Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|05: Lawful Stupid Is My Alignment.

Welcome to the last Edgewatch summary of 2021. There should still be another Talking for Three-Ring, but the one wrinkle there is my brother is coming to town later in the week, and the final phase of my merrymaking may be in full swing by then.

I see Steve called me out a little in the show notes, and… eh, he’s right. I suppose the one biggest change is my son starting a new job, but not having a) well-defined hours or b) a driver’s license. So there are nights when it’s hard to get working on Talking because I have to go pick up The Boy, and that process can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half. Plays havoc with my ability to stay on a consistent schedule. Check back next week: maybe I’ll make it a New Year’s resolution to get back on schedule in 2022.

This week, we have one of our classic Paralysis By Analysis episodes where we spend a LOT of time going back and forth on the questions of whether to accept the meeting and whether to actually bring Gord or leave him behind as an insurance policy. The first one ends up being the easy one – what we REALLY need out of this is a face-to-face with Maurrisa Jonne, and this gets us that. It was the whole reason to snatch up Gord in the first place. If we turn around and refuse the meeting outright, we don’t really have a Plan B. So we quickly come around to the fact that we have to make some sort of appearance.

The real crux of the matter lies in the second question: the truly logical thing to do would be to leave Gord behind because if we bring him to the meeting, one possible outcome is her attacking us as revenge for going after her brother. Gord not being there would be our one piece of leverage because harming us doesn’t get him out of a Starwatch jail cell in another district where she has no base of power. If anything, it seals Gord’s fate AND makes her a higher priority target for law enforcement, if she graduates to openly attacking cops. Having said all that, it does seem like the easy/metagame storytelling answer is to just bring him and resolve this in one meeting because this is the resolution of the side-quest and we want to get on with finding the Twilight Four.

For me, it comes down to “do the right thing for your character, and let the GM tell you if it’s going to work or not”. As players, we should do what makes sense, and leaving Gord behind is what makes the most sense. If Steve doesn’t want it that way, he has the power to pull strings and create a scenario where Gord HAS to be there.

And OK… I was a little frustrated at Seth in this moment, because I felt like we’d come to a pretty strong agreement that we WEREN’T going to bring Gord, and then we’re on the way to the meeting and he just casually starts with the “well, I’m talking to Gord because I went ahead and brought him anyway”… despite the conclusion we’d reached as a group. I wasn’t going to interrupt the session at that point because we’d just spent 30-40 minutes on the “bringing Gord” question, and even I didn’t want to re-open that can of worms, much less do it to the listeners. Especially not for something that would be more out-of-character arguing than playing. But internally… I’ll admit I was a little annoyed.

But hey, with 20-20 hindsight, maybe it was the right call anyway. With Gomez working on Gord on the way to the meeting, we were actually able to get him kinda-sorta on our side, so he was willing to put in a good word with Maurrisa when the time came. So maybe Seth’s kinda crazy… crazy like a fox!

Once a working truce is established, we’re able to get some more information on the situation. Basically, Maurissa claims she was a reluctant participant in the Skinner’s schemes and didn’t REALLY want to help them. (That’s the second gang leader to make that claim if you’re scoring at home). So between Gomez’s charm and taking out the Skinner, we’ve actually earned enough goodwill points that she’s willing to overlook kidnapping her brother. The NEW deal she offers us is that if we disrupt the Diobel Sweepers’ operations and eliminate Bloody Berleth, she’ll give us some dirt on the Twilight Four. And she even knows where the Sweepers’ main alchemical lab is – she just doesn’t want to attack it directly because it could set off full-scale gang war, dragging in a bunch of other allied gangs we haven’t met yet. PLEASE LET THE BASEBALL FURIES BE INVOLVED IN SOME WAY!

I have to admit feeling a bit conflicted about this. On one level, I don’t like the idea that basically we’d be serving as a mercenary force for a gang leader. That doesn’t seem like something we should be doing as agents of the law. And OK, whatever she may say now, SHE’S the one who was cooperating with the Skinner – unless there’s a connection we haven’t seen yet, there’s no evidence the Sweepers were involved in that. REALLY the only thing that suggests the Sweepers are worse is that their boss is nicknamed “Bloody” Berleth: not a nickname you get for your formidable backgammon skills.

Misgivings aside, we’d still be disrupting the gang activities of another gang – it’s not like she’s hiring us to mug innocent civilians for her. So we’d still be reducing the overall crime level, AND we’d get a lead toward the Big Bad that threatens the whole city. So it’s a bit of a deal with the devil, but it’s JUST inside the envelope of “enforcing the law” so I guess we’ll be doing that.

One day later… that IS what we’re doing… but we’ll be doing it next episode. So come on back for the last episode of 2021 and see what happens. As always feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show (though we’re a little scarce around the holidays). Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next… well, for this column, next YEAR.

Jason recaps the events from Agents of Edgewatch S3|04: You Don’t Understand Superior Tactics.

Welcome to the Great Holiday Slowdown! We’re done recording shows for the year, though Steve’s already got the episodes edited and they’ll still be posting regularly. I don’t know about the other guys, but I work at a university, so my work’s done for the year… so I’ll be pulling myself away from my streaming and videogame backlog to write these wrapups. (Caught up on Wheel of Time, but Season 2 of The Witcher got temporarily delayed by a spur-of-the-moment desire to re-watch some Tennant-era Doctor Who.)

I don’t really have a lot to add to Steve’s show notes, but I’ll toss a few observations.

I mostly agree with Steve’s point about “scheduling your fun” with one slippery-slope admonition. You never want something you’re doing for fun to become TOO much of an obligation, to the point where it becomes more like a job. That hasn’t happened with this, but that spirit literally KILLED World of Warcraft for me. If you wanted to do anything in WoW, you had to commit to 3-4 hours, 2-3 specific nights a week, or you’d either (shitty guild) get kicked out of your guild entirely, or (good guild) fall way behind your friends and be unable to play with them until their alts were ready to do the dungeons. At that point, just keeping up the pace necessary to participate felt like having a second job instead of a way to enjoy downtime. So schedule your fun, yes, but if you’re so scheduled that your hobbies are starting to feel like work, you’re doing it wrong. Again, I don’t think we have that problem here – we’re good about taking the occasional week off if people need to recharge.

Ironically – and our live listeners know this – we almost have the opposite problem. Since ours is a group of friends who have known each other for years (in some cases, decades), we have an issue with getting sidetracked. We sometimes get too far into the “weeds” of the overall friendship, BSing about movies, fantasy football, and other stuff. Officially we start at 8 pm. I think our unofficial record for the latest start was something like 9:15 or 9:20, though that’s from memory… I don’t sit around with a logbook tracking this stuff.

