The World Below - The Farthest Gate, Episode 1

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, friends, and welcome to another single serving tabletop adventure from Queen's court games. I am Aaron. I use he him pronouns, and tonight I will be your story guide as we burrow beneath the forsaken surface and explore the world below. The world below is a brand new fantasy exploration and survival game from Onyx Path Publishing. The Kickstarter literally just launched. Or maybe it did yesterday, or maybe it will tomorrow. Time is a flat circle that has no meaning, but we are one of the first people to play it. You are some of the first people to watch it. And, I mean, if that doesn't get you excited, I just. I don't know, man. You've lost your joy for life. In just a moment, we will be exploring fungal caverns, carving our way through granite, dealing with monsters infected with chaos and so, so much more. But first, I need to introduce you to the talented band of subterranean stars who will be joining us on this journey. First up, trading the good society carriages for grim subterranean caverns. From Manapot Studios, it's Marissa. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Hi, folks, I'm Marissa. I use she, hear her pronouns, and I am here to study chaos, make maps, and take names. Or at least take them down in my book. [00:01:15] Speaker A: My very favorite book. Next up, he assures me he isn't sufficiently interesting to generate a quippy introduction. Nevertheless, he's a regular contributor for black nerd problems. It's Garrett. [00:01:29] Speaker C: Hey, there. I'm Garrett. Use he him pronouns. And, yeah, I'm just here to make sure that all my little gremlin children survive the day and, you know, succeed and reach that pinnacle of life. I know they can reach. [00:01:46] Speaker A: Alongside. He swears he has three ferrets, but despite having spent several hours in character creation, I have yet to see them. They are the digital media manager for the masquerade endless nights. It's Vex Somniari. [00:01:58] Speaker D: Hello, I'm Vex Somniari. I use he, they pronouns. I am one of the children that Garrett is talking about, and I am here to use my single brain cell for something. [00:02:13] Speaker A: And if you're wondering who the other child is, process of elimination may have guided you to the correct answer. Exploring new turf with 100% of the dungeons but 0% of the dragons. TtrPG, mercenary and pigeon enthusiast. It's Lex. [00:02:28] Speaker B: Hello. [00:02:29] Speaker A: Hello. [00:02:29] Speaker E: I'm Svilbert. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Lex. [00:02:30] Speaker E: I go by she, they pronouns. I'm a little rat, and I can't wait to eat dirt. [00:02:35] Speaker A: With all y'all so much dirt. You can find links to their assorted social media accounts by typing exclamation point cast in chat or looking in the show notes if you're catching up later via podcast or on YouTube. Now that is introduction settled. We have our characters together. We have our tools and our tags and our paths and our dons. Are we ready to abandon the surface and strike out into the worlds of minerals, mystery, and magic that waits beneath? [00:03:10] Speaker C: Let's do it. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Very well then. Let me tell you a story. Not so long ago, an unknown calamity struck the surface world. Those who could, your grandparents, their parents, fled into the vast underneath, forced to struggle, adapt, and survive in their new chthonic home. The world below is a subterranean game of exploration, survival, and horror, where players take on the role of fantasy heroes, making the best of a dark and unknown world. Today we go into that unknown world. Today you are those heroes. The camera begins with an establishing shot coming up a small, claustrophobic tunnel as all manner of insects, of grubs, of worms, of the occasional rodent skitter away. It opens up into a broad, dirt caked cavern tall enough that the survivors of Mudtown have been able to stack building after building after building on top of one another into a teeming, crowded, claustrophobic mass of civilization here in the world below. Now, Mudtown sits at the center point of the various settlements that have spread out beneath the surface. But it is also not where any of you call home. I don't know that anyone ever has a good reason to go to Mudtown. Nevertheless, you must have some reason. Good or bad or indifferent or accidental matters. Not to me. As we begin to introduce our characters, that is where we will start. In just a moment, I will run, roll the assignment, and when that does, I'd like you to describe who we see, where they are in this teeming mass of larceny, of survival, of crafting, and what brought them here. So, here we go. That's a three. So from my left to right, that brings us to Tourmaline. Vex set the scene for us. [00:05:31] Speaker D: And Tourmaline is an antisyan, so very reptilian. But even with their reptilian features, their face is almost sunken. There's something about them that's just not quite right. It's inviting, but almost in a way that a funeral home is inviting when a loved one has died. They are standing amidst this crowd of people right in the very center, and there's a little bit of a birth around them. Something. Something tasteful, something respectful. No one's too close, but not too far to be rude. Of course, they have these almost white scales to them. But there's a darkness in certain patches around their eyes, around the lips. And they simply followed the voices here, the voices that never stop, the voices that never leave their psyche, that are echoing from all around them, from the living, the dead, and otherwise. And it led them to this very point. [00:06:45] Speaker A: You say a crowd has assembled. Are they here for a sermon? Are you providing some kind of service? Is it just that your appearance is strange and worthy of investigation? [00:06:55] Speaker D: So tourmaline is here for work. Formaline follows the voices, and that is where the work tends to be. And so the crowd that has gathered is for that. It's to ascertain services, to see. Maybe a loved one has passed and need to communicate. Maybe there's a haunting happening that needs to be investigated, anything of that nature. Maybe a fortune needs to be told. And that is why they are around Tourmaline. [00:07:21] Speaker A: Such is the duty of the farsider. Well, we will use this game's initiative system to also pass responsibility around. It is the end of your turn, which means you get to pick who goes next. Lex is hiding. Don't let them hide. If you need to go there, fear not. [00:07:40] Speaker D: I will let my fellow child wait for a little bit, and I will call instead upon the father of this whole operation. Toss it to Garrett. [00:07:50] Speaker A: And then Garrett. So enters Montgomery. What brings you to mudtown, and what are you doing today? [00:07:57] Speaker C: So what we see with Montgomery, also an anticient, a fellow snake body. Not really sunken features like that. However, there's still a little bit of creepiness to him. We have your snake body. There's a little bit of mushrooms and different kinds of fungus, just kind of growing in patches along the body. A little forest moss. Kind of looks like a tuft of hair, a backpack, and a lot of fanny packs. Lots and lots of packs. What are in those packs? We're not sure yet, but lots of preparedness from this father. See him talking to what appears to be a fellow merchant, probably doing some trading with, uh, fungus that he found that is usable for, uh, the settlement. Uh, the reason why I'm here is to earn a bit of cash. Uh, my duties tend to send me off. I'm very good at, uh, scrounging said areas for usable items. Very in tune with the ground itself. Uh, and I use those skills to trade different things, earn money to send back to my family. We just had a new brood hatch. So very much I'm out there trying to earn a lot of money, make sure those kids are very safe, secure, and, you know, not wanting for anything. [00:09:28] Speaker A: Very well. Have you found anything especially interesting here in Mudtown? Was there a rumor that you chased here? Or are you just exploring settlement to settlement, hoping to stumble upon something? [00:09:39] Speaker C: I tend to listen to the fungus that grows around me. They tend to send me in directions where I can find more bounty, basically. And is the fungus that led me to this area. [00:09:53] Speaker A: Very well. Very interesting. Well, the responsibility falls on your shoulders now. Who do we hear from next? [00:10:03] Speaker C: I'm gonna go with the older, more secure child in vivain. [00:10:10] Speaker B: I will gladly take the mantle as the front row sitting student a. I'm glad that dad has seen my competence, so I am playing vivain. We see a lithe and very clearly impatient elven scholar, dark hair, light green eyes, dressed in what are clearly the robes of a scholar and archaeologist. She's writing something in her grimoire, which is one of the trinkets that she always has with her. It's where she captures her spellcraft, she captures her scholarship, and crucially, the work that she does for the guild she belongs to, which is why she's here. She has been sent to Mudtown because it is her turn to do a survey of some of the surrounding caverns to get the latest and greatest notes about how they've changed since the last time this survey was done. Unfortunately, it's very painstaking work and very detail oriented work. And as someone who's not especially spatially skilled, but enjoys using the auspices of her guild for her own work, she is muddling her way through, making the most detailed, intricate map that she can. Frustrated blows a piece of hair out of her eyes as she realizes that the articulation of this particular grade of sediment is not quite what she hoped it would be and not quite what she saw. So she waves a hand over the page of the book, using her connection to chaos to erase the offending marks. However, given her inclinations and given her specific connection to chaos through her part, her background, her use of chaos always draws attention. And so her eyes light up violent violet purple, and there's a little kind of miniature sonic boom as the offending marks go away. But she has unfortunately drawn the attention of all of those around her. [00:12:11] Speaker A: You mentioned it was your turn to come to Mud town. Is that an assignment that has prestige attached or has somebody sent you maybe a not so desirable job? [00:12:22] Speaker B: I think she certainly does not consider this particular assignment to have prestige associated with it. I think she's been sort of sent to do the. And this is the annual survey because Mudtown is one of our big civilizations and settlements. We have to keep this up to make sure our infrastructure keeps running. And it just has to be done by someone you know. And you have drawn the short straw this year. So, yes, I think she's not especially pleased to be in this part of Mud town. Certainly not on this assignment. [00:12:52] Speaker A: No. And with those robes, knowing how this town got its name, it's not going to be a good day. Well, that leaves one. [00:13:03] Speaker E: I wonder who it is. Okay, so you notice the crowd stirring. Before you notice why, you start seeing children with their eyes wide and parents pulling them aside. Some. Some hunters looking, giving a quick nod. And then you see this possum esque rat humanoid wearing some mixed matched leathers. The bits that you can see over the excessive amounts of skulls and skins and bones and pieces that she has covered herself in to showcase the most recent of hunts. Some dried and fresh blood in too many parts for somebody who decided to go on a shopping trip. But she is looking around with a list in her hand, waving to people. They're towering. And as she's waving to them, just okay, I guess. And not fully realizing that the newest skin that she has is a very rare quartz mole that they think didn't even exist anymore. Parts of the world below. And people are just wondering how she's even found one, never mind killed one. And she's looking at this list, annoyed. And her eyes starting to glow with fire inside her brother, center on almost a wild goose chase of finding certain minerals and things. And this is the third town that she's gone to that hasn't had it. So she starts. She's starting to hope that. She's hoping that it's here, but she's getting a little annoyed. [00:14:33] Speaker A: Oh, the banality of it all. I mean, each of you are here for your own specifically interesting reason, but that definition of interesting is going to vary significantly from person to person to person, right? Or maybe not. I mean, Vivain, it's interesting in an intellectual way, but it's certainly not interesting in an intellectual way, right? Tourmaline, this is fascinating for people who are watching you, but for you, it's just another cycle here in the world below, Montgomery and sten, spending your time doing what you've always done. Maybe in a new place, maybe with a slightly different tint than the normal color of work, but work normal nevertheless. It is against that backdrop that things change almost immediately. And I will ask you for our first roll of the game as we find in new initiative, rolling initiative in the world below. You will use the higher of the two pools, either athletics and cunning or empathy and dexterity. Whichever of those gives you more dice, you will roll that one. Mechanically, once you've rolled, you're looking for eights, nines and tens. Eights and nines, add one hit to your total. Tens, add two hits. You'll add all those hits up together and then let me know what that number is. [00:16:07] Speaker E: I got a ten, eight, five, and three. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Well, ten is two, and eight is one. That'd be a total of three. [00:16:19] Speaker D: I got a single success of eight. [00:16:25] Speaker A: Three for Stan, a one for vervain. [00:16:32] Speaker C: I also got a. An eight and a ten. So that would be three, three for. [00:16:37] Speaker A: Montgomery. [00:16:41] Speaker D: Five total with no two tens, and. Oh, God, where'd it go? N one, nine. [00:16:49] Speaker A: Wow. The total is. The total is fine. If you can do the math, that'll save me from having to do the math, and we will all be better for it then, with five hits, that's actually quite an incredible total. And I believe it makes sense, because not only are you closest physically to what is about to happen, what is currently happening, but you are also closest mentally to what is about to happen, or spiritually, rather. If given the opportunity to pontificate, Vivain would talk about the benefits and the downfalls to being in such soft earth. It makes it incredibly easy when new room is required for people to burrow into the walls, to take the silt out, dump it in some forgotten tunnel, and create new space. But where the humanoid creatures can dig, so too can the less than humanoid creatures. And Tourmaline's first indication of something going wrong will be a thriving, loud, cacophonous addition to the realm of voices coming around. None of them humanoid, none of them in Tisian, none of them elven or dwarven or human. But a chittering, squeaking, ravenous tidal wave of thoughts pouring up from underneath you, and you'll all start to feel it soon after, as the ground begins to shake and then a sinkhole emerges. We'll say between where Montgomery is off plucking amongst the various merchant stalls and looking for this and that, and where tourmaline is holding court in the center, a sinkhole begins to open, the ground turning almost liquid as it's churned up, and dozens upon dozens upon hundreds of oversized rats. They look like rats. They've become something else in the world below, come pouring up out of the ground and swarming into the surrounding area. When you roll initiative in the world below, whoever gets the highest goes first, and at the end of their turn, they will decide who goes next? In this case, Tourmaline. Your options are any player character or a horde of hundreds of rats. So, having seen this unfold, you are the first to react. What is it you do? [00:19:21] Speaker D: Okay, so these rats are coming out of a volcano of rats, is what my brain gave me. Do they seem like they are attacking anyone or just existing in number? [00:19:36] Speaker A: They are not attacking any one person in particular. The word that I would use to describe them, I pick two. One ravenous, and two