D100 Table: Hallucinations

So you ate the funny mushrooms...

This table was requested by someone who wanted it for an assassin who incapacitates victims with hallucinogens. She described the substance as “incapacitat[ing] them with Weirdness," which is why a lot of the results leave the character unwilling to move. 

Anyone using this table is encouraged to copy it into a text file. Then, after each use, you should delete the results you used during the session and replace them with new results of your own devising, ensuring that the hallucinations never repeat. Since, you know, that would be weird.

I am always willing to write up tables for tabletop gaming by request. For free.

1. A bird's leg descends from the sky. It is inconceivably massive, and so tall that the bird's body is too far away to be seen. It is shortly followed by another, and then by the beak, as the cosmic-scaled bird tries to find out what sort of food is beneath the surface of this campaign world.
2. A creature of titanic scale cracks open the sky from outside -- like a clamshell -- and starts eating bits of the world with brobdingnagian chopsticks.
3. A gargantuan human-looking mouth opens in the ground at your feet and screams as if in terrible pain. The scream continues as long as the hallucination lasts -- if you run away from the screaming mouth, another one opens in front of you and now you have to listen to two screams.
4. A quasi-humanoid face forms on the largest surface you can see (other than “the ground", “the sky", or “the ocean" -- maybe on a mountainside). It immediately begins criticizing your every decision as well as every aspect of your appearance and personality with incisive and hurtful accuracy.
5. A small imp materializes before you. It refuses to answer any questions, but pulls out a quill and a book, where it begins meticulously documenting your every motion, word, and thought. If you leave, it follows you, still writing. It may hum to itself off-key.
6. A spectral aye-aye pulls itself out from inside your head, informs you that living on your thoughts is boring, and that it's going to go eat the dreams of some innocent children. Then it scampers off.

   

   Baby aye-aye -- the perfect combination of “creepy" and “adorable".

7. Alien abduction. Flying saucers, greys, probes, the whole shebang. Described in a setting-consistent manner, of course.
8. All animate things within your field of vision are staring upwards and screaming. You're not sure why.
9. All artificial objects are sprouting limbs and forming themselves into humanoid shapes, then sprinting away as quickly as possible. It might be wise to chase down your undergarments and your more important equipment.
10. All containers are filled with bees.
11. All insects, arachnids, & other such vermin are growing to hundreds of times their natural size. As they swell to monstrous proportions, you can see malice in their eyes.
12. All living things within your field of vision turn straight towards you, open their mouths impossibly wide, roll their eyes back in their head, and moan terribly.

    

    Art by Jessica Hayworth.
    (Welcome to Night Vale)

13. All natural features and large buildings in the area are actually giants wearing ill-fitting disguises -- how did you never notice this before?
14. All openings, portals, holes, and apertures are prone to turning into a vast bottomless pit when you approach, providing a corresponding sensation of vertigo. This includes doorways, drinking vessels, anthills, small punctures in cloth, mouths, ears, &c.
15. All senses inverted -- your eyes only see back into your skull, your ears only hear the sounds of your own internal systems, you can only feel the INSIDE of your skin, &c.
16. All voices, including those of animals, are replaced with threats.
17. Become utterly convinced that everything, including your “friends", wants to kill & eat you.
18. Birds are conspiring against you. If you stay perfectly still and quiet, you can hear the hidden meanings behind the birdsong.
19. Chanting in a language you've never heard before, at a deafening volume, is coming from all directions. You can see things starting to disintegrate from the arcane pressure behind the words.
20. Did you read Dr. Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins as a child? You now have that problem, except instead of hats, it's hideous & uncomfortable ritual masks.
    
21. Discordant, atonal piping comes from nowhere. Ten-foot-high monstrosities with too many eyes and not enough skin emerge from every conceivable hiding place and begin dancing, carousing, and generally carrying on bacchanal-style.
22. Elven abduction. Carried off to the Realm of Faerie for incomprehensible reasons, saw some bizarre and disturbing sights, then dumped back where you started -- after experiencing several subjective years in a few objective hours because that's how the Fair Folk roll. Bonus points if the GM quotes Sir Orfeo (or similar) at length.
23. Everyone else is dead and rotting, but haven't realized yet and keep walking around. This applies to animals as well.
24. Everyone is a demon in disguise. Including your neighbor, your neighbor's dog, the fleas on the back of your neighbor's dog, &c.
25. Everything around you is melting; in about ten minutes, the only solid items will be you and the one-foot-radius portion of ground you're standing on, floating on a glutinous, deeply suspicious sea.
26. Everything has eyes. They're watching you.
27. Everything is mimics.
28. Everything is suddenly one thousand times larger than it was. You must move carefully to avoid being eaten by roaches.
29. Everything is suddenly one thousand times smaller than it was. You must move carefully to avoid crushing the town beneath your feet.
30. Everything you touch turns to centipedes.
31. Everything, including you, is becoming perfectly spherical. In a few minutes, you won't be able to do anything without rolling around and bumping into other spherical objects like a game of billiards .
32. For a brief period, you have the color vision of a mantis shrimp; your brain desperately tries to catch up and interpret what you're seeing, but mostly everything is psychedelic madness that you will never be able to explain to another person.

    

    There's some debate about whether they actually see the amazing range of color suggested by their 16-coned eyes, but their visual system is definitely different from what you're used to. And they can see polarized light.

33. Fregoli delusion.
34. Friction stops working. If you move, you'll slip on the perfectly-smooth ground and slide until you bump into a wall or fall in a hole.
35. Gravity has decided to hate you; any movement of voluntary muscles will send you careening off through the air in a random direction.
36. Half of the world drops away. You are now looking over the edge of a cliff that reaches on and on into a terrible infinite void.
37. Horrible abominations live inside everyone's pupils, including your own.
38. Hundreds of slugs the size of your forearm are performing an impressive aerial ballet. You never realized slugs could fly, but they're actually quite good at it. Take some time to appreciate the artistic merit of their performance.
39. Inanimate objects begin to develop horrible fanged mouths that snap at you whenever you approach.
40. Inanimate objects move around when you aren't looking. Their plans are detailed, wicked, and targeting you personally.
41. It is suddenly absolutely clear to you that the world you live in is a crudely-made stage set. You can see the strings holding up birds as they “fly" by and the costume fastenings on that “monster" over there. Optional: All women are actually men in drag, since women can't be actors in this time period.
42. It's raining goats. They bounce impressively, and ricochet unpredictably, bleating angrily the entire time.
43. It's raining. But the rain is an acidic orange fluid of unknown provenance, and it's coming up from the ground & falling into the sky.
44. Previously-unknown deity manifests in front of you, informs you that you are its chosen prophet, and begins dictating a holy book. Better write it down quick. (At GM's discretion, individual suffering from hallucination may successfully start small religion, perhaps cause previously-hallucinatory deity to actually exist out of sheer belief -- but it's a pretty crappy deity until they get a bigger cult.)
45. Reversed gravity. Hold on tight.
46. Sailing ships filled with tentacular things drift down from the sky and, inexplicably, start sailing through the ground as if it were water. The crew is grabbing any people around and pulling them aboard.

