Zydrate Plays Games and Such

Half of this session was shopping and then a surprise ambush with a cliffhanger. With our newfound wealth, we really just wanted to liquidate stuff and then convert it to some resources that will be helpful for the coming boss fight.

Clank buys diamonds and dust for future revivify use. I am unsure if he’s got it prepped and ready or just has it available in his potential spell lists, but it’s good to plan ahead. The DM made this very point about component purchasing; if you know what spell you might be learning in the future it might be a good plan to stock up before you get it so you can actually use it instead of flailing around. Whistle continues to operate on vibes and doesn’t think that far ahead. Clank was mostly focused on a very specific plan.

He scried on Clink, our automaton from some months back that was given to us as a teammate fairly early on in the campaign to fill in a gap of our party’s shortcomings; that we didn’t really have a proper AoE capabilities. Whistle had Shatter but at a low level that was a one-pop and you’re done. As we leveled up he became less necessary and was captured for plot purposes. During this we take a bit too long explaining the visual of using the blessed wineskin from Zaria to use as a sort of spellcasting focus and how it related to how much wine was poured in a sink. I was like ya’ll it’s wine in a sink.

We got a glimpse of plans and rituals, with Clink as the center. We meet some unknown bearded figure, Kreus himself, and some female hobgoblin mercenary. There was some talk of false gods and unmaking the world, and Kreus seemed to be in the process of burning multiple bridges. Hobgoblin merc-type had trouble finding our party cos we’re hiding. He dismisses her, she attacks, cuts off his bronze metal thumb. The other guy poofed away after being disappointed that Kreus seemed to be operating against the grain of a greater organization. That’s moderately good news, because that means we’re not making some grander enemy by taking him out of the picture.

After he scries and some amusing drunken sleep roleplay between us, we finally get a proper long rest. Dakota sets out to liquidate the poisons and fake potions she got from the hags and restock with some actual real stuff. Also a quick liquidation of my various treasures and trinkets I had acquired over time that was starting to clog my inventory listing. Zaria might cry about Dakota selling that 200g bottle of wine, but that’s a lot of money to just drink and piss away, so that’s gone now. I had other trinkets, treasures, bottles of holy water, and a bunch of other crap. Ultimately I walked away from this only losing 200g of my own pot, because I also used ten of the big trade ingots we got from the ship selling to buy ten superior healing potions which we will undoubtedly need shortly. And some other specialized stuff like vitality and such. 

We then switch to Whistle who decided to push the plot forward a bit by investigating, player making damn sure we make some kind of real progress after two sessions or so of mostly just shopping and gambling. She gets a lead on the Fishmonger’s manor, which we knew about but not quite the exact location thereof. So she does get that extra nugget there. 

In a decision of all time, Whistle heads straight there and is ambushed by 3 cultists right on the street. Even after Dakota shouted at everyone to keep their heads down, Whistle was really just banking on her own passive stealth of 13 to get her through. It did not. She gets immediately slow’d which made her only be able to take one little action for her turn. Maybe her movement, I forget. Look up Slow, I forgor. Either way, in a big brain move she just Dimension Door’s 500ft away and absolutely fucks off. A few more checks from Whistle and she does seem to successfully evade the cultists for a length of time, and notes that the cultists have some pull in the city where the crowd generally parts as they travel through, making them a bit easier to spot and avoid.

Narratively this happens roughly the same time that Dakota is already done selling stuff and is likely in the process of buying stuff back and giving the alchemist all of their money back. Clank and Zaria are in their bathhouse bottle episode, cleaning him up from all the wine he got all over him from the scrying ritual. Dunno where in the timetable they fit in or what stage of cleaning up they are in by the time Whistle loses the first set of cultists, but we’ll get to that in a couple o’ weeks.