intentional. That they are pouring over every surface looking for something that can be consumed. And when they find it consume, they do. [00:19:58] Speaker D: Okay, so this is a problem. In a market, there is absolutely nothing, no experience that tourmaline has dealing with a hoard of hungry rats. And so going to use comb the hourglass from sorceries to see a potential outcome of said rants. [00:20:32] Speaker A: Okay, which dice pool does that power require? [00:20:37] Speaker D: That is empathy and cunning. [00:20:40] Speaker A: I know you're pretty good at empathy. Let's see how it goes. [00:20:46] Speaker D: I have four in cunning and four in empathy, so I'm going to go ahead and roll eight dice. [00:20:52] Speaker A: If you fail, you have no one to blame but yourself. [00:20:54] Speaker D: That's just luck. It is entirely on me. [00:20:58] Speaker A: Eights and nines are worth one hit, and tens are worth two. Cool. [00:21:05] Speaker D: I have no one to blame on myself for only getting two successes on this. [00:21:10] Speaker A: Ah, there you go. If there is no target difficulty, then the default is always one. So if any of you are making a roll, and I do not say specifically that there's a difficulty involved or there's not one listed, one is the number you have to beat. So in this case, congratulations. Two is larger than one. Would be humiliating if you rolled that many dice and got zero successes. [00:21:31] Speaker D: Yep, and I almost did. [00:21:37] Speaker A: Sorcerer allows you to gain at a future moment one advantage to any dice roll of your choice. You take that one advantage and put it in your pocket, because this is what you see. The hunger that emanates off of these rats is obvious to anyone who is watching. And the way that they peel and pour over the various surfaces through every little nook and cranny and cracks, scouring the plain for food is enough to know that it's dangerous. But as you shift through the possible futures, there are a few diverging moments that create pictures of clarity in your brain. If they find food, they will eat it. It's only a matter of time before one or two or 20 rats identify as the granary. And the shrieking and the sound of disgusting engorgement will pull the tide in that direction. It's known across the world below that swarms of a sufficient size can chew through years worth of stored food in hours. That's if they make it to the granary. If they don't, they're still hungry. And they will proceed down the list of things to eat in rank order of easiness, stopping at each rung on the ladder. So, stored grain, excellent. Below that, well, there's maybe cooked food around. There's less of it they might find. Maybe someone has built furniture out of. Out of fungal stalks. That would be it. And then below that, meat is meat is meat. And it's only a matter of time before they turn on the various settlers who are neither quick nor fast enough to escape. That presents you with a fairly dangerous, I guess, unpleasant set of options that this tidal wave will create suffering. It is just a matter of which which kind and where. [00:23:55] Speaker D: Okay. [00:23:57] Speaker A: Using that information, perhaps you can bend the future to your will. But for now, you will bend the initiative order to your will, because you get to decide who goes next. [00:24:07] Speaker D: Alright, I am going to toss it over to Vivain. [00:24:13] Speaker A: Not so loud in your brain, but in your ears. Definitely the sound of hundreds of rats. That's not kind of the ones that haven't made it to the surface yet. [00:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I think. With chaos still sort of crackling at Vevain's fingertips from having used it to erase her mistakes, she immediately sort of closes the book on the table, shoves it in her kind of couch that she has her little carrying space for her grimoire, like you would most people would holster a weapon. She holsters her grimoire and she proceeds out to take a look at what's going on. She clocks the situation. She sees the horde of rats, and she's read a lot about this. She knows that the guild has protocols for what to do. Almost like signs posted around, like in the event of a rat's swarm attack. Like, please proceed to your nearest bunker and await the end of the swarm. So she remembers her kind of drills, but the thing that I think sticks out to her most about how to deal with a swarm like this, beyond, you know, keep them away from people and food supplies, is try to get them elsewhere, try to put them elsewhere, try to make them go elsewhere. And so I think what Vivain wants to do, she has a synthesis called gatekeeper, which she has at two dots. You are in tune with the weave of chaos and can channel it through control over chaos gates. When you create portals, by tethering wild chaos, you may extend the area, factor of your result by a range band equal to the rating of this synthesis. So mechanically, I may need some guidance on what exactly this can look like, but the intent is she wants to create a portal that will take at least some of these rats somewhere else. [00:26:06] Speaker A: Tethering wild chaos is the part that you're going to want to cling to for a minute, because there are two kinds of ways to use magic in this world. There are the specific schools of chaos where people have at least done enough experimentation, enough science to narrow down specific ways to take the innate magic of this world and shape it into the effects you desire. But just because those are the ones that are written down doesn't mean that's the only way to use magic. So the world below as a game says, if there is something you want to do that is not covered by one of the spells we have written down, here's a way for you to do that. And in this case, bending the laws of chaos insofar as chaos can have laws to create folds in space time, or magical portals or however this works because none of us really know you can generate that effect. The difficulty of that role is determined by a few different things, one of them, which is the size of the effect that you want to make. It's very easier to create a candle sized little flick of fire, much, much harder to create a conflagration. This skill would allow you to make the portals larger and cut and defend, I believe would be the correct verb, more of an area, without increasing the actual difficulty of the task. So is that what you'd like to pursue? [00:27:25] Speaker B: Correct. That is indeed what I would like. [00:27:27] Speaker A: To pursue, a more prepared GM than I would have spent a lot more time getting to know the chaos rules, knowing who I am playing with, yourself included, but also others. That said, I'm going to look it up just to make sure go word by word from the book, because what I don't want to do is create an immutable memory of my failure that anyone on the Internet can go look at whenever they want. So the dice pool determined by the storyteller and the guide. In this case, it seems pretty straightforward that this would be your cunning and your esoterica cunning because it's brain power, but like on the fly or, sorry. And Esoterica because it is literally esoterica. [00:28:13] Speaker B: And luckily for Fathain, she is spec'd as a caster through and through. And not just a caster, but a scholarly one at that. So she has a total of ten dice that she can use just that alone. [00:28:28] Speaker A: From there, you choose different components of the spell which manipulate the difficulty. Like area is one of them. Yes, but also, if you were doing damage, that's one thing. If it's a duration, that's another. How far away away from you it is? One this, that and that. So in this case, I am going to use area in terms of how much it will take to defend a granary, and I'm going to use status effect for confused, of all things. Insofar as rats understand chaos, they. That's not going to, like, factor into navigation, right? They will try to go to the thing, go through the portal and end up somewhere else, which will limit their movement and their ability to take actions as they team over themselves. But otherwise, unless you are intending to add a damage effect or something else, that is where we will stop. In which case it looks like your target difficulty is going to be three to create something sufficiently large that it can keep the bulk of the tidal wave away from the granary. [00:29:40] Speaker B: Now, because Vivain casts magic using her, what I'm going to call, for lack of a better word, her tool, which sort of takes the form of a quarter staff type object that has been carved out of raw chaos stone, she gets a plus one enhancement when she uses this tool. What does that mean? [00:30:00] Speaker A: Mechanically, enhancements apply on any role where you. Well, if the tool applies to that role. So, for example, if a vein had, like, a hairdryer, that would probably not be, you know, it worked for hair drying, but less so for any other things. If the tool or the armor or the weapon are being used in a way consistent with that tool or armor or weapon, you get an extra hit on any roll where you get hits. So if you roll nine, if you pull a tourmaline and you roll a bunch of dice, but then don't get any successes, the enhancements don't matter. But if you get at least one, then you get to add plus one hit to your total. [00:30:38] Speaker B: Gotcha. Good to know. All right, well, let's roll and find out how we do. [00:30:45] Speaker A: I like your odds, but math has done stranger things on this network. [00:30:48] Speaker B: I mean, the thing is, you don't know until the dice have been cast, as it were. Although I'm getting used to the idea of rolling ten d ten s, which is a lot of them. Six 7810. [00:31:03] Speaker A: I've got a computer for it. [00:31:06] Speaker B: There's something charming about actually rolling all of them at once. All right, we've got a ten, an eight and a nine. [00:31:18] Speaker A: So three 6710 is worth two oh, two. [00:31:22] Speaker B: So four. [00:31:23] Speaker A: Yeah, four. And that is enough to beat the difficulty by one, which means you can also spend one point on a trick, the number of successes you need to beat the difficulty. Awesome. With extra successes, you can. You can either buy off complications or you can add bonus effects. There are no complications on the table right now, so if there's a trick you'd like to add, I'm here to help you. [00:31:45] Speaker B: All right, well, I only have one to spend. So that does get rid of the possibility of any of the twos or threes. But I think I would like to complicate, which is a universal trick. For one, inflict a complication on your target. And I think what Vivain is kind of trying to do here is complicate the magic such that the rats can't just, like, since they've gone through a portal and immediately turned back around. So that's the condition or the limit she's trying to kind of put on this magic and how she intends to complicate it. [00:32:22] Speaker A: Awesome. Mechanically, complications are bonus effects that you have to buy away if you don't take place. So it is possible to do an action but not have enough hits to also interrupt the complication, in which case the success happens, but the side effect does as well. Sometimes you have enough to accomplish the goal and get rid of all the nasty extra stuff, in which case, it's an extraordinary success. I don't know that the rat can get that excited about the concept, but it's on the table now because it's one point you spent. That makes it a minor complication. Minor complications take one hit to overcome, but overcome it they may or they may not. Who goes next? [00:33:07] Speaker B: I am going to throw it to Montgomery. I want to see our. Get our dad in on all this. [00:33:15] Speaker C: Okay, so I'm assuming where I'm standing, I can see that there was, like, a gate that opened and that some of the rats are flowing through. [00:33:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Let's say that there's a large, like, center street that kind of cuts through the main of this, like, shopping district, we'll call it. And then the granary, if you're looking forward, we'll say the granary is off to your left between where you are standing and where tourmaline is standing. And then, so you see this. This unfolding pattern, this swirl of purple and blue kind of start to. To, like, waterfall into existence. Like someone flicked the surface of reality and it began to ripple and splinter. And then, yes, this rather sizable portal opens up. I don't think it's a portal that also communicates light. But I do think that you can see there's a matching one somewhere else, and then rats go in and fall out. Like, intuitively, it makes sense to you even if you understand the particulars of the magic. [00:34:26] Speaker C: Right. [00:34:26] Speaker A: Okay. [00:34:28] Speaker C: I also believe we're both chaosis, so I might. I don't know. [00:34:34] Speaker A: Anyways, wild magic is wild. That's how it got its name. [00:34:40] Speaker C: I know it's magic. I can figure that out. So I see that happening, and I believe I would like to use a synthesis. I'm gonna use tendrils, which is three dots. Once per session, you're allowed to summon tendrils in the form of roots, webbing, wisps of living darkness, fleshy tentacles, or snakes. So I'm gonna conjure. I kind of actually like the idea of instead of it being like, a bunch of little snakes, it's like one big cobra. And I'm going to attempt to try to herd the rats into said portal. Yeah. And I believe we're using this. I get a plus one enchantment to intimidate or threaten. [00:35:37] Speaker A: Well, once there were no rats. Now there are rats. Soon after, there were no snakes. Now there's a snake. It's getting awfully crowded in an already crowded city, teeming first with people, then with wildlife, then with magic, then magical wildlife and crazy. It sounds. This is actually kind of a typical day in the world below, but one wizard glowing purple in eyes and other places, creating these portals. That sounded dirty. It wasn't supposed to. Creating these portals, and then snakes appear. Wow. Montgomery, that's the end of your turn, so you decide who goes next. [00:36:20] Speaker C: I believe the only one left is the chi child. Sten, would you like to trip up and show the class what you got? [00:36:27] Speaker A: For clarity? All the SPC characters also count, so if there are, like, six hobgoblins, archers who are trying to stop you, and the four of you go, then all six of those characters get to go in a row. So in this case, the teeming rat is also another option that you can choose. [00:36:46] Speaker C: Right? [00:36:47] Speaker A: I'm still gonna choose Sten, the bigger. [00:36:51] Speaker E: Rat, not the tinier rats. So when Sten sees this mass of creatures trying to attack, her immediate reaction would be to look to any hunters nearby. You two stop anything that you can coming your way and defend the citizens. She's gonna turn around and try to see anybody that she could try to, like, get out of the way, trying to help the citizens and children that were around. Pretty. She's pretty happy. That a lot of them were backing away from her anyway. But so trying to think mechanically, what she would do is either distract them, like, distract the rats from trying to be around her, or if you are. [00:37:35] Speaker A: Trying to drive people to safety, then that would be a leadership role of some kind to them out of harm. If you are yelling at them for flavor, that is fine, but that is also not an action. [00:37:47] Speaker E: Okay. If all this was just going on her head of ideas, like, that's probably not gonna work. That's probably not gonna work. Her actual physical action would be to grab her drill blade, which is just a long piece of metal with a huge drill bit at the end, and she would use it to slam into the ground and kind of go across to kind of try to crack in. Try to put, like, a crack in the ground as long as she could make it to kind of make it a little harder for the rats to move forward. [00:38:14] Speaker A: Hmm. A rat trench. [00:38:16] Speaker E: Rat trench. [00:38:18] Speaker A: Oh, excellent. In that case, I believe the role that you're going to be looking for will be might and athletics. You are not in a fight with the ground, but you are using your strength to perform a feat of physical exertion. [00:38:37] Speaker E: Awesome. Well, I have five might and one athletic. So that is six tastes. [00:38:42] Speaker A: This is a pretty straightforward difficulty. Cause the earth is soft, but you also need to make it deep enough