Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|34: It’s A Brand New Car!

You wouldn’t think so, but some of these combat episodes are surprisingly difficult to write about. Counter-intuitive, I realize, but true.

First, you’d think more action would be an absolute positive, in terms of having things to write about, but that’s not always the case. Action that advances the plot provides fertile ground for material. Action that gives us new monsters or powers or explores new parts of the rulebook lets us get into the nuts and bolts of the game to whatever level of detail is interesting. But sometimes it’s just “Week N+1 of fighting mostly the same creatures as last time” and that can be tough. It’s like being a rock-climber and having a flat rock face with no hand-holds to grab onto. And if I’m being honest, we had a little bit of that going on this week.

To finish the thought, boss fights are almost always the outlier in this respect. Boss fights almost always advance the plot, and the boss usually busts out a few new powers you haven’t seen before, so there ends up being a LOT to talk about. But this week, it’s like… “more xulgaths, only this one has an axe!” Eh.

Another thing is I find that the level of detail one needs as a listener and the level of detail one needs as a chronicler of the action are two different things. Don’t get me wrong: Steve and the players do their level best in fleshing out the “theater of the mind” aspect of the show. Vanessa in particular is GREAT at “dressing the set” for listeners and framing the action, and I’ve been trying to follow her lead on our Edgewatch show. For the level of “just a listener,” it’s easy enough to follow along. But sometimes if you’re trying to retain details as you go, it can all get a little opaque. As a listener, you just roll with it until you get your legs back under you, even if that’s the end of the fight. If you’re trying to write commentary and you lost track of whether there are two or three bad guys or how many times Darius critted and don’t want to rewind the last 20 minutes to figure it out… that’s a little tougher to deal with.

And look… some of that’s on me. If I were a more diligent writer, I’d take notes or even come up with some sort of “play-by-play” system to track combat more methodically. But that’s a tough call because I’ve always kind of approached this as a fairly spontaneous reaction to what I’m hearing, and I feel like there’s a danger of OVER-analyzing it to a point where I’m just listing off DPS stats for each fight like a human MMO mod.

The other thing is that I think roleplay is where this group really shines, and you don’t get as much of that in the combat episodes. More of a question of letting these folks do what they do best.

Or maybe all of the above is BS, and I’m just sullen and unmotivated this week because Cyberpunk 2077 moved its release to December and NHL 21 has a bunch of bugs that render franchise mode unplayable. Also a possibility.

Having essentially whined about the task, let’s talk about this week’s episode at least a little bit. The fight this week was fun enough; the creatures weren’t all that special, but it used line-of-sight in ways that kept the fight interesting. And hey, Darius punched a hole in a dude!

One thing was a little fuzzy to me, and you’re welcome to correct me on the Discord channel. There was that earthquake in the middle of the fight that basically knocked over everyone but Darius. Was that a creature’s ability, or was that an ambient environment effect? As in “this whole temple is unsteady and may collapse soon”? I’d been thinking the party had semi-limitless time to explore (as long as they got back in time for the next circus performance), but a seismic event that destroys the temple would put the whole thing on a bit of a clock. But if one of the bad guys did that… never mind. (I tried to go back and look for the moment but gave up after a while. See? Maybe I DO need to take notes!)

Speaking of being on a clock, how do we feel about long rests inside of dungeons? It’s one of those things that always struck me as a necessary evil of the game system, but can sometimes feel a little immersion breaking. You’re just going to lock yourself in a room for 8 hours and hope the enemies don’t notice their buddies are missing and come look for them?

If you remember the Plaguestone game, we wrestled with this a little in that campaign as well, but I think this game is a little different, and in ways that are more forgiving. First, there’s no running clock. In Plaguestone, Vilree was planning to destroy the town in a matter of day(s) and we HAD to stop her. There was a sense of urgency. Here, the xulgaths are just doing their thing and there’s no hard stop event that has to be averted. (At least none we know of yet, beyond getting back in time for the circus performance.) Also, there was more of a “high alert” vibe to the Plaguestone fortress where you had formal patrols that were expecting trouble; this just seems to be a lair where xulgaths come and go, so maybe they wouldn’t notice a missing compatriot for a few hours. Lastly, as Steve pointed out, the room the party is choosing to rest in seems to be one the xulgaths never discovered, so that might also work in their favor.

So we’ll break there, with the party catching the rare long rest, and that’s where we’ll pick it 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 Three Ring Adventure S1|33: Good Job Mortals!

For a second I thought this was going to go down as The Week That Second Edition Broke Vanessa. When she started laughing like a victim of Joker Gas after the third wasted Nat-20, I honestly worried that we were going to be introducing a new party member while Vanessa went off for some Me Time for a few weeks. Or at least that we were going to get a solid 15 minutes of swearing at Steve. Fortunately, there’s redemption around every corner, as Alhara not only gets to break out her thievery skills that have gone unused since the very first episode, but she even gets to proposition Ateran for a roll in the hay that Ateran interprets FAR too literally. By the end of the episode, I think we got her back to a point where she’ll be OK.

It started with getting chippy with Loren about Hap not doing anything with her turn, which… I’m sorry, but I have to side with Loren on this one. Sometimes, your character just doesn’t know what happened, and as much as you’d like to metagame yourself into a position to take an action, it’s just not fair to do so. In our Black Lodge game, it tended to take the shape of Mr. Peepers running off and doing something stupid “off-camera”; in this case, it was Hap not noticing the rock-flinging test that revealed the gelatinous cube.  Steve is usually pretty fair about giving players the benefit of the doubt by hearing “sounds of battle” and such, but in this case, there really wasn’t any sort of cue to indicate a fight had started. So Hap starting to cast spells would’ve bordered on psychic abilities.

But no… the REAL culprit was the not one, not two, but THREE wasted Nat-20s against Gel Cube #1. Full disclosure, I slept through most of Stats 2 in college, but I survived Stats 1, and I was definitely awake for basic independent probabilities. For those of you scoring at home, rolling three 20s in a row has a 1-in-8000 (.05 x .05 x .05) chance of happening. If you add up every die we’ve rolled in the three-plus years of this podcast, I guess we might have rolled 8000 of ‘em and been due, but still… if I lost three straight crits, you’d probably have been hearing muffled sobbing for the rest of the session. Or the aforementioned swearing at Steve.

