Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 20 May 2018

Characters
Archibald (innkeeper, 1st level Thief)
played by American John

Louis Black (politician, 1st level Warrior)
played by Petra

Nell (innkeeper, 1st level Warrior)
played by Todd

Session 3
A trainload of fur trappers passed through town, bringing along a barbarous Canadian holiday from the savage northern hinterlands during their stopover. Axes were thrown, foul-smelling fermented beaver meat was consumed, gravy was poured onto potatoes, and pretty much every drop of alcohol in town got drunk.

The Canadians are gone, back on their train, bound for who knows where, but the whole town is dragging in the aftermath of the celebration. Seems like half the damn town is laid up with one thing or another - hangovers, alcohol poisoning, beaver poisoning, gravy poisoning, and alcohol withdrawal while we wait for a new shipment from back east.

Meriwether, Eldon, Ethel, and Blaze were all hiding out in the cabin nursing unbearable hangovers. Sweet Nell had a pretty bad headache, but she felt up to another trip down into the mine. Louis Black had a sweet new beaver-fur hat, and bragging rights after drinking a handful of fur trappers under the table.

Archibald, Louis, and Nell decided to continue their search for the demon shrine the Freemasons had found and the Mexican police had been searching for. Louis loaned Archibald some money to help him buy thieves' tools, and Archibald repaid the favor immediately by forging lift tickets for all three of them. The were pretty fine craftsmanship, but the elevator attendant in the Gallows barely even looked at them, only glancing down for a moment before going back to holding a glass of cold water against his throbbing forehead.
 
The group decided to take a slightly different path than they had before, to avoid the high-gravity area where their friend Daniel and Officers Benicio and Shia all died. They traveled northwest into a region with enormous natural tunnels, where the gravity felt lighter and put a spring in their step. The group found another waterfall, and were attacked by a giant centipede that had been drinking from the pool. Louis drew his elephant gun and annihilated the creature with a single shot. Nell complained about her headache, and when she went to drink from the pool, found a statuette in the catch basin. It was a carving of a bat in Aztec style, with Aztec writing on the base. They wrapped up the statue and decided to show it to Meriwether, since his service in the Mexican-American War had seemingly familiarized him with some of the art from the region.

They continued northwest, arriving in an area of medium mining tunnels. They crossed another stream, possibly a tributary of the semi-circular stream they had found running around the northern side of the Maw. They also found an entrance to one of the Yellow Jacket Mining Company's claimed mine tunnels. The sound of insects chittering, omnipresent on the entire level, seemed somehow louder from inside the mining tunnel. They decided to pass it by.

They turned north, and entered another area of huge natural tunnels. This area also had increased gravity, and Archibald thought it might border the other high-gravity region they encountered before. It seemed there might be no way to enter the northwest quadrant without passing through an exhausting slog in high gravity. They found a pool with stagnant, cloudy water, which they declined to drink from, and found a mule wearing Yellow Jacket livery, with a pick and shovel strapped to its sides. They decided they would return the mule to the mining company in exchange for a finder's fee. With the lost animal following, they continued north.

As they traveled north, they passed into an area of man-made corridors, the floors and walls covered with stone tiles. They found an unusual doorway, one decorated with images of ants and a woman with the lower body of an ant. They decided this must be the shrine, and prepared to enter. Archibald the thief recognized that one of the tiles had a false surface, and underneath was a bear trap. It took him several tries with his crowbar to trigger it safely.

Unfortunately, while he was disarming the trap, they were approached from inside the shrine by a giant soldier ant. The ant bit Archibald in the back, wounding him badly. All three friends fired on the ant, but in the confusion, none of their shots harmed it. The ant attacked again, tearing into Archibald's gut and sending him tumbling to the ground bleeding. Louis used his magic cat gauntlets, sounding a musical note that visibly rippled through the air like a pebble tossed in a pond, lifting the ant off the ground and causing its carapace to fracture. The fight continued until Louis managed to stab the ant in the chink between its head and thorax, causing a gout of fluid to burst from the wound. The ant was still alive, but its morale failed; it ran past the group and down the hall.

Nell and Louis rolled over Archibald's body to see if he might still be alive though unconscious, but a look at the wound and the lake of blood left on the floor showed that he was truly dead. They tied his body to the back of the donkey, and returned south into the area of high gravity, deciding to leave further exploration of the shrine for another day. They passed through the enormous natural tunnels without incident, but their time in the mine and the difficulty of traversing this area began to fatigue them.

Nell and Louis force-marched the rest of their journey, although neither of them suffered injury as a result. As they passed the Yellow Jacket mine, a worker ant emerged from the mine and quivered its antennae at them, but they hurried ahead of it, and the creature didn't follow.

After passing through the final easy passage traveling southwest, they returned to the lip of the Maw and made their way back to the elevator. The elevator operator was surprised to see the donkey. Nell and Louis hadn't heard the news before now, but Yellow Jacket had a whole team of miner's trapped down here somewhere, and this donkey was the first sign of any of them in a week. The elevator operator put them in contact with the mining company, which paid for the return of the donkey, and offered them $50 a head for each miner they could manage to return alive.

Nell had other ideas though. She wanted to take the lump of demon ore and trade it to someone who might be able to magic Archibald's body back to life, or at least back to unlife to go to work as some kind of zombie servitor. Louis backed away slowly from the mad look in Nell's eyes, and explained he might have to sit that part out, as he would likely be busy making social visits to his numerous mistresses and bastard children. Meriwether seemed surprisingly open to the idea though. Apparently he saw this kind of thing all the time when he was in the army. He was particularly interested in the statue they'd found. He recognized it as Camazotz, the so-called Death Bat, a likely enemy of the demon Hezzemuth.

Gains
Canadian beaver-fur hat
$10 finder's fee for return of the Yellow Jacket donkey
contract with Yellow Jacket Mining Company for return of lost miners
statuette of Camazotz the Death Bat (worth $90, or usable as a holy symbol by a worshiper of Camazotz)

Losses
Archibald (killed by giant ant)

XP
1 XP for out-drinking the raucous Canadians (Louis only)
1 XP for forging lift-tickets (Archibald only)
1 XP for giant centipede encounter
1 XP for rescuing donkey
1 XP for bear trap
2 XP for giant soldier ant encounter
1 XP for fleeing giant worker ant encounter
2 XP for negotiating with Yellow Jacket
4 XP for exploring four new hexes
Total: 12 XP for Sweet Nell, 13 XP for Louis Black

Running graveyard (and session of demise)
Archibald the 1st level Thief (3), Officer Shia "the Beef" the NPC Mexian police-officer (2), Daniel the plumber (2), Officer Benicio "the Bull" the NPC Mexican police-officer (2), Luther the factory-hand (2), Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)

Postmortem
This week's random campaign event was "Sickness." The reason I was hosting this game, instead of playing in my regular Sunday game, was because two of my fellow players in the regular game are Canadian, and planned to spend the Saturday beforehand celebrating Victoria Day, aka May Two-Four, which traditionally involves throwing axes, eating beaver tails with maple syrup, and consuming celebratory quantities of alcohol. (Or so they told me, the whole thing sounds really made up.) My description of the event was meant to be poking a bit of gentle fun at my friends, not to indicate any serious anti-Canadian sentiment. 

I'm really enjoying using a random campaign event generator each session. It certainly helps give a sense of the campaign world being alive and separate from the players' direct control. Having two weeks of downtime between the start of each expedition is working pretty well so far, part of me wonders if I should up it to a month. If I did, I also wonder if there should be separate lists of events by season, to make spring, summer, winter, fall feel different from one another. Part of me also likes the idea of adding in something like Hill Cantons' "chaos index" so that the campaign world responds - not to the players' explicit desires to what should happen next, but instead to how much trouble and disorder they cause. That's not really necessary, and not worth the work at the moment. But one idea I like from Black Powder, Black Magic is that the War in Hell somehow mirrored the Civil War. If killing in the mortal realm somehow causes (or is caused by?) fighting between demons in Hell, then the players leaving a trail of bodies behind them seems like it should carry a risk of unleashing some kind of metaphysical chaos.

Louis continued to be the MVP of combat, obliterating their first enemy with a single shot, and dealing enough damage to the giant soldier ant to trigger its morale roll. The soldier ant is the most dangerous thing they've faced so far, and if the second attack had been on anyone but Archibald, they might've all come out alive. Unfortunately for Archie, I've been rolling the dice to decide who gets attacked, and his number came up twice in a row. I'm glad I remembered to check morale for the ant, and I'm going to try to remember to continue checking it for groups of insects in the future. Thinking about this combat made me wonder if I should have been doing reaction rolls for the insects this whole time. The soldier ant was guarding a demon shrine, so of course it attacked, but the other insects they've encountered so far might not need to be automatically hostile. It works nicely to create a funnel-like environment for zero-level characters, but leveled characters probably deserve the chance to get through some encounters without needing to fight. I could decide to do that going forward, or I could decide that there's a good reason the insects have all been hostile so far, and that if the players address that reason, then the hostility will stop. I'm leaning toward the second reason so that the change in their behavior will be linked to some goal the players accomplished, rather than me just changing my ruling for no good (in-game) reason.

The players have found both the sites I prepped so far for level 1, so I may need to prepare another "point of interest," although it sounds like their next adventure in Brimstone will be out in the field, rather than down in the mine (more on that in a second). Playing through like this, the feel of the game is not quite what I want it to be. First, it feels very open. In principle, each hex is supposed to represent a tangled maze of tunnels, which is why it takes an hour to find the way though. In practice, the players walk in, encounter whatever there is to be seen, and then walk out in whatever direction they choose. It makes me wonder if I should be using a mechanic more like Papers & Pencils' "flux space", where the players enter, declare which exit they wish to try to find, roll for encounters, and risk getting lost each time, until they map it successfully, at which point they can navigate more easily. In demonstration, it seems like this should work out. This could be combined with making some of the hexes complexes of rooms (4, 8, 12) instead of flux spaces. This would likely make each hex feel less like a single open room and more like a labyrinth of tunnels. The cost of making this change though would be to slow the game down considerably. Alternatively, I could lean into the idea of it being very open down there, making it less like a real mine, and more like a hollow earth / lost world environment.