Alas, she ran into the hobgoblin that just got “fired”, and the DM ended the session fairly early to leave it on a cliffhanger. (Coulda been longer if Whistle decided to actually fight the cultists). As a player, I imagine that maybe the hobgoblin is a mercenary that’s no longer getting paid to look for our party. However it could go one of two ways. Either she could be like “fuh, whatever.” and kind of be on our side? Or she could be like “ahhHA!” and try to go for the capture and go get their money. So it might depend on some clever spell usage (Friends/Suggestion) by Whistle or otherwise any other clever escape techniques. I think Dimension Door is the highest level spell slot they have available so I don’t think she can pop that again. 

It’s getting a bit hard to keep some of this together in my brain because sessions are becoming increasingly… unstable? And short. We had to delay a week because I felt uncomfortable driving the entire game by myself and with other issues popping up including me having developed some temporary amnesia about when our sessions start. We began doing 3 hour sessions instead of 4 so parts of the party can get an extra hour of sleep in. Cos we’re all in different timezones, and we still keep fucking it up. But anyway, enough whining. More videogame.

After last week’s fight with some fiends we spent some time coming down the landmasses inlet and generated a few short rests so we could heal up. We get into port, notice that NPCs are unbothered by Clank’s visage, and it is still under debate whether or not the town is entirely under the cult’s control or not. The DM pointed out that the fact we were not immediately accosted by authorities means they don’t. We’re still not sure how deep their influence goes.

But we stall for some time and when the Paladin joins us, we finally get to the conversation about the nature of selling the boat. Zaria generally preferred to sell the fiendskull controlled boat to, like, a cleric or at least not be duplicitous about what we’re about to sell to someone. As in if we’re up front about the nature of what steers the ship and if a buyer knows what they’re buying, that would satisfy the conditions and Zaria wouldn’t kick up a stink. That’s more or less what we ran into at the port, the local shipwright kind of knows about the local cult but through a high insight check we seemed to get the information that he’s not necessarily -with- them or will sell us out, but also isn’t in a hurry to stand up against them either.

Utilizing my criminal contact background feature, Dakota began establishing the team a location in the underground where people wouldn’t ask too many questions about our dealings and also not really give us up in a hurry to inquiring minds.

We then begin part one of a shopping episode. Dakota wants supplies, like healing. And to offload some random trinkets and mob parts she’s picked up over time, wouldn’t mind clearing out my inventory section in my doc. Clank is getting up in the levels to where he needs to start looking into actual material components. Not something we concerned ourselves about in the earlier levels but he’s getting access to stuff like Revivify and Greater Restoration which require more resources than a ‘mere’ spell slot. So Whistle and Clank go shopping for more instruments but that trip gets co-opted by the DM’s plot and they both find themselves in the presence of the Uhwerker, the guy that was showing up in Clank’s levelup dreams. Now Whistle has borne witness to him, and they talk about the moon's misalignments. I kept making a joke about how Whistle should ask him if he has any guitars to sell because it was so jarring. It was the DM’s way to get to our actual level up lore moments because we kept moving on without a true long rest. But they do get poofed back into the shop eventually and Whistle trades in some stuff for another instrument… I forget. A Pangolin or something.

Zaria went gambling, and hit an in-between point where Dakota was done with her task before moving onto the next. So she followed in stealth for a time. Zaria does her God-Of-Partying thing where she orders everyone around (Dakota grabs a free drink from this) and starts some kind of enthralling presence thing, which Dakota fails the save against. So while her sudden appearance by itself didn’t surprise Zaria, the fact that Dakota found herself some cute tiefling gal to do an irish jig with, was. Being in libations, etc.

During this sudden boost of partying people, the same mysterious figure taking on Thisbe, the sea elf’s visage shows up to Dakota again. Since we know she was likely captured and poofed away by the cult, Dakota is finally sure that some entity is just taking on the form of someone she cares a little about. Not a lot, just a little. This entity makes a point that Dakota has developed mortal-like tendencies like compassion and gratitude. She tried making this point that Dakota wanted to pay Otelia’s value before she ran off, which they argue is not something Devils can do. Dakota counterpointed that devils do have a structure and society, even if their morality is vicious and alien to others. But things like compassion, payment, reward, and other decent virtues are not foreign concepts to her. Devils are considered “Lawful” evil after all, and I don’t see Dakota as an evil alignment; she still profited from Lawful Evil beings in her background. (I still see her as a sort of Chaotic Neutral type thing). This entity also tried getting Dakota to guess who they actually are. She guessed things like Qirozz which wouldn’t make sense, and even tried guessing Kreus the Prophet, the guy we’re after. Even as a player I’m at a complete loss. 

