Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|14: Are We the Bad Guys?

Hope everyone is having a good holiday season. Obviously, I took a few days off to make merry, but I haven’t forgotten my columnar duties entirely. Now that things are getting back toward normal, I’ll do my best to get caught up on the goings-on in RFCland.

As we return, it’s off to a new city… well… town. Well… hamlet? And a new set of abilities for our now Level 10 heroes. After dabbling in animal husbandry and new and interesting ways to light things on fire, Hap starts to get back to some of the original bardic flavor of her character with some performance abilities. Alhara gets another reaction-based feat, and as we’re coming to understand, reactions are really where it’s at in Second Edition: the more things you can do to disrupt opponents’ turns, the better. Darius gets a pretty cool monk ability, the One-Inch Punch, which lets him dial up the actions to dial up the damage. And Ateran… well, Ateran mostly just backs up a dump truck full of spells into Csillagos’ hungry beak. (Still my favorite way of learning new spells ever.)

Of course, one thing we had to deal with here that we haven’t really encountered before is the idea of scarcity, as the party has to wait three weeks to get their new toys. (That’s right: the supply chain crisis has even reached into the world of tabletop roleplaying games.) Second Edition brought forth the idea that magic items are organized by rarity, and that not all towns will have all rarities available. It’s always been part of the rules, but it’s not especially relevant at the low levels, because anything one could afford at low levels is fairly common anyway. Heck, in the Edgewatch game, we don’t deal with it at all: we’re right in the heart of Absalom, so it’s like living in Manhattan – you can DoorDash yourself a Hand of Vecna at 3 am, basically. But here, trying to get magic items out in the boonies… that’s more like, say, forgetting to buy dog food on your last grocery run, running out on Christmas Day, and having to find a Walgreen’s because that’s all that’s open so you can buy an overpriced bag of Rachel Ray dog food because that’s all they had available.

Hypothetically. I mean… that’s how I IMAGINE it would be if such a thing had ever happened to me. MOVING ON.

Darius’ One-Inch Punch, and the discussion about when to use it… one thing I’ve noticed about 2E is they have several abilities that work only on the next attack you make. I specifically thought of this in the context of Basil’s Shared Stratagem, which lets me give out flat-footed to an ally for one attack, but I dimly remember seeing a couple of other examples as well. I feel like it’s meant to put the brakes on some of these 1E scenarios where you’d get five or six attacks with a huge bonus on each one: now you can get the bonus, but it’s a one-shot. So I’m thinking One-Inch Punch would be great to pair with one of those one-attack abilities – if you get the buff, pour all three actions into a single attack; if you don’t have the buff, just attack as normal, or at least hedge your bets with a two-action punch and leave an action for something else.

We also speculate whether it’s a good or bad thing that Darius hasn’t had any new visions of Achakaek lately and whether he’s turning into a forebearer of Cave Johnson’s army of mantis-men. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the lawful evil god of assassination, who is also a giant bug, is probably NOT someone you want on the Christmas card list. But that’s just me.

On the other hand, speaking of visions, and things going on in people’s heads… we have the beginnings of a disconcerting situation arise as most of the party (except Ateran) is starting to have the sorts of bad dreams that presage the mysterious deaths. So take away one is that Opper Vandy’s little side problem may now have a clock on it, and may impact the party more directly. Heck, maybe it’s even tied to the overall xulgath problem. Takeaway two is a bit more metagamey, since to the party, Darius making his save and Ateran not even having to attempt one would be indistinguishable to the characters. But we as listeners have the mystery of trying to figure out why Ateran seems to be the only one unaffected. Are their studies of Aroden or their witchy abilities protecting them? Did their role in uncovering Vandy’s deception protect them? Did the rest of the party inhale vaporized skeletal horse dust while they were at the Currew farm? I will admit, I’m probably not going to go deep-dive the last 4-5 episodes to try and figure out what Ateran did differently that the others didn’t, but it would be an interesting exercise.

(As an aside, now we’ve got supply chain headaches AND we’re doing contact tracing. I thought this game was supposed to be escapism. I eagerly await a future loot cache that includes a +1 N95 mask.)

As the episode draws to a close, our party – full circus in tow – begins to make its way to the next town, and we meet our next possible circus addition, Booralu the Gravedigger, the singing shoony. First, I’ve already nicknamed him “Shoony Bennett” in my head, so deal with it. Second, I assume – as our players do – this will be another opportunity to add an act to the circus, once they resolve his boggle. Which appears to be imminent, as it’s combat time as the episode comes to a close.

And that’s where we’ll leave it for next time. I’m sure a shoony that digs graves and sings to the dead can’t POSSIBLY have disturbed some undead power… that’s just crazy talk! 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|13: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.

I’ve got a bit of a challenge. I got both my COVID booster and my seasonal flu vaccination Thursday, so I was pretty much flat on my back all of yesterday. I’m back in the saddle today, but I’ve got tickets to Spider-Man in a couple of hours. So can I slam out a column in that time? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

As we pick up the action, our heroes had struggled in their first encounter with the alchemical golems. Some of it was bad luck with the dice; some of it was not really having a tactical plan and charging ahead with “Alhara leaps into the room, eats a bunch of attacks, and gets pummeled almost to death”.

So for round two, the gang has a plan. First, Darius is going to stand in the doorway – you know, a natural chokepoint – and keep the golems from getting at the rest of the party as much as possible. Second, Alhara will use her staff to generate sonic damage, which the golems are vulnerable to.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, the first part of that plan goes almost flawlessly. Darius does his job as an attack sponge, as a fair number of attacks miss against his AC anyway, and the healers can stay ahead of the damage from the attacks that land. And our team also catches a break insofar as the golems hadn’t healed their damage from the first encounter so ONE of the two went down the first time it was struck, leaving just one enemy to fight.

About Alhara busting them up with that sonic damage though… oh dear. Alhara just whiffs, whiffs, and whiffs some more, the large majority of her attacks being single-digit rolls on-die. I think we saw Vanessa re-enact the whole “five stages of grief” thing and add a sixth – giving in to the absurdity and finding the whole thing hilarious.

Which was assisted by Steve’s Shit-Talking Golem. Move over HK-47 and GLaDOS… we’ve got a sassy new sheriff in town. Of course, part of what I found amusing was imagining the hypothetical backstory of such a creation. I’m some sort of master alchemist, I’m building this golem to help me with my work, and at the very end, I think to myself… “I could make it a friendly companion to help me pass the time, or imbue it with the knowledge to have deep philosophical discussions while we work… but why don’t we just make it a sarcastic asshole instead?”

The good news is, with only one enemy to fight, the party is eventually able to pull together and win, even despite Alhara’s dice woes. Though credit due, she does eventually get ONE hit in, and it’s as impressive as hoped, generating 5d8 sonic damage. So… note to future self: bring lots of different damage types along for dealing with golems.