And of course, things get worse before they get better, as it turned out the gelatinous cube was really TWO gelatinous cubes, with the second one attacking pretty much right around the same moment the first one died. I have to admit, on first listen, I was in the same boat as Rob T. – I got confused and thought this was still the same cube. I had even heard the “creature death noise” but I figured it had some sort of “last attack” or was thinking “OK, the cube is dead but the characters were still in rounds until they break free”. But in a bit of a lucky break, I broke for lunch and lost my place, backed up a bit when restarting, so I heard the sequence a second time and got a better sense of what was going on.

I have to admit, I thought I was mostly prepared for the nastiness of gelatinous cubes from First Edition, but the suffocation bit caught me off guard. I knew they had the ooze properties, so I knew the party wasn’t getting any critical hits even as Vanessa was saying it. I also loosely remembered from First Edition and even old AD&D that both acid and paralysis were possibilities. The whole suffocation thing was either a new twist or one I had forgotten about. And in either case, it’s made worse by the fact that the suffocation rules are a lot tougher in Second Edition. In First Edition, the rule for holding your breath is 2 times your Constitution SCORE… so if you’ve got a 14 CON, that’s 28 rounds to figure out what to do. In Second Edition, it’s 5 + your CON MODIFIER, so that same 14 CON gets you 7 rounds (1/4 of the time). In both systems, the number starts dropping as you take actions or take additional damage, but 2E gives you a LOT less cushion to work with.

As an aside, when Steve mentions the breathing rules happening in the other game, based on the timing, I’m assuming he was talking about the PaizoCon special. In that game, there was a moment where Chris Beemer’s dwarf champion Thorgrim had to swim around underwater to retrieve a corpse from the jaws of a slain sea serpent because the corpse had a family heirloom we were hired to retrieve. That’s the last time I can remember us using the breath-holding rules.

The battle continues, and it’s starting to look dicey for a little bit, as Gel Cube #2 destroys the back ranks: Ateran is engulfed entirely and receives All The Bad Things while Hap narrowly avoids getting sucked in, but still takes a chunk of damage and suffers the paralysis effect for a round. (But not before casting acid resistance on Ateran… nice move there!) Fortunately for the party as a whole, the Varus siblings rise to the occasion and put enough damage on Cube #2 to save the day before anything truly bad happens. Whew!

We have some healing. We have some banter. We have romantic innuendo that mostly flies over Ateran’s head. (Though, I mean, who would want to get frisky on xulgath bedding anyhow? Ew.) And then the exploration resumes, and Alhara finally gets her moment of redemption for the episode, as Darius discovers a trap and she disables it. I’m trying to think… was it really all the way back in the second or third episode that she last used her thievery? Is there another incident I’m missing, or was that it?

With the trap disabled, Darius takes a peek behind the curtain… literally. There’s a curtain. And finds the beginnings of an actual temple structure. With multiple dinosaurs, and – at least based on smell – probably some more xulgaths to fight as well. There’s a little speculation about negotiation, but come on… we know where this is headed.

DINO-PUNCHING.

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

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|32: Bare Naked Skeletons.

I’m going to apologize in advance that I’ve got a bout of the old writer’s block this week. Sometimes these writeups come easy and I have the whole thing, or at least large chunks of it, laid out in my head before I ever hit the keyboard. Other times, like tonight, I go off and watch the West Wing Reunion Special so I don’t have to feel guilty looking at a blank page in MS Word for 90 minutes. My recipe for getting out of that sort of funk is to just start writing… something… so apologies if we get off to a bit of a rambly start here. IT’S A PROCESS, DAMNIT.

(Also, Sterling K. Brown was fine as Leo, but I really missed John Spencer. Just Sayin’.)

The first thing that jumped out at me this week was a bit of serendipity as, despite the real life time jump of almost two months, Steve acknowledged one of my concerns from last week in this week’s episode. If you remember, last week I was fussing about the fact that the xulgath lair probably wouldn’t stop smelling bad just because you killed the xulgaths unless it was a spray or something. Or that if it was a constant smell, they’d eventually acclimate. Well, turns out Steve tackled that problem by combining the two ideas; ruling that the stink was strongest in the immediate vicinity of the xulgaths, but at a more “normal” baseline level that the party could tolerate when the xulgaths were not around. I’m OK with that approach. I just found the timing funny because they recorded this show in… August or September, maybe?… and the recording still managed to anticipate my major complaint two months in advance.

Of course, it turned out to not matter for the remainder of this week’s episode, as most of the rest of the episode took place in a fairly clean portion of the dungeon that bears all the signs of having been cleared out by a gelatinous cube. Floors that look like they’ve been freshly mopped? Yeah, that’s a bad thing. And of course, our party slowed their pace to a crawl trying to game out the cube encounter, only to get jumped by non-cubish things in the interim.

Look, I don’t begrudge caution. At least based on First Edition, gel cubes are nothing to trifle with. I assume they’re built similarly in Second Edition – hard to see because they’re transparent, have the usual slime-family immunities to crits and precision damage, and they have both paralysis and acid attacks. If there’s a saving grace, it’s that they’re criminally easy to hit. (But of course in 2E, that means more crits going to waste.) I’d also like to mention that they are also generally one of my favorite creatures just because they’re such a weird invention. “Yeah, let’s just have a random block of Jell-O schlep its way around the dungeon dissolving things with acid.” What demented wizard decided to whip that up in his or her cauldron?

OK, time for a quick aside here. I’m never sure whether to look up 2E statblocks on these monsters or not. This is where the “two hats” thing has its limitations. The blogger in me strives for accuracy, and when I’m summarizing a fight, it’s sometimes very good to understand what abilities the creature was doing, or what it COULD have done but didn’t get a chance to. But I am still a player at heart, and sometimes that feels a little dirty because it’s looking at the other side of the GM screen. I’m not sure I want to have TOO much information about creatures that maybe we’ll face somewhere down the line. I suppose I err on the side of looking it up because I’ll probably have forgotten by the time it becomes relevant. But I always feel a little guilty doing so.

But back to the dungeon crawl. This feels like one of those moments that was clearly smart dungeoneering, but made for slow going as a listener. Casting light on rocks and throwing them down the hall in front of you would TOTALLY work as a way to find a gelatinous cube. Heck, you don’t even need to get fancy with cantrips – just pick up rocks and toss them. But as a listener, I’ll admit it reached a point where I was rooting for a little John Staats trademark impatience to carry the day.

They finally find something, but it’s not the gelatinous cube. Instead, it’s a skeleton that I assumed was going to come to life and attack, but nope. That’s just the loot. For the fight, Paizo had slightly different plans: it’s an initial salvo of bat swarms, followed by an ether spider jumping into the action halfway through the bat fight.