Mondays became our day mostly by process of elimination. Even going back to pre-podcast, there’s never been much enthusiasm for playing on weekends, Chris traditionally raided in WoW two or three nights a week, I had a home game on Fridays, and I think (at least pre-COVID) John was going to an in-person board game night at his local gaming store, so Monday was just the day that worked for everyone. (I actually think it was Wednesdays for a while, and then Chris switched guilds and his raids were on different nights.) In the COVID era where everyone’s forced to be a hermit — and also now that Chris got tired of WoW — we have a bit more flexibility, but that usually only applies to short-notice re-schedules: we pretty much try to keep to the same day if at all possible.

So that’s it for Steve’s show notes; on to this week’s show.

Going in, it is interesting to watch Seth and I (in particular) wrestling with the issue of how to apply modern morality to a fantasy-themed police force, insofar as we don’t have any actual charges on Gord. Yeah, his sister’s a known criminal, and he may be indirectly involved if his sister is bankrolling his antiques fetish. But technically we don’t know he’s done anything wrong: in modern parlance, we don’t even have a WHIFF of probable cause on the guy. So it’s one thing to go ask Gord a few questions, but literally grabbing him and holding him in a cell to get his sister to come talk to us… that’s kinda like kidnapping, isn’t it? You can hand-wave it and just say “they didn’t have probable cause in the Dark Ages either” and I’m sure a lot of gaming groups do. But it’s also naïve to think that stuff like that might not still be happening in the real world, whether it’s parts of the US or in other countries. If the notion of the law snatching up someone’s relative to use as leverage is considered “the Dark Ages”… it’s not entirely clear that we’re not still there.

And this is why I felt like Paizo made the right call continuing to release this adventure path, even after the calls to cancel it, so close upon the real-world events regarding George Floyd. Taking a pause was a good call in the moment. Taking a second look at the content to make sure you weren’t glamorizing police excesses… totally a good call. But art and entertainment can illuminate and spark conversation and that can be constructive rather than destructive. Here we are talking about what constitutes justified detainment of civilians by law enforcement in between dice rolls to see if my made-up bird-person stabs stuff with his sword-cane. You don’t get that with backgammon.

So moral qualms aside, we’re gonna go grab Gord because that’s kinda what the story requires of us. Going into this encounter, I certainly expected we would face combat. I assumed either Gord’s sister would have assigned him some bodyguards, or the owner of the boat would turn out to be some sort of underworld tough… black-market antiques dealer or something. (Belloq from Raiders, perhaps?) Did not expect to have to fight a daemon, though.

The fight starts out tolerable at first… yeah, the daemon has greater mobility than we do, but it’s not that hard to hit, so we’re at least putting damage on it. But that fear effect really had the potential to alter the battlefield with two of us wasting multiple rounds running away and coming back, leaving Lo Mang and Gomez hung out to try. THAT could’ve gotten messy, but we caught some good luck on dice rolls and they were able to stay in the fight until Dougie and I returned.

But then I get turned aside again, as Basil notices Gord (presumably) trying to sneak away from the fight while invisible, in a boat. This left me with a quick decision to make: standard TTRPG logic suggests you never split the party, but we really HAVE to. If we leave the daemon to chase Gord, it’s either taking free shots at us while we chase him, or killing random dockworkers. If we let Gord run while we finish the daemon, it’s likely Gord gets away and this whole episode went for naught.

So I go after him. I’m a LITTLE worried a one-on-one encounter could get messy but then again, if this guy was a decent fighter, a) he’d probably be a more prominent member of his sister’s gang and b) he probably wouldn’t have felt a need to summon a daemon to cover for his escape. Also, at the risk of metagaming, we’ve had a few examples already of abstracted chase sequences, and this quickly began to feel like one of those.

So off we go, and it turns out I have the right skillset (including flight, to avoid ground-based obstacles) and luck (a natural 20) to end up capturing Gord. Now… full disclosure… I feel a little disappointed that I didn’t roleplay the encounter with the Cayden worshipers a little better. Hell, I PLAY a Cayden worshiper (Brixley) in our other game; I really should’ve just offered a free round to whoever captured Gord. Who at that point really WAS a wanted criminal, since… you know… setting a daemon loose on the docks is a crime and all.

With the daemon dealt with and Gord in custody, we retreat, but not to the Docks, but to Starwatch. We just got read chapter and verse about how corrupt the Docks district is and how they ignore everything that doesn’t directly impact commerce; we’re not holing up THERE with our prize prisoner. Better to retreat to relative safety and force Big Sis to come to us.

So OK… maybe the circumstances of his capture are a little suspect, but we’ve got Gord in custody and we’re safe back at the ranch. Next week, we either see if he himself can tell us anything or (even better) if holding him kicks over the rock his sister’s hiding under and we can get a sit-down with her. Hope you’ll be back here next week for that. In the meantime, 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 S3|03: Let’s Make a Deal!

I’m going to start this week with a brief show note for our live Patreon listeners: we (the Agents Of Edgewatch show, at least) are on break the rest of the year and will not be recording again until after the new year. There will still be weekly episodes and weekly Talking recaps, just no live sessions while we enjoy some holiday downtime. I can’t speak for Three-Ring Adventure because I don’t know if they have plans to fit one more in this week, but since part of this is Steve going on vacation, I assume they’ll be shutting down at some point too; just don’t know exactly when that will be. But on the Edgewatch side of the house, we put our last show of 2021 in the can last night.

OK… administrative stuff out of the way.

This week we continue with what I have to admit was a frustrating chain of episodes for me. At this point in the show, I have to admit I’m getting a little tired of the whole “gang” thing. To give you a bit of a spoiler, this does EVENTUALLY go off in a different (and more interesting) direction and I’ll rediscover my mojo, but right now, you’re listening to a Basil and a Jason who’s feeling very stuck in the mud.

Part of it is that humanoid street gangs aren’t really feeding my sense of wonder. Pulling back and looking at the big picture, when we talk about types of players and what people look to get out of roleplaying games… part of it for me is fighting cool monsters you haven’t seen before; that sense of the fantastic really drives the experience for me. I want stuff that will excite my imagination and “killer newsies” just ain’t it. Yes, I know some of these gangs have had exotic pets/henchmen, but still… lots of fighting Batman ’66 henchmen with matching themed T-shirts.

The other thing is that really getting into this gang stuff is starting to show the limitations of the “cop” motif. Pick your favorite police procedural – Law And Order, The Wire, Broadchurch, Brooklyn Nine-Nine… whatever. As we do this, I start to realize we don’t really have the toolbox modern law enforcement has and it makes the roleplay quite frustrating in spots… like this one. Some of that is technological – we can’t put a wire on someone or do drone surveillance, or subpoena their cellphone records. But some of it that is that there’s not enough supporting material to have an authentic cop experience, and even if there was, I’m not sure it would make a compelling podcast. We’d have to spend 2 or 3 episodes investigating these guys’ known associates, digging up the records of their other crimes, looking for weak points that we can use to gain leverage on them. Here, we just kinda boil that down to an Intimidation check, and if that fails, they’re not afraid of jail time, guess we’re back to square one. Something about that feels a little hollow.

