Sketchy

To be clear, I'm not saying that because I dislike Bolaire, or purely because it was a Nat 20 vs Nat 1. I'm saying that because what he says is actually countered later, but in a way that I'm thinking Bolaire was doing a "true from my perspective, not necessarily objectively true" sort of thing. I think he was framing it explicitly in such a way that Hal would take his side and not question why Thjazi would respond so negatively to him. But with the coming episodes, we the audience get an idea about why he'd react so negatively.

For the record, here's that speech from Stone-Faced.

(sighs) One week after I met your brother at your home, Thimble arrived at the museum with a letter. (sighs) Your brother had discovered things about me that could get me, I'd say put away, but that sounds like I'd done something. He knew things about me that were, if put out into the open would've made my life if not difficult, unbearable. He told me I had to work for him, and he forced me to start stealing from this library for him, for other people. He told me if I told you any of this, that would be the end of me. I have tried so hard to never lie to you. Any lie I've ever told you is because your brother forced me to. I thought finally I would be free. I thought finally I could just know that my contract was over, know that there was someone who would let me go so that I could start cleaning up this fucking mess that your brother put me in. He has compromised every level of my life that I was very happy with and just treated me with more disdain than I can possibly express. And it has broken my heart that I've had to sit here and think about that in front of you for so long. (sighs) Your brother was a very complicated man. Many people I've heard have said many things about him. But he could also be very cruel and hateful. He was not kind to me to the bitter end, and I did not deserve it. Any sins that I have would pale in comparison to the things that I have done for him or the things I have seen him do. I thought Thimble, I thought maybe since she had been kind and worked very hard to make sure I never had to be in his presence. Used to say that she-- I would give her gifts and in return she would, as a Thimble should, keep me from coming into contact with a prick. (chuckles) So he's dead and there is something wrong out there. You know there's something wrong. There is a shadow.

So what is Bolaire communicating here? That without warning or reason, Thjazi used Bolaire's nature as a Panto Mask against him to force him to do terrible things. That Thjazi was cruel to Bolaire for no reason. That he "compromised every level" of Bolaire's life. That he did things so terrible that it Horrified the Horror.

Now. These things can be true. They can also be true from Bolaire's perspective, but not necessarily objectively true.

"I'd say put away, but that sounds like I'd done something". Bolaire has "done something". He has committed incredible acts of violence and murder. He has killed Falconers, killed and chopped up criminals, he literally has to wear other people and trap them in a mind prison so that he can live his own life (granted he doesn't have to do the mind prison but it seems he defaults to this). Even Taliesin, above table, acknowledges that this is the kind of artifact Percy of Vox Machina would put in a metal box and chuck into the sea. Bolaire is, put simply, dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. It is entirely disingenuous of him to suggest he hasn't done something to warrant being put away. He absolutely has.

But maybe not from his perspective. From his perspective, well, they were criminals! They were obstacles to his freedom and he surely can't be blamed for doing whatever it took to be free, can he?

"He has compromised every level of my life that I was very happy with" This is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless but it's worth noting that at the beginning of this session, the cold open was Bolaire being peeled off of a severely decayed body and taking over someone else immediately afterwards. So I'm inclined to believe a common theory that Thjazi insisted he remain on one body rather than go around bodysnatching other people. Which I imagine was very uncomfortable and made Bolaire unhappy, but wasn't exactly unwarranted or needlessly cruel from Thjazi's perspective, or indeed from most people's perspectives.

"He was not kind to me to the bitter end and I did not deserve it" Again, I think this is just a "My truth is that I didn't deserve it". It doesn't necessarily follow that he objectively deserved Thjazi's kindness or neutrality, which is what's implied here.

"Any sins that I have would pale in comparison to the things that I have done for him or the things I have seen him do." That is, again, definitely something I think is colored by Bolaire's own alien perception of what he considers right and wrong. What does Bolaire, a being who has gone through what? Three or four bodies in barely a week consider a "sin"? You can view that in one of two ways I think: That Thjazi did such monstrous things that he Horrified the Horror, or that Bolaire has such Blue and Orange Morality that he considers chopping up dead bodies to be an average Tuesday but something like telling a baldfaced lie to be horrendous.

I say that because Bolaire does, in fact, bring up Thjazi being a liar a lot. Thjazi was a trickster, a scoundrel, a thief and liar. And the last one seems to be what Bolaire gnaws at the most: He calls Thjazi deeply manipulative, a deceitful person, he straight up tells Thimble Thjazi was only pretending to tell her everything while lying to everyone else. I genuinely wonder if Thjazi's capacity for lying is something Bolaire finds so deeply distasteful that that rings as a greater "sin" than Bolaire living "honestly" as himself.

Combined with all this is the objective fact that we have absolutely no reason to believe Thjazi was aware that Bolaire isn't actively malevolent. Antiheroes and heroes alike work with evil artifacts for the greater good all the time; Vox Machina is a great example with the Sword of Kas.