I have to admit I’m with Steve – I thought that spider was going to be a LOT tougher. You look at the statblock, and it’s got poison, immobilizing webs, can shift into the Ethereal Plane as a single action… I’m imagining some pretty nasty hit-and-run tactics where it shifts ethereal, moves, and then pops up and webs or bites from some other direction and then shifts out again. But – noticing a trend here – the party got pretty lucky with their rolls and it ended up not being too bad. Looking at the stat block (Shhh! Don’t tell Steve!) it’s kind of a glass cannon; it has a lot of tricks, but pretty ordinary defenses for a creature of its level.

And just think. All that work for a suit of plate armor that no one can use anyway. That’s always frustrating. I suppose it’s still got loot value, but would’ve been nice to get something of more tangible benefit.

The dungeon crawl finally resumes, and FINALLY, the pebble trick works – one of their rocks flies down the hall and stops in mid-air. GELATINOUS! CUBE! Pop the popcorn! Oh, wait. It’s gonna be next week. OK, I’m getting the extra good popcorn for next week and we’ll see you back here then.

Before I close, a general “show note” of my own. At SOME point, I might try to dive in and give some thoughts about the RPG Superstar contest. I checked out a few of the top winners, but I do want to sit down and maybe write up some impressions. In general, some great stuff – I’m surprised at how well it came out.

Anyhow, thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|31: Conga Line of Death.

The tower! Rapunzel, Rapunzel! We’re going to the tower! (If any of you AREN’T imagining that line delivered as Johnny from Airplane!, the RFC Movie Club has your next assignment for you.)

I’m gonna begin this week’s column with a few Picky Points. I fully acknowledge none of these are particularly disruptive to the game, they’re not the difference between life and death… I just find myself scratching my head a little. Yes, I’m gonna be the whiny guy who points out continuity errors in movies for a few minutes. (“You see, when they show the wide shot of activating the time portal, Cap is standing to the LEFT of Black Widow, but when they go to the wide shot, he’s standing BETWEEN Black Widow and Hulk!”)

First, is it just me or did the climbing seem like it was a little too slow? I think what’s leaping out at me is that since default land movement is 25 feet, that makes default climb speed 5 feet. So if you don’t crit, you’re looking at eight rolls to climb a 40-foot ramp, and that seems excessive. Could it be that’s supposed to be in combat rounds and maybe it’s supposed to be fewer rolls in exploration mode? Or maybe that should be the speed on vertical surfaces and inclined surfaces should be a bit faster. Looking at it in real-world terms. If you have six seconds (a round), how much of a vertical surface could you really climb in six seconds… probably not a LOT more than 5 or 10 feet. But even a 15 or 20-foot flight of stairs seems like it would be doable in six seconds. I don’t know. It’s not enough to spend a LOT of time on, but I can’t be the only one (including a few of the players) who thought it was a bit much.

While we’re on the topic, it also seems like a mildly impractical design to have a ramp going 40 feet up to the entrance and then stairs immediately going back down once you get back inside. At least for a place of worship. For a military outpost… yeah, make those invaders give themselves heart attacks climbing up and down steps while you shoot at them. But as a religious facility? Just put the door at the bottom where it belongs. COME ON, PEOPLE.

I also feel like the whole “xulgath stank” sickness thing needs some clarity, even beyond Steve making them roll multiple saves, which I covered last week. My daughter was big into animals so we went to a lot of zoos over the years, and I’m here to tell you that an elephant cage still smells like an elephant cage, even if the elephant is outside in the yard. So I guess what I’m saying is… are the xulgaths spraying some additional odor or is their habitat just rancid? If it’s the latter, shouldn’t the party either be continuously sickened or eventually get used to it and not have to roll saves at all? If it’s an additional odor source… yeah, that ebbs and flows. If it’s the olfactory equivalent of background noise, you’d think it would either be always on or the players would get numb to it.

Again, none of these are ruining the story for me… just the places my overly analytical mind goes wandering to.

But OK, let’s stop nitpicking and get onto things I do like about this episode.

I mean, first… dinosaurs. Granted, just wimpy “glorified lizard” raptors; not anything cool like a triceratops or a T-Rex. But it’s a start, and we’ll take it. My inner five-year-old is pleased.

Next, between this scenario and the final fight in the druid hermitage, I’m really digging the increased commitment to using environmental challenges in the fight. I feel like this is a bit of a Second Edition thing… the three-action economy and removing attacks of opportunity have opened up adventure authors to get a little weird with their battlefields in ways that either might not have been possible in First Edition. (Or, might have been possible, but wouldn’t have been as interesting as everyone would just five-foot step their way through it.)

I think one of the things I like about environmental hazards is that it’s a way to more gently fine-tune the difficulty in what’s already a pretty swing-y combat system. We’ve talked plenty of times about how there are more, and more painful, crits in 2E, so if you just make the enemies tougher, that can make an encounter quite a bit more deadly. But if you make the battlefield a little harder to navigate, add some low-level environmental status effects… that feels like a more subtle way of doing things. It’s harder, but not “potential TPK” levels of harder. An elegant weapon for a more civilized GM.

Having said that, mild spoiler alert: check back with the Edgewatch show in a month or two, and you’re gonna see me swear up a storm about environmental challenges. Bookmark this page under “hypocritical takes that did not age well” and I’ll see you in a few months.

The other thing I really like about this episode is we’re finally starting to see the power of the healing system in Second Edition, with Darius’ growth into the role of Back-Door Paladin. (Bow-chicka-bow-wow!). Can we use “Pocket Paladin” instead? Oh wait, that’s not really a lot better. In fact, possibly worse.

It’s no secret that at low levels, healing has been frustrating in Second Edition. Potions only heal 1d8, with no floor, so sometimes you roll a 1 and waste 4 gold. There aren’t really many dedicated healer classes – a Cleric with the healing font gets a couple of extra spell slots dedicated to healing spells and can take feats to make their heals more effective, but for a Druid or divine Sorcerer to carry enough spells to pass as a healer, they pretty much have to sacrifice ALL their utility. Even the once-trusty wand, the staple of First Edition, is only usable once per day without running the risk of blowing out your wand. (And wands are pretty expensive compared to the loot you get at low levels anyway.) There are out-of-combat options, but they tend to be a little time limited by the cap on how often you can receive Treat Wounds – if you happen to have hours to rest between encounters, you’re sort of OK, but if you’re in a story where time matters, an hour is definitely out and even multiple 10-minute breaks start to bend the immersion a little. Think about our final assault in the Plaguestone campaign: we’d basically do a room or two, and then go hide for an hour while we topped off with Brixley’s Lay On Hands, even knowing that the evil alchemist was ACTIVELY planning the demise of the town we were protecting. Something always seemed off about that.