Now we have the core mystery of the tower to unravel. It’s easy enough to fly up the shaft in the golem room and into the main chamber, and we gain a greater understanding of what’s going on. It turns out the xulgaths have built some sort of machine to drain the energy of the aeon stone powering the tower, and it will eventually destroy the stone. I have to admit, I thought the xulgaths’ plan was to steal the stones and take them back to the underworld; I didn’t think they were going full-on nihilist and destroying them. But now we know.

(As an aside, when they found the instructions for the machine, that seemed like a perfect time for an IKEA joke, and I’d like to register my disappointment that nobody made one. Is the machine made entirely of particle-board? Do they need to go back to town for an Allen wrench to disassemble it? Does it have a Nordically-spelled name like “JEMDRAANIR”? COME ON PEOPLE. If you can make Waldorf and Statler references, you can get this one.)

So with assistance from the instructions and a couple of solid crafting rolls from Ateran, the machine is disabled, and almost immediately… LET THE HEALING OF THE LAND BEGIN. Water gushes forth (albeit into a now corpse-infested waterway), signs of life begin to return, and our party gets a new boon. Swim speed, water breathing, and a daily cast of the control water spell which feels like it’s fairly situational, letting you raise or lower the level of an existing body of water. Honestly, it feels like something out of a Lara Croft/Uncharted-style game where the room is flooded and you need to lower the water level in the room to access the passage that leads to the next area. Only instead of activating gems or finding pulleys, you just cast a spell.

We’re also posed with an interesting dilemma as Loren wants to reject the boon as anathema to Hap’s character concept. Or at least wants time to think about how she could make it work. Basically, her point is that Hap’s character is so defined by her use of fire, that water abilities are just totally against what she’s been building toward. Now, if you want to metagame, I feel like ALL of these boons are going to get used at some future point in the adventure, so refusing one of them might end up being a bad idea. On the other hand, if Hap REALLY wants to reject a boon from Aroden, I’d say you go ahead and let her. And if they need to go on an extended swim at some future point, throw Hap into the bag of holding for a change.

With the second aeon tower cleaned up, it’s time to head back to Ferny for a well-earned Ewok moment, partying up with the shoonies. After that… maybe a circus performance, or maybe straight on to the second tower. And I suppose it might be worth checking back on Opper Vandy and seeing if there have been any further developments with his situation. On one hand, I still feel like that dude kinda deserves what he’s getting – he’s not evil with a capital E, but he is kind of a weasel — but it’s also on the way to the other towers and solving the mystery still benefits the town as a whole. Lastly, it sounds like our heroes are going to level between sessions, so next week, we’ll be introduced to more powerful versions of our gang.

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|12: The Furball Special.

All right readers. Here’s my plan. I’m gonna tell Steve this column was late because I was ALSO at Pax Unplugged this weekend, but I must’ve just missed him. Repeatedly. For an entire weekend. If I really want to go next-level on this, I could find someone else’s PAX photos and Photoshop myself into them. You’ve got my back on this, right? Make sure to throw a bunch of stuff on the Discord chat about how it looks like I was having so much fun.

OK, we return to action with… well… a bit of a mismatch, as at least on the first attempt, the alchemical golem basically kicks our heroes’ asses. There’s no shame in that, really: it happens sometimes. Over in Edgewatch, we recently faced off with a high-level aberration that did half our kinda-sorta-tank’s (aka Lo Mang, if you listen to both shows) hit points in a single hit, in part because it could crit on a 14 or 15. So we ran away and came back for the rematch later when we’d added another level and figured out some better tactics.

Steve makes a good point in the show notes that I’ll amplify: I think video games (in particular) have conditioned us over the years to think challenges will automatically scale to the “right” level and be safe for parties to tackle. “There will be one boss encounter at the end that will be difficult, and everything else shall be manageable with our current resources. THIS IS THE WAY.” We’re conditioned to think of (videogame) levels and zones and assume everything will be where it’s supposed to be. (Except when some sonofabitch trains Dorn into a crowd of noobs in EverQuest.)

When you’re living in the pen-and-paper world, that’s not always going to be the case. Sometimes they just throw something tough at you to stretch your resources and see if you can handle it. I will say that usually when they include “stretch” encounters, they tend to be on non-critical paths – i.e. they’re something that’s not CENTRAL to the story and can be avoided if you have to – but they do exist. Again going back to our Edgewatch campaign, that aberration was a secondary quest goal – we could get into the main cultist lair without dealing with it, but there was a secondary quest to find a missing Graycloak captain that needed to be saved, and the aberration WAS on the critical path for THAT quest.

(And OK… sometimes in the early days of a new system — which we’re still in – adventure designers MIGHT even make the occasional mistake when scaling an encounter. Not saying that happened here, but it’s also a possibility. Heck, when we were doing Starfinder and the Dead Suns campaign, the rules technically weren’t even finalized when they started writing the AP, so there were probably some… ahem… “educated guesses” that made it into the final product.)

In this particular case, as Steve and Loren discuss, part of the issue we have is a branching story with three main paths, depending on which order the party chooses to tackle the towers in. Steve hints (or outright says) that they’ve chosen to solve that issue by writing all three towers to the middle standard: of course that means the first tower is going to be a LITTLE challenging, but theoretically a few months from now, tower three will be a little on the easy side.

So next May or whatever, we’re likely to see some xulgaths get pounded into the ground. But as Aragorn says, today shall not be that day.

Now, I hesitate to bring this up because I don’t know how long it was between sessions, and, hey, I forget stuff too. But as the Robert’s Rules folks say, POINT OF ORDER: Ateran did actually uncover a sonic vulnerability in last week’s episode when doing the initial knowledge check. But then again, the main source of sonic damage would’ve been Alhara’s staff, and she’s still dealing with enfeebled. So… 5% less chance to hit a creature that was already pretty hard to hit. Again, don’t want to be TOO aggressive about it because it’s a mistake we all make every once in a while. Hell, going AGAIN back to that Edgewatch example, I forgot the aberration could only be damaged by blunt, so I took a 150-gold aligned oil and put it on my bow and only brought regular (piercing) arrows to the fight. Oops.

The other thing we get into here is whether the mechanics of the dying condition apply to NPCs, specifically Riley. And not to get too snotty – geez, I’m doing it again, the second time this episode – but we covered this back in the Plaguestone campaign when Ember got reduced to zero. Use of the dying condition is actually explicit for players and their companions (emphasis mine), and GM discretion for “significant” NPCs – key villains, friendlies with story significance, etc.