that it is actually a barrier. So let's call it a two difficulty. [00:38:54] Speaker E: Two difficulty, six ice. [00:38:56] Speaker A: All right. All right. [00:38:59] Speaker E: We got a nine and eight, a ten, seven, a two, and a one. So I got 9810. [00:39:08] Speaker A: Yes. [00:39:09] Speaker E: I got three successes, but one was a ten. So it's four hits. [00:39:12] Speaker A: There you go. So that's enough to overcome the difficulty of two. That leaves you two left, four tricks. [00:39:17] Speaker D: Right. [00:39:18] Speaker B: Let's see, we got basic tricks and defense tricks. [00:39:22] Speaker E: I think probably right after, she would probably try and dodge away from it to try and get away from the rats that do make it past the weird trench. So she would do a quick dodge and kind of, like, tuck and roll. [00:39:36] Speaker A: The dodge action for defense. Or are you looking for roll away or. [00:39:45] Speaker E: I'll do roll away to kind of go back from them? Yes. [00:39:48] Speaker A: Okay. Roll away. Moving you one range band away from the rats enough to keep their whiskers from tickling the soles of your boots as you make it away or their whiskers from tickling your whiskers as you roll away. Because you and the rats have that feature in common. Well, your only option is to then give the turn over to the rat swarm. It is sufficiently large that it has three constituent pieces and they will act one after the other. We will divide them into the group that is closest to the granary where the portal is. And then we will say there is one group that is closer to Montgomery and the snake, and then there's another that is closer to Vivain and tourmaline. That makes sense. We're imagining this was kind of on like a wild west high street, and then there are kind of spread down it in these three groups. Let's start with the rats that are closest to the portal because they're going to have the worst time and it's best to get them out of the way. Enemies in the world below don't have pools in the way that characters do. So they don't have abilities. They just have three numbers. One, they roll for things they're great at. One, they roll for things they're okay at, and one, they roll for things that they're terribly, terribly bad at. In this case, the secondary pool is probably appropriate. Their primary pool is best for eating things, things in a very broad category, but also navigating to food is going to be import. And so we'll give them a six pool to figure out that the portal is a portal or maybe navigate around it to determine the correct way to solve this problem. One of the qualities that swarms have is hive mind. So much like PCs in a D and D game, they all know all the information concurrently, regardless of where they're standing or if they can communicate. Okay, well, that was two tens and then two. Not tens, but still highers than eight. So that is six, which is enough to beat the difficulty on Vevane's roll. And to, but, and then to buy the complication. Yes, because the difficulty was three and then it was one for the complication, they have one extra which they can use to buy a trick. And for that trick we will choose. And by we, I mean me. The basic track of not enough for that. And they also can't bolster. So never mind, that can just go away. However, it means that Vayne, while your efforts were admirable, they are able to dig and to twist. And even as your portal is there to stop them from going, there's another rat that tumbles out a different wall. And then when it starts to smell and find its way into the back, others can now dig and twist and tunnel through. That is the first closest one. They are now teaming up around. I'm gonna say teaming a lot because there's not a whole lot of words that accurately describe what rats do as they pile on top of one another. But they are now around the base of the granary, starting to, like, chew through wood if they can't find a loose board or squeezing through. I believe rats are like cats and that they have a dislocated or not attached floating collarbone, so they can move through anything that is the size of their head or smaller. It's true about cats. It's really weird. Then we'll turn to the one with. With near Tourmaline and Montgomery. Montgomery, you were create. You were correct. The antipathy between rat and snake is ancient and known by many. So when this creature pops up, of course, the snake is immediately upset to be surrounded by rats, and the rats are immediately upset to be having a snake in their midst. And they will rat hoard on top of around, trying to peck and gnaw and nibble at this creature. While I make this roll. Will you look and see? Did it tell you how many hit points your snake friend has it did. [00:44:07] Speaker C: They have three health total and zero defense. [00:44:11] Speaker A: Zero defense. Okay. Well, the rats have rolled enough successes to beat a zero defense. They will do one damage to the snake this turn. All successful attacks in the world below do one, one damage, inflict one injury, unless they're able to buy a critical hit, which takes three hits, not enough on this roll, or there's some other effect going on. For example, if you hit some with a flaming sword, that's one damage, and then they also catch fire. That will do more. Thankfully for everyone in this room, these rats are not on fire currently. And then for funsies, we can give the turn now to Montgomery or snow. Snake should get an action pool. I believe. [00:45:01] Speaker C: It acts on my turn. [00:45:05] Speaker A: Oh, if it acts on your turn, then we're gonna go to the rats. [00:45:08] Speaker C: We make sure once. Yeah, you can use it, like, an additional set of hands, you to do two things at once. So it'd be on my turn. Okay, now, following the rules for taking a mixed action. [00:45:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Because those are messy and, like, it's a really powerful ability, but, like, yikes. Anyway, then the third rat swarm. It is this one close enough to sten piling into the. Into the trench. Now, having talked about mixed actions, we're going to do one. Now, the normal rules are you can do one thing on your turn, right? You can cast a spell, or you can dash, or you can swing a sword, whatever you can. Also maybe you want to rush something and swing a sword. What do you do then? So that's where a mixed action comes in. The way mixed actions work is you declare the two things you want to do, in this case, rush through this trench to sten and then attack Sten. You use the lowest pool that applies to those actions. So, for example, like the Vayne, if you wanted to sing a song and cast a spell, I have reason to believe you are worse at singing than you are casting. You would use the singing pool for this role. You also use the highest enhancement available. So if you are singing a song while casting a spell and wearing a necklace, that gives you three enhancement to spell casting. You do get those three enhancements. Whatever number of hits you get on this roll, you can use to solve each of these tasks separately. So if the singing is a two difficulty and the casting is a one difficulty, and you only get two successes, you can decide, well, I'm going to fail the singing role. That's fine. I'm going to spend them all on the casting. Or you can say, no, actually, my music career is really important to me. I'm going to sing instead of right. In this case, a secondary pool for movement gives them six dice. We'll start there. Oh, not looking good for the home team. I take it back. My dice are excellent. So if yours are bad and you want to swap, that's on me. That is two tens and a nine for five successes total. The difficulty to scamper across your trench is two. So they will have three successes left. You are being attacked, which means we get to introduce the concept of defense. By default, everyone's defense is one. However, the first time that a player character, a big character is attacked in a round, you get to make a defensive roll. So, Sten, you get to roll your stamina. Just your stamina by itself, no other skill. And that will determine some things we'll talk about once we have the results of that roll. [00:48:18] Speaker E: Stamina is three. All right, we got an eight, a seven, and a nine. [00:48:24] Speaker A: Okay. Okay, so you have two hits. You can use those hits to buy defensive tricks. The difficulty on the stamina roll is zero. So any hits here you get to spend on hits, on tricks, rather, it's fairly simple. For defensive rolls, there are only a couple, one of which is make me harder to hit. [00:48:47] Speaker E: Like that one. Let's see. Move out of range. We'll get a reindeer. We will increase the difficulty of the opponent's rush attack. Yeah, I definitely want to do that one. Want to increase your difficulty. [00:49:06] Speaker A: That will apply to the next action. [00:49:08] Speaker E: Oh, okay. So it's not gonna be right now. [00:49:10] Speaker A: You're right. [00:49:10] Speaker B: You right. You're right. You right. [00:49:15] Speaker E: So I'm probably just gonna either dodge or die for cover. [00:49:19] Speaker A: Well, you have two hits. [00:49:20] Speaker E: Yeah, do both. [00:49:21] Speaker A: You can buy both. Cover is great for taking cover from ranged attacks. Rats are not ranged attacks. They don't have little bows. [00:49:31] Speaker E: And I will dodge and roll away just to get even more out of range of them. [00:49:36] Speaker A: Okay, so one hit spent on dodge increases your defense from two or from one to two. And then the roll away happens after they have resolved their attack actions. So in this case, they have three hits left. That's enough to beat the two on your defense. They have one hit left. They're going to use that to activate their ability. Clingy. Which is, once you are being ratted on, you remain ratted on. They are now crawling up the various parts of your armor underneath this piece of your little rat head, poking up out of the collar of your shirt. You're gonna take your helmet off. There's a rat there. You have no idea how it got there. As the granary is now swarming with rats, so too is sten. But you are able to roll away from more of the horde so you don't get swept up entirely in it. Now, that is the end of this round. So I, as the last person, have to pick which of you go first. I could just pick the rats again. That would be mean of me. But it is on the table that if you let the storyteller character have all three of their actions in a row, I can do three more right now and get six actions together. Something that you gotta be careful about. I know it sucks. You're like, I wanna have my turns. Oh, but it can go really, really bad. The same is true of me that if I do all three of my actions in a row with my rats, then you get four uninterrupted anti rat actions to take. It's a layer in this game that doesn't exist on a lot of other ones. I think it's incredible, but it's so stressful for everybody. But, like, in a good way. That being said, I'm going to pass it to Vivain. Sten's a little busy. I don't want to do that snake yet. So it goes to you. [00:51:31] Speaker B: Amazing. So, question about magical effects. Once they are in the world, is there sort of like, something has to be spent to keep them in the world before they disappear? Or is it like, end of turn, portal is gone unless I spend that same action again? [00:51:52] Speaker A: Duration is one of the things that you can use to when you're channeling raw sorceries, yes. The default is something along the lines of one turn per hit. Regardless, we'll say that this one has not gone away yet. [00:52:09] Speaker B: Okay, cool. And there isn't like a sort of bolster effect so that it continues another. [00:52:14] Speaker A: Round action that I don't know, off the top of my head. [00:52:18] Speaker B: Okay. I'm thinking sort of like concentration esque, you know, like being able to maintain it. But in that case, assuming that the portal will remain open, I think while vivain is trying to make the portal appear more maybe on the inside, it looks like there might be some food in there. It's elusive food, not real food, but I think she's trying to convince the rats who were not entirely convinced, to go into the portal, to go into the portal, or at least that it's an equally attractive option as to continuing to swarm the granary. So I think, like, this might still, because I think she's trying to change the effect that is already up or like enhance it. Is this just another sort of tether wild chaos because she's using chaos to adjust what already exists? [00:53:09] Speaker A: That makes as much sense to me as possible. [00:53:12] Speaker B: Cool. [00:53:12] Speaker A: The book defines it. Breaks it down into things we have written down and things we haven't written down. And this is not something they've written down, so we'll take them at their word. Cool. [00:53:21] Speaker B: Yeah. It's just sort of a question of like, you know, you try a thing and it doesn't fully work because they roll. Well, can you try that thing again? Or it's like, no, you tried the thing and it didn't work, so it's. [00:53:31] Speaker A: Never going to work. I believe you can because the mechanic that the story guide has available here is complications. Right? Yeah. You have wrought raw chaos into the world and now you are trying to bake this cake twice. That's a lot harder. So let's add a minor complication. One point or one require one hit to buy off, and then if you do not succeed in buying it off, it will invoke a chaos retaliation. That sometimes you do wild magic and the wild magic do wild magic back to you. [00:54:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is always fun. All right, so in that case, I assume I'm very similar, similar role to the last one since it is in effect the same action, just adjusting it. That is a ten, an eight and an eight. So we're on four successes. Oh, and another ten. So six. [00:54:28] Speaker A: More than enough difficulty at two. One complication. So you have three left to spend on tricks. [00:54:35] Speaker B: Fabulous. [00:54:35] Speaker A: Ooh. [00:54:36] Speaker B: What do I want to do? I think, let's see. I like the idea of shockwave two, which is apply the effects of your action to an additional target. If the new target is of higher difficulty, spend additional hits to make up the difference. In this case, I think, interpreting the rat swarm as three constituent parts. I kind of want to make this. This whatever is now illusory behind the portal or on the other side of the portal, attractive enough that it catches the attention of another group of rats also. [00:55:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that works for me. [00:55:14] Speaker B: Cool. So that is one or that's two of my options. And then I have one point left, and I think maybe I'll spend it on distraction. Your target suffers one difficulty on ranged combat, and athletics rolls until the end of your turn. [00:55:36] Speaker D: So just a group of rats. [00:55:38] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah. We've created a problem, right? So, not a problem for you, a problem for the rats, because you said that there's another illusory piece that comes into play, and now I have one portal, but rats coming at it from both directions. But that portal only links in one way, so rats coming in this way and then dumping out on that end, and, like, are you familiar with the concept of Rat King? That's what we're kind of getting into, where we're getting. It's no longer like swarms, yes, but it's starting to clump, as if someone had dumped some kind of rat surfactant into the mix, and now they're all kind of starting to team into one another. There's an air of rat frustration coming out of it. Tourmaline, you understand? Because if you have two primary motivations in the world, scuttle and eat, and you can't eat or scuttle, all that energy has to go somewhere. Rats not necessarily known for their kindness and understanding in moments of crisis. So rats pouring into rats. Not. It's different. It's different. Very clear distinction between stencil. Rats bracket sten and rats bracket feral swarm. So rats coming in, rats tumbling, twisting out, some of them attached less by tails and more by weird chaos chimestry. But we won't worry about that now. Suffice it to say, it will make things more difficult for them. If they want to move, you've put that complication on them. And then also if they want to successfully navigate around the portals with their goal, they also have to face that complication from before. All of that