So as this episode unfolds, it starts to feel like all the time we spent fighting these dudes last week and taking them in was a big waste, and that we basically got nothing out of it. So that’s contributing even more to my frustration. But then we catch a break in the form of that old standby: Going To The Tavern. Specifically, our big break in the case comes in the form of a shopkeeper who sees us as a means to get some revenge on the Washboard Dogs for shaking her down for protection money that wasn’t resulting in actual protection. And to make back some of her recent losses by forcing us to buy some of her… I won’t say “useless” crap, but “crap of questionable utility”. And certainly not worth the 200 gold that everything in the store conveniently seemed to cost.

It’s worth mentioning: I thought the 200g thing was a bit, but that actually IS the price of each of the items she was offering. So… there may have been some winking intent in choosing a bunch of items that were all the same cost, but she wasn’t offering Level 1 items at a ridiculous mark-up or anything like that.

Ironically, some of the loot she was offering would probably be really useful for a different adventure. If you’re camping out in the wild, a rune that lets you put on armor would be useful; when you go out on patrol each day… you’re already wearing it. An any-tool is a lot more useful when you’re away from civilization and can’t just run to a store. If you know you’re going to be interacting with a specific culture, that pendant that gives you their language and cultural traditions is pretty handy. But in a cop story in an urban setting… hard to see a use for most of that. (OK, the elemental gem was pretty cool, but 200g consumable? Oof.)

So we go with the Deck Of Illusions (from Secrets of Magic) because it’s at least got some fun flavor to it. The lead we get out of this encounter is that Maurrisa Jonne (the leader of the Washboard Dogs) has a younger brother, Gord, who’s a bit more accessible – still lives a public life, isn’t as protected. And specifically, that he comes to her shop every week to buy random curios. Furthermore, in the least surprising development ever, she knows that Gord is hanging out on a friend’s nearby boat, the Arrowhead. So assuming we can find the boat, it may be possible to grab up the brother, put some charges on him, and see if that Maurrisa to come out of the woodwork. Now, OK, it’s probably a little shady if he hasn’t actually committed a crime, but we’ll jump off that cliff when we get to it. For now, this is our lead. And OK, it sounds like something the police would actually do – grab a known associate and see what you can get out of them. So we’re back on track as the episode ends.

Next week, off to the docks – the actual docks, not just the Docks district we’re already in – to see if we can find Gord’s boat. Is this just another trap? Will Gord have bodyguards? Will we need to speak in nautical terminology, and substitute “fore”, “aft”, “port” and “starboard” for the traditional compass directions? Will I be required to wear a sailor cap and ascot to blend in? All questions we’ll tackle next time. In the meantime, 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 S3|02: Ello Gov’nor.

I was thinking about Steve’s show notes, and in particular, the notion about how it’s the GM’s job to basically lead the players around to the conclusion they’re going to have to reach anyway. To railroad them without having them feel they’re being railroaded. The funny thing is: at first, I felt this little rush of ego welling up inside me, along the lines of “What are you saying? Players are stupid?” But the more that I thought about it, he’s basically right.

On some abstract level, YES, you would want every decision to be the direct result of player choices. As a player, you DO want agency and you DO want to feel like your choices matter. There’s little worse than a campaign where you’re just piloting a glorified NPC in service of the GM’s idea of what the story should be. “Oh, you’ll let me roll the dice in combat? How generous of you!” The more the GM spoon-feeds you, the more you feel like a passenger instead of a driver.

But the reality is when you have these completely open-ended goals like “make contact with the gang”… the players and the GM (and the person who wrote the adventure) might have drastically different ideas on how to solve them, and how much of people’s time do you “waste” fumbling around? We talk about metagaming from the player side quite a bit, but at what point is it too metagamey to have to get into the head of the person who wrote the story and figure out exactly what they intended? Especially if the players come up with something that would ALSO work. Players are supposed to come up with creative solutions to the problem; I’m not sure requiring them to be psychic makes for a good game.

There’s also the general concession one has to make to the value of people’s time. We’re past the years of teenagers spending an entire weekend gaming (Order of the Amber Die notwithstanding). We get three hours a week (OK, closer to two if we BS about fantasy football and TV shows too much), and that’s it. How much of that should we spend on blind alleys? Especially for Steve as the GM… if we come up with some blind-alley plan, Steve would actually have to create something to play through that, when it’s really not going to serve the overall plot in any meaningful way.

And not to throw you listeners under the bus, but all of this goes double when you’re doing this as a show for an audience. Now you have to factor in “is this blind alley something that’s at least going to be entertaining?”. And if it is, MAYBE you let the players bumble around a little because at least it’s “good radio” and makes for a fun story months later (cough-Sharky-cough). But if it’s not, you’re sinking in quicksand: you’re not moving the central narrative forward and the failure isn’t even entertaining.

And OK… at the far end of all of this, what does it do to the health of a gaming group if they’re allowed to meander to a point where they “lose”? Some stories are open-ended and time isn’t a consideration, but others have a strict time limit or victory conditions. In the latter case, there’s always the chance the players go down SO many blind alleys that it’s impossible to justify them solving the problem that’s been presented. The bank heist was a good example of this: what if we’d been at a different bank and the bank had been robbed and we lost all our leads for the next part of the story? Does the whole campaign just come apart? Do we get sent on our way with a condescending deus ex machina to keep the story going – “well, you totally failed at the goal of the last 10 sessions, but here’s some random clue that drops into your laps to keep the game moving”. Being treated as some sort of pity case isn’t fun for players either.

So yes, I think the balancing act as GM is to make sure the players have agency for the KEY decisions, but maybe use breadcrumbs to take some of the lesser choices off their plates. Speaking of that bank heist, that was a good example of this – on paper, there were six different leads, but three of them led back to the same basic destination, and one of the others was a demonstration of how obviously impregnable THAT bank was. So we were able to pick the order we tackled the leads in, but most roads still led to Rome.

I also wanted to comment on Seth’s reluctance to go undercover again. I think I get what he was feeling. I think we COULD’VE gone undercover and tried to make contact with the gangs that way, but it would’ve had a high “been there done that” factor, and it also would’ve strained credibility – so not one, but TWO gang leaders fell for our act? Really? So yeah… let’s go out in uniform and punch our way through this one.

So we get our marching orders to go out into the Docks and use ourselves as bait to attract some gang activity, and sure enough, we find not one, but both gangs. And in a failure of intel, they’re actually working together. Even though they have different “turf” and their leaders are supposed to be feuding, the guys in the trenches are cooperating.