Now, normally I am not a fan of arbitrary choices when it comes to combat mechanics. But this is ONE case where I’ll make an exception because combat is also part of the larger story, and allowing the dying condition MIGHT make the story more compelling than just “Zero hit points? Dead”. HYPOTHETICAL: you’re there to rescue the Duke’s son, but the Big Bad in his dying breath stabs the kid… if zero hit points is dead, you fail the mission despite basically doing everything right. But if you allow NPCs to cycle through the dying condition there’s a chance to save the kid and the mission as a whole; heck, maybe mopping up the remaining minions becomes more compelling because you only have a couple of rounds to do it before the kid bleeds out.

So in this ONE case, yes, I support letting the GM pick and choose when to apply dying. Besides, if he has one of the minions stabilize the Big Bad, that just gives you a prone target to whomp on some more.

All of this is prelude to the “Furball Special”. Now, we know dogs love to chase balls… but hear me out… what if the dog IS THE BALL. “Hashtag mindblown”, as the Young People say. It’s a bit outside the box to do Whirling Toss as a defensive measure, but it ends up being surprisingly effective; really the only danger is doing too much damage to Riley on the throw – a crit would take him from Dying 1 to Dying 3, and he’d croak on his next turn, depending on where in the initiative he would’ve gone. I grant that there’s probably some really dark gallows humor (and maybe a Battlezoo Bestiary 2 entry) that could be mined from that scenario, but probably better if we avoid that outcome.

Also, if I REALLY wanted to quibble, maybe Steve should’ve ruled that planning out such an intricate set of actions should’ve gone beyond the realm of a single turn. I mean, Hap was supposed to figure out that Darius was going to throw Riley, get a healing spell ready, and stand in the right place, and Vanessa was going to catch him… all in six seconds? But that also gets into the application of the Rule of Cool, as well as the fact that Riley is A Very Good Boy and his life is more important than your fancy rulebook, mister.

So the party retreats and regroups, and then the question is whether to go back to (comparative) safety and rest for the day, or whether to just load up and go again with a greater focus on sonic damage. Now… I probably would’ve gone for the full rest, but it’s worth observing that the casters are already going to be limited by the fact that it’s a golem – most of their damage spells (Hap’s fire attacks in particular) aren’t going to do anything. So to some extent, regaining spell slots other than healing are of marginal value anyway. So I guess I can sorta see the logic of taking another bite at the apple. Especially if they’re gonna stay in the room and the party can always retreat again.

The good news is if they can get past this encounter, they have a direct path right up to the aeon stone, since there’s a big vertical shaft that leads directly up. Just a matter of getting past this one room, right? I guess we’ll see what happens next time. While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|11: The Alhara Yoyo.

Hey everyone. I’m still here. Things were just pretty crazy this week because… well… my daughter tested positive for COVID. I’m fine (and have since tested negative), even she’s no worse than “worst cold you ever had” levels of sick… but I spent most of the week re-learning all that DEFCON-1 stuff we did in the first few months of the pandemic and didn’t really think about writing anything. Look, you wanna think I’m being a preachy pain in the butt, be my guest, but I’m gonna say it: get those boosters and keep wearing those masks. It’s my wish for none of you to have the week I just had… and I wasn’t even the one who got sick.

So anyway… The Roper Returns. (OK, it never really left… so more like The Roper Remains.) We pick up with Alhara getting knocked from almost full hit points to zero in one round of attacks, so… this thing’s a bit of a challenge.

Now, I went and looked up the stat block for the roper, and we have to refine the meta on attacking the tentacles a little bit. Last week, I was kinda running with “well, you just need to AoE them down”, and it’s actually not quite that simple. Specifically, it appears that it has to be slashing damage and the attack needs to do at least 18 points of damage. (Unclear whether that’s meant to be cumulative, but I feel like it’s meant to be a single attack; otherwise, the GM would have to keep track of the location and hitpoints of all six strands, which… sounds like kind of a nightmare to administer. So let’s go with “if you don’t sever it entirely, it goes back to full”. But the main point is that something like Hap’s fireball AoE would NOT sever the tentacles, and the damage would go to waste.

(Also worth noting that the AC and HP of the tentacles don’t change with the elite/normal/weak versions – always 27 AC and 18 HP. Only the strength of the body changes.)

The good news is, the fire piece of the damage not only works just fine, and ropers are extra-susceptible to it. So… Hap turns into an elemental… OR DOES SHE? At first, I was a little bit surprised that Hap turning into an elemental while in the roper’s grasp didn’t cause some sort of fire damage, but that seems to be a difference between First Edition and Second Edition – she’s not actually a full elemental, but something else. In First Edition, the corresponding spell was elemental body, and you literally turned into an elemental, with all of the corresponding features. (I’m familiar with this: I played a druid in Carrion Crown and spent most of the game in air elemental form for the flight – so much so that my character picked up the nickname “Windy”.) With 2E’s elemental form, it is specifically “an elemental battle form” which sounds like the intent is “mostly human but with a little elementally-themed flair”. You do get the associated form of movement and a typed melee attack, but you’re still mostly human. So I guess after reading over the spell, it makes sense that Hap would be more “extra-fiery 16-year-old girl” and not an “actual walking blob of fire”.

(2E has a fair amount of that. There’s a whole section of… I want to say the Advanced Player’s Guide… that covers polymorphing, and it’s more geared toward transforming into something that has CHARACTERISTICS of the thing than a true polymorph into that thing.)

Hap also does something in this episode which… at first glance, it seemed reckless, but thinking about it further, not really… by going into melee range and protecting Alhara by standing between her and the roper. Now… my first instinct was “HAP WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” because, well… squishy caster. But thinking further about it, this thing’s got 50 feet of reach anyway, so unless there’s a plan to get everyone out to 51’ away and nuke it down from there, the difference between being 30 feet out and being right in its face doesn’t really matter. As a caster, she can’t even really do the “hide behind the corner, step out to shoot, and then step back into hiding” method because most of her spells take two actions. (Also… can the tentacles go around corners? Is a roper meant to be closer to Doc Ock or just Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tube-Man?)

Our team EVENTUALLY carries the day. Poor Alhara gets pummeled a bit, but the rest of the team is able to turn the tide and win. We even get a taste of Puppy Parkour as Riley manages to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge between a few of the roper’s attacks: sign him up for one of those agility courses! There’s a brief debate about whether to call it a day because of the enfeebled condition (it decreases 1 point per 8 hours), but Ateran has a spell for that: Ateran cures Darius entirely, and the others are only at a -1, which is workable. So they decide to continue. At which point they fairly quickly run into their next challenge: a… well… tell us what that is, Ateran!

This brings me to one of those things I always wrestle with in this game: battlefield information checks. I end up in this role in the Edgewatch game a) because Basil has a high INT, and b) because he has a specific skill that lets him Recall Knowledge as a free action. The question I wrestle with is how much of that should be fair to convey to your teammates in the heat of battle, and how much gets into metagaming. After all, a round is supposed to represent six seconds. If Steve reads out a whole stat block, could you REALLY convey all that to the rest of the party? On the other hand, I’m not sure I really want to deal with the overhead of Steve giving me information in private and then putting a stopwatch on me while I attempt to summarize a “realistic” amount. It’s probably just easiest to bend the definition of a round for this and keep the game moving.