But as Darius has grown as a character, you can start to see the promise of the system, as feats are starting to narrow that gap quite a bit. We’ve been seeing the usefulness of Battle Medicine for a while now, which lets you perform the healing portion of Treat Wounds while in combat. Now Darius gets Continual Recovery, which lowers that temporary immunity for Treat Wounds from an hour to 10 minutes. That puts his healing on a rough par with a Champion’s Lay On Hands, though the champ gets a fixed amount while Darius gets a variable amount. Eventually, he could also take Ward Medic, which would let him heal multiple people with the same 10-minute window – 2 if your Medicine is Expert, 4 if Master, 8 if Legendary. Add in that his Medicine will naturally climb and make the check easier as he levels up, and you’re eventually looking at a system where after-combat heals will become almost trivial… as long as someone in the party puts the feats into it.

Having said all that, in-combat heals will still be at a bit of a premium, but both Hap and Ateran have spells that will help, and access to better consumables will fill in the gaps quite ably. We were doing the math on the Edgewatch show, and while 12gp for a Lesser Healing Potion seems expensive when you’re a low-level character, it’s really just the equivalent of buying three minor healing potions and buying a guarantee that at least one of the rolls will be a 5.

Terrain aside, the fights in this episode didn’t seem that difficult. There was a brief “oh crap” moment when the gargoyles were resistant to Darius’ punches (since he’s traditionally been one of the best damage-dealers), but the rest of the party picked up the slack and took care of business. And I mean… come on… they’re made of stone, so you had to expect something like that. Xulgaths… we know from last week’s fight that the rank-and-file aren’t that tough; check back when we start bumping into their bosses. The dinos were a little trickier since they handle the terrain easily and have attacks of opportunity as part of their arsenal, but they still didn’t seem to have all that many hit points.

You know what I bet has a lot of hit points? A T-Rex. Just Sayin’. I swear I feel like a kid opening presents on Christmas, and if I don’t get a Real Dinosaur, I’m gonna lose it. T-Rex. Triceratops. I’ll even accept a pterodactyl in a pinch. So I guess we’ll convene back here next week and see if I get my wish. 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 S1|30: Alhara: Warrior Princess.

This week, I have a bit of a dilemma to confront: the difference between listening to the show, and writing about the show.

As a listener, it’s kind of nice to take a break for a week. We had a LOT of stuff happen over the last few weeks, so it’s kind of nice to have an episode where you just put your feet up (real or virtual) and relax with a fairly low-consequence fight. You can’t have your foot on the gas ALL the time, or you’ll burn out. (Heh… it’s like an anticipation vs. excitement mechanic for the show itself!) So a “down” episode is needed every now and then. Unfortunately, down episodes don’t always lend itself to strong opinions, so as the Designated Chronicler, it’s a bit tough to come up with a thousand words about a butt-whupping.

To be a little meta-gamey at the outset, the first fight of a new story section is almost always a warm-up fight of limited danger. Dead Suns… Plaguestone… most of our Black Lodge games… it’s kind of a thing Paizo does. (In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s fairly standard in the RPG world.) I feel like the goal is to “set the stage”… both in terms of building the danger level as you go, but also to give the party a fight to assess where they are at the start of a new section of the story. Yes, the bad guys COULD roll three or four crits in a row and make it unexpectedly tough, but the numbers are usually on the side of a squash match.

(If you’re unfamiliar… I’m outing myself as having been at least a casual wrestling fan here. A “squash match” is where they put the Big Name up against a nobody in a match that lasts less than a minute just so the Big Name can put in SOME sort of appearance to keep the fans happy. Not the sports with the ridiculously long racquets. I don’t know crap about that.)

So… a band of xulgaths that are lax enough to let our intrepid band sneak up on them and get a surprise round even though they’re ostensibly supposed to be defending the outer perimeter? Definite squash match, and that’s pretty much how it goes.

Except for the xulgath stink of course. I’m glad Steve corrected this in the pre-game comments because it just sounded wrong to me that you have to make five saves. I mean, if you get attacked by five… say BITES… yeah, I can understand having to make five different saves. Five different points of contact, after all. But if you walk into one continuous cloud of nastiness… OK, it’s five creatures, but you’ve only got one nose. Had I been a player, I would’ve been arguing this one a little more strenuously. Still… if it’s this bad OUTSIDE, I shudder to think what it’s going to smell like inside the enclosed area of the tower. (Cue up the “Sex Panther” scene of Anchorman.)

One thing I noticed about this fight – it was nice to see both Alhara the character and Vanessa the player get some of their mojo back this week. During the exploration of the hermitage, Alhara drew the short straw from the luck gods quite a few times, and Vanessa sounded like she was getting a little fried. I remember her getting dropped in the two consecutive fights before the finale, and even though she remained upright in the final fight, she still lost a round or two getting knocked into one of those moats. But this time around, she was able to get back to doing what she does best and was even able to bring back some of the Greatest Hits she lost when she had to square up the Playtest version of the swashbuckler with the Go-Live version. Level 4 Alhara is shaping up as kind of a badass.

Though… OK, the whole party was a little silly this week – “agile vomit”, “Golarion’s ass”, “PAJAMAS!”, the general return of poop-related entertainment – maybe they went to Happy Hour before recording this week’s show.

Another thing I liked was Rob P. sneaking a little bit of character development for Ateran in there by trying to talk down the clearly-evil xulgath prisoner after the fight. It was a nice call-back to the argument with Alhara after they (accidentally) killed the druid. I mean, I kind of assumed it wasn’t going to work out, but it was nice to see Ateran trying to adopt some new ways of doing things. (Though “I cannot blame them; I’m sure they feel subjugated” suggests they’re not ALL the way there yet.)

I’m glad we eventually got clarity on the whole issue of Hap’s bonus damage. On one hand, 2 extra damage isn’t a big deal, but I suppose it’s good to get it worked out now, in case it’s important down the road when it’s 7 or 8 damage, or when it’s a crit and it’s doubled. I’ll say that Loren’s interpretation sounded more correct to me – I took it as “you have to cast the spell, as opposed to casting it from a scroll or wand, but yes, cantrips count”.