said, who goes next? [00:57:24] Speaker B: Right. I get to pick. Um. I'm going to throw it to tourmaline. [00:57:32] Speaker D: Um, this is the least helpful scenario I could ever be in. Um, for. For myself, combat is not where I excel. However, I do have a question. I am abyss related in everything that I am, everything that I do. My armor that I have has the artifact tag to it. Could my armor also be abyss related? [00:58:05] Speaker A: No, that's a specific tag when it comes to being abused. Abyssal crafted. [00:58:10] Speaker D: That's cool. [00:58:11] Speaker A: The list you were given in character creation is a very small piece of a much broader set. You can. There's some wacky stuff that you can find out in the world below, but they just don't let you pick that at level one. [00:58:26] Speaker D: Cool. I wanted to check because it wasn't there. So, next question. Is there anything abyss related in this town, in the vicinity? Like, in general, does the abyss exist? [00:58:41] Speaker A: The abyss exists kind of everywhere. It depends a bit on what you're trying to do with it. [00:58:46] Speaker D: I need to talk with it. We need to have a chat. [00:58:50] Speaker A: Yeah. The abyss exists in all places. In general, magic is easier to access, but more unstable the further down you go in the world below, you are closer to the surface than you are to the impenetrable underbelly. So it's not. Not as intense, but it's always there. [00:59:10] Speaker D: So I am going to use my synthesis. Abyssal communion. If in proximity to the abyss or a place where abyssal creatures, artifacts or weapons are present, you can commune with the abyss as if it were a neutral entity. Once per session, it speaks directly into your mind and may offer advices to threats ahead, a portal to another place in the abyss of the dark. Demand sacrifice in exchange for favor, or if aggravated, spit out a monster in your vicinity. You always come away with such communication with something which could be as slight as a riddle or as impactful as a gateway to a hidden realm. [00:59:43] Speaker A: It's an interesting concept. I would like to know what you're trying to accomplish narratively, because if I. If I roll on the table of weird abyssal shit, this adventure is gonna get real crazy real fast. [00:59:54] Speaker D: Oh, no. So since tourmaline cannot fight in the traditional sense, I have it kind of in my head that when tourmaline does get into hairy situations, they call on the abyss for aid. And they are very generous with their offer to the abyss of potential future sacrifices or tasks that they are willing to do. So currently, they are asking for a form of aid to deal with rats in exchange for something the abyss may want or need. [01:00:33] Speaker A: Oh, well, when you shake hands with the devil, that's how the saying goes. The exchange is simple enough. I'm trying to avoid the word equivalent exchange and then summoning all of those things. Exactly. For the reason that Lex made that face. Garrett is also making that everyone has now made the face. We all get the reference, but that's a bit what it is, right? If you. The abyss says, okay, if you want to take something out of the world, then you will owe me something into the world in equal volume. And there's both a metaphor of a scale, but also a very literal. As this projects into your. To your mind, a sense of how many rats are we talking here? With the understanding that whatever you ask of the forces beyond comprehension to take out it is going to want to put that much volume back into the world on its own terms. This is very much the case of would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses or one horse sized duck? But in this case, it's rats in the abyss. [01:01:54] Speaker D: Um, I would like to apologize on behalf of anything tourmaline may do in this very moment just beforehand. Um, so just clarifying question real quick. Is the stem of rats. Have the rats stopped coming out of the hole, or are rats just pouring through this hole continuously? [01:02:22] Speaker A: Oh, just a constant stream of rats. Someone has turned on the rat faucet, and then the handle broke, and now it's just cool. [01:02:29] Speaker D: So what tourmaline would be asking is for that hole to be close. That that hole is not spewing rats anymore. That is what tourmaline is going to be asking. And so in that case, unfortunately, I guess that would be whatever stem of rants is from that hole. [01:02:56] Speaker A: Well, we've moved to a different thing now, because before. Okay, before it was, get rid of the rats, and now it's getting the hole. That's a different ask. [01:03:04] Speaker D: That is a different ask. [01:03:05] Speaker A: The same concept applies. Sure. I will close this hole in your world, and in exchange, you will let me open a hole from my world, which. You know what that means. But you're the one making deals, so. [01:03:16] Speaker D: Yeah, that's arguably worse. That is arguably much worse. [01:03:21] Speaker A: Thanks. Certifiably worse is the word I would go with. [01:03:24] Speaker D: But, hey, I got rid of your rat problem. The abyss is here. I got rid of your rat. Um, but no. So it's going to. Oh, we don't want to lose this food supply, but we also don't want to. Oh, no. [01:03:40] Speaker A: I can. I can present a novel solution. You could just kill enough rats. [01:03:46] Speaker D: I cannot kill enough rats. [01:03:49] Speaker A: That was. But that was the first deal you made. If, you know, like, uh, like. Like the end of, um, uh, what's the movie, like the end of, if you. The one that's coming in mine is ready or not. That's not the example that I want. But at the end, like, when all the things just start popping and the movie ends, like, we can go that route. But in order for. Yes, in order to take out this number of rats, I will put this many. Okay. Kilograms of rat out, kilograms of abyss in. Right. Not necessarily right now, not necessarily right here, but that's the deal. [01:04:26] Speaker D: You know? [01:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:04:27] Speaker D: Tourmaline would take that. Tourmaline would absolutely get rid of all these rats in exchange for the abyss popping up somewhere. [01:04:35] Speaker A: The question is how many rats? We'll use abstract units of swarms, right? Cause I don't know. You don't know how many rats are there? I don't know how many rats are there? None of us know. [01:04:46] Speaker D: How doth one calculate rats? I will go ahead and. Okay, I will bargain for two rat swarms. [01:04:55] Speaker A: Two rat swarms. Somewhere in the distance of your brain, a bell tolls and the pact is sealed. And what precipitates from that is both the secondary use of the word precipitate, but also the primary use of the word precipitate because it begins to rain. It begins to rain rats and rat bits and rat blood and rat screams and rat viscera, as in a wave. Waves are not interesting. In a spiral, like the blades on a lawnmower, a dishwasher starting to spin out and increasing in diameter from the center of this. Of the two you have chosen, I am assuming. But feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I am assuming it is the two that are not currently also have a snake in them. [01:05:50] Speaker D: Yeah, I don't think I'd blender the snake. [01:05:54] Speaker A: I was giving you credit for that. They begin to not explode, but just dissolve and then sublimate like rat. But dry ice is the visual you're going with here. And then rain, dissipate, twist away, all with that cold, wispy hoary with an h aftermath and the distinct impression, not down the world below, but in real life, of walking barefoot on a frosty lawn. Is that kind of after effect sneaking by? But a deal was made. I think the vane and montgomery you not. Hmm. We will have a discussion about whether or not you recognize what has happened. If it is just normal magic or something else. Sten, this is the fucking weirdest thing you've seen. It does not comprehend to you immediately. That said, tormally, your choice as to what happens next. [01:07:04] Speaker D: So before I toss it to someone, what this actually looks like from tourmaline. Upon making this deal and letting this go out is, as the blender begins, for lack of a better term, tourmaline is entirely engulfed in shadows. So tourmaline is still there, but it's just shadow writhing across their bodies to the point where only these piercing like, opalescent eyes are visible and splattering everywhere onto the shadow. It's fine. And I am going to bounce this. I'm going to bounce this to stem. Enjoy. [01:07:55] Speaker E: Sten's immediate reaction of being swarmed by rats and then swarmed by dead rats. It's just like, this is too many rats. [01:08:05] Speaker A: Sten. The only sten. Gory. Vivain gory. Montgomery. Safe asterisk, but yes. [01:08:17] Speaker E: All right, so I'm gonna try and use my blocking window to summon a protective shield of my chosen element, maybe to possibly flavor it, to sort of set myself on, say, fire, to burn the rats that are on me. [01:08:33] Speaker A: So it's very important when it comes to tags that they are all attached to different things for a reason. So armor is. Armor is armor, and it must be. [01:08:42] Speaker E: For the rules, protective purposes, not offensive purposes. [01:08:47] Speaker A: There's lots of narrative freedom in, like, which skills and abilities can apply to places, but there are some things where it's locked in place lest the whole house of cards come crumbling down. [01:08:56] Speaker B: Gotcha. [01:08:58] Speaker E: And break the game. [01:09:00] Speaker A: Not this early. [01:09:04] Speaker E: All right, so are the rats that are crawling on her now, terrified that there are dead rats everywhere? Have they been affected at all? [01:09:11] Speaker A: Oh, you don't have a rat problem anymore. You have a rat corpse problem. Very difficult. [01:09:15] Speaker E: Oh, it's just, it's just switched up. Two dead rats now. [01:09:18] Speaker A: Tourmaline sucked, like, 4000 rats into the abyss and, okay, yeah, Montgomery is the only one who has rats around them. You are as far away from rats as you have ever been since the arrival of the rats. I mean. [01:09:34] Speaker E: So she just kind of like, okay, this is fine. Covered in guts is normal, very much. [01:09:42] Speaker A: Hairy, but, like, with more hair and teeth. [01:09:48] Speaker E: Wouldn'T cook this. So her first reaction now would just kind of be, now the rat problem is over in her area to kind of check on civilians. [01:10:01] Speaker A: What action are you attaching to that? So, like, again, like, you can do first aid. You could rally the troops with leadership. You could hurl a child to safety with might. But as it stands, the only threat right now is to the snake and Montgomery. [01:10:21] Speaker E: Can I see Montgomery and the snake. [01:10:23] Speaker A: Through the haze of ratty mist? Yes. You don't know that it is Montgomery, but there is an antisyn and a snake. [01:10:32] Speaker E: All right, so if everybody has been, like, running away from her already at this point, then the snake would probably be the closest thing that she could see anyway. So she'd probably just start running towards the entician and the extra snake and guts to kind of see what's going on over there to see if there's more help needed. [01:10:50] Speaker A: Okay. Closing that distance with a move. Action. Um, because the ground is rat slick. And also, there's that trench that you. It was now full of rat corps, so there's still a trench there. Right. It would be a move, which would be might and athletics if you were doing, like, a running striding leap, which seems I don't. Sten does not strike me as the nimble, catwalking type. You are like, I'm dexterous. Well, it's not a matter of ability. It's a matter of style. Right? [01:11:19] Speaker E: She'll try to throw in a backflip and stuff. She climbs on walls and jumps out parkour. You know, like, mud turn parkour. [01:11:25] Speaker A: Okay. The difficulty is only one. It's. It's slippery, but it's not life altering amounts. [01:11:34] Speaker E: Well, anyway, so with my mighty athletics, that is six dice. Six of you. All right, I got a nine, a nine, a three, a five, and a seven. So I got two successes. [01:11:50] Speaker A: That's enough to get you through with one extra for a trick, although I cannot think of one that applies immediately to what you are trying to attempt. [01:12:02] Speaker E: I can just use my thesis cave runner, and just start running on the walls. Just make it look real cool. Just kind of jumping on all fours just for aesthetics. [01:12:13] Speaker A: With that extra one, when in Rome, formerly, it's done something very cool. And if you want to maintain your Mudtown street cred, you have to at least look like you are contributing in a cool way. Right now you're up against guy who summons snake and woman who opens portals and lawnmower like, you've got. The bar is high. You need to parkour your ass off if you want to stay at this lease. Right? [01:12:33] Speaker E: Yeah, she is all floors just jumping off of the walls, getting close to as possible, tail flopping in the wind. [01:12:40] Speaker A: Then who is next in line? [01:12:42] Speaker E: I'm going to throw it to Montgomery. [01:12:45] Speaker B: Just. [01:12:45] Speaker E: I'm running at you. [01:12:49] Speaker A: It's a weird day, having gone from shopping to this, right? [01:12:55] Speaker C: I see, like, past my group of rats that are still here and just see, I guess, like, blood and viscera and bloody mist just throughout the area. And then I see a big, uh, Mariku covered in. In, uh, rat viscera just charging at me, crawling on the wall. I was like, ah, um, uh. And I reach into one of my many, many fanny packs to pull out some, uh, just so some fungus and kind of real quick and toss it down. As I use my sorcery to cast flash, the caster condenses ambient chaos until a bright flash fly. This creates an overstimulating area and dazed effect status within close range of the caster until the beginning of the caster's next turn. The caster and their bond mates are unaffected by this. [01:13:56] Speaker A: It's not overstimulating enough as is with the screaming and the running. [01:14:03] Speaker C: It's very overstimulating just in general, and I gotta give that to the rats. So go and cast flash. [01:14:12] Speaker A: At the moment, your bond mates does not include sten vivain or tourmaline. It does include your snake, but for. [01:14:22] Speaker C: Only a short, close range is the distance. [01:14:25] Speaker A: Okay? So just for the sake of ease, you'll see the sten will arrive shortly after this, as opposed to having to resolve you flash blinding sten. [01:14:36] Speaker C: What I was hoping for. [01:14:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, now we've created something entirely chaotic because between the disorientation of the portal happening, the raw wisp of the abyss swirling around, and now the visual and auditory explosion of light and sound. I'm a writer. That was redundant. In any case, we have overwhelmed the rat's sense of desire, of navigation, of their concept of reality is, honest to God, a little on hinge right now. And there reaches a point where any animal realizes they are not going to get what they want, and the situation has become dangerous. I'm not a rat myself, but if I were, I would assume that having lost two thirds of my rat number with a giant snake in my vicinity and now blind and deafened, that would fall under the general category of sound rat retreat. Does that sound wonderful? So that being said, the flash goes off, and there is a latent amount of squeaking and scampering. It will be months before they have removed every rat from this place, but the main thrust of the attack is over. And in between the corpses, you see the various rodents disappearing into various rodent holes. The problem is solved, albeit only for now. But you've all made it through in one piece. Hell, you have more pieces now than you did before. That has to count as something of a victory. The citizens of Mudtown may see it differently. We will have to wait and find out, because we're going to come up on our first break of the episode. It's been about halfway through our time, we have managed to. Oh, kilograms of rats. So many rats. And we will deal with the consequences when we return. We return from our break and into the world below. It's unfortunate. It smells a lot cleaner in the real world. And now we all have to pinch our noses as we return to the rat soaked streets of Mudtown. On the bright side, you've solved the problem. It could have been much worse in terms of damage to the community. The greatest amounts of foodstuffs have been secured, the buildings are intact. As you look around, it seems that there are, of course, some bite wounds spread away. Montgomery, you know that those will have to be treated for various diseases immediately, which means that there's lots of work to do there. But there'll be meals for tonight and even tomorrow and the day after, thanks to your quick action and a pact with a demon that I'm sure will have no consequences whatsoever in the future. All of that said, it would be fair to accuse the people of mud town of being ungrateful, happy as they are, to not be swept away by a tidal wave of vermin. They are caked in gore. Stuff in the shops is ruined. Buildings are going to have to be scoured clean. There's the threat of disease. It's going to be a tremendous undertaking. The world below is a world of survival. Nothing comes cheap, nothing comes easy. Which means a lot of this will have to be replaced and amends made. Unfortunately for the the four of you, plenty of witnesses as to the ultraviolet spotlight opening portals. There's only one person within 50 or 60 miles who could possibly have enacted some kind of demonic pact. The fact that you recovered in tentacles, as it happened, also a bit of a giveaway. Sten and Montgomery, less troublesome. But guilt by association is one thing. And also you've made the critical mistake of proving yourself competent in a moment of crisis. Because, as you will soon find out, the demands this town will make of you will lead you out into the world below, into the tunnels unmapped and caverns yet unexplored. And if they have to choose between the blacksmith who's a bit tubby and can swing a hammer, or the person who can literally run sideways across walls, I know who I would vote to go on that adventure. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First things first. I want to talk about our reaction to all of this. A lot happened in not a lot of time. And as you. As you wipe from your whiskers, the various bits as you check inside your pockets to make sure they've removed noir didn't get dirty. As you brush off the eldritch tentacle leftovers and start to consider the weight of the task that you have introduced into the world, or as you just take in what happens when you leave children unsupervised. What is going through your head? I will roll the die. It comes up a four. So we'll begin with Montgomery and then go and let you inflict the curse from there. [01:20:10] Speaker C: Okay, cool boy. So, well, quick question, just for clarification. So now that the combat is over, is that considered the end of the scene? [01:20:23] Speaker A: Yes. [01:20:24] Speaker C: Okay, so once that completed, my giant snake just kind of dissolves and drifts away as it only lasts until the end of the scene. Kind of like a fungus. Spores, which is kind of cool, and goes away. And I think my immediate reaction is. [01:20:46] Speaker A: Still. [01:20:49] Speaker C: Like, a half yell at Sten, who was charging towards me. Are you okay? [01:21:02] Speaker D: I was coming to check if you were okay. [01:21:05] Speaker C: I think I'm fine. I just. I'm looking at you, and I can't tell what's. What's ratblender and what's you. [01:21:14] Speaker E: Uh, 50 50. [01:21:19] Speaker C: Okay. [01:21:20] Speaker A: Okay. Well, there has to be a frightful moment where the viscera and the rat features 50 50 on whether or not it was just another giant ratio. [01:21:30] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. I think the fact that we're talking, I'm like, okay, not with them. Still scary. You should probably wash that off, and whatever cuts you may have, definitely disinfect them, you know, down here, diseases really, really bad. And that. All of. All of that is. [01:21:59] Speaker E: Yeah, my bandages are kind of soaked in viscera. I probably should get new ones. [01:22:05] Speaker C: You see Montgomery, like, immediately look down and shuffles through many, many fanny packs. Here we go. Yeah, you know, some fresh bandages and little. [01:22:19] Speaker A: Little salve. [01:22:20] Speaker C: Put that on the cuts. It'll. It'll get you going. [01:22:24] Speaker E: Oh, nice. That's the stuff that, like, doesn't leave scars and things, right? I haven't seen this in a long time. [01:22:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty good. [01:22:30] Speaker C: Just, you know, make sure you. You do it, because I know sometimes people, especially, you know, good fighters, and you look like a good fighter, you know, you get the stuff to take care of yourself, then you don't actually do it. [01:22:44] Speaker E: Starts looking at all the exposed scars on her body just like. [01:22:47] Speaker C: Yeah, Montgomery's looking at the same. [01:22:51] Speaker D: Just. [01:22:53] Speaker A: Stan, 100% gives. I'm saving this potion for a harder dungeon. [01:22:58] Speaker E: Yes, absolutely. She just. [01:23:04] Speaker C: Okay, well, I mean. Yeah, sure. Save it for later. Just. [01:23:08] Speaker E: Yeah, it's only, like, a bunch of bites. Bites are fine. So probably should check on the rest of the civilians. [01:23:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I guess we'll look around. Are there any, like, immediate, like, people in. In peril? Or is it more of just like. [01:23:29] Speaker B: Oh, God, they're covered in blood? [01:23:31] Speaker A: Yeah, kinda like that. There's a bit of that. No one is in immediate danger. The. The. The triage situation is there are folks who got caught up in the tide and don't need your help. And there are folks who didn't get caught up in the tide and don't need your help. You could spend a whole month now going through and checking individual scars and handing out thousands of fanny packs worth of bandages and such. But in terms of things that require your immediate attention, no. Still nice to go and check around. I'm sure there are some people with more severe bites than others who would like to turn for a moment to either vivain or tourmaline. Montgomery's choice. [01:24:20] Speaker C: Let's do tourmaline. [01:24:27] Speaker A: Tour. [01:24:27] Speaker D: Tourmaline is sort of just standing there caked in blood, guts, viscera. They're kind of dripping. I imagine there's a steady little onto the ground, and really they're just looking. They're just listening. And as they see everyone's reactions and everyone's getting back up, they're like, okay, the main food stores are intact, and most people are not dead. That is better than both of the outcomes I saw. This is a good job. [01:25:13] Speaker A: I really want to read the book on Tourmaline's ethical calculus. Not right now, but I am. That is. That's a nice coffee conversation. I would love to have. [01:25:25] Speaker D: Tourmaline. See, if you look at Tourmaline, you get three vibes right now. And as they are pleased, they are utterly unbothered, and they're actually kind of amused. Uh, and really, they don't do anything. They don't go and, like, help people. They don't try to, like, pick things up or fix things in their mind. [01:25:53] Speaker A: They've. [01:25:54] Speaker D: They've done what they were set to do. [01:25:58] Speaker A: Somebody else's problem now. Yeah, no, I. You know what? I understand that intuitively and 100% respect that choice. I think it's a very different kind of crowd that begin to assemble around you now. But put a pin in that. As we turn to our last but not least, Vivain. The portals finally withering out of existence, the color of magic leaving flush from your skin. [01:26:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, yeah. Vivain looks kind of crestfallen. There's very much. She dismisses the remains of the portal with a gesture and, like, you get the definite vibe that she's like, I had that it was a designed rat trap. Like, this was going well, and now suddenly I'm covered in guts, and I think, and here's the question. To revisit that we had broached earlier, she knows what level of magic and what intensity it would have taken to achieve that effect. What sense does she have of where that came from? [01:27:13] Speaker A: This we can resolve with a roll. I would say it would be cunning and esoterica. [01:27:18] Speaker B: Okay, which is ten dice. [01:27:20] Speaker A: So, yeah, I have a feeling no matter which way I bend that branch, you'll be able to swing it pretty hard. Yeah, but esoterica is always the skill about dealing with magic and the weird stuff, the world. Cunning here is definitely the skill of, like, observation and deduction. How observant are you? [01:27:41] Speaker B: Right. We've got a total of four successes, a ten and two nines. [01:27:46] Speaker A: Okay, difficulty two. No need to spend tricks here. I don't think you need to, for example, shockwave that identify two of the culprits or bolster it so that sten also recognizes the culprit. But you are free too mechanically, if you so choose. But I suspect you will soon be announcing to the world who the culprit is, because Vivain does not strike me as the kind of person who is going to use this information quietly. [01:28:09] Speaker B: No, I think the second she puts the pieces together and Blake sees tourmaline, and I think she adds one plus two plus three in her little logical deduction calculus, she saw the glowing eyes, she saw the sort of shadowy stuff, and she knows that this was a level of magic. The amount of chaos, sorcery, like, structured chaos, it would have taken to do that would have been, like, mega gargantuan. You would have probably needed multiple mages to do it. I imagine. So. She's like, yeah, there is something else is involved here. So I think she strides right up to Tourmaline. You, what did you do? [01:28:56] Speaker D: I think we're all aware. [01:29:00] Speaker B: Let me rephrase the question. We know what you did. How did you do it? [01:29:07] Speaker D: I had a conversation. [01:29:11] Speaker B: A conversation? Is that what we're calling it? [01:29:14] Speaker D: That is literally what happened, yes. [01:29:16] Speaker B: I mean, usually the spell books and the literature uses the phrase bargain, in which case there is a penny that will eventually drop. [01:29:29] Speaker D: Is that not also a conversation? [01:29:32] Speaker B: Most conversations don't have consequences, although I suppose some do. [01:29:36] Speaker D: I beg to differ. I don't think there's a single conversation you have ever had that hasn't been the consequences of some kind. [01:29:46] Speaker B: Ah, well, you see, that's where we differ, because I get to control my consequences by controlling my actions. Can you say the same? [01:29:58] Speaker D: You're speaking to me about control? [01:30:02] Speaker B: Yes, I do. [01:30:03] Speaker D: Did I see. Out of curiosity, did I see the little magic display? [01:30:09] Speaker A: Another question for your observation skills. Why don't you try cunning and esoterica? It's not a hard role, but there's always a chance that you were a bit preoccupied with the dead or rat rain. [01:30:33] Speaker D: That's three. Tension. [01:30:35] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. You have a beat on one another. You know, it's what? [01:30:42] Speaker D: And Tourmaline, entirely unbothered. Like, if the Vayne is getting heated, if Evane is upset, Tourmaline's like, I run of the mill. People coming at me like, this is not unusual. You are not a first, and you are not the last. And Tourmaline is like, you're talking to me about control. But whenever you use magic at all, everyone knows. Do you control that? [01:31:12] Speaker B: I at least control what my magic does, and I can call upon it to my will, not the will of something greater than me. We can. [01:31:24] Speaker D: We can go back and forth and discuss them. What will is what later. But why are you not. [01:31:30] Speaker B: I had that. If you didn't see me over there in that corner with the purple little portals, most of those rats bought the illusion they were headed out of here, and there wouldn't have been guts, the food wouldn't have been spoiled, and there certainly wouldn't be an eldritch abomination bargain to have to contend with. Gm. [01:31:51] Speaker D: Out of curiosity, how was that portal working? [01:31:55] Speaker A: You mean like in terms of efficacy or in terms of explain it? Because I can't do the second one. It's chaos magic. No one knows. [01:32:01] Speaker D: Oh, I don't need to explain it. Were the rats actively going away or were they being cycled back? [01:32:08] Speaker A: The answer, both of these things are yes. Right? Because as I understand it, and as I was interpreting it, Vivain's goal was to disorient them sufficient that they would lose track of what was going on. Same frustration effect that Montgomery kind of. Kind of hopped on that train as well, that there was a way to. Let's use the faucet metaphor from before, right? Faucets on rats pouring out. Someone breaks the faucet. Mentally, what I was picturing is that the portal situation was going to be like the rats swirling around the drain and disorient and disrupt them such that they would have been either be fodder for a more controlled spell, you know, a nice little flame something right in the middle of it. Or as Montgomery proved, become, I keep saying, disoriented, discombobulated such that they would retreat once they lost control of the situation insofar as rats consider those things, whether or not tourmaline, a, knew that or B will admit they knew that, not my problem. [01:33:17] Speaker D: So maybe you did. But how long? How long would it take? How many casualties? How many unfortunate side effects? The truth of the matter is, I dealt with the situation as fast as possible because I saw how that could have turned out. I do not doubt your skills. [01:33:41] Speaker B: There's a book in the museum where I come from in the crystal city. It contains stories. One of them. I don't know if you've heard it, the tortoise and the hare. The general gist is that fast and big is not always best. [01:34:00] Speaker D: Okay, next time I will sit by and let multiple people die as the long plan takes its full time to enact. And then we'll talk on that pile of corpses. [01:34:13] Speaker A: I expect this conversation can go on quite a while, but I think two things are going to interrupt it. One is that, yes, Montgomery and Stan, as you. As you tend to the individuals, there may come a moment where, like Stan, you're helping someone put their cart back right after they've been toppled by rats. Or Montgomery patched up an adorable child with like a beautiful round face and like perfect box braids, right? And then give them a nice pat and say, you are. You're good to go, kid. Just take your medicine. Looking up between that to notice the conversation between verbain and tourmaline getting increasingly not heated but intense. I don't think they're screaming, but like you can, that face means something. And if not that, the booming voice echoing more so because you are in a cavern coming from the far, far end of the street accompanied by the metallic crunch of plated boots and armor as someone yells in an incredibly irritated voice, who the fuck ruined my market? They can see you waving from there. The person approaching is a magistrate or a captain of the guard, some figure of authority. And it's a personal thing of mine that when we introduce NPC's of some kind of employee into the world, I want to distribute this responsibility among the cast. So with the caveat we can't change either of those two things. One, they're pissed and two, they're in charge. I will invite folks to add some element of narrative fact to this character, bringing out the assignment die. Starting with Sten. [01:36:11] Speaker E: Merciful. [01:36:16] Speaker A: Stern but merciful. [01:36:19] Speaker E: Like a dad. [01:36:23] Speaker A: Is it a dad? Or is it a mom? Or is it a mom? [01:36:26] Speaker E: Yes. [01:36:26] Speaker A: Non gendered parent figure. [01:36:29] Speaker E: Non gendered feminine creature. [01:36:33] Speaker A: Androgynous with an edge of femininity, but hard to tell which direction it comes from. Got it. Pass on the assignment. [01:36:44] Speaker E: Marissa. [01:36:47] Speaker B: I think this. This is not this individual's first brat attack. Like, they've been around for at least, like, one or two previous, and therefore have a point of comparison for how prior cases were handled. [01:37:04] Speaker A: Ooh, excellent. I think you've left that open and having no idea when that information. That