Second, the level feels very empty. The random tables have succeeded in placing a single winding stream, fed by multiple waterfalls, a couple dead-end hexes that are cut off on five of their six sides, and a couple chasms that block travel in one direction. However, in each hex there's only a 2-in-100 chance of a demon shrine appearing as a complication, and a 1-in-20 chance of a "point of interest". (Since features are rolled twice for each hex, I guess this becomes closer to 10% rather than 5%, which makes for about 3 points of interest per level, on average. That maybe sounds alright, but the thing about random tables is that in small environments you never get the average result - you get "too many" repeats of some things and no appearance at all of others.) These are the only mini-dungeon-like structures. There are also chances to find caves, caverns, empty mines, and faction-controlled mine entrances, but so far I haven't been treating those as mini-locations - although maybe I should be. Writing a small random generator to create explorable mine-shafts would create definite mappable locations (and give a logical place to find some of the treasures and have some of the encounters). Making caves/caverns real locations might prevent each hex from feeling like it's just an open space.

Third, the movement rate is a little awkward. (Or it would become awkward if I changed anything else.) The characters get a number of movement points which are equal to the average of their Stamina scores. I've been treating this just as 12. Moving through each hex costs 2 movement points (unless it has high gravity, which makes it 4, or low gravity, which makes it 0). This is just about enough to go in, come back, and get out in one session, with a chance, but not a certainty, of forced marching to make the last couple hexes. On the one hand, this freedom of movement lets me get through every session in a couple hours. On the other hand, it contributes to the feeling of openness. Getting to move 12 spaces, instead of 6, would give pretty much total freedom of movement, which would likely make the problem worse - unless it was combined with flux space. Combining flux space with the current movement rates might slow the game to a true crawl and make camping mandatory. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you goal is to get the players in, back, and out in a couple hours, having to talk your way though several nights of camping could be too much of a slowdown. 12 moves a day, combined with flux space, and with a few more obstacles that limit crossing into whichever hex you chose, might be able to make the whole thing feel like more of a maze, and less like a giant open plain, a single enormous cavern that contains the entire level. Ruins of the Undercity and Mad Monks of Kwantoom are probably decent guides for how to make location generators for making caves, mines, shrines, points of interest.

I'm going to continue to playing this as written for now. I want to be sure I understand what I'm tinkering with before I try taking it apart and putting it back together. The issue I most need to think about before my next game is what sort of quest to send them on the resurrect Archibald (and what sort of quest-giver will accept their demon ore in return). I suppose that if I want to play a game that alternates between default underground exploration and player-driven above-ground questing, that I need to think about how I want to design the quests. I know that when I played in Carl's game, he sent us on several, but I have no idea how he came up with them. If I had some kind of random quest generator for this game, I guess it would generate some people who are capable of trading demon ore for magic items, along with some seeds of ideas of what task they want done in order to broker the exchange. (A list of magic items would be nice, but not really necessary, since there are so many out there.) You could use this generator a few times to generate rumors, so that players who don't have a goal in mind know what sorts of things are possible, and what treasures they could go for if they have nothing better to do with their ore. You could also use it each time the players propose a quest to accomplish a goal of their own choosing, to help figure out how they're going to accomplish it. I would also want the generator to have a chance of making quests that are recursive - to do the favor for one person, you need something from someone else, who wants a favor of their own to provide it. That structure is common enough in fairy tales, and I experience it once in Carl's game; it's very satisfying when multiple quests come to fruition in a single session. That's far beyond my needs for right now. Right now I just need one quest for next session, whenever that will be. But I mean, to play this kind of game consistently, week after week, a generator would help. Yoon Suin or Stars Without Number would probably be a good role model for that kind of situation generator.

Those GOD-DAMN Bird People in Scarabae

I was able to play one final session in Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque's online Scarabae campaign last year.

After this game, I picked up a new shift at work, which prevented me from playing anymore online games during the Scarabae timeslot. Also sometime after this game, the referee, Jack, renamed Scarabae "Umberwell", and he's been posting a lot of new ideas and hosting a lot of new games in the renamed city.

I harbor some hope that I'll get a chance to venture back to the weird city of Umberwell-Scarabae in the future, but for now, this post is a swansong.

At the end of Travita's previous adventure in Scarabae, Yuriko, the adopted daughter of her tiefling "odd jobs" broker Koska, was kidnapped by anti-city cultists called the Children of Fimbul.

Traviata may have been experiencing a bit of an identity crisis over her previous failures to sufficiently punish "the guilty" (basically, other, more successful artists) but the other half of her life's mission was to protect "the innocent" (herself, and other people who remind her of herself) - and Koska's daughter Yuriko certainly qualified! So together with her previous companions, Khajj the minotaur cleric, Crumb the kenku artificer, and Viktor the dragonborn sorcerer, and a new ally, Dr Aleister Whiffle the human fighter, Traviata boarded a steamship bound for Zarubad, the trading port nearest the jungle where the Children of Fimbul are believed to be holed up with Yuriko.

Zarubad proved to be quite different from the close, dark, dirty streets of Scarabae. Traviata had passed from a city where it seemed to always be night (or at least draped in impenetrable fog) to a city bathed in sunlight, the hot glow like being fixed in the opera's limelight, the wide streets a crowded riot of colored fabrics and flowers, the air thick with the scent of spices and sweating bodies.

In an attempt to get at much free swag as possible of Koska's dime prepare for their upcoming expedition into the jungle, the group split up in the market and began shopping and listening for rumors. The jungles south of Zarubad were supposedly full of biting insects spreading a disease called "monkey fever" so Khajj and Aleister bough gourds full of liquid insect repellent, and Traviata, retaining her sense of civility, purchased cones of incense she was certain would keep her safe. Crumb heard rumors of an undead paladin haunting the jungle, once charged with defending his god's temple, but cursed after abandoning his duty. Traviata heard about an ancient lost city somewhere in a basin or crater, allegedly filled with magic, which she thought would be a likely hiding spot for the Children of Fimbul, if they could find it.

Unfortunately, no matter how many maps they bought, every drawing seemed to disagree with all the others. The local guides likewise had nothing but ill-words for one another, so the group hired the most self-promoting specimen, a young woman named Salome, who was only too happy to tell them that all the other guards were frauds, charlatans, and thieves out to rob them of their wages. Traviata took an instant liking to the young woman and trusted her implicitly. On Salome's advice, they finished shopping by buying a canoe, a barrel of water, tents and mosquito netting, and a few other camping supplies, and finally set out into the jungle.

Collectively, the group decided to take the western branch of the river that led into the jungle. It was rumored to go deeper than its twin, and Salome claimed that it led all the way to a depression where lobster people lived. Traviata thought this "depression" sounded an awful lot like the "basin" she knew they should be headed towards, so it was decided. In less than a day on the water, they passed into the jungle itself, and as they did, the sky went dark from the canopy overhead, and the air filled with the sounds of frogs, insects, monkeys. On the third day, Khajj and Traviata both had good luck while fishing, supplementing their dry (though spicy and flavorful) rations.

On the sixth day down the river, they found a clearing that looked like an abandoned campsite. They found evidence of recent digging and dug it back up, finding a cache containing folded wooden tables and chairs, perhaps left by someone planning to return later. On the seventh day they found a more permanent campsite ... or rather, they found the remains of a more permanent campsite, since the place had been burned to the ground, with nothing but the scorched shells of cabins and long-buildings remaining. They were about to return to their canoes when Khajj spotted a statue he was sure had religious significance - a giant image of a man carrying a crocodile on his back. He was intrigued, but when he asked Salome, she knew nothing about either campsite, and had never heard of such a statue or image before, and Khajj felt the first tremors of misgiving pass through his heart. Searching the campsite further revealed no clues, only that whoever burned the place also seemed to have broken and wrecked everything that wasn't consumed by the fire, except for a tarot card depicting Strength, found in the mess hall.

Khajj's mighty heart fluttered again, and he remembered a human parable that might make sense of the statue. The first man who stood on a riverbank spoke to the first crocodile to come up onto the land. The two made an agreement with each other, that each would carry the other in times of danger. The crocodile began by carrying the man across the river, then climbed aboard the man's shoulders where it remained for the rest of his life, leaving the man feeling burdened and deceived. Salome said she'd never heard that story before, and Traviata too felt the first whispers of doubt begin to tickle her ears.

The statue had a doorway with stairs leading downward built into its base, and the group decided to investigate. They arrived in a long hall, and though Viktor's lizard eyes could spot a door at the far end, his spell to create a magical hand couldn't reach it. Mighty Khajj led the group through the darkened hall, and his canny senses noticed a pit trap in the center of the floor, and, after the group had sidled around that, the trigger for some other trap just ahead. Crumb was able to trigger the trap from a distance, releasing a huge scything blade that swept across the hall, and then ran forward and spiked the trapdoor shut. Finally close enough, they asked Viktor to open the far door with his mage hand, although just as he did, everyone but Salome experienced a kind of premonition and fell to the floor to take cover. As the door opened, Salome was thrown backward down the hall, as though by the shockwave from a silent, invisible explosion. Inside the door they found a spiral staircase leading up into the statue itself, with the skeleton of a giant lizard or crocodile scattered around the foot of the stairs. Aleister felt very worried that the bones might somehow reanimate, but Triavata thought that the skull would make an excellent crown and put it on. (A lot of my characters end up doing things like this. It might be my fondness for hats.)

To ease Aleister's mind Viktor cast a spell to sense magic and examined the bones. They were ordinary, but when he looked at the staircase, he noticed that several of the steps were somehow enchanted, and marked them out by drawing on the steps immediately before and after each one. They made their way safely to the top, where they found a large globular jug hanging from the wall by a strap. Guessing it might be important, Traviata tried to identify the object, but Victor simply pulled it down, in a hurry to return to safety outside. Somehow the jug had been weighing down the lever it had been hung from like a coat peg, and when it was removed, the lever popped up, and the entire structure began to collapse. Even the statue itself seemed to rain down upon them. Crumb, Traviata, and Salome were all nearly crushed, but Khajj rescued Traviata and hearty Salome somehow stayed on her feet and managed to pull Crumb's body to safety. Aleister and Viktor clung together, limped out side-by-side. Outside in the wreckage, Khajj and Aleister administered aid to Crumb and Traviata, saving them from death. Finally safe, the group made camp for the night on the shore.