After the fight, it turned out to be good that Darius and Alhara used non-lethal damage and they were able to take a prisoner because they got at least a little bit of intel on what they’re likely to face inside the tower. So it looks like there are about 20-some xulgaths, some with dinosaur pets, demons (hopefully not the ones from the church) and a demon-worshiping priest is leading the whole operation. That’s assuming the prisoner was telling the truth, but we’ll take it at face value for now.

So… with all that dispensed with, it’s time to climb the tower and invade the xulgath lair. And that’s where we’ll pick it up next week. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week!

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|29: Coulrophobia.

First, note the general title change: “Talking Circus” is now “The Sideshow”. Consider it fallout from the start of the Edgewatch show. I decided to call the recaps for that one “The Bird’s Eye View” because I’m playing a tengu in that game, and from there the wheels kept turning and I came up with a new name for this one. “Talking <Blank>” was getting a little old anyway.

So… back to this week’s action. I have to admit, I feel a little underwhelmed by this week’s episode.

Given the title and the big splashy picture, I thought the initial meet-and-greet would be a little more… bloody? I guess I thought we’d be getting right into the circus performance and see what sort of things Evil Clown Energy could bring to the show.

Not that the squirming and audible discomfort that resulted was BAD, mind you. It was kind of funny to watch everyone (except Hap) process their unease at the new member of the troupe. (Somehow Ateran’s dead stare was actually my favorite initial reaction.) But given that I thought we’d be counting up severed limbs or something, general awkwardness was a bit of a letdown.

But hey… file this away for now: I feel there’s at least a 15 percent chance that a year from now, Jellico will turn out to be a serial killer in Book 4 or Book 5, and this whole interlude will be whole new levels of embarrassing in hindsight.

On the other hand, delving deep into New CHDRR’s legacy pleased me greatly. I’m not above a little bit of ego… having my robot creation from Dead Suns (or a version of it) make its way into the new story was pretty cool. Of course, it’s going to take on its own life here, and I’m not going to have any hand in that, but it’s still neat.

Back on the circus front, I think it makes a certain amount of sense that the Professor would hire Jellico (and vice versa). From Jellico’s standpoint, it’s not like circus performers in a fantasy medieval setting would have guaranteed multi-year contracts or anything, and depending on the notoriety of the two circuses, Jellico might be more of a featured act in this circus. (Or again, maybe Jellico is a serial killer on the lam and he changes circuses every few months to evade the authorities. Still on the table.) Meanwhile, looking at it from the Professor’s side, adding Jellico would definitely raise the quality of the Professor’s roster AND he’d be taking a performer directly from a competitor. But mostly it just makes for great storytelling. Why have a boring old animal act or something when you can have a creepy-ass clown? And the fact that it’s a bit of a wild card act the players have no control over is compelling.

The other major theme of this episode was the shopping trip, and that spawns a few interesting side conversations.

First, put me down with Vanessa… I don’t generally enjoy roleplaying out shopping trips; I’d much rather just put a list together and get on with things. Having said that, some of the banter with the priest was entertaining, so it wasn’t a total waste. I guess I’d take a middle ground here – if shopping is somehow interesting to the story, then sure… play it out. But at some point, it really is just book-keeping, so better to just get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

I do think, as Steve points out, there’s value to doing it at the table, though, because you want to avoid the two extremes. At one end, particularly when resources are scarce, you don’t want to “waste” money by multiple people overbuying the same resources. On the opposite end, you don’t want to do all of your shopping in separate bubbles, and then get back to the table and realize nobody bothered to buy… say… healing. So I do think there’s value to kicking ideas around at the table in a semi-live setting. But in our game, we’ve been fairly successful doing that in chat and email, so maybe it doesn’t have to be “live”-live.

The other thing – and this is going to contain a VERY mild Edgewatch spoiler by comparison – is watching availability become an issue. In Edgewatch, we’re right in the heart of Absalom. Our group can pretty much buy whatever we want – we kind of liken it to New York City, where you can run to a CVS at 3 am and buy what you need. Out in the sticks, you’re much more restricted in what you can craft, as this group is finding out: half their shopping list vanishes because the local shops just don’t have anything that fancy.

In fact, this sets the table for a discussion of crafting. Crafting isn’t really THAT great in Second Edition, compared to First Edition. In First Edition, it was a flat 50 percent off for crafting your own items, so there was a clear and immediate benefit to doing it. And GENERALLY, the roll was shrugged off as automatic. In Second Edition, you need to pay 50% upfront, and the other 50% (or some portion of it) is dependent on how many days of downtime you can afford to spend. So if you have unlimited time (between adventures, for example), yeah, you could approach that same 50% cost. But if you have to craft something quickly, you pretty much end up paying full price. At the point of “I need this now so we can continue the adventure”, there’s no discount at all.

Here, with Ateran, we start seeing the one place where crafting is still useful – counteracting limited availability. If you’re in a place where you are trying to get a rare item that’s not available in stores, you can still possibly find more common ingredient items and craft it yourself. At that point, getting it at full price through crafting still beats not getting it at all.

The one remaining thing that stands out about this episode was Csillagos learning the spell by eating the scroll. I have to admit that one slipped by me when I was reading the Advanced Player’s Guide. I remember the part about familiars being able to trade spells by talking to them, but I missed the part about scroll-eating. That’s fantastic. Though if I ever make a Witch, I’m going to make my familiar be a picky eater. YOU EXPECT ME TO EAT THIS? IT’S NOT EVEN SEASONED PROPERLY.

As we end the episode, it turns out that there are five days until the circus performance, so it looks like the new plan is to go to the xulgath tower and deal with that situation first. So I guess Jellico’s first show will have to wait. Back to dungeon crawl… now with dinosaurs! While we’re waiting for next week’s episode, 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 S1|28: Dinosaur Fort.

Oh sure, Steve. Mess with my rhythm. Put all the best stuff in the last 10 minutes of the episode. BE THAT WAY.

That’s OK. I’m going to roll with it and discuss the end of the episode first and then go back to the beginning later.

Let’s start with the creation of the CHDRR Multiverse since I had a very small supporting part to play in that. So I guess this also serves as a bit of a confession: my listener experience was not 100% pure, and this on one occasion, I had some inside information. Though in my defense, this happened so long ago that I had honestly forgotten about it until now.