    

    Art by Raya Golden.
47. Some sort of stinking ooze starts bubbling up from the ground and forming itself into monstrous shapes. Odds are good they want to eat you.
48. Spiders the size of your hand keep appearing from nowhere, swarming towards you.
49. Strange beings with cyclopean visages and horrible claws sprout out of the earth and slither about on their murderous business. They viciously dismember anything living, but you're pretty sure they can only see movement, like a badly-researched T. Rex.
50. Strange limbs keep ripping through the fabric of reality, flailing around for organic matter, and retracting with their prey through the unsettling portals they created. DON'T LOOK THROUGH -- you don't want to know.
51. Struck with sudden-onset omniscience, paralyzed by complete knowledge of all things. (5% chance any given piece of information learned from this episode is remotely accurate.)
52. Sudden guerilla attack of sixteenthlings (one-eighth the size of a halfling) who tie you down Gulliver's-Travels-style.
    
53. Swarms of sea urchins begin migrating across the landscape. Rather than use their wee little feet as would be expected, they move like deranged tumbleweeds, bouncing from spine to spine at an alarming pace.
54. Tentacles keep poking out of everyone's skin-suits. If no people are around, this applies to all living things instead.
55. The air around you is entirely composed of miniscule air elementals. They are making fun of you and taking an unsettling amount of joy in the fact that you keep accidentally inhaling them.
56. The color drains out of everything you touch.
57. The entire world is on fast-forward. Seasons fly by in seconds. People are a blur too fast to see clearly. Pigeons treat you like a statue.
58. The floor is lava.
59. The GM should choose a passage in Revelations and read it out loud. That's what's happening right now.
60. The ground beneath you turns into quicksand. It is also full of various invertebrates mocking your plight.
61. The literal Grim Reaper is stalking the landscape, and you have a horrible certainty that he's looking for you.
62. The moon is made of green cheese and is falling out of the sky, the distinctive odor of aged dairy products preceding it. (If you get this result when the moon is not in the sky, then it comes over the horizon, rolling over all obstacles with a sound exactly like a giant ball of cheese squishing into things. (Bonus points if the GM simulates this by balling up some cheese and gleefully rolling it over the dice and various gaming accoutrements on the table.))
63. The nearest reflective surface (ponds, armor, any reasonably-shiny metal objects qualify if you are away from actual mirrors) bulges and distorts. Gnarled hands reach out of it and stretch it like a rubber band. A twisted facsimile of you with a malevolent grin clambers out and makes its way towards you. You KNOW, deep down in your gut, that this thing wants to kill & replace you and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.
64. The sky is the sea, and it's falling towards you.
65. The sounds of revelry approach! When you look, however, you see a carnivalesque parade of unspeakable horrors. The GM should describe in obscene detail the things gibbering, waving flags, eating humans-on-a-stick, singing songs of madness, &c.
    

    
66. The stones are talking to you, but they're strangely supportive and approve of your dress sense.
67. The sun and moon are eyes of some colossal being... watching you, personally.
68. The sun is being pushed across the sky by a giant dung beetle. The beetle hates you.
69. The world around you is incredibly fragile. A sudden movement could cause you to rip through the ground like it was paper and plummet to the center of the earth.
70. The world blinks out of existence, and you are floating in an endless void.
71. There are horrible monsters, the size of a large dog, roaming the streets. Nobody else can see them. They regularly steal things, which people seem to assume they have dropped and lost in a completely innocuous way. They also eat people, and nobody seems to notice.
72. There is a huge shadowy creature lurking nearby, stalking you. If you point this out to anyone else, it manages to hide just before they look in the right direction.
73. This region is haunted by everything that has ever died here. This includes huge swarms of ghostly bugs.
74. Unusually aggressive crabs scuttle out from hundreds of tiny, previously-unnoticed trapdoors and menace you with surprisingly dangerous-looking claws.

    

    This is actually a fiddler-crab mating ritual. So maybe the crabs aren't menacing you, exactly...

75. Up is down, east is west, north is left, south is out, right is backwards in time, and in no longer exists.
76. You are a turtle. Drop whatever you're doing and do turtle things instead.
77. You are acutely aware of the movement of the tectonic plates, the rotation of the planet, the slightest currents in the air and water, the sound of sand grains moving against each other, and every other natural process that people normally do not notice. You cannot focus on anything else.
78. You believe very strongly that you are dead and beginning to rot.
79. You can hear the GM and the players talking at the table.
80. You can hear the incomprehensible-yet-clearly-malevolent thoughts of the massive mollusk hive-mind a mile below the earth.

    

    The ALL-CONSUMING MOLLUSK HIVE-MIND is the true master of the earth, and it thinks you surface-dwellers are but IRRITATING PARASITES.

81. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant future. It may or may not be accurate, but it is horrifying on an existential level. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
82. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
83. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
84. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
85. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
86. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
87. You have microscopic vision; your eyes seem stuck on 500x zoom. The microscopic world is bizarre and you can't really get a grasp on what's going on at the macro level when you can only see tiny bits of it at a time.
88. You suddenly notice that you're standing on a sleeping dragon. Hold... very... still...
89. You suddenly realize the nearest person is a beloved childhood friend in disguise. If there are no people within eyesight, this applies to the nearest living thing. You cannot be dissuaded from this belief in any way.
90. You're turning to stone. You have maybe five minutes before you are nothing but a statue.
91. Your arms, legs, and neck are all growing longer at a rapid pace. Your hundred-foot-long-legs are too clumsy to control, even if you could see what you were doing from atop your eighty-foot neck.
92. Your ascension to godhood is imminent. Remain still and await apotheosis. Dramatic poses are acceptable.
93. Your blood is made of ants. They bite.
94. Your digestive tract is full of angry hornets. Sit down, keep your mouth tightly shut, and don't move; it'll be so much worse if they get out.
95. Your ears have turned into bat wings and your head is flying away. While you struggle to get control of the wings, you pretty much have to accept that your body below the neck is a lost cause, as it's already somewhere out of sight behind you and you can't access the muscle systems anyway.

    

    From the 2e Monstrous Manual.

96. Your limbs detach themselves and crawl off to take care of their own inscrutable business.
97. Your shadow is not your own.
98. Your skin is independently alive, mobile, and it hates you.
99. Your teeth begin carrying on a vicious debate about impenetrable skeletal politics. A few of them “storm out of the room" by uprooting themselves, sprouting legs, and either hopping onto the ground or stomping off down your throat.
100. Roll twice; reroll contradictions. Both are happening simultaneously.

You have my permission to use this, and any other resources on this blog, as long as you tell me how it went.

The Hungry Sky, Chapter Six

In Which

A Basilisk is Not Fought ⁂ The Party Arrives at Ang vy Moir ⁂ Beer is Had ⁂ The Locals Demonstrate How to Pronounce “Horned" with Two Syllables ⁂ Larceny is Perpetrated ⁂ Information is Gathered ⁂ Bork Sneaks About ⁂ Old Mother Rictus Makes a Deal

Oculi 16th, 211 Ravensblood

The next morning, the party continues along the lack of road. The northern foothills of the Afnung Mountains are bleak and colorless; the hills themselves look like huge swellings or boils in the landscape, and the valleys between are damp breeding-grounds for mosquitoes. The soil is nigh-lifeless; the only plants that seem to be able to survive are thickets of dark, thorny bushes and, on the highest parts of the hills, an evil-smelling grass that grows only above a certain altitude line.