So thanks to Ateran and a liberal definition of six seconds, we know it’s an alchemical golem. Remember your golem basics when it comes to magic: extra-susceptible to one (sonic, in this case), slowed by another (cold), HEALED by a third (acid), immune to everything else. So… that’s gonna create some issues for poor Hap. Now, I have some insights on this from having faced an alchemical golem in a different setting, but since that’s basically where the episode ends, maybe you’ll just get those 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 S3|10: Assurance is Magic.

It’s Black Friday, so time to stay inside and avoid humanity as much as possible. But I’m going to wait until all three parts of the Beatles documentary are out before I watch that, so I guess I’m catching up on writing today. THIS IS THE WAY.

I’m just going to warn you that this week’s column is a little more of a collection of random esoterica. It’s a battle episode, but a battle that didn’t run to completion, so it’s hard to evaluate as a finished product. There were a few moments I’ll come back to within that, but it’s a little hard to evaluate how effective things were when you’re still in the middle of it.

So we start with the show notes. I think the main takeaway I had from Steve’s dissection of the rules is that we’ve just gotten tremendously better at game design overall, perhaps with a detour into how much computer-based gaming has influenced the evolution of pen-and-paper games.

If you think about it, the first versions of D&D were not much more than a series of best guesses designed to duct-tape some fantasy lore onto traditional tabletop wargaming. We’ll create a rule and if it feels fun, we’ll leave it in there. If it’s not working, we’ll change it or throw it away. Even up through 3^rd Edition and 3.5, formal game design was starting to become a Thing, but the majority of choices were dictated by feel and by the inertia of what came before.

But then the thing in the middle that really changed the game – figuratively and literally – was the rise of computer-based RPGs. I think the digital world offered two major changes. First, the market moved faster and had more competitors, so innovation generally came faster. Second, the nature of computing – your “GM” was a dumb box of electronics you have to write a bunch of really explicit rules for – made for a pretty efficient gatekeeper for “these are the things we can solve with rules” and “these are the things that either we CAN’T solve, or aren’t worth the coding effort/money to solve”. The interesting thing is that the latter bucket refined the (excuse the obnoxious consultant term) use-case for what tabletop RPGs could offer that computers couldn’t… the places where a human GM playing with human players at a table could really shine.

So all the good stuff about feedback loops and reinforcement and really TIGHT rulesets that a CPU could understand made their way back to the tabletop world, but with a better understanding of where the dividing line between codification and the human element lived. 4E was probably a bit of a misstep in that sense, but 5E and now PF2E have done a much better job of capturing that distinction, and our games are better for it.

That’s my theory anyway. End of soapbox.

The other rabbit hole that I threw myself down this week was the question of movement speed. It came out of the debate about whether Hap could fly back to town or not. So I sat down and crunched numbers. The average humanoid movement speed is about 25’ per action, which is 12.5 feet per second. If you hand-wave the stamina as sustainable and crunch the numbers, that works out to about 8.5 mph. Having done a little running in my younger days, that’s definitely a brisk run, but not “champion marathon runner” fast (in the pre-pandemic sports world breaking the two-hour mark was the big deal, which would be in the ballpark of 13 mph).

Although… working backward to carry this thought exercise further, that means that something around a 40’ movement speed gives your character a pretty solid chance of winning next year’s Boston Marathon, and if you can pump it up around 80’, they could challenge Usain Bolt in the 100-meter dash.

Now, while I was already being pedantic and obsessive, I wondered how fast one could move and still be on one’s guard – that is, being able to do active Perception checks and such. I used the Step as the model for this: if you’re able to move 5 feet and protect yourself from an attack, you can probably move 5 feet and look for traps or listen for approaching enemies. Converting THAT to a land speed, you get something a little less than 2 mph, and that feels right… it’s a pretty slow walk. That’s like treadmill-on-cooldown speed where you’re having to exaggerate the slowness of your steps to avoid walking into the bar at the front.

Of course, the point of ALL of this (yes, there was a point… don’t look at me that way) is that yes, Hap has PLENTY of fly speed to get to town and back, even if she stops and rests periodically. All so we can get another round of restaurant-based humor in the form… I mean “phorm”… of Phoebe’s Phried Phish.

When Hap gets back and the team rests up, we enter the temple, and we almost immediately get into combat with a roper. (Or are there two? I got a little turned around and honestly wasn’t sure.) If you’re not listening to both shows, we had an encounter with a roper in our Edgewatch game, but we mostly avoided fighting it. We took a round of attacks and then turned it into a social encounter, buying it off with shiny trinkets. (It helped that it was guarding a non-critical part of the dungeon and there were other ways to go around it.)

The first question raised is “how DO you trip a stalagmite?”. I guess I always thought either ropers couldn’t move at all, or at least it was a fairly secure suction-cup thing, but whatever… I guess trips work on anything. If you don’t obsess about feet and just think of it as “DEX-based knockdown” there’s probably some way to make it happen.

The other interesting issue raised by the roper was the tentacles being their own entities with their own hit points and ACs. I’m fine with that as a rule, but it does seem like it raises some questions, or at least requires a few clarifications. The one obvious one is that if they’re separate targets, they should ALL be affected by AoE: Hap hasn’t had a chance to really test that yet, but I suspect it’s coming. It’s also worth asking whether they take up space while they’re extending and retracting (or when they’re extended to grab someone). Taking the most obvious case: if they reach out and grab someone at the end of their 50’ range, does that mean there’s 50 feet of tentacle available to attack? Is the tentacle enough of a separate entity to trigger attacks of opportunity as it’s extending, or does it not count since the base creature didn’t move? Does the tentacle itself obstruct movement through squares if it remains extended? Could an extended tentacle be used, for example, to block a corridor so the party couldn’t escape?

I guess we’ll figure out the answer to some of these questions next week. Or maybe Hap will just nuke everything and they’ll go unanswered. An equally likely outcome. Either way, hope you’ll join us. 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|09: This is Ateran!

People, we need to talk about this bag of holding thing a little bit more. It’s like… REALLY broken.

I did some calculations. Even if you used the smallest bag of holding, you get 25 bulk, which means 250 items of light bulk. So, even if you filled it with 1d6 flasks, that’s a possibility of 250d6 damage. And OK… for grins, I also calculated the worst “Mother Of All Bombs” Bag of Death: the largest bag of holding is 150 bulk, meaning room for 1500 flasks, and the high-end flasks do 4d6 each… yeah, that’s SIX THOUSAND d6 worth of damage that you could potentially deploy with a single action. I LOVE THE SMELL OF XULGATH IN THE MORNING.