From the outside looking in:

Thjazi meets Bolaire at Hal's place. Learns that Bolaire is a sentient artifact that has killed people, including fellow revolutionaries, and who wears people. He has absolutely zero idea why Bolaire is hanging around his brother. He has absolutely zero idea what Bolaire is doing. He only has history to fall back on: Bolaire kills people. Bolaire wears people. Bolaire is getting awfully chummy with Hal and seems entirely too interested in the theater.

He doesn't speak directly with Bolaire because he has no idea if Bolaire can put the mask on Thjazi himself. Better safe than sorry. He sends Thimble because she's too small to be forcibly masked and can get away swiftly if needed.

He does what he can to keep Hal out of it, in deference to Hal's request from years earlier, and blackmails Bolaire into not telling Hal anything. He presumably makes not wearing another body a requirement for Bolaire, which makes sense in the context of dealing with a malevolent artifact: You try to limit the damage they can do outside of your control.

We know that Bolaire is a PC. We know he's got a rich inner life and the capacity for benevolence and can be trusted. Thjazi, on the other hand, almost certainly did not. And had no reason to take that chance when Bolaire was hyperfocusing on his brother, of all people.

This is an excellent question. I don't think you're missing anything. I do think Brennan's DMing is full of consequences, and I think he makes things challenging enough to be interesting and for everything to feel very earned, but "consequence" is a neutral term. It is just as important that you get good consequences for good choices and rolls as negative consequences for bad ones, and Brennan provides both.

I also think you are correct regarding the abundance of information: because Brennan will bring down the hammer if deserved, and will make an encounter potentially lethal if that makes sense, but like. There's no fun in people losing an encounter because it wasn't clear what was going on. Like, I'm not saying you can never hide information from your players - obviously you can - but I think I've mentioned before that because all the players have to go on is what information the DM tells them, there's no honor or victory in refusing to tell them information a person who isn't a complete moron would know or figure out. Trick your players by saying Yanessa Halovar appears to be making death saves; don't trick your players by not telling them what the fucking room looks like, or withholding obvious information a person who lives in this world would be aware of.

If I may. I keep dividing people into blorbo and story people. I am obviously quite biased towards the latter. I think that the idea that Brennan is very punishing comes a little from the fact that the Critical Role fandom has seen him DM the three epic-scale Calamity/Downfall/Divergence miniseries, the first of which was designed in both plot and mechanics to be lethal, the second of which was designed in both plot and mechanics to be one of the darkest stories Critical Role has told thematically, and the last of which was designed to do one million points emotional damage to Matthew Mercer but also have a sense of overwhelming scale for very low level characters and thus was hard to not make lethal. But I think that even more than that, Matt, while obviously an excellent storyteller in his own right, is, deep down, a little more of a blorbo person, and Brennan isn't.

This is not a judgement. Matt tends to excel with character. He is an actor. He is an extremely accomplished voice actor, in fact, and his entire job is to be able to evoke a character's emotions while he is sitting in a recording booth. I would be surprised if he didn't lean towards character a bit over story, because he needs to embody character more than anything. I think this is why the most lauded campaign Matt has run was the deeply character-centric one, in which both he and his players explored significant internal arcs which all wove together in a narrative driven by them. I think this is why Campaign 1 is similarly quite highly praised; the plot is good but nothing groundbreaking, but it is lovingly crafted around his friends' characters and their interests.

In addition to DMing from an incredibly young age, Brennan's educational background after philosophy is screenwriting, and he has done more as a writer and improviser (which is often using a throwaway character for the larger goal of a coherent narrative, often though not always a brief one) and DM than an actor of characters outside the context of DMing. Obviously, characters are immensely important to stories, but in the context of TTRPGs, it is rare that one character is so important as to be irreplaceable or impossible to kill while keeping the story.

So: I think people used to Matt's style, which I think is actually especially generous even in his more hardass moments because it is so nurturing towards his friends' characters (and his own NPCs at times) are a little taken aback by the fact that Brennan will, in fact, kill Hannan or Gaya on the spot if it fits the story, and is willing to put PCs on the line because the larger narrative will survive even if they don't.

I think the people who think Brennan's style is specifically punishing are often people who are flinching when he says "gonna kill that dog". He will put a character in danger without hesitation. But he won't do so unless it makes sense, and he tries not to let people walk into a death trap without giving them multiple opportunities to realize it is a death trap. Which, if you approach the story as not a simple character vehicle, but as a full interconnected story, does not appear punishing but rather compelling. Of course there are heavy consequences, good and bad, because that's how you tell a story. But they are not unfair, and they are not unearned.

They want buckskin and face paint, drumming, songs in languages they can’t understand recorded for them but with English subtitles, of course. They want educated, well spoken, but not too smart. Christian, well behaved, never question. They want to learn the history of the people, but not the ones that are here now, waving signs in their faces, asking them for clean drinking water, asking them why their women are going missing, asking them why their land is being ruined.

They want fantastical stories of Indians that used to roam this land. They want my culture behind glass in a museum.