In the morning, Traviata fully examined the clay vessel and found it to be an alchemical jug, an enchanted object capable of generating gallons of fresh water and other liquids. Before leaving, the group made a final sweep of the campsite. Khajj found and tamed a baby bird that was being kept in a pen by the remains of the barracks. Salome had never seen a bird like it before, but Aleister was able to match it to a drawing from the guidebook he bought in Zarubad - it was an axe-beak, a fearsome jungle predator. Khajj seemed quite pleased to have a new pet. Viktor meanwhile decided for some reason to enchant a pebble to make light, then threw it down the military latrine. Surprisingly, he found a human body down there, a solider wearing scale armor and carrying a warhammer. Crumb climbed down into the horrible pit and retrieved the soldier's belt pouch, which contained five small gemstones. After bathing in the river, he was allowed back in the canoe, and the group continued downstream. For the rest of that day, and four more days after, they continued down the river, eating fresh fish, drinking fresh alchemically-treated water, and hearing distant roaring sounds like some animal loud as thunder, growing closer the further they went downstream.

On the evening of the thirteenth day, the river ran out, widening out to a mudflat and disappearing down a sinkhole, perhaps continuing somewhere far underground. The group left their boat by the "shore" and approached a plateau that stood over the jungle in this spot. Salome claimed success and bragged that she had successfully led them to the "depression" she'd told them about, brushing off all questions about the lobster people who were supposed to live there. Traviata wondered if the plateau could really be the lip of some great crater, and if so, if it could be the "basin" that held the lost city she still suspected the Children of Fimbul were using as their jungle hideaway, the place they were keeping poor Koska's kidnapped daughter, Yuriko.

Viktor led the way, using his magical slippers to walk up the wall as easily as he walked across the ground. As he strolled up the cliff-face, he saw a boulder, practically a whole island made of stone, floating in the air above the jungle far too high up for any method of approach the group currently had on-hand. He passed carvings of winged lizards and curling flames. Eventually, he reached a landing and threw down a rope to his friends, inspecting the rotted remains of a wooden door set directly into the wall of the plateau. After his friends joined him, Viktor used his mage hand to push the last remnants of the door out of the way, when he heard a frail woman's voice call out from inside: "Hello? Who's there?" An impossibly old-looking woman toddled out of the doorway, short, stooped over, wrinkled and wizened with age.

Viktor tried engaging the woman in conversation, with mixed results. "Victor? Are you the Victor who brings the bread? No one has brought me bread in a long time." Eventually he learned that the woman, who insisted on being called "Nanny" was especially perturbed by a group of "those GOD-DAMN bird people" who, she claims, keep breaking into her home and stealing her things. She gives Crumb a long, evil look until Viktor is able to regain her attention.

Noticing that "Nanny" keeps grumbling about how things are "not like they were in the OLD days," Viktor tries asking her what the old days were like. "Oh, you mean the OLD days? You mean before those GOD-DAMN bird people came around and started ruining everything?" Yes, those old days. It emerged that in the old days, Nanny was a bit of a literal hell-raiser, dancing naked in the woods, summoning demons from the Pit, and performing other bits of black magic just for the fun of it. "Not like these punk kids these days, no respect, and not like those GOD-DAMN bird people neither!" Traviata asked if Nanny could use some of her black magic to cast a spell to locate a lost child. Nanny readily agreed, but it quickly became clear that she thought they were finding the child so that they could put together a good, wholesome, old-fashioned human sacrifice. Aghast, Viktor tried a different tactic, and asked the easily-distractable old woman if she could help them find some people who'd moved into the area recently, some people who were practicing dark magic, but doing it like a bunch of PUNKS and AMATEURS, not the RIGHT way, not like Nanny and her friends used to do it in the OLD days. Nanny (again) readily agreed, and wandered back inside to cast her spell. Khajj wanted to sneak away immediately as soon as the woman was out of sight, but the others persuaded him to stay and hear her out.

(Now, Traviata is a smart woman, but she's not very emotionally complex. She has two goals in life, feels like she hasn't been doing enough to accomplish one of them, and then finds herself face-to-face with an actual honest-to-goodness wicked witch who lives in the forest and wants to cook a child in her oven. It shouldn't be a surprise what happens next. And - if you think more carefully about the tropes of D&D than I was at the time - it also shouldn't be a surprise how that works out for her. I WAS surprised, but you shouldn't be.)

While the group waited, Vikor used his magic shoes to walk around the perimeter of the plateau, and saw the wreck of a sailing ship, looking to all the world like it was fresh out of the ocean, lying broken atop the jungle canopy. He returned just around the same time Nanny was finishing up her hour-long spellcasting ritual. She emerged carrying a hand-drawn map that called for them to backtrack several days back up the river (Khajj shot Salome a withering look) and would have them end up near the shipwreck Victor saw. "Now you want to avoid this spot here, here, and here ... that's where those GOD-DAMN bird people make their filthy nests ..." She started mumbling again until Viktor assured her they'd use the map to get revenge on the AMATEURS for her. "Yeah, really show 'em what black magic should look like! Now in my day, in the OLD days, we would have skinned them alive before roasting them on the..." Again, she began to ramble at some length before Viktor cut her off again. "Victor? Oh Victor! Oh are you the one who brings the bread?" At this point it was Traviata who cut her off, play-acting at feeling happy and offering her a celebratory drink to her health. Despite seemingly having her fill of all the scenery she could chew, Nanny happily accepted the beverage and quaffed it in one gulp.

What Nanny actually drank was magical, alchemical poison, which would have killed a lesser being, but mostly just seemed to make her angry! She immediately slashed Traviata with her fingernails, nearly killing the poor singer. Nearly everyone else attacked Nanny with their guns or spells, and all of them bounced off her iron-hard hide, although Salome managed to cut Nanny with her scimitar, drawing first blood from the old crone. Nanny retaliated by slashing Salome, again, nearly murdering the woman with one stroke. Nanny continued to shrug off almost everything the group could throw at her, though Aleister's magical singing spear was able to pierce her flesh as well, as Nanny continued to savage Salome, who at this point was only kept alive by Khajj's quick thinking and magical healing touch. Finally, at the end, Aleister managed to pin her down with his singing spear, Crumb used his magical firearm to put an enchanted bullet into her, and Salome, whirling around like a pirouetting ballerina, swung wide her scimitar and lopped Nanny's head clean off, ending the fight.

That was the end of the night, and as I said, I never made it back to find out how the adventure ended, although in fairness, I don't think Jack ever made it back to this particular plotline either. After the new year, he changed the city's name and began running a slightly different sort of campaign there. When Traviata next sets foot in Scarabae-Umberwell, it will be a far different place than she remembers. I imagine her stepping off a boat on the docks, her memories of Zarubad already fading, unable to remember why she ever left the dank and gloom of her home, to rediscover anew what weird delights await her in the remade Umberwell.

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 13 May 2018

Characters
Louis Black (politician, 1st level Warrior)
played by Petra

Archibald (innkeeper)
Luther (factory hand)
Daniel (plumber)
Meriwether (infantryman)
played by American John

Detective Guillermo "the Bull" (man-at-arms)
Officer Benicio "the Bull" (man-at-arms)
Officer Shia "the Beef" (man-at-arms)
NPC allies

Session 2
Louis Black and his friends enjoyed some very short-lived fame after their expedition down into the Brimstone Mine, but they were bumped out of the limelight by some city-slicker Freemason architects from back east. That trio - Balthazar, Melchior, and Abendego - seemed like they were all over town, buying rounds for the house, and crowing about their great architectural discoveries down the Maw. For a week now, all anyone's wanted to talk about is those three hotshots and their fancy-dancy statuette of some blackstone lady from some ancient build site.

Well sir, Louis Black had heard just about enough about those three to last him a lifetime, when some newcomers approached him, said they still remembered his expedition, and wanted to know if he could apprentice them. Immediately taking a liking to the four deferential sorts, Louis was happy to regale them with some tales of his own before they headed over to the Gallows to purchase tickets down the Maw. Unfortunately for them, they all had a round of free beers pressed into their hands and had to listen to a rousing chorus of "He's a Jolly Good Fellow" before they managed to get onto the elevator to head down the shaft.

The group decided to try a different path than last time, heading northeast. They found comfortable passage through large mining tunnels, crossed an underground stream, and were stopped in their tracks by a 20' wide chasm. Just as they were turning around to double-back and find a new path, the low clicking and chittering that filled the air throughout the mines took on a new level of urgency, and they found themselves facing a giant ant with the chasm at their backs.

Louis drew his cavalry saber and commanded the others: "Charge!" Meriwether gave a quick salute before turning his rifle on the ant, and Archibald joined him with his pistol, although both shots hit the ground between the insect's legs. Daniel and Luther surged forward and bopped the critter on the head with their wrenches, but the durn ant turned and took a bit out of Luther's chest, putting an early end to him. Louis sensed impending disaster and surged forward, drawing his elephant gun, and planting his foot on fallen Luther's back before shooting a round down the ant's gullet, practically exploding it from the inside. Archibald and Daniel quickly relieved Luther's body of its valuables. Daniel took a second to compare Luther's little hand-wrench to his own oversized monkey-wrench before deciding to keep his original tool and tuck Luther's into his belt-loop. Louis congratulated the others, "You boys are learning from the best!" before giving loyal Meriwether a clap on the back. As they were leaving, Meriwether spotted a 100 peso-bill stuck to one of the ant's feet, and handed it over to Louis, whom he instinctively trusted as a superior officer.

Continuing northeast, they followed the stream into an area of large man-made corridors. Their passage north continued to be blocked by a chasm, although it narrowed to only 10' wide. Archibald asked if Louis had brought any rope, and upon learning that he hadn't, felt his esteem for the politician's supposed adventuring prowess diminish somewhat. They followed the stream to its source, bubbling up out of the ground, and found a lost donkey wearing a blood-stained serape draped over its back. They decided to adopt the tame beast, and it followed docilely behind them.