GM: It's kind of a Dunwich Horror type of landscape.
Aster OOC: Okay?
GM: Massachusetts, but evil.
Bork OOC: So, Massachusetts.

Art by Santiago Caruso.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions... When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned. Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way... When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs... As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them.

-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror, opening paragraphs

Thanks to a good roll on a Perception check, Bork catches an unexpected scent on the wind from the next hill. Squinting, she sees that if she looks closely, what she had taken for yet another boulder is, in fact, a large lizard -- something like a bulky, terrestrial crocodile with too many legs -- casually sunning itself. She points it out to the others, and Aster's Knowledge(nature) check identifies the thing as a basilisk. The party decides to detour around that particular hill.

Art by Ian Miller.

 After several hours of rather unpleasant hiking, they arrive at the walls of Ang vy Moir; the town is located in a valley between two tall, steep, rocky hills, and a wall is built across the valley's entrance. The guard in the gatehouse demands that they identify themselves.

Aster: We are but a band of weary travelers. [Diplomacy: 13]
Bork: My name is Gnoll -- I mean Bork. [Diplomacy: 17]
Guard: You seem to have some sort of horrific beast following behind you.
Aster: He's not a horrific beast; he's our friend.
Guard: Are you sure? There are strange things in these hills; perhaps you only think he's your friend.
Aster: Um --
Guard: Perhaps he's preying on your mind.
Aster: He looks like a giant snail to you, right?¹
Guard: Yes.
Aster: Then yes. He's our friend.
Guard: You know, there are things around here that can insert themselves into your memory, and you'll think he was always there...
Aster: Well, you have no way of knowing, and we have no way of knowing --
Bork: Do I look like someone whose memory gets fucked with?
Bariarti: If I could make people think I was always there, wouldn't I have done it to you? [Diplomacy: 16]
Guard: Good point. Okay, you can bring your snail-creature with you, but we're going to keep an eye on him.
Bork: Thanks for keeping an eye on him. He eats vegetables and needs to be watered every three hours.
Guard: I don't think we'll be taking over those duties.

With that, the guard raises the portcullis and allows the party to enter the town of Ang vy Moir.

Notice that the hunting lodge belongs to the “Marquis de Irzhihal"². When this came up in the game, I used the map as a reference, wasn't able to read the friggin' font I used, and thought it said “Marquis de Jezhibal"³. So the entire session I was thinking, “why did I name this guy after an Old Testament queen?" The answer is, of course, that I didn't, but I guess it's canon now. (Also notice that I don't know how to make the roads look like they're winding up a mountain, so the ones that go out of the valley just kind of cut straight across.)

Anyway. Ang vy Moir is really just a hunting outpost that's been there so long it's turned into a town. To quote the setting document:

One of the older towns in the region, founded by a human barbarian tribe over a thousand years ago. It’s never gotten particularly large or powerful, however; mostly it’s just a place where human and goblinoid hunters can establish simple homes and trade with the local orc clans. 

As the party enters, they notice fairly crude, ramshackle cabins that are, presumably, the locals' homes, as well as a handful of larger buildings. The major feature that catches their eye, however, is a statue that depicts a bizarre, many-limbed beast that seems to have a hornèd tentacle in place of a head. It is shown as being engaged in mortal battle -- and losing -- against a man in furs. Fritha warns them that the locals, as a result of their long semi-isolation, are a little “off" in some ways, and not to be freaked out by that. She leads them to the inn, which, according to the sign, is called the “Unspeakable Visage".

His mouth is meant to be stitched shut. “Unspeakable", see? Ahahahahaha.

Aster rolls a natural 20 on an unprompted Bardic Knowledge check, and remembers an entire story cycle she's heard that was set in this region. As she recalls, some decades ago there was a minor Far Realms incursion nearby, and she heard the dramatized version of the local heroes fighting off the nameless creatures that slipped through. To her knowledge, there are still strange things up in the hills, but not anything that's sufficiently dangerous or organized to pose a real threat to the town. This more or less explains the unusual statuary, paranoid guards, and probably the name of the tavern; the whole event took a bit of a toll on the local psychology.⁴

The party enters the inn, and finds that the first floor is a tavern filled with raucous drinkers. The inhabitants all seem pretty... redneck-y, for lack of a better term. The sort of person whom one would associate with a rural, huntin' and fishin' and drinkin' lifestyle. They're also a little... greenish-gray, slightly tusky, kind of bulky and hairy... like there's just a touch of orcish blood floating around the local gene pool. They're a long way from half-orc, but might be the sort of person to boast that their great-great-grandfather was a full-blooded Medfudr.^5,6 They seem pretty friendly, though, and jovially toast the new folk as they come in.

Bork scans the room for the wealthiest-looking group, and sees some men wearing nicer furs with what appear to be masterwork weapons at their belts; she decides she's going to try and get them drunk so she can scam some money off of them. Bork heads up to the bar and asks for a pitcher of their finest beer, which turns out to be a fairly strange concoction. The substance the barman pours for her is black as pitch and thick as mud; it smells like something profane, moldering, and rotten has been burnt to make it. If the dark beers you can buy in a more conventional bar are “stouts", this might be called a “corpulent", or possibly a “bloated"⁷. She carries the pitcher over to the table with the wealthy hunters, and announces, “this round's on me!" After a decent Diplomacy roll, the drinkers are very pleased to see her.

Drinkers: Woo! Yeah, drinks on... um..
Bork: Bork.
Drinkers: Drinks on Bork!

Bork sits down to drink with them. The beer is incredibly strong⁸, but Bork rolls a 24 on her Fortitude save, and is completely unaffected by it.

Bork: What race are these guys? I'm probably, like, twice their size.⁹
GM: Mostly human. By which I mean each individual is “mostly" human.

Bork eyes the hunters' weapons [Appraise: 16] and notes that everyone at her chosen table has at least one axe, bow, or other weapon of masterwork quality, though she can't tell whether any are enchanted. Aster wanders around the room and makes a very low Gather Information check¹⁰, while Bariarti scans the room with detect good. Aster doesn't pick up anything other than the exaggerated hunting stories being told around the bar, and Bariarti doesn't see anyone light up other than Aster. Notably, the hunting stories are a little odd -- there are very few about stags and similar, but "strange tentacular beasties" are apparently valid quarry in these parts.

Bork: So, guys, what's there to do in this town?
Dolyn¹¹: We drink, we hunt... and that's more or less it.
Bork: What's the biggest thing you've ever killed?
Dolyn: I once shot a moon-beast up on the peak of that mountain over there.
Bork: What is that?
Dolyn: It's this great bat-wingèd thing with dangling tentacles and eyes that drive men maaad.