I mean, now I want to try it JUST to see Roll20 try to roll 6000 dice without crashing. Some men just want to watch the virtual tabletop burn.

If there’s a single saving grace here, it’s probably that the economics of the tactic doesn’t scale well. Even the cheapest flasks are 3 gold each, and they ramp to 10, 250, and 2500 gold each time you add a die of damage. To give you some numbers, the hypothetical entry-level BoH I created above would cost 750 gold to prepare; the ridiculous “Fat Man and Little Boy” version would cost a paltry 3.75 MILLION gold to fill to the brim.  Even doing a more “realistic” version where you load like 10 of the cheap bombs into a bag… that’s still gonna cost you 30g for something that’s like… maybe 2 fireballs worth of damage. And that’s assuming a) they all hit, and b) the target doesn’t have damage resistance.

Now, I suppose the enterprising GM could just handwave their way out of it by saying that alchemical bombs are naturally inert and have to be activated as part of the attack… like pulling the pin on a grenade. Or one could imagine a scenario where some of the flasks collide with each other in transit and detonate before they reach the target, so you can never get full damage. There are certainly other ways to defuse this bomb (pun fully intended), but I do think the money is going to put the brakes on it more than anything else will.

Back in the world of what actually happened on the show this week, this was an interesting situation. There was kind of a “darkest before the dawn” dynamic happening because the team did a lot of damage and got everything softened up and READY to drop, but nothing actually DID drop. So the attacks were still coming in droves, and Hap and Alhara (in particular) were really close to death’s door. But then it felt like things really changed within the span of a single round – the enemies started missing, and the bad guys finally started dropping, and all of a sudden, the whole complexion of the fight changed. It really went from “could this be a TPK?” to “not sure what the big deal was?” in the span of one or two rounds.

One thing this battle reminded me of is how fun fights with a vertical component can be. Aside from conjuring pleasant images of the 3-D chessboard from Star Trek, it injects a little more of a tactical element and forces characters to use skills they might otherwise not use. Darius’ throwing skills are a prime example: it’s not that they aren’t useful at other times, but the extra dimension of throwing bad guys off the platform – either doing more damage or at least taking them out of the fight for a few rounds while they run back up – added a fun element you don’t see when people are just squaring off in a generic room. Mobility, in general, makes things more interesting.

The other interesting thing about this week’s episode is it really was some of the most… theatrical… action we’ve had on this show.

I don’t want to say combat gets stale, but a lot of combats are fairly by-the-book. Square off, roll your dice, do your damage… next turn. Here we had all sorts of shenanigans that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Hollywood movie. We already discussed Darius throwing xulgaths off the raised platforms a little bit last week: this week we got that nice moment where the xulgath tries to throw him over the edge, and he gets to reverse it and show the xulgath how it’s done. Ateran – probably not anyone’s most likely choice to win a physical altercation – manages to get a timely die roll and avoid getting shoved off a platform as well. Alhara pulling out her 18^th weapon of the fight – the great pick we’d all but forgotten she had – and critting one of the xulgaths. And perhaps the best of all… the timely re-emergence of Riley the Pocket Pup. I had almost forgotten Riley was there, and he shows up at what almost had to be the last moment to save Hap. The goodest of goodbois strikes again! It just felt like this fight had a flair for the dramatic, and it made for a more entertaining listen than usual.

Of course, good theater also includes a touch of dark comedy, mainly supplied by Alhara’s ongoing battle with persistent damage. What was that… AT LEAST four or five rounds she couldn’t get rid of it? Two or three was funny, but by the end you just wanted Steve to let her off the hook and have it go away on its own.

As we end the episode, the team FINALLY survives. Alhara FINALLY gets rid of the various persistent effects, Hap finally extracts herself from under a dead xulgath, and the team has to decide where to rest. They’re in no condition for another fight if the xulgaths send reinforcements to check on this group, but they’re also not really in much condition to fight anything if they get ambushed on the way back to town. Pick your poison, I guess. (I’m just realizing that’s a poor choice of words given Vanessa’s fun with persistent damage this week.) The team decides to rest here in the xulgath camp, 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 Three Ring Adventure S3|08: Nobody Expects the Alhara Inquisition!

Sorry, dear readers… a little late this week. I was a little bit under the weather earlier in the week and have been playing catch-up ever since, while also still operating at about 85 percent.

This week, we offer our salute to unorthodox tactics on Roll For Combat, as our team pulls all sorts of interesting tricks out of their collective hat, starting with the continuing bag of holding exploits from last week.

It’s funny… on at least two occasions, Loren asked Steve if he wanted to get into it about the bag of holding. She didn’t get a chance to, but I have a few questions.

First… how big is the aperture of a bag of holding? Are we talking coin purse or potato sack here? I know the extra-dimensional space on the INSIDE is big enough to accommodate a humanoid but is the opening big enough to stuff said humanoid in there in the first place? Or is this going to be like trying on skinny jeans where Darius gets in up to his meaty thighs and gets stuck? This seems to have been somewhat glossed over.

Also, what’s the experience like being inside an extra-dimensional space? OK, we’ve established there’s air in there, so a character won’t die, but that’s a pretty low bar. What about the mental strain of being inside a really freaky sensory-deprivation tank?

For a real-world example, there’s an anechoic chamber at a place called Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota. It’s a room that has so much sound-deadening material that the ambient room noise measures negative decibels. It’s so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. It’s been reported that the longest anyone’s ever been able to stay in it was 45 minutes, and some people LITERALLY have trouble remaining standing because the lack of noise is so disorienting.

And that’s just sound deprivation. With the bag of holding, there’s no light, unless you brought it in with you. No ambient noise. Even if you have light, there may not be any other objects to look at or judge distances against. Heck, you may not even be experiencing gravity or having any surfaces to rest against… you may just be floating there. I feel like it might be – excuse my French – a bit of a mind-fuck, and the realist in me would want the players to make a saving throw that they don’t get REALLY disoriented. (Or, given this show’s fascination with the scatological humor… poop themselves.)

But whatever. Our heroes aren’t going to be in there that long, so we’ll hand-wave it. So we begin Attack Pattern Delta, and things start to go awry almost immediately.

First, we have Alhara coming out of the bag earlier than everyone else, thereby exposing herself as the only target for attacks for the majority of the first round. The early bird gets… a face full of acid and javelins, apparently.

And then one of the xulgaths gets a lucky shot in and knocks Hap out of the sky.

For a second I actually thought Hap was in serious trouble. But two things. First, fall damage, in general, isn’t THAT bad in Second Edition: half the distance fallen over 5 feet. So a 30 foot fall is only 15 damage, which is really just an extra attack’s worth. Second, Hap has a feat that lets her take an extra 20 feet off the top, so for her purposes, it was a much more modest 10-15 foot fall. So… Hap stubs her toe and we move on.