Turning south, they found huge natural tunnels, towering 20' over their heads. Exploring this expansive place, they came upon another donkey wearing the same style of serape. The two were apparently a pair, as they sidled up next to each other and began sniffing each other's manes. Daniel petted the new creature, and found more money under the blanket (another hundred pesos, in 20 peso-bills this time) along with a fist-sized nugget of demon ore. He took custody of them for the group. After another hour of searching though, they realized there was no way out of this section, and so returned back to the area of tiled corridors before continuing northeast.

Here they moved into an area of medium natural tunnels, and found three badly lost Mexican police officers - Detective Guillermo "the Bull", Officer Benicio "the Bull", and Officer Shia "the Beef". The police explained that they've been dispatched by the Mexican government, pursuing a pair of sisters - Salma and Penelope - who were devoted acolytes of the demon queen Hezzemuth, and had been convicted of multiple murders down south. Guillermo said that there were rumors of Hezzemuth sightings in the region of Brimstone, and that they came down into the mine hoping to find the demon's shrine, along with the murderous sisters. Things went very wrong though, and the police thanked the adventurers for the rescue. The two donkeys nuzzled into their owners, as relieved as the police to be reunited with them. Daniel breathed a sigh of relief that he'd already hidden the cash and ore before returning the donkey. Louis offered the group's help to gather intelligence and lead another search into the mine, if Guillermo could provide funding. Guillermo agreed, and said he was certain he could convince the Mexican consulate to wire him the money as soon as he could get to a telegraph office. A handshake later, and all eight men made it back to the surface where they temporarily parted ways.

Louis Black was very excited to have new allies.

Following a hunch, the group decided to actually listen to some of the rumors swirling around the local celebrity Freemasons. Archibald's prior occupation as an innkeeper guided him to find the best eavesdropping spots, and the group managed to plant a few leading questions so that someone else in the crowd was heard to ask them. They noticed that the statuette the three had been showing off depicted a cruel woman with the lower body of an ant, matching Guillermo's description of the so-called "pain mistress" Hezzemuth. Listening further, they learned that the architects were calling their discovery "the shrine of an ancient religion," and that it was somewhere in the northwest quadrant of the first level of the mine. What's more, the three claimed that the shrine held some kind of sulfur spring that acted as a portal to another world.

Feeling confident that they were on the right track, the group sold their pesos to the town money-changer, getting $20 American for their troubles. They used the cash to buy rope and a tent, and reconnected with Guillermo, who offered them $5 per person per day of their trip. They agreed, and Guillermo paid everyone's fares back down the Maw. In the spirit of being more prepared this time around, Louis also took along the contents of the mysterious oil-cloth-wrapped package he found last time - two bronze cat-faced gauntlets that seemed to hum and sing like tuning forks.

The group decided to start by going due north, entering an area with medium natural tunnels, two streams merging into one, and an old mine entrance. One branch of the stream came from the east,  from the area they'd explored the week before, and the combined streams flowed back to the west in the direction Louis and his other friends had been three weeks ago on their first expedition. They hoped to follow the water's other branch upstream by continuing north, but found that the tunnels narrowed so much they'd be crawling on their hands and knees, and Joseph and Maria (the donkeys) would never fit. Daniel volunteered to crawl ahead while the others waited for him.

Daniel discovered a waterfall that appeared to be the stream's source in this area. Unfortunately, he also discovered that there were no other passages out of the narrow tunnels, except back the way he came in. When Daniel emerged with this bad news, everyone else noticed that he was coated in some kind of purple dust. When he tried brushing himself off, he inhaled some of whatever it was, felt malign magical energies coursing through him, and promptly passed out. They placed Daniel over the back of Joseph the donkey, and pressed on to the northwest.

Continuing on the path to the mysterious shrine, the group continued through more medium natural tunnels, but felt weighed down by extra gravity, as Louis had once before. They knew that traveling through this region would exhaust them, and they'd need to make camp for the night soon. Unfortunately, they never got the chance. Again the ambient clattering and clicking rose to a fever pitch, and the group was beset by four giant ants and a giant grasshopper. The excitement was enough to wake Daniel.

An ugly, vicious combat followed. Archibald started by shooting the grasshopper, and Daniel sicced his pet baby alligator on it, and the alligator tore one of its legs off. The smell of insect blood must have driven the ants into a frenzy, because one tore into the grasshopper and killed it, and another shredded Officer Benicio "the Bull". Louis acquitted himself admirably with the elephant gun, obliterating his second giant ant with a single shot before being bitten twice while shielding the others from attack with his body. Guillermo and Shia worked together to kill another of the massive insects, and Daniel and Archibald followed their example, using teamwork to put a third ant in the ground.

And then things went wrong... Louis said the magic word - "myow myow" - to use his cat gauntlets, but only managed to send a visible wave of sound bouncing off the ceiling, sounding a musical note that reverberated for the rest of the fight. Guillermo missed his shot and killed Daniel. Poor Meriwether, perhaps still suffering from a head injury he got in his soldiering days, continued his string of missed shots, but this bullet went wide and killed Officer Shia "the Beef". Archibald finally ended the fiasco by taking up Daniel's massive pipe wrench and clubbing the final ant to death.

The only good fortune to emerge from the fight was that both sides recognized that the shootings were accidental, and neither made war on the other. Guillermo wept for his colleagues, and Archibald and Meriwether helped him tied their bodies to the backs of the two donkeys. Everyone agreed they should return to the surface, and the friends chose to leave Daniel's body behind, although Archibald brought the baby alligator back up into town. With his heart heavy and his morale failing, Guillermo declared that he would return to Mexico by rail to bury his friends. He paid Louis $5 American as promised, and gave Meriwether and Archibald each $10 for their help. He wrote Louis a letter of introduction that could be shown to any other police or Mexican officials, and gave him the information needed to contact the Mexican embassy by telegram. Hen then departed for his hotel, and presumably, the train station. Louis considered Archibald and Meriwether to be full-fledged members of his group now, and brought them round to the rented cabin, which after a week of recovery time would still have a month's rent prepaid.

The cat gauntlets look like this. I really do insist that the player really says "myow myow" out loud to use them.

Gains
200 Mexican pesos (sold for $20)
a nugget of demon ore
$25 pay from the Mexican government
a letter of introduction from Detective Guillermo "the Bull"

Losses
Luther (killed by giant ant)
Daniel (killed by friendly fire)
Office Benicio (killed by giant ant)
Officer Shia (killed by friendly fire)
Detective Guillermo (retired)

XP
flat 10 XP each for Meriwether and Archibald for a successful zero-level expedition

1 XP for single ant encounter
1 XP for rescuing donkeys
3 XP for rescuing Mexican police and negotiation alliance
1 XP for intelligence gathering
3 XP for multi-ant and grasshopper encounter
7 XP for exploring seven new hexes (including Daniel's scouting trip)
Total: 16 XP for Louis

Running graveyard (and session of demise)
Officer Shia "the Beef" the NPC Mexian police-officer (2), Daniel the plumber (2), Officer Benicio "the Bull" the NPC Mexican police-officer (2), Luther the factory-hand (2), Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)

Postmortem
I've been using Dreams in the Lich House's campaign events for his Black City campaign to generate ideas for what's happening in town outside of events the players set in motion. Last time I got "Whirlpool", which is supposed to be a navigational hazard that prevents new ships from coming to the trading island that houses the Black City ... but it occurred to me that it the removal of a navigational hazard (the railroad worker's strike) would mark a pretty good beginning to the campaign. This week I got "Bragging Rights", which means that an NPC adventuring party got deeper into the site and becomes a rival. I previously discovered that there were a group of three Freemason architects who'd been into the Maw, so I figured they would make a good set of rivals, and that their bragging would create a clue that the players could choose to follow-up on to find a Demon Shrine.

The way that I discovered the Freemasons is that I generated a couple of minidungeons to place in level 1. The "Features" table that I have the players roll twice each mini-hex has "Point of Interest" and "Demon Shrine" as two possible outcomes, so I decided to generate one of each to have on-hand. My original plan was to simply let them show up wherever the dice decided - but when the campaign event demanded that someone found one of them, I picked which one, and rolled a random hex number as its location. I used Kabuki Kaiser's Ruins of the Undercity to generate the Point of Interest, which I decided will be a giant ant colony (as described in the DCC Core Rules in the giant ant monster entry). I used Kabuki Kaiser's Mad Monks of Kwantoom to generate the Demon Shrine. My random generation of the Shrine using the Black Powder Black Magic rules suggested that there would be two factions present ("doing what?" you may ask - stay tuned!) and one of them is the Freemasons. After the players find the ant colony (even if they don't explore it fully) I may generate a second Point of Interest for the first level just in case. I'm certain that I didn't use Ruins of the Undercity exactly correctly. I usually forgot to check if a corridor would flow out of a door or run perpendicular to it, for example. It was a fairly quick way to get a layout I'd never have drawn on my own though, and although I modified the contents from the book's recommendations (in part to fit a different setting) it did work to spur on my own creativity, while adding features I wouldn't have placed left to my own devices.

One of my goals in running this campaign is to have something relatively low-prep on my part and low-commitment for the players. Essentially it's an occasional pick-up game for whenever my regular Sunday group can't meet. Using Carl's BPBM rules straight out of the zine, using Kabuki Kaiser's minidungeon generators rather than planning and drawing my own maps, it's all in service of the goal of maximizing potentiality and discovery at the table while minimizing everyone's investment of time outside the sessions themselves.

One thing I've noticed is that Carl and Eric must have changed their minds between vol 1 and vol 4 of Black Powder Black Magic, because the prices go from a likely dollar-standard to a likely dime- or penny-standard. Louis Black's elephant gun would have been out of reach using vol 1's prices, but I've decided to use vol 4 prices, since the list is much more comprehensive. The treasures they're finding seem appropriate to the new price list, especially since they keep finding things that they can exchange for only a fraction of their nominal value. 

