Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|31: 69, Dudes!.

This is one of those weeks where I’ll probably dwell on the show notes as much as the episode because I think there’s a lot of good stuff there.

First, I was there when Steve and Chris got in the argument he mentions. It was a bit of a “perfect storm” situation. You had the ghost of a wizard, which was supposed to have the intelligence it had when it was alive, so Steve decided to use a humanoid understanding of tactics. We were low-level characters, so there wasn’t a lot of spare coin floating around yet to buy a solution. To be fair, I think the writers of the adventure included a ghost touch magic item (scroll, elixir, don’t remember what exactly) in a different room but we hadn’t found it. So you had the magic user popping out of the floor, casting a spell or attacking, and dropping back into the ground. And while we were able to prepare SOME ready actions to attack, it was just slow going we kept having to retreat over and over. And we couldn’t really go do something else because that was the critical path through the adventure. It’s all stuff you can justify, but it absolutely WASN’T fun gaming.

With that as backdrop, I actually agree with Steve that environmental dynamics can be a really interesting way to spice up a game when done right. If you think about it, a lot of these scenarios involve fighting multiple instances of the same (or close to the same) enemy. If we need proof, let’s have a drinking game where we take a sip every time someone says xulgath. Similarly, your characters only get new abilities when they level, so they stay pretty much the same and fight most battles the same way. So… same bad guys, same characters… even the best campaigns can get a little “lather, rinse, repeat” after a while. So that’s when changing the battlefield can be so effective, because it’s the thing you expect to change least of all.

(Let’s also acknowledge that it’s a concept that’s been borrowed from or influenced by MMORPG raid mechanics. Here’s your fight… now, 30 percent of the way through, we’re going to turn the floor to bees, and you have to execute this movement pattern we came up with to avoid getting stung to death.)

HOWEVER. I think it works best when it’s a mixed bag that has good or bad possibilities, or that both the party AND the enemies can make use of the change. If you create an environmental change and then give the bad guy the tools to bypass it entirely (for example: chunks of the floor drop out, but all the enemies have flying), than it’s ONLY a nuisance to the party and that’s just difficulty for the sake of difficulty. If it’s an environmental change that can also be used to the party’s benefit – even if they have to do some brainwork to make it happen – I think that’s where things get interesting.

Skipping ahead a little, that sort of applies here. Yes, the wall Thessekka lays down cuts Ateran off from the rest of the fight, and since they’re the main healer, that’s certainly not nothing. On the other hand, the wall also creates a potential defensive formation for the party as well, as we see when Ateran gets knocked down to their last hit points and can duck down behind it to stay alive. Mixed bag… interesting. One-sided… not interesting (unless it’s to beef up an encounter with a group of weaker foes.)

Now that we’re talking about the fight itself, we start this week with a lucky blow, as Hap’s chain lightning basically wipes the rest of the adds off the board and reduces the fight to Thessekka against the party. I’m not sure how manageable this fight would’ve been if the adds had lingered another round or two. But one good zap and a bunch of crappy saving throws (including the boss herself), and this is back in the realm of possibility.

In the unlucky blow category, we had Darius ALMOST getting knocked over the edge halfway through the fight. I don’t think the fall would’ve killed Darius outright, but if it took him multiple rounds to climb back up, having him not there to take blows and create flanking would’ve made the fight a LOT more hairy. And actually this dovetails nicely with Steve’s earlier point: if Steve was really a “killer GM” and treated the players in an adversarial fashion, he could’ve easily attacked Darius and tried to knock him off; without a second reaction, Darius wouldn’t be able to grab an edge again and would just fall. When Steve talks about not trying to “win D&D”, it’s stuff like that. Yeah you could… but is it something you’d feel good about if it becomes the reason a player leaves the group?

Luckily Darius stays in the fight, gets back up on the platform, and the battle continues. As it does, we see some smart tactics start to emerge, as the party (except for Darius) switches away from raw physical damage and moves to forms of damage that would stand a better chance of bypassing Thessekka’s defenses. In some cases (Hap) it was a 50-50 between a coherent plan and “that’s what spells were left”, but you did also see Alhara try to focus her attacks on generating bleed damage, and you saw Ateran move away from telekinetic projectile and toward to his less physically-oriented spells. Granted, those other spells came with save DCs and Thessekka made most of her saves, but the tactical thought was sound.