Just as a thought exercise: if you think about it, to die IMMEDIATELY in a fall, you’d have to fall (roughly) 4 times your hit points in distance. You need to get twice your total hit points to trigger the massive damage death rules, so to get twice your total hit points, you’d have to fall four times your total hit points in distance. However, I suppose it wouldn’t have to be an insta-kill; you could fall enough to go below zero and just not stabilize in time. So OK.. TWO times your hit points could kill you; FOUR times your hit points automatically would. Moral of the story? Stay away from 200-300’ cliffs, kids.

(Sorry… how high are these aeon towers again?)

After the early hiccups, the team regroups and we come to the unsung hero of the episode, wall of fire. Wall of fire is shaping up to be a rockstar. In our Edgewatch campaign, Gomez makes a lot of use of flaming sphere, but it’s really kinda wimpy because it only does damage on the caster’s turn. So the one thing you’d really LIKE it to do – restrict battlefield movement – it doesn’t really do.

But wall of fire? Oh does it ever restrict movement. Full damage if you go through it at all. AND as an added cherry on top, concealment from one side to the other, which saved Ateran’s bacon on at least one occurrence already. (But ohbytheway, no concealment for Hap. Genie-kin powers… ACTIVATE!)

And then we get to the best part ever: Darius throwing xulgaths THROUGH the wall of fire, off the platform. I have to admit I had the biggest smile ever while listening to this. First, there’s just the physical imagery of Darius picking up a xulgath and just tossing it 30-ish feet; I assume the feat name “Whirling Throw” implies it’s like an Olympic hammer toss where Darius spins around a few times before launch. So it’s already a hilarious picture. But then I also love it when you get stacking damage from multiple sources – oh here’s 4d6 from this, and another 3d6, and another 3d8 because screw you, that’s why.  It’s like hitting up the toppings bar at a frozen yogurt place: “you want Reese’s Pieces too… screw it, let’s have some Reese’s Pieces!”.

For the record, in a transparent attempt to appeal to a younger demographic, this technique will now be known as “Darius’ Yeets Of Strength”. That’s right, I speak fluent Young People.

Now, we’re having fun and all, but the bad news is this is all barely scratching the surface. There are 10 xulgaths, and they’ve each got a lot of hit points. Hap managed to fire off a fireball that did a net 200+ points of damage, and it’s still only kinda scratched the surface. So although we’ve had a little fun at the xulgaths’ expense, it’s still a touch-and-go question who’s actually going to win this fight.

And that’s where we’ll pick it up next week, with the conclusion of the big brawl. 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|07: The Tower? The Tower? Rapunzel! Rapunzel!

OK, can we all agree that Mistdancer needs her own show? Adventures Of The Passive-Aggressive Pony!

I suppose before we get to that, I wanted to back up and talk a little about Steve’s show notes, and specifically about occasionally “steering” the party. I’d absolutely like to go on record as being in favor.

I think some of it – maybe a LOT of it – is being older and having responsibilities: job, kids, fight clu… never mind that last one. I think when we were younger, just screwing around and seeing where the adventure takes us was a much more viable option. As you get older, you want to make those game sessions count… you want to feel like you did interesting things and moved the plot forward. If you look up at the end of a session and all you did was talk to NPCs for three hours, it starts to feel a little like you could’ve used the time better doing other things.

I will say that in the world of doing this as a podcast, Steve doesn’t usually put a STRONG hand on the rudder unless there’s a solid reason grounded in show logistics. I think there was one session where he pushed us to explore in one direction because he hadn’t had a chance to build the other wing of the dungeon in (at that time) D20Pro. On another occasion, it was because we were trying to wrangle a guest appearance, and he didn’t want us to meet the NPC the guest would be playing until the next session. Another common one is time management: recognizing that the door on the left starts a big battle that will take 2 hours, but we only have 15 minutes left. So part of the thing is to trust that there’s a method to the madness.

The other thing is: as much as he may claim his control of the story as GM is absolute, he will rarely say no if we absolutely insist. (Which probably did happen once or twice in the pre-podcast days.) Yeah, he’ll try and talk us out of it, and he may ask for some time to re-tweak (which is probably just downing a shot of Jim Beam and questioning his life choices), but if we ever really dig our heels in and say “we REALLY want to do things in this order”, he’ll figure out a way to make it happen. He’s good that way. But honestly, we’ve got a decade-plus of trust accumulated: if he asks, there’s usually a good reason, and it’ll usually be the choice that leads to the better session.

So anyway, back to Mistdancer. Holy crap, did this turn out to be entertaining. Mistdancer throwing a tantrum about her spot in the show was hilarious on its own merits, but at the same time, it was also kind of touching that Hap’s motivations were to protect Darius’ reputation and make sure he didn’t get blamed for the scheduling issue. So you had this nice little scene going, and Hap got JUST up to the point of apologizing, and then this little competitive impulse wormed its way in and threatened to undermine the whole thing. So they argued for a bit, and then it took another turn as Hap changed gears, took another run at sincerity (mixed in with a little food-based bribery), and broke through to a place where maybe she and Mistdancer can work together going forward.

Though OK, when Hap tried to get on Mistdancer’s back, I was legitimately worried that Mistdancer was thinking about flying her up into the air and dropping her. Wouldn’t THAT have been a twist… murdered by one of the circus’ own support acts.

I was thinking a little bit about Hap’s use of the creation spell. At first, I was thinking: wouldn’t a bouquet made with creation taste wrong? But then I re-read the spell description, and “vegetable matter” is the one thing it does well, so as long as you’re sticking to fruits and vegetables, you’re probably OK. I suppose if you tried to create something that’s supposed to be meat, you’d get an Impossible Burger. I did wonder a little bit about what happens on a biological level if you eat created food. Since the spell duration is only an hour, do you all of a sudden become hungry again? (OK, let’s be honest: the real question is DO YOU STILL HAVE TO POOP?)

So the circus heads up the road to Matten Cleave, and though it would’ve been hilarious to have the circus attacked by bulettes, they arrive safely. (OTOH, a bulette attack might have resolved the Mistdancer issue once and for all. While the circus starts setting up camp, our team does their first excursion out toward the tower, where we find even more drastic visual evidence of the blight that’s messing with the area.

And here’s where Ateran reveals a new trick in their book… the prying eye spell. And OK… holy crap is that a cool spell. (And it’s got an arcane version too, so yes, I’m already considering adding it to Basil’s toolbox.) As Rob said, its initial cast has to be within 500 feet (and visible), but once cast, there is NO range limit, beyond how far you can reasonably get with a move speed of 30 feet. Pretty amazing, especially if you were to tie it to a character with low-light or darkvision.