The fight isn’t tough on an absolute level, but I do think maybe we took it a little lightly going in. The Sweepers are alchemists; I can accept having a little bit of trouble with them because they’re clearly going to have access to magic. Sure enough… sling bullets with extra force damage. Ow. But I actually didn’t expect the Cockney Clowns…. errr… Washboard Dogs to give us any trouble. And yet here they are beating me down to about half my hit points before the fight is really underway.

(Speaking of which, I’m half-tempted to go back and try a drinking game with this episode where you have to take a drink every time Steve says “OI”. I didn’t notice it for the first few minutes, but he says it a LOT. It was almost “Hey Now!” Hank Kingsley territory.)

After we finally start taking the fight seriously, things turn around, and we get the gang members on the ropes. Two are down entirely, and two flee in different directions, leading to abstracted chase sequences. Lo Mang screws his up, and his man gets away, but Dougie manages to catch his. Meanwhile, I’m tending to our existing prisoners, because it would suck if both of the runners got away, and then we returned to find that the two we beat had woken up and bolted.

So in net, we have three prisoners – two Sweepers, one Washboard Dog. I think the Dog will be more valuable since that’s the gang we’re directly interested in, but maybe the Sweepers can give us some “enemy of my enemy” intel. I don’t think the Sweepers are good guys (I mean, their boss’ nickname is “BLOODY Berleth”), but they’re also not the ones who chose to harvest bodies for a death cult, so if we’re gonna pick a horse to back, it feels like they’re the ones to go with.

And that’s where we’ll pick things up 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 S3|01: The Tale of Old Woody.

Well, we made it to book 3! And we start things off with our first guest in… well, since the Black Lodge days… as Loren Sieg joins us in the guise of Prue Frosthammer from the Plaguestone campaign.

Now… this whole situation poses some writing difficulties for me because there are some unintentional Malevolence spoilers at play here. Backtracking, we started recording Malevolence with the Plaguestone gang while Rob Pontius was away during the summer. In doing so, I think we figured we’d wrap it up more quickly than we did, and some of it would’ve already aired by the time this show reached Book 3. Unfortunately, real-life intrudes (the unofficial mantra of Roll For Combat) and we haven’t finished (or even started airing) any of those shows, so some of our crossover creates some mild-but-unintentional spoilers for that show. (Either that or we’ll just have to give those tapes the Atari 2600 “E.T.” treatment and bury them in a landfill.)

So this is all preface to clarify what is and isn’t ad-libbed in this session. We’re clever, but we’re not “improvise a restaurant on the fly, with a full menu” clever. As part of her Malevolence background (i.e. “what’s been happening since Plaguestone?”), Prue opened a bar (Spirit’s Spirits), and in RFC’s glorious tradition of building out the food lore to ridiculous extremes, even created a menu for her establishment. (Graphic design included: it’s very Fuddruckers/Red Robin/TGI Fridays.) So all of the food and drink items we talk about were content that mostly Loren (with some help from the rest of Team Plaguestone in places) came up with. I will say the Old Woody variants were largely my doing, though Soul Woody was a collaboration: Loren had the initial idea of infusing a drink with a soul (it was the initial premise behind creating the bar), but either Steve or I decided to add it to the Woody family.

So all of that was pre-created for Malevolence and we re-used it here. But in the moment, the actual decision to bring Loren on and set the bar encounter at Sprit’s Spirits instead of a generic bar was totally done in the moment: once Steve decided we were going out to a bar, Seth suggested we do it at Spirit’s Spirits, and once that was going to happen, we decided to check if Loren was around to roleplay it out. And luckily, she was available, though Steve cut a 5-10 minute out-of-character gap where we had to get her logged in and set up (audio levels, give her the background, etc.)

So I’m saying this to give Loren her due… in addition to the creativity of the menu itself, she got pulled into our game on about 10 minutes’ notice, and she still delivered a great performance that really made this little interlude a lot of fun.

Also, one of our Discord listeners pointed out that Gomez mentions having been to Spirit’s Spirits and having tried the Soul Woody, and asks if that means Gomez actually appears in the Malevolence show. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see about that, won’t we? (Or eventually, the statute of limitations will expire and I’ll just tell you.)

Back to the story, the good thing about Loren showing up and spicing up this encounter is that I might have seriously lost my temper at the encounter with this particular NPC. I get that the harbor cops are supposed to be very laissez-faire and borderline corrupt, but come on… we shouldn’t have to spend 30, 40 gold on booze just to get our foot in the door. I was this close to using our newfound Internal Affairs powers to run her in. We are Starwatch now, after all. On the other hand, I will concede that a foul-mouthed hard-drinking elf is at least a bit of a fresh take on things. Standard protocol for such an NPC would be to make the character an orc or a dwarf. Good to see the fairfolk can party hard in this part of town.

After finally wearing down our quasi-hostess, we get a bit of intel to get started. Turns out there’s a turf war going on between the Jets and Sharks… errr… Washboard Dogs and Diobel Sweepers. The Washboard Dogs are the ones that the survivors of the cultist lair mentioned; this is the first we’re hearing of the Sweepers, so they aren’t directly relevant to our case.

Now, the Sweepers are intriguing; it’s a gang primarily made up of rogue alchemists. So they’re naturally into all sorts of illegal substances, and I assume if we go up against them, they’re going to have decent magic at their disposal. I don’t want to say they’re “stylish”, but they at least have some sort of aesthetic going on with the red bandanas

The Washboard Dogs, on the other hand, turn out to be some pretty serious unintentional comedy, as the artwork of the sample gang member looks like a demented newsie or badly-confused house painter. Seriously: go check the Discord channel. This is another one of those places where encounter scaling gets a little unintentionally silly because these guys are implied (by our place in the story) to be Level 8-10 type guys… which makes them more powerful than enemies like the ochre jelly and the skinstichers, and on par with the ceustodaemons and the golem. FANCY A CRIT, GUVNAH!?!?!

We also get a little bit of backstory of the feud between the gangs: the leaders of the two gangs USED to be friends in the same gang, but when they got busted by the cops, Maurrisa Jonne (leader of the Dogs) ratted out Bloody Berleth (leader of the Sweepers) to save herself. So now they hate each other, and that’s led to war between the two factions.

Speaking of this backstory, I’m feeling like there’s something I want to work on going forward as a playstyle thing. Since I have a high INT and all these knowledge skills, Basil tends to be the smart guy who receives the lore dumps. I feel like when Steve gives me exposition to share with the party, I want to read it a little less and roleplay it a little more like Rob P. does on the Three-Ring Adventure show. Rob P. actually roleplays out what Ateran knows in character; I just read the text Steve throws in the chat, and I actually want to try doing it closer to Rob’s way going forward. Of course, since this episode was recorded sometime in September, you may not hear any change for a while, but it’s on my agenda to start doing so.