Even in videogames I’m not the best at puzzles or investigations, but this weakness is heavily highlighted in TTRPG games where we have literally nothing to go on but our own player’s intelligence in what the exact questions we need to ask, are. And in those games they tend to be highly visual so we can see proper signs to things, but other than some clue about this entity taking on some horned helmet appearance (potentially referencing Loki, the DM’s preferred online moniker), I have no real in-universe guesses to who this entity is and I continue to be a bit confused why it has turned into a guessing game. Especially to a partially amnesiac ex-devil. How the fuck would she ever know who you are, mate. You just started popping up in my dreams.

We had a very smol thirty minute session one week as we worked on disguising the ship from the nearby nation we stole it from. Changed sails, painted new colors. But at a certain point it became a bit too much. I mentioned very very early on, it quickly became apparent that my character and our Paladin are the two big thoughtheads on this party. Our Warforged is still just learning about the world (and beyond) one levelup at a time and our Bird is highly vibes based who often starts her turns with the line “I could be useful or I could do something really funny”. So that really just leaves Dakota and Zaria. And losing out on Zaria just left me holding the bag for which route to take towards our destination. The type of route would essentially dictate our detectability from our enemies. If they scried on us and just saw we were out to see in the middle of fuck-all nowhere, then that would reduce the chances of them knowing where to send their minions. Go into the coast and along the river, then they can attack us that way. And then we had to name our new ship. Among other smaller decisions. Having this whole thing on my shoulders made me too uncomfortable. I needed the other Team Mom present. So we all cancelled early and moved onto the next session.

With a full party, Zaria was able to identify the spoopy skull at the head of the ship as a  Merrenoloth, which is a fancy Ferryman type devil. I also made an attempt to help Zaria discern the difference of… well. How words work.

This was in character. Dakota scrawled a quick little diagram to which the response was, as expected; “These are the same thing. That one’s red, this one’s red.”

Dakota ate the drawing in frustration.

Zaria mostly wanted to just immediately go inland, give up the spoopy devil boat and just go down the river with our Folding boat. However it was a coin flip, given to our Kenku who had a secret moment with the DM if she wanted to manipulate it in her favored route herself or not. As of this writing we do not know if she actually manipulated it at all or acted as a neutral, indifferent third party. It landed in my favor, so we did eventually go the route I had originally wanted to do. 

So we spent five days at sea. Clank and I progress our respective downtimes. He’s still trying to get music proficiency and I’m learning Elven. I don’t have any grand plan for learning that, just that being a Tiefling rogue didn’t really start me with a ton of options. Just trying to add onto it.

I’ve also flipped a little bit on the magical brooch. It’s something we’ve all had very early in the campaign but I can’t recall how detailed I’ve gone on about it. It’s something we got back in session three or so when we took out that very first cave boss before leaving the first township. Every day people can feed it a couple of their hit dice and get various advantages like charms or portents, which are things that mechanically exist for other classes. Divination Wizards get portents, it’s what I always make Gale do in BG3 because forcing enemies to fail rolls multiple times a day is hilarious. I don’t know where charms are originally from. Every 10-20 charges we put into it, it also evolves and introduces new effects and choices.

The entire campaign I’ve always been incredibly sus of it, but as we’ve leveled up fairly rapidly in the last couple months worth of sessions, the hit dice we feed it didn’t change. So having it eat my ability to recover in short rests made me nervous as hell, but we’re level 8 now and I could just keep feeding it my lower rogue hit dice since I prioritize the higher d10 from my fighter subclass anyway to heal up, not to mention stuff like Second Wind… And then I got a 20 on it a few sessions back and the DM used it on my behalf for a free crit hit against a hag during a session I couldn’t attend. Basically in recent sessions I’ve been trusting the process a bit more, but I did make the mistake of forgetting the fact that it basically ate Whistle’s ability to cast Shatter, which is pretty useful. So I play the downtime like a drug addict, really jonesing for the next hit, especially after I cross the 10 dice threshold and actually get a Familiar. 