For the most part, the procedural generation of the hexes has been going well, although I've noticed a couple things I would change if I were writing something like this myself. The tunnel types and diameters don't feel like they add much, with the exception of the ones so small they force you to crawl through. This is essentially the "terrain type" of each hex, but I remember as a player barely noticing this information, while as a referee I feel obligated to record it, even though it doesn't seem to matter a whole lot. I'm also, personally, not that fond of the two gravitational anomaly entries on the "Features" list. To me, they feel like part of the wrong genre. Features that reduce or increase the movement cost of passing though a hex seem like a good idea, but I feel like it would be more appropriate (at least in the upper levels of the dungeon) to have something like "very direct pathways" to reduce the costs and "very winding passages" or "very rough terrain" to increase it. The giant ants are also quite a formidable opponent for zero- and 1st-level characters. So far, they've only met 1 HD worker ants and not poisonous 3 HD soldier ants, but they've also met giant grasshoppers and giant centipedes, and those are both 3 HD. The ants also have a high armor class which makes it very hard for them to get a hit in, making combat longer, and thus deadlier, than it would otherwise be. The final issue I'm not sure how to handle at the moment is the demon ore. The rules give it a dollar value, and suggest that it can be used to manufacture magic items or fuel spellburn. When I played in his campaign, Carl didn't do that though. Instead, he made it possible to trade the ore with members of the spirit world, typically facilitated by a human broker, which meant completing a quest and getting a magic item in return. Since my players have found some ore now, I'll have to decide which approach I want to take.

By the luck of the dice, Louis Black turned out to be an expert marksman with that elephant gun, while Meriwether couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. It was gratifying to see that Louis could survive several ant-bites, when every zero-level so far has succumbed on the first hit. Like Blaze the servant from last time, Meriwether's been portrayed as very deferential, so I suspect he won't level up right away. Archibald was pretty handy. He seems perhaps a little thief-like to me, but we'll see. Daniel was brave and daring, and like so many favored zero-levels he met an early demise. I've noticed that the zero-level character you like most almost always dies in the funnel because you use them, and you end up leveling up someone you barely thought about until they were your sole survivor. I've tried to mitigate that problem a little by declaring that the monsters attack one of a player's characters, but then letting the player decide who's endangered and who stays safe and alive. We may not have heard the last of the Mexican government (or even the last of Guillermo) although I haven't yet decided how I'll know when another representative comes to join the hunt for Salma and Penelope. The next random campaign event may provide me a clue, or the players may take it into their own hands if they decide to telegram the embassy to offer their services and ask for back-up.

Session Report - Descend into Brimstone - 22 April 2018

Characters
Bill the livery-stabler
Edward the storekeeper
Henry the huckster
Harry the butcher
played by Canadian John

Blaze Riviera the servant
Sweet Nell the innkeeper
Rusty the auctioneer
Jed the miner
played by Todd

Eldon the dentist
Lilly the clerk
Ethel the servant
Louis the politician
played by Petra



Summary
The town of Brimstone had been closed for business for sometime, shut down by a miner's strike and cut off by a railroad worker's strike, but both labor disputes were recently settled, and the town was celebrating its grand re-opening, welcoming a whole passel of new greenhorns from back East into their midst. The wildest party of all was at The Gallows, the saloon with the only public entrance to the Brimstone Mine. Edward, Henry, Sweet Nell, and Rusty all won free "return trip" lift tickets and free drinks at the bar in a raffle. The others ponied up for tickets down, and those who could afford it bought return tickets so they could get back up again. It seems like before they knew it, they were all being hustled into the elevator lift, and were descending down into the Maw, the giant borehole at the center of Brimstone Mine.

The group got off at level 1, and Henry suggested that the area right off the elevator was likely to be pretty well picked over, and that the group ought to head around to another side of the Maw if they sought to find their fortune. The others agreed, and they spent the next hour walking the lip of the Maw, a 20-30' wide pathway with no guardrail, overhanging the great borehole. Arriving at the southwestern side of the mine, they decided to look for a way in.

The first entrance they found led them into narrow natural tunnels which they traversed on hands and knees. Jed quickly realized that they were actually crawling on the ceiling of the tunnels. " 'taint natural!" he declared. They crossed and recrossed a natural stream that was also flowing on the ceiling. At one point, washed up on shore, they found a tooth that had been made into a dagger. Harry inspected it, but he was used to dealing with herbivores, so all he could tell was that this was the tooth of a predator, and since it was larger than his hand, a big predator at that. The handle of the dagger looked like maybe Aztec design. Henry looked around very shiftily, opened his suitcase just a crack (careful to not let anyone see inside) and pulled out some chalk to help mark their path. He also helped himself to the dagger which disappeared into his suitcase. The group decided to follow the little river downstream.

The stream made a little waterfall at the boundary where gravity returned to normal, and everyone got soaked passing through, but on the other side, they entered large man-made corridors, tiled with dressed stone. In the open air, they heard what they couldn't make out over the sound of running water in an enclosed space before, the sound of insects, like cicadas on a hot summer day. Following the winding creek as it crossed and recrossed the perfectly straight corridors, the group ended up in a natural cavern with a hint of gold glittering in the walls. They all rushed in to inspect their find, and inadvertently got the drop on a trio of insects: an ant, a grasshopper, and a centipede, each the size of a pony!

Welp, I tell you a fearsome combat ensued. The friends got an early lead on the insects.. Bill tried to ride the ant, wailing at its flank with his riding crop, but got bucked off. Jed and Lilly killed it with a one-two of mining pick and letter opener. Nell shot the grasshopper, but then the dumb beast retaliated, chewing on her like she was a blade of sweet summer grass The centipede slithered on up to Blaze, injecting him with a poison that made him feel all weak in the arms, though Blaze did manage to bop the darn critter on the snout with his candlestick in revenge. Nell shot at the grasshopper again, but accidentally shot poor Rusty, ending his life. Henry ran to Rusty's side, making like to help the poor man, but really he was just helping himself to the contents of the auctioneers pockets. Harry got distracted and pratfalled right in front of the grasshopper, which munched away, ending him too. Finishing what others had started, Bill killed the centipede the same way he'd accidentally killed so many poor horses back East before they run him out of town - by beating on it with his riding crop until the critter didn't arise no more. Nell managed to shoot the cricket again, and Blaze finished it off with another stout blow from his candlestick. Blaze and Jed helped themselves to the dead butcher's accouterments, while Louis took up the auctioneer's gavel, fancying himself a bit judge-like now that he had it.

After the fight, Blaze tidied up like the good servant he is while Jed and the others inspected the shimmer of gold they saw in the walls. Jed was able to determine that it was a good, probably thousand-dollar vein. They took a sample of gold dust, and Lilly helped draw up a map to their stake. They figured they could sell it to a mining company back in town for a finder's fee. Henry made another big show of looking suspiciously at his colleagues while getting his chalk out again, marking the route back to the narrow tunnels while wearing Harry's suit coat right over his own.

They followed the stream further into some large mining tunnels, but came to realize there was no other way out of this section than the way they'd come in. They also found a chasm, but fortunately smelled that it was full of explosive natural gas before they got too close. Nearby they found hundreds of feet of tubing, and a barrel-sized machine with a pair of o-rings the tubes could be affixed to. It seemed to be some kind of bellows apparatus, and the group decided it was mining equipment for evacuating the bad gas from the pit. Rather than mess with any of that though, they doubled back into the dressed-stone halls, and located a new exit on the southeast side.

The next section they entered had huge natural tunnels, 20' wide and 30' high overhead. Unfortunately, the gravity in this area was powerful strong. Felt just like walking on the surface of Jupiter! It plum wore the whole group out. Even more unfortunate-like, a couple more of them ants came to attack them, and the buggers didn't seem to be bothered none by the gravity.

Well sir, it was a vicious fight. Straight away, the ants put down Bill and Lilly. Lilly always felt like she had a guardian angel sitting on her shoulder, but the poor dear must've been pinned to the floor by that gravity when Lilly needed her most. Jed and Ethel both pressed their luck to hurt one of the ants, and then Louis came in and took all the credit after banging on its head with his gavel. "Case closed!" he said. "The prosecution rests!" The remaining ant commenced to galloping around like a wild bronco, narrowly missing trampling Sweet Nell. Blaze and Ethel fumbled around like fools trying to hit the critter, but luckily managed not to hut anything more than their own pride. The ant sent Henry on to his grave before Jed sent the ant to an afterlife of its own with his mining pick.

There followed a great re-distribution of wealth, from the dead to the living. The saddlebags Bill had been carrying around this whole time turned out to be empty, and that suitcase Henry acted so protective over turned out to have nothing inside it but chalk. Henry the much-vaunted huckster turned out to be nothing but a two-bit chalk salesman! No one was much surprised, considering how luckless and unlikable the poor bastard had been. Ethel also picked up that letter opener of Lilly's that she'd been coveting for so long. Somehow, amidst all the rifling and trading, Jed and Louis found a oilcloth tied tight around some parcel, which Jed offered to hold onto for safekeeping.

Low on numbers and feeling sore exhausted after their hard slog though high gravity, the group decided to pass through one more section of mine on their way back to the Maw. They ended up in more man-made corridors, but these ones were a tight squeeze, and the team walked single file down the narrow halls. They found a mine entrance with a cavern on the other side, and what looked like a big old pool of blood on the cavern floor. Well, the group didn't like the look of that one bit, so they headed right back out into the hall. On the way, Edward found him $100 someone dropped long before, but as they filed back into the hallway, Louis realized that the blood puddle had reared up and begun to give chase! It was an awfully slow monster, so the group was able to outdistance it by running. That poor Jed though, his old heart couldn't take the strain. After crawling, and fighting, watching his friends die, and feeling the earth tugging down on him like he was made of lead, the old ticker just didn't have anything left in it, and he expired, clutching his chest as he went down.