According to the 3e Monster Manual II, this thing is actually a mooncalf -- the moonbeast is the entry on the page right before it, and has no bat wings. To further confuse matters, the term mooncalf originally referred to a deformed cow fetus -- which sounds like it could have been made into a much weirder monster than this thing -- and in Pathfinder, a moon-beast is one of those things from The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. I'm explaining this whole mixup in-universe by pointing out that Dolyn is a hunter, not a scholar; he doesn't place the beasties in a taxonomy, he just places an arrow in their brain-pan.

While Dolyn is telling his story, Bork uses her mage hand to lift his purse from his belt and into one of her belt pouches [Sleight of Hand: 28]. Bork asks Dolyn about how he shot the “moon-beast" in its madness-inducing eyes “without getting induced into madness" -- he tells her the trick is to already be a little mad.

 Bork: I really love stories about men killing big things.
GM: I don't know if you're trying to flirt with him there, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you that's a low-percentage strategy considering you're a giant hyena.
Bork: They're just jealous because I have a bigger dick than they do.¹²

She then repeats this process with another drinker  -- Otes -- and he tells a wild story about hunting a creature that looked like a basilisk but was made of translucent jelly “as if it had been touched by otherworldly energies."

Bork: How did you kill it?
Otes: From behind.

Bork rolls fairly low on her Sleight of Hand check this time, but Otes rolls even lower on Perception, so she gets away with it. Aster asks about the giant statue in the middle of town, and another drinker -- Teig -- explains that “when the Dread Gate opened fifty years ago, the great hunter Gastornax the Fabulous¹³ fought one-on-one with a hornèd beast from beyond reality and defeated it so that our town could continue to exist." Bork lifts Teig's purse while he is talking, then ducks into the privy so she can count her ill-gotten gains and consolidate them into her own purse. All together, the purses of the three wealthy hunters come to about 85gp, in varying denominations.

Bork decides that taking more purses would be pushing her luck, but the hunters continue to regale the party with stories. It becomes apparent that the reason they have more money than the others in the bar is because they are employed by an aristocrat who maintains a hunting lodge in town; he pays them handsomely to act as guides to the region and to lend aid if he runs into anything really dangerous. Bork is intrigued by the presence of an aristocrat nearby whom she might be able to rob, and prompts the hunters for more information. They tell her he is called the Marquis de Jezhibal¹⁴, that his hunting lodge is only a few minutes away, and that he summers here specifically to hunt the Far Realms aberrations that one still finds in the hills.

Bork: Does he kill them just for sport, or is he a mage harvesting bits of them, or...
Otes: I believe partially for sport and partially for culinary adventure.
Bork: I'm also a fan of culinary adventure.
Aster: I didn't realize you could eat those things.
Otes: Normally, you probably shouldn't. But... well, the Jezhibal Marches is one of those little states down to the south... you know, in the Necrotic Bloc? The Marquis himself is a ghoul¹⁵, so I'm assuming that a lot of what he eats is not healthy for actual living people.
Aster: What's it like working for a ghoul?
Otes: Well, it gives you the creeps at first, but eventually you get used to it. And it's not like they're animals -- he knows it's bad form to eat his employees.
Bork: Is he around?¹⁶
Otes: Yeah, he's in town. We just went hunting with him yesterday.
Bork: Oh, what'd you get?
Otes: Well, I haven't had time to make up an exaggerated story yet, but we did bag a few rock lizards.
Bork: Oh, rock lizards, fascinating.
Otes: Well, no, they're fairly easy quarry, nothing to write home about -- but the great thing about rock lizards is that if you get their hides tanned, they make good, tough clothing. There's a tannery outside town, and the guy there is real good at making armor and clothing out of animal bits.¹⁷

At this point, Aster, who noticed one of the purses Bork took, pulls her off to the side and lets her know that she's going to be very upset if Bork gets them kicked out of the inn before they even get their rooms. Bork heads back to the table, and tries to find out if there are any other nobles in town she could target -- there's an ambassador from the gnoll settlement of Grasp, which Bork has no interest in -- if there's somewhere she can buy magic weapons -- there's a talented smith in town who can forge enchantable-quality stuff, and knows where to contact people to do the actual enchanting -- and if any of them have magic weapons (presumably so she can steal them) -- Teig has an axe that can neutralize acid, which Bork thinks is boring.

Aster goes off to listen at other tables, and makes another Gather Information check -- she gets a 17 this time, and hears someone mention that there's a powerful magic-user who lives in a cabin way up in the hills -- a crone by the name of Old Mother Rictus. Soon after this, the party retires for the night -- they're the only outsiders in town, and the rooms are cheap, so they can each get their own. For a little while, sleep is difficult, because some of the drinkers downstairs are playing the pipes very badly, and the atonal, discordant music keeps them up.

Bork does not go directly to sleep, but instead sneaks out the window to go a-burgling. She decides that the smithy sounds like a safer target than the Marquis's lodge, and is able to find it with little difficulty. After checking that there is nobody watching, she takes 20 to pick the lock, and slips in. According to her Appraise check, there are a couple swords hanging on the wall that have elaborate designs -- at least masterwork, possibly enchanted -- and among the metal ingots sitting by the forge are a few small bars of mithral. She decides taking the swords would be too conspicuous, so she grabs two bars of mithral and leaves. Considering what to do with them, she eventually makes the very canine¹⁸ decision to bury them in the dirt floor of the inn's privy and come back for them later. Bork then heads back to her bed.

NPC Interlude -- Old Mother Rictus

Old Mother Rictus sat hunched in her cabin, breathing in the scent of the herbs she had burned in this room every day for -- oh, so many years. Across the table was a visitor. She got a lot of visitors like this one; nervous men and women, criminals with mundane concerns like the value of a stolen wand or how to evade the guards who even now chased them down. They were boring people, but very... profitable. She grinned at the visitor, her thin, dry, cracked lips stretching over unnervingly strong and sharp teeth; this grin, the one that came at opportune times and was just a little too wide, was her trademark now -- it put the visitors in the right frame of mind.

“What can old Mother Rictus do for you, dearie?" She asked, solicitous kindness not fully covering the eager, hungry greed.

The visitor placed two items on the table. “What are these?"

Under Mother Rictus's arcane sight, the items flouresced with strange colors, shades one only sees if one has the Sight. The patterns in which the colors moved were... interesting. Something she hadn't seen in a long time. “I can tell you," Mother Rictus said, “for a price."

Mother Rictus never charged in anything so mundane as gold. It had long since ceased to amaze her at what people would give for such simple spells. Mother Rictus named her price, and the visitor blanched, but agreed. 

“Hold on just a moment, dearie." Mother Rictus hobbled back further into the cabin, and rummaged through her pantry before producing a small jug of wine. She made the wine herself, from tannersblossom and weepingberry, plants that grew in some of the deeper valleys. The taste was passable, but it was mostly for this sort of thing. From a hook hanging on the wall, she retrieved a large brown feather, its quill having been carefully silvered and attached to a ring from which it could hang. Some years ago -- many years ago -- she'd demanded a dozen of these from a local hunter in payment for a spell; it was from an owlbear. Finally, she opened a cabinet and retrieved a shallow clay bowl.