So Ateran does their recon, and we get a sense of the exterior approach and the mouth of the tower entrance. And here’s where things take a turn for the loopy. We start with a sort of conventional idea: have the Varuses sneak up while invisible, have Hap nuke the site from orbit, and then have the Varuses drop their cloak start smacking whoever is left. (Gowron approves of this plan, BTW.) But there’s a problem with this plan. Darius and Alhara can advance while invisible, Hap can cast from within 500 feet, but that doesn’t leave Ateran with much to do.

And that’s where things get silly, as a new plan is hatched. We call this one the “Delivery Drone”: we load Darius and Alhara (and maybe Ateran too… I wasn’t 100% sure if he was included) into the bag of holding, fly over the xulgath encampment (maybe Hap is invisible, maybe not), and literally drop the melees on top of them. It’s dangerous and foolhardy, and I absolutely love it. THIS HAS TO HAPPEN.

Unfortunately, the episode ends before we can really get to it, but it looks like next week, we’ll officially be back on the main quest, beating xulgath butt and cleansing aeon towers. Should be fun to see how our team does. 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|06: Golarion Ninja Warrior.

OK, so it’s circus week. Did NOT expect that.

I thought “check in on the circus” was going to be a simple “stop by, give Marcel some orders, go back out on the road for a few days” thing. I didn’t realize we were actually going to put a performance together. And a performance under new rules, at that.

First, Steve said that going in, two people really wanted to do the circus and two wanted to move on. I am ABSOLUTELY 100% certain Loren was one of the ones who wanted to do it – she LOVES stuff like that — and I’m about 85% sure Rob T. was one of the move-ons. I just don’t know who the second enthusiastic one is. I feel like it might be Vanessa going in, but Rob P. kind of has a “still waters run deep” thing going on where it’s hard to get a read on what he’ll decide to dig deep on.

So let’s talk about the circus subsystem a little bit. Now I should caveat here: normally, I’m VERY much a “you shouldn’t complain unless you’re also going to offer a solution” person, but I don’t really have an answer here. But what I do have is a deadline and a word count, so I’m gonna wade in anyway.

It always struck me that there were two major issues with the existing system. First, the “secondary” activities tended to feel like busy-work and didn’t add a lot to the gaming experience – Roll… For… Buying A Larger Tent! The act of putting on the show has always been the sizzle on the steak. The second was that the system incentivized going all-out until you hit a certain point, at which point shifting gears and playing it safe became the smart play. Once you got the Anticipation and Excitement needles lined up where you wanted them, you were almost just better off just ending the show there than trying to do anything else. It seems to me that the ideal system should have you going all-out for the best performance possible; if you weren’t doing so, something was off about the incentives.

So I think Steve’s choices are a good first-pass at addressing those two concerns. No more secondary tasks was an easy obvious fix, and the circus performance is now basically pass-fail. The second problem could still be an issue if you have really good rolls for the first few acts and “run up the score”, but it’s a first attempt. Time will tell if those are the RIGHT fixes, but they do address those areas.

So we begin. First of all, I chuckled at Steve dropping them on the same map from the Escadar camp. In my brain, I started imagining a scenario where Kalkek snuck aboard their ship and followed them to Cortos. Wouldn’t that be entertaining?

I also love that Mistdancer turns out to be such a freakin’ diva and the whole back and forth with Darius. If you think about it, it was probably a little unrealistic that you could grab 4 or 5 acts from the other circus, drop them into the existing lineup, and NO ONE would have a problem with their stage time. So it seems fitting that somebody would’ve complained. That it was the FLYING HORSE is just the cherry on the sundae.

So we begin the show with a tent full of shoonies, and first up is Alhara’s obstacle course. (OK, this seems well-thought-out, maybe she’s the other one who wanted to go all-out.) Now, I realize Golarion is a world without ambulance chasers or medical waivers, but should we really be risking audience lives on this venture? Couldn’t the clowns do it or something? Or hell… send in The Artist Formerly Known As Jellico Bounce-Bounce: Vanessa’s looking for a reason to kill him off anyway.

And as the performance moves along, none of the audience members die, but we begin to establish the theme of the evening – good performance, weak finish. Not enough to ruin the whole show, but enough to be annoying.

Rob T. takes the helm as Matchstick Flynn, and manages to ad-lib a pretty good show, though again… botches the ending. And then Mistdancer ups the ante by failing entirely. Man, she’s going through a whole character arc, isn’t she? Will she experience growth and come back stronger next time? Will she have a Top Gun moment where she has to grip Goose’s dog-tags before she tries to perform again? Will Darius lift her spirits by proclaiming that he’d fly with her anytime?

So, the circus is beginning to come off the rails a little, and Hap’s up. Hap’s performance is a fun little thing where she starts to pull in some of her original bardic inspirations (haven’t seen that in a while), and it starts to lift the overall score up. We’re finally moving in a positive direction, just in time for the big finale.

Mammoth Lady actually seems to do pretty well. Dude. She can lift her mammoth. Who doesn’t want to see that?

Vanessa plays Namor and does pretty well also. As an aside, I think Vanessa should’ve had Fish-Boy perform Hap’s act IN ITS ENTIRETY, but using water. That would’ve been hilarious.

And now it’s Ateran’s turn, and OK… Rob P. is clearly the other person who was loaded for bear because he’s got a whole thing written out. NOBODY JUST AD-LIBS “CARDAMOM” OFF THE TOP OF THEIR HEAD. I love the visuals of his performance, with a smoky rendition of their adventures so far. Very imaginative. And then… again, botched ending… not enough for the audience to know it, but enough to Ateran off internally.

But when the smoke clears (literally and figuratively), it’s a successful performance. The mostly-shoony crowd leaves happy, our team will make some money, and their reputation will grow for next time. Good job!

Meanwhile, not much happens with the main storylines. The entity that’s been haunting Vandy doesn’t return, and we learn that maybe there’s a MILD connection to people who got in trouble with the law or people who were generally assholes, but it’s not really enough to call a lead. (Do we have a version of the Punisher that’s turned off by bad manners instead of crime?) So I guess we’ll get back to that next week after the tents are packed up for the next town.

(Also as an aside: during the part where they were talking about visiting four different cities, I proposed that the merch site needs a “Circus of Wayward Wonders” tour shirt with different cities and dates. Always loved tour shirts just because they were artifacts of THAT particular show; you could even point to it on the back of the shirt and say “yeah, I was at that one”. But we probably need to wait for a few more dates, because right now it would only have like, 3 or 4 entries.)

So next week, we’ll get back to our main mysteries. Maybe Vandy’s stalker will show, or maybe our team will head up to Matten Cleave and check out the first tower. Maybe both! I’ve given up trying to guess at this point. While you’re waiting, feel free to drop by our Discord channel or other social media and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and see you next week.

Jason recaps the events from Three Ring Adventure S3|05: Breakfast, Period.