Louis took custody of the oil-cloth parcel, and the group dragged Jed back to the lift to the surface. When Nell realized it would cost one of their lift-tickets to get him back on the elevator though, she made a real pretty speech about how Jed was a miner through and through, and then pitched his body down into the Maw. "It's what he would've wanted." Much reduced in numbers, the new friends made it back to the surface, hocked their map to the White Fang Expeditions for a 10%, $100 finder's fee, and at Edward's suggested, decided to rent them a pretty two-room cabin just outside of town. Edward put two months down, and the group divvied up their remaining cash all fair-like, putting the toothy dagger, the mystery parcel, and Jed's extra gold dust into communal property, for anyone to take who needed it. Unwrapping, the parcel, they found two metal gauntlets shaped like cats that fair hummed like tuning forks when you touched them. Written in chalk on the inside of the oilcloth was the phrase "myow-myow".



Gains
$100 cash
map to a $1000 gold vein (sold to WFE for $100)
magic bat-tooth dagger
magic cat gauntlets



Losses
Rusty (shot by Nell)
Harry (eaten by grasshopper)
Bill (bitten by ant)
Lilly (bitten by ant)
Henry (bitten by ant)
Jed (exhaustion caused by forced march)



XP
flat 10XP each for a successful zero-level expedition



Running graveyard (and session of demise)
Jed the miner (1), Henry the huckster (1), Lilly the clerk (1), Bill the livery-stabler (1), Harry the butcher (1), Rusty the auctioneer (1)



Postmortem
I used the hexploration rules from Stormlord Publishing's Black Powder Black Magic volume 4 to run this session. The hexagons are 1 mile wide and take 1 hour to cross quickly (with a chance of wandering monsters) or 2 hours to cross slowly (with monsters appearing only as a "complication.) Each time the characters entered a new hex, I had the players make a series of rolls. John rolled for a description of the tunnels, Todd rolled twice for "features" (things like the stream, the weird gravity, the dead end, and the chasm), Petra rolled for "complications" (things like a monster encounter or explosive gas), and I rolled for treasure.

Level 1 of the Brimstone Mine is "The Hive," every hex is supposed to be filled with the "chittering and clattering of insects" (although I often forgot to narrate that), and the "featured monster" complication for the level is giant ants and centipedes. I decided to add giant grasshoppers (as cave crickets) into the mix. The "puddle of blood" they found was a primeval slime straight from DCC.

The treasure table only gives a 5% chance to find magic items, so imagine my surprise when we found two in one short expedition! The first item found is "The Ragetooth," which I took from Stormlord Publishing's Camazotz The Death Bat patron write-up. If any of the characters decide to become a wizard, old Camazotz will certainly make them a pitch for the chance to become their first patron. The second item really caught me by surprise, so during the game itself, I said that only the character handling the oilcloth parcel had looked inside, and he wasn't telling anyone. After the game, I decided it was "the Gauntlets of the Wailing Mountain Lion," which were inspired by the cat-faced soundwave blasters Shuri wears at the end of the Black Panther movie (and by Lego Cat-Woman beginning and ending every sentence with "myow myow" in the Lego Batman movie.) Players who've seen Black Panther won't be too surprised when they find out what happens when you say the magic word written on the oilcloth while wearing the gauntlets!

The Terrible Perils of Joining the Whig Party in Scarabae

I played in another online game set in the weird city of Scarabae around a month ago. Here's a link to the referee's session report on Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque.

Since her last adventure - which had resulting in helping out the career of a hated artistic rival (aka Yvanna Gallows, aka really any artist who was still working in the arts rather than being forcibly retired due to illness) - Traviata had shut herself up in her apartment where she could hide from her rival's citywide popularity (and indulge in a bit of hate-listening to the recovered record without anyone else knowing her dirty secret.)

Eventually, Traviata used her downtime to get back in touch with Akiko, the water genasi nurse she'd helped rescue from a contaminated medical clinic. She asked Akiko to amputate the leg that had been scarred by a burrowing parasite, and fit her with the wooden prosthetic she'd taken from the clinic. Akiko was shocked, but performed the surgery gratis as repayment for Traviata's help saving her life.

(I think I managed to surprise the referee, Jack, with this request.)

When Traviata did emerge from her home to go back into the city, she found her neighborhood, the Redgutter, surprisingly quiet and empty. Ordinarily it was abustle with activity at all hours of the day and night. Instead the streets were silent and deserted. Checking her mail, Traviata found an invitation from the tiefling job broker Koska, asking her to attend a meeting of a number of local business owners.

When Traviata arrived, she met Khajj Kahla (a minotaur cleric she'd met once before on a job clearing out a haunted apartment), Gisbert Highforge (a dwarven fighter), and Crumb (a fellow artificer, a kenku who focused on gunsmithing rather than alchemy.) Koska's assembled "chamber of commerce" included Voone Jaskar (the tortle pawnshop owner and go-to fencer of stolen goods) and Wick (a fire genasi who owned the most popular adventuring bar, the Bull Roarer.) All three told a similar story to the gathered adventurers - everyone was missing, no one was left. Jobs were going unfilled with no one to take them, there was no supply of "recovered" artifacts to sell on to Scarabae's legitimate collectors, no one was showing up to share drinks and tall tales of their mighty deeds.

(I don't know if Jack intended it, but this mood eerily matched the feel at the time of one online community for roleplayers that he and I both frequent. There were some very public, very unpleasant arguments between members of the community that led to several of them leaving the public space in the week or so before this gaming session. At that time, there was definitely a feeling that people were disappearing, and the community felt unusually quiet and empty.)
 
(Koska's situation also matches every referee's worst fear - there are adventures to play, and you're ready to play them, but there are no players to be found, and for a moment at least, it seems like there will never be any players ever again. Again, at the time, this felt like a possible near future for the community.)

Koska swore to her innocence - this wasn't her fault, she wasn't sending everyone off to their deaths underground. Voone Jaskar reported that the last time he'd seen any adventurers selling loot, it was a lone thief trying to hock a box full of white powdered wigs. Wick claimed that after days without customers, she had a single visitor, an out-of-towner elven wizard who insisted he felt a malign otherworldly presence, and who left after a single drink, refusing to stay in a neighborhood he said was cursed.

Wracking their brains for potential contacts they could go to for information, the group decided to pay a visit to Aurulent Masque, a semi-retired drow warlock. She was an ex- (well, mostly ex-) adventurer herself, a hostess of semi-regular salons, and a known mentor and advisor to young adventurers. When they knocked, the found Aurulent all dressed up in her signature yellow gown and gold jewelry, and the poor woman nearly burst into tears at the sight of them. No one had come to see her for weeks! She's been so lonely, and she thought it was somehow her fault no one was coming to see her anymore! Traviata, Khajj, Gisbert, and Crumb were quickly hustled inside Aurulent's house and shown to her her salon, another room all decorated in shades of yellow, perfectly contrasting with Madam Masque's dark drow skin. Aurulent brought out her best detection spells for the occasion, finding the presence, determining that it was alien or even extra-dimensional, and localizing it to the old docks, a section of abandoned wharf and warehouses that was turf to a gang of ratfolk yakuza who styled themselves "the 47 Rodents." The group was glad for the information, but not quite sure how the rats could possibly be responsible for their current situation.

Together with Aurulent, the group walked to Wick's bar, talking loudly all the way about how they had a HUGE advance payment from Koska, how they planned to get BLACKOUT drunk, how they were HEEDLESS of any risk of danger. Their plan - to attract whatever was causing people to disappear - seemed to work. Khajj and Crumb both noticed they were being followed, and when the group got to the bar, they spotted their surveillance - a glassy-eyed halfling wearing a giant white powdered wig, pressing his face against the bar window to watch them. While the others held the spy's attention, Crumb snuck outside, disguised himself with magic, and walked right past the peeping halfling, at the very last moment, snatching the wig to pull it right off his head. He couldn't though, because the wig was clinging to the halfling's head with crab pincers, and the wig, not the halfling, was screaming!

(It's probably good that Crumb was the first person to interact with the wig creatures. Traviata might have just killed the spy if he wouldn't answer her questions, and I think certainly would have put on the wig to use as a disguise to try to infiltrate the 47 Rodents' hideout. Which, as we quickly learned, would have been a HUGE mistake on her part. Fortunately, thanks to Crumb, she never had the chance to make it.)

A brief combat followed, Gisbert defended his friends with his shield, Traviata blasted the wig off the poor man's head, and after a lot of screaming, the creature died. Back inside the bar, they questioned the halfling, who seemed not to have bathed for days. He said he and his friends were at their hideout after a successful burglary adventure, when they got a knock on the door, and found a hand-delivered crate full of white-powdered wigs. They thought it would be funny to try them on, and did, and he doesn't remember anything at all after that. Meanwhile Khajj dissected the monster and saw that it was an crablike alien crustacean growing long white hair from it's hindquarters, and the hair had been styled and coiffed to create the appearance of a wig.

(The appearance of these creatures kind of reminds me of the minogame, mythic Japanese turtles who live a long time, are very wise, and have a luxurious mane of hair growing from the rear of their shells. I absolutely love the idea that you could have a creature that looks like that, then grow its hair out and style it, so that most of the time, it just looks like a giant human hairdo, while still remaining a basically naturalistic creature underneath.)

Khajj cut the hair off the monster, and Traviata used skills she picked up in the opera to refashion the hair back into a wig to disguise the halfling Zillan as though he were still possessed. Aurulent took the body of the creature back to her house to study further. Zillan led the way back to his house, which was empty with no sign of his friends. The group did find the box the wigs came in though - an old tea crate with a return address at the abandoned docks. They traveled to the docks (presumably into the 47 Rodents' territory?) and located the address - a collapsed building. Inside they located the shipping office, where they found a hole in the floor. All the papers in the office related to the tea trade and dated back to when the company was still in business, offering no leads on the current problem. With the building dead silent, it seemed that any answers were going to be found beneath the surface. Khajj led the way down the hole into the underground.

(I had initially been imagining these docks being abandoned for 5-10 years. Jack shocked me when he said everything in the office was over 100 years old. It really changes my view of Scarabae to think that parts of it might have been abandoned, not for decades, but for centuries.)