is the kind of menace injection I appreciate. And then to. [01:37:20] Speaker B: I am going to throw it to Montgomery. [01:37:26] Speaker C: I believe this person got their position through combat. They've probably proven themselves to be a great warrior of some kind in the past, and that's why people of this settlement rely and respect said person. I don't think they were bloodthirsty or anything like that, but definitely cut their teeth through combat. [01:37:59] Speaker A: And then lastly, to tourmaline. [01:38:03] Speaker D: Backpacking off of literally all three of those. I think this person is a strategist. Specifically a combat strategist originally. So they were in the thick of combat. However, their brains work in a mile a minute. They're the one maybe not leading, but they're the ones guiding on the battlefield. And that probably led them, as Garrett said, to getting this position. [01:38:29] Speaker A: So we've established, then, an androgynous, but slightly feminine, experienced warrior leads from the front, but is also possessed of a broad enough mind to be able to weigh experiences against one another, specifically rat oriented experiences. Does that sound fair? Excellent. None of you are from mud town, but if someone wanted to roll intellect and culture, you might be able to identify them by reputation. It would be a difficulty. Pretty high. Would call it a three, maybe a four. [01:39:13] Speaker E: I only got two for that, so, no, not me. [01:39:18] Speaker A: Not necessary. If you. If you want to, it's available. That would just be an equivalent of having heard by reputation. [01:39:25] Speaker C: Go ahead. Just to make sure I'm rolling the correct amount, I have four in intellect, in two, and in culture, so that would be six. [01:39:34] Speaker A: Okay. [01:39:38] Speaker B: I can give it a shot. If you don't. [01:39:42] Speaker A: Or if you want to know for your own purposes, feel free to take a swing at it. Moving. I mean, shit. Stin can if you want. If you get two tens, you can figure it out. [01:39:50] Speaker C: I got two tens. [01:39:53] Speaker A: Okay. Montgomery knows. Yes. You have heard of the general known as jet a mononym. That is how you know they are important. But in a previous cycle, there's no day, there's no night. But there are seasons. You have the chaos and the calm. In the chaos, magic is. And magic is more abundant. There are more and more creatures that creep up from the dark crevices to interact with the world. But rewards are also more plentiful, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Calm is the season of change and of rebirth. So in calm is when you tend to see tunnels disappear or reappear. It's where the roads shift around. But it's also when the harvest is abundant, when the collection of resources is the safest, and the world below tends to define itself against those two cycles. So when I say many, many years ago, what I actually would mean is many cycles ago. And in that case, yes, that is how jet with two t's, achieved their fame and responsibility here in Mudtown. They were an adventurer, not unlike yourselves, who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time and led a successful counterattack and retaliation against a band of darkling raiders. Darklings are creatures that used to be humanoid, that they got lost in the world below or seduced into some dark corner, and they changed. Some people believe it's a result of cannibalism. Others think it's just spending too much time drinking the chaos tainted water. Others think that the world below just magnifies the evil that already exists in your soul. But regardless of your particular philosophy, there are humanoid raiders who exist out in the world and exist only through the violent seizure of that which folks like yourself and folks like Mudtown have brought from the earth. So that was the band that jet chased off and defeated. We'll say they use they them pronouns and then stuck around in Mudtown, in part because they wouldn't let them leave. Like, no, it's your job now. You did it until you die, or someone else is better. It's you. And that is the person who is thundering towards the epicenter of the. Of the. Of the mess, which is currently tourmaline in the vein. Yeah, that established. I remember. Yes. Tourmaline was waving and jet was yelling. That's where we left things. What happens next? [01:42:46] Speaker B: I think as tourmaline is waving, the thing definitely, like, points at very accusatory. [01:42:55] Speaker E: Are Montgomery and Sten, like, seeing definitely this part now? [01:43:00] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Okay. If you weren't looking, you hear the yell, and looking in the direction of the yell, you can see in the distance, the yelling getting closer, and then in the middle distance, Vivein, like, pointing is one thing. I think it's more like a full on, like, here's your prize gesture. Right step on down. Yeah, that's, that's what you have a vision of. [01:43:21] Speaker E: Stan probably would have started walking forward in one of these, like, almost like a stalking more than a walking. [01:43:33] Speaker C: I think Montgomery definitely said, like, I saw their faces as they were arguing and then that happened. Definitely already clocking who those two are and who I would relate them to and starting also to, I guess, slither since I'm a snake person, make my way that way. Not like jumping in, but definitely getting close enough to, if they're like, oh, yeah, you two were also part of it. Yes. We'll own up to it. But this kind of seeing what's gonna. [01:44:09] Speaker A: Happen first, if they, if the people behind jet are bringing a guillotine, you're leaving yourself some room to disengage. [01:44:17] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:44:19] Speaker A: A note on the world below. I don't think. I have not noticed it in the book, whether or not the antisyans have legs, I think as the story path in your own game, you should decide. And for us, it's more fun if they don't. So slithering snake people. Mmm. Chef's kiss. Well, that said, yes, Montgomery, you'll recognize the face immediately, and perhaps not the face, but not immediate. But you come to know this person, and that might give you some more confidence in getting closer because, yes, this is Jett, the captain of the Mudtown guard, who is known as tough but fair and very much believer in, we'll call it restorative justice, that there's no crime so great that you cannot be forced at sword point to make it right. Life in the world below is hard enough, and when people make mistakes, you have to give them a chance to redeem themselves if for no other reason than goods have to be replaced and lives have to be made up for. Jet will say with two t's and named for their armor, which is jet colored and jet adorned. Now, having closed the distance, they are, are they tall or are they short? This is a group decision. We have to know whether they are staring down accusatory tourmaline or up. [01:45:42] Speaker E: Up tall is tourmaline. [01:45:46] Speaker D: Tourmaline has, um, a, has a thesis called striking. Um, and so because of that, I think that tourmaline is quite tall. Not built, not beefy. Think, think like, um, slightly less menacing and bloodthirsty, slightly, uh, mother from coraline. [01:46:11] Speaker E: Question, though, because I know there's some snakes that can do this. How far up can you hold yourself from your tail? Because you could just suddenly make yourself, like, too feet taller if you wanted to. [01:46:24] Speaker A: No, I think, like, when you're measuring a horse. You measure from the withers. [01:46:27] Speaker C: Right. [01:46:28] Speaker A: There has to be a snake person equivalent, like an antician equivalent of like. No, you don't measure when they're all the way up. That's right. Well, height question established, you can be taller if you want, or shorter if you want. That is a decision you make on a moment to moment basis. But no matter how large or small you make yourself, jet, our jet clad and jet adorned warrior, they are large, no matter how tall they are. The accusation comes quickly, not about the magic, but about the mess. You couldn't think of any easier way to do that. Gesturing broadly to the point where they flick their fingers a little bit and yet remaining viscera just flicks off into the dirt. [01:47:19] Speaker D: I had a few options. I looked into our lovely little future here and I saw two things. I saw the granary overrun, or many of your townsfolk did. The simple solution, the fastest solution that would lead to neither of those things happening, was to take care of the rats as quickly and effectively as possible. [01:47:46] Speaker B: The vain does a big eye roll. [01:47:52] Speaker A: One of the guards accompanying jet at the mention of seeing into the future, they spit and make some kind of superstitious gesture. They know what you are. And the way they say Farsider is, oh, the derision loaded into that word jet, for their part, less immediately dismissive, but obviously not swayed. Oh, and the rest of you, you saw fit to let that happen. [01:48:26] Speaker E: I dug a trench. I got like a bunch of them in the hole. It was great. [01:48:33] Speaker B: The part of the story you're not hearing is that I actually had it handled. There was a portal situation. There was several step plan. I'd really only gotten to step one and a half of the plan. But then that happened. [01:48:50] Speaker A: It worked. [01:48:53] Speaker C: We tried our best to keep as much of the community intact as possible. While it is definitely disgusting, very few people are hurt and the main source of food is still intact. [01:49:14] Speaker A: No, in that you are correct. And I suppose, regardless of the means, I should be grateful that the worst of it was averted, regardless of whether or not it was predicted and regardless of whether those predictions are true. That said, we still have a problem, don't we? [01:49:40] Speaker D: Really? [01:49:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, we do. Because here's the thing. I've seen attacks like this before. I've seen darklings. I've seen all manner of foul beasts, rat swarms included. They never come once. They'll come again. And what that tells me is that were it not for you, and you can see them one say something like making a pact with the evil that defines our universe in the cruelest ways. But they kind of skip past that part. It's a face that says it's etcetera. Despite your being here. That won't always be the case. That leads me as the person responsible for this town and it's safety to come to two conclusions. One, I need to better fortify our grain stocks against this number of creatures. And two, I need resources to do that and grain to fill it with. You look the mage sort, it says, squinting at vivain. [01:50:51] Speaker B: Well spotted. [01:50:53] Speaker A: Where do you suppose I find those things in our glorious underworld? [01:51:00] Speaker B: Well, I suppose you will have noticed. And she gestures to her general attire reflective of her guilt. I am a mapmaker and I've been through many caverns of the world making maps there. The things you desire are probably fairly deep down them. [01:51:22] Speaker A: As is anything worth having in this world. You seem like the type to uh, and then sten you get the sense like for a moment they're thinking about flexing, but they don't want to get into a flex off. So it's more just like a hands on the hips, adjust the utility belt, you can handle yourself kind of mutual respect, but not in a way that requires you to actually compare. [01:51:54] Speaker E: She kind of looks up and down and just a respected nod. [01:52:01] Speaker A: Which means if I have the cast of this play set correctly, they will require some amount of wisdom to guide them. Now staring at Montgomery. [01:52:15] Speaker C: Montgomery, um, a couple of his scales just kind of turn a little bit red, a little tiny blush. [01:52:26] Speaker A: And of course it's your fault, so you don't get a choice in the matter. Excellent. Then it's settled. I am deputizing you into the Mudtown guard. Your mission is to travel through the caves in search of new supplies. The good news for you, I already have a lead that I've been meaning to check out. The bad news for you is there a reason is that there's a reason I haven't sent anyone to check it out yet. Are you familiar with the far gates? [01:53:03] Speaker B: Vivain nods vigorously. [01:53:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I suspect that you would know. I don't want to make you roll for it because it seems superfluous. [01:53:12] Speaker B: Even if she doesn't know as much as she thinks she knows, she generally gives people or wants people to have the impression that she knows. [01:53:19] Speaker A: Would it be more interesting for you or in character for Venice to let Jett explain? Or would you, Hermione Granger that straight to the front and just interrupt and begin educating everybody? [01:53:32] Speaker B: I think she'll let Jett have the expertise in their own domain. But equally, I think you see several moments Vivain sort of makes a gesture. She wants to add a kind of annotation. Well, there's actually something else to be said about that. And it's a footnote, like she'll restrain herself somewhat. [01:53:55] Speaker A: I hope. Happening. It's just slightly off camera. Or like Jett turns to someone else. So the camera, you can see Vivain doing it behind while the conversation is happening this way. I like that visual imagery. Yes. Jett goes on to explain that there are a series of gates built before Mudtown was here by people who were here before Mudtown was here. There are eleven between Mudtown and something. They are called the far gates because they travel exactly orthogonally, perpendicularly to the main travel roads that as you go through them, you are getting farther and farther away from the known world, insofar as this world can be known, or the mapped world, insofar as this world can be mapped. They are made from a substance that cannot be found on this level of the world below. As you go deeper, the rocks get more. They go from sand to silt and then all the way down to the bottom to the hardest stones of granite. And the minerals also get more valuable. You go from tin and iron at the uppermost levels down to the gold and the diamonds and the precious gemstones stones. Below these gates are massive constructions of rare metals formed into rarer alloys by skilled craftsmen. It is the very definition of forgotten civilization. And it's just a ways off this road. People don't go because the gates open towards Mud town. For those of you who are not castleologists, you build the gate such that it opens into the people who would be trying to get in. So if I can knock the gates down and they splinter open and hit you, that's bad news. But if they open towards me, that makes it harder for an army who is breaking it in to get through. And that clue alone in a world like this is dangerous enough for folks to say that these gates are. Are not meant to keep us out. They are meant to keep something else in. That hasn't stopped people in the world below from doing incredibly dangerous things. The nature of survival requires it such. And of the eleven gates, ten have been destroyed or hang open. All of that is the history knowledge that Vevain would have picked up in guild school. What jet will add to this is their research on what lies beyond. The farthest gate there is a citadel, some kind of colossal structure, a readout, a fortress built to be defensible, built to be unconquerable and according to records found by scouts, according to the last tortured visions of those who went and came back overflowing with rare forged metals and armors, coins and ingots of all kinds. Bullion and so, so many other supplies. If those rumors are true, if those visions are to be believed and those resources can be returned, it would be a legendary hall. An amount of wealth injected into this community that is in excess of anything recorded in Mudtown history. But that's the thing about big treasure halls, isn't it? When someone gives you a legendary rumor of a treasure that's just too big to behold, that story always ends with one of three things. Testing your pop culture knowledge. What are they? I tell you there's a buried treasure that people have been searching forever, but no one has found. What comes to mind? [01:58:04] Speaker B: Ghosts, traps. Imminent death. [01:58:08] Speaker A: Curses. Ghosts. Yeah, we're hitting it, right? Right. There