Way back in the Pre-COVID Beforetimes, when Three-Ring Adventure was either just starting or perhaps even before it started recording, Steve told me there would eventually be a construct member the circus serving as a laborer and handyman, and asked me to come up with a CHDRR-esque acronym for it. The ends were easy: “Clockwork” fell right into place as the “technology” word (thanks, steampunk genre!) and one of the multiple definitions of “Roustabout” is literally “a circus or fairground laborer”. (Also the title of a 1964 Elvis movie.) So I had the concept of “technological laborer” locked in pretty quickly. From there, it was just a matter of filling in the middle bits. Though OK… I cheated and reused “Dynamic” for the D-word.

So yes, Three-Ring Adventure now has its own CHDRR, and I helped supply its name. Having said that, now I’m back to a fresh slate like the rest of you and I’m curious to see what CHDRR is here to do. Will it be beating up drunks during the shows? Is it possibly going to be a source for crafting requests? Could they even find a way to use it in the act? I find myself curious.

But admittedly, nowhere near as curious as I am to see how the addition of Jellico Bounce-Bounce changes the dynamic of the circus show. Now look… one could make the case that a town that’s already been traumatized by marauding wild animals and psychotic druids probably doesn’t need a “dark, edgy” clown act, but from the Professor’s standpoint if you can steal an act from your closest competitor to help grow the show… why wouldn’t you? So Alhara will be sleeping with a dagger under her pillow and one eye open for the foreseeable future… you wanna succeed in this business you gotta have a thick skin!

Also, I don’t know if Steve’s voice for Jellico is an overt homage to Mark Hamill or just one of Bob Ross’ Happy Little Accidents, but I fully support it either way. Now if they hire a female clown assistant who keeps calling him “Mister J.”, that might be a little too on the nose. Though I also volunteer to play said female assistant. And if hired, I fully intend to call Ateran “Bats” at every opportunity. (Bateran?)

I also like the idea that their circus is going to kick off a potential holy war based on an idle promise they made two months ago. “Yeah yeah, we’ll do a show to help you rebuild.” So now they’re all set to do an Abadar-themed show with a Gozreh worshiper as their special invited guest, right after that Gozreh worshipper’s former buddies went crazy and attacked the town. THIS CAN’T POSSIBLY END POORLY. Stay tuned for the red-band version of the next episode where Jellico Bounce-Bounce practices his knife skills on poor Harlock.

Meanwhile, all of that kind of overshadowed the fact that our intrepid adventurers reached Level 4! I think the most interesting thing here was the renewed focus on healing as both Darius and Ateran put resources into the healing arts – Darius’ skills will be more for reducing after-battle downtime; Ateran’s healing will help more in combat. I felt a little bad for Vanessa that Alhara had to spend Level 4 cleaning up the differences between the playtest and the final release version of her character, but at the end of the day, she’s still roughly where she planned to be with Alhara, so no real harm done I guess. Just felt like opening presents when you already knew what they were going to be. And Hap… a lot of moving parts and swapping spells, so it’s hard to see how it’ll play out until we start fighting again.

Speaking of which… I guess it’s not the end of Book 1 yet, but if it’s any consolation, we’re gonna get some freakin’ DINOSAURS before it’s all over. It’s kinda funny to think how that dynamic works – in a fantasy setting, dinosaurs barely register as interesting compared to, say, dragons. When you’ve got a giant flying lion with an eagle’s head and wings, a big lizard OUGHT to be No Big Deal. But in the real world, a dinosaur is probably the closest thing we can imagine to a fantasy creature, so it’s almost hard-wired that we still react with that same level of childish wonder, even back in the game world. (I was at that PaizoCon where they announced dinosaur form as an “oh look here’s a sample spell” part of Second Edition, and Steve’s right… when they put the page up on the projector, the crowd went NUTS.)

I have to admit I didn’t totally follow Harlock’s lore dump, but it sounds like some of the town’s recent woes are tied to the corruption of special stones that led to prosperous harvests, mild weather, and other druid-y things. And the investigation of that is going to lead to a community of xulgaths (formerly known as troglodytes), who buddy around with dinos the way humans integrate dogs and farm animals into our lives. So our party of adventurers is going to head off to their lair as soon as they finish doing their circus performance.

And that’s basically where we’ll pick it up next week. On one hand, going by dice math, the show should be better than ever before now that the party is another level higher; on the other hand, there’s all sorts of weird energy in the air between the addition of the killer clown and the awkward religious overtones. So I guess we’ll meet back here next week and see how it goes. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. THIS week, I’ll also throw in an invitation to check out the Episode Zero of our Agents of Edgewatch show that’s launching… well… today. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|27: Harlock, I Presume.

This week it’s Boss Battle Week on Roll For Combat and not just Boss Battle week, but it feels like we’re also on the final approach for wrapping up Book 1 of the adventure path. There might be some cleanup for a few weeks after, but with the hermitage cleared out and the circus side of things facing diminishing financial returns, it’ll probably be time to move on to a new town and a new mystery. And we should get to see some new Level 4 characters soon… Steve pretty much admitted as much in the show notes, and that’s also How It Usually Works when there’s a big boss fight. So we’re on the threshold of pretty big stuff.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves; first, our band of merry adventurers has to survive the fight in front of them. Two casters, pet lizards, environmental hazards… should be interesting.

First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: how to pronounce the lady druid’s name. I don’t usually get in Steve’s business about this stuff, because it’s not like Paizo gives you phonetic spellings to help you out, but this time it went through about 10 different iterations and Rob P. even made a joke about it, so… it kind of became A Thing. The spelling from the adventure is “Enkrisha”, so I would assume “En-KREE-sha” or maybe “En-KRISH-a” would be the right call. “Escargot”, “Anchorage”, and “Abracadabra” are not correct.

I have to admit to giving a silent mental cheer at Alhara’s opening move to start the combat. Pretty inspired, classic swashbuckler stuff. It was a little hard to visualize at first, but I guess there was a water moat on one side and an air moat on the other, and the druid and her pets were on the strip of land between the two. So Alhara swashbuckled her way right in between them and almost successfully pushed both of the lizards into the moats. (Technically her roll succeeded both times, but one caught an edge and avoided the fall.) For extra credit, it also incapacitated the druid in the process, since she was holding their leashes, and forced her to make a choice between saving her pets or getting dragged in herself. That was pretty badass, even if it took a Hero Point to get there.