Mother Rictus returned to the table, and poured the wine into the bowl, then carefully stirred it with the feather, whispering incantations under her breath. She poured the wine over the items in front of her; if one was looking closely, as she was, one might see that the wine never quite touched the items, but turned into vapor a fraction of an inch from their surface. To Mother Rictus's eyes, the vapor spiraled into larger, clearer, more detailed imitations of the invisible magical patterns that covered the statues, showing clearer gradations of the shades of arcane coloring. She nodded, satisfied.

“Now give me your arm, dearie. This'll only hurt a moment." The visitor flinched, but followed instructions. Mother Rictus gripped the arm before her with unexpected strength, and, with the index fingernail of her other hand, quickly and expertly carved a complex symbol into the flesh. It healed, leaving no trace, as soon as it was done. “Good. Now --" She told her visitor what the items she had brought were, and grinned as the visitor's eyes grew wide and avaricious. Yes, this one was worth watching, at least for a little while. 

“Better hurry, dearie," she said. “Your friends will be waking up in just a few hours; if you leave now, you'll be able to get back to town and take care of business before they do." The visitor looked at her with naked surprise. “Oh, yes. Mother Rictus knows, dearie. Don't worry, though; it's none of my business."

Some time after the visitor hurried out of her cabin and back down the winding road -- a path that had been formed, not by design, but by decades of people walking from the town to see Old Mother Rictus -- she whistled softly into the night air, and one of her little helpers soon loped into view, its four delicate hooves leaving almost no impression in the dirt, with something clutched in the jaws of its great wedge-shaped head. “What have you brought for me, Tsega?"

Tsega spit a dead snake onto the ground, and Mother Rictus picked it up. “Perfect. Would you like to watch?"

“Yesss."

Mother Rictus fetched the rest of the jug of wine, and poured it into a large brass bowl she kept on a pedestal out back; the ignorant might have mistaken it for a birdbath, though birds only landed there when she needed one. She slit the snake open with her fingernail, and threw its entrails into the wine. Lighting the candles that circled the rim of the bowl, she whispered some incantations and watched. The entrails formed shapes, which soon acquired detail and color -- and she was watching her visitor, back in the town, creeping into a room. 

“That's the one who came here tonight," she explained to Tsega. “To identify some unusual magic items. But, of course, the items belong to that one in the bed, so there's a problem." 

Tsega laughed in his high-pitched way.

The visitor looked at the items, then at the sleeping figure -- then grabbed a candlestick from beside the bed, and with a practiced, precise, violent effort, struck the figure at the base of its skull. It went from sleeping to unconscious with barely a transition between. With care, the visitor lifted the sleeper over its shoulder, and headed towards the window.

“Wherrre do theyyy go?" Tsega asked.

“I expect," said Mother Rictus with a secret smile, “that they made sure to find out the best way in this town to get rid of someone inconvenient."

Tsega grinned, and the pair watched the scene in the bowl carry on.

---

1. I regret not having made a different “horrific beast" follow the party, invisible to them but not to others, and just letting the party assume the guard means Bariarti.

2. The “zh" is meant to be pronounced /ʒ/ -- many European languages would skip the “h" and write “ž", but computers are often touchy about diacritics, so I stopped trying to use them. So it's /ir.ʒi.hal/.
3. Which I then, like some sort of sucker, pronounced as /dʒɛz.hi.bal/ instead of /dʒɛ.ʒi.bal/.
4. The town is actually so weird because the general feel was inspired by Laird Barron's short story “Hand of Glory", but even a natural 20 doesn't let Aster's bardic knowledge extend to out-of-game material.
5. One of the better-known orcish tribes of the Afnung Mountains. It roughly translates as “Bear Kicker".
6. As I write this, I'm filing away the idea of playing a character who has just a tiny bit of non-human heritage -- not enough for it to affect his stats in any way -- but brings it up every chance he gets. “Actually, I'm ¹⁄₃₂ elven, so I know what I'm talking about." Then again, that might be the sort of character who ends up "heroically" dying by GM fiat; that's what happened to my Neanderthal character Og after one session of “this remind Og of time Og hunt great mammoth."
7. Bork's player is more knowledgeable about beer than I am, and after she asked what type of beer the Leering Lamprey's “good" brew was -- and all I could come up with was “brown ale" -- I decided there should be a more interesting answer to that question in the Unspeakable Visage. Her reaction to my description of the odor was, “oh, a smoky beer then; hmm."
8. In modern terms, it's somewhere around 15-20% ABV -- so much less than, say, gin, but much more than normal beer.
9. Gnolls are at least seven feet tall. Since, in my setting, gnolls have a society based directly on their spotted-hyena counterparts, the women are noticeably larger than the men, meaning Bork would be significantly above seven feet. So not twice their size, but bigger.
10. I house-ruled the skill back in. Having it as a subset of Diplomacy just doesn't make sense to me, and Aster's player uses it a lot but never seems comfortable with rolling Diplomacy when she's trying to overhear something or trying to look stuff up in books. While I could rule that those actions are a Perception check and a Knowledge check respectively, it just makes things smoother to have a single skill for general information-gathering.
11. Bork didn't ask for the names of any of her drinking companions, so I didn't give them any. It is only now, in this write-up, that I am assigning them these so that I don't have to call them “Drinker #1" and so forth.
12. Bork's player has familiarized herself with the anatomical peculiarities of female spotted hyenas (hyenae?). If you are feeling inspired to look up the details, I advise not thinking about them too much, especially if you are the type of person to wince when you see an unpleasant injury on television.
13. I paused trying to come up with a name, and Aster's player immediately dropped in “Gaston". I tweaked it just a little in case I wanted to re-use the story in a future game, but after being reminded of Gaston -- nobody cleanses the land of beasts from beyond the walls of sanity like Gaston! -- the only thing I could think of as an epithet was “The Fabulous". I now have a growing table of NPC names from various species and cultures so I don't end up naming anyone after Disney characters out of desperation.
14. Sigh...
15. For years now, I've been kind of irked by the standard game depiction of ghouls as feral creatures living in crypts. I mean, that niche is pretty well filled. Ghouls are not only intelligent undead, they're smarter than the average human. Pathfinder gives ghouls these mental stats -- Int 13, Wis 14, Cha 14 -- and then tells us “Ghouls are undead that haunt graveyards and eat corpses," and “Ghouls lurk on the edges of civilization (in or near cemeteries or in city sewers) where they can find ample supplies of their favorite food." Why do they do that? They aren't just smart, they have charisma -- and since it can't possibly refer to physical attractiveness in this case, that must mean they're really fast talkers and have a strong force of personality. They should be cunning, clever, leader-type monsters -- more like a vampire than a zombie. Plus that allows for the scene of a group of ghoul aristocrats inviting the PCs to join them for a banquet -- oh, no, as guests, not as the food, don't be silly, you're such a card, Sir Jeff -- here, have some leg of rotted elf. And then the GM describes in detail the unnaturally mobile jaws, long tongues, pointed teeth, and the substance on which they are -- in a genteel way of course -- consuming... and the players decide to go play something else, probably. Besides, having the PCs encounter a bunch of ghouls in a cemetery is creepy and evocative, of course, but that always brings up questions like, “so how many people are buried here? And how many ghouls is this supporting? For how long?" Basically, an undead creature whose defining characteristic is that they eat suddenly has an ecology to worry about. So, in my setting, ghouls are usually the smooth-talking servants of someone powerful -- or, in the Necrotic Bloc, they often are the power.
16. Out of character, Bork checks to make sure it's actually summer. Oculi 16th is equivalent, on our calendar, to June 17th, so it is.
17. This is my “hint, hint, remember you're carrying around all that ankheg chitin, maybe you should do something with it."
18. Yes, I know hyenas aren't actually canine, but just look at them -- don't you just want to give them ear scritches and belly rubs and cuddle them?