I feel like I should start this week’s column with a warning. I feel like this has the potential to become a little whiny, because this week’s episode happened to touch upon multiple pet peeves about this game in the same session. So apologies in advance if the tone is a bit too oppressive.

So… let’s get right into it.

Haunts. Ugh.

I will agree with what Steve said in his pre-game comments. I absolutely get what they were trying to do with haunts. Religion and Occultism are traditionally kind of under-used skills in the grand scheme. Every once in a while, you get to identify an object or recognize a name, but they can sit on the shelf for a while between uses. So haunts were an attempt to create a “puzzle” that could be solved with those particular skills; a supernatural thing that’s LIKE a trap, but not exactly a trap, because there’s no physical mechanism. So far I’m right there with Paizo – sounds like a really cool concept at first glance.

But the idea tends to fall on its ass in implementation, where haunts seem to combine the worst elements of both traps (the fact that it’s concealed or otherwise surprising, and the fact that it generally can’t be destroyed by conventional means) and combat (persistent damage over multiple rounds, something that keeps coming at you until it’s dealt with) into something that’s mostly just a pain in the ass, without providing nearly enough entertainment value.

A trap is generally finite. It triggers, does its damage… but then it’s generally served its purpose. MAYBE if it has charges, it’ll get a chance to do it twice before you get the hint. But if you get hit a second time by the same trap, that’s also you as the player paying the Stupidity Tax. Combat does a lot more damage and lasts until it’s dealt with, but you generally know what you have to do to beat it. And unless it’s immune to ALL the damage types you can throw at it, you’ve got SOMETHING in your toolbox that will get you there. Also, if you see or hear an enemy coming, it is POSSIBLE to avoid a fight, though in the words of T’Challa… “we don’t do that here”.

But that’s the thing about a haunt. Can’t see it coming. Can’t avoid it. Can’t damage it (usually). And you can’t stick around and figure it out because it’s beating down on you like a creature would while you’re thinking about it. So instead of being a fun puzzle, it becomes an annoying “no-fly zone” in the middle of your area map that you have to avoid until you stumble across some sort of hint for how to deal with it. (And frankly, if it’s not relevant to the main story, sometimes you just avoid it and move on entirely.)

Though OK, in the case of THIS haunt, “can’t see it coming” wasn’t really true. If there’s a lit candle in a triple-locked room in an abandoned farm that’s otherwise collapsing… maybe you don’t just go waltzing casually into the room? Just spitballing here.

So Darius entering the room sets off the haunt, and that summons a ghost, who starts ranting about… well… it’s kind of a word salad. And that brings me to my second pet peeve: Proper Name Vomit.

There’s this phenomenon – Vanessa kinda touches on it at one point – where a LOT of stuff gets thrown at you, particularly when you first reach a new section of the story. Here’s 15 NPC names and 8 location names; figure out which of these are important. And there will be a “quiz” later insofar as two or three of these will be mentioned four sessions later and you’ll have to remember why you kinda-sorta remember hearing that name.

Now, the dismissive “git gud” answer is “take notes”. And believe me – we generally try to. But a) sometimes the info dump is a firehose and it’s just too much to get down in its entirety, and b) even if you write it down, you never know which pieces are really going to be important. It is true the authors of these adventures usually leave a few bread crumbs for the single biggest “Next Item On The Agenda”, but they don’t necessarily do the same for secondary entities. So maybe “Brogdor The Unjust” SOUNDS really important at the time, so you write his name down, and it later turns out he’s the local cheese merchant, and the reason he got his nickname is the townspeople are WAY too dramatic about the price he charges for Havarti. Meanwhile, you didn’t really take any special note of Pig-Farmer Ted, and Pig-Farmer Ted happens to be the connection to the Big Bad because the Big Bad likes bacon almost as much as Darius does and Pig-Farmer Ted keeps him supplied.

To tie this back into the story we’re talking about here: this wealth of information to process means that even now, I’m STILL trying to sort out who screwed over who. There’s the angry ghost guy… and the Night Lady… and Minnesota Twins’ legend Rod Carew is involved somehow… but the real takeaway seems to be that Opper Vandy is a shady character because the ghost is ranting about him accepting “blood money”. So it’s back to town to talk to him some more.

I like how this encounter played out. In particular, the “give him enough rope to hang himself” approach of playing selectively dumb about what they had learned and seeing how Vandy reacted to the pieces they did know… that was a cool approach. I think it works better than a direct confrontation because it’s not as adversarial and maybe you get something you wouldn’t get if you go in swinging and they put the shields up right away. WE’LL MAKE COPS OUT OF YOU YET.

(And OK, I was amused that Darius has a “sitting casually, while still being ready to punch someone in the face” mode. He’s a man of contradictions, that one.)

Through this confrontation, we come to learn that Vandy is “shady” with a lowercase S, rather than “Shady” with an uppercase S. The good news is he’s not murdering people to bump up his numbers for the funeral business, which was the original concern. On the other hand, he did take out a loan and slow-walked paying it back until there was no one left to pay it back to. I feel like maybe it’s still TBD how hard he REALLY tried to find an heir – that part seemed a little too convenient/self-serving – but still, we’re firmly in white-collar financial crimes here, not the sort of evil the xulgaths represent (or the sort of evil we’re dealing with over on the Edgewatch side of the house). And certainly, even if you still think Vandy is a little crappy for doing what he did, it’s certainly unfair to take it out on the townspeople to get even with him.

But, it looks like we’re actually going to back-burner the haunt and helping Vandy, and take a look at the closest aeon tower instead. Perhaps a little passive-aggression there? “It turns out you’re kind of shitty, so we’re going to go off and deal with other stuff rather than help you.” But also, it does feel like fixing the tower would help the whole town, while solving Vandy’s problem would just amount to cleaning up his mess. So maybe that’s the right call.

Before I close, I don’t want to just whine about stuff. The phrase “LOL” is overused, but I did have a good chuckle at the start of the episode at Loren’s reaction to another 10 minutes of restaurant-themed shenanigans. “All right, so this is happening, I’m going to go get a water out of the fridge.” If you turn your speakers up high enough, you can actually hear her eyes rolling. Though she almost missed Vanessa’s on-the-fly songsmithing, which was also excellent. Makes me think… if we’re ever feeling REALLY ambitious, maybe we’ll have to do a musical episode one of these days.

So… tower next week? Or will something else happen? I mean, it just feels… incomplete… like there’s still another shoe about to drop. Maybe I’m feeling like there’s a chance that setting off the haunt and learning the truth might change the parameters and cause whoever’s messing with Vandy to up their game. So… OK, our team WANTS to go to the tower next week – that’s their stated goal – but I don’t totally discount another round of dealing with the skeletons in Vandy’s closet either. As we wait to see, 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.