And eventually, it all comes together and Thessekka is downed. Once it’s the entire party beating on one bad guy, it’s a short journey to victory lane. So that’s it, right? The Big Bad is vanquished, the towers are clear… oh wait a second. Thessekka left some notes behind. And those notes suggest that she experimented on her troops and created some mutant xulgaths that don’t sound like anything we’ve seen yet. You’d like to believe she wouldn’t create minions more powerful than herself – that’s not accepted best practices in the Evil HR Handbook — but even something close to her power could make for a nasty fight yet to come. (And lest we forget, we haven’t even gotten to some of the other side issues like the dead people with nosebleeds.) So despite the party running a little low on resources, we may not be QUITE done with this book of the AP just yet. Onward!

As always, we’ll pick it up next week with more smelly xulgaths (definitely), more good news and bad news that really just turns out to be bad news (probably), more gratuitous references to Darius’ buttocks (50-50 chance), and the usual hijinks you expect from the Circus of Wayward Wonders. As always, feel free to stop 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 S3|28: Be Vewy Vewy Quiet, I’m Hunting Xulgaths!!.

As I sit down to write about this week’s episode, it dawns on me that “they know we’re coming” is  a much more common trope in movies and TV than in the TTRPG world. There’s like… a whole John Wick movie about it. But in the TTRPG world, the normal mode of operation is that NPCs exist in suspended animation until the party stumbles into the room they’re in, at which point they spring to life and it’s time to fight. Even when the story positions them as guards, their “guard duty” tends to be physically occupying space the players need to move through, waiting for an initiative roll to kick them into gear.

For comparison’s sake, we just recently dealt with a similar situation in our Edgewatch game, where we were infiltrating a alchemical lab. There were guards around the exterior, but not patrolling: just enough of an inconvenience to require a Stealth roll, but no more than that. Once we got into the building, there were two NPCs who were playing chess in the room next to where we entered, but they didn’t notice our entry because they were playing chess.

So this week creates an interesting bit of strategy because our xulgath foes really do “know they’re coming”, in that they’re actively aware of the party’s efforts and have gone from passive protectors of the MacGuffin to an active security force.

But we’ll get there in a second. First up… Level 11 characters, though it’ll be brief because Level 11 tends to be one of those boring ones, at least for melees (casters at least get their level 6 spells). Well, maybe not boring, but 11’s biggest changes tend to be baked-in class abilities, so it’s a bit of a down level for player choice. That’s not meant as a criticism: there’s 20 levels, they can’t all be gems, and your character does get more powerful at the end of the day. But it is true that the part of the leveling where you get to pick out cool new stuff is… a skill feat, and a skill increase at a time where some classes don’t have a lot of skills to invest it in.

I do like the skill feat Loren took for Hap where she’s now a minor celebrity and can tap into that in any city the circus visits. It’s a neat little way to jump start information gathering in a new location, so it should fit the traveling circus theme well. I’m not sure how word of mouth gets around in a pre-technological world, but I’m sure magic will provide a way. I seem to recall that Starfinder has something similar, because I had a rolled a kasatha assassin/celebrity chef for Society play who either took or was thinking about taking the same feat. But it’s also been a while since I played him, so I might be remembering things wrong.

(As an aside, it’s kind of a shame I haven’t gone back to that character. Imagine Guy Fieri as a six-limbed contract killer who uses his equivalent of “Diners, Dives, and Drive-Ins” as his cover story for traveling the galaxy murdering people, and you’ve got the gist. Really wanted to do more with him.)

We also had an interesting interlude about death, sparked by the realization that Ateran is close to being able to bring players back from the dead. That is interesting on its own merits, but doubly so when learning about Loren’s firm rule about, essentially, permadeath. That’s right: it turns out Hap has a DNR in place.

We’ve discussed this elsewhere, particularly back when Darius should’ve died, but when characters die, Steve tends to leave options unless you did something REALLY foolish to end up that way. And he tends to make the final choice of whether to come back or re-roll the player’s. So Loren’s saying she won’t take that off-ramp if it ever happens to Hap. Interesting.