Dakota now has an imp friend named Nott. Not named after the critical role character but the Norse personification of the Night. The narration was brief but the DM described it as an old servant of hers from her past, but the entity was stronger then, so there’s an implication that it got a bit forcibly demoted right alongside Dakota. Perhaps as punishment for being an ally of hers. But a lot of this is conjecture. But now with a useful imp familiar that will now travel in raven form, I became a meth addict to the brooch. I even got a nat 20 for a portent which might have been useful if anything happened.

So a couple more days of travel pass and I slingshot myself over the next threshold of how much I have fed into this brooch. Now, unfortunately. It eats two of my three racial traits in trade for an Infernal Calling. I can summon a CR6 or less devil, the strongest one I can do is a CR5 Barbed Devil. It’s a bit of a contest of wills though, as I need to continually pass intimidation checks versus its insight or it becomes hostile to -everyone-. So I lost a bit of my stealth kit utility, I can no longer Detect Thoughts or do Thaumaturgy. But I have a grenade now. Yay. Don’t do drugs, kids.

We make it a few miles out from our destination, and four entities come hurling at us from the city. Gargoyle-type fiends with tridents. It was a fun fight, pretty intense. The big one dropped a Darkness spell on us which forced some odd positioning, and even forced Whistle to burn a Dimension Door to get out of it as safely as she could, mostly to support our werewolf NPC from two of the adds before she got gunned down by them. Zaria pulled a good move by incurring a duel which saved us a round of being hit; but not herself. Clank’s flow was a bit broke, having to burn the first round just running up the deck to even get to the fight. I killed one of the adds which hurt his following turn, utilizing one of his star forms but still had to burn another action to get close enough to do anything. But he later popped a faerie fire which helped negate some of the darkness. I also rolled pretty well, including a couple of crits. I’ve stopped hitpoint counting at this point of our campaign, I just know they were beefy. Especially with the revelation that the DM doesn’t even have an exact HP count for some bosses, and just letting the fight go long enough where he goes “yeah that’s about right” and lets us kill a thing. Our Bard also got two very useful counterspells in, countering two Cloud Kills which are big aoe 5d8’s plus poison. All around, everyone was incredibly useful.

My fiendslayer trait came in handy, allowing me to do double damage a couple of times. I got a gnarly 66 points of damage against the main boss and I became a major target of ire, which becomes narratively important shortly. I actually almost go down, getting to THREE hitpoints. It might have helped if I remembered that I had uncanny dodge to save myself some pain, but we’ve only been level 8 for like two sessions so it’s a toy in my toybox that got buried a bit with all the other shit we can do. Considering I almost went down I’ll probably make an effort to remember I have it.

The DM considered nerfing my Fiendslayer to only activate if I crit on an attack. However Zaria did bring up some points that Dakota is sorta turning into the party’s main DPS with literally all other players being some type of buffbot. Zaria the paladin can do decent damage with Smites but that’s a limited in-combat resource and she’s largely taking defensive feats. Clank is a bit of a hybrid once he gets the ball rolling. Whistle’s base kit and bard subclass is very much geared for support but the player is trying to grab aoe damage stuff as she levels up, and is the holder of the dreaded bombstick. Like the other two she has the potential to do decent damage but only in limited bursts with resources… But Dakota, sneak attack is eternal and last session’s buff to her gun makes her an absolute machine against fiends. After that, some of our damage comes from the DM-NPC’s that the DM brings in, usually to close a gap in our capabilities. And they’re all some form of temporary anyway.

The DM accepted this as a reasonable datapoint and is currently letting me keep Fiendslayer as is with the potential story beat of fiend enemies who will take Dakota as a higher priority enemy in fights. So I get good fuckoff damage against fiends but they’re going to start recognizing me as a threat. The John Wick arc has begun.