Lookit the little baby
(Picture from the Cincinnati Zoo -- it's an aardwolf, the smallest member of the Hyaenidae)

Ring of the Imposter

In the most recent session of the “Prophecy of the Hungry Sky" campaign, Aster rolled a 30-something when casting identify on a certain ring, so she has all the details about how it works now. Since I now don't have to worry about information leaking to my players, I can share the item with y'all and cause no end of trouble for players in any game you GM.

Ring of the Imposter

This tarnished bronze ring has a series of crude faces embossed upon it. (The “faces" may be meant to represent masks.)

This ring allows you to cast a variant of the spell alter self once per day. The effect of the ring differs from the familiar version of the spell in the following ways:

• Range: Personal Range: Touch
• In order to use the ring, you must be in physical contact with a living individual of your creature type. You mimic the form of that specific individual.
• Duration: 1 min. / level Duration: Instantaneous
• After the ring’s effect has taken hold, you are your new shape, and will remain in that form as long as you wish.
• Detect magic will therefore not show anything amiss.
• Dispel magic has no effect, for the same reason.
• You may not dismiss the effect at will, for the same reason.
• The ring will allow you to resume your true form, but it counts as your 1/day use — so if you use the ring, you’re stuck like that for the rest of the day, and when you change back, you can’t use the ring again until the next day.
• The ring “remembers” the true form of the people who use it, so that you can change back. However, you can only return to your true form if you’re wearing the ring. 
• Another ring with the same enchantment doesn’t count.
• If the form you assume has any of the following abilities… 
• You do not gain any abilities of the form you mimic, and you receive no bonuses or penalties to your ability scores.
• You retain all abilities you had before changing; however, if you do anything that the form you are mimicking would not be able to do, there is a highly noticeable visual effect.
• For example, if you mimic the form of someone who is missing an arm, and then try to use the “missing” arm, witnesses might observe a new arm growing out of the stump, performing whatever task, and then retracting.

In addition to alterations of the text of the spell, users of the ring should be aware of the following rules: 

• It is surprisingly easy to lose the ring; it has a tendency to slip off your fingers when they change shape.
• When changing, you must roll under your Dexterity in order to keep the ring on.
• If you fail and the ring falls off, you must make a DC 10 Perception check to notice you’ve lost it.
• You can choose to mimic the target’s clothing as well, but doing so requires a certain amount of mental focus.
• Roll under your Wisdom to do so successfully.
• Fail by 5 or more: Your clothes do not change at all, and probably don’t fit the new form. This is also the result if you decide not to roll.
• Fail by less than 5: Your clothes change to fit the new form, but otherwise look the same.
• Succeed by less than 5: Your clothes change, but only superficially. Close scrutiny — DC 30 Perception — will allow people to notice there is something odd about them.
• Succeed by 5 or more: Your clothes look and feel exactly like the clothes your target is wearing.
• Just as you retain all your abilities when changed, your clothing retains all of its properties, magical or otherwise.
• If you are unarmored and mimic the form of someone wearing full plate, even if you succeed in the check to have your clothes change with you, your AC will not increase; attackers may be surprised by how easily their blade splits your armor.
• The reverse is also true; someone heavily armored copying the clothing of someone unarmored may end up with a silk robe that swords inexplicably glance off of.

Note:

• You do not receive any of the target's memories; you had best dispose of the target right away, because you're going to lose any “which Jethro is the real Jethro" conflict that might arise.
• To GMs: Yes, this is basically an item that lets a villain of your choice play “doppelganger".
• And, as written, would allow, e.g., a storm giant to pretend to be a halfling while retaining every bit of its dangerous abilities, up to and including its ludicrously high strength score and ability to call lightning... imagine the results if you can delay that reveal until the worst possible time.
• To fans of a certain young adult book series: Yes, it would be hilarious if one of your PCs essentially became a nothlit as a result of this ring. For people with that sense of humor, I would suggest removing the creature type restriction and making the roll to keep the ring on much harder when changing creature types.

The Hungry Sky, Chapter Five

In Which

A Journey Begins ⁂ The Snail Flails ⁂ Firing into Melee is a Bad Idea ⁂ Bariarti Meets the Critical Hit Table ⁂ Nocturnal Attackers Figure ⁂ Death by Shoulder-Tap ⁂ Evil is Smitten ⁂ Aster Makes Numismatic Deductions

Oculi 13th, 211 Ravensblood (Feast of Saurivuntyr)

The party, having been notified that Fritha wants to get on the road in the near future and this may be their last full day in Stagnant Lake for a while, consider whether they have anything they still need to take care of. They generally conclude that they do not, and, in the words of the GM (i.e., my own recorded voice), “the day is generally uneventful and not worth recording."

That evening over dinner, Fritha informs the party (and Fluryka) that they should leave at dawn the next day in order to follow her preferred traveling plan. Sticking to the main roads would take weeks, but if they're willing to make a slightly riskier overland journey, they can reach the port town of Hoturla in just a few days and buy passage on a ship to Verunn. If they leave town early enough tomorrow, they can reach the Tomb of St. Tris¹ before dark, and thus sleep safely with the knowledge that they are surrounded by paladins. From there, they'll have to find their way through the foothills to Ang vy Moir, which will involve at least one night of camping, but Ang vy Moir has walls and an inn, and then it's only a day on the road to Hoturla. 

The party also has to decide whether they want Brother Saros travelling with them, given that he's somewhat irritating and gives them a weird vibe. They do, however, eventually agree that the greater access to healing is worth it.

Aster: If he's with us, we can keep an eye on him.
Bork: If he's with us, we can kill him in his sleep.

It is a minor side note that this day was also the Feast of Saurivuntyr, and a small banquet was held at the Tower of Eyes, local headquarters of the Royal Intelligence Corps, a few miles further along the lake's coast. The PCs were not invited.

Oculi 14th, 211 Ravensblood

The next morning, the party sets out, their numbers effectively doubled by the trio of NPCs with them. The road to St. Tris is not traveled very frequently; pilgrims visit there, and they buy food or other supplies from Stagnant Lake, and the occasional person in search of a high-level healer might find their way to the monastery, but generally the traffic is barely enough to warrant the existence of the road. Aster tries to make the day's walk² more cheerful:

Aster: Fritha, do you know any good stories?
Fritha: That's an... interesting question. [pause] The answer to which is “no".
Aster: Well, I do. Would you like to hear one?
Fritha: If that helps pass the time.
Aster OOC: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote...