So… I guess the question moving forward is “how do we use what we know to our advantage”? Surely we don’t just do the same thing we did with the Copper Hand gang and try to infiltrate, do we? That can’t possibly work twice. Do we try to catch a couple of Washboard Dogs in the act and shake them down, since we know they operate down by a known bridge? Is there some way we can use the conflict with the Sweepers to get access to the Dogs – an “enemy of my enemy” thing?

I guess that’s the part we’re going to hash out next time, so join us for the big throw-down with Hell’s Chimney Sweeps. 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 S2|34: We Have Such Sights to Show You.

Hey, everyone! Yes, I’m still here. Didn’t win the Powerball and change my identity, nor was I trapped in a freak avalanche. It was one of these things where I didn’t get to my column for a first few days because I had a lot of work stuff to get done before going on vacation and was tired after work; and then once vacation started, I down-shifted into vacation mode a little too hard and fast. I realize that’s a lot of words, to sum up, “I was a lazy-butt”, but here we are.

But I’m back, and it’s time to wrap up Book 2. The Skinner is dead, and we’ve just got a few more rooms to clear out… oh wait, maybe she’s not. I guess I was a little surprised we hadn’t killed her since we were in lethal mode for the whole rest of the dungeon, but I suppose Steve had his reasons for that, which we’ll get to later. But we summon our army of Henchmen Who Have Been Cops Much Longer Than Us But Are Surprisingly Useless to take her into custody and continue exploring.

In addition to a bunch of fairly “normal” loot, Dougie gets the doubling rings, and… those strike me as a pretty nice little magic item for a dual-wielder. Level 1 potency and striking runes are not that big a deal (about 100 gold between the two), but +2 potency and greater striking are in the neighborhood of a thousand gold each. And this 50g magic item literally gives you the equivalent of a copy of EACH for free if you have a first one – so there’s potentially a window where you can get 2000 gold of economic value out of a 50g magic item. And ohbytheway there’s no cap on how powerful the replicated runes can be, so yes, you can replicate +3 potency and major striking with the same entry-level ring (providing 40 THOUSAND gold of value). The ONLY restriction is you can’t replicate property runes unless you get the more powerful version of the ring. I can’t believe I had to talk him into keeping this.

First up, we stop by the prison and free the remaining (living) prisoners. Not too much to report here, other than the general observation that I must’ve stepped away from the computer for part of this because I didn’t remember it well at all. The one tangible development here is that it does give us some bread crumbs for starting Book 3, as the prisoners mention being attacked in the Docks district by a(nother) gang called the Washboard Dogs. Presumably, we’ll circle back around to that once we formally start the next book.

Next up, we find the Norgorber statue and add another magic weapon to our collection, and Dougie performs a little mild temple desecration in the name of the law. I thought it was kind of strange to have an encounter-less room, but now that I think about it, there haven’t been a lot of opportunities for treasure, so maybe the writer decided to throw in a loot room just to beef up the treasure content.

Then, we finally have our final kinda-sorta battle, though it’s cut short by Mobana surrendering halfway through. I have thoughts on this. On one hand, part of me wonders if this was Steve having had his fill of dungeon crawl and wanting to wrap things up. Or maybe even just a cut-for-time, so the session would end at 11. Yes, we could’ve taken another 20 minutes to slap her down, but the outcome wasn’t in any serious question.

On the other hand, it does kinda make sense on a storytelling level. Not EVERY minion is required to go down with the ship, especially once they’d have to know the leader is “dead”. If you look at the layout of the dungeon, since we hadn’t come down the ladder, we would’ve HAD to come through the Skinner to get to her room, so that means she’d have a general sense that the Skinner (and the complete upper level) had been dealt with. So if you’re a mild-mannered psychotic dress designer confronted with cops that probably killed your boss and plow through your minions like they were chopping firewood (what can I say, we’ve gotten pretty good at killing skinstiches at this point?), are you really gonna throw yourself in front of that? Probably not. So no Mobana fight. Oh well.

The good news is that while surrendering, Mobana gives us some more bread crumbs for the next phase of the adventure by confirming the existence of the Twilight Four. Turns out that the Skinner is one of FOUR crazy Norgorber weirdos trying to destroy Absalom, and in fact, she’s the weakest/lowest of the four. Not information we can do much with, but it does lay out the overall scope of the problem moving forward. One down, three to go. (Though there’s one more book remaining that Twilight Four members. Going REALLY metagame, does that mean there’s someone else leading them?)

The music box is an INTERESTING magic item in terms of flavor, but unlike the doubling rings, it doesn’t seem like a very useful one. Or at least it’s REALLY situational – I could actually see a situation where you’d set it off as a distraction to confuse enemies and screw up their perception checks while you do something else. The deafened condition isn’t THAT challenging in battle – it creates a minus on initiative checks, and forces a flat-check on anything that has an auditory effect, but deafened doesn’t seem to prohibit casting spells, so it’s not even a caster-killer. The downside is that whatever it does do, it does to EVERYONE – there’s no discerning friend from foe – so unless you bring earplugs, it’s going to have the same effect on your own team that it has on the bad guys. And ohbytheway, it’s also generally clumsy to use since you have to carry it in both hands to position it, and then have to set it down on a flat surface to activate it. So… really situational magic item or 250 gold (sell price)? Yeah, we’ll take the money.

The remainder of the dungeon crawl is mostly just refreshing our collective memory of how awful these guys were. Lots of creepy horror vibes – body parts, skinning rooms, people’s personal effects, and treasured possessions tossed in the trash… all that stuff. I have to admit I liked the ongoing meltdown Seth was having Gomez endure as we explored, and I was a little sad he kind of ended it at the end of this episode and doesn’t seem like he’s going to explore that idea long-term. A scarred Gomez could be an interesting variable going forward.

With the dungeon cleared, we go back to town and pretty much end the episode with a final interrogation of the Skinner. Functionally, we didn’t get anything new; I was hoping we’d get a more concrete lead on one of the Twilight Four, but really we just got the same breadcrumbs we got earlier – Twilight Four, Washboard Dogs, Docks district. Sounds like our next stop on the Absalom tour is the Docks.

What we didn’t get enough of was emotional closure, and I’m saying this as a compliment. Great story by the authors and great roleplay by Steve. Once again, I’m amazed at how emotionally invested I was in the situation. I really wanted the Skinner to FEEL something about the fact that she lost – you notice I made two or three attempts to go for the emotional dig, including the guilt play about her dead family – and she just didn’t bite at all. If I had to compare it to something, it felt reminiscent of the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker is in custody and still acts like he has the upper hand on Batman, and I found her lack of concern equally infuriating.

