#huge swathes of silence scattered all over the place; long shots where no one says a word ; i love it so much

[brittlebutch]

i love how Blunt TOS is with its editing actually. i Love that whenever the show wants to express that Something Is Wrong it will use an obnoxious scary sound effect and scary lighting And scary music And hamfisted acting to let you know that Something Is Wrong. no ambiguity. autism.tv — beautiful <3

[probablyottrpgideas]

Game Recap Series: EIS 3

Well, it’s been 14 weeks since I was DMing last, and I am so so happy to be back in the chair. I’ve had a great three session-long period with Av/Cleo’s player running a Norse Myth inspired game, and now the Empires Intelligence Services crew are back at it.

So we begin as we left off, in the underground tunnels beneath the lake, over the spider-filled corpse of Marzia Teresi, a village girl from Brattenhome. The crew continue forward, ever vigilant for traps, and discover the tunnel takes a turn further south at a sharp bend, and at the outside edge of the bend they find a door. Investigating, they discover the room is filled with a Darkness spell, and deeper inside they can discern a Silence spell is layered over the top, creating a total sensory deprivation chamber. Jimothy heads in to explore, but unsure as to what he might find he abruptly changes his method of exploration and hurls his sharp grappling hook forward. As he does, the spells end and he discovers that his hook was buried in the collarbone of one of the missing villagers. Stunned and horrified, the group begin to argue about what to do, but before they get a chance to do anything, thousands of tiny, white baby spiders pour out of the wound in the villager’s neck and along the rope on the grappling hook. Alketh, reacting on impulse, fires off a fireball, shaping it around Jimothy but forgetting to spare the villager. He sets most of the room on fire, and as they back out to escape Jimothy is forced to abandon his grappling hook.

They keep moving around the facility, finding a few more cells, these ones empty, and over time begin to realise that the caverns are shaped like a spiders web. After a brief diversion where Relic gets caught in an overblown pit trap that sealed shut behind him (eventually they freed him when they realised that the trap was designed to hold, not kill, and they discovered the reset switch hidden behind a camouflaged panel in the wall), they find a guard bunk room with chests of cultist robes, which they each don, and a single silver necklace shaped like a dangling spider, which Av puts on after she gets the okay from Arner and Alketh, who find nothing especially cursey about it. Celia, exploring a side corridor using her magical coatl tattoo, reports the discovery of another set of stairs leading down. They group decide to leave further explanation of the facility for later and push on to find the cult.

They head downstairs, hearing the sounds of a crowd, and exit the tunnel onto a ledge over a massive underground chasm. Over 200 cultists and 50 mutated villagers---around half of which are hulking, chitinous, fully-formed spider-men---stood arrayed in front of a stage, on which a small group stood. As they watched, a single figure with a large staff separated herself from the group and moved to the front of the stage, flanked by two huge blazing braziers. She speaks, and when she does the sound seems to come from right in front of every person, not raised in a shout but audible from everywhere in the room.

“It seems that we are to have...guests. They come to end our great work; this cannot be abided. 

We came here, so long ago, to complete a great work. Those who came before us have broken, have wallowed in debasement and heresy, and we will bring them to heel. 

Go now, into the town, and bring me everyone you can find. With our army a thousand strong we will spread underground, and no-one will know peace again. Go, now.”*

As the cultists move for the doors down the side of the room, the figure turns to a few of the fully completed mutations, and says;

“They’re here, now. Go and bring them to me.”

8 of the mutants rush across the room, moving blisteringly fast, but the room is over 600 feet long and so it still takes some time. Arner uses his giant Repeating Hand Ballistae (massive crossbow) and drops two feet of iron and wood into the shoulder of the figure on the dais, who turned and fled through a set of double doors behind the stage. The rest of the group readied themselves to engage in combat with the mutants.

However, in the two rounds of movement required to reach the party, the spidermen were preparing, using one-shot magic crystals to cast a modified version of Immunity to Fire and Haste on themselves. They blasted into the group and scattered them, dealing horrifying amounts of damage in short time. After two rounds, which nearly killed Relic and forced Nerra, Celia and Avoyelles to use whatever means they had to get off the edge of the cliff (rope, ninja skillz and a flying broom, respectively) and forced Relic, Arner and Alketh to flee back towards the stairs, leaving Jimothy out in the open. They managed to kill one of the mutants but six of them crowded Jimothy, and in no time at all he was on death’s door. Rather than kill him outright, however, one grabbed his body and started to flee, while the rest jostled for position to chase the others up the narrow tunnel.