Down the hole, the party found a circular chamber, with a giant pool of water blocking passage to the passageway visible on the far side. They also found a raft sitting on the still, dust-coated water, and a crack in the wall behind them. Suspecting that a raft-ride across to the other side was a sure chance for ambush, the party sent Traviata - wearing her new cap of water breathing - under the surface to investigate. Sure enough, she spotted a giant's skull that appeared to the hiding place of some kind of creature. Gisbert went under next, with a rope tied around his waist, to act as a fishing lure for the unseen creature, and he succeeded in baiting it to come forward and attack him. For several rounds after that, the party engaged in frantic combat against a giant hermit crab with a huge impenetrable skull-shell. After all that, the group still decided to investigate the cracked wall rather than chance crossing the water.

(Artificers get to make themselves magic items periodically, starting at 2nd level, and Traviata's first creation was the cap of water breathing. I chose it from among the available options because I thought it opened up new avenues of exploration. I kind of like that in this case, all it did was allow us to get ourselves in trouble we would have avoided otherwise. We didn't have to fight the crab monster, and in fact, we never would have encountered it at all if Traviata hadn't gone underwater. The monster had no treasure, and we gained nothing by defeating it. All we did was get into a pointless, dangerous fight that risked our lives and risked alerting the people we were trying to sneak up on.)
 
(I don't like adventures where everything is like this. I don't like it when all the treasure is worthless or cursed, all the secrets are harmful, every combat is needless and gains you nothing - but, I do think it's good for some adventures to have some areas like this. It makes a place feel more real when it feels like it exists for itself, rather than existing for the players' benefit. Nothing communicates how dangerous the underworld is better than having placed that exist solely to remind you that it's possible to stick your nose somewhere it didn't belong, and that you profit nothing by indiscriminately treating everything like it's there for your benefit. So while I hope that Traviata will eventually be able to use her cap to do some worthwhile underwater maneuvering, I'm okay with her first outing revealing nothing more than a secret room she'd have been better off not finding.)

Winding through the narrow crevasse in the stone wall, the party eventually made their way to a large open chamber filled with colorful mushrooms growing on mounds of dirt. A number of passages branched off from the chamber, and a stream of oily black liquid flowed out of one chamber before branching out to irrigate each of the mushroom mounds. Turning her alchemical eye to the mushrooms, Traviata determined that they were poisonous and would release deadly spores into the air if disturbed. The group decided to investigate the passage that held the source of the poisoned waters, and found that it was flowing out of a statue of a woman holding a skull and a dagger. Khajj couldn't identify the woman as any known deity, but he did spot that she was wearing a furry white cloak - in fact a giant wig monster. The group engaged in some really intense combat after that, and Traviata spent almost all of it pinned to the ground, held fast by a grasping tentacle of white hair. She's lucky the tentacle was just holding her, rather than trying to crush her to death, because she could not for the life of her break free. Khajj, Gisbert, and Crumb laid into the thing with their best attacks, but the wigmother soaked almost all of it up to no obvious ill effect. Eventually the trio's tactics won the day, and the wig monster was crushed under-hoof.

(I'm not sure if the wigmother had damage reduction, a high AC, or just a lot of hit points, but it spent most of the combat appearing to get hit a lot and not reacting to this at all.)

Gisbert used some of his dwarven carving knowledge to examine the statue after the fight, and found both a hidden chamber inside it holding a magical poisonous dagger, and a font that seemed to be producing the black liquid feeding the mushrooms in the next room. Traviata took the dagger and a vial of the liquid for study. In a second chamber off the mushroom hall, they found a haggard man chained to the wall. The man, Gessel, was another adventurer, and he claimed his own friends had knocked him and out dragged him down here while wearing white wigs. The group recovered 5 vials of potions (3 proved to be healing, and 2 to be magical poison) and then sent Gessel though the crack in the wall and encourage him to climb the handholds in the round chamber to meet Zillan in the tea-shipping office.

Investigating the next passage leading off the mushroom hall, the group found a well-appointed bed chamber, and located a chest full of valuables - piles of coins, a pair of ivory dice, an onyx locket, a silk handkerchief, a soapstone pitcher, a feathered owl mask. They also heard a clinking sound and muffled conversation coming through a door connecting to the bedroom. They decided to get the drop on whoever was on the other side, and flung the door open to surprise a shabby-looking man in a red robe and his dinner guests, a trio of white-wigged adventurers. Khajj and Crumb managed to kill the wig-monsters clinging to the elven, human, and dragonborn adventurers' heads, while Gisbert and Traviata worked together to defeat the red-robed cultist. Gisbert used his shield to protect the pair while Traviata stabbed with her new magically-poisoned dagger, eventually dealing him a death-blow. As he died, he gasped out "You fools! It's too late! You can't stop it now!" A perusal of his body turned up a very fine scimitar and pistol, while a cursory search of the room found more creates and barrels, stuffed with adventuring gear, herbs, tobacco, and mead. After the party revived the freed adventurers, they heard a familiar story, that they were kidnapped by friends wearing wigs, and had no memories after their arrival. The elf Zamph, human Golo, and dragonborn Edwyn thanked the group for their rescue, and each hauled a container of booty as they followed the group's directions to the surface.

Exploring more found a another corridor that circled back to the mushroom hall, and then a final passage leading downstairs to a giant prison cell. The room was filled with adventurers - the group recognized many people they knew from the Redgutter neighborhood - all chained to the wall, and mostly unconscious. As they were woken and freed, they told stories of receiving a package full of wigs and trying them on, or else of being ambushed by wig-wearing friends. Eventually, everyone was set free and instructed to pick up the rest of the cargo before climbing back up to the docks. Continuing past the cell, they found a storage room full of bedrolls, a room with hundred-year-old frescoes depicting everyday life in Scarabae, and a final passage that led back to the circular water-filled room.

(The fact that the entire map was a loop was a real relief, because we were really starting to worry about how we'd ever have time to backtrack to the beginning and clear an entire unexplored wing of the complex.)

As the friends, and all the freed prisoners carrying all the recovered loot, returned to Redgutter with the cultist's body, they laughed as the streets once more filled up with noise. Imagine Voone Jaskar's surprise as his shelves filled back up with plundered goodies! Imagine Wick's face as her bar packed in with weary folks eager for food and drink and conversation! The friend went to Koska's house first, to share the good news with her, but they found Koska at her wit's end, pacing and crying. She pointed to a scorched pattern burnt into her floor and stumbled through her story. Men wearing red robed had teleported into Koska's home, kidnapped her daughter, and teleported away!

They took Koska to Aurulent Masque's house, and Aurulent used her magic to interrogate the dead cultist's body. His corpse claimed to be a member of a group called the Children of Fimbul - druids who want to end all civilization. The Children believe that Koska's adopted daughter Yuriko has magical properties that will aid them in completing some important ritual. The corpse's final bit of information is that the ritual will take place across the sea, in the jungles far to the south. Traviata and her friends were struck silent by the magnitude of the task before them, and wondered how they would be able to rescue Yuriko from being sacrificed an ocean away.

(I got the sense from Jack that this news was the culmination of at least a half dozen threads introduced earlier in the campaign. Unfortunately for me, all the clues are from sessions before I started playing. I'll need to read up on his previous Scarabae session reports to find out more about the Children of Fimbul, their alliance with alien mind-controllers, and their plan for Scarabae and Yuriko.)

Keep Your Frenemies Closer in Scarabae

Here is a summary of my third adventure in the weird Gothic world of Scarabae.

This time around, Traviata was re-joined by the pugilist Mortimer and the werewolf-ish Leonid, alongside the dragonborn sorcerer Viktor. The tiefling fixer Koska had called the group together to retrieve a missing master recording - a glass disc inscribed with magic, used to mass-produce wax cylinders - belonging to the ultra-avant-garde ultra-goth noise musician Yvana Gallows. Koska was visibly gaga over Yvana's celebrity (and deep pockets) and had busted out the bubbly for the occasion. Mortimer seemed pretty agog himself, while Traviata spent the entire meeting frowning, scowling, and biting her tongue while Yvana explained how burdensome it is to be just. so. famous. for your art. Yvana was convinced that the recording was stolen by someone hoping to profit off her celebrity by black-market retailing the soon-to-be bestselling album. She was sure she could re-record it, but thought the original version was special and had a certain je ne sais quoi that might be impossible to recapture. Mortimer and Leonid seemed smitten, nearly tripping over themselves volunteering to return the album. Viktor kept his wits, and negotiated hazard pay if anyone died during the recovery. Traviata experienced massive cognitive dissonance at the idea of helping one of her enemies, but talked herself into it by convincing herself that the attention and scandal that bootleg copies of the album would attract would mean even more undeserved fame for Yvana than if it were released normally ... and by securing a promise to see her own name in print in the album liner notes if the group was successful.

(Jack described Yvana Gallows as a black-clad Andy Warhol figure. Somehow she also reminded me of the artist character in KJ Bishop's short story "The Art of Dying." I had a lot of fun playing up the social awkwardness of this situation with Jack. He played Yvana as someone who's very thoughtless about how her actions affect the people around her, and as someone who somehow manages to both humble-brag and brag-brag with nearly every word she says. Meanwhile, I had originally conceived Traviata as someone who thinks of every artist more successful than her as an enemy. And while I haven't thought a lot about Traviata's opera career, I've been assuming that "more successful artist" is basically every artist. So Traviata already hates Yvana on principle, especially hates listen to her praising herself, and especially especially hates finding herself in a situation where she's doing Yvana a favor. The idea of Traviata practically turning red with anger, and having to stop herself from interjecting a response to everything Yvana said - this is slapstick comedy material, and a different type than the adventurers-as-Keystone-Kops variety of slapstick that D&D usually produces. So as I said, the social scenes were very fun, but this whole adventure produces a crisis for Traviata's characterization that I'll come back to at the end.)

The group debated a variety of ways to track down potential thieves through their fences or vendors, but decided to check out the recording studio first. Their plans for any kind of social investigation went right out the window (or rather, right down the sewer grate) when they saw how the thieves broke in to the studio - by cutting through a metal sewer grate to come up through the floor, using cutting tools or cutting magic that left salt residue all over the scene. So, rather than look for the thieves' social contacts, they decided to just look for the thieves directly by going into the sewers. Leonid's wolf nose pretty quickly picked out the smell of salt, and the group followed his nose into the tunnels. They found a patch of salty hand- and foot-prints, like someone fell into the water and then left a residue on the tunnel floor. Then they found a giant disused subway worm hanging from the ceiling.