Speaking of Batman, I didn’t make the connection while we were playing, but as I was re-listening this whole Skinsaw cult thing has echoes of Batman: The Cult. It was a run of the Batman comic where a bad guy – “Deacon Blackfire” – created an army out of Gotham’s homeless that he ran out of an underground lair in the sewers. One of the central plot points that’s driving the comparison in my brain is that Blackfire was (or claimed to be) hundreds of years old and retained his youth by bathing in a blood pool. It’s a decent story, worth checking out.

So next week (OK, at this point… later this week) we’ll start into Book 3. A new part of the city. New challenges to deal with. No new level, but let’s not get greedy… we did just get Level 9 before the Skinner battle. 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 S2|33: Oh-Oh, Here She Comes.

So OK. One paragraph about the Skinner, 1300 words about Skyline Chili. BUCKLE UP!

Kidding. Though I will mention Skyline has a weird thing where they use cinnamon or nutmeg or something, so even though it’s not sweet, it pushes some of the same olfactory buttons as a dessert food. It’s kinda weird. Then again, it’s also been like 15 years since I tried it, so… take all that with a grain of salt.

OK, already went way too far afield with this. Getting back on track… we’ll start with the show notes. Steve makes an interesting point about having encounters ramp up as a storytelling mechanism and one thing I thought about that he didn’t mention. It dawns on me that it’s also a nice mirror of how players usually handle encounters, primarily because of resource management. Unless it’s the rare “only fight of the day”, you almost never open with your big guns – you usually have a round or two of feeling out the enemy, figuring out what it’s weak to, conserving your big stuff until you’re really sure you need it (and making sure it’s not immune to it, either). So as players, you’re ALSO building to a climax where you keep your big daily powers for when you really need them.

Like… you know… Basil being able to fly.

Sorry, I lied to you. I DID get something cool at Level 9. Basil took Soaring Flight as his ancestry feat, which gives me 5 minutes of true flight (not just feather fall), once per day. So basically one combat, or a short non-combat situation. I was just being dramatic so I could spring it at the right time. Call it a taste of the theatrical. (Also, I didn’t tell my groupmates either. I wanted them to be surprised too.)

Now, this wasn’t just Lo Mang-esque cowardice; there was a method to my madness. First, the whole “lollipop” battle map represented kind of the worst of both worlds for my fighting style – the enemies had gotten within 30 feet (the volley distance on my bow) and there was nowhere to back up to re-establish minimum distance. On the other hand, the front line was pretty congested, so getting in there with my sword-cane would’ve been tough. Also, I did have the thought that maybe the Skinner’s ability to use the excorions as healing potions MIGHT have a range limit. So if I could drag one down the hall after me, maybe she couldn’t use it to heal. So… there may have been a little bit of cowardice involved, but it was TACTICAL cowardice.

It’s probably worth reviewing the general rules for flying while we’re talking about it. If you’re climbing, it basically functions as difficult terrain and it takes twice as much movement to cover the same distance. On the other hand, you can descend twice as fast – 10 feet of descent for 5 feet of spent movement. The one thing that we got slightly incorrect is that you don’t have to land at the end of every turn; it’s just that (per the rules) “if you’re airborne at the end of your turn and didn’t use a Fly action this round, you fall”. So that sounds like you just need to use at least one of your three actions to maintain flight – if you were flying and did three attacks, you’d go splat. (Well, Basil doesn’t because he also has his tengu feather fall, but YOU would.) And there is also a hover action, which is just a fly action with a speed of zero.

If I’m being honest, I probably got the descending phase of my move wrong – I think I was supposed to go straight down instead of diagonally – but I would’ve only been off by 5 or 10 feet on the back end, and it wouldn’t have affected my attack on the Skinner at all. At worst, I should have ended my turn not-quite-as-far down the corridor. Not a huge mistake; chalk it up to first-time jitters. (Speaking of which, I was so excited about flying for the first time that I forgot to also use my reaction to try and poison the Skinner with my sword cane. Though… I assume she’s got a crazy fortitude save anyway, so I don’t think I really lost much on that one.)

Of course, the real story of this fight was Lo Mang breaking out the Mother Of All Hero Points to escape the Skinner’s chains. The funny thing is, I had JUST talked myself into the idea that her chain attacks weren’t that bad – I think the most she had hit for prior to that point was 30-some on a crit on Dougie. But that wrap-up ability the Skinner has is just brutal, and if she’d used it on me or Gomez, it would’ve pretty much ended either of our days. But Lo Mang… for all the times we make fun of Chris, he actually came through big on this one, rolling the natural 20 on Hero Point roll. I suppose we didn’t get a ruling on whether he actually broke her weapons or just escaped the grasp, but considering we finished beating her down before she got her next move, I’m not sure it matters that much.

And OK, I want to give Dougie his due as well. Critting off my Shared Stratagem and then having his sword re-apply flat-footed so he could land a SECOND dose of precision damage was kinda badass. TACTICS!

So the Skinner is down and dealt with. We’re not QUITE done with the cultists yet; there’s still a room that houses the lieutenant known as “Mobana the Stitcher” (I assume that was the room the earth mephit investigated when it went down the ladder from the sleeping area) and a few other rooms to be checked. But the big boss is done, and we didn’t really use that many resources doing it. (Heck, Tyrroicese was tougher, if you want to go there.) So, I feel pretty confident that we’ll be able to finish up the Skinsaw Cult on this trip into the catacombs.

Buuuut it won’t be this week, as Steve makes it a short episode. So I guess we’ll come back to it 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 S2|32: That’s How They Getcha!

Finally, we get to confront the Skinner this week.

One thing that’s a little bit weird: the Skinner is supposed to be the Big Bad of this whole cult, but after fighting Tyrroicese last week, she doesn’t feel THAT scary. I suppose it’s kind of an “if it bleeds, we can kill it” vibe – the Tyrroicese had all sorts of resistances, while this is “just” a person with pretty-much humanoid minions, albeit undead ones.

Now, OK, that’s an oversimplification. The other side of that coin is that Tyrroicese didn’t really have much in the way of special attacks: it hit really hard and it summoned oozes, but that’s pretty much all it did. Meanwhile, who knows what this lady has up her sleeve. (Other than a really large meathook on a chain. We know about that part already.) So what she lacks in exotic defenses, she might make up for on the other side of the ball.

Part of the confidence may just come from leveling. More hit points, better attack bonuses, and a few new tricks up everyone’s sleeves means we’re that much more survivable. Now, Basil didn’t add much at Level 9… or at least not much that will be useful in combat. It may come in enormously useful once we get back to investigating things. But for now, I’ll just have to live with being incrementally better.

Speaking of leveling, I kinda got the vibe that the main reason the Graycloaks volunteered to go with us was to create a reason to delay going back in immediately; in other words, to create a story reason for us to level up. Not that we WERE going to go back in immediately, but Steve kinda (lightly) forced the issue with that. Yet, for bringing all these extra bodies, it’s not like they sent a Graycloak team into battle with us, they just came along for… traffic control? A little weird. Doubly so since they’re the supposedly-hardened veterans and we’ve been on the job for 2-3 weeks. But whatever… DISBELIEF, SUSPENDED. We’ve got Graycloaks manning the Gatorade cooler to our rear. Down we go to the lower level.