The summer sun is hot, and the dust rises around their feet as they walk. On either side of the narrow, sporadically-maintained road, the tall yellowish grass that characterizes the area refuses to wave in the lack-of-breeze. The buzzing of insects and occasional rustling of snakes goes gradually silent, and the PCs make Perception checks. Bork gets a 25 ³, and is able to alert her companions to a strange scraping from underground, and the vibrations of movement in the soil. Thus there is no surprise round when the ankhegs burst from the soil...

From the 2e Monstrous Manual

Three ankhegs menace the PCs. Ankhegs, for the uninitiated, are ten-foot-long, carnivorous, burrowing insects with acidic saliva, so this is tremendously inconvenient⁴. Fluryka and Saros take the first opportunity to flee combat and leave the fight to others, being as they are unarmed. Bork manages to stab one, and it retaliates by gripping her firmly in its mandibles for significant damage. Another spits acid on Aster, Bariarti, and Saros -- who apparently didn't move far enough away. Bariarti slithers into battle with a flail; one assumes that Bariarti's player, as a long-time gamer, did this intentionally in order to invoke a “flail snail".

A flail snail, again for the uninitiated; a monster from the 1st-edition days generally considered to be absurd.⁵
I believe it was actually revived for 5e in the recent Volo's Guide to Monsters.

Some relatively unremarkable combat proceeds, in which Bork is crushed some more in the ankheg's mandibles, and Saros delivers some healing. One of the ankhegs then manages a critical, followed by a roll of 93 on the d100 critical table, and bites off one of Bariarti's hands. Aster manages to respond with her own critical, and does a whopping 6 damage with her halfling-sized crossbow; Bork finally kills the one grappling her. Fritha decides to fire into melee a few times, and manages to put more than one crossbow bolt into Bork over the course of the fight. Eventually the party kills two of them and drives off the last.

Once combat has ended, Fluryka returns from her hiding place in the grass and drops some wisdom: apparently you can use every part of the ankheg, or at least goblins do. She mentions to the party that not only are they edible, but you can make passable armor out of ankheg exoskeleton. Bork collects the biggest bits laying around for future armorsmithing, and Fluryka decides to cook some of the flesh up for lunch. It tastes not entirely unlike lobster.

That evening, they arrive at St. Tris and head straight to the monastery to see if someone can put Bariarti's hand back on. The monk they meet in the entrance hall is pretty skeptical, and even asks if Bariarti is some sort of demon they've brought into their monastery, on the grounds that he's never seen anything that looks like him and belongs on this plane of existence. He also asks whether they're sure his species normally has two hands; Bork produces the severed one from her pack. It turns out that the abbess is actually sufficiently powerful to do such a thing -- it's a real stroke of luck that this happened when the party was already on their way to a significant religious outpost.

The Tomb of St. Tris, in the foothills of the Afnung Mountains.

The monk is insistent on a sizable donation to the church for such a service, and is openly doubtful that this strange group of people has that kind of money on them⁶. Bork tries and fails to convince them to bill the monks who brought them back; the monk tries to convince Bariarti to agree to undertake a quest-to-be-decided-upon-later; eventually it turns out that Bariarti's player spent very little of his starting budget, and produces the requisite 1000 gold pieces. For this donation, the abbess takes time out of her busy schedule and ushers Bariarti to a consecrated altar, where she chants over him for nearly an hour until his hand reattaches itself.

The party then heads to the Civilian Quarter, on the monks' advice, where pilgrims can generally pay a local to let them sleep on someone's floor. (Fluryka, who is used to sleeping in real beds, insists on this.) Aster makes a low Gather Information roll, and finds an elderly man who used to be a cook at the military academy; he has enough room on his floor for two people, and that ends up being Fluryka and Saros. Bork, who doesn't mind sleeping outside but didn't buy camping gear, curls up on the ground outside like a dog.

Oculi 15th, 211 Ravensblood

Aster and Bariarti go to morning service at the temple, to hear about valiant adventure and the cleansing powers of fire. Bork idly considers “derail[ing] the entire campaign to plan an elaborate heist on the monastery and get our thousand gold back," but decides against it. Before the party leaves, they stop by the barracks to see if they're willing to part with some of the equipment they keep around for the paladins. They procure some traveling supplies so Bork has something to sleep under; Aster also takes a look around their armory and manages to buy a masterwork longsword with really nice scrollwork on the hilt. They then leave St. Tris on the grounds that there is no tavern and it is therefore a boring town.

As they leave town, Fritha warns them that this next leg of the journey is likely to be dangerous, as there is no established road. They should also plan to camp tonight, as they're definitely not going to reach Ang vy Moir before dark. The party moves through hills and valleys along a path that's not so much a road as a game trail; the day goes by fairly uneventfully, despite the ominous milieu. Before they make camp, Aster organizes a watch schedule. Fritha volunteers for first watch, and Aster for third. After some back-and-forth between Bariarti and Bork, Bork reluctantly agrees to take second watch on the grounds that she has a much better track record at spotting things than Bariarti.

This turns out to be beneficial, as not long into Bork's turn on watch, she spots a pair of shadowy figures moving silently towards the camp. Their use of stealth is actually very impressive, but gnolls have sensitive noses and the intruders smell terrible. Bork decides to use her rogue talent of “minor magic" and taps one of the approaching figures on the shoulder with mage hand.⁷ A successful Bluff check causes it to actually look around, and she shoots it while it's flat-footed, causing it to barely bite back a scream of pain. If they weren't hostile before, they are now. The two figures head out of the shadows -- allowing Bork to identify them as bugbears -- bothering much less with stealth. Some failed Perception checks on the part of the five sleeping members mean that literally nobody wakes up until Bork shouts.

Bugbear, from the 2e Monstrous Manual.⁸

The two that Bork spotted earlier proceed to clobber her with their morningstars, and two that had been successfully making their Stealth checks until now hurl javelins from the other side of the camp. Aster starts singing for her inspire courage effect, and the noise finally wakes Fritha, though the other two NPCs appear to be unusually heavy sleepers. Bork tries the “tap on the shoulder" trick again -- on the same bugbear -- and he fails his Sense Motive despite the penalty given for this trick already being done; she then gets a critical hit on her attack of opportunity, and kills him outright with a stab through the kidney. Bork's player makes it clear to all that her “laughing uproariously" should be considered as in-character.

Fritha's signature firing-into-melee move actually works out in this fight, and she does a small amount of damage to the bugbears. Aster shoots off one of the bugbears' thumbs on a critical that does all of two damage. Bork reduces the other one in melee with her to exactly zero hit points, so that it's unconscious but alive. Bariarti successfully smites evil for the first time, but rolls terribly low on damage. Aster takes down the one missing a thumb, and Fritha goes to poke the unconscious one to see if it's dead or not; the final bugbear flees, and manages to evade Bork's attack of opportunity by a hair.