are some damn good reasons no one's brought it back. And even if you can't identify them for real, you can sure as hell make them up. You are imaginative enough to understand why no one would have brought this back. And now it seems you are being asked with enthusiasm to be the ones who go and see if it's true. [01:58:38] Speaker E: I thought I was done with exploring these caves. She just somberly in the corner while you guys are, like, agreeing. [01:58:52] Speaker A: Was it agreement? I. I saw some nodding. I was not able to intuit the level of enthusiasm or actual agreement in that nodding. So is is on a scale from one to ten, we'll say where one is. Resignation. But otherwise they will hang me. And ten is. I can't wait to go open this cursed door. Where are we sitting? Individually. [01:59:19] Speaker C: Montgomery would. Excuse me. Montgomery would like to ask. Clearly, you're asking us to do this to, you know, know, make up for the damages that have been done in the town. It does seem, though, the proposed treasures would outweigh tremendously the damages that have been done. So say we agree to this. Is there any kind of additional compensation that we could expect? I don't mind doing it, but, you know, I have a couple of broods to take care of, and I need to make sure I send, you know, get something back to give to them to make sure that they're still eating. [02:00:05] Speaker A: Oh, to be clear, I'm not expecting you to go and then bring everything back for us. In point of fact, I suspect the only way you'll make it there is to travel light. So I'll say whatever you find there and can carry is yours. Bring me back a map. Of a safe path and a general inventory of what you found and whatever you can keep in your hands after that. That's between you and the well. [02:00:35] Speaker C: That seems mighty fine to me. [02:00:38] Speaker B: Mention of a map of a safe path, like Vivein is like, oh, God. Map drawing more of that. But I think she's. She's sitting at, like, a solid. I'd say, like, solid eight, 8.5. Veuvain, though, has no interest in treasure. She has no interest in any material wealth. But what she is interested in is she thinks somebody does need to go along on this sort of journey, because the person who opens an ancient citadel that hasn't been touched in centuries needs to have some expertise in how to deal with the culture and history and knowledge that may be there. Vivain's father was a curator of a museum in Crystal city, and so she grew up sort of believing, like, how a culture is remembered is extremely important. And, like, how you codify those narratives and what stories you tell about them. You have to have a trained eye to be able to intuit the facts from what's left and then present them in a fair and unbiased manner. And so Vivain's like, yeah, yeah, it's a responsibility that I go, because if I don't go, who else will do that? [02:01:49] Speaker A: Doesn't hurt the ten or 15,000 citations that people will make to her work after she writes the seminal text about this forgotten culture. [02:01:56] Speaker B: Right? Some icing on the cake, maybe, but certainly a more interesting. She is going to ask forgiveness and not permission from her guild to just go away from this current assignment of mapping the same tunnels we map every year in Mudtown and instead go map something new. [02:02:18] Speaker A: Formaline. How are you coming around and being conscripted? [02:02:22] Speaker D: Parmeling, sitting at a solid tent. This is probably why the voices called them there. There's probably dead people they can make friends with. Like, there are no downsides. They're vibing. They seem happy as can be. [02:02:37] Speaker A: It's all as it was foretold. Sometimes the pieces come together after the fact, but it's rare enough, but not uncommon, that you can just see it all lining up right ahead of time. Instead, you're funny enough. She's. [02:02:57] Speaker E: It's not that she doesn't want to. She's just like, ugh, I was doing this stuff already back in a ghazby. I'm just doing more of that. It's monotonous. [02:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:03:13] Speaker A: I mean, I don't know. On one hand, a tunnel is a tunnel is a tunnel. But on the other hand, each one has always new and exciting things to find. Oh, yeah. [02:03:22] Speaker E: It's like she's excited to see it, but she's like, I feel like I've already been doing some of this. She's gonna look at Mount Gurmy and be like, hey, hey, you're cheating. [02:03:30] Speaker D: You have a lot of packs. [02:03:30] Speaker E: You can take way more. I need more bags. She starts looking around for shopkeep with packs. [02:03:38] Speaker C: To be fair, most of these packs are already full. However, looking at this traveling party might free up some space. [02:03:49] Speaker A: Let us say this, that as your conversation with jetta ends, it's obvious you don't have to travel right now. For one, you're filthy, and then for two, there's no such thing as a day night cycle when there is no day and there is no night, for that matter. But there is an ebb and flow to the life of the world below. In some colonies, they can tell the time of day based on how active certain insects are, and they will set a clock as such. Others have rigged up mechanical bits around a waterfall. And then when this many water drops have gone, that's it. And a bell rings and lets everyone know. So there is a pattern to life. And we will say that for lack of other terminology. Next morning is when you are expected to leave. Also, you are allowed to requisition some item that will help you along the way so we can think about adding another tool to your inventory. I also presume you'll want to get to know one another aside from one of you makes pacts with demons, and one of you can summon a snake. So we can take that together to do a combination, not a full shopping episode. But if you want to have a comfortable market stall, get to know one another and go from there, because this is the secret, hidden last part of character creation, which I have hidden from you until you had a chance to kind of see how one another plays. And that is your bonds. You can, nay, you must form bonds with other characters. Those bonds can be spent to gain enhancements or advantages when you are doing teamwork with that person, when you are acting to defend that person, you can help out your friends mechanically. So I will find out the exact numbers I need to hand to you because I thought I remembered, and because I tried to remember, I forgot. But in the meantime, you can begin to suss out those questions. Have a van tourmaline stand. But there are other axes on this diagram that we'll need to assign values to for reference. You will have bonds with three people, it's always three. But there are four of you, so that works out. One gets rated at two. That is the person you get along with the most. Let's make it interesting. Let's say that one is rated as one where you can tolerate this person and you think they'll be valuable. You might actually have a spare conversation with them. The third, we will assign to zero. It's not that you don't like them. It's that they're a colleague, they're a co worker. They might have respectful talents, but you are not eager to share meals or personal secrets with them. So one at two, one at one, and one at zero. Some of this is very easy. I will say it does not have to be reciprocal. So it could be the case that Montgomery says, vevain is my too. I cannot wait to hang out with my new wizard bestie. And vein says, I cannot stand the fungus magic zero. And that is totally fine. But as you have these thoughts, feel free to articulate them out loud. Tourmaline can read your mind. I can't. [02:07:40] Speaker E: Hmm. [02:07:41] Speaker A: I think. [02:07:45] Speaker C: Thank you. I think right off the bat, Stan reminds Montgomery of one of his wild childs. One that definitely needs a little extra, needs to pay attention to a little extra. But they aren't. They don't make life harder. In fact, they make life a little more. More fun. It's just there's a lot of unexpectedness and definitely a lot of bandages. So. And Vayne and Tourmaline remind him of one of his many, many twins who don't get along at all. And already seeing them argue, it's already bringing back, like, oh, I gotta deal with that. Okay. Okay. I'm not sure where those two are yet, but I think Stan is at the right now would probably be number two. So two, one and zero, right? [02:08:54] Speaker A: Mm hmm. [02:08:55] Speaker C: Okay, so for Montgomery, Stan is at a two. [02:08:58] Speaker B: So here's a question. Is. So that, is the numerical value just reflective of, like, positive association and so, like, positive two, most, negative zero, or is it like, a reflection of intensity of the bond? Like, I really, really hate this person versus, like, I kind of feel neutral. [02:09:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't think there is a. That's a tough question. I think that it is. It's meant to be the strength of it. Like, on the scale from strangers to acquaintances to friends to besties, and that you can flavor that as you like in the text, like, a higher level bond, because they can increase as it goes. Could be like, buddy cop bros till the end of time. Or it could also be lovers who are going to travel the world together because their hearts are one, the zero, and they don't. They don't go negative for some basic party cohesion reasons. You can't have a negative mom, someone you hate, that's using drama. But. But a zero is a professional indifference, right. There's no kinship. Like, we travel together because we are forced to or because there is some kind of mutual need, but, you know, like, I just deliver pizzas with you, not friends. Right? [02:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I ask because I think it's interesting. I think definitely, like, Vivain's relationship with tourmaline is, like, the most negative insofar as they are rivals. But also I think it is like, the more intense. Like, she has, like, a strong opinion about tourmaline on the basis of that first interaction. And so, yeah, I mean, I think maybe it makes sense to set it zero just as a. Like, I'm not sure I would choose to. To go adventuring with you if I had a choice, in part because I don't agree with you on a lot of things, but also in part because I know there's this big shoe that's gonna drop at some point and the abyss is gonna, like, pop up and, you know, I don't know that I wanna sign up for that necessarily, but I might be forced to anyway. So, yeah, if it was like, intensity of bond, I would consider assigning the two on insofar as, like, that metric. But I think if it's two is like besties and zero is more like, I'm with you because I'm forced to, then I will assign the zero to Tourmaline. [02:11:23] Speaker A: I like your interpretation. And if we want to say that is intensity because it is more narratively interesting to you and you think you can make better choices, like, I kind of love the idea of having a two bond because, like, Tourmaline's reckless, I'm going to need to bail them out. Right. I'm going to keep the closest possible. I'm going to get to know them inside and out so I can sweep up their fuck up dust. Like, run with that. Right. [02:11:46] Speaker B: Cool. That is what I wanted to know, in which case I might swap it. [02:11:50] Speaker D: That's going to create a really interesting dynamic to me because if it's on intensity scale, the veins, then at zero because the vein acts towards Tourmaline, how Tourmaline's used to being acted towards the vein is just another person that has feelings towards them. During that argument, the thing was not the thing. Tourmaline was never upset, never, like, raised their voice. They were just as relaxed during that as they were at the start of it. So the vein doesn't really register to them. It's interesting. [02:12:29] Speaker B: Which drives the vein insane. Like, that's the other thing is, like, the vein needs to be, like, appreciated and understood and like, her opinions need to be respected and neutrality and like, and. And just kind of like a baseline indifference is like the worst possible insult to her. [02:12:46] Speaker A: I love this so much. Yeah, let's run with that. I mean, rivals is a perfectly valid reason to. To be intensely interested in someone. I am fine with that. For those of you running the game at home, make your own best choices. If it works for your table to have this kind of thing set up and everyone can sense that kind of. There's a certain amount of player versus player conflict that comes in with that kind of relationship. If you're cool with that, take it to your table, have a great time. If you're not, don't. One of the golden rules of TTRPGs is that you are at your table. You get to make your rules. [02:13:23] Speaker D: And as a side thing, on that note, I think it's important to put in here. Marissa and I actually had a little check in about the kind of rivalry and like, that combative nature between the two. So that does happen behind the scenes. We are doing the thing. [02:13:41] Speaker B: Yes. Always good to check in if there's even any sort of PvP or just intensity of like, yeah, my character's gonna go after you and have an intense dislike. Always check in with the other player. Really important. [02:13:56] Speaker A: I like these little sidebars. How to have a good role playing game in the middle of a role playing game, but we're starting to sort it out. Not going to put you on the spot to totally finish it right now, but just like a thought, you can continue to have, like I said, something leaves immediately. Fill that in and then go from there. Later on, as good and bad things happen, you'll be able to spend those bonds, another meta currency to turn the tides of things. Then I will say the same. With equipment, you can pick a tool, any kind of tool. The game separates the mechanical from the narrative. So you could have a very special bowl. And as a tool, it is for cooking. Right? You. It's a mixing bowl. It will give you an enhancement when you are cooking because that's what the mechanics say. But it's also a bowl, and you can use it for anything a bowl would do. Do. You just wouldn't get a bonus associated with it in a mechanical sense. So any kind of tool that makes sense to you, add that to your list. We won't give it extra tags, so it'll just be a plus one enhancement. Bowl, etcetera, please. I don't. I can't deal with it. If you pick a bowl, I'm gonna lose it. [02:15:09] Speaker D: I already have one. [02:15:10] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you have two. A bowl for your bowl or a bowl holder. I almost said Boulder, but that's a real word, so that Portmanteau does not play. And stick that in your character sheet as well. But the last thing I will ask as we round out towards the end of the session is you've made these preparations and you've had this encounter. It's actually kind of a rare thing to find people with powerful skills like the ones you have, regardless of how they choose to manifest them. And you've definitely been torn away from whatever path you have. And I want to answer this question on a fundamental level, not about the specific adventure, but about your place in the world below. Routines always change. The very surface of the earth changes underneath you on a semi regular basis. And how do you feel about that? How do you interact with that? Your life in the world below is defined by change and uncertainty. Does that excite you? Does it terrify you? Do you feel well equipped for it? What does that say about how you live lower life under the surface? And I will pose this in the question of a before you fall asleep monologue. So I will add, I would like to know a little bit about your bedtime routine, and I will give you enough time, me stalling, for you, to start having those thoughts while I make an elaborate gesture out of reaching for the assignment. Die. That way, whoever has to go first doesn't have to go first on a whim. And that is a two, which means it will be the vain. [02:17:02] Speaker B: All right, I think. Veuvain. When she prepares for sleep, she reads before bed. And inherently, I think she reads on a subject she hasn't encountered before or she doesn't know very much about. It's her way of kind of keeping track, of not specializing her knowledge too much, but always ensuring that her knowledge is growing and that she's actively maintaining it. Kind of like you would a living thing, engaging with it in a way that's not just like, yeah, I have