat; hopefully, he won’t go full Suirad and start chopping heads off. 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 Three Ring Adventure S2|31: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

In last week’s column, you might remember I played around with the whole “five stages of grief” thing. I’m pretty sure the real world is messier than that and grief doesn’t move in a straight line – you think you’re fine, the wrong song plays at the grocery store, and all of a sudden you’re tearing up while hugging a bag of frozen peas – but it made for a useful framing and did capture the different layers of shifting emotions about Darius’ death at the time.

Well, the funny thing is, over the weekend I had actually found my way to acceptance. Or at least I had managed to find some positives to introducing a new character. It would certainly have shaken up the roleplaying dynamic. What sort of character would Rob play, and how would the rest of the party react to this new person “filling Darius’ shoes”? It might have also freshened up the combat dynamics a little – I love Darius as a character, but his role in a fight is to stand in front of something and punch it. A new character might have introduced some new tactics. Maybe Rob would roll a TRUE non-human character – yeah, Darius and Alhara are half-elves, and now Hap has genie blood, but Rob could’ve really pulled out all the stops. (My suggestion: a boar-based beastkin who, to inject some irony, still loves bacon.) Also, out at the skinny end of the bell curve, part of me hoped Steve might let Rob brew a beta version of a Magus or Summoner since Secrets of Magic would be out by the time this aired (or close to it). Like he did with Alhara and the Swashbuckler when the show started.

So yeah, I had actually reached a point where I was willing to see the positives of a show that didn’t include Darius. Instead, the Reaper is cheated, and Darius lives to fight another day… but with a HUGE catch.

Now, let me step out of the story for a second and discuss “cheating death” as a general mechanism. My overall position is that the VAST majority of the time, death is death and shouldn’t be undone lightly, but I also think there ARE situations where you consider it, and maybe this was one of them.

Rule #1 is “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”. If the player gets killed because they were being reckless or stupid, they don’t get any favors. The GM should NEVER reward downright bad play. In this case, they had no way to know about the curse, and once they used the first round to figure out the golem’s “pattern”, their kiting tactics were actually pretty clever. Trip, run away, lather, rinse, repeat. Other than metagaming that it was an optional encounter and avoiding it entirely, you can’t accuse anyone of being reckless here.

Rule #2 is that sometimes you cut the players a break if the dice are REALLY against them – to borrow a phrase from poker, sometimes as a GM, you find a way to let them walk away from a bad beat. If we’re being fair, Darius’ death was probably in the middle. On one hand, it was a powerful creature so it had a high DC, and nobody told them to spend all their hero points. On the other hand, they had like five or six chances where a 15 or 16 (estimated) would’ve solved the problem, and couldn’t hit it. Mr. “I Took Stats In College But Mostly Slept Through It Because It Was An 8 AM Class” ran the numbers and the chance of failing ALL those rolls was 10 or 15 percent. That starts to get into the territory of “maybe the dice are cursed”.

I’m adding a Rule #3 based on how Steve handled this situation: if it can fit within the story, the player should have some choice in the matter. Maybe the player is actually ready to make a new character and doesn’t WANT to come back, or maybe they love that first character and would do anything to keep it. If you’re going to upend that apple cart, it’s probably a good call to have the player be on board.

Rule #4 is the big one. If you’re going to overrule death itself, it can’t be for free; there has to be a cost. Now “free” doesn’t have to mean money or losing a level… it just has to mean there’s some consequence. Even if it’s just a story/roleplaying consequence, where maybe people react differently to the character because something unnatural happened to bring them back.

And hot damn, here’s where Steve really pulled the rabbit out of the hat. And where laying all the roleplaying groundwork with the mark paid off.

First was the voice itself. As I joked in our group chat, Steve did such a good job with the Achakaek voice I ALMOST forgive him for the existence of Gibzip. I’m still trying to figure out whether Steve added some effects to the voice in post. If he did, that’s pretty cool. If it’s not, it’s just a testament to how good a job he did that I convinced myself he did.

So it turns out that Darius and Alhara’s mom was, if not a full Red Mantis Assassin, certainly an adherent of Achakaek, and must have passed some sort of protective blessing/curse… blurse?… onto Darius. So when Darius “dies”, he gets a VIP meet-and-greet with the bug god himself and he’s offered a diabolical choice. He can die and move on, or he can be brought back to life by giving up more control over the mark. And he would be doing this knowing the mark is a product of malevolent power.

And I mean… come on. Darius is Darius. He’s going to protect his family, and he’s one of those people who REALLY believes they can overcome ANYTHING. This stuff is hard-wired into him. So of course he’s going to accept the consequences of the curse and come back. So now we have Darius, but now with 30 percent more stone-cold killer. It will be interesting to see how that manifests going forward. (And as a “rubber meets the road” thing, I’m kinda curious whether Darius will have access to the full Red Mantis archetype, or whether the status quo will continue and the mark will continue to provide a few select powers.)

Before we move on, I wanted to commend all THREE of the group-mates for their excellent roleplay in this moment. It had to be hard to “go there” and play real grief, but Vanessa and Loren really pulled it off; it was really heartbreaking there in the moment. That’s not to disrespect Rob P. either – he had to play it more subdued because Ateran is someone who guards their emotions more closely, but I thought Rob’s choices of working through the intellectual puzzle of Darius’ death, wondering what they might have done differently, while still trying to comfort Alhara were well done.

Now, Darius’ death and return cast a pretty long shadow over this episode, but we did get one more intriguing little bit of lore dump when the party FINALLY gets around to reading “the letter” they found several episodes back. And as I somewhat expected, the letter sheds more light on Mistress Dusklight’s role in this operation, formally and finally painting her as Evil-With-a-Capital-E. She wasn’t just tomb-robbing and happened to bump into them; she formally helped augment the power of their rituals and – most sinister of all – helped round up surface-dweller sacrifices (presumably various townspeople of Escadar) for the xulgaths. So, I don’t know how Achakaek will feel about all of it but sounds like Mistress Dusklight needs to die sooner rather than later if she hasn’t left for Absalom yet.

There is one small silver lining in all of this. The letter does also hint at a xulgath faction that was opposed to what this group is doing. I’m not even going to TRY to spell specific xulgath names, but Dusklight’s letter mentions a diadem being damaged when knocked off the leader’s head during a battle with a fellow xulgath. So that raises at least a possibility that humanity may have some… if not allies, at least people who can be reasoned with… amongst the xulgaths. It’s SOMETHING to hang one’s hat on.

So this week, Darius rests and recovers and we all eat our feelings. Next week, we get back to work, whether that’s clearing the last few rooms of the temple, confronting Mistress Dusklight… or maybe they’re the same thing and it’s just a race for the diadem at this point. 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.

(Achakaek voice) OR ELSE…