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.
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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
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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.
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| 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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
Aster: We are but a band of weary travelers. [Diplomacy: 13]With that, the guard raises the portcullis and allows the party to enter the town of Ang vy Moir.
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.
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| 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.) |
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".
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| His mouth is meant to be stitched shut. “Unspeakable", see? Ahahahahaha. |
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 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: Bork.
Drinkers: Drinks on Bork!
Bork: What race are these guys? I'm probably, like, twice their size.9Bork 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.
GM: Mostly human. By which I mean each individual is “mostly" human.
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.
Bork: I really love stories about men killing big things.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."
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
Bork: How did you kill it?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.
Otes: From behind.
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...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.
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
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?
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?
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| Lookit the little baby (Picture from the Cincinnati Zoo -- it's an aardwolf, the smallest member of the Hyaenidae) |
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