#network.

Gossamer's upbringing makes people uncomfortable, reasonably so! She was raised in a brothel and started schooling in her social graces and artistic crafts young; she always knew what the ultimate goal was. It was never a secret. Her older sisters worked in the house, too, and they were models of what she could expect—but the difference was that Silk and Satin were the Madame's blood daughters, and they were drow women. There were expectations and pressures on them that Gossamer didn't experience; she was, essentially, a beloved pet in her own home.

Beloved pets still get housebroken. Menzoberranzan was a dangerous city for anyone, and Gossamer was a non-drow child in affluent spaces. It was genuinely imperative that she know when to be on her best behavior, and what that looked like, and Velvet was not above occasionally relying on enchantment spells to ensure her charge would mind her manners. She put Gossamer through the exact same rituals of violence all drow mothers put their daughters through to guarantee their ability to survive.

Unfortunately for Gossamer, sometimes her Mother Gothel really did know best. That doesn't really make it okay, and Gossamer knows that; it's why she ran away. But a huge part of her adventure was coming to terms with the dual reality of my upbringing was harmful vs. my mother was doing the best she knew how to do for me under bad circumstances, and it wasn't all good. She got to learn that forgiveness isn't an all-or-nothing game, and that the most amazing thing about it is the freedom of choice. She got to decide what to forgive, or if she could at all.

Flag of Norway but it's the norwegian main highway network.

When you pull from the Deck of Many Things, you must first declare how many cards you'll pull. Gossamer declared two.

Two of Clubs, the Idiot. Permanently reduce your Intelligence by 1d4 + 1 (to a minimum score of 1). Draw the same number of additional cards. -> Gossamer reduced her Intelligence from 11 to 9 and was forced to draw a total of four cards instead of just two. Worth noting that I played this as essentially a level of permanent brain fog; her processing capacity got a little slower, but the information and knowledge she had before is still there.

Two of Hearts, the Gem. Fifty gems worth 1,000 gp each appear at your feet.

Ace of Hearts, the Fates. Reality's fabric unravels and spins anew, allowing you to avoid or erase one event as if it never happened. You can use the card's magic as soon as you draw the card or at any other time before you die. -> Gossamer immediately tried using the card to break Lolth's hold on her mother, but her threads were woven too tightly. She alerted Lolth that she was tampering with the Deck, which was bad, but she was able to use the card to instead shift the outcome of events for her sisters. They made it safely out of Menzoberranzan.

Two of Diamonds, the Comet. Lolth orchestrated this pull as punishment and changed the way the card worked as Gossamer drew it. She became connected to a fated foe (her mother). if and when she ever entered initiative with her mother, Gossamer would be the only person able to affect her at all. Velvet and Gossamer would both basically become invulnerable to anything but one another, forcing them to 1-v-1. She would receive her mother's Fey Ancestry as a boon if she slayed her.

Gossamer has one tattoo: a small spellwrought tattoo of find familiar linked to a lust imp that calls herself Moxie. It's on the right side of her body, ribs, just beneath the line of her breasts, and it's simply Moxie's True Name in Infernal. Every member of the Saints of the Eye has one, linked to a different variety of imp; they were gifts from Baator. (The wizard was a spy sent to keep an eye on the Demon Lords, and her middle-manager devil brought them to us as we prepared to heist our way through Menzoberranzan.)

She keeps a much smaller apartment in Baldur's Gate, linked by a teleportation circle (thanks, Grin!) to her home in Waterdeep. Travel is easy and instantaneous, although it's Grin who knows the spell required to use the stupid thing. When she wants to go back and forth between cities, he has to escort her.

Deep within the Underdark, in a section famously known as the Wormwrithings, a beholder called Karazikar was fashioning itself as a god. Using its disintegration eye ray, it constructed a horrible lair and called it the Vast Oblivium: consisting of ten 30' wide, 100' deep, vertical shafts surrounding a central, 500'+ deep chasm known as "Karazikar's Maw," the Oblivium was, indeed, vast.

The Saints of the Eye were not the Saints of the Eye yet when they descended into that pit. The party was hot off their meeting with Menzoberranzan's exiled archmage who had hatched a plan to end the Rage of Demons, and this mage (Vizeran DeVir, probably Viconia's distant uncle) sent them on a hunt for a central Beholder eye. It was necessary for the ritual that would finally stop the Demon Lords.

They knew that they had to kill it. There would be no other way to take its central eye, but that begged the question of how, exactly, the party was expected to descend into a cult pit, kill their god, desecrate and steal pieces of its flesh, and then make it back out alive. It would be dishonest to say that they had a plan when they began their descent. They most certainly did not.