(I can only hope that the sewers in Scarabe look like the ones in The Third Man. Scarabae has biotechnology - giant hollow worms that serve as subway trains, giant hollow beetles that replace elevators scrabbling up the sides of buildings. It's a Weird city, and these details fit the aesthetic perfectly.)

The group climbed up into the broken old worm-train, where their combined weight made it fall off its mounting brackets and into the water - where it immediately went berserk and started speeding down the tunnel at breakneck pace. A couple of masked men dressed in palm (or fern?) frond clothing, carrying oversized white salt axes, managed to leap aboard and attack the investigators, and then disintegrated into salt themselves when they were defeated. Then the worm-train crashed, and since Leonid's player's internet connection died, we decided that he basically did break his neck in the crash, or at least that he was knocked unconscious for the rest of the adventure.

Getting out of the wreck, the remaining characters saw that they were on an island with a Himalayan pink-salt-crystal sun shining overhead. At this point, the group assumed they were in some kind of deep underground cavern, presumably where the city's sewers empty into a natural underground river or lake ... but the weird salt-lamp sun was pretty disconcerting, and suggested that they were much deeper into some kind of Hollow Earth situation than should really have been possible. They saw a village in the distance and a black ziggurat closer by. They snuck around the edges of the island, and managed to come at the ziggurat from the side. Four of the six temple guards in front of the building spotted them anyway and came around for a fight, and after those were defeated, the group took out the two who stayed guarding the door. Mortimer's flurries of blows, and Viktor's magic slippers that let him stick to the walls of the building were the real stars of this fight. Also, again, every time one of the guards died, they just dissolved into piles of salt.

(We had varying theories about what Jack is calling "the saline men." Initially, I think we suspected golems or living statues or some other magical constructs made of salt. Then we might have thought that these were normal humans who'd somehow been magically transformed to salt - or at least I thought that. The waterfall we found inside the ziggurat maybe seemed to support this idea. But by the very end, we realized that we were in a different kind of place with different physical laws, and that being made of salt was nothing special, it was just these people's ordinary condition.)

On the ground floor of the temple, we passed through a foyer into some kind of grand burial chamber. There was a salt-crusted mummy on display at the center of the room. The walls were covered in simple stick figures depicting various kinds of artists making art, and their audiences shunning them. So there was a musician playing to an audience of people covering their ears, a painter showing a painting to an audience of people covering their eyes, etc. Viktor was able to read the hieroglyphs, and learned that this was the burial chamber of Razo the Unlistening, a religious leader who taught that all art is sinful, and exhorted his followers to steal art and ritually destroy it. Traviata was incensed by a religion of people with "bad taste" passing judgment on art. Mortimer accused her of being the same as the Razors, since she was disparaging Yvana's "popular music" earlier in the adventure. Traviata tried to brush him off - "They hate the wrong art!" - but his comments really cut into her. Further back was a waterfall coming out of the wall of ziggurat and stairs leading up. The group was afraid to touch the water or get too close, but dipping in a spear caused it to become either covered in or transformed into salt.

The group went upstairs and found six Razor priests. Mortimer tried to reason with them and/or present them with a logical paradox (that their temple used art to teach them to hate art) but their faith was impervious to his attempts to out-logic them. The priests had a special ritual where they covered their ears, shut their eyes, and chanted "no, no, no, no," which caused them to grow giant salt crowns which then fired at the adventurers. Viktor cast a badass thunderwave spell that slammed half the priests, and Mortimer tore through them with another flurry of punches. They peeked under the back door and saw the ankles of another priest. Traviata managed to spill some acid under the door, which let the group get the drop on him. The high priest of Razo was still a tough opponent, despite the advantage of numbers and surprise. He swatted a spell right out of Viktor's hand, somehow turning the magic to salt, which swirled around the room and then fell to the floor. He also summoned a human-sized magic hammer that attacked by itself, and exploded more salt crystals from his head. Viktor and Traviata both went into shock and started dying while Mortimer saved the day by pummeling him to dust. Mortimer continued saving the day by saving his two friends' lives, and barring the door so they had time to recover.

They recovered the high priests awesome green-salt mask, a globe of glowing pink salt, a potion, and Yvana Gallows' master record. Traviata again criticized the Razors, and Mortimer again acted as her conscience by forcing her to confront her own flaws. "How are you any different than them? You hate Yvana too." "I don't hate her because she's bad, I hate her because she's more popular than me!" This admission / realization really shook Traviata, and probably helped prevent her from doing anything intemperate. She used her theatrical skills to disguise Mortimer as the high priest. He went up to the top of the ziggurat, which was a stage open to the village below. None of the villagers were watching though, so he didn't have a chance to try to provide them with any new prophetic guidance. On the way back out of the temple however, the group used Traviata's alchemical acid to etch away the figures rejecting the art, leaving only the images of artists behind. They also destroyed the salt-shell surrounding the body of Razo, and discovered that his corpse had long since desiccated and disintegrated, which saved them the trouble of destroying that too.
 
They got back on the worm-train, used the controls to drive it back along the path they'd followed to the island, and discovered that they'd passed through a magic portal on the way to the island. The island wasn't underground; it was on another planet, maybe even another plane of existence. Between the two of them, Viktor and Traviata managed to close the portal almost down to nothing, but left it slightly ajar in the hopes of returning to it in the future. They took the train the rest of the way back to the studio, and emerged to return the record to Koska and Yvana. Mortimer proudly handed over the record, and even played a harmonica solo for Yvana. Yvana was once again pretty thoughtless about the hardships the group had been though, although she agreed to pay the hazard fee since Leonid "hadn't made it back" (he hadn't made it back to Koska's, but his friends had dropped his sleeping body off at his apartment.) Traviata ended up getting infuriated again, although too late to do anything about it. After the adventure was over, she ended up buying a copy of Yvana's newest wax cylinder, the one she helped save, and hate-listened to it in her lab while brooding about how she had failed to exact revenge on one of her enemies, and about how Mortimer's words had confused and hurt her. Mortimer, meanwhile, discovered weeks later that Yvana had recorded a new single, where she stole the melody from his harmonica performance and gave him zero credit for writing it.

 
(So, obviously there is a meta-game reason why this session went the way it did. Obviously I was not going to skip out on the game just because Traviata wouldn't want to go on this mission, nor was I going cause the other characters to lose out on the small fortune Yvana was paying, or risk them getting beaten up or killed by her bodyguards, just because Traviata might want to do something impetuous. Those decisions were driven by my desires as a player - to play the session rather than skipping it, and to be a good teammate to my fellow players. My social contract with the other actual human beings playing the game overrides any within-game fictional need for my character to do stupid, destructive things.)

(But, those decisions also mean that Traviata has to do some serious soul-searching after this session. She could have tried to destroy Yvana's record, but let it get delivered without a scratch on it. She could have tried to kill or maim Yvana - she certainly killed enough saline men - but never lifted a finger against her. And Mortimer's attempts to act as her conscience meant that she was confronted with how ugly her hatred for other musicians really is, and how much her own opinions resemble the beliefs of a religion that she condemned for being too opinionated - or at least for being incorrect in its opinions. Traviata, as I originally conceived her, started out halfway to being a villain. In this session, she had the chance to be a villain and didn't take it. So what should she do next?)

(One option would be to have her pursue the other half of her personal mission - to help other sick and innocent people. Saving the patient and nurse from the clinic, and turning over the evidence to the Court of Wands are all steps in that direction. She could become a better person, learn to let go of her anger. I don't know if I'm ready for her to fully commit and become just good, however, instead of the interesting chaotic individual she is right now.)

(Another option would be for her to redouble her efforts on her next adventure - find someone who's enjoying the professional success she wanted but never got, and ruin that person's life. We'll see, but I don't necessarily think that's going to happen. Part of the social contract between players, I think, is not engaging in a lot of really self-indulgent spotlight stealing while everyone else is forced to sit on their hands, and I don't want to break that part of the contract either. Traviata could also lash out and try to physicalize her roiling, conflicted emotions. Smash her own treasures, burn down her apartment, hire the rescued nurse to amputate her leg and replace it with the wooden prosthesis. This probably runs into the self-indulgence problem again, unless it's handled as "downtime activities," although I suppose I could play her a little more angry and erratic throughout the session.)

(A more promising solution would be for Traviata to lean into her alchemy and mad scientist-ness. She's about to level up and learn to cast spells, and her alchemical acids and fires are about to get more powerful. She could also help fund Viktor's research into the portal and/or try to build a machine to help open and close the door to the Saline Realm. If she has enough cash, she could even hire Koska to put together a team to go collect alchemical salts and reagents from the other side of the portal. The leg thing fits here too, because it's totally a mad scientist-y thing to do, and it can happen off-camera and between sessions. This is probably the direction I'm going to try to take her.)

(And then finally, I guess Traviata could try doing more art. She liked using her knowledge of operatic storylines to help figure out the haunted apartment, and using her experience with stagecraft to lower the team "from the skylights" into the clinic. She likes singing to inspire her teammates - and give them temporary hit points before battle. If she could find a way to feel more successful as an artist, she might not feel so angry at people like Yvana all the time. The opportunities for this kind of fulfillment are likely to be limited though, at least compared to the chances to become a better alchemist, so we'll see, but this will probably not be the primary direction of her future growth.)

(I've been reading a little bit about the Burning Wheel family of games, and it sounds like they're supposed to facilitate character growth and decision-making like I've been talking about here. I don't know how I feel about trying to systematize that however. Part of me likes that it's basically a completely optional part of the game - I really don't spend as much time thinking about the emotions of most of my other characters, but there's something special about Traviata. Part of me also wants to learn a little more about how they handle it mechanically, to see if there's any part of it that I would ever want to bring in as a house-rule in my own games. 5e has some characterization mechanics, with things like the background bond, ideal, goal, and flaw, and with things like gaining and spending inspiration. But I wonder if anything in the Burning Wheel games would point to a way to modify those things a little to encourage or reward a character's emotional journey or development.)