I’m not sure I could ever be that absolute about things. I will admit I have some general sympathy for the position that if you die, you die, and pulling some rabbit out of the hat to stay alive feels a little too consequence-light. But I can’t QUITE bring myself to be as absolutist as Loren about it. If the worst should happen to one of my characters, it would honestly depend on how I felt about the character at the time. Part of it would be tactical, just because after playing a character for a year or two, sometimes it starts to get a little stale, and maybe trying something else would be liberating. But it’s also important how I’m feeling about my character’s journey at that point. We don’t roleplay AS heavily as the circus group does, but I do care about where my character’s overall journey ends up. There have been places in our story where I’ve felt “if we died here, I could live with it” and other places where I’d take ANY escape hatch because it didn’t feel like the right way to finish Basil’s story.

Anyhow, back to our story at hand. The group journeys forth to the last tower, and Ateran does a little Kirkland-brand Eye of Kilrogg scouting, and… this is going to be a challenge because the xulgaths really are prepared this time. They have a good defensive position with basically ONE point of entry, and the guards are actively patrolling. Specifically, they have to get up to a pair of raised platforms and then cross a bridge with no hand-rail, all of which is actively guarded. They probably can’t even do the bag of holding trick because the xulgaths will see it land and just… pick it up and toss it in a fire or something. (At that point, do they just wink out of existence immediately, or does their EXIT disappear, and they suffocate to death? ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW.)

Fortunately, the party has another tool up their sleeve: invisibility sphere. Basil’s had this spell for a little while now, so I’m familiar with it. The various rules for what happens when people leave the sphere or attack from within it get a little crunchy, but the short answer is, if you stay close together and party-move as one, you can stay invisible for 10 minutes.

Doesn’t help with sounds or the possibility that the xulgaths will see the ladder reacting to the party’s weight on it, and Steve could get nitpicky about situations where they have to switch to single-file movement… but it’s a plan for now. So the party begins to ascend, until the point where the xulgaths seem like they might have noticed the party’s presence.

OK, so… change of plans. The new plan will be that Darius will go up first and establish a beachhead, and hold the first platform while everyone else gets up to the platform. And the first part of the plan goes like clockwork. Not only does Darius get up to the platform, but Hap gives him a wall of fire to throw people through, and Darius chucks one xulgath over the side. So far, so good… right?

Except that’s when the alarm goes up and all hell breaks loose. Specifically, two things happen. First, the xulgaths drop a torch on the lower grounds, creating a nice little bonfire down below the platforms. And then, the party learns the hard way that the ladder isn’t as secure as they thought, as the remaining xulgath pulls a pin that releases the whole thing into freefall!

And that’s where we’ll leave things for 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 Three Ring Adventure S3|25: No, Sir…they’re Saying Boo-Urns.

I’m going to start this week by either providing a graphic demonstration of Steve’s point about forgetting session details, or by pointing out a bit of a continuity error. I don’t know if those “computer problems” Steve alluded to caused some lost data, but I can’t remember ANY conversation about the distillery crew not coming into town for the Stump Festival. Or Hap running into some weird guy, for that matter. I even went back and listened to last week’s episode to be sure, and it just wasn’t there. Last week’s episode ends with Darius experiencing all manner of stump-related cuisine.

OK, so either some of the session got lost amidst the “computer problems” Steve mentioned and didn’t get recorded, or perhaps it just ended up on the cutting-room floor because Steve was trying to knock out 364 episodes before going on vacation. The other possibility is maybe they were referencing rumors they heard all the way back at Kerrick and I’m just losing my mind. (Though that explanation doesn’t make sense because that was 2 or 3 weeks ago in game time, so presumably the distillery folk wouldn’t have been “missing” back then.)

It’s not the end of the world… it was still easy enough to fill in the gap and realize the distillery needed to be added to the itinerary. And in fact, it’s become the priority item — even above visiting the tower — since people are missing. But I will admit to being briefly throw for a loop. I mean… I listen to these shows largely while driving my morning and evening commute… I can’t POSSIBLY have fallen asleep while listening or I’d be writing this from an ICU bed.

Speaking of being thrown for a loop, both Alhara and Hap are a little bit distracted after their first exposure to the logging festival.