it. It's a static base of knowledge, but instead it's a growing, dynamic, holistic organism almost. And I have to take care of it. And I think that very much maps onto how she views the world below and her place in it. I think it's interesting. It's very dialectical for her, insofar as the very thing that allows her to continue to pursue new knowledge and ensure she can never totally know everything or be a complete expert in a single subject is the very fact that there is so much change that the knowledge that you think you have can sometimes be undercut and can sometimes be rewritten and can sometimes become meaningless. So it gives her continual purpose, but at the same time, it frustrates her because she thinks there's an established fact about the world, and yet, and it's something she knows deep down, it's inherent. And then suddenly, that gets overturned, because wild chaos does something new. And so I think there's not only just a frustration, but also a fearfulness a little bit about that, about, like, you could very easily stumble into something, something you're not ready for. And I think something that really defines Vivein is that, like, part of why she is so intense about knowledge and having all of the answers is a kind of preparedness to face what is coming. She always has something that she can do or throw or solve or win. And if the world changes too much, suddenly, maybe her tools become obsolete. And I think as she sinks down into slumber, that would be the thing. That. That is the cast. The pall that is cast over Vivain's nightmares is the possibility that you might not be prepared for something, and then you might fail at it. [02:19:26] Speaker A: And we know what happens to people who fail in the world below. It's not a safe or pleasant place. The best case scenario, you just die. Because tourmaline is talking with some of the worst things in the world. They're out there, too. But who will you pass this existential dread on to such that they may mold it into their own image? [02:19:54] Speaker B: I will throw the ball to Garrett if you feel ready. [02:19:59] Speaker C: Sure. Montgomery finds a nice spot where he can both stretch and then, like, coil up in, you know, find a nice, comfortable space for himself. He would then, like, look up. Doesn't matter what's above him. Look up and then say his good nights to his entire family. So he'd just be sitting there kind of mumbling, like, good night, Monica. Good night, Maurice. Good night, mark with a k. Good night, mark with a q u e. Good night, Marcus, and so on and so forth. And if anyone was over listening, they would notice that every name starts with an m, because that is their family trait. And as he is going through his entire lineage, he is both focusing on how they looked when he left and is anticipating and excited for how they'll look when he sees them again. For him, life is changed. Everything changes. When you go to sleep and wake up the next morning, you are changed, either by the experiences you just had, or physical changes or whatnot. And that's kind of his outlook on the world. Everything at some point will change, whether it's an immediate change or something that happens slowly over time. But change is something that he expects in his everyday life. So for him, him changes is. It's not good. It's just. That's what life is. It's full of change. [02:21:54] Speaker A: It's the way of fungus, right? A spore lands on something and turns it into something new. Not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, but certainly different. [02:22:02] Speaker C: Yes. And that's also his, like, nightly. So as he's getting, like, to the end of the list, it's like slowing down and getting drowsy. But he makes sure that he gets every last family member and then falls. [02:22:21] Speaker A: I hope this is one of those cases where anticians are like ad and d, second edition elves. Or the only, like a 30 minutes nap. Because you have a lot of relatives and there is not a lot of night. [02:22:35] Speaker C: But it is the sleep of a dad. So it's not quite everything he would like to get, but he takes what he can. [02:22:42] Speaker A: Then who do you pass this lack of sufficient slumber to? [02:22:48] Speaker C: I will pass it off to Sten. [02:22:52] Speaker E: Then she is finding a. She is finding a place to lay her head. She immediately plops into any form of water to get anything off of her. Like, not even a proper, like, take everything off to. I just drops everything in and just sits there for a minute, shakes it off like a dog. Just like, all right. And then she starts to, like, get into, like, more comfy attire and just lays down and just thinks about the day. And she's like, uh. I can't even tell Mackie what happened today. Thinking about her sibling. They were born at the same time. They've done everything together, gone through everything together. And if anything, she's most upset that she can't tell him how cool today was. And for her, change is very much necessary. It is what she's always known. Stagnant can mean death. Stagnant means you're not getting food. Stagnant means the water's not moving and you can't drink it. Everything needs to move and change. So for her and changing anything and the drop of a hat, flip of a dime, she's like, yep. Oh, okay. This is what's happening now. So for her, this is just another turn on the many turns of life. [02:24:06] Speaker A: I'm totally fine. Something besides for just riding the waves wherever they take you. [02:24:12] Speaker E: And it's tourmaline. [02:24:14] Speaker A: With that said, the trouble ends where it started. Tourmaline, the last on our list. [02:24:24] Speaker D: Ormaline finds wherever they are welcomed to stay. That is not always an easy task and it is probably more difficult given the recent events of the day. And it's not something they have ever held against anyone. And even now, when they're turned away because they just turned this town square into a blender, it shrugged off with a smile, with grace, and they simply move on to find somewhere else. And when they do find a place, they settle down, they coil up and they talk with the spirits that are there. They talk with the humanoids, they talk with the animal spirits, they talk with the earth itself. And it's an interesting dichotomy of these spirits and these animals. And these things are drawn to them because they're a far cider. They use heliogy. They have the light and the warmth of the sun with them innately as one of the last places underground that actually has that. It's why they're honored in a lot of cases, but because of their plutonic nature, it's the dead that they share it with. It's the dead that understand and it's the dead that commune with them and keep that companionship. And so at night, it's the dead they share their stories with. It's the dead they offer comfort to, they offer solace to, especially if some is newly dead. There's probably a lot of rats around at this point, but tourmaline welcomes them with open arms. There is no malice. There is nothing there that would indicate anger or that they were upset by what happened or that, oh, it's your fault that I am now in this position and change to them is like they view pretty much everything else. And that is, it simply is. There is nothing good, there is nothing bad in the world. Death means almost nothing to them because they get to keep viewing that person afterwards. It's not like the person stops existing. And so they honestly drift off to sleep really happy, surrounded by spirits of things not running from them, spirits of things that are welcoming to them. [02:27:05] Speaker A: There are those who say that the world below is too far away from the heavens for spirits to leave the earth. And that over time, all the dead will accumulate with their wisdom here in the many layers beneath the surface to do with it. What they will, or to share it with those who can listen. The rest of us have to acquire our knowledge by other means, either by books, by raw experience, learned at the end of a drill, with the tightening of a bandage, or the turn of a page. But all of these things are equally valid paths in the world below. This has been episode one of the farthest gate, our very first. I want to say the very first episode actually streamed actual play. There was a podcast version, but you're the first people's faces who can be seen playing this game, which as a time of recording may either have just been or will imminently be released on Kickstarter. We will put a link to that in the chat. Right now. We is me. I'm talking to future me. I'm doing my own Tourmaline riff right now, or in the show notes. If you're following us on YouTube or via podcast, none of this game would be possible without the enthusiastic support and generous support of Onyx Path Publishing. So please, please, please, if you like fantasy games but you don't like fantasy rulesets, give it a shot. There is a little bit of crunch here, but a whole lot of smooth vibes. It's a lot of the OSR fun with, like, modern sensibilities built in. That said, couldn't do it alone. Onyx Path helps, but I also need a cast, and it turns out I've got a really fucking good one. I will roll the assignment dice and start from there to introduce you to them because I can't pick. I don't want to go in alphabetical order. We will start with, this is nice. It's gonna go right across the screen. Stin, played by smallbird Lex, tunnel digging, civilian rescuing heart made of gold and or iron and or bronze, depending on which level of the world below we are in. Looking forward to the way that your strength and mobility helps us navigate the treachery ahead. But if people want to see you do that on a channel that is not this channel, or a game that is not this game, where can they do it? [02:29:32] Speaker E: Well, hello, I'm small bird lex. You can find me at small bird Lex and small bird art. I do art. I do tabletop, I stream. Sometimes I do all the things. I will be your cup of tea. This is a threat anyways. You can catch me on surf efforts, channel on Twitch on Saturdays for a level 20 campaign in D and D, where I play the most awesomest barbarian ever. There's the rules. I'm sorry. And then on Wednesdays on Phoenix, owake you can see me play a very Sus wizard, which is also pretty fun. [02:30:02] Speaker A: Ooh, yeah, that's about it. Difficult segue to go from Sus wizard to Sus wizard. But Bavain is next and I'm having trouble getting away from that joke, so I'm gonna deflect and be like, yeah, if, uh, if Lex is aggressively your cup of tea, marissa, what beverage are you and where can people find you on the Internet such they might attempt to procure it? Yeah. [02:30:25] Speaker B: Hi folks. I have been and will continue to be Marisa, the most critical of kittens who goes by, you guessed it, critical kitten. Most places on the Internet with a variety of punctuation depending on who had my username before me and whether or not they forced me to have to put a period between the two words. I am an editor of books and games, ttrpgs and video games. Also various places so you can check my work out. If you need an editor of any kind, hit me up at www.marisacours.com. You can reach out to me there. I am most frequently on the Menopot Studios Twitch channel. I'm on the award winning invisible sun actual play called the Hole in the World, which is currently on hiatus but will be returning in the new year, I'm delighted to say. And also on the flights of Fandom show, which is every Tuesday at 08:00 p.m. Tune in checkout. We're always playing in a new ip with a new indie system that we've matched to that ip this month is effectively what we do in Broadway. So come if you want to see folks do really cool stuff. Come check us out if you have any interest in playing in a flight to Fanda. We are always looking for new folks. So I am there most of the time. Come say hello. [02:31:46] Speaker A: Marisa is there most of the time, but Tourmaline is here most of the time to include the past, present and future immaculate vibes despite the consequences. First of all, vex, what beverage? And second, where can people find more of this energy on the Internet? [02:32:06] Speaker D: I would like to think that I am a nice aloe vera juice. Little weird. Little weird puts people off, but once you taste it, it is the sweetest drink that is not a soda that does not overpower you. Excellent. [02:32:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:32:21] Speaker D: You can find me literally everywhere at Vexomniari. My name is weird enough, just like me, that no one else had taken it because I'm not sure anyone thought to. And you can find me over on Twitch on Saturdays playing in a vampire. The masquerade game where I get to play Amorette Fane, who is a genderfluid little vampire with a humanity score of eight. They're doing their best. And then you can also find me over on dinner in a game where I'm playing in a monster of the week campaign called small town life, Tuesdays at 05:30 p.m.. PST. And I get to play a God that was trapped in a doll's body who does not feel any emotions at all. And you'll actually be seeing me in a few more places on dinner, in a game. And I will be filming a music. [02:33:14] Speaker B: Video at the end of now, next. [02:33:15] Speaker D: Month, at the end of November, I suppose I should say. [02:33:20] Speaker A: Yeah, criminally productive. But, man, if you need an all Vex content calendar, you got one. From a God trapped in a doll's body to a dad trapped in a dad's body. I am slightly upset with myself that I only let it go 15 or 20 minutes before inflicting Montgomery with an argument between two children, but he handled it well. And here we are. Garrett, if people think your vibes are immaculate and they are desperate for a more dad, where can they go? [02:33:51] Speaker C: If you do like my vibes and you like scotch? Because that's definitely my drink that I'm going with. You can find me on black nerd problems. I'm one of their contributors. You can see my articles there. Find me on YouTube airbearstare. That's where we'll be looking at older vintage cartoons and animation and will probably extend to other things once the Sag strike is over. And you can also find me wherever you find your podcast. On the vintage anime podcast, I'm one of the rotating cast of co hosts where we look at 20 year old and older animes movies. And I think the last thing that I was a part of, we looked at the the opening for Daikon three and Daikon four. Those were japanese conventions that happened way back in the day, and the creators who made the opening ceremony went off to form Gainax. So we do like to look at a lot of history when it comes to anime as well. So if you're interested in that, find us there. [02:34:53] Speaker A: Well, I am 20 years old or older. I suppose that makes me vintage. I'm Aaron, your forever GM storyteller, and the 90% of my job is making these transitions, and sometimes I swing real hard on it. I'm just like, instant regret comes out of my mouth. But if you like that kind of autumn City, fearless in the face of failure, you can find more of itaron in words on Twitter and or bluesky. I don't activate them often. I'm vintage. I'm not good at social media. You'll have to accept that if you want to be my friend. Else you can see most of what I'm doing at Queen's court games, most places on the Internet or at Queen's court. Queen's court rpg on Twitter where usernames are not allowed to be that long. Oh boy. Big, big schedule coming. Of course, world below gonna happen. Immediately after that, follow us into our all southeast asian space opera Mekong. In the year to follow, we have an all black vampire game based on dragon culture in the eighties in Chicago. We're going to play red markets, we're going to play nights black agents. There's so much stuff happening. So here's what I need you at home to do. One, love this episode. Cool. Yeah, do that. Easy accomplished. Two, go hit up some of our backlog because there is some incredible stuff there with more guests like these fine folks use that to pass the time until the next thing happens. And third, when you see the new stuff and you're like, oh my God, this is all so great. Go to our Patreon, check it out. Perhaps give us $5. It's better than giving us $5 on Twitch because we got to share with Jeff Bezos. It's all, all, all ours. And we will use it to do things like pay our artists and also keep Adobe audition and premiere pro. All that said, you can hear the next part of this story one week from from now, but about 3 hours ago. Until then, bye for now.