The first thing that stands out about this battle is the “lollipop” logistics of the map. The stairwell terminates in a roughly circular room, then there’s a long diagonal hallway to the southwest, headed toward the room with the blood pool. So the good news is it makes a natural chokepoint for Dougie and Lo Mang that should be pretty easy to hold. The bad news is that – at least until Dougie and Lo Mang push down the corridor a little – it makes it a little tougher for me and Gomez to get clean sightlines for ranged and/or spell attacks. The stairwell in the center of the room precludes just taking a straight shot down the corridor, so you have to angle in on either side, which doesn’t always lend itself to a good shot. (And in the case of my bow, certainly doesn’t provide 30’ of distance to avoid the -2 penalty for volley.) And if you want to switch sides (on a clock, moving from 11 to 7 or vice versa), you might have to run all the way around the stairwell to the opposite side. So it’s a SAFE place to start combat, but it’s a tactically inefficient spot as well.

And, OK, the second thing that stands out was Chris dropping the “we’re here to collect your taxes” line on her. It felt like something out of the Lethal Weapon series. If we’re gonna be cops, let us be wise-cracking 80s cops, I guess.

So combat starts, and at first, things are actually going fine. Better than fine, when you factor in the fact that Dougie’s slashing weapon does EXTRA damage against the minions. They don’t seem especially hard to hit, their hit points are… tolerable: I wouldn’t call them easy, but the first one went yellow after one round, so not ridiculously hard either. (There have been creatures where we load a full round of attacks on them and they’re still green.)

Things get even better when I land one of my best bow shots ever on the boss when she finally comes down the hall to join the fight. Seriously… 60 points on one arrow? I love my sword-cane as a roleplaying device, but if I can land those kinds of shots consistently, I may have to hang it up and become an archer for good. (The clear next step will be to add a property rune to the mix.)

But then the Skinner finally makes her way down the hall and reminds us this is going to be a real fight. First, an attack. Not a special attack, but still… crazy to-hit bonus, big damage… she’s a piece of work. And it does put it in the back of your mind to worry about what other tricks she has waiting for us. And then we see the real hidden power of the blood pool, as she manages to feed off one of her minions to heal herself. That’s right… they’re walking, punching healing potions that only she can use, and my 60-point arrow (Mostly? ENTIRELY?) falls by the wayside. Lovely.

So the real question is how to tackle the fight going forward, in light of this new information? She’s got three juice boxes left, one of which is decently damaged but the other two are mostly untouched. So the question is whether to focus on the boss or the adds. The “boss” school of thought suggests that if you just keep piling damage on her, either a) forcing her to heal will suck up actions that she’d otherwise use to attack, or b) MAYBE you power through and kill her outright because she just can’t keep up. Also, making her heal is the equivalent of getting a one-shot kill on the minions, and that’s almost certainly more efficient action-wise than fighting them ourselves. On the other hand, the minions are the softer targets – easier to both hit and crit – and once we take care of them, we only have to grind her down to zero one time and it’s over. Also, this is more speculative, but is the amount of the heal dependent on how many hit points they have left? Maybe we don’t have to kill them entirely; maybe if we take half their hitpoints, the heal is only half as effective or something.

Or, knowing us, we’ll probably just hit whatever is in front of us until a strategy emerges from the mess. That seems more like our modus operandi. So be sure and come back next week to see if we can pull it 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 Agents of Edgewatch S2|31: I Have a Bad Feeling About This.

So it seems like this week, the main story is us doing something stupid. (I know, right? Big shock.) We managed to get through Tyrroicese, but we ultimately made the fight harder than it needed to be by not bringing our blunt weapons to the party and not optimizing our use of the one source of good damage we brought along: the aligned oil.

Well, OK, I made the mistake. Lo Mang has fists, Dougie has a shifting weapon, Gomez casts spells. So it’s me we’re talking about here.

So I’m going to go ahead and break down what happened there. There are parts of it that I’m absolutely willing to defend as “the right call”, and other parts where I’m quite willing to say “yeah, I screwed up”.

First and foremost was just the lag between doing the initial research on Tyrroicese and actually fighting it. One would have to go back and see EXACTLY when it was, but in real life, AT LEAST a month passed… maybe closer to two… between first doing our intel-gathering and actually fighting. (In addition to the episodes themselves, I think this was around GenCon/back-to-school/etc. so I believe there was a week or two where we didn’t play.) So “vulnerable to good” managed to stick in my brain all that time but “you have to use blunt weapons” did not. So, 20-20 hindsight… maybe we should’ve refreshed our research or taken more complete notes the first time. “Defense will stipulate” as the courtroom shows say.

I’ll also admit that there was a bit of an emotional reaction to John (in particular) grousing about the cost of the aligned oil. My attitude was “we’re cops, we’re supposed to save this person; if spending a little money wins the fight, that’s what we need to do”. In particular, the point at which I’d already said I would pay for it and John was still calling it a waste of money was the point at which my pride got in the way of my decision-making just a little bit. I decided inside my own head that I was going to do 800 good-aligned damage so I PERSONALLY could prove that it was a good idea, and at that point, the idea of buying it and giving it to someone else (Lo Mang) became a non-option. Though in truth, a hasted Lo Mang could’ve done more attacks (up to 5 if he doesn’t also have to move) than I could.

Now here’s the part I will defend as sound tactics. That thing hits HARD – and my armor class is a few points lower than theirs. It was going to hit us; it was going to CRIT us. So the general intent of putting the aligned oil on a ranged weapon was to create a consistent damage stream that wasn’t likely to need healing unless/until other things went wrong. Dougie and Lo Mang might have to disengage to heal, or they may lose a round or two if they got dropped, while I could stay out of the fray and just plink it down with arrows. At worst, I would lose one action each round tweaking my positioning for optimal range. I even had an expanded version of the plan where I got up onto the catwalk and shot at it from there, but that would’ve required losing a round or even two in transit.

So there’s a tactical level on which the plan was sound, if I’d just remembered to bring some blunt arrows. I did create “a consistent damage stream”… that consistency was just 10 damage per shot instead of 25 or 30.

And that’s the other thing. When you take out all the OTHER stuff the Tyrroicese was immune to (precision damage and crits, in particular), this fight was ALWAYS going to be a grind. Even if we’d put the oil on Lo Mang… maybe the fight ends a round earlier. But then that means my bow was COMPLETELY useless, and I would’ve had to wade into melee range, and how does THAT change the complexion of the fight.