In Alhara’s case, it’s a case of competitive spirit with no outlet. Imagine: the devotee of Kurgess and general show-off, not being allowed to compete in an athletic competition! The TV sitcom solution would be for Alhara to disguise herself as a lumberjack to compete… except that Kurgess also has rules about competing fairly and respecting the rules. So… she’s just gotta sit and stew about the unfairness of it all. I do hope Alhara gets to compete at some point; the games sound like they could make for fun skills challenges.

In Hap’s case, she’s distracted, smitten… dare I say, in LURRRRRV… with Dingo (is that really his name?) the Lumberjack, a corn-fed mule of a man. While Hap desperately tries to get the adults to make themselves scarce, Ateran launches right into the sales pitch for the circus. This does prove to be an interesting encounter, because for arguably the first time, it’s not really clear if the circus is the right fit. You can kind of see a case for him joining the circus because he does have skills that would be unique anywhere OTHER than a town full of lumberjacks. (And OK, no one’s saying it, but having a master woodsman on staff will help with some of the grunt work associated with setting up the circus.) On the other hand, Dingo seems genuinely good where he is, and doesn’t seem like the showbiz life is really calling him the way it is with the other acts. Dude is too wholesome for this crew. And if Hap thinks her party-mates are getting in the way now, wait until Dingo starts bringing his DAD on dates.

Though I have to admit, I was sort of cracking up when Ateran was pitching Dingo on the idea that Hap would help introduce him to other women. Is Ateran that clueless, or is it a well-meaning (if awkwardly framed) double-cross to get Hap and Dingo to spend time together? All I know is that if this ends in Dingo joining the circus but ending up with the snake lady, I wouldn’t want to be in Ateran’s shoes. Watch their back, Csillagos.

Either way, my proposed title for the spin-off series: Hap and the Thirst Trap. T-shirts, anyone?

So, our crew decides to start with the distillery instead of going directly to the tower, and on arrival there are definitely signs SOMETHING is amiss. Javelin-riddled horse, signs of struggle… and lo and behold. XULGATH BUDDIES emerge from the trees! Hap gets the jump on initiative, then the xulgaths, and then everyone else. As an aside, I loved Rob P’s out-of-character deadpan: “Oh, I beat one person on initiative. The dead horse”. And… in the words of Dr. Sam Beckett, “oh boy”.

Hap fires a fireball at the xulgaths. As one does. Unfortunately, guess who else is in that fog of war? Hostages. The surviving xulgaths now have their choice of original (in the distillery) or extra-crispy (tied to trees).

First, I hope the Lumberjack Himbo doesn’t have any friends amongst the distillery workers. That’s gonna make for a really awkward date. “So, what do you do for fun?” “Oh, just light your friends on fire.”

Second, speaking on behalf of my Edgewatch brethren, any and all applications to join the force are hereby revoked. I’ll grant we’ve lightly dented a few bystanders in our travels, but we’ve never lit any on fire.

Though OK… amidst all the soul-searching, I did literally (not figuratively) laugh out loud when Loren said: “And after that, another fireball.” Gallows humor is great, people.

Could things get worse after that? Well… morally… no, of course not. But in terms of game mechanics, HELL YEAH, as now all the xulgaths go, and Steve gets the insane luck of three 20s in a row against Hap. (Remember math nerds: it’s not impossible, 1-in-8000 is just really improbable.)

So a huge wrench has been thrown into combat right from the start, but our team actually does a pretty good job pulling themselves together. Alhara in particular gets off some nice shots (complete with “Vanessa and the Chipmunks” sound effects), and things are starting to stabilize after the messy start.

But then as the session ends, the battlefield is thrown into upheaval once again, as the remaining distillery workers come out of hiding, armed. Now, I have to admit, when they first said “stop killing our friends”, I thought they meant the xulgaths. I thought this was going to be some peaceful coexistence twist. But no, they’re just mad at the party for lighting up their friends. Even so, they’re going to try and help defeat the xulgaths, but they’re also not really trained fighters and their first couple shots go wide.

And that’s where we’ll pick things up. How will the rest of the combat go? What will be the fallout of Hap’s “nuke the site from orbit” strategy? To borrow from Harry Shearer in This Is Spinal Tap, “will we still be doing a circus performance?”. And for extra credit: should we be worried that the supposedly dead horse is listed on the initiative? Come back next week and find out. As always, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.