Unfortunately, the moats turned out to not be the “I win” button the party was hoping for, as the lizard that falls in climbs back out the next round. So clearly they’re not “bottomless”. But that cuts both directions – it’s not a death sentence if one of our heroes gets pushed in either, which happens to Alhara the following round. At that point, we find out they’re not really THAT bad as long as you have semi-decent climbing skills. Now if one of the casters get pushed in with their low strength scores, that could be bad, but as long as it’s the fighters, it’s a survivable situation.

Speaking of which, two things. First, I was surprised the summon ended up being “just” a mephit. I thought the druid summon was going to be something nastier. Teeth, claws, whatever. Probably a bit of a missed opportunity. (Then again, it also wasn’t a squirrel swarm. I would’ve cracked up if Steve had done that.) I was also kind of amused by Vanessa’s annoyance at the mephit copying her tactics and pushing her in – it’s “Hipster Alhara”, pushing people into moats before it was cool!

The mephit was a symptom of a larger surprise related to this fight. I was actually surprised that there didn’t seem to be a big central enemy in this fight. Usually, Paizo is fond of one Big Bad Guy who is easily identifiable as such, and maybe a few minions helping it out. Here, it didn’t really seem to fit that model. The lizards were tough opponents, but summoning a mephit was kind of a wimpy choice, and the other druid cast Produce Flame. Cantrips? In a boss fight? Really? I guess if you have four different enemies (pre-mephit) and environmental complications, that’s still a challenging fight, but it’s not the usual way these things unfold.

That’s not to say it wasn’t challenging. While she didn’t take a lot of damage, Alhara basically lost an entire round escaping from the moat she fell in. Meanwhile, Darius did his job tanking and taking hits with Mountain Stance, but that ongoing acid damage was doing a number on him (didn’t help that Steve rolled pretty well for the ongoing damage every time – I distinctly remember both a 6 and a 5 coming up at various points). Hap and Aterian stayed pretty safe in the back, but things could’ve gotten bad quick if Darius had dropped.

The battle continues and there’s a distinct ebb and flow to the action. The players got off to a tremendous start in the first round. Then in the second round, it’s the bad guys getting the better of the action, with Alhara getting knocked into the trench and Rob taking a few big hits. But the players rebound from that point on, the casters basically focus on keeping Darius standing, and eventually, the team puts the fight to bed. Even better, nobody drops!

Unfortunately, we aren’t going to get any answers this episode – we do finally meet Harlock, the object of this whole search, but he’s too tired from his ordeal at the hands of the bad guys to explain much yet. So it seems like next week is when we’ll finally get an explanation of just what the heck’s been going on here. Harlock also drops a hint that he’ll be able to cure Hap’s ghoul fever, but when a man’s got to nap a man’s gotta nap. And Steve dropped the hint that we should see some leveling soon.

So that’s a lot to get into next time. For now, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think about the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S1|26: Hungry Like The Wolf.

First of all, I would like to lodge a meta-complaint that the Three-Ring Adventure podcast is now casually dropping movie recommendations into their show. INFRINGING ON OUR TERRITORY, SERIOUS ROLEPLAYERS. THIS AGGRESSION SHALL NOT STAND!  (Truth told, I’m not worried… I shall be reclaiming my pop-culture crown either this week or next week. Two words: song parody.)

As we start this week’s episode in earnest, I have to be honest: I don’t believe in luck, I believe in math.

Look… rolling two Nat-20s in a row is RARE, but it’s not impossible. If you want to get technical, it’s a 1-in-400 occurrence. OK, that sounds large, but if you think about it: we’ve been doing these shows for almost three years now, over however many combats… it was bound to happen eventually. Heck, back-to-back 1’s are still out there on the horizon somewhere. Unless we’re talking about John Staats’ healing rolls, in which case it’s happened OVER and OVER and OVER again, and will continue to the end of time. Because the Healing Gods clearly hate John. We know this.

I will say I don’t think Nat-20 crits are any more common; I think the problem is that crits, IN GENERAL, are more common in Second Edition, and some weird little grounding wire in our subconscious still equates that to Nat-20s even when someone’s critting on a 14 or 15. So we get left with this vague after-impression that Steve is rolling a lot of 20s, when the sad truth is that we players probably just need some better gear.

None of which is any help to poor Alhara this week. Whether it’s Steve’s lucky last name or the law of large numbers, Alhara pretty much ended up as a bug on fate’s windshield this week, getting dropped by back-to-back crits. Oof. Sometimes, it’s just not your day, so you limp through the session and pour yourself a stiff drink after. Or… given that she also got pummeled in the previous fight against the smoky-cats… probably during.

Fortunately for Alhara, the rest of the party managed to hold their own and make reasonably swift work of Clarissa the Evil Druid and her zephyr hawk. No near-miss with a party wipe this week. And yes, we finally bump into an actual druid, much to Ateran’s chagrin.

It’s kinda funny that we’re still having this druid-priest-whatnot conversation. If you think about it, there are very few places where everyone does exactly the same job. OK, maybe on an army base, you have a little bit of that where even the person running the PX is also a solider. But the point is that there’s really nothing that says everyone who lives in a hermitage has to be a druid. I mean, my day job is IT work for the department of engineering at a college – that doesn’t mean I have an engineering degree. Nor do the people who work in the Einstein’s Bagels down in the lobby, much as it would be amusing to have them break out a whiteboard and debate thermal coefficients for optimal heating of my morning snack.

I think the idea of single-class enclaves is probably one of those things we inherited from MMOs. Games like WoW and EverQuest tended to have a place where all the people of your class congregated, so you could go train your skills, get quests, buy equipment, and such with a minimum of aimless wandering. And to make it obvious who you were supposed to be talking to, THOSE little establishments tended to be all of whichever class you were looking for, down to wearing similar outfits. (“Would you say I have a plethora of paladins?”) But it’s hardly the norm for real life. So OK… it’s been a largely druid-free druid hermitage so far. We’ll just have to deal with it.

After the team gets Alhara back on her feet, they make an effort to force Clarissa to Explain It All, but she’s not having it. She’s evil… the best they can get out of her is she wanted to make super-critters that could defend themselves against evil humans, but that’s just Evildoer 101. So they thunk her on the head again and lock her away, part of their growing collection of evil cultists. Kudos to Ateran for NOT aruda voldik-ing her into next week I guess. We’ll chalk that up as personal growth. (And yes, since the players have decided that aruda voldik is its own verb now… I’m swimming with the current.)