The other big story of this battle is just how lucky we got. Relistening to it later, Tyrroicese missed all but one attack in its first round, and then missed multiple attacks in its second round as well. Given that it was able to hit on something like a 5-ish on-die (depending on who it’s attacking and such), and crit around a 16, missing that much was WAY out on the skinny end of the probability curve. You’ll notice once it started hitting consistently in Round 3 and beyond, things started turning bad pretty quick, and we were lucky it was on its last legs… pseudo-pods… whatever… by that point.

Speaking of luck: did ANYONE expect Chris to land five consecutive hits… ever?

Another thing that amused me about this fight was at the opposite spectrum: how comparatively EASY the ochre jelly has become. Remember when we literally had to leave the dungeon and send an abstracted Hazmat crew in to reclaim Hendrid Pratchett’s remains because doing it ourselves might be a TPK? Now, that same basic monster is dealt with in two rounds, and the only reason it took two is that we still had to finish off the boss first. If we’d focused fire on the ochre jelly from the second it showed up, we probably could’ve gotten it down in one.

Of course, the Tyrroicese battle was the big focus, but we also managed to check off one more side quest by putting the chain back on the statue and putting Frefferth’s spirit to rest (or at least imprisoning it again). I love the newly revealed backstory that the “hero” of the battle was basically just felled by a stray arrow, and his saltiness at his own death turned him evil. That’s wonderful. Almost wonderful enough to make up for their being no loot.

There is, however, experience. This isn’t all metagame – we genuinely need to get the captain to safety and I’m not sure we want to tackle the Skinner with anything less than a full tank – but between Frefferth and rescuing the captain, it feels like we ought to be close to leveling, doesn’t it? I’m torn. We could PROBABLY go back and start the final level, but… the Big Boss is basically the first room you enter when you go to the lower level. So I think we’ll probably bask in the glow of our slightly suboptimal victory and come back at it next time.

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 S2|30: Roomba of Blood.

This week’s a bit of a weird week on Roll For Combat because… I’ll be honest… I barely remember any of this happening. I had been under the impression we won the big fight and pretty much immediately retreated to safety, but clearly not; looks like we had almost 90 minutes of checking bodies and exploring the final room or two on this level. The Roomba Of The Damned? I LITERALLY forgot ever running into that thing, though once it actually started playing, the lightbulb went on in my head. I suppose I’ll just blame it on endorphins or something. We’d just had a running battle that stretched over multiple sessions; as you might have picked up, it was a little stressful.

The good news is we’ve now OFFICIALLY cleared the upper level. The last room has been explored – that turned out to be DoomRoomba – and nobody else responded to the alarm. The BETTER news is we got a little bit of advance scouting of the lower level done as well; partly thanks to the open grate over the blood pool, partly thanks to Gomez’s endless supply of mephits. We now know that the Skinner is in the central area, and the area to the west that the mephit explored holds a humanoid and a couple of Skinstiches. (Presumably, that’s the area marked as the Sewing Room on the map.)

Though, OK… pet peeve time. I feel like I have to point this out. A large part of the big running battle happened pretty close to the grate we just used for recon. You know… the grate with holes large enough to see through, and the grate that was enough of a walking hazard that Lo Mang had to roll a skill check to cross it. You’re telling me NOBODY down below heard the sounds of the battle… or of the alarm going off? That seems a LITTLE dubious. I guess she could’ve been out of the room during the battle and then come back in, but that would represent some pretty convenient timing. Though in my personal headcanon, I’m choosing to believe that the Skinner chooses to have some Enya playing in the background while she takes her blood baths, and that’s why she didn’t hear anything. Sure, she’s a remorseless serial killer… but she needs to decompress too. Murder and flaying are hard work.

As we proceed with the loot round-up, the most interesting prize is that we officially find Frefferth’s chain. So we should be able to cross that quest off the list; we just don’t know if there would be one more fight involved in doing so because one more fight might be one fight too much in our present condition. If all we gotta do is put the chain back on the statue, cool. If putting the chain summons Horse-Boy for one more battle… it’s dicey. So I think we’re going to have to defer, even if it might be really nice (and maybe lucrative) to get it taken care of.

On the other hand, as we gather up loot, we get a reminder – a heavy, bricky reminder – of the fact that we haven’t found Gubs yet, and now we have the realization hanging over our heads that we might have accidentally killed him in the Grand Melee. I mean, if the presence of his stuff means he hung out in this area with all the other cultists… that’s not a good sign, right? Thinking back to our conversation with Dannicus, the idea was that if we shouted for him, he might switch sides and join us, and we kinda forgot to do that. If you want to go meta, I didn’t see his name on any of the human NPC tokens, but then again, the guys that came out of the sleeping quarters didn’t even have names, they were just “cultists” or “initiates” or something. So it’s still possible Gubs was one of those guys. In which case… oops?

There’s still also the lower level, so maybe he’s down there and not all is lost. On the other hand, I also feel like joining a cult that chops people up to fill a blood pit for their boss is the definition of a “make your bed, lie in it” situation. I’ll feel bad at having not completed the task, but… 3 outta 10, 4 outta 10 max. Especially now that he dropped a pile of bricks on us from (maybe) beyond the grave.

The other thing we had to deal with this episode is the sheer amount of stuff we have to pull out of here. It’s actually pretty rare when you’re able to fill up an entire bag of holding — I’m actually impressed. My immediate frame of reference was the sled from The Grinch That Stole Christmas, so now I have this image of Lo Mang in a Santa suit (pantsless, of course!) carrying a huge bag with a Christmas tree sticking out the top. If we wish to further the imagery by tying a single antler to Gomez’s head, I wouldn’t complain much. (Also… if this isn’t the RFC Christmas card, we riot.)

So now, FINALLY, we get out of the dungeon, dragging our rescued prisoners along with us. Sure, we still have challenges to clear – rescuing the captain of the Graycloaks, dealing with the horseman, and clearing the lower level – but we definitely earned our paychecks today.

Though spending our paychecks is another matter. If there’s one thing I REALLY want, it’s a property rune to add some elemental damage to my bow. I’m starting to really love archery, and adding some additional damage and effects would take it to a whole new level. I’m probably leaning toward frost, because critical hits would apply slowed, and taking away even ONE enemy action per turn would be fantastic. Unfortunately, my gold tops out in the mid-300s, and all the elemental damage runes start at 500g. And it’s a little too much to borrow the difference – if I were 10g short, that’s one thing, but 100g short is a little too big a gap. So… next time.

Of course, there’s the other unspoken thing: will we level? We have to be getting pretty close since we took out an entire level – not just the Grand Melee, but the otyughs, the spider, and the initial batch of guards in the lookout post. Having said that, not only did I probably jinx it, but the Frefferth quest was the thing that made us come up short. But hey… can’t level if you’re dead.

So next week, we’ll come back, finish any shopping we might want to do, and figure out what order to attack these remaining tasks in. 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.