There is some discussion about whether to interrogate the unconscious bugbear or kill it outright. Bork wonders out loud if they're actually sapient, and Aster points out that they're smart enough to use javelins; Bork is of the opinion that a sufficiently motivated dog could throw a javelin, so that doesn't prove anything.⁹ It is, however, fairly common knowledge that bugbears are just a variety of goblinoid, and are known to be sapient even if the fact that they're carrying weapons and wearing armor isn't enough to convince Bork. Bariarti wants to just kill it -- his smite evil worked on one, so as far as he's concerned, his god wants them dead. Aster convinces the party to bind it instead, then wake it up and ask it questions. The interrogation proceeds as follows:

Bork: Why did you attack us? (Intimidate: 23)
Bugbear: What? It's just -- I mean -- you know -- a good night's fun.
Bork: [glares]
Bugbear: Right, right, so it was a hit. But we were hired through an intermediary; we don't know who wanted it done.
Bork: Intermediary?
Bugbear: Just some guy, you know? He -- they -- just showed up with a message.
Bork: He or they?
Bugbear: Look, I don't know how to recognize human genders.
Bork: But just one person?
Bugbear: Yes. One guy. Could have been a chick. Dunno.
Aster: But human.
Bugbear: Yeah.
Bork: What did they say?
Bugbear: That if we saw a hyena and a snail traveling together, we should ambush them and try to kill the whole group.
Bork: I'm a gnoll, you racist fuck.
Bugbear: I don't have time for political correctness.
Bork: Yeah, you don't have time because I'm going to cut off your head if you don't give us the answers we want.
Bugbear: Hey, I'm cooperating. Cooperating. I'm answering, aren't I?
Bork: Are you sure it was a human who hired you and not, like, a frog?
Bugbear: I think I would have noticed.
Bork: I dunno, you're kind of dumb.
Bugbear: You're kind of dumb.
Bork: I killed your partner by tapping him on the shoulder in the middle of combat.
Bugbear: He was kind of dumb. Look, I gave you your answers. Are you going to let me go?
Bork: I'll let the paladin decide. Was the person who hired you wearing any religious symbols or weird jewelry?
Bugbear: Not that I saw. They were dressed like a human. Doing human things.
Bork: What did they pay you?
Bugbear: They gave us a bag of gold.
Bork: Where's the gold?
Bugbear: With the rest of the tribe.
Aster: [Sense Motive] Liar.
Bugbear: All right, it's on the dead guy over there.
Bork: Paladin, he's all yours.
Bugbear: Remember I cooperated! And I'm unarmed!

Bariarti clobbers him to death with his flail without apparent moral compunction as Bork loots the bodies. She does indeed find a bag with 21 gold pieces in it, as well as a necklace of scrimshawed human teeth and a small wooden tribal totem. Aster's bardic knowledge identifies the carvings on the totem as being characteristic of Tribe Drool-Dark, a nomadic tribe in the foothills that is known for ambushing travelers for fun and profit.

Bork: Want to go slaughter their families too?
GM: Whoa.
Bork: He's the one that killed an unarmed man!
Aster: Yeah, I kind of feel like that's un-paladin-like.
Bariarti: [shrug]
Aster: I guess it depends on the god.
GM: Grandfather Kraken is pretty hands-off.¹⁰ His paladin status is not in danger.

Aster also wants to examine the coins in the bag and see if they come from anywhere in particular. This actually reveals something interesting -- all of them are coins minted in the now-defunct Necrocracy. They are still the currency of choice in the dozens of tiny fiefdoms south of the Afnung Mountains where the Necrocracy used to be, now referred to as the Necrotic Bloc. Though they are not uncommon sights in general circulation, it is unusual that the entire bag is Necrotic currency.

Necrotic currency is easily identified because of the onyx incorporated into the design. Though the metal is copper, silver, and gold-colored in order to match the schema used by neighboring countries, it's actually just cheap alloys; the value of the currency is based on onyx. Copper “scythes" have almost-negligible amounts of onyx dust mixed into them; silver “chiefs" have a small shard through the center; and golden “dances" have a thin slice inlaid on the reverse. Another unique aspect of Necrotic currency is that the “platinum piece" has been eliminated in favor of the “eye", which is a thin ring of tarnished bronze around a flat disc of onyx, valued at 25 gold pieces; the onyx discs used are of sufficient size and quality to use in the creation of undead, thus giving them inherent value.

The party discusses how much they can deduce from that, and then splits the coins three ways. Bork informs Fritha that she earned a gold piece for actually shooting an enemy this time, but she owes Bork a gold piece for shooting her yesterday, so it's a wash. They then (mostly) return to sleep.

---

1. St. Tris, in life, was actually a PC in a previous campaign some years ago -- the first campaign in this particular world, in fact. She erred on the “good" side of “Lawful Good" and tended to solve her problems with fire and sword. After spending some of her afterlife as a saint of Pelor, she became a demigod in her own right after Pelor abandoned the world in the Great Holy War. Her worshipers are few, and her only temple is the one by her tomb. Her doctrine is mostly about being an active force for good in the world, with a strong undercurrent of “smite evil first, and ask questions later". Most of the permanent residents of the “town" of St. Tris are either monks or paladins-in-training -- her church maintains a highly-specialized military academy.
2. Not only were they unable to find any mounts for sale in Stagnant Lake, Bariarti is physically incapable of riding anything, so going on foot is really their only option.
3. Bork OOC: Not only do I hear what you're having me roll for, but I can hear the dreams of my compatriots.
4. It should be noted, however, that they do wonderful things for the quality of the soil. I'm not making this up.
5.  Though Zak S. said the following nice things about it here:

Ok so a flail snail is silly but, really have you ever looked at a snail? A snail is fucked. In a line drawing on a Hallmark card a snail is just a wiggle and a spiral, but in reality a snail is a gross fucking monster from hell. Imagine that slick, slightly pocked, stretching moist slugskin forming the spheres and spikes of a morning-star-shaped faceless-vegetable-like unface and then wanting to touch you with it. If you still don't get it, watch that scene in Microcosmos where the two banana slugs mate on a rope of their own slime while an aria plays in the backround--a thing like that pounding on you with its own eyeless faces would drive you insane. See? Ok.

 (In context, that counts as saying nice things.)
6. This is actually on me -- I thought spells of that level were more expensive than it turns out they are. We spent a solid fifteen minutes at the table conversing with the monk before I checked the cost and found out it was more affordable than I thought.
7. Or, you know, telekinetically prods their shoulder in such a way that it feels like a finger tap.
8. From the setting document: “Bugbears are yet another variety of goblinoid, and the same sort of questions about whether they’re a subspecies or… what, exactly, tend to float around. In general, however, they are a combination of the worst traits of their goblinoid cousins: the strength and organization of hobgoblins, but the bad attitude and destructive tendencies of goblins. Not only are they big enough to take pretty much anyone in a straight-up fight, but their personalities tend to range over the spectrum between ‘asshole' and ‘serial killer' — with the occasional spike into ‘war criminal'. They tend to stick to small, mobile groups — not so much because that’s their preference, but because larger groups tend to collapse into infighting and any more permanent settlements end up in conflict with their neighbors. Of course, since nobody is ‘always Chaotic Evil', there is in fact a decent-sized bugbear settlement to the far north — Putiurl — where those who don’t fit into traditional bugbear culture often settle."
9. Bork OOC: Some people do agility courses with their dogs; we do random sadistic javelin throwing.
Bariarti OOC: That's basically reverse fetch.
10. Tentacles-off.