Jason recaps the events from The Black Lodge Tale 3, Chapter 2: Green Light Kid!
Sorry this is a little late but I’ve just been out of it the last few days because of the state of the country and all the protests going on and it was hard to get psyched up to write about what felt (comparatively) like a silly little make-believe session. And it still is a little. The session we recorded last night… spoiler alert: in a few weeks, when you hear it, you’re going to get a fairly zombified version of Nella because I didn’t want to cancel once everything had been scheduled, but I was definitely not feeling it knowing protesters and cops were going at it 10 minutes from my house.
Look, I’m not particularly wired for Delivering An Important Message. That’s not who I am. Or at least if I AM going to do that, I’m going to do that in my own way and using my own platform. On the other hand, I feel like not acknowledging it at all would be ignoring the elephant in the room. So, I’m not gonna give you the 3000-words version, but I’ll just say that I’m firmly on the side of the protesters and of African-Americans getting better justice than they’ve been getting in this country, and you can take that as you will.
Elephant in the room addressed. On to our episode.
I have to admit that after a few straight really long shows (if we’re lumping in Extinction Curse, some of those cracked the 2-hour mark), it was nice to get a fairly short show in this time around. I’ve probably mentioned this before but I’m more an hour, 90-minutes-at-the-max kind of listener. And we also had a bare minimum of endless bickering about pointless minutiae, which represents progress for this group. On the other hand, the trade-off is that the actual game action this week is a little sparse: it’s basically a single battle that looked initially scary, but really ended up being a walk in the park. Ultimately, the skeletons didn’t have a lot of hitpoints and couldn’t hit most of our armor classes (except maybe Nixnox, but he was hiding most of the fight anyway). Nella has an 18, Thorgrim is a 20, Mama Millicent… I don’t remember her exact number, but it’s up there too.
Having said that, the fight looked like it might be tough when it first started, just based on numbers – I forget whether it was 7 or 8 total skeletons, but they definitely had numbers on us. I did wrestle with some internal debate whether I really needed to use Shillelagh, but decided to go ahead with the thinking that it was going to take us a few days to reach our destination, so I’d probably get a chance to recharge before we hit Diggen’s Rest and the real fighting started. Heck, even if we got there the same day, we could probably rest overnight and start exploring the following morning – I didn’t get a sense there’s a time constraint on this one like there was with our other adventures.
By the end of the fight, I felt kinda silly for burning the spell though. They couldn’t hit us, they dropped fairly easily… WASTED RESOURCES. I suppose that I also argued against using my Hero Point to re-roll that final attack, but at that point I just wanted the fight done. And then Steve figured out the thing with the blindness, so I got it back anyway. I wasn’t expecting that, but a nice little bonus.
After the fight, we got to have another segment of Fun With Treat Wounds. I love the mechanic… in both directions. I like that it’s an extra source of healing that (almost) anyone has access to – it’s a handy little mechanic. I equally love that you can screw it up and actually make things worse. Which… in this case, Mama Millicent actually does to Mister Peepers, who was somehow the one member of the party that managed to take some significant damage in the fight. Luckily, Thorgrim is able to step in with Lay On Hands and bail Millicent out, but it provided a little moment of levity.
Lastly, we have a treasure and lore dump. The archaic wayfinder is kind of a neat item – being able to slot an aeon stone without using your head slot is of fairly obvious use, but I’m still trying to figure out what the optimal use of the cantrip slot would be. If you cast one of your own cantrips… duh, you already have access to those anyway. So… you maybe have someone else cast a cantrip onto it, as Chris (I think) suggested, to diversify your spell list? Or give it to a non-caster, so they have at least one spell they can cast in a pinch. I guess that’s the way to go with it.
I’m in a weird mood, so I can’t believe I’m going to go on this digression, but a few more words about Voyagers! (not Travelers). I suspect it’s probably one of those things that didn’t age well, and if I go back and re-watch it, I feel like I’ll be disappointed. (See also: Hill Street Blues). But at the time it was quite the fun little show. Half Quantum Leap (fixing history), half Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (run-ins with famous historical figures). I feel like I should clarify that the actor (Jon-Erik Hexum) died while shooting his NEXT show (Cover Up, about CIA agents who were undercover as fashion models) – that wasn’t the reason Voyagers! got canceled. Voyagers! just got an unceremonious cancellation after one season. And because I’ve gone too far down this black hole, he also was dating E.G. Daily at the time, who was a singer who was a staple of second-tier 80s movies and also went on to voice the main character in Rugrats.
Wait. How did we end up here?
Whatever, that’s as good a place to wrap it up for this week. Next week, we’ll formally begin the investigation of Diggen’s Rest, and hopefully get into more fights, since the last adventure left us itching for a scrap. As always, feel free to drop by Discord or other social media, and let us know what you think of the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.