Working quickly, Av casts Healing Word to bring Jimothy back to consciousness, and then when she is next able to cast a spell she uses Hold Person on the mutant, which is thankfully still classed as humanoid and not aberration (my fault). Celia Misty Steps (I love Eladrin) over to the two of them, wrenches open the mutants paralysed arms, and frees Jimothy, the two of them jumping out to a rope Celia had suspended from the broom. 

In the tunnel, Alketh for the third time had the same terrible idea, and finally decided to go for it. He touched the Glutton’s Fork (I use a modified Fantasy CostCo list as a shop list for the capital city) to an Arcane Core (based on the TAZ one but far more versatile and, frankly, insanely overpowered), and ate it. In his little Dragonborn tummy terrible, terrible things began to happen, all fuelled by about five pounds of pure, undiluted crystalline magic. He fell to his hands and knees and let loose a breath weapon that was less a stream of acid and more a jet of superheated plasma, turning all six remaining spidermen in the tunnel to smoke shadows and burning through so much of Alketh’s vitality in the process that he was immediately dropped to 1 hit point and fell unconscious. 

Despite their best efforts, Av, Jimothy, Celia and Nerra were unable to kill the last spider-man before he escaped through the double doors, so they instead used their stones of farspeech to warn the Mayor of Brattenhome that a small army was on its way. Worse still, Av and Jimothy were both certain they had heard the voice of the woman who spoke some time before, but they couldn’t figure out where. They regrouped, backtracked out of the facility and raced to town after as short a rest as would allow them healing, knowing that every moment wasted risked tragedy.

When they eventually made it back to the town around dusk, they found the citizens of Brattenhome were mounting a brave defence against their own families and friends and the monsters they had allied themselves with. But although initially outnumbered and overpowered, the citizens used every trick they had to corral the invaders away. The Krok stablemaster marshalled his gigantic crocodillian steeds into blocking off the North road, the barricaded Town Hall rained magical attacks on the West Road by way of office clerk and level one sorcerer Ifraan Basara and his Firebolt spells and Avoyelles and her Call Lightning. In the south, the fishermen had pulled their boats out into the centre of the river to blockade the cultists approaching from the water, and the homesteaders had overturned carts to block the bridge and were holding their barricade their. And on the East road, Sheriff James and what remained of his guard outfit were using pistol and bows to thin the approaching hordes. Alketh awoke to find the war going on around him and echo-like spasms of raw magic overload twitching through his body. For a short time, his magic was wild and unpredictable, randomly producing different variations on the spell effects and even sometimes casting from his hands without his command. While the effects of the Arcane Core were beneficial, they were too unpredictable and wild for Alketh to feel fully comfortable with them, and he instinctively knew that trying something like that again might kill him, and possibly everyone around him.

Jimothy took directly to the streets, carving swathes through the cultists with his terrifying Daedalus Blade, meeting up Celia---who had come by river using Krearshe’s water skimmer---as he did so. He saved a contingent of villagers, the three workers at the Temple of Avandra and one of the school teachers, from the chains they had been placed in by some cultists, and something nagged at his head. After a time the fighting stopped, and the town, though thankful, were more interested in picking over the dead, although the innkeeper did offer to waive their charge for their rooms. 

Suddenly, as he helped the clerics and the teacher back to their respective flocks/classes, Jimothy realised; the voice of the woman on the stage, the one he knew; it was Ashe Corria, the schoolmistress. She was the leader of the cult.

Alketh went to check up on his old friend, the oddball thri-keen thaumaturgist Bakar al-Haque. He found an empty, vacant lot where Bakar’s shop had been, and an envelope on the ground where it had been. Inside was a card, which read;

“Alketh, 

You were a good friend.

I’ll see you again.”

That night, everyone slept, even the elves who didn’t need it, such was their exhaustion. Alketh, still twitching from the magic overload, laid down and closed his eyes, only for bizarre dreams to invade his mind. 

As follows is the exact description of the dream given to Alketh’s player:

“As you fall into a restful sleep, images and sounds clatter around your head.

You see a polar tundra, and the roaring scream of some gigantic creature

You see a mine, long abandoned, ivy growing around the supports and a pair of red glowing eyes, six feet high, deep within

You see a tower, spearing up into the sky

You see a human man and an eladrin woman, dressed in fine clothing, holding hands and looking worried

You see a beautiful elven figure, sitting on a high backed chair

You hear a maniacal laugh

You hear a terrible scream

You hear a beguiling, implacable voice, saying the words “Interesting. Very interesting. Bianca; attend…”

Tune in two weeks from now as they finally go to end Ashe Corria and destroy the Cult once and for all.

*I tried to get this out in person, but my group just cannot shut the fuck up. I hope they read this because it’s important information.