We also get a little bit of Hap bonding with the wolf that the party rescued. Are we potentially going to see Hap go full animal companion at some future point? Though frankly, if she does do so, I’d put my money on the freakin’ BEAR. Just sayin’. Now, it used to be one would have to take the druid multiclass archetype to get an animal companion, but with the release of the Advanced Player’s Guide, there’s something called the Beastmaster archetype, which basically lets you graft an animal companion onto ANY character. You don’t get all the bells and whistles of a true druid/ranger bond, but if you just want an animal following you around, the APG has you covered.

Speaking of which, did it sound like Steve was hinting they’d level up if they took a long rest before doing the final room? He did seem to be drifting toward that “you feel stronger, more powerful…” thing he does when the party levels. But the party chose to play it straight – Vanessa’s bad day aside, they’d only fought two fights that day, and it was the very last room. So they decided to go for it.

Idle thought before the final room… whatever happened to the ghast from about three episodes back? Did it just run away and find a new lair? Is it going to be an additional enemy in the final room? I’m still kinda curious about that.

We’ll find out the answer to that next week, but we at least get the setup this week. The boss seems pretty straightforward… mean warrior lady with two pet lizards. Druid? Ranger? Some special one-off NPC they created just for this? The layout of the room is what gives me pause – environmental hazards out the wazoo. We’ve got two weird chasms – one filled with water, one filled with whirling winds, but both look fairly deadly if you fall into them. I believe the word “bottomless” was kicked around, wasn’t it? And bridges that I’m sure won’t be rickety or easily damaged at all, right?

So the stage is set for the final fight… which we’ll get into 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 Three Ring Adventure S1|25: Hide and Seek.

When I was writing last week’s episode up, I had questions, as I’m sure we all did. I asked Steve, and he said to wait because we’d get some answers next week.

So here we are… it’s next week, and I guess that’s SORTA true. We don’t know the total scope of Darius’ new powers in terms of game mechanics – how often can he use it, how many rounds does it last, does he even (yet) control it, or does it just come out when it wants to, etc.? But we get a little bit of enlightenment as far as the story of his mark. And in particular, we get the fact that it’s a very stylized letter “N” which maybe gives us hints about its origins (or was that an “M” as in “Mancy”?), and Darius also has a dream vision of his mother, reassuring him that the mark was not sinister and could be used for good. The latter annoys the heck out of Alhara – why doesn’t SHE get dream visions of Mom – but also suggests a trail of breadcrumbs back toward the rival circus, as maybe Darius’ father can shed some further light on the topic.

Among other things, I thought this was a really great roleplaying moment for Rob T. because it showed a whole new side of Darius we hadn’t seen before. Up until this point, we’d only really experienced the big, boisterous, happy-go-lucky, extroverted version of Darius… pretty much unafraid to tackle the world’s challenges as long as he was stocked up on Pocket Bacon. Even the more subdued version of him we saw in heart-to-hearts with other party members was more Benevolent Sitcom Dad dispensing nuggets of life wisdom. This time, we actually got to see an out-of-sorts Darius, shaken in his usual confidence, worried about the possible negative effects of this power that had unleashed itself. It’s always cool when a player can take a character to a new place in a compelling way, and I think Rob really pulled that off here.

We also get a little more insight into Ateran’s mistrust of druids – it turns out they were raised by druids, who were abusive toward them as a youngster – and a bit of an apology for losing their cool with the captured priestess. And we also briefly get into the fact that Hap is either firePROOF or at least fire RESISTANT. Guess we’ll need to park her in front of increasingly strong red dragons and have them breathe on her and see at what point she starts taking damage. FOR SCIENCE.

Oh, we also got a little more information about some of the treasure the group picked up. Turns out the fancy trident can lengthen or shorten so that it can be optimized either for throwing or can create reach in its longer configuration. Someone’s going to have to let Chris Beemer know that exists, so Thorgrim can keep an eye out for one… he sure does love throwing that trident of his. Also, one of the scrolls was a spell called Personal Rain Cloud. It creates a little cloud that, in terms of tangible effects, extinguishes non-magical flames and provides 2 points of fire resistance. (And if a creature has a weakness to water, also does water damage, in case you find yourself in a Wizard of Oz crossover campaign.). I find myself wondering if it has any applications within the circus environment because as a combat spell, it seems fairly useless.

Needless to say, after the events of the last few episodes, a long rest is in order, so the party barricades themselves in the… maintenance shack, I guess?… so they can rest and heal up, and then the exploration resumes the next day.

The first bit of good news… we find that the book that was needed to satisfy the side quest was NOT in the room that caught fire, but in a separate room, so it was unharmed. The same cannot be said of the poor librarian, whose dead body is found locked up nearby. We also find the first secret door in… geez, I don’t know when… we might almost have to go back to Dead Suns for that. Plaguestone? Don’t remember there being a secret door. We had a few pit traps on the Black Lodge side, but a secret door? Been a while.

Next, the team discovers the hermitage’s animal hospital, a discovery that ought to make Hap pretty happy. Most of the cages are empty, except for one fairly specific habitat enclosure that’s held closed with wire. Is opening that cage going to trigger a combat encounter? Damn right it will. Does the party do it anyway? Of course they do.

My first reaction to the smoke leopards was to think they were distant relatives of Ember, my pet fire cat from the Plaguestone adventure. Could this all be part of the Paizo Connected Universe? Did these guys ever work with Vilree?

I did respect that Hap at least tried to just let them go – good to see Hap staying true to her critter-lovin’ roots. That said, it became pretty obvious these cats weren’t ones to just be let loose, or our heroes might get back to town to find half the circus eaten. On the other hand, glass half full, I did also have the very brief thought that Plaguestone history could repeat and Hap could tame one of these cats as a pet. Though I’m not sure a cat that engulfs you in smoke and obscures people’s view would work well with Hap’s pyrotechnics act.

As this fight unfolded, I was actually surprised how tough it ended up being. Their first few strikes, you heard 5, 6 points of damage, and… certainly, in comparison to the demons from last time, I figured this should’ve been a walk in the park, right? But then two things happened. First, the cats got a run of TREMENDOUSLY good luck on their rolls – particularly against poor Alhara. Second, the concealment from the smoke ended up being much more of a pain in the butt than one would’ve initially thought. Not just the 20 percent miss chance; it also complicated basic movement and attempts to work together as a team. Being unable to see people heal or buff them? Kind of a problem.

So the fight goes back and forth a bit, but then the party finally gets their act together, Darius lands a timely crit, and the cats are beaten. Poor Alhara took a bit of a beating, but the rest of the party should be able to continue… 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.